American Literature in the World

Premise: In both The Maltese Falcon and The Man in the High Castle, some object arrives that is rooted in or tied to extraordinary historical circumstances—an almost mythical falcon from the time of the Crusades and an explanation of an alternate history, respectively. For lack of a better term at the moment, these two items can be referred to as “sources of legend.”

Working (and rough) thesis: The introduction of these sources of legend—foreign in origin— disturb the rhythm of the city and society, yet nevertheless, or perhaps as a result, manage to reflect some core aspect of the worlds of their respective novels.

I. Coming from a foreign import/visitor

A. As brought to (a) main character’s attention
-the Kasouras mention The Grasshopper to Childan, and they are Japanese to Childan’s native San Franciscan
-Gutman, a man of international origins, explains the history of the falcon to San Franciscan Spade
B. Foreign in creation
-The Grasshopper was written in the Rockies area, technically foreign to the Pacific States, and written by the I Ching, a Chinese import to American culture
-the falcon is from Malta

II. The mixing of reality and fantasy

A. Presented as historical or scholarly
-The Grasshopper is regarded by its readers as systematically taking into account several political figures and movements
-Gutman’s various research sources mentioned when recounting the history of the falcon

B. Considered on various levels to be fiction
-The Grasshopper is very much considered to be a fictional book since it describes an alternate reality
-the story of the falcon turns out to be true, but Spade is skeptical at first and has it verified by a university professor

C. They prove to be surprisingly disruptive in scope
-Reiss, Rita, and Juliana are instantly addicted to and preoccupied by the ideas presented in The Grasshopper
-The falcon is so fantastic that regular investigators and authorities (police, district attorney) are stymied in their efforts to put normal explanations (such as mob wars) on odd occurrences

III. Revealing the truth
-revelation of The Grasshopper being the real truth as opposed to the characters’ reality
-the falcon’s ultimate arrival both reveals the rest of the mystery of who killed whom and the truth of each character’s nature

I plan to do a digital project on the importance of and references to nature in the House on Mango Street. This is a working concept but I plan to point out the treatment of nature of pure, positive, and an escape/refuge from the ills of urban/sub-urban life.

1. Trees

-Four Skinny Trees

-“Our house would be white with trees around it, a great big yard and grass growing without a fence.”
(The House on Mango Street)

2. Wind

– “Nothing wakes the but the wind” (Bums in the Attic)

– “They came with the wind that blows in August” (The Three Sisters)

3. The Sky

-“Ruthie looked at the sky and her eyes got watery at times. ” (Edna’s Ruthie)

-“And if you opened the little window latch and gave it a shove, the windows would swing open, all the sky would come in.” (Sally)

-“Then the colors began to whirl. Sky tipped. Their high black gym shoes ran. ” (Red Clowns)

Comments

Kaivan —

A wonderful topic; I can’t wait to see how digitization or visualization would extend and complicate your argument.  Trees and wind and the sky are crucial to The House on Mango Street, but they are not pure or pristine, nature in the wild, but rather “nature” shaped and deformed by their urban setting.  Of the four skinny trees, Cisneros writes: “They send ferocious roots beneath the ground. They grow up and they grow down and grab the earth between their hairy toes and bite the sky with violent teeth and never quit their anger. This is how they keep.”  These trees are survivors, bearing signs of their hostile environment and the fierce struggle they have lived through.  I look forward to more discussion of the way man-made realities permeate nature in Cisneros.  To give the essay greater scope, it would be good also to consider nature in Sandburg’s Chicago Poems.  A comparison of these two authors would shed light on each.

Old vs. New: The True Markers of Civilization

At first glance, Frank Norris’s McTeague only seems to confirm the rather bleak naturalist theory that humans cannot rise above their base instincts—that they are at the mercy of elements of their family background and the pressures of everyday life. Such a philosophy would seem to indicate that despite all efforts to be civilized, humans cannot escape the urges left over from centuries past. Yet upon further investigation, Norris’s outlook on this issue proves to be more complicated. In Norris’s conception of civilization, succumbing to such base behavior is a result of both living in and conforming to unnatural surroundings. The modern city life of San Francisco, considered by the mainstream to be the latest step in the progression of civilization and sophistication, is revealed in its artificiality to be the catalyst for uncivilized behavior. It is in the past iterations of San Francisco that its residents managed to distance themselves the most from their base tendencies, which have now returned in the modern city. As shown by the stages of reversion experienced by McTeague, Norris portrays the modern city as a step backward rather than forward in development, while the older, less sophisticated ways of life are truly the more civilized.

In describing the height of McTeague’s social advancement, Norris makes clear the artificiality of the dentist’s conforming to the ideas of respectability and status characteristic of modern San Francisco. As McTeague and Trina settle into the routine of married life, Trina gradually develops an influence over her husband when it comes to playing a proper role in society. It requires patient dedication on Trina’s part, and McTeague’s acceptability in her estimation is only achieved over the course of several steps. Not only is it a matter of dressing better, but putting a stop to “the habit of eating with his knife,” drinking “bottled beer in the place of steam beer” and knowing to “take off his hat” to the various women he encounters (150). As gaining this level of purportedly civilized mannerisms requires so much training and so many codes of conduct, it is evident that none of it is truly a natural state. Its artificiality is made even more clear when it comes to McTeague’s resulting state of mind. As a result of Trina’s influence, it is explained, McTeague develops his own “ambitions,” which are described as “very vague, very confused ideas of something better…for the most part borrowed from Trina” (151). That McTeague does not come up with these ambitions on his own indicates that they are unnatural in some way, only obtained by thorough inundation into modern city values. To make matters worse, the ambitions themselves are misguided and flawed. McTeague dreams of a house “with a grass plat in front and calla lilies,” and envisions having a son “whose name would be Daniel” (151). The specificity of these details is rather odd due to the fact that they lack an explanation. There is no reason given for the name Daniel, or why calla lilies in particular are the flower of choice. Without a basis for these desires, the need to strive for them at all is called into question, and McTeague’s enthusiasm for these possibilities comes across as absurd.

Norris further demonstrates the pointlessness of McTeague’s, and by extension the population of San Francisco’s, attempts to be civilized members of society in describing McTeague’s suffering when he is deprived of the quality food and clothing to which he has become accustomed as a result of his financial woes. McTeague’s petulant attitude, captured in his sulky declaration of “But I don’t like steam beer now” in response to Trina’s directive to buy a cheaper drink (225), is in direct contrast with the sophisticated image he is attempting to maintain. Lacking the means to adhere to the physical hallmarks of the social standards that Trina has trained him to uphold, McTeague has nothing to help him maintain his behavioral conduct. He has not advanced in personality, only developed a desire for objects that are now out of his reach. Such circumstances suggest that attempts at sophistication cause more harm than good, as now McTeague is aware of material items that he lacks. Yet despite his initial resistance to being forced back down to a lower level of social acceptability, the fact that he rather quickly reverts to his habits of passing the time in the car conductors’ joint and sleeping and smoking on Sunday illustrates that the tastes that Trina had trained him to favor never really had a firm hold on him to begin with. With so-called civilized conventions causing such consternation when they cannot be realized, and being so easily forgotten after a time, there seems to be no point in attempting to gain them in the first place.

McTeague’s return to his pre-city ways, like his return to his pre-marriage ways, reveals yet another level of artificiality in modern city life. While McTeague’s first reversion still left him in the city, just with a different level of social respectability, his second reversion takes him out of the city entirely. Soon, a more natural way of life becomes apparent. While McTeague’s reverting to steam beer and napping on Sundays is quick but painful, his return to Placer County and the ways of the mine is filled with sensations of contentment—he belongs in the mines even more than he belongs at Frenna’s. He actually looks forward to getting further away from the mainstream height of civilization, to returning to an older way of life. Its naturalness to him is apparent in how he barely has to think to get to his destination, very much in contrast to the extensive training he had to undergo to appreciate bottled beer and the importance of doffing one’s hat. For the first time McTeague seems to fit in to the way of life. There is even an element of sophistication in the way he engages the foreman in offering himself for hire, knowing all the subtleties of the encounter and the terms “chuck tender” and “Cousin Jack” (302). In contrast with the modern city’s discord, the Big Dipper mine operates with harmony and regularity, indicating that it contains more civilized behavior than the modern city could ever have. Meanwhile, just as he forgot his artificial tastes after his first reversion, “[w]ithin a week’s time [of working at the mine] it seemed to him as though he had never been away” (302-3)—a feat even more impressive than the first considering that he has been gone for more than a decade.

In evading the pursuit of the police, McTeague reverts to the oldest way of life for San Franciscans: prospecting. It proves to lend itself to even more harmony and civilized interaction than the mines. This is shown in the way in which the prospector Cribbens interacts with McTeague. While McTeague is content upon returning to the Placer County mines, he does not seem to strike up a friendship with the other miners. Working with Cribbens, however, McTeague experiences the purest friendship of the entire novel, indicating that only when completely removed from the city and adhering to the ways of the past can people work together. Cribbens and McTeague team up despite their differences—Cribbens puts a stop to their argument over how to find gold with the rather civilized observation that “pardners ought to work along different lines” (313). When McTeague and Cribbens finally do hit gold, there is a strong emphasis on the two men’s partnership, in contrast to the hostility that grows when Trina strikes it rich in her own way by winning the lottery. Cribbens uses a language of alliance throughout the scene. such as when he instructs McTeague to keep an eye out for any intruders, declaring that, “This yere’s our claim. I guess we got it this time, pardner” (319). There is no animosity about sharing the find, even though they found the gold using Cribbens’s “contact” method rather than McTeague’s unsystematic approach. Left to their own devices, away from the pressures of the city, the two men have the most successful interaction out of almost any pair of individuals in the novel.

In the final scene of the novel, Norris makes one final affirmation of the modern city’s unnatural influence that pushes people toward corrupted thought. Death Valley is as far removed from the city as is possible, its starkness a symbol of a time before people even populated the area. Yet when Marcus confronts McTeague in the middle of this vast nothingness, he brings with him the modern city priorities and sensibilities McTeague had left behind, demanding that McTeague hand over the five thousand dollars. The realities of the wilderness, however, cause Marcus and McTeague to put aside their differences in pursuit of the most basic of human needs —water. In this least sophisticated struggle, the problem of obtaining water, McTeague and Marcus participate in the most civil relationship there has been between them since McTeague asked Marcus to let him court Trina. Marcus begins to use a language of alliance that echoes Cribbens’s statements in the previous scene. As the mule runs off with the canteen of water, Marcus tells McTeague, “We’ve got to follow him” (344). This fellowship spreads to their misfortune as well—after the canteen is broken, Marcus asks, “What are we going to do now?” (346). Yet this reconciliation is short-lived. Nonsensically fighting to the death over five thousand dollars in the middle of an uninhabited desert, Marcus and McTeague exhibit the most uncivilized, basest display of violence, brought out by a final succumbing to the mentality of the modern city.

As McTeague reverts to past iterations of himself and San Francisco as a whole, his experiences demonstrate how the old ways of life, much simpler than the complex and artificial ways of the modern city, are more conducive to civilized and peaceful behavior due to having more natural elements. City values and practices require extensive training to appreciate, evidence that they are little more than constructs, not inherent markers of civilization. They force acceptance of certain desires that have no reasoning behind them, and they are much easier to lose than to gain. In contrast, escaping from the city allows for a much more straightforward approach to civilization, and appeals to the natural emotions in individuals. The old ways—mining and prospecting in particular, but also simply trying to stay alive when at the mercy of the desert elements— have a level of harmony and civilized cooperation that is not found in the city. Only when the unnatural tendencies of the modern city find their way into these older environments are the people in them put in jeopardy. As shown by McTeague’s final predicament, the pressures of this latest stage in modern civilization can overcome all human reason and bring out the most brutish actions.

I. Introduction
A. At first glance, Frank Norris’s McTeague only seems to confirm the naturalist theory that humans are in the end only pawns of larger forces of ancestry and inextricable urges, which indicates a rather bleak outlook on any chance of improvement.
B. Thesis: Rather than being resigned to the idea that humans cannot shed their baser instincts and are unable to advance, Norris actually seems to celebrate an older, less sophisticated way of life, with the modern city representing a step backward rather than forward in development.

II. Norris ridicules practices and phenomena that are a part of city life, especially those that are ordinarily taken to represent power and high social status
A. The Charlatan Dentist
1. Norris mocks McTeague’s mother’s hopes of helping her son rise in society, since the man behind his training is a joke professional (p. 2)
B. Marcus’s political speeches and activities
1. Marcus just repeats nonsense political phrases, and his parade is more delusional than grand (p. 10, 110, 156)

III. Instincts warped in the context of or as a result of city environment
A. Trina’s saving without knowing why
1. said to be instinct inherent in her “peasant blood” (p. 106)
B. Marcus and McTeague in the desert
1. gold and water senselessly put on same level of importance for the two men (p. 345-6)

IV. Favor given to the old ways of San Francisco rather than the new
A. Lottery vs. prospecting
1. The lottery is a corrupting influence that is fed by Trina’s claim of sole ownership of the money (p. 122)
2. Goodwill and partnership characteristic of the prospecting scene (p. 319-321)

V. Having succumbed to the demands of the city, simpler pleasures are difficult to obtain
A. McTeague suffers when deprived of the quality food and clothing he’s grown accustomed too (p. 225)
B. Contentedness upon returning to the mines at Placer County ruined by the pursuit of city officials (p. 304-5)

VI. Conclusion

***

Comments

Shelby:   Counterintuitive and illuminating.   I completely agree with you that there’s a persistent nostalgia in McTeague, a longing for a simpler way of life at odds with the complexities of the modern city.  Rather than threading your argument through Marcus, or McTeague’s mother, you might want to focus on old Grannis and Miss Baker, representatives of a bygone generation who remain old-fashioned in spite of the urban environment, and who manage to survive, even to flourish, when younger folks like Trina and Marcus fail to.   McTeague is an interesting case here, with his heart in Placer County, but unfortunately now under the power of modern San Francisco.   I look forward to a great paper analyzing all of these.         — wd

Kristy Kim

ENGL 012 Literary Cities: Presentation Outline

Professor Dimock

18 April 2016

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer

Background

• EL&IC is a novel with “visual writing”—sprinkled with photos of doorknobs, birds, a man falling, etc. as well as blank or nearly blank pages

– novel ends with 14-page flipbook (falling in reverse)

• Tuesday, September 11, 2001, the North Tower of the World Trade Center was crashed into at 8:45 AM, hit on the 80^th floor out of 110 stories, killing hundreds instantly and trapping hundreds more

– South Tower is hit at 9:03 AM at the 60^th floor

– 3,000 people were killed in the Twin Towers and vicinity, 343 paramedics, 23 NYPD, and 37 Port Authority Officers

– ***the risk of writing about something so poignant and recent

– spoke of this 9/11 novel as a “sort of obligation, a challenge to him as a New Yorker and an artist…I think it’s risky to avoid what’s right in front of you”

• Bombing of Dresden: Feb. 13^th, 1945
• British and U.S. bombers destroyed the city of Dresden
• Between 35,000- 135,000 were killed
• Controversial because mainly only civilians were killed, Dresden was not important to German wartime production nor was a major industrial center

1. The Voyager: Narration

• Oskar as an unreliable narrator (12-year-old boy, possibly has Asperger’s due to extreme intelligence and lack of social cues (99) but inconclusive)
• A child trying to understand the tragedy of 9/11, a tragedy even adults could make sense of
• How is Foer’s choice for his primary narrator to be a child impact the themes of the novel and the reader’s experience? What, if anything, is lost with this choice and what is gained?
• Is Foer asking too much of his narrator to comment on the nuances of the “worst day”?
• Oskar as a voyager
• Novel is less about the incident, more about the city (shows us all of 5 boroughs of NY by trying to find everyone named Black)
• Labyrinth, clues, searching for explanations

1. The Voyage

1) Actual, physical journey through the boroughs

• “Even though I’m not anymore, I used to be an atheist, which means I didn’t believe in things that couldn’t be observed. I believed that once you’re dead, you’re dead forever, and you don’t feel anything, and you don’t even dream” (4)
• very invested in the concrete, physical tangible objects
• ties into Oskar’s obsession to find what the key unlocks—finding the objects help find the people they lost
• the knowable vs. unknowable

– “Parents are always more knowledgeable than their children, and children are always smarter than their parents” (7)

– “I think and think and think, I’ve thought myself out of happiness one million times, but never once into it” (17)

2) Emotional, intrinsic journey of self (type of closure?)

• **Oskar hides the messages from his mom (68): IMPORTANT PASSAGE
• “that secret was a hole in the middle of me that every happy thing fell into” (71)
• reservoir of tears (fairy tale quality)
• “She could tell that I was zipping up the sleeping bag of myself…I knew the truth, which was that if she could have chosen, it would have been my funeral we were driving to” (6)
• “sleeping bag of myself” (37)
• “there’s nothing wrong with not understanding yourself” (114)
• “I felt, that night, on that stage, under that skull, incredibly close to everything in the universe, but also extremely alone. I wondered, for the first time in my life, if life was worth all the work it took to live” (145)

III. Question of Mortality

• What/who we leave behind, or more importantly, what people remember of us
• “Do you promise not to bury me when I die?” (168—whole passage)
• the one word biographies: “everyone gets boiled down to one word” (157)
• prevalence of the word “war”
• “So in a way, the more you kiss with lips, the more human you are.” “And the more you wage war?” (99)
• “it was one of the best days of my life, a day during which I lived my life and didn’t think about my life at all” (28)
• “Nothing is beautiful and true” (43)
• Nothing Places: “the less was said, the more misunderstood” (111)
• “sometimes I can hear my bones straining under the weight of all the lives I’m not living” (113)

Concluding Questions

• Does the book need the context of 9/11 to be as effective? Or could it be just as successful without it?
• The scars of grief
• Bruises (50)
• Grandfather does not speak or outside (162) or hear (165)
• Presence and absence of time
• The time stamps on the voice messages
• “Do you know what time it is?” (112, 118, 125, 129)
• preoccupying fear that we won’t have enough time/waste time

Kristy Kim

ENGL 012: Literary Cities

Long Essay Outline

Professor Dimock

12 April 2016

Topic: the use of language/native tongues to reflect cultural dissonance within the immigrant’s experience in Amy Tan’s The Kitchen God’s Wife and Julia Alvarez’s How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents

Intro

• In many cultures, language is not merely used to refer to a specific object—it has connotations of certain feelings, layers of historical context, and personal significance.
• The specificity of language to a particular culture/time period can cause dissonance between generations (i.e. Winnie and Pearl, Sofia and her father)
• Inability of language to be perfectly translatable: describes the hardships of assimilation– what is lost? (accents, vocabulary, i.e. Yolanda’s Spanish has gone rusty) What is gained? And is that enough to compensate for the loss? Why can’t both coexist?
• Language can also reflect cultural values/social norms (i.e. the many different words for various types of luck in The Kitchen God’s Wife—representative of cultural beliefs)
• The absence of language is just as significant—what underlies the text, the expectations/limitations of communication (both of the novels construct “hieroglyphic” worlds)
• What, if anything, can be the “universal language”?

Lost in Translation

• “This word, taonan? Oh, there is no American word I can think of that means the same thing. But in Chinese, we have lots of different words to describe all kinds of troubles” (Tan 207)
• only the necessity of certain situations, feelings, etc. will yield to the creation of that word in that language
• there are voids in language which leads to voids in understanding (also there is a generational gap)
• this vacuum can lead to internal confusion: how to explain to others, how to reason/think about oneself
• the purpose of language is to be able to communicate with others, however, if from two separate cultures/worlds/languages, how do you reconcile them?
• “She always called me syin ke, a nickname, two words that mean “heart liver”…In English, you call it gizzard, not very good-sounding. But in Chinese, syin ke sounds beautiful, and this is what mothers call their babies if they love them very, very much” (Tan 93)
• when translated, the beauty of language may be lost/diminished
• preservation of the purity of the native tongue
• Antojo: “Actually it’s not an easy word to explain”/ “[it’s] a very old Spanish word ‘from before your United States was even thought of” (Alvarez 3)
• One’s origins/roots and their importance (what came first/what holds precedence): a sense of pride in one’s heritage
• “your United States”: ownership thrust onto those who are “bilingual” (what is yours vs. what is ours/ what is innate vs. what is learned)
• “And Yo was running, like the mad, into the safety of her first tongue, where the proudly monolingual John could not catch her, even if he tried” (Alvarez 72)
• “yo” rhymes with “cielo”— because she wants to be the sky
• “what language do you love in?” (13): implication that raw emotion will cause you to revert to the native tongue, that is your purest form of expression
• Yolanda’s name: fractured into nicknames that are created to fit her into a specific context (lost sense of identity, lost sense of self)

Language to Reflect Cultural Values/Beliefs

• “But your father did not think it was fate, at least not the Chinese idea of ming yuan… And here he used the American word “destiny,” something that could not be prevented” (Tan 341)
• differences between fate and destiny?
• At what point is it just semantics and the two points of view can simply be reconciled to mean the same thing
• “Ying- gai was what my mother always said when she meant, I should have” (Tan 29)
• “Jye shiang ru yi. This first word is “luck,” this other is another kind of luck, and these two mean “all that you wish.” All kinds of luck, all that you wish” (Tan 53)
• the idea of good luck and bad luck—is it an entity that simply exists (people are predestined) as a way to account/explain phenomenon
• the naming of Danru (268), a “good Buddhist name” to reflect the nonchalance that Winnie wanted him to have, even to his own mother
• the emphasis on “la familia” (Alvarez 109)
• the family as a unit (collectivism vs. individualism)
• generally accepted Western social norm: children grow to be autonomous adults with their own agency
• does not translate to other cultures where the hierarchy of the family is maintained throughout one’s life (“deep roots” (Alvarez))

The Absence of Language and its Significance

• Winnie complaining about Helen and Auntie Du’s care
• The incident with the falling scissors
• For superstitious reasons, things are not spoken
• Interesting point to consider: John’s pro/con lists
• Alvarez: Sofia’s name is not mentioned as one of the daughters during game at father’s 70^th birthday party
• “She’d take her turn and make him know it was her!” (Alvarez 39)
• explore the fallacies of language (misconceptions, miscommunication, etc.)

Download the properly formatted version: Outline 2 

Quantifying Pathologies as Patterns and Preservation

1. The Premise: Y-BOC Scale
   1. Throughout much of the literature that has been traversed in this semester, many pieces have been driven by a singular obsession, a fixation upon an object, an ideal, a memory. These obsessions are unique to each individual, but also serve as a common thread throughout, acting as an inescapable force, a representation of human fragility, and as a tenuous form of preservation.
   2. This experimental form will try to apply the Yale-Brown Obsessive Compulsive Scale (http://www.stlocd.org/handouts/YBOC-Symptom-Checklist.pdf) to some of the obsessions in these literary pieces and develop patterns, establish a spectrum, and draw conclusions. This by no means attempts to “diagnose” the characters, instead using the scale as a tool to organize the behaviors of the characters. Luckily, the scale is easily separable into “obsessive” and “compulsive” and this will focus primarily on the “obsessive.” The only character of the three (Trina, Charlie Citrine, and Gutman) who develops real compulsions is Trina.
   3. Definitions from Y-BOC:
      1. OBSESSIONS are unwelcome and distressing ideas, thoughts, images, or impulses that repeatedly enter your mind. They may seem to occur against your will. They may be repugnant to you, you may recognize them as senseless, and they may not fit your personality.
      2. COMPULSIONS, on the other hand, are behaviors or acts that you feel driven to perform although you may recognize them as senseless or excessive. At times, you may try to resist doing them but this may prove difficult. You may experience anxiety that does not diminish until the behavior is completed.
   4. The Y-BOC is also split into six areas that deal with obsessions:
      1. Time occupied by obsessive thoughts
      2. Interference due to obsessive thoughts

• Distress associated with obsessive thoughts

1. Resistance against obsessions
2. Degree control over obsessive thoughts
3. Insight into obsessions

1. Ultimately, the Y-BOC will be used as a marker to easily refer to and categorize the obsessive behaviors of Trina Sieppe in McTeague, Casper Gutman in The Maltese Falcon, and Charlie Citrine in Humboldt’s Gift.

1. Trina in McTeague
   1. The patterns of obsession in McTeague are not difficult to identify at all. McTeague continually falls back upon his steam beer and concertina; Maria her story about her family’s gold, even Old Grannis and his book binder. However, the development of obsession is most evident in Trina.
      1. From the very beginnings of her marriage to McTeague, Trina has already developed a fierce attachment to her pattern of life.
         1. “all her pretty ways, her clean, trim little habits, would be forgotten, since they would be thrown away upon her stupid, brutish husband” (146).
      2. The obsession begins in earnest, however, when she actually receives the grand sum of money by winning the lottery and she begins to express her emotional obsessiveness:
         1. “’Oh, you are the thick-wittedest man that I ever knew. Do you think we’re millionaires? Oh, to think of losing thirty-five dollars like that.’ Tears were in her eyes, tears of grief as well as of anger” (161). This is the beginning of the obsession’s interference in her normal actions.

• The most prominent example of her obsession’s interference is embodied in her meditations about and repulsion to her generosity to McTeague.
  1. “If not thirty-five dollars, then at least fifteen or sixteen, her share of it. But a feeling of reluctance, a sudden revolt against this intended generosity, arose in her” (164).
  2. This is also an example of almost-resistance. Trina’s resistance of her impulses have already been quickly diminished at this point, although she is well aware of her miser-like behavior: “’I guess I am [miserly], but I can’t help it, and it’s a good fault” (197).
  3. She ends up breaking those precious “pretty ways, her clean trim little habits” in her pursuit of hoarding, saving: “Trina’s stinginess had increased to such an extent that it had gone beyond the mere hoarding of money. She grudged even the food that she and McTeague ate, and even brought away half loaves of bread, lumps of sugar, and fruit form the car conductors’ coffee joint” (233).

1. So far, Trina has already fulfilled four of the six sections of the Y-BOC. Trina’s most extreme form obsession often takes place in distress associated with her obsessions.
   1. After basically forcing McTeague and herself to move out of their home in the Parlors (because she refuses to admit she has the money to continue living there), she “sob[s] herself to sleep at the thought of her past happiness and her present wretchedness,” which is, of course, self-inflicted (216).
   2. And when she finds her money has been pilfered by McTeague (although not all of her money, yet), she has a physical breakdown: “She dug her nails into her scalp, and clutching the heavy coils of her thick black hair, tore it again and again. She struck her forehead with her clenched fists. Her little body shook from head to foot with the violence of her sobbing” (274).
      1. The most striking indicator of her obsession’s total control over her life and her thoughts is her response when told her fingers must be amputated: “’My work!’ exclaimed Trina” (276).
   3. Trina scores a 15/20 of the Y-BOC in the obsessions alone.

• Charlie in Humboldt’s Gift
  1. Charlie Citrine is already in the throes of his obsession with Humboldt, which has truly begun before he even meets Humboldt. The entire novel is driven by Charlie’s meditations upon Humboldt, that almost every moment of the piece is permeated by Humboldt’s post-humus presence, a “What would Humboldt have said to this?” at every turn (3).
  2. The readers’ introduction to Humboldt is highly ordered and deeply nuanced—a clear sign of deep meditation beforehand.
     1. “What else can result from the capitalization of such nouns? Myself, I’ve always held the number of sacred words down. In my opinion Humboldt had too long a list of them—Poetry, Beauty, Love, Waste Land, Alienation, Politics, History of the Unconscious” (6).
        1. There’s something very intimate about this description that screams volumes about the thought that Charlie has put into looking back upon the person Humboldt was and the time he has spent thinking about Humboldt.
     2. Charlie also does Humboldt’s bidding—see the Princeton Plan (126).

• Like Trina, Charlie is somewhat aware of his own obsession, but seems unwilling or unable to take action against it.
  1. “I’ve reached an age at which you can see your neurotic impulses advancing on you. There’s not much that I can do when the dire need of help comes over me. I stand at the edge of a psychic pond and I know that if crumbs are thrown in, my carp will come swimming up” (50).

1. The obsession with the past considerably intersects itself into Charlie’s other pressing (financial) matters. “How to prevent the leprosy of souls. Somehow it appeared to be up to me. I meditated like anything. I followed Humboldt in my mind. He was smoking on the train. I saw him passing quick and manic” (137).
2. In terms of resistance, we know Charlie is aware of his apparent obsession because many others make a point of it—most notably, Renata: “What you do [. . .] is invent relationships with the dead you never had when they were living. You create connections they wouldn’t allow, or you weren’t capable of. I heard you say once that death was good for some people. You probably meant that you got something out of it” (315). He has little resistance to these probing thoughts and has little control over them as well.
3. Beyond the generally cumbersome presence of Humboldt in Charlie’s narration, the scene of Humboldt walking down the street with a pretzel stick is the most piercing image that continues to insert itself into Charlie’s mind.
   1. “The mention of zwieback brought back to me, also, the pretzel he was chewing on the curb on that hot day. On that day I made a poor showing. I should have gone up to him. I should have taken his hand. I should have kissed his face” (346).
   2. This scene recurs on many occasions, being conjured up my many different triggers. In this instance, his obsession is not perhaps with the person that is Humboldt, but on the actions he did not take.
4. Charlie scores a 11/20 of the Y-BOC in the obsessions alone.

1. Gutman in The Maltese Falcon
   1. Gutman’s obsession with the physical object that is the Maltese Falcon seems the most straight-forward, but is probably the most subtle in-text. This obsession is defined by the lengths to which he is willing to go to attain his end goal.
   2. First and foremost, Gutman, like the others, spends an inordinate amount of time meditating upon the object of his obsession. He knows this long-winded (and hard-to-believe) history of the falcon by heart and takes it as irrefutable: “These are facts, historical facts, not schoolbook history, not Mr. Wells’s history, but history nevertheless” (124).
   3. Gutman’s obsessions are quite well-veiled. The outbursts are intense but far in between; tiny moments (“The fat man set the bottle on the table with a bang. ‘But you said you [knew where the falcon was],’ he protested” (128).) There are a number of surprising things that Gutman is also willing to commit to get at this bird.
      1. Poisoning Charlie: “He shook his head again and took an uncertain step forward. He laughed thickly and muttered: ‘God damn you.’” (130).
      2. Using his daughter as a red herring: “’That daughter of yours has a nice belly,’ [Sam] said, ‘too nice to be scratched up with pins.’ [. . .] ‘Yes, sir, that was a shame, but you must admit that it served its purpose’” (173).

• Giving up Wilmer as a fall-guy: “’I feel towards Wilmer just exactly as if he were my own son. I really do. But if I even for a moment thought of doing what you propose, what in the world do you think would keep Wilmer from telling the police every last detail?’ [. . .] The fat man sighed and made a wry face and replied, ‘You can have him.’” (1178, 186).

1. Gutman, unlike Trina and Charlie, is able to mask his obsession in casual control.
   1. Gutman is never the one to initiate talk about the falcon. “’Let’s talk about the bird,’ Spade said” is how they come to speak about it almost every time (123).
   2. From the beginning, Gutman is painted as somewhat suave, well-mannered (as well as ruthless). Therefore, the image of him “fumbling [. . .] Sweat glistened on his round cheeks. His fingers twitched” when faced with the actual (supposed) bird seems jarring. This is a moment of reality, a second where Gutman’s veiled obsessions shine through.
2. The interfering nature of his obsession is most apparent when he decides it may be worth it to drop everything and go to Turkey at the drop of a hat to find this bird. By any sane logic, there must be a certain point where the sunk cost no longer weighs on the hunt, especially as “’For seventeen years [he has] wanted that little item and have been trying to get it. If [he] must spend another year on the quest—well, sir—that will be an additional expenditure in time of only’—his lips moved silently as he calculated—‘five and fifteen-seventeenths per cent’” (203).
   1. Gutman has no resistance to his thoughts. He thinks it a noble cause and therefore sees no need to resist the obsession.
3. Gutman scores also an 11/20 on the Y-BOC in the obsessions alone.

1. Pattern-reading
   1. The different patterns are generally comparable to intensity and duration. Gutman has the duration of the obsession locked up, and Charlie has the moments of intensity in his thoughts about Humboldt. Trina is the most interesting in pattern-reading, because as she develops throughout the novel, she develops intensity as duration continues to elongate.
   2. Also interesting, both Trina and Gutman are “destroyed” in the most physical way at the end of their obsession. It remains to be seen whether Charlie truly releases his obsession with Humboldt (that is, not to say that he completely wipes Humboldt from his mind, but rather is no longer fixated).
2. Pathologies as preservation
   1. Trina’s preservation is a desperate attempt to retain normalcy, her habits, masking her fragility and fear. Her interactions with McTeague have fundamentally changed her course of life, not just because McTeague is brutish, but because it constitutes a certain loss of self. As she becomes more and more detached from the life she knew before McTeague, the more fiercely she holds onto the gold, the money, her physical ability to save and savor something.
   2. Charlie’s preservation is two-fold. It is both in Charlie’s preservation of Humboldt as a greater person than the specter he sees on the street right before his death, and also in Charlie’s need to save himself by doing so. Charlie is seeking answers to his current decline in the past of Humboldt, a mentor and (mostly) a huge figure in his life. In a way, he is getting something out of it, as Renata accuses him of doing. Saul Bellow also projects this obsession as far more positive than Frank Norris does Trina’s—Charlie’s obsession results in some form of release and a noble gesture, whereas Trina’s obsession leads to her complete disregard for her own safety.
   3. Gutman’s preservation is the least obvious. He’s protecting his purpose. In a way, Gutman’s preservation is an extreme of the sunk-cost-problem. Gutman has built an entire network dedicated to tracking down this bird and has invested years of his life into this endeavor. At this point, find this Maltese Falcon is almost a part of his identity. Quitting at this point is a waste, although there is no way to get back the years he’s already used in the search. The payoff of the bird has something to do with the money, for sure, but the greater payoff deals with Gutman’s self-constructed identity surrounding this object.

• Conclusions

Fate and Determinism in McTeague and The Kitchen God’s Wife

Intro: While McTeague and The Kitchen God’s Wife might both be books of San Francisco, they could not be more different. McTeague is a dentist driven to murder by forces outside his control—namely, the greed of the people in his life and the materialistic environment of a San Francisco at the mercy of the Gold Rush. He has absolutely no control over his fate.

In contrast, the protagonists of Tan’s novel acknowledge the role that luck, or fate, plays in their lives, but are far more successful in playing an active role in their destinies. This manifests itself in the more optimistic representation of San Francisco as a haven for immigrants. Although much of the novel takes place in China, Winnie’s resourcefulness and resilience give her agency and make her an ideal example of what immigrants in the ‘90s might have expected from the American Dream.

Point 1: Determinism versus Agency

• McTeague is completely at the mercy of his environment. (naturalism)
  • 304, “It was the same work he had so often performed in his Parlors, only magnified, made monstrous, distorted, and grotesqued, the caricature of dentistry.”
  • McTeague’s utter confusion at the way greed makes his wife/Marcus act.
  • Golden canary in a cage
• While Winnie emphasizes the role that luck/fate plays in her life, especially in positive ways, she ultimately believes she has agency and can fight her fate if she tries hard enough.
  • 341, “That’s what I said to your father many years later, after we were married. How lucky we were that fate brought us together…All I can say is this: I was on a small road in Shanghai. Your father was at that same place.”
  • 401, “For all those years I had imagined how it would be to have my mother know…She was putting all this into her own heart, so I could see what was left. Hope.”

Point 2: Contrasting Depictions of Immigration

• The immigrants in McTeague are either constantly suffering or malicious drains on their cities’ resources
  • Zerkow/Maria
    • 34, “It was impossible to look at Zerkow and not know instantly that greed—inordinate, insatiable greed—was the dominant passion of the man. He was The Man with the Rake, groping hourly in the muck heap of the city for gold, for gold, for gold.”

• The traumatizing things that happen to Trina’s family

• In contrast, immigrants in The Kitchen God’s Wife are productive, hopeful citizens that build new lives for themselves in entirely unfamiliar cities.
  • 14, “My mother and Auntie Helen co-own Ding Ho Flower Shop on Ross Alley in Chinatown.”

Point 3: Protagonists (McTeague/Winnie) as Reflections of Their Cities

• McTeague and his stupidity/powerlessness despite his physical prowess are direct reflections of the San Francisco of his time. The city treats immigrants and non-immigrants alike as marionettes controlled by the factors of greed that regulate the Gold Rush.
  • 20, “In some places east of the Mississippi nature is cozy…In Placer County, California, she is a vast, unconquered brute of the Pliocene epoch, savage, sullen, and magnificently indifferent to man. But there were men in these mountains, like lice on mammoths’ hides…sucking their blood, extracting gold.”
  • 71, “Neither of them had asked that this thing should be, that their destinies, their very souls, should be the sport of chance.”
• Winnie comes to a San Francisco with far more opportunities for honest social/economic mobility for immigrants, and her personal strength is a reflection of that.

Conclusion: Restate thesis: the contrasting ways the characters of Norris’s/Tan’s novels feel in control of their fate reflect their personalities/the quality of the San Francisco they inhabit/the attitude of the authors and the cities towards immigration. In this way, the personality of San Francisco as a whole can be seen as unbelievably dynamic. Judging from the ideas presented in these novels, within the span of a century, San Francisco went from a harsh, naturalistic playground for the greedy and corrupt to a beacon of hope for immigrants searching for better lives.

Gabriel Rojas

Literary Cities

Dimock

4/12/16

Essay 2 Long Paper Outline

Prisons as areas of liberation and safety in Native Son and The Jungle

Intro

• Topic: American Incarceration through the Works of Richard Wright and Upton Sinclair

• Thesis: Though incarceration is structured to punish criminals and offenders, both Richard Wright and Upton Sinclair promote the notion that prisons may act as havens for the oppressed and serve as areas of enlightenment. (Note: I may rework the idea of “enlightenment”)
  • Incarceration separates the oppressed from their environment, which thus allows them to think critically and self-analyze in ways that were previously hindered by environment.

Point 1: Brief History of American Incarceration (?)

• Bring in statistics and highlight the growth of imprisonment in the United States in the past decade
• Cycles of oppression
  • Targeted as minority and impoverished groups
• This is done to highlight the importance of the following discussion

Point 2: Jurgis’ Environment; Pre-imprisonment

• Life working on the stockyards as to highlight the poor living conditions that Jurgis lived in
  • “They don’t waste anything here,” (25)
  • The great corporation which employed you… it was nothing but one gigantic lie,” (55)
  • “now he found that each one of these lesser industries was a separate little inferno,” (71)
  • Gothic imagery throughout the text (75-79)
  • “old Packingtown jest – that they use everything of the pig except the squeal,” (97)
• The disposability of man
  • “This was called ‘speeding up the gang,’ and if any man could not keep up…” (42)
• Perceptions of America
  • “When he came home that night he was… for his faith in America,” (47)

Point 3: Bigger’s Environment; Pre-imprisonment

• Use the opening rat scene as a metaphor for Bigger’s own life—one in fear and trapped by those of (4-6)
• Bigger’s feeling of oppression brought upon him by white citizens
  • “Suppose a police saw him wandering in a white neighborhood like this? It would be thought that he was trying to rob or rape somebody,” (44)
  • “he was very conscious of his black skin… and men like him had made it so that he would be conscious of that black skin,” (67)
  • Bigger is a victim of circumstance when he himself murders Mary
    • “Hell, she made me do it! I couldn’t help it”
  • “All right. They white folks. They done killed plenty of us,” (178)
• Consider using more quotes (bookmarked)

Point 4: Jurgis’ Incarceration

• Jurgis’ assault of Connor (110)
  • Connor’s a criminal that is not brought to justice yet, Jurgis is the one taken to prison
• Jurgis’ incarcerated protects him from his environment
  • “And the bitter mockery of it – all this was punishment for him!” (115)
  • These midnight hours were fateful ones to Jurgis;… frenzied hate” (116)
• The mistreatment of Jurgis’ trial
  • He subsided, but he never took his eyes off his enemy…” (120)
• Jurgis’ freedom from jail
  • “all the dreadful imaginations that had haunted him in his cell now rushed into his mind at once…” (125)
• Second trial for his “assault” on the bartender.
  • Again, he is not given a fair trial (176-180)
  • Bridewell prison
  • “Doping” prisoners as a way to contain them (184)

Point 5: Bigger’s Incarceration

• Bigger is imprisoned
  • Highlight the importance of Bigger’s comparison to Jesus, “Two men stretched his arms out, as though about to crucify him,” (270).
• Bigger’s silence is one of sadness but also of rest
  • “There was no day for him now,… for he knew that hate would not help him,” (273)
• His desire to read the newspaper is one of self-interest, but also one that displays his separation from his environment. He is now an observer, not an actor. (279- 281)
• Bigger’s interactions with Reverend Hammond (282)
• Bigger’s interations with the other man imprisons who “went off his nut from studying too much at the university,” (343).
• Mistrial (380-430)

Point 6: Changes in Jurgis’ Mentality and Personality

• It is after Jurgis’ second arrest that he then becomes a criminal by mugging individuals
  • Criminal justice system has created a criminal out of Jurgis?
  • Mentorship of Jack Duane
• Attacks Connor for one more time (200) but is able to bail himself out with the money he has saved
• Becomes an active socialist at end of the novel (Chapters 29-31)

Point 7: Changes in Bigger’s Mentality and Personality

• Bigger continues to battle with his own racism
  • “’She’s the same color as the rest of ‘em,” (351)
• Bigger speaks about his opinion on racism as a method to suppress African-Americans
  • “The white folks like for us to be religious then they can do what they want to us,’” (356)
• Critical thought on killing and Bigger’s acceptance after his trial
  • “‘Mr. Max, you go home. I’m all right…” (428).
  • Pages 426-430)
  • “He still held on to the bars. Then he smiled a faint, wry, bitter smile,” (430)

Point 8: Modern Prisons

• Key differences between modern US prisons and those of the early 20^th century
• The increase in incarcerations
• Continue to point out those who are prosecuted the most

Conclusion           

• Restate Thesis
• Final thoughts on the faults of the American prison system
• Has Chicago’s law and prison systems changed between the turn of then the 20^th century (The Jungle) and the 1930s (Native Son)?

The Kitchen God’s Wife Presentation

Introduction

• The Kitchen God’s Wife was published in 1992
  • Mirrors some of Tan’s own life (she being Pearl, not Winnie)
• Amy Tan
  • Born in 1952
  • First generation Chinese-American
  • Many of her novels and literary work focuses on the mother-daughter aspect of Chinese-American experiences

Goals

• Explore the immigrant-first generation relationship between Pearl and Winnie.
• Social hierarchy between men in women in China. How does this hierarchy compare to that of Western culture?
• Compare the superstitions that exist in American culture and in Chinese culture. Which superstitions do we accept, deny, or find ridiculous.

Theme 1: One’s duty to the Family and how does Pride, or Respect, contribute to this “duty”?

• One’s duty to family
  • How does the notion of one’s duty to his/her family contribute to the complex relationships between the Kwongs and the Louies?
    • Pearl speaking: “Over the years that we’ve been married, we’ve learned to sidestep the subject of my family, my duty,” (15).
    • Winnie speak of her mother’s leaving: “What my mother did was a big disgrace. That’s why they said she died, to bury her scandal,” (100)

• Pride/Respect
  • Is pride and the gaining of respect acceptable incentives for behaving a certain manner or achieving success?
    • Pearl speaking: “And then she reminded me that Grand Auntie was always proud of me – in our family “proud” is as close as we get to saying “love,” (17)
    • Winnie to Pearl: “’This is how you show respect.’ / I nod. Respect,” (43).

• Importance of money
  • Why is money, again, so important to Winnie’s family? How is money shown differently here than in previous novels we have read? Is money a method of displaying importance within the family?
    • “’Tofu, how much do you pay?’ asks my mother, and I can tell she’s eager to outdo me with a better price, to tell me how I can save twenty or thirty cents at her store,”’ (21).
    • Winnie’s marriage preparations (144-151).

Theme 2: Chinese and American superstitions – along with the influence of luck

• How does Chinese superstitions compare to that of Western superstitions?
  • Pearl: “She’s like a Chinese version of Freud, or worse. Everything has a reason. Everything could have been prevented,” (29)
  • “No, I’m not being superstitious, I am only saying that’s how it happened… Chance is the first step you take, luck is what comes afterward,” (123)
  • Ying-Yang story (159-163)

• How does the formation of the ghost character act as a connection between the past and the present, as well as the dead and the living?
  • Gan’s ghost nightmare (204-205)

• How much of our success and achievements can be contributed to luck?
  • The tale of the Kitchen God (53-55).
  • “Even though Helen is not smart, even though she was born poor, even though she has never been pretty, she has always had luck pour onto her plate, even spill from the mouth of a three-day-old fish,” (62).
  • The fortune teller on page 122

Theme 3: Womanhood

• Discuss how womanhood may be described in western culture to that of Chinese culture. Similarities? Note the differences in time periods.

• All of chapters 7-11 (131-205)
  • The pain and suffering for one’s husband (168)
  • The Ying-Yang story (159-163)
  • “In China back then, you were always responsible to somebody else…. Your family could do anything to you, no reason needed,” (132).

Theme 4: Immigrant-first generation Relationship

• How does the language barrier between Winnie and Pearl contribute to conflicts between the two of them?

• Should Pearl make a greater effort to learn Chinese for her mother and immigrant relatives or should she not because she was born in the United States.
• Language Barrier/it’s usage
  • Pearl: “ Her fingers moved slowly down the red banner, as she reads in a formal Chinese I can’t understand,” (24).
  • Repetition of ying-gai: “Ying-gai was what my mother always said when she meant, I should have,” (29).
  • “Phil chuckles at my mother’s Americanized explanation of the hierarchy of Chinese deities,” (53).

• Assimilation to American culture
  • What do immigrants lose due to their existing diaspora? What is chosen to be left behind in their home country and what is picked up in their new nation?
    • “Auntie Helen says soothingly from across the table. ‘Look, here’s some fragrant beef, ah? Yum-yummy, tastes like McDonald hamburgers,” (33).
    • “How could I explain such a story to the immigration authorities. They wouldn’t understand! They knew only one kind of government,” (71).

Theme 5: How reliable is Winnie as a narrator?

• So far the novel as displayed Winnie as our main protagonist and narrator, but how much of what she tells us is true? With each new chapter, she corrects herself and announces new information not previously disclosed. Do we believe all that she tells us or should we as readers be skeptical and think that her stories themselves contain secrets she still has not confessed?