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Bryce Aston Dr. Wiley ENGL 253-04 13 December 2016 Prompt: Authors from every era have loved to play with detachment in their work, using it in different contexts and for different purposes. In “The Infinite” by Giacomo Leopardi, “A Carcass” by Charles Baudelaire, “The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock” by T.S. Eliot, and “We Are the Authors” from the movie Waking Life, the authors all use detachment differently to develop a certain idea or concept within their work. What role does detachment play in each of these pieces? What does it mean that these authors use detachment in this way? Ninety-nine Problems But Attachment Ain’t One
When I first learned what a metaphor was, I was probably in third or fourth grade and didn’t understand the full power of what I had been given. I was young and had little need for catharsis, at least that I was aware of. It wasn’t until middle school that I discovered the wonders of angst-ridden, metaphorfueled poetry as a coping mechanism. I became privy to the greatest secret I had ever known: when you find the right metaphor, the right combination of words and images just detached enough from what you are actually trying to say, you learn much more about yourself than in any direct attempt at self-discovery. The secret was to detach myself from the problem, and instead create a metaphor for it. I learned then that detachment can lead to healing and understanding, and that these things can lead to truth. I learned that when you look slightly to the left, your peripherals can show you far more stars than you realized were there. Of course, I am not the only self-proclaimed (shakily proclaimed, but still) author to realize this. Detachment, whether it be in style or content or literally as a topic of a piece, is one of the more prolific recurring themes and motifs in literature. It manifests in any number of ways, whether internally or externally or some combination of both. Pieces like “The Infinite” by Giacomo Leopardi narrate a detachment from one’s own thoughts, zooming out from the self to find relief. Other pieces rely on detachment in style: “A Carcass” by Charles Baudelaire objectifies reality in order to cope with personal
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loss. Then we have pieces like “The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock” by T.S. Eliot that once again shows a narrator detaching, this time not from himself but from those around him. Even in such a diverse array of works, there is a commonality: these authors are employing that tactic which I’ve come so heavily to rely on myself. They are using detachment and objectification as a coping mechanism, for both their narrators and characters, and themselves. The culmination of this, then, is the piece “We Are the Authors” from the movie Waking Life. This is the ultimate example of self-awareness in writing. It is a piece that examines the threads of different writings and identifies the role that alienation has in self-awareness. “We Are the Authors” discovers that in life and literature, detachment allows a person to come to a truce with the world and with yourself. If all these pieces were put on a scale together, “The Infinite” would come at the beginning as the most basic conceptualization of detachment. Leopardi’s approach doesn’t tackle any universal truths or self-realizations. The piece focuses simply on a narrator who seems to be overwhelmed by his own self, and by distancing himself from his thoughts, finds respite. He sits on a hill, contemplating the universe, “And then I call to mind Eternity, / The ages that are dead, and the living present / And all the noise of it. And thus it is / In that immensity my thought is drowned / And sweet to me the foundering in that sea” (Leopardi 66). In this case, the detachment is of the mind: the narrator is taking a step back from his own thoughts, focusing on the scale of the universe in order to escape his mind. It is clear, too, that distancing himself from his own thoughts is a coping mechanism. Though the poem never specifically names the source of the narrator’s discomfort, the last line implies that the silencing of his thoughts is a relief. Leopardi’s poem explores the way in which removing yourself from your thoughts can create much-needed clarity. In contrast to the internalized detachment in Leopardi’s piece, Baudelaire’s “A Carcass” features a narrator detached from the world around him. However, in spite of their differences, “A Carcass” is also an example of a narrator using separation as a coping mechanism. The poem begins with an address to “my love” (Baudelaire 27), introducing the narrator’s intended audience. In juxtaposition to this sweet beginning, Baudelaire’s narrator then goes on to describe in vivid yet almost inflectionless detail a rotting corpse that he and his love had encountered on a walk. The language is almost obscene in its plainness: the second stanza describes how, “Her legs were spread out like a lecherous whore, / Sweating out
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poisonous fumes, / Who opened in slick invitational style / Her stinking and festering womb” (Baudelaire 27). Even in describing something horrific and undoubtedly unnerving, the narrator is intentionally detached. He is looking at the body objectively. The complexity of this poem and the true purpose of the narrator’s alienation from reality becomes clear only in the last three stanzas. Almost abruptly, he returns to addressing his lover directly, saying, “-- And you, in your turn, will be rotten as this: / Horrible, filthy, undone, / Oh sun of my nature and star of my eyes, / My passion, my angel in one!” (Baudelaire 27). In contrast with the first part of the poem, this sudden onslaught of intense sentiment is jarring. This, then, is the core of the poem: the narrator’s almost clinical description of the dead body is a coping mechanism. He is detaching himself from the reality of death in order to process his lover’s mortality. By objectifying the corpse, he is protecting himself from the thought that this will one day be his lover. The detachment is not entirely successful in consoling him, as is seen in the those final stanzas, but he is trying. Though his detachment is from an outside reality and not the turmoil of his own thoughts, it’s role as a coping mechanism echoes that in Leopardi’s poem. On the scale of detachment mentioned earlier, Eliot’s “The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock” takes its manifestation to new levels of complexity. Prufrock’s narrator is also using alienation as a coping mechanism, but unlike the previous two cases, he seems to be unaware or else unwilling to admit that he is doing it. Additionally, where Leopardi and Baudelaire portrayed detachment from one’s own mind and from aspects of reality, Eliot’s poem focuses on a detachment from society. While the entire poem screams of alienation and loneliness, one couplet in particular conveys the narrator’s detachedness: “I should have been a pair of ragged claws / Scuttling across the floors of silent seas” (Eliot 223). The significance of this line lies in the imagery, that of a lonely crab alone on the floor of an empty ocean. In these lines, Eliot’s narrator is acknowledging his own detachment: he believes that he does not belong within society and pictures himself as alone in the world. Part of the complexity of this narrative is the lack of agency felt by the narrator. He does not seem to understand that his loneliness is, in many ways, a self-fulfilling prophecy. He believes that he does not belong in society, he feels uncomfortable there, and so he almost unknowingly separates himself from it. In portraying himself as an outsider, he simply makes himself more of one.
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The detachment in this poem is very different from those mentioned before, and yet there are still parallels in the purpose of it. Eliot’s narrator, whether he realizes it or not, is using his alienation for his own protection. Throughout the poem, the narrator conveys a deep sense of self-doubt. For example, at one point he imagines descending a staircase, “With a bald spot in the middle of my hair -- / (They will say: ‘How his hair is growing thin!’)” (Eliot 220). Self-conscious imaginings such as this are common throughout the poem, and it is clear that the narrator is experiencing a kind of crisis over the reality of his own imperfections and mortality. The entirety of the poem seems to be a lament of his aging, and it reflects a deep sense of fear over the ways in which society perceive him. Therefore, his detachment can be seen as a way of protecting himself from the judgement that he so obviously fears: if he is not connected to society and not exposed to it, he does not have to experience judgement or even face his own shortcomings. Eliot’s portrayal of detachment, while in many ways deeply variant from the other two, still holds true to acting as a coping mechanism. Following these three pieces, “We Are The Authors” from Waking Life, written by screenwriter Tara Carreon, is almost jarring. Where the speakers from the first pieces were absorbed in their own narrative, “We Are The Authors” is written from a very self-aware perspective. It speaks in broad universalities, mentions famous authors and quotes them as well. This poem, rather than implementing detachment as a coping mechanism, discusses it. Throughout the poem, there are instances in which it references detachment from self, and in some cases, analyzes the purpose of that detachment. The concept of detachment is introduced early in the poem when Carreon’s narrator claims that, “This entire thing we’re involved with called the world… / is an opportunity to exhibit how exciting alienation can be” (Carreon 41). In the context of the poem, which references works from other famous poets, this seems to be celebrating the role that alienation plays in literature and in these poets’ general experience of the world. As the poem continues, Carreon’s narrator discusses the ways in which to live life to the fullest, and the paradox of how “life understood is life lived” (Carreon 41). He then describes how, even in their frustration with this complicated concept, “...on really romantic evenings of self, / I go salsa dancing with my confusion” (Carreon 41). The significance of this line lies in the separation between self and feeling: the narrator has detached himself from his own confusion. In the context of “We Are The Authors,” this
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detachment is both similar and different to that shown in the previous pieces. On the one hand, the narrator in this poem portrays his detachment with life and whimsy, which is a far cry from the seriousness of the past poems. On the other hand, we find that once again, the narrator is using detachment as a coping mechanism. He is confused and frustrated by his confusion, but he detaches himself from it and allows it to exist without ruining him. And so even though this poem is so vastly different from those by Leopardi, Baudelaire, and Eliot, it still holds so much similarity in its portrayal of separation, of survival. This, then, is what it comes down to. This is why these poems matter, and why their narrator’s detachment matters. It calls to a universal tendency within the human race, an almost instinctual thing that we find ourselves doing every day. We detach ourselves from that which is closest to our hearts and our insides. Just like the body goes into shock, doesn’t allow us to feel when the pain is too great, so our minds instinctively draw back from the plain truth. Instead, we find ways to create space, and then in that space we adapt, we learn, we cope, we survive. Once, in an article about a band I love by a blogger named Emma Stanford, she attempted to capture what was so compelling about their music. She described the lead man’s writing in this way: “...it’s mostly about the breathing room carved out by his metaphors. He has a poet’s gift for injecting universal feelings into specific and alien narrative contexts, which allows you to catch your own emotional bogeymen by surprise…the obliqueness of this association makes it possible to look almost directly, even almost compassionately, at something that three minutes ago you’d have given anything to disown” (Stanford). This, I believe, is what these poets are striving to do. Whether they know it or not whether their narrators know it or not - they are appealing to the safety found in detachment. They are, as Stanford puts it, “in the business of reattaching limbs, gently steering us towards the things we need to feel about the parts of ourselves we need to hold onto” (Stanford).
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Works Cited Baudelaire, Charles. “A Carcass.” Translated by James McGowan. Wiley, p. 27. Carreon, Tara, screenwriter. “We Are The Authors.” Waking Life. Fox Searchlight Pictures, 2001. Wiley, 2016. Damrosch, David and David L. Pike, editors. The Longman Anthology of World Literature: Volume F, The Twentieth Century. Pearson Education, Inc., 2009. Eliot, Thomas S. “The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock.” Damrosch and Pike, pp. 221-224. Leopardi, Giacomo. “The Infinite.” Damrosch and Pike, p. 66. Stanford, Emma. “Let Us Consider the Mountain Goats.” The Toast, 15 July 2014, http://the-toast.net/2014/07/15/let-us-consider-mountain-goats/. Accessed 12 Dec. 2016. Wiley, Amy, editor. English 253: Comparative World Literature 1789-Present, Course Reader. 2016.