 Quite an amazing tale, reminded me a bit of The Immoralist by Andre Gide. Both Michel (I think it is Michel) and Mann's Aschenbach are sober, Apollonian characters that go to the Mediterranean where they are enticed by young, beautiful boys (Arabs in Michel's case, and the divine, Polish Tadzio for Aschenbach). Different set of dualisms govern the narrative in these stories: in Michel's case, it is the movement from sickness to health, from intellect to body (with an opposite movement happening in his wife, Marceline(?) as they go further into the Mediterranean), while for Aschenbach, there is a movement from the Apollonian to the Dionysian.
The ending of Death in Venice was incredibly cinematic, as Aschenbach's gaze is fixed on Tadzio playing on the beach with his playmates, and then Tadzio's gaze eventually returns to a dead Aschenbach. Not sure when Mann wrote this book or if he was a fan of cinema, but this last scene in the book reminded me of the ending of The Passenger by Michelangelo Antonioni.
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 Reads as if written by a rabid man possessed by a ceaseless torrent of thoughts.
Doystovevsky explicitly writes at the beginning that the unnamed narrator (the one writing the Notes) is "of course, imaginary." However the unreliability of the narrator seems to mock the sincerity of such a claim. Interestingly, the Notes laid bare Doystovevsky's personal thoughts more explicitly than his other books (according to the introduction of my copy). The first part is a critique of Enlightenment reason, utilitarianism and mathematical determination. The masochistic narrator recognizes that man's volition takes is often contrary to reason, volition being "the manifestation of the whole life" (p.35). The second part recounts his days as a young man, and refers a lot to master and slave morality. Our weak-bodied narrator believes himself superior to others (especially intellectually) but is shown that he is not a higher man in his dealings with others. Instead of breathing fresh air in the tall mountaintops (like Zarathustra) he broods in the musty, suffocating underground, filled with resentment.  Fun book that I read over the past two or three months that takes "one's object the study of the object" (Bourdieu's Afterward), namely, fieldwork.
Some interesting quotes and moments and people: - Richard, the French emigré bar owner in Sefrou stuck in between two worlds, that of the vieux Marocains and the nouveaux vieux Marocains - Rabinow's relationship with his informant Ali; Rabinow's "systematic questioning" brings Ali to spend "more time in this liminal, self-conscious world between cultures," a dialectic process in which "neither the subject nor the object remain static" (p.39) - the same Ali is a pimp and Rabinow has sex with one of his girls - Rabinow identifies participant observation as an "oxymoronic term," as "no matter how far 'participation may push the anthropologist in the direction of Not-Otherness, the context is still ultimately dictated by 'observation' and externality" (p.79)  This ethnography is the product of two years of ethnographic research in Second Life by Tom Boellstorff. I have been wanting to read this ethnography for a while now, particularly because in these online environments, one is forced give birth to oneself, so to speak. I connected this with Sartre's bon mots: "man is condemned to be free"--this is an environment where the existence of the character you make precedes its essence, and you choose how you are thrown into the world. (There are obvious limitations, it is the game developer who ultimately provides the meta-structure for these choices.)
The "virtual" is described by Boellstorff as a gap between the potential and actual, in Second Life this gap is most saliently manifested in the gap between "online" and "offline." (There seem to be many layers of virtuality, however, and one of Boellstorff's express goals is to show that humans have always been virtual through culture.) Boellstorff thinks through online spaces by reconceptualizing the human as homo faber, who constructs virtual worlds through techne (contra homo sapiens who makes known the world through episteme). Through techne online residents of Second Life emplace themselves in their virtual environment, constructing social places; places in the virtual world are not inherently inferior to ones in the offline world. The spatial gap constitutes the divide between the actual and the virtual and residents of Second Life can navigate this gap with varying levels of immersion (one can be "afk" or away from keyboard, which is a way of being present but not immersed). However, the temporal gap between the actual and virtual cannot be navigated as time is thoroughly nested in the actual world; time in the virtual world can threaten time commitments in the actual world. Boellstorff has an interesting comment on immersion that is relevant to immersive hardware technologies like VR. He recollects a debate in Second Life about the addition of voice capacities (communication was wholly in text in the time of his ethnography); many residents felt threatened because it would close the gap between the actual and the virtual and "destroy the fantasy" (p. 114) to quote one of his informants. In his opinion, technologies of greater sensory immersion are not as important as the techne of social immersion. Second Life is immersive for its residents because of virtual sociality, and the emphasis on sensory immersion through VR technologies may breach the generative actual-virtual gap. Boellstorff also analyzes the political economy of Second Life. He identifies it to be fashioned in the "Californian Ideology" of its creators, and calls it "creationist capitalism" (p. 206). In this system, the consumer is simultaneously a producer, and self-fulfillment takes on the form of creative production. There is a whole chapter devoted to 'Personhood,' the chapter that I looked forward to the most (as mentioned above). There was a great deal of divergence in how Second Life residents expressed the gap between the actual self and the virtual self (the avatar): some thought that there was a great divergence, some noted an interpenetration (personality in Second Life influences the actual), and some believed that "I can truly be myself, my inner self" (p. 119). None of these I find mutually exclusive. In all these cases, the avatar is a construction of homo faber, of techne. Second Life personhood becomes more interesting when one considers the possibility of one actual person to have two or more Second Life accounts ("alts") and the possibility of one avatar being shared by more than one actual people. In both these cases, the avatar was treated as a discrete and continuous self; people did not question or probe into the existence of friends' alts, even when they were in intimate relationships. Boellstorff ends the chapter on a provocative note: concluding that "avatars [are] not just placeholders for selfhood, but sites of self-making in their own right," he wonders if avatars as such have agency, or as he puts it "can the avatar speak?" (p. 149).  I could feel Pearl Buck's admiration for the Chinese people as she describes them as being stoic, courageous, and eternally optimistic - which reminded me of the film 活着 (I think "To Live" in English) by Zhang Yimou - despite their daily bombardment by the Japanese in the fictional town of Chenli.
Buck is not too kind to the new, "modern" Chinese like Dr. Chung, who works in the same hospital as American doctors Gray and Sara. Dr. Chung colludes with Japanese captive and hospital patient Yasuda for his own personal benefits, and is used as a contrast to highlight a type of Chinese patriotism on the part of Gray and Sara, who love and are devoted to the Chinese inhabitants in Chenli. Maybe Buck, who was American but was born and grew up in China, was expressing her own Chinese patriotism through Gray and Sara, (I think it is significant that Sara ends up adopting an unwanted Chinese baby girl), a situation where Buck cannot but be a foreigner. I definitely did not enjoy it as much as The Good Earth, and Buck's Christian moralizing (I guess she is Christian) makes it a bit off putting at times. However, the relationship between Dr. Chung and Yasuda is interesting; usually in Korean films about Japanese colonialization Koreans are all patriots while the Japanese are all evil. I would like to see more of these complex relationships in Korean cinema.  Finally finished Kundera's The Art of the Novel, a "practitioner's confession" as he calls it. Split into seven parts, Kundera celebrates the greatness of the novel as an art form and talks and writes about his personal vision for the art form. I found it a very good key to his work (he even includes a glossary of some important and reoccurring terms and themes in his work; so tired was he of his translators translating these terms into synonyms).
His comments on the structure of his work were of great interest to me, and I thoroughly enjoyed his essay on Kafka.  Well-written ethnography on the Western Apache people. For the Apache, the principle question of the past is found not in the when, but in the where. Places contain stories of the ancestral past and act as mnemonic devices that continue to convey a traditional ethics (basically what is good vs bad).
Basso notes the lack of attention on the ways people use places in anthropological studies, and creates a foundation for anthropologists to think about the way their interlocuters use their places.  A classic in the canon of anthropology. Mauss conducts a intercultural survey in the attempt to define the gift (the French title is 'Essai sur le don').
In the process of doing so, he challenges utilitarian assumptions and expands on ways modern society can use man's fundamental instincts and create an economy that is more gift-oriented and that can increase social solidarity.  An infinitely interesting investigation into the great question beauty. This first time around, I could not recognize if Mishima enounciated a coherent theory of aesthetics or if what was written was a confused collection of ramblings (don't get me wrong, such meandering ramblings are often more profound and thought provoking than a clear position).
I also feel as if the perspectives that Mishima took are quite foreign to my own, and I struggled in this foreign, Oriental soil. The protagonist is stuttering Zen acolyte Mizoguchi who falls under the spell of the beauty of the Golden Temple, a sometimes abstract, sometimes concrete image of beauty itself. In his various attempts to form relationships with women (who represent life and a transient type of beauty), the Golden Temple comes forth with its image of eternal beauty. I sense a sort of conflation of the beautiful and not-beautiful with the dichotomy of good and evil. This is initially exemplified by the pure and good Tsurukawa, who is able to act as a purifying messenger for Mizoguchi's stuttering tongue and corrupted heart. Tsurukawa gives way to the clubfooted and far-too-knowledgeable Kashiwagi, who defiles the idea of the purity of beauty with his own developed idea of aesthetics. This is definitely a rich text, and I hope to come back to it one day. However, I think I will have to read up on Zen Buddhism and some more of Mishima's books first to have more effective next readings.  Now in his 80s and in the vesperal stages in his life, Kundera celebrates the insignificance of life with this slim and comic novel.
Nothing of much importance happens throughout the story. Four friends enjoy each other's company and talk about this and that, their conversations (and Kundera's narratorial voice) sometimes veering into the terrain of philosophy, the content of which is not exceptionally profound. The climax of the story is a birthday party that three of them attend, where nothing much happens. They talk about Stalin and his insignificant story of the 24 partridges, and in the end of the novel, Stalin and his follower Kalinine make a surprise entrance into the world of these four friends, into the Luxembourg gardens where they create a lot of laughter. "L'insignifiance, mon ami, c'est l'essence de l'existence..." Against the heavy spirit of seriousness Kundera's novel celebrates the spirit of lightness and humour through the innocent and liberating truth of insignificance. |
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