Author: uclma07

G.R. Thomas suggests that that “one of the favourite pastimes of critics is trying to identify the symbolic meaning of the colours of the seven rooms” in The Masque of the Red Death (Zimmerman, 2009, p. 60). But when authorial intentions are ambiguous, but we insist on creating meaning out of certain features of a text, are we really doing justice to it? Is literary criticism a truer testament to our own beliefs, values and biases rather than the author’s? How many authorial choices are deliberate and at what point do we draw the line between conscientious lexical choices and mere syntactical coincidences? I’ve dedicated my entire undergraduate career to this discipline, and I love it, but sometimes I truly wonder if l’analyse de texte is a fruitless exercise that has somewhat compromised my ability to look at subject matters objectively.

Looking at extracts in isolation from their context forces you to pay attention to minute details and the effectiveness of certain linguistic and rhetorical features – but it would be wrong to deviate so far from ‘true meanings’ that works are ripped out of their author’s clutches. As an author, if my work resonated with others for reasons apart from what I’d intended to communicate, I’m not sure if it would be appropriate to feel flattered or devastated; especially if the heart of what I was trying to express was overshadowed by the aesthetics of eloquent language and universally relatable images. Recently, I wrote a sonnet as a part of an assessment where I had to reflect upon my own writing. I used the image of an unripe date in the first stanza and depicted its violet nectar. However, in my reflection I had to go out of my way to say: ‘My use of the colour ‘violet’ has no symbolic value – it is the literal colour of the unripe dates in my garden.’ Granted, it’s seldom that authors leave us with intricate roadmaps that guide us through the nuances of every image and technique used in their works – which is what makes decrypting ambiguous literature an enjoyable and stimulating challenge. But there are some days where I really wish they did, Poe with his array of colours being no exception.

Nicholas Ruddick insists that the chromatic imagery has no symbolic meaning whatsoever and that Poe employs to emulate Prospero’s insanity because the colours are discordant (Ibid., p. 60). Edward William Pitcher suggests that the colour scheme is tripartite representation of different aspects of life (blue and purple are associated with ‘divine truths’, green, orange and white for spring and violet with black unveiling the ‘facility in belief’ or death) (Ibid., p. 61). Patrick Cheney correlates the colour scheme with the Catholic liturgy, paralleling it with a ‘reversal of the Christian drama of resurrection’ and a ‘triumph’ over death by subverting theological doctrine (Ibid. p. 61) – which seems quite incongruous with the denouement in my opinion. As of now, I stand firmly behind Ruddick’s interpretation and will abstain from over-analysing the colours in The Masque of the Red Death.

Bibliography

Poe, E. A., 1842. The Masque of the Red Death – The Poe Museum. [Online]
Available at: https://www.poemuseum.org/the-masque-of-the-red-death
[Accessed 2021].

Zimmerman, B., 2009. The Puzzle of the Color Symbolism in “The Masque of the Red Death”: Solved at Last?. The Edgar Allan Poe Review, 10(No. 2), pp. 60-73.

Coming from a country where you hear horror stories about gay people being murdered by their domestic help or people within their own villages, you can imagine my limited contact with queer theory, queer art and the movement of resistance that came from generations of homophobia and hatred. Luckily, over the course of my degree in Comparative Literature, we came to study a striking film called Blue produced by Derek Jarman, which unveiled the complexities and immense struggle of an epidemic that was sitting right under my nose this whole time. Before touching upon the masterpiece that is Blue, I will delve into Philadelphia and 120 BPM, which are other works that grapple with HIV/AIDS.

Forget about Philadelphia.

Philadelphia, among other works that testify to the rampant homophobia that plagued (and still plagues) America, are integral to preserve because they give us proof of archaic attitudes towards homosexuality. And for me, that’s all Philadelphia ever really will be.

If you’re looking for a striking challenge to the Christian Anglo-American dogma that suggests that AIDS was a disease that came to plague homosexuals, something that subverts these homophobic attitudes altogether or a piece of art that exposes you to a glimpse of what it means to live with the obscenely painful disease, Philadelphia is not the film for you (Blue is). The film’s creators merely ‘ticked a box’ of political correctness and weren’t really invested in the cause; you’ll see this seep into elements of the film.

As Dr James Agar highlighted in his compelling criticism of the film, Philadelphia sub-textually re-enforces some of the attitudes that it seems to criticise, especially through these specific aspects of the film:

• By failing to display any instance of homosexuality, it reinforces the idea that gay people should remain covert and closeted.
• The ubiquitous images of babies reinforce the idea that homosexuals may not be able to have their own children and offer the promise of new generations that will not be homosexual and therefore will not contract HIV/AIDS.
• The final sequence, where Andrew Beckett is portrayed as a child holding a baseball mitt, is evocative of a very masculine American heterosexual archetype. Here, analepsis is used to scrutinise on a moment in time in which he was not homosexual and was considered an innocent, unworthy-of-the-disease, apple-pie-eating American (thanks for the inspo, Dr Agar). This characterisation of ‘innocence’ raises the binary opposite state for the grown-up Andy, who is culpable and tainted by his dark, ‘immoral’ sexual desires.

It becomes quite dangerous when subliminal messages are used to normalise prejudiced views, and this definitely isn’t a new phenomenon in the vein of HIV/AIDS-related media.

120 BPM

120 BPM, coming in nearly 3 decades after Philadelphia, does more for the movement than Philadelphia ever could and has won several accolades. Here are the points that struck me as the most pivotal:
• 120 BPM challenging heteronormativity by portraying homosexuality openly and graphically
• encapsulating the poignancy of losing a loved one to HIV/AIDS
• displaying the pain and heinous symptoms of the disease
• shedding light upon ACT UP Paris’ work and the radical action that the group has had to resort to in order to promote safe sex and pressurise the government to deal with the epidemic more seriously
• using its acoustics incredibly, from the loud whispers of the sequence where Nathan tells Sean about the boy he was once in love with, to the non-diegetic sounds that intensify the cheerleading sequence

My sole criticism would be the lack of intersectionality explored through the film in great depth, but this will be for other marginalised artists to show the world in the work that embodies their unique struggle.

Oh Blue, come forth.

Blue is a piece of ex-cinema, a film that orbits at the periphery, simultaneously being a part of but excluded from conventional cinema (Lippit, 2012). The only thing that you can observe visually in this film is a blue screen, an aesthetic choice that Jarman made to emulate his deteriorating sight, which was characterised by sporadic, blue flashes of light. This, along with the decay of the rest of his body, all stems from his contraction of HIV/AIDS.

By giving you little to focus on visually, Jarman takes you through an immersive journey using the striking power of sound, narrating the pain of the illness and taking you through instances where he contemplates the beauty of his life along with its melancholy. It can get quite dark when he creates a Dante-esque hell, wherein he envisions all of his ex-lovers perishing. A lot of the film is infused with a powerful sense of bereavement for all of the people that he lost to the disease and self-bereavement as he grapples with his own, imminent death.

In other instances, he creates a fictional entity called Blue who fights a strange antagonist called yellow belly (perhaps a manifestation of AIDS?). Mundane moments of the film, such as him drinking coffee, are punctuated by the fact that his coffee is served to him by refugees from the war raging in Bosnia. The narrator is deeply contemplative and a beautiful storyteller. Additionally, the voice of the principal narrator is just stunning. It’s this deep, masculine voice full of musical resonance with such eloquent intonations that you feel as if you wouldn’t need any other acousmatic sounds.

COVID-19 vs. AIDS – some xenophobia here, some homophobia there

It seems as if nations led by bigots will hop onto any opportunity to further marginalise their enemies, or frankly any threat to their power. Pandemics and epidemics are no exception to the trend. American advertisements called HIV/AIDS ‘gay cancer’ and created pseudo-medical advertisements to re-enforce the link between homosexuality and the virus, while Trump and other rightists called Covid-19 the ‘Chinavirus’ and Asians all across the globe became victims of hate crime. Although both instances seem like incredibly blatant cases of discrimination, some people might not see it. Or, they may be too afraid to challenge it because it’s widely accepted. Question, dismantle and counteract such rhetoric and beware of the more subtle embedding of prejudiced content – pseudo-academic accounts are often the most effective at spreading it because they create a veneer of reliability, like the image below:

VD vs. AIDS – recycling femme fatale narratives and spreading misogyny

During WWII, propaganda regarding venereal disease was used t o reduce promiscuity to prevent soldiers from contracting STIs. This came with vilification and abjection of the female body, somewhat like HIV/AIDS propaganda was used to vilify homosexuals and criticise sodomising. The parallelism between these two STIs raises the question of another central religious tenant – upholding one’s chastity, which pre-marital heterosexual and homosexual sex both violate. It seems as if this abused dogma surrounding chastity forks out in grotesque ways, resulting in immensely condemning narratives that bolster state agendas.

Blue-related films and readings:

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yo5BBifhS6M the whole film!!! Watch it before they take it off of YouTube! (Or watch it on BoB!)
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3jEer2d3nMg&t=584s the denouement of Blue: lost boys.
• https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/jarman-blue-t14555 background into the origin of the blue screen
• https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/90011646 some interesting secondary reading – some aspects of it however, especially with respect to the interpretation of the young boy, are highly problematic.

AIDS-related media from the 1980s:

• https://theconversation.com/aids-homophobic-and-moralistic-images-of-1980s-still-haunt-our-view-of-hiv-that-must-change-106580

Bibliography:

Lippit, A. M., 2012. EXCoo Exergue Ex-Cinema’. In: Ex-Cinema: From a Theory of Experimental Film and Video. Berkeley: Berkeley: University of California Press.

Within the context of today’s post, translingualism means “operating between different languages” (Canagarajah, 2017).

‘Crisis’ – translations and etymologies from my mother tongues

In her highly intriguing podcast, Dr Staiger invites us to explore the Greek etymology of the prolifically-used English word ‘crisis’ and then takes us through an array of languages in which a similar term exists. The French, Spanish, Italian and German words share the same Greek etymological root but diverge in slightly in meaning as they separate, absorb and extrapolate different meanings, or fragments, of the same root. Dr Staiger also invites us to observe the distinct nuances of the Hebrew word for crisis and the distinctions that come into the term as a result of a unique etymology. This inspired me to share the meanings and etymologies of my own mother tongues Urdu and Turkish.

Urdu is currently the lingua franca of Pakistan, which is home to 74 languages (66 indigenous and 8 non-indigenous) (Tayyab, 2019). The country is split into 4 concrete provinces and debatably more when considering disputed territories that fall within the Pakistan’s borders. The Urdu language’s origins can be traced to Delhi in the 12th century (Atlas, 2021), when the subcontinent was divided into different regions, but when partitions and modern-state borders did not exist. Although it was based primarily on the Hindi language, it was significantly shaped by Arabic, Persian and Turkish. This blend of languages leads us to the contemporary term for crisis:

The Arabic influence is not only clear in terms of modern Urdu typography but also in the etymologies of words; British translator and lexicographer Edward Lane (19th C) suggested that the term بُحران (Bohran) comes from the archaic Arabic البَاحُور‎ (al bahur), which means “expanding” or “widening” to the point of the furthest extremities (Lane, 1863). One can envision such ‘extremities’ as binary opposite poles on the same spectrum or an endless abyss of one form of ‘crisis’, culminating in the form of an extreme position. Given the strong presence of Islam in the conception of Pakistan and the influences of Islam upon Arabic (Dr Staiger explores similar parallels with Christianity) the ‘Day of Judgement’, or the Christian ‘Last Judgement’, could introduce apocalyptic connotations to the term, especially when considering the culmination or utmost extreme point of crisis.

As for my other mother tongue, I’ve chosen to delve less into the history of the Turkish language, even though it is quite rich, primarily because the language has existed for 5500 – 8500 years and can immediately be affiliated with the modern state of Turkey (even though the language stretches far beyond its borders as a result of Ottoman colonial legacy and even periods prior to that). The term ‘Turkish’ invokes less confusion to the foreign ear compared to Urdu, whose name does not immediately link us back to its modern state, or at least in the English language. The Turkish word for crisis is ‘kriz’ and is borrowed from the French ‘crise’. When Turkey was decreed as secular and a modified version of the Latin alphabet was adopted by the nation in 1928 (All About Turkey, 2021) as a result of Atatürk’s reforms, several words from French and Italian were interwoven into Modern Turkish to linguistically echo Turkey’s new secular foundation. In Ottoman Turkish, the word بحران (buhran) was used, which is essentially the word that is used in Urdu today (Canagarajah, 2017).

Further Reading:

The history of the Turkish language: http://www.turkishculture.org/literature/language-124.htm#:~:text=Turkish%20is%20a%20very%20ancient,it%20possesses%20a%20rich%20vocabulary.

Bibliography

All About Turkey, 2021. Ataturk’s Reforms. [Online]

Available at: https://www.allaboutturkey.com/ataturk-reforms.html
[Accessed 2021].

Atlas, 2021. Urdu Language – history and development. [Online]
Available at: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/atlas/urdu/language.html#:~:text=Urdu%20started%20developing%20in%20north,Persian%2C%20as%20well%20as%20Turkish.&text=During%20the%2014th%20and%2015th,to%20be%20written%20in%20Urdu.
[Accessed 2021].

Canagarajah, S., 2017. Translingual Practice as Spatial Repertoires: Expanding the Paradigm beyond Structuralist Orientations. [Online]
Available at: https://academic.oup.com/applij/article/39/1/31/4626948
[Accessed 2021].

Lane, E. W., 1863. Arabic-English Lexicon. [Online]
Available at: https://archive.org/details/ArabicEnglishLexicon.CopiousEasternSources.EnlargedSuppl.Kamoos.Lane.Poole.1863/01.ArabicEnglLex.v1p1.let.1.2.3.4..Alif.Ba.Ta.Tha..Lane.1863./page/n192/mode/1up?view=theater
[Accessed 2021].

Tayyab, A., 2019. How Many Languages Are Spoken in Pakistan. [Online]
Available at: https://www.samaa.tv/culture/2019/02/how-many-languages-are-spoken-in-pakistan/
[Accessed 2021].

Not So Fun Facts About ‘The Plague’ Today

1. It’s still rampant in Madagascar

The country regularly faces outbreaks, and its most notable outbreak wasn’t too long ago (2017). 2,348 people were infected and 202 were killed. Carriers of the pathogen occasionally misconstrue symptoms of the plague with those of malaria (a disease which is not contagious by human transmission) and therefore do not isolate, which leads to the propagation of the disease (Chodosh, 2018).

2. The bacteria that caused the plague (Yersinia pestis) was nearly used as a biochemical weapon during the Cold War.

Both the USA and USSR contemplated using Y. pestis as a part of bioterrorism. The Soviet Union gathered enough research to determine that 50 kg of the aerosolized pathogen could begin an epidemic that would infect 150,000 people within a city of 5 million inhabitants (Ibid, 2018).

3. Dung and urine prescribed remedies in the Middle Ages

This is one of the many experimental treatments that doctors resorted to when they were unable to identify a remedy that would actually work. Some doctors believed that unpleasant smells could drive the plague away, which is why they resorted to using human faeces and unpleasant excretion products (Facts Chief, 2015).

However, this is incongruous with other anecdotal evidence from the era. Impure air, tainted by the scent of rotting corpses, fruit and vegetables, as thought to induce poor health and subsequently produce maladies. What we now call aromatherapy was used to treat patients of the plague (M. L. Duran Reynals, 1949, p. 75).

Miscellaneous Snippets of History

Etymology of ‘Pestilence’

The Black Death was referred to as the Pestilence or the Great Mortality (Facts Chief, 2015). During the Middge Ages, the term was defined as: “a time of tempest” induced by the “light from the stars’. Pes (the first syllable) was derived from tempesta, te (second syllable) from temps (time) and lencia (third syllable) from lencia from the Greek lencos (which translated to brightness or light) (M. L. Duran Reynals, 1949, p. 63).

Unique Symptoms

A few anomalous symptoms, dictated by region, as a result of the plague among other maladies:
• Kingdom of Valencia – anthrax (AKA “the vulgar tongue of Catalonia”)
• Germany – abscesses
• Sabartes – goitre (swelling of the neck resulting from an enlarged thyroid gland, typically caused by iodine deficiency)
• Lombardy – women giving birth to monkeys
• France – deformed female babies (Ibid., 1949, p. 63)

The Four Humours and Medieval Alchemy

The word humour stems from the Latin humor (moisture), which is why blood, phlegm, yellow bile (or “choler”) and black bile (called “melancholy”) were referred to as the Four Humours. According to medieval alchemy, an individual’s personality traits, health and complexion were dictated by the balance of these four liquids within them and every individual on earth possessed the Four Humours. The ideal or ‘balanced’ human being had an equilibrium of the four substances. An excess of one or more of the four humours was considered the source of illness and diagnosticians performed treatments to reinstate balance. (Miller, 2014) Drawing upon Carol Symes’ criticism of the way that readers dismiss Medieval practitioners as ignorant or primitive, an important part of decrypting literature, medical archives, art or any remnant of history is to attempt to remain neutral and to stray from one’s contemporary lens to allow oneself to live vicariously through the voices of the deceased that live within the extracts we analyse. (Symes, 2014)

When in Doubt… Become Pious

Within a Medieval context, for the religious, a plague or natural disaster would have been attributed to mankind displeasing God. The Bianchi, among other Christians, did not wallow in self-loathing or feel disabled by the omens – instead, they demonstrated proactivity and began repenting and worshiping zealously, partaking in processions, antiphonal singing, self-flagellation and emulating Christ (Imitatio Christi). (Jansen, 2018) Amidst crises, it is intriguing to observe the way in which mankind finds autonomy and tries to remain in charge of the catastrophe in which it is placed.

Bibliography

Chodosh, S., 2018. Five things you might not know about the plague (not including the fact that it still exists). [Online]
Available at: https://www.popsci.com/bubonic-plague-black-death-modern-facts/
[Accessed 2021].

Facts Chief, 2015. Black Death Facts. [Online]
Available at: https://facts.net/history/historical-events/black-death-facts
[Accessed 2021].

Jansen, K. L., 2018. Preaching, Penance, and Peacemaking in the Age of the Commune. In: Peace and Penance in Late Medieval Italy. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

M. L. Duran Reynals, C. E. A. W., 1949. Regiment de Preserv Acio a Epidimia o Pestilencia e Mortaldats. Bulletin of the History of Medicine, Volume 23, pp. 57-89.

Miller, M. J., 2014. The Four Humors and the Integrated Universe: A Medieval World View. [Online]
Available at: https://owlcation.com/humanities/The-Four-Humors#:~:text=As%20mentioned%20above%2C%20these%20four,the%20attributes%20of%20these%20humors.
[Accessed 2021].

Symes, C., 2014. Introducing The Medieval Globe. The Medieval Globe, Volume 1.

Economic failure

As the letters of London merchant John Paige (1648-58) pointed out, pathogens transmitted themselves through international trade, which caused epidemics to gradually spread across the globe. (Paige, 1984) As a result of this, in addition to the disruption in supply chain labour as more and more people contracted the disease, trade would come to a standstill, leading to a surge in commodity prices. The sharp rise in specific commodities today, from precious metals to fertilizers (World Bank Group, 2020), and the detrimental impact upon citizens of countries that are heavily dependent on imports, highlights our failure to reshape the global economy to stay afloat in the midst of crises. For developing nations like my home country Pakistan, state debt and our excessive reliance on imports doomed the poorest civilians of our nations and pummelled our currency substantially. With the deprecation of the rupee, it has become obscenely more difficult for more people to keep up with price inflations and meet regular payments.

Anacardina Espiritual – history really does repeat itself

‘Sad laments’ and ‘cries of pain’ ensued after the prices of loaves of bread rose to unbearable feats (Serrano de Vargas y Ureña, 1650). All pandemics are marked by the exacerbation of pre-existing socio-economic disparity, as we’ve seen through our encounters with Medieval English and Spanish literature, as well as contemporary sources.

While the death of ‘notable people’ (Serrano de Vargas y Ureña, 1650) made the contagion seem more tangible in Málaga in the 1600s, we observed the same phenomenon in the 21^st century when figures like veteran actor Tom Hanks or North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un contracted Covid-19.

What do HIV/AIDS, the plague and Covid-19 all have in common?

They’re all zoonoses (a term we’re all familiar with now because we’ve all become epidemiology experts during this pandemic).

The plague: rodent/flea –> human

Influenza: pig à human –> bird à human

HIV/AIDS: chimpanzees –> human

Covid-19: bat à pangolin à human

A deeper explanation of zoonoses and how atrocious farming practices, like cramping animals into tiny cages where they can expel urine and faeces on top of one another, can really mess things up: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TPpoJGYlW54

But what even is a pangolin?

A scaly ant eater.

Bibliography

Paige, J., 1984. The Letters of John Paige – Letters: 1649. [Online]
Available at: https://www.british-history.ac.uk/london-record-soc/vol21/pp1-8
[Accessed 2021].

Serrano de Vargas y Ureña, J., 1650. Espiritual, Anacardina. [Online]
Available at: https://moodle.ucl.ac.uk/pluginfile.php/3799508/mod_resource/content/2/Anacardina%20translation%20and%20transcription.pdf
[Accessed 2021].

World Bank Group, 2020. Commodity Markets Outlook. [Online]
Available at: https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/bitstream/handle/10986/34621/CMO-October-2020.pdf
[Accessed February 2021].

When the pandemic first emerged, I observed the resuscitation of verses of scripture floating around Twitter, particularly depicting the Holy Prophet’s mannerisms during the bubonic plague; records of how he maintained his hygiene and kept his composure amidst the flurry of mayhem resurfaced, offering a model for us to emulate.

Others within religious communities posited that the virus had surfaced to admonish mankind – we were so consumed with our own lives and individual struggles that we had become acquiescent towards the evils that were consuming the world: of the decay of nature, of the humanitarian crises that had become mundane headlines, of the oppression of innocuous people.

I firmly agree with Mcloughlin’s highlighting of the idea that mankind once, and still does, rely on God as a pillar of ‘crisis management’ and propels the spiritually connected to conduct an internal synthesis to deduce the wider meaning of mass-scale events like this pandemic. I find it even more intriguing that the Ancient Greek etymological root of the word ‘crisis’ lends itself to many definitions, including that of ‘measuring oneself’, which offers the notion of introspection. On a micro-level the pandemic has given those of us that had become too absorbed in the urban bustle and constant bombardment of superficial goals and activities time to sit beside ourselves, to contemplate and to assess our characters. In these moments of solitude, we have had time to distance ourselves from the obligations of work (at least initially), detach from technology momentarily and question our purpose on Earth. Some of us have suffered from great loss, coming to grips with the transience of our lives. But have we now come to value our finite time on Earth more? Have we drawn ourselves closer to our ‘true purpose’? Have we finally understood the virtue of patience in a world marked by instant gratification?

This pandemic has been the most existential one yet, further characterised by fifth generation warfare, rapid subliminal messaging, economic chaos, political agendas and civil disunity, and, as Caduff very rightly highlights, the exacerbation of inequality. This pandemic poses its own unique dilemmas but also offers certain privileges that exist by the virtue of time and generation (at least for some of us). Previously, there was no sufficient technology or infrastructure that could prop up a hospital in the span of 10 days. There were no means of circulating anecdotes or sharing news about medical breakthroughs in the span of seconds and there certainly wasn’t faith that that teams of researchers would be able to pull through with a vaccine within a relatively quick timeframe of 12-18months. While this certainly hasn’t been the most devastating epidemic, we can observe more nuanced problems within our particular socio-economic bubble, such as the restlessness of being trapped alone within an apartment, resorting to starting at a screen for solace at the expense of human contact.

Personally, I have experienced waves of anxiety and harmony, transacting simultaneously within me. I have come to appreciate the frailty – both physically and mentally – of humankind in the midst of this pandemonium. But with the promise of great chaos, comes the promise for great opportunity – that has been one of my sources of solace

Further Reading:

https://www.trtworld.com/magazine/what-islam-tells-us-about-responding-to-deadly-pandemics-35441#:~:text=%E2%80%9CWhen%20you%20hear%20that%20%5Ba,the%20principle%20of%20modern%20quarantine.