Dolom, Ram Anthonie N. Prof. R.

Koropeckyj CEE STD 126 06 December 2010 Final Examination Prompt 1 Milosz uses the phrase suction of the absurd to describe the general frustration and helplessness caused by heightened consciousnessmainly an awareness of lifes meaninglessness. (They are totally unaware of the fact that nothing is their own, that everything is part of their historical formationtheir occupations, their clothes, their gestures and expressions, their beliefs and ideas. They are the force of inertia personified.) One of its symptoms is a revulsion (easily reflexive) at human happiness given the falsity of individual will. To one under the fits of such deflation, a program as meaningful as the one communism offered is instantly attractive. Forward to the post-war spaces that The Case Worker and The Quest for Christa T. inhabit, a time and place where the early grandeur of the communist scheme has shriveled into a mock-heroic. Life has regained its former purposelessness, and accordingly the more perceptive evolve an awareness of this absurd, among them Christa T. and Comrade T. First, Comrade T., whose awareness of the absurd is deeply predicated on an awareness of its presence in him. Throughout the text, he casually dispenses insights on the inescapability of the course of ones life, a path that in his view is externally-directed. The authority of routine, over which human agency has no jurisdiction, is ascendant. Every institution makes for a specific state of mind. At the circus my client laughs, at the public baths he daydreams, on

Dolom 2 the streetcar he stares into space, at a boxing match he is aggressive, in the cemetery subdued, and so on. Our protagonist is keenly aware that this string of pavlovianisms in the compound completely abolishes individuality. In Comrade T., we have a self-aware instance of Marxs idea of entfremdung: as he himself confesses, The client vanishes behind his case, the official behind his function. The overall sense of claustrophobia in the novel is a residue of Comrade T.s surrender, that feeling of being irrevocably trapped. The Case Worker is a parable of powerlessness, in whose center is a person suffering from the suction of the absurd. Christa T. is possessed of the same insight; she knew it was easy to fall into tins long prepared and even labeled to receive us, tins in existence perhaps even before we were born. However, there is none of the fatalism, none of the suction Milosz predicted. Instead, she sets her entire life to proving the absurd wrong, motivated by an absolute refusal to give it refuge in her being. She was a woman in motion, completely in the present progressive. And out of her knowledge of the absurd comes a certain altruism, a benevolence. Christa T. sought to set an example, to open peoples eyes to the infinite possibilities still in [them]. The tersest and most accurate manifesto is in one of her many scribblings: the goal: fullness. Fullness for all. She inverts Miloszs paradigm: knowledge does not result in a snobby jadedness, but in a power. After all, as the narrator admits nothing can become reality unless it has been thought out beforehand. She is therefore a redemptive figure, on a societal scale; having seen the illusion, she is now prepared to break it. Finally, Man of Marble presents a stream of narrators who are all to varying degrees products of the absurd. The system gorges on human material and spits them out deformed. Think of Burski, whose artistic success is a direct result of the systems patronage in his youth, having found in him a suitable advocate. Think of Witek, who is subsumed into the apparat, the

Dolom 3 establishment co-opting his former indignation, disarming him. Think most of all of Hanka, the most jarring example of a manipulated lifecompare the promise of her youth to the alcoholic she later becomes, and how her narrative had so little to do with self-originating decisions. We have in effect characters that are at the dispensation of the systemwe get a genuine sense that the fault is in their stars. Finally, because of the voyeurism written into the medium (written into the sensory relay inherent in all art?), all films are in an inescapable first person, told through the perspective of the audience. Those prone to the suction of the absurd then are the viewers, before whom is a parade of life after uncaptained life. They get to decide. They can follow Comrade T. and surrender to the suction of the absurd. Or they can take after Christa T. and parley the awareness so that they may rise on stepping-stones of their dead selves to higher things.

Prompt 2 The Joke, 2A This passage, seemingly a mere interstitial, is important for its insight on Lucie, a crucial character in the novel. Lucie as vagabondella, the she-vagrant, implacable, unknowable, peripheral, uncontainable. This particular four-paragraph episode is an allegory concretized in the last sentence of the chapter. Rape, that final and absolute instance of objectification, finds incarnations in all of Lucies relationships with the opposite sex in the novel. Lucie, in the fantasy networks of the relevant males, is an empty vessel waiting to be filled. Ludvik does this by shaping her to his desires, teaching her poetry and dressing her in the fashion of the day. Kostka, who is the narrator of the passage, finds a missionary fantasy fulfilled in Lucie, flooding her completely a-religious mind with his beliefs. All these attempts at imposing the totalizing power structure of rape are finally unsuccessful though. Lucie breaks free in the end. Kostka and

Dolom 4 Ludvik are left fingering mere traces of her, never able to know her as an individual, just as the two officials sift through her luggage, becoming familiar with the residue and not the core (this also reflects Lucies existence within the narrative, we only hear of her secondhand, even the reader cannot know this figure truly). The vignette could also contain a more inclusive metaphor given everyone in the novel is raped by ideology. That central act of rapeforced penetration, the act of filling in unwilling lacunaeis visited on all the characters. Ideology strong-arms its way into each and every life in these societies, its strictures ultimately leaving a profound trauma as evidenced by the complex deformations inherent in the psyches on display. Minor Apocalypse, 4B This mainly one-sided conversation showcases the collapse of the binary (one of the novels major themes), on which all meaning depends. In this post-significance world, government officials are part of the opposition (the great army of positive oppositionists) and people are free because [they] have imposed [their] own slavery. These tiny oxymorons are just part of the inner logic of Konwickis fictional universe, minor mise-en-scene that compound into an eerie sense of disjointedness, non-sequitur upon non-sequitur that serve to disorient, much like the narrators temporal cluelessness. Once that grand project of demolishing meaning has been accomplished, perfect chaos can be expected to follow. The harbingers of several seasons visit Warsaw within a single day. Language is incapacitated, having been robbed of all antitheses against which one can prop up meaning. Without language, advanced human thought is impossible; without thought, coherent identities disappear. This fleshes out the roots of the narrators nihilismall value systems have collapsed along with his identity. Nothing matters to him anymore, not the opposition, not him, not the exercise alluded to in the title. The narrator does not believe in it (he cares about this as much as he does anything else, his insouciance in

Dolom 5 accepting the task betrays as much). The opposition does not believe in it (one gets an overwhelming sense that the dissidents are just playing to their label, going through the motions). The party does not believe in it (they know of the plan and do not try to thwart it). Therefore, the self-immolation in the climax, for all its dramatic potential, will be anticlimactic precisely because it will be meaningless. The Garden Party, 5A The play mounts a general attack on the grand narrative, language, by exposing its imperfections. Language, that arbitrary and all-encompassing machine, readily results in clunky contradictions (liquidating at the very time the Liquidation Office is being liquidated). In the world of the garden party, language has a post-functional existence, the two components of the sign having been divorced. Signifier floats freely disentangled from the signified. Words therefore follow each other meaninglessly, a stream of pure signifiers, the language of absurdity, an echo of psychosis. Once one plays with the idea of languages disintegration, one encounters several paradoxes. An example would be the uncoupling of that important signifier, the name, from its signified, the self. The result: an unselfed self. It is only because of the name next to his lines that one can accept a unity in the character throughout the plays confused developments; the placemarker Hugo exists as a pure signifier. He slips in and out of this identity, his parents cannot recognize him, he himself waits for Hugo to come back hoping for an audience with the man. Given that the main character has a putative identity only due to his name, his existence is purely linguistic. Language has created him, language has kept him, and language destroys him, tearing at the threads that unite him into a coherent ego. There was never a Hugo outside of language. Language is the overarching ideology that is imposed on a man (its wealth of presuppositions, arbitrary rules and limitations), and language is the last to leave him.

Dolom 6 The Quest for Christa T., 6B The paragraph seems to be able to work as a manifesto for the narrator, in as much as the entire novel reads like a meditation on the nature of truth; the various motifs repeatedly revisited throughout the narrativethe unreliability of memory (the paths we took are overlaid with paths we did not take), the impossibility of objectivity, the compromise between emotional and factual truth (what it is that one has to invent, for the truths sake)are all subareas of a grander preoccupation with truth. The middle sectionnothing is so difficult as turning ones attention to things as they really are, to events as they really occur, after one has spent a long time not doing so and has mistaken their reflection in wishes, beliefs, and judgments for things and events themselvessummarizes the novel perfectly as well; Christa T. had heretofore been a mere projection to the narrator; the projection is subjected to an ongoing renovation throughout the novel as it meets countermanding scraps of information. We find a bona fide attempt at understanding Christa T. in all her resplendent individuality and complexity. And it is difficult; reliving the past is an intensely emotional experience for the narrator. Also, it was probably an ordeal because of the difficulty that attends having to disabuse oneself of a necessarily lie-ridden personal narrative, important parts of which are the specific perceptions one has of certain important figures. Finally, the idea that truth can be preserved against the corruption of the clocks is another important apercu, one that touches on the overall goal of this novel as set out in the first chaptershe needs to be protected against being forgotten, which to the narrator would be a new more total death and, though she cant explain it, a profound betrayal.