Imaginary

Fictional Narratives

Marius and Cosette were in the dark as to one another. They did not address each other, they did not salute each other, they did not know each other; they saw each other; and like stars of heaven which are separated by millions of leagues, they lived by gazing at each other. [Victor Hugo, Les Misérables (1862), Volume IV – Saint-Denis; Book Third – The House in the Rue Plumet, Chapter VI, The Battle Begun.] 

Old and eternal Mother Nature warned Jean Valjean in a dim way of the presence of Marius. Jean Valjean shuddered to the very bottom of his soul. Jean Valjean saw nothing, knew nothing, and yet he scanned with obstinate attention, the darkness in which he walked, as though he felt on one side of him something in process of construction, and on the other, something which was crumbling away. Marius, also warned, and, in accordance with the deep law of God, by that same Mother Nature, did all he could to keep out of sight of "the father." Nevertheless, it came to pass that Jean Valjean sometimes espied him. Marius' manners were no longer in the least natural. He exhibited ambiguous prudence and awkward daring. He no longer came quite close to them as formerly. He seated himself at a distance and pretended to be reading; why did he pretend that? Formerly he had come in his old coat, now he wore his new one every day; Jean Valjean was not sure that he did not have his hair curled, his eyes were very queer, he wore gloves; in short, Jean Valjean cordially detested this young man. [Victor Hugo, Les Misérables (1862), Volume IV – Saint-Denis; Book Third – The House in the Rue Plumet, Chapter VII, To One Sadness Oppose a Sadness and a Half.]

Oh! But he was a tight-fisted hand at the grind-stone, Scrooge! a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous, old sinner! Hard and sharp as flint, from which no steel had ever struck out generous fire; secret, and self-contained, and solitary as an oyster. The cold within him froze his old features, nipped his pointed nose, shrivelled his cheek, stiffened his gait; made his eyes red, his thin lips blue; and spoke out shrewdly in his grating voice. A frosty rime was on his head, and on his eyebrows, and his wiry chin. He carried his own low temperature always about with him; he iced his office in the dog-days; and didn't thaw it one degree at Christmas.  External heat and cold had little influence on Scrooge. No warmth could warm, no wintry weather chill him. No wind that blew was bitterer than he, no falling snow was more intent upon its purpose, no pelting rain less open to entreaty. Foul weather didn't know where to have him. The heaviest rain, and snow, and hail, and sleet, could boast of the advantage over him in only one respect. They often "came down" handsomely, and Scrooge never did. [Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol (1843), Stave I: Marley’s Ghost.]  

Novels and stories:

• Joyce Carol Oates, Sourland: Stories (Ecco/HarperCollins, 2010).
• Thomas Mann, Buddenbrooks (1901), on decadence and the separation between business and life.
• John Wray, Godsend: A Novel (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2018) A central character’s “blankness . . . universalizes, in some ways, Aden’s inchoate longing for meaning. Yet it also made me consider Donald Barthelme’s question, in his short story A Shower of Gold’: ‘How can you be alienated without first having been connected?’” 
• Benedict Wells, The End of Loneliness: A Novel (Thorndike Press, 2019): “At the heart of the novel are three disparate siblings who are packed off to boarding school after their parents die in a car crash.” 
• Caryl Phillips, A View of the Empire at Sunset: A Novel (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2018): “Caryl Phillips proudly upholds her standards in this austere, evocative investigation of a life caught ‘somewhere between colored and white.’ It is a novel of acute psychological empathy and understanding.” 
• Ben Lerner, The Topeka School: A Novel (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2019): “Adam’s faithlessness can no longer be written off as cosmopolitan neurosis. It is instead a symptom of a national crisis of belief, in which structures of understanding crumble and ‘regimes of meaning collapse into the spread.’”
• Roddy Doyle, Life Without Children: Stories (Viking, 2022): “. . . Stories of Life in Lockdown”.
• Marieke Lucas Rijneveld, The Discomfort of Evening: A Novel (Graywolf, 2020): about the loss of a child; “The title refers to the point in the evening when cows begin to low and call for relief, their udders heavy with milk. The story is about painful repletion of another kind, and of solace that never arrives.”
• Bryan Washington, Memorial: A Novel (Riverhead Books, 2020): “a Young Gay Couple Is Divided by Race, Class and Culture”.
• Jhumpa Lahiri, Whereabouts: A Novel (Knopf, 2021): “. . . the pain of the narrator’s isolation feels extremely real . . .”
• Sarah Moss, The Fell: A Novel (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2022) “inspired” by the COVID-19 pandemic: “They’re all temporarily stuck at home in the Peak District, in the north of England, eating awkward dinners with relatives on Zoom, avoiding the dishes or grumbling internally over one another’s bathroom etiquette. Kate’s agonized decision to break her mandatory 14-day quarantine and head out for a walk provides the book’s central drama.”

Visual Arts

• Paul Delvaux, Loneliness (1956)
• Salvador Dali, Tristan and Isolde (1944)
• Paul Dalvaux, The Conversation (1944)
• Edward Hopper, Nighthawks (1942)
• Edvard Munch, The Lonely Ones (1935)
• Salvador Dali, The Invisible Man (1932)
• Salvador Dali, Loneliness (1931)
• Rene Magritté, untitled (1926)
• Edvard Munch, Separation (1896)

Music: Composers, artists, and major works

Compositions:

• Ralph Vaughan Williams, Symphony No. 7 ("Sinfonia Antarctica") (1952) captures the bitter cold and barrenness of the most hostile and remote region on Earth. Boult in 1959, Previn in 1969, Haitink in 1984, and Manze in 2019 conducted top performances.
• Rag Bageshri (Bageshree): this classical Hindustani raag for late evening expresses the emotion of a woman awaiting her lover’s return usually is performed around midnight (performances by Banerjee, Deshpande, Rashid Khan and Shridhar & Skivkumar).
• Raga Bhimpalasi, an early afternoon Hindustani raag (performances by Shahid Parvez Khan, Banerjee and Bhattacharya)
• Raga Gujari Todi, often portrayed as a young woman sitting on a pad of leaves, singing and playing a vina (performances by Chaurasia, Joshi and Sultana)
• Raga Ramkali, often pictured as a forlorn young man sitting next to a young woman, who has rejected him (performances by Amjad Ali Khan, Sharafat Hussain Khan and Ravi Shankar)
• Raga Alhaiva Bilawal (Alhaiva Bilawal) is a Hindustani classical raag about separation (performances by Amonkar, Gokhale and Shankar)
• Blomdahl, I Speglarnas Sal (In the Hall of Mirrors) (1951-52): “ . . . based on nine sonnets from Erik Lindegren’s collection, The Man without a Way (1942), an anxiety-loaded suite of pictures of the possibilities of life and death, perhaps easiest to read against the background of the madness of the second World War.” [Gören Bergendal, from the notes for this album] 
• Zimmermann, Dialoge - Concerto for Two Pianos and Large Orchestra (1960, rev. 1965) 
• Yun, String Quartet No. 4 (1988): The division between South and North Korea was a centerpiece of the personal relationship that led to this work. 
• Yun, Concertino for Accordion and String Quartet (1983): The accordion struggles to find a measure of harmony with the string instruments. 
• Weill, Concerto for Violin and Wind Orchestra, Op. 12 (1924) 
• Nordheim, Solar Plexus, for voice, saxophone, piano/organ, recitation & percussion (2002) 
• Nordheim, The Return of the Snark, for trombone & tape (1987)
• Asia, String Quartet No. 1 (1975)
• Asia, String Quartet No. 3 (2007)
• Leshnoff, Symphony No. 3, inspired by World War I letters home
• Wollschleger, “Hollow City”

Some heavy metal groups express modern alienation with a high level of artistry.

• Darkthrone, "Hate Them" album 
• Old Man’s Child, Revelation 666, "The Curse of Damnation" album 
• Laibach

Other albums:

• Tyshawn Sorey, “Verisimilitude” – disjointed jazz
• Michael Burks, “Iron Man”
• Jaap Blonk, “Irrelevant Comments”
• Joseph Tawadros, “The Hour of Separation”
• Jennifer Koh, “Alone Together”
• Charlie Grey & Joseph Peach, “Spiorachas: A High Place”: music of loneliness

Poetry

Film and Stage

• Persona, an exploration of a relationship between two women, testing which, if either, is the caregiver; their spiritual pain only intensifies when they seemingly trade identities
• L’Avventura, a film that finds “a place in our imagination – a melancholy moral desert,” “exploring states of feeling and breakdowns in human connection”
• Breathless (1961), about alientation in “the tough underbelly of modern metropolitan life.”
• Les Cousins (1959), a French wave film pervaded by “a deep cyncism that is expressed in absolute hedonism and a maudlin wish for death”
• The Crying Game, about how other people may not be who we think they are, and how we all are trapped, somewhat, in who we really are
• In a Lonely Place: the filmmaker’s “haunting work of stark confessionalism” explores alienation in several dimensions through one character
• Little Vera: an alienated teenager
• Klute: stalked by one of her customers, a prostitute “is forced to reconsider her detached urban life”
• Memories of Underdevelopment: a would-be Cuban dissident is blocked from acting on any of his ideas
• Midnight Cowboy: American decadence, a la 1960s New York chic
• Rebel Without a Cause, a 1950s view of alienated youth in the United States
• Red Desert (Il Deserto Rosso), about a young woman suffering from depression
• River’s Edge, a study of contemporary alienation
• The Mother and the Whore (La Maman et la Putain), about three lost souls in a romantic triangle in France during the sexual revolution of the 1960s
• Accattone (The Producer) (The Scrounger): a seemingly emotionless film about the spiritually lost
• Leap Year (Ano Bisiesto): the lovers’ “sexual synchronicity may derive from very different places and be headed toward very different goals”

Music: songs and other short pieces

• Simon and Garfunkel, Bleecker Street
• Simon and Garfunkel, The Sounds of Silence
• Disturbed, The Sound of Silence
• Acker Bilk, Stranger on the Shore
• Schubert, Der Alpenjäger (The Alpine Huntsman), D. 524: a young man thinks of his “distant beloved / Who remains at home”.