11 your presence the occupation

MP3:YOUR PRESENCE THE OCCUPATION


Reading this now---understand that my compulsion is to have this inquiry eventually be honed into something so rigorous that it resembles a mathematical deduction. The way to achieve this is not presently evident to me-so I will be investigating possibilities in the form of digressions...


Learning Spanish, I've been browsing over the collected works of Vargas Llosa, since most of it is readily available is translation- and this makes
learning unfamiliar words more convenient...In the book, mala niña, the narrator refers to the "la aventura de Mayo de 1968, en que los jovenes de Paris llenaron el bario latino de baricadas y declaron que habia que ser realistas eligiendo lo impossible" (p.94) (the adventure of May 1968 in which the parisian youth filled the streets of the latin quarter with barricades and declared that one had to be a realist by choosing the impossible. )

On my next visit to the library, the title: "the temptation of the impossible" forced me to stretch out my hand and pull the book from the shelf. Its subject is an appraisal of Hugo's Les Miserables...more specifically, it is an appraisal of Victor Hugo himself and his motivations for constructing such an astonishingly longwinded epic. Vargas Llosa uses the occasion to reflect upon more general considerations: What is purpose of novels generally? Given the real world of human problems, can a tale of fiction play any role in solving them? Hugo himself avowed the belief that portraying characters harmed by social injustice would serve as a means to provoke society to change itself...he believed that society was something that was able to progress to a more just state of affairs. Surprisingly, to our 21st century eyes, this rather modest suggestion of the possibility of reform was judged as seditious by the authorities of Hugo's day. The book was banned by the church and attacked by some of Hugo's peers.

And is there any merit in their objections? All perspectives have their arguments, so let us attempt to understand the proponents of injustice. First...and obviously...many books and societies have flowed under the bridge since the appearance of Hugo's epic. Monstrously, the intention to create a society that was more just than those of the past has served one of the founding motivations for places that became some of the most oppressive and tyrannical that the world has ever seen. (...China and Mao, Stalin and USSR, Pol Pot and Cambodia...) This is the essential precipice over which this entire discussion must eventually drive. But before we take that path, let's reflect on some visions from 19th century France. In this case those of Lamartine, Hugo's dissenting contemporary:

...................Los Miserables lleva a cabo "una crítica excesiva, radical y a veces injusta de la sociedad, algo que puede inducir al ser humano a odiar aquello que lo salva, el orden social, y a delirar por aquello que es su perdición: el sueno antisocial del ideal indefinido' p. 210 '¿Ha creado la vida la sociedad? ¿Ha inventado ella la muerte? ¿Es ella, por ùltimo, la que produjo la desigualidad, inexplicable pero parte orgànica de la naturaleza y de la condiciòn humana? No, no ha sido ella, sino Dios. Compadecerla, sì, aconsejarla, bueno; pero, acusarla, no, porque es irreflexivo y bàrbaro" p. 212

....................Los Miserables has brought about "an excessive, radical, and at time unjust criticism of society, something that could incite humand beings to hate that which is their salvation, the social order, and to desire that which is their perdition: the antisocial dream of the indefinite ideal" p.210 "Has society created life? Has it invented death? Is it, ultimately, that which has produced inequality, that inexplicable but organic part of nature and the human condition? No, God, not society, is responsible for these things. To commiserate with it- yes, to advise it- good; but to accuse it--- no, because this is thoughtless and barbaric p.212

attributing the responsibility for human suffering to society is incorrect. It is thereby dangerous, for when the masses discover that there is no possibility for a reality to exist which would correspond to their desires for happiness, their disappointment would culminate in a sacred fury whose outlet consists in nothing other than their own destruction.

VL goes on to express the sentiment: "Las temores de Alphonse de Lamartine harian sonreier ahora a muchos. Quien cree in nuestro dias que una gran novela puede subvertir el orden social?" (((Today, the fears of Lamartine would make many smile. Who in our days believes that a great novel can subvert social order))) Common sense to be sure. But the words "in our days" may be crucial to this sentiment. Who is to say, today, that they can truly appreciate the potency with which the written word could stir the imaginations of the nineteenth century. Attempting to appreciate this, we are led to ask if there could be, in our day, some form of human communication that poses a threat analogous to the one that the novel seemed to present to the order of nineteenth...If there could be, in our days, as well as theirs, an essential fiction behind which reality was completely obscured. A fiction that is as false to now as the one that was the substance of then- that certain men were appointed to rule others by the mandate of God.

As far as my faltering attempts to learn Spanish go, I definitely owe bit of gratitude to VL. While I no longer have the slightest bit of patience for the craftsmanship of storytelling in my native language, I have to admit that being able to follow a coherent narrative is occasionally of some assistance when making guesses at unfamiliar words in another tongue. ';';';';';;As good as some of his fictions are (and several chapters of La Guerra Del Fin Del Mundo, in particular, creates some poetically fated characters evoke some scenes which really rise up before one's imagination);';';';';';';'; VL truely shines as an essayist. I tore through the three volumes of Contra Marea y Viento at a breakneck pace.

Esa es una de la seguridades que tengo...El escritor siente i'ntimamente que escribir es lo mejor que le ha pasado y puede pasarle, pues escribir significa para e'l la mejor manera posible de vivir, con prescindenca de las consecuencias sociales poli'ticas

"You know, I think that writers write what happens. Let's face it, things don't happen unless somebody writes it...I had been in Algiers eating in this milk bar. Two months after I had left there, about two years after Graham Green had written this scene, the explosion occurred."
(24)
What is a writer trying to do? He's trying to reproduce in the reader's mind a certain experience, and if he were completely successful in that, the reproduction of the experience would be complete. Perhaps fortunately, they're not that successful.
(53)

A division in the world between reality and fiction. between an objective world that is the cause of experiences and ideas in the mind that are representations of that world. A causal relation between the former and the latter.

The entire structure of this is a misunderstanding...consciousness itself is a misunderstanding. but then we are forced to confront that "understanding" is a word whose meaning is dependent on a consensus and certain patterns of usage, a word whose meaning depends on other people, something cannot be understood unless it understood by others

It is one of my principles that one must not write oneself. The artist must be in his work like
God in his creation: invisible and omnipotent (3/1857) I even think that a novelist hasn't
the right to express his opinion of anything whatsoever. When has God ever expressed his opinion?

Matthew Arnold set up three criteria for criticism:
1. What is the writer trying to do?
2. How well does he succeed in doing it?
3. Does the work exhibit "high seriousness"? That is, does it touch on basic issues of good and evil, life and death and the human condition.

Does anyone know what Arnold text Burroughs is paraphrasing here?

The third of these criteria is obviously a little more vague than its predecessors. It could be replaced, without any general loss of meaning, by merely asking: "3. Is it worth doing?" The word: "worth" contains within itself all the inquiry that is implicit within value, desire and their opposites.

the principle instrument of monopoly and control that prevents expansion of consciousness are the word lines controlling thought, feeling, and apparent sensory impressions of the human host