Sumários
Discussion of set text
12 Dezembro 2016, 14:00 • Cecília Maria Beecher Martins
Discussion of the text from the manual "The reasons why exhaustion and burnout are so common" based on Anna Schnaffner's book Exhaustion: A History . We also discussed potential role of the arts in preventing burnout.
Writing Argumentative essays
7 Dezembro 2016, 14:00 • Cecília Maria Beecher Martins
Discussion of writing argumentative essays.
Students did practise exercises.
The German Requim in Nora Webster and writing argumentative essays
5 Dezembro 2016, 14:00 • Cecília Maria Beecher Martins
Based on the students' readings we discussed the role of music and in particular Brahms' German Requim in Nora Webster (expiation and thansgiving).
Discussed the layout of argumentative essays and asked students to prepare themes that they would work on in the next class.
Fictional Narratives - their capacity to help write one's way out of trauma
30 Novembro 2016, 14:00 • Cecília Maria Beecher Martins
Students presented their final readings of interpreatives questions in the manual on Nora Webster.
We discussed the purpose of music in the novel, in particular the Archduke's Trio and Brahm's German Requim.
We also discussed the role lliterature may play in over coming trauma after reading the text below and na interview with Colm Toíbin.
Guardian vídeo interview https://www.theguardian.com/books/video/2014/sep/25/colm-toibin-loss-father-nora-webster-video
Colm Tóibín: austere in writing, wicked in person
Colm Tóibín’s new novel about a bereaved family in rural Ireland is his most personal yet. He tells Gaby Wood why it took him 14 years to write By Gaby Wood person.html
… His latest is Nora Webster, a novel whose descendant was born first. He wrote the first chapter of Nora Webster 14 years ago, and stopped. On page four, a neighbour comes to pay her respects to the eponymous widow. She mentions, in passing, how devastating she found the death of her eldest daughter, Rose, and the departure for America of her youngest, Eily. And here, instead of continuing with Nora Webster, Tóibín prised from between its lines another novel, which became Brooklyn.
“The problem with Nora Webster is that some of it is so close to me, I couldn’t put any shape on it,” he explains. “I would add to it every so often over the years, always working out solutions and finding problems – how to go about it, and how to trust it.”
We are sitting outside as he tells me this, in a large private square to which he has access. From time to time, he says, it looks as if the residents might vote to hand it over to the city, but they think better of it on the grounds that the Roman Catholics who run Dublin would replace the austere lawn and ancient trees with gaudy flower beds. This is a multi-edged joke from Tóibín, a lapsed Catholic who errs on the side of austerity in prose and on the side of wickedness in person.
In the autobiographical aspect of the novel, Tóibín is represented by Donal, the elder of two brothers whose father has died. (Tóibín was 12 when his father died, and his brother was eight.) Maurice, like Tóibín’s father, was an influential schoolteacher and a member of the ruling political party. Generations of locals looked up to him. Donal’s passion is photography – “I couldn’t make him a little writer,” says Tóibín. He develops a severe stammer after his father’s death, and that part, Tóibín says, was true too. “The worst part of the stammer was that it would come and go, but it was there a lot. I really worked it out on my own, doing various things with my voice.” Writing was easier than speaking, and it was partly this that led to his vocation. “If you’re a writer, you don’t have to have a strategy for every word, so it’s a relief.”
That period became one of intense observation. “I was the sort of kid who remembered everything. I remember what shop was where, I remember what grave was where, I remember who said what to who – I stored that up.” Enniscorthy, the setting for so much of Tóibín’s fiction, is seen here in vivid close-up: “If you turn left you’ll hit exactly what I say you’ll hit”.
What’s striking, though – and what gives the book its insistent power – is that all of this is seen through the eyes of the mother, Nora, not the boy. In fact, it’s seen through the eyes of a mother more or less blinded by grief. So the idea that the book is autobiographical seems somehow misleading. It is, surely, a refraction of his own experience?
“You see, I couldn’t do it from my own point of view because I didn’t exist,” Tóibín replies. “I was almost reduced so much by what happened that nothing made any sense at all. But of course I was watching her. She was rebuilding her life – she wasn’t rebuilding mine, anyway – and I became interested in the idea of this sort of anti-mother.”
Nora is impatient and severe, lost and uncommunicative, unloved by her own mother when her mother was alive. Though her children find her difficult, she has them in mind all the time – or so it seems, until it becomes clear she has forgotten them at crucial moments. The book judges her less than Tóibín appears to in conversation: Nora is the heart of it, and the reader shares her burden.
Mothers are something of a specialist subject for Tóibín, whose last book, the Booker-shortlisted The Testament of Mary, took the ultimate mother and turned her into someone who had chosen to save her own skin rather than stand by her son. Yes, she sees him on the cross, but then she runs for her life, stealing clothes and shoes from strangers along the way. She dreams that she has held Jesus in her arms, but the pietà, in truth, never happened.
“I’m sort of giving up on it now,” Tóibín says with a laugh. “I’ve done a few gay novels, I’ve done a few mother books, and now I’m going to go on to do something else. The problem was that I did call a book of stories Mothers and Sons, and the book of essays was called New Ways to Kill Your Mother, so everyone was saying ‘your mother, your mother, your mother’.”
In real life, Tóibín’s mother had five children. If you gave her a couple of drinks – it would only take two, he says – “she’d look out over the distance and say: ‘Do you know, if I had known that you could get married and not have children, I certainly would’ve had none. I mean, I love you all and it’s wonderful having you all here, but if I’d known, I certainly wouldn’t have gone through that.’ ” And Tóibín would say: “ ‘It’s a pity you didn’t act on that, as far as I’m concerned, because I have no interest whatsoever in being born or being here.’ And that would cause a silence further.”
Later in life, his mother became quite serious about reading, but she found Tóibín’s novels too slow. (“She preferred the comic, in literature.”) In the local library, she discovered Wallace Stevens and Saul Bellow. “I often wish she had Martin Amis as a son,” Tóibín says with a grin, “because then they could have talked incessantly about Bellow. She would have been better as Martin Amis’s mother than mine.”
Nora Webster wasn’t really meant – to borrow Tóibín’s title – as a new way to kill his mother. What he wanted to do was write about grief, not from the point of view of a writer – as in Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking, or Julian Barnes’s Levels of Life – but as it happens to someone “who has no way of articulating anything, and what that does to a family”. He had tried it in The Heather Blazing, in which only the father and son remain alive (“Freud would have had a field day”), and he returned to the subject, and the place, for this novel.
The Websters are a kind of frozen family, in a way that relates to Tóibín’s rendition of what’s unsaid by Henry James. As a result, nothing much happens, unlike in Brooklyn, with its conflicting love stories and its bold young emigrant protagonist. At one point you think there might be some child abuse, at another it could be a Mrs Robinson story, and later, possibly, a political drama. But all of these are staved off in favour of emotional paralysis. There is a line in which Nora herself wishes she were further along in the book she’s reading, so she could feel more immersed, and it comes as a sly joke to us, just when we might be wishing for more action.
Tóibín is suspicious, he says, of “literature that depends on plot”. He doesn’t think more should be required than “a portrait of a sensibility”. He suggests it’s as if someone had told Vermeer, “If you could just stick a knife in the back of one of those girls, it would be so much more exciting. And he said, No, no, she’s just going to read a letter. Or if she wept reading the letter, could you have tears? No, no tears.”
Still, he doesn’t think of it as realism. He’s not interested in realism, he says, or even very interested in the novel as a form. “I would take realism as something where the sentences provide information,” he explains, whereas here, “you’re being led towards feeling with as much subtlety as I can manage. It’s closer to some sort of poetic thing, but it’s buried.”
The truth is, what Tóibín really likes is silence. Or music, accompanied by silence. There are three types of men, he says, a category pronouncement that comes out of nowhere. There’s the man who pretends to play baseball, or does baseball commentary, in the shower. There’s the man who plays air guitar and thinks he’s Eric Clapton. “And then there’s the worst one of all, who thinks he’s Daniel Barenboim or Herbert von Karajan, and when he gets into a concert hall starts conducting the orchestra. I could kill him!” There is, of course, a fourth type: the writer – who books himself in, alone, to the chamber music venue below Carnegie Hall, because that’s his idea of uninterrupted bliss. A few months ago, Tóibín did this, and just as he was sitting down to enjoy a Bartók quartet, he felt a tap on his shoulder. “I hope you’re going to be quiet,” said a voice. Tóibín turned round. It was Philip Roth.