Creative minds are on strike this month with writers and Broadway hands hitting the picket lines. The world goes into rerun mode, so hey, let’s follow the fold! The old spamguy blog at Blog-City implodes in about a month, so I’ll fish out the best postings from the archives. Using WordPress’ ‘Import’ feature would be nice, but either Blog-City doesn’t know XML from a wart on its hand, or WordPress can’t parse it any better than a toddler.
This post, ‘How to Write English Papers Without Really Trying,’ was written March 20, 2004:
For all you high school juniors and seniors, AP English tests are coming up in a month or two! Even after entire English classes training you for one class, I never felt like I was writing satisfactorily. In Ms Adams’ junior English class, I never got an essay score above 90 (89 was my max). And thus the flaw of all English courses was exposed: if you can’t write, you can’t write. Improvement is a futile and fruitless process.
Bullshit, I said. After much ruminating following my 3 on AP Lit (thank god it doesn’t count for any course at CWRU anyway), I made a startling discovery: all analyses are the same. Thinking outside the box is a forbidden quality in the competitive world of brown-nosing postmodern (and even pre-postmodern) nonsense. To succeed, you must gain the acceptance of your peers. To gain acceptance, you must write like them. The central question now became not ‘How do I write?’, but ‘How do I rephrase what’s already been said?’ From there, seeing the patterns across the English major universe was easy. I shall dispense my observations. Including them in every essay you write will guarantee you a Rhodes Scholar award soon.
1. Everyone symbolises Jesus Christ. All characters have some characteristics that resemble The Messiah. Like the rest of English criticism, it is just a matter of picking out those characteristics and turning a blind eye to those that don’t agree with your assertion. Take, for example, this thesis on Crime and Punishment:
Through alliteration, symbolism, and dichotomies of love and hate, Rodion Raskolnikov’s murder parallels Jesus Christ in his constant introspection and musing over the meaning of existence.
An important question often comes up after hearing this: ‘If everyone represents Jesus,’ you ask, ‘won’t [my book] have nothing but Jesuses (Jesii?) in it?’ A catch indeed, but it can easily be circumvented. One possibility is simply to choose one Jesus per book. For the danger lovers, bring more into the mix. After discussing Jesus #1, move on to Jesus #2, #3, etc. To be an effective comparison, The leap must be between foil or protagonist/antagonist characters.
Some books are not so clear cut. Never stretch the truth, as graders are taught to recognise that. It is instead best to reinterpret what is given to you. Try associating common words to make this work. That is what I did in the above example. Raskolnikov murdered, and Jesus was murdered. From that, mortal sin is the common ground between the two. Ta-da! In most cases this will not be necessary; the similarity will be obvious. Oskar in
The Tin Drum is seen climbing on a plaster statue of the Baby Christ and playing with his ding-a-ling (this works great with Rule #2 below!).
Although Raskolnikov appears as a Jesus figure in Crime and Punishment, his murder victim plus his arresting officer Petrovich have striking Christ qualities as well.
2. Everyone does what they do for homosexual reasons. Freudianism never goes out of fashion, and English teachers masturbate over papers that use this school of thought. Always emphasise, though, that
characters don’t know they’re gay! What’s more, never use the word ‘homosexual’ outright. That’s the engine that drives your work, and you mustn’t break it, nor must you reveal your secret. A sample on
Ulysses:
Leopold Bloom wanders not only through Dublin but also his own soul searching for meaning in his sexual desires; only with his encounter with Stephen Daedelus does he feel truly happy. Despite Bloom’s pleasure in whores, sex with his wife, dreams featuring droves of his past female conquerings, and lewd hallucinations, the placement of the Daedelus/Bloom encounter at the end of the book suggest a last minute change in Bloom’s sexual orientation.
Of course this is utter nonsense; most literary criticism is. There is no acceptable evidence to support batting for the wrong team in this novel; don’t let the grader know that! Again, select what proves your point–which might involve some, ahem, ‘reinterpretation’ of some book segments–and dispose of the rest. Above, I even included all the countering points before making my assertion. Once my assertion proves valid, the arguments for hetero sex become moot. Of course, these counterpoints must be placed in a spot where they will be forgotten once your evidence is presented. A more dangerous but more rewarding path is to take
both sides as being true, and use irony as a conjunction:
Bloom admires his own limp penis in the bathtub prior to the funeral. Ironically, this penis seems more drawn to the women of his infidelity in his nightmare than it does to Daedelus or even Bloom himself. His feelings for both genders remain confused throughout the novel, adding to the whirl of consciousness for which Joyce aims.
3. Everything alludes to something else. Screw anachronisms. According to you, Shakespeare was stealing from Stoppard, Stoppard from Chaucer, Chaucer from
The Necronomicon, and
The Necronomicon from Shakespeare. Applying this rule is easy. If two authors use the same grammatical structure for a sentence or two, pounce on it! If your book came before Author B, call the parallel ‘a similarity.’ If your book came after Author B, call it ‘an allusion’ or, more rashly, ‘a copy.’ The latter is reserved for exact writing similarities, such as the use of noun-verb sentences.
Logic can also be employed to transverse across literary history. Since I’ve proven all characters are Jesus Christ and gay, it is logical to conclude that all characters equal all other characters. In math, this is transitivity: A = C, B = C, therefore A = B.Time to wrap up. All you need is the perfect thesis sentence to make it all work in one orgy of intellectual thought. Let’s go for a hard one like, say,
A Tale of Two Cities:
Dickens equates Charles Darnay to his foil Sydney Carton through their portrayal as Christ-like saviours, run-on Joycean sentences, and a Freudian love bond between them.