the tyranny of slender

The impulse to put people into neat categories is irresistible. The human aspect is sadly missing from our categorizations of self. Instead we see ourselves constrained by social hierarchies and gender roles, distinguished by our clothes, body shapes, and economic status.

Today, so much of the conversation about women and fashion focuses on body size that we discuss weight as though it were the most important aspect of our life. It seems like media is on a mission to demoralize the average, chubby woman.

The beauty ideal portrayed by media has always been slender.

Being saturated with so many media messages about how we should do gender and what we need to consume in order to do it appropriately creates an anxiety. Susan Bordo calls it “the tyranny of slender,” and how the slender, firm, fit body is taken as a statement about ones character. This assumption that if you are fit you are somehow a disciplined person, you self manage, and you have managerial abilities. You are an ambitious, achieving person.

The cumulative weight of advertising in our everyday life is the insecurity, and the struggle, to constantly live up to this slender body. Not always consciously, but there are pressures that nag at us in our everyday life. One of the fears of losing femininity for me is whether I live up to this beauty ideal, in terms of how I dress and the amount of time I spend doing hair and make up in order to keep up.















We think that if we are lucky to have a job we better live up to the expectations that come with it - the expectations that are hanging over the work situations and that demand to perform in a public sphere and to live up to the notion of “the universal worker.”

Instead of changing the system, I have built my life around it, around the organizational structure, and I navigate, while negotiating my femininity, toning down sexuality and feminized communication style in order to survive in a bureaucracy that is not gender-neutral, but is built around men and masculinity. According to Joan Acker, it is the organizational system that is gendered.

(As Acker illustrates the concept of hegemony, she claims how the bureaucracy creates gendered hegemony that presses everyone, and how we all buy into this norm.)

I have functioned under the assumption that the barriers to women's advancement are created by expectations and habits surrounding communication, and the assumption that masculine communication style is more naturally professional and managerial, realizing that the only way to be in a strong role is playing a part originally written for men.

Acker acknowledges that there are women who are able to step into “a men’s world” and succeed, but it generally requires what she calls “becoming a social man, whose personal and private needs are taken care of outside work,” in order to live up to the idea of “the universal worker.”

London 2010

Advertising Gender

In Tom Ford’s risqué new fragrance campaign a very nude woman is featured wearing nothing but the product. The bottle of cologne is placed between her legs. In the attempt to make sex and the naked body glamorous and chic, the ad uses photoshopped body parts, producing a shiny and plastic image of a woman’s body that looks like an unclothed Barbie doll. This is not anywhere near a natural body. The woman has no head. She is not a real person.

One example Suzanne Romaine offers of all the contradictions that are embedded in media is promoting the “natural look,” so we are trying to copy this ideal as if it is based on a real woman, which in fact is not a real woman. It is a cartoon image.

In Tom Ford’s most recent menswear ad, a young gentleman, who is dressed in a white suit and holds a bottle of beer and a cigar appears with a fully naked woman, and we see only her toned and tanned body with no face. This is an example of the way women and the promise of women is explicitly used to sell things to men – advertizing gender.

As Tom Ford claims, “we are selling to men – put the fragrance where they want to look,” admitting that objectifying women is very profitable in the fashion industry.

Tom Ford is an equal opportunity objectifier, however. In a parallel process his ads also depict boldly naked men. The campaign includes images of the ideal male body, putting more pressure on men to make a spectacle of themselves with the cut abs and the cartoonish biceps.

Romaine argues that ads call on us to do gender in a way that is truly in drag. We are not copying an original; we are copying what is in essence a hyper-feminine or masculine cartoon. And eventually everyone ends up feeling pressured. Advertisement plays a strong role in this.

In menswear ads masculinity is represented in a fierce formal look. Men appear in suits with immaculately groomed hair. But it is not only the heterosexual man portrayed here. Tom Ford’s PR campaign uses photo and video ads with same-gendered couples in the midst of passionate acts or posing as sophisticated looking professionals (which seems a lot to handle for some people without any warning).

Although homosexual, the male protagonist is of high class, white, similar to the notion of the universal male who is young, fearless and secure.

The femininity is depicted by reducing women to just their body parts. Romaine points out how body parts and gendered images of body parts are invoked even in ads that have nothing to do with sexuality. In this case the ad for cologne is used to evoke sensuality versus sex.

This relates to creating need around ideal beauty and the use of sexuality to sell things, by making the product look like it is associated with a desirable lifestyle.

This is how need is created around ideal beauty, as Romaine claims it. That if you consume the product, it will lead you to this beauty ideal, it will enhance your lifestyle, your relationships, and your status in the world. And we get sucked into particular brand from the basis of those image associations.

Tom Ford brand isn’t selling clothes. It’s selling a culture, an identity. The clothes make you. Buying something from Tom Ford is like joining an elite club.

30 Days of School

My Gender Credentials

I like to wear ribbons and glorious long dresses










In reality, I strive to be a woman. I look for creative ways to be strong and assertive without losing my femininity. I am concerned with how my behavior is perceived by others.

I am constantly involved in:
- Community building
- Networking
- Maintaining of relationships
- Organizing events
- Throwing parties

Ceasing to live according to social expectations
Ideally, I would like a dynamic genderless identity - an identity that encompasses fundamental human traits. I wish to create my identity and construct my self without the constant awareness of the gender categorizations.

I am actively producing gender-specific behavior by:
- Collaborating
- Supporting
- Assisting
- Cooperating

I do not wish to be defined by the traditional female experience
The gender identity I especially wish to avoid is a classic female identity, with mere features of empathy, kindness, motherly compassion and understanding. I do not want to live up to the social expectation and project an intuitive, nurturing personality.
- I try to no longer feel accountable for my unwomanly conduct
- While communicating I am being direct
- I am willing to be logical than yielding or pleasing during the process of reasoning

I am a product of my culture!











In my culture, there are distinctive and separate roles for the males and the females, reinforced by a set of qualities and attitudes that define femaleness and maleness. I was taught that femininity is not an object; it cannot be lost. It is what a woman is. It is a part of woman’s identity.

As a woman, I constantly deal with the tension between the traditional female role of homemaking and my career and education, in order to maintain the necessary creative balance.

The connection between gender identity and existential situations
My gender identity is revealed in the situations in which I am placed. It is through specific circumstances and events that my femininity is enacted.

However:
- I never ask for directions
- I don’t enjoy shopping for shoes
- I am rarely emotional
- I don’t share secrets with my mother
- I say what I think

Meryl Streep is My Gender Model
Because she demonstrates the “ability to plunge into her characters and lose herself inside of them, transforming herself physically to meet the demands of her roles.”1 Streep can be plain or glamorous and radiant; she can be a woman or a man.
1 Brennan, Sandra. “Meryl Streep: Full Biography.” The New York Times. 5 Sept. 2010

That’s the way it is meant to be!
I encountered the following enforced messages that
sustained and rendered my social reality. The first
three were advice given to the bride at a marriage
ceremony:
“The husband is the head of the wife and the wife must be subservient to the husband.”
“A man is to be the head of the house and a good provider.”
“If one of you has to win an argument, let it be your mate.”
“A woman is judged more by her appearance than by her performance.”
“A woman’s place is in the kitchen.”
“A woman should be feminine for the man to be masculine.”

The essence of being a woman











The following are the activities in which I
participate that support my being a woman:
- Gift-wrapping and color-coordinating
- Smiling and nodding while listening
- Including a “smiley face” in my notes
- Putting an exclamation mark in “Thank You!”
- Designing and decorating
- Taking photos and sharing online albums
- Attending baby and bridal showers
- Remembering the birthdays and anniversaries
- Wearing glorious long dresses

BACK2SCHOOL - Fall 2010

BlogDay

СЕГОДНЯ 31 Августа мировое интернет-сообщество отмечает День блога (BlogDay). В этот день каждый пользователь публикует у себя ссылки на пять других блогов, отличных по тематике.

BlogDay was created with the belief that bloggers should have one day dedicated to getting to know other bloggers from other countries and areas of interest. The designated date is August 31, because when written 3108, it resembles the word "Blog". On that day, bloggers recommend five new blogs to their visitors, so that readers discover new, previously unknown blogs.

Ну тогда и я скину Вам 5 блогов которые я читаю:

Сноб
Kris Carr
Erik Raschke
Hasmik Arsen Wanderings
Unzipped: Gay Armenia

BONUS: FearLess Revolution

SUMMER BOOKS

'The Lovers,' by Vendela Vida
It's my favorite read of Summer

Like 2007's "Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name," Vida's "The Lovers" follows a woman who travels far from home on an emotional quest. This time, it's Yvonne, a 53-year-old high school history teacher from Vermont; her destination is the coast of Turkey. Yvonne’s story can be seen from the start as an unusual and engrossing exploration of marriage, parenthood and the accidents that can end and reconfigure lives.

We are presented with an American woman abroad who is less interested in her exotic surroundings than in mapping out the equally mysterious terrain of her past.

To begin, Yvonne isn’t sure she raised her children fairly or understandingly enough. She and her son barely know each other, and her daughter has been severely troubled from an early age. Nor can she pinpoint what part of her was lost or subsumed in marriage, or if the relationship was on the whole a success. Underlying these questions is her desire to know whether she’s lived as she should have. As a teacher of history, she would be familiar with Solon’s admonition to Croesus of Lydia — no one’s life can be deemed happy until it is over — which makes her hope for answers equally fascinating and futile.

Vida, who is married to the writer Dave Eggers, is a subtle writer with a spare and authoritative voice, and her third novel is further evidence that she can fashion characters as unpredictable as they are endearing. Although its ending is a little rushed (some situations feel arbitrarily abandoned), the book is a satisfying, often brilliant portrait of a woman searching for relief from things that will not, she discovers at last with something like acceptance, go away. From New York Times Sunday Book Review, July 1st, 2010


The book advances itself with echoes and variations on themes. A woman who travels alone will see couples everywhere, and there are an overwhelming number in this book. The owls had mated for life, couples sunbathe on a beach, Yvonne's children are twins, and there is an excessively smug pair on a boat trip that Yvonne takes to Cleopatra's island. Lovers, appropriately for a book of this title, surface often, with the furious menage a trois between the house owner and his wife and mistress, Yvonne's love story with her husband, and, most importantly, the book that Yvonne is reading, Marguerite Duras' stunning short novel, "The Lover."

Duras' book gives a reader a key to the deeper aims of Vida's work. Throughout her life, Duras rewrote, in a number of ways, her autobiographical story of a young girl in French colonial Vietnam who takes an older Chinese lover. There is a small echo of the story in Yvonne and Ahmet's friendship: as innocent as it is to Yvonne, theirs is an unequal relationship based on money, and it does appear sinister to outsiders.

Vida's first novel, "And Now You Can Go," is a swift, funny story about a young woman whose life falls apart after she is held at gunpoint in a park, and how she slowly heals after a volunteer surgical trip to the Philippines. Vida's second, "Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name," is about another young woman who flees to Lapland when the man she has always believed was her father dies, leaving her parentless and unsure of her own identity. "The Lovers," Vida's new novel, is the story of yet another woman who, in the aftermath of trauma, travels in order to heal herself.

It is only in light of Duras' lifelong project - to refine her story by retelling it - that we understand that Vida's project over her three novels is quite ambitious, even if her methods are quiet. In the end, by pushing deeper into her refrains of grief and travel, Vida's work becomes clearer and more sophisticated with every book she writes; and "The Lovers" is her best and most disturbing novel yet. From SFGate.com, June 20th, 2010

HAUNTED at GUGGENHEIM

Like many amateurs I have enthusiastically embraced digital photography because I believe in capturing the moments that are true to my heart. Photography legitimizes important events - graduations, weddings and festivities. It suggests family plots and explores our rituals of remembrance – both our need to remember and the impossibility of actually succeeding. Photographs teach us to recognize ties of blood; they develop sense of belonging and determine our memories of childhood.

Photography constructs memory and our sense of identity. We experience events in real time. In photographs we alternate reality in fictional scenarios. Past returns moments caught on camera to recreate the experienced nostalgic longing for the past and difficulty maintaining elusive memories.

Guggenheim's "Haunted" exhibition explores themes of memory, trauma and return to the past















What I remember from the exhibition most vividly, is the photo of the girl by Gillian Wearing - Self-Portrait at Three Years Old (2004). "Confronting the viewer with her adult gaze through the eyeholes of the toddler’s mask, Wearing plays on the rift between interior and exterior, and raises a multitude of provocative questions about identity, memory, and the veracity of the photographic medium."

The purpose of a mask is to send the viewer back to a time before our experiences shaped who we are. In a sense, a person wears their life on their face, and the mask has the ability to conceal that life.

New York 2010

Constructing Social Class

Observing how communication is used to construct a class system, and how class identification is obtained in a large hierarchical organization.

In my exploration of the class system I focused on ways the employees are divided into class groups. I examined the practice of annual review – a process used by managers to evaluate the employee performance. From a critical perspective, I looked at how the entire process functions as a control mechanism and contributes to class formation.

Looking at an organization which employs well-specialized engineers and a work force consisting of highly-educated personnel. Those who hold a Ph.D. are engaged in the research and development of advanced technology systems. The remaining staff consists of mechanical engineers and technicians who work in manufacturing and production. These are the employees who work offstage and are rarely seen in the area where the offices and conference rooms are. The office space is split into front and back, giving visibility and higher regard to employees who are in forward positions.

Each employee is expected to set yearly objectives and is responsible for achieving and working towards the set goals. Since the annual performance review is vital for professional advancement, employees often depend on their managers for good ratings. Managers who conduct evaluations of employee performance have seniority and hold higher positions within the organization; they are vice presidents, directors, senior managers and supervisors. These distinctions between levels are evidence of power relationships (p. 99).

Classism occurs when some people have power over the others (p. 98). In an organizational setting, power helps high-status managers to administer their subordinates; it gives them control over the workforce. In this setting, class matters because it affects the organizational system. The powerlessness employees experience leads to consent and subordination. As a result, employees are placed in ranks, and managers with higher status are given the ability to control others’ behavior. This legitimizes the system of domination and maintains the class system that seems very hard to change. Class becomes a product of power relations in the system of hierarchical organization. The workplace is a crucial site of class production and reproduction (p. 108).

In a competitive environment, where employees are driven to exceed expectations, success is seen as a result of “superior” individual effort and employee potential (p. 105). Everyone can advance if they work hard (p. 105). In the process of performance evaluation, however, employees are categorized and classified into groups based on cognitive abilities and skill set. No matter how hard employees work, their ranking is determined by their performance relative to others. Not all employees perform on the same level, especially in relation to each other. Those in business development teams who hold Masters or Bachelor’s Degrees have an advantage over manufacturing and assembly line employees, given their communication skills and capacity for achieving higher rankings. The apparent advantages of business administrators over blue-collar employees can be explained by the differences in cognitive and verbal abilities. In effect, use of performance review marginalizes employees, regardless of their performance capability. By holding employees responsible for their accomplishments, the process ignores the fact that “a person’s starting point can affect success” (p. 99).

Success often depends on social standing, which is determined at birth or earned over a lifetime. There is a difference between the ascribed and achieved status – a status acquired based on merit, skills and abilities. Looking at my own example, the difference in my manager’s and my social status is only the tip of the iceberg. The underwater part of the cultural iceberg is his class identification “based on conditions at birth, race, sex and place of birth” (p. 97). My manager is a white male who was born in the United States and was better positioned to attain resources like social skills and education, whereas I immigrated to America without financial assets and had to rely on my knowledge of language and interpreting skills to obtain my class identification.

Economic factors are not the only determinants of class (p. 98). According to French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, people use capital to achieve social status (p. 98). Bourdieu emphasizes three types of capital: “economic capital, which includes financial assets; cultural capital, which consists of specialized skills, education, experience, and knowledge such as linguistic; and social capital, which is networks of connections” (p. 98). Due to my cultural capital – the experiences I gained while traveling and the cultural competencies passed down through my family – I was able to work my way through the labyrinth of hierarchical organization. Unless we acknowledge that the economic, cultural and social capital can tilt the playing field in favor of those who have wealth, knowledge and connections, the hierarchies will not be flattened.

Through the ongoing practice of employee evaluation the stratification of employees is created and perpetuated. These types of company policies and processes grant control to managers who are subordinating members of their staff by rating employees into categories of high, basic and low contributors. Subordination of employees is a form of power. This process reinforces the class system; it secures status for employees in higher ranks and deprives those in lower ranks of power.

Moreover, classism is continually reproduced by communication practices and daily interactions. Social status is reflected in ways we communicate; it is apparent in employee conduct and determines a set of behaviors and expectations. We perform class through our choices of clothing, speech style, manners and food preference (p. 108). Our appearance signals status in the organization and helps us maintain a certain image (p. 108). Although people rarely admit how great a part of life is dependent on socioeconomic status (SES), which is determined by the combination of income, education and occupation, many of us throughout life and career strive to achieve status and privilege (p.100).

References
Allen, B. J. (2004) Difference Matters: Communicating Social Identity. Long Grove, IL: Waveland Press.

Tomas & Teresa

See THE UNBEARABLE LIGHTNESS OF BEING















As Kundera explains in The Art of the Novel, existence means being in the world, and as the world changes, existence – being-in-the-world – changes as well (Kundera 36). To understand the characters we need to understand their world and the public events. The events that occur in Prague merge with the lives of Tomas and Teresa in a way that changes their existence. The world they live in becomes an entrapment for both of them.

Teresa works in a bar where she meets an engineer and decides to make love to him to experience physical love through her body alone, without involving her soul, to confirm what Tomas told her time and again – that love and sexuality had nothing in common. Teresa’s risky sexual affair with the engineer, who may or may not be an agent of the secret police, becomes her trap. Recalling the smallest details, she realizes that it may have been a predesigned scenario – a trap set for purposes of future blackmail by the government (Banerjee 233). That is the trap, real or not, that she imagines for herself as she thinks of the possibility that the engineer had been sent by the police (Kundera 24).

Teresa examines the entire event “in search for her offense” (Kundera 108). She remembers the radio series of private talks between the Czech novelist Jan Prochazka and a friend of his. The recorded conversations were produced by the secret police to broadcast the sequences in which Prochazka made fun of Dubcek and slandered his friends. In The Art of the Novel, Kundera writes about an extreme version of totalitarian society in which the boundary between the public and the private is abolished and the lives of citizens become entirely transparent (Kundera 110). Teresa realizes that she too, just like Procahzka, lives in a concentration camp, where privacy ceased to exist (Kundera 167). She retreats to a village to escape the trap and lives in isolation with Tomas. Here Kundera underlines the impact and significance of political events for individuals who are obliged to live under a Communist regime (Kundera 37).














Meanwhile, the article Tomas wrote on Oedipus in the spring of 1968 comes back to haunt him. Using the example of Oedipus, who enacts self-indictment by which he acknowledges the actions he committed in ignorance, the article attacks political leaders who refuse to admit responsibility for their actions, because they did not know and were not completely aware of the wrongdoings and the consequences (Banerjee 240). In his article, Tomas uses the Oedipus analogy to hold responsible the Communist leaders for the country’s misfortunes and for its loss of independence: “If you had eyes, you would have to put them out and wander away from Thebes!” (Kundera 177). When Tomas is pressured to make public retractions of his past statements, he gives up his job as a surgeon and goes to work in a country clinic.

When he is visited by a man from the Ministry of the Interior, he is trapped into something even worse. As Tomas realizes he is under interrogation, he falsifies his answers and inadvertently informs on someone else, on a different editor. His fear and paranoia that the police would make public a false statement over his signature, lead him to lose his profession – something so much a part of him (Kundera 194). As a result of these events, Tomas abruptly resigns from his medical post. He escapes the trap by descending the ladder and becoming a window washer. “Once he had reached the lowest rung on the ladder, they would no longer be interested in him” (Kundera 192).













As Tomas refuses to compromise and to comply, he makes heavy go light (Kundera 196). He embarks on a grand holiday and returns to his bachelor existence. By refusing to sign a note stating that he has nothing against the regime, Tomas is released from “his weighty duty” (Kundera 196). The key words for Tomas’s existential code are lightness and weight. His existential problem is the lightness of being in a world where there is no eternal return (Kundera 32). He fails to see that what he chooses as an honorable decision for him is the most horrible thing possible for Teresa. Faced with personal fulfillment on one hand, and with historical and socio-political circumstances on the other, he rejects his life’s external and internal imperatives. Kundera studies Tomas’s attitudes in these situations by tying the individual to the historical and political events, and looking at how private life is balanced with the larger terrors of life in a police state. Tomas is constantly going back and forth between lightness and weight. As Kundera explains, “that was the ‘Es muss sein!’ rooted deep inside him” (Kundera 194).

The Unbearable Lightness of Being is about an investigation of being and existence. It is a political novel, but the description of the politico-historical events or the role of the Communist institutions does not interest Kundera. He places his novel in a world provoked by political events that transform the world, to investigate the human condition and a way of being. He looks at the relationship between the events and real life – the regulation of private situations where the individuals are dominated in totalitarian ways, the resulting depersonalization of the individual, the violation and the lack of certain kinds of freedoms, the danger of losing privacy. According to Kundera, “the novel is an investigation of the essence of human situations” (Kundera 32).

Teresa

See THE UNBEARABLE LIGHTNESS OF BEING













Kundera is interested in the existential code of each of his characters more than in their physical description. In The Art of the Novel he explains that “to apprehend the self in the novel means to grasp the essence of its existential problem” (Kundera 25). The existential code reveals itself in the situations in which the characters are placed. Kundera doesn’t show us what happens inside the characters’ heads; rather he situates them in circumstances tied to public events and investigates their attitudes. He grasps the characters by understanding and naming their attitudes (Kundera 25).

The days Teresa walks through the streets of Prague “taking pictures of Russian soldiers and looking danger in the face” are the best of her life, and she enjoys a few happy nights (Kundera 26). “The Russians had brought equilibrium to her in their tanks” (Kundera 27). The carnival atmosphere in the streets of Prague replaces the weight of her problems and the responsibility of her love for Tomas. But when the “carnival of hate is over,” and when the Russians force the Czech representatives to sign a compromise agreement, Teresa fears her nights again. Here's where we begin to see the connection between individual lives and individual problems and the body of the state. Kundera provides us with keys to understanding Teresa’s character – her feelings – from which we grasp the character’s nature.
















The historical circumstances of the Soviet occupation are used to reveal the existential situation for the characters in the novel (Kundera 37). Kundera offers analysis of situations and insists on understanding the essence of a situation rather than the physical appearance of the character. Understanding the situation that shapes the characters and grasps their existential problem is what makes them alive and real. The essence of a character’s existential problem is rooted in themes of the novel.

Teresa’s body is her main theme. She longs to be a body unlike other bodies (Kundera 47). Teresa insists upon the uniqueness of her body. Within a totalitarian regime, the individual body and all that is most private is in need of being protected, “if any sense of individual integrity is to be retained” (Rhine 231). Her mother is another of Teresa’s main themes. “When she lived at home her mother forbade her to lock the bathroom door,” and implied that Teresa’s body was just like all other bodies: Teresa had no right to shame and no reason to hide something that existed in millions of identical copies (Kundera 57). “Since childhood, Teresa had seen nudity as a sign of concentration camp uniformity” (Kundera 57). Her mother’s injunction against privacy of the intimate body mirrors the state’s “complete obliteration of privacy” (Kundera 137). Here a connection is established between private body and a political system, and the leveling of individuals that is common in totalitarian societies.

Tomas’s repeated infidelities cause Teresa’s torment and jealousy. In her nightmares she is marching around the pool naked with a large group of other naked women, where all bodies are equal, which means that Tomas has drawn an equal sign between Teresa’s body and the other bodies. “Her mother's world, which she had fled ten years before, seemed to be coming back to her.” Tomas’s womanizing denies the uniqueness of her body, of all bodies. Here is another connection made to the state, and a reference to assimilation with no distinction that negates the sacred integrity of individual body. Both Tomas and her mother have placed Teresa in the “concentration camp” of bodies, where one body is just like another.














Kundera says that “not only the historical circumstances create a new existential situation for a character in a novel, but history itself must be understood and analyzed as an existential situation” (Kundera 38).

“When Alexander Dubcek returned to Prague, he gave a speech over the radio. He was so devastated after his six-day detention he could hardly talk; he kept stuttering and gasping for breath, making long pauses between sentences, pauses lasting nearly thirty seconds” (Kundera, Milan part 1, 26).

This historical episode reveals the weak state of the country. Teresa cannot bear that weakness and prefers to emigrate, but faced with Tomas’s infidelities she is like Dubcek – disabled and weak (Kundera 38). She leaves Tomas and returns from Switzerland to the “city of the weak,” because she understands that she belongs among the weak, “and that she had to be faithful to them precisely because they were weak and gasped for breath in the middle of sentences” (Kundera 73). Kundera explains that here the historical situation is itself a human situation – a growing existential situation (Kundera 39). Here the Prague Spring is not described in its historical aspect but as a fundamental existential situation.

Returning again to the link between private life and the state, Kundera compares the weight Tomas feels after Teresa returns to Prague to “the tons of steel of the Russian tanks” (Kundera 31). At the same time, Kundera takes the individual issues of lightness and weight and connects them to the country. Teresa could not forget the awful pauses in the middle of Dubcek’s sentences, and how he seemed unable to breathe as if a heavy pressure was coming down on him (Kundera 26). “One thing was clear: the country would have to bow to the conqueror” (Kundera 26). The entire country is placed under the weight of the compromise and humiliation.

Sabina

Another way Kundera links the novel’s characters and the state is through the divergence of individuality and Communism. Recognizing how unique existence is extinguished, Kundera’s characters express freedoms by moving away from the public to find escape in the personal. It starts with Sabina who is strongly opposed to life within a totalitarian political regime that denies creativity. As a socialist realist artist, Sabina uses the technique of “double exposures” (Kundera 63). She accidentally drips red paint on a painting of a steel factory, turning it into a battered backdrop. The socialist realist image of steel works becomes artificial: “On the surface, an intelligible lie; underneath, the unintelligible truth” (Kundera 63). Her paintings feature the confluence of two themes, with the “intelligible lie” on the surface, which implies that socialist realism is a façade. Of course if she shows them to anybody she will be kicked out of the Academy (Kundera 63). This is how the private and public in the novel are tied in mutual contradiction. This is how Sabina finds a way of living while the experimentalism in art is progressively disappearing, and while many artists find their works censored, ignored, or rejected. She saves her art from socialist realist kitsch – the propaganda in communist society that masks what is underneath and prevents us from seeing the truth.

For Sabina, living in truth is possible only away from the public (Kundera 112). “A man who loses his privacy loses everything” (Kundera 113). When Franz makes their love affair public, she feels as though he has “pried open the door of their privacy” (Kundera 115). Once her love had been publicized it would gain weight and become a burden (Kundera 115). Sabina and Teresa correspond here in the idea of the sanctity of privacy. Her mother’s reading and mocking Teresa’s diaries is compared to the invasion of privacy in the totalitarian society. Teresa’s struggle with her mother and Sabina’s rejection of socialist realism are extensions of resistance to the totalitarian state.













We are told that Sabina is charmed more by betrayal than by fidelity (Kundera 115). Betrayal is the essence of Sabina’s existential problem. Thus the keyword for Sabina’s existential code is betrayal. “Betrayal means breaking ranks and going off into the unknown” (Kundera 91). The existential code of Sabina reveals itself progressively in the action of betrayal as she marries a second rate artist, as she betrays her father, and Communism, which is merely another father, and as she leaves Franz; she feels that she has to keep doing it again and again (Kundera 29). She is someone whose personality has been damaged – destroyed in many ways by the Communist experience. She chooses the path of betrayal of all of her attachments. This is reflected in the government’s betrayal of her Soviet-occupied country. As a result, Sabina emigrates, escaping the pressures of the Communist ideology.

Kundera - The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Kundera's brilliant novel is about political events in totalitarian society and ethics and morality of totalitarian societies, and somehow it has a connection to the private lives of the characters who also sometimes are dominated in totalitarian ways and lack certain kinds of freedoms. It starts out with Sabina as a socialist realist artist, and the idea that in socialist realism the individual is literally inscribed into the body of the state - in its iconography. The novel is about the dynamic correspondences between a larger totalitarian government and what is happening on the individual level.

The Prague Spring was a period of political liberalization in Czechoslovakia during the era of its domination by the Soviet Union after World War II. In spring of 1968 the Czech Communist Party elected Alexander Dubček, a reformist leader who is symbolically linked with the phrase “socialism with a human face” - the idea that the communist party was not the gatekeeper to personal freedom; he called for relaxation of censorship, individual liberty and freedom of press.

The novel starts with the Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia in August of 1968. The reforms, especially the decentralisation of administrative authority, were not received well by the Soviets who, after failed negotiations, sent thousands of Warsaw Pact troops and tanks to occupy the country.

The first thing he does he hits us with Nietzsche and the idea of eternal recurrence or eternal return. Nietzsche calls the idea "horrifying and paralyzing", and says that its burden is the "heaviest weight" imaginable. He asks the question: "What would be different about our lives if everything was destined to occur?"

The wish for the eternal return of all events would mark the ultimate affirmation of life:
What, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: “This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more” ... Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus?

In essence, if you accept this thought experiment, if you accept the idea of eternal return, do you live differently? Nietzsche says "what happens can return, can happen again and again and again..." The idea is that our actions become heavy if we accept this thought experiment that our actions are going to recur again and again...and all of a sudden we live with more consciousness and responsibility, because we are terrified of doing the wrong thing, because it is going to happen again and again. (It's hard to understand this realistically; we need to accept this as a kind of a thought experiment.)

Then Kundera introduces the idea of lightness and weight. “In the world of eternal return the weight of unbearable responsibility lies heavy on every move we make.”


At the same time Kundera takes this individual lightness and weight issues and connects them to the country - lightness and weight in relation to what is happening in the country. “When Dubcek returned [with them] to Prague, he gave a speech over the radio. He was so devastated after his six-day detention he could hardly talk; he kept stuttering and gasping for breath, making long pauses between sentences, pauses lasting nearly thirty seconds.”

“One thing was clear: the country would have to bow to the conqueror. The carnival (lightness) was over. Workaday humiliation had begun.”

Margarita: The Source of Justice and Mercy

Human greed, cowardice, and the redemptive power of love are distinguishable themes in Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita. At the beginning of the novel, the Devil arrives in Moscow and performs black magic at the Variety Theater, satirizing the vanity and greed of the Muscovites. The Soviet citizens, whose lives are so arranged that they are unaccustomed to supernatural events, are faced with their real world which has been displaced into something completely crazy and fantastic. In the world where evil, loathing, hypocrisy, and despair left no trace of humanity, the Devil is the force that brings justice. Throughout the novel characters are punished or rewarded by Woland, presumably Satan, and his retinue. The contradictory nature of the characters that dispense justice is the novel’s main premise (Weeks 25). Justice is the underlying theme of the novel.

The novel has a very strong binary structure that resolves itself in unity. The two plot lines have corresponding and juxtaposed characters, and are connected through repeating dual motifs of sun and moon, light and dark, good and evil, truth and lie, Yershalayim and Moscow. Bulgakov’s Margarita is not a classic female character, with mere features of empathy and kindness. Margarita is also a witch with an unleashed sexuality and wickedness. In the novel she is called on to fill both the role of Virgin Mary and to serve as Queen of Hell at the Grand Ball.

Margarita is a dynamic figure. Unlike the Master, “who retreats under the attacks from the critical establishment and burns his manuscript,” Margarita has unstoppable determination (Weeks p. 39). She is the one with a quest to save her beloved Master and his manuscript about Pontius Pilate. Margarita turns into a witch and performs justice. She punishes Latunsky, the literary critic who ruined the Master. On her broom ride Margarita releases uncontrolled anger and violence. The devastation she causes to Latunsky’s apartment and the DRAMLIT HOUSE is similar to the chaos and disarray caused by Woland and his retinue at the Variety Theater. In her pursuit of justice, Margarita is allied with Woland. Margarita nevertheless is not evil, just as Woland is far from playing the role of adversary (Weeks 43).

Throughout the novel Woland fulfills the epigraph: “I am part of the power which forever wills evil and forever works good.” He punishes people in Moscow, he retrieves the manuscript of the book that was burnt, and gives Master and Margarita peace. Here Bulgakov is proposing an alternative to traditional Christian theology (Weeks 43). In Bulgakov's cosmology God and Devil are one. Ultimately there is no evil. In the novel good and evil coexist like light and darkness (Weeks 42). Towards the end of the book, as Woland and company prepare to leave Moscow, we are reminded that “after all, shadows are cast by things and people, and what would good do if evil didn’t exist, and what would the earth look like if all the shadows disappeared” (Bulgakov 305).

No one in the book, except Yeshua, is entirely good or evil (Weeks 25). In her battle against injustice Margarita is merciful. Her motherly compassion emerges in her care of the little boy in Latunsky’s apartment building and in her relationship to Ivan Bezdomny (Weeks 34). As a reward for her service at the Satan’s Ball, Margarita pleads for Frieda’s redemption. The very handkerchief with which she killed her child torments Frieda eternally. Margarita asks Woland to grant mercy, to which Woland remarks that mercy is not in his department - evidence that he serves in a kind of “heavenly hierarchy” (Weeks 43). Instead he instructs Margarita to carry out forgiveness. In a sense, Margarita performs both justice and mercy. In her role as a witch she functions in parallel with Woland, and in her more compassionate role, she is equivalent to Yeshua, who performs mercy and believes in the basic goodness in every human. “There are no evil people in the world,” says Yeshua (Bulgakov 20).

Bulgakov’s worldview differs from the traditional Christian one in his treatment of good and evil (Weeks 42). God and Devil are made compatible in the novel, each performing his function in the world. Justice is enforced by Woland. Christ, and in some instances humans, perform mercy. This is how Bulgakov sees and interprets the world: justice and mercy operate together to create balance. He believes in the “necessary balance of powers within the universe” (Weeks 43). The answer seems to be his belief and faith in some kind of a world order that ultimately makes the horrors of Stalinism right.

Everything that Woland does when he comes to Moscow amounts to justice. At the end, Master and Margarita receive justice and fly away with Woland and the company. When Margarita asks Woland to grant forgiveness to Pontius Pilate, who has been tormented for two thousand years, Woland says that, “Everything will be made right, that is what the world is built on” (Bulgakov 323). This is how Bulgakov deals with the evil of Stalinism. He believes that there is a way out of the underground of the Stalinist world.

Oh gods, gods!

The Master and Margarita - Part Two

Follow me, reader! Who ever told you there is no such thing in the world as real, true, everlasting love? May the liar have his despicable tongue cut out! Follow me, my reader, and only me, and I'll show you that kind of love!

Margarita wakes up on Good Friday after 12 o’clock and as we know, Christ was crucified between noon and 3 o’clock. She wakes up and knows something is going to happen. Master has disappeared. Margarita’s dream about a place she doesn't recognize with the log hut is a clue that he is arrested and imprisoned somewhere. To a Russian reader it would be clear from this section that Bulgakov is describing the Master either in a camp or in exile, although he is careful to make it a dream.

Margarita goes to a park near the Kremlin wall and meets Azazello. She at first thinks she is being picked up, and then she thinks she is being arrested - typical string of reactions. “What is this: as soon as you start talking they think you’re going to arrest them!”

Since Azazello (also Azazel) is the fallen angel who taught women to paint their faces, it is clear why he, and not Behemoth, must deal with Margarita at this point. Azazello is sent to give her the cream - the cream that turns you into what you are.

Margarita turns into a witch - witch as part of woman's real nature.
Natasha, her maid, also turns into a witch, and the neighbor, Nikolai Ivanovich, turns into a pig.

His name is connected to Nikolai Ivanovich Bukharin - a party ideologist who was an intelligent charming man whom women loved. Bukharin had conflicts with Stalin because he was opposed to collectivization. The scene is tide to the idea that the old Bolsheviks like Nikolai Ivanovich who liked women are demons who become swine.

Witches’ Sabbath traditionally takes place on Good Friday, from the time that Christ dies on Friday afternoon through the time when he is resurrected. And that's exactly why the Satan’s Ball takes place on Friday night and that is the reason why Woland and his crew are in Russia until Sunday morning.

Bulgakov is theoretically describing a Witches’ Sabbath (also see Walpurgis Night (Walpurgisnacht)) , but the tone is comic rather than threatening. The extravagant details of the enchanting ball scene, which appears to be both an updating of a Witches’ Sabbath and a version of the classic ball scenes to be found in nineteenth-century Russian literature, actually has its source in the author’s own life. Bulgakov and his wife attended a ball at the American embassy in 1935, which in terms of everyday life in 1930s Moscow was truly amazing, since it featured live bears and birds, and lavish musical entertainment as well as enormous amount of food and drink – and a few well-known informers as well.

At the ball, Margarita has a picture of a poodle on a heavy chain around her neck. This is another Faustian reference; Mephistopheles takes the form of a poodle at one point. However, this is also displaced Gospel material, since, unlike Yeshua, Margarita does go through her version of the Stations of the Cross with something heavy around her neck.

Margarita and Yeshua are corresponding characters. The difference is that Yeshua says he loves all people, and all people are good. Whereas Margarita’s love and her concern extends mainly towards the Master, whom she wants to get back and who is ultimately liberated and whose manuscript is restored.

Manuscripts don’t burn is a phrase that went into Russian literature history. Woland is talking about the immortality of a created work, possibly in the sense that sooner or later it will turn up, perhaps even to be given to one writer or another as inspiration from another world. However, despite this phrase, Bulgakov himself knew very well that manuscripts do burn, since he burned a number of his own in 1930 – including the first draft of a novel about the devil – when he lost faith in his future.

Nevertheless, the phrase is iconic for the Russian and Soviet culture, signifying that no matter how hard enemies of the state worked to destroy the literary works, they ultimately did not succeed.

Bulgakov - The Master and Margarita

... and so who are
you, after all?

-- I am part of the power
which forever wills evil
and forever works good.

GOETHE'S Faust

The novel begins in Moscow with the three men on the bench.
Berlioz, Woland and Bezdomny.

From each of these characters there is a line that expands to all the different plot levels of the novel.

Berlioz is connected to the literary establishment MASSOLIT. He is also the apartment mate of Likhodeyev - the director of the variety theater.

Bezdomniy takes us to the insane asylum and leads us to the Master.

Woland and his suite take us to the show at the variety theater and then onward to what's happening in Moscow.

The two parallel plot lines are united at the beginning of the novel.

Berlioz, a highly educated man, whose life is so arranged that he is unaccustomed to the unusual events, is faced with his real world, which has been displaced into something completely crazy and fantastic. The Soviet citizen, (in the atheist society that basis atheism on materialist philosophy and psychology) like Berlioz, is not used to the unexpected events.

Meanwhile, the presentation of the Jerusalem story, the world that Berlioz does not believe in, is being told in a very realistic way compared to the presentation of the story at Patriarch's Ponds.

The subject of the discussion at Patriarch's Pond is the existence of God.

"We don't believe in God," claims Berlioz, "but we can talk about it freely and openly."

Berlioz further adds that the human mind can only function on the basis of reason and empirical evidence and therefore a discipline like metaphysics is really useless. Most people seem to act as if there is a God.

"Man himself is in control." In other words, man is a noble creature who is capable of great things and therefore is able to control his own destiny.

At this point in the novel we know that Woland is the Devil. And the point of the magic he performs at the variety theater is to see if the Muscovites have changed in any significant way.

Thursday, February 4, 2010

The Violinist

Marc Chagall painted with intense colors, embracing the world around him. His works are populated with scenes from cultural traditions, childhood memories, and with constant references to his native Vitebsk and to people he loved. Many of his works are infused with his Jewish roots. As Chagall depicted his life on canvas, he also evoked the Jewish folkloric tradition (Wullschlager 262).

Chagall’s signature violinist is more than just a folk image. Developed from his memory, the fiddler with the green face has a vital presence in many of his paintings. It is a mythic figure whose music accompanies the Jewish celebrations - the births, weddings and burials, making him the “witness to all human existence” (Faerna 11). Chagall reused this image repeatedly. The violinist is a Jewish archetype, evolving from European Jewish folk tradition.

The earlier version of this painting, “The Violinist in Green,” was painted in 1918; it represents his uncle who played the violin (Faerna 21). The image reoccurred in 1920 when Chagall created series of murals for the Kamerny Jewish Theater in Moscow (Faerna 28). Titled “Music,” the violinist is one of the large-scale murals that decorated the walls and foyer of the theater (Wullschlager 261). It is currently at the State Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow and is exhibited in the U.S. as part of the “Chagall and the Artists of the Russian Jewish Theater, 1919-1949” (Scher, http://www.thejewishmuseum.org). Chagall made a copy for himself in 1923 called “The Green Violinist,” which is now at the Guggenheim Museum in New York (Faerna 13).

As one of his earlier works, this painting has a striking quality of genuine emotion captured on canvas. This primitive-looking scene calls to mind that what was dear to Chagall – life in its simplicity. He uses colorful geometries to present memory and imagination from his own life. In the painting, Chagall employs geometric forms in shades of soft color to illustrate a scene in the village. The large fiddler is painted with vivid colors. The geometric shapes in variations of purple show the effect of light on fiddler’s coat, while his face is painted in unnatural green. The cupola of the Orthodox Church, the dog, the wooden rooftops and the cubed houses are elements from Russian folk art. The presence of Cubism is in the strong colors, lines, squares, triangles and circles.

Chagall lived in Paris from 1910 to 1914 where he assimilated Fauvism, mowing away from realistic representation (Faerna 6). In the Fauve vision a face could be green, a cow red or blue (Faerna 6). In creating this painting he incorporates elements of Fauvism and Cubism.

He began painting “The Violinist” in 1913 (Wullschlager 170).

The green-faced violinist, one giant foot thumping out his rhythm on the roof of a timber hut, is a solitary chorus on human destiny and the cycle of life, and the most monumental of all the figures he painted in Paris – he would later become, through the musical Chagall loathed, his most famous image: the fiddler on the roof. (Wullschlager, Jackie ch. 9, 170)





As he depicts the figure of the violinist, Chagall makes him appear more important than the deserted village in the background. Through primary and secondary colors, he creates a simplistic peasant world, and as is common with many Chagall works, this painting features a figure floating against the sky. Despite the vibrant colors, the painting implies sadness and nostalgia, perhaps because this was the time of anti-Jewish persecution and pogroms, when many had to flee in order to survive. The green violinist is the symbol and the foundation of Chagall’s culture. He is raised above the houses to guard everyday life with his music. By featuring the fiddler in many of his paintings, Chagall preserves the spirit of his homeland.

When he returned to Russia in 1914, Chagall developed a personal approach to his work, moderating the Parisian avant-garde influence and reflecting his Jewish heritage into his art (Faerna 8). During this period Chagall’s colleagues opposed his traditional style. Unlike Malevich, he never developed the “experimental and scientific” techniques of avant-garde (Faerna 8). The central theme of his paintings remained his private world and his Jewish background. Chagall strived to sustain the connection between his art and Russia (Wullschlager 170).

Although Chagall experimented with Fauvism and Cubism, he was faithful to his own unique style (Faerna 8). He refused the radical avant-garde approach and “reaffirmed the symbolistic traditions of his native country” (Faerna 6). This compromise between the avant-garde and the traditional, between the present and the past, is a constant feature of all Chagall’s paintings (Faerna 6). And this is what makes him “one of the most original and imaginative geniuses” of twentieth-century art (Faerna 61). One can recognize his brushwork regardless of the time it was created.

In 1922 Chagall left Russia definitively (Faerna 8). He lived in France, and turned again and again to the recurring themes of musicians and memories of his Russian Jewish heritage. As his career progressed, his fascination with theater became a preferred motif, and the circus replaced the village landscape (Faerna 28). Chagall applied his bold colors and fantasy style to paint clowns, acrobats and carnivals. He illustrated messages from Bible and made his art known to the world (Faerna 8). By 1966 Chagall was a celebrated artist (Faerna 8). The themes that Chagall used in his work throughout his career were his refuge from the world. He once said, “If there were a hiding place in my pictures I would slip into it” (Chagall 171).

Tuesday, January 12, 2010

TEXTS for Project RUSS 4821

Zamyatin, WE, Penguin
Babel, RED CAVALRY, Norton
Bulgakov, THE MASTER AND MARGARITA, Vintage
Kundera, THE UNBEARABLE LIGHTNESS OF BEING, Harper Collins
Solzhenitsyn, ONE DAY IN THE LIFE OF IVAN DENISOVICH, Noonday
Ulitskaya, SONECHKA, Schocken Books
McAuley, SOVIET POLITICS 1917-1991, Oxford
Pelevin, THE LIFE OF INSECTS, Penguin