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Notes on *The Eye*
Jan. 5th, 2010 11:36 pmFrom The Eye:
"The situation was becoming a curious one. I could already count three versions of Smurov, while the original remained unknown. This occurs in scientific classification. Long ago, Linnaeus described a common species of butterfly, adding the laconic note 'in pratis Westmanniae.' Time passes, and in the laudable pursuit of accuracy, new investigators name the various southern and Alpine races of this common species, so that soon there is not a spot left in Europe where one finds the nominal race and not a local subspecies. Where is the type, the model, the original? Then, at last, a grave entemologist discusses in a detailed paper the whole complex of named races and accepts as the representative of the typical one the almost 200-year-old, faded Scandinavian specimen collected by Linneaus; and this identification sets everything right" (53-4).
"What difference did it make to me whether she were stupid or intelligent, or what her childhood had been like, or what books she red, or what she thought about the universe? I really knew nothing about her, blinded as I was by that burning loveliness which replaces everything else and justifies everything, and which, unlike a human soul (often accessible and possessible), can in no way be appropriated, just as one cannot include among one's belongings the colors of ragged sunset clouds above black houses, or a flower's smell that one inhales endlessly, with tense nostrils, to the point of intoxication, but cannot draw completely out of the corolla . . . . What I needed from Vanya I could never have taken for my perpetual use and possession anyway, as one cannot possess the tint of the cloud or the scent of the flower" (70-1).
One direction in which these quotes point in common with Sebastian Knight is that objectivity doesn't matter in certain realms--especially those of personal identity and perceptual/emotional experiences. The objective identity of the person one loves isn't required for the love to be real.
A man who may or may not be a ghost is tracking down others' impressions of someone--who unsurprisingly turns out in the end to be himself. He proclaims that he is nothing but an eye. I'm not sure I can make much of the being-an-eye theme (which immediately makes me picture Emerson's 'transparent eyeball'); that the role he takes is passive does not seem necessary for the other things to be true. Perhaps it is significant, though, in relation to the idea that sensory qualities cannot be taken out of experience and into the objective realm. They can only be seen with eyes, etc.
What is especially congenial to me, though, is the 'family resemblance' theory of personal identity (like that of the 'many-sided flower' in The Waves. The idea seems to be that the 'true self,' much like essences in a Wittgensteinian theory of meaning, is completely illusory; there is only a set of different instances.
And of course I do like the idea that one can be happy without something 'objective' (read: solid, socially recognized) which is the cause of one's happiness. (And if he's right about the ineffability of things like happiness, it shouldn't matter anyway.) I think I turned to Sebastian Knight when I did because it offered hope--that I could manage to arrive at something real and redeeming entirely through my mind. 'Entirely' is not quite true, though--at least, not for me. But there are certain transformations of the spirit that can take place.
This falls clearly into the category 'novels about the slipperiness of one's experience of oneself' (mostly from the early 20th century)--those in which characters feel invisible and go on to somehow affirm their reality as sippery observers. This was a revelation to me in high school; less profound to me now. I suspect there's something in Sass's Madness and Modernism about the simultaneous appearances of the ideas that with respect to the self, meaning, and things perceieved, there are only instances, a series of versions, perspectives, uses, with no center.
"The situation was becoming a curious one. I could already count three versions of Smurov, while the original remained unknown. This occurs in scientific classification. Long ago, Linnaeus described a common species of butterfly, adding the laconic note 'in pratis Westmanniae.' Time passes, and in the laudable pursuit of accuracy, new investigators name the various southern and Alpine races of this common species, so that soon there is not a spot left in Europe where one finds the nominal race and not a local subspecies. Where is the type, the model, the original? Then, at last, a grave entemologist discusses in a detailed paper the whole complex of named races and accepts as the representative of the typical one the almost 200-year-old, faded Scandinavian specimen collected by Linneaus; and this identification sets everything right" (53-4).
"What difference did it make to me whether she were stupid or intelligent, or what her childhood had been like, or what books she red, or what she thought about the universe? I really knew nothing about her, blinded as I was by that burning loveliness which replaces everything else and justifies everything, and which, unlike a human soul (often accessible and possessible), can in no way be appropriated, just as one cannot include among one's belongings the colors of ragged sunset clouds above black houses, or a flower's smell that one inhales endlessly, with tense nostrils, to the point of intoxication, but cannot draw completely out of the corolla . . . . What I needed from Vanya I could never have taken for my perpetual use and possession anyway, as one cannot possess the tint of the cloud or the scent of the flower" (70-1).
One direction in which these quotes point in common with Sebastian Knight is that objectivity doesn't matter in certain realms--especially those of personal identity and perceptual/emotional experiences. The objective identity of the person one loves isn't required for the love to be real.
A man who may or may not be a ghost is tracking down others' impressions of someone--who unsurprisingly turns out in the end to be himself. He proclaims that he is nothing but an eye. I'm not sure I can make much of the being-an-eye theme (which immediately makes me picture Emerson's 'transparent eyeball'); that the role he takes is passive does not seem necessary for the other things to be true. Perhaps it is significant, though, in relation to the idea that sensory qualities cannot be taken out of experience and into the objective realm. They can only be seen with eyes, etc.
What is especially congenial to me, though, is the 'family resemblance' theory of personal identity (like that of the 'many-sided flower' in The Waves. The idea seems to be that the 'true self,' much like essences in a Wittgensteinian theory of meaning, is completely illusory; there is only a set of different instances.
And of course I do like the idea that one can be happy without something 'objective' (read: solid, socially recognized) which is the cause of one's happiness. (And if he's right about the ineffability of things like happiness, it shouldn't matter anyway.) I think I turned to Sebastian Knight when I did because it offered hope--that I could manage to arrive at something real and redeeming entirely through my mind. 'Entirely' is not quite true, though--at least, not for me. But there are certain transformations of the spirit that can take place.
This falls clearly into the category 'novels about the slipperiness of one's experience of oneself' (mostly from the early 20th century)--those in which characters feel invisible and go on to somehow affirm their reality as sippery observers. This was a revelation to me in high school; less profound to me now. I suspect there's something in Sass's Madness and Modernism about the simultaneous appearances of the ideas that with respect to the self, meaning, and things perceieved, there are only instances, a series of versions, perspectives, uses, with no center.
