Archive for the ‘Premodern Postmodernism’ Category
Eros and the Arabesque (Part IV)
The Death Drive and King Shahrayar
Confronted with mounting evidence of a compulsion to reenact traumatic events, which the pleasure principle could not explain — victims of railway disasters, soldiers returning from World War I, and even children were obsessively reliving unpleasurable events in dreams, behavior, speech, therapy and games — Freud developed a theory of the death drive, more primitive and fundamental than the pleasure principle. According to Freud, the death drive is an urge to return to an inorganic state — basically a translation of the law of entropy into psychoanalytical terms. The law of entropy states that matter and energy tend toward a state of greater disorder. Organic life, ever recombining in more and more complex forms, runs contrary to entropy, reproducing in defiance of this fundamental law of physics. So, Freud argued, all organic matter longs to return to its original state, suggesting, therefore, that “the aim of all life is death” (Freud, “Beyond” 613).
Eros and the Arabesque (Part III)
The sexual instinct, which Freud said is so hard to “educate,” can be carried to such extremes that pleasure becomes destructive, even self-destructive. From the point of view of self-preservation, Freud writes, the pleasure principle is “from the very outset inefficient and even highly dangerous” (Freud, “Beyond” 597). The prologue, which establishes the frame story of King Shahrayar and Shahrazad, is dripping with destructive sexuality.
Read the rest of this entry »
Eros and the Arabesque (Part II)
Pleasure Frames the Story
What gives The Arabian Nights its ageless appeal? Pleasure! The pleasure principle draws in readers (as the promise of pleasure entices the king into Shahrazad’s narrative). Ample evidence of the pleasure principle can be found even before the story begins.
Eros and the Arabesque: The Serial Proliferation of Life in The Arabian Nights (Part I)
Introduction
I have heard, O wise and happy Professor, that the end of the story is death, its continuation, life. For Shahrazad this is literally true. While the story continues, she lives. If the story ends, she dies. Full of jealousy and rage, the king has sworn to take a new wife every night, satisfy himself with her and kill her the next morning before his seed has dried in her womb. Thinking to save himself from the cunning of women, the king has unwittingly placed himself in a vulnerable position between orgasm and murder: under the tongue of the most cunning of women, the quintessential story-teller, Shahrazad.
This is not the title of another post on Tristram Shandy,
because I am still considering what title I want to use. Although I have already written about the play of form in Laurence Sterne’s book (Tristram Shandy ****s Up the Page, Progressive Digressions in Tristram Shandy, and The Stuff That Dreams are Made Of), there is so much more to say! I feel I could go on exploring metafictional elements in Tristram Shandy for years and never get to the bottom of the book. So here are just a couple of additions to my earlier observations of metafiction in Laurence Sterne’s masterpiece.
The Stuff That Dreams Are Made Of: Paper, Ink, Letter and Word
0001101110001010111100100001101011101001010100100111101000100000010101010111010101010000101
cvlkjva [-09w8u} =t04 olsd; lkcmvfdkn [goiwe[oidufalkdm;olwih[ot9iyu=frik]; lfdkvna; leirthj ofiu so fijgs; lkrjt
word though there Sterne is attention black and of aware deal recommend the stridulous parcel burn it
In Tristram Shandy, Laurence Sterne draws the reader’s attention to the stuff a book is made of: the pages, the spaces, the ink, the letters, and the words. I have already written about this in “Tristram Shandy ****s Up the Page,” but much more could be said about the earliest and still most complete metafictional novel ever written.
Progressive Digressions in Tristram Shandy
In my copy of Tristram Shandy, pages 23 to 68 came loose and I joked about mixing them up and reading them in a random order, but it doesn’t work. There is order to the disorder, organization to the chaos.
Why Read Spenser When Allegory Invites Despayre
When Allegory invited me to a read and feed, I hesitated. He is a thin man, easy to overlook, his yellowish skin almost transparent. He wears a mishmash of musty, old-fashioned clothing: a toga and a biblical robe, medieval hose and cod piece, moccasins and a romantic scarf. Nothing modern, except maybe the combination.
Tristram Shandy ****s Up the Page
Shockingly audacious even today, Tristram Shandy was printed in installments from 1759 to 1769, about two hundred and fifty years ago. Laurence Sterne misuses the stuff novels are made of — the ink, the symbols, the pages, the fly-leafs — to make readers aware of the materiality of the book. Flipping through the novel you will come across a totally black page, front and back. I say totally black, but only the part of the page where the text normally appears is blacked out. The block of ink is framed by normal margins and includes page numbers (33 and 34 in my edition). The motivation for this famous black page is the exclamation “Alas, poor YORICK!”, which appears twice on the previous page.
When a Reader Enters a Book: Sampson and Quixote
How would you feel if you heard that a book had been written about you without your knowledge or permission? You would worry, I’m sure, about how it portrayed you. Unfortunately, Don Quixote has just learned from Sancho Panza that a book of their exploits is spreading across Europe and the book portrays him a madman and Sancho a fool. The knight dispatches his chubby squire to fetch the bachelor who has read the book El Ingenioso Hidalgo don Quijote de la Mancha.
