Class Notes 3/1 & Beckett

Notes: (My own input will be in parentheses)

World as Dream & Illusion

( The above theme leads me think of the world as Maya, from Hindu philosophy,Advaita Vedanta philosophy, it is all an illusion. Everything is Maya. Since Brahman is the only truth, Maya cannot be true. Imaginary man running up an imaginary tree from an imaginary Elephant.)

To Do: We should start blogging on The Tempest, The Matrix, and Stranger then Fiction

In class we watched an abbreviated version of Stranger Than Fiction (Thank you Rio!)
Lowbrow version of Beckett = Movie, Stranger Than Fiction

Blog: How does this movie connect to:
-Fiction as life
-Samuel Beckett
?

fiction being truth??
(But isn't fiction often more interesting than reality? Why do people read books? or watch movies....to see a more interesting and different [fictional] reality. This makes me think of The Decay of Lying, Wilde, "Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life". [from wikipedia] Wilde holds that art sets the aesthetic principles by which people perceive life. What is found in life and nature is not what is really there, but is that which artists have taught people to find there, through art.)

We are all in a story........(our own story I suppose)
But what if we are all characters in a story....?

In the movie he saves the boy from being killed by the bus, and he says, "I had to." Not only because he is a compassionate man, but because it was written.
(Am I writing this blog because that is how I am written in a novel starring myself?....or maybe someone else? or maybe no one? or maybe the human race? I can't help but recommend Paul Auster's book Travels in the Scriptorium.......again. If you liked the movie Stranger Than Fiction, you might like this short novel. I will lend it out.)

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Samuel Beckett link, Samuel Beckett's Postmodern Fictions by Brian Finney

The unstable, heterogeneous and dispersed social reality of the postmodern
cannot be contained within any totalizing theory. Without such metanarratives,
Lyotard argues, each work of art, "working without rules in order to formulate
the rules of what will have been done," becomes a unique event describing its
own process of coming into being.

This is what Beckett's fictions do.
Each one starts out anew, inventing its rules as it goes along. Its subject is
itself, the narrating voice creating a world out of language. Before, between
and after the jabber of words that constitute the fiction is silence. How to
express silence through sound? Beckett is preoccupied with this dilemma from the
beginning of his career.