Several months have passed since I last posted on this blog. I had started many different posts during that time, but they always managed to get deleted. One of my other blogs became stuck on politics for no other reason than my brain was working something out, and little managed to escape other than the trivial.
Since reading Kafka's The Metamorphosis many years back, I've been at the least obsessed with a shifting in thought from Plato to Kierkegaard. I often find it difficult not to mention one or the other. And as my days of becoming a full-time writer get closer I've been struggling to understand who I am as a writer.
I think of myself as an artist. But I also think about myself as a capitalist. I want to make money, but that's not the most important thing. As an artist, I want to create, not recreate, not replicate. The little capitalist in me has been patient because he knows I'm great at making money, so he's biding his time.
This is the tragedy of the artist, to create, to invent. It is to say something new, to express one's self in a new manner. It is to do more that create art; it is to define art. And the capitalist in me is quick to point out that the Renaissance began in gift shops.
Yes, in gift shops, my internal dialog goes. It was the aristocrats and well-to-do who purchased portraits and landscapes from the lands they visited and this financed early painters. This infusion of money spawned one of the greatest artistic resurgences in human history.
The novel has similar origins in that people sought stories of foreign lands, most notably during the Age of Discovery. The competition among travel writing turned to fiction to spice up the norm. Fiction freed the writer from reality, from actual travel, and fantastic stories of high adventure emerged.
Enter Romanticism. The Noble Lie. Plato. Combine the propensity for exaggeration with sycophantic treatment of patrons and you get Romanticism. You get Plato's "Noble Lie." Though, as always, it is far from noble. Romanticism demands ignorance, a blindness toward all that is bad, and an exaggeration of all that is good.
Even our first Western novel, El ingenioso hidalgo Don Quijote de la Mancha, satirizes Romantic notions. Writers, and artists in general, all participate in the lie; only the romantic attaches nobility to it. For the rest of us, we justify our lies differently.
With Gustave Flaubert came realism, a focus on what was common. Flaubert gave us a lie we all knew well. He gave us our own lives in print. James Joyce successfully captured Flaubert with his masterpiece The Dead, giving us the epiphany along the way, and then made an odd departure. Enter modernism.
We mustn't confuse modernity with modernism. Modernity was a social shifting in the way people thought about life. It marks the shift in focus of religion and its gods from being the center and reason for life, to people accepting direct responsibility for their actions. Modernity marks the point where politics and religion became two distinct aspects of one's life rather than one.
Modernism, on the other hand, more accurately describes a shift in focus to the self, a self-awareness, a focus on the individual. Joyce is the epitome of modernism, yet with Joyce's later work, most notably starting with Ulysses and carried on to Finnegans Wake, in many ways he took a step back toward the romantic.
Maybe we should blame Freud because Joyce's modernism turned inward, and oddly this inward world of stream-of-consciousness took Joyce, and all of us along with him, back to the middle of romanticism. We lost Flaubert and flesh-and-blood and found a new form of a Noble Lie.
At the same time the existentialists captured our attention yet only managed to point out how absurd this Noble Lie is. Joyce begot his protégé Samuel Beckett. The existentialists begot the postmodern era.
To ask, What is postmodernism? is akin to asking What are people like? Postmodernism is a response to discovering that the Noble Lie is simply a lie. Postmodernism is a group of hippies having sex in an open field. Postmodernism is nihilism, it is a New Age religion, it is atheism. Postmodernism is Dr. Phil.
Postmodernism is a reaction to the belief that society defines you. You are a result of the fingers of society molding you. You are a result of consumerism and nationalism. Your soul is stained with the fingerprints of every -ism that has tugged and pulled you into your present shape. You exist only as a concept, as a market, a demographic. You is defined by Them.
Postmodernism begot Them and They and reacted by pointing at You, because We can only see Them and They through You.
And so we reacted. We did drugs. We had sex. We rekindled old superstitions with new names. We gave up our superstitions for our neighbor's. We became atheists. We became reborn. We sought a better self. We did more drugs. We became capitalists. We became bankrupt. We turned to daytime television. We continually traded one religion for another and called it something new.
We traded one Noble Lie for another. The only thing that changed was who They were, and We became Their hand mirrors. In short, we had too much time on our hands and complained, but not enough to do something about anything. We had enough time to follow, but not enough to lead. We were postmodern.
If everything is a lie, then the only Noble one is the one we tell ourselves. It is a difference between being a character in someone else's story, and writing your own story. If everything is a lie, then we cannot find meaning outside ourselves. We must create meaning in our life, not search for it. There is no soul; the soul is You.
It isn't enough to point out the absurd of Plato's ideals. The absurd of religion, of atheism. The absurd of politics, of anarchy. The absurd of drugs, of sobriety. Meaning begins when you take control of your own fiction, when you write your own story.
We can never escape the reality of our experience, for that is how we define reality, by interactability. Magical or fantastic realism is romantic escapism. Reality though is never concrete; it depend on our perspective. Therefore reality is never absolute, never completely real; it is relative.
The absurdity of the Noble Lie is not only in the lie itself, but the acknowledgement of lies. There are no lies, no good, no bad. Meaning is never fully transient between people; it is unique to each individual. To live a full life is to write our own fiction and appreciate the relative realism that You create.
0 comments:
Post a Comment