Study guide

Foundations in

ENGLISH LITERARY STUDIES
Only study guide for

ENG1501

Authors: Deirdre Byrne
Fetson Kalua
Ruth Scheepers
Critical reader: Gwen Kane

Department of English Studies
University of South Africa
Pretoria

© 2012 University of South Africa
All rights reserved
Printed and published by the
University of South Africa
Mucklneuk, Pretoria
ENG1501/1/2013–2015
98926381
InDesign, Florida

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Although every effort has been made to trace the copyright holders, this has not always been possible.
Should any infringement have occurred, the publisher apologises and undertakes to amend the omission in the event of a reprint.
Deirdre Byrne

CONTENTS
Page


Note

iii

Section 1:

Reading poetry

Section 2:

The Catcher in the Rye

50

Section 3:

The Road to Mecca

75

Section 4:

When Rain Clouds Gather

95

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NOTE

You will find a number of tables and boxes in this guide. These contain important information about literary studies, including the right terms to use when writing about literature and some background information. Make sure you read these boxes carefully and take note of the information they contain. There are also a number of writing activities (usually under the title “Exercise”) in the guide. Please complete them, either in this guide, in a journal that you have bought for your study notes, or on your computer or tablet. Writing is an essential part of successful English Studies.

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SECTION 1
1

Reading poetry

by Fetson Kalua and Deirdre Byrne

A GUIDE TO THIS SECTION
This section contains the following things:

•• Some discussion of poetry in general;
•• Detailed study notes on ten poems from Seasons Come to Pass;
•• Definitions of terms that are often used in the study of poetry (these appear in
••

boxes throughout the text);
Some final advice about writing about poetry.

In this section we are going to explore the study of poetry by means of a close reading of ten poems from your prescribed book. These are not the only poems to be studied in this module, though: we have chosen them as examples of the methods we want you to use in reading and studying poetry. As a rule, you will need to study approximately twenty-five poems for this module. A list of all twenty-five poems, including the ones we have analysed for you in this guide, will be sent to you in good time.

Study programme
Activity

Time spent (approximately)

Reading the poems

2 hours

Reading this study note and making notes of important points

6 hours

Completing activities in the study guide 8 hours

Preparatory writing for your assignment on poetry

2 hours

Drafting and revising your assignment

6 hours

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What is poetry?
This question has intrigued many people over many centuries and continues to provoke varied and interesting answers, so let’s think about it before we begin exploring specific poems.

Exercise
Fill in the following table before you start studying this section.
Poetry is …

I like poetry because …

I dislike poetry because …

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SECTION 1: Reading poetry

Now mark each of the following statements as true or false, depending on what you believe. Please be as honest as you can, since that will help you to see what you really think about poetry and to raise your awareness of this form of literature.
Remember that nobody needs to see your answers and that there are no “right” or “wrong” answers: at this stage we are merely investigating what you think and believe about poetry.
STATEMENT

True/False
(beginning of the module)

True/False
(end of the module) Poetry is the opposite of prose.
Poetry is difficult to read.
A poem must rhyme.
Poetry uses language in a different way from the way we usually use it.
I have read a lot of poetry.
Poetry is outdated and belongs only to the past. Poetry has nothing to do with ordinary life.
Poetry belongs to the upper circles of educated and sophisticated people, and not to ordinary people.
All poems are less than a page in length.
The best subjects for poetry are life, death, love or nature.

Please keep your answers to these statements in a safe place. We will return to them later in this study unit. For now, though, please remember that I told you there were no right or wrong answers to the statements above. At this stage we are investigating what you think, feel and believe about poetry. We can, however, note that:

•• Poetry is not the most popular cultural form. Most people would rather read a
••

novel than a poem (although poems are usually shorter than novels).
Although poetry is taught in high schools and is part of the South African matric syllabus for English, most learners do not have much exposure to poetry at all and read only ten or fifteen poems in their Grade 12 year of schooling. Most of these learners will not choose to read poetry in their post-school lives.

From these facts, we can gather that poetry is not a popular choice of reading material for the general population of South Africa. Nevertheless, it is compulsory for you to read and study poetry in your first-year English module on “Foundations in
English Literary Studies” because:

•• Most poems are short, so we can study the creative possibilities of the English language in a condensed form.

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•• Poets usually use several different creative strategies in each poem, including
••

sound-effects, such as rhyme, rhythm and repetition, and imagery (pictures in words), so reading and studying poetry can give us insight into the way language is used for creative purposes.
Poetry often offers us a condensed piece of text in which we can explore how poets choose to use certain words and images to achieve particular effects and how successful this is (we would write about how effective the poem is as a whole).

Poetry is a form of communication, and it must communicate effectively with its reader/s. When we take time to understand how the poet has used language – in ways that are strange and unusual, compared to our everyday conversations and writing
– we can see, not only what poets are trying to say, but also how they use language to say it. The aim of this section is for you to find out how poetry uses language in fresh, original, strange and “different” ways in order to communicate with its readers.
Let’s begin …with our first poem. Here it is:

To His Coy Mistress
Andrew Marvell (1621–1678)

Had we but world enough, and time,
This coyness, Lady, were no crime.
We would sit down, and think which way
To walk, and pass our long love’s day.
Thou by the Indian Ganges’ side
Shouldst rubies find; I by the tide
Of Humber would complain. I would
Love you ten years before the Flood;
And you should, if you please, refuse
Till the conversion of the Jews.
My vegetable love should grow
Vaster than empires, and more slow;
An hundred years should go to praise
Thine eyes, and on thy forehead gaze;
Two hundred to adore each breast,
But thirty thousand to the rest.
An age at least to every part,
And the last age should show your heart.
For Lady, you deserve this state,
Nor would I love at lower rate. But at my back I always hear
Time’s winged chariot hurrying near;
And yonder all before us lie
Deserts of vast eternity.
Thy beauty shall no more be found;
Nor, in thy marble vault, shall sound
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10

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SECTION 1: Reading poetry

My echoing song; then worms shall try
Thy long-preserved virginity:
And your quaint honour turn to dust,
And into ashes all my lust:
The grave’s a fine and private place,
But none, I think, do there embrace. Now, therefore, while the youthful hue
Sits on thy skin like morning glew*
And while thy willing soul transpires
At every pore with instant fires,
Now let us sport us while we may;
And now, like amorous birds of prey,
Rather at once our time devour,
Than languish in his slow-chapped* power.
Let us roll all our strength, and all
Our sweetness, up into one ball:
And tear our pleasures with rough strife
Thorough* the iron gates of life:
Thus, though we cannot make our sun
Stand still, yet we will make him run.

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35

40

45

*glew – glow
*slow-chapped – slow
*thorough – through
We will begin by exploring the language used in this poem, and this will be a consistent focus throughout this section on poetry. The companion module to this one, ENG1502 (Foundations in Applied English Language Studies), will show you how to explore language in use and in the context of various interactions. Poetry uses language in specific ways. I’m sure you would never speak or write in the way this poem is written. This point is also a useful place to begin working towards an understanding of the poem. What is the difference between the way language is used in this poem and the normal or usual use of language?
You probably realised that this poem does not use modern English. Even if the date of Andrew Marvell’s life had not been given as 1621–1678, words such as “shoulds’t”,
“thine”, “yonder” and “thy” alert the reader immediately to the fact that an older version of English is being used in this poem than the one we are used to encountering and using every day. Some words in the poem are still used in English, but not in the way they are used in this poem. For example, a modern lover would be very unlikely to call his beloved “Lady”, as the speaker does in this poem (line 2).
Marvell uses the article “an” in “An hundred years”, but this expression is no longer used in twenty-first century English. A final example is the word “thorough”, which means “through” in line 44 of the poem, but which we use today to mean “careful” or “extensive”. All these usages should have alerted you to the fact that “To His Coy
Mistress” does not exactly use English as we use it today.
The layout of the poem is also unfamiliar. We note that the words of the sentence do not go all the way to the right-hand margin of the page as they do when we are writing prose (this is the definition of prose: words that extend from the left to the
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right margin and then continue on the next line). This fact, which we use intuitively to distinguish poetry from prose, turns out to be interesting when we consider it more closely, especially in relation to this poem. The length of the lines – the fact that they are all relatively short – is what makes the poet able to use rhyme.
Take a moment to explore the rhymes used in “To His Coy Mistress”. Write down the final words of each line. Begin with the following pairs time/crime; way/day; side/tide; and so on. What do you notice about these rhymes?
I’m sure you will notice that each line rhymes with the one that follows it. This form of poetry, where the lines rhyme in pairs, is called heroic couplets. The important question to ask now is, what is the effect of each line rhyming with the next one? The answer is that the rhymes emphasise or strengthen certain words. Words that rhyme are brought closer to each other in order to bring their connection to the reader’s attention: time and crime, for example. (In fact, we discover, later in the poem, that the speaker is accusing his mistress [or girlfriend] of a love “crime” of wasting too much time before agreeing to make love with him.)
Another unusual feature of the language used in this poem is that the poet has divided it into three sections: lines 1–20; lines 21–32; and lines 33–46. This reminds us of the way prose is often divided into paragraphs and might remind us, too, that each paragraph usually expresses one idea. Perhaps we could try looking at this poem to see whether this is true.
Lines 1–20 describe a certain way for the speaker to love his mistress (or girlfriend).
He is imagining how things “would” be if he had his way, not how things really are for the two lovers. She would “find rubies” (line 6) by the banks of the Indian
Ganges (the Ganges is a major river in India) and he would “complain” (line 7) about her absence on the banks of the Humber (in the North of England). They would have plenty of space to enjoy themselves and to walk around at their leisure while deciding “how to pass our long love’s day” (line 4). If this were true, how would the speaker choose to pass the time? Give some examples from the poem.
You probably noticed that the speaker immediately turns to his mistress’s body. He mentions a number of body parts (her eyes, her forehead and her breasts) and says that he wants to appreciate and enjoy each of them for a long period of time (such as a hundred years, two hundred years, or thirty thousand years (lines 13–16)). This tells us three things about the speaker and his poem. In the first place, he is concerned about bodily, corporeal and (we can assume) sexual matters. (Indeed, this turns out to be the poem’s focus.) And in the second place, he is clearly not writing about reality or anything that would actually take place. Finally, the theme of time is important and we have the sense of the speaker dealing with huge tracts of time
– centuries, ages, epochs.
The images used in this section of the poem are important. For example, the speaker uses the image of “My vegetable love” in line 11. This is a very unusual image as we do not generally think of love and vegetables together. How can the speaker’s love be like a vegetable? On the one hand, vegetables (like love) are nourishing. But another, maybe more fruitful answer lies in the speed of growth: both his love and the vegetable would, in the ideal world the speaker describes in the first section of the poem, grow slowly and spread over centuries until they become enormous and cover huge areas: the many kilometres between the Humber river in North England and the Ganges River in India would be as nothing.
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What, then, are the characteristics of the kind of love the speaker is describing in the first section of the poem? Write down at least five qualities of this kind of love in the space below.

Some of the qualities you might have listed are: detailed, reverent, respectful, slow, adoring, gradual. (It would help to provide quotations from the first section of the poem to support each of these qualities.)
In the second section of the poem, the speaker immediately introduces a contrasting point of view. The word “But” in line 21 tells us that the speaker is going to offer a different viewpoint. It turns out, in an extremely famous metaphor, that “at my back I always hear/Time’s winged chariot hurrying near” (lines 21–22). The “winged chariot” carries connotations of speed and rush; and, together with the words “Time” and
“hurrying”, conjures up an image of rapid movement. The speaker is being chased by the chariot “at [his] back” and, therefore, he cannot love his mistress in the way he has described in the first section. What are the reasons for this?

Exercise
Explore the way the speaker uses images of death and the grave to explain what will happen to him and his mistress when they have both died. Then, on the lines below, write a description of what, according to the speaker, will happen to them in the centuries to come beyond death.

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In these lines (21–32) the speaker uses words to paint a picture of a vastly different space than the one he evoked in the first section of the poem. This one is bare, barren and lifeless. The only living things appear to be the worms which “try/Thy long-preserved virginity” (line 28). This is the “quaint honour” that the speaker mentions in the following line. Stop and think about this for a moment, bearing in mind that “To his Coy Mistress” was written long before the HIV/AIDS pandemic.
In this context, how does the woman’s virginity appear to you? The speaker sees it as “quaint”, which means endearing but not exactly what he regards as appropriate.
At this point we are beginning to glimpse what the speaker of the poem is driving at, through the use of words such as “virginity”, “honour” and “lust”. He makes it explicit in the final section of the poem, where he concludes his argument. Note that
Marvell has constructed his poem carefully, in order to make a rational argument: the first section of the poem describes his wish for the relationship between himself and his beloved to be a certain way (we know this because of the word “would” and its relationship to the conditional mode in English). The second section describes why this cannot be the case – because of the “but” and the fact that Time is rushing by. The logical and inevitable result of Time’s passing is, naturally, death, and the speaker says that there will be no “embracing” in that area (“The grave’s a fine and private place/But none, I think, do there embrace” (lines 31–32)). This is the point the speaker has been trying to reach, and he delivers it with a humorous flourish, by tentatively saying “I think”, when we all know that it is impossible to make love in a coffin.
Having given all the evidence for the argument, the speaker makes his concluding appeal, which he begins with the words “Now, therefore” in line 33. “Therefore”, like some other words, such as “but”, “thus” and “so”, is a logical marker, which indicates to the reader that a strong line of argument has led up to this point. (Remember to use these words in your essays as markers to show the reader that you have good reasons for your point of view.)

Exercise
What is the speaker asking for? Read the final section of the poem carefully and write your answer on the lines below.

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If you said that the speaker is asking his beloved to make love with him, you would have been correct. It turns out that the whole poem is an elaborate act of persuading a woman to sleep with a man. She does not wish to do so (that is why she is described as “Coy” in the title) and the speaker has to persuade her. He uses many strategies to do this, including the emotive language of flattery in the first section of the poem and the equally emotive horrors of death and decay in the second, together with strong arguments and apparently irresistible logic to convince her of the folly of postponing their physical pleasure.
Some extra points of interest
There are two interesting aspects of this poem, which you might enjoy knowing about. In the first place, Marvell is writing within the tradition of courtly love and is writing against it, to a certain extent. The courtly love tradition was a tradition within poetry where male poets wrote ardent love poems addressed to women, often naming the women as their inspiration for battle, leadership or politics. These love poems usually used exaggerated terms to praise the women to whom they were addressed – in the same way as the speaker in “To His Coy Mistress” claims that he would spend “an age at least to every part” of his beloved’s body and being. (Edmund
Spenser’s sonnet, “Ye tradeful merchants”, is usually mentioned as an example of a poem that expresses the courtly love tradition. Some of Shakespeare’s sonnets, such as “My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun,” mock or subvert the exaggerated praise that formed part of the courtly love tradition.) The second interesting feature of “To His Coy Mistress” is that the speaker calls on the idea of carpe diem, or “seize the day”, to persuade his mistress to have sex with him. Carpe diem is the idea that, as time is passing rapidly, and will never return, we should take every opportunity that presents itself to us.1 This idea is based on the notion that it is good to indulge the senses, for example by making love or eating chocolate cake. It is not difficult to see that this is not always true.
To conclude
“To His Coy Mistress” uses language in an unusual way to express a fairly basic argument: that a woman should not hesitate to make love with her male partner.
The speaker is obviously male, and expresses his point of view with great force and care. The three sections of the poem are carefully designed to persuade the woman to give in to the man’s suit, and make love with him. This is not at all the kind of subject we usually think of as best suited for poetry – but “To His Coy Mistress” is
1 Carpe diem was a common theme in Medieval and Renaissance literature, and it was common for people would put a picture of a skull on display in their homes as a constant reminder of mortality.
The importance of death and the afterlife was frequently invoked as a reason for following Christian principles. ENG1501/19

one of the best-known and often-quoted poems in the history of English Literature.
This points to the fact that poetry can be about almost anything: it does not have to be only about the subjects we think about as “poetic”, such as love, flowers, sunsets and the like.
If you go back a page or so, you will find a reference to Shakespearean sonnets. If you did not understand what we meant by the word “sonnet”, do not worry. We are now going to explore the sonnet form through a detailed examination of three well-known sonnets in English poetry: John Milton’s “On His Blindness” (written in the 1600s), William Shakespeare’s “Let Me Not to the Marriage of True Minds”
(written in the 1500s) and John Keats’s “When I have Fears that I May Cease to Be”
(written in the 1800s).

On His Blindness
John Milton (1608–1674)

When I consider how my light is spent,
Ere half my days, in this dark world and wide,
And that one talent which is death to hide
Lodged with me useless, though my soul more bent
To serve therewith* my Maker, and present
My true account, lest He returning chide;
‘Doth God exact day-labour, light denied?’
I fondly ask. But Patience, to prevent
That murmur, soon replies, ‘God doth not need
Either man’s work or his own gifts. Who best
Bear his mild yoke, they serve him best. His state
Is kingly: thousands at his bidding speed
And post o’er land and ocean without rest;
They also serve who only stand and wait.’

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*therewith – with that
To begin with, it seems quite clear that the speaker is in a crisis or difficult situation.
Answer the following questions to help you explore this problem.
(1) What crisis is he facing?

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(2) Why is it so difficult for him to accept the predicament he finds himself in?

SECTION 1: Reading poetry

John Milton’s poem is a good example of a Petrarchan sonnet. This is to say that both its form and structure conform to the traditional Petrarchan convention of fourteen lines, as well as having a typically Petrarchan rhyme scheme of abba abba cde cde. Shakespeare and some of his contemporaries would adopt, and even slightly adapt, this verse form more than two hundred years later, although the sonnet’s running feature (of the standard fourteen lines) remained unchanged. While dealing with the subject of love, say by exploring the virtues of the poet’s mistress, Shakespeare and other sonneteers ranged more widely and thus wrote about topics that touched on and relate to human existence in general, hence the frequency in their poetry of motifs such as humour, sickness, love, death, and so forth. In addition, Shakespeare and some of his contemporaries adapted and modified the sonnet’s form and structure by doing away with the Petrarchan divisions based on the octave and the sestet.
Instead, they introduced their own distinctive divisions, namely three quatrains and, crucially, the rhyming couplet – the last two lines of the sonnet. It is important to note that, when it came to writing sonnets, some sonneteers, notably John Donne, decided to retain the Petrarchan convention.
The poem is autobiographical in that it represents the poet’s life experiences – Milton began to lose his sight in 1644, and by 1652 he was completely blind. The poem is divided into an octave (the first eight lines) and a sestet (the last six lines). The meaning of the poem follows this division. In the first eight lines, the speaker, Milton himself, questions how he can serve God by writing poetry if he is blind. The first lines: “When I consider how my light is spent/Ere half my days” are paradoxical: he spends his days (“light”) writing poetry but now, before half his of life is over, his light, or eyesight, is “spent”, in the sense of being used up or exhausted. Lines 3 to
6 are an allusion to the parable of the talents (Matthew 25:14–30). In this parable, the master of three servants goes away on a journey but, before leaving, he gives them each some money – coins called talents – and tells them to use the money wisely. On his return he rewards the first two servants who have put their coins to good use and doubled their money. The third servant, however, buries his talent and presents the master with this one talent on his return. His master punishes him for his laziness and casts him out into the darkness.

Exercise
Answer the following questions to help you understand how Milton has used the parable in his poem:
(1) What do you think the word “talent” means in the context of the poem?

(2) Do you think the meaning of the word “talent” is the same in modern times?
Give reasons.

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(3) Describe the kind of talent that Milton has been given by God and what he feels about his talent.

(4) What do you think is the significance of the parable of the talents in the poem?

Milton’s reference to talents alludes, or refers, to Christ’s parable. In the parable the word “talent” is the name of a coin, but the word takes the more modern meaning, in this poem, of gifts or special abilities we are blessed with. Milton has been given a gift, a talent, for writing poetry, just as the servants were given coins. If Milton
“hides” or buries this gift, as the third servant buried the coin he was given, it would be tantamount to Milton’s death – a spiritual death in that he would be unable to serve God – just as, in the parable, hiding the coin spelled almost literal death for the servant, who was cast out by his master. Milton feels he will be called to account for his use (or failure to use) of his gift, just as the servant was called to account for the fact that he had not made his money grow like the other servants had.
Milton compares himself with this servant – his own talent, that is, his gift for writing poetry – is “lodged” with him, “useless” as he is blind and cannot write, even though he is “more bent”, more determined than ever to serve God with this talent. He wishes to present a good “account” to God, to show, as the two servants in the parable did, that he has used his gifts wisely and to the glory of God, in order to avoid being chided, or scolded and cast out into the darkness. But how? Milton boldly asks foolishly (or “fondly”), “Does God expect service (“day-labour”) from
His subjects, while at the same time denying them light (sight)”?
Some literary terms
Personification: This means giving inanimate (lifeless) objects human qualities. For example, in the sentence, Her dress danced in the wind, the word danced is an example of personification.
Oxymoron: a poetic arrangement of words to create a paradoxical expression, which combines two terms, which in everyday use, are opposites. For example, in the sentence, It was a bittersweet farewell party, the word bittersweet is an oxymoron.
Pun: a play on words that may sound the same but be very different in meaning.

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In the sestet, Patience (the capital letter indicates that Milton personifies this virtue) answers Milton’s question, or perhaps simply shows him that the question is badly framed. This virtue called Patience reminds him that God does not need anything from mankind – He is sufficient unto himself – “Who best/bear his mild yoke, they serve him best” (lines 8–9). God’s will is represented by the image of the yoke, used to harness the ox to the plough, and is a symbol of submission.

Exercise
(1) At this point, the speaker uses various images to illustrate God’s will. List the images and explain what they mean.

(2) Identify the poet’s use of puns in the poem and explain how they work.

God is a mighty presence and has thousands who travel the earth doing His bidding
– He does not need any special efforts from Milton. Simply by submitting to God’s will, Milton is serving him – and the poem ends on this note: “They also serve who only stand and wait” (this line has been used to justify passivity, of course), while at the same time pointing to the kind of meekness (alluded to in Christian teaching) which is said to be a good thing. For example, we are told in the Bible that the meek shall inherit the earth.
In this poem, Milton uses a pun to put across an idea. For example, “light”, understood literally, means the light of day – Milton has spent his days up to now serving
God by making use of his gift for writing poetry. But now his light (eyesight) has been used up and “spent”. So, in fact, there is a play on the meaning of both “light” and “spent”. The significance is that Milton questions how he can serve God without light – both daylight to see by and eyesight to see with.
“Mild yoke” is an oxymoron, a figure of speech by which an expression, usually two words, produces an incongruous, seemingly self-contradictory effect, as in “cruel kindness”, “bittersweet”, or “to make haste slowly”. In this poem, “yoke” suggests
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submission, hardship, but God’s control is “mild”, or loving and gentle. God controls his servants with kindness, so Milton suggests.

Exercise
List words or expressions in English which can be described as oxymorons (you can draw on your own general knowledge of English to answer this question. A good way to begin is to put together two opposites, as Shakespeare does in Romeo and Juliet when he speaks of “loving hate”).

Note that there is a dramatic shift between the two sections of the poem. In the octave, Milton’s tone is questioning, even peevish and annoyed, as he wonders how he can be expected to serve God if God removes his ability, his tools as it were, to do so. In the sestet, though, his patience is restored by the words of the personified virtue (Patience). The tone in the last six lines is one of acceptance and resignation to his plight. The poem ends on a more optimistic note, though; he realises that he too has a role to play and he too can serve God, even if it is in a less obvious and active way than he did before. Simply accepting his lot is in fact to serve God.

Exercise
Do you find John Milton’s argument (in the above poem) convincing? Give reasons from your own life experience.

Let Me Not to the Marriage of True Minds
William Shakespeare (1564–1616)

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove.
O, no! it is an ever-fixèd mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wand’ring bark,*
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Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.2
Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle’s3 compass come;
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom. If this be error and upon me proved, I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

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*bark – ship
Introduction to the Shakespearean/Elizabethan sonnet
The poem above is a Shakespearean or Elizabethan sonnet. You will recall how, when we looked at John Milton’s sonnet, “On His Blindness”, we observed the way in which his Petrarchan sonnet is divided into an octave (the first eight lines), and a sestet (the last six lines), with the ideas in the poem following that division. Just like Petrarchan sonnets, Shakespeare’s sonnets were also written in fourteen lines.
But unlike Petrarchan sonnets, the fourteen lines in a Shakespearean/Elizabethan sonnet are broken down into three sections called quatrains, each comprising four lines, followed by the final component of the sonnet, which is called the rhyming couplet. This final division has two lines, which rhyme. Usually the poet allows the theme of the poem to develop progressively, building it up through each of the quatrains, until the highest point is reached, or, (in some cases) a contrasting point is expressed in the rhyming couplet. Love is often seen as the dominant and overarching theme in Shakespearean/Elizabethan sonnets, but other subjects, such as sickness or death, are also tackled.
Sound effects in poetry
Poetry is meant to be read aloud. For this reason, poets often use carefully chosen sound-effects, such as alliteration, assonance and rhyme. Here are some definitions of these terms.
Alliteration – the deliberate repetition of consonants at the beginning of words that are placed close together (for example, the river raged).
Assonance – similarity in the vowel sounds of words that are close together
(for example, born and warm). Note that the spelling does not have to be the same for the words to rhyme.
Rhyme – the repetition of the same or similar sounds at the end of lines, either in pairs or in more complicated patterns.

Exercise
(1) Now see if you can work out the rhyme scheme of the sonnet, “Let me not to the marriage of true minds”. Use a different letter for each sound at the end of a line. So, for example, you would represent the sound of “minds” at the end of the first line by a.

2 Reference to the measurements of a ship, in particular the height of the mast.
3 Curved knife used for harvesting or cutting crops.
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(2) List what the poet mentions are the possible barriers (impediments) to love.

(3) Identify the use of personification in the poem and explain how this powerful poetic device contributes to the overall understanding of the poem.

If you came up with abab cdcd efef gg as the rhyming scheme for the above poem, then you are right. “Let me not to the Marriage of True Minds” is held together by the cohesive devices of alliteration and assonance, just as (if not more than) it is by the rhyme scheme. The poet’s use of personification (writing about Love and Time as though they had human qualities) gives the sonnet great power, thereby contributing to a greater understanding of its theme.

Exercise
In the course of the poem, the speaker demonstrates that love is important in our understanding of time. Briefly explain how he does this.

The overall meaning of the poem (also called the theme) is certainly the speaker’s strong resolve to love in the face of difficulties. Note how the poet/speaker uses a tone of confidence, certainty and self-belief throughout the poem to put across his message. For example, take note of the following expressions: “Let me not …”, “Love is not …”, “Or bends with the remover …”, “O, no! it is …”, “Love alters not …”, “If this be error …/… no man ever loved”. This passionate and self-assured tone permeates the whole sonnet. The tone helps us to realise that the speaker completely believes that love is the only eternal and indomitable force that overcomes and overwhelms all barriers, and that good and wholesome love is the key to overcoming mortality
– the inevitability of death. But these general remarks about the poem seem more
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like conclusions than “working analyses”. Let’s work towards a clear understanding of how this general idea is communicated by answering the questions that follow.

Exercise
(1) Throughout the poem, the speaker lists many obstacles to love. List them and explain the ways in which they are barriers to love.

Some of the difficulties or obstacles pointed out in the poem are found in terms such as “remove”, “impediments”, “tempests”, and “doom”. The speaker expresses his firm resolve or determination to love.

(2) Make a list of the nautical images that are used in the poem to suggest a sea journey. You would have mentioned images of sea journeys, storms, navigation by stars, the effective use of the word “compass”, and so forth. The speaker uses a metaphor when he likens the constancy of love to “an ever fix’d mark” and “a star to every wand’ring bark”, both suggesting the idea of the compass and its significance in showing directions during navigation.
The speaker goes on to demonstrate the relationship between love and time, insisting that “Love’s not Time’s fool”, that love never bends with time (line 4), though the bending of Time’s sickle destroys youth it cannot alter love (line 10). In other words, the greatest impediment to love is time, but the speaker maintains that love can overcome Time. In short, the poem seeks to resist or fight love’s enemy – time
– which is ultimately the enemy of life itself as the force of ageing, of falling off
(out!) of love and the bringer (ultimately) of death. The speaker makes it clear that he is aware of such “impediments” that could stand in the way of love, that could cause love to “alter”, but that he himself cannot allow such a thought to cross his mind because of his total conviction and understanding that love is unconditional, pure and complete and transcends time and, perhaps, even death. This conviction is expressed in his use of the first person singular pronouns – “me” (line 1) and “I”
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(line 14). According to the speaker, true love does not change: even if there may be reasons for doing so, it remains ever and unwaveringly constant.
It is now time to focus on the rhyming couplet. In Shakespearean sonnets, in particular, the rhyming couplet has a special function of wrapping up the argument
(or line of reasoning) presented in the poem. In this case, the speaker’s declaration, “Love is not love ... the edge of doom” is further confirmed in the rhyming couplet (the last two lines of the poem). Here, the idea of genuine love is placed in context – the relation of the poet himself to true love. He says: “If this be error and upon me proved/I never writ nor no man ever loved”. We can rewrite these two lines informally as follows: If my claims or utterances can be “tested” and it can be demonstrated that I’m mistaken, then, either I haven’t written any work (presumably this poem and other works) and neither I or any other man has ever fallen in love. In this context, the writer seems to suggest that he must be right since he has written and has loved someone before.
Two important terms
Irony: the technique of implying exactly the opposite of what is being said.
In other words, the meaning of something differs from what it appears to be.
Paradox (or ambivalence): a contradiction in terms; words with an implication that is opposite to their meaning.

Considering what the speaker says in the three quatrains, the rhyming couplet might be seen as ironical or paradoxical, especially given the speaker’s keen awareness that time is, in fact, the enemy of love. A highly critical reader will read irony into the couplet – the kind of reader who is perhaps prepared to embrace the contrasting views of the poet or speaker, particularly considering the views and arguments about love expressed in the three quatrains.

When I Have Fears That I May Cease To Be
John Keats (1795–1821)

When I have fears that I may cease to be
Before my pen has glean’d* my teeming brain,
Before high piled books, in charactry,*
Hold like rich garners* the full ripen’d grain;
When I behold, upon the night’s starr’d face,
Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance,
And think that I may never live to trace
Their shadows, with the magic hand of chance;
And when I feel, fair, creature of an hour,
That I shall never look upon thee more,
Never have relish in the faery* power
Of unreflecting love; – then on the shore
Of the wide world I stand alone, and think
Till love and fame to nothingness do sink.
*glean’d – harvested
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*charactry – letters of the alphabet
*garners – storehouses
*faery – magic

Exercise
Look at the title of the poem and reflect on the word “cease” and the phrase “to be”.
(1) What ideas do these conjure up in your mind? (Use your dictionary to help you.)

(2) Notice how Keats’ first line of his poem echoes Milton’s first line of his sonnet
– repeating the “When I ....” opening words. What does this tell you about the writing of sonnets?

(3) What “fears” does the speaker mention in the poem?

(4) What metaphor does the poet use to describe the writing process in the first quatrain? John Keats’s poem possesses the characteristics of an Elizabethan sonnet. Like
“Let me not to the Marriage of True Minds”, its rhyme scheme is abab cdcd efef gg.
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The speaker says that the thought of dying young terrifies him. This fear is caused by the fact that he has not fulfilled himself through writing poetry, something for which he has natural talent.
The historical background to this poem is that the Romantic poet, John Keats, experienced all manner of affliction in his life, including the death of family members who succumbed to tuberculosis (known as “consumption” in the nineteenth century).
At that time, TB was fatal. He, too, later developed the symptoms of this disease and died at only 24 years old. In the sonnet, Keats reflects on, identifies with and tackles the emotion of fear, which is fuelled by the thought of dying before his time.
In the first quatrain, the speaker’s brain is literally “teeming” with ideas that he wants “penned” or written down. Keats’s fear of death is expressed through his use of a powerful image (a picture in words) in line 2, where he likens writing poetry to harvesting grain, with the pen as the main instrument for carrying out such a process: “Before my pen has glean’d my teeming brain”. In the following line, books are compared to “garners” or granaries: buildings where grain is stored after harvest.
We gather that he wants to harvest the fruit of his mind (grain) before he dies.

Exercise
Look at the second quatrain and answer the following questions:
(1) When the speaker looks up into the sky, he sees stars and clouds in the night.
What do you think these symbolise?

In the second quatrain, Keats goes on to reflect on the possible consequences of his untimely death by using personification. When he looks at the shining, starry night, he is reminded of “symbols of high romance” (line 6) whose “shadows” he may not “trace” if he were to die young. “High romance” here suggests abstract or philosophical ideas about the meaning of life, in this case associated with the stars.
The speaker says that he thinks it possible to find meaning in life through great achievements that philosophers have talked about down the centuries as being associated with the stars.
In the last quatrain, Keats addresses someone, possibly his beloved. The person is described as the “fair creature of an hour” (line 9). His fear of death leads him to realise that he may never experience and enjoy the “faery power/Of unreflecting love” (lines 11–12), as his beloved exists for only an hour, which is not a very long time. The use of the word “faery” (for fairy) is both old and odd to describe the ephemeral nature of romance and, by extension, life. The speaker is suggesting here
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that if life is that transitory, then he may not live through the sumptuous moments offered by romantic love, which he could experience with his beloved.

Exercise
Consider the rhyming couplet (the last two lines of the poem) and answer the following questions:
(1) What emotions is the poet expressing in these lines?

(2) What conclusions does he come to and why?

If the quatrains provided the speaker with high ideals about things – such as the meaning of life – then the rhyming couplet is a far cry from this thinking. This is because the poet comes to the awareness that he is “alone” in this world, and that fame is a short-lived thing for him to bother about. His long quest for the meaning of life (which he thought he would find in knowledge, fame and love) seems a forlorn hope, something inconsequential, since “love and fame to nothingness do sink” (line 14).
At this point, not only does this realisation seem to dispel Keats’s fear of death, but it also seems to make him come to terms with the idea of dying, and see it as a natural thing. The speaker experiences various emotions in the rhyming couplet, including loneliness, despair, nihilism (the sense that life is meaningless), and a sense of resignation in the face of the inescapable impermanence of life.

Dover Beach
Matthew Arnold (1822–1888)

The sea is calm tonight.
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits;* – on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!

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Only, from the long line of spray
Where the sea meets the moon-blanch’d* land,
Listen! you hear the grating roar
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Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.

10

Sophocles* long ago
Heard it on the Aegean,* and it brought
Into his mind the turbid* ebb and flow
Of human misery; we
Find also in the sound a thought,
Hearing it by this distant northern sea.

15

The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle* furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles* of the world.
Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

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25

30

35

*straits – narrow channel of water
*blanch’d – whitened
*Sophocles – classical Greek author of tragic dramas; much admired by Arnold
*the Aegean – part of the Mediterranean Sea between Greece and Turkey
*turbid – muddy
*girdle – belt
*shingles – pebble beaches
This poem, like “To His Coy Mistress”, also uses language in unusual ways to make its point. Look, for example, at the first and last lines. The first line reads “The sea is calm tonight” but the last line reads “Where ignorant armies clash by night”. What is the difference in meaning between these two lines? Obviously something has changed dramatically between the first line and the last: in the rest of this section, we are going to explore what it is.
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What is the poem about? Take a few minutes to read it aloud and then try to write a single sentence that begins ‘“Dover Beach” is about …’. You will notice that it is not as easy to say what “Dover Beach” is about as it is to pin down what a news report, for example, is about. If you do not understand exactly what the poem is saying, though, do not panic. Re-read it and look for something you understand.
We could begin, for example, by looking more closely at who is present in the poem.

Exercise
Who are the speakers in the imaginary conversation that takes place in “Dover
Beach”? Look for clues in the poem and then write your answer on the lines below.

You probably noticed the speaker addressing someone in lines 6, 9 and 29. In line 6 he says “Come to the window”, which implies that he is with someone; in line 9 he tells this person to “Listen” and in line 29 he calls his companion “love”. It is only at this point, then, that we actually find out who is present in the poem: it seems
(though we cannot be absolutely sure) that it is a man and his female partner. This changes our interpretation of the poem slightly as we realise that we are “eavesdropping” on a moment of intimacy between lovers.
For the rest of this discussion, I am going to explore a single image from the poem
– the image of the sea – and see where it leads us. In the first few lines of the poem, the speaker draws a picture of himself and a loved one standing at a window looking out over the sea. As the poem progresses, it becomes clear that this is not just any sea, but the sea that lies between England and France (Dover lies opposite the
French city of Calais, at the narrowest point of the English Channel that separates the two countries). The speaker and his companion, then, are looking over the sea at another country. In the first stanza, the sea is “calm” and peaceful, and the speaker creates a beautiful image of tranquillity with the moonlit bay spread out before him.
Things can never remain like this, though, and so, by the end of the first stanza, the speaker has introduced a completely different note: the “eternal note of sadness”
(line 14) that comes from the pebbles that the waves throw continuously up the beach in a “grating roar” (line 9). At this stage, in the first stanza, I think you will agree that the sea in the poem is a real sea, with waves, sand and fish. In the second stanza, though, it is not quite the same sea: here the speaker mentions “Sophocles” and “the Aegean”, referring back through history to the 5th century BCE – a time that nobody could remember who would ever read this poem. At this point we notice that the sea is more than a literal one: the speaker is beginning to write about it as a remembered body of water. Later in the poem it will become more symbolic of emotion and human conditions. At this point the sea was also heard by Sophocles, who was reminded by it of “the turbid ebb and flow/Of human misery” (lines 17–18).
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It is important to note that the sea, by itself, cannot sound like “human misery” at all. This meaning has been added by the speaker, and even attributed to Sophocles.
In the next stanza, the sea changes once again: this time it is “the Sea of Faith”
(line 21).

Exercise
Take a minute to think about what this metaphor means to you and write down all the meanings you can think of in the space below:

Metaphor and simile
A metaphor, such as “the Sea of Faith”, is a comparison between two things.
Here the speaker in “Dover Beach” compares the levels of faith in the world to a sea. But he does not use the words “like” or “as” in order to create the comparison. If he had, for example if he had written “faith is like a sea”, this would have been a simile. He simply says that there is a “Sea of Faith” that is waning as human history goes on. Metaphor is a part of our daily life and use of language, but it is used most creatively in poetry.

Historical context
The idea of the “Sea of Faith” is important here. “Dover Beach” was written during the Victorian Era, when Queen Victoria was on the throne of England (remember that Queen Victoria reigned from 1837–1901). During the Victorian Era there was a loss of some people’s faith in God and in the Christian religion, largely due to the fact that science made major advances, including Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, which discredited the idea of God having created the whole world as recounted in the Bible. When the speaker in “Dover Beach” says that “the Sea of Faith” is withdrawing and retreating, he is referring to the loss of faith in God, but also, more generally, to a loss of faith in life in general. As people lost faith in God during the
Victorian Era, according to Arnold, there was an increasing sense of pessimism in people’s lives. The image of the sea covers several ideas: first is the quality of ebbing and flowing with the tide, as the water rises and falls twice a day. (Explore the poem to find images of the tide rising and falling, and think about how the levels of people’s faith and misery have been rising and falling throughout history.) The second idea is expressed in lines 14, 17 and 25, and is related to the sound made by
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the sea retreating down the beach with what the speaker calls “a grating roar”. To him, it sounds sad: it reminds him of “the eternal note of sadness” and “the turbid ebb and flow/of human misery”, and it is “melancholy”. In these images, though, the speaker has not found these emotions in the sound of the sea retreating down the beach: they have been projected onto the sound of the sea.
In the fourth stanza (or “paragraph” of poetry), in lines 29–37, the speaker explains his view of the world and of life in general. Look at the images used in this stanza and fill in the table explaining the denotations and connotations of each one.
Connotations and denotations
Connotations are the meanings associated with a word or phrase, beyond its direct or literal meaning (denotation). For example, we know that the word
“rose” has a certain meaning: it refers to, or denotes, a kind of flower. The fact that a rose is associated with love is part of its connotation, rather than part of its direct meaning. In studying poetry, we are often more concerned with connotation than denotation.

Image

Literal meaning
(denotation)

Figurative meanings
(connotations)

land of dreams a darkling plain confused alarms of struggle and flight ignorant armies clash by night

You will probably agree that the image of life, and of the world, that is created in this stanza is not optimistic. Arnold contrasts two things. One is the view that we have of life and the world as “a land of dreams,/So various, so beautiful, so new”
(lines 31–32). Let’s take a minute to consider this image. What would you imagine in a “land of dreams”? Wouldn’t you imagine a realm where all your wishes could be fulfilled? Would it not also be “various” (that is, containing many different things),
“beautiful” and “new” (that is, not worn out)? In these two lines, Arnold sums up all the hopes and wishes that people have in relation to their experiences of the world.
Our hopes and wishes, though, do not come true, because the speaker dashes them all in the next two lines, when he says that the world “Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,/Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain” (lines 33–34). Look at all the negative expressions in these two lines – each positive feature of life (such as joy, love, light and so on) is negated one by one, until the reader feels crushed by the weight of all the things that are not provided by the world.
Instead of our wishes coming true (Arnold says), we are “here as on a darkling plain”. “Darkling” is an unusual word and one that we do not usually use. It means
“becoming darker” or “associated with the dark”. Take a minute to visualise this
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image. The speaker says that “we” (that is, human beings) “are here as on a darkling plain” (the word “as” signals the fact that this is a simile or comparison between two things). “Here” means “in the world”, and the picture that is created is of an empty, flat, dark, uninhabited space (the darkling plain). The last two lines of the poem use the sense of hearing rather than sight to create the impression of confusion and the noise of battle, which you probably noticed in the image of “ignorant armies”.
“Dover Beach” is not a cheerful poem. Rather, it uses a number of images to evoke
(that is, to make the reader feel and understand) a growing sense of disillusionment and despair.

Exercise
What is the one thing that, according to the speaker, remains to be believed in the face of global confusion and loss of faith? Write your answer in the space below:

Finally, let us look at how the poem is written. I am sure you noticed immediately that its lines do not rhyme in a regular scheme as they do in some of the other poems we have examined so far. In the first stanza the the final words of the lines are: “to-night”, “fair”, “light”, “stand”, “bay”, “night-air” and so on. Some of these lines rhyme with each other (such as “fair” and “night-air”) but some do not. In the same way, you might notice that the lines in “Dover Beach” are of different lengths, with some much longer than others. This means that “Dover Beach” is written in a less regular format than we are used to; it is, in fact, in free verse. Matthew Arnold wrote during the Victorian Era (1837–1901) in a time when there was more freedom of experimentation with poetic form than there was in Shakespeare’s time and this might help to explain why his poem is less regular than many earlier poems.
The effect of free verse – as opposed to more regular poetic forms such as the sonnet or the heroic couplet – is to make the poetry sound like normal, natural conversation between two people. It is not really normal conversation, though: when people speak naturally, there are all kinds of interruptions in their speech, such as
“um” and “you know” and even “like”, which are completely absent from this poem.
So the poet is actually working hard to make his poetry sound as though it is being spoken naturally. (If you are in doubt about this, make a list of the contrasting words that appear in the poem, such as “calm” and “war”, “cadence” and “clash”.) Overall, the speaker evokes a scene of order in the first three stanzas, but this is overthrown by an idea of chaos and disorder in the final stanza when he begins to speak about war and the destruction it brings in its wake.
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The Road Not Taken
Robert Frost (1874–1963)

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveller, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

5

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that, the passing there
Had worn them really just about the same,

10

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

15

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I –
I took the one less travelled by,
And that has made all the difference.

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Exercise
“The Road Not Taken” contains a single, central image that conveys its main idea.
What is this image? Write your answer in the space below.

I am sure you noticed that the poem uses the image (or picture in words) of a person standing at a fork in the path and deciding to take one path rather than another. The poem deals with the process used by the speaker to make a choice between the two paths that lie in front of him. It is important, though, that the poem is called “The
Road Not Taken” (not, say, “The Road I Chose”). By using this title, the poet draws the reader’s attention to the poem’s focus on the choice that was not made, rather than the choice that was. The path that was not chosen, ironically, becomes the more
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attractive one, and the one that occupies the speaker’s thoughts much more than the path that he did choose. (The poem would be vastly different if it were entitled “The
Road Taken” instead of “Not Taken”.) Compare this imaginary situation with your own life experience. Have you ever made a choice between two things that, like the two paths in the poem, appear much the same? If you have, did you find yourself wondering what would have happened if you had chosen differently?
What, though, is the point of writing an entire poem about choosing between two paths in a wood? Why should we, as readers, care about this at all? In fact, the poem deals with a choice on the literal level of coming to a fork in the road. What could this suggest on the figurative level (that is, what are the symbolic and metaphoric meanings of this situation)? The “path” is clearly much more than a specific route through a particular wood – it is a metaphor for a life choice made by the speaker.
In the final stanza of the poem, the speaker tells us that he “took the one less travelled by” (line 19) and that this has “made all the difference”. This means that the speaker found himself on a life path that was not popular or chosen by many people
(since it is “less travelled by”). How could this make “all the difference”? Write your answer in the space below.

“The Road Not Taken” is an example of a poet using a fairly simple image (the picture of someone making a choice between two paths in a wood) to mean something much broader: the choice between two options in life. By using this image, the poem explores the way humans make decisions like this (and, often, cannot say what made them choose as they did) and then wonder what might have happened if they had chosen differently.
To round off our discussion, we are going to explore how the poem is written (its form). What we call “rhyme” is a quality of the words at the end of lines of poetry.
When these words sound the same, we say that the poem rhymes. “The Road Not
Taken” is a rhyming poem: the poet has created stanzas of five lines each where the first, third and fourth lines all rhyme, and the second and fifth lines rhyme with each other. This is not a regular or recognised poetic form with a name such as a ballad, limerick or sonnet, but Frost uses it to great effect in this poem.

Exercise
Take a moment now to write down the rhymes at the end of each line in stanzas 1,
2, 3 and 4 of the poem in the space below:

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We do not usually use rhyme either when we speak or when we write. So what are these sound-effects for? I will try to answer the question by looking at the rhymes in the first stanza, which are: wood-stood-could (lines 1, 3 and 4); both-undergrowth
(lines 2 and 5). All these words contain long vowel sounds, which are drawn out and have the effect of drawing out the reader’s attention, making the action of the poem appear longer. The effect would have been different if the poet had used shorter vowel sounds, such as those in “pat” or “cut”. It would also have been different if he had used words with more syllables, such as “establishment”. By using short words, most of them with only one syllable each, the poet is making use of simple terms and concepts to get his message across. (Try this yourself: deliberately try to use short words when you speak or write in an informal context. Explore how this feels and what the effect is on your reader or audience.)
But what is the poem “about” and how does exploring the rhymes help us to arrive at an understanding of its meaning? (A more abstract version of this question would ask whether the formal aspects of a poem, such as rhyme and the shape of the stanzas, have any impact at all on the meaning.)
The rhyme scheme for “The Road Not Taken” looks like this:
Stanza 1:

Lines 1, 3 and 4:

wood, stood, could

Lines 2 and 5:

both, undergrowth

Stanza 2:

Lines 1, 3, and 4:

fair, wear, there

Lines 2 and 5:

claim, same

Stanza 3:

Lines 1, 3 and 4:

lay, day, way

Lines 2 and 5:

black, back

Stanza 4:

Lines 1, 3 and 4:

sigh, I, by

Lines 2 and 5:

hence, difference

You will notice immediately that the rhyming words are short (most of them are only one syllable long). This use of simple and short words is the trademark of Robert
Frost’s poetry, which is famous for using simple language and words to express comENG1501/129

plex emotions and experiences. By choosing certain words to rhyme, Frost has placed them in relationships with each other, so each of the rhyming groups listed above is somehow connected: for example, one group from Stanza 3 is “lay”, “day” and
“way”. These words are connected because, on that particular day, the speaker found himself in a place where two ways (or paths) lay before him (the word “day” also suggests light and brightness or clarity). The other rhyme in this stanza is between
“black” and “back”. When we compare the meaning of “day” and “way” we can see how the speaker is suggesting that the clearest route (or “way” ahead) is to go forward by one of the two paths, while going “back” (to take the other path) would be unlikely, as implied by the rhyme with “black” or darkness. As it turns out, the speaker knows that he will not go back to that same spot in the wood and then take the other path, because he says: “Oh, I kept the first for another day!/Yet knowing how way leads on to way,/I doubted if I should ever come back” (lines 13–15). We can paraphrase this or rewrite it in our own words. We might say something like the following (I have used a different font so you can more easily see my words):
The speaker says that he chose one of the paths and followed it, imagining that he would come back to the other one at a later stage. He knew, though, that his chosen path would lead him on to other paths, and so would lead him very far away from the original spot where he made a choice. So he knew that he would probably never return and therefore would probably never get a chance to follow the other path.
Above, I have rewritten the lines from “The Road Not Taken” in my own words
(using a different font) in order to understand better what they mean. This is known as paraphrase. It can be useful when you are trying to understand a complex or difficult text, but you must be sure that you do not over-use it, and especially that you do not use it in your essays without providing a reference to the text you are paraphrasing. This would make you guilty of plagiarism.

Still I rise
Maya Angelou (1928–) 4

You may write me down in history
With your bitter, twisted lies,
You may trod me in the very dirt
But still, like dust, I’ll rise.
Does my sassiness* upset you?
Why are you beset with gloom?
‘Cause I walk like I’ve got oil wells
Pumping in my living room.
Just like moons and like suns,
With the certainly of tides,
Just like hopes springing high,
Still I’ll rise.
Did you want to see me broken?
Bowed head and lowered eyes?

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4 The bracket does not give a date for the poet’s death, indicating that she is still alive.
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Shoulders falling down like teardrops,
Weakened by my soulful cries.
Does my haughtiness offend you?
Don’t you take it awful hard
‘Cause I laugh like I’ve got gold mines
Diggin’ in my own back yard
You may shoot me with your words,
You may cut me with your eyes,
You may kill me with your hatefulness,
But still, like air, I’ll rise.
Does my sexiness upset you?
Does it come as a surprise
That I dance like I’ve got diamonds
At the meeting of my thighs?
Out of the huts of history’s shame
I rise
Up from a past that’s rooted in pain
I rise
I’m a black ocean, leaping and wide,
Welling and swelling I bear in the tide.
Leaving behind nights of terror and fear
I rise
Into a daybreak that’s wondrously clear
I rise
Bringing the gifts that my ancestors gave,
I am the dream and the hope of the slave.
I rise
I rise
I rise.

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*sassiness – cheekiness
Some more poetic terms explained
Tone is the emotion, feeling or emotional resonance of the poem or an image in it. “Tone” is also used to refer to the attitude of the speaker. Tone is an important marker of a person’s mood (for example, angry, hopeful, sympathetic or impatient). By close reading of a poem, you will be able to establish the tone by examining the poet’s choice of words.
Diction: this word means “the choice and use of words and phrases to express meaning”. It refers, thus, to the way a poet chooses words and places them in the lines of poetry to create a certain meaning or effect.
Synonym: two words or phrases that mean the same. For example, synonyms of the word angry are annoyed, furious, irritated, and so forth.

We are going to apply the concepts we defined in the box above to our reading of
“Still I Rise”.
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Exercise
Go over the poem once and write “True” or “False” next to each of the statements below. Give reasons for your answers.
(1) The following words and phrases are the possible synonyms for the word
“still” in the poem “Still I rise”: yet, in spite of, notwithstanding, nevertheless.
(2) The poem is written in an informal, conversational style.
(3) The poem has a rhyme scheme.
(4) The tone of the speaker in the poem is one of anger and boldness.
(5) The overall meaning of the poem is the speaker’s indomitable urge to speak out against injustice.
Historical context
At this point you should know that Maya Angelou is one of the most important and well-known black African American writers of her generation. In most of her works, which span more than three decades, Angelou deals with the enslavement of the black people over the centuries, the kind of frustration, anger and resentment a history of slavery has caused among the black population, and their determined efforts to fight this oppression with a view to bringing about their emancipation.
Maya Angelou’s poem, “Still I Rise” is written against the backdrop of invasive racism, racial segregation and prejudice in America during the 1950s and 1960s.
The poem represents the writer’s angry protest against racial discrimination. The speaker in the poem speaks out against the racial prejudice and intolerance that she sees around her before making an appeal for black pride and dignity. In fact, the anger galvanises and strengthens her determination to rise and defeat all forms of discrimination based on race.

The first place to begin working towards an understanding of the poem is with the title: “Still I Rise”. Certain titles (such as this one) simply state and make clear the theme of the poem. Notice, for instance, how many times the exact words of the title are repeated throughout the poem. How does this relate to what we have just said about the main idea of Angelou’s poem? Apart from creating an atmosphere, as well as enabling the harmony of rhyme scheme, the effect of this repetition is its overall contribution to the theme of the poem – the poet’s resolve, expressed at the end of each stanza, to overcome her oppression. This repetition becomes even more resonant at the end of the poem, where the title is again repeated three times.
The tone of the poem is one of anger and open defiance. Throughout the poem, the speaker addresses people whom one could describe as white supremacists (people who believe they are better than others because they are white). These people have caused all kinds of suffering to the speaker, including the fact that they have tried to “write me down in history/With your bitter, twisted lies” (lines 1–2), “trod me in the very dirt” (line 3), “shoot me with your words” (line 21), “cut me with your eyes” (line 22), “kill me with your hatefulness” (line 23) and so forth. The speaker here refers not only to the ills of slavery which dehumanised the black race, but also to the climate of the 1950s and 1960s in America, when black people were still treated as second-class citizens. The speaker’s fuming and defiant tone is further accentuated through her expressive use of questions, to which suggested answers are given. For example, the speaker‘s boldness is quite evident in questions such as,
“Does my sassiness upset you?” (line 5) , “Does my haughtiness offend you?” (line
17), and “Does my sexiness upset you?” (line 25). Notice how comical some of the answers are – they all express the speaker’s courage and daring. The same is true when the speaker expresses her dogged determination, as in the question: “Did you want to see me broken?” (line 14).
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Exercise
Use the space below to list examples of the kind of language used throughout the poem, in particular the speaker’s use of those words or expressions that refer to slavery and discrimination.

Finally, you should focus your attention on the speaker’s use of poetic devices such as similes, metaphors and personification and how these contribute to the overall theme of the poem. Metaphor, simile and personification are called “figures of speech” or “figurative language” to convey their difference from literal language.
Here are some examples of poetic devices in “Still I Rise”, whose meanings you can explore:

•• Still, like dust, I’ll rise (simile)
•• ‘Cause I walk like I’ve got oil wells/Pumping in my living room (simile)
•• Just like moons and like suns/... Just like hopes springing high,/Still I’ll
••
••
••
••
••
••
••
••

rise (simile)
Shoulders falling down like teardrops (simile)
‘Cause I laugh like I’ve got gold mines (simile)
I dance like I’ve got diamonds (simile)
You may shoot me with your words (metaphor)
You may cut me with your eyes (metaphor)
You may kill me with your hatefulness (metaphor)
I ’m a black ocean ... (metaphor)
I am the dream and the hope (metaphor)

The effectiveness of the figurative language in each of the above instances is the extent to which it contributes to the overall meaning of the poem, given the context in which each of the examples above is used.

Exercise
In the space below, describe how each of the above poetic devices extends, expands and creates ideas that the poet is trying to put across to the reader.

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To conclude, Maya Angelou makes it abundantly clear that, through her activism as a writer, she is “the dream and hope of the slave”. Hence, as “a black ocean”, she will emerge “Out of history’s shame, “meaning slavery, and fight for her rights.
Once the fight is won, she will participate in and enjoy a common humanity, which has been denied to black people for centuries of oppression and racial inequality.

In Exile
Arthur Nortje (1942–1970)

Open skies flare wide enough to make me vaguely anxious.
Nimbus* wisps trace patterns of the past.
Wind sweeps between the towers through tunnels, old and new.
My heart is hollowed with the boots passing through.
Garments gather and play about my limbs: they tremble to a return
Gust. Leaves and transient* streetscape conjure up that southern blue sky and wind-beautiful day, creating paradise.
Otherwise:
the soul decays in exile.
But wrong pigment has no scope, so clot the blue channel of memory.
On a sand slope
I build a picture of the sea.
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The grains that slide away are wind-breathed, are stirred by finger.
Benign, a cloud obscures the sun, this hunger.
*nimbus – storm-cloud
*transient – passing
We will begin our interpretation by thinking about the title of the poem: “In Exile”.
This is often helpful because, as Moffet and Mphahlele say, “Some titles ... contain essential additional information that illuminates the poem that follows” (2004: xxix).
The title can help to evoke, in the reader’s mind, the mood or atmosphere of the poem.

Exercise
In the spaces provided below, briefly answer the following questions:
(1) What does the word “exile” suggest?

(2) What sort of feelings would you expect someone in exile to experience?

The Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English defines the word exile as “a situation in which you are forced to leave your country and live in another country, especially for political reasons” (2003:638). The idea of exile, then, necessarily involves or entails a condition of separation from one’s land, home or people. So what do we make of the entire title of the poem, “In exile”? Even though the meaning of the preposition in, (in “In Exile”) has a range of meanings, depending on its context, it seems quite obvious that the context here is close to the following range of meanings: inside, during, for the period of, to mention only a few.

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What’s all the fuss about context?
The Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English defines the context (of a word) as follows: “the words that come just before and after a word or sentence and that help you to understand its meaning” (2003:396). For example, consider this sentence. When Jane found out that she had passed her examination, she went mad with joy. For the reader to infer or work out the meaning of the word “mad”, s/he will need to understand the context in which it has been used. The context is provided by the phrases “had passed her examination” and “joy”. From this then, the reader knows that the word “mad” in this context has nothing to do with foolishness, but rather means excited, very happy, overjoyed or delighted.

The background to this poem is fairly straightforward. The time is the 1960s, during the height of apartheid in South Africa. The speaker in the poem has fled the land of his birth and now lives abroad, in a foreign land. In short, he is in exile. Having lived in this unnamed country for some time, the speaker is beginning to feel a longing to return. In other words, the poem revolves around the poet’s desire to go back home, and we learn about his feelings through his attempts to remember his homeland. Thus memory is central in the poem. But then, as he tries to convey these feelings of possible homecoming through memory, he is also intensely aware of the harsh reality associated with going back to a place (South Africa) where
“wrong pigment has no scope” (line 17). His dream of “paradise” (line 14) evoked by his efforts to find comfort in memory is contrasted with the awareness that “My heart is/hollowed with the boots passing through” (lines 7–8). Thus, as the speaker moves between the present (of living in exile) and the past (defined by his reflections on memories of his home country), the sense of estrangement from both exile and home is deepened, rather than diminished.
In the spaces below, explain what each of the following lines means in the historical context of apartheid.
“Leaves and transient streetscape conjure up that southern blue sky, creating paradise”

As I mentioned above, the speaker is thinking about home and the possibility of a homecoming. In stanzas 1 to 4, the speaker’s memories of his time in South Africa keep flooding back. These memories are triggered by what he observes in a moment of intense reflection while living in exile. To that end, the poet uses many verbs throughout this poem to emphasise the intensity of the action which he sees around
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him, and which acts as a prompt to his memories (of home) that keep welling up.
Here are some examples of action verbs: flare, make, trace and sweeps.

Exercise
Now, complete the list from the rest of the poem.

What effect do these verbs have on the speaker? Give reasons for your answer.

In the first four stanzas, the poet employs many images that point to the speaker’s deep yearning to return to his homeland. For example, “Open skies flare” (line 1),
“Nimbus wisps trace patterns of the past” (line 3), “Wind sweeps between the towers” (line 5), “Garments gather and play about/my limbs: they tremble to a return/gust” (lines 9–11), and “Leaves and transient/streetscape conjure up that southern/blue sky ... creating paradise” (lines 11–14) – all suggest the positive and uplifting role of memory in bringing about comfort. The image of “paradise” implies that ideas about the final return can be entertained.
A point of disharmony is, however, placed side by side with the image of paradise. This is when the speaker states that “My heart is/hollowed with boots passing through”
(lines 7–8). Here the tone of the poem shifts considerably. Memory or remembering is no longer seen as being always a good thing; memory, according to the poet, can be damaging. The image of the speaker’s heart being “hollowed” evokes the notion of the heart, regarded as the seat of emotion, and therefore of memory, being “hollowed out”, of having holes made in it. The idea of “the boots passing through” the speaker’s heart imply that memory can no longer be a source of comfort.
In the last two stanzas, the speaker’s hope of a homecoming is killed off altogether by the facts of how complex the situation is in his home country. This sense of resignation is conveyed by images such as “clot the blue channel of memory” (line 18),
“benign ... this hunger” (lines 23–24), and “a cloud obscures the sun” (lines 23–24).
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Exercise
Fill in the table below giving the literal and figurative meanings of the above images. clot the blue channel of memory Literal meaning:

Figurative meaning:

A cloud obscures the sun Literal meaning:

Figurative meaning:

Benign ... this hunger

Literal meaning:

Figurative meaning:

While, in the first four stanzas, the speaker has the leisure to entertain all kinds of nostalgic emotions of desire for return, the last two stanzas present the speaker with a reality check: a moment when he must think seriously about his true situation, instead of trying to live in a dream world where everything is perfect. Introduced by the conjunction “but”, the speaker “comes down to earth”, with the knowledge that “wrong pigment has no scope” (line 17). In short, the speaker cannot fulfil this deep, nostalgic desire to return home. So he reminds himself to “clot the blue channel of memory”, meaning he might as well obliterate any memories of return because going home is so unrealistic that it is not worth thinking about.

Exercise
The speaker continues to reflect that if he were to do so, then “On a sand slope/I build a picture of the sea” (lines 19–20). In other words, his thinking about return is as good as a person who, as we say, “builds castles in the air” – a complete daydreamer. In the lines below, explain what other meanings the above lines have.

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The last stanza is a fitting conclusion to the poem in which the speaker states that
“this hunger” for homecoming is “benign” and therefore not dangerous. At this point, “a cloud obscures the sun”. These last images suggest that all the speaker’s hopes of a homecoming are vain, and hence the yearning to return is again hidden.

Exercise
(1) Through reading the poem, we have come to see that he speaker is ambivalent
(or in two minds) towards both home and exile. Briefly explain this ambivalence in the space below.

The Child who was Shot Dead by Soldiers at Nyanga
Ingrid Jonker (1933–1965)

The child is not dead the child lifts his fists against his mother who shouts Afrika! shouts the breath of freedom and the veld* in the locations* of the cordoned* heart

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The child lifts his fists against his father in the march of the generations who shout Afrika! shout the breath of righteousness and blood in the streets of his embattled pride

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The child is not dead not at Langa nor at Nyanga nor at Orlando nor at Sharpeville nor at the police station at Philippi where he lies with a bullet through his brain

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The child is the dark shadow of the soldiers on guard with rifles saracens* and batons the child is present at all assemblies and law-givings the child peers through the windows of houses and into the hearts of mothers
20
this child who just wanted to play in the sun at Nyanga is everywhere the child grown to a man treks through all Africa the child grown into a giant journeys through the whole world
Without a pass
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*veld – savannah or grassland
*locations –  his word was used under Apartheid to describe the separate areas that t were reserved for blacks to live in
*cordoned – fenced off
*saracens – armoured cars or tanks
This is one of South Africa’s most famous poems and is often read at public gatherings or assemblies. The poet, Ingrid Jonker, wrote mainly in Afrikaans, but this poem was written in English. She committed suicide by drowning at the age of 32.
Her life story is presented in the 2011 film Black Butterflies.

Exercise
What seems unusual to you about the way the poem uses language? Write your first thoughts in the space below.

You might have noticed that the speaker repeats certain words and phrases throughout the poem. This feature of the poem is similar to “Still I Rise”, where the phrase
“Still I rise” almost forms a chorus. In this poem, the phrase “the child” is repeated throughout. It appears twice in the first stanza; it begins each of the poem’s stanzas; and it appears five times in the fourth stanza. There are other repeated phrases and words in the poem.
Why does the poet repeat certain words in the poem? Is it because she thinks her readers are not intelligent enough to understand what she means the first time, or is it because she cannot find words to say what she means? The answer is neither of these options. The effect of the repetition is to drive the poem home into the memories of its audience (the people who hear it spoken). As we know, people will remember a word, phrase or line that is repeated much more than if it is said only once. For this reason, you must read “The Child who was Shot Dead by Soldiers at
Nyanga” aloud in a bold tone (try doing this to your family members and see how they respond). Only by doing this will you fully appreciate the effect of the repetition of “the child” and other words and phrases in the poem.
Who, or what, would you say, is the main presence in the poem? Is this person or thing actually present (there can be such a thing as an “absent presence”)? Surely the fact that “the child” is repeated so many times in the poem means that the child who was shot dead is the main presence in the poem; it dominates the entire text.
We cannot read the poem without encountering this child. The fact that the child
“was shot dead”, as we learn in the title, is brought home to us again and again throughout the poem.
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Exercise
How can a dead child, whose name is not even given in the poem, be so important?
Write your answer in the space below.

When we use someone’s name (if, for example, the poet had used the dead child’s name in the poem), we make our words individual to that person or child. But when we speak generally about “a child”, our words resonate further afield and apply to all children or to the state of childhood. This is what Ingrid Jonker has done in this poem. “The child” is a symbol of all the innocent children who were killed by soldiers under Apartheid in South Africa for no other reason than that he “wanted to play in the sun”, as any child has the right to do as part of childhood exploration and joy in being a child. The child did not know that violent events were taking place in the place where he wanted to play, and did not know that he belonged to the wrong racial group to be in that place, and so he died.
“The Child who Was Shot Dead by Soldiers at Nyanga” draws on a fairly common idea – that violence within a country destroys innocent members of society, such as women and children, and, in this way, damages the country and its future severely.
This idea is often used, for example, in magazines such as Time and National Geographic when they publish photographs of children as victims of war and violence. At the same time, poets always have to put their ideas (even if these are not completely original) to original use. How does Jonker make the idea of the innocent child-victim fresh and new in her poem?
We are going to explore one single instance in which the poet re-uses the idea of an innocent child who has become a victim of violence that did not concern him. In the third stanza, the speaker says: “The child is not dead” (line 11), despite the evidence to the contrary and the fact that he is lying “with a bullet through his brain” (line
15). Does this mean that the child has miraculously survived being “shot dead” (as the poem’s title says), or does it mean that the speaker is mistaken about the child’s condition? Neither of these is true. In fact, the child is – physically and medically
– dead, but he is not spiritually or poetically dead at all. There are two reasons for this. One is the poem we are reading and studying, which makes sure that the child is not forgotten. The other reason is that his death has inspired others to take up the cause of freedom and given new energy to the struggle against apartheid. In effect, the child lives on through the poem as a memento of the senselessness of racial violence that killed him. Furthermore, the speaker tells us in the final lines of the poem that the child has grown up: he has “grown to a man” and “treks through all Africa” (line 21); in fact he has “grown to a giant” and “journeys through the whole world” (line 22).
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Exercise
The final line of the poem gives the punch-line: the child is able to travel wherever he wishes “Without a pass”.5 Bearing this in mind, how does the poem’s final line offer hope for South Africa’s future?

It is worthwhile, here, to explore what the speaker has not done in this poem, which, as we now see, is a protest poem against Apartheid. She has not tried to elicit sentimental sympathy for the child for being killed (as one might have expected in a poem that is so clearly anti-violence). In fact, she has not mentioned race, racism or racial conflict in her poem at all. Rather, she has written about “the child” as though everyone who reads the poem will know exactly which child she means. But, as, we have seen, the child has come to symbolise much more than just a single dead infant.

Exercise
Let us explore the effect of the word “giant” in the second last line of the poem.
What are the connotations of this word? Write them in the space below.

We associate a “giant” with power and huge size, so by growing into a giant in the second last line of the poem, the small victim of violence has now grown into a strong, powerful figure whose domain is no longer a limited township environment, but the whole world.
5 Under Apartheid, during the 1960s, blacks were required to carry a document called a “pass” if they wanted to leave their home areas. They could be stopped by white police at any time and searched for this pass, and if they did not have it with them, they could be imprisoned. The “pass” thus became a symbol of racist oppression and was the focus of many protests during the struggle against Apartheid.
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Now that we have explored how the poem uses the image of the child’s death, you should be able to see why this poem is so often read aloud at important public meetings. Exercise
In the space below, write a paragraph (about 10 lines) explaining why this poem
“works” as a protest poem.

What you have just done in the space above is to write about why the poem is effective. This is an important part of poetry analysis as it focuses on how poets make poetry work and why it works for the reader.

Alexandra6
Wally Mongane Serote (1944–)

Were it possible to say,
Mother, I have seen more beautiful mothers,
A most loving mother,
And tell her there I will go,
Alexandra, I would have long gone from you.

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But we have only one mother, none can replace,
Just as we have no choice to be born,
We can’t choose mothers;
We fall out of them like we fall out of life to death.
6 Under Apartheid this was a Black township outside Johannesburg. It is still a fairly poor area.
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And Alexandra,
My beginning was knotted to you,
Just like you knot my destiny.
You throb in my inside silences
You are silent in my heart-beat that’s loud to me.
Alexandra often I’ve cried.
When I was thirsty my tongue tasted dust,
Dust burdening your nipples.
I cry Alexandra when I am thirsty.
Your breasts ooze the dirty waters of your dongas,7
Waters diluted with the blood of my brothers, your children,
Who once chose dongas for death-beds.
Do you love me Alexandra, or what are you doing to me?
You frighten me, Mama,
You wear expressions like you would be nasty to me,
You frighten me, Mama,
When I lie on your breast to rest, something tells me,
You are bloody cruel.
Alexandra, hell
What have you done to me?
I have seen people but I feel like I’m not one,
Alexandra what are you doing to me?
I feel I have sunk to such meekness!
I lie flat while others walk on me to far places.
I have gone from you, many times,
I come back.
Alexandra, I love you;
I know
When all these worlds become funny to me,
I silently waded back to you
And amid the rubble I lay,
Simple and black.

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The historical origin of the township of Alexandra during the era of apartheid was the policy of forced removals, which made it a law that blacks could be removed from areas that had been designated as “white”. This helped the Nationalist government to control and monitor the movement of black people and ensure that they only had access to the poorer areas of land in South Africa.

Mongane Serote’s poem is written in free verse, meaning it does not have any regular rhyme scheme. The other interesting characteristic of this poem is that it is written
7 Ravines caused by soil erosion; associated with drought and degradation of the land due to overcrowding and overgrazing.
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using the first person pronoun “I”. In fact, from using the singular form “I” in the first stanza, the speaker changes into “we” in the second stanza before going back to “I” in the third stanza. What could his reasons be?

Exercise
In the space below, write down at least two reasons why the poet has done this.

This poem is about the speaker’s experience of growing up in the township of Alexandra, South Africa, at the height of apartheid. Alexandra can therefore be seen as the main influence deciding his fate, just like a child’s biological mother. The “knot” is like the umbilical cord that ties one to a place, as it does to a maternal source of identity, and life itself.
The speaker uses personification by likening Alexandra township to a mother. The warm tone of the poem is created by the words “beautiful” and “loving” – words that evoke the positive characteristics and caring nature often associated with mothers in their relationship with their children. The effectiveness of this metaphor is evident when we learn that, according to the speaker, all places (other than Alexandra) must be alienating because he’s “knotted” to this woman. Further, in the second and third stanzas, the speaker provides a description of the unique and irrevocable bond that exists between him and his mother. Phrases such as “we have no choice to be born”
(line 7), “we can’t choose mothers” (line 8) and “my beginning was knotted to you”
(line 11), demonstrate that special relationship.
The tone begins to change towards the end of the third stanza. The question “Do you love me Alexandra, or what are you doing to me?” (line 22) evokes negative and hurt-filled emotions, including those of sadness and frustration. These emotions are further expressed in stanza four where the speaker is now frightened of his “Mama”, largely owing to her cruelty and unkindness. This makes the speaker portray his
“mother” in metaphors such as “hell” (live 28).

Exercise
What was the result for the speaker of his “mother’s” peculiar behaviour (lines 34–35)?

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We have not given you much help in interpreting “Alexandra” by Mongane Wally
Serote at all, because it is the last poem to be analysed in this study note. We hope that, by now, you have learned how to read and interpret poetry for yourself and you will be able to fill in the table below without too much confusion.
Phrase from the poem Question

Alexandra, hell (line 28)

How does the speaker feel at this point?

I have seen people but
I feel like I’m not one
(line 30)

What has made the speaker feel like he is
“not a person”?

Repetition of the word
“Alexandra” (throughout the poem)

What is the effect of repeating this word so many times?

Your breasts ooze the dirty waters of your dongas (line 19)

How does this remind the reader of the traditional role of a mother?
How is it different?

the rubble (line 40)

What is the literal meaning of this phrase?
What does it mean figuratively? Simple and black (line
41)

Answer

Why is this a good ending for the poem?

Final note
In this section we have drawn your attention to various possibilities for exploring and appreciating poetry. We have pointed out, for example, the centrality of tradition and conventions in the sonnets. In some instances, we have also discussed the need for understanding the poet’s historical context. We have highlighted the significance of imagery or poetic devices, as well as other sound-effects such as rhyme, rhythm, alliteration, and so forth. Finally, we’ve underscored the relevance and significance
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of tone and diction in poetry interpretation. When you write about poetry in assignments and the examination, we expect you

•• To write about the poem’s main idea (the overall meaning of the poem);
•• To support your claims about what the poem means and how it conveys meaning
••
••
••
••

by referring to the poet’s choice of words and phrases;
To quote from the poem correctly, giving line numbers for each of your quotations;
To write a systematic discussion of the poem, where your ideas are linked in coherent paragraphs and where you provide an introduction and a conclusion.
But note that this does not apply to an examination question which has been broken down into component parts;
To use the English language as correctly as possible throughout the essay. This means that you should revise and correct your work before submitting it; and in the case of an assignment, please ensure that you provide a bibliography of the works you quoted in your essay. This requirement does not apply in the examination. Finally, please return to the table you filled in at the beginning of this section, where you had to mark various statements relating to poetry as true or false (depending on what you thought). Write “true” or “false” depending on what you now believe to be true. I offer a few comments on each of the statements:
(1) Poetry is the opposite of prose. This is clearly not true. Poetry uses the same language as prose (English, for example) and the same techniques to refer to reality. But poetry uses lines in a different way from prose, since the lines in poetry do not go all the way across the page, while in prose, they run on to the next line of print.
(2) Poetry is difficult to read. Some poetry certainly is difficult to read. Other poems are easier. Some poems may be difficult for you on one day, and easier on the next. This statement is highly subjective: that is, its truth will depend on the individual and how he or she feels at the time. Hopefully, this chapter has helped you to feel more confident about your reading of poetry.
(3) A poem must rhyme. This is clearly not true. Some poems rhyme and others do not. This does not make those that do not rhyme any less “poetic” than those that do.
(4) Poetry uses language in a different way from the way we usually use it.
This is certainly true of most poetry, although it is nearly impossible to define exactly what the difference is. One way of putting it is that the language of poetry is more condensed and contains more meaning than the language we use every day. Another way to express it is to say that poetic language draws the reader’s attention. How would you explain the difference between language in poetry and in everyday use?
(5) I have read a lot of poetry. This may or may not be true for you generally, and the answers will differ from person to person, but now that you’ve finished working through this section, you have definitely read more poetry than you had before!
(6) Poetry is outdated and belongs only to the past. This is not true at all.
Contemporary music uses poetry (the lyrics of a well-written song will certainly classify as poetry); political gatherings often use poetry to greet important guests or to praise public figures; and there are other contemporary uses of poetry as well.
(7) Poetry has nothing to do with ordinary life. It is true that poetry seems to be removed from everyday existence because of its unusual way of using
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language. On the other hand, poetry deals with the same issues we confront on a daily basis, such as the household chores and the meaning of life.
(8) Poetry belongs to the upper circles of educated and sophisticated people, and not to ordinary people. As we mentioned, poetry is found in public gatherings, newspapers and on billboards, where it can be read by ordinary people every day. This shows that poetry is not restricted to the “upper circles” at all.
(9) All poems are less than a page in length. This is certainly not true. John
Milton’s epic poem, Paradise Lost, is over 200 pages and is by no means the longest poem ever written. A poem can be any length – as long or as short as the poet needs it to be.
(10) The best subjects for poetry are life, death, love or nature. This is not true either. Poetry can deal with any topic at all: it is not the topic, but the way the poet writes about it, that makes the poem effective or not.
All these sentences are designed to make you think about what you believe poetry is and how it works. Most of what we believe is not based on fact or experience, but on assumptions. In this section, we hope we have challenged some of your assumptions about poetry and helped you to understand it better.

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Cover image retrieved from http://whs.wsd.wednet.edu/Faculty/schafercloke/ images/Rye5.jpg (accessed 5 June 2009)

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3

2

SECTION 2

The Catcher in the Rye8 by Ruth Scheepers

Image of J.D. Salinger retrieved from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._D._Salinger (accessed 10 June 2009)
© The Lotte Jacobi Collection, University of New Hampshire. J.D. Salinger, New
York ca 1950. Lotte Jacobi, Photographer

A GUIDE TO THIS NOTE
This section contains the following things:

•• A study programme to enable you to study The Catcher in the Rye;
•• A discussion of the history and context in which The Catcher in the Rye was written;
•• Some notes about language, style, form and genre in The Catcher in the Rye;
•• A detailed discussion of each section of The Catcher in the Rye;
•• A list of sources for you to consult if you want to learn more about The Catcher in the Rye.

Study programme
Activity

Time spent (approximately)

Reading the novel

4 hours

Reading this study note and making notes of important points

4 hours

Completing activites in the study guide 8 hours

Preparatory writing for your assignment on The Catcher in the Rye

2 hours

Drafting and revising your assignment

6 hours

Some historical background
J(erome) D(avid) Salinger was born in New York on 1 January 1919, into a well-to-do businessman’s family. He attended a private school and a military academy and though his own experiences no doubt influenced his description of Holden Caulfield’s school encounters in the novel, his own school days appear to have been generally happier.
8 All page references are to the 1958 Penguin edition.
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His first short story was published in 1940. From this point on his writing was regularly featured in “prestigious” journals such as the Saturday Evening Post. In 1941 he had a story accepted by The New Yorker, which was regarded as the most significant publisher of fiction at the time. He was 22.
This story, “Slight Rebellion off Madison”, describes the antics of a character, Holden
Caulfield, who, home from school for the Christmas holidays, goes on a date with his girlfriend Sally. The story is in some ways a precursor of The Catcher in the Rye as many of its events reoccur in the later novel. The significant difference is that in this story Salinger uses an omniscient third person narrator, while in the novel he shifts to using the first-person narrative, the voice, idiosyncratic and quirky, of
Holden Caulfield himself.
Omniscient (third-person) narrator
The voice that tells the story in a work of fiction is the narrator. This might (or might not) be the voice of one of the characters. Most often, the narrator uses one of two pronouns to tell the story: “I” or “he/she/it”. If the narrator uses “I”, we say the narrative is told in the first person. If “he/she/it” is used, we say it is a third-person narrative. An omniscient narrator is one who (pretends that he or she) knows everything about the world of the narrative, including the thoughts and feelings of all the characters.

Unfortunately, publication of this story was interrupted by the Japanese attack on
Pearl Harbour and America’s subsequent entry into World War II in December 1941.
The story was eventually published in December 1946, by which time Salinger had made several references to Holden Caulfield in stories published in other magazines.
The war brought great changes, both to American life in general and to Salinger’s life in particular. He was called up to the armed forces (“drafted”, in American parlance) in 1942, and transferred to England in 1944 in preparation for D-day. According to his daughter, Margaret, the war had a traumatic effect on Salinger, which we can see reflected in, among other aspects of the novel, Holden’s vehement anti-war feelings.
During the war, Salinger kept up his writing and assembled a cast of characters that he developed across his fiction and through whom he represented himself (Graham
2007:4). The Catcher in the Rye was published in July 1951, and although Salinger has published five novellas and 30 short stories, it is on this novel that his reputation mainly rests.
Although The Catcher in the Rye was met with great acclaim, remaining on the New
York Times’ best seller list for almost six months, Salinger struggled to complete the novel, calling himself “a dash man, and not a miler” (Hamilton, 1998:94, in Graham,
2007:6), and it took him 10 years to complete.
The social and cultural context of the novel: post-war America
Although Catcher is understood to be a novel that captures the unease of
American society in the 1950s and articulates the emerging phenomenon of adolescent identity, the novel is in many ways a product of the 1940s.
(Graham 2007:7)

The novel is set in 1949 and draws particularly on Salinger’s earlier short story,
“Slight Rebellion off Madison”. Great changes were occurring in American society
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and culture: US participation in World War II ended the Great Depression. The atomic bomb had forced the Japanese to surrender, but spelled the beginning of a new age. Note Holden Caulfield’s anti-war feelings and preoccupation with death and suicide (for example, on p. 147) throughout the novel – try to trace these through the text. As Graham (2007:8) remarks, Holden’s “hatred of ‘phonies’ can be related to the ethos of post-war America which was preoccupied with matters of secrecy and security” (Graham 2007:8).
From 1951 onwards, America engaged in the Cold War, an ideological conflict based on American hostility to Communism which was the very antithesis of capitalism.
The American fear of Communism was encapsulated in the McCarthy “witch hunts”, which saw anyone suspected of Communist activities or opinions persecuted, jailed or even killed.
The Catcher in the Rye caused a stir when it was published mainly because it portrays a “rebel against the status quo” (Graham 2007:9). In the 1940s and 1950s American society became conservative in its attitudes and reaction to the fears aroused by the
Cold War. This conservatism went hand in hand with an economic boom, which especially favoured white middle-class Americans. The focus fell on the nuclear, all-American family – father the bread-winner, mother raising the children at home.
Women were actively discouraged from following careers. Real women, it was implied, stayed at home, raised their children and consumed goods. Working women were blamed for raising delinquents.
But not all women felt as Sally (p. 139) does. Second-wave feminism arose in the revolutionary period of the 1960s and 1970s, but writers like Sylvia Plath and Betty
Friedan presaged these feelings in their challenge of the inflexible gender roles of the post-war period.
Men were also pressured to conform, to marry and father children and to have a steady career. Marriage was as important for men as it was for women as it fitted with the norms of sexual identity as well as those of values and ambition. Note
Holden’s words on p. 139:
Think about Sally’s responses to Holden’s urge to escape
(p.119). Sally accepts that”‘gender not talent” (Halberstam,
1993:589 in Graham
2007:10) is the required qualification for a career, while he rejects the “passive acceptance of social norms in women and men” (Graham
2007:10).

I’d be working in some office, making a lot of dough, and riding to work in cabs and Madison Avenue buses, and reading newspapers, and playing bridge all the time, and going to the movies and seeing a lot of stupid shorts and coming attractions and newsreels. Newsreels.
What does this suggest about his attitudes to society’s expectations? Whyte, in his book The Organization Man (1956), notes that the ultimate goal is “belongingness, a concept entirely antithetical to individualism” (1956:7, in Graham,
2007:12). Consider Holden’s conflict between wanting to belong (to those he loves in particular) and his rejection of conformity (expressed in his wearing of the red hunting cap).
Conformity was also encouraged through popular culture. The novel is set before television had become the powerful force it was to become in the fifties. The main form of mass entertainment was the cinema. Holden reveals ambivalence towards films or “movies”: he regards them as “phoney”, but they are intensely influential in his life. Find quotations in the novel which support this (e.g. p. 109: “The goddam movies. They can ruin you. I’m not kidding”).

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In the 1950s cinema centred on the rise of the teenager, both in content and with regard to audience. The period saw the advent of the phenomenon of the “teen-ager” as it was spelt initially. As Graham (2007:13) puts it:
The fact that teen-agers/adolescents had been excluded from the armed forces during the war, and that post-war prosperity allowed young people to have spending power [gave rise to a] peer-group culture, in which people looked to each other (rather than parents) for advice on how to live.

Exercise
Trace the motif (an important and sometimes recurring image in a literary text) of the cinema in the novel. Comment on Holden’s attitude and comments on movies in general, as well as on particular movies he watches, and explain what these reveal about his character.
When The Catcher in the Rye was published in 1951 it became an instant best seller.
But it was atypical – in that year, the most popular novels were all based on the war
– James Jones’s From Here to Eternity, Herman Wouk’s The Caine Mutiny and The Cruel
Sea by Nicholas Monsarrat. Books like these praised the courage of soldiers and were concerned with questions of honour, discipline and military life.
Holden’s anti-war feelings (for example, p. 147) are in stark contrast to these values.
His attitude prefigures (or looks forward to) protests against war in the US in the
1960s and 1970s.
Holden’s willingness to confront taboo subjects and the novel’s social criticism offers post-war America an unexpected image of itself.
(Graham 2007:17)

Stream of consciousness writing tries to imitate the flow of thoughts and feelings within a character’s mind and emotions.
Italics – printed in or using letters that slope to the right.
Use italics for book titles when you write on a computer. They are also used for emphasis. Language, style and form
As you know from your studies in ENG1502 (Foundations in Applied English
Language Studies), language is not a neutral window onto the world or mirror of it.
Rather, authors, poets and dramatists make choices when they place certain words, phrases or expressions on their pages, in order to achieve certain effects. This is true of all literary texts and it is part of your work as a student to pay attention to how language works to achieve these effects.

The Catcher in the Rye is typical of Salinger’s style in that it is colloquial, humorous and intimate (Graham 2007:19). Features of his writing are an idiosyncratic use of dialogue – some of this novel is almost stream-of-consciousness, with Holden’s thoughts running on in a seemingly random manner from one subject to the next.
He has peculiar mannerisms which make his speech idiosyncratic (distinctive, peculiar to him, almost eccentric at times).
The whole text is dominated by the use of dialogue. The setting is secondary and not always described in detail. Salinger uses italics to echo the spoken word in his writing, and accent and dialect are used to indicate class status. Although Holden uses the slang of the day and swears a great deal, like most adolescents, his speech is generally standard English, if American. The working class people he meets, on the other hand, reveal their social status through their dialect.

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Intertextuality is the relationship that exists between different texts, especially literary texts, or the references in one text to others. An allusion is something that is said or written that refers to or mentions another person or subject in an indirect way. Exercise
Find examples of the way dialect is used in the novel to reveal social class and status
(think about the cab driver and the prostitute, for instance). Comment on how effective this is.
Intertextuality is also a feature of Salinger’s writing. In this novel there are many examples of direct references and allusions to other literary texts. These help to throw further light on the themes and issues in the novel.

Exercise
Find as many references and allusions to other texts as you can and comment on their significance in The Catcher in the Rye.
Salinger often sums up characters in one pithy statement. These images or phrases, or even habits or peculiarities, are repeated and become emblematic of the character.

Exercise
Find examples of this in the text – think about characters such as Stradlater, Ackley and Ernest Morrow. What images or phrases or habits become emblematic of
Holden, do you think?
Humour is a crucial aspect of Salinger’s writing. Characters are not always amusing in themselves, but the images and the language rather than the content are what amuse the reader.

Exercise
Find some examples of humour in The Catcher in the Rye and comment on its purpose and effect in the novel.
Narration and point of view
Salinger uses a first-person narrator in this novel.

Conventionally, the use of the first-person narrator creates a close bond between reader and narrator and great potential for intimate engagement with the main protagonist. If, however, the narrator is not telling the truth, it is difficult for the reader to judge what is happening in the text.
(Graham 2007:20)
It is very important to Holden that he should not be seen as a phoney by the reader and so he constantly tries to prove his credibility. Note how often he uses the word
“really”, sometimes even italicising it to add extra veracity to his narrative. In his conversation with Mrs Morrow on the train he says, “Then I really started chucking the old crap around” (60): some editions italicise only the “real” in “really”, adding extra conviction to the words – he is really, really telling the truth! He also frequently uses expressions such as “I swear (to God)”, “if you want to know the truth”, “if you really want to know”, “(I’m not) kidding”, I mean it”. As Nadel (2008:56) puts it:
“These signifiers, along with those which emphasize the intensity of an experience
(e.g. ‘boy!’) or the speaker’s desire for clarity (e.g. ‘I mean …’) make Caulfield’s speech one which asserts its own veracity more than once for every page of narration.”
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Genre – one of the categories, based on form, style, or subject matter, into which artistic works of all kinds can be divided. For example, the detective novel is a genre..
A Bildungsroman is a novel which is an account of the youthful development of a hero. It describes the processes by which maturity is achieved through the various ups and downs of life.
The dissonances and conflicts appear as the necessary growth points through which the individual must pass on his way to maturity and harmony. Charles
Dickens’s novel
David Copperfield belongs to this genre. The novel follows the emotional, moral and spiritual growth of the hero at different stages of his life, and his defining in relation to the other characters. http://www. tesionline.com/intl/ thesis.jsp?idt=20550 In the United
States, a prep
(preparatory)
school is a private secondary school that prepares students for college, often with academic requirements for entry. Another of his idiosyncrasies is the use of exaggeration: “my parents would have about two haemorrhages apiece if I told you anything personal about them” (5); “I’m the most terrific liar you ever saw in your life” (20). In fact, Holden may be regarded as an unreliable narrator, often inaccurate in his judgements of both himself and others in the novel. His narrative is also a mass of contradictions – he claims to be an atheist and that most of the religious people he has come across are phonies, and yet he has a preoccupation with religion and is surprisingly well-informed about it.

Exercise
Find more examples of Holden’s “unreliability” in the novel. Consider the incident in which he meets the three women in the Lavender Room (p. 74), for instance. How do they react to him? What does he make of them and their opinions? Also think about his reactions to Sally on p. 130. Think about the inconsistency between his perceptions of others and how others react to him.
Genre
Catcher in the Rye could be called a “coming-of-age” novel. The main character, Holden
Caulfield, is moving from a state of “innocence” (in childhood, adolescence) to one of “experience” (in adulthood). The term Bildungsroman denotes a novel of all-around self-development. My definition of Bildungsroman is a distilled version of the one offered by Marianne Hirsch in “The Novel of Formation as Genre”:

(1) A Bildungsroman is, most generally, the story of a single individual’s growth and development within the context of a defined social order. The growth process, at its roots a quest story, has been described as both “an apprenticeship to life” and a “search for meaningful existence within society.”
(2) To spur the hero or heroine on to their journey, some form of loss or discontent must jar them at an early stage away from the home or family setting.
(3) The process of maturity is long, arduous, and gradual, consisting of repeated clashes between the protagonist’s needs and desires and the views and judgments enforced by an unbending social order.
(4) Eventually, the spirit and values of the social order become manifest in the protagonist, who is then accommodated into society. The novel ends with an assessment by the protagonist of himself and his new place in that society.

The novel
This novel covers three days in the life of Holden Caulfield and is told as a flashback as he looks back on his experiences six months after the event.
The novel can be divided into four sections:
Section 1:  aturday afternoon and evening, at Pencey Prep, Holden’s school (ChapS ters 1–7)

Section 2: Saturday night, Edmont Hotel, Manhattan (Chapters 8–14)
Section 3: Sunday, wandering about the city (Chapters 15–20)
Section 4: Sunday night, Holden and Phoebe in the family apartment; early hours of Monday morning, Holden’s visit to Mr Antonini; Monday afternoon, Phoebe at the carousel (Chapters 21–25)

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Chapter 26 brings the reader back to the starting point of the novel, six months after the events of the main narrative.

Saturday afternoon and evening, at Pencey Prep, Holden’s school (Chapters 1–7)
The first chapter of the novel introduces many of the central themes and sets the tone of the novel through the use of the intimate first person narrative. Holden Caulfield’s unique voice comes through from the outset, and in the reader being addressed as
“you”, it seems we are being taken into his confidence.
The first paragraph of the novel is important in many ways. Holden refers to David
Copperfield as “crap”, and yet there are similarities between the two stories. Dickens’s novel has been seen as the archetypal bildungsroman, chronicling the development of the main character from boyhood to maturity. In these kinds of narratives, typically, the “hero” suffers a loss, which leads to a journey in which he faces various difficult encounters. These experiences change him and he ends by reflecting on his situation in the present (Graham 2007:32–33).
Although Holden asserts:
Besides, I’m not going to tell you my whole goddam autobiography or anything.
I’ll just tell you about this madman stuff that happened to me around last
Christmas before I got pretty run-down and had to come out here and take it easy. I mean, that’s all I told D.B. about, and he’s my brother and all. He’s in
Hollywood. That isn’t too far from this crumby place, and he comes over and visits me practically every week-end (p. 5),

A sanatorium is a hospital or a clinic, or a nursing home.
Flashback - a scene or event from the past that appears in a narrative out of chronological order, to fill in information or explain something in the present

he does in fact relate a story, but he does not abide by the “rules” of autobiography, which dictate that the character generally tells his or her life story. In this first passage, several important details are revealed: Holden is in some sort of rest home or sanatorium, and he is in California ― on the other side of the continent from where the action of the novel plays out ― indicating to the reader that in fact the narrative is a series of flashbacks. In this opening passage (p. 5), Holden mentions the people who feature least in the narrative ― his parents and his older brother, D.B. This story is told from the perspective of a child or adolescent, and adults are often on the periphery, or seen as disappointing, even corrupt or not to be trusted. In this first passage there is the first of many references to the movies: Holden equates films with betrayal and prostitution: “Now he’s out in Hollywood, D.B., being a prostitute. If there’s one thing I hate, it’s the movies. Don’t even mention them to me” (p. 5). This is an example of Holden’s unreliability as a narrator – in fact, he loves the movies, and uses them as a constant frame of reference. He acts out movie roles on several occasions in the novel, he uses them to express his own feelings and goes to see them often – “even when he believes that they will be unsatisfactory” (Nadel 2008:60).

Exercise
Holden’s sense of loss and his fear of it are made clear in this first chapter. Find evidence to prove this statement.
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Exercise
The early chapters raise the issue of Holden’s hatred of all the things he sees as “phoney”. In the first section this is expressed in his disgust for his schoolmates and also for various authority figures. What does he mean by “phoney”, do you think, based on your reading of these early chapters? These early chapters also establish Holden’s disaffection with school and his hostile attitude to his schoolmates in particular and to people in general – note his retort to Ackley that his hat is not a deer-hunting hat, but a “people shooting hat” (26).
Suicide is a theme that can be traced through the whole novel. The first mention of suicide occurs in chapter 1. In this chapter it also becomes clear to the reader that
Holden is isolated, different from the rest, and a rebel.

Exercise
What elements of this chapter emphasise Holden’s view of himself as a “misfit” who is “different” from his peers?
Holden’s visit to Mr Spencer in chapter 2 underlines his fear of death and growing old. We are given a first glimpse of the contradictions that are Holden Caulfield – he is six foot plus, he has some grey hair and is often mistaken for someone much older, but at heart he is still immature and childlike in many ways. The mention of
Beowulf implies that Holden’s wanderings around Manhattan once he has left Pencey are a kind of quest – one in which he is searching for a place where he feels safe and secure as well as for answers to questions that are troubling him. Among these questions are his sense of the unfairness of people dying young – Allie, James Castle,
“Lord Randall, my son …”.
Comment on the significance of the
“game” Holden plays with Ackley in this chapter
(25):
I slid way the hell down in my chair and watched old
Ackley making himself at home.
… I pulled the peak around to the back again, and relaxed.

Isak Dinesen was the pseudonym of
Danish writer
Baroness Karen
Christence
Blixen-Finecke.
Her 1937 novel,
Out of Africa, was based on her experiences on a coffee plantation in British East
Africa (now
Kenya).

Exercise
In chapter 3, Holden wants to “call up” (22) certain authors – why might these be significant? Holden says:
The book I was reading was this book I took out of the library by mistake … .
He just isn’t the kind of guy I’d want to call up, That’s all. I’d rather call old
Thomas Hardy up. I like that Eustacia Vye. (22)
The books that are mentioned here are:
Out of Africa – Isak Dinesen
Ring Lardner – The Portable Ring Lardner, a collection of stories by the American humourist (1885–1933)
The Return of the Native – Thomas Hardy (the heroine’s name is Eustacia Vye)
Of Human Bondage – Somerset Maugham (a semi-autobiographical bildungsroman about the difficulties of coming to terms with adult sexuality. Holden rejects this book, underlining his own isolation and sense of confusion, particularly about sexual matters.)
In chapter 4 we learn more about Holden’s roommate, Stradlater:
He always looked all right, Stradlater, but for instance, you should have seen the razor he shaved with. It was always rusty as hell and full of lather and hairs and crap. He never cleaned it or anything. He always looked good when he

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was finished fixing himself up, but he was a secret slob anyway, if you knew him the way I did. (p. 31)
Holden’s reaction to the news that Stradlater has a date with Jane Gallagher is worth noting: Boy, I nearly dropped dead when he said that.
“Jane Gallagher,” I said. I even got up from the washbowl when he said that.
I damn near dropped dead. “You’re damn right I know her. She practically lived right next door to me the summer before last.”
…
“How’d she happen to mention me? Does she go to B.M. now? She said she might go there. She said she might go to Shipley, too. I thought she went to
Shipley. How’d she happen to mention me?” I was pretty excited, I really was.
(p. 35)
And:
“I used to play checkers with her all the time. … She wouldn’t move any of her kings. What she’d do, when she’d get a king, she wouldn’t move it. She’d just leave it in the back row. She’d get them all lined up in the back row. Then she’d never use them. She just liked the way they looked when they were all there in the back row.” (pp. 35–36)
In comparison to his feelings about Stradlater, Holden appears to have strong feelings, even idealistic ones, about Jane. Read this chapter carefully and explore this.
Consider, too, how Jane is a motif that runs throughout the novel. In this chapter, our first encounter with her is through Holden’s memories of her (how does he remember her?)
Although Holden says that he hates the movies, he knows a lot about them and he uses them to cope with his emotions, and in Chapter 5 he asks Brossard and Ackley to go into town and see a movie with him. While waiting for Ackley to get ready,
Holden starts to make a snowball from the snow collected on his windowsill.

As Graham
(2007:40) puts it, the “impact of
Allie’s death on
Holden is one of the central issues of the novel”. Keeping in mind Holden’s description of his actions and reading between the lines of remarks such as
“they were going to have me psychoanalysed and all” (p. 42), comment on the truth of this statement. 58

The snow was very good for packing. I didn’t throw it at anything, though. I started to throw it. At a car that was parked across the street. But I changed my mind. The car looked so nice and white. Then I started to throw it at a fire hydrant, but that looked too nice and white, too. Finally I didn’t throw it at anything. All I did was close the window and walk around the room with the snowball, packing it harder. A little while later, I still had it with me when
I and Brossard and Ackley got on the bus. The bus driver opened the doors and made me throw it out. I told him I wasn’t going to chuck it at anybody, but he wouldn’t believe me. People never believe you. (p. 40)
Holden values the qualities of innocence and purity, the innocence of childhood, and hates these qualities to be spoiled and defiled: the snow is pure and white, suggesting innocence. The car looks immaculate under its mantle of snow, as does the fire hydrant, and he does not want to spoil or deface this. The fact that he does not throw the snowball is “an attempt to preserve innocence” (Graham 2007:39).
Holden decides to ignore the topic Stradlater has given him, and instead writes about
Allie’s baseball mitt. This evokes memories of Allie and reveals Holden’s feelings for his brother. This passage, “The thing was, I couldn’t think of a room or a house or anything to describe the way Stradlater said he had to have. … You had to feel a little sorry for the crazy sonuvabitch” (pp. 41–43), is significant in that it introduces important features of Holden’s story – his grief at Allie’s death, his reactions to it and

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his inability to come to terms with this death. The episode also raises the spectre of death and dying, and reveals something of Holden’s obsession with death. “You’d have liked him” (41) draws the reader, as a confidant, into the relationship Holden had with his brother.

Exercise
How does Holden retell his behaviour on hearing the news of Allie’s death? What does this show about his personality?
The mitt (or glove) is a catcher’s mitt for baseball, and this brings to mind the title of the novel, The
Catcher in the Rye. Holden, as the novel reveals, tries to save those he loves (such as Phoebe and Jane) from being damaged by life. He was unable to save Allie from death, and probably cannot save Jane from being defiled, as he sees it, by Stradlater. “For Holden, physical intimacy signals a loss of innocence and entry into the adult world, which he associates with corruption” (Graham 2007:41). Stradlater, through his rejection of the essay about Allie’s glove –
“For Chrissake, Holden. This is about a goddam baseball glove” (p. 45)
– and his behaviour with Jane and the suggestion that they have had sex, or as Holden rather crudely puts it, that he has given “her the time in Ed
Banky’s goddam car” (p. 47), defiles the memory of both Allie and Jane.
Image of catcher’s mitt retrieved from http://www.clipart.com (accessed 15 June 2009)

Exercise
Hands are a recurring motif in the novel, both caring and nurturing and protective (Jane’s hand on his neck at the movies, Mr
Antolini’s hand, although this is an ambivalent and troubling scene) and violent (Holden breaking his hand by smashing the windowpane). Find other examples in the novel.

The final chapter of this first section of the novel is dominated by despair and thoughts of death – the notion of suicide resurfaces (“I almost wished I was dead” (51),
“… I felt like jumping out the window” (52), and “It made me too sad and lonesome”
(pp. 54–55)). This is an important and recurring aspect of Holden’s narrative: what does it suggest to the reader?
The excerpt below (p. 55) tells us a good deal about Holden’s state of mind and his relationship with his parents, as well as his own sense of self. Read it carefully and explore what it reveals about him:
One thing about packing depressed me a little. I had to pack these brand-new ice-skates my mother had practically just sent me a couple of days before. That depressed me. I could see my mother going into Spaulding’s and asking the salesman a million dopey questions – and here I was getting the axe again. It made me feel pretty sad. She bought me the wrong kind of skates – I wanted racing-skates and she bought hockey – but it made me sad anyway. Almost every time somebody gives me a present, it ends up making me sad. (p. 55)
As Holden leaves the school, he slips and nearly breaks his “crazy neck” (p. 56).
This introduces the theme of falling that runs through the narrative: references to jumping from windows, the suicide of James Castle, dreams of saving children from falling, the carousel. There are also other examples of his clumsiness caused by his anxiety (falling over the suitcase in the episode with the prostitute, blowing smoke

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into the faces of the nuns, falling off the seat of the taxi while trying to kiss Sally).
Holden’s body language tells the reader a great deal about his state of mind.

Saturday night, Edmont Hotel, Manhattan (Chapters 8–14)
This section (starting with chapter 8) introduces us to Holden’s preoccupation with gender roles, relationships and sexuality. His conflicted and double-sided view of the movies reappears: he realises that they project an exaggerated, false, “phoney” representation of reality and relationships (consider his description of the kind of men and women who inhabit the stories he reads in magazines, and by extension, the movies) and yet he is clearly hugely influenced by films.
Ambivalence – the presence of two opposing ideas, attitudes, or emotions at the same time; a feeling of uncertainty about something due to a mental conflict His meeting with Mrs Morrow in this chapter underlines his essential ambivalence towards women – he doesn’t want to be like Stradlater, whom he despises, and he feels awkward about the attraction he feels to Mrs Morrow, and yet he also seems to see women as endearingly inept and impractical, for example when she leaves her bag in the aisle where everyone will trip over it. There is also an amusing misunderstanding here – he is attracted to her sexually, and suggests a drink, noting his height and grey hair as signs of his (apparent) maturity, while she refers to him as “dear” and questions whether he should be smoking and drinking! His involved “shooting the breeze” with her about her son is amusing but reminds us of his hatred of phonies, his own unreliability as a narrator, his lack of a sense of self and even his desperation – he will do anything to make a connection, even if it means telling outright lies!

Exercise
The description of Ernest Morrow is another example of how Salinger uses one particular detail to describe a character – in this case “snapping” (flicking) his
“soggy old wet towel at people’s asses” (p. 58). Can you find other examples of this technique in the novel?
From Chapter 9 onwards (until the return to the starting point of California in the last chapter) the events unfold in Manhattan (a borough, or municipality, of New
York City). In this chapter Holden voices his concerns about the ducks in Central
Park – where do they go when the pond freezes over? He asks the taxi driver:
“Hey listen,” I said. “You know those ducks in that lagoon right near Central
Park South? That little lake? By any chance, do you happen to know where they go, the ducks, when it gets all frozen over? Do you happen to know, by any chance?” I realized it was only one chance in a million. (p. 64)
Do you think these concerns have something to do with Holden’s own anxieties about loss – specifically death and dying? The ducks represent absence: Allie’s death has so traumatised Holden “that he sees inexplicable loss everywhere” (Graham 2007:45).
The Edmont Hotel is a place where Holden knows he is unlikely to bump into anyone he knows – on the wrong side of Central Park (see the picture on the next page) and a distance from his parents’ apartment. We are made subtly aware throughout the novel, through the references to private school, Holden’s suitcases, his parents’ apartment on the (richer) Upper East Side of Manhattan and money in general, that he comes from a wealthy and privileged background.
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As he says on page 65, “I didn’t know then that the goddam hotel was full of perverts and morons. Screwballs all over the place.” Here he sees the underbelly of society and “he is both repelled and fascinated by what he sees” (Graham 2007:45). Holden regards sex as something imposed on a woman by a man. As Graham (2007:45) notes, one must remember that Holden is “a product of the repressive post-war era in America, when sexual desire was considered unspeakable and clear information about sex was rare”. He does not understand sex, but he is intensely curious about it.
In his loneliness, Holden thinks about calling up his sister (Phoebe), but decides against it for fear of alerting his parents to his whereabouts. This leads him to reflect deeply on his relationship with Phoebe, and by extension, with Allie.

Exercise
Read the passage from “While I was changing my shirt …” to “Then I got all ready and went down in the elevator to the lobby to see what was going on” (pp. 71–73). What does this passage reveal about Holden and his relationship with his siblings? Why do Phoebe’s openness and displays of affection alarm Holden?
Image of Manhattan skyline on http://www.freefoto.com (accessed 6 June 2009)
The three women Holden meets in the Lavender Room highlight the theme of class difference and social privilege. Their names suggest their working-class origins.
Holden is mocking and disparaging of them, showing his innate (if unconscious) snobbery, and like Stradlater, whom he despises, he reveals that for him, too, appearances count more than personality. Again in this episode we are made aware of his lack of insight into his own nature and state of mind. He does not pick up the import of the women’s remarks about his age or the references to his father.

Exercise
Chapter 11 is central to the whole novel. Holden’s memories of Jane reveal much about his attitude to women and sexual matters. Read the chapter carefully and write notes on what it tells you about Holden, his attitude to Jane in particular and women in general, his state of mind, and any other ideas that strike you as important. Here are a few pointers:

•• “You don’t always have to get too sexy to get to know a girl” (p. 81). Does this
••

••

indicate Holden’s desire for a relationship that is more than only sexual, unlike
Stradlater and Ed Banksy?
The symbol of hands occurs here too – trace this symbol and its significance through the novel. Here they are nurturing and comforting as Holden remembers holding Jane’s hands, her hand on his neck: “All you knew was, you were happy”
(p. 84); Mr Antolini’s hands are at first comforting but become more threatening;
Allie’s baseball catcher’s mitt, and Holden’s desire to be the “catcher in the rye” reveal his desire to save the innocence of the children he knows.
Racial tensions and hierarchy – the unconscious stereotyping and prejudices that
Holden expresses unwittingly in his descriptions of black or “not white” people.

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Chapter 12 revives many of Holden’s thoughts – his hatred of corruption, his ambivalence about the movies and writers and his dislike of performers like the pianist
Charlie. He is acutely aware of the phoniness of those around him: the Yale type telling his date about a suicide while at the same time “giving her a feel under the table” (p. 90), bumping into the pretentious Lillian, clearly only interested in D.B. and not Holden, the pianist Charlie giving a “very phony, humble bow. Like as if he was a helluva humble guy, besides being a terrific piano player. It was very phoney
– I mean him being such a big snob and all” (p. 89).
Holden returns to the subject of the ducks, to the eventual fury of the cab driver.
This reminds us of his preoccupation with death and the inexplicable way that some things (and people, Allie in particular) do, simply, die.

Exercise
Holden’s behaviour continues to grow increasingly erratic and odd. With this in mind, read Chapter 13 and 14 carefully and discuss the incident with the prostitute and the pimp. What does it reveal about Holden’s state of mind? What themes does it develop? Some points you might consider are:

•• Holden falls over his suitcase as he hurries to open the door to the prostitute (p. 98)
••

••
••

••
Rubberneck
n 1. a person who stares or gapes inquisitively, esp in a naive or foolish manner. 2. a sightseer or tourist vb (intr) to stare in a naive or foolish manner. http://www. thefreedictionary. com/rubberneck

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– another example of his clumsiness and also a reference again to “falling”. Also,
Holden reverts to lying and exaggeration again to avoid having to actually commit to having sex – note the reference to the operation to his “clavichord” (p. 101).
The prostitute, Sunny, says she comes from Hollywood, reminding us of how
Holden feels about the movies and about his brother writing for them: “Now he’s out in Hollywood, D.B., being a prostitute” (p. 5). Sunny says that Holden reminds her of an actor: “You look like a guy in the movies. You know. Whosis.
You know who I mean. What the heck’s his name?” (p. 101)
Read the passage on pages 104–105: “Finally, though, I got undressed and got in bed” to “They sound so phoney when they talk.” Explore the way this passage represents Holden’s ideas and feelings about religion (both religion and schools create social barriers as far as Holden is concerned).
The fight with Maurice is also significant. Again, Holden reverts to acting out a scene from an imaginary movie to deal with a difficult situation. Refer to other examples of this behaviour. What does this behaviour reveal about Holden?
Consider the meaning of his words: “The goddam movies. They can ruin you.
I’m not kidding” (p. 109).
Also note Holden’s talk of suicide. These words are an allusion to Holden’s later mentions of James Castle and the circumstances of this boy’s death and develop the theme of death and dying that pervades the narrative:
What I really felt like though was committing suicide. I felt like jumping out the window. I probably would’ve done it, too, if I’d been sure somebody’d cover me up as soon as I landed. I didn’t want a bunch of stupid rubbernecks looking at me when I was all gory. (p. 110)

•• Holden makes a reference here to “rubbernecks”. Read the textbox, and explain what this word means. Holden shows, throughout the novel, an unwillingness to expose himself to a stranger’s gaze. Think about other examples of where he has revealed this reluctance to expose himself. All these are ruses to deflect attention from his state of mind, from what is really troubling him.

SECTION 2: The Catcher in the Rye

Sunday, wandering about the city (Chapters 15–20)
Exercise
“This chapter [Chapter 15] begins a section of the novel in which Holden seems increasingly anxious and his attempts to make meaningful connections with other people become ever more desperate” (Graham 2007:54).
Keep this statement in mind as you carefully read the next six chapters. Here are some points for you to consider:

•• “I got a cab outside the hotel, but I didn’t have the faintest damn idea where I
••
Bathos (adjective bathetic) – anticlimax, often with ridiculous effect.
In writing or speech, a sudden descent in style or manner from the elevated to the commonplace, producing a ludicrous effect

••

••

was going. I had no place to go. It was only Sunday, and I couldn’t go home till
Wednesday – or Tuesday the soonest” (p. 112).
So he goes to Grand Central Station. Why do you think he makes this choice? (The station suggests people in flux, on their way from here to there, no permanence, no arrival or having to face the reality of life.)
The sight of the nuns and his help with their “inexpensive” suitcases sets him off on another reminiscence, this time about Dick Slagle and his cheap suitcases, a reminder of the class consciousness of Pencey and Holden’s own background.
Consider, too, his references to his father’s wealth on page 113. It is clear from these details that Holden has never really had to think about money or about where it comes from, but that he is intensely aware of the trappings of wealth and social privilege, even though he pretends contempt for them. He feels sorry for the nuns and their obvious lack of money, but his attempts at chivalry and sophistication also sink to the bathetic when he blows smoke into their faces!
Consider, too, his diatribe about Catholics (pp. 117–118) – is this significant?
In his conversation with the nuns he refers to books he has read. What is the significance of these titles?

Holden goes in search of a record, “Little Shirley Beans”, by “this coloured girl singer, Estelle Fletcher … She sings it very Dixieland and whorehouse, and it doesn’t sound at all mushy. If a white girl was singing it, she’d make it sound cute as hell, but old Estelle Fletcher knew what the hell she was doing …” (p. 121). Here he is using racial stereotypes and making black people more “sexy” than they possibly are. The fact that a white girl would have made the song sound “cute” but that the coloured singer “knew what the hell she was doing” suggests that the white girl is seen as innocent and childlike, while the black singer is regarded as more sexual.
This was a common racial prejudice at the time – although Holden is cynical and questioning of everything he sees as the status quo, he is still prone to clichéd attitudes to racial identity.
Holden passes a couple with a child (pp. 121–122). Note his description of the couple and his social comment – despite criticising others for snobbery, Holden again expresses his prejudices and unwittingly underlines his own privileged background.
The little boy with the couple is singing “if a body catch a body coming through the rye”. This is a (misquoted) line from an old song based on a poem by Scottish poet Robert Burns (1759–1796).
The title of the novel is taken from this poem. Holden either hears incorrectly, or the boy has got the words wrong, but whatever the case, this misquote actually removes the sexual connotations from the poem. The words “catch a body” remind us of the motif of “falling” which runs throughout the narrative, and the poem seems to sum up Holden’s deepest desire – to save those he loves, specifically Phoebe and children
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in general, the innocent, and by extension, himself, from death and defilement (for instance, he longs to save Jane from being sexually corrupted by Stradlater).
Coming Through the Rye

Coming thro’ the rye, poor body,
Coming thro’ the rye,
She draiglet a’ her petticoatie
Coming thro’ the rye.
O, Jenny’s a’ wat, poor body;
Jenny’s seldom dry;
She draiglet a’ her petticoatie
Coming thro’ the rye.
Gin a body meet a body
Coming thro’ the rye,
Gin a body kiss a body –
Need a body cry?
Gin a body meet a body
Coming thro’ the glen,
Gin a body kiss a body –
Need the warld ken?
Holden buys tickets for a Broadway show starring “The Lunts”. The mention of this “showbiz” couple and of Laurence Olivier may be a subtle reference to homosexuality, or “flits” as Holden calls them. Both Alfred Lunt and Laurence Olivier were suspected of homosexuality – but we must remember the oppressive nature of post-war American society and the mystery and prejudice attached to this, which fascinates Holden. In those days, any proof of homosexual activities would have ended an actor’s career.

Exercise
Holden decides to go in search of his sister and on the advice of the little girl in the park (mistaken though it is), he heads for the museum.
Even though it was Sunday and Phoebe wouldn’t be there with her class or anything … Then a funny thing happened. When I got to the museum, all of a sudden I wouldn’t have gone inside for a million bucks. (pp. 125–128)
Read the whole passage carefully and comment on the significance of Holden’s feelings about the museum. Why do you think he resists entering the museum at the last moment? For Holden, change means loss (Graham 2007:57). In the end he does not go in – is he afraid that the museum may, after all, have changed too?
Holden’s date with Sally Hayes develops themes that are now familiar. His concerns with phoniness and sincerity (or the absence thereof) are expressed in his remarks about the actors “the Lunts” (Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne):
… they were very good, but I didn’t like them much. They were different though, I’ll say that. They didn’t act like people and they didn’t act like actors.
It’s hard to explain. They acted more like they knew they were celebrities and
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Greenwich
Village (often simply called
“the Village”), is a largely residential neighborhood on the west side of Lower
Manhattan
in New York
City. A large majority of the district is home to upper middle class families.
Greenwich
Village, however, was known in the late
19th – earlier to mid 20th centuries as the bohemian capital and the birthplace of the Beat movement. wikipedia.org/ wiki/Greenwich_ Village

all. I mean they were good, but they were too good. When one of them got finished making a speech, the other one said something very fast right after it. It was supposed to be like people really talking and interrupting each other.
The trouble was, it was too much like people talking and interrupting each other. They acted a little bit the way old Ernie, down in the Village, plays the piano. If you do something too good, then, after a while, if you don’t watch it, you start showing off. And then you’re not as good any more. (p. 132)
These thoughts continue to preoccupy Holden as he watches Sally’s behaviour with the young man she recognises during the interval. This “phoniness” persists when they decide to go ice-skating, purely, Holden cynically believes, because Sally wants to show off her legs and behind in “those darling little skating skirts” (p. 134).
Holden’s behaviour is becoming more and more inappropriate – his voice rises, he suggests a mad plan to run away with Sally, back to the simple life, and when she rejects this idea and tries to bring him back down to earth, the scene culminates in
Holden’s insulting words: “You give me a royal pain in the ass, if you want to know the truth” (p. 139).

Exercise
Read the section from “Then all of a sudden, out of a clear blue sky, old Sally said,
‘Look. I have to know. Are you or aren’t you coming over to help me trim the tree
Christmas Eve? I have to know’ ” to “I swear to God I’m a madman” (pp. 135–140).
Consider what this passage tells us about Holden’s state of mind at this point in the narrative. What fears does it raise? He makes another reference to “rubbernecks”
“that didn’t have anything better to do than stand around and watch everybody falling over themselves” (p. 135). Think about the theme of “falling”, and Holden’s unwillingness to be watched, or recognised, and his many disguises or pretences
(find occasions when he has tried to disguise himself and his actions – either literally or figuratively – elsewhere in the narrative). To which other memory in the novel is the reference to suicide an allusion? Find other occasions when he has expressed similar fears and comment on these.
“I’m in bad shape. I’m in lousy shape” (p. 137) and “I swear to God I’m a madman”
(p. 140) could be regarded as cries for help from Holden. Is he becoming more aware of his own imminent breakdown? He is in bad shape and we see in the last few chapters how he spirals down into deep depression, ending finally in a sanatorium, from where he is in fact telling this story.
After another attempt to phone Jane – “Anyway, I gave old Jane a buzz again, but her phone didn’t answer, so I had to hang up” (p. 142) – Holden decides to call up
“old Carl Luce”. To kill time he goes into Radio City and catches the stage show between movies. This leads to a memory of going to the Christmas show as a child.
The kettle drummer is another symbol of constancy, something that could be relied upon to be the same year after year. His memories are tinged with his adolescent cynicism, but amid the phoniness the drummer stands out as something reliable and pure – “the thing Jesus really would’ve liked would be the guy that plays the kettle drums in the orchestra” (p. 143) – he “probably would’ve puked” at the other things! The film he then watches does nothing to improve his mood or relieve his cynicism either, being clichéd and predictable. What really seals his dark mood and confirms his low opinion of most of humankind, however, is the mean and “phoney”

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behaviour of the woman sitting right next to him, and how she reacts when her son keeps asking to go to the bathroom:
She kept telling him to sit still and behave himself. She was about as kindhearted as a goddam wolf. You take somebody that cries their goddam eyes out over phoney stuff in the movies, and nine times out of ten they’re mean bastards at heart. I’m not kidding. (p. 145)
Pages 146–147 refer to more books and poets. These allusions reflect many of the preoccupations of the novel, not least the criticism of American society and antiwar feelings. Holden’s comments about war would have been construed as “antiAmerican” at the time of writing and remind us of the anti-war counter-culture that arose over later conflicts such as the Vietnam war, and which extend even to the present day in reactions to the war in Iraq and Afghanistan, and America’s role here (Graham 2007:62).
Holden’s drink with Carl Luce reawakens his concerns about his own sexuality and sex in general. Holden confesses to “only horsing around” (p. 150) and succeeds in annoying Luce with his childish behaviour (although we see that Luce is the ultimate phoney, whose sophistication thinly masks a superficial and arrogant nature) he does make some telling remarks about his own ideas about sex, which reveal a surprising maturity in stark contrast with the likes of Luce, Stradlater and Ackley:
“You know what the trouble with me is? I can never get really sexy – I mean really sexy – with a girl I don’t like a lot. I mean I have to like her a lot. If I don’t I sort of lose my goddam desire for her and all. Boy, it really screws up my sex life something awful. My sex life stinks.” (p. 153)
Finally, very drunk indeed, Holden telephones Sally in an attempt to apologise for being so rude to her. He becomes more and more depressed:
When I finally got down off the radiator and went out to the hatcheck room,
I was crying and all. I don’t know why, but I was. I guess it was because I was feeling so damned depressed and lonesome. (p. 161)
He goes in search of the ducks, but by now he is so drunk that it takes him a long time to find the pond. Something terrible happens – he drops Phoebe’s record and it breaks into a dozen pieces. He picks up the bits, even though they are useless now.
His thoughts turn to his childhood, Allie and death. His references to Allie in his grave, “surrounded by dead guys” (p. 161) reveals that for Holden, Allie is not really dead at all: he thinks of him constantly, talks to him whenever he is in a crisis and is clearly still grieving deeply for his brother. This grief sets him apart from others, even from readers of the novel. Note how he says “You didn’t know him. If you’d known him, you’d know what I mean” (p. 162), establishing a distance between him and his reader.
His thoughts then turn to actually being dead himself, and the pain this would cause
Phoebe (and, by implication, his mother) so he decides to go home before he dies out there of pneumonia. There is a strong sense of relief in his last words in chapter
20, which bring us to the turning point in the novel:
So I got the hell out of the park, and went home. I walked all the way. It wasn’t too far, and I wasn’t tired or even drunk anymore. It was just very cold and nobody around anywhere. (p. 163)
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Benedict Arnold was an American officer in the War of Independence who later betrayed the
American cause.
His treason was stimulated by anger over charges by
Pennsylvania
authorities that he violated military regulations.

Sunday night, Holden and Phoebe in the family apartment; early hours of Monday morning, Holden’s visit to Mr Antolini;
Monday afternoon, Phoebe at the carousel (Chapters 21–25)
Chapter 26 brings the reader back to the starting point of the novel, six months after the events of the main narrative.
The last section of the novel is its climax. It ends with Holden’s experience of insight at the carousel and takes us back to the starting point of the novel, the sanatorium in California. Throughout this section we see Holden’s behaviour spiralling down into a breakdown. His conversations with Phoebe dominate the first three chapters.
Phoebe is playing Benedict Arnold in the school play. Arnold “is an emblem of unreliability and betrayal, like other authority figures in the novel” (Graham 2007:66).

Exercise
Read pages 174 to 179 carefully. Holden tries to explain to Phoebe why he hated
Pencey so much. (Can you explain what he objected to in his old school? Consider the boys’ behaviour.) What sort of qualities is the school breeding in young men, do you think?
Think about why
James Castle jumped out of the window; reflect on the fact that Mr Antolini was the only one to approach him and that it was he who picked him up; he was wearing
Holden’s sweater.

Phoebe challenges Holden to mention one thing he likes a lot. He is hard pressed in his depression to name anything and can think instead only about the nuns and
James Castle. Read the passage on pp. 176–178, which includes: “‘All right,’ I said.
But the trouble was, I couldn’t concentrate” to “Just because I didn’t know him too well.” There have been references to this suicide throughout the novel. Why do you think this memory is particularly important?
In the end, Holden can only think of Allie as something he likes a lot. This infuriates Phoebe:
“Allie’s dead. You always say that! If somebody’s dead and everything, and in
Heaven, then it isn’t really –”
“I know he’s dead! Don’t you think I know that? I can still like him though, can’t I? Just because somebody’s dead, you don’t just stop liking them, for
God’s sake – especially if they were about a thousand times nicer than the people you know that are alive and all.” (p. 178)
But for Holden, Allie is not really dead at all, as we have seen. He is still grieving and for him his dead brother has become more alive than the living.
The chapter ends on a sombre note:
“You know what I’d like to be?” I said. “You know what I’d like to be? I mean if I had my goddam choice?”
“What? Stop swearing.”
“You know that song “If a body catch a body comin’ through the rye”? I’d like –”
“It’s ‘If a body meet a body coming through the rye’! old Phoebe said. “It’s a poem by Robert Burns.”
“I know it’s a poem by Robert Burns.”

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She was right, though. It is “If a body meet a body coming through the rye”.
I didn’t know it then, though.
“I thought it was ‘If a body catch a body’,” I said. “Anyway, I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all. Thousands of little kids, and nobody’s around – nobody big, I mean – except me. And
I’m standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff – I mean if they’re running and they don’t look where they’re going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That’s all I’d do all day. I’d just be the catcher in the rye and all. I know it’s crazy, but that’s the only thing I’d really like to be. I know it’s crazy.” (pp. 179–180)
Several important issues are raised here, not least the idea of falling (and death) which pervades the novel. Holden wants to “catch” the children, or prevent them from falling in the first place – he wishes to preserve the innocence of childhood, represented physically by Phoebe but also implicitly by his own childhood. As we have seen throughout the narrative, he is frightened of growing old, of crossing the divide into adulthood, with all its attendant responsibilities and challenges, not least of which are relationships and sex. Falling also reminds us of Mr Antolini and his role in James Castle’s death, and the fact that Holden regards him as a surrogate big brother – a caring, reliable and nurturing figure. This accounts for his last desperate cry for help when he calls up Mr Antolini in the dead of night.
Tangible – able to be touched or perceived through the sense of touch

Holden escapes detection when his parents come home, but it is clear that at this point he really wants to be found. His despair is tangible:
Then, all of a sudden, I started to cry. I couldn’t help it. I did it so nobody could hear me, but I did it. It scared the hell out of old Phoebe when I started doing it, and she came over and tried to make me stop, but once you get started, you can’t just stop on a goddam dime. (p. 186)
He also says:
It was a helluva lot easier getting out of the house than it was getting in, for some reason. For one thing, I didn’t give much of a damn anymore if they caught me. I really didn’t. I figured if they caught me, they caught me. I almost wish they did in a way. (pp. 186–7)
There are both resignation and exhaustion in these words – Holden is at the end of his strength, worn out by the last three days, both physically and emotionally. He longs for the solace of home but has become so alienated that it is impossible for him simply to face his parents. Instead, he escapes down the stairs, falling over the garbage bins on his way down, yet another hint of his approaching breakdown and his preoccupation with death and falling.
Holden is warmly welcomed when he arrives at the Antolinis’ apartment. Mr Antolini clearly feels genuine concern for Holden – he mentions that he has had lunch earlier with Holden’s father, which underlines his connection to Holden’s family.
He is perceptive enough to see that Holden is on the brink of a disaster: “I have a feeling that you’re riding for some kind of terrible, terrible fall. But I don’t honestly know what kind. … Are you listening to me?” (p. 193). These words are significant in the light of what happens next and what we have seen of Holden’s increasingly desperate behaviour. The use of the word “fall” is significant too, reminding us of several of the novel’s preoccupations – death, mental breakdown and Holden’s desire to “catch” and preserve the innocence of childhood.

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Mr Antolini, like Phoebe, questions Holden about school. He is interested in Holden’s prowess in English in particular – there are numerous references and allusions in the novel that suggest that this is where Holden excels. (Try to make a list of these references.) Consider Holden’s description of the “Oral expression” course that he
“flunks”. Just as in his description to Phoebe of Pencey pupils’ behaviour, this description tells the reader a good deal about the sort of values schools like this instil in young men.

Exercise
Mr Antolini is clearly concerned about Holden and his overwrought state, and tries to talk what he regards as sense into him – for him, “falling” in this context means social failure:
“All right. Listen to me a minute now. … I may not word this as memorably as I’d like to, but I’ll write you a letter about it in a day or two. Then you can get it all straight. But listen now, anyway.” … Boy, I felt so damn tired all of a sudden. (pp. 194–195)
Read this passage carefully and take note of all the references to falling and death.
Unwittingly, Mr Antolini has hit on Holden’s exact preoccupations – he has had a sensation of falling, and has experienced falls in several ways, throughout the narrative, and they are all symbols of the emotional fall he is hurtling towards. In the last sentence, Holden mentions feeling weary of all this, indicating that his grief has become a deep, disabling depression. Mr Antolini is right to fear the worst.
Despite Mr Antolini’s care and insight into Holden’s state of mind, and in contrast to his seemingly bohemian lifestyle and unconventional ideas, the import of his monologue is as conservative as Mr Spencer’s: he believes that education will provide the answers Holden is searching for, and his solution is that he should get back to school and apply himself to his studies:
“Among other things, you’ll find that you’re not the first person who was ever confused and frightened and even sickened by human behaviour. You’re by no means alone on that score, you’ll be excited and stimulated to know. Many, many men have been just as troubled morally and spiritually as you are right now. Happily, some of them kept records of their troubles. You’ll learn from them – if you want to. Just as some day, if you have something to offer, someone will learn something from you.” (p. 196)
At the close of this chapter, though, rather than providing a sanctuary for Holden,
Mr Antolini’s inappropriate advances send him fleeing in panic. The shock (and perhaps the confirmation of an unspoken suspicion) that Mr Antolini is a “flit” or homosexual, as well as the horrifying possibility that he, Holden, may perhaps also be homosexual, sends him reeling from the apartment. We are reminded of the incident with Carl Luce and Holden’s mention of Luce’s warning, which he only half believed, that young boys can turn into flits overnight: his fears about sex and sexual encounters resurface. This is another instance, too, of Holden being let down and betrayed by the adults in his life. His reference to previous sexual encounters of this type (“When something perverty like that happens, I start sweating like a bastard. That kind of stuff’s happened to me about twenty times since I was a kid.
I can’t stand it.” (p. 200)) reminds us of the theme in the novel that sex corrupts the innocence of childhood.
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In the final ten chapters of the novel we have seen an escalation in Holden’s frenetic and almost insane behaviour. He becomes drunk and out of control physically, but is also emotionally out of control. His drunkenness is just a symptom of his underlying despair and the fact that he is on the brink of a breakdown. Notice how many times he refers to himself as “a madman”, or “crazy”. These are prophetic words in the light of what happens to him – he is not mad, but his mental state is unstable.
It is significant, too, that both the male figures Holden turns to at this point of crisis, Carl Luce and Mr Antolini, are sexually ambivalent and let him down. The encounters with these men raise Holden’s own fears about and preoccupations with his own sexuality.
The second-last chapter of the novel presents the climax of the novel – the highest point of Holden’s crisis, and its resolution. He reaches his lowest ebb – he has nowhere to turn and ends up spending an uncomfortable and miserable night in the waiting room at Grand Central Station: “And I think I was more depressed than I ever was in my whole life” (p. 201). He is confused and begins to think that despite his behaviour, Mr Antolini has always been very good to him, and he remembers that it was Mr Antolini who picked up James Castle after he had jumped from the window. This redeems him somewhat in Holden’s eyes, and for a moment he considers returning to the teacher’s home. There are many references to falling in the novel and they come to a head in a strange and frightening experience:
Anyway, I kept on walking and walking up Fifth Avenue, without any tie on or anything. Then all of a sudden, something very spooky started happening.
Every time I came to the end of a block and stepped off the goddam kerb, I had this feeling that I’d never get to the other side of the street. I thought I’d just go down, down, down, and nobody’d ever see me again. Boy, it did scare me. You can’t imagine. I started sweating like a bastard – my whole shirt and underwear and everything. Then I started doing something else. Every time
I’d get to the end of a block I’d make believe I was talking to my brother Allie.
I’d say to him, “Allie, don’t let me disappear. Please, Allie.” And then, when
I’d reach the other side of the street without disappearing, I’d thank him. Then it would start all over again as soon as I got to the next corner. (p. 204)
His fantasies of escape, echoing the fantasy he tried to share with Sally earlier in the weekend, suggest that he wants to withdraw – not to remove himself entirely from society, but to live on the margins, the periphery, and be able simply to observe, not engage.

Exercise
Holden
makes several references in the novel to wanting to be alone, isolated, to escape. Identify as many of these as you can. Why does he feel this way? Look at Holden’s wish to be “a poor deaf mute bastard” (p. 205) living in “a little cabin somewhere” (p. 205), and his desire that it be “sunny as hell all the time”
(p. 205). What does all this suggest about his state of mind and his feelings about his life and the society he is part of?
Reflect, too, on the fact that although this fantasy is essentially unconventional, marriage is very much part of it. But “If we had any children, we’d hide them somewhere. We could buy them a lot of books and teach them how to read and write by ourselves” (p. 206) reminds us of the title, and of how Holden longs to save the children and preserve their innocence. This desire is expressed again when Holden sees the swear word written on the wall at Phoebe’s school:
It drove me damn near crazy. I thought how Phoebe and all the other little kids would see it, and how they’d wonder what the hell it meant, and then some dirty

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kid would tell them – all cockeyed naturally – what it meant, and how they’d all think about it and maybe even worry about it for a couple of days. (p. 207)
This episode reminds us of the comfort Holden finds in things that do not change, like the school and the museum, but this sense of safety is shattered by the defacement of the school walls. But this experience brings with it, too, the realisation that he cannot protect the children from the world and its dangers. He is depressed by this thought and by his powerlessness to save them, to be the “catcher in the rye”:
“I hardly even had the guts to rub [the swearword] off the wall with my hand, if you want to know the truth. I was afraid some teacher would catch me rubbing it off and would think I’d written it” (p. 208). And when he sees yet another expletive, this time scratched into the plaster, he says: “it’s hopeless, anyway. If you had a million years to do it in, you couldn’t rub out even half the ‘– you’ signs in the world. It’s impossible” (p. 208).
In the museum, a place of safety and security where he sees two little boys in search of the mummies – a reminder of himself and Allie perhaps? – he comes across yet another “– you”:
That’s the whole trouble. You can’t never find a place that’s nice and peaceful, because there isn’t any. You may think there is, but once you get there, when you’re not looking, somebody’ll sneak up and write ‘– you’ right under your nose. (p. 210)
These words could be interpreted as expressing his intense disillusion, his despair and his imminent breakdown. He passes out at this point (why?).
The final episode with Phoebe and her suitcase marks a new maturity in Holden – he has to take charge, and symbolically removes his red hunting cap as a sign that he will not leave. As he watches Phoebe on the carousel, he muses:
Is it significant, do you think, that Holden’s thoughts turn to death at this moment? The thing with kids is, if they want to grab for the gold ring, you have to let them do it, and not say anything. If they fall off, they fall off, but it’s bad if you say anything to them. (p. 218)
He realises that his overwhelming need to protect Phoebe and children like her is misplaced: they have to learn about life’s dangers for themselves. This can sometimes be a painful process, but it is an essential one (Graham 2007:76). But lest we forget his age and his state of mind, the last paragraph of this chapter makes it clear that he is still a troubled adolescent and far from adulthood:
I felt so damn happy all of a sudden, the way old Phoebe kept going round and round. I was damn near bawling, I felt so damn happy, if you want to know the truth. I don’t know why. It was just that she looked so damn nice, the way she kept going round, in her blue coat and all. God, I wish you could’ve been there. (p. 219)
These last words re-connect us with Holden (his connection with the reader was disrupted by his accusation earlier on that we could not empathise with his sense of loss about Allie). The words “round and round” suggest, perhaps, that resolution comes because he realises that, though she may move away from him metaphorically, Phoebe will always return – he is growing up but this does not mean he will have to lose her. This is also a reminder perhaps of the loss of Allie – that although he is physically gone, he is still with Holden in spirit.

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An epilogue is a short chapter or section at the end of a literary work, sometimes detailing the fate of its characters.

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The last chapter serves as an epilogue – the reader is returned to the starting point of the novel, the sanatorium where Holden is recuperating from his breakdown.
Graham (2007:77) notes that Salinger “subverts the bildungsroman by resisting closure”.
The conventional bildungsroman ends on a positive note, by resolving the trials the hero has endured. This novel ends on an uncertain note, giving the reader pause for thought after the fairly optimistic mood of the previous chapter. It would seem that
Holden’s future is still not clear to him: when D.B. asks him “what I thought about all this stuff I just finished telling you about” he does not have an answer. It seems that telling the story may not, in fact, have helped Holden to work things out. He even expresses some regret at having told his story at all. Relating it has not helped him, but has instead revived all sorts of feelings in Holden: “Don’t ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody” (p. 220).

Works cited
Books
Graham, S. 2007. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye. London: Cromwell Press Ltd.
Nadel, A. 2008. Rhetoric, Sanity, and the Cold War: The Significance of Holden
Caulfield’s Testimony. In Bloom, H. (ed.) 2008. Bloom’s Modern Critical Views:
J.D. Salinger. New York: Bloom’s Literary Criticism (Imprint of Infobase
Publishing):53–68.
Takeuchi, Y. 2008. The Zen Archery of Holden Caulfield. In Bloom, H. (ed.) 2008.
Bloom’s Modern Critical Views: J.D. Salinger. New York: Bloom’s Literary Criticism
(Imprint of Infobase Publishing):191–197.

Articles
From: [e-mail]
Baer, Leonard and Gesler, Wilbert. 2004. Reconsidering the concept of therapeutic landscapes in J D Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye. Area; Dec, Vol. 36 Issue
4:404–413.
Barron, Cynthia M. 1982. The Catcher and the Soldier: Hemingway’s “Soldier’s
Home” and Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye. Hemingway Review, Fall 82, Vol. 2
Issue 1:70–74.
Beidler, Peter G. 2007. What Holden Looks Like and Who “Whosis” Is: A Newly
Identified Movie Allusion in The Catcher in the Rye. ANQ; Winter, Vol. 20 Issue 1:51–56.
Coles, Robert 2000. Anna Freud and J.D. Salinger’s Holden Caulfield. Virginia
Quarterly Review; Spring, Vol. 76 Issue 2:214–125.
Freedman, Carl. 2003. Memories of Holden Caulfield – and of Miss Greenwood.
Southern Review, Spring, Vol. 39 Issue 2:400–417.
Irving, Joanne. 1976. The Catcher in the Rye: an Adlerian interpretation. Journal of
Individual Psycholog y; May 76, Vol. 32 Issue 1:81–93.
Privitera, Lisa. 2008. Holden’s Irony in Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye. Explicator;
Summer, Vol. 66 Issue 4:203–206.
Schneiderman, Lawrence J. 2002. Empathy and the Literary Imagination. Annals of
Internal Medicine, Vol. 137 Issue 7:627–630.
Takeuchi, Yasuhiro. 2002. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye. Explicator, Spring, Vol. 60
Issue 3:164–167.
Takeuchi, Yasuhiro. 2002. The burning carousel and the carnivalesque: subversion and transcendence at the close of The Catcher in the Rye. Studies in the Novel, Fall,
Vol. 34 Issue 3:320–337.
Ziewacz, Lawrence E. 2001. Holden Caulfield, Alex Portnoy, and Good Will Hunting:
Coming of Age in American Films and Novels. Journal of Popular Culture, Summer, Vol. 35 Issue 1:211–218.
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WORKS CITED

Websites and images http://classiclit.about.com/od/catcherintherye/a/aa_catcherquest.htm (accessed 7
June 2009) http://www.shmoop.com/catcher-in-the-rye/ (accessed 5 July 2009) http://history1900s.about.com/od/1930s/p/greatdepression.htm (accessed 11 July
2009)
http://womensissues.about.com/od/secondwavefeminism/Second_Wave_
Feminism_1960s1970s_Womens_Lib.htm (accessed 17 June 2009) en.wikipedia.org/wiki (accessed 20 July 2009) http://www.tesionline.com/intl/thesis.jsp (accessed 23 July 2009) http://www.filmsite.org/capt.html (accessed 11 June 2009) www.performerweb.com/.../lunts-smile_500.jpg (accessed 9 June 2009) greywolf.critter.net/gallery/crittersgallery- (accessed 5 July 2009) http://www.centralpark.com/ (accessed 8 July 2009) http://www.freefoto.com/preview/1210-14-23?ffid=1210-14-23 (accessed 6 June 2009) http://www.victorianweb.org/genre/hader1.html (accessed 10 June 2009) http://www.newyorkled.cwwom/moreNYseasonal_Christmas-Spectacular.htm (accessed 15 July 2009) http://emargh.blogspot.com/2008/02/from-two-books-that-changed-my-life.html (accessed 12 July 2009) http://www.velikovsky.info/Wilhelm_Stekel (accessed 8 July 2009) http://www.clipartguide.com/_pages/0060-0807-2100-4108.html (accessed 15 June
2009)

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SECTION 3: The Road to Mecca: Athol Fugard

4

3

SECTION 3

The Road to Mecca: Athol Fugard by Deirdre Byrne

A GUIDE TO THIS SECTION
This section contains the following:

•• A study programme to enable you to study The Road to Mecca;
•• A discussion of the history and context of The Road to Mecca;
•• A discussion of some features you should look out for when you are studying
••

The Road to Mecca;
A guide to writing essays on the play.

Study programme
Activity

Time spent (approximately)

Reading the play

2–3 hours

Reading this study note and making notes of important points

6 hours

Completing activities in the study guide 8 hours

Preparatory writing for your assignment on The Road to Mecca

2 hours

Drafting and revising your assignment

6 hours

As a first step, you should Now read the play (at least twice). If you don’t understand it the first time, read it through again. The study of English and English literature is all about reading. You will not achieve anything in English Studies without reading. It is always a good idea to read your prescribed books more than once (aim to read them twice each before you write exams).

Exercise
Answer the following questions, based on your reading of The Road to Mecca.
(1) How many characters are there in the play?
(2) Who is the most important character? Why do you say this?
(3) How do the other characters relate to the main character?
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(4) Does the play have a “happy ending”? Why do you think this?
(5) What general, human issues is the play “about”? (Note: do not answer this question by explaining what happens in the play. Try to identify the theme or main idea of the play instead.)
Your answers to the questions above will give you a starting point for your study of The Road to Mecca. Keep them handy as you work through this section. We are going to explore several important themes and aspects of The Road to Mecca. They are: the characters; symbols; Fugard’s representation of the position of women; and the role of art.

Introduction: the play and the film
The Road to Mecca, by Athol Fugard, is a playscript. This means that it belongs to the dramatic genre, similar to Shakespeare’s plays, such as Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth and
The Merchant of Venice, which you may have read at school.
Plays are meant to be performed, which means that The Road to Mecca is written with the intention of appearing on a stage. The play is only fully realised when it is performed; until then, it is only a script. It is likely that The Road to Mecca does not look like other books you have read. This is because it belongs to a different genre, or type, of literature, with its own special features. It does not, for example, contain any descriptions of places or people. All the action takes place via spoken words, (or dialogue) with characters’ names attached to them and stage directions to indicate what the scene is supposed to look like, including the movement of actors, characters, and the setting (whether the action takes place inside a building or outside).
Genres and their subdivisions
We generally think of literary texts in three genres (pronounced dzahn-rƏ): prose, poetry and drama (or plays). Each of these genres looks different on the printed page and uses specific subdivisions to mark the end of each section and the beginning of the next.
Prose (whether fiction or non-fiction) uses chapters to divide sections of the text from one another.
Poetry uses stanzas. A stanza is a paragraph in verse.
Drama uses Acts for major divisions. Acts may be divided into scenes, so that the location of the action can change from one scene to another in the same Act.
It is important to use the right words (terminology) when you write about genres and their subdivisions.

As a Unisa student, you probably do not have the capacity to put on a performance of The Road to Mecca, so you will have to imagine how it would look on a stage. An assignment might ask you to stage the play in your imagination: where would you place the furniture? How would you light the scene? What tone of voice would you want the actors to use at each point in the performance? Questions like these will help you to bring the play to life in your own mind. There is also a film of The Road to Mecca, which will deepen your understanding of the play.
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The Road to Mecca as a film
The Road to Mecca was filmed in 1992, as one of the first South African films for an international market, with Peter Goldsmit as Director and author Athol
Fugard as Producer. The renowned South African actor, Yvonne Bryceland, played Helen Martins and American actor, Kathy Bates, played Elsa Barlow.
The author, Athol Fugard, played Marius Byleveld. The film was a great success and brought South African drama and film to the attention of international audiences. You may watch the film, which is available from specialist DVD outlets, as a way of enriching your reading of The Road to Mecca, but you should always remember that you are studying the text, not the film version of the play. There are many ways to perform each scene, and if you were directing it, you might not arrange the characters or the stage in the same way as it is done in the film.

When you read The Road to Mecca you will notice that the book contains some textual items before the playscript begins. There is “A Note on Miss Helen” by Athol Fugard, the author, and then there is a list of Characters. This list of characters is also, sometimes, called “Dramatis Personae”, which is Latin for “persons in the drama”.
The list contains only three names: “Miss Helen”, “Elsa” and “Marius Byleveld”.
This tells the reader that this is not a play in which crowds of people appear; the interactions in the play are limited to those taking place between only three people.
We can expect, then, that the interactions will be fairly intense.
Terms used in studying drama
All plays contain similar features: the dramatis personae, the stage directions and the words (or dialogue).
The dramatis personae is the list of characters in the play.
The stage directions tell the director and actors what is happening on the stage at any point in the play: it gives instructions such as who is coming onto the stage, who is moving across the stage and who is leaving it, as well as the way characters should say their lines.
The dialogue is the words spoken by the characters in the play.

The Road to Mecca is divided into two Acts. The first Act begins with Elsa Barlow’s arrival at Helen Martins’s home in Nieu Bethesda. The conversation introduces the audience to the problems that the two women are facing.
The second Act introduces a third character ― Marius Byleveld, the “dominee” or priest of the local church. The conversation between Helen, Elsa and Marius takes up the whole of Act 2 and brings some resolution to the problems that were raised in Act 1.
Act 2 is different from Act 1, although they take place in the same location (or setting) because there is an extra character. This changes the tone and content of the conversation between Helen and Elsa, and pushes Helen to make an important decision about her life.
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The characters
Of the three characters in The Road to Mecca, one is based on a real person and the other two are fictional (that is, invented by the playwright Athol Fugard). Fugard tells us in “A Note on Miss Helen” at the beginning of the play that “there had been one very significant friendship ― a friendship with a young woman, a social worker, from Cape Town”. Elsa Barlow is based on this person, whose real name is not given in the play. Marius Byleveld, the dominee or priest of the local church, is there because a little town such as Nieu Bethesda would, naturally, have had a church and a priest. As we shall see, though, the play takes us far beyond the social roles of the characters in their community, and into their personal struggles and relationships.
Helen Martins (“Miss Helen”)
Helen Martins, who was known as “Miss Helen”, lived from 1897 to 1976 and provided the inspiration for the character of Helen in The Road to Mecca. Helen Martins was born in the closing years of the nineteenth century, and grew up in the early part of the twentieth century, when there were strict expectations of all members of society (but particularly for women, as we shall see later).

As Helen Martins is one of South Africa’s most famous artists, her life story is well known, and you can read it yourself on the following website: http://www.owlhouse.co.za/helen.html The important events in Helen Martins’s life, as far as The Road to Mecca is concerned, are her divorce from her husband and her return to Nieu Bethesda in the 1930s to care for her ill mother. Her mother died in 1941 and she was left alone.
Where is Nieu Bethesda?
The map of the Western part of the Eastern Cape, below, shows the location of Nieu
Bethesda, the village where Helen Martins created her art.
Nieu Bethesda

Map of the Eastern Cape showing the location of Nieu Bethesda. Reproduced with permission from http://www.routes.co.za
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SECTION 3: The Road to Mecca: Athol Fugard

Nieu Bethesda is a little town, as Elsa says in The Road to Mecca, approximately 12 hours’ drive from Cape Town. It is situated in the Karoo, which is a region of semidesert that stretches across the Western Cape, the Eastern Cape and the Northern
Cape provinces in South Africa. Remarkably for a town in a semi-desert, though,
Nieu Bethesda has a plentiful supply of water, so that the land in the area is fertile and produces many crops. It is, therefore, a farming community, where values and norms are conservative, most people know each other and strangers are few. (At the time Helen Martins lived in Nieu Bethesda, it did not have electricity or running water. Helen, therefore, used lamps and candles at night.)
Nieu Bethesda became famous after Helen Martins’s death because of her art. A small, but active community of artists live there now amongst the regular inhabitants.
After the death of Martins’s mother, she inherited a small house in the village. The
Karoo desert is very dry all year round, cold in winter and hot in summer. Houses in the village were small, with low roofs. “The Owl House”, as Helen Martins’s house has become known, is typical of the architecture of the town. From the outside,
Helen Martins’s house looks exactly like any other house in an arid area. It is only when one enters it that one sees the extraordinary transformation that she brought about inside it. Look at the following picture of the interior of the house:

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and of the yard, which Helen called “the Camel Yard”:

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SECTION 3: The Road to Mecca: Athol Fugard

Exercise
Now take a few minutes to write about these pictures. Answer the following questions in separate paragraphs:
(1) What is your first response to the pictures of Helen Martins’s art that you have just seen? For example, do you find it attractive, strange, ugly or does it arouse any other feeling? Why?
(2) What do you think about the woman who made these art works? What kind of person could she have been?
(3) Are there religious symbols among Helen’s art works? If so, what religion do they remind you of?
According to Helen Martins’s biography, she was ill one night and watched the moon shining through her window. That night, she thought that her life had become drab and grey, and she decided that she would change it by bringing light into her environment. From that one moment of self-reflection sprang the entire transformation of the Owl House.
Helen Martins’s life and art provided the inspiration for Athol Fugard to write The
Road to Mecca. But you should not confuse the character of “Miss Helen” in The Road to Mecca with the real Helen Martins. For example, the real Helen Martins and her husband were divorced after only a few years of marriage, while Fugard makes his
Helen the widow of a man called “Stefanus”. The marriage between Helen and Stefanus, which took place many years before the action of The Road to Mecca, gives Helen the opportunity to reflect on what really matters in her life and whether marriage
(which was expected of women in small villages) provided her with real fulfilment.
In addition, Helen Martins did not make all her own sculptures: she designed and only possibly made some of them. She employed two “Coloured” men, Piet van der
Merwe and Koos Malgas, to build, cement and decorate the figures and animals in her “Camel Yard” and around her house. These men are now honoured as artists in their own right, but they do not appear in The Road to Mecca, where Helen describes building her own figures and animals. Finally, Fugard has invented all her words in the play; and the two other characters, Elsa and Marius, are also invented.
Elsa Barlow
Athol Fugard writes in an interview with Gitta Honegger (which appears before the play text in the prescribed edition of The Road to Mecca) that:

… in the last years of [Helen’s] life, the last period of nothing until her death, there had been one very significant friendship – a friendship with a young woman, a social worker, from Cape Town.
(Fugard 2003: n.p.)
Elsa Barlow is based on the young social worker who meant so much to Helen Martins in her later life. Fugard has changed the details, though: he has invented the young woman’s name and her profession (she is not a social worker, but a school-teacher in the play) and he has invented all her circumstances as well.
The play opens with Elsa’s arrival at Miss Helen’s house in Nieu Bethesda. She has just driven for twelve hours from Cape Town to Nieu Bethesda, and she appears to be tired from her journey as well as somewhat irritable. One of the first things she tells Helen, rather strangely, is that she gave a lift to a young woman and her baby on the road between Cape Town and Cradock (a village in the Western Cape).
This nameless young woman, whom Elsa describes as “African” (that is, black), is extremely important, although we find out only later why she disturbs Elsa so much.
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Exercise
Now that you have read the play, answer the following questions:
(1) What kind of person is Elsa? Which adjectives (describing words) would you use to describe her personality? You may use as many as you wish.
(2) What are Elsa’s life problems?
(3) Why has she come to visit Helen?
(4) What is her role in Helen’s life?
(5) What does Helen mean to her?
As Elsa slowly explains her personal problems to Helen, we realise that she is a single woman who has been having a relationship with a married man (we might call this an “affair”) and has fallen pregnant. She had an abortion to do away with the foetus and is deeply scarred by the experience. This helps to explain why she is so upset by the plight of the African woman and her baby on the road, although her reaction
(she tells Helen in Act 2 that she “stopped the car, switched off the engine, closed my eyes and started to scream” (Fugard 2003:77)) is extreme.

Exercise
Read page 77 again and write a paragraph explaining why Elsa screams after she has dropped the young woman and her baby on the road. (Note: Elsa’s feelings about this encounter are complex. You will have to make a few guesses about what she is feeling.)
Elsa and Helen have a deep and special friendship. Early in Act 1, Elsa says “Let’s face it, we’ve both got a little girl hidden away in us somewhere” and Helen replies
“And they like to play together” (Fugard 2003:18). Despite the differences between their ages, occupations and cultural backgrounds (Elsa is English-speaking while
Helen is rooted in Afrikaans culture), they discuss ― and disagree about ― a wide range of private and political matters.
Helen and Elsa agree that the essence of their friendship, the thing that makes it special, is “trust”. Read their discussion of trust in Act 1, pp. 31–32, and think about whether you agree with Fugard (speaking through Elsa) that “the really big word is …
Trust” (Fugard 2003:31). For Helen and Elsa, the fact that they can trust each other means that they can let their defences down, show their faults and vulnerabilities, and be truly themselves with each other. And that, Fugard suggests in The Road to
Mecca, is the only way a relationship between two people (whether they are partners, parents, children or friends) can mean anything. It also refers to the Introduction to
The Road to Mecca, where Fugard writes that this is the first time he has ever written about a friendship between two women, although he is famous for including intense interactions between men in his plays.

Exercise
Because Elsa and Helen can share anything with each other, they are also able to challenge each other. Based on your reading of the play, write a paragraph on the ways Elsa and Helen challenge each other. The following questions will help you to focus your writing:
(1) What is Elsa’s challenge to Helen?
(2) How does Helen challenge Elsa in return?
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The play ends on a note of hope. As the two women prepare for bed, Elsa offers
Helen a Valium (a chemical tranquilliser or sedative). The final line is spoken by Elsa:
“Open your arms and catch me! I’m going to jump!” (Fugard 2003:79).

Exercise
What does Elsa mean by “I’m going to jump”? (Hint: If you are in doubt, go back to Act 1 and look again at the two women’s discussion of trust on pp. 31–32).
This line means that, after all the problems and difficulties they have dealt with during the evening, they are still able to take comfort in their friendship.
Something to think about
It is sometimes said that there is a “sisterhood of women”, based on their common experience of oppression by men and bearing children, and that women can understand one another because they share the same condition of living in a society that is dominated by men. Do you think that Elsa and Helen share a “sisterly” experience of being dominated and/or oppressed by men? Does this give them a common ground of understanding? Or is their friendship based on other aspects of their experiences?
Dominee Marius Byleveld
Many of the villages in the Karoo desert were settled by Afrikaans-speaking people
(originally from Holland or elsewhere in Europe). These settlers brought their religion with them and established churches in their new environments. Nieu Bethesda is one of these villages, where Marius Byleveld presides over the church (hence his title is “Pastor” or the Afrikaans word “Dominee”). Fugard does not say which church Marius represents (it may have been the Dutch Reformed Church). As an ordained minister of religion, Marius’s job is to take care of his “flock” (everyone who attends his church). He is not only interested in their spiritual wellbeing and beliefs, but also in their life circumstances and whether they are living lives that are both good and happy. People in small villages usually live there for many decades, so their priests have plenty of opportunity to get to know them, their families and their situations. The priest would often visit them, too, and often became a trusted friend of everyone in his parish.

Helen describes Marius as “an old friend,” but it is evident that her friendship with him is not as deep or profound as her friendship with Elsa. In fact, there is an unspoken conflict between Marius and Helen over religious and artistic issues, although their conflict is expressed in polite terms and is not violent in any way.

Exercise
Re-read Act 2 of The Road to Mecca now and answer the following questions:
(1) What is the reason for Marius’s visit? What does he want Helen to do?
(2) Marius claims that he knows what is good for Helen and that is why he has come to visit her. Do you believe him? Why?
(3) Elsa claims that Marius is in love with Helen (Fugard 2003:74). Do you agree with her? Why?
Naturally, Marius believes in and serves the Christian religion, worshipping God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit within his church. We can assume
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that most of the people in the village belong to his church, too. Helen’s statues of mermaids, owls and pilgrims on camels, on their way to Mecca, offend him because they refer to another religion or vision of life: they do not fit into his views of what widowed old ladies are supposed to do. He says of Helen’s statues: “In another age and time it might have been called idolatry” (Fugard 2003:67), or the worship of false gods. Later Marius remembers how Helen missed church to make her first statue of an owl, and it is clear that he views the making of the statues as a kind of competition in Helen’s mind and life with “the true faith” of Christianity. To Elsa, though, the statues are an expression of something else: Helen’s “vision” of life and her desire for beauty and light. There are, therefore, three different views of Helen’s art, which is at the centre of the play’s development. We will explore Fugard’s representation of art in The Road to Mecca later.

Symbols and Symbolism in The Road To Mecca
Symbols in art and literature
People often say that a certain image or object in a work of art (such as a painting, sculpture or a literary text) is a “symbol” of something else. But what is a symbol?
The Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary gives the following definition: a person, an object, and event, etc., that represents a more general quality or situation: White has always been a symbol of purity in Western cultures.
A symbol, then, is an image or object that represents (or “stands for”) another quality or meaning.
Religions are particularly rich in symbols. Think, for example, of the meanings of the cross in Christianity, the lotus flower in Buddhism, or the mezuzah in
Judaism. This may be because religion and spirituality deal with abstract and intangible things, such as love and faith; and people use concrete images to represent (or “stand for”) these qualities.
Literature uses symbols, too. The image of a red rose is usually used to represent romantic love, for example. As you read more literary texts, you will encounter many symbols.

Some of the symbols in Helen Martins’s art
Symbol
The owl

This was Helen Martins’s personal totem animal (an animal that is a symbol of a particular quality). For her, the owl was a symbol of intuition, insight and wisdom (maybe because of its large eyes).

Mecca

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Some of its meanings

Mecca, the capital of the Middle Eastern country of Saudi Arabia, is the holy city of the religion of Islam. To travel to Mecca is the high point, or goal, of a devout Muslim’s religious life.
Mecca is, therefore, the symbol of a spiritual or personal goal.

SECTION 3: The Road to Mecca: Athol Fugard

Glass

Helen Martins used glass in her art because it reflects light.
Her aim as an artist was to fill her living space, and her life, with light, which is a symbol of clarity and happiness.

Camels and their riders

As Mecca is situated in a desert country, pilgrims on their way to the holy city would often ride on camels (which are known as “ships of the desert” because of their ability to undertake long journeys across desert landscapes).

After looking at images of The Owl House, you may see a number of other symbols.
It is important to realise that the meaning of symbols is not fixed in any rigid way: artists, such as Helen Martins, often use existing symbols in new ways. Thus, for example, The Road to Mecca refers to Mecca, the holy city of Islam, but nobody in the play actually travels to Saudi Arabia. Rather, Mecca represents a state of mind in which spiritual fulfilment and freedom have been reached.
Religion and conflict
Human history is full of religious conflicts and even wars (think of the Crusades, or
“wars of the cross”, which raged between 1096 and 1291 over control of the Holy
Land around Jerusalem in modern-day Israel). Religion is one of the greatest spurs to disagreement and conflict because people feel strongly about it.

Helen Martins’s use of the word “Mecca” in The Road to Mecca is associated with
Islam, not Christianity. Marius Byleveld is a Christian priest, or “dominee”. In the twentieth century, during Helen Martins’s life, the village of Nieu Bethesda was part of the settlement of South Africa by Christians of European origins, belonging to various denominations, such the Dutch Reformed Church. To them, the Christian religion was the only right way to live. The Church was the instrument of God’s will and the Bible was the ultimate authority.
By using The Road to Mecca as the title of his play, Fugard aligns himself with a different religion from Christianity ― Islam. The holy symbol of Islam is not the cross, but the city of Mecca, where pilgrims travel as the culmination of their devotion to God.
Pilgrimages
Throughout history, religious people have travelled to holy places. They do this to deepen their experience of God. These journeys are called pilgrimages and the people who undertake them are called pilgrims.
Examples of holy places that have been visited by pilgrims are: Canterbury in England (Geoffrey Chaucer’s famous poem, The Canterbury Tales, tells of a group of pilgrims and their stories); Lourdes in France (where the Virgin
Mary is believed to have appeared); and Mecca in Saudi Arabia. Every adult
Muslim must make a pilgrimage (or Hajj) to Mecca once in his or her lifetime to worship at the Holy Mosque in the city.

There is a clear conflict between Helen’s “Mecca” and the Christian faith of the
Church Council of Nieu Bethesda, represented by Dominee Marius Byleveld, even though this is not spelled out in terms of faith, God or any spiritual concepts. Marius, on behalf of the Church Council (who are probably very powerful in the village),
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wants Helen to move to the “Sunshine Home for the Aged” in the nearby town of Graaff-Reinet (about 60 km from Nieu Bethesda). Elsa describes the Sunshine
Home as follows:
ELSA: That’s the lovely old house on the left when you come into GraaffReinet, next to the church. In fact, it’s run by the church, isn’t it?
HELEN: Yes.
ELSA: That figures. It’s got a beautiful garden, Miss Helen. Whenever I drive past on my way up here there are always a few old folk in their “twilight years” sitting around enjoying the sunshine. It’s well named. It’s all very restful.
(Act 1, p. 40)
Helen does not want to move to the Sunshine Home for the Aged, though. She wants to stay in Nieu Bethesda, close to her “Mecca”. Part of her discussion with
Elsa concerns whether she is able to look after her home and herself, and therefore keep her independence in her own home as an active artist (there would be no place for strange sculptures of camels and owls in the Sunshine Home). There is, then, an opposition, or conflict, between what the (Christian) Church wants for Helen and what she wants for herself.
Throughout the play, Elsa and Helen talk a great deal about Mecca and its meaning for Helen. At their first meeting, Helen asks Elsa the way to Mecca and then proudly corrects her. This is very unusual behaviour for a woman in a tiny, Christiandominated village in the Karoo: we would expect her, if she showed any religious belief at all, to be interested in the location of the nearest church.

Exercise
Read the following passage from The Road to Mecca in preparation for answering questions on it.
ELSA: But that first time … I wish I could make you realize what it’s like to be walking down a dusty, deserted little street in a God-forsaken village in the middle of the Karoo, bored to death by the heat and flies and silence, and then to be stopped in your tracks – and I mean stopped! – by all of that out there. And then, having barely recovered from that, to come inside and find this! Believe me Helen, when I saw your “Mecca” for the first time, I just stood and gaped. “What in God’s name am I looking at? Camels and pyramids? Not three, but dozens of Wise Men? Owls with old motorcar headlights for eyes?
Peacocks with more colour and glitter than the real birds? Heat stroke? Am
I hallucinating?” And then you! Standing next to a mosque made out of beer bottles and staring back at me like one of your owls!
(Act 1, p. 33)
Now re-read the section of the play that deals with the idea of “Mecca” (Act 1, pages
33–36 and 47) and answer the questions below.
(1) Is Helen’s Mecca the same as the holy city of Islam in Saudi Arabia? Why, or why not?
(2) We know that Mecca is the goal of Islam’s most important and meaningful pilgrimage. In what way can Helen’s art be compared to a pilgrimage?
(3) Helen creates her “Mecca” as a non-Christian holy site. Can you speculate about the values of Christianity that she might be rejecting in this action?
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(Hint: you might consider that, in the early part of the twentieth century, a divorced woman living on her own was not entirely acceptable in some small communities.)
It should be clear from your exploration of the idea of “Mecca” in The Road to Mecca that Helen associates religious values with her art. It is worth considering whether
Athol Fugard, in writing this play, is also encouraging readers and audiences to see art and creativity in the same way, as having spiritual overtones. Certainly, for Helen,
“Mecca” is associated with the freedom to express herself and her inner vision. In the same way as the city of Mecca is the goal of the major spiritual pilgrimage of
Islam (the Haj), Helen’s “Mecca” is the goal of her journey as an artist. She might feel that she has reached Mecca when she has finished decorating her house with light and building sculptures in her yard. It is clear that, as long as Helen continues work on her “Mecca”, she will have a reason to live.
Women in The Road To Mecca
To state the obvious, Helen and Elsa are women. But this statement has some implications that are worth spelling out.

Helen Martins’s life story tells how she married a young man called Johannes Pienaar, but did not remain married for long. It is important to remember that at the time of her girlhood, a woman’s destiny was to marry and raise children (to a large extent, this is still true). By marrying in her early adulthood, Helen Martins was, therefore, living up to social expectations. But separating from her husband was not part of what was expected of a woman, and would have brought some degree of shame or notoriety upon her. Therefore, at the end of her marriage, Helen would have been seen as an unusual, slightly misdirected woman, who had strayed from the path that society laid down for her.
Her next act was to move to Nieu Bethesda to look after her ailing parents, which was perfectly acceptable for a dutiful daughter of her time. Helen spent 17 years nursing her sick mother and she was nearly 50 when she found herself alone in a small village in the Karoo. Even in our time, this is not a promising situation for a single woman, and it was less promising in Helen’s time. There was, presumably, a shortage of eligible men, so Helen Martins’s marriage prospects were not very good.
And in the early part of the twentieth century, it was not socially appropriate for single, middle-aged women (Helen, by then, was in her late middle age) to take up a new career and manage it on their own.
Helen Martins was, therefore, a very unusual woman, who did not conform to what society expected of her in any way. Once married, she did not devote herself to the care and nurturing of her husband or children (she did not have any children, in fact): and when alone, she did not do what many women of her age did, namely to sink peacefully into old age as a useful member of her community, perhaps as a helper in the local church. Instead, Helen began an activity that is usually considered as belonging to men only: making sculptures.

Exercise
Write a paragraph about the ways in which Helen, in The Road to Mecca, does not conform to what is expected from women.
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Now write another paragraph about how you imagine her community in Nieu
Bethesda might have responded to her as a single woman in late middle age who was building sculptures in her yard of camels, pilgrims, owls and mermaids with cement, broken car headlights and bottles.
There are other women characters in The Road to Mecca, too, who come into conflict with social expectations for women: Elsa Barlow and Katrina, as well as the woman to whom Elsa gives a lift. We will explore these women’s circumstances in some detail.
Katrina is Helen’s part-time domestic helper. In Fugard’s version, Katrina is also married to Koos Malgas (the real name of the man who, under Helen Martins’s direction, built a great many of the sculptures that decorate her yard). When Elsa is asking Helen about Katrina, Helen replies:
HELEN: She’s fine. And so is the baby. As prettily dressed these days as any white baby, thanks to the clothes you sent her. She’s been very good to me,
Elsa. Never passes my front door without dropping in for a little chat. Is always asking about you. I don’t know what I would do without her. But I’m afraid
Koos has started drinking again. And making all sorts of terrible threats about her and the baby. He still doesn’t believe it’s his child.
ELSA: Is he beating her?
HELEN: No. The warning you gave him last time seems to have put a stop to that.
ELSA: God, it makes me sick! Why doesn’t she leave him?
HELEN: And then do what?
ELSA: Find somebody else! Somebody who will value her as a human being and take care of her and the child.
HELEN: She can’t do that, Elsie. They’re married.
ELSA: Oh, for God’s sake, Helen. There’s the Afrikaner in you speaking.
There is nothing sacred about a marriage that abuses the woman!
(Fugard 2003:23)
The problems mentioned in these lines (alcohol, wife-beating, teenage pregnancy and the abuse of women) are common in poor communities across the globe. Unfortunately, they impact more heavily on women than they do on men, because women are child-bearers, their social role is to raise children, and they tend to be physically weaker than men.
We learn a few lines later that Katrina is seventeen years old, which is really very young for motherhood. By not believing that Katrina’s child is also his, Koos is also accusing her of infidelity and giving himself a further reason to abuse his wife. Katrina’s plight is the same as that of many black women, who are married and pregnant at a young age and are then at the mercy of abusive husbands. Elsa’s response to her problems (“There is nothing sacred about a marriage that abuses the woman!”) expresses a feminist attitude to the social problems that beset women, especially in poor communities where, unfortunately, they are frequently the victims of violence and abuse. It is likely that Athol Fugard shares Elsa’s view of marriage, as it is a “human rights” approach to the problem of marital violence: but what does this mean for Helen’s marriage?
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As I mentioned earlier, Helen is depicted in The Road to Mecca as the widow of Stefanus. In conversation with Marius in Act 2, Helen describes her marriage:
HELEN: You brought me home from the cemetery, remember, and when we had got inside the house and you had helped me off with my coat, you put on the kettle for a pot of tea and then … ever so thoughtfully … pulled the curtains and closed the shutters. Such a small little thing, and I know that you meant well by it, that you didn’t want people to stare in at me and my grief
… but in doing that it felt as if you were putting away my life as surely as the undertaker had done to Stefanus a little earlier when he closed the coffin lid.
There was even an odour of death in here with us, wasn’t there, sitting in the gloom and talking, both of us in black, our Bibles in our laps? Your words of comfort didn’t help. But that wasn’t your fault. You didn’t know I wasn’t mourning Stefanus’s death. He was a good man, and it was very sad that he had died so young, but I never loved him. My black widowhood was really for my own life, Marius. While Stefanus was alive there had at least been some pretence at it … of a life I hadn’t lived. But with him gone …!
(Fugard 2003:71)
The experience Helen describes in these lines is also common amongst women, who marry and then discover that they do not share real love with their husbands. After
Stefanus’s funeral, Helen feels as though she is dead: as though her life is over and there is nothing meaningful in it any more. But she realises that her marriage was deathly and that, after Stefanus’s death, she is free.

Exercise
Write a paragraph in your writer’s journal about the way/s in which women are not
“free” in marriage.
It is beginning to appear that women’s problems, as depicted in The Road to Mecca, are largely caused by men. This is certainly true of Katrina and Helen, as well as the woman to whom Elsa gives a lift on the road to Nieu Bethesda. But what about
Elsa? She is a single woman living an independent life in a large city, and so we might assume that she is free to please herself.

Exercise
Read the sections of The Road to Mecca in which Elsa describes her relationship with
David (pp. 28–31 and 76). Then write two pages in which you answer the following questions: (1)
(2)
(3)
(4)
(5)
(6)

What problem in Elsa’s relationship with David led to their separation?
What were the consequences of the relationship?
How does Elsa feel?
How do you imagine David feels?
Who is to blame in the situation?
Finally, would you say that Elsa is as much the victim of a man as Katrina is?

Marius is a complex character. He is acting in all good faith, as a representative of the
Church Council, when he visits Helen. But are his actions really aimed at increasing her happiness, as he believes they are? Or is he, like Stefanus, also guilty of trying to suppress Helen’s creativity? If so, is he perhaps just like all the other men in the
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play – maybe well-intentioned, but in fact quite unaware of the needs and goals of the women around him? Or is this going too far? What do you think?
Art and freedom
As you have no doubt realised by now, Helen Martins of Nieu Bethesda was an artist.
Her transformation of her home and garden with countless sculptures and works of mosaic is now regarded as some of the finest art produced in South Africa. It is worthwhile, here, to look at another picture of her art:

Helen Martins is known as a “visionary artist” because of the way she made her art in accordance with an inner vision of the final product. In The Road to Mecca, Helen explains to Elsa how she works:
HELEN: I’ve told you before, Elsie, I have to see them very clearly first. They’ve got to come to me inside like pictures. And if they don’t, well, all I can do is wait … and hope that they will. I wish I knew how to make it happen, but I don’t. I don’t know where the pictures come from. I can’t force myself to see something that isn’t there. I’ve tried to do that once or twice in the past when
I was desperate, but the work always ended up a lifeless, shapeless mess. If they don’t come, all I can do is wait …which is what I’m doing.
(Fugard 2003:36–37)
Some artists take their inspiration from objects and the world around them. But the
“pictures” Helen speaks of here are not images in the world around her, as you can see from the two previous images of the Owl House. Although some of them can be recognised as creatures or objects in the “real” world, many of them are fantasy creatures, made up of parts of real creatures, like the winged horse with an owl’s head in the picture above. These images come from Helen’s mind and imagination.
She does not know where they come from: they appear to be “visions” from some source outside herself.

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Exercise
Re-read page 68 of The Road to Mecca. Then answer the following questions:
(1) Why does Helen miss the church service?
(2) What is Marius’s response to her absence from the church service?
When Helen had an image of her first owl sculpture, she went to work immediately in order to make the sculpture before the image would fade. She had to make an important choice – would she go to church, and risk the image fading from her mind, or would she miss the church service and work on the owl? Helen chose to stay at home and make the owl she had seen in her imagination. By choosing to stay at home, though, she also chooses not to go to church, which means that she is not doing what is expected of her as a “good”, well-behaved, widow and member of her religious community.
As you now know, Helen’s art is not “good” or expected behaviour from a middleaged woman in her position, who would have been expected to get involved in the life of the village by attending church. Can you think of other activities that would be expected from a woman of her age, alone in a small village?

Exercise
In the table below, place a tick next to all the activities that you would expect a woman of Helen’s age to do and place a cross next to those activities that would not be expected. Give reasons, either from the play or from your own experience, in the final column of the table.
Activity

Expected or not
(√ or X)

Reason

Attending church
Taking care of her home
Going out with single men
Socialising with other villagers
Making art
Talking to people of other races

Your table, once completed, should give you an indication of what the villagers expected of Helen after Stefanus’s death. It should also indicate to you that there were clear notions about “good” behaviour for a widow. She might have been expected to involve herself in “good works”, such as helping the poor or visiting the sick – but
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she would certainly not have been expected to make art in her back yard or in her house. In general, women are not expected to become artists as this conflicts with their social role as home-makers and the caregivers of children. Being an artist takes a woman’s time away from such domestic activities.
Differences between Helen Martins’s life and The Road to Mecca
In real life, Helen Martins had the help of two men, Piet van der Merwe and
Koos Malgas, in her artistic projects. Helen was not strong enough to undertake structural alterations to her house on her own, and Piet van der Merwe did these for her.
Koos Malgas was an unemployed sheep-shearer when he met Helen Martins.
She employed him for twelve years and he did all the work involved in making her sculptures, including work with chicken wire, cement and glass. Some of these tasks were very arduous and would have been beyond the strength of an aging and physically small woman.
In order to work for and with Helen, both Piet van der Merwe and Koos Malgas had to understand what she wanted and what she was trying to do. In a way, they were the translators who took her ideas and made them into physical reality. Koos Malgas, who worked on all the statues in the Camel Yard and outside the front of the house, is now recognised as an artist in his own right because of his contribution to Helen’s art.
In the play, The Road to Mecca, Fugard has erased the roles of Piet van der
Merwe and Koos Malgas. Instead, he has Helen making all her own art. Clearly, this simplifies the process considerably and makes her solely responsible for the vision and realisation of the art works that decorate her home. It also means that the whole burden of artistic creation rests on her – and, in turn, gives Marius more reason to be concerned about Helen’s ability to cope with her own home on her own.
Please do not confuse Helen’s life (which is a matter of history) with its representation in Fugard’s play (which is a matter of imaginative and dramatic literature). Fugard has changed the “facts”, which makes his play less “true” than the historical facts of Helen Martins’s life, but he did so for a reason and his play is more streamlined than it would have been if he had not simplified the facts.

Once Helen decides, on that first Sunday morning, not to go to church as expected, but to stay at home and make her first owl, it seems her path is set and she cannot stray from it. Several years later, Marius remarks:
MARIUS: Helen, Helen! I grieve for you! You turned your back on your
Church, on your faith and then on us for that? Do you realize that that is why you are now in trouble and so helplessly alone? Those statues out there can’t give you love or take care of you the way we wanted to. And, God knows, we were ready to do that. But you spurned us, Helen. You turned your back on us and left us for the company of those cement monstrosities.
(Fugard 2003:68–9)
Marius’s words are a reproach. But what is he accusing Helen of?

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Exercise
In your journal, write a paragraph (about 15 lines) explaining what Helen has done
“wrong” in Marius’s eyes and what his view is of her statues.
Now read Elsa’s comments on his speech, on p. 69 of your text, and write a paragraph answering the following questions:
(1) According to Elsa, what motivates Marius’s response to Helen’s statues?
(2) What is her view of them?
(3) What is the difference between Elsa’s and Marius’s view of the statues?
Later on the same page, Marius explains:
MARIUS: When I find that the twenty years we have known each other, all that we have shared in that time, are outweighed by a handful of visits from her, then yes again. That leaves me bewildered and jealous. Don’t you realize that you are being used, Helen – she as much as admitted to that – to prove some lunatic notion about freedom? And since we’re talking about that, yes yet again,
I do hate that word. You aren’t free, Helen. If anything, exactly the opposite.
(Fugard 2003:69)
This speech by Marius makes the real point of the argument between him and Elsa
(and Helen, too) very clear. It is a question of freedom. Helen wants and needs the freedom to create what her imagination can envision: but to do that, she has to refuse to do what her community wants of her, namely conducting her life quietly and concerning herself with the activities and wellbeing of other villagers, and, of course, attending church. Her choice to pursue her art instead of doing what is expected of her by the society of the time is what offends Marius.
Marius’s claim that Helen is not free is another clue to what is at stake in his conflict with her. In one sense, nobody could be more free than a single woman with no children in late middle age, since she has no responsibilities to anyone but herself.
But, from Marius’s point of view, she is not free because she has responsibilities to her community. Those responsibilities demand that she should conform to expectations and live a “good” life as befits a woman in her situation.

Exercise
The Road to Mecca puts forward three different views of Helen’s art, each belonging to one of the characters. Copy the table below and fill in the details. Some ideas have been provided for you.
Character

Their interpretation of Helen’s art

Helen

“my Mecca” (my “holy city”)

Elsa

Beautiful; surprising

Marius

“cement monstrosities”; dangerous

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Your table should have included the ideas of a woman’s art and freedom, as well as other images that Fugard uses to refer to Helen’s art. It should be clear by now that
Helen is a rebel against what her society expects of her, and that, by filling her house with ground glass and her yard with statues of pilgrims, camels, owls and mermaids, she was making a statement about artists’ freedom to express their own personal vision. In this way, as both Elsa and Marius notice, she is a threat to the established norms of the village, which do not approve of the kind of art she makes.

Exercise
Now write two paragraphs about your own opinion of Helen Martins’s art. You may wish to consult the official website of the Owl House: or any other text concerning
Helen Martins’s life and art. Your paragraphs should:
(1) Say whether you like Helen Martins’s art or not, and why.
(2) State your opinion of the meaning of Helen’s art.
(3) Say what you think Helen’s status as an artist should be.
Conclusion
As I mentioned earlier, Helen Martins is now regarded as one of South Africa’s foremost artists for her work on the Owl House. In her own lifetime, though, she was viewed with suspicion and her work was seen by many as dangerous and even inspired by evil forces.

Athol Fugard’s play, The Road to Mecca, is partly an attempt to come to terms with
Helen Martins’s legacy. The evening he writes about in his play did not really happen, but it serves as a focus for exploring all the themes that surrounded Helen Martins in her life and art, and which we have been examining in this note. While Fugard uses a simple, conversational style of writing, the ideas and problems he explores in his play are anything but simple. Rather, they are complex notions of freedom, art and religion, as well as women’s place in society. The assignment you will write on this play will ask you to explore these notions in more detail.

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5

4

SECTION 4

When Rain Clouds Gather
(Bessie Head) by Fetson Kalua

Image of Bessie Head retrieved from http://1.bp.blogspot.com (accessed 8 March 2012)
Reproduced with permission from www.aaregistry.org

A GUIDE TO THIS NOTE
This section contains the following:
(1)
(2)
(3)
(4)

A study programme to enable you to study When Rain Clouds Gather;
A discussion of the history and context of When Rain Clouds Gather;
A discussion of the characters in When Rain Clouds Gather;
A guide to some essay topics.

Study programme
Activity

Time spent (approximately)

Reading the novel

2–3 hours

Reading this section and making notes of important points

6 hours

Completing activites in the study guide 8 hours

Preparatory writing for your assignment on When rain Clouds gather

2 hours

Drafting and revising your assignment

6 hours

About the author
Here is some background information you should know about Bessie Head, the author of When Rain Clouds Gather. This information will set you thinking, particularly with regard to the issues in the novel.
Bessie Head “was born of mixed parentage in Pietermaritzburg in 1937” (Mackenzie
& Clayton 1989:5). Her mother was a white woman and her father a black stableman.
Because of the apartheid system and its discriminatory laws, Head’s grandmother
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arranged for her immediate adoption, so that at least two families (one white, the other Coloured) fostered the young Bessie Head before “she was placed in an Anglican mission orphanage in Durban” (Mackenzie & Clayton 1989:5).
As a young adult, Bessie Head trained as a primary school teacher, enjoying a brief stint in the teaching profession before moving on to work as a journalist for Drum publications in Johannesburg and Cape Town. This was in the early 1960s, a time when she wrote her first novel entitled The Cardinals. Her contemporary journalists on Drum were writers who went on to become famous. According to Mackenzie and
Clayton, in 1964 Bessie Head “left South Africa for Botswana to take up a teaching post there. She was refused a passport and had to leave South Africa on an exit permit, which prohibited re-entry into the country. She remained for a long time what she called ‘a stateless person’, and was only granted Botswana citizenship in 1979”
(Mackenzie & Clayton 1989:6). It was in Botswana that Bessie Head established herself as a famous writer.
Some useful definitions
Novel: Abrams defines a novel as “an extended narrative ... distinguished from a short story” (1957:110). As an extended piece of narrative prose, a novel is made up or invented. This means that even though there might be points of similarity between the life of the author and the main character in her/his work, the events in the story are not factually or historically true.
Autobiography: In very simple terms, this term means writing about the self. Derived from Latin, the word “autobiography” can be broken down into three component parts, namely auto (self), bio (life), and graph (scribe or write).

Now we will explore the novel as a genre:
As you learned in the previous section, a genre is an art form or a literary type of writing. Genres are literary forms, and the three main categories are poetry, drama and narrative (short story or novel). In this course we define the core or essence of the novel as narrative, which is a mode of story-telling involving a series of episodes/ incidents/events/happenings which are held together by one main character, known as the protagonist.

We expect you to learn and apply the following terms when writing about prose fiction such as When Rain Clouds Gather.
Some more literary terms
Setting:

Plot:

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this refers to the time and place in which the action of a story takes place. Thus the setting of a novel would require us to think about things such the social, historical and political background in which the story is placed. The setting of When Rain Clouds
Gather is the village of Serowe in Botswana. plot means the sequence or series of events as arranged and narrated by the author. What is important to note about plot is that, as you read the story, you should be on the lookout for the tension or conflict which often lies at the core of the story. This conflict is the force against which the main character is opposed, and which provides the starting point for the action. In other words, conflict in a story is what galvanises the main character into action.

SECTION 4: When Rain Clouds Gather (Bessie Head)

Character: this word has two meanings.
(i) Character refers to people or animals in the story. For example, the author of Animal Farm (a fable) decided to use humans and animals as his characters.
(ii) The second meaning of character (in this particular sense also characterisation) relates to the nature, qualities, or characteristics of the people (the fictional characters) in the story.
For any story to be credible, authors invest their characters with human qualities. This explains why we enjoy reading literature or fiction in general, because we either identify or empathise with the characters, dislike or even loathe them.
Theme:

the theme of a work is its main idea or message. A novel’s theme can be stated directly (explicitly) or indirectly (say, through symbolism). Getting started

■ Read the text (When Rain Clouds Gather) at least twice, the first time maybe

cursorily, and the second time with concentration. As you read the book for the second time, jot down the main ideas.
■ Write notes (possibly in an A5 notebook, but also in your blog or electronic journal) on what happens in the novel, from the opening episode until the last. Where possible, explain the reasons for what happens in each episode.
■ Formulate your own opinions about the text in order to develop your own responses, viewpoints and judgements.
■ Relate the text to your own experiences (think about the issues of exile, prejudice, race, xenophobia [fear of people from other cultures], as well as the situation of working on a farm, etc).

Exercise
Having read the novel, answer each of the following questions very briefly (no more than three sentences per answer) to demonstrate your grasp of the literary terms as applied to When Rain Clouds Gather.
(1) Briefly describe the setting of the novel.

(2) In three sentences, summarise its plot.

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(3) List at least seven characters in the novel.

(4) Choose one of the characters (in Question 3) and describe his/her characteristics – both positive and negative.

(5) Write two to three sentences describing the main theme (or idea) of the novel.

The main characters in the novel
When Rain Clouds Gather is the story of a young South African Zulu man and political prisoner called Makhaya, meaning “one who stays home”, but in this case he does not live up to his name. He is frustrated with the unbearable conditions of apartheid and leaves South Africa for Botswana. After fleeing South Africa, Makhaya takes refuge in the community or village of Golema Mmidi. There he joins a group of refugees and exiles and becomes actively involved in the activities of an agricultural cooperative which is run by the local people and the refugees, the most influential one being Gilbert Balfour, who becomes Makhaya’s close friend. It is in this village of Golema Mmidi (which becomes his “home”) that Makhaya begins to get a sense of perspective and to achieve a measure of clarity on a range of issues, including power, race and oppression, which are the source of his inner turmoil and isolation.

Bessie Head portrays Makhaya as finding joy and fulfilment in the friendship with
Gilbert, in his relationship with Paulina, to whom he proposes marriage at the end of the novel, as well as in the success of the cooperative’s farming activities, which transform the lives of both the refugees and the local people. In a sense, this success provides the healing process that Makhaya needs in order to forget the pain and inner turmoil engendered by apartheid. But his healing is fully realised, not only
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through his readiness to teach the women tobacco farming for a higher quality of life in the semi-desert conditions, but also in his lasting relationship with Paulina.
Now look back at the sketch of Bessie Head’s life under the heading “About the author” with which I began this note. We can see something of Bessie Head’s life in the complex character of Makhaya, who, on arriving in Botswana seething with turmoil, settles down to a life of healing and reflection. In other words, the novel may be read as an autobiography, because Bessie Head herself had a terrible relationship with South Africa, leaving the country in the 1960s to escape the constrictions and injustices of the apartheid system, and settling among refugees and exiles in the Botswana city of Francistown, where she seemed to have found a semblance of healing through the various personal relationships she cultivated within the refugee community. In this way it is easy to identify Makhaya with Bessie Head.
How are Bessie Head and Makhaya similar? Fill in the points of similarity.
The author Bessie Head was born in
South Africa.

In the novel, Makhaya is born in South
Africa.

Bessie Head left South Africa for
Botswana.

Makhaya leaves South Africa for
Botswana.

It is important to note that, in When Rain Clouds Gather, Bessie Head is, in a way, fictionalising her life and writing her autobiography. While most autobiographies use the writer as the protagonist directly, this one is indirect.
The following reflections by the main character about his personal turmoil and a deep sense of loneliness point to the connection between Makhaya and Bessie Head:
(1) “...he could not marry and have children in a country where black men were called ‘boy’ and ‘dog’ and ‘kaffir’ ”(p. 16).
(2) ... “he simply wanted a country to love and chose the first thing at hand...” (p. 17).
(3) “ ... One road might lead to fame and importance, and another might lead to peace of mind. It’s the road of peace of mind that that I’m seeking” (p. 20).
(4) “I am Makhaya, the Black Dog ...” (p. 128), he tells Mma Millipede, reflecting on his life in South Africa.
(5) What he has known is “torture and torment ... and abysmal betrayal, a howling inferno where every gesture of love and respect was repaid with the vicious snapping jaws of the inmates of this inferno” (p. 133), hence his “hatred of the whiteman” (p. 133).
Such musings and moments of reflection suggest a link between Makhaya (the fictional character) and Bessie Head. But thanks to the community of Golema Mmidi, this
Makhaya’s pent-up anger and violence begins to change over time, being replaced
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with an overlay of feelings of kindness. Read the quotes that follow as examples of his emotional turmoil, which leaves him susceptible to violence:
(1) Mma Millipede reminds Makhaya that “generosity of mind and soul” are genuine and something to strife for in life.
(2) He arrives at the conclusion that “the hatred might fall away from him like old scabs” (p. 132).
(3) Following his altercation with Chief Matenge in which he vows to kill him,
Makhaya changes his mind completely because “Murder is small-minded business” (p. 178).
(4) Makhaya expresses an aversion to “hate-making political ideologies” (p. 80)
(apartheid would definitely be one of these).
From this point on, Makhaya is full of optimism as he begins to acknowledge and appreciate human relationships in their varieties and complexities.
Gilbert Balfour, another character, is portrayed as “a practical and down-to-earth kind of man” (p. 81), who is prepared to be of service to his fellow human beings.
Fully aware of the needs of Golema Mmidi village, he seeks to initiate cooperative farming methods in the village, and the methods show immense potential for success. A committed optimist, he lives just like local people and ensures that, in this cooperative farming project, emphasis is placed on growing cash crops and sinking boreholes (to cope with the inevitable water shortages during spells of drought). He even marries a local woman by the name of Maria, Dinorego’s daughter.
Another character you need to think about and pay attention to is Chief Matenge, who represents “Old Africa” at its worst – moral degeneration. Compare Chief
Matenge with Paramount Chief Sekoto in the novel. Bessie Head presents Chief
Matenge as a villain, a bad person, as he is openly corrupt and has a tendency to tribalism – characteristics which disrupt the harmony of the otherwise peaceful community. Traditional norms are being eroded by tribalism, with men making women pregnant but unable to care for the children who are born from such loveless liaisons, and thus leaving the lonely women saddled with all sorts of hardships as they raise the children alone. You will need to explain here why this social evil can be traced to tribalism.
Tribalism
The word “tribalism” means the practice of advancing one’s own tribe above others, or judging other people on the basis of their tribal origins. Explore When
Rain Clouds Gather and find two examples of tribalism. Is this presented in the novel as good?

Yet another character who turns out to be very helpful to Makhaya is George
Appleby-Smith – a white police officer (a special immigration officer) who secures permanent residence for Makhaya in Botswana. Like Gilbert and Makhaya, George is also an exile who is convinced about the certainty of self-government, and so he is always on the side of the oppressed.
Finally, there are other characters of note, such as old man Dinorego and old woman
Millipede. Almost a godfather and spiritual leader of the community of Golema
Mmidi, Dinorego leads Makhaya to his tiny village, while Millipede is a gracious woman (Dinorego’s counterfoil) who gives peace to Makhaya’s tortured and troubled soul and ensures that Paulina does not give him trouble.
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Chapter by chapter analysis
I will now provide an analysis of each chapter. At the end of each chapter’s exploration, you will find questions to guide you to a clear understanding of the chapter I have just analysed. Make sure you answer the questions in your own words. My analysis is not a substitute for a careful reading and analysis of the text.

CHAPTER 1
In this chapter, we are introduced to the main character in the novel. We learn he is a young man who is, “just out of jail” (p. 9) in South Africa, is fleeing the country for Botswana. When we encounter this young man, named Makhaya, he is on the
South African side of the border, where an old man is hiding him in a circular hut so that once darkness has set in the young man can sneak across the fence into neighbouring Botswana. After dusk, Makhaya successfully sprints across the border into Botswana and arrives at an old woman’s house, where he stays the night. The following day he hitches a lift and arrives in the village of Golema Mmidi, which will be his new home for the foreseeable future.
Questions
(1) Explain what led up to Makhaya’s flight from South Africa. You may make a list of phrases or quotations.

(2) Why does he cross the border into Botswana by jumping over the border fence? (3) Name the village he arrives and takes refuge in.

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(4) Name the person who grants him asylum (a safe place to stay). What procedure is followed before he is granted asylum?

CHAPTER 2
We are introduced to several characters in this chapter. Old Dinorego is Makhaya’s
“new-found companion” (pp. 22–3), who is prepared to keep Makhaya in his house for some time. We are also introduced to Paramount Chief Sekoto, who has appointed his brother, Chief Matenge, as the sub-chief and administrator of Golema
Mmidi ward or village. Gilbert Balfour is yet another character we learn about in the chapter. He is a British agronomist who is in the village “to assist in agricultural development and improved techniques of food production” (p. 23). Other characters are Maria – Dinorego’s daughter ― and Mma-Millipede.
Questions
(1) What is Mr Matenge, the village administrator, notorious for?

(2) How does Paramount Chief Sekoto help the cause for which Gilbert finds himself in the village of Golema Mmidi?

(3) Who introduces Makhaya to Gilbert?

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(4) “This is Utopia Mack ...” (p. 31). Who says these words? Explain why he says them (you will need to include the meaning of “utopia” in your answer).

CHAPTER 3
At the end of Chapter 2, Makhaya agrees to join Gilbert on the corporative project and in Chapter 3 we see him settling in to his new employment. We learn about
Gilbert’s grand idea of agricultural cooperatives. This would involve changing the land tenure system in the village into a cooperative that would be similar to communal ownership of land.
Land tenure
This idea is central to When Rain Clouds Gather. It means the system of ownership of land: whether it is owned by an individual or by more than one person, for example by a family or a co-operative group of farmers. The question of land ownership is central to African history and politics, especially as land was taken away from its rightful black owners by European colonisers.

Questions
(1) Both Gilbert and Makhaya are educated young men. What makes them unique individuals, living in a village that is full of poor people?

(2) Describe the major projects that the two men get involved in and how the local people respond to their involvement.

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(3) Explain why Chief Matenge wants Makhaya thrown out of the village.

(4) According to Gilbert and Makhaya, how would the people of the village benefit from the cooperatives?

CHAPTER 4
This chapter gives an insight into the life of Paramount Chief Sekoto, a man described as having “three great loves: fast cars, good food, and pretty girls” (p. 49). But, despite his flaws (and unlike his brother, Chief Matenge), Chief Sekoto is shown to be a man of great wisdom (as we see when Mma Baloi’s case is brought before him).
Questions
(1) How does Chief Matenge plot to get rid of Makhaya? What is Paramount
Chief Sekoto’s response?

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(2) How does George Appleby-Smith help Makhaya in view of Chief Matenge’s scheming? SECTION 4: When Rain Clouds Gather (Bessie Head)

CHAPTER 5
In this chapter, we learn about the turbulence that is the inner life of Chief Matenge, and in particular the reasons for his hatred of Makhaya. Although he is a rich and educated man, with a number of possessions to enhance his image, Matenge is at heart a deeply evil man. His extreme dislike of Makhaya prompts him to plot against him by reporting him to George so he can be deported. But, knowing Matenge, George arranges for Makhaya’s permanent residence instead.
Questions
(1) Describe the events leading to the confrontation between Matenge and
Makhaya.

(2) What ill fate befalls Makhaya?

CHAPTER 6
The chapter starts with a description of Paulina’s background and her true nature. It also details Makhaya’s views on oppression in Southern Africa, as well as Gilbert’s ideas about progress.
Questions
(1) Describe the character of Dinorego.

(2) Describe Makhaya’s thoughts about Southern Africa and oppression. Quote from the text (pp. 80–90) to support your answer.

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(3) Describe Gilbert’s ideas about progress (these are described on p. 82).

(4) Whom does Gilbert marry and why?

(5) Explain the significance of Gilbert’s quote from Kipling, especially with reference to Makhaya.

CHAPTER 7
In this chapter, we are introduced to the character of Paulina Sebeso. She is trying to recover from her own trauma. For example, her husband committed suicide after being (falsely) accused of theft by his company. When Makhaya meets Paulina, she and her young daughter live in the village, while Isaac, her son, lives alone at the cattle post, looking after his mother’s herd of cattle. But the most interesting events in this chapter are as follows: Mma-Millipede arranges a wedding party for Gilbert and Maria; Gilbert appoints Makhaya to give women instruction on the farm; and
Mma-Millipede begins to think about Paulina ― the only woman who could persuade other women to attend lessons at the farm ― as Makhaya’s possible soul mate, and eventually his wife.
Question
What characteristics does Paulina possess that make her suitable (in Mma-Millipede’s opinion) to be Makhaya’s future partner?

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CHAPTER 8
Makhaya organises the women into a tobacco-growing cooperative. As a result of working together on the farm, Paulina is drawn to Makhaya. Eventually the two strike up a friendly relationship.
Questions
(1) Describe the kind of activities the women are involved in on the Turkish tobacco project.

(2) Describe how the community of Golema Mmidi benefits from the activities that Makhaya spearheads (pp. 112–3).

CHAPTER 9
In this chapter (as elsewhere in the novel), Makhaya is thinking about his own transformation. Thus, in his reflections, he tries to resolve the pain and grief he has endured from the days of living in South Africa, as follows: he is prepared to “slip into this new life” (p. 122); for him, “agriculture was something he grasped at to save his own life” (p. 123); aware that his inner life has been “battleground of strife and conflict” (p. 124), he arrives at the conclusion that humankind needs generosity; he realises that saintly Mma-Millipede will “relieve his heart of much of its ashes, frustration, and grief” (p. 126), and she does.
Questions
(1) What aspects of life are covered in Makhaya’s reflections on pp. 133–135?

(2) Give the reasons for his admiration for Gilbert.

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(3) Explain how Makhaya’s conversation with Mma-Millipede contributes to his healing. (4) Explain why, for Makhaya, Golema Mmidi becomes “a dream he had evoked”.

CHAPTERS 10 AND 11
Chapter 10 describes the positive developments taking place in the village of Golema
Mmidi and the wrath this evokes from Chief Matenge. The chapter goes on to describe the crippling drought that has afflicted the land, leaving the soil bone-dry, the livestock dying off. The people too have suffered terribly. For example, in Chapter 11, as Paulina, Makhaya and Gilbert arrive at her cattle post to check on Isaac (Paulina’s son), “they could see that not a living thing moved on the ground” (p. 161). Paulina’s herd of cattle has been wiped out, and, what is more, Isaac is “a heap of clean white bones lying on the floor” (p. 162). Paulina’s child has died from malnutrition. From this point onwards, Makhaya decides to have a close romantic relationship with
Paulina: “All his life he had wanted some kind of Utopia, and he had rejected in his mind and heart a world full of ailments and faults. He had run and run away from it, but now the time had come when he could run and hide no longer and would have to turn round and face all he had run away from. Loving one woman had brought him to this realisation: that it was only people who could bring the real rewards of living, that it was only people who give love and happiness” (p. 163).
Questions
(1) How do the developments in Golema Mmidi village affect Chief Matenge?

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(2) Describe the consequences of the severe drought on the community of Golema
Mmidi.

(3) What does Makhaya do to the “heap of bones” (p. 167)? What do his actions show about his character?

(4) Comment on what you think Bessie Head means by the title of this novel:
“When Rain Clouds Gather”, as suggested on p. 168?

CHAPTER 12
We learn about two important developments in this chapter. The one is that the cooperative exercise is a success. For example, the experimental plot of tobacco is thriving, and Gilbert is now suggesting that the community should erect a twentymile fence to enclose a ranch or cattle holding ground. The other is the death of Chief
Matenge, whose “still body (is found in his house) hanging from a rafter” (p. 178).
Questions
(1) How does Chief Matenge die?

(2) At the end of this novel, Chief Matenge is dead and yet the agricultural experiment seems a great success. What do you think Bessie Head is suggesting about the running of agricultural projects and villages in Botswana?

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Symbolism in When Rain Clouds Gather
The words “When rain clouds gather” (the title of the novel), which appear in Chapter 11, on page 168, are used in a most symbolic fashion. The words are spoken (as a metaphor) during a vigil at Makhaya and Paulina’s home marking the passing of
Paulina’s child (Isaac) who died from malnutrition alone at the cattle post. The old man rues the gravity of the drought, which has left almost everything lifeless, but
Maria says:

“You may see no rivers on the ground but we keep the rivers inside us. That is why all good things and all good people are called rain. Sometimes we see the rain clouds gather even though not a cloud appears in the sky. It is all in our heart.” (p. 168)
The title When Rain Clouds Gather thus represents the basic goodness and graciousness of humankind which, in this novel, is reflected in the spirit of characters such as
George, Gilbert, Dinorego and Millipede – all of whom have contributed immensely towards the common good in Golema Mmidi (through bringing about, for example, the healing of Makhaya’s troubled soul; the healing at the funeral of Paulina’s son; and working on cooperative farming projects to help the community achieve selfsufficiency in food supply, thereby remedying poverty and suffering). The title may also be seen to mean that, even when things look bleak and hopeless, there may still be hope if people continue with positive actions and relationships.
The End of the Novel
The novel ends with the death of an oppressor, but the cooperative farm is still prospering. At one level, it would seem that the book ends with optimism in that the village does overcome forces of evil (represented by Chief Matenge), and embraces the idealism or utopia that Gilbert and Makhaya represent, which is probably close to Bessie Head’s vision for many villages in Botswana. At another level, it is vitally important to ask ourselves whether or not the vision of a social order that Bessie
Head is promoting here is innocent, naive, too simplistic, too abstract, and therefore unworkable. What do you think? Could a village such as Golema Mmidi use cooperative farming to escape from poverty and drought? Or is Bessie Head being too optimistic here?
A Summary of the Themes

(1) The denunciation of oppression of all kinds. For example, Makhaya flees
South Africa to escape white-on-black oppression. But then the situation he encounters in Golema Mmidi involves a black-on-black kind of oppression
(brought about by Chief Matenge); lack of responsibility (Chief Sekoto); and corruption (Tsepe). When Rain Clouds Gather shows all these kinds of oppression as negative and to be avoided.
(2) When we first encounter Makhaya in Chapter 1, his soul is tortured and in turmoil. But this state of affairs is gradually replaced by his attempt to achieve a sense of mental balance in the course of the novel, thanks to his meaning110

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ful friendships with people like Dinorego, Mma Millipede, George, Gilbert,
Paulina and Maria. We learn that the process of healing involves Makhaya working through his suffering by learning to trust and believe in the characters listed above.
(3) Having known poverty most of her life, and seeing it as a social problem,
Head seems to have developed wide-ranging views about how this problem could be tackled, including her belief in a system of land ownership by the community, where communities can work together to improve their lives.
Thus Bessie’s Head’s use of the farm cooperative, for example, points to her vision of how to resolve social problems for the greater good and prosperity of the community.
(4) Apart from Chief Matenge, Chief Sokoto and Joas Tsepe (all of whom, in various ways, represent power, oppression and corruption), the novel demonstrates how humanity can live in perfect harmony only if issues of skin colour, gender or place of origin do not blind one to human values such as compassion and working together. Thus there are good characters in the novel, who provide healing to Makhaya. Take note of the following productive relationships:
(i) George (a white man) is prepared to stick out his neck for Makhaya (who is a black exile) from beginning to end.
(ii) Gilbert (the white English agronomist) befriends Makhaya. Thus Makhaya wants to “combine ... the good in Gilbert with the good in his own society” (p. 135).
(iii) Dinorego becomes Makhaya’s surrogate father.
(iv) Mma Millipede becomes Makhaya’s surrogate mother.
(v) Gilbert marries Maria (a black Motswana woman, Dinorego’s daughter).
(vi) Makhaya has a lasting and fulfilling relationship with Paulina (a black
Motswana woman), to whom he eventually proposes marriage.
All the above characters (and the entire community of Golema Mmidi) show their willingness to cross the border between fixed tribal or cultural identities and to embrace a wider human identity. This kind of identity, defined by the brotherhood/ sisterhood of humankind, remains Bessie Head’s vision in most of her fiction.
Writing Exercise: Character Sketches
This exercise is included for self-study and not submission. The exercise can be done in your journal, whether paper or electronic. The sketches will give you an idea of what kinds of questions your lecturers may ask you on this book. Write character sketches for the important characters in the novel. You will find the quotes in three ways: by following the author’s description of the character; through what the character does and thinks; and through what other characters in the novel say or think about the character.

A sketch is something like this:
Paramount Chief Sokoto
•• Everyone knows him as “a very charming man” (p. 49)
•• He looks at “the sunny side of life ...” (p. 49).
•• Has “three loves: fast cars, good food and pretty girls” (p. 49)
•• Keeps “concubines” (p. 49).
•• Despises his brother sub-Chief Matenge (p. 50)
•• He is in many ways a very sensible and wise chief (pp. 51–3 – refer to Baloi’s case).
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Now do the same for the following cast of characters that we meet in When Rain
Clouds Gather:
(1)
(2)
(3)
(4)
(5)
(6)
(7)
(8)

Makhaya
Dinorego
Mma Millipede
George Appleby-Smith
Gilbert Balfour
Paulina Sebeso
Chief Matenge
Joas Tsepe

Possible Essay Questions
Test your knowledge of When Rain Clouds Gather by writing an essay on one of the topics below. These are included to give you an idea of what kinds of questions your lecturers may ask you to answer on this book. Remember to answer these questions, like any essay questions, in well-constructed arguments written in paragraphs, and by referring closely to the novel to support your views.

(1) Choose one of the memorable characters in the novel and discuss the reasons why you find him/her unforgettable. (You may choose Makhaya, Gilbert,
Matenge, Dinorego or Mma Millipede.)
(2) Although it is Makhaya’s suffering, trauma and healing that form the core of the novel, Bessie Head also brings to the fore other problems to do with colonial authorities, tribalism, greed and hate. Discuss.
(3) Discuss the reasons for Makhaya’s inner turmoil and sense of anger in the first part of the novel and how his arrival in Golema Mmidi provides the basis for healing.
(4) Discuss the reasons why the people of Golema Mmidi stand up to Chief
Matenge. What are the implications of Chief Matenge’s death with regard to tradition and oppression?
(5) Describe the ending of this novel. How does it provide a suitable conclusion to the action of the book?
(6) How does When Rain Clouds Gather demonstrate Bessie Head’s vision of the possibility of how races might exist in harmony?
(7) Discuss Bessie Head’s representation of white people in the novel (George
Appleby-Smith and Gilbert Balfour), contrasting this with the white people in South Africa, from where Makhaya has fled.
(8) Writing in A Woman Alone: Autobiographical Writings, Head has this to say about her fiction:
My work was always tentative because it was so completely new: it created new worlds out of nothing; it battled with problems of food production in a tough semi-desert land; it brought all kinds of people, both literate and semi-literate together, and it did not really qualify who was who – everyone had a place in my world. (1980:28)
How do these statements apply to When Rain Clouds Gather?
112

SECTION 4: When Rain Clouds Gather (Bessie Head)

Works cited
Abrahams, C. (ed) 1990. The Tragic Life: Bessie Head and Literature in Southern Africa.
Trenton: Africa World Press.
Abrams, M.H. 1957. A Glossary of Literary Terms. New York: Holt, Rinehart, & Winston.
Brown, C. 2003. The Creative Vision of Bessie Head. London: Associated University
Presses.
Head, B. 1968. When Rain Clouds Gather. London: Heinemann.
Head, B. 1979. ‘Social and Political Pressures that shape literature in South Africa’,
World Literature in English, 18:22–23.
Head, B. 1980. A Woman Alone: Autobiographical Writings. London: Heinemann.
Ibrahim, H. 1996. Bessie Head: Subversive Identities in Exile. Virginia & London:
Charlottesville.
Mackenzie, C. 1989. Bessie Head: An Introduction. Grahamstown: The National English
Literary Museum.
Mackenzie, C. & Clayton C. (eds). 1989. Between the Lines: Interviews with Bessie Head,
Sheila Roberts, Ellen Kuzwayo, Miriam Tlali. Grahamstown: The National English
Literary Museum.
Ola, V.U. 1994. The life and works of Bessie Head. New York: The Edwin Meller Press.
Sample, M. (ed.) 2003. Critical essays on Bessie Head. London: Praeger.

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