I really enjoyed reading my diaries from Ouch! again so I've decided to post my essays from my final year of university here as well.....hell, they deserve to be somewhere. It's a retro feast! In order, we have: Modern Gothic, The Body, Contemporary American Writing, The Beat Vision, and my Dissertation. The Body is probably my favourite. The Dissertation was a real labour - the whole thing was done in one 12 hour sitting. The commentary for it is particularly hilarious, I was definitely seeing things at that point. Not that it matters.....I still passed the fucking thing.
Transgression and Transformation: Modern Gothic 1/3/06
Assignment Three
‘We live in Gothic times’. Examine three texts in the light of this proposition
Angela Carter’s suggestion that we live in Gothic times is without doubt an interesting one. In his introduction to the genre, Fred Botting makes the following observation :
“Gothic atmospheres - gloomy and mysterious - have repeatedly signalled the disturbing return of pasts upon presents and evoked emotions of terror and laughter. In the twentieth century, in diverse and ambiguous ways, Gothic figures have continued to shadow the progress of modernity with counter-narratives displaying the underside of enlightenment and humanist values…If not a purely negative term, Gothic writing remains fascinated by objects and practices that are constructed as negative, irrational, immoral and fantastic”#.
In this essay I intend to use Botting’s model of the genre to examine three fairly recent texts that could be considered as Gothic - Daphne Du Maurier’s ‘Rebecca’, Jean Rhys’s ‘Wide Sargasso Sea’ and Arundhati Roy’s ‘The God of Small Things’ There are several reasons I have chosen these particular texts as, as well as being quite different from one another, they also exhibit several key themes which link them together in terms of displaying supposed Gothic sensibilities. Beginning with Rebecca, I intend to examine each text in terms of it’s relation to Gothic in the following areas; gender, feminist perspective and the uncanny. All of the texts are Gothic in how Botting describes the genre as being concerned with atmosphere, and this is immediately obvious with ‘Rebecca‘:
“ ‘I think it’s a pity you came back to Manderley so soon’, said Beatrice, ‘it would have been far better to potter about in Italy for three or for months, and then come back in the middle of the summer. Done Maxim a power of good too, besides being easier from your point of view. I can’t help feeling it’s going to be rather a strain here for you at first’. ‘Oh, I don’t think so‘, I said. ‘I know I shall come to love Manderley’. She did not answer, and we strolled backwards and forwards across the lawns.”#
In many ways, this passage encompasses the atmospheric and Gothic difficulties encountered in Du Maurier’s text. The hostility that the new Mrs De Winter finds herself on the other end of is not physical, but rather indicative of a more psychological barrier left by the still tangible memory of her husband’s ex-wife. This is non more so obvious as when the couple return from their honeymoon in Italy. Mrs De Winter does not know how to react to her new surrounding - the daunting task of being the leading lady in a such a sizeable estate as Manderley is not a responsibility she is comfortable with. Her interactions with the servants and butlers at Manderley compound this - particularly the vindictive Mrs Danvers, who will not tolerate anything done differently or even slightly out of step with the way Rebecca did things. The clarity and level of Danvers’ distaste for Maxim’s new wife is highlighted on the night of the traditional and eagerly anticipated costume ball - her ensuring that she wears the same dress as Rebecca on the night is proof enough of this, and Du Maurier sets the event in the darkest, most Gothic context possible:
“I felt very much the same as I did the morning I was married. The same stifled feeling that I had gone too far now to turn back. The evening had got to be endured…I came forward to the head of the stairs and stood there, smiling, my hat in my hand, like the girl in the picture. I waited for the clapping and laughter that would follow as I walked slowly down the stairs. Nobody clapped, Nobody moved…Something was wrong, they had not understood…Then Maxim moved forward to the stairs, his eyes never leaving my face. ‘What the hell do you think you are doing?’ he asked. His eyes blazed in anger, his face was still ashen white…I brushed past him, stumbling, not looking where I went. Then I saw that the door to the west wing was open, and that someone was standing there. It was Mrs Danvers. I shall never forget the expression on her face, loathsome, triumphant. The face of an exulting devil.”#
Here we are introduced to the idea of the uncanny in Du Maurier’s text, and Gothic ‘doubles’ - Caroline serves in many ways as a double for Rebecca, and it is only as the story progresses that the difference between the two women is really observed. The themes and ideas in ‘Rebecca’ as a Gothic text are somewhat mirrored in Jean Rhys’ ’Wide Sargasso Sea’. Interestingly, the book as a whole can almost be seen as a doppelganger in itself - the foundations of it as a work of literature are borrowed extensively and entirely from ‘Jane Eyre’. It’s themes of race, politics and history permeate throughout the novel but - much like Arundhati Roy does with God of Small Things - the author pervades a sense of isolation, forbidden love and quiet madness throughout her work, which stems from a desperate need to belong. By attempting to create an entirely new story based around the life of Bronte’s character from ‘Jane Eyre’ Bertha Mason - known in Rhys’s work as Antoinette Cosway - Rhys is deliberately and in a very Gothic manner, offering a different perspective and level of understanding to an already recognised literary character. By crafting a possible explanation as to why Bertha eventually went mad, she is subverting and challenged Bronte’s depiction of Bertha as uncomplicatedly insane and unbearable to the extreme:
“In this room I wake early and lie shivering, for it is very cold…the coal smoulders and glowers. In the end the flames shoot up and they are beautiful. I get out of bed to go close and watch them and to wonder why I have been brought here. For what reason? There must be a reason. What is it that I must do? When I first came here I thought it would be for a day, two days, a week perhaps. I thought that when I saw him and spoke to him I would be wise as serpents, harmless as doves…But he never came…What am I doing in this place and who am I?”#
In keeping with Fred Botting’s views on the nature of Gothic, and indeed Angela Carter’s statement, Bertha is also tellingly described in the novel as ‘the girl who lives in her own darkness’. In ‘Gothic and Gender: An Introduction’, author Donna Heiland comments extensively on the issue of female ‘madness’ throughout history and in relation to Gothic. Here, she explains in detail the colonial and historical aspects that may impact on Gothic from a feminist perspective, and her suggestions can be applied to not only Rhys and Roy, but also Du Maurier, given each novel’s historical context, and the books as texts that can be viewed in conjunction with one another:
“The notion that female solidarity is necessary for women to escape the literal and figurative constraints on their lives pervades…madness, which finally emerges as a way of escaping the confines of bodily existence. She describes her initial loss of sanity in this way: “The deep melancholy which had seized upon my brain soon tinctured my whole mass of blood - my intellects strangely blackened and confused…madness is simply a reflection of what exists outside herself” A substantive existence…is either trapped or driven out by appearances, with the result that the world is peopled by shadows, illusions, and ghosts, and can only be described as gothic”.#
Heiland’s suggestions are interesting when it comes to examining Arundhati Roy’s ‘The God of Small Things’. Arguably, the sense of increasing tension and the non sequential narratives in Roy’s novel are the most important aspects within it in terms of creating a Gothic atmosphere. There is again also a penetrating sense of madness however as both Ammu and Baby Kochamma go mad - in the style suggested by Heiland - as they are victims, both physically, mentally and spiritually, to the passage of time and the subject of circumstance. Without a doubt, however, the most Gothic aspect to The God of Small Things is the one event around which all others hinge: the death of Sophie Mol:
“The family stood huddled together…Though Ammu, Estha and Rachel were allowed to attend the funeral, they were made to stand separately, not with the rest of the family. Nobody would look at them. It was hot in church, and the white edges of the arum lilies crisped and curled. A bee died in a coffin flower. Ammu’s hands shook and her hymnbook with it…Inside the earth Sophie Mol screamed, and shredded satin with her teeth. But you can’t hear screams through earth and stone. Sophie Mol died because she couldn’t breathe. Her funeral killed her”.#
In conclusion, it is easy to see how all three of these texts can be related to the Gothic genre and the assertion that we live in Gothic times. Perhaps it would be appropriate, given the texts and how they relate and rely heavily on representations of the human body to express their Gothic tendencies, to end with a quote from Kelly Hurley, who asserts in her book ‘The Gothic Body’ that the human form is perhaps the most significant embodiment of the term Gothic, particularly in relation to the fin-de-siecle phenomenon:
“…the ruination of the human subject…of traditional constructs of human identity that accompanied the modelling of new ones at the turn of the century. In place of a human body stable and integral (at least, liable no worse than the ravages of time and disease) the fin-de-siecle Gothic offers the spectacle of a body metamorphic and undifferentiated; in place of the possibility of human transcendence, the prospect of an existence circumscribed within the realities of gross corporeality; in place of a unitary and securely bounded human subjectivity, one that is both fragmented and permeable.”#
Bibliography:
Botting, Fred. Gothic: The New Critical Idiom Routledge,1996
Du Maurier, Daphne. Rebecca Virago Press, 2003
Heiland, Donna. Gothic and Gender: An Introduction Blackwell Publishing, 2004
Hurley, Kelly. The Gothic Body: Sexuality, Materialism, and Degeneration at the Fin-
De-Siecle Cambridge University Press, 1996
Rhys, Jean. Wide Sargasso Sea Penguin Books, 1997
Roy, Arundhati. The God of Small Things Harper Perennial, 2004
The Body: Assignment One
How far is the human body and it’s various forms used as a vehicle for expression and as a central character in itself in Benjamin Lebert’s ‘Crazy‘?
In Benjamin Lebert’s debut novel, ‘Crazy‘, the author explores issues of the body pertaining to pain, pleasure, the body and the soul and the theoretical and practical difference between the two. What makes Lebert’s novel unique is something multifaceted - not only was he just sixteen years of age when the book was published, but it is astonishing to learn that the names, places, people and events depicted in ‘Crazy’ are by and large factually accurate, with the true to life experiences of author - particularly his relationship with his own body and the bodies of those around him - resting at the centre of the story. However, to fully understand ‘Crazy’ and successfully explicate the concepts and ideas examined within it, it is first essential to set ‘the body’ as a whole into some kind of separate and isolated context - only then will it be safe to bring the human body as it is depicted in “Crazy” to life, and consequently to analysis. In reality, bodies and texts have long been intertwined. Indeed, one could argue that ever since the recounting of the crucifixion of Christ in the Bible, poets, philosophers and writers alike have been presented with the fundamental problem of how to overcome the issue of Incarnation when incorporating aspects of the human body into their work. Principally of course, the major issue surrounding Incarnation in literature is not so much one of religion as it is one of practicality. In ‘Discipline And Punish: The Birth Of The Prison’ renowned theorist Michel Foucault argues that the body and the soul must be looked at from a dualistic perspective, in order that both may be fully understood:
“It would be wrong to say that the soul is an illusion, or an ideological effect. On the contrary, it exists, it has a reality, it is produced permanently around, on, within the body…This is the historical reality of this soul. It is not that a real man…has been substituted for the soul…A ‘soul’ inhabits him and brings him to existence, which is itself a factor in the mastery that power exercises over the body.”#
Shortly after this rumination, Foucault goes on to suggest that perhaps the soul is ‘the prison of the body‘. Here, there lies one of the most interesting aspects of Foucault’s theory in relation to the representation of a body in text. It is perhaps much easier to visualise the other way around; that the body might be a prison for the soul. However, choosing to meet Foucault’s argument with visions of a trapped and stifled soul, desperately attempting to escape the confines of a cruel and restrictive body that offers it nothing except despair, would be foolish. Instead, Foucault is offering the possibility that the soul is its own self-contained prison within the body, operating around, and certainly at times in conjunction with, the body itself. This ideal is one which is certainly more aligned with the themes, ideas, and narrative exploration that is navigated within ‘Crazy’, and serves as a good platform from which we can begin examining the book. One of the most startling aspects of ‘Crazy’ is undoubtedly the clarity of expression and at the same time depth of perception offered by the author. At such a young age, it is quite remarkable that Lebert immediately engages with issues of physicality, sex, death, philosophy and friendship in a brutally honest and yet naively endearing fashion. What is all the more fascinating is the totally autobiographical nature of the story, which serves to enhance rather than undermine the ease with which the reader can engage with the narrative voice offered by Lebert. The book charts Lebert’s time at Castle Neuseelen Boarding School, and begins with a simple and accessible statement of his surroundings and current situation:
“So this is where I’m supposed to stay. Until I graduate, if possible. That’s the plan. I stand in the parking lot of Castle Neuseelen Boarding School and look around. My parents are standing beside me. They brought me here. I’ve got four schools behind me now. This is to be my fifth. And the fifth is finally supposed to raise my damn math score from a 6 to a 5. I can’t wait”#
Immediately, Lebert sets the tone here with which he is to address the reader throughout the novel. It could be argued that even within this short and introductory paragraph, an inherent sense of the awareness of physicality, surroundings and people is already beginning to build.
A little later however, we are introduced much more specifically to Lebert and his disability -notably by a third-party - and the idea of the novel as a meditation on the human form really begins to take off:
“How many times have I pushed this envelope into a teacher’s hand? A dozen a least. Now I get to do it again. Jorg Richter reaches hastily for the envelope. His eyes glint with curiosity. He opens the letter. To my horror he reads it out loud. His voice is clear and full of understanding…My son Benjamin has had a partial paralysis of the left side of the body since birth…he either cannot perform or has difficulty performing such fine motor tasks as tying his shoes, using a knife and fork…any movement that involves a sense of balance…as the last word is read out, I shut my eyes.”#
From this point on, the pace of the novel picks up incredibly quickly, and the importance of the representations of various bodies in the text intensifies. One of the main ways in which the author brings this change about is through the introduction of other characters. Just as the reader was introduced candidly and informally to Lebert and his disability, so the same thing happens for each of the core characters in the story. Crucially, each one of these essential accomplices to Lebert’s story has some trait which marks them out as physically different. Equally important to this is each character’s own measure of self awareness, which continually feeds into the representations of the body in the text, and later on, into the philosophical aspects of the story. In ‘The Body In Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World‘, Elaine Scarry suggests that one of the factors that help give a body a successful voice is the expression and experience of pain. Expanding upon this, she suggests there might well be something in the idea of self imposed torture as a kind of vehicle to demonstrate the unity of shared experience - a theory which very much resonates throughout the whole of ‘Crazy’. Scarry writes:
“This dissolution of the boundary between inside and outside gives rise to a fourth aspect of the felt experience of physical pain, an almost obscene conflation of private and public. It brings with it all the solitude of absolute privacy with none of its safety, all the self-exposure of the utterly public with…its possibility for camaraderie or shared experience. Artistic objectifications of pain often concentrate on this combination of isolation and exposure”#
If then we take Scarry’s theory on artistic objectifications and Foucault’s propositions on the relationship between body and soul, we now have some solid foundations on which to really begin examining ‘Crazy’ as a text chiefly concerned with the human body. Arguably, the major turning point in the book occurs when the boys set off on an after hours trip across the boarding school to get to the girl’s dormitories. Again, it is not merely the action itself which contains the interest, but rather the way in which the crusade is portrayed by the author, and the events which precede and follow the incident - our narrator’s first experience of sex sparks a major philosophical revolution that permeates right through to the novel’s close. Before all of this, however, Lebert and his cohorts must explore within themselves and each other that juxtaposition of isolation and exposure that Scarry maintains is essential when expressing physicality:
“So things start to roll. Another pointless event. The same six of us. Janosch says these pointless events will single us out. As I look around, I see he’s right. Here we all are - the pointless eventers. Florian a.k.a. Girl, in a rust coloured pyjama top and white undershorts. His bare feet patter on the linoleum floor…Next to him Fat Felix. Apparently he doesn’t often go along on trips to the girls corridor…Which is why the others always make sure Felix has a lot to drink…Behind him are Skinny Felix and Troy. The two big question marks. Nobody knows much about them.” #
It is clear from the above passage that the body exists in the framework of Lebert’s narrative almost as an entirely separate entity, linking each character together. As the actions and situations of ‘Crazy’ move into more spiritual territory - mainly through the dialogue between Lebert and his friends - it is important to note that the body in no way takes a back seat. If anything, the body and soul become more intertwined as the novel goes on, and there are arguably two major and pivotal events within it that facilitate this movement. The first is Lebert’s experience of losing his virginity, and the second is the decision made by all six friends to abscond from Castle Neuseelen and head out on a pilgrimage to Munich. These episodes happen consecutively, and it is arguable that one leads directly to the other - that the liberation experienced by the author in terms of such a physical release results in an awakening of a much broader context. Writing again in ‘The Body In Pain‘, Scarry observes that:
“The invented god and its human inventor...are differentiated by the immunity of the one and the woundability of the other; and if the creature is...handicapped or physically marred in some way, then that individual is asserted to exist at an even greater moral distance from God than does the “normal” person”.#
This concept is a particularly interesting one when examining ‘Crazy’ - not least because the central argument which underlines it is at once validated and contradicted in Lebert’s text. The subject of life as a ‘handicapped or physically marred’ individual - to borrow Scarry’s blatant language - is discussed at length as the book progresses, as is the philosophical nature of life itself and, invariably, the question of how (indeed if at all) any kind of God has any kind of responsibility toward those who experience an altered lifestyle due to their physicality. As Lebert himself remarks in the book:
‘The good Lord should cut me some slack. We can behave as if nothing happened. The whole thing is beginning to get too complicated for me....what moron ever came up with this idea?’#
Theoretically, the ‘idea’ Lebert is referring to could be seen as life itself, and this fits in with the evolving ethos of the novel as it draws to an end. The trip to Munich signifies a greater turn toward the characters interacting and philosophising about their position - the role of themselves as individuals versus the impact that any sort of God could have on them in their lives. Where the body fits into this is interesting - the device Lebert uses to bring forward this transition is the introduction of another character whom they meet on their travels, an old man who forces them to examine their own mortality:
“You will certainly get old, my boy. Thats life. All parts of you will get old: your soul, your heart, your opinions. Whether you grow old or not is a matter of chance. And whether you sing the song of life or not is up to God. It’s that simple”#
This meeting brings the question of mortality and the body to the novel and, as the book draws to a close, this is something which Lebert chooses to deal with in more detail. Lebert uses several devices to illustrate this and whilst the old man is the central one, there are other far more subtle ways in which the author deals with this dichotomy. Lebert becomes deliberately self-referential and intertextual, using an encounter with not only the old man himself, but also with the Ernest Hemingway novel ‘The Old Man and The Sea’, as a way to examine the body in relation to age, time and the inevitable spectacle of death:
“I give myself over to my text and read it loudly and clearly, only making occasional mistakes…Soon Janosch isn’t the only one listening; the others have pricked up their ears as well and they’re gaping at me wide eyed…I don’t know how long I read, but it’s a damn long time…The old man loses the battle with the sea…The guys faces are all red…Glob and Skinny Felix are so upset they reach for each others hands, and there are tears in their eyes.”#
This passage is an interesting and significant one. Using the technique of positioning a novel within a novel as a character in it’s own right, Lebert highlights the vital relationship between the body and language itself - the reactions the latter can impose on the former. This relationship is, in a way, the crux of the novel. As it draws to a close, ‘Crazy’ accelerates it’s exploration of the body even more, as the final major act on the character’s pilgrimage to Munich involves a visit to a strip club. This experience again brings the issue of physicality in the novel back full circle:
“He runs his hand through my hair and smiles. I’ve never seen Janosch smile like that before, and I’ll never see him smile like that again. Troy has joy nailed all over his face with big fat pushpins. Even Fat Felix is laughing…He can’t wait for Angelique…She’s wearing high heels. Black suede. She insinuates her leg around one of the iron poles.”#
Overall, then, it is easy enough to see ‘Crazy’ as a text in which the most prominent and significant character is the human body itself. However, what becomes even clearer as the text is explored is the way in which the author uses the human body as a vehicle for expressing the intricacies of the mind, the desires of the soul and the purity of the heart. When considering this, perhaps it would be appropriate to cite Armand Marie Leroi, who, in his book ‘Mutants’ makes the following simple and encompassing observation:
“The genetic grammars of all creatures are quite similar. But just as, over time, the vocabulary and grammatical rules of human languages diverge from one another in ways large and small, so too do the languages of…the human body…We must approach the human body more circumspectly. We must find mutants.”#
Bibliography:
Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Penguin Social Sciences,
1977
Lebert, Benjamin. Crazy. Hamish Hamilton Ltd, 2000
Leroi, Armand Marie. Mutants: On the form, varieties and errors of the human body.
HarperCollins Publishers, 2003
Scarry, Elaine. The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World. Oxford
University Press, 1985
Contemporary American Writing - Assingment One 12/03/06
The postmodern strategy of de-composition exists to disintegrate, to atomise and fragment rather than to create a community. How do two texts employ postmodern strategies to express anxieties about social breakdown?
Arguably, decomposition and social breakdown are the two most recognisable facets of any postmodern text. Two texts that deal, in great detail, with the issues surrounding the anxieties, fears and ultimate disintegration of community in a postmodern setting are Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner and John Sayles’ Lone Star. Whilst the two films might appear to have very little in common at first glance, beneath the trappings and superficialities of routine filmic conventions there exists a deep bond between the two directors in their depiction and exploration of the social fabric involved in postmodernism. In his book ‘The illusions of postmodernism’, Terry Eagleton suggests that the key to understanding postmodernism as a concept is to first of all grasp the importance of history in relation to universal identity:
“Only when we have the institutional means of determining our own histories will we cease to be constrained by History. In this sense, the humanist notion of the self-determining agent, and the postmodern conception of the multiple subject, are not finally at odds. But they are at odds for us now - since to bring about those conditions would involve instrumental action, determinate purposes, ideas of truth, precise forms of knowledge, [and] collective subjectivities…”#
If, then, we take Eagleton’s theory as a platform from which to examine Lone Star against Blade Runner as contemporary texts dealing with a postmodern ‘strategy of decomposition’ we can subsequently start to dissect both films in relation to how they deal with social breakdown and the issue of community and identity. Lone Star and Blade Runner deal with these things in ways that are at once both polarised and extremely similar. Beginning with Lone Star I will examine how these similarities and differences are presented in the films. Sayles film is, ultimately, a search for truth within the complex maze of history. Each character - from Buddy Deeds to Pilar Cruz to Charley Wade - must deal with not only their own history but the histories of those around them. Crucially, Sayles presents history as a multifaceted, three dimensional and interconnected structure, and this informs much of the film’s postmodern feel. On the subject of the film being, denotatively and principally, about the burdens of history, commentator Tomas Sandoval notes:
“The film arrives at conclusions…..worth consideration, for in many ways, they speak to our own condition today. By more than simply echoing the mantra of self-empowerment and human agency, Lone Star offers insight into the ways in which human beings can exist outside of history by choosing to exist within the present. But the question remains to be answered: Is John Sayles right? If blood (and history) only mean what we let it, then why have humans always felt so compelled to act as they are told from the past rather than from the present?”#
This concept of history as a burden is certainly an interesting one. As Sam Deeds struggles to uncover the truth about Wade’s murder in a town still intoxicated with the memory of his recently passed father, he must simultaneously consider and battle with his own feelings towards his past and how he regards his revered namesake. There are several main reasons for this inner struggle and, although by the film’s close Sam’s dichotomy has almost completely turned around, the events which triggered it in the first place illustrate pointedly how the film deals with postmodernism and communal social breakdown. The first reason Sam struggles is own view of his father pitted against the views of the rest of the town. Already living in the shadow of Buddy Deeds - who was loved and respected unconditionally by the Frontera townsfolk because of the towns past and the fact that Buddy replaced the tyranny of Charley Wade as sheriff - Sam is facing not only the burden of being his father‘s son and taking over his fathers job, but also the fact that his father is his main suspect in the case of Wade’s murder. Apart from wrestling with the guilt of not holding the same view of Buddy as everyone else - and, crucially, the guilt of not really knowing or understanding within himself, at least in the beginning of the film, what view he actually does hold of his dead father - Sam also holds much resent toward Buddy for Buddy’s (perceived, by Sam) role in the destruction of his relationship with Pilar Cruz. Of course, much like in Blade Runner, as the film progresses, the stipulations and notions of identity, truth and personal reality are challenged and undergo metamorphosis to the point of being unrecognisable quite quickly. In Lone Star, these changes take place in two main areas. As it is chiefly a border text, Sayles weaves into the film a background narrative concerning the geography of the town of Frontera. The politics of the imminent prominence of the Mexican population in the town becomes an issue that threatens to change the past, present and future of the town perpetually. The other area in which Sayles explores breakdown, change, and interpersonal revelations is of course to further expand on the relationship triangle that exists between Pilar Cruz, and Buddy and Sam Deeds. This is done slowly over the course of the film’s constantly changing, chameleon like narrative as Sam realises that several key factors - in both his past and present, which are sure to affect his future - are definitely not as he had previously perceived them to be. Perhaps the less significant of these revelations (and only marginally less significant) is Sam finally discovering the identity of Charley Wade’s killer. Here Sayles has set up a complex, almost leap-frog style system of character roles that plays with and examines the model of postmodernism offered by Eagleton: Sam discovers that his father, the ex-sheriff, was not the murderer of Wade (for the sake of ease and the simplicity of the theory, the ex-ex-sheriff) but rather that the culprit was Hollis Pogue, the current mayor of the town. Cleverly, this allows Sam (the current sheriff) to in at least some capacity, cast off the underlying weight of his past, or to paraphrase Eagleton, to free himself of the constraints of his own history, and also to change and reconcile within his own mind his feelings about Buddy Deeds, and being Buddy Deed’s son. This freeing of constraints continues with a subsequent revelation; although any viewers of the film will surely agree that for every weight that is lifted in this case, another must be added. Regarding Sam’s resentment of his father’s role in the demise of his relationship with Pilar Cruz - when it transpires that his teenage sweetheart is, in actuality, his half sister, and that Buddy and Pilar’s mother were engaged in a passionate and almost forbidden love affair due to their cultural differences, this finally allows Sam to fully understand himself, his history, his future and his relationship with both his father and his lover. It is clear then how Lone Star uses the concepts of history, identity, truth and geographical space to explore community and its breakdown through the vehicle of postmodernism. But how can this be related to Blade Runner, and how do the two films tie together in their examination of a strategy of de-composition? In ‘New York fictions: Modernity, Postmodernism, The New Modern’ critic Peter Brooker suggests that it is in fact the metaphorical dialogue presented within an urban environment that is one of the most important aspects of our modern social fabric:
“…One level of common experience in the postmodern city [is] the boundaries of the kind of knowledge derived from direct personal acquaintance with people and places. On one side of our minimal coexistence in city crowds and public places there is the full but circumscribed familiarity of immediate relationships in households and demarcated neighbourhoods. Beyond that…on the other side of stark coexistence there is estrangement: the look of the unknown, and the risk and threat this brings.”#
Arguably, Brooker’s theory is a good base from which to begin analysing Blade Runner against Lone Star as an equally postmodern text. Whilst it might seem odd at first to connect Brooker’s more ’urban identity’ related model to the histories and personal truths explored in Lone Star, in actuality the two separate ideologies fuse together nicely with Scott’s film to create perhaps a more cohesive picture of the so-called ‘strategy of decomposition’. Moreover, Brooker’s idea serves as a more than appropriate analogy for the existence and significance of the ‘replicants’ in Blade Runner. The film is set in an environment that looks in parts equally like the landscapes of Los Angeles and New York City, despite the audience being told on screen at the beginning of the film that the location is indeed Los Angeles in the year 2019. As one writer suggests, this apparent fusing of urban landscapes may account for at least some of the film’s engagements in postmodern concerns:
“The film's postmodernist tendencies have also been detailed extensively by such writers as Giulliana Bruno and David Harvey. Most obvious is the film's use of postmodern pastiche: the film's production design emphasises the coexistence of multiple historical influences and styles, particularly of architecture. The urban decay and retrofitting shows the acceleration of industrial processes and recycling (which Bruno characterises as the process of becoming reliant upon one's own waste) under late capitalism. Harvey is quick to note that the production of replicants individual parts has been outsourced to street vendors, which extends the process of industrial devolution and flexible flows of capital found in post-Fordist economies. The replicants' four year life spans (offset, claims Tyrell, by the intensity of their lives) are suggestive of the accelerated experience of life under postmodernism#”
As is the case with Lone Star, the issues of truth, history and personal identity are major factors when dealing with postmodernism in Blade Runner. The replicants are hugely symbolic in this sense. The notion of what is real and what is merely perceived as real - particularly in terms of history, on a personal level - is another comparison that can be made between Lone Star and Blade Runner. Whereas Sayles presents his characters as fully formed but with opinions and misconceptions about their past that send them on a personal journey to find the missing link and subsequently themselves, the replicants that Scott presents us with are much more threatening - from the start, nobody - not even the very characters themselves - can be sure of whether they are ‘real’ or not. This is dealt with in both films in a similar way, as for both Sam Deeds and Rachel, personal history (and crucially, ones own memory of that personal history) are revealing enough to be of major consequence, particularly when considering the films in a postmodern light. Interestingly, both films are also concerned with history outside of a personal sphere and in a broader sense and context. The idea of progression being the enemy of truth is considered. In Lone Star, the town’s constant and blinkered affection for Buddy, and the golden monument they erect in his honour, are arguably symbolic of history being challenged and redefined by technological advancement. The equivalent signifier in Blade Runner is that of the photograph - it‘s importance as a physical and tangible reminder of what has gone before, and how that effects what will be in the future, cannot be underestimated. It is clear then how we can build up a fairly clear picture of how these two texts deal with postmodernism as a concept. By exposing a strategy of decomposition, Sayles and Scott both identify the ways in which identity, past, present, future and above all truth, are explored and ultimately dismantled through the medium of social breakdown in a postmodern era.
Bibliography:
Brooker, Peter. New York Fictions: Modernity, Postmodernism, The New Modern.
Longman Group Limited, 1996
Eagleton, Terry. The Illusions of Postmodernism. Blackwell Publishing, 1996
Webography:
http://home.pacific.net.au/~satadaca/bladrunn.htm (2006)
http://bad.eserver.org/issues/1996/28/sandoval.html (2006)
Beat Vision - assignment one 1/3/06
The Beat Vision - Take 5
In this essay I will attempt to familiarise the reader with the mechanics and overall philosophy of the ethical and spiritual phenomenon known as ‘the Beat vision’. Generally, this practise can be described as a way of life that teaches and promotes the importance of the art of being, and, more specifically, the art of being as the art of existing in the moment. The origins of ‘the Beat vision’ as a term are invariably complex and tied to both cultural and historical context, however principally it is related to the concept of the beatific vision, i.e. a vision that brings to the human mind the attainment and joy of the immediate knowledge of the spirit of God. Between the 1950’s and 1970’s the musical, poetic and basic creative climate became one of philosophical expressionism and artistic freedom. To further explore the significance, impact and influence of this incredibly important period, I will present and explicate five quotations from different artistic quarters of the time, in the hope that I can further define and make understood the premise of the Beat vision. Unarguably, one of the forefathers of ‘Beat’ as an act of expression was the poet Allen Ginsberg. In his poem, ‘Song’ he wrote:
The weight of the world
is love.
Under the burden
of solitude,
Under the burden
Of dissatisfaction
The weight,
The weight we carry
Is love. #
This particular quote from Ginsberg is very representative of the Beat philosophy and the almost sacred importance of that which was beatific. It is generally agreed that Ginsberg’s influences - Walt Whitman and William Blake in particular - were chiefly concerned with the liberation of humanity. Given the historical climate that greeted Ginsberg as a poet, living in the aftermath of a post war society still attempting to celebrate it’s affluence, it is no surprise that here he talks with no uncertainty of his hopes for a spiritual future for the human race. After all, what else could be the purpose of unburdening the world of love, other than to finally and truly experience it? Linguistically Ginsberg touches upon the two opposing spectrums of eastern philosophy - love and dissatisfaction. Between the two, both metaphorically and in the poem’s structure, sits solitude as a representation of a possible instruction on how to get from one to the other. With the weight of the world, the subject of history - i.e. time, is also a factor. Ginsberg struggled with his own burden, that of the role of being a poet and consequently a voice for the people. The balancing of this act against the oppressions of the opposing social consciousness which ran contradictory to his entire ethos (he and his contemporaries such as Gary Snyder were strongly opposed to militarism and violence, indeed the very idea of confrontation) presented Ginsberg with the problem of having to at once engage with his past, present and future whilst at the same time trying to maintain the clarity and authenticity of a vision that was, and through his work remains, inherently beatific. Just as important - some would argue more so - as Ginsberg, was Jack Kerouac. His quintessential novel The Dharma Bums, detailing the spiritual journey of a group of writers (essentially Kerouac and his friends and contemporaries, Ginsberg included, thinly disguised by what are mostly easily decipherable pseudonyms) on a Buddhist inspired quest that is both metaphorical and literal. In it, he asserts at one point ‘I hadn’t yet digested the Lankavatara Scripture which eventually shows you that there’s nothing in the world but the mind itself, and therefore all’s possible including the suppression of suffering’#. Again, when looked at in conjunction with Kerouac’s background and in relation to the Beat vision, it is clear to see how important such a statement is - Kerouac actually coined the term ‘Beat’. He by and large thought the counterculture of the 1950’s and 60’s was disastrous and like Ginsberg wanted nothing more than to see an end to the suffering of man. He had something of a pre-occupation in his work with physical pain and suffering - as seen in the above quote - and this was no doubt as a result of his tumultuous family life, in particular the very physically painful death of his 9 year old brother Gerard, which haunted Kerouac ever after and inspired the book Visions of Gerard. The final poet I will look at in this essay (strictly speaking, Bob Dylan and Lennon/McCartney were songwriters) is Gary Snyder. Snyder can be linked closely with both Kerouac and Ginsberg - all three men were contemporaries and tended to move in the same circles. Snyder was most definitely a disciple of Zen, well versed in the art of Buddha nature. In his famous poem ‘RIPRAP’ he writes:
Crystal and Sediment linked hot
All change, in thoughts
As well as things#
An interesting point must be made here. With poets such as Kerouac and Ginsberg acting as figureheads for the Beat movement, it generally came to be thought of by many as bohemian, drug crazed and alcohol fuelled. Snyder however offered with his art a different perspective - that ecology was of great importance to the beats seen as according to Buddha, everything that lives is holy and comes from the earth, which is sacred. Bob Dylan is someone who would most likely agree. Dylan represents an altogether different (yet still in many ways curiously similar) facet to the Beat vision, that of the singer/songwriter. In ‘Chronicles’, Dylan sums up his role in that time thusly:
Passion and enthusiasm, which sometimes can be enough to sway a crowd, aren’t even necessary. You can manufacture faith out of nothing and there are an infinite number of patterns and lines that connect from key to key - all deceptively simple. You gain power with the least amount of effort, trust that the listeners make their own connections, and it’s very seldom that they don’t#
Bob Dylan is relating to the Beat vision here in a way that is interesting and unexpected; i.e. through prose rather than song. It is easy to see, however, where and how he is connecting with the Beat philosophy in his writing. Attaining power through the spiritual connection of music, self manufacturing faith and engaging in a practice that is, above all, deceptively simple - all of these are qualities that are found in the Beat vision ethos and, as Dylan was a crucial new figure in Greenwich Village during the early 1960’s, it is not surprising that he embraced and utilised such eastern philosophies in a largely western society. The final quote I will examine is a song lyric - not by Dylan, but from The Beatles. Although The Beatles were from Liverpool it did not stop them having an almost incalculable level of impact and resonance on popular culture all over the globe, particularly in America and with the poets and writers I have already looked at in this essay. With it’s themes of nostalgia and differing perspectives on the nature of time and space on the self, it seems only fitting to end with an undeniably Zen lyric from the band Dylan himself once claimed changed the universe:
Let me take you down, 'cause I'm going to Strawberry Fields.
Nothing is real and nothing to get hung about.
Strawberry Fields forever.
Living is easy with eyes closed, misunderstanding all you see.
It's getting hard to be someone but it all works out.
It doesn't matter much to me.
Let me take you down, 'cause I'm going to Strawberry Fields.
Nothing is real and nothing to get hung about.
Strawberry Fields forever.
No one I think is in my tree, I mean it must be high or low.
That is you can't you know tune in but it's all right.
That is I think it's not too bad#
Bibliography:
‘The Beat Vision: Snyder Handout’, Dept. of English, MMU, 2006, p. 289
Aldridge, Alan. The Beatles Illustrated Lyrics Little, Brown and Company, 1998.
Dylan, Bob. Chronicles Volume One Simon & Schuster UK Ltd, 2004
Ginsberg, Allen. Selected Poems 1947-1995 Penguin Books, 1997.
Kerouac, Jack. The Dharma Bums Penguin Books, 2000
Dissertation submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements of the degree Programme of BA(Hons) in English, or English and Creative Writing, Faculty of Humanities and Social Science, Manchester Metropolitan University (2/6/06)
As If Alive: A Collection of Poetry
By: Ciaran James Gilligan
The ghost of your company
Wish I could bring you here, and then
I’d close my eyes and count to ten
I’d do it over and over again
Just so I could see
Your face anew, looking back at me
Every time I opened them
But all you have to offer me
Is the ghost of your company
The ghost of your company
Haunts me separately
To you
Unforgiven
You will remain unforgiven
Like the love that hides inside
A ball of unrelenting and
Shining naivety,
Holding for me nothing but a shadow
In which a memory lies dead,
Yet perfectly preserved
Like a bird in the display case of a museum
With it’s eyes, shining
As if alive
Escaping
How can she escape
The self?
Do any of us actually understand
The insides inside
Our conscience ticking,
The past and present
Forever slipping
Like tectonic plates that jar our hearts
With our minds.
A monumental shift in time.
Being High
Down there it is black but up here
It is not. The muggy streets are far away,
Parted between me
By an expectant landscape of air,
And shapes, and flat sound.
The city is one I know well
For I dream of it often. Tonight though,
It twists and turns only half as much
as my insides. I stand looking over the edge and,
Feeling sick and dizzy. I remember being high.
Dreams
As the sun rises and the night subsides
Deep inside the walls of love
I remember you and the peace you brought
As I wake it leaves me
An ironically I am left with an imprint at the same moment
Of how affected I still am
By you and the presence you can no longer give to me
Except
Of course
Each night
In dreams
Rain
If the rain that comes will fall to you
And everything that you hold true
Is soaked to the skin
Then how can life begin
Ask him in six months
And feel the heat of this sin which
Spirals down and tumbles fast and without
Stopping to consider
Rain itself
Which is the thing that cools it
Body
Her body exists as a map inside my head,
Created a thousand days ago
Under the same stars
And borne of the same electricity
That finds us now changed.
I need no compass to traverse it;
Merely the memory which is instinctive,
And the hands which talk to my eyes of beauty,
Or inform my mind that it might now love.
The heart simply beats onward,
Waiting for sleep, and praying for a slower pace.
Time
The hands of time tick by and chime
And so to do his feet.
His eyes are darting back and forth
With the rhythm of a ball
Across a tennis court
He meets our dreams and as we sleep
He carries them steadily away.
To where he does not say
He leaves us by and by
To weep.
Language
Tiredness creeps in,
With only the language of words
In the library of the mind
Left with the job of expressing it.
Eyes can sag,
Fingers may stab,
And ink might expand slowly, like fog
Over the white landscape of an A4 desert,
But ultimately it will be left to the l e t t e r s
To make sense of all of this, and bring it to life in the eye’s mind
Land
As the metal train transports her
Fast across the land
The vast expanding night
Invites a change to enter
The parallel landscape of her mind
Too late perhaps,
For new mishaps,
But older ones renew then collapse
As the train speeds on
To leave what’s left behind
Missing
I have a plan I’d love for you to know about
But part of it is missing
Along with parts of me
So as flowers grow and bloom
Maybe both of us can grow
And you can search the sky for room
When I eventually get up there with you
For we are twinned, after all
Two halves of one hole, and I know
You will look after my friend. He is missing
Remembering
I remember as the rain comes down
And my stomach expands to let in new rollercoaster feelings
(though one has not been ridden)
That I have not remembered you in a while
Or how we used to be.
When I do, I am filled with a sadness, sickly sweet
And awash with memories that are impatient
For a future in which they may be forgotten,
Or at least locked away, contained to a single cell
That can be hidden, somewhere in the back.
The music
Listening to the music
Makes my ears sit up and take notice
Of something other than the insanity
Caught within the invisible traffic
Of the Earth and her airwaves.
Catching suddenly,
A turn of phrase or vocal arrangement
That one can recognise instantly
And know it’s history even from that inaugural beat
Is preciousness and pleasure objectified
The Sea
The sea has taken all that she wants,
All at once. She continues in the cold
And the salty breeze, to drown the lives
Of those that love her; and to sink
The grandest ships that dare sail her.
Vast, and tempered like a blanket
Of cool, warm and inviting death.
Intriguing and mysterious,
Unpredictable and defenceless…
The sea reminds me of you.
Last Day
Senseless doom forebodes
Along with a compounding fear of the appearance and
Inevitability of the End. A chest rises, falls and
Falls again, forgetting at last to rise once more.
The smell of the place he rests in,
He takes that laboured memory with him.
It’s ok though - there are many more memories
Gathered around him, and stored in his flesh and bone.
In another room a child is restless, just arriving. But for him
On this last day, the truth of his death lies in the life lived before it.
Drafts for ‘As If Alive’
The ghost of you (possibly change to ‘your company’s ghost)??
The ghost of you
Haunts me through and through until
I don’t know what
I am to do
But Still your ghost
Comes through and haunts
Me separately
To you
Not sure on language/structure - sounds more like the talking of an actual ghost, rather than conveying the sense that character is missing someone. Also needs to be longer if to fit in with the each poem at 10 lines idea!
Escaping
How do we escape each other?
A monumental shift in time
Never knowing when,
To draw the line.
Tectonic plates that draw our
Hearts and minds together forever
We do not know how.
BEING HIGH - make this one about new york!!
It was over a year ago, but I still
Remember being high. Down there the streets
Are muggy and
Up here my mind, is foggy
But now I still remember being high
As my insides twist and turn tonight
Good ideas but it needs definite reinvention for the final product!
Travelling through the body (probably shorten this title, sounds a bit airy fairy)
Her body exists as a map inside my head,
Routes not in what was done or what we said
But memories left in sheets and on the bed
Not sure about this at all, will have a re-draft (major) in terms of actual style and content of the piece…What am I tryin to saaay??
I want to write about R but I dunno how….here are a few ideas (title wise at least, the rest will SURELY follow):
Dead presumed missing
Cut off from the two
Just missing.
Wondering about you.
Actually scrap that, they all sound terrible
Commentary on As If Alive: A Collection of Poetry submitted as 3rd Year Dissertation
By: Ciaran James Gilligan
My intention with this collection was first and foremost to simply explore what the essence of poetry is to me - what it means to be a poet, and how far the accepted conventions and forms of poetry matter when the issue at hand is as simple as that of pure expressionism. In ‘Poetry: the basics’ author Jeffrey Wainwright asserts the following:
“There is now substantial evidence that poetry has more writers than readers…It is the most practically available literary space. It probably requires paper and certainly some time, but perhaps not as much of either as writing a novel…Moreover, the development of ‘free verse’ in the twentieth century has -for good and ill - had the effect of loosening convention, and this, together with the wider availability of knowledge…has expanded the long-standing practice of verse-making and given the developing poet a greater range of possibilities from which to proceed.”#
Wainwright’s proposition of the ‘developing poet’ who has effectively been given free reign over the language at his disposal thanks to the steady evolution of poetic form is undoubtedly the position I find myself in with this collection. From the off I will freely admit that I have written an infinitely larger number of poems than I have read - this is perhaps to my detriment with the work you see here. Conversely though, there is of course the possibility that this makes me as an author less bogged down in the bureaucracy of influence and generics, and therefore my work more fresh, original and compelling. The latter outcome is, of course, the one that I hope and have aimed for here - writing the collection has certainly been an enriching an eye opening experience for me, as well as being incredibly cathartic one at times. This point brings me to the first problem I encountered when first sitting down to begin a collection of poems - what exactly does a poet write about? The simple answer is, a poet writes about what a poet wants to write about. The difficulty of subject where poetry is concerned is that the choice remains almost perpetually unlimited. However, as is usually the case (one suspects)for a developing poet, the genesis for the work came ultimately from my personal, emotional, political and practical experiences I was undergoing at the time of writing. As a result, I will admit that much of the work here is highly personal. Where there is a ‘character’ voice (particularly an ‘I’) this is more often than not myself. However I do not believe that this detracts from the work necessarily. The form of the piece as a whole is particularly open ended - the only limitations I decided upon were that the collection should be comprised of 15 ten line poems. The reason for this format was simple - I wanted specifically to explore the idea of conciseness in poetry, and have each single poem be short but nonetheless filled with detail and able to leave a lasting impression, almost like the literary equivalent of an intensely busy and colourful photographic snapshot. Hopefully I have managed to achieve this effect (particularly with “Body” and “Unforgiven“) but even if I have failed, I am confident enough that this is what I set out to do. With regard to the style of the pieces and the actual physical layout of the language, again I have to confess that there was no real precedent or outline that I aimed for or set the task of deliberately engineering - with the exception of the deliberate spacing of the word ’letters’ in “Language”, I just let the words fall and be placed naturally where they felt right. I believe wholeheartedly that this approach has given my work an organic feel - because of the relative shortness of each poem being written around a certain theme, I made little alteration to each poem from the first draft (and in one or two cases, not at all). Whilst this may appear foolish and unthinkable to some - and it is a view, all possible things considered, which may be correct - I deliberately wanted to retain the ‘freshness’ of the moment of conception for each particular poem. To again use a photographic analogy, I wanted to keep as clear a picture as possible of the moment of the ‘birth’ of each poem. It is often said that Shakespeare did not indulge too much in the art of re-writing for fear of killing the artistic freshness his work through by labouring over it too long, and certainly from my own experiences of writing (and reading) this is a concern that I can all too well appreciate. Indeed, in ‘The Making of a Poem’ the introductory statement makes the following observation:
“The fascination of poetic form, however, goes well beyond the answer to questions about structure and origin. Once these are answered, another door opens, another labyrinth waits…Perhaps the chief problem is that form is a powerful filter, but not an inclusive one”#.
And so now allow me to go into the details of my form - particularly the piece as a whole - in a little more depth. I chose the title ‘As If Alive’ for the collection because ultimately it seemed the most fitting moniker to express what poetry is, and in truth how to most honestly describe it. As I have said before, the genesis for all the poetry was personal experience - there was little outside influence in terms of subject. The period in which the collection was written was for me a time of personal reflection and consideration, and the poems themselves all reflect this. The collection begins with ’The Ghost of Your Company’, a piece inspired - as a number of the works here are - by the breakdown of a relationship. I felt it was an appropriate piece to begin the collection with as it was the subject at the forefront of my mind at the time. The only thing I would say about this piece is that it is the only poem in the collection where the language may be considered a little clichéd in terms of the nature of the subject of the poem and its ruminations on love. However I decided in the end that the purity of the expression in the piece was the thing I wanted to retain the most. This is a re-occurring theme throughout the collection and I would like to think that overall, it adds to the uniqueness of my work. The collection ends with ‘Last Day’, which was a last minute addition about the death of a close friend. I chose deliberately to begin and end with the pieces that I did because the two themes explored in them - love and death respectively - are ones that permeate and punctuate (consciously) throughout the collection as a whole.
Bibliography:
Strand, Mark and Boland, Evan. The Making of a Poem: A Norton Anthology of
Poetic Forms Norton Paperback, 2001
Wainwright, Jeffrey. Poetry: The Basics Routledge, 2004
