Showing papers on "The Imaginary published in 1981"

The Utopia of a Tired Man: Jorge Luis Borges

Abstract: ION It is hardly possible to open a book of criticism these days without encountering a reference to Borges. The name magically transports writers from the drier labors of analysis and explanation to the oasis of parable. His "fictions" have the force of a demonstration whilst remaining eminently disponibles, which possibly explains why they appeal to the avant-garde left like Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze, to the quietist skeptic in the University profession as well as to those who take the unequal balance of power between metropolis and periphery as part of the natural order of things. In effect, the graph of Borges's reputation outside the Argentine began to rise rapidly after 1961 when he was co-recipient with Samuel Beckett of the Formentor prize. This was precisely the time when G6rard Genette, Foucault, Barthes, Derrida, the Tel Quel group, and others had begun to challenge the procedures of discourse and the assumption on which traditional narrative, history, metaphysics, science, and anthropology based their authority. The fictions opportunely became the exemplary texts. The laughter provoked by reading Borges's imaginary Chinese taxonomy' shattered, according to Foucault "all the familiar landmarks of my thought, our thought, the thought that bears the stamp of our age and our geography."" Everyone would surely want to join this particular revolution which involved no bloodshed. Borges's fictions could be claimed as examples of e'criture, as religious, metaphysical, or skeptical demonstrations, as existential searches, as demonstrations of stoical quietism, and, more modestly, as proof that Latin America was indeed in the avant-garde.3 On the other hand, Borges's works also hold comfort for conservatives. They do not shatter the peace and order of military governments. They confirm metropolitan critics in their belief that Latin America, and Argentina in particular, do not deserve the civilized pleasure the fictions provide. According to one critic, it is only Borges's "triumphant overflow of civility and intelligence that salvages the entire continent of brutality and stupidity." In all that barbarism, he is held up as the exception that proves the rule.4 What is surprising is not that the fictions are read in these different ways nor that they become arguments both for the right and for the left, but rather the critical consensus: '"El idioma analitico de John Wilkes," Otras Inquisiciones (Buenos Aires, 1960), p. 142. 2Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. (New York: Vintage Books, 1975), p. xv. 3See, for instance, the special issue of Revista Iberoamericana, XLII, 100101, (June-Dec., 1977). 4Paul Fussell in his review of Paul Theroux's The Old Paragonian Express in the book supplement of the New York Times (August 26, 1979). JEAN FRANCO, the author of An Introduction to Spanish-American Literature, is the chairperson of the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Stanford University. A co-editor of the periodical Tabloid: A Review of Mass Culture and Everyday Life, she has most recently published Cesar Vallejo: Dialectics of Poetry and

Thomas More and Tyranny

Abstract: Tyranny is a recurrent preoccupation in the life and thought of Thomas More. It is among the first of the subjects which he takes for his own in his earliest examination of Greek prose. It is the theme of a significant number of his Latin poems. It provides the matter of his Richard III and the anti-matter of Utopia: it is among the evils which his imaginary commonwealth is designed to annihilate. ‘He always’, wrote Erasmus, ‘had a special loathing of tyranny.’

Imaginary Toads in Real Gardens

Abstract: HE presentday reader is in the same relation to the codes and touchstones of Elizabethan language as the future reader will be to the codes and touchstones of present-day language. A sensitive critic of the future, encountering the terms “golden arches” or “watergate” in a fine poem by a venerable poet of the 1970s, might logically conclude that “golden arches” referred to the streets of heaven, the lost city of Coronado, or even rapidly ascending but transitory wealth and that “Watergate” stood, metaphorically, for a weak barrier to the flood waters of corruption. Such readings would be logical, perhaps even valid, for both terms had long histories of accumulated suggestions before McDonald’s made golden arches the ubiquitous emblem of fast food and Watergate acquired specific political signification. Only the political and commercial journalism of the 1970s and the ephemeral banter of popular television and journals-“Is the Pope Catholic? Does McDonald’s have golden arches?”-could provide the future critic with the materials necessary for a full understanding of the import and irony of these terms. Only within the framework of all that is known of Elizabethan life and language can the achievement of language that is Elizabethan literature be fully perceived. Only from the chapbooks, popular tales, miscellanies, plays, sermons, and broadsides is it possible to learn that Love’s labours lost” was a clichk, that the proverbial expression, “ifhe kills with the sword, you kill with the scabbard,” dramatized by Shakespeare in the actions of Pyramus and Thisbe in A Midsummer Night’s Dream,’ was bawdy advice to a wife whose husband was committing adultery. And only in that faint light left of their own age do the words, images, and complex patterns of their great artists come into full 6 6

Capacities for integration, Oedipal ambivalence, and imaginary companions.

Abstract: The phenomenon of imaginary companions in early childhood has been approached from the standpoint of capacities for ego integration. A limited review of the literature has been presented, along with a brief discussion of the development of synthetic functions and the growth of an integrated personality structure. The fantasy of an imaginary playmate has been examined as representing latent deficiencies in ego integration that become manifest with the rise of Oedipal conflicts. The case study of Susan was chosen to illustrate this process. The differential course of this stage of development for boys and girls is thought to require differential degrees of synthesis, and is presented as an explanation for the recurrent empirical finding that imaginary companions occur more frequently among female children. The ambivalence created in the child's relationship with the mother has been explored as a critical facet of this process, and the relationship of these early difficulties with integration to later psychopathology has been briefly addressed.

"Straight" and "Secret" History in Vietnam War Literature

Abstract: Graham Greene concludes the dedicatory letter to R6n6 and Phuong that prefaces The Quiet American (1955) this way: "This is a story and not a piece of history, and I hope that as a story about a few imaginary characters it will pass for both of you one hot Saigon evening."' But despite Greene's ironic disclaimer, readers have understood that the novel is a history of the early fate of Americans in Vietnam. "Maybe it was already over for us in Indochina," Michael Herr writes in Dispatches (1977), "when Alden Pyle's body washed up under the bridge at Dakao, his lungs all full of mud. .. ."2 And readers have recognized that the novel is a visionary or proleptic history of what would happen to Americans in Vietnam. "He had always understood what was going to happen there," Gloria Emerson writes in her account of an interview with Greene, "and in that small and quiet novel, told us nearly everything.'"3 Greene's remark notwithstanding, The Quiet American is a sort of history, a fiction of the actual past and the real future, a "story" in the place of "history." The collapse of the distinction between these two terms occurs in much of the literature of the American war

Melville and the tradition of primitive utopia

Abstract: complex, the most multi-dimensional, with the most tangled intel lectual history. Those ideographs of society redeemed from the Fall and purified of the ills of the real world, which we call utopias, themselves divide dramatically into two types?what Lewis Mum ford has called utopias of reconstruction and utopias of escape.1 The tradition of the reconstructive utopia begins with Plato's Republic and Laws and includes most of the works that constitute the literary cum-philosophical genre: More's Utopia, Campanula's City of the Sun, Andreae's Christianopolis, Cabet's Voyage to Icaria, Bulwer Lytton's The Coming Race, Bellamy's Looking Backward, Wells' several technocratic futures, and B. F. Skinner's Waiden Two, along with a host of less significant progeny. What unites these fictive projections?as well as numerous political blueprints, such as those of Robert Owen, Fourier and Comte?is a stress on social organiza tion and behavior control. Rational planning is the keynote, with the inevitable result that the imaginary citizens of these imaginary societies appear manipulated, regimented, and fungible?quite ra tional, but rather robotic. The model of the reconstructive utopia I have elsewhere defined as civilization-only-more-so: that is, as a systematic intensification of the restraints upon which all actual soci eties rest.2 The model of the escapist utopia, paradoxically, represents the other extreme: a primitivist rejection of the entangling restraints of civilization. That the same generic term should denote both models is a source of no little confusion. R. W. Chambers, for instance, com

Narcissism and the death instinct.

Abstract: The myth of Narcissus is a myth of death resulting from the absence of desire in a love relationship, and a metaphor of the symbolic and imaginary death of the narcissistic person. Four of Freud's dreams are analysed in terms of their narcissistic structure. They reveal some important features in the implicit relationship between the feminine nature of the narcissistic body and the counterpart. They lead to a better formulation of the narcissistic state in terms of the relationship between the self and the counterpart. The narcissistic relationship is based on wishes and not desires. The object of the wish is not essential for the wish to emerge or to be sustained. As a result, the narcissistic relation is characterized by the absence of its aim and the impossibility of its satisfaction; and consequently it symbolizes death of the world or the self and is an imaginary death of both. In that sense, Freud's introduction of the concept of narcissism and his concept of the death instinct should be seen as connected, as they constitute a stage in psychoanalytic knowledge. It is difficult to understand narcissism detached from the concept of the death instinct without rendering the issues of meaning and interpretation irrelevant to the psychoanalytic act.

The Field of Language in Film

Abstract: The three films which Laura Mulvey and I have made together (Penthesilea, 1974; Riddles of the Sphinx, 1977; AMY!, 1980) all attack a single set of problems which are at the same time political, psychoanalytic, and semiotic. According to the Lacanian schema, each of us is subjected to the symbolic order, the superimposition of social law and regulation on the needs and instincts of nature. This symbolic order, this law, is authorized in the name of the father, the third term which intervenes to break up the dyad of mother and child at the joint moment of entry into the Oedipus complex and acquisition of language. Thus the symbolic shatters the imaginary plenitude of the mother-child relationship and restructures the course of our identifications. We must find our places, as men or women, within that symbolic order, an order which is constituted through verbal language and on the alienation of sign from object. The patriarchal character of this symbolic order necessarily makes it problematic for women and a fortiori for feminists. In our films we have tried to investigate the limits of a validation of the imaginary (the myth of the Amazons, the dyadic mother-child relationship, the exemplary heroine) as a form of resistance to patriarchy and the possibility and implications of transforming the symbolic order to one which is nonpatriarchal. Since the symbolic order is tied to the acquisition of language, this has involved paying particular attention to the place of verbal language within our films, which in many respects are interrogations of language itself, symbolic quests in search of the place from which women could utter the repressed counter-meanings of patriarchal discourse. One possible strategy, which we have always rejected, would be to avoid verbal language altogether and produce a kind of film which, lacking the explicit presence of words, was made only of icons and indices, images and traces. From the beginning of cinema, again and again, we can find an impulse on the part of filmmakers to banish language and reduce film to the status of a "pure" visual art. Not only was the advent of sound resisted (seen as tributary to verbal language) but there was a campaign, within silent cinema, against the written intertitle, both in commercial and avant-garde film. Up to this day, many avant-garde filmmakers persist in refusing verbal language or reducing it to a minimal and epiphe-

Recent Research on Charlotte Brontë’s Juvenilia

Abstract: Her navels stand at the end af a lang apprenticeship. ift is this apprenticeship that has been my cancern far the last faur years. Thraugh a clase study af her juvenile manuscripts, I· have attempted to' follaw the caurse af Charlatte's earlywark and to relate it to' her later develapment as a writer. In her case, the meaning af the term "juvenile" must be extended: until the age af twenty-three she cantinued to' write staries. and paems abaut the imaginary African kingdam which she and her brothers and sisters had created. Charlatte's juveni!lia began as the result of childhaod play, waven araund a set af twelve 'wooden tay-saldiers given to' :Branwell an June 5, 1826. Three years later 'the children began writing miniature boaks far the toy-saldiers. Gradually the plays taak an an exclusively literary nature as the children chranicled the events and staries af their imaginary characters. Little evidence survives af the rales which Emily and Anne played in this early imaginary warld; after 1831 they withdrew to' form their awn legend af Gandal. But far anather eight years, Charlatte and Branwell cantinued to write their "Glass Town Saga", which tater carne to' concentrate an the imaginary kingdam of "Angria". TO' understand why there is nO' previaus study of Charlatte Brante's juvenilia based on knawledge of all her exisfing works, we must bear in mind the nature and histary of the early manuscripts. In quantity, they amaunt to' more than all her later navels, yet anly half af them have been published. Their tiny size and Charlatte's microscopic script make transcriptian extremely slovv

Barthes's Imaginary Voyages

Abstract: Reading L 'Empire des signes and Alors la Chine as points of departure, the article explores a network of reciprocal images of the text as voyage and the voyage as text, with Barthes as a self-styled, disinherited ethnographer/traveler.