[Dae] Labyrinthe Library

[Hina's Simp]

How does one enter into a text? What twists and turns creep up? What decisions are made at these partitions? How does one reach the center and return safely from there?

A text is an arrangement, a collection of words that come together to force the reader into making decisions as they navigate through it. Though the beginning and the end remain clear, the opening and the closing of the book, it is the middle which folds and ruptures. The reader, once they impart into the newly uncovered world of reading, are placed into the labyrinth, at which the path reveals itself and makes itself known: the only way for the reader to make their way toward the end of the maze is through, coming against dead-ends, endless turns, and walls which seemingly reach into the heavens. Around them, above them, and below, it remains the same: words which lead toward confusion of the future and provide clarity only of the past. The text is an endless arrangements, collections, and formations of these ideas, which it is for the reader to make it through.

Welcome to the Labyrinthe Library, a creation of my own in which I navigate through the various literature I choose to spectate, unravel, and explore. I want this to act as a place to hold refuge of my thoughts, to fall into a labyrinth of my own device, where the walls act as shelves of my textual discoveries. Not only does the labyrinth kindle into the experience of the reader, it also marks the vast nature of the world of literature: only by reading into the text does one learn what the text has to offer, and only by exploring one's own thoughts does one come to understand the very confusion which besets them. Where the labyrinth makes clear of the past and confuses the future, the same is placed back onto the reader: they are clear in what has taken place, while lost in what is to come. Only by taking toward this, the path forward, does one learn the clarity in which they seek. And as much as it is possible to get lost in the labyrinth, the only way to free one's self from their own skepticism is to continue forward. As with this, each text offers a labyrinthine experience, as is just the experience of the subject. Again, welcome into the labyrinth of my own creation, I encourage those who enter in to find a way to get lost and continue forward.

I write down the thoughts I have about books

Yukio Mishima's Sea of Fertility

Notes on Yukio Mishima's Sea of Fertility Tetralogy

Le Guin’s “The Day Before the Revolution"

The Short Story as Singularity; Or, Revolutionary Exhaustion in Le Guin’s “The Day Before the Revolution” (Part 1) 

The Short Story as Singularity; Or, Revolutionary Exhaustion in Le Guin’s “The Day Before the Revolution” (Part 2)

Hermann Hesse's Glass Bead Games

Play and Non-Play in Glass Bead Games

Hajime Isayama's Attack on Titan

Notes on Aot and Free Will

Paula Volsky's Illusion

Traversing the Revolution: Fantasy Space and Becoming-Fantasy in Paula Volsky’s Illusion (Part 1)

Traversing the Revolution: Fantasy Space and Becoming-Fantasy in Paula Volsky’s Illusion (Part 2)

Walter Benjamin's "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Production" 

AIrt for AIrt's Sake: Or Producing AIrt in the LLM Age of Postproduction (Part 1)

John Crowley's Ægypt

The Fantastic Statement: Semiotics, Language, and “The Lost World” of John Crowley’s Ægypt

 

Edited April 16 by Hina's Simp

[Hina's Simp]

Notes on Yukio Mishima's Sea of Fertility Tetralogy 

The mirror is a process, at least according to Eric Steinhart’s own reading of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s Phenomenology. The mirror stands as the threshold between the object and the subject, between the object and their reflected self, “immediately giv[ing] rise in a child to a series of gestures in which he playfully experiences the relationship between the movements made in the image and the reflected environment”. Narcissus saw his own reflection in the rippled waters, extending his hand out to grasp the object before him; against the reflection is the desire within the subject, what the subject wants to hold. Narcissus never overcame the process of the mirror, and was in fact ensnared by the reflection, the object that he desires but cannot hold — Lacan’s objet petit a. To overcome the mirror, for Hegel, was to perceive the difference between the subject and the reflected image as the subject-in-reflection, or the subject within otherness. Steinhart considered it as this, “This is the difference between self and other, Self-recognition has to occur in otherness; you can't recognize yourself in yourself”. For the mirror to function as a process, it is to perceive the difference in the subject through the reflective image, as “[t]he eye can't see itself because there is no difference between the eye and itself”, due to there being no difference between the I and itself.

Hegel’s mirroring was not to see one’s self in a literal mirror; Rather, it was within the difference of one’s self within their own perception and through their own observations. While the I or Eye cannot see itself, it is able to reflect back upon itself through a surface such as the mirror. Hegel’s surface, according to Steinhart, was history, “The thing being mirrored is us, it's humanity. The mirror is our own history. If you look at our history, you see human culture rising from the primitive to advanced culture”. One could look at history in an instance, the past to the present all encased upon the surface of the reflection. Lacan echoed this similar position in the development of the phase taking place through the infant’s gaze upon the mirror, mirror-phase, “This development is experienced as a temporal dialectic that decisively projects the individual’s formation into history”. For Lacan, however, to glimpse at the mirror and to recognize one’s own image was to fracture his own image, to desire the image in the mirror, and to know that the self was only a semblance of what the mirror portrayed. This, to Lacan, was known as the “Ideal-I”, a social image that brought about “discordance with his own reality”. The overcoming of the mirror is to resolve the social image placed within the mirror, to not see it as ideal, but to see it as the self in the ideal; this image would be a historical displacement, one left in the past rather than a desire in the future.

As Narcissus would look in the mirror, it was himself in the reflection that he desired. He could never witness his own beauty through his own eyes, only to look at it as other with desire; Narcissus’ tragic flaw was within the mismirroring, a mirroring gone awry, to where he hadn’t overcome the Hegelian process and stuck in the Lacanian phase. The inability to overcome this mirroring process led to a literal death in the form of tragic irony, a symbolic matrimony between ideal and material. Slavoj Zizek recognized this as the failure and collapse of the perceiving-I, that this overcoming, “saves phenomenon by providing an external guarantee of the phenomenal domain”. In other words, the mirroring process breaks the disconnect between material and ideal, as a means to account for the self within both of these domains. Here, however, is where Honda had maintained his life, between the ideal and the material, stuck in the Hegelian process and within the Lacanian phase. Honda desired that which he saw upon the surface, to experience life as and through Kiyoaki; His delusion was that he only saw the life that Kiyoaki had lived, without noticing himself upon it. Honda continued through life with this desire at the heart, to be caught in the continuous cycle of his own mismirroring, a false-image. Noted in the previous comment, a delusion. Just as he was willing to cross the threshold, to attempt to break the mirror, he had succumbed to the same tragic flaw that Narcissus had fallen for, to desire that which was reflected without witnessing the I in the reflection. Because of this, he encountered the same fate as Narcissus; by crossing the mirror, he had met death without.

 

[Hina's Simp]

The Short Story as Singularity; Or, Revolutionary Exhaustion in Le Guin’s “The Day Before the Revolution” (Part 1)

Introduction: Theorizing the Short Story

Ursula K. LeGuin brings two subjects out from the woodworks through her treatment of the short story genre: The first dictates the relationship that the short story has to the novel and the second being the utility of reading the genre for its historical or theoretical perspective. The first only needs a brief reflection to disengage that comment, while the second refers to a much broader and sustainable discourse. The short story occupies a different space within genre theory and literary discourse than its counterpart, the novel, and facilitates a different conversation than what has taken place within the novel, though it shares many of the features with the former. As LeGuin comments, “[t]he short story is an ancient and inevitable form of fiction, endlessly offering new possibilities”. On this front, the short story offers the same potential that the novel maintains, while it is a medium of shorter lengths (hence the moniker, short story); though, there is something else which distinguishes the short story than simply its length (or lack thereof), and that is what reinforces the short story as a genre worthy of its own criticism and theoretical perspective. The short story is a total form that is maintained through complete separation from the world around, for the reader. In fact, it is the only form which is prescribed this sentiment, and a spatial presentation in which the reader is ensnared in its totality. Edgar Allen Poe, in a review of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Twice-Told Tale” exclaims that what distinguishes the short story, or tale in this this, from lengthier forms is that other forms “cannot be read a one sitting”, and as such, “it deprives itself [...] of the immense force derivable from totality”. What constitutes the short story as its of form is not what it shares with the novel, or other similar genres, but what it carries out that no other genre can: As Edgar Allen Poe continues,

Quote

In the [short story], however, the author is enabled to carry out the fullness of his intention, be it what it may. During the hour of perusal the soul of the reader is at the writer’s control. There are no external or intrinsic influences— resulting from weariness or interruption.

This is where LeGuin’s comment on “new possibilities” reinforces itself: the short story ensnares the reader and detaches from their own spatial and temporal bounds, encasing them in the space of another, the space of a “single sitting”. The short story genre, as exemplified by Ursula K. LeGuin’s 'The Day Before the Revolution,' offers a unique narrative space defined by its limitations and potentialities, allowing readers to explore revolutionary struggles and political futures.

For LeGuin, it was, rather, the connectedness that had allotted individuation for the short story: a means to stand on its own, yet still take part in a collection that would be developed by the reader instead of the writer. The short story is a form of freedom that takes place within one’s own tether, withheld by the writer and yet freely open to the reader. The short story, as she states, “doesn’t gather the great momentum of the novel, but it moves with freedom, approaching people from various directions, letting the reader make connections and perceive the overall direction”. In other words, though the reader is restrained to a singular space, it is from within this space that their narrative freedom is opened up: they are free to read the narrative, make their own connections and devise their own direction, from through the limitations of the genre and from the constraints of a particular space. This essay argues that Odo’s pursuit of an absent revolutionary event reveals the transformative power of the short story genre to inspire critical reflection and action within constrained temporal and spatial boundaries.

Particularly, it is through Le Guin’s short story, “The Day Before the Revolution”, that I choose to explore the narrative positioning for the reader and the literary text, as this is a short story that specifically reflects on the revolutionary figure, Odo, while maintaining an intertextual link to other literary texts, Le Guin’s own The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia and “The Ones Who Walked Away from Omelas”. Susan Lohafer, in her published monograph, Coming to Terms with the Short Story, presented the idea of this spatial enclosure as a separation, an “ontological gap”, between the real world and the story, as what she titles the story-correlate. This idea, the story-correlate, is where the narrative begins, and with it, the entrapment of the reader: it begins with the title, the first sentence, the “firsts information about the new world” which disconnects the reader from the real world and connects them into the written one. At this point, the short story follows many of the same attributes and shares many characteristics that the novel has, but because it is read within a disconnected world, itself an isolated experience that is structured around this limited time phrase, “the perusal of an hour”. The title of LeGuin’s short story reinforces this idea, “The Day Before the Revolution”, in relevance to the thesis and scope of this project, specifically with the word, “Before”, while simultaneously describing the protagonist, Odo, as a revolutionary figure. One might consider Sisyphus to be the figure of revolt, in Camus’ own acknowledge, but Camus describes him an absurd hero, where not only had Sisyphus revolted against the gods and his own punishment by finding joy within it, it is also that he maintains this joy throughout his struggle. Odo follows: while the revolution has not come, and while she knows that she might not find success in her own condition, she continues forward. For her, there is nothing more life than bringing about a revolution that might not come. In fact, the revolutionary event is a “potential”, a future-yet-to-come or even occur: it remains absent. For Sisyphus, his own lucidity was the condition in which his revolt took place, and what exclaimed him as the absurd hero. “Revolt”, as Camus dictates, “is a constant confrontation between man and his own obscurity … [It] is certainty of a crushing fate, without the resignation which out to accompany it”. Odo is probably not Sisyphus, a revolution is not some philosophical revolt; Even for Camus, rebellion was an insistence in which resistance would be the fighting mechanism against the “forces of the world which aim at the obliteration of human life”. It is possible to extend the notion of revolution to Camus’ own idea of rebellion, specifically addressing it through political and cultural terms. From this, Odo, though not a mortal punished by the gods, she is a figure bound in a Sisyphean situation wherein she finds her own lucidity through the revolutionary struggle to bring about a revolutionary event that might not even take place.

The short story genre, and the narrative event specific to “The Day Before the Revolution”, offer novel  and boundless possibilities from within their own limitations. This essay examines the revolutionary event through the lens of the short story genre, and the effect of these various conditions that define the particular genre have upon revolutionary discourse. As LeGuin posits, the short story genre offers endless possibilities. Her own narrative, “The Day Before the Revolution”, is one such narrative that offers novel insights that can inform our own revolutionary struggles in the absence of the event itself. In this essay, I instill Odo as a Sisyphean-figure who finds her own lucidity (exhaustion) from within a revolutionary struggle. From here, I advocate for reading narratives through their generic limitations and conditions in order to highlight and reveal the numerous potentialities in which these genres uniform our own contemporary and future political environments. . If one were to consider the short story a genre of its own not based on its limitations, and more appropriately based on its potentialities, it is within these limits that such potentialities are mentioned. Considering that the short story is read within a limited frame, it makes do with that notion by instilling a singularity as its focal point. One could think of the short story, then, as a singularity: a single event, a single life, a single meaning, and single effect. In fact, this is the very role which distinguishes the short story as its own genre. “The Short-story is the single effect, complete and contained”, as Brander Matthews contends. This single effect refines the immense potential found withins its words, “the effect of ‘totality”, a total narrative wherein all effects and techniques, all aspects, all work together to produce a single impression upon the reader throughout the piece. Reading LeGuin’s “The Day Before the Revolution” through Camus' Sisyphus demonstrates the very means in generic spaces (the short story) which shape, form, and even transform these political futures. As such, while Odo struggles to bring about a revolutionary event in her own narrative, we, as readers, can use this text in efforts to bring about our own. The short story, through its limitations, offers something that the other readings within this project cannot: a test of knowledge, preparation. Because the short story is bound to a specific temporal and spatial environment, the single-sitting, the reader is left to fend off the writer’s assault upon them with only the knowledge that they enter into the space with, with the knowledge and discourse that they are armed with and have prepared beforehand.

 

[Hina's Simp]

The Short Story as Singularity; Or, Revolutionary Exhaustion in Le Guin’s “The Day Before the Revolution” (Part 2)

Jean-Claude Milner considers Sisyphus to be the literary figure of Zeno’s paradox of dichotomy, which states the following: “Motion is impossible because the moving object must reach the halfway point before reaching its goal”. Odo, the protagonist of LeGuin’s “The Day Before the Revolution”, follows in Sisyphus’s footsteps, falling victim to the same paradox which he finds himself in — a closed circuit of ascent and descent, never reaching the end though however much distance was crossed to reach it. As Milner states, Sisyphus is refined by his movement toward and back from his destination: it is his object which surmises the paradox, the rock, “The moving object that fails to traverse a given distance, to reach a fixed endpoint—unlike Achilles, where the endpoint itself is mobile—is this not a formalization of the rock”. The goal of his task is to return back from up the hill, as his struggle is to repeat within this cycle: he never accomplishes his own goal, and is left with his own aim. Camus considered the aim of Sisyphus, within his struggle, was to find his own lucidity; that it was the task of the reader to consider Sisyphus happy, “one must imagine Sisyphus happy”. His aim is, then, tasked with two projects: lucidity and satisfaction, one respective of Sisyphus as a figure and the other respective of the reader’s own acknowledgement of Sisyphus’ affective response(s). While Zeno’s paradox resides within the separation of dichotomy, within the gap of the notion of movement (One must infinitely cross the halfway point of their goal, and as they continue, they will never reach their goal), Zizek reimagines this paradox between the notions of aim and goal, wherein through repeating the task of his eternal struggle, up and down the mountain, her experiences the real aim of his task: “the way itself”, as he describes, “the alternation of ascent and descent”. This is the crucial circumstance which assigns this paradox back to Odo and her own revolutionary tasks, it is not the revolution itself which brings about satisfaction, but the efforts that were done to bring it about. And now, just as the revolution approaches, her real source of full satisfaction presents itself. The Zizekien reimagining of Zeno’s paradox of dichotomy, situates the gap of movement back to the position of desire, what one wants to achieve and how they want to achieve it. The goal is the final destination, while the aim,” he writes, “is what we intend to do, i.e., the way itself”. He furthers this comment,

Quote

Lacan's point is that the real purpose of the drive is not its goal (full satisfaction) but its aim: the drive's ultimate aim is simply to reproduce itself as drive, to return to its circular path, to continue its path to and from the goal. The real source of enjoyment is the repetitive movement of this closed circuit.

LeGuin reframes Zizek’s own reimagining of the paradox of dichotomy through the figuration of Odo, an exhaustive revolutionary figure who has caused/inspired revolutionary activities throughout her life, in efforts to bring about a revolutionary event that would restructure the entire political, economical, and social plane (If one wants to continue from here, Le Guin’s own novel, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia, depicts this restructuring). Odo presents an additional affective element to the two which Camus articulated, and this is in the form of fatigue or exhaustion.

As Zeno’s paradox and Zizek’s reimagine depict: the task is not determined by its goal, it is rather in the aim and the affective nature illustrated from this aim that articulate the importance of this paradox. LeGuin depicts her protagonist, the figure of Odo, as an exhausted revolutionary placed within the Sisyphean reimagining of Zeno’s paradox of dichotomy. In this essay, I investigate the effect of the generic conditions of the short story — its treatment of singularity — and its specific literary techniques  upon this figuration and depiction of Le Guin’s protagonist, Odo. This essay delves into the intricate thematic and literary dimensions of Ursula K. Le Guin’s short story “The Day Before the Revolution”, reframing Odo’s revolutionary struggle through the philosophical lenses of Zeno’s paradox, Albert Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus, and Slavoj Žižek’s exploration of the tension between goal and aim. In presenting Odo as a Sisyphean figure, her labor becomes emblematic of the paradox inherent in revolutionary work—a continuous oscillation between aspiration and fulfillment, always striving but never arriving at her goal. The analysis considers the short story genre as a singularity in its critical treatment, the motif of exhaustion as both a literary and existential condition, and the estrangement that accompanies labor and revolutionary identity. Far from being a mere narrative of political ideals, Le Guin crafts a meditation on the act of striving itself—its transformative potential and its inherent toll upon the subjects. It is through Odo’s exhaustion, her inability to fully embody the revolutionary ideal she symbolizes, that Le Guin unveils the profound duality of revolutionary labor as both deeply personal and communal, a form of intersubjectivity.

As mentioned in the first section of this essay, the primary condition of the short story is that it is a singularity: it takes place in a single sitting, it depicts a single event, and it establishes a singular meaning. Here, I want to spend some time discussing the term “singularity” as it is one which breeds confusion: there are some positions in which the word reinforces the confusion which it dictates, and these are recognized from Fredric Jameson’s own article on the matter, “The Aesthetics of Singularity”, which attempts to surmise the term through three considerations: Firstly, it has to do with the scientific nature of this term, something akin to a Black-hole, or the singularity event. The second connects to the term in its relationship to genre, specifically science fiction, which presents, “the return of the repressed, of a future we are no longer able to imagine but which insists on marking its imminence with nightmarish anxiety”. It is the third which bears my interest, the term and its relationship to philosophy. “Singularity” as Jameson states,

Quote

proposes something unique which resists the general and the universalizing (let alone the totalizing); in that sense, the concept of singularity is itself a singular one, for it can have no general content, and is merely a designation for what resists all subsumption under abstract or universal categories.

In other words, or at least the purpose of this reading, the singularity reflects the notion of One: in temporal terms, the immediate-present or the instance. In generic terms, the singularity maintains the text in its immediacy, the moment in which the text is read and recognized, but not before nor thereafter. Continuing even from the term within its philosophical relationship, Gilles Deleuze designates the term “singularity” as a similar matter of Jameson’s own treatment, particularly with the differences between singularity and universality. Where Jameson considers that singularity resists universalizing, Deleuze implores the specific disconnect associated with these terms, the singular and the universal, returning it to a much more appropriate temporal shell: it is not that the singular resists the universal, it is that they are two distinct terms which regard the same measure. He begins from the position of event, that which happens: For him, especially in his monograph Difference and Repetition, it is repetition that dictates event, and therefore also dictates the notion of singularity and of universality. “If repetition exists, it expresses at one and the same time a singularity against what is general, a universality against what is particular”. Here, the short story, as Jameson would consider, is a singularity which resists the universal category of literature: it renders only a fracture of the universal and the general, a “instance” from temporality or a “figure” from the ideal type. Singularity, in its connotative form, according to Deleuze, refers back to that which happens, or an event. Peter Borum continues Deleuze’s trail in expounding this term, “the singular is once, and for one”, and from one which all else takes place. This sustains the relative term “event”, as it describes the instance from which all else refers back to, “the ideal event” or “primary”, and as Deleuze continues, that which “distributes the imaginary attitudes or roles of the beings or objects that come to occupy them”. Crucial to this project: the short story is the singularity of the genres, as the first chapter acts as the singularity of their respective texts. This chapter acts as the singularity of this text, from which all the latter texts and proceeding chapters are distributed from. It begins with Odo, but not as a literary character, as a desiring-machine which produces, “and…and…and”: she produces the setting and the context of the novel, The Dispossessed: An Ambigious Utopia; she produces, which will be developed further into this chapter, the narrative of “The Day Before the Revolution”; but firstly, she produces the LeGuin as a writer of the singularity.

This is where Odo of “The Day Before the Revolution” gains recognition: As for a literary character, she is much more substantial than most, for in fact, she is essentially three different figures of the same character: The first stands from the narrative history imbued within LeGuin’s novel, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia, where she is recognized for her revolutionary endeavors that brought about the societal setting of that novel. The second, which will bear more more focus later on, comes from the Epigraph just before the short story. LeGuin substantiates her own comment of characters who traverse multiple narrative planes, such as Odo, because “the characters each experience separate transformations—but each story echoes and interconnects with the others”. Each figure of Odo across these different narrative forms direct their own role, experience their own, separate, transformation and characterization. Odo reveals herself through the veil of history, as the specter of revolution, to Le Guin (as she mentioned in the Epigraph), to recount the tale of of her tribulations in bringing about the revolutionary event which she would never witness; instead, this appearance coincides with Zizek’s own disconnection between goal and aim that is bound by Zeno’s paradox. Particularly for narratives, it is the distinction between, as Wolfgang Iser would comment, effect and meaning. LeGuin introduces her audience to Odo through a discarding of the novel genre to explicitly reveal the effect and meaning that is placed within this short story: “To embody a novel”, as she states, “was a long and hard job for me, and absorbed me totally for many months”. It was Odo who rekindled that lost flame, as she brought about a more vigorous LeGuin as an author, this time through the workings and the features of the short story. In a sense, it was Odo of the Epigraph which releases the revelatory nature of the short story that seems dismissed. As she continues, Odo tore through the veil of history as the conjuration of revolution to inspire Le Guin, “I was very grateful, therefore, when Odo came out of the shadows”. Before exploring the Odo of “The Day Before the Revolution”, it is crucial to understand that revolution stands in the background and reveals itself only at heighten moments where the tension between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat is at its inevitable climax, the strings of conflict are shredding and tearing apart. This notion reflects the “before” in the title, the Sisyphean disconnection of aim and goal: the effect that LeGuin attributed to her character was the writing of single point, “wanted a story written, not about the world she made, but about herself” which encases her own struggle, her own subjectivity. It is an existence of displaced agency, of inactive action: above these, however, it is one which illustrates the postmodern effect which riddles literature and language, exhaustion. The goal of the revolutionary event was not accomplished, as soon as Odo appears to LeGuin is how quickly she also returns back to that veil to become a figure left to a (literary history), amongst others of her own following (which is regarded as “The ones who walked away from Omelas”). It is her aim to rekindle the agency that had been given up for the collective act. Only is this not possible during her tenure as a revolutionary, it only becomes possible once all of her efforts have been exhausted that she can reclaim her own agency, and that all which confronted her goals have been satisfied through the aim itself. If one must imagine Sisyphus as happy, that his own salvation is through his subjectivity, and in this subjectivity reveals both his lucidity and satisfaction, then the same could be said about Odo as she desires for her singular life to be scribed. One must, then, regard Odo as exhausted. Specifically, the role of exhaustion and the act of being exhausted vis-a-vis John Barth in his work “The Literature of Exhaustion” or Derrida in Plato’s Pharmacy. Referring back to the notion of singularity, of the single effect in the short story: “The Day Before the Revolution” illustrates the exhaustive nature of the way itself  toward the bringing about a revolutionary event through the single life of Odo.

Odo repeats herself, another iteration of herself appears from somewhere else. As the Odo of the “epigraph” presented herself from the shadows, so does the fictive figure associated with “The Day Before the Revolution”, this time in a barrage of sound from another: she encroaches toward that “booming voice” from the background of an obscure world that surrounds her. She appears out from the liminal and into the crowd which she gave no attention, except for the subject which occupied her gaze: “She did not hear the words, nor see the faces”; what, instead, captivated her and encouraged her forward was “Taviri”, the other voice which echoed above everything else. Her exhaustion begins as her action comes to an end, and then comes the moment in which Sisyphus gained his own lucidity, it is that moment which Odo came to be exhausted. She reached out her hand to hold on to Taviri, “to catch his hand”; but she could only continue to reach out, further and further, as “she did not stop. She could not stop”. Just as she was about to fall, just like as Sisyphus was to reach the peak of the mountain, she was rendered motionless; “She feared to fall, to fall, she stopped”. To echo the phrase which radiates through this entire essay: one must consider Odo exhausted, reaching the final steps which bring about the closed circuit of the Sisyphean struggle: she is both the bolder and the figure, falling at the point in which she has already reached the top. She is the bolder as she cannot bring herself to stop, she is also Sisyphus who will, in turn, find himself in the same position as before. Exhaustion overwhelms her: she has accomplished all she could before reaching the aim of her role, and as such, though she can continue to support her efforts, her body shows her own efforts stretched out through the years. It appears as if life is fading, leaving her own form: “The toes, compressed by a lifetime of cheap shoes”; “the nails were discolored and shapeless”; her ankles held together with “fine, dry ankles”. Her body recounts the history that she brought forward, now slower and closer to death than full of life, all that is left is one who is exhausted and scared of what remains inevitable, “She had to put out her hand to the bed-table, for she dreaded falling”. As mentioned, exhaustion is already an established concern within the postmodern tradition, enacting the literature which culminates under this title, as stated by John Barth in “The Literature of Exhaustion”. Barth concerns himself not with acting to the point of being exhausted, rather it is to act until every feat has been exhausted: “all the possibilities of choice are embodied, and — barring special dispensation like Thesueus’ — must be exhausted before one reaches the heart”. Echoing this sentiment, the same holds true in regards to Derrida and their concern of language, as “[o]ur lexicon is at any rate is not from being exhausted”, much to Odo’s similar condition, there will nothing more than to keep in the limits of these possibilities, as “our questions have nothing more to name but…within the textual, the textile, and the histological”. All that is left for Odo in her exhaustion is brought back to the difference between aim and goal, to either bring about the revolution that she had put all her effort into, or to fall. Exhaustion takes notice, and she takes notice of it, once she has reached the heart of it all and all that is left is within the very event which has striven to actualize. She bears witness, acknowledges the “[h]ours, days, nights. She had thought of them all, each one, each one of the Fourteen Hundred, how they law, how the quicklime worked on the flesh, how the bones touched in the burning wood”.

She asks the question of her own self interest, “but what could one do but go on?”. For the revolutionary figure, this is an idea which emboldens them to move forward in their already difficult endeavor, as it is not meant to be a motivator. Instead, the narrator responds back to the question, anything else is a fate similar to death. The narrator writes, “To die was to merely go on in another direction”. Odo only occupies the revolution in its virtual, existing as both an agent for the event and one who has faced the consequences of embodying such a movement. Instead of deterring or avoiding death as one does throughout their struggle, as to live means to simply not die, her existence becomes the embodiment of this movement: to act or die, and to die would simply be a detour toward this ideal. In each instance, at each point, there is only one subject which drives Odo forward, up the very stairs that lead to her room and back down them again. It might be Taviri, whom she holds her hand out for in the beginning of the text, who she longs for and which also distracts her. “The one who loved Taviri”, her lost figure, as the narrator addresses, attached to the memories and recollection of a life long lived; “The little girl with scabby knees”, distant and naive to the world which resided in struggle; “The sixteen-year-old”, far gone and left behind, who fell victim to the production of revolution. Even for the last figure, exhaustion had been her end, “a blood clot in a vein had taken that woman away”. Her resolve, that constant drive and movement forward began and ended up only one conclusion, regardless of what shape or form the figure and role that Odo would act through. There was nothing before, and in fact, the conclusion that she had come to, that the only ideal that one would put themselves through was for the revolution-to-come. “There was nothing left”, Odo commits, “but the foundation”. The paradox of Sisyphus explains that he is stuck in the perpetuity of his own struggle, ascent and descent; the same holds true for Odo, contained within her own struggle, this being that of turn and return. As she goes forward, as she moves in either direction, she will always come back to the position she took off from, even stating that “true voyage is return” and death is only another turn within this circuit. As she embodies the revolutionary event, it is her body which projects the scars that have turned her away, brought her forward, and returned her back to this purpose.

It is the body which confirms this exhaustion: As mentioned in “Literary Exhaustion”, it is “exhaustion which returns us to our bodies” and kernels the limitation of the human condition to fall victim to this exhaustion, “in all their frail finitude”, in their most feeble condition. Much like the worker, readily placed in his relationship to production, “he does not feel himself in his work but denies himself[;]he does not develop freely his mental and physical energies but is physically exhausted and mentally debased”. Odo is readily placed in her relationship to the revolutionary spirit in which she produces. This action has pursued an endless continuation within the alternation between ascent and descent. She even distinguishes her further from the ones who are brought about in the very conditions that she has produced. “Besides”, the narrator comments, “they had grown up in the principle of freedom of dress and sex and all the rest, and she hadn’t”. Compared to them, she was not grounded on these principles: her stance was related to bringing them about, not settling within: she produced them, and Marx echoes the discern between producer and production. The narrator continues, “All she had done was invent it”. Marx exclaims that those who partake in the commodity only know that which they hold in their hand, not the efforts that it took to produce and bring about such a commodity to enjoy. Deleuze and Guattari restate this caveat, “we cannot tell from the mere taste of the wheat who grew it; the product gives us no hint as to the system and relations of production” which brings it about. As so, those who speak loudly about the coming revolution only see the possible future in front of them: they cannot tell from the mere conditions that they live in who produced it, nor find hints in what is left from the production process. The narrator finalizes this difference, contrasting those who ignite with the revolutionary spirit without feeling the exhaustive nature that riddles the body with scars and discoloration, for “it’s not the same”. It is not the same indeed, nor should it be: She does not belong, her role is for others to belong. Continuing on the previous regarded comment of Marx and estranged labour, “the worker…feels himself only at home during his leisure time, whereas at work he feels homeless”. It is not the same for she has no place to belong, no home or locale to return to; and though this might be a concern, the narrator exclaims loudly that “it is not the same”, it is something inspiring and invigorating: Odo is estranged, displaced from those around her. She is a mere stranger to them, for they do not know who she is just as much as they cannot trace the conditions in which they thrive to the one who brought about such conditions. Part of the word “estranged” draws attention to the word “stranger”, enforcing the root “strange” to be relevant, maybe not directly, but to the portion of this text as it leaves Odo disconnected and absent, drawn away from those who follow in her footsteps without knowing.

Though she is exhausted, it is only because she has faced revolutionary moments to keep the flame of progress alive; while she has never participated in such an event, Odonians of The Dispossessed look back fondly at their socio-economic environment and grant her the title of revolutionary. Odo exists within the societal tension between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat class, resisting the oppression that is placed upon the proletariats within their laborious existence. As an estranged member, as a stranger in her own dwellings, she follows along in the role that such a moniker entails. Maurice Blanchot exclaimed that this figure resembles the qualities of the stranger, to which she terms, “autrui” or “the one who is coming”; as she comments, the stranger is not only who occupies any spatial boundary, but one who opens the gaps of the space in-between. An “encounter with the autrui opens the space in which the unknown is encountered as unknown”, or more directly, the autrui, “calls up [] the cite of a between-two, between appearing and disappearing”. This idea, as was mentioned, draws attention back to the preface of this project, in which the “specter of revolution” was commented as an apparition or a haunting, which would stratify between absence and presence. The title is placed on her, and the weight that is brought upon her through her own exhaustion, highlight the inability to move forward as this idealized figure, while surmounting something that stands above her in the effects that she brings forward. Though she does not reside in any one place, occupying no homely quarters, she does find a dwelling that is given to her, to which the descent of Sisyphus repeats and ripples through the text. The narrator establishes this sentiment that had concerned Odo during her frail years, as “she had never hopes to see [favoritism, elitism, leader-worship] eradicated in her lifetime, in one generation; Only Time works the great changes”. She could never meet her own goal, all while such a goal was already taking place: as the stranger opens up the space between disappearing and appearing, it prompts those which occupy this space to appear and disappear, moving as they please, such as the specter of revolution which flows freely when all of history is the tension of class struggle. The revolutionary figure is one who envelops and reveals the revolutionary moment for which others can continue in their stead, much to how Odo continued for the sake of progress, even when it weighed on her most, as “people kept telling her were so full of ‘spiritual strength’” all while lying to herself until she was “blue in the face…trying to keep her spirits up”. She asked herself, rather than trying to fall victim to her own exhaustion, “But what could one do but go on? Had one any real choice, ever”?. As one might consider the revolutionary a figure of hope, one must recognize that there is nothing left within this role except for the sake of the revolution that they might never see:

Quote

The revolutionary is a doomed man. He has no personal interests, no business affairs, no emotions, no attachments, no property, and no name. Everything in him is wholly absorbed in the single thought and the single passion for revolution.

There is only the goal of the revolution: though that goal might never be reached, and though the one who attempts to bring about this event might never live to experience the conditions that arise from such an event, there is only one thing that occupies their mind, the way itself and the exhaustive struggle that is opened up by this revolutionary potential, to destroy the very grounds that his figure occupies and construct from the rubble an ideal of progress and change.

Just as she was to reach her goal, her aim had revealed itself: exhaustion continued to haunt her, to be the product of her struggle; death being another turn toward her own goal, both away and toward it. It was never to live in a world where revolution had actualized. It was to be the body which the revolution actualized itself through. “Tomorrow? Oh I won’t be here tomorrow”, she answers, knowing that her work, her own struggle and resolve had been her purpose and her own undoing. The narrator expounds confusion, bewilderment to the sentiment that Odo held, “What a thing to say on the eve of the Revolution”. Yet, it demonstrates the very concern and hope that is proclaimed by this figure. Her goal had shown itself to be worthwhile, and amidst the weight that she carried, she began her ascent, “began to climb [the stairs] one by one”. Her body continued on forward, displaying and fronting the disfigurement and discoloration; her movements conducting her weariness. “She was dizzy”, as she begins her ascent, the closed circuit now opens up and frees her from the struggles she was bound to. No longer was her fall, her fear, apparent: “she was no longer afraid to fall”. The narrative resolves at the end, concluding with Odo fading back into the background rather than returning back to the purpose that brought her forward. While, “At all times, and in all places, the revolutionary must obey not his personal impulses, but only those which serve the cause of the revolution”: she has served the revolution in this actualization, and she had now unbound herself from her perpetuity, she had now brought about and actualized the revolutionary event, and in doing so, brought forward an ideal of change and progress that would be retold through another narrative. The process of the revolution ends only when there is no longer a body remaining that is formed by struggle, as either of these cease to exist, the revolution itself virtualizes. The singularity begins from the position of the single effect, it relays to other singularities, interacting and affecting them: shifting from a singularity to another, a multiplicity. The limits of the short story are bound to the limits, from and to the point of the singularity; it is not that this narrative assumed the effect of a single life, it is that death would be another narrative with which this short story would interact. The single effect of Odo, her single life brought forward, recounts the tale of the revolutionary stuck within an instance of her own perpetual struggle.

One must consider the revolutionary as exhausted: though their efforts had not been successful, they should not be seen as failures; rather, one should see the revolution as inevitable and until it comes, it is bound to be actualized. Her body recognizes the consequence of her own insistence: her own revolutionary endeavor encourages a confrontation of the agency of the subject and the desire of the purpose; one must be willing to put aside their own selfish intent for the inherent drive within a progressive, potential, and possibility, and must consistently accomplish such an aim regardless of whether it will change in reflection of this drive. The last regard that Odo inspires in this reflection is from her supposed death and the event which she would never see, where she reveals the same aim that Sisyphus follows, “If you wanted to come home you had to keep going on, that was what she meant when she wrote “‘True journey is return’”. Ursula K. Le Guin's “The Day Before the Revolution” offers a contemplative exploration of revolutionary labor, using the character of Odo to depict the tension between idealism and exhaustion. Odo, a once-impassioned revolutionary now weary and distanced from her former ideals, exemplifies the struggles of those who dedicate themselves to a cause that may never bear fruit in their lifetime. By engaging with the philosophical frameworks of thinkers like Camus, Žižek, and Lacan, Le Guin reimagines the Sisyphean paradox and Zeno’s dichotomy to illuminate the endlessness, exhaustiveness of revolutionary work. The process of striving—like Sisyphus’s eternal climb—becomes the focus, not the eventual outcome (the aim, not the goal). Odo’s fatigue becomes a powerful symbol of the personal cost of creating a future for others, a future that she may never fully experience. The story’s emphasis on the present moment urges readers to reflect not on the success or failure of revolution, but on the significance of the struggle itself—a struggle that, while never leading to final fulfillment, becomes a defining act in its own right. Though Odo’s journey resolves itself, Le Guin underscores the paradox inherent in revolutionary labor: it is a continual, consuming cycle that reshapes those who embark upon it, even as it remains, at times, an unfulfilled pursuit. Her absence takes place on the eve before the Revolution: from here, there are more struggles to come, more bodies which bear the marks of the struggle, and demonstrates that one body, one person, has limitations of what they are capable of and what they can bring about. “The individual, by its energetic conditions of existence”, as Gilbert Simondon mentions, “is not only inside of its own limits; it constitutes itself at the limit of itself and exists at the limit of itself”.

Edited March 7 by Hina's Simp

[Hina's Simp]

This is sometihng I wrote almost 4 years ago:

Play and Non-Play in Glass Bead Games

Literary Play and Non-Play

Literature and games parallel the area of analysis, even intersect on similar fronts when it comes to studying the subjects. Peter Swirski notes this connection in his definitive study of narrative thought, Of Literature and Knowledge: Explorations in Narrative Thought Experiments. He notes that the studying of games “can model the reading process as a tacit game between the author and the reader”. At a point, analyzing games presents a possible textual model of analysis for literature that posits both the author and reader as participants within the game of the game. This is even further connected through the similarities that reading a text has with the activity of game; when it comes to the discipline of game studies and narrative studies, each may provide insight and connect toward each other. At least with game theory, ludology, and narrative studies, narrotology, this connection possibly reflects a “meta-hybrid approach that actively deconstructs the methodologies themselves”. While the areas of these studies have an already established practice toward this connection, ludonarrotology and literary game theory, the subject of the text or game bridges these methodologies past the textual model, presenting a possible position within the textual space that breathes this area of study. Hermann Hesse’s Glass Bead Games, instead of connecting game and narrative in a form of analysis, positions the narrative as a game for the reader to explore and take part in while the act of reading is taking place. Reading the text is much more than a game between the author and the reader: the reader transforms into a character through the events of the text, playing the game on an intra-textual level. The reader actively plays the text, learning the rules of the game and the conflict of the story as he is reading it. While this game is taking place, however, there is another level of game that is occurring for the characters; instead of playing the game of the text, the concept of game within the narrative takes on an explorative function within the text. The characters, rather than playing the game of the text, explore the text much like David Golumbia’s study of “Games without Play”.

There are two levels of game that take place within the narrative of Glass Bead Games. Before analyzing and constructing the subject of the game within the text, it is worth noting the prospects of play and non-play in association with the narrative game. These two notions allow the reader to participate within the game and resist the mechanisms of the game. Game, as a critical term, has always been an aspect of culture; Joan Huizinga presented the basis of the play-element of culture, studying it through the activity of game as a critical concept. Where Huizinga presents the idea of game as an activity. I want to further this idea and connect it to the narrative frame within literature and the act of reading. Reading is not simply an activity. At a much closer glance the act of reading is almost a substitute for the lived reality or even a simulation of lived reality. Game is much the same, in that it “proceeds within its own proper boundaries of time and space according to fixed rules and in an orderly manner”. Game, instead of being an activity, is a space for activity, in which the participants substitute the space of lived reality with the reality of the game. Similar to that of Henri Lebefrve’s abstract or imaginary space, the game and the text fulfill the same requirements of that space, where “the existence of absolute space is purely mental and hence ‘imaginary”, that this space has a “social existence, and hence a specific and powerful ‘reality’” (Lefebrve). Because of this, the terms “game” and “text” create their own imaginary reality and space. As Lefebrve states, the “imaginary [space] is transformed into the real”. It is through this space that the participants take their place; the reader and the characters become players within Hesse’s narrative game, escaping from the lived reality to experience one that is imaginary. While it is imaginary, this space holds its own specificity and power.

The subject of the text is the history and experience of the “glass bead games”. But for the reader and the characters, it is the activity through the game that they experience. This activity takes on two positions: play and non-play. For the reader, the act of reading is playing the text, experiencing the “imaginary” reality of the text and taking on an active role in the narrative process. The reader takes on the figure of a player, someone that “plays” the text. Play, for Huizinga, “is a free activity standing quite consciously outside ‘ordinary’ life as being ‘not serious’, but at the same time absorbing the player intensely and utterly”. The reader is subsumed into the game space of the text, through the narrative tricks of the narrator and the textual aspects that present through the narrativity of game. For the characters, this effect of the narrative is much different than that of play for the reader. The characters, previously mentioned, are not playing the game, at least not in the sense of Huizinga’s presentation of free-play. This style takes on a different notion: The characters experience the game within playing it. David Golumbia wrote an essay titled, “Games without Play”, focusing on the role of digital open-world online games that parody the lived reality. In order to interact with the world of these online games is much like interacting with the lived reality, simulating the experience of lived reality. He notes that “computer games...conform to recognizable cultural patterns that demand the kind of close analysis of which cultural critics are already eminently capable”. These cultural patterns are skin to the rhetorical situations that occur within lived reality. Glass Bead Games may not be a computer game that mimics the experience of cultural patterns and practices, but the characters of the text are created within the imaginary space. Their experience within the text is the only experience they take part in, as if mimicking the cultural patterns of the lived experience without being a concrete embodiment of reality. The characters are placed in the middle of this narrative game, without even establishing the understanding that it is a game that is taking place. The text provides a structured experience and closed space for the characters to take part in. This narrative, itself, is “not loose or unstructured” for the characters,

Quote

“It is not without consequence; it does not admit significant breaking of the rules or their suspension for social purposes; and an extensive part of the actual activity one undertakes is extremely goal-oriented and prescribed, in many ways the opposite of what we have heretofore called play”.

The characters within Hesse’s novel are not agents; they are characters the reflect the agency of the narrative at hand and their directive is to fulfill the role granted to them by the narrator, so that the reader can learn and cooperate with the rules set forth throughout the novel, and take on the active figure of player through the game of the text. The plot of the text will eventually come to a destined and closed ending, one that is prescribed for both the reader and the characters. It may be different for the reader, as they have the agency to resist the declarative reading that the author imparts. Instead, the characters are destined to play their part in the completion of the narrative, to be nothing more than pawns for the author’s textual game.

The Game in Glass Bead Games

ndividualism is placed as the calling-card for the reader. Hesse’s reflections and personal stake have always been placed toward the value of the individual against social authority. Peter Roberts notes this personal stake as “[f]rom his youth, Hesse had rebelled against the imposition of social authority on the individual, and he continued this resistance throughout his adult life”. Hesse extends this sentiment toward the reader; While not strictly against social authority, the reader is mirrored by the authority of the author and given the task of finding their individualism. This is where the game of the text begins, that the reader is instead of reading the text, set forth toward the goal of resisting the text and rebelling against the authority of the author. The text sets toward this goal by inviting the reader to take on the role of character within the story, drawing them toward the narrative through a retelling or a history instead of direct fiction, that it is a story of possible happening instead of falsity. The text speaks directly to the reader, “IT IS OUR INTENTION to preserve in these pages what scant biographical material we have been able to collect concerning Joseph Knecht or Ludi Magister Josephus, as he is called in the Archives of the Glass Bead Games”. The reader, through this direct connection, is placed into the realm of the text and transforms into a player of the narrative game. Reading the text, then, is to play the game. Though, what occurs differently here than that of free-play, is that the boundaries of the pages, instead of presenting the rules of the game or the structure, use uncertainty as the structure of the game.

Even before drawing the reader in as a player of the text, the rules make themselves known through activity: “Nothing is harder, yet nothing is more necessary, than to speak of uncertain things whose existence is neither demonstrable nor probable. The very fact that serious and conscientious men treat them as existing things brings them a step closer to existence and to the possibility of being born”. The rules of the game present as a monograph for the reader, a warning for the reader to enter into the realm of game with caution. The characterization of the reader makes itself known; not through what the reader is at the beginning, but the end results of the games once it comes to an end. The reader is not granted neither victory nor defeat. Until the reader breaks away from the role he is forced to play, he is nothing more than a narrative pawn. This is where the objective of resistance against the text is maintained, that “nothing is hard, yet nothing is more necessary” to break away from the role of character. To take on the role of the player within the text is the first step to resisting the authority of the text.

The structure of the text is one of uncertainty, that the reader knows nothing of what the text is trying to put them through and only learns as the text goes on. The goal, though, is rightly apparent, that it is for the reader to resist the play-elements of the text; that while the author transforms them into a character, a spectator of the story, the narrative model is to be played with. Through this, a main aspect of the game is the boundary that it takes place in. By taking part in the narrative game of the narrator, the reader conforms to the space of the game and to the role granted to him. The reader, while a narrative-figure and character, is not directly regarded here. Every reader plays a different game with the text, as each will read the text differently. Hesse even comments on this idea, that experiencing and taking part in the game, no matter how similar the pattern at which they approach it, will have different end results. In the text, it notes, “Even if it should happen that two players by chance were to choose precisely the same small assortment of themes for the content of their Game, these two games could present entirely different appearance and run an entirely different course, depending on the qualities of mind, character, mood, and virtuosity of the players”. The text is the space of the game, the boundary and limits in which the game can be played. It is up to the reader to construct the route in which he traverses the text, the method and approach to playing the game.

To transition back to the game of the narrative; There is not much to reconcile it as a game directly. This part comes at the approach of the reader, through their own analysis and interpretative play. Reading is akin to the act of gameplay, but not a substitute for it.  Though, it is the similarities that it has with playing a game, that allows for this approach. One such metric that connects this toward the concept game is that it reflects a presence of culture without the consequences of lived reality, that it participates in a space of play that “[stands] quite consciously outside ‘ordinary’ life as being ‘not serious’[,] at the same time absorbing the player intensely and utterly”. Reading and playing games both occur within an imaginary space, where the consequences that occur are only within the experience of the game that is played or the text that is read.  The game of the text was more than just a form of play, it presents itself as an object of consumption that the reader becomes invested in even if, in the background, it might only be an imitation (and thus game) of lived reality. In the first chapter, while constructing the boundaries of the game, it implies the correspondence of culture and the lived reality, as more the simply game, due it being a space of game instead of an activity: “The Game was not mere practice and mere recreation; it became a form of concentrated self-awareness for intellectuals. Even to extend this basis, “The Glass Bead Game contributed to the complete defeat of feuilletonism and to that newly awakened delight in strict mental exercises to which we owe the origin of a new, monastically austere intellectual discipline”. The game is itself a reflection of lived reality, that the reader is swallowed into, even to the point of utter and intense absorption into the text. This, however, does not directly reflect that of lived reality. Toward the end of the chapter that sets the framing of the game for the reader as character, it explores the connection of the game with art, or more directly, music-making: “We consider classical music to be the epitome and quintessence of our culture, because it is that culture’s clearest, most significant gesture and expression.”. Hesse adds to this idea,

Quote

“For in the final analysis every important cultural gesture comes down to a morality, a model for human behavior concentrated into a gesture. As we know, between 1500 and 1800 a wide variety of music was made; styles and means of expression were extremely variegated; but the spirit, or rather the morality, was everywhere the same. The human attitude of which classical music is the expression is always the same; it is always based on the same kind of insight into life and strives for the same kind of victory over blind chance. Classical music as gesture signifies knowledge of the tragedy of the human condition, affirmation of human destiny, courage, cheerful serenity”.

Hesse’s first chapter acts as the entry point for the reader to attempt an understanding of the rules, structure, boundary, and goal of the game they are about to play; But, the conflict with this game is that even with an attempt to fully understand it, the game is meant to break toward the reader’s complete characterization of a character within the narrative instead of a player of the game, that reading the text would take on similar aspects of the characters involved if read by the structures put into place. This is where the reader fully takes on the identity of the player, that to play the game within the narrative, the reader must take toward the advice of Hesse instead of the authority of the narrator. The reader must seek their individualism through the text, while resisting the entrapments and tricks at the narrative level. Instead of reading the text at a surface level, the reader must resist the authority of the text, and in doing so, play the narrative game.

The Reader Playing Glass Bead Games

Play and game have their own divergences. There are surely connections between these two critical areas, but it is their differences that allow us to transcribe the experience of playing a game through reading. These different approaches and applications occur with the narrative, depending on the lens at which the reader views the text and the situations that take place within the narrative. The game in Glass Bead Games takes on a malleable identity, one that while told through a historical lens, reclaims its own conditions and regulations because is experienced as a form of ontology — The players of the game take form and identity through the experience of the game, embarking a sense of becoming rather than one of being. For the characters to experience the world within the text, it is a part of the structured situations that they take part in, a part of their own lived experience. They are forced to participate in the game; whereas the reader is given the option to do so through the act of reading. The reader does not have to fully commit to their role, but when they do they are given a character-like role within the text. The narrative tries to force the character identity on to the reader, while the reader is able to resist the narrative game and play it on their own terms.  The first line in the text sets this role up for the character indirectly, with the historical presence that the text instills, “IT IS OUR INTENTION”. The reader is included with the objective for this text as a historical document alongside the narrative, “our”, to “to preserve in these pages what scant biographical material we have been able to collect concerning Joseph Knecht or Ludi Magister Josephus”. The reader is placed into commonstance with the narrator, both with the similar goal. The only difference between these two characters is the way that each approaches this goal; And in these two differences, the reader and narrator are placed at opposite ends of the game board, playing the textual game against each other. The narrator is the one who evokes the game rules, while the reader is the one who has to figure out how to play and also resist the forced role granted to him. And his status is more than just another character, it is in the same position with the narrator. The only concern for the reader is that while he is playing the game, it is the narrator who is in charge. He is at a disadvantage because he does not know the rules, regulations, systems, and the mechanisms that govern the game. The true method to resist the narrator’s game is to resist forced interpretation of the text, to read it on his own terms.

This role is set within a disconnect, so that the reader can still recount his role as an interpreter, yet becomes distorted through the position as a character within a text. As he is to learn of the game, he is set up with a framing of what the game represents and how the game presents itself. It is through this disconnect that the difference of play and non-play is put forth, as the reader is actively engaged in the work that the text offers, yet not a fully established position within the re-telling of the game itself. Then, the reader, while still a player, is put into a different game than that of the textual characters. Brian Upton presents this type of game in his book The Aesthetics of Play, “As we play a game, read a book, watch a movie, or listen to a symphony, we are continually engaging in interpretative play”. This act is placed as a textual element of the work, as the role of the characters is put into the position of the historian. This position adds to the ways the reader can interpret the text and resist characterization in the text. White notes that the measure of a good historian is: “the consistency with which he reminds his readers of the purely provisional nature of his characterizations of events, agents, and agencies found in the always incomplete historical record”. This note itself adds elements of the measures in which the reader plays the game of the text, as well. By recognizing the limits of the narrator in the next, the reader resists the characterization of himself. This connection between the two, the reader and the narrator, provides a metric of resistance. The reader is pulled into the text as a parallel to the narrator, yet presents himself as an observer to the events. The reader, then, instead of fully putting on the role of historian as the text offers, can shape this figure into one of his own creation. And, in doing so, this is where the reader fully sets forth into the game of the text. The reader, as character, is a historian that the narrator wants to fulfill the objective of re-telling the work, whereas the reader, as player, is set to fulfill this role through his own agency and interpretive skill set.

As Upton presents further, this game is set between two axioms: explanation and prediction. And the narrator puts this forth, through his presentation of the history of the game as explanation. Prediction is employed by the reader, as it is his task to predict the next part of the text, through what the narrator has already revealed and continues to reveal. It is between these two axioms that the play of the game takes place, where the narrator reveals information about the game (explanation) and the reader predicts what might come next in each phase of the game (prediction). The narrative might have its players, but it does not have the world or the full space of the imaginary world that it takes place in until all roles have been assumed, taken on, and presented. As of now, it is only the players and the objective of the game. Once the events of the narrative begin, so does the game. This is where the characters, the “non-players” who experience the game without taking on their own practice of agency, are placed within the game. Beyond the opening chapter, the narrative begins and the game-master, the narrator, takes full control of the game. When the reader turns the page into the second chapter, not only do they take part in the narrator’s game, they also enter into the realm of the game, the imaginary space and world of the game itself. The characters provide a sense of place within this imaginative world; they are also devices for the narrator to develop and progress the game.

I never finished this, nor do I think I want to. But I liked what I wrote, so I am sharing it here.

 

Edited March 7 by Hina's Simp

[Hina's Simp]

This is something I developed on a discussion of Attack on Titan and free will. I think I want to expand upon it, more toward anime and critical studies as a whole. While I love watching anime, I think a lot of critical discourse and discussions fall victim to the knowledge (or lack of knowledge) of their viewership, concerning the extent in which such anime explore, develop, and provide commentary on such matters. While anime is full of depth and care, the general basis of viewership ignore the actual discourse of its themes outside of the source material. This is only an example of what I am referring to, as AoT does not delve into a in-depth concern of free will, but rather the repetitious nature of history which precludes such scholars as Karl Marx (his development of class struggle) or Nietzsche (his axiom of eternal recurrence). This might later venture into a discussion of Frieren, as many have positioned it as a "deconstructive" anime, like others, or have placed it into a idea of "nostalgia" for the future. I think this will eventually develop into criticism on "pop critiques" of anime. Right now, though, it is only a comment on Aot and its treatment of free will.

Notes on Attack on Titan and Free Will

It doesn't facilitate the idea of free will in the everyday lives; it does accomplish some idea of entrapment in the everyday, because to live is to struggle to survive. Where the concern with "free will" presents itself is that it is about choosing to live the life that you want how you want, where some of this is covered more in "how to live day to day". Nietzsche covers much of this when he discusses his "overcoming Nihilism", but I think a better reading would be Camus' L'Estranger.

A problem of trying to cover "free will" in terms of AoT is that it follows the vicious cycle, only assuming that history is set to repeat itself, not life. There is scarce lack of this investigative reading with Eren and company, because the characters themselves do not dictate fate: Eren seems to run the show, thinking that a cycle is to return back to the point it has come from. Many people have discussed this matter due to Eren knowing his father was going to eat his mother, and the future being set in stone.

I think a concern that comes here is that while AoT might cover these topics, they do so in a grand narrative away from the concerns which are present in the discussion of Free Will. It is much more than "does God have control over my choices or do I?", and more nuanced than pre-determinism will consider.

Why I think people should turn to Camus' L'Estranger to investigate free will, is that most of the discussions come in the choices that seem so obvious. Descarte's cogito might present one's self as a thinking thing, but do people think about why they brush their teeth the way the do? That was a question that St. Augustine poised when concerning his own choices, that to brush and focus on a certain tooth above others might seem like nothing, but it is a choice that comes is investigated retroactive: was the choice to do that something more akin to Freud's unconscious topology or for Nietzsche's eternal return?

One should look at Camus' *L'Estranger: "*The first of Camus's novels published in his lifetime, the story follows Meursault, an indifferent settler in French Algeria, who, weeks after his mother's funeral, kills an unnamed Arab man in Algiers." A conversation that it discusses is, or similar to: If I high fived someone that was blind, was I just acting or did I know the choice before hand? To think of the context of the actions amounts to parts played into free will.

Anime is so hard to discuss with the matters, especially applying philosophical axioms to them, because they already cover the axioms in a fantastic way. AoT does a fantastic job of presenting history as repetition, even playing with Marx's own ideas of the sorts considering the "first as tragedy, twice as farce" notion. However, it doesn't cover the delicacy that these discussions tend to have, in the realm of the everyday. Actions that do not incite themselves, but are incited by the very practice of those actions.

The struggle to survive is replicated, not represented, and much of the fantastic elements that open to a grandiose narrative also perverse the reading inherent in addressing the questions that free will present. They do not confront or encounter them, as in to acknowledge the position to enter discourse, a mis-opportunity to partake in it on the same front.

I want to add: A reason that a revolution did not take place in the US during the Great Depression was because of the inability to target a certain power structure in it, "There was no longer an economic or a political class that could be the object of widespread intense hatred because of its indifference or hostility to the downtrodden". Similarly, while free will was present, it was not discussed or developed outside of the historical cycle because there was no focus on those who could acknowledge such a matter: the people of the society much accepted the Titans having existed.

And any point in which free will was discussed, it had more to do with the political play than the overt One (God-figure), where such positions were filtered through.
I think that is a primary question that is missed in Aot, to much of the reading/watching. It doesn't reflect the "live as we do", but to change the environment in which we live to live as we do; If there was no world amounting catastrophe, then there would be no question to ask. It hints at these ideas, surely.

Much of the epilogue attempts to express some idea: falling in love, having a child, moving forward in living to finally have a say. I think an paramount position in discussing free will in AoT would be how much it avoids the question as a whole. When Eren was infiltrating Eldia as a spy, he was talking about trying to run away from the war: yet this was a ploy to bring about the end of Eldia, and learn more about the culture to bring in this "tension. The plot literally runs from the conversation of free will as a formative effect of war, avoiding a discussion and kindling an aesthetic.

The plot of AoT brings in references of free will and "to live as one wants" only to play into the tension that the narrative is framed within; this is even more present in Armin/Eren, because as much as they have agency to do things, they take on the roles necessary by their own faculties instead of developing the manner in which to come to these decisions openly.

Armin didn't have a choice to become the Collossal titan or take up his new title, as much as he was given the binary and the plot seemed to call him to these ideas. If one were to discuss the matter of free-will in the text, I would position it has a narrative necessity to avoid the discussion of free will, analyzing how the plot desires to avoid it. Similar to Peter Brook's reading of Freud and the death-drive. Surely, there are moments where it seems like these discussions can be brought up. The theme is readily present. Seems underwhelming to compare AoT or discuss how it builds into the theming of free will without concerning what the application of free will is.

I think the best thing that Aot confronts is the immeasurable impact of war, as both a cultural, natural, scientific, and economic necessity. It is a war story, and it really excels at building up war against all of these. The first being war against an apex predator, the war against each other (Annie, etc), the war to learn as more "unknowns" were feature. I mean, it was a war: they literally treated Eren as a war prisoner and an experiment because he turned into a titan. To place above anything: the constant threat present in the narrative itself is the only constant part of the anime that maintains a story. Eren changes, Armin changes; The biggest thing that changes is the terms of the war.

I wouldn't think love and understanding are present, either, since the implication of the "vicious cycle" basically says that none of this mattered. It calls back to Nietzsche's instance where nihilism is exclaimed, "The eternal hourglass of existence is turned over again and again—and you with it, speck of dust!". It satisfies love, maybe. I wish the story of Historia's child, if bring about that idea more explicitly in learning about love and understanding.

I don't think I have any primary idea of what the story is: there are surely things that I liked about the story, and much of these are just narrative elements that make it more enjoyable. The idea that the ending was implied from the first scene, the overlooking over the sea, the Chekhov's gun in the basement. I think that reading into the narrative limits would be worthwhile, not something I have considered. Most of what I am typing is just what is coming to my mind as I am typing it.

I have no idea of the "cautionary tale" position, I don't see how that can be put forward. Caution for what? I am not really concerned with AoT Titan overcoming the limits that it has, I think that the most fascinating part of the anime, and the thing that I loved most, is how it paces into opening the world. It does a phenomenal job of doing so, with war being at the forefront of the plot in every instance. I really haven't spent much time thinking beyond being fascinated by the story, I enjoyed it. That is really all that I have to say about how I ventured with the story, it didn't make me think of anything otherwise.

If anything, the literal phrase "to go beyond the wall" is clearly something that is important in the story. So maybe, the walls of anime are something to read into that would be of amicable interest. This is probably the most I plan to discuss AoT, though.

 

[Hina's Simp]

Traversing the Revolution: Fantasy Space and Becoming-Fantasy in Paula Volsky’s Illusion (Part 1)

This chapter begins from a thread developed within the last chapter, from Slavoj Zizek’s own concern between goal and aim, now opening a gap to which he refers to as “Goal and Aim in Fantasy”. Rather, it begins from the treatment of these concepts in relationship to the psychoanalytic perspective of fantasy, wherein the imaginative plane realizes the potential measure and limits of curiosity, thought, and imagery. Within its condition, fantasy links the unreal with the real, connects fiction with fact, and crosses the intersection between the abstract and the concrete; upon which, as Zizek describes, it isolates the subject within the conditions through the lens of psychoanalysis, and reveals (or constructs) their very desires. This marks the relationship between fantasy and psychoanalysis. In fact, their very relationship draws out the mechanisms which construct and develop the subject’s desire, or perception of that desire as such. “The fundamental point of psychoanalysis”, as Zizek describes, “is not something given in advanced, but something that has to be constructed”. Fantasy provides the space in which the subject can construct, recognize, and perceive desire. As he continues, Zizek explains, “the role of fantasy [is to] give the coordinates of the subject’s desire, to specific its object, to locate the position the subject assumes in it”. Fantasy generates the space in which the subject can recognize their own desire, to translate desire from an abstract realm into something grounded and represented in more concrete forms; it places the subject within the space, at the intersection, from which their own desire externalizes, is brought out from inside of them; it produces the subject in the frame of the desiring subject, or to complete Zizek’s thoughts, “through fantasy, we learn how to desire”. As such, turning from the short story genre as a spatial limit, the fantasy novel traverses space through mobility and travel; it produces space as a means to navigate the desire of the subject, and in doing so by navigating the narrative realm, or “other world” of fantasy. Fantasy allows for the subject to expand, go further, beyond the borders and constraints of the concrete, to develop the limits of the abstract from within the concrete; as it connects between these binary oppositions, it also destroys the chains which posit these ideas as opposites, allowing them to align, cross, reflect, and reproduce each other. In part, refining the fantasy through its special reflection necessitates not only a means to perceive the fantasy as space, but it relies on a rethinking of space itself as a means to expand and contain the dimensions that are possible within these spatial terms. Anthony Pavlik exclaims that this “rethinking of the spatial…requires an alternative perspective on the nature of borders and the liminal, on the ways into fantasy worlds”, or a means to cross into a place where desire is actualized, or where the subject itself transitions toward the subject-as-desiring. In this case, while the fantasy is that which constructs the space of the subject, it also positions its borders, or specifically, produces the malleability and the plasticity of these spatial boundaries, and the means at which one can travel toward, cross, and breakdown such margins — such limits.

Paula Volsky, in her novel and fantastical reimagining of the French Revolution, Illusion, offers a reflection of the desiring-subject within and through the revolutionary event; or rather, Volksy, through her fantasy novel, navigates the narrative terrain of revolutionary desire from the perspective of a member of the royal court and bourgeoisie class, from outside of the proletariat class, whose aim reflects the goal of the revolutionary event. In other words, Eliste, the daughter of the elite Maquis de Derrivalle, experiences the revolutionary event from the majority position that is reversed and turned minor subject, brought from the foreground of her respective cultural hierarchy, the bourgeoisie class, into the liminal space in which this hierarchy is destroyed, brought to rubble, at once with the proletariat subject. Through this shift in perspective, brought into the fantasy world by stratifying these social boundaries, Eliste recognizes the potential and transformative nature of magic, of desire-represented, against the frameworks which bind history together, class-struggle. Volsky places travel and movement within the folds of the fantasy narratives, utilizing magic as a means to explore, or go further than the very limits that the subject allows. In a sense, one could look at this novel as a means of, taking both Jacques Lacan’s concept and Zizek’s development of this concept, traversing the fantasy through a revolutionary event. The reader is also situated upon this fantastical plane, much like that roles of the protagonist and author, though, his relationship to this concept is vastly different; it is one that is reflected in the reading experience, confining the border of liminal itself, between what has already happened and what is to come: it is not at the spatial form of this border, but rather the temporal one, a moment between each of these sequences. From his own work, The Fantastic: A Structuralist Approach to a Literary Genre, Tzevatan Todorov acknowledges that the fantastic is formed from within the reader through the hermeneutical process, along the horizon of expectations; it is found at the very intersection between what the reader has already experienced, or read, and what is to come next, at the moment in which expectations, thought, and interpretation enter into the frame; it is found within the moment which holds that past and future at bay. In his own words, “The fantastic is that hesitation experienced by a person who knows only the laws of nature, confronting an apparently supernatural event”, or in other words, the moment which crosses between the natural past and one unknown, bordering upon the supernatural. By way of both the reader and the use of the conditions of the fantasy genre, the sequence in which the subject encounters/confronts the unknown is also the sequence in which desire and the supernatural reveal themselves, produce themselves and position the subject back within this intersection.

One thing that has been recognized as of yet: fantasy predicates itself as the space between the subject and their desire, transitioning the subject-as-such to the subject-as-desiring. This is what Lacan and Zizek describe as traversing the fantasy. As the subject experiences and participates within this space, they become acclimated and conditioned by it; it is a becoming. In other words, fantasy shifts the subject-as-such to the subject-as-desiring, or as Deleuze would exclaim, becoming-desiring or becoming fantasy. This ideal puts the subject in opposition against history:

Quote

I became more and more aware of the possibility of dis­tinguishing between becoming and history ... What history grasps in an event is the way it’s actu­alized in particular circumstances; the event’s becoming is beyond the scope of history. ... Becoming isn’t part of history; history amounts only to the set of preconditions, however recent, that one leaves behind in order to “become,” that is, to create something new.

As the first chapter of this project attempts to align revolution and history as their own oppositions, it is more appropriate to consider revolution in the same position as becoming, or more akin to becoming-revolutionary. In regards to fantasy, the shift of subjectivity from subject to desiring subject is a form of becoming, turning into something new. Zizek exclaims that traversing the fantasy does not escape the Real; it is a becoming that takes place within the real, from within and throughout it. “Traversing the fantasy”, he elaborates, “does not mean going outside reality, but ‘vacillating’ it, accepting its inconsistent non-All”. As we read into Illusions, this notion will be expressed more accordingly. It is paramount to recognize that fantasy, even in terms of its genre, notes a relationship between the real and subjectivity, it coordinates the subject and their object of desire as separate, a part, and only together can be whole. To travel the real and along the lines of desire, fantasy maintains this order, and keeps these to objects from each other. In full, “to traverse the fantasy”, is not simply walking within the conditions (the symptoms) of the real, but to acclimate and be conditioned by it, “to fully identify oneself with the fantasy — with the fantasy which structures the excess that resists our immersion in daily reality”. As such, the space of the fantasy positions the subject as lacking, with having something missing. To travel this space is to maintain that lack, to keep the subject separated from what would make them whole. Todorov presents the reader as lacking, desiring for the next event and release from their own expectations. As one be part, is it this lack which also ensures the desire. The subject must always be part in order to maintain the fantasy; in terms of revolution, the event must never stand on its purpose to bring about change immediately, there must always be something more that is desired for such an event to remain virtual.

Volsky places the readers within the perspective of Eliste to have the reader adjacent to the revolutionary event, without taking part within nor fully recognizing the event itself. However, Eliste travels throughout the text, from her own socio-economic position, to the very grounds which she travels, always in proximity to each moment or actualization of the event. In part, Eliste maintains a frame of liminality within the fantasy, “vacillating” within the narrative boundaries. As she travels, though, the symptoms of the real project throughout her own escape away from the actuality. Volsky attempts to propel Eliste forward through her direct link to the fantasy, as she exhibits a connection to magic that allows other characters to manipulate, exhaust, and transform the space around them; She places Eliste alongside other revolutionary figures to encourage a becoming that otherwise never gets fulfilled; She positions Eliste on the liminal to traverse the fantasy, to be in proximity to her own desires, to become-fantasy without escaping, being freed from it, and always to be desiring a better world than one that already exists. As much as fantasy maintains this relationship, it also illustrates that the relationship is one that is pertinent to the revolutionary figure and to the revolutionary event. Fantasy, as explored through psychoanalytic frameworks and narrative structures, serves as a spatial and conceptual medium that bridges the subject's lived reality with their desires, offering a transformative site for both individual and collective becoming. Through its capacity to traverse boundaries—social, temporal, and ontological—fantasy enables subjects to vacillate between the real and the imagined, positioning them within a liminal space where they confront their lack and perpetually strive for fulfillment. Paula Volsky's Illusion, with its reimagining of the French Revolution, exemplifies this dynamic by situating its protagonist and readers in a state of adjacency to revolutionary events, reflecting the transformative power of fantasy to disrupt and reconfigure the subject's relationship to history, desire, and the real. Following the protagonist, Eliste, readers witness the symptoms of the revolutionary event while maintaining a sense of disconnect, a lack, from these events forthright. The purpose of this essay is to highlight and investigate the conditions of the fantastic in relation to the reader, the narrative, within their position to history, desire, and the real. Fantasy maintains the notion of the possible, yet to come, and the more-likely not to happen; magic becomes a tool of the fantasy genre to realize the abstract potential of desire within the fantasy and through the subject-as-desiring, a tool for disrupting and destructuring the boundaries of the real and the imagined. Volsky illustrates the flaw which undermines revolutionary thought: “It will not, however, destroy the power of Nirienne's thoughts, nor the loyalty of his disciples”, as much as magic (read: weapons) can disrupt, it can never destroy the residual effects that are left behind. This, though, is also the strength of revolutionary desire: it persists against the attempt to throttle its effect. As Jason Read writes, “the revolution is always virtual”, one must turn to this virtuality to find the whispers which maintain and actualize its presence.

 

[Hina's Simp]

Traversing the Revolution: Fantasy Space and Becoming-Fantasy in Paula Volsky’s Illusion (Part 2)

From History and Travel: Genre as Social Mobility and Class Stratification

Volsky begins her narrative with the bourgeois treatment of the Other: seen as only tools, any form of subjectivity that is put forth by them is made apparent that such an act is a tragedy that must be punished. Herein lies the subject of history: the class-struggle, between the proletariat and their oppressors. It is also in this act that the whispers of change are brought forth, and even more are the whispers also silenced through the power which holds the proletariats in their social containment. As Marquis vo Derrivalle witnessed his own subject to be acting out of term, his frustration relayed only back to the work to be done and his own position as oppressor. “Bad enough that a serf should be reading at all” the narrator states, “for literacy overburdened the menial mind, resulting in mental and moral injury”. The whispers contain themselves in the writings which the subject was reading of “the pamphleteer in question…the execrable republican Shorvi Nirienne, whose writings the Marquis had proscribed”. The serf, Zhen Suboson, faced the consequences of his role and his subjection, “locked up in the stable, awaiting interrogation and the inevitable punishment”, as the choices he would make were to exist and work, to work for his existence and to exist solely for work. The working class is defined and maintained as a socio-economic position by this very sentiment, where the bourgeoisie maintains this structure. In part, the division between these two classes in not one pertinent to capital or wealth, it is one wherein the ones who have “transform[ed] the means of production, land, and capital” are the ones which have done so by “the means of enslaving and exploiting labor, into mere instruments of free and associated labor”. In Volsky’s narrative, the historical novel evolves into a travel tale that challenges the boundaries of class struggle and historical determinism, using Eliste's journey from stagnation to forward movement as a metaphor for revolutionary potential. By intertwining history, fantasy, and the act of travel, Volsky redefines the role of the subject in creating new socio-political realities, emphasizing the possibility of breaking free from oppressive historical structures through the imaginative and the fantastical.

As such, Volsky’s narrative begins from the position of the historical novel: it is a retelling of the historical consequences that instigated and developed feudalism as the primary economic environment, where private property itself was the classification of wealth and any capital would only reinforce the social hierarchy at play. It is not until the narrative focus shifts toward Eliste that the novel encounters the fantastic, and the reader, though they might be caught between the coming events, there is nothing which forces them to hesitate or pause, only that this is a story which has been repeated throughout history and continues to repeat. A consistent attitude is maintained in the narrative thus far which encourages a future of bourgeoisie society that is in control of the means of production, land, and capital. Volsky perpetuates this idea, following the conditions of the historical novel, in which all forms of progress are pushed to the background. It is as Goerg Lukacs mentions, where any form of class-struggle are shown as forms of failures, to instill that it is history which orders the continuance of class struggle that, in this case, would end “in the common ruin of the contending class”. Lukacs contends, in illustrating the novel as historical and in the realm of bourgeois realism, it follows the path in which the bourgeois maintains control and order of the means of production. Because of this, “the events of class struggle…threatening a prospect for the future of their society and class, that the disinterested courage with which the contradictions of progress have been disclosed and declared was bound to disappear”. The narrative maintains its position with the historical novel to dissuade the audience and keep them bound to this narrative, where even if the ruling class is viewed in contempt, they are also the ones which enforce their own sense of law and order, until the fantastical is introduced which shifts the role from one connected to history to one that connects to becoming and revolution.

One reads into Deleuze’s becoming as, though not opposite of history, something itself distinct from history: “becoming isn’t apart of history”, but rather something outside of history which exists purely as itself. In fact, it is something that parallels history and continues as if free from history, “The Untimely”, something which opposes history:

Quote

A bit of becoming in the pure state; they are transhistorical. There is no act of creation that is not transhistorical and does not come up from behind or proceed by way of a liberated line. Nietzsche opposes history not to the eternal but to the subhistorical or superhistorical: the Untimely, which is another name for haecceity, becoming, the innocence of becoming (in other words, forgetting as opposed to memory, geography as opposed to history, the map as opposed to the tracing, the rhizome as opposed to arborescence).

For the subject, becoming-fantasy is a personal and intersubjective position which considers them as transitory, temporary, impermanent. In a sense, the subject maintains a liminality between being and non-being, treated as a figure between these two poles. Becoming-fantasy recognized the subject as movement within space. Traversing the fantasy parallels this notion: it acts as the boundaries of space with which the subject moves around and about, negotiating between the real and the non-real (or, in Lacan’s topography, the symbolic). While becoming parallels history as a pure-state, something inclusive of all history without being subject to it, the fantasy is a component of the real which is distinguished and organized through language. In the fantasy novel, though, while language is the medium in which the fantastic is portrayed (it could also be considered as a position of language), it is a sense of the non-real which is imagined and pretended as real, as possible. Space, in this position, is one that places the subject at the center; space is organized through and by the subject, a means of placing it and displacing it. Michel de Certeau suggests that, as characters act upon and engage with their narrative world, they are coordinating it as well, these characters “traverse and organize places; they select them and link them together, they make sentences and itineraries out of them”. As the narrative shifts away from the historical, it enters into one of travel: the respective figures are placed in their societal binds, the proletariat figure of Zhen Suboson “locked up in the stable” and the oppressor-figure of the Marquis left with the freedom and luxury to “pursue[] his own hobbies]”. The reader’s attention is extended toward the daughter of the Marquis, whose background is placed within the bourgeois class, with her eyes upon the proletariats; her background continues the struggle between these two opposing classes while her eyes draw toward a change which entirely rewrites this history, creating something new — becoming.

Similarly, Volsky ascertains this perspective between history as class-struggle and a revolutionary correction of this struggle, that change can only occur through creating. However, her stance on change is one that implies violence. As she writes, “[T]he systematic victimization of the populace over the course of centuries builds a debt of blood and pain that may be repaid with interest, one day”. She aligns the prospect of a revolutionary project with the enacting through violence and revenge. Though, the narrative maintains its historical conditions as it develops the space in which these characters configure their archetypal roles. Eliste, however, is one which recognizes the flaw of this historical moment: though she remains the daughter of the oppressors, she also considers a kinship with those who are her servants. The fantasy starts to tear through the space of the historic, breaking down the boundaries and freeing its characters from their generic captivities. Eliste kindled and wandered the space between these two social classes, where if she “preferred to live among serfs” she would not be “Eliste vo Derrivalle, daughter to his lordship”. Instead, it was more appropriate to consider her “some lowborn imposter, a peasant’s whelp switched at birth with the Marquis’s child”. She stratifies the roles between these two positions, following in closer proximity to the serfs until her “worst tendencies were corrected”. Until her behavior and condition portrays the proper performance, she could only embody the name of Derrivalle with shame and be an embarrassment to the Exalted, the ruling class. This position remains enforced as Eliste breaks through the threshold of historical fiction in the realm of the travel novel, where her estrangement becomes all the more clear and that the role of her character is much better suited for the role of something else, something new. As Eliste stratifies the position of these two statuses, aligning more with the working-class while portraying the ruling class through status and title. This led Eliste to the margins of her cultural division, “on the margins of two cultures and two societies, whichever completely interpenetrated and fused”, where either her behavior had to be corrected or her attitude would persist otherwise. This transitory identity shifts the generic boundaries away from class struggle to one where the protagonist travels to coordinate her space, her relationship to this space, the relationship of space back onto her. The limits of the historical novel present themselves within the background of the reader’s attention: As the reader is focused on Eliste, on her marginality of individuated status, between identity and association, the historical accounts for the status groups and the social classes which she borders.

In part, the conditions of Marx’s account of history is the deliberate practices of its novelization: As Lukacs perpetuates, the historical novel arose out of the French Revolution and the development that was made through this historization, “the organic character of English development is a resultant made up of the components of ceaseless class struggles and their bloody resolution”; he continues to state that from this, the historical novel took form. As it continued to take shape based on this condition, it never escaped and thus found its limit/potential as an outward expansion of this idea, and an inward maintenance as well. The historical novel cannot account for the future, it cannot account for what takes place after the fight between the oppressed and their oppressor, “a fight that each time ends 

, either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes”. Fredric Jameson sees that the continuation of the historical novel finds its evolution into a genre which accounts for this prospect, “the historical novel of the future will necessarily be Science-Fictional inasmuch as it will have to include questions about the fate of our social system”. Volsky, though, continues her narrative past the limits of the historical genre: As Eliste finds her content against her father and his societal disposition to his own objects, which she assumes as subjects. It follows the very statement that Sigmund Freud makes in his “A Disturbance of the Memory on the Acropolis”, to which he entails that the “great part of the pleasure of travel lies in the fulfilment of these early wishes – that it is rooted, that is, in dissatisfaction with home and family”. Volsky’s narrative enters into the realm of travel writing from the perspective of Eliste, to which her own stagnation and stillness had been a tribute to her social position, caught within the struggle of her father and his own object; again, alienated and left alone, “Eliste sought her own chamber, there immuring herself in miserable solitude”. The fantastic begins to weave through the narrative pages, but only when Eliste’s own subjectivity is thrown away and brought into the realm of travel, of movement. She casts aside own attire, and from her still moves forward. As the novel lets go of its historical conditions, it follows forward into the present “the past was suddenly immediate”, at which Eliste’s becoming takes the foreground. “Eliste gazed for only a moment”, as she let go of her performance and behavior, “then stood and began to pull off her clothes”. At this moment, the shift from travel had become apparent; travel begins as a form of resistance and rejection, that the joy which comes with movement is also brought about in the loss of home and family. Volsky commits to this generic transformation through Eliste’s own unsettled roaming about: disparaged from a history that is now lost and brought forward into something else which has no ties to anything but the contemporary moment, she is estranged and placed into the realm of travel.

“Travel writing” Kai Mikkonen states, “evokes and creates the world, a world of possibility”that only takes place in the immediate, something freeing and disconnected from the past and the historical. In fact, William Damper had argued that the “travel narrative traditionally belonged to [the fantastic]”, though that is more an anecdote at this point instead of something developmental. Rather, the potential of traveling and the generic conditions that it coordinates — movement forward — follows the shifting back and forth of “crossing of the boundaries constituted by more or less forbidden frontiers in the course of the traveler's progress through the world”. Following this, the new generic limits of Eliste begin from her movement forward as she sheds (frees herself) from the world tied to history and into one that progresses through a newly created world, a world of possibilities. Already does Eliste pertain two social worlds spread about through disparity, to which she belongs to none: her stillness paralleled the attachment to the struggle between these two classes, and as she moved forward, “passed from bed chamber to sitting room”, she would draw her attention backwards, as she “paused at the corridor door”. Even in her moments where she was brought to this stillness, “apparently blocked”, she continued forward, gaining more confidence along the way, “confidently she moved left along the base”. And in her step, she moved toward the fantastic, toward something that brings about the supernatural into an ever-present natural environment. “Eliste fixed her eyes on the spot…and the rock itself appeared to simmer like lava”; the fantastic unveils itself through the walls which keep it hidden, placing Eliste not into a world of possibility, but into a world where the impossible and the non-real are materialized as if they were possible and real already. The shimmering glow vanished, and so had Eliste’s connection to the fantastic; instead, a figure from out behind the rocks appeared simultaneously as the fantastic disappeared, “a figure appeared to step from the stone; whereupon the ghostly light vanished”. As Eliste travels through the world which is created possible by movement, it is still in the act of creation which constitutes it. Her relationship to this space, as she navigates through it, continues to organize itself. The fantastic resides in the background, that the supernatural appears as something altogether separate from the natural, because it has not connected with Eliste’s forms of travel. In constructing the world, it is then only organized through the person’s experiential affection of the world: “The geography of the world is unified only by human logic and optics”, by the body first, and then of the mind, “by ideas of the good, the true, and the beautiful”. As travel literature opens up a new world, it limits itself back to this role of movement forward, away from what is familiar and towards the uncertain. Yo-Fu Tuan explains, though not directly, travel literature is inherently displacing, that it is always attached to the future and unbridled by the past. For him, “Movement to it is forward movement”, but it is also experienced as a tie back to the historical if it brings the subject back to where they remain familiar. He continues,

Quote

Home is now in his future in the sense that it takes time to get there, but he is not likely to feel that the return journey is a forward movement in time. He returns—tracing his steps back in space and going back in time—to the familiar haven of the home. Familiarity is a characteristic of the past.

When Eliste comes into contact with this light, with this figure, a world of possibilities is not only formed, it is also propelled into one that is distinct from that of history, the class struggle, and one of travel, that of movement. In this case, it is a thirdspace, something else which joins these two products and offers more from it, “simultaneously real-and-imagined and more”. The “so-called magical powers of the Exalted” that was discussed scarcely within the first chapter had now shown themselves and revealed their potential “I can but produce illusions or sometimes, if it is there, detect and cultivate the buried consciousness in creatures and objects. But child, no one can break the law of Nature that prohibits Man from flying”. The possibilities of the fantastic are as limiting for Volsky’s narrative world as the laws of Nature which restrict them, all the while, which though the fantastic brings together the boundaries of other genres, it restricts itself to the agent which organizes the world around them. But, while history perpetuates the struggle between the proletariat and bourgeoisie, and while travel familiarizes itself with the creation and movement forwards, its limits are tied to this production of creation and the future. Eliste’s attention is brought back to the historical and the future only as potential to change these dimensions: using travel to fracture the struggle that concerns the historical, and this is where the fantastic enters into the frame. And for Volsky, that is through the revolutionary desire that is recognized within Eliste, and through the introduction of the practice of magic into her narrative world. This brings us back to the first section of this chapter: the fantastic novel, and how Volsky utilizes the fantastic as a tool for change which rewrites the historic through the use of travel. In the next section of this piece, I will turn my focus to the application of the fantastic as a narrative medium to instill revolutionary acts in the guise of continuous progress toward change. While Eliste is not recognizing her desire, Volsky maintains that her desire is main apparent to the reader through her own transition between genres and proximity to the fantastic; in part, this is because “fantasy is the language of desire”, but it is also because the fantastic is a genre which is not bound to specific boundaries. As Pavlk suggests, the fantastic as generic space operates thought this unconstrained production: Spatiality of these narratives is, in fact, unbounded (it is simply not necessarily revealed to the reader), acknowledging the possibility of other routes, and the potential for multiple spaces (not all of which will be occupied by the protagonist)”.

 

Edited March 10 by Hina's Simp

[Hina's Simp]

Art for Art's Sake: Or Producing Art in the LLM Age of Postproduction (Part 1)

The Consumer as Artist 

This essay begins as a continuation of Walter Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”. Following his own thesis, the work of art and the realm of production has again shifted. Where his thesis coordinated the space between machine and production, this argument shifts toward another realm. In the title, this space reflects the role of the machine (or mechanical) as Language Learning Machines (LLM) and Post-production, rather than an age of “reproduction”. However, though this shift is prominent and will be explored further, what remains at the forefront of this project is the notion of product and production. Karl Marx’s entire economic oeuvre is dedicated to this notion, though where I refer to product, his notion for the same idea revolves around “commodity”. Here, product facilitates the same regard as Marx’s idea of commodity: For him, a commodity is defined as “an external object, a thing which through its qualities satisfies human needs of whatever kind and is then exchanged for something else”. The difference between commodity and product results in the second deliberation, in the “exchange” between one object and another. A product refers back to the person who had labored and worked on, essentially produced the object; the commodity only refers to the object in its relationship to exchange. However, it is this exchange which develops the position of the product. Where the product refers back to the producer, the commodity refers back to the two subjects taking part in the exchange. This entire relationship is maintained by this exchange, following the pattern of: producer — product — exchange — consumer. One could extend this entire relationship to encase the economic model of Capitalism, but that is beyond the scope of this project. In fact, the limits of this project take place through this very relationship, as does Benjamin’s own thesis. Here, Benjamin explains the effect that mechanical reproduction has on the authentic work of art. “Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art lacks one element”, he explains. What it lacks is what disconnects it from the “work of art” as a product. It is this “aura”, or “that which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction” is that which is lost in the realm of reproduction. The new forefront is no longer reproduction; Instead, it is something entirely new and further away, a post-reproductive, or as I determine, a post-production era.

This age of mechanical reproduction has come to pass; No longer does the work of art maintain its aura. Instead, in its stead, something new has been produced, something that no longer fits in the role of “production” or “reproduction”, something even more distant from the work of art than its own replica. This “something new” drives the very realm of a new form of mechanical reproduction: the machine is no longer reproducing the same product, now it is learning to form its own products through the pattern which had determined both the product and the re-product. This shift begins with the machine: where the artist is no longer creating the work of art, their role has then shifted to that of the worker, the one behind the line and the means of production. Now, there is a further disconnect: where the artist has turned into the work, the worker is rather a model in which the Language Learning Machine (LLM) takes from to produce: the machine takes the position of the worker, facilitating the role which the worker would originally assume in the production line. From the original formula, this shift presents itself as: machine — product — exchange — consumer; no longer (or less necessary) does there need to be a human, “producer”, factor in this relationship. In fact, this entire process seems to model, rather than the product itself, the process which creates the product. Susan Ariel Aaronson even relays this sentiment, that such LLMs are “less human -like than parrot-like”. Rather, as LLM models the very process of production, it does so by “predicting” the pattern that the process facilitates. Aaronson explains this parrot-like process,

Quote

An LLM algorithm scans enormous volumes of text to learn which words and sentences frequently appear near one another and in what context. LLMs can be adapted to perform a wide range of tasks across different domains. Developers take and combine various data sets, then remove redundant, missing or low-quality data through a filtering process (Dermawan 2023). The data is then fed into machine-learning software known as a transformer, which is a type of neural network (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development [OECD] 2018; Knight 2023a). The LLM learns the patterns in that training data and eventually becomes proficient at predicting the letters and words that should follow a piece of text.

Developers might be the last human touch which remains in the realm of LLM and AI development; here, there might be some soul which distinguishes the algorithm itself as “art”, far from the same can be said about the product which in this prediction process. The extent to human hands comes in the very measure at which the person writes out a “prompt” for which the LLM determines the outcome which it produces. My concern here is within this disconnect, how much farther we have come to further the artist from the artistic process. Benjamin even recognizes this very distance in his own determination of reproduction: as the authentic work of art is determined by its uniqueness or “aura”, the  replica loses this feature: it becomes reproduced for the sake of reproduction. Through this process, “[w]hat they intended and achieved was a relentless destruction of the aura of their creations, which they branded as reproductions with the very means of production”. As reproduction became more and more sought after, the effects had substituted the producer for the worker. Reproductions, in this sense, had become the very products that were created; the aura or uniqueness of a work of art had been lost in the very means of production which had once refined it.

This brings us to: if reproduction had replaced the product in the means of production, this is what had defined the Mechanical Age. The means of production, at least in a digital sense, had once again changed. The product (the re-product) had once again changed and taken on a new form, something which brings back the “uniqueness” of the work of art, while still losing touch of its aura (that which had brought about its authenticity); instead, what had changed is that a product is produced without an artist at the helm. This is the age of “post-production” which I incurred earlier, a process which resides within the relationship of the Machine replacing the Worker, where it had once been the Worker which had replaced the artist. Bertram C. Bruce had extended Benjamin’s thesis to incorporate the technological shift of the late 1950s, wherein  the typewriter had now been replaced by the computer and word processing programs. Here, the disconnect between the artist the product had once against been divided and furthered: 1. “They can make many more copies, such that the Mona Lisa is reproduced on countless Web sites created by students, and then reproduced again by each visitor to the site as he or she calls up that Web page image”; the digital age brought a more crucial development to reproduction. Not only had anyone had access to an already reproduced version of the work of art, but not they did not even need a physical copy to establish this replica. It could be viewed and processed through the very language (computer code) which translated the material. This digital age had also furthered the ability to manipulate the replica to the user’s preference, not only replicating it, but molding its shape into something else. Bruce recognizes this as one of the more crucial aspects of this shifting perspective as a “capacity of the user, or viewer” to manipulate the very replica in front of them. This form of digital reproduction, as he explained, allowed the viewer  to “manipulate the work of art and thus control the context of viewing”, or in other words, transformed the means in which the reproduction was viewed or the form in which it was presented. The digital age offered a new method in the means of reproduction, where the user could manipulate the work of art to shape their own viewing experience. It added a dimension of interaction, for which the viewing experience had also reproduced the experience of viewing and most appropriate form of that experience for the user. However, it replaced the extent to which the artist or creator had in the experience itself; now not even the canvas they chose to display their piece on was determined by them. The digital age had introduced “interaction” into the viewing experience, in that the user now molds the point in which they experience the work of art; as such, the worker only constitutes the reproduction; there is no extent in which the artist has control of the art which they had presented, and the consumer in involved ever more present in this exchange. The product, then, is determined not simply by the exchange in which it took place, it is also reinforced by the experience that the consumer has through the product. This reinforces the very position of the worker, as Marx considers: the worker no longer produces a product; instead, the product has already been produced and reproduced, and is now molded by the consumer. As Marx had stated, “the more the worker produces, the less he has to consume”, it is also its opposite which remains true: The less the worker produces, the more they have to consume.

This, then, brings us back to the extent to which the worker has been replaced by the machine in this relationship of exchange. As the digital age has decried the worker as consumer, the worker in this contemporary time is not only losing their production, but the role of the worker is also being lost to the age of post-production. Wherein the artist had been replaced by the worker, the worker had been replaced by the consumer, AI had shifted back to a point in which art is now produced: there is just no more artist to create. Instead, the consumer fulfills the role of artist to the extent in which, through their consumption, something new has been created. Many have considered that AI had concerned the death of the artist, unlike Barthes’ death of the author. My stance is that the artist has long been dead: as art had taken the position of commodity, there was no more pure act of creation in which an “aura” could be recognized; the more that reproduction and consumerism had replaced aspects of the exchange relationship, this notion had proven itself more. What remains with the death of the artist, and the creation of the worker, is the life of the consumer. In the roles of both production and experience, the consumer is that which dictates the realm of machines, both their use and application. This returns back to Benjamin’s original thesis, though the age has shifted from mechanical, toward the digital, and into the LLM, concerning the work of art. If the artist has been dead ever since art had been replaced with the commodity, where or how does one encounter the artistic? What does this reflect in the realm of creation? If one wants to address the current environment of consumerism, here are some places in which creation is the furthest application of exchange: Asian influencer farms; The dead internet theory; Pokemon Card Scalpers. There is scant reason to expand on these points, but there is an obvious observation which comes from them: the consumer is also the producer, and the same is said for the use of AI technology. In the LLM Age of Post Production which is positioned in the title, this “post”-production is determined by the influence that the consumer has in the exchange relationship, for it is not just machines that replace the worker: the consumer replaces themselves both as worker and consumer, no longer replacing the work of art with a replica, but parroting the very means of production in their own consumption. The question which Benjamin reinforces about art perpetuates through each age, with not only it being more difficult to define that which constitutes the work of art, but the more difficult is comes to determining the position the role of the artist within the realm of consumption: are they that which create a product for consumption, or are they the ones which consume the commodity for production? Here, the work of art is discouraged and questioned: it also brings in mind the purpose of art, the creation of art, and the position in which an object is recognized as a work of art.

 

Edited April 2 by Hina's Simp

[Hina's Simp]

The Fantastic Statement: Semiotics, Language, and “The Lost World” of John Crowley’s Ægypt

The sign is the basic unit of semiotics; the langue is the basic unit of language; the statement is the basic unit of discourse. Each semiotic system, such as language and discourse, rely on this basic unit to develop and construct its code, or system of signification. Language and discourse become extensions of the notions developed within semiotics, referring back to their own signs and signifiers. Roland Barthes positions the mythic within the realm of language, constituting a semiotic system which refers back to a sign and signifier which precede or take place before communication. Umberto Eco considers that such signs and signifiers form around the code, or a system of signification, which links these notions to a particular context. It is through this process, between the sign and the signifier, which context presents itself. Jacques Lacan considers that it is this code which “locks” or “closes” these notions to particular context, otherwise their referents would continue ad finitum, constantly referring to something else. Without this signification, then the sign and the signifier would be rendered all-meaning and meaningless, having nothing direct and specific: the sign and the signifier would refer to an absent object void of direct meaning. For, it is, as Eco continues, “enough for code to foresee” this relationship, “valid for every possible addressee even if no addressee exists or will ever exist”. Mythic signification renders communication possible from material of the past, a code “that it is constructed from a semiological chain which existed before it: it is a second-order semiological system”. My interest does not lie in the ordering of these systems, but the creation of a system itself; drawing inspiration from Barthes’ mythic speech, John Crowley’s novel, Ægypt, parallels the subject of myth with the mode of the fantastic, drawing from similar material of the past which renders itself present in the speech associated with it. For Tzevetan Todorov, the fantastic juxtaposes this “in-between” code of signification, positioned against the “‘stands for’ and its correlate”, in the shape of a specific coordination of time: a “moment”. As Todorov explains, “[t]he fantastic is that [moment of] hesitation by a person who knows only the laws of nature, confronting an apparently supernatural event”. Or, to place it within the semiotic system, it is placed as the sign of the supernatural and the signifier of the change in the laws of nature. The mythic, as Barthes explains, draws from a system of signification rooted in the already, a type of speech encoded through a code derived from past materials, while the fantastic, as rendered in Crowley’s Ægypt, arises from the hasn’t-been, from a discourse encoded not through what has been communicated but through what has been forgotten, lost, or only imagined; it is a mode of speech which, rather than transforming the past into language, makes a language from that which was absent, revealing a semiotic condition in which the real and the imaginary collapse into a singular signification born not from knowledge but from rediscovery.

 

Roland Barthes begins his examination of the semiotic system of mythology with a basic question, “what is a myth, today?”. It is in his answer which begins the perusal of this idea, connecting it to discourse and to language, framing it through a code or a “system of signification”. As he responds to his own question, he declares that “myth is a type of speech” that is determined by the same qualifications as all speech is hitherto bound and developed by — the tripartite notion of sign, signifier, and signification. Foucault, however, shifted from the framing of semiotics through language to one more associated with discourse, another means of presenting communication through signs and signifiers, at the level of the written and spoken language. In other words, discourse is not a type of language, but language in use. It is the phenomenon of practicing language; it concerns itself with the practice, distribution deliverance, and reception of the language. In part, discourse implies a struggle of language between an address and addressee, or as Michel Foucault explains, “[d]iscourse transmits and produces power; it reinforces it, but also undermines and exposes it, renders it fragile and makes it possible to thwart”. Here, discourse broadens mythic speech, and all forms of speech, to a reflection in which its aim is to render the meaning of the transmission of language, unearthing the significance and meaning that is placed behind this speech. Here, the signification exhibits the very ideas that Danisi presents in his development of the semiotic dimensions in speech and discourse. Specifically, language refers back to the system in which communication is possible. For mythic speech, this system determines itself from materials already established for the purpose of communication. This form of speech, then, draws its signification from this material. Barthes explains, “Myth sees in them only the same raw material; their unity is that they all come down to the status of a mere language”. The fantastic, while draws from a similar material, places its context in the hasn’t been rather than the already. Todorov’s perspective on the fantastic occurs in hesitation of the reading, encoding the text with an explanation that leads one of two ways, an explanation which hasn’t been. Christine Brooke-Rose develops this hesitant moment of the text based on how such a hesitation becomes resolved, and what explanation is delivered to further it. “This hesitation for the reader”, she explains,

 

Quote

As encoded in the text, may be resolved by a natural explanation (a dream, drugs, trickery, etc.) in which case we are no longer in the pure fantastic but the uncanny (l’etrange). Alternatively, we may have to accept a supernatural explanation, or the supernatural may be accepted from the start and throughout as supernatural (magic powers and auxiliaries), in which case we are not in the fantastic but in the marvellous (e.g., elements of accepted supernaturalism in epic and tragedy would pertain to the marvellous).

Jacques Lacan establishes that this relationship between these three notions is determined by the third dimension, the signification, whereas the dimensions of the sign and the signifier refer back to an endless cycle of subjects and images. The signifier, as established by Lacan, “is that which refers to the subject of another signifier”, or the subject which relates to any and all forms of the signifier. This limit remains similar to the sign, which instead of referring back to another signified, finds its place in the different forms in which it represents, or as Lacan states, “represents something for someone”. It is through the significance process which confines the sign and the signifier, places them into their related context and the addressee for which they refer back to. This third dimension, as Marcel Danisi defines, is determined by the “thoughts, ideas, and feelings” for which the sign evokes, rather than the function or the image that it takes on. Barthes’ own mythic speech presents itself through this closed system, through its signification, within its own code. I use the term “code” to express the system in mind, as Umberto Eco expresses that signification takes place through the “coding” of the system in which it refers to. For him, this process exists between the limits of the sign and signifier, and should “foresee an established correspondence between that which ‘stands for’ and its correlate”, between the sign and the signifier. In other words, the signification process refers back to the relationship which takes place between the sign and the signifier, or the context and the code for which these terms reference. It is, however, the explicit code in which speech presents itself which determines if that speech is mythic or not. Barthes’ mythic speech refers to a code which draws upon the past or the already to determine its code, its signification. As Barthes explains, this type of speech, “mythic speech”, is constructed or “made of material which has already been worked on so as to make it suitable for communication”. It is this material which refines the signification, or the classification of speech as mythical or otherwise, drawing from a cultural consciousness. In other words, as Barthes furthers, the materials which develop mythic speech, “the materials of myth (whether pictorial or written) presuppose a signifying consciousness, the one can reason about while discounting their substance”. Such speech is framed by how it is communicated, turned into both language and discourse, from within the code which refines it. Myth transforms the materials that it takes from (“the language itself, photography, painting, posters, rituals, objects, etc.”) into a language, or code, for communication. The fantastic, however, is already encoded into its language; the raw material does not transform into a language, but come encoded with the language itself. This distinguishes the aspects of the semiotic systems they take place in, it is speech which encodes the mythic, while it is discourse which encodes the fantastic.

The fantastic becomes encoded through the text, through the moment in which the reader is held between what has already happened and what is to happen next, between the already and the hasn't been. Here, the fantastic draws upon the similar material as myth; rather than seeing it as raw material which produces a language, however, it is raw material which produces a discourse: it transforms language from the natural and into the supernatural. Or rather, as the fantastic is held to the “hesitation”, the in-between of already and hasn’t been, it produces an “evanescent element” with which this “hesitation as to the supernatural can last a short or a long moment and disappear with an explanation”. The fantastic itself exists only within the statements which render it possible, drawing upon an understanding of natural law which then may be subverted, distorted, or perverted, as to transform it into the supernatural. This is where mythic speech and fantastic speech differ in their production, as one produces a language and a code of communication, the other produces a discourse which is encoded within the explanation. While mythic speech draws upon the already, John Crowley turns his attention to the fantastic and fantastic speech in his novel Aegpyt, referring to speech that was lost within the past and found within the present, rather than which set its determination on material of the past. Following the path of mythic speech, fantastic speech also draws its signification within the relationship between the signified and the sign; but rather than positioning its determination within the “presuppos[ition] of a signifying consciousness”, it is founded in material that remained absent from this signifying consciousness, forgotten or lacking within. Crowley establishes this material in his representation of the forgotten and lost country of Aegypt, for which the book takes its name after. As he explains, this country draws from the fantastic and the mythic to constructs it notion, “from Ægypt, the country where all magic arts were known”. Its existence remains something only read about, something that declares itself within the statements and the phrases which bring it forth. It becomes corporeal in the discourse which contextualize it, from the stories that precede it: “after all, he had got the stories he had told from somewhere”. From stories, only more stories evoke. As it comes from somewhere beyond himself, it continues through his speech, “From History, he had told his cousins”. In part, the country remains lost only to the past that might have never been, a lost world which “never-was” and has always been.. For the protagonist, the claim proclaims its effects from within the imaginary and into the Real, “for sure his Ægypt was imaginary; only perhaps it hadn’t been he who had invented it”. The protagonist had come across something bewildering: a world that had once been told, but lost to both time and space. Now, he had come across it as if it were fiction itself made real, discovered and created simultaneously. This instance is what separates the fantastic from the mythic, specifically due to the fantastic only making itself known through itself being “lost”, “discovered”, or “invented”; the mythic draws on past material, while the fantastic codes this material through a newly discovered and unraveled means. Such material, though it is possible to come from the same as mythic language, the fantastic comes from a language which makes itself known only as it is spoken.

 

The phrasing I put in the last part of the section is something important for this sentiment, specifically the word “lost”. Now, for Crowley, and more apparent for his protagonist, Pierce, Ægypt is a country that only exists in the residual effects which persist throughout time, in the presentation of literature and passed-down traditions. For the latter, these traditions are tied to specific cultures: “[w]e believe Gypsies can tell fortunes” because “still carry with them, in however degraded a form, the skills their ancestors had”. As such, thought brought back to the Real through this recreation, there are elements which had remained prevalent. The gypsies tie the lost country of Ægypt to a cultural movement, traversing and evolving through geographic lines and temporal placements; though it had been a shell, “degraded a form”, it had continued onward past the locale which one held it. In fact, had there not be a direct tie to the literature which Pierce has been given, “some book full of antiquated notions and quaint orthography had first suggested to him the existence of that shadow country”. From this, Crowley shapes the signification of the fantastic: it is something beyond, something far gone and yet not revealed; it has always been, just never noticed. It exists much in the same way of hesitation, distorting the understanding of the natural and placing it into the realm of the supernatural, which now one must either accept or attempt to explain. It feels almost mythical in its relationship to the natural, but for the speaker and the listener, remains a “product of imagination”. This repeats the very notion, that while Pierce had acknowledged a shadow country or a lost world, “his Ægypt was imaginary”. In fact, for Lacan, the imaginary is as much real as the fantastic: “in [this] way the real can be seen to be contained in the imaginary”. One could further this connection toward Lacan’s psychic topology, but what remains important is how the fantastic draws from the real. As Crowley states, a “country once again seemingly before him, still there in the past: Ægypt.”, a country which was lost to the past and had found its way into the present —  a lost world, a world lost to time moving forward. Here, the fantastic is brought back into the world by records of the past being found anew, being found with the contemporary present; their only attachment to the past is that it took place, was created there, remaining within the unveiling of a past made present. The country remains lost physically, disappearing from the very locale and place which had originally  occupied it, “Whatever country occupies its geography now, Ægypt is gone, has been gone since the last of its cities, in the farthest East, failed and fell”. As the protagonist uncovers, it is within the records that make their way from the past that this country remains, something wondrous and fantastic beyond the trajectories which construct the present moment. Crowley expresses this country as a “shadow” that conceals and hides itself, explaining that it was from “one book full of antiquated notions and quaint orthography” that had “first suggested to him the existence of that shadow country”. The lost country has always been around: it is a rediscovered world. “It is only lost because it has been found”, Daniel Haines explains, “[n]ow that we have found it we can say that ‘it was lost’, but while  it was ‘lost’ we never knew or suspected it existed”; rather, it has always been there. The fantastical occupies this position of a “lost world”, something that is only lost due to it being found. More specifically, or in other words, the fantastic is always prevalent; it is only recognized as it makes itself known within language.

 

       The fantastic is found within speech: it prescribes the possibility of the supernatural and the natural, condensing the symbolic and the imagination into a moment at which these two poles are confronted. “There is language”, Foucault claims, when one “suspends, not only the point of view of the ‘signified’...but also that of the ‘signifier’”; left within the gap of the signifier and the signified remains the signification, the meaning: it is the perception of the sign and the signifier, “signification, interpretation, or simply meaning”. The signification process refers to the meaning-making of language, the way in which use and practice of language is directed. Here, the signification of the fantastic is exactly as Pierce describes his finding of Ægypt; what fantastic language possible is that it is to be“encountered again and again, apprehended, understood, recounted, forgotten, lost, and found again”. The signified and the signifier of the fantastic refer to the referral and the referent of the explicit moments in which the fantastic is enunciated. As language, it is the conditions which posit the possibility. Rather, by putting aside the point of view of the signified and the signifer what remains within the signification process is language: “reveal[ing] the fact that, here and there, in relation to possible domains of objects and subjects, in relation to other possible formulations and re-uses, there is language”. This “found only because it was lost” makes possible fantastic speech, prescribes the use in which such a language is enunciated. But, as Pierce had found Ægypt within the fantastic, he had also recreated it within the present, within his imagination. The use of fantastic speech, from the present and through the imagination, then, remains something else — something other. While others have dictated the ways in which the fantastic has been used, that is not the aim of my position: rather, I want to create the fantastic for myself to lose and for others to find again, to make their own meaning from it. As Pierce had discovered Ægypt, he also, “at the same time” felt that because of his discovery, “the universe extends out infinitely in every direction you can look in or think about, at every instant”. As readers of this essay come to learn: the fantastic is always around, it is for those that hesitate as they confront it to “extend out in every direction” their meaning. The fantastic, is then, the language of the infinitely possible and is only limited within the relation between the subject and the object, within the conditions of the signification process.  

Edited April 16 by Hina's Simp