How To Read Literature Like a Professor - Ch. 23-24

Examples:

In Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier, the narrator is fallible, clueless, and therefore pathetic. While traveling with another couple to Europe, his wife Florence begins cheating with the husband of the other couple named Edward. Edward's wife knows of the affair and might of guided him towards it intentionally. Only the narrator is kept in the dark about the affair.

• Florence and Edward both are ill with heart trouble; in this case, they are dishonest, selfish, and disloyal.

In Colin Dexter's The Remorseful Day, the detective Morse is a brilliant strategist, but has flaws including excessive drinking and lack of physical fitness that leads him to be hospitalized numerous times. His major problem, however, is loneliness which is why the author chooses to make Morse die of a heart attack.

• Instead of making Morse die of liver failure based on his drinking, Dexter wants the reader to infer that Morse suffered not because of his behavior but because of his pain. In other words, he drank because he was lonely and regretful. His humanity is emphasized more than his misdeeds in this way.

Chapter 24

Principles Governing the Use of Disease in Literature:

1. Not all diseases are created equally.

• An example would be cholera, which doesn't come close to tuberculosis in its frequency of literary occurrence because of their images. Death by cholera is unsightly, painful, smelly, and dark, while TB is about coughing and the lungs.

2. It should be picturesque.

• A person who has TB acquires a bizarre beauty because the skin becomes almost translucent and the eye sockets dark, so that the person looks like a martyr in medieval paintings.

3. It should be mysterious in origin.

• TB again, very popular, swept through numerous of families of the sick ones. Many people of the twentieth century though, didn't know how TB spread so that's why it was so popular.

4. It should have strong symbolic or metaphorical possibilities.

• TB literally and metaphorically means wasting away, literally the person is becoming thinner and thinner, and it also meant the wasting of the lives that were often barely under way.

The 4th consideration generally overrides all the others. A compelling metaphor can induce an author to bring an objectionable illness to a work.

An example would be a plague. In Sophocles' play Oedipus Rex, he has Thebes hit by numerous plagues, withered crops, stillborn children, etc. The author isn't too interested in the individual aspect but more of the communal way a plague is viewed. They show how an illness can affect everyone and not just the person who is sick.

Chapters 23/24:

It's Never Just Heart Disease...

...And Rarely Just Illness

Chapter 23

The heart is the pump that keeps us alive but it is also used to symbolize emotion.

Because of this, usually when there is an ailment in the heart in literature, it has something to do with a shorthand of a character.

Examples of works where TB dominated in literary illness are:

The Portrait of a Lady, The Wings of the Dove, Uncle Tom's Cabin, Women in Love, etc.

Heart Disease can symbolize many emotions including:

• bad love
• loneliness
• cruelty
• pederasty
• disloyalty
• cowardice
• lack of determination

Notice how most of these are a major flaw of the character; sometimes besides character flaws, heart disease can stand for a social injustice or something that is seriously wrong at the "heart" of the issue. (e.g: Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad)

Other Literary Examples include:

• Nathaniel Hawthorne's "The Man of Adamant", where the main character isolates himself from society only to have his heart turn to stone (both literally and figuratively).

• Joseph Conrad's Lord Jim, where Jim loses courage (strength of heart) that results in the death of his best friend; this later results in Jim being shot through the heart. Jim was initially considered as having a true heart by being loyal and trustworthy so he can only die by a blow to the heart.

AIDS.

Malaria or Roman Fever

Fever

More diseases....

AIDS is the tragedy and despair, but also the courage and resilience and compassion.

Fever worked like a charm in past times. The character would get fever, go to bed, and died in short or long order as the plot wanted. The fever could represent the randomness of fate, the harshness of life, the unknowability of the mind of God, any of a wide array of possibilities.

Back during the Romantics and Victorian era the most common disease was consumption or TB; We have AIDS.

AIDS is very popular among the writers of its time. This disease is very picturesque in the sense of how terrible and dramatic it is. Its also Mysterious because this virus could mutate in infinite ways. It is also Symbolic, its the mother lode of symbol and metaphor because it tends to lie dormant for so long, then make an appearance, because of that dormant period it turns every victim into an unknowing carrier, its virtual 100% mortality rates over the first decade or so giving things to offer strong symbolic possibilities.

The Novella 'Daisy Miller' by Henry James shows how malaria could metaphorically translate to "bad air", Daisy has suffered from figurative bad air-malicious gossip and hostile public opinion.

The old name of malaria 'Roman Fever' perfectly captures what happens to daisy, who is destroyed by the clash between vitality and the rotten atmosphere. James flamboyantly can kill off a character in a highly lifelike way and still employ an apt metaphor for her death.

Engar Allan Poe who saw plenty of TB gives us a mystery disease in "The Masque of the Red Death". The story could be about TB or some other malady, but chiefly it is what no real disease can ever be: Exactly what the author wants it to be.

Real illnesses come with baggage, which can be useful or at least overcome in a novel. A made-up illness, can say whatever its maker wants it to say.

Sadly nowadays with modern medicine it could virtually identify any disease; where the cure is worst than the disease, at least for literature.