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