Poetic Drama /Verse Drama of Modern age Essay

Eliot’s plays attempt to revitalize verse drama and usually treat the same themes as in his poetry. They include Murder in the Cathedral (1935), dealing with the final hours of Thomas ÃÆ' Becket; The Family Reunion (1939); The Cocktail Party (1950); The Confidential Clerk (1954); and The Elder Statesman (1959)..(1) Indeed, Eliot hoped that the study and critical reception of early modern verse drama would shape the production of modernist verse drama. In the 1924 essay â€Å"Four Elizabethan Dramatists,† Eliot calls for the study of Elizabethan drama to have a â€Å"revolutionary influence on the future of drama.†(2) Yet, in his later writings as a verse dramatist, Eliot always keeps an arm’s length between himself and the early modern dramatic poets, especially Shakespeare, whom he saw as his strongest precursors in the development of a modernist English verse drama. In the 1951 piece â€Å"Poetry and Drama,† on the matter of verse style in his ow n first major poetic drama, Murder in the Cathedral, Eliot writes, â€Å"As for the versification, I was only aware at this stage that the essential was to avoid any echo of Shakespeare.†¦ Therefore what I kept in mind was the versification of Everyman.†(3) Elsewhere, he is keenly aware of the challenges of writing verse drama for a modernist theatre: â€Å"The difficulty of the author is also the difficulty of the audience. Both have to be trained; both need to be conscious of many things which neither an Elizabethan dramatist, nor an Elizabethan audience, had any need to know.†(4) Eliot finds his whip for training his [p. 105] audience and himself, as dramatist, less in the examples Shakespeare and his contemporaries provide than in the works their medieval predecessors left behind. This essay examines Eliot’s status as a medieval modernist. The periodicity of Eliot’s Middle Ages, problematic as it is, represents the convergence of his animus against modernity and liberalism with his desire for a religiosity that is not marginal, fragmented, and â€Å"compartmentalized† but rather central to the activity of everyday life in a culture and society best characterized by the words unity, integration, and order—the ideological language of conservatism. In part, the concept of Eliot as  Ã¢â‚¬Å"medieval modernist† is indebted to Michael T. Saler’s work on visua l modernism, the English avant-garde, and the London Underground transport system. What Saler describes in terms of medieval modernism is very much a stance or attitude towards the relationship between aesthetic production (imagination) and the utility of consumption (reception) grounded in a social functionalism thought to have its origins in the medieval. I should be quick to point out that Saler is rather ambivalent on the point with regard to Eliot himself: â€Å"While T. S. Eliot might be called a medieval modernist because of his admiration for the organic and spiritual community of the Middle Ages together with his â€Å"impersonal† conception of art, his elitist and formalist views isolate him from several of the central terms of the tradition as I have defined it.Eliot’s ambivalence towards the early modern and repeated turns to the medieval evidence a contradiction between Eliot’s life-long desire for a clearly articulated unity, integration, and order in all aspects of everyday life, including writing and religion, and his fetishization of an early modern period he imagines in terms of anarchy, disorder, and decay. Eliot repeatedly mystifies the early modern period. In his introduction to G. Wilson Knight’s The Wheel of Fire, Eliot gives voice to a vision of the early modern past as a period of phantasmagoric peril, uncertainty, even unknowability: â€Å"But with Shakespeare, we seem to be moving in an air of Cimmerian darkness. The conditions of his life, the conditions under which dramatic art was then possible, seem even more remote from us than those of Dante Verse drama is any drama written as verse to be spoken; another possible general term is poetic drama. For a very long period verse drama was the dominant form of drama in Europe (and was also important in non-European cultures). Greek tragedy and Racine’s plays are written in verse, as is almost all of Shakespeare’s drama, and Goethe’s Faust. Verse drama is particularly associated with the seriousness of tragedy, providing an artistic reason to write in this form, as well as the practical one that verse lines are easier for the actors to memorize exactly. In the second half of the twentieth century verse drama fell almost completely out of fashion with dramatists writing in English (the plays of Christopher Fry and  T. S. Eliot being possibly the end of a long tradition). As Eliot sank ever more deeply into his Anglo-Catholic schtick and he no longer had Pound around to cut the fat and grain filler out of his work, he turned to writing verse drama. He wanted to  reach  people.  He  probably  wanted  to  be  Shakespeare.  Murder in the Cathedral was the first of these verse dramas, and the only one I can even begin to tolerate. The title is intended to evoke a whodunnit; it may be a ponderous Eliotian attempt at a â€Å"witticism†. The joke, such as it is, is that the murderee is Archbishop St. Thomas à   Becket, the killers are some of Henry II’s knights, and the scene of the crime is Canterbury Cathedral, anno domini 1170. If you happened to be hanging around Canterbury in 1935, this was a big win because Canterbury Cathedral is where the thing was first performed. (If you were hanging around  Canterbury  in  1170,  call  me;  we  should  talk).  The background: King Henry II’s wanted to gain influence over the Church in England. He appointed Becket as Archbishop of Canterbury to that end because Becket was his boy. Once in office, Becket’s loyalty shifted to the Church. The two came into conflict over the practice of trying clergy in ecclesiastical courts for civil offenses, and Becket fled to France. While  in France he continued to defy Henry, going so far as to excommunicate some of Henry’s more loyal bishops. At the beginning of the play, Becket returns from his seven-year exile in France. He goes straight to Canterbury, arriving in time for Act I. Four Tempters tempt him. Meanwhile, Henry has put on his John Stanfa hat and made an offhand remark to some of his knights about how convenient it would be if Becket weren’t around any more. The knights draw the obvious conclusion about what he means, and they depart for Canterbury. When they arrive, Becket explains that he is loyal to a higher power than the king. They reply that they aren’t, and they kill him at the altar. The bloodshed is followed by a flourish of self-exculpatory forensic rhetoric from the knights: They argue persuasively that they’ve done the right thing, but not too persuasively because the author doesn’t agree. Exeunt knights; some priests pray at each other and asperse the audience; good  night,  good  night.  Historically, Henry disavowed the whole thing, the knights fell into disgra ce, and Becket was canonized. The whole thing suffers from Late Eliot Syndrome: No tack is left unsledgehammered. He lectures us about his points rather than demonstrating or illustrating them, and the writing is  often less than inspired. Still, it’s better than his other verse dramas: The form and the language are at least appropriate to the material, and the material holds up under the weight of the Message. Eliot later attempted to pile similar Messages onto midcentury English bourgeois melodrama  -in  verse!  It  didn’t  work.  At the height of his powers, Eliot might have done something really interesting with Murder in the Cathedral. Christopher Fry, who has died, aged 97, was, with TS Eliot, the leading figure in the revival of poetic drama that took place in Britain in the late 1940s. His most popular play, The Lady’s Not For Burning, ran for nine months in the West End in 1949. But although Fry was a sacrificial victim of the theatrical revolution of 1956, he bore his fall from fashion with the stoic grace of a Christian humanist and increasingly turned his attention to writing epic films, most notably Ben Hur (1959). The Lady remains Fry’s most popular play: the leading role of Thomas Mendip has attracted actors as various as Richard Chamberlain, Derek Jacobi and Kenneth Branagh. Today, one is struck by the way in which Fry’s euphuistic language – at one point, the hero describes himself as a â€Å"perambulating vegetable patched with inconsequential hair† – overtakes the dramatic action. But in a postwar theatre that had little room for realism, Fry’s medieval setting, rich verbal conceits and self-puncturing irony delighted audiences, and the play became the flagship for the revival of poetic drama. At the same time, Eliot’s The Cocktail Party enjoyed a West End vogue, and a new movement was born. Though less of a public theorist than Eliot, Fry still believed passionately in the validity of poetic drama. As he wrote in the magazine, Adam: â€Å"In prose, we convey the eccentricity of things, in poetry their concentricity, the sense of relationship between them: a belief that all things express the same identity and are all contained in one discipline of revelation.† For a period in the late 1940s and early 50s, Fry helped to revive English verse drama, to which he brought colour, movement and a stoic gaiety. How many of his plays will survive, only time can tell. But, at his best, he brought an undeniable, spiritual elan to the drab world of postwar British theatre. He certainly deserves to be remembered as something more than the inspiration for Margaret Thatcher’s famous remark, â€Å"The lady’s not for turning†. For many centuries from the Greeks onwards verse was, throughout Europe, the natural and almost exclusive medium for the composition and presentation of dramatic works with any pretensions to  «seriousness » or the status of  «art ». Western drama’s twin origins, in the  Greek Festivals and in the rituals of the medieval church, naturally predisposed it to the use of verse. For tragedy verse long remained the only  «proper » vehicle. In comedy the use of prose became increasingly common – giving rise, for example, to such interesting cases as Ariosto’s I suppositi, written in prose in 1509 and reworked twenty years later in verse. (La cassaria also exists in both prose and verse). Shakespeare’s use of prose in comic scenes, especially those of  «low life », and for effective contrast in certain scenes of the tragedies and history plays, shows an increasing awareness of the possibilities of the medium and perhaps already contains an implicit association between prose and  «realism ». Verse continued to be the dominant medium of tragedy throughout the seventeenth century – even domestic tragedies such as A Yorkshire Tragedy (Anon., 1608) or Thomas Heywood’s A Woman Killed With Kindness (1603) were composed in blank verse. For all the continuing use of verse it is hard to escape the feeling that by the end of the seventeenth century it had largely ceased to be a genuinely living medium for dramatists. Increasingly the prevailing idioms of dramatic verse became decidedly literary, owing more to the work of earlier dramatists than to any real relationship with the language of its own time. By 1731 George Lillo’s The London Merchant, or The History of George Barnwell, for all its clumsiness and limitations, in its presentation of a middle-class tragedy in generally effective prose archieved a theatrical liveliness and plausibility largely absent from contemporary verse tragedies – from Addison’s Ca to (1713), Thomson’s Sophonisba (1730) and Agamemnon (1738), or Johnson’s Irene (1749). The example of Racine was vital to such plays, but it was not one that proved very fertile. Lillo was praised in France by Diderot and Marmontel, in Germany by Lessing and Goethe. It is not unreasonable to see Lillo’s work as an early and clumsy anticipation of Ibsen’s. The London Merchant constitutes one indication of the effective  «death » of verse drama. Others are not far to seek. In France, Houdar de La Motte was also writing prose tragedies in the 1720’s, and Stendhal, in the 1820’s was insistent that prose was now the only possible medium for a viable tragedy. Ibsen largely abandoned verse after Peer Gynt (1867), in favour of prose plays more directly and realistically concerned with contemporary issues. A well-known letter to Lucie Wolf (25 May 1883) proclaims that  «Verse has been most injurious to the art of drama†¦ It is improbable that verse will be employed to any extent worth mentioning in the drama of the immediate future since the aims of the dramatists of the future are almost certain to be incompatible with it ». Against the background of such a pattern of development, later dramatic works in verse have often seemed eccentric or academic; this should not blind us, however, to the considerable achievements of modern verse drama and to the importance of the testimony they bear to an idea of drama often radically different from the prevailing modern conceptions. A genre which has given rise to some of the most interesting work of D’Annunzio and Hofmannsthal, Yeats and Eliot, is surely not a negligible one. In the English context, the verse dramas of the Romantics and the Victorians already constituted a kind of  «revival » part of a conscious effort to bring poetry back to the theatre. For the Romantics there was still a potential audience with some sense that verse was the proper  medium for tragedy. The theatrical inexperience of the poets, however, made them ill-equipped for real dramatic achievement. The efforts of Wordsworth (The Borderers), 1795-6), Coleridge (eg. Remorse, 1813), and Keats (Otho the Great, 1819) remain of only antiquarian interest, judged as works for the theatre, though all have much to tell about their makers, and the Borderers, at least, is a work of considerable poetic substance. Perhaps slightly more praise might be extended to some of Byron’s verse dramas (eg. Manfred, 1817; Marino Faliero, 1820; Sardanapalus, 1821) and Shelley’s Cenci (1818) contains some scenes of considerable power. For most of the English romantics, however, the sha dow of Shakespeare proved oppressive; admiration, or rather reverence, for his example produced in their own work a poetic and theatrical idiom lacking all freshness and contemporaneity. It was in the work of other lands and languages that the example of Shakespeare could work more positively. In Germany, for example, there emerged a rich new tradition of verse drama in the works of Lessing (eg. Nathan Der Weise, 1779), Goethe, Schiller, Werner, Kleist (notably in Penthesilea, 1808, and Der Prinz von  Homburg, 1821) and others. In Italy the early plays of Manzoni (Il Conte di Carmagnola, 1820; Adelchi, 1822) provided en example which only a few poet-dramatists endeavoured to follow, while others -such as Niccolini – were more concerned with an attempt to revive Greek models of tragedy. (In Italy verse drama could often not escape from the shadow of the operatic tradition). In America too, verse drama was being attempted by dramatists such as John Howard Payne (eg. Brutus, 1818), Robert Mongomery Bird (The Gladiator, 1831) and, a work of some quality, George Henry Boker’s Francesca da Rimini (1855). In 1827-8 the English troupe made its famous visit to Paris, performing, amongst other works, all four of Shakespeare’s major tragedies. The impact was enormous. One of those most affected and impressed was the young Victor Hugo. In Hugo’s plays, much influenced by Shakespeare, romanticism found far more effective expression in verse drama than it had ever found in England. In plays such as Hernani (1830), Le roi s’amuse (1832), Ruy Blas (1838) and Les Burgraves (1843), Hugo creates a verse idiom of immense vigour which articulates visions of concentrated and extreme human emotion. At his best Hugo’s discrimination of character, if crude, is also striking. Other succesful versedramas later in the century included Francois Coppà ©e’s Severo Torelli (1883) Les Jacobites (1885) and Pour la couronne (1895), as well as Edmond Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac (1897). Certainly it is in the work of French and German poets (in plays by Hebbel, Grillparzer and Grabbe as well as those of the poets mentioned earlier) and in the early verse plays of Ibsen notably Brand (1866) and Peer Gynt (1867) – that something li ke the full potential of verse drama is expressed. In England nothing of similar power exists in the nineteenth century. The  plays of James Sheridan Knowles (1784-1862) – such as William Tell (1825) and The Love Chase (1837) – provided effective roles for the great actor-manager Macready, but have little now to offer. Macready also acted in Lytton’s The Lady of Lyons (1838) and Richelieu (1839), both of which had considerable theatrical success, and are not entirely without enduring merits. Poets such as Tennyson (eg. Queen Mary, 1876; Harold, 1876; Becket, 1879) and Browning (eg. Strafford, 1837; A Blot in the Scutcheon, 1843) also wrote for the theatre but displayed very little sense of the genuinely theatrical (Tennyson assumed that he could leave it to Irving to  «fit »Ã‚  Becket for the stage). Other poets wrote closet dramas never intended for performance – Sir Henry Taylor’s enormous Philip Van Artevelde (1834) is an archetypal example of the genre, a work which, its author readily confessed  «was not intended for the stage » and was  «properly an Historical Romance, cast in dramatic and rythmical form ». Much the same might be said of two later and finer works: Swinburne’s Bothwell (1874) of which Edmund Gosse rightly observes that  «in bulk [it] o ne of the five-act Jidai-Mono or classic plays of eighteenth-century Japan, and it could only be performed, like an oriental drama, on successive nights », and The Dynasts (19038) of Thomas Hardy, the text of which occupies some 600 pages and which is described in its subtitle as  «An Epic-Drama of the War of Napoleon in Three Parts, Nineteen Acts, and One Hundred and Thirty Scenes ». The requirements and possibilities of practical theatre have clearly been left far behind; the divorce of the poet from the performers seems complete. Yet there were others who sought to maintain the relationship between poetry and theatre. The plays of Stephen Phillips, for example (eg. Herod, 1901; Ulysses, 1902; Paolo and Francesca, 1902; The King, 1912) have neither the psychological perception of Swinburne nor the historical insight of Hardy, but they did hold the stage with considerable success. Phillips had plenty of theatrical experience, having been an actor in the theatrical company of his cousin, Frank Benson. Phillips’ verse plays were produced by Beerbohm Tree, and they display a sophisticated command of theatrical effect and a wide-ranging, if almost wholly derivative, verse rhetoric which has, very occasionally, genuinely poetic moments. Elsewhere in the early years of the century there is to be found worthwhile work by a multitude of minor figures. Lawrence Binyon’s Attila (1907) and Ayuli (1923); Gordon Bottomley’s King Lear’s Wife (1915) and Gruach (1923); John Masefield’s Good Friday (1917), Esther (1922) and Tristan and Isolt (1927); John Drinkwater’s Cophetua (1911) and Rebellion (1914); Arthur Symons’ The Death of Agrippina and Cleopatra in Judea (1916); T.Sturge Moore’s Daimonissa (1930) – are all of interest and substance, but none can be said to make an overwhelming case for the genre, and all are, in varying degrees unable to escape from the long shadow of Shakespeare, especially as reinterpreted by the nineteenth-  century. Under fresh influences – French Symbolism and Japanese Noh theatre in particular – verse drama began to explore new possibilities. Gordon Bottomley’s later works – such as Fire at Callart (1939) showed an awareness of the possibilities offered by the model of the Noh. Yeats, of course, had more fully explored such possibilities in works such as At the Hawks’ Well, The Only Jealousy of Emer, The Dreaming of the Bones and Calvary (composed c.1915-20), insofar as they were the means of liberation from the obligations of a naturalistic theatre. Verse, music, ritual and dance were woven into a complementary whole. (Irish successors to yeats include Austin Clarke, whose verse plays have been performed by the Abbey Theatre, the Cambridge festival Theatre and others). In later plays such as The Herne’s Egg (1935) and Purgatory (1938) evolves a personal and convincing idiom (both verbally and theatrically) for verse drama. These are superficially simp le, but metaphysically profound works, both verbally exciting and theatrically striking. Elsewhere in Europe, the work of Gabriele D’Annunzio (eg. La città   morta, 1898; Francesca da Rimini, 1901; La figlia di Iorio, 1904) and Hugo von Hofmannsthal (eg. Jedermann, 1912; Das grosse Salzburger Welttheater, 1922) was bearing eloquent testimony to the continuing potential of the genre. In France Claudel was creating a series of verse plays upon religious and philosophical themes, whose intense lyricism and startling imagery for long went without full appreciation (eg. Partage de midi, 1906; Le pain dur, 1918; Le Soulier de satin, 1928-9). Other French twentieth-century verse-dramas include works by Char, Cà ©saire and Cocteau, but the poetic qualities which characterise much that has been most striking in modern French drama have more generally found expression in prose plays rather than verse plays – as, for example, in the work of Giradoux, Anouilh, Beckett, Ionesco and Vian. In Spain, Lorca mixes verse and prose in his plays. In Britain the 1930’s saw a new generation of poets whose experiments did much to broaden the range – in terms both of form and content – of verse drama. The Dog Beneath the Skin (1936) and The Ascent of F.6 (1937) were collaborations by W.H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood which brought a fresh wit and intellectuality, a new radicalism of social comment and contemporary relevance, to the genre. T.S.Eliot’s plays – notably Murder in the Cathedral  (1935) and The Family Reunion (1939) offered persuasive instances of how verse might, for the dramatist, be the means by which one could  «get at the permanent and universal » rather than the merely ephemeral and naturalistic. Murder in the Cathedral was written for performance in Canterbury Cathedral, while The Family Reunion was composed for the commercial theatre. The  idioms of the two plays are, therefore, necessarily very different; taken together the two offer a promise not wholly fulfilled by Eliot’s later plays, such as The Cocktail Party (1950), The Confidential Clerk (1953) and The Elder Statesman (1958). In these later plays the verse lacks the confidence to be genuinely poetic – the linguistic intensity of the pre-war plays gives way to something far more prosaic. Murder in the Cathedral is, in part, striking for its mixture of verse forms and idioms; the Auden and Isherwood collaborations drew on the techniques of the music hall, the pantomime and the revue. From the 1930’s onwards verse dramas have continued to be composed in Britain (and America), many of them works of considerable distinction. Most have been composed for performance outside the commercial theatre – for churches and cathedrals, for universities or drama schools, or for some theatrical groups devoted to verse drama. In London, for example, the Mercury Theatre in Notting Hill Gate, holding no more than 150, was opened by Ashley Dukes in 1933 and was home to E.Martin Browne’s Pilgrim Players. Browne was central to the revival of verse drama in the middle years of the century. He directed all of Eliot’s plays, including the first performance of Murder in the Cathedral. In the 1940’s he directed, at the Mercury, several important verse plays – both religious (eg. Ronald Duncan’s This Way to the Tomb, 1945; Anne Ridler’s The Shadow Factory, 1945) and comic (eg. Christopher Fry’s A Phoenix too Frequent, 1946; Dona gh MacDonagh’s Happy as Larry, 1947). Browne was also associated with the remarkable religious plays by Charles Williams (eg.Thomas Cranmer of Canterbury, 1936; Seed of Adam, 1937; The House of the Octopus, 1945). Indeed, the variety of the verse drama produced in these years was very considerable. It includes the grave beauty of Williams’ plays and the fantastic gaiety of Happy as Larry, its language informed at every turn by the ballads of Dublin and the idiosyncrasies of  colloquial  «Irish ». In the plays of Christopher Fry there is a substantial body of work characterised, at its best, by both a vivacity (even exuberance) of language and a well-developed theatricality. Plays such as The Lady’s Not for Burning (1948)), Venus Observed (1950), A Sleep of Prisoners (1951) and Curtmantle (1961) display a considerable range. Fry can be funny and moving, dazzling and beautiful. He can also be verbose and sentimental. Immensely successful – critically and commercially – at the beginning of his career, Fry’s reputation has suffered since. His best plays are both intelligent and entertaining, and will surely continue to find admirers. There is much that is rewarding, too, in the work of Ronald Duncan – in Our Lady’s Tumbler (195 0), which has some fine choric writing, or in Don Juan (1953); Stephen Spender’s Trial of a Judge (1938) is an intriguing experiment, with some highly effective moments. Louis MacNeice’s The Dark Tower (1946) is a rich and  mysterious  «radio parable play » in verse. The tradition of verse drama has continued to attract writers, and they have continued to produce interesting plays; such plays have, however, largely been seen (or read) only by specialised audiences. Few have found their way on to the commercial stage. Robert Gittings’ Out of this Wood (1955); Jonathan Griffin’s The Hidden King (1955); John Heath-Stubbs’ Helen in Egypt, (1958); Patric Dickinson’s A Durable Fire (1962) the list might be extended considerably. More recent years have seen the production (or publication) of significant verse plays by, amongst others, Peter Dale (The Cell, 1975; Sephe, 1981), Tony Harrison (eg. The Misanthrope, 1973; Phaedra Britannica, 1975; The Oresteia, 1981; The Trackers of Oxyrhynchus, 1990), Seamus Heaney (The Cure at Troy, 1990) and Francis Warner (eg. Moving Reflections, 1982; Living Creation, 1985; Byzantium, 1990). In America the tradition begun in the nineteenth century and continued by dramatists such as Josephine Preston Peabody (eg. Marlowe, 1901) and William Vaughn Moody (eg. The FireBringer, 1904), has had such later practitioners as Percy Mackaye (The Mystery of Hamlet, 1949), Maxwell Anderson (eg. Elizabeth the Queen, 1930; Winterset, 1935), Richard Eberhart (eg. The Visionary Farms, 1952; The Mad Musician, 1962) and Archibald MacLeish (eg. J.B., 1958; Herakles, 1967). Modern verse-drama has extended the formal possibilities of the genre far beyond the traditions of  blank-verse tragedy. A wide range of verse forms, of free-verse, and of experiments derived from the techniques of revue and music-hall have played their part in the evolution of new and striking theatrical forms. Why have so many writers continued to be attracted to verse drama when, as Peter Dale observes, his chances of seeing his work performed are generally very slight? If, like Ibsen after Peter Gynt, the dramatist’s aim is to write  «the genuine, plain language spoken in real life » (letter of 25 May 1883 quoted above) he will not, presumably, be attracted to verse as a likely medium. If, on the other hand, he feels with Yeats that the post-Ibsen prose of Shaw’s plays was devoid of  «all emotional implication », or if he shares the sentiments expressed by T.S.Eliot in his 1950 lecture on  «Poetry and Drama », it is more than probable that he will feel it necessary to turn to verse: It seems to me that beyond the nameable, classifiable emotions and motives of our conscious life when directed towards action – the part of like which prose drama is wholly adequate to express – there is a fringe of indefinite extent, of feeling which we can only detect, so to speak, out of the corner of the eye and can never completely focus †¦ This peculiar range of sensibility can be expressed by dramatic poetry, at its moments of greatest intensity. At such moments we  touch the border of those feelings which only music can express. We can never emulate music, because to arrive at the condition of music would be the annihilation of poetry, and especially of dramatic poetry. Never the less, I have before my eyes a kind of mirage of the perfection of verse drama, which would be a design of human action and words, such as to present at once the two aspects of dramatic and musical order †¦ To go as far in this direction as possible to go, without losing tha t contact with the ordinary everyday world with which drama must come to terms, seems to me the proper aim of dramatic poetry. Such thoughts enable us to see modern verse drama as much more than that reaction against naturalism as which it has often been depicted. At its best  verse drama is too positive an aspiration for it to be adequately understood merely as a reaction to the dominant idiom of the time. Much of what is best and most attractive in European theatre of the last 40 years might be described as post-naturalist, rather than merely anti-naturalist; verse-drama has made, and should continue to make, important and distinctive contributions to post-naturalism. According to Francis Fergussan, a poetic drama is a drama in which you â€Å"feel† the characters are poetry and were poetry before they began to speak. Thus poetry and drama are inseparable. The playwright has to create a pattern to justify the poetic quality of the play and his poetry performs a double function. First, it is an action itself, so it must do what it says. Secondly, it makes explicit what is really happening. Eliot in his plays has solved the problem regarding language, content  and  versification. In the twentieth century, the inter-war period was an age suited to the poetic drama. There was a revival and some of the poets like W. B. Yeats and T. S. Eliot tried their hands in writing of poetic plays. This was a reaction against prose plays of G. B. Shaw, Galsworthy and others because these plays showed a certain lack of emotional touch with the moral issue of the age. W. B. Yeats did not like this harsh criticism of the liberal idea of the nineteenth century at the hands of dramatists like G. B. Shaw. So he thought the drama of ideas was a failure to grasp the reality of the age. On the other hand, the drama of entertainment (artificial comedy) was becoming dry and uninteresting. It was under these circumstances that the modern playwrights like T. S. Eliot, J.M. Synge, W. B. Yeats, W. H. Auden, Stephen Spendor and so on have made the revival the poetic drama possible. The Choruses. A striking feature of â€Å"Murder in the Cathedral† is Eliot’s use of poetic choruses like the choruses in ancient Greek drama. The producer must decide the method which will project most effectively in the theatre these recurring choral passages, spoken by the Women of Canterbury. There are eight poetic rhapsodies or choruses, comprising approximately one fifth of  the text. The poetry in the choruses invites all the imaginative enrichment which light, music and dance can give it.  The chorus commenced in Greek drama, originally as a group of singers or chanters. Later, a Greek playwright called Thespis introduced an actor on the stage who held a dialogue with the leader of the chorus. Playwrights like Aeschylus and Sophocles added a second and a third actor to interact with the chorus. Finally, the chorus took on the role of participants in the action and interpreters of what is happening on stage. Eliot has based â€Å"Murder in the Cathedral† on the form of classic Greek tragedy. He uses the chorus to enhance the dramatic effect, to take part in the action of the play, and to perform the roles of observer and commentator. His chorus women represent the common people, who lead a life of hard work and struggles,  no matter who rules. It is only their faith in God that gives them the strength to endure. These women are uneducated, country folk, who live close to the earth. As a result, they are in tune with the changing seasons and the moods of nature. At present, they have an intuition of death and evil. They fear that the new year, instead of bringing new hope, will bring greater suffering. The three priests have three different reactions to Becket’s arrival. The first reacts with the fear of a calamity.The second is a little bold and says that there can hardly be any peace between a king who is busy in intrigue and an archbishop who is an equally proud, self-righteous man. The third priest feels that the wheel of time always move ahead, for good or evil. He believes that a wise man, who cannot change the course of the wheel, lets it move at its own pace.

The Overcoat

Meanings and Indeterminacy in Gogol's â€Å"The Overcoat† Author(s): Victor Brombert Reviewed work(s): Source: Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, Vol. 135, No. 4 (Dec. , 1991), pp. 569-575 Published by: American Philosophical Society Stable URL: http://www. jstor. org/stable/986817 . Accessed: 25/01/2012 04:09 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www. jstor. org/page/info/about/policies/terms. sp JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email  protected] org. American Philosophical Society is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society. h ttp://www. jstor. org Indeterminacy Meanings and in Gogol's The Overcoat* VICTOR BROMBERT Henry Putnam University Professorof Romanceand ComparativeLiterature Princeton University kaky Akakyevich is the central characterof Gogol's story TheOvercoat. Although Dostoyevsky gave common currency to the term â€Å"antihero† in Notes from Underground,it is Gogol's Akaky Akakyevich who is the genuine, unmitigated, and seemingly unredeemable antihero. For Dostoyevsky's anti-heroic paradoxalist, afflicted with hypertrophia of the consciousness, is well-read, cerebral, incurably bookish, and talkative. Akaky Akakyevich is hardly aware, and almost inarticulate. Gogol's artistic wager was to try to articulate this inarticulateness. The story, in its plot line, is simple. A most unremarkable copying clerk in a St. Petersburg ministry-bald, pockmarked, short-sighted, and the scapegoat of his colleagues who invent cruel ways of mocking himdiscovers one day that his pathetically threadbare coat no longer protects him against the fierce winter wind. The tailor he consults categorically refuses to repair the coat which is now beyond repair, and empts Akaky Akakyevich into having a new overcoat made, one totally beyond his means, but which by dint of enormous sacrifices, he manages to acquire and wear with a newly discovered sense of pride. But his happiness lasts only one short day. Crossing a deserted quarter at night, he is attacked by two thieves who knock him to the ground and steal his coat. Drenched, frozen, deeply upset, brutally reprimanded by a superior whose help he dared seek, A kaky develops a fever, becomes delirious, and dies. One can hardly speak of an interesting plot line. Yet this simple story lends itself to orgies of interpretations. In fact, there may be as many interpretations as there are readers. The Overcoatcan be read as a parable, a hermeneutic puzzle, an exercise in meaninglessness. But to begin with, there is the temptation to read it seriously as satire with a social and * Read 9 November 1990. PROCEEDINGS OF THE AMERICAN PHILOSOPHICAL SOCIETY, VOL. 135, NO. 4, 1991 569 570 VICTOR BROMBERT moral message. In The Nose, Gogol had already made fun of the rankconsciousness and venality of civil servants. In The Overcoat, he seems to deride systematically the parasitical, lazy, phony, world of Russian officialdom, whose members are the impotent mediators of a hierarchy of ineffectual power structure in which every subordinate fears and apes his superior. Early Russian critics, convinced that literature must have a moral message, read such a denunciatory and corrective satirical intention into the story even though it is clear that Gogol constantly shifts his tone, defends no apparent norm, and systematically ironizes any possible â€Å"serious† message. There is of course the temptation to read The Overcoatas a tale of compassion, as a plea for brotherhood. The pathetically defenseless little clerk, taunted and persecuted by the group, remains blissfully oblivious to the cruel pranks of which he is the butt, intent on his humble copying activity. Only when the jokes become too outrageous, or interfere with his work, does he protest ever so mildly. But here the tone of the story seems to change. For Gogol introduces a young man, recently appointed to the same office, who is on the point of sharing in the general fun, and who is suddenly struck by the strange notes in Akaky's voice which touch his heart with pity and make him suddenly see everything in a very different light. A true revelation emanating from an â€Å"unnatural† (neestestvennyi) power allows him to hear other words behind Akaky's banal entreaty to be left alone. What he hears are the deeply penetrating, unspoken words echoing with poignant significance: â€Å"I am thy brother. And with this voice from behind the voice comes the shocked awareness of how much â€Å"inhumanity† there is in human beings, how much brutality lurks in what goes as civilized society and civilized behavior. The apparent lesson in humanity given by the scapegoat victim seems, in the immediate context, to have an almost religious character, especially if one relates it to the narrator's comments, after Akaky's death, on ho w a man of meekness who bore the sneers and insults of his fellow human beings disappeared from this world, but who, before his agony, had a vision of the bright visitant (svetluy gost). The man of meekness, the man of sorrows, like the unspoken but clearly heard â€Å"I am thy brother,† seems to have a Christian, if not Christological, resonance. But we forget Akaky's name, and that we are not allowed to do. For the patronymic appellation not only stresses the principle of repetition (Akaky's first name being exactly the same as his father's), but the funny sound repetition is even funnier because the syllable kak = like (tak kak = just as) embeds the principle of sameness in Akaky's name, determining, it would seem, his single-minded, life-long activity of copying and implicit condemnation to sameness. Regarding the many years Akaky served in the same department, Gogol observes that he â€Å"remained in exactly the same place, in exactly the same position, in exactly the same job, doing exactly the same kind of work, to wit copying official documents. † But there is better (or worse) especially to Russian ears, for kakatj GOGOL'S THE OVERCOAT 571 (from the Greek cacos = bad, evil) is children's talk for defecate, and caca in many languages refers to human excrement. To be afflicted with such a name clearly relates to the garbage being regularly dumped on Akaky as he walks in the street, and to his being treated with no more respect by the caretakers than a common fly. The cruel verbal fun around the syllable kak extends beyond the character's name, and contaminates Gogol's text. Gogol indulges in seemingly endless variations on the words tak, kak,kakoi,kakoi-to,kakikh-to,vot-kak,neekak,takoi, takaya,kaknibut, (just so, that's how, in no way, somehow, and so on) which in the translation disappear altogether. The exploitations of sound effects or sound meanings clearly correspond to a poet's fascination with the prestigious cacophonic resources of ordinary speech. 1 One last point about the choice of Akaky's name, specifically the Christian act of â€Å"christening†: according to custom, the calendar was opened at random and several saints' names (Mokkia, Sossia), including the name of the martyr Khozdazat, were considered, only to be rejected by the mother because they sounded so strange. Akaky was chosen because that was the name of the father. But Acacius, a holy monk of Sinai, was also a saint and martyr, and we find ourselves-especially since the Greek prefix a (Acacius) signifies: not bad, therefore good, meek, humble, obedient-back to the religious motif. If Akaky continues to copy for his own pleasure at home, this is in large part because the bliss of copying has a specifically monastic resonance. Gogol does indeed refer to his copying as a â€Å"labor of love. † Here a new temptation assails the reader. Should The Overcoatnot be read as hagiography in a banal modern context, or at the very least as a parody of hagiography? A number of elements seem to lend support to such a reading of the story in or against the perspective of the traditional lives of the saints: the humble task of copying documents, reference to the theme of the martyr (muchenik),salvational terminology, sacrificial motifs or communion (â€Å"I am thy brother†), Akaky's visions and ecstasies, his own apparitions from beyond the grave. But the most telling analogy with hagiographic lore is the conversion-effect on others, first on the young man who has a revelation of a voice that is not of this world (svet), and toward the end he self-admiring, domineering, Very Important Person on whom Akaky's ghost-like apparition makes a neverto-be-forgotten impression. 2 The overcoat itself can take on religious connotations because clothing, in the symbolism of the Bible and orthodox liturgy, often represents righteousness and salvation. The only trouble with such an interpretation-and Gogol has written Meditations on the Divine Liturgy wh ich 1 Boris Eichenbaum speaks of Gogol's â€Å"phonic inscriptions† and â€Å"sound-semantics† in â€Å"How ‘The Overcoat' is Made,† in Gogol from the Twentieth Century, ed. Robert A. Maguire, Princeton University Press, 1974, p. 280. 2 See John Schillinger, â€Å"Gogol's ‘The Overcoat'as a Travesty of Hagiography,† Slavic and East EuropeanJournal, Spring 1972, 16, 1: 36-41. 572 VICTOR BROMBERT refer to the priest's robe of righteousness as a garment of salvation3-is that the coat can have an opposite symbolic significance, that of hiding the truth. Hence the traditional image of disrobing to reveal the naked self. In addition, there are many other possible meanings quite remote from the religious sphere: the metonymic displacement of the libido (the Russian word for overcoat- shinel- is appropriately feminine), the effects of virilization (in his new coat, Akaky surprises himself in the act of running after some woman in the street! ), loss of innocence and loss of â€Å"original celibacy. â€Å"4 The coat itself thus turns out to be a form of temptation (material acquisition, vanity, pride), and the devilish tailor is the agent of this temptation just as the writer or narrator (who in fact is he? â€Å"tempts† the reader into a succession of vacuous and mutually canceling interpretations. This provocative writer-reader relationship, sustained throughout the narration, casts a special light on Akaky's fundamental activity of copying- the act of writing in its purest form. It does not take much imagination (our modern critics discover self-referentiality everywhere) to see in Akaky's c opying an analogue of the writer's activity. And like the proverbially absorbed writer or scholar, he is obsessed by his writing to the point of finding himself in the middle of the street while thinking that he is in the middle of a sentence. This self-absorbed and selfreferential nature of Gogol's act of writing might be seen to imply a negative attitude toward the referential world, toward all that which is not writing. Much like Flaubert, who dreamt of composing a â€Å"book about nothing,† and whom contemporary critics like to view as an apostle of self-referential, intransitive literature, Gogol yearns for monastic withdrawal. Flaubert was haunted by the figures of the monk and the saint. Similarly, Gogol explained in a letter: â€Å"It is not the poet's business to worm his way into the world's marketplace. Like a silent monk, he lives in the world without belonging to it . . . â€Å"5 Pushed to a logical extreme, this sense of the radical deceptiveness of life calls into question worldly authority, and leads to a destabilizing stance that challenges the principle of authority, a subversive gesta of which the real hero is the artist himself. There is indeed something devilish about Gogol's narrative voice. It has already been suggested that the devil makes an appearance in the figure of the tailor who tempts Akaky into buying the coat. This caricature of the sartorial artist who quite literally is the creator of the overcoat, this ex-serf sitting with his legs crossed under him like a Turkish pasha, has diabolical earmarks: he is a â€Å"one-eyed devil† living at the end of a black staircase; he has a de3 See Anthony Hippisley, â€Å"Gogol's ‘The Overcoat':A further Interpretation,† Slavic and East EuropeanJournal, Summer, 1976, 20, 2: 121-129. Hippisley points out (p. 123) that Gogol, in his Meditations on the Divine Liturgy quotes Psalms 132:9: â€Å"Let thy priests be clothed with righteousness .. † 4 The expression is Charles Bernheimer's, in his fine essay â€Å"Cloaking the Self: The Literary Space of Gogol's ‘Overcoat,†Ã¢â‚¬Ëœ PMLA, January 1975, 90, 1: 53-61. 5 Letter to Pogodin, quoted by Charles Bernheimer (op. cit. , p. 53) and Donald Fanger, The Creationof Nikolai Gogol, Harvard University Press, 1979. GOGOL'S THE OVERCOAT 573 formed big toenail, hard and thick as a tortoise shell; he handles a thricereferred-to snuff box on which the face of a general has been effaced (the devil is faceless); he seems to be nudged by the devil and charges â€Å"the devil knows what prices. 6 This verbal playfulness seems to extend to the narrator himself, who undercuts his own narration in truly diabolical fashion by means of grotesque hyperbolizing, mixtures of realistic and parodistic elements, sudden shifts from the rational to the irrational, and elliptical displacements from epic triviality to unrestrained fantasy. Indulging in a game of mirages and fog-like uncertainties, the narrator subverts the logical progression of his story. Ultimately, even the ghost is debunked, and we are back in the blackness of quotidian reality. In the Russian text, these shifts in tone and textual instabilities are even more insidious, since everything seems to blur into the undifferentiated flow of seemingly endless paragraphs. This merging of discontinuities undermines any sense of plot, undercuts the notion of subject, and suggests at every point that what is told is another story, thereby teasing the reader into endless interpretations that can neither be stabilized nor stopped. Some of this is the inevitable result of a mimesis of inarticulateness, a narrative style that is the imitative substitute for Akaky's manner of communicating mostly through prepositions, adverbs, and â€Å"such parts of speech as have no meaning whatsoever. † But the strategy of destabilization and fragmented diction also has a deeper subversive purpose. The non sequiturs and hesitations reveal the arbitrariness of any fictional structure, and in the last analysis subvert any auctorial authority. The concluding page of The Nose represents an authorial critique of the story as incomprehensible and useless. The mediating self-negator is the fictionalized narrator identified in The Overcoat as the raskazyvaiushyi-the narrating one. And this narrator, occasionally pretending to be ignorant or semi-ignorant (like Cervantes's narrative voice as of the very first sentence of Don Quixote) does not know in what town, on what day, on what street the action takes placein fact, complains of loss of memory. All this, however, only accentuates the possible importance of the unknowable and the unsayable, while protecting the protagonist's sacred privacy. The narrator clumsily speculates on what Akaky might or might not have said to himself as he stares at an erotic window display in the elegant quarter of St. Petersburg, and he concludes: â€Å"But perhaps he never even said anything at all to himself. For it is impossible to delve into a person's mind [in Russian, literally: to creep into a person's soul]. The Overcoat is thus marked by conflicting and enigmatic signals, pointing to oxymoronic textures of meanings. Inversions hint at conver6 Dmitry Chizhevsky, who stresses the presence of the Devil in â€Å"The Overcoat,†writes: â€Å"As someone who was well read in religious literature, as a connoisseur and collector of folklore materials-from popular songs and legends-Gogol of course knew about the Christian and folk tradition that the Devil is faceless† (â€Å"About Go gol's ‘Overcoat,†Ã¢â‚¬Ëœ in Gogol from the Twentieth Century, p. 20). 574 VICTOR BROMBERT sions. What is seemingly up is in fact seen to be down, while the reverse is equally true. The downtrodden creature turns out to be capable of heroic sacrifices, while the powerfully constituted VIP with the appearance of a bogatyr(hero) is cut down to human size by fright. On the other hand, when Akaky's fall is likened to a disaster such as destroys the czars and other great ones of this earth, one may well feel that Gogol is ironic about all heroic poses, heroic values, and heroic figures. When Akaky wears the new coat, his pulse beats faster, his bearing seems to indicate a newly discovered sense of purpose (tzel), his eyes have an audacious gleam, he appears somehow to have almost become virile. Yet the overcoat is also the emblem of false values, of trivial passion, of a silly reason for a human downfall. One might wish therefore to read a deeper significance into these mutually canceling interpretations. In English, the word passion is fraught with a multiple significance: in the ordinary sense, it denotes intense and even overwhelming emotion, especially of love; yet etymologically, it signifies suffering. Love and suffering are of course linked in a grotesque manner in The Overcoat. Whether such love and such suffering are commensurate with any objective reality remains unresolved in this story which seems to say that any love is great no matter what its object, that love is all-powerful; and conversely, that any passion can drag one down, that the more intense it seems, the emptier it is. Gogol's style is in itself an admirable instrument of ambivalence: enlarging trivia, and thereby trivializing what we may for a moment be tempted to take as significant. What complicates Gogol's text for the reader is that it is not a case of simple ambivalence. It will not do to praise Gogol as a compassionate realist with an ethical message or to see him as a playful anti-realist indulging in overwrought imagery and in the reflections of distorting mirrors. The hard fact is that Gogol is a protean writer whose simultaneity of possible meanings allows for no respite and no comfortable univocal mess age. If the narrator is center stage, it is because ultimately he becomes a performer, a buffoonish actor mimicking incoherence itself. Intelligent readers of Gogol-Boris Eichenbaum, Vladimir Nabokov, Victor Erlich, Charles Bernheimer, Donald Fanger8-have in varying degrees and with different emphases, understood that rather than indulging in a feast of ideas to be taken seriously, Gogol delighted in verbal acts as a game-a game that implied the autonomy of narrative style, a declaration of artistic independence, and a thorough deflation of l'esprit de serieux. I am largely indebted to Dmitry Chizhevsky who has admirably shown how the repeated and incongruous use of the adverb â€Å"even† (daje) breaks up the logical train of thoughts, enlarges trivia, and frustrates the reader by making the insignificant seem significant, and vice versa. Such a narrative strategy is related by Chizhevsky to the semantic oscillations of the text (â€Å"About Gogol's ‘Overcoat,'† in Gog ol from the Twentieth Century, pp. 295-322). 8 Boris Eichenbaum, op. cit. Vladimir Nabokov, Nikolai Gogol, New Directions, 1944; Victor Erlich, Gogol, Yale University Press, 1969; Charles Bernheimer, op. cit. ; Donald Fanger, op. cit. GOGOL'S THE OVERCOAT 575 Perhaps there is an underlying autobiographic urge in The Overcoat, and the verbal clowning and narrative pirouettes are telling a story in which the irrational takes on an exorcising and liberating virtue-much as the idiosyncrasies of Dostoyevsky's Notes from Undergroundpresent a vehement protest against spiritually deadening rationality. What is certain is that Gogol needs to wear a mask. Haunted by the monsters born of his imagination, afraid to be unmasked, Gogol literally disappears in his writing by becoming a multiplicity of voices. 9 But there is a danger in depicting Gogol as an escape artist struggling against his own demons at the same time as he struggles against the repressive reality he wishes to deny. Similarly, there is the risk of considerable distortion in the determination of formalist and post-structuralist critics to draw Gogol to the camp of radical modernity by seeing him exclusively concerned with speech acts and sheer rhetoricity. Polyvalence does not mean the absence of meaning. The real problem, much as in the case of Flaubert, who complained of the plethora of subjects and inflationary overfill of meanings, is that over-abundance and multiplicity become principles of indeterminacy. Excess is related to emptiness. Similarly, Gogol seems torn between the futility of experience and the futility of writing about it, between the conviction that writing is the only salvation, and that it is powerless to say the unsayable-aware at all points of the gulf between signifier and signified. Nabokov may have come closest to the heart of Gogol's dark playfulness when he wrote: â€Å"The gaps and black holes in the texture of Gogol's style imply flaws in the texture of life itself. . 10 To this one might add, however, that the hollowness of the gaps, the terrifying absence, is also an absence/presence: a void that asks to be filled by the interpretive act. The dialectics of negativity, so dependent on the antiheroic mode embodied by Akaky, displace the production of meaning from the almost non-existent character and undecidable text to the creative reader. Victor Erlich has very convincingly discussed Gogol's motif of the mask and tendency to â€Å"speak in somebody else's voice† in his chapter â€Å"The Great Impersonator† in Gogol, op. cit. , pp. 210-223. Gogol himself writes: â€Å"If anyone had seen the monsters that issued from my pen, at first for my own purposes alone-he would certainly have shuddered† (quoted by Valery Bryusov in his essay â⠂¬Å"Burnt to Ashes,† reproduced in Gogolfrom the Twentieth Century, p. 111). 10Vladimir Nabokov, Nikolai Gogol, op. cit. , p. 143.

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Design an interview schedule and evaluate it - Essay Example In fact, it may be seen that educational exchange programmes create maximum cultural interaction and exchange of views and ideas between different cultures. The city of Newcastle was selected in this project because the city is important in many respects. One, it is a prominent destination in the UK with regard to educational facilities and students, especially foreign students come to this place to pursue their education. The city also provides umpteen facilities and resources for students to exploit and further their educational aspirations. However, the city also has its fair share of problems. Cases of harassment based on colour, religion and ethnicity have recently been recorded from the city and people are apprehensive about local groups that are notorious for harassing foreign students. However, in spite of such irritants, the city administration has done a fair job of providing many facilities for education seekers who come to this place in search of a professional degree and qualifications. The interview will be designed to elicit the answer to the question ‘whats it like being an overseas student in Newcastle?’ The interview will try to encourage respondents to answer what their experiences are as a student at Newcastle. The interview will try to analyse the background of the students and also the common problems that they face as a student in this place. The country has witnessed a tremendous amount of progress in the area of educational reform over the last fifty years: the educational achievement gap between those of different races is narrowing and more and more students are finding the resources necessary to pursue higher education. However, it still has not solved one of the most persistent and pervasive inequities in the educational system: poorer communities suffer from substandard instruction and a lack

Social obligation Essay Example for Free

Social obligation Essay Fred was sitting in his usual spot, with his coffee piping its way up his nose. Yet today there were other things on his aging mind. His blind eyes pierced the darkness before him amidst the meaningless babble around him. He knew the people around him were talking, and he knew that it was when the voices were hushed†¦transformed to a whispers, that they were talking about him. He trusted those around him despite the knowledge that he was really rather a burden on society. His experience of people had told him he would be this way and his mind drifted to the very day he realized what life was about. He remembered the day it happened. He remembered most of all because he had chosen to hold this memory close. The streets had been quiet and heavy with the smell of spring rains and he could hear the slow drip of precipitation as it coursed its way off of roof-tops and gutters onto the rising mist of the pavement. The man sat with his legs stretched out on the newspapers and cardboard on the hard concrete. â€Å"Pennies for the old man. † He drawled through his spittle stained mouth. Fred shivered and walked on. â€Å"I know who you are. † Shouted the man after him through a gurgled laugh. Fred cringed deeply, hating the uselessness and hopelessness of the man who took the role of his alter-ego. Yes, that ego he nurtured so close to his puffed up breast. He continued walking towards the park, where he proposed to write a new song for his ever-growing repertoire. His daughter was participating in a play that day, but he hated the formalities of everyday life and particularly the things that were expected of his. Social obligation. There had been something in the mockery of the street-man’s voice that seems to worm its way into his preoccupied brain. â€Å"I know who you are†¦Ã¢â‚¬  he repeated to himself, sneering at the arrogance of a man who had amounted to nothing†¦really. On his way back from the park, he thought of possible ways he could avoid walking past the menacing man. No, there was no way out and he shrunk into his designer overcoat, pulling his Al Capone hat over his eyes. That wouldn’t work either, he always wore it. The man was still there, apparently sleeping. Fred tiptoed past, holding his breath until he thought he was past the threat. He let out a deep breath†¦rolling his eyes back in relief. He heard a cackle and thought he was imaging it, perhaps his artistic overbearing imagination had gotten the better of him. â€Å"Don’t wanna see me do you? † said the gravelly voice. The sun was setting and the steam still rose form the grey pavement as Fred peered down at it. He suddenly felt awfully small. Maybe he should just talk to the man and get it over with he was thinking when the voice replied, â€Å"Yeah, just talk to the old man and get it over with†¦who knows, it could be you one day. † He shrunk a few inches more and turned to swagger back to the emaciated body. â€Å"Let me buy us coffee first. † Fred offered grudgingly. â€Å"I just loooove coffee, shrieked the voice, â€Å"but good Brazilian coffee please, none of this fake stuff†¦Ã¢â‚¬  Well, Fred thought, take the arm†¦. The two misfits were sitting on the pavement in silence, sipping the hot life-giving liquid. At length Fred began to wonder, â€Å"So how did you come to be here? † The man sighed, a wet tuberculosis riddled sigh. â€Å"Well†¦my father was a surgeon and my mother†¦she never had to work. My father never had much time for me but I had all I could want. † The sky was falling again, but Fred was enjoying the feeling of rain on his Carducci slacks. â€Å"I studied and became a lawyer, got married and children and got divorced. Losing my family made me lose faith in being accomplished at anything. I just let it all go†¦drank it away. Felt it was easier to just live on the streets and have no one to answer to, no one placate. It was easy, but lonely. I got in a fight on the streets and had my eyes gouged out. Now I see more than I ever used to. † Fred began to feel uncomfortable, but there was something he needed to ask. â€Å"Do you never miss your family, children†¦friends. † The man gurgled again, smiling a gapped smile, the teeth that remained, clawing into the heart of the viewer. â€Å"Nah, I have more friends now than I ever did. These friends care about me out of pity, the others cared about me for what they could get out of me. † Fred looked out at the empty streets and sidewalks†¦thinking of the man he walked past everyday with ever having really understood why he was there†¦

Socio-Cultural Factors in Banking Adverts

Socio-Cultural Factors in Banking Adverts This paper formulates a foundation using various variables to gauge advertising in ethical respect. It describes ethics as a way of formulating a certain behavior accentuating fairness in all deals regarding personal and external environments. The argument that has been raised in this research was whether ethical advertising is followed by Consumer banking institutes while advertising credit cards or not. Its effects on the consumer perception and the limitations under which the consumer perceives them are shown light upon. In the theoretical framework the factors that might influence ethical advertising are stated namely legal, social, environmental, personal/individual, situational, social, economic and consumer trend. The research was conducted in 5 banks in Lahore, through survey method. Questionnaires were floated amongst a sample size of 30 professionals related to the field of advertising in each banking institute. Once the date was collected and referred through facts from th e conducted interviews it was found out that all the above mentioned independent variable indeed did affect the dependant variable of ethical advertising. Introduction to Advertising The two basic functions of advertising are to inform and to persuade. It can be defined as a form of communication used to influence a certain target audience to purchase products, services or ideas. Advertising has diversified to being personal as well as a non personal way of approaching an audience. It has evolved into various types covering indoor and outdoor advertising. The major ways of deliverance are newspapers, magazines, television, radio, billboards or direct mail (internet). Advertising is no longer restricted to commercials promoting products or services, it has advanced to deliver public service adverting, on behalf of various institutions, programs and causes and also political advertising in the interests of parties and candidates. Advertising is a complex process which differs for various audiences from form to form conveying information to keep them indulged. However cultures and standards of living differ from person to person or country to country and so does advertising. This holds true as far as ethical aspect is concerned too, something that maybe considered ethical in one community might not be the same for another, for example advertising alcohol. Background The advertising business first discussed the need for a professional code of ethics in the years from 1900 to 1917, often called the Progressive Era. During that period individual practitioners in the Midwest formed the first national advertising organization, the Associated Advertising Clubs of America, for the explicit purpose of making the business a profession. What is the difference between unethical and ethical advertising? Unethical advertising uses falsehood to deceive the public, while ethical advertising us truth to deceive the public. Vilhjalmur Stefansson, anthropologist (1870-1962). Ethical advertising is such a vast terminology that it cannot be defined in a definite statement. One of the key issues here is that ethical is a subjective term- what is ethical to one person may not be to another. Moreover the concept of what is ethical is not fixed- for example it used to be thought ethical to advertise cigarettes but not condoms, however these days the position has completely reversed. In actuality ethical is not an absolute term and the word ethics, strictly speaking merely means the moral code by which someone decides right from wrong and is therefore highly personal. The term ethical has acquired a specific meaning over the recent past. When the word ethical is used it usually means an activity that does no harm. For example the term ethical advertising implies that money will not be invested in those advertisements that cause harm to people, animals or the environment. In this sense ethics really come down to respect for the world and the consequences of ones actions. Every advertisement should be prepared with a due sense of social responsibility and should conform to the principles of fair competition, as generally accepted in business. All the advertising should be legal, decent, honest and truthful. Decency Advertisements should not contain statements or visual presentations which offend prevailing standards of decency. Honesty Advertising should be framed such that it does not abuse the trust of consumers or exploit their lack of experience or knowledge. Social Responsibility Advertisements should not condone any form of discrimination, including that based upon race, national origin, religion, sex or age nor should they undermine human dignity. Advertisements should not appear to disregard or incite violence or unlawful behavior. Truthful presentation Advertisements should not contain any statement or visual presentation which directly or by implication, omission, ambiguity or exaggerated claim is likely to mislead the consumer in particular with regard to: The value of the product and the total price actually to be paid Delivery, exchange, return, repair and maintenance Terms or guarantee Copyright and industrial property right Social aspects of advertising Advertising as a part of the firms marketing efforts operates in the society for which it should follow social norms. Key areas of debate regarding society and advertising are: Deception Manipulation Taste Deception: it refers not only to the information content in advertising but may also arise from misplaced emphasis in presentations. Advertising as a whole must not create any sort of misleading impression although every statement, separately considered may be literally truthful. Manipulation: the freedom of choice for consumers is restricted by the power of advertising since doing so can manipulate buyers into making against their will or interest. Manipulations are usually done through emotional appeal. Taste: sometimes ads are offensive, tasteless, irritating, boring and so on. Deceptive Advertising Key area of debate regarding ethics and advertising is the truth in the advertising which involves deception and puffery (commercial exaggeration). Deception: deception exists when an advertisement differs from the reality of the situation and it affects the buying behavior of the consumer Puffery: this takes two general forms the first is the advertisement of opinion about a services quality using terms such as best or greatest. The second form of puffery is an exaggeration extended to a point of outright spoof that is entirely not true. In these case words such as perfect and amazing are regarded as mere puffing. For example the consumer banks advertising credit cards, now these adverts show the attributes that would get the audience to buy it. However certain details like the fact that credit will be putting consumers in heavy debts is held off from the consumer Significance of the Study The significance of our study is to determine the widespread issues regarding ethical advertising in consumer banking relating to credit cards adverts. There are certain ethical codes in our society and this study will help gauge if the banks follow on those codes. The dependent and independent variables defined in this study help establish a relationship between such advertising and the environment in general. It goes on to explain the ethical norms and the degree to which consumers rely on these norms to make their purchasing decisions regarding a commodity or service. Study Objectives Distinctively, our study objective is to identify and develop certain questions and then to find the answers to justify those questions. To study whether ethical codes being followed in general? To study whether consumer banking sector is following the ethical codes. To determine the independent variables of ethical advertising and its effects on morality. To determine whether these variables are interlinked and their combined effect on the organizations environment. How much are consumers relying on ethical norms or perceived consequences in forming a specific ethical judgment about their buying behavior? Theoretical framework ENVIORNMENTAL FACTORS SOCIAL FACTORS LEGAL FACTORS ETHICAL ADVERTISING PROFESSIONAL FACTORS CONSUMER DEMAND ECONOMIC FACTORS PERSONAL AND INDIVIDUAL FACTORS SITUATIONAL FACTORS Variables affecting Ethical Advertising Social factors Environmental factors Professional Environment Situational Environment Legal Environment Personal and Individual Factors Consumer Trends Economic factors Dependent Variable Ethical advertising Independent Variables Social factors Social factors are associated to the values and the beliefs about how a society operates. Regarding the organizational environment, it signals to the characteristics of work in that organization. These characteristics tell us how the employees perform a certain given set of tasks and what factors do they keep in mind while perceiving ethic. This in turn affects the organizational environment that determines what is considered ethical or unethical in performing organizational assignments. Environmental factors Environmental factors include the values and behavior determined by the cultural environment of an institution originating from the moral intentions of the policy makers. Moral intention is the probability of an organization to engage in a certain behavior which tells us about the moral values which determine the basic convictions that underline the conduct and dealing of that organization. Professional factors This deals with the top management policies, the codes of conduct followed by the society in general, the corporate organization in particular. Its the moral reasoning through which they determine whats right and whats wrong. Basically outlining the organizational regulations that determine what is to be regarded as ethical and what not. Situational factors They deal with stages of development of moral values and determinants of moral attitudes. Moral values are the convictions underlying decision making process regarding ethics. Moral attitudes are the result of an evaluation of moral behavior while moral behavior is denoted by action taken. After moral attitudes, moral reasoning results in moral judgments which are decisions regarding whether a certain alternative is morally good or bad. Legal factors Legal factors are of great importance since these are the first barrier that advertising needs to cross in terms to reach its target audience. Legal clearance in other words ensures that the advert is based on principles of ethical conduct and highlights rules and regulations regarding ethical decision making. Personal and individual factors Individual factors are the individual attributes which include personal goals, the motivation, experiences, personality, and demographics. While personal factors are influenced by the company we keep and the social class that we associate with. These factors are linked together via moral perception, knowledge and moral evaluation. Moral perception is when ethical problems are perceived and the amount of knowledge people hold regarding their moral standards. Specific knowledge about these standards then lead to moral evaluation which is the final decision making determining ethical or unethical conduct Consumer Demand (trend) The trend in what the consumer wants and if the offered product is catering to those changing trends, affects the sales of the product immensely. Without d demand, any product, however much advertised will not be able to attract the target market. Economic factors These include the trends in inflation or economic stability and growth that in return affect the buying power and patterns of the consumers. These are the major determinants of demand for a certain product. Research Hypotheses On the basis of theoretical framework the following hypotheses are formulated: H0 : The social factors will not significantly affect ethical advertising H1 : The social factors will significantly affect ethical advertising H0 : The environmental factors will not significantly affect ethical advertising H1 : The environmental factors will significantly affect ethical advertising H0 : The professional environment will not significantly affect ethics in advertising H1 : The professional environment will significantly affect ethics in advertising H0 : The situational factors will not significantly affect ethical advertising H1 : The situational factors will significantly affect ethical advertising H0 : The legal environment will not significantly affect ethical advertising H1 : The legal environment will significantly affect ethical advertising H0 : The personal and individual factors will not significantly affect ethical advertising H1 : The personal and individual factors will significantly affect ethical advertising H0 : The consumer trends will not significantly affect ethical advertising H1 : The consumer trends will significantly affect ethical advertising H0 : The economic factors will not significantly affect ethical advertising H1 : The economic factors will significantly affect ethical advertising LITERATURE REVIEW JudithÂÂ  W.ÂÂ  Spain, in Ethics and Geography -Impact of Geographical Cultural Differences on Students Ethical Decisions, conducts an exploratory survey to determine if there are differences in ethical decisions by business students based upon cultural backgrounds. Students responses to a vignette concerning advertising of cigar products in a variety of different media provided evidence of significant cultural differences between three groups of students from different geographical locations within the United States. This article suggests that the presumption that an individuals ethical beliefs and behaviors do not change after childhood may be in error. In Ethical Dimensions of Advertising Executions, Nebenzuhl and D.Jaffe determined the ethicality of disguised advertising presented to consumers under the assumption that itll gain potential benefits for the organization. For evidential proof a consumer survey was conducted in which exposure to the object message is followed by unaided recall and recognition tests. The results, however, unearthed the fact that conspicuous approach to advertising is not only unethical but also the gains to the sponsors of such advertising could not outweigh the losses to independence and privacy of the large number of consumers exposed. ScottÂÂ  J.ÂÂ  Vitell, in his paper, The effects of culture on ethical decision-making: An application of Hofstedes typology addresses a significant gap in the conceptualization of business ethics within different cultural influences. Though theoretical models of business ethics have recognized the importance of culture in ethical decision-making, few have examined how this influences ethical decision-making. Therefore, this paper develops propositions concerning the influence of various cultural dimensions on ethical decision-making using Hofstedes typology. Over the last decade, the topic of social responsibility and ethics in business has been made the focus of just a few studies, even though existing theoretical models recognize the importance of this factor. Great emphasis is laid on the importance of the role of culture in ethics decision-making identifying cultural factors such as values and customs, religion, law, respect for individuality, national identity and loy alty (or patriotism), and rights of property as influencing ethics. Kennedy and Lawton (1993) in the article Ethics and Services marketing states that marketing lacks an important component for ethical decision making while identifying the conceptual marketing approaches to the field of marketing ethics. This field consists of component such as the inter-organizational variables including professional environment, individual attributes and legal environment. Furthermore, while defining ethical behavior in a broader term a behavioral model of ethical and unethical decision making related to organizations has been presented. It links the inter-organizational relationships and ethics in terms of power, dependence and uncertainty and what effects these inter-organizational factors have on ethics. Ethical advertising: How ethical business is good business practice by Mike Catherall stresses on how any businesses should be accountable, transparent and responsible to their clients, suppliers and employees alike to characterize it as good business practice. He moves on further describing how a business must be true to its word since this acts as the hallmark for good business practice, and consequently ethical business. The article analyzes that in recent years, social-consciousness has become a buzzword, and ethical business practices more lip service than a philosophy. Legislations, regulations and self regulations was information that I came across on the website of Pakistan Advertising association which helped me gauge a few aspects to what really accounts as code of ethics here in Pakistan. The article states that although there is not any one specific law or piece of legislation that encompasses all aspects of advertising, there are codified pieces of legislation and frame wares. These include the Pakistan Advertising Associations (PAA) code of ethics. The article goes on to say that the advertising codes, although generate broad and comprehensive in nature; have suffered from a lack of effective implementation and a new specific focus. The majority of codes with respect to content are based on widely accepted concepts of social and moral decency. The occasionally vague and non specific nature of the regulations has often led to problems, where specific parties or social groupings take it upon themselves to exclude what is moral and what is not . Likewise Wenling Chen and Mei-Chyi Lui (1998) in the article Agency Practitioners Perceptions of Professional Ethics in Taiwan conducted a survey on the advertising practitioners in Taiwan concerning their experiences of ethical challenges at work. The study made use of a semi structured questionnaire which combined both quantitative and qualitative approaches to collect relevant information attempting for satisfying interpretations from the collected data. Among 120 respondents, 67.5 percent admitted that ethical problem was a commonplace at work. According to these respondents, the most frequently mentioned ethical problems area representing unethical products or services, the message of advertisements, agency-client relationship, the creditability of research, under table rebate, and the quality of service. Due to its preliminary nature, the present study should be considered exploratory and descriptive rather than conclusive, with the hope to inspire more research on advertising ethics in Taiwan as well as in other countries in the world. Candy A. Bianco and Susan M. Bosco in their article Ethical issues in credit card solicitation of college students, states how credit card companies aggressively solicit college students, without regard for the consequences of high credit card debt for these customers. The ethical conflict of the sale of easy credit to college students too often results in hazardous outcomes. This paper will investigate the dangers that credit card use presents to the young customer, the unethical manner in which the companies that issue these cards promote their products to this audience, and the role of institutions of higher education. A majority of students are not only using credit unwisely (average balances of over $1000 regardless of who reports the data) but are paying overpriced interest (18%-22%). The credit card companies call this responsible use. They are collecting enough interest and fees to more than cover losses resulting from bankruptcy. They use a variety of marketing techniques to lure college students glitzy MTV type shows, free prizes and gifts, special interest rate offers, and now they can pretend through Educational services to explain to college students why credit cards are important. This Paper investigates current solicitation policies of colleges and universities are also. Bank Credit Cards: Not-Illegal Does Not Equal Ethical by Charles H. Green strongly criticizes banks for deceiving the consumers where credit offerings through credit cards is concerned. The article talks about how for organizational profits the banks not only use unethical advertising as a tool but also neglect the distinction between illegal and unethical. The article goes on to say that most people can intuitively understand the difference between ethical and legal, and between unethical and illegal. Most of us want to live in a society where laws are ultimately derived from a sense of ethics-not the other way around. Just because something is not illegal hardly implies it is ethical. The article Opportunities vs. ethics by White, Phillip D points out how, in the area of fee income, bank marketing officers are being increasingly called upon to do two things the first being to assist the bank in identifying more fee income opportunities while the second states how to help the bank optimize or maximize fee income performance through the refinement of existing pricing strategies. The purpose of this article is to briefly review how bankers involved in marketing analysis and decision making should be aware of arguments and developments regarding potential ethical issues. Ethical standards in advertising: a worldwide perspective by Maria Cecilia talks about a study that was conducted that indicates how close advertisers from all the continents have been from the natural law and other fundamental moral principles. The ethical problems have not been equated with objectivity and the realist approach is appointed as a solution. The paper moves on explaining how there have been comments about the difficult practicability of ethically behaving in the advertising world due to problems faced by private companies, marketing research and advertising agencies, media and government. In many western countries, conflicts between ethical/moral and social/economic values can be observed. Many professionals see themselves disoriented concerning the correct attitude to take when facing the dynamic and diversified possibilities of their advertising campaigns. The objective of the paper was to call the attention of academicians and professionals who deal with advertising and to their responsibility toward the market. The intention is to encourage them to consider the values implicit in the campaigns they develop, guiding them toward the common good, helping them to find a wise and sensible way of acting rather than acquiring ways that misguide and mislead their consumers. Laczniak and Inderrieden (1987) in the article The Influence of stated organizational concern upon ethical decision making did the experimental study and evaluated the influence of stated organizational concern for ethical conduct upon employee behavior at managerial levels. A sample was tested on scenarios suggesting illegal conduct and others suggesting only unethical behavior. Only in the case of suggested illegal behavior tempered by high organizational concern were managers influenced by organizational policy to modify the morality of their actions. However the responses to the illegal scenarios were significantly more ethical than the reactions given to the unethical (but not illegal) situations. This particular study adopts an in-basket framework in order to investigate the influence of various levels of organizational sanctions upon ethical decision making. Methodology The methodology I will implement has two aspects and is going to be based on survey strategy: Questionnaires will cover the general trends in responses from the bankers also keeping in mind to structure them to be able to gauge some consumer trends. Interviews, of the bankers, will further help evaluate results gathered from the questionnaires The sample for this research will be the banks that offer consumer banking I will attempt to cover as many banks as I can since credit card issuance is foreign to none keeping in mind the growing trend. The sampling frame would be all the banks in Lahore City. The sample size would be 30 people from consumer banking sector involved in advertising credit card facility. The Research Study would start off from the questionnaire and thereafter statistical measures will be applied on the results to obtain analysis by using computer software SPSS. Analysis Q1. Do you think that the ethical codes of advertising are being followed? Q2. Do you think that the government is concerned with the censorship of advertisement through different mediums? HYPOTHSIS: H0- The legal factors will not significantly affect ethical advertising H1- The legal factors will significantly affect ethical advertising Analysis We know from the data analyzed using SPSS that our degree of freedom is 28 and I have supposed the confidence interval 95% (0.95), hence using the T-Table and determining the T-critical value against Degree of Freedom 28 and Confidence Interval of 95% (0.95), the value comes out to be 2.048, which is less than the T-stat of 4. 436. Since this proves my T-stat to be greater than my T-critical, the H0- The legal factors will not significantly affect ethical advertising is rejected. Q3. Has your business increased over the recent years in credit card financing? HYPOTHSIS H0- The consumer demand trends will not significantly affect ethical advertising H1- The consumer demand trends will significantly affect ethical advertising Analysis We know from the data analyzed using SPSS that our degree of freedom is 28 and I have supposed the confidence interval 95% (0.95), hence using the T-Table and determining the T-critical value against Degree of Freedom 28 and Confidence Interval of 95% (0.95), the value comes out to be 2.048, which is less than the T-stat of 4.254. Since this proves my T-stat to be greater than my T-critical, the H0- The consumer demand trends will not significantly affect ethical advertising, is rejected. Q4. Do you think that the rules and regulations of the bank affect moral reasoning determining the ethical behavior of advertising? HYPOTHSIS H0- The professional factors will not significantly affect ethical advertising H1- The professional factors will significantly affect ethical advertising Analysis We know from the data analyzed using SPSS that our degree of freedom is 28 and I have supposed the confidence interval 95% (0.95), hence using the T-Table and determining the T-critical value against Degree of Freedom 28 and Confidence Interval of 95% (0.95), the value comes out to be 2.048, which is less than the T-stat of 5.737. Since this proves my T-stat to be greater than my T-critical, the H0- The professional factors will not significantly affect ethical advertising, is rejected. Q.5 The culture of a bank determines the behavior of employees regarding corporate social responsibility. HYPOTHSIS H0- The environmental factors will not significantly affect ethical advertising H1- The environmental factors will significantly affect ethical advertising Analysis We know from the data analyzed using SPSS that our degree of freedom is 28 and I have supposed the confidence interval 95% (0.95), hence using the T-Table and determining the T-critical value against Degree of Freedom 28 and Confidence Interval of 95% (0.95), the value comes out to be 2.048, which is less than the T-stat of 6.343. Since this proves my T-stat to be greater than my T-critical, the H0- The environmental factors will not significantly affect ethical advertising, is rejected. Q.6 Do you think economic factors are a major determinant for the demand of your product (credit cards)? HYPOTHSIS H0- The economic factors will not significantly affect ethical advertising H1- The economic factors will significantly affect ethical advertising Analysis We know from the data analyzed using SPSS that our degree of freedom is 28 and I have supposed the confidence interval 95% (0.95), hence using the T-Table and determining the T-critical value against Degree of Freedom 28 and Confidence Interval of 95% (0.95), the value comes out to be 2.048, which is less than the T-stat of 5.125. Since this proves my T-stat to be greater than my T-critical, the H0- The economic factors will not significantly affect ethical advertising, is rejected. Q.7 Corporate social responsibility is an important factor in ethical advertising HYPOTHSIS H0- The social factors will not significantly affect ethical advertising H1- The social factors will significantly affect ethical advertising Analysis We know from the data analyzed using SPSS that our degree of freedom is 28 and I have supposed the confidence interval 95% (0.95), hence using the T-Table and determining the T-critical value against Degree of Freedom 28 and Confidence Interval of 95% (0.95), the value comes out to be 2.048, which is less than the T-stat of 4.938. Since this proves my T-stat to be greater than my T-critical, the H0- social factors will not significantly affect ethical advertising, is rejected. Q.8 Do individual attributes such as personal goals, life experiences and education determine the perception of the consumer regarding advertising? HYPOTHSIS H0- The personal and individual factors will not significantly affect ethical advertising H1- The personal and individual factors will significantly affect ethical advertising Analysis We know from the data analyzed using SPSS that our degree of freedom is 28 and I have supposed the confidence interval 95% (0.95), hence using the T-Table and determining the T-critical value against Degree of Freedom 28 and Confidence Interval of 95% (0.95), the value comes out to be 2.048, which is less than the T-stat of 7.408. Since this proves my T-stat to be greater than my T-critical, the H0- personal and individual factors will not significantly affect ethical advertising, is rejected. Q.9 Does your bank tends to suppress pertinent information about your services from consumers? HYPOTHSIS H0- The situational factors will not significantly affect ethical advertising H1- The situational and individual factors will significantly affect ethical advertising Analysis We know from the data analyzed using SPSS that our degree of freedom is 28 and I have supposed the confidence interval 95% (0.95), hence using the T-Table and determining the T-critical value against Degree of Freedom 28 and Confidence Interval of 95% (0.95), the value comes out to be 2.048, which is less than the T-stat of 8.773. Since