Evolit: Week 11--Convergence? Divergence?

I've been thinking a lot about Paul's groups' Thursday discussion of Hustvedt.  Over the course of the class I completely changed my mind about the nature of the novel and I thought that it was great that thinking and discussing in a group like that could fo this for me.  Initially I proposed that the novel might be Hustvedt's process of examining and dealing with her own father's death, that through writing the novel she could process her own life and heal from the death.  But as the class continued to discuss we came to a place of thinking more about the novel as Hustvedt's attempt to warn against such looking back in order to deal with significant and tragic happenings in our lives.  We thought that in writing the novel and using her father's diary as the raw material for a good chunk of the book was her way of showing the reader that what is productive is not looking back but taking the elements of that past and moving forward to do something new with what has happened to you. While Hustvedt did this literally with physical evidence of her memory and experience, I do think that she is more generally encouraging us to take our traumatic experiences and move forward from them and with them. 

Reading Sorrows of an American was a nice departure from the more dense texts we have read thus far. I enjoyed reading Sorrows, but I was also annoyed at times. I often felt that the characters in the novel were being whiny and melodramatic, especially towards the end. I can definitely see a connection between Sorrows and Whitman as both are highly related to the unconscious. Whitman writes in a style that attempts to recreate unconscious experience while Hustvedt borrows a lot from psychology regarding psychoanalysis, dreams, associations, and therapy to bring some light to the unrconscious experience of different characters in the novel. For instance, Erik's dreams and Miranda's drawings bring a lot of their unconscious feelings to the forefront ... perhaps even Lane's photography and Lisa's dolls. I was also puzzled by the title when I first started reading the novel, but after finding out it was named after another novel about a man's unrequited love it makes sense and reflects a bit of Erik's storyline.

I really like the novel The Sorrows of an American.  It's different from many things I've read before, and is definetely something I'd recommend to other people.  We talked in our small sessions about whether or not the narrator was left ambigious on purpous or not at the beginning... but thinking about it, I wonder if it was on accident.  People often write things knowing exactly what they are going to say and knowing almost everything about the characters.  So Hustvedt may have accidentally left out the knowladge that the narrator was a man, leaving the "reveal" on page 8 to be surprising to the reader.  Hustvedt may have realized this and not changed it, or because she knew that the narrator would be male all along, did not change it because she did not realize what she had done.

While reading Sorrows Of An American, most of us confused the narrator to be a female instead of a male ... intentional on the author's part ? ... skhemka

It is possible we all thought the character was a female at first because of the assimilation with his sister at the beginning of the book and maybe also since the writer is a woman, the main character might be “thinking like a woman” ... amirbey [14]

What made him sound feminine? The fact that he was so observant of other's feelings. Or the way he talked about his dead father, his mother, his sister, and his worrying of his niece ... aybala50 [15]

The Sorrows of an American is an absorbing novel, however I do not understand why Hustvedt’s narrative should be taken seriously in an academic discussion. Maybe Erik will answer my question in the final scene by closing the gap between past and present ... How do we get from Whitman, one of the most influential American poets, to Hustvedt? Both are examples of realism in literature, but there is still 150 years missing from the evolution of the self ... Lisa B [16]

This weekend I went to see the Cezanne and Beyond exhibit at the Museum of Art in Philadelphia. I'd never studied Cezanne before and I was struck by the way that his paintings seemed realistic at first glance, but the longer I stood and stared at them, the more they seemed ambiguous and slightly unreal. There's always something "a little bit off" about his paintings that make them intriguing and confusing ... I feel the same way about Hustvedt's novel, especially as I neared the end ... it's realistic but there's always something "a little bit off" ... it's easy enough to relate it in some ways to Whitman's work: bits and pieces of a man's life, strung together, and not necessarily related, but describing a sort of general overall theme or feeling. However, what is definitely unclear to me is how this novel is more significant than any other recent novel ... sbechdel [17]

I have found myself in several classes, including this one, asking myself “why this book?, isn’t there a better example out there?” ... It’s interesting to see unconscious thought, like from Leaves of Grass, weaved into a story with a distinct plot line. This immediately made me think of our discussions of evolution. I like Hustevedt’s writing and reading the character’s jumbled, stream-of-consciousness thoughts. I think its much more useful than Whitman’s purely stream-of-consciousness writing, but in this example Whitman was an ancestor of Hustvedt. The “trait” or idea of stream-of-conscious writing was refined and incorporated or “passed down” into a new type of story ... eolecki [18]

In this way, [Sorrows] seems utterly unlike Leaves of Grass or the unconscious. The poem might not have had a traditional structure, but it was always moving. The characters in the novel, on the other hand, seem stuck in isolation ... kbrandall [19]

I ... found the mixture of unconscious thought and consciouness to be very interesting ... there is a great deal more conscious organized thought than there was in Leaves of Grass, but there is also a randomness of order ... it jumps from a later entry into the father's diary to the narrators current time frame then back to the father's diary but to an even earlier time period within that time frame. It makes things a little more confused and jumbled, much like the initial impression of the unconscious thought ... enewbern [20]

We had traced Erik's individual history back with him until the final conclusion that perhaps his subconscious and his conscious were all results of this convergence of three individuals (two who came before him and himself), resulting in the individual he is ... ibarkas [19]

The problem with creating a class about cultural evolution is that there is not just one track to follow-- there are a lot of branches on the tree of cultural evolution too ... Maybe the best way would be to demonstrate the way the class itself evolves when it is given a story and then split up and asked to retell it seperately and then to tell the retold story to different other groups ... lewilliams [21]

I find it rather interesting that in the first half of this course, everyone thought Darwin was boring and that Dennett was more interesting and dynamic. Now in this second half of the course, most of the class believes that Whitman was boring and that Hustvedt is more dynamic and refreshing. It seems as though we like to see a series of ideas evolve (Dennett) or a story evolve (Hustvedt), and that we are bored by mere descriptions (Darwin) or representations (Whitman) of evolution at any scale. Maybe we don't enjoy evolution consciously, that is we find it boring to read peoples' accounts of it, whether large-scale or personal. Instead, we prefer to read things and acknowledge more passively that something is evolving, whether the story is good or not ... In some ways I think this sort of 'passive' acknowledgement of evolution opens just as much inquiry as Darwin's scientific story ... Recognizing that we are directing the evolution of this course and causing each other to evolve in thought is, itself, a great source of inquiry ... There is something very intriguing about controlling and experiencing evolution, perhaps more intriguing than simply studying it ... Jackie Marano [22]

our readings were much richer than they would have been just coming to it with our disparate and limited individual backgrounds and perspectives ... sustainablephilosopher [23]

And on ... to further unanticipated/unanticipatable richness [24]

I've noticed that in class we've been using the term "unconscious" frequently. Should we maybe be using the word "subconscious" in the context of this course?

After looking them up in the OED, I came across these definitions:

UNCONSCIOUS

1.a. Not conscious or knowing within oneself; unaware, regardless, heedless.

2.a. Not characterized by, or endowed with, the faculty or presence of consciousness.

2b. Temporarily devoid of consciousness.

 

SUBCONSCIOUS: 

a. Partially or imperfectly conscious; belonging to a class of phenomena resembling those of consciousness but not clearly perceived or recognized.    

b. Pertaining to the subconscious; belonging to that portion of the mental field the processes of which are outside the range of attention.

B. absol. as n. Psychol. The part of the mind that is not fully conscious but is able to influence actions, etc.

 On the subject of why Siri Hustvedt:

The Sorrows of an American discusses "the merging" that Whitman describes but, as someone in my small session  pointed out, Hustvedt's merging isn't quite the same. Rather than Whitman's full-bodied loving embrace, Hustvedt's merging is a description of the lonliness in different people coming together. Of course, the search for answers and meaning as well as the attention to the unconscience are important themes in the book relative to the class as well. I feel that the book is definitley well-picked for the class for these reasons as well as others.

I think that the story being "an imigrant's story" might be important to Hustvedt in this merging and diverging way. When an imigrant enters into a new society, he/she both merges with the new society and becomes seperate from it because of the difference he/she is bringing with them.

I have to admit that I'm not quite on the same page with people who enjoy reading Hustvedt over reading Whitman, however. Where Whitman's writing seemed to be constantly in excess, Hustvedt seemed somewhat dry. I'm not the biggest fan of either, but I seem to favor the excess. 

 

On a new type of class:

  I can think of a few classes at Bryn Mawr that cross divisions: this class, Conceptual Physics, and Poetry in Landscape. Interestingly enough, they were probably all based on a CSEM.

I'm not sure what the New Class would be. I feel that with a liberal arts education all of us are getting the breadth we need. We may be taking linear tracks, but we have other requirements that help us to make our own personal connections between the courses. The connections that we make on our own are part of what makes every student different. We choose classes that fit our own needs and make them work for us. This is the was we evolve from our classes.

The problem with creating a class about cultural evolution is that there is not just one track to follow-- there are a lot of branches on the tree of cultual evolution too.  I suppose the best way would be similar to this class. Maybe the best way would be to demonstrate the way the class itself evolves when it is given a story and then split up and asked to retell it seperately and then to tell the retold story to different other groups would be a good demonstration of what happens in cultural evolution. (Much like this class already does but to a larger scale.)

 

I find no connection to Walt Whitman's "Leaves of Grass" to Siri Hustvedt's "The Sorrows of an American".   I can relate to Hustvedt's novel but not Walt Whitman's.  Hustvedt's has a beginning and an ending.  I like beginning , middle and an ending.  Hustvedt's plot is interesting and captivating whereas Whitman's was dry and uninteresting.

In our discussion on Thursday, the convergence and overlap of the classes we take each semester was a topic that was talked about for some time. I mentioned how the similarities I found between all of my classes and the overlap between authors, ideas, theories, etc. were really exciting. The "no places" in between the strict disciplines set up by departments were the most fun and intriguing to think about.

Then, someone else mentioned how it was too bad no one else had the same four classes at the same time so we could discuss these overlaps. Having such unique schedules (and past schedules) gives everyone a different perspective.

THEN it was brought up that maybe it's a good thing we don't try and keep everyone to the same classes because thinking about the overlaps that no one else knows about is the best part of these exciting similarities.

I now find myself at an impasse--what's exciting--the similarities or the differences? It seems like you need both to create that newness that creates new thought patterns. Or maybe the new thought patterns and guides of different classes to create newness. 

I think I've backed myself into a corner along with the chicken and the egg.

On the topic of the self designed course module for this course, I think it might be interesting to move bakwards in time. Not an entirely novel idea but maybe instead of focusing on something that is considered to be a work of literature if might be more interesting to see how something from a new genre of litterature might have come from. For example there has been a shocking amount of "vampire" novels and series that have come out over the last five years or so. I genre that was widely unexplored until recently. Where did this come from? Why did it come at all? What sort of links does it have with modern culture and ideas? What links does it provide to the pat progression of culture? I thint it could be interesting. Although a good deal of these novels are by no means brilliant works they all seem to have common themes and ideas and work towards a common end more or less effectively. It might me something a little more outside the box, or it might be an adventure into futility. Only implementing it could really be telling.

 I also really enjoyed Sorrows of an American, though I have to admit that much like the rest of the class I initially thought of the narrator as a female character and was very surprised to find out that she was in fact a he. I also found the mixture of unconscious thought and consciouness to be very interesting. By that I guess I mean that there is a great deal more conscious organized thought than there was in Leaves of Grass, but there is also a randomness of order. Chronological time doesn't really seem to pertain to how this book was organized because it jumps from a later entry into the father's diary to the narrators current time frame then back to the father's diary but to an even earlier time period within that time frame. It makes things a little more confused and jumbled, much like the initial impression of the unconscious thought.

I have found myself in several classes, including this one, asking myself “why this book?, isn’t there a better example out there?”.  I was so perplexed when I began reading Whitman, I thought, there is no reason to read this in this class.  However, after our talks about unconscious and metonymic associations it began to make a lot of sense.  After talking about past book selections, including Moby Dick and Ahab’s Wife, I have more faith in the text selections for this class.  As I began to read The Sorrows of an American I noticed a lot of similarities or at least connections between the two texts.  There is a lot of unconscious thought in Sorrows of an American.  Also there are no divisions between types the story that is being told (whether itis Erik’s thoughts, his father’s diary, or an actual description of what is going on).  It’s interesting to see unconscious thought, like from Leaves of Grass, weaved into a story with a distinct plot line.  This immediately made me think of our discussions of evolution.  I like Hustevedt’s writing and reading the character’s jumbled, stream-of-consciousness thoughts.  I think its much more useful than Whitman’s purely stream-of-consciousness writing, but in this example Whitman was an ancestor of Hustvedt.  The “trait” or idea of stream-of-conscious writing was refined and incorporated or “passed down” into a new type of story.      

My favorite part of Thursday's class was our list of metaphors we generated to do with the reader, the text and the writer. The one I connected to most was not my own, but the one comparing the text to an apartment, the reader to the person inside, and the writer to the architect. This fits both with my experience as a writer of constructing something-- something almost tangible-- and my experience  as a reader of being in a new place. I've always seen books as something there for you to (literally) explore, and I can certainly get so lost in them that I don't hear someone if they call my name.

I never got that deeply into Sorrows of an American, and I'm finding it very frustrating. The only characters i care about at all are Sonia and Eggy-- the adults I lose my patience with. Even by the end of the book, it seems to me that they haven't moved from where they were in the beginiing. In this way, it seems utterly unlike Leaves of Grass or the unconscious.  The poem might not have had a traditional structure, but it was always moving. The characters in the novel, on the other hand, seem stuck in isolation.

I think that academics indeed proceeds linearly, but perhaps out of necessity. One must understand where one is coming from in order to understand both where one is and where one is going. As Paul said earlier in the semester, one must have understood the significance of the the thinking of Darwin's time in order to understand the divergence that it represents, as well as the conceptual significance of that divergence. In trying to think about non-chronological ways to go about teaching a course on cultural evolution, I just can't get beyond working through the canon from ancient, to modern, then to contemporary/ postmodern. Once one has this intellectual and conceptual history, one can go generatively in whatever direction one pleases. However, until this broad understanding is reached it may be irresponsible, or at the very least academically uninteresting, to merely interpret a text through one's own personal naive lens.

For example, in another English class I am taking called Humanimality, we read through the canon of how humans have thought about animals from the Greeks to the early-moderns through the Renaissance, then during the industrial revolution through today. We read historical accounts of how animals have been treated from the same time span. Finally, after spending half the course establishing the paradigms through which animals have been apprehended and treated through the ages, we read various contemporary texts through several rich interpretive lenses that we would not have had without establishing the intellectual history. We were able to identify strands of thought within a given author and put them into a cross-cultural and transhistorical conversation. This proved to be invaluable although it was laborious; our readings were much richer than they would have been just coming to it with our disparate and limited individual backgrounds and perspectives.  

While reading Sorrows Of An American, most of us confused the narrator to be a female instead of a male. In class we talked about it and raised the question of whether it was intentional on the author's part ? Whether the author wanted to mislead us into thinking it was a female narrator? I think that even though we found many clues pointing towards why we thought the narrator was a he, I do not think it was intentional on the author's part to misguide us.

The author is trying to bring out or rather portray the unconscious here. Just like Whitman's writing is about the unconscious and not the conscious. I think the goal of Siri Hustvedt is to make us realize that the unconscious has no gender and that we only try to look at things from the perspective of gender when the conscious is active.

We thought of the narrator as male because of our perception in the conscious about gender. We did the same mistake with Whitman's writing but instead of confusing the gender we confused the sexual preference of the man. We raised question of bisexuality and homosexuality with concern to Whitman. Maybe if we knew how to engage our unconscious while reading the texts we would not have made the same errors.

The Sorrows of an American is an absorbing novel, however I do not understand why Hustvedt’s narrative should be taken seriously in an academic discussion. Maybe Erik will answer my question in the final scene by closing the gap between past and present. If this is the anti-climatic resolution of the novel, then why are Erik and Inga important examples of the construction of the self? Throughout literary history there are many novels that use voyeurism or depict everyday life. How do we get from Whitman, one of the most influential American poets, to Hustvedt?  Both are examples of realism in literature, but there is still 150 years missing from the evolution of the self. I think it would be interesting to continue our discussion on course study design. This discussion itself could probably be a semester-long course!