These notes were produced in conjunction with Dr. Shelley Armitage's seminar Memoir and Identity, offered during the fall of 2012, in Union Institute and University's Ph.D. in Interdisciplinary Studies program.
***
In my view, identity may extend above and around any individual, an umbrella of how we’ve spent our time, whose flexible metal frame is our understanding and interpretation of those experiences—as best as we may recall and recount. Stuart Hall asks, “what is this never-ending theoretical work which is constantly losing and regaining concepts?” (42). An elusive answer to this dilemma of self-determination and representation comes in assessing modern mechanics of identity creation, of how and where we state and make known our unique abilities, insights, and narratives.
Hall’s discussion descends into semiotics, and spirals into discerning the meaning of Derrida’s elusive ‘a’ implanted into the word “difference,” seeking to prove that the paradox of our meaning becomes (according to Hall), the lack of human certainty, to any facts at all: postmodernism seems to have rendered our abilities of representation somewhat null, as “meaning is in that sense a wager” (p. 51), our best individual and collective guesswork, as to who we are and what we do. For Derrida (in my interpretation), the ‘difference’ of our individual existence becomes penultimate to a collection representative of the subtleties and nuances between us. For Hall, the question of individual self-determination becomes representative of “a change of consciousness, a change of self-recognition, a new process of identification, the emergence into visibility of a new subject” (p. 54).
This action of transformation and emergence may be the result of acknowledging a Derridadian ‘difference,’ which Morrison describes eloquently: it is the close and trepidations relationship between the author and their representational narrative she seeks to represent in her works, as well as the histories she may encounter and, by necessity, represent: “when you kill the ancestor you kill yourself” (p. 497). When one seeks contextualization for one’s own life experience, a keen sense of precedence, and what has come before, is essential.
In April of 2012, Bruce Springsteen delivered the keynote address at the Austin, Texas music and arts festival South By Southwest. As a springboard to his remarks, “The Boss” used music critic Lester Bangs’ grave characterization of creativity and a solipsistic climate of representation and identification within the genre, following the untimely death of Elvis. Bruce Springsteen cited Bangs’ final paragraph, which appears here unabridged, published originally in the Village Voice on August 29, 1977:
If love truly is going out of fashion forever, which I do not believe, then along with our nurtured indifference to each other will be an even more contemptuous indifference to each others' objects of reverence. I thought it was Iggy Stooge, you thought it was Joni Mitchell or whoever else seemed to speak for your own private, entirely circumscribed situation's many pains and few ecstasies. We will continue to fragment in this manner, because solipsism holds all the cards at present; it is a king whose domain engulfs even Elvis's. But I can guarantee you one thing: we will never again agree on anything as we agreed on Elvis. So I won't bother saying good-bye to his corpse. I will say good-bye to you (Bangs, 2003).
As we seek to create new methods of self-identification and representation, to what extent are our narrative impulses influenced by others in our intellectual environment? Have readers, listeners, and viewers’ expectations of representation in art changed since Bangs described a culture of fragmentation and solipsism; do we expect to see ourselves when we read, watch, or listen? Or, have we come to expect creative expressions of self-definition, across genres, to resemble each individuals’ coming-to-realization story of their connectedness? If we do have such expectations, Bangs’ comment on how culture may come to nurture a “contemptuous indifference to each others’ objects of reverence” remains, unfortunately, salient. Hall describes a “profound historical decentering in terms of social practice” (p. 43), in part because the “individual or collective subject [is lodged] always within historical practices, as we individuals or as groups cannot be, and can never have been, the sole origin or authors of those practices.” Acts of self-definition, identification, and the explanation of narrative are, according to Hall, to be eternally linked, traceable, in tandem with other individuals, moments, and works of expression that have come before: regardless of whether or not anything exists in our culture that we may have previously agreed upon. According to “The Boss,” our aims of expression and individual narrative come amidst a “post-authentic world. And today authenticity is a house of mirrors. It’s all just what you’re bringing when the lights go down. It’s your teachers, your influences, your personal history. And at the end of the day, it’s the power and purpose of your music that matters” (Springsteen, as cited by Powers, 2012).
Bangs, L. (2003). Mainlines, Blood Feasts, and Bad Taste: A Lester Bangs Reader. Ed. J. Morthland. Random House: New York.
Bangs, L. (29 August 1977). “Where Were You When Elvis Died?” Retrieved from http://josephwaldman.livejournal.com/43782.html
Hall, S. (1997).
"Old and New Identities, Old and New Ethnicities." Culture,
globalization, and the world system; contemporary conditions for the
representation of identity.41-68.
Morrison,
T. (1994). “Rootedness: The Ancestor as Foundation.”The Woman That I Am, ed.
D. Soyini. Madison: St. Martin’s.
Powers, A. (15 March 2012). “Bruce Springsteen on the Meaning of Music.” NPR.org. Retrieved from http://www.npr.org/blogs/therecord/2012/03/15/148693171/bruce-springsteen-on-the-meaning-of-music
***
Vizenor’s “Crows Written on the Poplars: Autocritical Autobiographies” experiments with narrative voice and the genre of creative non-fiction, to recount both his father’s death, as well as grapple with both his abilities and shortcomings of memory. Does Vizenor’s promise—to refer to himself in both the first and third person—complicate, or help achieve, his essay’s goal? Is this solipsism—the celebration of one’s own perceptions, as ultimate and central—or, does Vizenor’s essay seek to reflect an understanding of the world beyond, a history of the connectedness the author has accomplished?
The author’s sense of identity seems confused, for his choice to employ both first- and third-person: “who would he be now in his autobiographies, he wondered, if he had stayed in Japan?” (p. 429). Frankly, I am less interested in individuals’ narratives (including memoir), if review of such past-tense possibility is established as an overriding theme. Citing Georges Gusdorf, Vizenor’s theoretical embrace of autobiographical tasks becomes itself an uphill battle: as “autobiography becomes possible only under certain metaphysical pre-conditions” (Gusdorf, as cited by Vizenor, p. 432), the fragmented glances into the author’s life provide the reader traces and threads of comprehension. According to Vizenor, is an autobiographical author specifically fraught with the task of becoming his or her own subject? Should Vizenor, whose writing is replete with as many quotations on the craft, accept George Steiner’s characterization of the genre (“we speak first to ourselves, then to those nearest us in kinship and locale” (p. 432-433)), this essay seems to seek entry into the academic realms of the late 1980s , when ‘mixedbloods’ may have been as understandable as the essay’s elusive title phrase (I do not like poplars—one of the weakest trees, and no good for winter burning). Perhaps the role of the memoirist is, to Vizenor, like that of a poet: to wrangle with the concrete images until some novel and perhaps salient account is rendered, however comprehensive and comprehendible. Preferring prose accounts (Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London; Lorde’s Zami: A New Spelling of My Name), or even Ferlinghetti’s autobiographical and remarkable attempt at poetry (Americus, Book 1 (2005)), I suppose Vizenor—in part because of the composition of his being, in part because of his life experience—ascribes beyond genre to the aim of what “poetry” once meant. From W.H. Auden’s “In Memory of W.B. Yeats”:
for Poetry makes nothing happen: it survives
in the valley of its saying where executives
would never want to tamper; it flows south
from ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,
raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,
a way of happening, a mouth.
Vizenor, G. (1987). “Crows Written on the Poplars: Autocritical Autobiographies.” In Native American Autobiography: An Anthology. Ed. A. Krupat. University of Wisconsin Press.
***
Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (1982) represents a critical, reflective, and personal narrative: a work of memoir organized through moments of enlarged sensual and physical experience, in which the storyteller illuminates key moments of her understanding. Facets of Lorde’s identity—as a woman, a lesbian, as well as a member of the groups that occupy and reside in specific locations—evolve, threaded by her patient, reflective, and self-effacing tone. How does Lorde’s work (subtitled “a biomythography”) define, or provide contrast to, a more traditional definition of first-person non-fiction narrative?
Lorde’s experimentation in what psychology may name transactional analysis riddle each of the interactions she cites: be them with her mother, her father, her high school classmates, or the “beautiful young women whom [Lorde] was sheltering like a wounded banshee” (p. 119) at Hunter College. Raised in Harlem, her relationship with her mother characterizes her earliest years, spent upon an “unfriendly firmament” (p. 34); in both Catholic school as well as at home, Lorde’s “ability[ies] had nothing to do with expectation” (p. 24). Interactions are key to each event Lorde describes, from chanting collective Hail Marys with her classmates following Pearl Harbor (p. 54), to the patient sensuality expressed in her first physical encounter with a woman (p. 40). Relationships of many types remain Lorde’s central theme; beyond the historical significance of her accounts of community amongst lesbians during the late 1940s and early 1950s, the nature of deep and shared experience between women evolves and progresses throughout Lorde’s narrative, each instance increasing in complexity. For this reason, as well as for the time period it seeks to depict, I was reminded of the development of fraternity and the nature of male association and exchange through the endlessly-reflective narratives of Jack Kerouac . The prefix bio- Lorde applies to the subtitle of her work of memoir may represent her focus on relationships between the humans she encountered during a specific period in her life.
What of the characterization, then, of memoir being “mythography”—the tracing of a path upon some sort of map, upon which explanations for natural or social phenomena are represented? Some of the parental advice she mentioned: “Mistakes could mean exposure, maybe even annihilation” (p. 58). Following Audre’s disappointment, in the school election she had “cared about so much […],” her mother tells her, “‘Child, why you worry your head so much over fair or not fair? Just do what is for you and let the rest take care of themselves’” (p. 65). Lorde describes that “[she] was supposed to know without being told” (p. 69), about matters of inequality, racism, and the “new and crushing reality” surrounding her family. She is making dinner for her mother, smashing garlic with a mortar and pestal (p. 78-79), when she becomes further aware of herself as a physical, sensual, and sexual being—and, forgetting dinner, fails to meet her mother’s expectations. These pieces of wisdom sum to convey little sense of authority and autonomy to the author; rather, Lorde’s ethereal presence amongst these individuals seems to drive the narrative forward, as a procession of events leads her deeper into an understanding of one’s impact upon the world.
In describing the diversification of her experience at Hunter College (“each part of my school life was separate from the other, with no connection except through me” (p. 86)), her friend Gennie’s suicide attempts, which end in tragedy (p. 106), and her abortion, described graphically, and with a terse emotion (p. 110), Lorde’s narrative continues to bear a kind patience to its subjects, including her central character, herself . Later, following a variety of industrial jobs in and around Stamford, Connecticut—and after having gained confidence, understanding, and terminology for dimensions of her identity—Lorde is keen in assessing interactions within a specific community, however clandestine and taboo:“Lesbians were probably the only Black and white women in New York City in the fifties who were making any real attempt to communicate with each other” (p. 179). Perhaps the ‘myth’ inherent in Lorde’s “mythography” comes in her true assessment of her impact on others’ (and lovers’) lives: largely unknown, uncovered, and unresolved. Her path of knowing—first characterized by her utter blindness, and the enablement she feels upon getting glasses as a child—may be the result of her heightened social, sensual, physical, and sexual experiences. “I soon discovered that if you keep your mouth shut, people are pat to believe you know everything, and they begin to feel freer and freer to tell you anything, anxious to show that they know something, too” (p. 129).
Lorde, A. (1983). Zami: A New Spelling of My Name. Freedom CA: The Crossing Press.
***
To what extent may one show “love” for an aspect of one’s identity, however construed or contrived by society? hooks’ students, in a course on black women writers in the early 1990s, “wanted to talk about black self-hatred, to hear one another confess (especially students of color) in eloquent narratives about the myriad ways they had tried to attain whiteness, if only symbolically” (p. 10). The circumnavigation of her students, around and about their race, is characterized by hooks as “self-hatred,” “so intense that it silenced any constructive discussion about loving blackness” (p. 10). hooks uses the ideas of James Cone to assert how “moving away from the notion that an emphasis on sameness is the key to racial harmony” (p. 13), and towards not a culture of ‘racial erasure,’ but a full embrace of difference, as a “basis for solidarity.” While hooks’ theoretical context for race as a component of identity remains important, I found her quote from Jonathan Rutherford especially interesting, if increasingly outmoded: “advertising thrives on selling us things that will enhance our uniqueness and individuality […] cultural difference sells” (p. 17). If we consumers were still seeking technologies that, beyond their practical purposes, specifically deepen and enliven our identities and our connection to people like ourselves, a greater diversity of fair-trade products may have become available by now, twenty years after hooks’ original writing. What assessment of saleable cultural difference might be made, based on cellular phone carriers’ marketing, of the latest pocket computers? It seems more important now (than ever?) that corporations’ advertising—from Wal-Mart to Verizon, Toyota to IBM—feature individuals from a diversity of racial backgrounds.
hooks inquired as to why black students sat separately from white students, in the Yale University cafeteria: “we sit together with folks with whom we share common interests and concerns” (p. 16). To what extent may this criteria represent a new construction of ‘love,’ for not specific aspects of one’s own identity, but the acceptance and endorsement of such, in full? The differences between us are essential to our understanding of “our uniqueness and individuality”; in their acknowledgement comes a more complete understanding of who we are: “we cannot value ourselves rightly without first breaking through the walls of denial which hide the depth of black self-hatred, inner anguish, and unreconciled pain” (p. 20).
Since the time of hooks’ writing, the United States gained new extrinsic enemies through The War on Terror; we have elected a black male for President; a successful black entrepreneur sustained (however briefly) a campaign for the Republican nomination; military campaigns were launched and sustained, based on theological and political difference; the intrinsic and national demonization of racial difference Michael Jackson’s skin tone changed, literally from black, to his own unique shade of flesh. I am interested in how the “love” hooks describes might be applied to the widening economic disparity in this country, and wonder how might we come to love being part of “the 99%”?
***
Based in Damasio’s theories of connectedness,
Eakin(2005) seeks connections between the actions of the mind and the synchronization
of the body: “is it fantastical to align the events of our emotional,
intellectual, and spiritual lives on a continuum with the micro-events of our
physiology” (p. 4)? No greater error than the autobiographer’s assumption that
their audience has gathered with a similar and unifying expectation, and await
a writer’s “recovery of the past” (p. 5)—for this reason, Eakin focuses on a
definition of “narrative duration: it too has a trajectory stretching across
time, such that the present of the autobiographical act in these cases is not a
present of the present moment but rather a recent past, the history of the
autobiography’s composition” (p. 5). Hinting that our conception of time and
chronology may be one of our largest stumbling blocks in accurate portrayal of
our complicated lives, Eakin’s essay surmises new and inventive use of our
memories.
Our lives are made different by
our retelling: “not due only to the remodeling of the lived past that takes
place consciously and unconsciously, but also to the laying down and remodeling
of the anticipated future” (p. 6). I find this comment intriguing, as our
political system might bemoan its morning-after, post-Convention hangover:
viewing rhetorical synopses posted on factcheck.org and elsewhere, one may find
interesting trends in the extent to which Republican (and Democrat) politicians
have been willing to ‘look back,’ and the extent to which loud voices advocate
for “remodeling of the anticipated future.” Former Florida Governor Jeb Bush
remarked on his brother’s Presidential administration, in a rare and partisan
moment of reflection: "Mr. President, it's time to stop blaming your
predecessor. You were dealt a tough hand, but your policies have not worked […]
A real leader would accept responsibility for his actions, and you haven’t done
that” (Bush, August 30, 2012, as cited by Mascaro).
To what extent is the action of ‘remembering
remembering’ a feature of a writer’s Romantic sensibilities? Eakin
characterizes Wordsworth and Whitman in this respect, likely to be emotionally
attached to their action of memory: as we recall our biographical details at
different points in our lives, we are subject to the distortions of our
present-tense conditions—and perhaps, specifically, those among us who may
identify ourselves as poets (I once helped a friend with a poetry manuscript
titled “The Comedy of Memory”). Eakin is preoccupied with the fallacies,
incongruences, and the comedic that may come in our action of looking back at
our lives, not only because our bodies as well as our minds maybe seeking to
understand that rhythm, but also because we have endured these physical,
visceral experiences.
Eakin, P. (2005). “Living Autobiographically.”Biography,
28,1. Retrieved from http://search.proquest.com.proxy.myunion.edu/docview/215618822/fulltext?accountid=14436
Mascaro, D. (August30, 2012). “Jeb Bush ad-libs about
brother George W. Bush at GOP convention.”Los Angeles Times. Retrieved
from http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/la-pn-jeb-bush-george-bush-20120830,0,2837646.story?track=rss
***
Patricia Hampl’s memoir Blue Arabesque is a personal narrative focused on the author’s conception of leisure and indulgence, a search for distinction and calm The intersection of art, spirituality, and sensuality are key to Hampl’s memoir. Her childhood initiates her story, and much attention is paid to the formal and structured setting of “pre-Vatican II” Catholicism. The advice she receives from a “sixty-year-old cloistered nun” (p. 9), regarding leisure and the rare ability of just taking our time, propels her interpretation of great artists, including Cezanne (p. 73), Matisse (p. 72), and filmmaker Jerome Hill. “Like all true memoirists, Hill is drawn more the shards than stories, images rather narrative” (p. 102). Hampl embraces these ‘shards’ of lives in her patient yet sweeping account of her own, and others’ lives: for this reason, and for his work Film Portrait, Hill is important to her evolving definition of memoir. “A man hidden behind the scrim of his easeful life and obscured identity. Is it because of his essential shyness in the face of the personal genre he has chosen? Because he can’t tell all or even indicate much about himself? And does this reticence convey a greater, more enduring human truth than disclosure ever can?” (p. 107). This “reticence” is critical: as one assesses and explains one’s life and work, the narrator’s choices in omission and inclusion become themselves defining, to the listener or reader.
Hampl’s Blue Arabesque is interesting for its sequence: not specifically arranged by critical moments in the author’s life, but rather by the important encounters with narratives of other artists and scholars. Anais Nin’s search for “perfect indulgence and unbroken leisure” (p. 114) fascinates Hampl, and introduces themes of eroticism and sex into her discussion of leisure—interestingly, as she reviews her own sensuality as well as the artists that fall within her gaze, her retelling increasingly cites the Oxford English Dictionary, seek etymological roots of terms. From Nin and others’ sensual and sexual escapades, Hampl declares “the fountain of youth [to] not to be a gushing elixir but its opposite—the willingness to take in nothing, to starve and eliminate, to attenuate” (p. 117). This Zen-like stance carries the second half of Hampl’s memoir—she calls Matisse’s words of description of his model “strange bondage language” (p. 135), amongst much else—before discerning her relationship with her ultimate foil and inspiration, Katherine Mansfield: a writer who, according to Hampl, “exposed the membrane between self and art, the porous fiber that transformed a raw girlish ambition and overheated poeticism into the remorseless assurance of fiction” (p. 159). While Hampl appears unsettled about Mansfield’s lack of extended works of fiction and novels, she seeks to further understand the writer’s unique ability to simultaneously write and assess her own life, while maintaining a clear and poignant—yet emotionally uninvested—stance. My favorite passage in Blue Arabesque came as Hampl sought to understand artists’ relationship to their human subjects, their models: her description of Matisse in this regard echoed some of the more sordid biographical details of two of my favorite painters, Maxfield Parrish and Andrew Wyeth. While I found Hampl’s organizational technique at times challenging, I appreciate her aim to collect and interpret moments in which her definitions of specific universal concepts—here, leisure—became more clear.
***
The comic book form harkens deeply to my soul; a fan of the sanitized
color visions of Archie, Jughead, Veronica and Betty, Richie Rich, Casper the
Friendly Ghost, and—in high school—Mad and
Cracked magazines, as well as the
extensive and prolific work of Robert Crumb, a contemporary and peer of Art
Spiegelman. MAUS II is a rich and
comprehensive retelling of the author’s father’s narrative, of struggling to
exist, amid one of the most horrific environments humanity has ever known.
How does the comic book form work to convey elements of the environment
in this work? Actual photographic depictions within the walls of Auschwitz,
Dachau, and other nefarious locations are few; Speigelman’s drawings may
provide visual representation in a way few other documents may. While Raul
mentioned that “using a graphic novel to tell a horrible story of the Holocaust
is not the most enjoyable way to read a book,” I am challenged to invoke a
different creative genre that provides the reader both visual and linguistic
immersion, as well as establish and maintain resonant themes associated with
the form. A great deal of literature and historical narrative exists regarding
the Third Reich, yet few (in my estimation) achieve the level of engagement and
playful chronology of Speigelman’s efforts across Maus I and Maus II. Elie
Wiesel’s Night is a perennial choice
for high-school summer reading lists; an argument might be made to support
Speigelman’s Maus II as a viable, and
far more graphical, endeavor of historical engagement.
Maus II is important for its leaps in time: the
narrator, Speigelman’s father, appears in the author’s present tense, as
fulfilling stereotypes surrounding the elderly (the complete narrative’s
inciting incident comes as the father claims to have had a heart attack, to
garner his son’s attention). As the narrative’s Holocaust thread is sandwiched
between moments of interaction within a more ‘civil’ society—including a trip
to a grocery store, the illicit occupation of a backyard patio within a gated
community, and an incident with a black hitchhiker—the reader is challenged to
anticipate characters’ reactions and responses to their world. Glenda poses an
important question in her commentary: After the events of September 11th,
2001, how close did US constituencies come, to victimizing ‘the other’ as a
result of a collective pain and mourning? My answer would be: as close as
Speigelman’s father came to having empathy or tolerance for the black
hitchhiker. The vilification of Arab-Americans following September 11th,
2001 may have helped establish new themes of distrust in our society: not
unlike Vladek’s fear, that the hitchhiker would have stolen their groceries
from the back seat, some outlets for allegedly “fair and balanced” journalism
devoted an abundance of airtime to the discussion of a mosque, to be
established within blocks of Ground Zero, in the decade following the events of
September 11th, 2001. A similar distrust might be identified in the
relationship between Mitt Romney and the Occupy Movement; certainly, the media
and Presidential administration’s vilification of those questioning the cause
and true nature of those events became a national pastime. A “9/11Was an Inside
Job” bumper sticker is likely to be deemed unpatriotic by many demographic
groups and political organizations; similar characterizations may come in
examining Joe Arpaio’s political movement regarding Barack Obama’s citizenship,
or even the beleagured supporters of Ron Paul’s “End the Fed” movement (not to
mention the excised Maine delegates at last week’s GOP Convention). Because of
Speigelman’s careful and earnest portrayal of his father’s narrative and
tribulations in Maus II, I feel as
though a more clear portrait of the mechanisms and personalities at work our
divisive political climate may come into better focus.
Spiegelman, Art. Maus II: A Survivor’s Tale: And Here My
Troubles Began. New York:Pantheon Books, 1991.
***
Art Speigelman’s graphic memoir MAUS II seems a historical and personal representation of the
extent to which humans have treated each other badly: chapter six in Watson and
Smith’s Reading Autobiography seeks
to understand how visual and graphical representations may perform these tasks
differently than prose alone. Citing Jared Gardner’s definition, Watson and
Smith discuss how MAUS is constructed
of “the particular tension and dissonance it generates by mixing codes from
juvenilia into autobiographical narratives of history and trauma” (p. 169),
themselves asking “how can there be “art” after such events?” (p. 170).
Speigelman’s embrace of the visual, comic-book form, establishes
expectations within the consumer: depending on one’s background and history of
comics (I mentioned my fascination with Archie
in my previous post), such embrace may invoke a traditional paradigm of good
and evil, as we wait for any or all superheroes to descend, to valiantly rescue
all those persecuted, from the forces of oppression and death. Of what use is
art, in a world so cruel? The suspension of reality supports Watson and Smith’s
“recursivity,” in which the consumer is challenged to face “the crossing and
ultimate confounding of boundaries in visual-verbal narrative” (p. 171). If we
are to depict ourselves as comic—in
caricature and exaggeration—the relationships that are forged both inside and
outside of the creative work may bear unique and mysterious rhetorical powers:
rendering daily editorial cartoons about our own lives’ successes and failures
may offer more challenge than daily journal-writing. If we were able to imagine
the names and powers held by the superheroes, that could descend and repair all
of our social and non-human environment’s problems, the nature of our
self-reflection may be forever skewed. Perhaps such invention—of the
supernatural entities that may swoop in and rescue us from ourselves—may help
us intellectuals cure our postmodernist hangover, and proceed boldly into an
acute and reflective 21stcentury rhetoric: Wonder Woman for
President.
I am interested in Watson and Smith’s assumptions about YouTube
and Facebook (p. 185), as they note the potential within both platforms (“will
YouTube self-performance, with its instantaneous circulation and global
audiences, become an occasion for sustained and introspective self-narration or
signal its impossibility?”). I am glad the authors conclude their discussion of
visual, virtual, and graphical memoir with avocation for “new notions of
subjectivity through the effects of automediality” (p. 190), and their
acknowledgement that new representations of self-reflection and narrative may
“render certain stories intelligible, others unintelligible.” While my own YouTube
presence compiles personal effects, photographs, and music, no ‘particular
tension’ is represented or intended, but rather a fragmentary portrait of a
chronology, juxtaposed automatically into one “channel”; taken as a memoir
itself, this compilation might signify interests and moments of creative
expression, but may predispose the viewer to a specific relationship with the
discourse at hand. Unlike readers of MAUS
II, those seeking to indulge in others’ narrative representations across
virtual platforms may self-select the extent of their engagement—and, through
frameworks of response and criticism, provide feedback and critique. While
Watson and Smith’s discussion identifies the importance of new and virtual
platforms for the elaboration of memoir and self-narrative, one may wonder:
without individuals’ commitment to specific values of aesthetics and rhetoric,
how will “art” exist online?
I’m interested in more
in-depth discussions of what one may consider to be aesthetic and utilitarian,
and the extent to which one’s creative expressions of memoir and recollection
may be considered by groups and individuals to be ‘art.’ Somaly Mam’s work of
written expression represents her experience and interpretations of what she’s
seen and where she’s been; my disqualification of her efforts as ‘art’ renders
my judgment supreme, the dictate by which others may establish preconceived
notions. One literary example of this comes from a famous William Carlos
Williams poem, its text derived in full from a note he affixed to a friend’s
refrigerator door. Because it was pulled down by his friend and deemed by
scholars to be ‘art,’ fine poetry, newly representative of his and others’
experience, how may I—not a professional art critic, but an
interdisciplinarian—seek to better frame Williams’ words?
As a culture, we may
thirst for definitions of art beyond the traditional: as noted in a recent Wall
Street Journal article by Camile Pagila, revolutions of postmodernism that
swept through galleries in the 1960s may have been rooted in viewers’
connection to mechanical trades, that we were once a society that worked in the
factories that produced the soup cans Warhol depicted, once was able to have a
different perspective of the mammoth fabric-and-framework sculpture of a
cheeseburger Oldenburg revealed in 1962. The new art is the iPhone, claims
Paglia, and is representative of an aesthetic that appeals to a culture that
needs no gallery visits, no populist canvasses, but also no works of repugnant
criticism (she cites Serrano’s infamous “Piss Christ” and Cavallaro’s “My Sweet
Lord,” a full-scale chocolate Jesus). As “the art world, like humanities
faculties, suffers from a monolithic political orthodoxy—an upper-middle-class
liberalism far from the fiery antiestablishment leftism of the 1960s” (Paglia),
industrial design, including the ever-more-sleek iPhone, is Paglia’s suggested
as being the next realm for the employ of our artistic aesthetics. She declares
the avant-garde in fine art essentially dead, strangled by our own
technologically-enabled hands, before calling for a return to the
acknowledgement of the spiritual in the creation of art. “There is no spiritual
dimension to an iPhone, as there is to great works of art,” she writes.
Evaluations and
comparisons between Mam’s work of recollection and Apple’s latest incarnation
of their device may yield further insight into the nature of memoir, and its
viability as a work of fine art; I believe one’s personal expression of life
events is an important genre, one that may become more important (“Piss
Christ,” in all its symbolic minimalism and social commentary, may be less
effective in conveying one’s own biographical and spiritual narrative, that was
Mam’s work of nonfiction, or is my own Facebook timeline, website, or blog). As
technology allows for an increased automation in the way we account for our
lives, and the way our stories will be told in the future, the power of our
sustained written narratives may only increase.
Paglia, C. (5 October
2012). “How Capitalism Can Save Art.” Wall Street Journal. Retrieved from http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390444223104578034480670026450.html
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