Subject
"... all haunted by the figure of Lolita."
From
Date
Body
http://www.montevidayo.com/?p=747
Montevidayo <http://www.montevidayo.com/>
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Immoral Convulsions: Steven Shaviro, Sara Stridsberg and the
Cinematic Body<http://www.montevidayo.com/?p=747>
by Johannes <http://www.montevidayo.com/?author=1> on Jan.04, 2011, under
Uncategorized <http://www.montevidayo.com/?cat=1>
[In many ways this post is a sequel to an earlier post about Sara
Stridsberg, the movie Shutter Island, and the "cinematic body". That post is
here <http://www.montevidayo.com/?p=18>. If you are interested in what her
writing is like, you can skip to the bottom of this post, where I hastily
translated a bit.]
Here’s a clip of Sara Stridsberg talking about her brilliant novel, Darling
River, which tells the story of some young-ish women (it turns out at the
end that one is not that young) who are all haunted by the figure of Lolita.
(Well, one of the characters is in fact Nabokov’s Lolita going through her
fatal miscarriage.)
Here is the relevant quote from near the end:
“There was some expectation that this novel was going to save a kind of
Lolita figure, that it would write her story, her answer. If that’s the way
people read the novel, it’s a great disappointment because it’s more about
the gaze. It may be a critique of the gaze, but it’s also a way of being in
the gaze, investigating it by following its cruelty and be in it one self.”
This seems like an interesting approach to the issue of “the gaze”: to
inhabit it, to involve oneself, rather than the common way it is applied in
poetry discussions: for distance, iconophobia, moralism.
*
I raised the idea of “the gaze” yesterday not to discard it (which would be
pretty hard), but perhaps to call attention to the way it’s commonly
applied, and hopefully to get Danielle and Lara and others who have read
more about this issue to offer their views.
I’ve written about this before: A lot of discussions that invoke “the gaze”
tends to treat the visceral experience, the seduction of art as
“problematic.” This seems to be part of a general trend, a moralistic desire
to get outside of the artwork; that there is something immoral about the
seduction of art, the absorption into art, and that the moral high-ground
can only be through distancing devices.
It’s a very dominant modernist paradigm. In part it might come from a
reductive reading of Brecht. As Lucas hinted at in his post about
translation (more about this later), you can even see this fear of
closeness, need for distance in Lawrence Venuti’s estranging theories of
translation: we must be made aware that we’re reading a foreign text, or
else there’s something immoral about the absorption into the work.
You can see the same sensibility in a lot of the anti-kitsch rhetoric in
poetry. And in Clement Greenberg (the source I suspect of a lot of this
thinking): after all one of the moral failings of kitsch is that it is too
visceral.
*
Steven Shaviro, whose book The Cinematic Body I invoked in my last post
about The Black Swan, criticizes this moralistic distancing of theory (and
particularly in Laura Mulvey’s gaze theory):
“It is high time we rid ourselves of the notion that we can somehow free
ourselves from illusion (or from ideology) by recognizing and theorizing our
own entrapment within it.”
“The psychoanalytic theorist’s need for control, his or hr fear of giving
way to the insidious blandishments of visual fascination, and his or her
consequent construction of a theoretical edifice as a defense against a
threatening pleasure – all this tends uncannily to resemble the very drama
of trauma and disavowal that psychoanalytic film theory attribute to the
normative male spectator… Beneath its claim to methodological rigor and
political correctness, it manifests a barely contained panic at the prospect
(or is it memory?) of being affected and moved by visual forms. It is as if
there were something degrading and dangerous about giving way to images, and
so easily falling under their power. Theory thus seeks to ward off the
cinema’s dangerous allure, to refuse the suspect pleasures that it offers,
to dissipate its effects by articulating its hidden but intelligible
structure. Behind all these supposedly materialist attacks on the
ideological illusions built into the cinematic apparatus should we not
rather see the opposite, an idealist’s fear of the ontological instability
of the image, and of the materiality of affect and sensation?”
“Images are condemned because they are bodies without souls, or forms
without bodies. They are flat and insubstantial, devoid of interiority and
substance, unable to express anything beyond themselves.”
*
When I wrote the review of American Hybrid, I said that one thing it was
opposed to was “hysterical” poetry (or something like that). Of course film
and hysteria is tied together from the beginning (and this is what Breton
picks up on with Surrealism). If I were to rewrite that review, I might say
what American Hybrid (and what might be termed dominant aesthetics in
American workshops – whether “quietist” or “experimental” – as the “hybrid”
proves) must ween its students of, must protect American poetry against it’s
the “cinematic body” – full of visceral pleasure, affect, but without soul,
devoid of interiority.
In other words: Beauty must NOT be convulsive!
(This is why the “kitsch” rhetoric is so close at hand, whether you are Ron
Silliman or Donald Revell).
*
PS
I noticed somebody in the blogosphere writing the other day that no
Scandinavian has written any good novels except the detective stuff. This is
ridiculously wrong, only showing how limited Americans access is to foreign
lit. Stridsbergs novels – in their viscerally stunning, baroque dreamscapes,
in their sophistication – to me are as good as anything I’ve read of
contemporary American fiction. It also says something pretty good about this
moment in Swedish literature when strange books like hers are not only
published by the biggest press in Sweden (Bonnier) but also has won all the
major award (as well as awards in France and elsewhere in Europe). It says
something horrific about contemporary American publishing that these books
aren’t even translated here.
Dalkey, get on the ball!!
*
Here’s a bit of Stridsberg’s “Darling River” translated hastily (by me).
This is about a girl and her dad, abandoned by the mother/wife, who drive
around aimlessly picking up prostitutes. And then they do this amazing
thing, shooting the wife’s left-behing clothes in the woods:
“My father was the lone sharpshooter of the highway, an innocent activity.
Around my dad there was an atmosphere of violence even though I never saw
him getting into fistfights. He practiced sharp-shooting in the wood using
mother’s dresses and bed sheets, which he hung between the trees. I felt
guilty because I liked the image of her underwear hung up between the trees.
The entire forest smelled of her – lavender and cortisone salve – and then
all that snow. It sometimes happened that I fired a few bullets in sympathy
with my dad. I always cried afterwards. I was not a true hunter.
“During the summers, we brought antique furniture with us from home and set
them up in a forest glade. Father called it our imaginary room. While father
shot his way through mother’s wardrobe, I lay nervously bedded into an
18th-century sofa, in which the springs poked me in the back, and watched
clouds rush past between the tree crowns. Father had put up lace curtains
between the trees to keep away the other hunters. Mother’s undergarments
hunt shot-apart between the tree trunks. We punished her even though she was
already far out of our control.”
“I was always worried that my father was guilty of all of the things that we
read about in the newspapers. All the things that kept happening on the
outskirts of town. The forest fires, the rape of prostitutes, the child
murders, the attacks.”
***
*Barrie Karp
NYC*
Search archive with Google:
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Contact the Editors: mailto:nabokv-l@utk.edu,nabokv-l@holycross.edu
Visit Zembla: http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/zembla.htm
View Nabokv-L policies: http://web.utk.edu/~sblackwe/EDNote.htm
Visit "Nabokov Online Journal:" http://www.nabokovonline.com
Manage subscription options: http://listserv.ucsb.edu/
Montevidayo <http://www.montevidayo.com/>
- About <http://www.montevidayo.com/?page_id=2>
- Contributors <http://www.montevidayo.com/?page_id=4>
Immoral Convulsions: Steven Shaviro, Sara Stridsberg and the
Cinematic Body<http://www.montevidayo.com/?p=747>
by Johannes <http://www.montevidayo.com/?author=1> on Jan.04, 2011, under
Uncategorized <http://www.montevidayo.com/?cat=1>
[In many ways this post is a sequel to an earlier post about Sara
Stridsberg, the movie Shutter Island, and the "cinematic body". That post is
here <http://www.montevidayo.com/?p=18>. If you are interested in what her
writing is like, you can skip to the bottom of this post, where I hastily
translated a bit.]
Here’s a clip of Sara Stridsberg talking about her brilliant novel, Darling
River, which tells the story of some young-ish women (it turns out at the
end that one is not that young) who are all haunted by the figure of Lolita.
(Well, one of the characters is in fact Nabokov’s Lolita going through her
fatal miscarriage.)
Here is the relevant quote from near the end:
“There was some expectation that this novel was going to save a kind of
Lolita figure, that it would write her story, her answer. If that’s the way
people read the novel, it’s a great disappointment because it’s more about
the gaze. It may be a critique of the gaze, but it’s also a way of being in
the gaze, investigating it by following its cruelty and be in it one self.”
This seems like an interesting approach to the issue of “the gaze”: to
inhabit it, to involve oneself, rather than the common way it is applied in
poetry discussions: for distance, iconophobia, moralism.
*
I raised the idea of “the gaze” yesterday not to discard it (which would be
pretty hard), but perhaps to call attention to the way it’s commonly
applied, and hopefully to get Danielle and Lara and others who have read
more about this issue to offer their views.
I’ve written about this before: A lot of discussions that invoke “the gaze”
tends to treat the visceral experience, the seduction of art as
“problematic.” This seems to be part of a general trend, a moralistic desire
to get outside of the artwork; that there is something immoral about the
seduction of art, the absorption into art, and that the moral high-ground
can only be through distancing devices.
It’s a very dominant modernist paradigm. In part it might come from a
reductive reading of Brecht. As Lucas hinted at in his post about
translation (more about this later), you can even see this fear of
closeness, need for distance in Lawrence Venuti’s estranging theories of
translation: we must be made aware that we’re reading a foreign text, or
else there’s something immoral about the absorption into the work.
You can see the same sensibility in a lot of the anti-kitsch rhetoric in
poetry. And in Clement Greenberg (the source I suspect of a lot of this
thinking): after all one of the moral failings of kitsch is that it is too
visceral.
*
Steven Shaviro, whose book The Cinematic Body I invoked in my last post
about The Black Swan, criticizes this moralistic distancing of theory (and
particularly in Laura Mulvey’s gaze theory):
“It is high time we rid ourselves of the notion that we can somehow free
ourselves from illusion (or from ideology) by recognizing and theorizing our
own entrapment within it.”
“The psychoanalytic theorist’s need for control, his or hr fear of giving
way to the insidious blandishments of visual fascination, and his or her
consequent construction of a theoretical edifice as a defense against a
threatening pleasure – all this tends uncannily to resemble the very drama
of trauma and disavowal that psychoanalytic film theory attribute to the
normative male spectator… Beneath its claim to methodological rigor and
political correctness, it manifests a barely contained panic at the prospect
(or is it memory?) of being affected and moved by visual forms. It is as if
there were something degrading and dangerous about giving way to images, and
so easily falling under their power. Theory thus seeks to ward off the
cinema’s dangerous allure, to refuse the suspect pleasures that it offers,
to dissipate its effects by articulating its hidden but intelligible
structure. Behind all these supposedly materialist attacks on the
ideological illusions built into the cinematic apparatus should we not
rather see the opposite, an idealist’s fear of the ontological instability
of the image, and of the materiality of affect and sensation?”
“Images are condemned because they are bodies without souls, or forms
without bodies. They are flat and insubstantial, devoid of interiority and
substance, unable to express anything beyond themselves.”
*
When I wrote the review of American Hybrid, I said that one thing it was
opposed to was “hysterical” poetry (or something like that). Of course film
and hysteria is tied together from the beginning (and this is what Breton
picks up on with Surrealism). If I were to rewrite that review, I might say
what American Hybrid (and what might be termed dominant aesthetics in
American workshops – whether “quietist” or “experimental” – as the “hybrid”
proves) must ween its students of, must protect American poetry against it’s
the “cinematic body” – full of visceral pleasure, affect, but without soul,
devoid of interiority.
In other words: Beauty must NOT be convulsive!
(This is why the “kitsch” rhetoric is so close at hand, whether you are Ron
Silliman or Donald Revell).
*
PS
I noticed somebody in the blogosphere writing the other day that no
Scandinavian has written any good novels except the detective stuff. This is
ridiculously wrong, only showing how limited Americans access is to foreign
lit. Stridsbergs novels – in their viscerally stunning, baroque dreamscapes,
in their sophistication – to me are as good as anything I’ve read of
contemporary American fiction. It also says something pretty good about this
moment in Swedish literature when strange books like hers are not only
published by the biggest press in Sweden (Bonnier) but also has won all the
major award (as well as awards in France and elsewhere in Europe). It says
something horrific about contemporary American publishing that these books
aren’t even translated here.
Dalkey, get on the ball!!
*
Here’s a bit of Stridsberg’s “Darling River” translated hastily (by me).
This is about a girl and her dad, abandoned by the mother/wife, who drive
around aimlessly picking up prostitutes. And then they do this amazing
thing, shooting the wife’s left-behing clothes in the woods:
“My father was the lone sharpshooter of the highway, an innocent activity.
Around my dad there was an atmosphere of violence even though I never saw
him getting into fistfights. He practiced sharp-shooting in the wood using
mother’s dresses and bed sheets, which he hung between the trees. I felt
guilty because I liked the image of her underwear hung up between the trees.
The entire forest smelled of her – lavender and cortisone salve – and then
all that snow. It sometimes happened that I fired a few bullets in sympathy
with my dad. I always cried afterwards. I was not a true hunter.
“During the summers, we brought antique furniture with us from home and set
them up in a forest glade. Father called it our imaginary room. While father
shot his way through mother’s wardrobe, I lay nervously bedded into an
18th-century sofa, in which the springs poked me in the back, and watched
clouds rush past between the tree crowns. Father had put up lace curtains
between the trees to keep away the other hunters. Mother’s undergarments
hunt shot-apart between the tree trunks. We punished her even though she was
already far out of our control.”
“I was always worried that my father was guilty of all of the things that we
read about in the newspapers. All the things that kept happening on the
outskirts of town. The forest fires, the rape of prostitutes, the child
murders, the attacks.”
***
*Barrie Karp
NYC*
Search archive with Google:
http://www.google.com/advanced_search?q=site:listserv.ucsb.edu&HL=en
Contact the Editors: mailto:nabokv-l@utk.edu,nabokv-l@holycross.edu
Visit Zembla: http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/zembla.htm
View Nabokv-L policies: http://web.utk.edu/~sblackwe/EDNote.htm
Visit "Nabokov Online Journal:" http://www.nabokovonline.com
Manage subscription options: http://listserv.ucsb.edu/