Anthony Cortez's Journal

Duras/Barthes
I do not think that the connections between The Lover and Barthes are much different from the connections made in the previous books. Many of the conceptions of love that we have dealt with this year in our novels have been on the physical side (body-centered), with others being more on the spiritual side. The only difference here is that Duras’ writing makes the role of the body in love much more evident where in some of the other books we have read, the body’s role was more “disguised.” Although it seems like Duras and Barthes are “bodyists”, and a bit different from the other authors we have dealt with, I think that they just emphasize the role of something that plays just as big a role in all of the other works we have examined this year.

Duras and the Body
Duras incorporates the body into her writing by speaking of it more than the minds of the characters, for example, during the lovemaking scene between the French girl and her Chinese lover. In most cases of lovemaking, it is the body that puts one into the wild, animalistic mode during the sex act. As Duras shows, it is the body that is the center of attention during lovemaking and in many other arenas when desire is involved.
The body is a reverse in essence or nature because the body often doesn’t reflect who we truly are inside. Falling in love with, and desiring someone’s true essence or nature is a warm, soothing, calm, happy type of deal. When we desire the body; however, it is usually a madness. When people desire the bodies of others, they seem to turn crazy and want to start tearing off clothes and squirting KY Jelly all over the room. Falling in love with another’s soul usually isn’t like this. I believe this to be the reason why the body is a figure of madness for Barthes and Duras.

Bonjour Tristesse/Barthes
I felt that the passage in Barthes’ A Lover’s Discourse entitled “The Other’s Body clearly connected with Bonjour Tristesse. It is simple, to the point, and states: “Any thought, any feeling, any interest aroused in the amorous subject by the loved body.” In the novel, Cecile and her father are clearly much more in to the physical and superficial side of love than the deep, spiritual side of it. Although her father begins to change his ways when Anne comes into the picture, he obviously couldn’t escape the temptation to be with Elsa’s body again at the end of the novel.
Cecile realizes at the end that her and Cyril were not really in love with one another. They were merely indulging in one another’s bodies. This was the same case with her father and Elsa, in addition. Throughout the novel, most of the feelings of love that Cecile and her father felt (or thought they were feeling) were feelings of love that were conjured up by their lovers’ bodies, and not minds.

Filmic adaptation of Bonjour Tristesse
As far as the filmic adaptation of Bonjour Tristesse is concerned, I feel that the book is portrayed quite accurately on the big screen. The characters surprisingly gave me almost the same “feel” as the book, with a few minor exceptions. The unfolding of events and the storyline were near perfect, with the exception of how quick Anne came into the picture in the book, and a few other minor details concerning the characters relations with one another. I think that adaptation from book to film was a relatively easy due to the straightforwardness and simplicity of the storyline as opposed to a book like Madame Bovary where the internalized thoughts and attitudes of the characters were much deeper, ambiguous, and ever-changing. It would take one hell of an effort to perfectly or near perfectly represent a book such as Madame Bovary on the big screen compared to Bonjour Tristesse.

Barthes/Thief's Journal
A passage in Barthe’s “A Lover’s Discourse” that I feel connected with “Thief’s Journal” was the one titled “Love’s Obscenity.” It states: “discredited by modern opinion, love’s sentimentality must be assumed by the amorous subject as a powerful transgression which leaves him alone and exposed; by a reversal of values, then, it is this sentimentality which today constitutes love’s obscenity.” Due to the style of Genet’s book and the way it deals with the subject of love, I had some trouble at first linking Barthes to it.
On pages 57-62, Genet speaks of his position in the relationship he has with Stilitano. Genet sees himself as sort of an “apprentice” of Stilitano’s, with Stilitano being the macho, fearless, “in-control”, leader type of guy. Genet admires this quality and seems to want it for himself. Through love and his relationship, the much of the deeper side of Genet’s personality is revealed, and it is the sentimentality he has in Stilitano’s presence that allows this exposure of his true self to come forward (the female-like, submissive side that wishes it was “bigger and bolder”). As far as the part of the Barthes passage concerning modern opinion considering this exposure “obscene”, I can only agree that society would view an exposure like this as strange and obscene (I think this is what Barthes is trying to say, but I may not know what the hell I’m talking about).

Theifs Journal Challenge
I think that “Thief’s Journal” is a challenge to the average person’s expectations of language, topics of discussion, and overall “flow” of a novel. In this work, it seems as if Genet sought out to produce the most “raw” account of his life possible. He did not want to censor any aspect of the book, or make it “friendlier” to accommodate average Joe Blow’s happy little evening of relaxing on the couch, reading a nice little book. Genet’s style of writing helps to communicate the inner experience of Genet’s life to the reader in a much more effective fashion than a “normally” written book could. At first, I felt it to be a challenge (adapting to his style), but after a short time, I began to see why Genet’s style was so appropriate for the goal he set out to achieve in his writing and the book took on a flow of its own.

Immoralist/Barthes
A passage in Barthe’s “A Lover’s Discourse” I found to be connected to “The Immoralist was the one titled “I want to understand”. This passage states “suddenly perceiving the amorous episode as a knot of inexplicable reasons and impaired solutions, the subject exclaims: “I want to understand (what is happening to me)!” This perfectly connects to the fact that Michel often assesses his relationship with Marceline trying to understand what the relationship truly means to him, and how he fits into it.
This becomes especially evident as Michel begins to shed his illness, along with his old self, and starts to realize more and more that he married a woman that fit his old “untrue” self, and not what he was becoming (or, discovering). When Michel starts to get in touch with his new, “true” self, the inexplicable knot of his marriage starts to become clearer to him. Now that Michel is starting to understand what is happening to him and where he is going, numerous repressed areas of his self are now coming forward and making sense to him, along with the true essence of why he married this woman. He sensed a problem before, but just couldn’t explain what it was until he started to untangle the knot of his life, and the transformation he was going through.

Madame Bovary/Barthes
A passage in Roland Barthes' "A Lover's Discourse" I found to be connected to Madame Bovary is the one on "Ideas of Solution". The passage states that "enitcements of solutions, whatever they may be, which afford the amorous subject, despite their frequently catestrophic character, a temporary peace; hallucinatory of the possible outcomes of the amorous crisis". This line pretty much connects with the fact that Emma finds temporary solutions for entertaining herself, displacing her passions, and distracting herself from the boring, monotonous marriage she is stuck in.
Throuout the book, Emma is constantly trying to temporarily solve her problem with Charles despite the fact that the consequences had potentially devestating results. Not only does she temporarily solve her problem by seeing the other men that she does, Emma is constantly thinking about things that take her mind off of Charles and the marriage. She fantasizes about going to Paris with the Viscount, writes letters to Rodolphe, and seems to stare off into the distance in deep thought, etc. Emma's wandering, indulgent mind makes her able to deal with a situation that would otherwise be unbearable for her.

Bovary/Casting
Well, when casting characters for a movie one has to take into consideration (like with many things) that spoken language is very limiting. Somthing about the mannarisms and ways that a character has communicates somthing that words can not, so casting is extremely important. From what I get out of Emma and Charles' characters, I would pick Michael Dougless (minus a few wrinkles) and Wynona Ryder for their roles. Dougless can easily give off the monotonous, simple minded, plain, oblivious feeling as was evident in his role as the drug czar in Traffic. Wynona rider (without saying a word) gives off a cold shouldered, sneaky, "the storm is approaching" feeling that Emma seems to display in the book.
When adapting the novel to film version, I believe that the director needs to be aware of the feelings the author is trying to communicate to the reader rather than simply reciting the book word for word with un-thought-out casting. The feeling and mindset one attains from watching a movie or reading a book, in my opinion, is the most important part of it. If a director casts certain characters who give off feelings that do not parallel the ones produced in the book, I would not call it an accurate representation of the book (even if every line is identical). To deal with these problems, a director needs to transcend language and sort of feel out the "vibes" that an actor or actress may give off to his or her audience.

Werther/Barthes Connection
A selection in Lover's Discourse I found to be connected to Werther was the one " And The Night Illuminated the Night". Barthes quotes that night is "any state which provokes in the subject the metaphor of the darkness, whether affective, intellective, or existential, in which he suffers or subsides". I believe that the mental torment of Werther's longing for Lotte was a type of darkeness that "illuminated" other darknesses in his life.
The "darkness" of the mental torment produced in Werther by the situation he was in consequently put "dark lenses" in front of the eyeglasses he viewed reality through. Although not immediatly evident, the extent to which his mental darkness darkened the way he viewed the world became clear when he was talking about how nature was no longer beautiful and full of life to him. Werther now saw nature as forces forever devouring, regurgitating, chewing, and gorging. His world became so dark that art lost its meaning, and his world of hapiness and butterflies became nonexistant. Thunderstorms and black clouds were all that remained in Werther's world of nature and beauty thanks to a woman and a little mental torture.

Werther/Pop Culture
When relating a text from our popular culture to Goethe’s novel, a particular line in the Led Zeppelin song “Whole Lotta Love” comes to mind. Toward the end of the song, Robert Plant says, “I wanna be your backdoor man”, implying that he wants to sneak into the girl’s place secretly through the back door and avoid being seen. Werther certainly plays “back door man” with Lotte and wants to avoid being “seen” (mostly in a metaphorical sense, but also physically toward the end of the book) by Albert.
Although Werther’s game of back door man isn’t the teenage-like “I’m going to screw the girl when her parents are sleeping” type of deal that Plant was probably thinking, the “backdoor man” phenomena exists in many different forms among human beings, one of them being the situation Werther is in. Despite the fact that Werther is around Albert quite often when he sees Lotte, the intentions of his visit are very much “backdoor” to Albert until later part of the book. It always seems as if lovers (or one person who loves another) are at one time or another trying to hide some part of the truth from someone (one another, parents, spouses).

Symposium/ Lover's Discourse Connection
A particular passage in Barthes' book that I found to be connected to Plato's Symposium was the one on Union (pg.226), which spoke of the dream of total union with the loved being. In Symposium, Diotema told Socrates that love acted as a "mediator" between the physical (human) world and the divine world, thus allowing the two to communicate. Love is the means for humans to reach the divine plane of ultimate being, or union with the object (whatever this may be).
Diotema implies that love may be imposed on anything to acheive total union with it. This may be a person, an academic discipline (philosopy with Socrates), a hobby, or a way of life. Having true love for someone or somthing unites the person and the thing in a special divine way where the two become one. For instance, I love to play guitar. I invest endless hours in practice, and enjoy everything about it from the physical discipline to the ability to create feelings that words can not. The feeling of love for the instrument unites me with it to the point where the current mood I am in spills over into my playing for the moment. No, I don't have sex with the guitar.

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