Notes for 21 October 2015

LITCS 114
Teaching Associate: Patrick Mooney
Bldg. 494, room 160B
Fall 2015

• On Norse mythology...
  • The Völuspá
    • Völuspá means song of the Völva [seeress].
    • This is the first and best-known poem of the Poetic Edda, one of the primary collections of Norse and Germanic mythology and heroic legend.
    • The Poetic Edda is difficult to date with any certainty.
    • The oldest known written copy is the 13th-century Codex Regius, but the poems were part of an oral minstrel tradition long before that.
  • Ragnarök ...
    • literally means Twilight [or Fate] of the Gods; you may know this phrase better from its more modern German equivalent, Götterdämmerung.
    • is a predicted future series of events that was generally understood by the practitioners of the religion to be literally true.
    • may have been influenced, in the forms in which the story comes down to us, by medieval Christian beliefs about the Last Judgment.
    • may perhaps be best understood as the final stage in a cyclical series of events.
    • Sequence of (Major) Events
      • Garmr, the bloodhound guarding the gates of Hel, breaks free. The god Loki also breaks free.
      • Yggdrasil shudders; the World Serpent, Jörmungandr, lets go of his own tail.
      • A great battle occurs between the gods (the Æsir, and perhaps the Vanir) and the giants (the Jötunn). A number of major deities are killed, including Odin, Thor, Freya, and Loki. Great fires destroy the earth.
      • The sun turns black, and the world is submerged in water.
      • The world re-emerges, new and fertile. A number of deities who had been killed return from Hel. Earth is repopulated by two surviving humans, Líf and Lífþrasir.
    • Sample predictions ...

      • Brother shall strike brother and both fall,
        Sisters’ sons slay each other,
        Evil be on earth, an Age of Whoredom,
        Of sharp sword-play and shields’ clashing,
        A Wind-Age, a Wolf-Age, till the world ruins:
        No man to another shall mercy show.
        The waters are troubled, the waves surge up:
        Announcing now the knell of Fate,
        Heimdal winds his horn aloft,
        On Hel’s Road all men tremble.
        Yggdrasil trembles, the towering Ash
        Groans in woe; the Wolf is loose:
        Odin speaks with the Head of Mimir
        Before he is swallowed by Surt’s kin. (stanzas 39–41)

      • A further woe falls upon Hlín [Frigg/Freya]
        As Odin comes forth to fight the Wolf [Fenrir];
        The killer of Beli [i.e., Frey] battles with Surt:
        Now shall fall Frigg’s beloved [i.e., Odin].
        Now valiant comes Valfather’s [i.e., Odin’s] Son,
        Vidar, to vie with Valdyr in battle,
        Plunges his sword into the Son of Hvedrung [i.e. Fenrir, son of Loki],
        Avenging his father with a fell thrust. (stanzas 46–47)

      • A new earth
        Earth sinks to the sea, the Sun turns black,
        Cast down from Heaven are the hot stars,
        Fumes reek, into flames burst,
        The sky itself is scorched with fire.
        I see Earth rising a second time,
        Out of the foam, fair and green;
        Down from the fells, fish to capture,
        Wings the eagle; waters flow.
        […]
        Unsown acres shall harvests bear,
        Evil be abolished, Baldur return
        And Hropt’s Hall with Hoddur rebuild,
        Wise Gods. Well, would you know more? (stanzas 50-51, 54)

• On The Road ...
  • What is the experience of reading this book like? Who's read it before? Who's read other novels by Cormac McCarthy?
  • What's missing?

    • These are our roads, the black lines on the map. The state roads.

      Why are they the state roads?

      Because they used to belong to the states. What used to be called the states.

      But there's not any more states?

      No.

      What happened to them?

      I dont know exactly. That's a good question.

      But the roads are still there.

      Yes. For a while.

      How long a while?

      I dont know. Maybe quite a while. There's nothing to uproot them so they should be okay for a while.

      (42–43)

    • No lists of things to be done. The day providential to itself. The hour. There is no later. This is later. All things of grace and beauty such that one holds them to one's heart have a common provenance in pain. Their birth in grief and ashes. So, he whispered to the sleeping boy. I have you. (54)
    • The man's wife: You talk about taking a stand but there is no stand to take. (57)
  • What's reduced?
    • Some metaphors the novel uses:
      • Like some cold glaucoma dimming away the world. (4; third sentence of the novel)
      • Like the dying world the newly blind inhabit, all if it slowly fading from memory. (18)
    • After a while he fell back and after a while the man could hear him playing. A formless music for the age to come. Or perhaps the last music on earth called up from out of the ashes of its ruin. The man turned and looked back at him. He was lost in concentration. The man thought he seemed some sad and solitary changeling child announcing the arrival of a traveling spectacle in shire and village who does not know that behind him the players have all been carried off by wolves. (77–78)
  • What's left?
    • The man's wife: The one thing I can tell you is that you wont survive for yourself. I know because I would never have come this far. A person who had no one would be well advised to coble together some passable ghost. Breathe it into being and coax it along with words of love. Offer it each phantom crumb and shield it from harm with your body. As for me my only hope is for eternal nothingness and I hope it with all my heart. (57)
    • The man: So be it. Evoke, the forms. Where you've nothing else construct ceremonies out of the air and breathe upon them. (74)
  • How does signification work in the novel? What is the world?
    • He thought if he lived long enough the world at last would all be lost. Like the dying world the newly blind inhabit, all if it slowly fading from memory. (18)
    • The frailty of everything revealed at last. Old and troubling issues resolved into nothingness and night. The last instance of a thing takes the class with it. Turns out the light and is gone. Look around you. Ever is a long time. But the boy knew what he knew. That ever is no time at all. (28)
    • On this road there are no godspoke men. They are gone and I am left and they have taken with them the world.Query: How does the never to be differ from what never was? (32)
    • he made up new games and gave them made up names. Abnormal Fescue or Catbarf. (53)
    • My brother at last. The reptilian calculations in those cold and shifting eyes. The gray and rotting teeth. Claggy with human flesh. Who has made of the world a lie every word. (75)
    • He tried to think of something to say but he could not. He'd had this feeling before, beyond the numbness and the dull despaire. The world shrinking down about a raw core or parsible entities. The names of things slowly following those things into bovlivion. Colors. The names of birds. Things to eat. Finally the names of things one believed to be true. More fragile than he would have thought. How much was gone already? The sacred idiom shorn of its referents and so of its reality. Drawing down like something trying to preserve heat. In time to wink out forever. (88–89)
    • He'd come to see a message in each such late history, a message and a warning, and so this tableau of the slain the devoured did prove to be. (91)
  • The apocalypse: 52–53.
• Today's whiteboard snapshots
  • What's missing in The Road?
  • What's reduced in The Road?
  • What's left?