abril de 2004 - CCHLA - Universidade Federal da Paraíba

Generated by Foxit PDF Creator © Foxit Softwarehttp://www.foxitsoftware.com For evaluation only.This is an important issue; we cannot afford just toshrug it off. Perhaps it is the price one has to pay for theadvancement of understanding. But there us a furtherreason that is less obvious. It is possible that theambiguities of the word love are defenses against feelingsof separation and alienation, that the way that the idea oflove evokes positive feelings of awe and mystery is also adefense against these painful feelings.I suspect that my colleagues in the belle-lettreswould carry this complaint quite a bit further than I have.They quote D. H. Lawrence’s passage to me, where heridicules the way that emotion is often represented in theform of a stereotype:We see love like a wooly lamb…, We see hate like adog chained to a kennel. We see fear like a shiveringmonkey. We see anger like a bull with a ring through itsnose, and greed like a pig… (Lawrence 1968, p. 756)My colleagues use this passage to reject anyattempt to explicitly define emotions. But that would be tomisconstrue Lawrence’s argument, which concerns theproblem of learning to feel. Poetry, the novel, and indeedall art, use ambiguity to surprise us into connecting withour hidden feelings. Lawrence proposes reading novels asone example of how we might educate or at least feel ourfeelings: "[The reader should] not listen to the didacticstatements of the author, but to the low, calling cries ofthe characters, as they wander in the dark woods of theirdestiny" (ibid, p. 760).He is not condemning all didactic statements, butonly those in novels, which of course are no use for thereader who wants to feel emotions. In this paper, mypurpose is not to help the reader feel emotion, but ratherto understand them.The Vernacular Meaning of ShameThe word for shame provides a contrastingexample. Just as English defines love enormously broadly,current usage defines shame extremely narrowly, as acrisis emotion of disgrace that is conscious and painful.There is no room in the trope for what may be the mostprevalent type of shame, that which is unacknowledged,and on many occasions, outside of awareness. Responses119