Postapocalyptic Literature Notes #12

Some thoughts on The Day of Doom

First American bestseller is an apocalyptic text!
Literally read to pieces; no surviving full copies (but plenty of fragments)

Setting up Blindness

1995, Saramago rec'd Nobel Prize in Literature 1998.
Blindness has a sequel called, of course, Seeing.
What is the structure of the book like?
- What about grammar? How does it work? Samples to discuss:
  - In a tone of voice that would have been sarcastic ... who pay no taxes on their immoral earnings. (27)
  - The doctor identified himself when they replied ... only been observed in the human species. (32)
  - The government announcement: 42-44.
Seeing as metaphor for knowledge; trope of blindness as ignorance
- Some common English phrases that treat seeing as a trope for knowledge:
  - To see what someone means
  - Exclaiming, Now I see to indicate an epiphany
  - or to see the light
  - The claim that seeing is believing
  - An opinion as a point of view or perspective (or German Weltanschauung
  - Foresight
- Some literary examples:
  - Saul of Tarsus on the road to Damascus
  - Oedipus/Tiresias
  - King Lear
  - John Newton's Amazing Grace:
    I once was lost, but now am found,
    Was blind, but now I see. (First verse, from Olney Hymns, 1779)
  - Enlightenment; the Age of Enlightenment
  - Partial vision:
    - The cyclopes in The Odyssey:
      To this he gave me but a pitiless answer, Stranger, said he, you are a fool, or else you know nothing of this country. Talk to me, indeed, about fearing the gods or shunning their anger? We Cyclopes do not care about Jove or any of your blessed gods, for we are ever so much stronger than they. I shall not spare either yourself or your companions out of any regard for Jove, unless I am in the humour for doing so. And now tell me where you made your ship fast when you came on shore. Was it round the point, or is she lying straight off the land? (book IX)
    - And in Joyce's Ulysses:
      
      –The memory of the dead, says the citizen taking up his pintglass and glaring at Bloom.
      
      –Ay, ay, says Joe.
      
      –You don't grasp my point, says Bloom. What I mean is ...
      
      –Sinn Fein! says the citizen. Sinn Fein amhain! The friends we love are by our side and the foes we hate before us.
- In Wigglesworth's The Day of Doom
  
  But we were blind, they say, in mind;
  too dim was nature’s light,
  Our only guide, as hath been tried,
  to bring us to the sight
  Of our estate degenerate,
  and curs’d by Adam’s fall;
  How we were born and lay forlorn
  in bondage and in thrall. (verse CLIX)
  
  […]
  
  But Nature’s light shin’d not so bright,
  to teach us the right way:
  We might have lov’d it and well improv’d it,
  and yet have gone astray.
  The Judge most High makes this Reply:
  You ignorance pretend,
  Dimness of sight, and want of light,
  your course Heav’nward to bend. (verse CLXI)
- In Blindness:
  - The doctor: it’s the same with a carburetor, if the fuel can’t reach it, the engine does not work and the car won’t go, as simple as that, as you can see. (64; ch. 5)
  - it had to be acknowledged that the authorities had shown great vision when they decided to unite the blind with the blind, each with his own, which is a wise rule for those who have to live together, like lepers. (106; ch 7)

Lefebvre on space:

Henri Lefebvre’s two illusions:
- Lefebvre critiques the idea that the Cartesian-mathematical concept space is an objective, extra-ideological construct.
- This assumption that objective space is extra-ideological is produced as natural through …
  - the illusion of transparency, in which everything can be taken in by a single glance and according to which [c]omprehension is […] supposed […] to to conduct what is perceived, i.e. its object, from the shadows into the light; this is a common default position for those who are constructed socially as educated; and ...
  - the realistic illusion, the belief that things really are what they seem to be; this is a default position for those who are constructed socially as naïve. (From The Production of Space, 27–30)
- [R]epresentational spaces [are] space[s] as directly lived through associated images and symbols. (39)

Today's whiteboard snapshots

Notes for 11 November 2015