An Experiment

[omegaxx]

If you have read the following poem, heard of it, or know anything about its background, please refrain from commenting.

I will post a poem. The poet, Sigmund Polanski, was a German-Pole who lived through World War II where he was involved with the Nazis. Post-war ostracization forced him to later emigrate to the United States. Please refrain from googling up any additional info and just tell me how you would read the following poem:


Daddy
by: Sigmund Polanski

You do not do, you do not do
Any more, black shoe
In which I have lived like a foot
For thirty years, poor and white,
Barely daring to breathe or Achoo.

Daddy, I have had to kill you.
You died before I had time--
Marble-heavy, a bag full of God,
Ghastly statue with one gray toe
Big as a Frisco seal

And a head in the freakish Atlantic
Where it pours bean green over blue
In the waters off beautiful Nauset.
I used to pray to recover you.
Ach, du.

In the German tongue, in the Polish town
Scraped flat by the roller
Of wars, wars, wars.
But the name of the town is common.
My Polack friend

Says there are a dozen or two.
So I never could tell where you
Put your foot, your root,
I never could talk to you.
The tongue stuck in my jaw.

It stuck in a barb wire snare.
Ich, ich, ich, ich,
I could hardly speak.
I thought every German was you.
And the language obscene

An engine, an engine
Chuffing me off like a Jew.
A Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen.
I began to talk like a Jew.
I think I may well be a Jew.

The snows of the Tyrol, the clear beer of Vienna
Are not very pure or true.
With my gipsy ancestress and my weird luck
And my Taroc pack and my Taroc pack
I may be a bit of a Jew.

I have always been scared of you,
With your Luftwaffe, your gobbledygoo.
And your neat mustache
And your Aryan eye, bright blue.
Panzer-man, panzer-man, O You--

Not God but a swastika
So black no sky could squeak through.
Every woman adores a Fascist,
The boot in the face, the brute
Brute heart of a brute like you.

You stand at the blackboard, daddy,
In the picture I have of you,
A cleft in your chin instead of your foot
But no less a devil for that, no not
Any less the black man who

Bit my pretty red heart in two.
I was ten when they buried you.
At twenty I tried to die
And get back, back, back to you.
I thought even the bones would do.

But they pulled me out of the sack,
And they stuck me together with glue.
And then I knew what to do.
I made a model of you,
A man in black with a Meinkampf look

And a love of the rack and the screw.
And I said I do, I do.
So daddy, I'm finally through.
The black telephone's off at the root,
The voices just can't worm through.

If I've killed one man, I've killed two--
The vampire who said he was you
And drank my blood for a year,
Seven years, if you want to know.
Daddy, you can lie back now.

There's a stake in your fat black heart
And the villagers never liked you.
They are dancing and stamping on you.
They always knew it was you.
Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I'm through.

[Whifflingpin]

It would have sounded better in Swahili?

[stlukesguild]

A very Borghesian (ie. J.L. Borges) experiment.;)

[Virgil]

If you have read the following poem, heard of it, or know anything about its background, please refrain from commenting.

I will post a poem. The poet, Sigmund Polanski, was a German-Pole who lived through World War II where he was involved with the Nazis. Post-war ostracization forced him to later emigrate to the United States. Please refrain from googling up any additional info and just tell me how you would read the following poem:


I know this poem without having to google it. :D I guess you can say that the central theme is this: "Daddy, I have had to kill you."

[omegaxx]

It would have sounded better in Swahili?
Props for being the first replier. However I don't know what Swahili is:(


A very Borghesian (ie. J.L. Borges) experiment.;)
Shhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh hhhhhhh


I know this poem without having to google it. :D I guess you can say that the central theme is this: "Daddy, I have had to kill you."
But who is daddy? And why does the speaker have to kill daddy?:p

[AllyRose91]

this is difficult.... once i get an opinion... i read the next stanza and it contreadicts itself... i like it all the same though

[AllyRose91]

not contradicts.... but the meaning changes

[Jean-Baptiste]

This is interesting. I love this poem very much, so I won't comment.

Welcome to the forums, Ally! How do you mean changes?

[Redzeppelin]

I would love to talk about this poem, but I know it too - it is relentless. Scares the heck out of students when you teach it to 'em.

[Il Penseroso]

Am I the only one who doesn't know what is going on here?

[Riesa]

just one question, why do you say it's by Sigmund Polanski? Is that part of your experiment?

[Arania]

Oh my gosh. I love this piece. Have you ever heard the author read it? You should. It's online somewhere. Sorry, I know I wasn't supposed to comment because I already know the piece. But... you should definitely hear the recording. lol

[jon1jt]

i don't get what's going on either.

[Jean-Baptiste]

Omega, your subjects are getting restless. I think your experiment will be interesting enough even after explaining it. Sorry that you haven't collected enough data yet. But the object should not be destroyed by making everyone conscious of the purpose. I think you could get some interesting input by directly presenting your query. I certainly would be interested to see what other's think about it.

Maybe not.
What do you people think of this poem?

[ShoutGrace]

I think we all know this poem, no? Come back and post, omegaxx! :D



But who is daddy? And why does the speaker have to kill daddy?:p

Is it supposed to depend so drastically on who the speaker is? :confused:

Am I reading too far into these lines?

"The vampire who said he was you
And drank my blood for a year,
Seven years, if you want to know.
Daddy, you can lie back now."

[omegaxx]

Still no data for the scientist in me :bawling:
But okay here's the original plan.

Yup, as so many people have pointed out, this poem is by Sylvia Plath, an American poetess whose father was German (though he was not involved with the Nazis on any account). Sigmund Polanski is my own invention:p

The idea of the experiment came to me when we studied that poem in class. The whole class was debating how appropriate it was to appropriate Holocaust imagery as a metaphor for the speaker's relationship to her father. Then the idea occurred to me: can the arrow of metaphor go the other way? Can we say the father-daughter relationship is used as a metaphor for the Holocaust and the guilt of the next generation of Germans? Can this reading be supported or refuted on mere textual grounds?

I also read Bernhard Schlink's "The Reader" a while ago, a novel in which the love affair between a 33-year-old, ex-SS woman and a 15-year-old boy of the post-war generation is used to explore the ambivalence that post-war generations of Germans feel toward their forefathers who committed the unthinkable. Naturally, I was interested in seeing whether "Daddy" may be read this way, knowing that this is almost certainly NOT Plath's intention.

This then led me to think about the death of the author. Some people contend that a work of literature may be studied alone. No evidence is required other than what is already in the text. Every work may well be written by anonymous. That would not affect our reading of it one bit. I always wanted to test the truth of that proposition. Knowing Plath's biography, it is natural to read this poem as a reflection of her relationship toward her father, her husband Ted Hughes and other men. What if we were to substitute as the author a male who lived through the Holocaust? Would that automatically lead us to an allegorical reading of this poem? More importantly, will the text support any one of these readings over the other?

So the three questions I wanted to address are as follows:
1) Can the topic and the vehicle of a metaphor be interchangeable in a poem? ("The world is an unweeded garden." "The world"----topic, "an unweeded garden"----vehicle)
2) To what extent will the context of the poem, namely authorship, contribute to our understanding of the main metaphor?
3) Will the text lend more support for one reading over another? In other words, can the text "stand alone" and still keep its meaning intact?

[Whifflingpin]

I admit to being half-conned.

I did not know the poem, or the true author.

Obviously the personal references, or clues, in the poem (seven years of marriage, for instance) were lost. So, in this case, at least, the meaning of the poem was diminished or obscured without the biography.

My comment that it would have been better in Swahili - I don't speak Swahili, so this was a statement that I did not have a clue what it was about. For me, at least, it carried no meaning derived from the background that you invented for it.

I do not think, in general, that a knowledge of the author is necessary for understanding a work, but there are many works where such a knowledge is necessary, or advantageous. This poem appears to be one such.

.

[Redzeppelin]

This then led me to think about the death of the author. Some people contend that a work of literature may be studied alone. No evidence is required other than what is already in the text. Every work may well be written by anonymous.

You are discussing what is termed "New Criticism" - the predominant critical model taught by English departments for much of the 20th century - and their contention was exactly as you put it: the work stands alone.



1) Can the topic and the vehicle of a metaphor be interchangeable in a poem? ("The world is an unweeded garden." "The world"----topic, "an unweeded garden"----vehicle)

Do you mean the "tenor" and the "vehicle"? ("tenor" = the term you are attempting to illustrate; "vehicle" = the term you are using in comparison to make the illustration: Example:
The pearl glows like the moon. (pearl = tenor, moon = vehicle)
The moon glows like a pearl. (moon = tenor, pearl = vehicle)

You're essentially asking if metaphors work backwards and forwards - I think so, but that may depend on the construction. I'm not sure all metaphors can do so, but certainly (as my cheesy example shows) some can.


2) To what extent will the context of the poem, namely authorship, contribute to our understanding of the main metaphor??

I think that - once you divorce the author from the text - you have, to an extent, "genericized" the metaphor; meaning, that the comparison now draws up only the associations of the reader's experience - but knowing the author provides us clues as to that the metaphor may bring up association-wise because now we may have clues as to what the metphor may have meant emotionally to the author. For example, knowing the nationality of Plath's father adds intensity to the Nazi imagery she uses - it becomes less an "academic" metaphor of cleverness and more an intense and terrifying indictment of her father.


3) Will the text lend more support for one reading over another? In other words, can the text "stand alone" and still keep its meaning intact?

Deconstructionists will argue "no" here - but that's a trap: saying that a text has no stable meaning at all essentially makes the text (ultimately) meaningless. I think clues can point in a certain direction. As to your second question, I think the creation may contain its meaning, but that divorcing the text from the author "genericizes" (to reuse my made-up word) the meaning - we "get it," but do we "get" all of it?

Really, really cool questions - Nice!:D

[omegaxx]

I admit to being half-conned.

I did not know the poem, or the true author.

Obviously the personal references, or clues, in the poem (seven years of marriage, for instance) were lost. So, in this case, at least, the meaning of the poem was diminished or obscured without the biography.

My comment that it would have been better in Swahili - I don't speak Swahili, so this was a statement that I did not have a clue what it was about. For me, at least, it carried no meaning derived from the background that you invented for it.

I do not think, in general, that a knowledge of the author is necessary for understanding a work, but there are many works where such a knowledge is necessary, or advantageous. This poem appears to be one such.

.

My only experimental subject!;) Well, thank you for putting up with this very poorly designed and poorly controlled "experiment":p


You are discussing what is termed "New Criticism" - the predominant critical model taught by English departments for much of the 20th century - and their contention was exactly as you put it: the work stands alone.

I guess that's it. In a way, New Criticism is a nice break from the ridiculous extremes that psychoanalysts may take a work to, e.g. "this book has 5 chapters because the author first saw his mother naked at age 5 and subsequently repressed that memory:sick:" However, just as you said, lack of reference to the context "genericizes" the text and definitely will lead to an overlooking of subtleties and even important messages.
I suppose we can say there are three poles of literary criticism:
1) the work stands alone, completely, independent of the writer OR the reader (New Criticism)
2) the work stands independent of the writer but dependent on the reader (Reader Response Criticism)
3) the work depends COMPLETELY on the author and/or the context (Old and New Historicism, psychoanalysis, deconstructionism, and all that jazz)
This definitely warrants a large-scale study. I propose we have a literary science to address these questions:thumbs_up

[Redzeppelin]

I think New Criticism is a good basis to approach a work with so that the piece retains the central focus; once you have sussed out some basic ideas about meaning, motif, theme, etc... then I think it's helpful to examine the author's life, the historical context, etc...but you're right: sometimes some critical models go off the deep end (I think of feminist and Marxist criticism [sorry, just my opinion]) - so the work must remain the central focus.

To apply to Plath's poem: even without the knowledge of Plath's father's nationality, the imagery is devastating: it's clear the relationship between the speaker and her adversary is hostile, dangerous, and genocidal. We can establish that without biographic details, but boy, what the biographic details add!