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.)

Week 5: As structured as it’s ever gonna get

Saussure

The funny thing to me about Saussure is it seems he’s a bit poststructuralist himself. (Not that I’ll presume to know too much about Poststructuralism yet as we’ve still yet to get there.) But isn’t his biggest theme pointing out the paradox of how language is arbitrary, illogical, and doesn’t have much of a “structure” in terms of what we would generally assume? Well, whether that’s Structuralism or not, it’s certainly quite interesting. (Again, I’m probably just misunderstanding my terminology and –isms here, but whatever.) I do get that Saussure is structuralist because ultimately he’s still breaking everything down into its structure, and focusing on structure. It’s just cool that he’s so conscious of how structureless things begin to appear when you do that.

This theme of structure imposed on a structureless world really intrigues me. “Language works out its units while taking shape between two shapeless masses [thought and sound]” (Saussure 856)…basically, without language we have nothing that appears at all logical. Or maybe it’s more that once we have it, it’s hard to imagine anything else that could appear to make any sense, although obviously animals and nature do without it. (Urge to jump ahead to Lacan rising.) In any case, I suppose this is the point – language does give us structure, but because thoughts and sounds don’t tend to have much structure on their own, language needs to create one for them (for the most part) arbitrarily. In the end, it’s really just a case of “whatever works” – any language or system of signs can achieve meaning equally well in their own unique ways. The important thing is that there is meaning.

I liked the way we discussed Saussure’s sign in class and took it beyond just language and into the realm of imagery, especially in regards to advertising. The whole idea that the signifier can provoke millions of signifieds is probably the most intriguing part about the sign. We never just think of a word’s definition alone, we think about other things it relates to, both from context (what Saussure calls “syntagmatic relations”) and from what it makes us think of in our own heads, from our own experience (what Saussure calls “associative relations”).

One minor critique of our in class discussion though – we didn’t use Saussure’s diagram of the sign, and I feel it’s kind of important. In fact, I think we made a mistake in class, as I’m pretty sure at one point we said something along the lines of the signifier gives us the signified, but it doesn’t go the other way?* That’s the whole point of the arrows in Saussure’s diagram, isn’t it? As he says “The two elements [signifier and signified] are intimately united, and each recalls the other” (Saussure 853) (italics mine). This is why Saussure’s diagram is so important, because it makes the point that both signifier and signified are a part of the whole sign, and they are both equal parts that work backwards and forwards to create meaning.

(*I do apologize if I’m remembering this wrong, I just seem to remember we said something like this and it just didn’t seem quite right.)

And lastly, the idea that “in language there are only differences” (Saussure 862) and that whole idea of binary opposition and such is really interesting. Saussure says language is a “form and not a substance” (863) and those terms confused me until he goes on to say “all the mistakes in our terminology…stem from the involuntary supposition that the linguistic phenomenon must have substance” (863). Again, it’s that whole illusion of logic, of the sign not being arbitrary. Basically, meaning ultimately comes from the signs interacting, not the signs themselves.

Frye

I just wanted to touch briefly on Frye, even though this is getting a little long. One of the most intriguing things he brought up was ritual’s importance in human life. “It is the deliberate expression of a will to synchronize human and natural energies…in ritual, then, we may find the origin of narrative” (Frye 1310). This, and this whole paragraph, is beautiful, and oh so true. It shows how natural storytelling is for us, how whether it’s ancient myths, or religion, or any type of fiction at all, the drive is to create rhythm (as Frye says) in our lives…that structure in a structureless world. (This is beginning to sound like Existentialism, actually, but that’s a whole nother theory.)

As for the question posed in class about whether or not it’s possible to find a story without any archetypes, I’d have to say no. I feel like if you did, then could you even still call it a “story”? I think our definition of story implies at least the use of some kind of archetype, whether it’s just the fact that there’s a character doing something in some order…or at least I think people will always be able to find some kind of archetype that would fit for any given situation. Also, as Prof. Haake likes to say, “stories aren’t about the world, they’re about other stories.” I’ve always had mixed feelings about this statement, but I think it’s generally true, and what Prof. Haake’s point is is that archetypes are basically our language as writers, just as much as language itself. To tie Saussure back in, they’re conventions we use to create meaning, and we use them because they work. Without them, wouldn’t stories just be formless masses, just as thoughts and sounds would be without language? I think this is debatable, but it’s not a bad way to think of archetypes, and makes sense to me.

This also makes me think of Jung. Frye brings him up, and although he didn’t mention this theory, it made me think of Jung’s personality types. I’m a huge fan of the Myers-Briggs, and it’s really interesting because personality types are really archetypes applied to human psychology. This begs the question, can we reduce human beings’ personalities to archetypes? I personally think they can work more or less, and again theorists and psychologists stress that these things are always on a continuum. The interesting thing to note I think is that we can always make them work, and, again, I think humans tend to want to fit things into patterns. That’s the significant thing about archetypes, and stories in general (and theory, psychology and philosophy themselves)…that we are naturally drawn to patterns and logic.

Even when there’s none. Especially when there’s none.

(I apologize that this got so long, I couldn’t help it! This stuff is brain food.)

---

Works Cited

Saussure, Ferdinand De. “Course in General Linguistics.” The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Ed. Vincent B. Leitch. 2nd ed. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2010. 850-66. Print.

Frye, Northrop. “The Archetypes of Literature.” The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Ed. Vincent B. Leitch. 2nd ed. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2010. 1304-15. Print.

Week 4/Analysis 2: Word Picture – Defamiliarized Flight

Robert Williams – “The Flight of the Last Dodo” (This painting was actually on display last year in CSUN’s art gallery at an exhibit of Williams’ work.)

The Narrative

They look to her to give them their wings. They were born with little stubs that they flapped and flapped, but they never managed to catch the wind. She brings them spare pieces of scrap metal, old remains from the planes that lay wasted and broken, rusting in the dry earth under the sun’s eyes. She puts them together – slowly, meticulously – welding and oiling and finally strapping them securely onto their backs. They try to master their excitement as they wait for their own turn to receive their fuel, solemn, for this is a sacred moment they never expected to achieve.

And then one day he comes, promising her that life she’s always wanted. And she is setting the last of them free to take flight into the sunset, because there has to be more than this, this vanity project. She never wanted to be a hero, she just wanted a purpose, and she can’t imagine staying here forever when he offers so much more. The last one finally has her fuel, and takes flight. And they all watch from above as the wing-bearer goes, slowly making their way to greet the sun-painted clouds. The two below are nothing but specks on the ground, ants lost in a tiny world.

The Analysis

Robert Williams’ “The Flight of the Last Dodo” is an excellent example of Shklovsky’s concept of defamiliarization. Familiar objects, namely birds, are made unfamiliar by being attached to another object that is similar and yet different than a bird – airplanes. In this way, both the birds and the planes are defamiliarized.

Taking into consideration further that the birds aren’t just any birds, but specifically flightless dodos, adds to Williams’ approach to defamiliarizing – there is a logic here to the planes, and yet it’s such an amusing and unusual sight we must take our time to comprehend it. Eventually, we begin to see that the birds aren’t that much different than the humans beside them – both can only dream of flight, and need external machinery to make this dream reality.

Moreover, Shklovsky’s remark that “the purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known” (para. 4) takes this even further. What we know about dodos is that they are flightless, but this isn’t something we immediately perceive – when we first see them, we just see a bird. But the planes bring in a human element, and now we perceive the dodos less as birds and more as humans. This creates an emotional connection between us and them, even as they remain clearly separate creatures from us (note their rather expressionless faces in contrast to the humans). Ironically, there’s almost something more attractive about the dodos, something that makes them more relatable than the man and woman. They seem to be achieving their dreams, while the humans stay firmly on the ground. The dodos in this way take on an almost divine role in contrast to the man and woman – the birds are elevated, while the humans are trapped by what seems to be the more animalistic and earthly nature of romantic attraction. Thus our expectations are more or less reversed, further defamiliarizing the entire scene, and leading to an interesting commentary on what it means to be human versus a creature of nature.

(As a side critique, the little green guys on the bottom of the painting always seemed distracting and illogical to me, and I feel like they detract from the piece. Then again, I suppose they do “increase the difficulty and length of perception” (Shklovsky para. 4), I just wish they did so in a way that contributes more to the overall work, rather than as a side note that seems out of place.)

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Works Cited

Shklovsky, Viktor. “Art as Technique.” Vahid's Official Website, 30 Sept. 2007. Web. 26 March 2011.

Williams, Robert. The Flight of the Last Dodo. 2009. Flickr. Web. 26 March 2011.

Week 3: I do feel enlightened now, actually

I’d like to begin by admitting that this was the one week I missed class, so I was a little concerned I’d not know exactly what was going on in these readings. On the contrary, I’m happy to say not only did I understand them on the whole, but I found them to be brilliant, inspiring, and often enlightening (who would’ve guessed?). There was such a wide variety of views covered, and although I’d love to touch on everyone, I think I’ll have to stick with Kant and Burke. (Pope was a lot of fun with his theory in verse, and Hegel in Lectures on Fine Art reminded me a lot of the book I mentioned in my introduction post – Art & Fear.)

Kant

To begin, I’d like to thank this brilliant man for giving me faith in creating run-on sentences and not feeling bad about it in the slightest because I mean who doesn’t love a good long, long run-on sentence if it helps to enlighten us just a bit more and helps us understand things a bit better and who says they can’t be fun and who cares if they eventually get a little hard to follow?

Okay, all joking aside, Kant was a little hard to follow at times, but by the end I can say it was well worth it. At first, his definition of the beautiful confused me, even made me uncomfortable, but as I continued to read I started to feel better about it. His concept of the beautiful seemed almost zen to me, for he says it lacks “interest” and “emotion” in contrast to the sublime. It was a bit hard to wrap my mind around that, because there isn’t really any way to easily explain and comprehend what that is – but perhaps that is true of beauty. It reminded me quite a bit of Robert M. Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and his concept of Quality (uppercase Q). Pirsig wonders whether quality is objective or subjective, and finally concludes that the problem is that it should be considered in reverse, and that Quality is a state that determines both the objective and subjective. Kant also uses these terms a lot, and I suppose the beautiful could be seen as the same as Pirsig’s concept of Quality. And then Kant makes things even more interesting by explaining that what we judge as beautiful is something we demand be universally so for everyone. And thereby it is a subjective judgment that we view as objective. Does kind of sound like Quality.

(Kant's beautiful = Pirsig's Quality? I need to re-read this book now.)

I think a lot of what made me feel “uncomfortable” with the concept of the beautiful at first was the whole idea of it having nothing to do with interest or emotion, which wasn’t what I was expecting. But when Kant went on to describe his concept of the sublime I felt better, since I realized this was what I had had in mind. I do see why Kant separates these terms, for there is a real difference between the two and the way they make us feel. Sublime has interest and emotion attached, which is probably why it’s a little more, I guess you could say “special” (or so I’m inclined to think). An interesting idea Kant brought up in regards to the sublime is how things that are fearful create sublimity, which relates a lot to the ideas of…

Burke

I love the psychologist that Burke is. His observations on pleasure and pain seem pretty spot-on. Ultimately, his most interesting concept is probably his definition of the sublime, similar to Kant’s and yet taken one step further. While Kant says “the sight of [powerful and fearful things in nature] only becomes all the more attractive the more fearful it is, as long as we find ourselves in safety, and we gladly call these objects sublime because they elevate the strength of our soul above its usual level” (Kant 438), he sees this as only one aspect or source of the sublime. Burke, on the other hand, flat out states that “whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain, and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible…is a source of the sublime; that is, it is productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling” (Burke 459). It seems this is almost contradictory to what we’d normally assume, or at least how it was previously defined by Longinus, although he did touch on this aspect of it. Actually, this was something I noticed when I wrote my first analysis, how Longinus briefly discusses how the sublime can involve ambivalent emotions and negative emotions, but Burke really takes this further by saying it’s only about negative emotions, because these are the strongest emotions there are. That’s some really interesting psychology. I also think it’s interesting because I’ve noticed the concept of ambivalence come up a lot in my classes, especially from the writer’s perspective in my creative writing classes, as being one of the biggest keys to great art. And I think for me the sublime tends to be ambivalence.

In conclusion, it seems to me that what all the theorists agree on is the sublime is basically whatever is greatest. Ultimately, that can come from tons of different circumstances and emotions.

Analysis 1: Sublime Death

In the television series Dead Like Me, the heroine, Georgia Lass, dies and becomes a Grim Reaper. In this excerpt from the end of the pilot episode, George faces her first assignment: taking the soul of a little girl. After saving the girl’s life in a train wreck where she should have died, George must face her boss Rube. Rube proceeds to explain to George that if she doesn’t let those destined to die do so their souls will “go bad” and “wither and die.”

This is only the beginning of a long series in which George and her fellow Grim Reapers are forced to come to terms with death, its merciless and senseless nature. As George states at the end of this scene “for me, death was just a wake up call,” and thus the show tells as much the story of George’s coming-of-age as a naïve young woman as it does the absurdity of life, death, and fate. These are heavy topics, ones that Dead Like Me consistently approaches with a grace and grandeur that can only be referred to as sublime.

To choose one scene to exemplify the show’s sublimity is no easy task, but using the pilot’s final scene gives a good overview of the general approaches the show takes. To begin with, it’s clear that Dead Like Me demonstrates Longinus’ first source of sublimity, greatness of thought. Dealing with the nature of death is a naturally weighty topic, and as Longinus states “words will be great if thoughts are weighty” (139). Thus Rube’s dialogue with George in the pilot’s final scene is frequently sublime thanks to the weightiness of the topic, death, and the ways in which Rube attempts to explain it.

Moreover, Rube’s lines follow many of Longinus’ points on use of language to create sublimity. One thing that stands out is his point on the use of everyday words, “phrases [that] come within an inch of being vulgar, but they are so expressive that they avoid vulgarity” (Longinus 147). Thus, an interesting effect is created when Rube states, “It is cruel, it’s cruel she’ll never know what life is really like, it’s cruel she’ll miss out on so much love and pain and beauty. That’s sad for everyone in the world, except for her. She won’t give a rat’s ass, she’ll be doing something different. That’s just the way it is.” By using a phrase like “rat’s ass,” Rube’s point seems almost ironically casual, and yet it becomes all the more weighty. Rube speaks bluntly, and by doing so he powerfully exemplifies death’s inevitability.

He also uses metaphor and what Longinus calls visualization, specifically when he tells George “You know what happens when you keep a soul around after its time? Same thing happens to milk – spoils, goes bad – souls go bad in all kinds of ways” and that if she doesn’t take the little girl’s soul it will “wither and die and rot inside her.” These are powerful images that express the show’s entire dilemma within a few lines.

Ultimately, the crowning element of sublimity for this scene comes after George has accepted what she must do, and tenderly takes the girl’s soul. The girl goes off into a dazzling display of lights that descend from the sky to reveal what looks like an amusement park, as the song “Qué Sera Sera” plays in the background. What makes this moment feel so strikingly sublime is its juxtaposing of multiple emotions. As Longinus says, emotion is one of the most important elements of the sublime. More than just pure emotion, Dead Like Me works with ones that are constantly shifting and highly ambivalent, creating a sublime sense of how quickly death can steal away life, how life is fragile and filled with both joy and sorrow. In this way this scene shows us “not a single emotion, but a complex of emotions” (Longinus 140), and these create its greatest sublime effect. As the little girl departs from the earth and George and Rube “walk off into the dark unknown, or whatever you want to call it,” as George puts it, we have a sense of hope combined with the knowledge of the severity of death’s power. “Qué Sera Sera” contributes to this, and we see that life goes on even in the face of tragedy. The ending of the pilot is thus ambivalent and unified in being so, demonstrating Dead Like Me’s overall sublime nature.

Works Cited


Longinus. “On Sublimity.” The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Ed. Vincent B. Leitch. 2nd ed. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2010. 136-54. Print.


“Pilot.” Dead Like Me. Writ. Bryan Fuller. Dir. Scott Winant. MGM, 2003.