Week 10, Restrictions and Obstructions: Research Project Aim

My discussion from Week 7's blog "Madness and the Margins the Erotic: Sex and Death" was framed as a potential entrance point into Unica Zürn's Dark Spring for additional research/analysis.  Zürn's text struck me as the most intriguing among the works we have read in regard to its depiction of gender and identity, and when I wrote that blog, it felt to be a natural move and fit into an aspect of my ongoing project: to explore the constructions of voices, bodies, and identities that are often relegated to the margins of literature, particularly those marked as aged or culturally unmarketable, and the dysmorphic effect of the societal gaze.  What I find remarkable in Zürn's work is how certain characters are framed as Ideal-I's based on a filmic representations of gendered bodies.  For this project, I aim to to pursue the mise-en-scène-like stagings of bodies--namely the spectacle of the body--and how they inform Zürn's protagonist while simultaneously expose how cultural signifiers serve as signposts for gender.    

My Working Bibliography so far is as follows:

Gerstenberger, Katharina.  “Writing Herself into the Center: Centrality and Marginality in the

            Autobiographical Writing of Nahida Lazarus, Adelheid Popp, and Unica Zürn.”  Diss. 

            Cornell University, 1993.  Print. 

Littler, Margaret.  “Madness, Misogyny and the Feminine in Aesthetic Modernism: Unica Zürn

            and Claire Goll.”  Yvan Goll—Claire Goll: Texts and Contexts.  Eds. Eric Robertson and

            Robert Vilain.  Atlanta: Rodopi, 1997.  Print.  153-173.    

Lusty, Natalya.  “Introduction: Disturbing Subjects: Surrealism, Feminism, Psychoanalysis.”

            Surrealism, Feminism, Psychoanalysis.  Burlington, Vermont: Ashgate Publishing Co.,

            2007.  Print.  1-18. 

Plumer, Esra.  “The Luminary Forest: Robert Desnos and Unica Zürn’s Tales of

            (Dis)Enchantment and Transformation.”  Anti-Tales: The Uses of Disenchantment.  Eds.

            Catriona McAra and David Calvin.  Newcastle upon Tyne, United Kingdom: Cambridge

            Scholars Publishing, 2011.  Print.  115-129.

Rupprecht, Caroline. “The Violence of Merging: Unica Zürn’s Writing (on) the Body.”  Subject

            to Delusions: Narcissism, Modernism, Gender.  Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern

            University Press, 2006.  Print.  132-164.    

Suleiman, Susan Rubin.  “A Double-Margin: Reflections on Women Writers and the Avant-

            Garde in France.”  Yale French Studies, 75; The Politics of Tradition: Placing Women in

            French Literature (1988): 148-172.  JSTOR.  Web.  12 March 2013.    

Week 8, Aleatory, Algorithm, Constraint: Come Out and Play

Chrysopoea of Cleopatra
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ouroboros

     Aleatoric inwardness vs. programmed play seems to be key in positioning the space of difference between the Oulipo and Surrealism.  The randomness and juxtapositions of a Surrealist restorative project, where the unconscious is embraced, explored, and exposed in order to supplant reality, are eviscerated of any rumblings of chance in an Oulipian paradigm.  There is no chance encounter, only prescribed methods that portend unlimited potential (like a video game that is already predicated on existing code, but the routes of play are limitless).  The elegance, then, is in the process, the constraints, and the rule-bound system.  In this sense, perhaps, the Oulipo project has moved itself even further from the residues of Romanticism that haunt the creative spaces of Surrealism.  Nostalgia, passion, the erotic, the mythical, and desire are the impulses for Surrealism, and these drives can be expressed in those chance encounters.  For Surrealism, the beauty of the umbrella contrasted with the sewing machine is to be found in the hybridity of the two—the remix for the sake of transcendence above the two.  On the other hand, for the Oulipo, the process IS the desire and this desire is self-reflexive.  Specifically, I am reminded of an Ouroboros symbol here—the snake or dragon eating itself.  The Oulipian method of creativity entails an awareness of the constant [re]creating process and conceptualizations of the infinite.  For this reason I think the Oulipo is revolutionary in regard to methods while Surrealism is revolutionary in its content.  My binary thinking here proves troubling, but I cannot help but to see a content vs. form issue play out.  The intellectual prompt may need to soak in more. 

   

"Who Ate My Cheese?" by Mykl Travis
http://mykltravisfiberarts.com/2011/02/21/191/

     I for one think there is a satisfaction in constraint.  Self-imposed challenges, once fulfilled, tend to feel more rewarding.  Even when I am offered freedom in creativity the meanderings often turn to a type of limiting, a reigning in for the sake of feeling forward-movement.  Creative constraint can also feel like a gifting experience where there is anticipation in the restrictions given (or as Turchi describes it: “surprise depends on expectation” (182)).  Such a means of creativity even has a ring of ritualism to it, which perhaps explains Arnaud’s explanation of the secluded workshop: “There was a hint of the Masonic temple” (xii).  The sewing circle analogy that Arnaud described particularly resonated for me as a lovely image, one that entails the honing of skills and a reverence for what has come before.  I grew up in a quilting tradition, one where my grandmother would host quilting circles with her fellow Catholic women parishioners and friends.  I fondly remember sitting underneath their large quilt frame, set up in the middle of the living room, and feeling giddy from the phantasmagoric site of colors, fabrics, and threads that were carefully arranged and chosen according to a master plan that I was not privy to.  It was a mystery to me at the time, but having made my own quilts now in adulthood, I appreciate the beauty that comes out of a rule-bound size and mathematical structure (though the math part sometimes frustrates!).  What the frame can contain is truly limitless, or so it appears.  

Works Cited

Arnaud, Noël.  "Foreward: Prolegomena to a Fourth Oulipo Manifesto--or Not."  

Turchi, Peter.  "A Rigorous Geometry." Maps of the Imagination: The Writer as Cartographer:

Week 7, Madness and the Margins the Erotic: Sex and Death

     As I mentioned in class this past week, I am struck most by what seem to be influences of mise-en-scène in Unica Zürn's Dark Spring, specifically those moments in the text where bodies are framed as actors and staged as signifiers, or as the translator Caroline Rupprecht emphasizes in the preface: "Instead of words, it is the body that comes to act as a site of signification" (4). The influence of cultural images and the power of filmic bodies seem paramount in Dark Spring to the extent that that they serve as agents of psychological centering and totems to draw power from.  The narrator describes the exoticized maid Frieda Splitter as "a movie star" whom the young protagonist watches and is "enraptured by her every move" (Zürn 44-45).  The spectacle-like nature of Frieda's body and all the props that stage her body as uber feminine (the costuming of lingerie, perfume, powders, garters, and such) become a locus for the young girl to the extent that "Frieda [had] become the center of all things marvelous" (45).  

     Frieda's physical body and the extensions of her corporeality become a site of fantasy, a channel and means for the child protagonist to envision a separate reality.  The protagonist "she" seems to use bodies as visual referants of mise-en-scène to not only understand the world around her, but to also create alternate storylines (selves) and to then become lost in such cinematic spaces (perhaps a protective mechanism).  She wishes that "Frieda had a handsome young prince for a husband" (45), but the fantasy is shattered by the appearance of a new maid, a "successor [who] is an ugly hunchback" (46).  Even Frieda's last name (Splitter) suggests doubling and a splitting of the self: beautiful vs. ugly, reality vs. fantasy, idealized vs. realized.  It is further interesting that after both Frieda and her father have left, the then described ten-year-old alludes to Jules Verne's Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea where "Captain Nemo is another one of her heroes" (49).  The scene suggests a libidinal desire: "octopus tentacles that force their entry into the submarine, the "Nautilus" (49)...

Hokusai Katsushika's The Dream of the Fisherman's Wife
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Tako_to_ama_retouched.jpg

...and it also sets up a movie screen-like influence of male bodies, specifically that of Douglas Fairbanks in Thief of Baghdad.   

Douglas Fairbanks in Thief of Bagdad (1924)
http://www.fandor.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/Thief-of-Bagdad.jpg

Actor James Mason as Captain Nemo in 
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1954)
http://media.comicvine.com/uploads/6/64422/1543537-disneynemo.jpg

Just as there is an appreciation for an exoticized female body, one framed and understood in relation to a staged body, so too is there a desire for an exoticized male body: "She is sorry she has to be a girl.  She wants to be a man, in his prime, with a black beard and flaming eyes" (51). 
Both Douglas Fairbanks and Captain Nemo (at least a filmic version of Prince Dakkar) bear a strong resemblance to the characterization of the young girl's father and ground her sexual musings of racialized others who simultaneously protect and pleasure her.  More is to be said of the other "actors" who make appearances (the school teacher and the foreign-looking swimmer, love interest), but at this point I would offer that the visual impact of these allusions and mise-en-scène-like stagings in Dark Spring suggest not only the power of cultural references to shape social constructions of gender but also how visuality influences the artist, the viewer, and all points of signification in between.      

The uncanniness of Verne's Nautilus and one of Zürn's drawings:  

The Nautilus 
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f2/Nautilus_Neuville.JPG

Unica Zürn's “Hexentexte" (1945)

Of Further Interest:  http://www.brooklynrail.org/2009/06/artseen/poster-boy-brooklynovation_2

Works Cited

Zürn, Unica.  Dark Spring. 1969. Trans. Caroline Rupprecht. Cambridge, MA: Exact Change, 2000.     

     Print.   

Generative System Reboot

The gauntlet as thrown by Lane: "in the spirit of The Five Obstructions (which we will soon view) I'd be curious to see what happens with a genre shift. Try an iteration of this as a short poem, using the most beautiful and unexpected juxtapositions."  Although not completely "carved down to the bone" in length (I am too wedded to the images at this point but feel the future need to break, to splay, the quintains), here is my flash fiction piece rebooted in poetic form:

Knot Merganthum

A found fecundity

in a butterfly.  Shape

forever modified by…

magical riboflavin,

so polydextrosely delicious.

To morph, that striking hesperiidae

found again, in and within

an accumulation...

ascorbic acids, glycol mono cultures—

all natural and artificial flavors.

A corrosive people, obsessive customs

tangentially turn to angling

rows of periwinkle and weeping willows

countering the cultural malady:

Pasteurization of language.

Meditate the pink princess franchise.

Withdraw into mounds of hybridization;

roses, carnauba trees laden with palm oil,

snowflakes, jimmies, and skittles.

Contentment resides.

Nesting in modified cornstarch,

drawn by gelatin-infused air

its cherry-tipped antennae, a symptom.

Outline of a fragile psyche,

a pretzel of a prize, a pretiola before fasting. 

Abstention only a dream.

Locust Beans splay open

with buttery knives, they…

expose.  An echo and loon cry. 

Sorrow in Babylon.

Enter progenitor of dead language,

holy Sire of totalitarian tea

and garden parties.  An offfering:

glaze cakes in memoriam

a Tennyson hand extending like star-fruit.