ENGA10H3F Introduction to Literary Study 1890 to World War 2

ENGA10H3F: Introduction to Literary Study: 1890 to World War 2 THE DUAL EFFECT (TWO ESSAYS) ESSAY 1 QUESTION While Joyce here notes that his primary concern is “to write a chapter of the moral history of [his] country,” Conrad states a less ambitious goal: “to make you hear, to make you feel [and . . .], before all, to make you see.” These objectives seem quite different, yet in both cases, they involve seeing and/or exposing that which otherwise goes unnoticed. For Joyce, this unnoticed reality comes into view as a result of “the gropings of a spiritual eye which seeks to adjust its vision to an exact focus” (Stephen Hero). For Conrad, this unnoticed reality comes into view through sudden, shocking exposure to what lies before his characters. It comes into view, in other words, by “facing it — always facing it” (Typhoon). Focusing on Heart of Darkness and on one story we have covered in Dubliners, compare and contrast an important missed or realized insight. (Focus either on a missed insight in each text or on a realized one in each text, not on one of each, as this would get confusing.) If you are looking at a missed insight, what is denied or left unseen? If you are looking at a realized insight, what is experienced or seen? What is the effect of this insight, or lack thereof? What, ultimately, is significant about this comparison? How, in other words, does this comparison reveal the pressing questions Conrad and Joyce are both asking at the turn of the 20th century? What are these questions, and why are they important, both then and now? If you choose to focus on a realized insight, you may wish to include a discussion of the following quotes, one in which Marlow hears and faces “the horror, the horror,” but does not expose Kurtz's intended to it, and one in which Gabriel faces a different kind of ghostly reality: "'Forgive me. I--I--have mourned so long in silence--in silence. . . . You were with him--to the last? I think of his loneliness. Nobody near to understand him as I would have understood. Perhaps no one to hear. . . .' "'To the very end,' I said, shakily. 'I heard his very last words. . . .' I stopped in a fright. “'Repeat them,' she said in a heart-broken tone. 'I want--I want--something--something--to--to live with.' "I was on the point of crying at her, 'Don't you hear them?' The dusk was repeating them in a persistent whisper all around us, in a whisper that seemed to swell menacingly like the first whisper of a rising wind. 'The horror! The horror!' "'His last word--to live with,' she murmured. 'Don't you understand I loved him--I loved him--I loved him!' "I pulled myself together and spoke slowly. "'The last word he pronounced was--your name.' "I heard a light sigh, and then my heart stood still, stopped dead short by an exulting and terrible cry, by the cry of inconceivable triumph and of unspeakable pain. 'I knew it--I was sure!' . . . She knew. She was sure. (Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness) Generous tears filled Gabriel's eyes. He had never felt like that himself towards any woman but he knew that such a feeling must be love. The tears gathered more thickly in his eyes and in the partial darkness he imagined he saw the form of a young man standing under a dripping tree. Other forms were near. His soul had approached that region where dwell the vast hosts of the dead. He was conscious of, but could not apprehend, their wayward and flickering existence. His own identity was fading out into a grey impalpable world: the solid world itself which these dead had one time reared and lived in was dissolving and dwindling. A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead. (James Joyce, “The Dead”)