Robinson Crusoe

After reading Daniel Defoe's famous work Robinson Crusoe alongside South African novelist J.M. Coetzee's interpretation of it, Foe, I have started thinking about how language's empowerment (in terms of self-expression) translates into the relation of power between/among individuals. Defoe's Crusoe teaches Friday to speak a few words of English in order to find a bit of companionship - though Friday is never considered equal, but rather a servant. Despite the fact that Friday could speak his own native language and that this language (not English) would be spoken on the nearby island(s), Crusoe doesn't bother to reciprocate by learning it. Instead, he views himself as bestowing gifts; providing language, religion, and bits of his own cultural background as replacements for Friday's. Of course, Friday is a cannibal and therefore Crusoe (and the reader) might be tempted to regard Friday's language (the language of the cannibals) as tainted; the language and the sinful diet are joined through the tongue.

Friday's tongue becomes an important point in Coetzee's version of the tale: it had been cut out and, therefore, Friday is unable to speak. Indeed, Coetzee writes that "many stories can be told of Friday's tongue, but the true story is buried within Friday, who is mute" (118). Cruso (Coetzee's spelling) himself is a man of few words, and what he does speak seems to be the ramblings of a madman and liar. Coetzee's Cruso is a mixture of Prospero and Caliban from Shakespeare's Tempest, less magician than attempted rapist who is controlled by his language. Yet, the language is ultimately not even his own, as the ability to narrate his tale is relegated (as is Friday's) to Susan Barton, the narrator in Coeztee's book. In turn, Ms. Barton's narrating power is turned over to Mr. Foe (Daniel DeFoe), and we all know how his versionof the tale turns out - Barton's power is diminished and Cruso (as a further comparison to The Tempest) becomes a version of Stephano.

The transformation of Crusoe and Susan Barton occurs outside the "text", or rather between the Defoe and Coetzee versions of the tale. Within Coetzee's story, however, we see Barton as a more powerful figure. That is, while she is at the mercy of others (pirates, Cruso, Foe), she retains the ability to narrate her own story to the reader. Coetzee lets Defoe enact further injury to Barton's power via his powerful (Prospero-like) Crusoe. The tale is no longer Barton's, but is Defoe's (or rather Foe's) appropriation of it.

An interesting contrast to Foe's twist to the tale is Aphra Behn's story of the slave Oroonoko. In Behn's tale, the prince turned slave, Oroonoko, while retaining his self-respect, is led through a series of ever-increasing tragedies. The female narrator - unlike Barton and Coetzee's Cruso, but like Defoe's Crusoe - is wholesome and powerful. In many ways, Behn's narrator is Crusoe. While she isn't shipwrecked, nor must she build an infrastructure for daily living, Behn's narrator (like Crusoe and even Prospero) is empowered and absolved - perhaps even deified - through the language of her narration. In these stories (Crusoe, Oroonoko, and even Tempest), the tale provides an idealized version of the history, more a product of the imagination than the body and therefore, an anticipation of Romanticism.

Housecleaning and Pizza

Hmmm, as I look around the dusty corners of my blog I realize that it has been awhile since I've posted. Unfortunately, I've just been too busy lately. It seems that the work/eat/study/sleep pattern has squeezed its boundaries down even tighter and I just cannot allocate the time to write anything (much less proofread, which I have just plain ignored with blog entries).

One solution towards allocating additional time is to combine activities. Like working and sleeping :O Another alternative would be to combine eating and working, and that is where I think that having a pizza delivered right into your email inbox could come in really handy. The real problem there, of course, would be gunking up your email filters with all of that gooey cheese. Perhaps a better filing system for you food would be in order. Or one could go all out and equip the workspace to meet the vast majority of needs. Yet, sometimes upgrading only only makes one bitter. I suppose that the likelihood of either, or additional, outcomes is ultimately guided by circumstances, if not Boole's Inequality Theorem.

Bakhtin versus the Atkins Diet

My wife is reading Rabelais' classic work Gargantua. Wonderful book, relevant to Gulliver's Travels, Ben Jonson's Bartholomew Fair, and....er....who is that literary critic? Argh! Thus ensued my attempt to recall the Russian literary critic Bakhtin. Making a long story short, I found the Bakhtin Center. Of course, what good is a study of Bakhtin without context, so I was happy to find the site associated with a course on the aesthetics of the grotesque. Perhaps when I find time I can brush up on this literary foe of the Atkins diet.

The Linguistics of Tube Amplifiers

Earlier today I fired up my 1964 Harmony H306A amplifier (dual 6V6 power tubes, 12AX7 preamp tubes, 5Y3 rectifier tube, 6SH7 for the tube tremolo circuit). My amp has been removed from the chassis as I'm putting it into a head enclosure. Without the factory cabinet and speaker, I have it hooked up to a reworked 1930-40s Jensen Bass Reflex cabinet. Sounds great, especially when I played my Epiphone Casino through it - P90 pickups can get pretty raw and edgy.

I have a few amps that I play through, but the Harmony is a "keeper". Another "keeper" is my modified (switched power tubes from 5881s to EL34's - it is British after all) Marshall 100 watt JCM 900 half-stack. Where the Harmony is bright and raw, needing cranked a bit to get crunchy, the Marshall is crunchy from the get-go. Granted, one needs to raise the volume a bit to let the power tubes bring up the bass, otherwise the distortion is a bit thin. Turn down the guitar's volume and one gets that British midrangey dirty blues sound.

At various times I have pondered (and discussed) what it is that makes a particular sound attractive. Various theories have been posed, ranging from amplification harmonics (tubes amplify on even order, transistors on odd) to clipping dynamics (tubes squash, transistors clip). Yet, these don't really explain preference, just the properties of what it is that we prefer. My question is whether there is a linguistic basis for our preference, and whether this basis is partly driven by our mother-tongue. We select various phoneme combinations (as we try to pattern-select, or learn to predict patterns of sounds, the identification of morphemes). There are attributes of the amplifier's characteristic sound that would correspond not only to implementation of speech (inflection, tone, volume, etc.), but also to phonological units. In some regards, when we hear a musical style played through the wrong "sound" - clean jazz through Marshall's, or AC/DC played bluegrass style, on bluegrass instruments - then it seems as wrong as someone screaming "I love you" in an "angry" voice. Yet, after initial adjustment, we often find the result interesting (personally, I think Hayseed-Dixie is great) - just as we find new phonological/morphological combinations interesting when we are infants learning to identify speech language patterns.

I should look to see if anyone has done research on this.