Literary Experience

mid-term quiz & answers

[Please note that there are several correct answers for these questions; the following are given as examples of the kind of answers that would count.]

Answer the following questions, and explain the significance of the scene / event to the book / film.

1. What is Ginny’s job at the end?

    Answer: waitress; demonstrates her escape from farm and past; part "6" added to Lear's orignal five parts--a way to formally represent the theme of after-effects, living on after tragedy. 

2. What does Ginny take from Larry’s house after he’s dead?

    Answer: nothing; she and Caroline fight; no resolution and Ginny takes, literally, nothing from her past with her.

3. Explain what happens when Gloucester jumps off the cliff.

    Answer: It's a ploy by Edgar (disguised) to heal Gloucester of his despair, by having him jump "off a cliff," actually a little hillockp, and miraculously be still alive. Edgar offers vivid word-pictures to convince Gloucester of his near escape--and so perhaps (in his fictionalizing) becomes a figure for the author, but also problematic because he's lying and the whole problem with the play is the split between claim and intent: Can there be a good lie, and if so who decides?

4. What is the parallel scene in Ran? (parallel to #3)

    Answer: Lear falls from castle ruins, after fool offers a mock-heroic / mock-tragic moral (something about "humanity" or some such unwieldy and overwrought pathos). Kurosawa absorbs the Lear subplot into the main plot--and here you can see Hidetora taking on Gloucester's characteristics. But here the fall is just a fall, no lesson about the power of fiction to reform--or the problems with that.

5. Who is "always for the male" in the Oresteia?

    Answer: Athena, who at the end of the Eumenides breaks the jury's tie and votes for Orestes, absolving him of the crime of killing Clytaemnestra. The play here offers a foundational myth for Athenian justice--and its patriarchal underpinnings. The latter is enacted by the absorption (but in a subservient role) of the older, matriarchal principle of justice, the Furies (whose notion of justice is based on blood ties, not abstract law).

6. What’s the final image of Ran?

    Answer: Tsurumasu, the blind ex-prince on the cliff & brother of Sue, who drops the Buddah scroll. Striking image of blindness and hopelessness. Like Lear, a decimated landscape ends the film, but Kurosawa ends with a victim of Lear's politics, suggesting a shift of focus from the king to consequences of kingship on others.

7. Who is Kaede based on?

    Answer: No one exactly. In her visciousness she seems to absorbs characteristics of Goneril or Regan, but she is basically added by Kurosawa, to emphasize his more explicitly political theme of revenge. Kaede turns out to have orchestrated much of the plot in revenge for the conquest of her father.