Friday, August 23, 2013

...untitled...

The moment when you get stuck in somewhere...no matter in reality or in somewhere else...the feeling just kills as you need the freedom to give you strength and energy to hover...No matter words...you can hear them always, everywhere! The same tones, tunes, vibrations of vocal cords and that's it! Nothing more...well, sometimes you may stop to hear the voices to see if they say something but you know the answer already...there goes the rain, I can bet it penetrates your soul, devours every single cell of yours...hear it, live it, love it...no matter here or somewhere over the rainbow... 



Friday, June 14, 2013

NOEL

Le mot "Noel" vient du latin "natalis", signifiant "jour de la naissance".
     Depuis de nombreux siecles, le 25 decembre celebre le jour de la naissance du Christ. A cette fete s'accompagnent de nombreuses coutumes : le sapin ,  le Pere-Noël, les cadeaux, le houx (holly), les contes, les cantiques, la dinde, la buche, les chocolats, etc. Tous ces elements font traditionnellement partie des fetes de Noel.
      L'arbre de Noel regroupe plusieurs symboles montrant les richesses que nous offre la nature : la lumiere, les anges, les fruits des vergers, des champs, de la foret et de la mer. L'etoile qui brille a son faite annonce la fin du voyage, le havre de paix. Garni de pommes rouges, un sapin symbolisait alors l'arbre du Paradis. Au cours du XVe siecle, les fideles commencerent a l'installer dans leurs maisons, le 24 decembre, jour de la fete d'Adam et Eve.


      Le jour de Noel, ils se rassemblent en famille autour de la table de Noel. Le repas de Noel est souvent compose d'une dinde ou d'un chapon (cock) roti et se termine par une buche glacee ou un gateau. Celebration d'abord religieuse, Noel est devenu une fete de recueillement en famille. Pour les enfants, on devrait toujours celebrer cette nuit, car si le Pere-Noel se retrouve au chomage, qui va leur distribuer les cadeaux? ...

Thursday, June 13, 2013

What is Sakura?

      Japan is a country with a long history, rich culture and varied topography. Therefore, many symbols of Japan have developed over the years and are recognized worldwide. one of the most famous symbols is Sakura. In Japanese, the cherry is called “Sakura', which is generally believed to be a corruption of the word “Sakuya” (blooming) from the name of Princess Kono-Hana-Sakuya-Hime, who is enshrined on the top of the mountain Fuji. This long name means “tree-flowers-blooming princess”, for the cherry was so well known in those early days in Japan that the flower meant nothing but cherry. The princess was so named because, it is said, she fell from heaven upon a cherry tree.
     The cherry blossom is the flower of flowers to the Japanese people. It symbolizes their national character. This is because the life of a samurai of feudal times was proverbially compared to the short-lived cherry blossoms that last “no more than three days”, for a samurai was always ready to sacrifice his life for the sake of his master. Another saying is that “what the cherry is among flowers is the samurai among men”.
The Japanese are very proud of their Sakura. They love to see not only the single petal cherry blossoms in their prime and freshness, they also relish the beauty of falling snowy petals in the spring breeze. Of all flowers, the cherry blossoms appeal most to the aesthetic taste of the Japanese people. The Japanese people are never so jubilant, cheerful, optimistic and youthful as they are at the time of “Sakura” blossom.
     Beautiful as it is in bloom, the Japanese cherry tree does not yield fruit like other cherry trees. A critic once remarked that the Japanese cherry does not have to produce a market crop because it is born aristocrat and its single mission is to be beautiful. But it renders a very useful service to the Japanese people. The wood of the cherry tree is very valuable. It is used for producing color prints, furniture, trays, ornamental columns for alcoves and so on. In old days Sakura wood was used for making printing blocks for books and pictures.





Proverbs from Bible 13:10-12(KJV)


10 Only by pride cometh contention: but with the well advised is wisdom.11 Wealth gotten by vanity shall be diminished: but he that gathereth by labour shall increase.12 Hope deferred maketh the heart sick: but when the desire cometh, it is a tree of life.


In these three verses of Proverbs 13, we find three precious gems of wisdom -- how to avoid contention, the way to attain wealth, and how the results of answered prayer will produce growth and life. Verse 10 tells us that pride is behind every dispute that results in strife. The pride spoken of in this verse is referring to one being arrogant and haughty. If two people are unyielding and arrogant when they disagree about something, it will always produce contention and strife. If we desire to get along with others, we must humble ourselves, and not take the opinion that we are better or smarter than others. This verse says that if we are well advised, we will act in wisdom toward others. We will not act defiantly or condescending to others. We may be right in a situation and yet act in a wrong manner, thus defeating our position.

As God's children, we must always act the way He would want us to act. This is not saying that we are to always take the position of being a "door mat." Sometime the harder thing to do in a situation, is to speak the truth in love, instead of trying to avoid a situation because we dread conflict. When we find ourselves in a situation of disagreement with others, we should seek God as to how He would have us to respond, in spite of how we might feel about the situation. If we feel we are being treated unfairly, the best way to see justice in our behalf is to love, forgive and do unto others as we would have them do unto us. When we take this position and pray good prayers toward others, then God will defend us. We should never pray evil prayers toward those who oppose us. These kind of prayers are not coming from the heart of God, but from our own flesh. When we are blessing others with our prayers and our thoughts, we are overcoming evil with good.

Oscar Wilde (1854-1900): Aesthetics and Criticism



Megan Becker-Leckrone

[This article was first published in The Continuum Encyclopedia of Modern Criticism and Theory eds. Julian Wolfreys, Ruth Robbins, Kenneth Womack (New York: Continuum Press, May 2002) pp.658-65. It is here republished by kind permission and remains copyright © to the author, from whom permission for citation should be sought.]

Devoting most of his career to poetry, prose fiction, and drama, Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) wrote the bulk of his critical work between 1885 and 1891.  Along with a number of book reviews and brief articles, this corpus consists chiefly of just six major essays:  ‘The Truth of Masks’ (1885), ‘The Decay of Lying’ (1889), ‘Pen, Pencil and Poison’ (1889), ‘The Portrait of Mr. W. H.’ (1889), ‘The Soul of Man Under Socialism’ (1890), and ‘The Critic as Artist’ (1890).  In May 1891, four of these six essays were published together in a volume suggestively entitled Intentions, although each of the six was at one time or another considered for inclusion in the book (Danson, 1997, 7-8).  Wilde also published in 1891 the well-known ‘Preface’ to his only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray; a brief series of aphorisms on beauty and art, the ‘Preface’ serves as a pithy distillation of the paradoxical, subtly equivocal theoretical framework the essays collectively establish.  In 1895, Wilde’s own words would be interpreted, ironically, as utterly unequivocal evidence against him in the scandalous libel and criminal suits that eventually sent him to jail and effectively ended his career. 
This tragic conclusion did not extinguish Wilde’s legacy.  In fact, it is safe to say that his words have graced more greeting cards and bookbags than any other author featured in this book – all testaments to the prominent place Wilde holds in our cultural landscape to this day.  Yet such a distinction does more than indicate a unique literary and critical influence.  Most obviously, it attests to the witty, epigrammatic memorability of his declarations and, moreover, acknowledges that when many people speak of Oscar Wilde, they often refer to a personality and a life as much as a collection of ideas and texts.  Indeed, for a writer who famously explores the question of art’s relation to life, and whose life and work together offer an uncommonly rich site for examining the overdetermined sexual and social culture of late-Victorian England, such a focus is in many ways warranted.  For despite his avowed artistic detachment from the age in which he lived, Wilde was a keen social critic.  In ‘The Soul of Man Under Socialism,’ to name just one example, his description of the public’s despotic potential to quash – like Mill’s ‘tyranny of the majority’ – independently thinking, creative individuals provides an eerily prescient analysis of the fate which would befall him.  Recent Wilde scholars have explored such issues in groundbreaking ways.  But noting his status as cultural icon also points to a peculiar challenge his critics face, that of diffusing the still popular idea of Wilde as just a stereotype or a sloganeer. 
Beyond the mannered eccentricities Wilde exhibited in his deliberate cultivation of a public persona, beyond the famous utterances that seem to serve as captions to it, lies a largely coherent and complex aesthetic theory of ‘art for art’s sake,’ derived from the aestheticism of Walter Pater, though not merely derivative of it.  Morality and immorality, art and life, truth and lies – throughout his work, each of these categories garner their very particular meaning by way of Wilde’s paradoxical rhetoric and self-consciously performative style.  In a generically diverse body of criticism – which includes lists of cryptic or ambiguously referential aphorisms, a story of a fatally wayward critic, an appreciation of a forging and murdering artist, and two dialogues involving voices that are not merely transparent representations of Wilde’s own theoretical ‘intentions’ – how he makes his arguments often matters just as much as what, at isolated moments, they assert.  Separated from their intellectual or discursive context – on bookbags or greeting cards – these statements amuse, convey a personality, and perhaps seem cleverly apt.  In their discursive context, they do much more.  Wilde’s response to important critical thinkers who preceded him, his critique of the prevailing wisdom of his time, and his relevance to theoretical debates that continue to this day are considerable and warrant serious consideration.
Wilde’s insistence on the separation between art and life, and his claim for art’s priority in that pairing, point significantly to questions of aesthetic representation and reception that span the history of critical discourse from the classical age to the present.  The privilege he gives to the imaginative, rather than mimetic, function of art recalls the ancient poetic dispute between Plato and Aristotle and also situates him in a tradition of poetic apologies from Sidney to the Romantics.  As Hazard Adams explains, Wilde recognizes in his own era that ‘the theory of imitation was undergoing a crucial change.  The trend, at least since Kant and Coleridge, had been to emphasize art’s power to make, not to copy’ (Adams, 1992, 657).  Like Pater’s, Wilde’s concept of aesthetic autonomy belongs to and raises the stakes of this intellectual current.  If art does not primarily ‘copy’ life or nature, then what does it do?  Wilde’s provocative response to this question at once severs and reverses this mimetic relationship, proposing instead that ‘Life imitates Art’ (Wilde, 1989, 985).  Although it is the second effect – the reversal – in Wilde’s proposal that has gained the status of truism, both of the gestures have significant implications within the history of critical theory.
In the first sense, the separation Wilde imposes upon the mimetic formula, upon a ‘natural’ order from life to art, elaborates a chief tenet of Pater’s aesthetic criticism:  art in its highest form is something more and other than a mere reflection of the natural world.  This emphatic distinction underwrites aestheticism’s notorious insistence that, in Pater’s words, ‘[t]he office of the poet is not that of the moralist’ (Pater, 1986, 427).  For Pater, the true source of art – its ‘active principle’ – corresponds to what Wilde also privileges, ‘imagination’ (Pater, 1986, 428).  What it generates, for both of them, is ‘beauty’ and ‘pleasure.’  Wilde’s at times outlandish preference for the artificial over the natural – his protagonist’s refusal, for instance, to go outside in ‘The Decay of Lying’ – are best read within this specific context.  As Pater explains in his essay, ‘Wordsworth’ (1874), the active principle in art is not entirely natural – not  ‘rooted in the ground’ or ‘tethered down to a world’ – but rather ‘something very different from this’ (Pater, 1986, 428).  In the ‘Preface’ to The Renaissance, Pater calls this ‘something’ Wordsworth’s ‘unique, incommunicable faculty, that strange, mystical sense of a life in natural things,’ but he implies that this ‘strange . . . sense’ might itself be of another order (Pater, 1980, xxii).  Even this quintessential nature poet, Pater audaciously suggests, produces his greatest work not in mirroring the world around him, but in ‘moments of profound, imaginative power, in which the outward object appears to take colour and expression, a new nature almost, from the prompting of the observant mind’ (Pater, 1986, 424, emphasis mine).  In such moments, ‘the actual world would, as it were, dissolve and detach itself, flake by flake, and he himself seemed to be the creator . . . of the world in which he lived’ (424).  In Pater’s figuration here, the visiting light of the imagination upon the natural object decisively transforms it.  The result is a ‘new nature’ and a different world.
The true task of the aesthetic critic, correspondingly, consists of discovering the elemental traces of such moments in the work of art – and again, aesthetic separation proves a key dynamic.  Pater outlines this project in the ‘Preface,’ where he characterizes the critic’s work as a subliming process of elemental ‘refinement.’  The ‘function of the aesthetic critic’ – like that of a ‘chemist’ – ‘is to distinguish, to analyse, and separate from its adjuncts’ precisely what generates beauty from what does not.  Reading Wordsworth’s poetry, in particular, Pater argues the aesthetic critic must ‘disengage this virtue from the commoner elements with which it may be found in combination . . . [and leave] only what the heat of their imagination has wholly fused and transformed,’ thus subtly dismissing in the domestic, earth-bound aspects of Wordsworth’s poetry nineteenth century readers typically privileged (what Paul de Man calls the ‘Victorian Wordsworth’) (Pater, 1980, xx-xxi). Though often by exaggerating it to the point of seeming elitism, translating it into impertinent solipsism, or playing it up as the stereotypical dandy’s hot-house cult of artifice, Wilde adheres closely to Pater’s aesthetic vision. 
The effective reversal in Wilde’s life-and-art formula draws less directly from Pater and has, perhaps fittingly, become Wilde’s signature claim.  Yet it does not just describe the uncanny way in which real events seem to offer types or act out scenarios prefigured by artistic media, as it is popularly interpreted.  Nor does it simply ‘refer . . . to the fact that fashionable ladies in the 1880s tried to dress and look like the beautiful figures in the paintings of Rossetti or Burne-Jones’ (Longxi, 1988, 90-1).  Rather, Wilde argues we perceive the world by means of the conceptual models provided for us by art.  ‘Things are because we see them, and what we see and how we see it, depends on the arts that have influenced us,’ explains Vivian in ‘The Decay of Lying’ (Wilde, 1989, 986).  No perception is immediate.  What is is culturally constructed, and in a sense interpreted for us, already, by existing forms of understanding.  While by no means original to Wilde, this observation highlights a significant post-romantic intellectual undercurrent to the prevailing realism and positivism of Victorian culture; namely, a growing skepticism in the possibility of objective perception, aesthetic or otherwise.  In ‘The Critic as Artist’ and ‘The Portrait of Mr. W. H.,’ his insistence on implicating critical discourse itself in this constructivist condition aligns him suggestively with Nietzsche and even Freud. 
For this reason and others, Wilde’s reversal resonates unmistakably with concerns central to contemporary theory.  If, as Jonathan Culler has recently suggested, theory characteristically involves a critique of common sense and an interrogation of what we assume is ‘natural,’ then Wilde’s work is theoretical through and through (Culler, 1997, 4).  The aestheticism or decadence Wilde espouses declares itself overtly ‘against nature’ in its emphasis both on art’s autonomy and on the constructedness of ‘life.’   As Linda Dowling argues in Language and Decadence in the Victorian Fin de Siècle, the aestheticist proposal announces a specifically late-Victorian state of affairs:  a linguistic and epistemological condition wherein ‘nature,’ ‘reality,’ and ‘truth’ cannot be sustained as self-evident, stable, or authoritative categories, if indeed they ever could be.  Both Wilde’s theory of art and his often affected stylistic self-consciousness, according to Dowling, ‘emerge . . . from a linguistic crisis, a crisis in Victorian attitudes towards language brought about by the new comparative philology earlier imported from the continent’ and largely inherited from romanticism (Dowling, 1986, xi-xii). 
One benefit of Dowling’s reading is that it obviates the need to reconcile the seeming inconsistency between the gravity of Wilde’s ideas and the levity of their presentation.  In this light, we can see the relentless play of Wilde’s texts – his dizzying use of paradox, the witty exaggerations, carefully staged dialogues and complex narrative frameworks – not as the frivolous camouflage for serious ideas, but as performative demonstrations of them.  What Wilde’s essays so often ironically present are occasions that raise, in Dowling’s words, the ‘spectre of autonomous language’ – that is, adumbrations that our words might not correspond to our world or, more ominously, our ‘intentions’ in a harmoniously referential way (xii).   In this sense, there is a profound consistency between the content of Wilde’s aesthetic theory and his performative style.  Dowling considers the latter a strategically formulated ‘counterpoetics of disruption and parody and stylistic derangement, a critique not so much of Wordsworthian nature as of the metaphysics involved in any sentimental notion of a simple world of grass and trees and flowers’ (x). For this reason, Dowling suggests that aestheticism and key poststructuralist projects – Foucault’s, Derrida’s – share a common critical lineage, albeit on separate sides of the ‘metaphysical rupture brought about by Saussurean linguistics’ (xiii).
A close look at Wilde’s notorious use of paradox serves as an instructive illustration of the ‘counterpoetics’ Dowling describes.  In all of his paradoxical assertions, Wilde takes the commonsense, apparently natural order of things (the doxa) and reverses it, goes against it (para) in a way that seems initially wittily absurd, but which comes to make a certain sense upon reflection.  To cite just one example, we can look at the concluding sentences of Wilde’s ‘Preface’ to The Picture of Dorian Gray, written in part to counter the moral opprobrium the novel’s serial appearance first precipitated.  Here, Wilde offers three declarations that, taken together, form a kind of skewed syllogism:
We can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long as he does not admire it.  The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely.
 All art is quite useless (Wilde, 1989, 17).
In a text purportedly defending Wilde’s own work of art, it seems absurd to declare such a work ‘useless.’  But the paradoxical logic draws out a key cultural assumption – in this case, the presumed connection between utility and value, especially with regard to art.  He furthermore glosses the seemingly obvious truth that what is ‘useful’ would also have more value than what is ‘useless.’  Wilde’s apparently self-defeating defense, that ‘[a]ll art is quite useless,’ in fact, both articulates a long-standing bias – at least since Plato – that art is not socially or morally ‘useful’ and thus not valuable (or conversely, that it is useful, but only to the extent that it does serve society or morality) and turns it on its head.  In the process, Wilde dislocates utility and value, makes them opposites, and then reorders them, so that what is ‘useful’ becomes, paradoxically, what is not to be ‘admire[d].’  And art’s ‘uselessness,’ in turn and inextricably within these terms, becomes its unique, lofty essence.  Danson stresses the importance of context, both textual and intellectual, in understanding the force of such utterances:  ‘In Wildean paradox . . . the ironized new meanings of words are only realizable in relation to their old meanings, which the paradox, for its subversive purpose, keeps in circulation’ (Danson, 1997, 150).  Thus, the word ‘useless’ becomes a kind of portmanteau in which we may read a long history of aesthetic theory.  His paradox glosses at once Plato’s banishment of poetry from the republic, Kant’s description of the aesthetic object’s ‘purposive purposelessness,’ the ‘intense’ aesthetic admiration Pater advocates, as well as the contemporary popular sentiment Wilde means to subvert.
The longer essays employ this strategy and others to enact a similar theoretical engagement.  ‘The Decay of Lying,’ the first and most anthologized essay in Intentions, is a not-quite Platonic dialogue that considers the mimetic relationship between art and nature.  The dialogue’s title refers to an article Vivian (the parlor-room Socrates) reads to Cyril (his unequal foil) in the course of their discussion:  ‘The Decay of Lying:  A Protest.’  Vivian’s ‘protest’ most pointedly objects to realism’s dominance as an artistic method and aesthetic ideal in nineteenth-century art.  But the protest is embedded in a larger discussion that both articulates aestheticism’s central argument and situates it in long history of discourse on mimesis.
[W]hat I am pleading for is lying in art,’ not, Vivian emphasizes, in spheres where lying merely serves venal interests – in politics, for instance.  Vivian instead values the ‘fine lie,’ informed purely by the imagination, and created solely for its own sake (Wilde, 1989, 971).  This differentiation points to the first of his four ‘doctrines of the new aesthetics’; namely, that ‘Art never expresses anything but itself.  It has an independent life, . . . and develops purely on its own lines’ (991).  As does the ‘uselessness’ argument in the ‘Preface,’ Vivian’s doctrine calls art a distinct enterprise not properly judged according to normative, rational standards of truth.  In both instances, Wilde draws on the Kantian argument that ‘to judge an art object in terms of use’ – or truth value – ‘is not to make an aesthetic judgment’ (Adams,1992, 659).  Kant’s separation of aesthetic from rational or practical judgment also recalls Aristotle’s rescue of poetry from Plato’s banishment.  Wilde’s dialogue subtly restages the ancient poetic debate between Plato and Aristotle, echoing Aristotle’s insistence that poetry – in medium and manner – operates differently than other forms of representation and should be judged accordingly.  In characteristically paradoxical fashion, Wilde has Vivian explicitly enlist Plato himself in support of this argument as much as he does Aristotle.  Adopting Plato’s mimetic formula – wherein poetry, at two removes from ‘truth,’ is a ‘lie’ – Wilde also turns it on its head.  What Plato declares poetry’s ultimate weakness Wilde celebrates as its unique strength.  
Vivian’s second doctrine argues that realism strays from art’s distinct raison d’être.  ‘As a method, realism is a complete failure [for] it forgets that when art surrenders her imaginative medium she surrenders everything’ (979).  His supporting argument recalls Aristotle’s own mode of defense.  He offers an etiological history of aesthetic development that sees imaginative instinct as its ‘first stage’:  ‘Art begins with . . . purely imaginative and pleasurable work dealing with what is unreal and nonexistent’ (978).  Like Aristotle, Vivian too claims that this primal instinct is ‘natural.’  But even more so, Vivian’s ‘first stage’ is self-generated, ‘natural’ in that it stems from human nature, from within.  We ‘start . . . in life with a natural gift for exaggeration,’ and so too does art begin with this essential element (973).  The second stage in this history might surprise those who read Wilde’s separation of art and life absolutely, for here Vivian makes clear that there is indeed a connection – but a very particular one:  ‘Art takes life as part of her rough material, recreates it, and refashions it in fresh forms’ (978).  Like Pater’s Wordsworth, who throws the light of his imagination on nature and produces ‘a new nature,’ Vivian’s vision of art relies on nature (‘life’) as well, but secondarily.  Realism’s crucial error is to reverse this proper order, to present a ‘third stage’ in which ‘life gets the upper hand, and drives art into the wilderness.’  By Wilde’s subtle redefinition of the very label his critics used to condemn his aesthetic, realism’s late aberration becomes art’s ‘true decadence, and it is from this that we are now suffering’ (978).
Mistaking the proper relation between life and art, elevating life as an ‘artistic method’ instead of using it as ‘rough material,’ stems from a more comprehensive misreading of the mimetic formula.  This ‘third doctrine’ is the familiar suggestion that ‘Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life’ (985).  In its service, Wilde provides Vivian with some of his most outrageous claims:  that London fogs ‘did not exist till art had had invented them,’ that ‘the whole of Japan is a pure invention.  There is no such country, there are no such people’ (986, 988).  But of course, Vivian is not negating what ‘exists’ and what ‘is,’ but placing them within a specific theory of perception.  The outlandishness of the examples may stem from the fact that Cyril reminds Vivian he needs these proofs to make his theory ‘complete’ and challenges him to do so.  Vivian’s flourish demonstrates that he confidently accepts the challenge:  ‘My dear fellow, I am prepared to prove anything’ (986).
That Vivian indeed manages to show that what seems so patently false may possess a certain kind of truth underscores a further implication of ‘The Decay of Lying,’ as well as its fourth doctrine.  The aesthetic theory Vivian proposes does not sophistically devote itself to what is merely false.  And the ‘lying’ Vivian values, ultimately, does not merely oppose truth, but rather a narrow understanding of it:  ‘not simple truth but complex beauty’ (978).  Perhaps recalling Keats, Vivian supplants ‘simple truth’ with ‘complex beauty’ and thus implicitly equates the latter with some higher, ‘truer’ object.  The paradoxical, equivocal valence of ‘truth’ and ‘lies’ throughout the essay is contained in the essay’s ‘final revelation,’ that ‘lying, the telling of beautiful untrue things, is the proper aim of art’ (992).
‘The Critic as Artist,’ also a dialogue, pursues many of these same assertions.  Aestheticism’s spokesman here is Gilbert, who corrects a number of ‘gross popular error[s]’ regarding criticism’s proper relation to its aesthetic object.  In typical Wildean style, Gilbert presents this hypothesis by means of counter-intuitive paradoxes that Ernest, more pugnaciously than Cyril, earnestly resists. ‘The creative faculty is higher than the critical.  There is really no comparison between them,’ intones Ernest, Wilde’s voice of orthodox opinion (1020).  Gilbert counters that we are wrong to consider criticism merely secondary to the work of art it interprets and never creative in its own right.  He argues instead that this hierarchy is unstable, indeed ‘entirely arbitrary’ (1020). ‘Criticism is itself an art,’ and conversely genuinely ‘fine imaginative work’ is actually critical (1026, 1020).  For ‘there is no fine art without self-consciousness, and self-consciousness and the critical spirit are one’ (1020).  Like poetry, criticism too involves a working with existing materials and putting them into a new form (1027).  And here Gilbert insists that not only do poets work with words and generic conventions, they draw from existing works of art as well.  Like Vivian, Gilbert argues that art imitates art other art more often than life: Homer retells existing myths, Keats writes poems about a translation of Homer’s retelling, and so on.  The work of the critic is yet one more extension of that same process, its own retelling of what has been told before.  The argument glosses Arnold’s claim that ‘the proper aim of Criticism is to see the object as in itself it really is’ and rehearses Pater’s response to it (1028).   Like Pater, Gilbert believes instead that the critic’s ‘sole aim is to chronicle his own impressions’ (1028).  The critic deludes himself if he believes objectivity or ‘discovering the real intention of the artist’ is possible (1029). Gilbert’s supporting example – in which he claims ‘the work of art [is] simply . . . the starting-point for a new creation’ – subtly suggests that Pater’s much criticized, idiosyncratic reading of the Mona Lisa might be remarkable not for how willfully wrong it seems, but rather for how dramatically it demonstrates this discursive and epistemological condition (1029).
In fact, one may fruitfully read Wilde’s ‘Pen, Pencil and Poison’ by the light of this proposal as well.  Written in the style of Pater’s Appreciations and Imaginary Portraits, the essay studies the ‘artistic temperament’ of Thomas Griffiths Wainewright, a minor nineteenth-century artist who was also a notorious forger and murderer.  In ‘The Critic as Artist,’ Gilbert tells Ernest that Pater’s ‘imaginative insight . . . and poetic aim’ – indeed his very words – suffuse Gilbert’s own impressions of the Mona Lisa.  ‘Pen, Pencil and Poison’ makes such a tongue-in-cheek avowal of influence its guiding principle.  Along with details from Wainewright’s life and work (which Wilde liberally embellishes), the essay is strategically laced with plagiarisms from Pater’s critical work.  Wilde’s ‘new creation’ from this raw material is at once a rehearsal of the critical ideal expressed in ‘The Critic as Artist’ and an ingenious parody of it.  Taking aestheticism’s purported separation between aesthetic and moral judgments, Wilde offers hyperbolic enthusiasm for Wainewright’s work, impertinently insisting that ‘[t]he fact of a man being a poisoner is nothing against his prose’ (1007).  By giving his detractors such an outrageous version of aestheticism’s ills – its flirtation with danger, its complicity with violence and amorality – Wilde satirizes their censorious objections and, in the process, offers his own subtle commentary on where the real force of Pater’s critical project might lie.  ‘The Portrait of Mr. W. H.,’ Wilde’s story of a wayward critic, explores similar ground.  Obsessed with the personally overdetermined belief that he knows the ‘true secret’ of Shakespeare’s sonnets, Cyril Graham wanders down the garden path from creative criticism to outright forgery, manufacturing evidence when he cannot find it.  The story shrewdly outlines just how much epistemological desire, perhaps at the heart of creativity, necessarily drives the critical impulse.  Our own critical projects, variously aimed at uncovering Wilde’s true ‘intentions,’ would do well to remember that lesson.
Megan Becker-Leckrone is Associate Professor at the University of Nevada – Las Vegas where she specializes in Literary Theory and 19th- and 20th-Century British Literature.  Her book Julia Kristeva and Literary Theory  was published by Palgrave in 2005.


The Great Gatsby: The Corruption of the American Dream (Ամերիկյան երազի կործանումը <<Մեծն Գեթսբի վեպում>>)

The American dream is an ideal that has been present since
American literature’s onset. Typically, the dreamer aspires to rise from
rags to riches, while accumulating such things as love, high status,
wealth, and power on his way to the top. The dream has had variations
throughout different time periods, although it is generally based on ideas
of freedom, self-reliance, and a desire for something greater. The early
settlers’ dream of traveling out West to find land and start a family has
gradually transformed into a materialistic vision of having a big house, a
nice car, and a life of ease. In the past century, the American dream has
increasingly focused on material items as an indication of attaining
success. In The Great Gatsby, Jay Gatsby is a self-made man who started
out with no money—only a plan for achieving his dream. He is so
blinded by his luxurious possessions that he does not see that money
cannot buy love or happiness. Fitzgerald demonstrates how a dream can
become corrupted by one’s focus on acquiring wealth, power, and
expensive things.
Gatsby’s dream “is a naïve dream based on the fallacious
assumption that material possessions are synonymous with happiness,
harmony, and beauty” (Fahey 70). His American dream has become
corrupted by the culture of wealth and opulence that surrounds him.
Gatsby is a “nouveau riche,” and his romantic view of wealth has not
prepared him for the self-interested, snobbish, corrupt group of people
with which he comes to associate. He throws lavish parties for countless
people, yet he has no real friends. Gatsby buys expensive things and
entertains large groups of society because of his incommunicable desire
for something greater. Nick Carraway realizes that although Gatsby is
involved in underhanded business dealings and is fixated on money, he is
a good man at heart. The last time Nick sees Gatsby alive, he tells him,
“They’re a rotten crowd…. You’re worth the whole damn bunch put
together” (Fitzgerald 162).
Gatsby’s romantic view of life may partly be to blame for his
inability to achieve his dream. Although he has made his fortune through
racketeering and conducting suspicious business deals, his heart seems
untouched by the moral evil that is around him. “He has lived not for
himself, but for his dream, for his vision of the good life inspired by the
beauty of a lovely rich girl” (Fahey 71). Gatsby’s inspiration comes from
the beautiful Daisy (Fay) Buchanan, whom he knew when he was in the
military. Daisy’s parents considered Gatsby to be an unsuitable match,
because he did not come from a good background and had little money.
Nick Carraway, the narrator, sees Daisy as the golden girl—the
quintessential rich beauty.
Daisy is the symbol of all that Gatsby strives for; her voice is full of
money, as Gatsby describes it. Her voice was “full of money—that was
the inexhaustible charm that rose and fell in it, the jingle of it, the
cymbals’ song in it” (Fitzgerald 127). She can be interpreted as a
twentieth-century siren because she ensnares men with her husky,
mysterious voice. Gatsby became so enamored by her voice that he based
all of his actions on winning Daisy over. Her voice contains the promise
of vast riches. However, Gatsby is too late to realize that money is the
only thing her voice promises. There is no compassion in Daisy, just as
there is none in cold, hard cash.
Gatsby’s idealism is so great that even though Daisy is married and
they are having an affair, he assumes that his vision will be realized as
long as she will say that she has never loved her husband, Tom. “Not
content merely to repeat the past, [Gatsby] must also eradicate the years
in which his dream lost its reality” (Bloom 78). Daisy has been the object
of Gatsby’s obsession for the past five years, and his romanticism will not
allow him to separate the past from the present. He still sees Daisy as the
golden girl he knew five years ago, and he is still set on their golden
future together.
Gatsby’s lapse in judgment is in not realizing that Daisy represents
both material success and the corruption that wealth can bring. Although
she appears to be full of sweetness and light, she is at heart self-centered
and cold. Daisy is careless with people’s lives; she lets Gatsby take the
blame for her unintentional manslaughter of Myrtle Wilson. Her careless
actions eventually result in Gatsby’s death, of which she shows no
concern. She commits adultery, but she had no real intentions of leaving
her husband. After she learns of Gatsby’s shady background, she quickly
runs back into the arms of her equally self-absorbed, corrupt husband.
The Buchanans live in the wealthy and highly exclusive East Egg of
Long Island, which is the location that Gatsby probably desires. The
green light at the end of the Buchanans’ dock symbolizes Gatsby’s
yearning for wealth and power, and it also embodies Daisy as the object
of Gatsby’s desire. An obvious interpretation of the light is that the green
represents money. The green color can also represent envy—the “greeneyed
monster”—because Gatsby longs to be a part of the East Egg society.
The fact that the green light can be seen across the bay, “minute and far
away” from Gatsby’s mansion, symbolizes that it—Daisy or wealth—is out
of his reach, even though he can still see a glimpse of it.
Daisy and Tom’s marriage is further proof of the collapse of the
American dream. Although they belong to the elitist West Egg social
group and have extreme wealth, they are unhappy. Tom is first described
as “one of those men who reach such an acute limited excellence at
twenty-one that everything afterwards savours of anti-climax” (Fitzgerald
11). Tom and Daisy are both in unsatisfied with life and are searching for
something better. They have traveled to France and drifted “here and
there unrestfully wherever people were rich and played polo together”
(Fitzgerald 11). They are unhappy and bored with life. Tom seems to be
searching for the excitement that he found in playing football in college,
and he finds an outlet for his dissatisfaction by cheating on his wife with
Myrtle. Once again, Gatsby does not see that attaining wealth and power
does not equal happiness.
The Buchanans’ marriage is full of lies and infidelities, yet they are
united through their corruption. After Tom has discovered Daisy’s
infidelity and Myrtle has been killed, their callous selfishness is revealed
when they are reunited over fried chicken and two bottles of ale. “They
instinctively seek out each other because each recognizes the other’s
strength in the corrupt spiritual element they inhabit” (Bewley 46). After
Myrtle and Gatsby are both killed, neither one of the Buchanans sends
their regards or seem remorseful. In fact, they go on a short vacation,
which is an indication of the lack of compassion they have toward others.
Nick perceives Tom and Daisy as they really are, heartless and careless.
“They smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their
money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them
together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made”
(Fitzgerald 188). Tom and Daisy’s actions are an indication of the
detrimental and emotionally numbing effects that wealth can have on
someone. They focus too much on appearance and things of monetary
value, while ignoring people’s feelings and lives.
Jordan Baker’s plans are also negatively impacted by the corruptive
qualities of wealth. Although Nick is attracted to Jordan’s bored, jaunty,
careless air at first, he finally understands that it conveys her profound
disregard for other people’s feelings. Jordan supports Daisy having an
affair, because “Daisy ought to have something in her life” (Fitzgerald 85).
She sees Gatsby as something, not someone. Jordan also has a reputation
for being dishonest and for being a gossip. She was involved in a golf
tournament scandal in which she was accused of moving her golf ball to
her advantage. Jordan belongs to the elitist East Egg social group because
of her careless, dishonest ways. She serves as a hint as to the true nature
of the people from East Egg. Jordan may also be an indication of the
types of people that Gatsby entertains, since she attends his parties. She
is similar to many of his partygoers in that she exploits his hospitality yet
never shows any genuine kindness toward him.
It is very telling that Gatsby’s house is full of people throughout the
entire summer, yet when Gatsby dies, no one attends his funeral except
Nick and Gatsby’s father. The shallow acquaintances of Gatsby were
never his true friends—the only used him for his lavish generosity. The
countless people who attend his parties, ride on his hydroplane and in his
car, and drink his alcohol are nowhere to be seen when the time comes to
pay their respects for him. The only guest who calls Gatsby’s home is
Klipspringer, who lived in Gatsby’s mansion for a period of time.
However, he only calls to inquire about a pair of shoes that he has
misplaced. The corrupt atmosphere in which Gatsby has lived blights his
dream of success.
Nick is an atypical attendee of Gatsby’s parties, because he is the
only one who shows compassion for Gatsby. Nick knows the truth about
Gatsby—his humble background, his dishonest business dealings, and his
aspirations for success. Nevertheless, Nick recognizes that although
Gatsby has become immersed in a world of materialism and corruption,
he is still a good man. Perhaps because he and Gatsby both come from
the Midwest, they do not truly belong with the shallow company of East
Egg and West Egg. Nick serves as an objective view of the superficial
world that surrounds him in Long Island.
Nick’s personality is deeply rooted in ideals of the Midwest and of
his family. Nick comes to the East because he is feeling restless upon his
return from World War I. However, he comes to realize that the East is
full of heartless and shallow people. This atmosphere does not fit well
with Nick’s honest and sincere character. His Midwest background has
given him a comparison for judging the glitz and materialism that
surrounds him. Nick’s American dream is based on his experiences of
warm home life and friendly faces. He fondly recalls memories of taking
the train home from college with friendly faces and jingling sleigh bells to
keep him company. “It is the counterpoint to Gatsby’s sustaining dream,
which it frames and interprets, a dream of aspiration that moves Gatsby
to follow it to imagined glory and unforeseen defeat” (Fahey 79). Nick’s
dream is closer to the original American dream, which was focused more
around family than wealth and an unending quest for success. Nick
represents the opposite path that Gatsby could have taken from the
Midwest. Gatsby still possesses the principles of the Midwest, but his
values have become blurred by the bright lights and the sparkle of Daisy’s
golden glow.
Although Nick describes the towns beyond the Ohio River as boring
and sprawled, it is obvious that Fitzgerald’s novel is a commentary on the
distortion of the traditional American dream as a result of the East. “The
lure of the East represents a profound displacement of the American
dream, a turning back upon itself of the historic pilgrimage towards the
frontier which had, in fact, created and sustained that dream” (Bloom 75).
While the geographic locations of the East and the Midwest play
broad roles in shaping the novel’s view on values and money, the
microcosms of East Egg, West Egg, and the Valley of Ashes further
emphasize the socioeconomic disparity between classes. East Eggers are
at the top of the social ladder, while the inhabitants of West Egg cannot
seem to reach them. This brings to surface the differences between “old
money” and “new money.” Gatsby cannot accomplish his dream partly
because of the superior claims that old moneyed families have over newly
wealthy individuals. This directly relates to Gatsby being able to see the
green light on the Buchanan’s dock but not being able to reach it. The
working-class, depressing area dubbed the “Valley of Ashes” reinforces
the idea that corruption surrounds the wealthy. The Valley of Ashes is
where Tom acts out his infidelities. It is also the location for Daisy’s
killing of Myrtle. Tom and Daisy respectively use and harm members of
this class with no remorse.
On the surface, Fitzgerald’s novel may appear to be just a shallow
novel about the jazz, parties, and glitz that he experienced in the early
twentieth century. After closer examination, however, it is apparent that
The Great Gatsby is a profound social commentary on the corrupt and
disillusioning effects that materialism can have on members of society.
The have-nots yearn to be like the haves, yet those who already have
wealth and status are unhappy and dissatisfied with their lives. On the
whole, the elitist group in the novel displays characteristics of being
bored, disenchanted, and unmotivated. For example, the Buchanans drift
from one place to the next, with no real plan or goal in mind. Jordan
Baker has a constant bored, unaffected look upon her face. These people
are the “haves,” but Fitzgerald makes the reader question whether what
they possess is really worth having. Gatsby has devoted his life to
belonging to this exclusive group, but it becomes obvious that he never
will belong because of his disreputable background. It should also be
noted that Gatsby’s romantic idealism does not fit in with this group; no
matter how far up the social ladder he climbed, he would never really fit
in. The great irony seems to be that the people who have the means,
monetary or socially, to grasp their dreams do not have the motivation or
the will.
The drifting, careless, shallow people who comprise the social
group of East Egg and West Egg are representative of the corruption that
materialism can bring. Gatsby is surrounded by this materialism and
discontent, which serves to tarnish his dream of success. His rags-toriches
dream turns into a dark nightmare that leads to his untimely
downfall. His romantic idealism has not prepared him for the corrupt
world in which he enters. Gatsby is surrounded by proof of the
unhappiness that “success” can bring, as seen especially through Tom and
Daisy. Their marriage is full of lies and deceit, and they are both
searching for something greater than what they already have. Gatsby is
so blinded by his dream that he does not see that money cannot buy love
or happiness. Fitzgerald effectively offers a powerful critique of a
materialistic society and the effects it can have on one’s hopes and
dreams.

Works Cited
Bloom, Harold, ed. Modern Critical Views: F. Scott Fitzgerald. New York:
Chelsea House Publishers, 1985.
Fahey, William. F. Scott Fitzgerald and the American Dream. New York:
Thomas Y. Crowell Company, 1973.
Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Great Gatsby. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1925.

Time is the Only Unbiased Enemy


      Many people associate the word “enemy” with people. The enemies can be among the people you work or study with or just people  you do not like. Reasons may be different, for example, someone may not like you as he/she is jealous of you for your professional success or beauty or some character trait. This comes to prove that animosity is mainly biased, it is unfairly prejudiced for or against someone. It bears strongly subjective attitude on the part of the people.

     However, it is not only the people that show hostility against you, most people consider time as the greatest enemy of ours. As different from human beings, time is the enemy of all of us, as it causes us to sacrifice things we hold dear, it paints wrinkles in our faces making us weaker and weaker and finally time kills us. And no matter who you are or what you do you are destined to acknowledge the enmity of time as your life progresses. Thus, we can observe that time is not really prejudiced or biased, it is the same for all people irrespective of your nationality, age, race, profession or occupation, religious views. Though the latter may somewhat reconcile our minds to our non-permanence in this world and make the enmity of time tender.