Écriture Féminine

In The Laugh of the Medusa, Hélène Cixous speaks of female oppression from the phallogocentric structures inherent in language, in all cultural discourse, all signs, in all texts. Women are silenced, backed into a corner, told their nature, their sex is an abyss, a mysterious dark room, an unexplored, yet claimed country.

First, Derrida says that Western Philosophy is concerned with the elusive and irresistible search for Truth, or Logos. This is logocentricism, and its structures are organized through a series of binary oppositions: Man/Woman; Light/Dark; Dry/Wet. (More simply: A/-A.) The first term is desirable, the other shunned.

The shunned figures, the marginalized figures, the veils of philosophical discourse, the shadows, the enigmas, and figurative language itself, are, one can say, a resistance to Logos, the One, the Light, Truth, or whatever name it goes under these days.

Derrida also argues that speech itself can never manifest Truth directly. That speech, like writing, is structured through difference between the signifier and the sign.

“No actual language could achieve the simultaneity of signifier and signified, an idealization that as a consequence of the way in which Platonism and Christianity characterized the divine.” (Thank you Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, a different kind of bible, if you will.)

Structuralism analyzes the importance of binary oppositions, and now, through Derrida, Cixous, and other post-structuralists, the obscured ideas, the veils, the dark, infinite spaces, are also being analyzed, and then transformed.

Cixous talks of Écriture Féminine, writing through the body, writing in white ink, in Mother’s milk. She says that Écriture Féminine is characterized by the repressed mouths, both of them, woman’s sects. Écriture Féminine is about multiplicity, and forsaking once and for all the idea that woman is simply Not Man, or rather, a castrated man.

It’s A/B.

Not A/-A.

Cixous urges women to steal their voices back from men, to ignite their mouths, impregnate their words, and soar through themselves, soar above, on their own, without the phallogo-structures of men.

To do this, women must shirk the masculine tongue, the father tongue.

Cixous speaks positively and optimistically about women’s ability to reclaim their right to speak and write in a feminine style. She explains that to be effective, this style must take on an unconventional form, “sweeping away syntax, breaking from the famous thread which acts for men as a surrogate umbilical cord.” By abandoning the linear and orderly characteristics associated with traditional masculine style, Cixous uses the phallocentric language to her advantage. She acknowledges phallocentrism and then, through contradictions, she uncovers the inherent shortcomings. This inadequacy is based upon the realization that Cixous is not able to say exactly what she would like using a masculine discourse. Because Cixous does not have the option of speaking though a feminine discourse, she is forced to use alternative techniques in order to relay a direct and accurate meaning with a masculine language.

Cixous speaks about women’s writing: about what it will do.

For this, she uses Medusa, one of the three Gorgon sisters, the one with the hundreds of hissing snakes for hair, the unlucky girl cursed by Athena to be so ugly, so horrible, that her very gaze will turn men to stone. In a battle with Perseus, Zeus’ clever child uses his own shield to decapitate and defeat the hideous lovely Gorgon.

Freud once wrote a short essay on Medusa. He associates Medusa with castration and decapitation, whose image is both terrifying and ambiguous. The snakes on her head are a denial of the castration, are the act itself with the hissing penises and the what-not; and being turned to stone is also castrating (powerlessness, to make passive, to make a woman), as well as exciting, a form of arousal. His gaze, the gaze upon Medusa, woman, is so powerful, that the viewer is transformed, suffers a mini-death, an orgasm. Is rendered motionless by her figure, her form, her beauty.

But this is all to assume that woman is a castrated man, that she suffers penis envy, and requires either a deep dicking or a child to feel full, complete.

Cixous says men say that there are two unrepresentable things: death and vaginas. This is because vaginas need to be associated with death. Men need to fear women, they need to fear vaginas.

[Kenophobia. Apeirophobia. Thalassophobia. Menophobia. Kolpophobia. Gynophobia.]

Medusa is simply a manifestation of men’s fear of large empty spaces, infinity, the sea, menstruation, vaginas, women. And of course, castration.

This is why Cixous transforms Medusa. She must revise the notion of femininity itself.

Wouldn’t the worst be, isn’t the worst, in truth, that women aren’t castrated, that they have only to stop listening to the Sirens (for the Sirens were men) for history to change its meaning? You only have to look at the Medusa straight on to see her. And she’s not deadly. She’s beautiful and she’s laughing.

Write, Cixous suggests, demands. Write, write, write.

It is by writing, from and toward women, and by taking up the challenge of speech which has been governed by the phallus, that women will confirm that is, in a place other than that which is reserved in and by the symbolic*, that is, in a place other than silence.

* A reference to Lacan’s theory of the psyche. “The Symbolic” is the dimension of language, law, and the father; in contrast “The Imaginary” is modeled on the mother-child dyad or on the relation between an infant and its mirror image.

1st image: Laurent-Honoré Marqueste. Perseus and the Gorgon

2nd image: Nancy Farmer. Medusa in Modesty

Rhizomes, Memory, Deleuze and Guattari.

Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari criticize psychoanalysis for its reduction of everything to a fundamental Oedipal triangle (Daddy, Mommy, and Me). They say this promotes a conventional and repressive family structure, but, it also channels polymorphous desires into narrowly restrictive ones.

A famous example is Freud’s “Wolfman” case. In the Wolfman’s dream he sees six or seven wolves, Freud reduces all of the wolves to the father. Multiplicity is reduced to unity. Much like Freud’s interpretation of the vagina as lack, nothing, zero, as opposed to the obvious plural lips, its multiplicity.

Desire is not lack! It’s plenitude, exercise, and functioning!

This is where they developed their theory of the rhizomatic underground root structure.

Unlike plants with a single tap root, rhizomes spread in all directions, creating a chaotic network where one point can be connected to every other point. The multiform workings of desire are, that is, as deep rooted and as multidimensional as the roots of couch-grass, which, as all gardeners know, is almost impossible to eradicate. (The Penguin Dictionary of Critical Theory)

It is never the beginning or the end that are interesting; the beginning and the end are points. What is interesting is the middle.  The English zero is always in the middle.  Bottlenecks are always in the middle.  Being in the middle of a line is the most uncomfortable position.  One begins again through the middle The French think in terms of trees too much: the tree ofknowledge, points of arborescence, the alpha and omega, the roots and the pinnacle.  Trees are the opposite of grass.  Not only does grass grow in the middle of things but it grows itself through the middle.  This is the English or American problem.  Grass has its line of flight and does not take root.  We have grass in the head and not a tree: what thinking signifies is what the brain is, a “particular nervous system” of grass. (Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet, 1987,Dialogues II, trans. Hugh Tomlison and Barbara Habberjam, London: Continuum, 39).

I think the same of memory.

The structure of memory, its miasmic soup, its “undifferentiated sensual stew” (as Lily calls it) is an amalgamized entity, without origin, without end, that for every sign that pops into our head another sign follows, without fail, every time, for infinity, ad nauseam. We can’t help it.

For instance, I think of a pen, which makes me think of paper, which makes me think of snow, which makes me think of ice, which makes me think of salt, which makes me think of anchovies, and on, and on, and on.

This was the quite literal bane of Mahood’s existence in The Unnamable.

“I can’t go on. I must go on. I will go on.”

Memories beget memories.

If one memory is severed from the flow of memory, it is likely, that because of the flow, that deleted memory may be reproduced. (This is my official critique of the science behind Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Its narrative, however, is nearly flawless. Nearly.)

Let the Right One In

Since both the movie and the book are decent, if not good, I am torn between championing one while piggy-backing the other onto it. Meaning, praising the book, and then discussing how the movie was different and why it was worse. But, strangely, that isn’t the case here. I actually prefer the movie to the book.

Don’t get me wrong, this isn’t like Twilight, the book is actually good, but I didn’t find it amazing. It didn’t wow me, and I don’t mean that harshly, not in the least. John Ajvide Lindqvist is a capable novelist, a good old fashioned novelist.

In the book, we move through many different viewpoints, but about five or so characters could be considered protagonists. And around each protagonist, Lindqvist creates structures, tension, plot lines, and then smashes them into one another. Each narrative has its own suspense already, so when two narratives cross paths the suspense is doubled, sometimes tripling what’s at stake.

Oskar, the ipso facto hero, has a macabre personality, no doubt, because of the vicious bullying he endures at school. In the book it’s because he’s fat, in the movie it’s because he’s weird, but in the book he’s only weird because he’s bullied. It’s a catch 22 that I don’t mind because it isn’t necessary to the story. Oskar lives with his mother in a tiny apartment. He’s poor, lonely, and without a father. All things make him rife for unwittingly befriending a vampire, Eli, the girl that just moved in next door, with a strange man that Oskar thinks is her father but really it’s the guy who acquires Eli’s food as he has a predilection for young children. From there, a couple of other narratives spiral out, and weave together, in this back and forth motion, until the end of the book.

It’s a novel of nineteenth century proportions but its strength, its fresh outlook is not within itself, it’s within the vampire genre as a whole.

Some say, this book revolutionizes vampire fiction, which is simply not true, because vampire fiction cannot be revolutionized. It is what it is. Which usually is pretty white boys preying on young, pretty white girls, generally of the vestal variety. No one’s pretty in this movie, sure, in the book they can be as pretty as you want them to be, but no special attention has been drawn to the vampire’s beauty. Her appeal is that she’s twelve, and, as a side note, this book did lead me to believe that Sweden has a pedophile problem as a couple of the characters, as well as some of the descriptions, made it seem like desiring, procuring children sexually was a common practice.

I’m going to argue that the draw of this film, of this book, besides the structural juggling, is the banality of it all, which, I fear, the American version, Let Me In, will lack. I don’t know much about the upcoming film, but I do know that the producers felt Let the Right One In, was too long a title, and that is unsettling.

The book, the movie, takes place during the 80’s, but without nostalgia. The time seems much like the present. This immediacy grabs you, pulls you in, invites you to compare now to then. Because they aren’t that different, one is left comparing products, toys and fashion, but really, this is a minor note, and it’s presented as such. It’s presented like stuff doesn’t matter. Possibly the author’s recalling a time when capitalism wasn’t so rampant, when things were easier, but if he is, he’s doing so very lightly, and without affectation.

The long, in both sense of the word, sweeping landscapes, the uninterrupted plains of snow, are almost too sublime for the eye to behold. It’s the perfect setting to spill a couple of drops of blood onto. In this way, it reminded me of Lady Snowblood, the manga film Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill series was based off of. Like the image of the Japanese flag, a single red stain on a blanket of white, Lady Snowblood’s revenge is enacted with such beauty that one almost forgets they are watching murder. Because it’s a revenge tragedy, you want Lady Snowblood to kill these men. The same dilemma is presented in Let the RIght One In. It’s not that the murders are beautiful, though, they’re different from the usual gruesome gory ilk, it’s that one’s allegiance is brought into question. If these murders don’t happen then Eli will starve, and if Eli’s starves then Oskar will have no friends, and they’re both children for god sakes.

This is what I love about the story, the love story. Finally, a love story between children, pre-teens (teens?), that’s not soupy, maudlin, or obsessively G rated. There’s an honesty to Eli’s and Oskar’s love, something innocent and real, believable and childlike. The reader ends up caring about these two, no matter what. If these characters were adults, or even fully fledged teenagers, their story would seem less beautiful, less profound. It would be more about the sex.

Instead, the story’s about a child’s existential dilemma, how it’s very similar to the adult kind, but more frustrating, as children are more apt to be powerless. Most of the reviews are right. The story is moving. It’s gorgeous. The way the narrative unfolds at a lento pace reminds one that not all plots can be told with explosions, both the fiery and the orgasmic kind.

The movie walks, strolls, builds, then keeps walking. The book releases the tension then hiccups at the end, but by that time I was already fantasizing about what to read next. Maybe I was too easy on Lindqvist, maybe it is his fault. Maybe the book should’ve been 200 pages shorter.

Either way, I recommend the film.

Though I feel it is my duty to warn. The book is advertised as YA, and though I am all for not censoring, anything, ever, even when it comes to children, some people may find some of the scenes too disturbing. And the book is much more violent than the movie. Squeamishly violent. Just saying, but more importantly, watch for which film translation you pick up. The movie has two different sets of English subtitles. One is clever, funny, and deep, while the other is flat, matter-of-fact, and just not as good. I don’t know why this is, but it is. If one were to rent this movie on Netflix they get the good subtitles, but if one rents it through Blockbuster they get the bad one. (My internet crapped out mid-movie, so we went to Blockbuster, only to be profoundly disappointed.) I am warning you with utmost sincerity that if you get the bad translation, return it. It’s just not worth it. You will know immediately. When Lacke and Jöcke part ways very early on, like the first 15 minutes, Lacke will say, “Thank you for another night of friendship and merriment.” While in the bad version he will simply say “Thanks for drinking with me,” or something to that banal effect.

And, so we’re clear. That’s the bad kind of banal. The good kind presents vampires in a way that doesn’t highlight them as magnificent, awe-inspiring creatures. They aren’t something to be revered but to be pitied. They are like everyone else because they were once everyone else. They see their condition as a disease, nothing to brag about. Sure, a few perks come with the deal, but for the most part, it’s a life of tacking old blankets and cardboard boxes over the windows, and killing innocent people because you can’t fight the hunger pains any longer.

This vampire story is different, because, as one reviewer said it, you forget that it is a vampire movie, and that’s good for any and all genre fiction.

Bion and Beckett

Or… How Beckett Became Beckett by Abandoning Beckett.

Passages, and notes from Beckett and Bion by Kevin Connor.

Samuel Beckett and Wilfred Bion. 1934. Beckett was 27, Bion was 6 years his senior.

Beckett left Bion in 1935 and completed Murphy.

It has been said that these two were “imaginary twins” because they were both concerned with the possibilities of understanding and communication against the background of psychotic denials of meaning and human communication.

The originality of Beckett’s narrative writing derives from the attempt (unacknowledged and probably unconscious) to transpose into writing the route, rhythm, style, form, and movement of a psychoanalytic process in the course of its long series of successive sessions, with all the recoils, repetitions, resistances, denials, breaks, and digressions that are the conditions of any progression.

We may say of Beckett’s analysis perhaps what Bion says of the material uncovered by analysis: “In the analysis we are confronted not so much with a static situation that permits leisurely study, but with a catastrophe that remains at one and the same moment actively vital and yet incapable of resolution into quiescence.” In other words, the repetition of trauma. Usually because one cannot understand their own death, or birth[1]. So in order to understand one repeats these traumas, or traumatic images, as a mechanism of coping, but really, just reliving.

Traditional psychoanalysis functions like a nineteenth-century inheritance plot, in which the forward movement of the narrative is defined by the desire to retrieve the past, and this forward movement culminates and concludes with the reappearance of that past, the kind of analysis proposed by Bion would inhabit the looped, interrupted, convoluted duration of the modernist or postmodernist text, in the form represented by Beckett’s Trilogy.

While Beckett was writing the Trilogy, Bion was working on his Attack on Linking of the second “psychotic phase.” Both works explore the experiences of negation and negativity. Bion reports on patients who display in their attitude towards the analyst and the analytic session a hostile inability to tolerate the possibility of emotional links. The essay begins with taking the “phantasied attacks on the breast as the prototype of all attacks on objects that serve as a link and projective identification[2] as the mechanism employed by the psyche to dispose of ego fragments produced by its destructiveness.”

Under these circumstances, the failure of the link constituted by projective identification then gives way to an angry denial of the link by the patient. Because the mechanism of splitting keeps open the possibility of a relation to what is split off, it is the activity of splitting that is thus itself denied. This can only take place through the primitive process of the original splitting.

In The Unnamable, this process of disidentification becomes both more urgent and paradoxical. The speaker begins by claiming that he will do without projective identifications’ imminent extinction: “All these Murphys, Molloys and Malones do not fool me…They never suffered my pains, their pains are nothing, compared to mine, a mere tittle of mine, the tittle I thought I could put from me, in order to witness it. Let them be gone now, them and all the others, those I have used and those I have not used, give me back the pains I lent them and vanish, from my life, my memory, my terrors and shames.”

The speaker discovers that to dissolve, or attempt to dissolve these phantoms, is to reintroject them. The analyst is involved in this process since he is called upon to play the part of the mother prepared to introject the negativity projected into her by the anxious child. If the mother comes under attack so does the analyst, and the process of analysis itself. The particular form which this attack often takes, Bion suggests, is an attack on language as the medium of symbolic and cognitive linking.

The possibility that Beckett’s own discontinuation of his analysis was associated with an attack upon language is suggested in a letter he wrote to Axel Kaun months later: “It is indeed becoming more and more difficult, even senseless, for me to write an official English. And more and more my own language appears to me like a veil that must be torn apart in order to get at the things (or the Nothingness) behind it. Grammar and style. To me they have become as irrelevant as a Victorian bathing suit or the imperturbability of a true gentleman. A mask. Let us hope the time will come, thank God that in certain circles it has already come, when language is most efficiently used where it is being most efficiently misused. As we cannot eliminate language all at once, we should at least leave nothing undone that might contribute to its falling into disrepute. To bore one hole after another in it, until what lurks behind it – be it something or nothing – begins to seep through; I cannot imagine a higher goal for a writer today.”

The struggle against language is identified with a struggle against a series of mysteriously oppressing tyrants, whose motivation appears always to be to force a coherent ego or human nature upon the speaker of Beckett’s fictions. These figures begin Molloy, to the one who demands Molloy’s narrative, and progress through to the tyrannical Youdi and his agent Gaber, who extort Moran’s report; and harden at last into the figure of Basil/Mahood and the “college” of tyrants which the speaker in The Unnamable evokes at various points through his monologue.

He then turns on and others (splits) his own body. He represents his language in bodily emissions, he grounds himself in the muck of mammalian existence. Bion sees such processes or phantasms in psychotic patients as an intensified form of splitting, in which undesired or uncontainable feelings and ideas are not so much fragmented as pulverized. All abjections become bad. For the speaker in The Unnamable the process of logorrhoeic outpouring is the reflex of a process of unwilled introjection.

The terms of Beckett’s fictional verbal-corporeal economy in The Unnamable perhaps sums up some of the features of his own psychosomatic suffering, or the sufferings he was persuaded to see as such. Beckett’s own boils, cysts, and dermatological lesions led him to seek psychoanalysis, they also suggest the importance of the relations between contained and container. A Bionian interpretation would suggest that the pulverization and moralization of the ejected contents of the psyche seek a form or receptacle. It’s as if Beckett’s psyche collided with his body, and this kind of representation excited Beckett, as is apparent with his grotesque characters in the Trilogy.

As a text full of grotesque bodies, it is uncertain whether or not “the speaker” truly is alone, trapped inside his mother’s womb, or speaking with two even more grotesque figures. What is certain is that “the speaker” is at the heart of the narrative, and that whether or not these creatures (Mahood and Worm) are real or imaginary, he is never alone because he has othered his own body.

I think, the solipsism of the Trilogy derives its energy from alterity, its otherness. The aggressive purging of the other from the self reveals that the self will never glimpse or grasp itself except through the openings of its inauthentic others. “The battle of the soliloquy” as Beckett described it, is a battle with and against these others, a speaking to oneself via their speech. Like psychoanalysis, it demonstrates “How little one is at one with oneself” (in Moran’s words) as both Beckett’s and Bion’s final works show, it is a battle that is played and won, or successfully lost, but only and always in company.

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[1] Late in the analysis, Bion suggested to Beckett that he attend a series of lectures being given at the Tavistock by C.G. Jung. In the lecture, Jung spoke of the mechanisms of splitting and dissociation within neurosis and psychosis. There he told the story of a young girl afflicted by premonitions of death who, Jung said, had never properly been born. This haunted and fascinated Beckett.

 

[2] The term comes from “Evasion by Evacuation” by Melanie Klein: projective identification’, which Bion defines as “a splitting off by the patient of part of his personality and a projection of it into the object where it becomes installed, sometimes as a persecutor, leaving the psyche from which it has been split off correspondingly impoverished.”

Election Day as a Holiday

Why, why isn’t November 4th a holiday?

I don’t understand. Like literally. Don’t understand.

People need to get to the polls. Their bosses are supposed to let them go, give them an hour, but if they are even given this “privilege,” as they call it, often the hour is unpaid. And many can’t afford to lose an hour’s pay.

The conspiracy theorist in me says the republicans are preventing Election Day from being a holiday because most of the people it would benefit vote Democrat. But I’m not going there. I think at twenty-seven I’ve mostly shaken off the conspiracy theorist in me, mostly.

America is a secular country, yet we have a ton of religious holidays off.

I am NOT suggesting we forgo religious holidays, because I love when alternate side parking is abandoned for any reason. (Does that make me a hypocrite?)

I’m only suggesting that we consider making Election Day a holiday to get the maximum amount of voters at the polls as possible. Especially the ones that really want to vote.

And, for the record, I’m all for abstaining from voting. Even if it’s for apathetical reasons, though I’m less sympathetic to that argument. Part of democracy is the choice to vote. Forced voting is unconscionable, an act of tyranny.

When people say that cliché, “If you don’t vote you have no right no complain,” they don’t realize how ridiculous they sound. As if there are only two options in the world. Like black and white were the only colors.

The combination of the Democratic and Republican Parties could not possibly satisfy all of everyone’s needs.

Unfortunately, they’re the only options.

And don’t try and tell me they’re not. Right now, they are.

But again, I’m not getting into that.

I just want November 4h to be a holiday where everyone has the day off of work and school.

Constrained Writing

My friend Sarah just commented on my last blog about NaNoWriMo. And she posed a very interesting comparison between forced writing and constrained writing, which immediately reminded me of OuLiPo. (The Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle.)

She had said that she had to write a story in 55 words or less, in other words, flash fiction. Or, a story told with extreme brevity.

The most famous piece of flash fiction was written by Hemingway.

“For sale: baby shoes, never worn.”

Sarah’s piece pumps from a similar artery.

He pitched another beer bottle off the stoop. It bounced, not breaking, then rolled into the street with the others.

He stretched out his right hand in front of him. Painfully, the joints and tendons crackled. He opened beer number who gives a shit, knowing one thing for certain;

this time, she wasn’t coming back.

Flash fiction, when done right, is incredibly challenging and thought provoking. It’s more about what is not said rather than said. I like to think of it like jazz, as Lisa Simpson once tells someone to listen to the notes the musician is not playing.

Flash fiction forces an author to flex their creative muscle.

I have heard that Tetris can cure writer’s block. That when you are stuck, and you can’t seem to see a way out of your situation, playing a game of Tetris forces your brain into different modes of thinking, especially the quick problem-solving modes. By the time you finish the game, your brain has already come up with a couple different solutions to your writer’s block.

(And yes, Tetris has worked for me.)

The point being that puzzles are stimulating. And Oulipo is all about puzzles.

Some Oulipian Generative Devices:

S+7 or N+7

Replace every noun in a text with the noun seven entries after it in a dictionary. For example, “Call me Ishmael. Some years ago…” (from Moby Dick) becomes “Call me islander. Some yeggs ago…”. Results will vary depending upon the dictionary used. This technique can also be performed on other lexical classes, such as verbs.

Snowball

A poem in which each line is a single word, and each successive word is one letter longer.

Lipogram

Writing that excludes one or more letters. The previous sentence is a lipogram in B, F, H, J, K, Q, V, Y, and Z (it does not contain any of those letters).

Prisonor’s Constraint or “Macao” Constraint

A type of lipogram that omits letters with ascenders and descenders (b, d, f, g, h, j, k, l, p, q, t, and y).

Palindromes

Sonnets and other poems constructed using palindromic techniques.

 

Gilbert Sorrentino, the postmodern American novelist, describes Generative Devices as:

consciously selected, preconceived structures, forms, limitations, constraints, developed by the writer before the act of writing. The writing is then made according to the “laws” set in place by the chosen constraint. Paradoxically, these constraints permit the writer a remarkable freedom. They also serve to destroy the much-cherished myth of “inspiration,” and its idiot brother, “writer’s block.”

Constrained writing is a metaphor for the existing constraints in language.

And, that writing is a matter of playing with, or dealing with these pre-existing constraints.

What Sorrentino means by the “myth of inspiration” is that it is a common misconception that language can accurately describe everything that being human entails. As if this ready-made system of grammar and words is enough to express oneself.

Language already exists within a structure, and ALL structures are confining. Sure, cotton underwear is comfortable, offering plenty of breathing room, but it still does not compare with being naked. It still is a structure. Just as the body is. Think of the freedom we would experience if we could evolve beyond the use of our fragile bodies!

In Colson Whitehead’s novel the Intuitionist, where skyscrapers are ubiquitous and elevators are of utmost importance, the Intuitionists, a special type of elevator inspector, ride the elevator and intuit the state or condition the elevator is in. This then leads to the Black Box elevator, the perfect elevator, where inside one is telepathic and immediately understood. The black box is described as the elevator to the future precisely because the black box eliminates the need for language.

Language, that confining and inadequate thing.

Language cannot describe the color red. Or any color for that matter. Nor can language describe pain and love. But those are all things I’ve already blogged about in previous posts.

What I’m trying to say here is that OuLiPo is amazing. NaNoWriMo still sucks. And the Intuitionist is certainly worth checking out.

National Novel Writing Month

Or NaNoWriMo, what an awful title. Really. This concept is off to a bad start for me. But, in fairness, I do have an outstanding prejudice against shortening words for the sake of memes.

For instance, why on earth is Guantanamo Bay called Gitmo? It’s a disgusting word for a disgusting referent. People are generally in a hurry, and prefer their news in ninety words or less, and their blogs in micro formats such as Twitter.

In a way I’m not digressing.

This same concept, the constraints of time and effort, is the entire philosophy behind NaNoWriMo.

Valuing enthusiasm and perseverance over painstaking craft, NaNoWriMo is a novel-writing program for everyone who has thought fleetingly about writing a novel but has been scared away by the time and effort involved.

Writing a novel should be time consuming. It should involve a great deal of effort. Because the final product, the novel itself, is not for the authors, it’s for the reader.

NaNoWriMo is a program for the writers, a quick fix for the lot people who need to make something of themselves yesterday.

Make no mistake: You will be writing a lot of crap. And that’s a good thing. By forcing yourself to write so intensely, you are giving yourself permission to make mistakes. To forgo the endless tweaking and editing and just create. To build without tearing down.

I don’t mean to rain on people’s parades. This does sound fun. The kind of zany, good old fashioned sober fun that I wish more people valued. But NaNoWriMo is really nothing more than a writing exercise, albeit a nationally reowned writing exercise. It’s not designed for the sake of literature. And they’re even slightly mean spirited in their mantra.

Why: The reasons are endless! To actively participate in one of our era’s most enchanting art forms! To write without having to obsess over quality. To be able to make obscure references to passages from our novels at parties. To be able to mock real novelists who dawdle on and on, taking far longer than 30 days to produce their work.

Real novelists who dawdle…

There is a huge part of me that thinks meatheads are behind this, or maybe I’m being prejudice yet again because of the corporate sponsors page.

The sport of novel writing…

Either way, I didn’t mention the best part of the NaNoWriMo gig.

It’s a contest. Start today, or yesterday, since it is after midnight, write 50,000 words, and finish before Nov. 30, and you are eligible to win a badge. So, in other words, nothing.

The way to win NaNoWriMo is by writing 50,000 words by midnight on November 30. Every year, there are many, many winners. There are no “Best Novel” or “Quickest-Written Novel” awards given out. All winners will get an official “Winner” web badge and a PDF Winner’s Certificate.

The real prize in NaNoWriMo is the manuscript itself, and the exhilarating feeling of setting an ambitious creative goal and nailing it.

Nailing it… They tell you to throw quality out the window. That it’s all about quantity, and once you’re done, you’re done. There is no National Novel Editing Month. Because that would be stupid.

NaNoEdMo.

Hansel and Gretel. For Halloween.

Sometimes I guest blog on Nurturing Narratives. This is my latest.

As of right now, historians believe that Halloween (shape-shifted from All Hallows Evening) is the step-child of Samhain, a Celtic festival, which roughly translates to “summer’s end”, held at the end of the harvest season. But, as with most celebrations of the harvest, Samhain also honors the deceased members of the community. It is believed that this festival of the dead was carried over to North America during the Great Irish Famine of 1845-1852, and that the present day Halloween, the traditions of trick or treating, bobbing for apples, and spooky costumes were all remnants of those darker, and more superstitious, times.

With that in mind, I thought the Brothers Grimm’s terrifying Hansel and Gretel was the story to look at this month!

Hansel and Gretel combines several important and spooky motifs: the wicked step-mother, the evil witch, the abandonment of children, the edible house, the tricking of the witch, and the triumph over evil.

During the times of Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, fairy tales were much, much darker than they are today. Now, because they are so frightening, some parents won’t even consider telling a tale from the Brothers Grimm.

But sometimes a good scare is exactly what a child wants. Though unlike Halloween, the Brothers Grimm deliver a moral lesson, one that every child must learn, and Hansel and Gretel may help the child prepare for it along the way.

In the beginning, Hansel and Gretel’s family “had very little to bite or sup, and once, when there was great dearth in the land, [their father] could not even gain the daily bread.” Much to the father’s chagrin, the step-mother (which was actually the real mother in a much older version!) tells him that, in order to save themselves, they must abandon the children out in the woods.

According to Bruno Bettleheim (whose favorite fairy tale happens to be Hansel and Gretel), the Mother represents the source of all food to the children which is why they still want to return home after being deserted. This psychological interpretation is about dependence, in fact, Bettleheim says that before “a child has the courage to embark on the voyage of finding himself, of becoming an independent person through meeting the world, he can develop initiative only in trying to return to passivity, to secure for himself eternally dependent gratification.” (The Uses of Enchantment)

But, regression and denial will not get poor Hansel and Gretel anywhere, they must overcome their primitive desires to return to their Mother, the womb, or to a time when they were completely taken care of and did not have existential dilemmas of their own that they had to solve.

Stranded in the woods, when the children come upon a house, albeit a house made out of candy, they immediately and without thinking of the house as shelter, eat the house, satisfying their uncontrollable hunger.

“So Hansel reached up and broke off a bit of the roof, just to see how it tasted, and Gretel stood by the window and gnawed at it. Then they heard a thin voice from inside,”

When the witch asks them who is eating at her house (in a voice that could be misconstrued as the children’s consciences), they answer that it is the wind, knowing full well that they are stealing, and worse, eating this witch out of house and home, something their step-mother feared, leading to their abandonment.

Such unrestrained greediness cannot lead to anything good, especially in the morally structured world of fairy tales.

At first the witch is kind, “she took them each by the hand, and led them into her little house. And there, they found a good meal laid out, of milk and pancakes, with sugar, apples, and nuts. After that she showed them two little white beds, and Hansel and Gretel laid themselves down on them, and thought they were in heaven.”

Just as the children gobbled up the gingerbread house, the witch is equally determined to gobble them up!

The witch’s kindness, and then inevitable transformation, are symbolic for the inadequacies and betrayal of the Mother.

When a child is first born the Mother completely takes care of him, but even then, the Mother cannot possibly satisfy all of the child’s needs like she once did before the child was born. At the moment of birth the separation between Mother and child begins. As the child ages, the Mother no longer serves the child unequivocally, but begins to focus more of her energy on herself. For the child, this leads to rage and frustration with the Mother, as well as feelings of abandonment.

For the child reading Hansel and Gretel they are understanding everything on a symbolic level. Meaning, that in some way, they process all of this.

It is important that the first time Hansel and Gretel are abandoned Hansel saves them, but it is Gretel that pushes the witch into the oven. Hansel and Gretel is one of the few tales that stresses the importance of siblings cooperating and rescuing each other because of their combined efforts. The children move from depending on their parents, which will only lead them to a life of regression, to depending on each other, on people their own age. (This last step is key to understanding Roald Dahl’s children’s fiction.)

In order to stand to their full height as separate individuals, children must overcome their desire to return to infancy. They must also learn to face their fears, their anxieties, and their misgivings, as embodied in the human-like appearance of the witch. In Hansel and Gretel, both the step-mother and the witch must die for the children to transcend their immature dependence.

Where the Wild Things Are

The dialogue is so refreshingly honest. It is child-like without being childish, and at the same time so mature and profound that this movie can’t help but tickle your heart.

***Spoiler Alert***

Max goes on an extraordinary journey. Naturally, when he arrives at the island of the Wild Things there is talk of eating him. To prevent this gruesome death, he talks himself up, claiming he has magical powers, and is in fact more powerful than these ginormous monsters.

Those magical powers he allegedly possesses alerted me to his home-life, that he doesn’t have a dad. Sometimes, when a child doesn’t have a father they fantasize about everything a father can do. Because to children, fathers (and mothers!) are gods. They can do anything. As a child, I thought my father knew every fact and that there was no task he couldn’t master, no problem he couldn’t fix. I felt completely protected. And Max thinks of his own absent father that way, and to his surprise, the monsters think of him that way.

Max becomes their father.

At first, this is incredibly liberating for Max but then the burden of perfection weighs on him. In order to solve a problem between Carol and KW, Max proposes a dirt fight, which at first goes swimmingly, but then, as all rough-housing games usually end, somebody gets hurt, and the group disperses. Here, he wasn’t a very good king. But he goes to set things right. He apologizes to Alexander, the weakest link in the monster hierarchy.

When Alexander, the goat, tells Max that he doesn’t believe there is anybody out in the world that has the magical powers Max claimed he had, Max realizes that he may not necessarily be better off with a father, because a father would inevitably upset him at some point too. His father would be just like him, would be just like his mother, who he also realizes that he misses, and loves dearly. This is why Max leaves the island of the Wild Things. Though I think in the book he’s chased away, but the message is the same. That he must leave behind his childhood anger in the personified image of the Wild Things but specifically embodied in Carol.

It is sad, but also, the movie’s important and encouraging. In a way, more so than the book.

I remember the book vaguely. Max is being disobedient and is sent to bed without any supper (an archaic punishment). In his room he dreams up the Wild Things, though the line between fantasy and reality is as distinctly blurred as it is in the film. The main difference is that his mother doesn’t know he’s gone, and therefore Max’s leaving isn’t a punishment to her. Also, when Max returns, from the place she didn’t know he was at, his mother brings him dinner, thus negating his punishment.

But, again, I haven’t read it in a while. I should go out and get a copy.

I found the movie beautiful, nostalgic, magical, and sad.

It was definitely a time-machine.

I highly recommend it to anyone that wants to be a kid again, in a very literal way, not in the way Disney movies remind one of one’s childhood, but in that honest child-like way that most artists strive to replicate.

A friend of mine also discusses Where the Wild Things Are. Check out Rebecca Serle’s blog, Nurturing Narratives, from which this post sprang.

A Conversation between Lily Robert-Foley and Kelly A.K.

Guest Blogger: Lily Robert-Foley.

Yayayayayayay.

First published on the Green Lantern’s Blog:

Mexico City February 2009

Kelly and I lay on the floor surrounded by books.

“What question should we ask next?”  Kelly asked, aware of the absurdity of her question, as though asking a question can only ever be preceded and followed by an infinite loop of questions about the question itself:  “What is the question?”  “What was the question?”  “What is the answer to the question?”  “What does the question mean?”

We had been asking questions about God, and existence, the nature of nature, the mind-body connection, problems of philosophical methodology, reflection, and language.  But our limbs had fallen slowly to the ground like petals.  I had not found the post office.  We were becoming younger.

“Should I go back to the Marxist?”

“No…”

“No, I’m not asking you, I’m answering your question.”

She opened a book.

“Shall we ask Freud?  Or perhaps Pessoa?”

“Pessoa,”  I answered.

She leafed through the book

“To think about God is to disobey God,/Since God wanted us not to know him,/Which is why he didn’t reveal himself to us.”

“What does that mean?”  Kelly and myself elegantly and imperceptibly becoming of one mind, a woman talking or thinking to herself.

“It means you are conflicted.  That you are caught between two impossible halves of a division—like a Chinese finger trap.  You cannot know God without betraying God, but you cannot know not to know God without first knowing him.  Therefore you are in constant betrayal.  There is no option that does not lead to betrayal.”

“Did I not know that already?”

“You can’t ask Pessoa these things.  You want answers, you must go to someone who gives answers.”

“Who, like God?”

Kelly made a chiasmic facial gesture, raising her eyebrows and lowering, cocking her chin, her face splitting, breaking open, apart, like the earth, over time.  An expression that indicates both possibility and direction.

She reached over to my copy of the English bible laid out next to the Spanish one on the coffee table amidst my drafts of translation.

“Dear God, please give this poor young woman the strength to make a choice in this most infuriating dilemma.  Please guide her by giving her quick and easy answers so that she will not have to take responsibility for her own decisions.”

I grabbed the Spanish version off the table and threw it at her mouth, where her words had come out.  She raised the English version just in time to block her face and the Spanish one collided with it mid-air, and fell to the floor, open faced, it’s onion skin pages curling and bending.  Kelly laughing, the books scattered around us like the rests of a Bacchanal.

“Old Testament or New Testament?”

“Who cares, god is God, right?”  Jubilation.

“And Joshua gave their land to the tribes of Israel as a possession according to their allotments.”

“What is that supposed to mean.?”

“No idea.  Joshua sounds like a dick, though. Try the Spanish version.”

“El cadaver de Jezabel sera como un abono que se esparce y ni siquiera se podra decir: “Esta es Jezebal.”

“You opened to the part about Jezebel?  Unbelievable.”

“Let’s see…”  I rifled through my papers.  “The cadaver of Jezebel will be like a dispersed interest payment and not even the most insignificant shit will be able to say, ‘this credit card statement is Jezebal’”

“Your Spanish is really crap, you know.  How are you going to translate the bible if you don’t even speak Spanish?”

“Shut up, I’m working on it.  Besides, it’s the language of God I’m translating, and God speaks directly to me.”

“You’re fucked up, you know?”

“What’s it to you?  What does the New Standard Revised have?”

“Oh here it is, The English version says, ‘the corpse of Jezebel shall be like dung on the field in the territory of Jezreel, so that no one can say, This is Jezebel.”

“What are yout talking about?  It’s practically the same as my translation.”

“Joshua and Jezebal sitting in a tree, k-i-s-s-i-n-g!”

“Oh shut up.  I’m asking Bolano.”

“Bolano!”

“Bolano!  Our saviour!”

“Oh shit, I opened to Cesaria Tinajera’s poem.”

“You know, sometimes I think 2666 is actually based on the bible.  Like the Satanic Verses is based on the Koran.  The Satanic Verses of Mexico.”

“There is no doubt that Mexico needs its copy of the Satanic Verses.  There is also no doubt that we must do more to expose the tyranny of biblical dissemination in Mexico.  That it was the most heinous of the weapons of the Conquest, and remains to this day the principal instrument of oppression, never ceases to astound me.”

“Perhaps Bolano was trying to do that.”

“Perhaps… but Bolano has his own dialectic—or his own dialogue, I suppose.  Don’t you think?  He would never construct such a simple allegory without destabilizing its structures of correspondance…”

“To think about God is to disobey God.”

“Don’t think about God!”

“Ah!  I’m thining about him, I’m thinking about him!”

“Sinner!  Sinner!”

And at that I lunged across the room and began to wrestle with Kelly the two of us sisters, locked in a linguistic battle over the truth of God.  Our arms moving through each other’s, around each other’s bodys, our hands holding onto each other’s hair, our  mouths in flight, two angels, the wandering interpretation of texts.

“Oh what’s this?  This book of fairy tales opened all by itself!  Let’s see what it says”

They unraveled and laid flat on their bellies on the cold tile floor.

“Close your eyes and point.”

“ ‘Go West in a week,’”

“Now that’s some advice I can follow.”

- transcribed (loosely based on reality) and posted by Lily.