Wellington College English Magazine 2020

W ELLINGTO N E NG L I S H 2020

NOTHING LIKE

THE SUN

A pastiche of Shakespeare’s ‘Sonnet 130’ written and commented on by

NED C. My Mistress’ Eyes are Nothing Like the Sun My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun; the flames of Dante scorch with less contempt; with open arms and countenance divine, eclipse does she a fever so immense.

If heav’n is her, then name all sinner’s Gods, omit all fickle good, behold the vice.

With Judas’ tears does my mistress deceive; a silver mien does she express, but lead be a treasure: for she is only dun.

I grant I never saw Lucifer go: my temptress, when she walks, treads on the ground; and yet despite the blackness of her soul, no rose could stage the face of such a belle or with freezing blaze thaw my stony core.

The aim of my poem, inspired by Shakespeare’s ‘Sonnet 130’, was to tear down the traditional and superficial way in which the ideal, archetypal femininity of women was portrayed by many of Shakespeare’s contemporaries. Shakespeare’s ‘Sonnet 130’ is almost a parody of more conventional love sonnets; using typical metaphors and clichés of love poetry against themselves by distorting them to show that beyond his mistress’s appearance, he thinks his love for her to be just as rare and valuable as any other woman who has been ridiculously glorified within literature. In doing so, he (rather unkindly) proves that despite his mistress’s lack of outward beauty, his affection for her is just as valid. While the original poem mocks the stereotypically desirable physical traits in women, my approach was to focus on shifting the emphasis onto the character of a woman, which in my eyes should be deemed as the more important part of a person. By shifting the lens slightly, I wanted to create a figure who may have externally possessed the desirable qualities of a lady during the 16th and 17th centuries but was inwardly shown to have almost evil attributes. Despite the falseness of this woman’s disposition, I still wanted to crush the expectation’s that society had of women throughout the renaissance period by reinforcing the fact that her superficiality does not make her any less female, in the same way that Shakespeare’s speaker still loved his ‘Dark Lady’, both simultaneously acknowledging and disregarding the importance of her imperfections as they did not remove from his feelings for her.

I decided to use the sonnet structure in my poem: a balanced form with a strict metrical construction that was originally used to express love. However, there is a clear conflict between the aesthetically pleasing format of the poetry and the less than romantic internal description of the woman within the poem; this incoherence further embodies the superficial nature of the persona in the sonnet by emulating her outward agreeableness in contrast to the reality of her temperament. Normally, sonnets have regular rhyme schemes, much like in Shakespeare’s own ‘Sonnet 130’ but the clear lack of one within my own poem shows that despite her best efforts to appear as a wholly believably and benevolent character, her portrayed constitution is not actually real and is lacking in the profound depth of someone who’s mien is genuine, unlike the persona’s fabricated one.

Initially, I used the same opening line as in Shakespeare’s poem to introduce the subject of the sonnet: his ‘mistress’. Opening by describing her as what she is not; ‘the sun’ would suggest the persona to be of sublime magnificence which she is established not to be, opening up speculation as to whether she exceeds, or is inferior to an object of such astronomical importance. By then alluding to the works of Dante Alighieri such as his ‘Inferno’ it is clear that the expression in her eyes is not at all one of goodness or high moral position which would positively bind her together with the sun and the heavens. In Dante’s works he somewhat treats the devil with sympathy, acknowledging his fall from grace as an emotionally traumatic journey that has left him with immense anger; by proclaiming that hell’s ‘flames’ are less intense than the look in her eyes, it is evident that she does not possess a tender-

hearted nature and that she is more belonging to hell than to any divine realm. Hand in hand with Dante’s interpretation of Mephistopheles, the said ‘contempt’ in her eyes presents the persona as some sort of ‘scorned woman’, perhaps someone who has been hurt in the past (Similarly to Dante’s Lucifer) which may present insight into the reason for her angry look.

You could even go as far as to suggest that this evokes pity towards the woman due to the possibility of her difficult past; this emotion towards her reinforces that she is still in fact a woman and also human, irrespective of her vices. The same sort of comment on the persona’s character is again shown with a more religious connotation when she is described as ‘heav’n’ in comparison to all other ‘sinner’s’ who are ‘Gods’ in relation to her, presenting her actual position as being below all moral people to the extent that she is even more wrongful than people separated from God by sin.

The first stanza of the poem creates a sense of the persona’s deceptive nature, her initial ‘countenance divine’ is primarily pleasing and even god-like however it is used to ‘eclipse’ an internal hellfire. The use of this word suggests grand imagery of the natural world, relating back to the first line of the sonnet and placing emphasis on the falseness of her character as being something monumental and powerful which only enhances our dislike for her. Finally, this deception is again alluded to along with the biblical figure ‘Judas Iscariot’, the betrayer of Christ who was believed to have sold him out to the Romans for a reward of silver. She deceives with ‘Judas’ tears, implying that the display of emotion is entirely an act; this biblical allusion continues with the persona’s ‘silver mien’, relating back to Judas’ reward for double crossing Jesus. In the following lines (8 - 9) it is ultimately obvious that through her silver adorned façade, her real colour is ‘dun’, a dull greybrownish colour which as a metal would have been worthless, making an invaluable substance such as ‘lead’ to appear to be a ‘treasure’ in comparison to her; a metaphor for her real lack of goodness.

On the other hand, as everyone else, our mistress is not responsible for her own sense of morality, but she is responsible for her actions, which yes, are false, however not outwardly negative or detrimental; perhaps this may lead us to question the importance of her true nature in regards to the fact that she is not presented as being spiteful or unkind in her treatment of others. We may even dispute whether she could be a figure that is worthy of sympathy, born into a time where she would have had to break her own spirit trying to conform to the norms of a society, where women were subjected to the task of fitting into a subdued role of maternal modesty and respectability, subservient to their father’s, brother’s and husband’s. Instead of interpreting her internal ‘fever’ as being one of evil, this could instead refer to a feminine power not approved of by men at the time, who treated women as objects rather than people. This persona may be fearful of coming across as a sort of shrew, a woman with a sharp tongue and her wits about her, not at all approved of during Shakespearean times. But as women have gradually taken back their power, the definition of the previously outcasted shrew has now become a beneficial

quality and adjective used to describe an astute individual with sharp powers of judgement. In today’s world (despite its remaining gender inequalities), this woman’s character could be more comparable to Beyoncé, J.K. Rowling or any other powerful woman who is able to confidently express their inner fire without being subdued by men around them.

As was Shakespeare’s, the aim of my own ‘Sonnet 130’ was to get away from the more classical and consuming one dimensional affection which characterised love poetry written by other’s like John Donne, a metaphysical poet alive during the same period as Shakespeare or works thereafter such as Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s ‘How Do I Love Thee?’ (Sonnet 43). While there is no issue with these more conventional and inarguably beautiful literary expressions of love, you could say that compositions such as these could verge on being almost

RHETORIC OF

LOVE

cliché; not in their individual entireties but more because the idea of love poetry as a whole seems a little cringe and poking fun at this by manipulating conventional forms of it creates more conversation about the intention of a writer’s composition. This ambiguity surrounding what a poem aims to achieve when it’s traditional conventions become twisted means that, for example in this context, you could almost interpret Shakespeare’s Sonnet as having feminist undertones because of its renunciation of the importance of conventional female beauty; this seems almost empowering and subtly revolutionary within a time when women were expected to be mild and without much purpose. Regardless, Shakespeare’s speaker is not overly kind to his addressee, serving her a sort of back handed compliment which would not fill any receiver with confidence in their own beauty.

An extract from an IB Extended Essay exploring the extent to which Shakespeare unsettles the Elizabethan rhetoric of love through his epyllion ‘Venus and Adonis’ by

AUDREY D.

Beginning in in medias res, the poetic narrative voice dives into the action and tensions between Venus and Adonis by drawing upon setting, taking time for descriptions that symbolise the narrative tensions as reflected by the natural world. Venus’ power is verbal, initially feeble and weak in comparison to Adonis’ tacit resistance. Venus tries to overcome her powerlessness through dominance; using desire to gain a position of superiority, adopting a seductive tone to flaunt her body for Adonis’ pleasure. She infamously compares her body to a park and offers it to Adonis, ‘Feed where thou wilt, on mountain or in dale’, ‘stray lower, where pleasant fountains lie’. Shakespeare comically creates the sense that Venus blazons her body as an open source of sexual satisfaction for Adonis through the use of active verbs, ‘feed’ and ‘stray.’ Unlike Elizabethan blazon Venus’ description is highly sensuous and explicit. The park/nature imagery takes blazon to a hyperbolic level, with ‘park’, describing Venus’ entire body, unlike the typical objectification of blazon poetry which dwells on individual body parts. By empowering his female narrator to speak with hyperbole, Shakespeare unsettles the gender dynamics of Elizabethan blazon, suggesting Venus is reassuring herself that her desire is natural – making the viewer question how far desire constitutes as

natural sexual behaviour. As questioned by Coppelia Kahn, ‘Is it more ‘natural’ for Venus to satisfy desire than for Adonis to resist it?’ Shakespeare challenges preconceptions of representations of desire and exposes its cruel and abusive aspects. The effect is humorous but the message is serious: there is darkness behind the overwhelming and patriarchally narcissistic Elizabethan rhetoric of love.

In this way, Shakespeare subverts literary gender roles: Venus becomes the narrator. Through an unexpected reversal of gender power dynamics, the reader is able to view Adonis through Venus’ gaze: ‘My beauty as the spring doth yearly, / my flesh is soft and plump.’ (164,165) She blazons herself, relating her appearance to the season of spring, associated with flowering and fruitfulness. Venus not only offers her beauty to Adonis, but her fertility, her capability to give birth to his children. Arguably Shakespeare allows Venus to take on the male gaze and discourse to appeal to Adonis, his audience and perhaps the patron of this work and alleged lover to Shakespeare: Sir Henry Wriothesely. This is further suggested when, with comic irony, she idealises and objectifies Adonis ‘And yet cloy thy lips and loathed satiety/ But rather famish them amid their plenty, /Making them red and pale with fresh

variety.’ Zooming into his features, and adopting recognisable blazon imagery, she eroticises Adonis’ lips, making him the subject of the male gaze.

In contrast, Adonis remains quiet for most of the poem, only speaking in monosyllabic and short phrases (7% of the poem). As the subject of Venus’ desires, he takes the passive position. Allowing Shakespeare to subvert traditional gender roles and place Adonis as also the subject of the male gaze.

This is suggested through Venus’ description of Adonis, ‘Stain to all nymphs, more lovely than a man/ More white and red than doves or roses are;’ Venus idealises Adonis through her description, relating him to a rose and dove. However, these are symbolic metaphors, not blazon. Perhaps Shakespeare instinctively avoids blazoning Adonis due to his gender, choosing not to objectify Adonis’ appearance, only Venus’.

However, he does this through Venus’ discourse, therefore it is through her gaze that we see Adonis: the male gaze is inverted, Adonis is the subject with a potentially titillating effect on the male readership and patronage of the poem, through its homoerotic undertones.

Venus’ authority is also preserved within the relationship through Shakespeare’s manipulation of Ovid’s narrative: Adonis is younger than Venus, thus implicitly less powerful, ‘wildly exceed[ing] romantic convention.’ Venus could be regarded as more of a mother figure than a lover to Adonis, a metaphor which is expanded significantly in the falling action, further enhancing the idea that Venus has a higher status. ‘Look, how a bird lies tangled in a net, so fasten’d in her arms Adonis lies’. By adding a maternal dimension to Venus’ character, Shakespeare further unsettles the Elizabethan rhetoric of love while, the image that Shakespeare constructs of Adonis is one of vulnerability. These contrasting images of the protagonists preserves the physical distance between Venus and Adonis but also reinforces Venus’ controlling position of power, challenging Elizabethan gender politics and poetics.

A sense of overpowering desire can be identified after Adonis escapes Venus’ clutch to retreat to his world of hunting, ‘With this, he breaketh from the sweet embrace, / Of those fair arms which bound him to her breast,/ And homeward through the dark laund runs apace’. Shakespeare diverts the narrative suddenly, adding pace and building tension to foreshadow what is to come. Although Adonis is described as a victim escaping imprisonment there is a sense that he is moving away from comfort - ‘sweet embrace’- to a place of danger - ‘dark laund’, foreshadowing his tragic ending. Simultaneously, Shakespeare confines each character to separate worlds: ‘[Venus] is trying to confine [Adonis] to a woman’s world of words, comfort, and pleasure, while he seeks initiation into a man’s world of deeds, competition, and danger.’ While Shakespeare overcomes and subverts gender stereotypes through the shifting power dynamic, each character’s interests remain complementary to the status quo.

The characters of Venus and Adonis symbolic of the division between male and female: ‘Hunting is a male domain, and for the Renaissance, love is a female one’ Venus continues

to serve the man. Comparisons can made with Lady Mary Wroth’s poetry, the niece of Sir Philip Sidney and first woman to write in the sonnet form. According to Tomáš Jajtner, ‘She consciously questions…principles of the concept of love found in the Petrarchan tradition informed by the “maleness” of the discourse’ and seeks to empower women by giving them a voice within her sonnets. In her poetry, Wroth frees women from culturally-determined gender roles, rather than constraining them as in the Petrarchan tradition.

Therefore, it can be observed that the marginalisation of the interests of Shakespeare’s Venus can be attributed to the male authorship of the poem, ultimately conforming to the Elizabethan rhetoric of love.

The idea of distance between the protagonists is developed through Shakespeare’s repetitive use of the red and white motif when describing the appearances of both characters.

As summarised by Clark Hulse, red and white imagery is ‘A Petrarchan trope for the complexion of the beloved, embodying the blend of opposites which defines beauty’, therefore a typical motif in Elizabethan blazon. The contrast between red and white is symbolic of the distance, or perhaps the resistance that prevents Venus and Adonis from unifying.

Adonis’ pale skin, ‘More white... than doves’ associates him with the colour of white, innocence and chastity. Venus, the goddess of love, with rose coloured lips and fiery desire, is associated with red, perhaps promiscuity. By dwelling on this, the reader observes that although red symbolises Venus’ desires, for ‘Rose cheek’d Adonis’, it symbolises shame and embarrassment: ‘She red and hot as coals of glowing fire/ He red for shame but frosty in desire’. The ‘frosty desire’, a play on the Petrachan oxymoron commonly used in Elizabethan sonnets including Shakespeare’s. The red/white motif is deployed differently in this poem, and perceived entirely differently by each character, playfully challenging the accepted rhetoric of love in Elizabethan poetry, perhaps deliberately exposing the absurdity of its paradoxical conventions.

In the rising action of the poem, Shakespeare’s witty subversion of Elizabethan poetic tropes, takes on a teasing, humorous tone that satirises Venus’ position of power. She denigrates herself to Adonis’ immaturity, ‘Ay me,’ quoth Venus, ‘young and so unkind?... I’ll sigh celestial breath, whose gentle wind /Shall cool the heat of this descending sun:/ I’ll make a shadow for thee of my hairs;/ If they burn too, I’ll quench them with my tears.’ As the poem progresses, Adonis starts to find his voice and begins to resist Venus’ desire. In a bid to remove himself from Venus’ entrapment, he complains of the sun burning his face; Shakespeare humorously uses the sun as a metaphor for Venus’ overpowering desire for Adonis: ‘Fie, no more of love! /The sun doth burn my face: I must remove.’ This metaphor is reinforced by the fact that Adonis’ words and actions are ineffective against Venus’ erotic rhetoric. Ironically, Shakespeare playfully shifts the relationship power dynamic again so that now Adonis is in control through his resistance to Venus’ lust; an irony that confirms Mulvey’s Male gaze theory. To challenge this control, Venus uses her verbal power and plays up to him, claiming she is willing to do anything to satisfy his desires. This undermines

the Elizabethan rhetoric of love because the beloved female subject was usually silent, with the male speaker pining for her – sometimes comically or overpoweringly, such as in Astrophil and Stella by Sir Philip Sidney. As a result, Venus gives into gender stereotypes, even while abusing her position of power within the relationship, but also as a goddess, by reducing herself to serve Adonis in the hopes that she gains his desires.

Venus’ harmless desire shifts to physical dominance in an effort to prevent Adonis from leaving to hunt, ultimately pushing Adonis away further: ‘Venus… fails because she insists upon underlining her persuasive arguments with excessive snatching, pawing and crushing’. Shakespeare constructs a predatory image, with Adonis as the victim, ‘She sinketh down, still hanging by his neck,/ He on her belly falls, she on her back.’ A physical image which creates the sense that Venus is dominating Adonis: she is strong enough to pull him down, to crush him with her weight, ‘‘Fie, fie,’ he says, ‘you crush me; let me go; You have no reason to withhold me so.’ Yet this is also a description of violation, of gender roles reversed. This causes the reader to question the power roles: if the male protagonist behaved like this, would it be still be comical?

There is an ambiguity between desire and ownership in these conflicting gender roles: Venus is now in control due to her overpowering physicality. Thus Shakespeare introduces the darker side of desire, foreshadowing Adonis’ demise as he escapes Venus - Exposing Shakespeare’s presentation of desire as an essentially destructive force, unsettling the Elizabethan rhetoric of love once again.

The Necklace A poem in thanks to William Carlos Williams by

ISABELLA W.

The necklace has a thin gold Chain that catches light When at the right Angle.

Its chain is So icy And so cold.

THE MOOR OF VENICE An evaluation of the ways in which Shakespeare characterises Othello’s racial identity in ‘Othello’ by

GUY Z. In the Moor of Venice, whilst Shakespeare characterises Othello’s racial and cultural identity as alluring to the Venetian characters, through employing exaggerated otherworldly imagery, the protagonist’s character is illustrated as distinctly separate from the rest of Venetian society. Shakespeare utilises Iago to manipulate Othello’s racial identity, evincing racial symbolism and dehumanising metaphors, littered with colonial stereotypes of the “Moor”. Additionally, Shakespeare reveals how Iago’s bigotry evokes the dormant, yet deepseated, racism in Venetian society; the playwright manifests this in Roderigo’s and Brabantio’s prejudiced views that Othello and Desdemona’s interracial marriage is unnatural, highlighted using the semantic field of criminality. Also, Shakespeare depicts how the eponymous protagonist internalises Venetian stereotypes of his own blackness, notably in how Othello’s final monologue is interspersed with vivid imagery of foreignness. Increasingly throughout the play, the playwright depicts Othello as gripped by his hamartia – a capricious, crushing passion. Ultimately, Shakespeare’s adoption of such colonial stereotypes makes Othello an archetypically “black” character. Nonetheless, Shakespeare subverts contemporary expectations and presents the true outsider as not black Othello but white Iago, with repeated, scalding allusions to the devil testament to the treacherous antagonist’s consummate moral corruption.

Firstly, whilst Othello is valued by Venetian society for his fascinating, strange past, as well as his bravery on the battlefield, Shakespeare nevertheless paints him as an outsider. The playwright presents the extensive “travels’ history” of the “Moor” to the “antres vast and deserts idle”.

The poetic allusions to unfamiliar climes and landforms, emphasised by sibilance and parallelism of the nounadjective combination, depict the romantic strangeness of the protagonist’s identity. In addition, Shakespeare conjures

fear-evoking images of dangerous “cannibals” and mythical creatures like “Anthropophagi”. Although these daunting, mysterious images are steeped in hyperbolic, colonial stereotypes of Othello’s motherland, Africa, as an uncivilised and barren wasteland, they are nevertheless alluring to the Venetian élite. Notably, Desdemona’s “ear” is personified as “greedy” to emphasise her insatiable appetite for her lover’s extraordinary past. Shakespeare conveys Othello’s integration, due to his “noble” bravery, as somewhat transcending the typical limits of a contemporary Moor in Western society, illustrated in his prominence as General, with a revered “title”. Also, Othello’s lines are written in iambic pentameter, like other socially elevated characters, depicting his erudite nature and lofty status in the play. Even more revealing is how the authoritative Duke of Venice asserts Othello’s “virtue”, claiming he is “far more fair than black”, with the intensified comparative “far more” further highlighting Othello’s integrity.

Nevertheless, Shakespeare describes Othello’s virtue in relative terms, as despite his “black” identity, which is telling as to how his multiculturalism, albeit attractive, undeniably renders him as fundamentally different from his Venetian counterparts.

In addition, Shakespeare characterises Othello’s racial identity as a tool which Iago weaponizes to defame the superior “General”. At first, Iago is indignant that the “Moorship’s” already “chose [his] officer”, Cassio. The pejorative “Moorship’s” emphasises Iago’s bitter jealousy at being outranked by Othello and Cassio. Shakespeare also portrays Othello’s blackness as something which is weaponized by the treacherous conspirator to “serve [his] turn upon [Othello]” and as a means of social ascension. When warning Brabantio of the betrothal between Othello and Desdemona, Iago uses a dehumanising, racist metaphor to describe “an old black ram […] topping your white ewe.” Shakespeare employs

structuralism in the binary opposition between “black” and “white”, as well as the animalistic metaphor of “ram” and “ewe”, to depict bestial passion and draw on racial fears to alarm Desdemona’s protective father. Further, Iago refers to the tragic hero by his name only five times, instead repeating the racial term “Moor” over twenty times. Shakespeare also utilises the motif of evil, with Iago repeatedly referring to Othello as the “devil”. This biblical allusion manufactures an image of the tragic hero to evil personified, symbolically associating the dark skin of “The Moor” with moral darkness.

Critically, given that in Jacobean drama ‘all parts are played by white males’, Shakespeare presents this manufactured, besmirched projection of the Moor’s racial identity, not an innate colour or essence, that sets Othello apart; this subversion of contemporary colonial belief would have been most powerful and striking to contemporary audiences.

Furthermore, Shakespeare characterises Othello’s racial identity as a social barrier in Venetian society, especially regarding his marriage to Desdemona. Firstly, Shakespeare presents Othello’s foreignness as the jealous Roderigo’s ‘means of justifying his […] right’ to Desdemona. Roderigo laments the “full fortune… the thicklips owe[s]/If he can carry’t thus!”

The pejorative “thicklips” displays Roderigo’s heated jealousy at Desdemona loving Othello, underscored by racism.

Shakespeare employs the semantic fields of lust (“lascivious Moor”) and immorality (“knave[…] gondolier[…] gross clasps”), emphasised by the hissing sibilance of “gross clasps”, to again highlight Roderigo’s disdain towards Othello. This hostile language, echoing Iago’s own racist language, unveils both Roderigo’s and Venetian society’s colonial stereotypes, of black savagery and interracial love “not [being] possible”.

In addition, despite “lov[ing]” and “oft invit[ing]” Othello to his home, Brabantio’s affection turns into animosity on hearing the protagonist’s betrothal to Desdemona. Suddenly, for Brabantio, Othello is no longer the revered warrior but a “foul thief”, transgressing societal limits that his black identity bears in Venetian society. The phrase “foul thief” connotes malfeasance and impurity, reinforcing Brabantio’s claims that his daughter has been “abused” and “stol’n”.

Shakespeare employs verbs associated with criminality to accentuate Brabantio’s view, like Roderigo, that Othello and Desdemona’s love is a crime “against all rules of nature”. To Brabantio, the protagonist is a “thing […] to fear […]!” with the contemptuous exclamation emphasising the dehumanising noun “thing”. What more, Othello’s racial identity is an undeniable cause of Brabantio’s “pure grief” and subsequent death, such is the shock of a black man marrying his daughter.

Ultimately, Shakespeare demonstrates that, despite The Moor of Venice being a respected soldier, Venetian acceptance of him has clear, racially-motivated boundaries, which his marriage to Desdemona apparently transgresses.

Finally, Shakespeare portrays Othello’s racial identity as a source of insecurity which poisons his self-regard, actions and ultimate fate. When learning of Desdemona’s reported infidelity, Othello remarks: “Her name, that was as fresh/ As Dian’s visage, is now begrimed and black”. The stark contrast between the exalting simile “fresh as Dian’s visage” and the

disdainful phrase “begrimed and black” emphasised by plosive alliteration, evinces how Othello internally perceives black skin, like his, as indicative of innate immorality. The playwright also presents Othello as affected by these stereotypes when he is “eaten up with passion”, the metaphor demonstrating all-consuming jealousy. Othello’s uncontrollable emotion, his hamartia, is critical to the plot, driving his “great revenge” and leading him to tragically ‘stifle [Desdemona]’. Hence the playwright projects Othello as both internally and externally engulfed in colonial stereotypes of his racial identity, of Moors as emotionally volatile and violent. Despite his integration into Venetian society, The Moor of Venice, as the ambivalent title indicates, never assimilates; Othello remains an “extravagant and wheeling stranger” both to Venetians and himself, split from a white society that values him in ‘coldly utilitarian’ terms, for his interesting origins and military prowess, but that still sees him as an outsider. This is epitomised when Othello stabs himself at the end of the tragedy, remembering a “malignant and a turbaned Turk” being “smote”. The comparison between the killing of a heathen enemy of Venice, a “Turk”, and the death of Othello himself, is potent and telling. Through this concluding imagery, Shakespeare illustrates the protagonist, after a lifetime of social and psychological struggle as a Moor in Venice, eliminating his very foreignness, as if an enemy, in his tragic death.

However, it is crucial to remember that Shakespeare ultimately conveys Iago as the actual villain, despite being a white Venetian. When Shakespeare exposes the antagonist’s sly plot, the “O damn’d Iago!” is dehumanised as an “O inhuman dog!” The exclaimed interjections “O…! O…!” emphasise the villain’s shocking, sinful (“damn’d ”) and “inhuman” cruelty. Shakespeare also presents Emilia’s horror at realising her husband’s malevolence in Act 5, Scene 2, in the asyndetic tricolon “Villainy, villainy, villainy!” the exclamation further highlighting Iago’s evil. Lodovico calls Iago a “hellish villain” and the tragic hero acknowledges that his trusted informant is a “demi-devil”. Through utilising the lexical field of evil to paint Iago and illustrating his arrest at the end of the play, Shakespeare characterises Iago as more alienated from Venetian society by his moral transgressions than Othello ever was by his racial identity.

Overall, Shakespeare characterises Othello’s racial identity as a barrier to his assimilation into Venetian society. Whilst Othello is admired as a brave, noble warrior with an appealing past, he is perceived as nevertheless different. Iago exploits racial stereotypes to evoke fear and disgust in Roderigo and Brabantio, who both contest Othello’s marriage with Desdemona because of his blackness. Furthermore, the playwright illustrates how Othello’s insecurity of his otherness is manipulated, evoking fervent emotions that end up being his tragic hamartia. Nevertheless, Shakespeare leaves the audience feeling sympathetic to Othello, as he was ultimately ensnared by the cruel Iago, whose evil plot culminates in treason, murder, and his imprisonment as the true outsider of Venetian society.

SOUNDS AND SWEET AIRS Two poems inspired by Shakespeare’s ‘The Tempest’ by

ARIANNA D. AND ZIYI Y.

‘And life is like a dream’ And life is like a dream: Not known to man or spirit – Alive or not. A strange and new beginning.

Step foot on land of strange and personal beings – Different to home or what others would call their home, Unsure of the feeling in me I get when I take A walk on this land I don’t know.

Do I want to know?

And life is like a dream.

‘Dear Miranda’ Here is where our last journey ends And where a foreign one begins.

I do not know what lies ahead But you do not have to fear for I will protect thee at all costs, dear Miranda.

Trapped on this isle forevermore Rests a moon calf in slumber.

As I predicted, you’re a ghost Of Sycorax, thy mother.

CRUEL OPTIMISM An extract from an essay exploring the extent to which capitalism cultivates unstable fabrications of the self in Fitzgerald’s ‘The Great Gatsby’ and Williams’ ‘The Glass Menagerie’ by

MADDY P. “Cruel Optimism exists when something you desire is actually an obstacle to your flourishing”. Lauren Berlant’s notion of ‘Cruel Optimism’ can be read as an illuminating critique of modern capitalist America, because in both texts the perpetuation of capitalist ideals are shown to be responsible for the fundamentally unstable condition of humanity. When viewing these texts through a Marxist lens, the theory of ‘alienation’– “the social alienation of people from aspects of their human nature as a consequence of living in a society of stratified social classes” – offers a crucial paradigm for critical investigation. Alienated from meaningful labour, characters construct their identities in an attempt for stability. But ironically, these fabrications embody a form of ‘Cruel Optimism’, as they hinder authentic self-fulfilment, thus making the characters’ construction of the self insecure and unsustainable.

The Great Gatsby and The Glass Menagerie provide clear examples of how damaging unsatisfying labour is, as it alienates workers. Hegel names this dissatisfied state the “unhappy conscious” - a divided conscious which sees the contradiction of freedom and slavery in the same being. In these texts this contradiction takes the form of a tension in 20th century capitalist America between the confinement

of unsatisfying work and the promise the American dream, which as James Truslow Adams explains, is the promise of a “land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone, with opportunity for each”. To overcome this contradiction, the dissatisfied worker disregards his freedom and resigns himself to vocational slavery, which is seen in characters of Wilson in The Great Gatsby and Tom in The Glass Menagerie. In The Glass Menagerie Williams’ character Tom Wingfield endures dehumanizing labour in a Fordist conveyor-belt system, where labour is exploited as commodity, by neglecting his freedom and humanity. Williams presents Tom’s stark awareness of his captive role in this system in the exclamation “For sixty-five dollars a month I give up all that I dream of doing and being ever”. Here, what Tom is working “for” is placed in a dichotomy with what he has to “give up”. Tom suggests that the sacrifices one must make to survive in a society, which is founded on a bedrock of commerce, runs deeper than giving up a superficial want, as the present participles “doing” and “being” function as independent nouns naming the most fundamental states of existence. “I’m in no condition!”, reiterates that he has lost his connection to the human “condition”. Tom has been crushed under the tight grip of a capitalist economy, yet he’s aware of being a man who “makes a slave of himself”: making himself

both the subject and object of this clause, he recognizes that his unhappy subservience and rejection of freedom is selfinflicted because of alienating labour.

In The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald’s depiction of George Wilson is comparable to Tom Wingfield, if not more tragic. Wilson works in a small car workshop in the “Valley of Ashes”: the proletarian wasteland in the shadow of New York in which the “Ash-grey men [the workers] move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air”. It’s important to acknowledge that the differing portrayal of workers

by Williams and Fitzgerald is namely due to the form of their texts. The Glass Menagerie is a play, which permits a confessional tone but leaves a great deal of representational artistic licence to designers/actors, whereas novels allow the author to control the formation of ocular cues. Thus, Fitzgerald’s utilisation of figurative language in The Great Gatsby is visually successfully. “Ash” is the remnants of a fire, and so places these workers in the burnt-out wake of the fire that is New York, leaving it devoid of energy and vitality. Like Tom Wingfield, these workmen have lost their connection to the human “condition” -“crumbling” into the “powdery air”- which also suggests that they become part of their dismal surroundings, wedding them to their role as the proletariat, and underlining a fallacy of the American Dream: the failed promise of social mobility. However, unlike Tom Wingfield, Wilson is not self-aware - “agree[ing] hurriedly” to T. Buchanan’s demands. Both adverb and verb highlights his inferiority complex, showing that Wilson constructs his identity in the knowledge of his societal subservience; however it is this blind resignation to submissiveness which seems to preserve him from the emotional turmoil Tom Wingfield suffers.

As Fromm suggests, when “man’s existence is alienated from his essence […] he is not what he ought to be”. By yielding to the drudgery of unfulfilling labour man becomes alienated from his humanity, and if “conscious life activity distinguishes man from the life activity of animals”, but man is no longer living freely or consciously, he comes a “crippled monstrosity”, an animal. So, this pseudo-stability which is found in resigning oneself to the ‘slavery’ of a job in a capitalist system, is in effect precarious as it dehumanizes man. Both Tom and Wilson prove this; their sacrifice of freedom to construct a stable identity leads to their undoing. At the end of the play Tom “descend[s] the steps of the fire escape for the last time”, the barred metal rungs of the stairs evoke an image of an animal escaping its cage. Tom leaves both family and responsibility behind to follow his “instinct”, emphasising the animalistic quality of his break for freedom. Although officially titled a “Merchant Marine”, Tom becomes a wanderer, transcending the normal parameters of human civilisation by rejecting the grand narratives of occupation and the nuclear family. The simile “cities swept around me like dead leaves, […] torn away from the branch” accentuates Tom’s instability: like these leaves, he is “torn away” from any sense of purpose or familial responsibility. Similarly, Wilson breaks the shackles of his societal subservience in an animalistic outburst

after Myrtle is killed. His eyes “glazed” over, letting out an “incessantly […] high, horrible call”. No longer speaking but “call[ing]” like an animal, an extended metaphor of the bestial surrounds Wilson as he reverts to instinct, becoming a predator hunting his prey. Wilson stalks Gatsby “on foot” and murders him in a fit of rage which again transcends the rules of societal civility, as murder is associated with ruthless predators in the wild. Through the undoing of both these men, Fitzgerald and Williams suggest that the capitalist inequalities between rich and poor, and the failure of social mobility, are to blame for the instability of the working man.

In occupying unsatisfying jobs these men are alienated from their humanity and reduced to animals.

The Hand A poem by FRED S.

In white paint There is more description of the hand and fingers, Whisper by whisper, closer she lingers.

The majestic jewellery, homeshipped from Sri Lanka, Summoning up the street like an infantry tanker.

ART OF

LOVE An extract from an essay on the use of music in Stoppard’s ‘Arcadia’ by

HUGO W. Used for thousands of years to ‘glorify god’, music has nurtured the human soul with pleasure and anguish, to ‘indescribable depths’. As Melissa Cyperski proposes, ‘it was only a matter of time’ before secular individuals ‘attempted to harness its power.’ In Stoppard’s Arcadia, imitations of Classical music are heard diegeticallya, synthesised as sonorous counterparts to dominant themes: time and aspects of the human condition; reason, knowledge, and love. Stoppard conjures a Waltz that ‘grounds the idea of iteration and time linking between past and present.’ Throughout, Stoppard emphasizes musical genres to reiterate the literary timeperiod of scenes set in 1809, 1812 and the early 1980s. The connotations each musical period upholds, contributes to how a present-day audience engage with the spectacles and themes of Arcadia.

Stoppard harnesses the organised nature of music to help structure his play, creating a metaphorically elaborate fugueb. Throughout Arcadia, Stoppard produces a visual representation of ‘the story jumping nimbly between past and present’: Scene Seven slowly moulds each time period together onstage, culminating in a spectacular denouement. Valentine, Chloe and Gus arrive together onstage, humorously discussing Bernard’s recent publication ‘Even in Arcadia – Sex, Literature and Death at Sidley Park’ and Chloe’s statement ‘the future is all programmed like a computer’. The dialogue then switches to the early C19, sharing both past and present with the action shifting between each period yet sharing the same stage space.

Stoppard’s stage directions illustrate the first shift as a ‘light change to evening. The paper lanterns outside begin to glow. Piano music from the next room’, followed by the two dialogues weaved together; take Septimus’s, a C19 character, comment ‘the improved Newtonian Universe must cease and grow cold’ which is answered by Valentine, a contemporary character, arguing, ‘the heat goes into the mix’. These moments iterate themes of ‘the deterministic universe’, knowledge and love, while heightening an audience’s understanding of them. When both conversations focus on the same subject, ‘heat exchange’ and ‘Newtonian’

ideas on time, the audience slowly realise the correlation between ‘your tea’s getting cold’ and the ephemeral nature of each time period’s characters; connected through the human condition, time is always running out. This becomes a tragic foreshadowing of Thomasina’s premature death. In a fugue-like fashion not only do both time periods appear in a contrapuntal dialogue but they each converse around the same subject developing original themes, a parallel to the musical form. Interestingly, this could also contextual hark back to the neo-classical attitude that Stoppard thematically explores, linking through the classical era’s ‘harmonic, symmetrical and balanced’ approach to rationality and objectivity that a fugal structure also encompasses. David Guaspari contends that ‘the nineteenth and twentieth century stories converge to end jointly with a waltz. The finale’s design is formal and fugue-like. Its dialogue counterpoints past and present.’ Guaspari’s description of ‘fugue-like’ is contextually relevant as the fugal form was blooming in European music prior to the C19 (Scenes One, Three, Six and Seven) with Bach writing his Art of Fugue in 1742, causing a cascade of fugal compositions from major composers of C18 and beyond.

Arguably, in Scene Seven the dialogue between past and present is dispersed to highlight Stoppard’s resounding themes of reason, knowledge and love. Hannah’s recitation of Byron’s poem ‘Darkness’ toys with themes of life, ‘dreams’ and the human condition. She is abruptly interrupted by Thomasina’s entertaining remark: ‘Septimus, do you think that I will marry Lord Byron?’, iterating not only the motif of Byron’s symbolic off-stage role in the play but ultimately, that of the human condition itself. This final fugue also accentuates the events that re-occur between 1809, 1812 and the present – another physical iteration echoing musical form that is reflected in the play’s narrative structure. Thomasina enters the stage in the finale ‘spatting with Lord Augustus, who has threatened to tell on her for granting Septimus a kiss.’ Guaspari reminds us: ‘Septimus, she says, has agreed to teach her to waltz, the bargain ‘sealed with a kiss, and a second kiss due when I can dance like mama,’ ’ with Augustus

subsequently asking Septimus to explain the facts of life.

These events appear to echo the play’s opening where Septimus’s reported ‘embrace’ of Mrs Chater in the gazebo/ hermitage mirrors Septimus’s kiss with Thomasina – and Thomasina’s comic enquiry on ‘carnal embrace’. This specific discourse is re-iterated thematically throughout the play. In the opening scene the semantic field of sexual attraction seems to be present throughout the dialogue, whether contemporary or 18th century. Septimus’s ‘carnal embrace’ in the opening scene, becomes an innocent cloak for the sexual undertones of the play, while Bernard’s initiation to Hannah: ‘why don’t you come [to his lecture] …Oh, no, bugger that. Sex’ in Scene 5 also foregrounds sex and love, the latter of which Melloy argues to be one half of the play’s ‘major themes’, while also suggesting that ‘Stoppard twines sex and science into a single complex strand the same way he plays past and present of one another, portraying time as not only continuous but forever unfolding in a series of similar patterns.’ Although a contrasting argument, Melloy hints to a more general conclusion of how each repetition of events is another reiteration of Stoppard’s thematic reference; the 19th century conversation above, repeatedly foreshadows and ironically iterates the importance of sexual attraction on scientific knowledge; ‘it’s all because of sex’.

Guaspari also argues that the finale’s steady acceleration is achieved by the musical device of ‘compression’: leaving the tempo unchanged but diminishing the period in which melodic and harmonic patterns conclude. In Arcadia, these ‘patterns’ are cadences in which connections among the subplots (Bernard’s article, Valentine’ pursuit of scientific knowledge, Thomasina’s enquiries into science and sex) click into place during the finale.

Stoppard explores the musical metaphor in his text, driving the poignancy of individual thematic moments through successively ‘cadencing’ each theme in close proximity.

For example, Septimius’s addressal of Thomasina’s childish ‘ignorance’ to Augustus is quickly followed by Bernard’s theory, an address on knowledge of the past, is proved to be false and is expressed discordantly explicates through: ‘Oh nono-no-oh, bloody hell!’ Bernard shouts followed by Augustus’s’ ‘thank you, Mr Hodge, I will.’ Importantly, Stoppard addresses themes of time, knowledge and ignorance: contextually, the title ‘Arcadia’ is inspired by the Latin ‘Et in Arcadia ego’, a phrase seen in Poussin’s 1637 painting translating as ‘I [death], too, am in Arcadia’, Stoppard’s themes may be traced back to Virgil’s ‘Eclogues’, where the infamous phrase was first found.

During these last few moments on stage, the links between Stoppard’s Arcadia and ‘et in Arcadia ego’ are exclaimed to an audience.

Musical qualities are present both through the overriding repetition of theme and motif (macro) and through the specific details of contrapuntal episodes (micro). Both Valentine (Scene Two), and Thomasina, (Scene Seven), individually explore the second law of thermodynamics, a specific contrapuntal aspect of the play. Fischer argues that ‘Thomasina and Valentine recognise that such repetitions

not only produce difference, but loss,’ mirroring the repetitions of themes and motifs on a macro level. Loss seems to be the concluding theme of the play as Thomasina is remembered to have died in a fire, yet Nguyen argues a more prominent micro-iteration occurs during Scene Three, when Thomasina grieves the loss of ‘thousands of works in the library of Alexandria.’ Fundamentally, it is clear that Stoppard moulds Arcadia’s structure to prioritise a constant dialogue of themes, epitomising his dramatic intention. Although music is a core thematic and staging aspect of each play, both playwrights engage with it individually, exploring the ‘musical metaphor’.

Music is applied to highlight characters, themes and stagecraft, emphasizing each playwrights’ dramatic intentions.

Stoppard is able to accentuate an underlying connection between Gus and Thomasina through music, while concurrently illustrating themes of knowledge, love, and genius onto stage.

After Scene one, the audience gather that in Thomasina’s eyes both ‘love and physics are puzzles to be resolved’: ‘what is carnal embrace?’ and ‘do you think God is a Newtonian?’, both questions addressed to ‘Septimus’, accentuating a curiosity that continues throughout the play. It is the theme of love, however, that Stoppard explores through music; in Thomasina’s off-stage piano playing and through ‘her desire to dance the waltz’ that saturates her dialogue in the final Scene.

Concurrently, Stoppard also has the present-day character of Gus perform improvisations on the piano, evoking themes of scientific research and chaos theory through this aural link; underlining that both characters are connected as prodigies, demonstrating their passion through music. Similarly, Stoppard also employs both characters to create comic dissonance; ‘the noise is badly played in the next room’ by Thomasina (Scene Three), ‘From the next room a piano is heard, beginning to play quietly, unobtrusively, improvisatory’ by Gus (Scene Four). Stoppard reinforces the thematic links aurally by associating unconventional piano playing between the two most scientifically minded characters, in so moulding musical imagery to reflect his dramatic intentions.

Stoppard engages with two extremes of music: modern dance and 19th century waltz piano music. Each genre sounding unalike, connecting through being forms of dance while reflecting themes of death, knowledge and sex that Stoppard finally concludes upon through addressing what corresponds to each theme: time. Stoppard’s conceptual combination of music and time is also sustained by Cameron Sharps’ argument examining the impact of the final dance: ‘In a play which explores the emergence of orderly patterns from chaos, the disruption is truly stilled upon the enactment of the final dance, made fluid by an aural shift from modern dance music to that of the Romantic-era waltz.’ Thus music allows for an even greater reflection of Stoppard’s theme of chaos and harmony in an unpredictable timeframe. Without the marriage of aural and visual elements that grace the audience when both epochs share the stage, this powerful image would have been diminished in poignancy, and each ‘social barrier’ would not be ‘lifted’.

FRAGMENTS I HAVE SHORED AGAINST MY RUINS An extract from an essay investigating the extent to which the Great War was the single most profound influence on T.S. Eliot’s ‘The Waste Land’ by SAM G.

Written less than a decade after the conclusion of World War I, T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922) was born from a period of intense destruction and hopelessness. For Eliot, the bleak view of contemporary Europe in his poem mirrored his personal sense of deepening historical catastrophe. As he wrote to Stephen Spender in April 1921, ‘Having only contempt for every existing political party, and profound hatred of democracy, I feel the blackest gloom’. One of the major preoccupations triggered by World War I, then, was what this ‘lost generation’, as Gertrude Stein put it, would do next. Here, ‘lost’ holds a dual function, simultaneously implying a population that had died in war but also, for those who survived, one that lacked purpose and direction. To find some semblance of meaning, continuity and posterity, in The Waste Land, Eliot turned to primitivism, seemingly giving up on the present and searching for salvation in the past.

In analysing how World War I affected Eliot’s thinking about time, a letter to Eleanor Hinkley from the summer of 1917 is highly instructive. He observes that, if before the war, life was like a Jane Austen novel, during the war it had turned into a Dostoevsky novel. In other words, there had been a rapid and violent shift from the ‘order and ‘elegance’ of Victorian sensibilities where ‘due time was taken for due process’ to ‘at least half of Eastern Europe’ being ‘on the road to chaos and crisis, reeling into the abyss in a state of drunken delirium, singing drunken hymns as Dimitri Karamazov did’. This idea of ‘crisis’ and ‘reeling into the abyss’ is an important one as it mirrors Sigmund Freud’s definition of a very particular literary form that focuses on turning back time. For Freud, primitivism was ‘an experiment not as a focus of creativity and self-definition but as a product of a specific crisis’. Primitivism involved artistic attempts to recreate the past and primitive experiences; but more than this, it offered – via Rousseaun doctrine of tabula rasa – an opportunity to examine the untainted, intrinsic nature of humanity. As both Eliot and Freud allude, one reason for its proliferation in the first three decades of the 20th century was because it offered the chance of what Gabrielle McIntire describes as ‘a cultural reset from the horror and trauma of World War I’.

The opening lines of the poem offer a useful starting point: April is the cruellest month, breeding Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing Memory and desire, stirring Dull roots with spring rain.

Winter kept us warm, covering Earth in forgetful snow, feeding A little life with dried tubers.

Immediately, we are given a fixed sense of time: it is spring, the month of April. Yet, even here, the fingerprints of primitivism are evident. Eliot’s cruelty of April nods knowingly back into the past at the opening of Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales where the sweet April showers instigate life. As Maud Ellmann articulates, ‘Because these lines allude to Chaucer, they invoke the origin of the tradition as well as the juvescence of the year’.

Her observation is prescient because primitivism relies on this very idea – invoking, searching for, and returning to origins at the same time that it interrogates the Rousseaun notion of an untainted inception. However, Eliot also subtly subverts the concept of origins through his lexical dexterity. Words such as ‘stirring’, ‘mixing’ and ‘feeding’ profane beginnings through their form – as present participle verbs, they are literally in the middle of an action. Moreover, the fact the poet then places them specifically at the end of the line merely emphasises his intentions for disruption. Here, it is as if Eliot questions the need to search, but also the futility of searching, for patterns of meaning and continuity in a medium such as time that is so precarious and difficult to capture on the page. As Robert Langbaum emphasises, The Waste Land tries ‘to undo time… but it is also a literal act of un-doing: action becomes negated by stasis and apathy’. Another interesting example of this ‘apathy’ can be found in the opening lines of A Game of Chess. The soporific nature of these lines and in particular the confusion in grammar links to Denis Donoghue point when he asserts, ‘Nearly everything in Eliot’s language can be explained by his feeling that the truth resides in an indeterminate area: neither subject nor object, but a state compounded of both, neither time nor eternity, past nor present, but a state in which the double obligation is registered’. In particular an interesting grammatical collapse occurs from line 11: Her strange synthetic perfumes, Unguent, powdered, or liquid–troubled, confused And drowned the sense in odours; strirred by the air As William Empson points out, notice the words ‘troubled’ and ‘confused’. Because they follow the model of ‘powdered’, as we read, they come to us as adjectives. But as we continue, they belatedly shift into verbs (now following the model of ‘drowned’), hence the syntax of these lines becomes confusing and unclear. This is the perfect example of a ‘double obligation’, one that Eliot employs to establish the same apathy from the first section in the second.

North’s interpretation of ‘un-doing’ is worth further analysis.

In the rape that concludes ‘The Fire Sermon’, for example, the most notable element of the scene is its inertia. The ‘he’, according to Ellmann, ‘is passive in his violence, weeping at his own barbarity’. The victim, too, is equally passive as if she were Tiresias and ‘foresuffered all’: I raised my knees Supine on the floor…

He wept. He promised “a new start”.

I made no comment. What should I resent?

This passivity dovetails so neatly with Eliot’s attempts at primitivism because, as outlined earlier, the futility of undertaking such an endeavour is a constant concern to him.

In the same way the perpetrator promises ‘a new start’, the

poet is acutely aware promises are often left unfulfilled: what if primitivism does not prompt a new start at all? Put another way, clear answers are very difficult to come by, both for the characters in The Waste Land and its reader.

However, Eliot is not purely destructive. There is evidence of an attempt to piece together the fragments of the present throughout his poetry. Wassily Kandinsky stated in 1901 that ‘when science, religion and morality are shaken, man turns his gaze from externals in onto a broken self’. This shift in perspective and the necessity to approach a subject from different points of view coincides with Friedrich Nietzsche who believed in ‘the subject as multiplicity’, where personality could not be governed by just one atomistic trait. In ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’, for instance, Eliot separates the narrator into distinct personae to reveal aspects of a divided self. These constant shifts from Lazarus and John the Baptist to Hamlet ensure fragmentation is seen as both a structural tool but also an illustration of real social discontinuity. In The Waste Land, Eliot takes his synecdochical tactics even further. For Ellmann, the ‘waste land’ of the title symbolises a ‘waste ground, bomb sites or vacant lots… where ancient women gather the wreckage of Europe after World War I’. The trope of women gathering waste in vacant lots, of course, has often been used by Eliot (for example, in ‘Preludes’, ‘The worlds revolve like ancient women / Gathering fuel in vacant lots’; the same image recurs in ‘Rhapsody on a Windy Night’) – yet what is so profound in The Waste Land is what the wreckage symbolises and how Eliot attempts to piece it together. The opening to ‘The Fire Sermon’ is a case in point: The river bears no empty bottles, sandwich papers, Silk handkerchiefs, cardboard boxes, cigarette ends Or other testimony of summer nights.

On the one hand, this can be seen as a straightforward list of urban waste. Yet if we view waste as the purest expression of what a culture discards, what it does not see itself as, a far more profound conclusion emerges. Eliot’s metonymic listing of items represent the very core of who we are: food and drink (‘bottles’, ‘sandwich papers’), fashion and lifestyle (‘Silk handkerchief’), trade and business (‘cardboard boxes’) and vices of addiction and pleasure (‘cigarette ends’). However, his attempt to piece together the semblance of a normal, vibrant society, society as it was before conflict and World War I, is negated as he purposefully sets up a predicate of wrongness to hamper him. By this, we mean his list fails dismally on two fronts. Firstly, he is not actually listing objects – he is listing objects that are not there (‘The river bears no…’). In other words, by describing absent items, Eliot renders his list utterly pointless. Then, secondly, further bolstering the idea of futility, we notice the list does not, in fact, involve food or drink or fashion or trade as originally thought. On closer inspection, they include only the husks and remnants of it: the bottles are empty; the papers no longer contain any sandwiches; the silk handkerchief does not come with a suit; the cardboard boxes are void of product; the cigarettes have already been smoked.

Essentially, despite Eliot’s best attempts to piece together Ellmann’s ‘wreckage of Europe’ to create a more recognisable society, he realises not only are the pieces of the wreckage an illusion in the first place, but they are also utterly bereft of anything worthwhile.

SWALLOWED

BY TIME

An extract from an essay exploring narrative time in John Williams’ ‘Stoner’ by

HARRY H. In Stoner, Williams uses the flexible temporal structure to exaggerate the exploration of the human condition, by reducing and increasing temporal pace at varying moments throughout the novel. At the very core of Stoner lie deep rooted foundations in realism, with Williams creating a novel that is ‘an escape to reality.’ Arguably Stoner is a semibiographical novel, Williams himself having taught and studied at the University of Missouri, and William Stoner being inspired by his colleague, J.V. Cunningham. The author’s own reality is intertwined with the novel’s fiction to enhance its realism, creating a text that attempts a reflection on aspects of the human condition, exploring some extremes that life brings, from the highs of birth to the lows of death. There is a fundamental conflict at the centre of the novel between rationality and emotion, with narrative pace integrated with this conflict in harmonious synthesis. Stoner’s first year at University is reduced to a matter of pages, his ‘rational’ studies described as ‘thoroughly, conscientiously, with neither pleasure nor distress’. These moments of rationality are given little space in the narrative, whilst Williams extends the temporal narrative in times of emotional conflict. This choice appears to be a sacrifice by Williams, choosing to prioritise significant moments of passion and emotion over a more distributed picture of times effect on man. Stoner’s affair with Katherine is an extremely brief period of his lifespan,

yet, unlike the rest of the novel, Williams chooses to deliver an abundance of detail, and the temporal narrative appears to briefly slow down to the extent that Stoner’s own time seems to halt all together. He remarks they acted ‘like children who did not think of tiring at their play’ and ‘the spring days lengthened’, when love is introduced to his life, the narrative pace slows down.

Perhaps the most interesting example of William’s playful manipulation of time is the compression of the entirety of Stoner’s early life into a singular, solitary paragraph, the prologue of the novel. Williams deems Stoner’s early life as unimportant, perhaps due to its ‘rationality’ and lack of ‘emotion’. Williams makes a point to highlight the fact that Stoner’s colleagues ‘speak of him rarely now’ and he is a reminder ‘of the end that awaits them all.’. It is clear from the first page of the novel that whilst the preceding chapters may present a lifetime, Stoner’s life poignantly can just as easily be reduced to a matter of paragraphs. Stoner reflects all of humanity’s insignificance, his life reflecting the words of William Blake, ‘we are put on this earth a little space that we might learn to bear the beams of love’. Whilst the novel is almost biographical in form, Williams does not dwell on Stoner’s youth, and instead begins to slow the narrative pace at the beginning of Stoner’s academic pursuit. The

humble prologue at the beginning of the novel compared to the existential thrust of the main narrative that follows is indicative of Stoner’s life itself, a character who underplays his own narrative to promote the narrative around him. Tony Mckenna argues the novel ‘lacks all trace of the historical epic’, its travesties and triumphs lie in its subtleties and it is narrative pace which presents these subtleties so perfectly. In contradiction to McKenna however it could be argued that Stoner is somewhat of an epic due to the authentic humanity on show, Williams painting a picture of raw emotion felt throughout a singular lifetime. Whilst Stoner as a protagonist is somewhat underwhelming, it is this very normality which allows Williams to explore the complex issues of humanity with such ease, creating a tight proximity between the reader and Stoner. The short prologue is proof by Williams that the human complexity can equally be reduced to a matter of words; in the suspended disbelief temporal limitations are forgotten and the author can zoom and roam as to where he sees fit. The pace of the prologue contrasts with the rest of the novel so that the dichotomy accentuates the notion that a narrative act can be exploited to give or take away from the meaning of the life, a device Williams utilises throughout.

Williams also chooses to employ the narrative time of his novel to accentuate the pursuit, gain and loss of knowledge.

Stoner’s own academic advancement at the University of Missouri is paced along with the novel’s own pace, with Williams matching the reader’s discovery with Stoner’s own academic journey. Steve Almond suggests that ‘There is a hunger for books that portray the dignity of the academy and celebrate the life of the mind. Stoner is one of the few novels that honours our idealism’. By slowing down the pace of which the reader is introduced to Stoner’s intellectual pursuit, Williams creates a narrative that celebrates knowledge in its purest form. It is the prolonged temporal narrative that makes the pursuit of knowledge in Stoner so rewarding. In the final two chapters William’s slows down the temporal pace to such an extent that time almost appears to stand still during Stoner’s final breaths: ‘He felt that he was waiting for something, for some knowledge; but it seemed to him that he had all the time in the world’. In the final chapter, perhaps for the first time in the entire novel, Williams presents a Stoner who is content in his insignificance, and blissful in his perceived ignorance. The final image of Stoner’s own book, that is a representation of his life ambition, falling ‘into the silence of the room,’ is one that resonates heavily. The book falls as a symbol for Stoner’s own knowledge being swallowed by time, as his life fades away. Williams writes on the final page of the novel, ‘It hardly mattered to him that the book was forgotten and that it served no use’. In the final chapter the events of the novel are once again reduced by Williams, with Stoner reflecting on his life works and achievements. Furthermore, the symbolic final fall of his book is a metaphorical return to reality, as the diversion of the temporal pace is forgotten, and the fault in the temporal structure recedes. This shift back to the reality of the otherwise constant narrative pace acts with a poignant sense of finality; Stoner, and his life works, are lost to the relentless movement of time.

ISTANBUL An interrogation of the concept of ‘huzun’ in Orhan Pamuk’s memoir ‘Istanbul’ by

DASHA G.

Pamuk proposes two spiritual interpretations of huzun in his memoir Istanbul: shame for having invested in the material world, and spiritual anguish for not being sufficiently devoted to Allah. Pamuk’s interpretation of huzun as a self-imposed, higher spiritual state in Turkish culture resonates with Sufi mysticism, where it becomes secular: the absence of huzun causes one to feel it as unworthy devotion to Allah. Pamuk retains the semantic field of “incurable illness”, consistent with the Greek etymology of ‘melancholy’ (a rough English translation of huzun): “melan” - black, and “khole”- bile, regarded as illness by Ancient Greek and Arabic physicians. Drawing on Al Kindi’s vision of the “cemaat” and Levi Strauss’ communal “tristesse”, Pamuk emphasises huzun as the central uniting force for Istanbulites “in which [they] see [themselves] reflected”. Huzun is described “as life affirming as it is negating”, highlighting the frisson and national pride within the pathos. This essay interrogates two aspects of Pamuk’s presentation of huzun: its birth from the East-West and past-present tensions presented through the interweaving of the melancholic object and melancholic subject, and huzun as a chronotope of 20th century Istanbul which enables an artistic narrative of hyper-history.

Pumuk relies on the interaction between the melancholic subject and object in structuring his presentation of the two conflicts at the heart of Istanbulites’ huzun: between the Ottoman past and the Turkish present, and between East and West. Pamuk presents the first conflict through an interweaving of the melancholic subject (the downfall of the Ottoman Empire) and its reflection in the melancholic object (the anachronism between the remains of previously majestic buildings and rundown modern ones). Pamuk demonstrates how this melancholic subject permeates Istanbulite life: “Watching the Pasha’s mansions burn to the ground, [his] family maintained stony equanimity”, “each would be burned and demolished while [he] was studying there, even as [he] played football in the

gardens”, in paradoxical juxtaposition between mundanity and violent destruction of past greatness. As a result of constant exposure to the melancholic object, Istanbulites develop internal conflict between longing and pride for the past, and bathos for the present, resulting in simultaneous patriotism and shame.

Throughout the memoir, Pamuk uses the motif of old buildings, particularly the Pasha Mansions, as an embodiment of traditional Turkish culture and values. By contrast, their destruction is a metaphor for brutality of industrialisation, the “melancholy of this dying culture all around”. This conflicting duality represents an intimate, sentimental, love-hate relationship between Istanbulites and the city’s past, personified as a “spurned lover” who “throws away his lost beloved’s clothes, possessions and photographs” “to be rid of all the bitter memories of the fallen empire”.

The past/present dichotomy that drives Pamuk’s personal huzun, is also illustrated through the memory of his grandmother’s “dark museum house” and how his own family used to “furnish their houses like museums”. The “museum house” can be read as a monument, an attempt to conserve memory of the culture, recalling Pamuk’s use of this trope in his novel ‘The Museum of Innocence’. The semantic field of receding past is reinforced

by Pamuk’s use of chiaroscuro, personifying the darkness trapped inside the museum house as memory hiding away from modern enlightenment. This chiaroscuro is foregrounded through black and white photographic illustrations, evoking a sense of melancholy and longing by bringing the past closer, yet simultaneously emphasising temporal distance from these memories which have grown discoloured and lifeless. Chapter 5 particularly engages with liminal imagery such as “semidarkness”, “early evenings when autumn is slipping into winter” and “black and white crowds rushing through the darkening streets”, bringing to life the melancholy resulting from osmosis of past into present.

Pamuk presents the second internal conflict causing huzun, through the melancholic subject: the feeling of being peripheral caused by unattainable Western ideals, reflected in the melancholic object such as the gallimaufry of artefacts from both cultures, creating a conceptual and visual dissonance in homes and streets. The modernisation period in Turkey was led by, and cultivated, Western ideals which were ultimately unattainable for Istanbulites, causing them internal conflict between patriotism and disappointment. The “Huzun” chapter itself features a fivepage sentence: a collage of images linked by anaphora (‘of the’) and semi-colons, mimetic of intricacy of an ubiquitous huzun, as relentless as this sentence. This hyper-sentence features constant alternation between western and eastern imagery - a tug-of-war for power through juxtaposition between: “covered women who stand at remote bus stops” and “clutching plastic bags”; “the holy messages spelt out in lights between the minarets of mosques on holidays” and “missing letters where the lights have burned out”; or “tired old dolmuses” and “1950s Chevrolets” that ironically “would be museum pieces in any Western city”.

Huzun provides Pamuk with a platform to explore Orientalism simultaneously from a native and an international narrator’s perspective - through “western eyes” - and thus attempt to reconcile East and West. His authentically Turkish experience connects with his Turkish audience while he also engages the Western audience’s fascination with exoticism, evident from “all the Western artists who painted the Bosephorus” and “western travellers of the eighteenth and mid-nineteenth centuries” who “described the mansions of the rich”. Through the historical narrative style, Pamuk takes back the right to Turkish history, stripped away during modernisation, by actively shaping it for the reader.

Arguably, Pamuk also presents huzun as a chronotope, a symbiosis of space and time, which enables his subjective exploration of the past and creation of hyper-history. Huzun is born out of 20th century Istanbul, and therefore operates within this temporal-spatial frame by conflating two narratives: autobiographical and historical. Although the two are spatially congruent, Pamuk encounters a temporal inconsistency due to his own lifetime falling within a limited period of Istanbul’s history.

He attempts to resolve this through understatement of dates and using temporal determinators relative to his own lifetime: “Flaubert who visited Istanbul a hundred and two years before my birth”, “Although Melling returned…it would be seventeen years before the book [Istanbul] was published…he was able to start work…”, and “A hundred years before my birth, as [Flaubert] was wondering the streets in which I would spend my life”. This creates a nebulous temporal setting - a conflation of the past and present emphasising the timelessness and interminability of huzun. Pamuk attempts to make the chronotope whole in order to resolve the past/present and cultural identity conflicts, by using setting to reconnect with the past embodied by the “four melancholic writers wandering about the same streets that [he] wandered about as a child”.

Concurrently, Pamuk uses temporally self-focalised narration to emphasise the subjectivity of his historical perspective, tainted by a huzun-permeated childhood. This results in a hyper-history,

where real historic and autobiographical events are artistically rendered to reflect the huzun of their setting, simultaneously hyperbolising and perpetuating huzun, while enabling catharsis and escapism from it. When describing “a deadening tedium [he] identified with the ‘alaturka’ music to which [his] grandmother tapped her slippered feet”, Pamuk takes artistic licence to hyperbolise melancholy within an ordinary action, similarly to the hyper-sentence in “Huzun”, to create a need for escapism which becomes his imagination (“I escaped this state by cultivating dreams”).

Similarly, from his adult perspective, he writes: “I love the overwhelming melancholy when I look at the walls of old apartment buildings and the dark surfaces of neglected, unpainted, fallen-down wooden mansions”, zooming into the micro-perspective to discover melancholy within minutiae – “only in Istanbul have I seen this texture, this shading”, reaching catharsis when melancholy becomes pleasurable. The modified Istanbul of Pamuk’s paintings, reflecting only what he “could see from [his] window or when [he] went out into the streets” is a metaphor for transformed Istanbul of his memoir resulting from his subjective, huzun-driven perspective.

Thus, Pamuk presents the causes of huzun through the interweaving of the melancholic subject and object, symptomatic of East/West and past/present tension, using setting to present huzun as a chronotope and create hyper-history. Interestingly, as Pamuk’s exploration unfolds, the reader realises huzun defines him as a writer, and this transforms the memoir into kunstlerroman. The narrative of Istanbul creates a meta-narrative of Pamuk’s own transformation from naïve protagonist to perceptive critic and ultimately to master artist, driven by the discovery of his subject matter – huzun - and its vision. At the beginning of his journey as narrator of the memoir, the story of huzun is his own because he is a product of Istanbul, but in the process of exploration there is a reversal of causality where he realises that Istanbul’s story is his own because he is writing it and because he is thus contributing to defining huzun - not only he is shaped by huzun, but he himself shapes it.

Ultimately, the anthropological and poetic exploration of patriotism and Istanbul’s culture, is a theme that threads through many of Pamuk’s works. “The Museum of Innocence” captures preservation of cultural nostalgia like “the dark museum house” in Istanbul, draws a parallel between romantic relationship of protagonists and romantic relationship with huzun, and juxtaposes western and Turkish perspectives on the female role.

Meanwhile, “My Name is Red” portrays the culpable concrete representation of Turkish religious iconography, which draws a parallel to huzun being an ephemeral and semi-religious concept that in the same way cannot be portrayed. Pamuk’s profound explorations of Istanbul, have renovated the perception of the city not only for Turkish but also for Western readers.

THE MASTER AND THE MARGARITA A wide-ranging review of Mikhail Boulgakov’s response to Soviet state atheism in his novel ‘The Master and the Margarita’ by

MANSOUR K.

There is quite a lot that could be said about the absurd and quite frankly surreal times we are living through, but I shall restrain doing from that and leave that to the historians to do. I have for the past few months been faithfully upholding the good oldfashioned principle of “no news is good news” and have been ‘socially distancing’ myself from any sort of current affairs, political or social commentary on the situation today – just like a Siberian Orthodox hermit. I have, however, been delving into the much more pleasant world of literature. The last few books that I have read, namely Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited and Honoré de Balzac’s Illusions Perdues both of which I have thoroughly enjoyed. However, in this article I want to focus on Mikhaïl Afanassievitch Boulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, arguably one of the most influential works of the 20th century. Considered by many to be the author’s magnum opus, it is executed in the trademark mystical genre that constitutes the most significant features of Boulgakov’s writing style. Without getting too nitty-gritty into the plot, the story concerns a visit of Satan (who takes the name ‘Woland’) and his entourage to 1930s Stalinist Moscow. Simultaneously, because the narrative flits between two storylines, Pontius Pilate interrogates Christ (referred to in the book as ‘Yeshua Ha-Notsri’). It is a thrilling read; full of grotesque, and at some points intentionally tasteless, satirical scenes, invoking of the supernatural and profound commentary on ethics and Christian philosophy.

Since it is considered one of the greatest masterpieces of Russian literature, it has been analysed and interpreted by much more well-read people than I, and is so, as Oleg Bassilachvili said, ‘polyhedral and pervasive’ that it would be foolish to try and review the book as a whole in one go. Henceforth I would like to address just one element of the novel, that is Boulgakov’s response to the aggressive anti-religious campaign of the Communist Party. It can be seen as a rebuke to the militant bezbozhniki (“godless people”).

Boulgakov was known to have a very difficult relationship with the Soviet authorities. Few of his works passed through Party censorship, his play The Flight was banned by Stalin himself, who decided that “it glorified Tsarist generals”, his novel The White Guard and Heart of a Dog were “ripped to pieces” (in Boulgakov’s own words) by communist literary critics, condemned as “sympathetic towards the bourgeoisie and hateful towards the proletariat”. In 1929 came the last blow when all publication of Boulgakov’s works or plays was banned by the Government. In his desperation, Mikhaïl Afanassievitch even sent a letter to Stalin.

Boulgakov’s relationship with the communist dictator is one of the most fascinating aspects of his life, but that is a story for another day. That is when the author decided to end it all.

As he later recalled, he was sitting on a bench with a pistol in his pocket in Moscow when a stranger with different-coloured eyes sat down next to him and talked him out of suicide, prophesising that soon the ban will be lifted and a supportive woman will come into Boulgakov’s life. Both predictions were fulfilled the next year. Miraculously his play The Day of the Turbins (theatrical adaptation of The White Guard) was allowed to be performed and he met Elena Sergueïevna Chilovskaïa , the love of his life and his future wife, the prototype for the character of Margarita in the novel. True or not, the incident inspired the iconic first chapter of The Master and Margarita and the character of Woland. The novel was conceived for a period of ten years, Boulgakov began writing in 1929 and finished in 1938, but he continued to add to it until his very death in March 1940. Even on his deathbed, the irrepressible author would dictate new extracts for his wife to write down.

There are many prevalent themes in the novel; good and evil, the choice between mercy and justice and the internal freedom of man. But one of the most interesting themes of the novel in my opinion was the problem of Faith in God. The most interesting theological argument comes in the first chapter, but I will not go into detail. I will say only that Immanuel Kant’s argument for the existence of God is brought up, quite paradoxically, by Satan himself. “Curiously enough”, says Woland “[Kant] demolished all five of Thomas Aquinas’ arguments [for the existence of God], and then, as if to mock himself, constructed his own sixth one”. Kant’s ‘sixth argument’ is called “argument from morality”. It is safe to say that the German transcendentalist did not argue the existence of God, however he stated that faith elevates ethics, while atheism leads to a decline in morality. This idea is only subtly hinted on throughout the book. Scholars of Boulgakov (called Boulgakovedi in Russian) estimate that the Devil’s visit of Moscow came in the mid-1930s, nearly twenty years since the October coup – a whole generation reared in official atheism and bezbozhie (“godlessness”). All conceivable human vices such as ignorance, envy, boorishness, alcoholism and taking of bribes are presented in the wide array of characters embodying Soviet society.

The people have rejected God; for them there is nothing that is sacred. However, where there is no presence of God, there is place for Satan to roam. Devilry comes to Moscow to remind its inhabitants of the existence of a higher power - if not God, then at least the Devil. This is what Boulgakov calls his ‘seventh argument for the existence of God’ – belief in the Devil is parallel to belief in God. It is no coincidence that the epigraph to the novel is Mephistopheles’ phrase from Goethe’s Faust: “I am the Power which eternally wills evil and eternally works good”. And indeed, in The Master and Margarita Woland and his retinue execute justice, punishing and rewarding people for their deeds and according to the purity of their faith. It is difficult to say whether by the end of the novel the citizens of Moscow who have come into contact with the supernatural began to believe in God, but from their own experiences have become convinced of the existence of Satan.

The author’s position is similar to Kant’s postulate that atheism is an evil that adversely affects morality. But Boulgakov’s argument for God in the novel is achieved through proof of the existence of Satan. “Believe at least in the devil’s existence! I will not ask you for more”, says Woland in the third chapter of the novel. Belief in the devil is fear of punishment for sins and perhaps the only restraining factor for nescient people without clear moral guidelines – the first and lowest step on the long and arduous road to true righteousness.

This is where I must unfortunately wrap up since I have exceeded by a country mile the word limit, I hope you enjoyed my pseudo-theological musings. To the people who made it through the whole article, I strongly recommend The Master and Margarita, whether you believe in God or not (although it is always better if you do).

LUCIFER A poem by ANDREA L.

The bitter wind wailed and whittled the naked trees, which whined against the sooty sky.

The last hues of the blood-orange sun had swiftly drained down the jagged, craggy Silhouettes of scythed mountains, their pinnacles pierced into the heavens, like the teeth of some Monstrous beast, an unguarded back.

Mrs Plain, as his latex-gloved fingers traced the two uncanny distortions which protruded from her new-born baby’s back like thorns on a dying rose watched the doctor’s face grow whiter than a skull and his mouth twist into a red knot. The two stiff ends of his crusted lips tightened like a noose.

He’d tested Lucy’s blood and sweat and urine, but The alienish bumps turned out Not to be the cancerous tumours he had anticipated.

From the moment she was born, Lucy Plain was no stranger To the stony grasp of gloved hands which prodded her like some queer disease, Or to doctors gruff and rough and coarse like tree bark, Or to children on the playground who shrouded themselves against her like shy, palpable plants.

Lucy was light, finesse, and caprice.

Sunny and radiantly epicene, Like those snow archangels on Byzantine stainedglass windows.

As summers fell swiftly into autumns and winters thawed into springs, the strange sprouts on her spine blossomed into a pair of extravagant wings that now erupted terribly, beautifully, from the small of her back.

At the tender age of ten, she worshipped the oranged, unblemished billboard goddess of the Ventura freeway and was familiar with the noxious aftertaste of kleenex tissues.

She knew the greedy gurgle of the toilet’s blue throat, which she pored over often, Better than she knew the sound of her own name.

Over the years, her eyes had lost their rose-tainted lenses and had grown sore from the gawks and grimaces and sweeping stares she often elicited whenever she crossed roads.

It tormented her that there was a deep-rooted fear for fairy-like foe ingrained in the minds of human beings, seeded by the puritans and watered across countless generations.

Not only we; Lucy’s father was sickened by her mutant wings, deeply loathed her mongrel blood.

Father was stone, snark, and strong Last night, his steel fist knocked out Then slipped a boozy dime under h Like she still believed in fairies.

Her eyes turned liquid and tears ble She gazed at the ashen, pasty-faced An open wound. Somehow, she kne But what was left to say about this n Crotchety blackness languidly waltze Impastoed daubs of dark bloomed b Slowly, she fell asleep with her face o

At dawn, she awoke with the frenzy Now she perched before the mirro Deciphering herself like some unfam Surrounded, she was stalked by the as the mirror slowly swallowed her Whole.

Her eyes roved her reflection for off Everything she hyperfocused on blo Her itching fingers tugged at her clo The feathered wings which punctur Modulated into grotesque humps be She was a chef-d’oeuvre, chiselled b Out of love with the idea of B e a u t y.

But time for ameliorations and twea To erase these monstrous, feathere The child’s heart sprouted thistles an As she grasped the fragile, fledged fl Squirmed beneath the snarling head Veins drooled alien matter and bone Scarlet sprayed across the high-pitch A hysteria of blood and feathers soa Flashing white and red and gold.

coffee.

Lucy’s new back tooth, her ash-stippled pillow,

ed through the pane of her crushed veneer. moon; ew it would heal in the morning. night? ed in. behind her eyes. on the spinet piano.

y of its white-and-black keys confused on her cheek or in soft oblivion miliar page of music brown butts of cigarettes which sat in a circle

ff-pitch flaws, non-existent fault-lines, and disjunct fissures. ossomed into a dissonant motif, othes, searching for ways to cry I’m bursting at the seams. red like spindle needles through the flimsy fabric of her sundress efore her eyes. by a sculptor who had fallen

aks, ed faults. nd thorns spiralling out like tentacles into abysmal nothing flaws and hacked; d of the buzz saw. es crunched; hed ceiling and stippled the walls. ared into the air in a whirlwind of confetti,

Her room swiftly transposed into an abattoir As spluttery gouts of sinew inked the floor.

She maimed the stinking slabs of meat; Tender tissue and tendons tore.

Oozing, slimy sinew, hot beneath her cold, clammy hands, Licked at her frenzied, grisly grasp.

Her purple-inked lips etched a sneer as she engraved The corrections she had long yearned for.

The child fawned over her masterpiece, utterly unfazed By the scattered ecstasy of feathers and flesh and bone, By the carnage, the carcass, the sight.

Her first outcry was a contemptuous bark of a laugh.

She was like Alice drinking the vial; watching herself grow reckless and destructive. But Her figure, in her eyes, much improved, Compared to those outlandish, hideous wings.

With a sigh of respite and release, She turned around and regarded the newly botched, bleeding stumps And giggled.

Pitiful child, oh so hapless and naïve: She was oblivious that when tomorrow came crashing down on her, she’d turn the soft earth of the cemetery into a cold stone that no shovel could ever penetrate.

What a shame She never in her life tried to fly Into the star-peppered sky.

80 DAYS Observational journalism on the early days of lockdown by

SOFIA L. It has now been over 80 days. Over 80 days since Boris Johnson first announced the UK’s lockdown. The nation’s apprehension can be felt as you walk along the narrow Thames paths, displaying London’s best attempt at social distancing. What day is it? No one knows. Yet, without fail, the runners, joggers and strollers each relish those precious 60 minutes of freedom, day after day.

There is a familiar uncertainty. As the long days meld in with the long weeks, the unknown has become our new normal.

Whether we like it or not, while the world became paralysed, uncertainty stood by our sides from the start. Even the English weather feels the confusion: tempting us with warm summer-like days followed by bitter, dreary showers, just to throw off any perception of time you still have left.

Nevertheless, in a world of uncertainty, the youth are the ones that have found stable ground. This pandemic has revealed their impressive ability to rapidly adapt to change.

From the primary school children who do not yet fully understand why school stopped, to those missing out on their graduation, each individual has found a way to navigate through unprecedented times.

When asking my eight-year-old cousin on Zoom whether she found it difficult having to figure out how to do her schoolwork online, she laughed. “Oh, it’s easy!” She declared (as if it were stupid to suggest otherwise), “but I had to explain it all to Mummy because she got confused.”

Within a weekend, all UK schools were shut; and so, began the beginning of a new experiment: remote teaching. With many schools providing online resources or lessons, you would expect there to be technical hiccups or find students running into difficulties adjusting. However, this is not the case.

Those with access to online lessons smoothly transitioned thanks to the countless digital platforms which have served as new classrooms: Microsoft Teams, Google Hangouts and

Zoom are just some examples. Even more dynamic classes, such as drama or dance, appear to have seamlessly flowed into a digital realm.

to those most vulnerable. Within the London parks, the previously rushed with self-absorbed agendas have morphed into kinder individuals, sharing smiles with passers-by.

Beyond the virtual classroom, the quarantine has provided young people with an opportunity to find joy in ways to keep entertained. Creativity is being discovered and expressed in a multitude of activities. Some of the nation have taken to baking, others to art, or even TikTok dances. New variations of sports fit for the living room are being created and many teens have joined the home tie-dye trend. Amidst the shock of public exams being cancelled, even having the time to just sit back is appreciated.

This has also been an opportunity for deep reflection. We have been given the time to ask ourselves what we want to change about the world we live in. Personally, I have spent time considering the numerous world problems which my generation carries on their shoulders. The one I found most pressing is the growing education disparity at home, in the UK. We need an immediate solution. The longer schools are closed, the wider the UK’s education gap gets. Not all households have access to high speed broadband. Not all households have access to a computer. These things should be considered basic rights. Access to technology opens infinite opportunities and resources for education; from lessons provided by schools to two-minute YouTube videos explaining a concept. Without access to technology continuing an education during a pandemic becomes nearly impossible.

The youth find no problem staying connected. Before the lockdown, around half of teenagers’ interactions with friends were already online. Apps such as Instagram, Snapchat and Houseparty make keeping in touch with your friends effortless. We have grown up with social media. Amidst the uncertainty, there is still an aspect of normality as we look out for those we care about most.

Isolation has taught us the value of community. Each Thursday night the symphony of pots, pans and clapping shows communities coming together. As neighbours check on each other, sharing film recommendations and newly discovered recipes, you can feel a reassuring sense of solidarity. Food drives across the country have been organised to reach out

As we face unprecedented times, we have a responsibility to look out for each other: phoning a friend or helping those in your community who are in need.

The world is changing. So why not create your own change.

WHERE I’D RATHER BE A lockdown poem by

ALICE T.

Oh, to be in Barbados Bobbing in the Caribbean sea Or tucking into duck pancakes on a rib along the Yangtze.

I wish I could go hiking Up a mountain in Yosemite But instead I’m stuck in England Playing my 6th game of monopoly.

Oh, to be in Botswana On a walking safari Or finding my inner peace In a yoga barn in Bali.

I’m craving a pepperoni pizza From a restaurant in Tuscany But instead I’m stuck in England Fighting with my family.

Oh, to be in Corfu Learning how to water ski Or visiting the war ruins In Ho Chi Minh city.

I wish I could go dancing at Thailand’s full moon party But instead I’m stuck in England Baking banana bread and drinking tea.

Oh, to be in Verbier Watching children learn to ski Or watching the sun go down On a cruise on the Zambezi.

I would like to get a tan On a sunbed in Turkey But instead I’m stuck in England Deciding that lockdown just isn’t for me.

Oh, to be in Jamaica Singing along to Bob Marley Or sipping on some rosé, Wine tasting in Chile.

I’d even go to Egypt and be possessed by a mummy But instead I’m stuck in England Wondering if corona is going to get me!

Oh, to be in America Exploring caves in Tennessee Or on a therapeutic walk On the island of Santorini.

I’m told the best place to snorkel Is in Papua New Guinea But instead I’m stuck in England Hoping that soon we’ll all be free.

Oh, to be in Japan swallowing some sushi Or surfing huge waves On a beach in Miami.

I planned on going to Portugal With my classmate Charlie But instead I’m stuck in England With my new best friend, Siri.

Oh, to be in Belfast To escape the quiet country Or putting on a wetsuit For a short swim in Tenby.

I would even drive to Edinburgh For a change of scenery But instead I’m stuck in Farnham Thinking of all the places I’d rather be.

THE BIRD CAGE

Winner of the Connell Guides Short Story Competition for Years 10 and 11 by CLARA H.

As I walked towards the balcony, a gentle breeze flew through

my room and caught the edge of my pink, satin gown. The balcony, which overlooked the grey cobbled courtyard, consisted of a single, aged terracotta pot erupting with lemon fizz-scented geraniums and a wicker chair, covered in two faded cream cushions delicately embroidered with blue birds.

Although the balcony was small, it had a sophisticated air to it which oozed the French charm of the idyllic chateau. I made my way across to the chair and sat down, checking my watch at the same time. It was 6 o’clock: two hours before I was required for drinks downstairs in the drawing room before dinner.

Poitiers. France. 1923. I did not want to be here. This visit had been forced upon me like an unwanted present; I had been dreading it for the last twenty years. Within the next two hours, to my horror, I was scheduled to meet my fiancé, the son of a French lord, who I was expected to marry in the early days of next month. The decision that I would be wedded to Frances had been made when I was only eighteen months. I had been sold off like an animal at a fair by none other than my mother and father, who always claimed to have my best interests at heart. Nevertheless, the agreement had been made, the date set, and the husband chosen: I was going to be married.

Attempting to drown out my resentment for this evening’s events, I let my eyes wander over the surroundings. The air was thick with that particular, pungent scent of late afternoon cigars, emanating from a man sitting out on his balcony only a few windows across. He looked around sixty and had a red, plump face which mirrored his spreading body. Next to him, on a beige-coloured side table, was a bottle of wine and two glasses. Initially the presence of an extra glass confused me, but after a few minutes had passed, I heard a voice coming from the gentleman’s bedroom.

“Excuse me, Sir, but your wife has gone down to the courtyard” said the unfamiliar voice.

“Again!” spluttered the man, a fleck of spit landing on the table. “What is wrong with that woman? Always disappearing off…”

Directly below me stood a cherry blossom tree, which was coated in pink and white and had blanketed the floor beneath with petals. As the last beams of sunlight poured into the courtyard, the delightful fountain dazzled as the light reflected off the water like shards of glass. The muffled

sound of footsteps on flagstones echoed through the hallway which led out into the courtyard, and eventually an elderly woman dressed in a glorious full length emerald green dress appeared. Gazing meticulously at the lady, my eyes were drawn to her wrist where light refracted off an exquisite bracelet coated in rubies. Softly, she made her way across to the bench which was situated below the cherry tree and delicately eased herself down onto it. I suspected she was one of the guests staying at the chateau for the wedding: perhaps a great aunt of my future husband. The woman’s tiredness was obvious, as it was reflected in her slouched posture and weathered face. With the grace of an owl, her face slowly revolved to face mine and, although she was staring right up at me, her glazed eyes suggested that she was almost looking straight through me, as though I wasn’t even there. She blinked frequently, and whenever she did the prominent lines under her eyes would deepen. Despite her cold, expressionless exterior, her blue-grey eyes appeared to convey her sorrow and loneliness, almost entrusting me to discover the reason for her evident sadness.

I wondered whether I would end up like her, wrinkled and weathered by each choice that was snatched away from her throughout her life. “Remember” my mother and father used to tell me, “the choices you make will determine the life you lead” but what were these choices? Since I was born every decision had been made for me. My parents had prescribed my life through choosing my education, what I did every second of the day and, most of all, the person I was going to spend the rest of my life with: my husband. My suitcase was still there in the corner, untouched, next to the bird cage. I could hear my thoughts whispering to me, calling me and now shouting at me. I had two hours before I would be noticed, enough time for me to climb down into the courtyard and leave through the back gate. I stared down at the elderly lady.

I couldn’t end up like her, I just couldn’t. This would be the first time I did something without being commanded to do it, the first time I didn’t choose the life imposed on me by my parents. Without hesitation I got up from my chair and walked across to the suitcase.

Then A commended entry in the English and Media Centre Prize by JOSIE J.

Struck with Awe

The human heart has hidden treasures, In secret kept, in silence sealed;The thoughts, the hopes, the dreams, the pleasures, Whose charms were broken if revealed.

‘Evening Solace’ by Charlotte Bronte

A response to Coleridge’s poem ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ by

She pulled off her skin to reveal a face. Well, by ‘a’, I really mean ‘new’, since this was the third time she had pulled off her face tonight. And by ‘pulled’ it was more peeled - like one does to a sweaty sock they have worn for too long.

Frankly, I didn’t want to know where she put all her old faces; I imagine it to be fairly vile to open a garbage bin only to find a perfect mask, a template of a face. But, with closer inspection to find it with the exact tone and consistency of skin, only to further realise- oh dear, someone is missing their face.

Why, you ask, do I know that she has pulled off her face three times tonight? Well, a man of my good sensibility and reputation could not simply let an abomination out and about the streets at any time they deemed fit. Whoever went around just pulling skin off their face to reveal a new face, was in my books, not human.

For all of my discerning faculties (if I do say so myself - I have many); they were all concentrated on resolving this, this bewitching and elusive thing that had so easily snared my attention and provoked much turmoil, in and around me. As my Grandma (God bless her soul) always said: If it were to be, let it be done. And since the creature decided to be, I had to make sure that it was done.

By that time in the evening the visceral curiosity had usurped the rational fear of something so other.

So, with heart over head in mind, I trailed her with enough assiduity to unlock her secrets.

ISODORA B. In flight, we saw, all struck with awe Swimming in sky, on wing.

Without a sound, I looked around At mariner, arrow and string.

A cry of fear, a silent tear, The mariner, arrow and string.

The crunch and curl, waves swoop and swirl, A shout not near, nor far.

With lifeless eye, the bird did lie Until the night’s first star.

With curl of lip, with rise and dip, A raging from below.

Through irate word, the sea was heard, A curse as sharp as snow.

We sang the song, days short, days long Of wistful waiting woes.

As if through glass, the time did pass, Upon the sea of foes.

Engulfed in grey, demanding pay Through turmoil, trouble, time.

We paved the way, for one more day, Trapped in rhythm and rhyme.

I spoke to him, the mariner, I asked him what he’d done.

But dark encroached and death approached One by one by one.

THE TRUTH ABOUT RACE A poem by RUFUS

S.

They sang: Wade in the water, Wade in the water, children, Wade in the water, God’s gonna trouble the water.

They sang wade in the water so they could be found, and that’s what they longed for, they longed to be found.

They longed for the sound of rebellion, Hooves crashing on the ground, The screaming of voices, They longed to be found.

But what is it, to be found, It’s the end of the racist society in which we are bound.

Its people seeing The Truth.

The Truth about race.

People say that we’re equal but that’s not the case.

There are still too many obstacles that we have to face.

Even if you’re slightly foreign, even just a trace, People will try to single you out and “put you in your place”.

Wade in the water, Wade in the water, children, Wade in the water, God’s gonna trouble the water.

Eventually, God did trouble the water.

There was a war, freedom won, Black and white soldiers laid down their guns.

Families, were reunited with their sons.

Slavery was illegal, but we still hadn’t won. the damage had been done.

There was still a thought in many people’s brains, saying ‘oo he’s black I better switch lanes’.

What we need is an end to all this.

The fear in people’s eyes, there’s still too much amiss.

There is a person behind dark skin, which some people miss.

Now, make no mistake, most people are fine, But the truth is, it can be a burden, this skin colour of mine.

Even in many people, who consciously see the truth, There is still a whisper in the back of their brains, saying ‘oo he’s black I better switch lanes’.

Wade in the water, Wade in the water, children, Wade in the water, God’s gonna trouble the water.

That was the Truth, The Truth about race.

Even if you’re slightly foreign, even just a trace, People will try to single you out and “put you in your place”.

‘Sumer is i’ cumin in’ A poem based on a 14th century round by BRYN C.

Sing, cuccu, nu. Sing, cuccu.

Sing, cuccu. Sing, cuccu, nu.

A striking complexion of obsidian to blue.

Summer A poem by FERDIE G.

The trees sway from left to right in a cool summer’s breeze, The leaves ambivalent of their movement, The little, lime sketches etched into the leaves, The little carvings of ancient weathering on the trees.

WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO ‘READ’ A LITERARY TEXT? Winner of the Peterhouse, University of Cambridge, Thomas Campion Essay Prize by

MIA W.

The reading process In Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne, Shandy is both the protagonist of the story and the self-conscious author of it.

He proclaims that as an author, ‘The truest respect which you can pay to the reader’s understanding, is to… leave him something to imagine’. He suggests that the author is an orchestrator of meaning, with a variety of narrative tools at their disposal. Simultaneously, he illustrates how the author is never fully in control of the meaning, because of the element of creative interplay on the part of the reader. This means the mechanisms of a literary text must relate to the reader’s individuality to some degree, which is a comforting thought – if they weren’t, the act of reading would become derivative, and we would forsake the pleasures of critical analysis and debate.

Iser crafts a characterisation of this dynamism in The Reading Process, which assigns value to literary texts which perpetually provoke expectations in the reader (formed from personal preconceptions) and subsequently violates those expectations through its structure and rhetorical devices. In this mutuality of the reading experience, we, as readers, are essentially participating in a conversation – presenting what we know and having that knowledge redefined as we listen, before presenting the new, changed version of our knowledge, a fusion of what we knew before and what we were recently taught. It is this process which accounts for the ‘entanglement’ of the reader in what we read, in turn manifesting in the enjoyment we derive from a reading process which is interactive and creative, and which can also be deemed valuable.

Although this idea poses a means of interaction for the reader, it doesn’t account for reader autonomy within this interaction. Therefore, we must pose a practical question: who has the power as we read, the author as the orchestrator, or the reader as the interpreter?

The power of the author Within each literary text, there is a tension between the author’s intention and the reader’s reception. To some degree,

it is within the author’s power to control whether or not the reader interacts with the meaning of the text (although this essay will go on to discuss why the nature of this interaction, and therefore the significance of the text, is determined by the reader). Gadamer believes that the fundamental act of reading is in the recognition of the disparate ‘horizons’ of the author’s contexts and the reader’s preconceptions, and the attempt to merge the two3. He proposes that in order to provoke the reader to carry out this process, the author must ensure that a discontinuity (or a violation of expectations, as Iser would put it) forces them to recognise the gap between the horizons. The author’s power lies in the construction of this discontinuity.

We know, in a simplistic sense, how authors create illusions – they make up characters, plots, storylines. However, we are far less confident in how we approach these illusions and how we respond to them. Perhaps we begin reading a literary text with our preconceptions clouding our judgement from the very first sentence. These implicit biases may arise from any number of influences: the title of the text, the size of the font, the shape of a poem. As we read, others will develop: our own memory of the year that it was set in, the connotations we associate with a particular word in the fourth line, our urge to compare it to previous works from the same author.

Then the author’s orchestration presents developments discontinuous with our biases, and we recognise the need for a ‘merging of horizons’. This process occurs over and over throughout the text, as new expectations develop and are perpetually violated. Each reader will be affected differently by the same text according to their individual preconceptions, and Iser notes that this variety of reactions ‘is ample evidence of the degree to which literary texts transform reading into a creative process that is far above mere perception of what is written’.

If as a reading body we are so estranged from each other, then what is it that grounds us in the text? It cannot be a total appeal to authorial authority, as that would be to conjecture that the function of literary criticism is to analyse the author, and not the text. This would be a quixotic process due to the elements of poly-semantics and inescapable reader bias. Yet, simultaneously, it cannot be a total rejection of authority, or else we would be reading the text entirely through our own

prepossessions. If this were the case, reading would become solipsistic and we would never be prompted to acknowledge or approach that which we do not know. Instead, there needs to be a circularity in interpretation, created through the continuous formations and destructions of expectations.

Therefore, to read is neither to think entirely like the author or entirely like ourselves: each prediction encounters a plot twist. To engage, we must read on, and allow ourselves to be surprised. In this sense, to read is to let go.

The power of the reader In The Death of the Author, Barthes argues that the reader is an omniscient force, in that they ‘[understand] each word in its duplicity’ and ‘[hear] the very deafness of the characters speaking in front of’ them. He uses the concept of dramatic irony in tragedy to evidence this. Yet this contradicts the idea that reading is the interplay of past and present knowledge, that we can learn anything as we read — in fact, Barthes’s supposition that ‘the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author’ not only undermines the authority of authorship, but also the idea of the author’s identity contributing to the meaning of the text. Foucault goes one step further with this, arguing that authors exist purely as ‘founders of discursivity’, and that time is better spent analysing the subjects of the discourse prompted by the author, which, when we don’t appeal to the author’s authority, ‘unfold in a pervasive anonymity’.

But what of the discourse inherently bound to the author’s identity? The 2006 Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded to Orhan Pamuk, ‘who in his quest for the melancholic soul of his native city has discovered new symbols for the clash and interlacing of cultures’. In his memoir Istanbul, Pamuk describes his childhood in the context of Westernisation. In articulating his Turkish identity, he asserts a newfound literary and political authority which historically hadn’t existed for Eastern voices. The discourse of Orientalism existed without him, and thus he is not a ‘founder of discursivity’, but a contributor. His texts represent a negotiation of meaning, an interplay of a new voice with existing ones.

However, without the recognition of his readers, this voice wouldn’t be heard, Istanbul wouldn’t be reactionary, and Orientalist discourse wouldn’t be progressive. Pamuk, in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, declares that a writer ‘must have the artistry to tell his own stories as if they were his own, for this is what literature is’. Although this seems to be an argument for the power of the author in the reading of a text, it is in fact an attestation to the power of the reader. ‘All art is quite useless’ without the reader deciding its significance.

As we read, we choose whether we recognise Pamuk’s cultural identity and honour his autonomy, and how we subsequently proceed with his field of discourse. He can take steps to influence our reaction to the meaning of his texts, but ultimately he is still ‘paring his fingernails’ while we read and react. We decide whether we validate his autonomous voice. Therefore, when Foucault quotes Beckett and asks,

‘What matter who’s speaking?’, we respond: it should matter to the reader. In this sense, to read is to take control.

The balance of power We may refer back to Tristram Shandy in light of these ideas.

Throughout the novel, with his use of self-reflexivity, the character of Shandy maintains his position as an author chronicling his own narrative, distinguishing himself from Sterne. He is omnipresent throughout each reiteration of his life and opinions, and he makes us aware of the very process of writing as he writes. In doing so, he simultaneously brings himself closer to the reader and pushes his text further away by explicitly breaking the narrative illusion himself, instead of allowing the structure of the text to form and violate the reader’s expectations in its own right. He writes, ‘I know there are readers in the world... who find themselves ill at ease, unless they are let into the whole secret from first to last, of every thing which concerns you,’ and proceeds to tell us every detail of his thinking and writing processes, becoming truly authoritative when he relays, ‘I begin with writing the first sentence’. We could argue that the self-reflexive author removes the process by which we derive pleasure (Coleridge’s ‘suspension of disbelief’) in reading, and in doing so asserts his power as the author. The author is making it clear that he is an author and that this is his text, and he confesses his intention directly to the reader. This perhaps undermines the dynamism of the text — what can we gain from reading, if we don’t negotiate with the meaning?

Yet throughout all of Tristram Shandy, the reader is also hyperaware of this question: where is Sterne? If Shandy is so assertive in his role as the author, does this lead to an irreconcilable relationship with the literal author of the text, and therefore result in the literal author’s death? The potential answer may lie in a reversion to Iser’s characterisation of the reading process — Shandy, in his position as the author, is yet another illusory expectation, and any mental referral of intention back to Sterne is the process by which the reader breaks the illusion. We cannot allow ourselves to become fully invested in the idea that this character is an author, because we are inherently bound to our preconception that he is fictitious. This is converse to what Jorge Luis Borges writes of the play within Hamlet, that ‘if the characters of a fictional work can be readers or spectators, we, its readers or spectators, can be fictitious’. In fact, no matter the degree to which a literary text is self-conscious, we as readers are infinitely more so. Our power as readers is not vested in the death of the author, but in our position as readers — we are aware of the process of the illusion and our ability to break it.

Thus, to ‘read’ a literary text is to fully understand our power, to know that we can simultaneously be swept up in the illusion and challenge the illusory condition, utilise our preconceptions and change them, fear the disparate horizons and merge them, let go and take control.

IS LITERARY CRITICISM A POLITICAL ENDEAVOUR? First place in the Trinity College, University of Cambridge, Gould Prize for Essays in English Literature by

MIA W. Literature is a contest of influences. It is unable to escape its politics because the circumstancesof its production are inextricably political: the language with which it speaks, its tradition of precursive texts, its role in identity politics, and its reciprocal relationship with society. Althoughthe explicit politics of literature are often parallel to the politics of government, money, identityand so on, when we talk about the ‘realities of power and authority’ in literature, we are talking about an implicit circulation through a text of orders of power far beyond our traditional conception of politics.

Therefore, it is important to distinguish between a political endeavour and a political act, in that the former suggests an intentionality which is not always present. A text does not have to be a manifesto to be political; a poem about flowers is equally bound to the circumstances of its production. If we think of politics in this sense, then a general pronouncement about the political nature of literary texts is a valid one, whether we make it a primary emphasis of literary criticism or not. More simply put, it is the indisputable notion that texts must come from somewhere, that they do not fall from the sky.

Literary criticism, like literature, is political. Discourse is equally influenced by largely unseen forces in a social system; readers, like writers, are equally unable to escape their politics. Crucially, the critic acts as both reader and writer, so their role is twofold: they are receptive in that they interact with texts and value them, and autonomous in that they express opinions and regulate the contemporary existence of a text. They keep texts in circulation through aesthetic and interpretive responses, evaluating virtues and debating limitations. The politics of reading and writing will be discussed in this essay in terms of linguistic, historical, personal and societal circumstances. If these influences are inescapable, then it should follow that literary criticism is always, inevitably, a political act.

Linguistic influences The tendency in criticism to think of language as a tool of literature, and not the other way around, diminishes the active existence of language. Before a writer appropriates language for their own purposes, it exists as a multiplicity of intentions and sedimentations, ‘in other people’s mouths, in other’s people contexts’. It exists as such before the writer accesses it, and exists much in the same way afterwards, except for the singular difference of the writer’s new utterance. What the writer contributes is some element of their own style resonating through the text, a new voice adding to the interplay of voices.

The same interplay still exists when the reader accesses it, appropriating it in turn. The reader participates in the conversation by projecting their own interpretations onto language, based on their unique history of interaction with the words used in the text. The tenor of a word is different for every single reader, none of which is the exact way the writer intended it. The way that ‘worn-out figures of speech’ are appropriated by both writer and reader determines the meaning of a text, and therefore language cannot be wholly truthful.

If the language with which we write is itself a collective institution, susceptible to social function and interaction, then we cannot think of it as abstracted from politics.

Instead, it exists in dual systems: one that is closed within the rhetoric of the text itself, and another that is affected by the personal language of others. Concurrent with the dual systems of language is the duality of its function: firstly as interrelated with the elements within the text, and secondly as interrelated with other elements in other systems (Tynyanov characterizes this as the syn-function and the auto-function). The latter is the sense in which there is an authority for an individual voice despite the knowledge that ‘the word in language is half someone else’s’. Our interactions with language are conditioned by the heteroglossia, but style, the manipulation and filtering of the system, is a means of mediating the variety of meaning which interferes with what one is trying to say. Virginia Woolf illustrates this when she writes of the impediments presented to women writers by ‘the man’s sentence’. The utility of language is under the domain of the male tradition as a result of centuries of transformation being penned by the male hand, and the way in which women grapple with the system presented to them is defining of their voice. She asserts that Jane Austen did this most successfully, that she ‘looked at [language] and laughed at it and devised a perfectly natural, shapely sentence proper for her own use and never departed from it.’

If the language with which we write is a social system of voices, then the way in which one appropriates this language is a political act. Each writer’s style, as a way of negotiating with language to assert individuality, is a ‘resistance’. Thus, a critic’s attempt to evaluate this language and the extent to which it is successfully individual, is in turn a political act as well.

Historical influences For writers who attempt to stylize, to bring their unique voices to bear on the heteroglossia of voices, Aristotle argues that form serves as a limitation to their contribution. He believes that there is such thing as an optimum or natural form, which comes to rest ‘after undergoing many transformations’, and that once it is reached, further development is impossible and what occurs is only proliferation of different instances of that optimum form. This proliferation forms a Dionysian imitatio, and thus we establish canons by thinking about the relationships of poets with a tradition of literary expression from which they emerged, with poets imitating nature and then later poets imitating poetry, so that ‘when t’ examine ev’r y part he came, / Nature and Homer were, he found, the same’.

The issue with this idea is the assumption that the optimum form is itself static and unaltered by circumstance. In fact, the efficacy of a distinguished form is vulnerable to politics throughout the course of its production, reception and interpretation, as is the perception of what constitutes the ‘optimum’. The optimum in one society is not that in another, whether these societies are differentiated temporally, culturally or linguistically. In this sense, Arthur Miller’s tragedy of the common man is cathartic in 1960s America and inconsequential in Ancient Greece; Adichie, Baldwin, and Morrison’s work surges in relevance at the height of the Black Lives Matter movement; Haruki Murakami’s linguistic simplicity is bland in Mandarin Chinese and beautiful in English.

Of course, the very subjectivity of these three judgements proves precisely the impermanence of what we consider to be optimal.

Therefore, is it really appropriate to ‘set [the poet], for contrast and comparison, among the dead’? A critic reads each text with an awareness of the texts they’ve read before, particularly those of the same tradition. They automatically think, how does this elegy stand up against Gray’s, or is this a more nuanced confrontation of power than Machiavelli’s, or even I preferred the way Byron wrote about love. These thoughts themselves are political, not only because it is asubjective society which has collectively selected the texts which we continue to refer back to, but because that same subjective society is unable to make impersonal comparisons. There is an irony in utilizing a history of taste-driven judgements as

a standard by which to judge the texts we read today, yet this process is natural. The ‘optimums’ of the past are an important point of reference, but they are inherently political standards.

Personal influences An issue arises with those fields which have no tradition to serve as a basis for comparison. It is one thing for a text to ‘fit in’ to its tradition, and another for there not to be a tradition at all. These are generally the marginalized voices which have been silenced throughout history and restricted from the resources which would allow them to write. It seems often to follow that in these cases, critics instead focus on the mechanism of marginalization in an effort towards evaluation.

In other words, when we talk about the contributions of new black voices, instead of talking about a tradition of black writing, we talk about the historical, political explanations for why these writers are considered ‘new’.

Where there is a demographic of people who have the need for a voice, a tradition, a place of their own in literature, identity becomes an anchor in both reading and writing processes. Yet again, the same dilemma is encountered, where with only the ‘man’s sentence’ and an imperialist British literary tradition to access, identity itself needs to be appropriated to be heard. In grappling with the challenge of how to ‘speak the other’s language without renouncing their own’s, one is often forced to turn to the canon which is in place and read how men wrote about women, how white wrote about black, how the West wrote about the East.

As Said argues, although the history of literature is far from a veridic authority, the value of continuing to study it is in understanding and deconstructing the legacy of its power9.

One cannot create a voice, a tradition, a place of their own in literature, without first dismantling the one that has been created for them.

This is perhaps why we often seek definition through negation, in both reading and writing. For example, the essentialism of women’s writing (where the flowery sensitivity of women’s prose makes male writing conversely rational) or the master-slave dialectic (where the master uses the slave to prove to himself that he is free). When literature speaks about identity, these themes are recurring reminders that binaries of definition cannot exist apart from each other, that a writer’s self-identification isn’t so much a question of what they are, but what they are not. When readers encounter this interdependency, whether they identify with the speaker or the other, the way in which they come to understand themselves is precisely negative. Finally, when the critic comes to write, they do so under the inescapable weight of this negation – woman as not-man, black as not-white, Eastern as not-Western. The political history of personal influences is inextricable from an evaluation of their modern impact.

Societal influences The way in which we choose the texts that make up traditions is political as well. Jauss makes a clear distinction between aesthetic and interpretive responses to a text, arguing that an aesthetic response is a prerequisite to an interpretive one, in that a test only becomes historically relevant once it has been received aesthetically. The politics of interpretive responses are often examined, but aesthetic responses to texts are also political in two ways, albeit unconsciously: Firstly, there is the aesthetic response of critics, who parley over the terms of Aristotle’s optimum form. Texts academics find aesthetically pleasing aren’t always commercially successful, but nevertheless academics too are susceptible to the same surrounding influences which affect what they consider to be beautiful, moving or ‘innovative’. Secondly, there are the politics involved in reading for pleasure, where we find aestheticism in writing which allows for immersion in a fictive world. The pleasure we derive from beach-reading is more often than not the ability to suspend disbelief, in which the very act of suspension suggests a prohibition of the regulations we are used to. The fantasies we enter into – dystopias, historical fiction, magical realism – can often be telling of the world from which we escape.

Once the aesthetic response has been fulfilled, Jauss argues that we should approach criticism in terms of the way responses change. He writes that a literary work is ‘like an orchestration that strikes ever new resonances among its readers and that frees the text from the material of the words’. In this sense, texts have lives. The text is alive for any reader in the history of its reception, though it was different for the reader before and will be different for the reader after. Despite this, texts are mortal, and they are lost once they are no longer read. Woolf writes of dead texts in a locked library: ‘Venerable and calm, with all its treasures safe locked within its breast, it sleeps complacently and will, so far as I am concerned, so sleep forever.’

Perhaps each new text is a struggle for immortality, with a writer asserting their style in an effort to transcend the harsh and inexorable unravelling of literary history. Perhaps each new critic attempts to write about texts dispassionately, in order to say something empirically true which cannot be disputed by those who follow. Writers fail to immortalize because their readers are always passionate; critics fail to immortalize because their successors are always political. That is precisely their value. Critics can only ever say something which is true of themselves, as a reader and a writer of their contemporary moment. Literary criticism, with one foot buried in the quicksand of a critic’s politics, is the system of checks and balances through which we understand the impossibility of a text’s immortality. It is through criticism that we think of each text as transitory, and it is each critic who memorializes a specific transitory condition. Literature disguises itself as fictive, immortal, apolitical – criticism exposes it.

ORANGE ROSES A short story by MATTHEA S.

My younger cousin Hekla lay beside me with her cheeks blushing to match her scorching red locks that seemed burning to the touch. She looked out of place next to the lapping of the water soothing her to sleep. I stayed with her, some sense within me trying to protect the fire within her from the sea.

My hand brushed through the sun-browned grass, feeling a gentle tickle as each tongue swept against my fingers: they were searching around me for patches of blackberries. They were normally ripe around there during the summer, as dark as night bleeding sweetly on to my tongue, but I predicted the lambs might have stolen them. I envied the sheep and the animals around me: they obey no laws, walking freely though the countryside all summers, with only their mothers and wool to protect them against the wrathful Icelandic storms.

Independent: the puffins can fly, changing country by the season and alongside the same partner they fly until death.

My father says it gives them human traits, but I don’t think that humans are as faithful as the birds. I watched their wings break free of the forces that pulled my body towards the earth. I smiled at myself for my peaceful jealousy.

I felt a soft palm on my shoulder. I knew it was my mother by the gentle presence she brought. As I turned to look at her, I noticed that the church filled with life. Indistinctive muttering, polite conversation and forced smiles were plastered to their faces. The chaos of voices brought a calming regularity, the susurrations melting into liquid sound.

a version of the one the prior week). Wool absorbs sound.

Ears, eyes and lips: every inch of my body would be at peace.

A symphony of the aromatic smell of lupins and my mother’s perfume – the one that she wears like a cloak around her – grew stronger with every breath I took. Eurhythmic, inhaling in time with the church bells, my mind focused only on my senses, and not my thoughts. Covering the walls, Mountain Avens watched over us with their head of sensuous, white petals, each unique diamond sprouting long yellow eyes from their middle. Catching glimpses of the sunlight and the flowers, the ruffled texture of the leather hymn book under my gloves preoccupied me…

I remember them being expressionless. Hekla’s father rose from his pew and the people I knew to be my family followed him. It perplexed me that we stood in a church - a place of songs and belief, a place of effervescence - but no one smiled.

The colourless bearer stood with his face forcefully wiped of emotion by the dominance of sorrow. I watched him, in a trance, his blank expressionless face quivered at the weightlessness of youth raising it to his heart; his body moulding to the correct shape. As he did this, he did not make a sound. There was no singing: I would have given anything for the priest to end the silence, for the wind to escape the outside and break in through the polished windows.

I sat surrounded by women I scarcely knew. My father and brothers perched on the pew across the aisle from us. I did not understand why we were separated from each other.

The doors opened in remorse like twins who had been severely scolded by their teacher. All eyes betrayed their owners and released bitter water that rolled down sun-kissed cheeks, joining their freckles to form constellations. The eyes closed peacefully as if each soul transported into a memory it had lost. One foot ahead of the other my uncle led the precession of his sons transgressing to men, which submitted to the weight of death and sorrow as it rested heavy on the room, sheltering no others from that burden.

“That’s how it’s always done. Now sit up straight,” my mother spat in a sudden pique. Her answer confused me, but I think it was because she herself did not understand it, but instead followed these rules with a blindfold, like all the other women in the country, passing it on generation to generation until somebody chooses to see.

The men lowered the eternal sleeping chest into the soil, the grass where I had played hours before, broken into a pit of brown. Singular grains of dried mud broke off the sides as orange roses, that looked burning to the touch, were placed onto the fine-grained wood of the coffin. Then the shovel poured soil over the roses, suffocating their fire.

As I fixed my posture to sublimate my body with my surroundings, my hands traced the holes of my woollen jacket, rubbing my fingers rhythmically on the fabric. I knew the priest well, him having been there from days of my birth, always welcoming me into the arms of God. But while he spoke my mind ran to imagining the sensation of being completely enveloped in pure wool, (his lectures were always

As if my cousin had never been there, the ground was complete again. Engraved into the stone above were the words:

Their twill skirts and braided hair moved in unison, the wind a connection each person had with each other, then broken when walking through the doors of the church. There the only connections were individual, between them and God.

“Hekla, born to eternal life 1860-1863”

2,000 YEARS VS ONE DRUNKARD It was my shift that day, another day for my imagination to take me with it on its travels.

On the second floor, past the ‘Living and Dying Room’, was my room - or at least that is how I think of it. ‘Pottery through the Years’ - not a very intriguing name, yet each object held their own fascination, their own story. I shared that story with them and then I would always attempt to latch each story on to passers-by, ignorant tourists who have no real inquisition.

As I did my rounds, gently dusting each item, whispering under my breath, I tried to imagine who may have touched, held, created these creatures of nimbleness. I soon appeared before my favourite. The key to the glass cabinet hung around my neck and seemed to grasp at my hand as I reached for it through all the others. I knew it so well: the two spikes at the end, subtly flattening out into a small notch and little bump which always takes your finger by surprise. I opened the case.

The Portland Vase stood proud that day alone in its glass bubble - I felt it deserved to feel that pride, to encompass its own beauty. I would always spend just a little more time, clean a little more carefully and murmur a little longer to it. I would lay my dress, neatly around my knees as I kneeled. The vase was special, in need of that protection and care.

I never would pick it up in case of dropping it, or ruining that clear sheen of paint, or placing a small yet hurtful notch in its skin. But would feel around the handles, along the little rivers of dust that I would empty, the deep ‘V’ groves engulfing the handles. That was all just from sensory knowledge. As you traced your finger down the vase to peer over the gradual ridge, the eyes became the key instrument. The white, prominent against the deep black glaze splattered with puddles of reflective light. Female figures dousing in those puddles. That was the moment where I was enveloped in their world. I travelled 2,000 years back.

The women embrace so much glory as they lie upon the wooden structures. The tree a slave, to shelter and look after the airy woman. I imagine the heat. And that heat brought peace as it ambled through the lungs of each body and caressed their pale skin. I can see the men hard at work

A short story by KITTY H.

in the oppressive heat; foraging through waters and fields for food, imprudently manipulating materials which would nowadays sell for thousands to those sitting in the highchairs glowering as slaves and servants scuttle beneath. And then there was that man; his fingers protracted and thin, moulded for moulding and created for creating. He would work away by day, cupping the material, while watching the women bathe. Then, craft them as it was - arresting that moment forever. Capturing their elegance and vanity whilst keeping the basic functionality of the vase yet portraying it with beauty and grace. Holding it in the vase, a still life that was once so real. Then there would be the wine, perhaps also soaking in the heat beneath the fingers of sunlight. Before being poured around as men and women laughed, half-naked, as they slurped it down, cooled their throats and let it tickle their minds.

However, that virtuoso did not know then that 2000 years on it would be a masterpiece, admired each day by endless visitors peering down at it.

I was bought back to reality more suddenly than usual by rather loud prattle. I quickly locked the glass cage and looked around. A few people were peering at an old, scrawny looking man who seemed to be stumbling all over the place.

He seemed to have no control over himself - shouting with mumbles and staggering forward. Each step seemed to hit the floor as if it was not entirely anticipated and his eyes were everywhere; a small ship in a stormy sea. He was holding a miniature sculpture from the room beyond as he careered into my room.

Maternal instincts possessed me as I lunged forward to hold onto this creature, yet I had no power. I was only a maid.

I tried to grab an arm, but he dismissed me violently. He lifted the other twiggy arm and the statue went clear of his hand, but not of the casing. Shattering it to pieces and, before my eyes were focused, the vase had gone too. 2,000 years forgotten, lying broken in a pile, mourning helplessly as the useless bubble of protection lay shattered with guilt beside it. By now there were many people, some dragging the man away. My colleague came in, very authoritative and began carefully to pick up the pieces of the broken vase.

Our connection was shattered too, as strangers’ fingers lay on every shard. Once it had been just ours: mine and that ancient, skilful craftsman. We were two souls knotted by the vase, but then torn apart with ragged edges.

The dozing females awoke then from their slumber, the tree snapped, no longer protecting. Peace splintered into two dozen chaotic pieces each capturing now only the glaze and colour.

TUTANKHAMUN’S TOMB A short story by POSIE B.

As I descended the sixteen steps, an incomprehensible emotion surged through my body.

An achromatic gloom hung from the walls - ahead of me was a series of corridors leading to four chambers. Howard and I rushed into the first chamber enthusiastically, looking breathlessly at the mystical markings and details on the walls. I rubbed my hands over the concoction of dust and murk to reveal the faded hieroglyphics: a swarm of Egyptian vultures, horned vipers, and quail chick embellishments.

Feverishly, we entered the first chamber where an army of golden shrines stood out against the walls and shelves, disguising the cheerlessness of the monotone yellows and whites. Twelve colossal pots stood gracefully on the irridescent cabinets which had been precisely crafted in the six symbolic Egyptian colors and black hieroglyphics. I picked one up and there were engravings on the bottom - one read ‘Amun’ and the other read ‘Living image’.

The second chamber was home to four voluminous quartzite sarcophagi (towering red caskets brimming with ancient robes, masks, and headpieces). It was the first chamber I had ever seen with a mural on the wall. The figures of the four ancient Egyptian goddesses were intricately depicted; Isis, Nephthys, Neith, and Selket. Isis and Nephthys, dressed in flowing white robes tied together with amber ribbon, were gazing down upon a jeweled casket. Neith and Selket were wearing blue and black robes adorned with rubies and sapphires. They were holding large black shields, protecting the precious coffins and canopic jars.

It was nearly February 4th. Howard and I had decided to begin our search again - this time to The Valley of the Kings. Six seasons of searching had gone by and practically every archaeologist in the country had given up on the unattainable discovery of the famous King Tutankhamun’s tomb. It had taken long and thorough persuasion from Howard to convince me to continue but I knew in myself I still had one last spark of ambition. Howard and I were to start searching again at five in the morning. It was the perfect time - the city stood still - no cobras rattled and no Scarabs scurried.

The sun appeared at six o’clock on the dot; earlier than usual. Peering out from above the ancient pyramids and sphinxes, she ignited the city, making the sand glow a jubilant yellow and the heat radiate across the crowns of our heads. Interminable layers of sand and rock settled before us and a plethora of pathways and archways lead to the wondrous tombs and pyramids of the Ancient Gods and Goddesses of Egypt. We had taken five of our twelve planned routes the week before and found nothing. Every day we had prepared for failure.

The sixth route was strangely different to the first five. It was as though nobody had trodden that track for over a hundred years - a sickly chill of stillness ran through the valley. Thick layers of dust and rubble lay out of place above the sand. In the distance, a harsh ridge appeared from the ground, enshrouded in a blanket of sand. As I grappled forward, I didn’t know if I should be feeling optimistic or if that was naïve. I had been in hundreds of tombs but in none of them lay the corpse and tomb of King Tut, the famous Egyptian King. Carter rushed over to the discrepancy in the sand with great urgency, but I lagged by a few metres to check if there were any other distinct objects or clues. A flush of red highlighted his sweaty cheeks as he began digging under the rocks and rubble.

The headpiece, the robes, the mask – the third chamber. Tutankhamun’s corpse lay in his golden death-bed, surrounded by the goddesses of mourning. A lifetime’s story of great leadership was displayed in this single chamber. Every gold and navy head mask circled his crested casket and ‘Egyptian King’ in hieroglyphics was engraved into the gold shrine. This time I could easily identify my emotion, it was like nothing I had ever felt before. A mixture of proud accomplishment and relief which made the search feel so worthwhile. I studied every inch of the bed, the shrine, the sapphires and the rubies which held their vibrant colours so passionately. Howard and I stood at the back of the room taking in our colossal achievement.

“King Tutankhamun’s Tomb has been identified and found by archaeologists: Howard and Edwards” was our claim to fame. Our years of searching was recognized in every newspaper in Egypt. British and Egyptian observers stood at the sealed doorway on November 26th, awaiting the mystery Tomb of one of the greatest Kings in Egypt. “Would you like to unveil the tomb?” asked the news reporter. Without hesitation, I grabbed the scissors, cut the seal and descended down the 16 steps, the optimum emotion filling my body. This was our discovery.

BEING UNIQUE A speech exploring the concept of individuality by

BELLA G. Define Unique.

This is a word that we identify with before we learn to tie our shoes. Your parents probably told you time and time again that you were unique - that you were different.

That you were special.

But what does it actually mean?

Well, if you look it up in a dictionary the answer is: “being the only one of its kind; unlike anything else.”

So yes, by our very physical nature we are all unique; we don’t have to look further than our eyes, tongue, fingerprints to understand this. You are the only person out of 7 billion to have the exact imprinted lines on your fingers.

But why does this make you special?

Well, your experiences, your thoughts, what you value, are things that only you have.

Your voice is unique to you. And the importance of listening to unique voices is immeasurable.

Voices change the world.

This is true now more than ever. Following centuries of black oppression, catalysed by the tragic death of George Floyd, unique voices in the African American community are speaking out. They are communicating their own struggles with racism.

In fact, every significant individual in history was unique is some way or another: Take Martin Luther King Jr’s ability to speak. Standing in front of tens of thousands of Americans, he began with “I have a Dream” and when he was done, he had shifted the hearts and minds of millions.

Albert Einstein. His distinctive capability in physics coupled with an extraordinary prenatal intellectual disposition led to the development of some of the most important scientific discoveries of all time.

Joan of Arc. Need I say more? A female peasant born in France in the 15th century; she believed that God had chosen her to lead France to victory in the Hundred Year War. So, besides their outstanding contributions, what do these individuals have in common?

The answer is nothing.

And this is the beauty of being unique.

I am not saying that you will lead a French army to victory. Nor am I suggesting that you will be celebrated for years to come for a revolutionary speech or ground-breaking scientific discovery.

My point is that being unique is what makes you special. Your voice is unlike anyone else’s.

You have the ability to make a change.

So, I urge you to do so.

Thank you all for listening.

SAFE IN YOUR WARM HOUSES An evaluation of the significance of Spiegelman’s representation of food in the graphic novel, ‘Maus’ by

BEN W.

You who live safe In your warm houses You who find, returning in the evening Hot food and friendly faces Primo Levi – Epigraph to ‘If This Is a Man’

Art Spiegelman’s harrowing 1986 graphic novel, Maus, is a searing and celebrated exploration of the evils of Nazism and the terrors of the Holocaust. Based on true events and told through the anthropomorphism and allegory of animals, the story follows a family’s intense journey through this real-life dystopia, visualised through the memories of Spiegelman’s father, Vladek. Spiegelman’s daring use of the comic form ensures the atrocities of the Holocaust are accessible to the widest possible readership through the timeless allegory of cats and mice. Critic Hillary Shoot remarks how the comic ‘offers a rich temporal map configured as much by what isn’t drawn as by what is.’ Given the disguised horror of the Holocaust, it would seem Spiegelman’s choice of form is, therefore, doubly apposite.

A centrally important but perhaps overlooked element of this comic is the motif of food. In a primal sense, we, from the comfort of our ‘warm homes,’ take ‘hot food and friendly faces’ for granted. This both intensifies the horrors of Vladek’s experiences, and reminds us of how, when stripped of all fundamentals, food, at its core, becomes a craved beacon of survival. This essay will therefore evaluate how Spiegelman presents food in four distinctive ways: food as a symbol for cultural belonging and social identity; the absence of food as a punishment; food as a commodity, and finally, food as a form of relief and rescue.

Firstly, throughout the comic, Speigelman manipulates the food motif to display a feeling of cultural belonging and social identity. Notably, at the outset, food is depicted as an occasion of reunion and safety. Most explicitly on the two splash panels below:

Here, food is depicted directly in the midground. The panels have a light graphic weight which draws our attention to the darker drawn characters and surroundings, in many ways highlighting that the importance of food is not fully appreciated in these earlier, more plentiful, days. The food also stitches the displayed characters together, explicitly acting as a significant reason for their togetherness. From an anthropological perspective, meals are rituals central to all human communities – shared as a gesture of hospitality, and as spiritual or ceremonial markers. This is amplified in a Jewish community in which tradition and togetherness are integral – not least as a result of systemic marginalisation across centuries. As the comic progresses in parallel with increased aggression from the Nazis – this image of meals as a platform for gathering and safety sees a pronounced shift as it is presented as a much more crucial object for survival.

We see, for the first time, how food, and the survival it allows, has become the sole medium for desperate assembly. Distinctly contrasting against the heavily-shaded graphic weight of the splash panel, as well as the darklycoloured characters cradling around it, the chiaroscuro of the bag here represents how it has become a substantial signifier of hope amidst the darkening world Vladek inhabits.

Eventually, however, Spiegelman presents violent descriptions of people killing each other for food, symbolic of the disintegration of human behaviour due to the effects of hunger compounded by the worsened conditions. The idea of food beckoning communality has virtually dissolved: instead, food has returned to its fundamental basic symbolism: allowing individual survival to persist.

Whilst food has been presented as a means of social and cultural companionship, withholding meals by those in power demonstrates how food can become a political tool for subjugation and punishment. A salient example of food deprivation (and, therefore, the removal of a human right) being used as a punishment is where Vladek is shown being

There is a juxtaposition between dead, rotting bodies on one side, and those that are still alive on the other, which, for the reader, poignantly illustrates the magnitude of the suffering and death due to food deprivation. Furthermore, this is distinctly portrayed when Vladek is still hiding out in the city of Sosnowiec. Here, Speigelman evokes the utter pathos of the remaining Jewish community having to chew on wood as it ‘feels a little like eating food.’ In many ways, these survivors enter an impoverished, rodent-like state, chased into oppression by predatory Nazism - embodied by the comic’s anthropomorphism of the Nazis as cats and the Jews as mice.

bullied into making a stable ‘spotlessly clean in one hour.’ The failure of this ‘impossible’ task would ‘cost them their soup.’

The Nazi official, drawn with a very heavy graphic weight and whose arm gleams with a swastika, conveys an image of complete dominance over the lightly-drawn and starvedlooking Jewish prisoners in the background. Malevolent and over-fed, his figure is a reflection that food is abundant for him. It is clear that the Nazi enjoys tormenting them and was always aware that they would not get any food. Within this abhorrent setting, the scarcity of food, which is ‘crunchy like glass’ and ‘mixed with sawdust,’ is ‘just enough to die more slowly.’ This scorching image is captured in a voiceover in a splash panel: Throughout Spiegelman’s relentless narrative, he is able to further exploit the food motif when we see it become a tradable commodity – and a predominantly illegal one. We are introduced to the ‘secret’ and ‘not so legal’ street business that sells food coupons to the Jews. To amplify how highly enclosed and private this market is, out of fear of being

reported by non-Jewish communities, Spiegelman angles the introductory panel just above street level, which deliberately positions the reader as an outside observer. As the comic progresses, and the surviving Jews find themselves increasingly starved and confined, and Spiegelman depicts the food trade as covert and tense. When we are introduced to another of these ‘black market[s],’ there is a distinctly identifiable juxtaposition in the nature of the trade: where it had formerly been in a crowded public location, now it is highlighted by the dark graphic weight of Vladek, making his silhouette figure contrast against the light and empty courtyard surrounding

him. Therefore, Vladek appears vulnerable through exposure.

Most significantly, food is also used as a form of bribery, as shown in the poster below which states that ‘For every unregistered Jew you find [you will receive] one kilo of sugar.’ The poster, which clearly contrasts against the dark graphic weight of the background, shines above the hunched silhouettes of the Jews, quite literally dominating them. In this scenario, the perceived value of a Jewish character’s life has degraded to such an extreme that food is portrayed as a cruel form of bribery to extract, starve, and further humiliate the remaining Jewish population.

Finally, Spiegelman’s presentation of the food motif as a form of relief and rescue, both emotionally and physically, is arguably the most significant way in which the importance of food is expressed. Most memorable are the panels where we see ‘treasur[ed]’ packages of food being received. The minor exclamatory sentences, in bold special-effects lettering,

indicate every different item separately, drawing attention to the text and reinforcing the impact and overwhelming shock of the characters who have been so ‘very lucky to get such goodies!’ Furthermore, Spiegelman draws an almost halo-like circle in the background above the characters’ heads in each panel. This not only highlights how these packages captivate their imagination, but it also focuses attention on their eyes – wide and curved – emphasising the emotions of relief and surprise. This is further reinforced when Vladek is introduced to such a cornucopia of rich food that he ‘was afraid to look [at] it.’ The food is directly at the centre of the panel and has a relatively strong graphic weight, which, with the explosive white glimmer behind it, symbolises how revelatory and redemptive the food is. As Vladek realises that ‘this food… was for [him],’ his eyes, roughly drawn and darkly sketched, seem to sink into his face. He appears overwhelmed by the sheer quantity of food, and unable to comprehend the miracle that lays before him – a state of shock.

Taken together, Spiegelman presents the reader with a powerful allegory. His potent depictions of food are both graphically and linguistically central to the overarching concerns of oppression and human tragedy. Whilst he carefully manipulates the food motif to indicate the tragic arc of events over the passing of both historical and narrative time, he also clearly displays how food is used through punishment, discrimination, and salvation. Given the allegorical nature of the graphic narrative recounted through anthropomorphism, the food motif is ultimately tied with the prey/predator power dynamic and the fight for survival.

Ultimately, Spiegelman reminds us that food is a symbol of, on one hand, safety, and survival, and on the other, of oppression. Through this archetypal dichotomy, he tells a fable that portrays humanity at its most desperate, but also its most resilient.

English Department Wellington College Crowthorne RG45 7PU wellingtoncollege.org.uk