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Author
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Comment
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Midori
Unregistered User
(5/15/02 3:08:45 am)
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MR and transgression
Greg,
That's an interesting question about MR and transgression--I've been thinking about it since yesterday. I think that the notion of the border--though thin and certainly porus as it is in MR is still there and stories, despite the acceptance of the fantastic as ordinary--contain a tension between one state and another--a tension that is emotionally exploited by the story tellers. For example, Marquez's odd little short story, "Eyes of a Blue Dog" in which a couple can only meet and rediscover each other in a dream which they share. Yet each dream belongs to the dreamer and only in the smallest of intersection like two Cartesian sets do they overlap. There is a lamp that sits on the border between them by which they see each other--but they can not touch each other in the dream, nor pass the boundaries of their individual dreams. Here the border, which they can not transgress, becomes really important to the story--it holds in perpetuity their mutual frustration and desire. Waking is no solution, because the man can not remember the dream and the woman can not remember the city she lives in to tell the man in her dream where to find her. Without the border, between the fantastic dreams, between waking and dreaming, without the longing to transgress and the inability to do so there would be no story.
Perhaps in the Latin American writers, the moments of transgression (or failure to transgress) are really much more abstract and intellectual, or psychological. For instance, Cortazar's short stories often deal with a strange metaphorical version of rejecting birth--a man putting on a sweater gets his head caught in one sleeve, struggles to get his head out--as the head crowns in the too tight sleeeve, his left hand attacks him, he retreats inside the "web of wet wool" and promptly throws himself out the window. Cortazar felt that the primal drama or contradiction of life was birth, and the only way to write a story that resolved contradiction, was to construct a scenario where a character refused to be born. That sweater story theme--the rejection of birth--is in quite a few of his weird little pieces ("The Night Face Up)--love them! But there the border is approached and intententionally not crossed. The option to transgress is refused...but it only makes sense if it exists (at least figuratively and emotionally) in the story.
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Gregor9
Registered User
(5/15/02 5:08:25 am)
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Re: MR and transgression
Midori,
I'm a huge Cortazar fan, too. The first MR story I thought of that deals expressly with the border between reality and fantasy is his "House Taken Over", where the nature of the fantasy intrusion is never defined, except by the narrator's horror at discovering he must close off still another part of his house (which has been invaded by "them"), until finally driven from it.
It's maybe the most overt example I can think of, of the fantastic world itself being the transgressor. (And then there's "Lud in the Mist".)
Greg
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Charles Vess
Unregistered User
(5/15/02 6:59:24 am)
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Hmmm...
I'm going to be on THIS panel.
I have know idea what you guys are really talking about here... perhaps too many academic word useage shortcuts, I don't know?
Humble artists goes back to lurking in shadows,
Charles
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Midori
Unregistered User
(5/15/02 3:07:10 pm)
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Art as the expression of the liminal
Charles--you'll be fabulous! Don't worry. But, speaking of borders/ transgressing and art...have you seen "Waking Life"..oh my words fail here, which is hilarious because its a film so much about words and their inadequacy to express altered states of consciousness.
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Terri
Registered User
(5/17/02 1:26:04 pm)
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Re: Art as the expression of the liminal
Charles: What about the Appalachian "Jack" tales from your neck of the woods? He's often a transgressive, trickster character, breaking taboos willy nilly.
I'm also wondering now about depictions of transgressive characters (bad girls, bad boys, tricksters, disobedient characters such as Bluebeard's wife, etc.) in art .... any thoughts?
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Charles vess
Unregistered User
(5/17/02 2:19:27 pm)
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Transgression in art...
It was just occured to me that in art (at least my art) the intial idea sketch is "the path". And it is only by straying from that path, that is, allowing subconcious thoughts and external influences to transform those first pencil scribbings that you will ever arrive at anything artistically worth while. The artist needs to spend his/her LIFE transgressing as many boundries as possible (aesthetically that is) or all that will be left in the end is pile of paper covered with casual, boring ideas. The artist's job is to constantly drag all those subconcious thoughts from the depths of the great Id-wood out onto a clean sheet of paper and to transform them into interesting strokes of the pencil or dabs of color. There is nothing more artistically boring to me than to arrive exactely where I started from.
Anway, "Hi, Ho it's off to work I go..."
Charles
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Jane Yolen
Unregistered User
(5/18/02 4:04:10 am)
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Puzzled
I have been reading this thread and for me it is much too big and amorphous. Everything--every story I can think of mmediately--seems to be about the subject.
Charles' "Straying off the Path" being at the core of probably 85% of the stories I know. Whether the straying is good, dangerous, evil, or fated.
Jane
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Midori
Unregistered User
(5/18/02 4:50:26 am)
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huge
Jane,
Yes, this is a big topic--but that's what makes it so interesting. For the most part we think of "transgression" as something limited to an act of bad behavior--but the narratives really do offer a wide range of interpretation. For me looking at the idea of transgression is like getting around the idea of the "fantastic"........it plays so many roles in narratives; some of them overt, others really subtle. But it is the ambiguity of transgression (like the fantastic) that appeals to me and its ability to evoke a wide and sometimes contradictory set of emotions in an audience.
Also, this thread is huge because in a week we will have to forgo all this expansive thinking and focus our comments to fit productively within one hour on a panel (and there's seven of us! oy, oy, oy!). It will be a bit like plucking seven seeds from the chaff while tossing it up into the air!
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catja1
Registered User
(5/18/02 2:08:10 pm)
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Re: huge
"It's maybe the most overt example I can think of, of the fantastic world itself being the transgressor."
That's really interesting, Greg! My first thought when reading this thread was that the world the fairy tale takes place in is itself a transgression: it's a place where animals and humans can speak to each other, seven-league boots and invisibility cloaks get you where you want to go, and your identity and form can change with a wave of a wand. This is actually the primary distinction Max Luthi makes between fairy tales and legends: since legends take place in our world, the "real" world, when a frog speaks, or a king does not die but sleeps under a hill, or someone meets and converses with the devil -- that's a transgression of the laws of the world as we know it, and is remarked upon as such. But the fairy tale posits a world in which these sorts of transgressions can occur, and thus, in a way, are not transgressive; sort of like Midori's "two wrongs make a right" observation.
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