Literature P3 Concepts, the Individual, Society, and Tragedy

Literature P3 Concepts, the Individual, Society, and Tragedy This is Venice New Orleans isn’t like other cities

And so it was I entered the broken world To trace the visionary company of love, its voice An instant in the wind I know not whither hurled But not for long to hold each desperate choice. From the fifth stanza of ‘The Broken Tower’ by Hart Crane

Plot Structure of ‘Streetcar’? • The plot of this play moves from hope and frustration to destruction and despair

Lecture Content • Concepts; Literary Concepts (e.g. blank verse), and Conceptual Analysis • Core Concepts of Paper 3, more especially the concept of the Individual, the heroic individual, and that of Society; • Concepts related to ‘Othello’, and ‘Streetcar’ • Some basic comparative evaluative analysis of these two plays through the Concept of Tragedy

What (again) is a Concept? • A concept is a general idea or understanding of some thing X, its X-ness, formed by mentally combining all its characteristics, properties or particulars; • A concept is a particular way of thinking about some thing or other; (more especially abstract notions) • So to have a concept involves understanding or “seeing” some thing in a certain way • Concepts compose our thoughts; • Concept analysis – rationally and methodically working out the epistemic dimensions of that concept; mapping out its logical geography; its essential and accidental properties

Individuation and Identity • What sort of person one really is; • What makes your ‘I’ different from all other I’s? • What sort of person is such and such a character (e.g. Iago? Blanche?) • Are there clearly identifiable essential properties that are not shared by all individuals? That differentiate one person from another? • Individual essences: essential properties that are unique to them alone; • If so, Individuals can then be distinguished from each other by their individual essences

Iago’s individuating properties?Of his core psychology • Awesome autonomous agency; • Super-strong willpower; • ‘The Wisdom of Psychopaths’ a la Kevin Dutton; • Enduring patience and persistence • Janus-like; a chameleon figure • A genius of evil; evil in what way? Degree? Why? • Enigmatic; difficult to fathom • ‘I am not what I am.’ ‘Demand me nothing. What you know, you know. From this time forth I never will speak word.’

Individuality and Difference • It is a commonsense platitude that no two persons are exactly alike; • Either physically or psychologically; • And individual differences may be manifested not only in particular psychological facts, but also in psychological regularities; • Each of us has a core, or basic psychology or basic psychological make-up;

Literary Naming and Individuality, and literary effects • Williams’ use of symbolic names - Blanche Dubois • The name, Iago, phonetically similar to ‘ego’; • The meaning of ‘misfortune’ in the name Desdemona (from the Greek,‘dusdaimonia’) is not remarked on by any character, but nevertheless it is a horrible tragic accident waiting to happen • While Othello himself is perhaps haunted by the ‘demon’ hidden within his wife’s name, and thus he comes to regard her as a devil;

Typical or Atypical • What would you say if someone were to say to you- • You are a typical Singaporean! • ‘Streetcar’ is vividly characterized by recognizable individuals of the typically American variety of the American South • E.g. Stanley as the aggressive, tough-talking, ‘full-of-virile-energy-charged’, southern, urban working class post second world war American;

H G Wells on Types of People • Most people in this world seem to live ‘in character’; they have a beginning, a middle and an end, and the three are congruous with one another and true to the rules of their type. You can speak of them as being this sort of people or that. They are…no more and no less than ‘character actors’. They have a class, they have a place, they know what is becoming in them and what is due to them.

There are individuals, and individuals • The common / ordinary individual • The socially integrated individual • Successfully assimilated individual • The mass man / woman characterized by the herd instinct; docilely conforming and compliant • The outsider; the rebel; Blanche a defiant outsider? • The free spirit; freely forming one’s opinions • The exceptional, independent minded individual • Genius is the paradigm of individuality

J S Mill’s Conceptualization of Individuality To be an individual • Is to think independently, and also • To act and live independently; • To think independently, one must be allowed without interference to speak and listen, read and write freely; • While to act and live independently, one’s self-regarding choices and activities must not be interfered with by state or society;

The Free Spirit from Nietzsche’s ‘Human, All Too Human’ • He is called a free spirit who thinks differently from what, or on the basis of his origin, environment, his class and profession, or on the basis of the dominant views of his age, would have been expected of him. • He is the exception. What characterizes the free spirit is not his opinions are more correct but that he has liberated himself from tradition, whether the outcome has been successful or been a failure. As a rule though, he will nonetheless have truth on his side, or at least the spirit of inquiry after truth, the rest demand faith. • The fettered spirit takes up his position, not for reasons, but out of habit.

Hegel and Kant on the Concept of ‘I’ Individuality and Intellectuality • For Hegel, man becomes conscious of himself at the moment when—for the ‘first’ time—he says ‘I’. • Kant in his Anthropology, finds it remarkable that as soon as a child begins to speak of itself by the word ‘I’, a new world appears to open up for it. In fact this is very natural; it is the intellectual world that opens to the child, for whoever can say ‘I’ to himself uplifts himself, by that very act above the objective world, and steps out of the intuition of others into his own. —Philosophy must undoubtedly set out from that concept which contains all intellectuality within it, and from which philosophy evolves.

Society: Conditioning and Convention;Society as a Culture Box Concept of Society? (in the abstract) • Nature / character of Singapore Society • Nature of London Society (Liberal? Decadent?) • Nature / concept of the societies encountered in the fictional space of your set texts? • 16th century Renaissance Venetian society? • Early 20th century New Orleans society as depicted in the play, Streetcar Named Desire?

Concept of Society One may define a society • As a group of persons who cooperate for certain common purposes; • The most primitive social group is the family; • The main motives for social cohesion are economics and security; • Is the function of society to make all people alike?

Elements of Society • Social class, language, ethnicity, gender roles and relations; Social structures and relationships e.g. Marriage; and the Family • Education / educational institutions; and work; • The traditions, conventions, and practices of Religion, Morality and Justice, Sexuality, and Culture; in the case of Venice in ‘Othello’, the conditioning and shaping influence of the Christian church as evident in verbal / linguistic references to, and images of heaven, hell, and the soul; and yet Iago’s transgressions; • Nature of authority and power of Government in relation to the laws of the state, security; social order and control • Economic organization;

‘This is Venice’ ‘She must change for youth; when she is sated with his body, she will find the error of her choice. Therefore put money in thy purse. If thou wilt needs damn thyself, do it a more delicate way than drowning. Make all the money thou canst. If sanctimony and a frail vow betwixt an erring barbarian and a supersubtle Venetian be not too hard for my wits and all the tribe of hell, thou shalt enjoy her – therefore make money.’ (Iago in Act 1, Scene 3)

This is Venice • What ideas about Venice and Venetian society do you gain from Act 1? (P55 of text) From the whole play? • Senator Brabantio’s words carry the implication that he is proud to be a citizen of a civilized, well-governed state; Othello: ‘Are we turned to Turks, and to ourselves do that Which heaven hath forbid the Ottomites? For Christian shame, put by this barbarous brawl.’

Yet Venice is no ideal society • Venice is also the home of sophisticated vice, of exotic forms of decadence; a metropolis of greed; • A society that corrupts Othello’s humanity; • A disturbing note is sounded about it early in the play through the cruel and prejudicial voices of Iago and Roderigo

Concept of Tragedy in Shakespearean tragic drama And the plays of Tennessee Williams

Aristotle’s Concept of Tragedy (in the context of Tragic Drama) • Tragedy is an imitation of an action that is serious, complete, and of a certain magnitude; • in language embellished with each kind of artistic ornament, the several kinds being found in separate parts of the play; in the form of action, not narrative; through pity and fear affecting the proper purgation of these emotions. (Catharsis)

Williams’ plays not tragedies in the classical sense • Williams – the great dramatist of beautiful failure; • The poet of noble defeat; • The sense of inevitability that haunts his most powerful plays is the reason (it may be argued) they are not tragedies in the classical sense of the concept; • But rather dramas of pathos

Concept of Classical Tragedy in Drama • What makes classical Greek, and Shakespearean tragedy irresistible • Is the spectacle of a great figure, powerful and competent, (like Othello, King Lear, or Hamlet) • Brought unexpectedly low, (not inevitable) a reversal in fortune (peripeteia) by some tragic flaw in himself, (hamartia) some bad decision rooted in his character, some error in judgment • that leads with awful irony to inexorable destruction by the end of the play;

By contrast, in Williams’ plays • The bad decisions have already been made by the time the play begins; • The emotional core of his drama lies not in a critical moment of choice but in the spectacle of abjection • of an already ruined person(like Blanche) struggling to hang on to something beautiful

Blanche in Scene 2 p22 Blanche: There are thousands of papers, stretching back over hundreds of years, affecting Belle Reve as, piece by piece, our improvident grand-fathers and father and brothers exchanged the land for their epic fornications—to put it plainly. Till finally all that was left—and Stella can verify that!—was the house itself and about twenty acres of ground, including a graveyard, to which now all but Stella and I have retreated.

When you watch ‘Streetcar’ • You come to instinctively foresee from the moment Blanche appears outside her sister’s squalid New Orleans apartment dressed in her dainty white garden party outfit • That she will inevitably wind up in a lunatic asylum; • Through the foreshadowing symbolism;

Questions for further Study p138 Q4 • Discuss the dramatic devices which Williams uses in the play to suggest that Blanche is doomed.

Concepts of Character and Personality • Greek tragedians, and Shakespeare tend to be interested in character; • This is why the suffering comes at the end of their plays • In contrast, Williams is interested in personality • Which is why he begins with the suffering, with the poverty or madness

Characters and degree of Complexity? This is why Williams’ characters • While complex, they rarely develop; • Instead, Williams prefers to counterpose characters who represent monolithic and unchanging concepts or valuessuch as — • The raw energies of capitalism or • of libido / human sexuality • And the delicate, even delusional ideology of Beauty and Romance

Williams use of female characters;part of his dramatic technique • A crucial feature of Williams’ plays is of Beauty crushed, and heroic failure • a feature suggesting a certain resemblance between his drama and Greek tragic drama • Is Williams’ use of female characters intended to represent both the aspiration toward beauty • And the inevitability of defeat, of brokenness?

Women in Williams’ Cultural Milieu • In the time and place and culture that produced Williams, • Women could still function, without irony, as useful vehicles for exploring those qualities; • Few dramatists in the Western tradition apart from the ancient Greek playwright, Euripides, have made such memorable and distinctive use of women — Striving, pathetic, relentless, deluded • Women as mouthpieces for certain kinds of repressed emotional currents

Like Euripides • Williams exploited personal and cultural notions of the feminine — • Soft, poetic, silly, emotional, prone to madness and vengefulness, and cunning • To create female characters who transcended them; • Williams’ female characters manage to be both (a) memorably, even frighteningly extreme and (b) sympathetic at the same time (Intended Dramatic Effects)

Blanche’s tragedy • Part of Blanche’s tragedy is circumstantial; • In the end she runs against the brick wall of her desire; she had a weakness for Stanley, and his kind; • Stanley only gives her a little push in the direction she has been headed in all along; • At the end of the play we hear Stanley declare ‘We’ve had this date with each other from the beginning.’ • Blanche is undone by her own desire.

Literature P3 Concepts, the Individual, Society, and Tragedy