Home > Notes from the Underground
I tolerate this century, but I don't enjoy it.
All of the ephemera that is far too trivial to be bothered with elsewhere on this site or, depending on your point of view, a meta-commentary on it. This ephemera includes, but is not limited to art, music and literature. Most of the content here will be discussed in terms that are as abstract as possible, reality being a singularly overrated concept.
Wednesday, July 19, 2006
Of late, I've been reading two very different texts that share several themes in common. The first of these, Colin Wilson's The Outsider, a survey of alienation in romantic and existential literature. As a work of criticism it tends to be somewhat reductive, seeing anomie as a byproduct of thwarted mysticism, a somewhat difficult theory to approach the post-christian likes of Camus and Sartre with. Accordingly, Nietzsche in deflated to a religious mystic while the moral questions that so excised Bakhtin in his reading of Dostoevsky are declared an irrelevance.
The second, Orhan Pamuk's Istanbul, is both a bildungsroman and an account of the history and architecture of his native city. Where a Western writer would typically have sought to interrelate these two themes, Pamuk alternates between them, reflecting his own preoccupation with the idea of the divided self. Pamuk writes of his childhood imagining of another Orhan living in the same city, of seeing his myriad other selves reflected in the mirror, of his father's other life in another flat and of his dual perception of his city as its inhabitatant and under his own westernised eyes so that he comes to see it as a foreigner. The experience of alienation is one Pamuk sees as the product of a divergent cultural heritage, under Western eyes. At one point, he notes that the traditional Turkish view of literature was as something social, the bricolage that provides the communal myths and discourses that bind a society. To this he opposes the Western tradition of seeing the artist as a man apart and suggests a form of dissociation of sensibility is an inevitable result of this collision. To take a similar argument from TS Eliot's Tradition and the Individual Talent:"No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead. I mean this as a principle of æsthetic, not merely historical, criticism. The necessity that he shall conform, that he shall cohere, is not one-sided; what happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it."
Of the two views, I have to admit to finding Pamuk's the more congenial. As the likes of Lukacs argued, much of the reason for mythology of the individual in Western Literature is attributable to the increasingly individualistic, post-traditional nature of Western society; the paradox is that only an outsider can describe such a society. Like Sartre and his attempts to reconcile existentialism and communism, Lukacs saw self and society as being irrevocably sundered in modern society, in contrast to more homogeneous societies. Once this unity disintegrated, there could be no more spontaneous totality of being.
This paradox seems to me to have particularly seeped into the work of two of the greatest contemporary writers; JG Ballard and Michel Houellebecq. The latter depicts an atomised society with a fervour for the subversive and transgressive, such as sex tourism and a contempt for much of tradition, welcoming capitalism's destruction of religion. Equally, he detests capitalism and the social breakdown he sees as following from it, often reviling other forms of transgression like hippy communes and sex clubs. The former depicts a world of homogeneity and conformity which by its very nature produces instincts towards violence and destruction; "thrill seekers with a taste for random violence.. a deep need for meaningless action, the more violent the better." These drives alternate in Ballard between becoming the basis of a new form of social cohesion in which entire communities participate and a form of social subversion. Equally, Ballard often oscillates between depicting such instincts as the product of modernity and as a reversion to nature that takes place in the absence of society. Ballard's aesthetics remind me of this observation from Slavoj Zizek:"Throughout the entire twentieth century, I see a counter-tendency, for which my good philosopher friend Alain Badiou invented a nice name: 'La passion du reel,' the passion of the real. That is to say, precisely because the universe in which we live is somehow a universe of dead conventions and artificiality, the only authentic real experience must be some extremely violent, shattering experience. And this we experience as a sense that now we are back in real life."Labels: Alienation, Culture, Individuality, Literature
posted by Richard 8:18 pm
