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Paul Grobstein's picture

deconstruction/reconstruction: conscious/unconscious in art/lit

I think there's a really important, if somewhat inchoate, idea bubbling around from our last Tuesday session and earlier ones. The idea, relevant to literature and painting and philosophy and ... life, is that one can find new lines of exploration by deconstructing one's current conscious understandings: that conscious understanding reflect simpler unconscious elements that have been elaborated in various ways, and that one can recombine the simpler elements to yield new directions of exploration that wouldn't have been accessible through the elaborated forms. Hence, against "method" and against "interpretation" not in the sense that we shouldn't try and make sense of things but rather in the sense that we should recongize that existing ways of making sense of things build on unconscious understandings and that if we genuinely want to find new ways to make sense of things it is the unconscious underlying understandings that need to be recognized and altered.

With that idea in mind, what's interesting in the language arena is not only Robert Frost and formal logic but also some transitional forms between them:

Virginia Woolf, Orlando

Everything was different. The weather itself, the head and cold of summer and winter, was, we believe, of another temper altogether. The brilliant amorous day was divided as sheerly from the night as land from water ... The rain fell vehemently, or not at all. The sun blazed or there was darkness ... The moment is brief ... ; the mment is over; one long night is then to be slept by all.

Gertrude Stein, Buttons

There is no gratitude in mercy and in medicine. There can be breakages in Japanese. That is no programme. That is no color chosen. It was chosen yesterday, that showed spitting and perhaps washing and polishing. It certainly showed no obligation and perhaps if borrowing is not natural there is some use in giving.

James Joyce, Ulysses

Proudly walking. Whom were you trying to walk like? Forget: a dispossessed. With mother's money order, eight shillings, the banging door of the post office slammed in your face by the usher. Hunger toothache. _Encore deux minutes_. Look clock. Must get. _Ferme_. Hired dog! Shoot him to bloody bits with a bang shotgun, bits man spattered walls all brass buttons. Bits all khrrrrklak in place clack back. Not hurt? O, that's all right. Shake hands. See what I meant, see? O, that's all right. Shake a shake. O, that's all only all right.

Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot

Given the existence as uttered forth in the public works of Puncher and Wattmann of a personal God quaquaquaqua with white beard quaquaquaqua outside time without extension who from the heights of divine apathia divine athambia divine aphasia loves us dearly with some exceptions for reasons unknown but time will tell and suffers like the divine Miranda with those who for reasons unknown but time will tell are plunged in torment plunged in fire whose fire flames if that continues and who can doubt it will fire the firmament that is to say blast hell to heaven so blue still and calm so calm with a calm which even though intermittent is better than nothing but not so fast and considering what is more that as a result of the labors left unfinished ...

Like a late Mondrian painting, these linguistic creations are, to various degrees, offered not to be "interpreted" in terms of underlying meaning but rather as efforts to expose the bare bones of the unconscious (which has explanation but not meaning) out of which meaning may be subsequently elaborated. They require us not to "intepret" them but rather to ourselves create new meaning out of them.

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