Week 11, Restrictions and Obstructions, Part II: The game is afoot!

The Diana of Versailles
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diana_of_Versailles

     The obvious intersection of Calvino’s If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler, Perec’s A Void, and von Trier’s The Five Obstructions is the rule-bound structural constraint, but what interested me most is the pursuit to fulfill that constraint, a monomaniacal insistence that wreaks of desire, and the sensory connection to that desire.  In all three, the chase becomes the centralizing feature and driving mechanism (the Reader and Ludmilla in search of the “correct” text; a comical troupe of characters’ drive to solve linked, mysterious deaths; and von Trier’s challenge to Leth to remake A Perfect Human).  The chase is a fetishized experience and, the aim—the constraint—becomes a mythologized fixation.  Dare I say it is reminiscent of The Holy Grail quest?  This also reminds me of the chase of the white stag, pursued by Artemis, the Greek goddess huntress who enjoys the spectacle of the chase, namely the keladeinê, or the resounding noise that goes along with the chase.  

Wile E. Coyote and the Road Runner

     I can appreciate Peter Turchi’s analysis in his chapter “A Rigorous Geometry” here because he references the hermeneutics of the Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote: “For all their looniness, Road Runner cartoons are not so far removed from the experimental formalism of the Oulipo” (181).  While I really loved this comparison and means of understanding the self-imposed dictates of the action and the many possible results of set “rules,” I am far more inclined to see the beauty in the desire, that “persistence in pursuit” (Turchi 180) that operates within the system.  What stimulates the desire is the noise then, the sensory appeals or psychological triggers that impel the movement towards the constraint.  After all, what drives Wile E. Coyote to perpetually pursue the Road Runner?  There is something gained in that pursuit, something that hearkens to foreplay.   

     In Calvino’s anti-chapter 6, “In a network of lines that enlace”, the sound of the telephone haunts the professor narrator, and the opening line captures the noise and the power of the sensory that is attached to such noise:

The first sensation this book should convey is what I feel when I hear the telephone ring; I say “should” because I doubt that written words can given even a partial idea of it: it is not enough to declare that my reaction is one of refusal, of flight from this aggressive and threatening summons, as it is also a feeling of urgency, intolerableness, coercion that impels me to obey the injunction of that sound, rushing to answer even though I am certain that nothing will come of it save suffering and discomfort.   (Calvino 132)

This section ties together the sound, the keladeinê, with the sensation that comes of the relationship.  The visual image of the sound of the telephone chasing (hunting) the narrator captures the meta action of the overall quest and the driving force, namely the heightened sensitivity that one feels in a state of compulsion.  Further, language cannot possibly capture that feeling.    

Moby Dick
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Moby_Dick_final_chase.jpg

     In Perec’s tale absent of e, there are multiple references and hints to Moby Dick, the white whale (stag?), whose essence intensifies the overwhelming drive and longing: “a plunging void drawing you forward, drawing you downward, drawing you dizzily down into a miasma of hallucination, into a Styx as dark as tar, a ghastly livid whirlpool, a Malström !  Moby Dick!” (70). The Ahab complex is one that entails a delirium-like sensory overload, one that could be described as pleasure intermingled with pain: it is jouissance.  The characters in Perec’s A Void end up at the precipice right before solving their respective mysteries, and then they die, which translates as a noise of frustration and amplifies the desire to return to the precipice.  The chase begins yet again (even for the reader as well).  The same could be said of the film The Five Obstructions.  Lars von Trier’s obstacles for Jørgen Leth equate to a similar desire to satisfy those obstacles, but the satisfaction is derived from the game—the hunt.    

Works Cited

"Artemis." Theo Project, 2011. Web. 6 April 2013.  http://www.theoi.com/Olympios/Artemis.html

Calvino, Italo.  If on a a winter's night a traveler.  New York: Harcourt, Inc, 1981.  Print. 

Perec, Georges.  A Void.  Jaffrey, New Hampshire: David R. Godine, 2012.  Print. 

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