(no subject)

[proximoception]

Just read Shelley's Triumph of Life for the howevermanyeth time. No wonder I found Fanny and Alexander Shelleyan, the Jewish shopkeeper's story is impossibly similar. Yet surely Bergman never read it.

This makes me happy. My favorites are my favorites for a reason.

Comments

[nightspore.livejournal.com]

And you know, Derrida wasn't wrong (despite your not liking the book) to compare Death Sentence to it. When I teach Shelley (including this semester), there's a two hour session where I read every line aloud, commenting on the fly. Last year I gave them the option of memorizing the whole instead of an exam. One did, which was great.

"...but woman fell away..."

[proximoception.livejournal.com]

Triumph seems more reconcilable with First Love to me, though I'm convinced I just missed the boat on Death Sentence. Ever have an opinion you're sure is wrong but retain anyway? Mine is that post-Romantic French culture, though to a lesser extent than Japanese, meets in Anglo-American literature/culture a story too true to be refused but too anchored in scattered, hard to reach particulars to be properly understood. Where this doesn't spur them on to heroic assimilation as in Proust, it causes troubles. The story is either sketchily retold with blanks and grotesque bridges or entirely mistold past a certain point from a crucial misunderstanding, or used to illustrate that no story can make sense, that the truth is wrong. International influence anxiety. And the ensuing products are so strange they offer promise of escape from the difficulties of our own past, seem easier, fresher roads to the mystery. Symbolism/surrealism/existentialism/theory the equivalents of Japanimation. But again, I know this is wrong and I'm the one cartooning superiors.

A something in the pains and pleasures of women mysteriously gives a man a permanent grip on the frame of life, a grip that satisfies more deeply than life can, to the point of making life and further women in some sense unnecessary. / A something in the pleasures of life is distilled into a feminine essence in a man's imagination, pursuit of which within life proves impossible and fatal, while failure to pursue is also impossible unless said man is Socrates or Jesus. / A preferable state of comparative nonexistence is made difficult by a man's longings for a woman, leading him to accept life with the woman to end the longings, leading to further obstacles to his peace that, finally proving unacceptable, result in the choice of life alone again, but with some permanent loss or memory burden therefrom.

Text Desired State Existence of Pleasure Clear Connections
_____ _____________ _____________________ _________________
Sentence: attained maybe no
Triumph : unattainable initially mostly
1st Love: (re)attained? hell no crystal

Is First Love a satire on love or on a good Schopenhauerian's denial of it? The man reminds me of Kafka's Dog, who refuses to admit the possibility that his food might be a gift; the man is unable to take even ideas of the good from the world, assuming it entirely evil.

Shelley's poem is astonishing because he's so firm in his decision that a continuity that ends is not a continuity. He refuses all qualification, all "less difficult pleasures". And there's not even death as an answer, as in Alastor and maybe Adonais. Frankly I don't see how even Socrates and Jesus get out of jail; firm renunciation of all self-deception or selfishness may free one from confusion somewhat, but don't bring back the Vision. This is what fascinates me most, he seems to find his own conclusions unacceptable. The quest is weirdly still continuing even as he discovers it a trick or mistake.

How would it have ended? Rousseau seems to be about to echo Sophocles' dead baby-envy when the poem stops. What is life? The worst. And that's likely as much as Shelley would get out of him. But earlier he'd told Shelley to follow the commotion into the night to find out more, i.e. to die. I think this bitter remark is further evidence for a subtle turn from Adonais. "Die! If thou would'st be with that which thou dost seek" becomes "seek, despairing, even unto death". But of course in a poem you can wander into the death-night. Alternatively Shelley could have entered the crowd himself, and either confirmed Rousseau's take on all of it or discovered a saving something therein. But surely Shelley was too resolute and independent to be saved. How others finished it:

Blake, Marx: Problems will be worked through in time by the management. I am the management.

Wordsworth, Kafka: Don't be hysterical. There's always something you're forgetting.

Shakespeare, Keats, Stevens: There's something about the dance itself.

Many others: Lie a better world into existence.

Even more: Love what matters even though it doesn't matter.

Most: The others know.

Re: "...but woman fell away..."

[proximoception.livejournal.com]

Why doesn't this bloody thing let me space the way I want. My table is ruined!