English 145 / Nineteenth Century British Novel

A question that the ending of Never Let Me Go seems to be asking, in my opinion, is what kind of empathies can be legitimate. Particularly, we have talked about how The Lifted Veil is a tale of someone who suffers from “too much empathy” in the form of mind-reading. The idea of reading minds also appears in the ending of NLMG. Madame calls Kathy a “a mind-reader” and they talk about the time that Madame saw Kathy dancing around while listening to “Never Let Me Go” (270). Madame, on the other hand, does not possess this same ability. She says to Kathy “You read my mind. But I cannot read yours,” which seems initially to simply refer to the fact that Madame may not remember the details of the event that Kathy is talking about. However, there is a subtext of empathy here as well. Madame goes to great lengths in order to try and demonstrate the clone children have souls. This question of souls would seem to determine whether they are capable of and worthy of empathy from normal humans. The book seems to argue that they are, via the love that we see blossom between Kathy and Tommy, but Madame seems to implicitly argue the same thing. After all, she determines that Kathy is able to read her mind. What’s more, Madame says that in Kathy she saw “a little girl, dancing… so very sympathetically” (271). Sympathy and empathy are different things and Madame seems to be aware of this distinction, but the sympathy is driven by what she thinks a little girl is feeling on the inside. That requires a fundamental empathy, even if Madame is reluctant to admit it.

At a young age, children of Hailsham are exposed to themes revolving around mortality and death. Ruth makes it a mission to save Miss Geraldine from abduction, meanwhile, others are delighted by ‘horror’ stories of dead bodies found in the woods or even the possibility of committing suicide by touching the electric fence. The eerie part about it all is how unmoved the children seem to be when discussing these things. However, Hailsham intentionally practices this social conditioning to trivialize discussions of existing and dying in order to continue their mission at Hailsham. They groom these students from a young age up until adulthood to believe and accept their fate about the purpose of their existence. It is starting to become full circle as to why Hailsham keeps students isolated from other forms of civilization. Miss Lucy explicitly reveals what specifically donations are after she is fed up with students daydreaming about becoming actors, “Your lives are set out for you. You’ll become adults, then before you’re old, before you’re even middle-aged, you’ll start to donate your vital organs. That’s what each of you were created to do” (Ishiguro 81). Hailsham seems to be running an institution that prepares and normalizes students on the idea of death. What they were “created to do” is received much different than what they were “born” to do. Miss Lucy articulates this in a very chronological and orderly manner, giving us the sense that it is a process that comes with a beginning and end. There are no attachments, no sense of desire, or any room for an alternative way of living. Following Miss Lucy’s outbreak, the students simply respond, “Well so what? We already knew all that” (82). Hailsham’s curriculum has socially conditioned students to believe that being a vessel for harvesting vital organs is normal. Thus, when Kathy shares “But that had been Miss Lucy’s point exactly. We’d been “told and not told,” as she’d put it” (82) she means, “what is not told” is the fact that it is not normal.

I won’t lie and say that I didn’t begrudge Professor Hensley the tiniest bit when I found out that we were doing this remediation as our final assignment rather than another essay.  I get essays.  The prompt tells me exactly what’s being asked of me, I understand how much to write down, and I can gauge pretty well if I’ve written something worthwhile.  So when I saw that we were being asked to get creative, I felt as if Prof. Hensley were asking me to submit something artistic to the Gallery (and there was no Miss Lucy telling me it was alright if I didn’t want to do it.)

When I got back from class and was feeling sorry for myself for lacking any creative blood, I found a small black notebook in my desk like the one Tommy uses for his animal drawings, and thought it might be an interesting exercise (as someone who, like Tommy, has some limitations when it comes to creativity) to try and recreate his animal drawings.

My exercise is primarily pulled from pages 187 and 188, when Kathy is seeing Tommy’s drawings for the first time.  His drawings are described as incredibly detailed, with metallic features, at once busy and vulnerable. I wanted to see what it was like to spend so much time on these small details, and see how I then might connect to both the drawings and Tommy.  I think one of the best aspects of this book is its characterization – by the end, I felt like I knew the characters more intimately than those in most novels I’ve read – and I’ve really connected to Tommy, like most everyone in the class has.  But I thought that through emulating the practice that he devotes so much of his time to, I might be able to know him better, beyond just from what I hear through Kathy’s perspective and the book itself.

And, just like Tommy, I did feel a little silly drawing these animals (I think anyone would, when you’re cubed up in Lau, watching everyone watching you draw an armadillo for an hour and 15 minutes.)  The more time I spent on a drawing, the closer I felt to it and to Tommy, but I also felt pretty self-conscious showing them to people because they saw how much time I was putting into them, and saw that I was pretty invested in them – I imagine Tommy felt the same way.  

After working on these drawings, I realize Tommy’s would prove more than anything else in the gallery that the students have a soul, especially because he continued to work on them after finding out there was no chance of a deferral.  His animals are vulnerable, and meaningful, and I’m happy that I have a few of my own now (uploaded are a couple examples.)

Source Text: Jane Eyre

For this exercise, I chose the scene in Jane Eyreduring which Jane grapples with her tendency to prioritize her emotional intuitions over her voice of reason. Commanding herself to craft two portraits – one of herself alongside one of Blanche Ingram – Jane employs her art as a means of self-criticism as she accentuates stark differences between herself and Blanche. Glimpsing the internal conversation Jane embarks upon, readers hear Jane praise Blanche’s perfect, ivory-like features, dismissing her own as unremarkable, and perhaps even grotesque. This entire practice is meant to be an exercise in self-discipline as Jane attempts to end her fantasies of life and love with Rochester – a man she perceives as being far beyond her reach and status. In the end, she finds some solace in this activity, and vows to compare the two finished portraits whenever she needs reminding of her own inadequacy. Because this scene takes up around two pages of the novel, I have provided the page numbers instead of fully copying the scene out: pages 185-186.

Remediation:

Explanation:

Translating one of Jane Eyre’s most memorable moments of self-deprecation and artistry into a Tumblr post filled with sorrow and angst was both extremely enjoyable and a challenge. Attempting to master the emo-esque style for which Tumblr is notorious while retaining the integrity of Jane’s sentiments and stern nature, I found myself wrestling with what point of view I wanted to utilize in order to make the post feel both organic and modern, as well as how to craft a message that concisely summed up Jane’s internal dialogue without phrasing the post as solely introspective. Additionally, I found myself struggling to decide how to portray the portraits Jane creates in a modern, yet authentic fashion.

By choosing the medium of social media, the dynamic of this scene automatically shifts. Engrossed in this scene from the perspective of the novel, one is exposed to explicit dialogue within Jane’s own mind. One is in tune with both the authoritative version of Jane for whom the desire to discipline herself is paramount, and the version of herself who is struggling to check her own emotions and perceptions regarding Rochester. The war between these two pieces of Jane is captured clearly and seemingly fully by the scope of the novel and the style of first person narration which appears to lower all of Jane’s walls as she recounts the thought patterns flying through her head and heart. However, when translated to a public platform outside the confines of Jane’s own mind, this introspective conversation must be mediated differently, as internal dialogue is not typically spelled out explicitly by someone’s online postings. Instead, friends and followers must piece together an individual’s internal state from a series of clues – a change which makes the job of the reader a bit more difficult and interpretive.

It is for this reason that I chose to phrase the post in a conversational manner, as if Jane is talking to her followers and reminding them of their worthlessness. While harsh and extremely sorrowful, this style of writing more closely captures the spiritof a social media platform like Tumblr. While revealing her own struggles, the Tumblr platform allows Jane to have a conversation with herself in a way that feels organic and relatable to any followers who are feeling similar sentiments, as her internal crisis is coded in a projection of her emotional state onto her readers. Remaining both inquisitive and demanding in this style, Jane seems to be calling out to her readers for validation, as well as commanding them to see reason over emotion every time – advice that is, in reality, merely a coded message for herself. Expressing this in all lower case letters was meant to add to the dramatic, emo-like expression of internal turmoil which is characteristic of Tumblr. Additionally, I aimed to make Jane’s remarks genuine to her, but also a bit more edgy than expressed in novel form, reflecting the shape they might of taken in today’s age and thus better reflecting the style Tumblr often takes.

Aside from wrestling with how to craft Jane’s post itself, I struggled with how to accurately portrays Jane’s portraits of herself and Blanche Ingram. I felt as though having two separate images alongside one another, while more closely demonstrating the actual plot of the novel, would not convey the gravity and strangeness of Jane’s illustrative endeavor. Reading the novel, one is allowed to imagine what each portrait would look like, and while strange, Jane’s actions don’t seem as absurd. I feared that, in translating the scene to Tumblr, portraying two disjointed images would not convey the message of comparison and looming sadness that was felt in the novel. For this reason, I decided to craft one image, with Jane portrayed as a dark entity with a stern facial expression, with Blanche Ingram’s ringlets and ivory skin shining in front of her. To me, this image conveyed the looming sense of Blanche’s superiority which Jane feels, and better fit the Tumblr model as it had one dramatic image with an emotionally intense sentiment expressed below it. While losing the integrity of having two separate portraits, I almost feel that having one image with a hazy, yet illuminate Blanche Ingram shining over Jane paints a clearer image for readers of Jane’s sentiments – she will always be in Blanche Ingram’s shadow, and she must abandon hope of ever escaping. This image is, to me, a more visceral reminder of Jane’s relegation to the background as she watches the relationship form between Blanche Ingram and Mr. Rochester, providing a clarity of message which I find more compelling than the image of two portraits I experienced reading the novel form.

Siddhartha, by Herman Hesse

From Among the Samanas:

“Siddhartha stood silent in the vertical blaze of the sun, burning with thirst, and he stood till he felt no pain or thirst. He stood silent in the rainy season, the water dripping from his hair, over freezing hips and legs, and the penitent stood until his legs and shoulders were no longer freezing, until they fell silent, until they were still. Silently he crouched in the twisting brambles, the blood dripping from his burning skin, the pus from abscesses, and Siddhartha lingered rigid, lingered motionless until no more blood flowed, until nothing more pricked, until nothing more burned.” (Hesse, 14)

For my remediation exercise, I decided to turn a vivid passage from Siddhartha by Herman Hesse into an interpretive Snapchat. Such a medium has two very important features to it. The first is that it contains a photo, and the second is that you can draw on it. However, that drawing is strikingly different in quality from whatever the image is a picture of. This gap between the real and the artificial elements of the image itself seemed so unbridgeable to me that I decided it would be ridiculous to attempt to do anything other than lean into that distinction. That means that for my actual photo, the only real things in question were me and a makeshift robe. Most of the photo, then, is drawn in. It is significant that the possible quality of that drawing is low. To me, that low quality seems to lean into abstraction. Things that are drawn in are not exactly serious physical elements of the world, nor are they invisible. Instead, they occupy a place in between physical and non-existent. This role is not one that they explicitly play in the text. The sun, the rain, the blood—those are all as real as Siddhartha himself in Hesse’s prose. Due to the fact that I was not looking to recreate the media experience of a movie but less good, I veered away from that.

By drawing in most of the photo’s detail in an obviously artificial fashion, the metaphorical nature of those details is emphasized and the physical nature of them is rendered far less significant. This also helped me address another important issue in translating this paragraph, which is that of temporality. The written paragraph covers an unquantified but clearly significant amount of time, which a photo cannot do on face value. Instead, I compressed all of that time into one instant, which is juxtaposed with unfeeling asceticism. In the novel, the hot sun and the freezing rain and the thorny brambles seem to happen in succession, each a trial for Siddhartha to overcome. In this interpretive Snapchat, these trials all coexist in a way that rather emphasizes Siddhartha’s ability to overcome to depths of the range of human suffering. To me, this seems to emphasize his own ascetic triumph rather than the procedural nature of his suffering. Due to this difference, I actually sort of prefer this representation just to represent Siddhartha’s asceticism.

Overall, I think that it is clear that the interpretive Snapchat is not going to edge out the place of the novel anytime soon. While a fun and somewhat silly way to get another representation of a passage full of vivid imagery, Siddhartha’s ascetic triumph is much better understood with the power of narration in addition to some bad drawings. The passage does a very good job of showing Siddhartha unchanging in the face of many changing trials, while my interpretive Snapchat instead seems to perhaps show Siddhartha undergoing an apocalypse. The symbolic power of each of those ideas would be meaningful in the story itself, but the control that a novel lends the author over its world is extremely powerful. Where images such as this one can hint at the passage of time within them, a novel has ultimate control in a way that cannot be beaten in this case.

Quotation comes from:

Hesse, Hermann. Siddhartha. Penguin Books, 1999.

Source Text: The Lifted Veil
“I believe I was held to have a sort of half-womanish, half-ghostly beauty; for the portrait-painters, who are thick as weeds at Geneva, had often asked me to sit to them, and I had been the model of a dying minstrel in a fancy picture” (Eliot 14).

Destination Medium: Water Color Portrait

Translation:

Within The Lifted Veil, Latimer is a vivid narrator. I disliked his voice at first, but then came to enjoy it after rereading the novel. Latimer goes to great lengths to describe scenery and works of his imagination and descriptions of other people. For instance, Bertha is described as a slim, fair-haired girl with a mischievous/untrustworthy face (Eliot 29). However, Latimer rarely even describes himself in such detail. When Latimer does come to describe himself, he is extremely critical, either briefly describing his disappointing character or his unsatisfactory appearance: “…I thoroughly disliked my own physique…” (Eliot 14). Eliot’s writing allows the audience to experience Latimer’s interiority; thus, the audience can imagine what kind of personality Latimer has, but because Latimer does not describe his features with great detail, the audience may have drastically different interpretations of Latimer’s appearance.

I was especially curious as to how he would look. I wanted to put a face to the narrator of the novel. Like most people, whenever I read, I always interpret the words on the page into images and scenes in my head.

Within this scene, I wanted to assume the role of the portrait-painter and try and paint what I imagine Latimer to look like as a “dying minstrel”. Taking something that came from someone else’s creative thinking and rendering it to suit your imagination can be really difficult because the imagined result is always different from the actual.

As an art enthusiast, I thought it would be interesting to assume the role of an artist. I sketched several thumbnail drawings to determine what the final pose and look for Latimer should be. This thumbnail drawing was transferred to a larger sheet of paper and that sketch was then transferred to watercolor paper. Finally, the sketch was lined and colored. It was a very tedious process. The imagined Latimer ended up being different from the actual drawing because I wasn’t skilled enough to create the former. I had a difficult time trying to reconcile with this fact because the final product turned out so different from my initially imagined one. I don’t think Latimer looks dead enough.

As for the features I ended up choosing, to me, Latimer seemed as if he would have brown hair. There are definitely implicit associations about hair color and personality types that played into this decision-making calculus. I associated brown hair with a gentle/passive nature. In addition, because he is so taken with Bertha’s light-colored hair, I assumed that he himself did not have that type of hair. The audience is told that Bertha has green eyes, but Latimer never affirms his own eye color. Blue eyes are often described as piercingly cold and supernatural, so I gave Latimer blue eyes because I believed his ability to penetrate others’ veils gave him a mystical, other-worldly quality. As for his outfit, I looked at several google images of minstrels for inspiration and just made up what I thought would be appropriate. I chose navy and gold for the outfit because I thought it would match with his brown hair and blue eyes.

I think art provides a physically visual representation of what novels accomplish through activating one’s imagination. It draws the audience’s attention immediately by striking their sense of view. Especially with art drawn from a preexisting source, it provides a window not only into the artist’s point of view but also opens one up in the audience’s minds when they start making comparisons. On the other hand, whereas with novels, the audience must read first, then process those words, before finally interpreting those words by rendering them with our imaginations. This process is especially intimate with the reader and is private. Art, unless it never sees the light of day, is mostly made with the intent to show others. The audience can see the artist’s work and their interpretations and processes.

“When Tess had changed her bonnet for a hood, and was really on her stool under the cow, and the milk was squirting from her fists into the pail, she appeared to feel that she really laid a new foundation for her future. The conviction bred serenity, her pulse slowed, and she was able to look about her….After Tess had settled down to her cow there was for a time no talk in the barton, and not a sound interfered with the purr of the milk-jets into the numerous pails….the only movements were those of the milkers’ hands up and down, and the swing of the cows’ tails. Thus they all worked on, encompassed by the vast flat mead which extended to either slope of the valley” (Hardy 108).

I translated the first moments after Tess’ arrival at Farmer Crick’s dairy when she sits on the milking stool and begins to lay “a new foundation for her future” (Hardy 108). In this introduction before Tess meets Angel, she exists in a liminal space situated between a childbearing past and maiden-like future. It is within this space that Tess adopts a new persona as a milkmaid: an occupation that aids in the economization of the natural. I was struck by the parallels between the commodification of motherhood in the mass production of milk, and the commodification of Tess and her baby in the patriarchal system of sexual exploitation. As Tess settles down with her pail and a pair of udders, she is greeted by a creature who has experienced comparable exploitation of fertility and maternity. Surrounded by the Eden-like land of Wessex, both the cow and Tess must work within a system that demands their consent and yet simultaneously objectifies their very nature.

I wanted to illustrate such themes as they culminate in this passage to produce an alliance of sorts between Tess and these cows. When I initially read this section, I saw Tess amongst a herd of milkmaids as they worked through a pasture of cows, each sitting on her three-legged stools and milking to the rhythm of milk-jets and swishing cow tails. Yet because the staged or literal imagery of scenes was enacted in my mind as I read the novel, I wanted to translate this piece into a more symbolic depiction that complicates the straightforward visual consumption found in movies or theater. The novel form does not directly offer this in its words, but indirectly through the mental processing of Hardy’s message can I piece together phrases and imagery into a cohesive scene. Instead of staging the scene exactly as it was portrayed in the novel, I decided to explore the aforementioned concepts with a kind of symbolic representation. Symbolism in imagery gains a direct connection with the eyes that language in a novel does not offer. I wanted to group Tess and the cows in a way that the novel does not by underscoring their trapped positions in a perpetual cycle of exploitation. As Hardy largely focuses on the physicality of Tess’ new surroundings, the language of the novel cannot afford to delve beneath the surface of the milkmaids’ actions at this moment without losing the hopeful momentum of Tess’ burgeoning future. Yet the medium of painting captures Tess in a single moment of the maid’s busy milking and allowed me to examine her relationship to her fading past, the future upon whose precipice she stands, and the cow with which she sits. It is the latter that I wanted to focus in the center of the painting where both Tess and this cow find themselves in a milk jug: a cage that perpetually demands subjugation to larger powers of economic progress and gender hierarchy. The staging of this moment and the visual presence of their closeness is virtually inaccessible to narrative mediums in the novel. However, I found that the cohesion of this scene and the narrative-driven movement are lost in this translation into painting. Because we can only peer into a single moment of this passage, the rest is lost to this medium unless its themes are pulled into the symbols. The symbolic imagery of the baby and the jug are inherently imbued with thematic and ideological meaning that do not appear as clearly in the novel source, nor even in the mental imagery produced by the reading of this scene.

Most of our “evidence” came from witnessing the conspirators at work. One morning, for instance, we watched them from a second floor classroom Miss Eileen and Mr. Roger talking to Miss Geraldine down the courtyard. After a while Miss Geraldine said goodbye and went off toward the Orangery, but we kept on watching, and saw Miss Eileen and Mr. Roger put their heads closer together to confer furtively, their gazes fixed on Miss Geraldine’s receding figure. (Ishiguro 51)

When I think about translating texts to a different medium, I think about how to make the piece easier to understand. How I visualize and conceptualize any topic is by turning it into an internet “meme.” Internet memes, usually pictures or short clips/videos, are widely used on social media platforms to best and accurately reflect one’s reaction. The challenges that come with using “memes” are that some may incomprehensible without understanding the context behind the original content of the video/picture. Therefore, understanding the content after it has been translated into a meme is difficult. For example, a popular TV series, “Game of Thrones,” has re-aired and social media platforms like Twitter are full of “Game of Thrones” memes. These memes express viewers’ reactions and recreated versions of scenes are used as another form of reactions. Internet users who are fans of both Twitter and Game of Thrones use a variety of pictures/videos consistently used overtime to create a meme for their reaction and “meme’d” version of a specific scene to broadcast their perspective. However, Twitter users who do not watch “Game of Thrones” may view these memes in two ways: (1) either they understand scenes from Game of Thrones, without having to watch an episode because they understand the meme that is contextually used, or they absolutely have no idea what is going on because they do not understand the memes in addition to the content it presents itself in.

The translation of taking specific content and making it into another medium reaches a greater audience with the purpose of making it more enjoyable and to be more easily understood. The textual scene I chose references Kathy explaining how devout the “secret guards” are protecting Miss Geraldine. From reading the text itself, we understand a couple of things:  (1) Ruth is passionate about the organization of secret guards and their mission, and (2) secret guards are faithfully doing their job to protect Miss Geraldine from being kidnapped. This type of reading alone is leaves room for imagination in terms of what the setting, time, place, and characters look like. However, it is limited to orderly and strict syntactical structures. In other words, textual mediums follow rules that are restrictive to how content is received and understood.

When translating into a form of a meme, there are no rules or limitations to recreation. My meme shows three people with different expressions, actions, and labels, but all related to the novel. Just like there are different categories that separate one thing from another, there are different memes used in different contexts. Memes that use the picture I specifically chose, have a different purpose and therefore, belong in a different “genre” of memes. In this meme, labels act in lieu of the actual subject and are added purposefully (usually to hint at a specific action), and freely in the picture to recreate the source text. Despite the simplicity of memes, only so much can be understood from the translated medium. Firstly, unlike the text, the amount of room for imagination is limited when another visual representation of the text is presented. The characters labelled as Ruth, Miss Geraldine, and Miss Eileen and Mr. Roger now have a face to them after looking at the meme, exposing ourselves to an alternative image of the characters. Secondly, if the viewer has not read the original source text prior to looking at this picture, nor understood the function of the meme, the translated medium failed to serve its purpose. If the meme itself was understood in context separate from the text, then perhaps the viewer would be able to receive some message the creator intended to recreate. “Ruth” is labelled as the woman who seems to be protecting or defending a man labelled as Miss “Geraldine” from another woman labelled as both “Miss Eileen and Mr. Rogers.” Deciphering the meme without reading the text would translate the scene to look like two subjects are in opposition to the other two. In this case, Ruth seems to be defending Miss Geraldine from Miss Eileen and Mr. Roger because the meme, separate from the text, is understood to function this way. Ultimately, meme cut straight to the point which demonstrated how Kathy describes how devoted Ruth is when protecting Miss Geraldine from conspirators like Miss Eileen and Mr. Roger.