Showing papers on "The Imaginary published in 1976"

Olive Schreiner: Child of Queen Victoria stories, dreams and allegories

Abstract: Literature may be seen as significant fiction, "an imaginary presentation with meaningful relation to the real world",1 or as a "heterocosm, another world related to the real world by analogy" (Hough, p. 44). In this world of significant analogical structures, allegory has a special place. It is the mode "in which the exploitation of two layers of meaning becomes a formal constituent of the work" (Hough, p. 121). Its opposite is not symbolism, as symbols are often static visual components of its dynamic narrative structure, but realism, or mimesis, an imitation of the real world in which the sensuous level of particular lives is realized with detailed and often historical accuracy. "Allegory is the clearest instance (not the richest and most profound, but the clearest) of the dialectic between immaterial conception and sensuous realization of which the life of literature is made up" (Hough, p. 127). The difference between mimesis and allegory can be usefully illustrated by putting Middlemarch and The Story of an African Farm side by side; they were written in the same decade of the nineteenth century. Both works split a protagonist into a male and female aspect: for Lydgate and Dorothea read Waldo and Lyndall. Both express the failure to reach ideal aspirations: Lydgate and Dorothea compromise with harsh realities; Waldo and Lyndall die young. The difference between the works is one of literary mode: Middlemarch takes the English realistic, historical novel to a summit of detailed plenitude: the "heterocosm" of Middlemarch is tied by a million strings to the historical world of a given period. The Story of an African Farm is set in a world both timeless and phantasmagoric, and Schreiner 's Preface to the second edition makes it clear that the rules of the realistic novel will not fit her book: she distinguishes between the "stage" method where characters and crises appear in the right place and time and her own method, where "nothing can be prophesied."2 "When the crisis comes the man who would fit it does not return. When the curtain falls no-one is ready" (Schreiner, African Farm, p. 7). "Life may be painted to either method; but the methods are different. The canons of criticism that bear upon the one cut cruelly upon the other" (Schreiner, African Farm, p. 7). The defence of her method looks forward to Virginia Woolf's famous defence of her artistic procedure in rendering the random impressionism of life, and to D.H. Lawrence's talk of dissolving the old stable ego of character, just as her shifting dream-like landscape looks back to Spenser and sunyan. Olive Schreiner's fictions, both short and long, can best be understood as modern allegories, as extended narrative metaphors for the soul's timeless quest for the truth, but modified by the particular dilemma of the nineteenth-century soul, which needed to move out of the confining guilts of a punitive theology to the freer air of a new

Figure of Faust in Valery and Goethe: An Exegesis of Mon Faust

Abstract: midpoint somewhere between Plato's Timaeus and Einstein's field theory, traditional cosmology was not only changing; it was dynamically proliferating; and thus it encouraged imaginations like those of Hieronymus Bosch, Leon Battista Alberti, and John Milton to embark upon cosmic speculations of their own. After a succinct introduction, the monograph is divided symmetrically into two sequences of three chapters each, dealing respectively with the physical and the metaphysical aspects of the theme. First of all comes the Creation-what else?such as it is presented in the hexaemeral woodcuts of The Nuremberg Chronicle. Second and third, we watch the developing interplay of the Geocentric and Heliocentric Universes. Professor Heninger brings out the fluidity of the "debate about the arrangements of the planets." In this light, the Copernican alternative was more of an adjustment than an innovation; the Ptolemaic system, with theology behind it, held its place through various readjustments and compromises; and the observer of 1600 could take his choice from a plurality of world-orders. The fourth chapter, taking us back to Professor Heninger's earlier interest in the Pythagorean-Platonic Tradition, shows its syncretic involvement with cabbalistics and other occult schemata. The fifth, perhaps the most attractively illustrated chapter, concerns the human body as a Microcosm, whose analogies with the cosmos at large will be called into question by the advance of empirical science. The final chapter on Contingent Systems is perforce the most miscellaneous, ranging from numerological correspondences through alchemical tables to mythological hierarchies. Professor Heninger makes the significant point that he has found no visual depiction or topical description of the great chain of being among his sources; though it was implicit and archetypal, he suggests, it did not fully crystallize until the eighteenth century-where Lovejoy, we might add, found his most explicit models. By that time the scientific revolution was enlarging the grand design and introducing more flexible paradigms. "The cosmographical glass was shattered," the book concludes. If laws controlled the open universe, they would be too remote and difficult to be grasped by those whose lives they affected, with the exception of a small minority which splintered off into more and more specialized approaches. The modern individual would lose sight of that patterned relationship to the macrocosm of outer nature which had been the object of man's transcending vision, if not of his direct observation. He would turn his gaze upon himself, like "Walt Whitman, a Kosmos," retreating from imaginary order to chaotic actuality.

"Sebastian van Storck": Pater's Exploration Into Nihilism

Abstract: PATER'S CONTEMPT for "mere antiquarianism" is well known, though his partiality for historical settings is proved by his having set only three of his ten imaginary portraits (short, long, and incomplete) in the nineteenth century. That he had a philosophical bent and an interest in modern issues goes without saying. Suppose that Pater had wanted to explore the problem of nihilistic withdrawal from the democratic, bourgeois society of nineteenth-century England in his usual manner, that is, using a historical setting, concentrating on the mind of one character, and developing still another facet of a theme treated often in his fiction-the relation of philosophy to temperament and experience. He might very well have written "Sebastian van Storck." Holland of the mid-seventeenth century provided him with a philosopher whose authority could be thought to confirm some of the character's ideas,' a republican state and a bourgeois society, and a conventional but powerful image for annihilation-the encroaching sea. In other words, by selecting Holland in the mid-seventeenth century as his setting he was able rather easily to create a general air of historical reality; he did not, however, strive for historical accuracy or fullness of detail. He drew very slightly upon the ideas of the philosopher, Spinoza, and not at all upon Spinoza's spirit. Even allowing for some unconscious misinterpretation of Spinoza's ideas, Pater must have known that Se-

Colonial Discourse in the "Journey to the End of the Night"

Abstract: One recalls Bardamu's colonial days. Having reached Bragamance, an imaginary country in black Africa, the character in the Journey enters the store tended by a European on behalf of the "compagnie Porduriere". He witnesses there a typical scene of colonial commerce. For the reader's convenience, I am reproducing the passage to which I would like to apply some reading devices appropriate for the clarification of its ideological content:

[Jacques Lacan: The turn of the Obligado or the return of the unavoidable].

Abstract: "La Vuelta de Obligado" (Obligado bend of Parana river) is the name of a battle fought by local rebels against the colonial invading navy. The victory was due to a witty device: the patriots stretched a cable across the river and succeded in stopping the foreign float. The event is the paradigm of the everlasting fight of under-developped countries against powerful colonial metropolis. The author examines the conditions of local fight against colonizing cultural and scientific ideas, being his main content that scientific advancement needs not be an instrument of scientific imperialism. He analyzes in detail several factors currently impeding the use of scientific discoveries and improvements, focusing into concrete "obstacles" (in Bachelard's meaning) to betterment of Psychoanalytic knowledge. The obstacles are: 1. All-pervading transference. The rule adapted from Melanie Klein theories emphasizing hic et nunc validity of materials from the patient, neglects the fact that the analyst is also moved by desire, and that the patient's productions are not fragments of behavior able to be reduced to the present situation, but vectorial motions, always open and always re-opening into something defined since the beginning as forever lost. 2. Increasing activity for the analyst. The current hypothesis concerning the possibility of analyzing everything, encouraging the analyst's hyperactivity, does not allow for theoretical evaluation of the means and ways of manifestation of unconscious drives through gaps in the discourse. 3. Pan-counter-transference. The conception of counter-transference as an instrument is against Freud's contention, defining it as a reciprocal transference that must be fought in the same way as the patient's. 4. Belittling of theory. The thesis against theory, on the grounds that Psychoanalysis deals with affects and the affective life of patients, forgets that there is always some system for understanding the world and, for want of a theory, an ideological system is always ready to provide the grid underlying all concepts used. 5. Not-analyzing. The automatic "translation", lacking the search for new links to replace the ones that analysis dismantles, leads to denaturalizing the practice and keeping intact the patient's imaginary consistent universe. 6. Intergrationism. Other theories cannot be integrated to Psychoanalysis as they have different objects and different frameworks. Conversely, Psychoanalitic concepts cannot be formulated in other theories conceptual corpus for the same reason. The exception are the sciences having similar fields and methods of analysis, such as Semiotics or Linguistics. In their case the articulation of concepts becomes possible, but still requires the previous command of Psychoanalytic Theory in its full depth. 7. Communicationalism. The most common of all integrations with other sciences is the one linking Psychoanalysis with Communications Theory...