Project Poetics April 17, 2009
Posted by gbcarter in Unconventional Discourse.Tags: Mystory
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When we were talking Monday about poetic techniques and structures to adapt for our own projects, I was puzzled as to a specific setting for my project. Then I remembered something from my childhood: every year my family takes a vacation to the Great Smoky Mountains in Tennessee, and every year we drove right past Oak Ridge National Laboratory on the way. Given that my project is concerned with the experiences of the people involved in nuclear development, that area could be a potent figure to use in the project, both for historical and personal reasons.
So It Goes April 11, 2009
Posted by gbcarter in Unconventional Discourse.Tags: Creative, Vonnegut
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Billy was in the meat-locker the night Dresden was destroyed. The walls shook and dust sprinkled down on the prisoners, but Billy wasn’t there anymore. He was in the hospital listening as the esteemed professor Bertram Copeland Rumfoord read a press release to an illiterate wallflower. Billy heard about a bomb that had leveled a city in Japan and ended a war. Billy knew that it was the same war that he had been in, but the idea of waging war across a world didn’t make sense when Roland Weary died walking to the next town. Besides, if the President wanted to level a city and end the war, Billy couldn’t understand dropping one bomb to destroy the city when the giants of Dresden could knock them all the way to Tralfamadore. Billy rolled over in his hospital bed and was in another.
In 1945, Eliot Rosewater was telling Billy about his favorite author, Kilgore Trout. Kilgore Trout wrote books about robots and aliens and Jesus and the fourth dimension. Billy remembered a little dirty bookstore in 1968 New York, where he flipped through a book he had read before (with Eliot Rosewater) about a man and a woman who were put on display in a zoo. The store had pictures of Montana Wildhack in the back, but Billy ignored these—he had the real thing in the zoo on Tralfamadore—all he had to do was a little fourth-dimensional traveling to see her and the baby. Billy remembered being friends with Kilgore Trout in 1964—maybe he should tell him about Tralfamadore. Maybe that’s what made him write the book Billy read in 1945. Or maybe Billy should take the secret of Tralfamadore with him to Chicago on February 13th, 1976.
After Billy experienced death for a while, he swung back into life. He stopped halfway back, in the hospital in Vermont. Robert was there, talking to the doctor. Billy supposed he should talk to Robert, but all he could think about was robots with bad breath dropping giants on the moon. He wasn’t sure what that had to do with Robert, so he visited 1964 to ask Kilgore Trout. Kilgore Trout knew all about robots and bad breath. Bad breath like mustard gas and roses—or gasoline and rubber.
The Tralfamadorians told Billy that they didn’t watch wars. The walls in the shelter were shaking. When one of the soldiers checked outside, the smell came in—like robot halitosis—and one of the prisoners throw up everything he had eaten during that month in Dresden. That was I. That was me. That was the author of this book. Billy traveled to his honeymoon. He didn’t tell his wife, but he knew that they—along with five other people—were conceiving Robert, who Billy remembered was a Green Beret. Robert was back from Vietnam to see Billy in the hospital. Professor Rumfoord was telling Lily about weapons in Vietnam, things that burned and melted and killed every living thing. Billy didn’t think that made sense—if everything was dead, there wouldn’t be any birds to tell about it.
“Poo-tee-weet?”
Project Proposal April 4, 2009
Posted by gbcarter in Unconventional Discourse.Tags: Mystory
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I want to address a specific identity within the historical context of the Cold War. Specifically, I want to explore the experience of those individuals responsible for developing weapons during the Cold War, most notably the scientists who worked on the hydrogen bomb projects. This interests me as a chemistry major and future doctor, especially the tensions that surface within the pursuit of scientific achievement and the moral questions concerning applied science and technology in the culture of the Cold War. Often this issue is boiled down to superficial generalizations, where students learn in textbooks about historical figures like Einstein and Oppenheimer and the “conflicted” nature of their relationship to their work, but rarely, if ever, is a serious attempt made to relate to the actual experiences of the people involved in this issue at all levels. I would argue (if I actually intended to be argumentative) that the experiences of these individuals were much more complex, and could not be reduced to the platitudes which are most often applied to this question in conventional discourse. These historical characters are often separated from their perspectives of their experiences, whereas here the goal is to create a textual representation of those experiences using the poetic techniques derived from our sources throughout the semester. Roth’s utilization of historicity to support his literary structures is central for this project, which must be rooted in factual authenticity before it can hope to become unconventional discourse. Similarly, the shifting of scale between collective and individual is an effective tool that can be used to address this issue. Another way of producing a stereographic text is using the interplay of history, experience, and myth exemplified by Momaday. All of these techniques can be compiled into a text that resists passive or automatic reading and forces the reader to contemplate the unified experience of the individuals that are associated with the specific identity addressed within the project. When trying to achieve this blend of personal, historical, and mythical discourse, one of the natural candidates for reappropriation is Oppenheimer, who expressly linked his personal experience to a mythical figure, which is recorded as history for us. Also, his is easily the most recognizable name associated with this area, and he can serve as a reasonable anchor to ground the rest of the text in historicity. Because this is a topic that has been exhaustively explored using conventional discourse, it will be absolutely critical to avoid falling into an automatic or traditional mode of thinking where the consensus opinion replaces the essential experience at the core of the text. Although key figures like Einstein, Oppenheimer, or von Braun may be vital touchstones of historicity for the text, focusing only on these high-profile individuals would be conterproductive. Their involvement has been amply explored and analyzed; what is missing and what I aim to express is the experience of the anonymous masses that were also directly involved in and affected by these projects.
Not Here March 23, 2009
Posted by gbcarter in Unconventional Discourse.Tags: Roth
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Philip Roth’s novel The Plot Against America is a very effective example of paradoxical literature, as it functions on several levels to counteract the effects of consensus regarding American tradition and history, specifically that surrounding World War II. On the surface, the novel’s plot is an interesting and engaging exploration of an alternative version of the events leading up to America’s entry into the war in Europe and the Pacific and the effects of those events on the American people, represented by the Roth family. The situations that the novel proposes are a rather heavy-handed and somewhat off-target criticism of contemporary policies, an appeal based on a parallel comparison to the historical perception of the atrocities committed under Hitler’s Nazi regime in Germany. This sets up an interesting tension within the metanarrative of paradoxical discourse, as the novel’s effectiveness as an alternative to conventional thinking depends entirely on the application of a consensus perspective on fascism in a unique way: by placing it in the American political system, which is understood to prevent such totalitarian usurpation of liberty from occurring. Within the context of these fundamental assumptions, the novel functions very effectively as a form of unconventional discourse.
In addition to the paradoxical nature of its plot, another way in which the novel functions unconventionally is its style of disruptive historical narrative. Periodically throughout the novel, events force the reader to stop and look more carefully at the text, disrupting the flow of reading that most novels develop. One example of this is Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s speech to the anti-Nazi rally, in which he refers to his inaugural speech and its famous line, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” This actual historical event is referenced in a way that first catches the readers attention with its obvious historicity and then suddenly twists the line into a distinctly unconventional finish, with FDR denouncing President Lindbergh and his Nazi sympathies. The shocking subversion of the reader’s historical understanding and knowledge throws into a stark light the contrast between the unnatural events of the novel and the actual historical events. One of the most disruptive moments in the personal layer of the narrative is Philip’s dream of his stamp collection being transformed with Nazi symbolism. The novel’s juxtaposition of events on the world scale and their effects on an intimately personal level is highlighted at this point, with the disruptive image of America’s defining national landmarks being marred by Nazi graffiti.
Although the effectiveness of Roth’s novel is undermined by the absurdity of the heavy-handed comparison of Nazi fascism to the events transpiring in American politics at the time he wrote the novel, namely the Patriot Act, it is certainly exemplary of several effective techniques for composing unconventional discourse. His disruptive style of writing, where historical facts and conventional perceptions are brutally subverted by counterintuitive and jarring paradoxical figures, plays a key role in his creation of an alternative form of expression. Also, Roth’s interweaving of scales, shifting between the macrocosm and the microcosm, as well as his technique of shifting back and forth in time within the narrative, provide the reader with a comprehensive picture of world events and their drastic effects on the personal level while preserving the confusion of the characters and transmitting it to the reader, forcing the reader to identify on that level with the events of the novel. These distinctly poetic techniques, employed within prose fiction and placed within the framework of historicity, are the key elements of Roth’s unconventional discourse and can be adapted for use in many other works of paradoxical literature.
Natural Metaphors February 22, 2009
Posted by gbcarter in Unconventional Discourse.Tags: Response
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When I read David’s vignette, I found it very similar in tone to several of the submissions in the class, including my own. The obvious connections between the image of a foreboding natural phenomenon and the condition of living under the shadow of the opposing forces of the Cold War make those forms of figurative expression particularly powerful. In this case, the choice of a hurricane is especially appropriate, because the specific threat that it represents on the geographic level mirrors the particular geopolitical implications of the Cuban Missile Crisis; also, the mounting “red darkness” of a hurricane is a natural link to the Soviet threat, as is the fact that a hurricane forms far from shore but approaches in an unpredictable but inexorable way to threaten the coast. The repeated representation of the Cold War experiences of individuals on both sides of the Iron Curtain as natural disasters is indicative of a broader pattern within the literary tradition of figurative expression: namely, that the most frightening threat is not a horrifying monster that is actively seeking to harm you, but the primeval forces of nature that can engulf and destroy you in their utterly inhuman and totally impersonal savagery. That is, lions and tigers and bears are certainly scary, but how much more terrifying is the prospect of being caught in a raging storm, consumed in a blazing inferno, lost in an impenetrable jungle, or swallowed in an endless sea?
Firebreak February 20, 2009
Posted by gbcarter in Unconventional Discourse.Tags: Creative
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On this morning, no different from any other, a man climbed wearily out of bed as the gray predawn sky was just beginning to lighten behind the bedroom curtains. The morning ritual of shaving and dressing was completed with a mechanical efficiency born of constant practice; viewed through the filmy haze that had marked the treetops across the river for some time, the nascent sunrise proclaiming another day was regarded with the same enthusiasm as the baseball scores in the paper over breakfast. Shrugging off the last vestiges of the fuzziness of sleep and slipping out the door, the man could see the long, strange shadows typical of that hour stretching out before him under a clear dawn sky, the morning star fading on the horizon. He backed out of his garage and turned onto the road for the long commute north into the city. As the muted light of the morning sun streamed through his passenger window, he watched idly as the the scene to his left turned from rural landscape to suburban development and finally to urban sprawl, his view unbroken across the highway lanes devoid of oncoming traffic. Shaking his head ruefully at the sight of those open lanes leading back the way he came, he picked his way through the morning rush of traffic to find his way to his office building.
Nine clockwork hours later, the man found himself in a viscous stream flowing south, surrounded by the same consultants and managers and executives that shared the trip with him on every day. He found a satisfaction in watching the view from his right window revert slowly to undeveloped landscape as he made his habitual escape. As he left behind the rows of cookie-cutter houses and the company of his fellow workers, the evening sun hung low enough that the crystal sky softened its radiance to a warm, inviting glow. The orb finally slipped behind the horizon, taking with it the last lingering worries of the workday; the road wound on beneath the twilight sky, the deep blue-purple overhead streaked with color from a glow on both sides of the road. On this evening, no different than any other, an unsettling feeling crept into the void left by the distractions of the day.
As the road swung into the clear area along the riverbank for the final leg of the drive, his gaze was inexorably drawn to his left. Across the river, his view unimpeded by the morning light of his earlier trip, he watched the fire rage across the gently rolling hills, the spectrum of red and yellow playing against the pall of smoke that persisted above the flames. Remembering the front page story he had so perfunctorily passed over, he considered the reports that the long-burning blaze was firmly under control. It was assured that the fire departments had prevented the fire from progressing further for some time now, that the river provided a natural firebreak for containment of the conflagration and that the amount of resources being poured into the area would soon allow them to extinguish it altogether. As always, bolstered by the knowledge that the authorities had everything well in hand, he forced his eyes back to the road. Like every other night that he had seen the flames, the man found himself wondering if one of the leaping sparks that danced in the wind might find a fertile home across the water.
Figurative Expression as an Alternative Discourse February 13, 2009
Posted by gbcarter in Unconventional Discourse.Tags: Pynchon
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The two figures that stood out in Thomas Pynchon’s short story Entropy were the broken windows, which function as the physical representation within the text of the philosophical connection between the two distinct threads. Both of the characters that motivated the discussion of entropy within the two contrasting contexts of the party and the hothouse were involved in some way with the breaking of a window. Saul’s discussion with Meatball of entropy as the random noise within a signal is precipitated by an argument with his wife concerning communication and information theory, in the course of which a science textbook was thrown through a window. Callisto’s obsession with thermodynamic entropy and the impending heat-death of the universe, which has prompted he and Aubade to sequester themselves within a hermetically sealed hothouse, eventually leads her to break the window and embrace the intrinsic flux of the surrounding world. In each instance, the physical act of the broken window is the fulfillment of each interpretation of entropy. The book thrown through the window in mid-argument represents a breakdown in communication precipitated by a misunderstanding that is exemplary of the information theory form of entropy (the book being a thermodynamics text is a small nod to the superficiality of the connection between the two types of entropy). Aubade’s decision to break the window and allow the implacable forces of thermodynamics to enter the previously closed environment is a realization of the inevitability of the changes implicit in a thermodynamic representation of the world and the trends within it. Although isolation can give the illusion of stability, at every level change is unavoidable: flux is an integral component of existence. In both cases, the broken window represents the acceptance of entropy as a fundamental condition of reality: on the one hand, a limitation of communication that cannot be overcome; on the other, a state of change that cannot be circumvented.
This acceptance of certain fundamental conditions as constraints for existence and action is reminiscent of the progression of the Cold War in Europe, as described by Robert McMahon. In The Cold War, he explores the reasons behind the fact that the Cold War’s only militarized conflicts took place in the Third World. According to McMahon, the most fundamental reason was the mutual acceptance by both the East and West that any conflict in the central European theater would inevitably lead to a thermonuclear exchange, and that this outcome would not favor any involved. This consensus of mutually-assured destruction was the key balancing force for the duration of the four-decade conflict between the two superpowers. While many believe this to mean that the mere specter of nuclear retaliation would have prevented war from erupting and that the political machinations and military-industrial arms race on both sides following World War II was in hindsight unnecessary, McMahon demonstrates that the Soviet maneuvers in both the political and military arenas were intended to prevent the West from achieving enough of a strategic edge to launch the offensive that the inherently paranoid Soviets believed the capitalists must intend; the matching American responses were necessary to prevent the Soviet buildup from tipping the balance far enough for the communists to achieve their stated goal of forcibly subduing the West. As McMahon shows, the balance of power that prevented the Cold War from turning into a global thermonuclear war was a far more fragile and complex thing than is widely understood.
Figurative expression as an alternative discourse can be valuable in separating from and counteracting the more traditional forms of representing and communicating thoughts and ideas. Pynchon’s short story does this very well in the course of exploring the relationship between the information theory and thermodynamic concepts of entropy: rather than an academic paper detailing the similarities and differences in the theories and their applications, Pynchon crafts a narrative representation of the same concepts, demonstrating their application through the actions of the characters and linking the two different threads with the vehicle of the broken window. While this is a reasonable (and sometimes superior) method for conveying certain ideas, it must be noted that any attempt to replace direct communication with figurative expression is subject to the inherent risk of miscommunication within a form of discourse that relies on interpretation and the linkage of two different objects or concepts in the vehicle and the tenor.
Belief and Reason in the New World Order February 6, 2009
Posted by gbcarter in Unconventional Discourse.Tags: O'Connor
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Flannery O’Connor’s short story Good Country People is fairly typical of her work, and is indicative of the changing values of the time in which she wrote. The story was published in 1955, a time of great change in terms of the geopolitical and socioeconomic characteristics of the world, the nation, and specifically the South, the subject of most of O’Connor’s work. The two World Wars over the four prior decades had effectively ended the European domination of the globe and the colonial imperialism that had long been at the center of international affairs. The destruction of the old world order was accompanied by the rise of a new system, rooted in the rational ideals of the Enlightenment and embodied in the United States, the emerging superpower that took up the banner of freedom and liberty against the oppressive war machine of the Soviet Union. Driven in part by the Cold War and in part by the social changes occurring in American culture, the people of the new order had to examine the tensions resulting from the intersection of belief and reason within their modes of thinking.
In the South, O’Connor’s particular focus, the traditional point of view was ostensibly grounded in Christianity, but was in fact founded on the secular old-world sensibilities regarding propriety and class distinctions. This perspective is made clear in the character of Mrs. Hopewell, who forces everything and everyone around her into the worldview that her traditional upbringing has instilled in her. She is deeply disappointed in what she sees as her daughter’s willful refusal to grow out of her intellectual phase and settle down to the life of a proper Southern matron; she also clings to her preconceived notions of class when relating to her tenants, seeing the transients as trash but insisting that the Freemans are good country people (and as such, clearly and comfortably beneath her in the established social hierarchy). Her need to conform the world around her to the static ideal of her traditional views is shown to be incompatible with the inexorable changes taking place in that world, as it was put so well by Heraclitus. In fact, she trusts her traditional worldview to protect her from any change that might threaten to upset her carefully ordered ideals, a fallacy which is exposed and exploited by Manley Pointer.
Pointer also serves as the catalyst for exposing the flaws of another perspective, that of Joy Hopewell. She believes that she has escaped the trap of her mother’s irrational worldview, which she sees as representative of religion, by pursuing an education and learning to discard everything but reason alone. Her mother’s discovery of the Nietzsche text, which horrifies her although she does not recognize the source, clearly outlines Joy’s own worldview. It is in this light that she changes her name to Hulga, attempting to break free of the system in which her mother had attempted to place her. Her entire perspective is centered on an extremely nihilistic view of life, and she is devoted in her belief that Nothing is central to life and that reason has nothing to say about Nothing. To Hulga, the meaning of life is irrelevant and nonexistent. Ironically, it was precisely this idea that was the genesis of the socialist beliefs that drove the entire Second World to pursue the utter destruction of the freedom and liberty so cherished by those of the new world order. The inherent flaw in this reasoning is again exposed by Manley Pointer, who turns Hulga’s attempts to corrupt his pious alter ego back on themselves, showing her the emptiness and despair of her own beliefs.
By illustrating the fundamental flaws of both Mrs. Hopewell’s denial of change in favor of tradition and her daughter’s denial of belief in favor reason, O’Connor shows that neither blindly trusting in pseudo-religious values to ward off change nor forgoing religious belief altogether is a viable option. Instead, O’Connor shows that faith is a necessary concept, one that enables us to adapt to the dynamic world around us without compromising our understanding of the fundamental principles that govern existence.
Character Experience as Representative of Alternatives to Tradition January 30, 2009
Posted by gbcarter in Unconventional Discourse.Tags: Doctorow
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While reading Ragtime, I followed closely the character thread of J.P. Morgan, which seemed to be uniquely separated from the other stories interwoven through the narrative. All of the other principal characters are dealing on some level with money and the struggle to generate financial security for themselves. Tateh leaves his socialist comrades for the advantages and opportunities afforded by capitalism, Evelyn rejects her wealth and fame to pursue her own life independent of the society that had dictated her every action, and most of the other characters fall somewhere in between. However, Morgan’s quest within the novel runs in an entirely different direction. He has accumulated power and wealth so vast that it stretches the limits of imagination, enough that even his fellow industrial tycoons Carnegie and Rockefeller are regarded as inferiors. According to the traditional Western view of history as a linear progression of time, with events unfolding in sequence and with cause and effect clearly delineated, Morgan has reached the pinnacle of achievement and fully expects his legacy to endure long after he is gone (indeed, the character’s prospective ideas are validated by the reader’s retrospective knowledge), and he should be content with the life he has wrought. However, he rejects this idea as hollow and unsatisfactory, and turns to alternative sources to find a lasting fulfillment.
“It seemed an indisputable truth. Somehow he had catapulted himself beyond the world’s value system.” (141)
Morgan finds his answers, or at least the clues that start him on his quest for the ultimate answer, in Eastern mysticism and its notion of history as a cyclical progression of time and the associated belief in reincarnation, specifically the Hermetical belief that “transcendentally gifted” individuals are “born in each age to ease the sufferings of humankind with their prisca theologia“, the ancient knowledge that empowers these chosen paragons. From this model, which he envisions as applying to himself and perhaps other contemporary visionaries such as Henry Ford, Morgan derives a sense of satisfaction in his belief that he will be reborn when the world needs him again. His desire for order, juxtaposed with his understanding of the traditional old-world system as deeply flawed and his equally condemning view of the perceived chaos and instability inherent to the emerging new-world society, give the character a unique clarity when it comes to understanding the world events leading up to World War I and the long-term geopolitical and socioeconomic consequences of that process. His character thread concludes with his death which, ironically, was almost certainly a direct result of his quest for knowledge, and which he approaches without trepidation, believing wholeheartedly that the world’s need for his reincarnated self was most urgent in the face of the upheaval and chaos he saw.
The philosophical nature of Morgan’s progression throughout the narrative provides a stark contrast to the materially-driven development of the other dynamic characters of the novel, and places Morgan into a unique role in the text. Because his story arc moves in such a radically divergent direction, and because his pursuit of knowledge gives the character an unusual perspective, Morgan functions as a conduit for history itself within the narrative, afforded an understanding of not only what has been but what will be. By embracing an alternative view of history and time, the character has found himself in the unprecedented position of viewing the present from the exterior. Morgan’s notice of Einstein’s discovery of the curvature of the universe does more than date the text, it also provides a physical corollary to his belief: if the universe is curved, and time is truly a cycle, then by all rights an enlightened individual such as himself should be able to see all points on the wheel. By rejecting the traditional concept of history, Morgan to some extent becomes a physical manifestation of that which overlooks the passage of time. Implicit in this is the idea that the consensus views of American society are not inherently perfect, and that sometimes it is necessary to reject what is traditionally accepted to find answers or meaning.
