Collin County Community College Dimensions of Human Reality Discussion

[To post your response to the questions I’ve posed in the material below, return to the Discussion 2 Follow-up threadin the Discussions board. Enter that forum and use the Reply button.]As I mentioned previously, this discussion is a bit more challenging than the first. The greatest challenge (for mostof you) probably derived from the two Modernist works. That isn’t surprising, since the abstraction frequentlyfound in Modernist works can be challenging or even confusing at times, and at the very least requires some effortto come to grips with. I’ll start by taking a moment to say something about each of the four works.To begin with the paintings, many of you seem to have noticed and pointed out the similarity of subject matterbetween Delacroix’s Massacre at Chios and Picasso’s Guernica, the similarity being a setting of warfare or violentconflict, with the violence in question perpetrated by the powerful against the powerless. In the case of Massacreat Chios (painted in 1824), Delacroix wished to address the aftermath of the Ottoman Empire’s actions two yearsearlier to suppress the independence efforts of ethnic Greeks on Chios and other Greek­inhabited islands in theeastern Mediterranean Sea. In the case of Guernica (painted in 1937), Picasso’s subject was the bombing ofGuernica, a small city in northern Spain, earlier that same year. The bombing was carried out by aircraft from NaziGermany and fascist Italy during the Spanish Civil War and took place at the request of General Francisco Franco,a Spanish general trying to overthrow the elected government of Spain, who had allied himself with Adolf Hitlerand Benito Mussolini (who were the leaders of Germany and Italy, respectively? Franco was eventually successfulat seizing control of the Spanish government).Delacroix’s Massacre at Chiosis considered one of the first significant paintings in the Romantic style, and itplayed a major role in initiating the Romantic style in Western painting. It had an extremely controversialreception when first exhibited, both because of its subject matter and because of its rejection of Neoclassicalaesthetic principles. Picasso’s Guernica, while it did not initiate any new developments in Western painting (all ofthe stylistic elements that Picasso draws upon for the painting had been developed years earlier, either by him orby other artists), the painting itself is considered one of the most significant Western paintings of the 20th centurybecause of its powerful anti­war sentiment. (A reproduction of Guernica can be found in the entry lobby of theUnited Nations building, an organization founded after World War II in an effort to prevent future global conflict.)In the case of the poems, while the poems themselves and their creators are both prominent in the literary world,they don’t hold quite the same status as their painting counterparts. Poe was a skilled poet but, while a few of hispoems (such as ‘Annabel Lee’ and ‘The Raven’) are widely known and well-liked by many readers, most literaryscholars would say that his most important contribution to 19th century American literature lies not in his poetrybut in the role he played in the development of the modern short story. Cummings, in turn, while considered to bea significant 20th century American poet, would not usually appear in most literary scholars’ “Top 10” lists.Nevertheless, as with Poe, there are a handful of Cummings’s poems (such as ‘anyone lived in a pretty how town’and ‘she being brand’) that are highly prized by many readers. (Of the four works, the Cummings poem probablyposed the most difficulty for many of you. If you’re interested, at the bottom of this document I’ve added a briefdiscussion of some of the thornier technical aspects of his poem.)________________________________________________________In what comes below, my follow­up questions are bolded to make them easier to see.As I mentioned at the beginning, it’s clear that the use of abstraction poses challenges to the viewer of an artworkor the reader of a poem. The two Modernist examples, which utilize abstraction much more extensively than theRomantic examples, tended to be more difficult to grapple with. That raises the question, “Why use abstraction?”and especially why use it to the extent that many of the Modernists writers, painters, poets, music composers,dancers and other artists did. If, as a creative artist, I risk confusing or pushing away some of my potentialaudience, where is the gain in using abstraction? Some of you implied a connection between the abstractapproach and the viewer’s or reader’s imagination. This is an important element of abstraction’s appeal, butthere’s also more to it.Artists of all types, whether visual or literary or performing artists, are usually attempting to convey somethingabout the reality of human experience to their audiences. However, ‘reality’ as humans experience it has a widerange of dimensions, all of which are of interest to the artist or creative writer. Certainly, physical reality is one ofthose dimensions, and visual reality is one aspect of physical reality. But there’s also emotional reality, perceptualreality, social reality and so on, not to mention the imagination and the dream world, which combine the variousdimensions of reality in ways that are different from everyday waking reality. How can we go about representingthese various dimensions of human reality and the different ways of combining these dimensions ofexperience? One answer is that each requires different methods (‘languages’) of representation, and artists seekout and explore useful methods of representing each of these dimensions of human reality. “Abstraction” is onesuch method.To get a deeper sense of the role of abstraction in the creative arts, let’s explore more thoroughly the role ofabstraction in the two Modernist works under our examination (the painting by Picasso and the poem byCummings). First, consider the context in which Picasso and Cummings were working. What sort of changestook place in the social and cultural aspects of Western society between the time period in whichRomanticism was the dominant style to the time period in which Modernism was the dominant style? (Yourcourse reading materials might help with this.)Next, how might the social and cultural changes taking place in the Western world have affected the changein artistic emphasis between the time of the Romantic examples (completed between 1824 and 1849) and thetime of the Modernist examples (completed in the late 1930’s)? What might have compelled Cummings, forinstance, to feel that he needed a more complex, more abstract, and more allusive style of language tocapture meaning in the time and place he was writing? What, in turn, might Picasso have felt was gained interms of representation, in the context of the 1930’s, by presenting his subject in such a radically moreabstract style than that of Delacroix? To put it another way, how might the reality of daily human experiencein Western societies have changed over that hundred­year period in a way that could have contributed to thedevelopment of a more abstract ‘language’ for Western art and literature?Now, let’s consider why Picasso and Cummings, respectively, might have chosen to make heavy use ofabstraction in these specific works. Among other things, their choice implies that they wished to say something abit different about their respective subject matters than was the case for their predecessors (that is, Delacroix andPoe). For instance, despite the similarity of subject matter between Massacre at Chios and Guernica, the twopaintings obviously look and feel quite different. The two artists (Delacroix in the first case and Picasso in thesecond case) appear to be calling the viewers’ attention (our attention) to different aspects of these events. Whatis it, exactly, that’s more noticeable to you in each painting? What is it that each one causes you to be moreaware of, or that stays with you after you’ve turned away? In other words, what does Picasso seem to wantto show us (and have us remember) about Guernica that’s different from what Delacroix seems to want toshow us about Chios? And how does the use of abstraction help Picasso to do this, to achieve this differencein impact?We can ask similar questions about ‘anyone lived in a pretty how town’ in contrast to ‘Annabel Lee’. To do that, itmight be helpful to think of Cummings as telling multiple stories, with each of those stories runningsimultaneously through the poem, while Poe appears to be telling essentially one story.Two of the possible stories being told by Cummings depend upon the single word “noone.” Technically speaking,this word doesn’t exist… it’s ‘invented’ by Cummings. In practical terms, it’s simply a ‘misspelling’ of “no one” (twowords) that compresses it into one word. Since this ‘misspelling’ occurs multiple times, we can assume that it’sintentional on Cummings’s part. Knowing this, we can now read the word in two different ways ­­ as “no one” oras “noone.” Which way we choose to read it (interpret it) determines which of two possible stories we find in thepoem. But, we aren’t restricted to reading it only one way: We can read it first one way, then the other, in whichcase we get a different story from the poem in two different readings. One of these stories we can think of asbeing about a town, the other we can think of as being about two people.In addition to the stories that depend upon “noone,” there is at least one other story we might find in the poem.This story (which one or two of you might have alluded to in your remarks) comes out of the repeated but rotatinguse of the seasons, as well as the rotating repetition of the celestial phenomena (“sun, moon, stars, rain”). Thisadditional story derives from the juxtaposition of those recurring natural cycles with the human story or storiesthat run through the poem.How do the meanings of certain key words in “anyone lived in a pretty how town” change based upon whichof the multiple stories you’re focusing upon? (As just one “for instance,” how does the meaning of the word“anyone” itself change?) How does Cummings’s use of abstraction enable him to cause those words to carrymultiple meanings and thus to tell multiple stories simultaneously? And why do you suppose he would wantto tell so many stories at the same time, in one poem, in the first place? (For this question, keep in mind myearlier questions about the cultural context of Cummings’s time period.)_______________________________________________________________________In light of the challenges many of you faced with the Cummings poem, I’ve added here some technical pointsregarding “anyone lived in a pretty how town”:Although I’ve called out the importance of the word “no one” above, that’s just one instance of the abstract way inwhich Cummings uses language in his poem. In general (as some of you noted), the strongest abstract effectscomes from Cummings’s intensive, and sometimes peculiar, manipulation of syntax (the way in which parts ofspeech are arranged) as well as his heavy use of pronouns – anyone, someones, everyones, they, their, he, his,she, her – of which “noone” is a special case. (How many of you had ever considered how very abstract pronounsare?) When he does use a noun to refer to people, it’s a collective noun (women, men, children, folk, etc.) not anindividual noun.Regarding the manipulation of syntax, what’s usually happening is that Cummings is using words that wenormally encounter as one part of speech (nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, etc.) as a different part of speech.For instance, when Cummings writes, “he sang his didn’t he danced his did,” the words “didn’t” and “did” (whichwe almost always encounter as verbs or auxiliary verbs) are being used as nouns. This is unusual, and a littledisorienting, but not strictly wrong. In fact, we do this ourselves sometimes, especially when talking about a wordas a word. But even in more common situations, we sometimes do it. For example, suppose you hear an athleticcoach telling his or her team, “I don’t want to hear any coulda, shoulda, woulda … I just want to see focus andexecution.” The coach here is using “coulda, shoulda, woulda” (a more emphatic way of saying “excuses”) asnouns, even though we more commonly encounter those words as auxiliary verbs (which in their expanded, fullycorrect form would be “could have, should have, would have”). In other words, coach is speaking metaphoricallyin that moment, as is Cummings in his poem. The difference is that Cummings is doing this more intensively,more densely, in a relatively short span, than we would typically do in normal writing or conversation, and it’s thisintensity or density that we find a bit disorienting.When Cummings does this is, it allows him to get double duty out of his words (similar to what he does with“noone”). He gets to use the word as the part of speech needed in that particular moment, but he also gets toborrow the connotations that the word carries over from its more usual part of speech. For instance, we can read“he sang his didn’t he danced his did”in two different ways. In one reading, “didn’t” and “did” are nouns that carrythe suggestion of action or inaction, completion or incompletion. In another reading, we can treat “didn’t” as averb and stop after the second ‘he’, which makes the partial line into a question: “he sang his didn’t he?” So whichreading is the correct one? As it turns out, that’s probably the wrong question. If Cummings only wanted onepossible reading, I doubt he would have written it this way.There are some situations where Cummings is simply juxtaposing two thoughts or concepts that we don’ttypically associate with each other – for example, “laughed their cryings.” At the most basic level, this is“metaphor” (see Poetry Vocabulary Lesson)? it’s what poets do. Of course, even this bit of oddness in the poem isnot completely foreign to us: We’ve all heard someone exclaim, “I laughed till I cried,” right? Cummings doesn’tmean the same thing here, exactly, but it demonstrates that the juxtaposition – the metaphor – is not unknown tous.In other cases, Cummings uses words that are present primarily for their sound, or for the visual images theyevoke, or even for the aural (sound) images they evoke, such as “up so floating many bells down,” which I’m surehas many possible meanings or interpretations, but one of which, for me, is the hypnotic and lyrical effect of thesound of church bells carrying across the summer air in a small town. (Note also the multiple possibleconnotations of “bells” in the context of the various stories in the poem.)Finally, there’s the issue of structure, which some of you might have addressed in terms of rhythm or rhymerather than organizational structure. Although it’s true that Cummings is “breaking rules” to some degree in muchof what he does in this poem, his rule­breaking doesn’t really extend to structure or rhythm or rhyme.Structurally (and I think one or two of you might have mentioned this), Cummings’s poem is quatrains (four­linestanzas) from beginning to end. His adherence to a single structure is even more consistent than Poe’s, whosestanza lengths vary in Annabel Lee. (To be fair, Poe probably has specific reasons for that variance.) In terms ofrhyme, Cummings’s poem has about the same amount of rhyming as Poe’s. In both cases, about two­thirds of theline­endings use either perfect rhyme or near rhyme. Poe probably feels to us as if he rhymes more because hemakes greater use of perfect rhyme (mostly through the repetition of “sea” and “Lee”), whereas Cummings uses alarger portion of near rhyme (such as “same”/”rain” and “summer”/”more”). Modern Western poetry makes noqualitative distinction between perfect rhyme and near rhyme.As for rhythm, the rhythm and pace (or meter) of the Cummings poem is as regular and persistent as a drumbeat.Cummings uses a four­beat line (meaning, there are four stressed syllables in each line) throughout the poem, justas he uses four­line stanzas all the way through… and, for that matter, just as he consistently uses those four­partimages – one for the seasons and one for the heavens – to signify the passing of time. (It turns out that “four” is animportant ordering principle in the poem.)Skeptical? Try this: read the poem through aloud, just once, without worrying about what the words mean, andsimply allow yourself to pronounce the words as they would normally be pronounced. Treat them purely as sound(remember the Yeats quote from the Poetry Vocabulary Lesson that poems are made out of “a mouthful of air,”meaning that they are first and foremost constructions of sound). Read along at a comfortable pace and payattention to the rhythm that your voice falls into as you do so (as long as you don’t throw yourself off by stoppingto figure out the meaning). Chances are, you’ll start to hear the music that lives in Cummings’s poem.