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proximoception) wrote2006-03-20 03:27 am
proximoception) wrote2006-03-20 03:27 am
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Self-reflection's understandably quickening at two weeks from my 30th (to be spent in S. Carolina at another grad school visit).
I've been reading over what old papers I still have. Amazing how little I wince at them. Not that they're especially good, but I'm very forgiving, and of course the ideal reader--getting all jokes etc. The amazement's because I can't stand ones I just wrote. It's always all wrong, not at all what I meant or nothing a reader could ever understand.
The two surviving from about ten years ago amuse me most. What a terrible student I was then. Such a contempt for the paper-writing process. Ironically making them much better, as structured papers. Few ideas, drawn out to great length via examples. Hated citing just as much then, though, apparently. And how angry and humorous. I don't mean funny, necessarily, but finding things funny and framing them for humor. Heh, if I'd been funnier maybe I wouldn't have abandoned that sensibility.
...What is so wrong with Parts Two through Six of Crime and Punishment? I will again invoke the term "repetition". Raskolnikov wanders about in a feverish stupor more than once, passing out under bushes more than once to dream symbolic dreams of his predicament, fears and hopes more than once. Several times he seems to recover from his illness, only to several times relapse. Many times he acts madly guilty, leading many of the novel's characters to suspect him as the murderer. Twice, in fact, he confesses: once to Sonya and once to the authorities; each of these confessions occurs only after he comes back a second time, having gotten his nerve up. Constantly he switches between two modes of behavior: a system of Christian impulses and judgments and one of cold, remorseless materialism. Whole-hearted supporters of the novel would argue that these mental oscillations and the behavior they dictate are the core of the story's interest, and that the pattern of the oscillations' frequency and prompting is the map of Raskolnikov's journey to redemption. To this I would respond that though these oscillations would if organized indeed be the book's center, no such organization is visible. Examine, for example, Part Five, Chapter IV. Raskolnikov has visited Sonya at her lodging for what must be the third day in a row, and intends to confess his crime to her. Initially he is possessed by "impotence and fear." When he first speaks his voice is "trembling." He warms up to his subject by asking Sonya how she would decide the hypothetical question of who should die, Luzhin (who had wronged her in the chapter just past) or her beloved stepmother, if one had to die and one could be saved. When it is clear that, for religious reasons, she feels she has no right to make such a decision, he first "looked at her in black dejection," but "changed suddenly; his artificially bold and weakly challenging manner had disappeared. Even his voice had grown suddenly feeble." Skip a paragraph. Now, "a bitter hatred for Sonya seemed to flood his heart." Three lines down: "his hatred vanished like a shadow." He confesses; keeps going from meek to melancholy to feeling "a sudden shock and the old hostile, almost mocking smile played on his lips." He makes several abortive attempts to explain his crime, going from, "'I only killed a louse, Sonya, a useless, vile pernicious louse,'" to, "'Of course I know she wasn't a louse.'" He decides he did it because he is a bad person, then lapses into a rapturous speech about how "'power is given only to the man who dares stoop and take it.'" So it goes, the reversals occurring with more frequency at such moments of great tension. Yet the proliferation of these reversals is exhausting, and the farthest thing from character development...
...Excessive repetition is not restricted to Raskolnikov's actions: nary a character in the book does not walk into his room at least twice. Luzhin leaves rooms in a huff three times. Svidrigaylov is haunted by two or three ghosts and has two or three guilty dreams before shooting himself. Razumikhin and Katerina Ivanovna are not just loudly nervous characters: each seems to explode (in a small way) every few seconds. Recurring episodes cannot be fully excused by the novel's great length, either; if the term "deja vu" had not existed, the first French-speaking reader of Crime and Punishment would have had to invent it...
Today I'd write "leaves rooms in huffs three times". I have the strange sense I must have considered it then too? But how can memory be that good. "Nary": wow.
Still a slave to colons and semi-colons, now too to the dash. So much less angry--though I still haven't shaken the ferociously bad habit of attacking assigned, hence loved, course books.
In Borges' story where he meets his former self the younger one announces his love for Dostoevsky to the older's embarassment. Amusing reversal of that, I rather like crazy D. now.
I've been reading over what old papers I still have. Amazing how little I wince at them. Not that they're especially good, but I'm very forgiving, and of course the ideal reader--getting all jokes etc. The amazement's because I can't stand ones I just wrote. It's always all wrong, not at all what I meant or nothing a reader could ever understand.
The two surviving from about ten years ago amuse me most. What a terrible student I was then. Such a contempt for the paper-writing process. Ironically making them much better, as structured papers. Few ideas, drawn out to great length via examples. Hated citing just as much then, though, apparently. And how angry and humorous. I don't mean funny, necessarily, but finding things funny and framing them for humor. Heh, if I'd been funnier maybe I wouldn't have abandoned that sensibility.
...What is so wrong with Parts Two through Six of Crime and Punishment? I will again invoke the term "repetition". Raskolnikov wanders about in a feverish stupor more than once, passing out under bushes more than once to dream symbolic dreams of his predicament, fears and hopes more than once. Several times he seems to recover from his illness, only to several times relapse. Many times he acts madly guilty, leading many of the novel's characters to suspect him as the murderer. Twice, in fact, he confesses: once to Sonya and once to the authorities; each of these confessions occurs only after he comes back a second time, having gotten his nerve up. Constantly he switches between two modes of behavior: a system of Christian impulses and judgments and one of cold, remorseless materialism. Whole-hearted supporters of the novel would argue that these mental oscillations and the behavior they dictate are the core of the story's interest, and that the pattern of the oscillations' frequency and prompting is the map of Raskolnikov's journey to redemption. To this I would respond that though these oscillations would if organized indeed be the book's center, no such organization is visible. Examine, for example, Part Five, Chapter IV. Raskolnikov has visited Sonya at her lodging for what must be the third day in a row, and intends to confess his crime to her. Initially he is possessed by "impotence and fear." When he first speaks his voice is "trembling." He warms up to his subject by asking Sonya how she would decide the hypothetical question of who should die, Luzhin (who had wronged her in the chapter just past) or her beloved stepmother, if one had to die and one could be saved. When it is clear that, for religious reasons, she feels she has no right to make such a decision, he first "looked at her in black dejection," but "changed suddenly; his artificially bold and weakly challenging manner had disappeared. Even his voice had grown suddenly feeble." Skip a paragraph. Now, "a bitter hatred for Sonya seemed to flood his heart." Three lines down: "his hatred vanished like a shadow." He confesses; keeps going from meek to melancholy to feeling "a sudden shock and the old hostile, almost mocking smile played on his lips." He makes several abortive attempts to explain his crime, going from, "'I only killed a louse, Sonya, a useless, vile pernicious louse,'" to, "'Of course I know she wasn't a louse.'" He decides he did it because he is a bad person, then lapses into a rapturous speech about how "'power is given only to the man who dares stoop and take it.'" So it goes, the reversals occurring with more frequency at such moments of great tension. Yet the proliferation of these reversals is exhausting, and the farthest thing from character development...
...Excessive repetition is not restricted to Raskolnikov's actions: nary a character in the book does not walk into his room at least twice. Luzhin leaves rooms in a huff three times. Svidrigaylov is haunted by two or three ghosts and has two or three guilty dreams before shooting himself. Razumikhin and Katerina Ivanovna are not just loudly nervous characters: each seems to explode (in a small way) every few seconds. Recurring episodes cannot be fully excused by the novel's great length, either; if the term "deja vu" had not existed, the first French-speaking reader of Crime and Punishment would have had to invent it...
Today I'd write "leaves rooms in huffs three times". I have the strange sense I must have considered it then too? But how can memory be that good. "Nary": wow.
Still a slave to colons and semi-colons, now too to the dash. So much less angry--though I still haven't shaken the ferociously bad habit of attacking assigned, hence loved, course books.
In Borges' story where he meets his former self the younger one announces his love for Dostoevsky to the older's embarassment. Amusing reversal of that, I rather like crazy D. now.
Grad school visit?
no subject
Brandeis! Eesh. I wonder if I'd even hit their algorithm minima. Maybe for GRE.