A few months ago, I stated that it was my goal to read all of Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time; of course, this is not only a Proust blog, and I've obviously read a lot of other things (and will continue to do so), but the Proust entries are returning! I recently finished the first part of Volume II, Within a Budding Grove.
The narrator's admiration of Gilberte Swann evolves from a simple longing to gain access to her mysterious and forbidden world into romantic and sexual desire. Part One, titled "Madame Swann at Home," details his romantic quest for Gilberte; love is, of course, the major theme of this section, and many of the previous conclusions about love in Proust's work hold true here. Lack of control over the beloved both induces love, sustains it, and makes it a miserable state of being. Like Swann's desire for Odette, the narrator's love for Gilberte is sustained by her unreachability and strangeness from him; his alienation from her spurs his desire to possess her. He is vexed by her unpredictability and his lack of control, but this only deepens and strengthens his attraction. Love originates in difference, even though the experience of alienation from the beloved is painful. The narrator's ability to love depends on his inability to possess Gilberte, just as Swann's jealous love depended on his futlity in stopping Odette's infidelities.
Love originates also in the imagination of the lover, which can simultaneously ease that sense of distance and exacerbate it. Swann sustained his jealous love for Odette through imagining her infidelities, and comforted himself by picturing her innocence. Imagination, however, plays a very different role in the narrator's love of Gilberte. Swann's imagination drifted towards Odette's nefarious activities out of his view because his love depends on jealousy. The narrator, however, tends to imagine only the complete happiness that he could derive from unity with Gilberte, because his love depends on the possibility of possession. He spends his time imagining conversations he might have with her, in which she says all of the things he longs to hear. At times, his happiness is heightened by his imagination: "We are, when we love, in an abnormal state, capable of giving at once to the most apparently simple accident, an accident which may at any moment occur, a seriousness which in itself it would not entails. What makes us so happy is the presence in our hearts of an unstable element which we contrive perpetually to maintain and of which we cease almost to be aware so long as it is not displaced" (Proust 213-214). The increasing acceptance that the Swanns show to the narrator, inviting him to tea with Gilberte and dinners with Bergotte, causes him to view his possession of Gilberte as determined; with her father's approval, the narrator assumes that he has greater influence over her, and so he went to "see Gilberte as often as I chose, with enchantment if not with peace of mind" (Proust 213). That peace of mind, however, was soon disrupted by the same impulse to attach immense importance to insignificant, neutral, or ambiguous events.
Like Swann's jealousy, however, the narrator's desire for complete possession eventually leads to the destruction of love. His imagination first causes him to view reality as deficient, in comparison with his visions of potential happiness with Gilberte. She fails to react in the desired way, and the very quality of otherness that attracted him begins to vex him. He begins to sense that Gilberte is annoyed by his constant presence in her house and views him as an obstruction to her other activities; for example, she wishes to go to a dance with her friends, but her mother requires her to stay at home to entertain the narrator. Like Odette had with Swann, Gilberte rather effortlessly proves her independence from the narrator; both lovers are painfully desirous to do the same and prove their independence from Odette and Gilberte. The narrator eventually succeeeds, although he realizes, too late, that the attainment of that goal necessitates the death of love.
As in Swann's Way, love is presented as a tormented, humiliating experience in Within a Budding Grove, an experience which the narrator can only enjoy in memory. Hurt by Gilberte's perceived indifference, aggrieved that her parents' acceptance of him have failed to win him control over her, and convinced that Gilberte will find his affection for her unforgivably repulsive, the narrator decides to cure himself of his love; he ceases to contact her directly, refuses her invitations, and wallows in the voluptuousness of his melancholy. He succeeds in destroying his love, and the self that loved Gilberte; the self-imposed separation gradually diminishes his desire and he is relieved from the incessant anxiety that, in Proust, is essential of love.
He reflects on his former love for Gilberte and marvels "How infinitely we prefer to any such interview the docile memory, which we can supplement at will with dreams in which she who in reality does not love us seems, on the contrary, to be making protestations of her love, when we are all alone! How infinitely we prefer that memory which, by blending gradually with it a great deal of what we desire, we can contrive to make as sweet as we choose, to the deferred interview in which we would have to deal with a person to whom we could no longer dictate at will the words that we want to hear on her lips, but from whom we can expect to meet with new coldness, unforeseen aggressions!" (Proust 270). Swann does something similar in his approach to Odette; rather than view her only through memory, he chooses to view her through the veil of art. Odette is no longer a human subject, but an artistic object, which Swann can manipulate at his will, convince himself of her aesthetic value, and thereby appreciate. The narrator finally gains control over Gilberte through relegating her to memory; he surrenders the real, present, separate Gilberte for the phantom Gilberte of memory. The separateness of the other, the beloved, creates love, but it also creates the desire to escape the unstable state of being in love.
The narrator's disappointment and humiliation in his love for Gilberte is characteristic of a problem that extends beyond the experience of love; happiness is always deferred to a distant future, in which the internal conditions of the narrator will have changed so much as to render that happiness impotent. The narrator writes that "happiness can never be achieved. If we succeed in overcoming the force of circumstances, nature at once shifts the battle-ground, placing it within ourselves, and effects a gradual change in our hearts until they desire something other than what they are about to possess... Having failed in everything related to the sphere of life and action, it is a final impossibility, the psychological impossibility of happiness, that nature creates. The phenomenon of happiness either fails to appear, or at once gives rise to the bitterest reactions" (Proust 274). The narrator's earlier excursion to see Berma, his favorite actress, perform at the theater is a precursor to his love for Gilberte; he had longed to see Berma and built up impossible expectations of rapture and intellectual enlightenment upon finally seeing her performance, but his anxiety to catch every word she said and his extravagant hopes left him feeling bitterly disappointed. He could not enjoy the performance at all; he recognizes Berma as she appears on stage, "But at the same time all my pleasure had ceased" because he cannot slow down time and dissect the performance as it appeared (Proust 26). Pleasure is only possible in anticipation, and as soon as the anticipated happiness appears, as he wrote later, happiness becomes impossible.
Swann's Way was an account of an awakening of desires, but Within a Budding Grove is a narrative of the inevitable disappointment of those desires. The narrator expects his great hopes to reify, but the materialization of his longings inevitably falls short of his imagination. Although the narrator seems to experience life more deeply than most, he is also perpetually anxious or disappointed; he is as incurable a malcontent as his Aunt Leonie was an invalid, because, like his great aunt, he revels in his accute sense of disappointment, his suffering, his incurable state of discontent. The narrator is something of a youthful Underground Man; Proust mentions Dostoevsky in this volume, so I think a comparison between the narrator and Dostoevsky's Underground Man could be useful. Expect more on this subject in the future... just don't expect too much, because you're bound to be diappointed.
Tuesday, June 8, 2010
Thursday, June 3, 2010
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 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.
Wednesday, June 2, 2010
Pink Moon
Death is a catastrophe which no one can ever fully anticipate. Even when we know it is coming, that knowledge is abstracted and incomplete; my knowledge is merely second-hand, through the deaths of grandparents, aunts, uncles, neighbors, teachers, and it will remain so. I am not certain that the body ever experiences its own death, or only the process of dying. The decline of health and the sensation of a diminished life may be all that we feel until consciousness finally ceases. That moment, the intersection at which life ends and death occurs, may remain a mystery forever.
Somehow, that moment still holds tremendous power, even if it's an experience on which one can never reflect, which ends as soon as it begins. It's impossible to fully conceive, and the element of the unknown is part of why death is so terrifying. But another part of the fear is that we have an instinctual sense of what death is, and confronting the end of consciousness, the "impossibility of possibility" and its finality is terrifying. We lose consciousness in sleep, but it's never total; we dream, as a sort of assurance that the brain is still active, that consciousness has not completely abandoned us, and that the waking perceptions will arrive again to displace these sleeping dream visions.
But death is final. Waking will not come, and the self is lost, irrecoverably.
I often look to literature as a means of analyzing these mysteries. Death can never be fully elucidated, but it's presence in literature does provide opportunities to ponder it. Through the deaths of fictional characters, I am led to ask, How does one confront that finality of one's own death? Is it possible to face it joyfully, like Father Zosima's brother in The Brothers Karamazov? Although he was young, Markel comforts his weeping mother.
"Don't cry, mother," he would answer, "life is paradise, and we are all in paradise, but we won't see it; if we would we should have heaven on earth the next day" (BK, Part II, Book VI).
There is subsmission in Markel's dying days; he accepts the will of God, and he is not bitter. Instead, in his final days, he comes to comprehend life. He lives more fully in his acceptance of death than he ever did when he was healthy. He even died "fully conscious... up to his last hour he did not change," but accepted his death calmly, full of joy and love (BK). Father Zosima's narrative of his own life and his experiences with the deaths of others provides comfort for his followers-- not really for himself, since he has already accepted death and is waiting for it patiently.
Is it possible to accept death and be done with the fear? Tolstoy offers a very different depiction of death in Anna Karenina, with Levin's brother Nikolai. He is never peaceful in confronting his death, even though he has long known it as imminent. In terrible pain, he continues to believe that the medicine will cure him, that by ferociously clinging to life, he might drive death away. He cries out that he does not want to die, and his final words are, "Not yet... soon" (Tolstoy 574). Nikolai embodies the rationalist kind of society against which Alyosha Karamazov is positioned; Nikolai mistakenly places all of his faith in medicine, and fails to achieve the kind of introspection that characterizes Markel Zosima's death and Alyosha's guidance to the schoolboys in the death of Ilyusha. When Levin rushes to visit his brother before his death, he expects the dying man to say "something of peculiar gravity and importance, but Nikolai began speaking of his health. He found fault with the doctor, regretting that he had not a celebrated Moscow doctor. Levin saw that he still hoped" (Tolstoy 559). Nikolai thinks of neither life nor death, but only pays obsessive attention to his present condition, bearing "the stern, reproachful expression of the dying man's envy of the living" (Tolstoy 560). This attitude is so vastly different from Markel's demeanor; although he was just a boy himself, he urged his younger brother (Father Zosima) to go play and live, because he could not. Nikolai Levin covets life so greedily that he unknowingly squanders it in his final days.
Yet, the death of Markel is so idealized that one has to wonder if such an approach is possible; there is no sign of suffering in Markel's death, and Zosima insists that the boy somehow remained fully conscious until he died. Nikolai, in contrast, suffers greatly, and the chapters detailing his death emphasize his physical anguish. Perhaps the spiritual anguish is inevitable in the face of such bodily pain.
Levin, however, faces Nikolai's death without despair (though still with horror and fear), because he is taken outside himself in his brother's death, a level of abstraction that he could not attain in facing his own mortality when he had seen his sickly brother the previous autumn. Unlike Nikolai, Levin abandons himself and surrenders to life and all its incomprehensibility. Levin is thereby removed from tragedy; by holding onto the self so desperately, his brother and Anna both meet tragic ends, but Levin is able to transcend himself. He experiences life more fully by accepting it as it is, even though he is still afraid and uncomfortable with death.
But Levin does not die in the course of the book. His brother's death is followed immediately by his wife's pregnancy; he immerses himself in life, abandoning the question of death.
Perhaps that is how death should fit into life; it explodes into consciousness at particular moments and demands its due attention, but it must fade back into the background and allow life to continue. One should be too busy living to worry about dying; the time to think of death is when death arrives. Does this leave us unprepared? I'm not sure. Until I am dying, I can only experience death in the abstract, in times like now when I have learned of a family member's death. I can ruminate on it, and embrace this experience of the return of the ultimately repressed, the intrusion of death into life, but this feeling cannot last. Death will necessarily slip away from me again, until the next time, whether it's a recognition of the frailty of my own existence or the loss of someone else. It's an uncertainty that I must accept; I can never know when exactly death will return again, but I do know that I cannot outrun it, that I must stay with it for a while and learn from it.
The lesson from the few literary deaths that I have detailed here has been, for the living characters to discover something about life. Levin discovers the wonder and awe in the two extremes of life, its inception and its end; he experiences the power of both. Markel Zosima learns to live and love; in losing his own life, he knows life's true beauty and value. Life and death are linked, and one teaches us about the other.
Somehow, that moment still holds tremendous power, even if it's an experience on which one can never reflect, which ends as soon as it begins. It's impossible to fully conceive, and the element of the unknown is part of why death is so terrifying. But another part of the fear is that we have an instinctual sense of what death is, and confronting the end of consciousness, the "impossibility of possibility" and its finality is terrifying. We lose consciousness in sleep, but it's never total; we dream, as a sort of assurance that the brain is still active, that consciousness has not completely abandoned us, and that the waking perceptions will arrive again to displace these sleeping dream visions.
But death is final. Waking will not come, and the self is lost, irrecoverably.
I often look to literature as a means of analyzing these mysteries. Death can never be fully elucidated, but it's presence in literature does provide opportunities to ponder it. Through the deaths of fictional characters, I am led to ask, How does one confront that finality of one's own death? Is it possible to face it joyfully, like Father Zosima's brother in The Brothers Karamazov? Although he was young, Markel comforts his weeping mother.
"Don't cry, mother," he would answer, "life is paradise, and we are all in paradise, but we won't see it; if we would we should have heaven on earth the next day" (BK, Part II, Book VI).
There is subsmission in Markel's dying days; he accepts the will of God, and he is not bitter. Instead, in his final days, he comes to comprehend life. He lives more fully in his acceptance of death than he ever did when he was healthy. He even died "fully conscious... up to his last hour he did not change," but accepted his death calmly, full of joy and love (BK). Father Zosima's narrative of his own life and his experiences with the deaths of others provides comfort for his followers-- not really for himself, since he has already accepted death and is waiting for it patiently.
Is it possible to accept death and be done with the fear? Tolstoy offers a very different depiction of death in Anna Karenina, with Levin's brother Nikolai. He is never peaceful in confronting his death, even though he has long known it as imminent. In terrible pain, he continues to believe that the medicine will cure him, that by ferociously clinging to life, he might drive death away. He cries out that he does not want to die, and his final words are, "Not yet... soon" (Tolstoy 574). Nikolai embodies the rationalist kind of society against which Alyosha Karamazov is positioned; Nikolai mistakenly places all of his faith in medicine, and fails to achieve the kind of introspection that characterizes Markel Zosima's death and Alyosha's guidance to the schoolboys in the death of Ilyusha. When Levin rushes to visit his brother before his death, he expects the dying man to say "something of peculiar gravity and importance, but Nikolai began speaking of his health. He found fault with the doctor, regretting that he had not a celebrated Moscow doctor. Levin saw that he still hoped" (Tolstoy 559). Nikolai thinks of neither life nor death, but only pays obsessive attention to his present condition, bearing "the stern, reproachful expression of the dying man's envy of the living" (Tolstoy 560). This attitude is so vastly different from Markel's demeanor; although he was just a boy himself, he urged his younger brother (Father Zosima) to go play and live, because he could not. Nikolai Levin covets life so greedily that he unknowingly squanders it in his final days.
Yet, the death of Markel is so idealized that one has to wonder if such an approach is possible; there is no sign of suffering in Markel's death, and Zosima insists that the boy somehow remained fully conscious until he died. Nikolai, in contrast, suffers greatly, and the chapters detailing his death emphasize his physical anguish. Perhaps the spiritual anguish is inevitable in the face of such bodily pain.
Levin, however, faces Nikolai's death without despair (though still with horror and fear), because he is taken outside himself in his brother's death, a level of abstraction that he could not attain in facing his own mortality when he had seen his sickly brother the previous autumn. Unlike Nikolai, Levin abandons himself and surrenders to life and all its incomprehensibility. Levin is thereby removed from tragedy; by holding onto the self so desperately, his brother and Anna both meet tragic ends, but Levin is able to transcend himself. He experiences life more fully by accepting it as it is, even though he is still afraid and uncomfortable with death.
But Levin does not die in the course of the book. His brother's death is followed immediately by his wife's pregnancy; he immerses himself in life, abandoning the question of death.
Perhaps that is how death should fit into life; it explodes into consciousness at particular moments and demands its due attention, but it must fade back into the background and allow life to continue. One should be too busy living to worry about dying; the time to think of death is when death arrives. Does this leave us unprepared? I'm not sure. Until I am dying, I can only experience death in the abstract, in times like now when I have learned of a family member's death. I can ruminate on it, and embrace this experience of the return of the ultimately repressed, the intrusion of death into life, but this feeling cannot last. Death will necessarily slip away from me again, until the next time, whether it's a recognition of the frailty of my own existence or the loss of someone else. It's an uncertainty that I must accept; I can never know when exactly death will return again, but I do know that I cannot outrun it, that I must stay with it for a while and learn from it.
The lesson from the few literary deaths that I have detailed here has been, for the living characters to discover something about life. Levin discovers the wonder and awe in the two extremes of life, its inception and its end; he experiences the power of both. Markel Zosima learns to live and love; in losing his own life, he knows life's true beauty and value. Life and death are linked, and one teaches us about the other.
Rest in peace, Uncle Doug
Thursday, May 27, 2010
A few more words on Nietzsche
There are still complications in Nietzsche's writings on gender that I have not covered fully here; I'm going to read some secondary sources and do another post on this subject. Sexuality seems to be an area in Nietzsche's thought that is underdeveloped; but the references he makes to it are worth studying nonetheless. Much of my writings here have centered around such themes as love, sexuality, and gender, and these themes are present in Zarathustra as well-- and they are worth close, careful examination.
I must say, however, that Nietzsche's philosophy impacts me in a way that goes well beyond gender, and even the phrases that I found offensive cannot discount the kind of exhileration and enthusiasm that I derive from his concepts of self-overcoming, striving, self-creation, and, most of all, saying Yes to life. Yes to life exactly as it is, with all its difficulties and challenges. Not fearing failure, but throwing oneself into an experience and a trial with all one's effort and passion. I shall return to blog about Nietzsche again in the near future, but for now, I leave you with this quote:
"All praise to that wild, good, free storm spirit that dances upon swamps and afflictions as upon meadows! That hates the wasted dogs of the mob and all the ill-constituted brood of gloom: all praise to this spirit of all free spirits, the laughing storm that blows dust in the eyes of all the dim-sighted and ulcerated."
I must say, however, that Nietzsche's philosophy impacts me in a way that goes well beyond gender, and even the phrases that I found offensive cannot discount the kind of exhileration and enthusiasm that I derive from his concepts of self-overcoming, striving, self-creation, and, most of all, saying Yes to life. Yes to life exactly as it is, with all its difficulties and challenges. Not fearing failure, but throwing oneself into an experience and a trial with all one's effort and passion. I shall return to blog about Nietzsche again in the near future, but for now, I leave you with this quote:
"All praise to that wild, good, free storm spirit that dances upon swamps and afflictions as upon meadows! That hates the wasted dogs of the mob and all the ill-constituted brood of gloom: all praise to this spirit of all free spirits, the laughing storm that blows dust in the eyes of all the dim-sighted and ulcerated."
Wednesday, May 19, 2010
Femi-Nietzsche
I've been reading Thus Spoke Zarathustra, and I recently had some conversations with Jarrod about the role women play in Nietzsche's philosophy. One chapter had me particularly incensed, entitled "Of Young and Old Women." The chapter begins with Zarathustra out walking alone, when an old woman approaches him and says, mildly critically, that he has spoken to women a great deal, but has never spoken of women. Zarathusta then expatiates on women's nature and the relationship between men and women. Here are some of the quotes that left me fuming and perplexed:
"Man should be trained for war and woman for the recreation of the warrior: all else is folly." (91)
"The man's happiness is: 'I will.' The woman's happiness is: 'He will.'" (92)
"And woman has to obey and find a depth for her surface. Woman's nature is surface, a changeable, stormy film upon shallow waters. But a man's nature is deep, its torrent roars in subterranean caves: woman senses its power but does not comprehend it." (92)
"Everything about woman is a riddle, and everything about woman has one solution: it is called pregnancy." (91)
I am still grappling with some of these aphorisms, especially that last one that the "solution" to woman's riddles is pregnancy, but in taking such quotes in relation to some things that Nietzsche writes elsewhere, they are somewhat less offensive and inflammatory than on a cursory read-through. This will, however, require a follow-up post after I read some secondary sources.
Central to Nietzsche's concept of women is a belief that the sexes are very different, and remain incomprehensible to one another. He writes that woman senses the power of man's nature, but does not comprehend it, and I would venture to say that he would agree that man senses the power of woman's nature and is equally unable to understand it. The sexes, of course, have different natures, and seem to be comprised of different elements that are opposite, yet complementary. I think that it is important to know something of Nietzsche's biography on this subject; he was raised primarily by his mother and was close with his sister in his formative years. In his youth, he was surrounded by women, but he did not have many close relationships with women in his adult life and he never married. I think it's fair to say that he did not understand women very well, and that he did not feel like women understood him well. In "Of the Three Evil Things," Zarathustra asks, "And who has fully conceived how strange man and woman are to one another!" (207). That strangeness and fundamental unknowability of the other sex produces tension, but the tension is productive and uplifting.
There is a sense of opposition and even enmity between men and women, but the kind that arises between two worthy adversaries who push one another on toward greatness. It is redemptive in restoring the inherent virtues of each sex. The ideal relationship between the sexes would not domesticate or tame either, and would provoke the essential, elemental strength of each. I think many of Nietzsche criticisms of women attack cultured, European ideals that oppress women and pervert them into absurd, frivolous people, stealing their strength and mystical power. Although he seemed to be critical of the nascient feminist movement, he certainly did not deem the traditional view of women wholly satisfactory; these are the "fond little women" for whom Zarathustra is not the physician (320). This does not mean, however, that Zarathustra does not speak to any women at all; it is only the fond, little ones, the weaklings, to whom he cannot speak.
Nietzsche is censorious at times of women's behavior and mien, however, and he is equally critical of traditional concepts of femininity that make women frivolous and absurd, and the nascient feminist movement that, perhaps, denied something essentially feminine in the quest for equality. In "Of the Virtue that Makes Small," Nietzsche writes of contemporary society that, "There is little manliness here: therefore, their women make themselves manly. For only he who is sufficiently a man will redeem the woman in woman" (189, "Of the Virtue that Makes Small"). I think this idea of women making themselves manly is a criticism of the feminist movement that sought to make women adhere to masculine values and obscuring the feminine voice by absorbing it into male discourse. Nietzsche also implies here that modern men are not sufficiently masculine themselves, that their ideals are no more appropriate to their sex than women's adoption of masculine standards. Women and the feminist movement, then, are responding to a deficiency of strength and power in the contemporary culture and egalitarian values that Nietzsche saw as promoting little more than mediocrity. Women in Nietzsche, then, demand masculine strength, not because they themselves are weak, but because there needs to be a counterpart to feminine strength. The inverse of this is also true, and I think it's one of Nietzsche most trenchant criticisms of European feminism; there is also a need for a counterpart to masculine strength, and when women deny that femininity and take on masculine values, something beautiful and necessary is lost.
That is how man redeems the woman in woman, but Zarathustra abounds with examples of woman redeeming the man in man. As stated earlier, women demand masculine strength to match their own feminine strength. In "Of Young and Old Woman," Zarathustra asks, "Whom does woman hate most? --Thus spoke the iron to the magnet: 'I hate you most, because you attract me, but are not strong enough to draw me towards you'" (92). When I first read this, I thought that it was speaking to the weakness of the iron, that it could not draw itself toward the magnet, but in fact, the iron is angry with the weakness of the magnet, that it is unable to move the iron. Woman is angry that man's force is not sufficient to match hers, and she compels him to become stronger and worthy of her love. Through love, woman also inspires the creative child within man; Nietzsche writes that, "woman understands children better than a man, but man is more childlike than woman. A child is concealed in the true man; it wants to play. Come, women, discover the child in man!" (92). Zarathustra describes woman as "the most dangerous plaything," and while this descriptor may be shocking at first, the idea of being a plaything, one who inspires and provokes play, is by no means demeaning (91). Zarathustra's enemy is the spirit of gravity; one should live joyfully, striving upward and facing challenges with the attitude of a child at play. One should radiate life-affirming joyfulness in every struggle, every experience. That joyfulness of life, the sense of play, emits from the feminine presence in Zarathustra.
A group of girls dancing in the forest inspire Zarathustra to compose "The Dance Song," which abounds with energy and passion for life. In this section, Life is personified as a woman, and so is wisdom. Zarathustra sings that Life "laughed mockingly when I called you unfathomable. 'All fish talk like that,' you said; 'what they cannot fathom is unfathomable. But I am merely changeable and untamed and in everything a woman, and no virtuous one'" (131). Again, the essential incomprehensibility of the sexes is present, and this forms an analogy to the mystery inherant in life. Throughout "The Dance Song," Zarathustra describes this immense passion he has for life, through the metaphor of a romantic interlude, a game of courtship (he sings "as cupid" for the girls and dedicates the song to this "little god whom girls love best"). Life, love, and sexual tension intertwine in this song, and it acts as a fulfillment of the great longing expressed in the previous section, "The Night Song."
"Man's happiness is: 'I will.' Woman's happiness is: 'He will.'"
This one was very difficult to reconcile, but after staying with it for some time, I think I have begun to understand it in a different light. Woman exercises her will through love, and in Nietzsche, such an association with love endows women with profound connection with life itself. Woman's strength, honor, and virtue originate in her endless capacity for love. Although she surrenders and gives herself completely through love, she is not diminished. Like Zarathustra with his happiness and wisdom, woman is a squanderer of her love, bestowing it without restraint-- when she chooses. Woman's will and capacity for choice is exercised through her decision whether to love or hate (Nietzsche claims earlier in Zarathustra that woman is only capable of love, not friendship). Nietzsche is very hetero-centric here, in assuming that the recipient of love will necessarily be a man. There are still implications of a sexual politics that subordinates women, even if they willfully submit to men. In Zarathustra, women are presented as very powerful, but their greatest desire is to surrender that power to a man of comparable strength. They want to submit and have the man enact his will, and find happiness in his will to power once he has shown he is strong enough to overcome her.
Women are not weak, however, even though Nietzsche seems to simultaneously suggest their great power and their desire to submit to the power of men. Women are often associated with laughter, which plays a very important role in Zarathustra as an antidote to the Spirit of Gravity. Although the old woman Zarathustra encounters in "Of Young and Old Women" is not described in great detail, I imagine her with merry, mischievous eyes and a tone of playful teasing when she speaks to Zarathustra. From the beginning of this chapter, she is somewhat ironic towards him; he claims that one should speak of women only to men, and she responds that she is old enough to forget whatever it is he has to say. At the end of the chapter, she gives a rather flippant response to Zarathustra's string of aphorisms about women. She affirms that he has said many things that are true, but there is no sense that he has managed to teach her anything she did not already know. There is perhaps the hint that she is merely humoring him in his attempts to untangle the "riddle" that is woman. She unexpectedly gives something to Zarathustra in the end, her "little truth," which he carries with him like "an unruly child." This little truth is also humorous; she advises Zarathustra to bring his whip if he is going to women now, possibly acknowledging the accuracy of his estimation of women's untamed nature. Nietzsche, however, does not want woman (or man) to become tame and cultured; the whip will not tame the women Zarathustra meets, but it is a metaphor for the type of strength that he needs in order to speak to them effectively. The old woman is being facetious here in her suggestion, but she does offer some truth into woman's nature; she doesn't want to listen to someone who cannot back up his words with a whip, with a concrete show of the strength that he should possess.
There should be a sense of fear between the sexes, because they recognize the immensity of each other's sexuality. Awe is a better word; Nietzsche regards the good marriage as a sacred union, certainly not something to be taken lightly and dismissed as commonplace. When the sexes are in proper relation to one another, with this central tension and overcoming of each other and themselves, it is something to behold in awe and wonder. An equal relationship between the sexes does not exist for Nietzsche, but recall that he is a harsh critic of egalitarian values; equality eliminates greatness. A constant striving is the best way to live, so it is no surprise that the relationship between man and woman would be full of strife. There is a sense of enmity, but enmity as between Achilles and Hector-- they honor one another in their difficulty of being defeated. Woman's intractible nature presents an honorable challenge to man to overcome her, and the subsequent imbalance of power does not strip the woman of her own will to power. She exercises it through him, through the power of her love, which she can only fully bestow once he has proven himself "sufficiently man."
Throughout Thus Spoke Zarathustra, women appear as mysterious beings who come into the solitary world of Zarathustra, and are usually associated with laughter and nature. They are surprisingly self-sufficient; they do not flock to Zarathustra to be disciples or students, they do not want to follow but to challenge him, mock him for his weaknesses. They are somewhat wild and out of his grasp, yet they captivate him. Life and Wisdom are personified as women in Zarathustra, and their intriguing unreachability as women is essential to the concept of desiring and pursuing life that guides much of the philosophy of this text.
"Man should be trained for war and woman for the recreation of the warrior: all else is folly." (91)
"The man's happiness is: 'I will.' The woman's happiness is: 'He will.'" (92)
"And woman has to obey and find a depth for her surface. Woman's nature is surface, a changeable, stormy film upon shallow waters. But a man's nature is deep, its torrent roars in subterranean caves: woman senses its power but does not comprehend it." (92)
"Everything about woman is a riddle, and everything about woman has one solution: it is called pregnancy." (91)
I am still grappling with some of these aphorisms, especially that last one that the "solution" to woman's riddles is pregnancy, but in taking such quotes in relation to some things that Nietzsche writes elsewhere, they are somewhat less offensive and inflammatory than on a cursory read-through. This will, however, require a follow-up post after I read some secondary sources.
Central to Nietzsche's concept of women is a belief that the sexes are very different, and remain incomprehensible to one another. He writes that woman senses the power of man's nature, but does not comprehend it, and I would venture to say that he would agree that man senses the power of woman's nature and is equally unable to understand it. The sexes, of course, have different natures, and seem to be comprised of different elements that are opposite, yet complementary. I think that it is important to know something of Nietzsche's biography on this subject; he was raised primarily by his mother and was close with his sister in his formative years. In his youth, he was surrounded by women, but he did not have many close relationships with women in his adult life and he never married. I think it's fair to say that he did not understand women very well, and that he did not feel like women understood him well. In "Of the Three Evil Things," Zarathustra asks, "And who has fully conceived how strange man and woman are to one another!" (207). That strangeness and fundamental unknowability of the other sex produces tension, but the tension is productive and uplifting.
There is a sense of opposition and even enmity between men and women, but the kind that arises between two worthy adversaries who push one another on toward greatness. It is redemptive in restoring the inherent virtues of each sex. The ideal relationship between the sexes would not domesticate or tame either, and would provoke the essential, elemental strength of each. I think many of Nietzsche criticisms of women attack cultured, European ideals that oppress women and pervert them into absurd, frivolous people, stealing their strength and mystical power. Although he seemed to be critical of the nascient feminist movement, he certainly did not deem the traditional view of women wholly satisfactory; these are the "fond little women" for whom Zarathustra is not the physician (320). This does not mean, however, that Zarathustra does not speak to any women at all; it is only the fond, little ones, the weaklings, to whom he cannot speak.
Nietzsche is censorious at times of women's behavior and mien, however, and he is equally critical of traditional concepts of femininity that make women frivolous and absurd, and the nascient feminist movement that, perhaps, denied something essentially feminine in the quest for equality. In "Of the Virtue that Makes Small," Nietzsche writes of contemporary society that, "There is little manliness here: therefore, their women make themselves manly. For only he who is sufficiently a man will redeem the woman in woman" (189, "Of the Virtue that Makes Small"). I think this idea of women making themselves manly is a criticism of the feminist movement that sought to make women adhere to masculine values and obscuring the feminine voice by absorbing it into male discourse. Nietzsche also implies here that modern men are not sufficiently masculine themselves, that their ideals are no more appropriate to their sex than women's adoption of masculine standards. Women and the feminist movement, then, are responding to a deficiency of strength and power in the contemporary culture and egalitarian values that Nietzsche saw as promoting little more than mediocrity. Women in Nietzsche, then, demand masculine strength, not because they themselves are weak, but because there needs to be a counterpart to feminine strength. The inverse of this is also true, and I think it's one of Nietzsche most trenchant criticisms of European feminism; there is also a need for a counterpart to masculine strength, and when women deny that femininity and take on masculine values, something beautiful and necessary is lost.
That is how man redeems the woman in woman, but Zarathustra abounds with examples of woman redeeming the man in man. As stated earlier, women demand masculine strength to match their own feminine strength. In "Of Young and Old Woman," Zarathustra asks, "Whom does woman hate most? --Thus spoke the iron to the magnet: 'I hate you most, because you attract me, but are not strong enough to draw me towards you'" (92). When I first read this, I thought that it was speaking to the weakness of the iron, that it could not draw itself toward the magnet, but in fact, the iron is angry with the weakness of the magnet, that it is unable to move the iron. Woman is angry that man's force is not sufficient to match hers, and she compels him to become stronger and worthy of her love. Through love, woman also inspires the creative child within man; Nietzsche writes that, "woman understands children better than a man, but man is more childlike than woman. A child is concealed in the true man; it wants to play. Come, women, discover the child in man!" (92). Zarathustra describes woman as "the most dangerous plaything," and while this descriptor may be shocking at first, the idea of being a plaything, one who inspires and provokes play, is by no means demeaning (91). Zarathustra's enemy is the spirit of gravity; one should live joyfully, striving upward and facing challenges with the attitude of a child at play. One should radiate life-affirming joyfulness in every struggle, every experience. That joyfulness of life, the sense of play, emits from the feminine presence in Zarathustra.
A group of girls dancing in the forest inspire Zarathustra to compose "The Dance Song," which abounds with energy and passion for life. In this section, Life is personified as a woman, and so is wisdom. Zarathustra sings that Life "laughed mockingly when I called you unfathomable. 'All fish talk like that,' you said; 'what they cannot fathom is unfathomable. But I am merely changeable and untamed and in everything a woman, and no virtuous one'" (131). Again, the essential incomprehensibility of the sexes is present, and this forms an analogy to the mystery inherant in life. Throughout "The Dance Song," Zarathustra describes this immense passion he has for life, through the metaphor of a romantic interlude, a game of courtship (he sings "as cupid" for the girls and dedicates the song to this "little god whom girls love best"). Life, love, and sexual tension intertwine in this song, and it acts as a fulfillment of the great longing expressed in the previous section, "The Night Song."
"Man's happiness is: 'I will.' Woman's happiness is: 'He will.'"
This one was very difficult to reconcile, but after staying with it for some time, I think I have begun to understand it in a different light. Woman exercises her will through love, and in Nietzsche, such an association with love endows women with profound connection with life itself. Woman's strength, honor, and virtue originate in her endless capacity for love. Although she surrenders and gives herself completely through love, she is not diminished. Like Zarathustra with his happiness and wisdom, woman is a squanderer of her love, bestowing it without restraint-- when she chooses. Woman's will and capacity for choice is exercised through her decision whether to love or hate (Nietzsche claims earlier in Zarathustra that woman is only capable of love, not friendship). Nietzsche is very hetero-centric here, in assuming that the recipient of love will necessarily be a man. There are still implications of a sexual politics that subordinates women, even if they willfully submit to men. In Zarathustra, women are presented as very powerful, but their greatest desire is to surrender that power to a man of comparable strength. They want to submit and have the man enact his will, and find happiness in his will to power once he has shown he is strong enough to overcome her.
Women are not weak, however, even though Nietzsche seems to simultaneously suggest their great power and their desire to submit to the power of men. Women are often associated with laughter, which plays a very important role in Zarathustra as an antidote to the Spirit of Gravity. Although the old woman Zarathustra encounters in "Of Young and Old Women" is not described in great detail, I imagine her with merry, mischievous eyes and a tone of playful teasing when she speaks to Zarathustra. From the beginning of this chapter, she is somewhat ironic towards him; he claims that one should speak of women only to men, and she responds that she is old enough to forget whatever it is he has to say. At the end of the chapter, she gives a rather flippant response to Zarathustra's string of aphorisms about women. She affirms that he has said many things that are true, but there is no sense that he has managed to teach her anything she did not already know. There is perhaps the hint that she is merely humoring him in his attempts to untangle the "riddle" that is woman. She unexpectedly gives something to Zarathustra in the end, her "little truth," which he carries with him like "an unruly child." This little truth is also humorous; she advises Zarathustra to bring his whip if he is going to women now, possibly acknowledging the accuracy of his estimation of women's untamed nature. Nietzsche, however, does not want woman (or man) to become tame and cultured; the whip will not tame the women Zarathustra meets, but it is a metaphor for the type of strength that he needs in order to speak to them effectively. The old woman is being facetious here in her suggestion, but she does offer some truth into woman's nature; she doesn't want to listen to someone who cannot back up his words with a whip, with a concrete show of the strength that he should possess.
There should be a sense of fear between the sexes, because they recognize the immensity of each other's sexuality. Awe is a better word; Nietzsche regards the good marriage as a sacred union, certainly not something to be taken lightly and dismissed as commonplace. When the sexes are in proper relation to one another, with this central tension and overcoming of each other and themselves, it is something to behold in awe and wonder. An equal relationship between the sexes does not exist for Nietzsche, but recall that he is a harsh critic of egalitarian values; equality eliminates greatness. A constant striving is the best way to live, so it is no surprise that the relationship between man and woman would be full of strife. There is a sense of enmity, but enmity as between Achilles and Hector-- they honor one another in their difficulty of being defeated. Woman's intractible nature presents an honorable challenge to man to overcome her, and the subsequent imbalance of power does not strip the woman of her own will to power. She exercises it through him, through the power of her love, which she can only fully bestow once he has proven himself "sufficiently man."
Throughout Thus Spoke Zarathustra, women appear as mysterious beings who come into the solitary world of Zarathustra, and are usually associated with laughter and nature. They are surprisingly self-sufficient; they do not flock to Zarathustra to be disciples or students, they do not want to follow but to challenge him, mock him for his weaknesses. They are somewhat wild and out of his grasp, yet they captivate him. Life and Wisdom are personified as women in Zarathustra, and their intriguing unreachability as women is essential to the concept of desiring and pursuing life that guides much of the philosophy of this text.
Monday, April 26, 2010
An ode to the arse: profanity and vulgarity in Molloy
After reading The Unnamable, I decided that I ought to read all of Beckett's trilogy. So I am now half-way through Molloy, and one of the most prominent motifs in this novel is Molloy's propensity for the vulgar and the profane. He constantly talks about his bodily functions, partially because he is so embodied through his failing health (his legs stiffened and he found it increasingly difficult to move as his journey progressed, and in the present-day narration, he is entirely bed-ridden and still in pain). But I think the preoccupation with excrement has a greater thematic significance.
Freudian psychology associates creativity with anal fixation; the pleasure a child gets in controlling his bowels is tied to the recognition of something that he created, an original product of his own body. Narration is a similar act of control and creation; the author acts as God in the world of the story, he creates and controls. Beckett does not hesitate to point out that the product of the human body is waste; excrement is the sum of the body's creative powers. But what about the mind?
Molloy's narrative is evidence of his creative impulse, but he is hardly in control of his work. He admits that he is uncertain of his purpose, and the more he writes, the less sure he becomes of his memory and his sense of self. His narrative is a decomposition; Molloy's body deteriorates, and so does narrative cohesion and his sense of identity. He often pauses and asks himself what he has been talking about, but the thread of thought is lost forever. Sentences begin, grow confused, and trail off unfinished. Molloy fills the role of creator through authorship, but his narrative seems destructive at worst, and at best unproductive, fading into impotent silence and inescapeable confusion.
Reproduction and sexuality would seem to be evidence of the body's ability to create something other than waste, to create new life, another human being. Molloy, however, claims that his mother "brought me into the world, through the hole in her arse," and he confuses the rectum and the vagina later on as well, as though both organs produced the same thing, served the same function, and were interchangeable (Beckett, 12). This confusion implies that humanity is created and expelled in the same way as feces, perhaps that humanity amounts to nothing but feces.
But Molloy does not seem to suggest that, despite his self-descriptions. He apologizes for his vulgar language and frequent references to the "arse hole," but he goes on to say that,
"Perhaps it is less to be thought of as the eyesore he called by its name than as the symbol of those passed over in silence, a distinction due perhaps to its centrality and its air of being a link between me and the other excrement. We underestimate this little hole, it seems to me, we call it the arse-hole and affect to despise it. But is it not rather the true portal of our being and the celebrated mouth no more than the kitchen-door. Nothing goes in, or so little, that is not rejected on the spot, or very nearly. Almost everything revolts it that comes from without and what comes from within does not seem to receive a very warm welcome either."
Beckett, Molloy, p. 74
The true portal of our being, according to Molloy, is that which is rejected as impolite and repulsive, cannot be mentioned in conversation, must be hidden and whose products are shameful and must be disposed of immediately. Excrement is a symbol of the self, not because humanity is nothing but waste, but because the true self is something that is hidden and repressed, something we are told is shameful and must be covered with perfumes and rituals. The gradual dissolution of the fictions of Molloy's self is disorienting and unsettling. He creates himself through the destruction of the traditional narrative and modes of identification. What remains, the by-product, the waste, is the self as it really is, stripped of all the fictions that make it palatable. Like the "little hole," Molloy begins to reject everything that comes from without; he frustrates others' expectations and social norms (e.g., when the police officer demands that he present his papers, Molloy hands him a handful of newspaper scraps), he offends others with his remoteness, his refusal to identify himself and explain himself, even his physical characteristics are offensive. And what comes from within Molloy does not receive a warm welcome; he deconstructs his own memory, dissolves his identity, questions everything he thinks and experiences. Molloy is somewhat inviolate in this sense; he rejects the common markers of identity, and exposes the truth that he is diffuse, unstable, fragmented, ever-changing, and incomprehensible.
The subject of sexuality is closely linked to the imagery of excrement throughout Molloy; as mentioned earlier, Molloy occasionally confuses the female reproductive organs and the rectum/ He is equally preoccupied with genitalia and excretion, and the two often are mentioned simultaneously or in close succession. In Beckett's work, sexuality is almost always alienated from reproduction and the life cycle; there are more old men than children in his plays. In Waiting For Godot, Vladimir and Estragon are tempted to hang themselves to escape boredom, but also the possibility of an erection-- sexuality is linked to death, not the creation of new life. The Unnamable posits that he is the drying, dying sperm on a pubescent boy's sheets, the waste product of a nocturnal emission; this is a wholly non-productive, solitary, and unconscious sexuality.
This theme is also present in Molloy; sexuality is alienated, lonely, incapable of creating new life, and associated with waste. Molloy's one significant sexual relationship was with an older woman; little else is certain about her, since his descriptions are confused and contradictory. But the most consistent descriptions are laden with references to her infertility; she had no breasts to speak of, she is arthritic, and described as an "old crone" he could have easily confused with his mother or even grandmother, presumably well past her fertile years. Molloy claims that he is sterile as well: "from such testicles as mine... there was nothing more to be squeezed, not a drop," and calls them "decaying circus clowns" (Beckett, 31). Their sexual union is sterile in the lack of a chance for new life, although in Beckett's literature, the cycle of life and death is so repetitive, that originality, true creation, seems impossible. The two met in a "rubbish dump," and that was the site of their first sexual encounter; a fittingly decrepit setting to emphasize the theme of waste. Sex for Molloy is devoid of passion as well; their liaisons are mechanical and routine, and he describes them so prosaically that he seems to have felt no physical attraction to her at all: "I toiled and moiled until I discharged or gave up trying or was begged by her to stop" (Beckett 51). He had other motivations to seek out a sexual partner.
Sexuality did not forge any intimacy between them either, nor any significant knowledge of the other. When he first mentions her, Molloy cannot remember her name, and as he ruminates on her memory further, he grows less certain of any of her characteristics. The narrative again serves to deconstruct, to make her even more remote from him. This is also indicative of Molloy's deep sense of alienation from all other people, his radical solitude, even in the most intimate physical contact.
Molloy's involvement with her was a response to an irrepressable, solitary need for sexual release, for a mucous membrane (it mattered not whose); his desire was wholly unrelated to emotional intimacy, or even a strong physical attraction, since he seems rather repulsed by this woman's attributes. Their relationship was defined by alienation. She remains anonymous and remote from him in every aspect; for instance, they could only have sex with him entering from behind, so he never saw her face during intercourse. This position put greater physical distance between them, touching only at the genitals and nowhere else. She might have been anyone, and Molloy even considers the possibility that he had actually had anal sex with her, then posits that she might have been a man holding his testicles during the act. She is so unknown to him that he cannot be absolutely certain of her gender (again, there is the issue with the free interchange of rectum for vagina, that sexuality is analogous to excretion in producing only waste).
Molloy's sexuality is extremely diffuse and, thereby, completely solitary; he does not self-identify with any sexual orientation, since he considers the possibility that this woman was actually a man with little distress. What does trouble him is the possibility that his relationship with this woman wasn't "true love," because of the manner of sex. His definition of love is, as one might infer, far from sentimental:
"But love is no doubt above such base contingencies. And not when you are comfortable, but when your frantic member casts about for a rubbing-place, and the unction of a little mucous membrane, and meeting with none does not beat in retreat, but retains its tumefaction, it is then no doubt that true love comes to pass, and wings away, high above the tight fit and the loose."
Beckett, Molloy, p. 53
There is no spirituality, no emotial involvement, no meanings beyond that physical interaction, and the other, of whom sexuality ought to allow deep knowledge, remains incomprehensible and radically remote.
Sexuality in Beckett is a topic worthy of separate exploration, and I think this is a topic that I should develop further, this interaction between sexuality and excrement.
Freudian psychology associates creativity with anal fixation; the pleasure a child gets in controlling his bowels is tied to the recognition of something that he created, an original product of his own body. Narration is a similar act of control and creation; the author acts as God in the world of the story, he creates and controls. Beckett does not hesitate to point out that the product of the human body is waste; excrement is the sum of the body's creative powers. But what about the mind?
Molloy's narrative is evidence of his creative impulse, but he is hardly in control of his work. He admits that he is uncertain of his purpose, and the more he writes, the less sure he becomes of his memory and his sense of self. His narrative is a decomposition; Molloy's body deteriorates, and so does narrative cohesion and his sense of identity. He often pauses and asks himself what he has been talking about, but the thread of thought is lost forever. Sentences begin, grow confused, and trail off unfinished. Molloy fills the role of creator through authorship, but his narrative seems destructive at worst, and at best unproductive, fading into impotent silence and inescapeable confusion.
Reproduction and sexuality would seem to be evidence of the body's ability to create something other than waste, to create new life, another human being. Molloy, however, claims that his mother "brought me into the world, through the hole in her arse," and he confuses the rectum and the vagina later on as well, as though both organs produced the same thing, served the same function, and were interchangeable (Beckett, 12). This confusion implies that humanity is created and expelled in the same way as feces, perhaps that humanity amounts to nothing but feces.
But Molloy does not seem to suggest that, despite his self-descriptions. He apologizes for his vulgar language and frequent references to the "arse hole," but he goes on to say that,
"Perhaps it is less to be thought of as the eyesore he called by its name than as the symbol of those passed over in silence, a distinction due perhaps to its centrality and its air of being a link between me and the other excrement. We underestimate this little hole, it seems to me, we call it the arse-hole and affect to despise it. But is it not rather the true portal of our being and the celebrated mouth no more than the kitchen-door. Nothing goes in, or so little, that is not rejected on the spot, or very nearly. Almost everything revolts it that comes from without and what comes from within does not seem to receive a very warm welcome either."
Beckett, Molloy, p. 74
The true portal of our being, according to Molloy, is that which is rejected as impolite and repulsive, cannot be mentioned in conversation, must be hidden and whose products are shameful and must be disposed of immediately. Excrement is a symbol of the self, not because humanity is nothing but waste, but because the true self is something that is hidden and repressed, something we are told is shameful and must be covered with perfumes and rituals. The gradual dissolution of the fictions of Molloy's self is disorienting and unsettling. He creates himself through the destruction of the traditional narrative and modes of identification. What remains, the by-product, the waste, is the self as it really is, stripped of all the fictions that make it palatable. Like the "little hole," Molloy begins to reject everything that comes from without; he frustrates others' expectations and social norms (e.g., when the police officer demands that he present his papers, Molloy hands him a handful of newspaper scraps), he offends others with his remoteness, his refusal to identify himself and explain himself, even his physical characteristics are offensive. And what comes from within Molloy does not receive a warm welcome; he deconstructs his own memory, dissolves his identity, questions everything he thinks and experiences. Molloy is somewhat inviolate in this sense; he rejects the common markers of identity, and exposes the truth that he is diffuse, unstable, fragmented, ever-changing, and incomprehensible.
The subject of sexuality is closely linked to the imagery of excrement throughout Molloy; as mentioned earlier, Molloy occasionally confuses the female reproductive organs and the rectum/ He is equally preoccupied with genitalia and excretion, and the two often are mentioned simultaneously or in close succession. In Beckett's work, sexuality is almost always alienated from reproduction and the life cycle; there are more old men than children in his plays. In Waiting For Godot, Vladimir and Estragon are tempted to hang themselves to escape boredom, but also the possibility of an erection-- sexuality is linked to death, not the creation of new life. The Unnamable posits that he is the drying, dying sperm on a pubescent boy's sheets, the waste product of a nocturnal emission; this is a wholly non-productive, solitary, and unconscious sexuality.
This theme is also present in Molloy; sexuality is alienated, lonely, incapable of creating new life, and associated with waste. Molloy's one significant sexual relationship was with an older woman; little else is certain about her, since his descriptions are confused and contradictory. But the most consistent descriptions are laden with references to her infertility; she had no breasts to speak of, she is arthritic, and described as an "old crone" he could have easily confused with his mother or even grandmother, presumably well past her fertile years. Molloy claims that he is sterile as well: "from such testicles as mine... there was nothing more to be squeezed, not a drop," and calls them "decaying circus clowns" (Beckett, 31). Their sexual union is sterile in the lack of a chance for new life, although in Beckett's literature, the cycle of life and death is so repetitive, that originality, true creation, seems impossible. The two met in a "rubbish dump," and that was the site of their first sexual encounter; a fittingly decrepit setting to emphasize the theme of waste. Sex for Molloy is devoid of passion as well; their liaisons are mechanical and routine, and he describes them so prosaically that he seems to have felt no physical attraction to her at all: "I toiled and moiled until I discharged or gave up trying or was begged by her to stop" (Beckett 51). He had other motivations to seek out a sexual partner.
Sexuality did not forge any intimacy between them either, nor any significant knowledge of the other. When he first mentions her, Molloy cannot remember her name, and as he ruminates on her memory further, he grows less certain of any of her characteristics. The narrative again serves to deconstruct, to make her even more remote from him. This is also indicative of Molloy's deep sense of alienation from all other people, his radical solitude, even in the most intimate physical contact.
Molloy's involvement with her was a response to an irrepressable, solitary need for sexual release, for a mucous membrane (it mattered not whose); his desire was wholly unrelated to emotional intimacy, or even a strong physical attraction, since he seems rather repulsed by this woman's attributes. Their relationship was defined by alienation. She remains anonymous and remote from him in every aspect; for instance, they could only have sex with him entering from behind, so he never saw her face during intercourse. This position put greater physical distance between them, touching only at the genitals and nowhere else. She might have been anyone, and Molloy even considers the possibility that he had actually had anal sex with her, then posits that she might have been a man holding his testicles during the act. She is so unknown to him that he cannot be absolutely certain of her gender (again, there is the issue with the free interchange of rectum for vagina, that sexuality is analogous to excretion in producing only waste).
Molloy's sexuality is extremely diffuse and, thereby, completely solitary; he does not self-identify with any sexual orientation, since he considers the possibility that this woman was actually a man with little distress. What does trouble him is the possibility that his relationship with this woman wasn't "true love," because of the manner of sex. His definition of love is, as one might infer, far from sentimental:
"But love is no doubt above such base contingencies. And not when you are comfortable, but when your frantic member casts about for a rubbing-place, and the unction of a little mucous membrane, and meeting with none does not beat in retreat, but retains its tumefaction, it is then no doubt that true love comes to pass, and wings away, high above the tight fit and the loose."
Beckett, Molloy, p. 53
There is no spirituality, no emotial involvement, no meanings beyond that physical interaction, and the other, of whom sexuality ought to allow deep knowledge, remains incomprehensible and radically remote.
Sexuality in Beckett is a topic worthy of separate exploration, and I think this is a topic that I should develop further, this interaction between sexuality and excrement.
Thursday, April 15, 2010
If you never say your name outloud to anyone, they can never ever call you by it
I've returned! The grad school dilemma has been solved, for the most part, so now I'm back to writing these rambling little entries on literature and life.
I've inadvertantly encountered a number of discourses concerning identity and language in the past weeks, from very different sources: Samuel Beckett's novel The Unnamable, an interview on NPR, and the final chapter of Marcel Proust's Swann's Way. The essential question at hand is, what is the relationship between narrative and identity? And a subset of that is, what is the function of names in constructing an identity? Can there be a narrative without names?
I have asked these questions on this blog before, but these are questions to which I must return, continuously.
Each source provides a very different answer. The scholar on NPR insisted that there is no essential relationship between narrative and reflective consciousness; humans are not naturally narrative, and should not always use narrative as a tool in the process of reflecting on their experiences. He cited Sartre in the claim that narratives distort reality, and that reminded me of a post I had written earlier, in the particular distorting power of names. As soon as a thing is named, its identity pinned down to a consistent signifier, the name fails to address the thing's reality. A name cannot contain the thing itself, and neither can a narrative-- even a six volume narrative consisting of thousands of pages.
This notion of unnamability relates closely to Beckett's The Unnamable. The narrator of this strange novel, which has no real plot to speak of, is constantly beset by many voices, which define him and control him, forcing him to speak through a voice that is not his own, in a language that is not his own. The Unnamable longs and strives to find his own voice in this bewildering narrative, but he also desires silence. He seems to recognize that any narrative will fail to constitute an identity, or worse, will only impose on him a false identity. He yearns to recover his authentic voice, rather than continue to speak through their voices, and say something final about himself so that he may stop speaking altogether, fall into silence, and exist in pure selfhood. The tension between speech and silence is paradoxical; the only way, in the Unnamable's mind, to achieve full selfhood is to speak himself into silence, to recover his voice and then stop. I think that this is because the authentic self is so fleeting, that if he were to speak more than that single, definitive word or phrase, the voice of the other would inevitably resurface and he would have to begin the process of recovering himself again. If he could only identify when he has spoken something true of himself, and then fall silent, he would achieve ontological consistency.
According to Maimaitiming Aila, however, Beckett's characters are unwilling to entirely relinquish narrative because, without it, they sink into irrevokable oblivion. They cease to exist outside of the language that they use, especially the Unnamable, who seems to exist only as a voice. That language, though, is very inconsistent and confusing; names shift and metamorphosize, highlighting the tension between identity and anonymity. Characters have names, but they are temporally influenced; the names change over time, and through different places, suggesting that identity is not stable. Rather than the proper name functioning as "a reliable sign to designate a person, the narrators in the trilogy [of Beckett's novels Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable] hold it as a sign of the existence of a particular discourse, a moment in the stream of consciousness, and an expression of certain perceptions and ideas" (Aila, "Nothing but Dust: A Philosophical Approach to the Problem of Identity and Anonymity in Samuel Beckett's Trilogy," p. 129). This harkens back to the opening lines of The Unnamable: "Where now? Who now? When now?" These are three questions of identity; the "who" follows "where," is inseparable from "when." Time and space, then, determine identity, and because these are constantly in flux, identity is never stable.
Names are used to designate objects. In Beckett, the object changes, and the subject too, with time and place, with every possible world in which the object exists, and often, so does the name: "Beckett's practice of renaming characters reflects the idea that language obscures the reality it is attempting to depict. A name brings with it a superficial sense of a person's identity" (Rubin Rabinovitz, "Repetition and Underlying Meanings in Samuel Beckett's Trilogy," Rethinking Beckett, p. 52). The commentator on NPR would likely agree with Rabinovitz's assessment here; that language, and narrative in particular, obscures reality and is therefore inessential to the creation of an identity, perhaps even detrimental.
In The Unnamable, the difference between self and other erodes and the two become indistinguishable; the narrator is Mahood, Molloy, Worm, and all of the others who make up the shifting "they," whose voices he cannot stop from blending with, and overpowering, his own. Gradually, all of the distinguishing factors that comprise identity fall away: physical deterioration and uncertainty of the physical characteristics of one's own body (the Unnamable first says, for example, that he feels his hands are stuck to his knees, then later claims that he has no limbs at all), memory, and name, including the pronoun "I." The Unnamable questions his identity so radically that he claims that he can just as easily replace "I" with "they" or any other pronoun, any other word for that matter, and it would make no difference, because it is not he who is speaking.
In contrast to these views questioning the utility of narrativity is Proust. For Proust's narrator, language and narrative, and in the last chapter of the first volume, names are essential to comprehending reality. Language is an important part of reifying internal experience; although speech is part of the life of the mind, it also provides a link to sensual experience and physical reality. Speech is symbolic, but it's inseparable from the physical manipulation of the mouth and vocal chords; when the narrator seeks any opportunity to speak the name Swann, it's to bring Gilberte from the unreachable fantasy world she occupies in his imagination and into the concrete reality of his world. He is aware that saying words associated with her and repeating her name do not impact her at all, but they do bring something of her essence into his sphere and bridge the gap between them.
Proust does not promote the idea that the name is fully stable, however; when the narrator falls in love with Gilberte, every word and name connected with her is endowed suddenly with new meaning. His reaction to the names changes, even if the names themselves do not; the objects themselves also remain constant, uneffected by the referential shift the narrator experiences. The important thing is that the narrator's consciousness has changed, and this is why, in the final pages of Swann's Way, he laments the inability to fully recover the past; the physical relics of the past are insufficient, and so are linguistic re-tellings of past events. What he seeks to recapture is his consciousness at the time. Like the Unnamable and other characters in Beckett, the narrator is not the child whose experiences he recounts, although he remembers them. He cannot return to the consciousness of that particular moment, waiting for Gilberte in the Champs-Elysees, or to catch a glimpse of Madame Swann's carriage passing under the trees in a park. He continues to search for lost time, but he knows that it must remain, at least in part, permanently, irrecoverably lost, because he can never be that boy again. Time and place have changed, and so must he.
On that point, Proust and Beckett appear to agree (keep in mind that Samuel Beckett was a Proust scholar); a past consciousness cannot possibly be recaptured. In Krapp's Last Tape, the titular Krapp bears some resemblance to Proust's narrator; he searches his memory (for Krapp, it's recorded on spools of tape) and attempts to comprehend his past self. At times, Krapp does not recognize the voice on the tape, even though it is his own; there are considerable gaps in his memory. And there are things that he wishes he did not remember and impatiently skips over portions of his former self's narrative. At the end of Swann's Way, Proust's narrator appears to experience a similar kind of alienation from the former self. This narrator's memory is more reliable, perhaps, than Krapp's, but he nevertheless fails in the same task of recovering something of the past: "how paradoxical it is to seek in reality for the pictures that are stored in one's memory, which must inevitably lose the charm that comes to them from memory itself and from their not being apprehended by the senses. The reality that I had known no longer existed... The places we have known do not belong only to the world of space on which we map them for our convenience. They were only a thin little slice, held between the contiguous impressions that composed our life at that time; the memory of a particular image is but regret for a particular moment; and houses, roads, avenues are as fugitive, alas, as the years" (Proust, p. 606).
This is how Swann's Way ends, with a tinge of regret that the years can never be brought back to life, that places changes and the moment that has passed is gone forever. The narrative of memories that the narrator presents, however, seems to be at least a partial remedy for the impossibility of recapturing moments in the senses; he can, it seems, recapture these moments, even his former consciousness, through the act of constructing a narrative. This is where the debate arises; the NPR guest would claim that the narrative is falsifying and that he is never recapturing anything of the past, but only imposing a pseudo-reality onto his experiences. For the characters in Beckett's Trilogy, narrative adds to confusion and the oblivion of self, not the establishment of an identity. The characters' identities gradually disintegrate, and in The Unnamable, the monologue also deteriorates, slipping into contradiction and tormented uncertainty, culminating in the final words, "You must go on, I can't go on, I'll go on." While Proust's narrator can revisit and experience the entirety of his consciousness, "Beckett implies that our consciousness at its most fundamental level is elusive and anonymous, and that there will always remain an unthematic, unreflective, and opaque spot in the life of the subject" (Aila, p. 138).
Yet the narrative continues; the characters are not completely anonymous, not even the Unnamable. There is a measure of self-awareness that allows for narrative and prevents them from slipping away entirely into opaqueness. Language is an essential component of retaining a sense of self; Aila writes that "there is no point outside of language from which we come to express ourselves... the power of language becomes more and more a case of excess to such a degree that it anonymously speaks in the void: It speaks solitarily with itself in the end" (Aila, p. 141). Later, it is claimed that "Beckett thinks there is no 'I' prior to stories, to narrative, and, above all, to language. The self is a mere abstraction and fictional entity created in and through the effect of language, narrative, and self-perception" (Aila, p. 143). I'm not sure that I agree with that interpretation; language is important in Beckett, but silence, I think, is infinitely more important. On a metatheatrical level, as soon as the words end, the characters meet their demise; the curtain falls after they lapse into silence. But throughout the plays, from Hamm to Vladimir and Estragon to Krapp, the characters feel that there is something essential and authentic in silence, and so they strive toward it. It may be the end of this fabricated self created through narrative, but there could be a more genuine self, a pure experience of being without the falsifications of language, in the silence.
And what about the actor in Catastrophe? Like The Unnamable, the actor is bombarded with commands and manipulated by words, he is molded into something he is not; but then, he defies the narrative. He raises his face when he was told to keep it bowed. This is an act of self-assertion, I think, and it is wholly non-linguistic.
This post has rambled on to excessive lengths, so I think that I must lapse into silence and let this monologue end. I won't go on here, but I will be back to speak more of other things.
I've inadvertantly encountered a number of discourses concerning identity and language in the past weeks, from very different sources: Samuel Beckett's novel The Unnamable, an interview on NPR, and the final chapter of Marcel Proust's Swann's Way. The essential question at hand is, what is the relationship between narrative and identity? And a subset of that is, what is the function of names in constructing an identity? Can there be a narrative without names?
I have asked these questions on this blog before, but these are questions to which I must return, continuously.
Each source provides a very different answer. The scholar on NPR insisted that there is no essential relationship between narrative and reflective consciousness; humans are not naturally narrative, and should not always use narrative as a tool in the process of reflecting on their experiences. He cited Sartre in the claim that narratives distort reality, and that reminded me of a post I had written earlier, in the particular distorting power of names. As soon as a thing is named, its identity pinned down to a consistent signifier, the name fails to address the thing's reality. A name cannot contain the thing itself, and neither can a narrative-- even a six volume narrative consisting of thousands of pages.
This notion of unnamability relates closely to Beckett's The Unnamable. The narrator of this strange novel, which has no real plot to speak of, is constantly beset by many voices, which define him and control him, forcing him to speak through a voice that is not his own, in a language that is not his own. The Unnamable longs and strives to find his own voice in this bewildering narrative, but he also desires silence. He seems to recognize that any narrative will fail to constitute an identity, or worse, will only impose on him a false identity. He yearns to recover his authentic voice, rather than continue to speak through their voices, and say something final about himself so that he may stop speaking altogether, fall into silence, and exist in pure selfhood. The tension between speech and silence is paradoxical; the only way, in the Unnamable's mind, to achieve full selfhood is to speak himself into silence, to recover his voice and then stop. I think that this is because the authentic self is so fleeting, that if he were to speak more than that single, definitive word or phrase, the voice of the other would inevitably resurface and he would have to begin the process of recovering himself again. If he could only identify when he has spoken something true of himself, and then fall silent, he would achieve ontological consistency.
According to Maimaitiming Aila, however, Beckett's characters are unwilling to entirely relinquish narrative because, without it, they sink into irrevokable oblivion. They cease to exist outside of the language that they use, especially the Unnamable, who seems to exist only as a voice. That language, though, is very inconsistent and confusing; names shift and metamorphosize, highlighting the tension between identity and anonymity. Characters have names, but they are temporally influenced; the names change over time, and through different places, suggesting that identity is not stable. Rather than the proper name functioning as "a reliable sign to designate a person, the narrators in the trilogy [of Beckett's novels Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable] hold it as a sign of the existence of a particular discourse, a moment in the stream of consciousness, and an expression of certain perceptions and ideas" (Aila, "Nothing but Dust: A Philosophical Approach to the Problem of Identity and Anonymity in Samuel Beckett's Trilogy," p. 129). This harkens back to the opening lines of The Unnamable: "Where now? Who now? When now?" These are three questions of identity; the "who" follows "where," is inseparable from "when." Time and space, then, determine identity, and because these are constantly in flux, identity is never stable.
Names are used to designate objects. In Beckett, the object changes, and the subject too, with time and place, with every possible world in which the object exists, and often, so does the name: "Beckett's practice of renaming characters reflects the idea that language obscures the reality it is attempting to depict. A name brings with it a superficial sense of a person's identity" (Rubin Rabinovitz, "Repetition and Underlying Meanings in Samuel Beckett's Trilogy," Rethinking Beckett, p. 52). The commentator on NPR would likely agree with Rabinovitz's assessment here; that language, and narrative in particular, obscures reality and is therefore inessential to the creation of an identity, perhaps even detrimental.
In The Unnamable, the difference between self and other erodes and the two become indistinguishable; the narrator is Mahood, Molloy, Worm, and all of the others who make up the shifting "they," whose voices he cannot stop from blending with, and overpowering, his own. Gradually, all of the distinguishing factors that comprise identity fall away: physical deterioration and uncertainty of the physical characteristics of one's own body (the Unnamable first says, for example, that he feels his hands are stuck to his knees, then later claims that he has no limbs at all), memory, and name, including the pronoun "I." The Unnamable questions his identity so radically that he claims that he can just as easily replace "I" with "they" or any other pronoun, any other word for that matter, and it would make no difference, because it is not he who is speaking.
In contrast to these views questioning the utility of narrativity is Proust. For Proust's narrator, language and narrative, and in the last chapter of the first volume, names are essential to comprehending reality. Language is an important part of reifying internal experience; although speech is part of the life of the mind, it also provides a link to sensual experience and physical reality. Speech is symbolic, but it's inseparable from the physical manipulation of the mouth and vocal chords; when the narrator seeks any opportunity to speak the name Swann, it's to bring Gilberte from the unreachable fantasy world she occupies in his imagination and into the concrete reality of his world. He is aware that saying words associated with her and repeating her name do not impact her at all, but they do bring something of her essence into his sphere and bridge the gap between them.
Proust does not promote the idea that the name is fully stable, however; when the narrator falls in love with Gilberte, every word and name connected with her is endowed suddenly with new meaning. His reaction to the names changes, even if the names themselves do not; the objects themselves also remain constant, uneffected by the referential shift the narrator experiences. The important thing is that the narrator's consciousness has changed, and this is why, in the final pages of Swann's Way, he laments the inability to fully recover the past; the physical relics of the past are insufficient, and so are linguistic re-tellings of past events. What he seeks to recapture is his consciousness at the time. Like the Unnamable and other characters in Beckett, the narrator is not the child whose experiences he recounts, although he remembers them. He cannot return to the consciousness of that particular moment, waiting for Gilberte in the Champs-Elysees, or to catch a glimpse of Madame Swann's carriage passing under the trees in a park. He continues to search for lost time, but he knows that it must remain, at least in part, permanently, irrecoverably lost, because he can never be that boy again. Time and place have changed, and so must he.
On that point, Proust and Beckett appear to agree (keep in mind that Samuel Beckett was a Proust scholar); a past consciousness cannot possibly be recaptured. In Krapp's Last Tape, the titular Krapp bears some resemblance to Proust's narrator; he searches his memory (for Krapp, it's recorded on spools of tape) and attempts to comprehend his past self. At times, Krapp does not recognize the voice on the tape, even though it is his own; there are considerable gaps in his memory. And there are things that he wishes he did not remember and impatiently skips over portions of his former self's narrative. At the end of Swann's Way, Proust's narrator appears to experience a similar kind of alienation from the former self. This narrator's memory is more reliable, perhaps, than Krapp's, but he nevertheless fails in the same task of recovering something of the past: "how paradoxical it is to seek in reality for the pictures that are stored in one's memory, which must inevitably lose the charm that comes to them from memory itself and from their not being apprehended by the senses. The reality that I had known no longer existed... The places we have known do not belong only to the world of space on which we map them for our convenience. They were only a thin little slice, held between the contiguous impressions that composed our life at that time; the memory of a particular image is but regret for a particular moment; and houses, roads, avenues are as fugitive, alas, as the years" (Proust, p. 606).
This is how Swann's Way ends, with a tinge of regret that the years can never be brought back to life, that places changes and the moment that has passed is gone forever. The narrative of memories that the narrator presents, however, seems to be at least a partial remedy for the impossibility of recapturing moments in the senses; he can, it seems, recapture these moments, even his former consciousness, through the act of constructing a narrative. This is where the debate arises; the NPR guest would claim that the narrative is falsifying and that he is never recapturing anything of the past, but only imposing a pseudo-reality onto his experiences. For the characters in Beckett's Trilogy, narrative adds to confusion and the oblivion of self, not the establishment of an identity. The characters' identities gradually disintegrate, and in The Unnamable, the monologue also deteriorates, slipping into contradiction and tormented uncertainty, culminating in the final words, "You must go on, I can't go on, I'll go on." While Proust's narrator can revisit and experience the entirety of his consciousness, "Beckett implies that our consciousness at its most fundamental level is elusive and anonymous, and that there will always remain an unthematic, unreflective, and opaque spot in the life of the subject" (Aila, p. 138).
Yet the narrative continues; the characters are not completely anonymous, not even the Unnamable. There is a measure of self-awareness that allows for narrative and prevents them from slipping away entirely into opaqueness. Language is an essential component of retaining a sense of self; Aila writes that "there is no point outside of language from which we come to express ourselves... the power of language becomes more and more a case of excess to such a degree that it anonymously speaks in the void: It speaks solitarily with itself in the end" (Aila, p. 141). Later, it is claimed that "Beckett thinks there is no 'I' prior to stories, to narrative, and, above all, to language. The self is a mere abstraction and fictional entity created in and through the effect of language, narrative, and self-perception" (Aila, p. 143). I'm not sure that I agree with that interpretation; language is important in Beckett, but silence, I think, is infinitely more important. On a metatheatrical level, as soon as the words end, the characters meet their demise; the curtain falls after they lapse into silence. But throughout the plays, from Hamm to Vladimir and Estragon to Krapp, the characters feel that there is something essential and authentic in silence, and so they strive toward it. It may be the end of this fabricated self created through narrative, but there could be a more genuine self, a pure experience of being without the falsifications of language, in the silence.
And what about the actor in Catastrophe? Like The Unnamable, the actor is bombarded with commands and manipulated by words, he is molded into something he is not; but then, he defies the narrative. He raises his face when he was told to keep it bowed. This is an act of self-assertion, I think, and it is wholly non-linguistic.
This post has rambled on to excessive lengths, so I think that I must lapse into silence and let this monologue end. I won't go on here, but I will be back to speak more of other things.
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