Unit 2 -  Section 2

Literature 24 - Contemporary Literature

Summer 2010 - ticket # 62620

CLASS MEETS FROM 7/6/2010 to 8/15/2010

 // Marjorie Coverley Luesebrink, MFA, Instructor

(2)  Content/themes and the relationship to historical and current events, other literature

The relationship of literature to War has always been conflicted.  If we just take a simple ballad that many folks know "When Johnny Comes Marching Home" - we can see that the same tune has been set to quite different words, depending on the sentiment that is being expressed.  If you go to this page: <http://www.scoutsongs.com/lyrics/whenjohnnycomesmarchinghome.html>

you can see and hear the American Civil War version of "Johnny" that was written by John Phillip Souza.

It begins:  

When Johnny comes marching home again,
Hurrah! Hurrah!
We'll give him a hearty welcome then,
Hurrah! Hurrah!
The men will cheer, the boys will shout,
The ladies they will all turn out,
And we'll all feel gay
When Johnny comes marching home. 

The theme and the melody were adapted, however, from an old Irish Ballad - one with a much less cheerful reaction on

Johnny's return - it ends with these verses -

Where are your legs that used to run, hurroo, hurroo
Where are your legs that used to run, hurroo, hurroo
Where are your legs that used to run,
When you went for to carry a gun
Indeed your dancing days are done
Oh Johnny, I hardly knew ye

I'm happy for to see ye home, hurroo, hurroo
I'm happy for to see ye home, hurroo, hurroo
I'm happy for to see ye home,
All from the island of Sulloon;
So low in flesh, so high in bone
Oh Johnny I hardly knew ye 

Ye haven't an arm, ye haven't a leg, hurroo, hurroo
Ye haven't an arm, ye haven't a leg, hurroo, hurroo
Ye haven't an arm, ye haven't a leg,
Ye're an armless, boneless, chickenless egg
Ye'll have to put with a bowl out to beg
Oh Johnny I hardly knew ye


They're rolling out the guns again, hurroo, hurroo
They're rolling out the guns again, hurroo, hurroo
They're rolling out the guns again,
But they never will take our sons again
No they never will take our sons again
Johnny I'm swearing to ye


While Catch 22 is one of the most important novels that questions a war, this theme is not limited to the late 20th Century.  As I mentioned in the first lecture, Ernest Hemingway wrote about this, as did many other writers.  After the shock of the brutality of WW I., novels, poems, and essays which lamented various war issues were common - although never as frequent as the art and literature that glorified war.  Each writer tended to focus on different aspects of War - the horror of the battle, the war profiteering, the waste of lives, the destruction of civilians, and the neglect of veterans.  Catch 22 tends to focus on the absurdity of war and the corruption that can lie behind not only the visible profiteering in arms, but the entire commerce of military supply.  These themes are well developed, and I am sure you will see and understand them throughout the book.  What might be more important for us to look at, though, is the issue of language and reality.

And, as we look at language and reality, we cannot help but touch on a subject that is prominent in literature of the last half-century.  Part of the issue of "questioning reality" that we see in the early Modern period revolves around language and its meaning.  Conrad, as we saw, prompted us to think about what "civilization" might mean - who was civilized and what values were incorporated into a "civil" society.  But the events of the 20th Century intensified this concern about language.  The issues were both social and political.  

Let us look at the political evolution first.  Stalin and Hitler, among their other crimes, were part of political regimes that set out consciously to lie to their own people.  The practice of obscuring and shaping the truth for the ends of political power became known as Propaganda.  Stalin's campaign to eliminate millions of dissidents was presented to the Soviet people as a "purging" or "purifying" of the country so that everyone else could practice proper Communism.  Hitler, of course, used even more inflammatory language to convince the German people that he needed to rid the country of millions of "problematic" Jews - he had, it appears, much support for his "solution."  

Prior to WW II, though, Americans (and the British) tended to see "Propaganda" as a tool that was exercised by criminal dictators - rulers who had control over the press of their land and could exercise a kind of "mind control" over the population.  In 1949, a British writer, George Orwell, published a novel called 1984 (it was written, of course, in 1948).  This novel was particularly notable because it suggested that, in some distant future, the press and growing media of even "free" countries could be controlled by the forces of evil governments.  Part of the scenario envisioned by Orwell was a state of constant warfare maintained by a fear of unending "enemies."  The maintenance of a fear-based society was accompanied, in Orwell's future-world, by a protracted campaign of "newspeak" - the principal features of which are "the big lie" [War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, etc.] and a rampant censorship of all information.

Even though 1984 was a "fiction" novel, it influenced many scholars and historians in the years following.  Marshall Mc Luhan and Neil Postman, two "media critics" whose ideas are an integral part of our thinking about TV, Press, and Electronic Communication, start from the premise that, even in a "free" country, the Media are subject to influences of money and power - both from the Government and from Corporations.  Moreover, much of the literary criticism and scholarship of Postmodernism and Post structuralism are based on the study of the way language can be "slippery" - that the word may not actually signify a specific thing, but rather only what we "agree" it signifies at any one time.  

Other fiction writers carried this theme beyond political control into a critique of social and cultural norms.  Ken Kesey, in his contemporary classic, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, created a world in which the sane and the insane are seemingly reversed.  He was part of a fairly broad tradition of writers who wondered what it meant to be "sane" in a world that might be lacking in balance and health.  [This novel was made into a fine movie with Jack Nicholson which you can rent.]  

Many other fiction writers and poets of the 70's, 80's, and 90's focused on the role of language in our construction of reality.  The 20th Century was, after all, the first century in the history of the world in which ordinary people gained access to information.  It seems hard for us to conceive of now, but two hundred years ago, folks pretty much knew only what had happened to them or to their neighbors in a 20-mile radius.  Yes, there were traveling minstrels, and men went off to war and came home, and merchants brought tales - but for most folks, the chance to study the history of monarchies, religions, wars, countries, economies - for only the price of a paperback book - did not exist until after 1900.  Having such a wealth of information at hand (and now, with the Internet, a surplus of information) gave people a new power to examine and compare ideas across centuries and around the globe.  It became much more difficult, for example, to maintain that "our" government always told the truth and our enemies' governments did not when anyone could read the real history of the American conquest and treatment of the native peoples - and also read about how the government in Washington at the time of the Indian Wars misrepresented the situation and convinced Easterners that it was our "Manifest Destiny" to destroy the tribes.  In fiction, the inside story of the native tribes emerged in a group of fine novels by native Americans such as Sherman Alexie and Louise Erdrich - but I will save them for our Lecture on Other Voices.]

Ninety-two American Poets write about the War in Vietnam.

Not only did the past begin to seem more layered and complex than it had seemed - but the language that described our future underwent enormous change.

In the last Lecture, we looked at the problem of the Floating Contemporary - and the issue of language and meaning is a very good example of the way in which we get an ever-more-quickly receding past.  As the meanings of words and symbols change over the decades, we find it increasingly difficult to grasp just what was meant by a word or phrase that has come to be commonly used and misused in our culture.  One of the really valuable aspects of literature itself is that, when we read a novel like Catch 22 - or Neuromancer, our book for this week - we have a chance to see the origins of current ideas.

George Orwell:  <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Orwell>

Postmodernism:  <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postmodernism>