Автор |
Тема: Cредневековье и постмодернизм (Прочитано 1612 раз) |
|
Guest is IGNORING messages from: .
Antrekot
Bori-tarkhan
Живет здесь
CНС с большой дороги
Просмотреть Профиль »
Сообщений: 16204
|
Доклад, увы, на английском. Он ооочень старый и очень спорный. Меня попросили бросить дымовую шашку в курятник, то есть раздразнить группу людей, относящихся к постмодернизму очень серьезно - что и было сделано с удовольствием.
In year 1246 one medieval gentleman wrote about another: “He is a wise and noble man, equally worthy to attend both the birth and death of our Savior.” It sounds as quite a compliment until you recall that Jesus Christ was born among dumb animals and died between two thieves.
I would like you to remember this joke since it would become relevant later on.
The subject of my today’s presentation is “Postmodernism and mass society”.
First, I have to warn you that I am in no way going to proclaim any decisive verdicts on either Postmodernism or the mass society. The scholastic potential of this topic is almost inexhaustible and there are enough books written on both subjects to fill the shelves of a small library.
What I would like to do is to offer some tentative observations that might clarify some aspects of a very tangled debate.
For the last six years I’ve been studying the works of Varlam Shalamov. He is one of the most challenging Russian writers and poets of our century. Shalamov (though he never used the word himself) could probably be called a founding father of Russian Postmodernism. Varlam Shalamov spent 17 years in Kolyma prison camps and described his experiences in several cycles of stories, employing some highly unusual narrative strategies.
It was while studying these strategies that I stumbled upon a strange coincidence. It happened that some of the very features that set Shalamov outside Russian literary tradition and marked (or branded) him as a Postmodernist writer were also peculiar to another literary tradition. Namely to that of the secular and scholastic literature of the European Middle Ages.
On establishing this rather unexpected affinity (some of you might even heard my paper discussing some quasimedieval aspects of Shalamov’s creative manner that I presented at one of the previous seminars) I decided to check whether it was peculiar to Shalamov’s artistic vision or rather could be attributed to the Postmodernist trend as a whole.
Therefore I compared some basic structural elements of Varlam Shalamov’s “Kolyma Tales” to the corresponding aspects of fictional prose by Jorge Luis Borges and “The Name of the Rose” by Umberto Eco.
Naturally, in the process of such a comparison one is bound to encounter a plethora of cultural, personal and artistic dissimilarities. However, on the level of motif structure (my authorities on Borges being Wheelock and Sylvia Molloy and on Eco - Gritti and Eco himself) one comes upon an fascinating concurrence. In fact, Borges, Eco and Shalamov are living in very similar worlds.
Within the bounds of their texts time is either circular or static, space is either labyrinthine or fragmentary or both, and human personality is fluid and ultimately soluble. Even the sacred and authoritative identity of the author is undefined and open to question.
Two plus two can be anything and language equals life.
The principle of causality is covertly abolished. The rational order is dissolved and any attempt to discover an intelligible pattern is bound to end in a catastrophe. For example, in “The Name of the Rose” the detective, William of Baskerville, derives from the Apocalypse a theory that establishes a connection between several murders. That very theory convinces the murderer that he is just a weapon in a divine hand and therefore is not responsible. Ultimately the search for meaning leads to the truly apocalyptic fiery destruction of a great library (which within the framework of the story encompasses the world and therefore is the world).
Borges uses the similar turn of a plot in his story “Death and the compass” where
a detective is trapped and killed through his inclination to see patterns everywhere. In the world of Shalamov’s “Kolyma Tales” the death is an unavoidable result of any patterned action.
Another feature common to all the three authors is a rather broad definition of reality. The border that separated dreams, visions, delirium and plain fiction from solid facts has dissolved along with everything else and the informational flow has returned to its pre-Renaissance oneness. This oneness is further augmented by the propensity of the authors to equate the part of anything with the whole of it.
It was this metonymic and syncretic way of perception that gave Wheelock grounds to define Borges’s cosmology as “archaic”.
Unfortunately, the time limit does not permit me to ground thoroughly this inventory in examples. I am also forced to omit many of other convergence points in the motif structure of Borges’ short stories, Shalamov’s “Kolyma Tales” and Eco’s “Name of the Rose”.
However, the most striking thing in the worldview of Borges, Eco and Shalamov is that it concurs in a rather spectacular way with the notions that dominated medieval mentality.
My authorities on medieval treatment of space, time and human personality are the historians of the "New School" (A.Febvre, M.Bloch, J.Le Goff, etc.) and of affiliated orientations (N.Elias, A.Gurevich). It was they who first introduced and then developed the very concept of medieval mentality.
Speaking about time in the Middle Ages, William Manchester writes: “In the medieval mind there was no awareness of time… Medieval men were rarely aware of the century they were living in.”
For medieval people space was fragmentary and inconsistent. Distances were measured in the days of travel and most of hamlets and villages of Medieval Europe were actually nameless.
Most of the leading medievalists - from Norbert Elias to Aaron Gurevitch - commented upon medieval man’s almost total lack of ego. (For example, in the legal system of the 15th century Russia a household was still perceived as one composite person.)
With hearsay as the main source of information the line dividing reality from fiction was vague at best and nonexistent at worst.
The Bible was seen as a functional analogue of the universe.
So, as I’ve already noted, the rate of convergence between the medieval worldview and that of Borges, Eco and Shalamov is rather spectacular.
Neither Borges nor Eco nor Shalamov were unaware of this connection.
In fact, all the three authors recognise, openly acknowledge and exploit their kinship with medieval mentality and culture. Borges creates stories like “Theologians” and “Search of Averroes” that are based upon the rich tradition of medieval scholastics. He also claims Dante as a source of his stylistic inspiration.
In “The Name of the Rose” Umberto Eco locates his story in the 14th century monastery and embroils all the characters into a series of theological disputes (one cannot go more medieval than that). Moreover, he chooses to present the events from a viewpoint of a local, thus turning medieval mentality into a sort of artistic filter.
Varlam Shalamov identifies himself with protopop Avvakum - one of the heresiarchs of Russian Middle Ages (both Borges and Eco share this preoccupation with the idea of heresy).
So having established the affinity let us ask ourselves: why Middle Ages?
Why having at least 2000 years of literary tradition to choose from do three highly independent thinkers knowingly and willingly model their perception of the world after medieval standards?
Here I would like to return to the concept of the Postmodern literature as formulated by Foucault, Lyotard and Eco himself.
The Postmodern theory treats human activities (literature included) as a collection of language games where every statement is of equal value.
In the “Reflections on ‘The Name of the Rose’” Umberto Eco defines Postmodernist art as a matter of “irony, metalinguistic play, enunciation squared.”
The communicative channels of the Postmodern art are seen as dominated by an all-pervasive mode of double-coding. It means that every message is constructed by using at least two conflicting codifying systems. A classical example would be a man expressing his true love in a following sentence: “As Barbara Cartland would put it, I love you madly.”
The Postmodernist theory rejects the very notion of ideology or “grand narrative”. In fact, an all-encompassing ideology or uniting principle simply cannot be formulated within the Postmodernist framework, since the process of subversion, fragmentation and deconstruction would start at the moment the idea is put into words.
So why is the practical implementation of this inherently polyphonic ultra-modern theory so akin to one of the most rigid and intolerant modes of thought?
Why do the writers of this subversive and nonconformist trend express themselves through the categories of a mentality where a nonconformist is seen not even as an enemy but as The Devil Himself?
Postmodernism, as an artistic tradition defines itself through two types of relationship.
a) its relationship with the past, i.e. with the all the volume of accumulated culture;
b) its relationship with the future, i.e. with a presumed audience.
Returning to the works of Borges, Eco and Shalamov we discover (without much surprise) that typologically their treatment of culture is also very similar.
Borges, Eco and Shalamov are obsessed with the idea of memory. Characteristically, memory is depicted not only in the traditional terms of identity preservation but also as a dangerous and distorting influence.
In its ultimate form memory is seen by all the three authors as an antithesis of rational thought.
In the short story by Borges “Funes the Memorious” the main character - Irineo Funes - on acquiring perfect memory loses his ability to think in general terms. His logical faculties are completely displaced with empty enumeration. In “The Name of the Rose” Eco links memory with death. In Shalamov’s story “The Fit” memory is identified as a lethal disease that is killing the protagonist.
The collective, communal memory, i.e. culture, is treated in the same way.
Jorge Luis Borges treats culture as something alluring and fascinating, often meaningless, nearly always deadly and always restricting, limiting and patterning human thought and very existence. (Example - “Search of Averroes”)
Characters of “The Name of the Rose” are literally lost within the labyrinth of theories and quotations. Neither wise ones, nor those pure of heart are ever able to escape. Their culture devours and dissolves them.
Shalamov’s interpretation of culture is even more negative. In the world of the “Kolyma Tales” culture is not dangerous or hostile but impotent. Not only is culture unable to protect human beings from the prison camp environment but it is also incapable of describing and comprehending this environment.
Thus, one has grounds to conclude that we are dealing with three attempts to exteriorise and transcend culture.
Borges tries to achieve the transcendence by systematising culture, by making it a subject of a comprehensive study. It is not for nothing that his first collection of fiction was called the “Universal History of Infamy” and his later works incuded bestiaries. In assuming a role of a dispassioned omnivore scholar Jorge Luis Borges achieves certain disidentification with the object of his studies.
Umberto Eco pursues the same goal armed with irony and laughter. In “The Name of the Rose” he launches an attempt to carnivalise culture. (By the way, in using this medieval method of distancing Eco betrays the extent of his distrust for culture.)
Eco adds to the pot Sherlock Holmes, St. Francis, Marx, Freud, Roger Bacon, Ann Ratcliff, Le Roi Ladurie, William Occam and, of course, Jorge Luis Borges. He piles labyrinth upon labyrinth (in fact, there are at least three primary labyrinths in the story - the physical one, the theological one, and that of a crime). He raises up Borges’s universal library and then burns it down. He creates a self-perpetuating bacchanalia of parody thus achieving at least for a moment the status of an outsider.
Varlam Shalamov puts in front of culture an impossible task of describing and assimilating an inhuman experience of prison camps. The inherent inability of culture (culture being a human phenomenon) to complete such a task automatically demotes it from the status of all-encompassing and all-embracing universe to the status of one of the pockets in a real universe. A universe that contains many things philosophy have never dreamed of.
Judging from their modes of behavior towards culture we can assume that all the three writers somehow perceive culture as a threat.
Why is that?
Yuriy Ltman, one of the leading Russian literary scholars, defined culture as a “supra-personal intellect, a mechanism that makes up the deficiencies of the individual conscience”. In other words culture is seen as a kind of a big brother, as an ever-present and reliable source of information and commands.
The moment culture is perceived as an external rather than internal phenomenon it is recognised as a limiting and oppressive one.
As it was already noted, the Postmodernist tradition had rejected the very idea of ideology or a “grand narrative”. However, in abolishing the “grand narratives” Postmodernism had also abolished the concept of history. For if human existence is understood as a combination of equally legitimate language games, then nothing could or would ever change. Nothing, including culture.
Thus, the Postmodernist theory treats culture not only as at least partly external but also as an unchangeable, static, almost physical force that human being could not fail but conform to.
Therefore, of course, it is to be completely externalised, objectified, transcended, studied, mastered and finally assimilated as a part of human existence.
It is a very strange development. For the last 400 years European avant-garde movements tried to change, reinvent or redefine culture. At worst they tried to abandon all the preceding cultural luggage and to create a new proper, ideologically sound culture. None of them ever thought of transcending and subsuming culture. Postmodernism evidently did.
Here I would like to note that if the concept of transcending is evidently modern, the perception of culture as something unchangeable, static, eternal, as something that is and always will be is consonant to medieval mentality. Since for a medieval man the order of things and the relationships within this order were both inviolate and inviolable.
So, once again, why Middle Ages?
So far, we have observed that Postmodern art exists in a state of a rather radical interaction with its past. It is reasonable to suppose that this peculiar correlation is at least partly grounded in the relationship between the Postmodernist literary tradition and its potential audience.
We can try to find out whether something happened to this audience to produce such a violent artistic reaction.
When Columbus found America and Magellan sailed around the world, the crystal box that held the flat Ptolemean world shattered. In the popular opinion first space and then knowledge in general became paradoxically both infinite and accessible.
The advent of the Renaissance established and recognised the existence of cultural diversity. As a result, relatively homogenous Latin-based Christian culture of the Middle Ages splintered into dozens of insular forms.
The decline of the Middle Ages had seen an emergence of autonomous individual personality. The First Industrial Revolution provided the means for an individual to survive independently. Consequently, the society gradually became to be understood as a form of rational interaction between self-sufficient or almost self-sufficient individual units.
The idea of accessibility of knowledge combined with that of autonomous individual produced the popular image of an informed citizen deciding his or her own fate.
It is, of course, an oversimplification. However for a certain limit of time the Western civilisation perceived the world as a vast, radically diverse dangerous environment that a human being, nevertheless, could successfully confront alone.
During the last four decades this situation had slowly changed.
Right now the most remote part of our world could be reached in 48 hours and information travels far quicker than that. What is even more important, there is a growing awareness of closeness, of proximity, of mutual interdependence. (One can name global ecological projects as an example.)
Our world is not yet perceived as a small one, but it’s rapidly becoming smaller.
Moreover, for the first time in the last 400 years the culture had shown a tendency for homogenisation especially in the realm of mass or popular culture. This tendency had found a powerful support in the mass-media.
The joke “As Barbara Cartland would put it, I love you madly.” could be made and understood only if a sizable majority of the population at least knows what a romance novel is.
I’d like to refer to the story about a medieval insult I mentioned in the beginning. In the Middle Ages the Bible was employed as a universal code-book.
It seems that right now mass culture is slowly developing into a source of a universal code.
For example, the inner plot of “The Name of the Rose” is partly driven by the fact that one of the characters is first recognised as a medieval avatar of Sherlock Holmes and then gradually shown to be a very different person. Eco could employ such a device because he was sure that most of his readers knew about Sherlock Holmes and would identify William as another sherlokian incarnation quicker than you could say Baskerville.
At the same time, according to the sociologists and politologists, the proverbial informed citizen is slowly going the way of dinosaurs.
Right now the specialisation reached such a level that the common man puts more implicit trust into his physician than medieval peasants ever put into their priests. For while medieval peasants usually had at least some grasp of theology, modern medicine is generally considered to be beyond the understanding of a layman.
The diversification and multiplication of knowledge once again made the world incomprehensible, since a single human being is no more able to comprehend it.
The need to rely on experts in almost every aspect of our daily life automatically raises the level of trust and blind acceptance within the society.
Some of European sociologists, like Maffesoli or Ferrraroti, even suggest that the stress of living in the incomprehensible world combined with the necessity to put an absolute trust in the other people might have already started a process of cristallisation within the society.
To quote Maffesoli: “As opposed to an idea of the city formed of free individuals engaging in the essentially rational relationships … it would seem that contemporary megalopolises give rise to a multiplicity of small enclaves founded on absolute interdependence.”
According to Watzlawick within those enclaves we are to find an “ardent and unquenchable desire to be in agreement with the group”.
The sociologists suggest that in post-industrial society human being might even be returning to the state of soluble, fluid composite personality.
Thus, we can see, that a modern, post-industrial society has started developing an array of traits that were previously peculiar to the medieval mentality. I can offer no conclusions upon the nature of this connection - it might well be accidental. However, it is definitely present and, moreover, it had been recognised.
It could be that far from being parasitic and pretentious, Postmodernist art might have been a reaction of writers, artists and thinkers to a yet barely perceptible shift in the mass conscience.
The erudite carnival of the Postmodernist art, an all-out attempt of Borges, Eco and Shalamov to transcend culture should, perhaps, be treated as a signal of alarm. As a desperate attempt to protect both individ and culture in the times of a shrinking world and dissolving personality.
С уважением,
Антрекот
|
|
 Зарегистрирован |
Простите, я плохо вижу днём. Позвольте, моя лошадь посмотрит на это. (c) Назгул от R2R
|
|
|
Ципор
Гость
email
|
2 Antrekot
Прочла статью (7 печатных страниц!  ).
Первую,литературоведческую, часть я пока оставлю в стороне за малым кочествоm знаний (*), выскажу имху по второй:
Мне кажется , что хотя замечание о необходимости для современного человека полагаться на специалистов верное, но есть сушественное отличие от средневековья: бОльшая доступность информации. Ее открытость. У средневековых людей не было возможности наити большое количество альтернативных источников информации. Даже чтобы посоветоваться с другим врачом надо было иногда совершать немелкое путешествие. Сейчас иногда достаточно просто добраться до компа или телефона.
Далее, мировосприятие средневекового человека отличалось не только упомянутыми в статье характеристиками, а по ним современный человек отличается (мне тяжело сформулировать четче, но, может, у тебя получится сделать ето за меня Если нет, я попытаюсь)
Я согласна, что "image of an informed citizen deciding his or her oshhn fate" - ето химера, реальный человек (как можно легко заметить из параллельных обсуждений о российских гражданах) зачастую отнюдь не informed. Но и нарисованная у тебя картинка мне кажется излишне пессимистичной.
Кстати, вопрос от неграмотного сушества
У тебя слово desperate значит "отчаянный" или "безнадежный"?
====
(*) Один только пока вопрос по Шаламову. Правильно ли приводить его как пример постмодерниста,в творчестве которого присуствуют некоторые аспекты, характерные для средневекового менталитета и мировосприятия. Ведь он описывал в "Колымских рассказах" лагерный мир, а я помню приводимое тобой мнение некоторых историков, что в условиях сильного стресса , в человеческом коллективе восприятие окружаюшего мира и себя самих сдвигается в сторону средневекового. Ты спрашивешь:
"why Middle Ages?"
Но возможно в его случае ето просто потому, что _той части мира_, которую он взялся описывать, присуши некоторые черты средневековья.
Прошу прошения за некоторую невнятность изложения.
|
| « Изменён в : 06/20/05 в 11:24:13 пользователем: zipor » |
Зарегистрирован |
|
|
|
|
