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.
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 count
