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Evolit: Week 12--Lonely? Cracked?
Paul and I are glad you're here, to share thoughts about the story of
evolution and the evolution of stories. This isn't a place for polished
writing or final words. It's a place for thoughts in progress:
questions, ideas you had before, in or after class, things you've heard
or read or seen that you think others might find interesting. Think of
it as a public conversation, a place to put things from your mind or brain
that others might find useful and to find things from others (in our
class and elsewhere) that you might find useful. And a place we can
always go back to to see what we were thinking before and how our class
conversations have affected that. We are looking forward to seeing where we
go, and hoping you are too.
As always, you're free to write about whatever you're thinking about--but here are three (!) possibilities for this week, in order of increasing abstraction:
As always, you're free to write about whatever you're thinking about--but here are three (!) possibilities for this week, in order of increasing abstraction:
- Can you do some more work w/ that puzzling passage on p. 301 of The Sorrows of an American, when Erik says, "It was snowing...it struck me as a moment when the
boundary between inside and outside loosens, and there is no loneliness
because there is no one to be lonely"? What's happening here, @ the very end of the story, that enables this so-always-lonely man to gain such a Whitman-like sense of "self," which is not separate from the world?
- What relationship might we see (or imagine?) between the "cracks" Magda describes as being "healthy," and those Paul described as being central to the practice of science? What function do the cracks "in" our personality serve? How are they like/different from the cracks "of" personal temperament that fuel the ongoing process that is science?
| "We're fragmented beings who cement ourselves together, but there are always cracks. Living with the cracks is part of being, well, reasonably healthy"(Magda's advice to Erik, p. 139). |
 |
- How appropriate is The Sorrows of an American as the final text (not the "finale"--that will be your performances!) in a course on the evolution of stories? How much "movement" is there in the novel? Cf., for instance, Katie's impatience with all the characters "stuck in isolation," with Joanna's enjoyment in seeing Erik traced his "individual evolution backwards": does that action make it "count" (or not) as an evolutionary fiction?
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Narrative is determined not by a desire to narrate but by a desire to exchange. (Roland Barthes, S/Z)
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Being the final story
I think Sorrows Of An American as the final reading for the course worked pretty well for the class and helped put it all together. Before reading this text we learned about evolution, then we learned how evolution is applied and then we spoke about the unconscious and the conscious and now this books brings all of that together as an organized collage so that we have all the pictures on one canvas.
The characters evolve during the whole book while we get glimpses of their unconscious state of mind while dealing with their conscious. The characters are all lonely which helps us look at them as individual species who go through their personal evolution and some come out better than the other in the eyes of the reader just like speciation. This book has it all, the evolution, the pull of the unconscious and the randomness all wrapped up in a story deliberately written in a certain way. This story is one that helps end the class with a better understanding of all the discussions.
One part of this book that
New classics
I just wanted to point out this article to those who are questioning the idea of canon and how books get added to canon. This is Entertainment Weekly magazine's 100 books from the last 25 years that should be considered classic literature.
http://www.ew.com/ew/article/0,,20207076_20207387_20207349,00.html
included on this list are books I have read for classes (House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros; Blindness by Jose Saramago) and books I have read for fun (America the Book by Jon Stewart and the Daily Show Writers, The amazing Adventures of Cavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon).
ambiguity
One aspect of our
One aspect of our conversations re: Whitman and Husvedt that has been lingering in my head is where we have chosen to draw the line between author and character in each. For Whitman, our conversations centered around Walt as a person, perhaps most clearly seen through our debates about whether or not we would want to live with him. In these, we took his poetry to be an exploration and extension of himself, as a window into what "kind" of person he is. Certaintly, Whitman's use of the first person seems to indicate that he is writing as the "self" he is celebrating. And yet, Whitman also uses the third person. For example, in "Song of Myself" he writes "Walt Whitman, an American, one of the roughts, a kosmo..."(38). In this distinctly distanced stance, Whitman seems to be writing more about someone, then as someone--I'm not sure if this is an important distiction to draw, and yet it seems to introduce an interesting tension when contrasted with our discussions of Husvedt.
In our conversations about Sorrows of An American, we drew a clear line between the author and her charecters, even though she too, like Whitman, writes in the first person. The gender distinction between Husvedt and Erik is perhaps the most notable aspect of the novel that allows such an immediate boundary to be drawn. However, as we noted, such "gender trouble" was also afoot in Whitman. But instead of understanding Whitman as writing about a character who "contains multitudes," rather we were quick to critize the poet for what seemed to be a concieted, egocentric understanding of himself.
The differences in how we read these authors would be unproblematic to me if not for how we weighed the benefits and limitations of Husvedt's book. In our small group Dr Grobstein suggested that the bee in his bonnett about Sorrows of an American was that it was preoccupied with looking to the past, as opposed to demonstrating to its readers the interesting new possibilities for the future that arise through evolution. While I think it is true that Husvedt's characters are engaged in a somewhat hopeless project of attempting to piece together their past so as to understand their present, Dr Grobstein's critique relies upon an unfragmented idea of author and self that at once accords with how we read Whitman and disregards the multifaceted self that Whitman asserted. Though Husvedt writes about charecters who are stagnanted by their preoccupation with the past, she herself seems to have evoked the possibilities of the future through the creative production of a novel. Some of us(myself inclued) were a little taken aback by the revelation that Husvedt had used her own father's diaries for those of Erik's father. And yet with Whitman, we accepted that the person illustrated through his poems was meant as a kind of self-portrait.
I guess I am not advocating for one or the other approach, but rather asking why do we understand some people as inalienable from the texts they author, while with others we speak about the characters they depict? I think our discussions demonstrate how slippery it is when we attempt to concretely do one or the other, and how even in a class in which we have, from the beginning, admitted that there are "cracks" both between one another, and within ourselves, we retain a need for a central, singular understanding of the self as we delve into analysis.
The Snow Man
I mentioned in my small session Thursday that the snow scene of page 301 of Hustvedt seemed very similar to a poem I had read by Wallace Stevens called The Snow Man. I looked it up this weekend to see where that connection was coming from. This is Stevens' poem:
One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;
And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter
Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,
Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place
For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.
Compare this to Hustvedt:
"It was snowing... it struck me as a moment when the boundry between inside and outside loosens, and there is no loneliness because there is no one to be lonely."
Stevens could easily be one of the missing links between Whitman and Hustvedt. Both of these passages describe, to me, a kind of nilisism, where ultimately there's nothing, but in that nothingness there is something... where ridding the mind of the burden of one's self can acheive a greater understanding of the world that surrounds it.
Isn't that something that Evolution may ask us to do? Evolution may take away our meaning or our own singular importance in the world in exchange for an understanding of the world itself.
Stevens seems to think we have to be primed for that-- in order to understand the nothing we have to be ready to make our 'selves' nothing too.
cracked but not lonely
When I read that passage on pg 301, I felt that he was trying to say that no one is truly lonely. We’ll have our bad moments, days, or something bigger than that but there are other people around us. Even if these people are mere acquaintances or even complete strangers, we can’t deny that everyone has similar issues that make them cope with bad days and loneliness. Even if we can’t find comfort in someone else’s words or arms or presence, we all know that we aren’t struggling with our problems alone and we as the human race is connected together through both happiness and suffering (such as feelings of loneliness), and because there is this connection, we’re not all that lonely.
As for “cracks,” I side with Magda for the most part. Some are healthy and they help us define our uniqueness as a person. Without them, we wouldn’t be who or where we are today. I like to think of it as statues. Say we have five nearly identical statues in a room, and I say nearly because they all have cracks in them but in different areas. One may have several cracks in the head and another all around the body, and another may have a few on its hands. These statues now have some uniqueness to them because of these “flaws”. If it weren’t for our cracks, we wouldn’t be very human, instead we would be robots. These cracks allow us to be a diverse species and see the world in many ways, hence making life for everyone, a little more interesting.
A bit of film theory
The last couple of pages of The Sorrows of An American gave the feel of a film montage. Montage, as an film technique, is based upon the system of sequence recognition of objects into the brain. The film theorist Eisenstein argued that montage is an intellectual “Synthesis that evolves from the opposition between thesis and antithesis.” A montage cell (a single shot within a montage sequence) doesn’t need to maintain continuity with previous cells, in fact, the greatest impact is made when it does not. What matters is the emotional or psychological end the scene leads to. Indeed, these last few passages do reflect a kind of intellectual synthesis on the part of the main character, Erik. It’s interesting that a portion of the novel actual deals with the intricacies of a film, arguably the most influential medium of media of the 20th (and 21st?) century. Seeing as how she uses nearly every literary genre in putting together this story, it only makes sense that she should also use film. I might have liked to see the use of puppets somewhere in the novel, but I guess that’s asking a bit much. Maybe that’s just material for a final presentation…?
Light
A film montage is really a perfect way to describe the ending of the story.
Or what you could call an ending. In some ways I liked how the book ended, leaving the character at a point where he could finally experience the beginning of a life in a new phase of life. It was like coming from beginning to end, and then to the beginning again. An odd thought, like seeing the start at the stroy finally being revealed at the end of a movie with the characters looking about like they were blinded by the sun. A more retrospective look in a fresh new light of thinking that almost seemed to come from another voice than the book had been written through Erik. I wonder if Husdvedt was trying to tell us a better way to find the answers to our questions was to simply look at it in another way rather than continue puzzling through the same issues over and over again.
Why
So I found the quote I was
So I found the quote I was looking for on Thursday's class about the painting of Eggy. It's on page 39:
"Although the picture's luminosity conveyed a feeling of transcendence, I found it unsentimental, not one of those pictures that turn children into the objects of an adult's false romantic projections."
And from that point on I wondered whether Eggy as a character was, when it came down to it, one of those false romantic projections. She's quirky, certainly, and she as a character doesn't fall into the literary trap of always offering just the right insight without even knowing it because of her innocent view of the world. She's not what you would think of from a standard idealized child- she's too random and aimlessly playful for that. But at the same time she's never bothersome, and really, all 5 (6?) year olds are going to be at one point or another. She's always charming, really, a dynamic but an unflawed character. I was wondering if others then found this moment about the painting to be one that reveals Hustedvt's own flaws with creating this character? Is it then hypocritical for Hustedvt's to include this comment about the "romantic projection?"
Don't get me wrong, I love Eggy. :) I'm just wondering about her role.
Evolution of this course
Cracks
I feel like "figuring out
Therefore it is no surprise that a novel like Hustvedt's, focusing on static notions of finding a stable 'self' and discovering one's personal mythic past, is less-than-compelling for some of us to read, because as Ann noted the action primarily consists in "the journey into the landscape of the self." We live so much inside our heads and dote on this quest that moderns are completely isolated from one another physically, psychologically, spiritually. The p. 301 revelation that "there is no loneliness because there is no one to be lonely" made completely sense to me because there is no self that we seek at our core, just a Buddhist nothingness or sunyata, and, concordantly, separation of one human being from anything else in the universe is an illusion. "The illness that besets the intellectual" is precisely trying to analyze one thing in isolation from any number of other things, of trying to solve problems such as one's own identity in a vacuum.
As Paul noted Thursday, the novel is less interesting to him because what new things are possible through evolution is more interesting than analyzing the way things came to be the way they presently are. This moment in history is one way that things have happened, but it could have been infinitely otherwise, and will become infinitely otherwise.
Week 12
I think what Erik realised
I think what Erik realised in the 301 passage was that people will always be lonely. Even when they make friendships and relationships, they still have those moments when they get so absorbed in themselves that it feels like no one is there for them at all. I think the snow might have some deep literary meaning that an english scholoar could understand, but not me.
When people start thinking deep about their lives or the world around them, it's like they've fallen into some kind of crack. They just think and think and don't really come up with an answer. Or, a crack in personality can just be a personality flaw. Someone could be so nice to the point of gullible and seemingly stupid, it would be like a crack in their niceness.
Hustvedt’s characters
Hustvedt’s characters have spiraling out-of-control lives; neither their lives nor the book has an ending. Hustvedt is still alive so she has no ending either. Dennett is still alive and his book was a continuation of Darwin’s as well as others’ thoughts in addition to a compilation of Dennett’s postulations. Darwin and Whitman though dead in the flesh continue to live through their stories and their stories continue to live throughout history. The theory of evolution, like the authors and their works, is a continuous loop… a steady stream of information moving slowly, waiting to be observed – summarized – reobserved – resummarized and so on.
These readings have given me a greater appreciation for Darwin’s theory of evolution and a newfound realization that his theory is not limited to science but can be applied to all things.
Perfect? Please.
What function do the "cracks" in our personality serve?
I often tell my little brother (who is far from perfect) that "perfect is borirng." Pretty inane statement, right? Think about it, though. Imagine you're having a horrible day, and you really need someone to talk to. Would you rather go and confide in someone who doesn't appear to have any personality flaws, and who obviously has the whole thing figured out? Would you rather confide in someone who you recognize some of yourself in, who you can relate to through the fact that you know that have some similar, accepted personality flaws of their own?
I can't propose to know what any of you would actually respond to this question. I imagine that there will be some people who choose one, some who choose another. I think having accepting, and coming to terms with your personality flaws allows you to relate better to other people, to be a better, more understanding, more sympathetic and in-tune person, able to help others solve problems that you've recognized as issues in yourself. I think accepting and recognizing your own personality flaws also gives you goals to work towards, ways of betterng yourself and creating improvement that human beings frankly need. We need goals and purpose for the sake of motivation. Self bettermrent is a great provider of that.
Hello everyone, another blog
The cracks that Magda feels
The cracks that Magda feels are "healthy" are absolutely that. They are central to all progression in technology, science, literary analysis, etc. It is out of the chaos of not everyone feeling, percieving and thinking in the same manner that the greatest ideas emerge. It takes men and women that believe in ideas that go aganist the grain in order for these ideas to emerge and develop- Darwin, Franklin, Einstein, among others. The right idea may not always come out of the "crack" but it allows for others to build upon or deconstruct it in order for something different to emerge. Uniformity is and never has been a concept that has brought about change.
Furthermore, I am not sure if I view the novel as an evolutionary text. It seems to be concensus that evolution has to create something new. The characters all experience evolution in their own right as a result of attempting to solve internal and external conflicts but is that not how most if not all fictional novels work? There has to be some type of conflict or issue that needs to be solved and it is the unraveling of these issues that allows for resolution. These characters change over time due to their observations but I just don't understand how this could be deemed an evolutionary text. In the most basic sense, we could view "The Polar Express" among other children's books as an evolutionary texts then.
The appropriateness of Sorrows of an American
I still can´t decide how much I liked the Sorrows of an American as a novel. I think the closest I can come is to say that I liked and appreciated it, but I had a difficult time feeling really strong empathy for the characters. I also think it´s a little forgettable, that is, it didn´t leave me with any really strong feelings or any powerful message--in fact, it didn't even leave me with a strong feeling that life is anticlimatic.
I think selections from Hermann Hesse's Glass Bead Game, or maybe from Robert Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, may be more beneficial for this course--both books mix the art of the novel with philosophy and the Glass Bead Game's theme of understanding how all subjects relate to each other are particularly relevant concepts in the course.
reading to evolve thinking
Cracked-up?
Someone in professor
Someone in professor Dalke's thurday section (I'm sorry, Ive forgotten who) brought up All the King's Men as another novel with a similar quest for understanding the past. I read All the King's Men last year, and had been comparing it to The Sorrows of An American as I read-- but another thing brought up in class was an important difference between the two. Jack Burden, the narrator of All the King's Men, has an epiphany at the end about how to live with the past that changes his attitude (an evolution of character) In The Sorrows of an American there is no such epiphany or large change at the end.
That made me wonder how the lack of an epiphany or resolution was relevant to our theme of evolution. On one hand (as Pr. Dlke pointed out) it seems to be different from evolution-- part of the point of evolution is that it creates something new. On the other hand, the development of a novel which has no resolution is fairly recent in the history of literature-- that is one of the ways in which the form of the novel is a change from previous previous forms. This lack of a resolution, a definite ending, could also be related to biological evolution in that it is a process without a definite endpoint. Like this novel, it just keeps going in a collection of small changes. This made the novel very frustrating for me to read, but maybe it also makes the story more like real life than most fiction.
--According to Sontag, art's role is not to imitate life but to be something new-- so is this more "realistic" style necessarily a good thing?
I am not sure how
I feel like because we are in a class about the evolution of stories, we can be given almost any book and we will be able to interpret it as evolutionary fiction. Because of the fact we already know this a class about evolution, I feel that our brains will be able to mold anything so that it may be linked to evolution. Professor Grobstein said on Thursday that Moby Dick was another choice for the final text. Although I have never read Moby Dick, I know about it and have a good sense that it is very different from Hustvedt's book. I think it is interesting because if have been assigned Moby Dick instead, we would still have been able to find evolutionary aspects in it. I think there is no one best, final text for the course because any book would suffice. I think what is important to note is that the course itself is the evolutionary example. Because of all the choices of books students can be given to read, the course is what will evolve throughout the years and be the dominant example.
Week 12
This passage at the end of the book is very interesting to me. At first I did not see it as Erik finding his “self” in a Whitman like sense. I saw this as a way to say that if you are aware of yourself, you are going to be lonely. The way I interpreted this was that if there is no one then you can’t be lonely, if you aren’t aware of yourself then you won’t know you are lonely. This is not a positive message: self-awareness leads to unhappiness. But the more I thought about it, I reinterpreted it to mean that if you are too introverted you will be unhappy. If the boundary between the inside and outside loosens, meaning if you are more aware of the outside then just what is on your inside than you can realize that there is more to life than just the loneliness you think you feel. I think the ending message is there needs to be a balance between internal and external awareness, and that is Erik’s goal to happiness.
Week 12
Female author is good or bad?
cracked- but its a good thing
alone together
A text linked to evolution
I don’t know if I can say that this book is evolutionary, but I clearly see that it is linked to evolution. Indeed, at the beginning of this semester, we talked about Darwin’s theory of evolution and we saw that all actual humans have an ancestor in common and that we have to know our past in order to move on and keep on evolving. I believe that this is what is happening in “The Sorrows of an American” since each character seem to be looking at their past in order to understand themselves better and hopefully then move on with their lives. Erik for example is reading his father’s journal because he hopes to understand his own actions and thoughts better to know who he really is. The only person how seems to be representing the future is Eggy, since she is young and has all her life in front of her. However, after Eggy’s fall, her past might come to haunt her as she grows up…
not lonely in the snow
The passage you pulled out to discuss from page 301 about " there is no loneliness because there is no one to be lonely," reminded me of a short story I had read a few weeks ago. Written by Jorge Luis Borges it is called "The Aleph" and it has a moment which is similar to Eik's loss of loneliness. The aleph in the story is a point in a man's basement where you can see the whole world and everything tht ever was or will be in it. The man has to lay in a very specific position in utter darkness in order to see it but when he does he losses all sense of himself and becomes a part of the world.
Erik's feeling of losing the inside and outside barriers of himself is similar to this nirvana esque interaction with the world in Borges story. And in both you needed to dull the senses in order to acheive this state. We talked about how falling snow mutes sounds and isolates you. Borge's protagonist is similarly isolated by darkness and the barriers of a cellar door. Either way, this enlightenment is only acomplished by depriving yourself of sights sounds, of input of any kind. A strange sentiment, and one I am not sure I agree with, but the idea of both authors.