Monthly Archives: October 2017

The Saga of the Volsungs: Magic Writing

Anonymous, Gloss, Saga of the Volsungs, The, The Saga of the Volsungs: Magic Writing

“She saw that something else had been cut over what lay underneath and that the runes had been falsified.” (The Saga of the Volsungs, 97)


Though the women in myth do not (usually) possess the power of violent, physical force that the men have when solving their problems, they nevertheless possess an equally useful skill: knowledge, specifically the use and understanding of the written language to manage their affairs and of society in general. Gudrun, along with Brynhild (67), and Kostbera (97) posses not only the ability to read and write the runes (the men, too are capable of this as well), but more importantly they correctly interpret these runes.

Sigurd says of Brynhild, “Never can there be found a wiser woman in the world than you,” (71) after she teaches him the power, “mighty things,” (67) of the various runes. These runes – victory runes, wave runes (the sea), speech runes, ale, aid, healing (here a branch), and the mind – are very much like magic spells, or as we would recognize them as “legal fictions,” (Sapiens, 31) in that the ability to use these runes (words, writing) allows the clever person to manage a society.  As writing is a representation of something else, these runes carry with them the power and knowledge to control what they are representing. With the ability to, for example, control troop information in a battle (victory runes), or to heal an injured soldier (branch runes), or to educate a village, clan, or city (mind runes) so that information is not lost “Until the gods perish,” (70) people can control and manage their lives and the societies they live in even if they are made refugees, conquered, married off, or live vast distances from one another. In this way the runes (language) are representative of the power of the people who understand them and can use them wisely.

Yet while Brynhild says the runes are, “For all to use unspoiled / and unprofaned,” (70) it is a man, Vingi who profanes the runes and attempts to conceal Gudrun’s message of warning to her brothers. And while the men, such as Hogni are capable of reading the runes at the basic level, they are incapable of reading deeper into their meaning. These men are easily fooled by the false runes and it is a woman, Kostbera who, “discerned through her wisdom what the runes said,” (97). She even goes as far as to insult Hogni’s literacy, “You cannot be very skilled at reading runes,” (98) and backs up her runic interpretation by saying how she, “wondered how so wise a woman could have carved them so confusedly,” (98). For her the truth of the matter is clearly written, yet the confused nature of the runes speaks to the complexity of the political situation and ultimately Hogni does not heed the hidden warning (prophecy) and thus is doomed by Atli’s false invitation.

And it is in this complexity of interpretations, the female’s deeper insight as opposed to the male’s more literal interpretations of the runes, where we can glimpse the complexity of a political society as well as the woman’s role in preserving their society. Society is preserved through the use of language which the woman master, even if they are not always successful in forestalling a momentary disaster. And, to take my analogy a little further, the preservation of the Icelandic and Viking peoples still exists within our own magical runes of modern language. These cultures still “exist” because our runes say they existed, and while we can’t point to an actual Viking, their culture “lives” on through language.

Feminism

Barry, Peter, Beginning Theory: An Introduction to Literary and Cultural Theory, Feminism, Gloss

Barry asks, “If normative language can be seen as in some way male-orientated, the question arises of whether there might be a form of language which is free from this bias, or even in some way orientated towards the female.”

Perhaps a difference can be seen in examining the stereotypes of how men and women use language. For example, men are seen as using language with a specific goal in mind, the stereotype being men try to fix their partner’s problems with “why don’t you just tell your boss X or Y?”. Conversely, the stereotypical female use of language is to use language as a way of expressing emotion, such as “I’m really frustrated with my boss.”

These of course are stereotypes and tropes in our society since men do express their emotions to their partners and women do explain to people how to perform tasks. And the same can be seen in art, such as the character Ripley in the Alien films who performs both stereotypically male and female roles, often at the very same time (protecting a child in her arms while firing a flamethrower).

So what then would be a non-masculine language? Marks and Courtivron seem to be saying that a whole new language – written through their (women’s) bodies – must be invented. Even “pronouncing the word ‘silence’” would be done away with since that would impose a syntax, or a male-dominated control over the language. What this language would be I could image as a form of dance, a physical expression of want and desire and feeling, sort of like bees using their bodies to tell the hive where the pollen is located. Of course this presents the problem of their still would be a language with a rigid syntax that has been imposed on the culture.

M. Butterfly (film): Psychoanalysis: Audience as Superego

Freud, Sigmund, Gloss, Hwang, David Henry, M. Butterfly, M. Butterfly: Psychoanalysis: Audience as Superego

The film M. Butterfly allows the audience to actively participate in the role of the Freudian topography as a representative of the superego. An audience plays a major role in the film, not only as a character on screen but the filmmakers are counting on the audience’s reaction when confronted with a revelation counter to what we accept in normative society. In an effort to explore the audience’s preconceived biases, the filmmakers attempt to revolutionize the audience’s thinking to go beyond the current “normal” to suggest the possibility of a new, progressive “normal”. In this essay I will explore the different types of audience as presented in the film and will explore how the role of the audience as a superego shapes the characters as well as how these characters shape the audience in return.

The first example of an audience playing the role of superego, which Freud corresponds to the conscience (Barry, 97), is at the beginning of the film when Gallimard attends the embassy performance of Madame Butterfly (M Butterfly 00:05:10). In this scene Gallimard admits to having never seen the opera and is thus ignorant of its content. He is self-conscious of this fact and this exposes his alienation from the rest of the audience who is familiar with the opera. Gallimard is positioned as an outsider within his own culture, however he is not totally alien to the morals and norms of his Western European culture as we learn in the following conversation with Song when she argues against his reading of the opera. He says, “You made me see the beauty of the story. Of her death. It’s pure sacrifice… It’s very beautiful,” (M Butterfly 00:07:57) which she counters as his reading as being “… one of your favorite fantasies isn’t it? The submissive oriental woman and the cruel white man?”  (M Butterfly 00:08:36). Gallimard’s reading of the opera is assumed to be in line with that of the audience of the film, but Song is showing us that perhaps the audience’s reading is in error, perhaps we as an audience, a superego who are judging the characters, are not infallible and thus are capable of reevualating the normative pressure we impose on the characters (society).

The next example of the importance of the role of the audience is when Gallimard attends the traditional Chinese theater (M Butterfly 00:14:37). Here Gallimard is completely a foreigner since he cannot understand what the actors are saying as well as his being the only Westerner in the audience. Yet when he goes backstage he is given the opportunity to see how manufactured, how unreal, even chaotic this performance is, (M Butterfly 00:16:18). In a sense this is similar to the process of psychoanalysis when the patient – Gallimard plays a dual role as both the patient and as a proxy for the audience in this scene – begins to strip away the layers of repression (in this case the artifice of culture, here represented as the theater troupe) in an effort to expose what lies underneath. We have learned Gallimard’s reading of the opera (and thus the Chinese as a whole) is from a typical Western European point of view, and so this is his (and the audience’s) opportunity to see past these preconceived biases, to uncover these repressed and troubling biases about how we view a foreign culture and deal with them in the open.

Through the course of the film from this point forward we the audience become highly active in our role as the superego. We watch as Gallimard’s and Song’s relationship grows into what we, at first, assume will be a traditional relationship between a man and a woman, albeit across vastly different cultures. All this, however, takes place not in front of the audience of society, but tucked away in secret with only we the film audience watching events unfold. In a way we have been separated from the cultural norms of society as we undertake more in depth and private psychoanalysis of our “patients”.

While we are surprised to learn Song is biologically a man because our biases as a normative superego may initially reject this relationship possibility, yet having spent the duration of the film learning about these characters we’ve been given an opportunity to rethink our position as a normative influence on these characters. We are then presented with a choice: we could decide to continue to insist on a culturally normative relationship between a man and woman, or we have an opportunity to rethink our analysis, to have our minds changed, to engage in a revolution of norms and accept this new possibility.

And so we as a film audience who have undergone the psychoanalysis of the film where we have uncovered this repressed secret, join back up with the audience of society and we are confronted with how we will decide to judge these characters as represented in the courtroom scene, (M Butterfly 01:18:00). Here society as an audience literally judges Gallimard, especially when that audience learns he did not know the biological sex of Song, (M Butterfly 01:21:50), and thus that audience (society) finds him guilty. Gallimard deviates from the norm of French society and the rule of law insists he is to be punished for spying, in effect, on the alternative lifestyle. Yet we as an audience in the theater have been revolutionized, we were given the opportunity to know more than just the base facts in the case because we have grown with these two people and understand how this misunderstanding (either willful or from ignorance) could have ever taken place. We have seen backstage, just as Gallimard had earlier, and thus we are in conflict with French society. We now have conflicting superegos and we, too are to be judged.

This leads to the final example with an audience consisting of actual prisoners (themselves outcasts like Gallimard) who watch and judge Gallimard as he transforms on stage, (M Butterfly 01:29:27). They, like us, are captive to this transformation and not only have no power to stop the metamorphosis, but seem to accept it, a far cry from Gallimard’s previous audience of a jury in the French courtroom who cast him out. In this case one audience (French society as a superego) has been replaced with another audience (prisoners as an opposing, revolutionary superego), and while we might initially identify with the former, over the course of the film in which we are a captive audience, we wind up empathizing with Gallimard’s plight and therefore we as the superego are transformed into something wholly new.. No longer are we the normative societal force that frowns on Gallimard’s behavior, we are a different normative force who accept this transformation.

When we began the film we assumed a traditional interpretation of the characters: Gallimard is a man, Song is a woman. However, we are held captive to this traditionally accepted reading. Society (as a superego) forces us to conform to a certain standard of what constitutes a “proper” romantic relationship.

Yet why must this be so, is there no possibility of revolution in society, as there is in both China and France during the film? Can’t the superego, strict as it is as a normalizing influence be a reshaped? However, once it is reshaped, does it not just become the replacement normalizing force? Has the power now only shifted from one power structure to another? In the film the Chinese have undergone a cultural revolution where everyone is supposed to be equal, yet we see how even in this new system the new norms are enforced with strict punishments that are meted out when an individual runs afoul of them.

Who then is left to say our new, revolutionized judgment is any more authentic or legitimate than our previous biases? Are we as society’s audience also prisoners of society who judges based only on available, and often limited information? Ultimately, could this uncertainty as to the legitimacy of the authority of the superego lead to such a breakdown of an individual that they are no longer able to function in society, to which Gallimard reacts by literally killing himself, an extreme example of psychosis where the relationship with an external reality (the superego) “breaks down altogether,” (Gollapudi)?

 

Works Cited

Barry, Peter. Beginning Theory. An Introduction to Literary and Cultural Theory. Manchester University Press. 2002.

Gollapudi, Aparna. Principles of Literary Criticism. https://writing.colostate.edu/files/classes/11609/File_858E65CB-B94C-34D8-2112AC98F38F64D5.pdf. Accessed 30 October 2017.

M Butterfly. Dir. David Cronenberg. Warner Bros. 1993. Film.

M. Butterfly: Psychoanalysis

Freud, Sigmund, Gloss, Hwang, David Henry, M. Butterfly, M. Butterfly: Psychoanalysis

Each of the major characters in the opera can not only be slotted into each of the three topographic landscapes of Freud’s theory – Id, Superego, and Ego – but that the overall structure of the opera is representative of the entire model Freud is positing where there is a) desire, b) a mediating conscience, and c) an individual who must decide what to consciously pursue and what to repress.

One possible assembly of these pieces could consist of Pinkerton as the Id, Suzuki as the Superego, and Butterfly as the Ego. Here Pinkerton represents that which Butterfly desires to have: a husband who will give her life new identity and take her away from her previous, unsatisfactory life. However, Suzuki, who is always close at hand (much as we can’t ever escape our ever-nagging conscience) and whom is necessary for Butterfly to do pretty much anything in the home, represents the Superego who is attempting to instruct Butterfly that her decision to pursue Pinkerton is doomed. Finally, Butterfly is the Ego which must try to negotiate between the two, and on a few occasions verbally threatens Suzuki because Butterfly does not like being confronted with the painful advice being given when Suzuki tries to get Butterfly to really consider the consequences of her desire, or in other words to confront the possibility she is repressing her fear that this relationship is doomed.

Within this Freudian dynamic we can see the pleasure principle at work in Butterfly. She substitutes the pain she feels – the loss (lack) of Pinkerton’s physical presence, but also the pain of the repressed fear she has as to his actual intentions – with a reality she can control: a delusion of certainty that he is absolutely coming back (transference). Pinkerton’s absence is similar to the Fort-da game Freud describes in that Butterfly is processing this unusually long and painful separation as a sort of pressure gauge whose eventual relief will produce an even greater pleasure upon his return. In this sense she might believe Pinkerton’s absence is actually a voluntary renunciation she has control over because she tells herself it is her duty as the wife to support her hardworking husband even while he is away. She is, in her mind, the good American housewife who will be rewarded for her sacrifice.

Yet Butterfly’s separation (lack) from her desire (Pinkerton), the object she desperately needs in order to complete or at least maintain her constructed identity as a dutiful American housewife, is really a separation from a desire she can never really possess. For her Pinkerton is the key to her shedding the Japanese identity into the ideal American housewife, yet which itself is something she has almost no concept of other than what she imagines that to even mean. Probably she has never even met an American woman before and has based her identity on what Pinkerton has told her it could be like. Ironically, Pinkerton might not even know what the ideal American housewife is supposed to consist of!  

It is in this misunderstanding that we can see Butterfly attempt to symbolize her desire through a sort of created language when she wears the American style dress and sets the house up with western locks (symbolic of her repressing her Japanese-ness). She’s trying to approximate a meaning to a system she’s practically ignorant of (American culture). And the further she commits to this reasoning the more she’s invested into it because the consequences would be shame and the ridicule of everyone in the village. How her family and the villagers see her drives her on to separate herself from that identity, in effect her identity is being influenced by the outside world, an influence she rebels against.

Butterfly is living a highly fragmented existance, she is neither her old self nor is she the self she desires to be, she’s become, in effect, the uncanny in that he looks like Butterfly, but she also no longer resembles Butterfly. Not to mention the name Butterfly being problematic itself. She is a prosthetic, what we call the Ideal-I, a being existing somewhere between the experiential I she is and the ideal person she can never be.

Lacan explains we can never really posses what we desire, yet Butterfly does wind up back in Pinkerton’s embrace, literally the embrace of her desire. Yet in the Freudian sense to completely indulge that desire, to let that animal nature we repress to fully embrace and nurture us (as Pinkerton does as he holds her like a helpless child as she dies from her wound), would be to strip away our humanity and figuratively cause our death, a psychic death dramatized in the opera as her suicide since that accepted embrace of the repressed desire (the animal nature) is a form of suicide. She has attempted to return to a sense of wholeness, but by accepting the embrace of this Ego, it is a perverted and unnatural act that strips her away of her ultimate identity as a living human being.

Freud: Beyond the Pleasure Principle

Euripides, Freud, Sigmund, Freud: Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Gloss, Heracles

Freud mentions the “compulsion of destiny” as something that “seems intelligible on a rational basis,” (174) or in other words what the ancients called “Destiny” is little more than our inability to break from the habit of “‘perpetual recurrence of the same thing'”(173), our own repressed compulsions manifesting (what Freud calls transference) themselves over and over through the same (or seemingly similar) outlets.

One example (and in keeping with the theme of the ancients) is that of Heracles in Euripides play Herakles. Hercules is a warrior, he has been on numerous dangerous missions (the 12 labors) where his life was in great danger, and in fact he was even in Hades right as the story begins. Hercules has taken the lives of countless men and beasts, he is death and he brings death wherever he goes. Heracles is, in effect, a killing machine.

The play, tragically, ends with Heracles killing his own children in a fit of rage, or what we would now call something akin to PTSD. All the killing he has done, because that is his “Destiny”, causes him to continue to kill, which is his inescapable “Fate”. He repeats the same terrible acts over and over, even against those he loves because he can’t escape this destiny: a repressed compulsion to kill that he tries to keep repressed but which manifests itself in the most terrible ways possible, even against his conscious will and desire.

Hercules wishes he could live a normal life with his family, but he’s doomed to express his repressed “Destiny” (killing) because he has no other outlet and it becomes a compounding issue: the more he kills the worse his PTSD becomes and thus the more he kills. But he was born to kill, not to be a family man sitting at home smoking a pipe and listening to Perry Como on the hi-fi. He can’t repress his desire and though the actions of his desire to kill are terrible to him he repeats them over and over and, in effect, becomes sicker and sicker.