“Spinoza’s ethics has nothing to do with a morality; he conceives it as an ethology, that is, as a composition of fast and slow speeds, of capacities for affecting and being affected on this plane of [Nature]” (125).

–”you do not know beforehand what good or bad you are capable of…what a body or a mind can do, in a given encounter, a given arrangement, a given combination (125).

–Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy

 
 
M 02-Nov          Ceremony     (through p.186 )            (Jessica Brousseau & Phil Cafaro)

 
W 04-Nov          Ceremony     (through end)            (Eric Roe & Jake Jacob)

 
F 06-Nov      No class (away at conference)
                     Due: Blog entry (Friday this week)
 
 

 
 
 
 

Resp 5: Myth and Experiential Narrative in Ceremony
500 words min., 10 points; due W 11-Nov (deadline TBA)
Review assignment criteria here — also remember extra credit opportunity…
 
note: read instructions closely — three main tasks/objectives.
 

“Languages are more or less thick; certain amongst them, the most social, the most mythical, present an unshakeable homogeneity..: woven with habits and repetitions, with stereotypes, obligatory final clauses and keywords, each constitutes an idiolect or more exactly a sociolect.”
 
— “the antidote of myth would be the extreme pole or rather the region—airy, light, spaced, open, uncentred, noble and free—where writing spreads itself against the idiolect, at its limit and fighting it” (168).

Roland Barthes, “Change the Object Itself: Mythology Today” (1971). Image-Music-Text

 
Prompt:
Choose one Laguna “story” (myth) that Silko includes—

e.g. “Thought Woman,” Ceremony (frame); drought/rain; “Spider Woman” and “Gambler”; Fly & Hummingbird; Gallup Ceremonials; “Shush” / Bear; Coyote (Ck’o'yo magician) and Big Fly; Descheeny and captive girl; Witchery; Mountain Lion & T’seh; Sunrise offering.

 
— use this story to understand an historically specific experience in the novel’s diegesis/plot, not in mode of belief but expression (life).     review: Apparatus

 
First, briefly discuss affect that you intuit (third mode) from reading the aesthetic figures and the myth together (novel expression); describe the objective experience/situation in particular and concrete terms, avoiding generalization and abstraction. What is this experience? (focus should be specific, within Tayo’s overall narrative/s)

Tip: review your last Reading Response; likely need to describe experience in affective terms to greater extent (embodied exp., subjective, feeling but not “sentimental” or cliché emotion).

 
 
From this, address key question: how does this relation of myth and experience “negotiate” or “mediate” 1) {the past, culture, tradition} and 2) {historical situation or event, individual’s circumstances and identity}?
In contemporary terms, perhaps helpful to think of myth as “interface” for understanding subject’s (Tayo’s) “situation.”

Tip: review notes on “loss,” beyond single individual; on nature (esp. “the land”) and Nature; on “good/bad” (ethics) over “Good and Evil” (morality); on memory/forgetting, presence/absence, and reconfiguring these binaries.
Also see additional quotes from Barthes, below.

 
 
Finally, consider in relation with other “storytelling”:

either a form of narration within the novels
(e.g. Nick Carraway, metafictional Kurt Vonnegut, anonymous Jazz narrator)

or a story with which you are familiar, in “mode of belief” (from personal experience/knowledge):
e.g. parables/fables, religious/spiritual narratives, Greek mythology

Beyond compare/contrast (which is fine to limited extent), discuss the relation of narrative and experience, from this perspective — particularly what you’ve learned from Silko, in terms of expressing affect through aesthetic figures and “stories” (myths).
Speculate how we might apply your insight(s) in our experiment–not in the mode of belief (avoiding judgment), but concerning experience (Life).

After all, we are not passive receivers inheriting myths (and values) but active producers of culture and knowledge.