Sociological Dramaturgy

Our discussion on Thursday was one of my favorites from the class. Discussing how we change our language for different situations fascinates me because in this hyperindividualistic culture, people can't stand to think that they aren't themselves at all times. But we all do it.

Sociologist Erving Goffman called this "sociological dramaturgy." He proposed that we have two selfs, the front-stage self and the backstage self. Front-stage self is the "nice face" we put on for coworkers, our boss, neighbors, and the like. The backstage self is how we act at home when around only intimate friends and family. Some people call this "being fake," but with it being completely unavoidable, I'm not sure if that matters.

Spentropy

After reading Thomas Pynchon's "Entropy", it followed me around. I was walking to my math tutoring session in the Sinclair library, and passed by the reproductions of documents from the founding of the United States, primarily the Constitution. Then I passed by the African tribal art that is in the glass cases in the library. I was reminded of all the lengths curators have gone to preserve the actual physical Constitution in the National Archives in Washington D.C. It is kept out of sunlight, because UV rays will cause it to fade. It was encased in helium, and now in argon to preserve the parchment. Despite all of this, there is nothing we can do to keep it from deteriorating forever.

The famous Percy Bysshe Shelley poem "Ozymandias" talks about a statue of the Egyptian king that has crumbled and ironically says at the bottom, "My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings: Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!" This strong statue made of stone couldn't survive the elements, which eroded it away. The whole of art preservation seems to be a field of resisting change, of fighting against entropy. In a way it seems like a noble, though ultimately fruitless, battle.

God damn Thomas Pynchon is depressing.

A Nameless Dread

This week I finished Brett Easton Ellis' American Psycho. It features a rich wall street executive losing his mind and killing numerous people in vicious and sexual manners. It is not for those with weak stomachs to say the least. Some passages seriously made me feel disturbed like some sort of sympathy pain, except sympathy psychosis.

I am a bit lost after reading it. I get that it is a bit of satire about the superficial lives of the rich, with quotes like, "There wasn't a clear, identifiable emotion within me, except for greed and, possibly, total disgust." But on some level I still feel that Ellis has some pity for the main character, Patrick Bateman. You can't write 300 pages about the inner monologue of a character without identifying with that character on some level, which makes the satirical elements a bit problematic. There are also long passages where Bateman describes what everybody is wearing, focusing primarily on designer names, which, while incredibly tedious to read, serves to highlight how these characters only care about the surface. But, to write these passages, Ellis had to know a great deal about designer clothing, and this means he has to operate in that circle to some degree.

Another issue with the book is that there is a lot of homophobia and misogyny. This is further puzzling since Ellis himself is bisexual, and leans mostly towards homosexuality from what I've read about him. And one might argue that this is a continuation of the satire, mocking the hypermasculinity of these wall street types. But at some point you cannot hide behind satire anymore. At some point, you're producing so much homophobia and misogyny, that it becomes increasingly difficult to believe that you don't harbor some of those sentiments yourself.