To the Lighthouse...Virginia Woolf

The novel takes the reader through the perils of time when the roles of men and women were challenged. Men were dominant and women acted in the role they were given. The Ramsey’s were a family of ten; two adults and eight children. The children had a difficult time connecting with their father and rightly so. His views and treatment of women especially his wife and mother of his children exacerbated this feeling of disdain and hatred for him, especially in their youngest son, James. All throughout the novel there are references made about how he wanted the death of his father and by his own hand: “Had there been an axe handy, a poker, or any weapon that would have gashed a hole in his father’s breast and killed him, there and then, James would have seized it” (p.8).  James “hated” his father (p. 40). This was due to the fact that his father not only took pleasure in ridiculing (she wanted to go to the lighthouse) and debasing his mother, but took joy in the fact that he could just make judgment calls on their lives in whatever way he saw fit. On pg. 35 when Mrs. Ramey spoke again about going to the lighthouse, Mr. Ramsey flew into a rage. The author speaks of how he saw women’s minds as “folly,” meaning, foolish, stupid or silly. Mr. Ramsey would come to Mrs. Ramsey in public to seek accolades of his accomplishments and receive a stroking of his ego so that it would further strengthen his dominance over her and secure his rule and position, while simultaneously making her seem inferior. After she got through performing her womanly duties, she was mentally and physically drained (lying and babying a grown man is hard work) (pgs. 40-43).

Mrs. Ramsey held her power in her beauty. In this era a woman’s beauty was like gold and the author describes it as having the power to wipe away tears from those in mourning (pgs. 44-45). The author may have been a bit facetious and hyperbolic but she was probably a very beautiful woman. The image of the lighthouse, the repeated reference to the lighthouse is something Mrs. Ramsey can see, but she can never get to. She seems to always be in this constant state of making preparations for the journey, but no matter what she does, she always meets opposition and the novel has it to where she is always fighting to get there and then we  hear of her death on pg. 132. The struggle to the lighthouse, is synonymous to her struggles as the wife of Mr. Ramsey which is synonymous to the struggles of women in the 1900’s. Imagism is all about ordinary speech and the concrete presentation of images; trying to create that moment in time and this is what Virginia Woolf was trying to do by way of Mrs. Ramsey.

Mrs. Ramsey's Dreamlike Quality in Describing the Scene

One passage that stuck out to me was the dinner scene on page 107.  Mrs. Ramsey has been talking to Mr. Bankes, and right after she finishes serving the food, she kind of goes into this day-dreaming kind of state.

"Here she felt, putting the spoon down, was the still space that lies about the heart of things, where one could move or rest; could wait now (they were all helped) listening; could then like a hawk which lapses suddenly from its high station, flaunt and sink on laughter easily, resting her whole weight upon what at the other end of the table her husband was saying about the square root of one thousand two hundred and fifty-three" (pg 107).

She goes from having this plain, simple conversation about French food versus British food, and then lapses off into this positionality of a hawk, who is floating on laughter as if it was the wind and zeroing in on little snippets of conversation. She continues on vacillating between rational, in the moment thoughts, and these dreamy, blurry, descriptions.  The description in this particular part of the novel makes me think of an impressionist painting, VanGogh's Starry Night for example.  There is no clarity, the lines are blurry.

In many ways, as others have pointed out, Virginia Woolf has a tendency to categorize in a "black and white" fashion things like "love and hate" or "feminine or masculine."  To me this is almost cubist thinking.  She's taking something abstract and giving it boundaries, hard boundaries.  So hard in fact that things can be one or the other and not both. There is no blurring of the lines throughout most of this novel, however, in some places, this being one of them, she seems to be trying her hand at a literary impressionism. 

As I take this approach, of comparing Virginia Woolf to the artistic movements of the period, when I go back and flip through again, I see other examples.  

"Disappearing as stealthily as stags from the dinner-table directly the meal was over, the eight songs and daughters of Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay sought their bedrooms, their fastnesses in a house where there was no other privacy to debate anything, everything; flies; people; while the sun poured into those attics, which a plant alone separated from each other so that every footstep could be heard and the Swiss girl sobbing for her father who was dying of cancer in a valley of the Grisons, and lit up bats, flannels, straw hats, ink-pots, paint-pots, bettelse, and the skulls of small birds, while it drew from the long frilled strips of seaweed pinned to the wall a smell of salt and weeds, which was in the towels too, gritty with sand from bathing." (pg 12). 

This sentence is totally made up of little fragments.  When I read that again, I feel like I'm looking at a mirror that has been broken into a thousand little pieces, but still all held together.  Visualizing that makes me think of cubism, not quite in the way of taking something like a face and reducing it down to an oval shape, but more like Picasso's Weeping Woman where yes, parts are reduced down to shapes, but there is a whole picture made up of little fragments. If we looked at each fragment we wouldn't have a clue what we were looking at.  Here in one long fragmented sentence Virginia Woolf is describing the whole house in a way.  You get the sense of all the stuff that comes with having 8 children, as well as the sense of no real privacy.  

There are also a few places where she totally just breaks form.  On page 20 we see an example of this.  Her paragraph starts out:
     "Suddenly a loud cry, as of a sleep-walker, half roused, something about 

Stormed at with shot and shell

sung out with the utmost intensity in her ear, made her turn apprehensively to see if any one heard him" (pg 20).

What she's doing here is separating out what it is that she heard, the little snippet of conversation.  She doesn't give us quotation marks though.  She breaks the traditional literary form (or at least I think that was then the traditional literary form). It's almost as if she is trying to separate it for us visually.

While I am pointing out writing techniques, I can't help but note the repetitious circular manner in which she tells an anecdote here.  For example, on page 29 she brings us back to the point where the story starts; debating whether or not to go to the lighthouse the next day. Within that 29 pages, she comes back to someone saying "there will be no going to the lighthouse tomorrow" several times.  Also there is a repetition to the way we learn about the supposed death of the friendship between Mr. Ramsey and Mr. Bankes.  We are looking into Bankes' thoughts (which is coming from I don't even know who).  On page 24 we see "...William Bankes remembered (and this must refer to some actual incident), by a hen, straddling her wings out in protection of a covey of little chicks, upon which Ramsay, stopping pointed his stick and said 'Pretty--pretty,' and odd illumination in to his heart, Bankes had thought it, which showed his simplicity, his sympathy with humble things; but it seemed to him as if their friendship had ceased, there, on that stretch of road" (pg 24). Then on the next page we see "Begun long years ago, their friendship had petered out on a Westmorland road, where the hen spread her wings before her chicks; after which Ramsay had married, and their paths lying different ways..."(pg 25). There seems to be this circular pattern to the story telling, as if she is going around a mountain and coming back to the same view only from a slightly higher elevation.

Virginia Woolf's To The Lighthouse

I was drawn to a particular passage on pages 14-16 that conditioned my reading of the rest of the novel. The interaction between Mrs. Ramsey and Charles Tansley in this moment reminded me of last week’s assignment of taking the literary tools of impressionism and imagism and using the analytical tools on visual specimens. On page 14, Mrs. Ramsey essentially narrates Tansley’s history back to him, beginning with noting that he should have been a philosopher and then chronologically naming the things that had gone wrong. The narrator notes that at the end of Mrs. Ramsey’s “narrative”, they see Tansley as he is in the present moment, “and then lying, as they saw him, on the lawn” (14). On page 15, Mrs. Ramsey and Tansley witness a man hanging up an advertisement, which is given a rudimentary analysis by Mrs. Ramsey, followed by her in-depth analysis of Tansley’s response to the advertisement and her exclamation. As a response to the image of the circus, Tansley leaves Mrs. Ramsey all kinds of visual and audible hints that she then analyzes. Tansley wishes Mrs. Ramsley could “see” him differently, “gowned and hooded, walking in a procession. A fellowship, a professorship, he felt capable of anything” (15), but realizes she is looking at the man hanging the advertisement. When Tansley attempts to copy Mrs. Ramsey’s excitement about the circus, the narrator describes it as a “clicking” sound, and suggests that the way he says “Let’s go” is so self-conscious that it makes Mrs. Ramsey uncomfortable. The narrator remarks later in the paragraph that the way Tansley says “return hospitality” was “parched” and “stiff”. Aside from having an “untrained mind” (13), unable to “follow the ugly academic jargon” (16) that Tansley uses, the narrator gives Mrs. Ramsey the authority to actually help the reader to come to a compelling analysis of Tansley, by reading him like fragments of an image, lyrics to a song, and incorporating his history and contexts. 

The thing that I noticed the most about this book was the harsh emotions. Love or hate, rarely anything in between. Most of the love in the novel seems to be directed at Mrs.Ramsey even after she has died, while the hate directed at Mr. Tansley and Mr. Ramsey. Throughout the book everyone wants to please Mrs. Ramsey because they love her so much. Minta and Paul get married, even though to me it seems like they only do so because Mrs. Ramsey wants it to happen.Lilly wants to make sure that she represents everything properly in her painting to please Mrs. Ramsey. Mrs. Ramsey on the other hand is trying to make everyone happy. She does her best to keep up James' hopes about going to the lighthouse despite what Mr. Ramsey and Mr. Tansley say. She puts Paul and Minta together because she believes it is what is best for them. She also plots to get Lilly and Mr. Banks together, also for their own good. It seems that the only person who doesn't love Mrs. Ramsey is Mr. Ramsey. He never confesses his love of her to anyone, even himself. He is more concerned about his philosophy work to feel anything about anyone around him.

                One aspect of Virginia Woolf’s To The Lighthouse that especially caught my attention was the overt mention of gender roles and gender expectations. While in reading literature, especially from the early 1900s, it is not unlikely to see indicators of the separation between sexes, but I feel like Woolf is much more explicit in her mention of the distinction between males and females. This is especially prevalent in the relationship between Mrs. Ramsey and Mr. Ramsey. We see that Mr. Ramsey makes all of the decisions for the family where Mrs. Ramsey is viewed simply as a beautiful woman who cares for her 8 children. The most infuriating example of this is present on pages 120-125 where Mrs. Ramsey decides to read in bed with her husband. Woolf writes how Mr. Ramsey thought it was cute and funny that his wife would even dare try to read advanced literature. Mr. Ramsey would prefer that rather than trying to understand novels that would clearly be too far over her head, that Mrs. Ramsey would sit in admiration of him. ( GAG ME!!)

                Woolf also seems to satirically point to the gender beliefs during the time in which she wrote the novel when she writes how Mrs. Ramsey understands “masculine intelligence” when she thinks “What did it all mean? To this day she had no notion. A square root? What was that? Her sons knew” (107).  As someone who would consider themselves a feminist reading  this in 2015, I found this part of the novel (in addition to many others) almost too difficult to stomach as women are made to be fickle and unintelligent. If this part wasn’t bad enough I was also struck by the selection on page 88 that asserts “”one never gets anything world by having post-“ that was the sort of thing they were always saying. They made men say that sort of thing. Yes, it was pretty well true, he thought. They never got anything worth having from one year’s end to another. They did nothing but talk, talk, talk, eat, eat, eat. It was the women’s fault. Women made civilization impossible with their “charm,” all their silliness” (88).  While I am annoyed by these type of sections I am left wondering what Woolf was trying to show by making such clear distinctions about gender in this novel. I read these examples as satirical comments on the state of women, but I am not certain. Hopefully we will be able to answer this question in class!

The Age of a Woman and What's Really Important

Elizabeth Gagne

ENG 436.01

In the novel To the Lighthouse, there seems to be a large and, in my opinion, somewhat strange theme of all the men who encounter Mrs. Ramsay falling in love with her. It became especially odd when we find out that Mrs. Ramsay is not only married, but she has eight children. The woman is around fifty years old and still attracting the eyes of twenty or thirty year olds. She is described by each of the men as beautiful and caring and loving and such but there is never actually a description of her made by the author or an unbiased eye. Her husband also acts cold in the beginning but we find out later that he too finds her beautiful. At one point he even asks her if she loves him and although she does not say yes or no, he can draw from what she does say that she does indeed still love him.
Mrs. Ramsay's two oldest children, Andrew and Prue, are talked about quite a bit in the book even though they do not actually appear in it as characters. Mrs. Ramsay thinks about what she wishes for her children in much of her time at the house by the sea. For her daughter Prue, she hopes for a beautiful marriage and children and a kind husband whereas for Andrew, who is at school during their trip, she hopes that he can pursue his dream to be a mathematician. Prue must have achieved her wish but in finding out that she was with child, most likely from a husband, we also find out that she died from complications with the birth of said child not soon after. In regards to Andrew, he must have been pulled into a war for we also find out that he was killed “instantaneously” by an explosion somewhere in France (Woolf 137). These deaths, as well as Mrs. Ramsay’s, seem to be basically a side note in the actual story and not necessarily compared to the book, though, so it is as if nothing actually occurs in this book other than the trip to the lighthouse. One would think that the tragic deaths are what the novel is actually about but this is not the case in this tale.

 

            The Accordionist is a painting done by Pablo Picasso in 1911. The painting is the depiction of a man playing an accordion. This painting was done in the style of analytic cubism, which Picasso invented between 1907 and 1914. In this, he took three dimensional shapes and made them two dimensional. The image is clearly distorted, but uses simple color schemes to convey the meaning and depth. This type of cubism, analytical cubism, is the key in the development of modern painting because it gave way to a new form of pictorial space. Deep perspective is now replaced with shallow perspective. There is no longer several different elements to catch your attention. As seen in The Accordionist, you are primarily focused on differentiating the different yet simple shapes and making out the figure. The use of the brown and tan tones do not distract or take away from this either.

            As seen in Ezra Pounds poems that we looked at in class, he does not want to distract from the meaning or depth of his works either. As stated in the essay read for class, Pound was probably the most effected by the modern art, which was obviously influenced by Cubism. The simplicity of Pounds words draw attention to the simple meaning he is conveying in his works. In In a Station of the Metro, he writes a two lined poem that is rhythmic yet simple. He goes between modernism and nature and intertwines the two. We are meant to understand the meaning between this and nothing more. Like in The Accordionist, we are meant to understand the image and nothing more; how the different shapes convey and construct a simple image.      

Kandinsky Red Square in Moscow

        

           Moscow in Red Square by Vassili Kandinsky in 1916 has a lot going on. If indeed the painting is supposed to be somehow representative of Red Square in Moscow, the viewer gets this overwhelming feeling of motion when looking at this painting. There is also a impression that the city is floating off in a universe unto itself.  The traditional rules of perspective have been broken here and the city seems to be attached to nothing, and it even seems to have little parts shooting off of it. I noticed what appeared to be the Kremlin (or so I had a hunch), a little up from the bottom on the right. In order to see what was really going on in this painting I started searching through images of Red Square, the Kremlin and Moscow on Wikipedia just looking for quick pictures. Interestingly when I look up a map of Moscow there is a circular part, in which the Red Square and the Kremlin are right in the middle of, and on the map there are a few little areas jutting out and one great big area that juts out to the south east.  In the painting we see a large yellow circle in the middle of it, with different parts jutting out.  On the bottom right we see what I believe is St. Basil Cathedral, which in real life is very colorful, and sort of reminds me of a candy shop. In the painting it is pink and yellow, so still very colorful.  If from there we move up and to the left in a sweeping circular motion, we see a white tower with a pink circle in it towards the top and a gold circle on top.  I believe this is supposed to be Spasskaya tower with it’s clock face  at the top and it’s  gold peak with a star on top, though the star was added after this painting.  Next to the tower, to the left we see three towers, which I believe represent the Assumption Cathedral.  To the left of that is the Kremlin Palace.  If we move down the painting there is something that almost looks like a road, starting towards the bottom and going off into the distance, getting narrower as it goes up and around.  It is packed with little blue and red squares.  I think this is supposed to be Red Square itself.

            While you can tell what some of these buildings are supposed to be they aren’t drawn realistically and perspective is completely thrown out the window.  The painting seems to spin in a circle, and in fact that are several things that give that impression, including the blue and orangy yellow streaks near the top.  Those streaks set the city in motion.  The birds too, simple little black  lines shaped like the letter V all throughout the sky, seem to give the impression that someone just scared them all out of the trees they were resting in, or that there is no rest, or no place for them to rest.  In the top left there some indistinguishable things going on.  Those could be waves, or it could be some sort of an explosion (I can’t imaging what that might have been in 1916), and there is a little brown S in the midst of that mess, and I can’t even begin to imagine what that might be. It could be a volcano exploding, but again, I’m not recalling anything like that, but either way it seems like there is something raining down, or shining down on the city.  There also seems to be something almost raining down on the right side too.  In the center it appears that there  is a couple, a man and a woman perhaps watching a sun rise or a sun set, which would be the giant yellow circlish shape in the center.

            From looking at Kandinsky’s painting, one is left with a feeling of Russia.  It is a feeling of busyness and motion. It is a feeling of chaos and explosion.  It is a city of crowds, especially Red Square. One can see all the sights at once, just by spinniung around.  The bright colors give the painting a happy feel.   

  

 

Pyramid of  Skulls by Paul Cézanne shows four skulls on a mostly dark background. One of the skulls appears to be underneath another. The corner that the skulls are in has white, almost like a white sheet. Behind the skulls and to the left and directly above them the background is black. To the left there is red, yellow and green all with brown undertones. The skulls themselves are cream and ivory. The top one is the closest to pure white while the others are off-white. The Skulls also have small strokes of green on them

For the first things I thought of when I saw this were dark and creepy. I didn’t really notice the white in the lower right corner until I looked more closely. The white corner made me think of a sheet being pulled over someone after they have passed on. The red is the color of rust, or dried blood, which is another representation of death. The black on the upper right side of the painting shows the darkness of death. The skull in the back, not sitting upright is also the darkest. It is so dark that it almost blends into the background of the painting. The other skulls seem to almost have a look of sadness on them, but they are also in a position of power over the skull that isn’t upright. The lightest skull is on the top. The skulls upright, but underneath the lightest skull are darker, but the one in the background and tipped over is the darkest. This could be a statement of skin color leading to power. There are also small strokes of green on the skulls. To me green represents two things, nature and money. The meaning behind these things are different. To me nature, especially when it is green means life, which in this picture full of death is ironic. Money on the other hand represents power, and in this particular image it could suggest that power leads to death, but it seems even in death all that matters is the color of your skin, or in this case bone is all that really matters.

This painting made me think of a few scenes in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. The first one is the scene when Marlowe is under the tree, and is describing the dying “workers”. They are skin and bones, they are shadows barley there. They are in the shade, so they are in the dark like the skulls in the paintings. It also made me thing of the heads on stick surrounding Kurtz’s house. The only part of the people being represented is their heads. The same is true for the painting. The only bones shown are the skulls, no other part seems to be important.

Les Demoiselle d’ Avignon by Pablo Picasso

Les Demoiselle d’ Avignon by Pablo Picasso was paint in 1907. Les Demoiselles d’ Avignon composition is very provocative because it displays the prostitutes blunts and honestly. The women in the painting do not have a mathematical or methodical way of being placed. To the contrary, the women look like they are placed on top of one another. The lack of space between the women creates a claustrophobic like encounter the viewer experiences with the canvas. Picasso ability to immediately create discomfort for the view is not only in the provocative poses of the women. The poses are able to provoke the viewer because the sensual nature of prostitution that art has many years promoted even in controversial painting such as Olympia (1863) by Eduard Monet, the Father of Impressionism.

The poses of Picasso portrayal of prostitutes in a way that creates this idea of the viewer themselves getting solicited by the prostitutes, but in a greatly vaguer matter that Monet seemed only to allude to in Olympia. The contrast between the two paintings, which both promote prostitution, is  the different styles of between the artists. Monet abstract very little, in fact, it can be argued that there is very little abstraction in this painting to even acknowledge the realistic looks that it still maintains throughout the overall piece. The cubist way of abstraction furthers this discomfort of the view. No longer are the prostitutes portrayed in a seductive and allure manner. The cubist form of abstraction does not allow for such charm to be displayed. Instead, the viewer is subjected to the thought-provoking method of cubist abstraction that takes the sexual tension non-abstracted painting are able to readily create.

Cubism intentionally orients an object in multiple views and abstracts the objecting making it a challenge for the viewer to quickly understanding and identify in the subjects overall space. Cubism intentionally obscure and abstract the artist’s subject. In Macleod's paper these abstractions make the painting hard to distort for the viewer. Les Demoiselle d’ Avignon was created in the early development of cubism and lacks the in-depth analysis of angles from the second stage of cubism (1910-12) and the third stage of cubism Synthetic Cubism (1912-14) that mesh together objects and the subject of their canvas. However in this particular piece because this is early cubism and Picasso has yet to develop the Cubism of later years; Picasso relies on warm and cool tones of flesh to create dimension on the flatten shapes of the women. In fact, many deemed the piece as late primitivism (199-200). Picasso makes the women faces not painted in a euro-centric and realistic manner but paint them in the style of African Mask. In order for Picasso to further obscure the women in the painting he “others” racially the women in the painting that their class as being prostitutes would not have permitted earlier.

Picasso’s racialized portrayal of these prostitutes mirrors John Conrad’s portrayal of Africa in the Heart of Darkness (1899) the delayed decoding that Conrad uses to demonstrate an impressionist literary is evoked in Picasso’s style of cubism. “And this stillness of life did not in the least resemble and silence. And this stillness of life of like did not in the least resemble a peace” (41). Picasso creates this same mood by having the bodies be abstract of the prostitution be poised as if they remained in movement and Conrad creates a mood that makes the reader remain on edge.  The syntax disorients the reader because it is constantly changing between long sentences and short factual sentences. The verbs constantly change between past tense and present tense. These changing of tense causes the reader themselves to change the sense of time that has occurred in throughout the book.

Conrad relies on impressionism for Heart of Darkness and Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’ Avignon is an example of primitivism and early cubism. In their own right both Conrad and Picasso both deal with a European’s perspective trying to other understand the new World, specifically Africa. Therefore, the disorientation that they make their characters and subject undergo respectively is justified. 

Duchamp's Network of Stoppages

The 1914 painting titled Network of Stoppages, by Marcel Duchamp is an image that depicts nine unique lines that all originate from the same point, with all but two ending up in different locations. The top and the bottom thirds of the painting are painted black, while the main section is a mix of a few different colors, mostly yellow and green. The lines are black lines that have a white surrounding, with red writing on the lines as well.

My initial thought was that these were train tracks, or some sort of mapped out route that the artist had either known about, or previously traveled. The black lines look sort of like a map of railroads, with the white outline drawing your eyes to the lines immediately. The mix of colors behind these lines can easily be viewed as some sort of terrain, as the strokes used seem to even make the background look like there are mountains, as well as plains on this terrain. The red circles and notes on the piece made me think that these could have been places that the artist may have previously stopped, or was wanting to stop, combined with the word "stoppages" in the title of the piece. You could even look at this painting as a type of planning chart for future pathways.

What the piece actually is, is three different pieces of art superimposed on one another. It was not until I was doing further research on this piece that I had come across this information. The three images used by Duchamp to make up this piece are, The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelor, Young Man and Girl In Spring, and Three Standard Stoppages. The first two paintings that I mentioned were rotated to some degree as a way to alter the new image.

By using this additional technique, you can make the argument that Duchamp used a type of delayed decoding in this artwork. At first glance, you will most likely think of this painting in relation to some sort of tracks, but it is not until further exploration that you will notice that these are actually three paintings to make up an entirely new painting. An easy comparison to this painting and its use of delayed decoding would be the scene in Heart of Darkness, by Conrad, where the main character was unable to tell that what was on top of the posts on the island were actually human heads until his boat came closer. This would be the same type of strategy as we saw in the film clip from Apocalypse Now

"The City Rises" Umberto Boccioni

Elizabeth Gagne

ENG 436.01

In  1911, Umberto Boccioni created a piece called “The City Rises”. This painting involves a strange mixture of abstraction and what could possibly be realism. The image shows several realistic looking men that seem to be fighting strange horse-like creatures. There are also the lower sections of several skyscrapers in the background that show the reflection of cars lined up along the edges of the street. Judging from the title, I am going to guess that the men in the painting are actually supposed to be working on a building in a modern city and that the “horses” might represent the animalistic nature that the men are trying to control. There seems to be a fight not only between the men and the horses that they are struggling with, but also between the movement and stillness in the image. The skyscrapers and other background buildings and reflections are stationary while the struggle is drawn in a way that shows movement, even in this two dimensional picture.

This painting could be looked at as and called many different forms such as modernism, vorticism, cubism, and futurism. Being the broadest describer of this image, modernism is the word used to describe paintings which emerged sometime in the late nineteenth to early twentieth centuries in many Western cultures. The art style was shaped by the creation of modern cities and the industrial period which brought about this movement toward ideas about new social and economical views, as well as turning away from outdated Enlightenment ideas and ways of writing and drawing.

Cubism and Futurism are both modernist forms which involve the depiction of images which look as if they are in motion. Cubism, which was developed somewhere in France around the beginning of the twentieth century, shows drawings and images of objects from many different views or positions to indicate the significance of the object in the picture. Futurism, however, although having emerged from Italy around the same time period, was all about speed and the advancements that were being made in technology at the time. It was also involved in youth and violence that went along with said advancements as well as, again, motion. This style took the idea of drawing multiple perspectives or views of the object from Cubism, but changed it to involve the depicting of motion more that the significance of the object.The way they did this was that they draw several images of the same object as it would have been seen at several different moments in time.

The style that I believe best describes Boccioni’s painting is Vorticism. This style, created by Pound, Lewis, and a group of other “artistic radicals” in the early 1910-20 period, “emphasized motion and imitated the violent rhetoric and brash modernity of cubism and futurism (from which they strove mightily to distinguish themselves)” (Lewis 85). It is written about by Lewis as involving “patterns of lines, arcs, and other geometric shapes . . . [that] often suggested the rapid movement of bodies or machines” (85). This form does not seem to be as well known as many of the others, but I believe that it represents and helps a person to understand the struggle in “The City Rises” more accurately than any of the other styles mention by Lewis or Macleod.

In conversation with Joseph Conrad’s novel “Heart of Darkness,” one could compare the wildness of the animalistic urges of the horses with the natives that Marlow and his white crewmen encounter when they finally reached Mr Kurtz at his station. In this manner, a person could also compare the men who are trying to control these metaphorical horses to those men who are not natives or black crewmen, such as Marlow. The native people and those non-white “workers” in “Heart of Darkness” are portrayed as not intelligent, not as civilized, and simply not people who would be welcome in European society. In this way, “The City Rises” shows what seem to be wild horses in the middle of a busy city street. This is how white men believe Native Americans and African American people would act in their communities if they were not enslaved and “broken", so to say, which is presumably what the men in the painting were trying to do with the horses.

The Bride, Marcel Duchamp, 1912

The Bride, painted by Marcel Duchamp in 1912, carries with it the basic elements of cubism and abstraction. Duchamp was a leading figure of a movement known as “Dadaism.” Glen Macleod, The Visual Arts, made a few claims that I think are very pertinent and relevant to this piece. He said, “…Dada is not an artistic style but an attitude or way of life” (209). “…that it rebelled against all established institutions and traditional values” (209). In this piece, cubism (which is the techniques of fragmentation, the multiple perspectives and the juxtaposition) is clearly seen (202). This piece looks more like some type of a machine. On sight it does not resemble a traditional bride as we in society know it today. Cubism, according to Macleod, leads to pure geometric shapes that uses straight lines, right angles and primary colors. This canvas is pretty much following this conjecture. The image is

            Another point Macleod points out, especially within Dadaism, is where he speaks to the “viewer’s automatic first reaction, Is it Art” (210)? However, this cannot be answered until you address the age old question, “What is Art” (210)? When looking at this piece, the first question that came to my mind was, “what is this, because this does not look like a bride?” Duchamp was looking more for the idea behind the product, not the product itself. This movement fanned this notion that it was not so much what people saw with their visual eye, but rather what their mind could generate when they saw an image that was not so distinctly clear, as for an example, an obvious tree. The concept was abstract and the technique was cubism. Allowing the audience to come to their own conclusion about a piece of work offers a freedom not boxed in by the standard norms of what somebody says you have to think or believe.

            Joseph Conrad’s, Heart of Darkness had a great deal of Glen Macleod’s philosophical existentialism of that “What is this, what is going on” element. The narrator retelling the story has this mediated point of view. They have no factual sense of what is real and what is not because they are so far removed from the actual account and this individual is hearing from this random man on a ship that is docked and cannot go anywhere for the night. As this narrator is retelling the story, there is a feel of disorientation and a strong confusion at certain points, especially when the un-named narrator is giving an account of Kurtz. It utilizes the techniques of cubism and abstraction at its best, from what is known about these terms. Marlow also has his moments where he seems to be all over the place and trying to disassociate himself with what is going on, while at the same time trying to identify with it. It was like he was attempting to make sense of what was going on around him even though he knew it was wrong.

            Mina Loy, a poet, without a doubt encompasses the, “What Is This” element. Her poems (any of the ones we read in class) leaves the reader in a state of ambiguity and confusion. There is so much going on in the poems and all at one time. The reader cannot really get a grip on the poem. Cubism uses fragmentation and juxtaposition and that is exactly what Mina Loy does in her poems. Without even reading it and you just look at the physical structure of the poems, the reader can tell that they are fragmented and not following the standard formula of how poetry had been normally seen in metrical iambic pentameter, with the lyrical flow of rhythm and rhyme. Macleod described this “attitude or way of life” that emerged from Dadaism as being the aim of the movement. It was not so much a style. Mina Loy reflected this in her work. She had this “attitude” about the way she wanted to represent herself as a poet and her “ideas.” The same ideas that Duchamp was talking about when he said the aim was to produce ideas not a product. He did not want the focus on the product itself, but rather what the person could gain from it.

            “The Bride,”  “Heart of Darkness,” and the poems by Mina Loy all share the elements of cubism, abstraction and Dadaism. The authors and painters of the piece present their work to the audience and tell them to make of it what they will. The abstraction is probably one of the most powerful tools because it leaves the audience in a state where they can come to their own conclusion about what is actually going on with the information that is in front of them. The audience can begin to ask themselves, “How deep do I need to go into this analysis? What is the symbolic representation? What is the deeper meaning and how can I get there?” Seeing that authors and painters did not just come right out and say, “this is what I meant and this is what I was going for and this what I want you to get from it,” we are left to our own devices. Ironically, that is the beauty of it all.

 

http://library.artstor.org.ezproxy2.drake.brockport.edu/library/iv2.html?parent=true#

 

 

 

 

 

Marcel Duchamp, "On the Cliff" 1907

A textual reading of Marcel Duchamp’s 1907 painting “On the Cliff” highlights some of the imagist and impressionist strategies of the image, and the strategies from the two movements seem to be working together in some parts of the image. The imagist strategies of fragmentation, multiple perspectives, and juxtaposition coexist with the impressionist strategies of delayed decoding, singular/individual perspective, and abstraction to create an image which renders the “reader” (the audience/viewer of the painting, but for this assignment of “reading” images I thought I would play with this title) disoriented and unable to make sense of the image. Furthermore, the painting is in conversation with the serious literary and representational problem with imperialism, which was the problem of identifying and representing new world images with a language that is insufficient for the task.

The imagist strategy of fragmentation is applied to the painting visually with color. The cliff itself contains fragments of blue, white, brown, and a sort of mauve/pink color. The same colors are used for the water, but because of the different textures there is a clear distinction between the smooth water and rougher cliff. The top of the cliff contains fragments of green while the subject in the foreground, presumably a person’s head, is painted with fragments of red, brown, pink, and white. The texture of the image can be described as being fragmented, and can be compared to the visual “blotches” of random words and “gaps” in Mina Loy’s poem “Costa Magic”. The imagist strategy of fragmented texture complements and arguably creates the impressionist characteristic of abstraction and disorientation of the image. Although decipherable, the lines are not clearly drawn between the cliff and water, and although there is strong suggestion of the back of a person’s head, the image remains abstract enough to make the “reader” question whether it is a person or a living participant at all.

The imagist strategy of fragmentation is also used in terms of the image the reader actually sees. The image is very limited when considering what the perspective might be (to be discussed later!). On the limited space of the canvas, Duchamp had to make decisions of what parts of the cliff to paint, and how much. In this way, the imagist fragmentation is complemented by the impressionist strategy of a type of delayed decoding. Because the painting is static, the reader is only allowed this moment. The reader is given a visual moment, and Duchamp declared what the reader should be exposed to in this particular moment. This moment resembles something we might think of while reading the arrival passage of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness or the moment of discovery we are confronted with in the clip of Apocalypse Now. To summarize, in all of these representations the reader is limited in what is seen at a particular moment, as a result of the applied strategies of fragmentation and delayed decoding.

Perspective is a problem in this painting. Some of the other imagist and impressionist characteristics have been pointed out, and have shown to complement or rely on each other. The problem with perspective in this respect is that we learned that imagism and impressionism have opposite strategies for perspective. Imagism tries to take away the idea of perspective, and sometimes the persona or narrator will not have an “I” or an identity that is inherently important to the poem or prose. Impressionism plays with singular or individual perspective. If the painting were read as an impressionist painting, it may be assumed that this image is being viewed by another person behind the subject, and the painting is in the eyes of this person. However, the imagist fragmentation and limits of the image suggest that this may not be the case, because if the painting were meant to be through someone’s eyes, it would not be so limited. At the same time the already recognized strategy of delayed decoding creates the idea of the author (artist), through which he creates a narrator (eyes) who employs this delayed decoding on his vision (a  horizontally limited image of a person looking out at part of a cliff). On the other hand, the same painting read with imagism in mind would not employ a narrator or any kind of perspective. The image simply becomes a moment, a poetic representation of this person and that cliff, much like “these faces” the image in Ezra Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro”. The two readings are conflicting and become more complicated when the results of the aforementioned strategies are considered. I think this conflict of perspective is epitomized by the very title of the painting “On the Cliff”. Nothing is actually “special” on top of the cliff, and the subject or assumed “narrator” is not on the cliff as one might expect, creating a problematic juxtaposition with perspective and image.

Marcel Duchamp’s painting itself is a product of impressionism as well as imagism, as we saw with many of the poems in class. The painting of an observer on a shore resembles images of imperialism or discovering new worlds, as in Heart of Darkness. The combination of impressionist and imagist literary strategies in this painting creates a disoriented reader through the lack of clarity of the image itself, the mystery that surrounds the limited image, and the problem of perspective. This disorientation highlights the problem with representing imperialist images, how much of these new worlds can be effectively represented, and how much of the world the reader can understand by reading this image.