Nightwood
I haven't blogged for ages, again, partly because my interest in blogging has shifted away from the minutiae of my own life (ooh! There were small fishes' eyes in my cold rice today!) and the parts of my life that are not for the blogosphere but take away writing time (outside my own head, that is, upon which new and exciting scripts are being written...pretentious wanker) and towards the issues of the world that frustrate me with their complexity and tendency to nihilistic feelings and fascinate me with the potential for learning and imagining. I know that far better-informed bloggers are dealing with this (I've been enjoying Stephen Gowan's 'What's Left in particular). But for my own record, I have been thinking about development and how I was brought up with a Poor Starving Children in Africa attitude that my own progressive, wealthy nation really did have the right idea. That thought pervades sometimes. I like my car. I like my conveniently-packaged instant miso soup and being able to buy what I want. I am an utter hypocrite in many ways- I'm about to fly off to the Philippines, and I know that part of my interest in volunteering and doing good is a conformist, patronising effort to be something beyond myself without really knowing who I am and what I think.
So, development and wants. I think of Ghana and Zimbabwe, and the rhetoric of NGOs and the western media as to how neoliberal economies and democratically elected governments are the ultimate answer to those countries' problems, so often portrayed as their own fault, their inherent flaws rather than ugly protruding warpings of whatever hybrids that came before colonialism and the later romanticising of traditional, egalitarian tribal pasts...partly as a result of the ethnographic and modernist trends to find the unusual, the exotic and erotic outside of the perceived monolith of the west and its norms. Which brings me safely back to what I had intended to talk about. Not post-colonial politics but Djuna Barnes' Nightwood. Some moments of thinking through its dense, jarringly poetic prose were haunted with a 'well this isn't political economy, what am I doing pondering my own reading Lacan into a fictional character?'. But for crying out loud, these people wrote with art seen as the sole bastion against the oppressive, rationalising forces around them. I must allow myself to enjoy it and imagine things through it. It has also spoken to me in my own current situation, which has seen me thinking again about gender, the nature of love and possession and the monogamous pair.
Printed in 1937 with a small following, Nightwood follows, swoops around and melts into the words and streams of consciousness of Felix Volkstein, the Jew whose mother 'thrust him from her, and died' and who seeks to partake in the 'history of Old Europe', great men of noble birth and a coherence of surroundings and lineage that suppress the plurality of his past.
"...a race that had fled its generations from city to city has not found the necessary time for the accumulation of that toughness which produces ribaldry, nor, after the crucifixion of its ideas, enough forgetfulness to create legend".
Fragmentation, exile and change and the impossibility of acceptance into mainstream society are tragically manifested in his marriage to the boyish Robin Vote, who stands for a new breed of gender-defying, wandering and sexually 'inverse' women of the night, rejecting her offspring by Felix and the female love of Nora Flood and Jenny Petheridge. Felix's child Guido eventually aspires to the Church...the book ends in an abandoned chapel where Robin and Nora are brought somehow together in a scene of gruesome, surreal antagonistic copulation involving Nora's dog. Possession, animal passions, the dark, longing desire and its escape, the tragedy of a homosexual man who wants men not as his body but as the woman he feels himself to be, artifice, what it means to be human (the book takes on an especially tragic light, for all its radical implications, in the context of the war that was to come), love as neverending hope....all slowly swirling out of a linguistic feast. Again, I'm sure people have written properly about this book. But I wish to record a few of my favourite images and quotes, which are often self-imploding in their structure and dissonance, revolting against the linearity and realism that despite yourself you find yourself longing for at times...
Frau Mann, the 'trapeze artist' of a Duchess: 'The way she said "dinner" and the way she said "champange" gave meat and liquid their exact difference, as if by having surmounted two mediums, earth and air, her talent, running forward, achieved all others'
'Doctor' O'Connor: 'I haunt the pissoirs as naturally as Highland Mary her cows down by the dell...I've given my destiny away by garrulity, like ninety percent of everybody else- for, no matter what I may be doing, in my heart is the wish for children and knitting. God, I never asked better than to boil some man's potatoes and toss up a child for him every nine months by the calendar'. Nora has found him, dressed in a slovenly apartment in woman's clothing. All he wants is the body that he can never feel himself to BE- trapped in the state of becoming.
Crap it hurts too much to sit up (sciatica still raging)- will finish anon. must stretch
So, development and wants. I think of Ghana and Zimbabwe, and the rhetoric of NGOs and the western media as to how neoliberal economies and democratically elected governments are the ultimate answer to those countries' problems, so often portrayed as their own fault, their inherent flaws rather than ugly protruding warpings of whatever hybrids that came before colonialism and the later romanticising of traditional, egalitarian tribal pasts...partly as a result of the ethnographic and modernist trends to find the unusual, the exotic and erotic outside of the perceived monolith of the west and its norms. Which brings me safely back to what I had intended to talk about. Not post-colonial politics but Djuna Barnes' Nightwood. Some moments of thinking through its dense, jarringly poetic prose were haunted with a 'well this isn't political economy, what am I doing pondering my own reading Lacan into a fictional character?'. But for crying out loud, these people wrote with art seen as the sole bastion against the oppressive, rationalising forces around them. I must allow myself to enjoy it and imagine things through it. It has also spoken to me in my own current situation, which has seen me thinking again about gender, the nature of love and possession and the monogamous pair.
Printed in 1937 with a small following, Nightwood follows, swoops around and melts into the words and streams of consciousness of Felix Volkstein, the Jew whose mother 'thrust him from her, and died' and who seeks to partake in the 'history of Old Europe', great men of noble birth and a coherence of surroundings and lineage that suppress the plurality of his past.
"...a race that had fled its generations from city to city has not found the necessary time for the accumulation of that toughness which produces ribaldry, nor, after the crucifixion of its ideas, enough forgetfulness to create legend".
Fragmentation, exile and change and the impossibility of acceptance into mainstream society are tragically manifested in his marriage to the boyish Robin Vote, who stands for a new breed of gender-defying, wandering and sexually 'inverse' women of the night, rejecting her offspring by Felix and the female love of Nora Flood and Jenny Petheridge. Felix's child Guido eventually aspires to the Church...the book ends in an abandoned chapel where Robin and Nora are brought somehow together in a scene of gruesome, surreal antagonistic copulation involving Nora's dog. Possession, animal passions, the dark, longing desire and its escape, the tragedy of a homosexual man who wants men not as his body but as the woman he feels himself to be, artifice, what it means to be human (the book takes on an especially tragic light, for all its radical implications, in the context of the war that was to come), love as neverending hope....all slowly swirling out of a linguistic feast. Again, I'm sure people have written properly about this book. But I wish to record a few of my favourite images and quotes, which are often self-imploding in their structure and dissonance, revolting against the linearity and realism that despite yourself you find yourself longing for at times...
Frau Mann, the 'trapeze artist' of a Duchess: 'The way she said "dinner" and the way she said "champange" gave meat and liquid their exact difference, as if by having surmounted two mediums, earth and air, her talent, running forward, achieved all others'
'Doctor' O'Connor: 'I haunt the pissoirs as naturally as Highland Mary her cows down by the dell...I've given my destiny away by garrulity, like ninety percent of everybody else- for, no matter what I may be doing, in my heart is the wish for children and knitting. God, I never asked better than to boil some man's potatoes and toss up a child for him every nine months by the calendar'. Nora has found him, dressed in a slovenly apartment in woman's clothing. All he wants is the body that he can never feel himself to BE- trapped in the state of becoming.
Crap it hurts too much to sit up (sciatica still raging)- will finish anon. must stretch