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shadowkatHorrid week continues. Today, I misplaced my wallet. Discovered this after I exited the train and was hunting for my subway pass. First thought that entered my brain was - how the frigging heck am I getting home? Second, oh my god, where is my wallet! Third, OMG MY ID, MONEY, ETC is in that wallet! FUCK!!!! Calm down, calm....okay, think, (this while I'm having a coughing fit, and trying to breath, because methinks the allergies are either a cold, the flu, or just a severe allergy attack), right, must have left it at work. It's obviously there. Last time I saw it. Damn. Okay, how am I getting home? A nice black police officer kindly loans me six single dollar bills to buy a metro card to get myself home. Left messages at work - but no one is there to check - work place closes early. Almost positive it is there - because there is no other place it could be. I couldn't have lost it on the train and no one could have taken it out of my bag - very hard to get things out of my bag. But am worrying all the same.
[ETA at 12pm next day: Found my wallet at work, in my desk, as hoped. Highly relieved. Would have been a nightmare to replace.]
There's a rather interesting discussion going on in about two blogs on my flist about deconstructionalism. Actually not just those blogs, I've seen it elsewhere. It brings back fond memories of my days as an English Lit Major back in the 1980s. In 1989, I vividly remember spending two-three hours yakking with guy sitting at the computer terminal behind me, as we wrote our senior thesises. His was on deconstructionalism or rather deconstructing the superhero in society, or the protagonist privilege/Heroe's journey as deconstructed by Alan Moore and Frank Miller, amongst others. He had to fight the English Department to let him propose it. Cute guy - curly white blond hair, tall and lean, leather jacket with stubs, silver necklace, earring, John Lennon style glasses, and those big black boots - Doc Martens. Yes, he looked more like a punk rocker than an English Lit Major. This we know. And he was a heck of a lot more interesting than what I was writing about - I was busy contrasting Molly Bloom to Caddy Thompson - and how the male narrators deconstructed these women and redefined them to suite their own purpose.
What is deconstructionism?
A philosophical movement and theory of literary criticism that questions traditional assumptions about certainty, identity, and truth; asserts that words can only refer to other words; and attempts to demonstrate how statements about any text subvert their own meanings: "In deconstruction, the critic claims there is no meaning to be found in the actual text, but only in the various, often mutually irreconcilable, 'virtual texts' constructed by readers in their search for meaning" (Rebecca Goldstein).
Deconstruction is an approach, introduced by French philosopher Jacques Derrida, which rigorously pursues the meaning of a text to the point of undoing the oppositions on which it is apparently founded, and to the point of showing that those foundations are irreducibly complex, unstable or impossible. It is an approach that may be deployed in philosophy, in literary analysis, in other fields, or in a way that transcends the boundaries of such fields.
Deconstruction generally tries to demonstrate that any text is not a discrete whole but contains several irreconcilable and contradictory meanings; that any text therefore has more than one interpretation; that the text itself links these interpretations inextricably; that the incompatibility of these interpretations is irreducible; and thus that an interpretative reading cannot go beyond a certain point. Derrida refers to this point as an aporia in the text, and terms deconstructive reading "aporetic." J. Hillis Miller has described deconstruction this way: “Deconstruction is not a dismantling of the structure of a text, but a demonstration that it has already dismantled itself. Its apparently-solid ground is no rock, but thin air."[1]
I spent a good portion of my early twenties studying narratives that subscribed to deconstructionalism. Writers such as James Joyce, William Faulkner, William S. Burroughs,
or filmmakers such as Orson Welles - who literally made his protagonist, the anti-hero of his piece, a secondary character - that we only saw through the views of everyone else. The idea of broadening the text, so that you see the man on the street, the wife, the ex-girlfriend, the best friend, the reporter, the accountant, etc's take on the protagonist and the story itself, was fairly innovative when Citizen Kane premiered. Comic book writers went nuts - as did many filmmakers - who copied the approach. We could now tell a story from multiple views, and they didn't have to connect. Alan Moore in The Watchmen - takes this technique a step further - by creating a story within a story. While reading The Watchmen - you will be hard pressed to figure out who the protagonist is or even if there is one. It's a story with a large ensemble. And no, the film doesn't do it justice. There's a whole segment about a bunch of people who cross paths on a street corner - they don't know each other, but we follow each one.
What connects them is the street corner and the pattern of events surrounding it. The central focus of the story - is a mystery and the statement "Who Watches The Watchmen" - to what degree are superheroes held accountable for their actions? Are they heroes or villians? Who protects us from them? That's the theme, and the tale itself moves around it. Deconstructing as it does so the idea of a hero or even a central protagonist in society.
This is hardly a new idea - if you've followed noir film at all - black film - first on the scene back in the 1920s or 1930s, forget the exact period, this too deconstructs the heroes journey. In noir - we don't have a hero, so much as a protagonist. And we are meant to question the protagonist, to question his narration of events. Films such as Double Indemnity, Out of the Past, The Big Sleep (which even Raymond Chandler wasn't entirely sure he understood), and more modern flicks such as Body Heat, The Usual Suspects, The Sixth Sense and Memento - play with narration. Do we believe what we see. Much as Orson Wells did in the 1930s, and Hitchcock did in his films Vertico, Psycho, and The Rear Window.
More experimental filmmakers such as Luis Bunuel (sp?) and Roman Polanski went further still and played with visual perception. Bunuel in That Obscure Object of Desire, and Polanski in such films as Rosemary's Baby and The Tenant.
While in the literary world, we have Ian McEwan - who wrote Atonement - a story about a young female writer, a girl, who does a horrible thing - with horrible consequences, and decides to correct it by writing an ending to the tale and telling that ending instead of the truth.
Towards the end, when she actually does want to unburden herself - she has Altziemers, and can no longer remember what is fact and what is fiction. But the reader doesn't know that it is the girl's fiction until they reach that final section and discover, the portion they read before was not true - the young lovers never reunited, they never saw each other after the little girl's lie broke them apart. It was only in her fictional narrative - that they reunited and at her hands. Their story, what really happened, will never be known, any more than her lie will ever truly be unwritten.
In plays? It was Samuel Becket - with Waiting for Godot and Endgame - two tales that could be interpreted in numerous fashions...each depending on the viewer. The viewer brought the text.
This type of writing is hard to pull off, well. It requires a great deal of attention to detail, and awareness of point of view, and a deft hand at pacing. Welles was thought a genius for pulling off the difficult to sell Citizen Kane. There have been imitators, of course. Alan Moore's Watchmen was considered brilliant for similar reasons.
Moore's Watchmen and even more so, Frank Miller's nightmarish Dark Knight Returns - examine the societal reality of a superhero - what it would truly mean to have someone with super-powers living amongst us. In Dark Knight - Superman is almost a fascist keeper of the faith, a boy scout who does product placement, waves the flag, and keeps the unruly in line. While Batman, knee-deep in man-made armor, is a dark vigilante that haunts the night, and a leader of a guerilla faction. Neither are people you'd want to know or have living amongst you. Neither are heroes. Just as Alan Moore's Watchmen - are almost above it all, Ozymandias in his citadel, plotting the destruction of all who cannot evolve, and Rorasch who is mad with anger, and vengeance. The mainstream comic landscape is rather littered with this movement - which erupted in the 1980s as a sort of response to Reagan and Thatcher regimes in Western Culture. It quieted down a little in the 1990s, only to come back into fashion in 00's during Bush.
It also had a bit of an upswing in the 1940s - we got James Joyce and Faulkner in the 40s. I can't think of many women writers who played along with this. Alice Walker and Toni Morrison along with Zora Neal Hurston come to mind. Tended to be more minority women, who spoke on the fringes. Morrison's Beloved is anything if not deconstructionalist. The protagonist, if there is one, is a ghost and angry ghost at that - the ghost of slavery. Or at least that's the metaphor.
To be honest, I always found the literary criticism to be rather dull and headache inducing, but the writing to be a thrill ride - when I was in the mood. Not so much now. You need the head-space to delve into these artists works, the relaxation of mind and body to ride their waves of words and phrases. By equal measure - I can't say I have much fondness anymore for their counter - or the counter-argument, and there must always be one. Where the hero is the central focus, and we follow his trip...this tends to be found more often in science-fiction and fantasy tropes than literary ones. But not always. Dan Simmions, George RR Martin, and Connie Willis are at least three sci-fantasy writers that come to mind - who write ensemble casts well and multiple points of view. Even those who focus on the first narrative voice, such as Butcher and Harrison - do not fall completely into the WottaGuy, WottaGal trap of the Terry Brooks and Stephanie Meyers and their ilk.
And as much as Joseph Campbell as been reviled, some of his ideas were not completely off track.
The Heroes Journey is a definitive pattern in Western Mythology and the Mythos of the Desert Cultures of the Middle East. Not so much of the cultures of the jungles and forests...which are less popular and less wellknown. The Celtic Mythos doesn't entirely fit it - with the possible exception of the Arthurian Legends, but then that depends on your interpretation. In the Mabinogi or Welsh Folktales, as well as the Irish - Arthur is but a bit player, and far bigger roles are given to Morgan La Fay and other characters within that mythos. Same is true in the mythology of Indonesia, Aboriginal culture of Australia, the Native American cultures of the Americas, as well as the cultures of the far North. It's just that our current culture or rather the one that is controlling the media is heavily focused on the Hero's Journey Mythos - is all. And it is fairly male centric at the moment. Campbell like most cultural anthropologists focused on what interested him and resonated, and tended to ignore what did not.
I admittedly didn't study him much. Got a smattering of him in college, if that, and latter, picked up his books when people went nutty over him online and a friend I'd met at one of the fanboards rec'd him - wanted to see what all the fuss was about. I got in a lot of trouble by making the mistake of using his words in a few essays on Buffy, assuming everyone was nutty about him - was apparently a huge mistake. Some people hated the guy. One woman wrote me a very nasty email regarding it. So I didn't use Campbell ever again. Decided life was too short and I didn't like him that much anyhow. I don't. Sort of dry in places and a bit on the snotty side.
The problem with studying and analyzing literary narratives, whether they be mythology and oral in structure or written down for pay - is you are always playing a guessing game. In many cases your interpretation is basically whatever you want to see. After a while - the story itself loses it's original meaning and becomes whatever you want it to be - this is deconstructionism.
And if you read enough analysis on the topic, you stop knowing what the story was yourself.
Or for that matter even care. In fact, you may even lose interest in it altogether. I think one of the reasons I did not get that Ph.D in English Lit or cultural anthropology (which actually interested me far more) was the realization that over time, I'd lose the stories. Their emotional weight would dissolve beneath the analysis. There is such a thing as overanalyzing.
And often we find more in a story than the author intended or even wrote, or far less as the case may be.
Story-telling is not a defined or exact art, necessarily. And anyone can do it. The art of it, if there is one, is not in providing a clear theme or cool intellectual concept, but in connecting to the listener or reader or viewer - bringing them inside the story, communing with them on the inside, where the heart and emotions lie. Good stories speak to the heart not the head. The ones that last - always do. Think about it - the stories you loved, the ones you obsessed over, ...when you try to analyze them too hard, break them down, doesn't their plot seem hackneyed? Or certain things off? Go too far, and lose them, like whirl-a-wisps.
Stories I think are personal, not necessarily collective things, but they can connect to us as a group and motivate us as one - because they can connect on both levels. The stories that connect to us personally and as collective group - are the powerful ones, the ones that become the foundation of religion or change. The story of Jesus is an example. Just as is the Story of Mohammad or Buddha, or Abraham or Moses, or Elizabeth Cady Stanton....or Buffy the Vampire Slayer. What are we, without stories? Nothing but spit, blood, and bone and matter.
****Please read my profile page before commenting - where I state that I write spontaneously, rarely proof or edit, make frequent typos and errors, and none of this is necessarily factual unless clearly stated (which not here) - they are just my random musings and often off the top of my head (I may well change my mind five minutes later). So...if something I wrote makes you see red? Annoys you? Makes you cranky? Take five breaths, remember its just some woman's lj, and click away, do not post.
My blood-pressure thanks you. ;-)
ETA2: You may link to this entry, if you wish.
[ETA at 12pm next day: Found my wallet at work, in my desk, as hoped. Highly relieved. Would have been a nightmare to replace.]
There's a rather interesting discussion going on in about two blogs on my flist about deconstructionalism. Actually not just those blogs, I've seen it elsewhere. It brings back fond memories of my days as an English Lit Major back in the 1980s. In 1989, I vividly remember spending two-three hours yakking with guy sitting at the computer terminal behind me, as we wrote our senior thesises. His was on deconstructionalism or rather deconstructing the superhero in society, or the protagonist privilege/Heroe's journey as deconstructed by Alan Moore and Frank Miller, amongst others. He had to fight the English Department to let him propose it. Cute guy - curly white blond hair, tall and lean, leather jacket with stubs, silver necklace, earring, John Lennon style glasses, and those big black boots - Doc Martens. Yes, he looked more like a punk rocker than an English Lit Major. This we know. And he was a heck of a lot more interesting than what I was writing about - I was busy contrasting Molly Bloom to Caddy Thompson - and how the male narrators deconstructed these women and redefined them to suite their own purpose.
What is deconstructionism?
A philosophical movement and theory of literary criticism that questions traditional assumptions about certainty, identity, and truth; asserts that words can only refer to other words; and attempts to demonstrate how statements about any text subvert their own meanings: "In deconstruction, the critic claims there is no meaning to be found in the actual text, but only in the various, often mutually irreconcilable, 'virtual texts' constructed by readers in their search for meaning" (Rebecca Goldstein).
Deconstruction is an approach, introduced by French philosopher Jacques Derrida, which rigorously pursues the meaning of a text to the point of undoing the oppositions on which it is apparently founded, and to the point of showing that those foundations are irreducibly complex, unstable or impossible. It is an approach that may be deployed in philosophy, in literary analysis, in other fields, or in a way that transcends the boundaries of such fields.
Deconstruction generally tries to demonstrate that any text is not a discrete whole but contains several irreconcilable and contradictory meanings; that any text therefore has more than one interpretation; that the text itself links these interpretations inextricably; that the incompatibility of these interpretations is irreducible; and thus that an interpretative reading cannot go beyond a certain point. Derrida refers to this point as an aporia in the text, and terms deconstructive reading "aporetic." J. Hillis Miller has described deconstruction this way: “Deconstruction is not a dismantling of the structure of a text, but a demonstration that it has already dismantled itself. Its apparently-solid ground is no rock, but thin air."[1]
I spent a good portion of my early twenties studying narratives that subscribed to deconstructionalism. Writers such as James Joyce, William Faulkner, William S. Burroughs,
or filmmakers such as Orson Welles - who literally made his protagonist, the anti-hero of his piece, a secondary character - that we only saw through the views of everyone else. The idea of broadening the text, so that you see the man on the street, the wife, the ex-girlfriend, the best friend, the reporter, the accountant, etc's take on the protagonist and the story itself, was fairly innovative when Citizen Kane premiered. Comic book writers went nuts - as did many filmmakers - who copied the approach. We could now tell a story from multiple views, and they didn't have to connect. Alan Moore in The Watchmen - takes this technique a step further - by creating a story within a story. While reading The Watchmen - you will be hard pressed to figure out who the protagonist is or even if there is one. It's a story with a large ensemble. And no, the film doesn't do it justice. There's a whole segment about a bunch of people who cross paths on a street corner - they don't know each other, but we follow each one.
What connects them is the street corner and the pattern of events surrounding it. The central focus of the story - is a mystery and the statement "Who Watches The Watchmen" - to what degree are superheroes held accountable for their actions? Are they heroes or villians? Who protects us from them? That's the theme, and the tale itself moves around it. Deconstructing as it does so the idea of a hero or even a central protagonist in society.
This is hardly a new idea - if you've followed noir film at all - black film - first on the scene back in the 1920s or 1930s, forget the exact period, this too deconstructs the heroes journey. In noir - we don't have a hero, so much as a protagonist. And we are meant to question the protagonist, to question his narration of events. Films such as Double Indemnity, Out of the Past, The Big Sleep (which even Raymond Chandler wasn't entirely sure he understood), and more modern flicks such as Body Heat, The Usual Suspects, The Sixth Sense and Memento - play with narration. Do we believe what we see. Much as Orson Wells did in the 1930s, and Hitchcock did in his films Vertico, Psycho, and The Rear Window.
More experimental filmmakers such as Luis Bunuel (sp?) and Roman Polanski went further still and played with visual perception. Bunuel in That Obscure Object of Desire, and Polanski in such films as Rosemary's Baby and The Tenant.
While in the literary world, we have Ian McEwan - who wrote Atonement - a story about a young female writer, a girl, who does a horrible thing - with horrible consequences, and decides to correct it by writing an ending to the tale and telling that ending instead of the truth.
Towards the end, when she actually does want to unburden herself - she has Altziemers, and can no longer remember what is fact and what is fiction. But the reader doesn't know that it is the girl's fiction until they reach that final section and discover, the portion they read before was not true - the young lovers never reunited, they never saw each other after the little girl's lie broke them apart. It was only in her fictional narrative - that they reunited and at her hands. Their story, what really happened, will never be known, any more than her lie will ever truly be unwritten.
In plays? It was Samuel Becket - with Waiting for Godot and Endgame - two tales that could be interpreted in numerous fashions...each depending on the viewer. The viewer brought the text.
This type of writing is hard to pull off, well. It requires a great deal of attention to detail, and awareness of point of view, and a deft hand at pacing. Welles was thought a genius for pulling off the difficult to sell Citizen Kane. There have been imitators, of course. Alan Moore's Watchmen was considered brilliant for similar reasons.
Moore's Watchmen and even more so, Frank Miller's nightmarish Dark Knight Returns - examine the societal reality of a superhero - what it would truly mean to have someone with super-powers living amongst us. In Dark Knight - Superman is almost a fascist keeper of the faith, a boy scout who does product placement, waves the flag, and keeps the unruly in line. While Batman, knee-deep in man-made armor, is a dark vigilante that haunts the night, and a leader of a guerilla faction. Neither are people you'd want to know or have living amongst you. Neither are heroes. Just as Alan Moore's Watchmen - are almost above it all, Ozymandias in his citadel, plotting the destruction of all who cannot evolve, and Rorasch who is mad with anger, and vengeance. The mainstream comic landscape is rather littered with this movement - which erupted in the 1980s as a sort of response to Reagan and Thatcher regimes in Western Culture. It quieted down a little in the 1990s, only to come back into fashion in 00's during Bush.
It also had a bit of an upswing in the 1940s - we got James Joyce and Faulkner in the 40s. I can't think of many women writers who played along with this. Alice Walker and Toni Morrison along with Zora Neal Hurston come to mind. Tended to be more minority women, who spoke on the fringes. Morrison's Beloved is anything if not deconstructionalist. The protagonist, if there is one, is a ghost and angry ghost at that - the ghost of slavery. Or at least that's the metaphor.
To be honest, I always found the literary criticism to be rather dull and headache inducing, but the writing to be a thrill ride - when I was in the mood. Not so much now. You need the head-space to delve into these artists works, the relaxation of mind and body to ride their waves of words and phrases. By equal measure - I can't say I have much fondness anymore for their counter - or the counter-argument, and there must always be one. Where the hero is the central focus, and we follow his trip...this tends to be found more often in science-fiction and fantasy tropes than literary ones. But not always. Dan Simmions, George RR Martin, and Connie Willis are at least three sci-fantasy writers that come to mind - who write ensemble casts well and multiple points of view. Even those who focus on the first narrative voice, such as Butcher and Harrison - do not fall completely into the WottaGuy, WottaGal trap of the Terry Brooks and Stephanie Meyers and their ilk.
And as much as Joseph Campbell as been reviled, some of his ideas were not completely off track.
The Heroes Journey is a definitive pattern in Western Mythology and the Mythos of the Desert Cultures of the Middle East. Not so much of the cultures of the jungles and forests...which are less popular and less wellknown. The Celtic Mythos doesn't entirely fit it - with the possible exception of the Arthurian Legends, but then that depends on your interpretation. In the Mabinogi or Welsh Folktales, as well as the Irish - Arthur is but a bit player, and far bigger roles are given to Morgan La Fay and other characters within that mythos. Same is true in the mythology of Indonesia, Aboriginal culture of Australia, the Native American cultures of the Americas, as well as the cultures of the far North. It's just that our current culture or rather the one that is controlling the media is heavily focused on the Hero's Journey Mythos - is all. And it is fairly male centric at the moment. Campbell like most cultural anthropologists focused on what interested him and resonated, and tended to ignore what did not.
I admittedly didn't study him much. Got a smattering of him in college, if that, and latter, picked up his books when people went nutty over him online and a friend I'd met at one of the fanboards rec'd him - wanted to see what all the fuss was about. I got in a lot of trouble by making the mistake of using his words in a few essays on Buffy, assuming everyone was nutty about him - was apparently a huge mistake. Some people hated the guy. One woman wrote me a very nasty email regarding it. So I didn't use Campbell ever again. Decided life was too short and I didn't like him that much anyhow. I don't. Sort of dry in places and a bit on the snotty side.
The problem with studying and analyzing literary narratives, whether they be mythology and oral in structure or written down for pay - is you are always playing a guessing game. In many cases your interpretation is basically whatever you want to see. After a while - the story itself loses it's original meaning and becomes whatever you want it to be - this is deconstructionism.
And if you read enough analysis on the topic, you stop knowing what the story was yourself.
Or for that matter even care. In fact, you may even lose interest in it altogether. I think one of the reasons I did not get that Ph.D in English Lit or cultural anthropology (which actually interested me far more) was the realization that over time, I'd lose the stories. Their emotional weight would dissolve beneath the analysis. There is such a thing as overanalyzing.
And often we find more in a story than the author intended or even wrote, or far less as the case may be.
Story-telling is not a defined or exact art, necessarily. And anyone can do it. The art of it, if there is one, is not in providing a clear theme or cool intellectual concept, but in connecting to the listener or reader or viewer - bringing them inside the story, communing with them on the inside, where the heart and emotions lie. Good stories speak to the heart not the head. The ones that last - always do. Think about it - the stories you loved, the ones you obsessed over, ...when you try to analyze them too hard, break them down, doesn't their plot seem hackneyed? Or certain things off? Go too far, and lose them, like whirl-a-wisps.
Stories I think are personal, not necessarily collective things, but they can connect to us as a group and motivate us as one - because they can connect on both levels. The stories that connect to us personally and as collective group - are the powerful ones, the ones that become the foundation of religion or change. The story of Jesus is an example. Just as is the Story of Mohammad or Buddha, or Abraham or Moses, or Elizabeth Cady Stanton....or Buffy the Vampire Slayer. What are we, without stories? Nothing but spit, blood, and bone and matter.
****Please read my profile page before commenting - where I state that I write spontaneously, rarely proof or edit, make frequent typos and errors, and none of this is necessarily factual unless clearly stated (which not here) - they are just my random musings and often off the top of my head (I may well change my mind five minutes later). So...if something I wrote makes you see red? Annoys you? Makes you cranky? Take five breaths, remember its just some woman's lj, and click away, do not post.
My blood-pressure thanks you. ;-)
ETA2: You may link to this entry, if you wish.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2010-04-21 01:54 am (UTC)I've lost my wallet more than it has been stolen, and unfortunately it is just as annoying to replace a lost wallet as a stolen one, so I'll continue to hope you find it at work tomorrow.
{{hugs}} (hugs are supposed to be good for high blood pressure).
no subject
Date: 2010-04-21 04:14 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-04-21 04:01 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-04-21 04:12 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-04-21 04:42 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-04-21 08:25 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-04-21 04:13 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-04-21 09:54 am (UTC)"...
What are we, without stories? Nothing but spit, blood, and bone and matter.
..."
We ARE matter. Then, we make up p(r)etty stories to reflect upon our matter, justify our action and ease us to sleep.
I think the importance lies in the tools we use to de/construct, reflect and selfreflect; in the theory (story) we choose (or even invent) to explain/reflect upon our world/matter (including ourselves).
I came into contact with deconstructivism while considering gender and role. The core tool to dissect the world and (self)reflect has always been dialectis (to me). It works, it allows to change the theory/ground i stand upon and thus to change myself and the world (well, unfortunately not all by myself ;-)).
I wish you the best in your current hassle.