"Exercises in Style" Project: Main Text and Two Variations

MAIN TEXT

(I've altered my main text after realizing I was, in essence, glamorizing a mundane moment in an attempt to make it less so. Since this runs contrary to the spirit of the assignment, I present a new and more banal main text below.)

As my father drove our van through the flat, seemingly infinite plains of Kansas I passed the time by staring off into space. Having not brought any books with print large enough to read in a moving vehicle without becoming carsick, I rested my head against my window and tried to make out shapes in the clouds. Sadly, in Kansas even the clouds are nondescript.

Dad was quiet, left arm resting on the window sill. Hot wind tumbled into the car, accompanied at one point by a fly. The fly righted itself against this sudden change of location, flying dizzily around the car. I followed its movement, watching as it landed on my window. It crawled up and down the glass, stopping only to rub its front legs together. As time went on it grew panicked and began to fly at the window, baffled by this new barrier. Repeatedly it flew into the glass, punctuating the humming of its wings with small tink sounds.

Before long it flew up front where my father was sitting. It buzzed around his head. Dad shooed it away with an irritated wave of the hand. It moved left to dodge the hand and was suddenly pulled back into the hot Kansas summer air. I went back to staring at the clouds.

FIRST VARIATION
Retelling the story using nothing but nouns

Father. Van. Kansas. Summer. Plains. Books. Carsickness. Window. Clouds. Boredom.

Dad. Arm. Window sill. Wind. Fly. Car interior. Window. Fly. Front legs. Barrier. Panic. Fly. Window. Fly. Window. Fly. Window. Panic.

Father. Head. Fly. Irritation. Hand. Dodge. Wind. Kansas. Summer. Plains. Clouds. Boredom.

The Surrealist Erotic: Mutilation and Intimacy in Unica Zuern's "Dark Spring"

In reading Dark Spring one feels the nameless young girl acting as the main character is much more psychologically complex than what is originally presented in the text. For one example of how her character acts contrary to someone her age, one only has to go as far as the incident wherein, after learning of her parents' failing relationship and their polyamorous ways, one of her father's "friends" presents the girl with a "big, expensive" doll (40). The young girl's reaction to this doll says a substantial amount about the idea of eroticism within a violent action; in its entirety, the novella says this about the fate of the doll:

Angry and desperate about the unhappy conditions inside her home, she takes a knife and cuts out the doll's eyes. She slices open the belly of the doll and tears her expensive clothes to shreds. None of the adults utter a single word about this destruction. (40)

This passage is dripping with Freudian imagery and archetypal symbolism, both of which played arguably large roles in the development of the Surrealist oeuvre. The simple act of destruction clearly communicates a desire to dramatically alter the living conditions the young girl is in; one can interpret the gouging out of the doll's eyes in one of two ways: either she is jealous of the doll's ability to gaze upon the home life of the girl as an impassive observer and wants to rob her of that ability, or she is gouging out the eyes because she is ashamed and wants to hide the quickly-dissolving home she thought she was in from this doll and blinds it out of mercy. The slicing of the belly hearkens to the idea of the womb, and of either Cesarean delivery of a child (birth) or demolition of the womb/abortion (death). The ripping of the doll's clothes is a way of demoting the doll's status from that of an elegant creature from an elegant woman (her father's cohort) to that of a pile of rags and mutilated plastic.

A Surrealist would be quick to point out, however, that this destruction is also very intimate. It is, in fact, one of the more intimate passages in the book, though "intimacy" may be the wrong word. The young girl essentially rapes the doll, which provides another interpretation of ripping the clothing (as an act of power over a weaker individual), the gouging of the eyes (so that the victim cannot identify the attacker) and the slicing of the stomach (to negate any chance of propagation of evidence in the form of a child).

This event takes place shortly after the girl experiences her "sexual awakening" in that she becomes aware of sexual organs and begins to understand that sexuality plays a very large but almost unmentioned role in her family. The rape of her doll is her first sexual act, and while it is repulsive in its rapaciousness, it is also disarming in its eroticism and intimacy. Instead of being acted upon, as is the case when the girl is raped by her brother or when she goes to the basement to be with the dog, the girl is taking the active role here, controlling her own sexual explorations and empowering herself as she is unable to do in the rest of the novella.

A very brief, but very powerful scene.

Dali and the Divine Comedy

As Salvador Dali is one of my favorite artists--Surrealist or otherwise--it seemed fitting to study his work for this blog post. I was surprised, in the course of my studying, to find that Dali had in the course of his life created 101 watercolor paintings representing the 101 cantos of Dante's Divine Comedy. For this blog post I will be discussing the aspects of his Inferno paintings that are distinctly Surrealist or characteristically "Dali."

Dali is known in his work for representing people or objects in ways that are slightly off; in particular, he often toys with perspective and dimension, as he does with legs in paintings like The Temptation of St. Anthony or his sculpture Elephant With Long Legs. This extends to humans and humanoids in his watercolor paintings for Inferno, particularly with creatures like Minos, whose exaggerated shoulder blades, buttocks, and right leg all suggest a representation of something realistic (the human form) but at the same time defies reality in its dimensions. This continues in his Inferno paintings with images like the near-comically stretched skull used to depict The Blasphemers of Canto XIV and The Sodomites of Canto XIX. Both show the human body (or parts thereof) recast in ways that make them appear inhuman, alien. The Sodomites, for example, shows the human body in relatively realistic poses, but the dimensions of the bones themselves (such as the impossibly thin right calf of the man in the foreground) give this away as a Surrealist piece, and particularly one of Dali's.

The choice of color is important in discerning these watercolors as Surrealist pieces as well; every individual, human or humanoid, depicted in the 34 paintings of Inferno has a skin tone which is a different shade of olive or tan. However, these skin tones run the gamut from orange (In the Hands of Antaeus [Canto XVI]) to purple (The Furies [Canto IX]). Obviously, these skin tones can only exist in the world of a Surrealist artist, though it is particularly important to understand that Surrealist art did not try to be realistic, but rather tried to connect the subconscious to the conscious, and the use of color by Dali is almost certainly done to convey a specific emotion that he is trying to inspire in the audience (sorrow or fear in The Furies, agitation or excitement in In the Hands of Antaeus, etc).

All of the Divine Comedy paintings were taken from the Lockport Street Gallery website (http://www.lockportstreetgallery.com).