A small cronopio was looking for the key to
the street door on the night table, the night table in the bedroom, the bedroom
in the house, the house in the street. Here the cronopio paused, for to go into
the street, he needed the key to the door. -- Julio Cortazar,
"Story"
Unfortunately for critics of the
"Post-Modern," the term has gained enough currency to be included in
Humanities surveys. The last chapter of
a text I used in a Humanities class dealt with the Post-Modern Age. Indeed, I taught the course with this last
chapter in mind. It seemed necessary for students to know the soil from which
our times have sprung, even if they had difficulty understanding the definition
of Post-Modern or the very works defining this period.
As I suggested, defining
Post-Modernism was difficult. My students barely knew what the Modern was! I
found various pages and charts which pointed to some qualities. To these I tried to find various works,
especially television shows and movies, they may have been familiar with. For
example: Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Seinfeld. Twelve
Monkeys. Twin Peaks. The works of
Cristo. Then I distributed what were to
my mind quintessential post-modern works -- given the short time I was given to
conduct the class, I tried to find the smallest works to illustrate my points.
First, I passed around John Barth's Lost in the Funhouse and had them look
at the "Frame Tale," a cut-out story which when joined became a
mobius strip with the words "Once upon a time there was a story that
began" which ran into "Once upon a time there was a story that
began."
A neat trick. Then I presented M.C. Escher's Mobius Strip II, with the giant ants
crawling along the surface. Another neat
trick. Then more examples of Escher's
art, including Liberation and Ascending and Descending, to show how an
artist can illustrate a single theme in various ways.
Next, we would observe the same
principles on a slightly larger scale with Julio Cortazar's story
"Continuity of Parks" (it can be found on several web sites). A well-to-do man returns to his den to finish
a novel that he had begun a few days before: "Word by word, licked up by
the sordid dilemma of the hero and heroine, letting himself be absorbed to the
point where the images settled down and took on color and movement, he was
witness to the final encounter in the mountain cabin." A married woman and her lover meet here and
plan her husband's death. The man advances to the woman's estate, sneaks into
the house and proceeds down a corridor and up a stairway. He enters the salon to kill the husband, who
is in a red chair reading. It is the
same chair in which the man at the beginning of the story seats himself.
It takes some time before the
students understand what has happened.
At least a third of them have not connected the story's end to the
beginning. Most of the rest made the connection
but are unsure of its meaning. How could this have happened? Is the husband in the book? What's real life
and what's the book? Their questions and
puzzlement are what Cortazar expects from readers. Few students, however, dare to extend the
story's logic to their own reading experience.
That is, they too have magically undergone a process sewing them into
the story such that the connection between the real and unreal disappears. (This last aspect troubles Post-Modernism
haters because they project the apparent dissolution of boundaries to morality
and, consequently, the end of civil society and/or equate the dissolution with
everything they believe has gone wrong with the world.) I try to show how one of the many possible
meanings of the story can be conceived as a metaphor for storytelling. The link between the "real" and
"unreal" becomes indiscernible within the telling of the story
itself. For the reader, the suspension
of "belief" regarding the “”story versus reality replicates a process
similar to the author's when creating a fiction. Further, the metaphor I've described can be
projected beyond the story to life itself and the relationship between the
individual and society.
In the latter instance, I supplied a
small story, "Games," from an anthology titled Anti-Story, an appropriate tome to introduce a student to dozens
of post-modern fiction types. "Games" ably describes social
integration:
Two gentlemen make an appointment, but in
addition to that each sends a friend to a given place. These friends of the
friends also walk up to each other at the proper time at the given place.
New
appointments are kept and made until "the town is humming, a stranger who
driving through it says: 'This is a friendly town.'"
*
Just when students reach the brink
of despair over the unraveling of customs and usages they have taken for
granted on an elementary level, I turned to the beginnings of western
literature. One of my goals was to show Post-Modern elements in literature and
art throughout the length of western civilization. The seeds of the Post-Modern
existed from the beginning, not because literature had a self-destructive
instinct, but that the truth Post-Modernism magnified proved essential to
understanding the basis of our existence.
One of the first works they read is
Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex. Amidst their
repulsion over Oedipus' marrying his mother and being brother and father to his
children, they didn’t understand why he's blinding himself at the end. We'll get to that, but first they might have noted
the circular nature of the story and how any attempts to evade the prophecy
that Oedipus will kill his father and marry his mother merely pulled him more
tightly to that fate. In effect,
knowledge alone won't save us. For the
Greeks, his tragedy resided in the fact that the best of men couldn't see what
was happening to himself.
Finally, the story twists back on
itself as Oedipus himself as he leads the investigation to find who’s
responsible for the plague and famine in the kingdom of Thebes. Apparently, it’s
the result of a crime against nature itself.
Almost sounds like the plot of some films whence the investigator finds
himself, knowingly and unknowingly, hunting himself or returning to a past
experience: The Big Clock (and its
remake No Way Out), Angel Heart and Chinatown. When Oedipus
makes his discovery, he blinds himself, at once acknowledging his guilt for
being blind to reality, as well as taking on the burden of human guilt for
always being blind to the reality of our motives and actions: our original sin.
*
Heraclitus wrote in one of his
fragments: "The beginning and end are common," and in another:
"The way up and the way down are the same." Both literally anticipate Escher's
paintings. More subtly, in the first, we
detect its truth in more than just, say, the circumference of a circle coming
back to itself. When he says
"common" he is not saying "the same." The aphorism suggests that humans begin
enclosed in the womb and end, enclosed, in the tomb. Similar states, but not
the same. Apply this to Cortazar's
"Continuity of Parks," we find suggested that the book the husband is
reading is full of life and danger, yet the same book ends as his tomb.
The social implication taken from
Lettau's story, "Games", would have the structure of society starting
artificially and becoming real. The
individual born into this society wouldn't know the difference between
authentic and inauthentic actions. In
effect, our lives start in ignorance, formed initially from usages, customs,
signs, and symbols. From this assemblage
of artifice, we might begin to discern who we really are. At the least, humans can find out who and
what they are not. The ignorance with
which we started in life changes drastically as we grow and mature, but in the
end we go to the tomb relatively ignorant of ourselves and our society.
Like Oedipus.
Only his problem, and the eventual complex, is below the surface, in the
human unconscious. Beyond the reach of
even the best of us. Our
Ur-ignorance. We might have an inkling
of it there but even then. what can we do about it? How can we tell when the unconscious
deliberately drives our behavior? Stuck
in our minds we end up like the Cronopio looking for the key to the street
door. Trapped in our own constructs of
reality we become immobilized by the prospect that to get to the key we have to
enter the house in which we are already in.
Trapped in our own Escher painting.
Climbing and falling down.
No comments:
Post a Comment