—oOo—
Bob Dylan Live 2015 concert opener =] Things Have Changed
Self-Frankensteinization
Self-Frankensteinization
Towards the end of Stephen Crites' article "Storytime", on the narrative psychology of the self—a nightmare vision on the fixed selves we acquire, the artificial living dead we may become through a surfeit of coherence:
New variations on the same basic types of unhappiness arise when I wittingly or unwittingly confuse the recollective story with the projective scenario. On the one hand, treating my own past as if it were as indeterminate as the future, my story will be so loose and fragmentary that I cannot recollect myself out of it. I make a fairy tale of my past, and become at best an enigma to myself and others, a creature of uncommitted fantasy.
The reverse of this loss of identity is the loss of possibility entailed in the imposition of the tighter-woven recollective story on my future. Attempting to maintain my self unchanged, I impose the "will" of this self on the future. The unhappiness of that is not that I may fail, but that I may actually succeed. For then I will have locked myself into what is after all a construct recollected from the past. The self becomes its own Frankenstein, a monster of its own making, which exercises its control not only over whatever falls within its orbit as it stalks the earth, but also over its very self. I cannot free myself from the self-image I have created, which becomes more confining the more it suceeds in imposing itself.
("Storytime", 172)
Retropost #50: 5 de diciembre de 2004
lunes, 6 de julio de 2015
Retropost #50: 5 de diciembre de 2004
5 de diciembre
Recomiendo dos DVDs de conciertos recientes: Sarah Brightman, Live in Las Vegas (si algo hay bien conjuntado en este mundo, es Sarah Brightman y Las Vegas); y Juliette Gréco, Olympia 2004 , una rara ocasión de verla en vivo, impresionante... como hace cincuenta años. Por sorprendente que parezca, no tenía actuaciones en vídeo disponibles hasta ahora. Y esta no la nombran ni en su website. Ah, y para los amantes de Andrew Lloyd Webber o Wilkie Collins, ha salido en CD la grabacion de la premiere de The Woman in White. Y pronto estrenan aquí El fantasma de la ópera de Joel Schumacher (sin Sarah, hélas! pero iremos a verlo). Otras cosas visibles: tanto la película española concursante a los Oscars (Mar adentro ) como la francesa (Les enfants du choeur). Se llora en las dos, aviso. Pero tengo esperanzas de que se lo den a una aún más redonda.
Y una webcite divertida que he visiteado hoy, para aficionados al cine comic y literatura de horror: Feo Amante's Homepage. Hasta el nombre está bien.
Retropost #49: 4 de diciembre de 2004
Retropost #49: 4 de diciembre de 2004
4 de diciembre
Estamos de puenting, como dice la Sta. SS, otra que habla spanglish. Mientras España se desplaza como loca sobre sí misma, nos dedicaremos a descansar.
Sueño de Álvaro de esta noche, en direct discourse:
"Sabes qué he soñado, que yo era Jim Hawkins, y que estaba en la Hispaniola con Israel Hands y O'Brien, pero que vaya, eran un poco buenos, y el barco encallaba y se inclinaba y yo saltaba a tierra, iba a la isla y por un cañaveral me encontraba de repente a todos los compañeros del cole, y lo raro era que en el barco yo tenía coleta de Jim Hawkins, y chaleco y demás, y al ver a los compañeros, zas, me desaparecía todo, y estaban refugiados debajo de una especie de plancha, como de Onduline Bajo Teja, porque estaba todo lleno en determinadas zonas de Heracleoforbia 3000, el alimento de los dioses, y animales se volvían gigantes, y teníamos que escapar de miles de abejas y nos refugiábamos en el colegio, bajábamos mucho mucho por los pasillos que no sé por qué estaban desiertos, y veíamos que abajo había un convento de monjas, y nos seguían dos abejas gigantes, y corríamos a ponernos en la máquina multiplicadora, rápido, rápido, y chac chac, nos multiplicábamos, y las abejas de pronto se ponían de pie sobre sus escuálidas patas de atrás y sacaban cada una dos pistolas de plasma y decían "A ver, ¿quién de vosotros es el original?" (-"Y cómo sabías que las pistolas eran de plasma?" - "Porque tenían ese característico depósito verde detrás"). Bueno, así no hay quien se aburra. Addenda: "Ah, y tendrás que añadir un trozo que no te he contado, justo al entrar en el pabellón: venían corriendo detrás también Israel Hands y O'Brien, así huyendo de las abejas, uaaahhhhaaah!! agitando así los brazos, y las abejas zumbando detrás, pesadamente, con unas alitas pequeñas, no sé por qué no corrían más, y los pillaban justo al entrar al pabellón. No eran malos pero al final morían igual. Salpicaba sangre. Y las abejas parecían muy cómicas pero no sé por qué nos aterraban". Ahora está elaborando un gráfico con "la escena del crimen" que dice Ivo, dibujando las abejas "tal y como eran. Te va a sorprender la forma que tenían." --"Pero siempre les acertaban a los clones, que estaban hechos como de nubes sólidas, y no sufrían ni nada, simplemente desaparecían, les disparaban y se iban volviendo transparentes, y no decían ni aaagggg ni nada, bueno, si el original decía aaaggg ellos también decían aaaagggg".
Oscar, por su parte, dice que ha soñado lo siguiente: "Pues yo tenía olejas de gigante, y ya está!"
—oOo—
Storytime and Narrative Anchoring
Storytime and Narrative Anchoring
A short passage from Stephen Crites' article "Storytime: Recollecting the Past and anticipating the future", in which he puts forward a narrative psychology of the self. In this passage Crites differentiates between the self who remembers and the remembered self:
[S]tory-like narrative establishes a particularly strong sense of personal continuity, because it can link an indefinite number of remembered episodes from the single point of view of the one who recounts or merely recalls the story. This single point of view is the "I" who now speaks or recalls, and this "I" which situates my story and distinguishes it from others also anchors what I call my self in its identity over time. This story-like remembrance of things past is of at least Proustian length in its full extent, though what I can recollect at a sitting is mercifully some shorter sequence of the whole. The whole story generally remains vague and merely implicit. What I own as my self is always present as the character in the story from whose perspective its episodes are recalled, claimed as its own self by this "I" who recalls. By telling the story from the perspective of this self, as in a first person narrative, usually told in the past tense, I distance this self from the intersubjective matrix of experience in order to claim it as my own, as that personal past with which I claim identity. Still there is always some hiatus between the "I" who recollects and the self who appears as a character in a succession of episodes, a hiatus that I artfully bridge by owning this self, claiming it as my own. Still there remains a point of tension where the hiatus has been bridged, a tension that I express linguistically as a differentiation of tense between past and present. (Crites, "Storytime", In Narrative Psychology, ed. T. R. Sarbin, p. 159).
This is a distinction which is familiar to narratologists, from the German tradition of Spitzer and Gunther Müller, retaken by Genette, in the form of the opposition between the "narrating I" and the "narrated I" (Erzählendes Ich / Erzähltes Ich), i. e. the first-person narrator considered either as a narrator or as a character who is and is not himself, due to the distance in time, experience, knowledge, and narratorial function. The narrated I, the character, acts as a guiding thread and usually as a focalizer, though his perspective may be often qualified by the retrospective knowledge of the narrator.
Note the qualification "recounts or merely recalls"—narrative continuity and structuration is activated in the act of representation which takes place in memory alone, although it is questionable to what extent this constitutes "a narrative" before it is actually transmitted as one. Narrativeness is stronger in actual spoken or written narratives, but there is a degree of narrativity in the process described by Crites.
Note also the use of the term "anchoring". Here it refers to the act o situating episodes or events within a personal life-story, but it is clear that it is one aspect of what we call more generally "narrative anchoring", a term which refers to all kinds of anchoring of narrative sequences within larger sequences, whether personal, collective, or universal in scope.
Les années dautrefois (2)
Anytime, Anywhere (4)