Fifteenth lecture for my students in English 140, UC Santa Barbara, Summer 2012. Course website: http://patrickbrianmooney.nfshost.com/~patrick/ta/su12/index.html

1. Lecture 15: Penelope, Penelope
English 140
UC Santa Barbara
Summer 2012
29 August 2012
“History is what hurts, it is what refuses desire and sets inexorable
limits to individual as well as collective praxis, which its ‘ruses’ turn
into grisly and ironic reversals of their overt intention. But this History
can be apprehended only through its effects, and never directly as
some reified force. This is indeed the ultimate sense in which History
as ground and untranscendable horizon needs no particular
theoretical justification.”
—Frederic Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a
Socially Symbolic Act

2. A few more words about “The Dry Salvages”
The river is within us, the sea is all about us;
The sea is the land’s edge also, the granite
Into which it reaches, the beaches where it tosses
Its hints of earlier and other creation
– p. 130; lines 15-18
The salt is on the briar rose,
The fog is in the fir trees.
– p. 131; lines 26-27

3. The tolling bell
Measures time not our time
Ground swell, a time
Older than the time of chronometers, older
Than time counted by anxious worried women
Lying awake, calculating the future,
Trying to unweave, unwind, unravel
And piece together the past and the future,
Between midnight and dawn, when the past is all deception,
The future featureless, before the morning watch
When time stops and time is never ending;
And the ground swell, that is and was from the beginning,
Clangs
The bell.
– p. 131; end of section 1; lines 35-48

4. Water and time in The Time
Traveler’s Wife
Clare: “It’s hard being left behind. […] Long
ago, men went to sea, and women waited for
them, scanning the horizon for the tiny ship.
Now I wait for Henry. He vanishes unwillingly,
without warning. I wait for him.” (vii)

5. A few notes on gender roles
Clare [at 20]: “In some ways you were very
parental.” (9)
Henry: “Clare picks up her purse and I shake
my head at her. I pay.” (13)
Clare [at 16]: “I offered to go Dutch but he
[Jason Everleigh] said no, he never did that.”
(94)
Clare: “I feel a tiny pang of regret, as though
I’ve lost a secret, and then a rush of exaltation:
now everything begins.” (21)

6. Clare [at 6]: “Mr. Bear asks her about how it is
being a movie star and she says she really
wants to be a veterinarian but she is so
incredibly pretty she has to be a movie star and
Mr. Bear says maybe she could be a
veterinarian when she’s old.” (43)
Clare [at 11]: “we crowd into Mary Christina’s
room that is decorated totally in pink, even the
wall-to-wall carpet. You get the feeling Mary
Christina’s parents were really glad to finally
have a girl after all those brothers.” (61)

7. Grandma Meagram: “in fairy tales it’s always the
children who have the fine adventures. The
mothers have to stay at home and wait for the
children to fly in the window.” (127)
Henry [at 24, to Henry at 5]: “I’m an extremely
unusual grown-up. My job is to have adventures.”
(29)
“Do you ever miss him?” she [Grandma
Meagram] asks me.
“Every day. Every minute.”
“Every minute,” she says. “Yes. It’s that way,
isn’t it?” (128)

8. The color blue
Henry: “I would hold it close to my face, so close I
couldn’t see anything but that blue. It would fill me
with a feeling, a feeling I later tried to duplicate with
alcohol and finally found again with Clare, a feeling
of unity, oblivion, mindlessness in the best sense of
the word.” (22)
“I sat on the back porch in my pajamas with Mom
and Dad and Mrs. and Mr. Kim, drinking lemonade
and watching the blueness of the evening sky.” (25)
“The streetlights tint the sky orange above me; it’s a
deep cerulean blue over the lake.” (117)