| The first part in my five-part dissertation sets out to define the archaic, by tracing this term to the word arche in the doxography of Anaximander. The archaic subsumes the "primitive" as a chronological concept whose point of origin refers to a primal scene depicting the evolutionary birth of homo sapiens. The premise is that Bataille's primal scene in Lascaux, ou La naissance de l'art, as compared for example with Freud's primal scene in Das Unbehagen in der Kultur or Joyce's in Finnegans Wake, is closer in spirit to the Atlantean assumptions at work in Lawrence, Artaud and Olson. The historical context for this line of inquiry involves the emergence of "deep time" in 1859, when scientific consensus was reached regarding the antiquity of human beings on earth. The general hypothesis pertains to the resacralization of the present as the site of an open future that remains always already political. The significance of America is twofold: (1) as the site of Migration, Conquest and Revolution, America serves to locate Pleistocene, Renaissance and Romantic historiographic paradigms, and (2) the ritual violence of Aztec human sacrifice in particular offers an archaic analogy with Classical Antiquity that addresses the modern/post-modern holocaust that is World War.;The second chapter looks at Lawrence's American-based fiction (St. Mawr, "The Woman Who Rode Away," "The Princess" and The Plumed Serpent (Quetzalcoatl)) in light of Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious and Fantasia of the Unconscious. The third chapter considers principally the texts assembled in Artaud's Les Tarahumaras. The fourth chapter takes Olson's Mayan Letters as a point of reference for reading the Maximus poems.;The fifth part concludes in light of (1) Bataille's 'general economy' in La part maudite, and (2) Paz's 'dialectic of solitude' in El laberinto de la soledad, and also his 'dialectic of the pyramid' in "Critica de la piramide." The purpose is to show how all three writers prepare for Deleuze's 'societies of control,' as these in turn extend Foucault's notion of 'disciplinary societies,' in what can further be thought of as the neo-archaic Age of Graffiti now upon us. |
