A Wall
You put up a wall, and I recognize it as your wall. We get together on the telephone and talk about it. Or perhaps we e-mail, or snail-mail. I tell you I'd like to put some of my stuff over on your side of the wall. It's not a fence, mind you. I'm not talking about general earth-bound real estate. I'm talking about Intellectual Property, Cultural Capital, the Psychic Self, and the Psychological Self, but in all those contexts I suppose I'm still talking about turf. You remember, I'm sure, how the Snow Leopard marks his turf. Very real stuff! Potent smell! So now we can rest assured, we know turf.
* *
I went to the funeral of a former girlfriend. Her father was there. I went up to look at her body and then walked toward the area where her family was standing. I said something to her father and I started to cry. I was embarrassed. I walked out onto the porch and headed in the direction of my car. My feelings of sorrow shut down as if a wall had descended in my brain. By the time I got to the car I had no feelings. It frightened me though. Such a powerful force in my mind that seemed to be beyond my conscious control.
In his book, The Aesthetics of Middlebrow Fiction, Popular US Novels,, Modernism, and Form, 1945-75, Prof. Tom Perrin writes about blustering among mid-20th century literary critics. Here is a summary of one of the essays, written by Perrin.;
"Part of a collection of essays on The New Yorker. I argue that the mid-century critic Dwight Macdonald’s prose emblematizes a mid-century middlebrow literary mode to which I give the name blustering. Blusterers, who appear all over middlebrow US prose of the early Cold War, aim to talk with the appearance of forthrightness, but they get so bogged down that they end up muddled and mired in self-contradiction. Furthermore, I argue that blustering might itself be seen as an example of the modernism seemingly conspicuous by its absence from the mid-century New Yorker. I want to claim blustering as a variety of what Miriam Hansen calls “vernacular modernism,” an example from the expanded repertoire of modernist cultural productions that has been assembled in the new modernist studies over the last fifteen years or so. Hansen suggests that vernacular modernism comprises “cultural practices” outside the traditional modernist canon “that both articulated and mediated the experience of modernity.” Macdonald's blustering in The New Yorker is an exemplary instance of such a practice – a modernist and middlebrow mode mediated by modernism's self-contradictory and competing ideologies that at the same time attempts to articulate those ideologies."
I've only read the one essay by Prof. Perrin but I found it to be brilliant and I'm hoping to read the rest of that book as soon as I can and whatever else of his that I can find. I am particularly interested in his ideas and description of what he refers to, referencing Hansen, as vernacular modernism and its "cultural practices" outside the traditional modernist canon, and whether those who practiced this vernacular came into contact with certain walls in their thinking and...of what did those walls consist?
Without getting into a discussion of the subjects of semantics and linguistics too deeply let me just say that concerning walls, I'm using a broader definition than when describing an actual wall like the Great Wall of China. I'm using the term when it's discussed metaphorically; as I think I've said, in "You've put up a wall in our discussion of your mother!" As in the old topic of humor, the mother-in-law joke. I'm also using the term in other than geographic applications, as, for instance, the wall of a vein or artery, or a dam, such as the Hoover Dam, or a dam in an irrigation trench; walling up a river or a stream.
I find the thought intriguing to go beyond the subject of literature to the subject of painting during the same historical period to which MacDonald and his peers aimed their criticism. I'm thinking specifically about MacDonald's essay, Mass Cult and Mid Cult. Can I assume, (let me just speak for myself at this juncture), that the mode of vernacular modernism spread over the entire world of art and cultural criticism of that time? One thing that is different of course is the effect that commodification has had on the value of individual art pieces as time went on, relative to the value of the printed word.
But what about the construction of blustering? Of what does it consist? One thing that readily comes to mind is the fake. I think of Mike Tyson; a fake jab with one hand and a powerful blow aiming at the head with the other. Not once but many times, sometimes round after round. When I think of more boxing metaphors I could almost get carried away, but from shuffling I jump to shuck-and-jive which has to be another metaphor of numerous possibilities along those lines. What part do walls play in blustering?
Painting? Where to start? Partisan Review? The Nation? Art News? Blustering? Well now, the first generation of abstract expressionism would be unique. They were developing a language; and there was a line-up of critics and a line up of galleries and buyers and promoters. But, is it even possible that it never got out of hand?
* * *
Let's go back to the beginning for a minute. The Wall. I've mentioned the wall that is the discussion of the mother-in-law; a taboo subject. That's a different kind of a wall; assuming we started out with the wall in our house next to where we're sitting. The living-room wall, the bathroom wall, the wall in the basement that is part of the foundation but has fake pine paneling on it so that it looks more like a wall. So, for the sake of my own semantic and/or linguistic intentions in this post, I'll be using the word wall as an alternate nomenclature for something which might more normally or for different purposes be using another word. (Keeping in mind that when it comes to walls for hanging paintings on we're talking about a completely different generation, ie Structuralism and Post- Structuralism.)
Here are some places where I could use the word to describe something that is not the Great Wall of China:
A road block; a blood clot; a mental block; writers block. Suppose I stick with the letter b for awhile. Barrier, barricade, battlement, bar. Or a barrier by any other name, like the Maginot Line. (It was meant to be a wall, and Hitler did go around it; which is what you do to a wall.) [But, sorry, I switched from b to m.]
* * *
The wall that is in the mind is the one I'm most interested in. The one that blocked my tears. On occasion, it has been there purely for self-torture; in terms of memory blockage. There have been occasions, with me as with most people if I may so presume, that there's been a wall, a conscious-unconscious wall between me and where I left my car keys. If you have a car that doesn't need a key please feel free to substitute. O.K., I won't go further than this, but what I might do is use this post as a footnote to future mentions of walls in this context.
........
Lacan; From a talk entitled "Of Structure as the Inmixing of an Otherness Prerequisite to Any Subject Whatever".
"The question* that the nature of the unconscious puts before us is in a few words, that something always thinks. Freud told us that the unconscious is above all thoughts, and that which thinks is barred from consciousness. This bar has many applications, many possibilities with regard to meaning. The main one is that it is really a barrier, a barrier which it is necessary to jump over or to pass through. This is important because if I don't emphasize this barrier all is well for you. As we say in French, ça vous arrange, because if something thinks in the floor below or underground things are simple; thought is always there and all one needs is a little consciousness on the thought that the living being is naturally thinking and all is well. If such were the case, thought would be prepared by life, naturally, such as instinct for instance. If thought is a natural process, then the unconscious is without difficulty. But the unconscious has nothing to do with instinct or primitive knowledge or preparation of thought in some underground. It is a thinking with words, with thoughts that escape your vigilance, your state of watchfulness. The question* of vigilance is important. It is as if a demon plays a game with your watchfulness. The question is to find a precise status for this other subject which is exactly the sort of subject that we can determine taking our point of departure in language."
*Question?
*Should this second bringing up of question be re-phrased as problem? And where does he allow for the watchfulness to become conscious of a thought?
[Here, I'm asking help from Lacan in arriving at a conscious thought. Is this too much to ask? And/Or why did I add the above quote to my perfectly sensible short essay? Probably, it's a fishing expedition.]
