So, basically I was in the ballpark with my understanding of Bennett and Royle's direction.
Dr. M started talking about semiotics, which helped clarify where B&R were coming from when they talk about language. The idea is that everything is based on systems of arbitrary signs and that signs only have meaning in relation to other signs, and that these signs are what make up "language" in the B&R sense.
To illustrate this, Dr. M talked about traffic lights. The colors of the lights (red, yellow and green) don't have any inherent meanings, only meanings we've agreed to accept (red = stop, yellow = slow down, green = go). Another culture or group of people might use blue to mean "slow down". Then, to illustrate that signs can be reinterpreted and given "heretical" or "different" meanings, he mentioned the joke about "yellow means 'go faster'". Then he extended this to other sign systems and said it was possible to have "heretical" readings of other signs. In the novel we're reading, "Alias Grace", he described how Grace's reading of class, gender and other "languages" of the mid-19th century was "heretical" because she did not accept the stereotypical interpretations (for example, that female servants were prone to promiscuity).
So, to the extent that we interpret everything in terms of signs and their relationship to other signs, that is, language, the world is always mediated by language.
The place were I still don't agree is the view that
The "fiction of immediacy" extends from this to say not only can we not reach beyond the text of the "alternate universe" of a piece of writing, but also to say that we cannot reach beyond the text of what we perceive (everything is based on signs, hence is language, hence is a text) to anything deeper or transcendent. In my view, this eventually has to say (relativist, poststructuralist, existential, whatever) that there is nothing outside what we perceive or will eventually be able to perceive or describe in language -- there is no transcendental (God, Truth, Reality), only realities and truths and maybe gods. This is also what Derrida meant by no "outside-text" in the B&R translation.
Finally, the idea that a text undermines the notion of the world... This seems to have two flavors. One, because one can apply a "heretical" reading to any text, that reading can revise, restate or bring about change in how others view the text, destabilizing the world. This kind of action is seen whenever social attitudes change (be that for better or worse). Second, because the world is perceived through text, they can't really be easily separated and the notion that there is something outside text is weakened.
While I understand all this intellectually and can probably apply the basic ideas within the space of literature (we can find different meanings in books, readings should attempt to be aware of the signs they implicitly reference, etc.), that doesn't mean I accept it as the way I want to live my life. Relativism taken to its logical end means there can be no judgment of right and wrong because everything is relative to the individual and the individual's perceptions and interpretations. When that happens there can be no crime. Rape, murder, cruelty to animals, flying planes into buildings, it's all good.
03 September 2008
02 September 2008
LIT4934 - Workbook Entry 01: "First Love"
Our first reading for Beckett class (LIT4934) is Beckett's short story, "First Love". The first thing that I noted is that it is (thankfully) a bit more readable than some of the earlier works found in our Beckett short story collection, though it is still dense, dense reading. Much of the text dwells on the narrator's misery and general displeasure with life, the universe and everything.
One of the passages that best expresses this idea is on page 31 in our anthology. The narrator is homeless (possibly a metaphor for being completely exposed to the cosmic horror of the total meaninglessness expounded by existentialism). He sleeps on a bench facing the canal. A woman has been coming to his bench for a few days and disturbing his isolation. On the evening in question, she has convinced him to stretch out on his bench with his feet in her lap and has begun stroking his ankles. This causes him to have an erection, "physically too," he says.
Let's restate "erection" as "arousal". She's aroused not only his body, but his mind, drawing him out of his isolated, "dispeopled kingdom" and undoing the "supineness in the mind" that was "what mattered" to him. The narrator describes this state of arousal as follows. "One is no longer oneself, on such occasions, and it is painful to be no longer oneself, even more painful if possible than when one is. For when one is one knows what to do to be less so, whereas when one is not one is any old one irredeemably."
This passage lays out a paradox. The narrator says that being himself, he at least knows how to be less himself so he can mitigate the pain of being, but in this aroused state of mind, he is less himself, but the pain is worse because he doesn't know how to mitigate it when he is not himself. Either state "being himself or not being himself" is utter misery. Unless he can find some alternate, quantum state that lets him be himself and not himself simultaneously, he will be miserable in whatever state his existence takes. Perhaps he was (or at least believed he was) holding himself in an indeterminate state before he became aroused. Perhaps being aroused collapsed the quantum function and he is now in a determined state instead of an indeterminate state.
"What goes by the name of love is banishment, with now and then a postcard from the homeland, such is my considered opinion, this evening." So says the narrator immediately after declaring his pain caused by the arousal of his mind from its earlier indeterminate state. He has been banished from his "dispeopled kingdom" and longs to go back. One might find this subtly ironic because Beckett left his homeland, Ireland, for France and remained most of the rest of his life there with only occasional visits to Ireland. He was self-banished, but seemed to prefer it. More to the point, love is banishment for the misanthrope, and there is little doubt the narrator is a misanthrope, preferring to keep company with the dead in graveyards than with the stinking living, isolated in his "dispeopled kingdom", describing the country's "scant population" as a major factor in it's "charm" (bottom p.33), saying the woman's name isn't important, changing it from Lulu to Anna midstream in the story.
As the story progresses, the narrator eventually moves into the woman's apartment, moving all the furniture out of one of the rooms, sleeping on a couch faced against a wall (probably a womb image since Beckett seemed to be fascinated with "return to the womb" psychology). They possibly have sex at some point, but the narrator doesn't seem to remember the details, saying his "night was most agitated. I woke next morning quite worn out, my clothes in disorder, the blanket likewise, and Anna beside me, naked naturally." After that, she brings his meals and he stays on the sofa facing the wall. Eventually he leaves her after she gives birth to a child she says is his, though she has been sleeping with many other men in the intervening time.
The narrator concludes, "I could have done with other love perhaps. But there it is, either you love or you don't." This is likely the crux of the story. Did the narrator really love Lulu/Anna? He says he did, but he also admits he has no basis for knowing what love is. Given how he treated her, how he wanted nothing to do with her, and how he expressed disgust with her, it seems unlikely that he did. One must first love himself before he can love someone else. One must first love.
One of the passages that best expresses this idea is on page 31 in our anthology. The narrator is homeless (possibly a metaphor for being completely exposed to the cosmic horror of the total meaninglessness expounded by existentialism). He sleeps on a bench facing the canal. A woman has been coming to his bench for a few days and disturbing his isolation. On the evening in question, she has convinced him to stretch out on his bench with his feet in her lap and has begun stroking his ankles. This causes him to have an erection, "physically too," he says.
Let's restate "erection" as "arousal". She's aroused not only his body, but his mind, drawing him out of his isolated, "dispeopled kingdom" and undoing the "supineness in the mind" that was "what mattered" to him. The narrator describes this state of arousal as follows. "One is no longer oneself, on such occasions, and it is painful to be no longer oneself, even more painful if possible than when one is. For when one is one knows what to do to be less so, whereas when one is not one is any old one irredeemably."
This passage lays out a paradox. The narrator says that being himself, he at least knows how to be less himself so he can mitigate the pain of being, but in this aroused state of mind, he is less himself, but the pain is worse because he doesn't know how to mitigate it when he is not himself. Either state "being himself or not being himself" is utter misery. Unless he can find some alternate, quantum state that lets him be himself and not himself simultaneously, he will be miserable in whatever state his existence takes. Perhaps he was (or at least believed he was) holding himself in an indeterminate state before he became aroused. Perhaps being aroused collapsed the quantum function and he is now in a determined state instead of an indeterminate state.
"What goes by the name of love is banishment, with now and then a postcard from the homeland, such is my considered opinion, this evening." So says the narrator immediately after declaring his pain caused by the arousal of his mind from its earlier indeterminate state. He has been banished from his "dispeopled kingdom" and longs to go back. One might find this subtly ironic because Beckett left his homeland, Ireland, for France and remained most of the rest of his life there with only occasional visits to Ireland. He was self-banished, but seemed to prefer it. More to the point, love is banishment for the misanthrope, and there is little doubt the narrator is a misanthrope, preferring to keep company with the dead in graveyards than with the stinking living, isolated in his "dispeopled kingdom", describing the country's "scant population" as a major factor in it's "charm" (bottom p.33), saying the woman's name isn't important, changing it from Lulu to Anna midstream in the story.
As the story progresses, the narrator eventually moves into the woman's apartment, moving all the furniture out of one of the rooms, sleeping on a couch faced against a wall (probably a womb image since Beckett seemed to be fascinated with "return to the womb" psychology). They possibly have sex at some point, but the narrator doesn't seem to remember the details, saying his "night was most agitated. I woke next morning quite worn out, my clothes in disorder, the blanket likewise, and Anna beside me, naked naturally." After that, she brings his meals and he stays on the sofa facing the wall. Eventually he leaves her after she gives birth to a child she says is his, though she has been sleeping with many other men in the intervening time.
The narrator concludes, "I could have done with other love perhaps. But there it is, either you love or you don't." This is likely the crux of the story. Did the narrator really love Lulu/Anna? He says he did, but he also admits he has no basis for knowing what love is. Given how he treated her, how he wanted nothing to do with her, and how he expressed disgust with her, it seems unlikely that he did. One must first love himself before he can love someone else. One must first love.
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