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Creation and destruction

Page history last edited by Tim 15 years, 11 months ago

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Creation and destruction

The centrality of the purpose of the Elemenstor cycle can be found in the myriad reflections on the themes of creation and destruction. Indeed, no other theme neatly binds the entire cycle together as well as this dyad.

Lacan wrote: "The structure of the unconscious is a perfect torus." We find this idea well exemplified in the myriad destruction, in the abnegation of the substance of the Elemenstor worlds, because, at their epicenter, they are void. The Rig Veda explores the notion of absence in the middle of creation by invoking Shiva, destroyer of worlds, who is the consort and yet at the same time the avatar of Atman. The concepts of The Sundering and The Unsundering map nearly point for point on this geography, which we term the geography of absence. The choice of describing the world in destuctive terms and the antithesis of destruction (for could it not as easily been termed the Unassemblage and the Ressemblage?) means that Brahe's text is specifically cast in terms of the destructive, male, jouissance aspects of creativity, the hole-ness (wholeness?) notwithstanding. By holeness, I refer, of course, to the toroidal structure of Lacan's subconscious, not the imaginary signifier.

That the Epic form always includes aspects of creation we must, reluctantly, accept as a canonical definition (the interested reader is referred to Mariannye Subjorgenova's work Feminist Mythos and Legend for an excellent deconstruction of the genre). The Elemenstor cycles conform to this as well. Creation, whether explicitly phallocentric 100 Swords of Sepathok or in the subtle criticism of hypermasculinity to be found in the explication of the Steam and Carry elemenstations, abounds, the work may be well said to "crawl with life." Crawling, the aspect of supplication and begging (per Derrida) means that while the destructive aspects provide the overall structure of the narrative, the living aspects provide the flow of action. Subjorgenova explores this "crawl/carry/live" link well in her book mentioned above.

What is clear is that Harold Bloom's simplistic, Judeo-Christian inspired readings of the Elemenstor cycle, lack the explanatory power needed to fully embrace the metanarrative form of the work. His and like readings of the text are laughably cliched, reducing the entire corpus to a thing that is both dead and hokey, whereas a clearer, postmodern, embracing reading of the cycle taken in toto reveal the complexities, the subtleties, and the eudaimonean aspects of the work--precisely those things which elevate it to the status of Myth.

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