T.S. Eliot

I always go back to Eliot:

My interest in T. S. Eliot started when I was a sophomore in a two thousand level course. We read The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock and by the end of the class I had so many notes in the margins I didn’t know what to do with them. The notes didn’t help much, and I still didn’t understand what the poem was really about. Our professor for that class told us how he decided to become an English major when he found the poem when he was in high school. He saw all the notes on the poem and decided he wanted to be able to makes notes like that and understand the poem. I think I related to that as I, also, wanted to be able to decipher the meaning of the words I was reading. While at that point I didn’t understand the poem, I knew I wanted to be able to understand them because they were put together so beautifully:

Let us go then, you and I, 

When the evening is spread out against the sky

Like a patient etherized upon a table;

Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets, 

The muttering retreats

Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels

And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells

Streets that follow like a tedious argument 

Of insidious intent

To lead you to an overwhelming question…

Oh, do not ask, “What is it?”

Let us go and make our visit.

All these years later and I still have trouble understanding what Eliot is saying. I ask, then, “And how should I begin?”

I began with the question of modernism and what it means. It seems the academic world is so concerned about putting everything into categories that Eliot gets the distinction, both an honor and a curse, of being the model for modernist ideals. Modernism, like the other categories (romanticism, post-modernism, etc…) seems to be a term used to try to corral where it is we put artists and “movements.” But Eliot, I believe, should be beyond these categories, as the categories seem to be reductive of the creative work put forth by a great author. Shakespeare is a great Renaissance writer, but he is in a category all his own. Borges and Neruda are Spanish authors, but they encompass art beyond a reductive category.

The critical scholars of Eliot’s work seem to embrace this idea of reductive categories as well. Ronald Bush in T.S. Eliot: A Study in Character seems to be more concerned with Eliot as a person in society and how Eliot’s life affected his art. Craig Raines’ book T.S. Eliot (for the Oxford Lives and Legacies series) is more concerned with the poetry as its own entity. The only one that looks at Eliot through the context of “Modernism” is Louis Menand in his Discovering Modernism: T.S. Eliot and His Context, but even Menand is more concerned with how Eliot used the ideas of his time (“modernism”) for Eliot’s own “literary opportunities” (Menand 14).

Bush’s main concern is the relationship between the character and style. By character I believe what Bush means is Eliot’s psychological character and how this relates to Eliot’s style. What is meant then is that Eliot’s personality influences the form in art. Bush claims that all theories are found in autobiographies. This leads to the main crux of Bush’s study. Bush claims how in Eliot’s development we have the question of modernism itself; that is: the romantic idea of intense emotions conflicting with a modern sense of intellectualism that is not concerned with (or skeptical) of intense emotions.

Bush then explores Eliot’s psyche and this tension between romantic emotions (feelings) and a classical ideal (skepticism of emotion), as Bush says:

Much of the work of this study involved tracing the way these two streams of modernism grew, interacted and diverged in Eliot’s poetry and criticism (X).
And then later in the same preface:
As his admirers have always known, the power of Eliot’s early verse comes from an almost unbearable tension between romantic yearning and intellectual detachment. Significant areas of Eliot’s psyche are invested in both, and, forced to choose, we would have to say that the yearning, not the intellect, dominates (X).

In the later verses, though, Bush tells us how the intellect takes over.

Bush looks at Eliot’s work chronologically with this thesis in mind. The first half of Bush’s study looks at Prufrock briefly. Bush states how Prufrock, like Eliot, is continually questioning the emotional life. By questioning this emotional life, Eliot/Prufrock is able to identify with it and thus become free, but in doing so, in finding this freedom, he (them) alienates himself. Stating further how Eliot’s characters are fragmented because Eliot is fragmented between this polarity of feelings and thought.

I get the feeling that Bush is too forcefully looking for the poet in the work. While it would be a mistake to not realize that no poet writes in a vacuum, completely detached from his emotions, his surroundings, or the historical and cultural context at the time the poem is composed, I also believe that looking too forcefully for the poet in the poetry is a mistake as well. Especially by a poet, as Bush points out, was influenced by the French Symbolist. The Symbolist, again as Bush points out, wanted to write a poetry with no outside reference—“A poetry, so to speak, of pure music” (Bush IX).

Bush looks at the tension in Eliot’s psyche in The Waste Land and how this tension between the romantic and the classicist play out in the poem. Noting how Eliot adjusts his style between the earlier poems, like Prufrock, through to The Waste Land, and then how Eliot adjusts his style for the later poetry like Four Quartets.

Bush looks at this split in Eliot by looking at his family background. Eliot’s family represented, what Bush calls, “Boston doubt.” The idea, an inheritance from Eliot’s grandfather, that what counts is the greater good or “duty” over romantic feelings that are a “self-indulgence.” Bush explores how when Eliot married out of romantic feelings this split widened. Eliot’s mother, then, becomes the representative of the “Boston doubt” and Vivien, Eliot’s wife, represents romantic yearning. And it is when these poles meet, when Eliot’s mother comes to visit the newlyweds, that Eliot is torn between the two poles and has his nervous breakdown. And here, again, it seems that Bush is too concerned with Eliot’s biography. While Eliot’s mother’s visit was likely one of the reasons for Eliot’s breakdown, I think it reductive to not think about other factors. We can never know the inner workings of Eliot’s mind and possible chemical imbalances, his wife’s health, his concerns about becoming a poet and not taking a good job as a philosophy professor—all factors that could have contributed to his breakdown.

Bush, rather, takes a theoretical Freudian approach between Eliot’s mother and wife with Pound as a midwife. Bush then interprets The Waste Land less as a poem about myths (the Holy Grail, Frazer’s Golden Bough) and looks at it as showing this conflict between the two poles of his psyche. Bush does praise Eliot as a master of being able to merge emotion and intellect using James Joyce’s “Mystical method” to organize the poem. And it is around the time of this poem, which shows the shift in Eliot from romantic yearnings to intellectualism. Bush says that Eliot was fixated by his mother but wanted to escape her grasp over him. And it is this feeling that led Eliot to shift from the romantic to yielding to intellect, insincerity, rhetoric and form. I feel Bush is placing too much emphasis on Eliot’s mother’s influence on him and on Eliot’s biography.

Bush then looks at Ash Wednesday and how Eliot converted childhood memories into this poem. He goes on to explain how the garden Eliot is recollecting in this poem, a garden in an all girls school are what led to Eliot’s first thoughts of sex.

Bush also gets into the charges of anti-Semitism, specifically in The Yellow Spot review. It is Bush’s claim that Eliot’s religious fervor led to Eliot’s insensitivity to other’s suffering, and that Eliot’s “fierce theodicy” and Little Giddings are due to his anti-Semitism.

seems that Bush is tackling something that cannot be tackled—someone’s psyche. And his claims would be easier to accept, as Bush does do a great job of analyzing the poems and looking at Eliot’s imagery, if it weren’t for his dogmatic claims. Bush leaves little room for suggesting that his claims are his interpretations: rather, he makes his claims as if they were the truth. While insightful at times, I fell a scholar should keep the idea of interpretation open, always trying to look at different angles rather than state those interpretations so forcefully, especially when trying to find the poet in the poem. I can see how Eliot seems to be troubled by the idea of intense emotions verses the skepticism of those emotions but to attribute it all to biography, I feel, is reductive. If anything, we can look at the symbolist influence that struggled with these same concepts as Wallace Fowlie points out in his introduction to Baudelaire’s Flowers of Evil and other Works when he says, “Both Baudelaire and Valery argued that the poet’s drama is the struggle that is constantly going on between his sensuality [romantic yearning] and his critical mind [intellectualism]” (4).

Craig Raine is more cautious about biography, stating in his preface how you would be hard pressed to find Eliot in his poetry giving the example of how Prufrock was nothing like Eliot, but Raine admits that the theme of Prufrock , the failure to seize the day, the procrastination, avoiding risk is something Eliot had in common with his creation. Raine’s thesis, though, is along the same lines of Bush’s:

In ‘To Criticise the Critic’ (1961), he [Eliot] describes himself as ‘the mild-mannered man safely entrenched behind the typewriter’. And it is a theme of this study that the Buried Life, the idea of a life not fully lived, is the central, animating idea of Eliot’s poetry (Raine xiii).

This theme of the life not fully lived, Raine states, comes from literature (a common literary topos), and he states how the writer takes his themes from his predecessors and continues to develop it—explaining also how the fully-lived life for the artist is also the interior life.

Raine states that in finding the buried life theme of Eliot’s work, Raine will look at “the one poem.” In other words, Raine feels that this theme is consistent throughout Eliot’s work, showing itself in many different ways. And like Bush, Raine sees how Eliot is a modernist skeptical of emotions—and this leads to a conflict: Eliot wants to maximize emotions to have a life fully lived, but he is skeptical of emotions.

Raine immediately starts looking at the poetry, dissecting each line as skillfully as a surgeon. He is like an officer in a crime scene, looking at every detail, analyzing each word and line, and he masterfully moves from poem to poem with a nice lucid prose. Unlike Bush’s, at times, overly erudite writing, Raine is easy to follow and understand.

Raine deftly moves from looking at Animula to Gerontion describing how they are both about not living life fully. Raine, keeping with his notion that Eliot’s theme is a literary one, compares other authors when interpreting Eliot.
Raine moves form poem to poem outlining the literary topos: “I want to live” as he looks at The Hollow Men and, what Raine calls the most personal poem: Ash Wednesday. Raine never fails to go into a deep elucidation of a poem, looking at them section by section, line by line, and at times word by word, and he always reminds us how Eliot is borrowing these topos from other authors as he shows us how other authors have used similar themes.

Raine then traces Eliot’s anti-romanticism in Eliot’s essay on Dante, and in Eliot’s “Restaurant poems.” Raine looks at Eliot’s definition of classicist: which is the skepticism of strong emotion. It seems that Eliot’s main concern then is not so much with strong emotions, but rather with an excess of emotions—Eliot wants precise emotions. Eliot will use his skepticism to corral his emotions, as Eliot says: “What every poet starts from is his own emotions.” The idea seems to be: to take personal emotions and transform them into something universal. Raine then takes his razor sharp knife to dissect poems in which this is seen, and Raine states how he feels other critics have misread these poems. And while Raine comes off as too confrontational—again, like Bush, dismissing another way of interpreting a poem other than his, it does make for interesting reading.

Raine summarizes Eliot from two perspectives. The first being Eliot’s sense of a failure to live fully, “..to have a proper, vivid, satisfying emotional life,” (Raine 16) and Eliot’s yearning for romantic yearning which he inherited from Henry James.

In looking at Prufrock, Raine states, “Living ‘with all intensity’, for Eliot, as for Henry James, is to complicate life’s readied simplifications” (67), and that the “best illustration of this is the comic, antiromantic creation” Prufrock. Raine explores Prufrock’s complicated feelings—his feeling of insecurity, his fear of losing his head, of the butler, of social disadvantage and states how Prufrock has something on his conscious. That possibly the thing that is bothering his conscious is the inner life that is hidden not just from the reader (or the outsider looking in) but hidden from Prufrock himself.

The second half of the book contains extended analysis of The Waste Land and Four Quartets, in which Raine continues to dissect the poems to show how the buried life is the theme within them. While looking at them he connects the idea of the buried life with Eliot’s other poetry.

Raine goes on to look at Eliot’s drama where he continues exploring his thesis of the buried life within them, but concludes, “As drama, they fail in varying degrees, because we couldn’t care less what, say, Edward Chamberlayne really feels” (125). Here I feel that Raine’s dismissal of the drama is more out of the drama not showing his thesis as well as he would like.

After looking at the criticism, Raine attacks the charges of Eliot’s anti-Semitism. And while Raine makes a great case, he seems to be “protesting to much.” It surprises me how Bush and Raine take this aspect of Eliot without a grain of salt, seemingly. Defending or condemning rather than saying that it doesn’t matter as much as people make it out to be, especially Raine who spends more time looking at the poetry than at the biography. What matters for an artist is his art—and I believe we should be judging weather or not the art is good. What strikes me most about Raine’s defense of Eliot, and one of the reasons why I think it is so good, is that he points out how The Yellow Spot review that people use against Eliot wasn’t even written by Eliot, and that none of the scholars had bothered to simply look at the index where they would have seen that Eliot didn’t write it.

In Menand’s book, Menand looks at how Eliot changed the way we understand literature in the early part of the twentieth century. The way Eliot went about this, though, was to take the modernist effort to reestablish our conceptions of art and, “as a poet…find ways of transforming some of those difficulties into literary opportunities” (14). Which I find to be a little harsh, what poet, after all, didn’t use his current artistic philosophies to influence his writing and become a popular writer? Eliot, I fell, used what was at his disposal to create art within his context.

Menand points out how Eliot discredited the cultural values of the 19th century, but one can see these values underneath the modernist ones Eliot was using. But I think this goes back to the problem of using ambiguous terms such as “modernism” and “romanticism.” And while at first sounding very abrasive, Menand shows how Eliot’s genius was Eliot’s ability to properly fuse the contradiction between modernism and romanticism—the problem, I think, lies in when he says this genius was “literary opportunism.”

This was, for me, the hardest book of the three to read. Menand is without a doubt a very erudite scholar, and his prose comes off as such. At times I found myself lost in what it was I was reading, and I would have to go back to previous pages to remember how one point leads to the other. I feel that Menand is saying that Eliot was being insincere.

Out of all the books, I feel that Raine’s was the easiest one to read and follow. And while they all have their good points and bad points, I feel all these scholars take their views of the subject and their interpretation of the poems too serious and pronounce them too dogmatically.

 

Dante and Levi

Putting this on here, just because… To have it, to remember it… kind of like what the paper itself is about:

The Impossibility of Shared Experience

“Nothing fixes a thing so intensely in the memory as the wish to forget it.”
-Michel de Montaigne

Levi, like Dante, is trying to pass on the story of the people in hell in order to save the souls of other people. Dante, by telling the story of hell, is trying to turn people away from committing sins and is passing on the political story of his native Florence in hopes that the politics will change and that the proper people will be damned for the rest of history; Levi, by telling the story of Auschwitz, is trying to make sure that such atrocities never happen again while telling the story of people that suffered in order to keep the memory of them alive and to keep history alive. The problem arises when these writers try to explain the unexplainable. How can a writer possibly relate an experience to another person that is beyond words? These writers will fail. They will never be able to convey the “true” experience of what they went through, but the failure is important because the story must be passed on and must live on in the memory of history. The stories these writers try and tell will fail because language fails to convey true meaning and will always be interpreted, and because experience, like a text being read, will always be interpreted in different ways.

No one could ever come close to knowing what these writers went through when they were violently disconnected from their society because experience can only be experienced by the one that is present for the experience. For Dante, he took his experience and fictionalized Florence into a hell, and it was hell for him because it was not the land to which he had grown so attached. Dante’s identity was one of being a Florentine. Violently disconnected from this identity is hell for Dante, but it is a hell that he knows he has to get through in order to reach a paradise—which for Dante is reached only in losing himself completely and then finding himself. Whereas Levi’s hell is a real lived experience that Levi has to endure every waking hour. In both cases (and we always have to keep in mind that Dante being exiled to “hell” is not nearly as bad as Levi’s experience of a concentration camp that becomes a tangible, real life hell), these writers face the task of putting into words experiences that cannot be described or understood by anyone who did not actually go through them. This is why Dante turns his account into a fictional creation of a journey through hell leading to paradise because it is only through fiction that someone might get to the experience of being exiled. Rather than say “this is my experience,” Dante conveys this experience through fiction. As prideful as Dante is, he addresses the reader enough—in a desperate plea to be believed and in hoping the reader heads his message: “May God so let you, reader, gather fruit/from what you read” (20. 19-20)— Dante, in places, also lets the reader know that he doesn’t even believe what he is writing. That what he is writing is too unbelievable, and Dante therefore reminds the reader that this is just a story which alludes to reality.

Levi, on the other hand, is in hell and has the much harder task of conveying experiences of his reality in a fictional manner (through a book); furthermore, these are experiences that are so bad that “when you really seem to lie on the bottom—well, even in that case, at any moment you want you could always go and touch the electric wire-fence, or throw yourself under the shunting trains, and then it would stop raining” (Levi 131). Language is too insufficient to be able to convey a reality in which one goes on living because the thought of suicide gives them hope. And yet, like Dante (and to a much greater extent), Levi tries to write about experiences that can never be experienced in words through a text.

Although these stories fail to actually convey the mourning of their writers, it is this failure of conveying experience that is important in and of itself:

For mourning to fully succeed, we should be able to get over the loss of the other in question. But if we can get over him or her, something seems to have failed in the mourning […] From this perspective, a truly appropriate mourning would be a mourning we couldn’t accomplish, that continues until our death. Derrida claims that if mourning succeeds, it fails, and it must fail in order to succeed (Deutscher 71) .

Therefore, even though it would be impossible to transmit an experience through insufficient words, the story must be told and the failure that is achieved is important. It is important for Dante because the stories must be passed on in order for us, today, to sit in the classroom and learn about the ills of Florence and the people that did wrongs to Dante, and it is important for Levi (for an even graver reasons) because he is trying to tell his story in order to pass it on so that history does not forget these atrocities and keeps it from happening again. This is seen when Levi is telling the story of the prisoners who march out of the camp and says, “Alberto was among them. Perhaps someone will write their story one day” (155), but this is their story like it is Levi’s, like it is the failure of action of the world that let this happen. It is a story that will be written again and again in hopes that the world will never forget what happened and never forget to whom it happened to.

 

New Year’s Ramblings

It is New Year’s Eve, so I am not going to do much thinking today.

Here are just some smarter people than I am on the New Year:

New Year’s is a harmless annual institution, of no particular use to anybody save as a scapegoat for promiscuous drunks, and friendly calls and humbug resolutions. ~Mark Twain

He who breaks a resolution is a weakling;
He who makes one is a fool.
~F.M. Knowles

For last year’s words belong to last year’s language
And next year’s words await another voice.
And to make an end is to make a beginning.
~T.S. Eliot, “Little Gidding”

Be always at war with your vices, at peace with your neighbors, and let each new year find you a better man. ~Benjamin Franklin

Youth is when you’re allowed to stay up late on New Year’s Eve. Middle age is when you’re forced to. ~Bill Vaughn

The New Year bring with it all the old superstitions and traditions. In my family, from our Spanish grandfather, we eat 12 grapes at midnight. I also remember my father throwing out a bucket of water, and this was supposed to scare away bad spirits. A kind of baptism of the new year.

Here is a list of traditions from around the world. Enjoy the New Year everyone. I’ll be back to my fragmented thoughts soon enough.

So in searching for an image for this post, I ran into this.

 

The Road…is Bumpy

While talking to a colleague/friend the other day, we were discussing how this, this analyzing and constant reading of literature, does not seem to be a “normal” job. That since this is what we do, we are attracted to people who understand why it is so hard to lose/sell/give away books. People who understand why it is we write quotes down, constantly read, constantly go back and reread favorites, constantly seek out new books and writing. And I think that this need blurs into life.

There is this understanding that we can never grasp or obtain (own) words, stories, theories, the things we read, but we feel this need to memorize the thing. I have talked about this before, I think… But the concept comes from Derrida when he talks about a need to repeat over and over a phrase, to memorize a phrase, because this makes us feel like we can own it, like it is something graspable to hold on to. I think this notion is what compels people to be sport’s fans, “patriots”, attached to one theory over another. This is why there is so much bickering and fighting, why we have jealousy, anger– this is what Buddhist talk about. Our attachments to concepts whether it be concepts we have about patriotism, identity, literature, politics, or life in general, we can’t accept having those concepts questioned.

And I think I have talked about all this before when I discussed Demillo, and I counter charges that this is passionless as a misunderstanding of the concept of detachment. You can feel passionately about something without having that something determine your mood. But none of this really matters because you already have a concept of passion, life, and how to deal with all of it, and if this goes against that concept, you are going to think that everything I have said is bullshit anyway.

The point of this was to discuss how when I am sick or depressed or heartbroken or happy or any other emotion, I can easily go to my job as a server for a chain restaurant and fake it and do my job. If I have my classes planned out and I know what it is I need to cover, I can–more or less– go into a classroom and teach something that I have gone over a million times, but if I have any one overwhelming feeling that is occupying my brain, I can’t “think” or “work.” I can’t analyze something and write about it. I can’t apply concepts and look at problems, text, philosophy in any kind of new or interesting way. All I can do when I am like this, is this. Ramble on about things.

For example, this post started off in my head as a post about Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, and how the book is reminding me a little of Jung and how Jung discusses the journey into the unconscious and in that journey the subject needs to confront his shadow and his anima, though this book, thus far, doesn’t seem to have those factors. I wonder if it is (I am halfway done) that these thigns are not there because of the rotten state of affiars the unconscious is in, with its ash and destruction. The Road represents an unconscious without the proper myths to order it, without the proper language and signification to identify these objects of the unconscious that need to be confronted.

But my mind now feels like McCarthy’s Road– an apocalyptic vision of things under ash, dead forest, lost highways that crazy, starving cannibals roam eating up any signs of life and imprisoning people. The question becomes: can we learn anything about ourselves if we are by ourself without an other to refelct me and show me to myself? Can one (in Jungian terms) become self-actualized if the unconscious is broken of its symbols and shadow and anima that are supposed to be there and need to be confronted?

Maybe, my brain will be working by the time i finish the second half of the book, and maybe I can get to more reading and writing once this crazy holiday season is over… And maybe, this is my most fragmented ramblings yet…

Here is a poem by Byron that always reminds me of any apocalyptic visions

The Road, especially, with its images of a world where there is no food and people turn to eating each other reminds me of this poem:

The meagre by the meagre were devour’d,
Even dogs assail’d their masters, all save one,
And he was faithful to a corse, and kept
The birds and beasts and famish’d men at bay,
Till hunger clung them, or the dropping dead
Lur’d their lank jaws; himself sought out no food,
But with a piteous and perpetual moan,
And a quick desolate cry, licking the hand
Which answer’d not with a caress—he died.

 

Dairy of a Lazy Blogger

I still want to get to the melancholy, heartbreak, present-at-hand, and all that death stuff, but as the title of this blog attest to, my thoughts are fragmented. I was reading Atunes’s What Can I do When Everything is on Fire? But after five chapters of the same repetitive prose, it got a little old.

Then the other day before work I had forgotten to bring the book so I started to read J.M. Coetzee instead, and fell in love with the book after reading the following line:

From:

I think this speaks to the previous post about the melancholy that is a longing for something that has passed and also a melancholy that you might not want the thing you desire anymore, but I forgot all my other books, which means that today I plan to finish about 100 pages of Coetzee that I have left. The book fascinates me; Coetzee does a marvelous job of interweaving the three distinct narratives, which each inform one another.

I definitely want to explore the connection between the T.S. Eliot passage from A Coctail Party:

That is the worst moment, when you feel you have lost The desires for all that was most desirable, Before you are contented with what you can desire; Before you know what is left to be desired; And you go on wishing that you could desire What desire has left behind. But you cannot understand. How could you understand what it is to feel old?

and the Coetzee quote and see how all this interrelates. Soon, I just want to get some plain, good ‘ol fashioned reading done. A reading just to read—well, kind of; I am after all, going to be writing about all of this stuff soon.

 

Nostalgia

Ok, so this is just a quick note to self that will be elaborated on later:

So a friend posted this excerpt from T.S. Eliot’s “A Cocktail Party”

That is the worst moment, when you feel you have lost The desires for all that was most desirable, Before you are contented with what you can desire; Before you know what is left to be desired; And you go on wishing that you could desire What desire has left behind. But you cannot understand. How could you understand what it is to feel old?

This is what I briefly glanced at the other day looking for the information for my Lacan post the other day… I came across a discussion of “missing” (for lack of a better word), which is basically saying what this poem is saying. That my desire, my nostalgia, my melancholy for some “thing’ stems from the melancholy of not missing it anymore, of getting over it… And then I read this quote… serendipity…

I will get to this when I have had some sleep and can read the passage again carefully.

 

Melancholy Rough Draft

I make everything into an object of study. I am constantly in Heidegger’s present-at-hand, always scrutinizing things…

As I drove south, a certain feeling lingered over me. Everything had gone great, for the most part, but now this feeling: melancholy.

My melancholy comes and goes. As I watched Paper Heart, staring Charlyne Yi and Michael Cera, a certain melancholy struck me. The movie made me feel the on-screen’s couple’s melancholy. It was on Michael Cera’s happy face. Under his subtle jokes, which he is so good at, under his smiling happiness with a girl whose company he enjoys, the hint of melancholy was there. It is the phenomenologically same feeling after I have had leaving girls I cared for. This melancholy makes me think of Derrida in his “Rams” essay. He speaks about the melancholy (in a way):

“Mingled with the gratitude and affection that have for so long characterized this feeling. I sense, somewhat obscurely, an ageless melancholy” (135).

The melancholy is one that arises in the knowledge that after this meeting, after this dialogue I share with this person, one of us will eventually not be here anymore: “Death will no doubt have changed this melancholy—and infinitely aggravated it. Death will have sealed it. Forever” (155). Derrida goes on to explain how the melancholy is there, from the first interruption, and he explains how any dialogue is an interruption, a caesura. What happens then is that we continue an “interior dialogue” with the person… and he says a lot of stuff that basically mean that when someone close to me dies, I carry the world of the other. The memory of the other lives on in me, and I am then obligated (though I guess obligated is the wrong word; rather, how can I possibly not) carry the world of the other.

But what if the other is not gone(dead) , but rather just gone? What happens in heartbreak, or in the caesura of people separated in physical distance, not by death? Yes, Derrida says that death “changes” this melancholy (which means the melancholy is there, lingering, even before death), but I get the feeling that the melancholy is there because there is this underlying notion, this awareness, that eventually, one of you will not be there and that one of you will be left to carry the world of the other. But what happens when I don’t need to carry the world of the other who is still carrying his/her own world? What happens when the ceasura is brought about because one of the people does not want to mingle worlds, does not want to have anymore dialogue?

So when I leave an other (not dead, just leave), or when I feel a melancholy even in the midst of a wonderful moment being enjoyed with the other; I think there is a melancholy there, not of having to carry the world of the other that has passed, but in not being able to not carry the world of the other that is alive and just not here in dialogue. That is, the melancholy in Cera’s face, in having lunch with a person I cared so much for in the past (and suddenly desired her to desire me to care for her and vice versa, again), in the caesura of traveling away from dialogue with one I care for, comes in knowing that the dialogue has been interrupted.

While there is this melancholy of an interrupted dialogue, I think there is also a joy in knowing the other is not gone and that the dialogue can go on. And these feelings (melancholy and happiness) that vacillate during lunch with someone special, for instance, is one like waiting (link on waiting), it is the vacillation of Heidegger’s present-at-hand, it is the melancholy of knowing that this relationship can possibly come to an end (especially when you know for sure that it is coming to an end—that you are leaving on a plane, driving away in a car in just a couple of hours); it is a melancholy in thinking that maybe the next melancholy you feel will be the one Derrida talks about, but there is also the joy in knowing that the possibility for the dialogue to begin again is there (and here I need to really read “Rams” again, because I am sure Derrida must talk about this interruption, no?)

This is my fragment, my rough draft, my start before my caesura… I think Lacan has something to say about this too. There is an aspect of desire here that needs to be explored.

Desire, Derrida says, can never be fulfilled. Following the trace, if desire is ever fulfilled, then it is no longer desire. For something to properly be desire, it must never be reached.

Lacan talks about desire as being the desire to be desired… Also, Lacan talks about melancholy, and melancholy is the feeling not of sadness for loss, but the sadness that you will no longer desire the thing you desire, the melancholy that comes from the future possibility of getting over the thing you wanted most…

More to come soon, but it is dinner time, I don’t have my books in front of me, and I’m tired…. this is why I called this thing fragments…

 

Myths and Symbolic

I want to explore the connection between Joseph Campbell and Jacques Lacan. They both explore a symbolic (a necessarily symbolic) order that civilized society follows. I haven’t been able to formulate my thoughts yet, but I see this intermixing, and I think Campbell and Lacan can be put together with one informing the other. Campbell deals with myths, and Lacan deals with the story we tell ourselves, that are ultimately myths, too.

This is not the edition I am reading but couldn't find a picture otherwise

Campbell states that myths serve four basic functions:

1) Mystical: myths open up a mystical dimension; that is to say, behind the surface world, there is a mystical source for that world. I see this as, we see the sun rise and fall, so we come up with a mystical explanation, such as, some god is riding a chariot across the sky.

2) Cosmological: is our image of the world—how we perceive the world—which changes with from time to time (mostly because of science). The best example of this is the Copernicain revolution; we had thought the cosmos was ordered with the earth in the middle, and later we learned that it was the sun in the middle of our universe, and then later we learned that our universe isn’t even the center of the universe, etc…

3) Sociological: Myths are used to validate and maintain social order. This is seen in the mystical stories we tell ourselves, I believe. For instance, we have the story of Adam and Eve to not only describe how human beings ended up on earth, it is also a tale that tells us that we should obey a supreme being and not fall into vanity; therefore, the creation story serves the mystical purpose of explaining what is behind the surface, it also maintains order by telling us to obey the Big Other watching us.

4) Pedagogical: Myths are used for instruction, to teach society and guide individuals through life.

Myths then give society order, and, Campbell claims, that when myths break down, morals break down. Science has proven that the world is more than 6,000 years old, besides whatever Arkansas wants to say, so the power of the creation story and its functions breakdown, meaning that society breaks down, in Campbell’s words:

“With the loss of them [symbols/myths] there follows uncertainty, and with uncertainty, disequilibrium, since life, as both Nietzsche and Ibsen knew, requires life-supporting illusions; and where these have been dispelled, there is nothing secure to hold on to, no moral law, nothing firm” (Campbell 10).

But of course we need these lies (symbols—and I would argue that they are not lies in a traditional since, but rather, an opiate to help calm society. If a mad man sees an elephant in the room, that is a very real elephant to him, so could it really be termed a “lie”? I grew up Catholic and went to Catholic school, and there was never a tension (not overtly) between learning about Adam and Eve and learning science proper. To say that myths (stories) are a lie, is to say that they serve no function besides merely pulling the wool over our eyes. And that might be the case for some; that is why Socrates says that, “the unexamined life is not worth living.”)

Campbell goes on to explain this how we need these lies saying:

“…lies are what the world lives on, and those who can face the challenges of a truth and build their lives to accord are finally not many, but the very few” (11).

Now Campbell goes on to say how psychology and the scientific study of where myths come from are what must be pursued, but I think Lacan is the way to go.

The functions of myth sound much like the Lacianian triad: Symbolic—imaginary—Real:

First, there is the Mystical aspect of myths, which corresponds to the Imaginary order, which is our image of the world. An example of this order is given by Zizek when he relates the triad to a game of chess: “Imaginary…namely the way in which different pieces are shaped and characterized by their names (king, queen, knight), and it is easy to envision a game in with the same rules, but with a different imaginary, in which the figures would be called ‘messenger’ or ‘runner’ or whatever (Zizek 8).

Secondly, the way we maintain social order (the Sociological) corresponds to Lacan’s Symbolic order. The Symbolic order is the rules we follow in order to play the game. The Big Other operates on this level and always watches us so that we follow the rules; just as the sociological function of myths gives us rules that we must follow.

Thirdly, Lacan’s Real corresponds to the Cosmological (the world we see that changes over time). The Real is, within this triad, everything else, such as a player’s intelligence, and forces we might have trouble foreseeing. The intrusion of reality into the triad, and one can see how we have set up a cosmological real (reality before Copernicus that saw the world as the center of the universe), but then has that “Real” change when science (the Real again intrudes), and shows us a new reality.

The Pedagogical aspect of Campbell, I believe, is the interaction (an interaction that takes place within Lacan) of the triad and the way each Lacanian aspect plays off each other.

There is something here between the breakdown of myths and the way society follows the Big Other (and I understand I am making a bit of a jump here witout explaining, but since so few people follow this and read it at all, I just need to write this all down before I forget). Myths only hold power, give society its moral grounding, in so far was society believes myths and allows myths to do so, just like the power of the Big Other:

“In spite of all its grounding power, the big Other is fragile, insubstantial, properly virtual, in the sense that its status is that of a subjective presuppostion. It exist only in so far as subjects act as if it exists.”

And later:

“…so this [big Other, and I would argue myths and symbols] substance is actual only in so far as individuals believe in it and act accordingly’ (Zizek emphasis in original 10).

I believe there is an interaction within these two thoughts that can inform each other, and I will be exploring these thoughts in my readings. I want to end this now because I just got Foucault’s Madness and Civilization, and I am excited to read it. Lacan says that the mad man, the psychopath is the one who does not follow the rules imposed by this Symbolic power of the Big Other, and Campbell says that there are mental illnesses from a loss of myths, so I want to see how this history of madness can further inform these readings of Campbell and Lacan.

Til my next fragmented thoughts come to light and intrude my thoughts like an invasion of the Real…

Post to come: on different types of melancholy, on the relation between death and heart break and how they relate to waiting and Heidegger’s present-at-hand…

 

Still Burning

I am continued to be confused, baffled, and even entertained by Antunes. The breakdown in chronological time is fascinating and reminiscent of Faulkner, and I even read a review of ‘What Can I Do’ that points out Faulkner’s obvious influence on Antunes here:

Indeed, Faulkner presides over “What Can I Do When Everything’s on Fire?” as a tutelary spirit. Here, for instance, is a legendary sentence, spoken by a death- befuddled child, from “As I Lay Dying,” published in 1930: “My mother is a fish.”And here, uttered by a baffled son, is a sentence from “What Can I Do When Everything’s on Fire?”: “You’ve turned into a fish, father.” Like Faulkner in his great novels of the ’30s, Antunes deploys idiot monologues, garrulous, colloquial voices, superheated atmospherics and dismembered narratives that exalt not-knowing as a prime literary excitement.

Chapter two continues in the same manner as chapter one. The reader is given a little more background, and it becomes very clear that Paulo is on heroine and, maybe, other drugs.

There is a great image of Paulo going to sit on the beach so that the ocean waves and wild horses can drown out the noise of his parents fighting, but the arguments get so loud and intense that the image of relaxing, rolling waves becomes violent: “… I was the one hurt out there by the horses and the sea” (21).

The overwhelming motif (more so than in any Joyce novel) is the inter-mixing of all the images and symbols. Memory becomes a dream becomes reality becomes madness, and one symbol goes from being one of peace to one of horror from one page to the next.

This chapter elucidates some of the narrator’s problems: he steals for drug money; he feels guilt but uses drugs to forget; he feels guilt for taking advantage of his guardians, but then dismisses his feelings because they are not his parents and then feels guilty for taking advantage of them again.

There are wonderfully lyrical passages of using drugs and its withdrawal:

heat at first, followed by cold, followed by an urge to crush myself, I don’t know what dying is like but they’re disentangling me from my body, conversations that get away from me, scarecrows in smok holding a basin up against my chest
– Vomit” (29).

Here the story of the Neighbor Dona Aurorinha is told. She had a lover she would write to, but the lover died of some desease.

There is an interesting contrast between when Paulo says that he knows how to tell time and how his narrative doesn’t follow any chronological time. It goes back to the philosophy of waiting it seems. For Paulo, time is broken, but not in the sense that he has to wait—that waiting time in which one endures and “feels” time’s slow passage. Paulo’s time is, rather, broken in that its linear-ality has been destroyed. He has no way of telling past, present, or future, and this reflects his phenomenological experience of lived time. Just as he can’t tell time (or, maybe, more accurately put, BECAUSE, he can’t “tell time” as he claims), he can’t tell experiences apart from one another, whether real, imagined, resulting from madness/sickness, or dream.

Yet, at the same time, his “time” (his experience within time) becomes an object of analysis. Something he takes apart and tries to analyze. The story, what one is reading, his depiction of events, is his attempt to analyze his situation, but he is having trouble doing so because he is so lost in “time”.

 

This Fire is Out of Control

What Can I Do When Everything is on Fire? (A Novel) by: Antonio Lobo Antunes

I am getting around to reading one of the books that I received for my birthday. The title of this one was enough to make it my next choice of books to read. I want to look at this book chapter by chapter because it is, as the book jacket suggest, “…a poetic masterwork that recalls Joyce’s Bloomsday with its dizzying farrago of urban images that few readers will forget.”

The basic plot, from what I understand from reading the jacket (and the first chapter), is the story of Paulo trying to piece together the bits of his existence, but that existence is one of madness, fragile memory, and a reality that includes the most successful, flamboyant drag queen of Lisbon, Carlos/Soraia and his wife, Judite and his lover, Rui. It seems that Paulo has a breakdown and is sent off to a hospital, and somewhere along the way his parents give him up to some guardians. It seems that we are getting these fragments of his story from a mental ward.

The book opens up to the main character, Paulo, mixing a dream, an analysis of the dream, memory, and reality together in a poetic, stream-of-consciousness narrative that reveals very slowly the plot of novel. Paulo, at times, has a hard time separating what his dream was and what his memory was; he also has trouble remembering what reality is, as is seen when he mixes his parents with his guardians and his reality with his dreams and has obvious trouble with memory:

“my mother judite, my father carlos, the doctor, not this one, a fatter one,
I remember the doctor’s red necktie when they brought me in, a Gypsy woman who was hollering
or was I the one hollering?
the doctor
–What’s your mother’s name?
along with that I remembered the attendants, who were holding me by the wrists, from the ambulance Dona Helena had called
–Take it easy fellow
[...]
maybe it was the attendants who had helped me instead of the fat doctor with the red tie, not in this office bu in a room with no windows or a closet where the gypsy woman or I was hollering or maybe neither one of us, the noise of the dishes
–What’s your mother’s name?” (Antunes 2-3).

There is an interesting play of memory and dream and reality here, which raises interesting questions of what “reality” is? After all, aren’t our dreams part of our reality? And how much is a fragmented, unreliable memory reality?

We get that Paulo’s parents are dead (as well as Rui), that Paulo had a breakdown in which he broke lots of plates. These images are mixed superbly in a language that becomes easier to follow, but a language that is meant to be opaque. It becomes hard to decipher how much of the story is a memory and how much is madness.

There are images of fights between Paulo’s parents in which Judite is asking her husband about the bra she found, “Do you wear this, Carlos?” (17); along with images of Paulo’s drag queen father being described as a clown, and later, Paulo’s denial of his parent’s when he calls his guardians, the Couceiro’s, his real parents.

This narrative is quite a force that does more than merely convey a Joycean stream-of-consciousness. The reader is left wondering what can be trusted as the chapter ends:

“–I’m asleep
and since I’m asleep I don’t worry, everything is a lie, aware of the pillow sliding between the mattress and the trunk they were slamming me against” (19).

I look forward to see where all this is going. It is thus far an exploration of a person’s history of slipping into madness and blurring reality with dream and memory. It seems that Paulo trying to put this story into words is his way of trying to remember who he is. We are, after all, just what we were and what our future possibilities are. So what happens when we do not have a clear memory, or a broken memory, of the past?