First Semester Re-Cap

Happy 2011! I'm back after the most grueling five months of my life. That's right, I completed my first semester of graduate school (I'm getting a Master's in English).

A lot has happened since I first started this blog about a year ago; I started off by posting about the books I read as a way to keep myself in a semi-academic mindset in the gap year between graduating college and starting graduate school. Now that I'm here in grad school, academic exercises do not require the kind of extra exertion that they did when I was out of school. Academics now take up a large portion of my life-- in this first semester, it felt like an excessively large portion-- and that requires a redirection of energies. Reading and scholarship will take care of themselves now; I have and will put in the necessary hours of studying, writing, editing, etc., but I need to be as diligent about not letting other areas of my life slide for the sake of scholarship as I was about keeping up with reading and thinking critically when I wasn't a student.

I will always think of myself as a student and learning will always be an important part of my life, but now that I have this first semester behind me, I know better what it's place should be. Academia is not the place for me, and I will be very happy to finish this program next spring. I value all that I have learned and I look forward to my remaining time as a Masters student, but I would not consider going for a PhD. Scholarship cannot be my entire life.

As far as this blog is concerned, well, I'm not really sure what shape it's going to take now. I want to hold myself accountable for being healthy, nurturing my relationships, and enjoying the new city in which I live. I suppose now its focus will broaden to include all the aspects of living on my own and shaping my adult life. Still much to be learned, so I'll keep the title as it is.

I particularly want to make sure that I keep art in my life as I press onward with graduate studies. I did not take time to paint or draw at all this semester, and I noticed a change in my mood as a result, so I will probably use this blog to document some of my artistic projects (like the mural I started on the back of my bookcase in August, which I'm working on presently).

That's all for now; the new semester starts in less than two weeks and I intend to make it a more balanced one than the first.

Artaudian Cruelty (That's so metal)

As I've been working my way through The Theater and its Double, I've constantly been reminded of something that would, at first glance, have nothing to do with theater: metal music. Jarrod is much more of a fan of metal than I am, although I do like Between the Buried and Me and Bulb, but through the shows we've seen together and his frequent introduction of new bands and songs to me, I've come to understand this genre of music better. And I think it exhibits several connections with Artaud.

The Theater of Cruelty, Artaud's theory of theater in defiance of traditional western theater and literature, is an assult on the senses, a dramatic spectacle of metaphysical battles and an exploration of the dark power of freedom. Essential theater plays to all of the senses simultaneously, resulting in a frenzied, trance-like state in which the spectators are liberated and exposed to an intellectuality that goes beyond language and the traditional theater of psychology, which merely explores already-codified anxieties and conflicts. There is something anarchic in the midst of the strict, structured precision of this theater; although every movement must be carried out with almost mechanical accuracy, so that nothing is superfluous or void of meaning, the power of the gestures and sounds brings the audience to the edge of chaos.

Something very similar happens in metal concerts. A dream-like detachment from the body occurs as a response to the overwhelming physical force of the sounds and flashing lights in the darkness of a small room. Artaud's notion of "organized anarchy" is especially applicable to metal, because there is that duality of Apollonian order and Dionysian ecstasy. The music itself can be highly technical, even mathematical in its complex and tightly structured rhythms. Like the Theater of Cruelty, the sheer super-abundance of elements, all inextricably linked together, creates an impression of near-chaos, almost-anarchy. These elements-- guitar, drums, bass, vocals-- all crash against one another in a precise, calculated manner that nevertheless creates that other element of chaos.

In his manifesto on the Theater of Cruelty, Artaud is adamant about the elimination of the stage. Rather than perpetuating this notion of art as separate from life, that the life on the stage must be hermetically isolated from the life outside the theater, Artaud posits that the spectators should be enveloped by theatrical action. The fourth wall is nonexistent in Artaud's theater, and the only "sets" consist of the very costumes and props carried or worn by the actors. Most of the metal shows I've been to are in small venues, so the barriers between individuals in the crowd, and between audience and performer are often transgressed. The concert is not contained only to the stage, but infiltrates the entire building; the performance extends everywhere and the crowd is unknowingly transformed into performers themselves, responding to the music and creating a sort of communal dance which is impossible to fully escape. Musicians occasionally jump from the stage into the audience, or pull audience members onto the stage.

At first, I was frustrated because I could barely understand the lyrics of metal songs, but after reading Artaud, it's more apparent to me that the voice is used more as an instrument to contribute to an overall thematic effect than as a clear transmitter of words. Artaud's ideal theater liberates the mise en scene (everything apart from the written text, which Artaud claims is everything that is essentially theatrical: props, costumes, gestures, sound effects, lighting, etc.) from the hegemony of the text. Speech is not eliminated in Artaudian theater, but it does not serve its usual function of describing emotional states and psychological or social conflicts. Artaud explains that "it is not a question of suppressing the spoken language, but of giving words approximately the importance they have in dreams" (94). Words spoken in dreams may be completely incomprehensible upon waking, but within the context of the dream, this distorted language is efficacious. The same is true of the growling vocal technique often used in metal, which distorts the words. The intonation becomes more expressive than the words themselves; a primal scream or guttural roar contributes far more to the mood of the song and the performance than an abstracted description of anger, aggression, or ecstasy.

That intonation, in metal and in Artaud's notion of pure theater, expresses something dark, cruel, and dangerous; the two art forms are connected thematically as well. Artaudian theater must furnish "the spectator with with the precipitates for dreams, in which his taste for crime, his erotic obsessions, his savagery, his chimeras, his utopian sense of life and matter, even his cannibalism, poure out, on a level not counterfeit and illusory, but interior" (Artaud 92). Metal music often picks up these themes as well, especially in several sub-genres like death metal and black metal. The imagery, band names and song titles (such as Cannibal Corpse or "Hammer-Smashed Face"), and lyrics often center around the very themes that Artaud attributes to pure theater: humanity's taste for crime, his erotic obsessions, his savagery, his chimeras, a sense of danger. The most important theme for theater is that "we are not free. And the sky can still fall on our heads" (Artaud 79). This is the type of cruelty, danger, and metaphysical that Artaud promotes; the only way to recover life's value is to be made aware of how precarious our situation is, how little humanity counts in a vast, inhuman universe. Metal music is not perhaps always so eloquently existential in its lyrics, but this sense of dangerous forces is most certainly present. Taken in isolation, the lyrics are sometimes flat-out absurd; take, for example, Cannibal Corpse's "Shatter Their Bones": "Putrid foul zombies make their ghastly approach / A dreadful horrid feeling sets in / Scrambling for weapons, an attempt to defend / Against a gruesome horde of the undead." The zombies in this song are, perhaps, a return of the repressed, an indication of western society's alienation from death and the inherant horror the living have of the dead.

To me, these essential themes are most evident, not in the words (which I cannot immediately comprehend), but in the mood created by all of the elements of the performance. This sense of fear and danger cannot be fully captured in a recording; one needs to feel the bass and the drums reverberating through one's body and experience the indescribable sort of anxiety and euphoria that this sensation induces. Likewise for the Theater of Cruelty; a script can tell virtually nothing about the true theater, because theater does not lie in the words, anymore than the full experience of music resides in the score. It's in the mise en scene that theater exists, in the present creation of gestures that can never be repeated in precisely the same way, the aggregation of all the sensory elements so interconnected that one experiences them all simultaneously and throughout the entire body as a snake is lulled by the vibrations of a charmer's horn.

Both Artaudian theater and metal music are efficacious only to the degree that they can enact on the audience's senses. They appeal directly to the senses, but there is obviously something of intellectual value in both; the cultural tendency to avoid the topics that these two art forms discusss indicates their importance, their necessity to give expression to these forces that surround us and, perhaps even more frightening, within us.

The World's a Stage

I've written a lot about love in these posts on Swann's Way, but a larger, recurring theme for In Search of Lost Time is the interaction between art and reality. This is, of course, manifest in Swann's Way as well, and not only in Swann's comparison of Odette to a Boticelli painting.

Characters often do and say things for the sake of aesthetic effect-- not necessarily out of a genuinely held belief or feeling. Odette's friends the Verdurins epitomize pantomimed emotions, in their case for entertainment. For example, Madame Verdurin puts on a show of intense physical reaction to music (swooning, short of breath, painful headaches), although she knows virtually nothing about music and Swann claims that she has poor taste. She intends to entertain, to amuse, and, most of all, to create her own eccentric and distinct character, as the epicenter of such amusements. Her husband devises a way to create the impression of laughter without actually laughing, for the same purpose of creating his own character. Whenever a guest makes a witty reparte, Mr. Verdurin pretends to choke on his cigar with suppressed laughter. He is not actually laughing or choking, but he began this performance in emulation of his wife's show of suppressed laughter, to "one-up" her. These two pantomimes in particular recall Lacanian psychoanalyst Slavoj Zizek's analysis of things "deprived of their malignant property" and other objects devoid of their essential substance: decaffeinated coffee, nonalcoholic beer, fat-free ice cream, virtual sexuality without human contact or intimacy. Zizek's point is that these are all elements of a virtual reality, a sort of aestheticized and ironically detached existence. And to draw a connection to Baudrillard, this is simulacra, in which the essence-free copy becomes more real than the original. In the case of Mr. Verdurin, his feigned laughter more effectively communicates his amusement and geniality than real, genuine laughter would. Art supplants reality, fiction is truer than truth.

Throughout Swann's Way, characters deliberately disguise their feelings, often by putting on these exaggerated "dumb shows." Ironically, such overacting stems from a desire to show emotion with a subtle, artistic flair. Again, Zizek provides some insight; virtual reality permits everything, but everything is deprived of its dangerous element that constitutes its essence. Emotional intensity, in Swann's Way, is permitted but only when presented as an ironically detached pantomime of emotion. The result is a circle of intimate friends, whose interactions are wholly devoid of honesty. Everyone at the Verdurins' parties is required to wear a particular mask, and if a guest departs from the strict script which Madame Verdurin imposes on her parties, that guest is promptly declared a "bore," mocked, and never invited back. She prides herself that everyone at her gatherings is natural and open, but the underlying truth is that such openness can only occur within the rigid boundaries of her aesthetics. Swann's frankness is rejected and he loses favor with "the faithful" (the regular dinner guests) for not surrendering completely to Madame Verdurin's demands, for not complying with her script. The real honesty and frankness of Swann are aesthetically repugnant, in comparison to the affected, stylized interactions among the Verdurins and their guests. In "Combray," Swann does adopt an air of detachment and refrains from stating any opinion without the shield of irony, but this is a rather different aesthetic than the overwrought pantomimes in vogue at the Verdurins.

This preference for stylized frankness (honesty without honesty) extends beyond the Verdurins and their faithful. Francoise, the maid to the narrator's Aunt Leonie, feels compassion for those most remote from her, such as the hypothetical sufferer of labor pains in a medical encyclopedia, but she becomes cold when faced with the reality, such as the kitchen maid who was acutely suffering those labor pains. Similarly, the narrator himself says that "none of the feelings which the joys or misfortunes of a real person arouse in us can be awakened except through a mental picture of those joys and misfortunes" (Proust, 116). In other words, emotion can only be experienced indirectly, detached from the physical reality and immediacy of the individual or the circumstances and supplanted by an aestheticized portrait formed in the imagination.

Throughout Swann's Way, and I expect this to be true of In Search of Lost Time as a whole, there is tension between reality and art, the world of physical experience and that of creative imagination. The two must interact; no one can live entirely in fantasy or in unreflective experience. But the two are also antagonistic, and more often than not in Proust, imagination, ideals, and narratives overpower experienced reality. At the end of "Swann in Love," Swann laments that he has "wasted his life" on Odette, on the images he had formed of his mistress and the aesthetic experience of living solely for love, wallowing voluptuously in the realm of untempered emotions. I'm not sure how the narrator will handle this, since he seems more able to synthesize reality and fantasy in a way that illuminates both, but Swann does serve as a parallel for the narrator's experiences. Disillusionment is certainly on the near horizon.

Sartre and Proust

In my previous post, I wrote about memory and inner reality, as they are connected to Proust's theme that memory and imagination transform life into art. There is the implication that life is only comprehensible as art and that there is a self, an interior consciousness, which directs the transformation . Jean-Paul Sartre provides an interesting companion to Proust's philosophy of the mind as presented in In Search of Lost Time.

I recently read an introduction to an anthology of Sartre's writings and an article by Christie McDonald, "Sartre Rereading Proust." McDonald's article reads Sartre's Nausea as a response to and rejection of Proust's In Search of Lost Time. In both novels, the narrators embark on a quest to create meaning by "decoding" sensory experiences and memories. Proust dramatizes the exploration of one's own consciousness throughout In Search of Lost Time, but, according to McDonald, Sartre dramatizes the failure of that search in Nausea. Proust's work upholds the notion that "sensation will give rise, in privileged moments, to an inner truth, culminating in the ability to create something new" (McDonald 199). In short, sensations are not simply sensations (to give a more pointed Proustian example, a madeleine is not simply a madeleine). There is considerable distance between the outside world of sensory experience and the inner world of the mind.

Sartre, however, rejected the notion of consciousness' ability to turn its attention onto itself and view itself as an object, and even more, he was critical of literature's role in the exploration of the self. The act of reflecting on experience puts greater distance between the individual and the direct (what Sartre calls pre-reflective) consciousness of "the thing itself," and distorts and limits the thing that narrative attempts to describe. In Sartre's view, the narrator of In Search of Lost Time is doomed to failure because, by dissecting his experiences, he is distorting and constraining the very thing that he wishes to comprehend. In reality, objects and events are indifferent to and resist the meanings that humans seek to impose on them, and so those meanings constantly elude our grasp; this is the unsettling feeling that Roquentin, the narrator of Nausea, encounters. Unlike Proust's narrator, Roquentin finds that writing does nothing to help him describe and understand his world and himself. Instead, he only becomes aware of the instability and uncertainty of existence. He feels that "there seems to be no distance between him and objects, no clear distinction between inside and outside" (McDonald, p. 200). Now, this is not entirely foreign in Proust; the narrator of In Search of Lost Time finds the lines between external and internal reality blurry. But, those lines still exist in Proust, and reflective consciousness acts as an interpreter of sensory experience. In Sartre, Roquentin cannot find distance between the intenal and external worlds, or depth beneath surfaces. The surfaces remain surfaces, the things are unendowed with meaning, and Roquentin experiences nausea from his inability to force the world into comprehensible terms. McDonald writes that, for Sartre, "consciousness only transcends immediate circumstances to the extent that consciousness can recognize the circumstances, nothing more" (p. 199). The meanings for which Roquentin searches are imposed on top of an amorphous reality. Furthermore, this structure of narrative and meaning can only be imposed retroactively: "Experience does not, cannot constitute an adventure, and it is a lie to think that it does" (McDonald, 202). McDonald implies that, in Proust, the meanings beneath objects are essential, inherent in the things the narrator contemplates and examines, and that life can become art in an instant.

McDonald's article adequately demonstrates the disparities between Sartre and Proust, but I find that there are many more similarities, especially in Sartre's notion of the transcendental ego. For Sartre, an individual is in "bad faith" when he tends too much in one of two opposing directions, facticity and transcendence. To retreat too far into facticity is to deny any transcendent part of the self, to identify completely with a particular role (such as one's occupation or social status); this results in emptiness, because the roles are convenient fabrications that provide a simple identity that denies "the thing itself," or the self itself. One cannot state one's identity; to do that is to pin it down, flatten it out, and excise large portions of the self. Retreat into transcendence is equally dangerous and produces the same result of emptiness; it's living in a fantasy world for potentials that never come to be and (I think this is where McDonald focuses perhaps too blindly) prevents action and engagement with real life.

I'm not certain that I would classify Proust's narrator as too involved in fantasy. As a child in Combray, he certainly has an active imagination, but it hardly prevents him from engaging in reality. Of course, he cannot create and experience simultaneously; all of his recollections of Combray come about during a night of insomnia, in the dark blank where sleep should be. Similarly, Sartre's Roquentin becomes annoyed when he must choose between continuing to write or departing from his narrative and rejoining life when a woman interrupts his work. Proust's narrator only appears to us in the past, and McDonald asserts, "The present exists. The past does not" (p. 203). In this way, one might say that Proust's narrator is divorced from reality by looking backward, by focusing so much on the past that he negates the present. Swann, however, appears to be most in danger of tending too much toward transcendence. I've started the chapter "Swann in Love," which details the affair between Swann and his present-day wife Odette, and from the beginning of their interactions, Swann's interest in Odette has to be fabricated by his imagination. He initially finds little in her that is attractive, but because she is so forward about her interest in him, he starts to will himself into admiring her; he imagines that she resembles one of Boticelli's paintings and, from then on, he justifies the time that he spends with her by relating it to admiring a living work of art. He rejects the real Odette before him and replaces her with an image of Boticelli's Zipphora, whom he can love and find aesthetically beautiful. This is dangerous territory, and Swann is setting himself up for disillusionment and emptiness.

I've written quite a lot on this subject today, but I want to continue this commentary between Sartre and Proust on the subject of experience and aesthetics. More to come as I do more research into this.

In Search of Lost...

Thyme.

My first Proust entry was ridiculously huge, which isn't exactly the best way to write in the blog medium. Anyway, I'll try to be a bit more concise; I'm still getting the hang of this thing.

I've been reading some articles about Swann's Way today, and one, titled "Stylistic, Structural, and Thematic Transformations in Proust's Du cote de chez Swann" by Harold F. Mosher, Jr., highlighted the metafictional elements of the novel as aspects of the theme of "life as art." As I wrote in my previous post, the narrator and several other characters escape into fantasy worlds, and that the line between fantasy and reality is not always clear. Mosher expounds on this theme further, in relation to the romances between Swann and Odette, and the young narrator and Swann's daughter Gilberte. Both Swann and the narrator transform life into art through elevating their beloveds, and thereby largely fictionalizing them. Swann exhibits "willed blindness" to Odette's infidelity, and he transforms her from a demimondaine into his wife, a member of the aristocracy. Although Swann, and the narrator in relation to Gilberte, elevates his beloved to the level of a goddess, he occupies the role of creator, of a godlike figure with the power to shape this woman through his own imagination.

Swann's Way, in placing the narrator at that age where romantic longings are quite intense, has some elements of the fairy tale in it. Mosher identifies the three subdivisions within Swann's Way as examples of different types of romance; Part One is a pastoral romance, in which the narrator finds mystery and divinity in nature (and his desires are rather undifferentiated); Part Three is a heroic romance, with a specific object (Gilberte) and the narrator's religious reverence for her and his quest to obtain her love. Mosher claims that Part Two is a romantic comedy of manners, in which Swann confronts the reality of Odette compared with his idealized fantasies of her.

With Valentine's Day approaching, this is an apposite topic of discussion, one that I raised in my post on Tolstoy's story "The Kreutzer Sonata"; does love necessarily entail an element of fictionalization?

I think that, to a certain extent, we all fictionalize ourselves. We form abstractions, images, and narratives in order to organize our experiences and make sense of them. The transformation of life into art is a mode of comprehending our experiences; the very act of reflecting on an experience requires it to be translated into narrative form, which is of course, a creation of art.

And so we do this with our individual love stories. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, and it doesn't mean that love is based on a falsehood. As Heidegger wrote, art and poetry function to reveal truth, they "unconceal" a person or an object's true being. That is, of course, how art should ideally function; there is art that is more divorced from truth (as I'm sure all of us can agree upon recalling some embarrassing and nonsensical middle school crushes and imagined romances such as Proust's narrator). But, I think that in our artistic renditions of our own love stories, the images that we must create of a loved person in order to comprehend them, do function to reveal the truth of what is best in that individual. Whether art reveals truth in the romances in Swann's Way, however, remains to be seen.