Saturn Devouring His Son

2011 nomadWhat Sustains Us The Comparative Literature Program’s Journal of Undergraduate Writing University of Oregon The University of Oregon is an equal-opportunity, affirmative-action institu- tion committed to cultural diversity and compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act. This publication will be made available in accessible formats upon request. Accommodations for people with disabilities will be provided if requested in advance by calling (541) 346-0934. EDITORIAL BOARD EDITOR Amanda Cornwall EDITORIAL BOARD Dr. Lisa Freinkel Anna Kovalchuk Jenny Odintz MENTORS TO THE UNDERGRADUATE WRITERS Jacob Barto Sunayani Bhattacharya Jeong Chang Antontio Couso-Lianez Rachel Eccleston Valerie Egan Andrea Gilroy Susi Gomez Anna Kovlachuk Amy Leggette Chet Lisiecki Laura Mangano Emily McGinn Jenny Odintz Whitney Phillips Max Rayneard Sophie Sapp Martha Searcey Dr. Laura Selph Dr. Michael Stern Emily Taylor Mona Tougas SPECIAL THANKS to Sharon Kaplan and The Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art for their generous sponsorship of the Nomad Undergraduate Conference COVER PHOTOGRAPHY Braeden Cox CONTENTS vii Editor’s Comments RAQUEL LEVINE 9 Sustaining/Consuming the Ego: Francisco Goya’s and Peter Paul Rubens’ Saturn Devouring his Son LUCAS ANDINO 28 To Shit as Ginsberg NICK SNYDER 48 Exsanguinating Friendship: Alienation and Love in Let the Right One In PATTY NASH 67 Pornography in the Kitchen: Ree Drummond’s Pioneer Woman, Food Porn, and the Rules of Domesticity JACOB PLAGMANN 80 Dynamic Self-Becoming and the Perception of Christian Sin in Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov and the Works of Søren Kierkegaard OLIVIA AWBREY 101 Sembene Ousmane’s “Tribal Scars”: Storytelling as Sustenance in Post- Colonial Senegal CONTENTS KAYLA MEEHAN 118 “Begun by Living Actors, is Ended by Automa- tons”: A Discourse of [Post]humanism and Discontinuity in The Possibility of an Island LAUREN GREENHALL 136 The Red Tent and the Implications of Empowerment Within the Framework of Niddah ANNA HARDIN 153 From Typeset to Hypertext: Stranger in a Strange Land and the Future of the Book JOSHUA ZIRL 171 Flickering Reality: Illuminating Delusional Self-Sustainment Using Nabokov’s Pale Fire VANIA LOREDO 190 Without a Hand to Hold: The Exploration of Brazilian Children’s Family Reality in Child of the Dark and Cidade de Deus ©2011 University of Oregon Comparative Literature Program All Rights Reserved EDITOR’S COMMENTS s I think about this year’s NOMAD theme, “What Sustains AUs,” I’m amazed at the depth and variety of interpretations of the theme that this year’s mentees brought to the table. From Saturn Devouring his Son to Brazilian favelas, from scatalogical poetry to food pornography, our mentees have examined the question of sustenance in innovative and creative ways, pressing upon the theme until it yielded up these eleven outstanding essays. When I think about what this theme means to me, I can’t help but think about all of the people who work together to sustain the NOMAD project. I think of the graduate and faculty mentors who work to help sustain the efforts of the undergraduate mentees, who in turn sustain each other through their mutual support, collegiality, and camaraderie. The mentorship coordinators, Anna Kovalchuk and Jenny Odintz, who I can’t thank enough for their tireless efforts, provided sustenance for the project through their meticulous organization and careful communication. Emily Comments Editor’s McGinn and Jenny Odintz labored to sustain the integrity of the writing through their careful copy editing work, and I am deeply grateful for their eagle-eyed scrutiny. Sharon Kaplan, Museum Educator at the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art, made our NOMAD conference possible through the generous sponsorship that she facilitated. Dr. Max Rayneard, editor emeritus, provided no end of assistance to me as I put the journal together. Dr. Lisa Freinkel’s leadership, vision, and guidance were invaluable, and 7 of course the whole project would be unsustainable without the incomparable dedication of Cynthia Stockwell. AMANDA CORNWALL nomad Raquel Levine is a comparative literature major with a minor in Spanish. EVINE L This essay is dedicated to her Zaidy. Nomad Prize for Excellence in AQUEL Undergraduate Scholarship: Winner R Mentor: Max Rayneard SUSTAINING/CONSUMING THE EGO: FRANCISCO GOYA’S AND PETER PAUL RUBENS’ SATURN DEVOURING HIS SON rancisco Goya’s 19th century painting, Saturn Devouring his Son, Fpresents us with an emaciated and startled Saturn tearing away at a partially devoured corpse. The sickly looking Saturn of Goya’s painting is one of many renderings of the ancient Greek and Roman myth in which the angry god devours his children for fear of being overthrown by them. While Goya’s is perhaps the most popular depiction of the myth, the particular image was likely inspired by Peter Paul Rubens’ majestic representation, completed more than a century before Goya was born (Hughes 383). In Rubens’ painting of the 10 same title, we see Saturn as an old man ripping at the soft chest of an infant. Formally, the two paintings share few immediately obvious aesthetic qualities and do not evoke the same “mood” or reaction. In fact, the foremost visible commonality between the two great works is their thematic foundation—Saturn devouring his son. The god Saturn has held various cachets in western culture. nomad His significance has been subject to flux depending on the social context from which it is perceived. My essay examines this transition and how it manifests itself in the ancient festival of Saturnalia and through various iterations of the Roman Catholic Carnival in seventeenth century Italy and nineteenth century Spain. Between the time of Rubens’ and Goya’s rendering of Saturn, an enormous ideological shift took place that inverted the figure’s cultural significance from sublimity to abjection, terms which I will define using Julia Kristeva’s work The Powers of Horror: Essays on Abjection. I want to consider these pieces not merely as political protest or emotional expression, as has been done in the past,1 but as products of the philosophical, theological, and intellectual environment in which they were created. The myth of Saturn is that the Roman god (or his Greek counterpart, Kronos) is destined to be overthrown by one of his children. To avoid this eventuality he eats each child as he or she is born. However, their mother, Ops, manages to save their son, 1 See Hughes 383-384; Muller 170-177. Saturn Devouring his Son Peter Paul Rubens, Saturn Devouring His Son, 1636 Zeus, who eventually kills Saturn as was originally predicted (Warner 53). At its most fundamental level this tale contradicts one’s assumptions about linear generational progression and the familial roles that sustain them: a father should not eat his children. Rather, 11 one expects that he would nurture and sustain his offspring. However, the myth of Saturn dismantles the security that is 12 nomad Francisco Goya, Saturn Devouring His Son, 1819-1823 invested into the idea of a father and turns it into something threatening. We can use Kristeva’s work to understand this phenomenon as a collapse of symbolic stability. In Kristevan semianalysis, the “symbolic realm” is a patriarchal, structured system of signs, language and law that is in perpetual conflict with the “semiotic realm,” which exists as a matriarchal, pre- symbolic state of chaos (12). The ego or the “I” is situated within the symbolic realm. Its existence is made possible by the subject’s entry into language (the symbolic realm), which is facilitated by the infant’s separation from the undifferentiated whole within which it is a function rather than an individual (13). This separation is initiated by the “mirror phase,” or the moment when an infant sees his reflection in the mirror and recognizes himself as a separate entity from his mother (Kristeva 14). At this point the infant discovers the contours of his body and realizes there is space between him and his mother (and even that he is separate from the space that surrounds him), thus warranting the implementation of language to describe and secure these newly found borders. Kristeva draws on Freudian stages of development for her own analysis of the experience of the abject (as well as of the sublime). The mirror phase is the catalyst for our relocation from the semiotic realm to the symbolic realm and Saturn Devouring his Son requires that we acquire language sustain that independence. Kristeva says, “the abject confronts us...within our personal archeology, with our earliest attempts to release the hold of maternal entity even before ex-isting outside of her, thanks to the autonomy of language” (13). Thus the abject is the potential of the failure of language as a safeguard from the disorder of the semiotic realm; a failure of symbolic agency. 13 When Saturn consumes his children it initiates a reversal of their separation, a reinforcement of the subject into the parental organism. The semiotic (the illogic of cannibalism and infanticide) is consumed by the symbolic (father), which in turn means that the symbolic order of the linear bloodline is collapsed. In this way the “I” or the ego becomes lost in the collapse of structure 14 that the myth represents. Kristeva captures that loss of the self, asking, “how can I be without be without border?” (4). After the ego’s separation from the semiotic realm, it becomes dependent on symbolic order to sustain and reinforce that “autonomy;” language and law are used to quarantine the disorder of the semiotic realm. Kristeva theorizes that the sublime and the abject occur within the immanent space between the symbolic and nomad semiotic realms. The experience of the abject is an innate, “corporeal” reaction that alerts us of the potential of a symbolic collapse such as we see in the myth of Saturn.

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