Author Archives: Syndicated User

Pre-texts (no pun intended)

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Before reading any of the texts, and you get to know my literary analysis side, I hope to give you a small impression of who I am!
I chose the ARTS ONE program because I actually enjoy writing essays, which, as I understand, is a rare quality. As such, I express my ideas and opinions far better on paper than I do in verbal discussion, so this blog thing may just work well for me!

So here are some literary facts about me:

  • The longest essay I've ever written was 3901 words. It was a literary essay on themes developed by music in Steven Galloway's The Cellist of Sarajevo, a book which I highly recommend!
  • My most recent read was Richard Wagamese's Ragged Company.
  • The first book I remember reading was C.S. Lewis' The Magician's Nephew.
  • The most disturbing book I remember reading so far is a tie between Isabel Allende's The House of the Spirits and Yukio Mishima's The Sailor Who fell from Grace with the Sea. 
  • As far as plays go, I really enjoyed reading Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot  and Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest. 
  • I quite enjoy the poetry of T.S. Eliot as well as Pablo Neruda's political poetry (but not Neruda's non-political works). I'm not a fan of W. B. Yeats' poetry.
  • I am fascinated by George Orwell in all of his works that I have read including 1984 and Animal Farm, as well as many of his essays including Shooting an Elephant,  A Hanging, and How the Poor Die; all of which I highly recommend reading at some point in time.
  • I've been warned about Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness...
Well, that's it for now. Next up: Insights on Genesis and Kant
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Repetition and Sisyphus

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“The gods had condemned Sisyphus to ceaselessly rolling a rock to the top of a mountain, whence the stone would fall back of its own weight. They had thought with some reason that there is no more dreadful punishment than futile and hopeless labor.” (Camus, Pg. 489)

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Sisyphus is cursed by the gods to roll a boulder up a mountain, watching it come crashing down, walk back down the mountain after it, and roll the boulder up again. His life is an endless series of repetition. Worse than that, it is meaningless repetition. So then why does Albert Camus say that “One must imagine Sisyphus happy” (Pg. 492)? How can one imagine Sisyphus happy?

Camus’ 1942 essay, The Myth of Sisyphus, is itself an exercise in repetition. Not only does he examine Sisyphus–a figure condemned to repeat the same task over and over–but his examination itself is a revisiting of a text that has been revisited before, and will, no doubt, be revisited again. (Not to get too self-conscious, but it is being revisited right now, as I write this). I choose this text as an introduction to the Arts One 2013-2014 ‘Remake/Remodel’ theme, because the text repeats a myth about repeating. So, if you’ve been keeping up, we are repeating a text that repeats a myth that is about the agony of repetition. So, in doing so have we just tripled our agony? Is Sisyphus happy? And are we?

There are a lot of reasons to think that the answer to these questions is ‘no’. Repetition is often boring. And it’s often not seen as very meaningful. After all, what is the point of doing something we’ve already done before. It’s like ‘reinventing the wheel’. The first guy to invent it is a genius. But after that, it just isn’t so impressive or important.

There is another reason to think the answers to the above questions should be ‘no’. Camus tells us that

“If the myth is tragic it is because the hero is conscious. What would his torture be, indeed, if at every step the hope of succeeding upheld him?” (Pg. 491, emphasis added)

The implication seems to be that, if Sisyphus were not acutely self-conscious of the futility of the repetition he is forced to participate in, then things wouldn’t be so bad.Image

It’s because Sisyphus knows that what he is doing is futile that he feels its futility acutely. His awareness of its meaninglessness makes it meaningless. So, he is the author of his own empty life in virtue of his consciousness. Doesn’t sound too happy so far.

And it gets worse. Because this myth has been and can be treated as an allegory for life. Yeah, life! Under this reading it isn’t just that Sisyphus’s existence is meaningless, but that life just generally is pointless. After all, the repetition Sisyphus is engaged in is similar to the kind of repetition we are all engaged in. People are born. They live. They die. It’s been happening for hundreds of years. Worse than that, there is a sense in which many feel that even what they do with their lives has been done before. In the Bible, Ecclesiastes, we find the phrase “there is nothing new under the sun” and people often state that all the stories it is possible to tell have been told. There is a sense that there is no room for a truly novel ideal, or a truly unique experience. It’s all been done before. Probably hundreds of times before. We are all the authors of our own meaningless lives in virtue of our self-consciousness.

So by this point you should be getting the sense that this text is often seen as a bit of a downer. It should also come as no surprise that the first line of The Myth of Sisyphus is “There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide.” (Pg. 441) So forget why we must imagine Sisyphus happy for a moment, how can we imagine it? And if we can’t then what’s the point of all the repetition?

There are a lot of reasons to think of The Myth of Sisyphus as a depressing myth. There are a lot of reasons to find repetition tedious. But, that’s not the end of the story. As Camus revisits familiar ground in retelling this Greek myth, he illustrates what can be uplifting and creative in the act of repetition. Camus writes that “Myths are made for the imagination to breathe life into them.” (Pg. 490) The myth of Sisyphus is lacking in detail at times. It doesn’t tell us everything. It leaves things open to interpretation, and grants us the ability to fill in the blanks.

The details are lacking on purpose, according to Camus. The lack of detail allows the possibility for the myth to change even as it remains the same. Because the reader or the listener will change it. One sees it in a new way, a way unique to one’s own perspective in this time and this place. And this is not only true for the Sisyphus myth, but for every text we will read this term. Every text has been read by people before you. Every text has been talked about and written about by people before you. But none of them have been read by you. Here. Now. Even when you revisit these texts in the future (and we all hope you do) they will never be the same as they are right now. Because you will have changed, and your surroundings will have changed.

So I want to suggest that there is a tension in Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus. The tension is between the apparent meaningless of retracing the steps of others over familiar ground, and the freedom to make this journey one’s own through one’s own unique perspective, imagination and conscious life. I wrote above that we are the authors of our own empty lives in virtue of our self-consciousness. But it is also in virtue of our self-consciousness that we can give our lives meaning. This is one of the tensions that I hope to explore this term in Remake/Remodel: the ways in which existing patterns, structures, myths and customs both constrain us and offer us ways to freely and creatively express ourselves.

Camus argues that, even though Sisyphus is trapped in a repetitive structure, within that structure he is free. “His fate belongs to him. His rock is his thing. . . he knows himself to be the master of his days.” (Pg. 492). The structure is in place, but what he chooses to do within that structure is up to him!

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Works Cited: Camus, Albert “The Myth of Sisyphus” in Basic Writing of Existentialism, Gordon Marino (ed.) New York: The Modern Library. 2004. Pp. 442-488

Foe and the Narrative View of Self

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As someone with a long standing interest in Marya Schechtman’s narrative view of self, I was fascinated by reading J.M. Coetzee’s novel Foe (a retelling of Daniel DeFoe’s Robinson Crusoe) this term in Arts One. The book seems to me to be exploring (among other things) the challenges of establishing who one is in a narrative form when others seek to take control of one’s own story. It suggests that one’s self can never be entirely altered by another because a narrative is never able to entirely capture one’s self.

Schechtman, in her 1996 book The Constitution of Selves tells us that personhood is created through constructing a narrative that makes sense of one’s past experiences and memories. But the stories one tells in order to construct one’s self must be stories that can be understood by others. Schechtman says

“[p]ersonhood, it might be said, is an intrinsically social concept. To enter into the world of persons, an individual needs, roughly speaking, to grasp her culture’s concept of a person and apply it to herself.” (Schechtman, 94)

The idea that the stories one tells about oneself have to be intelligible to others is one that I’ve been thinking about a lot recently. Whether or not this is all that persons are (as the narrative view of self maintains) the fact is, we do tell stories. In fact, with Twitter, and blogs, and Facebook and a host of other ways of sharing information, we are telling stories about ourselves to anyone who will listen (or to no one, as the case may be, but that’s another problem). What if others don’t find you to be intelligible? What if they want to tell another story about you? One they think makes more sense than your own does?

As I approached Foe I already had these questions in mind. And in the novel, I found some of the same themes being dealt with. Susan Barton, one of the main characters of the text, returns to England from having been shipwrecked upon an island, and sets out to have her story told. She approaches the famous author Foe and requests that he write her tale for her since she does not see herself as a writer capable of giving birth to this narrative. At first it seems that her aim in doing so is purely for fame and money. She wants to be recognized, and she wants the story to sell well.

But as Foe pushes her to spice the story up a bit (by including pirates and cannibals) Barton pushes back, adamant that the tale of being stranded by itself is enough, lamenting “[a]las, will the day ever arrive when we can make a story without strange circumstances?” (Coetzee, Pg. 67) But Foe is equally determined to see the shipwrecked story changed somehow. He responds that “‘The island is not a story itself,'”(Coetzee, Pg. 117).

The problem is that, generally in Western European culture, we expect certain things from stories. We expect them to be logically and causally connected, and we expect them to move in four parts: the intro, the rising action, the climax and the conclusion in which everything is wrapped up. But life doesn’t follow expectation. Barton’s experience on the island had no climax and many things were left unresolved. And so I wonder if our struggles to tell stories about ourselves that others find intelligible and interesting are struggles against a part of who we are. I wonder if Soren Kierkegaard was right when he claimed that something is always left unsaid or unexpressed in our speech.

This wondering leads me to the character of Friday. Friday, in Coetzee’s novel, does not speak. It is rumored that he cannot speak, because his tongue was cut out. In any case, he does not (and perhaps cannot) tell his own story to anyone else. In one sense, this leaves Friday open to the interpretation of others. He cannot push back as Barton pushes back against Foe’s re-framing of her narrative. As Barton tells us

“Friday has no command of words and therefore no defense against being reshaped day by day in conformity with the desires of others. I say he is a cannibal and he becomes a cannibal; I say he is a laundryman, and he becomes a laundryman.” (Coetzee, Pg. 121)

But Barton’s view of Friday’s lack of agency seems a bit too simplistic. For the last section of Coetzee’s novel leaves me with a paragraph that challenges Barton’s account of Fridays maleable identity.

“But this is not a place of words. . . This is a place where bodies are their own signs. It is the home of Friday.” (Coetzee, Pg. 157)

I am left wondering about this relationship of narratives to bodies. What does it mean to say bodies are their own signs? Friday is still interpreted by Barton in various ways, and yet at the same time seems untouched and unchanged by her interpretations. His inability to communicate renders him untouched by this re-framing of his story. And yet he doesn’t seem to have a robust individuality that is conveyed through the story. Instead, the suggestion arises again and again that Friday is a void. He is empty and hollow, signified by the gap in his mouth where his tongue should be. If he is not reinterpreted and remade by others, the suggestion exists in the text that part of the reason for this is because there is no substance to be remade. But there is a substance. He is a body.

If personhood is social, Friday is not a person. Yet his physical existence is a sign of his personhood, even if he does not participate in the social creation of his own stories. Schechtman argues that some individuals (babies and those in the late stages of Alzheimer’s disease, for example) can fail to be persons because they cannot tell a coherent story about themselves. Friday cannot tell a coherent story either. However, the reason he cannot has less to do with his psychological organization and more to do with his physical body. He cannot speak. Much as Abraham, in Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling cannot speak.

Perhaps, the suggestion in this work is that narratives leave something unspoken. A void. The self cannot be fully articulated. And if that is the case, it cannot be fully altered by those who seek to make our stories more intelligible, more exciting, and more to their liking. No matter how much we fill ourselves with stories, the silence will always emerge.