conversations.from: human
conversations.value: What could be a title for a book about Baa, English, Character with the genre: Literature & Fiction, History & Criticism?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: A title for this book could be 'How to Read Literature'
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Provide the first five paragraphs for this book.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: How to Read Literature
  If Sue finds it hard to commit herself to Jude, it is not because she is a flirt but because she values her freedom. She grew up, so we are told, as something of a tomboy; and this epicene or sexless quality, which puts her beyond the pale of conventional sexual behaviour, makes it hard for her to understand men's sexual feelings for her. She can thus hurt them without intending to. She would prefer simply to be their friends. The novel sees with extraordinary insight that the sexual institutions of late Victorian society have destroyed the possibility of comradeship between men and women. Some of Sue's apparent perversity springs from the fact that her advanced sexual views are inevitably somewhat theoretical. Women's emancipation is still at an early stage. So her beliefs can easily succumb to social pressures. She is thrown out of college for unbecoming conduct, and then, alarmed by the public outcry this occasions, tries to set matters right with respectable opinion by marrying the mildly repulsive Phillotson. The result is predictably disastrous.
  One reason why it is easy for critics to see Sue as frigid and neurotic is that we view her largely through the eyes of others. We are not allowed much access to her from the inside. For much of the narrative, she exists as a function of Jude's experience, not as a character in her own right. If she seems so tantalisingly opaque, it is partly because she is filtered through the needs, desires and delusions of the protagonist. As one critic puts it, she is made the instrument of Jude's tragedy rather than the subject of her own. It is not surprising that after Jude's death she is no longer seen at all. To this extent, the novel itself is complicit in the sidelining of its heroine. But it is also extraordinarily perceptive in its presentation of her.
  The Marxist dramatist Bertolt Brecht, writing in the age of Hitler, thought that empathising with characters on stage risked blunting our critical faculties. And this, he considered, was highly convenient for those in power. Empathy elevated sentiment over critical reason. As a Marxist, Brecht also believed that social existence was made up of contradictions, and that these contradictions went to the heart of people's identities. To show men and women as they really are is to show them as changeable, inconsistent and self-divided. The idea of character as unified and coherent struck Brecht as an illusion. It repressed the conflicts within the self which might make for social change. In one of his short stories, Herr Keuner, who has been absent from his village for many years, returns home, and is cheerfully informed by his neighbours that he hasn't changed a bit. 'Herr Keuner,' Brecht writes, 'turned white.' Behind Scott or Balzac's conception of character lies one kind of politics; behind Brecht's lies another. He was the only man in history who was banned from the Danish communist party before he had applied to join.
  If imaginative sympathy is only one way of approaching character, it also has some more general limitations. The phrase 'the creative imagination' is one which almost everyone on the planet seems to find unequivocally positive, like 'We're off to Marrakesh tomorrow' or 'Have another Guinness'. But the imagination is by no means unambiguously positive. Serial killing requires a fair amount of imagination. The imagination is able to project all kinds of dark, diseased scenarios as well as a great many affirmative ones. Every lethal weapon ever invented was the result of an act of imagination. The imagination is thought to be among the noblest of human faculties, but it is also unnervingly akin to fantasy, which is generally ranked among the lowest.
  In any case, trying to feel what you are feeling will not necessarily improve my moral character. A sadist likes to know what his victim is feeling. Someone may need to know how you are feeling in order to exploit you more effectively. The Nazis did not kill Jews because they could not identify with what they were feeling. They did not care what they were feeling. I cannot experience the pains of childbirth, but this does not mean that I am callously indifferent to someone who does. Morality has precious little to do with feeling in any case. The fact that you feel a surge of nausea at the sight of someone with half their head shot away is neither here nor there as long as you try to help them. Conversely, feeling intense compassion for someone who has just fallen down a manhole, while nipping down a side-street to avoid having to haul him out, will not win you many humanitarian prizes.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Provide another paragraph.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Pip's childhood home is physically attached to the forge, which means that, unlike Wemmick's mini-castle, the world of work overlaps with the domestic sphere. The negative aspect of this is that the violence and oppressiveness of the public world also infiltrate the private one. Joe's job as a blacksmith involves a good deal of hammering, and so does Mrs Joe's treatment of Pip. In fact, Joe tells the boy how his own father, a blacksmith averse to work, 'hammered at me with a wigour only to be equalled by the wigour with which he didn't hammer at his anwil'. Pip uses the word 'unjust' of Mrs Joe's belabouring of him, which links the violence of the domestic world to the public domain of law, crime and punishment. The forge is associated with iron, and it is with a piece of iron that Orlick strikes Mrs Joe down.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Provide the last four paragraphs.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: The poet's eye here is steadily on the object. The lines resonate with wonder and admiration, but their emotions are kept in check by the demands of precise description. The poem allows itself a minor flight of fancy with 'The stars crowd through the lilac leaves / To look at you', but otherwise it subordinates the imaginative to the real. 'The low moon brightens you with silver' makes it sound as though the moon is paying homage to the flower, but if this is fanciful it is also a statement of fact. Swinburne's poem is full of hypnotically repetitive rhythms, stringing together phrases with too many syllables in them, whereas the rhythms of Lowell's piece are taut and restrained. There is a control and economy about her language. Though she is moved by the beauty of the flower, she refuses to lose her cool. Swinburne's lines tumble hectically along, while Lowell weighs and balances every phrase.
  We may end with a poet whose status is not in doubt. In fact, there is well-nigh universal agreement on the value of his work. So much so, indeed, that it is doubtful that his memory will ever fade. Much anthologised, he has a seat among the immortals as secure as Rimbaud or Pushkin, and his reputation has never suffered the ups and downs of some fellow writers. I am referring to the nineteenth-century Scottish poet William McGonagall, by common consent one of the most atrocious writers ever to set pen to paper. Here is an extract from his 'Railway Bridge of the Silvery Tay':
  The world is stuffed with mediocre poets, but it takes a certain sublime ineptitude to rival McGonagall's astonishing achievement. To be so unforgettably awful is a privilege bestowed on only a few. With magnificent consistency, he never deviates from the most abysmal standards. Indeed, he can justly boast of never having penned an indifferent or unremarkable line. It is idle to ask whether someone could write like this yet be aware of how dreadful he was. Like the less competent performers on TV talent shows, the fact that he does not know how bad he is is part of his badness.
  Yet a nagging question remains. Imagine some community, perhaps in the far-flung future, in which the English language was still in use, but its resonances and conventions, maybe because of some momentous historical transformation, were very different from the English of today. Perhaps phrases like 'And can be seen from miles away' would not sound particularly lame; rhymes like 'Tay', 'railway', 'day' and 'away' would not appear absurdly repetitive; and the flat literalism and rhythmical clumsiness of 'With your strong brick piers and buttresses in so grand array' might come through as rather charming. If Samuel Johnson could complain about some of Shakespeare's most inventive imagery, is it entirely out of the question that one day McGonagall might be hailed as a major poet?
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Swap the first and the last sentence.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: If Samuel Johnson could complain about some of Shakespeare's most inventive imagery, is it entirely out of the question that one day McGonagall might be hailed as a major poet? The lines resonate with wonder and admiration, but their emotions are kept in check by the demands of precise description. The poem allows itself a minor flight of fancy with 'The stars crowd through the lilac leaves / To look at you', but otherwise it subordinates the imaginative to the real. 'The low moon brightens you with silver' makes it sound as though the moon is paying homage to the flower, but if this is fanciful it is also a statement of fact. Swinburne's poem is full of hypnotically repetitive rhythms, stringing together phrases with too many syllables in them, whereas the rhythms of Lowell's piece are taut and restrained. There is a control and economy about her language. Though she is moved by the beauty of the flower, she refuses to lose her cool. Swinburne's lines tumble hectically along, while Lowell weighs and balances every phrase.
  We may end with a poet whose status is not in doubt. In fact, there is well-nigh universal agreement on the value of his work. So much so, indeed, that it is doubtful that his memory will ever fade. Much anthologised, he has a seat among the immortals as secure as Rimbaud or Pushkin, and his reputation has never suffered the ups and downs of some fellow writers. I am referring to the nineteenth-century Scottish poet William McGonagall, by common consent one of the most atrocious writers ever to set pen to paper. Here is an extract from his 'Railway Bridge of the Silvery Tay':
  The world is stuffed with mediocre poets, but it takes a certain sublime ineptitude to rival McGonagall's astonishing achievement. To be so unforgettably awful is a privilege bestowed on only a few. With magnificent consistency, he never deviates from the most abysmal standards. Indeed, he can justly boast of never having penned an indifferent or unremarkable line. It is idle to ask whether someone could write like this yet be aware of how dreadful he was. Like the less competent performers on TV talent shows, the fact that he does not know how bad he is is part of his badness.
  Yet a nagging question remains. Imagine some community, perhaps in the far-flung future, in which the English language was still in use, but its resonances and conventions, maybe because of some momentous historical transformation, were very different from the English of today. Perhaps phrases like 'And can be seen from miles away' would not sound particularly lame; rhymes like 'Tay', 'railway', 'day' and 'away' would not appear absurdly repetitive; and the flat literalism and rhythmical clumsiness of 'With your strong brick piers and buttresses in so grand array' might come through as rather charming.The poet's eye here is steadily on the object.