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