May 5-9, 10, Post 23, Presentation

I gave my the following presentation yesterday, referring to the Timeline published in the last post. I read the part of the Presenter and some great friends read for Roquentin, Revel, and Meta.

***

Emplotting the Self and the Live/Tell Paradox

(Roquentin and Revel should be off to the sides just in front of the Presenter, seated. Meta should stand a little behind and off to the side of the Presenter.)

Meta:              March 4, Post 2: How can I begin to write a thesis? My thesis? The ultimate academic work of my college career, representative of all my learning and intellectual potential – it’s not a thing that can simply be done - yet, it’s done every semester. My friends are all writing theses – though I don’t know for a fact that they ever began them…

Presenter:      I wrote my thesis in the form of a blog, from which you’ve just heard an excerpt and which you can see behind us.  This self-reflective voice, as well the protagonists of my two primary texts, Antoine Roquentin of Jean Paul Sartre’s Nausea and Jacques Revel of Michelle Butor’s Passing Time, will help me communicate my project tonight.

                        One of the primary themes of these two novels is what I have called the live/tell paradox. The heart of the problem is this: one cannot simultaneously experience life and relate the story of that life’s passing; telling one’s own story requires two things: a retrospective vantage point, and time.

Roquentin:     A man is always a teller of tales and he tries to live his own life as if he were telling a story. But you have to choose: live or tell. For example, one evening [this Erna girl I was with] left me to go to the ladies’ room. I began to tell myself what had happened. Then I felt violently that I was having an adventure. But Erna came back and sat down beside me, she wound her arms around my neck and I hated her without knowing why. I understand now: one had to begin living again and the adventure was fading out.

Presenter:        We don’t recognize we’re living adventures until we stop to tell ourselves the story, but, once we do so, we’ve lost the adventure. The implications of this problem for identity-formation are profound: identity is the way we understand ourselves given our experiences. If we cannot “emplot” the self, that is, if we cannot see our experiences as pieces of a larger plot, then how can we know the significance of our past to our present; how can we know who we are?

Recognizing the existential crisis created by the live/tell dichotomy, the narrators of these two novels search, with varying degrees of success, for solutions. 

                       

According to Nausea scholar Peter Ruppert, an Aesthetic Solution occurs when “a protagonist, following disruptive experiences and recognitions, find[s] sustenance or relief in art, specifically in the creation of literary art,”.

The two novels I’ve studied are written in journal form, meaning that we read the characters’ reports of their experiences directly. Through these reflections we see that Revel and Roquentin discover two different kinds of aesthetic solution: one mimetic, meaning imitative, and one creative.

Jacques Revel begins an attempt to chronicle his experience in the new city of Bleston six months after his arrival in order to preserve his sense of identity against the new environment. However, he fails to ever catch up to his present, and eventually gives up the journal project as his train departs from the city at the end of his sojourn.

This journal, nonetheless, demonstrates that he chooses what I’ve identified as several mimetic aesthetic solutions from examples he’s seen in art, primarily from a detective novel that takes place in the same city -

Revel:              (whimsically) It was as though a trail had been laid for me, at each stage of which I was allowed to see the end of the next stage, a trail which was to lead me hopelessly astray …

Presenter:        (annoyed) and, when that persona fails him, he takes on the role of Theseus, which he sees depicted in a French tapestry.

Presenter:        These pre-packaged narratives supply Revel with a ready-made worldview, which alleviates the problem of actually existing in the world. Sadly, superimposing the narratives of the detective and of Theseus onto the circumstances of his real life is ineffective, costing Revel not one but two potential love interests, and a measure of his sanity.

In my second example, Antoine Roquentin writes a journal to discover the source of his existential discomfort, which Sartre describes as nausea and, after hearing a song that has stood the test of time, Roquentin accepts what we could call a creative aesthetic solution: he decides to write a novel.

Roquentin:      A time would come when the book would be written, when it would be behind me, and I think that a little of its clarity might fall over my past. Then, perhaps, because of it, I could remember my life without repugnance… And I might succeed – in the past, nothing but the past – in accepting myself.

Presenter:        This creative solution is partially mimetic, as being a writer carries expectations just like being a detective or being Theseus but, since the writer creates stories, he has the unique opportunity to write his own life story, thereby emplotting his experiences and gaining an identity.

Though more promising than Revel’s solution, Roquentin fails to overcome the live/tell paradox. He opts to tell instead of live, whereas Revel opted really to do neither, since his actions were all predetermined according to the story of another life.

However, if we break the idea of autobiography down into smaller sections, perhaps only days or hours long, then we could conceivably switch between living and telling often enough to create a coherent story while living new experiences.

Since this is a reflective project, I’d now like look at the consequences of this paradox for the thesis itself.

Meta:              March 19, and 23, Post 10: I’ve all but given up the idea of writing an

expository thesis. It’s a relief, really, to be released from the formal conventions that have so strangled me in attempting this project. It almost feels like cheating…

                        March 27, Post 21, draft: I think I’ll have to do an expository paper after all. I don’t think I’m brave enough to live like this. I need to categorize my ideas, link them together, and show what I’ve learned. Otherwise I’m afraid I haven’t learned anything at all.

Presenter:        Just as the live/tell paradox affects the characters’ identities in these stories by limiting their ability to understand their experiences, it also affects the thesis of this project by limiting my ability to understand my research. The blog format, like the journal entries, is faithful to the lived experience because it is fairly immediate. An expository paper, on the other hand, is telling at the expense of living, since I would have to stop doing new research in order to review and order that which I’d already done. This presentation is my attempt at a compromise between the two. By personifying the self-reflective voice and allowing the characters to speak to you directly, I hope to maintain a feeling of immediacy between the living of the project and this presentation of the process.

(scroll down to chart)

Before I cede the floor to our next presenter, I’d like to propose a second method of presentation. Because, like Revel with his incessant journaling attempt to recapture the past, I was concerned about the degradation of my experience of doing this project, I took a page from Roquentin’s book – pun thoroughly intended – and mapped my project out in sound.

The chart behind us is a representation of my blog. Posts descend along the y-axis and time crosses right along the x. The different colors represent the seven different themes that I identified in my posts. I then assigned each theme a musical note in the C scale, starting with the self-referential theme on C and adding notes as new ideas were introduced. This means that each post now has a chord associated with it. If we play them all together, patterns emerge, like the persistence of the self-referential theme on C in contrast with the slow flow of ideas which we will hear in the gradual increase in pitch.

Take a listen: (play them all together.)

What we’ve just heard is my creative aesthetic solution: a musical account of my thesis in 37 seconds. I had to give up moving forward with my original research in order to produce this presentation but, because I was able to do so in exploring new mediums of communication, I was still able to work forward until the very end of my project, making the process of telling also one of living.  

Though the academic system required me to accept these compromises, these solutions have allowed me to communicate my work with you all which, as Sartre’s long-time partner Simone de Beauvoir points out, provides all the existential justification we need.

Meta:              April 1, Post 16: I'm not sure if I'm finished with this project or not. There is a lot more research I would like to do, but I've created a product, and, like Revel, my train is leaving town. So, for now, this is it. Thank you for taking this journey with me.

***

I wanted to include this presentation in my blog because I feel like it goes so much farther than the posts up until now have done. This was a turning point in my project because it marks the moment when I finally stopped and took some time to review what I'd done. As the presentation demonstrates, I did not stop "living" entirely; I produced the graph and the musical representations, which probably ought to have had blog posts of their own marking the process of their production. However, these developments are retrospective in subject, so, though they are new to the project, they are also a review of the project. They both need explanation and are the explanation, which, as I mentioned in my presentation, I think is an interesting compromise between living and telling.

Nancy Drew Nook / Treehouse II, KJ, Hamilton College, NY - May 18

Aril 27, Post 21

I think I'll have to do an expository paper, after all. I struggled against it because I wanted the work to stand on its own; to need no explanation. I wanted to show, not tell. I also liked the fact that the format, with all its loose ends and non sequiturs, mirrored the postmodern era into which these texts led the world. I don't think I'm brave enough to live like this, though. I think that I need to mark out my space and square it off. I need to categorize my ideas, link them together, and show what I've learned. Otherwise I'm afraid that I haven't learned anything at all. I'm sure someone knows whether or not you can learn without having named it learning, but I don't know who, and I don't know their decision. So I think I'll have to take the easy way out and write some kind of an academic paper. (I do realize how ironic it is that the paper now seems like the easy way out whereas before I was worried that the blog format was a cheat. They are connected - both hinge on the fact that I learn from grouping thoughts - it's just that before I was focusing on the amount of work involved and now I'm concerned about the product.)

When it comes down to it, my struggle is really the struggle of becoming. I want so badly to finish things, which de Beauvoir says is the meaning of being human, but, at the same time I recognize that these endings are really just impositions I'm putting on the thoughts and experiences I've had. This project will only end when the paper is finished because the paper will be finished, but it will have been a superficial ending. Just how what's gone into this project or what goes into the characters' journals is only a superficial representation of the events, a selected story among the infinite possible representations, the paper I will write will only be one of the many I could on the subject and the many I would if the timeline were extended or reduced. But infinity is not something we ought to try to catch,  not is it something of which we should be afraid. Respectful, yes. Awe-struck, yes. But afraid, no. I was really touched reading de Beauvoir's existentialism because it was so full of hope, which is rare of the philosophy I have read. What's more is that it is a hope I can get behind, a hope I can have myself, because it's not founded in God or anything of that sort; it's founded on the individual and his/her interest in making something out of their situations. Perhaps that explains my desire to write an essay explaining what I've done with this project - perhaps I want to write to share. That doesn't feel like the reason, though. I want to write to figure it out. I feel like I've got all the pieces of a puzzle here but that I don't have an idea of what image they are supposed to created.

The fact of the matter is that there is no reason to get out of bed in the morning but that we can and do, and together, we make the action worth it. By sharing our works, we validate each other. I don't know if anyone is reading this, and it doesn't really matter; the blog format allowed me to write as if I were writing for someone instead of writing only for myself. My notes matter then, because they are shared. And that has made all the difference.

Post 22, Timeline

This is a "timeline" of the work I've published in this blog. The lines represent different themes that I've identified in the posts. The sound clips are sonic representations of those posts, leaving out the green line which I've called "order", which was originally necessary to demonstrate the flow of the project but does not represent any theme. I assigned the bright pink line, representing the self-referential theme I've titled "Meta," the first degree in the scale (C, for convenience's sake), because it appears in the first post and proves to be the only enduring theme throughout. From there, I assigned notes to the themes in the order in which they appear in the chart's key which itself is, insofar as it is possible, chronological. This means that the red line representing "Event" is D, the second degree, the orange one representing the "Problem of Inclusion" is E, the third degree, and so on until the black line, representing "other" themes is B, the seventh degree of the scale.

The sound clip next to the color key is of the whole project together. Listening to it, we can hear the persistence of the self-referential theme (the tonic) and the gradual introduction of new ideas which is evident in the slowly ascending pitch.
Minor 213, Hamilton College, NY - May 9 (day of the our thesis presentations).

Addendum

I made this chart in an attempt to figure out what I had been doing for the past 2 months because, by the time I was forced to start thinking about presenting my thesis, I had really forgotten most of what I'd written. Such is the nature of feeble, fickle memory.

 I also found the idea of marking my thought visually really interesting, because I'm interested in theory of mind and modern art, and I think the graph represents an example of the cross-section between the two.

I was also interested in the immediacy of the visual form verses the length of time it represents, both in pure content and in time of execution, in light of the work I did in my French thesis. That project ended up (through several painful overhauls) being a demonstration that the two novels I looked at for that project, Dora Bruder by Patrick Modiano and Le Tombeau de Tommy by Alain Blottiere, a) constituted a new genre, the  "nouveau roman policier", and b) showed that, given a brief analysis of their chronotopes, these contemporary authors felt affected but not incapacitated by the traumatization of the two world wars. Part of my argument was that the two novels recaptured a measure of the lost past through visual aides, like pictures and clippings of newspapers, which represented that lost time to the present, thereby bridging the gap from the past. (However, given the work I've done on he aesthetic solution for this project, it was clear to me that the attempt at recapturing the past, which the protagonists of both novels do through cinema and literature, was an attempt at an aesthetic solution, and so the existence of this new genre identifies a flaw in the contemporary world-view.)

The timeline I created works as one of these visual representations of lost time, since it condenses the experience into something tangible and (nearly) immediate.

I was inspired to try to put sound to the posts as well by a quotation from Passing Time:

"Thus each day, evoking other days like harmonics, transforms the appearance of the past, and while certain periods come into the light, others, formerly illuminated, tend to grow dim and to lie silent and unknown until with the passage of time fresh echoes come to awaken them," (Butor, 304).

I love this quote because it perfectly expresses the problem of inclusion with which Revel has been struggling throughout his journaling process. New experiences highlight new connections between our experiences, making some nearly forgotten memories rise into prominence while others sink back into oblivion. 

It wasn't until after I had finished the whole process (twice) and written several drafts of my presentation that I realized why I had done this: I found my aesthetic solution, just like Roquenin found his. The chart exists as an aesthetic solution as well, but I found it still too difficult to decipher; it needed more explanation than it provided, which meant that there was too much room for meaning's degradation. The sounds, however, like the song which inspires Roquentin, will not change. They explain less, but require less explanation because they express themselves to the listener in a way that I don't feel the graph was able to do. There is a certain inherent value in the musical representation which, even without understanding the implications of the sounds, justifies its existence, and, at the same time, protects the meaning which is always there, if the listener takes the pains to discover it, which will, like the song, stand the test of time. 


Nancy Drew Nook, KJ, Hamilton College, NY - May 10 

April 8-10, Post 19

Methodology

I met with my beloved advisor, NSR, on Thursday 4/4 to talk about the "draft" of my thesis I'd completed (i.e., posts 1-16) and "whether I was Roquentin or Revel," meaning whether or not I would do edits, and, if so, how. Editing is typically the next step in the thesis process, however, because of the form I chose and because I don't want to sacrifice my attempt at authenticity, it was not immediately obvious how I could move forward. We discussed using some kind of hypertext so that I could make revisions, but keep the original text largely as-is.

This whole project has been a foray into the unknown for me in terms of technology and social media, and my experience in this matter has been no different. I got a few suggestions on how to actually use hypertext from a fellow Comparative Literature (and Physics) major who graduated last year, and from there I've had a lot of fun contributing to the entropy of the internet.

After some largely unfruitful work with ThinkLink (which did, however, allow me to post my bibliography as an icon in the blog's banner image), I eventually settled on creating a website to which I would link my comments, like an endnotes section, just on a different webpage instead of a different physical one. I also have been able to sneak a few non-edit-related links in, so I hope you've enjoyed coming across those, if you've visited my first posts recently.

This is all still a work in progress, so I expect something in this methodology will change before all is said and done, but for now, it seems like I've established a pattern that will support the editing requirements of my blog relatively well. I do say only "relatively" well, because I can't make myself track the changes I've made to correct typos and other silly errors that NSR caught which had originally escaped me. (I don't know if is more-so for reasons of simplicity or vanity, but I'm not keen to figure it out.) The other problem is that I'm rewriting a few sections, but they are obviously written from a different vantage point, coming from the "end" of the drafting process rather than in the beginning or even the pre-drafting stage, so I'm not sure if I ought to take on the persona of Emily-writing-March-10 or if I ought to write from the present. I'm leaning toward the former, though I have my methodological concerns about that. It seems to be the logical way to edit, though - otherwise, I'd end up with an obviously different project each time I went through to do corrections (not even content-related edits), which, though not unimaginable for me, is unacceptable given the graduation-imposed timeline.

I originally wanted to include text in the original posts that would appear as a reader hovered over a part of the text with their cursor, that way I could reduce the distance between the original material and the changes I was making in the "second draft," but I can't figure out how to do that. However, it's recently occurred to me that this hypertext form fits the content of the project much better than a linear one would, since its scattered pieces reflect the dissemination of meaning with which these texts variously struggle.

KJ Study Room, Hamilton College, NY - 14 April 2013. 

April 7, 11-12, 14, Post 18

While I was writing my first post on Bakhtin, I came across several short points I wanted to make that didn't really form any kind of readily apparent cohesive unit, so I thought I would leave the overly-long post as it was and discuss those points in separate posts. In this one, I'd like to look at what Bakhtin calls the "problem of historical inversion," (147).

This was an interesting find for me, theoretically, because it is similar to the idea about the forward/backward nature of autographical living that I've been trying to work out. On first glance, I even imagined that this was precisely what Bakhtin meant. However, as I've now looked more closely at the context, I see that it's only an adjacent concept which may, nonetheless, illuminate the "historical inversion" I had hoped it would be.


Bakhtin's Historical Inversion

When Bakhtin uses the term, he means that the normal vision of history has been reversed. The "normal" expectation is that events which have not yet happened in the present must occur in the future, if they are to occur at all; the past is complete, so all new events must necessarily occur in the future. However, in historical inversion, one sees the future as limited instead of the past. As Bakhtin explains it:

"The essence of this inversion is found in the fact that mythological and artistic thinking locates such categories as purpose, ideal, justice, perfection, the harmonious condition of man and society and the like in the past ... We might say that a thing that could and in fact must only be realized exclusively in the future is here portrayed as something out of the past, a thing that is in no sense part of the past's reality, but a thing that is in its essence a purpose, an obligation," (148).

In this mode of thought, the past is valued at the expense of the future. It's a nostalgic vision of time; it assumes that the past contained something uniquely good in it which has since been lost and can never be found again. Whatever future comes can never achieve the grandeur of the golden age that once was.

This devaluation of the future's potential recalls eschatological visions of time which similarly value the past to the detriment of the future. In that understanding of time, the period between the present and some desired end time is devalued, but here there is a light at the end of the tunnel: eschatological expectations await a period of kairos, or of opportune time, (such as the second coming of Jesus Christ in the Christian doctrine) which will eventually arrive and bring about an apocalypse of the barren time.  There is no such recompense for a temporal vision in historical inversion.

This makes it an existentially problematic world-view because it prescribes stagnation, if not decline; it is impossible to progress along any positive axis when the whole of the future is presumed to be less able to welcome success than was a past which never existed. It also presents pragmatic problems because believing that the past contained something ideal which never actually existed makes real positive action impossible, since beginning with unrealistic expectations, whether of what was once possible and therefore ought to be the overall goal for the future, or of predetermined failure or limitations, makes progress unlikely. This world view, then, instead of truly announcing a fact of the world, becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, as those believing in the future's inherent want will create a wanting future.

I don't mean to suggest that this is the only system in which the subscribers act based on false ideals. I don't know that it's even possible to not act in this way. I merely mean to point out what might be the important problems of historical inversion, which Bakhtin names as such but does not explicitly describe.

***

Historical inversion and Adventure: creative solutions for authentic living?

How might this conception of historical inversion inform my own conception of autobiography? My interest in the idea is in its its use of the different temporal periods to create the identities of each period; past informs future in historical inversion as it limits its potential, but present also informs past, as it's from present ideals that the supposed past golden era is defined.

In a parallel process, Roquentin creates the idea of adventure. He takes present ideals and creates from them a past which has not really happened. The primary difference in this part of the process, apart from the scale of the expectation (whole cultural eras vs. self-identity in a limited expanse of time) is  the scale of the fictional work done. To create adventure out of experience, Roquentin does not have to do much reevaluation. The experience is there, it only requires a different temporal position from which to see the events in order to go from "experience" to "adventure." In contrast, imbuing the past, as an era, with ideals takes a greater effort, which gives the impression of being a greater fallacy. I would go so far as to say Roquentin's adventure creation process is natural, and perhaps necessary, whereas the process of historical inversion, as it is an inversion of the expected temporal vision, is clearly not a necessary or normal process in today's world.

Besides these these implications of the two processes for the past and present, there is, of course, also the question of how they affect the future. We've already seen how historical inversion proves destructive to the future, assuming that it is indeed a false belief and that there is therefor something to be lost by its belief. I think that, again, the difference in effect is a matter of scale. Does the conception of adventure paralyze Roquentin? Is each adventure a small aesthetic hiatus like the final aesthetic solution is in Ruppert's analysis?

The obvious answer is yes. You have to choose, live or tell, because telling (i.e., creating adventure) requires the cessation of life. This, I believe, is for clear temporal reasons. What interests me is whether or not this activity then proves productive for the self since it helps create an identity on which the individual can rely, or if it only offers temporary existential consolation.

Bakhtin says: "If taken outside its relationship to past and future, the present loses its integrity, breaks down into isolated phenomena and objects, making them a mere abstract conglomeration," (146). Adventure-making concretizes past experience so that it can be remembered in the present as a meaningful experience, which allows it to aid in the construction of a self-identity. It therefore performs a necessary function of identity in linking the past to the present.  Bakhtin includes "future" in his temporal context, and adventure-making's utility relies on its ending with the present. Instead of aiding identity, projecting adventure into the future actually proves destructive to choice and is potentially the cause of the never-ending present problem with which I've been struggling throughout this thesis process. 

When adventure-making uses only events from the past to create an event, that event informs the present conception of self because it gives the individual the ability to point to an experience they've had as a precedent for present/future action. However, if the individual instead attempts to define the adventure as beginning in the past and stretching into the future, they come up with unrealistic expectations for how the future will be, since that imagined future is based off of fictional representations. That kind of future will never arrive since, as we've already seen, reality doesn't unwind like fictional plots do; if it did, there would be no need for any kind of aesthetic solution, since life would already have an imposed order. Waiting for these impossible events to occur as the next "plot points"in life paralyzes the individual, making authentic living impossible. 

This demonstrates that adventure-making is a vital part of self-consciousness and identity, but that it must be kept in check; as shown, it is a dangerous tool which allows future action but which can also, if  allowed too great a leash, ruin the individual's potential for action. The creative aesthetic solution is really a useful activity, if kept in the past. It becomes problematic when it bleeds over into the future. I had cast myself in the position of "thesis-writer" at the beginning of this project and could not begin my work because of the fictional expectations I had about what the experience ought to be like. I don't know how to defeat this impulse to fictionalize the whole of the self instead of only the past experiences,. The only way I know to circumnavigate the problem is to begin in any way possible, and to eventually try to work back around to the original goal in such a way that it doesn't realize you're coming for it. But is self-deception really the only solution? 

KJ Treehouse, McEwan Dining hall, Burke Library, KJ Study Room, Hamilton College, NY - 14 April 2013.

April 6, 10-11, Post 17

So much for a final post.
I'm doing another thesis - a "mini-thèse," as the department calls it - to fulfill my French major, and, as all my projects seem to circle around the same 4 or 5 major themes, the research I'm doing for that project seems to be as pertinent if not more so to this first project than to the one I'm actually trying to start now.

I've had trouble choosing a focus for the French project which, according to my Comp. Lit. friends, should not have come as a surprise to me; indecision has apparently been a long-present theme in my academic career. I've chosen three book (which I'd like to call novels except that Patrick Modiano makes that difficult), but I've been waffling back and forth between looking at the effects of place on identity and looking at how these three books deny generic classification and why that is important. When I started this post, I thought it would be the first project for sure, but now I'm leaning more toward the latter.

I’m frankly unwilling to choose between the two topics because I want my work to answer questions I myself have, not only to help me explain an idea I've already got in mind; I want to discover something over the course of my project, not just figure out how to best convince others that my position on something is the correct one. It seems a shame to have to pass over interesting connections that might lead to more interesting conclusions just because it's not certain that the connections are there to be made; I don't want to have to pass over questions of genre if I choose to look at place and identity simply because an inquiry into auto-fiction and the modern/postmodern detective novel would have to be either incomplete or would end up being a much larger project than the department has in mind. 

As this blog project has so conclusively demonstrated for me, the expository form is not conducive to productive thought; it is an effective tool for communication, but it necessarily restricts the richness of thought that is being communicated. Having been conditioned to produce expository work, I wonder how many connections I've missed over the course of my academic career - over the past year alone - that I could have found fascinating if I'd been able to think of my project in a less linear way. Theoretically, I could do all of this web-work and then stream-line into expository essays, but I think that, in most cases, the work would result in several essays and I'm afraid (and I don't mean that euphemistically - I really am afraid) that I don't have the energy for that level of commitment to this French project. I have (very) limited time, so the work I do needs to be pre-focused on the material that I will prove visibly useful in the written product.

I've started studying Bakhtin's essay "Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel" from The Dialogic Imagination, and I can't help but think of the text first terms of this project and only in terms of my French work as an afterthought. I'm hoping that, if I discuss Bakhtin here, I'll be able to then focus on its applicability to French. Of course, there is also the very real possibility that I’ll do this work, I’ll enjoy the exploration, I’ll learn about Bakhtin in terms of events and autobiography, but will not ultimately save any time by the effort. However, prioritization is not a great strength of mine, and I honestly don’t care whether or not this is the efficient choice because the material seems so applicable to this Comp. Lit. project that it would be academically (intellectually?) irresponsible to ignore. So here we go. 

***

Theory: the chronotope and adventure/biographical time

In this essay, Bakhtin coins the term "chronotope," literally “time space” (84). He explains the word in terms of artistic depictions, especially narrative representations in literature, of time and space, which he sees as inherently interconnected. Existence occurs in four planes, the first three being concerned with place, and the fourth being itself time, so a study of one is naturally also a study of the other. He idea of chronotopes offers a way of understanding how space/time is conceptualized in fiction during different historical periods, which sheds light on both the socio-political atmosphere of the time and on categorical questions of genre. Consequently, understanding how to recognize various chronotopes ought to give me a way to analyze the genres of literary works, either by identifying prevalent chronotopes or by recognizing how the works diverge from the expected treatments of space-time, though I am, of course, wary of using a post-structuralist theory as an organizing concept in my own work.

Furthermore, though Bakhtin discusses them primarily in fiction, he famously recognizes in his concluding remarks that “Every entry into the sphere of meanings is accomplished only through the gates of the chronotope,” (258). Though this is an old theory (it goes back, as Bakhtin notes, to Kant in his “Transcendental Aesthetics”), it’s important to this investigation because it extends the realm of chronotopic significance beyond the artistic oeuvre and into the worlds of the author and reader. Since all conscious experience is registered through an organizing filter, all conscious perception is the result of fictionalization. For my project, this means that chronotopes apply not only to fiction, but also to autobiography and the self-conceived identity.

The first section of his essay is concerned with analyses of the three ancient novelistic forms he recognizes: the Greek Romance, or the Novel of Ordeal, the Adventure Novel of Everyday Life, and the Ancient Biography and Autobiography. He then goes on to identify and explain several figures that create important chronotopes, like the Road and the Fool. Finally, he undertakes an analysis of the Rabalaisian chronotope before making his closing remarks, in which he revisits the major chronotopes of the road and threshold and expands the concept of the chronotope beyond the world of the novel to that of all perception.

The first kind of ancient novel, the Greek Romance, presents a static view of the individual by representing the story as two biographical poles with extra-temporal "adventure-time" between them. Though he does not explain biographical time in this essay, given its usage, I image that  it corresponds with time as we experience it when under no unusual duress, and is a kind of time that leaves a trace on the individual (90). Adventure-time, in contrast, is "highly intensified but undifferentiated,"(90). This particular genre involves a chronotope that depicts adventure as the hiatus between real life experience in which the characters travel widely and overcome many obstacles, but are ultimately unchanged by the events they’ve experienced. They meet and fall in love, and biographical time stops until they are married; everything between these two plot points is interchangeable.

The second ancient story archetype, which he provisionally titles the "adventure novel of everyday life" is marked the "mix of adventure-time with every day time," (111), and by the presence of individual agency at the expense of a diminishment in the power of fate, though he notes that agency is still limited to the individual who has no illusions of creating change in the wider world; there is still a lack of heterogeneity in the presented world (119).

As opposed to the first kind of ancient story, the ancient romance, this genre's most prevalent chronotope allows the hero to undergo an important change because of the events that happen to him in the story. (I do say "him," here, because Bakhtin doesn't identify any female heroes in this genre). The identity of the character, then, is at stake, though I don't believe this early novel includes meta-diegetic awareness. (By this I mean that the character whose identity changes would not reflect on the change he undergoes. To my knowledge, that realization is unique to 20th and 21st century literature like the novels I've studied in this blog.) This is an important distinction to make because it separates the ancient Greek "adventure in everyday life" chronotope from its derivative contemporary narratives, the pedigree of which I will now discuss.

In this kind of novel, "Time is not merely technical, not a mere distribution of days, hours, moments that are reversible, transposable, unlimited internally, along a straight line; here the temporal sequence is an integrated and irreversible whole," (119). It is irreversible because, in contrast to the Greek Romance, this genre's definitive chronotope allows the past causal power on the present/future. 

This introduction of temporal causality means that time in this novel is necessarily different from that of the Greek romance. Biographical time in this second genre is allowed a role instead of being relegated to the two poles of the story between which all the adventure takes place. However, these kinds of novels still cover a vast period of diegetic time. The typical solution to this conflict between the confines of the novel form and the time represented is to choose pivotal events and to explain those in biographical time, which, nonetheless, occupies what Bakhtin calls the vertical axis while the story’s arc (guilt --> punishment --> redemption --> blessedness) moves the story along horizontally.  (I say typically because, as Bakhtin notes, Tolstoy generally refuses disturb biographical time, preferring instead to allow his characters to come to slow conclusions than to introduce “suddenly” adventure-time logic to his novels. See 249.)

Though the biographical time is represented only in fragments, presenting several static pictures of the hero that are separated and explained by interspersed periods of crisis, it’s not an adventure-time logic that prevails, but rather a moralistic one. In Bakhtin’s example of The Golden Ass, Lucius really is guilty, and its his own actions that motivate the story’s motion, not the unpredictable intervention of the gods or fate; this means that the individual has gained agency in this genre which he lacked in the previously discussed one.

This power to influence the character of the hero reflects a shift in the purpose of the novel. Bakhtin calls the Greek Romance a “novel of ordeal” because it presents the hero with a test or trial, which he must then overcome while maintaining his sense of integrity. This genre offers the reader an existential reassurance that the self remains the same across tribulation. In contrast, the adventure in everyday life novel focuses on metamorphosis of character, showing “how an individual becomes other than what he was,” (115). This novel offers no existential consolation, but, instead, allows the character agency to affect his own life. This development is important for the history of the novel, as it's in part because of this second kind of work that others such as Nausea, which grant the protagonist too much freedom from fate, have been able to develop; there is no crisis of choice if there is no choice, so this development in the novel allowed for existential exploration to occur in the form.

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Roquentin’s problem of adventure: an infelicitous aesthetic solution in itself

I’ve focused on this genre of the ancient novel because I believe that the mix of adventure and biographical time helps explain Roquentin's conception of adventure/events and suggests a new reason behind his inability to decide whether or not he has experienced any.

The explanation Bakhtin gives of the biographical/adventure time dichotomy in this genre gives me insight into the problem Roquentin experiences in recounting his experiences. As I've discussed before, he believes that one has to choose to either live life or to tell it; one cannot do both. This means that up-to-the-moment self-consciousness is impossible; the comprehension of self will always be retarded by the continuation of experience and the necessity to conceptualize events lived before they can be understood as part of that self’s experience. Roquentin recounts several instances where he feels that he is having an adventure, only to lose the sensation as soon as he realizes what he's feeling.

Is it possible that he’s attempting to cast himself as protagonist of an adventure-time narrative? Since adventure-time disallows the individual to change, it disallows him live in the real world;  conceptualizing himself in terms of an adventure-time narrative would effectively rob Roquentin of his ability to act. As adventure-time is a purely fictional construct which cannot exist in the real world, attempting to overlay that chronotope on life would result in the collapse of self consciousness. If this is in fact the case, this constitutes a mimetic aesthetic solution like we have already witnessed in Revel's case which, as in Passing Time, proves destructive to the individual.

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Chronotopic Non-identity: fiction to reality

Though this essay is full of interesting thoughts, I’ll skip from here to the end because it’s Bakhtin’s discussion of adventure-time in contrast to biographical time, which I’ve already touched on, and his extension of chronotopic importance to the real world, which he undertakes in the Concluding Remarks ,that interest me most in terms of this project.

Until this section of the essay, which was written in 1973, a full 35 years after the rest of the text, it wasn’t clear to me exactly where one chronotope might end and where another would begin. Bakhtin responds here to this concern by explaining that chronotopes are “mutually inclusive” (252); the chronotope of meeting, for example, often is evoked by the chronotope of the road. This creates a dialogue between all representations, which is, in turn, filtered through the chronotopic world of the reader. The answer to my question is then that chronotopes are not rigid categories into which to sort material, but multiplicitous clues to the relationship of art to the experienced world.

Beyond offering that precision, this last section of the essay underlines one of the primary probems the protagonists of Nausea and Passing Time encounter. As Bakhtin poetically puts it:

“It is just as impossible to forge an identity between myself, my own ‘I,’ and that ‘I’ that is the subject of my stories as it is to life myself up by my own hair. The represented world, however realistic and truthful, can never be chronotopically identical with the real world it represents where the author and creator of the literary work is to be found,” (256).

In light of this quotation, it seems that the protagonists of my chosen novels struggle to rectify their lived chronotopes with those they are writing, Revel more so than Roquentin; it is Revel who agonizes over his inability to authentically or correctly represent his experiences, while Roquentin seems to have more basic chronotopic problems to at hand, as I’ve mentioned above. Since the two times can never be identical, the attempt at authentic representation is a priori doomed, though, as Revel demonstrates and as I have personally discovered, it often takes a failed attempt at unification to prove this.

Roquentin, though he also demonstrates this truth in the entry where he corrects the account he has just made of an even so that it includes the nonevent of the newspaper, is more concerned with his lived chronotope by itself; he doesn’t understand, for example, how to move from the present into the future, though it’s clear to him that everything changes at every moment, meaning that the world is in fact in temporal and spatial action. I would suggest that this leads him to accept the mimetic aesthetic solution, as discussed above, which causes his unnecessary confusion over “adventures,” which, as we know, cannot bring themselves into being but instead require retrospection for their birth, and which furthermore demonstrably cannot be lived. 

Bakhtin's text is long and covers a large spectrum of material which could all potentially be useful to my investigations. I've already started two or three other posts on individual ideas which didn't fit well into this discussion, so I imagine I'll be writing more on the essay.

Is the concept of completing a project as daunting as that of beginning one? I never thought so, but it may yet prove to be as difficult.

KJ Treehouse, Hamilton College, NY - 11 April 2013.