Not I

This weekend, I read Samuel Beckett's extended monologue “Not I”. It had a particularly forceful impact on me. Reading the monologue, I took in the frantic nature of the lines, but I knew how different it would feel watching it performed. When performed, the actress’ body is completely obscured except for her lips, so when watched, it appears that the only object on stage is a pair of lipsticked...lips. When read, it's easy to follow the loose story of a woman and her repeated experiences. The lines are read at breakneck speed and are almost unintelligible. What was remarkable, was that Beckett captured the way that humans inner dialogue sounds like. It is relentless. It never stops talking. From personal experience, when I recall an event, I run over it multiple times, the same way the actress repeats the lines of her traumatic experiences. Theater has always had a different response to me than written prose has. Not that it is superior, it just serves a different purpose. To watch the pair of lips release the never ending dialogue, my own began to speak up. It’s almost deafening. Beckett has that gift of showing humans what they least like to see. I read in an interview that the audience tried to leave and escape out the door or to the bathrooms. Beckett had anticipated this and locked the doors and took out the lightbulbs in the bathrooms so that the only thing the audience members experienced for those fifteen minutes was the buzz of the lips and total darkness. Theater gives a tangible event to analyze, while written works leave it to the reader’s imagination. The reader only gets out as much as they put in, while theater forces the audience member to take in what’s happening. By comparing and contrasting that two, I don’t mean to rank them. Sometimes, certain messages have to be placed in different ways to be effectively sent across from creator to observer. 

The World's End

Over this weekend, I had the pleasure to a night with my four best friends and a screening of The World's End. Walking into the high security movie theater with a $20 dollar hole in my wallet, I anticipated a hilarious and action packed finale to the beloved Three Cornetto trilogy. And I got that; however, when the credits rolled, I sat still in my seat, patching over what I had just watched. Not that the ending was something profound that hit me deep down, I had just never really experienced the message that was delivered to me, and in the way it was delivered. A quick synopsis for those who haven't gotten around to seeing it (don't worry, there's plenty of commentary to make up for wasted summarizing words):

*Spoilers, if you were the minority who actually looked forward to seeing the movie then you should have already seen it already. If not, you've been warned*

The protagonist, Gary King, is an alcoholic who is still tied to the past and the glory he experienced during his teenage years. To describe his character: he is still attending a party that has ended over a decade ago. Thinking fondly of what he remembers to be his greatest night, he decides he must return to his hometown and drag along his five childhood friends so that can complete their unfinished business: The Golden Mile, a twelve stop pub crawl. (They had only made it through 9). Immediately, I recalled, not from experience, that alcoholics must follow a twelve-step program to recovery. This would be Gary's closure. And so Gary's adventure begins, but not without resistance from his five hostage. His friends, all of whom have adhered to the system, are stuck at their desk jobs and are in unhappy marriages. The contrast between their boredom and Gary's obnoxiousness is glaring. It is revealed that everyone in their hometown has been replaced by "Blanks", an alien robotic race that has set up the internet to assimilate into culture. Mankind's imperfection frustrates the aliens, and they leave, taking the internet with them, but leaving the "blank" duplicates behind. The world ends. Duh. The robots, who were previously unconscious, wake up and begin to search for guidance. They find it difficult to re-assimilate into society after the computers have gone down. I thought it was a shameless jab at those who are absorbed with technology, but it certainly reminded me how much I rely on the internet. If something were to happen to it, would I be able to properly function? Do I want that much reliance on it? But that wasn't the central point. The last scene of the movie features one last bar. Gary, sporting a cowboy hat and a medieval sword, strolls up to the bartender and orders a water. He is surrounded by 5 duplicates of his childhood friends. After sparking up an argument with the bartender, he releases a battle cry and rushes forward into the shot, abruptly ending the movie. He fate isn't important, but what is important to notice is that Gary orders a water. This led me to the assumption that he is no longer an alcoholic. He doesn't have to numb himself anymore with substances, and can handle the world through a sober lens. His friends are forced to view it through a sober lens, technologically speaking, but are still miserable. It was almost troubling to watch the movie, as it was difficult to discern what the moral was. Yes, Gary is a miserable alcoholic who is stuck in the past, but his hedonism gives him a reason to live. . . Am I to believe that either way I lose? But then I realized the folly of Gary's boring friends. They grew old and turned their back on their past. Gary was able to grow up, but still appreciated the company of his childhood. I turned to my best friends, and smiled at how appropriate this movie had been to our outing. I knew that wherever I ended up in life, it was important to hold onto friends like these. They tether me to my own identity. Without them, I'm a blank.

Regarding "Theme"

After I read Perrine's (I do not know who the specific author was so the subject for the remainder of the rant will be referred to as "Perrine".) breakdown of theme on Monday, I've been considering many of his arguments over the week. I've tried understanding his point of view, but I'm close to giving up. I understand that it's important to set aside literary works from commercial ones, but it's one thing to divide the literary world into two separate spheres, and another to never allow the two to overlap. It's rather pretentious to cast away a horror story or a science fiction tale as nothing worthy of literary merit because their purpose isn't to reveal a profound truth. I instinctively shutter when I read the passage taking a stance on how a theme exists only when an author has deliberately introduced a concept or theory of life. In my 10th grade honors literature class, where the basis of my understanding of literature stems from, I was taught that the author is dead. It doesn't matter what they wanted to say, or how overreaching the theme was intended to be. They do not matter. When the reader - yes, I am the reader - interprets a book, I bring more of myself to the analytical process than I bring in what was going on in the author's life or time period. In Frankenstein, I couldn't care any less that Mary Shelley had lost her mother or her children before writing the book. To me, Frankenstein is a cautionary tale of fixation on perfection. I'd love to discuss the abortion or masturbatory imagery and consider it a central theme, but I feel like that's impossible when following Perrine's guidelines to theme. Sometimes a theme doesn't have to be skull cracking-ly deep. In fact, I don't want them to. The themes that stick with me the most, that I actually consider in real life while examining my surroundings, and not in literature circles, are the ones that are so simple, they can be expressed in a short phrase like "Crap happens" or "sometimes there is no point". Cliched themes are cliched because society fails to change them. Perrine channels Oscar Wilde when he claims that an author must "seriously attempt to record life accurately or reveal some truth about it". Author's intention has nothing to do with it, especially due to how incompetent they can sometimes be. Unintentional themes are often better than the ones that are deliberately forced. Spring Breakers, a party movie, gave me more insight on the dangers of hedonism and mindless pop culture than what the director wanted me to take from it.  Oscar Wilde said that an artist's, or writer's, duty is to hold up a mirror to nature or man; however, Oscar Wilde contradicts himself and shouldn't be trusted. In the end, of his preface in The Picture of Dorian Gray he says that "all art is quite useless". There obviously are no rules set for establishing the way to interpret art for the whole literary world. In an AP Literature classroom, it's dangerous to narrow the possibilities of interpreting a text by forcing the reader to consider what universal, long lost truth that is hidden inside all of us. How can you expect that all truth's must be revealed and not taught? In The Book of the Grotesque, Anderson writes of how the world is made up of infinite truths that man makes for himself. Sometimes, perspectives must be taught, as they haven't been considered. I don't buy into the whole inherent connection that humans are born with. Babies are blank slates. Even more, teenage readers are impressionable and haven't considered every angle to life. If truths are never taught, only revealed, and the reader is either culturally illiterate, or has only been "revealed/reminded" by profound, often vague, truths, then themes wouldn't be very insightful, or descriptive. I think it's a step backwards. Sorry for the angry rant, it's just been boiling inside of me. If you think that I missed the point to Perrine's discussion on Theme, let me know. Maybe it just needs to be revealed to me.