Ignorance, Social Science, and Sex in the Prett-ay Paincave

Ignorance

Part 1: Ignorant Sociology
So I got through the first of my summer reading books last week, Ignorance by Milan Kundera. I won't run down the whole plot here, since anything I write won't do the book justice. Anywho, the story surrounds two emigres from the former Soviet Czechoslovakia who return after the fall of communism and the role of nostalgia, memory, and return. As is common in Kundera's work (well I gathered from reading this and The Unbearable Lightness of Being) there are many departures throughout the novel into philosophy, history, and other stories. One of these focuses on the story of some random young girl who has broken up with her first boyfriend and has just started seeing a new one. The passage that struck me was this:

One day she sees he new boyfriend hurrying toward her in a blue jacket and she remembers that her first boyfriend also looked good in a blue jacket. Another day, gazing into her eyes, he praises their beauty by way of a highly unusual metaphor; she was fascinated by that because her first boyfriend, commenting on her eyes, had used word for the word the same unusual phrase. These coincidence amaze her. Never does she feel so thoroughly suffused with beauty as when the nostalgia for her past love blends with the surprises of her new love. The intrusion of the previous boyfriend into the story she is currently living is to her mind not some secret infidelity; it adds further to her fondness for the man walking beside her now.

When she is older she will see in these resemblances a regrettable uniformity among individuals (they all stop to at the same spots to kiss, have the same tastes in clothing, flatter a woman with the same metaphor) and a tedious monotony among events (they are all just an endless repetition of the same one); but in her adolescence she welcomes these coincidences are miraculous and she is avid to decipher their meanings. The fact that today’s boyfriend bears a strange resemblance to yesterday’s makes him even more exceptional, even more original, and she believes that he is mysteriously predestined for her.

What struck me most about this passage (and this chapter, really) is the similarity I see when I conduct empirical studies of social life. I am at first amazed by the patterns and resemblances that are apparent in day-to-day interaction and the role social location plays in social action. An awe, an excitement, fills me when I pick these things up and then apart. But the endless repetition, the common place nature of it soon dulls me to the phenomenon. Worse yet, if the phenomena in question is antithetical to my values, I find it hard to stomach, and become more jaded still.

The question here is the distinction between observation and experience. Is it possible to separate these into two separate roles? Or is an amalgamation an inevitable result? Each role brings with it highs and lows, and it seems the further I delve into the former (the role of the observer) the further distanced I become from the latter and vice versa.

Someone could argue that there is a beauty in the pattern, and realizing that you are not above it (or below it for that matter) and experiencing it as some sort of fateful happening is remarkable in and of itself. But as you can clearly see, I see one view as more accurate than the other (at least in personal experience.)

Part 2: Sexorcism
Nevertheless, pick up the book if you're looking for something to read during break. It is a worthwhile read although some of it can come of as uncharacteristically sentimental. One thing that annoyed me while I was reading the book was the motif of "female liberation through sex." It isn't as overt in Ignorance as it is in some other works, but it still caught my attention. I have come to believe that this is the most overused motif in modern literature. It's one thing to use fucking as a symbolism for change and maturation or loss of innocence or whatever, but in recent memory I have read or heard of this theme being used over and over and over again...Bored housewife has an affair...BAM! Spiritual reawakening...Sheltered girl gets fucked hard...BAM! She's an entirely new person. You'd think that these women's vaginas gained some sort of magical powers after fucking (like the ability to talk espanol or some shit). It seems that this is more a reflection of Western society's love/hate relationship with eroticism than anything else.

It's not really surprising then that you meet so many young educated women (read: educated, not enlightened) who spout this sort of inane crap about "expressing themselves sexually" and "oneness with their bodies" and other idiotic mixtures of the sexual and "spiritual" spheres. It's really a result of an inherent disconnect between what's being said and what's being experienced. The projection of sex into the metaphysical realm is really just an attempt to bridge the gap between what is expected and what is felt (in the crudest of terms). It possibly also partially explains the neuroticism and attraction to drama that typifies your normal 15-35 year-old woman.

To clarify, I have no problem with fucking or women fucking (in fact I encourage it!), but I am just kind of bored with this notion that any real transformation of the self begins with a commonplace, everyday act instead of a shift in the way one thinks and orders reality. For realsies, I'm annoyed that authors use the same idea over and over again, and worse yet readers eat it up. To be fair, Kundera relates everything to sex, this just got me thinking about shit. And I'm not a misogynist....I swear...So yeah...

-MX

P.S. After writing this and seeing how much I had diverged from my original topic, I divided it into two parts.
P.P.S. A talking Vagina would be awesome.