| It
is not until
sometime later, when Albert brings home his old flame Shug Avery, that
Celie is enabled, with Shug’s help, to find Nettie’s letters
to her. |
| It
is the seemingly
inappropriate nightclub singer Shug Avery, however,
who provides
Celie with an extended period of “female bonding”; who,
with unconditional love, provides a “holding environment” in
which Celie’s nascent self is reflected back to itself; and, who,
as surrogate and “good-enough mother,” and lover, helps Celie
to complete the development of those capacities that enable her to
deal more effectively with loss, to finalize her gender identity
and choice of mature love object, and to develop a stable sense of
self. |
| Although
Celie has found a “good-enough mother” in Shug, it
is only
when Shug can provide an extended “holding environment” that
Celie can build upon the efforts of previous mother surrogates
and, in bonding with Shug, complete her previously stymied
psychological development. |
| It
is also in this bedroom scene that the women become lovers. |
| It
is the narrator who
tells us that days already harmonious and pleasurable were
“enhanced” by what is about to be related: … |
| …
; and while it may be
the general reader and not the critical one who
takes language as “a matter of course,” even the most
perspicacious fox hunters among us are obviously supposed to be
“stirred” to “surprise and pleasure” at Hawkes’s
demonstration of verbal dressage. |
| Even
though I believe it is
versions of Cassandra which
may be identified most often within the text, the ancient myth of
her refusal of Apollo, her prophetic powers made unbelievable, her
capture, bondage, and death do not play themselves out in a
contemporary enactment of the old story. |
| It’s
particularly in the exchanges between the middle-aged Sandra and
Wally, however,
contestants in the battle of the sexes, that
Brook-Rose both parodies and foregrounds the stereotypes of sexual
politics—a version of the future that sounds horrifyingly
familiar. |
| It
is through such
self-acknowledged strategies that
Sandra survives; … |
| It
isn’t
Cassandra’s sex which
makes her an obvious representative for the woman innovator; it is
both her creative power, related to divine sources but gained
through sexual bargaining with Apollo, and the absence of a
believing and accepting audience. |
| Whereas
Stephen is observed at a distance, cast, as Joanne V. Creighton
says, as a “stagey and unredeemed villain” (42), and Sophy and
Mike play very minor roles, in The
Middle Ground it is
Kate herself
who has been
misusing comedy. |
| But
is it only
with the eye that
we “see” such “things”? |
| Yet
it is from
within this breach opened up by the "intensity of seeing” that
Oppen has “made poetry.” |
| As
I have argued, it is
the pre-position of “Being” that
makes possible the context in which we can be “among” anything
at all. |
| I
think it is
significant that
Oppen once again uses a deictic pronoun to point out that it is
a certain type of “truthfulness” [0]
he offers, and, as I have argued, “that” truthfulness is best
conceived in terms of recognition of others rather than agreement
of propositions. |
| It
is both because of
and despite the fact that
“we”—once again a word “among” others in the poem—are
obsessed and bewildered with and by the “singular” that we
choose to be among others, which is, I suspect, a principal
“meaning of being numerous.” |
| It
is in this latter
sense, I believe,
that Oppen
wants us to look to language, and to the language in poems
specifically, as “a test of truth” or “a test of
sincerity,” which would demonstrate “that there is a moment,
an actual time, when you believe something to be true, and you
construct a meaning from these moments of conviction” (“Oppen”
161). |
| In
short, it is a
Heidegger, and not a Proust, who
should become our “central” figure and should absorb our
critical attention. |
| Insofar
as the intellectual’s career of “self-revision” has an
impact upon and/or reflects the historically important issues of
the culture as a whole, it is
to that extent that
“self-revision” becomes worthy of extended analysis and
meditation. |
| It
is precisely
because “art is a fait accompli,” which is treated on the
surface as a matter for grief, that
it is able to “survive.” |
| This
passage is doubly important for us,
however, because it so happens that
it is here that
the content of the poem also comes to its sharpest point. |
| And
it is here that
Auden formulates the weltanschauung on which the more practical
resolutions of the final, third part of the poem will be based. |
| Beloved’s
character is both the frame and center of the book, and it is
her story—or her desperate struggle to know and experience her
own story—that
is the pumping heart of the novel. |