Great Literary Works

New Nabokov Novel: The Original Of Laura

noreply@blogger.com (son of rambow) — Sun, 29 Nov 2009 14:30:00 +0000

In an exclusive interview, the son of novelist Vladimir Nabokov tells Newsnight why he is defying his father's wishes to posthumously publish the controversial writer's final novel.

After the death of the notorious libertine Lord Byron, who was mad, bad and dangerous to know, his memoirs were thrown into the fire at the offices of his publishers John Murray in Edinburgh, in 1824.

The poet's literary executors decided to destroy Byron's journals in order to protect his reputation.

Byron's short but eventful life had taken him to Switzerland, among other places, and his Prisoner of Chillon was inspired by the brooding medieval castle of the same name on Lake Geneva.

A hundred and fifty years or so after Byron's death, another writer associated with sexual controversy passed away on the banks of the lake, posing a conundrum to his own executors.

He was Vladimir Nabokov, author of the brilliant but scandalous Lolita (1955), a blackly comic account of middle-aged Humbert Humbert's infatuation with a 12-year-old girl.

At the time of his death in 1977, Nabokov was working on another novel, said to deal with some of the same challenging if uncomfortable themes.

Last wish

The novelist Kingsley Amis, reviewing Lolita, had written mischievously, "Where's all the sex, then?"

My father told me what his most important books were. He named Laura as one of them. One doesn't name a book one intends to destroy.
Dmitri Nabokov

It was rumoured that "all the sex" was in this last book.

Nabokov made his wife Vera promise him on his deathbed that the manuscript would go the same way as Byron's diaries.

The book never appeared, and the world was entitled to think that it had read the entire corpus of the dazzling stylist.

But Vera Nabokov never fulfilled her husband's last wish. She agonised about what to do with the incomplete novel, while it gathered dust in the vaults of a Swiss bank.

She could not bring herself to commit the manuscript to the flames. On her own death, the burden passed to the Nabokovs' only child, Dmitri.

A man who has combined the careers of opera singer and racing driver, Dmitri was also a respected and assiduous translator and editor of his father's works.

But it seems he could no more resolve the dilemma of Nabokov's last book than could his mother.

Subject of speculation

Over the years, and particularly since the advent of the internet, the fate of the novel has been much debated by Nabokov readers and academics.

With something of his father's talent for creating a stir, Dmitri has given the impression that he was prepared to see the book disappear for good, only to leave others with a strong sense that publication was in the offing.

The affair of Nabokov's last book has become a kind of literary striptease, with tantalising glimpses of this sensation flitting into public view. Its title was said to be The Original of Laura.

A scholarly journal devoted to Nabokov studies ran a competition inviting readers to submit prose in the style of the author.

Of the five entries published by the magazine, two were said to be by Nabokov himself, unpublished fragments of Laura.

Its plot apparently concerns a portly academic called Philip Wild, and Flora, his much slimmer, "wildly promiscuous" wife.

Flora catches Wild's eye because of her resemblance to a young woman he had once been in love with. Wild is preoccupied by his own mortality, and resolves to obliterate himself from the toes upward, through the power of meditation.

Death, be it ever so unlikely, is a theme of the book, as it is in so much of Nabokov.

All the principal characters in Lolita are dead by the time Humbert tells his tale, Humbert included.

Some biographers have traced this fascination to the hapless end of Nabokov's own father, a Russian noblemen and politician, killed by a bullet meant for someone else with whom he happened to be sharing a platform at the time.

Finally, at the age of 73, Dmitri Nabokov has said that his father's last book will be spared the bonfire. Indeed, it will be published next year in what is likely to be the literary event of 2009.

Newsnight went to meet Dmitri at his house in Montreux, where he talked for the first time in a television interview about what led him at last to his decision.

"My father told me what his most important books were. He named Laura as one of them. One doesn't name a book one intends to destroy."

Of his father's last wish, Dmitri said: "He would have reacted in a sober and less dramatic way if he didn't see death staring him in the face. He certainly would not have wanted it destroyed. He would have finished it."

Dividing opinions

It's perfectly straightforward. Nabokov wanted it burnt, so burn it.
Tom Stoppard

With all due ceremony, a white-gloved attendant shimmered into Dmitri's sitting room, bearing the book from the vaults. It consisted of a grey wallet containing dozens of hand-written index cards.

It was Nabokov's practice, having conceived of a novel in his head, to plot it out on cards in longhand, before producing finished pages.

Because of Dmitri's unsleeping filial protectiveness, not to mention the terms of his publishing deal, we were not allowed to read the masterpiece through, let alone film it to anything like its full extent.

The book will be published unfinished, just as the master left it.

The literary world is in two minds about it.

John Banville, winner of the Booker prize, worries that it might compare unfavourably to Nabokov's greatest achievements. But he told us it is as fascinating and compelling as unpublished work by Joyce or Beckett would be.

Tom Stoppard says: "It's perfectly straightforward. Nabokov wanted it burnt, so burn it."

Scholars note that Nabokov had form in this area, once wishing to see a match applied to a novella of his called The Enchanter, ironically a kind of prequel to Lolita.

Perhaps it is true that his final work is even more scandalising than the earlier book, that it has "all the sex" in it.

The last of the veils hasn't quite slipped from Laura yet. [source: http://news.bbc.co.uk]

Translation and Intertextuality

noreply@blogger.com (son of rambow) — Sun, 29 Nov 2009 14:25:00 +0000

Intertextuality, something which covers many areas of texts, including many that some people would refer to as 'context', is clearly important for translations. History, literature, science are important for interpretations and every translation is based on a (often unspoken/intuitive) interpretation, so they are just as important to a translation.

I do, however, often come across translators who, I feel, are overdoing it. They 'translate' the references, too, by exchanging the allusion for a domestic one. Say, a famous American actor for a famous German actor. I tend to recoil at that.

But on the other hand, the way a text exploits intertextuality is often closely attuned to culture and language. Does a reference to Tom Jones work in German the same way that it works in English?

My answer: footnotes, explaining the significance. But as far as I monitored discussions and actual translations so far, that issue is far from resolved.[follow this topic and discuss here

Mishima Yukio: The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With The Sea

noreply@blogger.com (son of rambow) — Sat, 28 Nov 2009 13:26:00 +0000

Yukio Mishima’s The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With The Sea is a short novel but, due to its tight plot, brevity is not an issue. Published in 1963, seven years before he committed ritual suicide, the novel explores motivation and the factors that can cause someone to abandon their passions and resume their life embracing the dreams of another.

Noboru Kuroda, a thirteen year old on the cusp of an adult world, is part of a savage gang whose members, despite their exemplary grades at school, have rebelled against the adult world they deem hypocritical. Under the tutelage of Noboru’s friend, also thirteen, they condition themselves against sentimental feelings – a goal they call ‘objectivity’ - by killing stray cats.

Ryuji Tsukazaki, a merchant seaman, has been granted two days’ shore leave and has spent the time romancing Noboru’s widowed mother, Fusako. Noboru likes the sailor at first, his commitment to the sea and all the manly stories he has to tell. But, as Ryuji falls for Fusako, Noboru feels betrayed by the man’s burgeoning romanticism and, with the help of his gang, feels that action should be taken against the man who has replaced his father.

The first thing I noticed while reading this novel was that the characters are rich with life and history. Noboru, at thirteen, has strong feelings for his mother that manifest through voyeuristic sessions at night when, peeking into her room through a spy-hole, he watches her undress, entertain, and sleep. Ryuji, the sailor, knows he has some purpose at sea and continues his life off the land in the hope that one day he will learn his place in life. And Fusako, five years widowed, displays certain strength as she runs her own business, mixes with a richer class of citizen, while trying to raise he son as best she can.

The way the characters develop from this introduction is fast yet believable – the book, in fact, is split into two sections, Summer and Winter, to show that enough time has passed to be plausible. Noboru’s respect for Ryuji wanes as he becomes the worst thing, based on his gang’s beliefs, a man can be in this world: a father. Ryuji’s abandonment of his life’s passion is, of course, the main thread of the novel and it is a tragic decision he makes to give up the destiny waiting for him at sea in order to embrace the world of Fusako and the new direction she has planned for him.

The best thing about this novel is the language. The translator, John Nathan, has done a wonderful job and not a page passes without hitting you with a warm wash of sea-spray. Metaphors and similes are drenched with watery goodness as they add to the novel’s appeal. The prose is warm during the Summer section but as the book turns to Winter the turns of phrase become icier and tend to sting more. The dialogue is nice and realistic and doesn’t smart of stereotypical Japanese honour; the way the characters interact completely plausible.

I hadn’t heard of Mishima until I picked up this novel and, given that he had three Nobel nominations in his lifetime, I will certainly look out for more of his work. His concise prose, realistic characters, and the way his voice carries the sea makes him a rare find. If books were shells, I would hope to hear Mishima in every one.
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this article was posted in world literature forum by stewart. follow this topic here

read biography of Mishima Yukio at wikipedia

Is Scandinavian literature gloomy?

noreply@blogger.com (son of rambow) — Sat, 28 Nov 2009 13:21:00 +0000

I read on another thread somewhere that Scandinavian literature tends to be gloomy, depressing, or dark. I wonder whether this is because Scandinavian authors sit brooding in log cabins wondering whether to commit suicide, or to murder someone and then write a crime novel about it; or whether this has something to do with typecasting and selective translation.

Scandinavian children's books, such as those by Astrid Lindgren and Tove Jansson are certainly not morbid, though Jansson does the occasional gesture towards a doom-laden atmosphere. Jansson's stories for adults are certainly not gloomy; they are in fact quite life-enhancing. The open sea and the skerries are not a setting for gloom.

Strindberg was the antithesis of gloomy. He was angry, provocative and so on. A satirist in his prose. But even during his Inferno Crisis, he would rage rather than brood. And his late plays bring reconciliation, not a resigned morbidity.

I think that if people switched off their gloom-detectors and read more widely, they would discover that Scandinavia has quite a broad range of moods in the various national literatures represented there. There are also, quite at random, the zaniness of Kandre and Edelfeldt; the legends of Lagerlöf; the dystopia of Boye; the books by Paasilinna; the everyday stories by Grytten; the sci-fi of Ajvide Lindqvist; fay poetry by Byggmästar; the Communist-Socialist poets such as Ågren, Diktonius, Wichman; the provocateur Donner; the leading Jewish literary critic Brandes; the gay and social critical novels of Kihlman; the "hackèd him in pieces smaw" aspect of the sagas, etc., etc.

If you focus on Ingmar Bergman the filmmaker, you can slant your perception of him depending on whether you look at earlier films, such as "Shame" and "The Silence" or the rumbustuous epic "Fanny and Alexander".

And if you read only a strict diet of Lagerkvist, Borgen, maybe Vesaas, Bjørneboe, Mörne, Dagerman, then watch a series of early Bergman films, you could certainly convince yourself that Scandinavia is cold, ice-bound, deeply depressed and depressing. But would you be doing the region justice?

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this article posted by eric in world literature forum. follow this topic here

Short Story Competition 2009

noreply@blogger.com (son of rambow) — Fri, 27 Nov 2009 21:56:00 +0000

Please vote for the story you like best to determine the winner of Literature Network Short Story Competition 2009.

Discussion of the stories, to avoid influencing the outcome of the poll, are not allowed.

If contributers would like to ask questions, they should email us at litnetcompetition@hotmail.co.uk.

Please note that the authors agree to keep their identities secret when they enter the competition.

Those who breech this rule will be disqualified automatically.

Good luck, everyone!

Competition Rules

he Literature Network will hold an annual short story competition, which will be open to all its members. The rules of the competition are:

1. The stories should be submitted as email attachments in MS Word format and should be minimum 500 and maximum 2000 words and include your Forum names as well. Please send your stories to litnetcompetition@hotmail.co.uk. Please do not post your stories on the Forum!

2. There will be 5 selections (in February, April, June, August and October) throughout the year and only the stories which have been submitted by the first of these months latest will be included in that month's elimination. The five stories which win the each selection will take part in the final voting in November and December.

3. Members can submit only one entry for each selection round. If their story is a winner, they will not be allowed to take part in other selections.

4. The Admin or Moderators are not responsible for editing or correcting of the stories and therefore the writers themselves are required to make sure that there are no grammatical or spelling errors. The submitted copy is final and further corrections by the writers will be disregarded.

5. Only those members with at least 100 posts by each voting period can submit stories for the competition and vote in the polls.

6. Those who enter the competition agree to keep the information on their identities and stories confidential till the end of that year (only the Admin and Moderators will have access to that information). Those who breech this rule will be disqualified automatically.

7. All entries should be your own original work and not have appeared anywhere else before. Authors retain the copyright rights for the stories submitted to the competition.

8. All submissions must be your sole creative work and written for this particular competition. Anyone found plagiarising will be disqualified from this and all future contests.

9. If one of the 5 entrants selected for the final vote are no longer a member of the site at the time of the final vote, they forfeit their entry and the second place entry for their leg of entries gets bumped to first place.

10. You can withdraw a story during the submission period; however, once the voting starts, no story can be withdrawn. [source]

Note: This poll will close on December 31st, 2009.

The Art of Fiction: Interview with James Ellroy

noreply@blogger.com (son of rambow) — Fri, 27 Nov 2009 21:42:00 +0000

Interviewed by Nathaniel Rich
The Paris Review, Issue 190, Fall 2009

INTERVIEWER
You’ve called Dashiell Hammett “tremendously great” and Raymond Chandler “egregiously overrated.” Why?

ELLROY
Chandler wrote the kind of guy that he wanted to be, Hammett wrote the kind of guy that he was afraid he was. Chandler’s books are incoherent. Hammett’s are coherent. Chandler is all about the wisecracks, the similes, the constant satire, the construction of the knight. Hammett writes about the all-male world of mendacity and greed. Hammett was tremendously important to me.
Joseph Wambaugh was immensely important, too. He is a former policeman whose view of LA perfectly dovetailed with my minor miscreant’s view of LA. I also loved the quickness, the ugliness, the assured fatality of James M. Cain. That giddy sense that doom is cool. You just met a woman, you had your first kiss, you’re six weeks away from the gas chamber, you’re fucked, and you’re happy about it.

INTERVIEWER
How did you do in high school?

ELLROY
I did poorly, and I had an unimaginably dim social sense. I was horrified when the civil rights workers were killed in Mississippi in ’64, but I made light of it in school. I knew it was wrong, but I had to be superior to the events themselves. You can see this in my books. There’s the reactionary side of me as well as the critique of authority, the critique of racism and oppression. Back then, though, I possessed no social awareness.

INTERVIEWER
Did you graduate?

ELLROY
No. I flunked the eleventh grade and got expelled. I decided I wanted to join the marine corps, because I wanted to be a shit kicker, which I certainly was not. I did not want to go to Vietnam, I never thought about Vietnam. I had a vague desire to shoot guns. My father’s health was deteriorating ever more rapidly—he started having strokes and heart attacks—and he let me enlist in the army.

INTERVIEWER
How long did you last?

ELLROY
If you think I’m skinny now, at a hundred and seventy pounds, picture me at a hundred and forty. I got shipped out to Fort Polk, Louisiana. Flying bugs all over the place. Right away, I went from being a big egotistical bully to a craven scaredy-cat dipshit. My dad had another stroke the first week I was at Polk. I got flown home to LA, in my uniform, on emergency leave. Two weeks later, he had yet another stroke. I got flown back again, just in time to see him die. His final words to me were, Try to pick up every waitress who serves you.

INTERVIEWER
Is that when you started writing—after your father died?

ELLROY
The first thing I did after he died was snag his last three Social Security checks, forge his signature, and cash them at a liquor store. From ’65 to ’75, I drank and used drugs. I fantasized. I swallowed amphetamine inhalers. I masturbated compulsively. I got into fights. I boxed—though I was terrible at it—and I broke into houses. I’d steal girls’ panties, I’d jack off, grab cash out of wallets and purses. The method was easy: you call a house and if nobody answers, that means nobody’s home. I’d stick my long, skinny arms in a pet access door and flip the latch, or find a window that was loose and raise it open. Everybody has pills and alcohol. I’d pop a Seconal, drink four fingers of Scotch, eat some cheese out of the fridge, steal a ten-dollar bill, then leave a window ajar and skedaddle. I did time in county jail for useless misdemeanors. I was arrested once for burglary, but it got popped down to misdemeanor trespassing.
The press thinks that I’m a larger-than-life guy. Yes, that’s true. But a lot of the shit written about me discusses this part of my life disproportionately.

INTERVIEWER
Aren’t you responsible for this? You’ve written a lot about this period, and you frequently talk about it in interviews.

ELLROY
I’ve told many journalists that I’ve done time in county jail, that I’ve broken and entered, that I was a voyeur. But I also told them that I spent much more time reading than I ever did stealing and peeping. They never mention that. It’s a lot sexier to write about my mother, her death, my wild youth, and my jail time than it is to say that Ellroy holed up in the library with a bottle of wine and read books.

INTERVIEWER
Still, writing couldn’t have been exactly in the forefront of your mind at the time.

ELLROY
But it was. I was always thinking about how I would become a great novelist. I just didn’t think that I would write crime novels. I thought that I would be a literary writer, whose creative duty is to describe the world as it is. The problem is that I never enjoyed books like that. I only enjoyed crime stories. So more than anything, this fascination with writing was an issue of identity. I had a fantasy of what it meant to be a writer: the sports cars, the clothes, the women.
But I think what appealed to me most about it was that I could assume the identity of what I really loved to do, which was to read. Nobody told me I couldn’t write a novel. I didn’t live in the world of graduate writing schools. I wasn’t part of any scene or creative community. I happened to love crime novels more than anything, so I wrote a crime novel first. I didn’t buy the old canard that you had to start by writing short stories, and only later write a novel. I never liked reading short stories, so why the fuck should I want to write one? I only wanted to write novels. [The Paris Review. Purchase this issues]

Nietzsche's idea of "the overman" (Ubermensch)

noreply@blogger.com (eastern writer) — Thu, 26 Nov 2009 18:51:00 +0000

Nietzsche's idea of "the overman" (Ubermensch) is one of the most significant concept in his thinking. Even though it is mentioned very briefly only in the prologue of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, it might be sensible to conceive that Nietzsche had something in his mind about how a man should be more than just human-all-too-human, regardless if he was one or not. All these ideas had been pondered on and developed though all his works. The concept then seems to reveal much about the way Nietzsche saw life. This essay will attempt on seeing through, as much as possible, the idea of overman by Nietzsche and life from the point of view of an overman.

An overman as described by Zarathustra, the main character in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, is the one who is willing to risk all for the sake of enhancement of humanity. In contrary to the last man whose sole desire is his own comfort and is incapable of creating anything beyond oneself in any form. This should suggest that an overman is someone who can establish his own values as the world in which others live their lives, often unaware that they are not pregiven. This means an overman can affect and influence the lives of others. In other words, an overman has his own values, independent of others, which affects and dominates others? lives that may not have predetermined values but only herd instinct. An overman is then someone who has a life which is not merely to live each day with no meanings when nothing in the past and future is more important than the present, or more precisely, the pleasure and happiness in the present, but with the purpose for humanity.

In Nietzsche?s view, an overman should be able to affect history indefinitely. He will keep reentering the world through other people?s minds and affect their thoughts and values. Napolean who is highly admired by Nietzsche may be seen as an example here since he changed and created orders in Europe. What he did effects greatly in how Europe is today. This idea agrees with another of his most significant idea, the idea of the will-to-power. He asserts that life is the will-to-power. Although it is hard to say exactly what he meant by that term, it can be described as something, which underlies how human thinks, behaves and acts in all circumstances. He views that a human being is always in a constant struggle to quench his own desire. This is shown in the context of power used to exclude desires of others that is in conflict to his, power that is used to achieve what they desire. A living thing always seeks to discharge its strength, not only to survive but to power and this sometimes results in violent behaviour which is, allegedly by Nietzshce, intrinsic to the nature of men. However, the way to will can be different, constructive or destructive. My interpretation would then be that an overman uses the will-to-power to influence and dominate the thoughts of others creatively from generation to generation. In this way, his existence and power live on even after he dies.?

Nietzsche also has the answer to life that seems suffering. His answer, which is expressed in the same book of Zarathustra, is an attitude towards life that helps one overcome the feeling of its meaninglessness. It starts with the idea that life is an eternal recurrence with no beginning and no end but a repetition of the very same life over and over again. With all sufferings, unhappiness and misdeeds in life, one may feel cursed and despaired if he inevitably were to repeat the same life with the same pain and joy. However, the most important point may not be whether life is really an eternal recurrence. Rather, although not explicitly stated, the important point is that an overman should view it differently such that in the very same life, there has been a moment that it redeems everything else. It then makes him content with and happy to repeat that very same life again and again. He has got the feeling of unity of creation and destruction, good and bad taste of life and is able to say that life is good even it may seem terrible and questionable. He views all the past actions, silly or wise, accidental or achieving, as necessity of becoming himself. Therefore he can redeem himself and thus be willing to repeat the same life again. Some may even say that ?it was? and ?thus I willed it? even though he knows well that one cannot will backward and there are many other limitations in life. It implies that living a life of an overman is to live with the knowledge of what has already happened and constant reinterpretation according to it.? Clearly, an overman is then someone who can, with appreciation, face life that may seem so suffering and absurd, knowing that the basic conditions of life will not change even when he is in the ideal state of an overman.

In a sense, overman is about self-overcoming. It involves an attitude towards life when one may feel despaired and feel life is meaningless. It is about the way to deal with ?truth? not in direct manner with straightforward rules as in rationalism, but more like a sensitive mix of trickier indirect approaches. As he compared this with winning a woman?s heart, those who approach clumsily and directly will bound to failure and hence left dispirited. When compared to Kantian view of truth, it can be seen that going straight into finding an absolute naked truth may leave one unsastisfied with questions that remain unanswered. Instead, Nietzsche suggested the way to tackle this by going along with it and take it as it is. One will then feel content and happy with the life that may be so questionable.

Another characteristic used to describe an overman originated in his earlier work, The Birth of Tragedy. In this book, the notion of Apollonion and Dionysian principles is used with respect to his analysis of the Greek tragedy. They are used to describe two principles men use in thinking which consequently determine actions. Apollonion principle is the principle of light, rationality, order and clear boundaries whereas Dionysian is the principle of the dark, irratioanality, the collapse of order and boundaries. The Apollonion views an individual as separate from other reality and hence can be viewed dispassionately with rationality. On the other hand, the Dionysian views things as a living whole where one is a part of a larger reality. The Apollonion therefore involves no passion or emotion but pure reasons with order whereas the Dionysian is passionate, dynamic and unpredictable. Nietzsche believes that a balance of the two principles is essential in order to have some meanings in life. He seems to be very fond of art and viewed that artistic works, paintings, plays, literature or music exhibit a great deal of Dionysian principle in the form of creativity. In his later work, the importance of the Dionysian principle in living a life with values and meanings is expressed clearly. He views that the highest state attainable by a man can be achieved when life is conceived in terms of the realisation of the Dionysian ideal of the overman. That means one must realise and accept his own Dionysian nature and use it appropriately.

From my point of view, Nietzsche must have treated art as something higher than ordinary, mass-conventional logic and rationality such as that in science for he admired creativity and beauty in art above all things. A person who will be viewed by Nietzsche as an overman is then more likely to be an artist who uses his Dionysian principle and way of thinking and feeling to create works that carry particular individual?s picture or interpretation of the world. His values may or may not be the same as any other but a good artist should be able to combine creativity with his perception of the world and life and express it well in his work. On comparison to Aristotle who views that the most desirable state of a person is a philosopher who contemplates, Nietzsche viewed traditional philosophers during his time as people who did not really affect the real world outside and usually their traditional philosophical works were merely self confession. It can then be seen that his value is highly placed upon the concept of Dionysus and therefore he praised the Greek civilisation where a lot of creativity took place even more than in present society. Nietzsche accepted that Socrates did affect the history greatly, which is the characteristic that Nietzsche valued. However, he blamed Socrates for the western society and culture that emphasised the Apollonion principle too much. Socrates was thought to have gone too far in defending rationality. He even viewed that we could use reasoning in everything so that the nature?s flaws can be corrected. It is then what the western dreams of and pursues up until now through science and technology. This is the view that does not accept human limitation, that men are powerless and have no control but always places men on the top of everything. In contrast, Nietzsche views that an overman must be able to accept these limitations and can face it in the eternal recurrence. Nietzsche must have felt that the western culture had put less and less significance on artistic creativity and passion that mental and spiritual power which create beauty in life have fewer and fewer places in the modern society.

Emotion is one of the attributes of Dionysus and is also one of the entities which Nietzsche defended. He views that emotion is natural. Its repression or suppression is psychologically disastrous. This also includes sexuality. He attacked Christianity for its traditional value that places bars on emotion and impulse and this is viewed by Nietzsche as self-denying. He disagrees on inhibiting and thwarting human own nature. Rather, an overman must accept his own nature and divert the energy of primitive impulses into a culturally, higher or socially more acceptable, activity. This is exactly what should happen to a good artist on creating his work of art. To him, the Dionysian is not completely dark and evil as opposite to the Apollonion which is associated with light and reason. The Dionysian is rather viewed as natural, both good and bad just like any ordinary human being. It is in every human nature. With a right balance with the Apollonion and with the right use, a burst of creativity is the result. However, it is usually the case that when the Apollonion principle mixes the Dionysian, it tends to suppress the Dionysian. As a result, the Dionysian principle is expressed in a destructive way. Basically, an overman must be able to control this and divert the Dionysian power into something creative. To Nietzsche, Dionysian is profoundly irrational rather than negatively or stubbornly irrational.

?In the present age where science and rationality are highly valued, I realise that it is hard to accept the negative side of being rational since it seems to be the most reliable tool in treating others, living together and judging. Without it, society can be chaotic and too much disordered for no control is imposed on the irrational ones who do not use the Dionysian principle in a productive way. However, I agree with Nietzsche in the beauty of the product created out of Dionysian principle and feel that the right mix of Apollonion and Dionysian will make the world much nobler, not in the luxurious sense but aesthetic one. The world with no passion and emotion will be an unnatural one and this special property, among others, of human that differs from other animals will be lost.??????

Nietzsche might or might not consider himself an overman but he surely determined to be a means or bridge who brings closer to reality an emergence of an overman. In his view, men are not born equal. He always stresses on the difference of men and hence in contrast to Marx who includes everyone into his ideal society. For Nietzsche, there are only some capable and talented who qualifies to be an overman from his point of view. Therefore, he is usually perceived superficially as an elitist which might have brought down the value of his thinking. To me, it is a fact that is hard to swallow for all of us and quite sceptical on the ability of men. However, it is the case, at least throughout the history of mankind up to the present, for men are educated differently and experience different things. Nevertheless, Nietzsche?s thinking provides some space for this. He says that his ideal is not necessarily everyone?s universal ideal. Each of us values things differently and therefore his overman may not be the same as others? overman. He consequently urges for revaluation of traditional values such as, the supression of emotion, the wholeheartedly devoted rationalism. An overman, in his view, should not be restricted by tradition nor bounded by convention but has independent values of his own.???????

From all that is shown above, we may say that Nietzsche?s overman must be able to affect history indefinitely, conceives life in terms of Dionysian realisation and is able to divert Dionysian principle into something creative. With this kind of attitude and the realisation of his own limitation in life, he would then be able to face life, look back with satisfaction, realising that all pasts make him what he is today, and hence feel happy if he were to repeat that very same life eternally. An overman should then be content with his own life and appreciate every bit of it even though some of them are painful and suffering. He spends each day of his life creating beauty, which affects the minds of others through out the time, knowing that his life has values and meanings since his existence of will-to-power will live on indefinitely.?

References

1) The Cambridge Companion to Nietzsche, ed. B.Magnus and K.M.Higgins, Cambridge University Press, 1990.

2) Nietzsche, Life As Literature, Alexander Nehamas, Havard University Press,1994.

3) Nietzsche for Beginners, M.Sautet, Writers and readers, 1990.

4) Nietzsche:A Critical Reader.

5) Philosophy II lecture handouts.

Ubermensch: The Will to Power

noreply@blogger.com (eastern writer) — Thu, 26 Nov 2009 18:45:00 +0000

The Will to Power (German: "der Wille zur Macht") is a prominent concept in the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche. The will to power describes what Nietzsche believed to be the main driving force in man; achievement, ambition, the striving to reach the highest possible position in life, these are all manifestations of the will to power.

Friedrich Nietzsche found early influence from Schopenhauer, whom he first discovered in 1865. Schopenhauer puts a central emphasis on will and in particular has a concept of the "will to live". Writing a generation before Nietzsche, Schopenhauer explained that the universe and everything in it is driven by a primordial will to live, which results in all living creatures' desire to avoid death and procreate. For Schopenhauer, this will is the most fundamental aspect of reality—more fundamental even than being.

Another important influence is Roger Joseph Boscovich, whom Nietzsche discovered and learned about through his reading of Friedrich Albert Lange's 1865 Geschichte des Materialismus (History of Materialism), which Nietzsche read in 1866. As early as 1872, Nietzsche went on to study Boscovich’s book Theoria Philosophia Naturalis for himself. Nietzsche makes his only reference in his published works to Boscovich in Beyond Good and Evil where he declares war on "soul-atomism" Boscovich had rejected the idea of "materialistic atomism" which Nietzsche calls "one of the best refuted theories there are." The idea of centers of force would become central to Nietzsche's later theories of will to power.

Nietzsche began to speak of the "Desire for Power" (Machtgelüst), which appeared in The Wanderer and his Shadow (1880) and Daybreak (1881). Machtgelüst, in these works, is the pleasure of the feeling of power and the hunger to overpower.

Wilhelm Roux published his The Struggle of Parts in the Organism (Der Kampf der Theile im Organismus) in 1881, which Nietzsche first read the same year. The book was a response to Darwinian theory, proposing an alternative mode of evolution. Roux was a disciple of and influenced by Ernst Haeckel who believed the struggle for existence occurred at the cellular level. The various cells and tissue struggle for finite resources, so that only the strongest survive. Through this mechanism, the body grows stronger and better adapted. Lacking modern genetic theory and assuming a Lamarckian or pangenetic model of inheritance, the theory had plausibility at the time.

Nietzsche began to expand on the concept of Machtgelüst in The Gay Science (1882), where in a section titled “On the doctrine of the feeling of power,” He connects the desire for cruelty with the pleasure in the feeling of power. Elsewhere in The Gay Science he notes that it is only “in intellectual beings that pleasure, displeasure, and will are to be found,” excluding the vast majority of organisms from the desire for power.

Léon Dumont (1837-77), whose 1875 book Théorie Scientifique de La Sensibilité, le Plaisir et la Peine Nietzsche read in 1883, seems to have exerted some influence on this concept. Dumont believed that pleasure is related to increases in force. In Wanderer and Daybreak, Nietzsche earlier had speculated that pleasures such as cruelty, are pleasurable because of exercise of power. But Dumont, in 1883, provided a physiological basis for Nietzsche’s speculation. Dumont’s theory also would have seemed to confirm Nietzsche’s theory that pleasure and pain are reserved for intellectual beings, since, according to Dumont, pain and pleasure require a coming to consciousness and not just a sensing.

In 1883 Nietzsche coined the phrase “Wille zur Macht” in Thus Spoke Zarathustra. The concept, at this point, is no longer limited to only those intellectual beings that can actually experience the feeling of power; it applies to all life. The phrase Wille zur Macht first appears in part 1, "1001 Goals" (1883), then in part 2, in two sections, “Self-Overcoming” and “Redemption” (later in 1883). “Self-Overcoming” describes it in most detail, saying it is an “unexhausted procreative will of life.” There is will to power where there is life and even the strongest living things will risk their lives for more power. This suggests that the will to power is stronger than the will to survive.

Schopenhauer's "Will to life" thus became a subsidiary to the will to power, which is the stronger will. Nietzsche thinks his notion of the will to power is far more useful than Schopenhauer's will to live for explaining various events, especially human behavior—for example, Nietzsche uses the will to power to explain both ascetic, life-denying impulses and strong, life-affirming impulses in the European tradition, as well as both master and slave morality. He also finds the will to power to offer much richer explanations than utilitarianism's notion that all people really want to be happy, or the Platonist's notion that people want to be unified with the Good.

Nietzsche read William Rolph’s Biologische Probleme probably in mid 1884 and it clearly interested Nietzsche; his copy is heavily annotated and he made many notes concerning Rolph. Rolph was another evolutionary anti-Darwinist like Roux, who wished to argue for evolution by different mechanism than the struggle for existence. Rolph argued that all life seeks primarily to expand itself. Organisms fulfill this need through assimilation, trying to make as much of what is found around them into part of themselves, for example by seeking to increase intake and nutriment. Life forms are naturally insatiable in this way.

Nietzsche's next published work is Beyond Good and Evil (1886), where the influence of Rolph seems apparent. Nietzsche writes, "Even the body within which individuals treat each other as equals ... will have to be an incarnate will to power, it will strive to grow, spread, seize, become predominant—not from any morality or immorality but because it is living and because life simply is will to power." The influence of Rolph and its connection to “will to power,” also continues in book 5 of Gay Science (1887) where Nietzsche describes will to power as the instinct for “expansion of power,” fundamental to all life.

Beyond Good and Evil has the most references to “will to power” in his published works, appearing in eleven aphorisms and this was the time of greatest development of the idea.

Karl Wilhelm von Nägeli's 1884 book Mechanisch-physiologische Theorie der Abstammungslehre, which Nietzsche acquired probably in 1886 and subsequently read closely, had considerable influence on his theory of will to power. Nietzsche wrote a letter to Franz Overbeck about it, noting that it has “been sheepishly put aside by Darwinists”. Nägeli believed in a “perfection principle,” which led to greater complexity. He called the seat of heritability the idioplasma, and argued, with a military metaphor, that a more complex, complicatedly ordered idioplasma would usually defeat a simpler rival. In other words, he is also arguing for internal evolution, similar to Roux, except emphasizing complexity as the main factor instead of strength.

Thus, Dumont’s pleasure in the expansion of power, Roux’s internal struggle, Nägeli’s drive towards complexity, and Rolph’s principle of insatiability and assimilation are fused together into the biological side of Nietzsche’s theory of will to power, which is developed in a number of places in his published writings. Having derived the “will to power” from three anti-Darwin evolutionists, as well as Dumont, it seems appropriate that he should use his “will to power” as an anti-Darwinian explanation of evolution. He expresses a number of times the idea that adaptation and the struggle to survive is a secondary drive in the evolution of animals, behind the desire to expand one’s power—the will to power.

Nonetheless, in his notebooks he continues to expand the theory of the will to power. Influenced by his earlier readings of Boscovich, he began to develop a physics of the Will to Power. The idea of matter as centers of force is translated into matter as centers of will to power. Nietzsche wanted to slough off the theory of matter, which he viewed as a relic of the metaphysics of substance.

These ideas of an all inclusive physics or metaphysics built upon the will to power does not appear to arise anywhere in his published works or in any of the final books published posthumously, except in the above mentioned aphorism from Beyond Good & Evil, where he references Boscovich (section 12). It does recur in his notebooks, but not all scholars want to consider these ideas as part of his thought.

Throughout the 1880s, in his notebooks, Nietzsche also developed an equally elusive theory of the “eternal recurrence of the same” and much speculation on the physical possibility of this idea and the mechanics of its actualization recur in his later notebooks, which becomes tied with his theory of will to power as a potential physics integrated with the “eternal recurrence of the same.” Nietzsche appeared to imagine a physical universe of perpetual struggle and force, which successively completes its cycle and returns to the beginning again and again.

* Source: [http://http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Will_to_power]

Borges and The Name of the Rose

noreply@blogger.com (son of rambow) — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 23:16:00 +0000

Of the great contemporary novelists, Pynchon, Rushdie, García Márquez, and so on, each considers the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986) a great influence. No exception is Umberto Eco, whose laudatory blurb on the recently published Collected Fictions of Borges reads, "Though so different in style, two writers have offered us an image for the next millennium: Joyce and Borges. The first designed with words what the second designed with ideas: the original, the one and only World Wide Web. The Real Thing. The rest will remain simply virtual." These are traditions Eco hopes to follow, as he stated in a 1989 interview, "I would like to do with ideas what Finnegans Wake does with words." The present study examines Borges' considerable influence on Eco's The Name of the Rose, specifically through "The Library of Babel," "The Secret Miracle," and "The Garden of Forking Paths."

There is, first and foremost, "The Library of Babel," written by Borges in 1941, whose very first line sets off alarms to a reader of Eco: "The universe (which other call the Library) is composed of an indefinite, perhaps infinite, number of hexagonal galleries, with enormous ventilation shafts in the middle, encircled by very low railings." (79) Firstly, and most obviously, the library is certainly the world of Eco and Borges, two titans of learning whose lives are devoted to books. At the time "The Library of Babel" was written, Borges had spent years as First Assistant in the Miguel Cané branch of the Municipal Library, a menial job. Later in life, however, he assumed the post of director of the National Library of Argentina (resigning in 1973 when Perón returned to the Presidential office). Not only is the library the world of Eco and Borges, but also their characters. William of Baskerville, Adso, and the other monks often express themselves by unconsciously quoting books, not only because the entirety of human knowledge was kept in the monastic libraries, but because the monks were men who denied bodily desires and isolated themselves within walled microcosms (although, granted, more for Adso's Benedictines than William's Franciscans). Many human experiences were only to be gained from reading, secluded as the monks were. Borges' main characters are also overwhelmingly men of books and erudition, as will be shown.
The Aedificium library is obviously of similar construction to Borges' Library, with hexagonal rooms and ventilation shafts. The rooms of Borges have a set numbers of shelves and books, each gallery "identical to the first and all the others," (79) recalling why William and Adso became lost during their first exploration of the library. Spiral staircases are mentioned, but this is probably not significant, given the conventions of monastic building. In each "entrance way hangs a mirror," recalling the device that inspired fear in Adso, also another common symbol in the work of Borges. The Library is peopled by librarians who are born, work, and die among the stacks.
"The Library is a sphere whose consummate center is any hexagon, and whose circumference is inaccessible." (80) The fixed point symbol is central to Foucault's Pendulum, which questions the possibility of ever having just one. The Island of the Day Before similarly investigates the notion through the measure of longitude, demonstrating that any Prime Meridian is a purely arbitrary construct. Coupled with the infinite is the notion of infinite order, which in "The Library of Babel" leads to the divine: "Man, the imperfect librarian, may be the work of chance or of malevolent demiurges; the universe, with its elegant endowment of shelves, of enigmatic volumes, of indefatigable ladders for the voyager, and of privies for the seated librarian, can only be the work of a god." (81) The narrator, a librarian, then examines the apparent chaos of the books themselves, in which "as is well known: for one reasonable line or one straightforward note there are leagues of insensate cacophony, of verbal farragoes and incoherencies." (81) He then relates that many of the Library believe that the books mean nothing, and that to seek order in them is folly. The Library, it is eventually concluded, is composed of every possible book that can exist through the permutation all letters within a set number of pages.
Given this revelation, the Library people, whose history of centuries is narrated, faced the problem of finding order in their universe. The vocabulary of religion is used repeatedly. as groups of librarians tried to arrive at a system of order or conclusive disorder. The "Purifiers" went about destroying books that seemed meaningless. Another

blasphemous sect suggested that all searches be given up and that men everywhere shuffle letters and symbols until they succeeded in composing, by means of an improbable stroke of luck, the canonical books. The authorities found themselves obliged to issue severe orders. The sect disappeared, but in my childhood I still saw old men who would hide out in the privies for long periods of time. (84)

This passage first suggests the Jewish mysticism of Kabbala, which Borges and Eco write of considerably. More importantly, it raises the question of heresy posed in The Name of the Rose: are individuals allowed to interpret for themselves, or must they accept the bulls of authority? This sect and the Purifiers recall the librarians in Rose, who select which knowledge may be learned. Another group in the Library were believers in "the Man of the Book," who reasoned that "there must exist a book which is the cipher and perfect compendium of all the rest: some librarian has perused it, and it is analogous to a god." (85) The narrator, an old, disillusioned librarian, by story's end announces his own hope for universal order: that the Library is infinite but periodic -- that the limited number of books are repeatedly scattered throughout the endless galleries, in a sort of sine wave.
Now this is a monumentous literary precedent for Rose, which also examines how men invent or discover (as the case may be) ordered systems to explain their surroundings. Eco acknowledges the influence of "The Library of Babel" in many ways. The Aedificium library (hereafter "library," uncapitalized) is a universe in its plan, its parts corresponding in orientation and literary content to the known world map, its rooms identical to the ingenuous. It is interesting that the library's secret is solved in Eco, but not conclusively in Borges. The method William used to divine the library map is a great instance in the novel of the system being proved conclusively genuine (as is also the example of Brunellus). This is in marked contrast to the pattern of murders, which for the bulk of the week William assumes is based on the Apocalypse. However, the ambiguity of Borges' conclusion is repeated in Rose, as the library burns down and men are killed in an act recalling the end of the world. Books of serious depth, the final question of Rose and "The Library of Babel" is the final question of life: "Is there a God?" Is the universe ordered of its own, or have we simply imagined a system on top of chaos?
"The Secret Miracle," which Borges published in 1943, also contains many elements present in Eco. The story relates as such: Jaromir Hladik is a Jewish writer in Prague. When the Third Reich occupies the city in 1939, he is sentenced to death by the Nazi bureaucracy for "inciting others" through his writings, which amount to a translation of the Sepher Yezirah [the chief work in the Kabbalistic philosophy, already alluded to], "the unfinished tragedy The Enemies, a Vindication of Eternity, and an inquiry into the indirect Jewish sources of Jakob Boehme." (143) Sentenced on March 19th, his execution by firing squad is set for March 29th, a mere ten days' time. The night before his execution, he beseeches God to give him one year more of life to finish his mostly unwritten masterpiece.

Toward dawn, he dreamt he had hidden himself in one of the naves of the Clementine Library. [...] A librarian wearing dark glasses asked him: What are you looking for? Hladik answered: God. The Librarian told him: God is in one of the letters on one of the pages of one of the 400,000 volumes of the Clementine. My fathers and the fathers of my fathers have sought after that letter." (148)

Immediately in this dream one finds similarities to Eco. The Clementine is a beautiful Baroque library in Prague that was once a church. This librarian is similar to the other in "The Library of Babel;" they search for God among vast numbers of books. Kabbala is again recalled with the single letter of God, of which the librarian says, "I've gone blind looking for it. He removed his glasses, and Hladik saw that his eyes were dead." (147). The blind librarian is a very important figure for Borges, who at the time this story was written, 1943, was just such a man. Borges' father, also a writer, succumbed to blindness in middle age. A congenital disease, Borges himself began to go blind in the 1940s.
Now we come to Jorge of Burgos, Eco's blind librarian (with the perennial epithet of "venerable," as Homer's dawn is always "rosy-fingered"). The character's name (hereafter Jorge) obviously indicates Borges, with the further connection that he is Spanish. Jorge is a master of the labyrinth and library which hold so many Borgesian connections. This much is obvious. What, however, can be gleaned from the fact that Eco chose to represent Borges, rather than a Borges character, with his character Jorge of Burgos? Although one could argue that Jorge represents the character from "The Secret Miracle," it seems fairly clear that he's rather the man Borges himself. As Eco writes in the Postscript, "library plus blind man can only equal Borges." (515) This has become a fairly standard device among the "School of Borges," as one could classify the writers mentioned in the present study's introduction. Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow contains a character, Stephen Dodson-Truck, who seems to represent James Joyce. García Márquez' One Hundred Years of Solitude, which predates Rose by nearly two decades, also represents Borges in the character of Melquiades. Never explicitly, these characters invariably incorporate not only these writers' literature and theories, but the men themselves, the historical figures. Eco's use of Borges the man and not merely his books seems to indicate that serious study of literature can include the author's biography as fair game, contrary to critics who think that texts should be interpreted free from any such knowledge (this latter view seems to be held by Pynchon, who lets nothing of his personal life be known to the public. No photo of him from the past fifty years exists. He never gives interviews. This statement, however, did not stop him from incorporating Joyce as a character, ironically).
The treatment of Borges, it should be pointed out, is in marked contrast to William's evocation of Sherlock Holmes (not Sir Arthur Conan Doyle). However, the intellectual detective story is also a favorite of Borges', as evinced in "The Garden of Forking Paths." The Argentine writes in his introduction that this "is a detective story; its readers will assist at the execution, and all the preliminaries, of a crime, a crime whose purpose will not be unknown to them, but which they will not understand -- it seems to me -- until the last paragraph." (15) Eco's words in the Postscript are very similar in meaning: "What model reader did I want as I was writing? An accomplice, to be sure, one who would play my game." (524) "The Garden of Forking Paths" is narrated by Dr. Yu Tsun, a spy for the Germans in England during the First World War. His mission is to somehow send a message to Germany stating the name of a British artillery park along the Ancre River in France. However, the British agent Captain Richard Fadden is hot on his trail. Tsun catches a train out of town, one step ahead of Madden, to a small remote village where the brilliant Dr. Stephen Albert lives. Some children on the train, guessing his intent, advise Tsun on getting to Dr. Albert's house: "The house is a good distance away but you won't get lost if you take the road to the left and bear to the left at every crossroad." (93) Tsun narrates:

For a moment I thought that Richard Madden might in some way have divined my desperate intent. At once I realized that this would be impossible. The advice about turning always to the left reminded me that such was the common formula for finding the central courtyard of certain labyrinths. I know something about labyrinths. Not for nothing am I the great-grandson of Ts'ui Pên. (93)

"The Garden of Forking Paths" is filled with labyrinths, which appear in most of Borges' stories. "The Library of Babel" mentions a book as "a mere labyrinth of letters" (81). In "The Secret Miracle," "Hladik had visualized a labyrinth of passageways, stairs, and connecting blocks" behind his door. (148) But the labyrinth action of "The Garden of Forking Paths" only begins here. Tsun relates how his ancestor, Ts'ui Pên, had spent the last years of his life on two projects: writing a vast novel and creating a labyrinth. When he was assassinated, "his novel had no sense to it and nobody ever found his labyrinth." (93) The undiscovered labyrinth is meditated upon as Tsun walks the forking path. Dr. Stephen Albert greets him, mistaking him for a Chinese consul. It turns out that Albert is a scholar of Ts'ui Pên. This Englishman, Tsun narrates: "is as great as Goethe. I did not speak with him for more than an hour, but during that time, he was Goethe." (91) They discuss Ts'ui Pên's book, which was "a shapeless mass of contradictory rough drafts. I examined it once upon a time: the hero dies in the third chapter, while in the fourth he is alive." (96) Stephen Albert posits the hypothesis that "At one time, Ts'ui Pên must have said; 'I am going into seclusion to write a book,' and at another, 'I am retiring to construct a maze.' Everyone assumed these were separate activities. No one realized that the book and the labyrinth were one and the same." (96)
The book as labyrinth obviously reflects back on Borges, but also significantly on Eco, whose works are full of dizzying complexity, false clues, and blind alleys. The reader is fooled in Rose by the following systems of order: (1) That the murderer uses the Apocalypse as his model, and (2) That Name of the Rose is itself a detective story. While not proved totally false, both descend into ambiguity by story's end. As it turns out, many of the "murders" were not murders at all, and the Apocalyptic pattern was suggested, ironically, to Jorge by William. The novel ends in radically different fashion than the detective trappings would suggest. As Eco writes in the Postscript,

It is not accident that the book starts out as a mystery (and continues to deceive the ingenuous reader until the end, so the ingenuous reader may not even realize that this is a mystery in which very little is discovered and the detective is defeated). (525)

Continuing with "The Garden of Forking Paths," Gilbert concludes that Ts'ui Pên's books portrays not only what occurs, but what might also have occurred in a different time. In the end Tsun, with heavy heart, murders Albert before being caught by Captain Madden. Tsun's mission was completed. The Germans learned the name of the British location in France, Albert, by reading it in the newspapers, which reported a mysterious murder. The first postmodern detective story ends.
Continuing with detection, William does divine certain things correctly, which Adso enumerates at the book's end:

But it was true that the tracks in the snow led to Brunellus, and it was true that Adelmo committed suicide, it was true that Venantius did not drown in the jar, it was true that the labyrinth was laid out the way you imagined it, it was true that the one entered the finis Africae by touching the word 'quatuor,' it was true that the mysterious book was by Aristotle. (492)

These do not comfort William, but his processes find precedent in Borges' story, "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius," in which clues eventually also lead the reader to a correct conclusion. This will be dealt with shortly.
The texts of Borges and Eco teem with information, usually more abstruse than the average reader can understand, let alone digest. While this is part of layering a text that to please a spectrum of readers, it is also an intentional way of distancing the reader, added to the already mentioned frustration of designs (the Apocalypse and detective story). Eco, in an article on the translation of his novels, recalled the first pages of War and Peace, which portray the Russian upper class speaking French. As Eco writes, however, "Today if you re-read those pages, you will realize that it is not important to understand what those characters are saying, because they speak of trivial things. What is important is to understand that they are saying those things in French." Similar is Eco's use of Latin, which most readers will not understand but serves its function by merely being Latin. Eco writes further that "Even an American reader who has not studied Latin still knows it was the language of the medieval ecclesiastical world and so catches a whiff of the Middle Ages." That Eco's intent is similar to Tolstoy's emerges in the following situation: When collaborating with a Slavic language translator, the problem arose that Latin offered no clues to Slavic readers. The problem was solved by substituting Latin with ancient ecclesiastical Slavonic, so "In that way the reader would feel the same sense of distance, the same religious atmosphere, though understanding only vaguely what was being said."
There is much of such intentional distance in the works of Borges, which not only refer to more books and obscure studies than one reader could possibly recognize, but refer to imaginary books, for example to Silas Haslam's General History of Labyrinths in "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius." These references are meant to create a certain atmosphere without giving undue importance to the references themselves.
That said, it would conversely be extremely naive to dismiss anything by Borges or Eco outright, as both are masters of the layered text. It could very well prove true that the smallest reference holds the clue that decodes the larger text. In any case, the intentional distancing exists, although not in the "epic theater" tradition of Brecht, who sought to make the audiences of his plays constantly aware they were watching a play (as in Galileo and Mother Courage). Rather, Eco and Borges use the device of allusion to draw one into a world of mystery. If there is intentional distancing, there is also a notion in Eco of creating a text that welcomes the initiate after some hardship, like a secret society. "I wanted the reader to go through a penitential experience as he entered the book, just as a medieval monk went through strenuous tests when he entered the monastery," Eco said in a 1986 interview, elaborating on the observation that The Name of the Rose's first hundred pages were the book's most difficult. Although none of Borges' works are of a length that allows such initiation, it is clear that their complexity alone resists the reader while offering ultimate rewards.
A common theme in Eco is the notion of information saturation, which emerges in "The Library of Babel." The issue has become a media darling since the early Nineties, when the Internet finally achieved widespread use among laymen. Although Borges' vision well predates the technology, his conclusion, that too much knowledge is counterproductive, is no less profound. This theme appears somewhat in Rose's library, but more in Foucault's Pendulum which virtually overflows with texts, allusions, and information.
Having gone through specific notion and images, another way Borges seems to have influenced Eco is through the use of literary constructs, or framing devices. "The Garden of Forking Paths" is prefaced by the following:

In his A History of the World War (page 212), Captain Liddell Hart reports that a planned offensive by thirteen British divisions, supported by fourteen hundred artillery pieces, against the German line at Serre-Montauban, scheduled for July 24, 1916, had to be postponed until the morning of the 29th. He comments that torrential rain caused this delay -- which lacked any special significance. The following deposition, dictated by, read over, and then signed by Dr. Yu Tsun, former teacher of English at the Tsingtao Hochschule, casts unsuspected light upon this event. The first two pages are missing. (89)

Yu Tsun's text is also annotated by the authorities; when Tsun recalls a murder carried out by Madden, a footnote states, "A malicious and outlandish statement," recounting how Madden acted in self-defense. Many of Borges' stories have such literary constructs, even when not explicitly stated. Examples of these abound in literature, so perhaps too much weight should not be placed upon Borges as its trailblazer. There is Nabokov's Lolita, a book "written" by Humbert Humbert, introduced by the authorities that have arrested him; Gulliver's Travels is prefaced by a letter from Gulliver to his cousin, in which he remarks upon the editorial process involved in printing his travel journal; Lord of the Rings is supposedly a chronicle set down in the Red Book by Frodo. The method of Borges' literary constructs are similar, but often of greater subtlety. "The Library of Babel" ends with a footnote written by the narrator or another Librarian, which refers to yet another Librarian, Letizia Alvarez de Toledo, whose theories on the Library are expounded.
If the basis for such structures does not come from Borges, his influence is to be seen in the fictional introduction of The Name of the Rose ("Naturally, a manuscript"). This presents the text's very origin and validity as objects of mystery. The text as presented to us is the translation (let us say, out of convenience, that this introduction is narrated by ECO) of an nineteenth-century book, Abbé Vallet's "Le Manuscrit de Dom Adsom de Melk, traduit en français d'apres l'édition de Dom J. Mabillon (Aux Presses de l'Abbaye de la Source, Paris, 1842)," which in turn translated an eighteenth-century edition by Dom Mabillon, which claimed to reproduce the original fourteenth-century text. Thus we read what Eco "is saying what Vallet said that Mabillon said that Adso said," (512) or, as ECO writes, "my Italian version of an obscure, neo-gothic French version of a seventeenth-century Latin edition of a work written in Latin by a German monk toward the end of the fourteenth-century." (4) Fairly confusing stuff.
ECO decides to research the text, but finds no trace of the manuscript at Melk. Continuing his search, with the bibliographic information of the Mabillon edition in hand, the copy he finds at the Bibliotheque Sainte Genevieve contains no mention of Adso of Melk, with the date of publication and publisher's name also differing. ECO continues his search at Abbaye de la Source, but "no Abbé Vallet had published books on the abbey's presses (for that matter, nonexistent)." (3) ECO is stumped, and decides the work is a forgery.
ECO finds another clue, after some years, in a Buenos Aires bookshop, where he discovers an Italian translation of a work by Milo Temesvar, On the Use of Mirrors in the Game of Chess, originally in Georgian, which quotes extensively from Adso's manuscript, attributing the source as Jesuit Father Athanasius Kircher. However, ECO has a Kircher scholar confirm that no such commentary exists. ECO concludes that Adso's "memoirs appropriately share the nature of the events he narrates: shrouded in many, shadowy mysteries." (3)
An analysis of "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" will show its influence upon Eco's introduction. This story begins when the narrator's friend, Bioy Casares, casually quotes a heresiarch of Uqbar. Bioy recalled that this information came from the Anglo-American Cyclopedia, "a literal if inadequate reprint of the 1902 Encyclopedia Britannica." (17) When the two check an edition that happens to be around, however, they find no mention of Uqbar. Back at home, Bioy checks his edition, which does indeed have a listing on Uqbar, as he remembered. The editions are identical save the final pages, which described Uqbar, a country of unknown location, somewhere in Asia Minor. Two years later, the narrator acquires volume XI of the Encyclopedia of Tlön, "a substantial fragment of the complete history of an unknown planet [including Uqbar], with its architecture and its playing cards, its mythological terrors and the sound of its dialects" (21) and so on. The narrator discovers that a massive secret network of artists, engineers, mathematicians, and such had collaborated in creating a wholly imaginary world.
These descriptions speak for themselves; the unique copies of books, the references to chess and mirrors (both of which figure strongly in Borges' stories), and the clue in Buenos Aires, where Borges spent most of his life, all affirm the Argentine's influence in this regard.
Labyrinths are another trademark symbol of Borges. To summarize, "The Library of Babel" is most closely tied to Eco's big questions of order in the universe. Eco has said in interview, "I am no Renaissance man. Every single thing I've done comes down to the same thing: the study of the mechanism by which we give meaning to the world around us." Such study is clearly a common theme in Borges. Eco has borrowed many trappings of "The Secret Miracle," including the blind librarian and Kabbala. "The Garden of Forking Paths" is Eco's precedent for a postmodern detective story with a conspicuous literary frame. There is also its great symbol of the book as labyrinth, which seems to have influenced Eco. "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" sets the tone for Eco's introduction, which questions the validity of Adso's text itself. There is the intentional distancing of the reader, the commentary on information saturation. There is, finally, a rugged complexity of prose that simply did not exist before Borges. This is not to say his prose is more difficult, or even containing less allusions, than Shakespeare's. Rather, it is a constant interplay of ideas, a collection of story synopses that work better than novels ever could. Ideas are thrown away in Borges as quickly as they arrive. A difficult notion to explain, but it is clear that Eco's prose mimics this.
Of final note, Eco's commentary in the Postscript should be briefly mentioned:

Everyone asks me why my Jorge, with his name, suggests Borges, and why Borges is so wicked. But I cannot say. I wanted a blind man who guarded a library (it seemed a good narrative idea to me), and library plus blind man can only equal Borges, also because debts must be paid. And, further, it was through Spanish commentaries and illuminations that the Apocalypse influenced the entire Middle Ages. But when I put Jorge in the library I did not yet know he was the murderer. (515)

Clearly, Jorge is a character of great complexity, embodying many ideas and references, Borges being only one, if the most predominant. Eco speaks of debts to be paid, which the present study has attempted to catalogue.

Works Cited

Borges, Jorge Luis. Collected Fictions (New York: Viking, 1999).

"Lighthearted Heavyweight," Newsweek, November 13, 1989.

"A Rose by Any Other Name," Guardian Weekly, January 16, 1994.

"Superstar Professor," Newsweek, September 29, 1986.

Parenthetical references are to:

Borges, Jorge Luis. Ficciones (New York: Grove Press, 1962).

Eco, Umberto. Name of the Rose (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1994).

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written by Erik Ketzan [email: moby@jhu.edu]
this article was published at themodernword.com

Rainer Maria Rilke

noreply@blogger.com (son of rambow) — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 18:17:00 +0000

Sixteen of twenty numbered sections from a piece composed by Rilke in 1898, when he was twenty-two, and never published in his lifetime.

I.
You must have seen them: these small towns and tiny villages of my homeland. They have learned one day by heart and they scream it out into the sunlight over and over again like great gray parrots. Near night though they grow preternaturally pensive. You can see it in the town squares, where they struggle to solve the dark question that hangs in the air. It is touching, and a little ludicrous, to the foreigner, because he knows without a second thought that if there is an answer—any answer at all—it certainly won’t come from the small towns and tiny villages of my homeland, try as sincerely as they might, poor things.

II.
When I think about little girls in the moment of turning into big girls (it is no slow timid development, but something strangely sudden), I always have to imagine an ocean behind them, or a grave eternal plain, or something else you don’t actually see with your eyes but can only sense, and that only in the deep and silent hours. Then I see the big girls as being exactly as big as I was used to the little childlike girls being small—and heaven above knows why, that’s just how I want to see them. There is a reason for everything. But the best things that happen, after all, are the ones that hide their deeper reason with both hands, whether out of modesty or because they don’t want to be betrayed.

III.
Even so: in the small towns and tiny villages of my homeland too the little girls turn into big girls overnight. I cannot prevent it, and I cannot pour out an ocean behind their backs after the fact, because that would mean that their younger brothers, who still eat their ten-o’clock bread and butter at school, would need to tell everyone when they got home: “The geography book is wrong. And our teacher lied. He told us the ocean starts way down at the bottom edge of the map of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. And now it’s here in the middle of the Kingdom of Bohemia—the ocean.” I know that the little smart alecks smile their superior smiles at such realizations. But their smiles about the ocean I’ve unexpectedly made in the middle of Bohemia are not nearly as bright as the joy with which they imperiously tell themselves, faced with bare floorboards or furrowed fields: That is the ocean. So I’d rather leave creation to them, these little almighties, and content myself with the fact that behind the girls I’m thinking of there really and truly is a plain.

VI.
These girls of mine do not find, nor do they seek. They cannot remember ever once having sought. They know only darkly about various discoveries that belong to the time before they grew up. Whatever surprised them back then and nestled into their shy little brown hands, or into their much shyer hearts, they stored up, all these years, be it a curved brooch or a lost word. People love to brood about things: whom the things served, and why. Whenever I made such a discovery, I always felt like an heir coming to power after an unknown king. And out of this experience comes my conviction that these girls are the rightful heiresses of the bygone women who wore beautiful, heavy crowns.

VII.
With boys, growing up means coming-of-age. Big girls, though, are much less “of age” than little ones. You kiss the little ones often and openly; you want to kiss the big ones in secret. That is a difference, and surely one of the strangest. The boys grow up into their manhood so sturdily and steadily; all of a sudden it fits them, you don’t know how. The girls let go of their children’s dresses suddenly and stand there, timid and freezing, at the start of a wholly different life, where the words and the coins they are used to are no longer valid currency. They develop regularly and calmly only up to the threshold of their maturity. Then the clocks go haywire. Sometimes a day is like nothing at all and then right on its heels comes a night that is like . . . a thousand days.

VIII.
Old people from the country talk about how, in the good old days that they call theirs, young girls went to their distaffs in the long afternoons of autumn. In the big hospitable living room where all their friends would gather together, on their very best behavior, they sat contemplatively in a circle, and the early fire, cozily stretched out on the imposing wood in the covered tiled fireplace, often did their talking for them. A smell of fine white linen, homemade raisin cookies (from a secret recipe), and hot crackling pine resin, all mixed together, solicitously diffused around my kindhearted old Aunt Zdeni, would probably be able to bring back to this wonderful ancient woman’s mind some of what she felt forty-five years before in this same suggestive environment. But we have not the means to draw forth this wondrous scent from its censer, and my kindhearted Aunt Zdeni assures me that everything beautiful she brooded about back then must be safe in the threads of the white fabric she keeps stored all year long, untouched, in the dull mahogany wardrobe; since it was not to be found in her own long life, it must have stayed in the tablecloths, she says.

IX.
That’s how it always is. People would sooner weave their dreams deep into the linens than let them grow up next to them into a life without enough sun for them to ripen. When you near your end, you leave your dreams behind in small and seemingly worthless, old-fashioned things, which betray no secrets before they perish in turn. And not because they keep quiet, but because they sing their sentimental songs in a language which no one left alive can understand, for which there is no dictionary and no teacher. So even the ivory-inlaid spinning wheel of my virtuous ancestor Josepha Christin von Goldberg does a poor job of helping me understand the girls matured at the distaffs in the small towns and tiny villages of my homeland.

XII.
In books there are recorded the fortunes of those who were especially happy or unhappy, especially holy or hateful in their hearts. Then there are episodes from the life of each one: hopes and revelations, secrets and swoonings, ordered according to the alphabet of age and experience. They talk in those books either about girls in the country or girls in the city, or maybe about an only daughter taken out of one setting and placed into the other. They describe either a girl nothing happens to or a girl everything happens to, but they have a special predilection for cases where both take place, one after the other—this is felt to be particularly thrilling and educational and is now customary in novels and with anyone who deals with manufactured stories, events, and destinies.

XIII.
You cannot hold anything against this calm and tranquil occupation: the story of Zoroaster, that of Plato, that of Jesus Christ and Columbus and Leonardo and Napoleon and many more, did need to get written. In other words, these stories wrote themselves, so to speak. Every one of this cast of characters etched a furrow in the great gray brain of the earth, and we all carry a miniature reproduction of this archetypal brain within us, like a pocket watch or the small round pill of a compass that shows where the sun rises over a worthy citizen’s belly. Later the stories of rare women came into existence; but here a little assistance was necessary, and a logic and a mnemotechnic were invented for the geocentric primary brain that even the historians of today are still proud of. In our most recent century, which has almost died away now, people worked more and more on the paysage intime—they wanted to tell the story of the nameless individuals. Someone finally seemed to notice that battles don’t only take place at Thermopylae or Hastings or Austerlitz, sometimes the battlefield is called Fear or Desire or Ingratitude; that not every discovery is of America; that not every invention has to arrive at gunpowder or the steam engine or the airship in order to be meaningful and, in a certain sense, fruitful. And so it has become the norm to present not true, authenticated heroes, but plausible, authentic-seeming heroes. To this end they have spent the last few decades ripping apart the heroes of the past and the usable contemporaries and putting together new, ever new possibilities from the unrecognizable pieces. These possibilities are supposed to come across as interesting or singular human beings, at least when you look at them in the right light, from a certain angle. And people keep making these attempts, incessantly, keep manufacturing modern legitimacies that make the old measures seem moderate; they’re very happy when one of these specimens, after they attach its head not to its torso but to its right toe, clings to life for a while. That’s how people become clever. In other words, they lay in a collection of more or less serious experiences and then have to rent an extra room to hold all the fruits of their vigorous, diligent research. When you look at it this way, of course, the rare types and unexpected nuances count most heavily. And it may indeed be that mature human beings, standing in sharp contrast to their surroundings, do experience strange things, and in the strangest way too. It is said that their “fate” is of the greatest interest, and two things are meant by this word: that which strikes them from without, and their actions and reactions when faced with these blows and impressions.

XIV.
If I were to put together one figure from my many girls and from fragments of Joan of Arc, Charlotte Corday, and Anna Katharina Emmerich—just to touch on one possible combination—then I too could sing the praises of a heroine who would be happily and hospitably welcomed into the houses of the small towns if she were willing to stoop so low. But I see my girls getting scared. They are afraid I will haul them across all the abysses to each other, and will want this from one and that from another and everything from none of them; they are scared of being left behind as half-requited lovers with half of what they possess in their disappointed hands, like white roses a storm has moved through with its broad, merciless, terrifying shoulders.

XV.
And then I see, in their faces and figures, hundreds and hundreds of apprehensions. Clear and dark, dreaming and waking, renouncing and desiring fears press in on me or flee in fright from my glance to somewhere undefined. Then I know that I mustn’t cram ten or twenty girls together into one heroine. Instead I need to take one, think about her, and spread her out across the thousand sisters who are always with her. Only when I speak of a thousand girls will I seem to know something private and tender about one; only when their countless voices unite will even the saddest one and the one farthest away feel a breath of that high song that has no equal.

XVI.
Fra Angelico, in his great frescoes of severe solitary figures, expressed the aspiration to heaven simply and beautifully in every one. But on the many, many God-breathing faces of the angels in the Last Judgment, heaven itself has its place with all its serenity and sovereignty and song. These faces are the many-colored mosaic of heaven’s power, and there is no other picture of heaven that could be as great and rich and gripping.

XVII.
There have been many women. Tired like blonde Maria, bad like Perchta von Rosenberg who softly paces through the castles of Bohemia with death behind her, good like Elisabeth of Hungary, the lovely landgravine of Thuringia, whose trepidation called forth roses from her bread. And then the many mothers. But were there girls before my girls? You cannot find the traces of feet like theirs on any path. In vain would you seek the faintest footprint in all the sand in the world. It is like the mark on the cheek of a child who has slept on his little hand. Tiny hollows are left on the path, like those left under the weight of a caress—behind the girls; in front of them all is smooth and empty. So maybe they are the first, or did those before them always walk across the fields, or across dark, fragrant mosses, or on water across the sea?

XVIII.
Someone insists: There are no footprints to be found on a sidewalk’s pavement either. To that I reply: There are not many paved sidewalks in these small towns yet. Certainly the street itself, where the vehicles go, is almost everywhere still a river of dust, from which you escape to the firmer roadsides. But my girls stride straight down the middle of the street, wherever they can feel the most sky above them, and they walk through the whole town on little white clouds. With no whence behind them, so without any whither. Just walking. Maybe so that they won’t hear the tides of their blood surge so loud. Walking in the tentative rhythm of this secret inner beat of the surf. They are the silent shore of their restless infinity. They never find the same pace. They bump into each other as though blown by a host of inimical winds. Wave in different directions. Turn the corner, hesitating, when the wind tears words from their lips which they didn’t yet intend. Come back the same way, and wander back and forth again and again between two streets. Like someone waiting. Always finish their roaming around within fifteen minutes. Instead of venturing out into time like a white procession with a fiery foreign flag.

XIX.
Go walk behind them. Your gaze will involuntarily lower; their bright clothes are blinding. Your eye will fall, with wings half singed off, onto the road, which lies spread out and wide like an open book. In its pages, bygone carriages have laid down their lines. And that is good. For the steps of the girls can’t write straight. Many lines of writings run alongside the furrows. Up and down. As if someone had written them at night, or like the letters of the blind. Still, with a little effort and practice, you can tell that these are nothing less than long poems, improvisations, through which, waxing and waning, runs a strange rhythm. The same rhyme-words return again and again. As if pleading. You find the same ones waiting at every door. They are moving, simple words; lutes with only a single string. A silver string, you think—and its note can bring you all the way into a dream.

XX.
When these girls of mine wander and roam, their souls slowly sway like rowboats tied to an unsteady shore. —For their souls are gondolas of gold, laden with impatience. They are completely draped with old, soft, silken fabrics, so that dusk is eternally falling within them. The girls love this sweet-smelling darkness with its lovely inexhausted possibilities. They live in it. On rare occasions, when the folds of the curtain stir, the light scratches them. And then for a moment they stare, astonished, at a corner of the room or a garden where it is just evening. They are quietly terrified that room and garden and evening exist, and they lift the fear of these many things into the silken darkness of their lives and fold their hands over it. Thus are their prayers.

—Translated from German by Damion Searls

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source: The Paris Review

Cormac McCarthy: “God Is A Little Boy, And Also Trout”

noreply@blogger.com (son of rambow) — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 01:05:00 +0000

I’ve just finished reading Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, which set everyone’s hair on fire.

As an example of style, it works; the book is criss-crossed by references to ash and the aftermath of fire, and despite the single-mindedness of the landscape, and the microscopic focus on the father and the son, the minimalism is a triumph. Literally, there is less to do in the postapocalyptic world than there was in the world of cowboys, and this is a help to McCarthy, who otherwise tends to spend a long time on the insignificant everydayness of craft. For example, he will describe how a horse is saddled, or how a cowboy will secure a gate.

The Road is a Christian parable; that is its most important quality, and its downfall.

Another Christian parable is a waste of time; it would be more worthwhile just to re-read the Bible. If anything, the patent religiosity of the text made me realize for the first time that the “larder” scene in novels of scarcity (a more profane example being The Ginger Man) is actually a scene of communion, and sometimes also a scene of baptism, if there is an abundance of clean water.

Earlier this month, I watched Eastern Promises, which had a terrific baptism in it. I won’t be hungry for another baptism for at least six months.

Anyhow, the father and the son nearly starve to death. The moment they began to starve, I began to wait for the scene where they would find a tearjerking superabundance of food. It’s on page 123: the dinner of canned pears.

Over the course of the novel, the father struggles to keep himself and his son alive. Increasingly, the son becomes distant, because he rejects his father’s creed of kinship. The son tries to give food away, first to a little boy, then to an embittered old man, and finally to a thief who attempts murder. Angrily, the father says you’re not the one who has to worry about everything, and the son says, I am the one. I think he did not add “I am the alpha and the omega” because the apocalypse destroyed most of the good courses in ancient Greek.

The wasteland is actually described as “secular.” In the final scene, when the boy is adopted by good people, the woman begins to speak to him about God. The Son, however, is too busy conversing with the Spirit of his departed Father. The woman reasons with him that the breath of God passes between people who converse thus.

The final paragraph of the book is about trout, who mazily puzzle the hours in deep, remembering, mysterious waters. It is not clear who is speaking, since the father is dead. To McCarthy, the deep pools are rumors of God. His editor should be reprimanded, or at least subjected to small practical jokes. McCarthy’s editor, I mean. Not God’s.

I don’t think I could have Cormac McCarthy over for dinner. It would get awkward. Nervously, I would talk too much, and he would spoon the candied yams without even looking at them.

I recommend watching the trailer for The Golden Compass. In my dreams, that polar bear fights Aslan. I’m mixed in among the crowd, my fist around a wad of bills, yelling Faster, pussycat! Kill, kill! [source]

Private Life of a Nation by Lee Eung-joon

noreply@blogger.com (eastern writer) — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 15:45:00 +0000

Novel Portrays Chaos of Unified Korea

“Private Life of a Nation”
by Lee Eung-joon;
Minumsa: 261 pp., 11,000 won

Any Korean might imagine the reunification of the Korean Peninsula ― some may be longing for it while others dislike it.

A new novel ``Private Life of a Nation'' written by author Lee Eung-joon portrays the dark reality of reunification through his fictional characters.

The author spent three years studying North Korean defectors and read about 300 books related to North Korea.

The novel is a combination of various genres such as noir, thriller, black comedy, fable and melodrama and vividly depicts North Koreans who fail to adapt themselves to the new capitalist society stricken with drugs, sex and crime.

But at the same time, the book intensively deals with the matter of identification among Koreans after reunification from a ``private'' perspective rather than a political one.

The story is set in Seoul in 2016, five years after the two Koreas are unified. After North Korea was absorbed by the South in 2011, the North Korean army of 1.2 million soldiers was dismantled by the unified government. An enormous amount of conventional weapons were lost, creating social disorder and the forcibly discharged soldiers must seek new jobs.

The North still remains barren without any decent social infrastructure, driving North Koreans into the South to search for a decent life. Some of them become social ragtags or gangsters in South.

In the novel, the unified Korea is mixed with confusion and conflict between North and South Koreans. Such chaos is fused in an organized gangster syndicate that consists of North Koreans, former central figures in the North Korean army who have failed to adapt themselves to the new society.

The story unfolds with a mysterious murder in the crime syndicate known as ``Daedong River.'' Lee Gang, a former North Korean soldier, is the charismatic second man for the crime syndicate.

During a trip to Pyongyang, one of his colleagues is murdered. As Lee looks into the case, he gets entangled in a complicated scheme.

The story is full of the vivid portrayals of cruel and relentless crime scenes strongly reminiscent of a film noir.

Through the character of Lee Gang, the author tries to elaborate his vision about the collapse of a heroic North Korean warrior who dabbles in drugs and crime to sooth his sense of futility after reunification.

The protagonist is described as a sympathetic figure suffering strong oppressive feelings, and wanting to shoot himself on the street if he had a gun. The author also draws him as a man who is living, but has ``already died,'' which indicates his lost identity.

The story shows not only Lee's desperation but also the miserable lives of other North Koreans. The daughter of a former North Korean high-ranking military officer works as a prostitute, while an ex-North Korean announcer hangs herself and North Korean teachers are driven out of schools. Also, more than 60 slums housing North Koreans sprout up across the nation.

The story also reveals South Korean society's ills such as the strong obsession for real estate, showing many South Koreans claiming ancestors' rights before the Korean War over North Korean land.

``The South Korean-style capitalism is real estate. Look at what these villains are doing now after going far above the cease-fire line. They are going to build a church on the top of Mt. Myohyang and claim the rights to the waters of the Daedong River,'' the book says.

The unified Korea in the novel is apparently gloomy and chaotic particularly for North Koreans. The author shows how individuals are affected by a great change in history, which they cannot influence, and how they cope with this in their daily lives. [source: koreantimes]

The Character of Korean Literature

noreply@blogger.com (eastern writer) — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 15:40:00 +0000

Korean literature is usually divided chronologically into a classical and a modern period. But the basis for such a division is still being questioned. Great reforms swept Korea after the mid-19th century as its society actively absorbed Western things.

Korea's classical literature developed against the backdrop of traditional folk beliefs of the Korean people; it was also influenced by Taoism, Confucianism, and Buddhism. Among these, Buddhist influence held the greatest sway, followed by enormous influences from Confucianism - especially Song Confucianism - during the Choson period.

Modern literature of Korea, on the other hand, developed out of its contact with Western culture, following the course of modernization. Not only Christian thought, but also various artistic trends and influences were imported from the West. As the "New Education" and the "National Language and Literature Movement" developed, the Chinese writing system, which had traditionally represented the culture of the dominant class, lost the socio-cultural function it had previously enjoyed. At the same time, the Korean script, Han-gul was being used more and more frequently, resulting in the growth and development of Korean language and literature studies. With the advent of the "new novel" (shinsosol) came a surge in novels written in the Korean script. Music and classical poetry, formerly fused together in a kind of a song called ch'anggok, were now viewed as separate endeavors. New paths opened up for the new literature. While Korea was importing Western culture via Japan or China, it was also carrying out literary reforms from within.

Linguistic expression and manner of transmission are issues of utmost importance in the overall understanding of Korean literature. Korean literature extends over a broad territory: literature recorded in Chinese; and literature written in Han-gul. These two aspects of Korean literature greatly differ from each other in terms of their literary forms and character.

Korean literature in Chinese was created when Chinese characters were brought to Korea. Because Chinese characters are a Chinese invention, there have been times in Korea's history when efforts were made to exclude literature written in Chinese from the parameters of what constitutes Korean literature. But in the Koryo and Choson cultures, Chinese letters were central to Koreans' daily lives. We also cannot overlook the fact that the literary activity of the dominant class was conducted in Chinese. While Chinese-centered ideas and values are contained in this literature - a feature shared by most of East Asia during this period - they also contain experiences and thought patterns that express the unique way of life of the Korean people.

The use of the Korean script began during the Choson period with the creation of the Korean alphabet (Hunmin Chong-um). The creation of the Korean alphabet in the 15th century was a crucial turning point in Korea's literary history. Compared with the literature written in Chinese which was dominated by the upper classes, Korean script made possible the broadening of the literary field to include women and commoners. This expanded the social base of Korean writers and readers alike. The Korean script (Han-gul) assumed its place of leading importance in Korean literature only during the latter half of the 19th century. After the Enlightenment period, the use of Chinese letters swiftly declined and the popularity of Korean letters greatly increased. As soon as the linguistic duality of "Chinese" and "Native" within Korean life was overcome, literature in the Korean script became the foundation upon which the national literature developed. [source: www.asianinfo.org]

The Nobel Prize for Literature: A Slightly Irreverent FAQ

noreply@blogger.com (son of rambow) — Sun, 22 Nov 2009 15:47:00 +0000

What is it?

The Nobel Prize for Literature is one of 5 annual prizes awarded since 1901 according to the last will of industrialist Alfred Nobel (1833-1896), also known for inventing dynamite. (The others are chemistry, medicine, physics and peace; the Swedish National Bank invented an economics prize "in memory of Alfred Nobel" that sort of piggybacks on the others.) The money (currently about 10 million SEK or US$1.5 million) comes from Nobel’s will. Yes, still. Nobody ever lost money by inventing good ways of destroying things.

It's not awarded for any one piece of literature but for an author's collected works.

For some reason, it’s considered one of the most important literary awards. This is not an official title in any way.

Who gets it?

Well, first you have to be nominated. Here’s a list of who is allowed to nominate; basically, lots of people from all over the world. About 350 writers are nominated each year, including great and well-known novelists, poets you’ve never heard of, a couple of non-fiction writers, and Bob Dylan. The list of nominations, and the decision-making process itself, is confidential for 50 years. The Academy has no obligation to take all nominations seriously, there is no official short list, and all but 18 of the people doing the nominations have no say whatsoever in who gets it. In other words, being nominated is a bit like buying a lottery ticket; you can't win without it, but your chances are still pretty slim.

So who gets it?

The winner of the Literature prize is, in keeping with Nobel's will, chosen by the Swedish Academy, an organisation founded in 1786 to “further the purity, strength, and sublimity of the Swedish language,” which mostly means publishing dictionaries and critical studies of 19th century literature. In other words, the Nobel is a comparatively new hobby for them. The Swedish Academy has 18 members (on paper, see below), mostly writers and literature scholars, each of whom is elected for life by the other members.

Note that each of the Nobel prizes (literature, chemistry, medicine, physics and peace) is decided by a different organisation. Who gets the Literature prize doesn't (or at least shouldn’t) have anything to do with who gets the other ones, and vice versa.

Right, so stop waffling, who gets it?

"The person who has produced in the field of literature the most outstanding work of an idealistic tendency."

…What the hell does that mean?

See, that's the thing: nobody really knows. That's what Nobel wrote in his will, and it’s up to the Swedish Academy to decide what he meant. The interpretation has changed several times over the last 100+ years.

Fine, fine. Who’s gotten it?

These guys. (And occasional gal.)

Doesn’t it only go to authors nobody’s ever heard of?

It’s rarely awarded to the latest best-sellers, yes, and the Academy has a well-earned reputation for not picking the most obvious choices. It’s not intended to reflect popular taste.

Personally, I’d submit that if you’ve never heard of the likes of Steinbeck, Hemingway, Faulkner, Camus, Solzhenitsyn… or to take some of the more recent ones, Pamuk, Lessing, Pinter… are you sure you’re as interested in literature as you think you are, if these names are completely unfamiliar to you? And if they really do pick someone you’ve never heard of, hey, now you’ve heard of him/her. You have gained knowledge. Is this a bad thing?

Also, I’ve never heard of the guy who won the Nobel Prize for medicine last year. Boo! Hiss! Elitists! Give it to the guy who plays House!

Why isn't Author X on the shortlist?

As previously mentioned, there is no shortlist. Ladbroke's have no more idea than you or me who's actually being discussed.

Why didn’t/doesn’t Author X get it?

A lot of people claim to know exactly why certain authors get or don’t get the prize. Which is funny, considering the aforementioned confidentiality. Truth is, until 50 years have gone by, we usually have no way of knowing if they were even nominated.

Pick a reason:

* There’s one award to give out each year, and on average, more than one deserving author. New books are published each year. Do the math.
* The people who decide on it are a bunch of literary snobs. They’re not necessarily politically conservative (by US standards) or raging communist revolutionaries (by European standards). They’re just snobs, elected by other snobs for the specific task of being anal about language and literature.
* See above re: changing interpretations of Nobel's will. Tolstoy was considered too radical, for instance.
* Not everyone is a prophet in their own lifetime. See: Kafka, Franz; Proust, Marcel; and others.
* People, on a whole, read an awful lot of crap and keep expecting the Academy to validate their reading habits. Not gonna happen (see above under snobs, literary).
* The Academy has really boring taste sometimes. Fortunately, the older members are dying off.
* People like to speculate, and they seem to think that the longer they speculate about an author, the better his/her chances of getting it. Whether the Academy gives a damn about how often a certain author has been mentioned by people who are not them is unknown.
* Authors die. The Nobel can’t be given out posthumously. Good thing, or they’d have to start with Homer and Gilgamesh.
* Authors live. Not getting it one year doesn’t disqualify you from getting it next year or 20 years from now. See: Lessing, Doris.

And so some writers, for various reasons, end up without a Nobel prize. Funnily enough, we keep reading them despite their non-Nobel status. Putting it succinctly: if Tolstoy, Woolf, Joyce and Twain didn’t get it, there can be no shame in NOT getting a Nobel prize.

It only goes to Scandinavian authors.

Except for how not one Scandinavian author has gotten it since 1974. And only 14 before then. Which is still more than the total number of African and Asian (or for that matter, female) winners, true.

Why do they hate America?

So far, 11% of the winners have been from the US. Not too shabby for an international award. Feel free to compare it to the international spread of the Oscars.

But they said no American writer would ever get it!

They said no such thing. The former secretary of the Academy said that American literature as a whole was "insular" and "ignorant" regarding non-US literature, but that there is "powerful literature in all big cultures." (He's said similar things about literature in other countries too; see above re: snob, literary.) Stupid, perhaps, but that's what he said. A hundred angry US bloggers concluded the rest, then to prove him wrong, promptly responded to Le Clézio getting it with "Le who?"

Half the Academy quit in protest of Jelinek getting it!

One (1) member, Knut Ahnlund, quit. A year later. And he’d already quit the Academy ten years earlier and hadn’t taken part in its work since then (see above under life, elected for). At this point, it's a bit like George Lazenby announcing that he's leaving the James Bond franchise.

For the record, the other two vacant seats are Kerstin Ekman's (she, and two others, left the Academy in 1989 after they failed to condemn the fatwa against Rushdie as much as she wanted) and Sten Rudholm's (who died recently), bringing the total number of active members in this year's Nobel discussion to 15.

Everybody knows that it's just political.

Do they now? Well, it's apparently supposed to go to authors who deal with idea(l)s. Those tend to touch upon political subjects. And again, Tolstoy didn't get it because he was considered too politically controversial – does that seem right to you?

Shouldn’t we have a say in this?

Not unless you’re willing to contest Nobel’s will in a court of law, no. It's private money, handed out by a non-government organisation. It's really none of our business what they do with it.

Why should we care, then?

I don’t know. Who said you should? If you don't, don't.

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this article posted at World Literature Forum

The Gargoyle: a Debutant Novel by Andrew Davidson

noreply@blogger.com (son of rambow) — Sun, 22 Nov 2009 15:37:00 +0000

Book Title: The Gargoyle
Author: Andrew Davidson
Translators (Indonesian Version): Ary Nilandary
Publisher: Publisher Kantera
ISBN: 978-979-1924-01-6
Prints: I, June 2009
Thickness: 605 pp
Price: $ 89,900
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A Porn Star who was at the peak of his career in the traffic accident, his car into a ravine and caught fire. Fortunately, though tepanggang with his car and the fire burns the skin, flesh, to penetrate into the bone and tendons, his life was saved.

Once past the critical period and a coma for two months, she finally realized. But he must suffer the consequences of burns all over his body. Handsome face and athletic body that is the main capital as a pornographic film actor has gone, replaced with a broken face, and full body permanent scars that can not be lost. In addition to losing several fingers and toes, he also he must be willing to lose the penis kebanggaanya burned down. The doctor who saved his life had successfully defended his penis that resembles crispy charred burnt wick.

All this makes her self-esteem destroyed. His career as an actor and producer of pornographic films already finished. Therefore when he went through a variety of remedies and various therapies a painful operation, he secretly planned to commit suicide after discharge from hospital.

Amid the push to end his life that came a woman named Marianne Engel, a sculptor Gargoyle (yg monster statues usually serves as a gutter in old buildings) which was then being treated in the same hospital suffering from schizofernia. The woman claimed to have known him since seven hundred years ago. He approached the man and said: "You've burned again."

During his hospitalization Mariana Engel frequently visited and little by little to tell their love story in the past. He revealed that they actually have to live within the bonds of love for hundreds of years ago. In his past life, in the 14 th century, Mariana Engel was a nun in charge of copying and translating books on skiptorium monastery Engethal, while the actor porn is a mercenary. They met when the man who was wounded and burned by flaming arrows stuck in his body was brought by his friend to the monastery Engethal for treatment.

Just like in his past life, Mariana Engel is now caring for the man to recover. All fees are borne and hospitals from the hospital after he took the man to stay at his house. As long as they live together, Mariana Engel keep telling their experiences in life through his past. He also tells the tale of love a beautiful, inspiring, and full of sacrifice on the man.

In his past life, Marianne Engel had almost terengut his life to save the man. But in the midst of sakratul death he was given the opportunity to live with a condition. He was given a heart that must be thousands of distributed until they run out, while the final heart must be given to his girlfriend in his life later on.

In her life now, Mariana Engel gave a heart-heart on gargoyle statues are doing. Hundreds of statues have been done and now its time has almost run out, to whom he would give his last heart?

Through their love story in the past, and five tales of love that inspires the diuturkan by Marianne Engel, makes him get back the spirit of his life. Intention to commit suicide had vanished. Marianne Engel sacrifice the lives of both his past and present who care and who have been receiving disability itself is what makes a man caught in the vortex flow of love.

Is Marianne Engel and the man actually had lived for seven hundred years? Is this crazy fantasy that Marianne had been treated for his schizofernia? These questions that may arise in the mind of the reader for reading a compelling novel is stout. It seems the author deliberately did not provide clear explanation on this and let it be a mystery and gives freedom for the reader to interpret and develop their own imagination.

By engaging writer invites readers to travel through time, moving from mid-century and contemporary. Visiting various nergara such as Germany, Japan, Italy, Iceland, England, and the most interesting is the way to Hell as depicted in Dante Alighieri Inferno.
This novel combines the story of sacrificial love with this piece of history, philosophy, and the nun's life complete with skiptoriumnya. Then mentioned also about the history of reproductive Bible in German, the history of publishing and translation of the monumental work of Divine Comedy - Dante Alighieri.

All this proves that the novel is done with a very deep research. Some medieval characters and several accompanying events really exist and happen. In addition readers also get a bonus of knowledge about burns and medical treatment. Various materials makes this novel great potential to broaden his audience.

The author also expertly turn the hero characters in this novel interesting. Both Marianne Engel and the man received the same portion in the depth of character. With patience and detail the author describes the background of these two characters from childhood until now complete with the inner struggles they face. All this makes the reader get the full picture about the characters and the story built in this novel.

Manifold aspects of the material, stories, and time leaps from past to present the reader must of course make a little more concentration in reading this novel, not to mention plus inserts some tale of true love which is spoken by Mariana Engel on the man. Fortunately the displacement of time, setting, and presented with a neat story that the reader aware of the story time and where they're located.

Powerful love story, this piece of medieval history, the characters interesting characters, and elements of the medical treatment of burns in this novel are mixed in such a way that presents an interesting story and it's hard to forget. No wonder if Andrew Davidson's first novel was immediately successful when first published in 2007. In addition to the Fist won the 2008 Fiction Award, this novel is also included in several best-seller lists such as the New York Times Best Seller, Publishers Weekly Best Seller, the Canadian Best Seller, etc.. Will this novel successful in Indonesia?

A very good translation, an attractive cover and a vigorous campaign of course required for this novel can also be read by lovers of literature and a best seller in Indonesia. Andrew Davidson's name may still seem strange to hear fiction novel lovers in Indonesia therefore very unfortunate on the translation issue not included any information about the author.

About the Author

Andrew Davidson (born 12 April 1969) is a Canadian-born author graduated from the University of British Columbia jusrusan English literature, he has lived in Japan and worked as a teacher and author of Home lessons for Japanese Web sites. The Gargoyle is the first novel written in-depth research for seven years. The novel was first published in America by publisher Doubleday in 2007, then followed by Random House in Canada, Canongate in the UK, Text in Australia, etc, Davidson now lives in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada.

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reviewed by H Tanzil
visit his book blog at http://bukuygkubaca.blogspot.com

Nietzsche, Heidegger, and the Affirmation of Being

noreply@blogger.com (son of rambow) — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 00:50:00 +0000

Why is there something and not rather nothing? Or, as Heidegger posed the question more precisely in his lecture Existence and Being, “Why is there any being at all and not rather Nothing?” (221). In fact, Heidegger grants this question as the “basic question of metaphysics”. This question is not one that is merely conceptually asked and that can be merely conceptually answered. It is a question that is not merely posed through language, but it finds its roots in our personal and existential experience of this Nothingness. In other words, this question can only be asked because it is first existentially experienced.

It is this abyss that we are able to come existentially face to face with. The Nothingness that constantly stands before us in our being is what allows us to face the uncanny experience of existence. This “Nothingness” is a constant theme and impetus for Nietzsche’s emphatic affirmation of life throughout his work. It is also this “non-being” that is central to Heidegger’s undertaking of a “fundamental ontology” in Being and Time.

The primary focus of this essay will be the shattering topic of “Nothingness”, and will approach the astounding points of convergence on this subject from the work of Heidegger and Nietzsche; especially focusing on Nietzsche’s notion of “The Eternal Recurrence of the Same” and the affirmation of existence found therein. To use the term of the neo-orthodox theologian Rudolph Bultmann, there will be an attempt to “de-mythologize” Nietzsche’s Eternal Recurrence in order to better link it with the work of Heidegger as found primarily in Being and Time.

Part I: De-mythologizing Nietzsche’s “Eternal Recurrence”

The doctrine of Nietzsche’s Eternal Recurrence is exactly what the title would suggest. Nietzsche claims, “Everything becomes and recurs eternally—escape is impossible!” (545). That is, this exact life, as it is experienced now, will eternally recur with exactly the same events as are experienced. No event of this life will be altered in the ‘next life’ but will happen precisely as they have happened in this life. In a modern and scientific age, it is difficult to take this doctrine into literal account with a high degree of serious consideration. In a world in which the influence of scientific investigation is so heavily relied upon, we simply do not accept this doctrine that our lives somehow “eternally recur”. But, is this the primary intention of the doctrine—to convince us that our lives carry on through eternal repetition? Of course the answer is no. The thoughtful reader may find in this doctrine a meaning that is ever so applicable to the modern scientific man, and perhaps all the more applicable because of this rigid scientific culture.

Nietzsche exclaims the emphatic reinforcement of his doctrine of “eternal recurrence” in this bold passage:

A certain emperor always bore in mind the transitoriness of all things so as not to take them too seriously and to live at peace among them. To me, on the contrary, everything seems far too valuable to be so fleeting: I seek an eternity for everything: ought one to pour the most precious salves and wines into the sea?—My consolation is that everything that has been is eternal: the sea will cast it up again (548).

This passage, at first glance, would seem to carry with it mythological connotations. Nietzsche speaks of ‘seeking an eternity for everything’. He claims that he is ‘consoled’ by this notion of eternality. But, if this is what is focused on as the fundamental meaning of the passage, we have failed to see Nietzsche’s message of the affirmation of a meaningful existence.

Here we see Nietzsche’s address to the notion that the world is ephemeral. It seems as though it isn’t the affirmation of “things” that Nietzsche is looking for, but rather the affirmation of being; this life is the life that Nietzsche longs to celebrate and affirm. In so doing, everything in the world around us becomes precious, carrying its own light, and the temporality of the world is waylaid by our primordial experience of being.

The analogy that Nietzsche sets forth about the “salves and wines” being cast into the sea can be seen as an analogy of the preciousness of this life and its redemptive value. Nietzsche asks the question of whether or not to pour our “most precious salves and wines into the sea”. It is apparent that the answer is no but the next sentence is an extremely important one in uncovering the message that Nietzsche is conveying. He claims that everything is indeed eternal and that “the sea will cast it up again”. In other words, it is this life that offers us redemption for that which we have cast away ‘into the sea’. It is this life in which we are to appreciate all that is part of us, and this life that we are to treasure.

Later in Eternal Recurrence, Nietzsche seems to defend his doctrine further by saying:

This conception is not simply a mechanistic conception; for if it were that, it would not condition an infinite recurrence of identical cases, but a final state. Because the world has not reached this, mechanistic theory must be considered an imperfect and merely provisional hypothesis (549).

The notion of the “final state” is what Nietzsche is attempting to avoid and through this avoidance, he is affirming the possibilities that we all have the potential of realizing. The term “final state” seems to carry with it a nihilistic notion because it is a state of being where the world may go no further; there is no room for progression. Nietzsche adamantly and avidly despises this nihilism.

Focusing on whether or not Nietzsche’s notion of an “infinite recurrence of identical cases” ought to be taken literally is a matter of indifference in uncovering the underlying message in the doctrine. If life did indeed ‘literally’ repeat itself an infinite amount of times, would this not mean that we ought to attempt to live this life choosing the best of our possibilities? If we lived an infinitely repeatable life, and were cognizant of this infinite repeating, we surely would want to choose the best for ourselves so that we may live the ‘next life’ in the best manner possible.

The last section of the Eternal Recurrence writings suggests the most pronounced declaration of existence from Nietzsche. Nietzsche states:

This, my Dionysian world of the eternally self-creating, the eternally self-destroying…my “beyond good and evil”, without goal, unless the joy of the circle is itself a goal…do you want a name for this world? A solution for all its riddles? A light for you, too, you best-concealed, strongest, most intrepid, most midnightly men?—This world is the will to power—and nothing besides! And you yourselves are also this will to power—and nothing besides! (550).

This proclamation is a call to the progression of human existence, or what Nietzsche would call the ubermensch or overman. It is an assertion of life in the face of a nihilistic existence or in the face of Nothingness. Man, as we know him today, must be overcome. The somnambulistic state of man must be overcome through an emphatic affirmation of our existence in the face of Nothingness.

Here Nietzsche is going “beyond good and evil” without a “goal” or an end, unless, as he suggests, the “joy of the circle is itself a goal”. Again, it matters little whether or not this is a ‘literal circle’ because the true meaning would be veiled over by talk of its ‘literal’ significance or lack thereof. The “joy” is to be found here and now, in this life and in no other. The significance and meaning is to be established existentially here and now and not in the lofty—and often nihilistic—notion of a qualitatively better afterlife.

The question of ‘naming’ this world is a vital part of this passage. Nietzsche’s question implies the existentiality, and consequently the personal experience of this life, which cannot be summed up in a name. By saying that this world “is the will to power” Nietzsche has not applied a title to the world, but has made a statement of being and becoming. The conjugation of the verb “to be” in the form “is” shows us this assertion of being. The “will to power” is not a decisive act but is an existential event that must constantly be re-chosen and that is constantly in a movement of willing. It is a “willing” rather than some moment that has been willed. Our power must constantly be in a motion of willing.

Are we then to believe in a literally recurring life in order that we may fully participate in our being? Are we to believe that the only true appreciation of life comes from an understanding that it will eternally repeat itself just as it happens now? Certainly, we cannot be expected to believe this doctrine to be a literal account of the cycle of our lives. But rather, what we ought to gain from this ‘doctrine’ is the vital message of the affirmation of our existence. We existentially and individually experience the personal phenomena of death, or non-being, and this is ultimately what brings us a meaningful existence. That we exist at all must be seen as precious and worthy of our care.

Moreover, this allegory is not an attempt to offer some alternative to the notion of “heaven” that spawns from the Christian tradition. If understood literally, it certainly offers no promise of a ‘better life’ after this one. In fact, it would mean that every single detail of this life would be repeated over and over again which is certainly not an enticing or comforting thought for many. There is nothing qualitatively better about this than the traditional after life of heaven. Nietzsche rejected this notion of heaven as nihilistic because the focus on this life is undermined by a lofty vision of a better one. Why should we not better this life? By suggesting an eternally recurring life, Nietzsche has shown us that this life needs to be the focus of our energies, and it ought to be considered precious because our existence in this life is the only existence of ourselves that we can truly affirm.

Although this previous section is a rather rudimentary acknowledgement of Nietzsche’s prolific work, for the purposes of this essay it is safe to move forward to Heidegger’s notion of Being-towards-death and the significance it brings to life. To do so, we will focus primarily on Heidegger’s work as seen in Being in Time, and we may later compare this to Nietzsche’s “eternal recurrence of the same events”.

Part II: The Possibility of the Affirmation of Being in the Face of our Ownmost Death

Because Heidegger is dealing with what he deems a “fundamental ontology” in his work Being and Time, he has chosen to stray from the terms ‘human being’, ‘humanity’, etc. This is done in order that he may set forth a structurally sound ontological assessment of Being while not trapping the phenomena of Being under an inadequate title. “Dasein” is the term designated for ‘that being for which being is a concern’. Or more precisely, “Dasein” signifies, as literally translated from the German text, either “Being-here” or “Being-there”. Because of Dasein’s radical temporality, its Being-here is always its Being-there. In other words, we are constantly projected into the future and are called to choose from our ownmost possibilities of our future. Dasein is ‘here’ in its own ‘present time’, but Dasein is also ‘there’ because it is a “Being-towards-death”. We are existing—literally “standing out”—in a mode of being where we are able to come face to face with our ownmost death.

Each Dasein must face his own death. This death is a truly individuating factor of each Dasein. As Heidegger phrases it, “as a potentiality-for-Being, Dasein cannot outstrip the possibility of death. Death is the possibility of the absolute impossibility of Dasein” (294). Death is an event that Heidegger terms as “distinctly impending” for each Dasein. There are many things in the world that may be considered as impending upon our existence, but the distinctness of death is that Dasein cannot flee from it or have some other Dasein “die his death” for him.

It is in the face of our ownmost death that we are able to see our ownmost possibilities. “Being-towards-death”, when experienced as such, is what allows Dasein to realize his ownmost possibilities of his future, and resolutely choose his own authenticity. In the face of our ownmost death, we are then able to realize that we exist and that we can choose to exist authentically, and we are freed from the burdens of everyday modes of being. The anxiety that Dasein may experience through Being-towards-death is a moment when Dasein is brought out of his everyday existence, or brought out of what Heidegger calls the “they-self”. The “they” signifies everyone, yet no one in particular. Dasein is, for the most part, lost in the world of the “they” and is under the dictatorship of the “they”. “They say this and that”; this is precisely why Dasein is not its authentic self until it is called out of the “they” and into the anxiety of Being-towards-death.

Being-towards-death offers Dasein the possibility of being individuated from the dictates of the “they”. Heidegger states:

Anticipation reveals to Dasein its lostness in the they-self, and brings it face to face with the possibility of being itself, primarily unsupported by concernful solicitude, but of being itself, rather, in an impassioned freedom towards death (311).

Here we may see an emphatic affirmation of being in the face of Nothing. Heidegger states that this Being-towards-death is an “impassioned freedom”. It is the void of death which brings to us the potential of realizing the possibility of a full and authentic existence. By coming face to face with death, Dasein is able to see its lostness within the “they”, and is consequently able to freely choose his own authentic existence. This is a radical freedom that, for Heidegger, is not experienced daily and, in fact, may never be experience by some because many choose to flee from this anxious state of Being-towards-death. This is a radical realization of the utter freedom that each Dasein may become through the resolute choice in the face of his ownmost death.

Here too, as with Nietzsche, Heidegger phrases this phenomena using a statement of being. He states that Dasein is faced with the possibility of “being itself”. Because we are radically temporal, we are constantly “Being-towards-death”, and we are able to anxiously come face to face with this Nothingness and experience that we do indeed ex-ist. As the word “exist” etymologically denotes, we are literally “standing-out”. We are standing-out towards our ownmost possibilities for ourselves because we are also Being-towards-death.

Part III: The Synthesis of “Being-Towards-Death” and “Eternal Recurrence”

In Nietzsche’s Eternal Recurrence we have seen a bit of an enigmatic approach in the affirmation of being in the face of Nothingness. Nietzsche does not offer a structural approach, nor does he attempt to categorize this affirmation of existence under a set of names or titles. Rather, Nietzsche chooses to tell the story of the “eternal recurrence”. As previously stated in section two, whether or not Nietzsche intended this ‘doctrine’ to be taken literally as an explanation of the life cycle is irrelevant to the underlying meaning that he ostensibly intended to display. The liveliness of this work is found when we recognize Nietzsche’s call for the assertion of our existence in this life and no other.

Heidegger took a structural approach or what he called a “fundamental ontology” in Being and Time. Later, Heidegger criticized this title of a “fundamental ontology” in Existence and Being by saying, “this title, like any title, is soon seen to be inappropriate” (219). This self-criticism is a result of Heidegger’s realization that our radical temporal being cannot be placed under any title because it is not a thing, concept, or even a being. Despite this critique, Being and Time offers us a structural analysis of our Being in the face of nothingness. Heidegger chose to call this a “Being-towards-death”, which would seem to be the most accurate language applicable to the basic state of the Being of Dasein.

The styles of discourse differ greatly in the contrast of Heidegger and Nietzsche, but the common element to both is the affirmation of being in the face of non-being or Nothingness. This assertion of an “authentic” or meaningful existence has been the basis of a great deal of thought since their inception, including the basis of such neo-orthodox theologians as Paul Tillich, Rudolph Bultmann, and Schubert Ogden. These theologians have based much of their interpretation of Christianity on the basis of Heidegger’s prolific work, and they have broken from the Greek-based tradition.

The affirmation of our existence is the assertion that “man is not a thing”, and that our being is more than what is encountered everyday in the world. We are constantly under the overcast of Nothingness and, in the face of this, we are able to see our own possibilities because we do indeed exist. The experience of Nothingness can be followed through to an authentic existence if we do not brush it off as a merely fearful moment of some sort. Rather, this Nothingness is what allows us to realize our freedom as finite Being-toward-death, and we are then freed from the world in order that we may be freed for the world and to exist in it as fully and authentically as possible.

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Jacob Graham is a Senior at Ferrum College with a Major in Philosophy.
source: http://www.ferrum.edu/philosophy/nietaffirm.htm

Gunter Grass's Silence

noreply@blogger.com (son of rambow) — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 13:02:00 +0000

German author, artist and Nobel laureate G?nter Grass would be a tough day for anyone, the day you admit you were a member of the Nazi Waffen-SS. Sixty years after war's end, there continues to be, to put it mildly, a p.r. problem for Germans who belonged to Heinrich Himmler's personal army, the largely volunteer force that staffed the concentration camps and crushed the Warsaw Uprising.

Now imagine making that confession after a lifetime of establishing yourself as Germany's most ardent advocate of full disclosure and penance. There you are, having been jabbing a finger in the German body politic's chest for 60 years, accusing them of failing to own up to their collective responsibility for the war. And it turns out you've had a dirty little secret of your own all along. This is exactly what happened on last week to G?nter Grass, the novelist and Nobel literature laureate who was the voice of Germany's war generation. The admission came in an interview with the Frankfurter Allgemeine newspaper, in advance of the release next month in Germany of Grass's new autobiography, Peeling the Onion.

"It was a weight on me," Grass, 78, told the paper. "My silence over all these years is one of the reasons I wrote the book. It had to come out finally." Grass says he originally signed up for submarine duty at 15, but was turned down, and two years later, in 1944, was directed instead to the SS, though he says he didn't realize he was being shipped there until he showed up for basic training. Why volunteer in the first place? "Above all, I wanted to get away from home," he told the paper. "Away from the close quarters, away from the family. I wanted to end all that, and that's why I volunteered."

Grass had always maintained he was a flakhelfer, a youth conscript forced to work anti-aircraft batteries. The alibi placed him right in the mainstream of his peers, who came to be called the flakhelfer generation — those who claimed they were unwilling participants in the war effort and especially its atrocities.

Newspapers across Germany were predictably atremble over Grass's revelation. The Welt am Sonntag called Grass' admission "moral suicide," and compared his insistence that he never fired a shot while in the SS to Bill Clinton's saying he smoked weed but didn't inhale. Other papers cried "too late" and wrote at length about the glass house Grass had been living in. Over in Poland, Lech Walesa said Grass should give back his honorary Polish citizenship. At least one conservative politician in Germany, perhaps looking for payback after decades of being nettled by Grass, has called for his Nobel Prize to be rescinded.

What's being lost in all the giddy gotcha is an acknowledgement of the continued importance of Grass' message of reckoning with the past. Young Germans don't want to talk about the past. At the World Cup, they were delighted to be able wave their flags like Americans at a Fourth of July demolition derby. German Chancellor Angela Merkel has remained silent on a controversial proposal to build a Berlin memorial to the German families who were refugees from occupied territories after the war. Even Germany's most famously repentant flakhelfer, Pope Benedict XVI, n? Joseph Ratzinger (who was assigned to a missile battery protecting a BMW factory near his hometown during the war), has strayed from the cautious path of reckoning and reconciliation. His recent speech at Auschwitz, which seemed in part to recast the Holocaust as a cleverly disguised attempt on the life of the Christian faith, left many people scratching their heads.

It's no small historical irony that Grass and the future Pope were both POWs together in an allied prisoner camp at Bad Aibling. Grass told the Allgemeine that he and the future Pope were friends of sorts, even though Ratzinger was "extremely Catholic" and fond of quoting things in Latin. "He seemed a little uptight to me," said Grass. "But he was a nice guy."

Imagine, then, an alternate history, in which Grass had made his confession about his time in the SS back in that camp to his prim campmate. The confession might well have given him a clearer conscience. But that might have been a terrible thing for a postwar Germany trying to come to terms with its complicity in the Nazi horrors.

If Grass had not been living with this wretched little skeleton in his closet, he might never have written a word. Like 99% of his compatriots, he might have just dusted himself off at war's end, said his 20 Hail Marys, and gone about joining the blithely ahistorical postwar boom. Instead, a haunted Grass cranked out a series of brutal novels about the war and childhood in occupied Poland, beginning with his powerful 1959 novel The Tin Drum. Those unforgettable narratives, along with a good measure of his public hectoring and politicking, helped his entire country stave off collective amnesia for decades. So while his opponents, and even a share of his friends, are piling on him about the lies he told about his past, it's worth considering that those personal lies helped keep alive important national truths.

source: http://www.time.com/time/arts/article/0,8599,1226380,00.html

Freud in Nabokov's Despair

noreply@blogger.com (son of rambow) — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 01:56:00 +0000

Although Nabokov dismissed Freud as a trivial and vulgar thinker and derided him at every turn, the presence of Freud and Freudianism is quite conspicuous in his works. With great vigilance, Nabokov anticipates and short-circuits potential Freudian interpretations of his work through parody, travesty, and psychoanalytic pastiche.

Taking as points of departure Jenefer Shute's framing of Nabokov's conflict with Freud as an attempt to ensure hermeneutic control over his own texts and the cultural fields within which Nabokov's works were written and read, I analyze a literary mechanism within the 1966 text of Despair that both relies on and undermines a Freudian reading.

I identify a set of objects whose Freudian valence could easily mislead the unwary reader into taking them symbolically, thus overlooking their function as important clues to events in the novel. I also posit that prevailing discourses, coupled with what might be called the "cultural competence" of the reader or scholar, are co-determinants of literary devices, semantic structures, and textual patterning in Nabokov's texts.

In the case of the 1966 version of Despair, the resulting text is a palimpsest, as Nabokov adds, deletes, and reconfigures passages in translation, and the text itself is overwritten by discourses in the target culture. Moreover, by attending to cultural debates extant in mid-1930s émigré Berlin, where the Russian original was composed, it is possible to see within the canonical 1966 version vestiges of this originary text.

While I do not tackle the larger question of the nature of Nabokov's reliance on Freud head on, my analysis provides some purchase on this fraught relationship, its literary manifestations, and what may be learned by pursuing a line of questioning that Nabokov himself sought to stymie. [source]

Essay Topics for Kafka's Metamorphosis

noreply@blogger.com (son of rambow) — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 18:17:00 +0000

A first help to give a frame to your paper

1. Comment on the significance of the title "The Metamorphosis."

2. Construct an interpretation of The Metamorphosis based on your account of why Gregor Samsa "found himself in his bed transformed into a monstrous vermin."

3. What role do the boarders play in The Metamorphosis?

4. Compare the metamorphosis of Gregor Samsa with the awakening of Edna Pontellier.

5. Can Freud's notions of Eros and the death instinct illuminate Gregor's plight?

(From: Malaspina University College)

Lecture on "The Metamorphosis" by Vladimir Nabokov

noreply@blogger.com (son of rambow) — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 04:50:00 +0000

Of course, no matter how keenly, how admirably, a story, a piece of music, a picture is discussed and analyzed, there will be minds that remain blank and spines that remain unkindled. "To take upon us the mystery of things"—what King Lear so wistfully says for himself and for Cordelia—this is also my suggestion for everyone who takes art seriously. A poor man is robbed of his overcoat (Gogol's "The Greatcoat," or more correctly "The Carrick"); another poor fellow is turned into a beetle (Kafka's "The Metamorphosis)—so what? There is no rational answer to "so what." We can take the story apart, we can find out how the bits fit, how one part of the pattern responds to the other; but you have to have in you some cell, some gene, some germ that will vibrate in answer to sensations that you can neither define, nor dismiss. Beauty plus pity—that is the closest we can get to a definition of art. Where there is beauty there is pity for the simple reason that beauty must die: beauty always dies, the manner dies with the matter, the world dies with the individual. If Kafka's "The Metamorphosis" strikes anyone as something more than an entomological fantasy, then I congratulate him on having joined the ranks of good and great readers.

I want to discuss fantasy and reality, and their mutual relationship. If we consider the "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" story as an allegory—the struggle between Good and Evil within every man—then this allegory is tasteless and childish. To the type of mind that would see an allegory here, its shadow play would also postulate physical happenings which common sense knows to be impossible; but actually in the setting of the story, as viewed by a commonsensical mind, nothing at first sight seems to run counter to general human experience. I want to suggest, however, that a second look shows that the setting of the story does run counter to general human experience, and that Utterson and the other men around Jekyll are, in a sense, as fantastic as Mr. Hyde. Unless we see them in a fantastic light, there is no enchantment. And if the enchanter leaves and the storyteller and the teacher remain alone together, they make poor company.

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The Lost Symbol, Dan Brown's Da Vinci Code sequel

noreply@blogger.com (son of rambow) — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 19:00:00 +0000

Dan Brown has admitted that the success of The Da Vinci Code left him "temporarily crippled" when it came to writing his new conspiracy thriller, The Lost Symbol, which is published at midnight tonight.

In a rare interview, the reclusive author said that he was already writing The Lost Symbol when he started to realise that The Da Vinci Code "would be big". "The thing that happened to me and must happen to any writer who's had success is that I temporarily became very self-aware," he told Parade. "Instead of writing and saying, 'This is what the character does,' you say, 'Wait, millions of people are going to read this.' It's sort of like a tennis player who thinks too hard about a stroke – you're temporarily crippled."

But Brown overcame the paralysis – "I realised that none of it had any relevance to what I was doing. I'm just a guy who tells a story" – taking five years to pen the new adventures of his dapper symbologist hero Robert Langdon. His publisher, Random House, has lined up a 6.5m print run, one million of which are due to land in the UK. Waterstone's is predicting it will become the fastest-selling fiction hardback of the decade, other than Harry Potter – it has been the top seller at Amazon.co.uk for weeks – and bookshops are planning early openings tomorrow morning to catch readers on their way to work.

Early sightings of the closely-guarded text indicate that Brown has kept to the formula that made The Da Vinci Code the UK's bestselling adult paperback novel of all time, with 4.5m copies of the title sold since its publication in 2003. Readers of the Mail on Sunday were treated to a pull-out supplement containing The Lost Symbol's first two chapters, opening with an initiation into a masonic lodge "just blocks away from the White House", and with the arrival of Professor Robert Langdon in Washington DC, still sporting the "charcoal turtleneck, Harris Tweed jacket, khakis, and collegiate cordovan loafers" that give him more than a passing resemblance to his creator.

"There are parallels between it and all my other books. I'm back in the same world of symbols, secret societies, art, and history," Brown told Parade. Early reviews have borne the author's description out, with the LA Times judging that The Lost Symbol will "feel very familiar to readers of the previous Langdon books". Meanwhile the New York Times greeted the title with a largely positive early review, judging that Brown is "bringing sexy back to a genre that had been left for dead" and that the novel was "impossible to put down". Criticism from the New York Times centred on an over-use of italics, of which it said "the author uses so many italics that even brilliant experts wind up sounding like teenage girls". "And Mr Brown would face an interesting creative challenge if the phrases 'What the hell ...?,' 'Who the hell ... ?' and 'Why the hell ... ?' were made unavailable to him," the review continued. "The surprises here are so fast and furious that those phrases get quite the workout."

But overall, it said, Brown's "excitable, hyperbolic tone is one of the guilty pleasures of his books. ('Actually, Katherine, it's not gibberish.' His eyes brightened again with the thrill of discovery. 'It's ... Latin.'')"

Only four people at the book's UK publisher Transworld have read The Lost Symbol, with passwords and encryptions used on internal and external communications to keep its contents secret. Jon Howells at Waterstone's is set to become the first person in the UK outside Transworld to read the novel, taking delivery of a copy at 7.30 this evening and aiming to finish it by tomorrow morning, while Borders has lined up a speed reading champion, Anne Jones, to tackle it tomorrow morning.

"The Lost Symbol is expected to be the biggest hardback fiction release of the year, likely even this decade," said Borders senior fiction buyer Ruth Atkins. "We've had a record-breaking number of customer pre-orders and we're expecting to welcome lots of less frequent book-buyers into our stores. We'll also be opening our stores an hour earlier to cater for those people on their way to work who can't wait until lunchtime to get their hands on the next Dan Brown blockbuster."

But not everyone is as excited about its publication. Less-than-enamoured readers on Twitter have begun responding to mentions of Dan Brown by asking "Dan who?" and have even created a #danwho hashtag which they are hoping to get into the site's trending topics, while at US publishing website GalleyCat, suggestions to name "Dan Brown Day" have included "Brown-Out", "The Day Fiction Died" and the "Beigeocalypse". Booksellers reeling under the pressure of falling sales will be hoping that his many fans disagree.[source: www.guardian.co.uk

Free credit scores guide

noreply@blogger.com (son of rambow) — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 18:45:00 +0000

Credit scores affect whether you can get credit and what you pay for credit cards, auto loans, mortgages and other kinds of credit. For most kinds of credit scores, higher scores mean you are more likely to be approved and pay a lower interest rate on new credit.

Want to rent an apartment? Without good scores, your apartment application may be turned down by the landlord. Your credit scores also may determine how big a deposit you will have to pay for telephone, electricity or natural gas service.

Lenders look at your credit score all the time. They look at your scores when deciding, for example, whether to change your interest rate or credit limit on a credit card, or whether to send you an offer through the mail. Having good credit scores makes your financial dealings a lot easier and can save you money in lower interest rates. That's why they are a vital part of your financial health.

There are different means of calculating the credit scores. One of the most widely used credit scores are the FICO scores. When lenders talk about "your score," they usually mean the FICO® score developed by Fair Isaac Corporation. It is today's most commonly used scoring system.

The credit scores are the basis for most of the financial investments and tools available to debtors today. Without a good credit score the chances of getting beneficial loans like home loans, educational loans, etc are minimized. It also reduces the chances of getting employment, as most employers do check the credit rating before hiring. Also poor credit scores keep on adding to harassment and constant nagging from lenders to pay back their debts.

From Holmes to Harry Potter; British popular fiction.

noreply@blogger.com (son of rambow) — Sun, 13 Sep 2009 04:42:00 +0000

BESTSELLERS are in the air at the moment. A recent BBC television series "Reading the Decades" took a ten-yearly census of the books that had got people reading, talking and, most importantly, buying, during the post-war period. Now Clive Bloom extends that enquiry back to the beginning of the 20th century, by when Britain could be said to have become unequivocally literate (at the outbreak of the first world war only 1% of the population was still unable to read).

The reasons behind this sudden need to investigate what kinds of books people want to buy (or borrow, for Mr Bloom pays special attention to the role of local libraries in keeping sales of authors such as Catherine Cookson and Frederick Forsyth in their millions) are not hard to guess. The recent...

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noreply@blogger.com (son of rambow) — Sun, 13 Sep 2009 04:22:00 +0000

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Cheap Web Hosting Guide

noreply@blogger.com (son of rambow) — Sat, 12 Sep 2009 05:51:00 +0000

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