Humanities Crash Course Week 44: Modernist Art

Conveying ideas and feelings by transcending conventional words and images.

Week 44 of the humanities crash course had me delving into three modernist classics by two Irish authors: Samuel Beckett’s absurdist play Waiting for Godotand selections from James Joyce’s Dubliners and Ulysses. I’d long been intimidated by the latter, but enjoyed the first episode. (I’ll likely finish the novel next year, after I’m done with the course.) I also watched a movie that was both absurd (in the best sense) and appropriate to Halloween. Onwards!

Readings

Per Gioia’s recommendation, I only read the first episode of Ulysses. I won’t summarize it here, since it didn’t give me a sense for the overall story. I’ll just say I loved how Joyce played with language. While it’s clearly prose, it has the musicality and color of verse. I’m actually looking forward to reading the rest of the novel.

I also only read the last story in Dubliners, titled The Dead. A couple — Gabriel and Gretta Conroy — attend a dinner party hosted by the Gabriel’s aunt. After many sentimental reminiscences, they go home. Before turning in, Gretta emotionally recalls her first love: a young man who died many years before. This triggers in Gabriel an epiphany about love, memory, and mortality.

Waiting for Godot is the most famous modernist play. It consists of two acts and has a sparse minimalist setting and only five characters. The main ones are Vladimir (“Didi”) and Estragon (“Gogo“), two drifters. They meet under a bare tree in a road to wait for someone called Godot. They’re unsure why they’re waiting or who Godot is, but expect he’ll help them.

Eventually, two other men arrive: Pozzo and Lucky. The former has enslaved the latter, driving him leashed like a dog and grossly mistreating him. We learn Pozzo is on the way to a market to sell Lucky. Lucky says nothing until Pozzo orders him to dance and think. He dons a hat and a long stream of academic-sounding gibberish pours from him.

After Pozzo and Lucky leave, a boy arrives. He claims to be a messenger from Godot, and he tells Vladimir and Estragon that Godot has said he’ll come tomorrow. They decide to leave the tree and return the next day, but as the first scene ends, they’re still hanging out under the tree.

And that’s also where the second scene catches them. The tree now has leaves, but we might be looking at the following day. Estragon’s boots are where he left them the previous day, but he doesn’t remember the previous day. He doesremember being beaten overnight. We sense the character’s codependency and frustration: they keep wishing they’d brought a rope to hang themselves on the tree.

Pozzo and Lucky return, but they’re changed: Pozzo is now blind and Lucky is mute. They don’t remember what happened the previous day either. After they leave, a boy comes. He could be the same as before, but (surprise!) doesn’t remember the previous day. Still, he claims Godot will meet them tomorrow. Gogo and Didi say they’ll leave and return in the morning. But as in the first act, they just hang out under the tree as the lights go down.

Audiovisual

Music: Traditional Irish and Scottish music. For some reason, it was easier to find playlists of the former than the latter on Apple Music. Lots of bagpipes and fiddles!

Arts: The most famous artist of the 20th Century, Pablo Picasso. I’ve had the privilege of seeing many of his works IRL and read a biography years ago, so I didn’t revisit his work this week.

Les Demoiselles D’Avignon (1907) by Pablo Picasso, Museum of Modern Art via Wikimedia

That said, I can see the connection between his latter work and Beckett’s work. Both are abstract yet still convey important truths about the human experience.

Cinema: David Lynch’s first film, ERASERHEAD (1977). I first watched this in college decades ago and didn’t get or enjoy it. I liked it better this time around, although I still don’t get it. (But that may be part of the point.)

The theme is anxiety about sex and parenthood, but summarizing the plot is pointless: this film is about a vibe. Gorgeous black and white photography. Extremely mannered performances. Grimy industrial setting. Gross-out body horror. A moody ASLR avant la lettre soundtrack. Mysterious yet bizarrely matter-of-fact dialog.

In short, many hallmarks of Lynch’s later movies are present here. But I enjoyed BLUE VELVET and MULHOLLAND DRIVE more. ERASERHEAD feels more like an extended industrial/ambient music video than a movie. One can’t watch it without appreciating the fact it exists at all: it was scraped together over five years by people who must’ve expected no commercial upside.

Reflections

Much art is about communicating the human experience. What is it like to be? How do we live with each other? How do we respond to conflict or other challenging situations? Etc. Some works take a “realistic” approach to such questions: we recognize in them people, stories, and scenarios of the sort we might encounter ourselves in “real life.”

But some works go in a completely different direction. Rather than aim for realism, they communicate through more abstract means. Picasso’s paintings are the archetype. For example, if not for its title, most people would likely fail to recognize a woman in this painting:

Femme assise dans un fauteuil (Eva) (1913) by Pablo Picasso, Metropolitan Museum of Art via Wikimedia

Godot felt like that to me. I’ve never met anyone like its characters, and their situation and environment felt wholly contrived. But I recognized truths about my life in the play. For example, I often feel a breakthrough’s imminent. Perhaps tomorrow? But it doesn’t happen — and I’m still waiting.

Then there’s the question of memory. I know what I’m experiencing at any given moment, but then the moment passes. Sometimes, I remember what happened — or think I do. But often, I don’t remember at all. Do I recognize the lacuna or unconsciously fill in the blanks? Surely, yes. Perhaps?

Representing such vague ideas and feelings can perhaps be best done non-representationally. Language can trick us into perceiving more precision than is appropriate. Some of what’s conveyed is more somatic than conceptual: ERASERHEAD and Godot evoke feelings as effectively as ideas — and perhaps more usefully.

Notes on Note-taking

I’ve continued experimenting with Copilot for Obsidian. To remind you: this plugin allows you to pass files from your vault to various LLMs so you can chat with your notes.

I’ll start by summarizing what I’ve read (or watch, in the case of the movies.) In some cases, I’ll use the Text Generator plugin for GPT-4o mini to write a summary or outline of the work. Then, I’ll pass my notes to another LLM that helps me spot and correct errors and refine impressions.

I’ve used this process throughout the course. For the last step, I used to copy and paste my notes into a ChatGPT window. (I’ve set up a ChatGPT project for the course.) But now, I simply open the Copilot panel alongside the note in Obsidian, saving the round trip to the chat bot.

This makes the process more fluid, since I’m more willing to jump to LLM interactions earlier on. I’m only using a fraction of this plugin’s capabilities, but it’s clearly changing how I think through my notes.

Up Next

Gioia recommends Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse and selected poetry from T.S. Eliot including The Waste Land and “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” (Alack! More verse!) Again, there’s a YouTube playlist for the videos I’m sharing here. See you next week!

This post first appeared on my blog.