Tuesday, September 25, 2012

"flamboyant trees are lovely when they're flowering"


We touched upon this briefly in class, but I would like to explore further what appears to be a running topos, that of unconscious space, throughout our text--and perhaps the course as well (Women in Love springs to mind, anyway)...
On pg. 8 (actually the second page of the novel proper), Anna anna-lyzes (forgive me) her position, narrating, “Sometimes it was as if I were back there and England were a dream. At other times England was the real thing and out there was the dream, but I could never fit them together.” Already, we have two spaces, that of Morgans Rest, and that of England (colonized vs. colonizing space), but Anna gravitates dreamily from one space to the other. Pg. 23 dangles a key for how to interpret her dreamstates: “I felt as if I had gone outside myself, as if I were in a dream.” So dreaming for Anna is not unlike watching herself in a mirror; it represents an intangibility, a detachment from herself. She doesn't completely occupy Morgans Rest or England at any point, but rather, finds herself stuck in the abstract mental space between them, unable to “fit them together,” to integrate the self of her supposed origin with the self of her supposed destination--unable, as it were, to position herself with some spatially derived identity. As we discussed in class, Anna flounders in the waters (connected by Jung with the collective unconscious), perpetually in transit, in limbo, or what have you. However, on pgs. 77-78, an interesting development occurs: “But when I began to talk about the flowers out there I got that feeling of a dream, of two things that I couldn't fit together, and it was if I were making up the names [my italics]...” Positioning herself within a liminal dreamspace either affords Anna the capacity for meaning-making (making up names, and by extension, identities--"flamboyant," "lovely")...or robs her of that capacity (the names she lists are actual names—hibiscus, jasmine, etc--but lose their meanings). So, what I'm wondering is whether the dream-distancing constitutes another symptom of Anna's powerlessness, or the agency-loophole we've been fumbling for? Or, conversely, does this represent just another ambivalence, some tremendous failure in analysis (the one thing which seems to identify Anna), and/or her personal horizon of meaning (in this sense, the limit of meaning)?

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