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