Mimetic: The imitation or represetation of
aspects of the sensible world, especially human actions, in literature and
arts.
In the arts, mimetic is considered to represent
the human emotions in view ways , and so representing to the on looker, listner
or reader the in herent nature of the emotions and the psychological truth of
the work of art. By “mimesis” we can also understand the act of perceiving the
emotions of the characters on the stage or in the book; or the truthof the
figure as they appear in sculptures or in paintings; or the emotions as they
are being configurated in music. All these can be recognised by the onlooker as
part of the human condition.
If we think first of “Araby” we can easely
discover that this is a poetic name for Arabia. Both Joyce’s
stories “Araby and Clay” take place in Dublin, and as for the
descriptions the narrator uses realistic ones. Joyce deals in both stories with
feelings like love, far and frustration.
I Araby the narrator thinks that love can be
expressed only through gifts, so when he realises that he isn’t capable of
offering , one to the person he loves, he loses his hope-frustration. He even
interprets his late arrival at the bazaar as an ending of his lovestory. All
these feelings that we mentioned before are universal and every woman has
experienced them once in her/his lifetime. The narrator not only uses realistic
descriptions but the characters are also copied from the reality: simple human
beings (Maria, Mangan’s sister…) who have the same women as real people (eg:
the girl can’t g oto the bazaar because she has other things o attend to; his
boring life as a student, the late arrival of his uncle ,buying the right
plumcake, forgeting one of the pockets in the tram…)
In Clay” this time we have a name for our main
character- Maria-a real girl with real name.(very small person, very long nose
and very long chin, talks a litte girl through her nose)
She is also capable of expressing feelings like:
love,anger,fury,happiness or sadness as a real person. (eg: when she touches
the clay during the game that she plays with the children) She isn’t married
and probably will never get married-If we believe in the meaning of the clay
(early death).
Regarding Faulkner- both his stories have an
introduction point. They show us where and when the action is taking place.
Specifying from the beginning the time and place gives us the idea that those
might be true stories or that the facts are about a real event.
The first and the second story are based on
dualtiy. In the first one (that evening sun)- at the beginning of the story the
writer shows us two different aspects of the same city- one now , in the
present, and another one, fifteen years ago. The dualism is also represented by
the twodifferent narrators ( in the same body but also dualism- but this time
about people’s behaviour). See Emily has the representant of the high
aristocracy, but in the same time she hides som edep secrets- necrophilia.
In this fiction Faulkner uses a lots of
comparaisons and extended descriptions- like whe he describes the tourn of
Jefferson- the one that he sees today and the one he knew fifteen years ago; or
when he describes Emily’s house. Also the writer ususally jumps from a general
plan to a particular one. For example, “that evening sun” in the first
pharagraph he uses the general plan and in the second one he chooses the
particular one. We have no more Negro-women, we have now a name – Nancy and all the
action is focusing on her nour. To depict the reality evening beter way the
narrator uses for Nancy a broken English,
and not only for her but also for Dilsey and Jesus too.
“I anin’t studing no breakfast”
The same thing happens in “A rose for Emily”
with the plans first general and then particular. But here all the characters
use proper English. The only negro presentend here is more like an anonymous
one: no name, no lines for him…
Both stories use juxtapositio. By juxtaposing
the first thwo pharagraph in. That evening sun, Faulkner makes the difference
between the past and the present and he shows us hour might affect the people.
See also the difference between black people and white ones. For him the
Negroes are at the bottom of the scale. They are anonymous “A rose for Emily”
but sympathetically described”That evening sun”. Although they are shown from a
Southern point of view, Faulkner is aware that Negroes are humn beings like
himself, but ones who have suffered much more because of the color of their
skin.
Nancy complains about
her status : “I ain’t nothing but a niggers but it ain’t none of my fault”. She
is also really scared “Can it do nobody nothing with him?” She is so scared
that sometimes she looks paranoiac. The way the narrator depicts her shows how
good he can be at depicting the cruel reality. At the end se acts like she is
accepting finaly her condition and she is ready to meet her cruel destiny.
Maybe her death brouught by Jesus. If we talk about fear simple one or that one
close to paranoia- we can see that the dual points of we are showed by contrasting
Nancy’s fear (of death) and the children’s fear(scary cat). Nancy is terrified by
premonitions of her approaching death while the children are scared by
darkness.
If we talk about contrasts in “A rose for Emily”
we can find plenty of them. For example- see the contrast between the
aristocrat woman and her unspeakable secrets- who form the asis of this story.
In “A rose for Emily” the unnamed narrator,
which some critics have identified as ”the torn” or at least a representative
from it relates key moment in Emily’s life including the death of her father
and a brief love story with a yankee road paver named Homer Brown. Beyond the
literal evel of Emily’s Narrative, the story is sometimes regarded as a symbol
of the changes in the South during the representative period.
As for the vocabulary both stories use long
sentences, a lot of adjectivs and adverbs. Most of the verbs are used in past
tense. In that evening sun, if we look at the characters we can describe the
like this :father- calm and detached, just like Dilsey, mother-whining and neurotic,
Quentin-calm and raional, Caddy-inquisitive and daring and Jason-unpleasant and
obnoxious.
The structure of the sentence is sometimes long,
sometimes short but the narrator uses this show the psychological complexity of
his characters.
Unlike Joyce or Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway’s
fiction is totally different. The two stories here are full of symbolism and
hidden significations. In the “Cat in the rain” the narrator depicts the desire
for material goods of people as they can’t acquire intangible goods(like fun or
affection)
The stories are simple ,with no complicated intrigue.
Both stories contain dialogues that look so real. The American wife expresses
feelings that any ordinary woman will do. Jig. Expresses fear against an
operation –like any other human being. All this characters act so real that the
dialogues between them look like normal and right at that time.
Hemingway makes us to hear and feel his
characters, and he does it not only by directing our responses or summarizing
those of his characters, but by putting the terrain, the objects, the equipment,
the water (the rain) ,the places, the people before us in a since of cleanly
defined , carefully separated,
perceptions and notations.
The narrator usually places opposite pictures
side by side to keep the reader simultaneously interested in two things at
once(contrast).
“The girl stood up and walked to the end of the
station. Across; on the otherside, where fields of grain and trees…”
All the information are presented indirectly. We
have to find clues that reveal about feelings, thoughts and actions of
characters. Throughout the story the man seems as if he left the decision whether
or not the girl should have the operation. But if use read between the lines, use
understands that the man doesn’t want the baby at all. The story is full of
outward formalities for free choice. “I think is the best thing to do… if you
don’t realy want to”.
The small informaion supplied by the author help
us draw a reasonable conclusion about what characters feel or think.
At the beginning of the story, just like Joyce’s
or Faulkner’s stories wehave dscriptions-where the author sets the scene and
gives the reader a sense of time and place. The writer helps his characters to
come alive not only by describing the way they act but by letting us hear them
speak-unlike Joyce or Faulkner. Hemingway uses the dialogue a lot, so in this
way the onlooker feels that he is actally witnessing what’s going on. If
Hemingway is a writer who dispenses with symbolism, then Faulkner is his
opposite. Where Hemingway uses the short, paratactic structure, Faulkner’s
sentences may run on for a page, challenging the reader to find her way through
the hypotactic hate. Where Hemingway remains on the outside, giving us only
eight of the story, Faulkner shifts perspectives, moving in and out of the
consciousness of various characters and representing their process.
Franz
Kafka, Julio Cortazar and Jorge Luis Borges
Franz Kafka’s litrary style is so distinctive
that an adjective has been coined from
his name to describe similarly style. That objective is “Kafkaesque”.
Kafka write very strange, horrifying stories his
most famous novels involves the transformation of a man into a giant insect.
His works are not only fantatic and symbolic , but they are often very
philosophical and thought provoking. Many of his stories are allegorical or
metaphorical, focusing on the nature of spiritually and the absorbing of life.
Not only that, but his work is often intensely cerebral, delving deep into the
minds of his characters and examining their psychology and his motivations for
their actions.
Gaps and implicitness: The opposition gaps-facts
is only a crude representation of the structuring of fictional words that is
due to the present/absenceof texture. Both the construction texture and the
constructed fictional facts our homogeneous , but finely differentiated.
The texture of Franz Kafka- A hunger artist
mentions that the artist was taken by his impresario to many cities and
countries in Europe, but it is totaly silent
about any specific place especially about the place of his final feat. The
local of the protagonist’s death is an irrecoverable gap in the fictioanl
world.
Kafka’s gapping of local of settling becames
quite apparent if constructed with James Joyce-Dubliners.
The Fictioanl text is complex of explicit and
implicit texture; consequently, fictional facts are constructed ot only explicitly
but also implicitly.
For the semantic of fictioanl narrative,
inferences regarding aspects and constituents of acting are of special
significance. We know that an action has to be performed by an agent with a
specific intention , motivation, authority, are so forth. If the agent is let
unexpressed in an action description, for example by the device of passive
construction, we infer his/her existence. Two sentences from the beginnig of
the trial- provide an instructive example : “you are arrested…proceedings have
been nour instituted against you”. Knowing that arrests are made on somebody’s
orders, the reader infers that an anonymous person or institution is behind
Joseph K’s arrest.
There is no substance to the Hunger artist. He
rises from an absence, a formely blank page, which reveals itself as a trop
efor the ground of the world in which he Hungers, a literary world. All that we
read here is a construction , a fiction about an event that never happened anf
a figure who never existed. The book becomes real for us, that is unless we
should foolish try to eat it, ant then we would face the reality and it would
be bitter and pasty and in any case it would not satisfy our hunger.
With the figure of an hunger artist the starving
the artist comes to mind , but why do artists starve? The hunger artist confess
that he had never found anything good to eat. Not a very useful answer.
Despite the extreme odds against succes , the
artist would rather starve than do sth other than art.
The hunger artist rebels only against the
representation of his hungering, notaby in the photographs but even in the
suggestion that his hungering could be a cause for sth other than itself. He
rattles the bars of his coge like an animal when someone suggests that his
sadness really appears to come from hungering. At such times, hunger artist
springs up like threarened animal. The hunger artist demands truth but is
countured only by get a stronger “appearance” against which he is defebseless:
thephotograph, and also , we should not forget , the appearance of the story
itself.
The hunger artist is crisis. He is terrifying
because he shows us the horror of our existence. He reminds us of the reason
for aesthetics: distence from the crisis that appears in art, in the hunger
artist as much as the story about the hunger artist. The adults dry laughed it
off, but the children gaped open-mouthed. They had no understanding. There was
no undestandin to remember. The hunger artist has always know “ against this
nonunderstanding, against this world of nonunderstanding and faced the hopeless
of his art, the futility with which he practiced his craft.
He hunger artist terrifies us because he is like
us, not a cat but a papertiger. We are forced to confront what we , too , are
papertigers. Our lives human lives, are
literary, staging a rase of reality so
convincin that it becomes the supreme fiction. Like a Borgesian story,
literature writes its author and its readers.
A literar text, like Kafka’s “ A hunger artist”
does nothing other than offer a representation of something that we no longer
understand, have never understood. To respond to the question of literature can
be terrifying enough to keep us from ever proceeding beyond the practicalities
of the institution of literature. When we sustain overself with the questions
we hunger. Literature demand hunger, and we cannot fast in the precence of
literature any more than use can fast on it.
In the literary scholar is not much different
from he artist. In the figure of Kafka’s hunger artist we could and see
ourselves, and not all piteously. The hunger artist does not pity himself. In
fact, he is most content when he is finally allowed to fast without end, and
that only becomes possible when no one is no longer interested in his art.
I suggest that we see the image of the hunger
artist is not imetic reflection of our subjective selves, but rather an
indication of who are and what we do as scholars in a field like no other.
The hunger artist is a figure for the writer ,
for literature itself, and for the reader because hungering, even more than
fasting, manifests presence.
Kafka’s story is an allegory of our entire
culture. The author obviously sees his own art as representative of the
negative , Gnostic, and egoistical tendencies present in our world.
There is nouns more literal readings. There are
reasons to believe that Kafka himself had anorexic tendencies.
In conclusion of Kafka’s story, the crowds lose
interest in the “Hunger Künstler” who is finally swept out of his cage and
replaced not by someone in the sam eline of work but by a muscular and manacling
panther. This ending is often regarded, rather convincingly in my view as
prophetic.
In the arts, mimesis is considered to be –
perceiving the human emotions in new ways and so-presenting to the onlooker,
listener or reader the inherent nature of the emotions and the psychological
truth of the work of art. Mimesis is the thought of as means of perceiving the
emotions of the characters on stage or in the book; as the truth of the figures
as they appear in sculpture in pointing; or the emotions as they are being
configured in music and of their being recognized by the onlooker as far of the
human condition.