These were for the second day (having read through and including the first Timothy Cavendish section). They are a bit less complete than I would have liked, which reflects me running out of time.
finish up list of themes from last time
- the human and its passing
- see page 3
- page 6: assumptions about the human
- 10: the question of civilization
- it seems eternal, but it will not last
- it is historical
- and, it seems for Mitchell, cyclical
- all forms of government bad (this is Nietzschean)
- 61
- all exploit
- all are human constructions and shall pass
- Foucault takes this from Nietzsche
- both are antidotes to Hegel
- see 62: Zarathustra
- 76: times change and empires fall
- 81: hankering for immortality
- through authorship
- will it work?
- we will see something of it in the 1970s section
- chance
- especially the references in the second part to croupiers, but also the fact of the way that Ewing and Autua meet, etc
- chance stands opposed to necessity
- necessity is a property of the eternal as opposed to the historical, but the two become confused
- what is historical is, in theories contrary to the Hegelian, what is accidental
- not that it happened on accident, but that what happens could have happened otherwise or could have not happened at all
- textuality
plural amanuenses, is a person employed to write or type what another dictates or to copy what has been written by another, and also refers to a person who signs a document on behalf of another under their authority. The term derives from a Latin expression made up of a suffix, -ensis, “belonging to”, and prefix, manu-, “hand”.
The word originated in ancient Rome, for a slave at his master’s personal service “within hand reach”, performing any command; later it was specifically applied to an intimately trusted servant (often a freedman) acting as a personal secretary.
- the issue here connects slavery to textuality as well as to the undecidable nature of the text
- who writes it?
- this is an issue in the second part
- who completes it?
- who reads it?
- see also 65: giving up share of authorship
- cf “His Master’s Voice” on page 60
- see also the thematic links between Arys’s musical works and the rest of the text
- page 52
- untergehen: to die out or to go down fighting
- love
- of all kinds, even amongst people who never know one another
- Romanticism
- this last related to the question of the new
- are classics good?
- should we try to overcome them?
- can we, or are we always simply plagiarizing from the past?
- see 83: daring ideas in old age
the problem of fiction and reality
- we know how we are “getting” the Adam Ewing section already
- Robert Frobisher is reading it
- we also know that Frobisher, who is no authority certainly, questions the authenticity of the journal
- so let’s ask two more questions
- how are we “getting” the Robert Frobisher section?
- how are we “getting” the Luisa Rey section?
- what is the implication of the latter?
- if Luisa Rey (and Rufus Sixsmith) is fictional, does that mean that Robert Frobisher is fictional
- if Robert Frobisher and Sixsmith are fictional, does that mean that
- see 119: Cloud Atlas Sextet
- we know of its existence in the present before we know of its existence in the past
- implies that Luisa has read more of the letters than we have
evening redness 