Monday, October 22, 2012

"total sterility": denying the creative self


Anna claims if she had to label her dream that ends the black notebook, she would call it “total sterility,” recalling her earlier concerns of cleanliness in relation to her own body (period) and of immunization against cracking up (an ordering and separating of her identity from others).  This “sterility,” however, seems to be related to Anna’s writing/creative expression itself and rather illustrates her concern of not remembering “how Mayrose moved her eyes” or “how Paul laughed” (502).  In the dream, the cameras first remind—and then become—machine guns, suggesting that the capturing by film sterilizes the memory by not allowing it to be continually reinvented. 
Anna links the “untruthfulness” of her notebooks to her “sterility”(455), claiming that what she wrote down was not what she remembers.  Writing, then, as a form of “sterilizing” the self, contributes to Anna’s attempt to create an identity for herself but also undermines this very process by opposing the fluidity of memory and experience.  By reviewing her own notebooks (455), Anna further distances her present self from her past self and suggests that such a process of examination inevitably leads to a totalizing effect:  namely, that Anna uses her journals to draw conclusions about her past—“how the experience of being rejected by Michael changed, or apparently had changed, [her] whole personality” (my emphasis, 455).  The word “apparently” indicates Anna’s own skepticism regarding the truthfulness of the journals and distances Anna-as-reader from Anna-as-writer.  

4 comments:

  1. Anna, I am excited that you blogged about sterility, and I thought of your comments in class as I read that section in the novel. I too was interested in how Anna re-read her journals, and then evaluated her life. Usually, I think reading through an old journal would simply jog old memories, but instead Anna uses these memories to interpret how she feels now. In a way, she is using the past to "clean up" her present, but she only ends up confusing herself more.

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  2. Emily, I agree that Anna seems to reinterpret her present in light of past entries in her journal. Reflecting on our discussion today in class, I do wonder how we can connect this idea of sterility to the merging/fusing of identities in the latter portion of the novel? It seems as though sterility is not set in opposition to reproduction but rather is the antithesis of creativity (a definition of sterility can be "lacking in stimulating emotional or intellectual quality"). Thus, is it the "unchanging" quality of something that is "sterile" that is most disturbing to Anna?

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  3. Anna, I think we might begin to answer this question of how sterility relates to merging/fusing of identity by further examining corporeal sterility/fecundity, specifically as it relates to the sense of smell. Anna's disgust at her period stems from the smell of it: "I stand in the washroom, putting scent on to my arms, so as to defeat the smell from the stale leak of blood" (pg. 334--according to goldennotebook.org). Since smell is, at least, the literary catalyst of memory (through Proust), we can link her disgust to a moment in the Black Notebook, on pg. 415, (in the midst of the great pigeon pogrom); "We were slightly sick with the smell of blood." (note: Anna announces her intention to reread Proust a little further down on the same page). The smell of her period recalls the smell of death, but also life (blood as life-force, also fecundity); creation and destruction inextricably fused. If smell is the basis of memory, and memory is the basis of identity, this link might be a node of Anna's identity, but one which she fears, because it puts her in mind of the chaos she fears and separates out, and distances herself from, in her four notebooks.

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  4. Interesting! One small point: although smell is a catalyst in Proust for what he calls "involuntary memory" (by that he means the way, say, a particular song immediately takes you back to 7th grade when you hear it on the radio even years later), it's not the only sense to do so. The famous incident in "Swann's Way" has to do with taste and there is another well-known example of hearing some dogs bark.

    More importantly, though, I'd be keen to hear more about memory in this book, and just what its value is. Thoughts, anyone?

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