The Little Mermaid is a tale written by Hans Christian Andersen in 1837. It's a well-known tale today because of the adaptation Disney made. I love Disney's version of the story, with the happy ending, but I do prefer Andersen's. It's way more complex and philosophical. 

• The tale ( resumed and simplified but still quite long!)

The little Mermaid was living happily in the ocean, with her father, her grandmother and her five sisters. She was waiting to be 15, because at this age, mermaids are allowed to go and see the surface. As she turned 15, she rushed to the surface and sought a boat, with a man, a prince indeed, whom she falled in love with at first sight. A terrible storm hit the boat and The little Mermaid saved the prince from drawning. She took him to a temple's shore, where a girl came to take care of him. Ironically, he thought the woman of the temple was the one who saved him. The Little Mermaid went back in the deep ocean and asked her grandma whether or not the human lived as long as the mermaids. Her grandma answered that althought they barely lived for less than a century, unlike three hundreds for the mermaids, humans had an eternal soul, and that was what was important. As she knew she wouldn't be able to reach a prince with her flippers, she swam to the Sea Witch, and asked her to give her feet and legs to walk next to the prince. The Sea Witch agreed, but on some conditions: the witch would keep the wonderful voice of the Little Mermaid, and she had to make the prince marry her with true love, or the night after the prince's other wedding, she would turn into foam. She warned her too about what having feet would cost her: each step would be like they were throwing a sword through the soles of her feet. 

Yet, the Little Mermaid accepted. She went to the surface with her new legs and the prince fell in love with her too. They both lived happily and planned t get married but the king decided that his son would be married to a princess, for a neighbor kingdom. The prince went to the temple to say that he wouldn't marry the princess and that he loved the Little Mermaid, but he discovered that the lady of the temple was also the one he thought rescued him from drawning. The Little Mermaid was mute, so she wasn't able to say she was the one who rescued him. As the prince plan the wedding with the princess, the Little Mermaid prepared to die, so desperate by the idea of losing the prince. She went on the boat where the wedding was thrown. Her sisters followed her and hailed her. They said they had cut their hair to sell them to witch in exchange of a cure for her. they gave her a knife, and told her she had to kill the prince to become a mermaid again and forget about all her problems. The Little Mermaid took the knife and went into the prince cabin, but she wasn't able to stab him, she just blew him a kiss and ran away. When dawn came, she prepared to be turned into unsensitive foam, but she kept feeling the sun, the wind and everything that was going on around her. Something came next to her and explained that she was now a pure soul, and that with good actions, she would be able to reach eternal life, just because she strove to fulfil her dream to have one. 

Voyage and Return Stories Main Steps:

According to Christopher Booker's pattern, there are almost always steps followed in each Voyage story.  Here they are with the example of the Little Mermaid. 

1. Anticipation stage and " fall" into the other world: When The Little Mermaid turns 15, she encounters the prince and falls in love with him, enough to leave her world and go into his. 

2. Initial Fascination: Even is she's hurt everytime she walks, she loves the prince and he loves her, and they're going to get married. Moreover, she has now an eternal soul.

3. Frustration Stage: the king decides his son will marry a foreign princess, so the prince goes to say he won't marry her. But he falls in love with the princess and leaves the little Mermaid alone.

4: Nightmare Stage: The Little Mermaid is desperate and she has to kill her one true love to keep living like she used to. 

5: Thrilling escape and return: she finally decides not to kill the prince and she prepares to die, but instead of turning into foam, she becomes a pure soul who will access eternal life. 

But enough of sadness and despair, here's a song extracted from the Disney cartoon that is way funnier! Enjoy! 

Last tuesday, we studied one of the world's most famous authors: Ernest Hemingway. 

For sure when you hear his name you think about his marvellous stories and also maybe about his tragic ending. But Hemingway was way more than that. That's why our teacher asked us to write his biography. [I decided to write it in a literary style, like a story indeed.]

Biography:

 Ernest Hemingway was born in    1899 in a small town named Oak Park in the state of Illinois. He lived peacefully his childhood, apart from the conflict with his mother about music. He began a journalistic career in 1916 for the Kansas City Star. In 1918,  he was sent to the Italian Front, as many of young americans. There he fell in love for the first time, with a nurse named Agnes Von Kurowsky. First love, first heartbrake: she refused to marry him, which broke Hemingway's heart. At the end of the war, around 1919-20, he moved in Chicago and worked for the Toronto Star. He married Hadley Richardson ( and divorced her in 1927) and stayed for five years in Paris, where he mostly did two things: he socialized and wrote as a correspondant. There he met what we called later "The Lost Generation", principally bullfighters, soldiers and hunters that represented, according to Hemingway, the adversities of man against modern society. In 1928, he went back to the USA, married Pauline Pfiefer ( and divorced her in 1937) and shared his time between several places in the USA, most of the time in Keywest were he wrote novels such as A Farewell To Arms and To Have And To Have Not. After a long time of fishing, hunting and going to safaris, he went to Spain during the Spanish Civil War (1936) to be once again a correspondant. In 1939, he settled in Cuba and he married Martha Gellhorn in 1940. In 1944, Hemingway was a war correspondant in France and that's why he had the chance to sit in the "Libération". He divorced Martha in 1945 and remarried the year after that, with Mary Welsh whom he stayed with for the rest of his quite short living. He travelled to Venice in 1948 and recieved the Pulitzer Price in 1952 for the Old Man And The Sea and began a Nobelist in 1954. But, no matter how great his succes was, Hemingway committed suicide in 1961 in Ketchum, leaving behind him quite a travel and many marvellous books that will never stop suprising us and delighting the future generations. 

 A New Kind Of Literature:

There are two aspects in his work that are quite new: Foremost, he dealt with real life, the one he has heard from "The Lost Generation" or even his! He wrote about his tastes and loves, as in the almost ubiquity of cats in his books. He also quite often refered to the sea, but not in a common way: he used " La Mar", when he wanted to describe a sea that was kind and giving fish and " El Mar" when on the contrary it could sink your boat. Moreover, he wrote a literature that was accessible even to the common workers ( blue color). No one ever did that before, because classics were only for the upper classes who had access to a way higher education. 

So Hemingway wasn't just a writer. He was a war reporter cause he covered really fantastic events, an outdoorsman cause he loved a bunch of really different people, a romantic lover since he had love life that was filled, and a great traveller, as he travelled all accross the globe. But over all, he was the man who changed the future of Literature by making it reachable to everyone and thanks to him today anyone can read classics.

Tuesday, we studied a shortstory, Mabel, by William Somerset Maugham.

The scene takes place at Pagam in Burma, a couple of days before the narrator got to Mandalay. The first lines introduce the main characters: the narrator( a man), George, the secretary and Mabel. This part is suppose to introduce us the characters, the place, the time; It's called the incipit. 

Basic situation: George and Mabel are supposed to get married in a few months, but the death of Mabel's father and the war keeps them from marrying. 7 years later they finally can  get married, and George's waiting on the quay.

Rising Action: George's suddenly scared of by the perspective of marrying a girl he barely knows and decides to run away, leaving a simple note as an excuse for cancelling the wedding.

Climax of the story: George finds out that Mabel is following him and about to succeed in catching him, so he runs again from Singapore to a place at the border of the Tibet. 

Resolution: It comes with Mabel arriving in the hotel where he's staying and marrying him right after that, because they'll finally be together, where they belong.

Last Tuesday, we studied the beginning of Hemingway's most famous novel : The Old Man and The Sea, which tends to be the anticipation stage of Christopher Booker's pattern, because it introduces a character that waits for something to happen. We also studied the movie that was released in 1958 by John Struges. 

To do a quick recap of the beginning, this is the story of an old fisher (Santiago) who hasn't been lucky for 84 days.  He as a really tight friendship with a young boy named Manolin, who used to fish with but now is forbidden to, because of his parents  who think the old man's always gonna be unlucky. But the old man remains happy and you can feel assureness in his thoughts: He will catch a big fish.

Here is the video of the very beginning of the movie, with spanish subtitles, sorry about that, I couldn't find it in original version only!

 Here are some infos we found in the movie : 

- Do the words used in the movie stick to the text? What impact has the off-screen on the viewer?

Although the dialogs aren't in the same order, the words stick to the text, except in some occasions like when Manolin orders a coke instead of a beer. The voice captives the attention and make the story seem like a tale, with indeed a universal moral, that we'll discover later.

- What do you think of the choice of the actors?

Manolin is way younger in the movie, because he seems to be about 10 years old whereas in the book he's already a teenager. This choice could be explained by the fact that a child is more touching and that creates a bound between the old man and the kid such as agrandfather to his grandson.

Santiago also looks younger in the movie. He's not as skinny as he old man of the novel . He's in fact a sixty-year-old man whose skin has a light complexion  , which excludes he's cuban. We guessed the film maker didn't care about the man's skin because the actor, Spencer Tracy, was really famous in the 50's, and that assured the movie would be widely broadcast.

-How does the film maker stress the relationship between the two characters?

He stresses the relationship with a really slow and melancolic music, and really frequent close-up shots. The characters are only separated during the first spart and the last of the beginning, which draws a loop in the movie schema.

Mutual Conclusion

So this opening scenes corresponds to the anticipation stage of Christopher Booker. Indeed, although the old man hasn't caught a fish for 84 days now, he still believes he'll manage to catch a fish, a big one. He's ready for a new journeyand he feels time has come. He's all the more confident than the boy trusts him.

Before Holidays, we studied the second part of the novel, and it was really moving. 

First, we had to " ask" the text all the questions we found with the expression " How come..." and then try to answer each of them with certain various degrees of probabilty. It made us feel like we were in our childhood again, asking questions for anything that came into our minds reading the text. I have to admit it was quite hard trying to think like a child when you're always told not to be one!! ;) Anyway, those are some of the questions we used as examples and their answers:

-How come the old man knows Africa? 

 He may have been born there or Africa may have attracted him.

- What does Africa smell like?

 Africa may smell like the wilderness of a land, or like felins.

Then, we tried to see if this part corresponded to what C. Booker names the " Dream Stage" on his pattern of a travel story. As a matter of fact, not the whole part corresponds to it. Indeed, the beginning is just the continuation of the 1st part which was the " Anticipation Stage" with all the waiting, the memories and nostalgia. He doesn't feel disconcerted on the sea since he considers her as a woman, not as a contestant, nor as an ennemy. He's not in the " Dream Stage" where everything is new since he has a deep knowledge of the ocean. it's only at the end of the passage, when the old man goes in the boat whcich starts drifting away and that the old man discovers a world he's not used to, that we can say he's now in the dream stage.

Last Tuesday, we studied the continuation of Hemingway's novel, and we tried to guess whether or not it could be related to what C. Booker calls the " Frustation Stage", and we concluded that this passage was typical of the frustation stage:

• First of all, the old man discovers he's having hard time with his fish, which is drifting him far away from the coast. He can't catch the fish for fear his line might break so he's waiting for the fish to get tired.S
• Secondly, he regrets the boy's absence for if the boy was here they would manage to catch the fish together. He also suffers from solitude and that's why he's speaking to himself. This absence of the boy is becoming oppressive as it is mentionned at the beginning and at the end of the passage.
• Moreover, to fight against this oppressive feeling, the old man develops positive feelings towards the fish. Indeed, he refers to the fish with the pronoun "he" as if it was a human being and he credits it with intentions ("he knows", "any plans") and feelings ("desperate", "love") . Consequently, as the old man evokes the beauty of nature, he discovers he pities the fish.

 Is he starting to regret being a fisherman and bringing death to a world he admires so much?

Before going to class, we had to answer the question : The old man's about to enter the nightmare stage, what do you think is going to happen? 

It was quite hard for me as I already read the book, so I kind of failed in answering the question. Nevermind, I'll do better next time, won't I? 

Anyway, this is not the point of today's article. The point is that we did study this passage, the nightmare stage. It was hard to read because it was so moving  how the old man realized what it thought was over was about to be destroyed by the shark coming.

You can see by yourself by clicking here to read the 4th part we studied.

Before vacations, we studied the last passage of the novel (click here if you want to read it)

We found a question that was the more accurate on this extract: How far a travel story can change someone?

When you first read this passage, there is an impression of a status quo, as if nothing changed. Actually, only the old man thinks that, because everything has changed. Indeed, with the skeleton of the marlin, the old man will be respected now, no one will dare laughing at him. Moreover, Manolin seems to have changed, because he stands up against his parents and decides that he's going to come back on Santiago's boat, and that he'll bring the luck with him. We could say that everything has changed for the characters of this story. But is it true for all?

Last vacations, I visited Florida, well not the whole state but two principal towns , Miami and Orlando, and some of the main attractions: I went in the Everglades, which are extremely wide swamps, and also the only spot in the world where you can find rivers with both alligators and crocodiles. Since I also visited the Keys, where Key West is situated, I decided to write this article about the Ernest Hemingway Home. Fisrt of all it's quite huge. You enter by the porch where there's a really funny sign " don't take the cats back home", which makes you wonder if it's just a joke or if there are really cats. Well, there are. And they have six claws on each paw. Indeed, Hemingway recieved a cat from a friend with this suprising feature and decided to make them breed so that they would keep this "skill"( if it can be named this way, which I doubt). They are 54 today and are all around the house ! Even on Hemingway's bed!! There's also something I find really sad, because it meant how time had passed and how short their life was : a cat cemetary. But even if we love cats, that's not really the point of the visit, is it? So we entered the house and went into the living room. It was quite cosy, there were a lot of paintings, and it was a lot alike the houses of the XIXth century. Indeed, a lot of houses have this amazing colonial style the Hemingway's home has. [ to be continued when I have time :) ]