Billy Budd re-write

I have been wanting to share this with you guys for awhile, but had trouble tracking down the files. Luckily, one of my collaborators still had a couple of the files. Forgive the backtracking.

So, back in 06, my first semester at Bama, I was in a yearlong novel workshop run by Kate Bernheimer (if you like fairytales, check out her Fairytale Review). The first semester, we did not write. Not exactly. We brainstormed, complained about writing and ourselves as writers, we wrote a little, read about the coming ecological apocalypse, and read and then re-wrote Billy Budd in teams of 6.

Our version ended up playing on how the themes refracted through a viewing of Blade Runner. Andy Farkas, one of our group mates, loves Philip K Dick.

I was thinking about this project in terms of textual history (how we decide what to do, who to write what and the algorithm for how to set things in motion) as well as the question of the author in terms of intent, language, etc. It is clear that is it all over the place because we each had our own agendas. Even though we all did brain dumps that semester so we could get to writing the hundred pages Kate demanded of us the next semester, and so never looked at this again, I recognized it immediately. My writing is decidedly different. Chapters 8, 9, 17, 18, 26 and 27. Though there are places where I clearly edited a bunch since we all took turns editing the whole thing as we progressed. It is especially interesting for me to see again because there are some things in there that would seem obvious to me now, but that I don't feel I had much intellectual critical thinking grounding for yet. My sarcastic condemnation of the corporation was clearly in the voice of me loving Melville, but also, dare I say, a wee bit Marxist. Weird for an avowed Marxists-are-silly person (at the time). I suspect these ideas came more from my phase of reading of 19th century mystery novels, combined with my involvement with New Narrative writers, and my intense interest in the prison industrial complex.

If you want to peak, it is wildly imperfect, but also short.

Billy Budd/Blade Runner redux draft

A Variation on Spivak's Silent Subaltern: Is there such a thing as the Post- Post Colonial?

All of this week’s readings are connected by the common theme of myth as it relates to and manifests in culture in order to achieve a particular end. Levi-Strauss asserts simply that myth “corresponds to a universal way of organizing daily experience” (819). We see this statement enacted in the “Just So Stories”, particularly in the account of how the camel got his hump, as the camel is literally saddled with a hump as punishment for his laziness. The structure of the story follows Srauss’s formula: We are presented with a question that addresses two opposites and aims at presenting the solution. The myth’s moral is one of utilitarian virtue which warns a hump will develop from boredom and a poor work ethic. Thus, myth provides a model for explaining contradiction and also is also that contains the beliefs of a society. While all of this is obvious and easily grasped, the most interesting part of Strauss’s article is how he says it is the repetition of and in myth which renders its structures apparent. And I think it is with this notion in mind that a segue into Said’s discussion of Orientalism and colonial discourse is most meaningful.

Said argues that “knowledge [or a lack thereof] of the Orient creates the Orient, the Oriental, and his world” and that colonialism is a self-affirming, self-fulfilling enterprise that is dependent on imagined binaries of superiority/inferiority, strength/weakness, etc which tautologically claim Western dominance over the East. His main gripes are that the Western understanding of the East lacks objectivity and instead favors a fixity whereby the colonized people are both historical and ahistorical, they (the Orientals) have a “history” of being weak that is supposedly permanent and unchanging. This is where Strauss’s repetition comes into play since the colonizing force is constantly having to remind itself of the reasons for colonization. Said emphasizes the paradoxical nature of colonial thought by showing how there is both a visibility and an invisibility inherent to it-- the power structures are able to be seen in Christian missionaries, schools, and government which propagate Western ideals, yet the ideology behind this propagation is veiled. In a nutshell, colonial rule is dependent on a fixity of the Other, out of which comes a stereotype of the Other as weak, stupid, and tons of other negative things in order to maintain power.

Said obliquely address the anxiety of the colonizer, especially when he quotes Kissenger, “Thus the duty of men in the Post-Newtonian (real) world is to construct an international order before a crisis imposes it as a necessity” (47). But overall he seems more concerned with addressing how the West uses its imagined narrative of the East to justify subordinating it.

In his essay “The Other Question: Stereotype, Discourse, and Colonial Power” , Homi Bhabha elaborates on this notion of the anxiety in the stereotype, indeed his whole corpus is concerned with probing the ambivalence of the relationship between colonizer and colonized in order to get beyond this Western “epistemic violence”, to borrow from Spivak, that Said talks about. What Bhabha means by ambivalence is that colonial discourse inheres in contradiction: the West colonizes in an effort to “civilize” but its methods of doing so are aggressive and racist. Bhabha says that the colonizer’s anxiety over this ambivalence is unconsciously apparent and he connects the sterotype to the fetish:

Within discourse, the fetish represents the simultaneous play between metaphor

as substitution (making absence difference) and metonymy (which contiguously

registers teh perceived lack). The fetish of stereotype gives access to an identity

which is predicated as much on mastery as it is on anxiety and defense, for it is a

form of multiple and contradictory belief in its recognition of difference and

disavowal of it (Location of Culture, 74-5).

Bhabha goes on to say this disavowal of difference in the stereotype is captured by Lacan’s Mirror Stage insofar as image is not identity. Said also touches on this briefly when he mentions something about the colonized subject never being able to see the colonizer age so as not disrupt the image of authority. Basically, Bhabha considers how colonial rule is born of stereotypes, myths, narratives of superiority, and the tension in this narrative which stems from an inherent contradiction and, further, how the potential for this tension to be turned into a resistance to Western hegemony.

As you may recall, I am working with Junot Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous LIfe of Oscar Wao for our assignments in this class, a text that is steeped in myth, hybridity, and the experience of diaspora. The passage that I’m going to have us look at tomorrow presents myth as the kind of resistance Bhabha mentions. Oscar Wao is the story of an overweight Dominican ghetto nerd who grew up in Jersey and can’t get a girl to save his life. Diaz appropriates all kinds of culture in the narrative--sci fi novels, comic books, classical literature, and Latin dictators to name a few. The kind of writing that Diaz does has been dubbed “post-post colonial” in that it articulates the second generation experience of colonialism, one that occurs in a Western, imperialist country. With all of the cultural borrowing that we see going on today would we be willing to say that there is such a thing as the post post colonial?

Derrida on Deconstruction

Hi guys, I know this isn't related to Psychoanalysis but I thought this was interesting to see.

Enjoy!!

Derrida on Deconstruction

Psychoanalysis and Anais Nin

When reading Freud and Lacan, I actually found a lot of their ideologies interesting despite their sexist views. Especially comparing it to the text I am studying Henry and June, I felt that psychoanalytic view on phallus is very important reoccurring themes. First, let me point out few things that stood out to me when reading Freud and Lacan. Their use of phallus as a symbol of desire was very interesting. Especially when Lacan mentions that, “The phallus is the privileged signifier of that mark in which the role of the logos is joined with the advent of desire” (Norton, 1187), I found the interconnection between language and phallus very important. Lacan goes to argue that it is a signifier because it is the most “tangible” element in the real sexual copulation. This is interesting because in Anais Nin’s text, it is all about intangible emotions and feelings that are put into writing and sexual relationships between two or more individuals.

In Anais Nin’s case, this is very true. She tries to overcome the issue of father being absent originally by writing a diary which is where my text comes from. Nin’s writing motive evolves from a letter to her absent father to writing itself to discover herself and later to observe others. In the text, she constantly analyzes herself as well to gain the knowledge of herself and others. In a way, like Freud’s idea of unconsciousness taking shape and civilized, she does the similar process in her text.

In Lacan’s theory, the center is called the Other, the Phallus. He believed that the self is constructed through relationship with others. The child tries to find the meaning and purpose of one’s self through interacting with other people and leaning about their desire, their phallus. This is a very interesting idea to discover because what Anais Nin does is she tries to figure out her own desire through interacting with the others. She is focused on her pleasure, her desire, her needs but she isn’t so concerned with merging with others and necessarily becoming one with them.

This is one of the conversations between her and her doctor:

From my dreams he culls the consistent desire to be punished, humiliated, or abandoned. I dream of a cruel Hugo, of a fearful Eduardo, of an impotent John.

“This comes from a sense of guilt for having loved your father too much. Afterwards I am sure you loved your mother much more,”…

I feel oppressed, as if his questions were thrusts. I am in a terrible need of him. Yet analysis does not help. The pain of living is nothing compared to the pain of this minute analysis. (Pg 131).

I believe that in here, she shows her side of the resistance as a woman. The man’s analysis that is based on male dominated society does not suit her. And later she gives her own analysis on her behavior based on the idea Allendy gives her: “I take Hugo to the rue Blondel and incite him to infidelity to punish myself for my own infidelities. I glorify June to punish myself for having betrayed her” (pg 133).

I think these two are interesting parallels. She accepts the psychoanalysis and she does not deny the power and logic of it. However, at the same time, she does believe that with women, there is far more than just “penis envy” and there is something more rising out of it. The desire to be woman is something that Freud could never fully fathom. And in Anais’ text, she takes the readers on an emotionally complex journey. We get to take a view into a woman who wishes to live like a woman but not by the society’s standard. She chooses to be a woman of her own. And this woman of her own is what the readers must discover through her diary.

The Uncanny Fear of Bats in Batman Begins

The condition of fear – what causes us to be afraid and why – is a study that has continued to intrigue me since my junior year in college. What particularly interests me about Freud’s argument in The “Uncanny” is his suggestion that what an individual perceives as uncanny fear is rooted in a past (usually childhood) experience: “the uncanny is that class of the frightening which leads back to what is known of old and long familiar” (The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism 825). Freud’s analysis of Jentsch’s analysis (and subsequently Freud’s reanalysis) of E.T.A. Hoffmann’s Nachtstücken reminded me of the creation and foundation of Bruce Wayne’s fear in Christopher Nolan’s 2005 film Batman Begins. Wayne’s fear of bats is also rooted in his childhood when he falls in a well and is engulfed by the bats. He, of course, is rescued by this father. For Wayne, this memory is intertwined with his profound love for his father. It will also be connected to his profound guilt for (as he perceives it) causing the murder of both his parents, since it is because of his fear of bats manifested the dramatic representation of them in an opera performance which causes his parents to take him out of the opera house and run smack dab into a mugger, who ends up shooting Wayne’s parents in front of him. As an adult, Wayne’s fear of bats is intertwined with his pervasive childhood memory of his parents and their murder; his love, guilt, and anger over what happened. The way in which Wayne then harnesses and utilizes his fear as a means of empowerment is also fascinating, but less in line to what Freud discusses in The “Uncanny.” Ultimately, however, I feel like Nolan’s film is an excellent modern demonstration of Freud’s analysis of the uncanny brand of fear and its source.

The Center and Billy Budd

While finishing the last few chapters of Billy Budd I couldn’t get this idea of the center being both within and outside of the structure. As I sat tallying up the different instances of Billy, Claggart, and Vere as center in the novel I was for some reason annoyingly repeating the first verse of Yeats’s poem “The Second Coming”. At first I thought this was mostly because of that line “the center cannot hold”, but then it occurred to me that the verse in its entirety really speaks to the kind of conflict and ensuing chiasmus that Barbara Johnson talks about in the chapter we read. Here’s the verse

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere the ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.

Initially I thought I would be able to make the case for Vere as the center since he adjudicates Billy’s assault on Claggart, however I see now that this would’ve been flawed since, as Johnson points out, Vere is making his judgement from inside a political and historical structure which Billy and Claggart do not occupy. Likewise, Vere doesn’t understand the structures, or maybe more precisely modes of being, that Billy and Claggart exist within. I’m interested in those last few sentences of Johnson’s, “It [the deadly space where eclipses in meaning occur] is that which, within cognition, functions as an act; it is that which, within action, prevents us from ever knowing if whether what we hit coincides with what we understand” (p.109). Is she not basically saying that there is no center? Because if there were then wouldn’t action always have to coincide with understanding since the center would be a kind of fail-proof metric for both what we know and how we act? She looks at all these different approaches to interpreting the novella, psychoanalytic, moral, religious, and according to her they all fall short. I feel, though, that her relentless introduction of all these oppositions, human being and doing, literality and irony, leave me with the same lack of understanding. Is that the point? That the more we interpret the less things are what they seem? That things (knowing, action, judgment) fall apart because, as Yeats proclaims, the center cannot hold?