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Banned Books and Novel Ideas
Suzanne Penuel
Romeo and Juliet and Romeo + Juliet: Some Beginning Questions
• High culture/low culture: At what points do Romeo and Juliet (the play) and Romeo + Juliet (the film) seem most exalted, and what points do they seem most trashy? Do Shakespeare and Luhrmann play with the ostensibly separate categories of Art and Junk in a productive way or not? Shakespeare, with more cultural prestige than any author on our syllabus, is usually put into the high-art camp.
What gives Shakespeare this canonical status? In Romeo and Juliet, is it his language? Characterization? Plot? Is it just a bandwagon effect and a function of the plays’ age? To what extent does the linguistic difficulty of the text contribute to Shakespeare’s status in the twenty-first century? Does Shakespeare lose or gain present-day status from the countless pop culture references (almost product placements) to his work?
• Media and entertainment: Both play and film, in their ways, emphasize the centrality of media in our lives. Luhrmann not only makes us almost painfully aware of the camera at times, but also bombards us with images of televisions, billboards, and references to the actors’ previous roles in productions such as My So-Called Life (Danes televison series) and The Basketball Diaries (early DiCaprio film). And Shakespeare writes a play in which the primary action starts at a symbolic play, the masked ball—people come and display themselves in costume, engaging in public ritual activity such as dancing.
What’s the potential range of effects on the audience of this awareness of media presence? Are media, for Luhrmann, what take the place of Shakespeare’s “fate” and “stars,” as a non-human presence that structures our lives? And how does the half-tacky, half-beautiful religious imagery fit in?
• Defamiliarization and naturalism: Obvious artificiality isn’t a new dramatic or film technique—it exists in the morality plays of the Middle Ages, and twentieth-century German playwright Bertolt Brecht created a body of drama around what he called the Verfremdungseffekt (also termed the “alienation effect” or “defamiliarization effect”). His plays focus on economic exploitation and other forms of social injustice. Brecht, a socialist, intended the defamiliarization effect to startle audiences, to jolt them out of a merely emotional experience of his plays and make them think about what the situations on stage had in common with aspects of their lives that needed to change.
How much defamiliarization is there in Shakespeare? In Luhrmann? What are its effects? And how, in R and J and R + J, does defamiliarization combine with naturalism, a representational style that seeks to imitate life as convincingly as possible?
Grass Soup: Study Questions
These questions and notes reflect what I perceive to be central issues in Zhang Xianliang’s Grass Soup; they do not, of course, cover all of the relevant concerns. You can use this as a study guide for the essay questions on the exam by trying to answer the questions raised here with specific examples from the text.
Censorship: How does censorship influence the original diary? What kinds of censorship (external, internal and conscious, internal and unconscious) affect GS? Where do you see these effects? How do they tie into common literary techniques and modes such as irony, ambiguity, symbolism, metaphor, and allegory?
Reform: What are the different meanings of “reform” in the text? What kind of reform do the camp leaders expect? What kind of reform, if any, do Xianliang and the other prisoners experience? What role does the memoir itself play in this reform?
Texts/genres: As one of you asked in the forum, what genre is GS? Is it autobiography? Memoir? History? Diary? What difference does a genre label make to a reader’s perception of the text? What is the relationship between the original diary and GS? How/why does that relationship change over time? How is the reader affected by this relationship?
“Plot”: Some literary genres are expected to have plots; some aren’t. Does Grass Soup have a plot? If so, what is it? How would the ending of the text fit into that plot? How would the changes in the narrator’s level of emotion and the kinds of details he reports fit in?
Literary history: After the 1949 Communist revolution, Party leaders strongly encouraged socialist realism in both visual and verbal art. This form of realism is marked by faithful adherence to party teachings and by a strict focus on the believable depiction of outside reality. In 1966-76 C, Mao Zedong reaffirmed the Party’s commitment to this type of art. How does GS bear the traces of socialist realism, either in conforming to it or rebelling against it?
Materialism/class struggle: One of the ideas implicit and often explicit in Communist/Marxist theory is that goods are central to existence—that the degree to which we can access products (including intangible products, such as education) and the means of production determines most of the aspects of our existence, including gender and race relations. Materialism does not mean “greed” here, but rather a consciousness of the importance of the role of economic power in human life, even in areas which seem to be immune from it. Where and how does Xianliang seem to agree, and where and how does he seem to disagree? You might think about his depiction of women in connection to Communist teachings. Likewise, how does he present class struggle? How does he perceive the proletariat in the camps, and how does he perceive intellectuals? To what degree does he rebel against the Chinese Communist doctrine that valorized the worker and criticized the intellectual, and to what degree does he internalize it? How does his understanding of class relations affect the style of the text?
Nature: What is Xianliang’s relation to the natural world? Does it change? Does GS present a consistent picture of human nature? Is it different from animal nature? What is the relationship between the human mind and the human body? Note the references to devolution and regression which surround the frog-eating historian episode. Can we tell if Xianliang thinks this regression is social, a product of a corrupt government? Biologically inevitable at times? Both?
Political history: How does Xianliang deal with Chinese events such as the Cultural Revolution, the Great Leap Famine, and the Tiananmen Square uprising/massacre? What kinds of allusions, if any, does he make to them?
Banned Books and Novel Ideas
Suzanne Penuel
Kiss of the Spider Woman: Questions
• Formal issues: As we’ve noted, Manuel Puig distances himself narratively from the text, presenting the novel primarily in dialogue and occasionally in transcript and freeform interior monologue, or stream of consciousness. What effects does this narrative distance have? Try comparing it to Xianliang’s first-person narrative and omnipresent authorial voice in Grass Soup. And of course, consider the footnotes: do they count as part of the narrative? Puig says they’re just background, but an author never has the final word on his own text, nor should he.
If the footnotes do count as part of the narrative, how exactly do they fit in? Is Puig more clearly present as author in the notes than he is in the rest of the text? And on a note that bridges formal analysis and character analysis, do Molina’s use of language and Valentin’s use of language differ? If so, how? Does the degree of difference change throughout the novel or not? Many of you mentioned that it was often hard to tell who was talking, but we know that Valentin and Molina are of different generations and educational backgrounds—in real life, wouldn’t they sound different, even when discussing the same topic? Why does Puig make their lines hard to distinguish?
Look at the beginnings of Chapter 8 (148) and Chapter 11 (197). Here we have more dialogue, but this time it looks like a theatrical script, since the characters are identified before each of their lines. Why does Puig choose to identify them here but not elsewhere? Why does he identify them by profession/position and not by name, even Molina? And on the subject of names, why are we introduced to Molina by his last name and Valentin by his first name? (It’s not until fairly late in the book that we learn his last name is “Arregui.”)
• Media: What is the importance of the idea of theater in this text? What about the idea of film? What are some significant differences between the two forms of expression? Why is it important that Molina likes movies and not plays? Hellman’s The Children’s Hour opposes film and theater in some ways, too—do the texts handle the distinction in similar ways? We might associate theater with falseness, pretense, high culture, speech, effeminacy, and we might associate film with escapism, low culture, glamour, visual spectacle (notice I say “might”). Does Puig present film in these somewhat stereotypical ways or not? How does Kiss of the Spider Woman handle the concept of “escape” in general? Are Valentin’s books an escape or a connection to the realities of the world outside the men’s cell? Both? What about KOSW itself? The novel ends with the line “[T]his dream is short but this dream is happy.” Does Puig represent his own text as a short, happy dream? And if so, does that representation trivialize the novel?
The films within the text, of course, are rich in interpretive possibilities. Their recurrent themes of physical beauty, metamorphosis, the duality of human nature, colonialism, and (attempts at) redemption tie in with the novel’s concerns and with the concerns of the characters within it.
• Philosophical underpinnings: Though Molina mocks Valentin’s interest in political philosophy, the novel as a whole raises questions that the sort of books Valentin reads may be trying to answer. Kiss of the Spider Woman, like Grass Soup, examines human nature: what does it mean to be a person? Is there any such thing as “natural” in a human being? Are there any qualities inherent to all people? What divides humans from non-humans? Some of the films Molina recounts allude to these questions, albeit indirectly—the cat human, the zombie human, the spiderwoman, the Jews whom the Nazis see as less than human. At the end of the notes for Chapter 8, Puig writes about some theorists’ perception of the “essential mutability of human nature” (154). Do the events of the novel seem to bear out this theory? Does Puig seem to view this mutability as a frightening possibility? An exhilarating one?
• Power dynamics: One of KOSW’s central concerns is power: who has it, how they get it, what they do with it. Does Puig present power as lying in the hands of a specific type of person? What different types of power do the characters use? Keep Hegel’s master-slave dialectic in mind: though the master supposedly has all the power, his very identity as master depends on the existence and obedience of the slave. One can easily apply this dialectic to other categories in Kiss of the Spider Woman, such as dominant husband/submissive wife, government/populace, jailor/jailed, rich/poor. A question to ask, though, is how meaningful this dialectic is in everyday practices of living. Is the slave aware of his power? Is the master aware of the slave’s power?