Research Project: Jungian Alchemical Cycles of Transformation in Locus Solus

        For my research project, I’ll be writing a short article-length research paper (16 – 18 pages) based on parts 1 and 2 of my blog entry on Roussel. Most of the primary works on Roussel and alchemy are only available in French (specifically works by Jean Ferry—a contemporary of Breton—and Ricahrd Danier). However, I’ve found sources in English that summarize and explain these sources, so I can have a basic understanding of how Roussel is already read in alchemical terms. In brief, previous scholars have focused on Roussel’s linguistic wordplay and cryptic metaphors connecting to alchemical materials and processes. Breton noted references to cabbalistic ritual and Tarot in Roussel’s work; however, he was primarily examining Roussel’s play La Poussiere de soleil. 

       Since my knowledge of alchemy is really only second-hand from Jung’s writings (in which he examines alchemy metaphorically to illustrate the functioning of the psyche—the union of the Self through opposites, as symbolized in the Lapis Philosophorum), I am doing a great deal of background research on the literal practices of alchemists. I am also researching critical interpretations and biographies of Roussel that don’t directly mention alchemy, such as Foucault’s Death and the Labyrinth and Mark Ford’s Raymond Roussel and the Republic of Dreams. Finally, I’m tracking down as much of Breton’s readings of Roussel I can find in English. This week I’ll be reading Breton’s Arcanum 17, which includes discussions of Jung and Tarot. 

       My unique angle (which I haven’t seen any scholars address, although I’m still in the midst of my research) is to take into consideration Jungian alchemical cycles in Locus Solus. I plan to argue that the novel's cyclical structure (in the way I have mapped it out in the chart on my blog) reflects certain traits of alchemy that Jung also describes as metaphors for individuation. With this reading, I’m trying to understand the novel as the artist’s search for wholeness or completeness of the fractured self. Instead of focusing on wordplay or finding linguistic connections to alchemy (which previous scholars have covered), I will do a very specific Jungian reading. In the process, I also hope to illuminate the cyclical narrative structure of the novel, based on my chart, which I argue mirrors Jung’s claim of “inner alchemy” as a process by which imagination fosters a cycle of creative death and resurrection that leads to transformations of both the unconscious and the outer physical world. To me, the narrative structure that I’ve mapped out is essential for understanding how the novel emphasizes death and rebirth as inner, creative processes that are expressed through the act of artistic creation. I also hope this reading will compliment and extend Foucault’s analysis.

Oulipian Constraints

       The constraints of Oulipo seems to be directly at odds with the Surrealist emphasis on automatic writing or allowing the language of the subconscious to emerge through the creative process. Whereas the Surrealists break starkly from tradition, the Oulipos seem to reappropriate old forms. If the sonnet stands at odds with the type of poetry generated through automatic writing, then the Oulipian use of the sonnet form makes the old form new by revealing the freedom of restriction.

        Since I’m not a creative writer, the only time I’ve really dealt with constraints or restrictions on a regular basis is with academic writing. We don’t often think of the stylistic conventions of academic writing as being particularly liberating or creatively stimulating, but sometimes I do my best thinking when crafting a formal essay. How might I synthesize a complex idea into a fifteen-page maximum essay? Or how might I challenge myself to expand an idea into an article-length essay? How can I craft an idea in one field that might be of interest to readers across disciplines?

        In my experience writing story variations of this class, I was venturing into completely new territory. Whereas the poetry assignment was challenging, it didn’t feel overwhelming because I had at least some previous experience writing poetry when I was younger. But since I’ve had no experience writing short fiction or creating various plots and scenarios with re-written material, I felt as if I had no idea what I was doing. I didn’t even know if I was doing the assignment in the right way (or even if there was a “right way”). I had to ask myself questions I had never asked before of my own writing (or at least, not in terms of writing short fiction): What exactly is a “linguistic” variation? How does a variation in narrative differ from a variation in genre? Can one story actually contain all three types of variations, and if so, is that allowed? (This might perhaps relate to Le Lionnais’ idea of “levels of constraint.”) After asking these questions and looking at the example from Queneau, I just barreled ahead and gave it my best shot.

        It’s hard for me to answer the question of which movement is more “revolutionary.” When reading the Surrealists, I felt I was encountering literature I had never experienced before. In reading the few Oulipo texts we’re been assigned so far, I feel as if some of these techniques are not as new or as unique as what the Surrealists were doing. Calvino’s novel in particular seemed too close to Hoffmann’s The Life and Opinions of the Tomcat Murr with the idea of a meta-narrative of intertwined stories, complete with printer’s errors, parallel chapters, and shadow characters. The idea of Oulipo writers “embracing” previous writers as those who were Oulipo but just didn’t know it, seems to suggest that they also realized that perhaps their ideas weren’t new, even if they were trying to push boundaries with older traditions.

Zürn and the Wound of the Knife

        Near the beginning of her novella Dark Spring, Unica Zürn presents a striking image of a little girl mutilating “a big, expensive doll” given to her by her father’s female companion. The moment both reveals the inner psychology of the character and introduces a symbol that will become important later in the story: the knife. Because she is “[angry] and desperate about the unhappy conditions inside her home,” the girl “takes a knife and cuts out the doll’s eyes” and “slices open the belly of the doll and tears her expensive clothes” (40). At first glance, this appears to be an abortive act, slicing open the womb of the doll to express frustration in her struggle to understand her budding sexual desires and her inability to have her father all to her own. Two of the novella’s primary themes are a search for a lack of completeness and for a feminine identity, which are both symbolized in slicing through the doll’s womb.

        In The Uncanny, Freud links blindness and fear of losing one’s eyes to castration anxiety. For women, this happens is when a young girl attaches to the father and grows separate from the mother at the phallic stage. In the previous paragraph, Zurn describes the girl’s initial rejection of her mother’s body as monstrous, setting up a tension throughout the novel between the girl and her overbearing mother.

        The Freudian reading of the scene is even more apparent when the word “knife” again appears in the text when the girl’s brother forces himself onto her and “drills his ‘knife’ (as she calls it) into her ‘wound” (56). By referring to her brother’s penis as a “knife,” the girl links the aggressive sexual act to the violent dismembering of the doll—the moment at which she first acknowledges her own psychological wound. We must then return to the doll scene and understand the slice across the belly as not only abortive, but also sexual—both a creation of and an attack on the vaginal “wound” that foreshadows the sexual thrusting of her brother. In this sense, the doll scene can be read as the girl performing her own “wounding”—that is to say, both coming into the sexuality of her own womanhood and lashing out against the lack of completeness she feels as a direct result of that sexual awakening.

Cut-and-Paste Found Poetry Part II

Based on the poem I wrote in the previous entry (which you should probably read first), Lane asked me to do the following: "1) out of this, 'mine' a short poem that feels definitively 'modern' (in a contemporary way, not in a classical Modernist way) and 2) using only this text, (connective words are allowed) turn this poem into a sonnet."

Below I've written two new poems using only the words and punctuation found in my initial poem with no extra or connective words. The sonnet is first, followed by the contemporary poem. I loved writing Shakespearean sonnets when I was a teenager, but I haven't written one in over ten years (and never with these constraints). I don't think I've ever tried to write a contemporary poem, per say. In all honestly, I don't read much poetry beyond the 1970s, and mostly it's late stuff from James Dickey or Robert Penn Warren, both of whom rejected contemporary poetry in different ways. But, I gave it my best shot!

As mentioned in the previous post, these words all come from movie titles in my DVD collection.

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Strange Sanctum

Beyond the scarlet-golden sunset light,

A raven dreams of death. Condemned to fly

On silent wings across the winter night.

Her lonely sacred burden is to die.

The violent voyage of eternity

Will long escape this phantom with no name.

Her fugitive flesh now chained to body,

With soul reborn in rhapsodies of flame.     

A distant lightning echoes in my eyes--

The moonlight shadows at midnight are long.

The Darkness broken by savage sunrise.

I wake up to witness God's hollow song.

Passion of night now vanishes in fire--

My dream an illusion of inner desire.

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Bridal Shadows

My wife is chained

to my shame. I murder her

heart, and smile as I kiss

her naked tears.

We live a hollow life.

At night we scream

as in a tomb.

I speak of her

as a saboteur of my passion--

But I am her.

Cut-and-Paste Found Poetry

Here is my cut-and-paste poem from found sources. Below the poem I provide a link to where I drew the material. I figured it would be more fun to read the poem first before discovering how I pieced it together. I rewrote this countless times over the week until I got it just the way I like it, so this is pretty close to how the final draft will look.

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The Triumph of Dream Shadows

Temptress Satan, my lady of whims,

keeper of the flame as the long

day closes: witness your black legion gambling

with souls. Invisible agents of destiny, they live by lessons

of darkness. Phantom fiends with no name,

wolf riders by gaslight, herdsmen

of the lonely dawn. Flesh and the devil

duel for inner sanctum.

Each sunset I die.

Tonight: behind locked doors, a savage

bridal procession. Fallen angels dance with burning

flowers, desperate sinners on a paradise path

of passion. Death smiles on the women

condemned--demons who fire-walk on a violent sea of grass

where serpents dream of winter light. Dangerous Juno--Killer

of Men! Royal Wife of the Goat! Sitting high and strange across

the distant valley of vengeance--who

leaves nothing sacred in this narrow

corridor of sleeping bondage. 

Chained raven of Hell strikes scarlet streets of panic. 

My marked woman of shadows

reborn in moonlight--assassin of youth in the persona

of a stolen face. Her heart of glass. Her naked

kiss a fog of evil. Lethal decoy, strange illusion,

discreet downfall of

Shame.

Saboteur of ecstasies on broken wings of hope.

The midnight bride came D.O.A.

Call it murder! Or the conquest of a lesser god.

For her, I wept a golden reservoir of tears.

Eternity remains a hollow triumph for

God's lonely man,

a sinner in the land of silence and darkness.

Glitterbug soul, rise from my wild eyes (Look:

A dragonfly in the stardust!).

Fly beyond the last door of the living flesh to

escape the Chariots of Death.

We are spellbound searchers for the moonstone of life....

 (*But sweet rhapsodies also die--the burden of dreams

at Bellevue.) 

Sunrise! 

And with it Death. 

I wake up screaming. Chimes of a sombre empire ring

bells from the deep. A scream of stone:

song of fear in the night like lightning over water. A trick of light

echoes in the tomb of the blind dead. The midnight

voyage vanishes. My fugitive soul encounters its body

in the final shock of day. 

I speak now my ballad of fire: a tribute to

the fata morgana of lost desire.

***********************************************

My list of found items for this poem consisted of titles from my DVD collection, which can be found here: http://www.facebook.com/notes/mike-sanders/my-dvd-and-vhs-collection/10151104618662489 (I made this Facebook note public, so I think everyone should be able to see the list from this link). Every word in the poem comes from the list, and I didn't reuse words unless they appeared on the list multiple times. For example, I used the word "of" 23 times. It appears on the list far more than 23 times. (I stopped counting after 23 because I didn't use the word any more!) "Death" appears on the list seven times. I used it twice.  At one point I wanted to use the word "drink" or "eat," but I didn't have them, so I had to go in another direction. I also could only use "as" twice and "but" once. Thankfully, I had Woody Allen's Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Sex *But Were Afraid to Ask, or I would have been unable to use it at all! 

Notice that I also incorporated the asterisk in the title before the word "But," as in Allen's title. All punctuation marks that appear in the poem--periods, commas, dashes, exclamation points, and parentheses--also appear on the list, and I didn't use any more than are on the list. Thankfully, I had many titles with "Mr." and "Dr." or abbreviations like "C.O.D." or "D.O.A.," which I mined for periods in my poem. I also had Lindsay Anderson's IF...., from which I drew the ellipsis after "moonstone of life...." 

Since I’m a fan of old B-movies from the 30s, film noir, and German cinema, the tone of the poem is fairly dark! I think the best lines in the poem come from the German film titles.