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Daniel C. Noel, ten years after
Aug. 9th, 2012 12:00 pmI don't think I've updated my commentary on Daniel C. Noel since 2008 ( http://joculum.livejournal.com/172153.html?thread=255097 ) so it is high time to say the same thing again, without re-reading what I wrote in 2008 beyond confirming that that was its subject matter.
Dan Noel, the tenth anniversary of whose death is fast approaching, was an early mentor-at-a-distance (though I saw him annually at AAR meetings and I got him a year-long gig at Emory University years after I had finished my own doctorate) whose "Still Reading His Will? Problems and Resources for the Death-of-God Theology" gave me some of the clues and cues I needed.
Jung and Owen Barfield were enough of a hint that we are constructed of a combination of biologically given structure, early and later personal experience, and the inherited forms taken from language and how society uses it. The only argument among those who believe in this tripartite nature of human existence is what the percentages are of the three impacts, and whether the impacts are ever messed with by influences other than society and the physical environment. We are storytelling creatures who live by our fictions, though we only live insofar as our fictions aren't too out of line with observable physical invariables. (That was more or less as far as I had gotten at the time of my doctoral dissertation.)
I don't think Dan Noel got nearly far enough along the road, either Roethke's "long road out of the self" or the road towards understanding the relationship between culture, history, biology, and environing world. I could say the same about myself, but of course I won't say that, now will I? I'll let LJ-friend utopyr say that for me. It would be interesting to try to re-interpret his books and essays on hallucinatory experience, on the mythic imagination of the age of space exploration, and the mythologizing of actual shamanism in Euro-American practice in light of what we now know, or think we know, about the role of narrative and metaphor and how we are pulled this way and that by our cultural and genetic predispositions.
But the story has moved on, and all I can do is figure out why the things I think are wrong about his ideas would be considered wrong. Dan's own intellectual trajectory was shaped by three disappointments: first, when Carlos Castaneda turned out to be writing fiction rather than anthropology; second, when he realized how Joseph Campbell made his theoretical misstep early and then stubbornly stuck with it; third, when he realized that Mircea Eliade's scholarly model of shamanism seemed to be based on information as dubious as the Navajo ceremony that Maud Oakes paraphrased for Campbell in 1943—but that Eliade's model corresponded extremely well to the mythic models from Romanian culture that he encoded in his novel The Forbidden Forest, which Noel later called a "shamanovel," a use of fiction as an initiatory psychological matrix for skeptics. (I had noticed, long before Dan pointed it out, that all their mythic parallels don't do much good for the various folks entrapped in the troubled history of Romania 1936-1948 as it is depicted in the novel.)
Now to go back to trying to write about how Ashley Anderson's show at Emily Amy Gallery is based on his discovery of various visual allusions to Warhol's multiples of Marilyn Monroe in the inner layers of a Sega video game in 1986—conscious insertions that say a great deal about the mind set of the art school grads who designed games at the time of Warhol's death. Anderson adds some layers to the Marilyn mythos that I'm sure would have delighted the soul of Dan Noel.
Dan Noel, the tenth anniversary of whose death is fast approaching, was an early mentor-at-a-distance (though I saw him annually at AAR meetings and I got him a year-long gig at Emory University years after I had finished my own doctorate) whose "Still Reading His Will? Problems and Resources for the Death-of-God Theology" gave me some of the clues and cues I needed.
Jung and Owen Barfield were enough of a hint that we are constructed of a combination of biologically given structure, early and later personal experience, and the inherited forms taken from language and how society uses it. The only argument among those who believe in this tripartite nature of human existence is what the percentages are of the three impacts, and whether the impacts are ever messed with by influences other than society and the physical environment. We are storytelling creatures who live by our fictions, though we only live insofar as our fictions aren't too out of line with observable physical invariables. (That was more or less as far as I had gotten at the time of my doctoral dissertation.)
I don't think Dan Noel got nearly far enough along the road, either Roethke's "long road out of the self" or the road towards understanding the relationship between culture, history, biology, and environing world. I could say the same about myself, but of course I won't say that, now will I? I'll let LJ-friend utopyr say that for me. It would be interesting to try to re-interpret his books and essays on hallucinatory experience, on the mythic imagination of the age of space exploration, and the mythologizing of actual shamanism in Euro-American practice in light of what we now know, or think we know, about the role of narrative and metaphor and how we are pulled this way and that by our cultural and genetic predispositions.
But the story has moved on, and all I can do is figure out why the things I think are wrong about his ideas would be considered wrong. Dan's own intellectual trajectory was shaped by three disappointments: first, when Carlos Castaneda turned out to be writing fiction rather than anthropology; second, when he realized how Joseph Campbell made his theoretical misstep early and then stubbornly stuck with it; third, when he realized that Mircea Eliade's scholarly model of shamanism seemed to be based on information as dubious as the Navajo ceremony that Maud Oakes paraphrased for Campbell in 1943—but that Eliade's model corresponded extremely well to the mythic models from Romanian culture that he encoded in his novel The Forbidden Forest, which Noel later called a "shamanovel," a use of fiction as an initiatory psychological matrix for skeptics. (I had noticed, long before Dan pointed it out, that all their mythic parallels don't do much good for the various folks entrapped in the troubled history of Romania 1936-1948 as it is depicted in the novel.)
Now to go back to trying to write about how Ashley Anderson's show at Emily Amy Gallery is based on his discovery of various visual allusions to Warhol's multiples of Marilyn Monroe in the inner layers of a Sega video game in 1986—conscious insertions that say a great deal about the mind set of the art school grads who designed games at the time of Warhol's death. Anderson adds some layers to the Marilyn mythos that I'm sure would have delighted the soul of Dan Noel.
