ENGL 325 (Spring 2006)

Caption 1

http://www.flickr.com/photos/flisspix/15849911/

Originally posted by: mygothlaundry

“ ‘ Chris was always an entrepreneur,’ Billie says with a laugh. ‘Always.’ As an eight-year-old, he grew vegetables behind the house in Annandale and then sold them door-to-door around the neighborhood.” (Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild, p. 115).

This is a picture of a little vegetable garden in someone’s backyard. The caption from McCandless’ mother paints a picture of how driven McCandless was even when he was a small child. He was very intelligent and driven, but didn’t necessarily have a lot of common sense, as we the readers find out through out the book.  I choose this picture to go with the caption because I see an eight-year-old working diligently on this small piece of land, planting seeds and checking everyday to see if anything is growing. I can also see the eight-year-old mind working to make a profit, reminiscent of Calvin from Jim Watterson’s comic strip. This picture could be anyone’s backyard, with anyone’s small child tending to it.  The caption is sentimental, and makes the reader feel remorse towards McCandless’ death. You can see the cute little face with the basket of vegetables, instead of the gruesome, emaciated, furry man found at the beginning of Krakauer’s book.  Many people would prefer to see the picture of the little boy as opposed to the dead young man.

 

Caption 2

http://www.flickr.com/photos/sillykitty/23465997/

Originally posted by: sillykitty

“..and I could tell by the language he used he was a real sharp fella. He wasn’t what you’d call a typical hitchhiker.” (Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild, p. 159)

This is a picture of Marvin the Martian, holding a handwritten sign. I picked this particular quote because it summed up much of Chris McCandless/ Alexander Supertramp’s transportation. After he left his Datsun in the desert, McCandless either walked, canoed, rode a bicycle, or hitchhiked to get to the next place in his journey. I picked this picture because it had a hitchhiker holding a sign. The language used on the sign is English and very simple, the opposite of the complexity and style of  how McCandless talked. The figurine is not based on a real person, but a character from a cartoon. This is similar to how McCandless based his idea of an Alaskan adventure on fiction books. The caption I choose to go with this picture is ironic because it has a little plastic man holding a sign that says happy birthday. The figurine is standing in front of a keyboard and a computer monitor, and no where near the road. The Martian is recognizing other people, and is connected to those people through the internet. His cartoon character travels through space, where McCandless traveled on the Earth. Marvin the Martian is not what you would call a typical hitchhiker.

 

Caption 3

http://www.flickr.com/photos/94799348@N00/127315133/

Originally posted by: slylitteminds

“For most of it’s short length, Davis Gulch exists as a deep, twisted gas in the slickrock, narrow enough in places to spit across, lined by overhanging sandstone walls that bar access to the canyon floor.” (Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild, p. 88).

This picture is a picture of Fremont Gulch, in Colorado. I choose this picture because it is a picture of a gulch. It is what the gulch that is mentioned in the book looks like in my head. This picture has all the different elements described in the passage I choose. The picture and the caption go together because you can see the gulch, and might describe it the same way that Krakauer does. The landscape is beautiful and  haunting because there is no human life portrayed, just endless sky and sandy crevaces.  I choose the caption because it is about the place where Everett Ruess disappeared. The desert that Ruess choose is very similar to the Alaskan wildness that McCandless choose because they are both desolate, fairly uninhabited places. Krakauer compares Ruess and McCandless, marking their solo journeys, their disappearance from the social world, and their deaths. The two men were very similar, and had similar experiences while tramping through the desert.

 Caption 4

http://www.flickr.com/photos/burlapjacket/22081306/

Originally posted by: burlap jacket

“Over the next three years the Park Service used the Datsun to make undercover drug buys that led to numerous arrests in the crime-plagued national recreation area, including the bust of a high-volume methamphetamine dealer operating out of a trailer park near Bullhead city.” (Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild, p.27)

This is a picture of an Astin Martin on a corner in New York City, in the SoHo district. I chose this quote because I really like that McCandless’ Datsun got a lot of good use by the park service. I chose an Astin Martin to compare with the quote because it is a car of all cars; James Bond drives them in the movies. They are really expensive, top of the line machines. This particular car isn’t abandoned, and is being shown off around town. This car is the opposite of what McCandless would have chosen to drive and own.  The car is not going to be used for drug busts, or for the greater good of society. It’s a car to have fun in, and let other people see you in. The picture is ironic because the Astin Martin represents the opposite of Chris McCandless’ ideals. McCandless wanted to find the real meaning in life, and I think he would have seen the Astin Martin as a huge affront to finding that meaning, because it represents a lot of wealth and money. McCandless made a lot of effort to get rid of money in the last two years of his life, only getting the bare essentials of what he needed.

Synthesis

Photographs influence the meaning and meanings of their pictures because they give the viewer something solid and defined to compare the words to. The word happy under a picture of someone frowning is ironic, whereas the same word under a picture of someone smiling can be redundant. The caption can also get rid of potential meaning the viewer may see. The caption has the capability of limiting or expanding meaning. Chris’s Datsun was able to help better the world by getting rid of drug users, while the people who drive the Astin Martin might be involved with the white collar version of drug use. To use the very cliché phrase, a picture is a thousand words. Using a caption under a picture reduces those thousand words into a paragraph or even a single word. The viewer is almost forced to see the picture the way the caption, or the person who decided on that caption, skews it. When Into the Wild is taken out of context, anything can happen. Seeing the picture of the vegetable garden, paired with the caption I choose, the reader may think that Into the Wild is the biography of Chris McCandless. The picture of the Astin Martin would change the book into a story about how an abandoned car helped to reduce drug problems, almost eliminating McCandless from the story. Into the Wild would not be about young men with ideals that led to their demise, or in Krakauer’s case- his almost demise, but about going into the wilds of drug circles and the men and women that try to eliminate their existence. Pictures invite the viewer to see what they want to see, and take away what is important to them, where captions make those same readers take away what the photographer intended.

Picture 001: Caption: A wide mix of seeds.

Picture 001: URL and Citation
http://www.flickr.com/photos/brimley/130865463/
Uploaded on April 18, 2006
by Brimley
Copyright: CC

Picture 001: Type of correlation: To pair the photograph with Krakauer’s own words, thoughts, or descriptions. The caption should “fit” the image.

Picture 001: On page 195 of Into the Wild, Krakauer says “If McCandless ate a big slug of these seeds while he was already in a semi-starving condition, it would have been setup for catastrophe.”

Picture 001: Write up: This is a picture of different seed types. I selected this image because is visually depicts a wide variety of seeds and that one may become confused or be unaware as to which are safe to eat. I chose the caption that I did because McCandless stated that game was scarce towards the end of his life. Therefore, he may have had an incentive to splurge on some seeds. For this image, it should fit the picture and not be ironic. This photograph influences the meaning of the caption as the wide variety of seeds may be confusing to someone not in touch with nature. It may lead one to eat the wrong seeds or eat seeds which may be good at one time but poisonous at other times. For people in a city or not in the wild, looking at the image without the caption, many people would see some seeds and maybe try and plant some flowers or trees with them but not eat them. Reading the caption mentioned above describes what one is seeing overall, not the specific type of seeds in question. The caption encompasses what one makes of the image at first glance and straight forward, a wide variety of seeds.

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Picture 002: Caption: A moose in a place he does not belong due to the sharp contrast in color that easily reveals its location.

Picture 002: URL and Citation
http://www.flickr.com/photos/nilsohman/101625623/
Uploaded on February 19, 2006
by Nils Öhman
Copyright: CC

Picture 002: Type of correlation: To pair the photograph with Krakauer’s own words, thoughts, or descriptions. It should be an ironic juxtaposition.

Picture 002: On page 166 of Into the Wild, Krakauer says “On June 5, he shot a Canada goose as big as a Christmas turkey. Then, on June 9, he bagged the biggest prize of all: “MOOSE!” he recorded in the journal.”

Picture 002: Write up: The photograph shows a real moose, not a caribou. I chose it as it was a big topic of discussion toward the end of the book. It was when Alaskan’s wrote Krakauer with heated remarks about McCandless not knowing the difference between a moose and a caribou. The caption is ironic because Krakauer first sided with the Alaskan people, that they must be correct. However, during careful study, it was later discovered that it was indeed a moose after all. The photograph influences the meaning of the caption by showing the reader or observer what a moose looks like. This is important as after the some people had discovered the pictures he had taken of the moose, the remarks about McCandless seemed to end. This particular image is also juxtaposition in itself, as it almost appears the moose was artificially inserted into the image as if it does not belong there. One can contrast this with the story as the Alaskans remarks were unwarranted as they did not have any proof, only “assumed” that it must have been a caribou. The caption frames this photograph as the moose being out of place; this can be contrasted with the comments of the Alaskans as also being out of place or simply put, wrong.

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Picture 003: Caption: An English teacher’s worst nightmare.

Picture 003: URL and Citation
http://www.flickr.com/photos/cadigan/16903181/
Uploaded on June 1, 2005
by Cadigan
Copyright: CC

Picture 003: Type of correlation: To pair with quoted dialogue or other cited material from the book that should be ironic.

Picture 003: On page 166 of Into the Wild, Carine says “His name was printed wrong. The label said CHRSTOPHER R. MCCANDLESS. His middle initially is really J. It ticked me off that they didn’t get it right.”

Picture 003: Write up: The photograph shows multiple spelling errors, where to should be too. I selected the image to show juxtaposition between this image and McCandless’ name being spelled incorrectly. In this image, the people on the bus are both writers and editors, which make this image ironic. In the story, it is ironic that a cremator would misspell a love one’s name as one would assume he or she would be very careful to not make any mistakes. This photograph shows that even though there were writers and editors in the bus, that they did not appear to care if the advertisement was misspelled or not. The correlation between this and the story is that even though it ticked off his sister, she did not do anything about the misspelling, just like the editors and writers that were on the bus. It is ironic when people who identify such errors with spelling or getting the initial wrong do not make any attempt to fix them, rather, they just complain. If it really impacted his sister, she would have had the name corrected, I believe Krakauer is “stirring the pot,” when he mentioned her being ticked off.

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Picture 004: Caption: Icy winter rapids.

Picture 004: URL and Citation
http://www.flickr.com/photos/luckienyc/93793145/
Uploaded on January 31, 2006
by luckienyc
Copyright: CC

Picture 004: Type of correlation: To pair with quoted dialogue or other cited material from the book that should apply to the image somehow.

Picture 004: On page 170 of Into the Wild, McCandless writes “Disaster. . . . Rained in. River look impossible. Lonely, scared.”

Picture 004: Write up: This photograph shows very rough rapids during the winter season. I chose this image to indicate what McCandless may have seen when he tried to cross back over the river. I chose the caption as I did to depict how difficult it may be to attempt to cross such an obstacle, especially when the water is near freezing! This correlation is not ironic. This picture shows the main obstacle that caused McCandless his life. McCandless had planned to return home as he had packed his bags and thought he could cross just as he had done earlier. Unknowingly, with the water still both freezing and violent, he could no longer cross. This ultimately led to his demise. The caption “icy winter” shows the water almost as being frozen like icicles as it rushes over the rocks. With my caption, I did attempt to obscure one’s view from the bridge in the background. Naturally, there was not a bridge nearby for the river McCandless had crossed.

“He was alone,” as James Joyce wrote of Stephen Dedalus, his artist as a young man. “He was unheeded, happy, and near to the wild heart of life. He was alone and young and wilful and wildhearted, alone amid a waste of wild air and brakish waters and the seaharvest of shells and tangles and veiled grey sunlight” (Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild, p. 31)

The latter half of Tuesday’s discussion concerned Jack London’s stories as the impetus for McCandless’ journey. I disagree with this assertion. London may have paralleled the notion of going “into the wild” and the romantic ideals of nature being pure etc. However, I feel that it is Leo Tolstoy, the other author championed by Alex, which was the catalyst for his pilgrimage. The reader is easily thrown off by the emphasis put on War and Peace. Though this is Tolstoy’s most famous work (I personally have yet to muster the endurance needed to read it), other pieces by him, specifically “The Death of Ivan Illych” harbor an ethos that seems more applicable to McCandless and his journey.
Tolstoy’s “Ivan Illych” is a short story about a man who is an honest and diligent worker. Illych’s life is spent in attempt to be successful and lead a “good” life, which he does – he becomes a prominent judge and has a relatively happy family life. Through a series of events however, Illych begins to die. As he is dieing, he begins to examine his life and finds it to be superficial and wasteful and embarks on an introspective journey that culminates in his demise.
Paralleling this, McCandless came from a stable family, went to Emory, graduated with honors, was destined for law school, then leaves it all behind, denounces almost all “material” possessions, and begins a journey that ends in his death.
In the same vein though, I feel it necessary to caveat this with the fact that I see McCandless as crazy (as of now), much the same way I see Tolstoy’s outlook as disillusioned. What is crazy anyways? Two definitions given by Merriam-Webster are “being out of the ordinary” and “being distracted by desire or excitement.” It was McCandless’ desire to leave everything behind and fulfill a selfish goal that distracted him from an “ordinary” life.

Coda – Ironic similarities: Like Into the Wild, “The Death of Ivan Illych” also immediately begins with the main character’s death and then explains the process. Additionally, both characters are involved with the law (Alex was supposed to use the $25K for law school; Illych was a lawyer and then a judge).

After last night’s recitation, I had a few comments on the professor’s idea that the ‘perfect alien language’ has yet to be achieved in literature. I can appreciate his exhaustive clinical approach: indeed, it certainly helped me understand his field of study with such a unique topic of discussion. My point of contention arrives when he talks about the creation of an alien language that utilizes all the nonhuman phrasings and segmentations he brought up in the lecture. He felt that he ultimate goal of any author attempting to create a completely alien language is falling short of his goal by not making his language strange enough (while still keeping the possibility of human pronunciation possible). He went on to give possible reasons for this lack of inaccessibility found in writers attempting to simulate alien speech, immediately discounting the idea that any author who is trying to create connections to the reader by making the language more familiar to our own ways of speaking.

I believe that the sole hope of an author of science fiction should not be to create the most technically bizarre language for its readers. For one thing, to create a limit of only human sounds is a rather silly way of limiting alien speech, even in fiction work. If the only goal is to make a language completely indecipherable to humans, why bother with human noises at all? Why not have a language of whooshing noises, or of rhythmic slapping or growls? The limits, while an understandable deterrence in acting, will only hold back from a truly unique experience. Another thing I couldn’t understand was the emphasis put on preventing a connection to the alien language by the reader. Isn’t it the author’s job to try and make the reader feel some kind of association with the characters in a book? Unless the express aim is to do the exact opposite, I don’t think it’s fair to discount an attempt to make the reader empathize with a creature alien to our understanding by framing its speech in a similar manner. If you want alienation, make a race that communicates nonverbally, or uses light and music (a la Close Encounters).

In class we talked about how Alex’s journey looked more like a circle (which seemed pointless-the circle that is) I don’t think it matters what shape his journey was, it was the cause of the journey that matters I believe.  I don’t think that Alex was looking to explore nature or to experience the wild, I think he was looking for a purpose.  He was looking for something like the old man said; what it was, he didn’t know. 

The way to find it (I believe) he thought was through nature, because it is closer to truth than our ‘civilized’ society is. 

He followed his instinct when he left from one place to another which is closer to nature than systematic (learned reasoning) he acquired from society.  Alex was good with animals which I thought was interesting since it also follows a nature guided instinctive pattern of life. 

Although, he seems odd to most of us, I think Alex was more far sighted than most people.  He got sick of society’s mundane expectations.  The cyclical life he was bound to have which inevitably rotated around basic human needs.  Graduate, get a job, make money so he can enjoy the pleasures of life.  Apparently, that did not satisfy him as an answer; he wanted to find the essence of life, the rock bottom reality which is not tampered with opinion, the essence of life—the purpose of life.  Just like Thoreau who in Walden wanted everyone to agree upon a reality.

Let us settle ourselves, and work and wedge our feet downward through the mud and slush of opinion, and prejudice, and tradition, and delusion, and appearance, that alluvion which covers the globe, through Paris and London, through New York and Boston and Concord, through Church and State, through poetry and philosophy and religion, till we come to a hard bottom and rocks in place, which we can call reality, and say, This is, and no mistake; and then begin
Be it life or death, we crave only reality.

I can’t help but notice the similarities between Into the Wild and “Grizzly Man”. We find out a lot of information about the characters from the work that they have left behind, and the people that knew them, but nothing from the two men themselves. The book and the films are very similar in that respect.  Both men wanted to be away from people, but yet they both seem to crave some sort of contact, a “look what I did/am doing” mentality. Alex Supertramp wrote in journals and took rolls and rolls of film. He wanted some type of documentation of what he had done. If he didn’t want some sort of contact, he wouldn’t have felt the need to do so. Timothy took hours of film, shooting the footage of himself as well as the bears. He shot the footage like he was making a television show to put on national television. His quest for aloneness with the bears was ruined by his filming more of himself than of the bears doing bear things. I think that these men had an unrealistic view of nature, which ultimately led to their deaths.

Chris McCandless or Alex Super tramp, whichever one he prefers, is an individual who has made changes in the lives of others around him but has overlooked his parents. As I am reading this book, Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer, I can’t help but think how ironic it is that Chris gets along with people he encounters on his journey and yet he cannot stand his parents. I feel that Chris is not a hero but rather is running away from his parents. If this entire mission was solely to appreciate nature, Chris would not continuous mention to people he encounters and complains to them about how his parents take him for granted. Chris’s adventure is only done to defy his parents and to prove to them that he does not need them buying him a new car, or paying for his law school education. Rather than just telling them this as a man, Chris decides to live on his own in the wild, and was hoping to come out alive to prove to his parents that he didn’t need them that he knew what he wanted to do in life. The approach in which Chris went about this is totally incorrect; for an educated person, he did not educate himself about the outdoors, or check out the credentials of the authors of those outdoor adventure books. A person with such a high grade point took a fictional and used it to survived in a real life. This once again proves my point that Chris was in such a rush to defy his parents that he did not research about this journey thoroughly before he departed.

Regarding the discussion that we had in class today dealing with story telling and whether or not a person has the authority to put an evocative analysis on another individual’s story, I could not help but to think of Jon Krakauer’s twist on McCandless’s travels in “Into the Wild”.  Interestingly, in order for us to fully analyze the story of Chris McCandless, we as the readers must believe that Krakauer is a reliable source.  Although he is a well-known author – “Into the Wild” became a national best seller! – I never thought to question whether or not we can believe that Krakauer’s account of McCandless’ wanderings and eventual death is complete truth.  As human beings we cannot help but put our own twist on stories we hear, simply because we have perspectives, imaginations and a mind that enables us to see every situation slightly different from another person.  When we were sharing our own stories as a class, I could not help but wonder how different each person’s version of even one of the stories would be, had we continued to pass it on and tell it to someone else.  Without a doubt there would be some discrepancy regarding the people involved, the chronology, or details in the setting that we would forget or even add in, depending on our experiences.  Krakauer then, probably cannot help but to add in his own story in juxtapostion with McCandless’ own story and it is probably for the better that he brings in his own separate experience.  By mentioning his own story separately, but within the story of McCandless, Krakauer is able to distinguish between the two distinct tales and therefore not confuse the details of McCandless’ story with his own.  This in turn makes Krakauer a more reliable story teller and the reader can enjoy “Into the Wild” without constantly wondering if what the author says happened is fact.

After listening to Professor Rick Davis’ lecture last night I appreciated the play more so than before.  I like how talked about how some things in life need a longer time to understand.  I think the people in my recitation were rude.  I don’t how many of them are Joyce scholars or have experience directing plays, but I think they wouldn’t have directed any better.  Professors respect their students and sometimes take their opinions as if they were equals but at the end of the day Professor Rick Davis does know more about Joyce than most of us I would say.  Some egotistical students take advantage of this respect and display their ignorance about Joyce in the form of critcisim.