bookshelfporn:

Axe Bookshelves. Perfect for the upcoming zombie apocalypse.

I think things like that are already happening, and for reasons much more mundane than need for survival. In my opinion, rape and torture are not atrocities very different from cannibalism, and they’re enacted out of a  hunger for power and sadistic instincts. It almost seems more of a surprise that cannibalism is a (nearly) universal taboo than that it should quit being a taboo in case of disaster-induced necessity. The most realistic thing about The Road to me was the representation of cannibalism. I can certainly imagine today’s psychopaths and perverts running havoc all around the world in the aftermath of “the end”, imprisoning, torturing and eating people for the pleasure they get from it as well as the necessity.

I don’t know why cannibalism is such a taboo today, but I would assume it has something to do with concerns about taking another human being inside, making them a part of you. I once read somewhere (and I don’t know where, but I’ve seen the same idea being used in a few popular works, such as the second film of “The Pirates of the Caribbean”) that in ancient times eating a dead human body wasn’t a form of punishment (as earlier Hollywood movies and “Turist Omer Afrika’da” would have had us believe) but a form of showing respect, a funeral rite. It was a way of honoring the dead by digesting them, making them parts of living people, possibly their loved ones. So that might be why most of the horrible people on earth refrain at least from eating their victims: because of an archetypal fear of honoring them, or on a more symbolic level, because of a fear of empathizing with them. 

hum331barisemrekaya:

In the history of literature, there are many accurate shots that an author write possible future one of his/her books and his/her assumptions happen; George Orwell and Jules Verne are example of this amazing event. So, what do you think about the novels we read or the movies we watch; do you think…

For me, the main question throughout this course was that if our idea of the end is incorrigibly limited and defined by our human logic, or if there is some truth to it. Kermode suggests that our fictions of the end are indeed only fictions, invented to make us feel important. Looking at some apocalyptic cults and Hollywood movies such as “I Am Legend”, one tends to agree with him. On the other hand, Zizek (and many other Marxist and environmentalist thinkers) do believe that we (as the humankind) are heading towards an irreparable disaster. Looking at incidents such as the Chernobyl disaster or the Iraqi War, one tends to agree with them also. But what I’m really intrigued by is Kermode’s detection that apocalypticism is an integral part of the modernist literature, as exemplified by Yeats and Eliot (and many others). Even Kermode himself concedes that the sense of a nearing crisis has become chronicle in the twentieth century, with the advance of nuclear technology and stuff. So what is it, what is this relationship between modernity and the apocalypse? Despite Kermode’s arguments, can it be true that our time is a different, important time, at the edge of a world-wide change? Or does it only seem so for other reasons?  

The New Yorker article you’ve shared with us is very interesting in that it seems to completely contradict Kermode’s description of Burney’s mental state. Kermode states that Burney deliberately avoids forming some contact with his cell neighbor to be able to focus wholly on his own thoughts. The sheer intensity of his mental exercise also is in direct contrast to the consequences of solitary confinement as described by the New Yorker:  the slowing of brain waves, the twelve-hour-a-day sleep. In my personal experience and observation, the New Yorker article seems more plausible to me. This Burney is “abnormally intelligent” indeed! Then maybe we could claim that Kermode is wrong in arguing that fictions are “consolations of human loneliness”, because evidence shows that in reality, loneliness undermines the ability to create and communicate fictions, and fictions only gain some value, or some credibility, when they are shared by a multiplicity of people. This actually seems closer to the truth to me. However, this idea might actually lead us to realize that people might be creating fictions to reach out to other people, to connect with them - an idea which would bring us back to Kermode’s idea that fictions are born out of loneliness. Still, I can’t shake away my personal opinion that loneliness engenders more loneliness, as it renders the individual more and more isolated til they can no longer imagine interacting with another human being, rather than constituting a common point that two (or more) people connect through (no matter how many romance novels argue in favor of the latter idea).

hum331kamilbayri:

It would seem that in order to invent a necessary fiction in concordance with reality, poverty and a suitable constitution are requisite. Kermode asserts of Burney that

he is abnormally brave, abnormally intelligent, and, it is relevant to add, upper-class English. (155)

The contention made…

“Close to the ground, almost at their level, he read their inhuman scroll as an argument: I was here, I am here now, I have existed, I exist still. This is our town.” Zone One, 246

“… the imagination is always at the end of an era …” Kermode, 196

Zone One ends with a reclaiming of the New York city by “the dead”, made up of “every race, color, and creed … as it had been before, per the myth of this melting-pot city” (243). In the end, the symbolism is made more clear. All these people, the masses collected and degenerated by the New York city, or the system it symbolizes, are now in a rage to do what they’ve been taught to do – consume and destroy. It becomes crystal clear in this chapter (if it wasn’t in the previous ones) that what Whitehead is trying to say is indeed that our society is a zombie society. However, Whitehead is more honest than most apocalyptic writers, since he doesn’t pretend to tell us what happens after the inevitable end – Mark Spitz walks out into the crowd of the dead, and the narrator leaves us there, since after the apocalypse, there is no more for humans to see. “The world wasn’t ending: it had ended and now they were in the new place” (257). The book ends with the recognition of this fact, and is silent after that, since there is nothing in the new place that we can understand with our old minds.

This delivers me back to Kermode, with his insistence upon our need for, maybe even captivity by fictions. “The free imagination makes endless plots on reality … our common sense makes us see that without paradox and contradiction our parables will be too simple for a complex poverty” (164). Is this what Whitehead is doing in the final chapter, giving us “paradox and contradiction” so that our minds will be fooled (soothed) more easily by his fiction? Not really, because his fiction isn’t “consolatory” at all. It doesn’t end with a possible happy ending like The Road does, but its ending cannot be called a tragic ending that will give us a catharsis, either. It just ends – it ends so utterly and completely that we know we can hear no more. Poverty is all. I think, trying to free our minds (and his own) entirely from fictions about the end, writing a story that grasps the actual truth, has been Whitehead’s goal in writing this novel. Maybe it would be appropriate to say that he aimed at writing a narrative in “chronos” with a subject matter that is traditionally considered very suitable for “kairos” kind of narratives. Still, maybe Kermode would argue if Whitehead was to think only in terms of chronos, he wouldn’t be able to write any story at all – because even deciding what event will be the beginning and which one the end is attributing some specialty to otherwise chronological events.

I agree with you on the fact that it’s the main characteristic of novel characters to be tools for a writer’s imagination, to be puppets that only act in a way that will make the writer’s point. Actually, most writers would claim that their characters have “their own personalities” and writers “let them go where they’d naturally go” etc. etc, but as readers and critics, the idea that characters are there only to obey the writer’s will defines our whole perception of them; in fact, in my opinion, the whole discipline of literary criticism is based on this perception. Kermode tells us on page 140 about the way Simone de Beauvoir talks about how she “provided” one of her characters with a wife, “whom [she] used as a foil.” The idea that if a character appears in a novel, s/he’s either a protagonist or an antagonist or a foil to somebody or a metaphor or a type; or if it’s not any of them, s/he’s unnecessary, shouldn’t be there - this is the idea that drives literary criticism, and the example shows that even writers (and existentialist ones, for that matter) go along with it. Because, after all, is there any other way? Kermode, Sartre and Beauvoir all seem to suggest that without a touch of deliberate characterization, what you write wouldn’t be a novel but a unintelligible jumble of anecdotes and ideas. It’s funny that Sartre’s character Roquentin, whom Sartre had set out to create as a partial reversal of some of the determinism of a novel, seems to me as more strictly “constructed” than traditional novel characters, because as Kermode also points out, Roquentin’s job is to promote an ideology.

Still, as you’ve also beautifully pointed out, we have another dimension of the differences between fiction and reality at our hands: in real life, the people we meet don’t represent something. Or, at least, they don’t represent the same thing to everyone all the time. The fictions of real life are ever changing: we keep writing new roles for both ourselves and people around us. I think novels can be said to be each like a drop of water, separated from an ever-flowing river and demonstrated in crystal glass. The ever-flowing river is our everyday perception. The water drop, in a way, both constitutes the main substance of the river, what that river is, in itself; and is a completely separate object that doesn’t resemble the river in any way. Novels are constitute the core of life, but are contradictory to it at the same time.

hum331tugcevural:

In the fifth chapter, Kermode’s discussion about fiction is broadened to a new angle. In my opinion, comparing fiction with the reality has three main components: characters, situations and time.

“What puts our mind at rest is the simple sequence, the overwhelming variegation of life now…

“How to do justice to a chaotic, viscously contingent reality, and yet redeem it?” Kermode,145, about La Nausée.

I believe most people would agree with me on that the most conspicuous characteristic of the film “Children of Men” is its conscious realism. The director and the scriptwriter were evidently bent on creating a narrative that is completely different from your average Hollywood cliché storm. The film definitely looks like an iconoclast in comparison to any mainstream Hollywood action-adventure film; with an average looking, African woman as the heroine, the complete lack of romance between the hero and the heroine, the casual slaying of a prominent character at the very beginning of the film. However, once you look through all that, it’s yet another narrative in which the whole universe seems to help the protagonists to achieve their happy (or maybe in this case, bittersweet) ending. Not surprisingly, the film doesn’t fail to employ its religious imagery, either. You’d think a director with an ambition to portray a contingent world would avoid the implication that the chaotic future will imitate some semi-mythical events from two thousand years ago.

“The Children of Men” is a popular movie with commercial concerns, so some of its more conventional elements are probably deliberate decisions on the producers’ part to be able to address the average viewer. However, according to Kermode, even works created in serious attempts at avoiding such “fraudulent fictions”, like La Nausée, can never be free of some conventional forms and imagined causalities, as long as they have such a concern as to communicate, that is. Characters, for example, are not always placed in stories because they were created (imagined) as heroes, sometimes they become heroes just by virtue of being placed in a story, (thus having to face a conflict,) like Sartre’s Roquentin. According to Kermode, Sartre himself is aware of the inevitability of forms, whenever one tries to tell a story; so what he attempts to do is to introduce the world of contingency into the world of the novel. Kermode quotes him in page 145, saying: “The final aim of art is to reclaim the world by revealing it as it is, but as if it had its source in human liberty.” What I understand from this is that he thinks human life will take a meaning by being faced with its own meaninglessness; only after we realize the absolute contingency of the world and time our fictions will stop being fraudulent, because when we are fully aware that they’re fictions, they’ll be true fictions.

Zone One, once again, seems to be a perfect manifestation of existentialist concerns. One might even say (judging by Kermode’s description of Sartre’s novel) that Whitehead does it better than Sartre. Is Mark Spitz tragic? Maybe a little. But at least he doesn’t seem to carry the burden of any moral responsibility. Although he’s in some sort of depression, he doesn’t feel the “nausea”, he doesn’t feel responsible for finding a meaning in this world of contingency. Maybe that’s why, I don’t find him to be a thoroughly identifiable character. Which, I think, gives Zone One the most part of its realistic (that is, as realistic as can be in a book about the zombie-apocalypse) feel. We watch all the characters from outside, without thoroughly identifying with them; without really wondering how and where they’re going to end up. This post-apocalyptic world is almost blasphemously dull and mundane. It’s funny that Mark Spitz should also comment on this, on page 196, when he thinks sarcastically about how he’s been granted his childhood dreams of adventure. The sad fact he realizes is that, adventures are wonderful and exciting only in a novel. They become dangerous and stressful or annoying and routine when we actually go through them, in real life. 

Perhaps what is the most interesting point about Yeats and other early modernists is that, I think, they actually perceived the twentieth century as very different from the nineteenth, which they had also experienced. Their sense that the end was near seems to actually have stemmed from an observation of tangible change, a visible difference that they found between their youth and later life. Yeats’ poetry abounds with such a comparison of the old times and now in a very concrete, specific way. In “Easter 1916”, for example, he first talks about how he knew the prominent figures of the Irish Easter Rising before, and didn’t think them very important, then how those days were over suddenly and dramatically, and out of these people’s violent actions “a terrible beauty is born.” (Here is a link to the poem: http://www.online-literature.com/frost/779/ ) In addition, while Yeats’ early poetry (like “Lake Isle of Innisfree” or “Down by the Salley Gardens”) more often engaged in Romantic themes such as the relationship between man and nature or memory and remembrance, his later poetry tends towards modern themes like alienation and loss.

I think that the Modernist paradigm was the reflection of a time when, as Kermode also suggests, and as you have also pointed out, living a world of crisis and the nearing end became the nature of our lives. This could bring us to the conclusion that current paranoia(s) about the apocalypse are in fact different from the earlier occurrences of mass hysteria regarding the same topic. That is to say, maybe we do live in a world where there is substantial evidence to believe that the end is near. However, Kermode argues for the most part that this isn’t true and today’s paranoia is yet another manifestation of our necessity to think in terms of a narrative. with a beginning and an end.

hum331pedroruezga:

We live in a world as Kermode pointed out as a technological, military, cultural great age of Crisis. However, Kermode also states that crisis is a central element in making sense of the world that we live in. This being said, “Time is not free, it is the slave of a mythical end” (p. 94). We…

This is more related to last week’s Kermode reading, but here is a joke regarding the difference between mortal time and eternal time from the book Plato and Platypus Walk into Bar: Understanding Philosophy through Jokes by Thomas Cathcart and Daniel Klein:

A man is praying to God. “Lord,” he prays, “I would like to ask you a question.”

The Lord responds, “No problem. Go ahead.”

“Lord, is it true that a million years to you is but a second?”

“Yes, that is true.”

“Well, then, what is a million dollars to you?”

“A million dollars to me is but a penny.”

“Ah, then, Lord,” says the man, “may I have a penny?”

“Sure,” says the Lord. “Just a second.”