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.
Saturday, January 17, 2009
Unlike Bernd Eichinger's earlier Downfall, which depicted events around one central figure over a relatively short period of time and an extremely confined space, The Baader-Meinhof Complex takes place over the course of the 'red decade' from the 1967 killing of Benno Ohnesorg by the West Berlin police (recently re-evaluated as inflammatory act by the Stasi) to the RAF's plane hijacking and kidnapping spree that later became known as the 'German autumn' of 1977. The events proceed across the entirety of West Germany, with excursions to Jordan and Iraq, and include a large cast of the gang's central figures. Like Downfall, The Baader-Meinhof Complex works by presenting events as reportage, intercutting the narrative with scenes with contemporary television footage (rather oddly showing the crushing of the Prague spring alongside student riots in Paris). One of its particular strengths is its observation that this particular revolution was remorselessly televised, with the protagonists repeatedly captured on film throughout and spending much of their time watching the reporting of their actions on television.
Inevitably, this opens the question of whether the film glamourises the terrorists, making them heroes in an action movie filled with glamorous locations. If one compares the film posters to the wanted posters that could be found on nearly every street in West Germany, then it is difficult not to notice that the modern actors are rather better looking compared to many of the bespectacled faces on the original. Nonetheless, if the characters are shown driving fast (stolen) cars, wearing leather jackets and raybans, much of this is simply because the characterisation of the originals as rebels without a cause is not entirely unreasonable; Baader did model himself in figures like Marlon Brando. Baader always wanted to be a leader, but as a young man he had little success inspiring others to follow him. When he was a teenager, he was sent to a new boarding school near Munich. In a attempt to draw interest Baader began periodically coughing into a handkerchief, while dropping hints that he had some incurable lung ailment. The other students noticed that his handkerchief never showed blood. Most students saw his sad attempts to generate interest exactly for what they were, and they ignored him. Later Baader would adopt a swaggering style. In new situations he often talked aggressively, trying to establish early that he was the toughest in the room. His act never really worked with some of the crowds he mixed with, like the Rockers — who saw through Baader immediately. But within the burgeoning student movement he found that his tough-man routine was accepted unquestioningly. Baader’s life as a terrorist was as much the story of a dedicated violent poseur as the story of a Marxist Revolutionary.
The film is thus rather acute when it comes to depicting the gang as intellectually vacuous, their actions borne out of sociopathic delinquency rather than conviction. Confronted by an Italian third making of with their stolen car, Baader is outraged, just after he has incited Mahler to steal a woman's wallet. Ensslin's hysterical rants about the immorality of standing by in inaction is counterpointed by the wailing of her ignored children. The policy to only attack representatives of the state and not workers does not last long, from the security guard in the department store they burn down, a librarian they shoot or the typesetters at Springer publishing.
Conversely, the film is not as good at pinpointing the group's ideological underpinnings. If Baader was simply a thug, Ensslin and, to a lesser extent Meinhof, were ideologues. One would not be aware from the film that the gang were used as an instrument by the Stasi, from whom they received funding. German universities were awash in what would now seem to be radical Marxist thought, filtered through Fanon, and parsed by Marcuse, Horkheimer, and the other titans of the Frankfurt school. Students learned that German society, like all western society, was in the throws of late Capitalism, eventually to be replaced by true Democratic Socialism. While it does acknowledge the RAF's connections with Palestinian terror organizations in both Jordan and Iraq, it does not have Ulrike Meinhof's character recite the diatribe she wrote justifying what she called the Munich "aktion" - the 1972 murder of Israel's Olympic wrestling team. It also does not feature the earlier new-left bombing of a Jewish Community Centre in West Berlin on November 9th 1969, the anniversary of Kristallnacht. This left-wing anti-semitism culminated in the Entebbe hijacking in 1976, in which two German members of the Revolutionary Cells — another terrorist group to emerge out of the West German student movement — and two members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine hijacked an Air France jet, flew it to Entebbe and separated the Jewish passengers and the non-Jewish passengers before Israeli commandos stormed the aircraft. The cells had also planned to assassinate Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal. This from a student movement that began as a rebellion against the 'Auschwitz generation.' Horst Mahler, the actual founder of the gang is now a neo-Nazi.
In some respects, the converse also applies. The film is strong when it comes to depicting police brutality during the visit of the Iranian Shah to West Berlin or the police state tactics used by the authorities to locate the gang. Less is made of the continued presence of Nazi party members in the administration at the time. The Wanted poster itself had originally acted to glamourise the gang, showing that half of the gang as female. German society was still characterised by the tripartite ideal of Kinder, Kuche, Kirche (Children, Kitchen, Church), where it was still technically illegal to co-habit with a man who was not your husband, where all abortion was outlawed, and where men were legally recognized as the head of the household. To men and women alike, the posters made the gang appear both liberating and chic. Even the police seemed to be tacitly accepting the Baader-Meinhof Gang’s premise of gender equality by equally spacing the women and men throughout the poster; few would have noticed had the poster lined all the of the men along the top rows and the women along the bottom, indicating men’s traditional dominant role and women’s traditional auxiliary role. If anything, police chief Horst Herold is used as a means of authorial commentary, (inbetween plying his colleagues with lobster soup), regularly stating that the group are protesting against political problems which objectively exist and which must be addressed in order to resolve the conflict - in practice, it took the fall of the Berlin wall to dissipate the violence. The result may simply be that film is not as well equipped to deal with subjects of this kind as the novel is.
Not entirely unrelated themes emerged in the rather more traditional setting of the Old Vic, with a performance of Joe Sutton's Complicit. The interior of the building had been extensively remodelled to replace the conventional stage with a circular dais at the centre of the theatre. The result is rather like the Globe, allowing for a rather more intimate performance where the actors are not quarantined from the audience. With only a few props and three actors (David Suchet's performance being particularly good), the play is a rather intense piece although a little unsatisfying: it feels like a vehicle to explore political ideas around torture rather than a character piece.
The Tate's Rodchenko and Popova exhibition leaves me feeling a little depressed; ane arlier exhibition last year had captured Rodchenko's decline into a propagandist on a par with Leni Reifenstahl. This exhibition covers an earlier period and demonstrates how great the fall was. The early work of both artists is easily comparable to that of artists in Western Europe. The texture on many of Popova's works recalls Kandinsky, while her use of wood as a canvas and wood dust to add texture to the paint anticipates Duchamp's readymades. Rodchenko's focus on the geometrical recalls Mondrian, Braque and Malevich, while a painting of two layers of black anticipates Rothko's version of abstract expressionism. Nonetheless, their social context created difficulties their Western counterparts lacked. Like the Futurists, the Russian constructivists embraced the machine age, dwelling on the dynamic and geometric. The discarding of representational models seemed to chime with the Bolshevik policy to discard the traditional elements of society. In practice though, the attempt to reconcile avant garde art with politics was an uncomfortable one. Assigning a utilitarian purpose to artforms lacking representational content proved difficult at best, with attempts to replace subjective artistic creation with objective construction of forms doing little other than to obfuscate the problem with terminology. A point of crisis comes as Rodchenko paints three solid blocks of red, yellow and blue and declares it the end for painting. Hereafter, art must be aligned to industry, and a turn to architecture, textiles, set design and advertising (under Lenin's new economic policy) follows. This isn't entirely unusual in art; the Arts & Crafts movement was closely related to the Pre-Raphaelites. Figures like Lautrec, Millais and Mucha produced adverts. The difference between high and low art is certainly an arbitrary one, as examples like Chinese ceramics show. Nonetheless, it's difficult not to be relieved that Millais didn't base a career on his Pears soap work and it's equally hard not to be dismayed at seeing Rodchenko and Popova throw themselves into often rather bad posters for Red October biscuits and rubber boots. This seem particularly so when one considers that their design work was not greatly more purposeful than their artwork; Popova might have thought seeing a peasant woman wearing one of her designs the highpoint of her career but in practice the peasant's need for clothes was not overly dependent on Popova's designs. While the suppression of constructivism in favour of socialist realism was certainly done by Stalin's fiat, it also seems surprising that it was not done earlier; as an artistic project it was simply rendered superfluous by the the same October Revolution it had embraced. Before leaving I revisit the Soviet School room - a collection of Soviet propaganda posters. None are overly constructivist in style but they do represent a better view of what popular style in the Soviet Union was than the work of Rodchenko and Popova.
Zola's Germinal and The Belly of Paris both betray a visceral hatred of the Second French Empire, to the point of siding with the assorted communists who wished to see it annihilated. By contrast, the novel that depicts that annihilation, The Debacle takes a surprisingly moderate. The novel is balanced between the views of two characters, Jean and Maurice. The latter is depicted as intelligent and unstable, accordingly sides with the commune. The former is portrayed as stolid but dependable, and accordingly sides with the government. The relationship between the two is oddly homoerotic, with them kissing; "no woman's arm had held him as close and warm as this." Dead soliders are frequently depicted locking in dying embraces of hatred or love. When Jean kills his friend the act is described as being akin to the removal of an infected organ. At the same time, the novel dwells on the possibility of the creation of a 'new France' by Jean, even after he has said that "it was destruction for destruction's sake so as to bury the ancient, rotten, society beneath the ashes of the earth in the hope that a new society might spring up." The novel endless debates these points, beginning and ending with the observation that "Is not life a state of war every second? Is not the very condition of nature a continuous struggle?... war if life and it cannot exist without death." The evolution analogy is explicit with the soldiers compared to wild beasts or to black ants on the march. While here, as in Germinal, Zola advances the idea of a new dawn (typified in Jean and Maurice's love; " in the midst of the savage egotism around him... this total self abnegation"), the novel stresses the "self centered rage of the individual" and a relapse into savagery. Unlike in Stendhal, there is no sense of glory in the fighting and no sense of a guiding hand, with Napoleon being depicted as weak and powerless.
I often have reservations about reading much postwar American literature, much of which seems imbued with a sense of machismo and a fear of emasculation by women. Where nineteenth century American literature foregrounded pioneer mythologies of the lone hero, its later counterparts centre on the irrelevance of such figures cast into the enfolding social structures of a commercial, bourgeois, society. Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates is perhaps less bad than examples like Hemingway and Bellow, but it still seems present. The plot rather reminds me of Orwell's Keep the Aspidistra Flying: but whereas Orwell is sceptical of romantics seeking to shun mundane existences of work and family, Yates leaves little doubt that he subscribes to them. As such, when Frank seems to avoid a bohemian life in Paris in favour of public relations, his animosity to April's sponsorship of these ideas manifests itself as misogyny, citing Freud's ideas of penis-envy or characterising abortion as a 'denial of womanhood,' later admitting that his masculinity had felt threatened. Shep Campbell imagines April after years of being the breadwinner as having become like a man. Frank denounces a woman who criticises his affairs with a secretary as a 'latent lesbian.' When it comes to the final tragedy, the voice of the chorus represented by John Givings denounces Frank as a coward but rather than praising April he also denounces her as a tough shrew who gave Frank a hard time. Frank is allowed to step outside prescribed social structures, April is not, meaning that she must be punished.
The authorship of A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the most notorious Pyrates is often disputed, with the text attributed to Defoe rather than the eponymous Charles Johnson. Like Defoe, the text presents moral fables that undermine that basic premise with an emphasis on the contingent nature of vice ("in the beginning he was very averse to this sort of life.. yet afterwards he changed his principles"). AS in Defoe 'sudden changes of conduct' are far from uncommon. In many cases, crews of attacked vessels are forced into service on the pirate ships, making difficult to determine whether their service was voluntary or not. The author notes at one point that the only difference between a sailor on a pirate ship and a government man of war is circumstance; &quo; who might have passed in the world for a hero had he been employed in a good cause". As in Defoe, poverty is often cited as a key motivation for vice. However, in a vein that is less characteristic of Defoe, the author often cites little cause for a life of piracy other than piracy: "it is surprising that men of a good understanding should engage ina course of life that so debases human nature and sets them on a level with the wild beasts of the forest." If Defoe is often Lockean, this is rather more Hobbesian; "nature seems to have designed him for a pirate from childhood". In some of the tales, the pirates simply end up dispersing back into society, in others they revert to their old ways even when offered repentance.
It's been a while since I looked round the permanent collections at the V&A and there were more things that I recognised than on my previous visit: the statue of Perseus from Munich in the Cast Court or the three silver lions from Rosenborg Castle in the silver galleries, for example. But there were many other exhibits I didn't recall; three ivory dragons fighting over a crystal globe in the Chinese section, an articulated metal snake in the same area, Celadon pottery from Korea, Chinese funerary art such as ancestor painting or ceramic horses and camels. In the Islamic section there's the large Iznik tile frieze, the Ardabil Carpet, Rock crystal ewers and marble window screens. In the European section, I'm quite struck by Leighton's frescos and a ceiling in the vein of the Great Exhbition that is only visible through a small window, as it has only since been blocked up with the construction of a smaller roof beneath to block out the light. The section on the Great Exhibition itself is quite striking, noting that similar buildings were planned for New York and Munich. The contents of the exhibition included a German style tankard with a byzantine mosaic and gothic planters by Pugin. The Victorian section also includes furniture from Webb, Voysey, Burges (especially ornate cabinets and glassware) and Wyburd through to Mackintosh and art nouveau. The origins of the Gothic revival are traced in Beckford's Holbein furniture and in the Walpole collection. An entire fake Monk's cell is included from a house designed in imitation of Strawberry Hill. Imperial influences also abound - Japanese influences on Godwin's furniture or porcelain clocks, Islamic influences on Owen Jones and Morgan's ceramics. The section of stained glass proceeds directly from the medieval period to Rossetti, Burne Jones and Piper. The sculpture section contrasts Canova with Thorvaldsen, the paintings section comprising Blake, Martin, Roberts, Rossetti, Alma Tadema and Turner. Last but not least is a small picture of a church reflected in a pond taken by the Victorian photographer Benjamin Brecknell Turner.
Food cooked: Sicilian spaghetti, Peking duck, Balti pasanda, Chicken and papaya soup, Salmagundi, Turkish chicken with walnuts, Calderette of rice with allioli, Flamenco eggs, Steak with anchovy sauce, Duck liver pilaf, Scallop and potato soup, Steak with anchovy sauce, Chocolate cake, Morroccan chicken with pears and honey, Lychee curry, Paprika Hendl, Spaghetti Carbonara, Prok Stroganoff, Portuguese Jugged Duck and Orange, Chicken with Tamarind and Turmeric, Vietnamese seafood with lime and coconut, Apple and Coconut cake, Poacher's pie, Georgian chicken, Louisiana paella, Crab bisque, Greek prawns with feta and peppers, Pecan pie, Fish with Harissa and Tahini, Bobotie, Spanish pork and chocolate stew, Sri Lankan cashew and chicken curry, Kidneys with Mustard, Mediterranean Baked Fish, Polish pork with juniper, Carbonnade Flamande.Labels: Cooking, Drama, Film, Germany, Literature
posted by Richard 4:07 AM
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 15, 2008
Orientalism is an exhibition at the Tate dedicated to European painting of the Middle East, one of the latest in a quite long series of exhibitions at various London institutions dealing with the Middle East. The first room announces that the theme is rather predictably inspired by Edward Said, although it admits that Said has become a controversial figure. This seems a pity, as much of the exhibition does go a long way to undermining Said's case. It shows paintings by people who had effectively gone native, were motivated by mysticism or who were opposed to imperialism or who were simply motivated by a love of the exotic. Although Said's case that the West depicted the Orient as a decadent, barbaric other (as in Byron's poetry) is validated to some extent (as with the many pictures of the harem or slave market, although it's interesting to note that a French painting is the only one to explicitly sexualise the slaves, to the apparent disapproval of a British Empire that was banning such practices), he fails to perceive that as nineteenth century civilisation grew increasingly grey and industrialised, its writers and artists increasingly sought refuge in their own medieval past or in other places unpolluted by modernity. Ruskin sought this in Venice, the likes of Wilkie and Holman Hunt in the Orient. With the ruins of Rome already excavated and familiar, novelty dictated that the ruins of Egypt and Jordan were the next to be discovered. Equally, if the West was decadent, much of the appeal was that Westerners wanted to lose their inhibitions. Figures like Lewis and Leighton often came to show Western figures in Oriental settings.
The exhibition begins with portraiture; the daughter of English merchants who had grown up in Turkey shown in Western dress, the painter John Frederick Lewis depicting himself as a carpet seller in the bazaar, figures like Holman Hunt and Wortley Montagu in Eastern clothing. The depiction of Islam by Lewis is especially sympathetic, with his paintings showing himself at prayer in the Mosque. I'm interested in Wilkie's portrait of the Ottoman Sultan, shown in mostly Westernised dress. It seems to be forgotten that cultural interchange worked both ways, with foreigners dressing as Arabs and vice versa; again, Said's account assumes that orientalism can only be an imperialist ploy rather than a form of cultural exchange; the most clearly imperial portrait here, of Napoleon in Egypt, is notable for the stark contrast between the Eastern setting and the Western attire of the dictator. Something similar is at work in the painting of European explorers, dressed in Roman togas, rediscovering the ruins of Petra with their Arab guides. The nearest there is to a validation of Said's theories is an Augustus John painting of TE Lawrence in Bedouin clothes, although Lawrence was a poor sort of imperialist at best.
The later paintings move onto the subject of religion. During the course of the nineteenth century, wealthy westerners financed the establishment of Jewish homes and collective farms in Jerusalem, which accordingly grew more and more Judaicised. Figures like Holman Hunt grew increasingly interested in Judaism, leading to support for the establishment of a Jewish homeland. His painting of The Scapegoat combines both Christian and Jewish themes, although much of his painting of Jersualem and its churches is more straightforwardly christian. It has to be said that the most interesting paintings (and some of the most numerous) in the exhibition are of architecture and landscapes though. For instance, Lord Leighton's paintings of Algiers and Damascus, Frederick Lewis depicting the bazaars of Cairo, Edward Lear's view of Constantinople from a cypress filled cemetery or the pyramids from a tree lined avenue, Holman Hunt showing the pyramids reflected in the Nile (he didn't care for them much and managed to make them look like Silbury Hill) David Robert's depiction of the ruins of Petra, Baalbec, Philae and Karnak. Judging from this, it's very clear that both Lear and Roberts are very much underrated as artists.
As an exhibition, there's more cultural and historical interest than artistic here. None of the paintings are poor but few are masterpieces. To take a few that stood out, there's Stanley Spencer's paintings of mosques in Sarajevo, Bomberg's modernist painting of Jerusalem, Dadd's strange concatenation of Bedouin tribes and Roman soldiers into a strangely symmetrical painting an allegory whose meaning is forever lost. Before, I leave I take the opportunity to have a look at The Sleep of Arthur in Avalon. It fills an entire wall of the gallery and is easily the finest masterpiece that I saw that day. It's a pity I'll probably never see it again.
Like Said's Magnum Opus, John Berger's Ways of Seeing is an interesting text, if not one I can bring myself to entirely agree with. The second section discusses the history of the nude, with its tendency to depict women as passive objects of the male gaze. It's difficult not to sympathise with much of this argument (especially that non-Western traditions have not focussed exclusively on the passive image of a woman), but it still seems rather limited. The nude in the likes of Cranach or Titian heralds the vanquishing of the medieval prohibition of sexuality, a reawakening of the sensual and physical (it's interesting to note that there's absolutely no discussion of the role of religion in Western art in Berger). A figure like the Rokeby Venus, as Camille Paglia might argue, surely has its own power and is difficult to solely characterise as passive. More generally, Berger's argument seems to have been undone by the passage of time and the increased sexualisation of the male body; Germaine Greer is surely right to argue that women, as much as heterosexual men, have a right to this form of visual pleasure.
The third section is probably the one I most agree with. Berger argues that the physicality of oil painting was ideal both for the depiction of material objects, whether still lives or other forms of property (e.g. land in Constable or animals in Stubbs) and for the establishment of the oil painting as a form of property in its own right. Berger counterposes this to the ethereal figures in Blake's engravings. Berger does deal with an aspect of the Western tradition I have little liking of here, but it seems a little strained all the same; I can't say I would swap the physicality of a Vermeer with its pleasure in the physical world for a medieval triptych especially gladly. Equally, given the prominence of the romantic depiction of nature from Rosa and Ruisdael to Holman Hunt and David Friedrich, the argument that nature is not present except as property seems frankly ludicrous.
The final section deals with the transition from oil painting to colour photography in advertising, from the wealth and status of the elite to the promotion of wealth and status to the lower echelons. The argument is a familiar one, revolving around the role of advertising in manufacturing false wants by associating certain products with sexuality or status. I tend to suspect that this argument requires one to accept the Marxist idea of false consciousness (as Popper pointed out a mechanism that simply dismisses any obstacle to Marx's account of social history as being an aberration); Berger certainly speaks of advertising as a form of force rather than a form of consent.
By contrast, Susan Sontag's On Photography is considerably more appealing to me. Noting that a photograph is essentially an accidental and serendipitous combination of how light interacts with chemicals, Sontag sees it as a way of seizing aspects of the world than a composed artform. Sontag accordingly disdains the rigid compositions of Weston in favour of Atget's more disorderly 'captures.' Where Berger's approach is Marxist, Sontag sees photography's overthrow of the distinction between high and low art as being essentially akin to surrealism. The only problem is one of period. Digital photography is rather less accidental than the film cameras Sontag was writing about. Techniques like high dynamic range photography or photoshop manipulation mean that photography becomes rather more akin to painting, which Sontag had seen as imitating photography. Of course, there's also a movement towards using older cameras, even pinhole ones, although the element of 'historical slumming' to this often seems a counterpart to more modern ways of aestheticising photographs, even to the extent of photoshopping marks and flaws onto the image.
Donald Richie's Japan Journals rather reminded me of Forster's accounts of Italy, Ozpotek's Turkey or the North Africa of Bowles, Burroughs and Orton. It's an odd sub-genre whereby the Western gay male looks for sexual liberation in a culture that lacks Western moral inhibitions or the mechanised and staid nature of Western society. In a lot of cases, the culture in question was a patriarchal one where homosexuality could be hidden within broader homosocial social structures. It's also a partly obsolescent sub-genre given that moral inhibitions are now more likely to be considerably stronger in Tangiers than in London. Perhaps, this is as well given the connotations of imperialism and economic exploitation in it alongside the escape from Western mores. "You seem to have deserted Japan in favour of the Third World," a friend tells him as his attentions turn from the Japanese to immigrant workers. "It was not I that deserted Japan," he writes, "but Japan that deserted the Third World . . . It was the Third World in Japan that so appealed to lubricious me, and now that Japan is more First World than even the USA, the appeal is no longer there. That makes me that figure of fun, the garden-variety colonial imperialistic predator." As Japan westernises, Richie begins peevish complaints against the ignorance of sexual indifference of Japanese youth, with friends departing for less affluent Thailand.
In this context, Japan is an odd example, having gone from being a traditional patriarchal society to a modern Westernised society where Richie documents the rise of women's rights. While Japan lacked the traditional opprobrium directed against homosexuality in the West, it nonetheless remains more conservative than a modern Western society. Richie is suspicious of the elevation of sexual preference to a component of social identity but there is something rather tragic in an existence of cruising and losing his lovers to marriage (Mishima's widow and children living in permanent denial as to his homosexuality). On the one hand, Richie documents the role of the transvestite performer in Japanese theatre, festivals undertaken by mostly nude men, fishermen who worked nude, carpenter's dancing women's dances and on the other he documents Yukio Mishima's hyper-masculinised identity and his identification with western classicism and the figure of Saint Sebastian in preference to Japanese models. Richie notes that "a dandy, far from being the individual eccentric he is often though to be, is really a strict conformist.. the dandy is no rebel, and no true reformer or renegade was ever a dandy. Maybe that is why society is no tolerant of dandies." However, Richie elsewhere notes that the bricolage Mishima constructed his identity from is that of the Western rebel, as with Brando. The version of homosexuality preferred in Japan is an unthreatening one that hardly seemed to fit Mishima's identity, leading to him becoming more conformist and conservative than Japanese society itself (Richie notes that Mishima's suicide says nothing about contemporary Japan). Mishima is reminiscent of nothing so much as a Tom of Finland cartoon. Richie's position in Japan is that of gaijin but notes that Japanese society would otherwise be far more oppressive than that of the society he had fled. Richie repeatedly decries the conformity of Japanese society, its absence of intellectuals or individuals. Nonetheless, his attitudes to sexuality belong to the age of Proust and Forster who only seemed capable of finding stronger heterosexual men arousing.
Reading Soseki's I am a Cat it occurs to me that Soseki is veering between two extremes. On the one hand, his feline protagonist serves to dismiss all humans as vicious and depraved. On the other, his principal human character serves to dismiss westernising tendencies in Japan. The two are linked by being increasingly marginalised voices (the cat describes his master as being superior to his fellows by being weka minded, just as he is described as a runt in comparison to all the other cats he knows) but they only intersect at certain points. For example, Sneaze is told that "the ways of our ancestors are much wiser and more effective than the ways of Europe.. the craving for satisfaction remains unrealised, the quest for the ideal eternally unrealised." This advice comes from a character dismissed as nearly insane and dangerous and Sneaze is ridiculed for his adoption of this viewpoint. Sneaze eventually seems to agree with his cat by dismissing all of his friends as lunatic, irrespective of their philosophical views. Nonetheless, this does not stop Soseki ending the novel with the theme of suicide as a harbinger of increased westernisation; "this overweening consciousness of self never lets up.. word such as serenity and self composure have become no more than so many meaningless strokes of a writing brush."
Viridiana surprised me as a film. Having seen An Andalusian Dog, The Golden Age and The Exterminating Angel before I was expecting something more self consciously surreal. Although the symmetry of its structure and some of its allegorical references are clear enough, it's still essentially cast in a realist vein. I found myself frequenting comparing it The Exterminating Angel where the bourgeoisie are trapped at their dinner party as an act of metaphysical revenge in the class war. Here, the film ends with Viridiana playing cards with the wealthy land owner, her project to house the poor having miserably failed. The dinner party here as the paupers invade the house is almost a parody of its counterpart in The Exterminating Angel.
I've often thought that authors like Sterne, Voltaire and Diderot are the nearest approximation to the modern playfulness of authors like Perec, Nabokov and Calvino. Reading Diderot's Rameau's Nephew reminded me rather of Mandeville's Fable of the Bees or The Beggar's Opera; in satirising modern vices they also implicitly undermine modern ideas of virtue. Diderot's habit is persistently to make a statement and then undermine, as with his disingenuous endorsement of Rameau; "the famous musician who has delivered us from the plainsong of Lully, who has written so many unintelligible visions.. not a word of which he or anyone else has understood." The narrator frequently denounces his interlocutor, but only to receive the response that he is the rule not the exception; "there's nothing degrading in doing the same as everyone else. I didn't invent them and I should be incompetent if I didn't conform... a thief happy to be among wealthy thieves." Instead the emphasis shifts from personal to public vice; "what a bloody awful economy, some men with bursting stomachs others clamour with hunger."Labels: Art, Film, Japan, Literature, London
posted by Richard 12:56 PM
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
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
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
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
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 hemispheres; an impressively futuristic building but one which looks incongruous at best in a rather traditional setting. During this time, I often found myself thinking of the idea of the manufacturing of tradition; though the idea of continuity of tradition embodied in the above stately homes is probably a myth, it is nonetheless a powerful one and the lack of any historical sense of time or place in Birmingham is disquieting at best.
Later, I visited the De Morgan Centre; a single room in Putney library that blazes with colour as one walks in. It includes a good selection of William De Morgan's work including a number of tiles featuring Islamic designs and a distinctive dark blue moonlight suite. Much of the centre is taken up with Evelyn De Morgan's work, equally characterised by vivid (possibly too vivid) colours. She has been described as a symbolist rather than a pre-raphaelite (her work is much later than that of the original Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood). Unfortunately, much of the symbolism is rather crude and seems regrettably influenced by spiritualism (I suppose it could have been worse; spiritualism left E F Benson with a morbid interest in demonic slugs). Her better work tends is devoted to classical themes, such as a portrait of Phosphorus and Hesperus; more the sort of subject matter one would expect from Simeon Solomon.
The same afternoon was devoted to the Wallace Collection. This house is decorated in typically Rococco style; red crimson and gilded walls, Sevres porcelain and Boulle marquetry furniture. I tend to have ambivalent attitudes to Rococco, since it very much seems a style designed to demonstrate wealth rather than taste. It has a certain kitsch quality to it. Beyond this, the ground floor is filled with a strange diversity of exhibits; Iznik ceramics, Venetian glass and German pewter, for example. It also has an extensive armoury of which the centrepiece is clearly the Islamic section. The Mughal and Persian shamshirs are much more ornate than any European weaponry, save perhaps those of Venice. The upper floor is more dedicated to painting, including the entirely expected horrors from the likes of Fragonard. However, it also has an excellent selection of Canaletto paintings and a good mixture of Dutch genre and maritime painting. Amongst the less well known artists, Horace Vernet's paintings of Napoleon and the Middle East stand out. The highlight is the Great Gallery, with Velasquez's The Lady with a Fan, Rembrandt's Titus and, above all, Hals' The Laughing Cavalier. This really does stand out; the facial expression is immediately individual unlike the posed expressions of most portrait painting while the elaborate symbolism of the motifs of the clothing recalls Hilliard as much as naturalistic painting.
Elsewhere in London, I spent a pleasant day in Greenwich. This seems a place quite apart from the rest of London; a leafy setting filled with Hanoverian period architecture that looks directly opposite to the Manhattanite setting of Docklands and Canary Wharf. I recall HG Wells once predicted a future where height restrictions would be abolished and it is interesting watching that come to pass. Initially, I had a look at Wren's Royal Naval College. The banqueting hall is perhaps less impressive than it should be; the use of painting as a substitute for plasterwork (a'la trompe l'oeil) is rather transparent while the choice of colours is rather subdued (mostly browns). More promising is the opposite chapel where the later interior neo-classical design recalls Wedgewood (presumably Wren's original design might have looked more like the gold and white rococco design of St James's Church, rather similar to the gusto italiano interior to the nearby Royal Academy). Following this, I went on to the Queen's house. Designed by Inigo Jones, this is an odd Jacobean version of classical architecture. Much of the painting is more of historical than aesthetic interest. That said, it does have a Canaletto painting of the Naval college, some works by Hogarth and some maritime paintings by Dutch artists such as Backhuysen and the Van De Veldes. I went on then to the Royal Observatory, with its display of camera obscura, telescopes that more closely resembled cannons and John Harrison's timepieces (I'd been reading Eco's The Island of the Day Before illustrated many of the themes in evidence here). Finally the Maritime Museum was of least interest, save perhaps for Prince Frederick's barge and its gold Chinoiserie decorations. Instead of returning by rail, I took the boat back, passing under Tower bridge and past most of London's main landmarks. Given London's maritime history I must say that this does seem the most natural way to travel, though perhaps without the tedious commentary on luxury flat property prices I had to endure. I note that the new Norman Foster skyscraper is visible from most points of this tour; perhaps it needs to have a restaurant built on the upper floors so that we can follow the approach Maupassant took to dealing with the Eiffel tower.
A later visit saw a climb to the summit of Wren's monument to the great fire; a tower that must have originally dominated the skyline in the same way as Nelson's Column. Now it is hemmed with other buildings and once one has climbed to the top it becomes apparent that the same applies to other buildings such as the Bank of England, the Royal Exchange, St Paul's and the Tower of London, all of which have been bested by taller modern buildings such as Canary Wharf; only Tower Bridge stands out as much as it would have done originally.
Conversely, where London is a cacophony of architectural styles Oxford manages to assimilate each new development, even the ziggurat of the Said Business School. While in Oxford, I went to the Ashmolean museum. I've often thought the Ashmolean has to be counted as one of the most impressive museums outside of London, if only due to the size of its collection of oriental exhibits., which has a large range of objects like painted silk screens, red lacquerware (as well as one lacquer casket formerly owned by Beckford), arita porcelain and a large wooden bodhisattva statue. Similarly, there is also an impressive Islamic section, featuring the customary display of Iznik ceramics and wooden arabesque patterns. The more customary historical sections, such as those of Rome and Egypt are more modest, including a well preserved statue of Athena, colourful mummy cases and an entire Nubian shrine. More impressive though, were the examples of Romano-Egyptian funeral art, the paintings made on coffin lids; the quality of painting is such that wasn't seen again for hundreds of years. One of the diverting section was that devoted to the Tradescant collection, an original bequest to the museum that reflects the cabinet of curiosities approach to such things. I must admit to finding this ad hoc collection of Malay kris, Danish wooden tankards and Tomahawks rather more engaging from an aesthetic standpoint than the usual collection of like for like. The galleries similarly reflect a high standard; especially the selection of Dutch paintings including one Hals painting. Beyond that, the modern section has some good Pisarro paintings in a pointillist style (Les Jardin Des Tuileries) and a new gallery includes an excellent selection of Sickert paintings, an intriguingly impressionist Picasso painting (Blue Roofs) and a vivid Kandinsky painting. The pre-raphaelite section was dominated by Holman Hunt ranging from religious allegory (a painting of a priest being sheltered from the druids) to painting of London bridge and continuations of his middle-eastern paintings. As in the earlier pre-raphaelite exhibition, some of Seddon's similar paintings were included, especially a panoramic painting of Jerusalem. In terms of the other pre-raphaelites excellent paintings by Alma-Tadema, Burne Jones (as well as an arts and crafts wardrobe decorated by him) and Millais (The Return of the Dove to the Ark) are included.
Following the interest in De Morgan, I went to Kelmscott Manor, the former home of William Morris. This is an Elizabethan house built next to river, where willows dip their branches into the water and rooks caw in the horse chestnuts. It still looks exactly like its engraving in News From Nowhere The gardens are a riot of colour, even at this time of year, with bluebells, irises, primroses and tulips in a variety of colours (scarlet, black, lilac, white and some striped red and white). The centrepiece is an ancient mulberry tree at the centre of the garden. The interior retains much of its original character, including Flemish tapestries and a considerable amount of seventeeth century furniture (considerably more ornate then the over idealised rustic simplicity of Philip Webb's chairs). The arts and crafts tapestries, wallpaper and decoration all accordingly fit in well with their surroundings (a prelapsarian vision of history counterpointed to the reality), though it is perhaps a little surprising to discover the amount of Chinese and Burmese furniture and ceramics (including a star shape tile decorated with the first sura of the koran set in a wooden frame) in the house. Dutch imitations of Iznik pottery and an Icelandic casket were rather less surprising. Beyond that the house has several Durer engravings and Rossetti paintings; more particular portrait of Jane Morris with a gold frame against the dark blue wallpaper (the same colour as the blue silk dress Morris wears in the painting) was especially striking.
I've been reading Pessoa's The Book of Disquiet. A review of this seems a little otiose, given the futility of deconstructing a book that deconstructs itself, but nonetheless. Although ostensibly written with one authorial persona or heteronym, the book deconstructs that notion to a large extent, with each of the subject it treats of being rewritten throughout the text. On religion, the text veers from mourning the death of god; "Never reaching union with god... always with a longing for it." and castigating atheism "to deny the existence of this intelligence, namely god, strikes me as one of those idiocies... every sound mind believes in god," whereas elsewhere it is stated that belief in god is impossible and the very concept is castigated as dangerous. Similarly, an aesthetic view of art is propounded; "Art is a substitute for acting or living...Why is art beautiful? Because it is useless" But elsewhere, advances a view of art that sees it in didactic terms, as advancing human civilisation. In some places, dreaming is described as "superior to reality," while later it states "I lack the money to be a dreamer," recasting it as a luxury, rather than a retreat from the quotidian. The text even asserts its own plurality, "I have the most conflicting opinions, the most divergent beliefs," only to deny this later, "I reread some of the pages that will form my book of random impressions..even while saying that I'm always different, I feel that I've always said the same thing." The result is that reading The Book of Disquiet becomes a matter of finding the figure in the carpet.
Pessoa reminded me of Coetzee's The Master of Petersburg a revisionist novel fictionalising elements of Dostoevsky's life (an unusual concept to begin with; A Dead Man in Deptford being the only other example to come to mind). As much as The Life and Times of Michael K pastiches Kafka (it's difficult not to use that term in a pejorative sense, and to some extent I can thinking of Bakhtin's concept of heteroglossia) The Master of Petersburg pastiches Dostoevsky. This is in spite of the novel having a similar structure to The Life and Times of Michael K, representing a dialogic conflict between a social ingenue (Doestoevsky, with his view of anarchism as a form of nihilism at best, possession at worst) and elements of social extremism (Nechaev with his denunciation of Dostoevsky's greed in his gambling and ignorance of the economic forces that determine existence). In his own way though, Coetzee deconstructs the idea of an authorial identity every bit as much as Pessoa. Waiting For The Barbarians presents a more idiosyncratic work, wherein the narrator wavers between dissolving the dichotomy between civilisation and barbarism (by presenting the two as part of a cycle; "civilisation entailed the corruption of barbarian virtues.. I never wished it for the barbarians that they should have the history of Empire laid upon them.") and doubting this dissolution (something epitomise by his archaeology, the preservation of the filiations of memory; "Do I really look forward to the triumph of the barbarian way; intellectual torpor.. if we were to disappear would the barbarians spend their afternoons excavating the ruins? ")
I've also been reading Atwood's Oryx and Crake. Science fiction often tends towards the extremes of the utopian (in this case, an extropian or transhumanist view) or the dystopian (in this case, environmentalist or religious conservative; whose language Atwood seems peculiarly close to here), with little time for the no-man's land between that the present is invariably composed of. This book is no exception to that, following the likes of Brave New World or (perhaps more accurately) Day of the Triffids. With that in mind, it would be perfectly possible to read Oryx and Crake as a dystopian text where Crake, a Faust-figure like Nemo, Moreau or Frankenstein, pursues dangerous technologies without thought for the consequences, unintended (such as the Craker's development of symbolic thought and religion) or otherwise (the success of the engineered virus). On the other hand, most dystopian novels, including Brave New World, 1984 and We deal with the suppression of biological imperatives rather than their alteration. But comparisons with other Atwood novels suggest otherwise. Surfacing is full of similar dystopian theories concerning an American invasion of Canada for its oil reserves, and sees its protagonist retreat from civilisation into nature (feeling a guilt at being human and expressing a desire for humanity to disappear); similarly, throughout Oryx and Crake mankind is viewed as an aggressive species that consumes resources indiscriminately (essentially, as Easter Island writ large); the Crakers represent a similar retreat to nature, allowing Crake to take on the mantle of an almost heroic figure instead. To be specific, Oryx and Crake shares the same concerns over capitalism as Surfacing but its depiction of gated communities having evolved into a corporate caste system is essentially tangential to the plot, and the overall depiction is more ambiguous since the damage is largely done by environmentalist characters rather than corporate strategy.
Umberto Eco's The Island of the Day Before, on the other hand, was something of a disappointment, seeming more a vehicle than a novel. More promising was VS Naipaul's Beyond Belief, an examination of Islam considered as a colonial force in formerly non-Islamic countries. Naipaul characterises islam as a totalising ideology that isolates it adherents from both regional traditions and foreign influences, leaving those societies in an ideological vacuum with islam as the only philosophy available to them (though many of the outcomes of that seem typical of monosyllabic post-colonial societies to some extent). Although he compares the Islamic displacement of other faiths to the spread of christianity in the Roman Empire, Naipaul suggests that christianity tends more to assimilate other traditions and to allow some form of congruence. Certainly, it is possible to think of examples that might confirm this, such as the use of pagan symbolism at Christmas, but equally the history of Protestantism after the reformation hardly seems all that different from islam. Equally, Naipaul notes the Islamic assimilation of Hindu myth and suggests that islam in these societies had become less tolerant in recent times (again inviting parallels with the change from Catholicism to Protestantism). The overall impression is that a predetermined thesis has been proved, with the result that much of the picture painted is both uniform and monolithic. By way of contrast, compare Naipaul's account to that of Orhan Pamuk; "it seemed to me that their little bursts of lawless individualism were strangely at odds with the state-imposed religious laws that dictated every other aspect of life in the city."
Junichiro Tanizaki's Some Prefer Nettles represents an interesting continuation of the themes I discussed from In Praise of Shadows. Interestingly, where a European novel would have rendered these themes against a wider social panorama with a large cast, Tanizaki uses a narrow number of characters and suggests such wider concerns through metonym and symbol. The book suggests that Kaname's westernisation lies at the root of his personal problems; "the tradition of woman worship in the West is a long one, and the Occidental sees in the woman he loves the figure of a Greek Goddess, the image of the Virgin Mother... to some extent every woman tries to make herself look like an American movie star." Conversely, Kaname's emulation of his father-in-law, with his doll-like concubine, upholds a more reactionary set of Oriental norms, and Tanizaki implies that Kaname has allowed his wife too much autonomy (though conversely, the father-in-law's concubine appears unhappy).
In terms of film, I've been watching Before Night Falls, Beau Travail (a film that reminds me of Apocalypse Now in that cinematography fails to act as a proxy for the interior narrative of the novel used as a source in either case) and Le Fabuleux Destin D'Amelie Poulain, a film that avoids sentimentality through its suggestion that happiness is something that must people must be cajoled or deceived into. Similarly, Delicatessen is an excellent film. Where the Americans always envisaged the post-apocalyptic future as being one of urban warfare and anarchy, the French see it more as people going quietly insane behind masks of middle-class respectability. Interesting food cooked recently: Polish sauerkraut stew, Hungarian ghoulash, Turkish bobotie, Turkish Lahmacun, Chicken Fricassee, Chicken Marengo, Lebanese spiced chicken and Coq au Vin.Labels: England, Film, Flora, Food, History, Literature, London, ScienceFiction
posted by Richard 2:57 PM
Wednesday, January 21, 2004
"In 1951, (Cage) visited an anechoic chamber at Harvard University in order to hear silence. "I literally expected to hear nothing," he said. Instead, he heard two sounds, one high and one low. He was told that the first was his nervous system and the other his blood circulating. .. "Try as we may to make a silence, we cannot... In India they say that music is continuous; it only stops when we turn away and stop paying attention." From: The Sounds of Silence
Listening to the recent broadcast of Cage's 4.33 last night, it was quite noticeable how often it had been described as four minutes and thirty three seconds, whereas the more accurate description is that of an absence of intended sounds; and the presence of unintended sounds whether that of rain falling outside, passing traffic or the awkward shuffling and coughing of an audience (the 'composition' is therefore as aleatory as using the I Ching and the 'performance' is done as much by the audience as by the orchestra). As with Robert Rauschenberg's paintings, the blank slate becomes a screen to project onto. One of the problems seemed to me to be with the similarity to the most notorious work of Marcel DuChamp; an ordinary urinal signed with his name and exhibited accordingly. DuChamp had a flair for satire and recognised that the incongruity of the object would provoke exactly the reaction he hoped. The incongruity of a silent orchestra equipped with blank music sheets has precisely the same effect; unfortunately not the effect Cage had in mind, seeming to view the act as being like meditating upon a zen koan (Tanizaki comments during In Praise of Shadows that Japanese music is more reliant on silences than Western music). Of the other pieces broadcast, I preferred Cage's The Seasons and Ives's Central Park in the Dark.
In terms of film, I've finally got round to watching October by Eisenstein. It's an odd film, not least for its depiction of gender politics, portraying the women's death battalion almost in terms of a Dickensian grotesque, while the sailors of the Aurora (as much as those of the Battleship Potempkin) are portrayed in terms of a cult of masculine heroism reminiscent of one of Umberto Eco's characteristics of an ur-fascism, though it seems equally impossible to discount Eisenstein's homosexuality in that context. Conversely, Alexander Nevsky has none of these peculiarities, but instead is made rather problematic by virtue of the attempts to reconcile a narrative based on one heroic aristocratic individualist figure with communist ideas. The problem is even more acute in Ivan the Terrible where the protagonist is no longer even a commoner, though much of the narrative initially dwells upon the displacement of the nobles in favour of commoners.
I've been reading Carter's The Bloody Chamber and Black Venus, a set of interpretations of fairytales (typically lacking the vicious retribution typical of the Grimm versions), each of which was written and published separately but which are most interesting in this combination. For example, the revision of Bluebeard, The Bloody Chamber itself where the heroine is rescued by her mother rather than her brother, is counterbalanced by The Lady of the House of Love (a combination of Dracula and The Sleeping Beauty) wherein the virginal sacrificial victim is male. After all, Carter had written in The Sadeian Woman that "Justine marks the start of a kind of self-regarding female masochism, a woman with no place in the world, no status, the core of whose resistance has been eaten away by self-pity." Equally, the The Courtship of Mr Lyon is exactly in the vein of Cocteau's La Belle et La Bette, while The Tiger's Bride sees the heroine's sexual awakening as beauty becomes a beast; human nature is envisaged as something mutable where male and female roles can easily be reversed. In some cases, such as Peter and the Wolf and The Fell River Axe Murders sexuality and aggression are seen as liberating forces, in others, such as The Kiss and Black Venus, as oppressive forces. The same applies to the film of The Company of Wolves, where the wolves are both a threat (killing Rosaline's sister and grandmother) and liberating (reflecting Rosaline's own transmogrification), something made possible by the role of conflicting stories in the film (the bride cursing her husband into becoming a werewolf and having to be saved from one by her huntsman husband).
I've also been reading Baudolino by Umberto Eco (perhaps better known as the semiotics of simony), a work that sees Eco almost pastiching his own work. The detective thread recalls The Name of the Rose, the forgery of history recalls Foucault's Pendulum ("all the time that you were inventing, you invented things that were not true, but which became true.") and much of the rest of the text resembles a novelisation of Serendipities.
I've also read Kundera's Book of Laughting and Forgetting, a novel that recalls Bakhtin in terms of its resistance to communism and foregrounding of carnival. The themes of laughter (resistance to official ideology though laughter is described as "an explosion that tears us away from the world and throws us back into our own cold solitude" and is counterpointed to love) and forgetting (oppression through revising reality, as with doctored Soviet photographs; "you begin to liquidate a people by taking away its memory," though for one of the characters the desire to retain memories of her husband are her means of resistance) are counterpointed, in a polyphonic manner (since one of Kundera's main themes is the extent to individual viewpoints are irrevocably alienated from one another).
The same theme recurs in Slowness, where "our period is obsessed with the desire to forget", leading to a dance where the characters are thrown between the humiliation of the laughter of others ("can people move so easily from veneration to contempt") and the balm of forgetfulness ("Stop thinking about the laughter that wounded you - it no longer exists"). Here, forgetfulness is not so much an aspect of totalitarian revisionism but a capitalist equivalent "the situations history stages are floodlit only for the first few minutes... does Somalia still exist?.. a jumble of events that crossed the planet at a speed that made it impossible to see their features." This disconnection between the personal and the political informs the dialogic character of the novel (most evident in a digression where the narrator's wife reproaches his lack of seriousness) where the carnivalesque theme of the body is very much in evidence; "we cannot choose the era we are born into... you'll start protesting against cathedrals, as some modern barbarism..the only thing left for us is to revolt against the human condition we did not choose!" It's this ambivalence that makes Kundera so much more interesting than Klima whose Three Lives reflects a simpler correspondence between the two where the state "forced people to profess what they did not believe."
I was so impressed with Book of Laughting and Forgetting and Ignorance (not having read Kundera for many years), I decided to follow on by reading Immortality, which must count as one of the most impressive books I have read since Earthly Powers. Aside from the existential dilemmas commonly explored by Kundera (typified in the rejection of solidarity with all others by Agnes, a refusal that can be viewed as a refusal to allow her identity to be defined), this can be described as a post-communist novel (or perhaps a depiction of what happens to carnival in a capitalist society); "the age of tragedy can only be removed by the revolt of frivolity. Nowadays people know longer know Beethoven's Ninth from concerts but from four lines of the Hymn to Joy which they hear every day in the ad for perfume."
In either case, laughter has acquired an entirely different connotation to that held in Book of Laughting and Forgetting; "if our era, against the spirit of the great painters, has made laughter the privileged expression of the human race, it means that an absence of human will and reason has become the ideal human state," though elsewhere one of the characters contradicts this theme; "Diabolum is characterised by a total lack of a sense of humour... humour can only exist when people are still capable of recognising some border between the important and the unimportant." Immortality often sees the methodology of capitalism and communism as being essentially alike; "are you objecting that advertising and propaganda cannot be compared because one serves commerce and the other ideology...because the remnants of Marx no longer form a logical system but only a series of suggestive images... we can rightfully talk of a gradual transformation from ideology into imagology." However, the novel's depiction of a post-historical society where meaning has lost all significance conflicts somewhat with this; "Marx tried, all the revolutionaries tried, and in the end Diabolum always managed to appropriate every organisation whose original goal was to destroy him." In one particularly dialogic section, two characters debate this point; "Beethoven and Stalin belong together.. war and culture, these are the poles of Europe.. if high culture is coming to an end, it is also the end of you and your paradoxical ideas, because paradox as such belongs to high culture."
As with the Book of Laughting and Forgetting the central theme of Immortality is resistance; "what is a man to do when he realises that no organised, sensible and effective fight against Diabolum is possible? .. keep on cultivating an inner need for revolt and from time to time give it expression." One of the most interesting aspects of the novel is how its structure reflects this with an episodic structure, on the one hand finding brief moments of significance in an apparently meaningless environment rather than using official narratives; "biography; sequences of events which we consider to be important... we accept as important whatever is accepted by others, for example by our employer." But on the other, such a structure denies any pattern; " world history, with its revolutions, utopias, hopes and despair had vanished from Europe."
With the sole exception of Yukio Mishima I've read very little Japanese literature, so I was quite interested to hear about Junichiro Tanizaki's In Praise of Shadows, an essay on the difference between Oriental and Occidental aesthetics. Tanizaki suggests that Oriental aesthetics valued shadow above light, therefore preferring wood and lacquerware to tiles and ceramics. For example, a Tudor building like Hardwick Hall was constructed with much of its walls consisting of windows to cast light on the bright tapestries within and to overcome the darkness of the wood. Later, rococco buildings such as Versailles or Sanssouci were decorated in bright colours with large windows on one side of a room and mirrors on the other. In each case, the goal was to banish shadow and darkness.
One of the problems of this thesis is that it can be better described as polemical than descriptive (after all dark woods were a favoured building material for much of Western history and ceramics were largely imported from the East. When Tanizaki attributes the importance of gold to being a reflector in subdued light that will not easily lose its lustre, he forgets that this is precisely why it was popular in the West as well). The polemic springs from a backlash against the Westernization of Japan that followed the 1867 Meiji restoration; much of the essay consists of invective against the unconscious Western assumptions in many modern conveniences, recalling Camille Paglia's assertion that cinema had always been an implicit concept in the Western visual imagination (e.g. electric lighting where Tanizaki undermines some of his case by noting that the Japanese were more enthused by electric lighting than any other nation save the United States; in contrasting cultures it becomes clear that the cultures in question are far from being monolithic entities. Not to mention his own refusal to inhabit a house as uncomfortable as his aesthetics advocated) which veers between pleading for recognition of Japanese identity as being 'separate but equal' and denouncing Western civilisation as being tasteless and uncouth (since it is the origin and otherness of many of these conveniences which seems to trouble Tanizaki at least as much as the unwelcome nature of the changes). Much of this Orientalism seems rather uncomfortable today; after all, nineteen thirties Japan saw a great deal of discussion of how to overcome the modern where science and industry were seen as having fragmented the holistic nature of the essentially spiritual Japanese culture. In such cases much of what Tanizaki says represents a disturbing continuum with other aspects of Japanese culture of the time; this is after all written just after the end of the Taisho democratic and the beginning of Showa militarism.
Elsewhere, I've read Hesse's The Glass Bead Game. I'd read Narziss und Goldmund a few years ago and had been impressed with the clarity of its allegory expressed in similar terms to The Birth of Tragedy. Here though, the chiastic opposition between differing principles is expressed in terms of a set of negotiations and an attempt to form a synthesis; the use of three allegorical stories at the end is a particularly interesting technique (since the stories alternately suggest the futility of the Ascetic/Apollonian and the Worldly/Dionysian) more reminiscent of Nabokov.
I've been listening to 'The Further Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, a set of stories that take offhand references to people and cases from the Doyle stories (e.g. from the first paragraph of Thor Bridge) and to write a story from that. On the whole, the dramas pastiche Doyle really quite well, though I have to admit that my favourite (The Madness of Colonel Warburton) acquires that crown on the grounds that its depiction of fraudulent spiritualists would have really annoyed Doyle. It's always interesting to consider Doyle stories from the point of view of the criminal; the murderer in The Boscombe Valley Mystery appears as a victim of fate or causality in much the same way as any Hardy character. The murderers in The Five orange Pips, on the other hand, are brought down by the hand of god. I've also been reading The New Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. Amongst the more creditable pastiches here Basil Copper's Adventure of the Persecuted Painter (which introduces suitable tinges of the gothic), Zakaria Erzinclioglu's Adventure of the Bulgarian Diplomat (a more political affair based on the possibility of a single incident relating to the Turkish occupation of Bulgaria sparking war in the same way as Franz Ferdinand's assassination was to) and Michael Mooorcock's Adventure of the Dorset Street Lodger, where the mystery hinges upon the gender of the criminal (Moorcock seems to be more challenged by writing in a realistic vein, I've noticed). Oddly enough, the most interesting story in the collection is Stephen Baxter's Adventure of the Inertial Adjustor, which introduces a number of science fiction ideas relating to the HG Wells novel The First Men in the Moon.Labels: Film, Literature, Music
posted by Richard 2:54 PM
Sunday, October 5, 2003
I've visited the Gardens at Wisley, which, while rather more mannered and less curious than those at Kew, are certainly not without interest. This year the English autumn has been more of a New England fall, with vivid golds, reds and yellows everywhere. But these gardens were caught in that liminal moment between summer and autumn; a bonfire tree's leaves turned flaming red, while lilac crocuses flower.
The most striking feature is a country house built in 1903 in imitation of a seventeenth century manner; a testament to the English ability to invent tradition (or to travels in hyperreality, depending on your point of view). Although the gardens have large areas dedicated to woodland and lakes, the two most striking areas for me (perhaps rather predictably) were the glasshouses (less striking than those at Kew, but with some interesting bromeliad displays) and Japanese garden (filled with slate stones amidst gravel, bamboo, Acers and bonsai juniper).
Another event was a second video evening, again showing two versions of Dracula; the first with Bela Lugosi, the second with Christopher Lee. The Lugsosi version benefits considerably from his presence and that of Dwight Frye or Edward Van Sloan, as well as some well designed sets. On the other hand, it is resolutely (brazenly, some might say) cast in the mould of melodrama and features some rather amusingly unconvincing bats and spiders (not to mention the somewhat bizarre presence of armadillos). The sequel, Dracula's Daughter is a more staid affair, in which the eponymous heroine decides that Freudian psychoanalysis is the obvious means of curing her vampirism.
I've read The Athenian Murders by Jose Carlos Somoza. The novel reflects Pericles striking Phidias' statue of Athena to force it to speak; "What does it mean? What do you mean? The paper, of course, yields, no answers;" there is, quite literally, nothing outside the text. Accordingly, the novel grafts an anachronistic postmodern view of language onto ancient Greece; "words simply lead to other words, thoughts to other thoughts and the truth remains unattainable... Someone else would, with utter confidence, produce a different version, evoking different images... to another reader they might be something quite different.. images change, they're imperfect. " Within this context, a debate on Platonic ideas ensues; each chapter of the novel uses differing phrases to build up eidetic images corresponding to the Platonic notion of ideas. These ideas would not vary for differing readers; the discovery of such a consensus would point to a discovery of a world that is rational, beautiful and just. However, the novel characterises such attempts in the mode of tragedy, with the discovery of a Bacchic cult within Athens, and the more postmodern deus ex machina of exposing the translator and his footnotes as being as much a textual construct as the other characters.
Perhaps the problem is that this conclusion is an ineluctable as that of a Greek tragedy (with the possible exception of the fact that both Heracles' rationalism and Diagoras' idealism are thwarted by the text). As such, while the parallels this has provoked to Pale Fire and The Name of the Rose are well earned, I am not quite as persuaded by this curiosity, which seems perhaps a little too geometric; as John Bayley argued literature perhaps needs to be a little untidy; "The conventional novel depended on our "not knowing" in life, its function being to supply the omniscience that life denies. James has now found how to turn into art the fact that in life we never find anything out. " In essence, The Athenian Murders denies its characters the omniscience it comes close to claiming for its author by proxy Philotextus. The ethos behind conceiving an author as puppet master seems opposed to the emphasis on plurality of meaning.
I've also been reading My Education: A Book of Dreams by WS Burroughs. It's been described as a book of the mythology that underpins the Burroughs cannon and certainly much of what we would expect in that regard is present and correct. However, the absence of the cut-up technique changes both context and meaning; the land of the dead or post-apocalyptic landscapes are peopled with figures from his own past, and disquisitions on the possibility of immortality. Given these intimations of mortality, the novel, like Queer to some extent, provides a curiously intentional aspect to the Burroughs oeuvre.
Finally, I've also read Sartre's The Reprieve (read alongside Pullman's The Subtle knife; a disturbingly appropriate combination), The structure of this book, flitting from the stream of consciousness of one character to another leaves me oddly reminded of a Victorian novel; in the sense that Dickens and Eliot showed the interrelation of otherwise unconnected characters through the plot devices of their respective novels. Sartre does this to some extent (as with the meeting of Philippe, Mathieu and Irene) but relies on stylistic techniques to achieve a similar effect; "each dimension was an autonomous consciousness...yes, each of those consciousness, by imperceptible contacts and insensible changes, realises its existence as a cell in a gigantic and invisible corral." Where The Age of Reason retained a much more conventional bourgeois form at odds with its themes, The Reprive is more experimental. However, this should be viewed in the context of the Sartrean tension between existentialism and humanism, which is why the structure of the novel largely sees its characters remaining separate from one another, unlike in Dickens or Eliot. Accordingly, at some points Sartre tends to agree with Merleau Ponty that "Our freedom does not destroy our situation, but gears itself to it: as long as we are alive, our situation is open" and elsewhere tends towards a Marxist critique of freedom.
For example, Mathieu considers that "If I had done what I wanted, if I had once, only once, succeeded in being free - well, that would in my case have been an ugly deception, since I should merely have exercise my freedom in this false piece.. I am free for nothing." Daniel faces the same predicament; "Why can't I be what I am... a loathsome object that does not even manage to exist." The novel is certainly dialogic on this point; is this being-for-itself or the frustration of one's freedom. In the similar case of Philippe, we decides that he is condemned to freedom and faces his own cowardice, but his predicament is couched in the same terms as those of Daniel. The absence of a defined structure allows for a polyphonc interplay between the characters; for example, being-for-others ("I am seen therefore I am" as Daniel puts it) being represented by the unthinking conformity of a bourgeois character receiving his call-up papers, some of the female pacifist's showing for being-for-others for the opposite reason, while Gomez's commitment to fighting is another aspect of being-for-itself.Labels: England, Film, Flora, Horror, Literature
posted by Richard 2:50 PM
Saturday, September 20, 2003
I visited the Dali exhibition at London's County Hall today; a somewhat tawdry and gimmicky affair (piped music and looped silent videos on the wall spring to mind) and therefore ideally suited to its subject. Certainly, the exhibition had some of Dali's more odd creations, such as the Mae West lips sofa or the oil painting from Hitchcock's Spellbound (an odd film I saw recently; Dali's dream sequence erupts into a quite staid film, quoting the slicing of eye imagery used in Un Chien Andalou). The strength of the exhibition is in sculpture and glasswork, the instantiation of much of Dali's personal mythology. This is most obvious with works like the Space Elephant, the hollow figure of Newton, a winged snail, the figures with drawers coming out of their bodies (sometimes aflame), or the soft watches in various forms. Glass proves an excellent medium for Dali, emphasising an abstract character in his work, with works like Anti-Flower having an organic quality that Dali shared with Gaudi. Another strong area for Dali proves to be design (since the juxtapositions inherent in Dali's art are much more forceful in an everyday context), such as a sofa with an arm winding round the back, ashtrays that combine the shape of swans and elephants, candlestick holders in the shape of flames and butterflies and his lobster phone once more. The exhibition's lithographs and watercolours are not Dali's best work.
I've been reading Goytisolo's Forbidden Territory, a polyphonic work that counterpoints the writer's political and poetical imaginations ("a mismatch between life and work" as he puts it). For the latter, "my dislike and even horror of urban areas that are open, clean, symmetrical and despairingly empty" is opposed to a love of "street chaos, the brutal transparency of social relations..the insidious flow of merchandise, precarious lives.. in a struggle for survival." But his early communism clashes with this outsider aesthetic; "merciless competition and barbaric exploitation by the capitalist industry of the time" particularly given his own description of the Soviet Union of "the almost physical density of that hybrid of alienation, lethargy and monotony." I also reread Genet's The Thief's Journal, a work which begins to seem somewhat perverse in the contradictions it combines. On the one hand, Genet's aesthetics of transgression permit him to say "betrayal, theft and homosexuality are the basic subjects of this book," while also flaunting contempt of "queers." On the other hand, it does at least interrogate this self hatred; "my cowardice.. my shame in the presence of good looking boys."
I've also read Houellebecq's Platform. The book combines a number of disparate viewpoints. For example, much of the book is cast in the language of the left, with capitalism viewed as producing alienation; "a part which is safe, attenuated, one which fully complies with the standards of international commerce." The novel views sex as an aspect of commerce (at the same time attacking the opponents of sex tourism as puritans). However, Houellebecq's description of Cuba is much like Goytisolo's description of Russia "the revolution had obviously failed to create the new man, driven by more altruistic motives." As such, much of the language becomes Hobbesian (though equally theft is described as being in keeping with social norms); "the notion of equality has no basis in human society...I was in Sao Paulo once, that's where evolution has been pushed to its limits. It's not even a city anymore." Crime, described in the language of civil war features more and more prominently. Similarly, racism "is neither economic nor cultural, it is brutal and biological.. Darwinism." The fact that many of the predictions of such internecine violence are spoken by a marginal character introduced for the purpose serves to reinforce the extent to which different discourses struggle for dominance in this novel.
In particular, one of the main themes is the absence of any notion of identity set in the context of the Eastern societies in which it is set and opposed to Western rationalism; "as often as not it is futile to wear yourself out trying to distinguish... the idea of the uniqueness of the individual is nothing more than a pompous absurdity." Elsewhere, a Buddhist text is quoted as saying "clinging to their egos they take wrong actions. As a result they become attached to a delusive existence." Equally, Westerners "no long feel sex as something natural...we have become cold, rational acute conscious of our individual existence." However, this contrasts again to the descriptions of Islam, and the approval with which its demise at the hands of capitalism is quoted, as opposed to the descriptions in that context of the loss sense of the superiority of Western civilisation, "they believed in the superiority of their civilisation; they had invented dreams, progress, the future."Labels: Film, Literature
posted by Richard 2:49 PM
Thursday, May 29, 2003
This time, a trip to the V&A Museum for its Art Deco exhibition. My impression was that the exhibition set itself a difficult task, covering art nouveau from modernist art and design in Europe to the Jazz age and post great depression shading into mass market and industrial design, with the distinctions of art and design becoming somewhat blurred. In addition, my own feelings regarding Art Deco are somewhat ambivalent, my preference always having been for Art Nouveau or Arts & Crafts, but most of exhibition does impress nonetheless through sheer grandiosity (the consequence is that this piece has a certain tendency to run to inventory, selecting pieces I particularly liked). It's an ambivalence that matched the age itself; on the one hand, Auden derived inspiration from factories rather than nature, while DH Lawrence detested the dehumanisation of the machine age. The work that most epitomises this is Lang's Metropolis, where the art deco design of the city (based on New York) is the showpiece of the film, but the theme is the dehumanisation that accompanies the machine age; in spite of this it is a film concerned with masses not individuals. Accordingly, the design of the film itself reflects some of the tension between communist and christian themes within the film (not unlike Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin, where god is seen as subduing the workers, in spite of the sailor's revolt being concerned with getting their daily bread. Ironically, Eisenstein's portrayal of frenzied mobs is arguably less communistic than that of Lang). In the exhibition, Depero's cubist paintings of Manhattan, a city he detested, reflect this ambiguity.
As is common for the V&A, the exhibition commenced by establishing the non-ethnocentric basis of the movement; Egyptian (bringing to my mind the dance of the false Maria in Metropolis), Greek, Mayan, Japanese and African influences (reviled by DH Lawrence in Women in Love), as well as the influence of cubism; Blue faience scarabs replicated by Cartier, Jade necklaces from Boucheron, African chairs from Dunand and Legrain. However, the centre of the exhibition is the pieces from the 1925 Paris exhibition. In the case of the former, Swedish engraved glass by Orrefors (a wonderful Lalique glass lamp also being on display), a Czech vitrine by Gocar (which oddly reminded me of the design in Das Cabinet Des Dr Caligari) a British writing desk gilded with white gold by Maufe, Ruhlmann lacquered cabinets and paintings from artists like Dupas and de Lempicka.It must be said that the best aspect of this was the photographs of the various pavillions from the exhibition, almost all of which represented unique works of architecture (For instance, a lalique glass fountain). The 1931 Colonial exhibition is also rather striking; Dunand vases and a pirogue day bed from Ireland. A disturbing aspect of this is a film of Josephine Baker dancing with her banana skirts; her vivaciousness shines through, but the film has some rather disturbing racist aspects nonetheless; the idea of the exotic could clearly be as dehumanising as the industrial influence.
Later, the exhibition had the entire foyer of the Strand Hotel; all backlit frosted glass, before finishing with international aspects of art-deco; a silver four poster bed from India, American architecture and the wrought iron gates to the Chanin building. However, this was probably the lest interesting part of the exhbition; attempts to rehabilitate bakelite are deservedly doomed to fail. Overall, an interesting experience, and it was rather nice to discover some work by someone who had worked on the Tuschinski theatre (which I had stumbled over in Amsterdam), and recognising some pieces from the Brohan Museum in Berlin.
Another entertaining event was a film evening comprised of FW Murnau's Nosferatu and Merhige's Shadow of the Vampire. The former is relatively faithful to the novel of Dracula save for the lynching of Renfield and the shift from Van Helsing as protagonist to Mina (and the opposite role assigned to her than in either Stoker's novel of Fisher's later film), but it is the film's imagery that makes it stand out; the Venus fly trap, the shadow on the walls, the grave strewn beach and so on. Otherwise, the film revels in melodrama (it is a quite simple film, unlike say Das Cabinet Des Dr Caligari with its unreliable narrator), something that Shadow of the Vampire humorously picks up on in what is otherwise a reverent homage. I've also watched Herzog's eerie version of Nosferatu, which plays with replicating much of the original film in order to create greater dissonance as the departure from it grows greater towards the conclusion, bringing out the plague metaphor and enlightenment/superstition themes to a greater extent than Murnau. Instead of the wonderful imagery in Murnau, Herzog prefers understated scenes that are more naturalistic for central Europe, but interrupts them with grotesqueries and the surreal; the skeleton reaper clock, for example. However, given the apparently infinite variety of the Dracula myth, one thing I do find odd is that no-one has seen the Count as a tyrant, of the kind that Vlad the Impaler surely was.
As can be seen from above, black and white films interest me greatly, and I've just had an opportunity to see a striking example. In terms of content, Un Chant d'Amour occupies ground that should be familiar from Miracle of the Rose; the same sexual dissidence regarding working class figures (i.e. prisoners here or sailors in Querelle of Brest) and the emasculation of authority figures like Seblon and the Warder here (though some of the pastoral imagery seems rather odd for Genet). What is perhaps more interesting is in terms of style, which has an oddly ritualistic quality to it. Edmund White, for example, argued that Genet's style had always been inherently cinematic;
"A close look at the composition of his novels reveals that he was profoundly influenced by the cinematic techniques of collage, flashback and close-up. Just as Un Chant d'Amour intercuts the warder's sexual fantasies with realistic scenes of the prisoners in their cells ... each of the five novels juxtaposes two or three separate plots. ... Close-ups of gestures are also essential to Genet's conception of the novel, since in his ontology accidents determine fate, gestures form character and costume triggers events. A Genet film script states: "In effect the cinema is basically immodest. Let us use this faculty to enlarge gestures."
The same symbolism is transferred from the novels to the film. For instance, in The Thief's Journal "there is a close relationship between flowers and convicts. The fragility and delicacy of the former are of the same nature as the brutality and insensitivity of the former." As such, the surrealist flower imagery intermittently erupts into what is otherwise a grimly realistic piece (as such, more like Orphee than Un Chien Andalou); somewhat ironic given that the only film of one of Genet's novels, Fassbinder's Querelle, was drenched with fantasy and artifice.
Driving later that weekend I passed by a building site in the country. The walls had not been finished and were made of concrete breeze blocks, but the roof was complete and made of thatch. An odd combination certainly but one that is quite in keeping with the British habit of inventing tradition (e.g. morris dancing).In terms of literary pursuits, My Name is Red by Orhan Pamuk was a surprisingly interesting read. The obvious comparison of the plot is to The Name of the Rose (both being philosophical novels based on ideas hidden within libraries undermining religious conceptions); in the latter the detective plot hinges on the effects of Aristotle's treatise on comedy on christianity, in the former, the plot hinges on the effect of Venetian naturalistic painting on Ottoman religious norms; whereas the occidental concentrates on individual style and drawn from life through viewpoint, the oriental being devoid of perspective and drawn from a single conception in imagination; "events I'd once endured briskly and sequentially, were now spread over infinite space and existed simultaneously." Accordingly, to mix the styles is seen as a blasphemy; "attempting to depict the world that god perceives, not the world that they see."
The difference between this and Eco lies in the way this theme permeates the book's structure, told by multiple narrators allowing for a number of polyphonic viewpoints, which are not resolved into a single unity. As such, the subjectivity of perception (literal as well as metaphorical blindness for many of the characters) opposed to divine omniscience is a key theme; "the blind and the seeing are not equal;" ideal for a detective novel where perception of events is all. To some extent, these themes leads into a postmodern narrative, exposing the limitations of the narrator; "for the sake of a delightful and convincing story, there isn't a lie Orhan wouldn't deign to tell" (Orhan also being one of the character's names) or "my dear storyteller Effendi, you might be able to imitate anyone or anything, but never a woman." Conversely, the novel also seek to depict events "as from above" in the oriental style, with each viewpoint contributing a part short of the whole and leaving a intractable core of "mystery," excepting the references to red, "an omnipresent red within which all the images of the universe played," which runs like a braid through the novel. Another read was Dali's Diary of a Genius, which, combining spirituality, scatology and a desire to invert metaphysical categories (the Surrealist as Catholic not Marxist, the artist as extroverted and wealthy rather than introverted and impecunious) makes it a carnivalesque text in the sense proposed by Mikhail Bakhtin. The same applies to Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita, where the devil is portrayed as a mischievous trickster, where "what would the earth look like if all the shadows disappeared from it...would you like to denude it.. in order to satisfy your fantasy of rejoicing in the naked light?"
Elsewhere, I've read Bertrand Russell's Why I am not a Christian and Umberto Eco's Travels in Hyperreality. In the case of the former, I was left struck by some apparent anomalies. Firstly, Russell describes one of the defects of religion as being its individualism, contrasting Christ unfavourably with Plato and arguing that modern society requires a more social conception of welfare (a perhaps rather more uncertain concept now). However, in contrasting Catholic and Protestant sceptics, Russell notes that "the Protestant conception of goodness is something individual and isolated," a tradition he locates himself within, whereas the Catholic notion of submission rather than sola fide is more inherently social. Elsewhere, he suggests that as societies progress the need for collective co-operation decreases (as the state acquires many functions handled by such civic bodies as churches) and individualism increases, thereby reducing communal taboos. As such, this tension between the individual and society leads on to another tension; between rationality and prejudice.
At one point, Russell makes a rather curious statement; "this active malevolence is the worst aspect of human nature, and the one which it is most necessary to change if the world is to grow happier." The idea of a constant nature is conjoined with a more fluid conception. Elsewhere, Russell writes of "primitive impulses" of fear that perpetuate religions, and condemning religion for seeking to arrest natural impulses and only succeeding in retarding them. But these primitive impulses can apparently be wiped from the tabula rasa; "educational reforms must be the basis, since men who feel hate and fear will also admire these emotions and wish to perpetuate them." Education becomes critical for Russell, noting, after Skinner, that "the scientific psychologist, if allowed a free run with children, can manipulate human nature as freely as Californians manipulate the desert." On the one hand, "ecclesiastics co-operate in education, because all depend for their power upon the prevalence of emotionalism.. intensifying and increasing the propensities of the average man."
The results of this tension of nature and nurture are somewhat equally uncertain. Russell suggests (presumably thinking of Skinner where we would think of Pinker) that "Nature, even human nature, will cease more and more to be an absolute datum.. it will become what scientific manipulation has made it." The result of this, he suggests is that we will acquire the same domination over our passions (note the Hobbesian term) as we have over the external world. The difficulty begins when Russell observed that in Russia alone "the state is not in the grip of moral and religious prejudices," taking the view that the state will play a greater role in family life and in so doing decrease inherited prejudices. Russell certainly notes that this could equally be used to the opposite end and was vociferous in criticising the Soviet Union at a later date, but the tensions between liberty and rationality remain unresolved.
In the case of Eco, it is difficult to offer any interpretation of a book of interpretations. That said, one interesting point lies in an essay contrasting two writers "they cite the same events, one seeing them as symbols, the other as symptoms." But the arbitrary correlation of sign and signifier also applies to Eco himself. In the title essay, Eco speaks of "Where the American imagination demands the real thing, and, to attain it must fabricate the absolute fake; where the boundaries between game and illusion are blurred." Eco clearly dislikes this imbrication, this illusion of the real, in contrast to a European notion of authenticity, but remains ambivalent. The gaudy Hearst Mansion is condemned, but speaking of the Getty Museum; "after the first reaction of mockery or puzzlement, raise a question; Who is right?" Later, the established dichotomy continues to denature; "we must in fairness employ this American reality as a critical reagent for a critical examination of conscience regarding European taste... this is not to absolve the shrines of the fake, but to call the European sanctuaries of the genuine to assume their share of guilt." Finally, Eco is clearly revolted by wildlife preserves underpinned by nature, but admits; "it would be secondhand Frankfurt school moralism to prolong the criticism" and admits the educational value, providing a form of criticism that deconstructs itself.Labels: Art, Culture, Film, Literature, Religion
posted by Richard 2:45 PM
Thursday, May 22, 2003
Kew Gardens is wonderful at this time of year. The bluebells and Rhode were in flower, as was the Wisteria that formed a shady pergola, and, indeed, the vivid red and purple bromeliads within the Conservatories. One particular highlight were the enormous flowering strelitzia reginae, though sadly the lily pads in the main conservatory were rather smaller than on my last visit. On the other hand, peacocks stalked the grounds and greylag geese swam in the lake before the Palm house, its shore dominated by flowering rhubarb.
Although much of the interest in Kew is ethnographic (for instance, the traditional Japanese house and Indonesian musical instruments made out of Bamboo) or based on curiosity (the Dali sculpture behind the Palm House) my interest was more historical (for instance, Burton's Palm houses with its heraldic statues and the classical temples scattered throughout the grounds); the contrast between the genteel eighteenth century design and the more naturalistic reinvention of the gardens by Capability Brown being particularly striking. The most fascinating buildings are William Chambers' Pagoda (though its brickwork is a little dour, and much of the building is in need of restoration; the Chinese teahouse and Dragon House at Sanssouci are superior examples of the eighteenth century fascination for Chinoisserie), and the Chokushi Mon with its wonderful kare-sansui gravel garden and burgundy Acers. The last time I visited the place had small plots dedicated to Japanese gardens, but I recall thinking at the time that the original was best.
One of my favourite places was the elegantly patterned parterre box garden behind Kew Palace with its wrought iron pillars and gazebos (again not unlike Sanssouci) painted in blue and gold. The one part I was not especially taken with is the most modern conservatory; although its contents are fascinating, ranging from cloud forest to desert, the building itself is rather unpleasant and contains far more concrete than one would ideally wish to see.
Nearby are the Hell Fire Caves excavated by Sir Francis Dashwood; somewhat spoiled by gimmicks but the underground stream and large banqueting hall are quite impressive nonetheless. Much the same applies to Dashwood's renovated church, build using flint in a traditional style but with an eighteenth century design. Particularly odd is the golden sphere at the top of the summit, apparently built in imitation of Venice and St Petersburg. Regarding West Wycombe Estate itself, the grounds remain dotted with classical temples and follies (albeit with tiling on the roof) while the otherwise Palladian landscape, like that of Kew, has been redesigned into a more romantic style from its rococco original. The effect is rather impressive, with the grounds being composed of quite densely grown woodland and lakes with Islands linked by bridges. It does rather create the sensation of walking in a Claude painting Similarly, the Manor dates back to Queen Anne but had been redesigned itself in mock-grecian and rococco styles. Accordingly, the Manor shows the personality of its creator; quite literally in the case of the numerous painting of Sir Francis in various rooms., but also in the case of the flamboyant decoration. Pictures of Bacchanalian scenes vie for space with pictures of the eminently eccentric Sir Francis Dashwood in various costumes (the dining room has him dressed as the Pope while toasting Hermaphrodite, as an Ottoman Emperor and as himself). There is also a picture of Milton looking very uncomfortable at the company he keeps (i.e. the pictures of Bacchanalian orgies to either side of him).
I've also visited Hughendon Manor in Buckinghamshire; in truth not an especially interesting place, largely interesting because it was once owned by Disraeli. The house is essentially Georgian with some Gothic alterations; for example, intricate wooden panelling in the Gothic style; I was rather struck by a set of prints of Pottsdam, dating from the Berlin Congress. Similarly, the garden is most interesting for the collection of firs and pines started by Disraeli.
Elsewhere, I've been for a rather pleasant walk alongside the Kennet and Avon canal and underneath a bridge constructed by Brunel for the Great Western Railway. I hadn't actually noticed the plaque marking the bridge as a listed building before (the amount of graffiti, sadly, made it rather difficult to discern) but it is quite striking; two small arches on either side flank a fifth central arch which spans the canal. Although the area is rather dilapidated, the willow trees and buddleia made for reasonably pleasant scenery, while coots, swans and ducks nest nearby while vivid blue dragonflies flit around.
I've just finished reading Gaston Leroux's Phantom of the Opera. Like Stoker's Dracula it is atrociously written (in a curiously staid manner which is ill at ease with the sensationalist plot). The interest of the story largely comes from the set pieces (unlike, say, The Woman in White); the same labyrinthine caverns as in The Castle of Otranto and the same oriental decorations as in Vathek. I'm reminded of something Umberto Eco wrote in an essay on Casablanca as a form of intertextual collage; "in order to transform a work into a cult object one must be able to break, dislocate, unhinge it so one can only remember parts of it." I've also been reading Kipling's Kim. What was surprisingly interesting about this is the extent to which identity is such an uncertain concept, as Kim howls his name over and over again; "letting the mind go free upon speculation as to what is called personal identity." Kim's identity exists within a liminal space between the idea of a noble savage and the civilising European, between his Buddhist master and the great game.
Dorian by Will Self is essentially a cover version of Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray (not quite as Wide Sargasso Sea relates to Jane Eyre). I've always been a bit ambivalent about Wilde; where How the Dead Live and My Idea of Fun left me indifferent and feeling that Self was best confined to short stories, Great Apes was quite striking, a Ballardian revision of Swift and Boulle; "the idea of depicting, allegorically, the anti-naturalism of the condition of modern urban chimpunity... the distorted relation between chimp's minds and chimp's bodies." Similarly, in Dorian, Dorian's chameleon like character performs a similar allegorical function (similarly Simon's art and Henry's novel perform a similarly postmodern role; Henry's distortion of reality in writing is akin to his warping of Dorian; "Dorian was one of those unusual beings who make a reality out of the fictions they cannot write") "the product remains the same... the packaging remains the same...artists always create themselves to begin with." As such, Dorian is "a social chameleon, adapting himself perfectly to whatever background he finds himself standing against." or "the chameleon is the most significant of modern social types."
The ending resembles that of My Idea of Fun in calling into question the reliability of what has preceded it, Accordingly, the novel is close to magic realism, suggesting the social reality in a superficial age is largely symbolic and arbitrary, thereby explaining one odd feature of the book; the lack of social change. The book is filled with vitriolic social commentary, but there is no sense of change throughout. Conversely, the original The Picture of Dorian Gray was a fable, where sir Henry Wotton's aestheticism is the dialogic heart of the novel, with Wotton commenting that murder contravened his aesthetic code as much as conventional moral codes. Wotton is less interesting in Dorian, resembling the cynical and self hating Lilly in How the Dead Live. The problem with this is that the novel does rather tend to become the moral fable Wilde saw too much of in The Picture of Dorian Gray, particularly with the introduction of AIDS as a theme; "the nasty moral majority saying it was all your minority fault;" Self is a (left-wing) moralist, where Wilde was an aesthete.
As a parallel to this, Derek Jarman's film, Sebastiane (or Beau Travail for that matter) sees Sebastiane condemned because of his own repression; the problem is that be retaining the christian narrative, Jarman turns Sebastiane into a martyr.
I suspect a more interesting portrayal of what a modern Sir Henry Wotton might resemble lies in Ravelstein by Saul Bellow, a novel that could be described as depicting the process by which the establishment strengthens itself by absorbing foreign bodies. Ravelstein, a homosexual Jew (although "he despised campy homosexuality and took a very low view of gay pride." Incidentally, Dorian says exactly the same thing of Wotton) with conservative philosophical predilections, oscillates between subversion and conservatism, buying expensive suits and spilling food on them. That is not to mention vacillating between the philosophical poles of Athens and Jerusalem, and spending time in Paris inspite of disliking the 'Anti-American' views and relativist philosophies of its inhabitants; "a bourgeois solution in bohemian dress.. I mentioned bohemianism because we need to feel we are liberated."Labels: England, Film, Flora, Literature, London
posted by Richard 2:43 PM
Monday, July 15, 2002
It would probably be fair to say that while Minority Report is an entertaining film, it suffers from all of the flaws one would expect from a PK Dick story. Said flaws largely pertain to the proposition of a binary metaphysical dilemma (as to whether the characters are androids or not in Blade Runner like in the Turing test, or as in this case whether actions are predetermined or subject to free will) with much strained oscillation between the two possibilities. In this case, the film tentatively accepts the cause of free will (since knowledge of the prediction changes the circumstance as with Heisenberg) and acknolwedges the difficulty of prediction in an inherently indeterministic universe (since the precognitives are unable to always give consensus predictions). As it happens, the film might have been better if it had accepted determinism; since the predetermined tragedy wherein the protagonist is inexorably lead to his fate is aborted in favour of a rather more mundane conspiracy theory (much of which revolves around amazingly incompetent retinal scan security) traditional in films of this ilk. What tends to mainly stick in the mind from the film is the curious blurring of science and superstition promoted in the film; wherein genetic engineering is regarded as leading to premonition. The other thing is the film's design; which looks of a piece with Lang's Metropolis with its art-deco city of the future having bi-planes flying between the buildings. Somewhat depressingly both this and the recent Star Wars film view the city of the future as being the city of the present (apropos of nothing very much I've often wondered why films like this can't be released showing nothing other than the lovingly depicted scenery, especially since directors seem to considerable antipathy towards actors talented enough to distract audiences from said scenery).
Currently reading Modern Nature by Derek Jarman and How the Dead Live by Will Self. I was more impressed with Whatever by Michel Houellebecq. In many ways the novel bears a certain resemblance to the sociological stereotyping practised by Douglas Coupland, and its accompanying sense of l'ennui d'etranger; "we need adventure and eroticism because we need to hear ouselves saying that life is marvellous and exciting... a fitting symbol of this vital exhaustion."
For Coupland, this alienation is almost a desirable product of rejection of the mores of a ferociously commercial society. Houellebecq shares this ("the society in which I live disgusts me; advertising sickens me."), but where Coupland's characters embrace what is essentially a designer lifestyle, Houellebacq is more reactionary. When one of the novel's characters speaks of using information technology to increase potential choice and thereby increasing degrees of freedom, the narrator retorts; "if human relations become progressively impossible this is due, precisely, to the multiplying of those degrees of freedom." To Houellebecq alienation is not a lifestyle; it is something determined by the fragmentation of social being; "just like unrestrained economic liberalism, and for similar reasons, sexual liberalism produces phenomena of absolute pauperisation."
Yet the most interesting fascination of Houellebecq is his dialogic approach to such matters. For example, he switches from Marxist studies of alienation ("of all the economic and social systems, capitalism is unquestionably the most natural. This already suffices to show that it is the worst") to Lacanian references to the mirror phase; "early on certain individuals ... cannot bear to see thir own life before them... while day after day a mirror returns only the same desperate image, two parallel mirrors elaborate and edify a clear and dense system". in this analysis, certain individuals are exceptions to the laws of nature; and cannot reconcile themselves to the masculine-feminine dichotomy accounting for all aspects of human behaviour (returning us to Houellebecq's raging against nature and advocacy of transhumanism).
One of the main features of the novel is what Bakhtin termed its dialogic complexity, which makes observing a philosopher novelist particularly interesting. In Sartre's Age of Reason Mathieu is hardly what one would expect of an existentialist protagonist, with the title of the book coming from his bourgeois brother's observation that Mathieu's conception of freedom is essentially expressed as indecision, living what is essentially a conventional married life but refusing to marry. Similarly, the character of Daniel is in many ways a critique of Genet's heroes, since his status as an outsider only creates a greater desire to conform, due, the novel suggests, to essence preceding essence; "all inverts are ashamed of being so, it's part of their make-up."
Reading Nietzche's Twilight of the Idols and The Anti-Christ I am struck (as always) by the sheer plurality of Nietzches; like Whitman, he contains multitudes (as Blanchot put it in The Infinite Conversation "Jaspers was the first to advise us of the principles that every interpretation of Nietzsche must respect...The essential movement of Nietzsche's thought consists in self-contradiction; each time it affirms, the affirmation must be put in relation with the one opposing it: the decisive point of each of its certitudes passes through contestation, goes beyond it, and returns to it... In Nietzsche's work there is nothing that might be called a centre."). The same writer who denounces equality as a product of slave morality and avers a preference for Prussian authoritarianism, is the same writer who denounces Germany as a crude state only capable of military power and lacking France's cultural influence; to the extent that no-one in Germany is capable of understanding him. The same writer who castigates spirituality can also write (following Schopenhauer) that Buddhism is the only positivistic religion that has gone beyond good and evil; "to dominate barbrians, christianity had need of barbarous concepts and values... weakening is the christian recipe for taming." Similarly, Nietzche's critique of christianity is only partly because of its tendency towards repression, but also its unholiness; "one does well to put gloves on when reading the new testament." Scepticism remains the mark of Nietzche's philosophy, thereby avoiding the problem that predtermined description of the ubermensch would turn it into another form of herd morality.
Also reading Against Nature by Huysmans (though against convention might have been another applicable title). One of the problems for this novel is that it seems reluctant to step outside the dialectic it sets itself. This is made quite explicit regarding the tension between the sacred and the profane in the novel; "since sacrilege depends on the existence of religion, it cannot be deliberately and effectively committed except by a believer." Accordingly Esseintes must "oscillate between sceptical ideas and sudden fits of faith," or compromise on a depraved form of mysticism. The same applies for nature and artifice, where one becomes exasperated with Huysmans in the same way as Nietzche grew irritable with Mill and Eliot,as Huysmans displays variations on rejecting nature in favour of artifice or transforming nature into artifice. But like Wilde, Huysmans is an aesthete and his notions of aritifice are founded of nature. Where Hardy saw railway stations as the new cathedrals (a notion later agreed on, though one wonders whether Self is right in predicting that the same fate will befall our motorways) and Auden spurned nature in favour of trips to the gasworks, Huysmans reacts in the same way as Wilde; "this terrifying world of commerce, immersed in this isolating fog... this ruthless machine."
J M Coetzee's novel Disgrace is a somewhat oddly fatalistic affair, though lacking experience in much modern South African writing it is difficult to be precise regarding it. The fall following the narrator's seduction of an inexperienced schoolgirl is presented as being due to uncontrolled sevititude to his own passions; "he doesn't act on principle but on impulse, and the source of his impulses is dark to him." When asked to express his remorse, he refuses; "repentance is neither here nor there. Repentance belongs to another world, another universe of discourse." Like his mentor Wordsworth, the narrator is in search of revelatory moments of transcendence, and seeks to enrich himself through these relationships, which is why he will not govern his impulses or seek redemption. The purpose of the novel seems geared towards reconciliation to loss of the transcendental; "they are not going to lead me to a higher life, and the reason is, there is no higher life. This is the only life there is." Nonetheless, the terms of this reconcilation are disturbing to say the least; his daughter's accomodation with the man who raped her (the novel both posits and denies an analogy between them), noted
in a passage where blame is described as a form of secular scapegoating,
of driving evil away.Labels: Bakhtin, Film, Literature
posted by Richard 1:15 PM
Thursday, December 20, 2001
The Barbican Centre recently put on a series of short films with specially commissioned soundtracks. Oddly enough the first of these, a collaboration between Nicholas Roeg and Adroan Utley of Portishead, simply entitled 'Sound,' was rather reminiscent of Koyaanisquatsi (although Kubrick's 2001 seems the more obvious influence), with images of icicles erupting into outer space, and of stars melting into microscopic cells. However, where Reggio's film has a certain clarity to it, Roeg stated in his pre-film talk that he wished this to be a film that people "do not try to work out." The disconnected nature of the film serves as a disquisition on the fragmented nature of memory (something reflected very well by the soundtrack with its extensive use of sampling), but for a film that we are not supposed to conceptualise too much, the film nonetheless continually invites us to do so, being almost saturated with a number of disparate themes, including a meditation on the nature of celebrity featuring Claudia Schiffer.
One aspect of this is the image of Schiffer's face occluded behind a grid, like that of a chess board, wherein some of the squares are transparent and others opaque, the final image then being superimposed over a variety of images such as a frieze of hieroglyphs or a bust of Athena. It gives a certain mythic quality to discussions of celebrity, and rather reminds me of Camille Paglia's comment that western art has always been inherently cinematic.
The second film was a collaboration between the Quay brothers and Stockhausen. The oppressive score is almost impossible to describe; it seems to carry the listener along with it, rather them allowing them any distanced standpoint from which to observe it.
The film itself is rather easier to describe, with sepia-tinted images of a woman writing letters from an asylum. With images of the pen moving all by itself, the film merits some comparison with Bunuel and Cocteau, although jocular images of puppetry sit uneasily alongside the rest of the piece.
The final film was evidently what most of those present has come to see, with both Werner Herzog and John Tavener present to discuss the piece before the performance. The subject of the film is pilgrimage, and the images of Russian orthodox ceremonies make clear the reason for Tavener's interest. Tavener himself, with his flowing white hair, appears to resemble the elderly Tolstoy more and more. Whereas the elderly Count had proclaimed "it is impossible to continue like this, impossible" Tavener speaks of the "impossibility of modernism, minimalism, ism, ism, ism," before proclaiming the death of art and how no western singer could perform this piece (which appears to consist of a number of sanskrit refrains endlessly repeated - unfortunately Tavener cannot remember what the sanskrit means) . The film, he pronounces, is decidedly not art, it may either be higher than art or lower than art. Art is about substance, not the essence that interests him. In short, Tavener appears in exactly the same manner as I envisage Tolstoy to have been; a contemporary Biblical prophet, with all the curious imbrication of insight and obduracy that that implies. In truth, Tavener's music is not especially well suited to these surroundings, which lack the necessary intimacy. Moreover, Herzog's film is perhaps not. The images of pilgrims moving to the shrine on their knees, in evident agony, seems a somewhat ambivalent homage to a spirituality that can both contain such profound reverence and such grotesque self-denigration.
posted by Richard 12:48 PM
Tuesday, December 4, 2001
I was recently reminded of the controversy surrounding David Cronenberg's film of JG Ballard's novel, as an acquaintance indignantly forwarded a quotation from Ballard that "A car crash harnesses elements of eroticism, aggression, desire, speed, drama, kinaesthetic factors, the stylizing of motion, consumer goods, status - all these in one event. I myself see the car crash as a tremendous sexual event really: a liberation of human and machine libido." It is perhaps rather too easy to become indignant about such a quotation, stating as it does Ballard's preoccupation with the malleability of human personality in a fractured technocracy, and of the resurgence of primeval instincts in such an environment. Nonetheless, it is equally worth noting that Ballard has a recurring habit of stating the opposite case to his own beliefs in the most extreme manner possible; as he put it himself, the novel is "a cautionary tale where the writer or the film maker plays devil's advocate and adopts what seems to be an insane or perverse logic in order to make a larger point."
Moreover, it seems difficult to refute Ballard's allegation that we do not generally appear to regard the car as an appliance but as an extension of our self. It is not difficult to infer from that that our perceptions of the automobile are, in part at least, sexualised. One thinks of the morbid mythology surrounding the deaths of Jayne Mansfield and James Dean; both of whom might well have been utterly forgotten had they died in their sleep. More recently, much of the hysteria that the sudden demise of Diana created, a hysteria that seemed to have a great deal to do with how she died. One also thinks of the importance of the car to hollywood, and to such films as Mad Max. Such a critique might be more lucidly penned by the author in question:
"I've been in a car crash and it did nothing for my libido. What I was saying was that the idea of the car crash is sexually exciting or intriguing. By sex I mean all those aggressive sexual energies that impel some young men to chase women drivers who dare to overtake them."
House of Leaves by Mark Danielewski, has been compared by Bret Easton Ellis to the likes of Joyce and Ballard, but the closest comparison seems to me to be with Lawrence Sterne. Wolfgang Iser has made the same kinds of claim
for Tristram Shandy, that Danielewski's novel makes it for itself, whereby
the meaning of the text is something constructed by the reader. If anything, Danielewski overemphasises this point rather too much, and his novel starts
to seem formulaic (especially give the novel's sub-plot wherein a commentary of Heidegger's concept of the unheimlich postulates a particularly gothic interpretation on formalist ideas of defamiliarisation; an experience enforced on the reader through the concentric rings that make up the narration; firstly the recording of events by Zampano and their subsequent re-telling by another narrator, secondly the possibility that either narrator is unreliable and thirdly the labyrinthine amount of footnotes).
Both Tristram Shandy and House of Leaves approach this in a satirical fashion, and Danielewski includes a chapter wherein various luminaries, such as Douglas Hofstadter, Camille Paglia, and Jacques Derrida discuss the non-existent film that forms the meta-text of the novel. Although, the character given Paglia's name sounds rather more like Andrea Dworkin than the author of Sexual Personae, the author is nonetheless keen to ensure that her lampooned interview accurately depicts the relationship between the two main characters of the film. The problem with this meta-commentary is that it does leave the text as bing exclusively self-referential; enough to make one sympathetic to the ideas of the New Puritan Manifesto.
I've also recently watched Koyaanisquatsi, the collaboration between Philip Glass and Godfrey Reggio. The title is derived from Hopi, and signifies life out of balance, a reference to the concerns in the film that our existence is out of balance with nature, as the film progresses from images of nature to those of humanity. I still find it difficult to find this a particularly apposite description of the film. I have always shared WH Auden's view that factories and buildings were at least as beautiful as nature if not more so and this is certainly the case here, as the sun glints over the monolithic skyscrapers of Manhattan and a nuclear cloud rises above the Mojave desert.
More particularly, when the film shows time-lapse images of humans scurrying round like ants, it seems as much a commentary on stasis within change as the images of the sand blowing and continually resettling within the Sahara, a pattern continually subject to mutability and continually resettling itself.Labels: Ballard, Film, Literature, Music
posted by Richard 12:49 PM
Wednesday, October 31, 2001
I went to watch Brotherhood of the Wolf recently, and was suitably impressed. Amongst other things, the camera work is particularly original without having recourse to the more garish special effects available. Although the film is partly a measured disquisition on such themes as the atrocities committed by Europeans in America (although the enthusiasm displayed for American Indian culture is somewhat excessive) and the Enlightenment (although the suggestion that the Enlightenment was apparently synonymous with atheism seems somewhat misplaced), it also succeeds in a more visceral sense, in a way in which few English films can. The tendency in the English speaking world has been towards a somewhat postmodern style of allowing the genre to bring attention to itself, and which has consequently led to a degree of objectification that is essentially incompatible with the horror genre. One other aspect of the film that may prove attributable to its origins is its refusal to sanitise violence (as a consequence the film can be well described as gore-spattered) by airbrushing injury out altogether.
I also went to see Moulin Rouge. It's a somewhat interesting film, although given the somewhat traditional plot, one is left wondering what the exact reason for the anachronistic use of modern music in a turn of the century setting might be. This is not to say that the music is misplaced, the inclusion of Nirvana and Bowie is certainly aesthetically congruent with its surroundings, but it is to say that the Brechtian quality to it seems a little gratuitous. If anything the film makes less sense as a narrative than as a combination of the music and visual effects, a combination that appears to try for much of the time to bludgeon the senses; although it has to be observed that this does mean that the film tends to fade from memory somewhat quickly after you leave the cinema. One of the highlights of the film is undoubtedly Jim Broadbent's rendition of Madonna's Like a Virgin, a piece which admirably showcases Mr Broadbent's talents as one of our finest male impersonators.
Another recent viewing was Enigma, although I should perhaps note that having already visited Bletchley Park may well have given me somewhat of a head start on understanding the film. That said, the role of cryptography in the plot does save the film from what it might otherwise have become; a somewhat conventional thriller, mystery story and romance. Finally, it would be unfair not to note that John Barry's score for the film is certainly one of the best things he's done in years. On a rather less topical note, I've also watched A Clockwork Orange. I have to admit that I was not excessively impressed; Burgess originally chose Beethoven in the film so as to avoid the risk of pop culture references becoming dated (even if Elvis regrettably appears to be dating rather better than Beethoven). In this case, why did Kubrick feel it to be a good idea to use electronic versions of Beethoven's music that now sound horribly dated? Perhaps for the same reasons that he chose set and costumes that look as if they were on loan from some especially ghastly seventies BBC sitcom? It all sits very badly with the quite Shakespearean language (a somewhat vague analogy but it is the one that keeps on coming to mind, perhaps because of the books Burgess wrote on Shakespeare and Marlowe) and the otherwise impeccable acting of Malcolm McDowell.
It's also clear why Burgess disliked the film; the concept of the film as a Catholic morality play, hinging upon the idea of moral rehabilitation being worthless without the element of choice is made to compete with a set of alternative tenets; namely that the violence of the state is worse than that of the individual. In short, the Prison Priest is displaced as a moral figure in favour of a political satire (perhaps Kubrick should have chosen Enderby instead) directed at the Home Secretary. It's the sort of idea that worked well in Dr Strangelove, which, by being a much simpler film, acquired much more clarity. The complexity of A Clockwork Orange does make it more interesting but, by diluting any central message, also weakens the overall impact.Labels: Film
posted by Richard 12:55 PM
Monday, May 14, 2001
An interesting couple of weeks or so. Last week I went to a sushi bar in London. The most notable feature of this restaurant is that all the kitchen staff are in the centre of the room behind a conveyor belt upon which all of the small dishes of food are precariously balanced. Rescuing a plate as it sails past your elbow can be something of an art-form. The appearance of the bar is perhaps best described as conforming to the typically kitsch Japanese preference for the synthetic over the authentic (or the faked authentic, which might described many European restaurants). One of the more unusual features of the bar was that it had a pair of robotic drinks trolleys performing a circuit round the bar. In the event that anybody got in their way the trolleys would start to vociferously. Having been informed of this in advance, our party regarded it as a point of honour to obstruct the trolleys as much as possible in order to hear what they had to say. "Get out of my way. Honestly - some people," lisped one trolley in a voice that sounded disturbingly like a Japanese Kenneth Williams. Even more disturbing was the fact that the bar was loudly playing Abba and the Village People at the time.
Returning home quite late my arrival at the station was greeted by some football supporters starting a riot. My own view is that football simply lacks enough violence to satisfy the supporter's need for vicarious entertainment. It may well be time to reintroduce the eminently civilised practice of throwing christians to the lions - my suspicion is that crowd violence should drop dramatically in that event.
On a similar note, I recently happened to purchase some carnivorous plants.
The shop assistant looked at the Venus Fly Trap I had selected and asked
if it was a cactus. I politely explained what it was, observing the mortified expression on her face as I did so.
On that subject, a film once told us that you're nobody if you're not on television. Visiting my parents recently I was able to find a somewhat disturbing confirmation of this precept. We had gone for a stroll in a nearby nature reserve. As we walked back to our car, we saw them. At first I was unable to determine why this couple walking their dog looked so out of place. Then I realised: it was precisely their intention to look out of place. To be more specific, it was their intention to look exactly like David and Victoria Beckham. The overall effect was close enough to be somewhat unsettling, and we did wonder what was the appeal of two individuals who have always seemed to me the epitome of all that is insipid and banal.
More recently, I went to attend a live performance of Howard Shore's soundtrack for Naked Lunch, while the film itself was projected onto the screen above. In spite of his embarrassing involvement with Mrs Doubtfire, Shore is one of the few soundtrack composers of any merit (other examples perhaps being John Cale and the soundtrack for American Psycho), having first impressed himself upon me with Cronenberg's film of Crash. The idea of performing a film soundtrack is one that is rather more common with silent films, and it was somewhat difficult to avoid concentrating so much on the film (which, unsurprisingly, has far more to do with Cronenberg than with Burroughs) that one heard very little of the score. In the case
of this particular film, Shore's own rather brooding style sits uneasily
alongside the rather more violent jazz of Ornette Coleman (although the dissonance between the two is wholly appropriate for such a film).
posted by Richard 12:44 PM
