Post-War Wastelands

"The end is in the beginning, and yet you go on."
Samuel Beckett's Endgame (1957)

Points for Reflection

Langston Hughes's "Afro-American Fragment" (1959), PDF

1. why open and close the first stanza with the first three, short lines?
2. does the narrator call upon a thread of shared, oral history woven throughout his ancestors’ experience?
3. how useful are history books, songs, and the English language itself at capturing African-American experience, according to the narrator?
4. is the song heard by the narrator a product of the past, the present, or a melding of both?
   

Allen Ginsberg's "Howl" (1954-55; 1956), online

1. In Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own (1928; 1929), the narrator declares that the best art is created by an unfettered, “incandescent mind” freed of that “fear and hatred” which can fracture art before its completion (58). Would Woolf consider Ginsberg's mind incandescent?
2. does Ginsberg's poem identify a clear cause of the "madness" he accuses of destroying the best minds of his own generation?
3. can you find evidence that these "best minds" encompass people of color?
4. does drug use appear to be more a cause than a product of the extended, varieggated vision provided by the narrator?
5. the narrator lists a number of American and international locations visited by these vanished best minds. Does he privilege particular parts of the world? Does he steer clear of others?
6. what attitude does the narrator adopt towards therapy, an ostensible treatment for the madness he identified at the poem's beginning?
7. to adopt Ginsberg's own words, does this poem's colleage of images strike you as more a set of "lofty incantations" or "stanzas of gibberish"?
8. has this poem "dreamt and made incarnate gaps in Time & Space through images juxtaposed"? Does it focus more on gaps and absences, or on what can be seen and held?
9. why does the narrator include so many religious references throughout the poem? Does he mention Christian and Buddhist images and notions for similar or disparate reasons?
10. can you derive a tangible sense of what might be meant by the following, evocative but enigmatic phrases?
    • "purgatoried their torsos"
    • "kind king light of mind"
    • "meat for the Synagogue cast on the pavement"
    • "the narcotic tobacco haze of Capitalism"
    • "the total animal soup of time"
    • "where the faculties of the skull no longer admit the worms of the senses"
11. at what Moloch-like aspects of modern culture does the narrator take particular aim in Part 2?
12. Ginsberg fabricated the events related in Part 3, yet mentions his friend Carl Solomon by name. (Solomon was not happy about this.) Does this feel like an enfringement on someone else's rights--to immortalize them in a poem, by name, by connecting them to things which did not in fact characterize their own experience?
13. does the poem transcend the stylistic and thematic inspiration of Walt Whitman enough to become its own creature?
14. is the complaint raised in "Howl" at all similar to that voiced by the black writers of the stories and poem we read for today?

Samuel Beckett's Endgame (1957), PDF

1. Why might Beckett assign a "very red face" to both Clov and Hamm, and a "very white face" to Nagg and Nell?
2. A quarter of the way into the play, Hamm contemplates what type of meaning an alien visitor to earth might apply to what s/he sees upon observing the actions of Clov and Hamm. What kind of meaning is the reader/viewer encouraged to derive from the actions of these characters?
3. What clues does the dialogue provide that these four individuals are living in some sort of apocalyptic environment?
4. Do Nagg and Nell find comfort in their shared memories?
5. Why has Clov not left Hamm permanently, despite constant threats to do so? Why does he always obey Hamm?
6. Why do the play's characters sometimes respond immediately with a "no" or "yes" before they know the import of the question to which they're responding? (Often, such a short response immediately precedes a request for clarification.)
7. How does Christianity fare in this play?
8. Are any of these characters capable of love?
9. What appears to be the "natural" state of things in this play? Are there any predictable events or straightforward principles on which the characters can rely?
10. Was the characters' past better than their present?
11. Consider the relative validity and thematic significance of the following, seemingly absurd moments and observations:

• Nell's noting that "[n]othing is funnier than unhappiness"
• Hamm's recalling his visits to a madman in an asylum
• Clov's exclamation that the pain in his legs may eventually prevent him from thinking
• Clov's query of whether Hamm believes "in the life to come," and Hamm's response
• Hamm's storytelling, and Clov's commentary on Hamm's progress
• Clov's wondering what there is to keep him with Hamm, and Hamm's response
• Hamm's reflection that we weep so as not to laugh, and gradually begin to grieve
• Hamm's observation that solitary children create imaginary friends so they don't feel alone
• Clov's overhearing what Hamm meant to be a theatrical "aside"
• Hamm's final articulation of the now-familiar line "Me to play"

The Ladder (1957)
Marc Chagall

Dr. Paul Marchbanks
pmarchba@calpoly.edu