Poems by Louis Lento

August 16, 2003 by Leave a Comment

Wakeup Call: September 11, 2001

The cacophonous ring
of the motel-room phone woke me into the eerie dream of a bad tv movie —
it was Tuesday morning.

In the half-sleep grogginess

of my 7am wakeup call, the curtains in the room looked opaque

except for the light gray tight creeping through the window edges.

I turned on the tube for background noise while I dressed for a meeting
and the movie grew stranger as

I searched my suitcase for a tie:

news coverage Manhattan interviews

The gaping wounds
of the twin towers
lay open to the tv world.

smoke debris statistics

I pressed my pants
with the motel-room iron
and couldn’t find matching socks.

The Pentagon was bleeding black smoke on one channel, a Pennsylvania field
was littered with twisted metal on another. In the Big Apple, leaping bodies

floated down a hundred stories
like discarded tulips from a flower bowl:

replay slow motion every channel newscasters emergency crews disbelief

I grabbed my computer bag and bagel, checked out, and waited for a shuttle in the lobby of this beautiful, terrible,

and dangerous life, wondering

if we would ever sleep soundly again; and decided we would,
we must,
we have.

page4image488

 

Twenty Four Hour Lifetime in L.A.

When morning percolates the waking day
and buses echo through the city’s walls,
the citizens start all over again
as if to press the Rewind of their lives.
The army vet wakes up on public lawns
in a makeshift sleeping bag like yesterday,
and the chef in his fiery kitchen on restaurant row is shackled to a menu set in stone.

Then when the day turns into afternoon
and the afternoon starts melting into night, apartment couples moan their same old sex, varying the rhythm once a month.
And those next door continue with their fights, waking up the newborns of the world,
while the elderly proceed to wake themselves, nocturnal urination breaks their sleep.

The lifetime that we’re granted everyday
Is lived, like déjà vu, with little change,
And when the city’s tape has reached its end, It’s left there flapping on the spinning reel.

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Cyborg Agency in the Digital Age: On William Gibson’s Neuromancer by Shigeru Suzuki

August 16, 2003 by Leave a Comment

I. Introduction

William Gibson’s first novel, Neuromancer (1984), is one of the contemporary clas- sics that deal with our postmodern conditions and phenomena in the highly- advanced nations such as late-capitalism, globalization, cyborg and flesh bodies, posthuman, electronic media, and information technologies. In the history of cyber- culture, the name of William Gibson is inscribed as the person who coined the word, “cyberspace,” which many scholars and critics point out often as the begin- ning of the extensive discussion on cyberspace.1 However, interestingly enough, when Gibson wrote Neuromancer with its innovative descriptions of cyberspace in the early 1980s, he was writing with a manual typewriter (not a computer), and it was far before the pervasion of the Internet and even before the invention of World Wide Web (WWW) by which we became promptly familiar with the idea of cyber- space. Cyberspace, in our reality, is a virtual space (without actual physical space), a new dimension, where a number of different activities and factors are occurring and generating such as investments, interests, desires, powers, surveillances, crea- tive activities, and illegal activities. In cyberspace, our social, economical, and cul-

1 Cyberspace is hard to define partly because the speed of technological inventions and de- velopments causes the rapid transformation of cyberspace itself. In my discussion, I in- tend to signify the imaginary and virtual space where we associate when we use e-mail, BBS, and other activities on the Internet. On the definitions of cyberspace, see tural practices intersect, negotiate, and conflict with each other so that cyberspace re-creates itself, self-generates and in much regard is a “work in progress.” It is true that Gibson’s description of “cyberspace” and our cyberspace have many differ- ences, but there is a possibility of the emergence of a more Gibsonian “cyberspace,” in which human personality (or human consciousness) “jacks-in” into the Matrix and rides through the graphic representation of information.

However, Gibson’s interest is never in the prediction for the future of our society. In an interview2, Gibson comments on the role of science fiction: “I don’t think sci- ence fiction has a lot of predictive capacity, but it’s an interesting tool for looking at the world you live in” (Olsen, 11).3 Thus, it is not so important that we have differ- ent kinds of cyberspace from the Gibsonian one; rather, we should see how his novel contextualizes and articulates the current human situation in a highly- technological society. His fiction provides many intriguing insights into how we regard humanity and human conditions; and, how we situate our own “self” in the age of information technology.

First, let us see how Gibson recalls how he conceived the idea of cyberspace:

“I was walking down Granville Street, Vancouver’s version of “The Strip,” and I looked into one of the video arcades. I could see in the physi- cal intensity of their postures how rapt the kids inside were. It was like one of those closed systems out of a Pynchon novel: a feed back loop with photons coming off the screens into the kids’ eyes, neurons moving through their bodies, and electrons moving through the video game. These kids clearly believed in the space games projected.” (272, “An Interview with William Gibson” in Storming the Reality Studio)

The “feed-back loop” in the quotation is a concept that comes from cybernetics es- tablished by Norbert Weiner. As the title of his book, Cybernetics; or, Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (1948) shows, cybernetics is a dis- cipline of studying the communication between the organic and the inorganic. Wie- ners’ cybernetics also includes the study of any system that contains an information feedback loop. Although his study was innovative in the 1940s, our everyday life is now filled with many kinds of feedback loops. For example, watches, elevators, credit card readers, bank databases, cars, traffic lights, flight controls, fax machines, TVs, VCRs, and computers. In the current digital age, we are living in and with electronic and computer technologies, which are becoming crucial to our own exis- tence.4

II. Cyberpunk Fiction: Technology is Inside Us.

The transformation of social infrastructure and centralization on information tech- nology also changes our human identity and subjectivity. Cyberpunk fiction in the 1980s succeeded in grasping this kind of social structural change. The term cyber- punk was popularized by Bruce Sterling, a science fiction writer, and cyberpunk fiction became fashionable and popular in practice and even to general readers in the 80s. In 1986, Bruce Sterling published the anthology of cyberpunk fiction enti- tled Mirrorshades (1986). In this book, Sterling collects several short stories by cy- berpunk writers such as William Gibson, Rudy Rucker, Lewis Shiner, John Shirley, and Sterling himself. In the introduction of Mirrorshades, Sterling explains some characteristics of cyberpunk novels. Bruce Sterling summarizes: “For the cyber- punks, [. . .] technology is visceral; [. . .] it is pervasive, utterly intimate. Not outside us, but next to us. Under our skin; often, inside our minds.” (xiii) As for the themes of cyberpunk fiction, Sterling enumerates the following ones:

“The theme of body invasion: prosthetic limbs, implanted circuitry, cos- metic surgery, genetic alteration. The even more powerful theme of mind invasion: brain-computer interfaces, artificial intelligence, neurochemistry — techniques radically redefining the nature of humanity, the nature of the self” (xiii).

Cyberpunk novels are the first series of novels that respond and contextualize this kind of shifts in technology, which signifies that cyberpunk fiction examines im- plicitly and/or explicitly examination on the contemporary human conditions with the rises of new technologies even though their setting are oftentimes in the future. Among others, as a ‘guru’ of cyberpunk writers, Gibson’s works provide us a new perspective to think about our humanity, identity, and self in the age of information technology. Along with the pervasion of information technology in the 1990s, sev- eral academics and scholars started responding to cyberpunk novels with enthusi- asm. To name a few for example, Larry McCaffery’s Storming the Reality Studio (1991), Scot Bukatman’s Terminal Identity (1993), Katherine Hayles’s How We

4 In this regards, Y2K problem, which we were so concerned about just before the begin- ning of year 2000, exemplifies our society’s exceeding dependence on the electronic and computer technology. Like these scholarly works, the successive academic interests from early 1990s have made William Gibson one of the ‘serious’ writers who are interested in the contem- porary society and human conditions in it.

III. Cyborgs in Reality and in Neuromancer
As Sterling mentions in the introduction of Mirrorshades, Gibson’s Neuromancer directly deals with the current human conditions in the age of information. The first sentence of Neuromancer signifies the milieu of our postmodern everyday life, which is encompassed by high-tech and electronic media and images (or simulacra) generated by those technologies: “The sky above the port was the color of televi- sion, tuned to a dead channel.” (Neuromancer, 1) In another place, the postmodern city is described with a VCR metaphor: “Night City was like a deranged experiment in social Darwinism, designed by a bored researcher who kept on thumb perma- nently on the fast-forward button (Neuromancer, 7). These writing styles with high- tech metaphors are appropriate in describing our postmodern technological city- scape where technology is ubiquitous, familiarized, and in many cases, naturalized. In 1991, Frederic Jameson commented on postmodern culture and society in his influential book, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991), “‘culture’ has become a veritable ‘second nature’” (Jameson ix). Nevertheless, our city life is exponentially filled with high-tech and electronic media and digital and information technologies (both in visible and invisible ways). It is perhaps more appropriate to rephrase Jameson’s phrase like this: “technology has become a veri- table ‘second Nature.’”

As Bruce Starling points out, the technology already invades our body’s physical demarcation. According to Katherine N. Hayles, the human-machine subjects, that is, cyborgs already exist in literal and metaphorical ways. In her essay, “The Life Cycle of Cyborgs: Writing the Posthuman,” she mentions, “about 10% of the cur- rent U.S. population are estimated to be cyborgs in the technical sense, including people with electronic pacemakers, artificial joints, drug implant systems, implanted corneal lenses, and artificial skins.” (322) Katherine Hayles also adds up the number of cyborgs in metaphoric sense such as people who use computers, neurosurgeons guided by fiber optic microscopy during an operation and teenage videogame play- ers in arcades (322).5 Thus, our biological and daily existences are supported by high-techs and we are coexisting with or in many high-tech products that reconfig- ure us cyborgs in both literal and metaphorical ways.

In Gibson’s Neuromancer, almost all of the characters have modified their bodies. The protagonist, Case, is a hacker (called a “console cowboy” in the novel) whose brain is impaired chemically not to “jack-in” cyberspace. Molly, whose sunglasses (mirrorshades) are implanted into her cheeks, which enables her to see in the dark, and her fingernails are also modified to be retractable steel, razor-like weapons. 3Jane and 8Jean are clones constructed by DNA splices. In short, these characters are living in man-machine symbiosis; that is, cyborgs.

Gibson’s world does have an affinity with high technology, but Gibson’s view on technology is always ambivalent. When Gibson wrote the body-enhanced cyborg characters, he suggests the frightening possibility of the use of high-technology to control people. For example, the protagonist, Case, has been controlled by having mycotoxins (poison) injected to his nervous system so that he has to behave accord- ing to other’s direction. In the world of Neuromancer, hegemonic power is repre- sented by multinational corporations. At some point, businessman (“sarariman” in the novel) are described: “M-G [Mitsubishi-Genentech] employees above a certain level were implanted with advanced microprocessors that monitored mutagen levels in the bloodstream” (10). In these examples, the technologies in bodies are used to control or oppress characters. Indeed, as Molly comments on herself, the cyborg characters in the novel are “wired” and, thus, become “meat puppets” by somebody else (however, in the case of Neuromancer, the ultimate control comes not from humans but from AI). Control and dehumanization by technology are not a new theme in the history of science fiction, but in Gibson’s Neuromancer, repressive control comes (almost unexpectedly) from inside, their cyborg bodies.

While Gibson depicts human characters who become cyborgs with enhanced bod- ies, he also introduced machine “characters” who act like humans. Dixie Flatliner is one of the typical examples. Dixie is physically dead, but his memory is contained in a ROM (read-only memory) construct. In it, his consciousness is still alive and can be accessed to and communicated with. Dixie is not only an accumulation of information but also he (or it) does have a personality. However, Dixie confesses his unbearable limbo status of ROM (106), and eventually asks Case to erase him. In a word, Dixie, a Rom construct, desires for his own deletion, his own real ‘death.’ Along with his humorous repeated comments, Dixie’s indefatigable, passionate desire for death problematizes humanity; specifically, in contrast of other human characters who are emotionless, passive, and moving like machines.6

Another inorganic creature, Wintermute also has a human nature. Wintermute is an artificial intelligence (AI) living in cyberspace. AI is a program with autonomy, but in this novel, it does have a “character.” Later in the novel, every major character realizes they have been just pawns of Wintermute, which wants to merge with an- other AI called Neuromancer.

These characters (cyborgs, AIs, and ROM personality) problematize and reconfig- ure our traditional idea of identity, subjectivity and even humanity. As Hayles sug- gests, cyborg exist in our reality both in the technical sense and in metaphorical sense. With the highly-digitalized milieu in our society, our subjectivity exponen- tially transforms into a new subject, man-machine hybrid subject; that is, cyborg. To Gibson, this perspective has ambivalent effects. The cyborgian fusion between hu- man and machine provides both empowerment and disempowerment. On the one hand, Gibson shows that a cyborg subject is able to acquire capability beyond ordi- nary human power (like Molly’s mirrorshades and finger-nail weapons), but on the other hand, Gibson warns of the possibility of being controlled with the very act of enhancing bodies.

IV. Cyborg Agency

In philosophical context, cyborg subject materializes the de-centered subject dis- cussed in the field of critical and cultural theories such as structuralism and post- structuralism for the last two decades. In critical and cultural theories, human sub- ject has been discussed as a socio-cultural and historical construction —for exam- ple, subject is constructed by ideology (Louis Althusser), by language (Jacques La- can) or by discourse (Michel Foucault) — so that (the modern idea of) human sub- ject is de-centered and de-powered in several senses. These theories deconstruct 18th-century modern subject, which is a rational, autonomous, creative subjectivity, and revealed that human subject is a social, historical, and ideological construction. Their views critically facilitate re-examination of modern human deeds and human- centered views. Although they are useful to articulate the problems of modern his- torical subject, it also divests an independent autonomy and initiative potentials. Thus, after the decentralization of human subject by critical theories, the idea of agency appears in the reaction to the decentralization of human subject as an inac- tive, passive construction by social forces. By the term, agency, scholars and theo- rists imply an ability to perform an action, in many cases, with political intentions. The agency is never a restatement of the same, former modern subject. The term, agency, suggests the historical development of critical theories and willpower (usu- ally political willpower) to act out against any repressive, invisible power structure.

Donna Haraway’s influential essay called “Cyborg Manifesto” (1985) proposes the similar politics and creates a new politics for cyborgs. In her essay, she provides a positive perspectives on cyborgs with political agendas. Haraway defines a cyborg: “A cyborg is a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction. Social reality is lived social rela- tions, our most important political construction, a world-changing fiction” (150). The significant concept of her cyborg theory is that she creates the transgressive, interdisciplinary (or meta-disciplinary) domains which deconstruct the traditional boundaries and binaries such as race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, real/fiction with a wide range of critical aims. The even more important perspective of her theory is that Haraway discusses cyborg in social reality and in fiction as well. Thus, Hara- way’s conceptualization of cyborg opened up the theoretical and philosophical di- mension which we can discusses cyborgs in both our social reality and in our imagination (that is, literary fiction).

Haraway’s cyborg theory serves for consideration on Gibson’s punk politics of cyberpunk novels. Similar to Haraway’s cyborg theory, the punk elements of Gibson’s cyberpunk novels undoubtedly have political implications. In Gibson’s fiction, technology is not only for the ruling classes; on the contrary, the socially marginalized people use it in subversive ways. In a short essay in Cyberspace: First Steps edited by Michael Benedikt, Gibson writes:

“The Street finds its own use for things — uses the manufacturers never imagined. The micro-tape recorder, originally intended for on-the jump executive dictation, becomes the revolutionary medium of magnetisdat, allowing the covert spread of banned political speeches in Poland and China. The beeper and the cellular phone become economic tools in an increasingly competitive market in illicit drugs. Other technological arti- facts unexpectedly become means of communication. . . . The aerosol can give birth to the urban graffiti-matrix. Soviet rockers press home- made flexidisks out of used chest x-rays” (Gibson, 1992, 29).

The phrase in the first line, “the street finds its own use for thing,” is a mantra in Gibson’s street politics.7 These examples of technological appropriations in the “street-way,” which decontexualizes the intentions of original makers or producers, can be summed up as a punk sensibility in Gibson’s fiction. As Dick Hebdige dem- onstrates, punk is a sign and subversive gesture against any kind of repressive, con- trol systems.8 In our society, high-tech gadgets have oftentimes military-industrial origins such as (parts of) TVs, computers, rockets, and the Internet. That is, they come from huge systems which we cannot usually resist. But “punkish” appropria- tion of technology decontexualizes and re-directs the technology to critique against such oppressive system. With “street” and “punk” sensibility, cyborg agency can refurbish and reconfigure the intension of producer or manufacturer into our own use (or deprive the utilitarian use of technology). Gibson’s street-tech subversive appropriation is a strategic decontexualization of technology. This is what cyborg agency — that is, “we,” cyborgs– should act out in the age of digital information technology.

Work Cited

Benedickt, Michael. Cyberspace: First Steps. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1992.

Gibson, William. Neuromancer. New York: Ace Books, 1984.
—– . “Burning Chrome” Burning Chrome. New York: Ace Books, 1986.
—–. “Academy Leader” Cyberspace: First Steps. Edited by Michael Benedickt. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1992.

Haraway, Donna. Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge, 1991.

Hayles, Katherine N. “The Life Cycle of Cyborg: Writing the Posthuman” The Cyborg Handbook. Edited by Chris Hables Gray, Heidi J. Figueroa-Sarriera and Steven Mentor. New York: Routledge, 1995.

Hebdige, Dick. Subculture: The Meaning of Style. New York: Methuen, 1979. Jameson, Frederic. Postmodernism or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. London: Verso, 1991.

McCaffery, Larry. Ed. Storming the Reality Studio: A Casebook of Cyberpunk and

Postmodern Fiction. London and Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991. Moravec, Hans. Mind Children: The Future of Robot and Human Intelligence. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988.

Olsen, Lance. William Gibson. Mercer Island, WA: Starmont House, 1992.

Sterling, Bruce. Ed. Mirrorshades: The Cyberpunk Anthology. New York: Ace Books, 1986.

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No Woman’s Land: Deterritorialization in Jane Eyre by Ann Marie Martinez

August 16, 2003 by Leave a Comment

In their many writings, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari have put forth the concept of deterritorialization, and it seems that the best way to grasp its meaning is to fall back on one of their own sentences – one both simple and complex at the same time: “A stick is, in turn, a deterritorialized branch.”1 It is something out of its original element. Just like that stick, Jane Eyre is out of her element; but unlike the stick, whose deterritorialization is absolute, Jane is constantly endeavoring to regain her territory. From the moment we first encounter her, she is a voice coming to us from an unknown setting – she is about to tell us of all the places she has been to, but we do not know from where she is speaking. Her voice is in a temporal de- territorialization. As we embark on the journey through her life, we realize that her story is one of advancing toward a completion, both in the self and in the setting.

Jane Eyre does not belong anywhere or to anyone. Her parents and her home, by misfortune, were taken from her, and she has been left without anything to call her own – without a territory. According to Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s con- cept of territory, in the ethological sense [it] is understood as the environment of a group [...] that cannot itself be objectively located, but is constituted by the pat- terns of interaction through which the group or pack secures a certain stability and location. Just in the same way the environment of a single person [...] can be seen as a “territory,” in the psychological sense, from which the person acts or returns to.2

Jane may be in the care of Mrs. Reed, she may be in the company of her young cousins, she may sleep near the servants’ quarters, and she may live at Gateshead Hall, but she is shunned by Mrs. Reed, mistreated by her cousins, looked down upon by the servants, and constantly in search of a corner in the great house to call her own. Mrs. Reed considers Jane to lack a “sociable and child-like disposition” 3—she does not even see her as a child; the Reed children call her a “bad animal” and John Reed says to Jane, “you ought to beg, and not live here with gentlemen’s children like us” 4; the servants see Jane as “someone less than a servant, for [she] does nothing for [her] keep.” 5 Many times she is left by herself because she has not integrated into any of the household’s groups. And, as “Jane looks wistfully toward the light and warmth of the servant community [ at one point, she] has no more place there than she does among the Reeds,”6 and so must continue by herself. Possibly, if Jane saw the environment around her as a home-environment, she would respond to it warmly, but, most importantly, since Jane sees herself as an outsider everything and everyone is as foreign to her as she is to them. She says,

I was a discord in Gateshead Hall: I was like nobody there: I had nothing in har- mony with Mrs. Reed or her children, or her chosen vassalage. If they did not love me, in fact, as little did I love them. [I was] a thing that could not sympathize with one amongst them; a heterogeneous thing, opposed to them in temperament, in capacity, in propensities; [...] a noxious thing [...].7

Jane, however, is free precisely because she is deterritorialized. In fact, “[d]eterritorialisation [sic] frees a possibility or event from its actual origins”8 be- cause without an attachment to something specific mobility is increased. Hence, her transfer to Lowood is not emotionally disturbing because she has no attachment to Gateshead. She is free to explore and roam. Indeed she does, for “everyone, at every age, in the smallest things as in the greatest challenges, seeks a territory, tolerates or carries out deterritorializations, and is reterritorialized on almost any- thing,”9 so Jane seeks the territory she lacks; nevertheless, her deterritorialization continues at Lowood Institution.

Here, too, she sees herself as alien to her sur- roundings – even though her stay extends for eight years in which she is first a stu- dent and then a teacher. Her emotional attachments are limited to two individuals: Miss Temple and Helen Burns. The first agreeable moment Jane enjoys at Lowood is in their company. There is the warmth of the fire in Miss Temple’s room, tea and seed-cake to appease hunger, but, yet again, Jane is the outsider – she is the visitor in someone else’s territory. Jane stands aside and observes Helen and Miss Tem- ple: “They conversed of things I had never heard of [...] they spoke of books: how many they had read! What stores of knowledge they possessed! Then they seemed so familiar with French names and French authors” 10; and as the girls leave the room, Jane notices that “Helen she held a little longer than me: she let her go more reluctantly; it was Helen her eye followed to the door; it was for her she a second time breathed a sigh; for her she wiped a tear from her check.”11 Highlighting the connection between them of which Jane is not a part. During Helen’s sickness, she (Helen) is kept in Miss Temple’s room, and when Jane hears about Helen’s immi- nent death, she literally crawls into Helen’s territory, into the crib, and stays with her until the end later that same night. The following chapter resumes the story eight years later, with Jane assuming the role of teacher as well as Helen’s former position as Miss Temple’s favorite.

And while at first Jane describes Lowood, its surroundings, and its modus operandi in relative detail, she abridges this period with a simple sentence, by saying, “During these eight years my life was uniform: but not unhappy, because it was not inactive.”12 Jane has not found something to call her own at Lowood per se, but she has, though, in Miss Temple. Jane says of her, “to her instruction I owed the best part of my acquirements; her friendship and society had been my continual solace; she had stood me in the stead of mother, governess, and latterly, companion.”13 But upon Miss Temple’s marriage and de- parture from Lowood, Jane finds herself once more facing acute deterritorialized, because the one thing, the one person, she can claim for herself leaves, never to return; as Jane explains, “[f]rom the day she left I was no longer the same: with her was gone every settled feeling, every association that had made Lowood in some degree a home to me.”14 Admitting to herself that she does not belong propels her to continue her search.

Jane casts herself out into the world in order to attain what she lacks, and falls into the role of a governess. However, in nineteenth century England, the one occupa- tion that placed a person at a middle ground, alien to those immediately around her, was that of a governess. Any young woman stepping into this profession at the time “must live daily amidst the trials of a home without its blessings; [...] without any consent of her will, she is made the confidante of many family secrets; [...] she must appear not to hear sharp sayings and mal-a-propos speeches; she must be ever on her guard.”15 A governess is to be a member of the household, but the schism that separates her from those sharing the roof with her runs deep. Because of her higher education and social class, to the “servants she was as unapproachable as any other middle-class lady.”16 And since there was no real difference between the governesses and the families that employed them, a “fictitious barrier” had to be created, for, as was advised in magazines at the time, “[w]e must ever keep them in a sort of isolation, for it is the only means for maintaining that distance which the reserve of English manners and the decorum of English families exact.”17 The gov- erness is the buffer that has access to both groups yet belongs to neither.

At Thornfield, Jane both places herself and is placed by others in this middle bub- ble of the governess. Although conscious of being an employee, she sets herself apart from the other servants in the house, as she says, “[t]he other members of the household, viz. John and his wife, Leah, the housemaid, and Sophie the French nurse, were decent people; but in no respect remarkable,”18 and they, as well, avoid socializing with her beyond the everyday common greetings. Upon first arriving and meeting Mrs. Fairfax, Jane feels welcomed and content to work for such a per- son. “My heart really warmed to the worthy lady as I heard her talk”19; but, upon learning the very next day that Mrs. Fairfax is not the owner of the house, Jane re- sponds in the following manner:

The enigma was then explained: this affable and kind little widow was no great dame, but a dependent like myself. I did not like her the worse for that; on the con- trary, I felt better pleased than ever. The equality between her and me was real; not the mere result of condescension on her part: so much the better – my position was all the freer.

While Jane may consider herself on an equal level with Mrs. Fairfax, and thus not alone, she has clearly brought her down from being a “worthy lady” to a “little widow,” right into Jane’s own middle bubble. Indeed, seemingly there is no “lady of the house,” so Jane may take certain freedoms that would otherwise be unavail- able. And yet, it is with the arrival of Rochester’s guests that Jane experiences the pangs of the social class divide once again. When these guests enter the drawing- room and find Jane sitting by the window, with Adele, responding to Jane’s curt- sey, “one or two bent their heads in return; the others only stared.”21 For them, Jane is someone they cannot socialize with, and subsequently, a potted plant – they discuss any matter before her as if she were not there, even talking of the faults of the governess in her presence. Indeed, “[a]t Gateshead and Thornfield both, she is neither family nor servant, but floating uncomfortably between.”22

Due to her deterritorialization, since childhood, Jane lacks a static role model from whom she can build her own self-image. There is no one to tell her who she is. Consequently, Jane creates herself by taking fragments from the women around her – they define what she is, and what she is not. Walter Benjamin discussed the con- cept of a vessel created by the unification of diverse fragments in order to complete the whole. “Fragments of a vessel,” he says, “which are to be glued together must match one another in the smallest details, although they need not be like one an- other.”23 While Jane is selective, she appropriates fragments from the very diverse women around her, in order to create and complete her own self – the English lady she wishes to become. As a child at Gateshead, Jane lacks role models, let alone positive ones, with the exception of Bessie, who “employs her as ‘a sort of under- nursery maid, to tidy the room, dust the chairs, &c’ [...] apprenticing her in the ways of serving, as a mother would her daughter. This apprenticeship is consistent with Jane’s developing self-perception.”24 Bessie is the only person at Gateshead to offer Jane a kind word. And it is Bessie’s words that Jane carries with her, for her latter belief in the unexplained and otherworldly steams from Bessie’s evening ghost stories, which are strewn throughout the novel giving way to both minor and major events – as is the introduction of Rochester, who “first appears in a super- natural haze, as if he had come galloping out of one of Bessie’s nightmarish tales,”25 and Jane’s eventual return to Rochester by heeding the voice she hears in the night wind.

Jane’s further socialization is taken from those she admires most at Lowood. Even though at Gateshead Jane was treated as a beggarly dependent, she has always seen herself as belonging to a higher social class. The first person she sees as a lady-like role model is Miss Temple, who impresses Jane by her “voice, look, and air.”26 It seems that, Jane’s “organ of Veneration” swells at the very well-dressed sight of [Miss Temple]: not the pharisaic finery of the ladies Brocklehurst, but just enough quiet ele- gance to indicate that here stands a proper specimen of the bourgeois female [...]. As her name suggests, Miss Temple is a living shrine to this type, and Jane quickly comes to worship there.

From her, Jane adapts what she calls her “Lowood notions of the toilette,”28 always wearing a simple dress, smoothed back hair, and, when the occasion calls for, “a single little pearl ornament which Miss Temple gave [her] as a parting keepsake,”29 or even the “strict self-repression” Jane has been taught by the “marble-like” Miss Temple.30

Of Helen Burns, Jane says, “I suspected she might be right, and I wrong,”31 and so she is diligent to integrate in herself Helen’s disposition toward forgiveness, endur- ance, and composure. Helen even says to Jane, “‘Love your enemies; bless them that curse you; do good to them that hate you and despitefully use you.’”32 While a young Jane voices her disapproval at such a suggestion at the moment, she is able to precisely follow the advice in her visit to Gateshead during Mrs. Reed’s illness. Later, as she wanders aimlessly through the streets, “[t]he girl who once declared, ‘I must resist those who punish me unjustly’ [...] now swallows her anger at mis- treatment and forgives injustice with Helen’s own complacency,”33 and blames not those who refuse to give her any food or aid, but rather turn her away.

From these three women Jane has taken fragments in order to build her own per- sona; but of others she has been much more discriminatory, and has opted to be their mirror image, reflecting, inversely, their traits. Of Georgiana Reed she has rejected frivolity; of Eliza Reed it is over-zealousness; of Blanche Ingram it is un- truthfulness and charade; of Grace Pole it is vice; of Céline Varéns it is the role of mistress; and of Bertha Mason it is that of subjugation and fury.

Slowly, through her encounters with different women, Jane has almost completed her self, the vessel of her being is almost as intact as it can possibly be, but as her wedding day approaches, Jane senses that a large fragment is yet missing. When, the day after their engagement, Rochester calls her by her future name, that of Jane Rochester, her response is not one of appropriation but of rejection toward it. She says, “I could not quite comprehend it: it made me giddy. The feeling, the an- nouncement sent through me, was something stronger than was consistent with joy – something that smote and stunned: it was, I think, almost fear.”34 A few days later, looking at her packed trunks Jane disowns them as well as the person she is to become:

tomorrow, at this time, [the trunks] would be far on their road to London: and so should I [...] or rather, not I, but one Jane Rochester, a person whom as yet I knew not [...]. I could not persuade myself to affix [the address cards on the trunks], or to have them affixed. Mrs. Rochester! She did not exist.35

On her wedding day, Sophie, the French nurse, calls Jane back to see her reflection in the mirror, and the image that bounces back is not to Jane’s liking. “I saw a robbed and veiled figure” Jane says, “so unlike my usual self that it seemed almost the image of a stranger.”36 The woman she sees in the mirror, the one she is about to become, will be more incomplete than she is because Jane will cease being her own person and become someone else’s “perfect angel” – someone who is com- plete only in another’s eyes, yet incomplete in her own. She cannot proceed to step into the already-completed life of a woman (with a husband, a house, servants, and even a “daughter”) if she has not finished piecing her original self together. That is why, when faced with an uncertain future, Jane decides to leave Thornfield in order to flee from Rochester’s advances and toward her missing fragment.

From infancy, one word has been burned into Jane’s psyche – dependent. Upon her marriage to Rochester her state would not have altered since she would have simply transferred her dependency from being his employee to being his poor, unconnected wife. What Jane precisely lacks is her independence, and the one thing that guaran- tees her such a state is income. The coincidence that of all the homes in England, Jane arrives at the threshold of St. John, Diana, and Mary Rivers’ may seem some- what incredible, but it serves a pivotal purpose for it is there, and only there, where Jane can find her missing fragment. At their home, she not only finds the family she belongs to, but the inheritance she is rightfully to attain. However, she does not remain with them at Moor House because it is not her home, her territory – it is theirs. She would once again be “the other,” the addition. Thus, as an heiress, she now has the financial and social independence she once lacked, and can return on an equal sense, in every way, to Thornfield.

Up to this point, Jane has always been moving away from some place, and this is the first time she is coming back to a place with the idea of remaining there indefi- nitely. Indeed, she is returning, she is reterritorializing herself to Thornfield, the only true home she has known. Had she married Rochester the first time, she would have remained deterritorialized for two reasons. First of all, since “deterrito- rialization, which relies on an initial territorialisation, is also accompanied by reter- ritorialisation [sic]”37 she has to find a territory, leave, and return to it for her to be reterritorialized – remaining there would keep her in a constant state of deterritori- alization. When she approaches Thornfield upon her return, she is exuberant at the prospect of returning because now she identifies it as a home, having been away from it for a period of time; she says, “How fast I walked! How I ran sometimes! How I looked forward to catch the first view of the well-known woods! With what feelings I welcomed single trees I knew, and familiar glimpses of meadow and hill between them!”38 However, when she reaches Thornfield she finds it destroyed. It has burned to the ground at the hands of Bertha Mason. And this, in part, leads to Jane’s true reterritorialization. She could never be “the lady of the house” at Thornfield, for it has always been Bertha’s home – she not only inhabited the attic, but every corner of the house was stamped with her presence. Jane then simply transfers her attachment from Thornfield to Ferndean, thirty miles off, and establishes her home there with its inhabitants, while still remaining in the shadow of Thornfield.

Even though Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre may be simplistically summarized by some as a Cinderella story, in the end, it seems that in fact “Jane does not want a man, she wants a manor.”39 While this too may seem at first like a harsh judgment due to the monetary connotations evoked, Jane does not want the status of a landed gentry, she wants something to call her own.

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What, Me Worry? by Meredith Kunsa

August 16, 2003 by Leave a Comment

All of us bear the imprint of the culture and the time we are born into as much as we do the imprint of our genes, our family system, our birth order. Our experience of community, for instance, has a retrospective aspect, involving a tradition carried from generation to generation. Great events of the immediate centuries of our lifetimes (those great events of history from wars to religious turmoil, from political to social, to environmental realities) affect the cycles of our families and our own generation. There’s also the prospective aspect that can be described as making part of one’s life part of the whole stream and not a mere stagnant puddle without any overflow into the future. This feeling of community starts out for some simply as cooperation or consideration and eventually can become a feeling of being connected with the whole, with humanity, and a perspective on the welfare of mankind.

As I grow older, I realize that the sum total of such events has in many ways shaped who I am. Not everybody develops this sense, but without it how else can we hope to address the significant evolutionary ideas of humankind? A frightening possibility facing us all today is Global disaster where mankind may extinguish itself. To put an end to humans would require an extremely unlikely blend of social disaster, human malevolence, technological perfection, and bad luck. Ours is more likely to be a continuous struggle toward an improved civilization or a terrible (but not final) outcome for our planet.

Our country’s present focus on terrorism has required sacrifices from a citizenry that has responded by putting community ahead of self. The 911 crises caused a new, untried President Bush to begin to lead, and the majority of our people supported him. That it is not the case, I believe, in the impending war with Iraq. Yet in a long-standing American pattern, our officials reacted to the 911 emergency by using the crises to create a new social contract. Prior to the 911 events, American society had enjoyed a long era of relative peace and comfort. We had settled into a mood of general pessimism about the long-term future, fearful that our superpower nation, exemplified by the personal aspects of our presidential chief Clinton, were somehow rotting from within. We were definitely too individually focused. Overly focused, perhaps, on an “I” and “me” outlook instead of a “we” outlook.

During the World War II era we once thought our- selves collectively strong. Yet just over a year ago we regarded ourselves more as individual entitles. Even today in our isolated and inward focused families we forget that we breathe common air, drink common water, inhabit common communities. In the face of the general apathy in society concerning social and family programs, how do we overcome this passivity? How do we re-thread our society which has become so unraveled?

Even though our recent attention and resources have been focused on the War Against Terrorism, programmatic needs in our own American hometowns remain daunting, for behind each problem lies another problem that must be solved first, and behind that lies yet another, and another. To fix crime we have to fix the family, but before we do that we have to fix welfare, and that means fixing our budget, and that means fixing our civic spirit, but we can’t do that without fixing moral standards, and that means fixing schools and churches, and that means fixing cities, and that’s impossible unless we fix crime. There’s no fulcrum on which to rest a policy lever.

So why don’t more of us act? Is it because we feel overwhelmed, don’t know how, don’t have hope? The more we do take committed stands, the more we create inspiration for others to do the same. Technologically, we can connect through hundreds on the web who host grassroots groups concerned with issues such as anarchism, media activism, nonviolence, economic sanctions, environment, health, human rights, labor, police brutality, disarmament, third worlds, diversity, and gun control.1 I’m hardly qualified to answer the what now? question. Each generation has its own symbols and emblems that seem to capture their collective personality.

The G.I. generation before mine had Superman, and my own had Alfred E. Neumam’s “What, me worry?” Not the most self-complementary image. But I have never felt cynicism about my voice counting, or that my actions don’t count, or that nothing we do will matter. And what I can say is that one never knows where one’s journey will end, you just have to have the faith to begin. How do you motivate yourself to take the first step? Find some issue you care about. Can’ t you make the most impact simply in the way you live your life today? The way we live our life is important. Cumulatively, thousands of decisions help make more options possible. Who will take care of healing the planet? Who will clean up the mess of our corrupt campaign finance system? Who will address our growing inequalities, where the wealthiest 1% now control more wealth than the bottom 94%?

These challenges can only be solved through common action. We must bring into the public sphere our deepest felt convictions, what we believe in our heart. Even if we ourselves do not directly cause a change, perhaps someone who has heard us and believes in what we see may make that change and thus we have made a difference. We may never know the impact of our actions. Keeping silent is a form of consent. Regardless of our callings in life, as social individuals we need to acknowledge our connectedness both to the past as well as to the future.

What we are ably to do in our lives depends very much on the contributions made in the past by others. A critical question that faces each person is, AWhat will be my contribution to life? Will it be on the useful or useless side of life? How are we going to get the substantial group of people who have lived all their lives as moral outlaws to see and appreciate the inherent virtues of responsibility, self-control and other necessary virtues? This question calls for more than slogans and transcends our political and economic ideological differences. I believe the answer begins with the old concept of character development. We need to more visibly prize character, demonstrate it, and instill in young people the desire to have it. We need to teach them and remind ourselves that character counts. The six core values crucial to a democratic society identified by the Institute of Ethics which founded the nonprofit and nonpartisan Character Counts! Coalition includes:

1. Trustworthiness: honesty, integrity, promise-keeping, loyalty.

2. from violence, coercion and intimidation; treating others with courtesy, civility, politeness.

3. Responsibility; accountability, pursuit of excellence, self-discipline.

4. Justice and fairness: impartiality, commitment to equity and equality, open- ness to information and ideas, reasonableness, consistency.

5. Caring: regard for the well-being of others, kindness, compassion, consideration, charity.

6. Civic virtue and citizenship: living up to social obligations, participation in the democratic process, law abidance, protection of the environment, community service, doing one’s share.

I, along with fellow travelers of my generation now in elderhood, see the protective family structure of our youth disintegrating around us – often in our own childrens’ families that are falling apart. Global terrorism has shaken the sanctuary of our home ground.

As the elder stewards of this time in history, we must look for ways of staying con- nected with the younger generations. Upcoming Baby Boom grandparents are looming. The recent average age of women turned first-time grandmothers in 2000 was 47. We “Grands” have a unique inter generational understanding. For those of us preceding the Boomers, our core values stress participation over authority, and process over results; listening, adapting, seeking a consensus; not standing out are values to be embraced and celebrated. They are values particularly suited to elder- hood, to the old ones who may lead quietly by seeming to follow; who, by having no “blood boiling” agenda of their own to which they are attracted, may allow a larger agenda to emerge from the circumstances of the moment which is in the best interests of everyone to pursue.

To me that’s a far better way to live than giving up our hope and our voice. So we act to make a better world, one we’ll pass on to our children and grandchildren. But ultimately, we do it because it makes us more whole, teaches us who we are, reminds us why we’re here on earth.

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Kiss My Aztec: The Functions of Satire by Micah Berger

August 15, 2003 by Leave a Comment

Mass media like a published newspaper disseminates information to an audience of at least a few thousand people. In most cases mass media like newspapers are put out by a group of people working together or a corporation. This corporation, or group of constituents, then uses some kind of mechanism to reproduce its mes- sage. (Severin 8). An example of this kind of mass media would be the San Diego Union Tribune. A commercial newspaper like this one has a few general functions. Harold Lasswell, a scholar of communication and a professor of law at Yale, has separated these general functions into four categories:

1)Surveillance of the environment. This means that the publication provides news about elements of the economy, weather, and military 2)Correlation of parts of so- ciety in responding to the environment. This is the specific opinion that a society has concerning the news being presented 3)Transmission of social heritage from one generation to the next. This increases social cohesion and helps outsiders inte- grate into the society reflected by the newspaper 4)Entertainment, which consists of art, music, editorial columns and other leisure material (Severin 212-14).

While mass media tries to objectively portray news events, there is often a conflict of values. Warren Breed, a former newspaper reporter and Tulane University fac- ulty member, believes that the media tends to sacrifice accurate reporting of signifi- cant events for the sake of “respect for convention, public decency and orderliness” (Severin 222). Another mass media theorist, John Downing (2001), agrees that self-censorship by mainstream media leads to the “unquestioning acceptance of stan- dard professional media codes” (16). Downing (2001) also believes that “mass cul- ture, the product of the commercial industries of advertising, broadcasting, cinema, and print media, is a spurious and implicitly even fascistic rendition of the public’s needs, asphyxiating the questioning spirit” (4).

This “asphyxiation of the questioning spirit” is not a problem that has gone unat- tended to. The response has taken the form of “radical media.” According to Downing (2001) “Radical media has a mission not only to provide facts to a public denied them but to explore fresh ways of developing a questioning perspective on the hegemonic process and increasing the publics’ sense of confidence in its power to engineer constructive change” (16). Radical media is also simultaneously a part of “popular culture.” Popular culture can be defined as a “mixed phenomenon” be- cause it can be radical in some respects and not in others. Another attribute of popular culture is that it can be elitist, racist, misogynist, homophobic, and ageist. And furthermore, this culture is free to express these views in inventive and attrac- tive ways. (Downing 5) The producers of popular culture are free to do this because they are not claiming to maintain any standard social codes of morality.

In the following discussion I will examine the relationship between the Daily Aztec and the Kiss My Aztec as a response to this kind of conventional public communica- tion. First I want to determine the function of the Daily Aztec as a form of mass media. Second I will try to understand the ideology of the satirical Daily Aztec parody called the Kiss My Aztec.

The Daily Aztec is a San Diego State University publication that is modeled after any generic city newspaper. The front page consists of headlines, a few eye- catching pictures and a brief table of contents at the bottom of the page. This table of contents also contains a brief synopsis of the weather. As a former columnist for the Daily Illini, the newspaper published by the University of Illinois at Cham- paign-Urbana, I can say that the formats of both college publications are nearly identical. Both are primarily about social and political events taking place at the college of their publication. And both have the appearance of a real newspaper from a distance of six or seven feet. The only dead giveaway is that these college newspapers seldom use colors or colored graphics in any of their publications. Just as a national or city publication includes stories about political figures and promi- nent members of the community, their collegiate counterparts include stories about the president of the university and prominent faculty members and students. These collegiate publications present their school, a small part of national society, as the dominant community. This technique further emphasizes the legitimacy of these publications as formal kinds of mass media that more or less obey the same precepts and serve the same functions as their national counterparts like the Union Tribune or the New York Times.

In a chapter on media criticism by Barry Brummett (1994), he comments on the function of “media logic.” Media logic is “the assumption that as people become accustomed to a technology and to the social uses to which it is put, they internalize certain ways of thinking and perceiving it” (139). This means that the medium the information is presented on has a strong affect on the way that we perceive its value. Because of this, an article that you would read in the National Enquirer would be received in a much different way from an article that you might read in Time or Newsweek. This is because magazines like Time or Newsweek portray themselves as accurate forms of journalism while the National Enquirer makes no such claim. By graphically designing the Daily Aztec to look just like a regular na- tional newspaper, its creators partially succeed in transferring the media logic of a respectable newspaper to their own collegiate publication. And to take this transfer a step further, The Kiss My Aztec has the same relationship with the Daily Aztec as it tries to look like the respected college newspaper that the student body has come to internally recognize.

Another distinction that can be drawn between media publications is the difference between first and third world views of nationalism and cultural production. Ac- cording to Frederick Jameson, the main difference between the two is their eco- nomic means of production. He believes that “first world postmodernism reflects multinational capitalism, the most advanced stage of postindustrial capitalism, while third world texts reflect ‘primitive or tribal’ societies based on precapitalistic modes of production” (Bennett 178-79). The Daily Aztec exhibits qualities of a first world publication, just as a national newspaper does. It confines itself to ac- ceptable social precepts of the community, and is “commodified” in such a way as to promote the dominant capitalist institutions that surround it. Examples can be seen in promotions for events that are taking place in the San Diego area, adver- tisements for non-profit special interest groups, and other associations with the dominant culture of the San Diego community. Also, because the Daily Aztec is distributed to thousands of students daily, it can be influential in the community just like other forms of first world texts. The Kiss My Aztec exhibits qualities of a third world text as it is not bound to any national regulations that are found accept- able to the community. It contains fewer advertisements, and limits itself to local commentaries that do not attempt to figure into the identity of a national commu- nity. For instance, the bulk of most Kiss My Aztec publications consist of grotesque images and misogynistic humor. I don’t know of any respectable national commu- nity in San Diego that accepts these community values as representatives of their own. In addition, the means for production of this text are severely limited in com- parison to the production of the Daily Aztec. While the Daily Aztec is distributed from bins located all over campus, the Kiss My Aztec can only be found in a few select areas on campus. In these ways this parody of a campus newspaper repre- sents a primitive local view of a community that it does not completely belong to. But despite these drawbacks, there is still a rising population of students (myself included) that looks for the next edition twice a month. In this way the Kiss My Az- tec portrays the attitudes of radical and popular media.

Mikhail Bakhtin defines this kind of radical third world text as a discourse that seeks to represent an “active polyglot word.” This is a process that Bakhtin calls a dialogization, or the process by which a language user enters into a dialogue with other people’s language in an effort to populate it with his own intention, his own accent, when he appropriates the word, adapting it to his own semantic and expres- sive intention . . . forcing it to submit to one’s own intentions and accents. (Ander- son 293-94)

Here we are beginning to see the functions of parody in mass media. In Bakhtin’s words, the function of a parody is to open a channel of communication between the standard social norms and the minority views of that same community. In another text, Robert Bennett (2000) quotes Bakhtin’s views on parody texts. “Bakhtin em- phasizes how language can be reaccentuated through literary parody of past literary conventions and popular carnivalizing of authoritative social and linguistic norms” (184). Here Bennett is hinting at the way parody is able to pave the way for a new cultural ownership by a community located on the fringes of the “normal” social culture. Bennett (2000) also believes that this “modern cultural form” functions in a way that unifies opposing cultural beliefs (185).

This perspective looks at parodies as a method of bringing together communities with opposing values in an exchange of cultural opinions. If we see parody in this favorable way, it becomes easier to respect it as an “engineer of constructive change” (Downing, 2001, 16). But at the same time we must also consider the Kiss My Aztec’s function as a kind of popular media, which we know is not concerned with respectable social values that can be found in radical media. The most objec- tionable quality of any form of popular cultural media is that it reserves its right to be nasty and hateful just for kicks. An example of this type of discourse can easily be found on any page of the Kiss My Aztec. Some example headlines of this publi- cation read: “Top Ten Excuses From David Westerfield” or “Figuring Out Women.” In the article about women there is a brief description of female person- alities. It reads: “You can tell a lot about women by the drink they order. For exam- ple, if a girl orders a vodka cran or a gin and tonic, then she’s probably a whore. But if she orders a Bud Light or a Coors Light then she’s probably a whore!” (March 2002).

Here we see that the Kiss My Aztec is also a representative of a grotesque carnival- ized look at mainstream culture and media, specifically the Daily Aztec. Another example of the relationship between the two publications is the current mascot de- bate taking place on the San Diego State campus. A discussion of this debate in the Daily Aztec appears in an article entitled “Mascot ideas center stage at forum.” In the Kiss My Aztec this same debate has been twisted into a misogynistic joke. In an article entitled “Mascot Suggestions” there is a mascot named “Megan The Coke Slut.” Besides offending women, this article is designed to offend anyone who has taken this racist mascot debate seriously. At the same time, it appeals to irreverent jerks who don’t really care that much either way about the fate of our school mas- cot (May 2002).

The grotesque satire of the Kiss My Aztec can be seen from a Rabelaisian perspec- tive. There are two major components of what Bakhtin calls “Rabelaisian laughter.” They are the carnivalization of existing traditions and the illustration of abstract ideas through grotesque imagery. Bakhtin discusses the purpose of laughter from the perspective of Rabelais. In his description, we begin to see the socially redeem- ing qualities of humor as it presents itself in satirical literature:

True ambivalent and universal laughter does not deny seriousness but purifies and completes it. Laughter purifies from dogmatism, from the intolerant and the petri- fied; it liberates from fanaticism and pedantry, from fear and intimidation, from didacticism, naivete and illusion, from the single meaning, the single level, from sentimentality . . . Such is the function of laughter in the historic development of culture and literature. (Bakhtin 123)

Here we can see the purpose of satirical representations of serious discourse. By poking fun at the powers that be, Rabelais feels that he is able to liberate the minds of people who are restricted by social norms. His idea is that parody causes us to see through the traditional concepts of propriety in our social institutions. This al- lows us to judge our world using our own moral standards rather than those that have been imposed upon us as a culture. In other words, Rabelais believed that sa- tirical laughter strips the object being parodied of its “false verbal and ideological husk” (Bakhtin 237). The ability to derive personal judgment from humor was viewed by Aristotle as a valuable part of social insight. “According to Aristotle, a child does not begin to laugh before the fortieth day after his birth; only from that moment does it become a human being” (Bakhtin 69). Here Aristotle is describing the cognitive developments in the brain that allow a person to laugh at their surroundings. These developments further indicate the ability to form ethical and moral judgments about the environment.

An example of a socially enlightening source of laughter in an issue of the Kiss My Aztec can be seen in a brief statement about the Starbucks Coffee chain. There is a graphic of the Starbucks logo with the phrase “Black coffee for white people.” And above this graphic is the statement: “Don’t get Starbucked, boycott the monopo- lists” (March 2002). This humorous commentary makes the reader think about the racial and social implications of the popular coffee chain. Not only does it make a statement about our modern economy, it also makes people evaluate their own ra- cial stereotypes. In this way we can see how laughter contributes to our social per- spective of our surroundings.

While this kind of statement causes us to evaluate our existing society, what Rab- elais terms “carnivalization” paints a clear picture of a society turned upside down by satire and humorous criticism. In Rabelais’ time there was a widespread practice in Medieval France called the “Feast of Fools,” this festival was described as hav- ing “a reversal of the hierarchal levels: the jester was proclaimed king, a clowninsh abbot, bishop, or archbishop was elected at the ‘feast’” (Bakhtin 81). This “feast of fools” that Rabelais so enjoyed embodied his desire to “destroy the official picture of events” (Bakhtin 439). A perfect example of this destruction of the official so- cial picture through a reversal of roles can be seen in the Kiss My Aztec article enti- tled “Win The Ultimate St. Patrick’s Day Date” (March 2002). With a headline like this, a reader would imagine the prize to be a date with a sexy person that they would like to meet. But instead there is a picture of the Kiss My Aztec editor, J. Rhodes, looking unattractive in a pair of tightey-whiteys. By turning around the ideals of sexual appeal, this advertised contest has turned the laughable court jester into an even goofier king. Even though Rhodes is looking quite ridiculous in the picture, it still qualifies as an instance of what Rabelais would call “bringing down the high and raising up the low.” (Bakhtin 177). This is another case how he seeks to undo the habitual pictures of the world that dictate our social structures.

The other aspect of “Rabelaisian Laughter” is the depiction of the grotesque. Ac- cording to Rabelais: “The body copulates, defecates, overeats, and men’s speech is flooded with genitals, bellies, defecations, urine, diseases, and dismembered body parts . . . there is still an eruption of these images into literature, especially if the literature is gay or abusive in character” (Bakhtin 319). In an excerpt from Rab- elais’ book Pantagruel, he shows us just how grotesque his image of the human body can be: “I have observed that the pleasure-twats of women in this part of the world are much cheaper than stones. Therefore, the walls should be built of twats, symmetrically and according to the rules of architecture, the largest go in front” (Bakhtin 313). The purpose of this grotesque image could be to comment on the social status of women. Or it could have been to help men see how poorly they treat women as they objectify them for their parts.

The Kiss My Aztec also contains grotesque imagery of dismembered body parts. Incidentally, it is the same dismembered part of the female anatomy used in Rabal- ais’ text. The depiction of the vagina in the Kiss My Aztec does not have a role as socially symbolic as in Pantagruel, but may be just as grotesque. It is an article en- titled “Cameltoe Classifications.” This article has names and corresponding pic- tures of the female anatomy that depict it in a very crude way. Some of the disgust- ing classifications of the grotesque disembodied depictions of the female anatomy are “Baked potato, Barroom ashtray, and Big Bird’s wishbone.” (Kiss My Aztec, May 2002). The only positive social message that I can see coming out of this edi- torial is the realization that women’s bodies are too often objectified by our colle- giate community here at San Diego State.

In this way, the satirical publication appeals to the values of popular culture which is free to express its beliefs that appeal to any social group. The Kiss My Aztec is full of other grotesque articles that serve little or no satirical purpose. I would also classify them as products of a disturbing popular culture. Some of these articles include a picture of J. Rhodes, the Editor of the Kiss My Aztec, urinating on some- one’s living room floor; an article entitled “Warning: Don’t Put Nads in Your Ass- hole;” and a discussion of how to make an organic ink that is safe to use when mak- ing a print with the underside of your penis. This print was also included on the front page of the last Kiss My Aztec publication (May 2002).

All of the topics of this satire of the Daily Aztec are a product of grotesque humor. And some serve as a more obvious form of social criticism than others. This is the difference between a mass-produced print of the male genitalia, and a caption that reads: “Father Weber implements new male only G-string policy. Says he will per- sonally enforce the strict code” (Kiss My Aztec, May 2002). This second example is a commentary on the news story of a local high school dress code involving thongs and an invasion of personal privacy by a teacher.

In the Master’s Thesis entitled “Breaking Through: Carnivalesque Discourse as Therapy,” Cynthia Dudley discusses the “laughing truth” which is a synonym for insight. Dudley says: “the temporary removal of social and political restraints pro- vides carnival participants the opportunity to examine, understand, and compare their internal and external existence (6). I believe that she is talking about the per- sonal role that each person perceives as theirs in the world that they live in. From this explanation, we can see the Kiss My Aztec is an outlet for students who ques- tion the social restrictions that surround them in campus life.

But the Kiss My Aztec does more than function as a symbol of social dysfunction. It also represents some of the crass pleasures of popular culture. In this way it re- minds us that not every gross thing you see is the product of a sincere social con- cern. Instead, these things can be seen for what they are, the perverted ideals of an irreverent minority in the San Diego State student body. In other words, a print of the underside of a man’s penis made from a thick mixture of water and instant cof- fee contains no valuable social commentary. It is just a sign of the moral perversion found in popular culture that has infiltrated our collegiate communities.

References

Anderson, B. (1983). Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso.

Bakhtin, M. M. (1984). Rabelais And His World (H. Iswolsky, Trans.). Blooming- ton, Indiana: Indiana University Press.

Bennett, R. (2000) National Allegory or Carnivalesque Heteroglossia? Midnight’s Children’s Narration of Indian National Identity. In San Diego Bakhtin Circle. Bakhtin and the Nation (pp. 177-192). London: Associated University Presses.

Brummet, B. (1994). Rhetoric in Popular Culture. Boston: Bedford/St. Martins. Downing, J. D. (2001). Radical Media: Rebellious Communication and Social

Movements. Thousand Oaks, California: Sage Publications Inc.
Dudley, C. L. (1992). Breaking Through: Carnivalesque Discourse As Therapy

(Master’s Thesis, San Diego State University, 1992). pp. 4-7. Rhodes, J. (2002, March). March Madness. The Kiss My Aztec.

Rhodes, J. (2002, May). SDSU Students Continue To Get Molested. The Kiss My Aztec.

Severin, W., Tankard, J. (1979). Communication Theories: Origins Methods Uses. New York: Hastings House Publishers.

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The Poetics of Transformation by Jan Lee Ande

August 15, 2003 by Leave a Comment

What transformation are poets called upon to make at this critical time in the world’s history? How do we transform our anger, our prejudices, our drive toward destruction, into poems and a presence that awaken us to the sanctity of life? How do we use creativity to urge us toward revolutionizing our lives and world? What is the language in which poets might talk about a continuum of change?

Muriel Rukeyser devoted her life to poetry and believed in its ability to transfigure people and planet. She searched for a grammar, a syntax and diction, of conver- sion. Writing about the time during World War II, she says:

I needed a language of transformation. I needed a language of a changing phase for the poem. And I needed a language that was not static, that did not see life as a series of points, but more as a language of water….Moving past one phase of one’s own life–transformation, and moving past impossi- bilities….That meaning is a religious meaning. And a very common plain one too. (xxii)

How does change come about? Is it drawn out and transitional? Or does it happen straightaway, like a tarantula stepping from its skin–so effortless it appears for an instant as though there are two tarantulas? It may well be that transformation has immediacy to it rather than a mutational or evolutionary quality. An instantaneous regeneration may occur. We step through a veil into a more luminous space and time. We see ourselves connected with the world. We inhabit a moment of grace: we are changed in an instant. At such times, transformation appears as a gift, a cryptic mystery.

Jiddu Krishnamurti knows that the transformation of the person can happen quite suddenly, as a product of pure and humble attention. Pupul Jayakar, a longtime associate of Krishnamurti’s, offers insight into such change:

Seeing and listening to the fact directly–innocently, without thought seek- ing to change or alter the fact, a nonoperation of thought or will on the deep roots of hate, anger, greed, fear–dissolves the state. There is a transforma- tion in the nature of matter as anger or fear and the release of an energy held in these states, an energy untouched by time and, therefore, not subject to its laws. (Jayakar 111)

In Canto XXXIII of The Divine Comedy reference is made to the influence and authority of love. In line 146 of the Paradiso, Dante tells us love is the motive force behind the workings of the sun and stars. (Ciardi 601) Perhaps it is true that love is the driving power of the universe, pushing planets, suns, comets, the mysterious dark matter. It flows in, around and through, making all things move. We are told in I John 4 that God is love, and perfect love banishes fear. We cannot love the divine while hating our brothers and sisters in the great chain of being that stretches from prokaryotes (primal cells) to angels.

Possibly the earth–roots and rivers and creatures–is God’s body, as some new sci- entists, mystics, poets, and traditional peoples have intuited. Maybe God’s body extends through this solar system, out into our spiral galaxy and beyond, throughout this universe, and maybe many more.

Neurons talk to one another by way of synapses, tiny threads of connection. Cells talk to cells. The thread of God spun throughout connecting cells, organs and sys- tems, beyond individual boundaries, out of our particular cells and into those of other beings and things.

How do we become consciously aware of our connectedness? How do we grow into a sense of responsibility toward the poet’s task? Each healing of self brings a healing to the world.

Jewish legend tells of the thirty-six hidden zaddikim of every generation. The zad- dikim strengthen the link between person and divine, remind us of our relationship to God and others. They are wise and devoted, and without them the world, it is said, would not cohere. When one zaddik dies, another arises to take that place (Friedman 31-33). Interestingly, “zaddik” is also Arabic for good friend or trusted one.

There are nuns, among them the Franciscan Sisters of Perpetual Adoration in Wis- consin, who continually pray for peace. Since 1878 these nuns have prayed during all hours of the night and day: “Bring peace to the world.” Maybe in their hearts, in silence, they say Lord, make me an instrument of your peace. Where there is ha- tred, let me sow love. Where there are missile silos and the gleam of military gray, let there be fields of sunflowers and grasses. Perhaps their prayers and contempla- tion keep the world bound together, held in a net of love and compassion.

Who is to say what power for change zaddikim and nuns, poets and monks mani- fest? Who is to speculate what yet unfound law of physics they demonstrate? Each solitary act of selflessness, of acceptance, changes the world and its creatures. It feeds into the field of the species. It helps to make known the beings reborn in con- sciousness.

Allow the thought that transformation is possible. Expect the miraculous and the immediate, and it may manifest now, before it is too late for this turning of the wheel of becoming. Sanctify the life that is our gift.

For many millennia, words for religion were missing from the world’s holy litera- ture. Early peoples did not split the sacred from the secular. All words were in- stilled with power and place. The earth was known, in all its multiplicity, to be holy.

Writer and poet Annie Dillard once proclaimed “I know only enough of God to want to worship him (sic), by any means ready to hand” (55). Where do we go to worship, beyond churches and temples and synagogues? Beyond meeting houses and long houses? Beyond pastures and bedrooms and boardrooms? We go to the empty page, the book of poems, the spoken word.

Let us take our worship to the table. Let us look at one another in a conspiracy of the chosen. Let us break bread at the table of the world.

In the past we sent out poets, prophets, seers, and shamans to explore the farther reaches of psyche. They bypassed the senses and reached the raw experience of nature that pours into the unconscious. They entered the world of dreams, myth, communion, and revelation.

The shaman and the inspired poet speak and understand the language of the crea- tures of this earth. In traditional cultures, they are healers. They adopt other identi- ties, farflung and adventuresome. They employ spirit helpers and ancestors to carry their messages. They learn wisdom through illness or suffering. We turn to the poet who journeys into the distant reaches of mystery and brings back visions and power needed by the human community. We begin to engage in a new intimacy with the planet.

Poets cross lines of psychotherapy, theology, magic, and medicine. They under- stand that illness and evil and apocalypse exist, yet refuse to align with these forces. They recreate balance, envision healing and light. They activate the aspects within us that honor the mystery of life.

All about us a new poetic presence rises up. A wise layer of the psyche is awaken- ing, outfitted with the tools of the journey. In times of great cultural upheaval, this aspect of psyche takes on a pervasive role. The poetic ethos emerges in both theory and praxis, across disciplines and callings. Scientists and theoreticians of the new paradigm do wondrous work at this dimension of the psyche.

We are part of the great forward reaching thrust of evolution. We are part of the great surge of life and creativity that moves through all creatures from simplest to most complex. Evolution is a lineage, a progression, a surge, an erotic urge. A heartbeat that passes through each one of us and on to the next and the next. Through waking to ideals of compassion and service, the stream moves ever on- ward.

In Christianity we find the communion of saints. Every time we partake of the Eucharist, each time we eat the flesh and drink the blood, we are joined in a pro- gression two thousand years old spread across the planet (Brown and Novick 1490150). In Zen Buddhism we find the dharma transmission, the carrying on of the lineage. Soto monks stand eye to eye with their Zen teacher–who becomes Vairochana, the Buddha who transmutes hatred into wisdom–to receive the direct transmission that connects them back to Shakyamuni Buddha, some two thousand five hundred years ago (Goldberg 202-215).

In the simple living of our lives, we come into contact with the lineage of all life. Through prayer and contemplation, by giving thanks, by opening to the wisdom of world and self, we realize this unbroken line that extends from the birth of our planet fifteen billion years ago to the awakening of a new consciousness. It extends from the many deaths (by meteors, of dinosaurs and other extinct species) to the possible death of most lifeforms on our planet. It calls on us to live a life of con- tained hope. It calls us to worship at the altar of the holiness of simply being alive.

In the following poem, I write about the sixth hexagram of The I Ching, a time of confrontation and spiritual maturing:

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Conflict

It is not simply grains of colored sand,
I tell you. It is not simply a white scarf and fruit laid before the Lama.
Even though a strand of my hair (grown past my shoulders by then) was cut at the crown to stubble, I know the meaning of initiation. Do not tell me it is mumbo jumbo, or that I am a child of the devil.

Let me say it like this: I embrace unholy sonnets; the sacraments of desire;
the revelations of the Qur’an in their one hundred and fourteen suras; a goddess seated in the lap of a god; sweating in a lodge of cedar and stone.

But friend, let me lower my eyes and break bread with you, sip the grape juice that becomes blood, tongue the wafer turned to a burning body. I kneel before your teachings do me what you will: pagan, infidel, child of darkness. When I look at your body, a radiance blazes from your limbs where thirteen wingéd seraphim whirl.

Works Consulted

Alighieri, Dante. The Divine Comedy. trans. John Ciardi. New York: Norton, 1954.

Dillard, Annie. Holy the Firm. New York: Harper, 1977.

Friedman, Maurice. Religion and Psychology: A Dialogical Approach. New York: Paragon, 1992.

Goldberg, Natalie. Long Quiet Highway: Waking Up in America. New York: Ban- tam, 1993.

Jayakar, Pupul. Krishnamurti: A Biography. San Francisco: Harper, 1986.

Rukeyser, Muriel. quoted in The Life of Poetry. 1949, 1974. Ashfield MA: Paris Press, 1996.

Sheldrake, Rupert. Interview. Mavericks of the Mind: Conversations for the New Millennium. By David Jay Brown and Rebecca McClen Novick. Freedom CA: The Crossing Press, 1993.New Millennium. By David Jay Brown and Rebecca McClen Novick. Freedom CA: The Crossing Press, 1993.

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Aesthetics Engage Language by Sally Ades

August 15, 2003 by Leave a Comment

Although the medium of film, by virtue of its photographic process, is image- dominated, some of its finest efforts have been in re-presenting word-centric tales. The text—appealing to the intellect—is refashioned/reinvented into a medium ap- pealing to the senses of sight and hearing, through the personal vision of an au- tuer/director who adapts material from the language of text to the language of film. Certainly technical considerations come into play, but the autuer’s choices are es- sentially aesthetic. In rendering words into images, he or she responds to the audio- visual aesthetic of film.

Since its inception, cinema has re-created countless literary works into a new real- ity by the perspective of this lens-driven medium. The new creation, now expressed in the language of film, may resemble its source but it is distinct. This tenuous rela- tionship between word and image is articulated by Michel Foucault in his landmark study of European madhouses, Madness and Civilization.

Between word and image, between what is depicted by language and what is ut- tered by plastic form, the unity begins to dissolve; a single and identical meaning is not immediately common to them. And if it is true that the image still has the func- tion of speaking of transmitting something consubstantial with language, we must recognize that it already no longer says the same thing; and that by its own plastic values painting (animation) engages in an experiment that will take it farther and farther from language, whatever the superficial identity of the theme (18).

Foucault identifies an essential issue in the relationship of text and image. That film, even as it engages the text by translating it into images, by virtue of “its own plastic values,” alters the meaning to conform to a different code or language. It follows that the filmmaker adapting text into the medium of film makes the choices that inevitably create a new product.

But what if the “superficial identity of the theme” is language itself? How does film explore, translate the nature of words—“what is depicted by language” into “what is uttered by plastic form”? Two films that respond to the interrogation or dialogue between image and text by cinematically re-presenting the nature of language are Il postino and Padre padrone.

These films are based on books that focus on the power of language to transform and re-form both initiates and masters in the world of language. Each film is unique in its approach to this theme, reflecting the personal vision or subjective reality of its respective autuer, yet they share a similar structure in their means of translating the nature of language into the imagery of film. The films are structured linearly to follow the protagonists as they move through various stages in their encounter with language: they have an awakening, or epiphany, to a world of language they never knew existed; they desire to learn about this new world; and finally, they are trans- formed by literacy as are those around them.

Padre padrone is an Italian production by the directorial team of Vittorio and Paolo Taviani who adapted an autobiography by Gavino Ledda, an illiterate shepherd in Sardinia who becomes a professor of linguistics and best-selling author. Il postino is also about a man whose life is altered by words. As postman to the Chilean Marxist poet, Pablo Neruda, recently exiled for his political affiliation, Mario is influenced by the poet to see and feel through poetry. Essentially an Italian film, its British director, Michael Radford, adapted a Chilean novel by Antonio Skármeta.

The directors of these two films respond to the language-based concepts of the books through their own vision. Vittorio Taviani describes this challenge, as quoted by Millicent Marcus in her study of Italian cinema and its relation to literary adap- tation, Filmmaking by the Book, “it was necessary to decompose the book into its constituent material . . . and make the material that came from the experience of Gavino Ledda, man and author of the book, confront our own material, and it was necessary to recompose all in a different work that has its own language, audio- visual language” (157). The director evaluates the process from text to image that he and his brother followed in adapting Padre. Vittorio’s words about recomposing the book into a “different work,” echo Foucault’s.

In Il postino, Radford introduces the theme of language in the first scene. Mario Ruloppolo, the protagonist, haltingly attempts to express his revulsion at fishing to his unsympathetic fisherman father. Their conversation is an edgy, inarticulate dia- logue, because of Mario’s frustration in trying to communicate why he can’t follow his father as a fisherman, and his father’s silent response. Thus, Radford begins his film with a scene that is all about words—Mario and his father lack the words to express their feelings and the film shows this by silence, their facial expressions, and body language. This scene sets up the viewer for the role words will play for Mario, enabling him to articulate his ideas and feelings through poetry.

The films exploit the audio-visual aesthetic of their medium to portray how the in- troduction of words to these young men, Mario and Gavino, is preceded by other means of communication such as music and nature. Mario awakens to the lyrical nature of poetry when he happens upon the Neruda’s, dancing a passionate tango to music from their gramophone. In this scene, Radford places the viewer alongside Mario as he watches, charmed by the grace and intensity of their movements. Mario and the viewer are being primed to see poetry as an audio-visual language. Later when he reads Neruda’s poetry and questions him on its meaning, the poet gives him his first lesson, “when you explain poetry it becomes banal. You must feel it. Meaning doesn’t count, images are spontaneous.” Neruda and his wife express po- etry in emotion, tenderness and passion as they dance. This kind of poetry needs no explanation to the voyeur, Mario. He intuitively understands this language, and soon will intuit the written language of poetry.

In Padre, Gavino also intuitively understands the language of feelings. But his en- trance into the language of words is through an intimate knowledge of nature and its sensory codes, which he learns as a child-shepherd—left to express himself through feelings, but without words.

In teaching him how to survive in the savage loneliness of the Sardinian region of Baddevrustana, his father, Efisio, asks him, “Do you hear this rustling? You need to learn to recognize it. Lower your eyes.” Marcus describes this scene where “the man and the boy both close their eyes and tilt their heads down in concentration,” as a “mythopoetic vision” for Gavino. And she links this scene to Gavino’s even- tual entrance into literacy, because it is his acute sensory perception that causes him to respond to music. “It is sound,” she writes, “that liberates Gavino from the solip- sism and muteness of his shepherd’s lot, as the music of Strauss’s Fledermaus res- cues him from the stultification of Baddevrustana, and as language finally equips him to communicate with others and think critically about his plight” (169). Thus, when some itinerant musicians happen to pass him on their way to the nearest vil- lage and he hears music for the first time he is fascinated and attracted to the world of culture that it opens to him.

In his autobiography, Gavino describes his love for the sound of words, which led him to become a linguist. But through the aesthetic medium of film the viewer hears the sounds that sensitized and prepared him for words. As Marcus explains, “sound becomes Gavino’s true educator” (170). The film’s soundtrack assails the viewer with a barrage of deeply evocative sounds, including wailing sheep, tolling bells, and the chilling cries of the shepherds as they shriek over the mountains to each other. These familiar sounds of his shepherd’s life represent Gavino’s earliest awareness of communication. Next, are the cultural sounds of music as he evolves toward words.

According to the Taviani’s audio aesthetic, Gavino enters the world of language through the door of sound. Whether the real-life Gavino was as influenced by sen- sory perception as is his re-presented film-self, is immaterial to the film which has become a unique work with its own language. What is pertinent, is the means to express his intellectual transition from illiteracy to literacy—largely a mental jour- ney—as an audio-visual journey on film.

In this film journey, Gavino and Mario move from their awakening to language into their desire to learn. But their desire to learn is motivated by more pressing desires. Mario is smitten by the island siren, Beatrice, who snubs his clumsy advances to- ward her. Undeterred, he enlists his new friend, Neruda, to help him win her through poetry. For Mario, Neruda serves as a surrogate father, teaching and guid- ing him to see the world through words and convey his vision to others through po- etry. Gavino, on the other hand, sees the world of learning as a way to escape from the suffocating oppression of his authoritarian father-padrone. Indeed, it is Efisio who precipitates his learning experience by enslaving him in illiteracy.

A compelling scene in Padre, illustrates Gavino’s first steps toward independence. Gavino and other young shepherds are carrying their local saint to a village. The Tavianis drive home the role of the father/padrone by a cinematic coup de maitre: the face of the saint becomes the face of Gavino’s father, looming over the boys who are struggling to bear his weight on their shoulders. It is cinematography that needs no words to make its point. It is infused with symbolism referencing the col- lusion of patriarchal and religious authority—elements which conspire to maintain the status quo in the rural Sardinian society.

It is in this scene that Gavino first verbalizes his need to escape his father’s con- trol—“rejecting his father” as Peter Bondanella succinctly sums it up in his Italian Cinema From Neorealism to the Present, “and the archaic, patriarchal system of repressive authority he represents” (344). And it’s in this scene where Gavino joins the other youths in their decision to emigrate to Germany, as a means “to slough off the weight of patriarchal culture figured by the patron saint and enter into a history of (at least attempted) self-determination” (Marcus 174). Although this first attempt to get out of his father’s grasp fails because Efisio denies him permission to leave Sardinia, Gavino has taken the first step toward throwing off the shackles of illiter- acy his father has imposed on him.

Mario also takes bold steps to reinvent himself. From an inarticulate, barely edu- cated—albeit clever fellow, he aspires to express himself by writing poetry. On the face of it, this appears a quantum leap—but like Gavino, he is deeply motivated. He must overcome his own diffidence, Beatrice’s indifference, and placate her watch- dog aunt’s superstitions and suspicions. He observes Neruda’s marital felicity and the esteem in which he is held by the world at large, and naturally concludes that poetry achieved this for the poet.

For his initial attempt to create poetry, Mario learns about metaphors from Neruda. Radford plays with the term metaphor, applying it visually to film as it applies in poetry—to invoke an image for the viewer that gives a new perspective on the sub- ject. For instance, Mario creating metaphors from the beauty of his island is a meta- phor itself for his new, poetic view of his surroundings. Neruda’s advice that “when you explain poetry it becomes banal,” points to film as the ultimate metaphor for a novel way to look at text—through images.

Creating metaphors involves locating a kinship between concepts, which aptly de- scribes the autuer’s task. This task may be understood from the perspective of translation theory as posited by Walter Benjamin in his essay, “The Task of the Translator,” where he discusses the link between languages. “The task of the trans- lator consists in finding that intended effect (Intention) [his emphasis] upon the language into which he is translating which produces in it the echo of the original” (Venuti 18). From this perspective, Radford’s emphasis on the metaphor in Il postino may be seen as providing that link or echo to the original, the book by Skármeta.

Mario creates metaphors for Beatrice, smuggling them to her in secret letters to avoid her aunt’s prying eyes. As she repeats Mario’s words to herself, savoring their sensual and romantic quality, they transform him, in her eyes, into a person of stature—a poet like Neruda. We hear her thoughts in the film by the cinematic tech- nique of voice-overs, enabling the viewer to eavesdrop on the characters’ thoughts.

But her aunt sees these metaphors differently. In her ignorance she suspects the metaphors, indeed any words that she doesn’t know, to be a secret code between her niece and Mario. Here, the film illustrates the value of words from different perspectives. The aunt and her ally the priest are satirized as comical, superstitious characters serving as counterpoints to Neruda and Mario, also accomplices but motivated to open rather than close minds. In this context, the film also juxtaposes learning, as represented by words, with ignorance or fear of words. Beatrice de- fends Mario’s verse by telling her aunt that there is nothing wrong with words—but the aunt treats Mario’s sequestered letter to Beatrice as if it were a message from the devil.

As Mario rambles around his island in search of metaphors, the cinematography focuses on the lush, fertile ambiance of his surroundings which inspire him. The island is his muse. He need go no farther to gather images for his poetry. By con- trast, the landscape of Gavino’s world is barren, harsh, isolated. The Tavianis give a view of the interior Sardinian countryside, in particular the pastoral area of Bad- devrustana—site of Gavino’s calvary experience as a shepherd—that clearly re- flects his barren intellect during his exile in this inhospitable terrain.

Using landscape as imagery in these films insinuates the direction of each protago- nist’s journey toward eloquence and personal enlightenment. Mario’s evolution moves from the particular to the general; that is to say, he learns language from his mentor, Neruda, and from the resources of his island. From there he moves out- ward, as he becomes aware of politics and the state of affairs of his country. His thinking processes also evolve from the personal to the universal as he moves from his romantic concerns to embrace the beliefs of brotherhood espoused by Commu- nism and embedded in Neruda’s poetry. His personal goals expand accordingly, from winning Beatrice to contributing to his fellow workers’ struggle for justice and equality. From the peaceful, remote atmosphere of his island, he journeys out to the turbulent political arena on the mainland of Italy.

Gavino’s journey works in reverse. Due to the harshness of his native environ- ment—both physical and mental—he is forced to emigrate to the mainland in search of education and enrichment. His experiences outside of Sardinia give him the tools to view his own environment with perspective. Like Mario, his path leads from the particular to the universal when he returns to his homeland to apply his education to help others who are still in bondage to illiteracy and an archaic, re- pressive culture.

Gavino’s return to Sardinia at the end of the film diverges from the actual ending in his autobiography where he does not return home. There are, no doubt, various rea- sons why the Tavianis chose to change Gavino’s ending. One reason may be to give a framing device to the film, which gives shape/support to a concept. In the film version, the real-life Gavino opens and closes the film by appearing as himself in the beginning and end. This particular frame invokes the film’s source, an autobi- ography, to remind us it is a true story. And at the same time, the frame calls attention to the film’s distance from the book by creating a different ending. These op- posing messages self-reflectively point to the new creation that has emerged from the autuers’ vision.

Another construct of the filmmakers, which serves to turn a concept into an arrest- ing visual image, is to repeat the classroom scene, which opens the film, again at the end of the film. One of the first scenes of the film shows Efisio barging into his son’s classroom to end his education by taking him out of school to become a shep- herd. His audacious action in the class epitomizes the authoritarian patriarchal role that is the basic conflict of the story. He roars to the class of frightened little boys in knee pants, “Hands on the desk: today it’s Gavino’s turn, tomorrow it’s yours!” To drive home the point that Gavino eventually succeeds in thwarting his father’s plans to keep him in ignorance, the autuers repeat this scene toward the end of the film, with a twist.

The first time we see the scene, the camera pans four of the boys as they reflect on Gavino’s plight. We hear their thoughts in voice-overs—their childlike reactions in rebellion to his fate—and see their tear-stained faces. But at the end of the film when the scene is repeated and the same four children are again singled out by the camera, instead of words we hear the Strauss waltz which began Gavino’s journey out of his shepherd existence. The implication is clear, as Bondanella interprets it, “but now his terrifying words have an entirely new and revolutionary significance, one of hope rather than despair, for if Gavino was able to evolve from an illiterate peasant into a professor of linguistics and even a best-selling author, than all of the school children have the same potential” (344). However, the Tavianis, being true to their personal vision of this story, don’t leave us with a utopian version.

From this upbeat revision of the classroom scene, the final scenes show the real-life Gavino back in his shepherd persona, but as an adult. He is perched on the same rocks of Baddevrustana rocking back and forth as he had when as a child he tried to console himself from his fear and isolation. This ending, and the classroom scene, visually summarizes his ultimate transformation and its effect on others, for the purposes of the film version. On the one hand, Gavino’s success has given hope to children who may follow his example and strike out for education against the im- prisoning structure of their culture. On the other hand, the image of a grown man reverting to his childhood method of self-consolation throws doubt on his victory over the past as being a complete victory. The Tavianis’ ending is a two-edged sword, which may be the visual representation of an unanswered question: how to measure success in personal and universal terms.

This question is also handled with ambiguity in Il postino. The autuer depicts the personal and the universal in the trajectory of Mario’s and Neruda’s lives. The poet’s fortunes, like Mario’s are tied to the world of learning and poetry. Neruda is a world-famous poet, revered by many, as shown by the letters he receives, yet he is exiled from his country because of his poetry. He inspires others to fight for free- dom with his verse, yet he grieves for his homeland on an isolated island—crying at a tape sent by his friends in Chile. Ultimately he gains recognition and awards, at home and abroad. But when he returns after years to visit his former place of exile, he learns of Mario’s death and hears the tape he made for him. We may conclude from his pensive expression as he listens to Mario’s audio-poetry on tape, that he is weighing his own life against the tragedy and success of Mario’s.

Mario’s life is also remade by his response to the language of poetry. His meta- phors and verses empower him to attract the woman he loves and enable him to articulate ideas—ideas learned from Neruda’s poetry. He grasps the abstract or spiritual aspect of poetry and creates an audio-poem for Neruda by taping the sounds of his island—the waves, the wind, birds—and the heartbeat of his unborn son. He also writes a poem in homage to his mentor, Neruda, but before he can read it at a political rally, he is killed.

In these final scenes, the autuer summarizes the film without providing or imposing a judgment or conclusion. Like Padre, the ending is open to interpretation. The viewer, like Neruda, is invited to weigh the success of Mario’s transformation from simpleton to a literary thinker who learns to translate his ideas into poetic terms, surpassing his mentor by creating a unique work of art—a wordless poem of sounds.

What did Mario or Gavino accomplish by learning to love words, to express their thoughts through verse or prose? What is the cost of being re-born by language? How do we measure the impact of poetry, literature on ourselves, on our world? The ambiguous endings of Il postino and Padre padrone pose these questions and invite the viewer to reflect on how the films explored these issues, and how the vis- ual representation translated these ideas to images.

These films constantly remind the viewer that they are watching the interaction be- tween words and image—by spotlighting letters, poetry, references to literature, words in voice-overs and superimposed on the screen, just to name a few of the devices used by the filmmakers to forge a link between text and image. Recalling Foucault’s words that “between word and image . . . a single and identical meaning is not immediately common to them,” we may ask, what is the link that makes these dissimilar mediums able to communicate or find a common ground in film?

The link may be in finding the intention, as Benjamin identifies it, in the original and re-presenting it in the translated product. He gives us a poetic image to under- stand this concept, “unlike a work of literature, translation does not find itself in the center of the language forest but on the outside facing the wooded ridge; it calls into it without entering, aiming at that single spot where the echo is able to give, in its own language, the reverberation of the work in the alien one” (Venuti 20).

Il postino and Padre padrone explore this intention in the source material and re- state it in the aesthetic of their medium. This process is inferred by Neruda’s words to Mario: “When you explain poetry it becomes banal. You must feel it. Meaning doesn’t count, images are spontaneous.” The meaning is not the same, but the im- ages suggest the echo of the original. Film is a language of images, which must be perceived by the senses. It is our spontaneous reaction to these images that attract us to film—an aesthetic reaction to an aesthetic medium.

Works Cited

Bondanella, Peter. Italian Cinema: From Neorealism to the Present. New York: Continuum, 2001.

Marcus, Millicent. Filmmaking by the Book: Italian Cinema and Literary Adaptation. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993.

Venuti, Lawrence, ed. The Translation Studies Reader. New York: Routledge, 2000.

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