A Singular Modernity, or Jameson’s Four Maxims
the term itself: “everything modern is necessarily new, while everything new is not necessarily modern” (18)
First Maxim:
We cannot not periodize.
“What is at stake here is a twofold movement, in which the foregrounding of continuities, the insistent and unwavering focus on the seamless passage from the past to the present, slowly turns into the consciousness of a radical break; while at the same time the enforced attention to a break gradually turns the latter into a period in its own right” (24)
Second Maxim:
Modernity is not a concept, philosophically or otherwise, but a narrative category.
“the ‘correct’ theory of modernity is not to be obtained by putting [the origins of modernity] together in some hierarchical synthesis....what we have to do with here are narrative options and alternate storytelling possibilities, as which even the most scientific-looking and structural of purely sociological concepts can always be unmasked” (32)
Third Maxim:
The narrative of modernity cannot be organized around categories of subjectivity; consciousness and subjectivity are unrepresentable; only situations of modernity can be narrated.
“It is not to be understood as an ontological proposition, that is, it does not affirm that no such thing as subjectivity exists. It is rather a proposition about the limits of representation as such, and means simply that we have no way of talking about subjectivity or consciousness that is not already somehow figural” (55-6)
Fourth Maxim:
No ‘theory’ of modernity makes sense today unless it is able to come to terms with the hypothesis of a postmodern break with the modern.
“[there] is at least one clear dividing line between the modern and the postmodern, namely, the refusal of concepts of self-consciousness, reflexivity, irony or self-reference in the postmodern aesthetic and also in postmodern values and philosophy as such, if there can be said to be such a thing. I imagine this also coincides with the disappearance of the slogan of freedom, whether in its bourgeois or anarchist sense” (92-3)
Points of reference:
“As for the ontology of the present, however, it is best to accustom oneself to thinking of ‘the ,odern’ as a one dimensional concept ... Foucalt, Les Mots et les Choses which has nothing of historicity or futuricity about it. .... Radical Descartes, Meditations alternatives, systematic transformations, cannot be theorized Heidegger, Nietzsche; Basic Writings or even imagined within the conceptual field governed by the Weber, The Protestant Ethic word ‘modern’” (215)
Annotated Bibliography
Chefdor, Monique. “Modernism: Babel Revisited?”, Modernism: Challenges and Perspectives. Ed. Monique Chefdor, R. Quinones, A. Wachtel. Chicago: U of Illinois P, 1986. 1-6
This article focusses on the confusion surrounding the term ‘modernism’ itlsef. Anglo-American critics capitalize the word, as it symbolizes a “historically and conceptually defined movement in literature and arts”, while continental critics do not, as they see the term as a catch-all for the numerous ‘isms’ or movements of the “period”; the latter prefer ‘modernité’. There is also dispute amongst Latin-American critics: for some modernismo refers to a type of symbolism, whereas for others it is the avant-guard reaction against symbolism. Chefdor points out that the use of terms like ‘High Modernism’ demarcates a certain tension in the umbrella term to contain the varieties of artistic expression for the “period” in question.
Chiari, Joseph. The Aesthetics of Modernism. London: Vision P, 1970.
An older volume specifically chosen to demonstrate the narrative of history countered by Jameson, leading from Aquinas’s critique or Aristotle, through the scientific rationalism of the Enlightenment (specifically the Copernican revolution) which increased the trend toward secularism and the immanence of the human subject (Cartesian self-awareness), to late-eighteenth century nihilism of Nietzsche and Baudelaire. Chiari seems halfway to Jameson’s ‘truth’ in his statement that “every age is a kaleidoscope of conflicting elements, rationalized and categorized into shapes, according to the sensibility, taste, and fashion of the day” (16).
Frisby, David. Fragments of Modernity. Cambridge: Polity P, 1985. 1-37.
In this section, Frisby looks at the paradoxes inherent in the critical study of the modernist project. He begins by quoting Lyotard’s implicit coordination of modernism with fascism, and that the failure of such a project is precisely the destructured forms of post-modernity. The first ‘phase’ of modernity Frisby describes as Baudelaire’s flaneur seeing himself continually anew in the masses; the artist must look to the ‘now’ rather than an eternal timelessness in the past. The second ‘phase’ emerges with a sense of history impacting upon consciousness; the ‘cult of the self’ was reified in the aestheticization and decadence of the late 19th century. Frisby then summarizes Marx’s main works, perhaps best with the phrase: “the commodity form not merely symbolizes social relations of modernity, it is a central source of their origin” (22). Modernité in the materialist sense is the continuous production of new commodities, which serves to distract the masses from the reproduction of the same fundamental relations of production – thus it is an inversion of the conception of modernist aesthetics, namely as an everchanging signifier for permanence, and thus ironically it is itself transitory. Frisby then sides with Nietzsche in believing that art serves as a counterculture for such forms of human decadence. Art is the examination of every minute moment as representing the eternal.
Isaak, Jo Anna. The Ruin of Representation in Modernist Art and Texts. Ann Arbor: UMI Research P,
1986.
Examines the two notions of modernism popular at the book’s publication, namely ➀ self-consciousness is equal to an artistic gesture towards non-representationalism, ➁ self-consciousness equal to intense realism. She then posits Joyce’s Ulysses as a text which contains both the art of style (non-realistic representation) and the art of (realistic) representation. Isaak then continues her examination of the modern with a one-hundred page critique of the conflation of the visual and literary arts. This inter-media fusion of aesthetic influences reflects Marinetti’s dictum: “There is no such thing as painting, sculpture, music, or poetry; there is only creation!”
Larsen, Neil. Modernism and Hegemony. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1990. 3-31
Larsen begins by invoking Jameson’s afterword in Aesthetics and Politics where Realism and Modernism are conjoined within a single hermeneutic process. He then himself problematizes this, stating that such a creation does not explain “the specific appropriateness of an aesthetics of representation as such to the problem of history” (5). Larsen falls back on Adorno’s position that one cannot truly represent any historical occurrence, for that precise re-presentation brackets its subject in an entirely different manner – which a priori reveals what was not there and hides what was – in other words, aesthetic realism is the realism of the singular representation, not of the subject in its original authenticity. A similar extension can be made with Jameson’s beliefs concerning ‘periodization’, namely that one cannot not periodize, and thus the past is solely the present seen a a specific manner, and consequently the term ‘Modernism’ cannot truly signify the totality of occurrences in art during the 20th century. Thus the power of naming is displaced from the agency of culture producers to culture readers who then rewrite their own history as anterior fact. The empowered subject represents itself in modern art by means of a fissure or crisis in representation, whether that of style or content; in political terms, art redeems the failure of the proletariat by opening up fissures “in a history without revolutionary agencies”.
Showing posts with label modernism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label modernism. Show all posts
Sunday, March 16, 2003
Wednesday, December 04, 2002
The Moderns, or how to write a conference paper about Nothing, in particular
To say that modernism is a constellation of artistic expressions or even a certain totalizing aesthetic, un fait accomplit, is primarily to misjudge the intentions of those who may fall under its aegis. Certainly there was a fundamental shift from the pre-modern to modernité proper, yet the recognition of a single defining point for the commencement of the latter in fact betrays a certain conceptual impulse which we must deem inherently anti-modern. The consequences of periodization are obvious, and perhaps a touch stereotypical; even the overlapping ‘geological’ nature of periods and movements which informs Foucault’s reading of socio-structural changes in Les Mots et les Choses is perhaps too much of a generalization when localized on modernism. It is therefore my intention to look at modernism as a recognition of the multiplicities, contradictions, and absurdities inherent in existence, which then become reified in given artistic expressions. Central to this position is the awareness that a multiplicity of existences has both spatial and temporal concerns; we see, for example, that the modernist gestures of Stein or Kafka do not correlate in either respect with those of Borges or Tarkovsky, and yet each can claim citizenship within a modernist aesthetic. Fundamentally, they make the same interpolative gesture in relation to the viewing subject, in part the abstraction of subjective experience from the capacity to represent and interpret that experience, as well as the same ontological claim upon themselves, namely a negation to which I shall return shortly. The list of unique artistic expressions that can be contained within modernism as narrative trope are as numerous as the points (of rupture, origin, etc) from which modernism as narrative category emerges from the pre-modern: historical occurrences such as the social and religious revolutions in Europe in the 18th and 19th centuries; philosophical creations such as Cartesian rationality or the nihilistic individuality of Nietzsche; or perhaps with the introduction of the (self)creation of the human subject by its own (un)conscience, forwarded by Freudian psychoanalysis.
The last example best exemplifies the principle conception about modernism, namely that it knows itself, that it is self-aware and by extension self-referential. In many respects, Freud’s work anticipates the anxieties of representation which were not to enter into modernism proper until serialism in music, abstract expressionism in visual art, and the “lost generation” in literature (and language poetry in the later context of a post-modern crisis). Repetitive gestures of representation, which by the turn of the century had begun to include mechanical techniques of image and language reproduction, created in a sense a high tide of represented figures and exhausted tropes. Reality has by the pre-war period incorporated previously symbolic modes of understanding and expression as tangible and in a very real manner marketable products, and thus the authentic artist, siding with Nietzsche in the belief that the ‘real’ – a construction of reality predicated on the reiterated past – is intolerable, seeks a new language in order to express his own subjective experience of their surroundings. It is at this point that the artistic gesture encounters an impasse in relation to the artist, namely that the latter has seen itself before itself in this very guise. The subject is made painfully aware that it is using a language increasingly distanced from experiential reality, and thus a rupture is formed within the subject’s historical sense of time.
It is here that the subject creates the present by reifying the past as the past, namely as a narrative category or trope by which the present is defined. The modernist sees the eternal present within the recurrent past and the rupture that this creates within subjective relations to time, much as the chronological flow of Proust’s text is famously suspended with reveries of childhood as certain smells and tastes elicit profound reminiscences (and in a physically real sense time is objectively telescoped for the reader, as one compares the simple lifting of a madelaine to one’s lips in relation to the time it takes to read Proust’s narration of the event and realizes that the very physicality of this text – over 3500 pages in many editions – is itself a modernist gesture). The impasse which hinders the artistic gesture mentioned above is the moment when the artist realizes that nothing new has emerged to define the past by a repetition of the present; in other words, the continual repetition of the past annihilates both the past as the present. Consequently, the initial crisis of representation felt by the ‘High” modernists of the visual arts, namely that the introduction of certain technological advances such as still and film cameras made traditional representation in painting and graphic art completely irrelevant, can be correlated to a similar crisis encountered by painters of the late modern period who found that they had exhausted the various schools of interpretation/production within abstract expression. And thus the anti-consumerist gestures of the avant-guard (which in Benjaminian terms is de facto anti-bourgeois) became the pro-consumption repetitive tropes of pop art; the avant-guard gesture of Magritte’s La Chambre d’Ecoute was reiterated by Warhol’s Goethe. In a similar manner the avant-guard of Schoenberg’s serialism and Berg’s atonality in modern composition became the widely popular neo-classicism of Stravinsky. Indeed, one can locate a unique intra-mediary correlation between the artistic gesture in music and the visual arts in the 1950s, when abstract expressionism emerged as the logical extension of the initial crisis of representing the subject realized by the Impressionists at the very same time that freely improvised music emerged from direct compositional influence; one gets the same sense of spatial and temporal play within the art of both Pollock and de Kooning, for example, as one can interpret within the music of Morton Feldman or Ornette Coleman. Each seeks to relocalize the past in order to more accurately situate the present, and thus legitimate the artistic gesture itself. Importantly, film, itself a new medium born with modernité, suffers no such crisis of representation. To summarize in brief, modernity must remain continually at play with its own conceptualization in order to remain truly modern. The modern artist must indeed follow Rimbaud’s dictum, “Il faut être absolument moderne!”, and remain like Baudelaire an eternal flaneur of the present, for living and creating otherwise is precisely the annihilation of history.
And yet the construction of the artist of modernism remains in a very real sense a mythology, and as such requires situation within its own narrative voice. It is here that I wish to posit the closest thing I can to a thesis concerning modernity. Modernism is a description rather than a totalizing category pour-soi. Within rhetorical terms, modernity is a trope for textual production, yet it is one which, in a performative manner, creates and signifies itself. As Fredric Jameson writes in A Singular Modernity – admittedly the guiding critical text for my present formulation of the modern – “this is to say that the trope of ‘modernity’ is always in one way or another a rewriting, a powerful displacement of previous narrative paradigms” (35). And thus an artist who is self-aware is merely one representation of what the modernist artist can be. There are indeed others, suggested by the notoriously unconscious modernist expressions of Jackson Pollock, William Burroughs, and Jean Genet, who remain distanced somewhat from the authentically self-referential texts by ‘High’ modernists such as Duchamp, Joyce, and Faulkner. There is not one narrative which universalizes and conceptualizes all that is located within its jurisdiction. Despite a multiplicity of subjects of and subjective experiences depicted in warfare, Picasso’s Guernica does not attempt to contain all the voices of the participants of the Spanish civil war nor does it attempt to re-present as legitimate their subjectivity to that experience. That space of silence – not an ontological muting but rather a semantic one – is both the negative space of the darkness, which defines the forms and serves to function as a sort of negative dialectic imparting meaning to the ‘positive’ images, as well the geometric and temporal fracturing of the images themselves into their constituent parts. The latter differs the initial experience of Guernica as conceived objet d’art, initially distancing the viewer of the mural from itself as an image, but it also geographically unifies them as a multiplicity of overlapping images which create subelements of visual representation. One can notice, for example, that the white rectangular area to the right of the mural’s centre when viewed in the same plane as the lightbulb-eye conflation just above the horse’s mouth in the centre suggests a darkened room in which the artist repeats the violence done to bodies in warfare by interrogating them as subject to his artistic gaze (simultaneous to this, we see ourselves situated within this room, ourselves interpolated as agent-victim of the recuperated violence).
In this capacity, Picasso’s work doubles in upon itself, replicating the silence of its subjects within a language that can speak only by negation, by precisely what it is not. It has in effect sealed the historical rupture between the gesture of painting (or representation, and by extension of the historical process in general) and the event itself, which upon reflection is an element of and for its own history, and thus solved its own representational crisis by the very act of negating itself within this rupture. That this conscious gesture of rupture is one and the same with the same implicit and unavoidable one in the photographic process is no simple accident of historical synergy. I am here thinking of Barthes’s argument in Camera Lucida, in which the temporality of the photographic subject is utterly destroyed by the infinitude of the moment of time captured in its representation. In other words, the viewer experiences a fundamentally different set of subjectivities in relation to the image, and thus a new mode of production is required for the artist who wishes to express the authentic. Film and still cameras had captured the horrors of warfare (and indeed all of its subjects) more provocatively than was possible with the language of art the moderns inherited. Thus a new language was required to re-create the visual arts as authentically and legitimately expressive. Bodies in Picasso’s mural are made infinitely more sensual than they would given a traditional depictive gesture – I invoke the ontologic interchangeability of orgasm/pleasure and termination/death as the extension of de Sade and the French formulation of jouissance as le petit mort – and thus the violence done to them is even more intolerable. In a very real sense then, the viewing subject is made to experience the dislocation of their own body along with the numerous arms, heads, and legs which populate the scene simultaneous with the realization that this process is one of self-mutilation. This process of internalization is further evidenced by a somewhat more literal interpretation of the figures within the scene, who seem to merge the private and the public spheres of subjectivity and emphasize the violence inherent in this act. They are both the intruders and the intruded upon, and represent places and moments of hiding, discovery, and subterfuge, and one is reminded that the Blitzkrieg – an act of warfare targeting an entire population both civilian and military – was perfected in the Spanish conflict. The sense of dread and guilt, both of the future and the avoidance of the inevitable within that future, permeates Picasso’s mural and the viewing subject is forced to confront the limits of its own rationality. Guernica speaks to the desire for a totalizing experiential representation of its subject and the ontological crises which this process by consequence suggests.
As a logical extension of the principle of narrative multiplicities, we must not, by a process of institutional exclusion and thus textual censorship, avoid the voices of the repressed in modernity, those among the subaltern who may not have the agency to represent themselves as authentic subjects within the conception of modernity. I am here thinking of the recovery strategies proposed by feminist and post-colonial critics, who wish to re-introduce texts that have been excised from the archive of modernity and authenticate them within the canon of academic study; this is a theme to which I will later return. That the modern subject requires certain aesthetic realities for acceptance as ‘modern’ reflects the institutional nature of criticism in its most general sense, namely that of inscribing the past with the voice of the present. Indeed, Jameson identifies such a conception as belonging to the ‘High Moderns’, a term which must be positioned as belonging to the canonization of art and not a category for its production: “most often they allowed representation to follow its own semi-autonomous course ... they allowed it to separate itself from its content and its object” (198). It is my own belief that such an arbitrary stance toward the signifier reflected the sense of play, in the sense proposed by the later Wittgenstein, towards conceptualization in general. In other words, during the moment of artistic gesture the individual artist whether consciously or not creates a text (perhaps body is both more accurate and more suggestive than text) which adheres solely to an internal logic, and in a sense prefigures itself to itself. In this respect, Duchamp’s 1946 piece Paysage Fautif, composed entirely of the artist’s own semen, best exemplifies the gesture of modernism, although in an admittedly abstract manner. The rational mind of the viewing subject seeks order within this particular amorphous geometry produced by Duchamp, and thus the image begins as an overhead picture of an island perhaps, or the conceptualized resistence of an organic, non-angular entity against the angular and obviously mechanized confinement of the frame and the negative (and negated) space it suggests. Rather the gesture Duchamp makes is quite literal: art is simply a jouissance reified and solidified, and consequently made into a gesture, by its own materiality. In the vein of Escher’s representation of mathematical space or the ‘self-sufficient’ compositional feedback of musical phrases in the magnetic-tape era Varèse or Cage, the gesture enters into itself in order to emerge as a concrete entity.
This has been true of artistic expression in a very broad sense throughout post-classical history – the emergence of perspective in Renaissance European art, and western-style tonality in post-monastic musical composition are as self-referential or ‘internalized’ in the sense given above as any artistic gesture of the twentieth century. Yet there is one fundamental difference, namely that which the self represents to itself as an ontological reality; this has indeed changed from the pre-modern to the modernists. The difference within modernism itself is that this process of representation-to-oneself is a process of increasing abstraction and duplication. For the pre-modern artist the representation of a given subject was simply: “I am painting x, and thus need to follow the rules for painting such subjects in order to realize x as x within my audience’s perception of x”. That painting until the middle of the 19th century has been traditionally conceived within the discourse of art history as a process of increasingly ‘realistic’ representations of given subjects, followed by the rupture of an Impressionism which celebrated painting for its own sake, is more reflective of the narrativization of history than historical actuality itself, for the contrapuntal (and to a degree contradictory) subtext to such histories will forever remain the sublimated surrealism of fantasy artists beginning with Bosch and running through the engravings of Blake straight to post-Impressionism. Rather the pre-modern artist remains such precisely because of a belief in a totality and universality of representation, or in other words that x will forever be viewed as x so long as it is painted correctly. Alternately, the modern artist is cognizant that there is no true x except the representation of x, and therefore the act of play occurs in a secondary manner in relation to the subject of the art gesture. For the modern artist, x becomes a mere abstraction for the true process of art, namely “within my audience’s perception of x through medium y, I wish to realize x as y in order to properly situate x as x”. This process can exhaust our alphabet quite readily – Duchamp would locate the museum itself as z, for example – as the subject position of both the artist and the audience are continually negotiated and re-conceptualized.
And yet the ontology of the art gesture is exactly the same, despite the multiplicities it suggests. The subject is annihilated in order to be recreated as as representation. Thus the modern artist, regardless of medium, plays with representation itself knowing full well that the representation of a given subject will then be re-presented to the viewer of the artwork. This is not the same as the process Arthur Danto describes in The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art, in which the awareness of criticism ontologically changes artistic expression, and indeed changes the modes of its production (Danto himself does not use such an obviously Marxist teleology, but my purposes are served) – Andy Warhol knowing, for example, that the process of art criticism and reception requires a priori certain criteria which are then negated or emphasized in a particular piece of work. More to the point I wish to suggest that within the modernist aesthetic the critical function was itself an element for play within a broader gesture towards culture, which would include not only the critical function but also those of the market, ethics, technology, ethnography, sociology, etc. Indeed, the mark of the modern is the same that marked Cain: having destroyed the traditional subject of art, modern art must now be protected from those who wish it vengeance, and thus it retreats into itself in order to legitimate itself. The rupture from the pre-modern to the modern is an act of violence, and in this capacity I cannot think otherwise than Derrida in Archive Fever. The pleasure of the archive – the institutionalization of the modern as modernism – is precisely the pleasure of inscribing certain texts into the archive and excluding others in a process of negation. Thus the Tintin comic strip is not modern in the institutional sense for the reasons that it is not like that which has been included; likewise Mina Loy has been recovered from the purgatory of the non-modern as a legitimate and authentically modern artist. Indeed, how can one think otherwise, with an example such as ‘There is no Life or Death’ from The Last Lunar Baedeker, which sees only an eternal present created out of a narrativization of its own past: “There is no Life or Death / Only activity / And in the absolute / Is no declivity”. She tells us that nothing exists save a certain subjectivity towards ourselves, and this by extension precludes totalizing gestures (life and death being two of the most obvious examples). This is fundamentally the same gesture as Faulkner’s temporal fracturing of narrative subjectivities in The Sound and the Fury, just as Picasso’s Guernica echoes her line, “There is no Space or Time / Only intensity”, in the refusal to objectively situate a site the ‘real’. The annihilation of the subject of the present inaugurated by the past is the subject of her unpublished ‘Continuity’, in which the eternity of subjectivity encounters the ironic termination of the eternal present by mechanical reproduction. Loy twice invokes the passage, “Continuity / renews / precedence”, which serves as a concept prefiguring its own continuation and reification as poem despite its grammatical fracture. The unpublished ‘Echo’ perhaps best concretizes the expressive gesture towards an ontologic negativity which I have been promoting throughout this discussion. Existence is figured as an inquiry which fundamentally looks through itself to create itself; “our anxious ‘Why’”, the philosophical imperative which constitutes the self, returns as an ambiguity, an echo, which then reifies whatever is external and transcendent to itself as mere subjectivity: “echo is no answer”. The sole answer to the question of existence that Loy is here forwarding is the process of self-creation through negation.
It is with modernism that we enter into the space where institutionalization encounters authenticity, and within this space a certain respect must be given to all those who consciously or not were able to counter the violence done to them by exclusion from the umbrella of (High) Modernism. It must be recognized that there are experiences of modernity which will never be recovered – one must think of the anonymous poets of the first world war who are canonically deferred in favour of an Owen or a Brooke, just as one must think of the anonymous housewives whose expression of domestic subjectivities in textile or food production were as powerful a realization of the modern as Stein’s Tender Buttons. And yet we can accept the relatively nonsensical text of a Stein or a Burroughs as important objects of study precisely because we have the institutional means to accept their existence, namely the study and reproduction of language in both the educational and critical mediums. Other modernist gestures which cannot be so easily contained are excluded from study; they are censored by the archive of modernism itself. It is thus that we arrive at what I initially posited as an institutional function of modernism which is itself anti-modern. Modernism must attempt to contain all that is a gesture of the modern, and yet it cannot for it has created a temporality for itself which cannot inscribe the totality of the modernist oeuvre within its archive. The sense of history is created out of specific modes of production which embraced the expressions of certain artists while rejecting others as ‘not-of-itself’. And indeed, it is to be remembered that Modernism is a narrative creation and as such it a priori excludes that which contradicts a given experiential reality. Thus, while Marinetti’s followers could indeed rejoice in his dictum that there is no painting, sculpture, or poetry, but rather there is only creation (!), all elements of said creation cannot be contained within Modernité proper, as Jameson elaborates in A Singular Modernity: “each mode of production has its own system of temporalities” (79), further emphasizing the inscribing process of history from specific vantage points. In this sense it is easy to see why the readymades of Duchamp were so readily accepted, and indeed consumed, within the art community; had Duchamp’s gesture been less akin to sculpture, had he for example made a film of himself baking a cake and submitted the reels for museum installation and looped presentation, his subversive expression would have been greeted with a sense of boredom rather than anger – the film would be a non-art and thus a non-entity for criticism, whereas the readymades were so obviously anti-art, and thus inherently artistic in their negational qualities. Forgetting the absurdity of the preceding example for a moment, it does serve its purpose, namely to further underline the notion of modernism as a narrative trope, as a history created by the present for the present. A contemporary critic would have no problem whatsoever in discerning the gesture and artistic consequences of a filmed occurrence, regardless of subject; in this sense, it is possible to argue that only within a post-modern society can the modern be truly situated.
The last example best exemplifies the principle conception about modernism, namely that it knows itself, that it is self-aware and by extension self-referential. In many respects, Freud’s work anticipates the anxieties of representation which were not to enter into modernism proper until serialism in music, abstract expressionism in visual art, and the “lost generation” in literature (and language poetry in the later context of a post-modern crisis). Repetitive gestures of representation, which by the turn of the century had begun to include mechanical techniques of image and language reproduction, created in a sense a high tide of represented figures and exhausted tropes. Reality has by the pre-war period incorporated previously symbolic modes of understanding and expression as tangible and in a very real manner marketable products, and thus the authentic artist, siding with Nietzsche in the belief that the ‘real’ – a construction of reality predicated on the reiterated past – is intolerable, seeks a new language in order to express his own subjective experience of their surroundings. It is at this point that the artistic gesture encounters an impasse in relation to the artist, namely that the latter has seen itself before itself in this very guise. The subject is made painfully aware that it is using a language increasingly distanced from experiential reality, and thus a rupture is formed within the subject’s historical sense of time.
It is here that the subject creates the present by reifying the past as the past, namely as a narrative category or trope by which the present is defined. The modernist sees the eternal present within the recurrent past and the rupture that this creates within subjective relations to time, much as the chronological flow of Proust’s text is famously suspended with reveries of childhood as certain smells and tastes elicit profound reminiscences (and in a physically real sense time is objectively telescoped for the reader, as one compares the simple lifting of a madelaine to one’s lips in relation to the time it takes to read Proust’s narration of the event and realizes that the very physicality of this text – over 3500 pages in many editions – is itself a modernist gesture). The impasse which hinders the artistic gesture mentioned above is the moment when the artist realizes that nothing new has emerged to define the past by a repetition of the present; in other words, the continual repetition of the past annihilates both the past as the present. Consequently, the initial crisis of representation felt by the ‘High” modernists of the visual arts, namely that the introduction of certain technological advances such as still and film cameras made traditional representation in painting and graphic art completely irrelevant, can be correlated to a similar crisis encountered by painters of the late modern period who found that they had exhausted the various schools of interpretation/production within abstract expression. And thus the anti-consumerist gestures of the avant-guard (which in Benjaminian terms is de facto anti-bourgeois) became the pro-consumption repetitive tropes of pop art; the avant-guard gesture of Magritte’s La Chambre d’Ecoute was reiterated by Warhol’s Goethe. In a similar manner the avant-guard of Schoenberg’s serialism and Berg’s atonality in modern composition became the widely popular neo-classicism of Stravinsky. Indeed, one can locate a unique intra-mediary correlation between the artistic gesture in music and the visual arts in the 1950s, when abstract expressionism emerged as the logical extension of the initial crisis of representing the subject realized by the Impressionists at the very same time that freely improvised music emerged from direct compositional influence; one gets the same sense of spatial and temporal play within the art of both Pollock and de Kooning, for example, as one can interpret within the music of Morton Feldman or Ornette Coleman. Each seeks to relocalize the past in order to more accurately situate the present, and thus legitimate the artistic gesture itself. Importantly, film, itself a new medium born with modernité, suffers no such crisis of representation. To summarize in brief, modernity must remain continually at play with its own conceptualization in order to remain truly modern. The modern artist must indeed follow Rimbaud’s dictum, “Il faut être absolument moderne!”, and remain like Baudelaire an eternal flaneur of the present, for living and creating otherwise is precisely the annihilation of history.
And yet the construction of the artist of modernism remains in a very real sense a mythology, and as such requires situation within its own narrative voice. It is here that I wish to posit the closest thing I can to a thesis concerning modernity. Modernism is a description rather than a totalizing category pour-soi. Within rhetorical terms, modernity is a trope for textual production, yet it is one which, in a performative manner, creates and signifies itself. As Fredric Jameson writes in A Singular Modernity – admittedly the guiding critical text for my present formulation of the modern – “this is to say that the trope of ‘modernity’ is always in one way or another a rewriting, a powerful displacement of previous narrative paradigms” (35). And thus an artist who is self-aware is merely one representation of what the modernist artist can be. There are indeed others, suggested by the notoriously unconscious modernist expressions of Jackson Pollock, William Burroughs, and Jean Genet, who remain distanced somewhat from the authentically self-referential texts by ‘High’ modernists such as Duchamp, Joyce, and Faulkner. There is not one narrative which universalizes and conceptualizes all that is located within its jurisdiction. Despite a multiplicity of subjects of and subjective experiences depicted in warfare, Picasso’s Guernica does not attempt to contain all the voices of the participants of the Spanish civil war nor does it attempt to re-present as legitimate their subjectivity to that experience. That space of silence – not an ontological muting but rather a semantic one – is both the negative space of the darkness, which defines the forms and serves to function as a sort of negative dialectic imparting meaning to the ‘positive’ images, as well the geometric and temporal fracturing of the images themselves into their constituent parts. The latter differs the initial experience of Guernica as conceived objet d’art, initially distancing the viewer of the mural from itself as an image, but it also geographically unifies them as a multiplicity of overlapping images which create subelements of visual representation. One can notice, for example, that the white rectangular area to the right of the mural’s centre when viewed in the same plane as the lightbulb-eye conflation just above the horse’s mouth in the centre suggests a darkened room in which the artist repeats the violence done to bodies in warfare by interrogating them as subject to his artistic gaze (simultaneous to this, we see ourselves situated within this room, ourselves interpolated as agent-victim of the recuperated violence).
In this capacity, Picasso’s work doubles in upon itself, replicating the silence of its subjects within a language that can speak only by negation, by precisely what it is not. It has in effect sealed the historical rupture between the gesture of painting (or representation, and by extension of the historical process in general) and the event itself, which upon reflection is an element of and for its own history, and thus solved its own representational crisis by the very act of negating itself within this rupture. That this conscious gesture of rupture is one and the same with the same implicit and unavoidable one in the photographic process is no simple accident of historical synergy. I am here thinking of Barthes’s argument in Camera Lucida, in which the temporality of the photographic subject is utterly destroyed by the infinitude of the moment of time captured in its representation. In other words, the viewer experiences a fundamentally different set of subjectivities in relation to the image, and thus a new mode of production is required for the artist who wishes to express the authentic. Film and still cameras had captured the horrors of warfare (and indeed all of its subjects) more provocatively than was possible with the language of art the moderns inherited. Thus a new language was required to re-create the visual arts as authentically and legitimately expressive. Bodies in Picasso’s mural are made infinitely more sensual than they would given a traditional depictive gesture – I invoke the ontologic interchangeability of orgasm/pleasure and termination/death as the extension of de Sade and the French formulation of jouissance as le petit mort – and thus the violence done to them is even more intolerable. In a very real sense then, the viewing subject is made to experience the dislocation of their own body along with the numerous arms, heads, and legs which populate the scene simultaneous with the realization that this process is one of self-mutilation. This process of internalization is further evidenced by a somewhat more literal interpretation of the figures within the scene, who seem to merge the private and the public spheres of subjectivity and emphasize the violence inherent in this act. They are both the intruders and the intruded upon, and represent places and moments of hiding, discovery, and subterfuge, and one is reminded that the Blitzkrieg – an act of warfare targeting an entire population both civilian and military – was perfected in the Spanish conflict. The sense of dread and guilt, both of the future and the avoidance of the inevitable within that future, permeates Picasso’s mural and the viewing subject is forced to confront the limits of its own rationality. Guernica speaks to the desire for a totalizing experiential representation of its subject and the ontological crises which this process by consequence suggests.
As a logical extension of the principle of narrative multiplicities, we must not, by a process of institutional exclusion and thus textual censorship, avoid the voices of the repressed in modernity, those among the subaltern who may not have the agency to represent themselves as authentic subjects within the conception of modernity. I am here thinking of the recovery strategies proposed by feminist and post-colonial critics, who wish to re-introduce texts that have been excised from the archive of modernity and authenticate them within the canon of academic study; this is a theme to which I will later return. That the modern subject requires certain aesthetic realities for acceptance as ‘modern’ reflects the institutional nature of criticism in its most general sense, namely that of inscribing the past with the voice of the present. Indeed, Jameson identifies such a conception as belonging to the ‘High Moderns’, a term which must be positioned as belonging to the canonization of art and not a category for its production: “most often they allowed representation to follow its own semi-autonomous course ... they allowed it to separate itself from its content and its object” (198). It is my own belief that such an arbitrary stance toward the signifier reflected the sense of play, in the sense proposed by the later Wittgenstein, towards conceptualization in general. In other words, during the moment of artistic gesture the individual artist whether consciously or not creates a text (perhaps body is both more accurate and more suggestive than text) which adheres solely to an internal logic, and in a sense prefigures itself to itself. In this respect, Duchamp’s 1946 piece Paysage Fautif, composed entirely of the artist’s own semen, best exemplifies the gesture of modernism, although in an admittedly abstract manner. The rational mind of the viewing subject seeks order within this particular amorphous geometry produced by Duchamp, and thus the image begins as an overhead picture of an island perhaps, or the conceptualized resistence of an organic, non-angular entity against the angular and obviously mechanized confinement of the frame and the negative (and negated) space it suggests. Rather the gesture Duchamp makes is quite literal: art is simply a jouissance reified and solidified, and consequently made into a gesture, by its own materiality. In the vein of Escher’s representation of mathematical space or the ‘self-sufficient’ compositional feedback of musical phrases in the magnetic-tape era Varèse or Cage, the gesture enters into itself in order to emerge as a concrete entity.
This has been true of artistic expression in a very broad sense throughout post-classical history – the emergence of perspective in Renaissance European art, and western-style tonality in post-monastic musical composition are as self-referential or ‘internalized’ in the sense given above as any artistic gesture of the twentieth century. Yet there is one fundamental difference, namely that which the self represents to itself as an ontological reality; this has indeed changed from the pre-modern to the modernists. The difference within modernism itself is that this process of representation-to-oneself is a process of increasing abstraction and duplication. For the pre-modern artist the representation of a given subject was simply: “I am painting x, and thus need to follow the rules for painting such subjects in order to realize x as x within my audience’s perception of x”. That painting until the middle of the 19th century has been traditionally conceived within the discourse of art history as a process of increasingly ‘realistic’ representations of given subjects, followed by the rupture of an Impressionism which celebrated painting for its own sake, is more reflective of the narrativization of history than historical actuality itself, for the contrapuntal (and to a degree contradictory) subtext to such histories will forever remain the sublimated surrealism of fantasy artists beginning with Bosch and running through the engravings of Blake straight to post-Impressionism. Rather the pre-modern artist remains such precisely because of a belief in a totality and universality of representation, or in other words that x will forever be viewed as x so long as it is painted correctly. Alternately, the modern artist is cognizant that there is no true x except the representation of x, and therefore the act of play occurs in a secondary manner in relation to the subject of the art gesture. For the modern artist, x becomes a mere abstraction for the true process of art, namely “within my audience’s perception of x through medium y, I wish to realize x as y in order to properly situate x as x”. This process can exhaust our alphabet quite readily – Duchamp would locate the museum itself as z, for example – as the subject position of both the artist and the audience are continually negotiated and re-conceptualized.
And yet the ontology of the art gesture is exactly the same, despite the multiplicities it suggests. The subject is annihilated in order to be recreated as as representation. Thus the modern artist, regardless of medium, plays with representation itself knowing full well that the representation of a given subject will then be re-presented to the viewer of the artwork. This is not the same as the process Arthur Danto describes in The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art, in which the awareness of criticism ontologically changes artistic expression, and indeed changes the modes of its production (Danto himself does not use such an obviously Marxist teleology, but my purposes are served) – Andy Warhol knowing, for example, that the process of art criticism and reception requires a priori certain criteria which are then negated or emphasized in a particular piece of work. More to the point I wish to suggest that within the modernist aesthetic the critical function was itself an element for play within a broader gesture towards culture, which would include not only the critical function but also those of the market, ethics, technology, ethnography, sociology, etc. Indeed, the mark of the modern is the same that marked Cain: having destroyed the traditional subject of art, modern art must now be protected from those who wish it vengeance, and thus it retreats into itself in order to legitimate itself. The rupture from the pre-modern to the modern is an act of violence, and in this capacity I cannot think otherwise than Derrida in Archive Fever. The pleasure of the archive – the institutionalization of the modern as modernism – is precisely the pleasure of inscribing certain texts into the archive and excluding others in a process of negation. Thus the Tintin comic strip is not modern in the institutional sense for the reasons that it is not like that which has been included; likewise Mina Loy has been recovered from the purgatory of the non-modern as a legitimate and authentically modern artist. Indeed, how can one think otherwise, with an example such as ‘There is no Life or Death’ from The Last Lunar Baedeker, which sees only an eternal present created out of a narrativization of its own past: “There is no Life or Death / Only activity / And in the absolute / Is no declivity”. She tells us that nothing exists save a certain subjectivity towards ourselves, and this by extension precludes totalizing gestures (life and death being two of the most obvious examples). This is fundamentally the same gesture as Faulkner’s temporal fracturing of narrative subjectivities in The Sound and the Fury, just as Picasso’s Guernica echoes her line, “There is no Space or Time / Only intensity”, in the refusal to objectively situate a site the ‘real’. The annihilation of the subject of the present inaugurated by the past is the subject of her unpublished ‘Continuity’, in which the eternity of subjectivity encounters the ironic termination of the eternal present by mechanical reproduction. Loy twice invokes the passage, “Continuity / renews / precedence”, which serves as a concept prefiguring its own continuation and reification as poem despite its grammatical fracture. The unpublished ‘Echo’ perhaps best concretizes the expressive gesture towards an ontologic negativity which I have been promoting throughout this discussion. Existence is figured as an inquiry which fundamentally looks through itself to create itself; “our anxious ‘Why’”, the philosophical imperative which constitutes the self, returns as an ambiguity, an echo, which then reifies whatever is external and transcendent to itself as mere subjectivity: “echo is no answer”. The sole answer to the question of existence that Loy is here forwarding is the process of self-creation through negation.
It is with modernism that we enter into the space where institutionalization encounters authenticity, and within this space a certain respect must be given to all those who consciously or not were able to counter the violence done to them by exclusion from the umbrella of (High) Modernism. It must be recognized that there are experiences of modernity which will never be recovered – one must think of the anonymous poets of the first world war who are canonically deferred in favour of an Owen or a Brooke, just as one must think of the anonymous housewives whose expression of domestic subjectivities in textile or food production were as powerful a realization of the modern as Stein’s Tender Buttons. And yet we can accept the relatively nonsensical text of a Stein or a Burroughs as important objects of study precisely because we have the institutional means to accept their existence, namely the study and reproduction of language in both the educational and critical mediums. Other modernist gestures which cannot be so easily contained are excluded from study; they are censored by the archive of modernism itself. It is thus that we arrive at what I initially posited as an institutional function of modernism which is itself anti-modern. Modernism must attempt to contain all that is a gesture of the modern, and yet it cannot for it has created a temporality for itself which cannot inscribe the totality of the modernist oeuvre within its archive. The sense of history is created out of specific modes of production which embraced the expressions of certain artists while rejecting others as ‘not-of-itself’. And indeed, it is to be remembered that Modernism is a narrative creation and as such it a priori excludes that which contradicts a given experiential reality. Thus, while Marinetti’s followers could indeed rejoice in his dictum that there is no painting, sculpture, or poetry, but rather there is only creation (!), all elements of said creation cannot be contained within Modernité proper, as Jameson elaborates in A Singular Modernity: “each mode of production has its own system of temporalities” (79), further emphasizing the inscribing process of history from specific vantage points. In this sense it is easy to see why the readymades of Duchamp were so readily accepted, and indeed consumed, within the art community; had Duchamp’s gesture been less akin to sculpture, had he for example made a film of himself baking a cake and submitted the reels for museum installation and looped presentation, his subversive expression would have been greeted with a sense of boredom rather than anger – the film would be a non-art and thus a non-entity for criticism, whereas the readymades were so obviously anti-art, and thus inherently artistic in their negational qualities. Forgetting the absurdity of the preceding example for a moment, it does serve its purpose, namely to further underline the notion of modernism as a narrative trope, as a history created by the present for the present. A contemporary critic would have no problem whatsoever in discerning the gesture and artistic consequences of a filmed occurrence, regardless of subject; in this sense, it is possible to argue that only within a post-modern society can the modern be truly situated.
Friday, November 03, 2000
Reflecting Eagleton: Capitalism, Modernism, and Postmodernism
Reflecting Eagleton: Capitalism, Modernism and Postmodernism
The Modern
The avant-garde culture which dominated Modernism attempts to reintegrate art into political life to achieve socio-political ends, a socialist future in which art and society achieve a mutual enlightenment. In this sense the present – the actuality – of the subject is merely a dislocated future which exists simultaneously as now and to come. History then becomes a rupture in temporality (re: Cubism, montage in cinema) rather than a linear narrative.
Modernism resists commodification by rejecting the bourgeois forms and tropes of representation in favour of the less consumable and non-representational: surrealism; dadaism; serialism; the theoretical (or academic) enfranchisement of form and structure as reified, for example, in the work of the Cubists, the neoclassicists, and musique-concrete. In this regard, “Modernism refuses to abandon the struggle for meaning” while simultaneously attempting to continually re-localize sites of meaning away from itself. It thus denies the self of its referent (object; “I am art”) while simultaneously glorifying the self which enacts the representation (object[strikeout word]; “I am the gesture of art”) in a performative manner.
The utopia envisioned by the Modern aesthetic was checked by elements of late capitalism which institutionalized and commodified its once revolutionary gestures. “High modernism ... was born at a stroke with mass commodity culture”; it resists commodification, but that very gesture of resistence is itself institutionalized as commodity. In protesting bourgeois elitism in art and politics, modernism attempted to remove itself from general social practice (re: mass commodity culture) and thus reiterated the isolationism and elitism it strove to overcome. It became a fetish, the singular ‘collectable’ in both its materiality and its existence as image.
The Postmodern
Artistic expression within postmodern culture is “the dissolution of art into the prevailing forms of commodity production”. It is not simply l’objet d’importance in its material form, but rather the gesture of its presentation is its ontology. Thus, Eagleton expands upon Jameson’s belief that pastiche is the mode of postmodern art by reclaiming parody as a equal structural element. Po-mo art reiterates the tropes of modernism but moves their political implications. No longer is the alienation of the human subject the dominant theme of art, as such remains tied to tradition metaphysics which correlates an a priori gesture of transcendence with all human endeavour. Consequently there can not be an attribution of value to representation; rather value is a subjective concept which must remain in relation to the art object and not an element of the object itself.
The commodification of art reflects the aestheticization of the commodity; art and political life return to the pragmatic from their theoretical plateaux. Since the modernist project was itself subsumed by commercial culture, then the postmodern project will reposition itself in a pre-emptive manner within capitalist discourse; “only that which is already a commodity can resist commodification. If the high modernist work has been institutionalized within the superstructure, postmodernist culturewill react demotically to such elitism by installing itself within the base”. Thus simple valuation of bad and good – high contra low art – is deemed obsolete; the historical process and any notions of aesthetic value which are its consequence must be forgotten, while simultaneously its forms and tropes are themselves consumed and reused by postmodern expression.
“From modernism proper, postmodernism inherits the fragmentary or schizoid self, but eradicates all critical distance from it, countering this with a poker-faced presentation of ‘bizarre’ experiences which resemble certain avant-garde gestures”. The postmodern project wrongly assumes the end of representation to signify the death of truth, and thus a multiplicity of truths can co-habitate.
The postmodern subject oscillates between the interiority of its individuality and its citizenship amongst a faceless mass.
The Modern
The avant-garde culture which dominated Modernism attempts to reintegrate art into political life to achieve socio-political ends, a socialist future in which art and society achieve a mutual enlightenment. In this sense the present – the actuality – of the subject is merely a dislocated future which exists simultaneously as now and to come. History then becomes a rupture in temporality (re: Cubism, montage in cinema) rather than a linear narrative.
Modernism resists commodification by rejecting the bourgeois forms and tropes of representation in favour of the less consumable and non-representational: surrealism; dadaism; serialism; the theoretical (or academic) enfranchisement of form and structure as reified, for example, in the work of the Cubists, the neoclassicists, and musique-concrete. In this regard, “Modernism refuses to abandon the struggle for meaning” while simultaneously attempting to continually re-localize sites of meaning away from itself. It thus denies the self of its referent (object; “I am art”) while simultaneously glorifying the self which enacts the representation (object[strikeout word]; “I am the gesture of art”) in a performative manner.
The utopia envisioned by the Modern aesthetic was checked by elements of late capitalism which institutionalized and commodified its once revolutionary gestures. “High modernism ... was born at a stroke with mass commodity culture”; it resists commodification, but that very gesture of resistence is itself institutionalized as commodity. In protesting bourgeois elitism in art and politics, modernism attempted to remove itself from general social practice (re: mass commodity culture) and thus reiterated the isolationism and elitism it strove to overcome. It became a fetish, the singular ‘collectable’ in both its materiality and its existence as image.
The Postmodern
Artistic expression within postmodern culture is “the dissolution of art into the prevailing forms of commodity production”. It is not simply l’objet d’importance in its material form, but rather the gesture of its presentation is its ontology. Thus, Eagleton expands upon Jameson’s belief that pastiche is the mode of postmodern art by reclaiming parody as a equal structural element. Po-mo art reiterates the tropes of modernism but moves their political implications. No longer is the alienation of the human subject the dominant theme of art, as such remains tied to tradition metaphysics which correlates an a priori gesture of transcendence with all human endeavour. Consequently there can not be an attribution of value to representation; rather value is a subjective concept which must remain in relation to the art object and not an element of the object itself.
The commodification of art reflects the aestheticization of the commodity; art and political life return to the pragmatic from their theoretical plateaux. Since the modernist project was itself subsumed by commercial culture, then the postmodern project will reposition itself in a pre-emptive manner within capitalist discourse; “only that which is already a commodity can resist commodification. If the high modernist work has been institutionalized within the superstructure, postmodernist culturewill react demotically to such elitism by installing itself within the base”. Thus simple valuation of bad and good – high contra low art – is deemed obsolete; the historical process and any notions of aesthetic value which are its consequence must be forgotten, while simultaneously its forms and tropes are themselves consumed and reused by postmodern expression.
“From modernism proper, postmodernism inherits the fragmentary or schizoid self, but eradicates all critical distance from it, countering this with a poker-faced presentation of ‘bizarre’ experiences which resemble certain avant-garde gestures”. The postmodern project wrongly assumes the end of representation to signify the death of truth, and thus a multiplicity of truths can co-habitate.
The postmodern subject oscillates between the interiority of its individuality and its citizenship amongst a faceless mass.
Thursday, March 30, 2000
Quentin's Tarrentino-esque Suicide in The Sound and the Fury
One of the main concerns facing many readers of Faulkner centres upon the interpretation of his frequently non-linear and freely associative narrative techniques, usually referred to as stream of consciousness writing. The Sound and the Fury is no exception, as the first two sections of the novel are written from the perspective of a mentally handicapped adult and a neurotic and suicidal adolescent (or young post-adolescent). However, it is through these rather disjointed narratives that one can more fully appreciate the relationships between the various family members. The principle focus of Faulkner’s text is Caddy, the sole daughter in the Compson household. While Benjy was certainly loved by his sister, there seems to be a much closer relationship between her and Quentin. Throughout his section of the narrative, Quentin almost single-mindedly concentrates on his sister, reliving old memories to the point of confusing them with his contemporary world: “How many where there?”. His narrative – in a sense ‘a day in the life’ of a mentally unstable individual – is much more disjointed and seemingly arbitrary than Benjy’s, which despite its free association of memories still retained a cohesive structure. Once a reader begins to understand Benjy’s conventions his text is rather easy to comprehend. Alternately, Quentin’s narrative continually degenerates into a neurotic stream of consciousness, especially toward the end of his section as he approaches the moment of his suicide.
Quentin’s section is perhaps most vividly able to portray the corruption of the entire Compson family (or dynasty, as Faulkner relates in his Appendix to this novel, which traces the Compsons from colonial times). It is he who seems to be the last “great white hope” for his family, and it is for him that a part of the estate is sold to pay for a Harvard education. Of all the members of the family except perhaps his mother, it is Quentin who most fully internalizes the concept of the majestic old South along with a sense of southern nobility. Within this context he is to be the defender of his sister, and indeed as the eldest son, he must act to protect the entire family. When Quentin reveals his feelings toward his sister in relation to her involvement with Dalton Ames, there is a profound sense of powerlessness in his thoughts. In fact, one could argue that he has not only internalized the southern chivalric code, but the extreme sense of meaninglessness and absurdity felt by the South after the American Civil War. It is possible to understand his rather pathetic “fighting spirit” in regards to this profound sense of purposelessness. There are in fact two fights in this section of the novel, although Quentin’s narrative confuses the two. Early in the year he had challenged Dalton Ames to a duel in order that Caddy’s honour could be reclaimed, which he of course believed to have been tarnished by their sexual relationship. Dalton had refused the challenge, and apparently while remembering this instance, Quentin proceeded to lash out at Gerald Bland, who promptly defended himself by bloodying his attacker. Such violent tendencies reflect a self-hatred and nihilism inherent in suicidal individuals: the urge to fight a superior opponent, which was the case with both Ames and Bland, is a repressed desire to kill oneself.
So what does in fact lead to Quentin’s suicide? Certainly there are numerous factors in such an maximal and final decision. The aforementioned sense of powerlessness, despite adherence to the Southern code of chivalry and nobility, extended into everything surrounding Quentin. He tried to argue against his father’s nihilism, yet everywhere he looked was evidence to support an absurd existence. Yet the most overwhelming element present in Quentin’s section is his relationship with his sister Caddy. Much like many men throughout recorded history he views his sister within the virgin / whore paradigm. For him his entire sense of Southern nobility is maintained by his sister’s virginity, and its loss is the final proof for Quentin of the degeneration of that mentality, and as well that all existence is absurd. When he proclaims to his father that it was in fact he who took his sister’s virginity, he is attempting to preserve her dignity by (in a sense) “keeping it in the family”. Yet this very passage demonstrates how corrupt his vision of Southern chivalry has in fact become. Perhaps it even portrays the extent to which his mind has become unhinged and all his thoughts are theoretical. Certainly his life is lived in the abstract: one cannot interpret Quentin’s perception of time, as depicted in the clockmaker sequence, as a perception of reality. When everything has lost its physicality and becomes completely abstracted, a concept such as self-destruction through suicide is entirely feasible.
There is very much a perception in Quentin’s section (as well as in Jason’s narrative) that Caddy’s awakening sexuality precipitates the downfall of the entire Compson dynasty. Faulkner’s emphasis upon her soiled underpants in Benjy’s section – she had climbed a tree that her brothers could not to look upon death, and consequently revealed her undergarments – is perhaps a rather obvious metaphor, yet it does succeed in anticipating both Quentin’s and Jason’s opinions of their sister as revealed in their later monologues. One is therefore left to wonder whether it was in fact the sins of Caddy – if such rather normal adolescent behaviour can be so negatively labelled – which will motivate the downfall of the Compson family.
Quentin’s section is perhaps most vividly able to portray the corruption of the entire Compson family (or dynasty, as Faulkner relates in his Appendix to this novel, which traces the Compsons from colonial times). It is he who seems to be the last “great white hope” for his family, and it is for him that a part of the estate is sold to pay for a Harvard education. Of all the members of the family except perhaps his mother, it is Quentin who most fully internalizes the concept of the majestic old South along with a sense of southern nobility. Within this context he is to be the defender of his sister, and indeed as the eldest son, he must act to protect the entire family. When Quentin reveals his feelings toward his sister in relation to her involvement with Dalton Ames, there is a profound sense of powerlessness in his thoughts. In fact, one could argue that he has not only internalized the southern chivalric code, but the extreme sense of meaninglessness and absurdity felt by the South after the American Civil War. It is possible to understand his rather pathetic “fighting spirit” in regards to this profound sense of purposelessness. There are in fact two fights in this section of the novel, although Quentin’s narrative confuses the two. Early in the year he had challenged Dalton Ames to a duel in order that Caddy’s honour could be reclaimed, which he of course believed to have been tarnished by their sexual relationship. Dalton had refused the challenge, and apparently while remembering this instance, Quentin proceeded to lash out at Gerald Bland, who promptly defended himself by bloodying his attacker. Such violent tendencies reflect a self-hatred and nihilism inherent in suicidal individuals: the urge to fight a superior opponent, which was the case with both Ames and Bland, is a repressed desire to kill oneself.
So what does in fact lead to Quentin’s suicide? Certainly there are numerous factors in such an maximal and final decision. The aforementioned sense of powerlessness, despite adherence to the Southern code of chivalry and nobility, extended into everything surrounding Quentin. He tried to argue against his father’s nihilism, yet everywhere he looked was evidence to support an absurd existence. Yet the most overwhelming element present in Quentin’s section is his relationship with his sister Caddy. Much like many men throughout recorded history he views his sister within the virgin / whore paradigm. For him his entire sense of Southern nobility is maintained by his sister’s virginity, and its loss is the final proof for Quentin of the degeneration of that mentality, and as well that all existence is absurd. When he proclaims to his father that it was in fact he who took his sister’s virginity, he is attempting to preserve her dignity by (in a sense) “keeping it in the family”. Yet this very passage demonstrates how corrupt his vision of Southern chivalry has in fact become. Perhaps it even portrays the extent to which his mind has become unhinged and all his thoughts are theoretical. Certainly his life is lived in the abstract: one cannot interpret Quentin’s perception of time, as depicted in the clockmaker sequence, as a perception of reality. When everything has lost its physicality and becomes completely abstracted, a concept such as self-destruction through suicide is entirely feasible.
There is very much a perception in Quentin’s section (as well as in Jason’s narrative) that Caddy’s awakening sexuality precipitates the downfall of the entire Compson dynasty. Faulkner’s emphasis upon her soiled underpants in Benjy’s section – she had climbed a tree that her brothers could not to look upon death, and consequently revealed her undergarments – is perhaps a rather obvious metaphor, yet it does succeed in anticipating both Quentin’s and Jason’s opinions of their sister as revealed in their later monologues. One is therefore left to wonder whether it was in fact the sins of Caddy – if such rather normal adolescent behaviour can be so negatively labelled – which will motivate the downfall of the Compson family.
Friday, April 09, 1999
The Discourse of the Other in The Prowler
There has been a great deal of discussion concerning the real-world applicability of critical theory. Despite ostentatiously basing their works on tangible examples in literature and society, theorists have often been accused of merely exchanging ideologies amongst their own elite academic society with no acknowledgement to those outside their ‘interpretive community’. There are however many artistic works which do not allow for an interpretation unaided by critical discourse. Certainly the most popular critical model used to interpret art in the twentieth century has been psychoanalysis. It has been praised for its universality, although it is just as frequently been over-emphasized as an effective tool of evaluation. Other models have been proposed which can be applied just as universally, arguably the most important of which have proven to be the deconstructivist ideas of Derrida and Foucault. In establishing mutually-dependant binaries – such as Self and Other – deconstructionism has proven to be a productive supplement to literary studies, explicating relations between characters for example. Furthermore, other critical movements have emerged from deconstruction theory which have also been of great influence. Perhaps the most currently debated critical movements are feminism and post-colonialism, which are similar in that each acts as periphery to the central masculine-imperial ideology. They endeavour to subvert this dominant cultural ideology and displace it with their own. Adapting these theoretical models to analyse Kristjana Gunnars’s text The Prowler demonstrates their usefulness to literary study, as indeed the work is pregnant with theoretical meaning. Gunnars continually emphasizes the Other, which is mainly the various representations of the prowler as individual, and in fact the Other can almost be viewed as the Althusserian problematic of the text. The Other is also signified in the author’s implicit post-colonial discourse, which posits her native Iceland as occupied country under the authority of several other nations. Additionally, feminism informs not only the subject matter of the novel, but its structure as well. Indeed, the form of the text – regarded somewhat loosely as a novel by Gunnars herself (or the publisher) – is difficult to interpret without regarding feminist discourse.
Emerging from Saussurian and Lacanian ideas of slippery signification, deconstructivist theory analyses the relationships between dominant and marginal entities. Derrida’s work – and also in the ideas of Bakhtin – suggests that the two are not mutually exclusive, but alternately are intimately intertwined ontologically. The definition of one depends on the existence of the other. It is within this context that the concept of the Other can be applied to literature. In The Prowler, the Other is not one entity to the narrator, but indeed there are a variety of Others. Gunnars is in fact subtextually referring to the structuralist ideology of slippery signification in this regard, for while the meaning of the term itself remains the same, that which it signifies changes dramatically through the text. The prowler is variously a thief, the reader, the narrator, a man onboard the Gullfoss, the author, and finally the text itself. Indeed, it is the prowler-as-reader which provides the greatest disclosure of Gunnars’s application of slippery signification. Every aspect of the prowler – as thief, as author, as narrator – are all contained within the position of reader: “There are prowlers everywhere. They prowl about, looking for dialogue” (Gunnars, 74). The author and narrator become the reader as well as the thief in order to understand their story, for it is the “reader [who] ... steal[s] from the text”(Gunnars, 59) and is therefore able to take its meaning. The exchange of roles in this manner is implied by her statement that “the answer is also contained in the question” (Gunnars, 24), that the very act of questioning is its own answer. By destroying the boundaries between the various prowlers, between author and reader, the author / narrator is “free to steal from [herself]” (Gunnars, 59), and consequently learn from her writing. This is made most evident when the narrator and the prowler-as-Other cooperate in reconstructing a puzzle on board the Gullfoss. Furthermore, there are several instances in the novel where Gunnars posits herself as Other to the text itself: “It is not my story. The author is unknown. I am the reader.” (Gunnars, 119). The Self is identified by the Other; Gunnars logic therefore is to become the Other in order to realize the Self. The narrator herself endeavours to become the Other, first describing herself as the prowler of the school library, but also more importantly when she begins to learn other languages. Throughout the text she refers to the almost mythological purity and value of other cultures, that “anything that came from far away was good. Life elsewhere was magical. The further away it was, the more magical” (Gunnars, 21). There is no purity in the Self, it is diseased and needs to be cured by the Other. Such a belief emerges when the narrator is brought to a doctor who tells her “if you live in the Middle East, ... you can maybe go to the Red Sea and wash in it. That will no doubt cure you”, as “up here in the North there is no hope” (Gunnars, 37). Indeed, the self-doubt of the narrator is blatantly expressed when she states that “material for stories came from magical places so far away that people there had never heard of us” (Gunnars, 83).
She does in fact come to a very distinct conclusion about her existence within the Self-Other binary however. Like Derrida, Gunnars states her preference for the ambiguity – of the freeplay – between the definitions of Self and Other caused by their mutual dependence. By identifying with the text itself, Gunnars is able to observe all of these different borders and abuse their definitions, for “all that a story is ... is a way of looking at things” (Gunnars, 90). She is well aware that any definition given to an entity is not a strict and complete measure of its existence, but instead that “everything ... depends on vantage point” (Gunnars, 90). There are many references to the uncertainty and arbitrariness of socially defined borders which express the author’s desire for freeplay. Iceland itself, while having the definite physical borders of being an island, does not have any ethnic or cultural ones. There is no sense that nations are defined by natural reasons, and consequently the narrator questions the rigidity of national boundaries, whether one can “know when there was a border? Can borders be felt? Is there perhaps a change of air, a different climate, when you go from one country to another?” (Gunnars, 60). At several times Gunnars mentions the classless system upon which Icelandic society is built; everybody is a “white Inuit” at relatively the same socio-economic level. The narrator is often confused when confronted with distinctions in class, as when she lived with her great-aunt and her housemaids. The encounters that she has with other cultural groups also hint at the ambiguity of boundaries. She initially defines Americans as abusers, as men who would prey on teenage Icelandic girls. When she goes to school in America however, she learns that Americans are not in fact different from her own countrymen. The author also makes reference to the lack of a perimeter in modern electronic communication, which can indeed be seen to define much of modern world culture: everyone has access to American radio and television broadcasts. It is within such regions of ambiguity that the author / narrator does indeed find solace. Outside of boundaries she defines herself, free of self-judgement and free of judgement by the Other. It is for this reason that she likes sailing, where she is between boundaries and can feel “entirely at home (Gunnars, 134) as “the text is relieved that there are no borders” (Gunnars, 164).
There are certain limitations placed upon such a lack of ‘natural’ borders however, as it is human nature to delineate the natural world for political and economic reasons. Consequently, those Icelanders who did in fact listen to American radio were accused of betrayal: “Rolls of invisible barbed wire circled the American as across the airwaves” (Gunnars, 71). Additionally, while the narrator herself is above all ethnic classification and is able to function among all the various groups at school, nevertheless there were many who had been rigidly inscribed within a set class definition. These socially described exactitudes can be seen to emerge quite directly from Iceland’s status as an occupied country. Following Bhabha’s discourse of mimicry, it could be argued that the Icelanders’ adapting of class distinctions is a mimicry of the authority imposed upon them by their quasi-imperial occupiers. In other words, the occupying peoples – such as the Danes – attempt to recreate the stratified conditions in their home country, and in doing so they cause the Icelanders to internalize colonial authority and displace their own identity. Gunnars makes the resultant alienation quite apparent when she speaks of their culinary habits, which are different from those of other peoples because of necessity: “we are the white Inuit. We eat fish. And in summers we graze like sheep among the mountain grasses” (Gunnars, 7) because Iceland “was a country where people died of starvation” (Gunnars, 39). The reader is brought to sympathize with these white Inuit not because of the relatively poor food selection, but rather due to the estrangement and self-effacement that results from their cultural differences. A more obviously colonial alienation occurs as a result of the extensive leprosy found in Iceland, lepers which had been expelled to Iceland by other countries because “they did not think the people on this remote island counted” (Gunnars, 41). Gunnars is implicitly asking why it is that Iceland is not to be respected, and why it has little respect for itself. According to Bhabha such is the nature of colonial discourse, as the authority of the occupying nation – signified by its denigration of Iceland – is mimicked by the colonized. Gunnars herself predates Bhabha’s work, yet she does signal his ideology; another interpretation of “The answer is also contained in the question” is the mimicry of colonial discourse.
The author / narrator’s self-doubt can also be explained in terms of post-colonial theory. It is the desire of the colonizer to define the colonized; they are the Self which defines the Other. When she doubts the authenticity of her text – “I do not feel clever. If I laugh at myself, it is because I have nothing to say and I am full of love. Because nothing I say says anything. There will be mere words.” (Gunnars, 4) – it is precisely because she questions her right to assume for herself a voice. Much like her relationship with her parents – Iceland “was not a country where children spoke to adults. Only the adults spoke to the children” (Gunnars, 10) – the narrator struggles to claim for herself a discourse within the colonial system. Obliquely referring to Said’s Orientalism, the narrator presupposes the authority of imperialist texts when she describes Malraux’s text on the Chinese Revolution as “something worth writing ... a true story” (Gunnars, 86). Her own text is something to be doubted: “it is not writing. Not poetry, not prose. I am not a writer” (Gunnars, 1). The voice that does emerge however is not expressed in her own Icelandic language as Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o suggests is necessary, ostensibly because she has internalized so many languages as her own. She even forwards the notion that language is not the defining characteristic of an individual, that “there can be nothing extraordinary ... in a language” (Gunnars, 5). Iceland itself remains under colonial authority and does not express itself in any meaningful cultural way: there are, for example, “no Icelandic dances” (Gunnars, 44). But ultimately the text is given life by the author / narrator, it does stand independent as a worthy story.
Indeed, by claiming the text for herself – not as a story or a poem, but just as a means of expression – Gunnars not only escapes from the trap of a post-colonial mentality of silence, but also from the trap of a masculine ideology which similarly imposes a silence upon her. It the “relief just to be writing” (Gunnars, 3) that confirms her independence. The very act of writing itself rejects patriarchy, for “writing ... contain[s] a note of defiance. To confront its opposite, to stare it down” (Gunnars, 105). This rejection of masculine-imposed silence is completely within the ideologies of Helen Cixous, who explicitly calls for women to write. The traditional masculine views of women, that they are far too influenced by their emotions to have meaningful discourse, must be rejected if women are allowed to speak. Gunnars posits that it is not emotion itself which impedes discourse, but rather it is “conflicting emotions [which] are silencing” (Gunnars, 36). Certainly she had internalized masculine oppression, of not owning her own identity as her name was not her own but belonged to a man: “I was certain I was my father’s property” (Gunnars, 94). This identity is quickly rejected however as she continues to write and identify with the text. From one author emerges two voices, one which remains repressed by a patriarchal society and another which merely intends to write in her own voice. The latter censors the intended writing of the former, it is the other author, “behind the official author, who censors the official text as it appears. The other author writes: that is not what you intended to say. I think of a book which has left in the censor’s words.”
(Gunnars, 63).
This multiplicity of expression again finds a correlation in the ideologies of Cixous. Women must acknowledge their bodies in their writing, as indeed this is the basis for expression for both genders. Consequently female writing will be informed by the multiplicity of their sexual experience; no single approach will suffice, but instead the multi-orgasmic, multi-sensuous woman will speak with multiple voices. Certainly Gunnars makes several references to the importance of the female body to her expression: the anorexia experienced by the narrator’s sister is directly associated with her silence. More importantly however, the very structure of the text is informed by Cixous’s ideology of multiplicity. It does not have a linear focus, but instead approaches the narrative and thematic strands in a variety of ways; the ending itself is self-described as arbitrary. Neither time nor the narrative are contiguous, but are broken up and placed seemingly randomly in the text, picked up at certain moments and subsequently dropped until late. The structure of the text is not a ‘rising action leading to climax followed by denouement’, but rather “an unfolding of layers” (Gunnars, 25). Conversely, male authors need a distinct purpose which is to be followed directly and linearly: “The male line. The masculine story. That men have to be going somewhere. Men are always shooting something somewhere” (Gunnars, 25). Accordingly, the novels written by Icelandic men have a particular motive, which was to slander women accused of having American lovers. Such works have one centre which is pursued. Alternately, The Prowler is an attempt “to watch the egg hatch” (Gunnars, 28); it has no specific centre but is composed, like the jigsaw puzzle that the narrator and the prowler collaborate on, of numerous centres. While in her text “there are figurative prowlers looking for something” (Gunnars, 110), Gunnars-as-prowler has already found the numerous centres with which she has constructed her identity.
Certainly when one has been informed by some measure of critical theory The Prowler aids in its own interpretation. Gunnars does not bury the Althusserian problematic of the text too deeply, but rather seems to delight in periodically exposing it for critique. Indeed, such is perhaps her point, as it conforms with the theme of the text. The Prowler is a meditation upon the gradual cognizance of self-identity, an identity which emerges in multiple fashions. Gunnar’s Self is not informed and defined by any single Other, but rather it is a centre for numerous Others. Consequently, identity could be extended to represent the transitional area between an almost infinite number of centre-periphery relationships. By the end of the text, Gunnars suggests that it takes a long time to come to this necessary realization.
Bibliography
Althusser, L. “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses”, Modern Critical Theory. Ed. D. Coleman. Hamilton, Canada: McMaster University Bookstore, 1998.
Bakhtin, M. “ From Discourse in the Novel”, Modern Critical Theory. Ed. D. Coleman. Hamilton, Canada: McMaster University Bookstore, 1998.
Bhabha, H.K. “Of Mimicry and Man; The Ambivilance of Colonial Discourse”, Modern
Critical Theory. Ed. D. Coleman. Hamilton, Canada: McMaster University Bookstore, 1998.
Cixous, H. “The Laugh of the Medusa”, Modern Critical Theory. Ed. D. Coleman. Hamilton, Canada: McMaster University Bookstore, 1998.
Derrida, J. “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences”, Modern
Critical Theory. Ed. D. Coleman. Hamilton, Canada: McMaster University Bookstore, 1998.
De Saussure, F. “The Object of Study”, Modern Critical Theory. Ed. D. Coleman. Hamilton, Canada: McMaster University Bookstore, 1998.
Foucault, M. “From the History of Sexuality”, Modern Critical Theory. Ed. D. Coleman. Hamilton, Canada: McMaster University Bookstore, 1998.
Gunnars, Kristjana. The Prowler. Red Deer, Canada: Red Deer College Press, 1996.
Lacan, J. “The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious or Reason since Freud”, Modern
Critical Theory. Ed. D. Coleman. Hamilton, Canada: McMaster University Bookstore, 1998.
Ngugi wa Thiong’o. “The Language of African Literature”, Modern Critical Theory.
Ed. D. Coleman. Hamilton, Canada: McMaster University Bookstore, 1998.
Said, E. “From the Introdustion to “Orientalism”“, Modern Critical Theory. Ed. D. Coleman. Hamilton, Canada: McMaster University Bookstore, 1998.
Emerging from Saussurian and Lacanian ideas of slippery signification, deconstructivist theory analyses the relationships between dominant and marginal entities. Derrida’s work – and also in the ideas of Bakhtin – suggests that the two are not mutually exclusive, but alternately are intimately intertwined ontologically. The definition of one depends on the existence of the other. It is within this context that the concept of the Other can be applied to literature. In The Prowler, the Other is not one entity to the narrator, but indeed there are a variety of Others. Gunnars is in fact subtextually referring to the structuralist ideology of slippery signification in this regard, for while the meaning of the term itself remains the same, that which it signifies changes dramatically through the text. The prowler is variously a thief, the reader, the narrator, a man onboard the Gullfoss, the author, and finally the text itself. Indeed, it is the prowler-as-reader which provides the greatest disclosure of Gunnars’s application of slippery signification. Every aspect of the prowler – as thief, as author, as narrator – are all contained within the position of reader: “There are prowlers everywhere. They prowl about, looking for dialogue” (Gunnars, 74). The author and narrator become the reader as well as the thief in order to understand their story, for it is the “reader [who] ... steal[s] from the text”(Gunnars, 59) and is therefore able to take its meaning. The exchange of roles in this manner is implied by her statement that “the answer is also contained in the question” (Gunnars, 24), that the very act of questioning is its own answer. By destroying the boundaries between the various prowlers, between author and reader, the author / narrator is “free to steal from [herself]” (Gunnars, 59), and consequently learn from her writing. This is made most evident when the narrator and the prowler-as-Other cooperate in reconstructing a puzzle on board the Gullfoss. Furthermore, there are several instances in the novel where Gunnars posits herself as Other to the text itself: “It is not my story. The author is unknown. I am the reader.” (Gunnars, 119). The Self is identified by the Other; Gunnars logic therefore is to become the Other in order to realize the Self. The narrator herself endeavours to become the Other, first describing herself as the prowler of the school library, but also more importantly when she begins to learn other languages. Throughout the text she refers to the almost mythological purity and value of other cultures, that “anything that came from far away was good. Life elsewhere was magical. The further away it was, the more magical” (Gunnars, 21). There is no purity in the Self, it is diseased and needs to be cured by the Other. Such a belief emerges when the narrator is brought to a doctor who tells her “if you live in the Middle East, ... you can maybe go to the Red Sea and wash in it. That will no doubt cure you”, as “up here in the North there is no hope” (Gunnars, 37). Indeed, the self-doubt of the narrator is blatantly expressed when she states that “material for stories came from magical places so far away that people there had never heard of us” (Gunnars, 83).
She does in fact come to a very distinct conclusion about her existence within the Self-Other binary however. Like Derrida, Gunnars states her preference for the ambiguity – of the freeplay – between the definitions of Self and Other caused by their mutual dependence. By identifying with the text itself, Gunnars is able to observe all of these different borders and abuse their definitions, for “all that a story is ... is a way of looking at things” (Gunnars, 90). She is well aware that any definition given to an entity is not a strict and complete measure of its existence, but instead that “everything ... depends on vantage point” (Gunnars, 90). There are many references to the uncertainty and arbitrariness of socially defined borders which express the author’s desire for freeplay. Iceland itself, while having the definite physical borders of being an island, does not have any ethnic or cultural ones. There is no sense that nations are defined by natural reasons, and consequently the narrator questions the rigidity of national boundaries, whether one can “know when there was a border? Can borders be felt? Is there perhaps a change of air, a different climate, when you go from one country to another?” (Gunnars, 60). At several times Gunnars mentions the classless system upon which Icelandic society is built; everybody is a “white Inuit” at relatively the same socio-economic level. The narrator is often confused when confronted with distinctions in class, as when she lived with her great-aunt and her housemaids. The encounters that she has with other cultural groups also hint at the ambiguity of boundaries. She initially defines Americans as abusers, as men who would prey on teenage Icelandic girls. When she goes to school in America however, she learns that Americans are not in fact different from her own countrymen. The author also makes reference to the lack of a perimeter in modern electronic communication, which can indeed be seen to define much of modern world culture: everyone has access to American radio and television broadcasts. It is within such regions of ambiguity that the author / narrator does indeed find solace. Outside of boundaries she defines herself, free of self-judgement and free of judgement by the Other. It is for this reason that she likes sailing, where she is between boundaries and can feel “entirely at home (Gunnars, 134) as “the text is relieved that there are no borders” (Gunnars, 164).
There are certain limitations placed upon such a lack of ‘natural’ borders however, as it is human nature to delineate the natural world for political and economic reasons. Consequently, those Icelanders who did in fact listen to American radio were accused of betrayal: “Rolls of invisible barbed wire circled the American as across the airwaves” (Gunnars, 71). Additionally, while the narrator herself is above all ethnic classification and is able to function among all the various groups at school, nevertheless there were many who had been rigidly inscribed within a set class definition. These socially described exactitudes can be seen to emerge quite directly from Iceland’s status as an occupied country. Following Bhabha’s discourse of mimicry, it could be argued that the Icelanders’ adapting of class distinctions is a mimicry of the authority imposed upon them by their quasi-imperial occupiers. In other words, the occupying peoples – such as the Danes – attempt to recreate the stratified conditions in their home country, and in doing so they cause the Icelanders to internalize colonial authority and displace their own identity. Gunnars makes the resultant alienation quite apparent when she speaks of their culinary habits, which are different from those of other peoples because of necessity: “we are the white Inuit. We eat fish. And in summers we graze like sheep among the mountain grasses” (Gunnars, 7) because Iceland “was a country where people died of starvation” (Gunnars, 39). The reader is brought to sympathize with these white Inuit not because of the relatively poor food selection, but rather due to the estrangement and self-effacement that results from their cultural differences. A more obviously colonial alienation occurs as a result of the extensive leprosy found in Iceland, lepers which had been expelled to Iceland by other countries because “they did not think the people on this remote island counted” (Gunnars, 41). Gunnars is implicitly asking why it is that Iceland is not to be respected, and why it has little respect for itself. According to Bhabha such is the nature of colonial discourse, as the authority of the occupying nation – signified by its denigration of Iceland – is mimicked by the colonized. Gunnars herself predates Bhabha’s work, yet she does signal his ideology; another interpretation of “The answer is also contained in the question” is the mimicry of colonial discourse.
The author / narrator’s self-doubt can also be explained in terms of post-colonial theory. It is the desire of the colonizer to define the colonized; they are the Self which defines the Other. When she doubts the authenticity of her text – “I do not feel clever. If I laugh at myself, it is because I have nothing to say and I am full of love. Because nothing I say says anything. There will be mere words.” (Gunnars, 4) – it is precisely because she questions her right to assume for herself a voice. Much like her relationship with her parents – Iceland “was not a country where children spoke to adults. Only the adults spoke to the children” (Gunnars, 10) – the narrator struggles to claim for herself a discourse within the colonial system. Obliquely referring to Said’s Orientalism, the narrator presupposes the authority of imperialist texts when she describes Malraux’s text on the Chinese Revolution as “something worth writing ... a true story” (Gunnars, 86). Her own text is something to be doubted: “it is not writing. Not poetry, not prose. I am not a writer” (Gunnars, 1). The voice that does emerge however is not expressed in her own Icelandic language as Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o suggests is necessary, ostensibly because she has internalized so many languages as her own. She even forwards the notion that language is not the defining characteristic of an individual, that “there can be nothing extraordinary ... in a language” (Gunnars, 5). Iceland itself remains under colonial authority and does not express itself in any meaningful cultural way: there are, for example, “no Icelandic dances” (Gunnars, 44). But ultimately the text is given life by the author / narrator, it does stand independent as a worthy story.
Indeed, by claiming the text for herself – not as a story or a poem, but just as a means of expression – Gunnars not only escapes from the trap of a post-colonial mentality of silence, but also from the trap of a masculine ideology which similarly imposes a silence upon her. It the “relief just to be writing” (Gunnars, 3) that confirms her independence. The very act of writing itself rejects patriarchy, for “writing ... contain[s] a note of defiance. To confront its opposite, to stare it down” (Gunnars, 105). This rejection of masculine-imposed silence is completely within the ideologies of Helen Cixous, who explicitly calls for women to write. The traditional masculine views of women, that they are far too influenced by their emotions to have meaningful discourse, must be rejected if women are allowed to speak. Gunnars posits that it is not emotion itself which impedes discourse, but rather it is “conflicting emotions [which] are silencing” (Gunnars, 36). Certainly she had internalized masculine oppression, of not owning her own identity as her name was not her own but belonged to a man: “I was certain I was my father’s property” (Gunnars, 94). This identity is quickly rejected however as she continues to write and identify with the text. From one author emerges two voices, one which remains repressed by a patriarchal society and another which merely intends to write in her own voice. The latter censors the intended writing of the former, it is the other author, “behind the official author, who censors the official text as it appears. The other author writes: that is not what you intended to say. I think of a book which has left in the censor’s words.”
(Gunnars, 63).
This multiplicity of expression again finds a correlation in the ideologies of Cixous. Women must acknowledge their bodies in their writing, as indeed this is the basis for expression for both genders. Consequently female writing will be informed by the multiplicity of their sexual experience; no single approach will suffice, but instead the multi-orgasmic, multi-sensuous woman will speak with multiple voices. Certainly Gunnars makes several references to the importance of the female body to her expression: the anorexia experienced by the narrator’s sister is directly associated with her silence. More importantly however, the very structure of the text is informed by Cixous’s ideology of multiplicity. It does not have a linear focus, but instead approaches the narrative and thematic strands in a variety of ways; the ending itself is self-described as arbitrary. Neither time nor the narrative are contiguous, but are broken up and placed seemingly randomly in the text, picked up at certain moments and subsequently dropped until late. The structure of the text is not a ‘rising action leading to climax followed by denouement’, but rather “an unfolding of layers” (Gunnars, 25). Conversely, male authors need a distinct purpose which is to be followed directly and linearly: “The male line. The masculine story. That men have to be going somewhere. Men are always shooting something somewhere” (Gunnars, 25). Accordingly, the novels written by Icelandic men have a particular motive, which was to slander women accused of having American lovers. Such works have one centre which is pursued. Alternately, The Prowler is an attempt “to watch the egg hatch” (Gunnars, 28); it has no specific centre but is composed, like the jigsaw puzzle that the narrator and the prowler collaborate on, of numerous centres. While in her text “there are figurative prowlers looking for something” (Gunnars, 110), Gunnars-as-prowler has already found the numerous centres with which she has constructed her identity.
Certainly when one has been informed by some measure of critical theory The Prowler aids in its own interpretation. Gunnars does not bury the Althusserian problematic of the text too deeply, but rather seems to delight in periodically exposing it for critique. Indeed, such is perhaps her point, as it conforms with the theme of the text. The Prowler is a meditation upon the gradual cognizance of self-identity, an identity which emerges in multiple fashions. Gunnar’s Self is not informed and defined by any single Other, but rather it is a centre for numerous Others. Consequently, identity could be extended to represent the transitional area between an almost infinite number of centre-periphery relationships. By the end of the text, Gunnars suggests that it takes a long time to come to this necessary realization.
Bibliography
Althusser, L. “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses”, Modern Critical Theory. Ed. D. Coleman. Hamilton, Canada: McMaster University Bookstore, 1998.
Bakhtin, M. “ From Discourse in the Novel”, Modern Critical Theory. Ed. D. Coleman. Hamilton, Canada: McMaster University Bookstore, 1998.
Bhabha, H.K. “Of Mimicry and Man; The Ambivilance of Colonial Discourse”, Modern
Critical Theory. Ed. D. Coleman. Hamilton, Canada: McMaster University Bookstore, 1998.
Cixous, H. “The Laugh of the Medusa”, Modern Critical Theory. Ed. D. Coleman. Hamilton, Canada: McMaster University Bookstore, 1998.
Derrida, J. “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences”, Modern
Critical Theory. Ed. D. Coleman. Hamilton, Canada: McMaster University Bookstore, 1998.
De Saussure, F. “The Object of Study”, Modern Critical Theory. Ed. D. Coleman. Hamilton, Canada: McMaster University Bookstore, 1998.
Foucault, M. “From the History of Sexuality”, Modern Critical Theory. Ed. D. Coleman. Hamilton, Canada: McMaster University Bookstore, 1998.
Gunnars, Kristjana. The Prowler. Red Deer, Canada: Red Deer College Press, 1996.
Lacan, J. “The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious or Reason since Freud”, Modern
Critical Theory. Ed. D. Coleman. Hamilton, Canada: McMaster University Bookstore, 1998.
Ngugi wa Thiong’o. “The Language of African Literature”, Modern Critical Theory.
Ed. D. Coleman. Hamilton, Canada: McMaster University Bookstore, 1998.
Said, E. “From the Introdustion to “Orientalism”“, Modern Critical Theory. Ed. D. Coleman. Hamilton, Canada: McMaster University Bookstore, 1998.
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