Jamesonnnn

I feel like more of a Jameson expert now than when Hannah and I did our lil project thing… huh.  Maybe it’s just because I’ve had more time to let things marinate.  Any who, I feel like Jameson has become this little man that sits in a chair at the back of my head and sticks his ideas into pretty much everything I think.  I was trying to write a paper for my medieval texts on film class, which was on the Risala and the 13th Warrior with Antonio Banderas(don’t waste your money), and I turned parts of it into Jameson nonsense. 

I like Jameson’s idea of the cultural dominant and how capitalism consumes our lives.  I think that in today’s society, we are totally immersed in capitalism and our world is run around the almighty dollar.  However, I’m more of a Lyotard fan when it comes to defining the time aspect of postmodernism.  I think you can be postmodern whenever you want, I don’t think it’s limited to right now.  That idea is so constricting. 

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So I’ve been thinking about how we said in class that Marla sparked the creation of Tyler, and while I do think that makes sense, I’m just wondering if Marla deserves that much blame/credit.  But I guess if the narrator hadn’t met her, he would have just continued in his support groups and kept up with his boring meaningless life.  I guess Marla was just the spark that set off the Tyler fire.  The narrator was definitely nutso before he met her and I think that if he hadn’t met her something else would have set him off eventually.  To me though, the narrator seems the most sane once he realizes he’s insane.  It’s the only time he ever shows affection towards Marla and the only time he seems to care about what happens to other people.  He knows he’s crazy and that he’s created this split life between him and Tyler, and yet he is the most ambituous he’s ever been throughout the whole novel, and tries to undo what he’s done.  I think that’s weird.  Once he realizes he’s Tyler, he stops knowing how to be Tyler.  It’s like the road runner and coyote cartoon, bad stuff only happens to the coyote once he realizes it’s coming.  But it also makes me wonder why he wants to change everything.  I think he knows he’s screwed either way, so why turn yourself in?  Why does he all of a sudden care?  Does he finally realize he has feelings for Marla?

The only thing I didn’t like about the ending was how everyone from the support group came to save him, it seemed like Hallmark-ish and kinda cheesy.  But the insane asylum part I like.  I am still fixated on why that sentence in the last chapter is the only time the narrator’s words gets quoted though.  It makes me think it’s not him.  Or maybe it’s the post-Tyler version of him, and that’s why it gets quotes.  I don’t think I’ll ever know.

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I guess this middle part is just about fight club and project mayhem.  I’m not exactly sure where it is in the book but I remember Tyler saying something about how we are the middle generation of history.  We don’t have a great depression or a war, the great depression is our lives, or something to that effect.  I think Tyler is absolutely nuts, but I completely agree with him in this.  It seems that most everything that’s worth fighting for has been fought for already.  Women’s rights, black rights, gay rights… on and on…  What do we have to fight for in our every day lives?  I think it’s this stagnant state that contributes to the narrator’s insanity and creation of Tyler. 

So this makes me think about how Tyler wants to destroy history and create his own version.  This is his way of becoming part of history, otherwise, he’d be just another blip ont the screen, just another number, nobody special.  But if he destroys all we know of history, he can create whatever he wants and put himself into everything in history.  He would be the creator of our new history.  Twisted.

Another part that sticks out for me is at the end of chapter 15 when the narrator fights with himself to get something he wants from his manager at work.  He refers to himself  “the monster” several times and gives himself monster-like attributes with claws and stuff.  Well it’s not an actual self referral, he calls himself the monster and then it.  I wonder if this is where the narrator and Tyler start to unravel?  I think the narrator knows but it’s just one of those things that he can’t admit until it’s right in his face.

FC, 1-6

I think it’s strange that in order for the narrator to feel anything he has to go to support groups for diseases or problems he doesn’t have.  It makes me wonder what’s missing in his life taht he needs something like that.  He is basically a shell.  Nothing better to do than to fill up his condo with stupid ikea furniture and go to a job he doesn’t like.  I think his emotionless-ness is what keeps him from sleeping.  There is nothing in his life that makes him feel anything, and instead of trying to do something about this, create relationships or whatever, he fills that void with support groups. 

I like how the beginning is really the end of the novel.  I like it when movies and books start out that way, and then the characters tell you how it got to that point.  It makes me think and involves me that much more in the rest of the story. 

The narrator also meets Marla and Tyler for the first time.  He’s mad at Marla for invading his support groups but at the same time seems like he’s interested in her.  That’s where Tyler comes in.  Like we said in class, the only way for the narrator to be with Marla is to be Tyler.  It’s this bizarro love triangle with only two people. 

Fight Club, the movie

I started reading the book before I saw the movie.  I’ve watched it a few times now and because I’m reading the book at the same time, it feels like I’ve seen the movie a bagillion times.  Any who… I really enjoyed the movie.  I was actually really surprised how much of the beginning was word for word.  There were parts of it that made me laugh out loud, which I usually don’t do when I watch something by myself.  The part when one of the space monkeys is spraying random passer-bys with a hose is one of my favorite parts.  And then it ends up being a priest who fights with him, and the monkey sprays his bible!  I love that part.  But going deeper into this, maybe it’s a comment on what Tyler is trying to accomplish with Project Mayhem, and how he is trying to destroy an ideology while in turn creating a new one.  The Church of Tyler.  Spooky.

I thought it was interesting how Tyler and Marla and the narrator were never in the same room together.  Even while knowing that Tyler and the narrator were the same person, the interactions between Marla and the narrator made it seem like she was nuts, which obviously wasn’t a far stretch.

The end of the movie confused me a lot though.  Edward Norton shot himself in the head and was bleeding from the neck but was still alive?  Riiiight.  I thought the end was cool though, how all the buildings blew up in sequence, and the narrator and Marla together. 

Lyotard

I really liked some parts of what Lyotard had to say.  A few of his points that stick out to me are the “incredulity toward metanarratives” and his ideas of style vs history.  When I first read this most of it was over my head, which is why I really like our discussions in class because it helps me understand what’s going on.  I like the idea of metanarratives, and I think it makes complete sense.  It also makes me think of the matrix, like the matrix is just one huge metanarrative.  That’s actually what it is, because the matrix is a simulated world, like a video game, for humans to live in so the machine things can use their lives as energy…? 

I also liked that Lyotard believed that realism, modernism, and postmodernism all existed at the same time because they are defined by style and not historical periods.  And I still like this despite partially agreeing with Jameson and his idea of the cultural dominant.  I think I’m just going to pick and chose the ideas I like from each theorist and make my own, possibly contradictory, theory.

But anyway, back to style vs history.  I like this idea because I think that art work and novels and what not should be defined by their style rather than the time period they were created in.  I think to be defined by time puts too much constratint on things.  What if someone painted like Picasso and Monet?  Not combined together but did separate paintings with these styles.  Then how would you define them?  Should there even be definitions?  They only exist to make things easier on us.

end of Written on the Body

Holy crap, I haven’t written in forever!!

All in all, I really enjoyed this book.  At first the ambiguity of it all drove me nuts but I slowly convinced myself that all the mysteries were ok and was what part of what made the story so beautiful.  I love the way Winterson writes, the way she describes things.  Some of my all time favorite books, like White Oleander and My Sister’s Keeper, have special attentiont to details and unusual comparisons like Winterson uses.  This technique really catches my attention and draws me in. 

For the ending, of course part of me hoped that the narrator and Louise would end up together, but then another part of me was happy with the way it ended because it was consistent with Winterson’s style.  I think if it had the traditional happy ending that little part of me would have been happy at first, but then the critical analysing part of me would have been disappointed in Winterson for having such a cliche ending.

We are Jameson experts.

     To put Jameson’s definition of postmodernism into our own terms we have decided to unpack the second half of the title, “The Culture of Late Capitalism.”  To break it down even more we have defined capitalism as the promotion of products to consumers at any cost, basically shoving it down your throat and making you feel like you will die if you do not have this product.  This type of thinking defines our society today; that is our cultural logic.  Therefore Jameson says that postmodernism is the way we live our “meaningless consumer driven lives” (to take a quote from 10 Things I Hate About You).  It is a complete saturation of images, advertisements, and products to everyone at all times. This is why Jameson believes that the key to postmodernism is the “cultural dominant”—the complete involvement of all society in the movement regardless of their knowledge.

Jameson argues that postmodernism is a specific point in time, which he calls Late Capitalism. He believes it is global, not just an American phenomenon, and this is the third phase of capitalism which is in its purest form.  Originally capitalism was centered on factories and people having jobs and earning money just to live, and now it is focused on McDonalds and that extra layer of special sauce that we do not need. It is the purest form because we are not just exploiting our own countries resource and underclass, but we are acting as a country as the “elite” exploiting the other countries resources and people. It doesn’t get any more capitalist than that.

Fight Club agrees with Jameson in saying that capitalism is bad.  Tyler says that “You are not your problems, you are not your name,” you are not the things in your life.  This is directly related to capitalism.  These companies are trying to push their products down your throat and Tyler is saying, wait a minute, hold up, I am not my condo, I am not my job.  He tries to make the narrator see this by destroying these things.  Through destruction comes rebirth.  Jameson said that at one point in history we were at this point of enlightenment, of being able to attain truth. He thought the modernist movement was the key to the “little people” rising up and distributing the wealth– and instead we just took a nosedive into consumerism, and in turn forgo all hope of attaining “the truth”. 

 On the other side of the coin we have Lyotard who says that postmodernism cannot be pinpointed into a specific time in history but rather it is a style and it surpasses space and time.  What this means is that this “post-modern” condition we are now it could have occurred at any point in time- and has. It is just a cycle of realism-modernism-and post modernism. Jameson is a dead-set on Postmodernism because specific to here and now! Jameson’s idea of history is that its no longer tangible to us, we see it through a “Titanic-esque lens.” (the proper clothes, the different classes with the happy 3^rd class dancing below deck, etc). This idea also connects to the waning affect he mentions on page 11.  Jameson says that everything is a copy of a copy and we are getting further away from what actually happened (“true history”) and this is making us numb with icons, “leave it to beaver”, “Pleasantville” “That 70’s show”, etc. 

Hannah’s thoughts: Postmodernism is a good way to question things but is not the best way to define them.  Jameson was unhappy because the rules and codes of reading art and literature had gone out the window. I would have to agree to a point. How can we ever build on ideas if we never have any established ones? The only way we could is building horizontally, with no depth increasing. Jameson says pretty much the same thing on page 12—his idea of depth replaced by surfaces or multiple surfaces pretty much sums up my thinking—with much better vocabulary. Aprille’s thoughts:  From reading Lyotard and Jameson and the other texts we’ve covered in class so far, my concept of postmodernism is that it is very contradictory and chaotic.  I still feel like it cannot be pinpointed into one specific definition or belief.  I agree with Lyotard in his thoughts on meta-narratives, and I agree with Jameson in his belief about our culture being consumed and driven by capitalism.  I don’t think I’ll ever have one concrete belief about postmodernism because I can relate to many different ideas about it.

Outside sources:

we just thought this was funny

http://www.cla.purdue.edu/english/theory/postmodernism/modules/jamesonpostmodernity.html

That’s a website about Jameson’s theories, it basically unpacks his ideas for you.

the man himself

http://www.mun.ca/phil/codgito/vol4/v4doc2.html

more unpacking of Jameson

all you need is love

ok so i’ve thought more about winterson and her choice of keeping the narrator nameless and genderless, and i’m starting to accept it and let go of questioning it.  maybe her point is for us as readers to focus on the meaning behind her words.  what is her story about and what does she want to say to us.  her story is about love and so does it really matter who is in love with who?  love is love.  maybe she is trying to get us to focus on that instead of focusing on the characters and their interactions.  by making her narrator genderless i think she’s trying to get her readers focused on the events and the love of the story rather than who.  i can’t help but relate this to race.  i try not to do it, but so much of the time whenever my friends or family are telling stories, they always say, oh it was a black guy, or a hispanic woman… mention the race/ethnicity of the person.  i just don’t like how, unless it’s specifically mentioned, everyone else in the story is assumed to be white.  who says the narrator is white?  we just assume it.

written on the body

i like this book so far.  i like the mystery of it, although it does drive me crazy slightly.  i’m also a big fan of how winterson takes little details and describes them, like saying plums are the color of bruises.  and i also like the connections she makes with describing things.  i’ve been going back and forth on deciding if the narrator a man or a woman, and i’m beginning to think that maybe it’s both, maybe she took elements of both and put them into this one genderless character to keep her audience guessing.  at first i just assumed it was a woman because why keep it hidden if it was a man?  whoopie doo, another story about a woman cheating on her husband with another man… but if it’s a woman, that makes it controversial and interesting.  so i think for my sanity’s sake, i’m going to go that sam is neither male nor female and both at the same time.