the persistence of memory meaning psychology

THE PERSISTENCE OF MEMORY MEANING PSYCHOLOGY MOVIE
THE PERSISTENCE OF MEMORY MEANING PSYCHOLOGY SERIES

Surveying world mythology, Eliade places the symbol of lightning in a lunar register, connecting it with the cycles of the moon which herald regeneration. He’s left in a “larval” state, at the cusp of a death that yet heralds rebirth, the return of youth.įor Eliade as well as the surrealists, shock, such as that produced by a chance lightning strike, “convulses” identity, producing a “new” self. Unfolding his umbrella, Dominic is suddenly swept up on a current of lightning before being dropped back to earth, the entire surface of his body crisped.

THE PERSISTENCE OF MEMORY MEANING PSYCHOLOGY MOVIE

An early scene in Coppola’s movie finds an elderly Dominic Matei abruptly enveloped by a freak thunderstorm on an Easter evening in 1938 (thus establishing Faustian undercurrents that ripple throughout the movie). In Youth Without Youth, shock also produces mythological reverberations. Surrealist André Breton concluded his novel Nadja with an unforgettable line intended to shock: “Beauty will be CONVULSIVE or will not be at all.” Indeed, the convulsions of this beauty are “destined to produce … Shock.” Aesthetic shock, or convulsive beauty-as achieved through objective chance, for example-is embraced by the surrealists as a means of disrupting individual identity. In fact, Youth Without Youth opens with a scene that recalls a phenomenon dear to the surrealists: shock. Though Eliade wrote his novel in 1976, decades after the interwar heyday of surrealism, I place his book in a surrealist lineage, not only because Eliade admired the researches of surrealism into dreams, symbolism, the unconscious, and pathological mental states, but also because his novel employs surrealist techniques and tropes, such as “objective chance” (fortuitous events that seem foreordained), the confusion of dream and waking states, and hysterical convulsions of personal identity. In doing so, I hope to trace some connections between art, autobiography, religion, and politics in Eliade’s “dialectic of the sacred.” In the spirit of his speculative novel, I sketch here a speculative interpretation of Youth Without Youth that suggests some relations between the “persistence of memory” and Eliade’s “persistence of the sacred,” with regard to historical and mythological conceptions of time. These fluctuating clocks, reminiscent of the iconic melting timepieces in Salvador Dalí’s famous painting “ The Persistence of Memory,” appropriately open a movie that, as Coppola has said, seeks to explore “Time and Interior Consciousness.” While I found Coppola’s movie to be intermittently ponderous, melodramatic (without the saving grace of campiness), and mired in “mystery” while lacking in suspense, it nonetheless highlights some possibilities and problems associated with Eliade’s understanding of time, which he calls “the supreme ambiguity of the human condition.” Mircea Eliade, No Souvenirs, Journal 1957-1969įrancis Ford Coppola’s rendition of Mircea Eliade’s novel Youth Without Youth opens with a montage of clocks woozily bending. Seeing them and reading them even if they aren’t there if one sees them, one can build a structure and read a message in the formless flow of things and the monotonous flux of historical facts.” That means: seeing signs, hidden meanings, symbols … in everyday life.

THE PERSISTENCE OF MEMORY MEANING PSYCHOLOGY SERIES

“…the exile must be capable of penetrating the hidden meaning of his wanderings, and of understanding them as a long series of initiation trials …. Michael Taussig, Walter Benjamin’s Grave

But if the fantasy increased in intensity beyond a certain point, it too would be repressed, and a physical symptom would take its place. But where does it go? What happens to it? Freud suggested fantasy was a montage of sight and sound drawn from prior experience that disguises that experience and represses memory of it. “The ultimate fantasy would be to write about a fantasy because as soon as you realize it’s fantasy, it changes.

The persistence of memory meaning psychology