1: RE: Dorian Gray and the difference between ritual and addiction
One could argue that Dorian Gray is addicted to the life of experience. As his compulsion to act on “infinite curiosity” progresses, the narrator says something essential about this condition: “The more he knew, the more he desired to know. He had mad hungers that grew more ravenous as he fed them.”
This is interesting from a temporal perspective: the moment of satiating desire loops immediately back to the moment of desire; there’s no real movement, in other words, beyond a reiterated moment, that inescapable presence of addiction (ie. addiction is always present); rather, that moment gains ever more gravity. “Passion makes one think in a circle,” as the narrator says elsewhere. This adds a layer of meaning to Dorian’s eternal youth: he is caught in the perpetual ‘now’ of impulse.
If addiction can be characterized, thus, as the impulsive return to the desiring impulse, I would argue that ritual, in contrast, is neither impulsive nor perpetual. This depends a lot on how one defines ritual (and I’m sure I don’t have the ‘correct’ anthropological or social definition), but in my personal experience of sacred and secular traditions, ritual time is deliberately allocated and structured to link the present with the past or a desired future (or both). Thus, though I almost entirely agree with Julia’s response above, I would say that ritual is the closed circuit (ritual time begins and ends, and it is the distinction from regular time – from the present – that gives it meaning and power), whereas cycles of addiction, devastatingly, keep going.
2) RE: Heart of Darkness and the myth of progress
Marlow's story highlights humanity's lack of progress, what he calls "truth stripped of its cloak of time:" that "the dreams of men" have actualized no dawn to follow the "night of first ages." This message, alongside the narrator's comment that the meaning of Marlow's "episode [is] not inside like a kernel but outside, enveloping the tale," lead me to wonder if Marlow's final stance "in the pose of a meditating Buddha" is one of enlightenment. Has Marlow grown?, in other words: is his "ascetic aspect" indication of some progress through experience, even as his story undermines the possibility of such? My interest here is ultimately the author himself: given that Heart of Darkness "illuminates" humanity, can we say that the author, at least, enjoys a vantage point that contradicts the narrative by formally modelling enlightenment?
My questions are prompted partially in consideration of Chinua Achebe's strong position against Conrad's "obvious racism." Contrary to the impossibility of progress that Heart of Darkness suggests, Achebe argues for pursuing progress (by way of eliminating Conrad's "racist" work from the western canon of classics). I wonder how Conrad might respond, particularly when Heart of Darkness presents even "infinite pity" as a veil. If there is no progress from "the horror" of darkness, is storytelling obliged to any imperatives?
Evidently, I have more questions here than answers. But the general drift of my thoughts is that, just as Heart of Darkness explodes the certainty of distance between the present and primordial past, it also explodes the certainty of the narrator's remote perspective. Instead, the external "haze" becomes just as much subject of the narrative as the inner "glow." In this sense, Heart of Darkness is about storytelling itself, that old "monkey trick" of creating myths out of experience: it seems to me that in the aspect of an 'enlightened' Marlow spinning his yarn, the author presents a commentary on yarn-spinning itself as formally enacting the myth of progress in endless "visions and revisions," as Eliot says elsewhere.
Building into a discussion on realism (responding to professor)
Professor, I appreciate your prompting me to think about the realist novel and its aims... my general understanding of victorian realism is that it was an attempt to see and represent the world rationally, empirically, scientifically - to capture and convey all the details (a kind of colonization of the real). Conrad's novel, alternatively, destabilizes every representation of reality and perhaps representation altogether (in the "mere incidents" of life, "the reality - the reality I tell you - fades" as Marlow says).
I'm also mulling over what you say above re: whether narrative requires change "towards a modern 'self' with a propensity to...'accumulate' and adequately consume." We might theorize experience as the thing that is consumed (or raw material, to use another metaphor) in the production of narrative. A sentence from Conrad's work jumps out at me, towards the end, Marlow reflecting on Kurtz: "his memory was like the other memories of the dead that accumulate in every man's life." This links, also, to my point on seeing Marlow as a figure who has died through one experience and is reborn as the narrator, a Buddha no less, a figure who is continually reborn, accumulating lives!
RE: European linear time and its relationship to colonial ideas of progress (responding to a student)
You touch on a very interesting point here re: time as discourse, historical consciousness as ideology (shared reality rather than "the real," per our discussion on Lacan yesterday) wielded by both capital and state to dominate those outside the discourse, history's subalterns - ie those who do not interpret the real in that way, speak in those terms, understand time as linear progress. In this sense, history - by which I mean Western historical discourse - is bound to colonial and imperialist violence.
Marlow gains insight into the contrived, unreal nature of history; thus we can read Heart of Darkness as a progressive text critiquing ideology... but at the same time, the novel absolutely relies on a linear, historical framework to make its narrative and thematic moves (even as it doubts that linearity). In class we spoke about how Marlow senses the jungle, whereas others just see the trees (our Lacanian analogy), suggesting his commitment to "the real" - but an issue with the text is its inability to think of the jungle beyond the framework of time: the jungle represents the primordial (as do the natives - Achebe's contention). An inescapable primordiality, yes (in which sense the text questions history), but primordiality nonetheless (ie. its meaning depends on historical discourse).
This reminds me of an article I read recently by Ashis Nandy called "History's Forgotten Doubles," wherein Nandy argues that that "historical mode" gained and maintains dominance over ahistorical modes due to the ways in which it links with the nation-state, science/Enlightenment rationality, nineteenth century ideas of progress/current ideas of development, etc. A vexing point from that article, and one way to think about how or why Conrad's critique of history still relies on history (as well as modernist temporal anxiety generally): "Historical consciousness is very nearly a totalizing one...once you own history, it also begins to own you."
3) RE: "Two Gallants" from The Dubliners, "moral paralysis," and the epiphany
While he's waiting to reconvene with Corley, Lenehan has a "vision [that makes] him feel keenly his own poverty of purse and spirit." A moment of mindfulness ensues - but if this is Lenehan's epiphany, there's more of gravy than of grace to it: "He [feels] better after having eaten" and resumes his meandering night.
This seems to be the point. The moment entirely lacks moral sway and is instead subsumed into Lenehan's circular "wanderings." (I wonder, also, at the superimposition of this moment on the event of a meal, the desires and anxieties therein possibly sustaining the spirit of Lenehan's ongoing "wanderings.") Thus, even the epiphany has its place in the cyclic (i.e. inert, paralytic) structure of Lenehan's life.
The final revelation of the gold coin, a second epiphany of sorts, similarly maintains the momentum of a circle, the gold coin answering the questions driving both Lenehan and the narrative itself: can Corley "pull it off all right," is the slavey "game," etc. Our discussion last class reminds me that we might read this coin as reward (i.e end of a cycle), investment (i.e. beginning of a cycle), or potentially both.
There's something to further tease out here about the narrative function of epiphany, but I'm not sure what. The story's focalization causes the reader to experience the revelation of the gold coin along with Lenehan; thus the narrative itself becomes a transaction where we as readers exchange time for the reward of a conclusion. In other words, we read simply for the revelation of the story, to know where it goes (and does it go anywhere, from the reader’s perspective?). The coin reads to me like the culmination of a cycle, suggesting moral paralysis for the characters, but I'm not sure to what extent we should synthesize the narrative function of the reader's epiphany with the (lack of) moral function of the character's epiphanies.
4) RE: the dinner passage in The Dead
There's a way in which Gabriel as a character, along with his subjectivity as an experience for the reader, disappears within the dinner scene: "Kindly forget my existence" he requests, and the narrative obliges, mostly leaving him alone until the speech brings us back into his point of view. Before that, we catch glimpses of him "at ease" (as he is at the beginning of my assigned passage), no doubt because he finds himself in a customary role: he's an "expert carver" and this is "not the first time" they've gathered for their annual Christmas dinner, as he emphasizes. It's useful to recognize the dinner as a ritual, one in which Gabriel is able to seemingly, momentarily lose himself.
With Gabriel's subjectivity apparently diminished, the dinner scene reads almost like realism, particularly in the lengthy, detailed descriptions of the table, food, and ongoing shuffle of objects, guests, and discussion experienced through what feels like a relatively omniscient perspective. We might read this realism as a representation of the world as is, with subjectivity suspended. But there's something self-conscious about it too - like a performance of realism, rather than the real thing. It feels like what matters is not the details themselves so much as the contrived feeling of realism, of a detached perspective. In this sense, the lack of Gabriel's focalizaed, self-concious perspective is conspicuous, a marker, indeed, of Gabriel's subjective experience, which is, for once, fairly "at ease." In other words, his subjectivity has indeed retreated, in a way, but this retreated subjectivity still colours the passage, being present through absence.
5) RE: Mrs. Dalloway, and modernist temporality
I think of modernism as a period in which people lose faith in the progress of history; thus arise ambiguities around concepts of time. I’ve selected the passage above because it touches on these themes.
Perhaps the most significant event that struck off modernist thought was The War, in which coalesced all the emblems of modernity (technology, machinery, nationalism) with the basest qualities of humanity (greed, hatred, murder) to produce “the horror” (to recall another modernist work) of the realization that there has been no progress.
The War is treated lightly in this passage, reflecting Mrs. Dalloway’s mood – for her, it is “over” – but it has left its marks (on Mrs. Foxcroft, for example), persisting even in “the middle of June.” Of course, the novel takes this theme up in full with the character of Septimus, whose present is determined by a nightmare past that he cannot escape. (To the extent that Mrs. Dalloway can be read as a microcosmic portrait of “life; London; [all realized in this] moment in June,” the persistence of war represents the trauma to the social psyche that produces modernism as a historical break.)
This duality of time – that an event can pass and be “over” but simultaneously persist – is caught perfectly here in the motif of Big Ben. The striking of the hour exists, first of all, in the future: Mrs. Dalloway anticipates it, “having lived in Westminster…over twenty [years]”; thus the past, though over, persists as memory and anticipation. Interesting too, how this hour melts into the future “dissolv[ing] in the air” of quotidian life, rather than happening and then disappearing, without a trace.
One final note to make on time in relation to this passage, and generally in relation to modernism, is the de-sacralization of time, the belief that our lives keep time by some cosmic measure. In this passage we do indeed have something that feels sacred: “a particular hush, or solemnity; an indescribable pause; a suspense…before Big Ben strikes.” However, the thorough narrative focalization destabilizes this, for it is Clarissa who is “positive” of this sacred quality, and even she doubts it: “that might be her heart, affected, they said, by influenza.”
This way in which the narrative undermines its own validity through the usage of unreliable narrators, is characteristically modernist, setting works of this period apart from realism. Modernism casts doubt on meta-narratives (including the omniscient narrator); in the aesthetic absence of a guiding principle, modernism sometimes looks (as it does in Mrs Dalloway, as well as, for example, Waiting for Godot) like a perpetual now-ness, a fixation on what characterizes the moment.
6) RE: The Wasteland and footnotes
Over the weekend, bearing in mind that I had to be attentive to the footnotes, I attempted to read a hypertext version of The Wasteland (linked below). I found it extremely distracting, but it did get me thinking about how the various footnotes and endless allusions produce an extensive hypertext, expanding the poem from 400 lines to something like thousands of lines, as a kind of poetic excess.
The temporal qualities of hypertext are fascinating - think of how the internet can be such a sinkhole of your time, the rabbit-hole of Wikepedia articles or Youtube videos, everything linking to everything else, so that you can just keep going and going forever it seems, in every direction and in circles too. When you read The Wasteland as hypertext, it feels like that - the hypertext produces an even greater sense of temporal disorientation than the poem itself. (Are footnotes pre-thoughts or post-scripts? Allusions seem to exist in parallel, so that brief poetic moments - sometimes just a line or a word - extend the present ever outwards into a dense, temporarily atemporal network of history and myth.)
I am reminded of Eliot's critical essay "Tradition and the Individual Talent" wherein he posits an ideal "historic sense" as "indispensable" to the modern poet. This historical sense, according to Eliot, "involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence...a feeling that the whole of...literature...has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order...a sense of the timeless and of the temporal together...[that] at the same time...makes a writer...acutely conscious of...his own contemporaneity."
Eliot's dialectic between history and contemporaneity also reminds me quite a bit of clock-time versus cloud-time: there is the immediate poem, which moves (can we say forward?) as a series of fragmentary moments; meanwhile the various inter- and intratextual references produce a kind of temporal cloud around the poem, a cloud of what feels like distraction wherein we are jostled back and forth through time.
Which brings me to my final point, and a question: do the allusions and footnotes in fact offer a kind of cloudy coherence to the fragmentary poem? At the very least, they do demonstrate an author's hand at work (perhaps his "automatic hand," given Eliot's poetic ideal of impersonality). The footnote that really jumps out at me in this regard is the one about Tiresias (line 218), who the note clearly indicates is "the most important personage in the poem, uniting all the rest...[because] what he sees...is the substance of the poem." This footnote, pointing out (in an act of saving grace) the crux of a poem set up to challenge any crucial sense, is kind of remarkable to me for its confidence in substance. While most of the footnotes are not nearly as direct, I do therefore wonder if the allusive cloud within and about the poem betrays a unified consciousness distinct from the various fragmented consciousnesses represented.
That the hypertext felt like a distraction to me seems relevant here: considering one of the footnotes clearly points out the "substance" of the poem, perhaps it is more the reader's desire to filter out the hypertextual past in order to attend to the poetic present that is a distraction; perhaps it is at the "dull roots" of the poem that we find sense and substance.
The hypertext version of the poem I was attempting to read:nhttp://eliotswasteland.tripod.com/Another hypertext version that seems even better: http://world.std.com/~raparker/exploring/thewasteland/explore.html
7) RE: The Wasteland and the roots that clutch
The poem plants this seed of a question - "what are the roots that clutch?" - setting us on a quest searching for those roots among the "stony rubbish" of the poem. The question itself uproots reader and poet alike into this quest, rather like the thought of the key which creates the prison.
I'm not sure these roots, "clutching" as they are, are particularly good for us, after all. Perhaps the question is not so much how can we ground and stabilize ourselves, but rather, how can we up-root and un-ground in order to escape (i.e. what roots clutch, holding us back?)? But it seems to me that the very question keeps us rooted to it, trailing along poetic branches, clutching for fixed foundations. We get trapped in the poem, following shadows back and forth; the poet wants to divert us to"dust" instead.
Does the poem thus suggest redemption in disintegration? That it doesn't allow us to set roots anywhere seems part of the wasteland's torment - but perhaps this is that "fear in a handful of dust" that the poem reveals, a fear that prompts the reader's restless quest for wholeness.
In thinking of the poem's ungrounded, unrooted voice in this way, it's hard not to think of Eliot's poetic ideal as a "continual self-sacrifice," an orientalist aesthetic that is echoed in "datta, dayadhvam, damyata." Eliot finds comfort and sense in a philosophy of letting go. But does the final "shantih, shantih, shantih" actually bring peace? Can the modernist root herself in "datta, dayadhvam, damyata" - in a mode of "continual self-sacrifice"? (Can the modern self be rooted in selflessness?)
I'm not sure. As "Tradition and the Individual Talent" suggests, Eliot's de-personalization is fundamentally a means of recovering the self in the higher, more stable order of tradition. If we think to our contemporary world's turn to Eastern religion, philosophy, and practice as a means of finding the self, we also clearly see how such philosophies are always corrupted by modernist anxiety. The modernist desire to let go of the self is always corrupted by an ulterior motive of finding the self.
So, too, I think, if we think of "datta, dayadhvam, damyata" as the answer to "what roots clutch" - the quest for an escape from our rootedness in the wasteland corrupts our ability to escape the wasteland. Thus, I think if there is peace at the end of the poem, it can only be found by forgetting the questions that drove the poem in the first place (which is to say, the poem must uproot itself).
8) RE: Good Morning, Midnight and "negative 'hailing'" (Prof. G. Leonard's phrase)
I strongly agree with your notion of a "negative hailing" that Sasha experiences. It does seem to me, though, that, in addition to being excluded, she is significantly included in the world around her, very much against her will (as perhaps negative hailing implies?). In the dream, for example, she is being forced to look at the signs and move towards the Exhibition - her desperate desire for "the way out" is produced within the context of having both her gaze and self forcefully directed further in. So too, of the landscape, built of "certain cafes, certain streets, certain spots" that Sasha is trying to avoid: both her movements within the world (as acts of a positive and permitted self) and the movements she avoids (acts of a negated, othered self) are products of the same landscape, which sometimes includes her where and when she doesn't want to be.
My general understanding, in line with this, is that alterity, by virtue of exclusion, is actually produced (interpellated?) by ideological systems, and is therefore inherent to them. Thus, it seems to me that Sasha's othered subjectivity is propped up by a world which includes it by means of exclusion. She herself captures this relationship quite clearly when thinking about Mr. Blank, her boss:
"You, who represent Society, have the right to pay me four hundred francs a month. That's my market value...We can't all be happy, we can't all be rich...There must be the dark background to show up the bright colours."
Although he's not part of the landscape, the exchange with Mr Blank is particularly illuminating on the nature of visibility in the production of otherness (i.e. invisibility) within social relationships. Sasha clearly doesn't want to be seen by Mr. Blank - "Don't let him notice me, don't let him look at me," she thinks - but what is most fascinating is the way her subjective voice explodes into lengthy internal narrations in direct response to being seen. An example:
'She speaks French,' Salvatini says. 'Assez bien, assez bien.'
Mr Blank looks at me with lifted eyebrows.
'Sometimes,' I say idiotically. Of course, sometimes, when I am a bit drunk and am talking to somebody I like and know, I speak French very fluently indeed. At other times I just speak it. And as to that, my dear sir, you've got everything all wrong. I'm here because I have a friend who knows Mr Salvatini's mistress, and Mr Salvatini's mistress spoke to Mr Salvatini about me, and the day that he saw me I wasn't looking too bad and he was in a good mood. Nothing at all to do with fluent French and German, dear sir, nothing at all. I'm here because I'm here because I'm here. And just to prove to you that I speak French, I'll sing you a little song about it: 'Si vous saviez, si vous saviez, si vous saviez comment ca se fait.'
For God's sake, I think, pull yourself together.
I say: 'I speak French fairly well. I've been living in Paris for eight years.'
As I think this passage demonstrates, being seen produces the unseen/unheard (that which can not or does not want to be visible) as an excess of what is "pulled together" in response to the act of hailing. Indeed, even what you might call Sasha's political consciousness as an other, an example of which I quoted above ("You, who represent Society..."), is produced in one of these moments in which her internal narration explodes in response to Mr. Blank's "boiled eyes, served cold." We could further argue, of course, that this invisible self was 'always already' there, and only brought into realization in this social exchange.
9) RE: Good Morning, Midnight, history and subjecthood
There is a question to consider, I think: whether Sasha is a a figure of subalternity (out of history) or alterity. Subalternity - a la Gayatri Spivak's "can the subaltern speak" - is such thorny theory, but here we go.
My discussion post last class argued, as you do in this section, that the system Sasha wishes to escape "require[s] her continued presence." Thus, I would push back a little on your claim that Sasha's "perspective comes from a non-place." In fact, Sasha does not have a zeroed-out value -- at one point, she was worth 400 francs a month -- but it is the case that her value is constantly depreciating. An aging woman darting in and out of poverty, she flickers on the verge of disappearance; she knows what it is to be nothing (she has seen the horror), so I do agree with you that her perspective is strongly informed by non-existence.
You make a very interesting connection between history and accumulation when you say Sasha's is a history of the places she has existed. Western history is a temporal collection; the "accumulation" aspect makes me realize that it is also a system of accounting: to self-narrate is to account for the self. This presupposes, of course, a self to be accounted: how do you account for your self in instances where subjectivity is decimated, and a self is not present?
I think again to the exchange with Mr. Blank (a conversation in which Sasha must account for herself). What is so interesting is that a good chunk of Sasha's thoughts during the exchange are only constructed in retrospect: "Did I say all this? Of course I didn't. I didn't even think it." We could make a strong case that, in this instance for example, Sasha's narration creates a subaltern self, materializing both voice and thought in retrospect (hello, again, Spivak) in order to construct a subjectivity for a subject that was, in situ, truly annihilated in a moment of objectification.
This way of looking at the text helps me grapple somewhat with my sense that, although as you say, Sasha "longs to have a history," she also actively discards history, changing her name and avoiding "certain spots" just as she avoids memory. Not wanting to be subject to the past she has been subjected too, she effaces her history of effacement -- significantly, as a mode of self-preservation against a history that threatens to efface her as a figure in time (consider how time collapses when she collides with things she wants to avoid; what is the temporality of trauma, after all?).
From here, I think I can tentatively turn to considering the ending of the book, with emphasis on the way Sasha dissociates from her attempted rape. In relation to your point that Sasha has no social relations to mediate the collection of images she has accumulated through life, it seems to me that Sasha mediates her exchange with Rene specifically through memories (images in her "film-mind") that she is trying to avoid -- when he touches her leg, for example: "It reminds me of - never mind." This produces a dissociation from the present moment, fled from as it collapses into the past: "We kiss eachother fervently, but already something has gone wrong. I am uneasy, half of myself somewhere else." Sasha does not fully want to exist in this moment, which she relates to (and produces) as an image: "I want to avoid...a scene in this hotel...My idea is not so much to struggle as to make it a silent struggle. Nobody must hear us." This dissociation, as it relates to the subject in history, a self that makes a mark (being seen or heard), is, as I've said above, a survival tactic of the dispossessed, and a paradox: Sasha does not want to exist in a painful objectifying moment in which she does not exist (ie. an instance of rape); meanwhile, her inability to exist in the present moment is conditioned by and perpetuates a history of such moments of dispossession.
My final thought, which I won't fully flesh out given space, is that Sasha's embrace of the man in the "white dressing gown" (recalling the father in her nightmare, to speak of another image mediating social relations) represents a traumatic implosion of time and history. The "yes yes yes" is utterly ambivalent (does it represent positive subjectivity or loss of self in utter objectification?). I'm sure we will get to discussing this in class. Looking forward!
