S D. Chrostowska
Autor von Permission
Werke von S D. Chrostowska
Getagged
Wissenswertes
- Rechtmäßiger Name
- Chrostowska, Sylwia Dominika
- Geburtstag
- 1975
- Geschlecht
- female
- Ausbildung
- University of Toronto (PhD)
- Berufe
- professor of 20th century continental thought
- Organisationen
- York University
Mitglieder
Rezensionen
Permission (Canadian Literature) von S. D. Chrostowska
I thought this one would be right up my alley—but I had a hard time getting into it. This may have initially (and at the end) been due to the feeling that the author/narrator was attempting to reproduce Derrida's mannerisms in English. If it makes any sense, there was something very un-vulnerable about it; I couldn't get into it because I wasn't being invited/let in.
½
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# Video review: https://youtu.be/p7S1JaoBzQM #
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Transcript review:
This book was sent to me from the Toronto-based publisher Coach House Books. The first thing that seized my attention was the construction of the physical book. As soon as my fingers came into contact with these pages I registered that something was a bit different. Visually, there was a nice creaminess that I’ve seen plenty of times before, but tactilely there was a pleasing ribbed texture. In the back of the book it explains that it was printed on Zephyr Antique Laid paper, which was manufactured, acid-free, in Saint-Jerome, Quebec, from second-growth forests. And it was printed with vegetable-based ink on a 1973 Heidelberg KORD offset litho press. This was a smart choice because it really sets the book apart and indulges my love for the physical text.
I’m a sucker for the Luddite novel. Give me anything that rails against the ruination of humanity in exchange for technological advancement we don’t need and I’m as happy--and agitated--as my teenaged self, reading Walden for the first time. I’m also a sucker for books written by professors. Barth, Gass, Eco, the list goes on. And The Eyelid is both of these. It takes the form of “a utopia wrapped in a dystopia,” as the publisher calls it in their trailer for the book (link in the description below).
S. D. Chrostowska is a professor in the Graduate Program in Social and Political Thought at York University in Toronto. In addition to numerous academic publications, she previously published an inventive epistolary novel with Dalkey Archive in 2013. I would list all of her accolades, but I want to get to the book. Suffice it to say that Chrostowska is smarter than both of us.
Paris is now the capital of Greater America, a universal state of the near future. The totalitarian regime has figured out how to prohibit sleep and reverie to further the productivity of its citizens. Like Soma in Huxley’s Brave New World, which blankets over any form of discontent and unhappiness to make the state’s citizens pliable, here we have the drug Potium, which sustains the health of its users while eliminating their need for sleep, which the government has deemed the new “opium of the masses.” As another means of keeping the dream-prohibited masses servile, there is a Westworld-esque virtual reality called Comprehensive Illusion that allows people to indirectly fulfill their need to dream in a state-regulated environment.
A revolutionary named Chevauchet approaches our unnamed narrator, a dreamer in the Romantic and literal sense of the word, and leads him on a Virgilian tour through Onirica, a world built on dreams, which Chevauchet hopes to establish as the opposition to the totalitarian state.
Many different names crossed my mind as I read this book: Casares, Borges, Philip K. Dick, Voltaire, Camus, Orwell, Huxley. Even Lovecraft flitted through my head as I read a particular passage of the narrator’s thoughts concerning Chevauchet; it had the feel of the narrator in Lovecraft’s “From Beyond” as he writes about Crawford Tillinghast. But these writers only shade the work. Chrostowska forges her own style.
It’s a small book and highly concentrated in its thesis. The unnamed narrator becomes our guide, just as Chevauchet is his guide. The unemployed, narcoleptic narrator works on multiple levels. First, he is precisely the type of person the universal state of Greater American despises--that is, a dreamer. Second, he is precisely the type of person Chevauchet needs to develop his uptopia. And on still another level, the narrator is poetically inclined, which counterbalances Chevauchet’s often dry and didactic discourse. The result confirms that Chrostowska is adept as both professor and poet.
We get lines of sharp imagery delivered in luscious prose:
The closing sentences, too, are delivered in a manner that brings an ache to the chest for its poignant beauty.
The majority of the novel is dedicated to the exposition of Chevauchet’s oneiric ideas, his manifesto, his plans for Onirica’s revolution. It is thus a novel of ethos more than pathos, stimulating thought more than emotion. As the narrator says of him: “Many of Chevauchet’s ‘teachings’ were hard to take in large drafts. Nor did he bother to sweeten them. But, in his tireless animation, he would sometimes shift from the often dry, critical register to something like poetry” (63). Thus this book, too, is serialized into small sips of chapters, emulating the narrator’s processing and synthesis of all the information.
The best way to approach the book is as an innovation of the Platonic dialogue with Chevauchet as Socrates and the narrator as one of the many Platonic devil’s advocates. The narrator acts as a fulcrum to balance Chevauchet’s extended treatise on dreaming as the last bastion of personal freedom and the way in which his utopia can redeem this besieged front. These fragments of his philosophy are richly drawn from the author’s obvious critical thinking on the subject. Fantacide (death of the imagination); egeirocracy (a regime of total wakefulness); and Narcopolis (a community of sleepers). Chrostowska’s stringing of academic jargon gives a legitimacy to the book that blurs the certainty of whether or not this is fiction. I had to slow down and, well, think. This is a novel of ideas, not a simple theoretical thriller that flares in your mind as an ephemeral conjecture and then fizzles out. No. The Eyelid’s ideas are potent and beg real consideration.
The argument presented in the book is a crucial one. As we become more and more reliant on technology, we can begin to impose the same expectations of immediacy, precision, and endurance on human beings. In the book, the points about insomnia and workaholism as national values are particularly relevant. The worker who works his- or herself to the bone is valued in the workplace above the worker who simply fulfills the expectations of the job. Going above and beyond is the new average. And as for thinkers and artists, I recall David Denby’s telling statement from Great Books: “In America, a grown man or woman reading at home during the day is not a person to be taken seriously” (195). Points on this debate have also been expounded in Bertrand Russell’s 1932 essay “In Praise of Idleness” where he argues for the 4-hour workday and traces out the origins and development of labor as a virtue and leisure as waste. The apparently unpopular argument goes that a worker could produce higher quality work in a shorter amount of time if they are given ample time for leisure and rest, as opposed to the coffee-addled, bleary-eyed workforce that yawns its way through an eight-hour-plus day, eking out mediocre work. But try it out with your manager and see how far you get.
One of the most chilling moments in the book occurs when the narrator finds himself drifting off and people grab his shoulder and tell him to wake up. He remarks: “They were just ordinary passersby, citizens doing their duty to the state” (135).
The Eyelid, in its very title, evokes that thin fold that separates wakefulness and dreaming. That veil between two worlds. “The world is an eyeball in space, which nothing projects” we are told near the end. That is, the world has been shorn of its lids, its means for dreaming, and thus the final space of personal freedom has been vanquished. And for those of us who, like our narrator, decide to rally against this great appropriation of dreaming, we may well find ourselves immersed in the same irony as the narrator: he becomes so busy running his Narcopolis as a merchant of sleep that he has no time for sleeping. In a telling statement: “My eyelid twitched uncontrollably” (127).
I hope you consider getting a copy of this thought-inducing little book, and I really hope you enjoy it as much as I did.
… (mehr)
# Video review: https://youtu.be/p7S1JaoBzQM #
#################################
Transcript review:
And the aim was not revolution as we know it. Our resistance to the system could only take shape where one overthrew the symbolic order of reality: in a united dreamworld (48).
This book was sent to me from the Toronto-based publisher Coach House Books. The first thing that seized my attention was the construction of the physical book. As soon as my fingers came into contact with these pages I registered that something was a bit different. Visually, there was a nice creaminess that I’ve seen plenty of times before, but tactilely there was a pleasing ribbed texture. In the back of the book it explains that it was printed on Zephyr Antique Laid paper, which was manufactured, acid-free, in Saint-Jerome, Quebec, from second-growth forests. And it was printed with vegetable-based ink on a 1973 Heidelberg KORD offset litho press. This was a smart choice because it really sets the book apart and indulges my love for the physical text.
I’m a sucker for the Luddite novel. Give me anything that rails against the ruination of humanity in exchange for technological advancement we don’t need and I’m as happy--and agitated--as my teenaged self, reading Walden for the first time. I’m also a sucker for books written by professors. Barth, Gass, Eco, the list goes on. And The Eyelid is both of these. It takes the form of “a utopia wrapped in a dystopia,” as the publisher calls it in their trailer for the book (link in the description below).
S. D. Chrostowska is a professor in the Graduate Program in Social and Political Thought at York University in Toronto. In addition to numerous academic publications, she previously published an inventive epistolary novel with Dalkey Archive in 2013. I would list all of her accolades, but I want to get to the book. Suffice it to say that Chrostowska is smarter than both of us.
Paris is now the capital of Greater America, a universal state of the near future. The totalitarian regime has figured out how to prohibit sleep and reverie to further the productivity of its citizens. Like Soma in Huxley’s Brave New World, which blankets over any form of discontent and unhappiness to make the state’s citizens pliable, here we have the drug Potium, which sustains the health of its users while eliminating their need for sleep, which the government has deemed the new “opium of the masses.” As another means of keeping the dream-prohibited masses servile, there is a Westworld-esque virtual reality called Comprehensive Illusion that allows people to indirectly fulfill their need to dream in a state-regulated environment.
A revolutionary named Chevauchet approaches our unnamed narrator, a dreamer in the Romantic and literal sense of the word, and leads him on a Virgilian tour through Onirica, a world built on dreams, which Chevauchet hopes to establish as the opposition to the totalitarian state.
Many different names crossed my mind as I read this book: Casares, Borges, Philip K. Dick, Voltaire, Camus, Orwell, Huxley. Even Lovecraft flitted through my head as I read a particular passage of the narrator’s thoughts concerning Chevauchet; it had the feel of the narrator in Lovecraft’s “From Beyond” as he writes about Crawford Tillinghast. But these writers only shade the work. Chrostowska forges her own style.
It’s a small book and highly concentrated in its thesis. The unnamed narrator becomes our guide, just as Chevauchet is his guide. The unemployed, narcoleptic narrator works on multiple levels. First, he is precisely the type of person the universal state of Greater American despises--that is, a dreamer. Second, he is precisely the type of person Chevauchet needs to develop his uptopia. And on still another level, the narrator is poetically inclined, which counterbalances Chevauchet’s often dry and didactic discourse. The result confirms that Chrostowska is adept as both professor and poet.
We get lines of sharp imagery delivered in luscious prose:
Come autumn, the eyes reap color against the lengthening shadows and the night that seals them closed, as if nature, having already given spring to love and summer to leisure, made a season especially for dreamers, its days hazy and heavy-lidded, its evenings haloed and smudged by rain, the hours’ hours hypnotic passage sleeping all who, dazed and doubled in themselves, fall leaflike under its spell (9).
…where the air was clearer, crisper, where the grass was grizzled by frost… (10-11).
As white silence fell around me in flakes… (13).
I shivered as I uttered these words, feeling upon me the breath of approaching night, in whose cavernous mouth I caught sight of the uvular pendant of a waterfall (21).
The closing sentences, too, are delivered in a manner that brings an ache to the chest for its poignant beauty.
The majority of the novel is dedicated to the exposition of Chevauchet’s oneiric ideas, his manifesto, his plans for Onirica’s revolution. It is thus a novel of ethos more than pathos, stimulating thought more than emotion. As the narrator says of him: “Many of Chevauchet’s ‘teachings’ were hard to take in large drafts. Nor did he bother to sweeten them. But, in his tireless animation, he would sometimes shift from the often dry, critical register to something like poetry” (63). Thus this book, too, is serialized into small sips of chapters, emulating the narrator’s processing and synthesis of all the information.
The best way to approach the book is as an innovation of the Platonic dialogue with Chevauchet as Socrates and the narrator as one of the many Platonic devil’s advocates. The narrator acts as a fulcrum to balance Chevauchet’s extended treatise on dreaming as the last bastion of personal freedom and the way in which his utopia can redeem this besieged front. These fragments of his philosophy are richly drawn from the author’s obvious critical thinking on the subject. Fantacide (death of the imagination); egeirocracy (a regime of total wakefulness); and Narcopolis (a community of sleepers). Chrostowska’s stringing of academic jargon gives a legitimacy to the book that blurs the certainty of whether or not this is fiction. I had to slow down and, well, think. This is a novel of ideas, not a simple theoretical thriller that flares in your mind as an ephemeral conjecture and then fizzles out. No. The Eyelid’s ideas are potent and beg real consideration.
The argument presented in the book is a crucial one. As we become more and more reliant on technology, we can begin to impose the same expectations of immediacy, precision, and endurance on human beings. In the book, the points about insomnia and workaholism as national values are particularly relevant. The worker who works his- or herself to the bone is valued in the workplace above the worker who simply fulfills the expectations of the job. Going above and beyond is the new average. And as for thinkers and artists, I recall David Denby’s telling statement from Great Books: “In America, a grown man or woman reading at home during the day is not a person to be taken seriously” (195). Points on this debate have also been expounded in Bertrand Russell’s 1932 essay “In Praise of Idleness” where he argues for the 4-hour workday and traces out the origins and development of labor as a virtue and leisure as waste. The apparently unpopular argument goes that a worker could produce higher quality work in a shorter amount of time if they are given ample time for leisure and rest, as opposed to the coffee-addled, bleary-eyed workforce that yawns its way through an eight-hour-plus day, eking out mediocre work. But try it out with your manager and see how far you get.
One of the most chilling moments in the book occurs when the narrator finds himself drifting off and people grab his shoulder and tell him to wake up. He remarks: “They were just ordinary passersby, citizens doing their duty to the state” (135).
The Eyelid, in its very title, evokes that thin fold that separates wakefulness and dreaming. That veil between two worlds. “The world is an eyeball in space, which nothing projects” we are told near the end. That is, the world has been shorn of its lids, its means for dreaming, and thus the final space of personal freedom has been vanquished. And for those of us who, like our narrator, decide to rally against this great appropriation of dreaming, we may well find ourselves immersed in the same irony as the narrator: he becomes so busy running his Narcopolis as a merchant of sleep that he has no time for sleeping. In a telling statement: “My eyelid twitched uncontrollably” (127).
I hope you consider getting a copy of this thought-inducing little book, and I really hope you enjoy it as much as I did.
… (mehr)
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