I tolerate this century, but I don't enjoy it.
All of the ephemera that is far too trivial to be bothered with elsewhere on this site or, depending on your point of view, a meta-commentary on it. This ephemera includes, but is not limited to art, music and literature. Most of the content here will be discussed in terms that are as abstract as possible, reality being a singularly overrated concept.
Friday, December 25, 2009
The year did not so much end as collapse, amidst scenes of the entire transport infrastructure failing. Viewed from inside, the weather was rather beautiful with the snow gleaming as the skies cleared and the sun shone. Viewed from outside, the affair looked like something from an apocalyptic science fiction film, with the blizzard reducing buildings to barely discernible grey silhouettes. It was probably quite appropriate that the BBC chose this year to broadcast a remake of Day of the Triffids (with The Road being released shortly, realism and science fiction seem to be enjoying something of a rapprochement). Finally arriving in the Midlands, I find the place shrouded in fog. Lichfield Cathedral looms out of the whiteness like some strange creation from a David Friedrich. Later after the snows had gone, I went to visit Waverley Abbey in Surrey; ironically one of the film locations for 28 Days Later. It certainly has a rather bereft feel to it. On the one hand, there are the ruins of the abbey itself, representing a destroyed part of society. On the other, there are the crumbling defensive formations from the second world war. The riverbank is lined with concrete dragon's teeth, smothered in moss while large redbrick pillboxes face towards the ruins, themselves buried in ivy.
Back in London, I'd revisited Apsley House. The enormous statue of Napoleon by Canova, wonderful as it may be, leaves me rather reminded of Soviet statues of Lenin and Stalin (Napoleon was at least rather embarrassed by it). The same applies to the nearby statues of Wellington himself, of course. We later visit the the new Medieval and Renaissance galleries at the V&A; things like Della Robbia lunettes, the Casa Maffi ceiling, the Hertogenbosch choirscreen, Paul Pindar's house, a Donatello influenced sarcophagus, Limoges cloisonne reliquaries and a French salt cellar shaped like a boat and made from a nautilus shell. I wonder somewhat as to how long it will be before we see anything else like this being opened, given the inevitable funding cuts coming this year. Later on, I visit the British Museum's Moctezuma exhibition. Not quite as impressive as the Royal Academy's Aztects exhibition of a few years ago, it was particularly noteworthy for showing Spanish paintings of Moctezuma and of the events ensuing from the arrival of Cortes, as well as showcasing a number of Mexeca codices and European histories. The problem is that while the exhibition painted a suitably vivid picture of the Mexeca themselves, much of the detail about Moctezuma himself is rather speculative. It's difficult to discern why he went from being a ruthless general to a craven appeaser of the Spanish invaders and conjecture that he was murdered by the Spanish rather than meeting his end at the hands of his own people does little to help matters. Equally, the attitude towards the Mexeca themselves is an ambivalent one; the post-colonial narrative of a people destroyed by a foreign occupation sits poorly with the fact that the Mexeca were essentially undone by an uprising of the peoples they had themselves oppressed (albeit an uprising orchestrated by the Spanish, who had lacked sufficient numbers otherwise even when their use of horses and guns were taken into account). Beautiful objects like the obsidian mirrors, feathered serpents and feathered fans are offset of stone eagles used to contain human hearts, turquoise skull masks, ceramics with flayed skull designs protruding or by stone skulls. The most impressive exhibit is a stone sculpture dedicated to warfare; rather resembling a throne it stood at the centre of the Reading Room, towering over everything else around it. I also briefly visited the National Gallery, mostly to look at Botticelli's Mystic Nativity; I rather decide I prefer his portraiture, but am rather impressed by some of Crivelli's works. The embedding of physical objects into the paintings seems to challenge the distinction of arts and crafts.
The protagonist of Roberto Bolano's 2666 takes his name from the Italian painter Arcimboldo, with a somewhat crude parallel between the composites that form a common figure in his paintings to the composite formed by the parallel narratives in the novel. The interesting point is whether the novel does actually form a composite at all, given its interest in the impenetrability of meaning, as with Amalfitanio's drawing of disgrams that he himself does not understand; "something the voice in the dream called 'history broken down' or 'history taken apart and put back together,' although clearly the reassembled history became something else." Where a novel like The Savage Detective revolved around the quest of its protagonists, 2666 has no centre as such. It simply guestures towards a figure of meaning lost in the distance ("No one pays attention to these killings, but the secret of the world is hidden in them."), veering between the idea of literature as a means of arresting death ("an old book is the past.. its author no longer exists") and the idea of writing as failing to transparently convey meaning. In this respect, it reminds me of the idea in Bayley's The Uses of Division that it is often the most flawed and imperfect works that have the greatest interest. Bolano seems to guesture in this direction when he makes Amalfitano think that a young pharmacist is; "afraid to take on the great, imperfect, torrential works... they choose the perfect exercises of the great masters." Certainly, Bolano's conception of the novel is one of enormity and polyphony, as when he describes a writer's prose; "encapsulates all of Chile's styles, it also represented all of its political factions."
While much of the narratives are conducted in a mode familiar from realist fiction, the preoccupation with science fiction in the final narrative suggests a wider set of preoccupations, particularly given that the reading of Boris Ansky's writing that represents a point of turning for Reiter. The novel persistently hints at Platonic or Kabbalistic concepts of the fantastic; "the search for some 'mysterious numbers' hidden in a part of the vast landscape." Similarly, Amalfitano believes that "when a person was in Barcelona , the people living and present in Bueons Aires and Mexico City didn't exist." Reiter becomes obsessed with the illusory nature of appearances, wondering if he and his friend Hugo had been the same person; "he began to think about semblance... semblance was an occupying force of reality" The idea of doubles recurs throughout; Hans and Hugo, Boris and Hans, Hans and Benno; "the Swabian was a grotesque double of Archimboldi, his twin, the negative image." Certainly, many of the characters seem to think the same thoughts and dream the same dreams. Archimboldi ponders alternate realities where either everything is static or where even the inanimate have velocity, just as Espinoza ponders a condition "as if they were living in a world different from ours, where speed was different, a kind of speed that looked to Espinoza like slowness, although he knew it was only the slowness that kept whoever watched from losing his mind." The characters are more symbolic creations here than in The Savage Detective, as with comparisons to Sisyphus or to Reiter's erasure of his old identity when be becomes Archimboldi.
Capote's Other Voices, Other Rooms is something of an odd anachronism. In contrast to The City and the Pillar, Giovanni's Room or even Maurice which all paint a gay identity we can still recognise today, the one shown by Capote harks back more to the sort of ideas found in the The Well of Loneliness. The ephebian protagonist Paul is mirrored on either side, in one instance by the tomboyish and obviously lesbian Idabel and on the other by the Wildean Randolph. Randolph embodies conventional gay stereotypes; an effeminate transvestite who pines for a brutal heterosexual lover. In choosing to love Randolph, Paul does suggest that gay love is possible and that gay men are not simply pitiable creatures doomed to look with longing on straight men, but the novel nonetheless works by subverting such stereotypes rather than reject them completely.
I recall it being observed that Ireland has Swift and Joyce while England had Eliot and Thackeray. The latter had a stable and autonomous society, the absence of which left the former needing a less realist style of narration. Something similar seems to apply to much Central European literature; the likes of Grabinski, Kafka and Schulz all sharing a penchant for the fantastic, with both Kafka and Schulz writing tales in which a character metamorphoses into an animal. Bakhtin's concept of carnival is perhaps useful here; Schulz's concept of fantasy is a rather materialist one ("the demiurge was in love with consummate, superb and complicated materials; we shall give priority to trash.") that is concerned about the alienation of the familiar rather than with the mythological of transcendental; "one's imagination, bewitched and misled, creates illusory maps of familiar districts." Nonetheless, Schulz opposes this concept materialistic fantasy to certain quotidian concepts; "the spirit of the times, the mechanism of economics, had not escaped our city... pseudo-Americanism, grafted on the old crumbling core of the city." As with Bakhtin's idea of carnival, Schulz's fantasy is an inversion of, or escape from, the normal order, as with the barrel organs that Schulz describes as "belonging by right to that dreaming, inward-looking day." Similarly, Roth's What I Saw: Reports From Berlin reads like an extended version of the Futurist Manifesto retold as a series of feuilletons; "I am filled with awe at the omnipotence of human technology." But at the same time, his technophilia is given some rather odd slants, as when he describes the invention of the airplane as the fraternisation of man and the birds. In his final essay, Roth speaks of how Jews had depicted Germany as it really is in their art while German writers had stuck to parochial ideas of pastoral. The point is well made but Roth is not exactly immune from romantic concepts of nature and his descriptions of Berlin's pleasure industry is replete with references to 'infernal machines' and 'industrialised merriment.'
Twilight and New Moon seem a rather odd addition to Vampire mythology.
Although much has been made of the fact that their author is a Mormon, with an analogy being drawn between the 'vegetarian vampires' and American ideas of sexual abstinence, the novel seems more confused than that. A lot of the novel's concepts seem more new age than christian, as with the vegetarianism concept or Edward's comment that they try not to impact on the environment with their hunting. Instead of a view of vampires as damned, the novels alternate between a view of them as being as capable of moral redemption as humans. The story of Carlisle's background typifies this; his father is described as the epitome of religious intolerance but the evil he believes in is frequently depicted as being real enough. Edward suggests that the same god could have made them as made both the lion and the lamb, a rather odd concept that suggests a god of evil as much as good. Edward believes they are soulless and damned, while Carlisle believes they are capable of redemption; both seem to believe in god, while Bella does not. It's a rather confused sort of theology, not really helped by the novel's rather rapacious materialism, with scores of enthused descriptions of the Cullen's designer clothes and expensive cars.Labels: England, Literature, London, Weather
posted by Richard 3:39 AM
Monday, May 25, 2009
Gloucester struck me as one of those places that are too small to hide their contradictions. Firms of stockbrokers occupy buildings next to pound shops. Much of the town feels down at heel, with the inevitable display of decaying seventies shopping centres and boarded up windows, while the other half seems to thrive quite nicely with the influx of tourists, as a statue of Nerva announces the town's historical credentials. Even the sights to be visited are essentially divided between former docks and a cathedral that was once a Monastery. As a place, the layers of the past are evident, the contour of the present and future rather more difficult to discern.
Inevitably, it's the cathedral I'm most interested in. Whilst looking at the cathedral lantern, I notice something on the grass; shattered plaster adjoined to what seems to be the decapitated head of a pheasant. My initial suspicion was satanic rites, although the disappointing truth proved to be vandalism of the Motectum art installation by Elpida Hadzi-Vasileva, wherein casts of angels are painted and mounted with the heads of ducks and chickens. It's an interesting concepts; angels are almost invariably depicted with the features of humans and the wings of birds (i.e. peacock wings in medieval painting) and this concept neatly inverts that. The results rather remind me of Ernst.
The interior of the main cathedral nave is quite similar to Tewkesbury, with round Romanesque arches and thick pillars. By contrast, the quite and cloisters erupt into a frenzy of gothic, whose organic rather then geometric character reminds me of Geiger or Gaudi. The stained glass in the cloisters filters the air with polychromatic phovic clouds, creating a rather surreal effect. I mistake some of the glass for Burne Jones, with Christopher Whall being the actual artist; with the usual Minton tiling much evident, the Victorian presence at Gloucester is quite obvious, as with one of the side chapels decorated by Gambier Parry. Stained glass by Thomas Denny represents a small concession to modernity. The ambulatory design again recalls Tewkesbury, with the tombs of Osric of Mercia and Edward the Second. It's difficult not to feel sorry for Edward, exiled to a provincial tomb and denied Westminster.
Outside, I step through one of the cathedral close arches and find myself confronted with a gothic monument to a bishop burnt by Queen Mary and the church of St Mary de Lode. The inside of this feels rather empty, with the space formerly filled by box pews never really having been given a new task. It's the oldest church in the city (Roman mosaic is still visible in its foundations) the parish church at the time the cathedral was still a monastery, and the sanctuary still clearly shows its Norman design. I walk to the ruins of Greyfriars, dissolved in the reformation to leave only a set of skeletal arches. Blue irises flower in the churhyard alongside a modern set of carvings of the green man and the devil. I finally come to the docks, which remind me a little of East London or even parts of Copenhagen; the latter is more representative in that the buildings have been repurposed rather than demolished (there's even a small Mariner's chapel still), although you don't have to go too far along the canal to see derelict Victorian warehouses, with the paint peeling off the riverside columns and ghost signs imprinted on the brick. The buildings closer to the centre have inevitably become shopping centres or apartments.
The following day is taken by with a visit to Osterley Park, via Charles Holden's strangely monumental tube station with its constructivist tower. The park itself is rather beautiful, with pochards and mandarins swimming on the lake as swans and coots tend to their young. Lupins grow in gardens dotted with the customary follies. The house itself is a product of architectural nostalgia, a deliberate Tudor revival of a building constructed by Sir Thomas Gresham. The exterior combines Tudor ogee cupolas on redbrick towers with a Corinthian portico decorated by Sphinxes. By contrast, the Adam interior is uncompromisingly classicist, the Eating Room is decorated with pastoral scenes of Roman ruins, the staircase is decorated with a Ruebens fresco showing the glorification of the Duke of Buckingham, the Drawing Room ceiling is modelled on a Palmyran temple, via West Wycombe, while a Dressing Room feigns the appearance of Etruria. A tapestry room is perhaps rather more traditional; I'm amused by the incongruous presence of a badger. Guardi paintings of Venice hang on walls throughout; I'm quite struck by two Mother of Pearl Chinese ships, one with a dragon figurehead, the other with a phoenix (representing the Chinese Emperor and Empress respectively). The Chinese Emperor also features in a Gilray print showing a British emissary grovelling before him. The Prince of Wales and Sheridan also come in for attack, as does the King, shown as an Oriental potentate being resisted by the Duke of Wellington.
The following week is taken up with a return visit to Salisbury. I begin with the Church of St Thomas, which I'd missed on my previous visit; the interior is dominated by the largest surviving doom painting, although it also boasts a wooden Tudor memorial panel and a chapel painted with medieval murals and whose ceiling is decorated with wooden angels but which is otherwise filled with Georgian furniture. The nearby Poultry Cross is also surprisingly ornate, with a set of carved angels around the central column. The city museum also proves unexpectedly interesting with exhibits like stuffed Great Bustards, clay pipes decorated with images of the Great Exhibition, snuff boxes in the shape of coffins and funerary monuments dedicated to the memory of the rotten borough of Old Sarum, a Turner painting of Stonehenge, a set of Rex Whistler paintings of Wilton Hall, a giant puppet and hobby horse used for Tailor's Guild processions, a Roman mosaic, beaker people skeletons and Auroch horns. There's also a section dedicated to Pitt Rivers, including the usual wunderkammeresque items like a Dugong tooth, obsidian axes, Tibetan saddles and a skull measuring device. I had noticed several streams running through the city, but apparently it originally had several open water channels, like modern Freiburg, that were eventually closed for sanitary reasons. Inevitably, the cathedral is more familiar, but I note a few things like the modern font where water reaches a flat mirror-like surface before pouring off through four rivulets, a Sudanese Madonna and the Long Division sound installation, where fragments of slate with texts engraved are scattered throughout the cloister gardens as hidden speakers intone the words. Long Division begins as the clock chimes the hour and there follows a sequence of sixty hushed exchanges, timed to the divisions of the clock. The whispering phrases gather in intensity second by second, falling silent again at the start of each new minute.
In terms of reading, I had just finished reading Zweig's Beware of Pity. It's a book I have ambivalent feelings about; its focus on the idea of the feminine as a form of trap, a lure from masculine virtues, is one that disquiets me. Like Zola's Nana it sees the decadent forces that sap a state's fibre as being essentially female and bound in either case to lead to collapse. It's not difficult to read disability as a proxy for gender, a critique of Freud's Civilization and Its Discontents, where the elements conventionally identified with civilisation become feminine snares opposed to martial world of the regiment; "it's precisely on men like Kekesfalva, who have in the past been so energetic and ruthless that giving way to their feelings has such a grave effect." Nonetheless, the book is more subtle that this. If pity is often seen as a feminine virtue, Zweig draws a distinction between its soft, sentimental aspects and the harder aspects of self-sacrifice. The distinction means that the narrator is at once victim and criminal, hard and weak. Such distinctions are also essential to Nightwood by Djuna Barnes, where the opening sections are witness to a diatribe on the progressive decline of Western civilisation that goes a long way to explaining Eliot's interest in the novel. The depiction of Felix's Jewish roots in particular, shares Simone Weill's preoccupation with deracinement, the alienation of modernity. The Nightwood is essentially a state of moral reflexivity. Nonetheless, the depiction of the inverts that epitomise this condition is more dualistic than this would suggest; "What is this love we have for the invert... the girl lost, what is she but the Prince found?.. when a long lie comes up it is a beauty."
Italian Hours by Henry James offers a perspective on Italy that is quite familiar from Ruskin, one dwelling on the same history and architecture that the Futurists were later to demand the destruction of. James occasionally describes himself as a flaneur, a term Baudelaire had conceived of for an industrial city like Paris or London, but in many ways, James defines his observations against the present; "Venetian life, in the large old sense, has come to an end and the essential present character of the most melancholy of cities resides in its being the most beautiful of tombs... no young Sienese eye ever rests upon anything youthful... everything has passed its meridian." James writes that "the greater part of the life about you goes on in the streets" but in practice he tends not to dwell on streetlife as a subject; indeed, it is significant mostly by its absence. The only obvious exception is the documenting of a riot in Rome. There are other respects in which the Jamesian perspective is an odd one. Most obviously, although James gives up much of his descriptions to the subject of ecclesiastical architecture he doesn't have any great feeling for religion itself, as with the following description of a young priest; "though I wasn't enamoured of the carnival myself, his seemed a grim preference and his foreswearing of the world a terrible game." James repeatedly notes that Catholicism is a diminished force in Italy; "where you go in Italy you receive such intimations as this of the shrunked proportions of Catholicism and every church I have glanced it... has given me an almost pitying sense." James effectively sees the churches less as a part of any living religious life but as a set of melancholy deserted temples; ruins before the fact. When James does go out on the streets the results are often similar, as he laments the demise of picturesque traditional dress and complains of tourists who are there for exactly the same reasons that he is; "the place has passed so completely in the winter months into the hands of the barbarians... its most ardent life is that of the tourists." Where he does encounter modernity he does not greatly care for it; "of interesting architecture, fruit of the old idleness... Leghorn is singularly destitute."
Chekhov's short stories offer several variations on themes of rural virtue. Without a title depicts a simple story of the appeals of urban vice opposed to rural asceticism, while The Head Gardener's Tale satirises the very idea of pastoral virtue andThe Robbers shows the precise converse, a story of the appeal of rural vice against the tedium of bourgeois and urban virtue. Equally, one of the things that leaps out from Ginsberg's poetry is the internalised homophobia. Like Burroughs, Ginsberg lauds the queer lifestyle as a form of rebellion even as he uses terms like faries and fag.Labels: England, Literature, London
posted by Richard 10:20 AM
Monday, April 13, 2009
This Easter, I travelled back up to the Midlands with a visit to Stokesay Castle and Ludlow. I recall going to Stokesay as a child and I've long wanted to return. I recall it as a ramshackle affair, not entirely unlike Gormenghast, and the truth is surprisingly close to this, even if the scale now seems different to how it appeared to my younger counterpart. The building is a 13th century fortified manor that has largely survived unaltered. I enter through a half-timbered gatehouse, its beams decorated with images of sea-beasts and dragons, before passing through to an inner courtyard, home to a great hall and a stone tower. The hall with its cruck roof and large arched windows is rather reminiscent of a cathedral, save for the worn wood that makes up its stairs and buttresses. Walking upstairs to some of the rooms, I realised I can hear birds calling though the floor. Most of the building is bare and cavernous, save for some medieval tiles and a carved overmantel. The same goes for the tower, with its warning notices about rabid bats. The interior courtyard has been richly planted with flowers, while the drained moat is home to swathes of white daffodils. Swans can be seen gliding across a nearby lake. Nearby lies the manor's church (there was a village here once, of which little remains). Inscriptions from Exodus are written on the walls.
I then pass onwards to Ludlow, a town of white and black half-timbered houses. The church of St Laurence is effectively a minor cathedral; one enters through a hexagonal porch, in to a gloomy interior through which shards of light rain down from the upper windows. As my eyes adjust to the darkness, I can see more detail; alternating bands of red and green on the ceiling between carved angels, baroque skull monuments, a gold lantern on the crossing, medieval tiles mixed with Minton, owl and griffin misericords and tree of Jesse stained glass windows. Later, I finish the day with Croft Castle. In contrast to the perpendicular gothic of Ludlow, the Castle is a variant of Regency Gothick. The church here is medieval, with a strange Georgian clock tower grafted onto it. The interior is dominated by an elaborate alabaster monument of a sleeping knight and angels. The lion at the Knight's feet has his tongue stuck out. Jacobean wall panelling survives on the interior alongside Georgian stucco and the Rococo concept of gothic. I'm surprised to see a Kokoschka portrait on the walls, alongside a painting of the castle by John Napper.
I also visit St Mary in Ingestre, a Wren design in the middle of the countryside; I'm struck by the Grinling Gibbons carvings, Burne Jones windows, marble tombs, golden skulls, Venetian tapestries. In neighbouring Derbyshire, I visit Kedleston Hall. Buoyed by funds from a recent film, much of the interior has been re-upholstered and re-hung, emphasising its resemblance to a particularly opulent mausoleum. In the case of the church, the claim is of course true, with iron railings fencing off funeral monuments for the Curzons, alongside a series of Tudor and Medieval monuments. The exterior is dominated by skulls, hourglasses and a faded romanesque typanum. I visit Melbourne's church on the way back; a Romanesque affair with thick columns and a medieval wall painting of the devil. Finally, I visit St Edburg and St John the Baptist in Oxfordshire; St Edburg has William Morris and Burne Jones stained glass, Baroque skull monuments and a single pane of surviving medieval glass. St John is a ruin, its redbrick skeleton hidden in wooded shadows near a lake. Broken tombstones are arranged on one of the altars.
A few weeks later, I travel westwards towards Bath. Again, this is somewhere I remember visiting as a child but other than some memories of the baths themselves, the rest of the city is now a blank to me. The place reminds me of Oxford, in terms of the period of the buildings and the colour of the stone, although Oxford's flatness is not replicated at Bath. To begin with the baths then. Once one has gone past the Georgian entrance, the baths are decidedly impressive; steam rises from the bubbling green waters, as water spills out from underneath the pavement into the pools and statues of Roman emperors or medieval effigies of King Bladud look down from above. The east and west baths are undercover and the dark glooms in those rooms closely approximates what it must have been like for a Roman visitor who, lacking any rational explanation of the spring, took the site as sacred. Coins glimmer beneath the surface of one of the pools. The accompanying exhibition contains some of the lead curses that would have been thrown into the waters, various Roman and Celtic gravestones, and various altars, including one that would have been used by a Haruspex. A couple of items stand out; a mask that worn have been worn by a Priest, the face of the Gorgon surviving from the temple pediment and a bronze bust of Sulis Minerva. This leaves me especially impressed; in its own way it's as beautiful as the bust of Nefertiti. From the baths, I wonder past the abbey and an obelisk dedicated to the Prince of Orange, past a set of gardens with a bronze angel dedicated to King Edward towards Adam's Pultney Bridge (the gardens are occupied by some alarmingly large seagulls, whose cries can be heard throughout the city). With shops lining either side of it, I can only assume it to be modelled on the Rialto Bridge. A swan is nesting underneath it. I continue northwards, past the Victorian church of St Michael Without (modelled on Salisbury cathedral, like so many Victorian churches), until I arrive at the Circus. This seems especially impressive to me, much more so than the nearby Royal Crescent. Enclosed like Stonehenge or the Colosseum on all sides, each building having odd acorn finials and decorated with Masonic symbols, it's an especially odd piece of Georgian architecture. I walk for a bit in the Victoria park, looking at the Victoria memorial, replica of a vase from Cicero's garden and the sphinxes and lions decorating the gates. I then return to the town centre, walking through some of the Victorian arcades and through a garden maze with a set of mosaics at its centre. I then enter the abbey. A particularly pure example of medieval fan vaulting, the walls are pale, with light streaming in through the large windows. Equally, there are relatively few large tombs inside, although the walls are lined with plaques. The exterior is especially ornate, with angels climbing a ladder on the front facade. Finally, I visit the Victoria Art Gallery. I have to admit that most of the artists named therein are utterly unknown to me, but it does have some interest works by Hodgkin, Sutherland, Sickert, Nash and Danby. I'm struck by a moonlight scene painted by Sebastien Pether; it reminds me of Dahl and Freidrich. There's also a good ceramics display; Delft, Lustreware and Eltonware.
The following weekend and I'm back in London, at Dulwich Picture Gallery for an exhibition on Sicket's Venetian paintings. It's something or an irony that for a city first painted in minute detail by Canaletto, its depictions were later to decidedly to incline to the impressionistic, as Monet, Turner, Whistler and Singer-Sargent depicted its mists and sunsets. Of these, it's Whistler that Sickert most clearly resembles, with night scenes of the Campanile and St Marks reducing them to blurs of light and with the influence of Degas apparent in the cropped 'close-ups' of the same buildings. Yet, Sicket is significantly more realistic than Whistler, and while his palette tends to more subdued colours, the buildings are not difficult to recognise; they merely look more grimy than is their usual wont. Equally, the influence of Degas or Toulouse-Lautrec is apparent in the depiction of the Venetian lowlife; the exhibition records an interest in the exoticism of Venetian women with their strange geisha-like hairdressings, but for the most part we could easily be in Camden or Montmartre.
Bolano's The Savage Detectives is in many respects utterly materialistic, concerned with the failure of the visceral realist movement, the trajectory of its leading lights from romantic roles as rebels and criminals in the vein of Rimbaud or Genet, to their dissolution into obscurity. It is also in many respects utterly metaphysical, concerned with a quest romance to discover the poetry of Cesárea, which is a set of arcane symbols that denote the limits of language's mimetic abilities. Amadeo Salvatierra admits that he has never understood her work, and he does not listen to or record Belano or Lima's discussion of its meaning. Similarly, although the narrative dwells on Belano and Lima, the writer who repeats her achievement is Madeno, who is never mentioned by any of the other narrators. Writing in Bolano is something to be written about but not to be shown; we never read any of Belano or Lima's poetry, only Cesarea and Madeno's ideograms. The insane writings of one narrator, Andres Ramirez, use Plato's cave metaphor to describe reality, glimpsing alternative visions of his present through dreams. Bolano's mode of etaphysical realism' operates by offering differing fractured routes to the same subject; Bolano saw the orderly, refined and harmonious in literature as coterminous with cruelty and fascism, the unstylised and untidy, with rebellion and truth, as in Planell's epiphanic moment;3 "in a brief moment of lucidity, I was sure that we'd all done crazy. But that moment of lucidity was displaced by a supersecond of superlucidity... a sign of our miraculous and pointless innocence," Events are accordingly described in a polyphonic manner by different narrators. Their narratives are frequently unreliable, some told by the insane, some told told be the mendacious or biased. Univocal statements are quickly dissolved. Belano and Lima themselves are witheld from the narrative, denied the opportunity to explain themselves. Meaning exists at a vanishing point, the novel guestures towards but does not show, as with the description in By Night in Chile of books as being equivalent to the shadows in Plato's cave. One other point to note is the role of sexuality; there's a marked machismo in Bolano's work here and in By Night in Chile, only challenged by the narrator's confession in the former novel that the women and gays he had demonised in his poetry had done nothing to him.
Reading Broch's The Sleepwalkers is an odd experience; the structure of the novel is decidedly experimental, with various narrative strands developed in isolation, some of which converge while others remain separate. Nonetheless, he lacks the interest in consciousness typical of that period; since he regards his characters as primitives, products of the social and ideological conditions of their age. They may act unpredictably, as rounded characters in Forster's phrase, but only because Broch is sceptical that such animals can have a controlling intelligence. If he sits at an odd angle to the modernist novel, much of this can be explained by the fact that many of his views would have sat well with the Victorians; the condemnation of the Renaissance architecture would have chimed with Ruskin's views ("the horror of this age is perhaps most palpable in the effect that its architecture has on one"), if not Broch's accompanying denunciation of Protestantism and of Kant in favour of Leibniz. Like the Victorians, Broch is essentially a medievalist, seeing medieval Catholicism as offering an organic structure into which every aspect of existence could be integrated; the fall into various sectarian cults opened the way for the remorseless fragmented logic of the modern rationalist and commercial society that Broch sees as being decadent and degenerate. It is in many ways one of the most reactionary of European novels; foreigners like Czechs are characterised as barbarians, women are split into virgins and whores, causal homophobia ("the horror that overcame him when he saw those men dancing cheek to cheek") and anti-semitism (the abstraction of Judaism and its basis in law stand in contrast to Broch's account of Catholicism) are rife. Sometimes Broch sounds rather like Carlyle, whose unpleasant views also went hand in hand with a denunciation of the cash nexus, as with Broch's complaints that the profit motive is the sole governing principle in modern like, so that respectable business men may also be murderers. The progression towards degeneracy in the novel is also a progression down the social spectrum. Nonetheless, the novel isn't quite that simple. The initial section is in many ways a pastiche of a Victorian novel; Pasenow's failure can either be viewed as not submitting to duty or of failing to break with convention altogether. As is said of Esch later in the novel; "he saw the play of good and evil. But his impetuosity often made him see an individual where he should see a system." This particularly applies to the character of the aesthete Bertrand. Broch describes aesthetes as serpents with the garden of eden, art for art's sake representing another branch of the disintegration of all values in place of medieval art's religious purpose. These are certainly the terms Pasenow always thinks of Bertrand in, as he disdains Bertrand's commercial work in contrast to his military career. Nonetheless, with his nomadic lifestyle, there's a case to be made that Bertrand is the romantic, not Pasenow. As Broch puts it; "we have no longer two mutually exclusive fields of reality... we find them co-existing within the same individual... we are ourselves split and riven" Similarly, when Bertran falls a victim to Esch's homophobia (as when Esch is taken aback that Martin and the Newspaper Editor defend Bertrand; "what business is it of ours anyway?"), there's a good case to be made that is the victim of Each's rage rather than a criminal receiving his punishment.
Reading Robbe-Grillet's Jealousy and Repetition, I'm struck by the way he repeatedly depicts women as powerful and aloof, only to insist on their degradation. In the midst of a text like Repetition, where are all the characters (consciously or unconsciously) are liars, it is only Gigi who is repeatedly denounced as such.Labels: Art, England, Literature
posted by Richard 2:52 PM
Sunday, March 8, 2009
For as long as I can remember, walking around the City of London at the weekend has been a disquieting experience. It's streets have invariably been deserted, its shops closed as if some great cataclysm had overtaken the city's inhabitants. At present, this sensation of the deserted city is exacerbated by the fact that many of the shops have not just shot for the weekend but have shut for good. The prospect of London as a skyscraper graveyard opens up before us.
One of the particular aspects of London that always unsettles me is its grafting of raw and cavernous concrete structures onto a medieval streetplan. The result is often claustrophobic and overwhelming at the same time. Nowhere is this more true than at the Barbican. Conceived of as an attempt to impose order on the unruly chaos of the London streets, the complex seems folded in on itself, hostile to stragers and resistant to their attempts to penetrate it. Pleasant gardens with fountains sit alongside concrete pillars encased in scaffolding. The reason for my visit is an exhibition about Le Corbusier; not my favourite architect by any means but one I still feel I should learn more about, if only in the interests of giving him a fair hearing before condemning him. Much of the initial exhibits reveal a puritanical classicist that is little removed from my prejudices, interested only in reducing items to their basic form rather than delighting in them. Initially a disciple of arts & crafts, his work was intended to adapt man to the machine age, hence his tendencies for 'garden city skyscrapers' and his willingness to co-operate with regimes from Moscow to Vichy and New York. Like Wren or Haussmann, his designs would have demolished and reconstructed almost entire cities. His painting, influenced by Leger and Picasso seems rather more of interest than his architecture. The later work perhaps seems of more interest, when his interest in 'type objects' gave way to an interest in found textures and the poetry of objects. The result was an emphasis on biomorphic, which at least softened the designs at Ronchamp and Chandigarh. The most interesting structure for me is easily the Philips Pavilion, constructed jointly with Xenakis and Varese. The exhibition shows the Daliesque video projected onto the pavilion walls, as it was lit up in different colours - the result must have been rather like a sixties happening. The building itself seems more reminiscent of Gaudi or Calatrava, in its use of hanging techniques that have only really become widely available through computer modelling. To me, it looks like a geometrical ribcage.
Later, I walk around the nearby areas of the city; the lost graveyards of St John Zacharay and St Anne & St Agnes, the Wax Chandler's unicorns, the ruins of London wall, the barber's herbal garden, the ruins of St Alphage, St Albans and the Pewterer's dragons. I'm pleased to note that St Giles Cripplegate is open; a rather austere post-war interior, interrupted by some surviving Baroque and Tudor monuments, as well as busts of Cromwell, Bunyan and Milton. I look at the heraldic crests on the walls for the Salters, Brewers, Cutlers, Wax Chandlers, the Stock Exchange, Chartered Institutes and so on. I wonder through Postman's Park, the Holborn Viaduct, the Prudential Assurance, St Luke's and find the interiors of St Mary-at-Hill and St Mary Pattens open.
I return the following week to go to Hampstead, a part of London that retains the winding roads of a village but also its appearance. One exception to this is 2 Willow Road, the former home of Erno Goldfinger. Goldfiner makes an interesting contrast to Le Corbusier, whose style of 'white box' architecture (typified in the mot too distant Isokon building) Goldfinger rather disdained, preferring instead a tradition of 'structural rationalism.' 2 Willow Road has many of the hallmarks of modernist design; much of the wall space is window and the base level is supported by concrete pillars. However, the building is designed in the same brick as the nearby Georgian houses, whose order and proportion Goldfinger professed to admire. For me at least, the result is rather nondescript combining some of the blander aspects of Georgian construction with the puritanical aspects of modernism. The interior is a little different though, not because of any difference in the design but in terms of it containing Goldfinger's art collection. For a house lacking any form of decoration it seems odd that the inside seems so cluttered, with very little space remaining on the walls, window sills and shelves. I'm struck by a Delaunay drawing of the Eiffel tower, a cubist interpretation that makes it look like a gothic cathedral, a large pebble painted by Ernst to transform nature into artifice, a wooden sculpture from Moore combining the soft curves of the wood with geometry of stringed lines, a Duchamp rotorelief, several Riley paintings, Man Ray photos, kinetic sculptures that use magnetism to attach rings to a surface but leaving them mobile, and corrugated triangles used to form a canvas that allow a work to be seen with different shapes or colours depending on whether one stands to the left or to the right. Ethnographic items line the window sills; African masks, Iranian pottery, skulls and so on.
I walk across the heath to meet a different view of classicism; Adam's Kenwood House. The grounds are dotted with sculpture; Hepworth's Monolith Empyrean and Moore's Two Piece Reclining Figure. As ever, I prefer the former, with its resemblance to a petrified figure. From the exterior, the fundamental design of Kenwood House is essentially conservative, a classical design used for thousands of facades. However, Adams has enlivened it with decorated reliefs in stucco; the delight in surface decoration seems very un-English when compared to the earlier Palladian styles or more austere approaches to classicism. This is particularly evident when one comes to the Library; the ceiling is decorated with frescos and the walls painted with blues, pinks and coated in gold. It comes perilously close to rococo, even with mirrors on the wall facing the window. A bust of Zeus-Ammon stands in residence. Other rooms have similar examples, as with a chinoiserie fireplace. Like Willow Road though, much of the interest derives from the art collection, much much of the emphasis being on Dutch art: a Cuyp painting of Dordrecht harbour, Van De Velde seascapes, a De Witte painting of a church interior, Ruisdael landscapes, a Rembrandt self portrait and Vermeer's Guitar Player. There's also an extensive collection of English art, with the set of sixteenth century paintings of the family especially striking, accompanied by assorted Gainsboroughs and Reynolds. Although some of Reynolds paintings of famous actresses in a variety of dramatic poses are rather diverting (for instance, one painting shows Emma Hamilton in one of her 'attitudes') I'm more taken with some of Guardi's Venetian scenes.
This is mirrored afterwards by a visit to South London and Nunhead Cemetery. In many ways the least interesting of the Victorian cemeteries I've visited, it lacks the famous or notorious internments of its Northern counterparts and mostly lacks their architectural flair too. One exception is a tomb modelled on the Lycian Payavan tomb from the British Museum; originally accompanied with two weeping statues destroyed in the war, it would fit better into Pere Lachaise. Nearby is a terracotta tomb equipped with romanesque designs that remind me of the Watts Chapel, although it would seem more likely to be by Henry Peto, given the resemblance to his Doulton and Tate tombs at West Norwood. Finally, there's an obelisk to the Scottish martyrs, political radicals exiled to Australia by Pitt. A cherry tree is in full blossom in one corner of the graveyard, framing a view of St Paul's, while a pair of green parrots chatter in the trees. At the centre of the cemetery lies the ruined Anglican chapel, an unusual octagonal structure whose interior was gutted by fire in the seventies. It seems to lack the faded grandeur of its counterpart at Abney Park though, the stabilisation and restoration work robbing it of decay's poetry.
The following week is taken with visit to some Oxfordshire villages. The church of St Mary at Kidlington is a typically English bricolage of styles; Baroque memento mori wall monuments, medieval stained glass, medieval tiles, Victorian stained glass, green man corbels. The nearby church at Hampton Poyle has an odd column showing medieval knights with linked hands forming a circle around the circumference of the column, several stone tomb effigies, a carved stone block with a hole for heart burials and Minton tiling. Finally, I go to the ruined village of Hampton Gay. Unlike Minster Lovell, the Jacobean manor here is a ruin in the true sense of the term. It is neither preserved nor maintained. Thick ivy vines prise mortar and stone apart, smothering the walls in a sea of dark green. Sheep wander through the door and out the other side. The church is small, with a somewhat misshapen wall monument and a carved wooden heraldic shield below the barrel organ.
At one point in Betjeman's Trains and Buttered Toast, Betjeman complains that Pugin and Morris were escapists and fantasists, their work being essentially analogous to stage scenery. It's a charge that could also be levelled at Betjeman himself, with his tendency to idealise picturesque country cottages whose lack of decent sanitation or heating he wasn't obliged to endure himself. It's a little tiring to continually read references to 'the slave state' as code for the welfare state, complainst about artistic types ruining rural towns, or to come across jokes about birch rods being the most suitable item to be included in a church children's corner. In his radio talks during the war, he advances christianity as an counter-balance to such progress myths as fascism or marxism (progressive committees and civil servants frequently seem placed in the same category as the Nazis as part of modern barbarism). For better or ill, his work is almost entirely insulated from the currents of modernity, preferring instead to dwell in a Burkean reverie upon the age of chivalry and wondering in his lecture on wartime reading whether the nation was not simply trying to escape into the past (never mind that these reveries had been denialist fantasies for Morris as much as Pugin in the context of a rapaciously commercial and industrial nation; much the same applies to today's idylls of smalltown Americana). In his lectures on Edwardian literature, Gissing is the only name to survive amidst a great mass of forgotten poetasters (Joyce is briefly referenced but the likes of Eliot and Woolf are entirely elided). Essays on such luminaries as Henry Newbolt, briefly reference Yeats in passing. I can't help but feel awkward in reading Betjeman. I don't share his Tory sympathies or his Anglican affiliation but I do mourn the apparent passing of English liberalism. His nostalgic conservatism could be aptly characterised as the English disease, the daydreams of a nation ill at ease with its present and with a glorious future firmly behind it. At the same time, it's difficult to feel that his complaints about modernist architecture weren't justified.
Mishima's Spring Snow is a novel that offers up a commentary on its own events in the form of the theories and reading of Honda, with their critique of Western ideas of free will and Meiji bourgeois decadence alike; "Europeans believe that a man like Napoleon can impose his will on history. We Japanese think the same of men like your grandfather... you have one characteristic that sets you apart: you have no trace of willpower." Honda limns a world where the age of glorious warfare ended with the Meiji restoration leading instead to an era of the wars of emotion are fought where Kiyoaki lives "in a world of feeling." Nonetheless, the novel seems to have an ambivalent attitude to such commentary. The depiction of Kiyoaki as infected with the effete degeneracy of ineffectual aristocrats like Ayakura, shows him as effeminate, emotionally unstable and lacking a true self (only wanting Satoko when it is forbidden having previously wanted to punish her for loving him). But equally, once his love for Satoko is declared, Linuma sees "a hidden determination that had never shown itself before." Similarly, his grandmother sees him as a true grandson of his warrior grandfather his disgrace; "how remarkable that this grandson, who seemed so effete at first glance, should have revived the spirit of that age." As such, Kiyoaki emerges as both heartless rake and lovelorn fool, just as women such as Satoko feature in the novel as both Kiyoaki's victim and glamourous but dangerous threats to the homosocial order ("a woman will destroy the friendship of men").Labels: Architecture, England, Literature, London
posted by Richard 2:29 PM
Saturday, November 22, 2008
I'm not often inclined to visit art installations, but Seizure by Roger Hiorns struck me as quite unusual. We're often taken with aspects of the chnaging seasons because of how they rewrite the world and change our vision of it; the land encased in snow, tree leaves becoming inflamed with burgundy and gold, the same trees bereft of those leaves and left skeletal. Something similar but rather more unnatural, is at work with Seizure; a derelict block of low-rise flats was filled with a heated solution of Copper Sulphate, drained, and then allowed to cool. The outcome of this process was to leave the walls, floor and ceiling encrusted with these crystals; a form of aleatoric art. On the outside, the houses are boarded up, paint peeling off their walls. Hiorns is interested in brutalist architecture, failed visions of a utopian future that carry 'the stain of life.' Entering inside, the crystals have covered almost everything, with mounds, troughs and puddles of copper sulphate solution forming a miniature terrain across the floor. In the darkness, the crystals covering the walls glitter. It all leaves me reminded of Ballard's The Crystal World.
Walking back, I notice Rodney Gordon's Faraday Memorial. I must have walked past this spot several times now without ever noticing it, which is odd as it is quite striking; a stainless steel exterior without windows that is identical on all four sides, only interrupted by a single door. The object houses a substation for the London Underground and is accordingly functional but does not obviously correlate to any established architectural norm. It must have looked quite futuristic when constructed in the sixties; but now its fate would seem to have become nondescript. Further to the south, I visit West Norwood cemetery on a frosty and cold day. It seems noteworthy for two particular reasons: firstly, its Greek orthodox section (mosaics are an especial feature here) and secondly, its terracotta tombs designed by Harold Peto for Doulton and Tate, with Venetian glass and elaborate corbels. Many of the tombs are rather ornate to the point of being rather kitsch in their demonstration of Victorian sentimentality. Nonetheless, much of the cemetery seems in rather poor repair; several of the tombs are broken, leaving the vaults beneath exposed. Equally, much of the place seems overgrown and wild; at one point I'm confronted by a fox who seems largely unconcerned by my presence. The entire remembrance garden is enclosed in scaffolding. Like Highgate, the Cemetery is on a hill from where the skyscrapers of the city can be seen glinting in the distance. Back in the city, the Guildhall has a small exhibition of GF Watt paintings from the closure of the Watts gallery for restoration. While much of Pre-Raphaelite art was meticulous in its presentation of detail, Watts tends to predate impressionist or even abstract modern art. Much of this stems from an idiosyncratic interpretation of Darwinism; like Pater, Watts was interested in flux and chaos and opposed religion to it as an idea of the transcendent rather than a dogma. As such, much of his work is allegorical but stemming from what is effectively a private mythology. Looking at some of the other paintings, I'm struck by the resemblance borne by one of Poynter's paintings of ancient Egypt to the Klenze paintings of Athens I saw in Munich.
I haven't visited Tate Modern's galleries since the collection was rehung according to artistic genre rather than theme, so I decided it would be worth completing the day by doing so. The first section is dedicated to abstract and expressionist art; I find myself especially impressed by the contrast between the likes of Rothko (a wonderful golden painting), Pollock and even Monet on the one hand, and a section dedicated to Viennese Actionism on the other, as with Hermann Nitsch's Poured Painting or Arnulf Rainer's Wine Crucifix where red paint like blood runs down the canvas. Lee Krasner's Gothic Landscape rather more resembles the Viennese paintings than the American ones. There was also an interesting contrast between Giacometti's statues with their Egyptian and African influences and David Smith's sculptures, welded farm art made from disused farm machinery. I'm also interested in the expressionist Brucke group and am somewhat surprised at having missed any of Karl Schmidt-Rottluff's paintings during my visits to Germany. The final room of interest contains Matissse's The Snail, Picasso's Goat's Skull, Bottle and Candle and Hepworth's Orpheus. The next collection of interest is surrealism. I can't deny that surrealism is by far and away the most interesting to me, presumably due to its close linkages with psychoanalysis and literature (although much of it is also concerned with painting as an equivalent to automatic writing, as with Miro or Calder's mobiles). The first room contains De Chirico's Uncertainty of the Poet before paintings by Magritte, Dali, Ernst, Tanguy and Tanning, but there are some unfamiliar works like Landscape from a Dream by Nash, Ibdes in Aragon by Masson, A Naturalist's Study by Roy, Variation on the Form of an Anchor by Hillier, Black Virtue by Matta or Fini's Little Hermit Sphinx. I pause for a while to watch Maya Deren's Meshes of the Afternoon and proceed upstairs to the next collection.
The next collection is Futurism, Cubism and Vorticism, beginning with Boccioni's Unique Forms of Continuity in Space. Unsurprisingly, much of this collection is taken up with Picasso, Severini, Balla, Lewis and Braque, but there are some surprising inclusions from Vanessa Bell, Christopher Richard Wynne Nevinson's A Star Shell and Fernand Leger. Much of this section is given up to more generally post-impressionist art; Mondrian's Sun, Church in Zeeland; Zoutelande Church Facade, Picasso's early Girl in a Chemise, Munch's The Sick Child, Matisse's Trivaux Pond as well as works by Cezanne and Bonnard. There's also a section on realist art; Meredith Frampton, Chagall and Derain. The final part is dedicated, rather oddly, to Soviet propaganda. Characterised by hero-worship and militarism it's not overly pleasant. The final collection is given up to abstract art and minimalism; Mondrian, Gabo, Brancusi, Helion, Malevich, and Kandinsky.
Travelling north, I go for a walk in the National Memorial Arboretum. I notice a nearby cottage with sheep and goats grazing in front of it as I walk alongside the river. There's a section I haven't seen before featuring replicas of various historical memorials; cairns, menhirs, roman gravestones, medieval memento mori, baroque cherubs, victorian angels and modern designs. The following day is taken up with a visit to Croxden Abbey, a ruin dissolved in the reformation. The building survives quite well; elaborate capitals remain on arches and tiles can still be seen on the floor. The line of the building is quite visible for the most part, such as the multiple side chapels on the main church building. I then make a return visit to Pugin's church at Cheadle, with its angels and seraphim on the altars, its encaustic floor tiles, and polychromatic tiles lining the walls. The day after that is mostly taken up with a visit to Ashby castle. The nearby church has an elaborate Elizabethan alabaster tomb from its founding family; part of it is still painted. The ruins themselves retain traces of the original ostentation, especially above the fireplaces. I recall the civil war tunnels from a childhood visit but am also impressed with the remains of the chapel, a set of iron gates barricading off the empty arches. Further down south, I visit Minster Lovell, another ruined mansion near Oxford, with a rather macabre 'Musgrave Ritual' story attached to it. The walls seem generally rather better preserved than those at Ashby, having been destroyed by entropy rather than by gunpowder; gargoyles and decorated arches survive. It's another rather dark day and the Windrush has flooded much of the ground.
Reading The Arabian Nights, it's easy to see why romantic writers were so taken with it; most obvious is the sense of irrational exoticism that appealed to the likes of Walpole and Beckford but also the sense of threat from forces beyond human comprehension that pervades the tales and the gothic novel alike. In a more philosophical context, romanticism fitful relationship with the transcendent dovetails neatly with the fatalism of the tales, whereby everything happens by the will of the divine. The tales are framed with a device of Scheherazade using her narration as a means of influence but frequently contain stories where the hero's fate has little to do with self determination and where the malfeasant are often rewarded as much as the virtuous. The tales have been made Muslim, but not with complete success, and not to the extent of excluding all the jinn, ghouls and other popular superstitions that canonical Islam disdains. They are localised in the great cities of the Arab golden age, fascinated by commodities and coined money, fabrics, scents, confectionery, guilds and crafts, but uncomfortable in the countryside and terrified of the open sea. The prudery and solemnity of Arab merchant life, the stately procession from shop to mosque to bath and back again, is subject to violent disruption by a flash of black eyes from behind a lattice or the sudden appearance of a demon. Reading Herodotus's Histories, I was struck that whereas much of Greek historical writing tends to centre around the Hellenic world and a Persian other (with open admiration for Sparta in the case of writers like Xenophon), Herodotus is as much an anthropologist as a historian and is as interested in foreign cultures as he is in events. If anything, Persia receives more attention that Greece even if events are told from a Hellenic perspective (as with the Persian debate over whether to accept democracy or autocracy).
Reading Willa Cather's The Troll Garden and Selected Stories is to proceed down a path that initially seems well travelled. The stories concern unfulfilled lives dwindling in the backwaters of the American mid west. In many respects, they resemble Hardy with their convergence of heredity and environment to crush their characters, especially in a story like Eric Hermannson's Soul: "a face that bore the stamp of Nature's eternal injustice... Cheat nature? Bah! One generation may do it, perhaps two, but the third.." The early stories accordingly make much of the Norwegian ancestry of many of the characters as much as the hardship of their existence eking a living out of the soil. Nonetheless, Cather is not much of either a pessimist or a moralist; her Emma Bovary in The Bohemian Girl or her Trenchard in On the Divide are able to find happiness while other characters in Eric Hermannson's Soul blame the "evil spirit" of the local gospel sect for condemning people to misery rather than any sense of ineluctable metaphysics doing so.
In the stories that make up The Troll Garden itself, matters prove more complicated, with the mismatch between the individual and the environment manifesting itself in more complicated ways; While some characters like Merrick thrive away from the Midwest, others like Katharine are only tormented by the memories of other places they are returned to it. A story like The Garden Lodge offers a parable of profligacy and prudence as equivalent roads to suffering. Nonetheless, many of which are not fully explained; for a realist writer Cather often tends to leave matters unsaid, to leave a figure in the carpet. The Sculptor's Funeral and A Death in the Desert furnish good examples, with the relationship between the sculptor and the lawyer left undefined, as is the nature of Roux's disgrace or the absent figure of Adriance Hilgarde for whom his brother serves as a proxy in Katharine's love (a modern sensibility would presume, not unreasonably, a homosexual interpretation in each of these cases, although the stories benefit from this lacuna). Other stories are more ineffable still; the epicentre of The Marriage of Phaedra is located in the speechless canvas of a painting while Paul's Case and A Wagner Matinee both dwell on the ineffable longings created from exposure of music, ranging from desire for a road not taken to crime and death. In Eliot's phrasing, Cather has withheld an objective correlative for these stories.
Reading Heidegger's Being and Time, I find myself most troubled by his continual emphasis on the importance of authenticity. Much of the text can be described as a phenomenological argument with Kant, replacing Kant's metaphysics with a materialist outlook derived from romantic thinking, stripping out the cartesian emphasis on the soul or the transcendential and replacing it with an emphasis on the throwness of being and the inseparability of being from the world. With that said, Heidegger's terminology often seems more religiose than Kant's, particularly so with the emphasis on the fallen nature of existence. Although Heidegger is clear that he is not equating inauthenticity with sinfulness, it seems difficult to avoid the equation, leaving the impression of secular theology rather than existentialism. Certainly, the use of the term differs greatly from equivalent concepts in other existentialist thinking, seeming to conflate Nietzsche's ressentiment (a critique of slave morality) and what Sartre would term bad faith (a refusal to accept freedom or moral agency). Heidegger both characterises being as being governed by care of conscience, thereby guesturing towards a Sartrean notion of social commitment, and as being at risk of falling into being overwhelmed by the the mass of humanity, thereby echoing Nietzschean concepts (e.g. "in utilising public means of transport and in making use of public sources of information such as the newspaper, every other is like the next...the real dictatorship of the 'they' is unfolded"). It's characteristic of Heidegger to collapse distinctions between opposing tendencies and to treat them as parts of a broader dialectic. Nonetheless, it still leaves me wondering how theese theories could be put into practice; many of Heidegger's philosophical themes—the overcoming of nihilism, the importance of rootedness, the need for decisive action—found vulgar echoes in Nazi thought. Faced with choices between the mass democracy of America and the collectivism of the Soviet Union, it seems little surprising that he found the Nazi emphasis on hero worship conducive to this thought. As he put it in his rectoral address: "the relentlessness of that spiritual mission that forces the destiny of the German people into the shape of its history... Does this essence have genuine strength to shape our existence?" The spiritual mission of the German people (again, note the reconstitution of religious terminology) under Nazism distinguished itself from the subjugation of Dasein under the domination of technology in communism or democracy, a process he termed 'forgetfulness of being' (Seinsvergessenheitct) in The Question Concerning Technology. One can, of course, read Heidegger's text more sympathetically than the biographical emphasis would seem to warrant; his comments on technology have an obvious force regarding the industrial nature of the holocaust and his criticism of inauthenticity could conceivably be applied to Nazism amongst other mass movements. Nonetheless, he seems a markedly more difficult figure to rehabilitate than Nietzsche.
The Tin Drum by Gunter Grass is one of the very few works of the modern era that could be labelled carnivalesque. In the Bakhtinian sense, the term denotes the anarchic and comic: fools become wise, kings become beggars; opposites are mingled. Throughout the novel, Grass establishes dichotomies only to overturn them: Oskar is identified first with Satan and then with Jesus, with Rasputin and Goethe as the twin poles of his reading matter. The narrator frequently refers to himself in the third person, further establishing a split within himself. Polyphony abounds, with the alternate narrators giving slightly different accounts of events to Oskar. It also dwells on the body and the material, as does Grass in his scatological descriptions of the infant christ's anatomy, in Oskar's deformity, in Oskar's refusal to believe in Jesus unless it can come alive and drum ("either he drums or is he is not a real jesus") or even in the horse's head filled with eels. The same applies to The Dog Years where one student of Heidegger buries "a real mount made of human bones under medieval allegories." With that said, Grass uses magical realism as a means of producing concrete synbols: the deformed dwarf, the black dog, worms, scarecrows (themselves emblematic of the Heideggerian distinction of being and emptiness at the same time they satirise Heidegger's endless metaphysical neologisms). Like Hasek's The Good Soldier Schweik, The Tin Drum also a picaresque novel, episodic and peripatetic by nature. The comparison with Hasek is a rather apt one: that novel is perhaps the closest to the The Tin Drum in many respects, with the exception that the humour of the earlier novel is univocal in its targets. Oskar almost epitomises the object of Nazi eugenics: deformed, Polish and an artist. His anarchism can also easily be construed as a form of resistance to fascist ideology, as with his disruption of a Nazi rally and equal disgust with the socialists and communists. Vaclav Havel once observed that; "We are the seekers of truth who fear those who claim to have found it." Similarly, the dichotomies of the novel represent a rejection of ideas of the absolute notions of truth that typically form the bedrock of totalitarianism; where "there is politics there is violence." Oskar is presented as free to "harmonize chaos and intoxicate reason," where the dichotomy of hero and villain is itself rejected. Where Schweik constantly acts to undermine authority, Oskar is the willing servant of the Nazis for much of the novel and leaves a trail of blood and destruction in his wake (the author's recently disclosed SS membership is rather obviously suggestive here). His drumming seems the perfect allegory of a world where all values had already been inverted and insanity reigned. It does raise the question as to whether carnival is an entirely effective mode of opposing totalitarianism; it may not be enough to overturn all values when the oppressors have already done that.
The addition of a modern soundtrack by Michael Nyman does little to efface the comparison, but I couldn't help comparing Vertov's Man with a Movie Camera to Koyaanisqatsi; both eschew narrative in favour of disconnected images, both are concerned with the relation of man and technology, albeit the former glorifies it as the latter reviles it. In both cases, the absence of a controlling structure leaves the interpretation decidedly open ended. Reggio's cinematography of gleaming skyscrapers is quite beautiful, Vertov's vision of dehumanised man as a machine (with factory workers showed beaming in the midst of their drudgery) is rather horrifying. Inevitably, Vertov's depiction of everydaylife dwells on certain aspects; the interest in speed and technology (cars, planes, motorbikes, trains and trams all feature) recalls while Marinetti while the interest in the athletic physique recalls Reifenstahl. The scenes in the beerhall introduce the only permissible element of decadence amongst the rather interminable wholesomeness of the images of work and play. The composite of scenes from Moscow, Kiev and Odessa forges the idea of a single Soviet identity. What's most interesting about Vertov is the rather postmodern self-referentiality of the film - the framing of it within a cinema, the repeated shots of the lens or of the cameraman; this diary of a cameraman is a film about the making of a film.
posted by Richard 11:22 AM
Sunday, June 29, 2008
I saw the work of Vilhelm Hammershøi during my visit to Copenhagen a few years ago, but I can't say with any honesty that it made any great impression on me at the time. This is perhaps unsurprising; understated paintings in grey tones of spartan and austere subjects are comparatively easy to miss in the midst of other works; it's only when one sees the paintings together that one realises the obsessive theme driving them.
Hammershøi's loose brushwork and restricted palette immediately associate him with his contemporary Whistler, but seventeenth century Dutch painting was also a significant influence on him. As with Vermeer, Hammershøi is frequently found depicting figures in interiors, showing the play of light from nearby windows. Where the Western tradition is for the subject to stare out of a painting and challenge the viewer, Hammershøi follows Vermeer in denying this, having his figures (or figure; his wife was his persistent model) turned away from the viewer to give a hermetic aspect to the painting. In tandem with the grey, barely furnished interiors (photographs of the same rooms show them filled with furnishings and decoration), where the light from a window largely serves to suggest that life is somewhere else, this creates the melancholic air that pervades his work. Durer's figure of melancholy was turned away from the viewer as well. Hammershøi returns again and again to the same interiors, the same piano, the same pictures, the same bowls. But his work also rather resembles Escher or Piranesi, showing long corridors with successions of doors, looking out into interior courtyards through layers of interior windows, with doors that are slightly warped and distorted against the overall geometry of the work. There's a disjoint between the realistic, objective, settings and his imprecise impressionistic brushwork; what is being depicted is an objective correlative for his own state of mind.
The other component to Hammershøi's work is his landscapes, both rural and urban. Whether showing the Danish countryside, Copenhagen's royal palace or church spires, the British Museum or a London street, the scene is always devoid of people and depicted with grey wintry skies that seem somewhere between Whistler and Atkinson Grimshaw. I recall Copenhagen as a colourful city with painted buildings and red church towers surmounted with verdigris encrusted baroque spires. But I recall being fascinated by the same buildings, showing the same empty streets. I discover a certain fellow feeling for Hammershøi that I'm rather unaccustomed to.
The following week I return for two exhibitions near Trafalgar Square. I start with an Wyndham Lewis at the National Portrait Gallery. I recall Angela Carter complaining that all of Lawrence's women were just clothes without bodies, as opposed to his meticulous depiction of male physicality. Something similar can be said of Wyndham Lewis's paintings. The subjects of these portraits are puppet or simulacra. They have the quality of remaining just what they are, fixed in a particular epoch to furniture which is now dust (hence Froanna's liminal character in her Red Portrait as she fades ino the background). "The process and condition of life, without any exception, is a grotesque degradation." The stress on dehumanisation in his writing manifests itself in his painting by his focus on clothes rather than people. The portrait of Edith Sitwell shows her with her eyes shut, her face turned from the viewer, buried in a mass of clothes. Sitwell thought her hands to be her finest feature; here, Lewis hides them altogether (the same applies in his painting of Mrs Schiff, unlike Edwin Evans whose hand blends into his trousers). Hats and helmets abound throughout the paintings. Depicting TS Eliot, he gave the poet a "gioconda smile." Sketch after sketch shows the face left unworked till last. Eliot looks downwards, Pound closes his eyes. Like Modigliani or Picasso (albeit without their primitivism), Lewis saw the face as a mask, indistinguishable from the hat he always painted himself wearing.
Confronted with demands for a return to the classicism of Raphael, Lewis responded by suggesting Shakespeare as an exemplar, praising the famous woodcut of the playwright as serene and empty. Lewis develops various personae in his painting and writing like 'the enemy' as his satirical response to the literary and art world, or his embodiment of satire, the tyro. Lewis caught sight of his face in a cracked mirror and saw "the mask of a syphilitic Creole." Whatever was worth recording in life, he asserted, could be mapped in surface forms. On the whole, I find myself thinking tht Lewis is a rather more sympathetic as a painter than as a writer. His painting of Froanna is a particular masterpiece; red tones predominate excepting the blue of her eyes as she stares directly at the viewer, one of the very few subjects to do so in the entire exhibition.
I follow this with the nearby Divisionism exhibition at the National Gallery. Like Pointillism or Impressionism, Divisionism was a response to new scientific theories of light and colour, like colour wheels. Nonetheless, where French art often has an art for art's sake philosophy, with low-lifes or nudes (Longoni's pickpocket painting is the nearest to that here) featured to epater les bourgeoisie rather than for political ends. By contrast, Italian artists were unhappy with technique alone. Italian reunification has created considerable social upheaval, poverty and inequality that lent itself to a realist style of portrature that much of the rest of Europe had already explored. Equally, symbolism offered a more escapist response to the same conditions, one that especially appealed to Catholic artists. Often, divisionist artists would veer between these extremes. Nomellini paints grey scenes of striking workers at one point in his career, and then paints an extraordinary indigo blue symbolist work showing the sea, entitles Symphony of the Moon. Segantini's nature scenes remains sufficiently detailed to sit alongside Pre-Raphaelite painting, but his later symbolist works show a bizarre depictions of sins being punished in hell. His Return from the Woods is the most perfect fusion of the two strains shown in the exhibition; showing a peasant woman dragging wood in a snow scene, but withthe church spire at her destination is reminiscent of David Friedrich (the same applies to some of Grudicy's autumnal scenes; I'm struck by the spider's web drawn on the frame of one of them). Some of the realist paintings, such as those by Morbelli could have been painted fifty years earlier in terms of their technique, even if light falling through windows is a particular theme. Morbelli also painted melancholy quasi symbolist works of sunsets though. In other works, the divisionist technique, so effective in Segantini's Alpine scenes, imposes a stillness and imprecision that fits oddly with the social agenda of the paintings. Morbelli's luminscent painting of women working in the rice fields utterly fails to convey any sense of misery; it's much too tranquil and beautiful. Either these artists assumed that a method that was 'scientific must be allied to social progress, or the political posturing was actually an alibi for aestheticising the predicament of the working class. Much of the symbolist work is also quite socially engaged though but in a more reactionary fashion, as with Previati's paean to the virtues of the madonna. Volpedo's country scenes are reminiscent of Sisley but show christian processions. Many of the forms are religious, such as the tondo or the polytych. At the very least, religious symbolism is used to evoke a sense of secular national identity; Mazzini had argued that Italians must develop a "religious concept of their nation."
It wasn't until futurism that the techniques developed by divisionism could be applied to a specific programme, albeit one where the interest in light was often centered on electric lighting. The exhibition depicts a move from Boccioni's early pastoral landscapes to a picture of a seamstress (albeit one where the focus is on her cobalt blue dress) to his explicitly futurist painting of a dam being constructed. Other works by Balla and Carra show the futurist depiction of movement in still life or the energy of technology.
As I child I recall seeing a particular statue during a visit to Osbourne House on the Isle of Wight; a black basalt statue of Antinous. I couldn't place my interest in it exactly at the time, presuming it to be due to the exotic Egyptinate character of the statue. I now presume that my interest was mostly taken by the frank sexualisation in the semi-nude depiction of Hadrian's lover. No wonder Winckelman had been so enthused at the imagery that showed Antinous as being somewhere between Athena and Apollo. The story of the doomed youth is one of the central myths of gay history, alongside that of Edward the Second. It's the prospect of seeing Antinous that attracts me to the Hadrian exhibition at the British Museum. The depictions of him are many, from the Egyptianate statue of him as Osiris (with whom he had shared a death day), Ephebian depictions of him as Bacchus (another arisen deity) with vine leaves in his long hair or versions of him as a Greek fertility god. In some of these he conforms to the Roman ideal of the beautiful youth (shown here with the inclusion of the Warren cup), in others his sexuality is more aggressively that of an adult male. I find myself wryly amused at the prospect of his cult competing with christianity; if only it had won. Otherwise, the material at hand is rather more conventional; accounts of Hadrian's brutal suppression of Jewish rebellion, retrenchment and consolidation of the empire's borders after Trajan's overly ambitious expansion, the amnesty on public debts, construction of the Scottish wall (admittedly a turf bank for much of its length that could have served little defensive purpose, instead presumably it served as a means of channelling and controlling the border), anf finishing with the construction of buildings like the Pantheon, his Mausoleum and the architectural fantasisa of his Tivoli villa. The images of Hadrian himself seem surprisingly individual, with his beard setting him out (cited as evidence of his love of all things Greek or a means of covering his blemishes, depending on your preferences) as well as a dimple in his ear that may be evidence of heart disease. Giant busts and statues alternately show him as emperor, priest, warrior and deity. Some of the reliefs from Tivoli, showing Parthenon style depictions of naked figures alongside detailed carvings of vines, birds and squirrels also stand out, but I'm especially drawn to two beautiful peacocks that formerly were in place on the walls of Hadrian's mausoleum.
The great court of the Museum currently has a striking work by Zhang Wang inside it; following the Chinese inclusion of weathered stones in gardens, Wang has taken the image of such stones and encased it in silvery metal, which looks as if it were frozen mercury. This questioning of the relationship between nature and art is counterpointed by some temporary gardens outside, where a genuine stone can be found amidst the dogwood, wisteria, lacquer tree, willow, bamboo and peony. An exhibition of Chinese nature painting inside continues this theme. I'm struck by the role of literary allusion in the paintings and ceramics shown; many of the flowers and animals are chosen for their symbolic connotations (like the lotus) others by homophones suggested by their names (bamboo sounding like congratulations, narcissi sounding like immortality) or for compounds formed from the combination of different items. A few weeks later I'm revisiting Silchester and an archaeological dig is on. A small garden has been created illustrating the sort of plants found in a Roman garden and illustrating their symbolic functions. There are some overlaps with the Chinese symbolism, as with peony being used in protective amulets.
Walking around the city, I visit the interior of St Mary Alderdmary, an exercise in hyperreal gothic by Wren. The effect is quite odd; the fan vaulting is decorated with floral patterns that seem to belong rather more to the baroque period. The effect of the interior being coated in white plaster is rather sepulchral, giving it the effect of an alabaster tomb and contrasting oddly with the colourful Victorian tiling on the floor. While I'm there the organ starts playing Bach's Toccata and Fugue. I move onto Wren's St Stephen Walbrook. The interior here is more like a playfully decorated version of the pantheon; unlike Hawksmoor whose eccentric designs seem to match the English character, Wren would have been a much greater architect in a catholic country, where his designs could have made with red marble rather than Portland stone and his interiors gilded and painted. One detail I am struck with is a totentanz on one of the pillars, showing a bride dancing with a skeletal death. This evening, I go to Monteverdi's The Coronation of Poppaea at the Proms. Even if Monteverdi is best known for his ecclesiastical music, this amorality tale does rather confirm the reputation of renaissance Venice as indifferent to religion at best. The plot begins with Cupid asserting her primacy over Virtue and thereafter protecting Poppaea as she schemes her way to becoming Nero's wife, displacing the rather more virtuous Octavia. Poppaea's mother attempts to dissuade her from this course, but only on the grounds of practicality, advising her to go for someone less ambitious instead. Similarly, Octavia's nurse attempts to persuade her to take a lover as a form of revenge. Seneca is depicted as the moral centre of the play but also as a tedious windbag. The only character to receive any punishment is the wronged Octavia, while the assassin Otto is allowed happiness with Drusilla. The staging attempted to draw attention to later events (Poppaea' death at Nero's hands) by having him come close to slapping her as well as introducing an unscripted (and historically inaccurate) scene where Nero drowns Lucan. Since the drama is essentially concerned with Poppae's triumph, I wasn't especially sure I appreciated these interpolations, even if the original audience would have been well aware of Poppaea's eventual fate and that she would have achieved her ambition by remaining faithful to Otto. The Skakespearian approach to casting works bettwe, with both Nero and Poppaea played by women (Nero would originally have been played by a castrato) and various female parts like the nurse played by men (the nurse here bears a disturbing resemblance to Margaret Thatcher).
Later at the Proms, I listen to Tchaikovsky's Sleeping Beauty. The full version is rarely performed in ballet (the story being slight, Tchaikovsky had padded it with various dances). I find myself surprised at the idea of Tchaikovsky writing an opera under the influence of Rameau, although the idea of parallels to Wagner and Brunnhilde's sleep is more natural. In later works, Rimsky-Korsakov's Kaschkey the Immortal inverts this, with the hero's kiss to an evil witch killing her and releasing the princess. I follow this with Dvorak's Slavonic Dances and Janacek's Osud. The latter is quite odd, reminding me of the role of neuroticism in Schnitzler or the sense of impending fate in Kafka (Mann also leapt to mind, prompted by the spa setting). The first two acts describe a conductor's love affair and its end in madness and death. His opera is only written to comprise two acts and the third has his describing the above events it to music students at its premiere, thereby forming the third act.
The following weekend, I go to a Taraf de Haidouks concert in Cheltenham. Much of their music is intended to take orchestral settings of gypsy music by the likes of Bartok and Albeniz and to place in back into its original context, playing it as dance music on the violin, accordion, bass and cymbalum. The result is rather like rock music and it's difficult not to think that where nineteenth century Europe preferred to take folk music and to apply it to orchestral works, twentieth century America preferred to allow black artists to pioneer jazz and blues. The irony of re-appropriating Bartok is born out by the venue, a rather gaudy regency affair. The audience look as if they go there often to attend classical concerts; standing for this one they occasionally manage to sway a bit (aside from one rather energetic elderly lady). It's also worth mentioning the supporting act, the London Bulgarian Choir, who performed a capella folk songes dressed in traditional costumes.
Cheltenham itself, with its rows of regency buildings, seems rather tepid to me. I'm more struck by my visit earlier in the day to Tewkesbury Abbey. It reminds me of Southwell, another place where the isolated location seems to have helped the building survive with comparatively little destruction or alteration. The exterior is rather ungainly; a squat central tower is flanked by various side chapels and fronted with a facade composed of two towers dwarfed by a central window, recessed back as if it were a romanesque arch. The interior is dark, supported by round pillars (each with a face as a corbel facing its counterpart opposite) above a gothic ceiling painted green and white. The effect is rather like a forest. After the rood screen the effect becomes more markedly gothic, with Victorian Minton tiling below matched by white, blue and red patterns above. England's oldest fan vaulting in some of the chantry chapels, some of it still painted. One of them has an effigy of its knight suspended above it, others show statues of mouldering corpses, others show fights with the devil. I'm also quite struck by the lady chapel, with a Byzantine mosaic and icon of St Benedict.
The following day is taken up with a brief visit to Glasgow. I find the Victorian buildings in red sandstone mixed with baroque church spires, Marcochetti statues, greek revival art galleries, elaborate corbel figures and art deco building fronts quite wonderful. I'm equally delighted with the police boxes I keep on seeing on street corners. The back of Prince's Square behind the City Chambers is labyrinth of arches that reminds me of Piranesi. In front, I'm struck by the column surmounted by Walter Scott. London has no statue of Shakespeare, let alone dedicating Trafalgar Squate to him. I walk out to the cathedral and walk around the graveyard. The monuments are eroded and weathered, decorated with skulls and morality symbols. The symbols seem wraithlike when corroded in this manner. On one of them Minton tiling has been badly blackened by industrial pollution. Several more modern tombs are caged in with rusted iron, the interior overgrown with weeds. I walk over to the Victorian necropolis. The presence of the tombs on this hill reminds me of Prague, as does the presence of an old town next to a new one on a grid layout. Presumably Mackintosh would figure as the Glaswegian Gaudi. Paths spiral around the hill, as one passes celtic crosses, Egyptian tombs, funerary urns, all encrusted with rust and weeds as they crumble to dust. The style of the monuments seems rather diverse, from Moorish gothic to Romanesque chapels. Returning, I enter the cathedral. Its stone is quite black with the roof covered in a rich, dark wood. The modern stained glass is a lovely blue. The interior seems as labyrinthine as the necropolis with a crypt where Saint Kentigern's tomb had rested. Medieval German stained glass creates phovist patterns on the floor of a side chapel. Here alone the walls are painted in white and I notice a roof boss in the shape of a skull. Elsewhere, the sacristy's floor is lined with Minton tiles. I look at the funerary memorials in the cathedral. Unlike even those in Tewkesbury they are brightly painted, somewhere between gothic and Tudor in their design.
Lautreamont's Maldoror follows in the path of Baudelaire and Nerval in delighting in contradictions, even as Lautreamont condemns it in his poems. Similarly, the poems are explicit in rejecting the romanticism of Byron, even as Maldoror follows in the path of Manfred, Goethe and Maturin (although he also speaks of tragedy, such as that of Mervyn, as moral, exciting pity and terror). Where, Maldoror denounces god the poems state that "I reject evil... man never fell from a state of grace." Maldoror itself is far from monologic. At one point, Satan is Maldoror's great rival, elsewhere god is essentially identical to satan ("I created you so I have the right to do whatever I like to you... I am making you suffer for my pleasure") at another the archangel speaks of Maldoror in the same terms as Lucifer himself, a fallen angel they would welcome back as one of their own. Since the text accepts the binary logic of christianity throughout, it is split between salvation and damnation as mutually exclusive choices, even as the narrator rejects god as an evil tyrant; "this god who is insensible to your prayers.. this shapeless and bloodthirsty idol... I should like to love and adore you but you are too powerful and there is fear in my prayers." Since man is made in god's image it follows that man is as corrupt and vicious as his creator ("the creator who ought never to have bred such vermin"), making murder a moral act. Applying Blake's dictum that one should soon smother a child in its cradle than nurse unacted desires, Maldoror emerges as a Sadeian rebel in the same way Blake envisaged Milton's Satan. But at the same time the narrative voice can still shift to utter conventional homilectics; "that torch of unjustifiable pride that is leading you to your damnation."
Roderick Hudson reminded me of an observation I'd heard that while homosexuality forms an obvious subtext in many novels by gay authors, the sense can permeate other works (the example cited was a rereading of 1984 as story of gay love and persecution). Here, there are grounds to suspect a subtext; Cecilia introduces Roderick as "a pretty boy" while in Venice Roderick and Rownland watch "a brown breasted gondolier making superb muscular movements." The core of the novel can as easily be read as concerning Rowland's unrequited love for Roderick as it can for Mary. In spite of the depiction of Mary, women essentially figure throughout as sexual threats that destroys men of talent as much as Rowland's interference; "a buxom, bold faced, high-coloured creature... she used to beat him and he had taken to drinking." Then later; "he had married a horrible wife.. it was said she used to beat poor Savage." Similarly, Christina is "as cold and false and heartless as she is beautiful... her disrelish of a man who lacked the virile will."Labels: Architecture, Art, England, Glasgow, History, Literature, Music
posted by Richard 8:14 AM
Saturday, January 12, 2008
Brookwood cemetery is not, it has to be said, quite as interesting as its earlier counterparts at Highgate and Kensal Green. It lacks the elaborate monuments found in its counterparts and since it is much larger and wilder it is often a surprise to come across a solitary monument that it larger than a normal tombstone. Its feels like an inferior imitation of its predecessors, a form of down at heel grandeur. The tombs often seem to be in a worse state than those in London itself, while the very conceit behind its existence, that of cadavers being brought to it out of London by train, also confers a rather shabby feel with mass production being applied to undertaking. It is wilder, with robins resting on gravestones while squirrels and rabbits scamper nearby. The grounds are planted with giant redwood and rhododendron, giving it the air of a park rather than of English countryside. Nor did it help that at the time of my visit it had been raining heavily, with everything cold and damp. Moss had displaced grass in many parts.
Many of the monuments are also rather out of kilter for an English cemetery. Near to the main entrance is the Zoroastrian cemetery, where depictions of flame replace crosses. The tombs here are some of the finest in the cemetery, with Victorian grandiosity being welded to Parsee sensibility; ceramic depictions of Persian figures adorn tombs whose arches are filled with elaborate tracery. The fravahar emblazons many tombs and hands hold tinder. Nearby are islamic tombs (including some for members of the Ottoman nobility) with headstones apparently designed as a miniature Taj Mahal or covered with golden domes. There's a funeral in the ismaili cemetery; I can hear chanting and see smoke rising. I'm also struck by a solitary Japanese grave; a square patch of gravel with a grass tumulus at the centre surmounted by a single post. Some of the European tombs are quite different as well; much of the area is occupied by a World War Two cemetery, with headstones and monuments in gleaming white stone. A circular monument to soldiers killed in Norway rather reminds me of the National Memorial Arboretum. Several nations are represented in this section; Czechs, Poles, Americans and Turks.
The cemetery is bisected by a road, and this half of the cemetery is home to more traditional English tombs. Many of these such as the domed columbarium or the near collapsed Bent Memorial are in an extremely poor state of repair, though the finest monument I saw there, the Drake Monument, has recently had its roof restored. The building is in Italian gothic, with red marble contrasting with the brick. A mosaic frieze around it has formerly spelt out a homiletic; I find a few blue and gold tiles neatly placed on the balustrade beside it. Other monument in this section include several celtic crosses designed as quite faithful replicas of Irish counterparts, the pink granite Hughes Mausoleum with its Egyptianate lotus columns, a wooden lychgate to a small churchyard within the cemetery and a tomb that consists of a gothic arch design. More oddly, this section of the cemetery is also home to a series of arts &' crafts buildings that form an Eastern Orthodox Brotherhood dedicated to guarding the bones of St Edward the Martyr. The cemetery also houses the remains of Rebecca West, John Singer Sergeant and Charles Bradlaugh, who must make odd company for a saint.
Surrealism is often described as a Freudian movement, following Breton's use of Freudian techniques in a neurological hospital during world war one. Yet reading Aragon's Paris Peasant I find myself concluding that his brand of surrealism is better described as Jungian, an attempt to weld mythic archetypes of the collective unconscious ("not a retreat into solitude but rather a retreat into a world of similarly adventurous spirits.. the town's collective unconscious") onto an empirical reality. This is why Aragon is concerned with psychogeography, seeing it as the basis for this collective unconscious. At the same time, for all his insistence on the concrete Aragon also dismisses logic in favour of the imagination, reintroducing the idea of solipsism instead of a collective dream. One of the things that had struck me about Thomas Bernhard's Correction was the opposition of nature and artifice in it, as with the stuffed animals created by one of the characters and by Roithammer's plan to build a conical building in the middle of forest. In his autobiography, Gathering Evidence, Bernhard does emerge as something of a romantic in his attitude to nature, going for long walks in the woods and only beginning to recover from his illness when exposed to the mountain views at the sanatorium. He decries his school on the grounds that it turns "his whole nature into something that is the antithesis of all that is natural," before saying that his work in a shop allows him to lead "and intense, natural and useful existence." Nonetheless, Bernhard seems ambivalent about this romanticism, feeling that his grandfather's withdrawal into solitude had marked him as an eccentric, while his time working in business is surely the antithesis of all that romanticism had stood for; the importance of being useful to him is simply utilitarian. But even here, his is far from consistent, writing that he never had any intent of wasting his time in the shop and seeking instead to resume his musical career.
Reading Manhattan Transfer by John Dos Passos it occurred to me that one of the feature of modern society is the way it has produced few social novels in spite of its social upheavals and growing inequality. Exceptions like Wolfe seem few and far between when compared to the body of literature the late nineteenth and early twentieth century produced under similar social conditions. Modern society appears solely concerned with the individual rather than with society at large and our literatuyre would appear to reflect this. While American literature previously produced socially committed authors like Dos Passos, Dreiser, Lewis, Crane and Anderson, history has tended to remember the likes of Hemingway and to produce writers like Mailer to walk in his footsteps. Perhaps this is why the writer most noted for being influenced by Dos Passos is Sartre.
Food cooked: Valencian paella, Chorizo and chestnut stew, Bouillabaisse, Hungarian lamb with pickel sauce, Sri Lankan banana curry, Swedish sausage and potato, Chicken fricassee, French chocolate cake, Swedish salmon casserole, Harissa spiced chicken, Moroccan chicken with preserved lemons, Irish mustard chicken, Keralan sea bass and coconut curry, Roast Pork with Prunes, Lemon Tart, Czech Salmon with lemon and caraway, Chinese tea smoked duck, Italian chicken with chestnut and pistachio, Kleftico, Kabuli chicken, French cherry batter pudding, Lamb with pickle sauce, Tarragonan fish stew, Indian chicken with almond sauce, Hradschin fish, Balti chicken, Yassa chicken, Borscht, Himmel und erde, Italian pork cooked in milk, Drunken chicken with tequila, coconut soup, Balti chicken with tamarind, Catalan chicken with prawns, Mughal chicken, Pheasant with sauerkraut and wine, Chicken with almonds and grapes, Pork with chestnuts and wine, Meatballs with apple and cider, Roast Duck, Lepeshki.Labels: Cooking, England, Food, Literature
posted by Richard 9:40 AM
Wednesday, December 19, 2007
When visiting Coventry it's rather difficult not to feel like English visitors to Rome in the eighteenth century, struck by the contrast between the ruined grandeur of the old and the premature decrepitude of the modern. Coventry is in many respects a metonym for many towns in the Midlands; a medieval city with gothic cathedrals, ruined monasteries, half-timbered houses and an early Twentieth century town hall in keeping with the Tudor style of the surrounding buildings. In parts, it reminds me of Lichfield, with the churches and cathedral spires being cast in the same sandstone. It's also now home to dulled concrete and tarnished metal buildings that lack any form of ornamentation or continuity with the previous structures. Where gothic accrues patina over time, modernism simply becomes a decaying vision of the future. It has the feel of a place where civilisation collapsed. The most obvious expession of this is the difference between the city's two cathedrals. I've heard people speak of the bombing of Coventry (conventration, as it was later to be known), of how the entire sky burned for miles around as a medieval city was reduced to cinders. As a ruin, St Michael's cathedral with its tall spire and blasted arches, retains a great deal of melancholy dignity. It reminds like a David Friedrich painting, as I look at the remaining pieces of stained glass in the window arches and a funerary monument still handing on the wall with a skull and crossbones beneath it. A bronze effigy of the first Bishop of Coventry bears the reversed figure of a swastika on its mitre. Figures of squirrels can still be seen in the apse tracery alongside real ones chasing each one through the ruins and onto the grass outside. With the trees being out of leaf, both they and the cathedral look like skeletons of their former self, with the hope of the old stones putting forth some form of new leaf in spring. In practice, this spring never came. Nearby is Basil Spence's new cathedral. Harshly modernist, it lacks spires, arches or buttresses and makes few concessions to ornamentation, save for a form of fan vaulting on the ceiling. John Piper's stained glass and Graham Sutherland's altar tapestry are both striking but seem imprisoned in darkened gloom. Outside a sign on one of the chapels warns visitors to beware falling masonry from the old cathedral. It's difficult to resist imagining a future where the new cathedral has to be demolished while the ruins of the old still stand; though whether christianity remains in England by then is probably a moot point.
Nearby lie the ruins of Greyfriars, a church demolished during the reformation. A later church, Christchurch, was build around the surviving spire, only for it to fall again and once more leave the spire intact. The remains of the pre-Dissolution Priory have a good museum adjoined, showing displays of medieval tiling and some extraordinarily well preserved medieval painting from the book of revelations. A nearby park houses some Victorian churches and a somewhat unexpected monument to the inventor of the bicycle. Less striking is the church of St John the Baptist, a squat affair whose tower seems fortress-like; it served as a prison during the Civil War. Most impressive of all is Holy Trinity, the de facto cathedral of the city. The church is notable for its Victorian stained glass (as well as some rather garish modern stained glass), Minton tiling and beautiful bossed ceilings. George Eliot once worshipped here and it almost leads to appreciate her continued reverence for aspects of christianity, but the church's most famous feature does nonetheless leave me room for pause; a doom painting of the last judgement, showing souls rising from the grave and the damned being lead to the mouth of hell as Jesus looks on. The artistry is cruder than that of Bosh and has an almost cartoonlike quality to it (certainly in comparison to the similar mosaic I saw at Torcello a few months ago). It's a disturbing subject that summarises christianity at it worst, for all of the undeniable force inherent in the work. A modern gothic replica of the earlier Coventry cross stands nearby. The Herbert art gallery is mostly shut, save for Hepworth's Figure (Walnut) and Cormac Faulkner's sound installation, I am an Instrument, which plays different sounds depending on one's position as one ascends a staircase; a sort of combination of Eno's ambient music and Cage's aleatoric music. Oh, and for some Peruvian stick insects, for reasons I couldn't quite discern.
If I have been dismissive of the modern here (as is often my habit), I should mention the National Memorial Arboretum. England really has little tradition of collective memory. In the past churches and cathedrals would have been the primary vessel for mourning for the lost in wars, with some exceptions like the Crimean monument in Waterloo Place. After the First World War, crosses began to appear in village greens leading to monuments like Lutyens' cenotaph. By contrast, America, with its former secular tradition does have national monuments to the fallen in Washington, and the new Memorial at Alrewas is in that vein. Carved from portland stone, it is comprised of two hemispheres on a raised tumulus; it rather resembles Stonehenge or Silbury Hill and has been designed so that London will steam through a gap in the walls on one day of the year and hit a bronze wreath on a central dais. Nearby is a gilded obelisk and bronze statues of soldiers, again in the American vein. It's a surprisingly pagan structure.
The following day is to Lichfield Cathedral for a candlelight concert, which begins with Handel's Messiah, followed by Corelli's Christmas Concerto and John Tavener's settings of The Lamb and The Tyger. These are particularly effective, with the nursery rhyme quality of The Lamb made sinister and sepulchral and The Tyger made dissonant and chaotic. I feel awkward when it comes to carols and demur from singing. The Victorian rood screen behind the choir is lit up during the performance, but there is darkness behind, only broken by the moonlight shining through the stained glass and making web-like patterns on the gothic arches.
Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy can probably be best described as a fallen summa theologica, an attempt to account for the lack of metaphysical certainty in a post-reformation world ("the superstition of our age, our religious madness"), cataloguing the myriad schisms undergone by the church and the number of fanatics that have founded new cults as "they drive out one superstition with another... how many silly souls have imposters deluded!". It incessantly probes the boundaries of the immaterial and the naturalistic, cataloguing anecdotes in an encyclopaedic manner (a painter who tortured a man in order to depict it, a Swiftian tale of medical treatment by applying bellows to the fundament). The summa encompasses both the christian and the pagan, leading Burton into some rather heterodox observations. For instance, his dismissal of asceticism; "a company of cynics... that contemn the world, contemn themselves... yet in that contempt are more proud than any man living whatsoever," his dismissal of the virtuous nature of poverty "there are those that approve of a mean estate but on condition that they never want themselves," or his appeal for understanding of suicides; "we ought not to be so rash and rigorous in our censures as some are." Whilst still avowing religious orthodoxy, the dialogic approach Burton adopts castigates other religions and christian sects as well as questioning some of the basic tenets of christianity; "why does he suffer so much mischief and evil to be done, if he is able to help, why doth he not assist good or resist bad?" Burton also decouples religion and morality, arguing that "the nature of injury" is sufficient to keep men obedient to the law. Finally, he also questions the validity of a universal religion, suggesting the need for infinite religions for infinute circumstances.
Reading Mary Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Women, I was struck by the extent that is in many respects a conservative, christian text. Whereas, figures like Godwin broadly argued that dramatic changes to the social context would have equally dramatic ramifications for human behaviour, Wollstonecraft is much more meliorist in her demands for social change, concedes to a large extent the fixed character of human nature (and therefore that women are inferior to men in some respects) and couches her arguments in terms of christian virtue, arguing that the current condition of women only fits them for the seraglio. Her radicalism essentially consists of the fact that her account of virtue is either neutral of gender (as with her argument that chastity is surely a virtue for men as well as women, although "women are more chaste than men") or swayed in favour of the masculine (reason in particular is seen as something women have been deprived of; "women at present are by ignorance rendered foolish or vicious"). These ambiguities are perhaps best typified by her description of 'nature.' In the one instance, she admits of some natural differences between the genders, on the other she sees modern women as needing to "bring women back to nature," as with her denunciation of Rousseau's women as "unnatural."
Reading Woolf's The Years, I found myself thinking of her statement in Character in Fiction that "on or about December 10 1910 human nature changed... The first signs of it are recorded in the books of Samuel Butler, in The Way of All Flesh in particular; the plays of Bernard Shaw continue to record it. In life one can see the change, if I may use a homely illustration, in the character of one's cook. The Victorian cook lived like a leviathan in the lower depths, formidable, silent, obscure, inscrutable; the Georgian cook is a creature of sunshine and fresh air; in and out of the drawing room, now to borrow the Daily Herald, now to ask advice about a hat... All human relations have shifted - those between masters and servants, husbands and wives, parents and children. And when human relations change there is at the same time a change in religion, conduct, politics and literature. Let us agree to place one of these changes about the year 1910." Although I tended to mentally connect the well known quote in the first sentence with Freud, Woolf was more preoccupied at the time by social relations than by consciousness, in the vein of Lytton Strachey, who once wrote in a letter to Woolf that "Is it prejudice, do you think, that makes us hate the Victorians, or is it the truth of the case? They seem to me to be a set of mouthing bungling hypocrites; but perhaps really there is a baroque charm about them which will be discovered by our great-great-grandchildren as we have discovered the charm of Donne, who seemed intolerable to the 18th century. Only I don't believe it." It's an odd concept, since much of The Years is spent documenting the awkwardness of the characters in dealing with servants, feeling that one must prove oneself superior to them or be cheated; Woolf is nothing if not an arch snob. The Years is ostensibly concerned with documenting the damage wrought by the repressive character of Victorian society, citing the demise of Parnell as an example, but equally much of the narrative of the novel seem to work in exactly the opposite direction, describing a loss of collective identity as social roles become more reflexive ("What's I?.. two sparks of life in two separate bodies.. what is this moment and what are we"), this time citing the Suffragettes as an example ("all their clothes are the same, she thought; all their lives are the same.. and which is right?.. which is wrong?"). The change to human nature seems something both liberating and traumatic for Woolf ("the old platitude about solitude in a crowd was true").
Whilst the fiction of Wyndham Lewis is perhaps one of the most philosophically fluent in English literature, with clear demonstrations of influence from Bergson, Frazier and Nietzsche, he also belongs to the rank of writers like Celine, Hamsun and Pound who remain tainted to some degree of their connections with Nazism; Lewis could be broadly described as anti-humanist, a stance that led him to contribute to Mosley’s publications as well as to his (later recanted) admiration of Hitler. Lewis believed that man could only rise above the beasts by classical detachment and control, and he followed Goethe in distinguishing between 'natures' (the natural men who achieved this; "the educated man like the true social revolutionary, does not accept life in this way. He is in revolt.") and the vast majority of people who were inevitably puppets or automata ("my puppets... the creaking men machines"). Dehumanisation is in other words a central characteristic of his aesthetics. This type of bastardised Nietzscheanism is very much in evidence throughout The Wild Body, a collection of stories set amongst the "primitive" peoples of Brittany. Whereas Balzac had lent something of the noble savage to the Bretons, Lewis has no truck with any romanticisation of the primitive, repeatedly describing his characters as animals (even characterising the art of novelist as being akin to that of an entomologist). The characters are accordingly frequently observed in forms of struggle for power with each other, as with Beau Sejour where a Polish cuckoo displaces a French couple from their home (this does rather lend his fiction a certain tedious masculinism that resembles Norman Mailer, alongside his frequent snide references to jews and homosexuals).
The depiction of these petty ubermensch is offset by the importance of laughter in Lewis and the influence of Bergson's ideas on the subject. Bergson argues that the source of humour is the "mechanical encrusted upon the living" According to Bergson "the comic does not exist outside of what is strictly human." He thinks that humour involve an incongruous relationship between human intelligence and habitual or mechanical behaviours. As such, humour serves as a social corrective, helping people recognize behaviours that are inhospitable to human flourishing. As Lewis puts it; "the root of the comic is sought in the sensations resulting from the observations of a thing behaving like a person." However, in Lewis it is never entirely clear whether he is seeking to deride the "mechanical encrusted upon the living" or to degrade the living to the condition of the mechanical; as with the influence of Frazier, it can look remarkably like scapegoating. For example, he writes that "violence is the essence of laughter.. it is merely the failure or inversion of force." Some of this ambiguity especially occurs in the first story of the collection, A Soldier of Humour where he describes laughter as the foundation of his philosophy as sex was for Freud; "I am a large blonde clown... I am aware that I am a barbarian... I realise the uncivilised nature of this laughter." In what follows, humour is used to degrade the soldier's mock opponent in the story but the idea of such a thing being uncivilised is one of the few hints of humanity that occur in the stories. Whereas Celine and Hamsun's affiliation from Nazism grew to a large extent from their romanticism, their opposition to the dehumanised machine like existence of modern society and preference for gesellschaft rather than gemeinschaft, Lewis is rather more of an anomaly, embracing that dehumanisation instead.
Much later in his career, The Childermass demonstrates many of the same characteristics as The Wild Body. The novel combines two generic sources; one the Platonic dialogue (Lewis adhering to Platonic concepts in defiance of Bergson's process philosophy) and the other Dante's Divine Comedy. The novel counterpoints the classical and christian through the format of the dialogue. On the one hand is the puppetlike representative of the authoritarian deity, known as the Bailiff. On the other are Hyperides and Alectryon, who broadly represent the rebellion of the ubermensch against god (with Lewis balancing his interest in Nietzsche against his interest in Catholicism); "persons possessed of conspicuous undemocratic abilities... must become outcaste in the midst of the modernist class-conscious orthodoxy... these exceptional persons would be considered as too noble.". The latter is described as wearing; "a Bangkok Swastika temple design imposed upon a rough brooch.. his face has no feminine imperfections... some romantic postulant of a much tired order in a militant epoch." By this point Lewis had become interested in Hitler as creating a Pan-European racial and cultural brotherhood, the Blutsgefuhl of the northern Europeans. After the First War, Lewis believed the individual self to be under attack from various sources, liberalism, and communism amongst them, and particularly from a Jewish conspiracy. Nonetheless, the novel also complicates things with the Bailiff's reaction to Alectryon; "have you no pure Anglo-Saxon.. I refuse to be dressed down by a dirty Dago." Nonetheless, the 'dressing down' that follows is essentially another instance of scapegoating. Alectryon's dialogue does indeed seem quite compatible with Nazi rhetoric; "homosexuality is a branch of the feminist revolution." By as is often the case, the Bailiff's rhetoric is quite similar; "the weak will not be encouraged to go on living and suppressing the strong." The text closes with the dissolution of the Court and Pullman's bullying of Satters into the endless ritual of meaningless activity, leaving the verdict of the debate open (although the original text closed on the roar of acclamation given to Alectryon).
It's a commonplace that the American novel tends to dwell on the individual in isolation, the pioneer and the rebel, whereas the European novel dwells on the individual as an unavoidably social animal. Melville simultaneously resides within both categories, siting his works away from society onboard ship whilst using that ship as a microcosm for society at large. In the case of Redburn there is also the presence of a more conventional social narrative, both in the details of Reburn's fall from the middle classes (Redburn's outsider status is conferred through his middle class status, in contrast to characters like Finn and Bumpo) and in its depiction of Liverpool society. The novel does also critique the notion of romanticising the outsider though, describing sailors as bearing the same relation to society as wheels to a coach (quot;deemed the refuse of the earth and the romantic view of them is principally held through romances" as well as uncoving inconsistencies in Larry's dismissal of society in favour of primitive islands when he reaches London). As often in his work the encounter with foreign cultures is used as a critique of American society; Reburn's initial prejudices (as with the anti-semitic description of the Jewish pawnbroker) are challenged by being treated"as if I were an African in Alabama," his horror at the treatment of Indian sailors (whose shipwrights had surpassed those of Europe) as if they were nothing more than sheep, and by his realisation that the thriving city of Liverpool once feared the economic damage from the curtailing of the slave trade; "I could never look at their swarthy limbs and manacles without being involuntarily reminded of four African slaves in the marketplace." Melville's attitudes are ambivalent; on the one hand he celebrates the extinction of national prejudice in American society (questioning whether Turks might not get to heaven before christians) while noticing that black Americans can behave more freely in Liverpool than in New York. There is also the question of the homosocial aspects of the novel, with the emergence of homosexuality as a marker of difference; although never stated this would seem to lie at the basis of Harry Bolton's escape ("feminine as a girl's... a delicate exotic.")
Antonioni's Blowup is something of an anomaly; ostensibly it inhabits the form of a detective film but lacks the assumptions that typically underlie this form of being able to precisely determine the truth behind events. Instead Antonioni's assumptions are neorealist, a reluctance to make moral judgements ("we have examined those moral attitudes very carefully, we have dissected them and analyzed them to the point of exhaustion. We have been capable of all this, but we have not been capable of finding new ones.") and an avoidance of neatly plotted stories in favor of disconnected episodic structures. Paul Bowles complained to Antonioni that a speech in which is character provided the key to the events was cut, leading to the riposte; "If I leave the speech in, everyone will know what the film is about, but if I take the speech out, everyone will say it is about this, it is about that, it is about the other. It will be controversial." Instead, Paul Castle's statement that he has no intent when he starts a painting, and that meaning only comes later becomes the key to the film. The film repeatedly denies the viewer access to the meaning behind events, forcing us to rely on the photographer's perception of what she saw behind the lens, mistaken or otherwise. Art, whether photography or cinema, is described as a contrivance not a transparent window on the world, as with the mime act and the director's erasure of his own character at the end. With that said, the film does allow its opacity to become slightly more transparent at points; it frequently invites the viewer to make judgements, as with its depiction of the misogynistic and lackadaisical protagonist, whose decadent existence lacks all convictions (as with the scene with him allowing a political placard to fall unhindered out of his car) and who inhabits a society whose Dionysianism seems mostly the product of boredom. Equally, the film does not leave the issue of whether a murder has taken place to chance; the photographer does find a body where his photographs had suggested it would be.Labels: England, Film, Literature, Music
posted by Richard 9:25 AM
Thursday, November 1, 2007
Eastern Promise continues Cronenberg's move away from science fiction towards realism, with the incidents of the film set against the Thames Flood Barrier, St Luke's Old Street and Brompton Cemetery. Nonetheless, the effect of this is essentially to contrast with the events depicted, using London's scenery in effectively the same way the likes of 28 Weeks Later did. Characters in Shivers and eXistenZ undergo horrific transformations and those in Crash the characters embrace their own deformation. Similarly, the tattoos of the Russian mafia serve the same purpose, with the characters driven to enter that world against their better judgement. The Russian characters see London as a form of decadent infection, in spite of the sumptuous surroundings of the Russian restaurant that is the film's principal setting and their contrast to the more prosaic world of the English characters.
Having seen one of the film's characters having his throat slit in Brompton cemetery, I found myself there a few days later. The weather was impossibly mild for November, with the yellowed leaves slowly falling to the ground and forming a carpet on the central avenue. I found myself looking at some details I'd missed before; Minton tiling forming a headstone above a floor of unraveling white and black diamond tiles, the lily and ivy decorating one of the tombs designed by Burne-Jones. A large chunk had fallen off the imposing bulk of the Hannah Peters Mausoleum. Squirrels frantically scamper about, trying to bury nuts and seeds, usually in the flower pots left by the graves. I walk to the Embankment, where I watch a pair a ducks trying to sleep on the Thames; periodically one would realised that they were about to be beached on Cleopatra's Needle, swim upstream and settle down again, so beginning the process anew.
I then walk to the National gallery, for its Renaissance Siena exhibition. Sienese art has been described as overshadowed by that of Florence, with the former written out of art history by the Florentine Vasari and by Florence's conquest of Siena. In this revisionary account, Sienese art is visionary and mystical, with Mariolatry (the Virgin was the city's patron) as its principal subject, in contrast to the naturalistic art of Florence, with it s depiction of the male form and of fighting in particular. I can't help but wonder if a better word to describe Siena's art might not be 'medieval' if we think of the Renaissance as the displacement of religion and the discovery of the individual. Certainly, Siena retained many gothic influences, such as painting onto gold (and then using sgraffito to expose it as part of clothing or the beams of heaven's rays) and was often slavish in its imitation of figures like Donatello, while the city itself was a rather enfeebled city state, wracked by internal strife, debt and threat of invasion. Some of the most powerful works here are by Raphael (The Dream of a Knight) and the Cortonese Lucca Signorelli rather than by any Sienese painter.
The exhibition opens with some classic examples of Siena's Marian art; in San di Pietro's The Virgin Recommends Siena to Pope Calixtus, which shows the Virgin towering over a dwarfed and distorted city. Others showing her leading the ship of state or protecting the city from earthquakes. Paintings by Pietro and Francesco di Giorgio firmly continue the gothic tradition of iconography. Renaissance influences only figure with the idealised landscape shown in Benvenuto di Giovanni's Virgin and Child or Giorgio's sculpture of Male Nude with a Snake. However, later works show a different and more interesting side; cassone chest paintings show scenes of seduction and classical scenes (like the Roman capture of Zenobia or the meeting of Antony and Cleopatra from the workshop of Neroccio de Landi). For a female art, much of it proves surprisingly homoerotic, as with Signorelli's Two Nude Youths or portraits by Giovanni Antonio Bazzi (nicknamed Sodoma due to being openly homosexual, keeping a bizarre menagerie of animals and claiming tax relief because it was so expensive to keep all his boys and pets.) Particularly striking are the interior scenes, where the tone is profane rather than sacred; carved wooden pilasters, frescos of classical scenes and maiolica flooring. Most impressive are the paintings by Domenico Beccafumi, with soft brushwork and an ethereal rendering of colour. Paintings of virtuous historical figures often seem quite odd; did the Tanaquil Livy denounced really seem a virtuous figure? Nor do the ruined backdrops seem to serve any particular allegorical purpose. His two most striking works are a malevolent Cupid with Venus and a bizarre depiction of the feast of Lupercalia.
Journeying to Westonbirt Arboretum, a bright sunny day is transformed into mist. The arboretum has a complete collection of Japanese Maple cultivars, whose leaves were bright burgundy, ochre, pink and bronze. Evergreen yews, pine and firs forms a backdrop to this. Several of the planted trees are new to me; Sapphire Berry (a bright azure berry), Katsura (gives off the scent of caramel), Spindle Tree (with its bright red berries), Wingnut (named for its sycamore-like seeds), Persian Ironwood (named after the explorer who rediscovered Mount Ararat, turned gold and red in autumn), Alue Atlas Weeping Cedar (with a curtain like fall of branches) and Paper Birch (whose bark turns pink-orange as the lenticels fall off). Other plants were more familiar, from Giant Redwood to Monkey Puzzle and an ancient lime coppice. I was equally impressed by the lichens growing on the tree trunks, from hairlike encrustations to something that looked like bright orange rust. One dead tree had its base covered with bracket fungi.
Reading Arthur Hugh Clough's poems, I'm struck by the idea of a Victorian poet working in a largely discursive mode, with Dryden and Wordsworth as his principal influences for their use of the language of everyday speech. His work is not only heteroglossic but it is also dialogic, with much of it being taken up by counterpointed discussions on the death of god. Amours de Voyage has two narrators with opposed perspectives of the protagonist, with much of the narrative opposing is attitudes to christianity, Rome's pagan past and the revolutions of 1848. Similarly, Dipsychus utilises the format of Goethe's Faust, only to assign the role of the tempter to christianity.
Reading Mishima's The Golden Pavilion, I'm reminded of the concept of occidentalism. A conference held in Kyoto in 1942 was devoted to the subject of how "how to overcome the modern." Modernity was associated with the West, and particularly with Western imperialism. Westernization, one of the scholars said, was like a disease that had infected the Japanese spirit. The "modern thing," said another, was a "European thing." Others believed that "Americanism" was the enemy, and that Japan should make common cause with the Europeans to defend old civilizations against the New World. There was much talk about unhealthy specialization in knowledge, which had fragmented the wholeness of Oriental spiritual culture. Science was to blame. So were capitalism, the absorption into Japanese society of modern technology, and notions of individual freedom and democracy. These had to be "overcome." All agreed that culture - that is, traditional Japanese culture - was spiritual and profound, whereas modern Western civilization was shallow, rootless, and destructive of creative power. The West, particularly the United States, was coldly mechanical, a machine civilization without spirit or soul, a place where people mixed to produce mongrel races.
Mishima's novel exhibits many of the symptoms identified here. Mizoguchi looks at the lights of the city, the same lights Tanizaki had denounced as an unwelcome manifestation of modernity in his Praise of Shadows (Tanizaki had also praised the glimmer of gold in the dark, as with the temple here), and dubs it "the mundane world... people are being driven about under that night by evil thoughts... please let the evil that is in my heart increase.. so that it may correspond in every particular with the light before the eyes." As this quotation suggests, Mizoguchi's response to modernity is bifurcated between embracing it as a form of nihilism (itself a profoundly un-Japanese idea; "burdened with a special individuality or sense of mission" which the novel opposes to the intoxication offered by the temple) and rejecting it outright (though even the form of asceticism offered by religion in the novel represents a form of alienation); " youth like myself came to entertain two opposing forms of power wishes... my dream of being a tyrant or great artist." The conclusion of the novel, the arson of the Golden Temple, unifies these themes in a form of immolation just as Mizoguchi's observation produces an ecstatic state that is directed inward; "I was drenched up to the neck in the existence that was myself.. my inner being and the outer world slowly changed places" Mishima's particular brand of masculinist homosexuality further contributes to this nihilism, with women the repeated object of dehumanisation and violence; "the same masculine evil thoughts as the others... the smell of a young man's sweat-moistened skin that they gave off... there was an intrepid beauty about him like that of a lovely woman."
Much the same applies in The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With The Sea, a sort of Japanese Lord of the Flies, where Ryuji's fall is largely predicated on his acceptance of marriage and the feminine world. Mishima's masculinist homosexuality seems not unlike that of William Burroughs, seen as somewhere opposed to effeminancy and the perception of matriarchy and developing a cult of violence in response to it. Women and death are seen as coterminous ("her sweat and perfume fragrance reaching him on the breeze seemed to clamour for his death... are you going to give up the life that impelled you towards the pinnacle of manliness?"). With that in mind, the nihilist children are both in revolt against a Westernised society and a product of its degeneration, of modern society's alienation.
Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward can be best described as a variant on the trope used by both Twain and Irving of a sleeper awakening to find himself in another time (the idea being also essentially the analogue of that depicted by Huxley in Brave New World). It depicts a decidedly bourgeois form of utopianism, by which social equality has been achieved through a process of evolution rather than through any need for a communist revolution (anarchism and communism are portrayed as essentially invidious to the cause of social progress). Bellamy seems to regard evolution in Lamarckian terms, as a form of progress ("in accordance with the principles of evolution... the next phase on the social and industrial development of humanity") achieved through sexual selection ("the principle of sexual selection, with its tendency to preserve and transmit the better types of race and let the inferior types drop out, has unhindered operation") rather than through natural selection and the survival of the fittest (Bellamy closes by denouncing how nineteenth century society created "a brutal struggle for existence"). In spite of the determinist tone taken here, Bellamy is nonetheless closer to Edward Taylor than Marx though (and closer still to Comte). Where the likes of Owen saw human nature essentially as a tabula rasa and therefore capable of being adjusted to new social conditions, Bellamy frequently uses the term 'human nature' to denote a fixed state, which Doctor Leete denies having altered since West's time. Bellamy nonetheless decries the idea that "the only stable elements in human nature, on which a social system could be founded, were its worst propensities." Accordingly, Bellamy can often be quite conservative, viewing women as having a distinct and separate nature from men (""the distinct individuality of the sexes"), in spite of discarding the idea of women as either household drudges or gilded ornaments. Equally, the notion of the majority of society being employed by an 'industrial army' seems a harshly masculine mode of social organisation, if not unpleasantly reminiscent of the national socialist brand of utopianism (particularly as issues like race are almost entirely elided from the novel, the presence of a black servant in the nineteenth century notwithstanding).
Dostoevsky's The Double reminds me most of Kafka's Metamorphosis in so far as uncanny events unfold without an obvious sense of explication. Where the double is most often invoked as an example of man's divided nature between good and evil or between expression and repression (as in The Confessions of a Justified Sinner or Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde), Dostoevsky instead frustrates the morality tale aspects of the narrative by placing the emphasis on Golyadkin's status as a superfluous man, his desire for self-annihilation, his inability to preserve himself. The relationship between self and double is an almost sado-masochistic one, leaving the reader uncertain as to whether they have witnessed a morality tale or not. Tolstoy's The Cossacks and Hadji Murat deal with a rather more conventional form of other, with the former novel defining a liminal space between three of set of groups; Russian, Cossack and Chechen. As with The Double one expects some form of fable concerning the moral progress of another superfluous man through his contact with nature and removal from the frivolities of Muscovite life. For Tolstoy, the Caucasus serves almost the same sort of function that Italy did for EM Forster or DH Lawrence. In practice though, Tolstoy's fatalism often tends to preclude the sort of teleological development associated with characters in European novels. Something similar applies to Hadji Murat whose hero dies a death that is essentially futile and entirely contrary to the status the narrative has accorded him.
On a quite different note, I recently watched the film Thirty Days of Night, one of the more memorable contributions to the vampire genre of recent years. The vampires depicted in it are different from the suave model of Christopher Lee and instead resemble Shreck's Count Orlok, looking both mundane and alien at the same time. Another film I saw not all that long ago is Sunshine, a film that follows similar generic principles to earlier science fiction films like Event Horizon (science arrogantly assuming the prerogative of the divine and so on) but does have some interesting variations on that theme. The character of Pinbacker sees the sun as a god and views any attempts to reignite it as desecration, although when the character of Capa does precisely that he is for instant staring into the face of god. The film seemed unsure as to whether it should be mystical or materialist.
posted by Richard 2:37 PM
Sunday, May 20, 2007
Stowe's landscape gardens were designed to reflect the Whiggish views of Viscount Cobham, representing allegory as architecture. It coincidentally depicts a palimpsest of architectural and garden design, with the move from Baroque to Palladian and Augustan styles and from thence to Brown's Serpentine designs. I feel ambivalent on several scores, preferring the Gaudiesque playfulness of Hawksmoor or Wren to the classically correct Palladian style embraced by Burlington and Kent, whilst the continent preferred rococo. Palladianism was closely associated with the Whigs and Kent's designs follow that (although the relationship was fraught; Kent's Augustan style followed a Roman model that was redolent of Roman tyranny rather than Greek liberty, hence the subsequent Greek Revival and James Stuart), depicting figures revered in the Whig tradition like Locke, Socrates and Milton. Conversely, the Tory Gibbs preferred the Baroque style and built an early example of the gothic revival from ironstone that is common in this part of Buckinghamshire and Northamptonshire. Gothic was justified as being suggestive of the country's Germanic heritage and commitment to liberty. As was common for early gothic revival buildings, it doesn't look as if Gibbs was entirely sure of what gothic was or how to construct it; the capitals here look more Egyptianate than Gothic. Equally, Brown's mimicry of natural landscapes is entirely dependent on the population of said landscape with various classical temples; I always feel I'd prefer the earlier formal style which admitted no division between nature and art. The grounds were at least home to a wide variety of nature outside of Brown's tamed vistas; lilies, rabbits, copper beeches, squirrels, horse chestnut, coots and geese. This period was also that of the faked ruin and Stowe does have these (along with a Chinese house), but The Temple of Friendship was perhaps more interesting in this regard; it was originally inhabited and decorated and was only perserved as a ruin after a fire. There's something particularly forlorn about its empty rooms, particularly given the surreal aspect given them by the retention of wooden doors and seats.
By contrast, Polesden Lacey is a more mannered affair, largely the creation of an ostentatious Edwardian heiress. The gardens combine formal planting with rock gardens and statues of griffins. The interior joins Edwardian ostentation (a saloon with the walls covered with gold gilt) with an antiquarian interest; Grinling Gibbons carving from an old Wren church, a picture gallery with a plaster ceiling in the style of a Seventeenth century long gallery. Each room is filled with Chinese or Imari vases, Maiolica plates, Ormolu clocks, Boulle and Chippendale furniture, Chinese lacquer and Persian rugs. Some Italian (though derived from Arabic) marquetry of walnut, bone and ivory was especially striking. The gallery is predminantly composed of Dutch (Velde seascapes, Ruisdael landscapes, a Van Der Neer frost fair) and Sienese altar paintings. It also included Corneille De Lyon miniatures and a Ter Borch painting showing an ambiguous scene wherein the characters seem to be playing out a moral fable (a brothel scene), something which typically tended to show low status characters but which here depicts recognisable middle and upper class figures. The gallery also contained a Roman sarcophagus, with elephants shown on its side.
Returning to Highgate, I found myself especially struck by the East Cemetery. When I last visited in Winter the grid plan this necropolis was laid out on was clearly evident and the place had a logical and orderly air to it. In summer, the trees had closen in and the paths beneath them seemed as hidden and secret as those in the West Cemetery. I look at gravestones shattered by ivy vines as thick as lianas, graves written in Arabic, Chinese and Hebrew, graves for obscure figures like magicians (the Human Hairpin) and forgotten inventors. Then there is Karl Marx, an anachronistic monument out of place in North London and out of time now that its kin have been pulled down in Eastern Europe. A single red flower rests on the mausoleum while a black cat flits quietly between the headstones. Within the West Cemetery foxgloves, roses and buttercups are flowering but the cover of the trees in full leaf only leaves the place more dark than on my previous visit in winter. It's difficult not to feel like Alexander Humboldt or Frederick Catherwood. I hadn't realised that this is one of the few places in London with a Giant Redwood. Monuments formerly surmounted by vases now witness them lying broken at their bases, crushed by bindweed.
Reading Museum is not especially noteworthy but it does have some interesting exhibits; green man capitals and animal voussoirs from Reading Abbey, black and white frets from Silchester, the Ogham stone, a Roman tombstone, an Iron age horse effigy and a head from a statue of the Egyptian God Serapis from a Silchester temple. At the time of visiting, the museum had an exhibition dedicated to Sir John Soane to coincide with the restoration of the Simeon Monument. Amongst other things it included various paintings by Joseph Gandy of the Bank of England. Reading Bach Choir also organised a set of peripatetic concerts, flitting from one Reading church to another. Beginning at St Giles (a high church interior filled with baroque monuments, paintings, Bavarian statues of st Mary, candles and Victorian mosaics of the saints) with Summer is Icumen in, then to St Mary's (a former evangelical chapel with a beautiful stained glass simple with a tree design) and Benjamin Britten before finishing at Reading Minister (high church adornments mingling with Saxon arches) and Tallis.
The exhibition of John White's drawings at the British Museum recalls Hakluyt's complex descriptions of native cultures. It begins by showing White's drawings of native cultures from Greece, Turkey and Uzbekistan as well as his Calibanesque imaginings of Pictish warriors. Many of his descriptions of Inuit and Algonquian Indians were to follow the same poses and tropes established by these depictions of savagery, most obviously in the scenes of violence shown with Frobisher's encounter with the Inuit while searching for the North West passage. Nonetheless, his drawings were also intended to assuage such fears of hostile savages and encourage would be emmigrants to Roanoke, and veer between the depiction of noble savages (stressing their agrarian expertise in the growing of maize, their ordered villages and craftsmanship in kayak construction) and objects of curiousity (the skinning of their dead and entombment in special huts, the dances around totem poles surmounted by human faces while draped with tobacco leaves and depictions of cannibalism). The drawings consequently emerge as a form of prospectus, reflecting the linkage between commerce and colonialism that was to set the pattern for the British Empire. White also meticulously recorded the flora and fauna of the places he visited; pineapples, flying fish, jellyfish, plantains, crabs, hoopoes and scorpions while the exhibition also contains some excellent Hilliard miniatures and an appearance from John Dee's scrying mirror (as well as a frontpage of a treatise on navigation showing Elizabeth at the helm of an exploring vessel, wherein Dee prepared the intellectual foundations for colonisation by using the term 'British Empire' for the first time).
Elsewhere in the V&A, an equally interesting exhibition on James 'Athenian' Stuart shows the drawings he and Revett made of buildings like the Temple of the Winds and the Choragic Monument of Lysicrates, frequently showing both of them wearing Ottoman dress. As well as depicting the architecture Stuart also had an ethnographic care in depicting the people of Greece, their dress and habits. The background narrative of avoiding plague and brigands alike nearly obscure his architectural achievement but Stuart was the first person in centuries to design structures like censor tripods or doric temples, with the rest of the exhibition showcasing designs and artefacts from places like Kedleston, Shugborough and Nuneham Courtenay. Later, I noticed Rysbrack's original statues of Thor and Sunna on display; if anything I preferred the weathered and encrusted copies that are still at Stowe.
Appelfeld's Badenheim 1939 is an uneasy compromise between realist and historical specificity on the one hand (in the vein of Solzhenitzyn's A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich) and an allegory that recalls La Peste, The Magic Mountain and The Trial (most obviously in the case of the two guards that come for Frau Zauberblit). As with the latter category of novel, Appelfeld deliberately isolates the events from their historical context, thereby implicity separating them from any meaning. The anomie and restlessness experienced by the inhabitants of Badenheim, whether manifested in a longing for the woods or for a Polish childhood, seems as generalised as the alienation experienced by Hans Castorp even if Appelfeld elsewhere identifies "a kind of neuroticism, a restlessness, a permanent alertness, a kind of insecurity" as an integral aspect of the Jewish consciousness. Equally, Appelfeld also elsewhere suggests that "a society without true roots is a society without a future...Without a deep belief, without a deep philosophy, mysticism, you cannot got through it." Nonetheless, the experience of collective memory in Badenheim 1939 is a deeply ambivalent one. For all of the scorn directed at self-loathing assimilated Jews who sneer at Buber and Herzl, the characters who embrace their Jewish identity most keenly in the novel are those that also embrace their journey to the Polish concentration camps. In a perervse sense the holocaust is envisaged as a form of pilgrimage, the longing for roots equating to a death drive in a way that perhaps recalls the exchange of European emnity for Arab emnity. The metonymic force of the novel is an undirected one that escapes the stark simplicity of the metaphor he employs of fish in the tank.
White's The Vivisector is cast in the same vein as Mann's <>Doktor Faustus and Bernhard's Correction in exploring the idea of the artist as a Faust figure (in depicting the embalmed remains of a vivisected dog it even touches of similar themes to Correction where stuffed animals are emblematic of the blurred distinction between nature and art). The difference is that White also considers the artist as being akin to god ("Yes, I believe in him... othrwise how would men come by their cruelty - and their brilliance?"), who is often described as the divine vivisector, the same term White uses for Duffield. Elsehwere in the novel, the relevation of god's purpose is through a wasp siting rather than by seeing eternity in a grain of sand. Art is a priestly function, of revelation ("the endlessly changing coloured slides in his magic lantern of a mind... were focussing into what might be called a vision.. these paintings are my revelations") but also of cruelty and dissection. In short, the faustianism is inverted, with christ and the devil being one and the same. This combination accountsfor the duality of Duffield as a character; he is often not consciously cruel to the people in his life. He is, for instance, horrified by Hero's drowning kittens and sending her adopted child back to his poor parents, something that is deliberately counterpointed to the actions and attitudes of his own parents (who are nonetheless seeking to treat the child as a work of art, to be moulded or disfigured). Such describes the novel's central fabula, but it is one complicated by class and repressed homosexuality. Caldicott and Cutbush represent the third sex, with the suggestion that the dislocation caused by their sexuality enables them to experience revelation. His liminal position between classes further displaces him from any sense of belonging.
Reading a selection of Emily Dickinson's poems, I felt quite strongly that she reminded me of Hopkins in her approach to language, to sexuality and to religion. The principal difference seemed to be although her work can be viewed as having the concepts of instress and inscape implicit within it, her work has a rather more modernist approach to the role of literature and language. Her poems present a spectrum of views on this from the disavowal of art in I would not paint a picture and Drama's vitallest expression is the common day to its elevation above nature in I reckon - when I count at all.
The Lives of Others is an anomaly, starting from the premise that East Germany was hospitable to art in a way that was not true for a unified Germany that lacked anything to believe in or to rebel against. It's a premise that creates the drama while obviating historical accuracy. In practice, a Stasi agent would not have been assigned sole responsibility for such an operation and would not have been able to collude with his victims; in describing Wiesler as a good man the film does blur the distinction between perpetrator and victim. In a certain sense, there is even a sublimated homosocial love story between Wisler and Dreyman.
Although art if assigned a redemptive quality in the film (as with Wiesler's reading of Brecht's poetry, as his sterile life is counterpointed to Dreyman's), its role is an ambiguous one. For example, the metaphor of acting permeates the script; the Stasi are seen as directors while the ketman practiced by the Easy Germans is characterised as acting. The main character uses this metaphor to persuade Christa to both be true to her husband and to betray him. As a consequence, few ideas presented in the film are seen as clear and stable; the communist bigwigs do not believe in communist ideology even as they enforce and abuse it (Margot Honnecker, gives Dreyman a book by Solzhenitsyn strictly prohibited to ordinary people), and even as Dreyman remains faithful to the cause. Fiction is repeatedly metamorphosed into the reality that originally produced it; the surveillance transcripts refer to an imaginary play and are then turned into a novel, undermining the role of art in bearing witness.Labels: Architecture, Art, England, Literature, London
posted by Richard 12:40 PM
Monday, January 1, 2007
Worcester cathedral was built with a mix of stones; something grey, sometimes red sandstone. Although placed in the heart of the city, the Cathedral Close still has a rather self contained feel to it, as one passed through Edgar's Tower and enters a complex of ruins where halls and other monastic buildings once stood. A watergate remains, something that only serves to emphasise the self contained character of the cathedral. The most interesting aspect of the interior is undoubtedly the Norman crypt begun by Bishop Wulfstan in a style reminiscent of Repton. Similarly, the tombs are especially striking, such as the Beauchamp tomb with its black swans or the ornate gothic tomb for Prince Arthur. The rest of the cathedral shows the evidence of Gilbert Scott's restoration, such as the painted ceiling. A graveyard is placed in the centre of the cloisters (monks who has tended the garden would once have been buried there) while figures from English history are depicted on stained glass in the arches. The town itself is a mixture of Queen Anne (such as the Guildhall and Hospital with its heraldic white swans), Georgian and Victorian buildings. The majority of the church towers are in red sandstone, excepting one where a grey baroque tower had been built onto an earlier gothic foundation. Another exception is the slender grey spire of St Andrew's, which rises far above the other buildings and rivals the cathedral. A Victorian structure, the building is nonetheless a ruin; nothing remains except the tower.
The Priory Church in Great Malvern rather resembles a cathedral as well, though there is something more colourful about its external appearance, with its patchwork red, yellow and grey stones. The stained glass is also a patchwork of fragments dating back to the time of Richard the Third. Victorian minton tiling sits alongside the original medieval designs it was based on. There's also some new windows stained in a more impressionistic style. The round arches on the interior date back to the Saxon period, sitting alongside baroque monuments and a chantry chapel containing medieval stone tombs.
The church of St Mary the Virgin in Ingestre, has the distinction of being the sole Wren church outside London. Although the stone is duller than the city churches, the building that stands next to Ingestre's Carolean hall is recognisably of the same design (particularly to St Mary Somerset). The interior is decorated with plaster carvings, Gibbons woodwork and Burne-Jones stained glass, showing blood dripping from a pelican onto Adam and Eve, who bear crimson halos and wings. Unusually, the marble monuments have been painted and gilded. Nearby in Hoar Cross, Holy Angels is GF Bodley's miniature cathedral standing stop a hill and surveying the valley beneath. Yews line the walk to the door, while winged gargoyles look down the roof, statues stare ahead from their niches and lonely stone angels on the graves stare at the sky. The church of St Paul in nearby Burton on Trent where it sits adjacent to the town hall, is also by Bodley and shows a similar style. More unusual is the church of St Modwen in the marketplace there. It's tower is blackened but is still in a recognisably baroque style. The interior is also quite unusual, with plain stone columns and round arches lining the nave, while the altar and sanctuary are 'high baroque.' Filled with dead leaves when I visited, the churchyard looks out over the then flooded river Trent and is filled with elaborate tombs. Finally, the church of St John the Baptist in Croxall presented an especially melancholy prospect. It stands high on a hill, above the river Trent next to the local hall. Like St Modwen, the churchyard was filled with elaborate eighteenth and nineteenth century tombs and framed with fallen leaves and bare tree branches. But the tombs here have fallen into desuetude; a celtic cross tips over as it sinks into the earth while the walls of box tombs crumble. The church is also in a poor condition; the windows are broken and the crudely repaired walls patched with brick seem less than steady.
Visiting Kensal Green Cemetery last spring, the central avenue was hidden in shade beneath the trees that lined it. In winter, the leaves had fallen and the grandiose tombs felt oddly naked and bereft. The decay of the tombs was also far more evident; since my last visit a section of the outer wall had collapsed and the resulting breach made it feel far more ramshackle than before. Since I wasn't as distracted by the novelty of the architecture this time, I also noticed far more that most of the modern graves were from other countries; Ethiopia, Yugoslavia or Greece. It seems oddly appropriate given the pagan symbolism of much of the funerary architecture, from Egyptian to Roman and Greek. I wondered if this reflects the increasingly multi-ethnic character of London or whether it was simply that people from these countries were more likely to be drawn to the same traditions that its Victorian creators were. Many of the more modern tombs also seem to display a sentimental and trivial approach to death, with cuddly toys left on the them, that were at odds with the cold stone that surrounds them. I also notice a jay perched on a nearby tomb, a pigeon nestles on a quatrefoil above a tomb door and a squirrel disappears through a tomb wall. Afterwards, I move on to walk around Camden market, somewhere else with Victorian roots that has given way to a more multi-ethnic London. Or at least so that might seem; despite the oriental food stalls and melting pot atmosphere, the predominant aspect is of white counter-culture; gothic clothes, new age and punk. The following weekend was occupied with Mapledurham church with its diamond patterned redbrick and flint by Butterfield (the house's original chantry chapel with alabaster tombs remains alongside the gothic revival building). Later, I visit St John's Gate, a hyperreal Victorian interpretation of a medieval Priory, even down to its reinvention of the Knights Hospitalier as a chivalric order in keeping with the Victorian emphasis on medieval tradition. I also returned to Limehouse churchyard, which was covered in a carpet of purple crocuses and daffodils.
Hockney as an artist always seems to me to be oddly hollow, someone who flits through different styles and media while the essential subjects remain the same, both in terms of the people being depicted and how they are depicted. Self-portrait with Blue Guitar shows him drawing naturalistically while all the objects around are shown in abstract terms that reference Picasso. Picasso recurs in his photographic collages, simultaneously showing the same subjects from different angles and at slightly different times. Conversely, his portraits combine modernist techniques (the collages recalling Cubism, his portrait of Divine recalling Matisse) with a surprising traditionalism; the portraits of his mother and lover against deep blue patterned backgrounds is heavily reminiscent of the Holbein paintings I had seen earlier, while a picture of the artist at work deliberately echoes Velasquez and Las Meninas. For all of this, there's a fundamental similarity to his work. His My Parents shows his mother staring out of the canvas at the viewer while his father sits at right angles to her. They are separated by a table where a vase of flowers stands (a favourite prop). Similarly, his portrait of Fred and Marcia Weisman shows her staring at the viewer while he stands at right angles to her, separated by one of the art objects they collected. The painting of Henry Geldzahler and Christopher Scott shows Geldzahler sat looking at the viewer while Scott, wearing a coat as if about to leave, stands at right angles to him (a glass table with a vase full of flowers rests in the foreground). Although his painting of Peter Getting Out of Nick's Pool is the most famous work, a later one finds Schlesinger sat alone, slightly at right angles to the viewer but still staring back, the pose used on Divine. Later, I walk around the National Portrait Gallery - I still think it an institution more marked for its commitment to historical narrative than to artistic excellence but I was struck by Roger Fry's portrait of Edward Carpenter, showing him in a spartan interior and his reflection only half visible in a mirror, leaving his figure to nonetheless dominates the room.
The BBC adaptation of Dracula was surprisingly original. It bends the novel to fit the conventions of the horror film (as with the deaths of Harker and Holmwood), but foregrounds the theme of occultism (rather reminding me of Huysman's The Damned) and the more obvious theme of syphilis, as opposed to Coppola's Faustian interpretation of the role of plague in Herzog's film. It did occur to me that the renewed 'threat' of immigration from Eastern Europe has given the novel a new resonance; this is after all the year Romania joined the European Union. Volver is a welcome return to the the camp humour and magical realism of Almodovar's earlier films, especially What Have I Done to Deserve this? (whose plot it resembles), combining this with the Hitchcockian plotting of Mala educacion. Children of Men falls uneasily between the apocalyptic and political genres, failing to formulate a consistent political critique on the one hand while failing to abstract those concerns into the the nihilism demanded by the former genre. Every part of the film refers to minor extrapolations of what can be seen in daily news broadcasts; low fertility rates, ethnic violence, immigration, state authoritarianism, terrorism etc.
Lawrence's Mornings in Mexico finds him once more enraptured by male beauty during Indian dances while only noticing the women's clothing; "the men are naked to the waist.. they are handsome, and absorbed with a deep rhythmic absorption." In describing the Indian culture, he celebrates themes of unity in a manner that is reminiscent of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance ("creation is a great flood, for ever flowing. in lovely and terrible waves. In everything the shimmer of creation and never the finality of the created") but as with Pirsig, the narrator figures as an outsider throughout (something emphasised by the absence of Frieda from the domestic setting), even finding himself uncomfortable with the presence of tourist crowds at the Hopi snakedance. Last Words by William Burroughs, reminded me of TS Eliot's complaint that Blake had concocted his philosophy from bits and bobs left around the house. Throughout, Burroughs reads an assortment of mystical and conspiracy theory writings designed to gull the credulous. He dotes on his cats and his collection of guns (reminding me of Self's waspish comment that Burroughs hated women and loved guns).
Turgenev's Home of the Gentry presents a fable of a rootless man like Rudin ("you're a thinking man - and yet you lie around... you're all well-heeled layabouts.. this ecstasy of boredom is the ruin of the Russian people"), which is complicated by a rival fable of rural virtue and urban corruption. The Russian admiration of the peasantry complicates a novel that could easily have become a narrative of individual damnation like Madame Bovary and instead gains a sense of the diminishing effect of the environment that has more in common with The Return of the Native or Ethan Frome. For example, Mikhalevich exhorts Lavretsky to work on the land and to concern himself with the welfare of his peasants, a fate that ultimately only manifests itself as a form of punishment. Russia destroys its own children and those that linger too long, such as Lemm's death in impecunious exile, feeling like "a fish out of water". Although Lavretsky and Panshin differ on issues of westernisation and slavophilia, neither worldview is material to their respective fates in the narrative which effectively share the same end; "we're sick because we've only become half-European; we must cure ourselves with more of what has made us sick." The realist context of the novel with its complex of patterning of economic, social and political strands is thus at odds with a metaphysical theme that sees life in Schopenhauerian terms; "he had actually ceased to think about personal happiness... he had become tranquil"
Sarah Orne Jewett's The Country of the Pointed Firs is unusual in American fiction for its emphasis on community and place (the very name being reminiscent of Middlemarch (the statement at the end of Marsh Rosemary being akin to that at the end of Middlemarch) or Cranford). Men figure throughout as objects of ridicule or of cruelty (Captain Littlepage and the pompous Minister that visits Joanna on the one hand, or Joanna's betrayer himself on the other) in contrast to the supportive community of women symbolised by Mrs Todd and her mother; "Mrs Blackett was of those who do not live to themselves, and who have long since passed the line that divides mere self-concern from a valued share in whatever society can give or take" (although events like Mrs Todd knocking the Minister down do challenge ideas about gender, Jewett is essentially a traditionalist on this score, blaming William for lack of ambition in a way no female character would be treated). Nonetheless, the location of Dunnet next to the sea introduces themes that recall Melville more than Austen. Both men and women yearn for the sea ("a far-off look that sought the horizon... inherited by girls and boys alike") and the novel foregrounds themes of individual isolation repeatedly, as with Joanna again ("doomed from the first to fall into melancholy... 'twas her poor lot") or the neighbours that never see one another from one year to the next ("for three generations the people had not spoken to each other even in times of sickness or death or birth"). Joanna's role is given to a male character in The King of Folly Island, where it is his daughter once more that stands for the feminine social virtues. Fishermen are portrayed as being at one with nature ("you felt almost as if a landmark pine should suddenly address you") more than with humanity, while the community is made up of women, but in stories like The White Heron this is reversed and it is women who are seen as being at one with nature (as with Mrs Todd's herbal medicines being opposed to the Doctor's remedies).
Whereas the realist novel typically works by assuming an empirical worldview, contrasting the individual consciousness against the social setting, Jacques the Fatalist operates in the conditional tense, continually disrupting linear narrative with a series of what if 'butterfly effect' discursions and interruptions. This feeds into the dialogic character of the novel, where the narrator simply notes of the debates between Jacques and his master; "and they were both right... has not everyone his own character, according to which he either exaggerates or attenuates everything?" The repeated interjections from the narrator also emphasise the fictionality of events and their arbitrary character. Diderot accepts Hume's critique of the reliability of the evidence of the common senses but is less certain when it comes to Hume's critique of causality. Throughout, Diderot uses ambiguous language ("what is written up above.. is it we who controls Destiny or Destiny which controls us?") to describes Jacques's fatalism, leaving it unclear whether a mechanistic materialism (adopting Spinoza's ideas over Hume's; "good brings bad after it and bad brings good") or a sense of religious destiny is being described (for instance, the idea of providence leading Jacques's brother into the Lisbon earthquake accords with a religious satire along the same lines as Voltaire's Candide).
Prevost's Manon Lescaut is like the works of Defoe and Fielding, episodic in nature rather than operating a linear narrative; events proceed through coincidence and accident rather than by causality. The characters of the novel accordingly vary with the circumstance; Manon being devoted and fickle by turns. Although the narrative is cast in the form of a fable, there is no redemption or repentance anymore than there is damnation ("a craven little soul, so devoid of feeling, that he could not see the humiliation of it... or else a christian... I was neither one thing or the other"), with Des Grieux even arguing that his love for Manon is akin to religious devotion or that it is unexceptional when one considers "that a mistress is nothing to be ashamed of nowadays." Prevost also suggests that Des Grieux's crimes are not of his own making; "knowing neither the mad lust for money.. nor the fantastic notions of hnour that had turned my father into an enemy." The novel is fundamentally a sentimental one, valuing natural emotion over the unnatural morals of his father, something that further serves to distort the moral fable at the novel's core.
De Nerval's writing is deeply embued with German metaphysics but nonetheless represents a point where the death of god leaves sublimity undermined by melancholy (Nerval's Aurelia, his Beatrice, is imagined as Durer's Angel of Melancholy). Whereas earlier Romantic aesthetics emphasised the ability to intuit the noumenal through the phenomenal in brief epiphanies, Nerval foregrounds the question of the potentially subjective and misleading character of such spots of time, both through his emphasis on the difficulty of distinguishing the real from the metaphysical and through the foregrounding of his insanity and experience of the asylum. For example, in The King of Bedlam, Spifame's imaginings of himself as the king lead to his being placed in the asylum only for him to end up leading a parallel existence to the monarch as he lives in luxury and has most of dictats implemented; "Spifame could recognise himself in a mirror or dream, he could take stock of himself even as he changed roles and personalities." Sanity and reason exist in a strangely liminal relationship rather than as opposites in Nerval; his characters remain aware of themselves even as they lose themselves. Similarly, in The Tale of Caliph Hakim, the sultan emerges first as the double of himself, sane even while mistaken for a lunatic, only to realise that he has a double he had been unaware of. The ruin strewn landscape of Sylvie (set in a landscape associated with Rousseau) similar emerges as a place of mistaken identities where neither the phenomenal nor the noumenal can be taken for certain; "but how could I be sure I was not merely the victim of one more illusion.. such are the chimeras that beguile and misguide us." Travelling to the Orient, Nerval found it too quotidian ("the Orient is no longer the land of marvels") and prefers his friends's opera set designs, travelling to Paris, Nerval found it a land of fantasy in contrast to British realism. His masterpiece, Aurelia, continues this: "the overflow of dream into real life... Spirit from the external world suddenly takes on the bodily shape of an ordinary woman." although at one point after a vision of the afterlife, Nerval proclaims that there is a god, he elsewhere proclaims that there is no god ("the virgin is dead and all prayers are useless... there is no god, god is no more!") and that he is god ("I myself was god, trapped in some sorry incarnation"), with the additional complication of his frequently esoteric view of religion, which has more in common with the druze than with christianity. Nerval is plagued throughout by his own double, as well as the question of whether his beloved exists as spirit or simply as a lost love, whether is insanity is precisely that or simply a form of vision. Throughout, Aurelia, opposites are overturned and nothing is left stable; everything is swallowed by the black sun.
Baudelaire's poetry reminded me of Arnold's line about "alarms of struggle and flight, where ignorant armies clash by night." Where Arnold's response to the death of god is comparatively straightforward, Baudelaire's is considerably more complex. Since his work is essentially symbolic, the symbol always seems to lack something stable to represent so that his Hymn to Beauty asks "did you come from the depths of heaven or up from the pit?" (just as Horreur Sympathetique speaks of how "your shafts of light are the reflection of hell") suggesting that clear knowledge of the noumenal is beyond the poet. The result is that his poetry is over-signified, being replete with meaning. At times, his stance seems to be akin to that of Arnold, of a poet caught in a world without the divine (the line about "my soul tossed.. on a monstrous, shoreless sea" in The Seven Old Men having more than a passing resemblance to Dover Beach), at other times his mythology remains essentially christian ("a damned man without a lamp" in Abel and Cain) and at others he resembles Blake, feeling sympathy for the devil (in The Irremediable there is "an angel, unwary traveller tempted by the love of the misshapen... as if it were reproaching god" while in The Rebel there is "a furious angel... but the damned rebel always answers "I won't!" Finally, Abel and Cain speaks pf throwing god down upon the earth). Baudelaire's poetry owkrs by overthrowing oppositions between good and evil, beauty and ugliness, company and isolation as he writes in Crowds that "the poet enjoys the incomparable privilege of being able at will to be himself and someone else."
Zola's The Earth bears a surprising resemblance to Hardy's novels (Nenesse is described as being proud of his roots as if he were a tree, centering the issues of place and displacement in exactly the same way Hardy does); both situate their characters within a rural environment that is being displaced by modern industry and commerce, both present their characters in quasi-Darwinian terms of their connection to nature, and both present them in terms of their struggle for existence. Zola's propensity for biological explanations of human behaviour is dominant here, with characters repeatedly described as animals (Buteau is "like soem great carnivorous beast") while only Lequeu is seen in more environmental terms in so far as his education has left him deracinated ("a country boy who through education had become imbued with a hatred for his class. he used to brutalise his pupils who he called savages" - a hatred it should be said that Zola shares as all of the educated characters despise the peasantry). Although the novel is replete with references to the oppression of the peasantry, there is something distant too it in so far as the peasants are described as being too lazy to take any effective action. The novel accordingly lacks the political engagement in Germinal and events effectively play out their own logic without reference to the overall social context in the way that Zola's urban novels tend to. Modern innovations are frequently seen as immaterial in the country so that Hourdequin's agricultural improvements simply breakdown and avail him little in spite of his predictions that the French soil is dying of exhaustion without them. Further intimations of decline, such as talk of declining faith and the villager's indifference to the absence of a priest equally prove themselves as irrelevances as the customary pattern of things reasserts itself for reasons of nothing more than social convention.
White's A Fringe of Leaves presents an especially interesting dialectic between civilisation and nature. The protagonist and her dual identities of Ellen Guyas and Mrs Roxburgh represents both of these aspects, rendering the disjunction between individual consciousness and the environment in the novel rather inconsistent. On the one hand, the novel depicts women as vulnerable and dependent on men; the murder of Garnet Roxburgh's and Chance's wives, while it is the modern Eve (the title being an implied reference to Genesis), Ellen, who best survives the expulsion from Eden, as her civilised husband is killed. The novel seems to constantly refer to Pygmalion; Ellen is both rescued from her wild early life by her husband but later comes to depend on that part of her nature after the shipwreck.
Niedzviecki's Hello, I'm Special presents an argument I have much sympathy with; that in a culture where individuality and rebellion are continually lauded as socially desirable, rebellion and individuality cease to be meaningful. Partly, Niedzviecki's concerns stem from a feeling that modern culture lacks a means to engender consent, but the argument seems confused on this score; the rebels he presents living on isolated islands are surely part of the same culture of rugged individualism in the United States that goes back to Thoreau and which has its trite expression in the films and music Niedzviecki denounces, rather than being a genuine expression of something the mainstream is faking. Equally, Niedzviecki notes that religious traditionalism may be more rebellious than commonly accepted ideas of rebellion, although his arguments invariably proves sufficiently elastic than almost anything can be regarded as a manifestation of 'individualistic conformity,' even when he himself notes that modern society is both homogenous and conformist.
Food cooked: Tiramisu, Baron of Hare, Vietnamese chicken with coconut, Singapore Laksa, Chinese chicken glazed with Orange and Apple, Singapore curry, Keralan Crab Curry, Thai hot and sour duck, Javanese curry and Nasi Goreng, Pork with parsnips, pears and maple syrup, Duck Vindaloo, Vietnamese curry, Tapas (Egg stuffed with Manchego and Sardine, Flamenco eggs, crab with flaked almonds), Mustard Spiced Indian chicken, Indonesian pork with soy sauce and nasi kunung, Moroccan chicken with lemon and olives, Pearl Barley rissotto with crab, Pork Stroganoff, Romanian Duck Jubilee, Louisiana Jambalaya, Chicken Mole, Poulet al'estragon, Kefta Mkaouara, Vietnamese chicken with sweet potato curry, Thai green curry, Red Thai Curry, Italian chicken stuffed with pear and chestnut, Spaghetti with Salmon and cream, Morroccan chicken with lemon and honey, Lamb tagine with ras el hanout, Vietname duck with nuts and dates.Labels: Art, England, Food, Horror, Individuality, Literature, London, Victorian
posted by Richard 7:40 AM
Sunday, November 12, 2006
"High the vanes of Shrewsbury gleam
Islanded in Severn stream;
The bridges from the steepled crest
Cross the water east and west." (AE Housman)
Shrewsbury is one of the best preserved towns in England, with streets lined with half-timbered buildings (one of them stayed in by Henry prior to the Battle of Bosworth Field), a castle on a hill and a profusion of churches from a number of a variety of different periods. Outside the town and besides the Severn lie the remains of the old Benedictine monastery (including a rather eeriely isolated refectory pulpit standing outside) and the present Abbey. The red sandstone exterior left me rather reminded of Hereford. The interior remains largely gothic, with the remains of St Winfrid's shrine having an orthodox icon of the saint by them (it's not really my sort of reading but I did always rather like the alternative story of Winifrid's arrival in Shrewsbury from A Morbid Taste for Bones), Tudor and Norman tombs, Norman remains, a font made from an upended Roman column as a font and Victorian reredos depicting Winifrid.
Within the town lies the church of St Mary the Virgin, with the third largest spire in England (half of it from the original sandstone, the rest much later). This is one of the most impressive churches that I've seen; the windows are filled with 13th to 16th century stained glass from Belgium and Germany, purchased at the same time as the Lady Chapel of Lichfield Cathedral. The 'Tree of Jesse' window showing Edward the Third is 14th century, Saxon tomb slabs, the floor is covered with Minton tiles, while the wooden ceiling is filled with elaborate angel carvings. Nearby is the more modest St Alkmund, a Victorian church with a painted East window and St Chad, a baroque round tower church with a circular nave. Outside, yellow and red leaves had fallen and covered the ground around the large tombs. Over the road is a park with a classical war memorial containing a statue of the angel Gabriel. Past a statue of Darwin outside the library, lie the remains of the castle, as red as the Abbey. A tower built by Thomas Telford when an earlier part of the structure collapsed stands overlooking the river. Down in the town, the museum houses a number of interesting exhibits from the Roman city of Virconium (Wroxeter), including soldier's gravestones (originally garishly painted) and Samian wear.
Elsewhere, St Michael's in Lichfield is set in one of the largest graveyard in the country. Though it lacks the elaborate tombs in the London Victorian cemetery, one of the larger tombs had it's own clock and gas supply to light it up. St Mary and St Hardulph, or Breedon on the Hill, is siutated atop a hill above the surrounding plain. Originally, the site of a Monastery, the largely Norman church is notable for its extensive Saxon carvings; an angel like the one at Lichfield, Vine scroll above the altar and Anglian beasts. Seventeenth century slates tombstones line up in the windswept churchyard, each decorating with elaborate neo-classical etchings that have survived well. A Tudor family memorial depicts the deceased at prayer as well as showing a skeletal corpse beneath. A wooden pew surives that served as the box for the local gentry during services. Nearby is St Michael and St Mary at Melbourne, a Norman cathedral in miniature, with thick columns and round arches supporting a gallery that runs the length of the church. A wonderful medieval mural of the devil survives on one of the walls, near to columns where Saxon carvings of animals remain, including a Sheela-na-gig, a pagan fertility symbol. Further on is St Mary at Tutbury, a rather more restrained affair which does nonetheless have an extraordinary Norman arch in alabaster (another shows scenes of boar hunting). Finally, I had been to Repton before, but was interested to note the same slate tombstones outside and the statue of St Wystan bearing a metal sword above the door.
Autumn is my favourite time of year, with the world transfigured with green thoughts to shades of bronze, gold and burgundy and where the fallen leaves are suddenly siezed and thrown through the air by the unseen force of the wind. I think what I increasingly like about looking at buildings and the natural world is a sense of transfiguration, something similar to Shklovsky's concept of ostranenie translates as 'making strange.' I think of how buildings take on different characters in different lights, of how the fog I can currently see from the window makes the innocuous and familiar sinister and hidden, of how autumn leaves transform the living into something artificial. Autumn has come late this year and it still feels more like October than November. Travelling into London to the Velasquez exhibition at the National Gallery, the sun is bright and the air still seems gentle. The exhibition itself shows Velasquez as a consummate realist, concerned with the mundane in his genre paintings (in spite of the number of religious or mythical subjects), while also continually suggesting, as with Foucault's analysis of Las Meninas, the limits of representation, as with the two kitchen scenes shown here where christ is seen as being somewhere else beyond everyday concerns. The same applies to The Rokeby Venus, where the mirror image only shows a dim reflection of Venus and one that is at the wrong angle (although most of the portraits show the subject facing the viewer, Velasquez also has his sibyl turned away and hidden). Two other small exhibitions were being held, of Cezanne and Dutch winter scenes. The former seems striking for Cezanne's almost cubist approach to nature painting while the highlight of the latter was Jan Beerstraten's The Castle of Muiden in Winter and Avercamp's Scene on the Ice Near Town. Elsewhere within the gallery, I walked through the Sainsbury wing, responding to the colours, but as ever, finding it hard to respond to the subject matter of works like The Wilton Diptych, until we come to the lascivious mythological painting of Florentine artists like Botticelli, Di Cosimo (though a Crivelli altarpiece with real jewels and gold embedded in it was rather striking), Cranach's Greek allegory of Cupid Complaning to Venus and Venetian portrait painters like Bellini's portrait of The Doge Leonardo Loredan. Van Eyck's The Arnolfini Portrait also stands out for me and I next visit the Dutch section, with its Vane De Velde maritime paintings, De Hootch allegories (although he always seems more amused at vice than outraged) or Ruisdael landscapes. Other striking works included Moroni's aristocratic portraits set in the midst of ruins and Rosa's proto-romantic scenes.
Like several other Icelandic sagas, Njal's Saga depicts the conversion of Iceland to Christianity. Njal is himself shown as an unearthly figure gifted with second sight and whose death has all the hallmarks of a saint's martyrdom. Zola's Therese Raquin shows less of a conflict between physiological and environmental considerations than that seen in his later works, cleaving to a theory of the body as the wellspring of all action (Therese and Laurent do not act consciously but are instead two people, driven by their physiogonomy), something that looks back to the medieval humours and forward to Ballard's instinct driven idea of consciousness rather than inahbiting a conventional idea of character. The results can be somewhat uncomfortable; Therese's actions are attributed to her African blood. Nonetheless, Zola is far from being consistent in this regard; Therese speaks of having her upbringing made her into a hypocrite and liar, while Laurent's suffering is seen to induce a change in his body and character, making him more nervous and feminine. While Laurent is held to act only out of fleshy desire, Therese is supposed to take pleasure in knowing why she acts. Their very guilt seems to product of consciousness rather than the instincts of the flesh, while such tropes as the ghost and their eventual suicide seem to suggest the structure of a moral fable.
The figure in the carpet is often cited as a characteristic of Jamesian fiction. The Europeans exemplifies this through the way it depicts its characters in relation to their environment (America and Europe) but elides description of those environments. Felix resembles a Turgenev protagonist while Eugenia resembles Flaubert's most famous heroine. But both Turgenev and Flaubert depict their characters as part of a complex web of social relationships, while James only briefly limns such matters in. Whereas earlier novelists like Dickens and Eliot had assigned a deterministic element to a character's environment, no such element exists for James whose characters are rather more unpredictable, with the lackadaisical Felix settling down while Gertrude discovers herself out of kilter with her home.Labels: Architecture, England, History, Literature, Weather
posted by Richard 7:39 AM
Wednesday, June 7, 2006
Anthony Giddens sees modernity as a condition whereby pre-modern (traditional) culture have given way to modern (post-traditional) culture; identity becomes more reflexive and self-consciously constructed. Roles are negotiated rather than assigned by convention. Anthony Trollope is consciously writing in The Way We Live Now as an opponent of modernity, counterpointing the morals and dignity of an increasingly impecunious aristocracy with the corruption of the self-made men of the rising mercantile classes; "his position is a sign of the degeneracy of the age". However, the novel also questions conventional ideas of identity; the stereotypically Jewish aspects of the portrayal of Melmotte's venality is balanced by the portrayal of Mr Breghert as he is wronged by members of the upper classes unwilling to accept that times have changed for social acceptance of Jews. Similarly, Marie Melmotte proceeds from being a hapless victim to revenging herself on her father and taking on property. Equally, the fact that Melmotte is brought down the avarice of the aristocracy and the dissipation of figures like Sir Felix, serves to deconstructs the opposition at the heart of the novel between old fashioned order and middle class rapacity. The novel acknowledges some of this in its discussions of how Melmotte himself is viewed; "as the great man was praised so too was he abused... the working classes were in favour of Melmotte... from their belief he was being ill-used.. that occult sympathy for crime, when the crime committed is injurious to the upper classes... it came to be said of him that he was more sinned against than sinning."
Similar concerns appear throughout Zola's The Kill, where Haussman's rebuilding of Paris serves throughout as a metaphor for the disorientation and the Durkheimite anomie of modernity. As such, Paris is seen as artificial and inauthentic, no longer the organic product of social evolution; "a strange feeling of illicit desire at the sight of this landscape that had become unrecognisable, so worldly and artificial." The preoccupation with the artificial and contrived point clearly to Zola's affiliation with Huysmans. As traditional roles fall into desuetude, so too do traditional ethics of abstinence; "the main preoccupation of society was with knowing how to enjoy itself." Sin becomes a form of consumption, of refinement. Similarly, sexual roles also become fluid once they are no longer constrained by traditional norms; "the sign of his boyish debauchery, this effeminisation of his whole being... he seemed born and bred for perverted sensual pleasure. Renee enjoyed her domination." Renee assumes the masculine role, Maxime the feminine. The paradox in many Zola novels is that while the central fable of his novels is concerning with condemning the immorality of modern, post-traditional society, the syuzhet draws much of its sensational interest from depicting them. As such, The Kill is loosely based on a moral fable, with Renee being betrayed by Saccard and Maxime. However, Saccard's indifference to her adultery goes a long way towards aborting that moral framework, with the cash nexus replacing normal social relations.
Hans Christian Anderson's stories depict a world where, as a character in The Ice Maiden puts it, "antiquated ways are discarded" so that mermaids and telegraph wires co-exist (memorably, the eyes of the ice maiden are described as being like the barrels of a shotgun) and the conventions of folk tales (of the kind described by Vladimir Propp) become contested and dispersed. A tale like The Tinderbox recognisably belongs to the same world as that of the Brothers Grimm; a hero is offered the chance of fame and fortune and is ruthless in his will to power, in contrast to the moral fable of Big Claus and Little Claus or The Ugly Duckling. However, in later stories this is sublimated, either into a thanatophilic concept of virtue being rewarded in the afterlife (as in The Little Mermaid, The Marsh King's Daughter or The Story of a Mother) or where aspiration and virtue alike are thwarted (as in The Shadow). Contingent upon this is a world that is far less centered around the protagonists, where everything from animals to inanimate objects have become anthropomorphised, as cats and storks become participants and commenters within the narrative. The fate of creatures like The Snowman or The Fir Tree is more suggestive of Kafka's Metamorphosis than the Brothers Grimm. Equally, if the stories frequently see female sexuality as threatening (particularly with the Ice Maiden or Snow Queen) then they also displace the role of the hero in favour of female characters, like Gerda in The Snow Queen or The Marsh King's Daughter.
Lessing's Memoirs of a Survivor is one of the most interesting dystopian novels I can think of. Whereas the majority of apocalyptic science fiction, from Wyndham to Atwood, revolves around the causal factors (technological, ecological, political, economic etc) for whatever has changed society from its familiar state, Lessing elides this; "for 'it' is a force, a power... 'it' can be, has been, pestilence, war, the alteration of climate, tyranny." The novel is deliberately dislocated from any specific sense of time or place and instead concentrates on the consequences of social breakdown from feral packs of children to tribal migration. Nonetheless, Lessing undermines the dystopian aspects of the novel in a number of ways. Firstly, dystopian fiction, whether 1984, Day of the Triffids or The Handmaids Tale tends to emphasise individual agency in the face of events. By contrast, Lessing repeatedly stresses that governments are powerless in the face of change while her characters take no actions to change matters. Offered the choice of moving to safer areas in the countryside, they do nothing. Submission is the order of the day (Lessing's interest in Sufism comes through strongly in how she handles time, viewing all phenomena as manifestations of a single reality, or Wujud i.e. being). She also expresses little sorrow for the loss of 'the age of affluence,' implying that the experiments in communalism that emerge represent an improvement on the society that had marginalised people like June Ryan; "all property worries gone; all sexual taboos gone... free, at least from what was left of 'civilisation' and its burdens." By repeatedly 'cutting' to descriptions of Emily's childhood, Lessing also appears to characterise the family in Laingian terms as a source of neurosis whose loss is not necessarily to be mourned.
From Zola's view of the novel as a scientific experiment to Wolfe's 'new journalism,' the novel has attempted to purge itself of all assocations with artifice and imagination, preferring instead to present itself as something objective and factual. If inherent in the idea of realism, it nonetheless represents a problematic conception, if only because if the act of observing something can change a subject, how much more can the act of narrating change it. The most notable example of which being Truman Capote's In Cold Blood, a 'non-fiction novel' relating the murder of four people on a Kansas farm in 1959. Bearing this in mind, the idea of creating a film depicting the writing of the book is an oddly postmodern one (a representation of a representation), particularly since the sparse and austere cinematography appears to be trying to emulate the novel's journalistic style.
Wimpole Hall, designed by Sir John Soane and James Gibbs, appears at first a model of neo-classical symmetry and proportion. However, the interior easily belies this, as corridors snake in on themselves leading to dead-ends. His main contribution is a drawing room with a large domed ceiling, not unlike some of his works at Lincoln's Inn. The main contribution from Gibbs was a Wedgewoodesque book room. The highlight of the interior was a small collection of Gillray prints, mostly lambasting the Prince Regent and the Broad Bottomed Ministry (as well as some more unusual ones with hunting as their target). I was also struck by a Grandfather clock, where a ship rocked on the waves in time with the ticks and tocks.
An interior chapel is painted with a trompe l'oeil effect (something of a theme; there's also a painted playing table, complete with painted cards). The grounds are home to a small church (with a large wing filled with marble monuments of the house owners) and a set of gothic ruins in the distance. The gardens have been restored to their original formal patterns (reversing Capability Brown's vandalism), though landscaped pleasure grounds filled with a wide range of trees and shrubs remain (including the national collection of walnuts). The sky was a brilliant shade of turquoise inbetween dark rain clouds, while the flatness of the Cambridgeshire landscape reminded me strongly of a Trent Valley that had never been industrialised.
Perched high above the Thames, Cliveden feels as if it should be a gothic castle. Instead, the Italianate building and formal gardens look as if they should be nestled within the gentle slopes of a valley. I'd forgotten the sheer amount of Roman and Italian sculpture in the grounds, such as the Borghese balustrade with its dragons and eagles as well as more modern conceits like the turtles on one of the fountains. The Wisteria was flowering alongside the Acer in the Chinese water garden (it felt as if cherry blossom should have been correct for the pagoda, but the Wisteria made a more than acceptable substitute). Ducklings splashed about in the waters around the Botticelli fountain. Further along the Thames and one comes to Windsor. The castle here towers well above the Thames (the site was chosen by William the Conqueror on defensive grounds) though the presence of the town nestling beneath it softens the scene somewhat. I find a meadow by the river, go paddling in the water and watch the swans glide by. Rather inevitably, the town itself has a rather kitsch feel to it, largely due to the continuous citing of often rather trivial historical associations; HG Wells working as a draper or Nell Gwyn and Shakespeare staying in local taverns. You do have to go back quite a long way before anything actually happened at Windsor. Even much of the castle has a rather Ruritanian feel to it, presumably due to the changes made by George the Fourth. The castle has been redesigned and redesigned so often that its medieval appearance is illusory and hyperreal. The town does at least have a more concrete feel to it, with a Guildhall designed by Wren and the nearby church St John the Baptist, home to an anonymous Renaissance painting of the last supper and beautiful altar mosaics and corbels, designed by the same artist that worked on Westminster Abbey.
Further down the Thames again and one comes to Richmond. When the likes of Hampton Court and Ham House were built here, courtiers would sail to the city on barges establishing its role as a rural suburb early on. Ham House was originally designed in the Jacobean period and much like its rival at Hampton was extended during the restoration. The house reached its apotheosis at this point, described by Evelyn as comparable to the finest villas in Italy and furnished like a palace. Nonetheless, its owner fell from favour at court, penury beckoned and the house was left to stagnate for centuries. Visiting in 1770, Walpole described it as dreary, ancient and decayed, a place barricaded away from the rest of the world and liable to defeat even his passion for the antique. Today, the house seems rather less formidable, in spite of the busts of Roman Emperors filling niche after niche in the redbrick walls at the front of the house. Nonetheless, the house looks out from a long avenue towards the Thames, as parakeets fly overhead. The restored gardens provide a glimpse of what Evelyn meant, with a wilderness area populated by statues of Hermes, hornbeam hedges and secluded gardens, formal gardens planted with lavender and box and overlooked by Bacchus and kitchen gardens (there is also a still chamber for the preparation of perfumes, conserves and cordials). One room contained detailed plans for rebuilding Inigo Jones' Westminster Palace, the subject of much speculation in Defoe's Tour Thro' the Whole Island of Great Britain and a good example of the many unfulfilled projects of what London could have been.
Like Hampton, the planting of myrtle, lemon, oleander and almond trees is of the period (tulips and pineapples are incorprated into statues and gates throughout the gardens). Conversely, the interior tends to illustrate the decayed grandeur of the place. A great hall hung with paintings by Lely and Kneller leads to a grand staircase, with an elaborate wooden balustrade. The North Drawing Room above is hung with Flemish tapestries (still retaining much of their original colour; a later room has Spitalfields tapestries copying Watteau designs), white marble chimneypieces and ionic columns and ivory cabinets. This leads to a long gallery, where dark black wood is gilded with gold, and Van Dyck paintings of the Royal family line the walls. A strange self-portrait hangs above the door, showing him with a sunflower, symbolic of art and nature, sovereign and subject. Marquetry and Japanned furniture, often with blue and white Kangxi porcelain line the walls. A closet leads to a collection of miniatures of subjects like Elizabeth, Lucretia's suicide and a love in flames (he who does not burn will die). Finally, an elaborate four-poster bed forms the centrepiece of the Queen's bedchamber, decorated with Van De Velde paintings.
Lacock in Wiltshire was once the home of an abbey that offered a home to the unmarried daughters of wealthy families, and to a village that grew wealthy through the wool trade. The Abbey was dissolved in the reformation while the nineteenth century cotton imports had a similar effect on the village. The combination of these factors with the relative isolation of Lacock led to them becoming a form of time capsule. The village remains full of half-timbered buildings, while the church of St Cyriac still houses a Lady Chapel where paint remains on the ceiling alongside especially elaborate gargoyle carvings. The church has a window above the chancel arch, indicative of the customary 'wool gothic' style of Cotswolds churches. The walls are still whitewashed, presumably indicative of no Victorian changes. The exterior of the church is equally elaborate, while the size of the tombs testifies to the wealth of the community. The abbey has rather less of a sense of continuity with that period, save for its cloisters. After the reformation, it was converted into a country house and an octagonal tower added to the side. The interior is dominated by a circular table, supported by three satyrs, while much of the house is dominated by images of the scorpion from that owner's crest. Later owners provided good examples of early gothic revival. The great hall comes with a barreled ceiling studded with crests, a rose window and wall niches filled with extraordinary terracotta figures representing death and the scapegoat. Later owners experimented with camera inventions and translation of cuneiform and populated the house with the likes of geological specimens and stuffed pangolins. The grounds are more classical, ranging from a stone sphinx to a botanical garden.
Nearby lies Great Chalfield house, a fifteenth century manor house complete with a moat. The church of All saints lies within the moat and includes a beautiful painted pre-raphaelite organ and wooden rood screens. Swallows nesting in the rafters looked down curiously on the visitors. The grounds bear witness of plants overspilling the paths and forcing their way through the cracks between the lichen covered paving stones (looking rather like Mariana's moated grange), a welcome correction to the meticulous restoration of the house itself. The great hall on the interior is much as one would expect, save for mask-like faces looking down from the galleries with empty eye-sockets (designed for the lord to spy on servants). Red paint remains on the rafters of the hall, while perhaps the most impressive aspect of the rest of the house are the oriel windows.
Having been to Highgate Cemetery earlier this year, I returned to London today for more of the Victorian way of death. The 'mighty seven' cemeteries represent a form of ritual, as much as photographs, death masks and portraits of the recently deceased produced by the Victorians, as well as jewellery that utilized a locket of the dead person's hair, extravagant funerals and the wearing of black crepe. After a stroll round the Kyoto gardens in Holland Park, were I watched the peacocks lazily strut about and a wagtail flit from one stone pagoda to another, I began at Brompton Cemetery. More like a landscaped garden than Highgate, ferns have nonetheless grown thickly across much of the grounds while squirrels scamper across the tombstones. The layout is also more formal than Highgate (based on the structure of a cathedral), with a central avenue leading to a chapel modelled on St Peter's Basilica, which is flanked by long colonnades. The tombs are also more impressive than the majority of those in Highgate, with Neo-classical, Gothic and Egyptian mausoleums lining the central avenue. The most impressive tomb is that of James McDonald (Chairman of Anglo-American Oil), a gothic affair complete with Pre-Raphaelite angels and stained glass windows. Conversely, the names of the dead are rather less noteworthy than either Highgate or Kensal Green; Emmeline Pankhurst being the most well known. The cemetery is also a rather blatantly obvious cruising ground; albeit by coincidence rather than by design, there's something rather reassuring (and oddly apposite) about desire persisting in the midst of death.
I then travelled north to visit Kensal Green, the first of the Victorian 'mighty seven' cemeteries to be constructed and perhaps the most impressive. While the trees were still leafless when I went to Highgate, Kensal had a perversely bucolic aspect in the sunshine with buttercups and daisies flowering while a Green Woodpecker perched on top of one of the graves. Kensal Green would certainly have been rural when it was built, but today the cemetery is dominated by the rusting skeletons of two gasometers and the louring presence of Erno Goldfinger's brutalist Trellick Tower. Kensal is by no means as formally laid out as Brompton, though it does have a set of Greek Revival Chapels (complete with catacombs and hydraulic catafalque) and a central avenue. The tombs along this are especially striking. On one side is the tomb of William Casement (four male statues supporting a stone canopy, in the manner of the Erechtheum), Andrew Ducrow (an Egyptian tomb decorated with scarabs and guarded by two sphinxes), Edmund Molyneux (Italian Gothic in red Peterhead granite) and Henry Edward Kendall (a Gothic cross decorated with Minton tiling). On the other side is Mary Gibson (a Corinthian canopy surmounted by four Pre-Raphaelite angels reaching towards the sky), and the quack doctor John St John Lang (a classical statue standing within a circular canopy) who died of the affliction his medicine purported to cure and William Mulready (a gothic statue lying in state in a classical canopy).
Kensal also has the advantage of the reputations of those interred there, from many writers and artists (Thackerary, Hood, Collins, Trollope, Waterhouse and Grossmith), engineers and scientists (Brunel and Babbage), disgraced royals and fascinating figures like Dr James Barry (a successful army doctor and duellist who was only unmasked as a woman after her death) and the Duke of Portland (an eccentric recluse who had built underground ballrooms and mazes under his estate, and was claimed to have faked his death as part of the Druce affair).
Beginning with Shadwell and Hawksmoor's church of St George in the East before travelling to Limehouse and St Anne's church. I'm always stuck by Hawksmoor's buildings; they make few concessions to architectural tradition and often feel as if they should be stage scenery; viewed from the front they are striking and impressive while viewed from the side they seem two-dimensional. St Anne's also happens to have an unexplained pyramid in its graveyard (drawings in the British Library suggest Hawksmoor may have planned pyramids on the turrets, while Christ Church in Spitalfields does rather resemble a pyramid from the front), possibly a Masonic reference. Walking around these areas, it was difficult not to be struck by how they are changing. High property prices elsewhere in London seem to be driving new property development, with cranes and tall blocks of luxury flats leaping up all around. This gentrification sits alongside the still all too visible poverty of East London and makes for an uncomfortable contrast. Walking back to the Limehouse station, I passed an old public library with a statue of Clement Atlee (Limehouse was his constituency). The architect of the welfare state was decaying badly and was missing his hand; a fitting comment on what was happening around him.
Travelling back into the centre of London took me to another Hawksmoor church, St Mary Woolnoth, a bizarre structure that barely looks like a church at all, lacking as it does a tower or a spire. I then walked around some of the other buildings in the area, like Wren's gothic church of St Mary Aldermary and his more baroque St Stephen Walbrook, before changing location again to the other side of the Thames and Lambeth. The gates of Lambeth Palace adjoin onto the former church of St Mary-at-Lambeth, now home to the Museum of Garden History. The sight of a Victorian graveyard, filled with the typically ornate Victorian funerary monuments and planted with sisal, poppies, roses, foxgloves and acanthus, was an odd indeed.
Passing by, I returned to north of the Thames, returning back to the city and The Museum of London. The first exhibition here was dedicated to Pre-Roman settlements in what was to become London. I was struck by the note that since the Thames is notoriously prone to flooding, entire sections of land could suddenly be left underwater. An excerpt from Pepys' diary captures this well; "digging his late Docke, he did 12-foot under ground find perfect trees over-Covered with earth, nut-trees, with the branches and the very nuts upon them, some of whose nuts he showed us, their shells black with age and their Kernell, upon opening decayed; but their shell perfectly hard as ever. And an Ewe-tree he showed us (upon which he says the very Ivy was taken up whole about it), which upon cutting with an adze, we found to be rather harder than the living tree usually is." Manmade objects seem to have survived well too, with the Walbrook having developed as a religious site, with votive offerings thrown into it to appease the gods (I was struck by a panel paralleling this to Bedivere throwing Excalbir back into the lake); a practice that seems to have continued well into the Roman period. This section showed a number of such offerings, typically carved from evergreen woods.
The Roman section was mainly noteworthy for displaying the statues from the Mithraeum found near St Paul's. As one would expect, several depictions of Mithras and the demon dull abound, along with statues of Minerva and Egyptian deities (apparently the Eastern cults proved more popular in this part of the Empire than the Roman ones). This also included the recently discovered sarcophagus from Spitalfields, decorated with shells throughout. The rest of the exhibition seemed somewhat lacklustre, though I was rather taken by a Victorian automaton called 'Psycho,' who was able to play cards and perform mathematical calculations. Due to the removal of internal workings (or hidden actors, depending on the extent of one's cynicism) the explanation for these feats has been lost.Labels: Architecture, England, Film, History, London, ScienceFiction, Victorian
posted by Richard 7:29 AM
Tuesday, April 18, 2006
Eliot had it right; April truly is the cruellest month, bearing the promise of light and warmth only to dash such hopes. Between overcast skies and bright sunlight, little middle ground has been offered this year. Arriving in Tamworth, I walked over the river Tame to the base of the hill surmounted by the town's castle. This wooded area is home to a statue of Aethelfleda, the daughter of Alfred the Great and ruler of Mercia, who rebuilt the town after the Danes destroyed it. Walking past the somewhat fanciful recreation of the castle's battlements and into the town, the first thing I met is the marketplace where a statue of Robert Peel stands in front of the town hall. Beyond this lies St Editha's Church, named after a saint that interceded with the Norman Lord Marmion to preserve the town's convent. Norman arches remain clearly visible in the fabric of a thirteenth century church filled with stained glass by Ford Maddox Brown while the dark wood ceiling is beautifully studded with gold patterns.
Shugborough was essentially built on the proceeds of piracy, with a British admiral capturing a Spanish ship and its gold cargo. Given that, some of the rooms accordingly show a taste for the exotic. One room is filled with Chinese porcelain, mirror paintings and cabinets in what Chippendale believed to be a Chinese style. Others are painted with pictures of ruins, mostly Roman but intermingled with the occasional gothic spire or pyramid, in contrast to the elaborately plastered Vassalli ceilings. I was also rather taken with the library, where the door is lined with fake books to conceal its presence. The grounds are similarly dotted with ruins and fake follies. One, a quaint imitation of The Temple of the Winds, is incongruously complete with stained glass and gothic gargoyles. Sudbury Hall is more of an oddity. Built in the Carolean period, the Dutch cupola on its hipped roof is the only contemporary aspect of its architecture. The rest is more Jacobean in style, with red and grey bricks arranged in quincunx patterns. The interior is much the same, boasting a wooden staircase, wooden carvings and a long gallery, filled with paintings by Wright and Kneller, whose ceiling is plastered in a more Carolean style, seeming to be alive with grasshoppers, boars and other animals. The grounds were changed to suit later tastes, and formal gardens were replaced with a lake and natural vistas.
Elsewhere, Calke Abbey lives up to its reputation rather poorly. Often described as a time capsule, there is no doubting the historical authenticity of the house contents but there is considerable doubt as to their interest. Put unkindly, the house is largely filled with the sort of objects no-one would wish to retain and which only remain because they could not be auctioned. The exterior of the building is unimaginatively neo-classical while the interior demonstrates that its owner's principal interests were less concerned with aesthetics and more concerned with destruction; room after room is filled with stuffed animals. The most interesting room houses case after case of fossils, geological curios, even an alligator skull. However, for the most part of the cold and decaying rooms seem to have little former grandeur to have The nearby medieval church is perhaps more interesting, as are the gardens (planted with period vegetables, even down to clay jars to force rhubarb), cavernous ice house and heated peach house (incongruously painted in blue).
The entrance to the Barber Institute is every bit as idiosyncratic as that of the Vienna secession, with traditional herringbone brickwork matching the jagged art-deco patterns on the doors. The heraldic crests on either side form an equally traditional contrast to the fluid modern lines of the rest of the building, while Birmingham University clock lours overhead. The inside is similarly modern, all gleaming marble and wood. The initial rooms present excellent works by Rossetti, Whistler, Gauguin, Derain and Magritte interspersed with such objects as Chinese cloisonne drinking cups, German unicorn models, Shiva statues and such objects as the head of Amenhotep. Later galleries present excellent displays of Medieval and Renaissance art but the highlight was an exhibition of art by the Norwegian painter JC Dahl. Dahl would seem to have had a predilection for moonlight scenes, drawing on the work of Vernet, Wright (the exhibition included a Wright painting of a lighthouse at night) and David Friedrich (including a painting of Pomeranian spires seen from the sea), Dahl draws such scenes as Kronborg Castle, Vesuvius and the Bay of Naples, the isle of Stege and Dresden, all exquisite works of Romanticism that parallel painters like Arkhip Kuindhzi or Atkinson Grimshaw.
Walking alongside the Birmingham-Fazeley canal, with its crumbling brickwork, weeds pressing through the cracks and decaying seventies buildings all around, was a rather disquieting experience. Nowhere more was this the case than underneath one of the railway arches, with the cavernous space beneath reminding me of the sort of thing Piranesi might have drawn. Emerging once more into the light I was confronted with St Chad's Cathedral, the first Roman-Catholic Cathedral to have been built in England since the reformation. With its two thin towers flanking its front facade, it's oddly reminiscent of Lichfield Cathedral, while the Baltic-German style chosen by Pugin seemed to take well to being transplanted into English redbrick.
Zola's Germinal presents Zola's most direct confrontation of Marx and Darwin. On the one hand, Etienne asks "Was Darwin right then, was this world nothing but a struggle in which the strong devoured the weak..?" The novel accordingly questions whether Darwin is merely providing a scientific basis for inequality, and whether strength rests with capital or "if one class had to be devoured, surely the people, vigorous and young, must devour the effete and luxury loving bourgeoisie?" The novel is decidedly dialogic in its approach to this; capital does defeat the miner's strike but the ending, as implied in the novel's title, leaves open the possibility of future changes; "before the century was out there would have to be another revolution, and this time it would have to be another revolution". However, it is clear that the balance is decidedly tipped in favour of capital, something the novel balances with its satirical depiction of the owner's ignorance of the miner's condition as set against their own unconscious assumption of what is a comparatively luxurious lifestyle. Nonetheless, Zola is even-handed enough to clearly report the owner's own problems; "since the factories have been closed down one by one... in view of decreasing demand we are obliged to lower our prices. That's what the worker's simply refuse to understand." Equally, one aspect of the novel is that Zola's interest in Darwin leads him to repeatedly characterise the miner's as animals; "the placid features of the Montsou miners had lengthened into something resembling beasts." Similarly, the novel leaves open the question of environmental and heredity influences. On the one hand the miner's suffer from "unnatural postures, the stifling darkness in which they were blanched like plants in a cellar." On the other; "the crushing mould of habit pressed him a little more each day into the likeness of an automaton." Such ambiguities coalesce in the figure of Etienne and the hereditary taint he carries with him, leading to the question of whether his actions are influenced by this (as with Rassenur's observation that Etienne is leading the workers out of self-aggrandissement or Maheude's realisation that the zealotry of the Priest sounds identical to that of Etienne).
Reading Balzac's A Harlot High and Low continues many of the ambiguities from Lost Illusions. Gradually sloughing off the form of a moral fable inherited from the earlier novel as the two protagonists kill themselves, the novel broadens its canvas to consider the status of crime and society in a decidedly Brechtian manner. Although, the novel is ostensibly cast in the same mould as Crime and Punishment or Bleak House and does not hesitate to repeatedly characterise Vautrin in terms that Lombroso would have been proud of, it still contests the moral and social viewpoints implied by the nascent crime genre. Nucingen's deception is partially justified on the grounds of his own rapacity; "they offered robbers the opportunity of stripping one of the richest capitalists in France... the shark." Prostitution and theft are characterised as forms of protest against society, the latter calling property and heredity into doubt. Accordingly, Vautrin's Vidocqesque transition into head of the Surete, hailed as Corentin's equal encapsulates this critique. A further aspect of the novel is its handling of sexuality, with Vautrin's relationship with Chardon and Rastignac being seen by Proust as sexual; certainly Vautrin characterises Chardon as feminine and in need of his protection.
Gabriel Josipovici's Moo Pak presents itself as a palimpsest of the events that occurred throughout the history of Moor Park; Swift's teaching of Stella, becoming a lunatic asylum, a code-breaking centre and an institute for the study of animal language. However, unlike the intricately woven Rings of Saturn by WG Sebald, the intricate sestina promised by the author does not figure, with only Swift and animal language emerging as themes alongside disquisitions on cultural decline. Josipovici sees tradition and the individual talent as being at odds, with this cultural dislocation leading to artists turning inwards. While artists like Shakespeare depicted the overthrowing of kings to symbolise this erosion, the Romantics were only able to produce fragments. So too is Moo Pak, a novel the narrator confesses to never having written, looking instead to figures like Swift and their bridging of the romantic and the classical, depicting an individual on quest romance in a fallen world, but still looking at the world around, the bodily distortions in Gulliver's Travels being cognate with Bosch's distortions in painting.Labels: Art, England, Literature
posted by Richard 7:27 AM
Monday, March 6, 2006
Arriving in Oxford at midday, I set off to the former site of Oxford's castle and, in more recent times, its prison. The site has a grisly history; Empress Mathilda was besieged here by King Stephen in the eleventh century while its grounds proved to be filled with the corpses of executed criminals (several of whose bodies were then used for medical experiments). One tower still stands and I stumbled across it by accident in a suburban street; it was not unlike stumbling across the Burnett's secret garden.
Following this, I set off for the Christ Church Picture Gallery. Oddly, I'd never been there before and although the collection is comparatively small it was quite eclectic ranging from Russian Orthodox icons (made from metal and ceramics rather than the more high status ones that are better known) to Rysbrack sculptures, Renaissance painting and Medieval triptychs and paintings. Particular highlights were Salvator Rosa's proto-romantic (a stoic by inclination, his works show a Baroque aesthetic depicting nature in similar terms to David Friedrich) and Jacopo Bassano, a Venetian whose showed a similar use of chiascuro to Caravaggio and similar brushwork to El Greco. As ever, the colours and pigments in the medieval paintings were wonderful, though I was especially drawn to a crucifixion scene by the Master of Delft. The crowds were drawn in the same manner as Brueghel but the rich pigments, gold in particular, seemed more typical of earlier painters.
The gallery featured an exhibition of the drawings of Thomas Graham Jackson, architect of the Examination Schools and the Bridge of Sighs (and ghost-story writer), showing detailed watercolours of Italy and France and designs for Oxford (including what looked like an attempt to build a tower similar to Magdalen in Christ Church). The Bridge of Sighs proved to owe more to Mostar than Venice. Following this we went for a walk around Christ Church. I had been in the great hall before but had quite forgotten the small Alice in Wonderland figures in the stained glass. Conversely, the cathedral was something else I had missed. Highlights included the Morris and Burne Jones stained glass, an enamelled window showing Jonah underneath a fruit tree staring at a far-off city (the colours fading in the background to impart a sense of perspective), the carved wooden dragons in the choir stands and the combination of fan-vaulted gothic with later, more classicist architectural styles in the transepts.
As the evening drew on, I went to a friend's photo exhibition. The rather beautiful photos were of the Isis and the Thames, showing Willows trailing through the water, young moorhens, frozen leaves in Oxford's Botanical Gardens and boats by Magdalen bridge. As the photos were all themed around water and rivers, the evening included a recital of poetry with related themes. I especially liked Willow Poem by William Carlos Williams (who I was aware of) and The Swan by Mary Oliver (who I was not aware of).
Having mentioned the Victorian preoccupation with spiritualism with regard to Highgate, I began wondering why it was that this seemed so poorly reflected in Victorian literature. It emerges to some extent in gothic writing from Wilde to Stoker but otherwise one is left with E F Benson's demonic slugs and Conan Doyle's Professor Challenger stories. So, I was surprised to come across The Damned by JK Huysmans, a novel where such concerns are altogether more central. As a novel it reminds me of the debate as to whether realism could be described as an acute aesthetic technique for depicting both the individual consciousness and its social context or simply a way of seeing such matters that was specific to a certain class and background. The most obvious parallel is between Jane Austen (portraying the details of English provincial life in a manner typical of early realism) and Mary Shelley (portraying a range of locations in a markedly fantastic manner). Of the two, Shelley was probably the one who depicted the spirit of her age more accurately, confronting the ideals of her anarchist and feminist parents with the monsters produced by the French revolution. Much the same could be said when contrasting Huysmans with many of his naturalist contemporaries; "there was always a fundamental intellectual difference between you and other realists... you execrate the age in which you live while they adore it... sooner or later you were bound to flee the Americanisation of art." Contrasting himself with Zola and the grimly utilitarian character of his age Huysmans depicts the same sense of withdrawal to be found in Madame Bovary or Oblomov; "it's just as positivism reaches its very zenith that mysticism re-emerges."
Equally, the novel questions many of the claims made by realism, citing its obsession with crime and sensation as being little different from that of Gilles. By contrast, Huysmans leaves the novel almost as a commonplace book, lacking the artificially plotted character of much realist fiction. The novel openly foregrounds such concerns in a decidedly post-modern fashion, taking a writer working on a biography of Gilles de Rais as its protagonist and comparing de Rais with Des Esseintes. The identification with the protagonist is marked in the extreme, more resembling Isherwood than contemporary writers.
Anne Bronte's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall is perhaps best known for the author's didactic moralising against drink and dissipation but I was nonetheless impressed with how the novel depicts both an unhappy marriage and the consequences of adultery from the perspective of the other parties. Neither of these are unknown in Victorian fiction but nor are they widespread. I was also reading a seminar on How Novels Think at The Valve, I was struck by this; "where such a novel as Jane Eyre allowed the family to eclipse civil society as the symbolic means of resolving social contradictions, Dracula turns the tables and allows a radically inclusive society to render the family obsolete, ending the regime of the liberal individual." The interesting thing about The Tenant of Wildfell Hall is that women are both marginalised and the guardians of the family and civil society. Bronte frequently critiques conventional assumptions about the role of women; "would you use the same argument with regard to a girl?... you would have her to be tenderly and delicately nurtured," supported by her having her heroine step outside social convention and support herself; "his idea of a wife is a thing to love one devotedly, and amuse him and minister to his comfort in every possible way." Nonetheless, the role played by Helen throughout is otherwise a conventional female one, nurturing and standing for morality and the family in contrast to the dissipation of her husband.
Reading Sir Thomas Browne's Urne Burial, I was struck by the tension between Browne's faith in christ and the resurrection on the one hand and by his antiquarian interest in such pagan habits as cremation and mummification on the other; Baconian scepticism and mysticism in one text.
Starting by visiting Great Coxwell Tithe Barn, a twelfth century structure much beloved by William Morris, who characterised it 'as beautiful as a cathedral, yet with no ostentation of the builder's art.' It's easy to see why Morris liked it so much; made from the local pinkish-grey stone, it's far larger than I had envisaged, while the elaborate purlin roof beams in the cavernous interior do indeed give it the air of a cathedral. On the other hand, Morris's tendency to romanticise the middle ages does lead him to ignoring the fact that the barn was effectively serving as an ecclesiastical tax office. The nearby church of St Giles is of a similar period, with assorted monsters still louring from the tower. The church sits at the summit of a hill and looks out over most of the Vale of the White Horse.
Arriving at Buscot Park, I began by walking around the grounds, designed in the 1930s in a formal Italianate style by Harold Peto. I have to admit that his style struck me as rather austere and uncongenial, excepting some more imaginative follies like a pair of Egyptian statues guarding the entrance to a sunken garden. The house itself was rather more impressive; the entrance hall was flanked by porphyry columns and contained black and gold furniture designed in an Egyptian style (this seemed something of a theme and was apparently fashionable after Nelson had won the Battle of the Nile, with alabaster canopic jars dotted round the rooms, as well as the first example of a Wedgewood canopic jar that I've seen or am likely to), with the rest of the design being more influenced by Boulle marquetry. The green room next to it contained a range of Dutch paintings, including one Rembrandt (and a surprisingly tolerable Rubens), Qing vases and Dutch designed cabinets decorated with red-stained tortoiseshell. This led to a red dining room, which contained two landscapes paintings by William Lambert that were very evidently drawing upon Claude's work.
Next was something more impressive; four large Burne-Jones paintings depicting the story of sleeping beauty, set into a gold frieze lining the room and with additional smaller panels continuing the narrative inbetween the paintings. Everything else in the room fitted with the gold colouration, excepting some turquoise Kangxi vases. Later rooms continued the Pre-Raphaelite theme by including a Rossetti painting of Pandora's box, GF Watts' paintings of Pygmalion and The Judgement of Paris and a Ford Madox Brown painting of the resurrection, which was Pre-Raphaelite in the original sense of the term, down to the saint's halos. Most striking was Lord Leighton's painting of Daedalus and Icarus, one of the very few depictions of male figures in Pre-Raphaelite painting (following my previous observations of his painting of Klytemnestra). A painting in the style of Salvator Rosa showed a set of proto-romantic ruins (albeit of classical structures). A staircase area, showed how considerable the wealth of the family must have been, judging by the paintings of family members by JW Waterhouse and of the grounds by Eric Ravilious. Maiolica pottery was kept nearby in cases while the family also apparently felt in need of an instrument linked to the house weathervane to tell them the wind direction. Finally, a sitting room contained a number of sculptures, from one of Napoleon to depictions of Michaelangelo's David, Antinous and Bacchus (another motif throughout the house and gardens, with a certain theme beginning to spring to mind as a result).
"It is for this rare, precious quality of truthfulness that I delight in many Dutch paintings, which lofty-minded people despise... It is so needful we should remember their existence, else we may happen to leave them quite out of our religion and philosophy and frame lofty theories which only fit a world of extremes. Therefore, let Art always remind us of them; therefore let us always have men ready to give the loving pains of a life to the faithful representing of commonplace things." - George Eliot
Visiting the current Jacob Van Ruisdael exhibition at the Royal Academy, I wasn't entirely sure what to expect. Seventeenth century Dutch painting tends to be noted for two mutually contradictory themes; firstly, the detailed realism of its depiction of lower and middle class subjects and secondly the allusive and symbolic quality of the painting. It's an awkward arrangement, given that there is no meaningful way to discern a distinction between the portrayal of an object (skulls and bones or broken tree stumps, for example) and any symbolic significance to it as memento mori. The argument runs that the Netherlands was primarily an empirical and descriptive culture, whose fascination with maps and microscopes had more bearing than the moralising of emblem books; nonetheless, the influence of Calvinism created fertile conditions for musings on predestination. Equally, the argument runs that the realism of Dutch painting was often tailored to the tastes of equally increasingly wealthy middle-class consumers; the marble floors that are widespread in Vermeer's paintings were only aspirational in practice, humorous depictions of peasants smoking tobacco went out of fashion once smoking became fashionable for urban consumers.
To some extent, much of Ruisdael's work does furnish material for this debate. One painting in particular, The Jewish Cemetery, is clearly used to offer an allegorical fable; a cemetery is set in a wild forest, next to a set of ruins and a broken tree stump (similarly, his picture of the prosperous town of Egmond shows the road to it dominated by a dead elm tree). Above, the clouds part to offer the possibility of an after-life; such was at least Goethe's interpretation, who assumed the ruins to be of cathedrals. In fact, they are of a ruined castle while the graves are those of the Jewish cemetery (which was near the Oude Kirk in what is now Amsterdam's red light district), which upsets the christian interpretation somewhat. Similar issues occur for The Reconstruction of the Manor Kostverloren; the name meant 'Money down the drain,' owing to the fact that the Manor's position in marsh land left in permanent need of repair, so that the repainting of the ruined walls and nearby bathers have led the painting to be interpreted as an allegory of the folly of human vanity.
Conversely, the realism of Ruisdael's paintings can be questioned. Ruisdael's work was highly influential on later painters like Gainsborough and Constable and he often shares with them an idealised and rather Arcadian portrayal of the countryside (though this is difficult to read; windmills may look picturesque to a modern viewer but they were simply agricultural and industrials tools at the time). However, Ruisdael does show aspects of work in the country, like the bleaching and laying out to dry of cloth in the fields or peasants at work in the fields (albeit he avoids anything too degraded, such as a dairy, preferring haymaking scenes). Equally, although he did paint scenes of town-life, they tends to be panoramas of Amsterdam's spires and windmills rather than showing domestic life.
One of the more interesting aspects to his work lies with how realism can be questioned in other ways; in spite of the influence on Gainsborough and Constable, much of his work looks more like the work of a nineteenth century romantic painter. For example, a painting of Bentheim castle has Ruisdael placing it high up on cragged hills to emphasis what would later have been called the sublime aspects of the work. In reality, the castle occupied no such vantage point. Ruins form an important theme for Ruisdael, as with those in The Jewish Cemetery and depictions of Egmond Castle ruins alone, another theme that would become a standard romantic trope. Most striking is a ruined castle high up above a river in valley filled with pine trees; the scene is set in Norway, a country Ruisdael had never visited and which seems to have served as an strange otherplace for him. The aforementioned painting of The Reconstruction of the Manor Kostverloren is perhaps unique in his work for resolving many of these contradictions; the scene is a wild wood, dominated by a ruined castle. But the scene also shows bathers in the castle moat and builders working on the reconstruction; to some extent it does show how the allegorical themes of Dutch painting (transience, sinfulness and mortality) dovetail well with incipient Romantic themes of decay.
Leaving the exhibition, I went for now seems a customary walk around London, starting at (the rather disconcertingly two-dimensional) Christchurch in Spitalfields (the shardlike exterior is more than usually worth looking at: walking to the side of this it all becomes quite two-dimensional, like a cut-out), to the Gherkin building and St Botolph's church and down to The Monument. Here I finally found the ruins of St Dunstan in the East. One of Wren's churches built after the great fire, the roof was bombed in the blitz and the building remains a ruin. As this was one of Wren's attempts at gothic, decay seems to become it, with the walls and spire still standing while the interior was been turned into a garden; water trickles from a fountain while blue pansies flower where the pulpit would have been; a haven of peace and serenity. While I tend to think of a building like Lichfield Cathedral as a good example of gothic (due to the darkness of the stone), I have to admit that the white Portland stone works well here; the delicate vaulting almost looks like bleached bones. It is, however, rather odd to look through the empty gothic arches and see banana trees and magnolias.
The BBC recently broadcast an interesting documentary about Vivaldi's relationship with the Ospedale della Pietà, a Catholic orphanage intended to house the girls begotten by the various dalliances of the Venetian aristocracy. Vivaldi taught many of them to play the violin and oversaw their productions, where even the bass parts may have been sung by women. The documentary was followed by a performance of Vivaldi's Gloria in the Pietà (albeit a slightly later and larger building than the one Vivaldi would have been familiar with), following from the recreation of Handel's Water Music they did a couple of years ago on a barge on the Thames. Unlike an English choir, the singers were dispersed throughout various upper galleries and largely hidden behind metal screens (the effect alternately being that of a prison or a confessional). It rather reminded me of an organ performance I went to in one of Prague's churches, where since the organists was hidden from view there was no visual focus to associate the sound with; the sound seemed to come from everywhere.
To Catch A Thief turned out to be much glamorous and exotic than most of Hitchcock's fare (and consequently less dark) but was refreshingly free of the cod-Fredianism Hitchcock was somewhat prone to. Instead, Cary Grant's Rafflesian anti-hero is shameless about his kleptomania. By contrast, The Titfield Thunderbolt, is an Ealing comedy about a English country village struggling to defend its railway in the face of the rise of the automobile and the bus. The idea of the harbinger of the industrial revolution as a symbol of English pastoralism seems more than a little odd to me but I did especially like a scene where the villagers gloomily realise that the railway is making a profit and is consequently at risk of nationalisation...
When I reviewed Edmund Crispin's The Moving Toyshop a while ago, I recall noting how Oxford as a place seems antagonistic to realism, with crime and fantasy its dominant literary modes (the latter paradoxically being the more realist of the two). Similarly, Philip Pullman once spoke of how the river's mists have a solvent effect on reality. The latest book to fit this thesis is Guillermo Martinez's The Oxford Murders, a piece of crime fiction whereby all the murders are made to conform to a mathematical series. Hindered by Wittgenstein's finite rule paradox and Gödel's incompleteness theorem, predicting the series is essential to solving the crimes. The mathematical conceit is welcome in so far as it places the novel more in the tradition of literary puzzles preferred by Doyle and Chesterton than to Christie's social conservatism, but it does leave the book with a somewhat abstract and inconsequential aspect that seems a little unpalatable when the novel comes to depict some of the deaths.
I rather liked last year's BBC remake of The Quatermass Experiment, largely for its eschewal of special effects and actions in favour of drama and dialogue. Accordingly, I was interested in a similar remake of A for Andromeda (in spite of not having realised before that it was written by the somewhat crankish Fred Hoyle). On the whole, I was pleasantly surprised by how easily it kept pace with the intervening decades (albeit with some rewriting), with the idea of self-aware computers chime with recent discussions of the singularity. Similarly, the growing of synthetic organisms was followed this week with the announcement of human organs being manufactured.
The most striking aspects is that where science fiction often depicts alien intelligence as having an utter reliance on logic that will leave them wide open to any strategy involving improvisation or instinct. By contrast here, it is made clear here that a superior intelligence will necessarily displace a lesser, with only the anomaly of Andromeda's humanity preventing it on this occasion. In that sense, it reminded me of HG Wells's The War of the Worlds; "We men, the creatures who inhabit this earth, must be to them at least as alien and lowly as are the monkeys and lemurs to us... And before we judge of them too harshly we must remember what ruthless and utter destruction our own species has wrought, not only upon animals, such as the vanished bison and the dodo, but upon its inferior races. The Tasmanians, in spite of their human likeness, were entirely swept out of existence in a war of extermination waged by European immigrants, in the space of fifty years."Labels: Art, England, Film, Literature, Oxford, ScienceFiction
posted by Richard 7:23 AM
Sunday, November 20, 2005
"A serious house on serious earth it is,
In whose blent air all our compulsions meet,
Are recognized, and robed as destinies." - Larkin
It was a delightfully misty morning today, with all the trees and hedges silvered with frost. Braving the cold, I travelled into London for the British Museum's exhibition on the Persians. Arriving a little early, I wandered around the Great Court and some of the other exhibits, including the Sutton Hoo finds, a double headed turquoise Aztec serpent and Chinese miniature landscapes. The largest room in the exhibition was taken by a series of exhibits from Persepolis and Susa, combining original sculptures and friezes from Iran and nineteenth century casts held by the museum. The walls were lined with friezes showing the differing peoples of the Persian Empire paying tribute to Darius, as well as a frieze of faience glazed bricks showing one of the 'Immortal' guards (a similar style to the Ishtar gate in Babylon). This room also had one of the bull-headed columns that would have supported the roof of the Apadana at Persepolis. Most of the other exhibits were rather smaller, showing intricate gold jewellery and tableware, finishing with the Cyrus cylinder, describing the conquest of Babylon.
Derby's Cathedral is an odd mixture of architectural styles, its tall gothic tower where peregrines nest being joined to an understated neo-classical chancel. Light effortlessly flows into the interior, causing the gold and white that covers the Baldachin and broad columns to shine. I'm not sure I don't prefer the more enigmatic gloom of a gothic cathedral to this sunny and typically English idea of religion (Lichfield, for instance, always seems to hide so many small details that are easy to overlook, such as the Green Man carvings I saw recently at the top of columns in the Chad's Head chapel); the one contrary aspect to the cathedral is yet another of Fyodorov's icons, this time of Jesus.
Derby museum houses a diverse range of exhibits, the most interesting of which is the gallery of Joseph Wright paintings. These veer from Arcadian views of the Italian countryside, Mythical scenes, rustic views of the Midlands and his most famous works, showing various industrial and scientific scenes from orreries to blacksmith's workshops (not to mention that many of his portraits are of industrialists, such as ). It's an odd combination, which reflects the rapid changes wrought by the industrial revolution. In many respects, this is something I find rather depressing; the Midlands was a technological and economic powerhouse, the home of Lunar Men like Erasmus Darwin, Boulton and Watt. Today, most of the industries they helped to create have vanished from the region. Some pictures, showing the sea through a cave (black and turquoise) reminded me strongly of Arkhip Kuindhzi's Moonlit Night on the Dnieper, though the rendering of the waves was not particularly well done.
Elsewhere in the museum are some smaller exhibitions on Egyptian Mummies, as well as pieces dating from the Viking occupation of the Mercian capital, Repton, including a boar's tusk and crow's foot from a Viking burial (offerings to Odin). I note some small orange ladybirds in a garden nearby; odd for the time of year. I call at St Wystan's in Repton on the way back, including the crypt where the Mercian Kings were buried. The modern church is largely 15th century, but the crypt largely remains Saxon, supported by barley sugar columns. I went round a few churches in the area as well; most interesting was the church in Abbot's Bromley, where the antlers for the horn dance are kept.
As the days passed, the snow came. Only the lightest dusting but enough to change the aspect of trees and buildings into something rich and strange (especially the sudden visibility of cobwebs on bushes). It was also enough to leave the local birds feeling rather hungry and Tits, Robins, Dunnocks, Blackbirds came to feed at the table, while Greater-Spotted Woodpeckers, Yellowhammers, Greenfinches, Bullfinches, Chaffinches, Jays and even a Tawny-Owl were seen nearby.
I'd been to Wightwick Manor before, but it's a place I loved going to, ranking easily alongside Kelmscott Manor and Leighton House as one of my favourite places. It's a wonderful concatenation of Victorian redbrick and hotchpotch ha lf-timer, much like Little Moreton Hall but more ornate. This time, I noticed many new details like the Phoenix and Dragon carvings by the fireplace or the Dragon and Owl carvings by the doorway. Much the same can be said of All Saint's Church in Herefordshire, surrounded at this time of year with the dead flowers of wild Clematis and Mistletoe thriving in the bare trees. An arts & crafts building constructed around 1900, it combines an awkward miscellany of differing architectural styles; a wooden spire (above the porch rather than the chancel) and a thatched roof, with a low building carved from the pinkish local stone. The interior is whitewashed with low arches sharply pointed upwards while diamond-shaped lamps hang down. The effect of this is oddly art-deco but most of the interior is emphatically different; the altar is flanked by two Burne-Jones tapestries while the window frames are patterned with ribbonwork designs.
I watched the two most famous Frankenstein films at a recent video evening; the Universal film (starring Edward Van Sloan and Dwight Frye) and the Hammer film (starring Lee and Cushing), with the customarily interesting reception differences. In the Universal Film, Frankenstein is both a hero redeemed by his love for Elizabeth into destroying the monster and the insane criminal that created it (similarly, the monster is both mistreated and simply a vicious animal that can do no other); two separate endings were filmed that reflected this difference, one where he dies as a punishment and another (the one we saw) where he is allowed to marry Elizabeth. Conversely, the Hammer film shows Frankenstein as a ruthless sociopath who keeps the monster chained up and treats it like an animal; the violence that follows is largely his own doing. One thing both films have in common is that although they depict his work as unnatural and immoral, they both suggest that it would have been eminently feasible for the experiment to have gone perfectly had events taken different course; not an idea in the original novel and one that the Hammer sequel, Revenge of Frankenstein, used to excellent effect, depicting Frankenstein much more sympathetically as someone essentially undone by events.
Brokeback Mountain originally fitted into a collection of stories, dealing with the harshness of life against the American landscape, Proulx's narratives are concerned with the quasi-mystical connection between man and the landscape (especially contained in the romanticised image of the cowboy) in the first instance and the hardness of life in impoverished and conformist rural communities in the second. The original context weaved homosexuality as a single thread within a larger pattern. Once it becomes the pattern in the film, the result seems somewhat unsettling; homosexuality is foregrounded as something aberrant from its setting but is still treated in similar terms to the way Proulx wrote the other stories.
Proulx describes the story thus "It is a love story. It has been called both universal and specific, and I think that's true. It's an old, old story. We've heard this story a million times; we just haven't heard it quite with this cast." To some extent, this could apply to Madame Bovary or Anna Karenin but more than any other, it reminded me of Hardy and The Return of the Native or even Wharton and Ethan Frome. The mountain displaces Egdon Heath while Jack and Ennis play the same roles as Eustacia and Damon. In both cases, fate is something ineluctable and changing social mores are not to be conceived of; class and environment are paramount. By contrast, gay writers have tended to present matters differently. To take Vidal's The City and the Pillar, Baldwin's Giovanni's Room or White's A Boy's Own Story, the narrative typically has its protagonist abandoning his rural background in favour of the city (or Europe, in Baldwin's case), with the liberation that follows from that being balanced by their sense of internalised homophobia. Sexual identity is a sufficient case in its own right and other issues are more easily transcended, dealing as these books do with middle-class life (though Baldwin did later write novels that took considerations like class and race into account). In Proulx the question of a gay identity is surprisingly absent (Jack and Ennis lacking any vocabulary to describe it) and questions of class are at least as important.
As such, it's not surprising that there has been some ambivalence over the political implications of the film. On the one hand, the film takes an icon of American masculinity and subverts it; on the other it predicates the audience's acceptance of the characters on their masculinity, (whereas femininity would have been more subversive), their lack of a sexual identity and their status as victims. Accordingly, the film chooses to dwell on Ennis as the lead character, too unimaginative and bound by the internalised homophobia bequeathed to him by his father to be able to consider breaking free of it. By contrast, Jack is less constrained, and is able to imagine the possibility of another life with Ennis or at the very least furtive escapism over the Mexican border (which revealingly represents the film's only portrayal of the urban gay lifestyle). While Jack's death is certainly eminently plausible (the parallel with the Matthew Shepherd murder being introduced in the film) it does nonetheless come over as a form of judgement on him for daring to imagine too much.
Radio 3 has been broadcasting Bach continuously, including the Toccata and Fugue as played on the organ and the violin (the latter being suggested to be the instrument the piece was originally composed for). Having previously heard Stokowski's orchestral arrangement and Grainger's piano arrangement, I was a little surprised by the violin arrangement. At some points, it sounded rather thin (lacking the reverberation produced by an organ and therefore simply falling silent), in others the sweetness of the sound did seem to lend the piece a different aspect. On the whole though, I'm not convinced.
Pamuk's The White Castle uses the format of a picaresque adventure in the manner of Rasselas or Candide, but is rather more detached from its allegorical aims (the castle of the title simply represents something unattainable). Pamuk treats phenomena as a matter of differance, where, lacking any attainable noumenal aspect (the ending mentions "some infinite-point in the emptiness... some non-existent focal point"), phenomena acquire an undifferentiated character, which only become distinct through interpretation (that of the Sultan, for example); "I began to believe that my personality had split off from me and united with Hoja's."
Voltaire's Philosophical Dictionary presents a disorientating set of viewpoints, between theism and atheism, treatise and satire, philosophy and polemic. Somewhat surprisingly, the clearest parallel to it is Swift's Tale of a Tub. Voltaire's style is essentially deconstructive and parasitic upon the discourses he dismantles, leaving the question of his own viewpoint largely elided. On the one hand, religion is described as leading to violence while even the taboos on such matters as cannibalism are dissected (though not those on homosexuality or anti-semitism, where it is uncertain as to whether Voltaire's prejudice is theological or racial). On the other, Chinese philosophy and Quakerism are praised for their record on toleration, as he distinguishes between dogma, superstition and morality, between artificial and natural religion. Instead, he repeatedly emphasises the limits of human knowledge, stating that the purpose of the Dictionary is to ask questions; "he concluded that beauty is decidedly relative; in the same way that which is decent in Japan is indecent in Rome, and what is fashionable in Paris is not so in Peking."
Zola's La Bete Humaine presents, like Crime and Punishment and Bleak House, an early instance of the detective novel (anticipating the role trains were to play in Agatha Christie's fiction in particular). Where much of Zola's fiction deals with the extent of environmental and genetic influences, La Bete Humaine heavily weights matters in favour of the genetic; unlike many of his other novels, much of this is set in rural environments, while none of his characters are compelled to kill for financial reasons; "but wild beasts are still wild beasts, and however much they go inventing still better machines, there will be wild beasts underneath just the same." To a large extent, this seems surprising; this period of urbanisation and industrialisation gave birth to modern policing, the idea of the panopticon and the idea of the detective novel. Indeed, Zola's withering portrayal of police ineptitude more resembles those of Wilkie Collins than Dostoevsky; the biological basis for Jacques' distemper is not one that is susceptible to the normal techniques employed by society (which instead chooses to preserve itself at a time of unrest by covering the matter up). Instead, the interest of the novel is with the portrayal of Jacques. Where Raskolnikov's crime is motivated by material concerns and forms the nexus point for a set of metaphysical concerns, this is only true to a limited extent for Jacques, who more resembles the protagonist of American Psycho; "at certain times he could clearly feel this hereditary taint... at such times he lost all control of himself and just obeyed his muscles, the wild beast inside him." Jacques is both unable to control his instincts and aware of them from afar, caught between Zola's materialism and a more metaphysical portrayal.
A Year in Thoreau's Journal and Walden offer a contradictory picture of their author, Most obviously, Thoreau's view of science is not dissimilar to that of Blake but he meticulously documents the botany of Concord while citing Linnaeus, Humboldt and Darwin. Equally, there is considerable ambiguity as to whether his eremitic existence is a product of misanthropy or mysticism (what we might now consider either a counter-culture lifestyle); "I go through the fields endeavouring to recover my tone and sanity & to perceive truly and simply again...a fatal coarseness is the result of mixing in the trivial affairs of men. Though I have been associating even with the select men of this.. I feel inexpressibly begrimed." However, Thoreau is rarely consistent, elsewhere observing that "what recommends commerce to me is its enterprise and bravery." When Thoreau refused to pay taxes as a gesture of civil disobedience regarding the Mexican war, he explained it as "men with pursue him and paw him with their dirty institutions and, if they can, constrain him to belong to their desperate odd fellow society." In part, such narratives seem the product of social resistance in part of rugged individualism; his view that "the best government (is) where the inhabitants are least often reminded of the government" is after all as much a product of American suspicion of central government as it is of romanticism.
The tendency with Thoreau is to aestheticise social questions, often seeing poverty through the lens of his own asceticism; "my greatest skill has been to want but little... I have since learned that trade curses everything it handles." For example, when hearing a factory bell, Thoreau's tendency isn't to imagine toil but to envisage matins in a spiritual community of holy knights; "of what significance are charity and alms houses? That they live unmolested.. a certain wealth of nature not poverty it suggests. Not to identify health and contentment.. with the possession of this world's goods." When looking at said workers (his reactions to Irish labourers in particular are rather reminiscent of Carlyle), his typical reaction is one of snobbishness; "the filthiness of his house... I am reminded there are all degrees of barbarism even in this so-called civilised community." But equally, this leads him to call for the state to educate such citizens to 'refine and civilise' them (a curiously Whiggish conceit for Thoreau). Conversely, at the other end of the social spectrum he writes that "give me the poverty that enjoys true wealth. Farmers are respectable to me and interesting to me in proportion as they are poor - poor farmers." In spite of the railways and telegraph Thoreau invariably attempts to see the country as being isolated from its social and economic aspects.
Umberto Eco's How to Travel with a Salmon presents a number of differing versions of irony, from the clearly ironic assertions of the ludicrous in place of the commonplace (advice on how to smuggle bodies through customs) to sly insinuations of oblique views to displace the commonplace (creating a chain of reason to demonstrate that such hated devices as faxes and mobile phones could only be the preserve of the common and vulgar). Rather than clear exercises in irony and satire, his object is more to show the slippery relation of signifier and signified, often dwelling on sign systems such as road signs and instruction manuals.Labels: England, Film, Horror, Literature
posted by Richard 7:10 AM
Sunday, October 9, 2005
Autumn is my favourite time of year. The weather is hesitant and uncertain, with blackened clouds and rain interrupted with bright sunshine and deep blue skies. Silver birch remains green, Stag's Horn (Sumac) turns bronze while Ivy turns crimson red. I'd recently seen an old tree stump with lavender growing around it and bracket fungi growing out of it. Tonight, I noticed something odd growing in the nearby borders. Parting the foliage I found an odd looking toadstool, red with white blotches. As far as I can tell it's fly agaric (Amanita muscaria), a type of mushroom noted for its hallucigenic properties amongst the Siberians, American Indians and the Japanese. I don't think I'd ever seen one before.
Arriving at the Watt's Gallery in Surrey, I noticed an odd looking red church on a nearby hillside and decided to walk back to have a look. Initially obscured from view by the churchyard's Irish Yew trees, the building proved to be the Watts Chapel, designed by Mary Watts in memory of her husband. Mary Watts was an exceptional artist in her own right, a painter and potter who worked with Celtic and art nouveau styles.
The structure of the rather squat chapel is cruciform (though essentially a rotunda intersected by the stations of the cross) and surmounted by a somewhat incongruous campanile. The exterior is ringed with a band covered in Celtic ribbonwork patterns made from terracotta and supported by three corbels on each section of the wall. The band's imagery is somewhat pantheistic, drawn from Egyptian and Sanskrit sources as much as The Book of Kells. Built from local red clay, Mary Watts had apparently hoped it would 'tone down' as it aged over time, but my suspicion is that the colour is only slightly less vivid than it was after it had been built. Surrounding it, much of the gravestones are made from the same clay and combine Burne Jones style angels with Celtic patterns. As you might expect, the overall effect is bizarre, more resembling a Byzantine or Italian church than something to be found in England; Romanesque design (the dome, Greek cross and lozenge shaped windows) with Celtic imagery. The interior, complete with white and marmalade guard cat (lying in wait for visitors and demanding to be stroked), is different again. The style is late pre-raphaelite or art-nouveau, showing gesso angelic figures and the tree of life, save for the altar where one of Watt's symbolist paintings hangs.
In truth, Watts himself is not one of my favourite Pre-Raphaelite painters. His work lacks the colour and vividness of Rossetti or Leighton (not to mention their rather decadent glamour) and, while anticipating the impressionists, lacks the dreamlike aspect of Monet's paintings. Looking at the works in the gallery he seemed to me to resemble William Blake more than most of his contemporaries, with all of his paintings being loaded with symbolism borrowed from christian and classical sources as well as an essentially private mythology. Like Blake, much of his work has a very direct aspect of social criticism (ranging from sympathy for 'fallen women,' anger at poverty and inequality and even concern about animal cruelty). In many cases, even his portraits seem to burst into the allegorical, with one such portrait having been changed from an original depiction of a neiad. The back of the gallery houses ajunk roomsculpture collection, littered with casts of his large public sculptures (like Physical Energy in Kensington Gardens) and one odd Egyptian sculpture that Watts had designed to look as if it had been ruined and devastated. Finally, the gallery has a small room dedicated to other Victorian painters like Arthur Hughes and Albert Moore.
The Edvard Munch exhibition at the Royal Academy. The range of personae on display is often surprising. Where Frida Kahlo always represented herself in broadly similar terms, it is often difficult to credit that Munch's paintings are of the same man. Partly, this is due to the fact that the paintings span his entire life, but equally he changes from naturalistic depictions where the flesh is whole to ones where the skin seems scarred (equally, his paintings often seem like acts of self-mutilation, showing his murdered or dissected corpse, his decapitated head, his skull and eyeball; Munch left his paintings out in the rain to be warped and distorted, inverting Dorian Gray's picture) to ones where his face has been all but erased completely. Equally, Munch's features displace those of any number of mythical and historical personae; John the Baptist, Marat, Orpheus. Women figures in any number of roles; whore, virgin, muse. Munch often simply allows paint to slide down the canvas, creating a particularly disturbingly liquid effect when he is painting blood, or even hair in the case of The Vampire; but again the range of painting styles were many and varied over his career. The early paintings are characterised by their sense of bohemianism; as if Wilde were being painted by Leighton. The later styles are clearly more symbolist, but unlike Kahlo there is no sense of an hermetic personal mythology. I was especially struck by one painting, Murder where the entirety of the painting swirled around a central point in the distance; it reminded me of how camera angles zoom in onto a central figure, especially in Hitchcock's films.
Der Edukators (or Die Fetten Jahre sind vorbei as it was originally titled) rather left me feeling that matters had been resolved rather too neatly. Much of the film revolves around contested ideas; in one instance, a group of activists who break into the villas of the wealthy, rearranging the furniture and leaving notes saying that the owners have too much money. In the other, the owners of one of the villas that they are keeping prisoner after things go wrong. For much of the film, it isn't clear whether his statements of former activism and sympathy for their ideals are genuine or whether he isn't simply manipulating them; the ending does seem to answer this question a little too equivocally for my taste, though it was rather noticeable that their prisoner's claim that it is simply natural for some to lead and others to follow receives rather more credence than might be expected from the way in which he almost over from them.
A pleasant day was spent with a walk around the Roman ruins at Silchester, leading to the incongruous discovery of a field in the middle of the old city housing some young llamas. I visited St Mary's Church and looked at the pre-reformation wall paintings (mostly floral). I also managed to spot a sparrowhawk almost floating over the walls.
A History of Violence sees David Cronenberg shedding the elements of science fiction in his films in favour of a more ostensibly naturalistic genre, the thriller, where a married man in Midwest America is confronted with his past with the mob. However, it seemed rather clear that this was a false distinction, with Cronenberg using the trappings of normalcy to disturb in precisely the same manner that the surrealism of his previous films did. What particularly achieves this effect is that the film seemed to suggest that violence isn't something that is repressed and periodically erupts but is rather something that forms an intrinsic part of normality, blurring moral distinctions between the Midwest family and the gangsters.
When I've reviewed Juan Goytisolo's novels on past occasions, I've tended to describe them in relation to the ideas of the Russian formalists Mikhail Bakhtin. In his essay collection, Cinema Eden, he himself raises Bakhtin in the first sentence of the first essay, characterising the Arab world as one where discourses are intermingled, between the sacred, the profane and the satirical; "this happy blend of licence and piety." Throughout, he adheres to this precept, mingling fantasy and reality in a piece imagining Gaudi living as a hermit in Cappadocia. Nonetheless, Goytisolo seems to introduce a further ambiguity, noting that many of these traditional elements of Arbaic culture help people "not to deny modernity but to co-exist with it," but elsewhere suggests that such arrangements are threatened by progress and Islamism alike and that they are better described as "a new form of shelter against the rootlessness and alienation created by modernity." It's difficult not to wonder at the extent to which these discourses really are entangled; the homosocial love of mystics or the soldier and the charcoal burner depends on homosexuality as a practice while leaving it castigated as an identity. The qualities he sees in the inhabitants of Cairo's city of the dead contrast to the antiseptic values of the West but also seem to come close to endorsing a form of social Darwinism in a society where life is nasty, brutish and short.
Reading the Laxdaela Saga, I found myself reminded of Ruth Benedict's distinction between shame and guilt cultures in The Chrysanthemum and the Sword. In guilt cultures personal morality is specific to the individual and their relationship to god, whereas in shame cultures morality is a social concept relating to community opinion (for instance, Hrafnkel The Priest of Frey sees its protagonist expelled from his lands for having been so foolish as to spare Hrafnkel's life earlier). The saga depicts Iceland's transition from one to another. Iceland as a society lacked executive government, meting out punishment through exile, ostracism and private compensation; something that became more complex with the introduction of christianity. One consequence of this is that the saga depicts character with unusual complexity (the concept of the individual being essentially inapplicable for the majority of other medieval texts where personality is seen in relation to religious and social categories). Gudrun is depicted against both a christian scheme of private sin and repentance and a pagan scheme of moral attrition and atonement where guilt is shared and negotiated (not unlike Aeschylus and The Oresteia).
Engel's The Condition of the Working Class in England struck me as vacillating between a number of opposed concepts; between a desire to both prevent ("it is high time too, for the English middle-class to make some concessions to the working men who no longer plead but threaten; for in a short time it may be too late") and to spark a revolution to end the class structure ("the revolution must come; it is already too late to bring about a peaceful solution"), between an idealised account of earlier more pastoral social structures (speaking of its 'idyllic simplicity;' "leading a righteous and peaceful life in all piety and probity; and their material position was far better than that of their successors.") and a view that their destruction was an advance towards the creation of communist society ("in a well-ordered society such things could only be a source of rejoicing; in a war of all against all, individuals seize the benefits for themselves."), even celebrating the creation of an internal proletariat and the deadening of national characteristics in the English working class. To a large extent, Engels is both awed and horrified by London, observing that "I know nothing more imposing than the view which the Thames offers...all this is so vast, so impressive that a man cannot collect himself, but is lost in the marvel of England's greatness," before detailing the sacrifices required to achieve it.
Barnaby Rudge is one of only two historical novels written by Dickens and it's interesting to observe how the constraints of a genre typified by Scott conflict with the more gothic and sensational elements that are more characteristic of Dickens. On the one hand, the historical genre demands a detailed observation of social and individual change. On the other, the gothic and sensational elements demand a more Manichean approach. As such, the narrative lacks a generic centre, perhaps due to its centre being the blank slate of Barnaby himself. In terms of social observation, Dickens frequently notes how much smaller London was at the time of the riots; "Nature was not so far removed, or hard to get at, as in these days... which turned into squalid courts." Social criticism is as present here as in any of contemporary social novels, as with the depiction of Sir John Chester's dissipated character. However, he also condemns Sim Tappertit for his opposition to the state of urban society; "the degrading checks imposed upon them were unquestionably attributed to the innovating spirit of the times, and how they united therefore to resist change." Accordingly, the social dimension of the novel is a complex one. Equally, the gothic and sensational elements complicate this further; George Gordon and Barnaby's father are both depicted in almost demonic terms to begin with ("prowled and skulked the metropolis at night... a spectre at their licentious feasts, something in the midst of their revelry and riot haunted and chilled him."), with the rioters also compared to devils. Innocence in the novel is no protection, either for Barnaby himself or for Miggs, the parody of his more virtuous heroines. The result is that Dickens is ambivalent in his attitude to the riots; "composed for the most part of the very scum and refuse of London, whose growth was fostered by bad criminal laws, bad prison regulations and the worst conceivable police... stimulated by their own headlong passions, by poverty, by ignorance" The riots emerge as both something unnatural and something manufactured by society, where the commons can revenge themselves on their oppressors.
Keith Robert's Pavane struck me as being quite odd; like many counterfactuals (such as Bring the Jubilee or even His Dark Materials; Pullman's vision of Geneva becoming the centre of christendom being the inverse of Robert's vision of Rome as remaining dominant in England) it is essentially whiggish, presenting a version of history where a vision of progress based on science and technology has gone awry and a vision of superstition and feudalism triumphed. It's an odd vision that ignores the fact that capitalist economies began to thrive through the renaissance more than the reformation. Conversely, its a fantasy, crafting a land still where faeries and old gods still hold sway; the peculiarity is that such a vision fails to lend itself to the same kind of pastoralism to be found in Tolkein.Labels: Architecture, Art, England, Film, Literature, Weather
posted by Richard 7:07 AM
Tuesday, July 19, 2005
I hadn't walked through Hyde Park for a few years and I'd forgotten how pleasant it is (though perhaps a little too much like a provincial country estate when compared to either the formal gardens in Amsterdam's Vondelpark or the wild areas it shares with Berlin's Tiergarten). The Serpentine is the most impressive part of the park; at one point the lake was crossed with posts with a solitary seagull perched on each of these. Nearby, a coot was building its nest in shallow waters. I left the park at Apsley House and the Wellington Arch (although the park is filed with war memorials, the arch is rather awkwardly militaristic for London) before walking back to Kensington, passing by the Brompton Oratory (an intriguing building in that the light-filled interior could be one of the Catholic churches in Europe rather than their quasi-anglicanised brethren here).
The Victoria and Albert Museum was holding an exhibition on Arts & Crafts, a counterpart to a previous exhibition on Art Deco. Arts & Crafts had an oddly double character; it emerged as a response to industrialisation, asserting the role of rural crafts, but was primarily purchased by the new industrial haute-bourgeoisie (Wightwick Manor, an arts & crafts mansion was also one of the first to have electric lighting and plumbing). By eschewing mass-production the artefacts of the arts and crafts movement would inevitably be high-value items, affordable only for the elites. The English section comprised furniture by Pugin, paintings by Burne-Jones, clocks and furniture by Voysey, ceramics by De Morgan, Morris tapestries and Baillie-Scott's stained glass. The inclusion of works by Beardsley made it clear how the romantic interest in nature held by the arts & crafts movement could lead to both aestheticism and art nouveau. By contrast, arts & crafts in America seemed much more to resemble something that had passed directly on to art deco without the intermediate stage of art nouveau; the materials and subjects were still natural but their treatment stylised and geometric (the only comparable works in the English section were by Mackintosh).
Although figures like Greene & Greene and Lloyd Wright were reacting to the rise of skyscrapers, the American houses appear to have been significantly larger than the English cottages dreamt by Morris (presumably the more deracinated character of America made idealisation of peasant life markedly more difficult; such traits are absent even in works like Walden). Although Viennese design was significantly more stylised (as with Klimt and Hoffmann's designs) and German more comfortable with industrialisation, the majority of European design seems to have been more in sympathy with England. Perhaps unsurprisingly so; Morris's socialist utopianism fed into Gauguin's praise of pre-industrial life in Tahiti. Van Gogh's artist's community in Arles, the Yellow House, emulated Morris's Red House, his famous ladder-backed armchair picture showing an arts & crafts design. Scandinavian design drew on rural traditions (as at Skansen) and myth (as with the snakes on Lars Kinsarvik's furniture), since both Norway and Finland were asserting new national identities. Similarly in Japan, Mingei arose as a response to the Westernisation later decried by Tanizaki, seeking beauty that was born rather than made, part of the traditional Buddhist belief in oneness with nature. I then went to the Poynter (blue Delft tiling), Gamble (white and gold ceramics, rather like the Cafe Imperial in Prague) and Morris rooms (green olive branch wallpaper, lined with gold friezes) for lunch.
The Proms began for me this year with Purcell's The Fairy Queen. This is one of the very few concerts that has made good use of the Albert Hall; at one point flutes could be heard from the upper gallery in imitation of bird song, at another the echo of a trumpet. The following day started at Covent Garden, walking around the market and the pleasant churchyard at St James, before proceeding back to Kensington for a performance of Die Walkure. Last year, Kim Begley dominated Das Rheingold as Loge; this year Bryn Terfel's Wotan and Lisa Gasteen's impish Brunnhilde (who bore a disturbing resemblance to Joan Sims) stood out. It's interesting that where Das Rheingold portrays women as either fickle and frivolous or as helpless, Die Walkure largely performs a volte-face on this, something that is as much emphasised as off-set by the idea that love and marriage as a punishment for Brunnhilde. This is largely because, following Schopenhauer, love and passion are only ever forms of affliction for Wagner; it is difficult for him to retreat to images of the loving wife and he must replace the virgin and the whore dichotomy with the shrew and the warrior. As I left, the London lighting gave the twilight an oddly attenuated quality I've not seen elsewhere, the clouds turned orange against the darkening blue of the sky. Watching Gotterdammerung later, it occurred to me how much Wagner sees love as something emasculating. For Brunnhilde, it is the end of her existence as a warrior maiden while for Siegfried it is that which leads him to first feel fear.
I came across Nightmare in Venice later, a compilation by the much-fabled ensemble Red Priest, who can best be described as playing early and baroque music in the manner of Stravinsky and with the attitude of Siouxsie and the Banshees. Dwelling on the strange and fantastic aspects of the baroque style (perhaps rather implausibly so on occasions), they perform Vivaldi, Purcell and Corelli (with an unscripted detour through Danse Macabre at one point).
Heading into London for the next Proms, I had a chance to see the tight security on the transport system at the moment; I have to say it's both rather reassuring and extremely disturbing to see armed police walking about in the sunlight, not to mention bag searches and scans slowly becoming endemic. Since the number of people queuing for the Proms was noticeably less than usual I went for a look at the science museum and got to stroll past Babbage's difference engine and Stephenson's Rocket. Westminster Abbey reminded me of nothing so much as the John Soane Museum; filled with statues and ephemera where much of the tombs and paintings appear to have survived the restoration unscathed. It is certainly the only abbey I have seen to have glass chandeliers (complementing the fan vaulting rather well). Like Dorchester, Winchester and Lichfield it had a pair of Sergei Fedorov icons. By contrast, the interior of St Paul's was as pure as the spire of his churches, quite unlike the Catholic churches it imitated. As is often the case, the Victorian mosaics on the ceiling have the effect of making it seem more orthodox than Catholic. Towards the beginning of the Prom I was going to a violinist from the American orchestra that was performing leaned over to the front rows of prommers and announced that she wanted to say hello as she rather felt like we were all attending the same dinner party. It's certainly true that there's something very pleasantly democratic and egalitarian about the proms; the prommers that are prepared to stand get the best possible views of the performance after all (even if there are plenty of others with expensive seats). These Proms also had a baroque flavour, with Rameau's Les Paladins and Dardanus and Handel's Water Music. Rameau proved to be quite effervescent in his choice of instrumentation and harmonies, though Handel's elegant simplicity seemed more beautiful than Rameau's more Italianate approach. It was interesting to note that the difficulties for a small orchestra to fill the Albert Hall with sound must have been similar to that of making oneself heard from the Royal barge.
The next Prom began with Berg's Lulu Suite followed by Mahler's Fourth Symphony. Seemingly an odd combination this worked rather well; Berg alternates between dissonance and lyricism while Mahler's philosophy that the symphony must contain everything leads him to alternate between the comic and the plaintive. This was followed by a performance of plainchant and organ music, comprising both medieval and modern works by Arvo Part. The Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir entered from each side of the hall, men on one side, women on the other and gradually walked to the stage, one verse at a time. It was interesting to see how modern minimalism seemed to complement plainsong (and odd given that I had always tended to think of minimalism as an Eastern concept, based on Wabi-Sabi or equivalent concepts), with each syllable being held and repeated over time. The first piece was by an composer I hadn't heard of before called, Sofia Gubaidulina, called The Light of the End. This seemed to move like the tides of the sea, building up and dissipating over and over again, something stressed by the piece's heavy reliance on a rather aleatoric percussion style. Overall, the logic of the piece seemed primarily driven by religious symbolism rather than conventional musical structures. By contrast, there's very little to say about Beethoven's Ninth Symphony; this piece was the one most admired by my favourite composer, Wagner and the ode to joy does have the same exhilarating quality to it that is shared by Tannhauser's Overture or Die Walkure's Fire Music. The final prom surprised me a little; Strauss's Thus Sprach Zarathustra seemed rather mannered when placed next to The Flying Dutchman overture or Beethoven's third piano concerto.
The Magic Flute was rather more odd than I'd supposed. Like many enlightenment narratives, it takes the form of a fairy tale, only to oppose the structure of the moral fable with an enlightenment narrative based on ideas of reason. To a large extent, it's rather noticeable that the narrative tends towards misogyny, privileging reason as a male virtue and slighting emotion as a female weakness. However, it's refreshing to note that the narrative itself overturns this, noting the inability of Monostratos to control himself, the weakness of Papagueno and Pamina's success in taking the ordeal of fire and water (particularly radical given Masonic barriers to women joining the order). In this there is at least the germ of an alternative reading that would see the Queen of the Night as a prototype for Brunnhilde and Sarastro as a tyrant, and the beginning of the romantic rehabilitation of the fairy tale.
I went to Clandon Park recently, an rather sparse (if not even rather ugly) house in Sussex, the exterior only enlivened by a Dutch sunken garden parterre garden and a maori house (surrounded by tree ferns, many carved to form statues). The interior was quite striking though; I walked into a gleaming white marble hall, lined with statuary by Rysbrack, Corinthian Columns and spanning two floors. I was especially taken with the lamps attached to the wall by arms, as in Cocteau's La Belle et la Bette. More odd were some paintings of an Ostrich and Cassowary. Later rooms had wooden furniture mounted on eagles in the style of William Kent and chinoiserie dressing tables by Chippendale (designed to resemble a pagoda). One room had an exhibition dedicated to Maori tribes, including whalebones clubs and jade tiki statues. The paintings were mostly undistinguished (Kneller, Lely and so on, the occasional Reynolds), apart from a caricature of George the Third by Gillray and a painting of the House of Commons speaker by Thornhill and Hogarth. Nearby was the St Peter and St Paul church, a twelfth century building that still had a medieval wooden triptych of three saints. Further away, Hatchlands house was more promising on the exterior (a Dutch design with glass cupola on one wing, a formal garden created by Jekyll and some classical follies in the grounds) but suffered from a cramped and was overly ornate Italianate interior by Robert Adams.
Following an encounter with a Saxon beech maze, shaped in the form of a sea creature, I went to Oxford. Bails lay in fields while poppies and cornflowers grew in hedgerows. I went up the tower of the University church, looking out over at the Radcliffe Camera, the sundial in Brasenose quad and the other spires. The green of the woods could be seen in the distance. The History of Science Museum had a fascinating collection of astrolabes (often Islamic, for use in praying to Mecca) and armillary spheres as well as compasses in ivory cases. Travelling back, I went to Dorchester Abbey. A simple building set in a pleasantly leafy area by the Isis, the interior is more impressive, the white walls being interrupted with 14th century paintings and a 12th century font. The stained glass in the North window is remarkably intricate, with stone patterns in the shape of branches (the tree of Jesse, showing how Chirst was descended from King David's ancestor Jesse). The requiem chapel has an orthodox icon, presumably St Birinus, of the same type I had seen in Lichfield and Winchester. The walls here also had medieval paintings on them, which seemed to have been repainted, presumably in the Victorian period. Reading The Secret History by Procopius, I was struck by the role played by women in it; Theodora and Antonina do not appear more important to events than Livia or Cleopatra but their role is described in so much more detail.
Tanizaki's The Makioka Sisters struck me as being oddly European. Where Some Prefer Nettles attached clear symbolic connotations to Tokyo and Osaka, here they are simply places. The weather and accents differ but there is no fundamental schism. Much like Buddenbrooks, The Makioka Sisters traces the decline of a Japanese House before World War Two. One sister, Yukiko, is traditionally Japanese; too withdrawn and retiring to cope in brash, modern Japan. She is counterpointed to Taelo, the most Westernised sister; independent and often ruthless in pursuit of what she wants. Both are counterpointed to the White Russian, Katherina, whose forwardness if greater than Taeko's with a correspondingly greater success. Though both Taeko and Yukiko are counterpointed, both are ill-suited for Japan at that time and fail accordingly (rather than turning into a fable of Taeko's progressive moral degenerations).
Normally in a narrative, an action leads to consequences, with this process being repeated over and over again in any variety of combinations until it reaches a conclusion. Georges Rodenbach's Bruges-La-Morte is an odd attempt to counterfeit this in a form that is more poetic than novelistic. Instead of motivation and action as being paramount, the narrative is driven by a set of competing metaphors such as the crying swan or the martyrs depicted in the Cathedral and the city itself; hence the Sebald-like use of photographs of Bruges throughout the text; "every town is a state of mind, a mood which, after only a short stay, communicates itself." Like all metaphors, both reveal and conceal their object; "by trying to fuse the two women into one he had only lessened the resemblance...day by day the dissimilarities were increasing." The novel is infected with a Schopenhauerian sense of mysticism, with the convent the only truly still point in the city, in contrast to Hugues's willing. As such, the stillness of the city is both a sign of nirvana and of decay. Accordingly, the two layers of narrative and metaphor are not quite contingent, with Jane's ignorance of these contiguities is what kills her "not having comprehended the mystery."
Casanova's The Story of my Life is a fascinating counterpart to more mannered documents like Rousseau's Confessions. Casanova repeatedly avows a faith in christianity, but in practice only rejects converting to Islam in Constantinople on practical grounds. He is surprisingly tolerant of homosexuality (perhaps since he was a sexual dissident himself, comparing the disguised nun he is romancing to Antinous, as well as the episode with Bellino). Equally, he professes to be a great admirer of Voltaire but tells him that there is no substitute for religion as a basis for social order. The tension appears attributable to his attachment to the Hobbesian idea of the passions as the basis for human character; "the fate of every man inclined to games of chance, unless he is able to master his passions," leaving him permanently attempting to balance duty and desire and failing.
The Travels of Ibn Batuttah differ from christian travel narratives in a number of respects. The Islamic world at this point was extensive, stretching from Spain to Mughal India; for the same reason it acted as a form of iron curtain for European merchants who were forced to explore alternative routes. Where Europeans were forced to confront other cultures, Batuttah's travels largely remain within the Islamic world. Of course, this still allows him to come into contact with the Jewish and Christ ain peoples within it, but his attitudes towards it seem somewhat ambivalent. he records the various restrictions placed on non-Muslim populaces (restrictions on trade, specific forms of taxation) and notes how unwillingly such humiliations were suffered. Equally, he notes that Muslim travellers to a Christian Monastery were generously received treating Muslims honourably and exacting no tolls, but approvingly records the destruction of a Greek Church; "I shall be the first to be stricken with madness in the service of god... and god gave the lie to the assertion of the Greeks." This in spite of his admiration of the Church of Sophia in Constantinople. For Battutah other cultures are always infidels; a Jew is denounced for sitting closely to Koranic readers, Hindus and Chinese (and indeed Rafidis) are treated in the same way. He is fascinated by Hindu Sadhus but makes no comparison between their creed and Islam in the way Polo does with Christianity. He is amazed by Chinese civilisation, its pottery and paper money but responds to it by saying "China, for all its magnificence, did not please me. I was depressed by prevalence of infidelity and whenever I left my lodging I saw many offensive things." As with any travel narrative of that period, it is not without its diverting idiosyncrasies; dog-faced men, flying leeches and monkeys with kings. Although the same applies to The Travels of Sir John Mandeville it shows a different worldview. Although much of it is taken up with exhortations for christendom to regain its piety in order to reconquer the holy land, it nonetheless treats other faiths (though showing little lack of awareness that the relative tolerance extended by the Islamic world to Jews and christians would not have been found within Europe) as being worthy of reflection; "it seemed to me a great cause for shame that the Saracens, who have neither a correct faith nor a perfect law, should in this way reprove us for our failings, keeping their false law better than we that of Jesus Christ." The same applies when Mandeville witnesses sutee; "they suffer so much pain and mortification of their bodies for love of that idol that hardly would any christian man suffer the half." Equally, Mandeville's reaction to the lands he describes is torn between wonderment and disgust at their decadence.
Reading Grimm's Fairy Tales, I found myself a little taken aback by a few things. Firstly, that although a number of the tales were a simply moral fable of virtue rewarded and malice punished (typically rather horribly) many of them are simply odes to raw will, rewarding poor protagonists with wealth irrespective of their crimes. Perhaps, this loss of clear patterning was what Gabriel Josipovici meant when he said that the tales "were transformed from tales told by speakers who were deeply convinced that they were true (whatever meaning one assigns to the term) into tales told by writers (Wilhelm Grimm, in effect)." Certainly, the attempt to forge a German nation out of independent states and to reject French conceptions of civilisation after Napoleon in favour of folk art and a Volksgeist. Germany was after all then a cluster of many rural kingdoms and tiny city-states. They possessed forty universities, no modern factories or far-flung colonies, but were united by a language and growing literature. Germany existed as an idea that hoped to become a nation so her poets and philosophers thought societies were shaped and driven by ideas - Christian, feudal, imperial and democratic ideas. Secondly, I hadn't expected to find a story like The Blue Lamp, featuring contrivances like jinis. Listening outside just now, I realised that the familiar sound of pigeons cooing was mingled with the stranger cries of seagulls. The other thing that struck me was how the tale of the princess kissing a frog does invert the normal gender roles of the prince rescuing the princess; more striking was The Nixie in the Pond where the wife must rescue her husband from a water-nymph.
Terry Gilliam's The Brothers Grimm, like The Village, is one of those films that is very difficult to assess in neutral and objective terms, leaving only the messy uncertainty of value judgements. It draws upon films like Sleepy Hollow in showing the reason of the enlightenment giving way to magic (albeit with slightly firmer historical ground; set in the time of the Napoleonic occupation of Germany, Kultur was indeed being advanced against le mission civilatrice).
The problem tends to be that Gilliam's imagination is fundamentally baroque rather than gothic (unlike Jordan's The Company of Wolves), and the number of comic grotesques as characters (even the two brothers come out like characters from Dickens) combined with flourishes like one of the children being turned into a ginger breadman sit rather uneasily with the imagery of the wolf filled forest coming to life or the ruined tower surrounded by tombs. One of the most striking scenes in the film shows a French general addressing a room full of dinner guests, only for the angle to shift and reveal that there are only a handful of guests with the rest being reflections in mirrors. Just as the evil queen is defeated by smashing the mirror containing her reflection the entire film has the sense that these things are but a playful conceit and will vanish like the illusions they are. Partly this is also due to the way the film insists upon the fictive status of what is happening; Briar Rose, Hansel and Gretel, Snow White, Rapunzel and Little Redcape are all clear sources as are a range of other works like Poe's Masque of the Red Death and Anderson's The Snow Queen.
I also went to see the latest film of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, based on the Dahl book I always used to love as a child. Roald Dahl's story can be best described as a sadistic fable; a story whose moral content is rather offset by the vicious glee with which cruel punishments are meted out to malefactors. Certainly, the moral content is rather restricted if we think of stories like his Tales of the Unexpected, where a wife kills her husband with a frozen leg of lamb and then disposes of the evidence by cooking it for the investigating police officers. Mostly, his stories are revenge fantasies, where suffering children are set free as the adults that oppressed them suffer especially vicious ends. Children always need the dark materials of fairy tales as a means of displacing feelings of anger, resentment, and powerlessness. Willy Wonka is more unusual in that it is the children that are mostly made to suffer for their crimes. I rather liked the introduction of a staple for Tim Burton films, the idea of a troubled hero haunted by memories of his father (see also Batman and Sleepy Hollow); the notion of a young Willy Wonka defying his father and naughtily eating sweets goes a long way to subduing the somewhat puritanical moralism on display elsewhere (the other children visiting the factory do rather resemble a list of the seven deadly sins). Returning home this evening, the clouds were particularly dark shades of grey and blue but the sun was still shying brightly and the stone of the nearby Polish church was glowing in the light against the blackening sky.
posted by Richard 7:03 AM
Monday, July 4, 2005
The day started with a visit to the small Guildhall art gallery, a modern building with walls cut from white stone and bizarre hexagonal doors. The gallery undercroft is the interesting part, containing a pre-raphaelite collection, mostly of classical subjects such as Tadema's The Pyrrhic Dance, Moore's Pomegranates (though the dwelling on a handful of colours were more reminiscent of Whistler) and Collier's Clytemnestra alongside more traditional pre-raphaelite works by Rossetti and Leighton as well as Constable's painting of Salisbury Cathedral and two Tissots. Some of the more obscure works, like Webb's painting of Mont St Michel were also surprisingly impressive. The paintings of London elsewhere in the museum were less interesting; mostly views of London painted from Greenwich when it was outside London altogether, showing the church spires and the monument unimpeded by other buildings, or of the demolition of the old London bridge and construction of the new. There was an odd symmetry with the second world war paintings, showing St Paul's towering over London once more as everything around it was destroyed. One especially vivid painting here was a painting by Charles Pears, showing a black Tower Bridge against a blood-red sky during an air-raid.
The basement of the gallery housed the ruins of a Roman amphitheatre, while after leaving I walked around an area that is home to a number of Wren and Hawksmoor's churches (St Mary-Le-Bow and St Margaret Lothbury) alongside the ruins of a Mithraeum and the site of London's Jewish ghetto. It's the type of vision that has so moved Peter Ackroyd, particularly in an area where the modern roads and buildings still trace the outlines of a much more ancient city. Leadenhall market is surprisingly beautiful for the city (a commerical cathedral built out of industrial gothic); more like Convent Garden than Smithfield. I still wonder what London would have been like if Wren or Soane had shaped the city as Cerda and Hausmann shaped theirs. For me, London is summed up by the Monument; a great testament to what Wren might have achieved, currently trapped, surrounded and dwarfed by the ugliest buildings London's financial district has to offer. I then crossed the Thames to Southwark Cathedral. After the grey spires north of the river, the honey coloured stone with its bleached white interior was a welcome relief. The church contains a tabernacle designed by Pugin alongside Tudor and medieval monuments (a particularly striking one for John Gower) that perfectly match Pugin's aesthetics.
Passing by the Golden Hinde I arrived at the Tate for the Frida Kahlo expiation. It was easy to see why Breton had liked Kahlo so much; where Dali remained christian her own brand of surrealism was both Freudian and Marxist. Ex-voto conventions are used to reflect this, typically with a total absence of subtlety (as well as the peculiar trait of being one's own muse, featuring herself in picture after picture). The mythology and symbolism of artists like Blake or even Dali cannot be reduced quite so easily to didacticism; conversely the fusion of Aztec, Christian and Eastern symbols is quite extraordinary. Even so, I still tended to think her most accomplished works were the portraits.
I've wondered in the past if the Globe theatre was not a rather distracting venue, that one went for the pageantry and the building as much as the performance, but of course all performances have some form of vision stamped on them and the Globe hardly seems any different in this respect to one where the sets and costumes of any other period have been imposed by a director. I was always struck by Camille Paglia's observation that she was always struck by the hostility of Shakespeare's prose, the bramble-like thickness of metaphor and simile, its resistance to interpretation. On the one hand, The Winter's Tale is all pattern and symmetry, cycles of death and birth being used to subdue chaos into order. On the other, the play leaves so much unsubdued; mostly obviously, the political elements of Leontes' unjust tyranny being brought low by a subject and that a woman, the redemption of the court through pastoral and the peculiar lacunae throughout the play; the suddenness of the king's jealousy, the death of Antigonus (ambushed by guerilla bears in this case) and the resurrection of Hermione. The performances were quite excellent, with an especially brilliant Prospero-like Paulina. The music for the performance was also rather fine, played on a range of period instruments from pipes to hurdy-gurdys. The seats were just to the side of the stage, which did give an excellent vantage point on the performance. As I left, the dark grey-blue clouds that had overcast the sky all day were counterpointed by the lights tinting the dome of St Paul's with the slightest blush of pink.
Travelling to Birmingham Botanical Gardens near Bournville, I was rather pleasantly surprised by how excellent the gardens are; comparable to gardens in some European capitals. The gardens included a conservatory with gardens with Mediterranean, sub-tropical and tropical houses (some interesting notes; figs are used to make a form of coffee in Austria and Bavaria, Dragon's blood was used as resin for violins). The gardens also had an aviary, holding Quaker parrots, tragedian pheasants and zebra finches. Peacocks stalked the grounds, with one peahen found hiding quietly beneath the shrubs in the historical gardens. These covered Tudor gardens (a knot garden with quince and catnip), Medieval gardens with wormwood and a Roman garden. A Japanese garden had a beautiful set of blue slates arranged to imitate a stream, alongside a bonsai collection. Kept behind bars in the interests of public safety, the trees ranged from Chinese juniper to English Elm. Elsewhere the grounds had a pinetum, woods (filled with tree ferns), rhododendron walks and a set of gardens based on paintings. The gardens based on Blake's Jacob's Ladder and Degas' Dancers were particularly noteworthy.
Nazism and romanticism are often considered as related concepts in their rejection of bourgeois society in favour of the heroic self and idealised visions of the past. In some cases, such as Lawrence and Nietzsche, notions of volk and imperialism were largely repugnant to them, effacing some of the more authoritarian elements of their work. In others such, as Wagner, Pound and Heidegger, it is considerably more difficult to effect any rehabilitation. One such case is the Norwegian writer Knut Hamsun a supporter of the Quisling government who openly wrote in support of Hitler. For instance, in Pan Hamsun contrasts the authentic self of his soldier protagonist, who lives alone in the woods with his dog as his sole companion, to the bourgeois Edvarda, who lives in society and marries a Swedish count.
Central to this joining of Nazism and romanticism was the distinction of gemeinschaft and geschellschaft, with Hamsun's novels typically depicting outcasts from a hypocritical bourgeois society; "I loathe your whole taxpayer's existence... I feel indignation rising within me like a rushing mighty win of the Holy Spirit." Heidegger sought from Nazism "a spiritual renewal of life in its entirety... Only a spiritual world gives the people the assurance of greatness.. and the spiritual world of a people...is the power that most deeply preserves the people's strengths, which are tied to earth and blood." Similarly, Nagel "couldn't understand what human beings would gain by having life stripped of all symbols, of all poetry," often speaking in parables, the fairy tales of a pagan christ. Influenced by Nietzsche, Hamsun's characters do not believe in god but continue to believe in a religious life, the same ambivalent relationship to religion that Nazism had.
But equally, his characters are deluded fantasists, inventors of falsehoods and contradictions. As one character says of Nagel in Mysteries; "I cannot figure out why you are turning yourself inside out for me." He himself speaks of his sudden jumps of thought, being a thinker who has never learned to think; "I admit I am a living contradiction." The vial of prussic acid he carries and his killing of a dog point to a dark aspect to his fantasies, parodying and mocking christ in the same way Nietzsche did. The element of romantic heroism is absent. Perhaps rather predictably, Hamsun's novels cannot easily be diminished to a set of unambiguous propositions. It seems flawed to analyse Hamsun's works for traces of Nazism when it was romantic culture, of which Hamsun was only one example, that acted to create Nazism. If the enlightenment is not viewed as being irredeemably tainted through its association with communism, it seems unfair not to grant romanticism the same benefit of the doubt. In practice, romanticism often acted as a necessary corrective to the extremes of other ideologies, a fact that should efface its own extremes a little.
Captain Cook's Voyages surprised me somewhat. Where nineteenth century explorers saw the world in terms of race and, increasingly, eugenics, eighteenth century notions of racial superiority revolved more closely around manners and morals, often in unusual ways. For example, cook notes that "the inhabitants of New Zealand are as modest and reserved in their behaviour as the most polite notions in Europe," comparing their tattoos with filigree work and admiring their crafts. As with almost any period of exploration attitudes bifurcate around a Hobbesian notion of savagery unredeemed by civilisation; "few consider what a savage man is in a natural state, and even after he is in some degree civilised" (noting that the New Zealanders live in a perpetual fear of being slaughtered by one another) and the notion of noble savagery; "so little does refinement or luxury promote happiness!" The most common complaint is of theft by the natives, but this equally applies to the description of the Dutch Governor of Batavia, depicted as a malevolent slum in comparison to the other islands Cook visits. Cook even complains of Dutch governance being oppressive when he frankly admits the intent to "deprive (them of their) kingdom and their liberties." The contradictions in the notion of liberal imperialism are far from new.Labels: England, History, Literature, London
posted by Richard 7:01 AM
Sunday, May 15, 2005
Following trips to Lichfield and Winchester, I went to Salisbury yesterday. The Cathedral purbeck stone is as white as Winchester but the early English gothic design is more reminiscent of Lichfield; an elaborate front (filled with image of christian masochism like Sebastiane and Agatha) surmounted with an octagonal spire that is the tallest structure from medieval Europe. Since the building was constructed in a reasonably short space of time, the design has an unusual consistency to it, though the impression of layer upon historical layer at Winchester seemed to make the place more intriguing, from my standpoint at least. By contrast, Salisbury was a tabula rasa, built to overcome the shortcomings of the original site at Old Sarum.
Inside, the interior is perhaps a little more colourful than is usual; the ceiling was painted during Gilbert-Scott's restoration, with the ceiling covered in Romanesque designs, while some of the windows were designed by Burne-Jones. The most impressive areas are the cloisters and chapter house. In the latter, a fan-vaulted ceiling rises above window arches that flood the room and its window friezes with light, while the arches of the cloisters look out onto a garden with Lebanon cedars at the centre. The Cathedral close is probably best described as picturesque; none of the buildings in it are especially striking but do produce an effect in combination. Mompesson house, a Queen Anne style building (moulded ceilings and painted walls combined with oak staircases; more genteel than Jacobean design, less mannered than later interiors), had an interesting display of modern engravings by artists like Eric Ravilious, set into a context of etching that included Munch, Gauguin and Blake. There were more traditional paintings too, including a view of the Thames by Brueghel and a view of the Tiber by Vitelli. The house also had a pleasant garden; wisteria and white tulips were in flower.
Returning, I called at Stonehenge. On the whole, I have to admit to finding Avebury a much more striking place though that may be simply due to how regimented any visit to Stonehenge is. Standing outside the circle at Stonehenge, it remains occluded where Avebury opens itself up to people and to the landscape it is a part of. Avebury is much more a part of its landscape, where Stonehenge is so fenced off from everything else (the fence cutting across what would have been the entrance route to the stones for instance; the site path takes you into it at a completely different place from how it would originally have been approached). Avebury's scale and fragmented beauty seem much more compelling than Stonehenge's closed and almost fascist regularity. Later, I returned to Avebury. When I was there last it was cold weather, with bare trees, a bitter wind and pale white sky. Today, close to the solstice, summer finally arrived and the sky was blue and the trees green as I walked through the fields from Silbury Hill to the village. Perhaps perversely, I couldn't help but find it more striking in its bleakest aspect (perhaps the ancient tribes agreed, since I understand that it is improbable that the summer solstice was actually celebrated). On the other hand, it was amusing to see how the usual middle-class and middle-aged visitors were counterpointed by visitors with dreadlocks and regrettable experiments in tie-dye. The weather was been quite extraordinary; following the heat came thunderstorms that lit up the entire sky. There's something very reassuring about the oppressive heat slowly ebbing away as you can hearing the sound of water dripping from the trees. Finally, the sun set, blazing red as it burned into the horizon.
From the outside the church at Cheadle, with its slender and rather severe steeple, is quite inauspicious, until one is close enough to realise that the doors are bright red with gold lions emblazoned on them, as with European churches. Inside, it is initially dark and unlit. The lights are switched on and the interior blazes with colour, with everything coloured in the brightest golds, reds, blues and greens. Modelled on old Catholic churches in East Anglia and Saint Chapelle in Paris, the church is the work of Pugin and the Earl of Shrewsbury, a relationship that seems surprisingly analogous to Gaudi and Eusebio Guell. Pugin sought to strip ecclesiastical architecture of all classical pagan elements, returning to a pure form of English gothic as an attempt to demonstrate the Englishness of Catholicism.
Passing on to Biddulph Grange, I walked around the gardens. These are interspersed with various follies; a Chinese pagoda and bridge, sphinxes and a yew pagoda. There's something rather kitsch about the whole affair (reminiscent of Eco's travels in hyperreality); the face of the sphinxes is a jowled Englishmen rather than the aquiline features characteristic of Egyptian aesthetics while a golden Hindu cow rests in a Chinese pagoda (reflecting the idea of the oriental as a single category; just as the Brighton pavilion is chinoiserie on the inside and Mughal on the outside). Elsewhere in the gardens are a pinetum lined with sequoia and a glen filled with mosses and tree ferns. The centre of the garden is a lake filled with koi and lined with yellow irises; as the sun appeared from behind the clouds the reflection of the house played gently in the waters. Finally, I've returned to a few other places; to Little Moreton Hall, to see the plasterwork in its long gallery and to Packwood House. Having being constructed in an ad hoc basis over the years, Packwood seems to face in all directions, having three front doors, four sundials (one bearing the inscription orimur morimur; I have risen and I have died, a typically melancholic inscription) and two clocks. Its allegorical depiction of the sermon on the mount in its yew tree garden always strikes me as especially pagan, something more like Stonehenge than Salisbury Cathedral. The gardens were full of red poppies, red hot pokers and fennel. At The Vyne, hibiscus and Monkshead were in flower.
Amelie by Jean Pierre Jeunet is probably my very favourite film, so my hopes were high when I went to see his latest film, A Very Long Engagement. I wasn't disappointed. This is a much more complex film than Amelie describing the First World War in a way that is bloody and horrifying, but retaining all of Amelie's quirky humour and dreamy romanticism as well. In short, it has a complexity that one would more commonly expect from a novel than a film. Like many of my favourite films (Goodbye Lenin and Amelie again) this writerly quality is partly due to the film being narrated as much as dramatised and to a structure that is very heavily reliant on flashbacks.
The title The Deep End refers to the name of a club in the film, but also alludes to the depths of Lake Tahoe as well as the more obvious associations of the phrase. Blue permeates the film, whether seen in the waters or in the club's lighting while the soundtrack also gives it a gentle ambient feel that is quite at odds with the events being depicted. The narrative itself is reminiscent of an Almodavar film (a blackmail plot revolving around the protagonist's gay son and the death of his lover), although as the relationship between the protagonist and her erstwhile blackmailer deepens it is this that proves the most disruptive aspect of the film, rather than her son's affairs.
One of my recent serendipitous secondhand bookshop discoveries was Benvenuto Cellini's Autobiography. This can perhaps be best described as the sort of account either Marlowe or Caravaggio might have written of their lives, had their survived to tell the tale. Like them, Cellini was homosexual (surprisingly openly so, as with an account of a handsome apprentice being dressed in drag), quick-tempered and deeply embroiled in court politics. The text seems to comprise a number of different influences. Firstly, it does bear a striking resemblance to a medieval hagiography (in much the same way as the first autobiography in English, The Life of Margery Kempe) by recounting the various hardships and misfortunes suffered unjustly by Cellini. This is taken to the extent that he even acquires a halo and a guardian angel (although the marks on his forehead that appear in one vision seem more like the mark of Cain and Cellini at one point witnesses the invocation of demons), and is saved from death by miraculous forces; "I was seized by an invisible force and carried away as if by a wind; I was taken to a room where that invisible companion of mine became visible and appeared in the form of a young man." It goes without saying that Cellini's guardian angel would be "marvelously beautiful."
Of course, where Kempe was a mystic persecuted on suspicion of heterodoxy, Cellini was a good deal closer to being an unapologetic sinner (most obviously when he is accused of being a sodomite and replies "I wish to God I did know how to engage in such a noble practice. After all, we read that Jove enjoyed it with Ganymede in paradise and here on earth it is the practice of the greatest emperors." Oscar Wilde would have done well to take note). The other influence seems quite opposed to this; like Nashe's The Unfortunate Traveller (also describing hardships endured on travels), it is a picaresque account of the life of someone who is often clearly a rogue, if a sympathetic one; "If when describing these events, I did not admit that I know I was sometimes acting wrongly, it would not ring true when I treat of actions which I know were justified." The text combines a Bakhtinian aspect of carnival that resists the religious narrative within the same text (again highlighted by the absence of any need for repentance being admitted at the end).
Coetzee's Elizabeth Costello has often led to questions as to whether it can be called a novel at all, seeming more like Murdoch's Acastos or Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Composed of a series of lectures given by the author himself, the issue of the author function is also present to an unusual extent, although this issue is further problematised by the extent to which the Costello personae's views are challenged throughout. In practice, the central issue of more one of the relation of literature of life; "the word-mirror is broken, irreparably... we are just performers speaking our parts." Similarly, the section on the novel in Africa foregrounds the solitude of reading as much of Costello's seclusion when writing, "people on trains take books out of their bags or pockets and retreat into solitary worlds" The novel and writing become a form of imperialism, a form of cancer, denying the ability to think ourselves into the mind of a bat and diminishing the ability like Kafka to think himself into the mind of an ape or cockroach; "if I do not convince you, that is because my words here lack the power to bring home to you the wholeness, the unabstracted unintellectual nature of that animal being."
Costello's flair for negative capability, to become the characters she depicts, is balanced by her total lack of empathy for others. Her passionate advocacy of animal rights, even if shared by her creator, is essentially a symptom of her alienation from other people, even wondering why she cannot help but see her own relatives as being as depraved as concentration camp guards for eating meat. Literature is an engaged media; it cannot help but be dialogic, representing the views of Costello's interlocutors (such as a Jew offended by her concentration camp comparisons) as Costello, of murderers (as in Paul West's novel in spite of the offence it causes Costello) as much as victims; "I maintain beliefs only provisionally ; fixed beliefs would stand in my way. I change beliefs as I would change my habitations or my beliefs." Likewise, in Dusklands, the narrator's involvement in the propaganda project contaminates him, effecting him far more than its recipients (the intent to dissolve Vietnamese patriarchal ties rebounding on his own son); "Print on the other hand is sadism and evokes pure terror." Conversely, in the second story, the narrative of Jacobus Coetzee, his sadism is innate and part of role as an explorer. Conversely, in In the Heart of the Country the narrator is denied awareness of the basis for her own actions, speaking of theories and fictionalised narratives of herself; "I signify something. I do not know what... is it possible that there is an explanation for all the things I do and that explanation lies inside me, like a key(?).. To die an enigma with a full soul or to die emptied of my secrets.
Michel Houellebecq's pose of wearied disgust with contemporary society and both extremes of the political spectrum is counterpointed by his commitment to what can probably be called futurism or extropianism; "ill-informed of recent progress in molecular biology, he had no idea that such modification... would shortly be possible." Lanzarote confronts this strain and appears to conclude it. The island could easily be a post-apocalyptic Europe, with its settlements destroyed by the volcano. While there, the narrator hears of similar themes within Europe; rising crime, ethnic violence and religious fundamentalism in European cities while America comes to dominate the world; "In Belgium we no longer constitute what is commonly called a society... I realise that this tendency is common to all European countries." When confronted with the Azraelian sect, the novel appears to compare their ideas to Houellebecq's futurism, suggesting that both emerge as a symptom rather than a cure of social breakdown.
Like Madame Bovary, Zola's Nana balances within itself a moral fable of subversion and punishment against the subversion of depicting such matters at all and eliciting sympathy for the perpetrator. But although he began by seeking to create a moral allegory that drew parallels between the Second Empire's moral degradation and its defeat in the war with Prussia ("morals such as these, reminiscent of Roman decadence, meant an end to all society.. the sort of indulgence that leads society to the abyss."). Zola is considerably more radical than Flaubert. In The Experimental Novel he wrote that "I consider that the question of heredity has a great influence in the intellectual and passionate manifestations of man. I also attach considerable importance to the surroundings... Man is not alone; he lives in society, in a social condition; and consequently, for us novelists, this social condition unceasingly modifies the phenomena. Indeed our great study is just there, in the reciprocal effect of society on the individual and the individual on society" Ambiguities between what we might now call genetic and social determinisms lie at the heart of the novel. In the case of the former, the novel abounds with imagery comparing its characters to animals (dogs in particular) and it is Nana's innate magnetism that allows her to conquer others; "his whole being was in revolt; the way in which Nana had slowly taken possession of him for some time past terrified him." Nana herself is an empty vessel, holding moral and religious views with limited awareness of her effect on others. But in practice, she poses a challenge to French society; "if decent women are going to meddle in our affairs and take our lovers away from us!... Oh, they're a nice lost, these decent women are!" The nature of this challenge is stressed by the social aspect of the novel; "the whores... avenged public morality by emptying his money bags... she had avenged the beggars and martyrs of her world." Devoid of materialism ("Money was all a lot of rot."), Nana is in some senses simply practicing redistribution of wealth from those that had earned theirs through privilege or dishonesty.
Similarly, in L'Assommoir, the narrative depicts Lantier's radicalism and seems to endorse it in its conclusion; "the truth was that she died of poverty, from the filth and exhaustion of her wasted life," though it immediately qualifies this with the less charitable suggestion that Gerviase dies from her own slatternliness. Elsewhere, the novel teeters between these explanations. On the one hand, the novel condemns Paris as an active participant in events, with Coupeau escaping his alcoholism only when out of Paris; "people don't realise how refreshed drunkards are simply by getting away from the air of Paris, which is really polluted by fumes of wines and spirits... oh, if she could have gone off like that, anywhere yonder, away from these dwellings of poverty and suffering." Here Zola is not so far removed from Engels who sees such matters in exclusively environmental terms; "How can he be expected to resist the temptation? It is morally and physically inevitable that, under such circumstances, a very large number of working men should fall into intemperance." But equally, the novels functions as a highly reactionary moral fable, condemning Gervaise for her profligacy and the tendency of the characters to destroy themselves (as with her conscious decision to start drinking).
Carlos Ruiz Zafon's The Shadow of the Wind is a rather odd combination of The Mysteries of Udolpho and Bleak House. The plot is in many respects a gothic romance, concerning the forbidden love of Julian Carax and Penelope Aldaya but like Bleak House its more fantastic elements (from a haunted mansion to a mephistopholean character that pursues the narrator as he uncovers Julian's history) are subdued within a realistic setting. The novel covers much of the history of Barcelona throughout the twentieth century and describes much of the city in precise detail (even assigning said mansion an architect, Puig Cadafalch who worked at the same time as Gaudi) with such areas as Barcelonetta, Els Quatre Gats, Las Ramblas and Montjuic playing central roles in the novel (the latter either in its capacity as cemetery or as a place of execution during the civil war). Equally, another of the central aspects of the novel is the Borgesian conceit of the cemetery of forbidden books, a sanctuary for lost works, and the novel is also concerned with more metaphysical concerns; for example, the allusion to shadow in the title covers a number of areas, from a sense of obscurity, a sense of evil to allusions to Plato's cave (books being referred to alternately as prisons and as mirrors).Labels: England, Film, Literature
posted by Richard 7:00 AM
Friday, May 13, 2005
Autumn and spring are my two favourite seasons and the most changeable. Summer and winter present largely unchanging extremes of weather that are both equally unwelcome in their own way. As the sun struggled to make its first appearance of the year yesterday I decided to visit Winchester, beginning with the Cathedral. Surrounded by a large park where the first cherry blossoms were emerging, snowdrop drifts were beginning to be displaced by crocuses and with gardens where medlar trees grow alongside the ruins of the Chapter House, the Cathedral combines the rather squat Norman architecture with the more fluid lines of the later Gothic perpendicular style. Inside, the north and south transepts particularly show the alien Norman influence, with roughly carved arches being supported by pillars stolen from Roman buildings (it is thought that the Normans were not sufficiently sophisticated to have produced them themselves). Overall, the Cathedral's interior is rather austere, with much of its decoration having been stripped out at either the time of the Reformation or the Commonwealth. Most of the present decoration, including various memorials and Kempe's stained glass is Victorian. Some murals have since been restored and several chantry chapels commemorating past Bishops remain wedged between arches, including one for a catholic Cardinal.
More oddly, niches on the retro-choir screen have been filled with a set of icons in the style of the Russian orthodox painter, Andrei Rublev (although two of the saints depicted, Birinus and Swithun, came from Dorchester and Winchester respectively). The Cathedral also has some more macabre oddities; such as a set of mortuary chests in the Presbytery for the Kings of Wessex; Alfred, Cnut, Egbert and the later William Rufus (apparently this was somewhat unwise, since the internment of his bones was followed with the tower falling down). I was then taken on a tour of the tower, proceeding up an extremely narrow spiral staircase, past the bell chamber and sound lantern to the tower. The view of Winchester was rather impressive, showing how the layout of the city was still recognisably medieval.
Following this I walked along Winchester's high street, past a statue of Alfred and the Victorian guildhall, to The Great Hall. The only surviving part of the original castle (destroyed by Cromwell; later plans for Wren to build Charles the Second a Versailles style palace nearby were rudely interrupted by the King's death), the Hall is most famed for the object displayed on the wall; a 13th century round table, painted in the Tudor period to depict the Arthur and twenty four of his knights. Immediately outside is Queen Eleanor's Garden, a recreation of the type of herbaria the castle would have had in the thirteenth century, including a fountain surmounted by a bronze falcon and a tunnel arbour. The plants are specific to the period; camomile lawn, bay hedges, Solomon's seal, iris, hyssop, hollyhock, lavender and so on. Finally, I walked up St Catherine's hill, former site of an iron-age hill fort, plague pits and the present site of a MizMaze. The hill offered a particularly good view of Winchester College and the Itchen flood plain.
Later, I went to visit Lichfield Cathedral. While Winchester's tower is rather squat and unobtrusive, Lichfield's three spires rise far above the town and across the expanse of Stowe pool. Where Winchester's white stones gleam in the sunlight, Lichfield's red sandstone has been blackened and weathered over the centuries. Rather appropriate really, given that the town's name is derived from 'field of the dead.' Accordingly, although the Cathedral is actually more recent than Winchester it gives every appearance of being significantly older. The structure is gothic, modified by George Gilbert Scott, with stained glass by Kempe (I've always particularly admired the window showing the reconstruction of the Cathedral after the Civil War) sitting alongside sixteenth century stained glass in the Lady Chapel. I was somewhat surprised to note another icon, this time of Saint Chad in that chapel, presumably having been created by the same artist (Chad's skull was displayed in an adjacent chapel). Accordingly, much of the Cathedral is essentially high-gothic, though there are some survivals from earlier period; murals whitewashed in the civil war can be seen in the Chapter House where the Lichfield Gospels reside.
Charlecote Park is a largely Tudor house by the river Avon with some later additions; a reconstructed box garden on the front lawn competes with a Capability Brown designed landscape with cedar trees while Jacob sheep graze. The interior is largely notable for its collection of objects from Fonthill abbey; Indian ebony chairs, beds and Chinese Lacquer cabinets mostly. The family seem to have had a taste for the exotic; more than a few paintings of satyrs grace the walls. As is often for these houses, the Tudor collides with other periods; walls covered in damask and furnished with marquetry furniture, a Great Hall whose window is filled with an eighteenth century alabaster fount complete with doves. Returning, I called at St Mary's Church in Warwick. Rather oddly, the tower of the church ends in a follow gateway where pedestrians can pass under. Much of the rest of the church was redesigned in the eighteenth century and represents a peculiar attempt to build a neo-classical church; urns grace the summit of the walls rather than gargoyles while the windows are gently curved rather than being filled with quatrefoils.
Following this, I returned to Kedleston. I'd been there many years ago and it had struck me as extremely austere and cold. To some extent, this impression still persists. Placed in Derbyshire with its attendant poor weather, the structure is defiantly neo-classical. Its front imitates Constantine's arch, the entire building being based on a Palladio design. The entrance hall replicates the atrium of a Roman villa, while the saloon is modelled on the pantheon. Much of this was designed as a temple of the arts rather than a house and I quickly found the impressions of my earlier self being confirmed. More interesting was the church, whose wall was mounted with a sundial and skulls to reflects man's mortality (with an execrable pun on 'sun dial' and 'soon die all'). More interesting was the exhibition of Kedleston acquisitions from his time as Indian viceroy, including Indian ivory and silverwork, Tibetan bronzes and Chinese lacquerwork. The interior has two wooden lids in the floor; lifted up they reveal stone faces of a medieval Lord and Lady Kedleston.
I went to Silchester recently, spending a few hours there and walking around the walls. Not an especially sunny day though, as with Avebury, the ruins do acquire an oddly forbidding aspect when the sunlight falls away. Formerly an important Iron-age and Roman town, little now remains besides the walls and an amphitheatre. I hadn't visited at this time of year before, and I noticed that bluebells were beginning to come into flower in the woods while the meadow was covered with dandelions. One afternoon later that week saw a heavy April shower. When it stopped raining, the sky was still swathed in dark clouds but the sun was very bright. In consequence, one of the most vivid rainbows I've ever seen plunged down from the storm clouds to light up the ground.
Later, I went to visit Mottisfont Abbey. This has actually been a house since the reformation but a cellarium and various surviving arches date back to the medieval period. Stylistically, the house is as much a patchwork as The Vyne, with the redbrick front retaining some Tudor features but the back and flanking wings being in a more downcast eighteenth century style. I particularly liked the parterre garden in front of the house, planted with blue hyacinths and white tulips, with bluebells and wisteria growing nearby. Rooks cawed in the nearby trees. Oddly, a modern mosaic appears in a niche between walls nearby, showing a orthodox icon (in reality the socialite that owned the house) The rest of the grounds also have several tulips displays in black, purple and white with red stripes. Plane trees line the grounds, many of them with mistletoe growing from their branches. The inside is a more nondescript eighteenth century affair, enlivened by some striking trompe l'oeil from the thirties, recasting the drawing room as a gothic palace like Walpole's Strawberry Hill. The illusion is rather well conceived, even down to a paint pot and brush drawn onto one shelf. Elsewhere, the house had a surprisingly good collection of modern art, ranging from Degas and Vuillard to Lowry (some dark but surprisingly naturalistic landscapes) and the Bloomsbury group (a particularly fine country scene from Duncan Grant with an obvious debt to Cezanne).
The following day, I returned to West Wycombe, where I was finally able to climb the hill (earlier the site of an iron age fort) and then the tower of Saint Lawrence's Church. The church itself proved surprisingly ornate inside (modelled on the Temple of Palmyra), with Corinthian columns drawing the eye up to the frescos on the ceiling. The yellow Palladian buildings at Wycombe finally seemed to take on the proper Italianate aspect in the sunlight (though I suspect Palladio was not given to using flint as a building material). The grounds seemed mostly covered in an odd combination of yew and willow while some caged parrots competed with nearby rooks. I also went to Grey's Court. This is a Jacobean house, with a rather nondescript eighteenth century interior; more interesting were the grounds with orchards and knot gardens surrounding the ruins of the original manor. The grounds are strewn with follies like a Chinese bridge and a modern miz-maze with an astrolabe at its centre. Nearby was beech woodland, where the sunlight set the leaves aflame as it fell down on the bluebells below.
Arriving in London, I briefly visited Tate Modern, dwelling on Klein and Rothko's brooding canvases, Braque and Kandinsky's cubism and the surrealism of Magritte. Having since visited the Trade Fair Palace in Prague, I'm inclined to take an increasingly dim view of Tate Modern; it's thematic arrangements of paintings increasingly seems to disguise a rather thin collection. Passing on, I walked past the Houses of Parliament to Tate Britain, for its exhibition of paintings by Turner, Whistler and Monet. "All art," wrote Walter Pater, "aspires to the condition of music," a hypothesis reinforced by Whistler's appropriation of musical terminology to mark his rejection of realism in favour of aestheticism. The exhibition accordingly presents a problem for the writer in its rejection of the concrete, leaving only the subjective and inchoate. The essential difficult lies in seeing Turner placed alongside two artists that refined his impressionism (arguably he would have gained more by being placed alongside his own contemporaries), the serenity of Whistler's nocturnes on the one hand and the convulsive explosions of colour proffered by Monet. Where Turner's serial paintings of the destruction of the Houses of Parliament all appear essentially similar, Monet's serial paintings of the same landscape always seem different.
I went to see The Downfall, a film that chronicles the fall of Berlin, counterpointing the fate of the pulverised city's inhabitants with the parties and dinners in Hitler's bunker. The Downfall has been the cause of much comment that connects it to 'normalisierung' novels like Crabwalk by Gunther Grass or other works like The Natural History of Destruction by WG Sebald. These are attempts to reconsider the second world war, noting the atrocities committed by the British, such as the bombing of Dresden (the type of subject where the British have never truly admitted culpability) and the suffering of German civilians.
To a large extent, such comments seem incorrect. While not depicting a caricature, the essential gist of the portrayal of Hitler is to show him as a deluded maniac, often barely seeming human. Blind obedience and fanaticism figure strongly as a lethal combination. Where the comments have more force is the portrayal of the military and those around Hitler. Although it is certainly known that a gulf over military strategy existed between the German government and its military (probably for the Wehrmacht and Navy, certainly not for the SS officers in the film), the portrayal of them as simply loyal and diligent in obeying orders seems to go unnecessarily far in exculpating them. Wilhelm Mohnke, seen pleading to arrest the needless slaughter of troops had no such compunctions concerning the British troops he massacred at Dunkirk. Dr Ernst-Günter Schenck appears a humanitarian throughout, but such compassion was never lavished on the concentration camp victims he experimented on. Traudl Junge is seen as innocent of politics, though in reality Nazism had shaped much of her life. The tendency is to see the German people as victims of Hitler rather than as agents (although Goerring becomes the unlikely spokesmen for the view that the German people had at least colluded in their fate and a coda at the end sees the actual Traudl Junge speaking of how she had come to realise that she should have been more alive to what the Third Reich had been doing rather than denying her culpability). Nonetheless, it still seems difficult not to feel that Claus von Stauffenberg deserved to be described as a victim more than many of the film's characters.
My view of the film is as such ambivalent to say the least; the film does derive much of its disturbing and powerful effect from a refusal to deal in moral absolutes in one of the very few places where they can hardly be said to seem unwarranted. As I left, a girl seated behind me was crying. "The madness" she said through the tears, "The madness."
Francoise Sagan's Bonjour Tristesse presents an interesting cocktail of what could (uncharitably) be called champagne existentialism. The narrator is an uncertain centre who confesses that in a month she would have been differing opinions on subjects, a device that allows Sagan to critique existentialism. Given a choice between being-in-itself and being-for-oneself, no decision can be made. One choice would destroy the hedonism upon which the lives of Cecile and her father depend. The other would destroy what would save them from that hedonism. Her own nausea cannot be overcome.
Alan Hollinghurst's The Line of Beauty left me with certain doubts as to whether the social novel is as meaningful a vehicle now as it was for the Victorians. The social novel carried with it a number of assumptions that sit poorly with modern ideas. For instance, ideas on social homogeneity (uniting 'the two nations') that don't coincide with more modern ideas on individualism or multi-culturalism, or on the social basis for character that began to seem difficult after Freud. My general conclusion is that to a large extent, the description of it as a social novel is entirely accurate. The main character certainly does allude to Trollope's The Way We Live Now and there are certain comparisons; the novel depicts a broad swathe of nineteen eighties society and depicts the transition of conservatism from being a party of the landed gentry to being a party of upstart magnates. However, novels like The Spoils of Poynton or The Picture of Dorian Gray seem more apposite comparisons (though it is difficult to see the novel as a moral fable; the crude moralisations of upper class conservatives are typically treated with disdain. Self's Dorian might accordingly be a better parallel). Where a Victorian social novel would have shown how different parts of society were inextricably joined, Hollinghurst deliberately emphasises the divisions of an increasingly atomised society, as the main character's homosexuality clashes with both his middle-class background and the upper-class milieu he has become accustomed to. Where a Victorian social novel would have had events like the stock market crash serve as a central deus ex machina, such things are often little more than background here.
Some time ago I came across a book called Herland in a secondhand bookshop. I had not heard of it previously, but was familiar with the author, Charlotte Perkins Gilman from her short story The Yellow Wallpaper. Reading it yesterday, it proved to be a utopian fantasy in the vein of News from Nowhere or Erewhon, founded on both feminist and socialist principles. In common with many other nineteenth century utopian novels, it seems more than a little disturbing today, combining incompatible adaptations of both Marxism and Darwinism (I suspect 'Galtonism' might be a better term in the latter case, if less recognisable).
On the one hand, the novel suggests that through "the most prolonged and careful selection and exclusion" cats could be bred that did not threaten birds and that criminal tendencies in the population could be bred out by simply not permitting anyone with such propensities to breed. Much of the novel attributes the superiority of Herland civilisation simply to the absence of any males in the society, thereby eliminating tendencies towards aggression and struggle. In this sense, Herland is little different from the fantasy depicted in The Time Machine, where the classes have evolved into differing species. After all, Wells found Fabian socialism eminently compatible with advocacy of select breeding; "I believe, that now and always the conscious selection of the best for reproduction will be impossible; that to propose it is to display a fundamental misunderstanding of what individuality implies. The way of nature has always been to slay the hindmost, and there is still no other way, unless we can prevent those who would become the hindmost being born. It is in the sterilization of failure, and not in the selection of successes for breeding, that the possibility of an improvement of the human stock lies."
However, it simultaneously dismisses genetics in favour of a view weighted heavily towards the blank slate. During a discussion of the genetic diversity shown by the Herlander in spite of being parthenogenetic, two characters discuss the matter; "But acquired traits are not transmissible... Weissman has proved that... If that is so then our improvement must be solely due to mutation or to education." In fact, education is what is stressed throughout; "however children differed at birth, the real growth lay later - through education." It is in short, the same view of nature that was to be inverted in the twentieth century's dystopias; "You are imagining that there is something called human nature which will be outraged by what we do and will turn against us. But we create human nature. Men are infinitely malleable." (George Orwell, 1984). But Herland also implies that the reactions of the three protagonists to Herland is a deeply ingrained one that proves not to be susceptible to any amount of re-education. Gilman's notions of human nature appear confused at best; the Herlanders react with horror and revulsion to what they hear of male civilisation but also find the prospect of visiting it enthralling and show blindnesses to its worst aspects. The Herlanders reject male society on the one hand, but are enthused at the prospect of abandoning parthenogenetic reproduction.
Melville's White-Jacket is in many respects a political allegory, drawing repeated parallels between shipboard life and social unrest elsewhere; "were it not for these regulations a man of war's crew would be nothing but a mob, more ungovernable than.. George Gordon... bowing to naval discipline afloat, yet ashore, he was a stickler for the rights of man and the liberties of the world." The navy are persistently held to account by the standards of the Declaration of Independence; "it is no limited monarchy where the commons have the right to petition... vesting in him the authority to scourge, comform(ing) in spirit to the territorial laws of Russia, which is ruled by an autocrat... for him our revolution was in vain; to him our Declaration of Independence was a lie." Meville notes its rigid social hierarchies and its treatment of sailors in the same manner as slaves are treated on the plantations. However, it seems awkward to place it in the category of realist fiction. It restricts itself to a narrow setting away from society, as much as the novels of William Golding. By contrast, Twain's Life on the Mississippi depicts the entire social strata along the river from the boats to the towns. Pioneer myths are dismantled by reference to the economic cycles that changed Westward expansion, while the genuine myths of the Indians are treated with scorn. Conversely, Melville's text is alive with metaphorical references to myth and history. Some of these are political (to Jews in Rome or the Saxons under William the Conqueror), other mythological (the sailors compared to Bacchanals), but all serve to point beyond the immediacies of the social fabric. Equally, the symbolic resurrection of the narrator with the demise of his hated white jacket seems to point to the metaphysical concerns of Coleridge's albatross or the similar death and resurrection in Moby Dick. The text points beyond itself but seems uncertain as to what.
A friend said a while back that she had been reading Golding's Lord of the Flies and had thought that the groups in it had seemed far too reasonable and well organised; to a modern reader, the descent into violence is less surprising than the order that preceded it. I made the point that it the time of writing, society and the education system were considerably more hierarchised and deferential, so I wouldn't be surprised that the groups initially seemed quite ordered. Similarly, I might not find the chaos and death unpredictable but this book was written in a somewhat more genteel age that lacked the benefit of having heard of the Stanford Prison Experiment. On the other hand, it is difficult to deny that Lord of the Flies may have dated somewhat. So, while reading two of Golding's other novels, The Spire and Pincher Martin, I was interested to see whether they would fare better. On the whole, I think they do.
It's often the case that an author's most famous work isn't their most interesting or even their best, and this certainly appears the case with Golding. Reading Pincher Martin I was struck by how little an equivalent to Meville's vision of the world outside impinges on what is a remarkably endogenous system. Pincher Martin is a form of inverted Robinson Crusoe, as much as Lord of the Flies is an inverted version of Ballantyne's Coral Island or The Swiss Family Robinson. Where the latter is humanistic and pragmatic, the former is anti-humanistic and even nihilistic. Golding sees human will in the same terms of Schopenhauer, as a form of violence and even rebellion against god. The extinction of the self in submission is his preference. Similarly, in The Spire, the construction of a spire on a cathedral lacking substantial foundations (the spire sounds like Salisbury, the details on collapsing towers and weak foundations sound like Winchester) proves a form of violent arrogance that corresponds to a psychomachia within Dean Jocelyn. Murders and deaths follow the construction.
I also went to a performance of Handel's Alexander's Feast. This was rather odd work is ostensibly an ode to the christian patron saint of music, Cecilia, but this does sit rather awkwardly alongside its main narrative of music's ability to inspire both love and destruction (recasting the firing of Persepolis in the same terms as the fall of the Troy). The concert was in a nearby church, replete with suitable Victorian high church gothic accoutrements, which made for an excellent setting. On the whole the performance was rather good, with the soprano especially standing out.
Reading Xenophon's The Persian Expedition and Arrian's The Campaigns of Alexander, it occurred to me that much of Edward Said's theories of Orientalism was as applicable to the opposition of Greek and Persian as it was to the opposition of Christian and Islamic. Said argued that imperialism had its scholarly corollary in Orientalism; "But this has often happened with the "orient", that semi-mythical construct which since Napoleon's invasion of Egypt in the late 18th century has been made and remade countless times... Every single empire in its official discourse has said that it is not like all the others, that its circumstances are special, that it has a mission to enlighten, civilise, bring order and democracy, and that it uses force only as a last resort." It's a Foucauldean view, by which the construction of discourse determines power relations, though allowing some humanistic conception of how discourse can also challenge such monolithic views. Similarly, it has been argued that the period between Homer and Sophocles witnessed the invention of the barbarian, a response to conflicts with Persia. For example, in The Persian Expedition Xenophon sees Persia in the same terms Spenser describes the bower of bliss; "if we once to learn to live a life of ease and luxury... then we might be like the Lotus Eaters and forget the way home... to demonstrate to the Greeks that their poverty is of their own choosing." This discourse of Eastern decadence and effeminacy (also seen to some extent in Homer's portrayal of Paris, and in Plutarch's description of the Persian king Surena; "his beauty had a kind of feminine quality which did not exactly fit in with his reputation for physical courage") was to persist until its inversion in the modern period. Persia is a mirror of Greece, its equal and opposite; it is only in Ukraine (Mossynoici) that they encounter something alien, described as being completely removed from Greece.
For Xenophon, Persia's decadence was an effect of the wealth and power of a state far stronger than fragmented and weak Greece, in spite of the efficiency of the Greek Hoplites against the Persian military (the lawless Greek pillagers are in most respects the Barbarians). Following the failure of Athenian democracy, Xenophon clearly admires both Sparta and Persia. For Arrian, the pattern is quite different, with Greece unified under Macedonian dictatorship. His narrative accordingly commences with the destruction of Thebes and the massacre of its inhabitants with the subjugated Greeks later found fighting for Persia against Alexander and his biographer Callisthenes killed for advocating tyrannicide. By contrast, in Persia "he dispossessed the ruling classes and established popular government in their place." Unsurprisingly, a hollow note enters into much of what follows; "our enemies are Medes and Persians, men who for centuries have lived soft and luxurious lives; we of Macedon have for generations been trained in the hard school of danger and war." As invasion passes into occupation, Alexander increasingly adopted Persian dress and customs, admitting subjugated peoples into his armies to fuel further conquest. Arrain certainly seems to interpret this as evidence of tyranny rather than tolerance; "Alexander came to allow himself to emulate Eastern extravagance and splendour, and the fashion of barbarian kings of treating their subjects as inferiors " For both Arrian and Xenophon Persia represents an odd combination of partly admired and tyranny and reviled decadence.
The essential theme of The Man Who Became Sherlock Holmes: The Tortured Mind of Jeremy Brett is that Brett's portrayal of Holmes as lethargic and blazing with energy by turns was to a large extent informed by his own manic depression. It further suggests that Brett strove so hard to become Holmes that his depression was provoked by the character. It's not unusual for actors to see themselves as being empty, a brass rubbing of the parts they play, but the notion that Brett was otherwise rather gregarious still seems slightly fanciful. The book does have a number of diverting anecdotes though; such as Brett's visit to the tomb of the figure Doyle based Hugo Baskerville on (an especially large granite slab had been placed over the grave to prevent anything escaping) and of Doyle's irritation at the burglar of his house being caught by the police rather than through his own deductions. One of the more striking details is of a play Brett appeared in that suggested Moriarty was simply a figment of the Holmesian imagination. After all, no-one other than Holmes saw Moriarty. With Holmes such an isolated figure (Watson's function is after all to tether Holmes to a world of the everyday that he is otherwise utterly disconnected from), it hardly seems surprising that he would have the need for a figure who was his equal and opposite.Labels: Art, England, Film, History, Literature
posted by Richard 6:56 AM
Monday, January 3, 2005
The Lady Lever art gallery is a particularly idiosyncratic collection covering pre-raphaelite painting, Roman sculpture, Wedgewood pottery, Chinese porcelain and assorted design pieces. The collection dwells on the fantastic and exotic, reflecting its role in advertising Sunlight soap (after all, it is difficult to think of an equivalent collection that did not emerge from an aristocratic background); on the whole, I found it difficult to think any worse of it for this. Most of the pre-raphaelite painting is quite well known (Rossetti's The Blessed Damozel, Alma-Tadema's The Tepidarium, Holman Hunt's The Scapegoat, Millais's Sir Isumbras at the Ford,) but there some good pieces that are less well known (Leighton's The Daphnepohoria, Madox Brown's Cromwell on his Farm), as well as some interesting pieces by more obscure Victorian painters (Etty's Prometheus). Some of the sculpture was also quite exceptional, such as Onslow Ford's Snowdrift. The Wedgewood collection was surprisingly interesting, containing a number of Wedgewood's experiments beyond the more familiar jasperware (as with the Portland and Borghese vases), to imitate Egyptian designs and Greek red figure ceramics with encaustic black basalt. The authentic classical collection covers Attic ceramics (including a black figure Psykter showing a Dionysiac revel) and Roman sculpture (including a statue of Antinous and busts of various emperors, especially dwelling on Hadrian for some unknown reason). The Chinese collection ranged from Kangxi period (including blue and white prunus blossom jars to famille noire vases) to Qing dynasty jade vases and Ming dynasty cloisonne enamel.
The surrounding village of Port Sunlight itself is a model village designed to house Lord Lever's factory workers. Though a benevolent project, its rather hard not to feel a little uncomfortable in the place, which seems too geometrical, too designed and too neat. The homogeneity is unsetting and unreal, emphasised by the obsolescence of its industrial feudalism. Though the buildings were designed by thirty different architects the arts & crafts style is consistent throughout (though it does jar awkwardly with the austere Lutyens-style classicism of the gallery and war memorial) with the doors still being painted the same colour on each street. As a rural idyll it is decidedly hyperreal.
The collection of Futurist art at the Estorick collection is housed in an unprepossessing building, where the spire of the Union Chapel can be seen from behind the metal sculptures and plants in the back garden. The collection is largely concerned with changing ideas of time and space In EM Forster's Howard's End Helen Schlegel finds the speed of travelling in a car disorientating, causing a loss of a sense of space (Forster describes how the landscape appears to congeal as the car gets up to speed). The advent of high-speed transportation radically changed perceptions of both of these, with much of futurism seeking to create a more dynamic concept of art that recognise this, as with Carra's Hand of the Violinist where multiple hands can be seen simultaneously; "Time and Space died yesterday," as Marinetti put it. In the case of flight (the current exhibition dwells on aeropainting), this was combined with an art-deco machine-aesthetic, again as with Marinetti's elevation of the motor car as art above the Victory of Samothrace.
The current Aeropainting exhibition ranges from Crali's vertiginous Nose Diving on the City with its jagged edges to the more organic lines of Tato's paintings. One disturbing suggestion is the linkage of these paintings with Guernica and the Blitzkrieg against East Europe, respectively. Certainly, in some cases propaganda is clearly apparent, with one painting showing the planes as christian crosses. Although futurism was closely linked with fascism (not least in its glorification of war and a military aesthetic) fascism itself diverged into forms of expression better suited to an establishment (becoming more Catholic and neo-classical) and it seems somewhat harsh to read most of these paintings in such terms. The aesthetic behind them might well be disturbingly militaristic, but on the whole, there is little that is directly political about them. With all that said, it does come as a relief to come across Modigliani's Dr Francois Brabander.
The Royal Academy's Turks exhibition covers successive imperial states and nomadic Turkic tribes that went to the form the basis of the Ottoman Empire and modern Turkey; beginning with the Central-Asian Uighur tribes, Iranian Seljuks, Mongolian Timurids through to the creation of the Ottoman dynasty itself. This combination of cultural and religious influences from an area that represented the central axis of the silk road, produced a varied and rich number of decorative arts. In the Uighur period, Chinese silk painting was emulated, the Seljuks produced extraordinarily intricate woodwork (wooden doors and Koran stands arranged in arabesque patterns) and metalwork (especially elaborate lamps and mirrors where the back is decorated in cursive or geometrical Kufic scripts) and textiles (carpets showing stylised birds and dragons; the latter being endemic in Ottoman art, from candleholders and doorknockers to Chinese-style dragon paintings), while in the Timurid period the illuminated manuscripts and calligraphy of Herat and Samarkand far outstripped those of medieval Europe.
This engagement with the East was to continue, as with the adoption of Mamelak Egyptian Koran caskets and the imitation of Ming porcelain to produce Iznik pottery with its serrated leaves and lotus blossoms. Ottoman attempts to 'improve' Ming porcelain by adding gold and jewels go a considerably long way to reassuring all concerned that the Ottoman Empire did indeed deserve its reputation for tastelessness. However, by this point Ottoman Turkey began to engage with the West as much as the East. Although all of the other works in the exhibition have been decorative arts, the Ottoman section begins with Bellini's portrait of Sultan Mehmed the Second. By this point, the European use of oils and shading to achieve perspective had already outclassed Islamic rivals; there is something odd about comparing Bellini's utterly European portraits with Ottoman attempts to produce the same effect in traditional stylised poses (the holding of flowers while sitting cross-legged). It's also somewhat incongruous that this cultural engagement went hand in hand with the point where the Ottoman Empire began to engage with Europe in a more direct fashion; through the invasion of Constantinople and much of the East of Europe. However, as with the difference between Venetian and Ottoman painting, the Empire was already being left behind as Western Europe explored trade routes that did not rely on the silk road.
Amongst the exhibition's curiosities are a medieval computer; a geomantic engine where soil proceeded through a set of what we would call logic gates to produce the desired divination. Similarly, if a dice was rolled a book of divinations could be used to look up precisely what this portended (rather like a Tibetan prayer wheel, I suppose). Any observation that a culture's most bizarre relics can usually be expected from its religions can probably be taken as read.
Ogier Ghislan of Busbecq was Habsburg ambassador to the Ottoman Empire in the sixteenth century, a period when the Ottomans controlled most of Eastern Europe and the Middle East. With the Ottomans closely allied to the French and constantly making incursions into Hapsburg territory, Busbecq was sent to negotiate improved terms. However, progress was slow and uncertain, with much of his Turkish Letters consists of his observations on matters antiquarian, numismatic and botanical (Busbecq appears to have introduced Tulip bulbs into Europe; though the Turkish taste in such flowers bore little resemblance to the modern version).
His attitudes towards the Ottomans are rather schizophrenic, fearing its order, discipline and military supremacy while describing it as backward and primitive (with surprisingly little sense of the apparent contradiction). On the one hand, the Turks had a highly disciplined standing army; "on their side, the resources of a mighty empire, strength unimpaired, experience and practice and fighting, a veteran soldiery, habituation to victory, endurance of toil, unity, order, discipline.. on our side is public poverty, private luxury, impaired strength, broken spirit, lack of endurance and training; the soldiers are insubordinate, the officers avaricious, there is contempt for discipline, licence, recklessness, drunkenness and debauchery are rife." It seems a somewhat odd judgement; in practice most of the wars that were to come resulted in stalemate (excepting the seizure of Cyprus), though it would be another hundred years before the Ottoman decline would begin. To take the example, of technology, Busbecq himself cites the Ottoman refusal to adopt clocks (as it would undermine the authority of the muezzin), the printing press and the destruction of Ottoman forces by a smaller European force armed with rifles. Equally, Busbecq portrays Ottoman society as meritocratic rather than hereditary; something of a distortion from someone whose illegitimacy had left him shut out from the upper echelons of the Hapsburg aristocracy.
Some counterbalance can be found in Busbecq's depiction of the Turks as backward barbarians. Though the ruins of Christian Constantinople do provoke an outburst against the Infidel from him, his outlook is essentially rationalistic rather than religious, characterising the Turks as superstitious and easily swayed by auguries and omens (though he doesn't seem entirely immune from such matters himself). He ascribes to the Turks a form of fatalism attributable to their religion; "they are persuaded that the time and manner of each man's death is inscribed by god on his forehead; if therefore he is destined to die, it is useless for him to try to avert his fate," citing a sanguine approach to containing the plague (the number of fatalities a day shocking Busbecq) as an example. On the other hand, when a Turkish official expresses the view that all men of piety are likely to be rewarded with salvation, Busbecq does not hesitate to condemn the view as blasphemous (perhaps somewhat oddly; the idea is present in Dante and can hardly have been an entirely alien concept); though he condemns Turkish oppression of the Greek and Hungarian peoples, the Ottomans still appear to have been more tolerant than christendom would have been.
Shugborough's gardens and estates are pleasant enough for a variety of reasons, most obviously the follies dotted throughout its grounds; a temple of the winds, a victory gate, a Chinese pagoda and a romantic ruin. But I was more interested in the Shepherd's Monument, a structure that depicts a Poussin painting with an encoded inscription beneath it; interpretations of its meaning relate to heretical sects that denied christ's divinity, the Templars and the grail and to Latin love poetry. Elsewhere, Middleton Hall, is an odd building surrounded by a moat and trees on two of its sides and gardens on the other two. The buildings are a hodgepodge ranging from Tudor to Georgian. I saw it covered with snow and with red squirrels playing on its front lawn. More forlorn is Bradgate Hall, the ruin of a Tudor palace now surrounded by open parkland with only a hilltop folly for company. Food cooked: Partridges and grapes, Chicken with black fruit stuffing, Persian duck with pomegranates, Moretum, Chicken and bacon in Tokay, Hungarian chicken in wine, Catalan Paella del Mar, Elizabethan chicken with sack mead, thai chicken legs, chicken Baltic, Hungarian cherry soup, prawn and crayfish laksa, Swedish fish and potato casserole, Moroccan pigeon pie, German pork and sausage casserole, white chocolate cheesecake with blueberries, Catalan chicken with figs, cherry and pomegranate khoresh, milanese risotto, chicken biryani, Singapore noodles, Corsican stew, baklava, Hungarian lamb with pickle sauce, chicken foo yung, chicken satay, Himmel und Erde, chicken tikka masala, Italian vinegar poached chicken with gnocchi.
Down south, I spent the day in Oxford, first climbing both St Michael's & Carfax Towers and gazing out over Oxford's rooftops and weather vanes (rather reminded me all of the viewing platforms from Prague's towers, particularly with the medieval clock on Carfax Tower; not unlike Prague's Horologe) and then going to the University and Pitt Rivers Museums. I love the iron forest canopy that makes up the University Museum, especially with various whalebone jaws propped against the pillars. The effect of walking into the main hall with its glass ceiling is more like one of Kew's palm houses than the London Natural History Museum. I was especially struck by the faked dragon embryo; as it suggested such a creature would be quite difficult to categorise (opposable thumbs more typical of mammals, and a combination of wings and limbs more typical of insects). Equally, I love the clutter of the Pitt Rivers and the totem pole that dominates the interior of the hall. Finally, I went walking amidst the emerging snowdrops and crocuses from the parks. The idea of a genetic garden to plant hybridised species alongside their forebears is a rather interesting one; it'll be worth coming back when more of the plants are in full leaf.
The QI bookshop in Oxford is based upon the excellent idea that the books are arranged by abstract themes rather than the usual classification by genre. As such, the themes included 'Ice,' 'Sea,' 'Bohemia' and 'Watching.' Since the usual divisions between specialisms were absent you found that a heading like 'The Big Picture' would include Milton's Paradise Lost, Hofstadter's Godel, Escher, Bach and Hesse's The Glass Bead Game. I thought these serendipitous connections between works that would otherwise have been on completely different shelves was rather engaging; perhaps the Radcliffe Camera should be re-ordered.
Recently, the sun was shining and the sky was blue, while a sudden snow shower drifted down to the ground. With odd meteorology like this, I wonder why people find the English obsession with the weather to be so unusual. I'm always struck by how snow makes the familiar unfamiliar, making every leaf stand out, making one's own footprints tangible. The presence of newly opened daffodils and crocuses only accentuated this even more. A watery and pale sun struggled to make its presence felt
in a clouded sky. One morning I found myself face to face with a fox (presumably in search of food amidst the cold). I'd never been this close to one before, and though it wasn't an especially dramatic encounter (it simply stood still, meeting my stare, until the cold persuaded me to go inside) it was wonderful to see such an impressive creature.
Reading The Motorcycle Diaries I had much the same reaction as I had to the film. Che's mestizo nationalism has racism at its centre; "Anglo-Saxon immigrants in Chile do not mix, so preserving the purity of the indigenous race... the pure expression of the most powerful indigenous race in the Americas still clean of contact with a conquering civilisation... the African race who have maintained their racial purity." However, Che is not consistent about this - he heaps praise on the Spanish general Validivia for his will to total authority, also striking an unpleasantly fascist tone.
Baudelaire's On Wine and Hashish makes an excellent reading of DeQuincey's Confessions of an English Opium-Eater. Where DeQuincey is concerned with a Kantian dialectic between reason and emotion, the ability of the mind to intuit the infinite rather than itself. By contrast, Baudelaire's concerns are more firmly materialistic and indeed visceral, as Benjamin put it "Baudelaire placed the shock of experience at the very centre of his artistic work" For much of the time, Baudelaire's language is as mystical or transcendentalist as that of DeQuincey or James; "the proportions of time and being are distorted by the innumerable multitude and intensity of sensations and ideas... you have cast your personality to the four winds of heaven." However, in many respects, his concerns are not with ethics or with mystical experience but with something more utilitarian; the transformation of authentic experience into a commodity; "what indeed is the point of working, ploughing writing, producing anything at all, when you can paradise at a stroke?.. enthusiasm and will-power are sufficient to raise him to supernatural existence... incapable of work, action or energy." As such, DeQuincey was concerned about solipsism, truth is not of concern to Baudelaire. He is instead concerned that if hashish simply opens up inner experiences then it represents a failure of will to be unable to access them without the use of artificial means; "a magic mirror in which man is invited to see himself.. the abyss by which he may admire his face like Narcissus... hashish reveals to the individual nothing but the individual himself." Benjamin suggested that Baudelaire was concerned with the commoditisation of culture and certainly such metaphors as "selling himself wholesale" recur. Marx supplants Kant.
I've described Orhan Pamuk as an existentialist mystic before and Black Book would add 'semiotician' to that list. Reality in the novel emerges as a form of text, where the link between signifier and signified is the key to a form of transcendental reality; "the world was not a place that yielded its secrets right-off, that it swarmed with secrets, and that in order to comprehend the secrets it was necessary to comprehend the mystery of letters," to see clues in things like in a detective novel. But equally Galip "despised the way he couldn't live without narratives...there was no room in this world for signs, clues, secrets and mysteries." Interpretation becomes a subjective affair; "he might get lost between these interpretations." Between solipsism and mysticism pamuk seeks a via media "realms unavailable to the 'objective and subjective styles' is the third voice: the dark persona, the dark style!" Reality becomes a narrative the characters can rewrite and reinvent, but only through a glass darkly. The novel accordingly teems with the imagery of darkness, literal and figurative in place of the white of Snow; "these dark, black, pitch-black pages." Peering through the darkness is far from easy, as with the Bektasi alchemists unaware their acolytes were Marxist-Leninists; "whichever realm was successful in seeing the world as an equivocal, mysterious place that swarmed with secrets got the better of the other."
In part, intertextuality counts as a means of rewriting reality; "he was being drawn into a world that was unintentionally transformed into a fairytale... the man in the street began to lose his authenticity because of these damn moves that came in canisters from the West." Cultural identity, is driven into the darkness like the ships at the bottom of the Bosphorus or the puppetmaker's figures in the tunnels. However, as with the narrative of the westernised Sultan, there is no identity without emulation; "we are also affected by those who have a distinctive personality and command our respect because we unconsciously begin emulating them.. I was unable to be myself," just as much as Galip becomes Jelal or the journalist becomes Proust (and the same reason Galip will not spend time in the Anglicised world of Ruya's detective novels); "No-one can ever be himself in this land!.. I am someone else therefore I am."
Peter Ackroyd's biography of London reminded me of an argument I had heard that histories dedicated to cross-period thematic approaches were eroding more scholarly works limited by their period. Certainly, Ackroyd approaches London as if it were a text to be interpreted, using literary criticism as much as non-fictional historical sources. He discusses London as a city dominated by symbols and theatricality, where the division between such things and the real is not clear (I was especially struck by his citing an example of Conan Doyle's The Man with the Twisted Lip being used as the basis for a begging career by one middle-class professional). In particular, much of the biography recalls Ackroyd's discussion of Blake and in particular Blake's dictum that without contraries there can be no progression. Accordingly, a chapter on noise is followed by a chapter on silence and Ackroyd alternately condemns London (for its imprisonment and cruelty towards its inhabitants, its ugliness and rapacity) and celebrates it (for its self-renewal, energy and enterprise).
Ackroyd's novel Hawksmoor, like Winterson's Lighhousekeeping dwells on the same ideas of permanency within mutability, but perhaps weights the balance in favour of the former. On the one hand, there is the architect Dyer's mystical demonism and on the other, Hawksmoor, a detective that forms Dyer's modern counterpart. People, places and events recur between the two time periods. The two characters gain a perverse communion, both alienated from their selves through various means (gazing into convex mirrors, insanity, drunkenness and sex). Hawksmoor notes that the Thames was "perpetually turning and spinning: it was going in no certain direction." He imagines tracing a murder "backwards, running the time slowly in the opposite direction (but did it have a direction?)." He might then "have to invent a past from the evidence available," which would make the future an invention too. Toward the end: "the future became so clear that it was if he were remembering it, remembering it in place of the past which he could no longer describe. But there was in any case no future and no past, only the unspeakable misery of his own self.' As such, the novel's two narratives proceed in parallel lines like trains on opposite tracks, mirroring each other but never converging. Ackroyd's conception of time is one founded on eternity and permanence; it does not admit of resolution or conclusion (a perhaps somewhat awkward conception, given the pulp fiction nature of the plot. For example, at one point a lunatic in Bedlam tells Dyer that Hawksmoor will be his undoing, a promise that remains unfulfilled).
DH Lawrence's Sketches of Etruscan Places is a later text in his 'savage pilgrimage' series of travel narratives, it is built on a series of dichotomies between Ancient and Modern, Roman and Etruscan. Accordingly, it is a good example of the progress paradox where one of the more marked features of civilisation and its discontents is an avowed preference for more primitive modes of society. To Lawrence, the Etruscans represented a more natural existence that was extinguished by Rome, something he sees continuing throughout history and exemplified by the distaste with which he responds to Italian fascism (given that he is often accused of fascist tendencies in his own thought, it is interesting to see how he reacts to it its manifestation). Lawrence's response to the Etruscans is essentially one of pagan mysticism; "In my tissue I am weary of personality.. all the pearly accretion of personality in mankind - what a disease it has become. Stubborn pagan indifference and sufficiency in the self; where can one find it?" Though Lawrence dwells on the balance of male and female sexual symbolism in Etruscan art he suggests a modern inequity; "if a navvy working in the street takes off his shirt to work with a free, naked torso, a policeman rushes to him."
Lawrence's Sea and Sardinia presents a less clearcut case and rather reminded me of an especially acerbic observation Angela Carter made of Women in Love; that all the men were depicted in close physical detail ("hard cheek, and hard dangerous thighs... to see these limbs in close knee breeches, so definite, so manly") while all the women were depicted as little more than walking piles of clothing (with detailed descriptions of the pleating and colouring of female peasant dress). Later, Lawrence approvingly describes how the young men all masquerade as women during the carnival and describes their two male drivers as being like man and wife, Jane Eyre and Rochester; "so terribly physical all over one another. They pour themselves one over the other like butter on parsnips. They catch each other under the chin, with a tender caress of the hand."
In Orlando Figes's Natasha's Dance he speaks of Russian literature as being a fusion of Europeanised upper-class culture and the folk traditions of the peasantry. Though Turgenev is always cited as a zapadnik rather than a slavophile Sketches From a Hunter's Album shows this quite clearly, in spite of the political mythology concerning the emancipation of the serfs that surrounds it. The sketches certainly do depict the oppression of the peasantry ("They work for him like they were in bondage to him.. bled them white he has"), with the aristocracy either being seen as rapacious, indifferent or ineffectual, with the results being similar in each case (with the rather totalitarian 'Peter the Great of his own village' in The Reformer and the Russian German being a case in point). How ever, the peasantry are instead often transmuted into mystical figures ("a strange and wonderful man he is, truly a holy man" or with the suffering and death of Lukeria in Living Relic). The suffering of the serfs is simply part of this transmutation; "What an astonishing thing is the death of a Russian peasant!... he dies as if he is performing a ritual act." The oppression of the serfs is not necessarily much attributed to the social order as to the moral corruption of the aristocracy (most starkly in Meeting where the jaded valet can only speak of the wonders of St Petersburg to the peasant girl he is abandoning or the Dasha mentioned in Death). For example, in Tatyana Borisovna and Her Nephew, the eponymous nephew is corrupted by his time in the city, but the narrative equally shows contempt for Russian parochialism against European internationalism.
Gaskell's The Life of Charlotte Bronte records some of the more interesting ambiguities in the Bronte attitudes towards religion. Anne had inclined towards a heterodox notion of universalism, wherein suffering for one's sins would lead all towards salvation (an idea with an obvious resonance within both Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre; though not Villette which ended in tragedy in spite of Charlotte's proscriptions against such melancholia). Charlotte's attitudes do indeed appear ambivalent (though she does repeatedly denounce "ghastly Calvinistic doctrines" of predestination; if christian perfection is necessary for salvation she admits she will never be saved; however, her attitude to existence if one of submission to what is predetermined). Gaskell records that "She had a larger religious toleration than a person would have who had never questioned, and the manner of recommending religion was always that of offering comfort, not fiercely enforcing a duty." Elsewhere, she speaks of how "it is more in accordance with the Gospel to preach unity among the christians than to inculcate mutual intolerance and hatred." She is struck by one of Mr Heger's exercises in portraying a subject from differing perspectives, using Cromwell as an example. However, she is revolted by Catholicism, describing her reaction as to that of the false Duessa.Labels: Art, England, Food, History, Literature, London, Oxford, Weather
posted by Richard 6:53 AM
Saturday, October 9, 2004
I had hoped to see the exhibits of the Carlsberg Glyptotek in the Copenhagen gallery that normally houses them (if nothing else because the prospect of a gallery and museum that has its own heated palmhouse seems more than a little striking), but since that is shut for renovation for several years, the current exhibition at the Royal Academy makes a reasonable substitute. The exhibition certainly makes clear that it is the product of the vagaries of a family of private collectors, consisting of Danish and French painting and ancient sculpture. The Egyptian exhibits are rather fine, including an impressive seated statue of Anubis and a bust of Pharoah Amenemhat the third. Rather memorably, it eschews the typically stylised nature of Egyptian art in favour of a more naturalistic style, emphasising the Pharoah's rather sharply defined cheekbones. The Roman exhibits covered a variety of periods and geographies, the most unusual being the Palmyran exhibits, showing many of the conventional aspects of Roman sculpture (e.g. couples with linked hands) are combined with Asiatic dresses and even camels. Of the native Roman exhibits, I was especially struck by a sarcophagus showing ships at sail; the waves are filled with dolphins and one man is drowning; very Musee des Beaux Arts. Other impressive exhibits here included a rather adorable red marble hippo from the Gardens of Sallust, and some statues of three of the Muses from the Sabine hills.
Nineteenth century Danish painting proves to have had a rather agreeable penchant for landscape and ruins. Much of this can be accounted for with paintings within Denmark, like Lundbye's painting of Zealand (a somewhat Constableseque affair, enlivened by a burial tumulus on the hill and what looks like a stone circle in the foreground) and Lake Arre or Kobke and Skovgaard's paintings of Frederiksberg Castle. But like many other European painters of the same period, the ancient world looms large, as with Rorbye's painting of the Tower of the Winds and Cypresses by the Baths of Diocletian, Hansen's painting of Rome, Naples and Vesuvius. By contrast, the French painting tends to be impressionist, heavily weighted towards Degas, Cezanne, Lautrec, Courbet and Manet (whose The Absinthe drinker, I especially liked). Most interesting here were paintings by Monet (a dark and unusually realist piece showing smoke stacks along a Dutch canal, counterpointing a more turquoise typical seascape) and Sisley. However, the highlight was clearly Gauguin, with paintings of Frederiksberg woods and Ostvald windmill showing his early realist style, and his later riotously colourful paintings of Tahiti. Of especial interest was a wood carving, recasting the narrative of the fall in Tahiti.
I then went for a walk, past Fortnum & Mason's clock with its automata appearing on the hour (a rather odd contrast to the Horologe in Prague), a market at St James Church, the Athenaeum and the Haymarket theatre, before emerging in Trafalgar where a group of pigeons were holding a sit-in against the London Mayor. Finally, I went to the National Portrait Gallery to looks around the Victorian and Modern wing. It's interesting to note that the museum inadvertently traces the decline of the court painter, so that the likes of Holbein are gradually replaced with Millais painting Gladstone and Disraeli or Singer Sergeant painting Balfour. In the modern area, it was especially good to see Brigid Marlin's portrait of JG Ballard alongside Graham Greene and Phillip's painting of Iris Murdoch.
Run Lola Run has a peculiar mix of chaos theory and free will; the slightest change in events has wildly different repercussions (along the lines of the flapping of the butterfly's wings), but the action is rerun until it produces an outcome satisfactory to Lola. The changes each time seem essentially unpredictable, but there is an order in how the lives of each of the characters proves to overlap, as well as in how Lola seems to retain a distant memory of how the events had previously been played out. In contrast to the wasted and conventional lives of her parents (The film shares Goodbye Lenin!'s anti-materialism; Lola's mother is the only point in the film never to change, more wrapped up in television than in events around her), Lola's actions reinvent reality, as much as her travels take her through an impossible Berlin that barely corresponds to the actual geography of the city and stitches together East and West, crossing the formerly restricted Oberbaumbrucke.
The Motorcycle Diaries seem an oddly empty film, just as after his death Che Guevara became an oddly empty symbol of rebellion. Much of the film is taken up simply with the cinematography of the South American landscape and lacks any specific ideology other than a broad protest against social injustice and some more specific sympathy for indigenist causes. With the actor playing Guevara's Hollywood looks, the motorbike (more Brando than Lenin), the rock & roll soundtrack (more Jagger than Castro) and incongruously American metaphor of the road (more Kerouac than Marx), Guevara becomes the perfect rebel without a cause. Ironically, given the criticism of how a sisterhood of nuns run a leper colony in the film, one of the most powerful images in the film, that of Che's body wracked by his asthma, is arguably an icon of Catholic martyrdom (communism may have officially been atheist, but it hardly seems unreasonable to characterise it as a religious movement in its own right). It is, in short, the perfect film was a post-ideological age that believes that everything communism said about capitalism, as was everything capitalism said about communism.
On the other hand, it's difficult not to suspect that the film represents something noted by the likes of Martin Amis, Robert Conquest and Anne Applebaum; a tendency to excuse the horrors of communism where one would do nothing of the kind for other ideologies (It's somewhat difficult to imagine a film that lovingly depicted the coming of age of an idealistic Hitler or Franco.). I am reminded of a quote Lessing attributes to Koestler in the Golden Notebook, that it was only possible to continue to cleave to the idea of communism out of a personal mythology, as a form of denial. Having read Arenas's Before Night Falls, and his descriptions of Che's labour camps I find it difficult to witness the mythologisation of Che. Certainly, the sole indication of the later Che (the Commandante of the Cuban labour camps) in the film is a scene at Machu Picchu where he dismisses democratic change in favour of armed insurrection. Nonetheless, I have to admit that it's difficult not to respond to the sense of injustice in the film, to the idealism, to the beautiful South American landscape. By contrast, Pedro Almodovar's Bad Education (also starring Gael Garcia Bernal) is oddly reminiscent of what Hitchcock might have made of Death in Venice; the same confused identities feature for both Directors, with the glacial blondes being replaced with dark latin men.
Meteorology, it seems to me, can be considered as a form of aesthetics (nature as a form of art; typical romanticism). During fog the most familiar of objects become rich and strange. Most obviously, the brick church steeple I can see from my window, rising through the trees. Reduced to a faint sliver of darkness ("Annihilating all that's made / To a grey thought in a grey shade. "), the denial of the usual detail grants it an otherwise unknown air of the unheimlich. Equally, the loss of colour in the trees as they become simply shades of grey, between which the difference is in degrees of colour rather than kind, seems to change the depth perception. Later, the sky grew more and more overcast until it rained, and it rained more and more until the rain became almost a solid wall of water. The level ground all around turned into a fast flowing river that had to be waded through and the thunder was deafening. One especially striking morning saw rime frost covering the ground all around, a light mist in the air and a grey sky; but a ferocious crimson sun staining the sky pink, like Homer's metaphor of dawn's rosy fingers.
As ever, Autumn is my favourite time of year and the golds, burgundies and crimson of the leaves at this time are something I can never tire of. There are few things as wonderful as walking through piles of crisp leaves as the wind causes others to swirl in the air around you. Accordingly, Wayland's Smithy is rather fine at this time of year; the funeral barrow is at the centre of a copse of beech trees that have turned to a yellowed shade of brown. Whereas the Kennet barrow can be seen for miles around, one simply happens across Wayland's Smithy. I noticed that someone had left some flowers and a note for a lost son on a tree stump amidst the beech mast. Uffington is more austere at the best of times and today (with the wind howling and walls of rain descending) the landscape in the distance seemed to dissolve into the bleached white sky, leaving the hill with its bare scalloped slopes (cut during the last ice age) against the tide of nothingness. Since the Uffington white horse can only be seen properly from the sky the most striking thing is Dragon Hill. Like Silbury Hill, this can be easily recognised as an artificial structure; like the stuffed animals in Bernhard's Correction these things impress because they are neither nature nor art.
Nearby is Ashdown Manor. This tall building is designed in a pure Dutch style, with hipped roof, dormer windows and a peculiar round glasshouse surmounted with a cupola and finial. Lacking any attached wings, the building towers over the surrounding landscape; in the seventeenth century lanes would have radiated from it at each of the four points of the compass, cutting across a square of domesticated parkland. The geometrical precision with which nature is subordinated, especially in the elegant curves of the parterre garden, has something to it that is at least as ritualistic to it as the Uffington horse. Today, the landscape is sparse downland, with sarsen stones embedded throughout the fields in front of the house and inkcap mushrooms growing between them.
I felt that Alan Hollinghust should have won the Booker Prize with The Folding Star ten years ago, so I was pleased to see that The Line of Beauty has won it this year. Firstly, on account of the sexual politics involved and secondly, because it is a social novel. Possibly, I'm becoming a new puritan ("In the name of clarity, we recognise the importance of temporal linearity and eschew flashbacks, dual temporal narratives and foreshadowing... We recognise that published works are also historical documents. As fragments of our time, all our texts are dated and set in the present day."), but the recent vogue for postmodernist, historical and speculative fiction (typically revolving around a somewhat superficial attempt to instantiate a rather limited set of metaphysical ideas) has become more than a little tiresome. Meals cooked recently: Javanese curry and Nasi Goreng (a form of spiced Indonesian paella), Mexican chicken with pineapple rice.
Marco Polo's Travels are rather more odd than their later English counterpart, Hakluyt's Voyages and Discoveries. Whether Hakluyt's compilation divides the world between noble savages and barbarians, Polo is more nuanced, typically cataloguing the wealth of other states in true mercantile fashion. The wealth and technology of the nations visited by Polo is typically more advanced than Europe (as with the Yuan dynasty postal system, paper money or the great canal; oddly enough, coal and stone bridges seem to fall into the same category while Polo neglected to observe either the Great Wall or printing). Polo is especially impressed with the city of Kinsai (City of Heaven), seeing its lakes, lagoons and bridges as being like Venice; it is easy to see where Calvino got the ideas for Invisible Cities. However, the narrative is far from lacking in ethnocentricism (for instance in the description of Christian Abyssinia's attack on Islamic Aden), often recounting miracles by which Eastern christians were preserved against the Saracen. However, the narrative is also a romance, and the sensationalisation of the east often interferes with this, as with the descriptions of the magical powers of the Brahmins and Buddhist monks, leading to the Khan's comments; "You see that the Christians who live in these parts are so ignorant that they accomplish nothing and are powerless. And you see that these idolaters (Buddhists) so whatever they will" Polo attributes such magical powers as refilling cups without touching them to the devil (certainly such things remind one of Marlowe's Doctor Faustus), but his descriptions of Buddhism and Hinduism are remarkably sympathetic, seeing Buddha as the equal of a christian saint.
Tanizaki's The Key presents the text that has no more connection with naturalism than the Bunraku theatre of Some Prefer Nettles, being composed of a dual narrative taken from two diaries, the authors of which frequently elide information or include misleading detail. But it is more interesting than either Some Prefer Nettles or In Praise of Shadows in that it breaks down the binary division they established between oriental and occidental social norms; "In the old days a woman simply obeyed her husband's wishes, not matter how indecent or disgusting.. I'd begun to understand that making him jealous was the way to make him happy - that was the duty of a model wife."
Maupassant's Bel-Ami is largely cast in the form of critique of a nouveau riche overreacher, criticising Duroy's both racism and chauvinism, his sense of emasculation stemming from the women he uses to progress his career. However, this moral fable is one that exists in spite of the death of god, "there are some people who really do suffer. And he felt a sudden anger against the cruelty of nature... these people at least thought that someone cared about them in heaven.. In heaven? Where's that?"Norbert de Varenne's complaint of the futility of things substitutes a form of hedonism for morality in much the same way as that of Henry Wotton in The Picture of Dorian Gray; "no doubt the truth is that we were born to live more materialistically and less spiritually; but through too much thought we've created a discrepancy between our overdeveloped intelligence and the unchanging conditions of our life.".
Stendhal's The Charterhouse of Parma is set in a period where Jacobinism threatens to overturn the established aristocratic order, and his novel correspondingly pulled between romance, picaresque and the more modern novels that followed. The romance elements of melodrama, the heroic quest romance for self discovery, aristocratic dramatis personae ("That commonplace does not rise to the height of ours") and almost courtly love are certainly present, so too are the more novelistic elements of character development and the depiction of characters in terms of their social interrelation, as with Eliot and Dickens. In terms of the picaresque, events frequently occur by accident (Fabrizio's exploits at Waterloo or the death of Giletti) or through a fortune beyond the control of the protagonists. Equally, causality pertains as much as in Dickens or Balzac, with the difference that the characters rarely seem aware of the implications of the actions. The resulting combination of accident with the crossed wills of the characters tends to recall Hardy as much as Defoe.
Astrology is a particularly difficult area for the novel; "inoculated him with unlimited confidence in the signs by which the future may be foretold... my imagination took upon itself to give them meaning and the most romantic one possible." As such. events frequently occur as if predestined by the heavens (as with Father Blanes's predictions or Clelia's prediction of her son's divinely ordained death), but the narration is distanced from the events it depicts and is consistently counterpointed to them; "she did not make that moral reflection that which could not have escaped a woman brought up in one of the Northern religions which allow self examination... That religion deprives men of the ability to reflect on unusual matters and particularly forbids self examination as the most heinous of sins;" Parma is persistently seen as a land governed by an arbitrary and unpredictable despotism (and therefore lacking the social stability that is a precondition for the realist novel) and whose inhabitants are governed by uncontrolled emotions ("Fabrizio was one of those unfortunate people who are tormented by their own imagination; this is a fairly common fault of men of intelligence in Italy") that they are unable to reflect upon. Much of religion is satirised throughout the novel, as with Fabrizio's use of the preaching as a means to see Clelia.
In Stendhal's Memoirs of an Egotist Italy emerges in the similar terms for Stendhal as it later figured for Forster and Lawrence. Describing himself as a liberal who despised other liberals, Stendhal's loathing of aristocratic privilege was only matched by his loathing of the crass mercantilism that was replacing it, something he saw prefigured in England, where all society has been subordinated to the cash nexus. By contrast; "How ridiculous it is for the English worker to have to labour for eighteen hours. The poor Italian in his ragged clothes is much closer to happiness."
Reading Twain's contemporaneous The Gilded Age alongside Maupassant was especially interesting. Twain departs to a large extent from the individualist conventions of American fiction in favour of something that does resemble a European social novel, examining each social strata through a broad cast of characters. However, there are differences. For example, Twain notes that a conventional novel would resolve the question of Laura's parentage, using it as means of demonstrating the interconnection of all parts of the social fabric (as with Esther in Bleak House), equally failing to provide a moral fable in the verdict of Laura's trial (often interrupting the narrative to make these gaps between artifice and nature clear in a surprisingly postmodern way). Maupassant depicts a society where social advancement is predicated on exploitation, counterpointed to the simple life of the peasantry. To some extent, Twain shares this, describing that "they were honest and straightforward, and their virtuous ways command respect" but also tends to see poverty as a form of injury to a greater extent, as with Colonel Sellers' turnip feast. Conversely, although elites are characterised as utterly corrupt, social advancement is seen in the gentler guise of a series of impractical visionaries (more like Skimpole in Bleak House).
Like Twain, Howells creates a social novel in The Rise of Silas Lapham, but the form seems hollow in comparison to its European counterparts. When Bromfield Corey notes that workers will in time dwell more and more on their poverty and become increasingly discontented, Lapham's reaction is that a poor man is satisfied if he can make ends meet. Lapham's fall is not attributable to anything that is deserving of censure, but instead to his unnecessary guilt over ousting Rogers from his partnership and "(if) he had looked after the insurance of his property as carefully as he had looked after a couple of worthless women that had no earthly claim on him, they should not be where they were now." Throughout the novel's moral scheme is an essentially utilitarian one, where Pen's self-sacrifice is seen as a form of "shallow sentimentality" that punishes three instead of one. In consequence, the moral fable of the novel deliberately undoes itself, with the fall into poverty having little more redemptive power than wealth had a corrupting one.
Darwin's The Origin of Species had always struck me as typifying the Victorian emphasis on the systematic, seeing all things as interconnected as much as Dickens or Eliot. The Voyage of the Beagle shares these traits, interweaving geology, paleontology and biology, but equally presents a more problematic picture. Darwin's observations here are equally amenable with a view based on Gould's punctuated equilibrium model (describing both natural disasters, such as the extinction of a land snail in St Helena when its habitat was destroyed and human disasters, such as the various South American dictatorships and revolutions as well as noting how South America would once have been populated with monsters, whose extinction left only pygmies in their place) as on natural selection (as with observations on the acquired blindness of a mole). His views on the introduction of alien species are without sentiment; modern environmentalism is anachronistic here, instead he comments on the historical ironies of the reintroduction of the horse into South America after its earlier extinction, these discussion of earlier mass extinctions sitting alongside extinctions caused by the introduction of European species, with the pig replacing the peccary; "according to the principles so well laid down by Mr Lyell, few countries have undergone more dramatic changes."
Although Darwin admires the tattoos of the Tahitians and vehemently opposes slavery ("I shall never again visit a slave-country... I will not even allude to the many heart-sickening atrocities which I authentically heard of"), his views are nonetheless imperialist; it is greater than between a wild and domesticated animal, inasmuch as in man there is a great power of improvement." Comparisons between native races and animals, even in the context of arguing against slavery are commonplace; "one can hardly make oneself believe that they are fellow creatures and inhabitants of the same world. It is a common subject of conjecture what pleasure in life some of the lower animals could enjoy; how much more reasonably the same question could be asked with regard to these barbarians!... persecuted enough to break the spirit of the lowest animal." Darwin's imperialism lies in his belief in the ability of colonial administration to effect an improvement in the character of the natives ("at the present day, from the progress of civilisation, there is much less warfare"), invoking Lamarckian terminology where he would have been contemptuous of it anywhere else. But elsewhere, Darwin appears to see the process in terms of natural selection. Just as he had written of how English vegetation was introduced into St Helena or how the Norway rat annihilated much of New Zealand's fauna, he writes of how the eventual extinction of the Australian aborigines and Tahitian natives ("it was melancholy at New Zealand to hear the fine, energetic natives saying that the land was doomed to pass from their children") due in part to European diseases to which there is no immunity and in part of the extinction of the wildlife seems inevitable to him. On one particular occasion, Darwin explicitly applies the idea of natural selection to the natives in a way he is rather unlikely to have done to Europeans; "nature, by making habit omnipotent, and its effects hereditary, has fitted the Fuegian to the climate and productions of his miserable country."
Pliny's Letters seem rather odd, recalling some of the reservations I had about medieval literature. In that context, all ideas of character and personality were related to moral and social schemes, without the modern idea of any form of interior life. It seems much the same as Chaucer's descriptions of his pilgrims, which almost exclusively relate them to essentially social ideas of morality. Much the same applies to Pliny, with the additional complication that (as a politician) much of the letters are a studied description of the author's public aspect, his pietas, that of his patrons and those that received his patronage. The Letters are an attempt to display his own suitability to be a member of the ruling class and for manipulating other members of that elite to subscribe to the same moral values and patterns of behaviour which he felt to be important. More interesting perhaps are the descriptions of the other sides of Roman society, opposed to this public aspect; the slaves that killed their Master, the husband who had a centurion convicted of adultery and exiled him, but refused to banish his wife.
Much of this relates to an attempt to gain immortality through his writings, as when he writes to Tacitus saying "I believe that your histories will prove immortal: a prophecy which will surely prove correct. That is why (I frankly admit) I am anxious to appear in them" and is later unafraid of appearing boastful when his own name is recognised and set along that of Tacitus. However, this is far from problematic, as when he notes that "my idea of the truly happy man is one of who enjoys the anticipation of a good and lasting reputation... lives in the knowledge of the fame to come. Were my eyes not fixed on the reward of immortality I could be happy in an easy life." Others, such as Regulus and Pallas whose monuments are without proportion to their objects are derided as immodest, and Pliny records how "people have criticised me in your hearing for taking any opportunity for the exaggerated praise of my friends.". The negotiation on this subject, between fame and hubris, are delicate, especially when Pliny defends his friend Verginus Rufus for ordering an inscription on his tomb, instead of forbidding such things; "do you really think it shows more reticence to publish throughout the world that your memory will live on, than to record your achievement in a single place in a couple of lines?" Tacitus's own Agricola and Germania is an equally odd text, lauding what he sees as the barbarians of Germany for their sexual morality (in contrast to Roman decadence) and both the Germans and Britons for their struggles for freedom (to some extent in contrast to Rome under Domitian). On the other hand, he derides their indolence and the primitive nature of their societies; seemingly he endorses a mid-point between barbarism and civilisation that can never be wholly satisfied by either.
Some of the most vivid aspects of Pliny's writing are the descriptions of his villas, where each of the elements are harnessed. Water falls by each seat, while each room catches the sun at different times. Quite a different conception is at work with Derek Jarman's Garden. Influenced by Gertrude Jekyll, it lacks any fences or hedges and is filled with the same wild flowers that grow in the shingle elsewhere at Dungeness. Stones are arranged in intricate patterns according to colour, in an imitation of Avebury. Gorse grows in a circle around a pole, which has patterns raked in the centre around it. It seems more reminiscent of the Japanese notion of shakkei, borrowed scenery, and the practice of raking gravel as a meditation exercise. But, as with the stone circles, Jarman does not fully subscribe to any notion of oneness with nature, setting rusted pieces of metals as found sculptures in his garden. Basho's The Narrow Road to the Deep North encapsulates this idea of oneness with nature, being distanced from an idea of a distinction between subjective and objective; "whatever such a mind sees is a flower, and whatever such a mind dreams is the moon. It is only a barbarous mind that sees other than the flower." The results of this are variable, with the poems often being rather abrupt.
As with Pliny, Suetonius is not especially interested in the psychology of imperial rule, tending not to speculate on the character development of the twelve caesars. However, he does shun a chronological narrative in favour of a more thematic approach (combining both of what we would see as the public and private), a technique that allows him to finely balance the vices and virtues of each Emperor. This doesn't seem especially surprising, since Suetonius presumably had to approach his subjects with considerable diplomacy. On the one hand, it would have been expedient for someone at the court of Hadrian to diminish former emperors by describing the arbitrary and cruel nature of their rule. On the other, his descriptions of attempts made to restore the Republic make it equally important to describe the need for Imperial authority against instability (including that of the Emperors themselves, especially Claudius). One of the more awkward aspects of The Twelve Caesars is the role assigned to augury. Although many of the defeats and downfalls chronicled throughout are foreshadowed by various omens, there is something often rather mechanical about such things with either generals or priests offering the most convenient interpretations of decidedly ambiguous events. Equally, Tacitus seemed to view such things as barbarian superstition in the Germania, while Plutarch noted how strange it was that Marius succeeded by heeding prophecies while Octavious was destroyed through them. It all rather reminds me of a story in Frazer's The Golden Bough, where a woman buries her son to his neck in the sand and sits nearby, wailing and lamenting in the hope that their particularly gullible rain god would take pity and cry (rain).
An interesting comparison is offered by Sei Shonagaon's account of her life at the Imperial Court of Heian Japan, where the sense of the noumenal is very strong throughout (and as manifest as her descriptions of the phenomenal world of her nature descriptions), with Shonagon often shunning rooms and paths proclaimed to be plagued by demons and spirits and fearing the return of ghosts at festivals. Her descriptions show a court that was heavily dominated by a ritual and etiquette that barely manages to conceal her own playfulness. However, as with Pliny, there is the sense of something repressed; given her distaste of the menial and common, to the point where it breaches etiquette even to mention such things, it's difficult not to wonder about what took place outside of the rather mannered court.Labels: Art, Copenhagen, England, Film, Flora, History, Literature, Weather
posted by Richard 6:50 AM
Friday, July 16, 2004
There can be something rather disturbing about visited restored buildings. The act of restoring an old building frequently does so by destroying layer after layer of history to reveal the desired outcome, just as Schliemann did with all of the cities he found at Hissarlik until he was satisfied he had found the Troy he wanted, or as Evans did at Knossos. In other words, it can be an extremely destructive and arbitrary process. Equally, there is something rather awkward about the hyper-real recreations of buildings, which seems as lacking in authenticity as the faked ruins favoured in the eighteenth century. Not to mention that the very idea of conservation has the unwelcome tinge of conservatism to it, which sits uncomfortably for someone ill at ease with the idea of tradition for tradition's sake. After all, most of the buildings prized as part of our heritage were built by either discarding the styles of the past or through the more literal means of destroying the buildings of the past.
So, I wanted to visit an unrestored building instead, of which there can be few better examples than the Midland Grand Hotel, now known as St Pancras Chambers. If there was ever a case study in architectural hubris it was this; built in luxuriant gothic style (it was not unknown for visitors to mistake it for a cathedral and ask when services began), its lack of either central heating or bathrooms ensured its downfall; perhaps rather incongruously so, since its 'ascending rooms' were state of the art at the time. Entering inside, elaborate columns coated in gold leaf sit alongside walls where the paint has flaked away and floors where the boards have rotted away. Pre-raphaelite murals of Chaucerian scenes and wyvern gargoyles rest in the darkness. In spite of my above comments it's difficult not to feel disconsolate at the Fifties beige or Edwardian burgundy paint covering the gold and crimson Victorian wall patterns. This is particularly so when one ascends the best preserved part of the building; the grand staircase. This imposing lined with gothic arches, through which light seeps into the gloom, leads up to a ceiling vaulted around a central boss, and incongruously painted with a blue sky and gold stars. Even in the dark the blazing colours shine out.
I'd certainly hate to think that such a building would fall further into decay and would love to see what these rooms look like once the paint has been scraped away to reveal the original frescos. But equally, much of why it is so striking is simply because it is a modern ruin; brightly lit and immaculate rooms as opposed to the current dark and cavernous interior would in many ways be a poor replacement. Apparently, now that St Pancras is set to become the main terminal for the Eurostar its restoration in some form is more likely than at any point for decades; I can only wonder what it will become. Later excursions proved rather more diverting. I went for a walk in the sunshine; past Lincoln's Inn Fields, St Clement's Church, The Royal Courts of Justice and then (avoiding the offices of the Daily Telegraph) to Smithfield Market and the sinuous Florin Court.
Elsewhere, in the country lies the awkward red-gritted bulk of Powis Castle, a building which nature seems to conspire to hide. Its rather impressive interior courtyard (flanked by a pair of Indian cannons whose barrel apertures are shaped as a tiger's jaw) is increasingly shrouded by wisteria and evergreen magnolia, while the yew trees are no longer shaped as topiary but have grown into a strange inchoate masses. The castle gives way to a set of seventeenth century terraces, originally progressing from aviary to orangery to a wild area planted with Acer and Stag's Horn, swallows flying low over the lawn at the base. Now the planting is more Edwardian than baroque and leads to a wild area where Acer and Chinese dogwood grows. Each border is lined with purple dahlias, blue salvias, acanthus, blue agapanthus, hostas, phormiums and aeoniums. Since only southern winds blow on the terraces a micro-climate has formed and bananas share the borders with fuchsias. The house combines baroque trompe l'oeil linenfold panelling and tudor plasterwork. Interesting exhibits included a beautifully intricate roman sculpture of a cat, imari vases, a View of Verona painted by Bellotto (slightly more down at heel than Canaletto) and an Elizabethan miniature of Herbert of Chirbury as a melancholy knight (I always wonder what went wrong with English portraiture between the Elizabethan and Victorian eras). The castle also has a clive of India collection, including a palanquin and a finial from Tipu Sultan's throne.
Elsewhere, Packwood house proved quite extraordinary. The exterior is a confusion of styles; stone, resembling Kelmscott to the Victorian redbrick. An enclosed garden with gazebos at each corner combines wilderness, a sunken garden, a terrace filled with foliage and flowering plants (easily rivalling Powis) and a symbolic yew garden, where the numbering of the yews along a long walk represents the apostles, with a spiral hedge leading a conical apex represents the sermon on the mount. The choice of the pagan yew invested a peculiar symbolism in this scene that seemed to resemble Avebury as much as the country churchyard. The interior is a product of the arts & crafts movement, an obsessive, even spartan, recreation of the medieval (even down to turning a barn into a great hall) and tudor at odds with the exterior of the house. Flemish tapestries and stained glass roundels abound alongside English flame-stitch textiles on the chairs. The only interruption is the red lacquer chinoiserie long clocks. Nearby, Baddesley Clinton seems to offer something similar, being a medieval and tudor manorhouse surrounded by a moat (occupied by predatory ducks) with a sunlit courtyard within. Although the house has beautiful wooden carving, offset with ivory and mother of pearl inlay, the effect is one of shabby decline, relieved by occasional odd items liked a narwhale tusk propped by in the corner.
Richard Haykluyt's Voyages and Discoveries is an Elizabethan compilation of travel narratives, written as a source of information on commerce, politics and geography that superceded the inaccuracies of Ptolemy and Mandeville. It regards natives (in this context the term can be applied to Russians and Tartars as much as the inhabitants of Africa or America) as either noble savages (docile and uninhibited by christian morals) or as Hobbesian barbarians existing in the brutish state of nature. These two postures prove to be far from incompatible. More interesting are the more ethnographic recordings; of an Indian Rajah's collection of white elephants or the ritual suicide of bereaved Javanese wives with a kris dagger (an odd combination of Indian sati and hari-kiri) which sit alongside wonder at the never-setting sun above Scandinavia, skirmishes with Tartars, capture by Moors and Spaniards, encounters with whales and sea-unicorns, and Raleigh's credulous belief in El-Dorado and of tribes without heads, whose faces appear in their chest.
Through Daniel Defoe's fractured and episodic narratives there is an inconsistent attitude towards the moral status of the protagonist as the genres of criminal biography and confession are combined, something enabled by the gap between the events and their narration. Accordingly, at the start of Daniel Defoe's The King of Pirates Avery protests of "the scandalous and unjust manner in which others have already treated me." Instead he describes his adventures as "unhappy though successful." Divorced from the social context of Moll Flanders the travel narrative represents a form of liberation from moral codes, with the piracy being depicted as offering both greater equality and opportunity than convention. Avery affirms that they had regretted "heavily they had not practised the same moderation before" and that "the men would be ruined by lying with the women in the other ships, where all sorts of liberty was both given and taken." From one aspect Avery is a sound entrepreneur as much as any government privateer, from another a criminal.
I also went to the National Gallery's Russian Landscape in the age of Tolstoy. The initial pictures by the likes of Shiskin are quite odd, painted in a similar style to Constable (later broadening to a more realist vein similar to pre-raphaelite landscape painting) and with the same idealised vision of pastoral. The serfs are typically shown in the fields but never labouring and with little suggestion of hardship. Tolstoy's outraged reaction to Chekhov's depiction of the serfs as living lives that were nasty, brutish and short (and sharing these characteristics accordingly) comes to mind. Though all of the pieces were pre-revolution it is doubtful that communist propaganda could have produced a worse historical distortion than the idealised illusions of these paintings.
Fortunately, genre painting later gave way to landscape paintings. Of some note here were Isaak Levitan, whose Above Eternal Peace shows a hilltop graveyard with a similar sense of symbolism to Holman Hunt, and Sarasov's feverish Sunset Over a Marsh. Of these, the most talented appears to have been the expressionist Arkhip Kuindhzi with his penchant for vast, depopulated landscapes (perhaps oddly so; I normally only care for landscapes as a setting in painting). The use of light in some of paintings, like Evening in the Ukraine, where everything is bathed in a crimson glow and the vertiginous perspectives, like The Steppe, a stark piece where a featureless green plain and white mist sky stretch off into a hazy distance, make him stand out from his contemporaries. The most striking painting was his Moonlit Night on the Dnieper, a panoramic piece where the iridescent reflection of the moonlight on the river recalled some of Atkinson Grimshaw's works. It reminded me of the night sky a few days ago where the moon's fitful light had emerged from two inky clouds both above and below it; although the moon was just short of being full, it strongly resembled scenes from many a horror film. I then walked past St Martins and the Coliseum Theatre to the National Portrait Gallery. I was pleasantly surprised by this; I've always loved the rich colours and finery of Tudor portraiture but been wary of later developments. Here at least, the flashes of recognition overruled the distaste for the muddy palettes and pedestrian themes of eighteenth century portraiture.
Huysmans's Parisian Sketches is an interesting dialectic of naturalism and aestheticism. Although the narrative describes events in precise detail these events are nonetheless recorded as subjective impressions or even sensations. On the one hand, the content is explicitly political; "have they never been moved by the desolate inertia of the poor... do they only admire nature when it's haughty and in its finery." But the aesthetic overtones cast the oppressed as romantic outcasts; "an obscure hideaway dreamt of by those in solitude... those disinherited by fate or crushed by life." Huysmans, like Baudelaire, aestheticises urban decay and squallor, writing that "nature is interesting only when sickly and distressed," there is a marked element of romantic pastoral throughout; "the joyous appearance of a country lane, enlivened by bothies and little gardens," something which easily shades into invective against industrialisation. Equally, much of the sketches are dedicated to the worship of the feminine but the tone is frequently one of revulsion, with smell being something Huysmans appears to find especially offensive.
Kleist's The Marquise of O and Other Stories presents rather bizarre combination of ontological ideas. Kleist developed a pre-Nietzchean form of pessimism surrounding Kant's distinction of the unknowability of things as noumena and as phenomena, so that his work is replete with ironic misprisions, with tragic consequences in The Betrothal in Santo Domingo, The Foundling and The Earthquake in Chile. However, this also leads to an emphasis on supernaturalism as inThe Beggarwoman of Locarno and St Cecilia or The Power of Music, implying a divine ordering in the sense that Kant had originally intended rather than Kleist's pessimistic interpretation.
Bernhard's Correction is in many respects a meditation on the division of nature and civilisation, reminding me of Paglia's observation that civilisation is a defence against nature. The character of Roithammer is a natural scientist studying genetics, with a preference for walks in the wilderness and admiring Hoelle's stuffed animals for precisely the reason that they were only barely the product of art rather than nature; "these products of nature always provided an occasion for reflection on art and nature... nature is that incomprehensible force that... forcibly pushes people together so that these people will destroy themselves." However, science raises the question of what Wordsworth referred to as how we murder to dissect, to divide the totality of existence (as with Roithammer's order discipline, his concentration chamber being a stand against the untidiness and clamour of existence, and conversely with the narrator's ordering of Roithammer's papers being seen in the terms of an act of violence) and the theme of building sets man against nature throughout. Roithammer's cone is at the exact centre of a forest, while Hoeller's house stands fast against the flooding of the river at the gorge, which has swept away all other buildings there. Nature is frequently seen as an entropic force, from the woodworm destroying Altensam to the decay of the derelict cone, to the flooding of Aurach; "nature hadn't changed so the people in their natural setting were still the same, with all their malevolence and frightful fecunity.". However, it is the aspect of gender that gives this theme its sharpest focus. The feminine is throughout identified with nature as being emotive and volatile ("people like my mother aren't rational beings... unconscious falsifications of nature"), the masculine is identified with rationality and intellect. This theme closely relate to the other central concept of the novel; the status of correction as refinement, as progress, or a form of destruction; "his utterly ruthless, hence utterly perfect corrections" By extension, this questions whether Roithammer is an isolated genius, struggling to create existential meaning in a void ("a man's lack of ideas is his death"), or a neurotic obsessive ("all those experts thought they were dealing with a madman.");.
The novel functions through the accretion (the text being almost cast in a constant stream of consciousness with few pauses) and revision of detail, viewing character as a palimpsest where excavation of history is intrinsic to an understanding of how inheritance has determined its course; "we still had the same conditions and therefore the same relationships as existed two hundred years ago... things that would determine our lives.. Altensam as the making of Roithammer, the source of all he ever was and still is". The novel casts into doubt our ability to live in our own world rather than that of our parents and educators. In the course of this, a rich set of polyponic perspectives become apparent. One particular aspect of this is the conflict between the perspectives of the narrator and those offered by Roithammer's own papers, and the question of reading-as-nature; "at certain points in our existence we break off the nature of our existence and proceed to exist only in books, until we again have the opportunity to exist in nature." Reading and art become substitutes for the intolerable freedom of nature, but is also an equally intolerable imposition on that nature. The result of that substitution is a blurring of the space between subject and object, part of the palimpsest's overlayering; "we become absorbed in the subject and can no longer think it through." As DeLillo put it "In the novels of Thomas Bernhard, the human mind in isolation is the final spiraling subject... a man so compulsively preoccupied with his art that this quality must inevitably destroy him. It has to be understood that Bernhard himself writes a prose so unrelenting in its intensity toward a fixed idea that it sometimes approaches a level of self-destructive delirium... Bernhard's fiction is anti-cinematic. There is almost nothing to see in his work. It is all personal history and tossing emotion, all voice--no faces, rooms, rainy days. There are references to streets and cities but no sense of place, and the novels I've read have no paragraphing, no divisions of text or accommodating space breaks. Bernhard's prose has a rapid and clamorous pulse rate. The narrator delivers eloquent chronicles of misery, illness, madness, isolation, and death. There are points at which the narration amasses such compressed layerings of loathing and self-loathing that it becomes rackingly comic. And weaving bleakly through it all is a sense of themes and patterns that ride recurringly in the mind." Bernhard's work generally works through the creation of a number of doubles; in The Loser the narrator is paired by two chiastic doppelgangers, one an ironic caricature of Wittgenstein as a failure, the other a model of Glenn Gould as the antithesis of all that is Austrian. Nonetheless, the potential different perspectives seem undermined by the monologic narration. Equally, while Bernhard advanced an idea of tragic comedy in which the accretion of tragic detail reached a point of comic release (certainly neither novel leaves much that isn't worse in Austria than anywhere else). Again the problem is that irony implies distance, and the first person narration leaves no room for this.
For most of The Village I was breathless at the combination of a Wicker Man style sparse and naturalistic cinematography with a rich sense of symbolism (especially with the way colours are presented, so that red is feared as enraging the animals that inhabit the woods leading the villagers to wear yellow cloaks). The result is something that intimately depicts the village but has a myth or fairytale's lack of exactitude (again, with the way the outside world was rejected by the villagers as sinful but where original sin recurs in their own eirenic valley with its autumnal beauty), so that in spite of the veneer of nineteenth century puritanism the villagers are never seen at church or praying. All of which is all well and good. I had realised during the course of the film what the ending would probably be and began hoping that I was wrong; I wasn't. Perhaps the difficulty is that, much like the villagers of the film, I find romantic myth rather too entrancing to be discarded, even if it does happen to be an illusion. Even a rationalist like myself would prefer Sleepy Hollow or the more nuanced dialectic of reason and unreason in Brotherhood of the Wolf.
The latest Prom was rather odd; the first half being dominated by Saint-Saens's Organ Symphony, the second being a selection from the nineteenth-century Austro-Hungarian hit-parade. Saint-Saens is rarely capable of restraining his eclecticism and the Organ Symphony demonstrates playful flourishes, lyrical passages and gothic romanticism alongside one another. That said, I have always preferred the darker aspects of Saint-Saens and although his work shares a baroque quality with that of Johan Strauss feuilletonist waltzes and polkas, the combination seems rather odd to me (Poulenc or Bach might have been a more obvious combination from my point of view). Gillian Weir played the Albert Hall organ and as with Janacek's Glagolitic Mass, the orchestra and organ competed through the fortissimo passages. Weir then proceeded to perform a Messiaen piece, which fully displayed his mad organist tendencies.
The second half proceed immediately in a more frivolous vein, as the cymbals proclaimed the beginning of the Radetzky March before the conductor had come on stage, followed by other works from Strauss the elder and Strauss the younger; Voices of Spring, Frederica Polka, Cachucha Galop, The Blue Danube and The Gypsy Baron. I'm very much reminded of a Joseph Roth novel called The Radetzky March; an elegy for the Austro-Hungarian Empire which dwells on the surface of its characters, recording them almost as a set of clothes and dress uniforms more than people. The same superficial pomp and circumstance is at work in the music, which is diverting but inconsequential. More interesting were the other Austro-Hungarian operetta composers. The Hungarian Emmerich Kalman's Gyspy Princess in particular, strayed into gypsy music and away from Viennese ballrooms.
Considering that Wagner has long been my favourite composer (rivaled by Handel and Tchaikovsky) it is a rather unfortunate fact that I have never had the opportunity to see any of the Ring cycle being performed, only Parsifal and the Tannhauser overture. As such, last night's Prom concert of Das Rheingold, performed by the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment and conducted by Simon Rattle (who had also conducted the performance of Parsifal I saw, something I'd quite forgotten about), was a rather special happening. Wagner saw himself as being both the Shakespeare and Beethoven of his day and this idea of the kunstwerk informs all of his music; I tend to think the ninth symphony's setting of Schiller's Ode to Joy is the most 'Wagnerian' of Beethoven's works. But like seeing Wittgenstein's duck-rabbit in both guises simultaneously it is never possible to attend fully to both at the same time. Previously, I had always listened to the voices in Wagner almost as another instrument and certainly the music throughout the concert soared through the Albert Hall. But in Das Rheingold Wagner allows the narrative to dominate in a way that recedes in the rest of the cycle and the discipline of standing through the entire concert with translated text meant that I paid more attention to the lyrics, with little impression of difference being made by the use of period instruments. The moral concerning the corrupting effects of wealth is at best trite and not one Wagner ever paid much attention to; perhaps as well since a music of excess is poorly matched to an ethics of chivalric renunciation. More unusually the cycle, initially suggests that greed exists in the absence of love, but the tauntings of the Rhine maidens and Fricka's jealously undercut this; the ethics of the ring are a peculiar mix of the romanticised Christian and the Schopenhauerian; hence the disenchantment of the Nietzsche who had seen the Dionysian in Wagner's music and rejected Schopenhauer).
Perhaps surprisingly, the text proves to be rather comic, with the Norse gods imagined in the same petty and impotent fashion that Homer created his in The Iliad (though as mentioned above the explicit moralism is very similar to the Brother's Grimm and much of the proceedings seem more drawn from fairytale). It's easy to sympathise with Nietzsche's view in The Case of Wagner that one must translate Wagner's gods "into reality, into the modern - let us be even crueller - into the bourgeois!" The excellent cast brought this out fully (for instance, with Fafner resembling nothing so much as an East-end gangster) and although there was no stage the opera was nonetheless acted to the full, with Kim Begley's outstanding Loki (Loge) easily outshining the rest (including Willard White's Wotan, I have to say); the most honest character present is the most amoral and therefore the least hypocritical. More than a few times as I stood in the arena I thought how unlucky all the people with seats were, since they missed so many of the small gestures and expressions that brought the characters to life. Finally, feeling blissfully happy I left the Albert Hall, seeing the golden statue of Prince Albert shining in the darkness. I walked down the stone steps, glanced briefly back at the Hall, with its iridescent new portico frieze glimmering in the light emitted from the Victorian street lamps, turned and headed to the tube station.
During the performance of Britten's Prince of the Pagodas the sound of something falling over filled the hall just at the point where the music was fortuitously reaching a fortissimo peak. It rather reminded me of the anecdote of Joyce and a 'Come In' to a visitor that had been accidentally transcribed while he was dictating the text of Finnegan's Wake; he decided to leave it in. Where Britten is normally dissonant and sparse, the Balinese gamelan influences on this added a more lush orchestration. Finally, Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition appeared. Since Mussorgsky only wrote a piano arrangement for this its most famous arrangement was actually created by Ravel. This performance instead saw the piece as a blank slate, and each picture had arrangements by differing orchestrators (being quite a varied piece from the outset this did make it seem oddly like Saint-Saens's Carnival of the Animals). Emile Naoumoff's delicate arrangement of Il Vechio Castello stood out for its replacement of Ravel's horns with piano (it did rather resemble a jazz version of the aquarium section of the Carnival of the Animals as a consequence) while Walter Goehr replaced the brass arrangement of the Promenade theme with a version strings and woodwind. On the other hand, Ashkenazy and Stokowski's more muscular arrangements (of Bydlo and the ride of Baba-Yaga respectively) were well counterpointed to these gentler arrangements. I've also listened to a different arrangement of Pictures at an Exhibition; James Crabb's dual accordion version, which brilliantly captures the more lyrical pictures but is less successful with the more powerful pictures, like the ride of Baba-Yaga.Labels: Art, Decay, England, Film, History, Literature, London, Music
posted by Richard 6:47 AM
Friday, June 18, 2004
The first piece at the Proms this year was Bach's Toccata and Fugue. The Toccata was played on the hall's newly refurbished organ and was indeed very impressive, but as far as the Fugue is concerned, I would have been much happier with the original version, possibly Stokowski's orchestral arrangement or Percy Grainger's arrangement for piano. As it happened, the Fugue used Henry Wood's arrangement for full orchestra, which seemed rather excessively jovial (so much so that I almost feared an outbreak of Wood's horrendously cheerful Fantasia on British Sea Songs). The Toccata and Fugue were originally the product of an austere religiosity and was later rediscovered by Mendelssohn as an example of the gothic revival (as with the later use of the organ for romantic works by Saint-Saens and Poulenc or even Donald Joyce's organ arrangements of Philip Glass); and the dark, gothic qualities of the work are what it is best known for now; which are simply not present in wood's arrangement. In fairness, I should say had this been a piece by Mendelssohn or Brahms I would probably not have felt so disappointed, but comparisons with the other arrangements rather darkened my perception in this case.
Elgar's The Music Makers exhibited all the worst aspect of Elgar's music, coupled with an egotistical tendency to quote from his own works. The performance of Holst's The Planets was nothing short of enthralling. Previously, I'd only really paid attention to the more Wagnerian movements like Mars and Saturn, but well performed as those were I found myself listening to some of the other movements (especially to the Dukas-like Uranus, Venus and Neptune) as if I'd heard them for the first time.
For my second prom, I spent a while beforehand in the Natural History Museum. This is one of my favourite buildings, a secular cathedral whose windows are adorned with pterodactyl gargoyles and whose walls writhe with octupi and birds and whose interior is filled with pliosaurs, glyptodons, ophthalmosaurs, coelocanths and sperm whale skeletons. The effect is surprisingly reminiscent of the Sagrada Familia, albeit in more conventional form. Extraordinary that it should be the sciences that have such a building, where, with the exception of the Henry Cole Wing, the neighbouring Victoria & Albert Museum is rather nondescript. This is a good time to go the museum and it still manages to educate rather then being a theme park; I hadn't realised that some carnivorous dinosaurs had downy plumage before. Outside, a new set of wild gardens have been established as a 'live exhibit,' growing native oak woodland, chalk downland, heath, fens and hedgerows.
Arriving at the Albert Hall, the first piece was Schubert's Unfinished Symphony, followed by Janacek's setting of Moravian folk songs and finishing with the Glagolitic Mass. The folk songs stood out with enormous clarity, being surrounded by sturm und drang, but the Glagolitic Mass was the centrepiece. Janacek was an atheist whose interest in liturgical music was akin to his interest in folk music, and the piece is chaotic rather than being characterised by religious transcendence. The pace is frenetic and much of the densely packed orchestration deliberately leaves each section conflicting with each other, as the trumpets strain to drown out the organ or the choir. Though Janacek was interested in traditional forms, the age of Stravinsky and Schoenberg was not far away.
Hampton Court, much like the Vyne, is an interestingly untidy anomaly, composed of an original Tudor redbrick gothic building, with a pre-copernican clock court, elaborate chimney spires and gargoyles alongside Vanbrugh and Wren's baroque building. The original design, with its domed turrets, looked akin to the Tower of London, the newer wing is oddly reminiscent of the New Palace at Sanssouci. The interior of some rooms has wooden panelling and Tudor 'arabesque' patterning on the ceiling. Others have chinoisserie and mirrors in the rococo style, where some ceilings are painted (one staircase is painted by Thornhill and does indeed look similar to the banqueting hall at the Greenwich Naval College), with trompe l'oeil. The gardens have the same confusion; parterre gardens sit alongside an orangery designed to contain Anne's collection of exotic plants. Elsewhere, Basildon Park is a perhaps some nondescript Palladian house enlivened by a room full of shells (from nautili to conches to cowries), a beautifully loggia, and an interest in the oriental from Chinese porcelain to medical mannequins used as lamps and paintings of Indian monuments. The surrounding area is also pleasant; white-balustraded redbrick Edwardian houses lined the river until the Basildon's gates, incongruously cast in grey stone in imitation of the Temple of the Winds.
In terms of film, I've watched Hamam and La Fete Ignoranti. The former is a narrative of a cultural other allowing spiritual liberation, as with Forster's Indian and Italian novels, Bowles and Burroughs in Tangiers, Isherwood in Berlin or Lawrence in Arabia. But setting this in culturally conservative Turkey raises questions that are only answered by the second film, where many of the characters are Turkish exiles in Italy (both films reject labels of sexual identity, but it is only La Fete Ignoranti that suggests the issue cannot be easily evaded, as with one character's indecision on coming out to her family). La Fete Ignoranti is a much more open-ended, dialogic work, where Antonia's naive middle-class background is contrasted to Michele's closeted liberation, but where's Antonia's more principled honesty suggests something is amiss with this. Food cooked recently; piri piri chicken, Lebanese garlic chicken and chicken with lamb and pomegranates, duck pasanda, chicken stroganoff, paella.
The second series of The Further Adventures of Sherlock Holmes has thrown up some interesting differences from the Conan Doyle stories. Firstly, as with the first series, the Victorian view on social matters is not replicated, nor is Doyle's elision of these issues; in The Tragedy of Hanbury Street and The Saviour of Cripplegate Square self-help and the undeserving poor are replaced with a more modern outlook. Secondly, the approach is more postmodern, in contrast to Doyle's studied verisimilitude. When Holmes observes that "if this was one of your lurid stories the doorbell would ring with a new case," it invariably does, and with Watson's observation that this is reality meeting only with "Is it? I wonder." At the same time as setting them as literary creations, Watson and Holmes are set apart from Doyle. Watson observes that his Strand stories were bowdlerised for a family magazine, one character complains that neither look anything like their Strand illustrations (it would have been particularly nice if he could have complained that Holmes never wore a deerstalker).
Finally, where crime fiction traditionally counterpointed the brilliant detective to the hapless police force, most modern crime fiction tends to have someone from the police as its main character. Accordingly, Lestrade has become a rival of whom Holmes is jealous in The Abergavenny Murder, while the detective in The Shameful Betrayal of Miss Emily Smith sees savagery that Holmes is blind to, and in The Determined Client has Holmes conclude that his client is a liar and the police were entirely correct.
The Dedalus Book of Austrian Fantasy, represents an interesting anthology of fantastic, veering from a Germanic obsession with the morbid and violent (in which writers like Leppin reimagined Prague as an other in racial, cultural or even sexual terms, opposing dark and gothic Prague to neo-classical and light Berlin) in the vein of Hoffmann or Poe, to the more metaphorical and surreal work of writers like Schnitzler and Kafka; "The Austrians, according to both Mitchell and Magris, have complementary passions for detail and for the dissolution of boundaries - between the real and the unreal, between dream and waking, between life and death," so that for Meyrink, Rilke and Csokor the inanimate and the animate are closely entwined.
Franz Fafka's The Trial undeniably represents the highpoint of a modernist aesthetic. It reminds me foremost of Eliot's essay
Hamlet and his Problems, from The Sacred Wood, where Eliot suggests that art expresses emotion through a suitable vessel, an objective correlative. However, in the case of Hamlet "The artistic "inevitability" lies in this complete adequacy of the external to the emotion; and this is precisely what is deficient in Hamlet. Hamlet (the man) is dominated by an emotion which is inexpressible, because it is in excess of the facts as they appear." With Kafka, none of the events or personae exist in relation to the reality that appears to the reader (just as the text refuses to exist in relation to either allegory or realism). Instead, it is a work of absurdism and surrealism where space is displaced as if it were Alice in Wonderland. The novels take place in the realm of the abstract, where the bureaucratic aspects of existence take on the character of a Platonic idea. As Robert Calasso noted, Kafka is not an 'organiser' of human experience in the manner of Proust and Joyce. In Kafka, consciousness is never more than vestigial; 'for the last time psychology!' is his watchword, where the central characters of his novels are rarely even fully described. Kafka depicts a world where external determinants have supplanted individual volition and rendered it obsolete. Instead of action and causality being the central aspect (indeed being almost peripheral; the precise narrative voice never hints at the extremity of the events that often follow and never changes register when they occur), undifferentiated bureaucratic time is the substance of his fiction; his characters simply wait. Calasso describes this as plunging the 'sharpest Ockham’s razor into the substance of the novel,' utilising the form of the novel in a manner completely opposed to its origins.
If the reader attempts to place the text in relation to reality, the inevitable result is only a greater sense of disorientation. The most obvious and most superficial reading is a political analogue, reading the events through the totalitarianism that followed (just as existential readings compete with political ones relating to Nazi occupation in La Peste). However, the text clearly suggests that the court exists apart from the institutions of the state, with the theme of judgement recurring throughout Kafka (as in the father's judgement in the original story or the captain's judgement of Schubal in The Stoker). Another reading is Freudian, with the events with Fraulein Burstner and Leni pointing to a form of sexual repression, where Josef K dallies with Leni to the detriment of the case and it is the vision of Fraulein Burstner that finally renders Josef supine to his fate (or the picture of a woman in Gregor's room immediately at the start of Metamorphosis; the last thing his human hands had touched). Such a view would be clearly supported by a biographical reading concerning Kafka's relationship with Felice Bauer (and the parallel with Metamorphosis where Gregor's decline parallels his sister's growth into womanhood). If sexuality is seen as sin (and the trial would certainly seem to point to some form of metaphysical corruption) then this would lend itself to a casting of the text as religious allegory intended to quiet the strivings of the self (hence the lack of any centre to the work). However, the darkened paintings that can no more be clearly seen than the shadows on Plato's cave and are equally suggestive of a godless world (the liminal space between death and life suggested in many fantastic Austrian writings; in the story A Dream, Josef descends into his own grave, perhaps not having yet accepted his death) inverting the traditional Zionist dream of the gateway being opened at the end of time, hence Josef's conclusion that "it makes the lie fundamental to world order" an almost existentialist conclusion reminiscent of L'Etranger. But equally, Kafka's other writings often casts all volition as unwelcome, as in Resolutions; "it remains advisable to accept whatever comes, to behave like an inert mass even if one feels oneself being swept away," and the story that formed the kernel of the The Trial, namely The Judgement where self destruction is seen as the outcome of all volition, of being itself, where effect exists in relation to cause only as a disproportionate excess.
Part of the interest in Kafka grows when considered alongside other Czech's writers, for example the meaningless eruptions of violence in Hrabal, or the ironic absurdism of Kundera (as with the accidental poisoning in The Farewell Party and indeed the comically failed suicide by poison in The Joke). The most striking example of this is Kafka's contemporary Hasek and The Good Soldier Svejk. As Angelo Maria Rippellino puts it in Magic Prague; "a mysterious bureaucracy makes decisions for him, and whether his name if Josef Svejk or Josef K he has no choice but to devise wily expedients to thread his way through the stifling ritual.". Svejk is marched by two attendants across the Charles Bridge to was as Josef K is marched by two attendants to his execution, but Svejk appears invulnerable and accordingly wins through as an epic hero. Where Kafka occludes all but his character's perceptions, Hasek writes in a naturalistic vein and in the picaresque tradition (though the absurdism of the novel is in many respects as close to Dickens and Kafka as to Heller; consider that Svejk's regiment never shows the slightest sign of engaging the enemy). Accordingly, the novel adopts a carnivalesque and satirical pose towards society, but does occlude the perceptions of its character. Svejk can either be seen as both a cunning malingerer seeking to evade hardship or as an imbecile whose actions create hardship for himself.
Bohumil Hrabal's Closely Watched Trains is cast in the genre of a military narrative as much as Sartre's Iron in the Soul but curiously evades its genre. Instead it dwells on violence almost as a Freudian drive within civilisation; from Lanska's slaughter of her rabbits, the station master's slaughter of his German pigeons to the slaughter of the war itself. Death is seen as part of nature, with the dead rooks killed by the cold being akin to the dead German pilot in his crashed plane, both fallen from the sky. Equally, the movement of pigs by train to Prague slaughter houses that the narrator cannot bear is analogous to the attacked train filled with German refugees from the bombing of Dresden. However, the novel also suggests the civilised qualities of the German soldier's; "it seemed strange to me that both these SS men were so beautiful to look at them you'd have thought they ought to be writing poetry." As Hrabal writes in Too Loud a Solitude "life is at its most beautiful in rancid, decomposing blood;" just as in Closely Watched Trains the author attempts to disentangle beauty and horror but ultimately cannot regard the concepts as distinct. The civilised repression of nature is foregrounded in the novel with the suggestion that the novel is itself responsible for violating this repression; "To the courts with these writers and educators, these purveyors of pornography! Away with the monstrous imaginings of these young folks!"
Andre Gide's The Vatican Cellars is an odd combination of genres. Much of the novel concerns the patterns of crime and punishment familiar from much nineteenth century fiction as well as Gide's own The Immoralist. However, much of the novel is peculiarly postmodern, almost resembling the work of Umberto Eco, where signs replace the objects they purport to signify; as with the counterfeiting of the Pope's abduction or the false miracle that leads to Anthime's conversion. Image is seen as a social convention that holds repressed desires in check; "and image of ourselves for which we are only half responsible, but out of whose contours it is indecent not to confine ourselves." However, the subversive aspect is only partial; the other being the denial of the meaning of Lafcadio's crimes by having a false image imposed on them. In that sense, the two plots cancel one another.Labels: Crime, England, Film, Literature, Music
posted by Richard 6:45 AM
Thursday, May 20, 2004
The approach to the house is through a lime walk leading to a peculiar round summerhouse in red brick surrounded by a period garden filled with flowering lamb's ears, tradescantias, electric blue delphiniums, and lavender. A black and white cat hides amidst the flowers to avoid visitors. The house faces onto a lake, an oddly Palladian outlook reminiscent of West Wycombe Manor. Conversely, all that Cliveden house reminded me of was Colditz, where the castle is on a steep cliff above the Moldau, just as Cliveden is above the Thames. The gardens are filled with ponds, alongside which Acer and bamboo grow and shelter a Chinese pagoda. Elsewhere, in the midst of the parterre garden, a marble chapel has an interior filled with gold mosaics, even the ceiling. The effect is not so much high church as Greek orthodox.
This is essentially an early romantic response to classical pagan religion ( with the frieze in the great hall corresponding reasonably well to that of the Ara Pacis Augustae), since Chute was a friend of Horace Walpole. Accordingly, the interest in the pagan is part of a broader engagement with cultural others (as with examples of chinoiserie and oriental furniture from his grand tours; the druid statue and Ramses statue follow in the same vein). Accordingly, the altar is actually made of a South East Asian wood, padouk. Walpole and Chute do seem to have made detailed sketches of various buildings for many of their designs but their approach seems to have been to combine differing elements (the house could be called 'rococco gothic').
Next to the bricolage of The Vyne Waddesdon Manor has a certain sterility in its purity of style; a French chateau with the interior in the manner of Versailles, a form of decoration that had been anachronistic for the bets part of a century, having been overtaken with neo-classical and gothic architecture. Each room is replete with Chandelabra, gilded panelling, Sevres porcelain, Savonnerie carpets and marquetry furniture by either Boulle or Reisener. The paintings are by Gainsborough or Reynolds. Occasionally, this uniformity is broken up with a mother or pearl mughal table but the effect is rather oppressive. There are two exceptions to this. Firstly, a gallery of Dutch paintings; Ter Borch's The Duet, de Hooch's A Game of Skittles or a Van Der Velde maritime painting. There's also an odd gallery of fairytale paintings by Leon Bakst, better known for stage designs for Diaghilev. Secondly, the gilded aviary, filled with Rothschild Mynahs, Satyr Tragopan, Spreo starlings and Grey Peacock Pheasants. The
grounds also have a rather nice glade filled with tree ferns.
Morrissey's new album 'You are the Quarry' has been widely touted (largely by one S Morrissey) as his best album since The Smiths. While at least three of his previous albums strike as being better qualified for that accolade (the music is a little too leaden for my liking), there's little doubt that has more than a few surprises here; most obviously a certain air of glasnost on such topics as race and sexuality, where his lyrics on the former had previously led to accusations of racism and the latter to accusations of being a furtive closet case. That said, the most striking aspect is the oddly mid-atlantic character of the album. On the one hand, there are songs about gangsters that seem a perfect reprise of his earlier Krays obsession, while another extolls an English heritage without Cromwell or the Royal family. Conversely, the opening song is about his ambivalent attitudes to America while Los Angeles is as likely to be the setting for the other songs as Manchester.
Fritz Lang's Dr Mabuse represents a traditional trope within fiction; that of the criminal, like Sax Rohmer's Fu Manchu, or Doyle's Moriarty, that comes to threaten the stability of the body politic. However, the ambiguity is that whereas Rohmer creates a convenient cultural other, Mabuse is much more of a floating signifier; for example, he also represents a form of metaphysical corruption, more in the vein of Stevenson's Hyde or DuMaurier's Svengali. Accordingly, both of the Mabuse films do not sit within traditional genres; they are as grimly realistic as The Maltese Falcon but with the same themes of the supernatural and the insane as Das Kabinett des Doktor Caligari.
Although Mabuse lacks the Brechtian theme seen in M where criminality emerges as an intrinsic part of civil society, the film is in many ways amenable to a Marxist interpretation since Mabuse's victims are all the decadent rich. Mabuse's games become a means of alleviating the anomie inherent in capitalism, as much as Countess Told's trips to the gambling dens. Equally, it's amenable to Rosa Luxemburg's description of capitalism in The Accumulation of Capital as "greed for surplus value, enhanced by competition, and the automatic effects of capitalist exploitation," where social instability is an inherent aspect of capitalism. Another aspect of the films is technology (as with Heidegger's Question Concerning Technology), where the villain in each case is a scientist (not to mention the nightmare sequence towards the end of Dr Mabuse: Der Spieler). However, the film can equally be interpreted in other ways, other than it's depiction of Mabuse's kampf (i.e. a critique of Nazi demagoguery); in particular, the undermining of law and authority by criminal conspiracy represented a key theme in Nazi propaganda, where Wenk and Lohman are able to resist this through force of will, e.g. where Hitler saw mob rule as part of the Marxist "endeavour to eliminate the dominant significance of personality in every sphere of human life and replace it by the numerical power of the masses." Lang's films use conventional genre structures to put forward more subversive ideas about crime, capital and society.
JG Ballard's Millennium People presents a similar prospect to many Ballard novels where rebellion ("an entire professional caste was rejecting everything it had worked so hard to secure.") is both a rejection of society and a product of it, as much as sexual tourism ("thrill seekers with a taste for random violence.. a deep need for meaningless action, the more violent the better"), something analogous to a hitherto repressed Freudian drive. The difference from previous Ballard novels lies in the notion of a middle-class revolution and its obvious absurdity, so that the revolution becomes a purely social matter ("amateur and childish but then the middle classes are amateur and childish" - normally Ballard concerns himself with the liminal space between pornography and technology) with docility being so inherent that any repression ceases to be evident; "we're trying to rescue them from heaven.. I want to be brainwashed." Not only this, but the novel suggests that any such rebellion is effectively assimilated, as with Kay Churchill becoming a TV presenter (not dissimilar to the one killed by Gould); "far from being on the fringe, these groups were now part of the country's civic traditions."Labels: England, Film, Literature, Music
posted by Richard 6:43 AM
Tuesday, April 13, 2004
I've been to Moseley Old Hall recently, a rather strange building in Staffordshire. From the outside it appears essentially Victorian, save for the twisted chimneys, knot garden, hornbeam and honeysuckle arbour and an orchard filled with cherry and quince. On the inside, it is lined with dark wooden panelling over wattle and daub construction. Similar peculiarities were in evidence at Hardwick Hall, not least the row of ash trees outside with their strange swellings amidst the branches. This building has been largely left as it was in Elizabethan times, with the occasional room that is incongruously filled with eighteenth century furniture. It is always pleasant to have a prejudice confirmed, so I was quite pleased to note that the elaborate design of the original furniture seemed much more spectacular than that of the later pieces (unfortunately most of the other original items such as wall paintings and tapestries are now all badly faded; in many respects the interior is an exercise in the poetics of decay as much as the largely glass exterior seems bold and ahead of its time). One particular item of note was the long gallery, which included an unusual painting of Elizabeth the First, her dress showing a depiction of the sea monsters Hilliard had imagined whales to resemble.
I went to Birmingham at Easter to listen to a performance of Bach's St Matthew's Passion at the Symphony Hall. While I like much of Bach's works, this did rather tend towards being the kind of religious work it is difficult for an atheist to appreciate, like much of the works of Thomas Tallis or George Herbert. Looking around earlier, I discovered that the city has an interesting Church designed by Chatwin with a wooden roof and a stained glass window by Morris and Burne Jones. I'd forgotten how much impressive architecture Birmingham has, such as the town hall and cathedral in addition to the rather oppressive disused factory buildings and warehouses. More recently, many of the grimy concrete buildings for which the city is infamous have been demolished and a new centre built. This includes a strange new shopping area, consisting of a sinuous organic shape whose surface pullulates with silver hem
