Wednesday, December 28, 2005

So This Ends Properly

Well, I got an A for this module. :) Praise God.

Au voir, then.

You could read my random blog here.

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Friday, September 23, 2005

Unsubstantial

I was on the bus home today. He was sick and sniffling beside me. And it got me wondering about the substantiality of our bodies. His thin frame racked by sneezes reminded me of Kafka. Somehow when we’re ill our bodies just appear so much more frail. Unsubstantial.

So this got me wondering about the relationship between the physical well-being of our bodies and our state of minds about our bodies/ourselves. When we are sick, we seem to lose a part of that physicality of our bodies—the more ill we are, the more bodies become less substantial, as though the slightest sneeze or breeze might have cause us to fall apart.

And I also wondered about the actual size of our bodies. Do fat people feel more substantial as they move around the streets? More mass, more presence? Thin people seem to have less…impact? Imagine, a big woman entering a ballroom, compared to a thin woman’s entrance: would the crowd not feel the big woman’s presence more? Do big people feel the materiality of their bodies more? I mean this ties in with the anxiety Kafka had about his own body—

“nothing can be accomplished with such a body . . . too long for its weakness, it hasn’t the least bit of fat to engender a blessed warmth, to preserve an inner fire, no fat on which the spirit could occasionally nourish itself beyond its daily need without damage to the whole.”

Hmm. Anyway.

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Wednesday, September 14, 2005

The Metamorphosis

I didn’t expect The Metamorphosis to be such an intriguing read. The first thing that bothered me was how Gregor was so, nonchalant about waking up one day realizing he’s turned into a bug!

Where previously Gregor’s body was yoked to commerce and provision for his family, now his insect body yokes itself to the family. When they realize that Gregor’s morphed into an insect, they are extremely quick to other him. Everything that is ‘human’ about Gregor is suddenly negated simply because his exterior form has changed. This really makes a point about how our bodies are pivotal in our interactions with people—that our bodies are not as innocent as they seem to be. By encasing ‘human consciousness’ in such a grotesque form, Kafka might be making a Faber point about us being “all the same under the skin”, yet that doesn’t matter as long as on the skin, you’re different. In other words, what’s inside is void, as long as what’s outside is alien.

Kafka writes with brilliant humor. However, here, unlike for Isserley, the body stands in the way of my sympathy for Gregor. No doubt on some level I do feel sorry for him, especially when he quietly dies alone and alienated, completely unhappy. But I think that by portraying Gregor’s insect body so grotesquely, Kafka takes pains to highlight the precise alienness of that insect body from us, the human body. All the crawling, the aporia, is so different from how the human body works. Whenever I am compelled to feel for and identify with Gregor, he starts crawling, or starts doing one of his ‘insect’ things that will remind me of his physical form. Somehow, reconciling the human consciousness within with the alien body without is just more difficult with Gregor than with Isserley.

Also, the insect body for me seems like a metaphor for the artist insofar as Kafka’s trying to say something about the artist being parasites and leeches of the society. When Gregor’s still in his human form, he was productive, useful, and contributive to his family and the economy, though he feels trapped and miserable. After gaining his insect body, he feels liberated from the verkher of the society but becomes a burden for the family. In his new insect, liberated body, Gregor is even able to protect his art. Here Kafka seems to suggest that the most conducive form for the artist is also the most vile and unproductive form for the society, or at least the people around him.

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Monday, September 12, 2005

A Child's Body

I’m thinking our awareness of our bodies—its materiality and corporeality—actually has a very significant bearing on our sense of selves. I mean contrast children and adults, for example. As a child I don’t remember paying all that much attention to my body—how it moves, whether it’s a separate part of me, a vessel for my consciousness, etc. etc. Of course as a child your world rarely go beyond playgrounds and chocolates but still, as you grow, you become more aware of the way your body functions. As you know more about your body, you also begin to set limits and paradigms for how you function. I wonder if that makes a larger point about how the more knowledge you have, the more paradigms you created or impose. And those paradigms sort of constitute our selves. It’s like suddenly, I have a body and a mind that are sometimes rather disembodied and our bodies sometimes act so foreign, it’s as though they’re independent of us, which is sometimes rather surreal.

Actually all these reminds me of Gregor. His body and his mind are often at odds with each other. Also, there’s Isserley, whose body perform a rather utilitarian function that is divorced from her mind/emotions.

Not sure what to make of all these… rather convoluted at the moment…

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Wednesday, September 07, 2005

Under the Skin

So we read Under the Skin. I have to confess I am extremely disturbed by the book after the first reading. The human/vodsel inversion totally got to me and I didn’t realize until way too late that the ‘vodsels’ are actually us humans and the ‘humans’ are actually the Other. Especially the part where Isserley is grieved that she is ‘human’ underneath it all and ‘why can’t anyone see that’—I was highly confused.

Anyhow, this book really concretizes what I said before about bodies being a great determinant of who we are. I want to talk about Isserley, mainly.

How does Faber make Isserley a sympathetic character? Why doesn’t her body get in the way of our sympathy for her?

The changes that have been made to her body singled her out as an Other in both worlds. In the text’s human-world, her physicality others her; in the vodsel-world, her interiority others her. In both worlds, she doesn’t belong. And she struggles in both worlds to belong, especially with the ‘humans’.

For me, what makes me sympathetic is precisely this struggle of not-belonging. And her not-belonging is because of the changes made to her body, which are made in order to further the cause/interests of the ‘humans’. In effect, she was sacrificed by her community, and subsequently alienated by them. This is already horrible in itself. On top of that, she is made to look like US, or ‘vodsels’ (in the text). Somehow the feeling that someone is othered precisely because they look like us just gets to me.

Maybe that’s why her body doesn’t get in the way of our sympathy for her. Because firstly, her body resembles our body (in the real world). That already establishes an identification with her, physically, even though she was surgically modified to look that way. On top of that, because I’m a girl, there’s the next level of identification with her as a female, especially in the rape scene (199).

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Monday, September 05, 2005

On Plath

Plath has always been a pet poet of mine… When I was reading “Tulips”, several things struck me about the ways in which the body and its physicality are featured.

First, the palpable presence of the tulips is juxtaposed against the asexual, hollow body of Plath. “The tulips are too excitable”, she says, against “how white everything is”. “As the light lies on these white walls, this bed, this hands”—seems to suggest a certain sterility in her body.

Also, Plath gives up everything that normally defines a person: “I have given my name and my day-clothes up to the nurses/ And my history to the anesthetist and my body to the surgeons”. I find these two lines extremely evocative. Here, by relinquishing her name and her day-clothes, she loses her identity and marks of civilization (in the clothes). She gives her “history to the anesthetist” and her “body to the surgeons”. Going back to what Grosz said about the inscription of history on bodies, here Plath loses both. She surrenders her “history to the anesthetist”—suggesting that she making null her history, numbing the who, what, where, when, how, of how she came to be who she is. By giving her body to the surgeons, it evokes an image of a body being susceptible to all forms of mutilation, scrutiny, modifications, etc. This must bring to mind Isserley in Michel Faber’s “Under the Skin”, where her body undergoes similar surgical procedures to become vodsel-like.

As Plath loses her name, her clothes, her history, and her body, her interactions with her surroundings become increasingly disembodied. Her head, propped “between the pillow and the sheet-cuff”, becomes an “eye”, a “stupid pupil” that “takes everything in”. The nurses become “gulls” and Plath only see them functionally—“doing things with their hands, one just the same as another”. Plath’s body becomes a “pebble”, something for the nurses and doctors to “tend”, like a garden. Thus there is the notion of the body as a passive receptor of what is administered to it—“they bring me numbness in their bright needles, they bring me sleep”.

One of the images that is very poignant for me is that of the smiles in the photo. “My husband and child smiling out of the family photo;/ Their smiles catch onto my skin, little smiling hooks” (emphasis mine). Here of course I suppose Plath is not masking her distaste for Hughes, saying his smiles are like “hooks”. The choice of the word “hooks” is very interesting. It reminds me of those hooks with pointed ends. When these hooks hook onto something, it latches on and the pointed ends prevent it from slipping out. Works like an arrow, I think. If you pull it out, it hurts like hell. I suppose here Plath is saying that her family’s smiles are her bane in a very bodily way—their smiles “catches onto [her] skin”. In other words, their smiles are sinister and painful physically.

Plath’s construction of her identity and her notion of self is also contingent on the stripping away of inscriptions on her body. In stanza 4, she is a “thirty-year-old cargo boat” who have been “swabbed clear”. The use of the word “swab” suggests that her corporeality is something to be tampered with, wiped, dabbed at—as seen already in stanza 1 earlier. Here, she is a “cargo-boat”. The emptying of her “loving associations—in other words, the objects which define her (and encumber her) are “swabbed” and “sink out of sight”, and then she feels free, “never been so pure”. She’s been stripped of her name, her clothes, her history, and her body; now she’s further stripped off her “loving associations”, i.e. inscriptions. The “teaset” may symbolize marriage, “linen” may symbolize wife/motherhood, and “books” may point to her career as writer/poet. As she becomes free of all these “associations”, she also becomes free, “never been so pure”, which kind of suggests that, in order to be liberated, one has to be free of inscriptions. Which again reminds me of Isserley at the end when she is finally ‘one with nature’.

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Sunday, September 04, 2005

Laid Bare for Scrutiny

Today I came home feeling rather forlorn. I started to write and wondered about posting it on my blog. Then I wondered about one day when I die and if all my works were published, pried open and into, dugged out, laid down, spread bare on the operating table for all to examine, scrutinize, and conclude things about me that I might not have been even aware of myself. (Of course that would necessarily mean I die a miserable, disturbed, desolate artist of some sort.)

If what I write is not a result of only mind but also of bodily inscriptions, as Grosz said, and Cixous had advocated for women to write ourselves into existence, then that act of examining my works would leave me virtually naked, forcibly, for all to analyze--eagle-spread, and no allowance for modesty, and the only thing you can close are your eyes.

Maybe that's why the binary of mind/body is still so integral today--that barrier makes us feel more comfortable that if we (i.e. who we are) must be exposed for ravens and buzzards, it's only the mind, something intangible. As opposed to exposing our bodies--something we see physically everyday, mostly in our own company--and feeling more violated (than exposing our minds).

Are people who are more closed about their bodies more liberal about their minds; and are people more liberal about their bodies more guarded about their minds? Is that another reason why we're hesitant about collapsing the mind/body binary? Since we tend to be simultaneously liberal and guarded, this binary would allow us to indulge this tendency; as opposed to a non-binary, which would mean we are either open (completely or partially) or closed (completely or partially).

I wonder how Plath feels about us dissecting her poetry and making statements about who she was. I wonder if she feels we are dissecting her body.

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Friday, September 02, 2005

On Cixous

“I, too, overflow; my desire have invented new desires, my body knows unheard-of songs. Time and again I, too, have felt so full of luminous torrents that I could burst—burst with forms much more beautiful than those which are put up in frames and sold for a stinking fortune. And I, too said nothing, showed nothing; I didn’t open my mouth, I didn’t repaint my half of the world. I was ashamed. I was afraid, and I swallowed my shame and my fear. I said to myself: You are mad! What’s the meaning of these waves, these floods, these outbursts? Where is the ebullient, infinite woman who, immersed as she was in her naiveté, kept in the dark about herself, led into self-disdain by the great arm of parental-conjugal phallocentrism, hasn’t been ashamed of her strength?”

This week’s reading is Cixous. I love Cixous! The Laugh of the Medusa is such great fun! :D She’d make a great girlfriend for one of those slumber parties, when we do girl talk and male bashing of sorts. She celebrates femininity and womanhood in a most eloquent and accessible manner. However, she is also extremely idealistic in her proposition for women to write themselves into being. It sounds as though she thinks a revolution may be brought about and egalitarianism achieved all by the pen, or rather, by writing, (since the ‘pen’ is a phallic symbol).

Women writing for Cixous is extremely bodily, like masturbation in secret—“[to women: your writing] wasn’t good, because it was in secret, […] because you wrote, irresistibly, as when we would masturbate in secret, not to go further, but to attenuate the tension a bit, just enough to take the edge off. And then as soon as we come, we go and make ourselves feel guilty” (335)

The woman’s body for men, according to Cixous, is dark and stormy (336). The act of writing reclaims the body—“write your self. Your body must be heard” (338). There are obvious problems with this. First is Cixous’s reliance on prevailing binaries to make her case. She plays the logos of men against the anit-logos of women—“To write and thus to forge for herself the antilogos weapon” (338).

My question is, why must we always pit one against the other in order for the other to be heard? In other words, why must be pit ‘logos’ against ‘anti-logos’? Why can women not reconcile themselves to logos? Because that would be subjugating themselves under the phallus?

Must we set up the Other in order to take down both binaries? Like how the female must be defined against the male as the first step to collapsing the two, since without conceptualizing the female, the male wouldn’t exist? Yet if we erect the female (via writing, as Cixous proposes) in order to challenge the male, and then take down the two, wouldn’t the ‘female’ go as well? Or is Cixous rallying for an erection of a totally new system?

Also, when she talked about the “castration fear” (341), I couldn’t quite relate to it. So I asked a guy, what’s with “castration fear”? How would you feel if you’re castrated?

And he said like, “I’d feel irrelevant.”

“So a core part of your male identity lies in your sexuality? (And this reminds me of Grosz!) Your penis?”

“Yes. In the same way you would feel less of a woman if your breasts/womb are removed.”

Would I, indeed? I thought. I don’t know. If I do feel less of a woman if my womb is removed, that would be a core part of my identity as a woman is defined by my reproductive role; if I feel less of a woman if my breasts are removed, that would be a core part of my identity as a woman is defined by my sensuality and my ‘otherness’ from the male. Very provocative train of thought for me.

Which led me to think about how our identities are really, to a large extent, rooted in our sexualities. I wonder why we feel less of a man/woman if we’re castrated. Is it because that is what is most distinctive about us and losing that which is most distinctive would reduce us to ‘sameness’ and ‘blank, asexual slates’? This would make a larger point about how our bodies carry significant physical characteristics that determine who we are.

So our bodies are not as innocent as we think they are. Our bodies are in fact very loaded; it forms and affects who we are, or who we think we are.

Back to Cixous. She mentions that “women are body”, and that “I-woman am going to blow up the Law, […] right now, in language” (343). The thing is, language is hardly the only key that unlocks ‘freedom’ for women. It cannot be. Because if phallocentrism is the only obstacle, then how can language unlock that door, when the gate is guarded by precisely language? How can language (of men) turn on itself?

Moving to the next paragraph, is Cixous asking us to wield the ‘men’s’ language against themselves, or is she disowning language as men’s altogether?

She says to “leave it to the worriers, to masculine anxiety [of …] knowing ‘how it works’ in order to ‘make it work’, “for us the point is […] to dash through and to ‘fly’” (343). It all sounds very revolutionary and fired up, but my question is, “fly”, yes, for what ends? For women to have a voice? And is that a mere explosive end, or means to an enduring end?

For Cixous, the woman’s body is extremely powerful when transposed into text. It is capable of being “volcanic”, “upheaval”, “smash everything”, “shatter the framework”, “blow up the law”, “break up the truth’” (344). By translating her physicality into texts, her body becomes “singing flesh” (345), able to transcend time, space, culture, elements (345, 2nd para). There’s the image of vibrancy, celebrating multiplicity within the body of the female and the body of her texts.

The image of the pregnant woman is also rather poignant. “[A woman] when pregnant, not only doubles her market value, but […] takes on intrinsic value as a woman in her own eyes and undeniably, acquires body and sex” (346). Cixous’ metaphor of the pregnant woman as a taboo is apt for multiplicity in that the pregnant woman is nurturing something other than herself within her, thereby becoming the living embodiment of multiplicity. A woman’s body, therefore, is capable of embodying multiplicity, and capable of transposing that multiplicity onto the texts that it generates. A woman’s body is far more superior in that way to men’s linearity and relative impotence, sterility, and inarticulateness.

Ok. Enough verbal diarrhea. Seriously. Woah. What a bloody long post.

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Tuesday, August 30, 2005

Can't keep up

I haven't posted anything on Cixous, Plath, Under The Skin, and I've got tonnes to say, and upcoming is Kafka--suffice to say I'm getting pretty stressed out. All my own undoing, notwithstanding. Sigh.

My body feels claustrophobic everytime I think about how much I want to say, afraid it'll end up in verbal diarhorrea. My mind feels all murky and jumbled up--like too much seaweed and the tide's going down.

I wonder why there's this relation (almost a direct one at that, I think) between what I think and what I feel bodily. Like if I'm stressed as mentioned, I'd feel nauseous.

Why??? Are there theories on that? Is it just purely scientific and biological, or are there other non-material reasons?

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Sunday, August 21, 2005

Reading Grosz (Again)

She's critical of how, amongst feminists, "there is still a strong reluctance to conceptualize the female body as playing a major role in women's oppression" (31). I found this an extremely interesting proposition--something I've never seen explicitly articulated before. She goes on to talk about how feminists should be paying more attention to the role of the female body because of the binary structure, and how males, in subsuming knowledge as theirs, have come to be associated with the mind; and how in dissociating from the body, the body becomes associated with the female, etc.

She then claims that all knowledges are therefore masculine (38). That these 'masculine' knowledges are then culturally and socially inscribed onto all bodies (male and female) to take precedence as something neutral, something eternal, and something true. I find this extremely problematic. First, she has no evidence that men, in "appropriating the realm of mind for themselves", has in fact "disavowed" their bodies ("physicality", to quote Grosz). This claim proceeds on grounds that the binary structure is already in place BEFORE this 'appropriation' of the males. While I agree it is true that traditionally, in most societies, patriarchy reigned supreme and therefore by default, men's opinions/thoughts/works etc. were 'canonized' and made integral to the society's backbone, I find that this does not neccessarily point to Grosz's simple equation that patriarchy = men's 'knowledges' as The Way = men "disavowing" their bodies, or as Grosz puts it, men's "disembodiment" (39).

Another thing that bothers me in her article is when she talking about "isomorphism" (38).

"This correspondence is a function of the systems of representation that traverse and constitute both men's bodies as such and the criteria for the evaluation of knowledges. [...] Instead of seeing man as the active creator of discursive and epistemic values, the male body must be seen as an inscribed product of the intervention of meanings into the way men live their bodies." (Grosz, 38-39)

It is admirable that she is attempting to make a case for men here--"It is not really a question of blaming men...". But it seems to me that this plea is rather futile. This whole 'crisis of reason' is a result of "the correspondence" between the men's bodies and external inscriptions. Now, if the society she referred to is a patriarchal one, then the "systems of representations" and the "criteria for the evaluation of knowledges" AND the "intervention of meanings" ARE ALL SET BY MEN THEMSELVES. They have created their own vicious cycle and are now trapped in it, embroiling women in the process, and now finding that there is a 'crisis' to their knowledges.

Perhaps Grosz is simply rallying for us to be critical of all knowledges; now that we know most, if not all, knowledges are 'masculine'. She is perhaps asking us take the cue from Irigaray, to re-evaluate knowledges as merely perspectives bound by significant sexual (and therefore bodily) differences. As such, does this mean the guys in this class will read the texts in a similarly different way from the girls?

It is still very confusing. But I think two of the more useful ideas are Irigaray's point about "returning the male body to its products" (42), and her attempt to "reveal a politics of truth, logic, and reason" (42), which means to me that she is not trying to debunk/negate 'masculine' knowledges, but more to reveal the tensions that produced the knowledges. I think this might be useful to keep in mind when we consider the other texts for this module.

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Saturday, August 20, 2005

On Elizabeth Grosz

I don't particularly take to Grosz's convoluted and ambiguous style, but she has raised some interesting (and controversial) points.

To summarize, she conceptualized the crisis as reason's "inability to rationally know itself, to enclose and know itself from the outside: the inadequation of the subject and knowledge" (26). To me, this means the failure of using reason to understand reason. Put another way, how do you know 'reason' is 'reason' when you use 'reason' to understand 'reason'?

That's like saying, that big comfy thing you sit on in the living room is a couch because that's the only thing I know that people sit on in the living room. It is that, because that is the only thing I know. And that is the crisis that she's trying to make us panic about. Our knowledge of things is 'knowledge' to us, not because the things are REALLY as they are, but because we understand them to be such.

In a word, she's saying, how can we ever know anything? She is problematizing knowledge as something fluid and susceptible to external inscriptions; therefore there is no Truth in the big somewhere out there.

I think there IS a truth out there--just that we probably won't ever get to it. As Grosz pointed out (most excruciatingly), it's not just our methodology that is flawed--our very beings, this body that we use to understand everything around us, is bombarded by so many factors that it becomes quite impossible for us to ever get to a neutral, eternal Truth about anything.

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Tuesday, August 16, 2005

An Introduction, Of Sorts

If you're here, chances are you are a fellow peer in the course. For the benefit of (un)fortunate blog-hoppers who stumbled here, this blog is a reading journal for a literature module. I will be doing reflections and ramblings of sorts about the body: seemingly innocent, consciousness-carrying, walking vessels that roam this world. (Ripped from Dr. Yeo's mouth, but I found 'carrying consciousness' rather intriguing, so, here it is.)

Anyhow, here's short introduction about myself. My name is Catharine, or you may call me Cat for short. I'm a Year 3 (struggling) Literature major. This semester started on pretty rocky grounds, so I'm still in a semi-forlorn state. I'm going to Canada next January under the SEP, so if anyone wants Canadian Candy Bars, place an order with me. Haha.

Alright. That's it for the first introductory post.

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