I tolerate this century, but I don't enjoy it.
All of the ephemera that is far too trivial to be bothered with elsewhere on this site or, depending on your point of view, a meta-commentary on it. This ephemera includes, but is not limited to art, music and literature. Most of the content here will be discussed in terms that are as abstract as possible, reality being a singularly overrated concept.
Friday, December 25, 2009
The year did not so much end as collapse, amidst scenes of the entire transport infrastructure failing. Viewed from inside, the weather was rather beautiful with the snow gleaming as the skies cleared and the sun shone. Viewed from outside, the affair looked like something from an apocalyptic science fiction film, with the blizzard reducing buildings to barely discernible grey silhouettes. It was probably quite appropriate that the BBC chose this year to broadcast a remake of Day of the Triffids (with The Road being released shortly, realism and science fiction seem to be enjoying something of a rapprochement). Finally arriving in the Midlands, I find the place shrouded in fog. Lichfield Cathedral looms out of the whiteness like some strange creation from a David Friedrich. Later after the snows had gone, I went to visit Waverley Abbey in Surrey; ironically one of the film locations for 28 Days Later. It certainly has a rather bereft feel to it. On the one hand, there are the ruins of the abbey itself, representing a destroyed part of society. On the other, there are the crumbling defensive formations from the second world war. The riverbank is lined with concrete dragon's teeth, smothered in moss while large redbrick pillboxes face towards the ruins, themselves buried in ivy.
Back in London, I'd revisited Apsley House. The enormous statue of Napoleon by Canova, wonderful as it may be, leaves me rather reminded of Soviet statues of Lenin and Stalin (Napoleon was at least rather embarrassed by it). The same applies to the nearby statues of Wellington himself, of course. We later visit the the new Medieval and Renaissance galleries at the V&A; things like Della Robbia lunettes, the Casa Maffi ceiling, the Hertogenbosch choirscreen, Paul Pindar's house, a Donatello influenced sarcophagus, Limoges cloisonne reliquaries and a French salt cellar shaped like a boat and made from a nautilus shell. I wonder somewhat as to how long it will be before we see anything else like this being opened, given the inevitable funding cuts coming this year. Later on, I visit the British Museum's Moctezuma exhibition. Not quite as impressive as the Royal Academy's Aztects exhibition of a few years ago, it was particularly noteworthy for showing Spanish paintings of Moctezuma and of the events ensuing from the arrival of Cortes, as well as showcasing a number of Mexeca codices and European histories. The problem is that while the exhibition painted a suitably vivid picture of the Mexeca themselves, much of the detail about Moctezuma himself is rather speculative. It's difficult to discern why he went from being a ruthless general to a craven appeaser of the Spanish invaders and conjecture that he was murdered by the Spanish rather than meeting his end at the hands of his own people does little to help matters. Equally, the attitude towards the Mexeca themselves is an ambivalent one; the post-colonial narrative of a people destroyed by a foreign occupation sits poorly with the fact that the Mexeca were essentially undone by an uprising of the peoples they had themselves oppressed (albeit an uprising orchestrated by the Spanish, who had lacked sufficient numbers otherwise even when their use of horses and guns were taken into account). Beautiful objects like the obsidian mirrors, feathered serpents and feathered fans are offset of stone eagles used to contain human hearts, turquoise skull masks, ceramics with flayed skull designs protruding or by stone skulls. The most impressive exhibit is a stone sculpture dedicated to warfare; rather resembling a throne it stood at the centre of the Reading Room, towering over everything else around it. I also briefly visited the National Gallery, mostly to look at Botticelli's Mystic Nativity; I rather decide I prefer his portraiture, but am rather impressed by some of Crivelli's works. The embedding of physical objects into the paintings seems to challenge the distinction of arts and crafts.
The protagonist of Roberto Bolano's 2666 takes his name from the Italian painter Arcimboldo, with a somewhat crude parallel between the composites that form a common figure in his paintings to the composite formed by the parallel narratives in the novel. The interesting point is whether the novel does actually form a composite at all, given its interest in the impenetrability of meaning, as with Amalfitanio's drawing of disgrams that he himself does not understand; "something the voice in the dream called 'history broken down' or 'history taken apart and put back together,' although clearly the reassembled history became something else." Where a novel like The Savage Detective revolved around the quest of its protagonists, 2666 has no centre as such. It simply guestures towards a figure of meaning lost in the distance ("No one pays attention to these killings, but the secret of the world is hidden in them."), veering between the idea of literature as a means of arresting death ("an old book is the past.. its author no longer exists") and the idea of writing as failing to transparently convey meaning. In this respect, it reminds me of the idea in Bayley's The Uses of Division that it is often the most flawed and imperfect works that have the greatest interest. Bolano seems to guesture in this direction when he makes Amalfitano think that a young pharmacist is; "afraid to take on the great, imperfect, torrential works... they choose the perfect exercises of the great masters." Certainly, Bolano's conception of the novel is one of enormity and polyphony, as when he describes a writer's prose; "encapsulates all of Chile's styles, it also represented all of its political factions."
While much of the narratives are conducted in a mode familiar from realist fiction, the preoccupation with science fiction in the final narrative suggests a wider set of preoccupations, particularly given that the reading of Boris Ansky's writing that represents a point of turning for Reiter. The novel persistently hints at Platonic or Kabbalistic concepts of the fantastic; "the search for some 'mysterious numbers' hidden in a part of the vast landscape." Similarly, Amalfitano believes that "when a person was in Barcelona , the people living and present in Bueons Aires and Mexico City didn't exist." Reiter becomes obsessed with the illusory nature of appearances, wondering if he and his friend Hugo had been the same person; "he began to think about semblance... semblance was an occupying force of reality" The idea of doubles recurs throughout; Hans and Hugo, Boris and Hans, Hans and Benno; "the Swabian was a grotesque double of Archimboldi, his twin, the negative image." Certainly, many of the characters seem to think the same thoughts and dream the same dreams. Archimboldi ponders alternate realities where either everything is static or where even the inanimate have velocity, just as Espinoza ponders a condition "as if they were living in a world different from ours, where speed was different, a kind of speed that looked to Espinoza like slowness, although he knew it was only the slowness that kept whoever watched from losing his mind." The characters are more symbolic creations here than in The Savage Detective, as with comparisons to Sisyphus or to Reiter's erasure of his old identity when be becomes Archimboldi.
Capote's Other Voices, Other Rooms is something of an odd anachronism. In contrast to The City and the Pillar, Giovanni's Room or even Maurice which all paint a gay identity we can still recognise today, the one shown by Capote harks back more to the sort of ideas found in the The Well of Loneliness. The ephebian protagonist Paul is mirrored on either side, in one instance by the tomboyish and obviously lesbian Idabel and on the other by the Wildean Randolph. Randolph embodies conventional gay stereotypes; an effeminate transvestite who pines for a brutal heterosexual lover. In choosing to love Randolph, Paul does suggest that gay love is possible and that gay men are not simply pitiable creatures doomed to look with longing on straight men, but the novel nonetheless works by subverting such stereotypes rather than reject them completely.
I recall it being observed that Ireland has Swift and Joyce while England had Eliot and Thackeray. The latter had a stable and autonomous society, the absence of which left the former needing a less realist style of narration. Something similar seems to apply to much Central European literature; the likes of Grabinski, Kafka and Schulz all sharing a penchant for the fantastic, with both Kafka and Schulz writing tales in which a character metamorphoses into an animal. Bakhtin's concept of carnival is perhaps useful here; Schulz's concept of fantasy is a rather materialist one ("the demiurge was in love with consummate, superb and complicated materials; we shall give priority to trash.") that is concerned about the alienation of the familiar rather than with the mythological of transcendental; "one's imagination, bewitched and misled, creates illusory maps of familiar districts." Nonetheless, Schulz opposes this concept materialistic fantasy to certain quotidian concepts; "the spirit of the times, the mechanism of economics, had not escaped our city... pseudo-Americanism, grafted on the old crumbling core of the city." As with Bakhtin's idea of carnival, Schulz's fantasy is an inversion of, or escape from, the normal order, as with the barrel organs that Schulz describes as "belonging by right to that dreaming, inward-looking day." Similarly, Roth's What I Saw: Reports From Berlin reads like an extended version of the Futurist Manifesto retold as a series of feuilletons; "I am filled with awe at the omnipotence of human technology." But at the same time, his technophilia is given some rather odd slants, as when he describes the invention of the airplane as the fraternisation of man and the birds. In his final essay, Roth speaks of how Jews had depicted Germany as it really is in their art while German writers had stuck to parochial ideas of pastoral. The point is well made but Roth is not exactly immune from romantic concepts of nature and his descriptions of Berlin's pleasure industry is replete with references to 'infernal machines' and 'industrialised merriment.'
Twilight and New Moon seem a rather odd addition to Vampire mythology.
Although much has been made of the fact that their author is a Mormon, with an analogy being drawn between the 'vegetarian vampires' and American ideas of sexual abstinence, the novel seems more confused than that. A lot of the novel's concepts seem more new age than christian, as with the vegetarianism concept or Edward's comment that they try not to impact on the environment with their hunting. Instead of a view of vampires as damned, the novels alternate between a view of them as being as capable of moral redemption as humans. The story of Carlisle's background typifies this; his father is described as the epitome of religious intolerance but the evil he believes in is frequently depicted as being real enough. Edward suggests that the same god could have made them as made both the lion and the lamb, a rather odd concept that suggests a god of evil as much as good. Edward believes they are soulless and damned, while Carlisle believes they are capable of redemption; both seem to believe in god, while Bella does not. It's a rather confused sort of theology, not really helped by the novel's rather rapacious materialism, with scores of enthused descriptions of the Cullen's designer clothes and expensive cars.Labels: England, Literature, London, Weather
posted by Richard 3:39 AM
Sunday, October 25, 2009
It's often easy to base artistic judgements against an illusory parallel with technological progress, so that modernist experimentation became the artistic standard par excellence of the twentieth century. Today we might well regard more atypical figures like Grossman or Shostakovich as being of equal or better merit to Schoenberg or Joyce. Similarly, the fact that the Pre-Raphaelites had reverted to a medievalistic conception of art as impressionism dawned in Europe or that Austen's novels were all written against the backdrop of early romanticism seems largely inconsequential. It was difficult not to think of things like this as I went round the National Gallery's exhibition of Spanish art. As with its earlier exhibition on Siennese art, the gallery seems keen to revive interest in minority subjects and this is a particularly acute example.
While medieval art routinely carved wooden sculptures for churches, the renaissance and reformation saw a trend towards carving statues from stone, leaving them unpainted in pure white, out of a mistaken notion that the Greeks and Romans had not painted their statues. In Spain though, the tradition of painting wooden sculpture continued unabated alongside increasingly realistic techniques of portrait painting. Paintings from the likes of Velasquez and Zurbaran deploy the same methods as Caravaggio and Veronese but retain all the hallmarks of artifice. Both painters add captions, writing and legends to their painters to destroy the impression of verisimilitude. Zurbaran tends to pose his things in stark white light against a dark black backdrop, as if the painting was a stage set. The sculptures seem eerily lifelike in comparison to Canova or Thorvaldsen, with eyelashes made out of hair, teeth from ivory and real clothing stiffened with glue used alongside glass eyes and tears. The sculptures would have had their clothing changed and be taken out for ceremonial processions; they were not simply static objects in galleries or museums. The rich detailing is often wonderful; the Virgin Mary by Montanes is a blaze of polychromatic colour. Equally though, the gory horror of some of the sculptures is frequently appalling; the severed neck of John the Baptist is rendered in anatomically correct detail while countless Christs are depicted in bathed in blood, their bodies pierced and lacerated. The images seen in glass cases below the altar in Catholic churches take centre stage here, like something from a casualty ward. Zurbaran's painting of St Serapion, who appears to be simply asleep comes as a relief from the horror. I leaving not doubting the artistic merit of the works but feeling glad their have been consigned as a historical relic and a matter of obscurity.
The logic behind the Royal Academy's exhibition on Epstein, Gaudier-Brzeska and Gill is presumably that of artistic parallels between three contemporaries, but it is somewhat difficult to leave the exhibition convinced that the three have a great deal in common. Gill and Epstein shared a notion of 'direct carving' but Gill's work seems more difficult to place, better connected to Blake and Palmer than Brancusi or Duchamp. The sexual politics of his work seem especially difficult to fathom; Ecstasy must have been one of the explicit paeans to sexual pleasure for thousands of years in Europe, but it sits alongside several Madonnas and Child. His religion and sexuality seem to combine in various odd ways; a shrivelled Christ on the cross was paired with a Earth mother figure that recalls his fecund Madonnas. Male submissiveness is frequently counterpointed to female dominance; he seems to have been less a Catholic and more a Mariolater. Something of the same sensibility certainly seem to apply to Epstein as well, but Rock Drill with its emphasis on aggressive male masculinity is quite unlike Gill, not to mention its adoption of readymades. Equally, his sculpture of Venus recalls the influence of African and North American art. Nonetheless, it's Gaudier-Brzeska that seems the more mainstream figure of the period (albeit perhaps a rather less interesting one), with the increasingly abstract nature of his sculpture and the influence of Vorticism, as well as the same African and North American influences.
Before leaving London, I visit the Barbican's conservatory. It's an odd place, a small jungle rising above the concrete walkways and towers, not least because the Barbican's concrete labyrinth applies every bit as much to the interior of the conservatory. With the concrete decayed under dripping water it looks like nothing so much as an enactment of Ballard's Drowned World. Bromeliads and Bougainvillea are in flower while Zebra finches sing in the aviary and alarmingly large carp splash in the pools.
Reading Zola's The Masterpiece is perhaps the reflexive of his novels, given the presence of himself and his circle of friends as characters. On the one hand, Sandoz proclaims that "this is the idea: to study man as he really is. Not this metaphysical marionette they've made us believe he is but the physiological human being determined by his surroundings" only to then undermine it with a lyrical hymn to the earth. The novel essentially proceeds as a critique of romanticism, as with Claude's tendency to undermine the naturalism of his paintings; "the old streak of romanticism.. the generation we belong to was brought up on romanticism, it soaked into us and we can do nothing about it." Equally though, the novel critiques the idea of a scientific basis for art itself, as with Claude's mistaken scientific theory of colours; "with characteristic over-indulgence he began to exaggerate the scientific theory of colours.. that way, it was obvious, madness lay.".Labels: Art, Literature, London
posted by Richard 1:01 PM
Sunday, August 16, 2009
The Proms this year began for me with a medley of Handel pieces. Given my previous exasperation with Handel's tendency to construct an entire aria around a libretto consisting of only one or two lines, I was impressed that Carolyn Sampson's acting managed to prevent too much boredom from seeping into the rendition of Semele. Unfortunately, the period organ wasn't working quite properly for the Organ Symphony. The text by Congreve proved rather too lascivious for Georgian tastes but works rather well now. This was followed by a late night Prom of music by Philip Glass. I rather liked the Violin Concerto but rather less so his Toltec Symphony. The recurring silences and crescendi work well, but there's something about the Carollesque libretto that rather offends me; I'd rather the choir had stuck to simple breathing sounds. Later weeks see more Handel performances, with an aria from Alcinia comparing favourably with Haydn's Scena di Berenice; as the soprano notes it's Handel's work that seems the more romantic and unrestrained. This is followed with another evening prom, this time with a performance by the Michael Nyman band. I've often felt that baroque music and minimalism have much in common, and Nyman's work stands in testament to that. With a live performance though, I'm astonished as to how raw and overwhelming it feels, as if it were jazz or even rock. The recordings of the performance don't quite seem to capture it. The following Celan Songs clearly seem to Nyman's answer to Adams and Harmonielehre.
This is then followed by a somewhat odd Prom, showcasing the work of Iannis Xenakis; Nomos Gamma and Ais. The former sees the arena of the Royal Albert Hall rearranged into segments divided between the orchestra and the audience. The idea is that the music is as spatial as temporal, with the experienced work depending on the position of the listener in the arena (in my case, right next to the percussion; the programme notes record how Xenakis was influenced by the sounds of warfare and student unrest but I may have received a somewhat excessively skewed version of that). It's an interesting idea, which means that the piece really has to be experienced rather than being listened to through a recording. I think a little of how much modern art is situational in this manner, as with art installations that depend heavily on the context in which they are viewed. Conversely, much modern music really has to be listened to, with certain recordings regarded by their creators as final and definitive. I'm less enamoured with Ais; the singer's low notes are convincing but his high notes sound like a musical form of drag that introduces a bathetic element into what is otherwise an impressive performance. I'm afraid I'm much more taken with the performance of Rachmaninov's Isle of the Dead.
Walking back the following week, I'm a little startled to see a green parrot eating at one of the feeders in Hyde Park and by how close it allows me to get. This time, I was going to see Beethoven's Fidelio. I hadn't known this before and can really only judge it by comparison with Wagner; Beethoven tends to prefer choral effects with several characters singing concurrently, as well as tending to repeat lines in the same way Handel does. It also seems to combine singspiel with drama (the former having been tampered with by Edward Said). The plot is also something of a hybrid, featuring a woman disguised as a man (since doing so allows her to accrue masculine virtues, which is presumably why the converse scenario is usually only used for comedy).
I come back later in the week for a tour of Somerset House. I've always thought the place was like a Piranesi drawing; all spiral staircases and strange moat-like gaps in the interior courtyard. The Nelson stairs prove to be modelled on a ships' prow as a sort of hybrid between a spiral staircase and a normal one. The moat proves to be a device to direct light down towards the lower offices while allowing access to the boiler rooms and coal stores. There's also the 'deadhouse,' a series of catholic tombstones (from Catherine of Braganza's retinue) moved from the Royal chapel when the palace was rebuilt. The tour ends at the location of the old watergate from before the embankment was constructed. The Courtauld institute has an exhibition on the Omega workshops, which proves quickly to be the Arts & Crafts movement shorn of its medievalism and with an interest in Matisse in its place. The works included range from rugs to wallpaper, screens and tables to clothes, including Gaudier-Brezska's marquetry and designs by Wyndham Lewis.
I then travel southward, finding the site of the Old Marshalsea prison next to St George the Martyr's churchyard. All that remains is an old wall in the overgrown park with its few remaining tombstones. Nearby is the Imperial War Museum, which I've wanted to visit on account of its art collection. The first world war section is dominated by Nevinson's mostly post-futurist works and works that continued in a Vorticist theme by Wyndham Lewis. Eric Ravilious accounts for some pieces depicting submarines and Epstein some bronze busts, but it's Nash's paintings of the Ypres salient and Menin road that are the clear highlight of the collection for me. Another annex houses Singer-Sergeant's Gassed; it's a touching work but the style and tinge of sentimentality make it seem quite foreign to the others, the product of a previous century. Something similar applies to Stanley Spencer's painting of the wounded at a dressing station; its implied christian themes seem obscenely inappropriate in such a context. The second world war section is perhaps less distinct, although many of the same names recur, with the addition of Bomberg's Bomb Store painting and Piper's depiction of a Bristol control room.
The following week leads me to visit Kensal Green Cemetery's open day, mostly so I can visit the chapel catacombs. The chapel itself is visibly crumbling away on the inside, with damp consuming the walls from within and the cornices having been eaten to nothing. The restored hydraulic catafalque (with swivel top for rotating coffins so that they are interred feet first) strikes a somewhat incongruous note as a result. The florescent lighting below seems both jarringly modern and quite appropriate, with it's harsh light casting sharp shadows. Light filters down through ceiling grilles as well, accounting for the odd presence of autumnal leaves below one's feet. There's enough light to dimly discern the rough shapes of the coffin behind rusted iron grilles but enough darkness to leave a certain sense of unease, particularly in cases where the outer wooden and velvet shells have corroded to nothing, leaving only lead boxes. Spelter (poor man's pewter) wreathes or mouldered velvet remain atop some coffins. I'd walked to the cemetery from Little Venice along the Grand Union canal. It occurs to me that Little Venice itself is misnamed; Little Amsterdam might have been a rather better soubriquet for its combination of Georgian houses and Victorian redbrick chapels. It's all too neat and mannered to compare to Venice's decayed Moorish gothic, which is not too say it's not rather beautiful. Venice also lacks the inevitable Ducks, Coots and Canada Geese. It also seems a counterfactual version of London as it might have been had the likes of the Walbrook and the Fleet not been entombed in concrete. The canal itself offers a form of social history, from the Georgian villas to the redbrick church of St Mary Magdalene through to pebble dash and modern wooden decking and metal balconies. Foremost amongst this historical panorama is Goldfinger's Trellick Tower. Approaching it beneath the concrete Westway, I see the tower reflected in the canal waters; a picturesque scene embodied in graffiti spattered concrete. A Moroccan garden has planted at the base of the tower; very beautiful if an example of a design aesthetic I can't see Goldfinger appreciating. Kensington Palace is an odd time capsule that combines tastes from William and Mary to Victoria. The Victorian rooms remain filled with domestic clutter, while Hannoverian inhabitants found the rather modest structure a little confining, with Kent adding elaborate trompe l'oeil effects to Wren's staircase and to the cupola room. Kent and Thornhill's painting sit alongside one another as do Kneller's portrait of Peter the Great with Van Dyck's painting of Charles the First.
Summer dwindles into autumn and Open House weekend comes once again. I start at St Mary Magdalene in Paddington. Like many of Street's churches it's rather dark on the interior, although I'm amused to see Saint Chad and Fridewide representing two of the cities I've lived in. I'm in time for a tour of the undercroft, a rather empty and dark space that was constructed using the same techniques as underground stations and looks like one; since burials had moved to the cemeteries by then there was no need for the church to have a crypt. The undercroft is solely for structural reasons relating to the steep ground the church was built on. Comper's chapel of Saint Sepulchre within the undercroft is quite spectacular though, with a blue and gold ceiling studded with stars and angels (albeit with much of the paint and plaster having flaked off) and a shrine to Saint Mary that features a tabernacle (a way of hiding the sacrament due to fear of riots against Anglo-Catholic churches such as this). Much of the carving is Flemish in source, apart from an oddly Botticelliesque representation of Saint Mary ascending to heaven. The chapel also possesses a rather bizarre 'doom' stained glass window showing the dead rising from their graves and demons with butterfly wings making off with sinners. After this, Hawksmoor's Christ Church seems preternatural in its ghostly whiteness and cavernous arches.
I walk onwards to Bishopsgate, where I finally succeeding in entering the old Turkish baths. Somewhat inevitably modelled on the Holy Sepulchre church in Jerusalem, I'm rather surprised as to how much space extends underground beneath this rather small and gaudy kiosk. I walk onwards again to St Helen's, a somewhat dowdy church in its structure but which retains scores of medieval monuments that predate the great fire. It's rather ramshackle design make it resemble any number of normal English country churches, making you recall how odd London's architecture is and how unlike the rest of the country. I rather like the monument to the Merchant Adventurer Martin Bond, showing him on campaign, seated in front of a tent and flanked by armed guards. I also rather like the church of Katherine Cree for similar reasons; a Jacobean church that survived the great fire, with a ceiling studded with heraldic crests and an odd gallimaufry of baroque memento mori and medieval alabaster monuments. My next church is St Mary Woolnoth; it's odd to see a church designed without any reference to ecclesiastical convention. The restrictions on the size of the land presumably forced Hawksmoor to build vertically rather than horizontally, with the rather small cubed interior dominated by the light pouring down from above. I briefly visit St Lawrence Jewry and St Mary-Le-Bow before finishing with Bodley's Holy Trinity in Kensington and Scott's chapel at King's College (a slightly Byzantine affair with wooden marquetry on the walls and painted red and gold pillars). The last thing I saw was the Apothecaries Hall, with its collection of Blue & white ceramic medicine jars (I like the one marked for absinthe), paintings of the armada and the glorious revolution. I also quite liked the society taking its emblem with Durer's mistaken depiction of a rhino as having a second horn on its back. The stained glass crests in the window include one of the Doctor who went on the 1953 Everest expedition.
Fourteen Byzantine Rulers by Psellus seems to inevitably invoke a comparison with Suetonius. It's certainly not a precise one; the events described in Suetonius occur over a longer timescale and with fewer rulers. Suetonius omits contemporary events (i.e. Hadrian's rule) while Psellus includes that of Michael Parapinaces. Suetonius was somewhat tabloid in style but wrote at a distance from the figures he depicts; Psellus repeatedly claims objectivity but was a pivotal figure in much of the narrative (indeed he was blamed by other historians for distracting Michael from the practical matter of government). Suetonius ends at the point the Roman Empire had reached its greatest extent, Psellus begins at that point. While the Byzantine court certainly appears riven with factions and plotting it should also be observed that few military coup d'etat's occur in the narrative, against the Suetonian depiction of what we would now refer to as a banana republic, with routine military takeovers, civil wars, as well as the reigns of Caligula and Nero that set a gold standard in debauchery that the Byzantines of this period appear to have been utterly unable to imitate.Some interesting distinctions from The Romans also appear; Psellus lauds the Greek practice of sharply dividing nobles and commoners, blaming the Roman habit for allowing barbarians to sit in the Senate. Psellus also utilises the Hellenic notion of fate, as a form of causality, even while noting such concepts to be denied in Christianity. Equally, he describes some forms of political violence as necessary in terms we might recognise from Machiavelli, while noting their abhorrence in christianity. More generally, Psellus does come over as a rather likeable figure in a way that is not the case for most Roman historians (Tacitus? Livy?), noting combinations of good and evil in his subjects in a way I hadn't expected from an early Christian writer.
As with most other ancient historians, Psellus tends to assume history to be the outcomes of individual decisions, typically those of Kings. By contrast, Gibbons approached many of the same subjects with a view of the wider ideological forces, if not a fully modern view of the interplay of economic and social factors. In particular, his description of Christianity's emphasis on individual virtue rather public valour, it's tendency towards generating sectarian conflict or the presence of Catharesque sects bent on acts of self-destruction also suggests Christianity as a contributing factor to the decline and fall of the Empire.
Saramago's Blindness is obviously reminiscent of Kafka; a series of events occur for which no explanation is provided but which nonetheless seem to represent some form of parable. As in Kafka, meaning is suggested but withheld; "it sounds like an allgeory, the eye that refuses to acknowledge its own absence." The description of a painting that seemed to fit the descriptions of all modes of art and which could not be identified due to the onset of the viewer's blindness is a case in point. Similarly, the leaving of a lock of hair on a doorhandle inverts a conventional symbol of death into one of life. Where many novels are narrated from a subjective first-person perspective, Blindness removes that perspective, relying instead on a clamour of voices lacking identity; "I am blind with your blindness." At points, it seems to represent an allegory of moral failure, as with the sighted Doctor's wife's declaration that "I shall never be free from this blindness... perhaps I'm the blindest of all" after sha killed a man. The blinding of the car thief seems to correlate with this, but the blinding of the Doctor and others is entirely devoid of pattern. The example of the prostitute;s concern for her parents points in an entirely different direction; " the existence of deep feelings... in the abundant cases of irregular conduct, especially in matters of public morality." Similarly, the church with the blinded statues of the saints is essentially suggest of universe lacking clear meanings and patterns, even as speeches proclaim all manner of divine causes for the blindness.
Nathaniel West's work has the same sort of focus on the material and the fantastic as Melville's; in The Dream Life of Balso Snell characters wonder around the interior of a body, telling stories that dwell on the grotesque; sexual arousal at hunchbacksor an accentuated senses of smell. One character notes that "I kill my body.. soon my body will be swollen and clumsy.. in my belly there is a tangled forest of arms and legs" when speaking of pregnancy. Sexual attraction is seen as a form of violence, with sex described as a sacrificial rite that leads to the penetration of Balso's body; "his body broke free... only to death can this release be likened." In Day of the Locust there's a similar emphasis, as with the cock fight or Homer watching lizards eat flies, but the depiction of Faye is equally congruent with the noir tradition of the femme fatale, with the novel emerging as a form of heterosexual Death in Venice. Glamour and disgust sit side by side. The introduction of the political creates what is especially odd about the novel, with one aspect of it being a critique of the American Dream, depicting wishes unfulfilled and the decline of the American Empire. It's like the idea of Meville writing a Steinbeckian novel, with it becoming difficult to be sure if the personal has been sublimated into the political or vice versa.Labels: Art, Literature, London
posted by Richard 10:57 AM
Monday, May 25, 2009
Gloucester struck me as one of those places that are too small to hide their contradictions. Firms of stockbrokers occupy buildings next to pound shops. Much of the town feels down at heel, with the inevitable display of decaying seventies shopping centres and boarded up windows, while the other half seems to thrive quite nicely with the influx of tourists, as a statue of Nerva announces the town's historical credentials. Even the sights to be visited are essentially divided between former docks and a cathedral that was once a Monastery. As a place, the layers of the past are evident, the contour of the present and future rather more difficult to discern.
Inevitably, it's the cathedral I'm most interested in. Whilst looking at the cathedral lantern, I notice something on the grass; shattered plaster adjoined to what seems to be the decapitated head of a pheasant. My initial suspicion was satanic rites, although the disappointing truth proved to be vandalism of the Motectum art installation by Elpida Hadzi-Vasileva, wherein casts of angels are painted and mounted with the heads of ducks and chickens. It's an interesting concepts; angels are almost invariably depicted with the features of humans and the wings of birds (i.e. peacock wings in medieval painting) and this concept neatly inverts that. The results rather remind me of Ernst.
The interior of the main cathedral nave is quite similar to Tewkesbury, with round Romanesque arches and thick pillars. By contrast, the quite and cloisters erupt into a frenzy of gothic, whose organic rather then geometric character reminds me of Geiger or Gaudi. The stained glass in the cloisters filters the air with polychromatic phovic clouds, creating a rather surreal effect. I mistake some of the glass for Burne Jones, with Christopher Whall being the actual artist; with the usual Minton tiling much evident, the Victorian presence at Gloucester is quite obvious, as with one of the side chapels decorated by Gambier Parry. Stained glass by Thomas Denny represents a small concession to modernity. The ambulatory design again recalls Tewkesbury, with the tombs of Osric of Mercia and Edward the Second. It's difficult not to feel sorry for Edward, exiled to a provincial tomb and denied Westminster.
Outside, I step through one of the cathedral close arches and find myself confronted with a gothic monument to a bishop burnt by Queen Mary and the church of St Mary de Lode. The inside of this feels rather empty, with the space formerly filled by box pews never really having been given a new task. It's the oldest church in the city (Roman mosaic is still visible in its foundations) the parish church at the time the cathedral was still a monastery, and the sanctuary still clearly shows its Norman design. I walk to the ruins of Greyfriars, dissolved in the reformation to leave only a set of skeletal arches. Blue irises flower in the churhyard alongside a modern set of carvings of the green man and the devil. I finally come to the docks, which remind me a little of East London or even parts of Copenhagen; the latter is more representative in that the buildings have been repurposed rather than demolished (there's even a small Mariner's chapel still), although you don't have to go too far along the canal to see derelict Victorian warehouses, with the paint peeling off the riverside columns and ghost signs imprinted on the brick. The buildings closer to the centre have inevitably become shopping centres or apartments.
The following day is taken by with a visit to Osterley Park, via Charles Holden's strangely monumental tube station with its constructivist tower. The park itself is rather beautiful, with pochards and mandarins swimming on the lake as swans and coots tend to their young. Lupins grow in gardens dotted with the customary follies. The house itself is a product of architectural nostalgia, a deliberate Tudor revival of a building constructed by Sir Thomas Gresham. The exterior combines Tudor ogee cupolas on redbrick towers with a Corinthian portico decorated by Sphinxes. By contrast, the Adam interior is uncompromisingly classicist, the Eating Room is decorated with pastoral scenes of Roman ruins, the staircase is decorated with a Ruebens fresco showing the glorification of the Duke of Buckingham, the Drawing Room ceiling is modelled on a Palmyran temple, via West Wycombe, while a Dressing Room feigns the appearance of Etruria. A tapestry room is perhaps rather more traditional; I'm amused by the incongruous presence of a badger. Guardi paintings of Venice hang on walls throughout; I'm quite struck by two Mother of Pearl Chinese ships, one with a dragon figurehead, the other with a phoenix (representing the Chinese Emperor and Empress respectively). The Chinese Emperor also features in a Gilray print showing a British emissary grovelling before him. The Prince of Wales and Sheridan also come in for attack, as does the King, shown as an Oriental potentate being resisted by the Duke of Wellington.
The following week is taken up with a return visit to Salisbury. I begin with the Church of St Thomas, which I'd missed on my previous visit; the interior is dominated by the largest surviving doom painting, although it also boasts a wooden Tudor memorial panel and a chapel painted with medieval murals and whose ceiling is decorated with wooden angels but which is otherwise filled with Georgian furniture. The nearby Poultry Cross is also surprisingly ornate, with a set of carved angels around the central column. The city museum also proves unexpectedly interesting with exhibits like stuffed Great Bustards, clay pipes decorated with images of the Great Exhibition, snuff boxes in the shape of coffins and funerary monuments dedicated to the memory of the rotten borough of Old Sarum, a Turner painting of Stonehenge, a set of Rex Whistler paintings of Wilton Hall, a giant puppet and hobby horse used for Tailor's Guild processions, a Roman mosaic, beaker people skeletons and Auroch horns. There's also a section dedicated to Pitt Rivers, including the usual wunderkammeresque items like a Dugong tooth, obsidian axes, Tibetan saddles and a skull measuring device. I had noticed several streams running through the city, but apparently it originally had several open water channels, like modern Freiburg, that were eventually closed for sanitary reasons. Inevitably, the cathedral is more familiar, but I note a few things like the modern font where water reaches a flat mirror-like surface before pouring off through four rivulets, a Sudanese Madonna and the Long Division sound installation, where fragments of slate with texts engraved are scattered throughout the cloister gardens as hidden speakers intone the words. Long Division begins as the clock chimes the hour and there follows a sequence of sixty hushed exchanges, timed to the divisions of the clock. The whispering phrases gather in intensity second by second, falling silent again at the start of each new minute.
In terms of reading, I had just finished reading Zweig's Beware of Pity. It's a book I have ambivalent feelings about; its focus on the idea of the feminine as a form of trap, a lure from masculine virtues, is one that disquiets me. Like Zola's Nana it sees the decadent forces that sap a state's fibre as being essentially female and bound in either case to lead to collapse. It's not difficult to read disability as a proxy for gender, a critique of Freud's Civilization and Its Discontents, where the elements conventionally identified with civilisation become feminine snares opposed to martial world of the regiment; "it's precisely on men like Kekesfalva, who have in the past been so energetic and ruthless that giving way to their feelings has such a grave effect." Nonetheless, the book is more subtle that this. If pity is often seen as a feminine virtue, Zweig draws a distinction between its soft, sentimental aspects and the harder aspects of self-sacrifice. The distinction means that the narrator is at once victim and criminal, hard and weak. Such distinctions are also essential to Nightwood by Djuna Barnes, where the opening sections are witness to a diatribe on the progressive decline of Western civilisation that goes a long way to explaining Eliot's interest in the novel. The depiction of Felix's Jewish roots in particular, shares Simone Weill's preoccupation with deracinement, the alienation of modernity. The Nightwood is essentially a state of moral reflexivity. Nonetheless, the depiction of the inverts that epitomise this condition is more dualistic than this would suggest; "What is this love we have for the invert... the girl lost, what is she but the Prince found?.. when a long lie comes up it is a beauty."
Italian Hours by Henry James offers a perspective on Italy that is quite familiar from Ruskin, one dwelling on the same history and architecture that the Futurists were later to demand the destruction of. James occasionally describes himself as a flaneur, a term Baudelaire had conceived of for an industrial city like Paris or London, but in many ways, James defines his observations against the present; "Venetian life, in the large old sense, has come to an end and the essential present character of the most melancholy of cities resides in its being the most beautiful of tombs... no young Sienese eye ever rests upon anything youthful... everything has passed its meridian." James writes that "the greater part of the life about you goes on in the streets" but in practice he tends not to dwell on streetlife as a subject; indeed, it is significant mostly by its absence. The only obvious exception is the documenting of a riot in Rome. There are other respects in which the Jamesian perspective is an odd one. Most obviously, although James gives up much of his descriptions to the subject of ecclesiastical architecture he doesn't have any great feeling for religion itself, as with the following description of a young priest; "though I wasn't enamoured of the carnival myself, his seemed a grim preference and his foreswearing of the world a terrible game." James repeatedly notes that Catholicism is a diminished force in Italy; "where you go in Italy you receive such intimations as this of the shrunked proportions of Catholicism and every church I have glanced it... has given me an almost pitying sense." James effectively sees the churches less as a part of any living religious life but as a set of melancholy deserted temples; ruins before the fact. When James does go out on the streets the results are often similar, as he laments the demise of picturesque traditional dress and complains of tourists who are there for exactly the same reasons that he is; "the place has passed so completely in the winter months into the hands of the barbarians... its most ardent life is that of the tourists." Where he does encounter modernity he does not greatly care for it; "of interesting architecture, fruit of the old idleness... Leghorn is singularly destitute."
Chekhov's short stories offer several variations on themes of rural virtue. Without a title depicts a simple story of the appeals of urban vice opposed to rural asceticism, while The Head Gardener's Tale satirises the very idea of pastoral virtue andThe Robbers shows the precise converse, a story of the appeal of rural vice against the tedium of bourgeois and urban virtue. Equally, one of the things that leaps out from Ginsberg's poetry is the internalised homophobia. Like Burroughs, Ginsberg lauds the queer lifestyle as a form of rebellion even as he uses terms like faries and fag.Labels: England, Literature, London
posted by Richard 10:20 AM
Sunday, March 8, 2009
For as long as I can remember, walking around the City of London at the weekend has been a disquieting experience. It's streets have invariably been deserted, its shops closed as if some great cataclysm had overtaken the city's inhabitants. At present, this sensation of the deserted city is exacerbated by the fact that many of the shops have not just shot for the weekend but have shut for good. The prospect of London as a skyscraper graveyard opens up before us.
One of the particular aspects of London that always unsettles me is its grafting of raw and cavernous concrete structures onto a medieval streetplan. The result is often claustrophobic and overwhelming at the same time. Nowhere is this more true than at the Barbican. Conceived of as an attempt to impose order on the unruly chaos of the London streets, the complex seems folded in on itself, hostile to stragers and resistant to their attempts to penetrate it. Pleasant gardens with fountains sit alongside concrete pillars encased in scaffolding. The reason for my visit is an exhibition about Le Corbusier; not my favourite architect by any means but one I still feel I should learn more about, if only in the interests of giving him a fair hearing before condemning him. Much of the initial exhibits reveal a puritanical classicist that is little removed from my prejudices, interested only in reducing items to their basic form rather than delighting in them. Initially a disciple of arts & crafts, his work was intended to adapt man to the machine age, hence his tendencies for 'garden city skyscrapers' and his willingness to co-operate with regimes from Moscow to Vichy and New York. Like Wren or Haussmann, his designs would have demolished and reconstructed almost entire cities. His painting, influenced by Leger and Picasso seems rather more of interest than his architecture. The later work perhaps seems of more interest, when his interest in 'type objects' gave way to an interest in found textures and the poetry of objects. The result was an emphasis on biomorphic, which at least softened the designs at Ronchamp and Chandigarh. The most interesting structure for me is easily the Philips Pavilion, constructed jointly with Xenakis and Varese. The exhibition shows the Daliesque video projected onto the pavilion walls, as it was lit up in different colours - the result must have been rather like a sixties happening. The building itself seems more reminiscent of Gaudi or Calatrava, in its use of hanging techniques that have only really become widely available through computer modelling. To me, it looks like a geometrical ribcage.
Later, I walk around the nearby areas of the city; the lost graveyards of St John Zacharay and St Anne & St Agnes, the Wax Chandler's unicorns, the ruins of London wall, the barber's herbal garden, the ruins of St Alphage, St Albans and the Pewterer's dragons. I'm pleased to note that St Giles Cripplegate is open; a rather austere post-war interior, interrupted by some surviving Baroque and Tudor monuments, as well as busts of Cromwell, Bunyan and Milton. I look at the heraldic crests on the walls for the Salters, Brewers, Cutlers, Wax Chandlers, the Stock Exchange, Chartered Institutes and so on. I wonder through Postman's Park, the Holborn Viaduct, the Prudential Assurance, St Luke's and find the interiors of St Mary-at-Hill and St Mary Pattens open.
I return the following week to go to Hampstead, a part of London that retains the winding roads of a village but also its appearance. One exception to this is 2 Willow Road, the former home of Erno Goldfinger. Goldfiner makes an interesting contrast to Le Corbusier, whose style of 'white box' architecture (typified in the mot too distant Isokon building) Goldfinger rather disdained, preferring instead a tradition of 'structural rationalism.' 2 Willow Road has many of the hallmarks of modernist design; much of the wall space is window and the base level is supported by concrete pillars. However, the building is designed in the same brick as the nearby Georgian houses, whose order and proportion Goldfinger professed to admire. For me at least, the result is rather nondescript combining some of the blander aspects of Georgian construction with the puritanical aspects of modernism. The interior is a little different though, not because of any difference in the design but in terms of it containing Goldfinger's art collection. For a house lacking any form of decoration it seems odd that the inside seems so cluttered, with very little space remaining on the walls, window sills and shelves. I'm struck by a Delaunay drawing of the Eiffel tower, a cubist interpretation that makes it look like a gothic cathedral, a large pebble painted by Ernst to transform nature into artifice, a wooden sculpture from Moore combining the soft curves of the wood with geometry of stringed lines, a Duchamp rotorelief, several Riley paintings, Man Ray photos, kinetic sculptures that use magnetism to attach rings to a surface but leaving them mobile, and corrugated triangles used to form a canvas that allow a work to be seen with different shapes or colours depending on whether one stands to the left or to the right. Ethnographic items line the window sills; African masks, Iranian pottery, skulls and so on.
I walk across the heath to meet a different view of classicism; Adam's Kenwood House. The grounds are dotted with sculpture; Hepworth's Monolith Empyrean and Moore's Two Piece Reclining Figure. As ever, I prefer the former, with its resemblance to a petrified figure. From the exterior, the fundamental design of Kenwood House is essentially conservative, a classical design used for thousands of facades. However, Adams has enlivened it with decorated reliefs in stucco; the delight in surface decoration seems very un-English when compared to the earlier Palladian styles or more austere approaches to classicism. This is particularly evident when one comes to the Library; the ceiling is decorated with frescos and the walls painted with blues, pinks and coated in gold. It comes perilously close to rococo, even with mirrors on the wall facing the window. A bust of Zeus-Ammon stands in residence. Other rooms have similar examples, as with a chinoiserie fireplace. Like Willow Road though, much of the interest derives from the art collection, much much of the emphasis being on Dutch art: a Cuyp painting of Dordrecht harbour, Van De Velde seascapes, a De Witte painting of a church interior, Ruisdael landscapes, a Rembrandt self portrait and Vermeer's Guitar Player. There's also an extensive collection of English art, with the set of sixteenth century paintings of the family especially striking, accompanied by assorted Gainsboroughs and Reynolds. Although some of Reynolds paintings of famous actresses in a variety of dramatic poses are rather diverting (for instance, one painting shows Emma Hamilton in one of her 'attitudes') I'm more taken with some of Guardi's Venetian scenes.
This is mirrored afterwards by a visit to South London and Nunhead Cemetery. In many ways the least interesting of the Victorian cemeteries I've visited, it lacks the famous or notorious internments of its Northern counterparts and mostly lacks their architectural flair too. One exception is a tomb modelled on the Lycian Payavan tomb from the British Museum; originally accompanied with two weeping statues destroyed in the war, it would fit better into Pere Lachaise. Nearby is a terracotta tomb equipped with romanesque designs that remind me of the Watts Chapel, although it would seem more likely to be by Henry Peto, given the resemblance to his Doulton and Tate tombs at West Norwood. Finally, there's an obelisk to the Scottish martyrs, political radicals exiled to Australia by Pitt. A cherry tree is in full blossom in one corner of the graveyard, framing a view of St Paul's, while a pair of green parrots chatter in the trees. At the centre of the cemetery lies the ruined Anglican chapel, an unusual octagonal structure whose interior was gutted by fire in the seventies. It seems to lack the faded grandeur of its counterpart at Abney Park though, the stabilisation and restoration work robbing it of decay's poetry.
The following week is taken with visit to some Oxfordshire villages. The church of St Mary at Kidlington is a typically English bricolage of styles; Baroque memento mori wall monuments, medieval stained glass, medieval tiles, Victorian stained glass, green man corbels. The nearby church at Hampton Poyle has an odd column showing medieval knights with linked hands forming a circle around the circumference of the column, several stone tomb effigies, a carved stone block with a hole for heart burials and Minton tiling. Finally, I go to the ruined village of Hampton Gay. Unlike Minster Lovell, the Jacobean manor here is a ruin in the true sense of the term. It is neither preserved nor maintained. Thick ivy vines prise mortar and stone apart, smothering the walls in a sea of dark green. Sheep wander through the door and out the other side. The church is small, with a somewhat misshapen wall monument and a carved wooden heraldic shield below the barrel organ.
At one point in Betjeman's Trains and Buttered Toast, Betjeman complains that Pugin and Morris were escapists and fantasists, their work being essentially analogous to stage scenery. It's a charge that could also be levelled at Betjeman himself, with his tendency to idealise picturesque country cottages whose lack of decent sanitation or heating he wasn't obliged to endure himself. It's a little tiring to continually read references to 'the slave state' as code for the welfare state, complainst about artistic types ruining rural towns, or to come across jokes about birch rods being the most suitable item to be included in a church children's corner. In his radio talks during the war, he advances christianity as an counter-balance to such progress myths as fascism or marxism (progressive committees and civil servants frequently seem placed in the same category as the Nazis as part of modern barbarism). For better or ill, his work is almost entirely insulated from the currents of modernity, preferring instead to dwell in a Burkean reverie upon the age of chivalry and wondering in his lecture on wartime reading whether the nation was not simply trying to escape into the past (never mind that these reveries had been denialist fantasies for Morris as much as Pugin in the context of a rapaciously commercial and industrial nation; much the same applies to today's idylls of smalltown Americana). In his lectures on Edwardian literature, Gissing is the only name to survive amidst a great mass of forgotten poetasters (Joyce is briefly referenced but the likes of Eliot and Woolf are entirely elided). Essays on such luminaries as Henry Newbolt, briefly reference Yeats in passing. I can't help but feel awkward in reading Betjeman. I don't share his Tory sympathies or his Anglican affiliation but I do mourn the apparent passing of English liberalism. His nostalgic conservatism could be aptly characterised as the English disease, the daydreams of a nation ill at ease with its present and with a glorious future firmly behind it. At the same time, it's difficult to feel that his complaints about modernist architecture weren't justified.
Mishima's Spring Snow is a novel that offers up a commentary on its own events in the form of the theories and reading of Honda, with their critique of Western ideas of free will and Meiji bourgeois decadence alike; "Europeans believe that a man like Napoleon can impose his will on history. We Japanese think the same of men like your grandfather... you have one characteristic that sets you apart: you have no trace of willpower." Honda limns a world where the age of glorious warfare ended with the Meiji restoration leading instead to an era of the wars of emotion are fought where Kiyoaki lives "in a world of feeling." Nonetheless, the novel seems to have an ambivalent attitude to such commentary. The depiction of Kiyoaki as infected with the effete degeneracy of ineffectual aristocrats like Ayakura, shows him as effeminate, emotionally unstable and lacking a true self (only wanting Satoko when it is forbidden having previously wanted to punish her for loving him). But equally, once his love for Satoko is declared, Linuma sees "a hidden determination that had never shown itself before." Similarly, his grandmother sees him as a true grandson of his warrior grandfather his disgrace; "how remarkable that this grandson, who seemed so effete at first glance, should have revived the spirit of that age." As such, Kiyoaki emerges as both heartless rake and lovelorn fool, just as women such as Satoko feature in the novel as both Kiyoaki's victim and glamourous but dangerous threats to the homosocial order ("a woman will destroy the friendship of men").Labels: Architecture, England, Literature, London
posted by Richard 2:29 PM
Saturday, November 22, 2008
I'm not often inclined to visit art installations, but Seizure by Roger Hiorns struck me as quite unusual. We're often taken with aspects of the chnaging seasons because of how they rewrite the world and change our vision of it; the land encased in snow, tree leaves becoming inflamed with burgundy and gold, the same trees bereft of those leaves and left skeletal. Something similar but rather more unnatural, is at work with Seizure; a derelict block of low-rise flats was filled with a heated solution of Copper Sulphate, drained, and then allowed to cool. The outcome of this process was to leave the walls, floor and ceiling encrusted with these crystals; a form of aleatoric art. On the outside, the houses are boarded up, paint peeling off their walls. Hiorns is interested in brutalist architecture, failed visions of a utopian future that carry 'the stain of life.' Entering inside, the crystals have covered almost everything, with mounds, troughs and puddles of copper sulphate solution forming a miniature terrain across the floor. In the darkness, the crystals covering the walls glitter. It all leaves me reminded of Ballard's The Crystal World.
Walking back, I notice Rodney Gordon's Faraday Memorial. I must have walked past this spot several times now without ever noticing it, which is odd as it is quite striking; a stainless steel exterior without windows that is identical on all four sides, only interrupted by a single door. The object houses a substation for the London Underground and is accordingly functional but does not obviously correlate to any established architectural norm. It must have looked quite futuristic when constructed in the sixties; but now its fate would seem to have become nondescript. Further to the south, I visit West Norwood cemetery on a frosty and cold day. It seems noteworthy for two particular reasons: firstly, its Greek orthodox section (mosaics are an especial feature here) and secondly, its terracotta tombs designed by Harold Peto for Doulton and Tate, with Venetian glass and elaborate corbels. Many of the tombs are rather ornate to the point of being rather kitsch in their demonstration of Victorian sentimentality. Nonetheless, much of the cemetery seems in rather poor repair; several of the tombs are broken, leaving the vaults beneath exposed. Equally, much of the place seems overgrown and wild; at one point I'm confronted by a fox who seems largely unconcerned by my presence. The entire remembrance garden is enclosed in scaffolding. Like Highgate, the Cemetery is on a hill from where the skyscrapers of the city can be seen glinting in the distance. Back in the city, the Guildhall has a small exhibition of GF Watt paintings from the closure of the Watts gallery for restoration. While much of Pre-Raphaelite art was meticulous in its presentation of detail, Watts tends to predate impressionist or even abstract modern art. Much of this stems from an idiosyncratic interpretation of Darwinism; like Pater, Watts was interested in flux and chaos and opposed religion to it as an idea of the transcendent rather than a dogma. As such, much of his work is allegorical but stemming from what is effectively a private mythology. Looking at some of the other paintings, I'm struck by the resemblance borne by one of Poynter's paintings of ancient Egypt to the Klenze paintings of Athens I saw in Munich.
I haven't visited Tate Modern's galleries since the collection was rehung according to artistic genre rather than theme, so I decided it would be worth completing the day by doing so. The first section is dedicated to abstract and expressionist art; I find myself especially impressed by the contrast between the likes of Rothko (a wonderful golden painting), Pollock and even Monet on the one hand, and a section dedicated to Viennese Actionism on the other, as with Hermann Nitsch's Poured Painting or Arnulf Rainer's Wine Crucifix where red paint like blood runs down the canvas. Lee Krasner's Gothic Landscape rather more resembles the Viennese paintings than the American ones. There was also an interesting contrast between Giacometti's statues with their Egyptian and African influences and David Smith's sculptures, welded farm art made from disused farm machinery. I'm also interested in the expressionist Brucke group and am somewhat surprised at having missed any of Karl Schmidt-Rottluff's paintings during my visits to Germany. The final room of interest contains Matissse's The Snail, Picasso's Goat's Skull, Bottle and Candle and Hepworth's Orpheus. The next collection of interest is surrealism. I can't deny that surrealism is by far and away the most interesting to me, presumably due to its close linkages with psychoanalysis and literature (although much of it is also concerned with painting as an equivalent to automatic writing, as with Miro or Calder's mobiles). The first room contains De Chirico's Uncertainty of the Poet before paintings by Magritte, Dali, Ernst, Tanguy and Tanning, but there are some unfamiliar works like Landscape from a Dream by Nash, Ibdes in Aragon by Masson, A Naturalist's Study by Roy, Variation on the Form of an Anchor by Hillier, Black Virtue by Matta or Fini's Little Hermit Sphinx. I pause for a while to watch Maya Deren's Meshes of the Afternoon and proceed upstairs to the next collection.
The next collection is Futurism, Cubism and Vorticism, beginning with Boccioni's Unique Forms of Continuity in Space. Unsurprisingly, much of this collection is taken up with Picasso, Severini, Balla, Lewis and Braque, but there are some surprising inclusions from Vanessa Bell, Christopher Richard Wynne Nevinson's A Star Shell and Fernand Leger. Much of this section is given up to more generally post-impressionist art; Mondrian's Sun, Church in Zeeland; Zoutelande Church Facade, Picasso's early Girl in a Chemise, Munch's The Sick Child, Matisse's Trivaux Pond as well as works by Cezanne and Bonnard. There's also a section on realist art; Meredith Frampton, Chagall and Derain. The final part is dedicated, rather oddly, to Soviet propaganda. Characterised by hero-worship and militarism it's not overly pleasant. The final collection is given up to abstract art and minimalism; Mondrian, Gabo, Brancusi, Helion, Malevich, and Kandinsky.
Travelling north, I go for a walk in the National Memorial Arboretum. I notice a nearby cottage with sheep and goats grazing in front of it as I walk alongside the river. There's a section I haven't seen before featuring replicas of various historical memorials; cairns, menhirs, roman gravestones, medieval memento mori, baroque cherubs, victorian angels and modern designs. The following day is taken up with a visit to Croxden Abbey, a ruin dissolved in the reformation. The building survives quite well; elaborate capitals remain on arches and tiles can still be seen on the floor. The line of the building is quite visible for the most part, such as the multiple side chapels on the main church building. I then make a return visit to Pugin's church at Cheadle, with its angels and seraphim on the altars, its encaustic floor tiles, and polychromatic tiles lining the walls. The day after that is mostly taken up with a visit to Ashby castle. The nearby church has an elaborate Elizabethan alabaster tomb from its founding family; part of it is still painted. The ruins themselves retain traces of the original ostentation, especially above the fireplaces. I recall the civil war tunnels from a childhood visit but am also impressed with the remains of the chapel, a set of iron gates barricading off the empty arches. Further down south, I visit Minster Lovell, another ruined mansion near Oxford, with a rather macabre 'Musgrave Ritual' story attached to it. The walls seem generally rather better preserved than those at Ashby, having been destroyed by entropy rather than by gunpowder; gargoyles and decorated arches survive. It's another rather dark day and the Windrush has flooded much of the ground.
Reading The Arabian Nights, it's easy to see why romantic writers were so taken with it; most obvious is the sense of irrational exoticism that appealed to the likes of Walpole and Beckford but also the sense of threat from forces beyond human comprehension that pervades the tales and the gothic novel alike. In a more philosophical context, romanticism fitful relationship with the transcendent dovetails neatly with the fatalism of the tales, whereby everything happens by the will of the divine. The tales are framed with a device of Scheherazade using her narration as a means of influence but frequently contain stories where the hero's fate has little to do with self determination and where the malfeasant are often rewarded as much as the virtuous. The tales have been made Muslim, but not with complete success, and not to the extent of excluding all the jinn, ghouls and other popular superstitions that canonical Islam disdains. They are localised in the great cities of the Arab golden age, fascinated by commodities and coined money, fabrics, scents, confectionery, guilds and crafts, but uncomfortable in the countryside and terrified of the open sea. The prudery and solemnity of Arab merchant life, the stately procession from shop to mosque to bath and back again, is subject to violent disruption by a flash of black eyes from behind a lattice or the sudden appearance of a demon. Reading Herodotus's Histories, I was struck that whereas much of Greek historical writing tends to centre around the Hellenic world and a Persian other (with open admiration for Sparta in the case of writers like Xenophon), Herodotus is as much an anthropologist as a historian and is as interested in foreign cultures as he is in events. If anything, Persia receives more attention that Greece even if events are told from a Hellenic perspective (as with the Persian debate over whether to accept democracy or autocracy).
Reading Willa Cather's The Troll Garden and Selected Stories is to proceed down a path that initially seems well travelled. The stories concern unfulfilled lives dwindling in the backwaters of the American mid west. In many respects, they resemble Hardy with their convergence of heredity and environment to crush their characters, especially in a story like Eric Hermannson's Soul: "a face that bore the stamp of Nature's eternal injustice... Cheat nature? Bah! One generation may do it, perhaps two, but the third.." The early stories accordingly make much of the Norwegian ancestry of many of the characters as much as the hardship of their existence eking a living out of the soil. Nonetheless, Cather is not much of either a pessimist or a moralist; her Emma Bovary in The Bohemian Girl or her Trenchard in On the Divide are able to find happiness while other characters in Eric Hermannson's Soul blame the "evil spirit" of the local gospel sect for condemning people to misery rather than any sense of ineluctable metaphysics doing so.
In the stories that make up The Troll Garden itself, matters prove more complicated, with the mismatch between the individual and the environment manifesting itself in more complicated ways; While some characters like Merrick thrive away from the Midwest, others like Katharine are only tormented by the memories of other places they are returned to it. A story like The Garden Lodge offers a parable of profligacy and prudence as equivalent roads to suffering. Nonetheless, many of which are not fully explained; for a realist writer Cather often tends to leave matters unsaid, to leave a figure in the carpet. The Sculptor's Funeral and A Death in the Desert furnish good examples, with the relationship between the sculptor and the lawyer left undefined, as is the nature of Roux's disgrace or the absent figure of Adriance Hilgarde for whom his brother serves as a proxy in Katharine's love (a modern sensibility would presume, not unreasonably, a homosexual interpretation in each of these cases, although the stories benefit from this lacuna). Other stories are more ineffable still; the epicentre of The Marriage of Phaedra is located in the speechless canvas of a painting while Paul's Case and A Wagner Matinee both dwell on the ineffable longings created from exposure of music, ranging from desire for a road not taken to crime and death. In Eliot's phrasing, Cather has withheld an objective correlative for these stories.
Reading Heidegger's Being and Time, I find myself most troubled by his continual emphasis on the importance of authenticity. Much of the text can be described as a phenomenological argument with Kant, replacing Kant's metaphysics with a materialist outlook derived from romantic thinking, stripping out the cartesian emphasis on the soul or the transcendential and replacing it with an emphasis on the throwness of being and the inseparability of being from the world. With that said, Heidegger's terminology often seems more religiose than Kant's, particularly so with the emphasis on the fallen nature of existence. Although Heidegger is clear that he is not equating inauthenticity with sinfulness, it seems difficult to avoid the equation, leaving the impression of secular theology rather than existentialism. Certainly, the use of the term differs greatly from equivalent concepts in other existentialist thinking, seeming to conflate Nietzsche's ressentiment (a critique of slave morality) and what Sartre would term bad faith (a refusal to accept freedom or moral agency). Heidegger both characterises being as being governed by care of conscience, thereby guesturing towards a Sartrean notion of social commitment, and as being at risk of falling into being overwhelmed by the the mass of humanity, thereby echoing Nietzschean concepts (e.g. "in utilising public means of transport and in making use of public sources of information such as the newspaper, every other is like the next...the real dictatorship of the 'they' is unfolded"). It's characteristic of Heidegger to collapse distinctions between opposing tendencies and to treat them as parts of a broader dialectic. Nonetheless, it still leaves me wondering how theese theories could be put into practice; many of Heidegger's philosophical themes—the overcoming of nihilism, the importance of rootedness, the need for decisive action—found vulgar echoes in Nazi thought. Faced with choices between the mass democracy of America and the collectivism of the Soviet Union, it seems little surprising that he found the Nazi emphasis on hero worship conducive to this thought. As he put it in his rectoral address: "the relentlessness of that spiritual mission that forces the destiny of the German people into the shape of its history... Does this essence have genuine strength to shape our existence?" The spiritual mission of the German people (again, note the reconstitution of religious terminology) under Nazism distinguished itself from the subjugation of Dasein under the domination of technology in communism or democracy, a process he termed 'forgetfulness of being' (Seinsvergessenheitct) in The Question Concerning Technology. One can, of course, read Heidegger's text more sympathetically than the biographical emphasis would seem to warrant; his comments on technology have an obvious force regarding the industrial nature of the holocaust and his criticism of inauthenticity could conceivably be applied to Nazism amongst other mass movements. Nonetheless, he seems a markedly more difficult figure to rehabilitate than Nietzsche.
The Tin Drum by Gunter Grass is one of the very few works of the modern era that could be labelled carnivalesque. In the Bakhtinian sense, the term denotes the anarchic and comic: fools become wise, kings become beggars; opposites are mingled. Throughout the novel, Grass establishes dichotomies only to overturn them: Oskar is identified first with Satan and then with Jesus, with Rasputin and Goethe as the twin poles of his reading matter. The narrator frequently refers to himself in the third person, further establishing a split within himself. Polyphony abounds, with the alternate narrators giving slightly different accounts of events to Oskar. It also dwells on the body and the material, as does Grass in his scatological descriptions of the infant christ's anatomy, in Oskar's deformity, in Oskar's refusal to believe in Jesus unless it can come alive and drum ("either he drums or is he is not a real jesus") or even in the horse's head filled with eels. The same applies to The Dog Years where one student of Heidegger buries "a real mount made of human bones under medieval allegories." With that said, Grass uses magical realism as a means of producing concrete synbols: the deformed dwarf, the black dog, worms, scarecrows (themselves emblematic of the Heideggerian distinction of being and emptiness at the same time they satirise Heidegger's endless metaphysical neologisms). Like Hasek's The Good Soldier Schweik, The Tin Drum also a picaresque novel, episodic and peripatetic by nature. The comparison with Hasek is a rather apt one: that novel is perhaps the closest to the The Tin Drum in many respects, with the exception that the humour of the earlier novel is univocal in its targets. Oskar almost epitomises the object of Nazi eugenics: deformed, Polish and an artist. His anarchism can also easily be construed as a form of resistance to fascist ideology, as with his disruption of a Nazi rally and equal disgust with the socialists and communists. Vaclav Havel once observed that; "We are the seekers of truth who fear those who claim to have found it." Similarly, the dichotomies of the novel represent a rejection of ideas of the absolute notions of truth that typically form the bedrock of totalitarianism; where "there is politics there is violence." Oskar is presented as free to "harmonize chaos and intoxicate reason," where the dichotomy of hero and villain is itself rejected. Where Schweik constantly acts to undermine authority, Oskar is the willing servant of the Nazis for much of the novel and leaves a trail of blood and destruction in his wake (the author's recently disclosed SS membership is rather obviously suggestive here). His drumming seems the perfect allegory of a world where all values had already been inverted and insanity reigned. It does raise the question as to whether carnival is an entirely effective mode of opposing totalitarianism; it may not be enough to overturn all values when the oppressors have already done that.
The addition of a modern soundtrack by Michael Nyman does little to efface the comparison, but I couldn't help comparing Vertov's Man with a Movie Camera to Koyaanisqatsi; both eschew narrative in favour of disconnected images, both are concerned with the relation of man and technology, albeit the former glorifies it as the latter reviles it. In both cases, the absence of a controlling structure leaves the interpretation decidedly open ended. Reggio's cinematography of gleaming skyscrapers is quite beautiful, Vertov's vision of dehumanised man as a machine (with factory workers showed beaming in the midst of their drudgery) is rather horrifying. Inevitably, Vertov's depiction of everydaylife dwells on certain aspects; the interest in speed and technology (cars, planes, motorbikes, trains and trams all feature) recalls while Marinetti while the interest in the athletic physique recalls Reifenstahl. The scenes in the beerhall introduce the only permissible element of decadence amongst the rather interminable wholesomeness of the images of work and play. The composite of scenes from Moscow, Kiev and Odessa forges the idea of a single Soviet identity. What's most interesting about Vertov is the rather postmodern self-referentiality of the film - the framing of it within a cinema, the repeated shots of the lens or of the cameraman; this diary of a cameraman is a film about the making of a film.
posted by Richard 11:22 AM
Sunday, September 21, 2008
I visited Bevis Marks Synagogue a few years ago as part of Open House weekend and in the meantime I had acquired a rather long list of otherwise closed places I wanted to visit this year. So, I started with GE Street's design for Law Courts on the Strand. One enters into a great hall that, unsurprisingly for Victorian architecture, is rather reminiscent of a cathedral (Street had left one pillar deliberately unfinished, a notion like a deliberate error being introduced into Turkish carpets), only much more empty and stark, lacking pews and only decorated with the occasional bust or painting. To each side stairways lead into a labyrinthine series of courtrooms and corridors, some of the lower ones rather resembling crypts. Only one room is at all ornate; unsurprisingly it is called the Painted Room. I follow this by walking along Fleet Street until I come to the Daily Express. While its vitrolite and glass exterior has a certain cold elegance to it, it's difficult not to see it as the progenitor of scores of more utilitarian modernist structures. The interior lobby is rather more what one expects of art nouveau though; all gilded in silver, with Indian styled reliefs, curved patterns on the floor and swirling spiral staircases.
I then walk to Westminster and visit Scott and Wyatt's foreign office. Scott had originally wanted to construct the building in gothic, but had been overruled by Palmerston. It's rather difficult not to imagine Scott scowling at having to design a classicist structure (albeit one where some of the corridors rather resemble St Pancras and the cupola of the grand staircase has a somewhat Byzantine feel). A lot of the rooms, such as Wyatt's Durbar Court or the Muse's Staircase, is wonderful, but much of it also looks as if it could have been designed at any point in a period covering around three hundred years. It seems to lack individuality. Finally on that day, I visit Holy Trinity in Kensington. This is another building I had walked past many times without seeing the interior. As it proves this is one of Bodley's later works, but with an especially ornate set of gold reredos and stained glass windows.
The following day begins with a more straightforward means of following my visit to Bevis Marks; by travelling to Lauderdale and New West End Synagogues. Both Victorian redbrick affairs, the former is a domed structure in Maida Vale, with a light green interior illuminated by bright stained glass decorated with natural patterns and dominated by dark wood furnishings. The latter is close by to the Orthodox cathedral and rather resembles it in many ways; although the ceiling is in plain white the design is essentially Moorish with the lower area decorated in marble and gold. Walking back, I briefly enter St Matthew's church, a Victorian gothic affair with Burne Jones style reliefs, side chapels with ceilings painted blue and a black and gold studded nave ceiling.
I then travel to Westminster and enter Westminster Hall. I'm rather reminded of the Tithe barn I'd seen at Great Coxwell; although this is more ornate the cultural continuity between these two different buildings seems enormous. Stone kings line up on the walls, wooden angels line the ceiling while the floor is annotated with notes concerning the trial of King Charles, Monarchs lying in state or the trial of Warren Hastings. The end of the hall leads to a long corridor that serves as an entrance to the Victorian Houses of Parliament; Minton tiling, statues of figures like Pitt, Fox and Clarendon, paintings of scenes from British history (a Jacobean ambassador visiting India, Elizabeth and Drake) mosaics of St Stephen. It's probably a lapse of taste but I can't help preferring Victorian gothic to its medieval counterpart. Finally, I visit the Inns of Court where I find the Temple Church open for the first time. As one would expect the interior is a mongrel of styles. The round section is entered by a Romanesque arch into an area dominated by Templar graves. Romanesque designs in the Triforium are followed by gothic arches and gargoyles below, including a figure whose face is being attacked by an animal. The font is also typically Romanesque, with various animals and mythological scenes shown on it. This section leads through to a gothic chancel, which still retains various Tudor and baroque monuments. Although the Victorian restoration has not survived, the bright blue modern stained glass is rather striking. Nearby, the Middle Temple Hall is also open; a dark hammer beamed ceiling above white walls and paintings of monarchs from Elizabeth to Anne. Much of the Elizabethan carving remains, with figures guarding the entrance ways.
A few weeks later, I travel to Hackney to visit Abney Park Cemetery. I rather like the Egyptian revival gates that Pugin so disapproved of, although the interior of the cemetery lacks any similar monuments and is mostly rather more restrained. The place is surprisingly bustling with people walking their dogs, assorted youths, vagrants and cruising men. As a nondenominational cemetery Abney Park was not set aside solely for cemetery use by Act of Parliament, and was not formally consecrated as burial land. Perhaps more so than any other it was entitled to be considered as a park as well as a cemetery; Abney Park was unique in being the first arboretum to be combined with a cemetery in Europe. I find myself amused by a squirrel frozen on the side of a tree trunk with a large nut in its mouth, presumably in the hope that it would not be observed. Falling leaves gently stray to the ground, like snow blowing in the wind. The most striking thing is the ruined chapel that sits at the very centre of the cemetery. The rose window at the front is a shattered hole partially covered by wooden boards, like a smashed eye. The front is covered in dead ivy above locked gates that allow one to see the derelict interior with another shattered oculus at the apex of a decaying arch, but not to gain access. I note that someone has written 'watch your skin peel' on the walls. Conversely, one can walk into the interior of the towers and see to the summit, past wooden boarding and cracks in the walls. The nearby grounds are a mixture of war memorials and statues in honour of the non-comformists who were the first to be interred here.
It's often been observed that counterfactuals are a politically confused genre. On the one hand, they tend to be predicated on a whiggish view of history, presenting alternative histories where the course of events has been deformed from how it should have progressed. On the other, they tend to assume that history is not so much born of deep social causes as hinging upon the actions of a few individuals. Philip Roth's The Plot Against America is very much a specimen of these contradictions; the narrative had history derailed by Roosevelt's defect at the hands of Charles Lindbergh, of progressive forces routed by reactionary opposition. At the same time, the narrative essentially hinges upon Walter Winchell's assassination, precipitating as it does the demise of the Lindbergh administration. While much of the narrative is told from the viewpoint of one Jewish family, Roth seems to struggle to achieve a consistent view of history; although much of the text depicts mass riots, other parts describe American fascism as an a temporary aberration, the result of a blackmail plot against Lindbergh's son. Conversely, Michael Chabon's The Yiddish Policemen's Union manages to present a counterfactual that eschews any discussion of why this history differs from our own; Israel's settlers were massacred and the Soviet Union never existed and that is all there is to it. Chabon appears ambivalent at the prospect of a world without Israel; the novel is highly critical of Zionism but also depicts the Jewish homeland of Sitka in Alaska as a miserable backwater. There's no definitive sense of what the 'right' version of history might be; perhaps that's why the novel is rather more successful than Roth's at establishing the actions of his characters as meaningful and significant rather than historical ephemera.
Reading Hofmannstahl's short stories, I noticed that his characters frequently have epiphanic moments of revelation (where "I saw all of existence as one unity. The mental world did not seem to me to be opposed to the physical"), but which often prove to lead only to disaster. Finally, in The Lord Chandos Letter language itself denatures; "abstract words.. disintegrated in my mouth like rotten mushrooms." Hofmannstahl comes over as a thwarted platonist, raising the spectre of the infinite only to dismiss it. Something similar seems to apply to Andrei Biely's St Petersburg, a novel that is ostensibly concerned with the acts of terrorism in Tsarist Russia that were leading to the Russian revolution. The theme is misleading as the narrative tends to approach events symbolically rather than through the lens of historical realism. Instead of social tensions, events are depicted through a set of chiastic oppositions; reason and unreason, occidental and oriental (at times it reads more like Sax Rohmer than Conrad's The Secret Agent). St Petersburg is at once a real city with places that can be found on the map and also a Escheresque labyrinth made unreal by mists ("he wondered as in a dream about the relation of appearance to reality"); the geometry of the enlightenment reverts to the swamp that lies beneath it. Unsurprisingly, the mutability of language emerges as a recurrent theme; "my words get entangled... a modernist would call it the sensation of the abyss and search for an image."
I was surprised by Kangaroo; there's a markedly dialogic element in all of Lawrence's work but it seems markedly stronger here than elsewhere, with the novel almost forming a debate between Lawrence and Frieda, between differing aspects of Lawrence's personality. As Harriet waspishly puts it; "I've seen you fiddling away hard enough many times.. why, what do you do, all your life, but fiddle some tune or other?" At the heart of this debate is Lawrence's division between the normal self and their central absolute self, a state from which women like Harriet are barred; "in short, he was to be the Lord and Master and she was the humble slave.. she was to believe in his vision of a land beyond this charted world.. and she just couldn't." The novel deconstructs Somers' vision in several ways; by his arguments with Harriet, with Kangaroo and with himself. For example; "Him, a Lord and Master!.. he was the most forlorn and isolated creature in the world.. so isolated he was barely a man at all." And later; "the bulk of mankind haven't got any central selves. They're all bits." A central part of Lawrence's absolute self is the implicit theme of Lawrence's repressed homosexuality, a theme that is disturbed by Kangaroo conceiving of it simply as conventional love rather than as worship of Lawrence's dark god; "he half-wanted to commit himself to this whole affection with a friend, a comrade, a mate. And then, in the last issue, he didn't want it at all... all his life, he had cherished a beloved ideal of friendship - David and Jonathan... it took Lovat Somers some time to admit and accept this fact." Kangaroo responds in exactly the same terms; "the perfect love that men may have for one another" but Somers can no more respond to him in this way than he can to Harriet - he is too isolate; "I don't want to love anybody... Somers would never be pals with any man. It wasn't in his nature."
The same sort of issues manifest themselves in the novel's social concerns and its depiction of Australia; "some men must live by this unremitting inwardness.. they must not let the rush of the world's outwardness sweep them away." As far as the normal social self is concerned Australia is in many respects the model of Lawerence's vision; as far as his absolute self is concerned, quite the converse. The novel begins with Lawerence praising the inhibited, Whitmanesque character of Australian life; "like a full river of life... for the first time felt himself immersed a real democracy," only to promptly retract it; "and this was what Richard Lovat Somers could not stand... you admit the necessity for rule... the colonies make for outwardness. Everything is outward, like hollow stalks of corn" At this point and beyond, the novel leaves the point open; "Richard was wrong... you can get on for quite a long time without rule.. is it merely running down? Aah, questions!" Hence the novel ends with Somers unable to give himself to Australia or anything else; "you won't give in to women.. you wouldn't give in to Kangaroo. You won't give in to Labour or socialism." Lawrence talks of his worship of the dark god as taking men "nearer the magic of the animal world," a state that the inaptly named Kangaroo finds absurd. But in practice, Lawrence is revolted by the 'unthinking masses;' "the masses are always strictly non-mental... this is the state where they society, tribe, herd degenerates into mobs... the disintegration of the social mankind... a herding together like dumb cattle, a promiscuity like slovenly animals." All of a sudden, the magic of the animal world seems tenuous. Mobs are seen as weak souls lacking direction and discipline, hence Lawrence's attraction to Kangaroo's fascism (and the various anti-semitic comments in the book, not lease making the fascist leader a Jew); society can only exist as a hierarchy.
In common with figures like De Sade, Bacon was the type of artist who cannot exist without a contrary that defined him. In his case, this meant all that was theological, transcendent and metaphysical. Perhaps this is why his is an art of pastiche, taking Velasquez's painting of Pope Innocent and counterpointing it to the dying nurse in Eisenstein, or recycling imagery from Michaelangelo, Van Gogh landscapes, Physique Pictoral, war photography and counterpointing it to images of the crucifixion. Conversely, although his art frequently cited literary sources, such as Eliot, he disavowed narrative in favour of sensation; "Some paint comes across directly on to the nervous system, other paint tells you the story in a long diatribe through the brain." Throughout he is a materialist, obsessed with the sexual and the decomposing body alike but depicting it in the terms of religious iconography. The current exhibition at the Tate dwells on his paintings of man and animal alike, showing both in terms of their ravening maw; a form of Darwinian iconography. This is followed by the figures in his 'space frames,' constructs that recall prisons or zoo cages. In each case, the features of the face and any sense of individuality are effaced. The focus on the individual in isolation recalls Hopper and could well be interpreted as a commentary on a pre-Wolfenden society, but the screaming faces has more in common with horror film imagery than Hopper's poignancy. The images of entwined figures leave it impossible to tell if the two male figures are lovers or wrestlers, emblems of violence or death. In the same way, his crucifixion scenes clearly guesture towards Nazi concentration camps or simple charnel houses, but conjoin this with religious imagery. Flesh melts in the same way it seems to in Dali. I'm left feeling reminded of Helene Cixous's rather simplified observations about Western culture being characterised by a set of dichotomies between male and female, eros and thanatos, sacred and profane and so on. Bacon's work could easily be construed as a riposte that seeks to take these chiastic oppositions and blur them.
At the same time, the other Tate gallery is holding an exhibition dedicated to Rothko. The two artists could not be more dissimilar; more essentially programmatic, the other abstract to the point of constantly having to defend himself against accusations of simply being a decorative artist. Most of the paintings here do not even have titles. On the one hand, Rothko withdrew his paintings from appearing in the context of the Seagram building's restaurant, preferring instead the environment of the Rothko chapel. Pollock's epic canvases are horizontal, like cinema screens. Rothko's - such as Number 10, 1950, which once belonged to the architect Philip Johnson - are vertical, like skyscrapers. He was also particularly interested in the hanging of his paintings and of how the size of the canvas affected the space (arguing that a small work is dominated by the viewer, while a large canvas dominates the viewer). On the other, the octagonal design of this structure uses no conventional religious design and the paintings do not correspond to any religious symbolism. There is no content, only layers of closely related colours; greys and blacks, purples and maroons, browns and greys, blacks and blacks.
During the 1960s, Rothko's paintings become poised between the materiality of their surfaces and forms, and the emergence of an image, even if it is an image of nothingness, or an image denied: a blank black screen, or a simple near-horizontal division which we unavoidably see as a horizon, between grey and brown, or black and grey. Rothko believed that all serious art was about death and sought to pursue what he called the 'tragic.' Hence his paintings, appear with frame-like forms painted over bloody depths, as if the canvases were windows or portals. The Rothko chapel utilises doorways that lead nowhere, that evoke the closed doors at the corners of Michelangelo's New Sacristy at San Lorenzo in Florence; Michelangelo similarly used sealed doors and sealed windows for one reason: to suggest death.Labels: Architecture, Art, Literature, London
posted by Richard 11:14 AM
Sunday, August 31, 2008
I was interested to hear of an open day at Battersea Power Station this weekend and accordingly found myself walking from Vauxhall station through an industrial maze of walls in an largely forgotten part of London. The open day proves to be organised by a group proposing a redevelopment of the site. The plans entail building a largely glass ecodome next to the power station, surmounted by a chimney tower that acts as a flue for the heated air from the dome, thereby obviating the need for heating systems. Looking at the enormous glass structure dwarfing the power station, I find myself unkindly reminded of Speer's plans for the new Berlin, whereby the Great Hall dwarfed the nearby Reichstag (another derelict at the time). The plans seem very laudable, with proposals for water recycling, green roofs, sustainable power generation, although given the current economic and political climate I'm inclined to be cynical as to their prospects. Looking at the CGI realisations of the power station, it all seems rather kitsch with a glass roof covering the inner courtyards; the same rather bizarre postmodern quality Gilbert Scott's other power station at Bankside now has.
I have, of course, come for the ruin rather than the plans though. Here again, I'm reminded of Speer and his theory of ruin value. Gilbert Scott's buildings do have a certain streamlined elegance to them but are still hardly especially enthralling. Nonetheless, their scale does mean they are well suited to becoming a ruin; place them in another context and they become an exercise in kitsch (even as power stations they must have been a little bizarre). I find myself thinking of the recent observation from Jonathan Meades that the English prefer prettiness to the sublime, raw and dramatic. Given that the sublime was a quasi-religious concept that sought to awe and crush the individual ego (a tactic well employed in the construction of cathedrals), it's difficult to see a secular role for the sublime, but in ruins it can certainly still have such a purpose. Perhaps modernism, with its futurist aspirations, was always especially predisposed to ruin value. With all this in mind, I walk across a large wasteland overgrown with weeds to the site. With one of the towers partially sheathed in scaffolding, its broken windows, the skeletal walls with their holes and breakages, it does look like some image of a ruined cathedral. The interior is green and pleasant with birds flying past the still tiled walls. Metal girders still stand, but rusted and increasingly seeming more part of nature than a work of construction. Some of the station machinery still remains, such as two rusted cranes standing motionless nearby. In many respects, it seems a terrible pity to 'regenerate' this.
I walk back along the river to Battersea Park and across the Albert Bridge to the Chelsea Embankment with its redbrick and terracotta buildings. I wanted to see the Royal Chelsea Hospital and walk past an obelisk in the front lawn, past the golden statue of Charles the Second, through its colonnades and into its dining hall. From there, I journey onwards to the city and spend some time visiting some of Wren's churches; St Benet, St James Garlickhythe, St Michael Paternoster and the ruined St Mary Somerset.
The evening is occupied with a visit to the Globe theatre, where Timon of Athens is being performed. I had never visited the Globe as a 'groundling' before and accordingly decide to do so on this occasion, ending up with a space immediately before the stage. This does have the advantage of better enabling you to experience the play as something happening around you rather than a passive experience watched from afar (the conventional theatre layout is after all essentially the precursor to the television screen). Characters enter and exit from the front of the stage, walking through the audience. In this production, a net has been draped over the roof space, enabling some rather acrobatic actors to leap down and retreat back up their ropes to the ceiling again. Dressed in black as crows with the sound of drums in the background, the production acquires something of an Aeschylean quality, with the Furies ever overhead. The play itself does a great deal to reinforce my conviction that one of Shakespeare's central facets is the destruction of moral and metaphysical certainties in the reformation. In many respects, the play is quite carnivalesque, dealing with the world turned upside down and scatological humour, but carnival's inversions are temporary and ultimately reinforce the status quo, whereas there is little that is regenerative here; the world remains upside down. Tragedy in the customary Shakespearian sense is a requital for some form of sin, with the downfall serving as a form of atonement; again there is none of that here. Timon could be viewed as a voluptuary whose downfall is linked to his excesses (something played up in the presentation of the banquet as a debauched orgy here), but it's more probable that his sin would be excessive generosity (while the callousness of the Athenians is left unpunished when Alcibiades spares them). In other plays, the malcontent is linked to the figure of the overreacher, but here it is linked to the figure of the hermit. In several respects, the Timon of the second half is pursuing the conventional course of the christian saint in his renunciation of the world and rejection of Apemantus and his rather more practical calls for moderation. The play dresses Timon solely in a loin cloth at this point, effectively comparing him to christ. In other words, it amounts to a critique of aspects of christian (and perhaps specifically Catholic) morality.
Reading Hugo's Les Miserables, it occurs to me that this is a good illustation of the novel not so much as a bourgeois epic (though that might be the case) as a liberal epic. Much of the protracted exposition serves to allow Hugo to navigate between positions of different extremes, much of the odd juxtapositions in the plot allowing him to reconcile contradictory positions (as with the eventual reconcilation of Marius and his father or of Javert not arresting Valjean). His attitude towards religion is a good example, with the early sections establishing the bishop as a model of morality and piety, only to introduce the episode of unction being administered to a dying jacobin who resolutely clings to principles of fighting for rights and opposing tyranny and has no interest in the last rites; "the Bishop went home deeply absorbed in thought.. threw him into a strange reverie." Conversely, the Bishop had previously decried the Voltairean ideas of another character. As the text notes, Valjean is saved by two houses of god at two critical points in his life. Later, we find Hugo proclaiming that Voltaire would have defended christ and that "the religious idea is undergoing a crisis. We are unlearning certain things, and we do well, provided that while we unlearn one thing we are learning another." Later, Voltaire's work is "sacred" with Hugo blaming misinterpreation; introducing, as he often does a mid-position. The same applies to politics, where Hugo complains that communism starves the means of production, but denounces the inability to distribute wealth effectively or to bring light to the lower orders. On the one hand, the gamin is essentially a form of noble savage, on the other many of the denizens of the underworld, like Thenardier, appear simply as intrinsically evil (in this, Hugo bears a marked resemblance to Dickens). In one instance, Hugo is a utopian and treats such characters as venerable heroes, on the other he decries the destructive effects of their violent heroism, with the French revolution characterised as an act of god. Later, this heroism has become the heroism of monsters.
Reading Egil's Saga it's interesting to note the divergences between the christian guilt culture (Egil often appears bellicose and underhanded) and the pagan shame culture (he is lauded as a great warrior), perhaps explaining something of his status as an anomaly in the text; poet, warrior, sorcerer, healer. I also find myself wondering if Iceland was not to medieval Scandinavia what Australia and America later were to Europe; a place of exile cum penal colony.Labels: Literature, London, Ruins
posted by Richard 5:12 AM
Sunday, June 15, 2008
Orientalism is an exhibition at the Tate dedicated to European painting of the Middle East, one of the latest in a quite long series of exhibitions at various London institutions dealing with the Middle East. The first room announces that the theme is rather predictably inspired by Edward Said, although it admits that Said has become a controversial figure. This seems a pity, as much of the exhibition does go a long way to undermining Said's case. It shows paintings by people who had effectively gone native, were motivated by mysticism or who were opposed to imperialism or who were simply motivated by a love of the exotic. Although Said's case that the West depicted the Orient as a decadent, barbaric other (as in Byron's poetry) is validated to some extent (as with the many pictures of the harem or slave market, although it's interesting to note that a French painting is the only one to explicitly sexualise the slaves, to the apparent disapproval of a British Empire that was banning such practices), he fails to perceive that as nineteenth century civilisation grew increasingly grey and industrialised, its writers and artists increasingly sought refuge in their own medieval past or in other places unpolluted by modernity. Ruskin sought this in Venice, the likes of Wilkie and Holman Hunt in the Orient. With the ruins of Rome already excavated and familiar, novelty dictated that the ruins of Egypt and Jordan were the next to be discovered. Equally, if the West was decadent, much of the appeal was that Westerners wanted to lose their inhibitions. Figures like Lewis and Leighton often came to show Western figures in Oriental settings.
The exhibition begins with portraiture; the daughter of English merchants who had grown up in Turkey shown in Western dress, the painter John Frederick Lewis depicting himself as a carpet seller in the bazaar, figures like Holman Hunt and Wortley Montagu in Eastern clothing. The depiction of Islam by Lewis is especially sympathetic, with his paintings showing himself at prayer in the Mosque. I'm interested in Wilkie's portrait of the Ottoman Sultan, shown in mostly Westernised dress. It seems to be forgotten that cultural interchange worked both ways, with foreigners dressing as Arabs and vice versa; again, Said's account assumes that orientalism can only be an imperialist ploy rather than a form of cultural exchange; the most clearly imperial portrait here, of Napoleon in Egypt, is notable for the stark contrast between the Eastern setting and the Western attire of the dictator. Something similar is at work in the painting of European explorers, dressed in Roman togas, rediscovering the ruins of Petra with their Arab guides. The nearest there is to a validation of Said's theories is an Augustus John painting of TE Lawrence in Bedouin clothes, although Lawrence was a poor sort of imperialist at best.
The later paintings move onto the subject of religion. During the course of the nineteenth century, wealthy westerners financed the establishment of Jewish homes and collective farms in Jerusalem, which accordingly grew more and more Judaicised. Figures like Holman Hunt grew increasingly interested in Judaism, leading to support for the establishment of a Jewish homeland. His painting of The Scapegoat combines both Christian and Jewish themes, although much of his painting of Jersualem and its churches is more straightforwardly christian. It has to be said that the most interesting paintings (and some of the most numerous) in the exhibition are of architecture and landscapes though. For instance, Lord Leighton's paintings of Algiers and Damascus, Frederick Lewis depicting the bazaars of Cairo, Edward Lear's view of Constantinople from a cypress filled cemetery or the pyramids from a tree lined avenue, Holman Hunt showing the pyramids reflected in the Nile (he didn't care for them much and managed to make them look like Silbury Hill) David Robert's depiction of the ruins of Petra, Baalbec, Philae and Karnak. Judging from this, it's very clear that both Lear and Roberts are very much underrated as artists.
As an exhibition, there's more cultural and historical interest than artistic here. None of the paintings are poor but few are masterpieces. To take a few that stood out, there's Stanley Spencer's paintings of mosques in Sarajevo, Bomberg's modernist painting of Jerusalem, Dadd's strange concatenation of Bedouin tribes and Roman soldiers into a strangely symmetrical painting an allegory whose meaning is forever lost. Before, I leave I take the opportunity to have a look at The Sleep of Arthur in Avalon. It fills an entire wall of the gallery and is easily the finest masterpiece that I saw that day. It's a pity I'll probably never see it again.
Like Said's Magnum Opus, John Berger's Ways of Seeing is an interesting text, if not one I can bring myself to entirely agree with. The second section discusses the history of the nude, with its tendency to depict women as passive objects of the male gaze. It's difficult not to sympathise with much of this argument (especially that non-Western traditions have not focussed exclusively on the passive image of a woman), but it still seems rather limited. The nude in the likes of Cranach or Titian heralds the vanquishing of the medieval prohibition of sexuality, a reawakening of the sensual and physical (it's interesting to note that there's absolutely no discussion of the role of religion in Western art in Berger). A figure like the Rokeby Venus, as Camille Paglia might argue, surely has its own power and is difficult to solely characterise as passive. More generally, Berger's argument seems to have been undone by the passage of time and the increased sexualisation of the male body; Germaine Greer is surely right to argue that women, as much as heterosexual men, have a right to this form of visual pleasure.
The third section is probably the one I most agree with. Berger argues that the physicality of oil painting was ideal both for the depiction of material objects, whether still lives or other forms of property (e.g. land in Constable or animals in Stubbs) and for the establishment of the oil painting as a form of property in its own right. Berger counterposes this to the ethereal figures in Blake's engravings. Berger does deal with an aspect of the Western tradition I have little liking of here, but it seems a little strained all the same; I can't say I would swap the physicality of a Vermeer with its pleasure in the physical world for a medieval triptych especially gladly. Equally, given the prominence of the romantic depiction of nature from Rosa and Ruisdael to Holman Hunt and David Friedrich, the argument that nature is not present except as property seems frankly ludicrous.
The final section deals with the transition from oil painting to colour photography in advertising, from the wealth and status of the elite to the promotion of wealth and status to the lower echelons. The argument is a familiar one, revolving around the role of advertising in manufacturing false wants by associating certain products with sexuality or status. I tend to suspect that this argument requires one to accept the Marxist idea of false consciousness (as Popper pointed out a mechanism that simply dismisses any obstacle to Marx's account of social history as being an aberration); Berger certainly speaks of advertising as a form of force rather than a form of consent.
By contrast, Susan Sontag's On Photography is considerably more appealing to me. Noting that a photograph is essentially an accidental and serendipitous combination of how light interacts with chemicals, Sontag sees it as a way of seizing aspects of the world than a composed artform. Sontag accordingly disdains the rigid compositions of Weston in favour of Atget's more disorderly 'captures.' Where Berger's approach is Marxist, Sontag sees photography's overthrow of the distinction between high and low art as being essentially akin to surrealism. The only problem is one of period. Digital photography is rather less accidental than the film cameras Sontag was writing about. Techniques like high dynamic range photography or photoshop manipulation mean that photography becomes rather more akin to painting, which Sontag had seen as imitating photography. Of course, there's also a movement towards using older cameras, even pinhole ones, although the element of 'historical slumming' to this often seems a counterpart to more modern ways of aestheticising photographs, even to the extent of photoshopping marks and flaws onto the image.
Donald Richie's Japan Journals rather reminded me of Forster's accounts of Italy, Ozpotek's Turkey or the North Africa of Bowles, Burroughs and Orton. It's an odd sub-genre whereby the Western gay male looks for sexual liberation in a culture that lacks Western moral inhibitions or the mechanised and staid nature of Western society. In a lot of cases, the culture in question was a patriarchal one where homosexuality could be hidden within broader homosocial social structures. It's also a partly obsolescent sub-genre given that moral inhibitions are now more likely to be considerably stronger in Tangiers than in London. Perhaps, this is as well given the connotations of imperialism and economic exploitation in it alongside the escape from Western mores. "You seem to have deserted Japan in favour of the Third World," a friend tells him as his attentions turn from the Japanese to immigrant workers. "It was not I that deserted Japan," he writes, "but Japan that deserted the Third World . . . It was the Third World in Japan that so appealed to lubricious me, and now that Japan is more First World than even the USA, the appeal is no longer there. That makes me that figure of fun, the garden-variety colonial imperialistic predator." As Japan westernises, Richie begins peevish complaints against the ignorance of sexual indifference of Japanese youth, with friends departing for less affluent Thailand.
In this context, Japan is an odd example, having gone from being a traditional patriarchal society to a modern Westernised society where Richie documents the rise of women's rights. While Japan lacked the traditional opprobrium directed against homosexuality in the West, it nonetheless remains more conservative than a modern Western society. Richie is suspicious of the elevation of sexual preference to a component of social identity but there is something rather tragic in an existence of cruising and losing his lovers to marriage (Mishima's widow and children living in permanent denial as to his homosexuality). On the one hand, Richie documents the role of the transvestite performer in Japanese theatre, festivals undertaken by mostly nude men, fishermen who worked nude, carpenter's dancing women's dances and on the other he documents Yukio Mishima's hyper-masculinised identity and his identification with western classicism and the figure of Saint Sebastian in preference to Japanese models. Richie notes that "a dandy, far from being the individual eccentric he is often though to be, is really a strict conformist.. the dandy is no rebel, and no true reformer or renegade was ever a dandy. Maybe that is why society is no tolerant of dandies." However, Richie elsewhere notes that the bricolage Mishima constructed his identity from is that of the Western rebel, as with Brando. The version of homosexuality preferred in Japan is an unthreatening one that hardly seemed to fit Mishima's identity, leading to him becoming more conformist and conservative than Japanese society itself (Richie notes that Mishima's suicide says nothing about contemporary Japan). Mishima is reminiscent of nothing so much as a Tom of Finland cartoon. Richie's position in Japan is that of gaijin but notes that Japanese society would otherwise be far more oppressive than that of the society he had fled. Richie repeatedly decries the conformity of Japanese society, its absence of intellectuals or individuals. Nonetheless, his attitudes to sexuality belong to the age of Proust and Forster who only seemed capable of finding stronger heterosexual men arousing.
Reading Soseki's I am a Cat it occurs to me that Soseki is veering between two extremes. On the one hand, his feline protagonist serves to dismiss all humans as vicious and depraved. On the other, his principal human character serves to dismiss westernising tendencies in Japan. The two are linked by being increasingly marginalised voices (the cat describes his master as being superior to his fellows by being weka minded, just as he is described as a runt in comparison to all the other cats he knows) but they only intersect at certain points. For example, Sneaze is told that "the ways of our ancestors are much wiser and more effective than the ways of Europe.. the craving for satisfaction remains unrealised, the quest for the ideal eternally unrealised." This advice comes from a character dismissed as nearly insane and dangerous and Sneaze is ridiculed for his adoption of this viewpoint. Sneaze eventually seems to agree with his cat by dismissing all of his friends as lunatic, irrespective of their philosophical views. Nonetheless, this does not stop Soseki ending the novel with the theme of suicide as a harbinger of increased westernisation; "this overweening consciousness of self never lets up.. word such as serenity and self composure have become no more than so many meaningless strokes of a writing brush."
Viridiana surprised me as a film. Having seen An Andalusian Dog, The Golden Age and The Exterminating Angel before I was expecting something more self consciously surreal. Although the symmetry of its structure and some of its allegorical references are clear enough, it's still essentially cast in a realist vein. I found myself frequenting comparing it The Exterminating Angel where the bourgeoisie are trapped at their dinner party as an act of metaphysical revenge in the class war. Here, the film ends with Viridiana playing cards with the wealthy land owner, her project to house the poor having miserably failed. The dinner party here as the paupers invade the house is almost a parody of its counterpart in The Exterminating Angel.
I've often thought that authors like Sterne, Voltaire and Diderot are the nearest approximation to the modern playfulness of authors like Perec, Nabokov and Calvino. Reading Diderot's Rameau's Nephew reminded me rather of Mandeville's Fable of the Bees or The Beggar's Opera; in satirising modern vices they also implicitly undermine modern ideas of virtue. Diderot's habit is persistently to make a statement and then undermine, as with his disingenuous endorsement of Rameau; "the famous musician who has delivered us from the plainsong of Lully, who has written so many unintelligible visions.. not a word of which he or anyone else has understood." The narrator frequently denounces his interlocutor, but only to receive the response that he is the rule not the exception; "there's nothing degrading in doing the same as everyone else. I didn't invent them and I should be incompetent if I didn't conform... a thief happy to be among wealthy thieves." Instead the emphasis shifts from personal to public vice; "what a bloody awful economy, some men with bursting stomachs others clamour with hunger."Labels: Art, Film, Japan, Literature, London
posted by Richard 12:56 PM
Sunday, February 10, 2008
Departing for London one morning, I found myself waiting for a train on a rural train station platform. It was a misty morning and I could see my breath curl into white patterns suspended in the air. The grey shadow of the church spire in the distance seemed to be floating aloft in the air, the mist divorcing it from the ground. Train lines disappear into the mist as they proceed beneath a bridge crossing the tracks. As I arrive in London, the mists gradually dissipate and the warmth of London's climate leads to a pleasant summer-like day in the middle of February. Crocuses and Daffodils are starting to come into flower.
I begin by walking through Islington to the Estorick Collection. I pass the church of St Mary, with its baroque tower, classical portico and strange modernist baroque interior with its Egyptianate columns. Further along lies the Union Chapel, an eruption of redbrick gothic amidst rows of dun coloured Georgian terraces. The collection itself lies on a rather nondescript square adjacent to an old Tudor tower. The contents remind me of the Guggenheim in Venice, with its Chiricos, Severinis and Boccionis. More prototypical futurist works are represented by Boccioni's Modern Idol, Russolo's Music, Carra's Leaving the Theatre and Severini's The Boulevard and Cubist Still Life. Some of the most interesting exhibits are the more conventional, as with the neo-impressionist Balla's Portrait of Carlo Fontana as opposed to his futurist Hand of the Violinist with its Bergsonesque interpretation of time. I have to admit that the further the painters deviated from futurism tenets, the more I warmed to them, especially Campigli's Etruscan influenced works, Modigliani's African-influenced portraits, Chirico's metaphysical Revolt of the Sage and Guttuso's Marxist polemic Death of a Hero.
Travelling southwards, I pass by St John the Evangelist, a Georgian Waterloo church before proceeding to Southwark. I look in Pugin's Catholic cathedral with its gleaming white arches contrasting with its mundane exterior, the ruins of Christchurch and the peace garden at the Imperial War Museum with its iron mandala, circula dharma pattern, earth, air, water and fire sculptures and language pillar with inscriptions in Tibetan, English, Chinese and Hindi. There's also a collection of the thirty four trees that colonised Britain after the ice age; Whitebeam and Pussy Willow, for example. Squirrels chase one another in the park. The day concludes with a trip to the Coliseum's performance of The Mikado. I don't particularly care for Gilbert and Sullivan but I suppose it was an pleasant enough diversion. The stage was distorted with slanted floors leading to trompe l'oeil rooms further back. Everything, from a giant gramophone to a pot plant is in bleached white. The singers appear dressed as if at a European spa in the nineteen thirties, making lines like "we are gentleman of Japan" sound rather odd, but in spite of the idea that this is Gilbert's best researched and most realistic opera, the engagement with Japanese culture is superficial, restricted to one song. Stripped of the costume, the opera works rather better in a European context; the satire directed against Pooh-bar applies well to Britain's rather nepotistic political culture. The result looks more like Jeeves and Wooster, with Richard Stuart's Ko-Ko rather resembling Terry Thomas. The lyrics to I've Got a Little List had been customised for the occasion, referring to the Archbishop of Canterbury and our dear leader, Prudence Brown.
Returning the following week, I briefly visit Butterfield's All Saints on Margaret Street, with its red and black bricks, tapering spire and an opulent interior with its tiles, mosaics and gilding. I also pass by the Georgian church of St George, Immaculate Conception on Farm Street and the Americana represented by the Grosvenor Chapel. Tracing my route back, I arrive at Piccadilly. There's something a little forced about the From Russia exhibition at the Royal Academy, with its attempt to yoke a disparate set of paintings loaned from the Hermitage and Tretyakov galleries into a cohesive whole. The just so story used to achieve this is one of the influence of French art on Russian painting. The exhibition begins with discussing how both French and Russian art in the late nineteenth century turned away from mythical subjects towards naturalism (just at the same point as the Pre-Raphaelites retreated from the industrial age into legend and myth), as with Repin's oddly Renoiresque Manifesto of October 17th, 1905. The likes of Camille Corot influenced landscape painting, as with Isaak Levitan (Chekhov's favourite artist) hauntingly empty After the Rain. The Russian pastoralism is rather more ideological than simply picturesque though as with Repin's Leo Tolstoy Barefoot, showing the Count dressed as a pesant or Nesterov's mystical landscape showing the murdered Tsarevich Demetrius (a painting disturbingly reminiscent of Holman Hunt's painting of the infant christ). This is then followed by showing French works purchased by Russian collectors; the pastoral theme being reciprocated with Monet's The Pond at Montgeron, Haystack at Giverny and Poppy Field and Cezanne's Mont Sainte-Victoire (at least one of the later Russian paintings could almost be taken for a Cezanne reproduction), Gauguin's Vairaumati Tei Oa (Her Name is Vairaumati) and Landscape with Peacocks.
From this point, the narrative becomes more diffuse, with the introduction of works like Manet's In the Bar, Renoir's In the Garden. Tatlin visited Picasso, Alexandra Exter worked with Leger, Chagall settled in Paris - giving new protein to French painting. And with the arrival of Diaghilev, Leon Bakst and the Ballets Russes, Paris became enamoured of all things Russian. The 1910 Jack of Diamonds show had exhibited Ivan Mashkov's Self Portrait with Pyotr Konchalovsky, a parody of Cezanne's Girl at the Piano, replacing the two girls with the artists as strongmen, playing Spanish popular tunes rather than Wagner. Simultaneously, the French started to go east, literally in the case of Matisse who was stunned by the candlelit icons in Orthodox churches. The most prominent works of the exhibition include Picasso's The Dryad and Farm Woman (Bust) (I can never really like Picasso after his Cubist phase and tend to prefer a nearby Braque painting; Picasso seems too intent on dehumanising, on decomposing individuals into objects) and Matisse's The Dance and The Red Room (Harmony in Red). The former almost has the quality of a graphic design to it in its simplicity, although the latter seemed the more engaging to me with its innocuous domestic setting conflicting with the riotous patterning and an inset view of the green wilds that's rather reminiscent of Velasquez. Fauvism was to become a critical influence on Russian neo-primitivism, with Vlaminck's Stream, Rousseau's The Muse Inspiring the Poet and Derain also represented (though I find myself preferring his later De Chiricoesque The Old Town Cognes) alongside Van Gogh's Portait of Dr Felix Rey.
The Russian response to this is interesting, taking French ideas and incorporating them into the context of orthodox iconography and folk art. While Picasso drew inspiration from Oceanic and African art, Goncharova and a number of her contemporaries formed a group who looked to folk art, peasant carvings and street signs. Picasso's massive Farm Woman, resembling a Moai or totem, speaks to Natalia Goncharov's Pillars of Salt, taking the Biblical scene and applying it to the context of folk Baba images. From the Union of Youth group, David Burlyuk's Portrait of Vasily Kamensky is essentially a secularised icon, with painters like Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin having originally been trained as icon painters (an icon of the Madonna is indeed included as his response to the first world war, alongside his Matisse influenced The Bath of the Horse). Chagall's work also dwells on subjects both Russian and Jewish, as in The Red Jew. Nonetheless, some of the most interesting work is more directly influenced, as with Altman's Cubist Portrait of Anna Akhmatova (alhtough something about the colouring and the use of modern techniques in a conventional manner reminded me of Lempicka). Alexandra Exter's Still Life, Filonov's crystalline painting of war and Nadezhda Udaltsova's City at Night are a distinctly Russian synthesis of Cubism and Futurism. Much more individual and unusual are Kandinsky's Winter and Composition VIII, followed by Malevich and his Suprematist trinity of Black Cross, Black Circle and Black Square, as well as other works that could easily sit alongside the likes of Mondrian.
Predictably, there are also some more odd and awkward works. Bakst's conventional Portrait of Sergei Diaghilev with his nanny introduces a room filled with works like Vrubel's symbolist Six Winged Seraph, landscapes by Diaghilev's set painter Roerich and Boris Grigoriev's portrait of the theatre director Vsevolod Meyerhold showing him as both clown and impresario. A couple of Cezannesque paintings like Fish Seller are included by Tatlin, before showing one of his constructivist sculptures, Corner Counter Relief with its echoes of Duchamp, and a model of his proposed tower with its grim forecast of art becoming subservient to the state.
I completed my visit to modern painting exhibitions with Tate Britain's exhibition on the Camden Town Group. Passing first by Westminster Cathedral, I felt that it would be ideal if the building is never finished; it's present state of sepulchral gloom being far preferable to the prospect of it glittering with gold mosaic. I hadn't really noticed the Eric Gill Stations of the Cross before. The Camden Town Group represented a kind of kitchen sink avant gardism (I'm not using the term lightly; Spencer Gore and Harold Gilman did both paint their kitchens). Once one removes social realism, the group fractures into a different styles, with the older Sickert influenced by Whistler and Degas in the midst of a group that favoured Van Gogh (transparently so in Gilman's painting of a Norwegian canal bridge), Cezanne and Gauguin, albeit at time when Kokoschka and Beckmann might have been better models. It's a particularly literary form of painting that rather looks like a visual representation of Hangover Square or Keep the Aspidistra Flying (if not The Forsyte Saga and Anna of the Five Towns. Their social realism often has something rather anitquated about it, as with Robert Bevan's paintings of the London horse cabs in contrast to Ginner's juxtaposition of flower girls in Piccadilly with the taxis and buses rushing past. Sickert's Gallery of the Old Mogul and Drummond's In the Cinema engage with cinema but the music hall and the circus were nonetheless the preferred venues for the group, along with Drummond's painting of Brompton Oratory. Much of the London landscapes focus on the pastoral aspects of London, as with Gore's The Fig Tree. Although Ginner and Gilman did several paintings of industrial Leeds or showing factories at work, Spencer Gore was more interested in places like the new garden cities or Brighton, and the group as a whole (save Sickert) did many paintings of locations like Romney Marsh, Richmond, Devon and even rural Sweden. These paintings seem to take them closest to the spirit of chosen modeles like Gauguin and Cezanne, as with Bevan's Dunn's Cottage or Ginner's cloisonnist Clayhidon. It's difficult not to conclude that their excursions amongst the lowlife are a form of tourism felt to accompany the mantle of bohemianism. Relatives tried to persuade them to lead proper English lives. Their reports on the city are slightly apologetic.
Vast swathes of the paintings being exhibited fell into the category of showing solitary figures, usually female, in down at heel surroundings as exemplars of ennui, with Gilman's Marxism in particular feeding into this (although Gore's parallel portraits of his wife and his servant seems more born from snobbery, in contrast's portraits of his landlady). Gilman's Meditation, The Coral Necklace and Girl with a Teacup, to name but three, are all variations of a theme handled by Sickert in rather more novelistic terms, often showing what look like frozen moments in a wider narrative, as in Off to the Pub, The Little Tea Party or Ennui with its use of stuffed animals to symbolise the relationship being shown. This is particularly so with Sickert's Camden Town Murder series, with this title ambiguously competing with others like What Shall We Do for the Rent?. On these paintings it's difficult to tell whether the passive clay-like flesh of the women is already dead (something here reminded me of Lucien Freud), whether it is showing two lovers or client and prostitute, whether the poses are of despair or of threat. They rather remind me of Hitchcock's Frenzy. It's also worth comparing this to Manet's Petit Dejeuner Sur L'Herbe or Olympia Where Manet is erotic, Sicket is seedy, using dark midtones that revolted Gilman, the "frigid Anglican" as Lewis called him. Nudes had to be removed from the easels of the studio at 19 Fitzroy Street, where Spencer Gore's cleaning woman dispensed tea on Saturday afternoons, so that the sensibilities of Gore's uncle, the Bishop of Oxford, would not be affronted. Sickert is also distanced from the rest of the group by his sense of enthralled melancholia with pictures like Noctes Ambrosianae and The New Bedford; only Ginner comes close to replicating it in his painting of The Circus. Ginner in fact emerges as the strongest of the group overall besides Sickert, with paintings like Evening, Dieppe. I depart, walk past the Buxton Memorial in Victoria Tower Gardens, enter the tube station and disappear.
Had PG Wodehouse been inclined to wrote medieval morality plays, the result might well have been quite similar to Waugh's Vile Bodies. Occupying an awkward vantage point somewhere between The Radetzky March and The Good Soldier Schwejk, the centre of the novel is Father Rothschild and his observation that "these young people have got hold of the other end of the stick and for all we know it may be the right one. They say 'If a thing's not worth doing very well, it's not be worth doing at all.'" Waugh veers between a denunciation of the Bright Young Things born of sexual disgust (the vile bodies of the title) and of the moribund and decrepit society that is about to destroy itself in the first world war, "we shall all be walking into the jaws of destruction again, protesting our pacific intentions." Some parts of the novel also remind me of the parts of Howard's End where Helen goes for a ride in a motor car; "the real cars that become masters of men, who exist solely for their own propulsion through space, for whom their drivers, clinging precariously to the steering wheel, are as important as his stenographer to a stockbroker. These are in perpetual flux, a vortex of combining and disintegrating units." The same thing happens with Nina's sickness as she looks down from the plane, a representation of the machine age that rather recalls Celine. Zorba the Greek was apparently written under the influence of Nietzsche, Schopenhauer and Buddhism and it would certainly appear to uneasily veer between these respective extremes, between Nietzsche's idea of the superman ("in other more primitive and creative ages, Zorba would have been the head of the tribe... I think of god as being exactly like me" with Zorba's anecdote of telling god to get out of his way) as counterpointed to Schopenhauer's idea of seeking a point of stillness ("life is trouble.. I listened to Zorba's words and realised that they showed me a sure, attractive and very human path to tread. It was again the spirit of the Mara..."). The novel flits between these two extremes and others, as with the christian Saint Bacchus becoming entangled with Dionysus or the paradox that the fulfilment of the narrator's Buddhism is to kill the Buddha; "and ordered the Buddha within me to dissolve."
I don't generally read a great deal of contemporary fiction but have recently decided to try a little. While revered by the mainstream press Ian McEwan tends to be reviled by many weblogs for a combination of perceived artistic (his novels broadly use the techniques of the realist novel and while Gabriel Josipovici's description of his writing as being little different to Defoe or Dickens is a rather trite complaint, it could certainly sit easily alongside Forster and James) and political conservatism. On Chesil Beach certainly contains several passages that suggest a degree of scepticism as to political radicalism; Florence's mother describes the Soviet Union as little different to Nazi Germany. As Florence believes it to be essentially benevolent it is a little inconsistent for her to describe Edward's membership of CND as being akin to a medieval millenarian cult (particularly when she too belongs to it). However, whether any of this really translates to support for conservative ideas is an extrapolation the novel fails to justify, particularly when McEwan comments that he has not disavowed any of the views he once held as a member of CND. My own reservations about McEwan are rather different. As the above descriptions attest, the novel is concerned with events in the years that Larkin described sexual intercourse as having invented in ("This was not a good moment in the history of English cuisine ...This was still the era when to be young was a social encumbrance.") At one point McEwan's omniscient narrator declares that "Their personalities and pasts, their ignorance and fear, timidity, squeamishness, lack of entitlement or experience, then the tail end of a religious prohibition, their Englishness and class, and history itself." This seems true of one of the characters, Edward, who travels in the course of the novel from English middle class awkwardness to becoming a sixties dropout. However, Florence's "visceral dread" of sex is deliberately left unexplained and can certainly not be laid at the hand of history. Similarly, her suggestion that their relationship be platonic, with her tolerating him having sex with other women hardly seems to be ahead of its time in the way McEwan seems to believe it to be; quite the contrary. The idea that Edward's life would have been much better if he had accepted also seems somewhat unwarranted, given that the novel itself holds out little more than a post in her father's firm for choosing that road. McEwan generally seems to prefer the aberrant and unexplained too much to be able to work fully within the constraints of the realist novel, where the struggles of Julien Sorrel or Dorothea Brooke is entirely in keeping with the spirit of their age. By contrast, one if left wondering why McEwan chose a historical setting at all and least of all one that can barely be within the bounds of his own memory.
The other writer I have recently read for the first time is Martin Amis with London Fields. Following some rather disappointing comments he has recently made, the Guardian did feel it had to praise him for his political engagement, quoting Ryszard Kapuscinski:"Twenty years ago, I was in Africa, and this is what I saw: I went from revolution to coup d'Etat, from one war to another; I witnessed, in effect, history in the making, real history, contemporary history, our history. But I was also surprised: I never saw a writer. I never met a poet or a philosopher—even a sociologist. Where were they? Such important events, and not a single writer anywhere?
Then I would return to Europe and I would find them. They would be at home, writing their little domestic stories: the boy, the girl, the laughing, the intimacy, the marriage, the divorce—in short, the same story we've been reading over and over again for a thousand years. You know, the other day I was reading about the novels that won the annual French prizes. It was incredible. None of these books had anything to do with our world, our reality—nothing. There was one about an unwanted child, and another about a boy, a girl, the laughing, the intimacy... so much of our literature is so very traditional, even when seen as being avant-garde. And if avant-garde, it is only avant-garde because of its style—as if assembled in a workshop. It is never avant-garde for its subject; it is never caught actually looking out at the world. The writer is always looking over his shoulder, noting the position of his predecessor. Contemporary literature is a very private affair."
It's a valid point but London Fields is characterised by a sense of English life as an irrelevance, a place from where history has fled ("Bellow says that America is the only place to be, because it contains the 'real modern action'"). I recall him later comparing England to Switzerland, making me think of Greene's comment about centuries of peace and prosperity creating nothing more than the cuckoo clock. The England depicted by Amis has the vestigial trace of social importance, whether it is the economics of Thatcher's Britain ("no-one seemed to have thought through the implications of a world where everyone cheated") to the vague threat of nuclear devastation. In terms of style too, Amis is far from McEwan's realism. His characters appear as automata with names that reflect allegorical or ironic descriptions ("in fiction people become coherent and intelligible - and they aren't like that... people are chaotic quiddities"), his prose style draws attention to the narration rather than establishing it as a transparent window on events. Amis is preoccupied with the idea of the unreliability of narration, with lies being woven by most of the characters in their speech and writing ("the truth doesn't matter anymore and is not wanted"). The novel reassigns the role of author to the character of Nicola, describing her as a puppermaster, using this to thwart the generic constraints of the detective novel at every turn ("she outwrote me"). In short, it's a very English compromise between realism and post-modernism.Labels: Art, Literature, London
posted by Richard 10:43 AM
Wednesday, November 28, 2007
DH Lawrence once complained of how we only know of the Etruscan way of death, not their way of life. The tombs survived long after the cities had been destroyed. Visiting the British Museum exhibition dedicated to the First Emperor, the centrepiece of which being specimens of the Terracotta Army, it's rather difficult not to be reminded of this observation. Even so, the comparison cannot be taken too far; Lawrence romantically portrayed the Etruscans as gentle artists overwhelmed by Roman imperialism whereas the Qin dynasty was depicted in Sima Qian's history as one of despotism and conquest. Much of the exhibition accordingly dwells on the militaristic aspects of the Qin dynasty, from their origins as horse breeders to the Zhou dynasty to its overthrow of the Zhou through the development of superior military strategy, such as the use of cavalry. The exhibition includes mass produced examples of crossbows, spears, swords and the bells used to sound the retreat. A brass rubbing shows Jing Qe's assassination attempt (the basis for the recent wuxia film - another example of contemporary Chinese pro-totalitarian and pro-reunification ideologies) The exhibition does tend to rehabilitate the First Emperor in so far glosses over earlier aspects of Chinese culture; the Zhou dynasty had after all produced Confucius, Lao Tsu and Mencius, creating a period for philosophy that had equalled Athens.
However, the exhibition does also contain examples of bells used for ceremonial purposes (lacking a clapper they had to be struck from the outside), various engraved bronze vessels, gold bowls, jade pendants and bi discs. Pottery tiles from the royal palaces show patterns of dragons, phoenixes, bi discs and sun flowers. It also dwells on some of the more functional aspects of Qin rule; the standardisation of weights, measures, coinage and of the language itself. Early coin designs were in the shapes of knives or spades. Yuan Yao's hanging scroll of the mythical city of Penglai (resting place of the immortals sought out by the Emperor and one influence for his necropolis) and Yuan Jiang's Ebung Palace are easily the most accomplished artworks in the exhibition. Both depict fantastical palaces set amidst the mountains and the exhibition also includes imperial inscriptions carved into the rock on the summits of various mountains. The Imperial tomb was itself designed to become one with the natural world, with the interior designed as a microcosm of his kingdom and the central pyramid having since become forested, thereby conferring the status of mountain spirit on the deceased. The principle is in most respects the opposite of the Western idea of architecture as a product of artifice, something to stand against nature.
This brings us to the statues themselves. Although mass-produced, each statue had to be completed by hand, adding details like moustaches and paintings, giving each of them a surprisingly individual aspect. A replica is included of how ones of the statues would have originally looked; like Roman sculpture it would have been painted and equipped with genuine weaponry. On some of the statues, paint has peeled away from the clay beneath creating an effect disturbingly like the decomposition of flesh from bone. The detail varies considerably in other respects, such as the wearing of hats or plain topknots. However, although the exhibition presents archers, generals cavalrymen and their horses and infantrymen, as well as a coach driver and four horses (the paint survives well here, with the the horses dappled and patterns decorating the coach) it also includes stable hands, civil servants, wrestlers, acrobats and musicians. Bronze geese and swans accompany them, as well as the bones of genuine horses and the tombs of real people; again, the difference between art and nature seems elided as with the intent to overcome the difference of life and death.
Afterwards, I have a look at the newly reopened Saint Pancras. It's oddly situated between something gleamingly futuristic and its original Victorian industrial gothic. The platforms shine with metal and glass beneath Scott's Venetian gothic brickwork and Barlow's painted blue girders. The presence of a largely deserted champagne bar serves as an apposite testament to fading of the city's years of plenty. It's also pleasant to see the statue of Betjeman with its quotation from Cornish Cliffs at the base; even if he wasn't a first class poet, it's too rare to see statues of writers.
During the evening, I go to a Radio3 arts recording at Broadcasting House, where Toby Litt performed a pair of Oulipo style pieces. The first 'Flatlish' was a piece written without ascenders or descenders, the second 'Japanglish' using the Japanese linguistic structure of alternating vowels and consonants ('y' being allowed as a vowel here), which included phrases like 'unopened ocelot' and 'aromatic ape;' taramasalata was the longest word Litt had found. The following day is rather modest in its ambitions; I go for a walk at Silchester before visiting Butterfield's church of St Mary at Beech Hill. The interior is like a chessboard with red, white and black bricks placed in alternating patterns and offset with Kempe stained glass and Minton tiles of fleur de lys and eagles.
Reading The Narrative of Frederick Douglass, I'm struck by some puzzling contradictions. Douglass notes that "the religion of the south mere covering for the most horrid crimes... of all slaveholders with whom I have met, religious slaveholders are the worst." I'm reminded of Robert Ingersoll's more cynical quotation "the slave ship sped from coast to coast, fanned by the winds and the holy ghost." Douglass also asks "does a righteous god govern the universe? and for what does he hold the thunders in his arm if not to smite the oppressor?" Yet religiosity is also something embraced by the slaves, presumably either for its message of equality and justice (in the next life, if not this one). It's an interesting question as to whether religion was genuinely liberating in this context or whether this is another example of the instances documented by Douglass of slaves embracing the ideologies that imprisoned them.
posted by Richard 8:51 AM
Thursday, November 1, 2007
Eastern Promise continues Cronenberg's move away from science fiction towards realism, with the incidents of the film set against the Thames Flood Barrier, St Luke's Old Street and Brompton Cemetery. Nonetheless, the effect of this is essentially to contrast with the events depicted, using London's scenery in effectively the same way the likes of 28 Weeks Later did. Characters in Shivers and eXistenZ undergo horrific transformations and those in Crash the characters embrace their own deformation. Similarly, the tattoos of the Russian mafia serve the same purpose, with the characters driven to enter that world against their better judgement. The Russian characters see London as a form of decadent infection, in spite of the sumptuous surroundings of the Russian restaurant that is the film's principal setting and their contrast to the more prosaic world of the English characters.
Having seen one of the film's characters having his throat slit in Brompton cemetery, I found myself there a few days later. The weather was impossibly mild for November, with the yellowed leaves slowly falling to the ground and forming a carpet on the central avenue. I found myself looking at some details I'd missed before; Minton tiling forming a headstone above a floor of unraveling white and black diamond tiles, the lily and ivy decorating one of the tombs designed by Burne-Jones. A large chunk had fallen off the imposing bulk of the Hannah Peters Mausoleum. Squirrels frantically scamper about, trying to bury nuts and seeds, usually in the flower pots left by the graves. I walk to the Embankment, where I watch a pair a ducks trying to sleep on the Thames; periodically one would realised that they were about to be beached on Cleopatra's Needle, swim upstream and settle down again, so beginning the process anew.
I then walk to the National gallery, for its Renaissance Siena exhibition. Sienese art has been described as overshadowed by that of Florence, with the former written out of art history by the Florentine Vasari and by Florence's conquest of Siena. In this revisionary account, Sienese art is visionary and mystical, with Mariolatry (the Virgin was the city's patron) as its principal subject, in contrast to the naturalistic art of Florence, with it s depiction of the male form and of fighting in particular. I can't help but wonder if a better word to describe Siena's art might not be 'medieval' if we think of the Renaissance as the displacement of religion and the discovery of the individual. Certainly, Siena retained many gothic influences, such as painting onto gold (and then using sgraffito to expose it as part of clothing or the beams of heaven's rays) and was often slavish in its imitation of figures like Donatello, while the city itself was a rather enfeebled city state, wracked by internal strife, debt and threat of invasion. Some of the most powerful works here are by Raphael (The Dream of a Knight) and the Cortonese Lucca Signorelli rather than by any Sienese painter.
The exhibition opens with some classic examples of Siena's Marian art; in San di Pietro's The Virgin Recommends Siena to Pope Calixtus, which shows the Virgin towering over a dwarfed and distorted city. Others showing her leading the ship of state or protecting the city from earthquakes. Paintings by Pietro and Francesco di Giorgio firmly continue the gothic tradition of iconography. Renaissance influences only figure with the idealised landscape shown in Benvenuto di Giovanni's Virgin and Child or Giorgio's sculpture of Male Nude with a Snake. However, later works show a different and more interesting side; cassone chest paintings show scenes of seduction and classical scenes (like the Roman capture of Zenobia or the meeting of Antony and Cleopatra from the workshop of Neroccio de Landi). For a female art, much of it proves surprisingly homoerotic, as with Signorelli's Two Nude Youths or portraits by Giovanni Antonio Bazzi (nicknamed Sodoma due to being openly homosexual, keeping a bizarre menagerie of animals and claiming tax relief because it was so expensive to keep all his boys and pets.) Particularly striking are the interior scenes, where the tone is profane rather than sacred; carved wooden pilasters, frescos of classical scenes and maiolica flooring. Most impressive are the paintings by Domenico Beccafumi, with soft brushwork and an ethereal rendering of colour. Paintings of virtuous historical figures often seem quite odd; did the Tanaquil Livy denounced really seem a virtuous figure? Nor do the ruined backdrops seem to serve any particular allegorical purpose. His two most striking works are a malevolent Cupid with Venus and a bizarre depiction of the feast of Lupercalia.
Journeying to Westonbirt Arboretum, a bright sunny day is transformed into mist. The arboretum has a complete collection of Japanese Maple cultivars, whose leaves were bright burgundy, ochre, pink and bronze. Evergreen yews, pine and firs forms a backdrop to this. Several of the planted trees are new to me; Sapphire Berry (a bright azure berry), Katsura (gives off the scent of caramel), Spindle Tree (with its bright red berries), Wingnut (named for its sycamore-like seeds), Persian Ironwood (named after the explorer who rediscovered Mount Ararat, turned gold and red in autumn), Alue Atlas Weeping Cedar (with a curtain like fall of branches) and Paper Birch (whose bark turns pink-orange as the lenticels fall off). Other plants were more familiar, from Giant Redwood to Monkey Puzzle and an ancient lime coppice. I was equally impressed by the lichens growing on the tree trunks, from hairlike encrustations to something that looked like bright orange rust. One dead tree had its base covered with bracket fungi.
Reading Arthur Hugh Clough's poems, I'm struck by the idea of a Victorian poet working in a largely discursive mode, with Dryden and Wordsworth as his principal influences for their use of the language of everyday speech. His work is not only heteroglossic but it is also dialogic, with much of it being taken up by counterpointed discussions on the death of god. Amours de Voyage has two narrators with opposed perspectives of the protagonist, with much of the narrative opposing is attitudes to christianity, Rome's pagan past and the revolutions of 1848. Similarly, Dipsychus utilises the format of Goethe's Faust, only to assign the role of the tempter to christianity.
Reading Mishima's The Golden Pavilion, I'm reminded of the concept of occidentalism. A conference held in Kyoto in 1942 was devoted to the subject of how "how to overcome the modern." Modernity was associated with the West, and particularly with Western imperialism. Westernization, one of the scholars said, was like a disease that had infected the Japanese spirit. The "modern thing," said another, was a "European thing." Others believed that "Americanism" was the enemy, and that Japan should make common cause with the Europeans to defend old civilizations against the New World. There was much talk about unhealthy specialization in knowledge, which had fragmented the wholeness of Oriental spiritual culture. Science was to blame. So were capitalism, the absorption into Japanese society of modern technology, and notions of individual freedom and democracy. These had to be "overcome." All agreed that culture - that is, traditional Japanese culture - was spiritual and profound, whereas modern Western civilization was shallow, rootless, and destructive of creative power. The West, particularly the United States, was coldly mechanical, a machine civilization without spirit or soul, a place where people mixed to produce mongrel races.
Mishima's novel exhibits many of the symptoms identified here. Mizoguchi looks at the lights of the city, the same lights Tanizaki had denounced as an unwelcome manifestation of modernity in his Praise of Shadows (Tanizaki had also praised the glimmer of gold in the dark, as with the temple here), and dubs it "the mundane world... people are being driven about under that night by evil thoughts... please let the evil that is in my heart increase.. so that it may correspond in every particular with the light before the eyes." As this quotation suggests, Mizoguchi's response to modernity is bifurcated between embracing it as a form of nihilism (itself a profoundly un-Japanese idea; "burdened with a special individuality or sense of mission" which the novel opposes to the intoxication offered by the temple) and rejecting it outright (though even the form of asceticism offered by religion in the novel represents a form of alienation); " youth like myself came to entertain two opposing forms of power wishes... my dream of being a tyrant or great artist." The conclusion of the novel, the arson of the Golden Temple, unifies these themes in a form of immolation just as Mizoguchi's observation produces an ecstatic state that is directed inward; "I was drenched up to the neck in the existence that was myself.. my inner being and the outer world slowly changed places" Mishima's particular brand of masculinist homosexuality further contributes to this nihilism, with women the repeated object of dehumanisation and violence; "the same masculine evil thoughts as the others... the smell of a young man's sweat-moistened skin that they gave off... there was an intrepid beauty about him like that of a lovely woman."
Much the same applies in The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With The Sea, a sort of Japanese Lord of the Flies, where Ryuji's fall is largely predicated on his acceptance of marriage and the feminine world. Mishima's masculinist homosexuality seems not unlike that of William Burroughs, seen as somewhere opposed to effeminancy and the perception of matriarchy and developing a cult of violence in response to it. Women and death are seen as coterminous ("her sweat and perfume fragrance reaching him on the breeze seemed to clamour for his death... are you going to give up the life that impelled you towards the pinnacle of manliness?"). With that in mind, the nihilist children are both in revolt against a Westernised society and a product of its degeneration, of modern society's alienation.
Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward can be best described as a variant on the trope used by both Twain and Irving of a sleeper awakening to find himself in another time (the idea being also essentially the analogue of that depicted by Huxley in Brave New World). It depicts a decidedly bourgeois form of utopianism, by which social equality has been achieved through a process of evolution rather than through any need for a communist revolution (anarchism and communism are portrayed as essentially invidious to the cause of social progress). Bellamy seems to regard evolution in Lamarckian terms, as a form of progress ("in accordance with the principles of evolution... the next phase on the social and industrial development of humanity") achieved through sexual selection ("the principle of sexual selection, with its tendency to preserve and transmit the better types of race and let the inferior types drop out, has unhindered operation") rather than through natural selection and the survival of the fittest (Bellamy closes by denouncing how nineteenth century society created "a brutal struggle for existence"). In spite of the determinist tone taken here, Bellamy is nonetheless closer to Edward Taylor than Marx though (and closer still to Comte). Where the likes of Owen saw human nature essentially as a tabula rasa and therefore capable of being adjusted to new social conditions, Bellamy frequently uses the term 'human nature' to denote a fixed state, which Doctor Leete denies having altered since West's time. Bellamy nonetheless decries the idea that "the only stable elements in human nature, on which a social system could be founded, were its worst propensities." Accordingly, Bellamy can often be quite conservative, viewing women as having a distinct and separate nature from men (""the distinct individuality of the sexes"), in spite of discarding the idea of women as either household drudges or gilded ornaments. Equally, the notion of the majority of society being employed by an 'industrial army' seems a harshly masculine mode of social organisation, if not unpleasantly reminiscent of the national socialist brand of utopianism (particularly as issues like race are almost entirely elided from the novel, the presence of a black servant in the nineteenth century notwithstanding).
Dostoevsky's The Double reminds me most of Kafka's Metamorphosis in so far as uncanny events unfold without an obvious sense of explication. Where the double is most often invoked as an example of man's divided nature between good and evil or between expression and repression (as in The Confessions of a Justified Sinner or Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde), Dostoevsky instead frustrates the morality tale aspects of the narrative by placing the emphasis on Golyadkin's status as a superfluous man, his desire for self-annihilation, his inability to preserve himself. The relationship between self and double is an almost sado-masochistic one, leaving the reader uncertain as to whether they have witnessed a morality tale or not. Tolstoy's The Cossacks and Hadji Murat deal with a rather more conventional form of other, with the former novel defining a liminal space between three of set of groups; Russian, Cossack and Chechen. As with The Double one expects some form of fable concerning the moral progress of another superfluous man through his contact with nature and removal from the frivolities of Muscovite life. For Tolstoy, the Caucasus serves almost the same sort of function that Italy did for EM Forster or DH Lawrence. In practice though, Tolstoy's fatalism often tends to preclude the sort of teleological development associated with characters in European novels. Something similar applies to Hadji Murat whose hero dies a death that is essentially futile and entirely contrary to the status the narrative has accorded him.
On a quite different note, I recently watched the film Thirty Days of Night, one of the more memorable contributions to the vampire genre of recent years. The vampires depicted in it are different from the suave model of Christopher Lee and instead resemble Shreck's Count Orlok, looking both mundane and alien at the same time. Another film I saw not all that long ago is Sunshine, a film that follows similar generic principles to earlier science fiction films like Event Horizon (science arrogantly assuming the prerogative of the divine and so on) but does have some interesting variations on that theme. The character of Pinbacker sees the sun as a god and views any attempts to reignite it as desecration, although when the character of Capa does precisely that he is for instant staring into the face of god. The film seemed unsure as to whether it should be mystical or materialist.
posted by Richard 2:37 PM
Sunday, October 14, 2007
As autumn descends and the ivy turns to a vivid burgundy and the tree leaves turns to burnished bronze or arterial crimson, I visited London and the Millais exhibition at the Tate. The choice of subject seems apt for the season, with several paintings like Mariana and Autumn Leaves allegorising the life of man through the seasons.
The Pre-Raphaelite movement is a classic example of the reactionary tendency in English culture, along with the Gothic Revival and Palladian architecture. English painting sought to return to medieval models, depicting nature with obsessive precision, at a time when European art was beginning to forge movements like impressionism and expressionism. Equally, the brotherhood was founded in the year of The Communist Manifesto but although Millais seems to have made many satirical (somewhat Hogarthian) drawings of contemporary society, none of them were transferred to canvas. Unlike Ford Madox Brown's The Last of England, Millais retreats to a mythical past. Like much of Victorian culture, the Pre-Raphaelites can perhaps be best understood as a means of withdrawing from an industrialised society to a romanticised past, looting models freely from different periods (the subjects displayed at the Millais exhibition range from Pizarro's conquest of the Incas to Renaissance Florence and Medieval England). It lacks any sense of expressing the collective consciousness of its age and seems instead to point to a lacuna. The sense of a void becomes painful in several of his later society portraits and grotesquely sentimental paintings of children; one can only be surprised that Little Nell evaded him as a subjects. Whereas contemporaries like Burne Jones and Watts devised stained glass and frescos for churches, Millais sold his pictures for soap adverts and painted portraits of the haute bourgeoisie.
However, with all of that said, much remains to be said in defence of the Pre-Raphaelite movement. Millais' sympathy for outsiders dominates his early paintings; Jacobite rebels, exiled Huguenots, heretics and vagrants. His women are alternately depicted as passive victims of the men that abandon them, but also have to be shown in terms of their stoic fortitude. Much of his work, such as The Bridesmaid, seems to look forward to the likes of Moreau, Klimt and Albert Moore. The iallusive quality of his later works, freed of explicit depictions of historical or literary scenes seem to parallel Bocklin and David Friedrich. The Pre-Raphaelite stress on literary allusions, with references to Tennyson, Shakespeare, Keats, Wordsworth and Coleridge, comes close to a Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk.
The initial rooms of the exhibition concentrate on showing the development of the early Millais to his Pre-Raphaelite work. His first major work is Pizarro Seizing the Inca of Peru, a picture that veers uneasily between historical epic and the later depictions of the victims of Catholic oppression, a Massacre of the Innocents The early Pre-Raphaelite works also quickly draw attention to the idea of the excluded and outcast; doomed love in Isabella, Ophelia, Mariana and The Death of Romeo and Juliet. A drawing showing the disinterrment of Queen Mathilda by Huguenot fanatics was presumably too sympathetic and Catholicism and was never painted. The (infamous) painting of Christ in the House of his Parents seems oddly realistic in comparison to the other works, as does The Order of Release, wherein the soldier's wife stands tall while her son and husband are huddled against her, inverting the model used in A Huguenot on St Bartholomew's Day. In a similar vein is The Proscribed Royalist where a somewhat effeminate cavalier is hidden by a puritan lover and in Peace Concluded where a wounded soldier returned from the Crimea is held by his wife. The sexual politics of Millais' painting are endlessly confusing; his depictions of women with persecuted men require them to be strong and resilient (although the atttitude in The Black Brunswicker is simply one of female helplessness even as the strong soldier shown is certain to die) but he is as likely to show them abandoned and betrayed, as in Waiting. One painting, The Escape of a Heretic is entirely different; showing a female heretic being rescued by a lover from the clutches of the Inquisition. Again, his drawings show what his paintings can't' The Bridge of Sighs depicts a fallen woman contemplating suicide.
The later works show Millais moving to looser brush strokes in a style more reminiscent of Titian or Velasquez, depicting subjects without explicit comment and with only the suggestion of context. Backgrounds are frequently blackened out to show the subject. Works like Spring and The Vale of Rest having a nonetheless rather crudely symbolised theme of mortality. Where historical subjects are shown, the results are often depressingly remniscent of much forgettable genre painting (Reynolds and Van Dyck emerge as influences at this point), although a painting like Esther continues the theme of female fortitude and courage. The most interesting works from this time onwards, are his Scottish landscapes which in their depicition of solitary figures in wintry scenes leaves me strongly reminded of Caspar David Friedrich, for instance in Dew Drenched Furze and Glen Birnam.
Leaving the exhibition, I spend a little time looking at the permanent collection, from Rossetti's The Annunciation and The Beloved, Holman Hunt's Claudio and Isabella and The Awakening Conscience , Hughes' The Eve of St Agnes , Whistler's Nocturne: Blue and Gold - Old Battersea Bridge and Moore's The Toilette and A Sleeping Girl. It does seem to me that Millais has at least some claim to be a via media between Hunt and Hughes on the one hand and Whistler and Moore on the other, while his woman are surely not simply objects in the way they always seem to be for Rossetti. I also find myself looking at more unusual works like John Brett's seascapes, Watts' Hope, Sargent's Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose and Tuke's August Blue, but I'm most struck by Richard Dadd's paintings; although not dissimilar to the Pre-Rapahelites in style and fitting in with Victorian conventions of fairy paintings, his work does nonetheless seem more like Bosch.
I then decide to look at the modern section. Some of the individual works are quite startling here; Sickert's Brighton Pierrots, Heron's Azalea Garden: May 1956, Hitchens' Woodland, Vertical and Horizontal, Hepworth's Curved Form (Trevalgan), Vanesssa Bell's Studland Beach and Gertler's Merry-Go-Round. I find myself particularly drawn to the room dedicated to John Piper's works, from his Britten set paintings (Death in Venice) to his work as a war artist (All Saints Chapel, Bath) to his Betjeman-like recordings of historic buildings (Holkham, Norfolk, Yarnton Monument) - although rather conventional subjects depicted in uncomprosingly modern terms. Another room dwells on war art, with results that seem quite surrealist - whether by intent or simply through elapsed time is difficult to say; Armstrong's Coggeshall Church, Essex looks like a dissection rather than a ruin while Nash's Bomber in the Corn and The Messerschmidt in Windsor Great Park almost look like totems. Sutherland's Devastation, 1941 series is perhaps the most conventional depiction of destruction and decay, although his Horned Forms contrives to turn the organic into something threatening and unnatural. Finally, a small exhibition is dedicated to Hockney's selection of Turner's paintings. I hadn't realised that Turner is in many respects an architectural painter, with Lichfield Cathedral, St George's Bloomsbury and Durham Cathedral all amongst his English subjects, while some of his Venetian work is dedicated to Canaletto's architectural fantasias. Hockney also has a collection on one of the stair wells; paintings of English woodland from different times of the year. I then walk from Tate Britain to Tate Modern, mostly to see the giant metal spider on display outside the gallery. Although given an artistic subtext it mostly reminds me of the metal sculpture of the invading Martians at Woking.
Reading Pavic's Dictionary of the Khazars I was particularly reminded of Umberto Eco's observations about the medieval quest for the prelapsarian language that had existed before the Tower of Babel. The dictionary seems equally preoccupied with the loss of language's capacity to represent certitude in the midst of a series of mirrored dichotomies; dream and reality, good and evil, male and female (as with the male and female editions of the text), life and death, all of which are blurred in the course of the text. Where Eco is interested in semiotic playfulness almost as an end in its own right, Pavic seems to envisage differance in mystical terms, as a means of representing man's fallen state (perhaps Habermas was right to call Derrida a Jewish mystic). He then complicates these chiastic divisions by enfolding them into a tripartite structure; Christian, Islamic and Jewish, with each dictionary having mirrored entries (either the same entry told from a fundamentally different viewpoint or the convergence of three different but related characters), the division between which is also blurred (with the idea of each religion being an aspect of the other two). The text also foregrounds the issue of interpretation, with every character who comes close to understanding the history of the Khazars being punished Icarus-like.Labels: Art, Literature, London, Victorian
posted by Richard 3:22 AM
Friday, July 20, 2007
The first Proms concert of this year opened with Part's Cantus in memoriam Benjamin Britten and Rakhmaninov's Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini (both rather backward-looking works that set a conservative pattern to the night) before finishing with Gliere's Symphony No.3 'Ilya Murometz.' I didn't know Gliere's work before and was somewhat surprised to find him to be a contemporary of Stravinsky rather than of Borodin. The symphony was based on narrative, in the style of the likes of Rimsky Korsakov, and its derivation from folk tales was clear in the way events seemed discontinuous, happening without apparent logical sequence or sense of causality, often for magical reasons. I was mostly reminded of Wagner; scenes of Ilya listening to bird song in the forest recalling Siegfried understanding the language of the birds after killing Fafnir in the forest. It also has to qualify as the loudest symphony I can recall, working up to a crescendo early on and maintaining it for much of what followed.
Following this, I was overjoyed to complete my viewing of the Ring Cycle with Gotterdammerung. I did find myself that given the cycle's odd compositional history it can be best described as two narratives. Firstly, there is the narrative of the downfall of the gods brought down by the curse of the ring as they give way to mankind. Secondly, there is a narrative about the destructive nature of desire, with the story of Siegfried and Brunnhilde being rather reminiscent of that of Samson and Delilah. The two seem to rather cancel one another out, with the destruction of Valhalla having little to do with the coming of the great hero but rather with Brunnhilde. What is admirable in Brunnhilde is her masculine qualities as a warrior, what is contemptible in Siegfried is his emasculation by Hagen and Gutrune; particularly given that the weak and decadent Gunther is permitted to atone for his crimes through a heroic death whereas Gutrune is simply insignificant and fades out of sight. Equally, although the opera hinges on the restoration of the corrupting ring to the Rhinemaidens they are nonetheless depicted as frivolous and vicious (and hence the means of a suitably humiliating death for Hagen). Following this, I was struck by Mahler's Des Knaben Wunderhorn a rather odd combination of A Shropshire Lad and The Brothers Grimm with lieder telling of the transience of youth and mortality in wartime but fringed with themes like the Totentanz.
Following this I went to a Baroque concert (Handel, Purcell, Telemann) jointly performed by the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment and the Freiburg Baroque Orchestra (giving the Fireworks Music a rather stereophonic feel, with all of the instruments doubled). It's always odd seeing an archestra playing without a conductor; although romantic music is supposed to be more spontaneous and free it seems a paradox that it actually requires the discipline of a conductor to wield its larger number of players together in contrast to more ordered (or playful?) Baroque music. Haitink's performance of Wagner (Parsifal, Tristan und Isolde and Lohengrin) and Debussy (Nocturnes and Six Epigraphes Antiques) was surprisingly effective, drawing strong parallels between the two composers. Both seemed steepted in the idea of the Gesamtkunstwerk. In the case of Wagner this largely meant welding music and lyric poetry in the contest of dramatic performance while for Debussy, it meant playing with symbolist motifs from painting (as in Whistler's Nocturnes) and literature, thereby introducing a form of music whose impessionistic style belied a frequently concrete approach. One of the paradoxes of twentieth century music is that although much of it was concerned with formal experimentation (Schoenberg) much of it was also concerned with reviving earlier musical traditions, such as that of folk music. Works like Kodaly's Dances of Galanta and Enescu's Romanian Rhapsody fit into the latter category while Ligeti's Atmospheres fits into the former, its performance showing each tonal layer individually, like a conventional work dissasembled and suspended in time. Bartok's Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta is the msot impressive work of this Prom though, managing to combine both strains.
Nicholas Nickleby cleaves closely the idea of the novel established by Fielding, whereby misadventure and financial hardship forces a young man out into a world where he is exposed to all manner of temptations. Nontheless, Dickens elaborates rather more polyphonic plot strands, taking his hero to the country rather than moving him from rural morality to urban decadence, depicting instead the perils faced by his sister in the city and the corruption and downfall of his uncle. Rather than suggesting that youth is corrupted by the city, Dickens instead suggests that vice is born of desperation ("ignorance was punished and never taught"), something that considerably complicates the moral fable at the heart of the novel. Although a Dickens novel tends to function by drawing together the different individuals that makes up its hetergenous plot strands, it nonetheless has the effect of depicting an atomised society ("this wilderness of London") rather than a community.
Sentimental Education seems to invert every convention of the nineteenth century novel, as with the absence of a clear telelogical structure (directed either at marriage or tragedy) or with the manner in which the hero is depicted in terms more suitable for female characters such as Madame Bovary (the only other comparison that comes to mind is Turgenev's superfluous man). Deslauriers is perhaps a more obvious candidate for the role of hero, resembling rather more a Stendhalian protagonist (indeed the reference to how "Frederic's physical appearance.. had almost exerted a feminine charm on him" suggests a homerotic relationship between the two male protagonists that threatens to eclipse female characters like Madame Arnoux). The absence of a teleological structure for depicting the characters is depicted by the absence of any such structure in Flaubert's view of history, which is as present here as in Eliot, Stendhal, Balzac or Zola but is far more disconnected from the central narrative. While the depiction of Dambreuse is not that far removed from that of Merdle or Melmotte (the poverty of Madame Arnoux and Rosanette is also no that far from Dickens), Flaubert is equally cynical as to the alternatives, as with his observation that Senecal is filled with love towards the mases in their aggregate state and is merciless towards individuals; "a sort of Athenian Sparta in which the individual would only exist to serve the state... anything which he considered hostile to it he attacked with the logic of a mathematician and the faith of an inquisitor." Frederic is at once an aristocratic snob ("he felt utterly nauseated by the vulgarity of their faces, the stupidity of their talk...the knowledge that he was worth more than these men lessened the fatigure of looking at them.") and is fired with revolutionary ideals ("I think the people are sublime"). Deslauriers similarly notes that "he had preached fraternity to the conservatives and respect for the law to the socialists." Sentimental Education is the great novel of the middle ground, with all viewpoints contested and all found wanting Frederic and not steering a straight enough course, and Desluariers being too rigid, with the same applying to the aesthetic debates of Pellerin and Senecal.
Laughter in the Dark compares itself to Anna Karenina but seems in many ways an intertextual satire at Tolstoy's expense, with its depiction of the heroine as both vapid and ruthless and destructive of a hero who represents rather mediocre rebuttal to the likes of Vronsky. The gender roles are instead inverted, with Albinus playing the part of a frustrated Emma Bovary, reduced itself to a frustrated and failed artist. Victor Serge's The Case of Comrade Tulayev oscillates between a sense of communism as an entirely failed project (as with Koestler or Solzhenitsyn) and of it as something betrayed and corrupted. During the course of the novel Rublev finds himself pinioned by inescapable logic; political action (where factories can conquer hovels and the "the old suffering of toil is extinguished forever.") can only be attained through unity as vested in the party. Individual conscience is a bourgeois luxury but if the party has betrayed the revolution then conscience must stand aside from that unity; "in that iron circle Rublev's thoughts never ceased to travel." Others argue that terror cannot form the basis of a state only its property relations and use this to distance the Soviet Union from fascist states, particularly given that the economic progress of the Union is forging a new type of consciousness (the novel incessantly compares Russia to the West, as when Xenia realises that poverty in Paris has a sort of abundance when compared to Moscow.) Koestler wrote that continued belief in communism could only be attributable to a personal mythology; it seems unclear whether this was true for Serge or not. Svevo's Confessions of Zeno reminds me stronly of its Austro-Hungarian counterparts The Castle and The Good Soldier Schweik, all depicting events as being born of unpredictable chance rather than of agency, with freedom something only intermittently possible. Throughout it remains unclear whether events occur due to accident (the marriage to Augusta, the recovery of Zeno's fortunes where Guido had squandered money on the same stocks) or by Zeno's own design (his longstanding antipathy to Guido). As Guido puts it in response to Zeno's disavowal of his caution; "curious that the cautious person should feel obliged to defend the scatterbrain." The novel is set against a backdrop of psychoanalysis (utilised as a framework for self-understanding whilst simultaneously dismissed), a framework that presupposes an underlying unity to events that the episodic narrative seems to deny, in spite of the suggestion of unconscious motivations towards Guido and Ada throughout. The novel ends with the modern man leads an unnatural existence and his life is poisoned to the root, but although this is ostensibly applied to Zeno it seems a better label for his erstwhile rival Guido (himself perhaps more resembling the hero of Svevo's tragic A Life), with his artistic temperament and inability to comprehend business. Like Schweik, it is unambiguous throughout as to whether Zeno is saved from Guidos' fate by cunning and guile or simply by his foolishness being protected by serendipity. Having asserted competence and strength throughout it such a way as to persuade the reader that he is neither, the suggestion hangs that those statements should have been taken at face value (in the same manner Zeno refutes arguments from the psychoanalyst with Schopenhauerian non sequiturs; life may be a disease but it can only be cured by death or obtains a medical certificate as proof of his sanity thereby convincing all that he is mad).
Benjamin's Berlin Childhood Around 1900 shows Benjamin looking back in the style of his own Angel of History. At one point he notes that "one forms an image of a person's character according to his place of residence and the neighbourhood he inhabits." It's a statement characteristic of the nineteenth century (described elsewhere as a hollow shell) that could have been shared by Marx or Eliot, but Benjamin only partly accedes to it. One the one hand, his Berlin is a place where there are only surfaces, with subject and object essentially coterminous.; "I was enveloped in the world of matter" The metaphor is that of the painter disappearing into his own picture. On the other hand, the Berlin he depicts is a liminal place shown through imagistic fragments (repeatedly characterised as part of a labyrinth one gets losts within) rather than a linear narrative and where the places are often as liminal as his arcades (for instance, the text begins with a descriptions of Berlin's loggias on the grounds of their uninhabitability to one who no longer had a fixed abode). Although the young Benjamin and his elder counterpart share a passion for collecting but refuse to arrange their acquisitions in a neat order. Equally, the places in questions are defamiliarised; the Victory Column is compared to a setting for Dante's Inferno while the Zoological Garden seems more ancient than Rome. Magic and myth are repeatedly invoked, contrary to an otherwise materialist strain.
Ballard's Kingdom Come frequently re-iterates a surrealist manifesto; "nothing is true and nothing is untrue." The novel is true to this statement of intent and aims to disorientate the reader, forcing them to participate in the elective insanity that follows. As Ballard puts it, the snakes are only pretending to be asleep and the ladders lead nowhere. Characters in Ballard novels rarely follow clear patterns, but instead shift their perspectives across ideological divides and back again; like many of his protagonists, Pearson plays the role of seeking to investigate and stop the violence but also incites it. Equally, characters like Falconer and Fairfax seek to turn the tide back but the methods they use only provoke the violence they are trying to assuage. As a consequence, the role played by the Metro Centre in the novel is ambiguous. On the one hand we are told that "it's an incubator. People go in there and they wake up and see their lives are empty. So they look for a new dream." But equally, it is also defined as an entire philosophy rather than simply a reaction to vacuity; "all his emotional needs, his sense of self, were satisfied by this huge retail space." Equally, one the one hand the novel uses the familiar Ballardian formula of a new type of human being created and the equally familiar trope that they are reverting to something primeval ("a primeval species with an unbelieavsble need for violence") expressed over the centuries in religion and the politics of fascism rather than becoming something new. Finally, on the one hand, we are told that "the great dream of the Enlightenment, that reason and rational self-interest would one day triumph led directly to today's consumerism" but those are also characterised as a brake against the delirium of consumerism that unfolds in the course of the novel.
Mann's Confessions of Fleix Krull presents a narrative that initially appears cast in the vein of a a moral fable, dealing with the exploits of a confidence man, only for this to be aborted in favour of a narrative about his love affair with a Portuguese mother and daughter. The initial narrative draws a Platonic parallel between art and deceit, with Felix inspired by seeing actors and by being a model for painting. It also draws a parallel between this indeterminacy in Felix's identity (the real Felix is something that does not exist) lends itself to a suggestion of homosexuality (itself something criminal at the time), with him being sexually admired by Herr Sturzli and Stanko.""Dali's masterpiece and, I believe, the greatest painting of the 20th century is The Persistence of Memory, a tiny painting not much larger than the postcard version, containing the age of Freud, Kafka and Einstein in its image of soft watches, an embryo and a beach of fused sand. The ghost of Freud presides over the uterine fantasies that set the stage for the adult traumas to come, while insects incarnate the self-loathing of Kafka's Metamorphosis and its hero turned into a beetle. The soft watches belong to a realm where clock time is no longer valid and relativity rules in Einstein's self-warping continuum." - JG Ballard"
Dali is something of an anomaly, an artist who moved seamlessly between avant-garde and popular culture, between the influence of Vermeer and Velasquez in one instance and between Breton and Magritte on the other. Many of his techniques were either familiar from classical painting or from film (many of the car crash scenes in Un Chien Andalou make the influence on JG Ballard manifest), but grafted onto a rather writerly personal mythology that was reminiscent of Blake (eyes, ants, eggs, soft watches, ruins, plains and so on). Time, space and motion feature prominently in his work rather than depicting images as static and frozen moments. At the same time, objects melt into one another and cease to be stable elements in their right. Equally, his experiments in film do dissolve linear narrative into a "heap of images." Film was seen as a variant of automatic writing.
Un Chien Andalou and L'Age D'Or present an equally heady combination of Freudianism and Marxism, showing the revolt of the protagonists and their desire against an ossified social order. In Un Chien Andalou, a character is held back by being tied to pianos, priests and rotting donkeys (though the protagonists are still left buried and the film repeatedly blurs the distinction of Thanatos and Eros as it does with all other contraries, including gender itself). In L'Age D'Or, a character throws priests and burning giraffes out of the mansion while the Majorcan Bishops are left to starve to death. However, his Marxism at that time forbids him from regarding the bourgeoisie as rebels, showing them as heartless and indifferent to the suffering of others (as with the shooting of the gamekeeper's son or the fire in the kitchen), thereby forming the nucleus of Pasolini's Salo or The 120 Days of Sodom.
The Bramah Museum records the distinction between tea and coffree elaborate by Kakuzo Okakura; the former, aristosratic and calming, its origins lying in ceremony. Conversely, the latter was bourgeois and stimulating, its orgins somewhat disreputable. The museum records the assimilation of Chinese and African beverages (though Ethiopia regarded coffee as a food source) into European culture, showing beautifully designed teapots in the style of bamboo and recording the origin of willow pattern as a fairytale of doomed lovers. I especially liked an anti-coffee house satirical pamphlet set to the tune of The Roast Beef of Old England, entitled The Grumbling of Old England. The Rose Cougou and Lemon served in the shop was rather pleasant too.
Walking around The Mall and St James' Park, I found myself rather indifferent to much of the architecture, which seemed rather dour and pedestrian with the only architect of note being William Kent. I noticed a blue-billed Ruddy Duck swimming in the park near to a black swan before visiting the Wellington Arch. I was struck by how it and Marble Arch formed yet another vision of how London might have been with their removal from their original location and the existence of earlier designs by Adam and Soane (not to mention a more grandiose design from Decimus Burton than was realised). Having walked back to Paddington, I visited the church of St James. Although rather nondescript on the exterior, Street's interior combines pink marble with a black ceiling lined with gold angels. Elaborate tiling and mosaics line the aisles while a modern window replacing one destroyed in the Blitz shows scenes from the station and the war. Visting Kensington, I walked round the round Pond and Palace, the statyes of William and Victoria, before coming to Scott's St Mary Abbot's, with its tall and spire and bending entrance through a set of cloisters through the churchyard. The interior is rather more minimal with marble floors and mosaiscs. I walk to see the Queen's Tower at Imperial College, which I've seen in the distance before but never from closeby.
The Courtauld Institute was a striking omission from the list of London galleries I had visited, so I accordingly decided to rectify this. Walking along one of London's bridges, I was met with one of Gormley's sculptures, joining the one I had seen on the roof of the Shell Mex house and on the rood of Freemason Hall (looking like potetential suicides in both cases). The collection conspicuously bears the mark of having been formed through a relatively small set of bequests, accounting for the presence of Mamluke metalwork, ivory caskets, eighteenth century silverware, Maioloica and painted Italian cassone. The initial collection was formed by a Victorian more interested in the Florentine than Pre-Raphaelite, containing triptychs that demonstrated the transition from Byzantine perspectives to a more naturalistic style. Particularly striking is Bellini's Assassination of St Peter Martyr, where the cut tree stumps bleed in sympathy with the murdered saint. The gallery was running an exhibition revolving around Cranach's Adam and Eve. For all of his connections with Luther, there's something pagan about Cranach, with his paintings of Apollo and Diana and Cupid complaining to Venus sharing the same poses as his christian painting, both interpreting classical myth as christian allegory and violating the Biblical symbolism at the same time. Something similar applies to his twin fascinations with depicting hunting scenes in tandem with a prelapsarian vision of man living in harmony with nature.
The following periods are rather barren for the gallery, save for Claude's Landscape with an Imaginary View of Tivoli, Pieter Brueghel painting of Landscape with flight into Egypt and Eworth's bizarrely allegorical Portrait of Sir John Luttrell. The strength of the collection emrges again when it comes to modern French painting, with a large collection of works by Manet, Renoir, Degas, Pissaro and Sisley. Some of the wotks surprise; early oil paintings in an impressionist style by Seurat, as well as a pointillist painting depicting his mistress in a comic parody of traditional portraiture (a theme also repeated in Manet's Le Dejeuner sur l'herbe where an unidealised nude sits alongside formally dressed men, while still resting in a classical pose as if she had casually strayed into the scene by accident) or Monet's still lives. A large number of landscapes by Cezanne show his depiction of natural subjects in geometric terms, while Monet's landscapes show his abandonment of chiaroscuro. Van Gogh's famous Self Portrait with Bandaged Ear is also present, showing a contrast behind the gaunt figure in the foreground and a colourful Japanese print hanging on the wall behind him (something similiar emerges in Lautrec's painting of Jane Avril, showing the glamorous and expensively dressed Moulin Rouge dancer in dark and subdued tones). Two of the Gauguin paintings are especially striking; Nevermore depicting a Tahitian nude in the same vein as an artist like Ingres while suggesting connotations of the fall in her facial expression, the presence of two whispering women in the background and the reference to Poe in a raven. Te Reriora or The Dream also draws a counterpoint between the foreground of the painting (a woman nursing a child while a man leaves behind her) and its background (frescos of lovers painted onto the walls of her house). Gauguin's depiction of 'noble savages' does seem to invest a rather 'writerly' quality into his work that makes it particularly fascinating for me.
This section was completed by one of Rousseau's naive Toll-Gate paintings and a Modigliano nude, showing again a classicised subject shown in terms derived from Oceanic sculpture. The gallery has recently increased its collection to include a number of works by Kandinsky, Sickert (a painting at an underground station), Pechstein, Vlaminck and Derain. There's also a brief British section, showing Frank Dobson's sculpture, Ben Nicholson's Mondrian-influenced Painting 1937, an Eric Gill engraving of a latin motto and a Graham Sutherland painting. The final section of interest formed the bequest of Roger Fry, ranging from Chinese bronzes and pottery to African masks. This section includes works by Vanessa Bell (praised by Woolf as a social satirist in painting), Duncan Grant and Fry himself, as well as the various pieces of crafts that came out of the Omega workshops.
Visiting Hampstead, I began at St John at Hampstead, a Georgian church whose interior opulence is only matched by its exterior dowdiness. The graveyard is more ornate, filled with older tombs decorated with skulls as well as with Victorian angels and celtic crosses. As with most London graveyards, it has an odd assortment of denizens, including Constable, Harrison and a relative of the last Tsar. Hampstead Cemetery is if anything rather more mannered than the tangled briars of St John's, having remained rather more faithful to the idea of the garden cemetery than Highgate. Comparatively unostentatious graves are laid out in neat rows interspersed with arboretum-like plantings of trees and shrubs (including a large palm treet at one point). Crickets chirped away in the background. One or two grandiose tombs do intrude; one in the shape of a church organ or the art deco Bianchi tomb with its Blakesque angel. Following this, I visited Fenton House with its collection of marquetry furniture, stumpwork, Kangxi Porcelain, Song paintings, snuff bottles and painted Chinese mirrors. The house has a quite good collection of paintings, including Duncan Grant, Sickert (paintings of Figaro and London music halls), Charles Ginner (a painting of Hampstead High Street at night that rather resembled Atkinson Grimshaw) and a rather poor GF Watts painting of waves turning into horses.
Visiting Wollaton Hall, I was struck by the classical and historical figures in circular niches along the walls (as at Ham House and Hampton Court) and the gargoyles underneath the windows. The overall effect is rather more ornate than Smythson's other building, Hardwick Hall. The interior is equally impressive, with its hammer-headed celing in the Great Hall, James Thornhill murals on the stairwells, the organ and single-handed clock. The interior included glass Blaschka models of aquatic life (octupi, squids etc) and geological displays of desert roses and haematite. Travelling onwards to Southwell Minster, I was impressed by the Norman exterior with its Rhenish caps and the remains of the ruined Bishop's Palace alongside. The interior balances different periods; Flemish and Victorian stained glass by Kempe, Norman arches at one end and early English gothic at the other. Wall plaster remains of a Roman bath house hang on the wall showing a male figure. Medieval misericord carvings of green men are displayed in the pulpitum. Green men carvings also predominate in the Chapter House, itself resembling a forest canopy. A Saxon tympanum rests in one of the transepts while an alter dedicated to fallen Polish soldiers has a triptych as its centrepiece - a Monet-like painting of lilies on the outside, depictions of barbed wire and a dead soldier on the outside.Labels: Art, Literature, London, Music
posted by Richard 9:39 AM
Sunday, May 20, 2007
Stowe's landscape gardens were designed to reflect the Whiggish views of Viscount Cobham, representing allegory as architecture. It coincidentally depicts a palimpsest of architectural and garden design, with the move from Baroque to Palladian and Augustan styles and from thence to Brown's Serpentine designs. I feel ambivalent on several scores, preferring the Gaudiesque playfulness of Hawksmoor or Wren to the classically correct Palladian style embraced by Burlington and Kent, whilst the continent preferred rococo. Palladianism was closely associated with the Whigs and Kent's designs follow that (although the relationship was fraught; Kent's Augustan style followed a Roman model that was redolent of Roman tyranny rather than Greek liberty, hence the subsequent Greek Revival and James Stuart), depicting figures revered in the Whig tradition like Locke, Socrates and Milton. Conversely, the Tory Gibbs preferred the Baroque style and built an early example of the gothic revival from ironstone that is common in this part of Buckinghamshire and Northamptonshire. Gothic was justified as being suggestive of the country's Germanic heritage and commitment to liberty. As was common for early gothic revival buildings, it doesn't look as if Gibbs was entirely sure of what gothic was or how to construct it; the capitals here look more Egyptianate than Gothic. Equally, Brown's mimicry of natural landscapes is entirely dependent on the population of said landscape with various classical temples; I always feel I'd prefer the earlier formal style which admitted no division between nature and art. The grounds were at least home to a wide variety of nature outside of Brown's tamed vistas; lilies, rabbits, copper beeches, squirrels, horse chestnut, coots and geese. This period was also that of the faked ruin and Stowe does have these (along with a Chinese house), but The Temple of Friendship was perhaps more interesting in this regard; it was originally inhabited and decorated and was only perserved as a ruin after a fire. There's something particularly forlorn about its empty rooms, particularly given the surreal aspect given them by the retention of wooden doors and seats.
By contrast, Polesden Lacey is a more mannered affair, largely the creation of an ostentatious Edwardian heiress. The gardens combine formal planting with rock gardens and statues of griffins. The interior joins Edwardian ostentation (a saloon with the walls covered with gold gilt) with an antiquarian interest; Grinling Gibbons carving from an old Wren church, a picture gallery with a plaster ceiling in the style of a Seventeenth century long gallery. Each room is filled with Chinese or Imari vases, Maiolica plates, Ormolu clocks, Boulle and Chippendale furniture, Chinese lacquer and Persian rugs. Some Italian (though derived from Arabic) marquetry of walnut, bone and ivory was especially striking. The gallery is predminantly composed of Dutch (Velde seascapes, Ruisdael landscapes, a Van Der Neer frost fair) and Sienese altar paintings. It also included Corneille De Lyon miniatures and a Ter Borch painting showing an ambiguous scene wherein the characters seem to be playing out a moral fable (a brothel scene), something which typically tended to show low status characters but which here depicts recognisable middle and upper class figures. The gallery also contained a Roman sarcophagus, with elephants shown on its side.
Returning to Highgate, I found myself especially struck by the East Cemetery. When I last visited in Winter the grid plan this necropolis was laid out on was clearly evident and the place had a logical and orderly air to it. In summer, the trees had closen in and the paths beneath them seemed as hidden and secret as those in the West Cemetery. I look at gravestones shattered by ivy vines as thick as lianas, graves written in Arabic, Chinese and Hebrew, graves for obscure figures like magicians (the Human Hairpin) and forgotten inventors. Then there is Karl Marx, an anachronistic monument out of place in North London and out of time now that its kin have been pulled down in Eastern Europe. A single red flower rests on the mausoleum while a black cat flits quietly between the headstones. Within the West Cemetery foxgloves, roses and buttercups are flowering but the cover of the trees in full leaf only leaves the place more dark than on my previous visit in winter. It's difficult not to feel like Alexander Humboldt or Frederick Catherwood. I hadn't realised that this is one of the few places in London with a Giant Redwood. Monuments formerly surmounted by vases now witness them lying broken at their bases, crushed by bindweed.
Reading Museum is not especially noteworthy but it does have some interesting exhibits; green man capitals and animal voussoirs from Reading Abbey, black and white frets from Silchester, the Ogham stone, a Roman tombstone, an Iron age horse effigy and a head from a statue of the Egyptian God Serapis from a Silchester temple. At the time of visiting, the museum had an exhibition dedicated to Sir John Soane to coincide with the restoration of the Simeon Monument. Amongst other things it included various paintings by Joseph Gandy of the Bank of England. Reading Bach Choir also organised a set of peripatetic concerts, flitting from one Reading church to another. Beginning at St Giles (a high church interior filled with baroque monuments, paintings, Bavarian statues of st Mary, candles and Victorian mosaics of the saints) with Summer is Icumen in, then to St Mary's (a former evangelical chapel with a beautiful stained glass simple with a tree design) and Benjamin Britten before finishing at Reading Minister (high church adornments mingling with Saxon arches) and Tallis.
The exhibition of John White's drawings at the British Museum recalls Hakluyt's complex descriptions of native cultures. It begins by showing White's drawings of native cultures from Greece, Turkey and Uzbekistan as well as his Calibanesque imaginings of Pictish warriors. Many of his descriptions of Inuit and Algonquian Indians were to follow the same poses and tropes established by these depictions of savagery, most obviously in the scenes of violence shown with Frobisher's encounter with the Inuit while searching for the North West passage. Nonetheless, his drawings were also intended to assuage such fears of hostile savages and encourage would be emmigrants to Roanoke, and veer between the depiction of noble savages (stressing their agrarian expertise in the growing of maize, their ordered villages and craftsmanship in kayak construction) and objects of curiousity (the skinning of their dead and entombment in special huts, the dances around totem poles surmounted by human faces while draped with tobacco leaves and depictions of cannibalism). The drawings consequently emerge as a form of prospectus, reflecting the linkage between commerce and colonialism that was to set the pattern for the British Empire. White also meticulously recorded the flora and fauna of the places he visited; pineapples, flying fish, jellyfish, plantains, crabs, hoopoes and scorpions while the exhibition also contains some excellent Hilliard miniatures and an appearance from John Dee's scrying mirror (as well as a frontpage of a treatise on navigation showing Elizabeth at the helm of an exploring vessel, wherein Dee prepared the intellectual foundations for colonisation by using the term 'British Empire' for the first time).
Elsewhere in the V&A, an equally interesting exhibition on James 'Athenian' Stuart shows the drawings he and Revett made of buildings like the Temple of the Winds and the Choragic Monument of Lysicrates, frequently showing both of them wearing Ottoman dress. As well as depicting the architecture Stuart also had an ethnographic care in depicting the people of Greece, their dress and habits. The background narrative of avoiding plague and brigands alike nearly obscure his architectural achievement but Stuart was the first person in centuries to design structures like censor tripods or doric temples, with the rest of the exhibition showcasing designs and artefacts from places like Kedleston, Shugborough and Nuneham Courtenay. Later, I noticed Rysbrack's original statues of Thor and Sunna on display; if anything I preferred the weathered and encrusted copies that are still at Stowe.
Appelfeld's Badenheim 1939 is an uneasy compromise between realist and historical specificity on the one hand (in the vein of Solzhenitzyn's A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich) and an allegory that recalls La Peste, The Magic Mountain and The Trial (most obviously in the case of the two guards that come for Frau Zauberblit). As with the latter category of novel, Appelfeld deliberately isolates the events from their historical context, thereby implicity separating them from any meaning. The anomie and restlessness experienced by the inhabitants of Badenheim, whether manifested in a longing for the woods or for a Polish childhood, seems as generalised as the alienation experienced by Hans Castorp even if Appelfeld elsewhere identifies "a kind of neuroticism, a restlessness, a permanent alertness, a kind of insecurity" as an integral aspect of the Jewish consciousness. Equally, Appelfeld also elsewhere suggests that "a society without true roots is a society without a future...Without a deep belief, without a deep philosophy, mysticism, you cannot got through it." Nonetheless, the experience of collective memory in Badenheim 1939 is a deeply ambivalent one. For all of the scorn directed at self-loathing assimilated Jews who sneer at Buber and Herzl, the characters who embrace their Jewish identity most keenly in the novel are those that also embrace their journey to the Polish concentration camps. In a perervse sense the holocaust is envisaged as a form of pilgrimage, the longing for roots equating to a death drive in a way that perhaps recalls the exchange of European emnity for Arab emnity. The metonymic force of the novel is an undirected one that escapes the stark simplicity of the metaphor he employs of fish in the tank.
White's The Vivisector is cast in the same vein as Mann's <>Doktor Faustus and Bernhard's Correction in exploring the idea of the artist as a Faust figure (in depicting the embalmed remains of a vivisected dog it even touches of similar themes to Correction where stuffed animals are emblematic of the blurred distinction between nature and art). The difference is that White also considers the artist as being akin to god ("Yes, I believe in him... othrwise how would men come by their cruelty - and their brilliance?"), who is often described as the divine vivisector, the same term White uses for Duffield. Elsehwere in the novel, the relevation of god's purpose is through a wasp siting rather than by seeing eternity in a grain of sand. Art is a priestly function, of revelation ("the endlessly changing coloured slides in his magic lantern of a mind... were focussing into what might be called a vision.. these paintings are my revelations") but also of cruelty and dissection. In short, the faustianism is inverted, with christ and the devil being one and the same. This combination accountsfor the duality of Duffield as a character; he is often not consciously cruel to the people in his life. He is, for instance, horrified by Hero's drowning kittens and sending her adopted child back to his poor parents, something that is deliberately counterpointed to the actions and attitudes of his own parents (who are nonetheless seeking to treat the child as a work of art, to be moulded or disfigured). Such describes the novel's central fabula, but it is one complicated by class and repressed homosexuality. Caldicott and Cutbush represent the third sex, with the suggestion that the dislocation caused by their sexuality enables them to experience revelation. His liminal position between classes further displaces him from any sense of belonging.
Reading a selection of Emily Dickinson's poems, I felt quite strongly that she reminded me of Hopkins in her approach to language, to sexuality and to religion. The principal difference seemed to be although her work can be viewed as having the concepts of instress and inscape implicit within it, her work has a rather more modernist approach to the role of literature and language. Her poems present a spectrum of views on this from the disavowal of art in I would not paint a picture and Drama's vitallest expression is the common day to its elevation above nature in I reckon - when I count at all.
The Lives of Others is an anomaly, starting from the premise that East Germany was hospitable to art in a way that was not true for a unified Germany that lacked anything to believe in or to rebel against. It's a premise that creates the drama while obviating historical accuracy. In practice, a Stasi agent would not have been assigned sole responsibility for such an operation and would not have been able to collude with his victims; in describing Wiesler as a good man the film does blur the distinction between perpetrator and victim. In a certain sense, there is even a sublimated homosocial love story between Wisler and Dreyman.
Although art if assigned a redemptive quality in the film (as with Wiesler's reading of Brecht's poetry, as his sterile life is counterpointed to Dreyman's), its role is an ambiguous one. For example, the metaphor of acting permeates the script; the Stasi are seen as directors while the ketman practiced by the Easy Germans is characterised as acting. The main character uses this metaphor to persuade Christa to both be true to her husband and to betray him. As a consequence, few ideas presented in the film are seen as clear and stable; the communist bigwigs do not believe in communist ideology even as they enforce and abuse it (Margot Honnecker, gives Dreyman a book by Solzhenitsyn strictly prohibited to ordinary people), and even as Dreyman remains faithful to the cause. Fiction is repeatedly metamorphosed into the reality that originally produced it; the surveillance transcripts refer to an imaginary play and are then turned into a novel, undermining the role of art in bearing witness.Labels: Architecture, Art, England, Literature, London
posted by Richard 12:40 PM
Monday, April 9, 2007
Returning to Hardwick Hall, I was struck by the forest-like character of the interior, with the main hall being decorated on all sides by painted plaster and tapestry hunting scenes showing wild stags, elephants and boars. Stags horns decorate the walls while a Hilliard school painting of Elizabeth produced at the hall shows her dress filled with sea monsters and birds; I am fire and air; my other elements I give to baser life. Outside, the entrance is dominated by the family crest of two stags, something that reminds me more of Schoenbrunn than England. The entrance hall doorway is flanked by two lionheads where hands holding torches force their way through the jaws. Nearby is the church of St John the Baptist, Ault Hucknall, where Thomas Hobbes is buried. The interior includes an elaborate Norman doorway (showing events from Genesis) in contrast to a simpler Saxon design, alabaster tombs, Green men heads on the rafters and a Norman depiction of George and the dragon outside. On the way back, I visit St Peter's in Elford, noted for its medieval alabaster monuments but substantially reworked in the Victorian period with carved wooden angels and Minton tiling. I also look at Holy Angels in Hoar Cross, a strange isolated cathedral on a hilltop. The exterior is covered with dragon gargoyles and statues of the saints while the plain red sandstone interior is lined with elaborate stations of the cross and black and white tiling. Light thinly permeates through Kempe's stained glass while the dark interior is illuminated by reflections from the gold rood screens. I also visited Letocetum, the remains of a Roman market and mansio near Watling Street, and a museum showing Samain ware, funerary urns and mosaics.
The following day I travelled to Birmingham, and to the Museum and Art Gallery there. I begin by walking round to Pugin's cathedral, with its plain white interior and gold pillars, Flemish stations of the cross, medieval pulipt and statue of St Chad. I then visit St Philip's cathedral, this time an exercise in baroque by Thomas Archer. Much of the older gravestones remain, while the bright interior is darkened somewhat by a set of oppressive blood red Burne Jones stained glass windows. There is also the newly restored town hall and Chamberlain memorial. Finally, there is St Martin's church, a Victorian reconstruction of a medieval church. The exterior almost crawls with gargoyles, while the interior is as stark as that of Holy Angels, save for the wooden angels lining the ceiling. Again, the stained glass is by Burne Jones.
Burne Jones also proves a prominent subject at the art gallery. A grand piano decorated by Burne Jones with a pattern of golden flowers forms the centrepiece of an exhibition dedicated to him. Other exhibits include a golden chest decorated with a picture of the Garden of Hesperides, as well as the paintings. I tend to think of Burne Jones as being a little too ennervated, denuded of drama and while I can't say I've changed my mind on the basis of what I've seen, the variety of works from famous paintings like Pygmalion and the Image, Phyllis and Demophoon (an unusual depiction of male sexuality) and King Cophetua and the Beggar Maid to more obscure works like Star of Bethlehem and The Merciful Knight was impressive. The collection has a substantial number of pre-Raphaelite works, such as Simeon Solomon's ephebian Bacchus and Frederick Sandys's Medea, shown against a gold background in the manner of an Orthodox icon. Although the collection has some good Rossetti paintings, most of it is taken up with Ford Madox Brown (represented by Valentine Rescuing Sylvia from Proteus and The Finding in the Saviour of the Temple, both showing a combination of mythical subjects, artifical tableaux and saturated colours that are more appropriate to his allegorical paintings like The Scapegoat), William Holman Hunt (the most succesful works here, combining social realism with the Pre-Raphaelite aesthetic in paintings like The Last of England and An English Autumn Afternoon) and Arthur Hughes (the beautifully detailed Long Enagagement, where the ivy is perhaps more succesfully shown than the characters). Other striking exhbits included some minor Watts paintings,. Fitzgerald's Bosch like fairy paintings of the death of Cock Robin, a William Burges marble table, De Morgan Lustre ware, Ruskin pottery and a marquetry table by Pugin as well as some Victorian landscapes like Leader's February Fill Dyke.
The rest of the collection is also quite strong, containing Botticelli's The Descent of the Holy Ghost and Bellini's The Madonna and Child, woodcuts by Ernest Heckel and Gauguin, Degas's A Roman Beggar Woman and Pisarro's The Boieldieu Bridge, as well as a museum containing an Egyptian statue of Isis, Peruvian moche pots, Ninevehan ivories, Pakistani shields and helmets and Pagua New Guinean funerary sculpture. The museum also houses a number of Egyptian mummies I recall being terrified by as a child, and a set of Buddhas, including the Sultanganj Buddha. There's also an exhibition of Islamic Khatam marquetry. Returning to the South of England, I called in at Nuneham Courtenay and the chapel there designed by James 'Athenian' Stuart, featuring beautiful marble statues and wrought iron across the windows.
Revisiting Winchester, I found that the cathedral in particular had a great deal that I hadn't seen on my last visit. Combining Norman, Gothic and Victorian architecture with an interior that mixes Medieval and Tudor, it's one of the most eclectic and fascinating cathedrals (Victorian mosaics sit alongside English baroque). I hadn't been to the Morley library before, which I recognised as the setting for a television adaptation of an MR James story from last christmas. Mostly though the wooden bookcases and globes reminded me of the library at Strahov Monastery in Prague. The cathedral also has a collection of medieval bibles, showing the brilliant illuminations for chapters like the Song of Songs. The Triforium Gallery also proved interesting, containing a set of painted wooden states of King James and King Charles (peppered with gunshot either due to the puritans or to extreme measures taken against pigeons) and a set of medieval mortuary chests. I also visited the crupt and found myself rather impressed by Anthony Gormley's statue in the flooded cavern. I found myself particularly impressed with the medieval tiling and fifteenth century murals in the Lady Chapel, where devils are shown plaguing men, as well as by the well preserved chantry chapels and twelfth century wall and ceiling paintings in the Holy Sepulchre Chapel (the depiction of Christ on the ceiling being one of the most Byzantine things I can recall in an English cathedral). Some of the side chapels have Burne Jones stained glass. Finally, I noted Scott's designs for the Wilberforce tomb; some angels hold the sun and the moon, while another, recalling earlier tomb designs, holds a skull. I also went to the city museum, and was struck by a perfectly preserved Roman mosaic, showing a star at the centre and a swastika pattern bordering it to represent the heavens.
Visiting London, I began by finding the church of St James the Less, a polychromatic redbrick affair by GE Street. The gothic exterior with its three spires on the tower is striking enough, though the interior contains frescos by GF Watts and red and white brick. Walking onwards, I arrive at the Tate for its Hogarth exhibition. Hogarth is the most writerly of painters, fitting into the narrative of Defoe and Fielding rather better than that of Kneller. As a painter, Hogath veers between attempting something in the manner of Kneller or Caneletto, only to return to something more in the mode of Gilray. Hogarth's satire seems partly motivated by moralism, castigating the sins of the decadent sity of London and partly by a more carnivalesque spirit (most clear in his painting of Falstaff as a subject) which opposes the raucous spirit of the city to foreign cosmopolitanism and native gentility alike. The most revealing examples of this lie with his society portraits. Hogarth is unable to show a group of companions without including a clergyman about to topple over from the chair he stands on. When showing a family in a rural idyll, he cannot but include some peasants having sex atop a haystack in the background. His engraving of an Italian musician shows him enraged by the sounds emanating from the streets outside his window, spiting Hogarth's principal object of cultural hatred. Many of his paintings include cats and dogs (something he has in common with earlier Dutch painting and later Victorian works like Hunt's The Awakening Conscience) introducing a note of anarchy into the most courtly scenes; a cat looking intently at a caged bird or a monkey dressed in a wig and about to give a singing recital. As such, there's a certain ambivalence in his satrical works; The Four Stages of Cruelty traces a path from childhood cruelty to animals to criminality but notes society's cruelty in its dissection of the hanged man's corpse. Crime is seen as something socially sanctioned, with Gin Lane and Beer Street showing the same vices in London poor and London rich alike; the same ideas about crime and capitalism that Brecht saw in Gay are also present in Hogarth. Before leaving, I visit the Museum of Garden History, mostly to see the Tradescant and Bligh tombs, but I was also struck by 'The Lamb of Tartary,' an example of a plant from central Asia, which Hans Sloane believed to grow sheep as its fruit. In fact it's a rhizome; a species of fern.
Dulwich park is as pleasant as Battersea, with Hepworth's Double Form overlooking the lake while Pochard and Mandarin ducks swim across. In the nearby picture gallery, I found myself especially impressed with the Canaletto exhibition. Canaletto emerges as an architectural fantasist as much as Piranesi or Whistler, rearrnaging or even inventing building and landscape alike. The effect of this is amplified by the distance in time; London is shown with Westminster Abbey and Hall towering over all with a lacunae where the modern Houses of Parliament would be. A wooden obelisk owned by the waterworks stands where Cleopatra's Needle is now. Somerset House is designed by Ingio Jones, not William Chambers. Several paintings show the interior of the vanished Ranelagh rotunda. In one picture, the distance between St Paul's and the Monument is extended far off into the distance. Particularly fascinating is the attitude to ruins. His pictures of English landscapes show buildings designed in the neo-classical style by Robert Adam alongside Capability Brown's replacement of formal gardens with proto-romantic parkland. The remains of Warwick Castle show it being reinvented in the gothick style with arched windows being added with brightly painted white panes. Of greatest interest are his fantasies, showing ruined classical architecture like the Colosseum and the alongside its modern, Palladian counterparts in pristine form. The romanticism is muted, with the depiction of the ruins tending to pastoral rather than the sort of work that came from Friedrich later. Nonetheless, Canaletto does bestride the classical and the romantic as much as he foreshadows the postmodern character of Victorian architecture with its pastiching of Classical, Gothic, Egyptian and even Byzantine architecture.
Visiting Ashdown House, I was again struck by the contrast between the genteel Dutch influenced architecture and the tragic aspect of its narrative, of a family forced into exile, first from Bohemia and then from England. The house towers over the landscape, which is neatly bissected by tree avenues and formal gardens but the prospect is nonetheless a lonely one of empty downland populated by sheep and sarsen stones. The inner stairwell only complicates the iconography of the place, filled with family paintings of the Winter Queen and Prince Rupert, and with classical busts of Hermes, Apollo and Athena. Travelling back via Donnington Castle, I arrive at Basildon Park. Again the genteel Palladian architecture belies a narrative based on colonial greed and I find myself more drawn to the broken classical statues at the back of the house.
I've written before about the implication of Romanticism in Knut Hamsun's Nazism and this is something that occurs to me once more as I read Growth of the Soil. To some degree, "Growth of the Soil" is a Norwegian anticipation of the phrase "Blut und Boden" (blood and soil) by the German author Walther Darre, often used by Hitler to assert that "pure-blooded" Germans have the exclusive right to occupy "German" soil. French fascists in World War II would also embrace the mythology of the soil; The Nazi collaborator Marshal Pétain said, "La terre ne ment pas!" ("The soil does not lie!") Isak is portrayed as having a spiritual kinship with nature that insulates his from the moral decadence that comes from the cities; "The land saved him. If he had lived down in the village, maybe the great world would have affected even him... here in the wilds he was sheltered from al immoderation." Similarly, Elesus is described as "blemished.. warped" by his time in town. The soil is seen as central to the national life, a concept of gemeinschaft. The one point this becomes explicit is less than edifying; "he's the modern type, a man of our time; he believes enough all the age has taught him; all the Jew and Yankee have taught him." Conversely, Inger's killing of her child as well as that of Barbro are acts fitting for a state of nature, reflecting a certain suspicion of the feminine.
Reading Tsypkin's Summer in Baden-Baden, I was surprised to note how many features of Western literature that would have been unavailable to Tsypkin were mirrored in it. The prose style flows on with little interruption from sentence or paragraph, recalling both Woolf and Bernhard, as it blurs the distinction between narrator and character, between past and present. There's an escapist element to this, with the Jewish Tsypkin speaking of days when Russian Jews would travel to Germany. Tsypkin places himself in the cosmopolitan tradition of Turgenev at a time when such cosmopolitanism was impossible. The novel even resembles a Turgenev novel, showing its protagonist defeated by the land he has travelled to. But the protagonist is Dostoevsky not Turgenev and the land is Germany, not Russia. Towards the end, Tsypkin writes "why was I so strangely enticed and attracted by the life of this man who despised me and my kind?" Tsypkin is attracted to Dostoevsky's sensitivity to oppression and suffering but repulsed by his nationalism and fanaticism, representing a dialogue about Tsypkin's own ambivalent relationship to a motherland he had sought to leave.
Writing about Calvino, David Mitchell pondered why writers that write about writing are accused of creative onanism while no such charge is laid against painters who paint their own portraits. For all of the eloquence of the case for the defence, Calvino's If on a Winter's Night a Traveller seems entirely open to that particular charge. Calvino's novel is hermetic, an endogeous system that admits of no external reference point, pointing to a wordlessness beyond language only to subsequently withhold it; "for what it reveals and even more for what it hides... the silent language to which all the words we believe we read refer." As books cannot contain totality, the only way to point to the unwritable is by writing the books of all possible authors. Equally, if there is no meaning beyond language, then all meanings become possible; "the former are convinced that amongst the false books flooding the market they can track down the few that bear a truth... the latter believe that only counterfeiting, mystification, intentional falsehood can represent absolute value." The novel accordingly simultaneously foregrounds the idea of an author behind the text while dispersing it ("I am an author who can be faked"), emphasises the idea of reading as a form of abandonment based on trust, only to deliberately challenge it through the repeated abortion of the narratives, to the chagrin of the characters ("behind the written page is the void").
After London by Richard Jeffries is oddly reminiscent of JG Ballard's depictions of heroes setting out into the heart of entropy (in this context, the fetid ruins of a drowned London) but in its context is perhaps more notable for its depiction of a fedual world that challenges the romanticisation of the medieval period in the works of Walter Scott and the Pre-Raphaelites (or indeed Morris and News from Nowhere) by describing that world as essentially totalitarian, nasty and brutish. Jeffries seems to a large extent to take an egalitarian view, showing his noble forced to learn from the lower orders only to resile from that by allowing his nobility and learning to ultimately win through.
Balzac's The Chouans presents an early stage in his career, which had more in common with Scott and Fenimore Cooper than Dickens or Zola. Although depicting its characters through the lens of historical and social change, it nonetheless also seeks to displace them from history by dislocating the narrative into a setting at a remove from historical events. Balzac instead emphasises that the Bretons are savages, the product of nature rather than civilisation. The novel is also interesting for decentering its focus from the aristocratic hero, an equivalent to Darnay or Blakeney, to its heroine, Mademoiselle Marie de Verneuil. Marie is one of the most striking characterisations of women in Victorian fiction, holding her opponents prisoner with a gun, wielding a dagger and commanding the Republican soldiers. Whereas many Victorian novels dichotomise the angel and whore, Balzac avoids this, although he still makes her a creature of emotion rather than reason; "Angel and demon you said and you were right... there is this to be said for women, that they never consider the rights or wrongs of their most reprehensible actions; they are governed by feeling."
Hoffmann's The Life and Opinions of the Tomcat Murr presents a familiar exercise in Romantic aesthetics; the narrative consists of a series of fragments designed to be able to intuit a transcendental whole. The text repeatedly references the idea of doubles; "I then fell into a state that, dividing my self in a curious way from my self, yet seemed to be my real self... his own self walking beside him.. I and my doppelganger... a dreadful doppelganger once looked up at me from another lake." In that vein, the narrative also repeatedly draws chiastic oppositions between paired characters; Murr and Kreisler, Kreisler and Hector, Hector and Cyprian, Severino and Abraham and so on. Mirrors reccur throughout the text, while other oddities from electric shocks to Severino's invisible girl continually draw attention to the noumenal. Nonetheless, the narrative also emphasises what is hidden, decentering the aesthetics of the sublime in favour of a focus on the unconscious and dreadful that were to be the hallmarks of the gothic genre. This tends to introduce a polyponic aspect to the text, as with Ponto's telling and re-telling of the story of Walter and Formosus from a different angle. The narratives of Kreisler and Murr are themselves most obviously counterparted in a parodic and carnvilesque fashion, the relationship between the two resembling that of Jacques and his master (although it could also be said that Murr serves to parody the Romantic ideal of the artist in much the same way as Swift used the Yahoos).
Although the likes of Tennyson, Scott and Rossetti had made the medieval a familiar figure in English literature and art, the same cannot be said on the whole for French literature. An exception is Huysman's The Cathedral, which establishes an uncertain analogy between the symbolism of medieval art and that of the likes of Mallarme, uniting both against a materialist world of appearances; "the whole cycle of mysticism... the essence of the Middle Ages... the Middle Ages knowing that everything is a sign and a figure, that the only value of things invisible is that they correspond to things invisible... men were not, as we, the dupes of appearance." Nontheless, the text objectifies this symbolism, preferring to offer a disquisition on symbolism than to simply represent the objective correlative itself. In part, this seems due to a dissociation of sensibility that Huysmans blames the church for; "the instinctive aversion for art, the tupe of ideas, the terror of words, peculiar to Catholics." Durtal consequently bemoans the irrelevance of the church to all modern artistic developments, castigating newer churches as empty and being without soul and a product of anomie he himself suffers from ("the American abominations of the day... a Parisian who likes his city so little he seeks out the most deserted nooks to live in... but when he has a chance of improving on this scheme of existence... he shies and kicks"). Consequently, the novel depicts Durtal progressing from black mass to monastery to cathedral to monastery without rest, unable to form his own system of symbolism behind appearances, unable to complete his text.Labels: Art, Birmingham, London, Victorian
posted by Richard 11:30 AM
Monday, January 1, 2007
Worcester cathedral was built with a mix of stones; something grey, sometimes red sandstone. Although placed in the heart of the city, the Cathedral Close still has a rather self contained feel to it, as one passed through Edgar's Tower and enters a complex of ruins where halls and other monastic buildings once stood. A watergate remains, something that only serves to emphasise the self contained character of the cathedral. The most interesting aspect of the interior is undoubtedly the Norman crypt begun by Bishop Wulfstan in a style reminiscent of Repton. Similarly, the tombs are especially striking, such as the Beauchamp tomb with its black swans or the ornate gothic tomb for Prince Arthur. The rest of the cathedral shows the evidence of Gilbert Scott's restoration, such as the painted ceiling. A graveyard is placed in the centre of the cloisters (monks who has tended the garden would once have been buried there) while figures from English history are depicted on stained glass in the arches. The town itself is a mixture of Queen Anne (such as the Guildhall and Hospital with its heraldic white swans), Georgian and Victorian buildings. The majority of the church towers are in red sandstone, excepting one where a grey baroque tower had been built onto an earlier gothic foundation. Another exception is the slender grey spire of St Andrew's, which rises far above the other buildings and rivals the cathedral. A Victorian structure, the building is nonetheless a ruin; nothing remains except the tower.
The Priory Church in Great Malvern rather resembles a cathedral as well, though there is something more colourful about its external appearance, with its patchwork red, yellow and grey stones. The stained glass is also a patchwork of fragments dating back to the time of Richard the Third. Victorian minton tiling sits alongside the original medieval designs it was based on. There's also some new windows stained in a more impressionistic style. The round arches on the interior date back to the Saxon period, sitting alongside baroque monuments and a chantry chapel containing medieval stone tombs.
The church of St Mary the Virgin in Ingestre, has the distinction of being the sole Wren church outside London. Although the stone is duller than the city churches, the building that stands next to Ingestre's Carolean hall is recognisably of the same design (particularly to St Mary Somerset). The interior is decorated with plaster carvings, Gibbons woodwork and Burne-Jones stained glass, showing blood dripping from a pelican onto Adam and Eve, who bear crimson halos and wings. Unusually, the marble monuments have been painted and gilded. Nearby in Hoar Cross, Holy Angels is GF Bodley's miniature cathedral standing stop a hill and surveying the valley beneath. Yews line the walk to the door, while winged gargoyles look down the roof, statues stare ahead from their niches and lonely stone angels on the graves stare at the sky. The church of St Paul in nearby Burton on Trent where it sits adjacent to the town hall, is also by Bodley and shows a similar style. More unusual is the church of St Modwen in the marketplace there. It's tower is blackened but is still in a recognisably baroque style. The interior is also quite unusual, with plain stone columns and round arches lining the nave, while the altar and sanctuary are 'high baroque.' Filled with dead leaves when I visited, the churchyard looks out over the then flooded river Trent and is filled with elaborate tombs. Finally, the church of St John the Baptist in Croxall presented an especially melancholy prospect. It stands high on a hill, above the river Trent next to the local hall. Like St Modwen, the churchyard was filled with elaborate eighteenth and nineteenth century tombs and framed with fallen leaves and bare tree branches. But the tombs here have fallen into desuetude; a celtic cross tips over as it sinks into the earth while the walls of box tombs crumble. The church is also in a poor condition; the windows are broken and the crudely repaired walls patched with brick seem less than steady.
Visiting Kensal Green Cemetery last spring, the central avenue was hidden in shade beneath the trees that lined it. In winter, the leaves had fallen and the grandiose tombs felt oddly naked and bereft. The decay of the tombs was also far more evident; since my last visit a section of the outer wall had collapsed and the resulting breach made it feel far more ramshackle than before. Since I wasn't as distracted by the novelty of the architecture this time, I also noticed far more that most of the modern graves were from other countries; Ethiopia, Yugoslavia or Greece. It seems oddly appropriate given the pagan symbolism of much of the funerary architecture, from Egyptian to Roman and Greek. I wondered if this reflects the increasingly multi-ethnic character of London or whether it was simply that people from these countries were more likely to be drawn to the same traditions that its Victorian creators were. Many of the more modern tombs also seem to display a sentimental and trivial approach to death, with cuddly toys left on the them, that were at odds with the cold stone that surrounds them. I also notice a jay perched on a nearby tomb, a pigeon nestles on a quatrefoil above a tomb door and a squirrel disappears through a tomb wall. Afterwards, I move on to walk around Camden market, somewhere else with Victorian roots that has given way to a more multi-ethnic London. Or at least so that might seem; despite the oriental food stalls and melting pot atmosphere, the predominant aspect is of white counter-culture; gothic clothes, new age and punk. The following weekend was occupied with Mapledurham church with its diamond patterned redbrick and flint by Butterfield (the house's original chantry chapel with alabaster tombs remains alongside the gothic revival building). Later, I visit St John's Gate, a hyperreal Victorian interpretation of a medieval Priory, even down to its reinvention of the Knights Hospitalier as a chivalric order in keeping with the Victorian emphasis on medieval tradition. I also returned to Limehouse churchyard, which was covered in a carpet of purple crocuses and daffodils.
Hockney as an artist always seems to me to be oddly hollow, someone who flits through different styles and media while the essential subjects remain the same, both in terms of the people being depicted and how they are depicted. Self-portrait with Blue Guitar shows him drawing naturalistically while all the objects around are shown in abstract terms that reference Picasso. Picasso recurs in his photographic collages, simultaneously showing the same subjects from different angles and at slightly different times. Conversely, his portraits combine modernist techniques (the collages recalling Cubism, his portrait of Divine recalling Matisse) with a surprising traditionalism; the portraits of his mother and lover against deep blue patterned backgrounds is heavily reminiscent of the Holbein paintings I had seen earlier, while a picture of the artist at work deliberately echoes Velasquez and Las Meninas. For all of this, there's a fundamental similarity to his work. His My Parents shows his mother staring out of the canvas at the viewer while his father sits at right angles to her. They are separated by a table where a vase of flowers stands (a favourite prop). Similarly, his portrait of Fred and Marcia Weisman shows her staring at the viewer while he stands at right angles to her, separated by one of the art objects they collected. The painting of Henry Geldzahler and Christopher Scott shows Geldzahler sat looking at the viewer while Scott, wearing a coat as if about to leave, stands at right angles to him (a glass table with a vase full of flowers rests in the foreground). Although his painting of Peter Getting Out of Nick's Pool is the most famous work, a later one finds Schlesinger sat alone, slightly at right angles to the viewer but still staring back, the pose used on Divine. Later, I walk around the National Portrait Gallery - I still think it an institution more marked for its commitment to historical narrative than to artistic excellence but I was struck by Roger Fry's portrait of Edward Carpenter, showing him in a spartan interior and his reflection only half visible in a mirror, leaving his figure to nonetheless dominates the room.
The BBC adaptation of Dracula was surprisingly original. It bends the novel to fit the conventions of the horror film (as with the deaths of Harker and Holmwood), but foregrounds the theme of occultism (rather reminding me of Huysman's The Damned) and the more obvious theme of syphilis, as opposed to Coppola's Faustian interpretation of the role of plague in Herzog's film. It did occur to me that the renewed 'threat' of immigration from Eastern Europe has given the novel a new resonance; this is after all the year Romania joined the European Union. Volver is a welcome return to the the camp humour and magical realism of Almodovar's earlier films, especially What Have I Done to Deserve this? (whose plot it resembles), combining this with the Hitchcockian plotting of Mala educacion. Children of Men falls uneasily between the apocalyptic and political genres, failing to formulate a consistent political critique on the one hand while failing to abstract those concerns into the the nihilism demanded by the former genre. Every part of the film refers to minor extrapolations of what can be seen in daily news broadcasts; low fertility rates, ethnic violence, immigration, state authoritarianism, terrorism etc.
Lawrence's Mornings in Mexico finds him once more enraptured by male beauty during Indian dances while only noticing the women's clothing; "the men are naked to the waist.. they are handsome, and absorbed with a deep rhythmic absorption." In describing the Indian culture, he celebrates themes of unity in a manner that is reminiscent of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance ("creation is a great flood, for ever flowing. in lovely and terrible waves. In everything the shimmer of creation and never the finality of the created") but as with Pirsig, the narrator figures as an outsider throughout (something emphasised by the absence of Frieda from the domestic setting), even finding himself uncomfortable with the presence of tourist crowds at the Hopi snakedance. Last Words by William Burroughs, reminded me of TS Eliot's complaint that Blake had concocted his philosophy from bits and bobs left around the house. Throughout, Burroughs reads an assortment of mystical and conspiracy theory writings designed to gull the credulous. He dotes on his cats and his collection of guns (reminding me of Self's waspish comment that Burroughs hated women and loved guns).
Turgenev's Home of the Gentry presents a fable of a rootless man like Rudin ("you're a thinking man - and yet you lie around... you're all well-heeled layabouts.. this ecstasy of boredom is the ruin of the Russian people"), which is complicated by a rival fable of rural virtue and urban corruption. The Russian admiration of the peasantry complicates a novel that could easily have become a narrative of individual damnation like Madame Bovary and instead gains a sense of the diminishing effect of the environment that has more in common with The Return of the Native or Ethan Frome. For example, Mikhalevich exhorts Lavretsky to work on the land and to concern himself with the welfare of his peasants, a fate that ultimately only manifests itself as a form of punishment. Russia destroys its own children and those that linger too long, such as Lemm's death in impecunious exile, feeling like "a fish out of water". Although Lavretsky and Panshin differ on issues of westernisation and slavophilia, neither worldview is material to their respective fates in the narrative which effectively share the same end; "we're sick because we've only become half-European; we must cure ourselves with more of what has made us sick." The realist context of the novel with its complex of patterning of economic, social and political strands is thus at odds with a metaphysical theme that sees life in Schopenhauerian terms; "he had actually ceased to think about personal happiness... he had become tranquil"
Sarah Orne Jewett's The Country of the Pointed Firs is unusual in American fiction for its emphasis on community and place (the very name being reminiscent of Middlemarch (the statement at the end of Marsh Rosemary being akin to that at the end of Middlemarch) or Cranford). Men figure throughout as objects of ridicule or of cruelty (Captain Littlepage and the pompous Minister that visits Joanna on the one hand, or Joanna's betrayer himself on the other) in contrast to the supportive community of women symbolised by Mrs Todd and her mother; "Mrs Blackett was of those who do not live to themselves, and who have long since passed the line that divides mere self-concern from a valued share in whatever society can give or take" (although events like Mrs Todd knocking the Minister down do challenge ideas about gender, Jewett is essentially a traditionalist on this score, blaming William for lack of ambition in a way no female character would be treated). Nonetheless, the location of Dunnet next to the sea introduces themes that recall Melville more than Austen. Both men and women yearn for the sea ("a far-off look that sought the horizon... inherited by girls and boys alike") and the novel foregrounds themes of individual isolation repeatedly, as with Joanna again ("doomed from the first to fall into melancholy... 'twas her poor lot") or the neighbours that never see one another from one year to the next ("for three generations the people had not spoken to each other even in times of sickness or death or birth"). Joanna's role is given to a male character in The King of Folly Island, where it is his daughter once more that stands for the feminine social virtues. Fishermen are portrayed as being at one with nature ("you felt almost as if a landmark pine should suddenly address you") more than with humanity, while the community is made up of women, but in stories like The White Heron this is reversed and it is women who are seen as being at one with nature (as with Mrs Todd's herbal medicines being opposed to the Doctor's remedies).
Whereas the realist novel typically works by assuming an empirical worldview, contrasting the individual consciousness against the social setting, Jacques the Fatalist operates in the conditional tense, continually disrupting linear narrative with a series of what if 'butterfly effect' discursions and interruptions. This feeds into the dialogic character of the novel, where the narrator simply notes of the debates between Jacques and his master; "and they were both right... has not everyone his own character, according to which he either exaggerates or attenuates everything?" The repeated interjections from the narrator also emphasise the fictionality of events and their arbitrary character. Diderot accepts Hume's critique of the reliability of the evidence of the common senses but is less certain when it comes to Hume's critique of causality. Throughout, Diderot uses ambiguous language ("what is written up above.. is it we who controls Destiny or Destiny which controls us?") to describes Jacques's fatalism, leaving it unclear whether a mechanistic materialism (adopting Spinoza's ideas over Hume's; "good brings bad after it and bad brings good") or a sense of religious destiny is being described (for instance, the idea of providence leading Jacques's brother into the Lisbon earthquake accords with a religious satire along the same lines as Voltaire's Candide).
Prevost's Manon Lescaut is like the works of Defoe and Fielding, episodic in nature rather than operating a linear narrative; events proceed through coincidence and accident rather than by causality. The characters of the novel accordingly vary with the circumstance; Manon being devoted and fickle by turns. Although the narrative is cast in the form of a fable, there is no redemption or repentance anymore than there is damnation ("a craven little soul, so devoid of feeling, that he could not see the humiliation of it... or else a christian... I was neither one thing or the other"), with Des Grieux even arguing that his love for Manon is akin to religious devotion or that it is unexceptional when one considers "that a mistress is nothing to be ashamed of nowadays." Prevost also suggests that Des Grieux's crimes are not of his own making; "knowing neither the mad lust for money.. nor the fantastic notions of hnour that had turned my father into an enemy." The novel is fundamentally a sentimental one, valuing natural emotion over the unnatural morals of his father, something that further serves to distort the moral fable at the novel's core.
De Nerval's writing is deeply embued with German metaphysics but nonetheless represents a point where the death of god leaves sublimity undermined by melancholy (Nerval's Aurelia, his Beatrice, is imagined as Durer's Angel of Melancholy). Whereas earlier Romantic aesthetics emphasised the ability to intuit the noumenal through the phenomenal in brief epiphanies, Nerval foregrounds the question of the potentially subjective and misleading character of such spots of time, both through his emphasis on the difficulty of distinguishing the real from the metaphysical and through the foregrounding of his insanity and experience of the asylum. For example, in The King of Bedlam, Spifame's imaginings of himself as the king lead to his being placed in the asylum only for him to end up leading a parallel existence to the monarch as he lives in luxury and has most of dictats implemented; "Spifame could recognise himself in a mirror or dream, he could take stock of himself even as he changed roles and personalities." Sanity and reason exist in a strangely liminal relationship rather than as opposites in Nerval; his characters remain aware of themselves even as they lose themselves. Similarly, in The Tale of Caliph Hakim, the sultan emerges first as the double of himself, sane even while mistaken for a lunatic, only to realise that he has a double he had been unaware of. The ruin strewn landscape of Sylvie (set in a landscape associated with Rousseau) similar emerges as a place of mistaken identities where neither the phenomenal nor the noumenal can be taken for certain; "but how could I be sure I was not merely the victim of one more illusion.. such are the chimeras that beguile and misguide us." Travelling to the Orient, Nerval found it too quotidian ("the Orient is no longer the land of marvels") and prefers his friends's opera set designs, travelling to Paris, Nerval found it a land of fantasy in contrast to British realism. His masterpiece, Aurelia, continues this: "the overflow of dream into real life... Spirit from the external world suddenly takes on the bodily shape of an ordinary woman." although at one point after a vision of the afterlife, Nerval proclaims that there is a god, he elsewhere proclaims that there is no god ("the virgin is dead and all prayers are useless... there is no god, god is no more!") and that he is god ("I myself was god, trapped in some sorry incarnation"), with the additional complication of his frequently esoteric view of religion, which has more in common with the druze than with christianity. Nerval is plagued throughout by his own double, as well as the question of whether his beloved exists as spirit or simply as a lost love, whether is insanity is precisely that or simply a form of vision. Throughout, Aurelia, opposites are overturned and nothing is left stable; everything is swallowed by the black sun.
Baudelaire's poetry reminded me of Arnold's line about "alarms of struggle and flight, where ignorant armies clash by night." Where Arnold's response to the death of god is comparatively straightforward, Baudelaire's is considerably more complex. Since his work is essentially symbolic, the symbol always seems to lack something stable to represent so that his Hymn to Beauty asks "did you come from the depths of heaven or up from the pit?" (just as Horreur Sympathetique speaks of how "your shafts of light are the reflection of hell") suggesting that clear knowledge of the noumenal is beyond the poet. The result is that his poetry is over-signified, being replete with meaning. At times, his stance seems to be akin to that of Arnold, of a poet caught in a world without the divine (the line about "my soul tossed.. on a monstrous, shoreless sea" in The Seven Old Men having more than a passing resemblance to Dover Beach), at other times his mythology remains essentially christian ("a damned man without a lamp" in Abel and Cain) and at others he resembles Blake, feeling sympathy for the devil (in The Irremediable there is "an angel, unwary traveller tempted by the love of the misshapen... as if it were reproaching god" while in The Rebel there is "a furious angel... but the damned rebel always answers "I won't!" Finally, Abel and Cain speaks pf throwing god down upon the earth). Baudelaire's poetry owkrs by overthrowing oppositions between good and evil, beauty and ugliness, company and isolation as he writes in Crowds that "the poet enjoys the incomparable privilege of being able at will to be himself and someone else."
Zola's The Earth bears a surprising resemblance to Hardy's novels (Nenesse is described as being proud of his roots as if he were a tree, centering the issues of place and displacement in exactly the same way Hardy does); both situate their characters within a rural environment that is being displaced by modern industry and commerce, both present their characters in quasi-Darwinian terms of their connection to nature, and both present them in terms of their struggle for existence. Zola's propensity for biological explanations of human behaviour is dominant here, with characters repeatedly described as animals (Buteau is "like soem great carnivorous beast") while only Lequeu is seen in more environmental terms in so far as his education has left him deracinated ("a country boy who through education had become imbued with a hatred for his class. he used to brutalise his pupils who he called savages" - a hatred it should be said that Zola shares as all of the educated characters despise the peasantry). Although the novel is replete with references to the oppression of the peasantry, there is something distant too it in so far as the peasants are described as being too lazy to take any effective action. The novel accordingly lacks the political engagement in Germinal and events effectively play out their own logic without reference to the overall social context in the way that Zola's urban novels tend to. Modern innovations are frequently seen as immaterial in the country so that Hourdequin's agricultural improvements simply breakdown and avail him little in spite of his predictions that the French soil is dying of exhaustion without them. Further intimations of decline, such as talk of declining faith and the villager's indifference to the absence of a priest equally prove themselves as irrelevances as the customary pattern of things reasserts itself for reasons of nothing more than social convention.
White's A Fringe of Leaves presents an especially interesting dialectic between civilisation and nature. The protagonist and her dual identities of Ellen Guyas and Mrs Roxburgh represents both of these aspects, rendering the disjunction between individual consciousness and the environment in the novel rather inconsistent. On the one hand, the novel depicts women as vulnerable and dependent on men; the murder of Garnet Roxburgh's and Chance's wives, while it is the modern Eve (the title being an implied reference to Genesis), Ellen, who best survives the expulsion from Eden, as her civilised husband is killed. The novel seems to constantly refer to Pygmalion; Ellen is both rescued from her wild early life by her husband but later comes to depend on that part of her nature after the shipwreck.
Niedzviecki's Hello, I'm Special presents an argument I have much sympathy with; that in a culture where individuality and rebellion are continually lauded as socially desirable, rebellion and individuality cease to be meaningful. Partly, Niedzviecki's concerns stem from a feeling that modern culture lacks a means to engender consent, but the argument seems confused on this score; the rebels he presents living on isolated islands are surely part of the same culture of rugged individualism in the United States that goes back to Thoreau and which has its trite expression in the films and music Niedzviecki denounces, rather than being a genuine expression of something the mainstream is faking. Equally, Niedzviecki notes that religious traditionalism may be more rebellious than commonly accepted ideas of rebellion, although his arguments invariably proves sufficiently elastic than almost anything can be regarded as a manifestation of 'individualistic conformity,' even when he himself notes that modern society is both homogenous and conformist.
Food cooked: Tiramisu, Baron of Hare, Vietnamese chicken with coconut, Singapore Laksa, Chinese chicken glazed with Orange and Apple, Singapore curry, Keralan Crab Curry, Thai hot and sour duck, Javanese curry and Nasi Goreng, Pork with parsnips, pears and maple syrup, Duck Vindaloo, Vietnamese curry, Tapas (Egg stuffed with Manchego and Sardine, Flamenco eggs, crab with flaked almonds), Mustard Spiced Indian chicken, Indonesian pork with soy sauce and nasi kunung, Moroccan chicken with lemon and olives, Pearl Barley rissotto with crab, Pork Stroganoff, Romanian Duck Jubilee, Louisiana Jambalaya, Chicken Mole, Poulet al'estragon, Kefta Mkaouara, Vietnamese chicken with sweet potato curry, Thai green curry, Red Thai Curry, Italian chicken stuffed with pear and chestnut, Spaghetti with Salmon and cream, Morroccan chicken with lemon and honey, Lamb tagine with ras el hanout, Vietname duck with nuts and dates.Labels: Art, England, Food, Horror, Individuality, Literature, London, Victorian
posted by Richard 7:40 AM
Sunday, September 17, 2006
Bevis Marks Synagogue is the oldest site of Jewish worship in Britain, dating back to Cromwell and the reformation. I was a little surprised to be asked to wear a Kippah skull cap, not having had any such request in Prague's synagogues, though I rather concluded that I liked it. The interior, in wood, white plaster and gold leaf is similar to Wren's churches, just as some of the Prague synagogues took on the guise of Baroque churches. I was also able to gain access to several Wren churches; St Botolph (elaborate Victorian stained glass with stuccoed angels in line across the ceiling), St Bride's (rather Catholic, with the eye streaming light from the altar beneath a barrel vault, suprisingly homoerotic photographic depictions of the crucifixion on the walls) and St Dunstan in the West (a gothic building, now filled with Orthodox icons). St Bride's crypts were open and were especially intriguing, showing both the foundations of succeeding churches and cleared gravestones. Finally, St Sophia, the Greek Orthodox Cathedral, represents what Westminster Cathedral may one day come to look like, with the mosaics created by the same artist, Boris Anrep. I had been to Brompton Cemetery before but hadn't realised that it is laid out in the plan of a basilica, albeit one with whose plans were incomplete with several chapels and bell towers never having been completed and the catacombs left largely unused. Unlike Highgate or Kensal Green, Bunhill Fields cemetery is only just outside the city of London and represents an outcast's cemetery as much as the Jewish cemetery in Prague (which is what it most reminds me of). Containing the graves of Blake, Defoe and Bunyan as well as assorted Cromwells and Wesleys, the tombstones are packed in thickly and are mostly unostentatious, bar the weathered skull motifs found on many of the graves. I walk to St Giles Cripplegate before travelling to the Tower of London. The tower is a rather hyperreal construct, a process that began as early as the restoration when the Crown Jewels were put on display there (originally so that the king's majesty could be touched, until one of the crowns was damaged) and wooden heads of past kings were put on display to legitimise the monarchy once more (Elizabeth had a special place alongside relics of the Armada and later the Jacobite rebellion). Another curiousity was a Venetian winged lion taken from Corfu, on display inside the White Tower. The white tower itself was only painted and gabled later, while much of the tower is a Victorian reconstruction of the original. Nontheless, what does tend to be interesting about the tower is the Chapel of St John the Evangelist or the graffiti scrawled on the walls by the likes of Arundel or by an astronomer sent to the tower by Bess of Hardwick on suspicion of sorcery. Before I leave I notice a seagull making of with meat intended for the ravens, three of whom indignantly fly in pursuit.
I go for a walk in Greenwich, beginning with St Alfege, whose interior rather reminds me of the churches in Denmark; white plaster and dark wood. Greenwich reminds me a little of Oxford; a place outside of civil society throughout history and whose confrontation with modernity has left it as a fly in amber. I go for a walk around the Naval College Chapel and the Cutty Sark before walking the Greenwich foot tunnel to east London. Here, I return to St Anne's Limehouse and am able to see the interior. Damage due to damp was all too visible, with the elaborate blue plaster horribly disfigured and decayed. The following day is witness to a St George's Cathedral. The building was shorn of its spire the second world war and is consequently rather drab and forgettable. leaving a marked sense of incongruity when one walks through to the beautiful interior. I then walked around the park that was formerly the grounds of the Bethelem Royal Hospital and are now adjacent to the Imperial War Museum (former site of Bedlam); within it grows the 34 native trees that colonised Britain after the ice age. Today, the grass has shrivelled and the tree's leaves are curling and withering in the heat. London silver vaults reminded me of Highgate's Egyptian avenue of funerary vaults; one descends downwards through a series of maze-like passages and stairwells. Upon arrival, corridors stretch off into the distance with doors on either side. Each shop is effectively a walk-in safe, with each of them selling the same kinds of candelabra and assorted ephemera. Visiting Convent Garden, I noticed the church there now has its own orthodox icon, showing the madonna, flanked by st paul and st genesius, the patron saint of actors.
The Holbein exhibition at the Tate represents the point at which art became full human and secular. Although Holbein did produce religious works they could most charitably be described as inferior imitations of renaissance painting. With most devotional work proscribed in Britain, his painting of Erasmus shows the scholar in the guise typically reserved for saints while other works are created as roundels in imitation of classical coins. Holbein pioneered painting where the subject looks directly at the viewer, so that his works acquire a peculiarly intimate quality (the subjects loom large, taking up the entire canvas). Merchants sought pictures that were true to life to send to far-fling contacts and family, thereby displacing classical and religious paintings. Elsewhere, the Tate had a painting of Abd el-Ouahed ben Messaoud ben Mohammed Anoun, Moorish Ambassador to Queen Elizabeth I and the peculiarly surreal painting of The Cholmondeley Ladies. The later section of Blake was also especially interesting, showing Blake's work in the context of artists between the wars who responded to his vision of a New Albion, such as Nash's paintings of the Mansions of the Dead and the Flight of the Magnolia as well as Robin Ironside's Daliesque paintings. Other interesting works include John Singer-Sergeant's paintings of the Middle-East and Whistler's surprisingly traditional Crepuscule in Flesh Colour and Green: Valparaiso , Piper's paintings of Bath destroyed by the Luftwaffe's Baedaeker's raids and Rossetti's The Annunciation. That evening I watched fireworks exploding over London, tracing patterns in the sky with sparklers and watching Millbank Tower silhouetted and Battersea Power Station being lit up by the lights.
Caesar's The Conquest of Gaul exhibits many of the same ambivalent attitudes to civilisation shown by Tacitus; the relatively civilised Gauls prove easy to conquer while the barbaric hunters of the German tribes cannot be vanquished. In a similar fashion, Thucydides records during The Pelopennesian War that the habit of dressing lavishly had been abandoned in Athens as being decadent in favour of Spartan simplicity.
Angela Carter's The Magic Toyshop ends with its two protagonists fleeing from the burning shop, a moment Carter saw as being akin to the expulsion from Eden (though the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah was perhaps the more obvious metaphor). However, the novel has two such Eirenic moments elsewhere (once in Melanie's garden at home and once with Finn in the pleasure gardens) with the surfeit of symbolism consequently overwhelming precise interpretations (particularly given the question of whether Uncle Philip represents the devil or a totalitarian god in the narrative). Antal Szerb's Journey by Moonlight affords a similar problem. Szerb was heavily influenced by Lukacs and the idea of the problematic individual, and the novel accordingly presents a disjunction between society and the bohemian aspirations of the novel's characters. Conversely, Szerb was also heavily influenced by Karl Kerenyi, a Jungian scholar of Greek myth Lukacs drove into exile. The character's bohemian rebellion is accordingly expressed as thanatophilia, through doors to the underworld and an Etruscan Eurydice leading Orpheus back down to Hades for their union to take place. The two narratives barely interlock and instead proceed in parallel with one another, the notion of Marxist alienation being aborted in favour of a view of society as despiritualised.
One of the advantages of the layout of the Globe Theatre is that it affords far more possibilities than a normal confined stage arrangement. The last production of Titus Andronicus saw the action spill out of the stage and around the rest of the theatre. Confetti is hurled from the galleries down to the conquering heroes and Emperors of Rome. Bassinius is thrown into a pit into the arena, where scaffolding is errected and moved for hangings and speeches. The actors move amongst the crowds in the arena, all of which seems apposite for a play that is often concerned with bread and circuses. The play itself is an anomaly; its bleak rejection of worldly affairs has more in common with King Lear and Timon of Athens than with the other early works. Like much of Marlowe's work, it seems well characterised by Artaud's ideas; "The Theatre of Cruelty has been created in order to restore to the theatre a passionate and convulsive conception of life, and it is in this sense of violent rigour and extreme condensation of scenic elements that the cruelty on which it is based must be understood.
This cruelty, which will be bloody when necessary but not systematically so, can thus be identified with a kind of severe moral purity which is not afraid to pay life the price it must be paid." As in Artaud's manifesto, the play uses symbolism to work with the emotions and to remove the audience from the quotidian, to attack their senses through violence and to use the grotesque (a late Bakhtinian concept that has lost its vital connection with renewal; much of the play can really only be directed as carnivalesque farce or burlesque. Hence Bloom's comment that the play should really be directed by Mel Brooks). Whereas later works, like A Midsummer Night's Dream carefully balance the claims of the wild greenwood and civilised Athens, Titus Andronicus lacks any such symmetry. The play opens with Titus mercilessly ordering the death of Tamora's son in spite of her entreaties and slaying his own, creating a question mark from the outset as to whether Rome is more civilised than the barbarous Goths (throughout, I found myself reminded of Cavafy's Waiting for the Barbarians). Later, the ascending of Tamora to becoming Rome's Empress further blurs that distinction, as much as the use of a Goth army by Lucius to liberate Rome from a despotic ruler. Walking back along the Embankment, I notice that all the trees have had blue and white fairy lights layed over their boughs, vesting the place with an oddly ethereal feel. Two men lovingly kiss underneath the leaves.
Coetzee's Slow Man marks an understated sequel of sorts to Elizabeth Costello, continuing in the same anti-novelistic tradition. Coetzee places the central elements of the novel in the background, whether it is narrative (events are understated, abandoning resolution in favour of the indeterminacy of life) or consciousness (the central character being essentially hollow, experiencing a series of reactions towards Marijana, none of which can be fully characterised as emotion or feeling). As a fable, Slow Man is non-existent, its protagonist gaining no
redemption, resolution or closure, simply a dying fall.Labels: Architecture, Art, Drama, History, Literature, London
posted by Richard 7:37 AM
Sunday, July 30, 2006
I began by walking through Battersea Park, a beautiful place next to the ruined towers of the power station. The park has been richly planted with cycads, banana trees, tree-ferns, pampus grass and bamboo, which provide a suitably defamiliarised setting for Hepworth and Moore sculptures. A heron looked out over one of the lakes while coots nest next to the shorelines (and an odd pochard duck, with a brown head and deep red eyes). Apparently, the park is having a duck race tomorrow. In time, I arrive at the peace pagoda, a wonderful contrast of white Portland stone, gold Buddha statues and dark Canadian fir. Crossing back into North London via the Albert bridge, I pass by Chelsea Old Church (and Hans Sloane's tomb) and Crosby Hall before walking up to the Albert Hall. Today's Prom consists of Wagner's Meistersingers, Barber's lyrical Knoxville and Prokofiev's music for Alexander Nevsky. As a piece, it seemed to me to illustrate some of the problems with Soviet realism; though this is clearly a composer of the same period as Weill and Bartok much of the tone is nonetheless familiar with Borodin and Mussorgsky.
Following a walk to watch the Pelicans in St James Park (descendents of a gift bequeathed by the Russian Ambassador to Charles the Second) around the Jewel Tower and a visit to the top of Westminster Cathedral's bell tower (which did rather confirm many of my prejudices about London, with the most beautiful buildings obscured by modern office buildings; Nelson's Column was barely visible, for example), I arrived at Cadogan Hall. Formerly a church (though its tower rather resembles a minaret), it combines gothic and celtic revival designs (especially in the stained glass) with art-deco sensibilities. The interior is beautifully light and airy and I settled down in the pews for a performance of two of Bach's Brandenberg Concertos and some pieces by Mozart showing the influence of such 'ancient music.' The concert, performed by the Academy of Ancient Music, was extremely pleasant before leading up to an evening performance of Janacek's Taras Bulba, Stravinsky's Symphony in Three Movements (derived from his wartime film music) and some Sibelius (not to my taste though Pohjola's Daughter had its moments). The following day saw more travels in London, from Temple to The Strand, before arrving at the Albert Hall for an organ recital. Mozart and Back again figured prominently, with the former represented by his Fantasy in F minor for mechanical organ. This is something of a curiosity, being written for a mechanical instrument that renders it impossible to be played as it was written (reminding me somewhat of Nyman's sonata for six fingered hands from Gattaca); this version had been adapted. Another oddity was a quietly beautiful Shostakovtch piece from The Gadfly. A Bach chorale prelude was the foremost representative of liturgical organ music, while many of the other pieces typified its use in Romantic music, such as Glazunov's Fantasy. However, the performance was very dominated by Liszt's Fantasia and Fugue on 'Ad nos, ad salutarem undam,' combining both traditions in a piece that was originally written for an instrument that was a cross between a piano and organ.
One of the advantages of the Proms is the closeness that one has to the orchestra and conductor. When the conductor happens to be John Adams, one is left with the distinct feeling that this is what it must have been like to stand next to Wagner or Stravinsky when they conducted their own works; the comparison is perhaps a little precipitate and somewhat awe-struck, but it was nonetheless rather difficult to keep out of mind. Like Barber's Knoxville, My Father Knew Charles Ives is a homage to smalltown America, pastiching the Ivesian style in its first part before proceeding to something closer to what we think of as minimalism. Pastiche also features in Harmonielehre, which draws on the romanticism of Mahler and Schoenberg, but draws it within the ambit of minimalism. Where the former normally has crescendos and glissandos while the latter only gradually and subtly varies its notes, Harmonielehre builds itself up to peak and simply remains there. The frenzied music simply holding itself at what should have been a point of climax reminded me oddly of the insistent thudding and Dionysiac quality of dance music. Finally, Adams' setting of Whitman's The Wound Dresser was especially beautiful, a poem that perfectly illustrates the gap between the homosexual and the homosocial.
The Kandinsky exhibition at the Tate proved unusual; while much modern art is centred on Western Europe, he is the only Russian representative of note. At first, the patterns in his work appear essentially chaotic, like a surrealist Rorschach test but stochastic is probably the better term as it becomes clear what the patterns represent (angels of judgement, icons, halos, crosses etc). Influenced by muscians like Wagner and Schoenberg, by ethnographic study of peasant art, like Blake, Kandinsky has constructed a private symbolic language in his work, introducing religious symbolism into an otherwise abstract form in an attempt to perceive the inscape of things (many of his paintings suggesting patterns like butterflies, birds or even musical notation). However, unlike abstract art, his work retains depth of field and perspective. Kandinsky's opposite is the protestant, reductionist style of Modigliani, whose portraits, like those of Lempicka, are conventional in how they depict their subjects (though influenced by Cubism, he never fragmented his figures, merely distorted them). Unlike her, his work has a mask-like, impersonal, ritualistic quality to it, like the Benin bronzes. As in Byzantine art, the eyes are striking, often with the 'windows to the soul' blanked out, missing their pupils. Equally, they often retain a disturbing intensity, as the viewer is directly stared at.
Shostakovitch's Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk makes subtle changes to the original novella that leave one wondering if Stalin's verdict of 'muddle, not music' might not have been correct. To accommodate the ill-defined idea of Soviet realism, Shostakovitch satirises and dehumanises all the characters into contemptible vermin except the heroine, Katya. But he fails to turn Katya into a rebel against bourgeois society, fails to overturn her betrayal by her working-class lover, and his tendency to satirise authority figures cannot have endeared him to the totalitarian regime. Had Katya been beated and oppressed, she could have become a tragic heroine in the way Shostakovitch appears to have intended but without that the lack of sympathy for the other characters simply leaves the text unabalanced between tragedy and satire, a combination that works for the music but not the text. The opera was preceded by a screening of Kozintzev's film of Hamlet (where the music was written by Shostakovitch to a screenplay by Pasternak), its black and white eloquently emphasising the melancholy of the play to the same sort of effect as Kurosawa's Throne of Blood. Kozintzev fills the play with fire and water imagery, placing scenes from Ovid's Metamorphoses on the castle walls. In tragedy, fate is normally an ineluctable entity; Oedipus and Orestes have already had their destiny cast for them; it only remains for them to fulfil it. For Shakespeare, living in an age whose metaphysical certainties had been upturned by state decree, no such conviction is possible. His characters instead defy augury, dramatising their consciousness and examining their own roles. Hamlet is the overreacher, the machiavel, the fool and the wronged hero, failing to become, as Eliot had it, a clear objective correlative for the events of the play.
Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther presents an interesting dialectic between Romantic ideas of nature and rationalist ideas. Werther speaks of "my resolve to keep to Nature alone in future. Only Nature has inexhaustible riches, and only Nature creates a great artist." Nonetheless he also later reverts to a less idealised conception of nature when he writes; "Nature, which has brought forth nothing that does not destroy both its neighbour and itself." Werther's fall is characterised by his loss of feeling for nature (though the editor speaks of Werther's 'natural powers' being confounded) but it equally suggests that Nature has a dual role within the novel. When debating with Albert he defends the Romantic individual against the contempt of the mundane masses, only to be told; "a man wholly under the influence of his passions has lost his ability to think rationally,"before Albert states that suicide is simply a display of weakness where fortitude was called for.
Rather perversely, La Dame Aux Camelias reminded me of Anne Bronte's The Tenant of the Wildfell Hall, not in terms of any novel attitude towards gender but in terms of its belief that the sinner is inevitably brought back to the path of salvation, with Marguerite repeatedly being described as saint-like before her eventual martyrdom; "to any woman whose education has not imparted knowledge of goodness, god opens up two paths to it; these are suffering and love." Nonetheless, the novel denies the possibility of redemption within Marguerite's life; she dies as surely as a sinner condemned to the fires of hell.
Thucydides's The Pelopennesian War presents some interesting challenges to conventional views of the ancient world. Firstly, that for all of the antipathy towards Persia, the Spartans were as willing to ally themselves with Persia as they had been to ally themselves with Athens at Marathon. Secondly, that it was largely Athenian imperialism rather than Spartan militarism that led to the war.
In the case of a figure like Pythagoras it is comparatively easy to distinguish his theorems from the religious credo that were formulated to prove. In the case of Plato, whose thought uses the principles of logic in the service of a view that sees philosophy as an essentially ascetic and religious function (a means of purging onself of the corruptions of the body), the matter is not so easy. I tend to regard Plato in the same manner as I do Paul or Augustine; as a dreadful mistake. Through christianity, Plato produced a philosphical tradition that disdained empirical experimentation and observation in favour of a focus on the causes of causes (i.e. the forms), disdained the body as a prison and which distinguished itself in opposition to sophistry's concern with descriptions of the world that meet our needs rather than conceptions of absolute truth. Socrates repeatedly scorns those who deal in paradox, viewing their arguments as being concerned with power rather than with truth, but is far from reluctant to marshall sophistical violence in his own arguments.
For example, within Euthyphyro, Socrates deconstructs good and evil into unknowable categories in order to lay blame on Euthyphyro for having laid a case against his own father for the death of a slave (an argument that leaves him open to the modern accusation that he is indifferent to the fate of anyone who was not a citizen. Conversely, in the Phaedo the claims of duty to the law and the state are absolute and transcend those of kin and friendship (equally, the product of a view that placed such emphasis on the role of the philosopher-king and none on the autonomous subject). Nonetheless, Plato regards philosophy as a process rather than a doctrine, suggesting in Phaedrus, that reading philosophy is a poor second to doing it; one can reject a conclusion, but it is much harder to reject a process of imaginative expansion.
Susan Sontag's Against Interpretation is essentially predicated on the argument that "Western man may be said to have been undergoing a massive sensory anesthesia.. with modern art functining as a form of shock therapy for both confounding and closing our senses." Rejecting the idea of naturalism, Sontag sees art as a means of conveying sensation rather than of imparting information. Her Notes on Camp advocate stylised art as a means of obectifying content. Conversely, criticism should not concern itself with content and hermeneutics but with form and the erotics of art. In practice, what this aesthetic translates into varied considerably; the objectified films of Bresson and Goddard with their lack of concern for personality on the one hand and the more convulsive work of Artaud on the other. The difficulty with her work is that she had essentially minsinterpreted the spirit of her age, which was better described in Debord's The Society of the Spectacle as not suffering from sensory deprivation but from a veritable surfeit of images; "the ever more triumphant values of consumer capitalism promote--indeed, impose--the cultural mixes and insolence and defense of pleasure that I was advocating for quite different reasons," as she wrote in a later preface.
Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake posits a world where genetic engineering is used to root out the most aggressive aspects of human nature, creating a new species and leading to the extinction of the old. Michel Houellebecq's The Possibility of an Island follows a similar path, though Houellebecq disdain's Atwood's 'ecologism,' seeing nature as a far more resilient force than human civilisation. Instead, he is concerned with what could be called the engineering of the psyche. Houellebecq cites Peirce in identifying personality and memory, identifying language as the conduit of memory, leaving open the issue of how language can be unbiased and objective (much of the text shows the cloned ancestors of the contemporary characters writing commentaries on their predecessors and attempting to cross-reference them to establish the truth; often failing totally to understand the inherently alien emotions being expressed). His ancestor is later to cite Godel in opposition to the rather mechanistic view of the self being developed. This immediately leads to the difficulty of establishing the unbiased conditons; the central character of Daniel begins the text by complaining of being mistaken for a humanist or a progressive (he later calls himself a rightwing anarchist, although in practice, much of what he achieves throughout the text is precisely that, the sort of progress familiar from Comte and positivism). Accordingly, Daniel spends much of the text advancing a cause that will lead to the extinction of desire in the interests of gaining a form of Buddhist serenity, whiel still fiercely pursuing both love and desire. Equally, Daniel follows his discourse on Peirce by noting that much of his memory, such as why he married his first wife, has simply been erased.
The Elohminite movement depicted in the novel itself rests upon a number of internal contradictions, particularly in the way it depends on a consumer society that turns youth into a commodity that can be indefinitely preserved only for this expectation to be inevitably disappointed. Its force depends entirely on what it opposes, just as Daniel's career depends on the sensibilities it deliberately provokes and outrages; "if the fluidification of forms of behaviour required by a developed economy was incompatible with a normative catalogue of restrained conduct, it was perfectly suited to a celebration of the will and ego". The consequence of this ambiguity is that the new species of neohumans find themselves leaving the calm of their habitations and exploring a post-nuclear wasteland inhabited by savage humans for whom the collapse of civilisation has been total and complete. The neohumans are both revolted by these creatures (the culture of the mind being impossible in a society locked into struggles for existence) while remaining unsatisfied by their own lack of will and consequent stagnation. As a species they achieve nothing and their lack of suffering effectively leaves them as an evolutionary dead-end.
Orwell's novels often depict the fall of a cause and the hero that propounded it, as in Burmese Days and 1984. In Keep the Aspidistra Flying, Orwell appears to be attempting, like Forster in Howard's End, to write a modern Victorian novel which values ideals of discipline and humility rather than individuality or non-comformism; "Money is what God used to be. Good and evil have no meaning anymore except failure and success." Gordon's defeat is as total as Winston's (especially given his comments about how it is women that force men to live by the money-code) but it would strain the novel to read it in the same terms as 1984 (as much as it would read to read The Taming of the Shrew as a parable of abuse or Shylock as a tragic victim). The same depiction of the udnerworld that animates Hamsun's Hunger simply manifests itself as petulance here. It also casts an odd light on Orwell's socialism, with him describing it as youthful fixation when "one can't see the hook for the stodgy bait." The character of Ravelston, is depicted as using a vaguely defined socialism as a lifestyle (where Gordon describes socialism as Huxley's Brave New World), something he can afford but others cannot; when matters are pressed his "class instinct" simply revert.
Mark Twain's Roughing It is a revisionist account of the American Dream, covering all aspects of the mythology of westwards migration (Indians, outlaws and gold mining, for example) through to his travels to Hawaii. However, in spite of rejecting his own misspent youth and the romanticisation of the West (instead depicting it as uncomfortable, lawless, unstable and dangerous) he remains far from immune on that score; "we are descended from desert lounging Arabs and countless ages of growth towards civilisation have failed to root out of us the nomadic instinct. We all confess to a gratified thrill at the prospect of camping out." Equally, his account of one outlaw finds him admiring his "splendid courage" and "peerless bravery." Nonetheless, Twain's astringent brand of realism is not without its attendant problems, particularly in his depiction of the Indians; "if perchance I had been over-estimating the Red-Man, while viewing him through the moonshine of romance... left him treacherous, filthy and repulsive." Twain has no time for the idea of the noble savage but is perhaps not entirely prejudiced in this regard. His account of the Mormons often treats them in the same terms, depicting them as "ignorant, simple, of an inferior order of intellect," and perfidious in their attempts to disguise the massacre of a hundred and twenty people as the work of Indians. Conversely, he praises the disenfranchised Chinese community for their industry and diligence. Nonetheless, his travels in the wake of Captain Cook form the greatest source of interest on this score. Describing the native transition from paganism and scarifice to christianity, Twain writes "the missionaries braved a thousand privations to come and makes them permanently miserable by telling them how beautiful and blissful a place Heaven is, and how nearly impossible it is to get there." Twain appears to be somewhat affected by romantic primitivism after all, in spite of an acute awareness of the previous practice of human sacrifice and his statement that "the benefit conferred upon this people by the missionaries is so prominent, so palpable," in recognition of their ending tyranny, sacrifice and war (while noting that the native population had plummeted since the introduction of christianity). Finally, Twain makes an especially interesting comment about Captain Cook; "plain unvarnished history takes the romance out of Captain Cook's assassination and renders a deliberate verdict of justifiable homicide." Cook is seen as both treacherous and ruthless in his dealings with the natives.Labels: Art, Flora, History, Literature, London, Music, Philosophy, Theory
posted by Richard 7:33 AM
Sunday, June 25, 2006
The Great Exhibition of 1851 was the expression of a society at the zenith of its prosperity and power. Paxton's Crystal Palace was a huge iron goliath with over a million feet of glass, containing such industrial exhibits as the jacquar loom, courts depicting the history of art and architecture from ancient Egypt through the Renaissance as well as exhibits from imperial territories like India and Austrialia. Major concerts were held in the Palace's huge arched Centre Transept, which also contained the world's largest organ. The central transept also housed a circus and was the scene of daring feats by world famous acts such as the tightrope walker Blondin. The Crystal Palace itself was almost outshone by the park in which it stood, which contained a magnificent series of fountains (the water pumped through a set of towers designed by Brunel) and the park's original trees.
Today, it is a rather different matter. What Mayhew described as the glass hive burned down in the thirties; all that remains are a set of empty terraces, the sort of enigma that would leave archaeologists with endless speculation. Some architecture has within it the potential for decay and ruin; the ruins of the gothic St Dunstan in the East wear their decay as if they had never been anything else, while the baroque ruins of Christchurch Greyfriars are decidedly ill at ease with their decline. The terraces of the Crystal Palace clearly fall into the former category, with headless statues gracing the steps and Sphinxes guarding the entrance way to nothingness. Based on the designs of ruined Egyptian temples, the Sphinxes seem entirely at home with their place amidst overgrown oak trees. Behind the trees, a BBC transmitter now lords it over the empty spaces of the park. A nearby lake provides a home for lillies, a family of coots with their shrill young and a heron.
One part of the exhibition was sufficiently at a distance to be spared destruction; the nearby dinosaur park, an exhibition of prehistoric reptiles and mammals, and examples of geology, spanning 350 million years of Britain’s evolution (all rather reminiscent of Conan Doyle's lost world). The park was conceived by Richard Owen as part of the same project that led to the founding of the Natural History Museum. Amongst eminent Victorians, Owen was especially striking. Having identified a giant fossil bird from New Zealand (the Moa) from a tiny fragment of fossilized bone alone and inventing the term 'dinosaur,' he nonetheless became notorious for opposing the theory of evolution. Famously, he hosted an extravagant party in the belly of a reconstructed Iguanodon at the park. Recently, the park has been restored and is now planted with tree ferns and monkey puzzle trees, along with azaleas and Australian bottlebrush, making it a minor botanical garden. Water birds nest inbetween the paws of the dinosaurs and another heron guards the shore line. Infant swans and coots cluster by the side of the water in the expectation of bread. A cormorant preens itself and stretches its wings in the centre of the lake. The dinosaurs themselves are easily as impressive as the skeletons in the central hall of the Natural History Museum, albeit subject to certain inaccuracies (the placing of the Iguanodon's thumb spike on its nose, placing of Megalosaurus on four legs or the turning of Dicynodon into a tortoise-like animal); though it should be remembered that such problems persist to this day (e.g. the discovery of feathered dinosaurs in China).
Ruskin was apparently often in the habit of journeying out from his home in Herne Hill to visit Dulwich Picture Gallery in order to reconfirm his prejudices against Baroque art and leave feeling "encouragingly disgusted." It's difficult not to sympathise with opprobrium against a period characterised by the trivialities of Watteau and Fragonard, Italian propaganda of the Counter-Reformation or the stately but arid paintings of Gainsborough and Kneller. A post-romantic sensibility is inevitably likely to struggle somewhat with this period. Nonetheless, the gallery does contain rather more than Ruskin gave it credit for, especially its collection of Dutch paintings. From a period when Holland had formed a society that was the prototype of everything Europe was to become (liberal democratic, mercantile and tolerant), its paintings were intended for private consumption rather than for ecclesiastical display, opening a space that allowed for a new form of art. Aelbert Cuyp's pastoral scenes were to be greatly influential on artists like Constable but were also to lead to a more proto-romantic sensibility in artists like Ruisdael (the same applyig De Velde's maritime paintings, intended to show the trading status of the Dutch nation). Still-life and landscape became more prominent as genres, historical and allegorial paintings, less so. Rembrandt's paintings denoted a move towards a focus on the individual and the interior life. A particularly Gerrit Dou painting shows a marked move from allegory to realism. The gallery also has a number of striking pictures in other sections; a Canaletto painting of Venice, Claude's equally proto-romantic Arcadian scenes or Reni's Caravaggioesque St Sebastian.
Otherwise, what is most of interest about the gallery is its status as a combined art collection and mausoleum (a form of modern Pantheon, like that of Canova, or a return to the style of cemetery originally found on the Via Appia before they were banished to necropolises outside Rome). The paintings in the gallery are effectively a form of grave good, no different to works found in Egyptian or Viking tombs. The gallery was the work of Sir John Soane and reflect an interest in funerary architecture that is also on display with his own tomb in St Pancras Cemetery and reflects his typically pagan style, placing Roman funerary urns on the outside of the mausoluem. Unhindered by practical considerations, funerary building was to prove an ideal area for architects to experiment with novel forms. Although a classicist in style (regarding himself as a latter-day Etruscan tomb-builder and brininging an Egyptian Sarcophagus of Seti into his house at Lincoln's Inn Fields as well as a monk's tomb, based on gothic arches from Westminster), Soane's ideas for a funerary architecture based in gardens and parks (the Elysian necropolis) were to form the basis of the rather more gothic Victorian garden cemeteries. Previously, churchyard burial had been considered as low status in comparison to the monuments found within churches and abbeys, a shift that was encouraged by the Napoleonic wars creating a need for large martial, public monuments.
Of all the Victorian cemeteries, Brookwood comes closest to having reverted to nature. The stretches of its heathes are filled with heathers and ferns interspersed with sequoia and cedar. This wild aspect is particularly odd as it was also the most modern, with the cemetery's railway bringing in coffins from London. In 1854, Brookwood was the largest cemetery in the world, and is accordingly filled with the customary Victorian angels and funeral urns. But it is also became home to other religions, from Swedish Evangelicals to Muslims. The Zoroastrian section is by far the most impressive though,with stone torches, Persian tiling and ornate tombs that are worthy of Highgate.
I've also recently been to Chelsea Physic Garden, which was founded in 1673, as the Apothecaries' Garden, chosen for its the proximity to the Thames and for a warm microclimate that allowed the survival of many non-native plants - such as the largest outdoor fruiting olive tree in Britain, pomegranates and bananas. The area was already famed for gardens and orchards owned by the likes of Thomas More and was used as a means of growing and studying medicinal plants (though the garden also now has plants like cotton, woad and madder), evolving in time into what we would now recognise as a botanical garden (the cedar of Lebanon was first cultivated in Britain here and its heated glasshouse was the first in Europe). The garden presents its specimins through a number of taxonomies; species (the fernery), geography (North America and Madeira), type (monocotyledons or dycotyledons), usage (Belladona for optics, Valerian for sleep, Digitalis for heart convulsions, Castor Oil Plant for skin conditions as well as curiosities like Mandrake and Mandragora), history (traditional kitchen gardens and exhbitions on the work of Joseph Banks on species like Australian Bottlebrush; Banks also brought back volcanic lava from Iceland for the central fountain) and a garden of world medicine, discussing Maori, Indian and Zulu uses of plants. This last section does have a certain romanticisation of the primitive to it, particularly given that research found that the tribal use of Madagascan periwinkle to treat diabetes was wholly ineffective though the plant did have a marked effect in laying waste to white blood cells. Whereas most gardens rely on sight as the main sense to appreciate them with, flowers are less common here but a thick scent pervades the air as bees, butterflies, and dragonflies flash cut through it. A wollemi pine is on display within one of the greenhouses.
A city like Amsterdam functions as a whole, lacking the grandiose monuments of other cities but rather creating its effect through an accretion of small details. London is quite the reverse, a grey and dirty concrete city, which is nonetheless relieved by the presence of small spots of beauty. One such is St Pancras Cemetery. This was once the churchyard of a village outside London, but urban expansion drew it increasingly within the cemtery. Then came the Midlands railway, arriving by St Pancras Chambers and cut through the graveyard. The then young architect Thomas Hardy was appointed to clear it and instead of stacking the headstones in a corner or cementing them into footpaths, he gathered them round the base of a tree. The Hardy Tree remains as a testament to the dead in the cemetery, as the railway goes through its second expansion. It also retains its mythic aspect, reminding one of that other ash tree, Ygdrasil, with the headstones bearing a grisly resemblance to roots. The cemetery now is more like a park, albeit filled with the more impressive monuments remaining. Foremost amongst these is the Soane Mausoleum, a classical structure that seems to reach back to the times when St Pancras was the site of a pagan compitum rather than a place dedicated to a christian martyr. Elsewhere, the cemetery contains the grave of Mary Wollstonecraft (and it was by this that Shelley first saw Mary Godwin) and the a sundial as a memorial to Angela Burdett-Coutts (in memory of the important people who had been buried near the church, and whose graves had been disturbed by the encroachments of the Midland Railway). The church itself is largely Victorian but does contain a beautiful Blomfield reredo.
From there, I went to the city, to the church of St Giles at Cripplegate (sitting on a moated island within the impenetrable fortress of the Barbican) and to St Botolph's Bishopgate. The churchyard there is especially noteworthy for containing one of the last Victorian Turkish Baths (though why something most likely to have been used by gay men should have been there rather puzzles me). From thence, I left the city and travelled to Westminster and to the cathedral there. This is perhaps a rather odd area, housing the Anglican Abbey, the Methodist Central Hall as well as the Roman Catholic Cathedral. Modelled on the Haghia Sophia so as not to compete with the Abbey, the Cathedral's Byzantine design compares oddly to Pugin's ambition to re-anglicise Catholicism by emphasising its gothic heritage, as with his church at Cheadle (particularly given the way the Cathedral dwells on English saints like Alban, Bede, Edmund, Cuthbert, Winifrid and, rather less convincingly, George, as well as martrys persecuted during and after the reformation, such as Thomas More). Much of the interior is simply blackened brick (still awaiting its mosaics; in this sense it is as incomplete as the Sagrada Familia) but with the lower areas given up to rich marbles and vividly colourful mosaics. Many of these follow Byzantine conventions but one of Boris Antrep depicted them in the style of his native Russia, against pink rather than gold. Work still contines; as I was there a mosaic was laid out on the floor waiting to be put in place in one of the side chapels. Finally, I walked to the Inigo Jones Banqueting House. To some extent this was a disappointment; the exterior had actually been redesigned by Soane whilke the introduction of murals onto the ceiling by Rubens also substantiually changes the building, preventing it from being used for masques.
The half-timbered gateway to the church of St Bartholomew the Great shows the saint wielding the knife with which he is thought to have been flayed (not inappropriately so; the feast day in his name was commemorated by Vlad Dracul impaling thirty thousand Transylvanians). Through the gate, there is an odd sight; the remains of the medieval church, a Victorian tower and heind it the modern Barbican tower. The interior is largely Norman and its blackened stones and dark transepts provide a strange contrast to the gleaming portland stone of the English baroque more commonly associated with London churches (even Southwark Cathedral's stone is a light honey colour that seems to glow in the light). Only a set of painted monument statues relieve the darkness.
Walking past the Old Bailey and the dark tower of St Sepulchre-Without-Newgate, to Postman's Park. St Botolph Aldergate, completed in 1791, has a late-Georgian exterior. The church is most noted for its churchyard, Postman's Park. Filled with tree ferns and a pleasant fountain, this is nonetheless as important a representation of the Victorian interest in death as Highgate or Kensal Green. Established by the Pre-Raphaelite painter GF Watts, one park walls is lined with tiles that serve as monuments to various people that were deemed to have died heroically, typically saving others from either fire or water. As an example of heroes and hero-worship it encapsulates both a Victorian instinct for egalitarianism and for sentimentality. Onwards again, to the ruins of Christchurch Greyfriars. Like St Dunstan in the East, this church was destroyed in the blitz. Where St Dunstan's gothic ruins are now filled with lush and exotic growths, Christchurch's more stately baroque remains are now home to rose gardens. Walking back past St Nicholas Abbey with its boat-shaped weathervane, St Dunstans in the West, the Daily Telegraph building and Charing Cross, I arrived at the Coliseum for a performance of Nixon in China by John Adams.
As a musical style, minimalism has tended to conflate Eastern influences with more popular Western styles, like Jazz, so it is an appropriate vehicle for an opera dealing with the rapprochement of West and East. Following the Second World War, the United States had refused to recognise China, instead conferring legitimacy on the exiled government in Taiwan. Nixon's state visit enabled the US to drive a wedge between Russia and China, and inaugurated a policy of detente that has led to China's re-emergence as an economic power, to the point where it has become quite easy to envisage it overtaking the US itself. The opera recognises this, depicting Map as seeing the demise of all he had worked for before him and alternately lauding how 'the pople are the heroes now' before condemning the collective violence of the Cultural Revolution. Act four in particular, where the Nixons attend The Red Detachment of Women, an opera written by Madame Mao, shows the Nixons responding to the downtrodded heroine but repulsed by the violence used to liberate the proletariat and the ideological conformity behind it. The Nixon's poor background is stressed against Madame Mao's elitism, while the opera repestedly seeks to both counterpoint and undermine right/left distinctions (Nixon and Mao agree that it is only the right that can act). Since both Nixon and Mao were adept manipulators of public opinion the opera seeks to portray the private persona, frequently embodied in Pat Nixon and Chiang Ch’ing.
Thomas Mann journeyed from bourgeois conservative to liberalism and his novels trace a not dissimilar path from from the social realism of Buddenbrooks to the symbolism of The Magic Mountain. Like Joyce in Ulysses, Mann has the real world of a sanatorium in the Alps shadowed by the mythic, with his protagonist entering the underworld in the same manner as Orpheus, Dante, Aeneas and Odysseus. Nonetheless, the novel often slips between realism and symbolism (most obviously with the depiction of a seance where Hans meets his dead cousin Joachim, meeting the dead literally rather than figuratively). The sanatorium represents something akin to Wagner's Venusberg or Spenser's Bower of Bliss, with the death instinct displacing love. However, the symbolism is uncertain; firstly symbols like the lindenbaum form an unclear objective correlative (not unlike Kafka in this respect, the tree of life is a symbol of death, resurrection, life the transcending of time into an epiphany). The mountain itself is revealed as a Freudian symbol by Dr Krokowski; "whoever recognises a symptom of organic disease as an effect of the conscious soul-life of forbidden and hystericised emotions recognises the creative force of the psychical within the material - a force which one is inclined to claim as a second source of magic phenomena." Krokowski sees disease as a physical manifestation of the psychic, forming the magic as much as references to Nietzsche's Zauberberg. Ilness, in Sontagian terms is clearly a metaphor but although she saw the novel as storehouse of the early-twentieth century metaphorical thinking, the nature of that metaphor remains elusive (tubercolisis clearly represents more than romantic wasting) but the wider implications In Memories, Dreams and Reflections , Jung saw mountains as symbolic of life, writing that "this is it, my world, the real world, the secret, where there are no teachers, no schools, no unanswerable questions, where one can be without having to ask anything." The inversion of the mountain and the underworld, life and death suggests how unstable symbols within the novel can be. Although the novel is essentially a bildungsroman, the development of Hans Castorp essentially takes place bu touching the ineffable through dreams and music.
The uncertainty of the symbolism also applies to the role of the characters in a manner that is profoundly dialogic, characteristic of the novel's polyphony. For example, some of the Berghof's denizens, such as Joachim, do not conform to the pattern of the symbolism and instead follow the course one would expect in a realist novel; Joachim feels trapped and imprisoned, not seduced by the Berghof, with his death being due to his escape from it. The oppositions between the differing characters can be read as being both Apollonian and Dionysian, German Culture and French Civilisation. Mann had previously emphatically endorsed Culture and the Apollonian only to later recant, but nonetheless Joachim's military honour and steadfast obedience remain the virtues of the Germany that Mann had turned his back on ("War is necessary. Without war the world would soon go to rot"). Similar difficulties pertain to the others; Settembrini is identified with reason and humanism, the form of positivism ridiculed by Nietzsche and exposed by Naptha as being both transcendental and aristocratic. In the other instance, Naptha is identified with nihilism and romanticism, accordingly somewhat closer to Mann's thought but nonetheless identified with the death instinct. Castorp's dreams suggest both are a destructive force whose positions frequently cease to be stable opposites and converge. Their duel proves the point but the via media of the earthy and sensual advocate of the Dionysian and Eastern gay science condemned by Settembrini and Naptha alike, Peeperkorn proves an equally dead-end with his suicide. Since the novel repeatedly imbricates life, love and death as concepts, each philosophy (with philosophy after all being concerned with being rather than its converse) within the novel fails to offer a coherent and convincing account that could divert it from its thanatophilia.
Mann's Doctor Faustus raises similar issues to Bernhard's Correction in its depiction of a genius throught the mediating narration of an observer; "the highly subjectivising contrast I feel between the nature of the artist and the ordinary man.... Adrian reacted witheringly to such romantic tripe" or "all the ideas and points of view made vocal around him were present in himself." Zeitblom implicitly draws anaologies between Adrian's descent into the irrational and that of Nazi Germany (where mythical fiction must replace debate and consensus) but the parallel is never clear, with Zeitblom also defending Adrian's liturgical music against the charge of barbarism. Adrian grows to look increasingly christlike, spiritualised through suffering; "with it is an inversion of the temptation idea; in such a way that Faust rejects as temptation the thought of being saved." The scene with the devil raises the question of how literally to take the idea of damnation or whether to see it as a metaphor for artistic creation or for the author's homosexuality and Adrian's love for Rudi; "barbarism even has more grasp of theology than has a culture fallen away from cult, which even in religious has seen only culture, only the humane, never excexx, paradox, the mystic passion."
Orhan Pamuk's Istanbul is both a bildungsroman and an account of the history and architecture of his native city. Where a Western writer would typically have sought to interrelate these two themes, Pamuk alternates between them, reflecting his own preoccupation with the idea of the divided self. Pamuk writes of his childhood imagining of another Orhan living in the same city, of seeing his myriad other selves reflected in the mirror, of his father's other life in another flat and of his dual perception of his city as its inhabitatant and under his own westernised eyes so that he comes to see it as a foreigner. The New Life depicts the idea of the transcendent as something disruptive and traumatic that causes people to fall away from their path in life and to encounter death. Pamuk writes that the novel is an unfamilar form, that rather being like Chekhov, writing of the pain and dignity of being alive "instead, like a writer from the East let me take the opportunity to tell a cautionary tale. In short, I had desired to set myself apart from others." Reality is dispersed and fractured, with characters taking on new identities from the dead and establishing new ones as doubles of the deceased; "I used to be someone else once and that someone used to desire to become me." As such, the novel casts its attempts to discern patterns and symbols (few of the characters use anything other than pseudonyms while the line between accident and design is continually unclear) into a cohesive whole through a series of characters, like Doctor Fine's attempts to preserve collective memory in certain objects (" if that were true flea markets would be bathed in spiritual enlightenment" ) like watches. Like the angel, Fine deplores the printing press against the written word but sees the cult as both un-Turkish and un-Islamic and therefore Western. The novel constantly aspires to allegory but is always frustrated.
In the style of Lucretius, Ovid's Metamorphoses concludes with a speech given by Pythagoras; "our souls are immortal and are ever received into new homes... everything is in a state of flux and comes into being as a transient appearance. " The Pythagoreans were known for their theory of Metempsychosis, the transference of souls between man and animal and between man and woman, just as Ovid depicts characters being transmogrified between species and gender. Distinguishing between the material and immaterial, many of Ovid's characters, like Aeneas, Caesar and Heracles, have their mortality burnt away, leaving their divinity. The poet himself concludes by saying that his poetry will perform a similar service for himself; "with my better part, I shall soar, undying." It's easy to see why Ovid was often read as a christian allegorist (or even Pound's "Say that I consider the writings of Confucius and Ovid's Metamorphoses the only safe guides in religion"). This dialectic between the material and immaterial is nonetheless rather problematic for Ovid, leaving the relation between the two rather uncertain; in some cases the deaths that lead to change are those of maligned innocents, in others they are punishments for crimes. The story of Arachne summarises this ambiguity, with Athena weaving a pattern of mortals guilty of hubris and Arachne depicting mortals wronged by the gods.
Daniel Defoe's A tour thro' the Whole Island of Great Britain is effectively the product of homo economicus; "we saw no idle hands here, but every man busie on the main affair of life, that is to say, getting money." The tour details the trade, commerce and condition of each part of the country (or in the case of Scotland, discussing its lack of trade, industry and discipline), often pausing to look at other matters but largely refusing to "meddle with the antique." Nonetheless, Defoe devotes much of his description of London in particular to lamenting the uncontrolled sprawl of the city, predicting economic collapse (occasionally citing the South Sea Bubble), decrying the mediocrity of the city's church architecture and calling for Whitehall Palace to be rebuilt in such a form as to rival Versailles.
With the return of the Proms, I once more found myself walking across Kensington Gardens to the Royal Albert Hall for the third part of the Ring cycle, Siegfried. In some senses, this continues the anti-capitalist romanticisation of the feudal past that underpins much of the ring; the love of gold destroys Mime while Siegfried is the authentic noble savage, untainted by society. Conversely, there is also something alarmingly feral about his status as ubermensch warrior, with his slaying of Fafnir being precipitate at best. This throws an interesting light upon the 'sleeping beauty' sequence with Brunnhilde, where he is emasculated by his sense of fear in her presence and she is feminised by the destruction of her armour; both experience love as weakness rather than as a civilisation of their wildness.
Jarrold and Dore's London: A Pilgrimage is structured much in the manner of a Dickens or Thackeray novel covering both the highs and lows of London society. Jarrold is quite striking when he describes life in nineteenth century London as a constant struggle for survival with each and every man fixed on commerce as his sole aim. Nonetheless, even after describing the rookeries around Westminster, his account lovingly lingers on society dinners and events before concluding with an somewhat inapposite peroration on the excellence of British charity and philanthrophy.Labels: Art, Flora, History, Literature, London, Music, Victorian
posted by Richard 7:31 AM
Wednesday, June 7, 2006
Anthony Giddens sees modernity as a condition whereby pre-modern (traditional) culture have given way to modern (post-traditional) culture; identity becomes more reflexive and self-consciously constructed. Roles are negotiated rather than assigned by convention. Anthony Trollope is consciously writing in The Way We Live Now as an opponent of modernity, counterpointing the morals and dignity of an increasingly impecunious aristocracy with the corruption of the self-made men of the rising mercantile classes; "his position is a sign of the degeneracy of the age". However, the novel also questions conventional ideas of identity; the stereotypically Jewish aspects of the portrayal of Melmotte's venality is balanced by the portrayal of Mr Breghert as he is wronged by members of the upper classes unwilling to accept that times have changed for social acceptance of Jews. Similarly, Marie Melmotte proceeds from being a hapless victim to revenging herself on her father and taking on property. Equally, the fact that Melmotte is brought down the avarice of the aristocracy and the dissipation of figures like Sir Felix, serves to deconstructs the opposition at the heart of the novel between old fashioned order and middle class rapacity. The novel acknowledges some of this in its discussions of how Melmotte himself is viewed; "as the great man was praised so too was he abused... the working classes were in favour of Melmotte... from their belief he was being ill-used.. that occult sympathy for crime, when the crime committed is injurious to the upper classes... it came to be said of him that he was more sinned against than sinning."
Similar concerns appear throughout Zola's The Kill, where Haussman's rebuilding of Paris serves throughout as a metaphor for the disorientation and the Durkheimite anomie of modernity. As such, Paris is seen as artificial and inauthentic, no longer the organic product of social evolution; "a strange feeling of illicit desire at the sight of this landscape that had become unrecognisable, so worldly and artificial." The preoccupation with the artificial and contrived point clearly to Zola's affiliation with Huysmans. As traditional roles fall into desuetude, so too do traditional ethics of abstinence; "the main preoccupation of society was with knowing how to enjoy itself." Sin becomes a form of consumption, of refinement. Similarly, sexual roles also become fluid once they are no longer constrained by traditional norms; "the sign of his boyish debauchery, this effeminisation of his whole being... he seemed born and bred for perverted sensual pleasure. Renee enjoyed her domination." Renee assumes the masculine role, Maxime the feminine. The paradox in many Zola novels is that while the central fable of his novels is concerning with condemning the immorality of modern, post-traditional society, the syuzhet draws much of its sensational interest from depicting them. As such, The Kill is loosely based on a moral fable, with Renee being betrayed by Saccard and Maxime. However, Saccard's indifference to her adultery goes a long way towards aborting that moral framework, with the cash nexus replacing normal social relations.
Hans Christian Anderson's stories depict a world where, as a character in The Ice Maiden puts it, "antiquated ways are discarded" so that mermaids and telegraph wires co-exist (memorably, the eyes of the ice maiden are described as being like the barrels of a shotgun) and the conventions of folk tales (of the kind described by Vladimir Propp) become contested and dispersed. A tale like The Tinderbox recognisably belongs to the same world as that of the Brothers Grimm; a hero is offered the chance of fame and fortune and is ruthless in his will to power, in contrast to the moral fable of Big Claus and Little Claus or The Ugly Duckling. However, in later stories this is sublimated, either into a thanatophilic concept of virtue being rewarded in the afterlife (as in The Little Mermaid, The Marsh King's Daughter or The Story of a Mother) or where aspiration and virtue alike are thwarted (as in The Shadow). Contingent upon this is a world that is far less centered around the protagonists, where everything from animals to inanimate objects have become anthropomorphised, as cats and storks become participants and commenters within the narrative. The fate of creatures like The Snowman or The Fir Tree is more suggestive of Kafka's Metamorphosis than the Brothers Grimm. Equally, if the stories frequently see female sexuality as threatening (particularly with the Ice Maiden or Snow Queen) then they also displace the role of the hero in favour of female characters, like Gerda in The Snow Queen or The Marsh King's Daughter.
Lessing's Memoirs of a Survivor is one of the most interesting dystopian novels I can think of. Whereas the majority of apocalyptic science fiction, from Wyndham to Atwood, revolves around the causal factors (technological, ecological, political, economic etc) for whatever has changed society from its familiar state, Lessing elides this; "for 'it' is a force, a power... 'it' can be, has been, pestilence, war, the alteration of climate, tyranny." The novel is deliberately dislocated from any specific sense of time or place and instead concentrates on the consequences of social breakdown from feral packs of children to tribal migration. Nonetheless, Lessing undermines the dystopian aspects of the novel in a number of ways. Firstly, dystopian fiction, whether 1984, Day of the Triffids or The Handmaids Tale tends to emphasise individual agency in the face of events. By contrast, Lessing repeatedly stresses that governments are powerless in the face of change while her characters take no actions to change matters. Offered the choice of moving to safer areas in the countryside, they do nothing. Submission is the order of the day (Lessing's interest in Sufism comes through strongly in how she handles time, viewing all phenomena as manifestations of a single reality, or Wujud i.e. being). She also expresses little sorrow for the loss of 'the age of affluence,' implying that the experiments in communalism that emerge represent an improvement on the society that had marginalised people like June Ryan; "all property worries gone; all sexual taboos gone... free, at least from what was left of 'civilisation' and its burdens." By repeatedly 'cutting' to descriptions of Emily's childhood, Lessing also appears to characterise the family in Laingian terms as a source of neurosis whose loss is not necessarily to be mourned.
From Zola's view of the novel as a scientific experiment to Wolfe's 'new journalism,' the novel has attempted to purge itself of all assocations with artifice and imagination, preferring instead to present itself as something objective and factual. If inherent in the idea of realism, it nonetheless represents a problematic conception, if only because if the act of observing something can change a subject, how much more can the act of narrating change it. The most notable example of which being Truman Capote's In Cold Blood, a 'non-fiction novel' relating the murder of four people on a Kansas farm in 1959. Bearing this in mind, the idea of creating a film depicting the writing of the book is an oddly postmodern one (a representation of a representation), particularly since the sparse and austere cinematography appears to be trying to emulate the novel's journalistic style.
Wimpole Hall, designed by Sir John Soane and James Gibbs, appears at first a model of neo-classical symmetry and proportion. However, the interior easily belies this, as corridors snake in on themselves leading to dead-ends. His main contribution is a drawing room with a large domed ceiling, not unlike some of his works at Lincoln's Inn. The main contribution from Gibbs was a Wedgewoodesque book room. The highlight of the interior was a small collection of Gillray prints, mostly lambasting the Prince Regent and the Broad Bottomed Ministry (as well as some more unusual ones with hunting as their target). I was also struck by a Grandfather clock, where a ship rocked on the waves in time with the ticks and tocks.
An interior chapel is painted with a trompe l'oeil effect (something of a theme; there's also a painted playing table, complete with painted cards). The grounds are home to a small church (with a large wing filled with marble monuments of the house owners) and a set of gothic ruins in the distance. The gardens have been restored to their original formal patterns (reversing Capability Brown's vandalism), though landscaped pleasure grounds filled with a wide range of trees and shrubs remain (including the national collection of walnuts). The sky was a brilliant shade of turquoise inbetween dark rain clouds, while the flatness of the Cambridgeshire landscape reminded me strongly of a Trent Valley that had never been industrialised.
Perched high above the Thames, Cliveden feels as if it should be a gothic castle. Instead, the Italianate building and formal gardens look as if they should be nestled within the gentle slopes of a valley. I'd forgotten the sheer amount of Roman and Italian sculpture in the grounds, such as the Borghese balustrade with its dragons and eagles as well as more modern conceits like the turtles on one of the fountains. The Wisteria was flowering alongside the Acer in the Chinese water garden (it felt as if cherry blossom should have been correct for the pagoda, but the Wisteria made a more than acceptable substitute). Ducklings splashed about in the waters around the Botticelli fountain. Further along the Thames and one comes to Windsor. The castle here towers well above the Thames (the site was chosen by William the Conqueror on defensive grounds) though the presence of the town nestling beneath it softens the scene somewhat. I find a meadow by the river, go paddling in the water and watch the swans glide by. Rather inevitably, the town itself has a rather kitsch feel to it, largely due to the continuous citing of often rather trivial historical associations; HG Wells working as a draper or Nell Gwyn and Shakespeare staying in local taverns. You do have to go back quite a long way before anything actually happened at Windsor. Even much of the castle has a rather Ruritanian feel to it, presumably due to the changes made by George the Fourth. The castle has been redesigned and redesigned so often that its medieval appearance is illusory and hyperreal. The town does at least have a more concrete feel to it, with a Guildhall designed by Wren and the nearby church St John the Baptist, home to an anonymous Renaissance painting of the last supper and beautiful altar mosaics and corbels, designed by the same artist that worked on Westminster Abbey.
Further down the Thames again and one comes to Richmond. When the likes of Hampton Court and Ham House were built here, courtiers would sail to the city on barges establishing its role as a rural suburb early on. Ham House was originally designed in the Jacobean period and much like its rival at Hampton was extended during the restoration. The house reached its apotheosis at this point, described by Evelyn as comparable to the finest villas in Italy and furnished like a palace. Nonetheless, its owner fell from favour at court, penury beckoned and the house was left to stagnate for centuries. Visiting in 1770, Walpole described it as dreary, ancient and decayed, a place barricaded away from the rest of the world and liable to defeat even his passion for the antique. Today, the house seems rather less formidable, in spite of the busts of Roman Emperors filling niche after niche in the redbrick walls at the front of the house. Nonetheless, the house looks out from a long avenue towards the Thames, as parakeets fly overhead. The restored gardens provide a glimpse of what Evelyn meant, with a wilderness area populated by statues of Hermes, hornbeam hedges and secluded gardens, formal gardens planted with lavender and box and overlooked by Bacchus and kitchen gardens (there is also a still chamber for the preparation of perfumes, conserves and cordials). One room contained detailed plans for rebuilding Inigo Jones' Westminster Palace, the subject of much speculation in Defoe's Tour Thro' the Whole Island of Great Britain and a good example of the many unfulfilled projects of what London could have been.
Like Hampton, the planting of myrtle, lemon, oleander and almond trees is of the period (tulips and pineapples are incorprated into statues and gates throughout the gardens). Conversely, the interior tends to illustrate the decayed grandeur of the place. A great hall hung with paintings by Lely and Kneller leads to a grand staircase, with an elaborate wooden balustrade. The North Drawing Room above is hung with Flemish tapestries (still retaining much of their original colour; a later room has Spitalfields tapestries copying Watteau designs), white marble chimneypieces and ionic columns and ivory cabinets. This leads to a long gallery, where dark black wood is gilded with gold, and Van Dyck paintings of the Royal family line the walls. A strange self-portrait hangs above the door, showing him with a sunflower, symbolic of art and nature, sovereign and subject. Marquetry and Japanned furniture, often with blue and white Kangxi porcelain line the walls. A closet leads to a collection of miniatures of subjects like Elizabeth, Lucretia's suicide and a love in flames (he who does not burn will die). Finally, an elaborate four-poster bed forms the centrepiece of the Queen's bedchamber, decorated with Van De Velde paintings.
Lacock in Wiltshire was once the home of an abbey that offered a home to the unmarried daughters of wealthy families, and to a village that grew wealthy through the wool trade. The Abbey was dissolved in the reformation while the nineteenth century cotton imports had a similar effect on the village. The combination of these factors with the relative isolation of Lacock led to them becoming a form of time capsule. The village remains full of half-timbered buildings, while the church of St Cyriac still houses a Lady Chapel where paint remains on the ceiling alongside especially elaborate gargoyle carvings. The church has a window above the chancel arch, indicative of the customary 'wool gothic' style of Cotswolds churches. The walls are still whitewashed, presumably indicative of no Victorian changes. The exterior of the church is equally elaborate, while the size of the tombs testifies to the wealth of the community. The abbey has rather less of a sense of continuity with that period, save for its cloisters. After the reformation, it was converted into a country house and an octagonal tower added to the side. The interior is dominated by a circular table, supported by three satyrs, while much of the house is dominated by images of the scorpion from that owner's crest. Later owners provided good examples of early gothic revival. The great hall comes with a barreled ceiling studded with crests, a rose window and wall niches filled with extraordinary terracotta figures representing death and the scapegoat. Later owners experimented with camera inventions and translation of cuneiform and populated the house with the likes of geological specimens and stuffed pangolins. The grounds are more classical, ranging from a stone sphinx to a botanical garden.
Nearby lies Great Chalfield house, a fifteenth century manor house complete with a moat. The church of All saints lies within the moat and includes a beautiful painted pre-raphaelite organ and wooden rood screens. Swallows nesting in the rafters looked down curiously on the visitors. The grounds bear witness of plants overspilling the paths and forcing their way through the cracks between the lichen covered paving stones (looking rather like Mariana's moated grange), a welcome correction to the meticulous restoration of the house itself. The great hall on the interior is much as one would expect, save for mask-like faces looking down from the galleries with empty eye-sockets (designed for the lord to spy on servants). Red paint remains on the rafters of the hall, while perhaps the most impressive aspect of the rest of the house are the oriel windows.
Having been to Highgate Cemetery earlier this year, I returned to London today for more of the Victorian way of death. The 'mighty seven' cemeteries represent a form of ritual, as much as photographs, death masks and portraits of the recently deceased produced by the Victorians, as well as jewellery that utilized a locket of the dead person's hair, extravagant funerals and the wearing of black crepe. After a stroll round the Kyoto gardens in Holland Park, were I watched the peacocks lazily strut about and a wagtail flit from one stone pagoda to another, I began at Brompton Cemetery. More like a landscaped garden than Highgate, ferns have nonetheless grown thickly across much of the grounds while squirrels scamper across the tombstones. The layout is also more formal than Highgate (based on the structure of a cathedral), with a central avenue leading to a chapel modelled on St Peter's Basilica, which is flanked by long colonnades. The tombs are also more impressive than the majority of those in Highgate, with Neo-classical, Gothic and Egyptian mausoleums lining the central avenue. The most impressive tomb is that of James McDonald (Chairman of Anglo-American Oil), a gothic affair complete with Pre-Raphaelite angels and stained glass windows. Conversely, the names of the dead are rather less noteworthy than either Highgate or Kensal Green; Emmeline Pankhurst being the most well known. The cemetery is also a rather blatantly obvious cruising ground; albeit by coincidence rather than by design, there's something rather reassuring (and oddly apposite) about desire persisting in the midst of death.
I then travelled north to visit Kensal Green, the first of the Victorian 'mighty seven' cemeteries to be constructed and perhaps the most impressive. While the trees were still leafless when I went to Highgate, Kensal had a perversely bucolic aspect in the sunshine with buttercups and daisies flowering while a Green Woodpecker perched on top of one of the graves. Kensal Green would certainly have been rural when it was built, but today the cemetery is dominated by the rusting skeletons of two gasometers and the louring presence of Erno Goldfinger's brutalist Trellick Tower. Kensal is by no means as formally laid out as Brompton, though it does have a set of Greek Revival Chapels (complete with catacombs and hydraulic catafalque) and a central avenue. The tombs along this are especially striking. On one side is the tomb of William Casement (four male statues supporting a stone canopy, in the manner of the Erechtheum), Andrew Ducrow (an Egyptian tomb decorated with scarabs and guarded by two sphinxes), Edmund Molyneux (Italian Gothic in red Peterhead granite) and Henry Edward Kendall (a Gothic cross decorated with Minton tiling). On the other side is Mary Gibson (a Corinthian canopy surmounted by four Pre-Raphaelite angels reaching towards the sky), and the quack doctor John St John Lang (a classical statue standing within a circular canopy) who died of the affliction his medicine purported to cure and William Mulready (a gothic statue lying in state in a classical canopy).
Kensal also has the advantage of the reputations of those interred there, from many writers and artists (Thackerary, Hood, Collins, Trollope, Waterhouse and Grossmith), engineers and scientists (Brunel and Babbage), disgraced royals and fascinating figures like Dr James Barry (a successful army doctor and duellist who was only unmasked as a woman after her death) and the Duke of Portland (an eccentric recluse who had built underground ballrooms and mazes under his estate, and was claimed to have faked his death as part of the Druce affair).
Beginning with Shadwell and Hawksmoor's church of St George in the East before travelling to Limehouse and St Anne's church. I'm always stuck by Hawksmoor's buildings; they make few concessions to architectural tradition and often feel as if they should be stage scenery; viewed from the front they are striking and impressive while viewed from the side they seem two-dimensional. St Anne's also happens to have an unexplained pyramid in its graveyard (drawings in the British Library suggest Hawksmoor may have planned pyramids on the turrets, while Christ Church in Spitalfields does rather resemble a pyramid from the front), possibly a Masonic reference. Walking around these areas, it was difficult not to be struck by how they are changing. High property prices elsewhere in London seem to be driving new property development, with cranes and tall blocks of luxury flats leaping up all around. This gentrification sits alongside the still all too visible poverty of East London and makes for an uncomfortable contrast. Walking back to the Limehouse station, I passed an old public library with a statue of Clement Atlee (Limehouse was his constituency). The architect of the welfare state was decaying badly and was missing his hand; a fitting comment on what was happening around him.
Travelling back into the centre of London took me to another Hawksmoor church, St Mary Woolnoth, a bizarre structure that barely looks like a church at all, lacking as it does a tower or a spire. I then walked around some of the other buildings in the area, like Wren's gothic church of St Mary Aldermary and his more baroque St Stephen Walbrook, before changing location again to the other side of the Thames and Lambeth. The gates of Lambeth Palace adjoin onto the former church of St Mary-at-Lambeth, now home to the Museum of Garden History. The sight of a Victorian graveyard, filled with the typically ornate Victorian funerary monuments and planted with sisal, poppies, roses, foxgloves and acanthus, was an odd indeed.
Passing by, I returned to north of the Thames, returning back to the city and The Museum of London. The first exhibition here was dedicated to Pre-Roman settlements in what was to become London. I was struck by the note that since the Thames is notoriously prone to flooding, entire sections of land could suddenly be left underwater. An excerpt from Pepys' diary captures this well; "digging his late Docke, he did 12-foot under ground find perfect trees over-Covered with earth, nut-trees, with the branches and the very nuts upon them, some of whose nuts he showed us, their shells black with age and their Kernell, upon opening decayed; but their shell perfectly hard as ever. And an Ewe-tree he showed us (upon which he says the very Ivy was taken up whole about it), which upon cutting with an adze, we found to be rather harder than the living tree usually is." Manmade objects seem to have survived well too, with the Walbrook having developed as a religious site, with votive offerings thrown into it to appease the gods (I was struck by a panel paralleling this to Bedivere throwing Excalbir back into the lake); a practice that seems to have continued well into the Roman period. This section showed a number of such offerings, typically carved from evergreen woods.
The Roman section was mainly noteworthy for displaying the statues from the Mithraeum found near St Paul's. As one would expect, several depictions of Mithras and the demon dull abound, along with statues of Minerva and Egyptian deities (apparently the Eastern cults proved more popular in this part of the Empire than the Roman ones). This also included the recently discovered sarcophagus from Spitalfields, decorated with shells throughout. The rest of the exhibition seemed somewhat lacklustre, though I was rather taken by a Victorian automaton called 'Psycho,' who was able to play cards and perform mathematical calculations. Due to the removal of internal workings (or hidden actors, depending on the extent of one's cynicism) the explanation for these feats has been lost.Labels: Architecture, England, Film, History, London, ScienceFiction, Victorian
posted by Richard 7:29 AM
Sunday, February 26, 2006
Death held an especial place in the Victorian psyche. The combination of sentimental literature, with its stressing of the more pathetic (in the sense of pathos) emotions and the evangelical revival ensured that death acquired a prominence in Victorian life that it did not before and has not since. Notoriously, Victorian literature loved to dwell on death of the pure and helpless, from Little Nell in The Old Curiosity Shop to Helen Burns in Jane Eyre. The horror genre, typified by Stoker and Poe The elegy grew to particular prominence with Tennyson's In Memoriam and Arnold's Thrysis, while such works as Rossetti's The Blessed Damozel aestheticised death as a state of romantic longing (Susan Sontag, in Illness as Metaphor, noted the particular place tuberculosis held for the Victorian mind; it was a wasting disease founded on passion, a consumption of the life force). Spiritualism became increasingly popular, with Conan Doyle's Professor Challenger proceeding from exploring a lost world of dinosaurs in one story to exploring the other world in a later narrative; not for nothing is it said that the Victorians treated death as simply another territory to be conquered.
More empirically, as the population of nineteenth century London increased and social conditions deteriorated the demands on London's cemeteries rapidly exceeded the available space; the solution was to build seven new cemeteries at a remove from the city, of which Highgate cemetery remains the most famed. Covering a considerable expanse, Highgate's necropolis represents as formidable an example of Victorian engineering and architecture as the museums in Kensington or the Houses of Parliament. Funerals had come to cost far more than weddings and accrued a wealth of ritual behind them; both the ceremony and the tomb had to be as grandiose as possible. Accordingly, the tombs cover a bewildering range of styles, from obelisks and pyramids to mourning angels (often with a trumpet to herald the day of the resurrection), to funerary urns half covered with veils (pointing to Roman burials practices; rather oddly as cremation was typically considered pagan and unconscionable), broken pillars (symbolising a life cut short) as well as the vogue for Celtic crosses. Where a modern cemetery is orderly and utilitarian, Highgate is filled with the mythology of the underworld. Walking round it feels like walking round ancient ruins, although this is nonetheless a cemetery of the bourgeois and the excluded (from Marx, Elizabeth Siddall and Christian Rossetti to Radclyffe Hall); those barred from being interred in Westminster Abbey or St Paul's.
However, many of the monuments in the West Cemetery are still more ornate, most obviously with the vaults held in an Egyptian avenue of lotus columns. Beyond that lies the circle of Lebanon, a rotunda where the vaults ranged from Egyptian to Gothic and Neo-Classical and which has a three hundred year old Lebanon cedar at its heart. The novelist Radclyffe Hall lies here buried with her lover, next to a Columbarium vault that holds later ashes from the first cremations. Nearby there is set of terraces where Victorian gentry could take walks and be seen in what was one of the most fashionable parts of London; this is one of the highest points in London and it originally had a phenomenal view across the city. However, this ended when newspaper magnate and German Jew Julius Beer chose to build his mausoleum so as to block the view in revenge for decades of social ostracism. The tomb, based on that of King Mausolus at Halicarnassus, remains quite spectacular and a peek through the glass windows in the door shows ornate statuary and a ceiling decorated with gold ceramics. A more frivolous tomb was that of a menagerist, where a particular domesticated lion rests forever on top of his grave.
Although the cemetery was originally planted with formal gardens, it is today characterised by the sight of magnificent monument crumbling and reverting back to nature, reverting away from the landscaped tradition towards something more like Prague's Jewish Cemetery or Stockholm's Woodland Cemetery. Much of the vegetation in the ceremony is evergreen and even at this time of the year it has the aspect of a dark jungle, with rhizomic tangles of ivy vines throttled many of the tombs, their stone angels ensnared by the leaves. Drifts of snowdrops were just beginning to come into flower. The site is rich in wildlife, with squirrels running inbetween the ferns and ash trees. Other species include dogwood beech, limes, oak, hornbeam and hazel.
By contrast, the East section of Highgate is considerably more understated. There are very few ornate monuments here, just rows of tombstones that have begun to fade as the trees take back this land as well. Although bitterly cold, it was nonetheless a bright and sunny day with a blue sky contrasting against the bleached trunks of the leafless trees here. There is one impressive monument here; Karl Marx's grave was originally quite nondescript but was eventually replaced with something more ostentatious, surmounted by a bust of the philosopher and surrounded by the graves of communist figures from South Africa and Iraq (and, more incongruously, by the grave of Herbert Spencer). Someone had laid flowers at the base of Marx's grave. George Eliot, England's greatest novelist, languishes nearby in obscurity while Dickens (an adulterer, after all) rests in Westminster Abbey and Poet's Corner. Today, I noted that the East cemetery seems especially popular with the Chinese community, with raw slate boulders engraved with Chinese characters being a common feature.
After Highgate, I went to a few other places in London, starting with the New St Pancras Church, which has an octagonal spire modelled on the Temple of the Winds in Athens and an equally Grecian set of four caryatids on the exterior. I then went to the Church of Holy Trinity in Sloane Square, described as the 'Arts and Crafts Cathedral.' Redbrick on the exterior, its stained glass windows were the largest items the William Morris company ever produced, while a Tractarian influenced was evident on the ornate beaten brass work throughout the church. As appears compulsory for Anglican churches at present, it had two Russian orthodox icons showing the crucifixion. Finally, I returned to the Leighton House museum, the residence of the pre-raphaelite painter. A redbrick building near Holland Park, the only sign of anything unusual inside is a small dome surmounted by a crescent; in fact an Arab Hall built using Iznik tiles. I hadn't noticed the rather inappropriate stained glass beneath the dome; brightly coloured and looking life Tiffany works. Other things I hadn't noticed before were the classical friezes around the top of Leighton's studio or the Chinese pottery inset into the black surround of a fireplace (I also hadn't realised that there's a tower on a nearby street built by gothic revival architect William Burges). The actual collection in the house is rather slight (Leighton owned a great many works, of which only one Tintoretto has ever been returned), but it does include many of his own paintings. I'd heard it said that his painting of Clytemnestra resembles a man more than a woman before but I also noticed that many of his paintings show androgynous figures and that he did paint male nudes. Since of all the Pre-Raphaelites his work comes closest to pornography (as anyone who has seen his painting of The Tepidarium can attest), Leighton's sexuality seems something of a puzzle; many of his figures are markedly androgynous he never married and did keep company with gay artists like Simeon Solomon.
Reading Balzac's Lost Illusions I was struck by how it forms a mid-point between the picaresque novel (since although Balzac's narrative is highly plotted, the plot nonetheless tends to turn through unexpected events in an episodic fashion, a moral fable depicting the travels of a young man from country to city and consequently from innocence to corruption and redemption) and later social novels (where morality has a much more problematic relationship with social conditions and where the character of society is not necessarily regarded as a given, though Balzac is markedly more nonchalant on that score than Zola). For instance, Balzac writes of Lucien that "he was under the spell of luxury and the tyranny of sumptuous fare; his wayward instincts were reviving," but in practice the majority of the narrative is driven not by Lucien's fall into immoral debauchery but by the machinations of society driven by the cash-nexus; "everything is taxed, everything is sold, everything is manufactured, even success." Accordingly, Balzac links dissipation with the society that produces it; "the helotism to which the Restoration had condemned young people... having no outlet for their energy they... frittered it away in the strangest excesses." The consequence is that although 'Herrera' is clearly marked as a Faustian figure, both author and narrator are left pinioned by the novel's own logic when he declares that any morality can only come after financial security. A statement worthy of Brecht's What keeps mankind alive?Labels: Literature, London, Victorian
posted by Richard 7:21 AM
Sunday, January 29, 2006
The Three Emperors exhibition at the Royal Academy covers a narrowly defined period in Chinese history, from the ascendancy of the Manchurian Qing dynasty over the Han Ming rulers to their consolidation of power over Tibet and Mongolia through the reigns of Xangxi, Yongzheng and Qianlong. In particular, it looks at their use of religion and art as a tool of statecraft, used to confer perceived legitimacy on regimes that were often regarded as having usurped power. It was also used as a means of cultural exchange, with these period seeing several Western attempts to gain a foothold in China, whether by Catholic missionaries or by delegations sent by European governments . At a period when Europe was eager for Chinese designs in porcelain, China was receiving European expertise in painting, architecture and technology.
The exhibition's scrolls and paintings partly utilise traditional Chinese axonometric perspectives (so that objects that are further away appear nearer and larger than would be the case in Western painting, allowing for the inclusion of extensive panoramic detail) and the use of Western materials and techniques to suggest depth. Long painted scrolls depict imperial processions throughout the Emperor's dominions; the purpose was largely to confer legitimacy on the Qing dynasty but they include a wealth of detail that is more unusual in Western painting (the Emperor is simply one point in each scroll), so that the effect is more reminiscent of Breughel than Holbein (though one other odd comparison did occur to me; the tigers in hunting scenes looked just like Blake's Tyger). Of course, there are paintings that do focus on the Emperor seated on the dragon-throne as the sole figure (where the background seems oddly attenuated with the axonometric perspective lending it a peculiarly flattened quality). More interesting is the painting of Qianlong Emperor by the Jesuit missionary Guiseppe Castiglione; the Emperor is shown depicted on horseback and although the pose is rather more sedate, it's difficult not to think of David's romanticised portrait of Napoleon on horseback. That said, a more revealing parallel is probably Bellini's portrait of Suleyman the Magnificent, where religious objections had impeded the use of perspective.
Frequently in the works of Castiglione (as well as other Jesuits and Chinese artists influenced by them) Chinese themes are depicted in a more typically Western manner. In the portrait of the Emperor, sanskrit text appears on his helmet to reinforce the image of the Emperor as a mean of religion and learning as well as war. Another portrait depicts a number of auspicious symbols, such as fungi, bamboo and pine (representing longevity) alongside a white hawk (symbolic of the sovereign's right to rule); the subjects and style are Chinese but the use of light and perspective are Western. Castiglione also designed buildings for the Qianlong Emperor; the rococo buildings seeming somewhat odd given the prestige attached to Chinoiserie in the European use of the style (for instance, Frederick of Prussia's Chinese tea house on the grounds of Sanssouci).
However, in technology, the picture was more one-sided, with clocks and astronomical instruments being prized especially highly in China. The final aspect to this was the role of religion, with the Emperors being depicted as the Buddha as a means of gaining support in their conquered territories while retaining something of the shamanistic practices native to Manchuria. Many of the items here were of interest more for their macabre quality than for historical interest; a skull cup made from the skull of an especially holy lama stood out in particular. More generally, the exhibits that also stood out for me were the weathered taihu garden rock (a testament to the sacred quality of mountains in miniature), red lacquered screens, five-clawed dragons and the blue-white porcelain.
One especially interesting aspect of the exhibition was the counter-narrative offered in one room, which was dedicated to works by the Han elite; representatives and descendents of the Ming dynasty who were in exile, often to Buddhis monasteries. Where court art was highly colourful and influenced by Western art, these figures clung to older and more austere models and typically used minimal black brushstrokes on paper. The works were not only more austere but were often less polished, using what one artist called an 'aesthetic of deformity' to imply attacks on the Qing regime (the absence of sky in one scroll being symbolic of the loss of heaven).
Finally, I went for a meandering walk along the Embankment, past Cleopatra's Needle, the Temple Church and St Brides. The weather was rather odd; very cold but also very dry; not at all like the usual damp English weather.
Reading a collection of Dickens's short fiction, I was especially impressed with George Silverman's Explanation. Not unlike the diary of a self-tormentor from Little Dorrit this presents an unreliable narration of the consequences of excessive self-denial. Like Fielding, Dickens sees morality as stemming from empathy and emotion (a view most forcibly expressed in Hard Times), a conception that is at odds with Silverman's self-defeating fear of worldliness. However, this also seems at odds with the criticisms Dickens often makes of those corrupted in voluptuaries as they move from city to country, as in Great Expectations. I'd read The Radetzky March by Joseph Roth not all that long ago and had thought that the way Roth tended to dwell on external surfaces, of clothes in particular, reminded me of DH Lawrence. The Emperor's Tomb reinforced this impression. Both this and Women in Love dwell distastefully on the dehumanised aspect of modern life, Lawrence in the character of Loerke, Roth in the character of Frau Jolanth (both defined in connection with primitive art and their sexuality). The difference is that where Lawrence aligns his fiction in relation to a vision of a new relation between men and women, Roth aligns his to a vision of a world that passed with the death of Franz Josef.
Food cooked: Romanian chicken Jubilee, Caribbean Chicken, Jugged hare, French blueberry torte, Greek chicken with figs and mint, Potato and feta salad, Calederete of rice with allioli, Swedish sausage with potato and tomato, Linz Torte, Cassoulet, Flamenco eggs, Pollo con Lagostinos, Circassion chicken with bulgar wheat, Greek duck with walnuts and pomeganates, Alsatian chicken with pork and apples, Kaiser goulash, Swedish herring salad, Irish duck with apples and cider.Labels: Food, History, Literature, London
posted by Richard 7:17 AM
Tuesday, July 19, 2005
I hadn't walked through Hyde Park for a few years and I'd forgotten how pleasant it is (though perhaps a little too much like a provincial country estate when compared to either the formal gardens in Amsterdam's Vondelpark or the wild areas it shares with Berlin's Tiergarten). The Serpentine is the most impressive part of the park; at one point the lake was crossed with posts with a solitary seagull perched on each of these. Nearby, a coot was building its nest in shallow waters. I left the park at Apsley House and the Wellington Arch (although the park is filed with war memorials, the arch is rather awkwardly militaristic for London) before walking back to Kensington, passing by the Brompton Oratory (an intriguing building in that the light-filled interior could be one of the Catholic churches in Europe rather than their quasi-anglicanised brethren here).
The Victoria and Albert Museum was holding an exhibition on Arts & Crafts, a counterpart to a previous exhibition on Art Deco. Arts & Crafts had an oddly double character; it emerged as a response to industrialisation, asserting the role of rural crafts, but was primarily purchased by the new industrial haute-bourgeoisie (Wightwick Manor, an arts & crafts mansion was also one of the first to have electric lighting and plumbing). By eschewing mass-production the artefacts of the arts and crafts movement would inevitably be high-value items, affordable only for the elites. The English section comprised furniture by Pugin, paintings by Burne-Jones, clocks and furniture by Voysey, ceramics by De Morgan, Morris tapestries and Baillie-Scott's stained glass. The inclusion of works by Beardsley made it clear how the romantic interest in nature held by the arts & crafts movement could lead to both aestheticism and art nouveau. By contrast, arts & crafts in America seemed much more to resemble something that had passed directly on to art deco without the intermediate stage of art nouveau; the materials and subjects were still natural but their treatment stylised and geometric (the only comparable works in the English section were by Mackintosh).
Although figures like Greene & Greene and Lloyd Wright were reacting to the rise of skyscrapers, the American houses appear to have been significantly larger than the English cottages dreamt by Morris (presumably the more deracinated character of America made idealisation of peasant life markedly more difficult; such traits are absent even in works like Walden). Although Viennese design was significantly more stylised (as with Klimt and Hoffmann's designs) and German more comfortable with industrialisation, the majority of European design seems to have been more in sympathy with England. Perhaps unsurprisingly so; Morris's socialist utopianism fed into Gauguin's praise of pre-industrial life in Tahiti. Van Gogh's artist's community in Arles, the Yellow House, emulated Morris's Red House, his famous ladder-backed armchair picture showing an arts & crafts design. Scandinavian design drew on rural traditions (as at Skansen) and myth (as with the snakes on Lars Kinsarvik's furniture), since both Norway and Finland were asserting new national identities. Similarly in Japan, Mingei arose as a response to the Westernisation later decried by Tanizaki, seeking beauty that was born rather than made, part of the traditional Buddhist belief in oneness with nature. I then went to the Poynter (blue Delft tiling), Gamble (white and gold ceramics, rather like the Cafe Imperial in Prague) and Morris rooms (green olive branch wallpaper, lined with gold friezes) for lunch.
The Proms began for me this year with Purcell's The Fairy Queen. This is one of the very few concerts that has made good use of the Albert Hall; at one point flutes could be heard from the upper gallery in imitation of bird song, at another the echo of a trumpet. The following day started at Covent Garden, walking around the market and the pleasant churchyard at St James, before proceeding back to Kensington for a performance of Die Walkure. Last year, Kim Begley dominated Das Rheingold as Loge; this year Bryn Terfel's Wotan and Lisa Gasteen's impish Brunnhilde (who bore a disturbing resemblance to Joan Sims) stood out. It's interesting that where Das Rheingold portrays women as either fickle and frivolous or as helpless, Die Walkure largely performs a volte-face on this, something that is as much emphasised as off-set by the idea that love and marriage as a punishment for Brunnhilde. This is largely because, following Schopenhauer, love and passion are only ever forms of affliction for Wagner; it is difficult for him to retreat to images of the loving wife and he must replace the virgin and the whore dichotomy with the shrew and the warrior. As I left, the London lighting gave the twilight an oddly attenuated quality I've not seen elsewhere, the clouds turned orange against the darkening blue of the sky. Watching Gotterdammerung later, it occurred to me how much Wagner sees love as something emasculating. For Brunnhilde, it is the end of her existence as a warrior maiden while for Siegfried it is that which leads him to first feel fear.
I came across Nightmare in Venice later, a compilation by the much-fabled ensemble Red Priest, who can best be described as playing early and baroque music in the manner of Stravinsky and with the attitude of Siouxsie and the Banshees. Dwelling on the strange and fantastic aspects of the baroque style (perhaps rather implausibly so on occasions), they perform Vivaldi, Purcell and Corelli (with an unscripted detour through Danse Macabre at one point).
Heading into London for the next Proms, I had a chance to see the tight security on the transport system at the moment; I have to say it's both rather reassuring and extremely disturbing to see armed police walking about in the sunlight, not to mention bag searches and scans slowly becoming endemic. Since the number of people queuing for the Proms was noticeably less than usual I went for a look at the science museum and got to stroll past Babbage's difference engine and Stephenson's Rocket. Westminster Abbey reminded me of nothing so much as the John Soane Museum; filled with statues and ephemera where much of the tombs and paintings appear to have survived the restoration unscathed. It is certainly the only abbey I have seen to have glass chandeliers (complementing the fan vaulting rather well). Like Dorchester, Winchester and Lichfield it had a pair of Sergei Fedorov icons. By contrast, the interior of St Paul's was as pure as the spire of his churches, quite unlike the Catholic churches it imitated. As is often the case, the Victorian mosaics on the ceiling have the effect of making it seem more orthodox than Catholic. Towards the beginning of the Prom I was going to a violinist from the American orchestra that was performing leaned over to the front rows of prommers and announced that she wanted to say hello as she rather felt like we were all attending the same dinner party. It's certainly true that there's something very pleasantly democratic and egalitarian about the proms; the prommers that are prepared to stand get the best possible views of the performance after all (even if there are plenty of others with expensive seats). These Proms also had a baroque flavour, with Rameau's Les Paladins and Dardanus and Handel's Water Music. Rameau proved to be quite effervescent in his choice of instrumentation and harmonies, though Handel's elegant simplicity seemed more beautiful than Rameau's more Italianate approach. It was interesting to note that the difficulties for a small orchestra to fill the Albert Hall with sound must have been similar to that of making oneself heard from the Royal barge.
The next Prom began with Berg's Lulu Suite followed by Mahler's Fourth Symphony. Seemingly an odd combination this worked rather well; Berg alternates between dissonance and lyricism while Mahler's philosophy that the symphony must contain everything leads him to alternate between the comic and the plaintive. This was followed by a performance of plainchant and organ music, comprising both medieval and modern works by Arvo Part. The Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir entered from each side of the hall, men on one side, women on the other and gradually walked to the stage, one verse at a time. It was interesting to see how modern minimalism seemed to complement plainsong (and odd given that I had always tended to think of minimalism as an Eastern concept, based on Wabi-Sabi or equivalent concepts), with each syllable being held and repeated over time. The first piece was by an composer I hadn't heard of before called, Sofia Gubaidulina, called The Light of the End. This seemed to move like the tides of the sea, building up and dissipating over and over again, something stressed by the piece's heavy reliance on a rather aleatoric percussion style. Overall, the logic of the piece seemed primarily driven by religious symbolism rather than conventional musical structures. By contrast, there's very little to say about Beethoven's Ninth Symphony; this piece was the one most admired by my favourite composer, Wagner and the ode to joy does have the same exhilarating quality to it that is shared by Tannhauser's Overture or Die Walkure's Fire Music. The final prom surprised me a little; Strauss's Thus Sprach Zarathustra seemed rather mannered when placed next to The Flying Dutchman overture or Beethoven's third piano concerto.
The Magic Flute was rather more odd than I'd supposed. Like many enlightenment narratives, it takes the form of a fairy tale, only to oppose the structure of the moral fable with an enlightenment narrative based on ideas of reason. To a large extent, it's rather noticeable that the narrative tends towards misogyny, privileging reason as a male virtue and slighting emotion as a female weakness. However, it's refreshing to note that the narrative itself overturns this, noting the inability of Monostratos to control himself, the weakness of Papagueno and Pamina's success in taking the ordeal of fire and water (particularly radical given Masonic barriers to women joining the order). In this there is at least the germ of an alternative reading that would see the Queen of the Night as a prototype for Brunnhilde and Sarastro as a tyrant, and the beginning of the romantic rehabilitation of the fairy tale.
I went to Clandon Park recently, an rather sparse (if not even rather ugly) house in Sussex, the exterior only enlivened by a Dutch sunken garden parterre garden and a maori house (surrounded by tree ferns, many carved to form statues). The interior was quite striking though; I walked into a gleaming white marble hall, lined with statuary by Rysbrack, Corinthian Columns and spanning two floors. I was especially taken with the lamps attached to the wall by arms, as in Cocteau's La Belle et la Bette. More odd were some paintings of an Ostrich and Cassowary. Later rooms had wooden furniture mounted on eagles in the style of William Kent and chinoiserie dressing tables by Chippendale (designed to resemble a pagoda). One room had an exhibition dedicated to Maori tribes, including whalebones clubs and jade tiki statues. The paintings were mostly undistinguished (Kneller, Lely and so on, the occasional Reynolds), apart from a caricature of George the Third by Gillray and a painting of the House of Commons speaker by Thornhill and Hogarth. Nearby was the St Peter and St Paul church, a twelfth century building that still had a medieval wooden triptych of three saints. Further away, Hatchlands house was more promising on the exterior (a Dutch design with glass cupola on one wing, a formal garden created by Jekyll and some classical follies in the grounds) but suffered from a cramped and was overly ornate Italianate interior by Robert Adams.
Following an encounter with a Saxon beech maze, shaped in the form of a sea creature, I went to Oxford. Bails lay in fields while poppies and cornflowers grew in hedgerows. I went up the tower of the University church, looking out over at the Radcliffe Camera, the sundial in Brasenose quad and the other spires. The green of the woods could be seen in the distance. The History of Science Museum had a fascinating collection of astrolabes (often Islamic, for use in praying to Mecca) and armillary spheres as well as compasses in ivory cases. Travelling back, I went to Dorchester Abbey. A simple building set in a pleasantly leafy area by the Isis, the interior is more impressive, the white walls being interrupted with 14th century paintings and a 12th century font. The stained glass in the North window is remarkably intricate, with stone patterns in the shape of branches (the tree of Jesse, showing how Chirst was descended from King David's ancestor Jesse). The requiem chapel has an orthodox icon, presumably St Birinus, of the same type I had seen in Lichfield and Winchester. The walls here also had medieval paintings on them, which seemed to have been repainted, presumably in the Victorian period. Reading The Secret History by Procopius, I was struck by the role played by women in it; Theodora and Antonina do not appear more important to events than Livia or Cleopatra but their role is described in so much more detail.
Tanizaki's The Makioka Sisters struck me as being oddly European. Where Some Prefer Nettles attached clear symbolic connotations to Tokyo and Osaka, here they are simply places. The weather and accents differ but there is no fundamental schism. Much like Buddenbrooks, The Makioka Sisters traces the decline of a Japanese House before World War Two. One sister, Yukiko, is traditionally Japanese; too withdrawn and retiring to cope in brash, modern Japan. She is counterpointed to Taelo, the most Westernised sister; independent and often ruthless in pursuit of what she wants. Both are counterpointed to the White Russian, Katherina, whose forwardness if greater than Taeko's with a correspondingly greater success. Though both Taeko and Yukiko are counterpointed, both are ill-suited for Japan at that time and fail accordingly (rather than turning into a fable of Taeko's progressive moral degenerations).
Normally in a narrative, an action leads to consequences, with this process being repeated over and over again in any variety of combinations until it reaches a conclusion. Georges Rodenbach's Bruges-La-Morte is an odd attempt to counterfeit this in a form that is more poetic than novelistic. Instead of motivation and action as being paramount, the narrative is driven by a set of competing metaphors such as the crying swan or the martyrs depicted in the Cathedral and the city itself; hence the Sebald-like use of photographs of Bruges throughout the text; "every town is a state of mind, a mood which, after only a short stay, communicates itself." Like all metaphors, both reveal and conceal their object; "by trying to fuse the two women into one he had only lessened the resemblance...day by day the dissimilarities were increasing." The novel is infected with a Schopenhauerian sense of mysticism, with the convent the only truly still point in the city, in contrast to Hugues's willing. As such, the stillness of the city is both a sign of nirvana and of decay. Accordingly, the two layers of narrative and metaphor are not quite contingent, with Jane's ignorance of these contiguities is what kills her "not having comprehended the mystery."
Casanova's The Story of my Life is a fascinating counterpart to more mannered documents like Rousseau's Confessions. Casanova repeatedly avows a faith in christianity, but in practice only rejects converting to Islam in Constantinople on practical grounds. He is surprisingly tolerant of homosexuality (perhaps since he was a sexual dissident himself, comparing the disguised nun he is romancing to Antinous, as well as the episode with Bellino). Equally, he professes to be a great admirer of Voltaire but tells him that there is no substitute for religion as a basis for social order. The tension appears attributable to his attachment to the Hobbesian idea of the passions as the basis for human character; "the fate of every man inclined to games of chance, unless he is able to master his passions," leaving him permanently attempting to balance duty and desire and failing.
The Travels of Ibn Batuttah differ from christian travel narratives in a number of respects. The Islamic world at this point was extensive, stretching from Spain to Mughal India; for the same reason it acted as a form of iron curtain for European merchants who were forced to explore alternative routes. Where Europeans were forced to confront other cultures, Batuttah's travels largely remain within the Islamic world. Of course, this still allows him to come into contact with the Jewish and Christ ain peoples within it, but his attitudes towards it seem somewhat ambivalent. he records the various restrictions placed on non-Muslim populaces (restrictions on trade, specific forms of taxation) and notes how unwillingly such humiliations were suffered. Equally, he notes that Muslim travellers to a Christian Monastery were generously received treating Muslims honourably and exacting no tolls, but approvingly records the destruction of a Greek Church; "I shall be the first to be stricken with madness in the service of god... and god gave the lie to the assertion of the Greeks." This in spite of his admiration of the Church of Sophia in Constantinople. For Battutah other cultures are always infidels; a Jew is denounced for sitting closely to Koranic readers, Hindus and Chinese (and indeed Rafidis) are treated in the same way. He is fascinated by Hindu Sadhus but makes no comparison between their creed and Islam in the way Polo does with Christianity. He is amazed by Chinese civilisation, its pottery and paper money but responds to it by saying "China, for all its magnificence, did not please me. I was depressed by prevalence of infidelity and whenever I left my lodging I saw many offensive things." As with any travel narrative of that period, it is not without its diverting idiosyncrasies; dog-faced men, flying leeches and monkeys with kings. Although the same applies to The Travels of Sir John Mandeville it shows a different worldview. Although much of it is taken up with exhortations for christendom to regain its piety in order to reconquer the holy land, it nonetheless treats other faiths (though showing little lack of awareness that the relative tolerance extended by the Islamic world to Jews and christians would not have been found within Europe) as being worthy of reflection; "it seemed to me a great cause for shame that the Saracens, who have neither a correct faith nor a perfect law, should in this way reprove us for our failings, keeping their false law better than we that of Jesus Christ." The same applies when Mandeville witnesses sutee; "they suffer so much pain and mortification of their bodies for love of that idol that hardly would any christian man suffer the half." Equally, Mandeville's reaction to the lands he describes is torn between wonderment and disgust at their decadence.
Reading Grimm's Fairy Tales, I found myself a little taken aback by a few things. Firstly, that although a number of the tales were a simply moral fable of virtue rewarded and malice punished (typically rather horribly) many of them are simply odes to raw will, rewarding poor protagonists with wealth irrespective of their crimes. Perhaps, this loss of clear patterning was what Gabriel Josipovici meant when he said that the tales "were transformed from tales told by speakers who were deeply convinced that they were true (whatever meaning one assigns to the term) into tales told by writers (Wilhelm Grimm, in effect)." Certainly, the attempt to forge a German nation out of independent states and to reject French conceptions of civilisation after Napoleon in favour of folk art and a Volksgeist. Germany was after all then a cluster of many rural kingdoms and tiny city-states. They possessed forty universities, no modern factories or far-flung colonies, but were united by a language and growing literature. Germany existed as an idea that hoped to become a nation so her poets and philosophers thought societies were shaped and driven by ideas - Christian, feudal, imperial and democratic ideas. Secondly, I hadn't expected to find a story like The Blue Lamp, featuring contrivances like jinis. Listening outside just now, I realised that the familiar sound of pigeons cooing was mingled with the stranger cries of seagulls. The other thing that struck me was how the tale of the princess kissing a frog does invert the normal gender roles of the prince rescuing the princess; more striking was The Nixie in the Pond where the wife must rescue her husband from a water-nymph.
Terry Gilliam's The Brothers Grimm, like The Village, is one of those films that is very difficult to assess in neutral and objective terms, leaving only the messy uncertainty of value judgements. It draws upon films like Sleepy Hollow in showing the reason of the enlightenment giving way to magic (albeit with slightly firmer historical ground; set in the time of the Napoleonic occupation of Germany, Kultur was indeed being advanced against le mission civilatrice).
The problem tends to be that Gilliam's imagination is fundamentally baroque rather than gothic (unlike Jordan's The Company of Wolves), and the number of comic grotesques as characters (even the two brothers come out like characters from Dickens) combined with flourishes like one of the children being turned into a ginger breadman sit rather uneasily with the imagery of the wolf filled forest coming to life or the ruined tower surrounded by tombs. One of the most striking scenes in the film shows a French general addressing a room full of dinner guests, only for the angle to shift and reveal that there are only a handful of guests with the rest being reflections in mirrors. Just as the evil queen is defeated by smashing the mirror containing her reflection the entire film has the sense that these things are but a playful conceit and will vanish like the illusions they are. Partly this is also due to the way the film insists upon the fictive status of what is happening; Briar Rose, Hansel and Gretel, Snow White, Rapunzel and Little Redcape are all clear sources as are a range of other works like Poe's Masque of the Red Death and Anderson's The Snow Queen.
I also went to see the latest film of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, based on the Dahl book I always used to love as a child. Roald Dahl's story can be best described as a sadistic fable; a story whose moral content is rather offset by the vicious glee with which cruel punishments are meted out to malefactors. Certainly, the moral content is rather restricted if we think of stories like his Tales of the Unexpected, where a wife kills her husband with a frozen leg of lamb and then disposes of the evidence by cooking it for the investigating police officers. Mostly, his stories are revenge fantasies, where suffering children are set free as the adults that oppressed them suffer especially vicious ends. Children always need the dark materials of fairy tales as a means of displacing feelings of anger, resentment, and powerlessness. Willy Wonka is more unusual in that it is the children that are mostly made to suffer for their crimes. I rather liked the introduction of a staple for Tim Burton films, the idea of a troubled hero haunted by memories of his father (see also Batman and Sleepy Hollow); the notion of a young Willy Wonka defying his father and naughtily eating sweets goes a long way to subduing the somewhat puritanical moralism on display elsewhere (the other children visiting the factory do rather resemble a list of the seven deadly sins). Returning home this evening, the clouds were particularly dark shades of grey and blue but the sun was still shying brightly and the stone of the nearby Polish church was glowing in the light against the blackening sky.
posted by Richard 7:03 AM
Monday, July 4, 2005
The day started with a visit to the small Guildhall art gallery, a modern building with walls cut from white stone and bizarre hexagonal doors. The gallery undercroft is the interesting part, containing a pre-raphaelite collection, mostly of classical subjects such as Tadema's The Pyrrhic Dance, Moore's Pomegranates (though the dwelling on a handful of colours were more reminiscent of Whistler) and Collier's Clytemnestra alongside more traditional pre-raphaelite works by Rossetti and Leighton as well as Constable's painting of Salisbury Cathedral and two Tissots. Some of the more obscure works, like Webb's painting of Mont St Michel were also surprisingly impressive. The paintings of London elsewhere in the museum were less interesting; mostly views of London painted from Greenwich when it was outside London altogether, showing the church spires and the monument unimpeded by other buildings, or of the demolition of the old London bridge and construction of the new. There was an odd symmetry with the second world war paintings, showing St Paul's towering over London once more as everything around it was destroyed. One especially vivid painting here was a painting by Charles Pears, showing a black Tower Bridge against a blood-red sky during an air-raid.
The basement of the gallery housed the ruins of a Roman amphitheatre, while after leaving I walked around an area that is home to a number of Wren and Hawksmoor's churches (St Mary-Le-Bow and St Margaret Lothbury) alongside the ruins of a Mithraeum and the site of London's Jewish ghetto. It's the type of vision that has so moved Peter Ackroyd, particularly in an area where the modern roads and buildings still trace the outlines of a much more ancient city. Leadenhall market is surprisingly beautiful for the city (a commerical cathedral built out of industrial gothic); more like Convent Garden than Smithfield. I still wonder what London would have been like if Wren or Soane had shaped the city as Cerda and Hausmann shaped theirs. For me, London is summed up by the Monument; a great testament to what Wren might have achieved, currently trapped, surrounded and dwarfed by the ugliest buildings London's financial district has to offer. I then crossed the Thames to Southwark Cathedral. After the grey spires north of the river, the honey coloured stone with its bleached white interior was a welcome relief. The church contains a tabernacle designed by Pugin alongside Tudor and medieval monuments (a particularly striking one for John Gower) that perfectly match Pugin's aesthetics.
Passing by the Golden Hinde I arrived at the Tate for the Frida Kahlo expiation. It was easy to see why Breton had liked Kahlo so much; where Dali remained christian her own brand of surrealism was both Freudian and Marxist. Ex-voto conventions are used to reflect this, typically with a total absence of subtlety (as well as the peculiar trait of being one's own muse, featuring herself in picture after picture). The mythology and symbolism of artists like Blake or even Dali cannot be reduced quite so easily to didacticism; conversely the fusion of Aztec, Christian and Eastern symbols is quite extraordinary. Even so, I still tended to think her most accomplished works were the portraits.
I've wondered in the past if the Globe theatre was not a rather distracting venue, that one went for the pageantry and the building as much as the performance, but of course all performances have some form of vision stamped on them and the Globe hardly seems any different in this respect to one where the sets and costumes of any other period have been imposed by a director. I was always struck by Camille Paglia's observation that she was always struck by the hostility of Shakespeare's prose, the bramble-like thickness of metaphor and simile, its resistance to interpretation. On the one hand, The Winter's Tale is all pattern and symmetry, cycles of death and birth being used to subdue chaos into order. On the other, the play leaves so much unsubdued; mostly obviously, the political elements of Leontes' unjust tyranny being brought low by a subject and that a woman, the redemption of the court through pastoral and the peculiar lacunae throughout the play; the suddenness of the king's jealousy, the death of Antigonus (ambushed by guerilla bears in this case) and the resurrection of Hermione. The performances were quite excellent, with an especially brilliant Prospero-like Paulina. The music for the performance was also rather fine, played on a range of period instruments from pipes to hurdy-gurdys. The seats were just to the side of the stage, which did give an excellent vantage point on the performance. As I left, the dark grey-blue clouds that had overcast the sky all day were counterpointed by the lights tinting the dome of St Paul's with the slightest blush of pink.
Travelling to Birmingham Botanical Gardens near Bournville, I was rather pleasantly surprised by how excellent the gardens are; comparable to gardens in some European capitals. The gardens included a conservatory with gardens with Mediterranean, sub-tropical and tropical houses (some interesting notes; figs are used to make a form of coffee in Austria and Bavaria, Dragon's blood was used as resin for violins). The gardens also had an aviary, holding Quaker parrots, tragedian pheasants and zebra finches. Peacocks stalked the grounds, with one peahen found hiding quietly beneath the shrubs in the historical gardens. These covered Tudor gardens (a knot garden with quince and catnip), Medieval gardens with wormwood and a Roman garden. A Japanese garden had a beautiful set of blue slates arranged to imitate a stream, alongside a bonsai collection. Kept behind bars in the interests of public safety, the trees ranged from Chinese juniper to English Elm. Elsewhere the grounds had a pinetum, woods (filled with tree ferns), rhododendron walks and a set of gardens based on paintings. The gardens based on Blake's Jacob's Ladder and Degas' Dancers were particularly noteworthy.
Nazism and romanticism are often considered as related concepts in their rejection of bourgeois society in favour of the heroic self and idealised visions of the past. In some cases, such as Lawrence and Nietzsche, notions of volk and imperialism were largely repugnant to them, effacing some of the more authoritarian elements of their work. In others such, as Wagner, Pound and Heidegger, it is considerably more difficult to effect any rehabilitation. One such case is the Norwegian writer Knut Hamsun a supporter of the Quisling government who openly wrote in support of Hitler. For instance, in Pan Hamsun contrasts the authentic self of his soldier protagonist, who lives alone in the woods with his dog as his sole companion, to the bourgeois Edvarda, who lives in society and marries a Swedish count.
Central to this joining of Nazism and romanticism was the distinction of gemeinschaft and geschellschaft, with Hamsun's novels typically depicting outcasts from a hypocritical bourgeois society; "I loathe your whole taxpayer's existence... I feel indignation rising within me like a rushing mighty win of the Holy Spirit." Heidegger sought from Nazism "a spiritual renewal of life in its entirety... Only a spiritual world gives the people the assurance of greatness.. and the spiritual world of a people...is the power that most deeply preserves the people's strengths, which are tied to earth and blood." Similarly, Nagel "couldn't understand what human beings would gain by having life stripped of all symbols, of all poetry," often speaking in parables, the fairy tales of a pagan christ. Influenced by Nietzsche, Hamsun's characters do not believe in god but continue to believe in a religious life, the same ambivalent relationship to religion that Nazism had.
But equally, his characters are deluded fantasists, inventors of falsehoods and contradictions. As one character says of Nagel in Mysteries; "I cannot figure out why you are turning yourself inside out for me." He himself speaks of his sudden jumps of thought, being a thinker who has never learned to think; "I admit I am a living contradiction." The vial of prussic acid he carries and his killing of a dog point to a dark aspect to his fantasies, parodying and mocking christ in the same way Nietzsche did. The element of romantic heroism is absent. Perhaps rather predictably, Hamsun's novels cannot easily be diminished to a set of unambiguous propositions. It seems flawed to analyse Hamsun's works for traces of Nazism when it was romantic culture, of which Hamsun was only one example, that acted to create Nazism. If the enlightenment is not viewed as being irredeemably tainted through its association with communism, it seems unfair not to grant romanticism the same benefit of the doubt. In practice, romanticism often acted as a necessary corrective to the extremes of other ideologies, a fact that should efface its own extremes a little.
Captain Cook's Voyages surprised me somewhat. Where nineteenth century explorers saw the world in terms of race and, increasingly, eugenics, eighteenth century notions of racial superiority revolved more closely around manners and morals, often in unusual ways. For example, cook notes that "the inhabitants of New Zealand are as modest and reserved in their behaviour as the most polite notions in Europe," comparing their tattoos with filigree work and admiring their crafts. As with almost any period of exploration attitudes bifurcate around a Hobbesian notion of savagery unredeemed by civilisation; "few consider what a savage man is in a natural state, and even after he is in some degree civilised" (noting that the New Zealanders live in a perpetual fear of being slaughtered by one another) and the notion of noble savagery; "so little does refinement or luxury promote happiness!" The most common complaint is of theft by the natives, but this equally applies to the description of the Dutch Governor of Batavia, depicted as a malevolent slum in comparison to the other islands Cook visits. Cook even complains of Dutch governance being oppressive when he frankly admits the intent to "deprive (them of their) kingdom and their liberties." The contradictions in the notion of liberal imperialism are far from new.Labels: England, History, Literature, London
posted by Richard 7:01 AM
Monday, January 3, 2005
The Lady Lever art gallery is a particularly idiosyncratic collection covering pre-raphaelite painting, Roman sculpture, Wedgewood pottery, Chinese porcelain and assorted design pieces. The collection dwells on the fantastic and exotic, reflecting its role in advertising Sunlight soap (after all, it is difficult to think of an equivalent collection that did not emerge from an aristocratic background); on the whole, I found it difficult to think any worse of it for this. Most of the pre-raphaelite painting is quite well known (Rossetti's The Blessed Damozel, Alma-Tadema's The Tepidarium, Holman Hunt's The Scapegoat, Millais's Sir Isumbras at the Ford,) but there some good pieces that are less well known (Leighton's The Daphnepohoria, Madox Brown's Cromwell on his Farm), as well as some interesting pieces by more obscure Victorian painters (Etty's Prometheus). Some of the sculpture was also quite exceptional, such as Onslow Ford's Snowdrift. The Wedgewood collection was surprisingly interesting, containing a number of Wedgewood's experiments beyond the more familiar jasperware (as with the Portland and Borghese vases), to imitate Egyptian designs and Greek red figure ceramics with encaustic black basalt. The authentic classical collection covers Attic ceramics (including a black figure Psykter showing a Dionysiac revel) and Roman sculpture (including a statue of Antinous and busts of various emperors, especially dwelling on Hadrian for some unknown reason). The Chinese collection ranged from Kangxi period (including blue and white prunus blossom jars to famille noire vases) to Qing dynasty jade vases and Ming dynasty cloisonne enamel.
The surrounding village of Port Sunlight itself is a model village designed to house Lord Lever's factory workers. Though a benevolent project, its rather hard not to feel a little uncomfortable in the place, which seems too geometrical, too designed and too neat. The homogeneity is unsetting and unreal, emphasised by the obsolescence of its industrial feudalism. Though the buildings were designed by thirty different architects the arts & crafts style is consistent throughout (though it does jar awkwardly with the austere Lutyens-style classicism of the gallery and war memorial) with the doors still being painted the same colour on each street. As a rural idyll it is decidedly hyperreal.
The collection of Futurist art at the Estorick collection is housed in an unprepossessing building, where the spire of the Union Chapel can be seen from behind the metal sculptures and plants in the back garden. The collection is largely concerned with changing ideas of time and space In EM Forster's Howard's End Helen Schlegel finds the speed of travelling in a car disorientating, causing a loss of a sense of space (Forster describes how the landscape appears to congeal as the car gets up to speed). The advent of high-speed transportation radically changed perceptions of both of these, with much of futurism seeking to create a more dynamic concept of art that recognise this, as with Carra's Hand of the Violinist where multiple hands can be seen simultaneously; "Time and Space died yesterday," as Marinetti put it. In the case of flight (the current exhibition dwells on aeropainting), this was combined with an art-deco machine-aesthetic, again as with Marinetti's elevation of the motor car as art above the Victory of Samothrace.
The current Aeropainting exhibition ranges from Crali's vertiginous Nose Diving on the City with its jagged edges to the more organic lines of Tato's paintings. One disturbing suggestion is the linkage of these paintings with Guernica and the Blitzkrieg against East Europe, respectively. Certainly, in some cases propaganda is clearly apparent, with one painting showing the planes as christian crosses. Although futurism was closely linked with fascism (not least in its glorification of war and a military aesthetic) fascism itself diverged into forms of expression better suited to an establishment (becoming more Catholic and neo-classical) and it seems somewhat harsh to read most of these paintings in such terms. The aesthetic behind them might well be disturbingly militaristic, but on the whole, there is little that is directly political about them. With all that said, it does come as a relief to come across Modigliani's Dr Francois Brabander.
The Royal Academy's Turks exhibition covers successive imperial states and nomadic Turkic tribes that went to the form the basis of the Ottoman Empire and modern Turkey; beginning with the Central-Asian Uighur tribes, Iranian Seljuks, Mongolian Timurids through to the creation of the Ottoman dynasty itself. This combination of cultural and religious influences from an area that represented the central axis of the silk road, produced a varied and rich number of decorative arts. In the Uighur period, Chinese silk painting was emulated, the Seljuks produced extraordinarily intricate woodwork (wooden doors and Koran stands arranged in arabesque patterns) and metalwork (especially elaborate lamps and mirrors where the back is decorated in cursive or geometrical Kufic scripts) and textiles (carpets showing stylised birds and dragons; the latter being endemic in Ottoman art, from candleholders and doorknockers to Chinese-style dragon paintings), while in the Timurid period the illuminated manuscripts and calligraphy of Herat and Samarkand far outstripped those of medieval Europe.
This engagement with the East was to continue, as with the adoption of Mamelak Egyptian Koran caskets and the imitation of Ming porcelain to produce Iznik pottery with its serrated leaves and lotus blossoms. Ottoman attempts to 'improve' Ming porcelain by adding gold and jewels go a considerably long way to reassuring all concerned that the Ottoman Empire did indeed deserve its reputation for tastelessness. However, by this point Ottoman Turkey began to engage with the West as much as the East. Although all of the other works in the exhibition have been decorative arts, the Ottoman section begins with Bellini's portrait of Sultan Mehmed the Second. By this point, the European use of oils and shading to achieve perspective had already outclassed Islamic rivals; there is something odd about comparing Bellini's utterly European portraits with Ottoman attempts to produce the same effect in traditional stylised poses (the holding of flowers while sitting cross-legged). It's also somewhat incongruous that this cultural engagement went hand in hand with the point where the Ottoman Empire began to engage with Europe in a more direct fashion; through the invasion of Constantinople and much of the East of Europe. However, as with the difference between Venetian and Ottoman painting, the Empire was already being left behind as Western Europe explored trade routes that did not rely on the silk road.
Amongst the exhibition's curiosities are a medieval computer; a geomantic engine where soil proceeded through a set of what we would call logic gates to produce the desired divination. Similarly, if a dice was rolled a book of divinations could be used to look up precisely what this portended (rather like a Tibetan prayer wheel, I suppose). Any observation that a culture's most bizarre relics can usually be expected from its religions can probably be taken as read.
Ogier Ghislan of Busbecq was Habsburg ambassador to the Ottoman Empire in the sixteenth century, a period when the Ottomans controlled most of Eastern Europe and the Middle East. With the Ottomans closely allied to the French and constantly making incursions into Hapsburg territory, Busbecq was sent to negotiate improved terms. However, progress was slow and uncertain, with much of his Turkish Letters consists of his observations on matters antiquarian, numismatic and botanical (Busbecq appears to have introduced Tulip bulbs into Europe; though the Turkish taste in such flowers bore little resemblance to the modern version).
His attitudes towards the Ottomans are rather schizophrenic, fearing its order, discipline and military supremacy while describing it as backward and primitive (with surprisingly little sense of the apparent contradiction). On the one hand, the Turks had a highly disciplined standing army; "on their side, the resources of a mighty empire, strength unimpaired, experience and practice and fighting, a veteran soldiery, habituation to victory, endurance of toil, unity, order, discipline.. on our side is public poverty, private luxury, impaired strength, broken spirit, lack of endurance and training; the soldiers are insubordinate, the officers avaricious, there is contempt for discipline, licence, recklessness, drunkenness and debauchery are rife." It seems a somewhat odd judgement; in practice most of the wars that were to come resulted in stalemate (excepting the seizure of Cyprus), though it would be another hundred years before the Ottoman decline would begin. To take the example, of technology, Busbecq himself cites the Ottoman refusal to adopt clocks (as it would undermine the authority of the muezzin), the printing press and the destruction of Ottoman forces by a smaller European force armed with rifles. Equally, Busbecq portrays Ottoman society as meritocratic rather than hereditary; something of a distortion from someone whose illegitimacy had left him shut out from the upper echelons of the Hapsburg aristocracy.
Some counterbalance can be found in Busbecq's depiction of the Turks as backward barbarians. Though the ruins of Christian Constantinople do provoke an outburst against the Infidel from him, his outlook is essentially rationalistic rather than religious, characterising the Turks as superstitious and easily swayed by auguries and omens (though he doesn't seem entirely immune from such matters himself). He ascribes to the Turks a form of fatalism attributable to their religion; "they are persuaded that the time and manner of each man's death is inscribed by god on his forehead; if therefore he is destined to die, it is useless for him to try to avert his fate," citing a sanguine approach to containing the plague (the number of fatalities a day shocking Busbecq) as an example. On the other hand, when a Turkish official expresses the view that all men of piety are likely to be rewarded with salvation, Busbecq does not hesitate to condemn the view as blasphemous (perhaps somewhat oddly; the idea is present in Dante and can hardly have been an entirely alien concept); though he condemns Turkish oppression of the Greek and Hungarian peoples, the Ottomans still appear to have been more tolerant than christendom would have been.
Shugborough's gardens and estates are pleasant enough for a variety of reasons, most obviously the follies dotted throughout its grounds; a temple of the winds, a victory gate, a Chinese pagoda and a romantic ruin. But I was more interested in the Shepherd's Monument, a structure that depicts a Poussin painting with an encoded inscription beneath it; interpretations of its meaning relate to heretical sects that denied christ's divinity, the Templars and the grail and to Latin love poetry. Elsewhere, Middleton Hall, is an odd building surrounded by a moat and trees on two of its sides and gardens on the other two. The buildings are a hodgepodge ranging from Tudor to Georgian. I saw it covered with snow and with red squirrels playing on its front lawn. More forlorn is Bradgate Hall, the ruin of a Tudor palace now surrounded by open parkland with only a hilltop folly for company. Food cooked: Partridges and grapes, Chicken with black fruit stuffing, Persian duck with pomegranates, Moretum, Chicken and bacon in Tokay, Hungarian chicken in wine, Catalan Paella del Mar, Elizabethan chicken with sack mead, thai chicken legs, chicken Baltic, Hungarian cherry soup, prawn and crayfish laksa, Swedish fish and potato casserole, Moroccan pigeon pie, German pork and sausage casserole, white chocolate cheesecake with blueberries, Catalan chicken with figs, cherry and pomegranate khoresh, milanese risotto, chicken biryani, Singapore noodles, Corsican stew, baklava, Hungarian lamb with pickle sauce, chicken foo yung, chicken satay, Himmel und Erde, chicken tikka masala, Italian vinegar poached chicken with gnocchi.
Down south, I spent the day in Oxford, first climbing both St Michael's & Carfax Towers and gazing out over Oxford's rooftops and weather vanes (rather reminded me all of the viewing platforms from Prague's towers, particularly with the medieval clock on Carfax Tower; not unlike Prague's Horologe) and then going to the University and Pitt Rivers Museums. I love the iron forest canopy that makes up the University Museum, especially with various whalebone jaws propped against the pillars. The effect of walking into the main hall with its glass ceiling is more like one of Kew's palm houses than the London Natural History Museum. I was especially struck by the faked dragon embryo; as it suggested such a creature would be quite difficult to categorise (opposable thumbs more typical of mammals, and a combination of wings and limbs more typical of insects). Equally, I love the clutter of the Pitt Rivers and the totem pole that dominates the interior of the hall. Finally, I went walking amidst the emerging snowdrops and crocuses from the parks. The idea of a genetic garden to plant hybridised species alongside their forebears is a rather interesting one; it'll be worth coming back when more of the plants are in full leaf.
The QI bookshop in Oxford is based upon the excellent idea that the books are arranged by abstract themes rather than the usual classification by genre. As such, the themes included 'Ice,' 'Sea,' 'Bohemia' and 'Watching.' Since the usual divisions between specialisms were absent you found that a heading like 'The Big Picture' would include Milton's Paradise Lost, Hofstadter's Godel, Escher, Bach and Hesse's The Glass Bead Game. I thought these serendipitous connections between works that would otherwise have been on completely different shelves was rather engaging; perhaps the Radcliffe Camera should be re-ordered.
Recently, the sun was shining and the sky was blue, while a sudden snow shower drifted down to the ground. With odd meteorology like this, I wonder why people find the English obsession with the weather to be so unusual. I'm always struck by how snow makes the familiar unfamiliar, making every leaf stand out, making one's own footprints tangible. The presence of newly opened daffodils and crocuses only accentuated this even more. A watery and pale sun struggled to make its presence felt
in a clouded sky. One morning I found myself face to face with a fox (presumably in search of food amidst the cold). I'd never been this close to one before, and though it wasn't an especially dramatic encounter (it simply stood still, meeting my stare, until the cold persuaded me to go inside) it was wonderful to see such an impressive creature.
Reading The Motorcycle Diaries I had much the same reaction as I had to the film. Che's mestizo nationalism has racism at its centre; "Anglo-Saxon immigrants in Chile do not mix, so preserving the purity of the indigenous race... the pure expression of the most powerful indigenous race in the Americas still clean of contact with a conquering civilisation... the African race who have maintained their racial purity." However, Che is not consistent about this - he heaps praise on the Spanish general Validivia for his will to total authority, also striking an unpleasantly fascist tone.
Baudelaire's On Wine and Hashish makes an excellent reading of DeQuincey's Confessions of an English Opium-Eater. Where DeQuincey is concerned with a Kantian dialectic between reason and emotion, the ability of the mind to intuit the infinite rather than itself. By contrast, Baudelaire's concerns are more firmly materialistic and indeed visceral, as Benjamin put it "Baudelaire placed the shock of experience at the very centre of his artistic work" For much of the time, Baudelaire's language is as mystical or transcendentalist as that of DeQuincey or James; "the proportions of time and being are distorted by the innumerable multitude and intensity of sensations and ideas... you have cast your personality to the four winds of heaven." However, in many respects, his concerns are not with ethics or with mystical experience but with something more utilitarian; the transformation of authentic experience into a commodity; "what indeed is the point of working, ploughing writing, producing anything at all, when you can paradise at a stroke?.. enthusiasm and will-power are sufficient to raise him to supernatural existence... incapable of work, action or energy." As such, DeQuincey was concerned about solipsism, truth is not of concern to Baudelaire. He is instead concerned that if hashish simply opens up inner experiences then it represents a failure of will to be unable to access them without the use of artificial means; "a magic mirror in which man is invited to see himself.. the abyss by which he may admire his face like Narcissus... hashish reveals to the individual nothing but the individual himself." Benjamin suggested that Baudelaire was concerned with the commoditisation of culture and certainly such metaphors as "selling himself wholesale" recur. Marx supplants Kant.
I've described Orhan Pamuk as an existentialist mystic before and Black Book would add 'semiotician' to that list. Reality in the novel emerges as a form of text, where the link between signifier and signified is the key to a form of transcendental reality; "the world was not a place that yielded its secrets right-off, that it swarmed with secrets, and that in order to comprehend the secrets it was necessary to comprehend the mystery of letters," to see clues in things like in a detective novel. But equally Galip "despised the way he couldn't live without narratives...there was no room in this world for signs, clues, secrets and mysteries." Interpretation becomes a subjective affair; "he might get lost between these interpretations." Between solipsism and mysticism pamuk seeks a via media "realms unavailable to the 'objective and subjective styles' is the third voice: the dark persona, the dark style!" Reality becomes a narrative the characters can rewrite and reinvent, but only through a glass darkly. The novel accordingly teems with the imagery of darkness, literal and figurative in place of the white of Snow; "these dark, black, pitch-black pages." Peering through the darkness is far from easy, as with the Bektasi alchemists unaware their acolytes were Marxist-Leninists; "whichever realm was successful in seeing the world as an equivocal, mysterious place that swarmed with secrets got the better of the other."
In part, intertextuality counts as a means of rewriting reality; "he was being drawn into a world that was unintentionally transformed into a fairytale... the man in the street began to lose his authenticity because of these damn moves that came in canisters from the West." Cultural identity, is driven into the darkness like the ships at the bottom of the Bosphorus or the puppetmaker's figures in the tunnels. However, as with the narrative of the westernised Sultan, there is no identity without emulation; "we are also affected by those who have a distinctive personality and command our respect because we unconsciously begin emulating them.. I was unable to be myself," just as much as Galip becomes Jelal or the journalist becomes Proust (and the same reason Galip will not spend time in the Anglicised world of Ruya's detective novels); "No-one can ever be himself in this land!.. I am someone else therefore I am."
Peter Ackroyd's biography of London reminded me of an argument I had heard that histories dedicated to cross-period thematic approaches were eroding more scholarly works limited by their period. Certainly, Ackroyd approaches London as if it were a text to be interpreted, using literary criticism as much as non-fictional historical sources. He discusses London as a city dominated by symbols and theatricality, where the division between such things and the real is not clear (I was especially struck by his citing an example of Conan Doyle's The Man with the Twisted Lip being used as the basis for a begging career by one middle-class professional). In particular, much of the biography recalls Ackroyd's discussion of Blake and in particular Blake's dictum that without contraries there can be no progression. Accordingly, a chapter on noise is followed by a chapter on silence and Ackroyd alternately condemns London (for its imprisonment and cruelty towards its inhabitants, its ugliness and rapacity) and celebrates it (for its self-renewal, energy and enterprise).
Ackroyd's novel Hawksmoor, like Winterson's Lighhousekeeping dwells on the same ideas of permanency within mutability, but perhaps weights the balance in favour of the former. On the one hand, there is the architect Dyer's mystical demonism and on the other, Hawksmoor, a detective that forms Dyer's modern counterpart. People, places and events recur between the two time periods. The two characters gain a perverse communion, both alienated from their selves through various means (gazing into convex mirrors, insanity, drunkenness and sex). Hawksmoor notes that the Thames was "perpetually turning and spinning: it was going in no certain direction." He imagines tracing a murder "backwards, running the time slowly in the opposite direction (but did it have a direction?)." He might then "have to invent a past from the evidence available," which would make the future an invention too. Toward the end: "the future became so clear that it was if he were remembering it, remembering it in place of the past which he could no longer describe. But there was in any case no future and no past, only the unspeakable misery of his own self.' As such, the novel's two narratives proceed in parallel lines like trains on opposite tracks, mirroring each other but never converging. Ackroyd's conception of time is one founded on eternity and permanence; it does not admit of resolution or conclusion (a perhaps somewhat awkward conception, given the pulp fiction nature of the plot. For example, at one point a lunatic in Bedlam tells Dyer that Hawksmoor will be his undoing, a promise that remains unfulfilled).
DH Lawrence's Sketches of Etruscan Places is a later text in his 'savage pilgrimage' series of travel narratives, it is built on a series of dichotomies between Ancient and Modern, Roman and Etruscan. Accordingly, it is a good example of the progress paradox where one of the more marked features of civilisation and its discontents is an avowed preference for more primitive modes of society. To Lawrence, the Etruscans represented a more natural existence that was extinguished by Rome, something he sees continuing throughout history and exemplified by the distaste with which he responds to Italian fascism (given that he is often accused of fascist tendencies in his own thought, it is interesting to see how he reacts to it its manifestation). Lawrence's response to the Etruscans is essentially one of pagan mysticism; "In my tissue I am weary of personality.. all the pearly accretion of personality in mankind - what a disease it has become. Stubborn pagan indifference and sufficiency in the self; where can one find it?" Though Lawrence dwells on the balance of male and female sexual symbolism in Etruscan art he suggests a modern inequity; "if a navvy working in the street takes off his shirt to work with a free, naked torso, a policeman rushes to him."
Lawrence's Sea and Sardinia presents a less clearcut case and rather reminded me of an especially acerbic observation Angela Carter made of Women in Love; that all the men were depicted in close physical detail ("hard cheek, and hard dangerous thighs... to see these limbs in close knee breeches, so definite, so manly") while all the women were depicted as little more than walking piles of clothing (with detailed descriptions of the pleating and colouring of female peasant dress). Later, Lawrence approvingly describes how the young men all masquerade as women during the carnival and describes their two male drivers as being like man and wife, Jane Eyre and Rochester; "so terribly physical all over one another. They pour themselves one over the other like butter on parsnips. They catch each other under the chin, with a tender caress of the hand."
In Orlando Figes's Natasha's Dance he speaks of Russian literature as being a fusion of Europeanised upper-class culture and the folk traditions of the peasantry. Though Turgenev is always cited as a zapadnik rather than a slavophile Sketches From a Hunter's Album shows this quite clearly, in spite of the political mythology concerning the emancipation of the serfs that surrounds it. The sketches certainly do depict the oppression of the peasantry ("They work for him like they were in bondage to him.. bled them white he has"), with the aristocracy either being seen as rapacious, indifferent or ineffectual, with the results being similar in each case (with the rather totalitarian 'Peter the Great of his own village' in The Reformer and the Russian German being a case in point). How ever, the peasantry are instead often transmuted into mystical figures ("a strange and wonderful man he is, truly a holy man" or with the suffering and death of Lukeria in Living Relic). The suffering of the serfs is simply part of this transmutation; "What an astonishing thing is the death of a Russian peasant!... he dies as if he is performing a ritual act." The oppression of the serfs is not necessarily much attributed to the social order as to the moral corruption of the aristocracy (most starkly in Meeting where the jaded valet can only speak of the wonders of St Petersburg to the peasant girl he is abandoning or the Dasha mentioned in Death). For example, in Tatyana Borisovna and Her Nephew, the eponymous nephew is corrupted by his time in the city, but the narrative equally shows contempt for Russian parochialism against European internationalism.
Gaskell's The Life of Charlotte Bronte records some of the more interesting ambiguities in the Bronte attitudes towards religion. Anne had inclined towards a heterodox notion of universalism, wherein suffering for one's sins would lead all towards salvation (an idea with an obvious resonance within both Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre; though not Villette which ended in tragedy in spite of Charlotte's proscriptions against such melancholia). Charlotte's attitudes do indeed appear ambivalent (though she does repeatedly denounce "ghastly Calvinistic doctrines" of predestination; if christian perfection is necessary for salvation she admits she will never be saved; however, her attitude to existence if one of submission to what is predetermined). Gaskell records that "She had a larger religious toleration than a person would have who had never questioned, and the manner of recommending religion was always that of offering comfort, not fiercely enforcing a duty." Elsewhere, she speaks of how "it is more in accordance with the Gospel to preach unity among the christians than to inculcate mutual intolerance and hatred." She is struck by one of Mr Heger's exercises in portraying a subject from differing perspectives, using Cromwell as an example. However, she is revolted by Catholicism, describing her reaction as to that of the false Duessa.Labels: Art, England, Food, History, Literature, London, Oxford, Weather
posted by Richard 6:53 AM
Friday, July 16, 2004
There can be something rather disturbing about visited restored buildings. The act of restoring an old building frequently does so by destroying layer after layer of history to reveal the desired outcome, just as Schliemann did with all of the cities he found at Hissarlik until he was satisfied he had found the Troy he wanted, or as Evans did at Knossos. In other words, it can be an extremely destructive and arbitrary process. Equally, there is something rather awkward about the hyper-real recreations of buildings, which seems as lacking in authenticity as the faked ruins favoured in the eighteenth century. Not to mention that the very idea of conservation has the unwelcome tinge of conservatism to it, which sits uncomfortably for someone ill at ease with the idea of tradition for tradition's sake. After all, most of the buildings prized as part of our heritage were built by either discarding the styles of the past or through the more literal means of destroying the buildings of the past.
So, I wanted to visit an unrestored building instead, of which there can be few better examples than the Midland Grand Hotel, now known as St Pancras Chambers. If there was ever a case study in architectural hubris it was this; built in luxuriant gothic style (it was not unknown for visitors to mistake it for a cathedral and ask when services began), its lack of either central heating or bathrooms ensured its downfall; perhaps rather incongruously so, since its 'ascending rooms' were state of the art at the time. Entering inside, elaborate columns coated in gold leaf sit alongside walls where the paint has flaked away and floors where the boards have rotted away. Pre-raphaelite murals of Chaucerian scenes and wyvern gargoyles rest in the darkness. In spite of my above comments it's difficult not to feel disconsolate at the Fifties beige or Edwardian burgundy paint covering the gold and crimson Victorian wall patterns. This is particularly so when one ascends the best preserved part of the building; the grand staircase. This imposing lined with gothic arches, through which light seeps into the gloom, leads up to a ceiling vaulted around a central boss, and incongruously painted with a blue sky and gold stars. Even in the dark the blazing colours shine out.
I'd certainly hate to think that such a building would fall further into decay and would love to see what these rooms look like once the paint has been scraped away to reveal the original frescos. But equally, much of why it is so striking is simply because it is a modern ruin; brightly lit and immaculate rooms as opposed to the current dark and cavernous interior would in many ways be a poor replacement. Apparently, now that St Pancras is set to become the main terminal for the Eurostar its restoration in some form is more likely than at any point for decades; I can only wonder what it will become. Later excursions proved rather more diverting. I went for a walk in the sunshine; past Lincoln's Inn Fields, St Clement's Church, The Royal Courts of Justice and then (avoiding the offices of the Daily Telegraph) to Smithfield Market and the sinuous Florin Court.
Elsewhere, in the country lies the awkward red-gritted bulk of Powis Castle, a building which nature seems to conspire to hide. Its rather impressive interior courtyard (flanked by a pair of Indian cannons whose barrel apertures are shaped as a tiger's jaw) is increasingly shrouded by wisteria and evergreen magnolia, while the yew trees are no longer shaped as topiary but have grown into a strange inchoate masses. The castle gives way to a set of seventeenth century terraces, originally progressing from aviary to orangery to a wild area planted with Acer and Stag's Horn, swallows flying low over the lawn at the base. Now the planting is more Edwardian than baroque and leads to a wild area where Acer and Chinese dogwood grows. Each border is lined with purple dahlias, blue salvias, acanthus, blue agapanthus, hostas, phormiums and aeoniums. Since only southern winds blow on the terraces a micro-climate has formed and bananas share the borders with fuchsias. The house combines baroque trompe l'oeil linenfold panelling and tudor plasterwork. Interesting exhibits included a beautifully intricate roman sculpture of a cat, imari vases, a View of Verona painted by Bellotto (slightly more down at heel than Canaletto) and an Elizabethan miniature of Herbert of Chirbury as a melancholy knight (I always wonder what went wrong with English portraiture between the Elizabethan and Victorian eras). The castle also has a clive of India collection, including a palanquin and a finial from Tipu Sultan's throne.
Elsewhere, Packwood house proved quite extraordinary. The exterior is a confusion of styles; stone, resembling Kelmscott to the Victorian redbrick. An enclosed garden with gazebos at each corner combines wilderness, a sunken garden, a terrace filled with foliage and flowering plants (easily rivalling Powis) and a symbolic yew garden, where the numbering of the yews along a long walk represents the apostles, with a spiral hedge leading a conical apex represents the sermon on the mount. The choice of the pagan yew invested a peculiar symbolism in this scene that seemed to resemble Avebury as much as the country churchyard. The interior is a product of the arts & crafts movement, an obsessive, even spartan, recreation of the medieval (even down to turning a barn into a great hall) and tudor at odds with the exterior of the house. Flemish tapestries and stained glass roundels abound alongside English flame-stitch textiles on the chairs. The only interruption is the red lacquer chinoiserie long clocks. Nearby, Baddesley Clinton seems to offer something similar, being a medieval and tudor manorhouse surrounded by a moat (occupied by predatory ducks) with a sunlit courtyard within. Although the house has beautiful wooden carving, offset with ivory and mother of pearl inlay, the effect is one of shabby decline, relieved by occasional odd items liked a narwhale tusk propped by in the corner.
Richard Haykluyt's Voyages and Discoveries is an Elizabethan compilation of travel narratives, written as a source of information on commerce, politics and geography that superceded the inaccuracies of Ptolemy and Mandeville. It regards natives (in this context the term can be applied to Russians and Tartars as much as the inhabitants of Africa or America) as either noble savages (docile and uninhibited by christian morals) or as Hobbesian barbarians existing in the brutish state of nature. These two postures prove to be far from incompatible. More interesting are the more ethnographic recordings; of an Indian Rajah's collection of white elephants or the ritual suicide of bereaved Javanese wives with a kris dagger (an odd combination of Indian sati and hari-kiri) which sit alongside wonder at the never-setting sun above Scandinavia, skirmishes with Tartars, capture by Moors and Spaniards, encounters with whales and sea-unicorns, and Raleigh's credulous belief in El-Dorado and of tribes without heads, whose faces appear in their chest.
Through Daniel Defoe's fractured and episodic narratives there is an inconsistent attitude towards the moral status of the protagonist as the genres of criminal biography and confession are combined, something enabled by the gap between the events and their narration. Accordingly, at the start of Daniel Defoe's The King of Pirates Avery protests of "the scandalous and unjust manner in which others have already treated me." Instead he describes his adventures as "unhappy though successful." Divorced from the social context of Moll Flanders the travel narrative represents a form of liberation from moral codes, with the piracy being depicted as offering both greater equality and opportunity than convention. Avery affirms that they had regretted "heavily they had not practised the same moderation before" and that "the men would be ruined by lying with the women in the other ships, where all sorts of liberty was both given and taken." From one aspect Avery is a sound entrepreneur as much as any government privateer, from another a criminal.
I also went to the National Gallery's Russian Landscape in the age of Tolstoy. The initial pictures by the likes of Shiskin are quite odd, painted in a similar style to Constable (later broadening to a more realist vein similar to pre-raphaelite landscape painting) and with the same idealised vision of pastoral. The serfs are typically shown in the fields but never labouring and with little suggestion of hardship. Tolstoy's outraged reaction to Chekhov's depiction of the serfs as living lives that were nasty, brutish and short (and sharing these characteristics accordingly) comes to mind. Though all of the pieces were pre-revolution it is doubtful that communist propaganda could have produced a worse historical distortion than the idealised illusions of these paintings.
Fortunately, genre painting later gave way to landscape paintings. Of some note here were Isaak Levitan, whose Above Eternal Peace shows a hilltop graveyard with a similar sense of symbolism to Holman Hunt, and Sarasov's feverish Sunset Over a Marsh. Of these, the most talented appears to have been the expressionist Arkhip Kuindhzi with his penchant for vast, depopulated landscapes (perhaps oddly so; I normally only care for landscapes as a setting in painting). The use of light in some of paintings, like Evening in the Ukraine, where everything is bathed in a crimson glow and the vertiginous perspectives, like The Steppe, a stark piece where a featureless green plain and white mist sky stretch off into a hazy distance, make him stand out from his contemporaries. The most striking painting was his Moonlit Night on the Dnieper, a panoramic piece where the iridescent reflection of the moonlight on the river recalled some of Atkinson Grimshaw's works. It reminded me of the night sky a few days ago where the moon's fitful light had emerged from two inky clouds both above and below it; although the moon was just short of being full, it strongly resembled scenes from many a horror film. I then walked past St Martins and the Coliseum Theatre to the National Portrait Gallery. I was pleasantly surprised by this; I've always loved the rich colours and finery of Tudor portraiture but been wary of later developments. Here at least, the flashes of recognition overruled the distaste for the muddy palettes and pedestrian themes of eighteenth century portraiture.
Huysmans's Parisian Sketches is an interesting dialectic of naturalism and aestheticism. Although the narrative describes events in precise detail these events are nonetheless recorded as subjective impressions or even sensations. On the one hand, the content is explicitly political; "have they never been moved by the desolate inertia of the poor... do they only admire nature when it's haughty and in its finery." But the aesthetic overtones cast the oppressed as romantic outcasts; "an obscure hideaway dreamt of by those in solitude... those disinherited by fate or crushed by life." Huysmans, like Baudelaire, aestheticises urban decay and squallor, writing that "nature is interesting only when sickly and distressed," there is a marked element of romantic pastoral throughout; "the joyous appearance of a country lane, enlivened by bothies and little gardens," something which easily shades into invective against industrialisation. Equally, much of the sketches are dedicated to the worship of the feminine but the tone is frequently one of revulsion, with smell being something Huysmans appears to find especially offensive.
Kleist's The Marquise of O and Other Stories presents rather bizarre combination of ontological ideas. Kleist developed a pre-Nietzchean form of pessimism surrounding Kant's distinction of the unknowability of things as noumena and as phenomena, so that his work is replete with ironic misprisions, with tragic consequences in The Betrothal in Santo Domingo, The Foundling and The Earthquake in Chile. However, this also leads to an emphasis on supernaturalism as inThe Beggarwoman of Locarno and St Cecilia or The Power of Music, implying a divine ordering in the sense that Kant had originally intended rather than Kleist's pessimistic interpretation.
Bernhard's Correction is in many respects a meditation on the division of nature and civilisation, reminding me of Paglia's observation that civilisation is a defence against nature. The character of Roithammer is a natural scientist studying genetics, with a preference for walks in the wilderness and admiring Hoelle's stuffed animals for precisely the reason that they were only barely the product of art rather than nature; "these products of nature always provided an occasion for reflection on art and nature... nature is that incomprehensible force that... forcibly pushes people together so that these people will destroy themselves." However, science raises the question of what Wordsworth referred to as how we murder to dissect, to divide the totality of existence (as with Roithammer's order discipline, his concentration chamber being a stand against the untidiness and clamour of existence, and conversely with the narrator's ordering of Roithammer's papers being seen in the terms of an act of violence) and the theme of building sets man against nature throughout. Roithammer's cone is at the exact centre of a forest, while Hoeller's house stands fast against the flooding of the river at the gorge, which has swept away all other buildings there. Nature is frequently seen as an entropic force, from the woodworm destroying Altensam to the decay of the derelict cone, to the flooding of Aurach; "nature hadn't changed so the people in their natural setting were still the same, with all their malevolence and frightful fecunity.". However, it is the aspect of gender that gives this theme its sharpest focus. The feminine is throughout identified with nature as being emotive and volatile ("people like my mother aren't rational beings... unconscious falsifications of nature"), the masculine is identified with rationality and intellect. This theme closely relate to the other central concept of the novel; the status of correction as refinement, as progress, or a form of destruction; "his utterly ruthless, hence utterly perfect corrections" By extension, this questions whether Roithammer is an isolated genius, struggling to create existential meaning in a void ("a man's lack of ideas is his death"), or a neurotic obsessive ("all those experts thought they were dealing with a madman.");.
The novel functions through the accretion (the text being almost cast in a constant stream of consciousness with few pauses) and revision of detail, viewing character as a palimpsest where excavation of history is intrinsic to an understanding of how inheritance has determined its course; "we still had the same conditions and therefore the same relationships as existed two hundred years ago... things that would determine our lives.. Altensam as the making of Roithammer, the source of all he ever was and still is". The novel casts into doubt our ability to live in our own world rather than that of our parents and educators. In the course of this, a rich set of polyponic perspectives become apparent. One particular aspect of this is the conflict between the perspectives of the narrator and those offered by Roithammer's own papers, and the question of reading-as-nature; "at certain points in our existence we break off the nature of our existence and proceed to exist only in books, until we again have the opportunity to exist in nature." Reading and art become substitutes for the intolerable freedom of nature, but is also an equally intolerable imposition on that nature. The result of that substitution is a blurring of the space between subject and object, part of the palimpsest's overlayering; "we become absorbed in the subject and can no longer think it through." As DeLillo put it "In the novels of Thomas Bernhard, the human mind in isolation is the final spiraling subject... a man so compulsively preoccupied with his art that this quality must inevitably destroy him. It has to be understood that Bernhard himself writes a prose so unrelenting in its intensity toward a fixed idea that it sometimes approaches a level of self-destructive delirium... Bernhard's fiction is anti-cinematic. There is almost nothing to see in his work. It is all personal history and tossing emotion, all voice--no faces, rooms, rainy days. There are references to streets and cities but no sense of place, and the novels I've read have no paragraphing, no divisions of text or accommodating space breaks. Bernhard's prose has a rapid and clamorous pulse rate. The narrator delivers eloquent chronicles of misery, illness, madness, isolation, and death. There are points at which the narration amasses such compressed layerings of loathing and self-loathing that it becomes rackingly comic. And weaving bleakly through it all is a sense of themes and patterns that ride recurringly in the mind." Bernhard's work generally works through the creation of a number of doubles; in The Loser the narrator is paired by two chiastic doppelgangers, one an ironic caricature of Wittgenstein as a failure, the other a model of Glenn Gould as the antithesis of all that is Austrian. Nonetheless, the potential different perspectives seem undermined by the monologic narration. Equally, while Bernhard advanced an idea of tragic comedy in which the accretion of tragic detail reached a point of comic release (certainly neither novel leaves much that isn't worse in Austria than anywhere else). Again the problem is that irony implies distance, and the first person narration leaves no room for this.
For most of The Village I was breathless at the combination of a Wicker Man style sparse and naturalistic cinematography with a rich sense of symbolism (especially with the way colours are presented, so that red is feared as enraging the animals that inhabit the woods leading the villagers to wear yellow cloaks). The result is something that intimately depicts the village but has a myth or fairytale's lack of exactitude (again, with the way the outside world was rejected by the villagers as sinful but where original sin recurs in their own eirenic valley with its autumnal beauty), so that in spite of the veneer of nineteenth century puritanism the villagers are never seen at church or praying. All of which is all well and good. I had realised during the course of the film what the ending would probably be and began hoping that I was wrong; I wasn't. Perhaps the difficulty is that, much like the villagers of the film, I find romantic myth rather too entrancing to be discarded, even if it does happen to be an illusion. Even a rationalist like myself would prefer Sleepy Hollow or the more nuanced dialectic of reason and unreason in Brotherhood of the Wolf.
The latest Prom was rather odd; the first half being dominated by Saint-Saens's Organ Symphony, the second being a selection from the nineteenth-century Austro-Hungarian hit-parade. Saint-Saens is rarely capable of restraining his eclecticism and the Organ Symphony demonstrates playful flourishes, lyrical passages and gothic romanticism alongside one another. That said, I have always preferred the darker aspects of Saint-Saens and although his work shares a baroque quality with that of Johan Strauss feuilletonist waltzes and polkas, the combination seems rather odd to me (Poulenc or Bach might have been a more obvious combination from my point of view). Gillian Weir played the Albert Hall organ and as with Janacek's Glagolitic Mass, the orchestra and organ competed through the fortissimo passages. Weir then proceeded to perform a Messiaen piece, which fully displayed his mad organist tendencies.
The second half proceed immediately in a more frivolous vein, as the cymbals proclaimed the beginning of the Radetzky March before the conductor had come on stage, followed by other works from Strauss the elder and Strauss the younger; Voices of Spring, Frederica Polka, Cachucha Galop, The Blue Danube and The Gypsy Baron. I'm very much reminded of a Joseph Roth novel called The Radetzky March; an elegy for the Austro-Hungarian Empire which dwells on the surface of its characters, recording them almost as a set of clothes and dress uniforms more than people. The same superficial pomp and circumstance is at work in the music, which is diverting but inconsequential. More interesting were the other Austro-Hungarian operetta composers. The Hungarian Emmerich Kalman's Gyspy Princess in particular, strayed into gypsy music and away from Viennese ballrooms.
Considering that Wagner has long been my favourite composer (rivaled by Handel and Tchaikovsky) it is a rather unfortunate fact that I have never had the opportunity to see any of the Ring cycle being performed, only Parsifal and the Tannhauser overture. As such, last night's Prom concert of Das Rheingold, performed by the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment and conducted by Simon Rattle (who had also conducted the performance of Parsifal I saw, something I'd quite forgotten about), was a rather special happening. Wagner saw himself as being both the Shakespeare and Beethoven of his day and this idea of the kunstwerk informs all of his music; I tend to think the ninth symphony's setting of Schiller's Ode to Joy is the most 'Wagnerian' of Beethoven's works. But like seeing Wittgenstein's duck-rabbit in both guises simultaneously it is never possible to attend fully to both at the same time. Previously, I had always listened to the voices in Wagner almost as another instrument and certainly the music throughout the concert soared through the Albert Hall. But in Das Rheingold Wagner allows the narrative to dominate in a way that recedes in the rest of the cycle and the discipline of standing through the entire concert with translated text meant that I paid more attention to the lyrics, with little impression of difference being made by the use of period instruments. The moral concerning the corrupting effects of wealth is at best trite and not one Wagner ever paid much attention to; perhaps as well since a music of excess is poorly matched to an ethics of chivalric renunciation. More unusually the cycle, initially suggests that greed exists in the absence of love, but the tauntings of the Rhine maidens and Fricka's jealously undercut this; the ethics of the ring are a peculiar mix of the romanticised Christian and the Schopenhauerian; hence the disenchantment of the Nietzsche who had seen the Dionysian in Wagner's music and rejected Schopenhauer).
Perhaps surprisingly, the text proves to be rather comic, with the Norse gods imagined in the same petty and impotent fashion that Homer created his in The Iliad (though as mentioned above the explicit moralism is very similar to the Brother's Grimm and much of the proceedings seem more drawn from fairytale). It's easy to sympathise with Nietzsche's view in The Case of Wagner that one must translate Wagner's gods "into reality, into the modern - let us be even crueller - into the bourgeois!" The excellent cast brought this out fully (for instance, with Fafner resembling nothing so much as an East-end gangster) and although there was no stage the opera was nonetheless acted to the full, with Kim Begley's outstanding Loki (Loge) easily outshining the rest (including Willard White's Wotan, I have to say); the most honest character present is the most amoral and therefore the least hypocritical. More than a few times as I stood in the arena I thought how unlucky all the people with seats were, since they missed so many of the small gestures and expressions that brought the characters to life. Finally, feeling blissfully happy I left the Albert Hall, seeing the golden statue of Prince Albert shining in the darkness. I walked down the stone steps, glanced briefly back at the Hall, with its iridescent new portico frieze glimmering in the light emitted from the Victorian street lamps, turned and headed to the tube station.
During the performance of Britten's Prince of the Pagodas the sound of something falling over filled the hall just at the point where the music was fortuitously reaching a fortissimo peak. It rather reminded me of the anecdote of Joyce and a 'Come In' to a visitor that had been accidentally transcribed while he was dictating the text of Finnegan's Wake; he decided to leave it in. Where Britten is normally dissonant and sparse, the Balinese gamelan influences on this added a more lush orchestration. Finally, Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition appeared. Since Mussorgsky only wrote a piano arrangement for this its most famous arrangement was actually created by Ravel. This performance instead saw the piece as a blank slate, and each picture had arrangements by differing orchestrators (being quite a varied piece from the outset this did make it seem oddly like Saint-Saens's Carnival of the Animals). Emile Naoumoff's delicate arrangement of Il Vechio Castello stood out for its replacement of Ravel's horns with piano (it did rather resemble a jazz version of the aquarium section of the Carnival of the Animals as a consequence) while Walter Goehr replaced the brass arrangement of the Promenade theme with a version strings and woodwind. On the other hand, Ashkenazy and Stokowski's more muscular arrangements (of Bydlo and the ride of Baba-Yaga respectively) were well counterpointed to these gentler arrangements. I've also listened to a different arrangement of Pictures at an Exhibition; James Crabb's dual accordion version, which brilliantly captures the more lyrical pictures but is less successful with the more powerful pictures, like the ride of Baba-Yaga.Labels: Art, Decay, England, Film, History, Literature, London, Music
posted by Richard 6:47 AM
Tuesday, April 13, 2004
I've been to Moseley Old Hall recently, a rather strange building in Staffordshire. From the outside it appears essentially Victorian, save for the twisted chimneys, knot garden, hornbeam and honeysuckle arbour and an orchard filled with cherry and quince. On the inside, it is lined with dark wooden panelling over wattle and daub construction. Similar peculiarities were in evidence at Hardwick Hall, not least the row of ash trees outside with their strange swellings amidst the branches. This building has been largely left as it was in Elizabethan times, with the occasional room that is incongruously filled with eighteenth century furniture. It is always pleasant to have a prejudice confirmed, so I was quite pleased to note that the elaborate design of the original furniture seemed much more spectacular than that of the later pieces (unfortunately most of the other original items such as wall paintings and tapestries are now all badly faded; in many respects the interior is an exercise in the poetics of decay as much as the largely glass exterior seems bold and ahead of its time). One particular item of note was the long gallery, which included an unusual painting of Elizabeth the First, her dress showing a depiction of the sea monsters Hilliard had imagined whales to resemble.
I went to Birmingham at Easter to listen to a performance of Bach's St Matthew's Passion at the Symphony Hall. While I like much of Bach's works, this did rather tend towards being the kind of religious work it is difficult for an atheist to appreciate, like much of the works of Thomas Tallis or George Herbert. Looking around earlier, I discovered that the city has an interesting Church designed by Chatwin with a wooden roof and a stained glass window by Morris and Burne Jones. I'd forgotten how much impressive architecture Birmingham has, such as the town hall and cathedral in addition to the rather oppressive disused factory buildings and warehouses. More recently, many of the grimy concrete buildings for which the city is infamous have been demolished and a new centre built. This includes a strange new shopping area, consisting of a sinuous organic shape whose surface pullulates with silver hemispheres; an impressively futuristic building but one which looks incongruous at best in a rather traditional setting. During this time, I often found myself thinking of the idea of the manufacturing of tradition; though the idea of continuity of tradition embodied in the above stately homes is probably a myth, it is nonetheless a powerful one and the lack of any historical sense of time or place in Birmingham is disquieting at best.
Later, I visited the De Morgan Centre; a single room in Putney library that blazes with colour as one walks in. It includes a good selection of William De Morgan's work including a number of tiles featuring Islamic designs and a distinctive dark blue moonlight suite. Much of the centre is taken up with Evelyn De Morgan's work, equally characterised by vivid (possibly too vivid) colours. She has been described as a symbolist rather than a pre-raphaelite (her work is much later than that of the original Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood). Unfortunately, much of the symbolism is rather crude and seems regrettably influenced by spiritualism (I suppose it could have been worse; spiritualism left E F Benson with a morbid interest in demonic slugs). Her better work tends is devoted to classical themes, such as a portrait of Phosphorus and Hesperus; more the sort of subject matter one would expect from Simeon Solomon.
The same afternoon was devoted to the Wallace Collection. This house is decorated in typically Rococco style; red crimson and gilded walls, Sevres porcelain and Boulle marquetry furniture. I tend to have ambivalent attitudes to Rococco, since it very much seems a style designed to demonstrate wealth rather than taste. It has a certain kitsch quality to it. Beyond this, the ground floor is filled with a strange diversity of exhibits; Iznik ceramics, Venetian glass and German pewter, for example. It also has an extensive armoury of which the centrepiece is clearly the Islamic section. The Mughal and Persian shamshirs are much more ornate than any European weaponry, save perhaps those of Venice. The upper floor is more dedicated to painting, including the entirely expected horrors from the likes of Fragonard. However, it also has an excellent selection of Canaletto paintings and a good mixture of Dutch genre and maritime painting. Amongst the less well known artists, Horace Vernet's paintings of Napoleon and the Middle East stand out. The highlight is the Great Gallery, with Velasquez's The Lady with a Fan, Rembrandt's Titus and, above all, Hals' The Laughing Cavalier. This really does stand out; the facial expression is immediately individual unlike the posed expressions of most portrait painting while the elaborate symbolism of the motifs of the clothing recalls Hilliard as much as naturalistic painting.
Elsewhere in London, I spent a pleasant day in Greenwich. This seems a place quite apart from the rest of London; a leafy setting filled with Hanoverian period architecture that looks directly opposite to the Manhattanite setting of Docklands and Canary Wharf. I recall HG Wells once predicted a future where height restrictions would be abolished and it is interesting watching that come to pass. Initially, I had a look at Wren's Royal Naval College. The banqueting hall is perhaps less impressive than it should be; the use of painting as a substitute for plasterwork (a'la trompe l'oeil) is rather transparent while the choice of colours is rather subdued (mostly browns). More promising is the opposite chapel where the later interior neo-classical design recalls Wedgewood (presumably Wren's original design might have looked more like the gold and white rococco design of St James's Church, rather similar to the gusto italiano interior to the nearby Royal Academy). Following this, I went on to the Queen's house. Designed by Inigo Jones, this is an odd Jacobean version of classical architecture. Much of the painting is more of historical than aesthetic interest. That said, it does have a Canaletto painting of the Naval college, some works by Hogarth and some maritime paintings by Dutch artists such as Backhuysen and the Van De Veldes. I went on then to the Royal Observatory, with its display of camera obscura, telescopes that more closely resembled cannons and John Harrison's timepieces (I'd been reading Eco's The Island of the Day Before illustrated many of the themes in evidence here). Finally the Maritime Museum was of least interest, save perhaps for Prince Frederick's barge and its gold Chinoiserie decorations. Instead of returning by rail, I took the boat back, passing under Tower bridge and past most of London's main landmarks. Given London's maritime history I must say that this does seem the most natural way to travel, though perhaps without the tedious commentary on luxury flat property prices I had to endure. I note that the new Norman Foster skyscraper is visible from most points of this tour; perhaps it needs to have a restaurant built on the upper floors so that we can follow the approach Maupassant took to dealing with the Eiffel tower.
A later visit saw a climb to the summit of Wren's monument to the great fire; a tower that must have originally dominated the skyline in the same way as Nelson's Column. Now it is hemmed with other buildings and once one has climbed to the top it becomes apparent that the same applies to other buildings such as the Bank of England, the Royal Exchange, St Paul's and the Tower of London, all of which have been bested by taller modern buildings such as Canary Wharf; only Tower Bridge stands out as much as it would have done originally.
Conversely, where London is a cacophony of architectural styles Oxford manages to assimilate each new development, even the ziggurat of the Said Business School. While in Oxford, I went to the Ashmolean museum. I've often thought the Ashmolean has to be counted as one of the most impressive museums outside of London, if only due to the size of its collection of oriental exhibits., which has a large range of objects like painted silk screens, red lacquerware (as well as one lacquer casket formerly owned by Beckford), arita porcelain and a large wooden bodhisattva statue. Similarly, there is also an impressive Islamic section, featuring the customary display of Iznik ceramics and wooden arabesque patterns. The more customary historical sections, such as those of Rome and Egypt are more modest, including a well preserved statue of Athena, colourful mummy cases and an entire Nubian shrine. More impressive though, were the examples of Romano-Egyptian funeral art, the paintings made on coffin lids; the quality of painting is such that wasn't seen again for hundreds of years. One of the diverting section was that devoted to the Tradescant collection, an original bequest to the museum that reflects the cabinet of curiosities approach to such things. I must admit to finding this ad hoc collection of Malay kris, Danish wooden tankards and Tomahawks rather more engaging from an aesthetic standpoint than the usual collection of like for like. The galleries similarly reflect a high standard; especially the selection of Dutch paintings including one Hals painting. Beyond that, the modern section has some good Pisarro paintings in a pointillist style (Les Jardin Des Tuileries) and a new gallery includes an excellent selection of Sickert paintings, an intriguingly impressionist Picasso painting (Blue Roofs) and a vivid Kandinsky painting. The pre-raphaelite section was dominated by Holman Hunt ranging from religious allegory (a painting of a priest being sheltered from the druids) to painting of London bridge and continuations of his middle-eastern paintings. As in the earlier pre-raphaelite exhibition, some of Seddon's similar paintings were included, especially a panoramic painting of Jerusalem. In terms of the other pre-raphaelites excellent paintings by Alma-Tadema, Burne Jones (as well as an arts and crafts wardrobe decorated by him) and Millais (The Return of the Dove to the Ark) are included.
Following the interest in De Morgan, I went to Kelmscott Manor, the former home of William Morris. This is an Elizabethan house built next to river, where willows dip their branches into the water and rooks caw in the horse chestnuts. It still looks exactly like its engraving in News From Nowhere The gardens are a riot of colour, even at this time of year, with bluebells, irises, primroses and tulips in a variety of colours (scarlet, black, lilac, white and some striped red and white). The centrepiece is an ancient mulberry tree at the centre of the garden. The interior retains much of its original character, including Flemish tapestries and a considerable amount of seventeeth century furniture (considerably more ornate then the over idealised rustic simplicity of Philip Webb's chairs). The arts and crafts tapestries, wallpaper and decoration all accordingly fit in well with their surroundings (a prelapsarian vision of history counterpointed to the reality), though it is perhaps a little surprising to discover the amount of Chinese and Burmese furniture and ceramics (including a star shape tile decorated with the first sura of the koran set in a wooden frame) in the house. Dutch imitations of Iznik pottery and an Icelandic casket were rather less surprising. Beyond that the house has several Durer engravings and Rossetti paintings; more particular portrait of Jane Morris with a gold frame against the dark blue wallpaper (the same colour as the blue silk dress Morris wears in the painting) was especially striking.
I've been reading Pessoa's The Book of Disquiet. A review of this seems a little otiose, given the futility of deconstructing a book that deconstructs itself, but nonetheless. Although ostensibly written with one authorial persona or heteronym, the book deconstructs that notion to a large extent, with each of the subject it treats of being rewritten throughout the text. On religion, the text veers from mourning the death of god; "Never reaching union with god... always with a longing for it." and castigating atheism "to deny the existence of this intelligence, namely god, strikes me as one of those idiocies... every sound mind believes in god," whereas elsewhere it is stated that belief in god is impossible and the very concept is castigated as dangerous. Similarly, an aesthetic view of art is propounded; "Art is a substitute for acting or living...Why is art beautiful? Because it is useless" But elsewhere, advances a view of art that sees it in didactic terms, as advancing human civilisation. In some places, dreaming is described as "superior to reality," while later it states "I lack the money to be a dreamer," recasting it as a luxury, rather than a retreat from the quotidian. The text even asserts its own plurality, "I have the most conflicting opinions, the most divergent beliefs," only to deny this later, "I reread some of the pages that will form my book of random impressions..even while saying that I'm always different, I feel that I've always said the same thing." The result is that reading The Book of Disquiet becomes a matter of finding the figure in the carpet.
Pessoa reminded me of Coetzee's The Master of Petersburg a revisionist novel fictionalising elements of Dostoevsky's life (an unusual concept to begin with; A Dead Man in Deptford being the only other example to come to mind). As much as The Life and Times of Michael K pastiches Kafka (it's difficult not to use that term in a pejorative sense, and to some extent I can thinking of Bakhtin's concept of heteroglossia) The Master of Petersburg pastiches Dostoevsky. This is in spite of the novel having a similar structure to The Life and Times of Michael K, representing a dialogic conflict between a social ingenue (Doestoevsky, with his view of anarchism as a form of nihilism at best, possession at worst) and elements of social extremism (Nechaev with his denunciation of Dostoevsky's greed in his gambling and ignorance of the economic forces that determine existence). In his own way though, Coetzee deconstructs the idea of an authorial identity every bit as much as Pessoa. Waiting For The Barbarians presents a more idiosyncratic work, wherein the narrator wavers between dissolving the dichotomy between civilisation and barbarism (by presenting the two as part of a cycle; "civilisation entailed the corruption of barbarian virtues.. I never wished it for the barbarians that they should have the history of Empire laid upon them.") and doubting this dissolution (something epitomise by his archaeology, the preservation of the filiations of memory; "Do I really look forward to the triumph of the barbarian way; intellectual torpor.. if we were to disappear would the barbarians spend their afternoons excavating the ruins? ")
I've also been reading Atwood's Oryx and Crake. Science fiction often tends towards the extremes of the utopian (in this case, an extropian or transhumanist view) or the dystopian (in this case, environmentalist or religious conservative; whose language Atwood seems peculiarly close to here), with little time for the no-man's land between that the present is invariably composed of. This book is no exception to that, following the likes of Brave New World or (perhaps more accurately) Day of the Triffids. With that in mind, it would be perfectly possible to read Oryx and Crake as a dystopian text where Crake, a Faust-figure like Nemo, Moreau or Frankenstein, pursues dangerous technologies without thought for the consequences, unintended (such as the Craker's development of symbolic thought and religion) or otherwise (the success of the engineered virus). On the other hand, most dystopian novels, including Brave New World, 1984 and We deal with the suppression of biological imperatives rather than their alteration. But comparisons with other Atwood novels suggest otherwise. Surfacing is full of similar dystopian theories concerning an American invasion of Canada for its oil reserves, and sees its protagonist retreat from civilisation into nature (feeling a guilt at being human and expressing a desire for humanity to disappear); similarly, throughout Oryx and Crake mankind is viewed as an aggressive species that consumes resources indiscriminately (essentially, as Easter Island writ large); the Crakers represent a similar retreat to nature, allowing Crake to take on the mantle of an almost heroic figure instead. To be specific, Oryx and Crake shares the same concerns over capitalism as Surfacing but its depiction of gated communities having evolved into a corporate caste system is essentially tangential to the plot, and the overall depiction is more ambiguous since the damage is largely done by environmentalist characters rather than corporate strategy.
Umberto Eco's The Island of the Day Before, on the other hand, was something of a disappointment, seeming more a vehicle than a novel. More promising was VS Naipaul's Beyond Belief, an examination of Islam considered as a colonial force in formerly non-Islamic countries. Naipaul characterises islam as a totalising ideology that isolates it adherents from both regional traditions and foreign influences, leaving those societies in an ideological vacuum with islam as the only philosophy available to them (though many of the outcomes of that seem typical of monosyllabic post-colonial societies to some extent). Although he compares the Islamic displacement of other faiths to the spread of christianity in the Roman Empire, Naipaul suggests that christianity tends more to assimilate other traditions and to allow some form of congruence. Certainly, it is possible to think of examples that might confirm this, such as the use of pagan symbolism at Christmas, but equally the history of Protestantism after the reformation hardly seems all that different from islam. Equally, Naipaul notes the Islamic assimilation of Hindu myth and suggests that islam in these societies had become less tolerant in recent times (again inviting parallels with the change from Catholicism to Protestantism). The overall impression is that a predetermined thesis has been proved, with the result that much of the picture painted is both uniform and monolithic. By way of contrast, compare Naipaul's account to that of Orhan Pamuk; "it seemed to me that their little bursts of lawless individualism were strangely at o
