Dear Richard,
You have made some wonderful observations in your posting which to me
are probably very close to describing ways of reading and writing
literature, good novels, poems, performance, film and video
that take it out of the waking subjectivity of structural narrative
analysis and hint at other ways of thinking narrative and stories. Do
stories have to be continuous? I don't think stories are continuous
except by dint of an ideal interpretation. Stories always divert,
jump and cut and the notion of narrative continuity is suspect. Can
you add to my comments below, or any others who have interests in such
things.... (time permitting of course, or can I quote your posting if
I need to?)
best wishes Chris Jones.
My comments on your posting, keeping what you wrote that intersted me
and deleting the rest for brevity, follows below:
On Fri, 15 Sep 2000, you wrote:
> Dream discontinuity here becomes more a matter of intersecting lines
> disrupting the subject of the conjunctive synthesis. At least from the
> point of view of the body without organs.
>
> In waking life, the ego uses narrative bridges to compensate for this
> discontinuity. Even when we wake up, the technique for learning dream
> recall is journalling.
I wonder if this could be used to understand the way one reads a
really good novel, a novel which draws one into a dream like state.
The narrative maybe discontinuous if we stopped and did some sort of
narrative structural analysis type of interpretation. Yet, asked how
we remember the novel we may revert to what we have been taught is
the proper way to read and say it has a continuous story or a plot
summary which means skipping the many diversions. Same goes for the
following paragraph.
>
> But when sleeping, the access to the neurotransmitters that allow
> identity structures to rigidly hold together and produce grids,
> thereby reterritorializing dominate cultural
> axiomatics, disappear. That is, the dream state is full of narratives
> and subjects, feelings and thoughts, repressions and productions, and these
> work in a way that is unfamiliar to the subject, who upon waking may recall
> a "dream" but in fact is only recalling the last slice, the one it can
> identify as a story.
>
> Disjunctions appear as gaps between dreams because the subject relates
> to them from its experiential story-frame. Deterritorializations may be
> experienced as apocalyptic or may be seen as loss of consciousness. Each
> dream story, while it is being produced, is like a child playing on a train
> track, and a track at the intersection of an infinite vortices. The
> subject consumes the dream as narrative, but can only rarely use that
> narrative structure to reterritorialize its identity.
What do you mean by narrative structure here? I think you are getting
at something more interesting if you drop the old idea of narrative
structure and story and started re-thinking narrative and story in
this disconjunctive way.
The following paragraph may well apply to (writing and reading)
literature, really good novels, wonderful poetry, performances that
take away a waking subjectivity, perhaps.
> OK, perhaps its just another tyrant awakening in the desert and slinking
> off to Bethlehem, but when the dream becomes one of many sites where the
> intolerable may first occur to us, where the molar limit produces molecular
> cracks and bleeds the brood of the night, then here is a factory that
> produces the un-containable rupture across which the nomad may skate.
>
> - Richard
>
> -------------------------
>
> Solms' articles are now to be found on many major magazines. But the latest
> site of debate, (if I can oppose the site to ads about the site?) I can
> find online is:
>
http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/bbs/Archive/sleep.html
>
http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/bbs/Archive/bbs.solms.html
