I'm gonna try to start writing again, because it'll help me with Diana's class, with Wayne's paper, and hopefully with papers for Leonard and Nigel. I have a lot on my mind, so I'm going to just start typing and see if what results coheres.
It was useful for me to decide to read Dora as a novel rather than as a scientific document, because it protected the girl Dora from the violence of the text. At the same time, that's not a good way of reading Freud. I'm going to try to slog back through it in the next few days, to see if I can get a better sense of how Freud thinks her condition operates, as opposed to trying to establish the plot of the story.
Diana's point the other day that the language of psychoanalysis /is/ the language of plot I found interesting, because in some ways it's true and in some ways it isn't. Zizek's Lacan is not really about plot, is it?
I'm much more interested in the way that Zizek talks about the constitutiveness of lack than I am in how he talks about the act/signifier/name of the father. I understand that there's a perceptive critique of ideology there, that's at least somewhat in dialogue with the Frankfurt School, but I just can't get myself particularly interested. I mean, I guess I just don't know how it works textually to account for things that I'm interested in the same way that desire does.
I need to start reading and writing about Ted Berrigan for Wayne's class to start generating that talk, as well. Right now, I'm interested in the way that "Dear Margie, it's 5:15 am" is different than "Hurry UP PLEASE IT'S TIME"--both inform others of the time. I may want to think about this in terms of Hegel's bit on "Now it is day."
Hurry Up Please It's Time uses a bit of overheard dialogue to inject a narrative situation into the poem. The speaking ladies are at a bar at closing time. This situation is a schematic of the poem in minature, as well; a version of TS Eliot's view of the now.
Writing a letter, one uses a mention of the time in order to enable the other to understand what position you're writing from. After all, it's not 5:15 am, probably, now. 5:15 am is a measure of the gap between sender and recipient, between letter sending and letter receiving, between what could be said then and what can be said now. At the same time, it's a statement of a precise fact, about as precise as a poem can get.
That tension, between "block-like fact" and the inevitability of its going awry is important for the poems. It's how they work. And, in the last few poems, when that going awry starts in itself to be right, we realize that the letter always arrives at its destination. I'm thinking in the Lacanian sense--more Zizek--it is in reading the letter that we recognize ourselves as its addressee.
It is in reading the Sonnets that we realize that we are the addressee of that letter--that's what happens over the course of the poem, as the private references break out into a code of our own. It is 5:15 am here, rather than 5:15 am there--the gap is there, but the letter has arrived.
Hurry up please it's time, on the other hand, attempts to interpellate everyone as its subjects. The voice of authority--barkeep, Eliot, history--has insisted that everything is ending. One can't start a letter back to Eliot:
Dear Eliot,
Here the bars don't close until 2:00.
The metaphor of voice doesn't work for what I'm describing, I don't think. Certainly a letter-writer's "voice" is different than a barkeeper's voice, except when a bartender writes letters or a writer keeps bar. There's something in these time references that represent a relation to time and society that is mediated by voice but isn't voice. I'm losing the thread here, but it's getting interesting.
to summarize:
In The Sonnets, the repetition of certain blocklike materials that acknowledge their own limitedness help us to begin to understand ourselves as appropriate addressees for them. It's a tentative sort of incorporation of ourselves into the text.
In The Wasteland, on the other hand, if we fail to be interpellated, we have to object to the text. There isn't another subject position available.
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