I was thinking about the comments made that we often wait too long and may lose the moment for change, for example the lack of drastic change during the Obama administration, thus far. Perhaps the reason there has been no revolutionary change and merely "incremental" change is because of Freud's idea on the compulsion to repeat. The idea of revolutionary change causes anxiety because it proposes something completely new and would force people to stop the repetition. Because as Freud notes, we feel the need to repeat (perhaps for control or comfort), even if the thing we are repeating causes us pain or harm. Perhaps the reason we don't see revolutionary change so often is because we as a people could not bear the upset it would cause. Perhaps revolutionary change is too dangerous and detrimental to our psyche. If the ways and customs that people follow are abolished and replaced by something altogether different, then the continuum is broken, and, although we verbally call for change, perhaps we subconsciously fear it because it leaves us with nothing familiar to grasp.
One purpose for writing in the wake of disaster is to restore some stable order so as to make sense out of the disruption and reorient oneself with respect to the world. Later, we'll consider the fact that this can be construed as an essentially conservative orientation. One literary technique that can be used toward this end is the use of structure as a stylistic element. In Will 'O The Wisp we can see that Drieu divided the novel into twelve episodes, and in the context of the pervasive references to time, this recalls the twelve hours of the clock - a manner of ordering and domesticating time. Given that the novel deals with a past event, this is not insignificant. Moreover, episodes often mirror one another, in particular the opening and closing scenes - in the bed at Dr. de la Barbonais' clinic.
In the manuscript version of Will 'O The Wisp (pictured below), Drieu in fact numbered the episodes. Why would he have deleted them upon publication. (It's interesting to note that the earlier English translation, entitled "The Fire Within" restores this numbering).
It is also important to note that Farewell to Gonzague was not published in the original edition of 1931. It was found among his papers after his death (some of these papers pictured below), and it is attached to Will 'O The Wisp because Gonzague refers to the same person, Jacques Rigaut, as Alain, and it is chronologically later.
It does appear that he may have planned to publish it, as he did produce a dactylograph (typed version - below). Why did he not publish it?
Finally, as we may or may not finish the film in class tomorrow (hopefully we will), I found that it is available in 10 segments on youtube. Here is the first segment.
We have already noted the rather circuitous path toward death taken by Alain in Will 'O The Wisp. While it is certainly evidence of premeditation, and possibly even rationality, his final peripeteia seems to me more than either a desperate attempt to find a reason to continue living or a last round of goodbyes. It seems absolutely necessary for him to do. It called to mind the passage in Beyond the Pleasure Principle where Freud says of life's inevitable path toward death - as the organism becomes more complex, the path becomes increasingly circuitous and these detours are what we know as life. This would imply that we cannot fight the death drive head-on, but that the best we can do is to divert it from us. This dynamic system seems to be a perfect parallel to the Second Law of Thermodynamics, i.e. the Law of Entropy. That is, in any given system, in the absence of energy input from outside of it tends inevitably toward greater disorder and lesser energy over time, eventually reaching zero, or death. Does the psyche operate according to this law? Does life? Life is physical in basis, so I tend toward answering in the affirmative, myself.
This perspective certainly has implications for our understanding of the novel and the issues at work. If disaster means disorientation, then in a sense it means disorder, so how to conceive of disaster in these terms? One final note, all of this called to mind a quote from William S. Burroughs, though I can't find it for the life of me, but he writes of the junkie seeking cold, an absolute zero. So perhaps Alain's use of heroin could find new meaning in this view.
I hope that by now it's clear why I asked you to read Beyond the Pleasure Principle before Will 'O The Wisp. At very least, Freud's theory of the drives and of the compulsion to repeat are useful concepts with which to interpret Drieu's novel and, particularly, the psyche of Alain.
An interesting thought recently crossed my mind apropos of the intersection between Drieu's novel and Freud's drive-theory. That is: Freud explicitly associates the life-drives with the unconscious, while the death-drive is an "ego-drive" (with the caveat, of course, that parts of the ego are not conscious - for instance, the preconscious). If this is the case, then this implies that Alain's self-destruction is not due to an unconscious urge (after all, his use of drugs and ultimately his suicide are quite deliberate acts), but are rather manifestations of a perhaps hypertrophied ego. After all, sexuality is associated with the unconscious and the life-drive, and Alain seems to have "difficulties" in that respect.
What other implications follow? Moreover, how could we interpret this otherwise?
