Living in a World Where Sophia Vergara Exists

Last night I saw Chef, the last film from Jon Favreau. I enjoy both his acting and directing work, and who doesn’t love a movie about food, family, and redemption?

I’m embarrassed to say that the only negative thought that crossed my mind when I entered the theater was that I would have see Modern Family’s Sophia Vergara on the big screen and thus be subject to a typical Good-God-I’ll-Never-Look-Like-That shame spiral.

I’m proud to say I checked that thought with “Yep, she’s super hot …and funny and charming and so on. But I don’t need to look like her because I’m not her, I’m me. I should appreciate both her beauty and talent as I do my own.”

Food for thought: I wonder if as women we shouldn’t be more intentional about adopting such supportive, accepting thought patterns/behaviors. I know that because I consciously checked my insecurity train, I enjoyed the film and SV, and walked out not jaded but joyful. I think much of our nastiness toward ourselves and each other stems from a past of fighting for men (read: food, income, other forms of livelihood that societal and economic norms equated with male purchase and ownership of one woman), but since that is the past for many if not most western women, shouldn’t we see that pathology for what it is–a way to keep us enemies rather than sisters? If we view ourselves as allies, there is no reason to feel jealousy or resentment; rather, we can cheer each other on and raise each other up.

Incidents in the Life of a Schizophrenic: *Ray of the Star*

 

I do not believe it is far-fetched to argue that the protagonist in Ray of the Star, the eternally haunted Harry, is a tragic victim of his own sublimated trauma, created by the death of his small children in a car accident he blames himself for, a trauma that transcended the usual manifestations of grief and bereavement and developed into a fully-fledged mental illness,  into a schizophrenic psychosis which is to blame for the occurrence of the fantastic in the novel, like the demonic “connoisseurs” or the surprisingly eloquent everyday objects,  and as well for the stream-of-consciousness like aesthetic form of Ray of the Star, with its chapter-long sentences and distracting asides, which almost reproduce a schizophrenic, unreal effect in the reader, who has to judge what is real and what is not, what is a “false start” and what is an “authentic moment” (RotS 94) in the narrative, yet if this judgment is made successfully, we can see that Harry’s schizophrenic quest for absolution for his sins, which took him from the “inferno” of a dark, windowless basement room in his house, via the “purgatorio” of the winter-march incident of physical self-flaggelation, all the way to the “paradiso” of  a happy end, where Harry finds himself safely in the arms of his friends (RotS 194), having rejected the infernal temptation by the “connoisseurs” and instead having anchored himself back in reality with the help of his new friends.

Laird Hunt’s The Ray of the Star: More of the Same?

“What do you think of that?”

“This?”

“Yeah, Lerner–what do you think of him?”

(Feeling sheepishly tentative as I had only then just begun reading the book 15 minutes ago.) “I like it . . . I’m reading it for a class on affect and contemporary American fiction.”

“Uh-huh . . . it’s all the same, that formalist shit. But Lerner’s apparently got a nice following. I used to be into that stuff.”

Within 15 minutes of sitting down in a coffee shop to read Ben Lerner’s Mean Free Path over the break I was approached by a wizened old man who subjected Lerner’s corpus to some rather trenchant criticism before shuffling off, with his coffee mug and cigarette in hand. Admittedly, my inane response certainly didn’t help Lerner’s case at all; in fact, it probably only served to corroborated his pre-existing stereotypes about Lerner’s readership. However, his blunt evaluation of Lerner, and New Formalism in general, stuck with me as I finished Mean Free Path and then started reading Laird Hunt’s The Ray of the Star and, while I don’t agree that Lerner is merely a purveyor of “that formalist shit,” I  understand the rationale behind my curmudgeonly friend’s critique. In contrast, I think that Laird Hunt’s The Ray of the Star shares none of the self-important shallowness that may (quite intentionally) characterize Mean Free Path.

Instead of immersing the reader firsthand in the traumatic experiences of protagonists in the manner of Toni Morrison or Jonathan Safran Foer, Laird Hunt powerfully represents the way that human beings sublimate their suffering until it becomes infinitely refracted to the point of obliviousness. The Ray of the Star manifests this agonizing uncertainty of vacillating between subjectivization and objectivization. This tension produces countless scenes of anxious bathos, such as when Ireneo wrangles with his sneakers, which exhort him to throw himself off a cliff in order to retrieve them.

The plight of Hunt’s Harry mirrors that of another Harry, the central character in Francis Ford Coppola’s psychological thriller The Conversation, who similarly “loses control of his own gaze” and is transformed “into an object of surveillance.” (Unlike Coppola’s protagonist, Harry arguably reasserts his subjectivity at the very end of the novel in a Bartelbyan moment of inaction through his refusal to utter the words “take me instead.”) However, before (and perhaps even after) this dénouement, Harry aimlessly muddles through the inertia of an objectless mood of dysphoria—a directionless, objectless state of restlessness, dissatisfaction, and suffering. This objectivization of the subjective is central to reading Ray of the Star and is formally inscribed in the unbroken sentences that comprise each of the novel’s chapters, which produce a kind of de-existentialization of affect. Indeed, the unsettling fluidity and disorientation of the novel unfolds in “an agreeable matrix of potential and mystery.

 

 

Late to the Very Depressing Party: Thoughts on The Bluest Eye I’ve Meant to Share but Only Just Got in Order

We, the group, as readers, appear – appeared rather; this was some time ago – divided in our opinion of Pecola Breedlove and her function in The Bluest Eye.  That is no great surprise; the theoretic success or failure of the book depends entirely upon her.  She is the novel’s ragged body, the structure and gut of it.  In turn, the novel is her rendered suffering; the form of her traumatized self.  Pecola and The Bluest Eye are one and the same.

When a reader considers The Bluest Eye, he/she is implicitly given a choice: turn away from the book (Pecola) and propagate the marginalizing of a violent cultural history, or actively engage the text and take part in cathartic reintegration.  Sadly, the choice to heal cannot be made without committing violence against the victim.  To open The Bluest Eye is to open Pecola and to dissect the scarring memories housed in her body.  So doing, a reader symbolically reenacts her fracturing sexual assault.  Even if one takes this re-traumatizing for a step toward reintegration, Pecola is incapable of consent.  The reader and writer collude in rape.  The Bluest Eye is exploitative by its very nature.

Why make it so?  Why condemn one’s self, one’s audience and, perhaps, the entire fictional enterprise?  It may be, there is no other choice.  Pecola, or a child like her, is the expected result of a history of violence, a hollowed abortive shell.  She was condemned before birth.  Societal illness – racism, sexism, violence, etc. – festers at the root of her degradation.  As a member of the offending body, the society that failed Pecola before she was born, no reader is entirely innocent.

On “The Ray of the Star” and its super long sentences that never seem to end because they go on for pages but remain a part of the overall aesthetic that Laird Hunt is trying to employ in his novel as a sort of New Formalistic answer to how to find affect in postmodern literature.

Laird Hunt’s novel The Ray of the Star has a very unique aesthetic formalism to it. It is no secret that each chapter is one very long sentence, often lasting two or three pages. Now, I am aware that this is his effort to use form to locate affect in post-modern literature. But I am wondering where the line is drawn. This sounds like a simple question: “why are we reading this?” or some other question asked by eighth graders who find To Kill a Mockingbird to be much too long. But I found Hunt’s experimentation to be alienating.

I suppose it is not inappropriate to talk about the affective reading experience in a blog post for this class. Again, it feels rather surface level, but I think it is often a constructive way to start talking about a novel.

Though the snaking and winding sentences are an admirable and precise task, one that constitutes an impressive feat of form experimentation, it took me out of the narrative. Perhaps that is the point. While I read each individual chapter, I found myself sort of floating gently into its waves. After the first few chapters, I did not realize Hunt’s gimmick any longer. However, when it came to stringing together a cohesive reading experience, one that carried a consistent theme or narrative across its chapters, I found the form to be too distracting.

I tried to justify the choice. What does it add to the reading experience? Authors should experiment, sure, but why such long sentences? When we lunched with Laird, he talked about a novelist he admired who wrote an entire novel without using the letter “e.” Cool. I could not do that. But, once again, what is the point other than jazz hands! And “look what I can do!”

I am submitting this question to the class and am open to any answer you can conjure. The only one I could even begin to explore was that maybe this was the literary form of the cinematic long take. I am taking sort of biographical liberties with this assumption, as Hunt mentioned he was a fan of experimental and avant-garde filmmaking.

In cinema, the ASL (average shot length) of films over the last fifty years has decreased from 8 seconds to 3.2-3.7 (depending on who you ask). Film theorist David Bordwell, professor of film studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has charted the average shot length of films and editing trends. Furthermore, he has scanned how viewers’ eyes gaze on images and how their attention is focused based on how long an image is focused on screen. While most audiences testify that films with longer shot lengths, like Bela Tarr’s (Satantango, which has an ASL of 3 minutes throughout its 7.5 hour running time) are boring, preferring films like “The Bourne Ultimate” with its 1 second ASL as a more gratifying and entertaining experience, others, including Jim Jarmusch and Roger Ebert, consider it to be dreamlike.

So, I guess these formal choices ask the question that Don DeLillo asked in The Body Artist: what is the nature of time in our experience of art?

Artifacts and Contextualization

In his 2003 text Real Spaces: World Art History and the Rise of Western modernism, David Summers embarks on a 687 page journey towards better understanding art and its contextualization. I mention the number of pages not only to recognize the amount of discourse opened in accordance with the matter, but also because the text’s length is itself a formal consideration. And in Summers’s introductory proposal and articulation of post-formalism, undeniably a movement in the same vein as Marjorie Levinson’s new formalism, we see that attention to form is something those ascribing to new or post-formalism tend to protect like an “endangered species” (Levinson 560).

In the third sentence of his first chapter, Summers, unsurprisingly with his background as an art historian, uses the term ‘artifact’ to situate the examination of art as an endeavor persistently “concerned with setting its object in spatial and temporal order” (15). Form is that which guides such an organization. Summers captures the method for utilizing form in this way in the following example, something he chooses in order to illustrate indexical inference (drawn from Peirce’s semiotics and the notion of index as concerned with existential relationship rather than undirected interpretation – note as Summers’s formulation of Peirce, not mine). He explains, “rather than describing, say, a large stone in the centre of a ring of small stones, then trying to figure out what it might mean, we may infer that someone, or some group of people, moved these stones and set them out in this way” (27). Our task, then, would be to consider why and how those people might have done this, as well as to see if the form is similar to other artifacts or works of art. In this investigation we treat the stone circle as an artifact and in so doing we come to find meaning in it; and it is meaning located precisely in the object’s contextual situation.

Reading Ray of the Star, I considered Hunt’s sparse inclusion of images such as a bell and a coat hanger in light of these objects as images with the purpose of creating context. I was reminded of Jonathan Safran Foer’s mixed media in Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, and I remain struck by the question: why? I wonder if we were to engage Summers’s approach by not only treating these images, and perhaps the novel as a whole, as an artifact, in addition to performing indexical inference, how we might pay proper attention to the form. Further – and no doubt a much larger question at the center of Levinson’s exploration – what might we say proper attention to form looks like without dangerously universalizing its concepts and context?

What do you think this notion of artifact might add to the discussion of new formalism?

*Ray of the Star* and Being Human

Marjorie Levinson’s literature review on “New Formalism” points out this movement’s “rededication” to literature’s formal qualities.  She states that many new formalists feel that “through its formal address, literature is said to solicit a set of responses that work to enhance and sustain our humanness, our sense of wonder, our awareness of ‘the non-centrality of the subject position,’ and so forth, achievements under siege by the collective forces of modernity and by the more restricted ranks of new historicists” (560).  When I read this comment, I couldn’t help but think of Laird Hunt’s The Ray of the Star, a novel whose deliberate formal conventions demand the reader’s notice and beg for interpretation.  As I thought about Levinson’s neat summary of New Formalism’s concepts and values, I wondered if this novel indeed reminded me of my “humanness,” or if, on the contrary, it only reinforced anxiety about the possibility of a lack of humanity in all subjects.  The novel’s story of grief and mourning, alongside its emphasis on the performance of emotion through physical staging and posing, made me question how much of human experience is truly felt from within (from where our “humanness” might reside) and how much of it is merely performed, resulting in a kind of detachment from the human (or at least from the human body). 

 

If literature can remind us of our humanness through formal qualities, does this happen in The Ray of the Star?  The novel’s sentences, which at once push the limits of language and the confines of grammar, while at the same time operating within those same structures fairly peacefully, pose many questions.  Why write this way?  Why is each “chapter” confined to one sentence?  What is the idea of the sentence to make it conducive to the idea of a “chapter” or an “episode?”  A sentence should be made up of a subject and an object; it should have a dominate clause and subordinate clauses.  In the novel, the sentences do have these elements, but they have them in multiply various and often inverted forms.  Through their sheer length, the sentences contain not one subject, or even a few, but often many subjects; the same goes for objects.  And often, the subordinate clauses overtake the dominate clauses to the point that the dominate clause is lost and becomes insignificant and unimportant, as one pulses through the waves of thought and motion of subservient ideas.  What does all of this mean?  What might these formal qualities say about being human, if they do work to remind one of one’s humanness (though of course, Hunt never makes it clear this is his purpose, and I am merely applying a movement’s ideas to the novel to see if it is productive)?  As I read, the novel reminded me of a super-modern version of the stream-of-consciousness technique.  Stream-of-consciousness in this novel is taken to the extreme, not just happening from sentence to sentence, but from clause to clause within the sentence itself.  This seemed to create a kind of kaleidoscopic fragmentation, a hazy free-floating phenomenon.  I can see how perhaps this may get at the de-centering of the subject that many New Formalists forefront, but I wonder how this free-floating quality contributes to notions of humanness.  Are humans grounded in nothing but abstractions, subordinates, and fragments?  Is there nothing central that permeates us?  The novel does seem to propose a kind of timeless, a-historical subjectivity, a subjectivity completely liberated from all conceptions of time, place, context, and ideologies.  But, Levinson also points out that a focus on form is meant ultimately to provide an experience of “pleasure” (561), and whether this is the affect of Hunt’s novel is still up for debate.

 

 

Incipient Machismo in The Body Artist

Don DeLillo’s The Body Artist seems to consciously evoke Freud’s Mourning and Melancholia, specifically problematizing the idea that melancholics “make the greatest nuisance of themselves . . . . [b]ecause . . . their behavior . . . proceed[s] from a mental constellation of revolt.” The first chapter of the novella gives a gloomy and cheerless picture of conjugal life, showing Lauren’s mute submission to being overshadowed by her husband’s faded notoriety as he lives out a Hemingwayesque machismo fantasy in a rented house. DeLillo depicts Lauren and Rey going through the motions of marriage as an empty participation in a synchronized series of shared rote behaviors—buttering toast, making tea, reading the newspaper, and pouring orange juice—which, day in and day out, amount to two lives.

DeLillo’s portrait of Rey also calls to mind Brian Massumi’s penetrating analysis of Ronald Reagan’s political persona—whose singular trait is an overwhelming affective vacuousness that enables him to serve as a receptacle for the common hopes and aspirations of the masses. Like Reagan, Rey exemplifies an affective vacancy that other characters fill up with their own personal feelings. Rey is likewise “an incipience”—a dry husk of masculine poise—who signifies “many things to many people” (in his case, many ex-wives and lovers) precisely because he is “unqualified and without content.” In this sense, then, Lauren—an artist in her own right whose creativity appears to be drained by Rey’s presence while he is alive—is representative of a kind of female electorate that silently acquiesces to the mythologization of a patriarchy that extinguishes their self-determining agency. Rey views Lauren as nothing more than a deindividuated anonymity—a blank embodiment of a married woman who “likes everything . . . [and] loves everything” and whose only function in Rey’s “happy home” is to serve as a balm for his own male insecurities. This hollow, perfunctory death-in-life drives Lauren to take refuge in solipsistic escapism, “insert[ing] herself into certain stories in the newspaper . . . some kind of daydream variation.” The Body Artist brilliantly immerses the reader in the flux of Lauren’s consciousness. This psychological instability is formally written through narrative moments of erasure and slippage which leave the reader questioning whether the story reliably recounts Lauren’s struggle with the wreckage left by Rey’s suicide or is instead the manifestation of a frustration fantasy, an imagined means of playing out a dominant role-reversal between Lauren and Rey.

The Elusive Half-Second and the Aesthetic Experience

Like Candis, I was particularly struck by Brian Massumi’s probing of affect and the ways in which his research and definitions can be applied to post-modern texts.  Massumi’s assertion that suspense or incipience is suggestive of potential and thereby both “pleasant” and memorable (as in the snowman experiment) does indeed give us new ways to look at post-modern techniques of fragmentation, both in image and in language.

 

What interests me most, however, derives from Massumi’s analysis of experiments with the expression-event, and the implications of his idea that “brain and skin form a resonating vessel” in which “stimulation turns inward, is folded into the body, except that there is no inside for it to be in, because the body is radically open, absorbing impulses quicker than they can be perceived, and because the entire vibratory event is unconscious, out of mind” (89). 

 

Massumi’s suggestion that brain activity occurs without our knowledge is readily accepted when thinking about central nervous system reflexes beginning with the body; we learn in third or fourth grade about the message sent to the brain when we touch a hot stove and the quickness of the response to remove our hand, and that only fragments of seconds elapse in this event.  Yet, the idea that the brain is functioning and drawing upon “past actions and contexts…conserved and repeated, autonomically reactivated, but not accomplished” (91) implies several ramifications in the study of affect as it relates to the aesthetic question.  In the first place, we are thinking and discerning outside of consciousness.  Further, we do so in drawing on a set of subjective and relative contextual and unfulfilled experiences. In addition, our ability to perceive temporal order is unreliable (i.e. the experiments).  And, perhaps most disconcertingly, language’s role in intensity and affect plays a resonating role that has little to do with linear or signified meaning.

 

DeLillo’s novel The Body Artist provides a fascinating context in which to test out Massumi’s theories.  As others have pointed out in their blogs, temporality is unclear and almost irrelevant to the affective experience; events and narration happen on concurrent planes and resonate throughout the novel.  Lauren Hartke has mastered the art of “acting, always in the process of becoming another or exploring some root identity” and has taught her body “to do things other bodies could not” (107).  Potential identities are test-driven before the final performance; each fragment draws together to create affect.  And, most compellingly, Massumi’s analysis of the Reagan speech seems to apply best to the novel.  Dialogue and exposition produce no narrative structure, but the jerky events of language and image create an overarching impression of curiosity, sadness, and loss that cannot sum up the entire performance.

 

Massumi and DeLillo

 

What I found most interesting in the reading for this week was Massumi’s distinction between emotion and affect.  His contention that emotion is personal, subjective, and social (88), while affect is impersonal and somehow outside of one’s self was confusing, but potentially productive for thinking about the texts we have read.  I kept thinking about the early discussions we had about the “waning of affect” in Postmodern culture/literature, and I wonder if Massumi has got it right; that maybe there is no waning of affect, but that affect simply has little to do with traditional conceptions of emotion.  Instead, perhaps it has to do with our responses that occur within the gaps, in moments of incipience of suspense.  This could explain why postmodern texts are so fond of fragments, non-linear narratives, and distance, as these stylistic/formal conventions create textual spaces of suspense and potential.  Perhaps these texts take advantage of the idea that “intensity” or affect is “associated with nonlinear processes” (86).

 

The idea of the body as virtual in Massumi’s article also helped me to contemplate Delillo’s novel.  Lauren is a strange character, because she is represented as alone and living within herself for so much of the narrative.  Lauren is made up mostly of interior monologues (although those monologues include dialogues with her late husband and with the ghost).  However, she is a bit of an anomaly because she is also, as a body artist, an extremely embodied character, a character who experiences herself through tactile and visual experience; she is vital due to her ability to contort and work with her body, a body that she places in contact with the exterior world.  I was reminded of cognitive theorist Andy Clark, who talks about the ways that individuals become embodied; he argues, similarly to Massumi, that our bodies create a parallel plane of cognition (although he seems more inclined than Massumi to believe that this plane is interwoven, not separate from, the planes of the brain and the mind). Clarkdiscusses how bodies create scaffolds, or apparatuses that connect them to the real world.  These scaffolds then alter one’s ability to think, experience, and understand; scaffolds create the body as an open system which changes cognition.  He uses the example of writing.  If one attempts to write on a computer, one is limited.  But if one has handwritten notes that one can spread out before one, or if one can spatially look at and arrange previous drafts, one’s cognition is actually changed because of these material scaffolds; one can think in ways one couldn’t before.  Massumi’s article expands on these ideas, or at least complicates them.  To Massumi, it is all about the gap between content and effect.  He feels that the mind is somehow subtractive, and that the body is able to experience a type of cognition on its own that is over-full of potential.  His discussion of the half-second delay illustrates his ideas about how the body, as its own plane of cognition, is full of “suspense” and “intensity,” while the mind is responsible for organizing this superlinear experience in a way that can be ordered, structured, and understood in an emotional context. 

 

I am also curious about how Massumi’s ideas might help us to understand the novel’s strange representations of time and space.  Delillo creates many different time zones in the novel.  Lauren exists in real time, and yet she is somehow outside it, or between times.  The ghost is outside of time altogether.  Lauren realizes “their talks had no time sense” and she notes that the man doesn’t “know how to measure himself to what we call the Now” (68).  How might Massumi’s article explain this timelessness?  Is this an attempt by Delillo, through the novel’s content, to represent the plane of affect, the impersonal, timeless, potential of the body (that is prior to language or outside of it)?