The Music Thing + The Story Thing

            As I have developed as a musician, I began to notice that the most engaging music has a strong sense of motion. This motion does not necessarily have to be communicated through dance or visual art (though it certainly could); it is simply felt by the listener along with the emotions and memories that the harmony evokes. Based off of Kurt Vonnegut’s “shape of story” plots, a quality piece of literature, viewed from the lens of one dynamic character, has a strong sense of motion to it as well. With this common denominator of motion, I combined music and literature by composing a classical composition that represents the shape of story plot for Sethe in the story Beloved.

            In order to make the interpretation and comparison between the two less arbitrary I made a key of musical devices translated to the motion of the story (pictured below).

Just as a writer makes use of a wide array of rhetorical and literary devices to convey his/her meaning, I sought to use various musical devices to convey the Sethe’s “happiness/sadness curve.” (pictured below)

            Starting from when Sethe is in labor with Denver, the piece starts off in d minor with fast harmonic minor runs towards the end; these fast harmonic minor runs along with diminished chords on measure seven all help to convey the rising tension that Sethe experiences due to her fear for staying alive to give birth to her child and her distress for the well-being of the rest of her family who she had been separated from; though the presence and “help” of Amy Denver was a slight ray of hope, the overall tension in the motion of this part of the story prevails. A ritardando (slowing down) and a modulation to the parallel major portray the huge sense of relief that Sethe undoubtedly feels upon her arrival to 124. This slow section, though it is mostly calm to portray the sense of peace that Sethe feels just after her arrival due to the almost assured future of family and freedom, there is still some dissonance (measure 16) conveyed through the flat six in the base line. A flat six is a reference to the minor key. This dissonance is due to Sethe’s angst about the well being of her husband, Halle, who has yet to arrive from the escaped plantation.

            The happiest section of the piece modulates back to minor and ends with a fast diminished arpeggio run (measure 32); this correlates to Sethe’s killing of one of her children due to the presence of the school teacher and her dreading the prospect of her children having to experience the sufferings of slavery. The “second movement” of the piece starts out in minor again portraying Sethe’s life 18 years after the killing of her child; the tension and melancholy feel of the music in this section represents the death of Baby Suggs, the running away of Howard and Buglar, and the continued disdain that the surrounding black community feels towards Sethe. The modulation to major is meant to portray the short spurt of comfort Sethe experiences as a result of Paul D arriving; it references the happy theme I composed earlier on in the composition because Sethe is constantly attempting to get back to that sense of peace she experienced during her first days at 124. The whole tone scale and chromatic scale (measure 46 and 47), meant to provoke a sense of ominous confusion and uncertainty, correlate to the unusual behavior of Beloved towards Sethe and the developing relationship between Sethe and Beloved; the piece modulates back to major to portray the short time of joy that Sethe, Beloved, and Denver experience together

            The last section of the piece is again in minor/ harmonic minor and is in ¾ time; this all helps to convey the rising tension that the relationship between Beloved and Sethe is causing; the tension continues to increase as all of the women in town gather in front of 124 along with Mr. Bodwin coming to 124 to pick up Denver so she can work at his house to earn money for her now mentally ill mother, Sethe. The ending harmonic minor run (measures 61-62) indicate Sethe rushing at Mr. Bodwin to kill him with an ice pick, mistaking him to be someone to be the school teacher.

            Though the story ends with a sense of hope with Paul D’s comforting words to Sethe, the piece still ends in minor to illustrate what the story of Beloved represents: the evil of slavery.

Sethe: The Existentialist

If an existentialist were to address the issue of slavery in the mid 19^th century, he or she would most likely nod their head in approval of the slaves who were able to escape (or attempt escape); they would applaud their understanding that their fate is in their own hands and the fact that escaped slaves (or attempters) did not merely sit by idly expecting their fortunes to change, accepting that their outcome was out of their control. Sethe, the protagonist in the novel Beloved epitomizes this principle throughout the story; when looked at in the light of this principle of existentialism (that the individual is in control of his/her fate), Sethe’s controversial decisions and actions can be better understood and justified.

            At first glance, it would appear that Sethe, from Toni Morrison’s Beloved, is a foil of Monsieur Meursault, from Albert Camus’ The Stranger; the way in which Sethe (and other escaped slaves alike) deals with slavery, by taking action in order to better her life as well as the lives of her loved ones, seems to be in direct contrast with Meursault’s apathetic indifference to his life and the lives of those around him. Fullfillment and happiness in Meusault’s life seems to be easily attainable if not for Meursault’s detached and overly passive lifestyle. This defining characteristic of Meursault is used by Camus to apply to his overall theme that life is “absurd,” because our deaths are inevitable. As Alan Gullette stated in his essay "Death and Absurdism in Camus' The Stranger," “In a sense, Meursault is always aware of the meaninglessness of all endeavors in the face of death.” Therefore, Meursault, when faced with the threat of a death sentence for an ambiguous murder that he was not necessarily responsible for fails to take the simple, legal (truthful) and easily executed actions necessary to, at the least, avoid the death sentence; Meursault’s complacency leads to his demise.

            In Contrast, Sethe and other escaped slaves are placed in circumstances where attaining happiness seems impossible, escaping the situation into freedom seems an equally hopeless endeavor. However, unlike Meursault they have a zeal for life that enables them to achieve what seemed impossible and hopeless. Sethe’s love for her children and her unwillingness to succumb to the thought that her fate lies in another’s hands not only helped she and her children escape slavery, but also, was what incited her to kill her daughter; if Sethe had possessed Meursault’s qualities, she and her family would have been forced to go back to Sweet Home and face the evil’s of the “Schoolteacher.” By killing Beloved, Sethe protected her daughter along with the rest of her children, from what would have been a lifetime of suffering and bondage.

When contrasting the two themes of the novel, it is easy to immediately jump to the conclusion that Albert Camus’ theme is “bad,” and that no similarities can be found between the two. However, another layer of Camus’ theme exists; at the end of The Stranger Meursault, at the precipice of death, experiences great happiness; he has finally been realeased from the constant pursuit to avoid death and is therefore able to enjoy the time he has left without worrying about death. As Gullette put it, “The idea of death makes one aware of one's life, one's vital being – that which is impermanent and will one day end.” In much the same way, Sixo, when he accepts that his death is inevitable, yields great joy from his last moments in knowing that he has saved his lover and the child that he had just conceived; he does not focus on death but on living and giving a good life to others. Sethe accepts a similar principle; she is able to see that death is not the worst thing in life, and, by doing so, saves Beloved from a life filled with suffering.

Sheets

As the rats hopelessly foraged for one, just one, morsel of food in the tight alley way, and the last surviving flies of the summer incessantly sought to penetrate the one flickering street lamp and its limited warmth, the old man walked. He plodded and lumbered and brooded and wandered through the unforgiving cold and dark. His gait was that of a decrepit lemon, on its last miles, crawling agonizingly up its one last hill; that of a beast of burden whose master is preparing to euthanize due to its lack of productivity and efficiency. Yes, society had declared the old man as one unable to acquire a meaningful profit; they had gotten all they could from him; his abilities, replaced by the new generation, were no longer needed. So down the abandoned street he went, with no where to go, and no where to rest, knowing that if he stopped, the creeping cold would take over.

He chose to sit down for a while, his aching body begging for some sort of a reprieve. But his body contradicted this action after a few minutes of sitting; his stillness invited the cold bitter air to invade his waning warmth and his body once again commanded him to get back up and keep walking, keep crawling. He couldn’t make himself stand so he curled up in a tight ball to better resist the cold. As the old man sat there, against the cold cement of the building he gazed around at his surroundings. The windows of the buildings winked back with the soft glow of comfort and warmth behind each curtain. He looked longingly at each window to see if any lights were on; if there was any hope that some compassionate soul might see an old man 30 stories below, dirty, exhausted, unshaven, and invite him in to stay in the warmth and comfort for the night.

As he sat there gazing blankly at the building, a motion in one of the windows caught his eye. It was that of young girl getting off the couch to turn off the lights and draw the curtains closed. The old man saw  the girl distinctly and noticed just before she turned off the light that she had wrapped herself up in a colorful quilt probably to beat out the feeble attempts of the cold to pervade her body. The vision of that quilt, the bringer of warmth, incited the budding of a dormant memory within the old man. He remembered like he never thought he would remember before, a moment before his abandonment and his betrayal and before incessant cold and discomforts were only present when the door opened. The memory simply consisted of him slowly drifting off to sleep on the family’s couch, swaddled in his favorite, beloved quilt. He had been reminiscing about the productive day’s work, his caring family, thankful for the continued fortune in his life despite age.

As if awaking from a dream, the old Man remembered where he was and just when his last golden drop of warmth was about to be spent, he discovered a new cache of energy that just enough to get him moving again. He finally got to the end of the street only to see another endless, dark sidewalk disappearing into the abyss of the city. Regardless, the elderly trudged on. He finally decided to lay down on the cold side walk near a darkened linen shop. The sign on the door read: “Hiring.” As the old man drifted off to sleep, surrendering to the cold, a peep of sunlight reflected off the glass windows of the buildings lining the streets.

Saving Private Billy

           Despite the portrayal of heroism and altruism (two traits that Kurt Vonnegut condemns when they are associated with war) in the movie Saving Private Ryan, both the film, with its realistic gore and questionable morals on both sides of the battle field, and Slaughterhouse Five share a the common theme of portraying the morality in war to be ambiguous; also, both seek to show the audience the horrors of war in order to denounce the widely held attitude that glorifies war.

            In Saving Private Ryan, it is evident from the first combat scene that Steven Spielberg desires to be as realistic as possible when rendering the decimation of human life that was D-day. Though Tom Hanks, playing the Captain that eventually won the Americans the Omaha beach head, was shown as heroic for his leadership and courage (therefore leading one to believe that war is being glorified) this one act of heroism is heavily outweighed by the slaughter that preceded it. As soon as the “ducks” carrying the men to the beach opened their hatches, life is equated to almost nothing. Men are killed before they can even take one step off the transportation vessels much less take one step onto the beach. Everything about the scene engenders abhorrence towards war, especially when Tom Hanks (the Captain) is shown experiencing a moment of trauma (to say the least) in which he seems to lose himself. 

The sounds become muffled, everything turns to slow motion, and we see things from his perspective: the man carrying his own lost arm, the soldier cowering behind the mine, the tide thick with blood, the strew of dead bodies. This creates a bigger imprint and effect when shown in this manner. It is as if to say, “how can I continue fighting when so much death and suffering has already happened). But the carnage and slaughter never capitulates. Perhaps the scene that causes the most repugnance toward war is when the German (whom the group had previously captured and let free instead of executing) comes back and stabs the Jewish American soldier with the Hitler Youth Knife. All of these instances incite the questions, “how can humans do this to one another?” and “What causes us to feel the need to cause so much suffering upon another group of people?” Slaughter House Five begs the same question. Vonnegut states atrocities that occurred in his experience of the war so bluntly and abruptly, as if he were making them commonplace. For example, at the very beginning of the book in the prelude, Vonnegut, talking about the cab driver Gerhard Müller, states, “He had a pleasant little apartment and his daughter was getting an excellent education. His mother was incinerated in the Dresden fire-storm. So it goes.” Or his calm, upfront approach to mentioning death with his reoccurring phrase, “so it goes.” This candid way of speaking is parallel to how undisguised the gore and horrors of war are in Saving Private Ryan. Nothing is left to the imagination.

            The occasional absence and ambiguity of morals in war is also a common theme in both works. However, both put an emphasis on the questionable scruples of the supposed “good” side (the Allied forces) especially the Americans. In Saving Private Ryan, for example, the Americans, after winning over the Omaha beachhead, continue to kill Germans after they have held their hands up in surrender. When they burn the inside of the gun tower in the same scene one of the American soldiers yells, “don’t shoot! [the German soldiers who are on fire] Let’em burn.” Similarly, in Slaughter House Five Vonnegut draws the attention away from the commonly told horrors of WWII (D-day, the Holocaust, Pearl Harbor, Iwa Jima) and focuses on a situation where devastation and suffering was caused by the Americans: the fire bombing of Dresden. Vonnegut also talks of the cruelty and selfishness of the American soldiers accompanying Billy before he gets taken as a POW. Both scouts abandon Billy and his oppressor, Roland Weary; after this abandonment Weary proceeds to brutally beat up Billy and, just as he is about to kill him, a small group of German soldiers appears, with one of the Germans described as, “the soldiers blue eyes were filled with a bleary civilian curiosity as to why one American would try to murder another one so far away from home…”

            By providing evidence of the supposed “good” side committing the same type of obscenities as the supposed “bad” side, Vonnegut and Spielberg divert the attention away from the battle against good vs. evil. They are putting down the common conclusion that people make about war: since the “good” side beat the “bad” side, war is necessary and good. The dubious morals that the American’s are shown to have and the stark descriptions and depictions of the savagery in war in both works show that war itself is the culprit; war should be treated as the enemy, and the only way to fight war is to stop fighting.

Yes, Books Can Talk to Each Other (and It Helps to Listen)

My fourth-grade mind struggled to stumble upon a truly original idea for the last “invention convention” of my schooling career. I was repulsed by the notion of “inventing” a device that someone had already thought of. If not for my father’s reassurance that “every idea comes from another idea,” my pursuit would have been futile and endless. I recalled this instance from my childhood as I read Foster’s words, “there is no such thing as a wholly original work of literature.” Whether consciously or unconsciously, writers site, allude to, symbolize previous stories, poems, plays, movies, as well as the themes, characters, and motifs from them. With this knowledge in mind, how then does a writer make his/her work truly unique and, as the commonly reoccurring command that every English teacher threatens to his/her students states, “not merely restating what has already been said?”

            According to Foster, how the author weaves the elements of other works into his/her own work, how they themselves interpret the work, and how the correlation, the “conversation” between the author’s work and an older piece, is what makes each story unique (while also strengthening the message). It is analogous to why musicians still play Brahms, Bach, and Beethoven. Each artist’s interpretation of the pieces of music has to be individually their own (not just playing the notes or “restating what has already been said”). Or take Jazz where the same standards have been played for decades. There is, of course, improvisation after the original melody is played where the musicians harmonize their own melody based on the chord progression of the tune. In both cases the artists, the writers, are creating their own unique work from somebody else’s famous piece that still resonates with people.

            Resonance. People love resonance. We love making connections and associations with things we are familiar with (that’s why the psychologists who make the SAT are evil). So when a ghost appears to a young boy warning him of the evil new ruler/stepfather and his betrayal to the crown/family, or when a character sacrifices himself to save a large group of people, we as readers are drawn towards these connections helping to make the reading experience more meaningful. Making parallels between texts adds more depth to the story and helps to implant the themes and meaning in our minds. But, as Foster underscored, recognizing a reference in a text is not an imperative for still obtaining the full potency of the story. Take Lord of the Flies for example. The first time I read the story I did not recognize that Simon was a Christ figure. Yet the story still maintained its powerful efficacy. Knowing that Simon was a Christ figure certainly did add significance to his death and magnified the brutality of the savage boys; it added a layer of meaning. However, Golding did not simply make Simon entirely alike to Christ. The differentiation between Simon and Jesus, the fact that Simon was not able to save the boys, by dying, from their sins, further intensifies the viciousness of the boys and causes the reader to beware of the evils man is capable of. Seeing the reference to the Gospel in Lord the Flies enhances the themes and message Golding imparts to his readers.

           

So it is for good reason that English teachers reiterate the necessity to stray away from plain restatements. The world has become increasingly more demanding of creative and clever insights and ideas. When we start working after college we are using prior knowledge to help us carry out our job just as the writer uses prior texts to write their story. But our job is to use that prior knowledge, the prior texts, in unique and meaningful ways to better the world around us. 

Thank You, Vampires for Showing Us What Not to Be

            As I roll up an old magazine to kill yet another mosquito that has found its way into our home, Foster’s words resonate with me, “placing our desires…above the needs of others.” This led me to ponder whether I was a “vampire” as Foster had described. It was, after all, “Just a fly,” but that statement seems to conform even more so than before to Foster’s definition of a vampire. In the end, I decided to do away with the insect due to the possibility of him (or her) having West Nile Virus and infecting my whole family. After all, the mosquito was the real vampire, living off our blood. I am much more at peace with my decision knowing that I rescued my family from the perils of the West Nile Virus; I had done them an invaluable service. So you can rest assured, I am not a vampire.

            So who is? Or, more specifically, who are the vampires in literature and why do they need to exist in stories? Foster defined vampires as someone who is strengthened by another’s enervation. This certainly broadens the scope of identifying vampires beyond the conventional blood-sucking, Dracula-like, undead young man or woman. However, this classic definition helps to find the figurative vampires in literature. The “sucking of blood” can symbolize or correlate to the fact that the vampire is getting stronger while his/her victim is getting weaker with the blood representing things like hope, innocence, happiness, or love. John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath contains numerous figurative vampires that feed off of both the Joad Family and the numerous other families like them. The biggest vampires are the rich, voracious landowners who give miniscule payment to starving families to do demeaning and tedious work. The Joad family encounters vampires throughout California and they slowly deprecate their hope that they will find a lasting, adequate job to help sustain their family. thousands of people suffer while a small group of people, the vampires, prospers. This theme is engrained in the reader throughout the novel and, unless you are a sociopath, causes the reader to feel an enmity and rancor towards the people besetting this anguish upon the Okies. The presence of the vampires causes the reader to feel an immense compassion and to get a taste of the misery and desolation that family’s like the Joad’s experienced. Our consciences are immediately inflamed when we see someone suffering especially when the suffering occurs for the benefit of another. We see these atrocities occur in literature, and we are hopefully moved enough by the evil doings of vampires to prevent the same from happening in the real world. The vampire stories help us to recognize the vampires in real life, or to recognize, as I thought I did, if we ourselves are vampires.

            The indecision that I felt when rolling up that magazine was the type of self-reflection that author’s writing of vampires (both figurative and literal) wanted in their readers regardless of the magnitude of the decision. After all, that is why we read: to not only broaden our perspective of the world, but to improve our personal character, to eradicate the vampires within ourselves. 

How to Find Your True Call(ing)

            A common piece of advice for writers is “go there,” the “there” meaning anything from some sort of an adventure to a walk in the park. One cannot write a piece of writing without seeing the world and experiencing the joys and challenges that come with one’s journey through it. The same goes for the characters that appear in these writers’ works. A plot cannot exist without some sort of change existing in the protagonist’s internal character. Because of this imperative, something of some sort of significance and import has to occur around/to the protagonist. Someone cannot experience an emotional, internal, spiritual, awakening or change by, say, sitting in their room all day playing Call of Duty. However, imagine that a writer decided to write about one such character who just so happened to experience a tear jerking, life altering, internal epiphany in which he finally stumbled upon the meaning of life and was able to change his emotional and internal outlook and character… while playing Call of Duty. Would this piece of writing have enough meaning and depth to make an impact on its readers? Would it be powerful enough to achieve the author’s noble purpose? Would it be moving enough to cause readers to seek to make a change in their lives based on the themes and messages the author sought to impart to his/her readers? Probably not. So, the general consensus among the writing community is to put their protagonists through “quests,” so they can best convince their readers and move their readers to be influenced to integrate into their lives the messages and themes that authors write about.

            Foster broadens the boundaries (it does not have to be as concrete and overt as quests like Bilbo’s or Odysseus’)  of what a “quest” can be by outlining the defining characteristics of quests: a quester, a place to go, the “stated objective,” trials and tribulations along the way, and the real objective which is always the quester learning more about himself/herself (in Foster’s words, “self-knowledge”). In addition there is usually an “evil knight” and a “princess.” However, one might pose the question: why does a quest need to have these characteristics? These features resonate most effectively with people because these traits are inherent in our own individual quest: life. The writer is doing the reader a kind favor of showing other’s quests and the mistakes they made along the way, and the lessons they learned, so the audience is more capable of dealing with similar issues in their own life journey (quest). Take, for example, Laura Hillenbrand’s World War II novel Unbroken. As Louis Zamperini’s remarkable life story of resiliency and survival unfold before the reader, it becomes evident that Zamperini’s life, his quest, is so convoluted and astonishing that readers have to constantly remind themselves that this is a true story. And yet, it has all the elements of a quest that Foster outlines. The quester, Louis, dreams of running in the Olympics (one of the many stated reasons). However, with the commencement of WWII, he becomes a bombardier. After his plane crashes in the middle of the Pacific, he finds himself one of three survivors of an eight man crew. He and his friend, Phil, are able to survive on a life raft in the middle of the Pacific Ocean for more than 50 days with sharks incessantly circling their small rubber vessel (the challenges, to name a few). They end up floating into a Japanese-held island and taken as POW's. They experience the most horrid treatment in the war with conditions and treatment that rivaled those that the Jew’s experienced in the concentration camps during the Holocaust. The stated objective for Louis is simply to get back to the freedom and love and comfort of his home. He encounters villains both tangible (i.e. prison guards, sharks) and intangible (hunger, thirst, sickness, etc.). Though he, at extremely slim odds, survives this odyssey of surviving on a raft, going to various enslavement camps throughout Japan, and fighting through his post-traumatic stress disorder, and alcoholism, (to name a few). However, through his desire to stabilize his life he finds his true calling (he achieves the ultimate “self-knowledge”).

            Hillenbrand did us an amazing favor. We are able to acquire in about a weeks worth of reading in the comfort of our home the insight that Louis Zamperini gained in a lifetime of trevail and suffering. But the lessons that Zamperini learned (and Hillenbrand imparted to her readers) compel the readers most effectively because they are about someone’s experience through life, which is the model all authors use for quests. Much better than playing Call of Duty.