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; 1
it requires certainty, and planning, and sources and citations and sections – so how could I ever begin to write something of this magnitude with just one word, for that’s all a beginning is. After that, it’s just – more. But a word, which is all you’ve got to work with, can’t do the ideas justice. Beginning anything important is an impossible task. And yet, it’s done every semester. My friends are all writing thesis. Or, they are writing them now – I don’t know for a fact that they ever began them…
It’s the event that is our undoing; we live our lives in the
shadow of tomorrow’s Events that never come. 2
Because that's my problem; I've got this idea that life ought to follow the pattern I've learned from books, with a beginning, rising action, and climax before the inevitable end, and that's not my experience. I'm sure that I could live the rest of my life without ever experiencing anything worthy of the term "event."
The concept of an event has been troubling me since I realized it wasn't a self-evident notion, and, as I've tried to pin down a definition, I've become aware of how tenuous its definition must necessarily be. So I'll do my best to explain the idea as it exists in my mind, supported and elucidated by the theoretical work of thinkers who've probably shaped the concept in my mind in the first place.
To do that, I think I have to start with Derrida, Phelan, and Fish, all of whom I read in my sophomore year Intro to Literary Theory class. Naturally, the context of the reading was different than is my remembering of that content today, but it's those readings that stick out in my mind as being formative of my conception of the signification of language, especially written language. So it's to them that I accord my present comprehension of literary communication that emphasizes the importance of context, including personal experience, cultural inheritance, and form, to name a few players, in the creation of meaning by a reader or interlocutor (I'm thinking now, if it's not evident from the terminology, of J. L. Austin, whom we also read for that class). 3
However, the question of self-identity or of autobiography is obviously multilayered; linguistic communication is the base layer, in my experience, because my conception of identity and of autobiography are inherently linked and, as I've grown up in a culture that lauds the novel, they are thus both resolutely narrative ideas.
The next layer in my conception of the Event must be Sartre's novel itself, Nausea, which was the initial impetus for my current project; it posed questions to me which, over the past four years, have slowly worked their way into the woodwork of my identity. So, when it came time for me to choose a thesis topic, Nausea presented itself as the inevitable beginning point of my work. What I've consequently come to is an investigation into the problematic aspects of fictionalization of the self.
Looking back over the book, it's the "Friday, 3:00 p.m." entry Antoine Roquentin writes that most marked the concept of events into my mind. His journaling practice is an attempt to make sense of the nausea he has begun to feel, which, as we slowly realize over the course of Sartre's novel, is a physical reaction to the iterability Derrida explains in "Signature, Event, Context." Derrida created this neologism from the latin words iter, meaning again, and itera, meaning change. It’s a very good word, in my opinion, as these roots demonstrate well the unit of the two supposedly separate ideas. Derrida wants to explain by this term that events, specifically literary events, (meaning the apperception of meaning from signs) occur (through our own conception of them), and subsequently reoccur in similar, though non-identical repetitions, since the context of their discovery can never be the same as it was in the first instance or indeed as it is in any instance. Thus, the same text is not the same text, though it may purport to be so.
Antoine intuits this change in his experience of objects. He sees it happen as he picks up a stone, as he recounts in the first entry of his journal and as he studies his reflection in the mirror in the "Friday 3:00 p.m." entry. When he explores his memory, he finds that his "memories are like coins in the devil’s purse: when you open it you find only dead leaves,” (32), and that "there are many cases where even these scraps [of images] have disappeared: nothing is left but words: I could still tell stories, tell them too well (…) but these are only the skeletons," (33). He remembers the words which he would have used to evoke the story in the past, but the words are only signs devoid of any corresponding signified thing. They mean nothing to him in the new context of the now. Hence the oscillation/undulation perceived in supposedly static things that causes Antoine’s nausea.
I was trying to explain this to my advisor once, and she suggested I consider Freud's uncanny in relation to Antoine's experience. I think that's just it; Antoine recognizes the iterability of language and the consequential emptiness of linguistic signs, but he does so without understanding, and he suffers for it. Because he doesn't expect the process, the new "now" signs are uncanny, having something of the original in the iteration, but being somehow deceptively, hostilely different.
Near the end of he novel, in a "Saturday" entry, we see Antoine go to visit his one time love-interest, Anny, a once-actress obsessed with finding and milking the "perfect moments" out of life. "First there are annunciatory signs. Then the privileged situation, slowly, majestically, comes into people's lives. Then the question is whether you want to make a perfect moment out of it [...] First, you had to be plunged into something exceptional and feel as though you were putting it in order. If all those conditions had been realized, the moment would have been perfect," (152).
It's this compulsion (or necessity?) to fictionalize life as if one were the protagonist of a novel in order to understand identity and the corresponding problems Sartre underlines that reverberated so soundly in my personal life. It's for this reason that I've begun this project. And - look at that! O merciful diction - I've begun!
Because that's my problem; I've got this idea that life ought to follow the pattern I've learned from books, with a beginning, rising action, and climax before the inevitable end, and that's not my experience. I'm sure that I could live the rest of my life without ever experiencing anything worthy of the term "event."
The concept of an event has been troubling me since I realized it wasn't a self-evident notion, and, as I've tried to pin down a definition, I've become aware of how tenuous its definition must necessarily be. So I'll do my best to explain the idea as it exists in my mind, supported and elucidated by the theoretical work of thinkers who've probably shaped the concept in my mind in the first place.
To do that, I think I have to start with Derrida, Phelan, and Fish, all of whom I read in my sophomore year Intro to Literary Theory class. Naturally, the context of the reading was different than is my remembering of that content today, but it's those readings that stick out in my mind as being formative of my conception of the signification of language, especially written language. So it's to them that I accord my present comprehension of literary communication that emphasizes the importance of context, including personal experience, cultural inheritance, and form, to name a few players, in the creation of meaning by a reader or interlocutor (I'm thinking now, if it's not evident from the terminology, of J. L. Austin, whom we also read for that class). 3
However, the question of self-identity or of autobiography is obviously multilayered; linguistic communication is the base layer, in my experience, because my conception of identity and of autobiography are inherently linked and, as I've grown up in a culture that lauds the novel, they are thus both resolutely narrative ideas.
The next layer in my conception of the Event must be Sartre's novel itself, Nausea, which was the initial impetus for my current project; it posed questions to me which, over the past four years, have slowly worked their way into the woodwork of my identity. So, when it came time for me to choose a thesis topic, Nausea presented itself as the inevitable beginning point of my work. What I've consequently come to is an investigation into the problematic aspects of fictionalization of the self.
Looking back over the book, it's the "Friday, 3:00 p.m." entry Antoine Roquentin writes that most marked the concept of events into my mind. His journaling practice is an attempt to make sense of the nausea he has begun to feel, which, as we slowly realize over the course of Sartre's novel, is a physical reaction to the iterability Derrida explains in "Signature, Event, Context." Derrida created this neologism from the latin words iter, meaning again, and itera, meaning change. It’s a very good word, in my opinion, as these roots demonstrate well the unit of the two supposedly separate ideas. Derrida wants to explain by this term that events, specifically literary events, (meaning the apperception of meaning from signs) occur (through our own conception of them), and subsequently reoccur in similar, though non-identical repetitions, since the context of their discovery can never be the same as it was in the first instance or indeed as it is in any instance. Thus, the same text is not the same text, though it may purport to be so.
Antoine intuits this change in his experience of objects. He sees it happen as he picks up a stone, as he recounts in the first entry of his journal and as he studies his reflection in the mirror in the "Friday 3:00 p.m." entry. When he explores his memory, he finds that his "memories are like coins in the devil’s purse: when you open it you find only dead leaves,” (32), and that "there are many cases where even these scraps [of images] have disappeared: nothing is left but words: I could still tell stories, tell them too well (…) but these are only the skeletons," (33). He remembers the words which he would have used to evoke the story in the past, but the words are only signs devoid of any corresponding signified thing. They mean nothing to him in the new context of the now. Hence the oscillation/undulation perceived in supposedly static things that causes Antoine’s nausea.
I was trying to explain this to my advisor once, and she suggested I consider Freud's uncanny in relation to Antoine's experience. I think that's just it; Antoine recognizes the iterability of language and the consequential emptiness of linguistic signs, but he does so without understanding, and he suffers for it. Because he doesn't expect the process, the new "now" signs are uncanny, having something of the original in the iteration, but being somehow deceptively, hostilely different.
Sartre develops the issue further, though, in his depiction of "adventures," which is really where I begin to form a concept of the event. The word "adventure" is first used by Sartre (or rather by Lloyd Alexander, the translator of my edition) offhandedly by Antoine, then reintroduced by the Self-Taught man, who "would like something unexpected to happen to [him], something new, adventures," (35). The Self-Made-Man, then, perceives adventure as being related to unpredictability.
Antoine dismisses the Self-Taught Man, but can't forget the question of adventures. His first instinct is to claim that he has had many adventures, but before he can get the words out of his mouth, something in the idea disconnects, and he isn't sure that he has ever had an adventure after all. He comes to the conclusion that this is because adventures require beginnings, which manifestly do not exist in life. Thus he reaches the conclusion that "you have to choose: live or tell." This version of adventuring, I think, is different from that of the Self-Made-Man, though whether or not it is diametrically opposed or not, I have not yet decided. I'll explore the implications of this kind of "adventure" to autobiography in later posts.
Since we've already seen that experience itself is unpredictable, particularly literary experience, it's easy for me to retrace my supposed train of thought from here. "Event," in my mind, is "adventure" in Antoine's, for every moment is constitutive of adventurous action. A "perfect moment," in my mind, is the ideal event. It's an experience fictionalized exceptionally well. It is given the context necessary for it to correspond to our sense of literary achievement. Indeed, Anny "used to say [that she] wanted to act because on the stage [she] had to realize perfect moments," (152). Combined with the idea of a perfect moment, which must be decided by circumstance and correct conception of details' importance, I've come to the conception of an Event which is a happening marked out by the experiencer against the regular tick-tock of time (the kairos out of the chronos), which is thus given significance which it cannot have initially had. It's a retroactive activity, and this is the heart of the problem: we want to live events, but living is concerned with the present-future, and events are necessarily retroactively determined.
It's this compulsion (or necessity?) to fictionalize life as if one were the protagonist of a novel in order to understand identity and the corresponding problems Sartre underlines that reverberated so soundly in my personal life. It's for this reason that I've begun this project. And - look at that! O merciful diction - I've begun!
Burke/Root/KJ Anthropology Resource Room, Hamilton
College - 13 March 2013.
No comments:
Post a Comment