Portland Seminar 2012
Gathering by the River
Facilitator: Peter Aicher (bio)
Location: The Atrium at Cedars, 640 Ocean Avenue, Portland
| Jan. 19 | H.D. Thoreau, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers |
| Feb. 9 | Edward Abbey, Down the River |
| March 8 | Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness |
| April 5 | Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek |
| May 3 | James Dickey, Deliverance |
| May 24 | James Joyce, a selection (!) from Finnegans Wake |
All meetings are on Thursdays, 6:30-8:30 pm
[Snow Dates: The Thursday following a Thursday cancellation]
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Rivers have been playing a central role in literature ever since Gilgamesh, gazing down from strong-walled Uruk, saw his own mortality in the corpses floating down the Euphrates. The six works chosen for this seminar are more recent examples of the river in literature. Though all were written in English (with the possible exception of Joyce’s contribution), they explore rivers from a variety of angles, never stepping in the same one twice.
Gathering by the River
January 19 H.D. Thoreau, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers
Written at Walden Pond just before Thoreau began Walden and based on a two-week trip with his brother some years earlier, A Week chronicles their trip in a home-made boat from Concord, MA to Concord, NH, and back. Thoreau’s style blends sharp-eyed observations of nature with oracular meditations on history, poetry, and religion; its takes him only half of the first sentence to go from the Concord to the Nile and Euphrates.
February 9 Edward Abbey, Down the River
“Not another river trip? Yes. This time it’s the San Juan.” The river trips that are the subject of many of Abbey’s essays in this collection take place in the American West, where “whiskey is for drinking, and water is for fighting over.” On one of his river voyages, Abbey brings along and comments on the classic work of the writer who almost equaled Abbey in bad attitude: Thoreau’s Walden.
March 8 Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness
“Traveling up that river was like traveling back to the earliest beginnings of the world.” Clearly the Congo (“a mighty big river… resembling an immense snake uncoiled”) is being asked to carry some symbolic freight in Conrad’s novel, as the narrator, a steamboat captain named Marlow, makes his way towards the darkness that is Mr. Kurtz.
April 5 Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
Dillard’s meditative sensibility, exercised here while resident near a creek in Virginia’s Blue Ridge, is laced with scientific insights and paired with a sharp and at times shocking eye. The rivers of Thoreau, Abbey, and Conrad involve journeys and boating expeditions; Tinker Creek is rather the scene of hard-won and fleeting perceptions, and stocked with metaphysical fish.
May 3 James Dickey, Deliverance
James Dickey was better know for his poetry (Poet Laureate in 1966) until his novel Deliverance was made into a movie in 1972. In a way, Deliverance is Conrad’s river updated for urban Americans, as civilization goes savage among banjo-playing hillbillies. Four guys with contemporary problems canoe down a wild river soon to be dammed, and soon wish they hadn’t.
May 24 James Joyce, a selection (!) from Finnegans Wake
There is much that is riverine in Joyce’s last work, from the first word to the closing scene where Dublin’s River Liffey lapses into the sea. Rather than tackling the whole work or sampling various sections, we will read, and hear a recording of, the famous chapter set on the banks of the Liffey, consisting of the gossip of two washerwomen. Joyce camouflaged hundreds of references to water and rivers in this section, as in the delta-formatted opening exclamation “O tell me…” ( “eau”), but this is only the least interesting facet of his homage to the River, which also represents one of the Wake’s great archetypal characters, Anna Livia Plurabelle.
You can download the Word document of the syllabus.
