Literary Article: Toward a pre-post-Trump cultural cosmography

We will occasionally be sharing writings of our own and (with permission of creators and copyright holders) writings of others just for the sake of focusing interest on what might be…well…interesting at any given moment.  The present article was composed as much for its appropriateness to representing what we want this space to be and “to do” as for its aptness to the present day, which might now be seen as an outcome If not merely an expression and reflection of the past fifteen or so years.  Are we able to “look back” now so as to look upon moving forward?  Or are we still within a fold of gravity that allows no purchase from within itself by which to “historicize” our present day from a “present-past perspective”?
I had been thinking about how culture has been and is still being communicated (or perhaps how the communicability of it can now be regarded as having been squandered at a critical tipping point for this planet and for everyone on it) partly due to the now apparent culture wars.  How “fractured” culture in its true appearance, if not in its apparent essence in experience, has become, and I had thought, was there one thinker we could read who could point us in the right direction?  I thought, we all come from culture(s) in one way or another–so we all can say we “know” culture–but that we are not always happy about this.  We might feel the need to resist culture’s trappings, but the egoistic impulse is also highly unappealing to many who are more comfortable as skeptics of culture (although sometimes the culture itself is egomaniac).  I asked myself: Who had intelligent ideas about “some essence” of culture–was so bold as to “essentialize” on it from the expression of it, the hegemony of it in certain instances, but also (and in speaking of “essence”) the reality of it we all intuitively feel, that it can deeply illuminate the human soul, a human soul within as it reaches outside ourselves?  In a sudden fIash, I thought, Carl Jung might be useful right now.  So I began reading Carl Jung.
I was led in the wrong direction, but in making my way back over several very difficult days, I discovered that in “unlearning” Jung (as I had to do, to rescue myself), I was in a position to see certain “fault lines” or “crevices” in his work as “wrong expressions” animated by true insights that were then showing themselves to be somehow profoundly salutary.  He wasn’t perfect, and he can even be “dangerous,” but in knocking out of his thought certain wrongful notions, which may have come of my misconstruing him–namely, that “images” and “myths” should be seen as a “fabric” out of which “our” conscious minds apprehend “our” reality–and then in regarding these wrongful static “figures of reality” as obscuring the ground of the dynamically changing and evolving being of “heart,” “soul,” and “mind,” I found I could move on from him with my own being wholly intact, even with a sense of well-being, and with an intuitive and enriched apprehension of culture that would allow me access to works of their time and place–where, for me, “myth” and “image” must cede “their” ground to “our own” living text of our experience, to a human history truer to “us,” rather than vice versa.  Perhaps the same can be said of “our cultured selves,” the “share of ourselves” we owe to our cultural identity, that it too must sometimes make way for an evolving us where our own experience is telling us we need it to.
My article would not have been selected if I hadn’t also been thinking on Goethe’s Faust (cited also, and actually by coincidence, in Jung’s early writing as the Greatest of all German myths, something that German culture couldn’t escape until after the Second World War). My neighbour visited me and we were talking about books we love, and she was telling me how much she’s always enjoyed, in vampire novels, how the vampire’s eventual victim must first invite the vampire into her home.  (Otherwise, the vampire is not permitted entry).  I told her about a similar rule in Faust, how the devil may not enter if there is a pentagram blocking access, and that Mephistopheles gains entry only because the tip on the point of the star facing the door is missing.  At our next meeting at F.L. Ternskie, this exchange happened to appear in my mind and I shared it with the others.  One of us said, “That’s like “the”–I mean, “the critical”–technicality.” “It’s strange,” said someone else, “Because it’s like we’re all supposed to know “their” laws, bizarre and ludicrous as these are.  To prevent them from destroying us.”  We thought about this for a moment or two, and then I said, “So in a way, I guess, you’re responsible for it, if you end up in Hell.” (Goethe himself makes “them” corruptive by their (view of their own) nature, by their (understanding of their own) “essence” (so, they really “can’t” be held responsible)–and if that’s simply their nature, then only laws they themselves deem binding on them can govern them.  So, of course, these laws probably tend to appear “insane” from our perspective). “Things are different nowadays though.” “Are they? Are they really?” “I should think they are,” I said. “We don’t “believe in technicalities” anymore.” “I’m not so sure about that….I mean, how do you define “technicality,” anyway?” (Was “technicality” even the right word for it?  What were we trying to name?).  “Well, even in Faust, it wasn’t about the technicality.  He was frail, mentally I mean, or certainly badly compromised.” ““Easy victim,” then?” “Hmm….” “And what if you’re innocent of their laws?  Maybe you’re just “too pure.”” “And I thought ignorance was supposedly bliss.”  “It’s not “ignorance”—it’s “inexperience.”” “You have work planned on this?” “I sure do,” I lied.  So we all agreed that I would be the one to kick off this section of the website that will be dedicated to literary and cultural work with a reading that might show one significant instance where culture touches oblivion.
Thankfully, and after a few anxious days of racking my brain, two possibilities for stories suggested themselves.  Perhaps all along I was being led along this path, beginning fifteen or so years ago when I had read “The Dead” by James Joyce.  Then, I had learned that I was someone who needed to “avoid” mass and traditional cultures.  Would this be a “coda” to that difficult time?  But it was actually “The Garden Party” by Katherine Mansfield whose appearance from memory was the more striking, uncanny, and unexpected, imparting a strong, magnetic kind of effect.  I hadn’t read that one since high school.  And upon re-reading it, I discovered why it had called me back to it.  In it, there is something that resembles what we were trying to describe and struggling to name at our meeting, something we were simply calling, “a technicality.”  But it was a modern form of it, or at least suggestively analogous, and something implicit in social codes and institutions among the middle and upper classes.  That was more like it, I thought.  I decided I would set aside “The Dead,” which was really more about being swallowed up–buried–by the “whole collective corpus” of communal culture and history.  That story was about the risk of “ego death” in traditional or mass culture, and that knowledge seems to me not at all empowering, less illuminating, and so, far less promising for a common way forward.
“The Garden Party” is told mainly from the perspective of a girl, practically a young woman, whom everyone who knows her regards as “artistic.”  We can see that if she one day becomes an artist, she will likely be a talented one, as her conscious mind is somehow (perhaps, “curiously”) “different,” more sensitive and attuned to people and to something that is of, yet directing her beyond, appearances.  She sees without knowing, which is to say that she one day can or must know.  Her sisters are different from her, but with their own personalities in this respect.  Jose is “practical” and bossy, meaning strictly observant of custom and convention but from which she feels entitled to benefit without being the least bit mindful of others, especially not of those who serve her every need.  She knows without seeing, and (we feel) she can never or must not ever know.  We might feel we know her sort, as we might feel we know Laura the artist’s sort.  Jose is privileged and likes to order the servants around, who seem to enjoy this because they too cannot afford to be too questioning of the rigid class hierarchy of British society of that time, and would prefer to view themselves as part of a Great Enterprise, say, the national economy as it is set in a noble, respected British household.  The third sister, Meg, is “simply Meg” (perhaps another “type” of “girl of privilege”), not really meriting her own development but rather someone belonging in the backgrounds and contexts of others, for instance, being Jose’s accompanist on the piano.  These three girls live in a blissful, colourful, happy world, where someone who is sensitive and perceptive, but lacking in “real experience” can be critical of the prejudice that comes of class structure and social hierarchy, but without yet really knowing anything “of substance” at all (and what would such knowledge consist of?  How could such knowledge come to be “framed”?  And in what way could it be?).  Upon seeing the workmen preparing the grounds for the party, Laura wonders: “Why couldn’t she have workmen for friends rather than the silly boys she danced with and who came to Sunday night supper?  She would get on much better with men like these./It’s all the fault, she decided…of these absurd class distinctions.”  This is only a little ironic, it needs saying, as while these workmen have just ignored her directions only a moment earlier, showing her little of the respect they would have shown the “matriarch” of the family, we might feel that the irony is softened by our feeling that Laura senses far more than she can possibly know about these men as human beings.  Could her sense of them be true?  Or is it simply “just” without necessarily being “true”?  What would only further complicate her view of their respective positions in relation to her is that she can only find their behaviour to be something like “curious” rather than as being anything in any way, “suspect.”  So while she is likely well-aware that they don’t take her seriously, we have the sense that she doesn’t make “too much” of their presentment of “these absurd class distinctions,” but rather, she merely “looks past” their attitude towards her, wishing she and they could all just become good friends.  The reader can then attribute her affection toward them to something she can only sense about “their sort” rather than to anything she actually “knows.”
The Sheridan garden party is as successful as any party could ever be, although Laura had thought they should cancel it.  When the cream puffs were being delivered to their kitchen, the delivery man from the bakery had shared news of a young man from the impoverished class falling off his horse to his death.  His cottage was somewhat near to the estate: “[Laura’s thought of cancelling the garden party] really was extravagant, for the cottages were in a lane to themselves at the very bottom of a steep rise that led up to the house.  A broad road ran between.  True, they were far too near.  They were the greatest possible eyesore, and they had no right to be in that neighbourhood at all….The very smoke coming out of the cottages was poverty-stricken.”  The proximity of the cottages is significant, because they were “too close” for the state of them on every other day, but on this day, they were far enough away that the thought of what happened there “should not” raise the ethical issue of throwing a party.  This is Laura’s consciousness, and she is reasoning from her social position, acquired from privilege.  Yet the contradiction is apparent to her.  And being who she is, thinking also with her heart, she implores her mother and her sister Jose to cancel the party.  Jose eventually accuses Laura of being overly sentimental.  But her reasoning is that “if you’re going to [cancel the party] every time someone has an accident, you’ll lead a very strenuous life.”  It’s not so ridiculous, because life must go on, and what is the nature of the connection between “there” and “here” in Jose’s mind?   There is no connection and we sense there can’t be any for her.  Interestingly, she lets it slip that, in her mind, she pictures the dead man as having been drunk, a drunken fool who clumsily fell off his horse.  Laura is outraged by this (as no one had said the man was drunk) and runs to tell her mother.  Her mother’s reasoning is superior to Jose’s: “[M]y dear child, use your common sense.  It’s only by accident that we’ve heard of it.  If some one had died there normally—and I can’t understand how they keep alive in those poky little holes—we should still be having our party, shouldn’t we?”  There are two thrusts here—first, that we may never even have heard of that young man’s accident and, in that case, we would be throwing our party for not having any knowledge of it, and secondly, that we seldom hear about these kinds of events—for they happen everyday–and this, too, shouldn’t stop us from throwing our parties.
The party is a great success, but afterwards, Laura is still troubled by having gone ahead with it in spite of being in possession of such news.  Her mother knows her very well and, following more details about the grieving family from Mr. Sheridan (delivered “tactlessly” in her view), she seems to concede a little to Laura’s feelings.  She suggests that they gather the leftovers from the party for Laura to deliver to the grieving family.  The technicality is not actually stated, but, rather, unspoken, withdrawn.  Mrs. Sheridan is advising Laura on how to deliver the basket, but Mrs. Sheridan is aware of something that Laura must know, but mustn’t even think of.  “And, Laura!”—her mother followed her out of the marquee—“don’t on any account—”/“What mother?”/No, better not put such ideas into the child’s head!  “Nothing!  Run along!””
Laura sees something highly significant, but that, too, must only be a “curiosity” (to her, but also to us).  Might this be something she wasn’t “supposed” to see?  She is taken into a room where the body can be viewed and she sees something that we might say is “beyond possible knowing.”  It’s something about the man’s expression, we understand.  Something telling her that, for him, death is beautiful, that he is “”happy…All is well….This is just as it should be.  I am content.””  We don’t know how she feels exactly, because she, herself, doesn’t know what her feelings should mean.  And how do we feel about what she sees?  She finds her brother, who is sensitive and “different” like her.  ““Don’t cry,” he said in his warm, loving voice. “Was it awful?”/”No,” sobbed Laura, “It was simply marvellous.  But, Laurie—”  She stopped, she looked at her brother.  “Isn’t life,” she stammered, “isn’t life—”  But what life was she couldn’t explain.  No matter.  He quite understood./”Isn’t it, darling?” said Laurie.”
Whatever the “technicality” was, whatever “little rule” Mrs. Sheridan had wanted to share with Laura but chose not to before Laura set off for the cottages, and whatever word there can be for what we feel protects us from that which we fear dwells “below” us (arising every so often in consciousness through our anxiety and fear), whatever we must avoid seeing, saying, or doing, so that we can throw a party (or lots of parties), which is what might be required of us to preserve the social order for our own survival within it, so that someone like Jose or Meg can remain comfortable simply as Jose or Meg–and whatever “little custom” we are to observe so that we can “go along with believing” in order to truly believe that we can avoid becoming the victim of “evil,” “the technicality” will always slip the grasp of our conscious mind, confound our higher reason, cast a veil over our hearts, and the reality we encounter as a result will continue to shape us as we make our way in humanity through life and knowledge of history.  Unconscious “knowledge” of “what is” supersedes us, with “what is” sometimes only standing in for all that we fear might be or for what might become of us, so that the two realities are never separate, but enfolded into one another, because the rules of maintaining one are always being determined by myths or images of the other precisely as this other reality remains shrouded in obscurity and darkness.  The “technicality” might as well itself be of the unconscious.  Perhaps it often is.  It is the “ridiculous” fruit of a long history of social and mental repression, and we often learn of it only upon our own descent’s arrival all around us.  In place of the technicality as the “little rule” will be Laura’s understanding, or the “meaning,” of what she would not have seen if she had learned the “little rule” before she set out, the “meaning” in what she saw perhaps conveying the very reason that the “profane” myths and images (and the social prejudices) of the repressed on one hand, and the “benign” social order as a “sacred” and protected space on the other, will continue to indicate “separate and independent” spheres of human life.  As a writer or artist, Laura knows that these appearances, socially inscribed and psychically determinant over and against “reality,” are inevitably false and that the truth must be experienced truly to be truly believed.