For Monday: Finishing The Mystic Masseur (if possible)

M:       V.S. Naipaul, The Mystic Masseur (Chs. 9- Epilogue)

NOTE: This is your last response for the class!  I’ve enjoyed reading and learning from your responses.  Far from being busy work, your responses helped me shape the class and decide how to approach the text—and quite often, made me reconsider my own conclusions.  Thanks for playing along! 

Answer TWO of the following…

1. How does Naipaul satirize democratic elections in a postcolonial nation?  How does the system not work—and how is the very idea of democracy often misunderstood by Ganesh and others? 

2. Once the American soldiers arrive in Trinidad, America begins to have a much more profound influence on Trinidadian life than Britain.  Where do we see the “American” influence in its day to day life?  How does Ganesh try to institute “American” popular culture? 

3. Once Ganesh enters politics he emulates the reforms and ideals of Gandhi, who liberated India from British control.  But is his ‘mimicking’ sincere or somewhat hypocritical?  What kind of political leader does he make?

4. How do you understand the end of the book, when the narrator, now a grown man, encounters Ganesh in London?  Why does he change his name to “G.Ramsay Muir”?  

For Friday & Paper #4 Assignment

No questions for Friday, but read the next two chapters of The Mystic Masseur (7 & 8).  We will have an in-class writing based on these chapters at the beginning of class.  The Paper #4 assignment on Mansfield is below...please let me know if you have any questions. 

Paper #4: Mansfield’s Stories: A Life Revealed

In her biography of Mansfield, A Secret Life, Claire Tomalin writes, “The particular stamp of [Mansfield’s] fiction is also the isolation in which each character dwells.   Failure to understand or to be understood is endemic in Mansfield.  Foreigners misinterpret one another, adults and children are at cross purposes, gulfs or incomprehension separate wives from husbands.  Neither happiness nor pain is shared very much, or for long” (6).  From stories like “In the Bay,” which is loosely based on Mansfield’s childhood, to “Daughters of the Late Colonel,” where the women are petrified to act without the permission of their father, Mansfield’s stories develop themes and identities that are central to her personality.  Reading them collectively, we are better able to understand who she was and what questions she hoped to solve, or at least pose, through the ambiguous medium of the short story. 

For this paper, I want you to focus on 2-3 stories that you feel offer an almost ‘autobiographical’ look at Mansfield’s character and sensibility.  Look for stories that seem to share consistent themes, characters, events, or dialogue: what do they collectively seem to be ‘working out’ or ‘answering’ for their writer?  How might Mansfield have been using these stories as a form of self analysis, splintering herself into different women (and men) and situations different from—but often related to—her own?  The key here is to use your gut and find thematic links that are too coincidental to be accidental; where does Mansfield ‘speak’ through the voice of her stories? 

To help you read her life, you will need 2-3 outside sources.  Besides articles in JSTOR, consider some of the following:

·         Katherine Mansfield Birthplace Website (with resources, bibliography, and links): www.katherinemansfield.com

·         Mansfield, The Critical Writings of Katherine Mansfield.  PR9639.3.M258 A6 1987

·         Hankin, C.A.  Katherine Mansfield and her Confessional Stories.  PR9639.3.M258 Z68 1983  

·         Daly, Saralyn R.  Katherine Mansfield (a biography): PR6025.A57 Z58  

·         Willy, Margaret.  Three Women Diarists: Fiennes, Wordsworth, and Mansfield.  PR111 .W52  

·         Murray, John Middleton (her husband!).  Katherine Mansfield and Other Literary Studies.  PR6025.A57 Z85  

·         Tomalin, Clarie.  Katherine Mansfield: A Secret Life.  PR9639.3.M258 Z89 1988  

REQUIREMENTS

·         4-5 pages double spaced (this is a minimum length; there is no maximum)

·         2-3 stories from our book (or other stories by Mansfield if you want to be ambitious—we have all of her stories in the library)

·         2-3 outside sources (see above)

·         Due by our Final Exam Day: Monday, Dec.5^th by 5pm

For Wednesday: The Mystic Masseur, Chs.5 & 6

W:       V.S. Naipaul, The Mystic Masseur (Chs.5 & 6)

Answer TWO of the following…

1. How does Naipaul satirize Ganesh’s inability to begin his writing career?  What obstacles does he face on his path?  Are these typical to all writers (or would-be writers), or are they uniquely Trinidadian (postcolonial) complications? 

2. Naipaul suggests that many citizens of Trinidad (and other third-world, former colonial nations) are reduced to being “mimic men,” or people who mimic the airs and pretensions of the colonial world.  Where do we see Ganesh or others try to be mimic men?  Examine a specific scene and discuss what they are trying to mimic and why. 

3. Defending his book to Beharry, Ganesh exclaims, “Is a damn good book, you hear.”  Why does Ganesh so overestimate the quality and importance of his book?  What do we see (thanks to the narrator) that he does not?  How might this reflect the colonial limitations of this world as Naipaul sees them? 

4. In Jamaica Kincaid’s A Small Place (a non-fiction work about the island of Antigua), she writes that “people in a small place cannot give an exact account, a complete account of events…The people in a small place can have no interest in the exact, or in completeness, for that would demand a careful weighing, careful consideration, careful judging, careful questioning” (53).  How might this relate V.S. Naipaul’s criticisms of Trinidad?  What postcolonial view do both writers share about their “small” island nations?     

For Monday: V.S. Naipaul's The Mystic Masseur

M:       V.S. Naipaul, The Mystic Masseur, Chs.1-4 (pp.1-67)

NOTE: A “masseur” is a term denoting something between a sage, a mystic, a spiritual healer, and a prophet.  Part of the comedy of this work is how Ganesh enters into this profession, and whether or not V.S. Naipaul affirms or denies the spirituality of Indian-Trinidadian culture

Answer TWO of the following…

1. How does dialect or a sense of native culture inform Naipaul’s work?  Where do you think he stands on the English vs. non-English debate? 

2. What role do books and knowledge (esp. English/European knowledge) play in Trinidadian society?  How might this play into Trinidad’s role as a postcolonial society?  Consider Ramlogan’s comment, “This reading, sahib, is a great great thing” (34). 

3. How does Naipaul depict local Indian culture in this novel?  Do you feel this is an affectionate portrait?  A satirical portrait?  Is he writing more as an “outsider,” like many English writers would have done prior to him, or is this an “insider” writing of things known only to one participating in the culture? 

4. Somewhat related to question #2, why might we consider The Mystic Masseur a satire of postcolonial society?  In what ways does Trinidad not function as a ‘modern’ nation?  What has colonialism left in its wake that destabilizes the life of day to day activities? 

Handout from Friday's class (may be on exam!)

This is a handout I gave to the class during our discussion of postcolonialsm on Friday.  One of the great dilemmas of the 'postcolonial' writer is what language to write in: the language of one's indigenous culture or nation, or the language of the former colonizer--English, French, etc.?  V.S. Naipaul made his choice by choosing a largely dialectical English which perserves the flavor of local Trinidadian culture and his own Indian community within Trinidad.  Here are two representative voices on the debate, which I may ask you to write/think about on the final exam, which will have a major V.S. Naipaul component:

LANGUAGE AND POSTCOLONIALISM: Two views

PRO—Salman Rushdie (India), from “Commonwealth Literature Does Not Exist” from Imaginary Homelands (1981)

“As for myself, I don’t think it is always necessary to take up the anti-colonial—or is it post-colonial?—cudgels against English.  What seems to me to be happening is that those peoples who were once colonized by the language are now rapidly remaking it, domesticating it, becoming  more and more relaxed about the way they use it—assisted by the English language’s enormous flexibility and size, they are carving out large territories for themselves within its frontiers…

“To take the case of India, only because it’s the one with which I’m most familiar.  The debate about the appropriateness of English in post-British India has been raging ever since 1947; but today, I find, it is a debate which has meaning only for the older generation.  The children of independent India seem not to think of English as being irredeemably tainted by its colonial provenance.  They use it as an Indian language, as one of the tools they have to hand.”

CON—Ngugi wa Thiong’o (Kenya) from “The Language of African Literature” from Decolonizing the Mind (1981)

“The real aim of colonialism was to control the people’s wealth: what they produced, how they produced it, and how it was distributed; to control, in other words, the entire realm of the language of real life.  Colonialism imposed its control of the social production of wealth through military conquest…But its most important area of domination was the mental universe of the colonized, the control, through culture, of how people perceived themselves and their relationship to the world.  Economic and political control can never be complete or effective without mental control.  The control a people’s culture is to control their tools of self-definition in relationship to others…

Language as culture is thus mediating between me and my own self; between my own self and other selves; between me and nature.  Language is mediating in my very being….Thus a specific culture is not transmitted through language in its universality but in its particularity as the language of a specific community with a specific history.  Written literature and orature and the main means by which a particular language transmits the images of the world contained in the culture it carries.”

For Wednesday: Three Final Stories...

Konstanin Makovsky, Portrait of Julia Makovskova (1881)

W:       Mansfield, Marriage à la Mode (92-101), The Singing Lesson (121-126), The Stranger (127-138)

Answer TWO of the following…

1. Which of these stories seems the most cynical about married (or engaged)

life?  Why, according to the world of the story, is the foundation for wedded

bliss doomed for the couple—and perhaps for all men and women? 

2. Why does the husband in “The Stranger” lament at the end that “They would

never be alone together again” (138)?  Why does his wife’s experience with the

dead man ruin everything for her husband?  Has she done something wrong? 

3. The story, “Marriage à la Mode” shows a married woman fallen in with a

“dangerous woman” (Moria Morrison) and her band of loafing artists.  Mansfield,

however, was much more like Moria than the wife in the story, so how do you

think she wants us to read the story?  Why might she write a story that seems to

sympathize with the husband? 

4. How does Mansfield make us question the ‘happy ending’ of the music teacher

and her fiancé in “The Singing Lesson”?  What clues are sprinkled throughout the

story of the nature of this match—and why the teacher is so willing to ignore the

obvious?

For Monday: Daughters of the Late Colonel and The Lady's Maid

Whistler, Symphony in White, No. 3 (1867)

For Monday, we will discuss two Mansfield stories, the sublime Daughters of the Late Colonel (52-70) and the last story in the volume, The Lady's Maid (149-153).  There are no take-home questions, but expect an in-class writing prompt when you get to class. 

Also remember your Paper #3 is due anytime next week, but no later than Friday by 5pm.  Paper #4 is coming soon as well!  On a final note, make sure you have our final book, V.S. Naipaul's The Mystic Masseur handy, since we'll be starting it the Monday after next.