"There are frogs falling from the sky": Divining the Essence of Lived Experience through Creative Acts in Magnolia and Proust
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2015
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Bi-College (Haverford and Bryn Mawr Colleges). Comparative Literature Program
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The Barbara Riley Levin Prize
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eng
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Open Access
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Abstract
In an interview called “Singing in the Rain” with Mark Olsen of Sight and Sound magazine, contemporary American director Paul Thomas Anderson talks about his 1999 film Magnolia and his reflections on the relationship he feels in his own life between film and reality. He explains that, “Movies are a big influence on how we deal with death, relationships... But they can also be a betrayal in terms of how to live your life” (Anderson, Sight and Sound, 10.3.26). This quote reveals a complicated disparity between real life and fictions: how can fictions help us cope with and comprehend real life events when at the same time they are incongruous with daily, lived experience? In this project, I will explore this issue with the help of Magnolia and Marcel Proust’s epic seven-volume work, In Search of Lost Time. I will analyze the interactions between the protagonists and fictions in each work, as well as the reader’s own experience with each work. In doing so I will ultimately convey that the creative act of engaging with a text offers an experience of essence, or the holistic, eternal significance of an individual’s experience outside of their subjectivity. This essence experienced through the creative act divulges the essence of everyday reality that would otherwise remain obscured, and in this way is able to help the individual understand and “deal with” their past events, assuring them of their position within that essence.