Notes for 26 May 2016

LITCS 111
Teaching Associate: Patrick Mooney
Bldg. 494, room 160B
Spring 2016

• Questions? Problems? Raves?
• Things you've been writing about in your reading journals? Let's have people read aloud from their journals.
• Reading aloud, commenting as a group: the very opening of the novel: The courthouse is less old than the town [...] only by creating or anyway decreeing one, could it cope with a situation which otherwise was going to cost somebody money [...] because of a jailbreak compounded by an ancient monster iron padlock [...] not so much with a problem which had to be solved, as a Damocles sword of dilemma from which it had to save itself (3–4).
• Then Ratcliffe, the trader, the store's proprietor, solved it—a solution so simple, so limitless in retroact, that they didn't even wonder why nobody had thought of it before [...] Put it on the Book, Ratcliffe said [...] (17)
  • Note the creation by fiat and the originary debt. Note also the declaration as an alternative to justice. And note the naming issue:
    • We decided to name her Jefferson (22–24)
    • And the town's reaction to the actuality of what had been created by fiat: By God. Jefferson. (26)
  • Note also the originary sin of Jefferson's existence: this one [building] too still costing nothing but the labor and—the second year now—most of that was slave (33)
• The famous quote: The past is never dead. It's not even past. (73). Let's talk about the context here, which is almost universally ignored.
• The geography of Jefferson
  • the order of downtown: both were conceived in the same instant and planned simultaneously during the same winter and build in continuation during the next three years [...] stakes and hanks of fishline [...] the irrevocable design [...] the four broad diverging avenues straight as plumb-lines in the four directions [...] the veins, arteries, life- and pulse-stream along which would flow the aggrandisement of harvest: the gold: the cotton and the grain (31–32)
  • and onward: But above all, the courthouse: the center, the focus, the hub; sitting looming in the center of the county's circumference like a single cloud in its ring of horizon, laying its vast shadow [...] (32ff)
  • But cf. Gavin's meditation in The Town: There is a ridge; you drive on beyond Seminary Hill and in time you come upon it: a mild unhurried farm road presently mounting to cross the ridge and on to join ghe main highway leading from Jefferson to the world [...] you see all Yoknapatawpha in the dying last of day [...] They are all here, supine beheath you, stratified and superposed, osseous and durable with the frail dust and the phantoms:— [...] the and laston to where Frenchman's Bend lay beyond the south-eastern horizon, cradle of Varners and ant-heap for the north-east crawl of Snopes. (330–32; ch. 20)
• Today's whiteboard snapshots
  • What do you notice immediately about Requiem for a Nun?
  • What's difficult about treating the novel as a play?