Myra Breckinridge – Presentation

…

Argument: Myra Breckinridge undermines masculinity on multiple levels, including Myra enacting ideas commonly associated with masculinity. By enacting this version of masculinity Vidal is able to critique constructions of masculinity. The camp nature of the characters serves to both ‘soften’ the blow with humor and to further highlight the artifice of construction of masculine idea he presents.

 

    Primary Texts:

 

Linda Hutcheon – A Poetics of Postmodernism / The Politics of Post Modernism

·          Parody is used in post-modern texts in a way to understand the culture being discussed. Postmodern parody enacts the ideas of the ‘thing’ in order to critique.

           Shorter version:‘Use it’ to ‘abuse it.’

 

Susan Sontag – “Notes on Camp”

·          Camp is a sensibility that revels in the seriousness that fails. The humor in Myra Breckinridge serves to goals: give the reader something to laugh at, even the most serious of points. The second, and important function, labeling something as camp is saying it seriousness fails. Masculinity’s seriousness does.

 

Douglas Eisner – “Myra Breckinridge and the Pathology of Heterosexuality”

·          Eisner argues that in various ways the Myra Breckinridge reinforces the Heterosexuality that it supposedly intends to combat. While my argue uses some of his ideas, I do not agree that it is failure that heterosexuality is reinstated, as it is fully eviscerated by the time reader reach the ending. A playfulness has opened up, despite Myra’s supposed failure

 

Gore Vidal – “The Twelve Caesars” “Sex and the Law” “Sex is Politics” “Pornography”

·          Homosexuality is an act, not a state of being, and the latter idea is created. Pornography too is something that is constructed by politics.

 

Important Quotes:

“Today there is nothing left for the old-fashioned male to do, no ritual testing of his manhood through initiation or personal contest, no physical struggle to survive or mate. Nothing is left him but to put on clothes reminiscent of a different time; only in travesty can he act out the classic hero who was law unto himself, moving at ease through a landscape filled with admiring women… The roof has fallen in on the male and we now live at the dawn of the age of Woman Triumphant, of Myra Breckinridge!” (57)

 

“The class went well until Buck decided to look in. I tolerated his presence. But then when he became critical of me I was forced to take a stern line with him. In fact, after her made a direct challenge to my authority, I struck him. All in all, it was a most satisfying thing to do and it will be some time before that keg of lard dares to cross me again.” (69)

 

Importance of the Argument:

The importance of my argument is that postmodern fiction can be use to critique traditional ideas on multiple levels, giving post-colonialists, feminists, and others (and any combinations) a contemporary avenue of critique.

Preciptiation

So the big message of Cloud Atlas is that we can make a difference, even as one person (or clone) as a part of many. If our nature is to be evil we must fight against our urges, and if human nature is good, we must live up to that ideal.

Eh. And I really want to like this book.

This book has been so frustrating to me as, Mitchell is capable of great writing, and believable characters. He can switch voices easily. Technically, this book is amazing. However, as much as I think The Sound and the Fury is an innovative and well-written novel, I’m not drawn into it emotionally as other novels. For all the connections about the status of reading and writing that connect each story and concepts, you have silly connections with the number six, and the birthmark on most of the characters, that suggests they may be reincarnation of previous characters (check the Luisa Rey chapter and the book’s wikipedia page). What is the point of the latter? Do they really need to connect? Why didn’t Mitchell just write a short story collection?

Or to go in the opposite direction– why didn’t he make the connections more explicit? Micheal Cunningham does this beautifully in The Hours. Readers know they’re going to read allusions to Mrs. Dalloway and Virginia Woolf, and the cause and effect of actions become apparent, but not out right obvious as to insult the reader. In Cloud Atlas we see chracters effect things, (ex. Somni becoming a holy figure), but they seem only to be echoes and one has to wonder why these connections are even made.

There is also something to be said about how thick Mitchell lays it down in Cloud Atlas. The last three pages, as I read in class, spell out the The Point ™. If I’m going to be preached to, I would like to have some leeway to think about the points that are being made. This is really odd considering past 400-odd pages don’t call out “THIS GOOD. THAT BAD.” like the ending does.

If I had to do some editing in the book, I would gotten ride of the Forbisher and the Cavendish chapters, because there is simply not as high level of tension that is going on in these chapters, especially compared with other sections of the book. 1930’s  Europe and contemporary London are places that easily could have been filled with the intensity of the Luisa Rey chapter. It doesn’t help that the Cavendish chapter seems to be mostly played up for laughs and while it is awful Forbrisher is basically getting his work plagarized from his supposed mentor, he doesn’t make his situation any easier by not keeping it in his pants. I guess there is room for humor in the work, but I didn’t feel that these chapters reptesented the themes oppresion and colonization that Mitchell sucessfully wrote about in other chapters.

Ultimately, I think Mitchell spreads readers to thin. What is the point of remembering all these names when we only get a small piece of them? Do all these sections really come back to an overarching theme and commentary of the human condition?  In my opinion he should gone with smaller stories and more of them or magnified the stories he had.

Good Morning (PoMo) Angels…

I was having trouble figuring out where I was going with postmodern form in the novel.  I could do form and character identity, but I don’t think there’s all that much there, at least not enough to keep me intrested. And I think some of the other angles I can take with Myra Breckinridge. So it’s form and socio-political statement for me. (Reading my draft over again, I guess I used identity to loosely, and got myself confused in the process.) 

But what in god’s name was Myra Breckinridge, the novel– not the woman who no man shall posess, exactly making a statement about. I decided I needed a breather, of course even when I’m getting Chinese food for dinner I’m thinking about work. I kept on hitting on the word parody. Myra Breckinridge is a parody of many things. Especially of machismo and the patriarchy (this could arguably go further and deal with jingoism that Vidal briefly touches upon.)

But how does form fit in? The novel is about a transexual who views the Golden Age Hollywood pantheon as well– an actual pantheon. Heck, the novel starts of one way and then restarts as a journal entries…

And then that when it hit me. The novel knows that it is fiction. It calls it’s own seriousness into questions three chapters in. Not only is it parody, but it is camp. By ‘undermining’ itself it allows itself to call other things in question as it has already recognized it’s own ‘faults.’ Myra is not a reliable narrator, and is dislikable with her ideas of ‘femdom’ or as I like to call it ‘Myra-ism.’ However these ideas are ‘just’ male sexual conquest being performed by a woman (who was born a man, but still).

So:

How does Myra Breckinridge use camp and parody to comment on patriarchal ideas?  It performs them in an exaggerated fashion in order to criticize them.

I’m going to need three women– three women theorists. Linda Hutcheon, who I need to do some more research on, but is an obvious chouces. She touches on 3 P’s: Poltics of Postmodernism: Parody. Another ‘p’ I might need to investigate is Judith Butler, I think in need to investigate and revist her views performativity as an suburisive act as well. Of course, I can’t talk camp with out looking into Susan Sontag.

– will be edited / updated with more with more research —

Seeing Things in the Clouds

Okay, I admit it: There is more to this book than I thought. There is some larger message going on. I still don’t think the form helps or that message getting put forth is anything new or special. I guess the face that we can see the world of Sonmi-451 actually happening in the not too distant-but distant enough-future, that you often want to have fiction as something escapist. If my future is to stink horribly, I guess I want laser beams and flying cars to go along with it. (The Jetsons lied to us.)

I do like how language has evolved in this novel. We started of with the verbose prose of Adam Ewing’s journal, the interesting and descriptive imagery combined with Robert Forbrisher short hand, the contemporary writing of Lusia Rey mixed in with the idioms of her time, the contemporary language, with a strong British dialect of Robert Cavendish to the world of Somni-451.

The language in the Somni chapter is interesting because it takes something has started around the second half of the 20th century: using brand names to describe objects. However it takes it a lot further, however I think it would be hard to argue that this is not its logical conclusion. Camera are now nikons, movies are now disneys and one has to wonder what ‘democratin means’ Also, the ‘e’ is taken off in words extra, examine and explain, which to be honest, makes sense. I also found this exchange to be interesting:

Slaves, you say? Even infant consumers know, the very word slave is abolished throughout Nea So Corpos!

Coropocracy is built on slavery, whether or not the word is sanctioned. (Mitchell 189)

Writing has become commodities as foreshadowed in the Cavendish section, and nowwords have been banned and messages are hidden. Not only writing, but people become commodities through the fabricant clones. Do we become enslaved by this dystopia when our words become enslaved? That seems to be one of the things that Mitchell is arguing. With Ewing who is writing his own narrative (that will be the dominant one for a long time) and Forbrisher’s music being co-opted, the idea is not as strong. However the Lusia Rey mystery makes that loud and clear, as those who work at he nuclear power plant are trying to silence Rufus Sixsmith anyway they can. It is not enought to destroy his work but they end up killing him as well.

From the first half of Somni-451’s interrogation/interview with the archivist we get Sloosha’s Crossin’ an’ Everythin’ After. This section reads like unholy lovechild of A Clockwork Orange and a Faulkner novel. (The apostrophes are everywhere, but at least it’s technically grammatically correct, or as close as it can get for slang.) One could argue that the language has devolved from the previous chapter, although that ignores a large amount of people that would argue that language has been devolving since (Shakespeare / 1800’s / their birthdate). Also, Zachry is a part of a tribe that is less civilized in comparison to times past. Meroynm speech would probably read differently.

The other thing about this chapter is that we kind of have a reversal of the Adam Ewing journals with the colonized talking about the colonized, when it started the other way around.

Thunder in the Skies?

Okay, maybe this novel is going somewhere. Outside the number six and and clouds which I think are inventive but ultimately superficial, there is one prevailing theme. Everybody is trying to take over everybody else. In The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing, we have colonizers trying to make the best out of the natives. In Letters from Zedelghem we have the young musician being lorded over by a composer. In Half-Lives: The First Luisa Rey Mystery, we have those behind Seaboard Village nuclear power plant wanting to kill those who know their harmful secrets. In The Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish we have Mr. Cavendish being chased after by gangsters than ruled over by those in the Aurora House. An Orison of Somni-451 has fabricants being used by humanity because they are believed to be soulless clones. Finally in Sllosha’s Crosssin’ and Everythin’ Afterhas tribes in the post-apocotlyptic world fighting with each other.

Oh, why does the world have to be so mean? There is deceit and conspiracy. People trying to resist horrible odds.

But for some reason, I’m not sure I care. I’m having fun, but I’m not sure I care the same way I was involved with Beloved or entranced by Myra Breckinridge.Mitchell puts on the right narrative costumes and is able to do convincing impressions of genres but I feel like that all I’m getting are quick character sketches, not even short stories. But there’s something off, perhaps I’m not in the characters head’s enough?

Or is the fun and interesting structure actually hindering my enjoyment of these characters? We go from one place and time to another, and while I know I will return to them later on, I have to learn about another group of people, and I’m starting to get a little motion sickness. The time and places are too diverse, as there are hints of previous time periods influencing those that follow, they seems like echoes in the distance. At most, you get to go “Oh, that’s neat.”

You could argue that the Earth and all of humanity are the main characters of the book, but that just seems like a cop-out to me. As much as I should care about man’s inhumanity to man, and what happens to the Earth in real-life, this is fiction. In fiction, I need one person to see the world from. I know that person will be somewhat biased, but it’s a view that gives me an anchor into the world. With this we have six pairs of eyes, that may or may not be connected, and different things to be looking at.

It feels like too big of a scope for me, especially if Tolstoy can write over one thousand pages about five families in Russia during the time of Napoleon, than Mitchell needs to write six separate novels about each of these time periods for me to care as much as I do about characters in my favorite novels.

It is a shame since all these characters and settings seem interesting, but I’m not sure it’s a succesful novel.

Tracing the Sky

en.wikipedia.org

I’m not going to lie, i did some research on Cloud Atlas before I started reading the book. (I do a quick read of the wikipedia page to see what I’m getting to. This was really helpful with Myra Breckinridge for obvious reasons.) I had heard of one of David Mitchell’s other novels number9dream, and new that he was them folks that plays with form. (I’m looking at you House of Leaves.

So going into the novel, I was wondering where I was going as reader. Even with the previous novels, in all their twists and turns, I eventually had a sense of where I was going, I had a mood at least that I could depend on. With Beloved, readers get prose-poem view of the terrible effects of slavery mixed with a ghost story, Myra Breckinridge was a romp through 1960’s California an all it’s societal revolutions and Uses of Enchantmentwas about feminism and pop psychology in 1980’s Massachusetts.

Cloud Atlashops through time periods, locations and even genres with each new section. Even worse is that you literally only get half the story in the beginning. We see the connection between the first two sections as Robert Forbrisher reads out of The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing. It’s interesting that we get to read along side one of the characters. However, we are reading it differently than he is. This leads me to wonder about the fact that we are reading about fictional characters reading about non-fictioinal characters and fictional characters in the world of this novel. What is real, and does it matter if it is all fiction anyways?

I do like the pastiches of certain genres. I do think the author editorializes with some of these sections with 20/20 hindsight, as now there are things presented that previous generations believed in that contemporary readers can get small chuckle at, in an “Oh, how silly we were!” moment. This also something to keep in mind as chapters go on.

The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing:

I think this a perfect mock-up of the typical travel narrative. There is some humor as our narrator seems to be the typical stuffy Englishman talking about the savage natives. Mitchell has done his research as Moriori are native Polynesian people who reside on the Chatam Islands near New Zealand. We even have the footnotes of the son who is reviewing the diaries.

The story of Autua feels fictional to me, as the narrator seems to willing to help him out. I guess along with the prevailing idea that he can be civilized along with the idiom that weirder things have happened, allows me to suspend my belief.

Letters from Zedelghem:

This part of the novel seems to me to be an updated version of the movie Amadues. Musicians with high tempers and people sleeping around all over the place. In comparison to the previous sections, this part seems frivolous as Ewing at least talked about something readers would consider historical instead of the torrid lives of composers. Forbrisher seems ready to sleep with anybody (And I mean anybody).

One has to wonder where the next leap will take us. Is there a prevailing narrative? Or are there simply just connections? Does it matter or are we simply supposed to enjoy these little stories?

In which I link Godzilla to Post-Modernism. Yes.

www.createchange.org

From what I’ve read of Hutcheon, I like her ideas. I think the most important thing to me is that she is ‘giving’ applications to post-modernist theories and art, which are usually characterized as deconstructionist or simply there and waxing self-referential about itself. With historigraphic meta-fiction we get works that become commentary on how stories and history is taught and told. He get new narrative created out of this, and a platform from which to discuss historical narratives.

The criticism is apt, although it seems we read an earlier version of her work in this area that is not as refined as later works. It would be interesting to see what she has changed in latter drafts and if criticism still applies or if holes in the theory are closed up.

The problemm, as Dr. Middleton brought up in class today, is that this subegenre that Hutcheon has created calls into question the mainstream historical narrative.

And that’s about all it does. It falls into the trap that post-modernism ideas often fall into: it destroys previously held ideas and theories akin Godzilla’s year visit to Tokyo, and then walks off back into the Pacific Ocean. Why doesn’t Godzilla post-modernism help to construct anything? It either says everyone is kind of right or everyone is wrong. (Rocks fall, everyone dies.)

Also part of criticism with this theory/commentary/type of work and post-modern views on history that Dr. Middleton brought up is the really unfortunate timing of these theories. Right at the time that various were making way in civil rights academia and intellegista decide to pull the rug out from under them. 

“Oh sorry about finding out all that history about all that stuff really happened, you know like how Columbus was actually a total jerk, an all. But there is not history! Whoops! Now to write more things using French words!”

Perhaps it didn’t happen like that, but instead of finding out what actually happened and replacing the mainstream narrative with one that is slightly more accurate… I will instead just give up a cop-out reply explaining that I didn’t know what really happened and who really does either?

And since those people are treated as elitist (see U.S. Presidential Election 2008) nobody really listens to them anyway, and most people stick with the orginial ideas until repeatedly smacked around with a new one.

There in lies the problem. How do you replace and old narrative with a new one and have it stick? With post-modernism we can take out the trash but we are not able to recycle. I think that one, I kind of like Post-Colonialism better as a lens, although when the two meet really interesting pieces are written, and secondly I want to see how post-modernism can be used to create or shed new light on something. I want to reader post-modern theories that do not make cynically relatavist assertions about history and truth, but introduce some new ground or platform to work from.

Post-modernism not as Godzilla but as Superman.

The Novel is…

…like a box of chocolates.

No.

Let’s go to the authors for some ideas.

I must go with John Gardner, the author of The Art of Fiction.

John Gardner’s quote:

“A novel is like a symphony in that its closing movement echoes and resounds with all that has gone before… Toward the close of a novel… unexpected connections begin to surface; hidden causes become plain; life becomes, however briefly and unstably, organized; the universe reveals itself, if only for the moment, as inexorably moral; the outcome of the various characters’ actions is at last manifest; and we see the responsibility of free will.”

I must admit that Gardner’s is the least organized out of the choices, and teachnically easier to agree with. (It’s like saying life is like a Jackson Pollack painting.) However, doesn’t that seem to say something about how novels are viewed? They are able to be pretty much anything, with boundaries being pushed farther each day. Currently the novel is mostly fictional prose that is more than certain length, as in whatever is the length for a novella, the novel is more than that. That’s what it is, and that’s debatable, but what it does (and should do) is another question.

Virginia Woolf discusses novels being pushed by characters and not preaching. However, I don’t agree, some great novels preach (although not in a very didatic manner) and some novels may not have characters at all, or not have them as the major thrust of story at least. Henry James feels that the novel is a form of personal impression, however, especially in this day and age, you don’t have to direct experience to write about it –that’s what memiors are for. (I kid.) William Phelps and Terry Eagleton are too short for me, and not nearly as poetic.

That leaves us with Gardner. Gardner discusses plot, plots or notions toward it, and the idea that things come together at the end, even if they are just a result of all the actions that have happened. Whether they are a beautiful sound or a cacophony of noise, the novel leads to something. I agree with Gardner that the novel always leads to something, that at least pieces come together. Even if things are not completely revealed, the reader is left with some change, some realization (not always a moral). Also I feel that with fiction and any type of story– life becomes organized and connected in a way that does not always seem to happen.

Whether that is a positive or negative for fiction, it is still intrinsic to the novel. Some truth is revealed, if only for a little while. With Beloved, readers are able to see the intricate horrors of slavery through a post-modern ghost story. With Myra Breckinridge, readers romp through sexual roles and orientations. The Uses of Enchanment is exploring the mind of a young girl and the role of feminisms in society.

The novel should let the reader realize something, even if that is that they shouldn’t realize something. Heck, even that they hate the book, is still a response and a realization.

Who is Mary?

In class today we were discussing who was telling the truth. But when the person who knows the most doesn’t know everything, and is playing games herself that she may or not be good at– the truth is going to be hard to come by.

For example it seems that present day Mary can’t help lying. She questions it now, “Was she really going through with this? Miss Pym may not have recognized her, but there was little chance that Roz Biedelman wouldn’t instantly know who she was” (Julavits 90). Although it seems here questioning the action is because she’s afraid of getting caught. And she goes on pretending to be Dr. Biedelman’s associate anyways.

I kind of wonder how much blame we can put on Mary for acting out and playing games with people. We can put some blame, and she even says that to Roz (who ironically does not let her have event that). But it seems that she can’t get any attention as herself, and get some when she’s playing games or becoming someone else. Everyone in her life is either distant or going after their own plans by using her.

Hammer notices this in their  March 4th, 1986 meeting.

“Still I found Mary’s past hard to reconicle with her present self; the volatile young woman I’d met in  in very few ways resembled the invisible, obedient, and ultimately unremarkable girl evoked by her teachers and her report cards.”

(Julvatis 97).

She may be Mary but she’s not acting like she’s expected. She switches roles with Hammer in another session. Ironically, she’s telling the truth or at least explaining a bare reality of their situation.

 If Mary is the girl in the What Might Have Happened chapters, who says her name is Ida (as in the character she writes about in one her creative writing assignments), then we have another example of Mary not being herself. And then with the added information about Abigal Baker, Dorcas Hobbs and Benitta Spencer who she mimics in the session– we have no real idea who Mary is. Even present-day Mary can remember all her stories.

It’s weird that Dr. Hammer gets so close and yet so far. You just want to shake him, and explain that Mary’s a teenage girl that’s perpetually overshadowed for most of her life, her parents marriage isn’t all that great, and school kind of sucks. If he’d stop interrogating her and just say that some parts of her life stinks– he might get somewhere. Mary is not stupid, as he is surprised to admit, she probably knows that it isn’t the worst thing in the world.

I don’t think we’ll ever get to know what really happens to Mary, if she is the girl who calls herself ‘Ida’ but Mary does say something important in the reading for next class:

“Bettina wanted somebody to write a book about her”     (Julvatis 213).

Well, somebody wrote a book about Mary– whoever she is.

A Close Look at the Grin-and-Bear-It Mural

Miss Pym and the Semmering trustees, after securing the funds for the new field house, had announced a mural contest in which “entries should illustrated, with reference to our area’s rich past, the trials, tribulations, and triumphs of New England women.” The winning mural depicted women being chased by tomahawk-weilding Indians and women tied to stakes, their skirt hems blotted by flames fanning upward from crudely rendered piles of logs. The clouds above the heads of the soon-to-be-scalped-or-burned women transformed, with a little squinting and very little imagination, into faces that surveyed the scene with expressions commonly interpreted as enthusiasm. To the handful of actively feminist teachers at Semmering, these possibly enthusiastic clouds were read as a perverse endorsement of injustice againstwomen by the school’s trustees, who “noted” their complaint as a way to actively ignore it. The mural’s official title–The Disappearing Women–was all but unknown among the student body, who referred to the thirty-foot wall painting as The Grin-and-Bear-It Mural; to them aptly summed up the way they had been taught to approach the world by parents and teachers: to keep their sadness to themselves even as they were materially spoiled in this suburban enclave with its lurid history of torment.                                      

                                                                        – (Julavatis 3).

Summary: In the lobby of Semmering Academy there is a large mural, placed their for winning the mural contest. The mural is supposed to depict the trials and triumphs of the women of New England. The mural depictswomen being burned at the stakes or being chased by Native-Americans with tomahawks, with faces in the cloud in the sky that seem watching enthusiastically. Some teachers interpret the mural as an endorsement for injustic against women. The students interpret the mural as a summary of the world view they were taught, and call it the Grin-and-Bear-It mural.

Analysis:

• The winning mural that supposedly is to represent the trials and triumphs of New England women of the past, depicts the only the trials part, presenting women as victims. The quote is followed by the depiction for a sharp contrast between intention and results of the mural contest.
• The mural references captive narratives during the time of English settlement (abduction), and the witch trials of Salem (witchcraft).
• The faces in the clouds are enthusiastic, as opposed to overjoyed, or watching in horror. As the narrator comments the specific word choice allows for the face to be permissive of the actions below, but they are not outwardly endorsing them.
• “To the handful of actively feminist teachers as Semmering…” Why such a small number of feminists at a girls academy? What does that say about that area
• General tone of the narrator is sarcastic. (Use of quotation marks)
• Trustees ingnore the complaints, some teachers make connection between them and the faces in the clouds.
• The students at the Academy see the mural different from other groups. Girls feel unable to express sadness due to wealthy status and location in New England, possibly shunned for what is considered ‘just’ complaining?
• Painting is a static product.

Synthesis: To put it bluntly: Semmering Academy does not seem all that great a place. A mural looms over head reminding(?) or showing women as victims, without balance of any heroines. The Semmering girls only inherit a history of abduction, or certain death for living outside the norms, and even sometimes for just being alive. Are there any positive female role models for these girls to emulate? The face in the clouds seem omni-present but do not interfere with the scene. There is also a questioning of feminism or what it is supposed to be, as the narrator says their only a few active feminist teachers, active implying that others are only in name and the rest would not consider themselves one, or be considered one by others. The mural serves as away to show the soically opressive enviornment that is the academy and potentially life in the town. The narrator suggests that the girls do not feel they are able to complain about thier life due to the wealth of their parents and the safe enviornment they live in. With no good way of expressing emotions, one of them might act out in various ways.