Enemy of the People

The translation that I read was done by Farquharson Sharp provided for free by Penn State. I read that he also did translations of A Doll House and Peer Gynt, and I think the translations were done around the time they were written. But I am not exactly sure on that last bit.

I think I read the play differently than both Steve McQueen/Arthur Miller and Professor Sexson. Or maybe bridging the gap is a more appropriate term. I didn't see Stockman as such a steadfast character as Miller did. I think that Miller ignored some things, like Stockman playing with Peter's cane and hat in the newspaper office, or how Stockman seems to bring up not wanting recognition an awful lot for a guy not wanting it. But at the same time I didn't read it quite like Professor Sexson. I didn't see Stockman as a bumbling boob, causing problems and full of himself. (Probably putting words in your mouth, professor. Sorry about that.) I guess I saw him as more of a mixture, somebody who didn't handle the situation very well, and at times got a little carried away, but who tried to do the right thing the entire time.

This might be because I have read A Doll House before this class, but what I noticed was Petra's character. For all of Stockman's talk about progressing and such, he doesn't give his wife a lot of voice in the matter. She is often silenced in the play, with Stockman ignoring her towards the end of act IV, and planning on moving the family to America without discussing the matter with her, I felt like Stockman was a product of his generation. However, Petra has a job of her own teaching, and she has ideas that are "extremely emancipated". It seemed to me that her character is far more liberated than her mother is, which makes me feel like Ibsen's intent was to make her the most sympathetic character in the play. Or what is probably happening is that my having read A Doll House is slanting my views.

I think it would be awesome to have McQueen's facial hair in this movie. Seriously, the beard was epic.

I should start titling these things

Maybe it was just my first reading of An Enemy of the People, but I didn't think it was that great of a play. I mean, it wasn't a bad play. But I didn't think it offered anything ground breaking in the way the story was told. I feel like the baths wasn't a very complex image. Baths have been an image of cleanliness and health since the aqueducts, and probably longer. The fountain of youth is another obvious example. And their being contaminated to show the sickness of society to me wasn't groundbreaking. Being exiled north also isn't that unique of an image. Maybe there is more significance to this, with some relation to Viking myths that I don't know about. Peter's clothing being used to show the stiffness of his character. The foreboding presence yet physical absence of the people in society with the most wealth was also boring.

Maybe it was just my first read, or maybe these literary devices have become boring because this became the play that people copied. Or maybe it is because I haven't seen it acted out. Overall I felt like the play's purpose was to present the dramatic essay that act four was. It seems like I am bashing the play, but that wasn't really my intent. I think that the story was well told and put together, but wasn't that interesting. Maybe I had higher expectations of Ibsen after reading A Doll House and The Master Builder, where even though you could see were the story was going they held your interest.

Another passage in The Biographer's Tale that is interesting is when Nanson is in the the museum of the Linneaus society. In the previous passage I looked at, either Linneaus wrote about finding the plant he named Andromeda, or Destry-Scholes created the story. In the passage on pages 131 to 134, more attention is given to Andromeda and what Linneaus thought of it, as well as a mention of Ovid, a Roman poet who wrote about her. There is a poem written by Linnaeus, as well as the drawing that the poem is on. There is also a section of a text written by Linnaeus about the flower. Both of these show the blurring between fact and myth that happened with Linnaeus. While Linnaeus was write, that plants were related to one another and could be classified, his method was flawed and doesn't hold water today. This is not to say that Linnaeus wasn't important, but that he was a product of his time.

But more importantly to The Biographer's Tale, this emphasis on Andromeda and the myth behind it indicates that the myth of Andromeda is also important. It is interesting that Andromeda was originally promised to her uncle Phineus, but ends up with Perseus. I do not believe that Byatt also naming her protagonist was a mere coincidence. But at the same time, I do not have a clue what it means. Andromeda could relate to Fulla in the passage on page 67, with Phineas acting as Linnaeus. Or Medusa could be related to Fulla, as they both have eccentric hair, but I find this unlikely. It is clear to me that Fulla and Vera are supposed to be the parrallel of the women in Bole's tale, the passionate woman in Turkey, the reserved woman in England. And Phineas ends up with both women. And their is no lost romance with Phineas in the story. Wikipedia gives multiple meanings to the name Andromeda, one being "to think, to be mindful" and another being "she who leads". The former could easily be Vera, and the later could just as easily be Fulla. But again, it doesn't really fit. And in the end of the myth, Phineus is turned to stone with Medusa's head, and I don't really see a parrallel in the story.

Either I am reading too much into this, which I suspect is easy to do with Greek mythology, or I am missing something.

Another thing I found interesting was Fulla's initial description. Her hair is related to the sun and comets. I find that interesting as it reflects her personality, as she is fiery and passionate. But at the same time she is an ecologist, some one concerned with the organic, things built upon carbon framework. Yet she is compared to very inorganic things, stuff made of metals, hydrogen and helium. Probably not really important, but I found it interesting.

One of the passages in The Biographer's Tale that I liked was the last exert from Linnaeus, starting on the last line of page 65 and continuing onto the next page. There is a lot of juxtaposition in this passage, making the section seem cloudy. Linnaeus writes that he "was walking rapidly, facing the icy wind and sweating profusely". Either the wind was more of a gentle breeze, or Linnaeus was moving really dang fast, or there isn't something right with the story. He goes on to say that he was "always on the alert", yet he walked past a plant, then he decided to check it out again. But then he almost leaves, thinking it is another plant when he decides it is a new one. These contradictions of the description make the validity of the story questionable.

Later, Linnaeus goes on to write that the sun, being far north, shines into the eyes and makes it difficult to see. He also writes that "the shadows are also extended, and by gusts of wind made so confused, that things not really a bit alike can hardly be told apart". I think this line in this section is the most important to the book as a whole. An biographer's job is to not only find out things, but to also group them well or to not group them at all, which can be difficult if there is something obscuring the facts. Also, if you are to examine what looks like it should go together, but shouldn't, they you also need to examine stuff that looks like it shouldn't go together but actually should.

This idea goes beyond writing a biography. In diffi eq, problems sometimes relied on being able to group terms that were similar so that they canceled out nicely, leaving an easier problem to solve. This is also similar to NMR, which uses the same principles as MRIs but is used to identify molecules. A NMR hydrogen spectrum will give various peaks for all of the hydrogens in a molecule, but if the sample is impure it can often be difficult to group the different peaks correctly so that you can tell what is in your sample.

Lists

Lists are an important way to classify and organize things or ideas that are similar. However, lists can often be confusing unless an explanation comes with it. I could write down "

- Enolate

- Aldehyde

- Ether

- Alcohol

- Ketone

- Ester

- Acid Anhydride"

and that would be a list that would make little if any sense to the vast majority of people. However, the list of words is not random as all of those are names of functional groups that all contain oxygen. That is what these three sections have in common. They all contain lists that would be difficult to decipher without other information. Foucault gives outside information to help explain his list of words that mean resemblance. Destry-Scholes had left a list compiled completely of names that went to a collection of marbles. With no explanation given, it is difficult for Vera and Phineus to find each marble's corresponding name. They end up relying on matching up he colors and shapes of the marbles to the name that makes the most sense. This relies on the assumption that Destry-Scholes did not name the marbles arbitrarily. They also relied on information from Phineus' research that would relate to the names on the list. However, they end up abandoning the attempt. The list in Pale Fire is the most confusing of the three. It is a list of letters grouped together by a board, that when arranged differently but in the same order form some words. However, as it is it is difficult to draw any meaning from the list.

These difficulties happen in science when trying to piece together what is happening. If you have enough of the right information, you can often figure out what is going on. However, if you do not have a large amount of detailed information to go along with a list, than it can become difficult to piece together what is happening. In organic synthesis, it can be easy to piece together the list of chemicals that are formed with a certain reaction. However, if the right information is not available, it can be difficult to piece together how the chemicals that went in turned into the chemicals that went out. However, even determining the products of a reaction can be difficult, which would be like the list in Pale Fire. You have something, and you set up a reaction where you thought that was the only possible product, but then you got something different. You are left wondering "What the heck, this makes no sense".