E. M. Forster

Edward Morgan Forster, The Longest Journey.

The question could again be the same, where the cow is.

So we read this masterpiece, and we can see that the least loved among Forster’s novels not only strikes us by the precision in characters’ depiction and in the description of their developments and of their movements, but it has in itself very much to tell us, and not only about the nature of reality.

First of all, because of its very strength in showing the world like it was before the twentieth century began, before First World War. The world mainly in the sense of relations between people, and for what concerns the differences between the rich and the poor, and for what concerns the vanishing of these differences. I mean, rich people could live a private life, poor people couldn’t. Nowadays, both can’t. 

And we can also see that the question of the cow is now, even more than in 1907, of huge momentousness. Because while in 1966 (remember The Beatles) the cow could be here there and everywhere, now after 2008 and the CDO affair, which Stewart Ansell could have definitely called the subjective product of a diseased imagination, now the cow can be everywhere, and nowhere.

And beyond the question of the cow we can find something more.

Reading the story of the clubfooted Rickie Elliot we can’t help thinking of Oedipus and consequently of William Gass’s Introduction to The Recognitions by William Gaddis. As a matter of fact, Rickie is looking for himself from the beginning to the end of the novel, and he marries a woman which is quite different from what he believed, and so, The Longest Journey turns out to be another novel about the everlasting theme of the recognition, and Rickie Elliot is another hero of this search of ourselves which we can never accomplish.

Rickie Elliot is hardly a hero. Oedipus is hardly a hero. And William Gass says, “We shall live for no reason. Then die and be done with it. What a recognition!”. And so we all are heroes, even though hardly heroes. (quint)

Erich Kahler

Erich Kahler, The Inward Turn of Narrative. (Princeton University Press)

In the depth of my mind. Drifting from a poor shallow idea to another.

It may occur to me that this, the ever new miracle I call thought, the most importante feature to make me different from a beast, has gone and is still going through changes.

That the thoughts of Dante Alighieri were quite different from the thoughts of John Milton.

Their thoughts and the way they considered the universe. The universe and every bit of reality and themselves.

Their minds were utterly different.

In this book Erich Kahler leads us through the deep changes of human mind, from the times of Gilgamesh to the times of Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, and even if he is not acquainted with the work of Marshall McLuhan about the importance of typography, he says more or less the same things.

He passes through Milton’s Paradise Lost and through Swift’s Gulliver Travels, showing us the huge significance of this work in encompassing a new awareness by human beings, of themselves and of their relation with reality and with others.

So now the question could be, what has happened during the time between Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Wakefield and Hemingway’s A Clean, Well-Lighted Place. Or between Tristram Shandy and Wallace’s Infinite Jest. In Tristram Shandy and in Infinite Jest we find the same disruption of time, but not the same depth of consciousness. And between Hawthorne and Hemingway we could find the growth of a new sense of disconnection from the world, from the outside world and from our inside world.

Consciousness is changing, just like it has always been changing.

Our minds are changing, and we ourselves are changing, and our world is changing with us.

The Inward Turn of Narrative may be a powerful aid for our comprehension of what there’s inside and outside us. (quint)

Malkina, Time and Space

Cormac McCarthy, The Counselor. (Picador)

Time and space.

Like everyone of us who are trying to resist the attrition of everyday existence in our electronic world, in this screenplay Cormac McCarthy has strived to draw a grain of a sense out of the fragmentation of time and space of our epoch.

The motion picture is well different from the screenplay and when you see the movie by Ridley Scott you realize that there is a really scanty amount of motion. We see facts in our minds while reading the screenplay and we see facts by our eyes in the superb sequences of the film, but the sense of the facts we see is to be found in the dialogues between the characters, in their comments and remarks about what is happening or has happened or about what is going to happen.

In a way, we may notice that this style of narrative is not so different from the style of Greek tragedy, in which you do not see facts happening on the stage, but you listen to reports by messengers and occasionally by the main characters.

And like the age of Greek tragedy, our age is an age of great transition.

Time is scattered and fragmented, space too.

A dreadful space, an unknowable reality which could even be a scarcely existing reality, just like the unreal reality of the Internet and of social networking, and in this film the enemy is everywhere and nowhere, like the Cloud. 

All that happens is not clearly intelligible.

Malkina is pregnant (in both senses) with the only remaining possibilities of meaning: love of nature, i. e. pets, and a child. At least, these are the only possibilities to draw out a sense of life that the present no-future mess has left to many people. (jessel)