OTHERS: The house on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros. Postcolonislism: Definitions and Characteristics

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The House on Mango Street


The House on Mango Street, which appeared in 1983, is a linked collection of forty-four short tales that evoke the circumstances and conditions of a Hispanic American ghetto in Chicago. The narrative is seen through the eyes of Esperanza Cordero, an adolescent girl coming of age. These concise and poetic tales also offer snapshots of the roles of women in this society. They uncover the dual forces that pull Esperanza to stay rooted in her cultural traditions on the one hand, and those that compel her to pursue a better way of life outside the barrio on the other. Throughout the book Sandra Cisneros explores themes of cultural tradition, gender roles, and coming of age in a binary society that struggles to hang onto its collective past while integrating itself into the American cultural landscape.
Cisneros wrote the vignettes while struggling with her identity as an author at the University of Iowa's Writers Workshop in the 1970s. She was influenced by Russian-bom novelist and poet Vladimir Nabokov's memoirs and by her own experiences as a child in the Chicago barrio. This engaging book has brought the author critical acclaim and a 1985 Before Columbus American Book Award. Specifically, it has been highly lauded for its impressionistic, poetic style and powerful imagery.
Though Cisneros is a young writer and her work is not plentiful, The House on Mango Street establishes her as a major figure in American literature. Her work has already been the subject of numerous scholarly studies and is often at the fore- front of works that explore the role of Latinas in American society.


Author biography

The experiences of Esperanza, the adolescent protagonist of The House on Mango Street, closely resemble those of Sandra Cisneros's childhood. The author was born to a Mexican father and a Mexican American mother in 1954 in Chicago, Illinois, the only daughter of seven children. The family, for whom money was always in short supply, frequently moved between the ghetto neighborhoods of Chicago and the areas of Mexico where her father's family lived. Cisneros remembers that as a child she often felt a sense of displacement.
By 1966 her parents had saved enough money for a down payment on a run-down, two-story house in a decrepit Puerto Rican neighborhood on Chicago's north side. There Cisneros spent much of her childhood. This house, as well as the colorful group of characters Cisneros observed around her in the barrio, served as inspiration for some of the stories in The House on Mango Street. The author once remarked, "Because we moved so much, and always in neighborhoods that appeared like France after World War II-empty lots and burned-out buildings-I retreated inside myself." Cisneros was an introspective child with few friends; her mother encouraged her to read and write at a young age, and made sure her daughter had her own library card. The author wrote poems and stories as a schoolgirl, but the impetus for her career as a creative writer came during her college years, when she was introduced to the works of Donald Justice, James Wright, and other writers who made Cisneros more aware of her cultural roots.
Cisneros graduated from Loyola University in 1976 with a B.A. in English. She began to pursue graduate studies in writing at the University of Iowa, and earned a Master of Fine Arts degree in creative writing in 1978. Cisneros says that through high school and college, she did not perceive herself as being different from her fellow English majors. She spoke Spanish only at home with her father, but otherwise wrote and studied within the mainstream of American literature. At the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop, Cisneros found her true voice as an author. Compared with her more privileged, wealthier classmates from more stable environments, Cisneros's cultural difference as a Chicana became clear. Though at first she imitated the style and tone of acclaimed American authors, Cisneros came to realize that her experience as a Hispanic woman differed from that of her classmates and offered an opportunity to develop her own voice. Cisneros once remarked, "Everyone seemed to have some communal knowledge which I did not have-My classmates were from the best schools in the country. They had been bred as fine hothouse flowers. I was a yellow weed among the city's cracks." The author began to explore her past experiences, which served as the inspiration of many of her stories and distinguished her from her peers. Her master's thesis, My Wicked Wicked Ways (Iowa, 1978, published as a book in 1987) is a collection of poems that begins to explore daily experiences, encounters, and observations in this new-found voice.
Cisneros has held several fellowships that have allowed her to focus on her writing full-time. These awards have enabled her to travel to Europe and to other parts of the United States, including a stint in Austin, Texas, where she experienced another thriving community of Latin American culture. She has also taught creative writing and worked with students at the Latino Youth Altemative High School in Chicago.
The House on Mango Street is the coming of age story of Esperanza Cordero, a preadolescent Mexican American girl (Chicana) living in the contemporary United States. A marked departure from the traditional novel form, The House on Mango Street is a slim book consisting of forty-four vignettes, or literary sketches, narrated by Esperanza and ranging in length from two paragraphs to four pages. In deceptively simple language, the novel recounts the complex experience of being young, poor, female, and Chicana in America. The novel opens with a description of the Cordero family's house on Mango Street, the most recent in a long line of houses they have occupied. Esperanza is dissatisfied with the house, which is small and cramped, and doesn't want to stay there. But Mango Street is her home now, and she sets out to try to understand it.
Mango Street is populated by people with many different life stories, stories of hope and despair. First there is Esperanza's own family: her kind father who works two jobs and is absent most of the time; her mother, who can speak two languages and sing opera but never finished high school; her two brothers Carlos and Kiki; and her little sister Nenny. Of the neighborhood children Esperanza meets, there is Cathy, who shows her around Mango Street but moves out shortly thereafter because the neighborhood is "getting bad." Then there are Rachel and Lucy, sisters from Texas, who become Esperanza and Nenny's best friends. There is Meme, who has a dog with two names, one in Spanish and one in English, and Louie the boy from Puerto Rico whose cousin steals a Cadillac one day and gives all the children a ride.
Then there are the teenage girls of Mango Street, whom Esperanza studies carefully for clues about becoming a woman. There is Marin from Puerto Rico, who sells Avon cosmetics and takes care of her younger cousins, but is waiting for a boyfriend to change her life. There is Alicia, who must take care of her father and siblings because her mother is dead, but is determined to keep going to college. And there is Esperanza's beautiful friend Sally, who marries in the eighth grade in order to get away from her father but is now forbidden by her husband to see her friends. Esperanza, Nenny, Lucy, and Rachel discover that acting sexy is more dangerous than liberating when a neighbor gives them four pairs of hand-me-down high heels. They strut around the neighborhood acting like the older girls until a homeless man accosts them. After fleeing, the girls quickly take off the shoes with the intention of never wearing them again.
The grown women Esperanza comes across on Mango Street are less daring and hopeful than the teenage girls, but they have acquired the wisdom that comes with experience. They advise Esperanza not to give up her independence in order to become a girlfriend or wife. Her Aunt Lupe, who was once pretty and strong but is now dying, encourages Esperanza to write poetry. Her mother, who was once a good student, a "smart cookie," regrets having dropped out of school. There are other women in the neighborhood who don't fit into either category, like Edna's Ruthie, a grownup who "likes to play." While the text implies that Ruthie is developmentally disabled, Esperanza perceives her as somebody who "sees lovely things everywhere."
Through observing and interacting with her neighbors, Esperanza forms a connection to MangoStreet which conflicts with her desire to leave. At the funeral for Rachel and Lucy's baby sister she meets their three old aunts who read her palm and her mind:
Esperanza. The one with marble hands called me aside. Esperanza. She held my face with her blueveined hands and looked and looked at me. A long silence. When you leave you must remember always to come back, she said.
What?
When you leave you must remember to come back for the others. A circle, understand? You will always be Esperanza. You will always be Mango Street. You can't erase what you know. You can't forget who you are.
Then I didn't know what to say. It was as if she could read my mind, as if she knew what I had wished for, and I felt ashamed for having made such a selfish wish.
You must remember to come back. For the ones who cannot leave as easily as you. You will remember? She asked as if she was telling me. Yes, yes, I said a little confused.

The three sisters tell Esperanza that while she will go far in life she must remember to come back to Mango Street for the others who do not get as far. By the novel's end Esperanza has realized that her writing is one way to maintain the connection to Mango Street without having to give up her own independence. She will tell the stories of the "ones who cannot out."

Characters

  • Alicia

"Alicia Who Sees Mice" is a young woman burdened by taking care of her family while attending college in order to escape her way of life in the barrio. She is only afraid of mice, which serve as a metaphor for her poverty.

  • Cathy

Cathy, "Queen of Cats," as Esperanza calls her because of her motley collection of felines, is one of Esperanza's neighborhood playmates. Cathy tells Esperanza that she and her family are leaving because the neighborhood into which Esperanza has just moved is going downhill.

  • Carlos Cordero

Carlos is Esperanza's younger brother. The brothers have little interaction with Esperanza and Nenny outside of the structure of the household.

  • Esperanza Cordero

"In English my name means hope. In Spanish it means too many letters," says Esperanza Cordero. In a child-like voice, Esperanza records impressions of the world around her. Her perceptions range from humorous anecdotes pulled from life in the barrio to more dark references to crime and sexual provocation. Through Esperanza's eyes, the reader catches short yet vivid glimpses of the other characters,
particularly the females in Esperanza's neighborhood. In part, Esperanza finds her sense of self-identity among these women. With a sense of awe and mystery, for example, she looks to older girls who wear black clothes and makeup. She experiments with womanhood herself in "The Family of Little Feet," a story in which Esperanza and her friends cavort about the neighborhood in high heel shoes, but are forced to flee when they attract unwanted male attention. Esperanza's sense of selfidentity is also interwoven with her family's house, which emerges throughout the book as an important metaphor for her circumstances. She longs for her own house, which serves as a symbol of the stability, financial means, and sense of belonging that
she lacks in her environment: "a house all my own-Only a house quiet as snow, a space for myself to go, clean as paper before the poem."
As the stories develop, Esperanza matures. She tums from looking outward at her world to a more introspective viewpoint that reveals several sides of her character. Esperanza is a courageous girl who recognizes the existence of a bigger world beyond
her constraining neighborhood, and who, toward the end of the book, is compelled by her own inner strength to leave the barrio. Nonetheless, Esperanza demonstrates empathy for those around her, particularly those who do not see beyond the confines of
their situations: "One day I will say goodbye to Mango. I am too strong for her to keep me here forever.
One day I will go away. Friends and neighbors will say, What happened to that Esperanza? Where did she go with all these books and paper? Why did she march so far away? They will not know I have gone away to come back. For the ones I left behind. For the ones who cannot out." In "Bums in the Attic," Esperanza says, "One day I'll own my own house, but I won't forget who or where I came from." The tension between Esperanza's emotional ties to this community and her desire to transcend it establish a sense of attraction and repulsion that characterize the work.

  • Kiki Cordero

Kiki, "with hair like fur," is Esperanza's younger brother.

  • Magdalena Cordero

"Nenny" is Esperanza's younger sister. Esperanza sees her little sister as childish and unable to understand the world as she does: "Nenny is too young to be my friend. She's just my sister and that was not my fault. You don't pick your sisters, you just get them and sometimes they come like Nenny." However, because the two girls have brothers, Esperanza understands that Nenny is her own responsibility to guide and protect. Esperanza and Nenny share common bonds both as sisters and as Chicana females. In the story "Laughter," a certain neighborhood house reminds both sisters of
Mexico, a connection possible only because of their shared experience: "Nenny says: Yes, that's Mexico all right. That's what I was thinking exactly."

  • Mama Cordero

Esperanza's mother is typical of the women in Latin American communities whose life is defined by marriage, family, children, and traditionally female activities. Mama reveals herself as a superstitious figure who tells Esperanza that she was bom on an evil day and that she will pray for her. Mama operates as a caretaker and has authority over her household, and she is portrayed as a martyr, sacrificing her own needs for those of her family. "I could've been somebody, you know?" Mama proclaims to Esperanza, explaining that she left school because she was ashamed that she didn't have nice clothes. Mama wishes for her daughters a better life outside the cycle of subjugation that characterizes her own, and she views education as the ticket out of that way of life.

  • Nenny Cordero (See Magdalena Cordero)

  • Papa Cordero

Esperanza's father is portrayed as a man burdened with the obligation of providing for his family. Papa holds up a lottery ticket hopefully as he describes to the family the house they will buy one day. In the story "Papa Who Wakes Up Tired in the Dark," Papa reveals his vulnerability to Esperanza, his eldest child, when he learns of his own father's death and asks her to convey the news to her siblings while he returns to Mexico for the funeral.

  • Earl

This man with a southern accent, a jukebox repairman according to Esperanza, appears in the story "The Earl of Tennessee." He occupies a dark basement apartment and brings home women of ill repute whom Esperanza and her friends naively take to be his wife.

  • Elenita

Elenita, "witch woman" who tells fortunes with the help of Christian icons, tarot cards, and other accouterments, tells Esperanza after Reading her cards that she sees a "home in the heart. This leaves Esperanza disappointed that a "real house" does not appear in her future.

  • Louie

The oldest in a family of girls, Louie and his family rent a basement apartment from Meme Ortiz's mother. His cousin Marin lives with the family and helps take care of his younger sisters. Although Louie is really her brother's friend, Esperanza notices that he "has two cousins and that his t-shirts never stay tucked in his pants."

  • Lucy

Lucy is a neighborhood girl whom Esperanza befriends even though her clothes "are crooked and old." Lucy and her sister Rachel are among the first friends Esperanza makes when she moves onto Mango Street.

  • Mamacita

In "No Speak English," Mamacita is the plump mother of a man across the street, a comic and tragic figure who stays indoors all the time because of her fear of speaking English.



  • Media Adaptations

The House on Mango Street was adapted as a sound recording entitled House on Mango Street; Woman Hollering Creek, published by Random House in 1992. It is read by Sandra Cisneros.

  • Marin

Marin is a Puerto Rican neighbor, an older girl with whom Esperanza and her friends are fascinated. Marin wears makeup, sells Avon, and has a boyfriend in Puerto Rico whom she secretly intends to marry, but meanwhile, she is responsible for the care of her younger cousins.

  • Minerva

Minerva is a young woman not much older than Esperanza who "already has two kids and a husband who left."

  • Juan Ortiz

"Meme" is a neighbor of Esperanza's who has a large sheepdog. "The dog is big, like a man dressed in a dog suit, and runs the same way its owner does, clumsy and wild and with the limbs flopping all over the place like untied shoes."

  • Meme Ortiz (See Juan Ortiz)

  • Rachel

Rachel is Lucy's sister, a sassy girl according to Esperanza. Esperanza and Lucy parade around the neighborhood in high heel shoes with her in the story "The Family of Little Feet."

  • Rafaela

Rafaela stays indoors and observes the world from her windowsill, "because her husband is afraid Rafaela will run away since she is too beautiful to look at." Rafaela stands as a symbol for the interior world of women on Mango Street, whose lives are circumscribed and bound by the structure of home and family.

  • Ruthie

Ruthie, "the only grown-up we know who likes to play," is a troubled, childlike woman whose husband left her and was forced to move from her own house in the suburbs back to Mango Street with her mother.

  • Sally

Sally wears black clothes, short skirts, nylons, and makeup. Esperanza looks upon her with fascination and wonder, and wants to emulate her, but the dark side of Sally's life is revealed in her relationship with her abusive father. She trades one type of ensnarement for another by manrying a marshmallow salesman before the eighth grade.

  • Sire

Sire is a young man who leers at Esperanza as she walks down the street, provoking in her inextricable feelings of desire, foreboding, and fear. Esperanza says that "it made your blood freeze to have somebody look at you like that."

  • The Three Sisters

"The Three Sisters" are Rachel and Lucy's elderly aunts who come to visit when Rachel and Lucy's baby sister dies. The three ladies recognize Esperanza's strong-willed nature, and plead with her not to forget the ones she leaves behind on Mango Street when she flees from there one day.

  • Rosa Vargas

In the story, "There Was an Old Woman She Had So Many Children She Didn't Know What to Do," Rosa is portrayed as a woman left in the lurch by a husband who abandoned her and their unruly kids. "They are bad those Vargas, and how can they help it with only one mother who is tired all the time from buttoning and bottling and babying, and who cries every day for the man who left without even leaving a dollar for bologna or a note explaining how come."







NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE: Ernest Hemingway and Toni Morrison (Nobel Lectures)

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Ernest Hemingway

The Nobel Prize in Literature 1954

"for his mastery of the art of narrative, most recently demonstrated in The Old Man and the Sea, and for the influence that he has exerted on contemporary style"


The Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech

    Having no facility for speech-making and no command of oratory nor any domination of rhetoric, I wish to thank the administrators of the generosity of Alfred Nobel for this Prize.

    No writer who knows the great writers who did not receive the Prize can accept it other than with humility. There is no need to list these writers. Everyone here may make his own list according to his knowledge and his conscience.

    It would be impossible for me to ask the Ambassador of my country to read a speech in which a writer said all of the things which are in his heart. Things may not be immediately discernible in what a man writes, and in this sometimes he is fortunate; but eventually they are quite clear and by these and the degree of alchemy that he possesses he will endure or be forgotten.

    Writing, at its best, is a lonely life. Organizations for writers palliate the writer's loneliness but I doubt if they improve his writing. He grows in public stature as he sheds his loneliness and often his work deteriorates. For he does his work alone and if he is a good enough writer he must face eternity, or the lack of it, each day.

    For a true writer each book should be a new beginning where he tries again for something that is beyond attainment. He should always try for something that has never been done or that others have tried and failed. Then sometimes, with great luck, he will succeed.

    How simple the writing of literature would be if it were only necessary to write in another way what has been well written. It is because we have had such great writers in the past that a writer is driven far out past where he can go, out to where no one can help him.

    I have spoken too long for a writer. A writer should write what he has to say and not speak it. Again I thank you.

Toni Morrison

The Nobel Prize in Literature 1993

"who in novels characterized by visionary force and poetic import,
gives life to an essential aspect of American reality"


The Nobel Prize Lecture

 
 "Once upon a time there was an old woman. Blind but wise." Or was it an old man? A guru, perhaps. Or a griot soothing restless children. I have heard this story, or one exactly like it, in the lore of several cultures.

    "Once upon a time there was an old woman. Blind. Wise."

    In the version I know the woman is the daughter of slaves, black, American, and lives alone in a small house outside of town. Her reputation for wisdom is without peer and without question. Among her people she is both the law and its transgression. The honor she is paid and the awe in which she is held reach beyond her neighborhood to places far away; to the city where the intelligence of rural prophets is the source of much amusement.

    One day the woman is visited by some young people who seem to be bent on disproving her clairvoyance and showing her up for the fraud they believe she is. Their plan is simple: they enter her house and ask the one question the answer to which rides solely on her difference from them, a difference they regard as a profound disability: her blindness. They stand before her, and one of them says, "Old woman, I hold in my hand a bird. Tell me whether it is living or dead."

    She does not answer, and the question is repeated. "Is the bird I am holding living or dead?"

    Still she doesn't answer. She is blind and cannot see her visitors, let alone what is in their hands. She does not know their color, gender or homeland. She only knows their motive.

    The old woman's silence is so long, the young people have trouble holding their laughter.

    Finally she speaks and her voice is soft but stern. "I don't know", she says. "I don't know whether the bird you are holding is dead or alive, but what I do know is that it is in your hands. It is in your hands."

    Her answer can be taken to mean: if it is dead, you have either found it that way or you have killed it. If it is alive, you can still kill it. Whether it is to stay alive, it is your decision. Whatever the case, it is your responsibility.

    For parading their power and her helplessness, the young visitors are reprimanded, told they are responsible not only for the act of mockery but also for the small bundle of life sacrificed to achieve its aims. The blind woman shifts attention away from assertions of power to the instrument through which that power is exercised.

    Speculation on what (other than its own frail body) that bird-in-the-hand might signify has always been attractive to me, but especially so now thinking, as I have been, about the work I do that has brought me to this company. So I choose to read the bird as language and the woman as a practiced writer. She is worried about how the language she dreams in, given to her at birth, is handled, put into service, even withheld from her for certain nefarious purposes. Being a writer she thinks of language partly as a system, partly as a living thing over which one has control, but mostly as agency - as an act with consequences. So the question the children put to her: "Is it living or dead?" is not unreal because she thinks of language as susceptible to death, erasure; certainly imperiled and salvageable only by an effort of the will. She believes that if the bird in the hands of her visitors is dead the custodians are responsible for the corpse. For her a dead language is not only one no longer spoken or written, it is unyielding language content to admire its own paralysis. Like statist language, censored and censoring. Ruthless in its policing duties, it has no desire or purpose other than maintaining the free range of its own narcotic narcissism, its own exclusivity and dominance. However moribund, it is not without effect for it actively thwarts the intellect, stalls conscience, suppresses human potential. Unreceptive to interrogation, it cannot form or tolerate new ideas, shape other thoughts, tell another story, fill baffling silences. Official language smitheryed to sanction ignorance and preserve privilege is a suit of armor polished to shocking glitter, a husk from which the knight departed long ago. Yet there it is: dumb, predatory, sentimental. Exciting reverence in schoolchildren, providing shelter for despots, summoning false memories of stability, harmony among the public.

    She is convinced that when language dies, out of carelessness, disuse, indifference and absence of esteem, or killed by fiat, not only she herself, but all users and makers are accountable for its demise. In her country children have bitten their tongues off and use bullets instead to iterate the voice of speechlessness, of disabled and disabling language, of language adults have abandoned altogether as a device for grappling with meaning, providing guidance, or expressing love. But she knows tongue-suicide is not only the choice of children. It is common among the infantile heads of state and power merchants whose evacuated language leaves them with no access to what is left of their human instincts for they speak only to those who obey, or in order to force obedience.

    The systematic looting of language can be recognized by the tendency of its users to forgo its nuanced, complex, mid-wifery properties for menace and subjugation. Oppressive language does more than represent violence; it is violence; does more than represent the limits of knowledge; it limits knowledge. Whether it is obscuring state language or the faux-language of mindless media; whether it is the proud but calcified language of the academy or the commodity driven language of science; whether it is the malign language of law-without-ethics, or language designed for the estrangement of minorities, hiding its racist plunder in its literary cheek - it must be rejected, altered and exposed. It is the language that drinks blood, laps vulnerabilities, tucks its fascist boots under crinolines of respectability and patriotism as it moves relentlessly toward the bottom line and the bottomed-out mind. Sexist language, racist language, theistic language - all are typical of the policing languages of mastery, and cannot, do not permit new knowledge or encourage the mutual exchange of ideas.

    The old woman is keenly aware that no intellectual mercenary, nor insatiable dictator, no paid-for politician or demagogue; no counterfeit journalist would be persuaded by her thoughts. There is and will be rousing language to keep citizens armed and arming; slaughtered and slaughtering in the malls, courthouses, post offices, playgrounds, bedrooms and boulevards; stirring, memorializing language to mask the pity and waste of needless death. There will be more diplomatic language to countenance rape, torture, assassination. There is and will be more seductive, mutant language designed to throttle women, to pack their throats like pate-producing geese with their own unsayable, transgressive words; there will be more of the language of surveillance disguised as research; of politics and history calculated to render the suffering of millions mute; language glamorized to thrill the dissatisfied and bereft into assaulting their neighbors; arrogant pseudo-empirical language crafted to lock creative people into cages of inferiority and hopelessness.

    Underneath the eloquence, the glamor, the scholarly associations, however stirring or seductive, the heart of such language is languishing, or perhaps not beating at all - if the bird is already dead.

    She has thought about what could have been the intellectual history of any discipline if it had not insisted upon, or been forced into, the waste of time and life that rationalizations for and representations of dominance required - lethal discourses of exclusion blocking access to cognition for both the excluder and the excluded.

    The conventional wisdom of the Tower of Babel story is that the collapse was a misfortune. That it was the distraction, or the weight of many languages that precipitated the tower's failed architecture. That one monolithic language would have expedited the building and heaven would have been reached. Whose heaven, she wonders? And what kind? Perhaps the achievement of Paradise was premature, a little hasty if no one could take the time to understand other languages, other views, other narratives period. Had they, the heaven they imagined might have been found at their feet. Complicated, demanding, yes, but a view of heaven as life; not heaven as post-life.

    She would not want to leave her young visitors with the impression that language should be forced to stay alive merely to be. The vitality of language lies in its ability to limn the actual, imagined and possible lives of its speakers, readers, writers. Although its poise is sometimes in displacing experience it is not a substitute for it. It arcs toward the place where meaning may lie. When a President of the United States thought about the graveyard his country had become, and said, "The world will little note nor long remember what we say here. But it will never forget what they did here," his simple words are exhilarating in their life-sustaining properties because they refused to encapsulate the reality of 600, 000 dead men in a cataclysmic race war. Refusing to monumentalize, disdaining the "final word", the precise "summing up", acknowledging their "poor power to add or detract", his words signal deference to the uncapturability of the life it mourns. It is the deference that moves her, that recognition that language can never live up to life once and for all. Nor should it. Language can never "pin down" slavery, genocide, war. Nor should it yearn for the arrogance to be able to do so. Its force, its felicity is in its reach toward the ineffable.

    Be it grand or slender, burrowing, blasting, or refusing to sanctify; whether it laughs out loud or is a cry without an alphabet, the choice word, the chosen silence, unmolested language surges toward knowledge, not its destruction. But who does not know of literature banned because it is interrogative; discredited because it is critical; erased because alternate? And how many are outraged by the thought of a self-ravaged tongue?

    Word-work is sublime, she thinks, because it is generative; it makes meaning that secures our difference, our human difference - the way in which we are like no other life.

    We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.

    "Once upon a time, ..." visitors ask an old woman a question. Who are they, these children? What did they make of that encounter? What did they hear in those final words: "The bird is in your hands"? A sentence that gestures towards possibility or one that drops a latch? Perhaps what the children heard was "It's not my problem. I am old, female, black, blind. What wisdom I have now is in knowing I cannot help you. The future of language is yours."

    They stand there. Suppose nothing was in their hands? Suppose the visit was only a ruse, a trick to get to be spoken to, taken seriously as they have not been before? A chance to interrupt, to violate the adult world, its miasma of discourse about them, for them, but never to them? Urgent questions are at stake, including the one they have asked: "Is the bird we hold living or dead?" Perhaps the question meant: "Could someone tell us what is life? What is death?" No trick at all; no silliness. A straightforward question worthy of the attention of a wise one. An old one. And if the old and wise who have lived life and faced death cannot describe either, who can?

    But she does not; she keeps her secret; her good opinion of herself; her gnomic pronouncements; her art without commitment. She keeps her distance, enforces it and retreats into the singularity of isolation, in sophisticated, privileged space.

    Nothing, no word follows her declaration of transfer. That silence is deep, deeper than the meaning available in the words she has spoken. It shivers, this silence, and the children, annoyed, fill it with language invented on the spot.

    "Is there no speech," they ask her, "no words you can give us that helps us break through your dossier of failures? Through the education you have just given us that is no education at all because we are paying close attention to what you have done as well as to what you have said? To the barrier you have erected between generosity and wisdom?

    "We have no bird in our hands, living or dead. We have only you and our important question. Is the nothing in our hands something you could not bear to contemplate, to even guess? Don't you remember being young when language was magic without meaning? When what you could say, could not mean? When the invisible was what imagination strove to see? When questions and demands for answers burned so brightly you trembled with fury at not knowing?

    "Do we have to begin consciousness with a battle heroines and heroes like you have already fought and lost leaving us with nothing in our hands except what you have imagined is there? Your answer is artful, but its artfulness embarrasses us and ought to embarrass you. Your answer is indecent in its self-congratulation. A made-for-television script that makes no sense if there is nothing in our hands.

    "Why didn't you reach out, touch us with your soft fingers, delay the sound bite, the lesson, until you knew who we were? Did you so despise our trick, our modus operandi you could not see that we were baffled about how to get your attention? We are young. Unripe. We have heard all our short lives that we have to be responsible. What could that possibly mean in the catastrophe this world has become; where, as a poet said, "nothing needs to be exposed since it is already barefaced." Our inheritance is an affront. You want us to have your old, blank eyes and see only cruelty and mediocrity. Do you think we are stupid enough to perjure ourselves again and again with the fiction of nationhood? How dare you talk to us of duty when we stand waist deep in the toxin of your past?

    "You trivialize us and trivialize the bird that is not in our hands. Is there no context for our lives? No song, no literature, no poem full of vitamins, no history connected to experience that you can pass along to help us start strong? You are an adult. The old one, the wise one. Stop thinking about saving your face. Think of our lives and tell us your particularized world. Make up a story. Narrative is radical, creating us at the very moment it is being created. We will not blame you if your reach exceeds your grasp; if love so ignites your words they go down in flames and nothing is left but their scald. Or if, with the reticence of a surgeon's hands, your words suture only the places where blood might flow. We know you can never do it properly - once and for all. Passion is never enough; neither is skill. But try. For our sake and yours forget your name in the street; tell us what the world has been to you in the dark places and in the light. Don't tell us what to believe, what to fear. Show us belief s wide skirt and the stitch that unravels fear's caul. You, old woman, blessed with blindness, can speak the language that tells us what only language can: how to see without pictures. Language alone protects us from the scariness of things with no names. Language alone is meditation.

    "Tell us what it is to be a woman so that we may know what it is to be a man. What moves at the margin. What it is to have no home in this place. To be set adrift from the one you knew. What it is to live at the edge of towns that cannot bear your company.

    "Tell us about ships turned away from shorelines at Easter, placenta in a field. Tell us about a wagonload of slaves, how they sang so softly their breath was indistinguishable from the falling snow. How they knew from the hunch of the nearest shoulder that the next stop would be their last. How, with hands prayered in their sex, they thought of heat, then sun. Lifting their faces as though is was there for the taking. Turning as though there for the taking. They stop at an inn. The driver and his mate go in with the lamp leaving them humming in the dark. The horse's void steams into the snow beneath its hooves and its hiss and melt are the envy of the freezing slaves.

    "The inn door opens: a girl and a boy step away from its light. They climb into the wagon bed. The boy will have a gun in three years, but now he carries a lamp and a jug of warm cider. They pass it from mouth to mouth. The girl offers bread, pieces of meat and something more: a glance into the eyes of the one she serves. One helping for each man, two for each woman. And a look. They look back. The next stop will be their last. But not this one. This one is warmed."

    It's quiet again when the children finish speaking, until the woman breaks into the silence.

    "Finally", she says, "I trust you now. I trust you with the bird that is not in your hands because you have truly caught it. Look. How lovely it is, this thing we have done - together."

DRAMA: Expressionism. Expressionism in drama

12:17 Silvia Lucía del V. Fernández , Posted in , , 3 Comments


Expressionism
               


 An exaggeration or distortion of surface reality to depict an inner truth. Expressionism is an artistic style in which the artist attempts to depict not objective reality but rather the subjective emotions and responses that objects and events arouse in him. He accomplishes his aim through distortion, exaggeration, primitivism, and fantasy and through the vivid, jarring, violent, or dynamic application of formal elements. In a broader sense Expressionism is one of the main currents of art in the later 19th and the 20th centuries, and its qualities of highly subjective, personal, spontaneous self-expression are typical of a wide range of modern artists and art movements.
Expressionism itself was never a concerted or well-defined movement, no one individual connected with expressionism wrote a program or offered a theory that was binding for the entire “movement,” one work in particular exerted a powerful influence on many artists.
 It can be said, however, that its central feature is a revolt against the artistic and literary tradition of realism, both in subject matter and in style.
 The expressionist artist or writer undertakes to express a personal vision--usually a troubled or tensely emotional vision--of human life and human society. THIS IS DONE BY EXAGGERATING AND DISTORTING what, according to the norms of artistic realism, are objective features of the outer world, and by embodying violent extremes of mood and feeling. Often the work implies that what is depicted or described represents the experience of an individual standing alone and afraid in an industrial, technological, and urban society which is disintegrating into chaos.
Expressionist painters tended to use jagged lines to depict contorted objects and forms, as well as to substitute arbitrary, often lurid colors, for natural hues. These artists used the expressive possibilities of colour and line to explore dramatic and emotion-laden themes, to convey the qualities of fear, horror, and the grotesque, or simply to celebrate nature with hallucinatory intensity. They broke away from the literal representation of nature in order to express more subjective outlooks or states of mind.
They used jagged, distorted lines; crude, rapid brushwork; and jarring colours to depict urban street scenes and other contemporary subjects in crowded, agitated compositions notable for their instability and their emotionally charged atmosphere. Many of their works express frustration, anxiety, disgust, discontent, violence, and generally a sort of frenetic intensity of feeling in response to the ugliness, the crude banality, and the possibilities and contradictions that they discerned in modern life.
Expressionism sets out to achieve the greatest possible degree of expressivity. It is not beauty that dominates but emotion. The deformation of the image of nature to reflect intense expression and the use of strong colours are characteristic of expressionist painting.
 What is Expressionism? First of all, what it is not:
--It is not Impressionism which seeks to capture transient nature at different moments, to reflect the diversity of the physical world. The impressionist expresses certain things without the intervention of the mind. Impressionist art records momentary impressions, of landscapes, buildings, parks. Monet painted a church at various moments of the day, each time producing a different painting.
Unlike Impressionism, its goals are not to reproduce the impression suggested by the surrounding world, but to strongly impose the artist's own sensibility to the world's representation. The expressionist artist substitutes to the visual object reality his own image of this object, which he feels as an accurate representation of its real meaning. The search of harmony and forms is not as important as trying to achieve the highest expression intensity, both from the aesthetic point of view and according to idea and human critics.

--It is not Naturalism which records "life as it is" & photographs everyday reality. Naturalistic art is grounded in a working-class milieu, in gritty and squalid environments. Naturalist plays often are written in dialect (e.g. Georg Hauptmann's The Weavers) and are reflective of a deterministic world view, bearing the marks of Social Darwinism.
The expressionist believes the world is there for everyone to see. It would be absurd to reproduce the world purely and simply as it is. Expressionism seeks neither the momentary appearances nor things in their everyday countenance, but rather the essence of things, the eternal or abiding meaning of facts and objects, the deeper reality behind surface appearances. Expressionists do not see; they have visions. Appearances are only a semblance, claims the expressionist; we must transcend the superficial guise of reality to find true meaning.

The expressionist seeks an object's most expressive aspect. Reality is not something "out there," but rather the creation of minds--and wills.
We people of today are expressionists. People who want to shape the outside world from within themselves. The expressionist is building a new world within him… a new macrocosm. A world of its own. Expressionist sense of the world is explosive. It is an autocratic sense of being oneself.



Thus, emphasis was not to be placed on “observation ofvisual details” but on “visionary experiences”. As Van Gogh wrote in  letter: “ Because instead of trying to reproduce exactly what I have before my eyes, I use color more arbitrarily so as to express myself more forcefully.... I should like to paint the portrait of an artist friend, a man who dreams great dreams, who works as the nightingale sings, because it is his nature. He'll be a fair man. I want to put into the picture my appreciation, the love that I have for him. So I paint him as he is, as faithfully as I can, to begin with.But the picture is not finished yet. To finish it I am now going to be the arbitrary colorist. I exaggerate the fairness of the hair, I get to orange tones, chromes and pale lemon yellows.  Beyond the head, instead of painting the ordinary wall of the mean room, I paint infinity, a plain background of the richest, intensest blue that I can contrive, and by this simple combination the bright head illuminated against a rich blue background acquires a mysterious effect, like the  star in the depths of an azure sky” (Letters, p. 277).
 Substituting definition for description, Herbert Read called expressionism an art seeking to reproduce “not the objective reality of the world, but the subjective reality of the feeling which objects and events arouse in us” (The Philosophy of Modern Art, p. 51).: Renouncing any claims to universal beauty, Kandinsky states that “internal beauty is achieved through necessity and renunciation of the conventionally beautiful”.

As far as painting is concerned, expressionism emerged as a reaction to impressionism and the academic style of the age. From an historic point of view, the creation of The Bridge movement (Die Brücke, 1905) can be considered as the beginning of expressionism in the fine arts.

The need to express a modern voice against an outmoded way of life led the Expressionists to break with the Old Order. In 1892 Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (founder of the Brücke group) viewed the Munich Sezession Movement exhibition of Impressionist and Post Impressionist paintings. He felt that their content and execution were insignificant. It was then (1900) that he decided German art needed a different direction, modern visual communication.

 The artists in the Brücke group found their stimulus from life and experience. They strove for personal expression, an artistic oneness, and soul-searching that liberated content from its constrictive mode. They enforced a revolutionary idealism and sought "a new culture of man as the basis of true art" .
 Most painted in an abstract manner in reaction to traditional Realism, voicing their discontentment with the spiritlessness found in contemporary society. Edvard Munch, analyzed the inner turmoil, conflicts, and extreme states of awareness in his paintings.  His The Cry is the epitom of the style.
By looking inward the Expressionists were able to scrutinize and express artistically their idiosyncrasies, cast- off antiquated perspectives, and obtain aesthetic fulfillment (life and beauty of spirit).

They sought liberation from conventional artistic trends through a psychological penetration into human consciousness. A majority used aesthetic expression as an outcry against the petrified formality of traditional styles. Others  confronted the inner unknown, and reacted against their dissatisfaction with the world.

Self-expression was theExpressionistic ferment for pure abstraction. Mystical-spiritual unity, man's autumnal awakening, and the struggle for social justice would be issues examined in their works. Kandinsky felt that absolute freedom for the artist produced spirituality and salvation.

 The intensity of color was transferred to canvas by frayed nerves exhibiting an ugly reality. The  , and explosion of sensation Van Gogh wrote his brother Theo: "Instead of trying to render exactly what I have before my eyes, I use color more arbitrarily in order to express myself more powerfully"
Van Gogh used yellow (his favorite hue) and blue as his primary colors; these colors would advance and vibrate from his canvas. Kandinsky and Marc used these primary colors to transcend everyday visual communication. Brightened by the influence of light, yellow became relaxed, hopeful, a guiding light while violet or gray dissipated into darkness .
 
Both Van Gogh and Gauguin felt that human emotions could be expressed through color; it gave their work symbolic meaning, the ideal state where man and nature were one. The Expressionists were motivated by the idea of colors and emotions being interrelated and the use of color to relate spiritual or mystical concepts.

Modern psychological studies have shown that colors do influence and affect our emotional states in response to size, distance, space, and temperature. The Expressionists would take color and light values beyond the established order, which showed mystical- modernity as a new era had begun.

Wassily Kandinsky founded a school known as the New Artists Alliance, Munich. Kandinsky used primary colors (under the influence of Van Gogh) like blue and yellow, and secondary colors like orange and green, a "choir of colors," to project the tangible unity found in man. Certain colors held vivid meanings which strengthened a painting's individuality, a unique "language of color and content." His emotional sequence ran as follows.

emotion [in the artist] > the sensed > the art work > the sensed > emotion [in the observer]

Expressionists were able to infuse a manipulation of the senses through their abstract works. Kandinsky stated: "The artist must train not only his eye but also his soul, so that it can weigh colors on its own scale and thus become a determinant in artistic creation". Kandinsky was an innovator who recognized and expressed the importance of color and abstraction's ability to evoke a multitude of reactions. Later in his career, color momentum and spiritual insight would become non-representational (in 1910, at forty-four years of age).


 The Creators: The Brücke and Blaue Reiter Schools

The Brücke (Bridge) group was founded in 1905 in the city of Dresden by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, a former architectural student turned painter. Other members included Fritz Bleyl, Erich Heckel, Max Pechstein, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, and later Emil Nolde. From the beginning they rejected traditional academic sterility and social injustice. Their art form was aggressive, spontaneous, often violent--which coincided with the times.

 They wanted their art to reflect an avant-garde interpretation, and to create a radically modern art form that disclosed the decline of an age. The artists in the Brücke group felt that man must strive for a higher existence beyond convention, and secularism.

Kirchner's paintings were flat, two-dimensional color areas with vertical-diagonal lines (symbolizing the infinite), elongated figures that were round in the belly with narrow legs (Medieval influence), and furioso brush strokes that expelled "emotional impact" (Preble 415). Primitivism, with its uncorrupted simplification, held great appeal for the ExpressionistsIn his oil paintings, Kirchner blended red with purple, black with purple, and blues and greens with purple, associating purple with spirituality. In the Catholic Church violet or purple had always been identified with the Passion of Christ. Kirchner stated, "My goal was always to express emotion and experience with large and simple forms, and clear colors" .

The Brücke group sustained their struggle within in order to inspire a pure identity and spontaneity of expression. Both were intent on preserving their improvisation and originality in form and color. Kirchner wrote in his diary in 1923: "Uncomprehended for the most part, and totally distorted; for with us [the will] shaped the form and gave it meaning".

Eventually the Brücke group grew apart; and after eight years of working together, in 1913 their dissolution was announced ending a remarkable legacy of artistic emotion. The Blaue Reiter (Blue Rider) School was formed in the city of Munich by Wassily Kandinsky, a Russian law student who had left Moscow to study art in Germany. Kandinsky and Franz Marc held the first Blaue Reiter Exhibition on December 18, 1911, at the Modern Thannhäuser Gallery.
From the beginning, individualism, instead of co-working, was evident among the various artists. The name Blaue Reiter held a significant spiritual and romantic relationship. The color blue exuded a transcendent spirituality and was associated with the German Romantic poets who had influenced the Expressionists. Secondly, the iconography identified with The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse--famine, pestilence, war, and death--reflected the confusion of the times in their works. Kandinsky wanted to express something more sacred: he felt art was the life of the spirit and should communicate to the soul through subjective colors like blues and oranges.
Their works were not based on objective reality and were meant as a salvation for humanity, a response against industrial expansionism, nationalism, and disenchantment. They wanted the public to adopt an imaginative interpretation
"If Expressionism at the moment behaves in an ungainly, violent manner, its excuse lies in the prevailing conditions it finds...we ourselves have to become barbarians to save the future of humanity from mankind as it now is. As primitive man, driven by fear of nature, sought refuge within himself, so we too have to adopt flight from a 'civilization' which is out to devour our souls...[Expressionism is] a tocsin of alarm given out by all panic-stricken souls." Hermann Bah



 
EXPRESSIONISM  IN  DRAMA

Trend that influenced drama, as a revolt against realism and naturalism, and aimed to show the inner state of the subject. NOT through psychological realism which rendered the subject giving the illusion of actual experience BUT through DIRECT EXPRESSIONS of thoughts, above all, emotions.

                                                                        THUS

They expressed the INNER CONSCIOUSNESS of an individual,


Through:

Ø  DISTORTION;
Ø  EXAGERATION;
Ø  PRIMITIVISM;
Ø  FANTASY

-They make full use of SIMBOLISM AND DREAM-LIKE ELEMENTS
-They tried to convey the DEHUMANIZING ASPECTS of the 20th century society.
-They focused on the regeneration of a CORRUPTED HUMANITY:
Ø  AGAINST SOCIAL  INJUSTICIES;
Ø  REJECTED MATERIALISM;
Ø  WANTED TO WEAKEN THE CAPITALIST SYSTEM.

As the chief characteristic of the 20th century literature is:
                                Experimentation, that is:
Ø  The belief that previous writing was stereotyped & inadequate;
Ø  Ceaseless technical innovation.

                                  THUS

EXPRESSIONISM set out the change of the rules that governed the way drama could be :

     WRITTEN,                                         ENCODED                     &                            STAGED.
                                                                     



-structure                                           -language                                                   -performance
 of the                                                - fragmentation                                           -overacting
 play                                                   - use of slang                                              - non-realistic
                                                                                                                               settings                                                                                          -divided
 in 8 scenes
-episodic.
CHARACTERISTICS:

  1. Non-realistic settings, which represents the playwrights MINDSCAPE.              Use of the fantastic.
-          STOKEHOLE, minutely described (stage directions, p. 1548), liner as a “steel cage”.

                                                                                                           DEHUMANIZATION
  1. Abstraction & Essentialization           mental images instead of real things.
  2. Characters, not named but labeled (voices, 2nd engineer) , they are not individuals but types, and they are symbolical & allegorical.
-          PADDY  represents the past. He is Romantic and Idealist. He believes in   love(p 1560). He marks the clash between the past and the present (industrialized society).
-          LONG is the stereotype of the socialist.
*They are supporting characters for they help to build up dramatic tension & emphasize the dramatic conflict-------MAN’S PLACE IN SOCIETY.
-          YANK is the stereotype of the worker. He stands for HUMANITY. He is a product of industrialism. He is also depicted as a hairy ape, in order to emphasize the DEHUMANIZATION OF THE WORKING CLASS---NO FAMILY, NO HOME, NO LIFE.

  1. The use of the GROTESQUE, conveys the idea of DEHUMANIZATION.
-          ALL MEN ALIKE               IGNORANCE ,
-          HAIRY APE IMAGE           MASSIFICATION & PRIMITIVISM.

  1. Repetition of imagery:
-          Rodin’s “ The Thinker” contrasted to the ape-like pose(scenes IV, p1559; VI, p 1516; VIII, p 1573). It conveys the idea of the “INABILITY TO THINK”(allegorical), and serves for the reinforcement of the theme.
-          Cage, conveys the idea of a “TRAPPED CONDITON” . Presented in the jail scene, the liner scenes and the zoo scene. It is the dominant image.
-          Two worlds:                the deck  & -------on the top, high class, wealthy people.
                                            the stoke hole-------underground, dark region of Yank’s      diff.  in                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                 
                                                                              mind (Freud), working class.                 social
                                                                                                                                    classes.
-          Voices        speaking in UNISON.           Compared to machines
                                        Like phonograph horns.           DEHUMANIZATION
                                          Metallic quality.                     MASSIFICATION, NOT
                                                                                           INDIVIDUALS.
                                       

6. Effect of imagery
-          Mildred’s white apparition          fantastic. Ghost-like. Marker of social differences.
Bear in mind the clash between her blinding whiteness & the darkness of the stoke hole
(chiaroscuro).
The white color is often associated whit wholeness but here it represents the opposite: emptiness.
She has  at this apparition too much light representing  energy but in scene II, p 1554, in  the stage directions she is depicted as speaking passionless, thus this apparition conveys ARTIFITIALITY & LACK OF ENERGY.
 
  1. Unrealistic expressive LIGHTING.
-          Use of the chiaroscuro------contrast between light and darkness
-          Most seen in the stage directions(scene III p 1557; p1558)
-          Gray light-----in between humanity & individuality (scene VI JAIL; scene VIII ZOO)
  1. Structure of the play, shows fragmentation, episodic, 8 scenes not divided in acts, symbolic of alienation, like a dream-like sequence
  2. Use of abrupt, telegraphic, exclamatory, slang, not well-spelled language & dialogue,. It represents IGNORANCE.

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