David Leavitt’s “Gravity” seen from diverse critical
perspectives.
Abstract
This paper aims to approach Davit Leavitt’s “Gravity” from diverse
critical perspectives, namely, Formalism, Structuralism, Marxism, Feminism and Psychoanalytic
literary criticism. It is an academic task while it must be born in mind that
reading is a versatile and many-layered activity that will never be fully
accomplished by means of only one critical perspective but by a kaleidoscopic joint
approach encompassing all of them. The story has been chosen from Joyce Carol
Oates’ anthology The Oxford Book of American Short Stories because it is
a superb example of how literature works: making language non-automatic,
condensing in a few pages a universal myth, showing how feelings are translated
into material commodities and finally depicting how people struggle to ultimately
disembowel their identities, eventually discovering that they are far from the
socially accepted canon and in desperate need of any small victory over universal
gravity.
A Multi-critical Perspective of David Leavitt’s “Gravity”
For its study the story has been divided into four parts, the two initial paragraphs marked [1] and [2], a central body of mainly dialogue: [3] and the final paragraph: [4].
[1] In the opening of the story the reader is confronted with the choice Theo had to take. A STRUCTURALIST critic who analyses the units of a system and the rules that make that system work will notice the linear syntacmatic sequence of the two possibilities:
a drug that would save his
sight
and
a drug that would keep him
alive
They are identical
but for the last three words in both phrases which imply an opposition though
using two verbs with similar meaning: save and keep. A logical analysis concludes
that what will save his life will make him ‘not keep’ his sight. The conflict was resolved by Theo choosing
‘not to go blind’. A FORMALIST critic will notice the antithesis and how the
author makes the construction ‘unfamiliar’ by not repeating one of the
propositions of the alternative, therefore increasing the difficulty and length
of the perception because “the process of perception is an aesthetic end in
itself and must be prolonged” (Shklovsky 18). Considering this same last
phrase, a STRUCTURALIST critic will further argue that “not to go blind” is
more than just the opposite of “to go blind” or ‘lose his sight’ for as “J. A. Greimas
has illustrated with his squaring of the opposition any semiotic system of
contrasting elements also imply the negation of each term in the binary”
(Felluga, 3), a contradictory pair, which in this case would be “non-to go
blind” and “non-not to go blind”. As the “bond between Signifier and Signified
is arbitrary” (Sausurre, 79) thus there can exist more than one Signified for
each Signifier, leading to multiplicity of meanings. In our case ‘ not to go
blind’ meaning not only to retain sight but be able to see- possibly more than
just the physical environment eventually grasping the ultimate reason of Theo’s
circumstance.
He stopped the
pills
and started the injections
these required the implantation of an ( ) above his heart
and within a
few days
the clouds in
his eyes started to clear up
he could see again.
A FORMALIST critic
echoing Osip Brik would say that the rhythm and stress in Leavitt’s prose
(which can be noted throughout the text) “are only the obvious manifestation of
particular instances of basic euphonic laws” and that “the figures play an aesthetic
role in its own right” (qtd. in Eichembaun, 9).
If we turn to what
a PSYCHOANALYTIC critic would have to say, we will immediately highlight the fact
that psychoanalytic literary criticism begins with Freud himself who “notices
that literary texts are like dreams that express unconscious material in the
form of complex displacements and condensations ( ) literature displaces
unconscious desires, drives, and motives into imagery that might bear no
resemblance to its origin but that nonetheless permits it to achieve release of
expression” (Rivkin and Ryan, 125). For Freud, in ‘The Uncanny’, fear for
castration takes the form not of a literal image, but of a metaphoric
substitute that displaces the protagonist’s anxiety onto a fear of losing his
eyes (160) and Theo’s choice can be taken as a flagrant example.
A STRUCTURALIST
critic will note then that this opening paragraph refers to the first plot
element – fright to lose his sight – as well as points out one basic “mytheme”(Lévi-Strauss,
104) in the laying out of the Oedipus complex-myth which the rest of the story
will further develop and which the reader can predict due to Leavitt’s
hermeneutic narrative: the reader knows from the beginning that Theo chose to
die and for a FORMALIST critic the story will then keep the reader’s interest making
him/her want to know how this will happen. The voice we hear is that of a
limited omniscient narrator, the FORMALIST critic would also point out: the
writer adopting the stance of an impersonal consciousness, itself not an agent
in the events of the story but able to observe the thoughts of one of the
characters. In our story it first seems to be narrating from Theo’s perspective.
But soon we realize it is really Sylvia’s feelings which are put through from
inside, while Theo is seen from an outer perspective. It will not be until the
last paragraph of the story that we are to deepen in Theo’s thoughts while he is
the one who tries to
analyse Sylvia’s. The FORMALIST critic will also point
out the use of analepsis or flashback taking us back to Theo’s childhood in the
third sentence of this first paragraph.
The anecdote depicted presents Sylvia – his mother- for the first time.
The Psychoanalytic critic will immediately observe the powerful mother-character
shaping the Oedipus complex/myth. The boy does not want to admit he needs
glasses and his mother, who gave him birth, who called him Theo (God) shoves her own harlequin glasses onto his face
(in the same impulsive way she will later toss the bowl to him) not caring what
people would think because he can finally see.
A FEMINIST critic is bound to note the family-rearing role the story
gives to Sylvia as well as her influence in Theo’s personality. Moreover, the
same critic will abound in noting that Sylvia has suffered an inmasculating
process taking on her back the task of further protecting her child as well as
bringing him up. A FORMALIST reading of the last phrase of the paragraph: ‘he
could see’ will highlight that it is a sort of antistrophe taking us back to
the previous ‘he could see (again)’ and further clarifying it: Theo had been
deprived of sight in an earlier stage of his life and it had been his mother
who had given him sight. Thus the ultimate purpose of the analepsis is to let
the reader know how it had been the same when Theo was twelve: his mother
protecting him – enhancing his sight. A
PHYCHOANALITIC critic would argue that Theo had not been able to acquire his
gender identity, not learning to give up his mother and identify with his
father. It can be noted again how the idea of fear of castration takes the form
of fear of losing his sight. Immediately a FEMINIST critic would point out that
Sylvia feels it is her duty to deprive herself of her own sight during the projection
of the film in order to allow her son to watch it.
[2]
The same idea is
further outlined in the second paragraph which starts: ‘Because he was dying
again, Theo moved back to his mother’s house in New Jersey.’ A FORMALIST critic will point
out the paradox of the situation. Cleanth Brooks explained in “The Language of
Paradox” that paradox is the appropriate language of literature (58). The
writer gives us a blurred impression that by helping him regain his sight once
more Sylvia is provoking his death as well. And that is quite so. Paradox,
though not a direct method, is the best to depict multiple implications. Sylvia
will be his nurse because having had already gone through her own mother’s
death she is fit to accomplish the same task with her son. Once more the
FEMINIST critic will note the further female role of caring and seeing through her
parent’s death in patriarchal society. The pipe stuck in his chest is the
‘constant reminder of how wide and unswimmable the gulf was becoming between
him and the ever-receding shoreline of the well’. A FORMALIST criticism will
justify the various metaphors and the subsequent contrast as a means to bring
the reader to the conclusion that Theo is definitely dying and that realizes it.
Immediately the contrast: Sylvia is cheerful – intricately though. She takes him to the library and the museum
and shields him when his thinness and cane draw stares. A PHYCOANALISTIC critic
will continue composing the image of castrated youth, and a STRUCTURALIST critic
will see as well in Theo’s use of a cane, another mytheme, one more constituent
unit of the Oedipus myth that normally is associated with the unsteady walking
when deprived of sight.
[3]
The central part
of the story confronts the reader -the FORMALIST critic will notice- with
another strange collocation of words in the first sentence: “they were shopping
for revenge”. The skillful use of foil here is a crucial part of the writer’s
repertoire. Setting things in systematic contrast to each other is one way of
drawing intense attention to details the writer refuses to spell out because
spelling things out would dilute the flow of events. A STRUCTURALIST critic
will argue on his side, following Sausurre that because language is a system of
interdependent terms in which the value of each term results solely from the
simultaneous presence of the others, the reader must stop and think in all the
weak meanings ‘shopping for revenge’ arises. But the most emblematic analysis
could come from a MARXIST critic who will logically conclude that shopping
refers to the act of acquiring a commodity, which by definition is “an object
outside us, a thing that by its properties satisfies human wants of some sort
or another” (Marx, 268). For Sylvia this want is ‘revenge’ and the MARXIST
critic will further claim that as the utility of a thing makes it a use-value, therefore,
the commodity to be bought by Sylvia will have a high use-value because revenge
–for Sylvia- is very useful.
To Sylvia’s phrase
“Ah, you live an learn” Theo replies ironically: “You live” The use of irony
here will lead the PSYCHOANALISTIC critic to the conclusion that it is a
symptom of Theo’s blaming his mother for his dying, and the fact that he makes
her see him through his last days is a punishment.
Sylvia reminds
Theo how Bibi had given him a ‘cheap little nothing’ for his graduation and, on
his side, Theo comments on his giving as
a wedding present to his roommate Nick a five-dollar garlic press which reflected exactly how much he felt his
friendship was worth at that moment. The MARXIST critic will note the use, once
and again, of commodities to express feelings. The interesting part of the
question it poses is how people get to permeate commodities with such abstract
characteristics. The analysis of both MARXIST and PSYCHOANALISTIC criticism come
to be very close regarding this matter. “According to Lacan, it was none other
than Karl Marx who invented the notion of symptom” (Zizek, 312). There is no
doubt a fundamental homology between the interpretative procedure of Marx and
Freud. As Slkavoj Zizek puts it in The
Sublime Object of Ideology “we must accomplish the crucial step of
conceiving the hidden “meaning” behind the commodity-form, the signification
“expressed” by this form; we must penetrate the “secret” of the value of
commodities” (313). Sylvia had been looking a long time for “something heavy
enough to leave an impression, yet so fragile it could make you sorry” and she
found it materialized in a bowl worth four hundred and twenty-five dollars.
What mattered least was if it was beautiful or ugly, that was not the case.
Both the MARXIST and the PSYCHOANALYTIC critics will hint the “Fetishism”
(Marx, 271) attached to the bowl. While
the latter will explain it as a part of a process of exorcism, the former will
realize that “there is a definite social relation between men that assumes, in
their eyes, the fantastic form of a relation between things” (Marx, 271). Hence the productions of the human brain
appear as independent beings endowed with life and interacting in the world of
commodities with the products of the men’s hands. And that Marx called “Fetishism”.
But it is not
enough that Theo sees the bowl, he has to feel it – Sylvia suddenly argues -and
unexpectedly tosses it to Theo like a football. She effects the sudden movement
in the same manner twelve years before she had shoved her glasses onto his
face. Her action obliges Theo to catch it and though it sinks his hands and makes
his cane rattle in the floor, he succeeds in catching it. Our STRUCTURALIST
critic is bound to find coherent that following the rules of the Oedipus myth, Sylvia,
helping him not to go blind, is showing him with her action he can oppose
gravity, that universal force. No need anymore for a cane that can be left, if
even for a moment, rattling on the floor. That sole instant will prove the PSYCHONALYSTIC
critic that unconscious forces can be defied; a person may defeat the psychic
censorship if given the opportunity of “activating the repressed wishful
impulse sending it into consciousness in a disguised and unrecognizable substitute”.
(Baker).
[4]
A FEMINIST
analysis of this last part of the story will notice how Sylvia is depicted
through a number of characteristics that “phallocentric order” (Mulvey, 586) traditionally
have awarded women with. Sylvia “squeezed
her eyes shut so tight the blue shadows on her lids cracked”; furthermore “on
the surface things seemed right. She still broiled herself a skinned chicken
breast for dinner every night, still swam a mile and a half a day, still kept
used teabags wrapped in foil in the refrigerator”. Everything is right because
Sylvia continues embarking herself in all the activities patriarchy has imposed
women in order to give pleasure when looked at. Laura Mulvey noted in “Visual Pleasure and
Narrative Cinema”: “In a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking
has been split between active/male and passive/female” (589). A woman has,
therefore, to be a passive image of visual perfection. It is basically what a
MARXIST critic would call keeping the use-value of women and what one of Lévi-Strauss’ theories would explain: “as the
exchange of women is a fundamental principle of kinship, the subordination of
women can be seen as a product of the relationships by which sex and gender are
organized and produced” (qtd. in Rubin, 544).
The FORMALIST
critic, on his end, would mark the use of the hyperbole for emphasis in “she
squeezed her eyes shut so tight the blue shadow of her lids cracked” as well as
the metaphor in “that gleam of flight and regret” when referring to the bowl
which is so oblique it can only be wholly understood if referred back to “so
fragile it could make you sorry” at the end of part [3].
Theo in a last and
perfect state of clarividence understands that his mother was trusting “his two
feeble hands, out of the whole world, to keep it from shattering. ‘What was she
trying to test? Was it his newly regained vision? (.) that he hadn’t slipped
past all her caring, a little lost boy in rhinestone-studded glasses?” A
PSYCHOANALISTIC critic would argue that Leavitt has made his character act
himself as a psychoanalist, wondering about both Sylvia and himself and there
mutual close relationship, until he finally experiences an epiphanic instant which
a FORMALIST critic would argue qualifies him as a dynamic character undergoing
a radical change in his self-identification. The epiphany is in the closing of
the story when Theo recalls the broad smile of his mother and he realizes that
in that war, they were both engaged in, between heaviness and shattering, “he
had helped her win some small but sustaining victory”. Our STRUCTURALIST critic
would mark, once again, the use of foil but this time in an oblique and subverting
way contrasting, as in the two sides of a war, heaviness and shattering when
really one is but the consequence of the other. On his end the FORMALIST critic
would claim that foils offer the writer interested in psychological or social
realism a way of maintaining the illusion of reality while at the same time the
crucial distinction between art and life is not lost, achieving as a result a
much clearer situation in literature than what can be experienced in real life.
To conclude this
multi-perspective literary criticism, we can turn to the FEMINIST criticism
once more: Sylvia exercises the power the myths of sexism make available to
her, and pushes Theo to oppose gravity, but that power is minimal because it
only is the power of inducement. It is her son/male who really executes the
action. The merit is his; Sylvia – the female- being just a tool, an object by
which Theo- the dominant male- achieves victories.
“Gravity”, as any
other narrative, has as many readings as readers it may attract, and therefore,
as many critical perspectives as existing theories can be drawn to discussion.
In any case what cannot be denied is that it is a powerful and disturbing
narrative that brings to surface many present questionings including such a delicate
case as ‘AIDS’ which is only implied throughout the story but nonetheless very
present.
WORKS CITED
Baker, Lyman A.
“One of Freud’s Analogies for Explaining the Idea of Repression”
This work studies a selection of Joyce Carol Oates’ anthology The Oxford Book of American Short Stories. The aim is to analyse the grade of implicitness present in American short stories throughout the last three centuries. Grice’s Relevance Theory and Bonheim’s Narrative Modes and Techniques of the Short Story have been taken as framework for the research.
The meaning of a piece of literature is more
than often not an obvious matter. It may lie hidden entwined in the characters
thoughts for the reader to detect or it may be just awareness on part of the
reader at a certain moment in the story, many times at the very end. This study
focuses on these hidden elements that affect intrinsic meaning, what linguists
call “implicatures”.
Implicitness in Short American Narrative
Introduction
On analysing Joyce Carol Oates’ The Oxford Book of American Short Stories as
the base for our study we encounter an outstanding selection of some of the
best and paradoxically least known American short stories. It was indeed, the
author’s intention to gather them in a collection, finding unfair that many
such an interesting story should remain practically unknown to the general
public. Joyce Carol Oates acknowledges having chosen the stories bearing in
mind storytelling as an art as well as political or social themes rather than
literary experimentation. This study will focus on the implicit ways these
themes are conveyed.
Part I of this work is a foreword on the elements considered important in the analysis of implicitness, in other words concepts relevant to our study such as implicature, explicature or narrative modes that have largely puzzled the erudite mind. Part II is entirely dedicated to the study of Implicitness under the umbrella of the distinct narrative modes and of the Relevance Theory. The Conclusion aims to outline the basic trend American short stories have followed since the eighteenth century concerning the grade of implicitness the writers pervade their literature by.
Part I – An approach to relevant
terms
Much has been written on Relevance
Theory, Implicatures, and Explicatures, but in general all linguists claim that
there is a distinction between the explicit content and the implicit import of
an utterance. Jim Meyer’s distinction in his article What is Literature? A Definition based on Prototypes is a relevant
one to bear in mind:
In
pragmatics there is an important distinction between ‘explicatures’ and
‘implicatures’ in understanding the meaning of a text. An explicature is the semantic
representation which is present in the linguistic cues of an utterance; an
implicature depends on the explicatures (the propositions which are expressed)
together with the context.
Jim Meyer makes some interesting quotations
from Diane Blakemore’s Understanding
utterances:
Speakers do not always intend to
communicate a specific set of assumptions: sometimes the speaker’s intentions
are less determinate so the hearer is simply encouraged to think along certain
lines without necessary coming to any specific conclusion (1992.168).
Every hearer (or reader) is guided
and encouraged by the text in the sense that it gives access to contextual assumptions
which yield implicatures…A creative hearer is encouraged to take a greater
share of the responsibility in the interpretation process, so that the extra
effort she invests is rewarded by a wide array of very weak implicatures, which
she is encouraged to explore (1992:172).
It is these ‘weak implicatures’ that
we intend to analyse as well as the way the writer may violate many of the
maxims Grice’s Cooperative Principle suggests as unequivocal to communicate
accurately under the four categories. Namely: under Quantity: be as informative
as required, do not be more informative than required; under Quality: make your
contribution one that is true, do not say what you believe to be false, do not
say that for which you lack adequate evidence; under Relation: be relevant; under
Manner: be perspicuous (avoid obscurity of expression, avoid ambiguity, be
brief and be orderly).
The violation of these maxims may
give place to what Meyer called ‘weak meaning’ or ‘weak implicatures’, meanings
which are present but which are less strongly present and that, sometimes,
combined with several other weak meanings may provoke in the reader the poetic
effect. Meyer also quotes Blakemore on the definition of the poetic effect “the
effect of an utterance which achieves most of its relevance through a wide
array of weak implicatures” (Blakemore 1992:157). For Meyer then, a
prototypical literary work contains many weak implicatures, so that the readers
are invited to think of many propositions which are only weakly present.
Two other terms that may deserve a
previous word are those of ‘short story’ and ‘narrative modes’. And in a way
the latter will help as a tool to understand the former. It is very difficult to define ‘short story’
most of all when it is still in midst of its development. Ian Reid tell us in The Short Story that we have to start
defining ‘story’ and only then continue with ‘short’, afterwards analyse its
evolution from the tale and note the impulse Romanticism gave to the genre
acknowledging :
..that the short story typically
centres on an inward meaning of a crucial event, on sudden momentous
intuitions, ‘epiphanies’ in James Joyce’s sense of that word; by virtue of its
brevity and delicacy it can, for example, single out with special precision
those occasions when an individual is most alert or most alone (1982:28).
Reid also points out in his fifth
chapter the ‘essential qualities’ of a short story, namely: unity of
impression, moment of crisis, and symmetry of design and, what is more,
questions their essentiality. It is not our intention to go into depth on these
matters, may they interest us as much as they do, but arrive to a close
definition which we can bear in mind while carrying out our research. For this
matter we find Joyce Carol Oates’ personal definition the most relevant, being
hers the selection of stories we are to deepen in:
My personal definition of the form
is that it represents a concentration of imagination, and not an expansion, it
is no more than 10.000 words; and no matter its mysteries of experimental
properties, it achieves a closure- meaning that, when it ends, the attentive
reader understands why..[..]..Its resolution need not be a formally articulated
statement…[..]..but it signals a
tangible change of some sort; a distinct shift in consciousness, a deepening of
insight. (7) [1]
James Joyce, Ian Reid,
Joyce Carol Oates, and many others, have realized that it was conflict and the
reader’s awareness of it all, no matter if suddenly experienced in an
“epiphanic” moment or through pages of swift consciousness, that generated a
piece of literature and therefore a short story.
Helmut Bonheim through his analysis
of The Techniques of the Short Story arrived
to the conclusion that some narrative modes have been more popular in one age
than in another. Bonheim starts his first chapter saying that “Even the
shortest of story forms, the anecdote, tends to use all of the chief modes of
narrative” (1992:3) which he later defines as description, report, speech and
comment. For Bonheim these four modes are “the staple diet of the short story
and the novel” (1992:3). But not in all ages the hierarchy of modes has been
the same:
“In our age speech stands high in
the esteem of most readers. Description is thought boring except in small
doses; comment of a particular kind, namely moralistic generalizing, is almost
taboo, even where imbedded in speech; and even report is preferred in the dress
of, or at least heavily interlarded with, speech.(1992:8)
Society’s tastes during a determined
period will be reflected in its literature and the study of short stories will,
no doubt, show us the same trend. For Bonheim a short story is:
“an amalgam, usually an unbalanced
one, of the four modes : whereas Irving’s story consists of description and
comment, these modes may be absent from stories written about a century later,
such as Katherine Mansfield’s “Theft”, which contains the other two modes
almost exclusively” (1992:14).
Part II – Implicitness in a
Selection of the Short Stories in Joyce Carol Oates’ Anthology.
In our days general literature
criticism believes that the writer should intrude as little as possible in the
reader, what Joseph Warren Beach called “exit author thesis” in The Twentieth Century Novel, Studies in
Technique (1932:14), but during the 18th and 19th century this was not so. The fashion then
indicated that the author could be very explicit in his comment and therefore
the most popular modes were report and comment.
Following a chronological order in
our selection, we first find Rip Van Winkle. Irving’s last sketch of his Sketch
Book has hardly got any speech at all – except for the middle part of the story
– but a lot of comment, description and report. Irving makes use of a series of pseudonyms
which act twofold: as a twinkle to the faithful reader, who will remember his
previous publicity campaign, and as a way to give his story authenticity. The
story is supposed to have been first told by Rip Van Winkle himself, written by
D. Knickerbocker as a true story and finally discovered by Geoffrey Crayon.
This introduction may also recall Cervantes’ introduction to Don Quixote where
he intends to assure accuracy. The interference of the writer is clear and very
characteristic of the time. The story itself starts with a long description of
the Kaatskill Mountains and with the author addressing
directly the reader: “Whoever has made a voyage up the Hudson, must remember the Kaatskill
mountains. They are a dismembered branch (……) At the foot of these mountains,
the voyager may have descried the light smoke curling up from a village” (18). What
further characterises the opening of this story is that the description will
not really be relevant to the plot, what would be considered out of place in a
modern story. Irving
continues his story with a report of Rip’s character and his falling asleep to
wake up twenty years later. It is only when he wakes up that the author’s
intentions come to surface. Towards the middle of the story, here also helped
with speech, Irving
reveals that Rip has awakened being part of a Republic and not a subject of the
King of England. In his quest for identity, Rip symbolises America’s own
quest; his divorce from the past may well be America’s denial of her British
past. There are very ‘explicit’ symbols like the sign on the tavern which had
been disguised as George Washington, but could still be identified by Rip as
“the ruby face of King George, under which he had smoked so many a peaceful
pipe” (27) The story ends with one of its many samples of humour and irony: “it
is a common wish of all henpecked husband [..] that they might have a quieting
draught out of Rip Van Winkle’s flagon”.(32)
William Austin, in his Peter Rugg,
The Missing Man, makes use of a similar strategy to put forward his tale as a
letter form Jonathan Dunwell of New
York to Mr. Herman Krauff and to reassure, therefore,
its authenticity. Austin, nevertheless, alternates report with speech and
comment making his story much more ‘modern’, although it has also got a lot of
explicit symbolism. This old yarn had been long told as a nursery tale and
later was forgotten for a long time. Austin
like Irving at
the end of the story includes a “Further Account of Peter Rugg by Jonathan
Dunwell” advocating for its veracity.
Here we find out that after having been running for years to find his
home, without being successful because he had defied Nature with his cursing,
he arrives to find his house burned and its land auctioned. The story is a
parable and as Irving’s
has also to do with Time. The Further Account finishes with an “explicit”
explanation:
Then spake a voice from the crowd,
but whence it came I could not discern. “There is nothing strange here but
yourself, Mr. Rugg. Time, which destroys and renews all things, has dilapidated
your house, and placed us here. […]..Your home is gone, and you can never have
another home in this world.” (61)
Both Irving’s and Austin’s tales are
about a subject that has always fascinated men: Time, though the way they make
use of it may differ in intention and in form.
The Wives of the Dead follows the
same line, starting Hawthorne
the story addressing the reader “The following story, the simple and domestic
incidents of which may be deemed scarcely worth relating..”(63) It directly
starts informing the reader of an incident that though it may seem
insignificant it had aroused interest and for some reason or other, and one immediately
hopes for the best. The comment and
report on the part of the author will continue all through the story embedded
even in descriptions of the sort: “Her sister-in-law was of a lively and
irritable temperament, and the first pangs of her sorrow had been expressed by
shrieks and passionate lamentation.” (64) The descriptions will leave little to
the imagination of the reader and almost no implicit elements will be found
throughout the story. On the other hand, it has, as almost all Hawthorne’s stories, a lot of moral content, especially
concerning the well-natured sisters-in-law who, believing each to be the only
one to have her husband alive, behave so unselfishly as to delay telling the
other in order not to make her suffer. The author is always very present even revealing
the thoughts of the characters in the form of direct monologue “My poor sister¡
you will waken too soon from that happy dream,” thought Mary”.(68) What strikes,
for the first time in the story to the 21st century reader is the
last paragraph which leaves the final outcome open, “Before retiring, she set
down the lamp and endeavoured to arrange the bed-clothes, so that the chill air
might no do harm to the feverish slumberer. But her hand trembled against
Margaret’s neck, a tear also fell upon her cheek, and she suddenly awoke.”(68) This
paragraph also supplies an example of “implicature” with this tear that also
fell, telling us that in her anxiety the young wife had also wept. We are left
to imagine the following development of the scene leading towards the final
discovering on the part of both sisters-in-law that the other knew of their
husbands being still alive, or, as a more suspicious reader may suspect, one of two informers could not have told the
truth and the story could lead elsewhere had it been written. A final word can
be said on the last “she awoke”. Could it not have been Margaret, but Mary? She
might as well have been dreaming.
If we turn to Herman
Melville and his The Paradise of
Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids, we encounter a prose that sounds much
more familiar to the modern reader. To start with the story breaks out with an
initial “It” that the reader will not fully understand until the end of the
second long paragraph, thus violating one of Grice’s maxims, and making the reader
keep on with curiosity: “It lies not far from Temple Bar. Going to it, by the
usual way, is…” (70) The reader will also be intrigued about this ‘usual way’
which he is supposed to recognise. The technique was not very much extended in
Melville’s time and it violates Grice’s Cooperative Principle maxim “Be
perspicuous” The story is full of implicit meaning. It was the beginning of
industrialization which, as it stood, was against the incipient democratic
principles and Melville denounces it in the story. The two parts of the story
represent the two worlds: the wealthy capitalist class that produced nothing
and just lived an empty life “of quiet absorption of good living, good
drinking, good feeling and good talk” (76) – a men’s world and heaven – embodied
by the Bachelors- and the other, the maid’s world and hell which incarnate
wooing maids, young girls chained to a machine that dehumanize them and make
them as white as the paper they manufacture. With this paper the lawyers will
earn their money, bachelors will abuse maids, capitalist will control workers.
The way the story is narrated, almost as if it were two different stories, is
revolutionary for the time and indicates the gap between the two social
classes. It may even indicate a feminist defence on the part of the writer “The
girls,” echoed I glancing round at their silent forms. “Why is it, Sir, that in
most factories, female operatives, of whatever age, are indiscriminately called
girls, never women?”(89) For the bachelor that governs them women must be like
“mares haltered to the racks” and not allowed to have children or husbands that
would only disturb them. Their forms are silent, unable to fulfil their natural
development. The guide lad, Cupid, relates it all to the visitor, as if it were
joke on the part of the writer on the interrelation man/woman. The final
exclamation: “Oh¡ Paradise of Bachelors and Oh¡ Tartarus of Maids” (90) unites
both worlds in the character’s mind giving them their real importance,
realizing that the paradise he earlier praised was on account of the hell of so
many. It is what modern criticism would call an ‘epiphanic’ moment.
Edgar Allan Poe’s mad character in
the Tell-Tale Heart begins addressing in the first person the reader as if in a
conventional chat: “True¡ nervous, very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and
am; (….) You fancy me mad. Madmen know nothing. But you should have seen me.” He
will continue trying to convince the reader he is not mad and by the mere fact
of doing so and telling how he killed the poor old fellow, because he could not
get rid of the look of “his Evil Eye”, he convinces the reader of the contrary.
Poe creates the ambiance and masterly
leads the reader to the final outburst of madness by means of a continued insight
of the character’s mind. The mind of a man or a woman, we do not know because
Poe uses “I” or “me” that is driven mad by the fear of the power of an evil eye
which he finally cannot escape.
The Storm is a master piece by Kate
Chopin which leaves little for the reader to imagine. It is one of the most
explicit stories of marital deceit with a happy ending in the story of American
literature and, what is more, with no sense of treachery on the part of the
actors. “The generous abundance of her passion, without guile or trickery, was
like a white flame which penetrated and found response in depths of his own
sensuous nature that had never yet been reached”.(133) The writer goes a bit
further stating that it was her flame that penetrated him and taught him what
he still did not know. In a time, when women had to be aloof from all sexual
desire, not to say of the actual knowledge of sex, The Storm could not have been but ignored by all publishers as it
actually was. The metaphor of the storm depicts Calixta’s passion which when
put off leaves her feeling even a better wife. Both couples are explicitly told to be at ease
at the end of the story: “So the storm passed and every one was happy.”
The Yellow Paper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman may be considered the opposite of The Storm if we discuss implicitness.
There is so much implicit that still nowadays the story is being analysed and
interpreted on different levels, namely psychological, sociological or
feminist. There is a lot to be interpreted. Only some examples are cited below.
From the very beginning, the narrator names herself only with pronouns: myself,
me, one, I. This has been interpreted by many authors as
a way to disguise her identity under a veil of anonymity which could include
many other women in the same condition. When the narrator uses her name, it is
only at the end of the story and in the third person when she has become the
other woman, the one which has escaped from the yellow paper and is addressing the
husband. “I’ve got out at last,” said I, “ in spite of you and Jane.(169) She is no longer Jane, she is “I”. The yellow
paper symbolises the oppressive situation many women lived in at a time, when
post-partum depression was considered an mental illness and women were
prescribed isolation and immobility by male doctors, which many times drove them
to real madness. Gilman depicts how a woman can finally get beyond the yellow
paper defying men’s power. ”And I’ve pulled off most of the paper, so you can’t
put me back¡” Now why should that man have fainted? But he did, and right
across my path by the wall, so that I had to creep over him every time¡”(169) In
the ending to the story it is the liberated woman that speaks, even if she is
on her hands and knees, she keeps creeping over the fainted man. Her husband faints because he cannot stand
her half disobedience, or because he cannot consciously accept not having full
power. The reader must make his own conclusions.
The Middle Years by Henry James is the story of an artist, a writer who achieves high
quality art when he is about to die and cannot accept not having a further
chance to continue with it now that it was finally in his possession. “The art
had come, but it had come after everything else. At such a rate a first
existence was too short-long enough only to collect material; so that to
fructify, to use the material, one should have a second age, an extension. This
extension was what poor Dencombe sighed for.” (174) James’ personal realism,
which depicted his character’s inner experiences not merely life as seen in a
mirror, works here very well. The writer by means of the character’s inner
thoughts will keep us informed of almost everything. There is little implicit
but we are taken by the hand of the author from beginning to end. Dencombe
laments his almost lost life very early in the story foreshadowing the last
sentences ”Frustration’s only life,”
said Doctor Hugh. “Yes, it’s what passes.” Poor Dencombe was barely audible,
but he had marked with the words the virtual end of his first and only chance.”
(189) This mixture of speech and comment on the part of the writer will close
an ending which otherwise would have remained a little more open and nearer to
21st century taste.
Even more explicit is Jack London’s In a Far Country where the author in his
celebrated two first paragraphs gives the reader a lesson of good behaviour
when leaving the well-known domestic world to venture into the unknown natural
world “For the courtesies of ordinary life, he must substitute unselfishness,
forbearance, and tolerance.” Making use of report and comment Jack London will
lead the reader till the end of the story where both characters kill each other
after incurring in almost every capital sin. There is very little speech, just
some thought in the third person narrator:
Well he would have company. If
Gabriel ever broke the silence of the North, they would stand together, hand in
hand, before the great White Throne. And God would judge them, God would judge
them¡
Then Percy Cuthfert closed his eyes
and dropped off to sleep.(205)
Old Woman Magoun by Mary E. Wilkins (Freeman) has relatively more speech than report or
comment. It is a cry in favour of women and mostly coloured women. “The
weakness of the masculine element in Barry’s Ford was laid low before such
strenuous feminine assertion” (207) The
reader of the story – if not familiar with the author’s tales – will not know
but for the language used by Old Woman Magoun that she is a coloured woman.
Neither is he told that Lily is the daughter of a black woman and a white man.
It is nevertheless implicit “She’s got a
good color” said Sally Jinks…(…)…”I know she’s got a beautiful color,” replied
Old Woman Magoun, with an odd mixture of pride and anxiety, “but it comes
an’goes.” (210) The beautiful colour and the mixture of pride and anxiety
implies all the horror that lies under the life of a mulatto girl (though we
are made aware of her blondness) whose grandmother knows better than let her
grow up because she foresees an unlucky destiny in the hands of a loathsome
white father. The episode of the berries which on the way to Greenham Lily is
forbidden to eat foreshadows the final outcome as, later on, on the way back
after having been denied the adoption which could have been the only salvation,
the girl is almost induced to eat, though in a silent manner. The author does not explicitly tell us what
is in Old Woman Magoun’s mind, but she leaves it very clear with the single
sentence “Come” she said, “it is time we were going. I guess you have set long
enough.” (221) The girl has had enough poisonous berries and she will be freed
from her terrible destiny of being given away as payment for gambling debts.
While getting closer to our time in
our chronological journey through the anthology, we begin to encounter more and
more implicit literature, less comment, more speech, and increasingly more
ordinary characters who, notwithstanding, will in their quest for identity
experience what any human being is deemed to experience: conflict and a moment
of illuminating awareness. Often these characters will feel that life is an
endless abyss of nothingness. On this line Ernest Hemmingway’s A Clear Well-Lighted Place is one of the
best examples of economy of words and comment but of profound enlightening on
the eternal dichotomy between the young and fearless man and the more mature
and sadly knowledgeable man who has finally realized there is “nada : pues
nada” (299) to pray for. Hemmingway uses only two short paragraphs, the first –
a description – and a middle one, in the form of interior monologue, to give
the reader some explicit clues on the characters’ thoughts. The rest – mostly
speech – serves to depict masterly the two worlds.
In The Strength of God, Sherwood Anderson’s Presbyterian minister also
experiences this moment of sudden awareness that functions as a high-pressure
valve through which all the repressed sexuality will give way to the appearance
of God in the form of a naked school-teacher kneeling on a bed. Basically the
story contains report and comment and the repressed thoughts of the only
character. It is not until the end of the story that he addresses a second
character, George Williard, to tell him how God gave him the strength to smash
the window through which he spied the woman. But this second character will not
utter a single word in response:
“I have found the light” he cried.
“After ten years in this town, God has manifested himself to me in the body of
a woman.”…..(….)..I am delivered. Have no fear…(…) “I smashed the glass of the
window,” he cried. “Now it will have to be wholly replaced. The strength of God
was in me and I broke it with my fist”. (263)
F. Scott Fitzgerald mastered another
character-maybe because he had had the same suffering- who felt lost in the
abyss of a wasted life. An Alcoholic Case
shows two characters that though sympathising one with the other are jointly
incapable of beating death. Death appears in a corner of the room, and both the
nurse and her ‘case’ feel it. ‘..she
knew that death was in that corner where he was looking’.(309) Discouraged the
nurse will explain, the day after, to her boss ‘It’s not like anything you can
beat’ …(…)..it’s so discouraging –it’s all for nothing”.(309) Once again there
is ‘nothing and then nothing’. With the use of ‘it’ and ‘anything’, of undetermined
intrinsic meaning, the author implies that which the nurse is not able to put
into words but the reader will perfectly grasp, thus violating all of Grice’s
Cooperative Principle maxims.
William Faulkner, the most original
writer of his day, almost re-invented fiction. He’s marvellous technique
enhanced him to talk in the voices of every kind of character. In That Evening Sun the eternal tragedy of
black people in the States is shown indirectly through the voices of the
children of a white American family (its member will appear again in The Sound and the Fury published later).
Through the incoherent chattering of the smaller children and a couple of
assertions on the part of the father and Quentin, his nine-year-old daughter
and first person narrator of the story, we learn the details of a frequent case
of abuse to black women by white powerful men. Jesus, the black woman’s husband
takes revenge in the person least guilty but most accessible: Nancy, his wife. “I
just a nigger. It aint no fault of mine”.(350) Nancy’s moaning has all the tragedy implicit.
She is not to blame but just accept her fate. After leaving Nancy alone in her cabin waiting for her
destiny, Quentin’s question clears the reader’s doubts: “Who will do our
washing now, Father?” I said. The matter is already settled and now the family
has to look forward to their immediate needs, even a nine-year-old is aware of
it. Faulkner mastered the economy of words and this “who?” is not questioning
but really answering.
Richard Wright, less innovating but
as reaching, depicts in The Man who was
almost a Man another tragedy another black abuse. The reader together with
the character, a fifteen-year-old black boy, will realize simultaneously at the
time of hearing the sound of a train approaching, that the boy had been cheated
into a-two-year slavery: “Two dollars a mont.
Les see now…Tha means it’ll take bout two years. Shucks¡ Ah’ll be dam¡” (383) The
reader is left running away with the boy after catching a train “away to
somewhere, somewhere where he could be a man”.(383) Here, once more in literature, an indefinite
pronoun stands for the staple of modern society.
It is no coincidence that the first
chapter of another memorable book starts: “It goes a long way back, some twenty
years. All my life. I had been looking for something, and everywhere I turned
someone tried to tell me what it was.”(441)
This is how Battle Royal, the
first chapter of Ralph Ellison`s Invisible
Man, begins. Here we encounter another black writer, but essentially the
same character running after his identity and after success. Ellison’s
character, does not have a name, he embodies all negro boys. The story is written
in the first person singular and the reader does not have a clear picture of
the narrator but the events narrated foreshadow what fate he will suffer. The anecdote
of his grandfather will also serve as a device showing the boy the way to
follow “Grandfather had been a quiet old man who never made any trouble, yet on
his deathbed he had called himself a traitor and a spy, and he had spoken of
his meekness as a dangerous activity” (442) The remembrance will haunt him all
his life and it is explicit at the end of the chapter in the form of a dream
where his grandfather writes “Keep This Nigger-Boy Running”.(445) He
acknowledges not having at the time an “insight into its meaning”. So the
chapter starts as it finishes with a search for identity and this endless
running after self-assurance.
Human eternal quest seems to have a
tragic ending in Ray Bradbury’s Three Will
Come Soft Rains. It is a terrible future of nuclear war that mankind should
avoid. There are many interesting features in the story as personification to
describe the house’s actions, that
continues to function as if nothing had happened. The house is afraid, though, and that fright
is reasonable because the family is gone though “their images burnt in wood in
one titanic instant” (458) can yet been seen. The writer does not inform the reader
immediately of the facts but goes little by little drawing the picture. The
title of the story, the poem chosen by the house to be said –not precisely at random – parallels the story
up to the final outcome: “And no one will know of the war, not one will care at
last when it is done. No one would mind, neither bird nor tree. If mankind
perished utterly” (460) It is precisely the falling of a tree that will cause
the final disappearance of the house under the fire. Then everything collapses and leaves us one last
voice “Today is August 5,
2026, today is…”(462) and hoping it would not be premonitory.
For the last part of the anthology
Joyce Carol Oates selected several stories by contemporary writers, many of
which belong to ethnic or social minorities, that have progressively had more
and more echo in society and whose vindications are conveyed in their
literature masterly and growingly elliptically.
Leslie Marmon Silko is one of them
and Yellow Woman one of her best
stories. As many of her contemporary writers, she does not openly speak in her
literature but her message is implicit in depths in her stories. Hers is the
voice of many Native Americans and it brings up issues of personal identity,
cultural identity, and genre identity. The story is told in the first person
singular and the narrator loosens herself to gradually believe she is Yellow
Woman, part of myth and tradition and therefore free to live her sensuality
without guilty feelings. But there is much more to the story if closely
studied. With the frequent mention of dampness, heat, warmth in connection with
the narrator’s senses, the author is linking Mother Creator with her siblings. “My thigh
clung to his with dampness…[…]…I cleaned the sand out of the cracks between my
toes…[…]…I felt hungry…” (592) The land and the woman are all one, the narrator
begins to feel part of tradition too, she wonders “if Yellow Woman had known
who she was…[…]..Maybe she had another name. (493) Later Silva will tell her “ But some day they will talk about us, and
they will say “Those two lived long ago when things like that happened.” (595)
“Stella, cold, cold, the coldness of
hell” This is the beginning of Cynthia Ozick’s story The Shawl. This seven words foreshadow the hell to be lived by the
main character, Rosa , as well as depicts the
character of Stella, her condition of being terrible cold and the ultimate
reason of Rosa’s child death. The title of the story the ‘shawl’ also
functions as a symbol: it will first serve to hide Magda – Rosa’s
baby – from the Nazis and later stop her from screaming when she actually
watches the child die. In the story we first encounter coldness, naked, harsh
words but gradually the author will impregnate them with a poetic scent “All at
once Magda was swimming through the air. The whole of Magda travelled through
loftiness.” (605) The words describe the instant previous to the child’s death
against an electrified fence in a Nazi concentration camp. How else could it be
beared?
David Leavitt’s Gravity has lots implicit in the title too. Gravity is what has to
be beaten to prove human consistency. There is no direct reference to AIDS in
the story nor to HIV+ but it is very well implied as for example in the
incident of the two salesmen who refuse to shake Theo’s hand. The title is echoed in “It seemed Sylvia had
been looking a long time for something like this, something heavy enough to
leave an impression, yet so fragile it could make you sorry.” The
impression would be left, not only in Bibi but also in Theo who will
realize that – no matter what – he could still mark a difference, impose his
being and by doing so help both his mother and himself to “win some small but
sustaining victory” (745).
Today’s writer has no other choice
than to provoke with literature sudden revealing moments, epiphanies, ‘titanic
instants’ because today’s conflicts are otherwise unspeakable; perspicuousness
too flat.
Perspicuous writing is also too
limited for Sandra Cisneros. Her stories, almost poems, are like photographed
instants, exquisite life portraits that elliptically tell us about Latino
community in North America and its terrible
circumstances. A house of My Own for
example, consists of only two paragraphs, one of them only a sentence “Only a
house quiet as snow, a space for myself to go, clean as paper before the poem”.
(749) and yet encompassing so many “weak implicatures”.
Finally, a word on Heat: our author’s own contribution to
her anthology. Oates expresses in the foreword to the story that “For the
author, the formal challenge of Heat
was to present a narrative in a seemingly acausal manner, analogous to the
playing of a piano sans pedal, as if
each paragraph, or chord, were separate from the rest” (607). She thoroughly accomplishes
the challenge. As J. Alan Rice noted in
his detailed study Chord Structure in
Joyce Carol Oates’ “Heat” (1995), Oates “means that the narrative has been
pared down to its essentials”. Her intention being to diminish it gradually
until it is understood as unique notes “without sustaining notes from one chord
to another” asserts Rice. “But the most important aspect of the structure of
“Heat” is that the final chord, that which the story is about, is missing.” Once again how could something as despairing as
the raping and murder of two girls else be told?
Conclusion
The success of a piece of literature
is parallel to its success in reaching each and every reader. The best way to do it will depend on the
artist’s expertise and sensibility. There are no predetermined rules and the
history of literature endorses it, but, many times, to convey meaning on part
of the writer or to apprehend it on part of the reader is no easy task; it
implies alertness on both sides. In
Joyce Carol Oates’ own words: “Because the meaning of the story does not lie on
its surface, visible and self-defining, does not mean that meaning does not
exist. Indeed, the ambiguity of meaning, its inner, private quality, may well
be part of the writer’s vision.” (8)
From the 18th century up
to our days storytelling has experienced notable changes. Far back in time have
the parables with moralistic comment been discarded. Detailed description and
lengthy report have also suffered a continuous metamorphosis evolving to more
and more succinct speech, at times only images, the meaning of which the reader
is merely invited to seize.
Notwithstanding this evolution,
nothing is definite. Storytelling is a long winding road; a multi-dimensional
road along which Society can trek, develop, progress and be substantially
represented while led in its eternal quest for identity.
Works Cited
Beach, Joseph Warren. The Twentieth Century Novel: Studies in
Technique. New York.
The Century Co., 1932.
Bonheim, Helmut. The Narrative Modes: Techniques of the Short
Stories. Cambridge.D.S. Brewer. 1992
Grice, H.P. Pragmatics: A reader. Oxford
University Press. 1991.
Meyer, Jim. What is Literature? A Definition Based on Prototypes. Work Papers
of the Summer Institute of Linguistics. University of North Dakota.
41: [33-42].1997.
Oates, Joyce Carol. The Oxford
Book of American Short Stories. Oxford
& New York
: Oxford University Press. 1994.
Reid, Ian. The Short Story. Methuen & Co. Ltd. New York. 1982.
Sent from Argentina : October 18 2019 Received : November 04 2019 Cover : Julien Blaine : Rep. éléphant 306 , 1962 Photo : Henry Ely / Inculding : Enzo Minarelli , John M. Bennett , Julien Blaine , Akenaton : Philippe Castellin et Jean Torregrosa , Bartolomé Ferrando , Clemente Padin , Giovanni Fontana , Hugo Ball , Bernard Heidsieck , Fernando Aguiar , Chiara Mulas , Anna Banana , Bill Picasso Gaglione , J.M. Calleja , Szkarosi Endre , … T.A.C. 42.292 Guy Bleus Archives : Silvio De Gracia / Hotel Dada Magazine / Argentina : # 000 013
DOCUMENTACIÓN:
PRODUCTOS
GRÁFICOS: MEDIOS IMPRESOS Y ELECTRÓNICOS EN ARTE POR CORRESPONDENCIA
El presente artículo es continuación de la edición
Número 118 – Agosto 2009, http://revista.escaner.cl/node/1454, dedicado a los Productos Gráficos: Medios Impresos y
Electrónicos en Arte por Correspondencia. Reseñaremos ejemplos adicionales
enviados a Postdata, clasificados como Productos paraeditoriales o ediciones periódicas y Productos extraeditoriales o Impresos editoriales
heterogéneos; que promueven la
utilización alternativa de formatos, procesos de producción gráfica y tecnologías
en la comunicación de arte por correspondencia.
Productos
paraeditoriales o ediciones periódicas
Heterogénesis,[1] Revista de Artes Visuales, es una
edición cultural periódica, miembro del Seminario Latinoamericano del
Departamento de Filosofía e Historia de las Ideas, Universidad de Lund, Suecia;
dedicada en el ejemplar del Año XII – Nr 45 – Octubre de 2003, a la temática
del Mail Art y encomendada a Elías Adasme, Networker y artista Chileno
residenciado en Puerto Rico quién trabajó como director invitado, incluyendo
artículos sobre Poesía Visual, Xerografía, Performance, Critica de Arte y Arte
Correo, entre los cuales mencionamos los siguientes: Arte Correo en
Latinoamérica: una apuesta por la utopía (Elías Adasme), Funtastic United
Nations: Por una creativa desglobalización de las culturas (Vittore Baroni), De
la alquimia del verbo a la estructura como crítica y metalenguaje (Jorge Solís
Arenazas), Conversación en red entre 2G´s (Gianni Simone y Guido Vermeulen), El
Arte Correo en el marco de la globalización (Clemente Padin), La globalización
de la utopia (Silvio de Gracia c/o Hotel DaDA), Arte postal y la poesía
experimental (Klaus Groh), Arte Postal – Células Cerebrales – Fractal (Ryosuke
Cohen), Xerografía: un recurso del arte postal en tiempo de globalización (Hugo
Pontes), Poesía Visual o el juego de las definiciones (César Reglero) y Arte
correo y poesía visual en México: una práctica todavía corrosiva (César
Espinosa).
Referiremos apartes de este último artículo, por:
«César Horacio Espinosa Vera, Mexicano, escritor, docente, poeta visual.
Creó y ha sido coorganizador de las Bienales Internacionales de Poesía Visual y
Experimental (1985-2009). Autor de libros y ensayos sobre poesía, arte,
política cultural y comunicación, uno de ellos en coautoría con Araceli Zúñiga
-La Perra Brava. Arte, y crisis políticas culturales, del cual una selección de
textos aparece en Ediciones Especiales, Escáner
Cultural.»[2]
Espinosa Vera, plantea una cronología de las prácticas
artísticas culturales que desde los años 70 y hasta mediados de los años
ochenta del siglo XX, se manifiestan como dos tendencias que aún hoy,
permanecen según sus palabras, […] «en estado subrepticio, disidente,
clandestino, a pesar de que cuentan con hondas raíces históricas y en su
desarrollo atravesó por todas las «vanguardias clásicas» en el mundo:
el arte-correo y la poesía visual»,[3] como propuestas de comunicación
paralela a la producción artística reconocida por el circuito de
críticos-galerías-instituciones en México y extensivamente en Latinoamérica.
[…] «En torno al primero, entre otras numerosas
definiciones existentes, cabe apuntar: Sería el arte-correo el que acabaría con
el privilegio desmitificador del «aura» del original al reproducir
masivamente, al sustraer el arte de la crítica, al demoler las contradicciones,
al democratizar la creación, al desregionalizarse como tránsito libre por el
mundo, al conciliar códigos, símbolos, grafismos, al crear interferencias
visuales hasta la saturación, al preparar la irreverencia paradiscursiva de los
«Paralamas del acontecimiento». [4]
[…] «Desde sus inicios el arte-correo ofrecía
los siguientes atributos, aún vigentes en lo básico:
I. Se trata de un diálogo a larga distancia, entre
personas que probablemente nunca llegarán a conocerse ni a intercambiar
palabras a viva voz. Esto rompe los parroquialismos, la estrechez de miras,
permite conocer otra circunstancia y otra problemática. Nutre la comprensión y
la solidaridad.
II. Correlativamente, se trata de un diálogo político,
ideológico, por la propia naturaleza del sistema. En cuanto sistema de
comunicación se interesa más por los problemas vivenciales y las circunstancias
de actualidad que por preocupaciones eminentemente formales y estilísticas. Si
bien posibilita desfogues escapistas, siempre significa una práctica ajena a
los códigos académicos o del mercado, lo cual favorece las capacidades de
autoexpresión como uno de los de los potenciales más productivos y corrosivos
del circuito. Esta característica resultó de especial importancia para enfrentarse
a regímenes dictatoriales, como los vividos en Latinoamérica, o sistemas
cerrados como los del «socialismo real».
III. Origina un proceso de descentralización
artística, cuando desde cada aldea o provincia se pueden enviar mensajes
creativos y ser conocidos o transmitidos hacia una multiplicidad de lugares, en
contraposición a los «centros» rectores del arte implantados desde la
segunda posguerra, donde una trama de galerías, museos, críticos y marchands
controla un cerrado aparato de mercadeo y «prestigio» que se
enseñorea sobre el arte universal. Con el arte postal deja de haber
«marginados» en la expresión y muestreo artísticos. Esto se potencia
ahora en los tiempos de Internet y el correo-electrónico».[5]
Periódico. Festival de la Interferencia, In Memoriam «Edgardo Antonio Vigo»
La publicación en formato Periódico que lleva por
título, Festival de la Interferencia, [6] Impreso por In situ Press, Estación
de Diseño y Producción Gráfica, reporta el encuentro Internacional de Arte de Acción,
realizado en las ciudades de Junín, Pergamino y Rosario del 25 al 29 de Abril
de 2007, organizado por Silvio De Gracia, In Memoriam «Edgardo Antonio
Vigo»; xilógrafo, pionero del Arte Correo argentino, artista conceptual,
del performance, poeta experimental, constructor de objetos, entre otros. Esta
edición realizada bajo el concepto editorial de impresión por demanda, es
decir, de tiraje limitado, como opción a las dinámicas comerciales del
periódico tradicional, órgano informativo cultural citadino que despliega
noticias de interés general.
El documento detalla el oficio curatorial de De
Gracia, incluyendo participantes que ejercen a la vez como artistas de acción y
corresponsales eventuales practicando indirectamente labores relativas al
oficio del periodismo, utilizando los géneros periodísticos o formas literarias
de manera informativa, de opinión e interpretativa; con artículos como: La
estética de la Perturbación (Silvio De Gracia), Los tejidos de la Performace
(Richard Martel), fragmentos de textos históricos de E.A. Vigo, de 1971, publicado
originalmente en la revista Hexágono’71, La Plata 1972, denominado, «La
Calle: Escenario del Arte Actual» y el titulado: «Un Arte
Contradictorio» (Declaración de 1968-69), adicionalmente, «La
performance desde la perspectiva Latinoamérica» por Clemente Padin.
Respecto al género periodístico literario que
corresponde a los editoriales y artículos de opinión, citaremos apartes del
editorial introductorio del periódico en cuestión y, por otro lado, un extracto
de la correspondencia electrónica con el autor del presente ensayo que expone
entre otras cosas los marcados intereses de, De Gracia, por la estética de la
perturbación o la interferencia, directrices a partir de las cuales concibe,
escribe y promociona sus eventos:
[…] «Pensemos que la interferencia es una
suerte de revulsión. Una revulsión que se produce en el artista y que se
exterioriza para buscar un interlocutor que, al menos de manera fugaz, tome el
riesgo de abstraerse del disciplinamiento social que se ha instituido en la
cotidianidad. Sacudir la inercia de la trivialización de los comportamientos
humanos es el objetivo. Pero esto no es para transformar la realidad, sino tan
sólo para crearle fisuras, abrirle intersticios, y «parasitarle» su
tejido racional y restrictivo. ¿Qué mejor forma de lograr esto que a partir de
la perturbación que se opera por las más diversas vías y estrategias: la
irreverencia, la ironía, la intromisión, la agresión, la apuesta lúdica, el
extrañamiento, la sorpresa, el delirio, el absurdo y toda forma posible de arte
insurreccional.»[7]
[…] «Te comento rápidamente que el eje
curatorial son las acciones urbanas (intervenciones, performances,
interferencias) que ejerzan algún tipo de efecto perturbador sobre la
cotidianidad… He apuntado a acciones que juegan en los bordes entre la
documentación y la videoperformance… pero en todos los casos se trata de
obras que han sido pensadas y desarrolladas en el espacio público con una
intencionalidad desestabilizadora…»[8]
Por otro lado y desde el contexto del producto
paraeditorial lo anterior connota un particular uso de este tipo de publicación
alternativa, no sujeta al acotamiento y en casos peores a la censura total del
comité editorial de turno de los medios tradicionales del periodismo local o
regional, aún el cultural, delimitado por las tendencias y políticas interinas,
que se yuxtaponen en este caso a un ejercicio periodístico alternativo, creando
«interferencias» al posibilitar de manera directa el análisis y el
ejercicio de libre opinión contribuyendo por otra parte a establecer parámetros
críticos por fuera de los intereses de la crítica de oficio, sujeta y
manipulada a su vez por los intereses económicos del oficialismo del arte
transnacional.
Productos extraeditoriales o
impresos editoriales heterogéneos.
Según Tena Parera, están conformados por un extenso grupo heredados del libro y de los
impresos editoriales periódicos; divididos a su vez por subgrupos según su uso
social en impresos eventuales, de presentación e identificación, de correspondencia,
administración, para el envase, embalaje y expedición, de información comercial
e industrial, papeles de valor, de fantasía, publigrafía y cartografía.
El Catálogo, es un impreso de información comercial e
industrial, en forma de folleto,
listando referencias, valores y descripciones sintetizadas de productos y
servicios. En arte, un catálogo se diseña de manera similar pero el objetivo
principal es el de promocionar obras plásticas o audiovisuales, con un marcado
acento en el diseño gráfico experimental, lo fotográfico como registro de obra,
una reseña crítica presentando el artista o colectivo y la imagen de identidad
institucional quién a manera de patrocinador presenta de forma temporal o
permanente una exposición, un evento, un proyecto, un certamen, etc.
En Arte Postal, generalmente un catálogo se compone de
una presentación introductoria institucional, una reseña critica o teoría sobre arte postal autorreferencial, de un directorio de artistas clasificados por
países y participantes, incluyendo la dirección postal, la dirección
electrónica y una selección de obras postales; utilizando diversos medios y
formatos para su publicación como el Offset, la xerografía, el afiche o póster,
la hoja carta, el acetato, la postal, el sobre-catalogo y la multimedia como
documentación del evento.
Ambassadors of the Artists Republic, International
Mail Art, Exhibitions & Conferences,[9] es el título del catálogo enviado
por el artista postal francés, Rémy Penard, documentando el acto protocolario
de la fundación de «La República de Artistas», tema de convocatoria
que sustentó además las exposiciones itinerantes de Arte Postal, video
conferencias y el taller sobre Sellos de Artista realizados en bibliotecas y
centros culturales, en la que se solicitó a los artistas postales que
manifestarán en sus mensajes que entendían por el concepto de «República
de Artistas». La siguiente nota de prensa incluida en el catálogo da
cuenta del acta de conformación redactada por sus autores.
«En noviembre de 1999, tres artistas de la región
de Limoges, Francia, el escultor Pierre Digan, el pintor Eugéne Chabreuil y el
Artista Postal Remy Pénard, se encuentran en un restaurante en el sitio
denominado como «El Campo de las Esculturas» (Le Pre aux Sculptures)
en el Lavergne cerca a St.-Martin-Chateau en el departamento de Creuse y
decidieron fundar una «República de Artistas» en ese lugar y
puntualmente se proclamaron sus embajadores. Los fundadores de esta
autodenominada «república» se amueblaron con los mismos medios para comunicarse
que el mundo del Mail Art, por correo, fax, e-mails y la red de manera tal que
contactaron mas de 1200 artistas de 54 países para fomentar los intercambios
con artistas internacionales en este terreno, Creuse, situado en el centro de
los intercambios de Francia, un lugar encantado en un mundo desencantado. Esta
parcela de 40 hectáreas, es frecuentemente visitada por artistas y será
inaugurada oficialmente el 14 de julio de 2000″.[10]
Aprovecho esta oportunidad para actualizar mi
declaración y/o participación que en esa ocasión fue de índole poética visual,
contestando a la pregunta ¿Qué opina usted del significado de una
«República de Artistas»?.
Rastreando algunos conceptos originales circulados en
la red de arte postal que oscilan entre la utopía y la realidad, entre otros el
de: «The Eternal Network» (Robert Filliou), «Funtastic United
Nations» (Vittore Baroni – Permario Cianni), o la siguiente frase citada
en el proyecto Web de Matt Ferranto, «mail art in not an artistic island.
it is a cultural peninsula», http://www.spareroom.org/mailart/mailart.html[11] encontramos de forma análoga enunciados que
expresan en su sintaxis experiencias de interacción relacionadas con ciertas
nociones y a la vez convenciones asignadas al concepto de territorio, nación,
sistema o red, al de cultura, prácticas artísticas, entre otras.
Adjetivos como eterna, divertimento fantástico,
unidad, artístico, cultural, califican a ideas de sistema o entidades como
Network (red de trabajo), naciones, isla, península, artistas y por extensión
al de «República», construcciones mentales que se enlazan para
connotar experiencias que emergen de la ficción o simulación de la realidad
como aspiración cultural de una interacción ética en un entorno sin
exclusiones.
Estas regiones imaginarias no son para nada una idea
utópica, es por tanto la confirmación de la sentida necesidad de establecer un
limite en algún territorio del planeta donde no halla división de clases y
exista más bien un consenso de valores, política, credo, costumbres y prácticas sociales, moral, etc.;
es decir, una confluencia cultural de actividades y correspondencia real sin
censura.
Portada Catálogo, Ambassadors of the Artist Republic. Rémy Pénard
Históricamente, el arte y sus ejecutores han creado e ideado en aras de revolucionar la institucionalidad artística un estanco donde discutir, proponer u oponer dialécticamente conceptos que debatieran el significado y la finalidad del arte mediante asociaciones, manifiestos, istmos, movimientos de vanguardia, neo vanguardia, siempre en constante secesión, debate, mutación y diálogo. La fundación de una «República de Artistas» autónoma, controvierte desde el punto de vista del Mail Art las características de «Tierra de Nadie» propia del arte oficial, una institución que termina por segregar a la gran mayoría, que no cumple por insuficiente su cometido, siempre corta de espacio, de presupuesto, ideología, política cultural, dependiente de viciados iconos y obras maestras para imponer su institucionalidad, que crea apartheid (Art is Apartheid)[12], segregación cultural, debido a lo pretendidamente hermético de su sistema, delimitando sus actividades a lo que el presupuesto o las partidas de dinero oficial, los fondos públicos, la empresa privada o los fieles mecenas les asignen para remozar y revivir su imagen cultural y paliar la agonía económica año tras año, exceptuando claro está, a las instituciones del primer mundo, que brillan por su inteligente administración y su gigantesca red de marketing consolidándose gracias a su bien calculado y estratégico negocio, sustentado por grupos de poder, accionistas, coleccionistas clásicos y el devoto público a quién no le queda otro remedio que consumir arte por nostalgia o por que el principio de realidad no le permite producirlo.
Como ilustración de lo anterior, presentaremos las
tarjetas postales clasificadas como impresos para la correspondencia, enviadas por Stephen Perkins,[13] artista postal
norteamericano activo en la red de arte postal desde 1984. Sus tarjetas nos
saludan con mensajes conceptuales directos y explícitos a la manera de un
retro-futurismo, como los siguientes: «museo de nada», «museo de
sueños», museo de desacuerdos», «museo de injusticias»,
«museo de lamentos», «un día sin artistas» o
«manteniendo mi respiración por la
paz», cuestionando el «Packaging
cultural», en relación con el punto décimo del manifiesto futurista
(Marinetti, 1909).[14]
Mapa Región. República de Artistas. Creuse-Francia. Rémy Pénard. Postcard. Eugénes Chabreuil & Rémy Pénard. Ambassadors of the Artists Republic at Vedéo Conférence of Mail Art Library Ussel – France (oct.02). Photo: Georges Chatain Museum of Dreams (Museo de Sueños) – Tarjeta Postal. Stephen Perkins. USA 2008 Museum of nothing (Museo de nada) – Tarjeta postal. Stephen Perkins.USA. 2008Museum of disappointments (Museo de desilusiones) – Tarjeta postal. Stephen Perkins.USA. 2008Museum of sin (Museo de culpa) – Tarjeta postal. Stephen Perkins. USA. 2008Museum of Regrets (Museo de lamentos) – Tarjeta Postal. Stephen Perkins. USA. 2008.A day without artista (Un día sin artistas) – Tarjeta postal. Stephen Perkins. USA. 2008Holding my breath for peace (Conteniendo el aliento por la paz)– Tarjeta postal. Stephen Perkins. USA. 2008Tarjeta postale. Stephen Perkins. USA. 2008
Yuxtapuesto al paradigma museo, presentamos el modelo conocido como EMMA, siglas de, The Electronic Museum of Mail Art,[15] cuyo director y guía es Chuck Welch conocido como Crackerjack Kid, escritor, artista postal, activo participante como trabajador de la red desde 1978. En 1985, Welch auto produce su libro «Networking Currents», permaneciendo como una publicación pionera acerca de los temas, problemas y la evolución de los artistas postales como Networkers (Obreros de la red); […] «analiza lo que denomina «Mail Art» como una forma de trabajo en red, y de esta forma lo que quiere extraer de cualquier contexto artístico que pudiera contaminar el proceso creativo de comunicación y del espíritu de comunidad que lo caracteriza.»[16] En enero de 1995, The University of Calgary Press, Calgary, Alberta, Canada; pública la edición denominada «Eternal Network: A Mail Art Anthology»,[17] la primera publicación editorial universitaria que explora las raíces históricas, la estética, y las nuevas direcciones del Mail Art contemporáneo en ensayos con referencias a prominentes artistas postales en los cinco continentes.
Podemos reseñar además desde EMMA los siguientes
aspectos claves de esta publicación antológica que dan cuenta de su producción
y pensamiento: el cuarto capítulo del libro ilustrado, examina el libre
intercambio y colaboraciones de la comunidad internacional para quienes los
buzones y los computadores reemplazan el museo, donde la dirección es el arte y
donde «el arte postal no son las bellas artes, es el artista quién es
bueno, excelente, fino, bello, etc.; «Whose mailboxes and computers replace
the museum, where the address is the art, and where «mail art is not fine
art, it is the artist who is fine» [18]
El libro presenta numerosas fotografías de artefactos
posteados, eventos performáticos, congresos, hojas de estampillas de artistas (Artistamps),
afiches, collages, libros de artista, poesía visual, arte computarizado,
revistas de arte postal, arte de la copia (Copy Art) e imágenes de sellos de
caucho artísticos; dividido en seis partes: Orígenes del Networking, Estética
abierta, Nuevas direcciones, Interconexión de mundos, Problemas comunicativos y
Reinos etéreos. Los apéndices incluyen direcciones de correo, exposiciones de
arte postal, un listado y locaciones de cerca de 350 revistas subterráneas de
arte postal y una comprensiva memoria de archivos internacionales públicos y
privados.
Eternal Network: A Mail Art Anthology Book,1995. The University of Calgary Press, Calgary, Alberta, Canada.[19]
Welch define a EMMA como el primer museo buzón electrónico donde la
dirección es el arte, la red es la clave y la entrada es libre, («EMMA is
mail art’s first electronic mail box museum where the address is the art, the
web is your key, and admission is free»)[20]
Los objetivos de EMMA son:
1. Introducir las comunidades de mail Art electrónico
y de superficie (Snail Mail Art) a cualquiera.
2. Desarrollar el concepto de e-mail Art o arte correo electrónico a través de
vínculos activos de correspondencia electrónica y Web sites.
3. Animar la interactividad del arte por correspondencia
electrónica a través de visitas dentro de las salas, galerías y librerías de
EMMA.
4. Promover el intercambio de imágenes. Los objetivos
de EMMA reflejan los esfuerzos en proceso para contactar las comunidades de
arte postal por fuera y por dentro del trabajo de vínculos en red a distancia o
Telenetlink [20] por correo electrónico y actualizando el directorio de
correspondencia electrónica.
Chuck Welch conocido como Crackerjack Kid, escritor, artista postal USA
Como contrapartida, el modelo de museo buzón
electrónico reduce la mega estructura del museo físico a su mínima expresión al
cambiar el arquetipo descomunal de su performance arquitectónica,
administrativa y comunicativa, por un espacio virtual, inmaterial, que aloja,
actualiza y distribuye la información gracias a la existencia del ciberespacio.
Los modelos se trastocan, museo, por museo buzón en
red, descentralizado, comunitario, global; la dirección es declarada arte, es
la entrada, el acceso libre a los datos del arte, con esto, se pasa de un
archivo de átomos, de costosa manutención, exhibición y alojamiento por un archivo
de proporciones binarias suspendido en discos rígidos diseminados y
direccionados por el planeta en servidores como esculturas tecnológicas
transitadas.
Esto es, comparativamente, los muros, las superficies,
los accesos, salas y volúmenes, etc.; son minimizados en clusters, micro
superficies distribuidas en discos rígidos, respaldo de la arquitectura
informática, programática y algorítmica que aloja las manifestaciones del arte
electrónico por correspondencia.
Por medio del diseño, la semiótica y la señalética visual, las interfaces gráficas nos dan acceso, lectura y tránsito a la red, cruce inmaterial por donde transitan los Cyber Networkers, con sus alias (nicknames), contraseñas (passwords) camino a sus buzones (mailbox), navegando a través de recursos nativos electro digitales como el hipertexto y la hipermedia para comunicar la tele correspondencia y agitar el intercambio de arte postal en red.
Compartimos las imágenes documentales de la importante donación de Mail Art de Ibirico, César Reglero y Valdor; y la firma de los contratos con la UCLM. Gracias de nuevo por su confianza en nosotros.
El Museo Internacional de Electrografía, Centro de Innovación en Arte y Nuevas Tecnologías (MIDECIANT) de la Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha (UCLM) amplía sus fondos con 5,000 piezas y miles de documentos complementarios del movimiento Mail Art de los artistas Ibirico, Reglero. y Valdor Con esta donación, este centro de la universidad regional amplía hasta más de 9.000 trabajos permanentes de arte electrográfico y digital. Las colecciones de Mail Art de los artistas César Reglero, Antonio S. Ibirico y Salvador Benincasa se agregarán a la colección del Museo Internacional de Electrografía, Centro de Innovación en Arte y Nuevas Tecnologías (MIDECIANT) de la Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha. (UCLM) Tras el acuerdo firmado hoy en el Campus de Cuenca por el Vicerrector de la institución académica, Manuel Villasalero, y los donantes de esta colección de alrededor de 5.000 piezas y miles de documentos complementarios.
El Museo Internacional de Electrografía, Centro de Innovación en Arte y Nuevas Tecnologías (MIDECIANT) de la Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha (UCLM) amplía sus fondos con 5,000 piezas y miles de documentos complementarios del movimiento Mail Art de los artistas Ibirico, Reglero. y Valdor Con esta donación, este centro de la universidad regional amplía hasta más de 9.000 trabajos permanentes de arte electrográfico y digital. Las colecciones de Mail Art de los artistas César Reglero, Antonio S. Ibirico y Salvador Benincasa se agregarán a la colección del Museo Internacional de Electrografía, Centro de Innovación en Arte y Nuevas Tecnologías (MIDECIANT) de la Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha. (UCLM) Tras el acuerdo firmado hoy en el Campus de Cuenca por el Vicerrector de la institución académica, Manuel Villasalero, y los donantes de esta colección de alrededor de 5.000 piezas y miles de documentos complementarios.
Participan
en la organización por AMAE:Ibirico Saez Ibirico y Ana Herrero y por parte del Taller del Sol: Isabel
Jover, Myriam Muriel Mercader Varela, Manel Antoli y Cesar Reglero Campos …como enterrador Domingo Sánchez Blanco (Director del Mausoleo)…La romeria contó con la
asistencia de los habitantes de Morille y con los participantes del Festival PAN… En este reportaje queremos
reflejar lo que fue un enterramiento
histórico dentro de este movimiento considerado por los especialistas el más
masivo de la historia. La convocatoria llevaba como subtitulo: Mail Art ¿Muerte
o Resurrección? Fue un acto con muchos matices y pequeños detalles que merecen
ser relatados y que así se hará en próximos capítulos. Nuestro agradecimiento a
César, y Mercedes, a «Pequeño Poni» y a , Manuel
Ambrosio Sánchez Sánchez, alcalde de Morille.
(*) 210
participantes; 350 obras; 33 países representados.
Dentro del encuentro transfronterizo: Vilarelhos (Alfândega da Fé) y Morille (PAN 2019: XVII edición) / Encuentro y Festival transfronterizo de Poesía, Patrimonio y Arte de Vanguardia en el Medio Rural. Tuvo lugar otro enterramiento y performance fotográficao de homenaje al gran hippolyte bayard y a todos los grandes fotógrafos (as) olvidados por la historia. Al frente del proyecto, y comandando la delegación lusa, Renato Roque, quien con esta fotografía de su autoría fue capaz de hermanar ambos eventos.
Como no podía ser de otra forma, rendimos merecido homenaje a Brain Cell y Ryosuke Cohen por su contribución a lograr que el mail art tenga una dimensión cósmica.(Fotografía de Renato Roque
Esta obra de Ibirico Saez Ibirico fué una las obras emblemáticas de esta convocatoria. Y el excelente fotógrafo Renato Roque supo recoger un instante mágico, justamente el momento en que CRC explicaba que a través de esta obra se podía llegar a la otra dimensión del arte correo, la que está más allá del espacio y del tiempo…y para alli viajan las 350 obras..
Las obras ya viajan hacia otras galaxias
Un momento trascendente fue sin duda cuando se depositaron las obras en el OVNI con el fin de que, en una nueva dimensión, pudieran disfrutar de una nueva y larga vida. Por supuesto, fueron los niños los primeros que entendieron la importancia del momento y los primeros que quisieron conectar con los habitantes de oras galaxias.
El arcángel y la amazona constituyeron dos figuras claves en este encuentro de entronque del mail art con las fuerzas cósmicas, porque no hay constelación ni nebulosa, ni sol ni planeta, en todas las profundidades del espacio ilimitado que no se comuniquen entre si y este es, sin duda, el destino del mail art dentro del universo. El arcángel y la amazona fueron los intermediarios que transportaron nuestros deseos a través del espacio infinito.(Fotografías de Jose Luis Romero Villar
Enterramiento
Final. Algunas de las obras enviadas tienen una historia detrás, y un trabajo
de diseño laborioso y muy detallista. Es el caso de la obra de Maya
Lopez Muro, que,
con su sello de caucho, certificó con acuse de recibo esta convocatoria.
Algunos aspectos de la exposición previa al enterramiento. Empezando por el registro estampado enviado por Maya Lopez Muro y materializado en el Ayuntamiento de Morille. El sello conmemorativo diseñado por Maya fue donado al alcalde.y al museo mausoleo.
Muchas
gracias a Ana Herrero por el montaje de las secuencias.
Certificado de defunción que fue enterrado a cada participante
El blog de Myriam M. Mercader 