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Module 18 - Part 2: Explorations and Exercises

Other parts of this module include:
Index  |  Part 1: Overview  |  Part 3: Texts and Contexts  |  Part 4: Web Resources

The Persistence of Memory in Twentieth-Century Literature

To respond to these exercises, it helps to have some appreciation of the cultural assumptions explored in them. Click on Web Resources for further insights into the way ideas about the human and divine in each culture colors the literary texts that we are studying.

These questions are arranged into three color-coded categories.

Level A invites you to look closely at some specific aspects of individual texts. Answering these questions shows that you have read carefully and understand the significance of important words and ideas as they appear in context.

Level B asks you to think more deeply about the implications of some of the details that you have isolated.

Level C allows you to build on the findings of the first two categories to theorize broadly about the relationship of the text to social and historical forces beyond the work itself.

Topics in this module's Exploration and Exercises section include:

Focus on Freud, Fragment of an Analysis of a Case in Hysteria: Dora

Level A

  1. As he begins “The Clinical Picture,” Freud distinguishes between several different kinds of memory lapses. What are they? 
  2. What is the “particular psychotherapeutic method” by which Freud treats these memory lapses (p. 1616)?
  3. Describe the symptoms that troubled Dora.
  4. How did Dora’s family background create the circumstances for her illness?
  5. What does Freud mean by “dreamwork”?
  6. How does Dora react to the suggestions that Freud makes to her about her amnesia? What is the significance of her “usual reply: ‘I don’t remember that.’” (p. 1639)?

Level B

  1. What is the meaning of “overdetermined” (see p. 1625)? How does it apply to Dora’s history?
  2. Freud frequently quotes Herr K’s announcement that he gets nothing out of his wife. Why does that formulation seem so important to him?
  3. With how many persons does Freud believe Dora to be in love? Do Freud and Dora agree on the significance of these relationships? 
  4. Why do you think Dora broke off the analysis (see p. 1660)? What is Freud’s interpretation of her refusal to continue? Do you agree with his understanding of the situation? Would Dora have agreed?

Level C

  1. Writing in German, Freud frequently uses non-German words, which the translator has been careful to preserve. Pick one of the passages where he does this (look, for example, at the passage in which he describes his ability to use technical terminology to discuss sexual matters with a young girl, on pp. 1635--6) and examine the points at which he chooses to express himself in French. What does this use of a foreign language suggest about Freud’s own feelings about his relationship with his patient?
  2. The heart of Freud’s narrative is in his eliciting from Dora the details of two dreams, which he then proceeds to interpret. Choose what seem to you to be the most interesting details in either of the two dreams, explain Freud’s explanation, and comment on Dora’s reaction to his analysis.
  3. What contribution did Freud make to our understanding of the role of the past in shaping the present? How has his work influenced our contemporary understanding of the nature of human personality? 
  4. How does the information that he confides in the Postcript help Freud reconcile himself to Dora’s refusal to continue his treatment? Why is it ironic that he later learns that she was not in fact happily married to the young man in her second dream, as he indicates in footnote 5 on page 1670? 
  5. How is the case history as a genre in itself an exercise in memory? Write an essay in which you demonstrate Freud’s ideas about the unreliability of our recollections and discuss whether the reader should trust Freud’s own recollected narrative.  

Focus on Proust, Swann’s Way. Overture

Level A

  1. What confusion about the time of his awakening does the narrator describe as a habitual occurrence in the third paragraph of Swann’s Way? What is the significance of the difference between what he thinks at first and what he then realizes?
  2. What distress does the visit of M. Swann cause Marcel?  
  3. How do the great aunts thank M. Swann for sending them a case of Asti wine? How does Proust reflect on the force of time present and time past in their conversation about the contrast between the gossip in the daily newspaper and the journals of the Duc de Saint-Simon (pp. 1785-88)?
  4. Why does Marcel’s father permit his mother to stay in the room with the child all night? How does reflecting on this moment in his past affect the elderly narrator of the novel (pp. 1795-96)?
  5. Why does Marcel’s mother like to buy antiques (p. 1798)? 

Level B

  1. What book does the narrator mention in the opening paragraph of Proust’s novel?  How do his reflections about it introduce the role played by memory in the way we constitute our identities? 
  2. How does the information that the young Marcel was given a magic lantern that projected a slide show of ancient legends of adulterous loves and brutal murders (p. 1776) give us some insight into the way he was brought up? How does this vision of the French past contribute to his experience of childhood?   
  3. Do children perceive time in the same way that adults do? Examine Marcel’s efforts to steel himself against the effects of M. Swann’s visit on the next several hours of his life on pp. 1786-89.   
  4. How can a painter paint a portrait when he does not have his subject in front of him? Examine the role of time and memory in the comparison between “a painter who can have his subject for short sittings only” (p. 1789) and Marcel’s intention to get the most of his mother’s kiss. 
  5. After having got what he wants, Marcel has a moment of sorrow, for he understands that his mother’s concession to him is “a black date in the calendar” (p. 1797). Explain his reflections on the process of time that his action has precipitated.

Level C

  1. Compare Proust’s reference to a traveler hurrying to a railroad station in the second paragraph of his novel (p. 1771) to the railroad station in Dora’s second dream (p. 1654).  What role did the railroad station play in the European mind in the early twentieth century? What is the relationship between railroad stations, memory, and time? (You may want to look closely at the painting by De Chirico in the Discovery section and consult the Web site about railroad time in Resources as you consider these questions.)
  2. What discovery did Eadward Muybridge make about the way a horse runs (see Resources)? What does Proust compare to the successive positions a running horse takes as it moves (see p. 1774)? Write an essay about the way the visual tricks that our eyes play on us reflect Proust’s treatment of time and duration in his novel.
  3. Compare Proust’s references to anesthetics (p. 1776), going to bed with a toothache (p. 1789), “strong medicine” (p. 1792), his father’s “neuralgia” (p. 1795), and the atmosphere of illness that pervades this text with Freud’s use of medical terminology. How do the two authors view the possibility of therapy? What role does each writer assign to memory in causing or curing ill health? 
  4. Discuss the way the mother treats verb tenses when she reads out loud to Marcel. How does her voice approach “the imperfect and the preterite” (p. 1800)? How does this comment call attention to Proust’s careful selection of different forms of the past tense in his novel?

Focus on T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land

Level A

  1. Why is April the cruelest month? What does it mean to mix memory with desire?
  2. Have you had any experience of the morning rush hour in a great metropolis?  What do people look like at this moment in the day? What does this evocation of an “Unreal City” add to the poem’s depiction of a depleted land? 
  3. Who is Philomel? How does she deal with her memories? How does her story relate to the experiences voiced by many of the female figures overheard in The Waste Land? 
  4. Find some of the geographical locations mentioned in The Waste Land and explain how they expand the space-time continuum in the poem. 

Level B

  1. The footnote tells us that lines 8-16 are based on the memoirs of Countess Marie Larisch. What does this speaker recall about her past? What kind of world does she seem to have inhabited when young?
  2. “Madame Sosostris, famous clairvoyante” (l. 43) claims to be able to see the future. How do the last lines of “The Burial of the Dead” suggest why the future is a problem for those who live in the waste land? 
  3. Try to construct a coherent narrative that explains the bits of dialogue and gossip contained in ll. 138-72. What is the role of the past in this sequence of the poem?
  4. What social worlds does Eliot juxtapose in “A Game at Chess”? How do different persons seem to blend into each other here? One character says she “can connect / Nothing with nothing” (ll. 301-02). Do you think the poem is successful in creating thematic connections that allow the reader to find some coherence in the way it moves from voice to voice and place to place? How does the persistent memory of fragments represent a possible meshing of past, present, and future? 

Level C

  1. See the information about Marie Larisch in Resources and relate it to the First World War and its impact on Eliot’s poem.
  2. T. S. Eliot quotes and alludes to many of the canonical texts of the Western tradition, including several plays by Shakespeare and other Renaissance playwrights, Dante’s Commedia, and the operas of Richard Wagner. Write a paper in which you look up one set of sources outlined in the footnotes and speculate on the relevance of the references.  For example, you might consider the last stanza of “The Burial of the Dead” and analyze how a memory of Canto IV of the Inferno helps to set the mood for the opening of The Waste Land.
  3. How does the past relate to the future in the Asian philosophies so prominent in the last section of The Waste Land? How does the poem suggest that the Sanskrit terms and the ideas they express could provide relief to the exhausted Western mind?
  4. How does the imagery collected by Eliot in The Waste Land suggest that one need not necessarily “Fear death by water” (l. 54)? Write a paper about some of the imagery related to rain, water, and the passage of time in the poem. Consider, for example, the references to the storm and shipwreck in Shakespeare’s The Tempest, the passage of time illustrated in section IV of The Waste Land, called “Death by Water,” and the refrain of the Rhine maidens. What is promised by the thunder at the end of the poem? How may the aridity implied by the title be at an end as the poem concludes? 

Focus on Bernard Dadie, The Black Cloth

Level A

  1. What event begins the fable? How does it initiate a concern with the passage of time?
  2. Why does Aiwa always smile? What effect does her smile have on her stepmother?
  3. How does the passage of time shape the life of the orphan Aiwa?

Level B

  1. How is memory an important factor in the literary genre to which The Black Cloth belongs?
  2. Why are so many fairy tales about orphans? Why is memory particularly important in the life of an orphan?
  3. 3.Why does the cloth finally get wet in the spring in front of the banana tree? (See Resources for assistance with this question.)
  4. Why is the black cloth associated with the stepmother and the white with Aiwa’s real mother? Why do you think the white cloth is exchanged with the black, rather than having the black cloth washed into whiteness? 

Level C

  1. Freud is often accused of having spoken of his cases as evidence of universal truths when the problems he diagnosed were really phenomena specific to the upper-middle-class culture of Central Europe. Yet The Black Cloth, an African folktale, seems susceptible to a Freudian interpretation. Rewrite the story as if it were a case study by Freud: how would you describe the relationship between Aiwa and her stepmother? What role does the memory of Aiwa’s mother play in the story? How does the end of the tale enact the Freudian idea of the return of the repressed? (See articles in Resources under Freud and Dadie.)
  2. Artists as different as Proust and Rulfo focus on the importance of childhood experience in the constitution of the self. Write an essay that compares the journey that Aiwa takes into the depths of the forest with that of a character in Swann’s Way. Overture or Pedro Paramo. In your opinion, what are the impediments to self-discovery? Which character most successfully recovers the past? 

Focus on Juan Rulfo, Pedro Paramo

Level A

  1. Whom does the narrator, Juan Preciado, meet at the crossroads? Why do you think Rulfo chooses the crossroads for their encounter? What do these men share?
  2. What kind of childhood did Pedro Paramo have? Why does Rulfo think it’s important for the reader to have information about his early years?
  3. What do we learn about Miguel Paramo? How does his relationship with his father contrast with that of Pedro Paramo’s other children?
  4. What memory does Susana San Juan have of her father’s lowering her into a mine (p. 2674)? When she and her father return to Comala, how do people perceive their relationship (p. 2669)? 

Level B

  1. What does Juan Preciado learn about his background as the novel develops? What kind of journey is he on?
  2. Who tosses in his sleep at the bottom of p. 2650? What memory disturbs his rest?  
  3. What two dreams does Dorotea remember (p. 2657)? Why does her contact with Juan Preciado trigger her recollection of them? 
  4. What other characters don’t sleep peacefully and why? What do you think this motif contributes to the mood of the book?

Level C

  1. A footnote explains the name Comala; the headnote mentions that the word “Paramo” means wasteland (p. 2623). Compare Rulfo’s vision with Eliot’s. Discuss how the friction between the past and the present creates the climate that their works critique. What role does water play in each text?
  2. Write a carefully developed essay that explores the reasons why twentieth-century literary investigations of the persistence of memory, including the works by Freud, Proust, Dadie, and Rulfo examined here, pay particular attention to the relationship between parents and children. 
  3. How does organized religion in general and, in the context of Pedro Paramo, the Catholic Church in particular, mediate between past, present, and future? Write an essay on Father Renteria’s role in Rulfo’s novel and compare the treatment of religion in The Waste Land.

Focus on Texts and Contexts

Focus on D. H. Lawrence, Piano

Level A

  1. Read the later version of the poem carefully and explain when the events it records occur: at what points in his life do we see the speaker?
  2. What does the second stanza tell us about the speaker’s relation to his memories?

Level B

  1. What is the child doing in memory? How do his actions mirror those of his mother?
  2. What was the atmosphere of the speaker’s childhood home? How does it contrast with the world of the present?
  3. How would you interpret two key word choices in the third stanza: “glamour” and “childish”? What alternatives might you suggest for them? How would they change the vision of the past that the speaker cannot keep himself from remembering?

Level C

  1. Compare the two versions of the poem. What has Lawrence changed? Look at the headnote to Eliot’s The Waste Land: how does the omission of detail intensify the poem’s representation of the way memory works?
  2. Read the biographical material about Lawrence in Resources and compare Lawrence’s treatment of the relationship of mother and son with Proust’s in Swann’s Way. Overture.

Focus on James Joyce's “The Fable of the Ondt and the Gracehoper,” from Finnegans Wake, Chapter 13

Level A

  1. Read Aesop’s “The Ant and the Grasshopper,” the original on which Joyce’s version is based. What is the difference between the ant and the grasshopper?
  2. How is time a crucial element in this ancient story? What moral does it teach?

Level B

  1. Finnegans Wake is a complicated work that takes years to fathom (if that is ever even possible), but it plays with language in ways that even a first-time casual reader can sense. How do the names of the main characters distort the names of Aesop’s characters, who are, after all, insects? What words do you hear in the term “larved”? What temporal process in the life of an insect may be hinted at here?
  2. How do the last two lines of the fable evoke the discoveries of Albert Einstein? How does Joyce’s revision of an ancient fable reflect on the ability of human beings to understand the world if the definitions of space and time fundamentally change, as modern physics demonstrates? 

Level C

  1. How is Joyce’s treatment of language here related to the modernist style that we see in writers like Proust, Woolf, and Faulkner? What happens to the boundaries of words and sentences? How does each of these writers reflect through the syntax of their prose the distortions that memory imposes on time? (See the article by Andrez Duszenko on Einstein and Joyce in Resources.)
  2. Check The Online Shorter Finnegans Wake in Resources for suggestions and identify some of the meanings inherent in any one or two words in Joyce’s “Fable.” How do the multiple echoes in each of Joyce’s words undermine the ostensible purpose of language, which is presumably to communicate? How is that undermining typical of the modernist sensibility?

Focus on T.S. Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent”

Level A

  1. What do “traditional” and “individual” mean in Eliot’s essay? 
  2. What relation does Eliot say a mature writer has to the artistic past?
  3. Explain Eliot’s analogy between “the mind of the poet” and “the shred of platinum” in a chemical reaction. 

Level B

  1. In what sense does Eliot speak of “the mind of Europe”? What view of culture is implied here? Why might it be impossible in the twenty-first century to speak in the same way of “the mind of the United States”?
  2. How is “the progress of an artist . . . a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality”? How does this proposition go against the way we normally think of an artist’s work?

Level C

  1. Eliot challenges Wordsworth’s definition of poetry as “emotion recollected in tranquility.” Discuss the attitudes toward time, memory, and the self implicit in Wordsworth’s formula. What is Romantic about his notion of the poet’s self? Why is tranquility important to him? What has to happen to emotions before they can be transformed into poetry? Imagine a conversation in which Wordsworth and Eliot negotiate their differences in an effort to arrive at a common definition of how artists respond to past events and earlier writers. 
  2. How does The Waste Land exemplify Eliot’s understanding of the relationship between tradition and the individual talent? Compare the use of “I” in Wordsworth’s and Eliot’s poems and relate them to D. H. Lawrence’s in “Piano.”
  3. Consider the importance of the artist’s personal biography in the works referred to in this module: what role does it play in Proust’s novel? Compare and contrast memory and personal reference in any of the following: Freud’s Dora, Joyce’s Dubliners, Eliot’s poems, Rulfo’s Pedro Paramo.
  4. How do tradition and the individual talent figure in Dadie’s retelling of orally transmitted materials? How do you think Eliot would view The Black Cloth?
 
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