Reflections on Saturday: the Mighty Story, the Mirror Stage, and Henry Perowne’s Ocular Proof

Early in our inhabitation of Henry Perowne’s mind, we observe him engage in one of many intellectual disputes with his daughter’s worldview: “This notion of Daisy’s, that people can’t ‘live’ without stories, is simply not true. He is living proof” (67). Yet, in its throbbing, irresistible entirety, McEwan’s novel offers instruction in Daisy’s notion, contradicting the verdict of the incisive surgeon through whom we grasp the blood lines of modern London. Perhaps the clearest evidence of this survival-by-story theory emerges in Baxter’s rapturous response to Daisy’s recitation of “Dover Beach,” which contributes to the family’s escape from his trembling hands. In the context of this course, Daisy’s rebuffed lesson calls to mind Jay’s mention of a prominent physician (her name escapes me) who believed she needed to obtain a degree in narrative theory in order to best perform her job as a doctor of medicine. Andrea Barrett’s Ship Fever, whose stories of science and love teem with intertwining vignettes, engenders conviction in the merits of this doctor’s professional choices. After all, to heal the sick one must read the story of their fall from health and create that of their return. Medical success depends on acute narratological interpretation. Fittingly, even in his “time off” Henry obsessively reads and produces not only states of physiological disorder, but also intentions, emotions, and the rhythms and reversals of people’s moods. A stranger’s momentary grimace evokes a tale he cannot resist diagnosing. Through such assessments McEwan deftly befogs the line between clinical diagnosis and narrative—artistic even, if not literary—interpretation. Thus, the king of Saturday’s five-act drama exposes a mental blind spot in his failure to perceive his own hungry, mortal reliance upon the lifeblood of the Mighty Story.

Saturday’s stories render the self radically impermanent, existing in a constant flux of transformation such that every instant, asserting its own biological and environmental recombination of matter, must be read and re-read anew. While refusing loyalty to any one hermeneutic sensibility, McEwan gives vision a particularly powerful showing. His novel contains exchanges that strike me as precious salvations from the alienation wrought by the Lacanian mirror stage. In several viscerally psycho-physical scenes, characters see vicariously, or attempt to see not themselves (Henry deliberately avoids looking at his tired face in the bathroom mirror), but to see into or through the lens of someone else. In the aftermath of Baxter’s invasion, just such a moment results in a soothing cohesion of the kind Henry has been semi-consciously seeking all day long: his wife “lowered her eyes as she orders her thoughts. When she lifts them he sees himself, by some trick of light, suspended in miniature against the black arena of her pupils, embraced by a tiny field of mid-green iris” (245). Of course, Henry’s literal glimpse of himself reflected in Rosalind’s black pupil means more than a “trick of light.” We are meant to understand that this is where he lives: in the eyes of his beloved. Much as his mother has slipped into mental death, Henry variously acknowledges his would-be nothingness in a world without these eyes and the stories produced when they meet his own. Henry’s insistence that “[h]e is living proof” of the dispensability of stories, coupled with the novel’s exploration of visual epistemology, call forth, for me, another association—that of Othello’s notorious demand for “ocular proof.” If Henry Perowne remains blind to the narratives ad infinitum that fuel his psychological life, he does recognize the human need for “ocular proof” of one’s own existence, a “living proof” of the self, which he discovers when he sees—even in the darkness of the bedroom—his lover’s eyes.

Diana

SATURDAY, & The Moon-Blanched Infarct

Inside its borders, having for years gone unnoticed, the delinquent gene now keys the security system’s alarm from whence the body relays outwardly its call of distress: slow at first, spasms and slippages begin the disease’s articulation; then suddenly, at the fated moment of kairos, the body is overthrown by a mutinous sinuosity; death before death. For the 25yrold thug Baxter in Ian McEwan’s novel Saturday, this insurgency turns out to be Huntington’s chorea, an incurable degenerative disease, the prognosis of which is at best bleak. So, when neurosurgeon Henry Perowne suggests that new treatments are available for Huntington’s in order to escape a drubbing at the hands of Baxter et al, Henry realizes that he’s acted cruelly by playing directly to his opponent’s weakness—point Henry, six-love. In effect, the specialist has from a position of impromptu authority conjured a “mirage for which people are prepared to kill and die for” (176). In all likelihood, Baxter watched his father die from the same hereditary disease and is unforgettably aware of the trajectory his own suffering will follow. Accordingly, Baxter inhabits that interstice between the kind of fear that clamors for obviation and the paralyzing terror of knowing himself to be ultimately helpless before cruelest death. Henry, whose mother suffers from another atavistic illness, dementia, comes to a similar conclusion by book’s end. Yet the thought of his properly “English” progeny is for Henry some consolation beyond the lemonade of clinical detachment.

But, whereas Henry suffers from an “expanding circle of moral sympathy” from inside his Mercedes, Baxter is all fight, no flight: a class-conscripted delinquent, he has no utopian notions of the hereafter and is instead emboldened by the very lack of an expectation that he will someday be compensated for his plight. And now, thanks to an interested Henry, Baxter has had to bear his wounds before a disloyal congress, Nigel and Nark. Furthermore, to the worse, Baxter’s fear—that “insidious whisper of ruin” lodged within—has been whetted down to an aim-for-the-jugular reflex against terror, or rather, surrogate terror. And so, inside Henry’s house, having followed Rosalind in, Baxter transforms the family reunion into something monstrous. To add insult to brain injury, Baxter attempts to harm those innocents closest to Henry, rather than circumvent collateral damage by attacking him directly. Arguably, in more than one respect, Saturday suggests a link, however tenuous, between the reckless Baxter and the terror-ists of 9/11. But perhaps this link ought to be enlarged and enlarged again so as to accommodate all non-westerners. Along similar lines, Henry’s invasion into Baxter’s brain is succinct, recupera-tive, and has an exit-strategy, to boot. Hmm? Well, at the very least, Saturday shows such things as (a) tyrannies, (c) war, (g) exporters of ideologies, and (t) degenerative diseases to be of the same gene tide, which with tremulous cadence slow, brings the eternal note of sadness in.

Finally, why is it that, even with the rudiments of an Arnoldian education, Henry finds nothing profound about Gregor Samsa gazing longingly out the window, at the anamorphic mirror of the city beyond? Or, for that matter, why does Henry consider magical realism absurd to the point of impertinence, but feel something like trust towards the talking heads on the electronic hearth? Also, would Baxter have turned out much like Henry did, had England a level squash court, or had someone spared Arnold’s winged cultural initiative the crossbow? To put it another way, if inoculated with Milton, what would Baxter’s Glasgow Coma Score climb to? Fourteen lines, say, with the accent on every fourth chromosome!

 Ben

Matthew Arnold in Ian McEwan’s Saturday

What should we make of the references to Matthew Arnold (yes, I am excited to discuss another Victorian reference) in Ian McEwan’s Saturday? I’m thinking, of course, of the dramatic shifting point when Daisy reads Arnold’s “Dover Beach” as if it were her own poem for Baxter. What is so interesting about the scene is that her reading of Arnold’s poem actually does produce results: it tames the violent threat coming from Baxter (perhaps just as Arnold was hoping to react to and tame the threat of mob mentalities in Victorian England). Do Arnold’s words really cause this effect, is it Daisy herself, or is it somehow a physical shift brought on by Baxter’s disease, as Henry suggests?

We also need to consider that in pacifying Baxter, Daisy creates a new dilemma. Baxter keeps repeating: “You wrote that,” and out of fear Daisy refrains from admitting her lie. In reading the novel and rooting for the family, I certainly had the initial response that Daisy’s lie is justified because it produces such important results. And really, she never states that the poem is hers, but she merely implies that it is and then refuses to admit the truth. But, then what of the power of Arnold’s message – that important message that served, as we just saw, to produce positive transformative change in Baxter? Arnold’s poem states or pleads rather: “Ah, love, let us be true/ to one another,” as if attempting to be honest and genuine with other people is the only foundation on which to build life on “a darkling plain.” Is Arnold’s message negated by Daisy’s lie, or is it an acceptable exception? Or is that plea for truth between people as “hopeless” as Henry hears it to be?

This dilemma seems relevant to all of our policy discussions, considering first of all how involved Arnold was in policy making. It also seems urgent for the policy-making arena as a scenario that questions the real value of attempted truths and the philosophy that ends justify means. (Even Henry, a responsible surgeon, is compelled to tell Baxter medical lies in order to produce necessary results.) Of course the novel’s dramatic scenarios amplify this situation, but what of truth and ends justifying means when we’re dealing with real-life policies, doctors, and patients? Do people need to be completely truthful, or should they do what is necessary to produce effects regardless of being truthful and forthright?

Erin Spinka

A Saturday with the Perownes

I read Ian McEwan’s Saturday in one sitting after we finished our class on Wednesday and I can honestly say that I could not put the book down. I finished around midnight and decided to just sit with the feelings I had just wrestled through over the course of about eight hours of reading. I guess I felt raw and affected. By reading it this way, and of course because of McEwan’s engaging storytelling, I was able to live Henry Perowne’s Saturday with him.

At times I found myself reminiscing, and very nostalgically I might add, about the life I left behind when I came to Vanderbilt. Perhaps it was the familiarity of the hospital, the operating theatre, the terminology, the interactions that took place between co-workers, the smells that were so well described, the life and death of it, that drew me in so much to the story of this particular Saturday. Perhaps it was the striking similarities between Perowne and the man I worked for over the course of seven influential years in my twenties, a man who struggled immensely with balancing a career as a very prominent vascular surgeon with being a father and a husband. Perhaps it was seeing how Perowne was somehow able to juggle it all, remain sane, and even manage to do many things well (except literature of course!) that made me feel some regrets about my active decision NOT to pursue becoming a surgeon. It was seeing the chief of surgery that I worked for struggle with this that helped my decision to lead a life that did not involve surgery. Perhaps it was Perowne’s repeated expressions about the clinical experience as “an abrasive, toughening process, bound to wear away at his sensitivities.”(85) Perhaps it was the dreamy interlude where Daisy is crying on her fathers lap and he is comforting her that really pulled at my heart and drew me in deeply.

Perhaps it was living, through the novel and with Perowne, what is probably every man’s worst nightmare: your family is physically threatened and you feel helpless. You have to watch as your daughter is forced to strip while thinking she is about to be raped. Your wife has a knife to her throat. Your father-in-law has had his nose broken by a reckless man. And you know it is mostly your fault – faulty genes. And all you feel is helplessness. McEwan captured this feeling painfully well. This scene reminded me of how I felt reading The Prince of Tides by Pat Conroy. There is a particular scene in that novel that really made you experience great compassion for the Wingo family; similar to the compassion I was feeling for the Perowne family.

In the end I am amazed at the forgiveness offered by Perowne toward Baxter. Henry seems to grasp just how lucky he is – at least in the present – because of the fact that genetics did not deal him the blow of Huntington’s disease at twenty-five years old. As Perowne says, “The misfortune lies within a single gene, in an excessive repeat of a single sequence – CAG. Here’s biological determinism in its purest form.” (94) Maybe he feels a kinship to Baxter because of what is happening to his own mother and because he knows that Alzheimer’s is in his own gene pool. Henry knows that he could easily end up how Baxter is going to end up, even if he is able to live a longer and more privileged life. Henry’s comment about Baxter that “He’s an intelligent man and…illness apart, he’s missed his chances, made some big mistakes and ended up in the wrong company.” It is interesting to me that Henry and Baxter are squared off against each other – perhaps in a quintessential nature versus nurture moment. As the narrator reminds us, it is all about “which sperm finds which egg, how the cards in two packs are chosen, then how they are shuffled, halved and spliced at the moment of recombination.” (25)

I was deeply affected and moved by this novel. It was an amazing way to finish the course. Thanks for reading and for receiving me so warmly in the class.

Corey A. Kalbaugh

Poets & Writers’ “For Writers, the Doctor’s Definitely In”

In support of short posts (and interdisciplinarity) – 

Kate Daniels brought this article in Poets&Writers to the attention of the MFA students:

http://www.pw.org/content/writers_doctor’s_definitely

- V2009

Sonmi-451 v. Kathy: Who Has More Genetic Potential for Heart?

While reading David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, I was struck by the similarities and differences between Mitchell’s portrayal of clones and that which we read last week in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go.  While Mitchell and Ishiguro share similarities in their telling of the stories (both create unique linguistic communities, for example – carer, donor, possible, etc. in Never Let Me Go  – and fabricants, purebloods, etc. even the elimination of “e” before “x” and the silent “gh,” in “An Orison of Sonmi-451”) each author portrays the clones themselves very differently.

When I first began reading “An Orison of Sonmi-451,” I felt that Sonmi-451’s narration was much less human compared to Kathy’s heartfelt prose about the emotional turmoil of childhood.  Sonmi-451’s first line, “Fabricants have no earliest memories, Archivist,” stood in stark contrast to Kathy’s “When did I know what I now know I always known?”  Compared to the desire of Kathy and the others to find their ‘possibles’ – Ishiguro’s nod to Kathy et al.’s obsession with possibilities and with hope – as well as the lifelong dream of running away for a few years to simply live and love, Sonmi-451’s response to her interviewer was cold and disappointing: Sonmi-451 agrees with her interviewer, “It is true, we rarely wonder about life on the surface.”

But as I continued reading, I realized the difference lay not in the clones themselves, but in their environments.  Sonmi-451 was raised in a world with “Soap” that repressed the expression of an innate personality, with amnesiads designed to deaden curiosity, with collars to relegate her and her fellow clones to the sphere of animals.  Kathy, on the other hand, was raised in a seemingly idyllic and progressive school, Hailsham, with delivery men who called her “sweetheart,” teachers who seemed to love her, and perhaps most importantly, encouraged her to create original art.   

I think both Kathy and Sonmi-451, at birth/creation, had the same genetic potential for “heart.”  Any innate variation is only the variation between two healthy humans.  Any further variation is a product of their environments.  And yet, while they both have heart and are both “human,” as Sonmi-451 so eloquently puts it, she and Kathy are “as singular as snow-flakes.”

Still, Mitchell seems to take a decidedly more sinister view of the world and mankind’s deepest emotions than Ishiguro.  While Kathy’s motivation to rebel is the product of a deep and lifelong love (for Tommy), Sonmi-451 explains her motivation this way: “Fury forges will.”  At one point, Sonmi-451 corrects his Archivist, “You underestimate humanity’s ability to bring such evil into being.”  The common denominator among the novels is, of course, humanity’s capacity for inhumanity, but Sonmi-451 seems to accept it with an inhuman calm: “Business is business.”

Nevertheless, I continue to believe that each clone is a product of her environment.  Sonmi-451’s world is cruelly calculated:  Even the verb remember – and the concept behind it, of course – is outside fabricants’ lexicons.  While Sonmi-451 is now, in a way, remembering events, the nature of the interview format – of someone else prodding these memories out of her, rather than a self-driven interest in analyzing them herself – suggests something unnatural, something forced.  Since Ishiguro’s novel is composed of memory itself, Somni-451 loses out against Kathy’s intense passion to organize, analyze, and preserve memories.  Furthermore, as far as memory goes, Sonmi-451 lacks the most important memories of all: those of childhood.

Ultimately, I sympathized most deeply with Kathy.  Maybe the moral of these two stories is that childhoods make us human?  Childhoods – whether unhappy, chaotic, happy, full of love, lacking love, etc. – provide us with the emotional foundations to sympathize, to love, to miss the past, to connect.  

- v2009

Inherited, Engineered, or Chosen: Attitude in Cloud Atlas

Attitude is both the curse and the savior of contemporary life, according to the two parts of “The Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish” in David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas.

Attitude certainly seems to be a problem for Dermot Hoggins, to say the least. It is also what makes Mrs. Judd an angel (Florence Nightingale) and Mrs. Noakes a monster. But I am more particularly interested in the two train ticket attendants, who prove to Cavendish to be impossibly rude, unfeeling, and “intractably dense” so that he condemningly concludes: “the corporation breeds them from the same stem cell” (168). Later, in attempting to explain his circumstances to Nurse Noakes, Cavendish again calls the two ticket clerks “the ruddy stem cell twins” (175). It is so interesting to see Cavendish link these two people literarily according to a genetic epithet—“stem cell twins”—when what links them is anything but genetics or blood relation or even physical similarity: What links the two clerks is their attitudes, their uninterest in helping him or in any sort of relational processes involved in their jobs.

In part two, when Cavendish has escaped the terrible confines of Aurora House, he clarifies the moral to his story for the reader: “That is more or less it. Middle age is flown, but it is attitude, not years that condemns one to the ranks of the Undead, or else proffers salvation. In the domain of the young there dwells many an Undead soul. They rush about so, their inner putrefaction is concealed for a few decades, that is all” (387). Now, attitude is a soul-saving matter, sounding almost inherent or spiritually inspired, not an issue of scientifically engineered “stem cell” design. What would Cavendish say about his “stem cell twins” in terms of his moral? Are they the Undead souls in the domain of the young? If so, why does he claim they have been engineered that way? Do they really have a choice to choose the attitude that proffers salvation or not? Or are they stuck in their own Aurora House?

What are the boundaries of this all-important attitude that Cavendish identifies, and how does one begin to encourage it? Through reading Cavendish’s story? How does one counter the corporations, then, that seem to have the power to breed the Undead? Why this metaphor of corporations breeding? Why does Cavendish not allow the same right to break free, to escape, to choose attitude for the two ticket clerks that he allows himself, the old man who will not join the ranks of the Undead?

Erin Spinka

Survival and Memory in “Sloosha’s Crossin’”

In the central story of Cloud Atlas, “Sloosha’s Crossin’ an’ Ev’rythin’ After,” Zachry finds himself unable to explain why he alone of his family has managed to survive the Kona’s siege and enslavement of the Valleysmen. Like many survivors of traumatic episodes, Zachry feels guilty: “Guilt ‘cos I always s’vived an’ ‘scaped despite my dirtsome’n’stony soul” (299). Survival takes on many forms in this story. Certainly survival in the Darwinian sense plays a role: the plague that moves inexorably to the people of Prescient Isle, leaving only “one in two hundred,” amounts to one of the random events that allow natural selection to operate, replacing one population with another. Zachry faces an analogous threat from a rival sociopolitical group, as the Kona threaten both the lives and the cultural inheritance of the Valleysmen as a people (a reimagining, of course, of the Maori/Moriori story). We know, of course, from the storytelling situation, that Zachry will escape these attacks; and we learn at the end that he not only survives but also has a son. Reproduction acts as a point of intersection between evolutionary and cultural survival—procreation is a necessary component of evolutionary fitness, and so often in literature the birth of a child signals the possibility of a future, a continuation of the ancestral lineage not just in its genetic manifestation but also in its ways of life, its stories and beliefs and kinship networks.

Telling stories is, for Zachry, an act of cultural survival, as it is for so many characters in Cloud Atlas. But even though the reproduction of Zachry’s words and dialect gives the illusion of a transparent transcription through which stories can survive intact and faithful to the events they tell, we ought to know better than that. Sonmi~451’s orison, though as true a recording of her interview as one could get, is a cipher to Zachry; it is only her eeriness and sadness that he remembers. Cultural memory in this story means reconstructing meaning from the fragments of the past that have survived, investing them with new significance. Sonmi~451’s survival amongst the Valleysmen depends upon a radical re-imagining of her identity in which she is deified; similarly, the learning and knowledge that survived the Fall remain only in bits and pieces, and in many cases have been transformed (cars and planes, for instance, have become the stuff of dreams and legends). Meronym’s name means “a part of a whole,” and I think this is perhaps a useful way of looking at cultural memory—the fragments of knowledge and stories that survive from before the Fall cannot really be re-integrated into the whole that was, but they can become parts of a new whole, and take on a different role in a different epistemology. Survival requires not just the luck or strength to resist destruction, but also the flexibility to adapt to a changing whole. I think the liminal figures such as Zachary and Sonmi, who have a foot in both the old and new worlds, are the most representative of this kind of survival.

Cari Hovanec

Evolution or Causation?

Shortly after first reading Cloud Atlas several years ago, I encountered a review of the novel by Tom Bissel in The New York Times whose vast divergence from my own view of the text has imprinted it in my memory. In a highly critical (and, in my opinion, largely unfair) reaction to the novel, Bissel accuses David Mitchell of deliberate difficulty simply for the sheer pleasure of difficulty. Leaving aside the loaded question of why finding pleasure in difficulty is bad – what sort of affective policing is going on there, as well as in the postmodernist rejection of modernist difficulty more generally? – I would like to instead look at Bissel’s two primary critiques of Mitchell’s difficulty. On the one hand, Bissel suggests that Mitchell undoubtedly pushes forward the historical progression of the novel, but he wonders whether the assumed end to this trajectory is in fact desirable or not. Bissel’s second problem with Mitchell’s novel, on the other hand, paradoxically has to do with its lack of difficulty. Transparent conventional devices, such as the birthmark that all of the protagonists possess and their consumption of each others’ stories as novels, films, and diaries, demonstrate that Cloud Atlas fails not only on Bissel’s terms, but also in respect to its author’s own presumed intentions. Why are these conventional devices so problematic for Bissel? Why do they not provide the ease of reading that he seems to yearn for, the security that conventional tropes typically provide? The key to this seemingly paradoxical critique (too difficult/not difficult enough) would seem to lie in Bissel’s tacit assumptions regarding the role of the novel and its “evolution.” For Bissel, the use of fictional texts as a vehicle of causation is tacky, unartistic, and not true to life, and he is far from alone in this respect. Kant’s notion of the “purposeless purpose” of art holds much the same moral, namely, that art does not “cause” anything in an instrumental sense (such as, say, a hammer). Writing that fails to achieve this “purposeless purpose” would fall into the category of didacticism, propaganda, or pornography, among others. The trouble with Mitchell’s novel for Kantian critiques is that it avoids any of the markedly kinetic forms of causation that coincide with these genres – the texts do not instruct, inspire, or otherwise directly motivate the characters’ actions – but we are still left with an ethereal, indeterminable sense of causation, that in one way or another each of these texts, whether fictional or non-fictional, has in some uncertain manner produced the action that follows. Indeed, it is hard not to feel that when Zach’ry’s son “shows” the reader the conclusion to “An Orison of Somni~451” a threshold has been crossed in the narrative that will allow the rest of the tales to conclude peaceable. Of course, the causal chain here works in reverse, from future to past, thus troubling the evolutionary framework that Bissel sets up to talk about the development of the novel. If, for Bissel (and he is far from alone in this assumption), the novel can “evolve” but not “cause” another event to happen, if to do so would be to forfeit one’s claim to artistic worth, then what we see in Mitchell’s use of conventional voices, tropes, and narrative devices is both his refusal of evolutionary teleology (Zach’ry leads to Adam Ewing as much as Adam leads to Zach’ry – the use of famous biblical fathers’ names cannot be accidental) and his insistence that the novel can be a causal factor, albeit one whose exact parameters are undefined.

And yet, the birthmark DOES come off as forced, over-the-top, and somewhat unconvincing. If I differ with Bissel in his condemnation of Mitchell’s difficulty, I cannot help but agree with his assessment of the birthmark as highly contrived, as well as the New Age thematic of reincarnation that goes along with it. Given the numerous theorists who have exposed New Age spiritualism as the obverse of capitalism (e.g. Slavoj Zizek), it is highly important for Mitchell to differentiate this “reincarnation” from an ethic of transcendental individualism that attempts to disavow the material world that has produced that very individuality. In this respect, note that Mitchell’s characters do not seem to reflect any single consistent personality type across their six variations – Luisa Rey’s often naïve innocence contrasts sharply with, say, the cynicism of Robert Frobisher. Instead, Mitchell presents six characters whose only apparent similarity seems to be the situations in which they find themselves – threatened death, dismemberment, and identity theft, all various ways to “lose” one’s self – and not any core individualistic personality. In other words, it is the similar networks within which the characters find themselves, their “niche” (to take Regenia Gagnier’s term), that produce them as, in some ephemeral way, the same “person.” These networks, like the mode of causation that the various intertexts provide, witness effects that are indeterminate with respect to any one given cause – Is it Adam Ewing’s poising that “makes” him the imprisoned Timothy Cavendish? His residence on an isolated island? – but which are nevertheless there. The birthmark, cliché extraordinaire, shows the very externality of this form of reincarnation, which can pass from fictional to “non-fictional” characters and vice versa: there is no interior essence that we can observe passing from character to character throughout the course of the novel, but only circumstantial similarities that impose themselves on the exterior of an individual subject.

New Endings and Old Beginnings

I think it’s amusing that the final blog post I will make for this class will be on David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas.  I am again writing something, but my repetition is an ending, which is a beginning for another reader.  As Frobisher, my favorite character in Cloud Atlas, writes, “Strip back the beliefs pasted on by governesses, schools and states, you find indelible truths at one’s core.  Rome’ll decline and fall again, Cortes’ll lay Tenochtitlan to waste again, and later, Ewing will sail again, Adrian’ll be blown to pieces again, you and I’ll sleep under Corsican stars again, I’ll come to Bruges again, fall in and out of love with Eva again, you’ll read this letter again, the sun’ll grow cold again.”  Frobisher, the affected artist and supposedly self-aware artist, unfolds these lines for his former lover in his final letter before a melodramatic suicide.  But despite his confessional letters, and his constant mockery of both himself and others, Fobisher is more serious than he himself knows, more likable in his calculated suicide than I would have thought possible.  His words are words I’ve heard before, but repeated in this context, spoken in this work or art within works of art, they gain a new pathos, a new pain, a new resonance.  In repetition, they become new.  This is not only the message of exphratic works like Cloud Atlas, or art in general, but it’s also one of the many messages I take from a biolgical model of the genetic code.

I don’t want to be maudlin, overly sentimental, or overgeneralize, but in the pursuit of knowledge one of the problems I perceived as an outsider to the formalized apparatus of knowing was a propensity to lose sight of a wider scope, a seductive arrogance that seems to accompany any kind of power.  One of the pleasures of attempting to view literature from a non-humanities perspective is that it humbles me, makes me feel small and insignificant in a grander scheme.  But it some ways, the same experience is achieved when reading a truly well-wrought work of fiction like Cloud Atlas.  The last words Frobisher writes before his name is a quotation from another piece of literature, “Sunt lacrimae rerum.”  Aeneas shouts these words in The Aeneid, after seeing a tapestry depicting the fall of Troy, and before weeping.  They translate as “the tears for things.”  Aeneas, like Frobisher, is caught in a repetition, a cycle.  He goes to Italy to crush a city as his city was crushed, and on its ruins to create an empire, an Empire which will reproduce the same cycle in different registers.  Both Aeneas and Frobisher shout their cries in an attempt to arrest the cycles of violence and redemption, to decry the shift.  But from Darwin to Dupre, everything in biology and literature points to life as flux as well as repetition, and arresting the repetition and minute changes its iteration carries is equivalent to death.  Even death, and the cease of motion, however, cannot escape the “great chain of being” as absence often leaves an environmental impact akin to memory in art, an nothing imaginable, existant, or dead can escape a serious attempt to understand anything.

Speaking of repetition, I suddenly feel as though I’ve rewritten the last lyrics of Dark Side of the Moon.

Michael Alijewicz