Bulatkin: Structural Arithmetic Metaphor in the Oxford “Roland”

Structural Arithmetic Metaphor in the Oxford “Roland”

Eleanor Webster Bulatkin

“Structural arithmetic metaphor” is defined as an ordering of poetic form according to an arithmetic pattern that uses numbers whose symbolic meaning restates metaphorically some basic idea inherent in the content of the poem.

Although no ars poetica describing the device has come down to us, combinations of numbers have, in one way or another, been used in the structuring of literary works (as they have been employed in architectural and musical composition) since classical antiquity. At some times, they have served simply to achieve harmonies and symmetrical proportions; but at others, they have expressed symbolic meanings as well.

As Eleanor Webster Bulatkin points out, the conception of arithmetic structuring and the notion that numbers carry a metaphoric significance are thoroughly consonant with the whole number philosophy of the Middle Ages, itself the product of a tradition of great antiquity. The use of numerical composition has been demonstrated in studies of the Old French poem La Vie de Saint Alexis of 1040 and Dante’s Divine Comedy of 1321. The evidence is entirely sufficient to justify the assumption that the practice was known during the period encompassed by these two works, and it is to this era that the Chanson de Roland belongs.

The author suggests that there are discernible in the Oxford version of the epic two arithmetic structures: an earlier one, which was probably invented toward the beginning of the eleventh century, and a later revision, which may have been devised at the beginning of the twelfth. The numbers selected, she finds, were chosen for their metaphoric significance, and are designed to emphasize quite different thematic elements in the two versions.

Bulatkin demonstrates conclusively that the coherence of the poetic constructs and their congruence with the obvious intent of the poem, as well as with the evolving historic, aesthetic, and philosophic ambience in which it was composed, indicate a probability that is clearly well beyond chance.

http://www.ohiostatepress.org

Bluefarb: The Escape Motif in the American Novel

The Escape Motif in the American Novel

Mark Twain to Richard Wright

Sam Bluefarb

The presence of escape or flight in the modern American novel reflects a dominant and enduring mood in American life. It appears with astonishing frequency as a kind of obsessive accompaniment or counterpoint to the main structure of the plot, or even as a narrative component of the story itself. And though the theme can be traced back beyond the beginnings of the American nation and into the European past and the flight from the Old World to the New, it is nowhere else so pervasive as in the literature of the United States.

Two developments in the history of America have given a particularly national stamp to the escape that is the special preoccupation of American novelists: the opening of the western frontier and its eventual closing. And it is in the long and frequently troubled interval between these two epochal events that the author finds occurring a slow but inexorable evolution in the modes and varieties of the escapes that are sought. Huck Finn’s flight from civilization to the Territory in the mid-nineteenth century is colored by the optimistic glow that permeated and characterized the westward migration in America. Bigger Thomas’s desperate flight a century later is without hope, and he is only drawn more deeply into the labyrinth that is the black ghetto of urban America.

Sam Bluefarb examines this evolution in eight novels: Dos Passos’s Three Soldiers, Harold Frederic’s The Damnation of Theron Ware, Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio, Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, Carson McCullers’s The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, and Richard Wright’s Native Son. He finds that they chronicle a rich variety of forms of escape reflecting the individual circumstances and particular times from which and in which protagonists take flight. But he has discovered, too, that common elements conjoin fictional escapes—whether made or just attempted—and attest to a persistent quest for freedom that informs out literature.

For the escapes recounted are more than just escapes: whether they are undertaken with hope or in despair, or are successful or unsuccessful, they symbolize a form of rebirth—that rebirth into freedom that is the exercise of an inalienable right. For the desire and the will to escape that are prompted by that painful awareness of the discrepancy between life as it is and life as it should be do indeed represent, for Americans, one of the fundamental rights guaranteed them—even though that guarantee is a provisional one and the outcome of the flight for freedom is often and at best in doubt.

http://www.ohiostatepress.org

Soellner: Shakespeare’s Patterns of Self-Knowledge

Shakespeare’s Patterns of Self-Knowledge

Rolf Soellner

The Renaissance evinced a strong interest in self-knowledge, and the theme is a persistent one in the moral and dramatic literature of the age. The ancients’ slogan nosce teipsum became a universal watchword of men schooled in the paramount importance of coming to know themselves.

Shakespeare’s abiding interest in the concept of self-knowledge shows itself in the dramatic patterns of his plays—in images, ideas, themes, and character portrayals. The recurrence of such motifs as the search for the self and the dangers and rewards of finding oneself as well as the prominence of such ideal of nearly ideal characters as Henry V, Duke Vincentio, and Prospero testify to the powerful influence humanistic notions of self-knowledge exerted on Shakespeare as a writer and thinker. But his was a changing and developing art in a restless and dynamic age. Professor Soellner suggests that as much as Shakespeare’s artistic development, which also affects his patterns of self-knowledge, is part of his natural growth into a mature and incomparable dramatist, it is yet analogous to the stylistic and philosophic changes that led from the Renaissance through Mannerism toward the Baroque.

Soellner examines twelve plays in which self-knowledge as the Renaissance understood it figures prominently. Mindful that concepts of self-knowledge are not independent of cultural contexts, and that the definitions in the moral literature of the time were notoriously imprecise and unscientific, he recognizes that the meaning of the term in Shakespeare’s time must be acquired as Shakespeare acquired it; that is, contextually.

The author distinguishes three points in Shakespeare’s evolution: an early stage that culminates in the later histories and the romantic comedies, in which the dramatist reflected, sometimes almost schematically, the humanistic patterns of his time; a middle or interim phase that begins with Julius Caesar and includes both Hamlet and the “problem comedies,” and in which Shakespeare experiences certain hesitations and entertains some doubts about the patterns accepted uncritically earlier; and the final period of the great tragedies and tragicomic romances, in which a growing awareness of the unpredictability of human nature leads to a dynamic synthesis in which what is the quintessence of humanism is fused with a full realization of the weakness of codification and a profound sympathy for the human condition.

In the last of his great play, The Tempest, Soellner finds, Shakespeare composed a brilliant finale in which are worked many of the patterns that he used in his earlier work. The dream of The Tempest, that man can control himself, limit his power, and even resign it voluntarily, is totally humanistic—and may be utopian. But it is one of the happiest expectations of man and represents an irresistible affirmation of his potential greatness.

http://www.ohiostatepress.org