(Audio) CBC | BBC (original broadcasts, 16 Feb 1945)
Notes and Context for Wed 07-Oct
When all is said, what remains to be said is the disaster. Ruin of words, demise, writing, faintness faintly murmuring: what remains without remains (the fragmentary). — Blanchot (33)
“And what do the birds say? All there is to say about a massacre, things like Poo-tee-weet?” — Vonnegut (24)
Notes and Context for Wed 07-Oct
Context:
Paradox of “writing experience” (writing the disaster)
Greek etymologies:
- word for “truth” is “alētheia” : unconcealment, disclosedness (Heidegger) // (classical intro.)
Q. what of a truth (of experience) that is not disclosed? - “catastrophe” = katastrephein {kata “to overturn” + strephein “turn”; or strophe “a turning”}
= “reversal of what is expected” (originally in drama)
Q. in what does a “turn” occur? (hint: EXP)
Blanchot: The Writing of the Disaster
-
“disaster” as “dis-aster”
– literally, separated from the stars (astronomy/astrology = fate)
“The disaster: break with the star, break with every form of totality…;
the disaster: prophecy which announces nothing but the refusal of the prophetic as simply an event to come, but which nonetheless opens, nonetheless discovers the patience of vigilant language.
The disaster, touch of the powerless infinite: it does not come to pass under a sidereal sky, but here—a here in excess of all presence.” (75)
→ thus, not accounting for experience of disaster by fate/destiny/fortune
Problem: Neither Belief (faith) nor Knowledge (reason/science) addresses or includes the “human element” of EXP…
“Target” (object/area of concern): experience of disaster → writing of experience?
-
i.e. how to write the experience of the disaster?
“The disaster, unexperienced. It is what escapes the very possibility of experience—it is the limit of writing.
This must be repeated: the disaster de-scribes.
Which does not mean that the disaster, as the force of writing, is excluded from it, is beyond the pale of writing or extratextual.” (7)
* Note Vonnegut’s foregrounding his writing of the novel, in the metafictional frame (and emphasized through other textual elements.
→ hypothesis: experience is (in/of) writing
Q. What lesson(s) to take from Vonnegut, from reading the novel?
Q. (more immediately) Vonnegut’s using disaster as figure:
- if the event is the vehicle, what is the tenor (expressed element)?
Literary Definitions: Simple || Extended
Note: I am not using “Figure” to mean metaphor; if anything, closer to metonymy… I can further explain rationale and distinction later; logic simply stated: contiguity favored over substitution.
Q. hypothesis / premise:
if memory concerns truth that “manifests” (as Alèthéia),
then what of the absence or absent-truth?
note: Lêthê (Greek) = “forgetfulness” or “concealment.”
(thus, a-lêthê = Alèthéia = unconcealed Truth.)
Also: in Hades (mythology),
the River and spirit/goddess “Oblivion”—opposite to Mnemosyne (Memory).
Blanchot: “Forgetfulness” — “refers us to nonhistorical forms of time, to the other of all tenses, to their eternal or eternally provisional indecision, bereft of destiny, without presence.” (85) → i.e. oblivion
Q. What is the (forgotten) experience of oblivion?
Or perhaps an oblivion-experience (the disaster). How to express this?
Additionally, note the different conceptions of time in Slaughterhouse Five…?
- Simultaneity of past – present – future (at/as one moment) = Eternal Moment
Ethical implications? (beyond “illusion of free will” vs. “determinism/fatalism”)
- cf. Nietzsche: Eternal Recurrence
(ewige Wiederkunft — not literal, but “thought of perpetual recurrence” as if, not as such)
Looking further ahead:
Potential discussion in next week’s blog entry:
reflection upon the “catastrophe” (turn) of experience — writing (of) experience.
(premise / hypothesis: the “turn” happens through writing experience…)
A potential figure? (even of contrast, to re-figure)
ASTER
NASA’s “Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer”
Part of “NASA’s Science Mission Directorate and the Earth-Sun System, whose goal is to observe, understand, and model the Earth system to discover how it is changing, to better predict change, and to understand the consequences for life on Earth.”
“The light from the single source threw the baroque detailing of Montana’s body into sharp relief.
Billy was reminded of fantastic architecture in Dresden, before it was bombed.” (170)
A potential figure? (to re-figure / re-fashion)
Dresden (w)as Baroque city
“Dresden:the making of a baroque city.”
Ralph Harrington (2005).
Figure of memory/forgetting?
“The Semperoper, the Dresden state opera house, in 2007. It was destroyed during the bombing, but was rebuilt in 1985. It opened exactly 40 years later on 13 February with the same opera that was last performed before its destruction, Der Freischütz by Carl Maria von Weber.”
– Wikipedia
A potential figure?
River Elbe (Dresden)
as
River Lêthê (Hades)
Result?
Lêthê Americana
(i.e. River of American forgetting and/or oblivion — memorial for disaster-experience?)
Question:
when Blanchot says that the disaster is the “limit” of writing but not “beyond the pale” of writing (7),
what do we take beyond the pale to mean?
Literal:
1. A stake or pointed stick; a picket.
2. A fence enclosing an area.
3. The area enclosed by a fence or boundary.
Also:
Pale (geography): a space or jurisdiction lying within a clear boundary.
–e.g. British rule over French and Irish Pales (13th-16th centuries)
Pale (heraldry): a vertical mark running down the center of a flag or shield.
Idiom: beyond the pale: “Irrevocably unacceptable or unreasonable”
–Phrase Origin
So, the disaster is outside experience, but “within the realm” of writing (expression) — perhaps an expression of this “outside”…
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