Sleepwalk (Tomine) in connection with White

9/28/2009

In reading Sleepwalk, I found myself digging into the grittiness, lonesomeness, depression, and overall grim nature of the text. It is not that I enjoy all of these qualities, but it was the way the author used all them in his text to show us the true reality of the society that we all are living in. Tomine simply uses his storytelling, I feel, to reciprocate his notion of a grim, isolated society. For example, one of my favorite stories in Sleepwalk is when the blind man befriends the employee at the grocery store, only for her to completely ignore him while he walks past her at the end of the story. For me, this conveyed such a strong notion of "we are all alone".

--What reality does Tomine wish to create for his audience/readers?
I felt such an incredible feeling of isolation while reading these stories, which leads me to believe Tomine does not wish happy endings upon us, for society does not supply us with those. The reality in which he portrays is "dog eat dog", grim, and depressing. I wouldn't say his reality has very much cheer in it. I would instead say that he wishes us all to act indepdentally of one another and do what WE AS AN INDIVIDUAL feel is right (not what society tells us is okay).

When connecting Sleepwalk with White's article I found a phrase in my notes that I find perfect for this posting: "Reality itself has no meaning, but can be molded into different meanings". While it is a natural occurrence for us as humans to tell stories, I believe that Tomine does such a wonderful job of not just relaying any message to us, but shows us that there are deep, underlying messages in any one story. The reality of the stories in Sleepwalk, for instance, have no specific meaning until you mold your own reality of the world that you find yourself living in to be similar to what you are reading (or at least not very far from it).

Not only does Sleepwalk deal with our dark secrets and touch base with some underlying emotions, but it grips us into a cold reality that we cannot get away from. A reality in which we are all living in and a society that we are being consumed into. I for one believe Tomine is dead on with this pressumption of reality and that we all can take something out of at least one of his stories.

Thanks for reading :)

Brittany Janning

DeBorges Religious Spectacle

Philosophy — the power of separate thought and the thought of separate power — was never by itself able to supersede theology. The spectacle is the material reconstruction of the religious illusion. Spectacular technology has not dispersed the religious mists into which human beings had projected their own alienated powers, it has merely brought those mists down to earth, to the point that even the most mundane aspects of life have become impenetrable and unbreathable. The illusory paradise that represented a total denial of earthly life is no longer projected into the heavens, it is embedded in earthly life itself. The spectacle is the technological version of the exiling of human powers into a “world beyond”; the culmination of humanity’s internal separation.

I agree with DeBorges in the sense that religion is indeed a spectacle created over centuries of events that may or may have not occured. I also do agree with him in that this spectacle does indeed seperate us. Although, proving that religion is an illusion itself can be hard to prove when there are such a wide range of religions and what they follow or believe.