[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
But I digress. Why, you ask, are they habituÉs of the spa? Florence and Edward are ill, of course.
Heart trouble. What else?
In literature there is no better, no more lyrical, no more perfectly metaphorical illness than heart
disease. In real life, heart disease is none of the above; it s frightening, sudden, shattering, exhausting,
but not lyrical or metaphorical. When the novelist or playwright employs it, however, we don t
complain that he s being unrealistic or insensitive.
Why? It s fairly straightforward.
Aside from being the pump that keeps us alive, the heart is also, and has been since ancient times, the
symbolic repository of emotion. In both The Iliad and The Odyssey Homer has characters say of other
characters that they have a heart of iron, iron being the newest and hardest metal known to men of
the late Bronze Age. The meaning, if we allow for some slight variations of context, is tough-minded,
resolute even to the point of hard-heartedness in other words, just what we might mean by the same
statements today. Sophocles uses the heart to mean the center of emotion within the body, as do
Dante, Shakespeare, Donne, Marvell, Hallmark...all the great writers. Despite this nearly constant use
over at least twenty-eight hundred years, the figure of the heart never overstays its welcome, because
it always is welcome. Writers use it because we feel it. What shapes were your Valentine s cards in
when you were a kid? Or last year, for that matter? When we fall in love, we feel it in our hearts. When
we lose a love, we feel heartbroken. When overwhelmed by strong emotion, we feel our hearts are full
to bursting.
Everybody knows this, everybody intuitively senses this. What, then, can the writer do with this
knowledge? The writer can use heart ailments as a kind of shorthand for the character, which is
probably what happens most often, or he can use it as a social metaphor. The afflicted character can
have any number of problems for which heart disease provides a suitable emblem: bad love, loneliness,
cruelty, pederasty, disloyalty, cowardice, lack of determination. Socially, it may stand for these matters
on a larger scale, or for something seriously amiss at the heart of things.
We re not just talking classic literature here. When Colin Dexter decides to kill off his recurrent
detective Morse in The Remorseful Day (1999), he has a number of options. The chief inspector is a
genius at solving crimes and crossword puzzles, but like all geniuses, he has flaws. Specifically, he
drinks too much and remains a complete stranger to physical fitness, so much so that in novel after
novel his Thames Valley Police superiors mention his excessive fondness for the beer. His liver and
digestive system are seriously compromised, to the point where he is hospitalized for these problems
in a previous Morse novel. In fact, he solves a century-old murder from his hospital bed in The Wench
Is Dead (1989). His major problem, though, is loneliness. Morse has spectacularly bad luck with his
women; several wind up as either corpses or culprits in his various adventures, while others just don t
work out. Sometimes he s too needy, other times too unbending, but time after time he loses out. So
when the time comes for him to collapse amid the spires of his beloved Oxford University, Dexter
gives him a heart attack.
Why?
We re into the realm of speculation here, but this is how it strikes me. To have Morse succumb to
cirrhosis of the liver turns the whole thing into a straightforward piece of moralizing: see, we told you
drinking too much is bad for you. Morse s drinking would go from being a quaint idiosyncrasy to
something from one of those old school-guidance films, and that is not what Dexter wants. Of course
excessive drinking is bad for you excessive anything, including irony, is bad for you but that s not
the point. But with a heart attack, the connection to an overfondness for drink is still there if that s
what some readers want to see, but now the ailment points not toward his behavior but toward the
pain and suffering, the loneliness and regret, of his sad-sack love life, that may well be causing the
behavior. The emphasis is on his humanity, not his misdeeds. And authors, as a rule, are chiefly
interested in their characters humanity.
Even when the humanity isn t very humane, or the heart ailment a disease. Nathaniel Hawthorne has a
great short story called The Man of Adamant (1837). As with a number of his characters, the man of
the title is a committed misanthrope, absolutely convinced that everyone else is a sinner. So he moves
into a cave to avoid all human contact. Does it sound like a heart problem to you? Of course it does.
Now the limestone cave he chooses has water, a little drip of water, that s just stiff with calcium. And
moment by moment, year by year, the water in that cave seeps its way into his body, so that at the end
of the story he turns to stone, or not him entirely, just his heart. The man whose heart was figurative
stone at the outset has his heart turn to literal stone at the end. It s perfect.
Or take the case of Joseph Conrad s Lord Jim. Early in the novel, Jim s courage has failed him at a
crucial moment. His strength of heart, both in terms of bravery and of forming serious attachments, is
in question throughout the narrative, at least in his own mind, and at the end he misjudges an enemy [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
zanotowane.pl doc.pisz.pl pdf.pisz.pl karpacz24.htw.pl
But I digress. Why, you ask, are they habituÉs of the spa? Florence and Edward are ill, of course.
Heart trouble. What else?
In literature there is no better, no more lyrical, no more perfectly metaphorical illness than heart
disease. In real life, heart disease is none of the above; it s frightening, sudden, shattering, exhausting,
but not lyrical or metaphorical. When the novelist or playwright employs it, however, we don t
complain that he s being unrealistic or insensitive.
Why? It s fairly straightforward.
Aside from being the pump that keeps us alive, the heart is also, and has been since ancient times, the
symbolic repository of emotion. In both The Iliad and The Odyssey Homer has characters say of other
characters that they have a heart of iron, iron being the newest and hardest metal known to men of
the late Bronze Age. The meaning, if we allow for some slight variations of context, is tough-minded,
resolute even to the point of hard-heartedness in other words, just what we might mean by the same
statements today. Sophocles uses the heart to mean the center of emotion within the body, as do
Dante, Shakespeare, Donne, Marvell, Hallmark...all the great writers. Despite this nearly constant use
over at least twenty-eight hundred years, the figure of the heart never overstays its welcome, because
it always is welcome. Writers use it because we feel it. What shapes were your Valentine s cards in
when you were a kid? Or last year, for that matter? When we fall in love, we feel it in our hearts. When
we lose a love, we feel heartbroken. When overwhelmed by strong emotion, we feel our hearts are full
to bursting.
Everybody knows this, everybody intuitively senses this. What, then, can the writer do with this
knowledge? The writer can use heart ailments as a kind of shorthand for the character, which is
probably what happens most often, or he can use it as a social metaphor. The afflicted character can
have any number of problems for which heart disease provides a suitable emblem: bad love, loneliness,
cruelty, pederasty, disloyalty, cowardice, lack of determination. Socially, it may stand for these matters
on a larger scale, or for something seriously amiss at the heart of things.
We re not just talking classic literature here. When Colin Dexter decides to kill off his recurrent
detective Morse in The Remorseful Day (1999), he has a number of options. The chief inspector is a
genius at solving crimes and crossword puzzles, but like all geniuses, he has flaws. Specifically, he
drinks too much and remains a complete stranger to physical fitness, so much so that in novel after
novel his Thames Valley Police superiors mention his excessive fondness for the beer. His liver and
digestive system are seriously compromised, to the point where he is hospitalized for these problems
in a previous Morse novel. In fact, he solves a century-old murder from his hospital bed in The Wench
Is Dead (1989). His major problem, though, is loneliness. Morse has spectacularly bad luck with his
women; several wind up as either corpses or culprits in his various adventures, while others just don t
work out. Sometimes he s too needy, other times too unbending, but time after time he loses out. So
when the time comes for him to collapse amid the spires of his beloved Oxford University, Dexter
gives him a heart attack.
Why?
We re into the realm of speculation here, but this is how it strikes me. To have Morse succumb to
cirrhosis of the liver turns the whole thing into a straightforward piece of moralizing: see, we told you
drinking too much is bad for you. Morse s drinking would go from being a quaint idiosyncrasy to
something from one of those old school-guidance films, and that is not what Dexter wants. Of course
excessive drinking is bad for you excessive anything, including irony, is bad for you but that s not
the point. But with a heart attack, the connection to an overfondness for drink is still there if that s
what some readers want to see, but now the ailment points not toward his behavior but toward the
pain and suffering, the loneliness and regret, of his sad-sack love life, that may well be causing the
behavior. The emphasis is on his humanity, not his misdeeds. And authors, as a rule, are chiefly
interested in their characters humanity.
Even when the humanity isn t very humane, or the heart ailment a disease. Nathaniel Hawthorne has a
great short story called The Man of Adamant (1837). As with a number of his characters, the man of
the title is a committed misanthrope, absolutely convinced that everyone else is a sinner. So he moves
into a cave to avoid all human contact. Does it sound like a heart problem to you? Of course it does.
Now the limestone cave he chooses has water, a little drip of water, that s just stiff with calcium. And
moment by moment, year by year, the water in that cave seeps its way into his body, so that at the end
of the story he turns to stone, or not him entirely, just his heart. The man whose heart was figurative
stone at the outset has his heart turn to literal stone at the end. It s perfect.
Or take the case of Joseph Conrad s Lord Jim. Early in the novel, Jim s courage has failed him at a
crucial moment. His strength of heart, both in terms of bravery and of forming serious attachments, is
in question throughout the narrative, at least in his own mind, and at the end he misjudges an enemy [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]