Title: The Flash of Capital: Film and Geopolitics in Japan
Author: Eric Cazdyn
Publication Year: 2002
Publisher: Duke University Press
Pages: 316

For all of the back-breaking piles of academic books I read, I sure don’t get around to reviewing many. I suppose this is because I spend so much of what passes for my real life writing about them that I don’t have many nice things to say at the end of the day. The Flash of Capital is an exception. Perhaps I feel this way because I was inspired to read every word of the book – and Cazdyn’s book is not easy to read. Interesting and thought-provoking, yes, original, yes, lots of fun, yes, but not easy to read. If you are at all interested in Japan, film, or even Japanese film, though, it’s worth the trouble.

Cazdyn’s basic thesis is that the major trends of Japanese film correspond with the major developments of capitalism in Japan, which is only natural, considering that both movies and modern capitalism came to Japan at roughly the same time. The first five of the six chapters explore these intersections by examining certain key questions of film studies. For example, the second chapter is concerned with film historiography and how the discourses surrounding the Japanese state have shaped the way that critics and scholars have talked and written about film. The fourth chapter discusses how economic development, especially as it has engendered interest in socialism, has affected the agency of the actor. It also touches on the politically utopian and dystopian implications of the professionalism or amateur status of the actor. And the fifth chapter, which focuses on pornography, completely changed the way I think about the meaning of visual representation in film. The sixth chapter takes the various concepts presented in these five chapters and uses them to give new, interesting, and politically significant readings to the canonical films of canonical directors, like Kurosawa Akira’s Rashōmon, Ozu Yasujirō’s Late Spring, and Oshii Mamoru’s Ghost in the Shell.

My favorite part of the book, however, was not the theoretical acrobatics or the micro-analysis of non-mainstream films and directors, but rather the information regarding the cultural context surrounding each topic. For example, the first chapter, which concerns the relationship between actors, spectators, and the medium of film, begins with a discussion of kabuki, which is linked to a discussion of the wanted posters for the members of the Aum Shinri-kyō cult (responsible for the 1995 Tokyo subway sarin gas attacks). And the discussion of the pornography industry in Japan in the fifth chapter is beyond fascinating.

Unfortunately, the valuable ideas and information presented by Cazdyn occasionally become mired in the language of post-structuralist theory. Some of his sentences derailed me for days at a time. I will give an example:

The problem, instead, lies in the way Iwasaki works through the problematics, which ultimately betrays (the dialectical implications of) his work’s title and resembles a teleological history more than a relational one, with the telos being the birth of the proletarian film or even a later moment of actually existing socialism.

Excuse me, what? I’m feeling a little stupid and uneducated here. Also, as you might be able to tell from the above passage, Cazdyn is a bit of a Marxist. Although he vehemently denies such an affiliation, his ideology comes on fairly strong at points, such as at the close of the fourth chapter:

What Ogawa’s Sundial Carved by a Thousand Years of Notches (and the Yamagata Documentary Film Festival that it inspired) suggests is that new transnational networks must be built, no matter how unprofessional and utopian, in order to wrest at least some of the power away from the core of brokers whose monopoly on world power grows increasingly consolidated by the day.

To be honest, though, I find Cazdyn’s occasional ideological outbreaks inspiring. Even if they are sometimes uncomfortably Marxist, they make me think that Cazdyn is one of the good guys, and that simply by watching movies and thinking and writing we can make a difference and triumph over the evils of the world. Even if you’re not entirely convinced that this is true, it’s still fun to read The Flash of Capital solely for the thrill of encountering new ideas and tackling big intellectual concepts. And did I mention the awesome chapter on porn? In any case, this book isn’t for the casual reader, but if you think you’re interested, you definitely want to read this book. Go for it.

The basis of Marxist criticism is that literature can be read through the lens of being an intentional or unintentional display of power within a society. The basic idea (and I do mean basic) is that literature either affirms or criticizes the social and economic hierarchy of the society in which the author lives. By examining the work from the standpoint of the daily lives, conditions, and social positions of the protagonists and antagonists, you can see what the author is trying to tell you about society.

Marxist criticism is also about pointing out these issues for the purpose of bringing about social justice. This is where the critical aspect is likely to appeal to the urban school student. From my personal experience, students in urban areas are very concerned, sometimes even obsessed, with the idea of government and societal intrusion in their lives. They see economic distress all around them (in many instances) and question these situations, how they originated, and how they can be solved.

As a teacher of English in these classrooms, taking the starting point of social justice and viewing the district mandated curriculum materials through the lens of Marxist criticism by determining the good, the bad, and the ugly about characters’ situations and lives, could spark a fire in many students. This spark might get them through the book, but hopefully it will instead get them to open their minds and eyes to ways of tackling the problems they see in their own neighborhoods.

I have made quite a disturbing discovery lately-Takashi Miike’s work is extremely reactionary. Yes folks, I’m afraid it’s true. My favorite dark horror director from back in my Satanist individualist days was a right-winger all along.

For those not familiar with his name or his work, Miike is best described as the Japanese Quentin Tarantino, though his works are much more about unbelievable violence and confusing non-linear plots than even Tarantino’s. American audiences who have not seen Ichi the Killer, Audition or The Happiness of the Katakuris may recognize him as the sunglasses guy from the movie Hostel.

Miike’s films often are a mixture of horror, sexual allegory and comic book gangster and superhero flicks. They often are very surreal and cartoony while at the same time being gritty as can be while never losing an ironic touch. There’s also usually a guy being cut in half or a woman being raped as well. This is the sort of pointless violence that is featured in all of his films.

I was contemplating his film Visitor Q the other day and it occurred to me that the film boils down to nothing more then a conservative endorsement of the traditional Japanese “family unit.” The violence and taboo-bashing contained within the film is not so much to celebrate the crumbling of the society that produces the family unit as a product, as I originally thought, but rather a validation of the necessity of family roles. Through the catharsis of violence and sexual deviancy, eventually everyone in the movie resumes their “proper” household place. The father goes back to being a provider, the mother a nurturer, the son and daughter as loyal, obedient offspring.

The sick images that Miike has indulged the audience in thus render themselves not as representations of the harmful psychological side-effects of bourgeois society, but as the moralist warnings of WHAT COULD HAPPEN and what has happened to disrupt that society. Things like this only make it more apparent that I can never go back to being a non-Marxist. There is simply no way I can forget what I have learned.

The majority of Victorian literature is the product of the petty-bourgeois class, and Wuthering Heights is no different. The tumultuous ideological storms contained within demonstrate a crisis in the ideology of the 19^th century Victorian petty-bourgeois class to which Emily Bronte was born. Frequently, novelists and intellectuals have a reflective role to play at a point of history where a crisis has impacted the prevailing base and has thereby begun the upward quake to the very spires of the ideological superstructure. The crises in the areas of estate, racial tensions and the family unit are all explored, but more than anything else, Wuthering Heights marks the crisis of individuality versus custom, since the contradiction between the social expectations of class privilege and the selfhood advocated by the rising neo-liberal capitalist system is the very essence of Victorian bourgeois consciousness.

From the start, Bronte seems more interested in showing the reader a world that is beset by the same conflicts as her own rather than an escapist daydream. Terry Eagleton says that “Wuthering Heights is [...] an apparently timeless, highly integrated, mysteriously autonomous symbolic universe” (1), which utterly defies the prevailing methodology of fiction literature to remove the reader from the discord of his existence. Most fiction novels come close to portraying what we would call “myths,” that is, the illusory resolutions of real contradictions within society for the purpose of the story in such a way as to validate ideology and the societal status quo. Although it is inherent to fairy tales and children’s stories that the hermetically-sealed bubble of this world never be burst, oftentimes with adult novels this purpose is stricken by strains in achieving its “proper” ideological closure. Indeed, the novel itself loyally reproduces the various disasters assaulting Europe, manifested in individual characters.

Marx’s pamphlet Wage Labour and Capital, written the same year that Wuthering Heights was published, addresses some of the social contradictions of the epoch, such as “the June Struggle in Paris, the fall of Vienna, the tragicomedy of Berlin’s November 1848, the desperate exertions of Poland, Italy and Hungary, the starving of Ireland into submission-these were the chief factors which characterized the European class struggle between bourgeoisie and working class” (2). In addition, it is important to know that the reverberating waves of the Industrial Revolution were being felt in Europe, starting the process of the unstoppable freight train ride from mercantile capitalist to industrial capitalist relations. This is the producing agent of the novel’s chief narrative subtext: “that [...] passion and [the] society it presents are not fundamentally reconcilable-that there remains at the deepest level an ineradicable contradiction between them which refuses to be unlocked, which obtrudes itself as the very stuff and secret of experience” (1). Bronte herself would most likely have a few ideas about that, being a petty-bourgeois “lady” who subtlety criticized British imperialism.

Whereas many novels would choose to show a young lady ending up wealthy and happy without compromising her dreams, morals or her fidelity to the petty-bourgeois ideals carved out for her, Wuthering Heights chooses to depict characters who are forced to choose between desire and social standing, love and money, passion and economic well-being. As is a common theme in Victorian novels about women, the pivotal catalyst for the story comes when Catherine Earnshaw must choose between two men-Heathcliff the wild, fiery-eyed gypsy and Edgar the safe, certain path of education, class position and property. Catherine’s reasons for choosing Edgar are as rational as they are brutally calculating: “‘because he is handsome and pleasant to be with [....] and he will be rich, and I shall like to be the greatest woman of the neighborhood, and I shall be proud of having such a husband’” (3). Emily Bronte may have tried, like her characters, to erect magical, glittering towers of a kingdom of romantic dreams around her in order to escape the Darwinian existence of capitalism, but in the end they crumbled to dust as surely as Catherine and Heathcliff’s did. No doubt this was a common personal crisis in England at the time.

Wuthering Heights takes another turn away from typical bourgeois novels at this point in the story by showing the realistic consequences of Catherine’s actions. Though her marriage has assured her and her child’s well-being, it does not resolve the fundamental crises of the text, but rather compounds them exponentially and eventually leads to her and Heathcliff’s deaths. There is no romantic, happy ending for Bronte’s world. Catherine is the product of a sexist and classist society-a “woman” as defined by her own age. Her transformation from a rebellious young girl to a “lady” through her stay at the Grange only reinforces the notion of her choice as a social product instead of a reactionary result of “women’s nature.” It is shown as a real-life structural fact of the role of women in 19^th century capitalist society.

Catherine, in her complicity with the bourgeois agent Edgar’s wishes, thus seeks to establish herself as the great martyr of self-destructive and self-sacrificing reformism. She shall win influence and power by working within the system instead of outside of it and will take care of her beloved Heathcliff in the process. She sees her capitulation to society as a means to an end within itself, a strategy for ending the heartless relations of the Heights. In the end however, it is all for naught. She soon finds that a woman, like a member of the working class, can have no true power within the restraints of the bourgeois system. She will always be under the influence of a father, a husband or a brother no matter what social position she holds, and the society has been molded to prevent emancipation from such relations. She will never be “out of her brother’s power.”

Heathcliff fares no better in his attempts to fit himself into his allotted role in class society. He disappears for a number of years and hardens himself, losing his ability to “succumb” to love in order to acquire enough cultural capital to “win” Catherine back from Edgar. In the process he essentially sells his cultural capital in exchange for property rights and financial capital. From his childhood onwards, “Heathcliff revolts, rather like Ireland against Britain, because of the barbarous way he is treated; only Catherine will grant him the recognition he demands, and even she, perfidious little Albion that she is, sells him out for Edgar Linton. In the end, even the liberals will rally to the landowners” (4). Heathcliff runs into the waiting arms of the bourgeoisie, seeking to become a willing member of the ruling class.

Heathcliff succeeds in his quest to become one of the petty-bourgeoisie that have oppressed him, going by brutal methods from a landless peasant laborer to a member of the rural bourgeoisie. He cheats Hindley out of the Heights, and once installed sets about becoming a ruthless landlord himself. Like the petty-bourgeois class to which he and Bronte both belonged, Heathcliff finds himself a great walking contradiction of class interests. As a “dark-skinned” former peasant he wishes to fight oppression, and as a landlord he seeks to forcefully acquire capital. He still nurses the ideal of a relationship with Catherine, but the characters have been so changed by their crises that the dream is rendered simply impossible. Catherine and Heathcliff, as an oppressed woman and an exploited peasant worker respectively, seem at first to have a chance at happiness, but it is absolutely impossible in the world of Wuthering Heights to acquire cultural or financial capital and still maintain self-integrity in a world defined by class positions.

Furthermore, except for Heathcliff’s childhood rebellion against the Lintons, neither character seeks outward revolution as a true solution to social injustice-both Heathcliff and Catherine run into the jaws of the society they despise in order to destroy it from within, an adventurist excursion which ends up costing them their lives. Wuthering Height’s undeniable liberal anxiety about social revolution thus comes to build itself upon the very doctrines that bourgeois capitalist ideology and tyrannical patriarchy rest upon. Wuthering Heights does not rebel directly against oppressive forces, but remains trapped within its own bubble, forever extending its bitter, trembling hands to the uncaring, stormy sky and cursing the heavens. Characters are victims of their own self-imposed personal hell, shackled by the chains of class slavery and its willing agent, reformism.

As well as gender and class oppression, the ideas of racial and cultural tensions are powerful preoccupations in Wuthering Heights, as they were in Bronte’s England. While the white, liberal abolitionist movement wrote poems and stories relating to slave revolts in the British colonies, Bronte wove symbols of cultural conflict into her own tale. The racial discrimination and subjugation deriving from the dominant ideology of British imperialism is set loose upon the young Heathcliff when the vagabond trespasses on the Lintons’ farm. The bourgeois Lintons then absorb him into their household, though only as an unwanted outsider. “As an alien, Heathcliff is brought into the family structure” (1). In capitalist society, the family is both a biological and convenient economic order for work and socialization. Imperialism, as we know, is the product of the capitalist crisis, generated by the desperation of the capitalist class to acquire more territory, resources, markets, subjects and workers. As Victorian capitalism rapidly moved toward the imperialist phase, it became necessary to dominate foreign peoples. The result of this was institutionalized racism and colonialism. As it is in reality, so it is in the Heights, where Heathcliff is subjugated to work the land for the prosperity of his white “slave-owners.”

Heathcliff’s race is kept intentionally ambiguous so as to make his character’s metaphor universal for colonized peoples. He is described by Mrs. Linton as “‘exactly like the son of the fortune-teller, that stole my tame pheasant’” (3), indicating he is probably a gypsy. In Heathcliff’s racial features and dark complexion, the Lintons “read his nature and his destiny, and they find in it a license to punish him for crimes of property putatively committed by others of similar appearance” (5), thus making him into a convenient servant for them. A crisis in the economic base of the Linton farm caused by Heathcliff’s appearance thus gives rise, in a reductive sense, to an essentially imperialist superstructure.

Unfortunately, as has been said before, the novel fails to carry through the portrayal the threatening collective energy of the slave workers of the West Indies, India, Africa and other British colonies of the time. “Read as a discontented worker, Heathcliff does not behave in a particularly dangerous manner. He does not form alliances with other workers (Nelly, Joseph, or Michael, for example), as the middle class most feared discontented laborers would. Instead, Heathcliff simply makes an [...] individualistic rags-to-riches plot, a plot that in fact reinforces the values of capitalism” (5). Just as both Catherine and Heathcliff failed to achieve any sort of revolutionary solution to their situations, so does Bronte fail to envision a truly revolutionary way for oppressed nationalities to rise against their masters in a direct way without simply integrating.

Instead of an easily-resolvable myth, Wuthering Heights is a novel that portrays a myth of a much darker, sweeter color-it is realist in the sense that it offers a realistic copy of the social conflicts within the culture and the European dialectic paradox between proletarian and bourgeois ideologies.

Works cited:

1) Eagleton, Terry. Myths of Power: A Marxist Study of the Brontes. Palgrave Macmillan, 2005.

2) Marx, Karl. Wage Labour and Capital. Peking, PRC: Foreign Languages Press, 1978.

3) Bronte, Emily. Wuthering Heights. 4^th Edition. New York: W. W. Norton & Company Inc., 1991.

4) Eagleton, Terry. Heathcliff and the Great Hunger. New York: Verso, 1995.

5) Meyer, Susan. Imperialism At Home: Race and Victorian Women’s Fiction. Cornell University Press, 1996.

Kipling seems to fancy himself as the first Eric Schlosser. In his story Kim, the presence of the concept of the “other” is scarce, even nonexistent, to the point of a noticeable, glaring omission. British, Indian and Tibetan cultures have minor contradictions with each other, but none is presented as particularly “domineering” over one another even within the context of colonial relations. No one is demonized; no one is more advanced or nobler than the other. Whatever ideologies might justify it, there is no particularly sharp mention of the destruction of previous forms of social organization (symbolized by characters such as the Lama), which seem merely dizzied rather than lost. Without realizing it himself, since this is the nature of ideology to fill the gaps and to consist on what the text hides, Kipling has constructed here a highly differentiated examination of pre-globalization before such a term existed. One cannot separate the full explanation of imperialism from late nineteenth-century colonialism and the necessary spread of capitalist production that comes from those particular stages. Such a spread, such as that from Britain to India, is globalizing, and imperialism has the ability to hide cultural and ethnic conflicts as much as it has the power to aggravate them for monetary and political gain. This is what we see a slice of in Kim.

The word “modernism” is intentionally ambiguous, and perhaps without realizing it is a fitting term for such a literary movement. In the most common usage it refers to the twentieth-century movement that began with the concept of the “modern” (obviously, since without this word how could one have modern-ism?) and ended up being a collection of authors and works characterized by efforts by the individual character and author to remold and reshape reality while reflecting its social ills. This is quite a simplistic analysis of an entire movement, but I will go into greater detail below.

Modernism took elements from realist literature in that it sought to realistically portray the growing social isolation and alienation of individuals caused by industrial capitalism. Characters are almost always withdrawn, and the entirety of the work contains a bitter cynicism bordering on absolute nihilistic despair. The main geographic sites for this movement were England and America post-Industrial Revolution, blooming during the periods between World War I and World War II, the main places where this system had taken hold. These first few decades of the new century begin with writers such as Joyce, Eliot, Pound D.H. Lawrence, who all stepped forward onto the literary scene by creating texts that were called highly experimental on content rather than merely form. This is the movement we now call “modernism,” though I don’t mean to use it in a reductive sense to imply that outside of these few head writers there exist no modernist movement.

The main characteristics of a modernist novel are as follows.

• The most prominent, noticeable facet of the modernist movement is severe alienation (even from one’s own work). It is important to realize that for a Marxist, the definition of alienation is a lack of control. This is why the worker is alienated from his work-he has no control over his workspace or the products he makes and consumes. Authors are not immune from this, and frequently show a coping mechanism for their alienation through experimentation with form and content. Many writers are themselves very conflicted about their proletarian, progressive or reactionary themes and the dialectic relationship between them becomes obvious within their work.
• The popular concept of the Victorian novel has overnight become meticulous to the new sped-up industrial capitalist life. Novels would now be leaner, meaner and with more bite.
• Frequently it put more emphasis on the individual over the social and outward, or is concerned with the outward only inasmuch as it affects the individual. Frequently showcases a central, heroic figure.
• Its operating ideological system is existentialism, or the belief that objective truth exists but it has no meaning for humans except the meaning we, as individuals or masses, create through acting upon reality. Often the work presents a world where chance makes things happen and the plot for the novel itself has no meaning except what the reader imposes on it.
• Frequently contains stream-of-consciousness ranting, a multi-narrative perspective, disjointed timelines and short, declarative sentences.
• Increasing skepticism about religious systems.

Moreover, these artists actually sought to challenge established systems by making their characters behave in ways outside the norm-much better than the reactionary “humanist” writers, with their hollow phrases overly concerned with form rather than content, and their content itself inhospitable to complex motivation and characterization, to actions and emotions “unacceptable” to petty-bourgeois reformism. Now for the bad news. Modernism, much like its even-lesser-defined evil twin sister postmodernism, gravitates towards a radically pessimistic vision of subjectivity as a rewarding experience for any given society. As in Eliot and Joyce, this leads to reactionary anti-social behavior, which then spawns uncompromising relativism and individualism, which would eventually give birth to the dreaded libertarian science fiction world of George Orwell, Aldous Huxley and Fahrenheit 451. Why is this movement “dreaded,” you ask? After all, they were only exposing the evils of government and the state, weren’t they? Yes, but unfortunately their works were not meant to represent the BOURGEOIS state, or organized religion (surely a much better and much closer twin of what they represent in their novels) but rather any state that the dominant ideology deemed “extreme.” As such, while the authors may not have directly intended as much (though Orwell certainly did), their works have become tools for imperialist propaganda. But hey, that’s another post.

This book will doubtlessly go down in history as the favorite palm book of the elitist, petty-bourgeois American social democrats and liberals. If you are looking for a manual on how to look down on the working class and lumpenproletariat for not having enough money or education to “know” to shop exclusively at farmers’ markets and Whole Foods, this is your book. If you wish to imagine yourself as part of a “new generation” of liberals with upturned noses pointed towards cheap food and the foolish people who buy it, and not bother to make a worthwhile analysis of why they buy it, this is your book. Finally, if you wish to remain blissfully unaware that farmers’ markets and organic stores are every bit as exploitive as Burger King, this is most definitely your book.

Perhaps I am being too harsh. After all, not all is lost here-Schlosser does a good job of portraying the exploitation of immigrant labor and the horrible working conditions inherent in the fast food industry. He also does a great job cataloguing how GREED is inherent also in capitalism and thus in its red-headed stepchild, the fast food industry.

He does NOT, however, examine how Whole Foods is nearly five or six times as expensive as your average fast food restaurant (since it too operates on a profit-motivated capitalist system), and how that might be a factor in fast food’s popularity among the lower classes. Instead, he seems to thumb his nose at those who dare not spend extra money on organic beef instead of using the check from their below-minimum-wage job to pay their rent. There are some families (immigrants especially) that are simply too poor to afford good food, not to mention fast food is available and addictive. Fast food restaurants, like gun stores and liquor stores, infest poor neighborhoods. Might there be a reason behind this? Not in Schlosser’s world.

The over-intellectualization should be a given when reading a book written by a journalist, but there’s enough here to make even your most dyed-in-the-wool urban liberal queasy. When an author tries to draw parallels between the specific rise of fast food and the life-long alienation of American workers, between fast food and High School dropouts, one begins to scratch his head.

Schlosser is frequently quite reactionary. For example, in one chapter he notes that robberies at fast food joints occur because those they employ members of the youth, poor people and minorities-groups responsible for much of the nation’s crime, he says. I found this quite disturbing. Is he suggesting these “high-risk individuals” should not be given jobs? He concentrates much on the question of brand fetishism, but also on the Freudian analysis of the fast food chain as a “papa” figure, rather than a chemical addiction and irreplaceable “choice” given by schedule and financial situation.

It pains me to blast this book so savagely, since Schlosser’s heart is obviously in the right place. However, his elitist approach and complete lack of working class analysis must be criticized, as well as his blaming the fast food industry instead of the system that produced it. This book was not a truly critical look at the system. His pleading to the reader to “do the right thing and look beyond what is profitable” is moralist and does not realize that the kind of “morals” he speaks of protect private property and the eternal interests of empire. He suggests stopping ads targeted at children, but then goes on to suggest that this will only happen when we, as individuals, decide to not buy anything from fast food places. Yeah, sure. Good luck with that.

The Republican/Democrat argument is irrelevant and breathtakingly naive. Both bourgeois parties protect and defend the wealthy interests these operations he seems to despise, as well as the small stores he seems to think are the solution. In another section, he suggests that the lure of employment at McDonalds is causing teenagers to drop out of High School. (Seriously, what?) If kids are having to support families, that highlights a social and economic problem, not the “foolishness” of working at McDonalds. He then goes on to link employment at fast food joints to dying because of on-the-job injuries, not realizing such things happen in every industry. Shock, petty-bourgeois and bourgeois store owners do not care about their workers!

More deeply, Eric Schlosser falls for the capitalist trap of bourgeois culture-beauty instead of truth, or in his case ugliness instead of truth. He provides no meaningful analysis of a system which allows such commercial capitalist relations to exist, and provides much history of the food chains themselves while magically giving no historical analysis as to the societal conditions which gave rise to the business IN THE FIRST PLACE. Yes, McDonalds flourished in 1961. WHY?

In the final analysis, his work is objectively pro-imperialist. He does not speak out against capitalism and exploitation-rather against BIG capitalism and VISIBLE exploitation. Most of his complaints themselves are capitalist and reactionary to the core. “Can’t we go back to the SMALL business owner?” (As though he were any less exploitive!) “Globalization homogenizes others!” (Not realizing, or more than likely ignoring, the fact that it can equally foster and exaggerate differences for political needs).

If nothing else, this book, as well as the movie “Super-Size Me” represent a growing tendency of the neo-liberal and social democratic movements to privilege reformism instead of actual solution to social conflict and “Golden Age”-favoring nostalgia of the “good ole days” to the actual, eternal realities of imperialism. His text, in the end, reduces itself to a mere gelatinous pile of complaints, utterly worthless, fattening and with no nutritional value, much like the food he so rails against. The irony of all this is supreme if one realizes that the small capitalist world they want back is absolutely impossible in an imperialist world. Liberal writers’ nostalgia and future hope for some unsullied traditional early capitalist culture where the small business owner rules and production relations are kept at the capitalist level cannot be seen as anything but reactionary. The base may have moved on, but the superstructure drags behind, wishing for better days.

Sir Walter Scott may have denied traditionalism and the ruling class culture of his time personally, but his novels provide no alternative to those bourgeois doctrines and rather in the values of that system find their own comfortable justifications for existence. To illuminate the question of class ideology and how it is reflected in Sir Walter Scott’s works, one only needs to examine aspects of the author’s life and how the prevailing culture influenced him. Following the path of cultural analysis, one can then investigate Scott’s works and see that his main characters follow the dominant bourgeois ideology. Whether or not this was intentional and the secondary, more passionate characters are meant to be the “true heroes” of the novels, the existence of the heroes themselves demonstrate Scott’s capitulation to established bourgeois perceptions of idealism and heroism.

This tendency has been noted by many of his critics, such as Alexander Welsh in The Hero of the Waverley Novels, who says about Waverly: “[Scott's novel] reverted to romance, which expresses, rather than criticizes, the desires of the mind. In Scott’s hands romance projected publicly accepted desires-the moral clichés of the time” (1). In addition to this, the central characters in Scott’s novels such as Edward Waverley and Frank Osbaldistone are amazingly unheroic, sniveling and incompetent fools. While Scott’s characters conform to the basics of the prevailing European culture of bourgeois morality, they possess few qualities that are worthy of admiration. The reader more often than not finds them cowardly and empty of exceptional traits-all of them heroes-to-be that never quite bloom. Since Scott himself was a faithful servant to a value system so centered in virtue, tradition and stability, his “heroes” were model citizens rendered almost unable to act. They are so perfectly molded to the debilitating standards of ruling class Platonic moralism, his creations become impossible to relate to.

Even early on, his choice of work showed that fiction to Scott was to be not only romantic, but romanticized-that is, to have the projection of an acceptable behavior pattern made before the reading public by the main character and the wholesome image served thereof-and show adherence to the dominant ideology of 19^th century Europe. In the period of 1796-1797, at the age of twenty-seven, Scott translated several German dramas for various London booksellers, corresponding with these companies by post. Ruth Adams examines several of Scott’s letters and concludes that “a preoccupation with the chivalric past and a utilization of scenes from the Middle Ages have long been counted among the many attributes of romanticism” (2). Adams goes on to say that “the plays he had translated have elements in common with aspects of Scott’s later work. Characters have similar motivation, perform similar deeds of chivalric defiance” (2). Even before his career had begun, Scott found himself more interested in idealized tales of the distant past than in rebelling against current ideology in any outward way.

This attitude of moderation at the expense of realistic portrayal reveals itself in his most popular works of prose. Frank Osbaldistone from Rob Roy is a primary example. From the beginning, he is shown to give in to the will of stronger characters. When his father admonishes him for what he considers the foolish hobby of writing poetry, Frank merely narrates, “I felt at that instant a strong inclination to submit, and to make Owen happy by requesting him to tell my father that I resigned myself to his disposal” (3). Here Frank considers giving up his dreams to please his friend Own and his father. During a violent confrontation with his cousin Rashleigh, in which Rashleigh says, “‘I hate you with a hatred as intense, now while I lie bleeding and dying before you, as if my foot trod on your neck.’” Frank then narrates: “‘I have given you no cause, sir,’ I replied, ‘and for your own sake I could wish your mind in a better temper’” (3). Even in the middle of a fight Frank will not abandon his manner nor curse his opponent who is trying to bring him death. As well, the book’s namesake is the “true hero” of the novel-the perfect romantic leader of the revolution who rides off into the sunset while the narrator Frank refuses to join him, remaining unchanged.

While this may be an intentional effort on the part of the author to make the reader more sympathetic to the more revolutionary characters when contrasted with the dullness of the hero, the fact that the hero had to exist in the first place to fulfill the obligatory role of the supposed moral compass of the story shows an unwillingness to challenge established the norms of the system. Thus Scott’s preconceived pattern is set. The hero in his stories must never commit himself to positions or actions considered by the ruling class to be “extreme.” He must never join any socially outcast or revolutionary movements, no matter how justified they might be. He never kills, even in the middle of battle, except in self-defense, nor does he passionately love or lust after any particular object or person outside the “damsel in distress” model, and even then only in restraint.

In this way, Scott’s ultimate loyalty seems to be to the false consciousness promoted by the Scottish and European ruling class. Waverley and Frank Osbaldistone in Rob Roy are witnesses to but never participants in revolutionary action. They are rarely, if ever, responsible for a suspension of socially conditioned ethics. Remaining loyal to the establishment, they of course become the wealthy and married beneficiaries of the state at the conclusion of their respective tales. Happiness, according to Scott, can be achieved within the realm of the existing society, and his fiction seems at once progressive yet content with the present social relations.

However, it is not only the comfort of dominant ideologies that affect Scott’s works, but his geographical and economic situation as well. Scott was known to have visited the Scottish borderlands frequently throughout his life. The rich and rural nature of his stories is likely to have been shaped by these experiences, giving rise to such works as Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, a collection of ballads showing Scott’s love for the Scottish tradition, Waverly, an account of the second Jacobite rebellion of 1745 which once again attempted to place the Stuarts to the British throne, and The Lay of the Last Minstrel, a story about an old Scottish legend. Though his early life in Sandyknowe made his affection for Scotland flourish, his old love of romantic tales never failed to manifest in historical whitewashing and the promotion of chivalric values, especially given that he had the privilege to have seen the real Scotland, a land thought of as wild and untamed by the European and English aristocracy.

An article by William Everett elaborates on the political stance of the Scottish nation by saying, “What Scotland represented not only for Queen Victoria but also for countless others was pure escapism-a fantasy world devoid of any of the pressures of civilized life. [...] The novels of Sir Walter Scott certainly promoted [an] enticingly rugged image of Scotland” (4). Here Everett hits on two important points-both the indulgent fantasies of Scott’s works and the perceived exoticism of Scotland itself. Rob Roy and Waverly are portraits of Scotland’s greatest heroic battles which end up being safe, predictable and easily consumable product for the reader. By putting on display the bloody and rugged wars of old and at the same time making it conform to the standards of the time, Scott provided his 19^th century audience with a myth of completed action, a convenient “division of time” in which all that is revolutionary and disruptive of the status quo has happened in the past, indulging his life-long love of romanticism.

Scott’s tendency to write dreamy moralistic tales and to reinforce ruling class ethics of “restraint,” “honor” and “saintliness” was criticized by many of his peers. In Life on the Mississippi, Mark Twain openly mocked Sir Walter Scott for works such as Ivanhoe which take seriously and indulge the old-fashioned code that in Twain’s opinion should have been swept away long ago. He writes, “If one take up a Northern or Southern literary periodical of forty or fifty years ago, he will find it filled with wordy, windy, flowery ‘eloquence,’ romanticism, sentimentality-all imitated from Sir Walter, and sufficiently badly done, too-innocent travesties of his style and methods, in fact” (5). Indeed, Scott’s fantasy-oriented ideals were the polar opposite of Twain’s realist movement, which strived to show events as they truly were.

Noting all this, one can read Sir Walter’s works as tools of representing the process of history. Being an explorer and a political strategist himself, surely Scott must have seen the economic forces at work in Scotland, including the program for agrarian change, the Enlightenment and the rise of industrial society. Whether he sided with the new social forces or not, he was clearly conscious of the structure of his society, how the existing social relations concentrated power and the movement of radicals post-French Revolution and Napoleon. The profound effect these movements had on him is still quite clear in his novels, which take place at the center of the action. Like his characters, Sir Walter Scott may himself have been a mere “casual observer” rather than an active hero, but he saw clearly the dialectic processes at work and sought to bring them to life through literature.

Works Cited:

(1) Welsh, Alexander. The Hero of the Waverly Novels. PUBLISHER, 1963.

(2) A Letter by Sir Walter Scott. Ruth M. Adams, Modern Philology, Vol. 54, No. 2 (Nov., 1956), pp. 121-123 Published by: The University of Chicago Press.

(3) Scott, Walter. Rob Roy, Wordsworth Classics, 1995

(4) William A. Everett. Untitled. International Review of the Aesthetics and Sociology of Music, Vol. 30, No. 2 (Dec., 1999), pp. 151-171 Published by: Croatian Musicological Society.

(5) Twain, Mark. Life on the Mississippi. Harper & Brothers, New York. 1917.

Usa ka adlaw sa akong paglatagaw ning syudad nga wa nako ma-ilhi, aduna koy namatikdang mga iro nga arno nga nag-riot sa tunga sa dalang walay ubang nag-labang, ako ra. Kalingaw ra ba jud tan-awon sa ilang pagbinigyanay. ‘Tsoy, unsa’y hinungdan aning gubota?’ nangutana ko sa isa pa ka iro nga nagsabay sa akong pagtan-aw sa mga arno. ‘Aw, nadakpan ni Browny si Lassie nga nag-jer jer kay Barbie kagahapon. Palag kaau mga tribu ASPO bai.’

Sa tunga sa kagubot sa mga baba nga nagkinagtanay sa dalan, sa dihang ni-abot si manong nga taga-dog pound. ‘Gashong! Dagan pareng!’, ang tingog nga wa nako nadunggan kay akong mata napuno sa kahadlok sa kadena ni manong.

Kasamok ba aning higot. Ganiha pa naglingaw ug tu-ok sa akong nag-pula pulang li-og. ‘P*ta! Scooby! Pandak! Tol, asa na man mo?’, ang akong walay pulos nga pag-singgit, kay dili makalusot akong tingog sa baga nga ding ding sa salakyan nga nagdagan. Ang akong kalagot misurok padulong sa tumoy sa akong mga dunggan sa pagkabalo nga si Browny kauban sad nako didto. Ug sa kamalas na lang jud sa akong kalag, sabay pa jud niya iyang mga batos nga mga dagko’g lawas inig mubarog pareha sa ilang leader.

Nipahiyum si Browny sa ako sa iyang pagsulti, ‘Tsoy, barkada man daw mong Lassie daw?’ Apan kalit nako namatikdan ang tudlo sa akong inahan, “Dong, ayaw jud pamakak kay ma-impyerno ka.” Ug nisulti ko kang Browny sa akong kahadlok sa mga pangil niyang nag-siwil sa kangit-ngit sa gabii. ‘Ay, kuys, dili gud.’

Abi nakog kalusot nako sa iyang kalagot sa akong bati nga dagway. ‘Uy, tsoy, nagsabay baya mu tong gi-jer niya si Barbie, kita ta ka sa kiliran sa dalan’, ingon ang dakong baba sa yawa nga akong kaatbang. Sa tinuuray nga storya ako miingon kaniya, ‘Kuys, nilabay ra ko ato.’

‘Ay, ay, sa imong kabayot, palusot ra ka.’

‘Kuys bitaw kuys, wa jud koy labot atong affair nila.’

‘Bakak! Dagway nimo, wa koy makit-ang kamatuuran.’

Wa na nakatubag akong ba-bang nagkurog kay kalit ra ko niya gi-bigyan sa tiyan. Ug iyang mga batos nitabang ug kulata sa akong lawas nga ilang gikaliwa’g pa-ak pa-ak. Usa ka kilo nga karne na ilang nawagtang nako pero wa pa sila napul-an. Kagat diri. Kagat diri na sad. Kagat. Kagat. Kagat.

Ang akong lawas napuno na sa kapula sa akong dugo ug sa kabaho sa ilang mga laway. Kanus-a pa man ni mahuman akong paglisod? Kapait na lang jud ani sa kinabuhi sa irong latagaw. Walay balay. Walay pagkaon. Tripan pa jud sa mga arno. Ma, wa man ko namakak pero ngano man ko na-impyerno??

Wala pud koy mama nga mag-tubag sa akong pangutana kay gipatay pud siya’g kulata ni Browny sauna human pila ka bulan ko niya gi-anak. Mama man gud ba, uyab man unta to sila ni Browny nya nisabay pa jud kay papa. Awa, naanak na lang ko. P*ta! Ngano gi-anak pa ko?

Agay! Agay! ‘Kuys, tama na kuys. Husto na! Husto na!’ ang kapila nako gisinggit sa mga nag-pista sa akong kaluoyng lawas. Ug at last, ni-abot si manong. Ambot unsa iyang gisulti pero naundang man sila.

Nya, gi-isa isa mi’g kuha sa sakyanan ug gidala sa lugar nga wa na sad nako ma-ilhi kung asa. Apan nakasulat sa entrance,

“Polomolok City Dog Pound:

Pagbantay sa Iro,

Iro, pagbantay pud.”

°ooOoo°

            We can see here the struggle of Junar as a wandering teenager dog with nothing else in life but only himself. And also the hierarchy of the dogs in the neighborhood with Browny at the top because of the respect they owe to his strength and his many friends. In a way, a sense of political capitalism is owned by Browny and it serves him the privilege to scorn other dogs’ life. Junar could not do anything with the tormented fate he did not choose to have. The same would be the picture of the millions of Filipino under the poverty line. They did not choose to be poor but still they could not do anything to rise above the many capitalist that continues to intensify their struggle and push their status down in the pyramid of class struggle.

            By the way, I made a flash fiction and used the bisaya language as medium with some kanto terms (e.g. arno, which is similar to the term ‘bugoy’ and equivocal to ‘buang’). Since the characters are stray dogs comparable to the ‘tambays’ and the OSY we see lingering around the streets of the city. Forgive me for the comparing the dogs to the situation of the people in the streets but I guess it’s the closest situation for the story.

            For all the things that happened to our pitiful character in the story, he was innocent. He did not choose to be born, and it is true that when Browny saw him with Lassie f*cking Barbie, he was just a passer by, like how he was in the riot when the guy from the dog pound caught him. But he could not do anything anymore; they had arrived at the dog pound where he will spend more time mauled by Browny and his company and the ‘Repressive State Apparatus’, the dog pound.

            If only, the spirit of communism rules the dogs in the neighborhood of Junar, he could have not struggled with his life. Browny could have used his strength to help other dogs. Everyone could have fair to everyone. Say for example, Browny could have listened to the defense of Junar that he was just a passer by because the little teenager dog had the right to speak and to be listened to.

was a stupid movie. I hated it. But - since we’re on the subject – I went fishing with Mark and his dad at Mark’s parents’ pond. We caught a ton of teensey little perch, but out of the blue, some bass decided it really wanted the worm that I was fishing for perch for. I ended up catching a 16 foot inch (thank you Amy!), 3 lb bass! Woo, they said it was one of the biggest in the pond (because they just started it a few years ago). Mark’s dad took a picture of me with it, but I don’t have it yet. When I do I’ll be sure to post it (unless I have a huge booger sticking out of my nose…in that case I’ll just pretend I didn’t get the pic!)!

On another topic…. I get to re-write my paper. Woo. Not only that…I totally corrected my teacher today. Made me feel a bit better, eh? See, the essay I wrote was supposed to be in the style of Marxist criticism. Well, according to Marxists, the characters in stories/books/poems/etc. are not supposed to be people, but they’re actually supposed to be a “performance model” of a human. So, instead of saying “Margaret did this” you would say “the performance model Margaret did this.” Well, I figured that since it’s not a person, but a performance model…I should use “which” instead of “who” in one particular sentence. He marked it wrong and changed it to “who.” When I asked about it today and explained my reasoning he just sat there for a few seconds and then said “I stand…rather…sit…corrected.” Yes, yes, I know, such a small victory, but it really made me feel better. And I’m not quite so angry anymore, because at least he can admit he’s wrong, right?

Anywho, we’re leaving to go to Blackwater convention tonight! Yay. Hope everyone has a beautiful weekend!

Bibliographical details:
Jonker, L., and D. Lawrie, eds. (2005). Fishing for Jonah (Anew): Various Approaches to Biblical Interpretation. Study Guides in Religion and Theology, vol. 7. Stellenbosch: SUN Press.

Publisher’s information:
Fishing for Jonah (anew) introduces students of theology to a wide range of approaches or ‘methods’ in biblical interpretation, drawing on the book of Jonah for illustrations. This thoroughly revised version of Fishing for Jonah (Conradie, Jonker, Lawrie & Arendse 1992) represents both a contraction and an expansion compared to its predecessor. The elementary introduction to the theory of interpretation in Sections A and B of the previous book is now dealt with in Angling for Interpretation (Conradie & Jonker 2001), and theological hermeneutics, briefly touched on in Section D of the previous book, will become the topic of Hooked on Hermeneutics (Conradie & Smit, in preparation). On the other hand, Fishing for Jonah (anew) contains a number of new chapters and revised and expanded versions of the chapters that appeared in the previous book. The chapters are ordered so as to give readers a rough picture of the history of biblical interpretation and of the debates and problems that have shaped it. In the view of the editors, this history is not simply a story of dawning enlightenment or of decline from a pure origin. It is, instead, the story of an ongoing struggle to make sense of the Bible and of insights gained, used, abused and sometimes regained. To such a story there can be no absolute conclusion. We can neither accept one of the approaches we have inherited as a final answer, nor can we start with a clean slate. We have to read the Bible with our brothers and sisters, our mothers and fathers. This book introduces some of the voices to which we have to give a hearing when we seek to ‘read in community’.

Dr. Louis Jonker Is Senior Lecturer in the Department Old and New Testament, Stellenbosch University. He teaches Old Testament, and has specialized in Exegetical Methodology and Biblical Hermeneutics.

Douglas Lawrie is Associate Professor in the Department of Religion and Theology at the University of the Western Cape, where he teaches Old Testament, Rhetoric and Homiletics.

Table of contents:
CHAPTER 1: Introduction … 1
1.1 The purpose of this book … 1
1.2 The spiral of interpretation … 2
1.3 The structure of Fishing for Jonah (anew) … 4

CHAPTER 2: Classical strategies of interpretation … 7
2.1 Introduction (Louis Jonker/Ernst Conradie) … 7
2.2 Allegorical interpretation (Louis Jonker/Ernst Conradie) … 7
2.3 Typological interpretation (Louis Jonker/Ernst Conradie) … 11
2.4 Rabbinical (midrash) interpretation (Louis Jonker/Ernst Conradie) … 13

CHAPTER 3: A modern era emerges … 17
3.1 Introduction (Louis Jonker) … 17
3.2 Historical-grammatical approach (Louis Jonker) … 18
3.3 Historical-rationalist interpretation (Louis Jonker) … 22
3.4 Historical-literal interpretation (Louis Jonker) … 24

CHAPTER 4: Approaches focusing on the production of texts … 27
4.1 Introduction (Louis Jonker) … 27
4.2 Historical-critical approaches (Louis Jonker) … 29
4.3 Canonical criticism (Louis Jonker) … 45
4.4 Cultural-anthropological approaches (Louis Jonker/Roger Arendse) … 47
4.5 Socio-rhetorical criticism (Louis Jonker) … 58

CHAPTER 5: Approaches focusing on the texts themselves … 67
5.1 Introduction (Douglas Lawrie) … 67
5.2 New Criticism and related approaches (Douglas Lawrie) … 72
5.3 Structuralist approaches (Douglas Lawrie/Ernst Conradie) … 78
5.4 Narrative approaches (Louis Jonker) … 95

CHAPTER 6: Approaches focusing on the reception of texts … 109
6.1 Introduction (Douglas Lawrie) … 109
6.2 The role of the reader (Douglas Lawrie) … 112
6.3 Rhetorical-critical studies (Douglas Lawrie) … 129
6.4 Deconstructionist approaches (Douglas Lawrie) … 146

CHAPTER 7: The hermeneutics of suspicion: The hidden worlds of ideology and the unconscious … 167
7.1 Introduction (Douglas Lawrie) … 167
7.2 Psychoanalytical approaches (Douglas Lawrie) … 171
7.3 Marxist approaches (Douglas Lawrie) … 189
7.4 Feminist approaches (Franziska Andrag-Meyer/Elna Mouton) … 200
7.5 African hermeneutics (Gerald West) … 207
7.6 An ecological hermeneutics (Ernst Conradie) … 219

CHAPTER 8: Where does this leave us? … 229
8.1 Introduction … 229
8.2 Towards multidimensional interpretation … 235
8.3 Bridging the gap between academic and non-academic readings … 242
8.4 Where this book meets its boundaries … 243

EXERCISES … 245

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY … 253
Works cited and suggestions for further reading on the book of Jonah … 253
Works cited and suggestions for further reading on the exegetical approaches … 256

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A modernist exercise in capitalist angst, T.S. Eliot’s famous masterpiece “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” at once exposes the crumbling of bourgeoisie society and the utter disintegration of its culture as a meaningful epoch. Considered by many to be the first modernist poem, its verses certainly carve out a splendid picture of the isolation and contempt for the status quo that marks modernist and postmodernist literature. More than that, it illustrates the emptiness and superficiality of class society through the middle-class male persona of the narrator, who is kept nameless but is presumably Eliot himself speaking through a fictional character.

The sense of being lost begins with the quotation at the beginning of the poem. Translated, it reads: “If I thought my answer were to one who could ever return to the world, this flame would move no more; but since no one has ever returned alive from this depth, if what I hear be true, without fear of infamy I answer you.” The quote, which comes from Dante’s Divine Comedy, is originally spoken by a lost soul in hell. This gives quite a first impression of the emotions to come from the main body of the poem.

In the first stanza, when the narrator asks a person, presumably a woman, to accompany him on a stroll through the streets of downtown, already the man’s thoughts have drifted to the decay of class society. He describes “half-deserted streets,” “restless nights in one-night cheap hotels,” and “streets that follow like a tedious argument/ of insidious intent.” This continues throughout-everything around him seems to be molding, rotting and rusting. Most revealing is his description of “sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells,” a contrast between the perceived “low-class” imagery of sawdust on the floors of a restaurant and the “high-class” imagery of the oysters on a half-shell. The narrator hates the upper-crust and empty society of London. This is significant, since in real life Eliot tried to escape such a culture, but his greedy wife lured him back in by insisting he get a “real” job other than writing.

The couplet, “In the room the women come and go/ talking of Michelangelo,” is repeated over and over at various stages in the poem, showing the two-fold mindset of wanting attention from women and fearing to get it, and criticizing the pretentiousness of the refined. The narrator realizes throughout that bourgeoisie capitalist culture, that is, the culture of the dominant class, expressed these days through advertising and television, is vapid, hollow and worth nothing. Even the aristocrat women of such a culture are worthless to him, which he reveal when he says, “And I have known the arms already, known them all/ arms that are braceleted and white and bare/ [but in the lamplight, downed with light brown hair!]” He notices the flaws of these shallow women, in this case the arm hair, which become symbolic for the larger imperfections of the social order they represent. He is even hesitant to participate in the classy activity of “taking toast and tea,” and in fact seems to find it reprehensive.

Not only does our narrator criticize the culture of the society itself, and the people which make up that society, but he also condemns the unsavory pillars which uphold that society. “The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes” can be interpreted to be either (or both) mustard gas and sickening smog. In another time-honored modernist tool, Eliot seemingly parodies the insanity of imperialist war and capitalist pollution with these images, two things which have helped give rise to the society he so hates.

Nevertheless, he saves his most biting criticisms for himself. He imagines himself as a foolish and aging old man, unable to command even the small amount of respect from women he has already: “With a bald spot in the middle of my hair/ [they will say: 'How his hair is growing thin!']” He speaks in subtle code about his lost sexual performance as an old man when he asks himself, “Should I, after tea and cakes and ices/ have the strength to force the moment to its crisis?” It is in this section of the poem that his pack of insecurities comes to a head with him claiming to have, “seen the moment of my greatness flicker” and to have “seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker.” The eternal Footman in this context is probably death, personified by the grim reaper, handing him his coat-an activity normally reserved for when one is about to depart-in order that he may “depart” from his life.

His anxiety peaks with the famous statement, “Do I dare disturb the universe?” from which the poem switches moods. The narrator’s fears become free-floating and ever sharper, as he questions whether it is worth it to be bold or if life itself is pointless. He asks himself if it “would be worth it” if he should end up having to say: “that is not what I meant at all. That is not it, at all.” He fears mistakes he will make and anticipates the ways in which the woman he desires will misunderstand him. His insecurity, which in itself is a social construct of the system he despises, knows no bounds. “No!” he claims, “I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be/ am an attendant lord, one that will do/ To swell a progress, start a scene or two/ advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool/ deferential, glad to be of use/ politic, cautious, and meticulous/ full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse/ at times, indeed, almost ridiculous- almost, at times, the Fool.” He feels he is not good enough or brave enough to be the hero character of fable, the knight in shining armor. This shows betrays a patriarchal mindset in which he, the male lead role, is the virtuous hero of the story who is the center of attention and praise, another social construct which is programmed into men as being the most ideal by bourgeoisie culture.

Finally, the world the poem has constructed so far abruptly collapses. There is suddenly no more talk of the city, or of culture, or of the narrator himself taking a walk with the woman he is with. He bemoans his fate of aging one last time with the line, “I grow old…I grow old…I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled,” this time talking in present tense, as if all hope is already lost. The scene changes to a fantasy of the narrator’s where he is walking along a peaceful beach with singing mermaids. Yet, even in this beautiful imaginary setting, our storyteller has no control over his own life or his surroundings. “I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each” he says, “I do not think that they will sing to me.” Even in fantasy, he is marked with hopelessness and loneliness.

Finally, wading into the ocean of his pretend world, he says, “We have lingered in the chambers of the sea/ by sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown/ till human voices wake us, and we drown.” He realizes real human voices must eventually awaken him from this dream world, and once again he feels lost. The poem ends with the disturbing imagery of drowning, which has the symbolic meaning of the narrator drowning in his raging insecurities about everyday life, aging, and of his sexual advances towards women being turned down, even in dreams. Eliot’s poem leaks cynicism, wit and anxiety in its carefully crafted stanzas.