I tolerate this century, but I don't enjoy it.
All of the ephemera that is far too trivial to be bothered with elsewhere on this site or, depending on your point of view, a meta-commentary on it. This ephemera includes, but is not limited to art, music and literature. Most of the content here will be discussed in terms that are as abstract as possible, reality being a singularly overrated concept.
Sunday, June 29, 2008
I saw the work of Vilhelm Hammershøi during my visit to Copenhagen a few years ago, but I can't say with any honesty that it made any great impression on me at the time. This is perhaps unsurprising; understated paintings in grey tones of spartan and austere subjects are comparatively easy to miss in the midst of other works; it's only when one sees the paintings together that one realises the obsessive theme driving them.
Hammershøi's loose brushwork and restricted palette immediately associate him with his contemporary Whistler, but seventeenth century Dutch painting was also a significant influence on him. As with Vermeer, Hammershøi is frequently found depicting figures in interiors, showing the play of light from nearby windows. Where the Western tradition is for the subject to stare out of a painting and challenge the viewer, Hammershøi follows Vermeer in denying this, having his figures (or figure; his wife was his persistent model) turned away from the viewer to give a hermetic aspect to the painting. In tandem with the grey, barely furnished interiors (photographs of the same rooms show them filled with furnishings and decoration), where the light from a window largely serves to suggest that life is somewhere else, this creates the melancholic air that pervades his work. Durer's figure of melancholy was turned away from the viewer as well. Hammershøi returns again and again to the same interiors, the same piano, the same pictures, the same bowls. But his work also rather resembles Escher or Piranesi, showing long corridors with successions of doors, looking out into interior courtyards through layers of interior windows, with doors that are slightly warped and distorted against the overall geometry of the work. There's a disjoint between the realistic, objective, settings and his imprecise impressionistic brushwork; what is being depicted is an objective correlative for his own state of mind.
The other component to Hammershøi's work is his landscapes, both rural and urban. Whether showing the Danish countryside, Copenhagen's royal palace or church spires, the British Museum or a London street, the scene is always devoid of people and depicted with grey wintry skies that seem somewhere between Whistler and Atkinson Grimshaw. I recall Copenhagen as a colourful city with painted buildings and red church towers surmounted with verdigris encrusted baroque spires. But I recall being fascinated by the same buildings, showing the same empty streets. I discover a certain fellow feeling for Hammershøi that I'm rather unaccustomed to.
The following week I return for two exhibitions near Trafalgar Square. I start with an Wyndham Lewis at the National Portrait Gallery. I recall Angela Carter complaining that all of Lawrence's women were just clothes without bodies, as opposed to his meticulous depiction of male physicality. Something similar can be said of Wyndham Lewis's paintings. The subjects of these portraits are puppet or simulacra. They have the quality of remaining just what they are, fixed in a particular epoch to furniture which is now dust (hence Froanna's liminal character in her Red Portrait as she fades ino the background). "The process and condition of life, without any exception, is a grotesque degradation." The stress on dehumanisation in his writing manifests itself in his painting by his focus on clothes rather than people. The portrait of Edith Sitwell shows her with her eyes shut, her face turned from the viewer, buried in a mass of clothes. Sitwell thought her hands to be her finest feature; here, Lewis hides them altogether (the same applies in his painting of Mrs Schiff, unlike Edwin Evans whose hand blends into his trousers). Hats and helmets abound throughout the paintings. Depicting TS Eliot, he gave the poet a "gioconda smile." Sketch after sketch shows the face left unworked till last. Eliot looks downwards, Pound closes his eyes. Like Modigliani or Picasso (albeit without their primitivism), Lewis saw the face as a mask, indistinguishable from the hat he always painted himself wearing.
Confronted with demands for a return to the classicism of Raphael, Lewis responded by suggesting Shakespeare as an exemplar, praising the famous woodcut of the playwright as serene and empty. Lewis develops various personae in his painting and writing like 'the enemy' as his satirical response to the literary and art world, or his embodiment of satire, the tyro. Lewis caught sight of his face in a cracked mirror and saw "the mask of a syphilitic Creole." Whatever was worth recording in life, he asserted, could be mapped in surface forms. On the whole, I find myself thinking tht Lewis is a rather more sympathetic as a painter than as a writer. His painting of Froanna is a particular masterpiece; red tones predominate excepting the blue of her eyes as she stares directly at the viewer, one of the very few subjects to do so in the entire exhibition.
I follow this with the nearby Divisionism exhibition at the National Gallery. Like Pointillism or Impressionism, Divisionism was a response to new scientific theories of light and colour, like colour wheels. Nonetheless, where French art often has an art for art's sake philosophy, with low-lifes or nudes (Longoni's pickpocket painting is the nearest to that here) featured to epater les bourgeoisie rather than for political ends. By contrast, Italian artists were unhappy with technique alone. Italian reunification has created considerable social upheaval, poverty and inequality that lent itself to a realist style of portrature that much of the rest of Europe had already explored. Equally, symbolism offered a more escapist response to the same conditions, one that especially appealed to Catholic artists. Often, divisionist artists would veer between these extremes. Nomellini paints grey scenes of striking workers at one point in his career, and then paints an extraordinary indigo blue symbolist work showing the sea, entitles Symphony of the Moon. Segantini's nature scenes remains sufficiently detailed to sit alongside Pre-Raphaelite painting, but his later symbolist works show a bizarre depictions of sins being punished in hell. His Return from the Woods is the most perfect fusion of the two strains shown in the exhibition; showing a peasant woman dragging wood in a snow scene, but withthe church spire at her destination is reminiscent of David Friedrich (the same applies to some of Grudicy's autumnal scenes; I'm struck by the spider's web drawn on the frame of one of them). Some of the realist paintings, such as those by Morbelli could have been painted fifty years earlier in terms of their technique, even if light falling through windows is a particular theme. Morbelli also painted melancholy quasi symbolist works of sunsets though. In other works, the divisionist technique, so effective in Segantini's Alpine scenes, imposes a stillness and imprecision that fits oddly with the social agenda of the paintings. Morbelli's luminscent painting of women working in the rice fields utterly fails to convey any sense of misery; it's much too tranquil and beautiful. Either these artists assumed that a method that was 'scientific must be allied to social progress, or the political posturing was actually an alibi for aestheticising the predicament of the working class. Much of the symbolist work is also quite socially engaged though but in a more reactionary fashion, as with Previati's paean to the virtues of the madonna. Volpedo's country scenes are reminiscent of Sisley but show christian processions. Many of the forms are religious, such as the tondo or the polytych. At the very least, religious symbolism is used to evoke a sense of secular national identity; Mazzini had argued that Italians must develop a "religious concept of their nation."
It wasn't until futurism that the techniques developed by divisionism could be applied to a specific programme, albeit one where the interest in light was often centered on electric lighting. The exhibition depicts a move from Boccioni's early pastoral landscapes to a picture of a seamstress (albeit one where the focus is on her cobalt blue dress) to his explicitly futurist painting of a dam being constructed. Other works by Balla and Carra show the futurist depiction of movement in still life or the energy of technology.
As I child I recall seeing a particular statue during a visit to Osbourne House on the Isle of Wight; a black basalt statue of Antinous. I couldn't place my interest in it exactly at the time, presuming it to be due to the exotic Egyptinate character of the statue. I now presume that my interest was mostly taken by the frank sexualisation in the semi-nude depiction of Hadrian's lover. No wonder Winckelman had been so enthused at the imagery that showed Antinous as being somewhere between Athena and Apollo. The story of the doomed youth is one of the central myths of gay history, alongside that of Edward the Second. It's the prospect of seeing Antinous that attracts me to the Hadrian exhibition at the British Museum. The depictions of him are many, from the Egyptianate statue of him as Osiris (with whom he had shared a death day), Ephebian depictions of him as Bacchus (another arisen deity) with vine leaves in his long hair or versions of him as a Greek fertility god. In some of these he conforms to the Roman ideal of the beautiful youth (shown here with the inclusion of the Warren cup), in others his sexuality is more aggressively that of an adult male. I find myself wryly amused at the prospect of his cult competing with christianity; if only it had won. Otherwise, the material at hand is rather more conventional; accounts of Hadrian's brutal suppression of Jewish rebellion, retrenchment and consolidation of the empire's borders after Trajan's overly ambitious expansion, the amnesty on public debts, construction of the Scottish wall (admittedly a turf bank for much of its length that could have served little defensive purpose, instead presumably it served as a means of channelling and controlling the border), anf finishing with the construction of buildings like the Pantheon, his Mausoleum and the architectural fantasisa of his Tivoli villa. The images of Hadrian himself seem surprisingly individual, with his beard setting him out (cited as evidence of his love of all things Greek or a means of covering his blemishes, depending on your preferences) as well as a dimple in his ear that may be evidence of heart disease. Giant busts and statues alternately show him as emperor, priest, warrior and deity. Some of the reliefs from Tivoli, showing Parthenon style depictions of naked figures alongside detailed carvings of vines, birds and squirrels also stand out, but I'm especially drawn to two beautiful peacocks that formerly were in place on the walls of Hadrian's mausoleum.
The great court of the Museum currently has a striking work by Zhang Wang inside it; following the Chinese inclusion of weathered stones in gardens, Wang has taken the image of such stones and encased it in silvery metal, which looks as if it were frozen mercury. This questioning of the relationship between nature and art is counterpointed by some temporary gardens outside, where a genuine stone can be found amidst the dogwood, wisteria, lacquer tree, willow, bamboo and peony. An exhibition of Chinese nature painting inside continues this theme. I'm struck by the role of literary allusion in the paintings and ceramics shown; many of the flowers and animals are chosen for their symbolic connotations (like the lotus) others by homophones suggested by their names (bamboo sounding like congratulations, narcissi sounding like immortality) or for compounds formed from the combination of different items. A few weeks later I'm revisiting Silchester and an archaeological dig is on. A small garden has been created illustrating the sort of plants found in a Roman garden and illustrating their symbolic functions. There are some overlaps with the Chinese symbolism, as with peony being used in protective amulets.
Walking around the city, I visit the interior of St Mary Alderdmary, an exercise in hyperreal gothic by Wren. The effect is quite odd; the fan vaulting is decorated with floral patterns that seem to belong rather more to the baroque period. The effect of the interior being coated in white plaster is rather sepulchral, giving it the effect of an alabaster tomb and contrasting oddly with the colourful Victorian tiling on the floor. While I'm there the organ starts playing Bach's Toccata and Fugue. I move onto Wren's St Stephen Walbrook. The interior here is more like a playfully decorated version of the pantheon; unlike Hawksmoor whose eccentric designs seem to match the English character, Wren would have been a much greater architect in a catholic country, where his designs could have made with red marble rather than Portland stone and his interiors gilded and painted. One detail I am struck with is a totentanz on one of the pillars, showing a bride dancing with a skeletal death. This evening, I go to Monteverdi's The Coronation of Poppaea at the Proms. Even if Monteverdi is best known for his ecclesiastical music, this amorality tale does rather confirm the reputation of renaissance Venice as indifferent to religion at best. The plot begins with Cupid asserting her primacy over Virtue and thereafter protecting Poppaea as she schemes her way to becoming Nero's wife, displacing the rather more virtuous Octavia. Poppaea's mother attempts to dissuade her from this course, but only on the grounds of practicality, advising her to go for someone less ambitious instead. Similarly, Octavia's nurse attempts to persuade her to take a lover as a form of revenge. Seneca is depicted as the moral centre of the play but also as a tedious windbag. The only character to receive any punishment is the wronged Octavia, while the assassin Otto is allowed happiness with Drusilla. The staging attempted to draw attention to later events (Poppaea' death at Nero's hands) by having him come close to slapping her as well as introducing an unscripted (and historically inaccurate) scene where Nero drowns Lucan. Since the drama is essentially concerned with Poppae's triumph, I wasn't especially sure I appreciated these interpolations, even if the original audience would have been well aware of Poppaea's eventual fate and that she would have achieved her ambition by remaining faithful to Otto. The Skakespearian approach to casting works bettwe, with both Nero and Poppaea played by women (Nero would originally have been played by a castrato) and various female parts like the nurse played by men (the nurse here bears a disturbing resemblance to Margaret Thatcher).
Later at the Proms, I listen to Tchaikovsky's Sleeping Beauty. The full version is rarely performed in ballet (the story being slight, Tchaikovsky had padded it with various dances). I find myself surprised at the idea of Tchaikovsky writing an opera under the influence of Rameau, although the idea of parallels to Wagner and Brunnhilde's sleep is more natural. In later works, Rimsky-Korsakov's Kaschkey the Immortal inverts this, with the hero's kiss to an evil witch killing her and releasing the princess. I follow this with Dvorak's Slavonic Dances and Janacek's Osud. The latter is quite odd, reminding me of the role of neuroticism in Schnitzler or the sense of impending fate in Kafka (Mann also leapt to mind, prompted by the spa setting). The first two acts describe a conductor's love affair and its end in madness and death. His opera is only written to comprise two acts and the third has his describing the above events it to music students at its premiere, thereby forming the third act.
The following weekend, I go to a Taraf de Haidouks concert in Cheltenham. Much of their music is intended to take orchestral settings of gypsy music by the likes of Bartok and Albeniz and to place in back into its original context, playing it as dance music on the violin, accordion, bass and cymbalum. The result is rather like rock music and it's difficult not to think that where nineteenth century Europe preferred to take folk music and to apply it to orchestral works, twentieth century America preferred to allow black artists to pioneer jazz and blues. The irony of re-appropriating Bartok is born out by the venue, a rather gaudy regency affair. The audience look as if they go there often to attend classical concerts; standing for this one they occasionally manage to sway a bit (aside from one rather energetic elderly lady). It's also worth mentioning the supporting act, the London Bulgarian Choir, who performed a capella folk songes dressed in traditional costumes.
Cheltenham itself, with its rows of regency buildings, seems rather tepid to me. I'm more struck by my visit earlier in the day to Tewkesbury Abbey. It reminds me of Southwell, another place where the isolated location seems to have helped the building survive with comparatively little destruction or alteration. The exterior is rather ungainly; a squat central tower is flanked by various side chapels and fronted with a facade composed of two towers dwarfed by a central window, recessed back as if it were a romanesque arch. The interior is dark, supported by round pillars (each with a face as a corbel facing its counterpart opposite) above a gothic ceiling painted green and white. The effect is rather like a forest. After the rood screen the effect becomes more markedly gothic, with Victorian Minton tiling below matched by white, blue and red patterns above. England's oldest fan vaulting in some of the chantry chapels, some of it still painted. One of them has an effigy of its knight suspended above it, others show statues of mouldering corpses, others show fights with the devil. I'm also quite struck by the lady chapel, with a Byzantine mosaic and icon of St Benedict.
The following day is taken up with a brief visit to Glasgow. I find the Victorian buildings in red sandstone mixed with baroque church spires, Marcochetti statues, greek revival art galleries, elaborate corbel figures and art deco building fronts quite wonderful. I'm equally delighted with the police boxes I keep on seeing on street corners. The back of Prince's Square behind the City Chambers is labyrinth of arches that reminds me of Piranesi. In front, I'm struck by the column surmounted by Walter Scott. London has no statue of Shakespeare, let alone dedicating Trafalgar Squate to him. I walk out to the cathedral and walk around the graveyard. The monuments are eroded and weathered, decorated with skulls and morality symbols. The symbols seem wraithlike when corroded in this manner. On one of them Minton tiling has been badly blackened by industrial pollution. Several more modern tombs are caged in with rusted iron, the interior overgrown with weeds. I walk over to the Victorian necropolis. The presence of the tombs on this hill reminds me of Prague, as does the presence of an old town next to a new one on a grid layout. Presumably Mackintosh would figure as the Glaswegian Gaudi. Paths spiral around the hill, as one passes celtic crosses, Egyptian tombs, funerary urns, all encrusted with rust and weeds as they crumble to dust. The style of the monuments seems rather diverse, from Moorish gothic to Romanesque chapels. Returning, I enter the cathedral. Its stone is quite black with the roof covered in a rich, dark wood. The modern stained glass is a lovely blue. The interior seems as labyrinthine as the necropolis with a crypt where Saint Kentigern's tomb had rested. Medieval German stained glass creates phovist patterns on the floor of a side chapel. Here alone the walls are painted in white and I notice a roof boss in the shape of a skull. Elsewhere, the sacristy's floor is lined with Minton tiles. I look at the funerary memorials in the cathedral. Unlike even those in Tewkesbury they are brightly painted, somewhere between gothic and Tudor in their design.
Lautreamont's Maldoror follows in the path of Baudelaire and Nerval in delighting in contradictions, even as Lautreamont condemns it in his poems. Similarly, the poems are explicit in rejecting the romanticism of Byron, even as Maldoror follows in the path of Manfred, Goethe and Maturin (although he also speaks of tragedy, such as that of Mervyn, as moral, exciting pity and terror). Where, Maldoror denounces god the poems state that "I reject evil... man never fell from a state of grace." Maldoror itself is far from monologic. At one point, Satan is Maldoror's great rival, elsewhere god is essentially identical to satan ("I created you so I have the right to do whatever I like to you... I am making you suffer for my pleasure") at another the archangel speaks of Maldoror in the same terms as Lucifer himself, a fallen angel they would welcome back as one of their own. Since the text accepts the binary logic of christianity throughout, it is split between salvation and damnation as mutually exclusive choices, even as the narrator rejects god as an evil tyrant; "this god who is insensible to your prayers.. this shapeless and bloodthirsty idol... I should like to love and adore you but you are too powerful and there is fear in my prayers." Since man is made in god's image it follows that man is as corrupt and vicious as his creator ("the creator who ought never to have bred such vermin"), making murder a moral act. Applying Blake's dictum that one should soon smother a child in its cradle than nurse unacted desires, Maldoror emerges as a Sadeian rebel in the same way Blake envisaged Milton's Satan. But at the same time the narrative voice can still shift to utter conventional homilectics; "that torch of unjustifiable pride that is leading you to your damnation."
Roderick Hudson reminded me of an observation I'd heard that while homosexuality forms an obvious subtext in many novels by gay authors, the sense can permeate other works (the example cited was a rereading of 1984 as story of gay love and persecution). Here, there are grounds to suspect a subtext; Cecilia introduces Roderick as "a pretty boy" while in Venice Roderick and Rownland watch "a brown breasted gondolier making superb muscular movements." The core of the novel can as easily be read as concerning Rowland's unrequited love for Roderick as it can for Mary. In spite of the depiction of Mary, women essentially figure throughout as sexual threats that destroys men of talent as much as Rowland's interference; "a buxom, bold faced, high-coloured creature... she used to beat him and he had taken to drinking." Then later; "he had married a horrible wife.. it was said she used to beat poor Savage." Similarly, Christina is "as cold and false and heartless as she is beautiful... her disrelish of a man who lacked the virile will."Labels: Architecture, Art, England, Glasgow, History, Literature, Music
posted by Richard 8:14 AM
Sunday, May 25, 2008
Reading Plato's The Republic it's difficult not to come to the same conclusions previously reached by Popper in The Open Society:"Now it is interesting that for Plato, and for most Platonists, an altruistic individualism (as for instance that of Dickens) cannot exist. According to Plato, the only alternative to collectivism is egoism; he simply identifies all altruism with collectivism, and all individualism with egoism.
Plato's identification of individualism with egoism furnishes him with a powerful weapon for his defence of collectivism as well as for his attack upon individualism. In defending collectivism, he can appeal to our humanitarian feeling of unselfishness; in his attack, he can brand all individualists as selfish, as incapable of devotion to anything but themselves.
Inherent in Plato's programme there is a certain approach towards politics which, I believe, is most dangerous. Its analysis is of great practical importance from the point of view of rational social engineering. The Platonic approach I have in mind can be described as that of Utopian engineering, as opposed to another kind of social engineering which I consider as the only rational one, and which may be described by the name of piecemeal engineering... And there can be no tolerance between these different Utopian religions...Thus the Utopian must win over, or else crush, his Utopianist competitors. But he has to do more...For the way to the Utopian goal is long. Thus the rationality of his political action demands constancy of aim for a long time ahead; and this can only be achieved if he not merely crushes competing Utopian religions, but also as far as possible stamps out all memory of them.
Plato's theory of justice indicates very clearly that Plato saw the fundamental problem of politics in the question: Who shall rule the state? It is my conviction that by expressing the problem of politics in the form 'Who should rule?' or 'Whose will should be supreme?', etc., Plato created a lasting confusion in political philosophy... While piecemeal reform lends itself to democracy, Utopian reform lends itself to dictatorship. The Utopian attempt to realize an ideal state, using a blueprint of society as a whole, is one which demands a strong centralized rule of a few, and which therefore is likely to lead to a dictatorship."
I tend to regard Plato in the same manner as I do Paul or Augustine; a dreadful mistake. Through christianity, Plato produced a philosophical 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 marshal sophistical violence in his own arguments. Plato distinguishes between misleading rhetoric and dialectic as a means of reaching truth, but the text is riddled with rhetorical devices, such as the metaphor of the cave or ship of state. It's difficult not to sympathise with the empirical view that dialectic doesn’t say anything about reality, only about the relations between words. Although cast as a dialogue, once the initial discussions with Thrasymachus and Glaucon have been dismissed, the text essentially becomes a monologue. Voices of dissent are simply silenced in favour of a repeated murmur of affirmation. The Platonic dialogue is ostensibly concerned with gaining consensus between parties, in contrast to the agonistic methods used by the sophists, which were not concerned with truth as an object; nonetheless Plato himself is quite concerned with suppressing other voices ("you think my questions were deliberately framed to distort your argument?... you know perfectly well that it's easier to ask questions than to answer them"). For example, the dismissal of myth is related to others citation of it to disprove his arguments on divine morality - Plato's prime means of argument is declaration by fiat. By contrast, Thrsaymachus has little wish to coerce others into his point of view; "and how am I to persuade you? If you don't believe what I have just said, what more can I do?" Equally, that single monologic voice in The Republic is far from consistent; war is honourable in Plato's own republic, deplorable in a tyranny. Art is of use as an instrument of propaganda or education in one instance ("we must.. require their stories and morals to have the opposite moral"), a dangerous and misleading conceit to be suppressed elsewhere ("we banished poetry from our state").
Part of this relates to Plato's insistence on what Popper calls methodological essentialism; the view that it is the task of pure knowledge or ‘science’ to discover and to describe the true nature of things, i.e. their hidden reality or essence. It was Plato’s peculiar belief that the essence of sensible things can be found in other and more real things — in their primogenitors or Forms. In this sense, Plato can perhaps be better described as a theologian than a philosopher or scientist, in that he can always dismiss the results of empirical investigation as not according with his idea of higher forms that can only be discerned through his own processes of ratiocination; "If anyone tries to learn anything about the world of sense, whether by gaping upwards or blinking downwards, I don't reckon that he really learns - there is no knowledge to be had of such things." Not only is Plato left as Philosopher King, he is also effectively anointed as prophet. Knowledge becomes something that can only be accessed by the few; "those whom the public call sophists.. in fact nothing but the conventional views held and expressed by the majority of the people they meet; and this they call a science." Plato uses the observation of an animal as an example; through study one could gain knowledge of its habits and behaviour but one would not know whether it is good or bad; phenomena are immaterial, mystical access to the noumenal is all. As a result, the only form of politics that is possible is dictatorship; "philosophy is impossible amongst the common people."
Plato's theology is equally self defining, relying principally on a reported account of what life is like in the underworld; a description that bears more resemblance to the Bible than to Homer. Similarly, Plato simply censors the corpus of myths available to him as inconvenient to his conception of god; "misrepresenting the nature of the gods and heroes, like a portrait painter whose paintings bear no resemblance to their originals." Equally, Plato's political ideology can also be described as having more in common with the doctrine of original sin or the christian idea of temptation and fall than with the political theory of Locke or Hobbes; "like a foreign seed sown in alien soil under whose influence it commonly degenerates into the local growth... his passion tyrannises him... unable to control the animal part of us" The result is effectively a form of theocracy; "wipe the slate of human society and human habits clean." Although Plato admits that societies are formed of individuals, he sees individual character as being formed by society; in short, there is only the state.
While I am on the topic of my particular dislikes, we can move on from Plato and enter the modern world of American literature. The likes of Mailer and Bellow are clearly skilled artists but that does little to prevent me from finding them utterly unlikeable for casual sexism and homophobia. If Dickens and Eliot as the leading voices of the British Empire expressed a concern for poverty and morality after god, Mailer and Bellow as the leading voices of the American Empire expressed little other than a rather neurotic fear of the feminine in a post-traditional society. Herzog is in many ways a great novel, dealing with the fate of a representative of the Jewish tradition when cast into a modern bourgeois civilisation ("a proud lazy civilisation that worships its own boorishness"), at once an outside and a product of that society; nonetheless the objective correlative chosen to denote this seem inadequate and rather paltry. The resulting effect is rather novel but not especially edifying. One the one hand, Herzog writes of "how life could be lived by renewing universal connexions, overturning the last of the Romantic errors of the uniqueness of the self." At the same time as rejecting the Western tradition, Herzog castigates Nietzsche for having a christian worldview predicated on seeing civilisation as having reached a point of crisis; "are all the traditions used up, the beliefs done for.. is this the full crisis of dissolution?.. the more individuality seems lost.. individuals are destroyed.. this is a doomed time". But equally Herzog decries modern society as coercive and collectivist; "his recent misfortunes might be seen as a collective project.. down in the mire of post-humanistic, post-Cartesian dissolution, next door to the void." It seems clear that the contradictions are deliberate and intending to render Herzog as an exemplar; "modern character is inconstant, divided, vacillating, lacking the stone-like certitude of archaic man." Herzog is able to delude himself into thinking that his work is the solution to the emptiness of modern life and that his opponents are endangering a great endeavour; but even even if he is a symptom of this rather than a cure it does little to make us feel any empathy for a project Bellow does appear to share with his protagonist.
Der Rosenkavalier is an oddity; a satire of marriage a'la mode that seems more in keeping with the age of Congreve or Hogarth and, along with, Orlando one of the last examples of the sort of comedy of gender confusion exemplified by Shakespeare's comedies. Hofmannsthal's surreal or gothic flourishes (as with the fake masked devils used to torment Lerchenau) also seem odd placed alongside the bawdy humour.Labels: Literature, Music, Philosophy
posted by Richard 6:10 AM
Wednesday, December 19, 2007
When visiting Coventry it's rather difficult not to feel like English visitors to Rome in the eighteenth century, struck by the contrast between the ruined grandeur of the old and the premature decrepitude of the modern. Coventry is in many respects a metonym for many towns in the Midlands; a medieval city with gothic cathedrals, ruined monasteries, half-timbered houses and an early Twentieth century town hall in keeping with the Tudor style of the surrounding buildings. In parts, it reminds me of Lichfield, with the churches and cathedral spires being cast in the same sandstone. It's also now home to dulled concrete and tarnished metal buildings that lack any form of ornamentation or continuity with the previous structures. Where gothic accrues patina over time, modernism simply becomes a decaying vision of the future. It has the feel of a place where civilisation collapsed. The most obvious expession of this is the difference between the city's two cathedrals. I've heard people speak of the bombing of Coventry (conventration, as it was later to be known), of how the entire sky burned for miles around as a medieval city was reduced to cinders. As a ruin, St Michael's cathedral with its tall spire and blasted arches, retains a great deal of melancholy dignity. It reminds like a David Friedrich painting, as I look at the remaining pieces of stained glass in the window arches and a funerary monument still handing on the wall with a skull and crossbones beneath it. A bronze effigy of the first Bishop of Coventry bears the reversed figure of a swastika on its mitre. Figures of squirrels can still be seen in the apse tracery alongside real ones chasing each one through the ruins and onto the grass outside. With the trees being out of leaf, both they and the cathedral look like skeletons of their former self, with the hope of the old stones putting forth some form of new leaf in spring. In practice, this spring never came. Nearby is Basil Spence's new cathedral. Harshly modernist, it lacks spires, arches or buttresses and makes few concessions to ornamentation, save for a form of fan vaulting on the ceiling. John Piper's stained glass and Graham Sutherland's altar tapestry are both striking but seem imprisoned in darkened gloom. Outside a sign on one of the chapels warns visitors to beware falling masonry from the old cathedral. It's difficult to resist imagining a future where the new cathedral has to be demolished while the ruins of the old still stand; though whether christianity remains in England by then is probably a moot point.
Nearby lie the ruins of Greyfriars, a church demolished during the reformation. A later church, Christchurch, was build around the surviving spire, only for it to fall again and once more leave the spire intact. The remains of the pre-Dissolution Priory have a good museum adjoined, showing displays of medieval tiling and some extraordinarily well preserved medieval painting from the book of revelations. A nearby park houses some Victorian churches and a somewhat unexpected monument to the inventor of the bicycle. Less striking is the church of St John the Baptist, a squat affair whose tower seems fortress-like; it served as a prison during the Civil War. Most impressive of all is Holy Trinity, the de facto cathedral of the city. The church is notable for its Victorian stained glass (as well as some rather garish modern stained glass), Minton tiling and beautiful bossed ceilings. George Eliot once worshipped here and it almost leads to appreciate her continued reverence for aspects of christianity, but the church's most famous feature does nonetheless leave me room for pause; a doom painting of the last judgement, showing souls rising from the grave and the damned being lead to the mouth of hell as Jesus looks on. The artistry is cruder than that of Bosh and has an almost cartoonlike quality to it (certainly in comparison to the similar mosaic I saw at Torcello a few months ago). It's a disturbing subject that summarises christianity at it worst, for all of the undeniable force inherent in the work. A modern gothic replica of the earlier Coventry cross stands nearby. The Herbert art gallery is mostly shut, save for Hepworth's Figure (Walnut) and Cormac Faulkner's sound installation, I am an Instrument, which plays different sounds depending on one's position as one ascends a staircase; a sort of combination of Eno's ambient music and Cage's aleatoric music. Oh, and for some Peruvian stick insects, for reasons I couldn't quite discern.
If I have been dismissive of the modern here (as is often my habit), I should mention the National Memorial Arboretum. England really has little tradition of collective memory. In the past churches and cathedrals would have been the primary vessel for mourning for the lost in wars, with some exceptions like the Crimean monument in Waterloo Place. After the First World War, crosses began to appear in village greens leading to monuments like Lutyens' cenotaph. By contrast, America, with its former secular tradition does have national monuments to the fallen in Washington, and the new Memorial at Alrewas is in that vein. Carved from portland stone, it is comprised of two hemispheres on a raised tumulus; it rather resembles Stonehenge or Silbury Hill and has been designed so that London will steam through a gap in the walls on one day of the year and hit a bronze wreath on a central dais. Nearby is a gilded obelisk and bronze statues of soldiers, again in the American vein. It's a surprisingly pagan structure.
The following day is to Lichfield Cathedral for a candlelight concert, which begins with Handel's Messiah, followed by Corelli's Christmas Concerto and John Tavener's settings of The Lamb and The Tyger. These are particularly effective, with the nursery rhyme quality of The Lamb made sinister and sepulchral and The Tyger made dissonant and chaotic. I feel awkward when it comes to carols and demur from singing. The Victorian rood screen behind the choir is lit up during the performance, but there is darkness behind, only broken by the moonlight shining through the stained glass and making web-like patterns on the gothic arches.
Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy can probably be best described as a fallen summa theologica, an attempt to account for the lack of metaphysical certainty in a post-reformation world ("the superstition of our age, our religious madness"), cataloguing the myriad schisms undergone by the church and the number of fanatics that have founded new cults as "they drive out one superstition with another... how many silly souls have imposters deluded!". It incessantly probes the boundaries of the immaterial and the naturalistic, cataloguing anecdotes in an encyclopaedic manner (a painter who tortured a man in order to depict it, a Swiftian tale of medical treatment by applying bellows to the fundament). The summa encompasses both the christian and the pagan, leading Burton into some rather heterodox observations. For instance, his dismissal of asceticism; "a company of cynics... that contemn the world, contemn themselves... yet in that contempt are more proud than any man living whatsoever," his dismissal of the virtuous nature of poverty "there are those that approve of a mean estate but on condition that they never want themselves," or his appeal for understanding of suicides; "we ought not to be so rash and rigorous in our censures as some are." Whilst still avowing religious orthodoxy, the dialogic approach Burton adopts castigates other religions and christian sects as well as questioning some of the basic tenets of christianity; "why does he suffer so much mischief and evil to be done, if he is able to help, why doth he not assist good or resist bad?" Burton also decouples religion and morality, arguing that "the nature of injury" is sufficient to keep men obedient to the law. Finally, he also questions the validity of a universal religion, suggesting the need for infinite religions for infinute circumstances.
Reading Mary Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Women, I was struck by the extent that is in many respects a conservative, christian text. Whereas, figures like Godwin broadly argued that dramatic changes to the social context would have equally dramatic ramifications for human behaviour, Wollstonecraft is much more meliorist in her demands for social change, concedes to a large extent the fixed character of human nature (and therefore that women are inferior to men in some respects) and couches her arguments in terms of christian virtue, arguing that the current condition of women only fits them for the seraglio. Her radicalism essentially consists of the fact that her account of virtue is either neutral of gender (as with her argument that chastity is surely a virtue for men as well as women, although "women are more chaste than men") or swayed in favour of the masculine (reason in particular is seen as something women have been deprived of; "women at present are by ignorance rendered foolish or vicious"). These ambiguities are perhaps best typified by her description of 'nature.' In the one instance, she admits of some natural differences between the genders, on the other she sees modern women as needing to "bring women back to nature," as with her denunciation of Rousseau's women as "unnatural."
Reading Woolf's The Years, I found myself thinking of her statement in Character in Fiction that "on or about December 10 1910 human nature changed... The first signs of it are recorded in the books of Samuel Butler, in The Way of All Flesh in particular; the plays of Bernard Shaw continue to record it. In life one can see the change, if I may use a homely illustration, in the character of one's cook. The Victorian cook lived like a leviathan in the lower depths, formidable, silent, obscure, inscrutable; the Georgian cook is a creature of sunshine and fresh air; in and out of the drawing room, now to borrow the Daily Herald, now to ask advice about a hat... All human relations have shifted - those between masters and servants, husbands and wives, parents and children. And when human relations change there is at the same time a change in religion, conduct, politics and literature. Let us agree to place one of these changes about the year 1910." Although I tended to mentally connect the well known quote in the first sentence with Freud, Woolf was more preoccupied at the time by social relations than by consciousness, in the vein of Lytton Strachey, who once wrote in a letter to Woolf that "Is it prejudice, do you think, that makes us hate the Victorians, or is it the truth of the case? They seem to me to be a set of mouthing bungling hypocrites; but perhaps really there is a baroque charm about them which will be discovered by our great-great-grandchildren as we have discovered the charm of Donne, who seemed intolerable to the 18th century. Only I don't believe it." It's an odd concept, since much of The Years is spent documenting the awkwardness of the characters in dealing with servants, feeling that one must prove oneself superior to them or be cheated; Woolf is nothing if not an arch snob. The Years is ostensibly concerned with documenting the damage wrought by the repressive character of Victorian society, citing the demise of Parnell as an example, but equally much of the narrative of the novel seem to work in exactly the opposite direction, describing a loss of collective identity as social roles become more reflexive ("What's I?.. two sparks of life in two separate bodies.. what is this moment and what are we"), this time citing the Suffragettes as an example ("all their clothes are the same, she thought; all their lives are the same.. and which is right?.. which is wrong?"). The change to human nature seems something both liberating and traumatic for Woolf ("the old platitude about solitude in a crowd was true").
Whilst the fiction of Wyndham Lewis is perhaps one of the most philosophically fluent in English literature, with clear demonstrations of influence from Bergson, Frazier and Nietzsche, he also belongs to the rank of writers like Celine, Hamsun and Pound who remain tainted to some degree of their connections with Nazism; Lewis could be broadly described as anti-humanist, a stance that led him to contribute to Mosley’s publications as well as to his (later recanted) admiration of Hitler. Lewis believed that man could only rise above the beasts by classical detachment and control, and he followed Goethe in distinguishing between 'natures' (the natural men who achieved this; "the educated man like the true social revolutionary, does not accept life in this way. He is in revolt.") and the vast majority of people who were inevitably puppets or automata ("my puppets... the creaking men machines"). Dehumanisation is in other words a central characteristic of his aesthetics. This type of bastardised Nietzscheanism is very much in evidence throughout The Wild Body, a collection of stories set amongst the "primitive" peoples of Brittany. Whereas Balzac had lent something of the noble savage to the Bretons, Lewis has no truck with any romanticisation of the primitive, repeatedly describing his characters as animals (even characterising the art of novelist as being akin to that of an entomologist). The characters are accordingly frequently observed in forms of struggle for power with each other, as with Beau Sejour where a Polish cuckoo displaces a French couple from their home (this does rather lend his fiction a certain tedious masculinism that resembles Norman Mailer, alongside his frequent snide references to jews and homosexuals).
The depiction of these petty ubermensch is offset by the importance of laughter in Lewis and the influence of Bergson's ideas on the subject. Bergson argues that the source of humour is the "mechanical encrusted upon the living" According to Bergson "the comic does not exist outside of what is strictly human." He thinks that humour involve an incongruous relationship between human intelligence and habitual or mechanical behaviours. As such, humour serves as a social corrective, helping people recognize behaviours that are inhospitable to human flourishing. As Lewis puts it; "the root of the comic is sought in the sensations resulting from the observations of a thing behaving like a person." However, in Lewis it is never entirely clear whether he is seeking to deride the "mechanical encrusted upon the living" or to degrade the living to the condition of the mechanical; as with the influence of Frazier, it can look remarkably like scapegoating. For example, he writes that "violence is the essence of laughter.. it is merely the failure or inversion of force." Some of this ambiguity especially occurs in the first story of the collection, A Soldier of Humour where he describes laughter as the foundation of his philosophy as sex was for Freud; "I am a large blonde clown... I am aware that I am a barbarian... I realise the uncivilised nature of this laughter." In what follows, humour is used to degrade the soldier's mock opponent in the story but the idea of such a thing being uncivilised is one of the few hints of humanity that occur in the stories. Whereas Celine and Hamsun's affiliation from Nazism grew to a large extent from their romanticism, their opposition to the dehumanised machine like existence of modern society and preference for gesellschaft rather than gemeinschaft, Lewis is rather more of an anomaly, embracing that dehumanisation instead.
Much later in his career, The Childermass demonstrates many of the same characteristics as The Wild Body. The novel combines two generic sources; one the Platonic dialogue (Lewis adhering to Platonic concepts in defiance of Bergson's process philosophy) and the other Dante's Divine Comedy. The novel counterpoints the classical and christian through the format of the dialogue. On the one hand is the puppetlike representative of the authoritarian deity, known as the Bailiff. On the other are Hyperides and Alectryon, who broadly represent the rebellion of the ubermensch against god (with Lewis balancing his interest in Nietzsche against his interest in Catholicism); "persons possessed of conspicuous undemocratic abilities... must become outcaste in the midst of the modernist class-conscious orthodoxy... these exceptional persons would be considered as too noble.". The latter is described as wearing; "a Bangkok Swastika temple design imposed upon a rough brooch.. his face has no feminine imperfections... some romantic postulant of a much tired order in a militant epoch." By this point Lewis had become interested in Hitler as creating a Pan-European racial and cultural brotherhood, the Blutsgefuhl of the northern Europeans. After the First War, Lewis believed the individual self to be under attack from various sources, liberalism, and communism amongst them, and particularly from a Jewish conspiracy. Nonetheless, the novel also complicates things with the Bailiff's reaction to Alectryon; "have you no pure Anglo-Saxon.. I refuse to be dressed down by a dirty Dago." Nonetheless, the 'dressing down' that follows is essentially another instance of scapegoating. Alectryon's dialogue does indeed seem quite compatible with Nazi rhetoric; "homosexuality is a branch of the feminist revolution." By as is often the case, the Bailiff's rhetoric is quite similar; "the weak will not be encouraged to go on living and suppressing the strong." The text closes with the dissolution of the Court and Pullman's bullying of Satters into the endless ritual of meaningless activity, leaving the verdict of the debate open (although the original text closed on the roar of acclamation given to Alectryon).
It's a commonplace that the American novel tends to dwell on the individual in isolation, the pioneer and the rebel, whereas the European novel dwells on the individual as an unavoidably social animal. Melville simultaneously resides within both categories, siting his works away from society onboard ship whilst using that ship as a microcosm for society at large. In the case of Redburn there is also the presence of a more conventional social narrative, both in the details of Reburn's fall from the middle classes (Redburn's outsider status is conferred through his middle class status, in contrast to characters like Finn and Bumpo) and in its depiction of Liverpool society. The novel does also critique the notion of romanticising the outsider though, describing sailors as bearing the same relation to society as wheels to a coach (quot;deemed the refuse of the earth and the romantic view of them is principally held through romances" as well as uncoving inconsistencies in Larry's dismissal of society in favour of primitive islands when he reaches London). As often in his work the encounter with foreign cultures is used as a critique of American society; Reburn's initial prejudices (as with the anti-semitic description of the Jewish pawnbroker) are challenged by being treated"as if I were an African in Alabama," his horror at the treatment of Indian sailors (whose shipwrights had surpassed those of Europe) as if they were nothing more than sheep, and by his realisation that the thriving city of Liverpool once feared the economic damage from the curtailing of the slave trade; "I could never look at their swarthy limbs and manacles without being involuntarily reminded of four African slaves in the marketplace." Melville's attitudes are ambivalent; on the one hand he celebrates the extinction of national prejudice in American society (questioning whether Turks might not get to heaven before christians) while noticing that black Americans can behave more freely in Liverpool than in New York. There is also the question of the homosocial aspects of the novel, with the emergence of homosexuality as a marker of difference; although never stated this would seem to lie at the basis of Harry Bolton's escape ("feminine as a girl's... a delicate exotic.")
Antonioni's Blowup is something of an anomaly; ostensibly it inhabits the form of a detective film but lacks the assumptions that typically underlie this form of being able to precisely determine the truth behind events. Instead Antonioni's assumptions are neorealist, a reluctance to make moral judgements ("we have examined those moral attitudes very carefully, we have dissected them and analyzed them to the point of exhaustion. We have been capable of all this, but we have not been capable of finding new ones.") and an avoidance of neatly plotted stories in favor of disconnected episodic structures. Paul Bowles complained to Antonioni that a speech in which is character provided the key to the events was cut, leading to the riposte; "If I leave the speech in, everyone will know what the film is about, but if I take the speech out, everyone will say it is about this, it is about that, it is about the other. It will be controversial." Instead, Paul Castle's statement that he has no intent when he starts a painting, and that meaning only comes later becomes the key to the film. The film repeatedly denies the viewer access to the meaning behind events, forcing us to rely on the photographer's perception of what she saw behind the lens, mistaken or otherwise. Art, whether photography or cinema, is described as a contrivance not a transparent window on the world, as with the mime act and the director's erasure of his own character at the end. With that said, the film does allow its opacity to become slightly more transparent at points; it frequently invites the viewer to make judgements, as with its depiction of the misogynistic and lackadaisical protagonist, whose decadent existence lacks all convictions (as with the scene with him allowing a political placard to fall unhindered out of his car) and who inhabits a society whose Dionysianism seems mostly the product of boredom. Equally, the film does not leave the issue of whether a murder has taken place to chance; the photographer does find a body where his photographs had suggested it would be.Labels: England, Film, Literature, Music
posted by Richard 9:25 AM
Sunday, October 21, 2007
Autumn has arrived once more and brought mists with it, turning the blue skies and gold leaves into blackened shapes against a pale and watery sky. By the time I've arrived in Leeds though the mists have dispelled and the sun emerged. The city is beautifully Victorian, with iron markets and glass arcades decorated with allegorical figures and reliefs with oranges and leaves. Belle epoque style statues bear streetlamps alongside the statue of the Black Prince in front of the Post Office. Cuthbert Broderick's Town Hall towers over the city, in contrast to his rather hidden Corn Exchange. Crests bear images of owls everywhere and gold owls sit atop the Civic Hall's spires. Unususally, the only obvious sign of gothic seems to mostly lie with the older buildings. The art gallery is home to a small but interesting collection, ranging from various Victorian paintings (Leighton's Return of Persephone and Lady Godiva, Waterhouse's Lady of Shalott, Holman-Hunt's characteristically crude Shadow of Death) to a set of Courbet and Sisley landscapes. More unsually, is a nocturnal street scene by Atkinson Grimshaw and a macabre painting of a dead bird by him. A set of Sickert paintings of pubs and music halls vie for space with Stanley Spencer on the staircase. Upstairs is the modern collection, Vannessa Bell portraits, Mark Gertler landscapes (and an intriguing self-portrait that references the marriage of Arnolfini, Dutch still lifes and Japanese prints) a Wyndham Lewis painting (rather reminiscent of Metropolis). Paintings by Nash, Sutherland, Hitchens and Piper remind me of my recent visit to the Tate. I have some tea in a tiled hall that reminds me of a Turkish Bath or the Cafe Imperial in Vienna.
Walking in the evening along a street filled with fallen leaves and the streetlamps casting halos in the fog, I'm reminded of Atkinson Grimshaw's paintings. I arrive at the Grand Opera House, for a performance of Reinhard Keiser's The Fortunes of King Croesus. The building, decorated in Pompeian red and with an enormous chandelier, is presumably similar in period to the Coliseum in London. The opera has been lavishly set, with the stage littered with aircraft wreckage following the enactment of an aerial battle. Lydia and Persia become the Battle of Britain and the Nazis. On the one hand, uniformity, on the other a Sardis that looks like Venetian carnevale, with eightennth century, Egyptian and Roman custumes. The staging does point to a weakness in the narrative; Cyrus serves as an agent of hubris, bringing down Lydian arrogance and decadence but it is rather difficult for a modern audience not to see it as a simple contrast of freedom and tyranny (with Cyrus depicted as a cross between Goering and Napoleon). The stoicism of Solon does not look markedly different to the cynical hedonism of Elcius and a good deal less enjoyable, particularly given that contrived denouement renders all paths equal and identical with few leading to unfortunate consequences. Although nout unlike Handel, earlier influences like Monteverdi are also clear, with the music rather more concise and less repeated than Handel. Also of particular interest is that the part of Atis was performed by a male soprano, Michael Maniaci, giving a rather unexpected insight as to how these operas might originally have been performed by castrati.
I read Natsume Soseki's The Three Cornered World on the way up to Leeds. I've written before about the role of the oriental and occidental in Tanizaki's work and the same issues apply here, in a book that frequently references both Chinese poetry and Western painting (especially Millais' Ophelia). Soseki begins by criticising the tendency of Western novels to concern themselves with the ephemeral rather than the transcendent ("escaping from the wearying round of steamers, trains, moral duties and etiquette," although Soseki later praises Turner for showing how a steam train could be beautiful). As in Hardy, the train serves as a metaphor for modernity, epitomising society's tendency to laud individuality whilst simultaneously crushing it to heel. Within this context, he sees people, and especially the old or the menial, as less than human and simply part of the harmony of the landscape (even suggesting using the bodies of criminals to fertilise orchids out of a sense of disgust comparable to Timon of Athens - an oddly Western model). However, Soseki finds it difficult to see this in the context of other figures, who he compares to Ophelia (he has earlier dismissed Hamlet as profoundly un-Japanese). He seeks to find a via media, noting the serenity on her face (although it is ambiguous as to how much serenity many of the suicides that litter the novel find), something he finds again in the compassion on O-Nami's face as her lover is sent to die in Manchuria. He criticises Western literature for not being objective and instead resembling a detective story, but the entire novel is told from his subjective viewpoint and is all geared around mysterious figures and this final revelation on her face, something that enables him to finally paint her. Although he sees the artist as standing outside society, he is nonetheless compelled to inhabit it; "I was being dragged back more and more into the world of reality."
Cormac McCarthy's The Road is in many respects a straightforward inversion of the pioneer theme in American literautre (or even the Western film) from Twain to Kerouac, with two male figures travel across the American landscape (women are as largely absent here as they are in Fenimore Cooper). Like Huckleberry Finn much of the novel is concerned with the opposition of childhood innocence to rather more cynical adult experience. However, it also belongs to something I tend to perceive more as a European genre, the apocalyptic novel, although the absence of cities is striking here and seems distinct from the European tradition. Equally, the novel is quite detached from details like the cause of the apocalypse (a nuclear winter, we presume) or the names of the protagonists.Labels: Art, Leeds, Literature, Music
posted by Richard 12:22 PM
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, 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
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
Friday, July 16, 2004
There can be something rather disturbing about visited restored buildings. The act of restoring an old building frequently does so by destroying layer after layer of history to reveal the desired outcome, just as Schliemann did with all of the cities he found at Hissarlik until he was satisfied he had found the Troy he wanted, or as Evans did at Knossos. In other words, it can be an extremely destructive and arbitrary process. Equally, there is something rather awkward about the hyper-real recreations of buildings, which seems as lacking in authenticity as the faked ruins favoured in the eighteenth century. Not to mention that the very idea of conservation has the unwelcome tinge of conservatism to it, which sits uncomfortably for someone ill at ease with the idea of tradition for tradition's sake. After all, most of the buildings prized as part of our heritage were built by either discarding the styles of the past or through the more literal means of destroying the buildings of the past.
So, I wanted to visit an unrestored building instead, of which there can be few better examples than the Midland Grand Hotel, now known as St Pancras Chambers. If there was ever a case study in architectural hubris it was this; built in luxuriant gothic style (it was not unknown for visitors to mistake it for a cathedral and ask when services began), its lack of either central heating or bathrooms ensured its downfall; perhaps rather incongruously so, since its 'ascending rooms' were state of the art at the time. Entering inside, elaborate columns coated in gold leaf sit alongside walls where the paint has flaked away and floors where the boards have rotted away. Pre-raphaelite murals of Chaucerian scenes and wyvern gargoyles rest in the darkness. In spite of my above comments it's difficult not to feel disconsolate at the Fifties beige or Edwardian burgundy paint covering the gold and crimson Victorian wall patterns. This is particularly so when one ascends the best preserved part of the building; the grand staircase. This imposing lined with gothic arches, through which light seeps into the gloom, leads up to a ceiling vaulted around a central boss, and incongruously painted with a blue sky and gold stars. Even in the dark the blazing colours shine out.
I'd certainly hate to think that such a building would fall further into decay and would love to see what these rooms look like once the paint has been scraped away to reveal the original frescos. But equally, much of why it is so striking is simply because it is a modern ruin; brightly lit and immaculate rooms as opposed to the current dark and cavernous interior would in many ways be a poor replacement. Apparently, now that St Pancras is set to become the main terminal for the Eurostar its restoration in some form is more likely than at any point for decades; I can only wonder what it will become. Later excursions proved rather more diverting. I went for a walk in the sunshine; past Lincoln's Inn Fields, St Clement's Church, The Royal Courts of Justice and then (avoiding the offices of the Daily Telegraph) to Smithfield Market and the sinuous Florin Court.
Elsewhere, in the country lies the awkward red-gritted bulk of Powis Castle, a building which nature seems to conspire to hide. Its rather impressive interior courtyard (flanked by a pair of Indian cannons whose barrel apertures are shaped as a tiger's jaw) is increasingly shrouded by wisteria and evergreen magnolia, while the yew trees are no longer shaped as topiary but have grown into a strange inchoate masses. The castle gives way to a set of seventeenth century terraces, originally progressing from aviary to orangery to a wild area planted with Acer and Stag's Horn, swallows flying low over the lawn at the base. Now the planting is more Edwardian than baroque and leads to a wild area where Acer and Chinese dogwood grows. Each border is lined with purple dahlias, blue salvias, acanthus, blue agapanthus, hostas, phormiums and aeoniums. Since only southern winds blow on the terraces a micro-climate has formed and bananas share the borders with fuchsias. The house combines baroque trompe l'oeil linenfold panelling and tudor plasterwork. Interesting exhibits included a beautifully intricate roman sculpture of a cat, imari vases, a View of Verona painted by Bellotto (slightly more down at heel than Canaletto) and an Elizabethan miniature of Herbert of Chirbury as a melancholy knight (I always wonder what went wrong with English portraiture between the Elizabethan and Victorian eras). The castle also has a clive of India collection, including a palanquin and a finial from Tipu Sultan's throne.
Elsewhere, Packwood house proved quite extraordinary. The exterior is a confusion of styles; stone, resembling Kelmscott to the Victorian redbrick. An enclosed garden with gazebos at each corner combines wilderness, a sunken garden, a terrace filled with foliage and flowering plants (easily rivalling Powis) and a symbolic yew garden, where the numbering of the yews along a long walk represents the apostles, with a spiral hedge leading a conical apex represents the sermon on the mount. The choice of the pagan yew invested a peculiar symbolism in this scene that seemed to resemble Avebury as much as the country churchyard. The interior is a product of the arts & crafts movement, an obsessive, even spartan, recreation of the medieval (even down to turning a barn into a great hall) and tudor at odds with the exterior of the house. Flemish tapestries and stained glass roundels abound alongside English flame-stitch textiles on the chairs. The only interruption is the red lacquer chinoiserie long clocks. Nearby, Baddesley Clinton seems to offer something similar, being a medieval and tudor manorhouse surrounded by a moat (occupied by predatory ducks) with a sunlit courtyard within. Although the house has beautiful wooden carving, offset with ivory and mother of pearl inlay, the effect is one of shabby decline, relieved by occasional odd items liked a narwhale tusk propped by in the corner.
Richard Haykluyt's Voyages and Discoveries is an Elizabethan compilation of travel narratives, written as a source of information on commerce, politics and geography that superceded the inaccuracies of Ptolemy and Mandeville. It regards natives (in this context the term can be applied to Russians and Tartars as much as the inhabitants of Africa or America) as either noble savages (docile and uninhibited by christian morals) or as Hobbesian barbarians existing in the brutish state of nature. These two postures prove to be far from incompatible. More interesting are the more ethnographic recordings; of an Indian Rajah's collection of white elephants or the ritual suicide of bereaved Javanese wives with a kris dagger (an odd combination of Indian sati and hari-kiri) which sit alongside wonder at the never-setting sun above Scandinavia, skirmishes with Tartars, capture by Moors and Spaniards, encounters with whales and sea-unicorns, and Raleigh's credulous belief in El-Dorado and of tribes without heads, whose faces appear in their chest.
Through Daniel Defoe's fractured and episodic narratives there is an inconsistent attitude towards the moral status of the protagonist as the genres of criminal biography and confession are combined, something enabled by the gap between the events and their narration. Accordingly, at the start of Daniel Defoe's The King of Pirates Avery protests of "the scandalous and unjust manner in which others have already treated me." Instead he describes his adventures as "unhappy though successful." Divorced from the social context of Moll Flanders the travel narrative represents a form of liberation from moral codes, with the piracy being depicted as offering both greater equality and opportunity than convention. Avery affirms that they had regretted "heavily they had not practised the same moderation before" and that "the men would be ruined by lying with the women in the other ships, where all sorts of liberty was both given and taken." From one aspect Avery is a sound entrepreneur as much as any government privateer, from another a criminal.
I also went to the National Gallery's Russian Landscape in the age of Tolstoy. The initial pictures by the likes of Shiskin are quite odd, painted in a similar style to Constable (later broadening to a more realist vein similar to pre-raphaelite landscape painting) and with the same idealised vision of pastoral. The serfs are typically shown in the fields but never labouring and with little suggestion of hardship. Tolstoy's outraged reaction to Chekhov's depiction of the serfs as living lives that were nasty, brutish and short (and sharing these characteristics accordingly) comes to mind. Though all of the pieces were pre-revolution it is doubtful that communist propaganda could have produced a worse historical distortion than the idealised illusions of these paintings.
Fortunately, genre painting later gave way to landscape paintings. Of some note here were Isaak Levitan, whose Above Eternal Peace shows a hilltop graveyard with a similar sense of symbolism to Holman Hunt, and Sarasov's feverish Sunset Over a Marsh. Of these, the most talented appears to have been the expressionist Arkhip Kuindhzi with his penchant for vast, depopulated landscapes (perhaps oddly so; I normally only care for landscapes as a setting in painting). The use of light in some of paintings, like Evening in the Ukraine, where everything is bathed in a crimson glow and the vertiginous perspectives, like The Steppe, a stark piece where a featureless green plain and white mist sky stretch off into a hazy distance, make him stand out from his contemporaries. The most striking painting was his Moonlit Night on the Dnieper, a panoramic piece where the iridescent reflection of the moonlight on the river recalled some of Atkinson Grimshaw's works. It reminded me of the night sky a few days ago where the moon's fitful light had emerged from two inky clouds both above and below it; although the moon was just short of being full, it strongly resembled scenes from many a horror film. I then walked past St Martins and the Coliseum Theatre to the National Portrait Gallery. I was pleasantly surprised by this; I've always loved the rich colours and finery of Tudor portraiture but been wary of later developments. Here at least, the flashes of recognition overruled the distaste for the muddy palettes and pedestrian themes of eighteenth century portraiture.
Huysmans's Parisian Sketches is an interesting dialectic of naturalism and aestheticism. Although the narrative describes events in precise detail these events are nonetheless recorded as subjective impressions or even sensations. On the one hand, the content is explicitly political; "have they never been moved by the desolate inertia of the poor... do they only admire nature when it's haughty and in its finery." But the aesthetic overtones cast the oppressed as romantic outcasts; "an obscure hideaway dreamt of by those in solitude... those disinherited by fate or crushed by life." Huysmans, like Baudelaire, aestheticises urban decay and squallor, writing that "nature is interesting only when sickly and distressed," there is a marked element of romantic pastoral throughout; "the joyous appearance of a country lane, enlivened by bothies and little gardens," something which easily shades into invective against industrialisation. Equally, much of the sketches are dedicated to the worship of the feminine but the tone is frequently one of revulsion, with smell being something Huysmans appears to find especially offensive.
Kleist's The Marquise of O and Other Stories presents rather bizarre combination of ontological ideas. Kleist developed a pre-Nietzchean form of pessimism surrounding Kant's distinction of the unknowability of things as noumena and as phenomena, so that his work is replete with ironic misprisions, with tragic consequences in The Betrothal in Santo Domingo, The Foundling and The Earthquake in Chile. However, this also leads to an emphasis on supernaturalism as inThe Beggarwoman of Locarno and St Cecilia or The Power of Music, implying a divine ordering in the sense that Kant had originally intended rather than Kleist's pessimistic interpretation.
Bernhard's Correction is in many respects a meditation on the division of nature and civilisation, reminding me of Paglia's observation that civilisation is a defence against nature. The character of Roithammer is a natural scientist studying genetics, with a preference for walks in the wilderness and admiring Hoelle's stuffed animals for precisely the reason that they were only barely the product of art rather than nature; "these products of nature always provided an occasion for reflection on art and nature... nature is that incomprehensible force that... forcibly pushes people together so that these people will destroy themselves." However, science raises the question of what Wordsworth referred to as how we murder to dissect, to divide the totality of existence (as with Roithammer's order discipline, his concentration chamber being a stand against the untidiness and clamour of existence, and conversely with the narrator's ordering of Roithammer's papers being seen in the terms of an act of violence) and the theme of building sets man against nature throughout. Roithammer's cone is at the exact centre of a forest, while Hoeller's house stands fast against the flooding of the river at the gorge, which has swept away all other buildings there. Nature is frequently seen as an entropic force, from the woodworm destroying Altensam to the decay of the derelict cone, to the flooding of Aurach; "nature hadn't changed so the people in their natural setting were still the same, with all their malevolence and frightful fecunity.". However, it is the aspect of gender that gives this theme its sharpest focus. The feminine is throughout identified with nature as being emotive and volatile ("people like my mother aren't rational beings... unconscious falsifications of nature"), the masculine is identified with rationality and intellect. This theme closely relate to the other central concept of the novel; the status of correction as refinement, as progress, or a form of destruction; "his utterly ruthless, hence utterly perfect corrections" By extension, this questions whether Roithammer is an isolated genius, struggling to create existential meaning in a void ("a man's lack of ideas is his death"), or a neurotic obsessive ("all those experts thought they were dealing with a madman.");.
The novel functions through the accretion (the text being almost cast in a constant stream of consciousness with few pauses) and revision of detail, viewing character as a palimpsest where excavation of history is intrinsic to an understanding of how inheritance has determined its course; "we still had the same conditions and therefore the same relationships as existed two hundred years ago... things that would determine our lives.. Altensam as the making of Roithammer, the source of all he ever was and still is". The novel casts into doubt our ability to live in our own world rather than that of our parents and educators. In the course of this, a rich set of polyponic perspectives become apparent. One particular aspect of this is the conflict between the perspectives of the narrator and those offered by Roithammer's own papers, and the question of reading-as-nature; "at certain points in our existence we break off the nature of our existence and proceed to exist only in books, until we again have the opportunity to exist in nature." Reading and art become substitutes for the intolerable freedom of nature, but is also an equally intolerable imposition on that nature. The result of that substitution is a blurring of the space between subject and object, part of the palimpsest's overlayering; "we become absorbed in the subject and can no longer think it through." As DeLillo put it "In the novels of Thomas Bernhard, the human mind in isolation is the final spiraling subject... a man so compulsively preoccupied with his art that this quality must inevitably destroy him. It has to be understood that Bernhard himself writes a prose so unrelenting in its intensity toward a fixed idea that it sometimes approaches a level of self-destructive delirium... Bernhard's fiction is anti-cinematic. There is almost nothing to see in his work. It is all personal history and tossing emotion, all voice--no faces, rooms, rainy days. There are references to streets and cities but no sense of place, and the novels I've read have no paragraphing, no divisions of text or accommodating space breaks. Bernhard's prose has a rapid and clamorous pulse rate. The narrator delivers eloquent chronicles of misery, illness, madness, isolation, and death. There are points at which the narration amasses such compressed layerings of loathing and self-loathing that it becomes rackingly comic. And weaving bleakly through it all is a sense of themes and patterns that ride recurringly in the mind." Bernhard's work generally works through the creation of a number of doubles; in The Loser the narrator is paired by two chiastic doppelgangers, one an ironic caricature of Wittgenstein as a failure, the other a model of Glenn Gould as the antithesis of all that is Austrian. Nonetheless, the potential different perspectives seem undermined by the monologic narration. Equally, while Bernhard advanced an idea of tragic comedy in which the accretion of tragic detail reached a point of comic release (certainly neither novel leaves much that isn't worse in Austria than anywhere else). Again the problem is that irony implies distance, and the first person narration leaves no room for this.
For most of The Village I was breathless at the combination of a Wicker Man style sparse and naturalistic cinematography with a rich sense of symbolism (especially with the way colours are presented, so that red is feared as enraging the animals that inhabit the woods leading the villagers to wear yellow cloaks). The result is something that intimately depicts the village but has a myth or fairytale's lack of exactitude (again, with the way the outside world was rejected by the villagers as sinful but where original sin recurs in their own eirenic valley with its autumnal beauty), so that in spite of the veneer of nineteenth century puritanism the villagers are never seen at church or praying. All of which is all well and good. I had realised during the course of the film what the ending would probably be and began hoping that I was wrong; I wasn't. Perhaps the difficulty is that, much like the villagers of the film, I find romantic myth rather too entrancing to be discarded, even if it does happen to be an illusion. Even a rationalist like myself would prefer Sleepy Hollow or the more nuanced dialectic of reason and unreason in Brotherhood of the Wolf.
The latest Prom was rather odd; the first half being dominated by Saint-Saens's Organ Symphony, the second being a selection from the nineteenth-century Austro-Hungarian hit-parade. Saint-Saens is rarely capable of restraining his eclecticism and the Organ Symphony demonstrates playful flourishes, lyrical passages and gothic romanticism alongside one another. That said, I have always preferred the darker aspects of Saint-Saens and although his work shares a baroque quality with that of Johan Strauss feuilletonist waltzes and polkas, the combination seems rather odd to me (Poulenc or Bach might have been a more obvious combination from my point of view). Gillian Weir played the Albert Hall organ and as with Janacek's Glagolitic Mass, the orchestra and organ competed through the fortissimo passages. Weir then proceeded to perform a Messiaen piece, which fully displayed his mad organist tendencies.
The second half proceed immediately in a more frivolous vein, as the cymbals proclaimed the beginning of the Radetzky March before the conductor had come on stage, followed by other works from Strauss the elder and Strauss the younger; Voices of Spring, Frederica Polka, Cachucha Galop, The Blue Danube and The Gypsy Baron. I'm very much reminded of a Joseph Roth novel called The Radetzky March; an elegy for the Austro-Hungarian Empire which dwells on the surface of its characters, recording them almost as a set of clothes and dress uniforms more than people. The same superficial pomp and circumstance is at work in the music, which is diverting but inconsequential. More interesting were the other Austro-Hungarian operetta composers. The Hungarian Emmerich Kalman's Gyspy Princess in particular, strayed into gypsy music and away from Viennese ballrooms.
Considering that Wagner has long been my favourite composer (rivaled by Handel and Tchaikovsky) it is a rather unfortunate fact that I have never had the opportunity to see any of the Ring cycle being performed, only Parsifal and the Tannhauser overture. As such, last night's Prom concert of Das Rheingold, performed by the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment and conducted by Simon Rattle (who had also conducted the performance of Parsifal I saw, something I'd quite forgotten about), was a rather special happening. Wagner saw himself as being both the Shakespeare and Beethoven of his day and this idea of the kunstwerk informs all of his music; I tend to think the ninth symphony's setting of Schiller's Ode to Joy is the most 'Wagnerian' of Beethoven's works. But like seeing Wittgenstein's duck-rabbit in both guises simultaneously it is never possible to attend fully to both at the same time. Previously, I had always listened to the voices in Wagner almost as another instrument and certainly the music throughout the concert soared through the Albert Hall. But in Das Rheingold Wagner allows the narrative to dominate in a way that recedes in the rest of the cycle and the discipline of standing through the entire concert with translated text meant that I paid more attention to the lyrics, with little impression of difference being made by the use of period instruments. The moral concerning the corrupting effects of wealth is at best trite and not one Wagner ever paid much attention to; perhaps as well since a music of excess is poorly matched to an ethics of chivalric renunciation. More unusually the cycle, initially suggests that greed exists in the absence of love, but the tauntings of the Rhine maidens and Fricka's jealously undercut this; the ethics of the ring are a peculiar mix of the romanticised Christian and the Schopenhauerian; hence the disenchantment of the Nietzsche who had seen the Dionysian in Wagner's music and rejected Schopenhauer).
Perhaps surprisingly, the text proves to be rather comic, with the Norse gods imagined in the same petty and impotent fashion that Homer created his in The Iliad (though as mentioned above the explicit moralism is very similar to the Brother's Grimm and much of the proceedings seem more drawn from fairytale). It's easy to sympathise with Nietzsche's view in The Case of Wagner that one must translate Wagner's gods "into reality, into the modern - let us be even crueller - into the bourgeois!" The excellent cast brought this out fully (for instance, with Fafner resembling nothing so much as an East-end gangster) and although there was no stage the opera was nonetheless acted to the full, with Kim Begley's outstanding Loki (Loge) easily outshining the rest (including Willard White's Wotan, I have to say); the most honest character present is the most amoral and therefore the least hypocritical. More than a few times as I stood in the arena I thought how unlucky all the people with seats were, since they missed so many of the small gestures and expressions that brought the characters to life. Finally, feeling blissfully happy I left the Albert Hall, seeing the golden statue of Prince Albert shining in the darkness. I walked down the stone steps, glanced briefly back at the Hall, with its iridescent new portico frieze glimmering in the light emitted from the Victorian street lamps, turned and headed to the tube station.
During the performance of Britten's Prince of the Pagodas the sound of something falling over filled the hall just at the point where the music was fortuitously reaching a fortissimo peak. It rather reminded me of the anecdote of Joyce and a 'Come In' to a visitor that had been accidentally transcribed while he was dictating the text of Finnegan's Wake; he decided to leave it in. Where Britten is normally dissonant and sparse, the Balinese gamelan influences on this added a more lush orchestration. Finally, Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition appeared. Since Mussorgsky only wrote a piano arrangement for this its most famous arrangement was actually created by Ravel. This performance instead saw the piece as a blank slate, and each picture had arrangements by differing orchestrators (being quite a varied piece from the outset this did make it seem oddly like Saint-Saens's Carnival of the Animals). Emile Naoumoff's delicate arrangement of Il Vechio Castello stood out for its replacement of Ravel's horns with piano (it did rather resemble a jazz version of the aquarium section of the Carnival of the Animals as a consequence) while Walter Goehr replaced the brass arrangement of the Promenade theme with a version strings and woodwind. On the other hand, Ashkenazy and Stokowski's more muscular arrangements (of Bydlo and the ride of Baba-Yaga respectively) were well counterpointed to these gentler arrangements. I've also listened to a different arrangement of Pictures at an Exhibition; James Crabb's dual accordion version, which brilliantly captures the more lyrical pictures but is less successful with the more powerful pictures, like the ride of Baba-Yaga.Labels: Art, Decay, England, Film, History, Literature, London, Music
posted by Richard 6:47 AM
Friday, June 18, 2004
The first piece at the Proms this year was Bach's Toccata and Fugue. The Toccata was played on the hall's newly refurbished organ and was indeed very impressive, but as far as the Fugue is concerned, I would have been much happier with the original version, possibly Stokowski's orchestral arrangement or Percy Grainger's arrangement for piano. As it happened, the Fugue used Henry Wood's arrangement for full orchestra, which seemed rather excessively jovial (so much so that I almost feared an outbreak of Wood's horrendously cheerful Fantasia on British Sea Songs). The Toccata and Fugue were originally the product of an austere religiosity and was later rediscovered by Mendelssohn as an example of the gothic revival (as with the later use of the organ for romantic works by Saint-Saens and Poulenc or even Donald Joyce's organ arrangements of Philip Glass); and the dark, gothic qualities of the work are what it is best known for now; which are simply not present in wood's arrangement. In fairness, I should say had this been a piece by Mendelssohn or Brahms I would probably not have felt so disappointed, but comparisons with the other arrangements rather darkened my perception in this case.
Elgar's The Music Makers exhibited all the worst aspect of Elgar's music, coupled with an egotistical tendency to quote from his own works. The performance of Holst's The Planets was nothing short of enthralling. Previously, I'd only really paid attention to the more Wagnerian movements like Mars and Saturn, but well performed as those were I found myself listening to some of the other movements (especially to the Dukas-like Uranus, Venus and Neptune) as if I'd heard them for the first time.
For my second prom, I spent a while beforehand in the Natural History Museum. This is one of my favourite buildings, a secular cathedral whose windows are adorned with pterodactyl gargoyles and whose walls writhe with octupi and birds and whose interior is filled with pliosaurs, glyptodons, ophthalmosaurs, coelocanths and sperm whale skeletons. The effect is surprisingly reminiscent of the Sagrada Familia, albeit in more conventional form. Extraordinary that it should be the sciences that have such a building, where, with the exception of the Henry Cole Wing, the neighbouring Victoria & Albert Museum is rather nondescript. This is a good time to go the museum and it still manages to educate rather then being a theme park; I hadn't realised that some carnivorous dinosaurs had downy plumage before. Outside, a new set of wild gardens have been established as a 'live exhibit,' growing native oak woodland, chalk downland, heath, fens and hedgerows.
Arriving at the Albert Hall, the first piece was Schubert's Unfinished Symphony, followed by Janacek's setting of Moravian folk songs and finishing with the Glagolitic Mass. The folk songs stood out with enormous clarity, being surrounded by sturm und drang, but the Glagolitic Mass was the centrepiece. Janacek was an atheist whose interest in liturgical music was akin to his interest in folk music, and the piece is chaotic rather than being characterised by religious transcendence. The pace is frenetic and much of the densely packed orchestration deliberately leaves each section conflicting with each other, as the trumpets strain to drown out the organ or the choir. Though Janacek was interested in traditional forms, the age of Stravinsky and Schoenberg was not far away.
Hampton Court, much like the Vyne, is an interestingly untidy anomaly, composed of an original Tudor redbrick gothic building, with a pre-copernican clock court, elaborate chimney spires and gargoyles alongside Vanbrugh and Wren's baroque building. The original design, with its domed turrets, looked akin to the Tower of London, the newer wing is oddly reminiscent of the New Palace at Sanssouci. The interior of some rooms has wooden panelling and Tudor 'arabesque' patterning on the ceiling. Others have chinoisserie and mirrors in the rococo style, where some ceilings are painted (one staircase is painted by Thornhill and does indeed look similar to the banqueting hall at the Greenwich Naval College), with trompe l'oeil. The gardens have the same confusion; parterre gardens sit alongside an orangery designed to contain Anne's collection of exotic plants. Elsewhere, Basildon Park is a perhaps some nondescript Palladian house enlivened by a room full of shells (from nautili to conches to cowries), a beautifully loggia, and an interest in the oriental from Chinese porcelain to medical mannequins used as lamps and paintings of Indian monuments. The surrounding area is also pleasant; white-balustraded redbrick Edwardian houses lined the river until the Basildon's gates, incongruously cast in grey stone in imitation of the Temple of the Winds.
In terms of film, I've watched Hamam and La Fete Ignoranti. The former is a narrative of a cultural other allowing spiritual liberation, as with Forster's Indian and Italian novels, Bowles and Burroughs in Tangiers, Isherwood in Berlin or Lawrence in Arabia. But setting this in culturally conservative Turkey raises questions that are only answered by the second film, where many of the characters are Turkish exiles in Italy (both films reject labels of sexual identity, but it is only La Fete Ignoranti that suggests the issue cannot be easily evaded, as with one character's indecision on coming out to her family). La Fete Ignoranti is a much more open-ended, dialogic work, where Antonia's naive middle-class background is contrasted to Michele's closeted liberation, but where's Antonia's more principled honesty suggests something is amiss with this. Food cooked recently; piri piri chicken, Lebanese garlic chicken and chicken with lamb and pomegranates, duck pasanda, chicken stroganoff, paella.
The second series of The Further Adventures of Sherlock Holmes has thrown up some interesting differences from the Conan Doyle stories. Firstly, as with the first series, the Victorian view on social matters is not replicated, nor is Doyle's elision of these issues; in The Tragedy of Hanbury Street and The Saviour of Cripplegate Square self-help and the undeserving poor are replaced with a more modern outlook. Secondly, the approach is more postmodern, in contrast to Doyle's studied verisimilitude. When Holmes observes that "if this was one of your lurid stories the doorbell would ring with a new case," it invariably does, and with Watson's observation that this is reality meeting only with "Is it? I wonder." At the same time as setting them as literary creations, Watson and Holmes are set apart from Doyle. Watson observes that his Strand stories were bowdlerised for a family magazine, one character complains that neither look anything like their Strand illustrations (it would have been particularly nice if he could have complained that Holmes never wore a deerstalker).
Finally, where crime fiction traditionally counterpointed the brilliant detective to the hapless police force, most modern crime fiction tends to have someone from the police as its main character. Accordingly, Lestrade has become a rival of whom Holmes is jealous in The Abergavenny Murder, while the detective in The Shameful Betrayal of Miss Emily Smith sees savagery that Holmes is blind to, and in The Determined Client has Holmes conclude that his client is a liar and the police were entirely correct.
The Dedalus Book of Austrian Fantasy, represents an interesting anthology of fantastic, veering from a Germanic obsession with the morbid and violent (in which writers like Leppin reimagined Prague as an other in racial, cultural or even sexual terms, opposing dark and gothic Prague to neo-classical and light Berlin) in the vein of Hoffmann or Poe, to the more metaphorical and surreal work of writers like Schnitzler and Kafka; "The Austrians, according to both Mitchell and Magris, have complementary passions for detail and for the dissolution of boundaries - between the real and the unreal, between dream and waking, between life and death," so that for Meyrink, Rilke and Csokor the inanimate and the animate are closely entwined.
Franz Fafka's The Trial undeniably represents the highpoint of a modernist aesthetic. It reminds me foremost of Eliot's essay
Hamlet and his Problems, from The Sacred Wood, where Eliot suggests that art expresses emotion through a suitable vessel, an objective correlative. However, in the case of Hamlet "The artistic "inevitability" lies in this complete adequacy of the external to the emotion; and this is precisely what is deficient in Hamlet. Hamlet (the man) is dominated by an emotion which is inexpressible, because it is in excess of the facts as they appear." With Kafka, none of the events or personae exist in relation to the reality that appears to the reader (just as the text refuses to exist in relation to either allegory or realism). Instead, it is a work of absurdism and surrealism where space is displaced as if it were Alice in Wonderland. The novels take place in the realm of the abstract, where the bureaucratic aspects of existence take on the character of a Platonic idea. As Robert Calasso noted, Kafka is not an 'organiser' of human experience in the manner of Proust and Joyce. In Kafka, consciousness is never more than vestigial; 'for the last time psychology!' is his watchword, where the central characters of his novels are rarely even fully described. Kafka depicts a world where external determinants have supplanted individual volition and rendered it obsolete. Instead of action and causality being the central aspect (indeed being almost peripheral; the precise narrative voice never hints at the extremity of the events that often follow and never changes register when they occur), undifferentiated bureaucratic time is the substance of his fiction; his characters simply wait. Calasso describes this as plunging the 'sharpest Ockham’s razor into the substance of the novel,' utilising the form of the novel in a manner completely opposed to its origins.
If the reader attempts to place the text in relation to reality, the inevitable result is only a greater sense of disorientation. The most obvious and most superficial reading is a political analogue, reading the events through the totalitarianism that followed (just as existential readings compete with political ones relating to Nazi occupation in La Peste). However, the text clearly suggests that the court exists apart from the institutions of the state, with the theme of judgement recurring throughout Kafka (as in the father's judgement in the original story or the captain's judgement of Schubal in The Stoker). Another reading is Freudian, with the events with Fraulein Burstner and Leni pointing to a form of sexual repression, where Josef K dallies with Leni to the detriment of the case and it is the vision of Fraulein Burstner that finally renders Josef supine to his fate (or the picture of a woman in Gregor's room immediately at the start of Metamorphosis; the last thing his human hands had touched). Such a view would be clearly supported by a biographical reading concerning Kafka's relationship with Felice Bauer (and the parallel with Metamorphosis where Gregor's decline parallels his sister's growth into womanhood). If sexuality is seen as sin (and the trial would certainly seem to point to some form of metaphysical corruption) then this would lend itself to a casting of the text as religious allegory intended to quiet the strivings of the self (hence the lack of any centre to the work). However, the darkened paintings that can no more be clearly seen than the shadows on Plato's cave and are equally suggestive of a godless world (the liminal space between death and life suggested in many fantastic Austrian writings; in the story A Dream, Josef descends into his own grave, perhaps not having yet accepted his death) inverting the traditional Zionist dream of the gateway being opened at the end of time, hence Josef's conclusion that "it makes the lie fundamental to world order" an almost existentialist conclusion reminiscent of L'Etranger. But equally, Kafka's other writings often casts all volition as unwelcome, as in Resolutions; "it remains advisable to accept whatever comes, to behave like an inert mass even if one feels oneself being swept away," and the story that formed the kernel of the The Trial, namely The Judgement where self destruction is seen as the outcome of all volition, of being itself, where effect exists in relation to cause only as a disproportionate excess.
Part of the interest in Kafka grows when considered alongside other Czech's writers, for example the meaningless eruptions of violence in Hrabal, or the ironic absurdism of Kundera (as with the accidental poisoning in The Farewell Party and indeed the comically failed suicide by poison in The Joke). The most striking example of this is Kafka's contemporary Hasek and The Good Soldier Svejk. As Angelo Maria Rippellino puts it in Magic Prague; "a mysterious bureaucracy makes decisions for him, and whether his name if Josef Svejk or Josef K he has no choice but to devise wily expedients to thread his way through the stifling ritual.". Svejk is marched by two attendants across the Charles Bridge to was as Josef K is marched by two attendants to his execution, but Svejk appears invulnerable and accordingly wins through as an epic hero. Where Kafka occludes all but his character's perceptions, Hasek writes in a naturalistic vein and in the picaresque tradition (though the absurdism of the novel is in many respects as close to Dickens and Kafka as to Heller; consider that Svejk's regiment never shows the slightest sign of engaging the enemy). Accordingly, the novel adopts a carnivalesque and satirical pose towards society, but does occlude the perceptions of its character. Svejk can either be seen as both a cunning malingerer seeking to evade hardship or as an imbecile whose actions create hardship for himself.
Bohumil Hrabal's Closely Watched Trains is cast in the genre of a military narrative as much as Sartre's Iron in the Soul but curiously evades its genre. Instead it dwells on violence almost as a Freudian drive within civilisation; from Lanska's slaughter of her rabbits, the station master's slaughter of his German pigeons to the slaughter of the war itself. Death is seen as part of nature, with the dead rooks killed by the cold being akin to the dead German pilot in his crashed plane, both fallen from the sky. Equally, the movement of pigs by train to Prague slaughter houses that the narrator cannot bear is analogous to the attacked train filled with German refugees from the bombing of Dresden. However, the novel also suggests the civilised qualities of the German soldier's; "it seemed strange to me that both these SS men were so beautiful to look at them you'd have thought they ought to be writing poetry." As Hrabal writes in Too Loud a Solitude "life is at its most beautiful in rancid, decomposing blood;" just as in Closely Watched Trains the author attempts to disentangle beauty and horror but ultimately cannot regard the concepts as distinct. The civilised repression of nature is foregrounded in the novel with the suggestion that the novel is itself responsible for violating this repression; "To the courts with these writers and educators, these purveyors of pornography! Away with the monstrous imaginings of these young folks!"
Andre Gide's The Vatican Cellars is an odd combination of genres. Much of the novel concerns the patterns of crime and punishment familiar from much nineteenth century fiction as well as Gide's own The Immoralist. However, much of the novel is peculiarly postmodern, almost resembling the work of Umberto Eco, where signs replace the objects they purport to signify; as with the counterfeiting of the Pope's abduction or the false miracle that leads to Anthime's conversion. Image is seen as a social convention that holds repressed desires in check; "and image of ourselves for which we are only half responsible, but out of whose contours it is indecent not to confine ourselves." However, the subversive aspect is only partial; the other being the denial of the meaning of Lafcadio's crimes by having a false image imposed on them. In that sense, the two plots cancel one another.Labels: Crime, England, Film, Literature, Music
posted by Richard 6:45 AM
Thursday, May 20, 2004
The approach to the house is through a lime walk leading to a peculiar round summerhouse in red brick surrounded by a period garden filled with flowering lamb's ears, tradescantias, electric blue delphiniums, and lavender. A black and white cat hides amidst the flowers to avoid visitors. The house faces onto a lake, an oddly Palladian outlook reminiscent of West Wycombe Manor. Conversely, all that Cliveden house reminded me of was Colditz, where the castle is on a steep cliff above the Moldau, just as Cliveden is above the Thames. The gardens are filled with ponds, alongside which Acer and bamboo grow and shelter a Chinese pagoda. Elsewhere, in the midst of the parterre garden, a marble chapel has an interior filled with gold mosaics, even the ceiling. The effect is not so much high church as Greek orthodox.
This is essentially an early romantic response to classical pagan religion ( with the frieze in the great hall corresponding reasonably well to that of the Ara Pacis Augustae), since Chute was a friend of Horace Walpole. Accordingly, the interest in the pagan is part of a broader engagement with cultural others (as with examples of chinoiserie and oriental furniture from his grand tours; the druid statue and Ramses statue follow in the same vein). Accordingly, the altar is actually made of a South East Asian wood, padouk. Walpole and Chute do seem to have made detailed sketches of various buildings for many of their designs but their approach seems to have been to combine differing elements (the house could be called 'rococco gothic').
Next to the bricolage of The Vyne Waddesdon Manor has a certain sterility in its purity of style; a French chateau with the interior in the manner of Versailles, a form of decoration that had been anachronistic for the bets part of a century, having been overtaken with neo-classical and gothic architecture. Each room is replete with Chandelabra, gilded panelling, Sevres porcelain, Savonnerie carpets and marquetry furniture by either Boulle or Reisener. The paintings are by Gainsborough or Reynolds. Occasionally, this uniformity is broken up with a mother or pearl mughal table but the effect is rather oppressive. There are two exceptions to this. Firstly, a gallery of Dutch paintings; Ter Borch's The Duet, de Hooch's A Game of Skittles or a Van Der Velde maritime painting. There's also an odd gallery of fairytale paintings by Leon Bakst, better known for stage designs for Diaghilev. Secondly, the gilded aviary, filled with Rothschild Mynahs, Satyr Tragopan, Spreo starlings and Grey Peacock Pheasants. The
grounds also have a rather nice glade filled with tree ferns.
Morrissey's new album 'You are the Quarry' has been widely touted (largely by one S Morrissey) as his best album since The Smiths. While at least three of his previous albums strike as being better qualified for that accolade (the music is a little too leaden for my liking), there's little doubt that has more than a few surprises here; most obviously a certain air of glasnost on such topics as race and sexuality, where his lyrics on the former had previously led to accusations of racism and the latter to accusations of being a furtive closet case. That said, the most striking aspect is the oddly mid-atlantic character of the album. On the one hand, there are songs about gangsters that seem a perfect reprise of his earlier Krays obsession, while another extolls an English heritage without Cromwell or the Royal family. Conversely, the opening song is about his ambivalent attitudes to America while Los Angeles is as likely to be the setting for the other songs as Manchester.
Fritz Lang's Dr Mabuse represents a traditional trope within fiction; that of the criminal, like Sax Rohmer's Fu Manchu, or Doyle's Moriarty, that comes to threaten the stability of the body politic. However, the ambiguity is that whereas Rohmer creates a convenient cultural other, Mabuse is much more of a floating signifier; for example, he also represents a form of metaphysical corruption, more in the vein of Stevenson's Hyde or DuMaurier's Svengali. Accordingly, both of the Mabuse films do not sit within traditional genres; they are as grimly realistic as The Maltese Falcon but with the same themes of the supernatural and the insane as Das Kabinett des Doktor Caligari.
Although Mabuse lacks the Brechtian theme seen in M where criminality emerges as an intrinsic part of civil society, the film is in many ways amenable to a Marxist interpretation since Mabuse's victims are all the decadent rich. Mabuse's games become a means of alleviating the anomie inherent in capitalism, as much as Countess Told's trips to the gambling dens. Equally, it's amenable to Rosa Luxemburg's description of capitalism in The Accumulation of Capital as "greed for surplus value, enhanced by competition, and the automatic effects of capitalist exploitation," where social instability is an inherent aspect of capitalism. Another aspect of the films is technology (as with Heidegger's Question Concerning Technology), where the villain in each case is a scientist (not to mention the nightmare sequence towards the end of Dr Mabuse: Der Spieler). However, the film can equally be interpreted in other ways, other than it's depiction of Mabuse's kampf (i.e. a critique of Nazi demagoguery); in particular, the undermining of law and authority by criminal conspiracy represented a key theme in Nazi propaganda, where Wenk and Lohman are able to resist this through force of will, e.g. where Hitler saw mob rule as part of the Marxist "endeavour to eliminate the dominant significance of personality in every sphere of human life and replace it by the numerical power of the masses." Lang's films use conventional genre structures to put forward more subversive ideas about crime, capital and society.
JG Ballard's Millennium People presents a similar prospect to many Ballard novels where rebellion ("an entire professional caste was rejecting everything it had worked so hard to secure.") is both a rejection of society and a product of it, as much as sexual tourism ("thrill seekers with a taste for random violence.. a deep need for meaningless action, the more violent the better"), something analogous to a hitherto repressed Freudian drive. The difference from previous Ballard novels lies in the notion of a middle-class revolution and its obvious absurdity, so that the revolution becomes a purely social matter ("amateur and childish but then the middle classes are amateur and childish" - normally Ballard concerns himself with the liminal space between pornography and technology) with docility being so inherent that any repression ceases to be evident; "we're trying to rescue them from heaven.. I want to be brainwashed." Not only this, but the novel suggests that any such rebellion is effectively assimilated, as with Kay Churchill becoming a TV presenter (not dissimilar to the one killed by Gould); "far from being on the fringe, these groups were now part of the country's civic traditions."Labels: England, Film, Literature, Music
posted by Richard 6:43 AM
Wednesday, January 21, 2004
"In 1951, (Cage) visited an anechoic chamber at Harvard University in order to hear silence. "I literally expected to hear nothing," he said. Instead, he heard two sounds, one high and one low. He was told that the first was his nervous system and the other his blood circulating. .. "Try as we may to make a silence, we cannot... In India they say that music is continuous; it only stops when we turn away and stop paying attention." From: The Sounds of Silence
Listening to the recent broadcast of Cage's 4.33 last night, it was quite noticeable how often it had been described as four minutes and thirty three seconds, whereas the more accurate description is that of an absence of intended sounds; and the presence of unintended sounds whether that of rain falling outside, passing traffic or the awkward shuffling and coughing of an audience (the 'composition' is therefore as aleatory as using the I Ching and the 'performance' is done as much by the audience as by the orchestra). As with Robert Rauschenberg's paintings, the blank slate becomes a screen to project onto. One of the problems seemed to me to be with the similarity to the most notorious work of Marcel DuChamp; an ordinary urinal signed with his name and exhibited accordingly. DuChamp had a flair for satire and recognised that the incongruity of the object would provoke exactly the reaction he hoped. The incongruity of a silent orchestra equipped with blank music sheets has precisely the same effect; unfortunately not the effect Cage had in mind, seeming to view the act as being like meditating upon a zen koan (Tanizaki comments during In Praise of Shadows that Japanese music is more reliant on silences than Western music). Of the other pieces broadcast, I preferred Cage's The Seasons and Ives's Central Park in the Dark.
In terms of film, I've finally got round to watching October by Eisenstein. It's an odd film, not least for its depiction of gender politics, portraying the women's death battalion almost in terms of a Dickensian grotesque, while the sailors of the Aurora (as much as those of the Battleship Potempkin) are portrayed in terms of a cult of masculine heroism reminiscent of one of Umberto Eco's characteristics of an ur-fascism, though it seems equally impossible to discount Eisenstein's homosexuality in that context. Conversely, Alexander Nevsky has none of these peculiarities, but instead is made rather problematic by virtue of the attempts to reconcile a narrative based on one heroic aristocratic individualist figure with communist ideas. The problem is even more acute in Ivan the Terrible where the protagonist is no longer even a commoner, though much of the narrative initially dwells upon the displacement of the nobles in favour of commoners.
I've been reading Carter's The Bloody Chamber and Black Venus, a set of interpretations of fairytales (typically lacking the vicious retribution typical of the Grimm versions), each of which was written and published separately but which are most interesting in this combination. For example, the revision of Bluebeard, The Bloody Chamber itself where the heroine is rescued by her mother rather than her brother, is counterbalanced by The Lady of the House of Love (a combination of Dracula and The Sleeping Beauty) wherein the virginal sacrificial victim is male. After all, Carter had written in The Sadeian Woman that "Justine marks the start of a kind of self-regarding female masochism, a woman with no place in the world, no status, the core of whose resistance has been eaten away by self-pity." Equally, the The Courtship of Mr Lyon is exactly in the vein of Cocteau's La Belle et La Bette, while The Tiger's Bride sees the heroine's sexual awakening as beauty becomes a beast; human nature is envisaged as something mutable where male and female roles can easily be reversed. In some cases, such as Peter and the Wolf and The Fell River Axe Murders sexuality and aggression are seen as liberating forces, in others, such as The Kiss and Black Venus, as oppressive forces. The same applies to the film of The Company of Wolves, where the wolves are both a threat (killing Rosaline's sister and grandmother) and liberating (reflecting Rosaline's own transmogrification), something made possible by the role of conflicting stories in the film (the bride cursing her husband into becoming a werewolf and having to be saved from one by her huntsman husband).
I've also been reading Baudolino by Umberto Eco (perhaps better known as the semiotics of simony), a work that sees Eco almost pastiching his own work. The detective thread recalls The Name of the Rose, the forgery of history recalls Foucault's Pendulum ("all the time that you were inventing, you invented things that were not true, but which became true.") and much of the rest of the text resembles a novelisation of Serendipities.
I've also read Kundera's Book of Laughting and Forgetting, a novel that recalls Bakhtin in terms of its resistance to communism and foregrounding of carnival. The themes of laughter (resistance to official ideology though laughter is described as "an explosion that tears us away from the world and throws us back into our own cold solitude" and is counterpointed to love) and forgetting (oppression through revising reality, as with doctored Soviet photographs; "you begin to liquidate a people by taking away its memory," though for one of the characters the desire to retain memories of her husband are her means of resistance) are counterpointed, in a polyphonic manner (since one of Kundera's main themes is the extent to individual viewpoints are irrevocably alienated from one another).
The same theme recurs in Slowness, where "our period is obsessed with the desire to forget", leading to a dance where the characters are thrown between the humiliation of the laughter of others ("can people move so easily from veneration to contempt") and the balm of forgetfulness ("Stop thinking about the laughter that wounded you - it no longer exists"). Here, forgetfulness is not so much an aspect of totalitarian revisionism but a capitalist equivalent "the situations history stages are floodlit only for the first few minutes... does Somalia still exist?.. a jumble of events that crossed the planet at a speed that made it impossible to see their features." This disconnection between the personal and the political informs the dialogic character of the novel (most evident in a digression where the narrator's wife reproaches his lack of seriousness) where the carnivalesque theme of the body is very much in evidence; "we cannot choose the era we are born into... you'll start protesting against cathedrals, as some modern barbarism..the only thing left for us is to revolt against the human condition we did not choose!" It's this ambivalence that makes Kundera so much more interesting than Klima whose Three Lives reflects a simpler correspondence between the two where the state "forced people to profess what they did not believe."
I was so impressed with Book of Laughting and Forgetting and Ignorance (not having read Kundera for many years), I decided to follow on by reading Immortality, which must count as one of the most impressive books I have read since Earthly Powers. Aside from the existential dilemmas commonly explored by Kundera (typified in the rejection of solidarity with all others by Agnes, a refusal that can be viewed as a refusal to allow her identity to be defined), this can be described as a post-communist novel (or perhaps a depiction of what happens to carnival in a capitalist society); "the age of tragedy can only be removed by the revolt of frivolity. Nowadays people know longer know Beethoven's Ninth from concerts but from four lines of the Hymn to Joy which they hear every day in the ad for perfume."
In either case, laughter has acquired an entirely different connotation to that held in Book of Laughting and Forgetting; "if our era, against the spirit of the great painters, has made laughter the privileged expression of the human race, it means that an absence of human will and reason has become the ideal human state," though elsewhere one of the characters contradicts this theme; "Diabolum is characterised by a total lack of a sense of humour... humour can only exist when people are still capable of recognising some border between the important and the unimportant." Immortality often sees the methodology of capitalism and communism as being essentially alike; "are you objecting that advertising and propaganda cannot be compared because one serves commerce and the other ideology...because the remnants of Marx no longer form a logical system but only a series of suggestive images... we can rightfully talk of a gradual transformation from ideology into imagology." However, the novel's depiction of a post-historical society where meaning has lost all significance conflicts somewhat with this; "Marx tried, all the revolutionaries tried, and in the end Diabolum always managed to appropriate every organisation whose original goal was to destroy him." In one particularly dialogic section, two characters debate this point; "Beethoven and Stalin belong together.. war and culture, these are the poles of Europe.. if high culture is coming to an end, it is also the end of you and your paradoxical ideas, because paradox as such belongs to high culture."
As with the Book of Laughting and Forgetting the central theme of Immortality is resistance; "what is a man to do when he realises that no organised, sensible and effective fight against Diabolum is possible? .. keep on cultivating an inner need for revolt and from time to time give it expression." One of the most interesting aspects of the novel is how its structure reflects this with an episodic structure, on the one hand finding brief moments of significance in an apparently meaningless environment rather than using official narratives; "biography; sequences of events which we consider to be important... we accept as important whatever is accepted by others, for example by our employer." But on the other, such a structure denies any pattern; " world history, with its revolutions, utopias, hopes and despair had vanished from Europe."
With the sole exception of Yukio Mishima I've read very little Japanese literature, so I was quite interested to hear about Junichiro Tanizaki's In Praise of Shadows, an essay on the difference between Oriental and Occidental aesthetics. Tanizaki suggests that Oriental aesthetics valued shadow above light, therefore preferring wood and lacquerware to tiles and ceramics. For example, a Tudor building like Hardwick Hall was constructed with much of its walls consisting of windows to cast light on the bright tapestries within and to overcome the darkness of the wood. Later, rococco buildings such as Versailles or Sanssouci were decorated in bright colours with large windows on one side of a room and mirrors on the other. In each case, the goal was to banish shadow and darkness.
One of the problems of this thesis is that it can be better described as polemical than descriptive (after all dark woods were a favoured building material for much of Western history and ceramics were largely imported from the East. When Tanizaki attributes the importance of gold to being a reflector in subdued light that will not easily lose its lustre, he forgets that this is precisely why it was popular in the West as well). The polemic springs from a backlash against the Westernization of Japan that followed the 1867 Meiji restoration; much of the essay consists of invective against the unconscious Western assumptions in many modern conveniences, recalling Camille Paglia's assertion that cinema had always been an implicit concept in the Western visual imagination (e.g. electric lighting where Tanizaki undermines some of his case by noting that the Japanese were more enthused by electric lighting than any other nation save the United States; in contrasting cultures it becomes clear that the cultures in question are far from being monolithic entities. Not to mention his own refusal to inhabit a house as uncomfortable as his aesthetics advocated) which veers between pleading for recognition of Japanese identity as being 'separate but equal' and denouncing Western civilisation as being tasteless and uncouth (since it is the origin and otherness of many of these conveniences which seems to trouble Tanizaki at least as much as the unwelcome nature of the changes). Much of this Orientalism seems rather uncomfortable today; after all, nineteen thirties Japan saw a great deal of discussion of how to overcome the modern where science and industry were seen as having fragmented the holistic nature of the essentially spiritual Japanese culture. In such cases much of what Tanizaki says represents a disturbing continuum with other aspects of Japanese culture of the time; this is after all written just after the end of the Taisho democratic and the beginning of Showa militarism.
Elsewhere, I've read Hesse's The Glass Bead Game. I'd read Narziss und Goldmund a few years ago and had been impressed with the clarity of its allegory expressed in similar terms to The Birth of Tragedy. Here though, the chiastic opposition between differing principles is expressed in terms of a set of negotiations and an attempt to form a synthesis; the use of three allegorical stories at the end is a particularly interesting technique (since the stories alternately suggest the futility of the Ascetic/Apollonian and the Worldly/Dionysian) more reminiscent of Nabokov.
I've been listening to 'The Further Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, a set of stories that take offhand references to people and cases from the Doyle stories (e.g. from the first paragraph of Thor Bridge) and to write a story from that. On the whole, the dramas pastiche Doyle really quite well, though I have to admit that my favourite (The Madness of Colonel Warburton) acquires that crown on the grounds that its depiction of fraudulent spiritualists would have really annoyed Doyle. It's always interesting to consider Doyle stories from the point of view of the criminal; the murderer in The Boscombe Valley Mystery appears as a victim of fate or causality in much the same way as any Hardy character. The murderers in The Five orange Pips, on the other hand, are brought down by the hand of god. I've also been reading The New Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. Amongst the more creditable pastiches here Basil Copper's Adventure of the Persecuted Painter (which introduces suitable tinges of the gothic), Zakaria Erzinclioglu's Adventure of the Bulgarian Diplomat (a more political affair based on the possibility of a single incident relating to the Turkish occupation of Bulgaria sparking war in the same way as Franz Ferdinand's assassination was to) and Michael Mooorcock's Adventure of the Dorset Street Lodger, where the mystery hinges upon the gender of the criminal (Moorcock seems to be more challenged by writing in a realistic vein, I've noticed). Oddly enough, the most interesting story in the collection is Stephen Baxter's Adventure of the Inertial Adjustor, which introduces a number of science fiction ideas relating to the HG Wells novel The First Men in the Moon.Labels: Film, Literature, Music
posted by Richard 2:54 PM
Saturday, June 21, 2003
Trafalgar Square is in many respects a rather drab affair, its austere neo-classical architecture being composed of shades of grey (comparing Nelson's Column to the Siegessaule in Berlin, for example, or even the Houses of Parliament visible in the distance). The National Gallery is not an especially striking building from the outside; the marble columns and damask hangings on the inside much more so.
Comparing this visit with my last one is rather interesting; I still enjoyed the paintings by Velazquez, Goya, Caravaggio and Friedrich but was more struck by Murillo (one self portrait in particular, with the nice touch of having his hand resting on the oval frame, bring the artist outside the art) and Hogarth (amidst otherwise interminable Reynolds paintings). Like George Eliot, I found the Dutch paintings particularly engrossing (for example, the ingenious Hoogstraten peepshow, a box with two peepholes whose inside is painted in the manner of a home; looking through the holes creates an illusion of three dimensions; a typically Dutch conceit as with Dou's framing of his paintings). Though Ruysdael or Hobbema's landscapes were excellent as was de Hooch's town scenes, the most interesting was Frans Hals, and his shunning of traditional poses for portraiture as well as almost impressionistic brushwork. I also found myself appreciating Van Dyk and Turner more than was hitherto the case, particularly the documentary aspect of Turner's paintings; the Great Western Railway and the Temeraire being towed to harbour by a modern steamboat, for example. The same applied to Claude and Canaletto, perhaps out of liking for the subjects as much as the portraits (Canaletto's paitnings of England are certainly very forgettable), though Claude's paintings of classical scenes with contemporary sailing ships rather than triremes seem rather odd.
In terms of modern paintings, I still find it difficult to appreciate Monet, preferring Manet and Renoir (perhaps because although their landscapes have similar qualities to those of Monet but a broader range, such as Manet's paintings of Parisian society). Still, I preferred Cezannes (particularly the use of angular and geometric brushstrokes on landscapes) and Van Gogh; I could have stared for hours at the handful of Van Gogh paintings on display.
That evening, I crossed the Millennium bridge to Tate Modern and the Globe Theatre. The new skyscraper being built along there looks a great deal better than I had thought it would, as does the bridge itself, but it's reassuring to see that St Pauls is still the dominant feature along there. It seems somewhat incongruous to visit an Elizabethan theatre next to the 1930s art gallery (frankly, I still expect it to have Nazi banners displayed on the chimney stack). The design of the theatre is certainly a much more intimate experiences than with modern theatres (with the actors cut off from the audience), in spite of the rather cramped conditions. Another odd thing is that they have clearly gone to great lengths to reproduce the original theatre (e.g. the marble effect on the wooden railings) but have neglected to season the wood, much of which is cracking. Finally, the three stage doors for props and scenery introduce a new dynamic into the performance in which, masque like, the choreography of actors moving around the stage becomes much more important.
However, the play, Marlowe's Edward the Second was nothing short of exemplary, enacted in Elizabethan costume and an all-male cast (Queen Isabelle had all the melodrama of a professional drag queen; the audience smirked when 'she' was advised to "be not so passionate"). The play (or masque perhaps in this context?) was perfectly choreographed in terms of changing scenes, assisted by an excellent musician's company (the drumming being reminiscent of that at the coronation re-enacted at the Proms last year). Edward the Second is a particularly difficult play to perform in modern times; originally it ran the boundary of the homosocial and homosexual (i.e. platonic and sexual love), but that type of careful coding is difficult to replicate today. The Globe solution was to make the play as explicit as Derek Jarman did, which resulted in a vein of black humour becoming apparent (or perhaps more Carry-On innuendo than the The Jew of Malta; the audience laughed at many references that would have been innocent to an Elizabethan audience and missed others, such as Edward's question to Gaveston whether he 'knows' Spencer; an ambiguous phrasing). Perhaps that's why today, it's rather more reminiscent of Antony and Cleopatra than Richard the Second. Later, I walked along the side of the Thames as the water lapped against the bank, the city lights danced in their reflections and St Pauls lit up the skyline. A good day.
As far as reading is concerned, I've finally read L'Etranger. The notion of failing to adhere to social conventions through pretence is sufficiently striking to explain the book's reputation, but not nearly as interesting as La Peste, or even Patricia Highsmith's Ripley novels (since the moral indifference of the novel does remind me of Highsmith somewhat).
A couple of weeks later, arriving at the Albert Hall, I was struck by the new entrance hall, which surprised me by not being utterly malign. The abstract iridescent design in lieu of a fresco on the portico is actually rather pleasant, though the plain glass sheeting on the windows and doors seemed a bit out of keeping with its surroundings. Entering the Hall I was able to get a place at the very front of the arena just in front of the orchestra, which I meant I could see the musicians pulling faces whenever they fluffed something. Since the overture to Tannhauser is one of my favourite pieces I was possibly a little fussy about the performance, since the string section seemed a little too restrained and the horn section a a little too vigorous at places. I wasn't quite as familiar with the seven Berg songs and Brahms Symphony no.1 in C minor that followed on, the former quite gentle and lyrical, reminding me of Mendelssohn, the latter reminding me of Schubert and Beethoven. A second concert began the following week with Mendelssohn's Violin Concerto in E Minor, a rather fine piece, and ended with Mahler's Titan Symphony No. 1 in D Major, which seemed somewhat piecemeal; good in places, sketchy in others. Two encores followed; Haydn, and a rather fine rendition of an overture from Lohengrin.Labels: Art, Drama, Literature, London, Music
posted by Richard 2:47 PM
Wednesday, January 1, 2003
I visited Wightwick Manor over Christmas. It's a decidedly odd house. As one approaches the rather ramshackle building one is struck by the contrast between the mock Tudor facade and the Victorian redbrick. Similarly, the medievalism of the house contrast within the plumbing and electricity (rather like the New Palace at Sanssouci).
Inside, the house has some wonderful William Morris rugs and wallpaper, Kempe stained glass, De Morgan pottery and paintings from Ford Madox Brown. The main highlight of the Manor is the hall, which has a marvelous Venetian mirror and a Burne Jones painting. It also has a Bison head mounted on the wall, who was suitably attired with seasonal decorations.
I got through quite a great deal of reading; The Pickup by Nadine Gordimer, My Idea of Fun by Will Self (a rather queasy mixture of magical and social realism; I have to conclude that Self seems mainly best when confined to short stories), Misreadings by Umberto Eco (a rather carnivalesque series of parodies based upon the idea of distorted perspectives; perhaps a little too contrived and simplistic in this form), Chroma by Derek Jarman (a set of meditations upon the differing significances of colours; perhaps at its best when Jarman becomes distracted from his rather rigid theme), Becoming a Man by Paul Monette (not unlike White's A Boy's Own Story) albeit rather more politically strident, and Steppenwolf by Herman Hesse. Solaris by Stanislaw Lem was rather disappointing; a rare case where the film version, Tarkovsky's beautifully eerie rendition, was much better. The novel does address some of the themes more fully (particularly suicide), but suffers from being rather excessively discursive; the descriptions of Solaris adding little to the book. Update: I've now seen the more recent remake of Solaris (remake of the film as much as the book, I suspect), which was considerably better than I expected. The disconnected quality to the filming (more reminiscent of Kubrick than Tarkovsky it should be said; perhaps a 2001 remake is in order) and the special effects both work quite well, and the film introduces several interesting ideas; e.g. concerning the morality of killing the duplicates, especially with the idea of Snow attacking and being killed in self defence by a duplicate of himself. On the other hand, I do agree somewhat with Lem's own critique of the film; it does dwell excessively on Kris and Rheya, and excludes some of the ideas concerning the Solarian organism's attempts at communication.
Noting that I don't often write about films on this page, I thought I should mention two films I rediscovered; Stalker by Andrei Tarkovsky and u>Matador by Pedro Almodavar. The latter perfectly balances the Freudian dilemma; on the one hand the liberation of the lovestruck pair of sociopaths (civilisation and its discontents) and the convergence of Thanatos and Eros. On the other, the consequences of repression through Angel and his mother. It's interesting that similar themes should re-emerge in Almodavar's latest, more naturalistic, film Talk to Her, though there the characters are left deprived of dignity and stature. Stalker reminds me of T S Eliot's description of Hamlet; in the absence of the fabled room, there is no objective correlative. As ever with Tarkovsky, the lingering footage of the landscape is especially haunting conveying so much more than the landscape in Apocalypse Now. But it's also about our stunted capacity for wonder; a kind of postmodern fairytale.
HG Wells pleasantly surprised me somewhat. In the same way that the socialist morality fable of The Time Machine is subverted by having the stereotyped characteristics of the Eloi/Proletariat and the Morlocks/Bourgeoisie inverted, The First Men in the Moon is equally ambivalent. In some ways the film seems a denunciation of colonialism; " What business have we here smashing them and destroying their world?" as the explorers attack the Selenites who spare cavor in return. The film is less than sympathetic to colonialism; "Governments and powers will struggle to get hither, they will fight against one another." The perspectives of Cavor and Bedford are deliberately counterposed; one is belligerent to the Selenities in the capacity of a practical man, while the scientific interest of the other leaves him cold and removed from concern for others. Accordingly, Cavor's account of the Selenite socialist utopia is deliberately undermined as he records overcoming his irrational practices to the imposition of roles upon the Selenites ("trained from their earliest years to give a perfect respect and obedience"), or even the drugging of workers between shifts.
I also read some of E F Benson's horror stories. On the whole, I do not consider his apparent obsession with either slugs or spiritualism to be healthy; much of his work is unpleasantly reminiscent of some of Conan Doyle's ill advised ventures into this field. Algernon Blackwood is, overall, the better horror writer. Also read John Wyndham's The Seeds of Time. I like Wyndham, but he is so much better when his pessimism shines through his whimsy.
Juan Goytisolo's novel, A Cock Eyed Comedy was especially interesting.
Essentially a picaresque rendition of Orlando, the novel perfectly matches Bakhtin's idea of heteroglossia and carnival; "in church language.. in order to parody it from within and expose its hypocrisy," a subversive intent that recalls Genet. That said, the carnival form is not ideal for subversion, since carnival is dependent (parasitic, even) on the order it seeks to invert, something Goytisolo partly acknowledges; "why don't you denounce tout court the backwardness and oppression.. contradiction and ambivalence nourishes your literary work."
However, the best read was The Garden of Secrets by Juan Goystisolo.
Told by differing narrators, this is a truly polyphonic novel with differing
perspectives and styles; "to realise a creative mix of perspectives and possibilities ... with digressions and alternatives." Elsewhere one of the narrators comments "I strive to see myself from someone else's point of view." As such, differing narrators lambast each other, accusing one another of lack of scientific rigour and of introducing anachronisms; "circumscribed by severely blinkered vision." Some of them describe the central character as an ascetic, some as an epicure; "I felt watched from a thousand differing anglesand sides, harassed by a prismatic gaze, a multiple, polyhedral eye." Like Kundera, Goytisolo equates the steely examining eye of the omnipresent narrator with that of the panopticon.
Leaving fiction aside, I read Bagehot's The English Constitution and Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals. Of the former, I recall Zizek's comment on how the most persuasive radical argument often from conservatives like Pascal; certainly it is a much more insightful document than The Federalist Papers. Of the latter, Nietzsche is as gloriously complex as ever. This is the text that comes closest to presenting the ubermensch in partly racial terms, but Nietzsche also bitterly attacks anti-semitism as a mark of slave morality; "they are all men of resentiment. " Nietzsche is perfectly alive to the ambiguities of the idea of the ubermensch; "consider what a problem it is, Napoleon, this synthesis of the inhuman and the superhuman." Georg Brandes described Nietzsche's philosophy as "aristocratic radicalism," combining the concept of the elite who define their own values instead of tradition with a commitment to meritocracy rather than to heredity. This text is also the one that comes closest to reconciling these ambiguities in a dialectical, almost Hegelian pattern, in which the re-evaluation of all values will be produced, but it is for these complexities (for example) between regarding science as an aspect of the will to power and a decayed aspect of the christian resentiment of the desire for an impossible truth, that makes Nietzsche so fascinating.
I went to see a performance of Powaqquatsi at the Barbican (it's not often that you see palm trees covered in snow but that was the case outside the building. I still say that the inside resembles a nuclear bunker decorated by Ikea). The music is rather more varied than Koyannisquatsi, and perhaps rather a little too varied. Similarly, the film lacks the visual language used in Koyaanisquatsi (though it does overlay some frozen and moving imagery to good effect). The film seems less than persuaded as to whether it is concerned with the greater spiritualism of the third world (the film is rife with fire and water imagery) or with the destructive effects of economic inequality between first and third world (the two not being quite congruent, but with the latter explanation being suggested by the meaning of the title). In particular, the film has a rather unpleasant tendency towards cheap sentimentality; children in front of guerilla warfare messages or next to trucks on dusty roads.Labels: England, Horror, Literature, Music, ScienceFiction
posted by Richard 1:25 PM
Tuesday, August 20, 2002
The recent Proms concert recreating the coronation of King George, as planned (rather poorly as it turned out) by Handel, was rather more pleasingly theatrical than usual. The concert began with a choir unexpectedly appearing on the staircase behind the audience and ended with a group of drummers disappearing through a door as their drumming grew fainter and fainter. The music was a pleasant mixture of Handel, Purcell and some more obscure composers. There was also a less endearing piece by Thomas Tallis which must qualify for an award for grovelling abasement, even by the somewhat low standards of CofE (it did rather remind me of a certain prayer in Monty Python's The Meaning of Life). As ever, I am at a loss to explain why the area of the Albert Hall has a pond at its centre, or why said pond has inflatable frogs and flamingos on it.
Also attended a performance of Boris Godunov from the Kirov Opera (who apparently prefer to be known as the Mariinsky theatre these days); an exceptional performance, and these two proms are certainly amongts the best I have attended (performances of Parsifal, songs of Brecht and Weill and the music of Reich, Glass & Eno being the nearest rivals). The opera is perhaps a little excessive in its religiosity (unlike Macbeth, Boris simply dies of guilt rather than being deposed) and the role of the orthodox faith but the music simply cannot be flawed. I also astonished myself by overcoming decades of English conditioning by telling the couple next to me to shut up. Lunch beforehand sat next to the Albert Memorial was also very pleasant.
I've recently been reading How the Dead Live by Will Self, Lessing's The Sweetest Dream, Hazlitt's Spirit of the Age and Wollstonecraft's Short Residence in Scandinavia, which was the most interesting of these. Wollstonecraft makes clear throughout that sensibility is not something that can be considered separately to taste and cultivation; "society there is in a more advanced tate... as the mind is cultivated and taste gains ground, the passions become stronger, and rest on something more stable than the casual sympathies of the moment," which reinforces her statement that "I never met much imagination amongst people who had not acquired a habit of reflection." But elsewhere in the text her position is slightly different; "nature is the nurse of sentiment - the true source of taste" which accord poorly with her descriptions of the 'simplicity of manners' she has found.
Further afield, she appears much closer to the position of her husband, that society must be considered a largely corrupting force, as when Wollstonecraft begins her narration with the adage that "despotism, as is usually the case, I found had here cramped the industry of man," or her observation that "the natural... will be found to consist merely in the degree of vivacity... whilst
the varieties which the forms of government, including religion, produce are much more numerous and unstable." In short, nature and civilisation exist in a shifting dialogue with one another in the course of the book, which is what makes it so much more interesting than a mere tract.Labels: Literature, Music
posted by Richard 1:16 PM
Thursday, December 20, 2001
The Barbican Centre recently put on a series of short films with specially commissioned soundtracks. Oddly enough the first of these, a collaboration between Nicholas Roeg and Adroan Utley of Portishead, simply entitled 'Sound,' was rather reminiscent of Koyaanisquatsi (although Kubrick's 2001 seems the more obvious influence), with images of icicles erupting into outer space, and of stars melting into microscopic cells. However, where Reggio's film has a certain clarity to it, Roeg stated in his pre-film talk that he wished this to be a film that people "do not try to work out." The disconnected nature of the film serves as a disquisition on the fragmented nature of memory (something reflected very well by the soundtrack with its extensive use of sampling), but for a film that we are not supposed to conceptualise too much, the film nonetheless continually invites us to do so, being almost saturated with a number of disparate themes, including a meditation on the nature of celebrity featuring Claudia Schiffer.
One aspect of this is the image of Schiffer's face occluded behind a grid, like that of a chess board, wherein some of the squares are transparent and others opaque, the final image then being superimposed over a variety of images such as a frieze of hieroglyphs or a bust of Athena. It gives a certain mythic quality to discussions of celebrity, and rather reminds me of Camille Paglia's comment that western art has always been inherently cinematic.
The second film was a collaboration between the Quay brothers and Stockhausen. The oppressive score is almost impossible to describe; it seems to carry the listener along with it, rather them allowing them any distanced standpoint from which to observe it.
The film itself is rather easier to describe, with sepia-tinted images of a woman writing letters from an asylum. With images of the pen moving all by itself, the film merits some comparison with Bunuel and Cocteau, although jocular images of puppetry sit uneasily alongside the rest of the piece.
The final film was evidently what most of those present has come to see, with both Werner Herzog and John Tavener present to discuss the piece before the performance. The subject of the film is pilgrimage, and the images of Russian orthodox ceremonies make clear the reason for Tavener's interest. Tavener himself, with his flowing white hair, appears to resemble the elderly Tolstoy more and more. Whereas the elderly Count had proclaimed "it is impossible to continue like this, impossible" Tavener speaks of the "impossibility of modernism, minimalism, ism, ism, ism," before proclaiming the death of art and how no western singer could perform this piece (which appears to consist of a number of sanskrit refrains endlessly repeated - unfortunately Tavener cannot remember what the sanskrit means) . The film, he pronounces, is decidedly not art, it may either be higher than art or lower than art. Art is about substance, not the essence that interests him. In short, Tavener appears in exactly the same manner as I envisage Tolstoy to have been; a contemporary Biblical prophet, with all the curious imbrication of insight and obduracy that that implies. In truth, Tavener's music is not especially well suited to these surroundings, which lack the necessary intimacy. Moreover, Herzog's film is perhaps not. The images of pilgrims moving to the shrine on their knees, in evident agony, seems a somewhat ambivalent homage to a spirituality that can both contain such profound reverence and such grotesque self-denigration.
posted by Richard 12:48 PM
Tuesday, December 4, 2001
I was recently reminded of the controversy surrounding David Cronenberg's film of JG Ballard's novel, as an acquaintance indignantly forwarded a quotation from Ballard that "A car crash harnesses elements of eroticism, aggression, desire, speed, drama, kinaesthetic factors, the stylizing of motion, consumer goods, status - all these in one event. I myself see the car crash as a tremendous sexual event really: a liberation of human and machine libido." It is perhaps rather too easy to become indignant about such a quotation, stating as it does Ballard's preoccupation with the malleability of human personality in a fractured technocracy, and of the resurgence of primeval instincts in such an environment. Nonetheless, it is equally worth noting that Ballard has a recurring habit of stating the opposite case to his own beliefs in the most extreme manner possible; as he put it himself, the novel is "a cautionary tale where the writer or the film maker plays devil's advocate and adopts what seems to be an insane or perverse logic in order to make a larger point."
Moreover, it seems difficult to refute Ballard's allegation that we do not generally appear to regard the car as an appliance but as an extension of our self. It is not difficult to infer from that that our perceptions of the automobile are, in part at least, sexualised. One thinks of the morbid mythology surrounding the deaths of Jayne Mansfield and James Dean; both of whom might well have been utterly forgotten had they died in their sleep. More recently, much of the hysteria that the sudden demise of Diana created, a hysteria that seemed to have a great deal to do with how she died. One also thinks of the importance of the car to hollywood, and to such films as Mad Max. Such a critique might be more lucidly penned by the author in question:
"I've been in a car crash and it did nothing for my libido. What I was saying was that the idea of the car crash is sexually exciting or intriguing. By sex I mean all those aggressive sexual energies that impel some young men to chase women drivers who dare to overtake them."
House of Leaves by Mark Danielewski, has been compared by Bret Easton Ellis to the likes of Joyce and Ballard, but the closest comparison seems to me to be with Lawrence Sterne. Wolfgang Iser has made the same kinds of claim
for Tristram Shandy, that Danielewski's novel makes it for itself, whereby
the meaning of the text is something constructed by the reader. If anything, Danielewski overemphasises this point rather too much, and his novel starts
to seem formulaic (especially give the novel's sub-plot wherein a commentary of Heidegger's concept of the unheimlich postulates a particularly gothic interpretation on formalist ideas of defamiliarisation; an experience enforced on the reader through the concentric rings that make up the narration; firstly the recording of events by Zampano and their subsequent re-telling by another narrator, secondly the possibility that either narrator is unreliable and thirdly the labyrinthine amount of footnotes).
Both Tristram Shandy and House of Leaves approach this in a satirical fashion, and Danielewski includes a chapter wherein various luminaries, such as Douglas Hofstadter, Camille Paglia, and Jacques Derrida discuss the non-existent film that forms the meta-text of the novel. Although, the character given Paglia's name sounds rather more like Andrea Dworkin than the author of Sexual Personae, the author is nonetheless keen to ensure that her lampooned interview accurately depicts the relationship between the two main characters of the film. The problem with this meta-commentary is that it does leave the text as bing exclusively self-referential; enough to make one sympathetic to the ideas of the New Puritan Manifesto.
I've also recently watched Koyaanisquatsi, the collaboration between Philip Glass and Godfrey Reggio. The title is derived from Hopi, and signifies life out of balance, a reference to the concerns in the film that our existence is out of balance with nature, as the film progresses from images of nature to those of humanity. I still find it difficult to find this a particularly apposite description of the film. I have always shared WH Auden's view that factories and buildings were at least as beautiful as nature if not more so and this is certainly the case here, as the sun glints over the monolithic skyscrapers of Manhattan and a nuclear cloud rises above the Mojave desert.
More particularly, when the film shows time-lapse images of humans scurrying round like ants, it seems as much a commentary on stasis within change as the images of the sand blowing and continually resettling within the Sahara, a pattern continually subject to mutability and continually resettling itself.Labels: Ballard, Film, Literature, Music
posted by Richard 12:49 PM
Tuesday, November 13, 2001
One of the things that struck me when reading J G Ballard's novel Super Cannes is simply that Ballard more closely resembles the kind of literary qualities we normally associate with French writers, such as Michel Houellebecq (it's worth noting that the novel's French setting does point to this, most vividly in its foregrounding of the Alice in Wonderland trope, a novel always regarded by the French as the acme of surrealism, which is surely at the heart of Ballard's codification of psychopathy).
This surrealism has always been central to Ballard's writing in a way that has not been true for rather more pallid novels such as the tedious American Psycho. The question in Ballard's novels has always been whether the suburbanisation of the soul simply creates frustrations (the "new vices" referred to) that lead to a release of primitive impulses (a model that would be congruent with Freud's Civilisation and its Discontents; "Homo Sapiens is a reformed hunter-killer of depraved appetites... these criminal activities have helped them rediscover themselves. An atropied moral sensibility is alive agin.") or whether it actively creates an entirely modern form of psychopathy "the old morality belonged to a cruder stage of human development... since they couldn't rely on self control they needed ethical taboos." The question is this; are the violent executives in the novel, as Penrose suggests, really no different from historical figures like Gilles De Rais? At some points the conflict between these two possibilities results in apparent contradictions; "the deviant impulses coded into his nervous system have been switched off." One particularly noteworthy statement is when Penrose refers to "a Darwinian struggle between competing psychopathies... we're driven by bizarre consumer trends, weird surges in entertainment culture... we may need to play on deep rooted masochistic needs." As a statement it would appear to lack internal cohesion, especially as these competing psychopathies have hitherto being regarded as closely imbricated throughout; these deep rooted needs appear to differ from those expressed in Nazi Germany in that they reflect a desire to be a victim - a change that would surely make them far from being any more deep rooted that the consumer needs.
In fact, one of the hallmarks of Ballard's surrealism is that the events
are seen via a number of distorting mirrors. For example, "he thinks you're
infantilising them... you begin by dreaming of the ubermensch and end up smearing your own shit on the bedroom wall." Another example is Penrose
saying "she's a rebel, but she doesn't realise that Eden Olympia is the biggest
rebellion of all," when he has previously been at pains to portray Eden Olympia as a form of social evolution; "perverse behaviours were once potentially dangerous. Societies weren't strong enough to allow them to flourish."
By contrast, in today's society the emphasis on self motivation in firms has permitted a change, although the statement contradicts the previous one stating that the aristocracy had always been able to cultivate their Sadeian impulses. In this, Ballard's surrealism is particularly adept; by distorting the events through the eyes of a multiple overlapping statements and perspectives the reader is exposed to the same form of disorientation as the characters. The most obvious device for this is aheavily biased narrator; where we are invited to determine whether his own psychopathy is any different to that promoted by Penrose.
However, in certain respects, the book is a step backwards. The plot of Cocaine Nights is partly repeated with violence erupting in cultureless modernity and the narrator ultimately repeating an almost archetypal pattern established by previous characters. Furthermore, the use of the detective genre limits the possibilities of the novel; the surrealism inherent in many of the ideas is diminished by the structured ordering imposed on it, as opposed to the episodic nature of novels like Crash and High Rise. That said, there are some hints as to these rather more traditional elements of Ballard's style "Eden-Olympia changed him... the way it changed everyone. People float free of themselves." Yet, even this has to be alongside Penrose urging Paul to "be true to your real self."
On the subject of Ballard, I've also finally read The Atrocity Exhibition,
which is back in print after many years of absence from the book shelves. This is undoubtedly Ballard's masterpiece, and represents his most perfect fusion of Freud and Baudrillard in a work that bears more resemablance to a surrealist painting (hence the repeated reference to Ernst). The style of the work perhaps bears a closer resemblance to Burroughs than to Ballard (many masterpieces tend to be atypical of the artist in question), with the way that themes and characters from other novels, like Vaughan in Crash and figures from The Unlimited Dream Company, reappear ("in a succession of roles, ranging across a spectrum of possibilites
available to each of us in our interior lives," although the form of this work does not permit Ballard to establish his typical theme of the malleability of the persona) in the same way Dr Benway did for Burroughs (the visual metaphor obviously applies here also, given that the cut-up technique was taken from the visual arts, with free association also being used by Ballard). Unlike a novel, this is a work that operates by an almost obsessive repetition of themes, rather than a linear development.
The themes in question are chosen to depict a virtualisation of our environment, with the consequence that as people are bombarded with these images they "prefer not to understand what is going on around them, so they can impose their own subjective image upon the external world" - a trait that typically leads to psychopathy.
With this inability to accept the phenomenology of being established the result is what Frye might have termed an undifferentiated continuum, in which the distinction between subject and object is dissolved; "this reluctance to accept the fact of his own consciousness may reflect certain difficulties in the immediate context of space and time." Finally, I've been reading Vermillion Sands, which conforms to the typical set of variations on a theme that has characterised Ballard's work. But not only are the customary themes and characters dismantled and reassembled here; all of the stories are set against a common location and, like musical motifs a set of ideas, each of the stories is filled with sonic sculptures and sand yachts.
With The Day of Creation it would appear that I have now read all of Ballard's novels, though as this one ably attests, not all are worthy of the same effort. In many ways, this parable of man pitted against nature has more in common with Hemingway than Ballard. One of the main themes of the novel is introduced by the presence of a TV documentary maker; "these sentimental wildlife films... help people to remake nature in a form that reflects their real needs." This is a theme that the novel repeatedly insists upon "television's flattering revision of nature was an act of creation as signficant as [its] original invention." However, where Ballard more commonly distorts any dividing line between truth and reality (hence his distaste for VR film predicated on whether people have re-entered reality or not) this leaves the division quite clearly demarcated. As always with Ballard's characters, Mallory seeks to oppose the very forces that have overwhelmed him; "your wish to destroy it is really an attempt to destroy televsion's image of the world." However, this is referring not to some form of metaphysical corruption but to a river. In common with most rivers, this one would appear to be lacking any figurative or metaphorical character.
I've also been reading Nabokov's Bend Sinister. In a review of Sartre's Nausea Nabokov wrote "One has no special quarrel with Roquentin when he decides that the world exists. But the task to make the world exist as a work of art was beyond Sartre's powers." The phrasing seems somewhat odd at first, until it is realised that for Nabokov the world as an aesthetic entity is far more pervasive than the world as presence. Like Pale Fire with its correlated patterns and semblances, Bend Sinister is replete with possibilities; "there are two themes here, the Shakespearian one rendered in the present tense... and another theme altogether, a complex mix of past, present and future."
In his preface, Nabokov is at pains to state that the novel is not concerned
with life in a police state in the way that Orwell and Koestler are (Nabokov had famously asserted the primacy of the aesthetic; "the study of the sociological or political impact of literature has to be devised mainly for those who are by temperament or education immune to the aesthetic vibrancy of authentic literature." Lectures on Literature) Yet, this is nonetheless the generic convention within which the novel most closely resides and it is difficult for the reader to avoid interpreting it as such, or at least not oscillating between political and what might be termed aesthetic interpretations.
Nonetheless, as a political novel Bend Sinister seems somewhat skewed. For example, when the novel's eqivalent of Marx speaks of "the last becomes the first and vice versa," he could be describing the scene where Maximov, "the perfect type of the average man," outwits Krug (as with Ember's interpretation of Hamlet, where Fortinbras is the real hero).
At the very least, Nabokov does not seem especially concerned with validating the individual experience in the face of this collectivism, something that conflicts with the aesthetic themes of the novel; "it was then that I felt a pang of pity for Adam and slid towards him along an inclined beam of pale light causing instantaneous madness, but at least saving him from the senseless agony of his logical fate." Krug is left displaced as an individual by the authorial assumption of a god-like status in this world of his creating; "he suddenly perceives the simple reality... [that they all are] merely my whims and megrims," as with the earlier (somewhat oddly callous joke) wherein Krug "began regarding himself... as a shareholder in an illusion...the same thing that is liable to happen in novels when the author... assert that the hero is a great artist." As such, it is the author who emerges as the novel's true dictator.
I recently went to a performance of two symphonies and a concerto by Philip Glass at the Barbican Centre. The third symphony, a beautifully fragile and brittle piece was the clear
highlight, although a spontaneous yelp at the very end of the third symphony may indicate that this view was not universally maintained. On the other hand, the composer did appear to sitting a little further along the row from the lady in question and therefore the question of moneys being exchanged cannot be entirely ruled out (nor, indeed, can the possibility that the yelp was written into the symphony, though that would seem more likely in a Frank Zappa recital). I noted in passing that Mr Glass appears to have finally mastered the crumpled appearance previously perfected by Geoffrey Howe, who always used to bear a strong resemblance to a well beaten rug. The concerto prominently featured timpani which rather drowned out much of the rest of the orchestra and seemed somewhat inappropriate for a Glass piece - it resembed nothing
so much as characteristically brash piece by John Adams.
I've also been to see the recent Victorian nude exhibition at the Tate, a somewhat dissppointing exhibition, which relying rather too heavily on the supposedly titillating nature of the subject matter rather than the quality of the work. Much of the exhibition was typically florid Pre-Raphaelite works, although it did have one or two interesting painters I had not previously heard of, such as Edward Poynter and John Collier as well as rather more respectable offerings from Frederick Leighton and Millais. This was interestingly balanced by the rather more Impressionist work of John Singer Sergeant and Henry Scott Tuke,
although the emphasis on chronology did seem to deprive the exhibition of a sense of depth, of detail in the development of each painter. By broadly stretching the net, any sense of context is left lacking, replaced instead with rather more dilute references to French and Classical imitation, and the attendant conflicts between classical virtue and prurience.
While at the Tate, I also saw something of this year's Turner Prize exhibition,
most of which reinforced my prejudices concering anti-art (the winner was praised for the fact that his work could be created at home, a state that seems to deny the importance of artifice - which is surely intrinsic to any meaningful definition of art - and to take it instead into the realm of nature), excepting the films of Isaac Julien (speaking volumes that the most talented artist is a film-maker), with his film's references to Williams, Warhol's film Lonesome Cowboys, Scorsese's Taxi Driver and Hockney. By mirroring the same images between two screens, a quite impressive kaleidoscope effect is achieved. While Julien retains the greater thematic complexity that cinema can provide, the film is cast as an extended moment rather than a prolonged narrative.Labels: Art, Ballard, Literature, Music
posted by Richard 12:56 PM
Monday, May 14, 2001
An interesting couple of weeks or so. Last week I went to a sushi bar in London. The most notable feature of this restaurant is that all the kitchen staff are in the centre of the room behind a conveyor belt upon which all of the small dishes of food are precariously balanced. Rescuing a plate as it sails past your elbow can be something of an art-form. The appearance of the bar is perhaps best described as conforming to the typically kitsch Japanese preference for the synthetic over the authentic (or the faked authentic, which might described many European restaurants). One of the more unusual features of the bar was that it had a pair of robotic drinks trolleys performing a circuit round the bar. In the event that anybody got in their way the trolleys would start to vociferously. Having been informed of this in advance, our party regarded it as a point of honour to obstruct the trolleys as much as possible in order to hear what they had to say. "Get out of my way. Honestly - some people," lisped one trolley in a voice that sounded disturbingly like a Japanese Kenneth Williams. Even more disturbing was the fact that the bar was loudly playing Abba and the Village People at the time.
Returning home quite late my arrival at the station was greeted by some football supporters starting a riot. My own view is that football simply lacks enough violence to satisfy the supporter's need for vicarious entertainment. It may well be time to reintroduce the eminently civilised practice of throwing christians to the lions - my suspicion is that crowd violence should drop dramatically in that event.
On a similar note, I recently happened to purchase some carnivorous plants.
The shop assistant looked at the Venus Fly Trap I had selected and asked
if it was a cactus. I politely explained what it was, observing the mortified expression on her face as I did so.
On that subject, a film once told us that you're nobody if you're not on television. Visiting my parents recently I was able to find a somewhat disturbing confirmation of this precept. We had gone for a stroll in a nearby nature reserve. As we walked back to our car, we saw them. At first I was unable to determine why this couple walking their dog looked so out of place. Then I realised: it was precisely their intention to look out of place. To be more specific, it was their intention to look exactly like David and Victoria Beckham. The overall effect was close enough to be somewhat unsettling, and we did wonder what was the appeal of two individuals who have always seemed to me the epitome of all that is insipid and banal.
More recently, I went to attend a live performance of Howard Shore's soundtrack for Naked Lunch, while the film itself was projected onto the screen above. In spite of his embarrassing involvement with Mrs Doubtfire, Shore is one of the few soundtrack composers of any merit (other examples perhaps being John Cale and the soundtrack for American Psycho), having first impressed himself upon me with Cronenberg's film of Crash. The idea of performing a film soundtrack is one that is rather more common with silent films, and it was somewhat difficult to avoid concentrating so much on the film (which, unsurprisingly, has far more to do with Cronenberg than with Burroughs) that one heard very little of the score. In the case
of this particular film, Shore's own rather brooding style sits uneasily
alongside the rather more violent jazz of Ornette Coleman (although the dissonance between the two is wholly appropriate for such a film).
posted by Richard 12:44 PM
Tuesday, November 14, 2000
""We're trash you and me, we're the litter on the streets / Just trash, me and you, it's in everything we do" - Suede, Trash
In an age where society seems fragmented, with each individual left somewhat isolated, our atavistic need for collective experience appears to reassert itself through music festivals. After all, why else would anyone wish to go? As a rule, the conditions vary from being best described as uncomfortable to being almost intolerable, while the vast majority of those present will see previous little of the bands they have paid so much for. However, such theories do little to account for the full irony of such experiences, as with the bizarre spectacle of hundreds of people obliviously singing in unison to Suede's anthems of alienation.
Upon a visit to the Reading festival some years ago I'm struck by the rather homogenised nature of the festival market. It has every stall that you imagine a festival to have, and indeed they are almost certainly exactly the same stalls that every festival does have. Eventually, I find a stall selling leather wristbands. "The people who make them in Tibet don't ask for payment," the owner rather implausibly states. "They have a higher system of values. Not like us in the west." "Indeed," I politely reply. "Speaking personally I'm entirely corrupted." She laughs nervously.
The other thing that deeply impresses itself upon me is the odd nature of the dialogue between the artists on stage and the audience (or should that be congregation?). When Echo and Bunnymen perform I see the first illustration of this. "I don't mean to be sarcastic or anything, but do you really like festivals ... " He is forced to break off as a loud roar of approval is heard. He then shrugs and gives up. Later on The Prodigy appear and express moral indignation at being asked not to play a song, which they know full well to be offensive. "The way things go, I do what the fuck I like," they proclaim. This elicits yet another roar of approval from the crowd. Later on the same holds true for the irate response to this comment from The Beastie Boys, and I wonder how many people cheer both times, and decide that an great many of the people there would have cheered regardless of what was said. One wonders what Pavlov would have made of festivals like this.
Finally, much the same happens during Drugstore's set. The singer, Isabel asks if the audience want a miserable song or a life-affirming song. I'm rather amused by the fact that the cheers are equally loud for both options, and appear to be coming from the same people.Labels: Culture, Individuality, Music
posted by Richard 12:39 PM
