Analysis 4: Everything is Rent: Rent, Marxism, and the Plight of Artists

“Everything is rent,” is a quite accurate way to sum up most of the points of Marxism in three simple words. Thus, the musical Rent provides us with a highly compelling example of a world in which capitalism has “left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous ‘cash payment’” (Marx 659). As the song that begins the musical, appropriately titled “Rent,” asks, “How can you connect in an age where strangers, landlords, lovers, your own blood cells betray?” In an age and country where capitalism dominates, the characters of Rent find themselves struggling to live with their chosen lifestyle, that of the bohemian artist. Throughout the musical they are constantly in a battle between two opposing forces – their need to find connection and free expression as artists, and their need to make ends meet. To explore these themes, the songs of “Rent” and “What You Own” provide two powerful examples, both in terms of their lyrics and, in the motion picture adaptation of the stage musical, the visuals that accompany them.

The song “Rent” begins with Mark filming part of a documentary on the streets of New York. Right before it starts we are already introduced to the issue of making a living – a homeless man attempts to make some money by offering his surfaces cleaning the windshield of a car at a stoplight, to which the driver yells at him to get off. As Mark witnesses this and the song begins, he remarks that “real life is getting more like fiction each day,” unbelieving of the effects that capitalism “in its blind unrestrainable passion” (Marx 671) has upon the world he sees around him. He continues on this theme by telling us that “headlines, breadlines blow [his] mind.” This point becomes all the more violently displayed later in the song, when Mark’s friend Tom is attacked by muggers, again displaying the lengths to which those in poverty must go in order to survive, often leading to brutality. The song, and musical as a whole, continues to drive this point home: a capitalist mentality leads, in all areas of society, to humans treating each other with a cruelty necessary to make profit, make ends meet, obtain basic needs like shelter and food.

We are then introduced to Mark’s, and his roommate Roger’s, personal plight – “and now this deadline / eviction or pay / rent.” We see Roger attempting to write a song in his and Mark’s apartment, when the lights are turned out, one would assume as a consequence of the rent not being paid. “We’re hungry and frozen / some life that we’ve chosen,” the two tell us, as they wonder whether the costs of living the way they are are truly worth it for the reward – their freedom to be independent artists. “As part of its ceaseless search for ways to induct workers in their own exploitation, capital, it might be said, has found the makings of a self-justifying, low-wage workforce” (Ross 2592), and this is the place in which Mark and Roger find themselves, choosing a life in which their inability to make the wages sufficient to pay rent is beginning to cost them the very basic things they need to create their art in the first place – a warm and lighted place to work and basic nourishment. In a symbolic act, Mark and Roger warm themselves by making a fire, and, with nothing else to burn, they are forced to “light up a mean blaze / with posters and screenplays,” sacrificing the art they own and have made in order to fulfill their need for warmth. At the end of their rope, Mark and Roger are forced to succumb to the fact that their art won’t, in the capitalist society in which they live, provide them with the basic things they need to survive – it has no exchange-value, and thus eventually it must be used in the only way it can, by its use-value of providing warmth.

“As the industrial division of labor everywhere sought to convert artisans into machine operatives, artists recoiled from being treated like any other trade producer…the artist was called on to represent, if not wholly embody, those imaginative qualities, skills, and virtues that industrial civilization was systematically destroying” (Ross 2586). Here, we see the struggle of the character’s of Rent on the larger scale – attempting to find a way to do that which gives their lives meaning and worth, while forced by the nature of their society to give it up in order to make enough money to live. The song “What You Own” makes this dilemma clear:

Mark begins by instructing: “Don't breathe too deep / don't think all day / dive into work / drive the other way,” the things that he has learned to do at his new job as cameraman for a news corporation. He continues, bitterly and nearly sarcastically assuring us that, “That drip of hurt / that pint of shame / goes away / just play the game.” As we see Mark preparing for work, we see that he finds himself stuck now “regard[ing] part-time commercial work as a vile meal ticket that expedites [his] true calling” (Ross 2596). However, although his reasons for taking the job in the first place were to pay his rent and ensure he could continue to work on his own documentary in the comfort of his home, he now finds the new work distracting from his own film. Mark realizes he must learn to “play the game” of the worker in a capitalist society and hope that it gets easier. In the chorus, he identifies the central issue that causes him “drips of hurt” and “pints of shame”: “when you’re living in America / at the end of the millennium / you’re what you own.” All he really owns of worth in terms of exchange-value is himself as a worker and his labor-power to be sold, that he is “nothing else, his whole life through, than labour-power…to be devoted to the self-expansion of capital” (Marx 671). Mark’s life as a worker first and artist second has caused him not only to lose time in which he could be working on his own film, it has deprived him of his very emotions and passion: “I escape and ape content / I don't own emotion – I rent.” By the end of the song, he finally concludes that he will quit his job so that he can finish his documentary, ultimately preferring his life as an artist to the stifling nature of the capitalistic world that he finds to be destroying his creativity, regardless of the security of shelter and resources it provides him.

As Jonathan Larson, lyricist, composer, and writer of Rent, has pointed out, the word “rent” doesn’t just signify the monetary issues related to capitalism – it “also means torn apart” (Wikipedia), and herein lies Rent’s strongest criticism of capitalist society and what it creates. As the song “Rent” ends, and the chorus of tenants sing in unison a declaration against the notices of eviction, “we’re not gonna pay rent / cause everything is rent,” the double entendre of their meaning adds to the power of their statement. In a capitalist society, everything truly is rent – human connection, on some level, is always related to monetary profit, and personal worth is based solely on exchange-value (Marx 659). Thus, “rent” is everywhere in that money runs every corner of society, and, as a result and perhaps most importantly, humans are torn apart from each other. True connection between people as people, beyond any worth related to their ability to provide labor-power and create profit, becomes something lost in the business of the day, the struggle to get by. Here is where the true plight of the characters of Rent takes place, as they strive to connect on a deeper and more meaningful level through their art. Thus, as the musical ends and Mark’s finished documentary is finally shown, we see the harsh streets of New York not just filled with the despair of the homeless, but also with him and his friends, dancing and laughing, putting aside their financial troubles and connecting on another level.


Works Cited

Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels. “The Communist Manifesto.” The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Ed. Vincent B. Leitch. 2nd ed. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2010. 657-60. Print.

Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels. “Capital, Volume 1.” The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Ed. Vincent B. Leitch. 2nd ed. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2010. 663-74. Print.

Ross, Andrew. “The Mental Labor Problem.” The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Ed. Vincent B. Leitch. 2nd ed. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2010. 2578-97. Print.

Rent. Writ. Jonathan Larson and Stephen Chbosky. Dir. Chris Columbus. Columbia Pictures, 2005.

Rent (musical). Wikipedia. 22 April 2011 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/rent_(musical).

Week 9: And just when I thought things couldn’t get any more disturbing…

…Ross comes along, and proves me wrong.

Well, really, Althusser too was disturbing, but somehow didn’t have as big an impact on me as Ross. I want to say this was because I feel Althusser’s ideas on ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses are ones I’m already very accustomed to, although, then again, I am also well aware of the truth of what Ross had to say. I suppose it’s just more of something I’m in denial about than Althusser. Probably because it’s something I relate to on a more personal level.

Reading Ross, I was reminded of reading Eagleton and being disturbed, in the same way I found myself disturbed a little in learning about Existentialism, actually, in a class last semester. It’s because I recognize myself so much in it. For Existentialism, it was realizing that our beliefs, ideologies, whatever gives our life meaning and helps us make sense of our world, is something that really has no inherent meaning. We make it up. Okay, this seems obvious by now, and once again brings to mind reader-response and poststructuralism to me, but the disturbing truth of it is still there. For me, the meaning I give to life comes more or less solely from literature and art. Hence, Eagleton resonating with me in a disturbing way. Literature is my opiate. And, I’m likely to be one of those women he describes as becoming an English professor, master of a “convenient sort of non-subject to palm off on the ladies” (Eagleton 2144).

Which brings me to Ross. I’m pretty sure there isn’t one thing he said that could have hit home in a more uncomfortable manner. Because I am the artist who wants to become a professor. The idealist who is more or less quite ignorant of economic realities, beyond the knowledge that capitalism has issues and is kind of scary.

The whole idea that as artists and intellectuals we willing choose to accept low wages for love of our subject has my name written all over it. The types of logic that Ross describes as feeding into the mentality of the bohemian artist and reasons that are used as justification for paying artists less than they deserve, the want to create a “hungry theater” because “only a hungry man feels compelled to say ‘what’s in him’ (Ross 2585)…all these things I have thought about myself as an artist and often thought would be reasonable rational for being paid less. Which is really messed up. Especially, when to create great art, more passionate art, I often notice it helps to have something that is bothering you, making you uncomfortable, at the least – at the most, something really difficult, something you need to work through and overcome, something that makes you “hungry.” And there is I think, in all artists, intellectuals, idealists, this “noble ethos of the unattached artist” (Ross 2586), who feels that to create real art you need to ignore the rest of the world, your monetary needs, etc. I do it all the time, even when I know I’m only hurting myself – for example, these blog posts: I know I should just get through them for the sake of making the grade, but I can’t resist writing so much because I find it too interesting. (Seriously – it’s a perfect example of this problem.)

Even more specifically, when he comes to discussing graduate students and the fact that “the attainment of a degree is not the beginning, but the end of their teaching career” (Ross 2590), I started to get even more depressed. Just recently I’ve come to the decision that I want to become a professor, because it seems like a great way to be an artist on the side while making some kind of living. But after reading Ross? Well, I guess there’s just no winning as an idealist. (I do believe this all stems, at least for me, from being an Idealist in the Myers-Briggs personality types sense, but that’s a whole nother story…)

Week 8: The fetishism of the report card commodity

Marx

Marx, like Freud, is someone I feel I’ve always heard a lot about but had yet to really study. Most of my knowledge of him comes from half-remembered high school history classes, so I felt I could use some brushing up. And I must say I much prefer studying him from a more philosophical than historical viewpoint. It’s less depressing, and more interesting.

Then again, it’s hard not to be depressed by this stuff on any level. Most of all Marx’s discussion in “The Working-Day.” The thing that always scares me the most in regards to the nature of capital he outlines isn’t even just the ways it impacts our health. It’s the whole idea of it cheapening the care we put into things. This is always something I find to be a personal struggle for me, just on very basic levels. I feel that the hardest and one of the most important lessons I’ve had to learn in school (and am still learning) is to meet deadlines, even at the cost of quality work. It’s something that drives me crazy and depresses me to no end. On the one hand, I am a bit of a perfectionist and really do need due dates to teach me to let things go. On the other hand, I recognize that at some level, especially in regards to systems like grading, students and workers are taught to cut corners and at some point stop caring about their work in order to reach levels of greater production.

Actually, let’s talk about grades specifically for a moment. (I admit I have more experience as a student than a worker, so it’s often easier for me to think of Marxism on the level of school life.) Grades are a lot like the exchange-value of commodities. Like commodities, in grades “the social character of men’s labour appears to them as an objective character stamped upon the product of that labour” (Marx 664). In contemplating the idea of grades, I’m often left with a disturbing kind of awe – how can one little letter sum up an entire semester, or year, of class work? That little letter can’t possibly even begin to convey all the labor that went into making it what it is, and yet it is meant to signify all that and more: it is meant to “prove” that the student has learned something. Grades, like commodities, are often sadly removed from the true labor that went into making them, even the true amount of knowledge gained in the class for which they are awarded to the student. They are often given on the basis of exchange-value – they are awarded for completed work. But who’s to say the student actually learned from this work? Conversely, a student who fails to turn in assignments receives a poor grade because they have not produced work, yet perhaps they learned much more from what they did do than a student who completed all assignments without being fully engaged in them.

I’ve had experiences on both sides over my years as a student. There were classes, usually the one hundred student ones in college where everything is determined on the basis of multiple choice quizzes, in which I received great grades but felt I learned no more than the necessary factoids I memorized to pass the tests, facts soon forgotten there after. On the flip side, there were classes in which my inability to keep up with the workload resulted in bad grades, but I left feeling as though I had learned a great deal from all the effort I put into the class.

I’d like to say these classes are in the minority however – for the most part, grades tend to at least come close to matching up with the true labor put in and the knowledge gained in a class. Most of the time, this probably happens. And yet, one can’t deny that the way grades work is on the level of exchange-value – students earn their grades by producing work and test scores. Knowledge in this way plays the role of the use-value of commodities, the actual way we interact with our course material. But grades aren’t directly related to this.

In the end, the most disturbing thing about this in regards to both grades and commodities is the ideology it promotes. The system cares only for achieving a final product – commodity, grade, capital. The focus is taken off of the desire to achieve personal fulfillment and knowledge and is only focused on the achievement of an object.

For my own part, I like to get good grades. But I like to learn more. I try to do both. (Luckily, I must say English classes tend to be quite good when it comes to the two naturally matching up.)

And, on a slightly different topic, don’t even get me started on how over-worked the average high school student is. With a school day from eight to three, and a night’s homework often four to five hours (or, at least, this is the time it can take if you want your grades to be high), that can be a twelve-hour day. What does this leave time for? Just enough for meals and hopefully the large amount of sleep necessary for teenagers (which I believe can be around ten hours). I admit this workload may vary with school, but it seems to be about what was generally true for me in high school, and my brother now, and a lot of other people I know, all attending different schools. Not to mention, similar things happen in some elementary and middle schools.

I guess we’re being groomed to enter the world of Capital…

Presentation: My attempt at Lacan

A Reflection

When my group decided to split up our presentation between all the varied topics of psychoanalysis, phenomenology, and reader-response, and each present a particular theory, I was pretty sure I knew which I wanted to do most (although I do admit later, as I was putting the presentation together, I couldn’t help but wonder what I had got myself into). As I’ve mentioned previously, one of the biggest things that drew me to theory in the past was a creative writing class I took last semester with Prof. Haake. Prof. Haake loves to discuss a wide range of theory in her classes and how they relate to writing, and one of her favorites happens to be Lacan. When she first introduced Lacan’s concept of the Mirror Stage last semester I remember being immediately in awe of how we learn to identify ourselves through image and language at such a young age, and how this impacts our sense of self for all our lives ever after.

Through our readings and discussions for this class, as well as Prof. Haake’s lectures last semester and in another class I’m taking with her now, I attempted to patch together my own understanding of Lacan’s complex theories. Fittingly, I found the more I attempted to figure out how to explain these theories, the less sense I felt they made. In my head, I have this very clear idea and feeling for what they mean, and yet to explain it in language seems to destroy that deep understanding. Yet, as Lacan tells us, this doesn’t mean we should stop trying to use language to explain things – it’s a natural part of human psychology.

So I attempted to persevere through the presentation, and I was impressed with how it went. (I do admit I was a little embarrassed by how much time my portion took to present – what was intended to be five minutes wound up being over ten, possibly the longest of our group. My Communications professor would not be proud of me.) Although part of me was at all times terrified at the notion of getting it all “wrong,” I was actually really happy to get feedback from Prof. Wexler, who seemed supportive of my attempts to come up with my own explanation of the theory, even while questioning me a bit at times. I realized some confusion in my explanation might have been cleared up if I had used more of Saussure’s terms or at least discussed his theory more specifically in relation to Lacan, especially considering that I think he’s a lot more illuminating in explaining Lacan than trying to compare Lacan to Freud.

Overall, in the moment of presenting, and looking back, I’m impressed with myself in how logical (I think) I managed to be. It was very important to me to not just parrot back information from the reading, but to give my own take on it and hopefully help the class understand it a bit more. I think (and hope) I succeeded in this for the most part.

I do admit though that I’m pretty sure my reading of Lacan is entirely postmodern/poststructuralist, and this is mostly Prof. Haake’s fault. (Of course I use the word “fault” quite jokingly here, because I do prefer this reading of Lacan, really.) Considering that at the time of the presentation we hadn’t yet covered poststructualism, this made me feel a little awkward and I wonder how much sense I made because of it. I know this was pointed out by Prof. Wexler at one point when he asked, “are we clear on what the idea of language being ‘distancing’ means?” (or at least I think the word I had been using in the presentation was ‘distancing’), and then he proceeded to mention Derrida, to which I agreed that he probably helps with the understanding of the theory, and mentioned we discussed him in relation to it in another one of my classes, which was Prof. Haake’s. But more importantly, this made me realize that at the time Lacan was writing, I wonder whether his theories were taken quite in this same poststructuralist way, considering that that movement hadn’t yet happened…correct? Or at least, Derrida was writing and lecturing in the ‘60s, ten years after Lacan’s “Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I” was published. Although I suppose the two happened close enough in time that they probably impacted each other a lot.

In any case, I suppose I’m stuck viewing Lacan with a poststructuralist lens. Probably not solely the fault of Prof. Haake, but, to quote our syllabus, “our ostensible postmodern condition.” From what I can tell, especially in my higher education studies, we are a bit biased to a more postmodern/poststructuralist view of things. Or maybe just in upper division classes. Whether that’s a positive or negative, it’s worth keeping in mind.

Archive of my Presentation

Copy and pasted from the PowerPoint I used… I tried to write these in such a way that I could expand upon in class and open a discussion with. Okay, maybe the discussion part was a little optimistic, but I at least hoped we’d be able to have one with the final Harry Potter clip…unfortunately, there was an error with the internet during the presentation and it wouldn’t play. I tried to summarize it but I doubt the effect was the same, and we were short on time anyway, so a discussion never really happened. If I could have changed one thing about my presentation, it would have been that more of a discussion could have resulted, as I agree wholeheartedly with Prof. Wexler in that what good or fun are these types of classes without discussion? Theories and stories mean nothing without the reader’s thoughts on them…again, a very reader-response and postmodern standpoint. And I stick to it.

Jacques Lacan

1901-1981

Influences

• Highly influenced by Freud and Saussure

• Critiqued and expanded upon Freud’s theories

• Used Saussure’s model of the linguistic sign as both signifier and signified to expand on Freud’s work

Three Dimensions of the Psyche

The Real

• Can’t be known or discussed

• Can only be studied in relation to the Imaginary and Symbolic

The Imaginary

• Our image of ourselves as a distinct individual

• Is imaginary because it is a form - a fictional idea of wholeness we can’t actually obtain

The Symbolic

• Our attempt to communicate/experience the imaginary through language, symbols, or signs

The Mirror Stage

• Occurs from the age of six - eighteen months

• The baby sees itself in the mirror and takes joy in its image

• In this way the baby for the first time views itself abstractly, as an image of a distinct self (the Imaginary)

• The baby learns to say “I” in order to express this sense of self-identity (the Symbolic)

• This is how we learn to define ourselves as individuals - through image and language - as the idea of a distinct, whole self that never truly exists

Signification of the Phallus as Desire

• Lacan views Freud’s theory of castration fear as a bigger metaphor for the psychology of desire

• Castration for Lacan is a symbolic loss brought about by our use of language

• Through language (the Symbolic) there is a splitting off - it brings us closer to the abstract (the Imaginary) while simultaneously distancing us from our body (the phallus) and its needs (the Real?)

• This creates desire - a desire for something we can never attain, because it never existed to begin with - thus desire is insatiable

• Castration is also a separation from the mother - the child recognizes that the mother lacks something (a metaphorical phallus), realizing that the mother can’t be all they need

The Mirror of Erised - Lacanian?

A link to the clip
(embedding was disabled)

I’m still not sure how well this clip fits with Lacan’s theories, but it seemed like a fun idea. The Mirror of Erised – desire spelled backwards. My take: Lacan says that the Mirror Stage, our entering into the Imaginary and Symbolic realms of the psyche in which we view the world lead to desire – our desire for the Real. In the clip, Harry desires to be with his parents in reality, but is only able to do so symbolically through the mirror. Dumbledore advises Harry not to get caught up in the imaginary and forget reality. And yet, according to Lacan, this is not possible. Our reality is always filtered through symbols and signs – they create our reality. So, in conclusion, perhaps Dumbledore must learn more about poststructuralism.

Analysis 3: The Beauty of Blanks in Avatar: The Last Airbender

Art gains its power as much from what is said, as what is unsaid. Usually, the more powerful is ironically the unsaid, the things only alluded to, the subtext that let’s the reader become the writer and share in the power of creation. This is something agreed upon by all the reader-response theorists to a greater or lesser extent, but only Iser goes right to work in breaking down how this comes about.

Perhaps it’s not surprising that the more exemplary examples of the power of subtext in art can be found in stories for children, stories that must often approach things more indirectly for the sake of their audience. And yet, this isn’t to say they lose their power – in fact, they often gain all the more for it. One such example is the animated television series Avatar: The Last Airbender, a show that never talks down to its audience, is always suggesting the serious and full implications of its themes just out of sight, even in plain sight, always strengthening its messages by letting its story continue and play off itself in its blank spaces.

Avatar’s blank spaces work, as Iser says, by “the threads of the plot [being] suddenly broken off…these sudden changes are often denoted by new chapters and so are clearly distinguished; the object of this distinction, however, is not separation so much as a tacit invitation to find the missing link” (1528). The clear distinction in this case is usually created by a scene change, in which characters are juxtaposed against each other. The missing link that connects the characters in this blank is often an incredibly powerful and surprising similarity between them – usually between characters who are often viewed as antitheses.

The show uses this technique to achieve incredibly powerful effects in many of its episodes. One of its most quintessential and masterful ones, The Storm, is a prime example. In this episode, the two main heroes, Aang and Zuko, are compared and contrasted – through various flashbacks, we learn more about these two characters’ pasts than in any previous episode, discovering the things that have made them who they are in the present day of the story.

Aang and Zuko, in the present day of The Storm.

Aang and Zuko, although ultimately both heroes by the show’s end, are presented for the majority of the series, especially here in the first season, as adversaries. Aang is the naïve and reluctant hero who, as the Avatar, must help bring peace back to a world that has been at war for one hundred years. (In the world of Avatar, humans can manipulate, or “bend,” various elements – water, earth, fire, or air, depending on their nationality. The Avatar alone can control all four, and thus has always been the one to help keep a balance between all nations of the world.) At the beginning of the series, Aang has just woken up from a hundred years sleep trapped in an iceberg to find the world in its current state of war. Zuko is the antagonist, heir to the throne of the Fire Nation, the nation who began and continues to wage this one hundred year war against the other nations of the world. Zuko has up to this point in the series been attempting to capture Aang in order to stop him from achieving his mission of ending the war.

And here is where this episode, The Storm, comes in, making the audience question its assumptions and look at how these two characters actually relate much more than they differ. What makes this episode so powerful is the way it tells the stories of Aang and Zuko’s pasts in parallel, revealing surprising connections between the two of them. These connections are established through the blanks that occur whenever there is a scene change between Aang telling his story and Iroh, Zuko’s uncle, telling his nephew’s.

In the first set of scenes juxtaposed back-to-back, we are first presented with Aang, telling the story of how he learns, from the airbender monks who were his teachers (this all takes place one hundred years prior to the present day), that he is the Avatar, and that a war may be approaching…

“Normally, we would have told you of your identity when you turned 16, but there are troubling signs…storm clouds are gathering…
I fear that war may be upon us, young Avatar.
We need you, Aang.”

The scene then changes to Iroh telling Zuko’s story of how, three years previously, Zuko speaks out of turn in a war meeting against a heartless plan of attack, requiring the sacrifice of a group of inexperienced soldiers…

“The Earth Kingdom defenses are concentrated here…a dangerous battalion of their strongest earthbenders and fiercest warriors. So I am recommending the 41st division.”

“But the 41st is entirely new recruits. How do you expect them to defeat a powerful Earth Kingdom battalion?”
“I don't. They'll be used as a distraction while we mount an attack from the rear. What better to use as bait then fresh meat?”

“You can't sacrifice an entire division like that! Those soldiers love and defend our nation! How can you betray them?”

These first two flashback scenes already suggest a connection to us, “prompt [an act] of ideation on [our] part” (Iser 1527), the full implications of which become clearer as the story progresses. What is set up by this particular blank space between these scenes, or more precisely these two “segments of textual perspectives” (Iser 1528), that is, the switch in perspective between Aang and Zuko that our “wandering viewpoint” follows (Iser 1528), is a shared theme of loss of innocence. For both Aang and Zuko, these are specific moments in their pasts when their lives began to abruptly change, and as we hear their stories we follow this shared theme and see that the two characters we once presumed to be quite different are anything but.


This theme of loss of innocence, moreover a theme of coming of age for these two adolescents, continues throughout the episode and moreover the entire series. In the case of The Storm, it comes to culmination in a final set of flashback scenes, again beginning with Aang’s story. We learn that eventually Aang runs away, overcome by the pressure and responsibility that has begun to make his childhood a thing of the past. This results in his one hundred year imprisonment in the iceberg, leading him to where he is in the present day: facing a world in which he must accept the realities of war and his responsibility to help make change.

“I was afraid and confused. I didn't know what to do.”

Next, we discover the culmination of Zuko’s story: as punishment for speaking out in the war meeting, Zuko’s father forces his son to fight him in an “Agni Kai” – a firebending duel. When Zuko ultimately refuses to fight, his father inflicts upon him two merciless punishments: he scars the left side of his face, and banishes Zuko from his home, allowing him only to return once he has captured the Avatar.

“Please, father, I only had the Fire Nation's best interest at heart! I'm sorry I spoke out of turn!”

“You will fight for your honor.”
“I meant you no disrespect. I am your loyal son.”

“Rise and fight, Prince Zuko!”

“I won't fight you.”

“You will learn respect, and suffering will be your teacher.”

As we witness this, not only do we discover that Zuko’s motivations for wanting to capture Aang are ultimately much more complicated than we previously presumed, but moreover, we make a thematic connection. This connection is what ultimately makes The Storm one of the most powerful episodes of the series, by “building up the aesthetic object” (Iser 1529) that is Avatar: The Last Airbender on the whole. The way in which Aang and Zuko’s stories are paralleled creates what Iser calls a vacancy, which “ultimately transforms the textual perspectives, through a whole range of alternating themes and background relationships” (1529) to relate to us a story of two adolescents, both equally struggling with the unfairness and indifference they find in the world. This “vacancy” allows us as the audience to make these thematic connections and realize just how shockingly similar Aang and Zuko are without it ever needing to be stated. This builds up the overall “aesthetic object” of the series by presenting a theme continued throughout the show: that of putting aside differences for a common good and finding connection with one another across boundaries – national, cultural, ideological. Aang is from the Air Nomad culture, Zuko from the Fire Nation, and yet by the end of the series they learn to work together. In this way, the show uses its blanks to skillfully support its overall theme.


By using these blanks and vacancies, The Storm only suggests these connections by showing the stories of each character next to each other, letting us discover for ourselves the ways in which they blur. Thus, this final moment in the episode where Aang and Zuko catch a glimpse of each other again in the present day…

…is all the more powerful, as there is that completely unspoken connection that has now been made between them. It is a “blank” in that it remains unstated, never spelled out by the text – the two characters themselves have not even had any actual interaction prior to this moment in the episode whatsoever – but for the audience, their newfound connection couldn’t be more clearly understood. Thus, Aang and Zuko are from now on irrevocably “linked together,” in the minds of the audience, and thus “the blanks ‘disappear’” (Iser 1527).



Works Cited

Iser, Wolfgang. “Interaction between Text and Reader.” The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Ed. Vincent B. Leitch. 2nd ed. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2010. 1524-32. Print.

“The Storm.” Avatar: The Last Airbender. Writ. Aaron Ehasz. Dir. Lauren MacMullen. Prod. Michael Dante DiMartino and Bryan Konietzko. Nickelodeon, 2005.

Week 7: The language keeps writing, and I keep reading

Heidegger: It’s About Language

On the one hand, Heidegger’s obsession with tautologies can get a little annoying, on the other, it’s the whole point. Like Barthes, he sees language as being…I want to say empty. It’s really pretty poststructuralist (I really am incapable of not always jumping ahead somewhat, it seems, huh?). Although, it’s not really that language is empty, it’s that the things we assume to create language – the person speaking, the author – and what they’re trying to say, isn’t really where the language comes from. What it really comes from is the language itself, alone. Nothing else.

Again, I’m going to have to mention Prof. Haake here, because this is more or less her very philosophy and how she teaches writing. She has a method she likes to call “burrowing,” in which while writing you focus on the language, and where it takes you…basically, you shift your focus from yourself speaking, to the language speaking, as Heidegger says.

I can’t help but often feel this seems to imply an “emptiness” – I recall a student making this complaint recently in my creative writing class. This used to make me really uncomfortable…sometimes it still does. The author is pointless? They have no control? Initially, that seems a bit strange, and wrong. But over the last several years, I’ve really come to embrace this fundamental truth about writing and all other art. It is something I completely depend on when I’m creating.

I think I first began to really get this artistic approach thanks to a theatre class I took here at CSUN my second year, where we learned “method” acting. One of the books we read for class was Zen in the Art of Archery, in which the author, Eugen Herrigel, talks about learning archery in Japan, and how the masters taught in a Zen way that required a letting go of control over the shooting of the arrow. Herrigel describes how amazed he was to find that once he got the hang of it, it was very much like the arrow was shooting itself – he had no power over it.

Not to be confused with a certain previously mentioned book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance...both are excellent, and have very interesting things to say about Zen-type teachings that relate on many levels to literary theory...read them!

This I believe is Heidegger’s point about language. Language speaks, the arrow shoots itself… In my acting class we learned that the best acting is that which is almost done unconsciously… This is something I’ve found to be equally true of writing, the visual arts, music… Art makes itself on some level. It’s really quite magical.

This was really a bit of a shocking realization for me at first, and it took me a long time to become comfortable with it. I had just never quite viewed making art in such a way before, even though I know I had always been doing so on some level, probably the majority of the time. I think a lot of people find this uncomfortable, “empty,” because there’s an assumption that the writer (or other artist) always has control and does things intentionally. It’s something I think we want to believe. But really, I’ve found for me as a writer, that Heidegger, and moreover Barthes, is right – I don’t always create my meaning in the writing stage…often that happens more in the reading stage.

Moreover, any intentions I begin with or use are ultimately taken from me and morphed, directed, and overall controlled entirely by the language, or other medium, as soon as I begin to write, or otherwise make a piece of art…that’s just the nature of creation. It may seem magical, but it’s really just reality. Try it – I’m not making this up.

And you want to hear something even more shocking? Another thing Prof. Haake likes to say is that “all writing is creative,” and I’ve realized that for me this is enormously true. I do this to a large extent when I write essays too. I have always utterly detested teachers who tell you to outline your paper before you write it. As Prof. Haake says, this is “writing backwards” – I have always felt this way. I might exercise more “control” over what I want to say in an essay than a piece of fiction, but I still let the language speak as I go, and I let it lead me where I don’t always expect. I never plan to any great extent – the language will just ignore the plans anyway.

Heidegger is right.

Barthes: It’s About the Reader, never the Author

I found it very interesting that Barthes talks about language being destructive… “Writing is the destruction of every voice, of every point of origin” (Barthes 1322). I’m sure he must have been influenced by Derrida and poststructuralists here, considering he wrote this at the same time period.

But what is he really saying? Ultimately, that the reader holds all the power in the author-reader relationship, and this must be acknowledged. Like Heidegger, and unlike Iser and Sartre who advocate a mutual relationship and importance for both author and reader, Barthes recognizes that the author has very little to no power. He points out that the kind of worship of the author is a more or less modern thing, that “in ethnographic societies the responsibility for a narrative is never assumed by a person but by a mediator, shaman or relator whose ‘performance’…may possibly be admired but never his ‘genius’” (Barthes 1322). This is again along the lines of that kind of magical, almost supernatural feeling artists sometimes get, the idea of the muse…language writing itself, once again.

But once more, if this makes us uncomfortable as readers, and writers, who want to believe in intentional meaning, Barthes offers a solution I’ve personally found to be quite helpful. Why put all our demands on the writer? What about the reader? Ultimately, the reader is the one who creates the meaning – meaning is created in reading, not writing. (To be honest, I do place a bit more emphasis on the writer than Barthes does, but I agree with him generally that the reader holds more power.) And why this is even more important… “by refusing to assign a ‘secret,’ an ultimate meaning, to the text…liberates what may be called an anti-theological activity, an activity that is truly revolutionary since to refuse to fix meaning is, in the end, to refuse God and his hypostases – reason, science, law” (Barthes 1325). I think I may have brought up Existentialism in a previous post before, but this seems to me to be it (which is ironic, I suppose, because the reading we did on Sartre seemed in some ways a little less so than this) – existence precedes essence – first a text must exist, and only then can it gain its essence from the reader. There is not an ultimate essence, an inherent meaning, that the writer gives to the text as he/she writes it. We must supply the essence – and the great thing about this is it can be whatever we want, whatever is most meaningful to us. This is Existentialism, and as Barthes says, it’s more than just a way to read a work of literature – it’s a way to “read” life.

Like Existentialism, this is really, ultimately, quite liberating. It promotes a certain freedom, not unlike that discussed by Sartre…

Sartre: It’s About Freedom

I found everything Sartre said in Why Write? to be beautiful and true on the whole. But I’ll admit that, by the end, his final claim that it’s impossible to use literature to oppress, that it can only promote freedom, seems unfortunately a bit doubtful to me. I think art can be used to oppress, especially if writers and readers are ignorant to the ways in which they may be oppressing others. It seems a little too dangerously dismissive to say this doesn’t happen, and that we should ignore it when it does.

However…I can see that this itself is Sartre’s ultimate point. It might take time, but eventually if a work of art is recognized as oppressive, it will lose its power, it will become a piece of history that is looked down on, seen as inferior and wrong. Ultimately, great art can’t retain lasting greatness if it somehow oppresses someone. Even works that might be alright on the whole, but contain elements of prejudice that aren’t used to support a theme of freedom, will find criticism for these components, even if they are otherwise respected, and will lose some of their overall power because of it.

Ultimately, Sartre again points out the reader’s power…without the reader’s consent to accept and participate in what the writer has created, the writer’s work becomes worthless. Sartre sees it as a mutual relationship where the writer and reader must trust and respect each other in order to both create the final work. It’s a collaboration, in the end.

It’s as though the writer and reader have a conversation with one another, almost…and here I’ll let Iser shine in my next analysis…

(And, by the way, this post got so long because the language just kept talking. It really needs to learn to quiet down sometimes.)

Week 6: Of subtext and mimesis and natural (in)sanity

Freud

I’ve been waiting to actually study Freud for quite a long time now, since he’s worked his way into popular culture so much. I keep thinking back to watching this one episode of The Simpsons as a kid where Marge goes to a therapist in order to overcome her fear of flying. By analyzing her dreams and memories, her therapist discovers that her manifest fear of flying is masking her true, latent problem – her shame of her father being a stewardess (as a kid he had always told her he was a pilot, and in a traumatic moment of discovery she walks onto a plane and sees him serving the passengers, whilst wearing an apron). This is how we learn about Freud these days, through popular comedy. Where I was surprised not to learn about Freud was in a psychology class I took a couple years ago. (He may have come up briefly, but we didn’t really study him at all, as far as I can recall.)

Overcoming the stewardess complex.

I always found that surprising. Really, today Freud is much more often seen as a joke than a psychologist, and yet, despite the reasons for this, we really do have a lot to thank him for. I found it very interesting when we analyzed the Peale and Bellelli paintings in class, and the “punch line” was revealed – the Bellelli painting was influenced by Freud’s theories. It really blew me away, because I really did find myself drawn much more to the Bellelli painting, and I didn’t know why. But that’s it – the subtext. And that’s what we have to thank Freud for: subtext, the whole idea of the subconscious. It’s really crazy to see how that’s impacted not just psychology, but art. Subtext in art is one of the most important things…in fact, this makes me want to jump ahead a little to Iser, and his point about the concept of “blanks” – letting things be latent, letting them be filled in by the reader, I believe, is what makes art so powerful. Probably the number one thing that makes it so powerful.

And therein lies Freud’s greatest theory and contribution. “But just as all neurotic symptoms, and for that matter, dreams, are capable of being ‘over-interpreted’ and indeed need to be, if they are to be fully understood, so all genuinely creative writings are the product of more than a single motive and more than a single impulse in the poet’s mind, and are open to more than a single interpretation” (Freud 818). The idea that things need to be “over-interpreted” is quite a statement, and although in true psychology this might have reasons to be criticized, it’s an excellent method for literary analysis. Interpretation is really all we have. (But again, I’ll get to that more later with reader-response…)

Now, when it comes to the Oedipus Complex and castration anxiety, I must say I prefer to take a much more metaphoric view, or really something a little more along the lines of…

Lacan

The interesting thing about Lacan is I had no idea his theories had anything to do with Freud when I was first introduced to him. That was last semester in a creative writing class I took with Prof. Haake. She has this great way of explaining Lacan by combining his dimensions of the psyche with his concept of the Mirror Stage along with his idea of castration. Although, the term she always uses is not “castration” but “the suture,” which is really Lacan’s concept of “Spaltung,” that splitting. Although, as Prof. Haake says, she uses the term “suture,” because it’s not just a splitting, it’s also a healing simultaneously. This is why I never realized Lacan was inspired by Freud, because Prof. Haake really intentionally leaves him out, his specific terms and such, and I think that’s smart.

Because the key to Lacan is language. Freud as metaphor for Saussure, you could say. Like a lot of theorists, he does something I love: he combines psychology and literature, discussing the psychology of how we use language…or more how language uses us (starting to sound like Heidegger here). I don’t know how much of my views on this have been influenced by Prof. Haake, and possibly, because she always discusses him in relation to Lacan, Derrida, but this is how I see his theories. Having now re-read him a few times, I think the thing I appreciate about him most is both how he relates humans to the natural world, and how he’s very big on something I find overwhelmingly important in psychology: mental illness as really just normal human psychology to an extreme. “The sufferings of neurosis and psychosis are for us a schooling in the passions of the soul,” Lacan states, and this is really his entire point in everything he says (1169). We are never whole, we are always pulled apart by language, the ways we interact with the world symbolically. Unlike Freud, who says children must overcome the Oedipus complex to become psychology healthy adults, Lacan doesn’t believe that we ever overcome our “castration,” because it’s natural to us. This is why Prof. Haake calls it “the suture,” because it’s not simply a negative phenomenon, it’s also positive because it’s our way of naturally interacting with the world.

Something else that stood out to me much more on my second reading is how Lacan cites evidence of similar behavior in other animals to the human’s Mirror Stage, both for pigeons and locusts, who must see either other members of their species, or their behavior, in order to fully develop (Lacan 1165). In this way, it seems we’re not so different really from other animals, just that for us our “mirroring” of things needed for development (or, to use another familiar term, mimesis) tends to be much more symbolic, or entirely symbolic. Even though Lacan seems to think our tendencies towards symbolism separate us a lot from other creatures of nature, I appreciate that he brought up other animals’ similar tendencies, which seem to indicate to me that, although they are more literal and less symbolic, that we really aren’t much different at all. The idea that mimesis is natural to the animal world, that animals learn through mimicking, is a simple, yet profound truth. (Seems Lacan is Aristotle all over again, but taking it a whole step further into deeper psychology. Which I love.)