@pn5721

4 years ago

In answer to Rupert's question at ~24:00 - "Is this spiritual malaise and loneliness endemic to Western cultures in particular?" I would say that the answer is Yes. There is a book called TIGER WRITING: Art, Culture, and the Interdependent Self by novelist Gish Jen. Harvard Univ. asked her to be the speaker for a famous yearly lecture series in 2012. The book is the lectures. INTERDEPENDENT v. INDEPENDENT cultures. Her father came from China, a very interdependent culture, and a great deal of his childhood (she quotes from the autobiography he wrote in his 80s) was spent in the architectural maze of the great house in which he was raised. AND his place in it. Where he could go, where he couldn't. He couldn't independently do what he wanted. He was part of a whole. Strict hierarchy but also a strict belonging. EXAMPLE OF HOW INTERDEPENDENT LOOKS AT INDEPENDENT: p. 125 from TIGER WRITING: "A friend teaching law in Egypt last year reported that people there asked her sotto voce if it was true that there are people in America who live alone." ANOTHER EXAMPLE: p. 135 Gish Jen writes about Susan Sontag - "Her outlook was simply too weighted toward individual experience for me -- too much about furnishing the independent self with the goods with which to nurse along its precious uniqueness. Feh." Interdependence completely changes one's filter and hence even one's memories (i.e. the SORT of memories one has) because one takes in life from a completely different point of view. She tells the fascinating story of her father's "cure" in an American engineering class (he was the prof) of an obstreperous American student (pp. 105-109). Reader's Digest version: p. 105 "My father has gotten his doctorate and is now teaching civil engineering at the City College in New York, where he finds that some of the students behave better than others. I happened to give a reading at CCNY where after one of his former students came up to me and told me an amazing story. This involved a classmate who, having exhibited bad behavior, was asked by my father to come to the front of the classroom and take out the garbage. To which the student understandably said, "What? Take out the garbage?" and so on, until he finally did it, and returned to the room, only to have my father say, "Take the garbage back in." To which the student understandably said, "What?" and so on again, but finally did it -- only to have my father repeat, "Take the garbage out"; and when the student did that, tell him, "Take the garbage back in," until finally the student was just doing it. He took the garbage out when my father told him to, and he took it back in when my father told him to, too. And then he was allowed to sit down. "Let's not take his teaching methods as "the Chinese way" or make it the focus of a pedagogy panel, either. "Still, what we can see is that a lesson in interdependence was being conveyed -- that the student singled out was being taught that what he thought about taking the garbage out simply did not matter, or at least not in that context and not at that moment. We might imagine he was being taught blind obedience. We might also imagine, though, that he was being asked to think, like my father in the halls of his house in Yixing, Where are we? And, Whose house is this? And, What is the way? rather than Who am I? And, What do I want? And, Do I feel like doing this ?" p. 143 of TIGER WRITING: Discussing Milan Kundera (a dissident who wrote under Communism): "...it was crucially heartening to me to intuit via Kundera that the novel could not only accommodate but be enriched by works of a more interdepedent orientation. I will say, too, that even as recently as a few years ago, I found myself thrilled when Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk, in the course of giving the Norton lectures here at Harvard, began complaining about there being too much importance placed on character in Western novels , saying 'People do not actually have as much character as we find portrayed in novels...I have never been able to identify in myself the kind of charcter I encounter in novels -- or rather, European novels.' "Furthermore," he went on, "human character is not nearly as important in the shaping of our lives as it is made out to be in the novels and literary criticism of the West." And indeed, in his novel "My Name is Red," for example, it is striking how much greater a role the book's puzzlelike architecture plays than the inner depths of its many characters. They seem governed by their context in a way that Pamuk himself notes, insisting that "More decisive than the character of a novel's protagonists is how they fit into the surrounding landscape, events , and milieu."

3 |