Thursday, February 05, 2004

On Rehearsals of Discomposure



I once wrote during a very lengthy (and difficult) examination in Graduate School that the reality of today is that Existentialism—as put forth by Sartre—has become a popular brand (although not always known with the same terminology), just like any commercial commodity, packaged and media-sold under the catchy name of “Generation X.” I also wrote that “angst” seems to have become a bottled elixir of emotion that people buy by the six-pack as they toast the familiar chronicles of anguished existence.



Most people today, especially those who have cultivated acute sensibilities concerning "self" in relation to others, as well as a capability for minute examinations of blind destinies, share varying sense of this existential dilemma. One way to measure this is through the undying popularity and patronage of angst-themed literature that range from the sublime to the pathetic. My library alone bleeds with titles and authors such as these.



Sherwood Anderson. James Baldwin, especially Another Country and Giovanni’s Room. Douglas Coupland, author of Generation X: Tales From an Accelerated Culture, the book that first popularized it all. Bret Easton Ellis, especially Less Than Zero and The Rules of Attraction. Alex Garland and The Beach. David Leavitt and his gay-themed self-explorations. Jay McInerney, especially Bright Lights, Big City. J. D. Salinger and his angry The Catcher in the Rye. John Updike and his Rabbit books. John Steinbeck. D. H. Lawrence. Ignazio Silone. Franz Kafka.



And, well, even Ethan Hawke.



Almost all of us, it seems then, are caught up with the subject of our existence (and the questions of its meaning, or lack thereof)—all because we are challenged by the notion that, as Sartre put it, “man is nothing else but what he makes for himself.” This is an uplifting notion, if also a scary one.



The glut of literature devoted to examining existentialism’s many facets and questions shows that isolation, estrangement, and alienation have become the common spiritual themes (spiritual in the Paul Tillich sense that they seek answers to age-old philosophical questions) in our age. Who hasn’t, but the basest of human beings, embarked on internal journeys exploring and questioning the metaphysical absurdities of life, the death of ideals, or the unshakable thought that, like ants, we are insignificant dots in the eyes of the universe? Reading these literatures is like traveling on a road to self. They magnify our questions, and sometimes our fears and insecurities--and through their insights, we may understand ourselves so much more.



Nathan A. Scott Jr.’s Rehearsals of Discomposure: Alienation and Reconciliation in Modern Literature tries to pin down these questions on the bases of four renowned authors (Franz Kafka, Ignazio Silone, D. H. Lawrence, and T. S. Eliot) whom he believes are the representative figures of modern literature’s alienation theme. At best, it is a very personal work that tries to passionately illuminate the philosophical beauties of these authors’ body of work. It is also a very heady, difficult read.



According to Scott, one of the most compelling traditions of sensibility in contemporary literature is best identified by three terms: isolation, estrangement, and alienation. The works of Kafka, Graham Greene, Djuna Barnes, and W. H. Auden has what he calls “an underlying unity of temperament and experience which is consistently organized into a description of the contemporary tragedy in terms of dereliction [abandonment or neglect], estrangement [hostile alienation], and exile, not in terms of an alienation within a stable world, but in a worlds where ‘things fall apart,’ where ‘the center does not hold,’ where man’s deepest tension is not social or economic but a metaphysical anguish.”



Kafka, Silone, Lawrence, Eliot, and their likes write without a naive innocence, only too painfully aware of the dissonance and incoherence in contemporary life. All of us feel this way. You must notice how sometimes our lives take on unexpected twists and turns, as if it is guided by some unseen hand, and we can only watch and witness how we fall into endless questions almost always beginning with “why.”



Why is this? Our age is defined and has been shaped by “wars and rumors of wars,” by demonic hierarchies of power and wickedness in high places (Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, George W. Bush, and Clinton’s Monica Lewinsky have made us jaded), and by a disintegration of traditional faiths. I would think that the latter matters most in our age where “the center doesn’t hold” (the phrase is from Auden, by the way). In Japan, I once asked my Japanese best friend Toshihiro Murata what faith he believes in. This was his cryptic reply---and which he says was typically very Japanese: “I go to a Shinto temple on my birthday, to a Christian church on Christmas, and to a Buddhist temple on New Year’s Day. What faith do I really believe in? I don’t know and I don’t care.” I thought back to my first reading of Wataru Tsurumi’s The Complete Manual of Suicide, which was an unprecedented bestseller in Japan. Last night, I read Scott’s words again and all I could see was the bleakness of life for the ordinary Japanese, living a fast, faceless life, and without an anchor to ground them.



Scott presents three dimensions of this sensibility in which various definitions are given of what it means to live apart in the modern world. The first level is an absolute isolation which expresses itself in terms of what Harry Slochower has called a “sense of cosmic exile,” which is sometimes nihilistic. Examples are Kafka, Sartre, William Faulkner, and Robert Penn Warren.



Slochower’s definition is most apt: think of yourself alone in space, claustrophobic inside some shell of a space station, looking down at earth, imagining and seeing what life bustles on its surface, and then relating yourself to that life, and finding out how very far away you are from everything.



What exists between you and living is a total vacuum, and there seems to be no immediate bridging of that gap. An attempt to do so may mean you being sucked to bits by the unmerciful vacuum of space. Stories say that living alone in space creates mad men, or at least disoriented men. But it doesn’t mean that living a solitary existence in space alone defines a cosmic exile. One may be surrounded by people yet still feel hopelessly alone, living seemingly on the jagged outskirts of society. Ellis’ American Psycho is a perfect example of this nihilism. In film, we see this in the psychotic tendencies of Robert DeNiro’s character in Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver.



The second level is a relational estrangement, which is an agonizing sense of isolation from the modern community. This is the realm of Silone, Malraux, George Orwell, Rex Warner, Ernest Hemingway, and Dos Passos.



The third level is an ontological solitude which often gives rise to melancholy. This is how Scott defines it: “The fact that I am I and you are you, and we are ontologically discrete factors between whom there is finally void and separateness.”



Let me illustrate this through a physical theory I learned from a movie (the term of which I forget at the moment), but I remember that it goes this way. Between two objects (or people), there is a distance. One can attempt to “bridge” that distance by one coming halfway through that distance. You proceed half of the way, and still there is another half right before you. You proceed on another half of that halfway, and still there is another halfway before you. In the end, you come to a realization that there is an infinite number of halfways between two objects or people. The jarring conclusion is that there can never be a real closeness between two objects or people. What is there is a distinct, unbridgeable division.



All of us are cursed to be separate. And, according to the poet Mallarme, “We were two; I maintain it.”



Readings can be so sad, and yet also so wondrously enlightening… and always both.


[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich

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