Musing on the Text of Whistler's Mother

Thinking about the 'text' of things, other than text, I recently saw a documentary James McNeill Whistler's "Arrangement in Gray and Black No. 1: Portrait of the Artist's Mother." More commonly known as "Whistler's Mother".

I can't, with any honesty say, that I was terribly attracted to this painting before watching the documentary, but after, I looked at it differently, and I found it much more intriguing. I had always imagined the work had been painted in the US, and it is only when I found out that it had been painted in London, did the context of the picture and its remarkable stark simplicity (compare it with the lush, Pre-raphaelite style of Dante Gabriel Rossetti who was a friend and contemporary of Whistler or the sentimentalism of Millais). The lack of colour, or props in the painting is in direct opposition to everything being painted by his contemporaries.

In a way, it's closer to the Problem Picture genre of the late Victorian period, although there is no obvious narrative, because it does present a puzzle. For a start, look at the title: the utter lack of sentimentality - he names his mother after he lists the colours. Then there is the total lack of engagement with the subject, who is painted in side-view, staring into the darkness at the left-hand side of the painting.

Barthes says that the author's life, and the events surrounding the making of the work don't matter but, if this painting is anything, it is proof that he is wrong. Because without the accompanying information, there is no understanding this piece of art.

Anna McNeill Whistler (his mother) was widow and a devoutly religious woman, puritanical and utterly self-reliant by all accounts (Norris). There's some evidence that she did not much approve of her son's decadent lifestyle in London. When she moved there, to escape the Civil War, she lived with her son, having control of his house in every aspect, other than his studio.

Her portrait was originally meant to be a standing one, but she was ill and couldn't support the pose after the first three days, so Whistler had her sit, her feet up on a footstool. She wrote a letter about the experience of sitting for the portrait and remarked that to pass the time, she prayed for her son. (Whistler).

This information caused me to see the painting as a sort of recursive, or mise en abyme piece. The artist's feelings for his mother were clearly problematic. He paints her, not in his world, but in her own - which brooks no extravagance and little decoration, which is entirely internal. And yet, he is in her mind constantly, throughout the painting.

Not an obvious, narrative puzzle, but an internal, human one of love and the boundaries of tolerance.

Not the End

I've really enjoyed the space and the time to take what I've been learning in this course and follow the threads of it along lines that intrigued me. I've tried, in my journal posts, to show some of the journeys it took me on.

I enjoyed having a blog journaling companion along the way. Zannie, a classmate, also used a blog as her tool for this assignment and I enjoyed the feeling that we were running a parallel course across the sea of learning.

I tried to justify why I felt that it was possible for a writer to go beyond the bounds of their own culture, if only a little, when writing about people and places in non-western environments.

I also explored, as truthfully as I could, why I write, and tried later to understand how that might bear on what I wrote, and how.

I met Derrida, who brought up the spectre of not only the unreliable narrator, but the unreliable writer, and most of all, the unreliable text. I found that there was a great potential for creativity in the gulf between what we hope to mean, and what is understood.

A quirk of fate took me all the way back to Plato, who inspired me with how much these dialectics are less a line than a circle. Only in my lifetime, more than two thousand years later can gay men sit around after a dinner and openly discuss the meaning of erotic love without fear of persecution. It's a good place we've landed, I think.

A link in the course prompted me to revisit a book I'd read many years ago, and see it in a new way. The long dark silence between us and Plato was not really dark. Umberto Eco introduced me to the bonfires of intellect in the intervening centuries, inspired me to be more of a model reader, and introduced me to the privileges I have, as a writer, to ask my reader to open their encyclopedia of understanding and add a few more entries. I'm on the lookout for my own strange unicorns and water-ducks now; more vigilant of the way I frame my own approach to the texts of others.

This led me to Foucault, and the proposition that names often get in the way of engagement with the text. It isn't always helpful to spend too long gazing at the well, it can interfere with drinking the water.

As a writer and a reader, as elusive and arbitrary as it might be, it is meaning that matters. The pursuit of it is at the core of the interchange between the players and the text.

And looking back on this journey of a journal, I think this has been a worthwhile exercise, and one I'm not sure I want to end, here, in week 10 of the course. So this blog will live on, and I'll continue to chart my journeys on it. Who knows? The ship might go down and someone might want to know why: beyond here be monsters.

What's in a Name?

Considering my recent reading, I think this is a relevant question. I've just finished Michel Foucault's essay on "What is an Author?" Much has been made of the portion of the essay that deals with what he calls "author-functions" and there is a reader's guide to this essay that is short and sweet and deals with this section nicely.

I've often gotten much enjoyment out of Foucault, being that he is usually so wonderful about backtracking to the origins of institutions, I was hoping really to get an over-view, and idea of the evolution of the authorial structure, but he only really gets into that at the end. First, though, he gets a little stuck on names. And this is what really interested me.

Like Barthes and Derrida, he rejects the writer's supremacy as the arbiter of the meaning over any particular piece of the writer's work, but he has a little snipe at them, suggesting this isn't as radical as it sounds; he calls it an "empty affirmation". He entertainingly attempts to crystallize what we mean when we talk about a "work" - not Nietzsche's laundry list, for instance. He questions why we feel that certain portions of an author's writings are 'work', and other bits are not. Although it turns out that, for Umberto Eco, laundry lists can be important (see "Foucault's Pendulum"), and he can clearly give as good as he gets (Eco says that there is no connection or reference, but you have to wonder).

What Foucault asks us to consider is the value we put on an author's name. Certain things can affect that value, others don't:

"If I discover that Shakespeare was not born in the house we visit today, this is a modification that, obviously, will not alter the functioning of the author's name. But if we proved that Shakespeare did not write those sonnets which pass for his, that would constitute a significant change and affect the manner in which the author's name functions."

This portion of the essay got me thinking about my name, or rather, the lack of it, really. It's not that I don't have a name, but I don't use it for my writing; I use a pseudonym. Moreover, I don't even use a proper name, like Mary Smith, or Catherine Le Blue. I use a descriptor - a word for a type of person, not an individual.

I can't claim any foresight in having done this. I started out using my pseudonym because I couldn't use my real name, and because I liked the idea of representing myself as what I was, rather than who I was.

The entity that is named as the writer of my works has lived on the net for about eight years now.

About 4,000 people a day read my stories and, for the most part, I don't think they think much about the author of them. The ones that do are free to make up any story they want about who the writer of these stories is, what she does, how she lives.

In the absence of any available information, I've noticed that they make stuff up. Certainly, from the comments and emails I get, it seems I'm a beautiful, mysterious, extremely vivacious, thoroughly over-sexed individual.I didn't really have to do much work crafting the entity I am online, people are happy to do it for me, after reading my stories. This leads me to believe that many readers assume that most fictional works are, unless it's completely unfeasible, autobiographical.

I've often wondered whether I should let them know that, in reality, I'm a frumpy, rather plump, middle-aged woman and that the only kink I get to witness on a regular basis is when my neutered cat tries to fuck the mango tree in my garden. But that would be unfair and mean, wouldn't it? After all, the author of my stories has become a story in itself, written by the readers. Do I have a right to tell them that they aren't writers and they don't get to invent fictions of their own? Barthes would counsel me not to. Not only does my life give no worthwhile insights into the text, but I don't have a right to close off possible meanings created by my readers, in the act of creating me, either (Lye). And to be totally honest, I like it this way.

In an earlier post, I tried to be honest about why I write. I suggested that it was egotism and a quest for immortality of a sort that drove me. What I wanted to be clear about here is that it isn't that I want to live forever, me, Madeleine Morris. It is the viral passing on of idea-material which is hybridized by the reader that I want to engage in.

Much of the discussion surrounding authorship, and authorial privilege is probably worth revisiting in the light of the Internet and the way writers on the internet are using this platform. If Foucault wasn't terribly impressed by the assertion that the author is dead, I'm not all that impressed by his assertion that the author's name is of questionable and arbitrary value.

References:

Foucault, Michel. "What is an author?." Generation Online. 1969. 5 May 2008 http://www.generation-online.org/p/fp_foucault12.htm

Lye, John. "The 'Death of the Author' as an instance of theory." Department of English Language & Literature. 2000. Brock Univerity. 5 May 2008 http://www.brocku.ca/english/courses/4F70/author.php.

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Revisiting the Rose

The Eco link in Module 9 of the course readings prompted me to re-read Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose. If you haven't read it, here's a link to a synopsis.

The first time I read the book, about twenty years ago, I loved it but knew nothing, really, about who Eco was or his work in the field of semiotics. I was interested, in light of the last year of study, to find out how the book would have changed for me since that time.

What struck me powerfully were the ways in which it had not changed for me: I still loved Adso's stubbornly concrete view of the world, and William's rational but compassionate lens. I still felt completely drawn in to the physical world of the Abbey and the shadowy half-world of the library. I still loved the murder mystery itself, having completely forgotten the solution to the riddle of the murders (I have a convenient sort of fictional forgetfulness that allows me to read books over and over and still be surprised).

When I first read the novel, I had not really thought of the way in which the culture of a time, a place, and a language dominates the thinking of the people in it. For this reason, the setting and characters in the novel seemed almost science-fictional at the time. I accepted this other world as I would accept a settlement on Mars and colonists long since exiled from the world I know.

This second reading was, in a way, a more anthropological one. I was listening to the language of the characters - associating it with the philosophy of the medieval scholastics and the doctrines of the Catholic Church at the time. I understood a lot better how intensely dangerous ideas that fell outside the bounds of accepted thought could be. The hesitations of the denizens of the Abbey and of both William and Adso ceased to be fantastical. And they led me to question how, now, we have different "heretical" thoughts that we also hide and disguise within fiction. Specifically, it led me to re-examine my reading of William Gibson's Pattern Recognition, with its logo-adverse heroine who is both a specialist and deeply allergic to corporate branding (for a fuller, more proficient synopsis, click here). Still, Eco himself would have it that my first reading isn't actually an erroneous one, if we accept his view that novels are "machines for making possible worlds" (Eriksson).

What also struck me were the ways in which I saw the book in a new light, and what deep admiration it engendered in me for anyone who researches their work so beautifully, so obsessively, as to populate an entire novel with meticulous clues to the origins of his ideas. This is something I probably did not see on first reading. Being a passive and greedy reader, I just let the thousands of references flutter down around me like confetti. But now, reading it again, I can see the mind that created this semiotic treasure-trove behind the story; that he is literally illustrating in fictional form the mnemonic arts ascribed to the monks at the Abbey (Newlon).

Many critics have, as Birgit Eriksson remarks, have read the novel "as being just a fictionalised version of his theoretical work". But I find it impossible to read this way because, as Eriksson points out, it not only illustrates his theory, it shows the limits of it. And it this way, it gave me a lot of insight into what relationship my own fictional writing and critical theory might have.

Although I'm not a theorist, I have been deeply impacted by many of the theories I've read about. I don't think it's possible to get through this degree and not, somehow, reflect that learning in my fictional work. However, I've been very concerned about how it might be affecting it, worried that it would warp my writing into something inauthentic and somehow "posed" for framing by one theory or another.

What is brilliant and inspirational to be about The Name of the Rose, is that it underscores the fact that, no matter how far theory can take us, it is a machine for describing worlds, not creating them.

References:

Eco, Umberto. The Name of the Rose. New York: Harcourt, Inc., 1980.

Eriksson, Birgit. A Novel Look at Theory: About Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose and Foucault's Pendulum. Centre for Cultural Research, University of Aarhus. 01 May 2000. 2 May 2008 http://www.hum.au.dk/ckulturf/pages/publications/be/novel.htm.

Gibson, William. Pattern Recognition. Paperback. New York: Berkley, 2005.

Newlon, Brendan. Beasts and Buildings: Religious Symbolism and Medieval Memory. The Modern Word. nd. 1 May 2008 http://www.themodernword.com/eco/eco_paper_newlon.pdf.

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Derrida vs Plato in a Socratic Smack-down: The Symposium

or Why you should never discuss critical theory at a dinner party

The Symposium is one of Plato's spiciest Dialogues. It is set in the form of a drinking party to celebrate the recent success of Agathon, a tragic poet (Plato, 385 B.C.).

Present at the party are seven figures, some of them real, some of them fictional. After dinner, one of them proposes that they take turns singing the praises of Eros in as eloquent a manner as they can manage. Here, for your pleasure, is the cast of characters.

• Phaedrus - a friend of Socrates
• Pausanius - a legal expert
• Eryximachus - a physician
• Aristophanes - a comic poet & dramatist
• Agathon - a tragic poet & dramatist
• Socrates - Philosopher, teacher of Plato
• Alcibiades - A military general, and all-round "rock-star and bad boy of Athens" (Hobbs, 2007).

Phaedrus begins: he praises Eros by recounting the influence that Eros wields over lovers. Egging them on to acts of heroism and self-sacrifice. No one, he says, wants to act shamefully in the eyes of his lover and, therefore, Eros' influence makes men behave virtuously.

Pausanius speaks next. He reminds the party that there are two kinds of love: the vulgar kind and the heavenly kind. The goodness and beauty of love is not in love itself but in how it is pursued.

Eryximachus, the doctor relates the origin myth of lovers. The Olympians created men, women, and hermaphrodites who were something like Siamese twins: four arms, four legs, two heads, two sets of genitals, etc. These hermaphrodites were so strong and independent that the Gods themselves feared them. So Zeus cut them in half. Lovers, says Eryximachus, are torn souls yearning to rejoin their other halves. Once they find each other, they become whole.

Aristophanes pleads hiccups, so Agathon takes the floor. He speaks of the perfection of love:

"He brings peace among men, calm upon the sea, repose and sleep in sadness. He frees us from ill-will, and fills us with kindliness, brings all gentleness and expels all ungentleness, whom every man should follow with sweet hymns in his praise, taking his part in that song of beauty which Love sings, healing the troubles of all minds of gods and men."

When Agathon finishes, Socrates takes the floor, chiding them all for singing the praises of Eros without doing him the honour of being truthful.

It is here, in Socrates' account of love that we find the seeds of Derridean theory. He questions Agathon, and in doing so shows us the paradox of the concept of Erotic love:

"And the admission has been already made that Love is of something which a man wants and has not?

True, he said.

Then Love wants and has not beauty?

Certainly, he replied.

And would you call that beautiful which wants and does not possess beauty?

Certainly not.

Then would you still say that love is beautiful?"

Here, in the space between love and what love wants, we find a wonderful illustration of the Derridean concept of differánce. The gaping hole between the shifting, impermanent language we must use and the meaning that lies beneath it (Derrida, 1982).

Socrates goes on to tell the story of his lessons in love from Diotima, the oracle. He admits to having felt the same way as Agathon about love until Diotima confronts him with the logic that, at the very core of the nature of love, is lack. Vulgar or heavenly, love is desire for something.

Diotima challenges Socrates to admit that if love involves lack, then Eros is not perfect - not a god - neither good nor beautiful. Socrates accepts this, venturing that, perhaps, Eros is bad and ugly.

Note the binary oppositions flying around: here get to watch Diotima as the first woman in history to perform a Derridean deconstruction of the text of erotic love.

She tells Socrates that Eros is neither good and beautiful, nor bad and ugly. She chides him for the way he privileges the binaries of "good" and "beautiful" (Hedges, 1998).

Eros, she tells him, is not a god, but rather, a spirit - a conduit between humans and the gods. She says of Eros, rather semiotically, that "Plenty was his father, and Poverty his mother". So he shows traits of both parents.

Diotima goes on to get Socrates to admit that love longs for beauty - perhaps the body of a beautiful boy - but that, as love grows up, it begins to see that beauty's not in one body alone, but in all bodies. It evolves, beyond wanting to contemplate beauty, to create it so as to ensure that it is ever-present.

Here, says, Diotima is when love grows up; in the pursuit of immortality. At it's most basic level, is the urge to reproduce - achieving immortality through the physical organism. Art and science and all creative endeavours are by-products of the maturation of love; a leap towards immortality through great works that live beyond the creators' lifespan.

But the purest and most immortal of all loves, says Diotima, is the love of beauty itself, not the shadows of it that populate this mortal world.

Here again is the echo of Derrida's differance. For Beauty, says Diotima, is perfect and cannot lack and, therefore, cannot return the lover's love (Derrida, 1982).

Ultimate love is forever unrequited.

After this wonderful investigation of the essence of erotic love, Plato, in startlingly post-modern style, pulls us down to earth with the introduction of the drunken, surly, Alcibiades.

The handsomest man in Athens has a crush. And the object of his love is Socrates. This is where the drinking party turns into a hybrid soap opera - reality TV show full of flirting, couch-hopping, melodramatic fun as Alcibiades (the young, the butch, the forlorn) tells the whole party how Socrates has spurned him over and over again, refusing him affection and decimating his own sense of self-worth.

My question is: was Plato channeling Derrida? Or was Derrida channeling Plato?

References:

Plato, (384 B.C.) Symposium, trans. B. Jowett, The Gutenberg Project,
http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext99/sympo10.txt (Accessed: April 2, 2008)

Hobbs, A. (2007) Angie Hobbs on Plato on Erotic Love, Philosophy Bites Podcast,
http://nigelwarburton.typepad.com/philosophy_bites/2007/11/angie-hobbs-on-.html
(Accessed: April 8, 2008)

Derrida, J. (1982) Margins of Philosophy: Differance, The Hydra Website, http://www.hydra.umn.edu/derrida/diff.html (Accessed: April 16, 2008)

Hedges, W. (1998) Derrida & Deconstruction: Some Key Points, South Oregon University Website, http://www.sou.edu/English/Hedges/Sodashop/Rcenter/Theory/People/derdakey.htm (Accessed: April 16, 2008)

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Meeting Derrida

I remember the very first time I ever heard about Plato's cave. I think I was about 16. (My father had given me Bertrand Russell's "A History of Western Philosophy"). At first I had a hard time grasping the metaphor of it and then, once I did, I got very angry. Who the hell was this dead Greek guy to tell me that everything I had experienced all my life was illusion? And that I had been too stupid to notice it.

A little later, in my early twenties, I had to read Descartes's "Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting the Reason". I didn't take well to the idea of having to leave common sense behind and questioning things I felt were obvious.

At the age of twenty-eight, I was diagnosed with manic-depression and, after a lengthy talk, my wonderful Czech psychiatrist handed me his personal copy of "Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason" by Michel Foucault. He proscribed me medication, asked me to read it, and then decide whether, in light of what I'd read, I wanted to keep on taking the medication or not.

I went on to read a number of other books by Foucault. The idea that all the structures of power around me where not what I imagined them to be, what I was taught they were, scared me. Well, first it annoyed me that, again, I was being asked to question what I felt was a given reality. Then it scared me. Then I calmed down about it.

Many years later and somewhat saner and now writing, I read Barthes' "Image-Music-Text". I took to the idea of everything having "text" quite well. However, my first reaction to "The Death of the Author" wasn't a particularly accepting one. It took me a while to see the possibilities in reading available to a "writerly reader".

When I started this masters, I read a little of Daniel Chandler's "Semiotics for Beginners" online and balked a little. As good a writer as Chandler is, it's dense going at first and it takes a couple of re-readings to get some of the ideas. In the end, I bought the book when I was in London because I wanted to make sure he got some money.

Similarly, my initial run-in in with the structuralists wasn't a happy one. Who likes being told they aren't really a creative being, that the language "uses" us, and that that language is a construction of what society dictates?

Now along comes Derrida, who claims we can't even have any confidence that what we think we mean IS what we mean. And certainly we can't make any claim at all to being assured that anyone else will make any sense at all of what we say, or write.

We are, it seems, a bunch of walking automatons. Out of our mouths and our pens we leak not what we mean to say at all, but the detritus of our cultural biases, the viral load of our overlords and, sometimes - by sheer fluke - nonsense.

And here, all the time we were writing, we thought we were makers and communicators of meaning, masters of the universe.

If I were to take all the critical theory of the last 50 years to heart, I'd never write another word. What, after all, would be the point?

It's always worth, I think, keeping in mind that theories are tested at their extremes and that theorists write of their ideas at the extremes to, in essence, see if they have legs.

Rather, I think, we are somewhere inbetween a state of being totally autonomous beings who mean exactly what we say, and the enslaved brainless mouthpieces of the state. We're both, and none of those too.

Reading Derrida, I feel rather sorry for him. He took on an impossible task of examining the fragility of meaning in language, with language as the tool. His writing is annoying in the extreme: repetitive, circuitous, full of words he's given new meanings to, unstructured and sometimes wildly metaphor-ridden. He's bloody hard to read. But having struggled through chapter 2 of "Of Grammatology", I can't in all honesty say that some of his ideas are without merit, nor that the questions he asked and the assumptions he challenged weren't worth asking or challenging. I've read equally dense academic papers that presented far, far smaller ideas than his. At least with Derrida, I didn't regret the time I spent trying to understand his ideas.

So I've been surprised at some of the reactions of my fellow students. One of them, reference to Derrida, boasted that he "didn't have to taste shit to know it was shit."

Similarly, I was surprised to run across " Jacques Derrida, Abstruse Theorist, Dies at 74," the obituary for Derrida, published in the New York Times, by Jonathan Kandell, who not only misrepresents a lot of his ideas, but also subtly attempts to suggest he was soft on Nazis by bringing up Heidegger's past affiliations and articles Paul de Man wrote during WWII; guilt by association, one assumes.

These aren't negative reactions to theories one decides are groundless, or disagreements over approach or methodology. They aren't even legitimate questions over the ethics of a certain line of inquiry.

These are fear-based reactions reminiscent of McCarthyism. Like the fabled responses to the proposition that the earth wasn't flat, or that we might have evolved from monkeys, or my own reaction to the allegory of Plato's Cave.

Do ideas that are wholly without merit elicit this reaction? Usually we laugh at them, dispute their logic, and push them aside. So, given the reaction I've witnessed, I think I need to read more Derrida.

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Why I write

Going through these courses, I've been prompted on many occasions to reflect on aspects of my writing. There have been broad, educative questions like: How do I write? Who do I write for? What do I write? Why do I choose to write this or that?

The one question that never really comes up is why. Why do I write? I wanted to address this issue, to get it down in some solid form, perhaps to deny myself at some later date some sanctimonious prattle I might use to justify why I haven't fed the cat, or marked those papers, or why I didn't look up from my laptop and at least afford my husband some recognition when he came home disheartened and in need of a chat.

This isn't really a reflection as much as a confession. And I don't want the reader to infer that I feel all writers are like me. I can't speak for them, only myself.

Perhaps I write some good things. Perhaps my readers gain satisfaction or insight or a feeling of fellowship when they read what I write. It's not that I disavow the product of my labours, or belittle them. But the behind the product is motive for the production, and I have to admit that it's wholly selfish.

I write for ego gratification. I'm not entirely sure I can put into words exactly by what mechanism writing gives me this gratification, but I think my need for a reader as an integral part of my writing process does give me some hint. I once wrote, on the discussion board of my writers' list, that when I write erotica, I have a sense of having sex with every one who reads it; the fact that I can get into their mind and engage their erotic imagination is a central part of why I write. So, pulling out into the broader landscape, I write as an act of promiscuity.

This is not as sophisticated an act as I might like; images of males in rut frantically mounting any available female do seem uncomfortably apt. The DNA of my ideas eagerly injects itself into as many receptive minds as possible, to be mixed with the readers thought DNA and, by way of all that chromosomal crossing over, and the magic of how all the dominant and recessive genes express themselves, something new is born - part me, part reader. This is all the more apt because of what I write - although I don't think it would be different if I wrote something other than erotica. I'm having a very gratifying congress with you right now, at this very moment. I do hope you don't mind. Soon, the cells of our hybrid creation will start to divide and multiply. I thank you in advance for being the one to carry the embryo.

Of course, I've carried a lot of these hybrid embryos myself, which is why I'm not too concerned that this is going to be an undue hardship for you. I've carried the children of Camus and Bronte, of Heidegger and St. Thomas Aquinas, of Austen and Lao Tse. As a reader, I have been mother to thousands and thousands of hybrid children of the writers I have read. Most of them turned out okay.

I don't want to hide anymore behind protestations of altruism or addiction. At the same time, I believe my reason for writing informs you that I'm no misanthrope. I would not seek congress with so many minds if I didn't at a very basic level, love humanity. But I don't do it for humanity. I do it for myself, to extend my ego outwards, into both time and space, with a view to immortality.

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