I met Claudia through Chet. He invited me to come with him and two of his friends from the Groton School to meet this man named Pablo who was from Brazil in medical school, but was spending time in Boston to learn English, taking time off from his medical studies. Pablo was living in Chet's family's house. Through Pablo I met Claudia in the bar downstairs below the Pizzeria Uno in Harvard Square and a number of other international people.
“Dude, we’re leaving. Are you coming or not?”
Chet and his prep school friends left me with the international crowd. For a few seconds I felt great. I was hanging with the right people like I was back in Paris or Berlin. Then all eyes were turned on my person, as if to say explain your self, thought you were leaving with the American Apple Pie Boys.
“So you’re an old friend of Chet’s. What do you do in life? Play baseball?" Pablo was leading the inquisition. I didn’t feel welcome anymore. But I knew I wasn’t like Chet or his friends. I was a francophone, yet I hadn’t realized it until now.
“I’m taking time off from college to travel around the world and write my novel.”
“You’re writing a novel you say. Sure you are, kid. I can understand why you would lie to impress these beautiful young ladies.”
I didn’t have a comeback. But I wrote my name, number and address down on my napkin. I pushed my napkin into the middle of the table for everyone to see.
“If you don’t believe me and are curious to find out if I was lying or not, why don’t you all come over for brunch tomorrow at my parent’s house.”
And I left. Feeling great.
It had been about two weeks since that had happened. The weekend before I went to Quebec. Then I invited Claudia over for brunch the next day. She was a bit of fresh air when I brought her into the house. She was a charming, intelligent, polite—an extremely charismatic young woman capable of being relaxed, showing her enjoyment of being in another person's house.
Claudia immediately hit it off with my parents. She came over with Frank who was from the Ivory Coast. My father spoke a little German with her. Of course she could speak some French. Frank's first language was French. It was a pleasant feeling.
They were the only ones to show up at my parent’s house. Frank was nice. I wanted him to go. We were getting along well, but I had eyes only for Claudia. Frank was trilingual, smart and witty, and he was a man. He understood the situation. Pablo was right about one thing. There were beautiful women sitting at that table in Pizzeria Uno. I wasn’t lying about writing a novel, yet I was using that information to show off. And when I wrote my address on that napkin she knew it was for her.
I didn't realize how attractive she was until she was in my room lying on the bed reading my book. She was reading my book lying on her stomach with her legs up in the air.
She giggled.
“What is it?”
“Is this faux-postmodern thing necessary? Does the novel exist for any reason except for the sake of its own existence?”
I laughed. “I don’t know where I’m going with it.”
I was enjoying the whole thing. I was thinking I was carried away. Only because I liked her more than she liked me.
I showed more affection than she showed me, which intensified my feelings toward her. But she was also responsive to me. She seemed to like me too, yet in subtle ways, she rejected me. She was withholding herself. I didn't understand. I didn't think I understood why she was doing that.
Whether she was just being coquettish or I knew I had to go a little slow with her. I didn't know anything. Honestly I had many theories, but she was so good. She had a lot of tact. I had no grounds for a real theory.
It was only superficial. First of all I didn't think she knew what she was doing. But my theory was this: it was at that point two and a half weeks away from a boyfriend of hers coming to visit. She never said boyfriend (they never do). She said a friend. When a girl said a friend it meant a male, yet a friend could mean many things. He was not only a friend, but also a young man. I didn't know how young.
The friend had arrived that past Monday. Coming from Switzerland where she was from. I would have been willing to say that the notion that she became cooler the closer it was getting to his arrival, in a certain sense meant, she was encouraging my advances, in a way that showed she maybe was more interested in me than she was willing to admit. On that score I would have had to say maybe she was tempted by me and she was trying to hold herself back. She was reminding herself of some commitment she had made.
I didn't know what was going on in her head. She first mentioned that the friend was going to visit about one and a half weeks before. She told me that her male friend was coming to visit her from Zurich, Switzerland in Boston, and next week her mother was coming to visit. Following the coming weekend the two of them, mother and daughter would have gone to New York City.
It was interesting to me that the second time I saw her, a week ago last on Saturday night, Claudia spent the night with me. One might have thought that a girl, who would spend the night with somebody, and in the same bed, might have been saying something by doing that. Possibly trust. A lot of trust and an affectionate sweetness, but might have also been misleading and upsetting, especially for somebody who was dying to have her or who fell in love with her. It was intense, but I wouldn't say misleading, not completely misleading because it was comfortable.
I had a great time, even though we didn't sleep together. We didn't have sex. We cuddled. It was nice people could do that. And didn't have to do anything more than that. And didn't get the wrong idea or get angry.
I felt angry. I couldn’t deny that. I could have been suppressed. Or rather I suppressed the feelings of anger about being rejected. Frustration.
I remembered when I invited her to an opera last Friday night. The Magic Flute, which was a reading of an opera by some rather good singers, neat costumes. It was a lot of fun. Of course it was in German, so Claudia was hearing something in her own language and seemed delighted by the whole thing. It was nice to have her there.
There were a bunch of my Parents' friends there, Don and Elizabeth, Diane Abeille and other people were there and Emily and Charles and so on, a party thrown together. Anne and Leo were there. They all dispersed afterwards, in different directions. It was nice to see Claudia. She was getting to know my parents by that time. This was the third time I'd seen her. She must have felt more at home, but I wasn't sure. She spent the night with me that night too, after the opera. That was Friday night.
We slid into bed and cuddled and fell asleep. Saturday morning we woke up. Caressing. I pulled up her shirt and I put my head on her breasts, playing. I put my head under her shirt, she was wearing a tank top, one of my tank tops, and I looked at her. I had my head on her breasts.
Definitely sexual but restrained. Playing around and not actually forcing the issue. She wasn’t distant. No. She was a little distant Friday night. Every time she slept over and we woke up in the morning in my room we were close, and she would leave the house, I felt she was almost my lover.
She always came over as a friend and, in a way left as a lover, even though nothing profound had happened. Nothing. Her ability to trust me was profound. Maybe girls that didn't let me have sex with them made me respect them more and that I was more interested in them because they didn't. The opposite would be when a girl was willing to have sex with me when I didn't know her.
I didn't know them long enough to give any real commitment, as far as knowing that I was going to be there for them, and that there was going to be some consistency in my behavior; that by not having waited through that kind of period when one could get to know each other, and just being willing to have sex with somebody who was a stranger, in a certain way, it seemed that that destroyed respect, making it hard for respect to develop, because it was too easy.
I needed innocence. Claudia’s needs were unknown. In one sense innocence meant not knowing, not knowing something was wrong. By not knowing the other person intimately, not taking my clothes off in front of the other person, by in a way hiding something or covering something, that innocence was retained. I didn’t know whether Claudia had been doing this consciously or unconsciously, and if she had been doing this at all.
I liked her more than she liked me and she had detected this. Claudia may have been obsessed with innocence. She was not Catholic. She was Protestant. Sex for her might have been something that was reserved for long term commitment, which only was something permissible when people had gotten to know each other well, and had made a very serious commitment, such as wanting to get married. For some people, that was the way it was. Could she be one of them?
Some people would not have considered having sex with another person unless they were married, and that that was part of the whole expression of that commitment. It was very different from most people of my generation. There was the possibility that both of us could be over-intellectualizing about this, and she just didn't feel like having sex with me for no reason, but she also liked being with me and didn't want to alienate me by just saying no, just making a rule.
Our need for innocence and therefore the need to put off having sex to keep the innocence thing going was in stark contrast by the fact that too many people who were being overly quick about it. It wasn’t clear what the American value system was in relation to innocence if these people had no compunctions about having sex with somebody that they had just met. Maybe it had ceased to be operative. Or maybe if it was operative hypocrisy, it had a role to play.
I wanted to see Claudia. I doubted whether she was going to call me while this man was here. What if this person who was visiting turned out to be somebody who was fifty years old? She said nothing. I didn't ask.
Claudia just called. Claudia called my parents in Boston for my number here in Paris. She was to finish school in three weeks. Her birthday was in three weeks. She would be turning twenty-four. I had been on the phone with my parents. First I spoke to my mother. Alice was feeling nervous. She handed Jacob the telephone. I gave Jacob a positive sketch of the goings on in my life. I kept returning to this news about Claudia. She had said that she had no school on Thursday and Friday. She proposed that I come to Zurich on Wednesday, that I leave between two and three in the afternoon, arriving around 9:00 PM. I said I would call her Wednesday morning to let her know of my arrival time. She giggled as we said goodbye.
She was a hard nut to crack. I arrived on a Wednesday night. Not last week but the week before. About a week before I arrived in Zurich, Claudia called me. I had a suspicion before she had called, that I'd never speak to her again, because I had lost her number...One time when I was staying at Bruno and Phillip’s apartment—with their parents—my wallet had been washed in the washing machine, and her number had been smeared.
Then I rescued the little piece of paper, when it dried, and took the number down again, called her on her cell phone. And then I lost her number again. But she tracked me down. She called my father in Boston. Jacob gave her my number in Paris at my new apartment. I was so happy she called. The first thing I said after asking her how she was doing was, "so when can I come and see you?" We were back in touch.
I called her, wrote down her number, and I wrote it down in several places, so I wouldn't lose it and called her back. She said the best time would be to come on that Wednesday night.
I arrived there and she picked me up. She was alone. She picked me up in her car at the train station in Zurich. I was speechless. I had a big smile on my face. We drove to her house. Her family lived on a hill above Zurich, a five-minute drive into town. I met her mother and her brother. Her father had not come home from work yet. We went up to her room. We talked and lay on her bed. Eventually, some mnemonic device in the conversation reminded me.
Somehow I was talking to Claudia about how she had Pooh Bear, stuffed animal, she had Pooh Bear on her bed. The other was a teddy bear, but he was not very interesting. So she had Pooh Bear on her bed. I started explaining that Pooh Bear was a perfect Zen person.
I tried to explain Zen. I didn't really know what Zen was. I couldn't give a dictionary definition. I did know that Pooh Bear could have the best fun doing absolutely nothing. Like me he did absolutely nothing well.
That was not all he did. He did something as well as nothing. He ate honey and helped his friends out. She didn't know what Zen was, and I had to call my father and ask what Zen was. My father started telling me, and then I gave the phone to Claudia, but before that, I told him to start speaking in German, because we had been looking in her dictionaries and we couldn't find it. On the phone Jacob started telling Claudia about Zen, the Japanese philosophy.
It was originally Chan. A form of Buddhism in China and then migrated to Korea and to Japan. It was called Zen. My father thought, when she first asked the meaning of Zen, that she was asking the meaning in English of a German translation of the word 'then.' He misheard me. Jacob was trying to explain in German for 'then,' but we finally straightened that out.
She took me out with her friends. We went to a club. And I was talking to this tall lanky kid. He said that Claudia had never been in a relationship with a guy. He explained how she had many guy friends and she slept in their beds. She had affectionate relationships with them. Affectionate, meaning holding, kisses, but not passionate kisses, implied sexual affection, maybe.
It never went farther. He said, he thought she was a virgin. I told him I thought otherwise. Her idea of men or relationships was that the perfect man for her would one day show up and she'd get married. I was getting along well with him even though he was a complete loser. Her friends were nice, but I didn’t like them.
There were times when I would wake up in the middle of the night and I'd look at her and I'd want so much to hold her. Or, in an animal way, kiss her and make out with her. Maybe I loved her. No, that was more an expression of my desire to be even closer to her, but it also involved a lot of things for her: commitments. I was sure she'd marry somebody in her culture in a structured and secure way, which was traditional.
The next day we went into town, and she had to go get a few bumps on her chin removed by a doctor, and she dropped me off, and I walked around Zurich and sat on a bench and looked out at Lake Zurich and watched the boats rock, and the swans go bob in and out of the boats and look for food, and I looked at people. I walked around Zurich and looked at people. Then we met up again.
The whole while during this trip I was thinking, what was I going to get her for her birthday, because her birthday was coming up. It was July 6. I said I was going to go back to Boston, and I was going to come back for her birthday. I was thinking about what I was going to get her for her birthday. I was feeling frustrated about this.
Feeling trapped by the inevitable, or the fact that we would never get closer, meaning we'd never be true lovers. And I was thinking about her birthday present, about giving her this painting I had done last summer, which I had actually given to the Boncoeurs. But every time I had visited the Boncoeurs, it was still sitting on their floor and not on their walls.
I felt angry. I stole their painting. Stole my painting back from them, putting it on my wall in my apartment, telling them that I was going to work on it again. I had no intention of working on it. It was finished.
I was thinking of giving her this painting. Now there was some significance to this. It was as if every time I gave a painting to a female, that was the day before I never saw them again.
When I was still in high school, three years ago, for Linda’s birthday party, she had a big ball at her parents’ house in Brookline, Massachusetts. I showed up with a beautiful watercolor, framed and a bouquet. I went to meet her in Bermuda, and had a big argument with her, and that was shortly after her birthday party where I gave her my best painting at the time, which I went to great trouble to have matted and put together behind glass, and clips, wire to hang it on, and wrapped it up, and presented it beautifully to her.
Then this beautiful girl I met in Berlin. Christina. I brought an even greater painting, my best oil painting. I took it down from the stretcher, and then I remounted it when I arrived there, and presented it to her.
These were important pieces of work that I had done. There was no reason to think that if I brought Claudia this painting that I did in Normandy last summer, that it would mean that at all. She was a person I might be friends with a long time, whatever happened to her, whether she would get married to somebody else or not. She was somebody who obviously cared about me, and had a real affection for me.
And, the fact that we had not been lovers may have had something to do with the friendship going on, because sometimes things happen when one had been intimate with somebody, that it made it very difficult for them after the romance had ended to continue any form of contact.
Being there with the family was pleasant. In fact I was honest. I was in good humor with their parents. And I was maybe too uninhibited. To her parents I would say things right off top of my head, exactly what I was thinking.
For some reason I was comfortable with her parents. They made me feel at home there, and welcome. They treated me like an adult. They treated me with the respect of an equal. I had never experienced that before.
I had a girl friend when I did my last year of high school in Paris. This girl was from Banbury, England. I would go and visit her. The last weekend I spent with this girl was at her father's house. I had been spending the weekends at her mother's house. I spent a weekend at her father's house, had never met her father before, the father gave me a hard handshake, made me feel like a little twerp, and separated us, and made us sleep in separate rooms. It was one of the worst experiences of my life, and I was trying to lose my virginity with this English girl, but it couldn’t happen.
And other fathers of girls were cold to me. There was always an undertone of hatred and the Oedipus complex or something like that. I was getting along well with Claudia's father. He didn't speak any English or French. But somehow we were talking. The father was speaking in Swiss German, and I was speaking in English and French.
Somehow we understood each other. That was great. I should write that family a good thank you letter. The mother was stylish, and had charm. The brother was a handsome guy. He was an electrician, but a real big athlete. He played soccer, and many other sports, like me. And he boxed.
The last morning I was there the brother set the garage up for me, which had a heavy bag and had gloves and hand raps and jump rope ready for me. So I worked out with his stuff. And, we had a lot in common, although he didn't speak much French or English, but he understood everything I said. What the brother couldn't say, he was somehow getting across to me, although maybe they thought I was another kid that was crazy about their daughter, doomed to fail in getting her heart, like the others.
One night I cooked for Claudia. She had never tasted my cooking. I cut up some peppers, onions, garlic, and carrots. A bunch of vegetables. And I put beer in it, while the vegetables were cooking, tomatoes, and broccoli. Then I put some boneless chicken in small pieces. I mixed crème fraiche in and whipped it up and put a little more tomatoes in and stirred it up. And it was great. She liked it.
The brother came in, as we were finishing up. And he had a plate of it. He liked it too. He mopped up the sauce with bread. It was all right.
I was going to go to Lausanne and, telling her that I was going to get a ticket to come back to Boston, and she said how are you going to do all that? She didn't think I could make it to her birthday. Go to Lausanne and buy the ticket at the last minute. Claudia was organized, but she thought she was disorganized. I must have been crazy compared to her, with my disorganization. Switzerland was an organized place. Claudia didn't think she was organized but she was.
We had gone to a nightclub the night before. And we woke up late Saturday afternoon. She drove me to the station, and I went to Lausanne, just as simple as that.
She was an unforgettable person, easy to be with, to be comfortable with. There was a goodness that shined out of her, a great spirit. It was really nice having her in Boston. Having her at home. This made a great story. It was a story that didn't necessarily point in any direction in the future.
Except that I felt that she was somebody I'd always keep up with, because she had a real affection for me. And, I made a strong impression on her. I was privileged to have had her at home, staying several nights at my parents’ house in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Thursday 20 November 2008
Canada
Amazing how beautiful she was. But what I didn't understand was... something about her smell, the smell of the pine forest. I couldn't describe it.
Smells were impossible to describe. I didn’t know where the smell came from. It could have been her breath or her body odor. I didn't know—whether it was the smell of a forest when I was in Quebec. It triggered a free association of an image, but I could have argued about that forever.
The smell reminded me of a forest. No, no, no. It didn't remind me of a forest. It made me feel repulsed. Repulsed. The only thing I could think of because I had to give an answer—was the forest: This forest smell. No it was just pure negativity. Forests represented pure negativity. I asked myself if it was a class thing. I hit something there.
I ran into this girl in Charles de Gaulle airport. I was in Charles de Gaulle for about eight hours waiting for the airplane. Five minutes before my plane was supposed to take off, I get in line, and there was an announcement made. The plane would be delayed eight hours. The pilot was ill.
They directed the passengers to go to a restaurant to get free food, and information about the flight would be presented to them later. So everybody started walking in the direction of the restaurant, out of the terminal into the main part of the airport. I turned to the first girl I saw. It was pure impulsive behavior. I started talking to her.
I asked: “Do you want to walk with me?” Of course we're talking in French. She said, sure, I'll walk with you. And we started talking. We went to the restaurant together for the free food that the airport had promised us.
I told her of my adventures, my travels. She told me things about her self, that she was a hairdresser, lived in Quebec, owned a horse. She lived at home with her parents. Then we went to a bar. She bought me a beer.
Then I bought her a glass of champagne. She made a call to her parents. I called my parents. Next we were lying on top of each other trying to keep warm. The body heat, something happened.
On the plane I changed my seat to sit next to Maxine. Maxine had the window seat. I had the aisle seat. Two isles over was a beautiful girl much better looking than Maxine. Maxine was pretty.
Maxine was ugly compared to this girl. Maxine was very pretty in the pictures I took of her, but the girl two aisles over, was absolutely stunning. She could have been on a cover of a magazine.
And the whole plane ride I was tempted to go over and talk to her, and ditch Maxine, and take the empty seat next to this beautiful girl. During the whole trip I was eyeing her. She was eyeing me. Every time Maxine was looking out the window I'd wink at this beautiful girl, and she'd wink back. We were smiling the whole time.
The beautiful girl I was looking at was giggling every once and while. I should have ditched Maxine! I regretted not being able to become two people at once. I tried taking a little walk, but she was in plain view. I would have been spotted immediately.
No. My designs would have been known, wrecked everything, because of guilt and fear. I didn't follow my gut, which was to ditch Maxine. Take up with the other girl. Maxine's smell made me have a doubt.
I arrived in Montreal so late that I couldn't come to Boston. Maxine’s parents immediately picked her up. I had to go to a hotel, wait till the next morning, and get up real early with an alarm clock. I had to wake up at 5:00 AM. I woke up without an alarm clock. I slept about two hours.
I left at 6:30 AM and arrived in Boston around 7:30. I get a call from Maxine. I didn't remember much. I had a terrible memory. She called about a day later. This was around the end of January. Back in Boston.
Then I made a reservation to go up four days later to Quebec City. I didn't make a reservation. I was trying to look into plane fares and they were so expensive. I took the bus to Montreal. Nine hours. Thirteen hours in all.
To get there! To Quebec City. Because I had to go from Boston to Albany New York...I forgot. I blocked it out. Thirteen hours of bus ride. On the way back it was only 4 or 5 hours. I didn’t get a direct bus ride. I might have asked. But there were none that day. I arrived in Quebec City at 1:30 AM.
She picked me up at the bus station. She knew I was coming in. I had called her. We went to her house. But she took me for a drive around town first.
She drove me quickly around the town. The streetlights were glowing. I would have liked to stay in the center of town, but instead we went to the country, the suburbs, housing developments, boring. Except it was hilly. There were forests.
I couldn’t remember whether they were two story or one-story houses. Barely two-story. Ranch style. And so the whole idea of her being out in the country was exploded. It was the beauty of Quebec and the wilds of Canada and everything—it turned out—she lived in this housing development. And her horse was not down the road.
I didn’t see the horse. I didn't get what I wanted. I imagined that it would be in the pure countryside...Forests. And behind her house would be this horse running around with a fence around it...Mountains in the distance.
Instead it looked like disgusting suburbia, which I hated! I traveled thirteen hours to get to this ugly little suburb outside of Quebec. And the horse was not behind the house.
I arrived there. And her parents were asleep. She picked me up in her own car. And so I walked into the house—a sleeping house—in the basement. That was where she lived. She had moved down to the basement where her brother used to live. Her brother didn’t live in the house anymore.
We crawled into bed. I was only in my underwear. She put on these thick cotton pajamas, with these cows, cartoon cows all over the pajamas. And I didn't understand why she was wearing these pajamas. I was in my underwear. Maybe she was cold.
She started kissing me, and holding me and getting me really horny and I tried to take off her pants and she had these big cow—cartoon—pajamas on, and I couldn't get her pajamas off. Finally I realized she didn't want to take them off. But she was giggling the whole time. And this went on, I trying to take off her pants, and her giggling, for about three hours, making out. I barely slept a wink.
We finally woke up at around 11:30 AM. Her father had gone to work. Her mother was a housewife. And the father worked in Insurance. I was not sure.
I couldn’t take it in. Some boring suburban job...conventional, conservative, but barely middle class. Yes, I had a sense of class superiority.
When I woke up I was still horny. She finally took her pants off. I just put it in and I, it was, pre-ejaculation. It was premature ejaculation.
Not again. It was terrible. In Mexico I had great sex, sustained. There had been too much titillation the night before. She didn’t seem to resent that. No, she said she thought it was funny. This was a great girl.
We went and had this big American breakfast, which made me feel better, but then I wanted to have a nap. Actually I wanted to get her back in bed to try again. We didn’t even go into the center of town. We didn’t go to Quebec City. We were still in the suburbs, Suburbia, the land of nothing: Lots of snow though.
There was tons of snow. It was frigid. It was absolutely freezing out. I didn’t bring long underwear. No, I didn't.
We bought some film and I took some photographs of her. I promised her that I wouldn’t post the photographs on the Internet. Then we get back in bed. That was when we did it! It was good, fast, animal sex. And we fell asleep.
We woke up at 4:45 PM. She had to go to work at 5:00 PM. I went back to bed. Before I went back to bed, before she left, she said: "you can wake up any time and go upstairs and my parents will make you dinner. Don't worry. They're nice."
I hadn't even met her parents yet and somehow she knew how afraid I felt. It was the look on my face that must have tipped her off. I was terrified of the idea of meeting them. Guilty. No, anxious the father would be protective of his daughter. I went back to bed.
I woke up at around 6:30 PM, and I lay in the pitch dark, feeling a little confused, and I couldn’t decide whether or not to go upstairs. Finally, after an hour, at 7:30 PM I went up and there they were. The parents: Just as I had imagined. I had found the courage. Though it took an hour to decide.
I must have felt something climbing those stairs. I became hungry. I was apathetic. I didn’t remember what I felt. I introduced myself. "How are you?" In French.
I went upstairs. It was exactly what I had been imagining for the past hour when I was in the pitch dark in her bed. What a let down. I imagined her parents watching TV, like any suburban, boring, conservative family. Glued to the TV: Hard to get their attention; very hard.
Immediately they gave me a plate of food out of the microwave, as I had imagined it, two hamburgers, with French fries, gravy and green peas. They must have heard me scrambling up the basement stairs in the pitch dark like some refugee seeking asylum. No ketchup for the Hamburger, none, only gravy. And the bread was soggy, and the French fries were wet and tasted of plastic. As I swallowed the fries, they felt like wax.
Not hot but warm. I had to admit it. It was food.
The food had a gray look to it. When I looked up from my chewing experience, the parents sitting on their overstuffed couch, which had no distinguishable color like the pallor of their skin, I had to admit that, everything was gray. With a sweeping look, holding my fork poised above my lips, I noticed warms and cools in the open kitchen-dining room area, connected to the TV den, were different shades of gray, as if I were in a generic model of the perfect quotidian suburban home. I felt a small unwelcome chill ascending my spine. It was fear. Fear was telling me something. I had to get away from here.
And I was hungry. I ate it but slowly. Their heads turned back to the TV. In between bites, I told them a little bit of what I was doing as if they really cared. Taking a year off from college and writing a book.
Tried to explain the book, but every time I explained the book to anybody I felt like I was eating my words. I felt like I wasn’t getting through to them. So I gave up trying to talk about my book, and ate my food.
Then I decided to call my father at 9:00 PM, as Maxine was coming back from work. My father told me that the cancer was worse. He was scared of dying. But Maxine was back. I told them what happened.
My father was fairing worse and I had to leave the next day. I was glad that I had talked to my father, and heard it was worse, because I didn't want to stay anymore. I didn't like Quebec. Forest smells. But it was more than that.
It was the smell of the country that began to bother me. But I had a good time. After having told them I was going to leave, Maxine brought this girl over called Veronique. The three of us went out to a gas station and bought some cheap wine, some beer, cigarettes and junk food, and the three of us went to Veronique's house.
But Veronique was really named Sophie, yet there were another two Sophies at the hairdressing salon. So, Sophie had to change her name to Veronique when she moved to the small suburban town.
Now, all her friends were connected with the salon. She was called Veronique by almost everybody in town except for her boyfriend who called her Sophie. We went over to Sophie/Veronique's place, met her boyfriend who was cool, and the four of us smoked hashish, and drank beer and wine. During this pleasant evening Veronique or Sophie called a gay hairdresser, one of their coworkers named Marko on speakerphone. Marko joined the evening.
He was in the bathtub having a bubble bath.
Marko was my favorite. Better than Maxine. He was witty. He was funny and full of life...in the bathtub. And he wasn’t there.
He stayed with us on speakerphone for about two and half-hours. They were all talking and at one point, I had my arm around Maxine, holding the phone up, representing Marko in effigy, Veronique/Sophie took a photograph of the three of us or two of us.
And then we came back home. To Maxine's home. Maxine and I drove back to her place, and I was stoned and drunk. And I was trying to go to sleep. I had my eyes closed, but she took off my pants and started to fuck me, and I was really not able to function properly, but my cock was hard.
She was riding me like a horse, but I succeeded in pulling her close to me, because she had been sitting on me while having sex with me, and I was able to pull her down, and holding her neck so she couldn't move, even though I couldn't move.
I had to get out of this. But I just tried to go to sleep and close my eyes, until she stopped fucking me. And she was having orgasms. She had two orgasms, with the tremors. And the cries, some sounds. Some moans. I tried not to listen.
I left the next morning. She took me to the bus. She drove me to the bus station. And she was being affectionate and I was being distant like it was too much for me. This thing about the country that bothered me, it was simply an annoyance. The smell of the country had begun to bother me.
Smells were impossible to describe. I didn’t know where the smell came from. It could have been her breath or her body odor. I didn't know—whether it was the smell of a forest when I was in Quebec. It triggered a free association of an image, but I could have argued about that forever.
The smell reminded me of a forest. No, no, no. It didn't remind me of a forest. It made me feel repulsed. Repulsed. The only thing I could think of because I had to give an answer—was the forest: This forest smell. No it was just pure negativity. Forests represented pure negativity. I asked myself if it was a class thing. I hit something there.
I ran into this girl in Charles de Gaulle airport. I was in Charles de Gaulle for about eight hours waiting for the airplane. Five minutes before my plane was supposed to take off, I get in line, and there was an announcement made. The plane would be delayed eight hours. The pilot was ill.
They directed the passengers to go to a restaurant to get free food, and information about the flight would be presented to them later. So everybody started walking in the direction of the restaurant, out of the terminal into the main part of the airport. I turned to the first girl I saw. It was pure impulsive behavior. I started talking to her.
I asked: “Do you want to walk with me?” Of course we're talking in French. She said, sure, I'll walk with you. And we started talking. We went to the restaurant together for the free food that the airport had promised us.
I told her of my adventures, my travels. She told me things about her self, that she was a hairdresser, lived in Quebec, owned a horse. She lived at home with her parents. Then we went to a bar. She bought me a beer.
Then I bought her a glass of champagne. She made a call to her parents. I called my parents. Next we were lying on top of each other trying to keep warm. The body heat, something happened.
On the plane I changed my seat to sit next to Maxine. Maxine had the window seat. I had the aisle seat. Two isles over was a beautiful girl much better looking than Maxine. Maxine was pretty.
Maxine was ugly compared to this girl. Maxine was very pretty in the pictures I took of her, but the girl two aisles over, was absolutely stunning. She could have been on a cover of a magazine.
And the whole plane ride I was tempted to go over and talk to her, and ditch Maxine, and take the empty seat next to this beautiful girl. During the whole trip I was eyeing her. She was eyeing me. Every time Maxine was looking out the window I'd wink at this beautiful girl, and she'd wink back. We were smiling the whole time.
The beautiful girl I was looking at was giggling every once and while. I should have ditched Maxine! I regretted not being able to become two people at once. I tried taking a little walk, but she was in plain view. I would have been spotted immediately.
No. My designs would have been known, wrecked everything, because of guilt and fear. I didn't follow my gut, which was to ditch Maxine. Take up with the other girl. Maxine's smell made me have a doubt.
I arrived in Montreal so late that I couldn't come to Boston. Maxine’s parents immediately picked her up. I had to go to a hotel, wait till the next morning, and get up real early with an alarm clock. I had to wake up at 5:00 AM. I woke up without an alarm clock. I slept about two hours.
I left at 6:30 AM and arrived in Boston around 7:30. I get a call from Maxine. I didn't remember much. I had a terrible memory. She called about a day later. This was around the end of January. Back in Boston.
Then I made a reservation to go up four days later to Quebec City. I didn't make a reservation. I was trying to look into plane fares and they were so expensive. I took the bus to Montreal. Nine hours. Thirteen hours in all.
To get there! To Quebec City. Because I had to go from Boston to Albany New York...I forgot. I blocked it out. Thirteen hours of bus ride. On the way back it was only 4 or 5 hours. I didn’t get a direct bus ride. I might have asked. But there were none that day. I arrived in Quebec City at 1:30 AM.
She picked me up at the bus station. She knew I was coming in. I had called her. We went to her house. But she took me for a drive around town first.
She drove me quickly around the town. The streetlights were glowing. I would have liked to stay in the center of town, but instead we went to the country, the suburbs, housing developments, boring. Except it was hilly. There were forests.
I couldn’t remember whether they were two story or one-story houses. Barely two-story. Ranch style. And so the whole idea of her being out in the country was exploded. It was the beauty of Quebec and the wilds of Canada and everything—it turned out—she lived in this housing development. And her horse was not down the road.
I didn’t see the horse. I didn't get what I wanted. I imagined that it would be in the pure countryside...Forests. And behind her house would be this horse running around with a fence around it...Mountains in the distance.
Instead it looked like disgusting suburbia, which I hated! I traveled thirteen hours to get to this ugly little suburb outside of Quebec. And the horse was not behind the house.
I arrived there. And her parents were asleep. She picked me up in her own car. And so I walked into the house—a sleeping house—in the basement. That was where she lived. She had moved down to the basement where her brother used to live. Her brother didn’t live in the house anymore.
We crawled into bed. I was only in my underwear. She put on these thick cotton pajamas, with these cows, cartoon cows all over the pajamas. And I didn't understand why she was wearing these pajamas. I was in my underwear. Maybe she was cold.
She started kissing me, and holding me and getting me really horny and I tried to take off her pants and she had these big cow—cartoon—pajamas on, and I couldn't get her pajamas off. Finally I realized she didn't want to take them off. But she was giggling the whole time. And this went on, I trying to take off her pants, and her giggling, for about three hours, making out. I barely slept a wink.
We finally woke up at around 11:30 AM. Her father had gone to work. Her mother was a housewife. And the father worked in Insurance. I was not sure.
I couldn’t take it in. Some boring suburban job...conventional, conservative, but barely middle class. Yes, I had a sense of class superiority.
When I woke up I was still horny. She finally took her pants off. I just put it in and I, it was, pre-ejaculation. It was premature ejaculation.
Not again. It was terrible. In Mexico I had great sex, sustained. There had been too much titillation the night before. She didn’t seem to resent that. No, she said she thought it was funny. This was a great girl.
We went and had this big American breakfast, which made me feel better, but then I wanted to have a nap. Actually I wanted to get her back in bed to try again. We didn’t even go into the center of town. We didn’t go to Quebec City. We were still in the suburbs, Suburbia, the land of nothing: Lots of snow though.
There was tons of snow. It was frigid. It was absolutely freezing out. I didn’t bring long underwear. No, I didn't.
We bought some film and I took some photographs of her. I promised her that I wouldn’t post the photographs on the Internet. Then we get back in bed. That was when we did it! It was good, fast, animal sex. And we fell asleep.
We woke up at 4:45 PM. She had to go to work at 5:00 PM. I went back to bed. Before I went back to bed, before she left, she said: "you can wake up any time and go upstairs and my parents will make you dinner. Don't worry. They're nice."
I hadn't even met her parents yet and somehow she knew how afraid I felt. It was the look on my face that must have tipped her off. I was terrified of the idea of meeting them. Guilty. No, anxious the father would be protective of his daughter. I went back to bed.
I woke up at around 6:30 PM, and I lay in the pitch dark, feeling a little confused, and I couldn’t decide whether or not to go upstairs. Finally, after an hour, at 7:30 PM I went up and there they were. The parents: Just as I had imagined. I had found the courage. Though it took an hour to decide.
I must have felt something climbing those stairs. I became hungry. I was apathetic. I didn’t remember what I felt. I introduced myself. "How are you?" In French.
I went upstairs. It was exactly what I had been imagining for the past hour when I was in the pitch dark in her bed. What a let down. I imagined her parents watching TV, like any suburban, boring, conservative family. Glued to the TV: Hard to get their attention; very hard.
Immediately they gave me a plate of food out of the microwave, as I had imagined it, two hamburgers, with French fries, gravy and green peas. They must have heard me scrambling up the basement stairs in the pitch dark like some refugee seeking asylum. No ketchup for the Hamburger, none, only gravy. And the bread was soggy, and the French fries were wet and tasted of plastic. As I swallowed the fries, they felt like wax.
Not hot but warm. I had to admit it. It was food.
The food had a gray look to it. When I looked up from my chewing experience, the parents sitting on their overstuffed couch, which had no distinguishable color like the pallor of their skin, I had to admit that, everything was gray. With a sweeping look, holding my fork poised above my lips, I noticed warms and cools in the open kitchen-dining room area, connected to the TV den, were different shades of gray, as if I were in a generic model of the perfect quotidian suburban home. I felt a small unwelcome chill ascending my spine. It was fear. Fear was telling me something. I had to get away from here.
And I was hungry. I ate it but slowly. Their heads turned back to the TV. In between bites, I told them a little bit of what I was doing as if they really cared. Taking a year off from college and writing a book.
Tried to explain the book, but every time I explained the book to anybody I felt like I was eating my words. I felt like I wasn’t getting through to them. So I gave up trying to talk about my book, and ate my food.
Then I decided to call my father at 9:00 PM, as Maxine was coming back from work. My father told me that the cancer was worse. He was scared of dying. But Maxine was back. I told them what happened.
My father was fairing worse and I had to leave the next day. I was glad that I had talked to my father, and heard it was worse, because I didn't want to stay anymore. I didn't like Quebec. Forest smells. But it was more than that.
It was the smell of the country that began to bother me. But I had a good time. After having told them I was going to leave, Maxine brought this girl over called Veronique. The three of us went out to a gas station and bought some cheap wine, some beer, cigarettes and junk food, and the three of us went to Veronique's house.
But Veronique was really named Sophie, yet there were another two Sophies at the hairdressing salon. So, Sophie had to change her name to Veronique when she moved to the small suburban town.
Now, all her friends were connected with the salon. She was called Veronique by almost everybody in town except for her boyfriend who called her Sophie. We went over to Sophie/Veronique's place, met her boyfriend who was cool, and the four of us smoked hashish, and drank beer and wine. During this pleasant evening Veronique or Sophie called a gay hairdresser, one of their coworkers named Marko on speakerphone. Marko joined the evening.
He was in the bathtub having a bubble bath.
Marko was my favorite. Better than Maxine. He was witty. He was funny and full of life...in the bathtub. And he wasn’t there.
He stayed with us on speakerphone for about two and half-hours. They were all talking and at one point, I had my arm around Maxine, holding the phone up, representing Marko in effigy, Veronique/Sophie took a photograph of the three of us or two of us.
And then we came back home. To Maxine's home. Maxine and I drove back to her place, and I was stoned and drunk. And I was trying to go to sleep. I had my eyes closed, but she took off my pants and started to fuck me, and I was really not able to function properly, but my cock was hard.
She was riding me like a horse, but I succeeded in pulling her close to me, because she had been sitting on me while having sex with me, and I was able to pull her down, and holding her neck so she couldn't move, even though I couldn't move.
I had to get out of this. But I just tried to go to sleep and close my eyes, until she stopped fucking me. And she was having orgasms. She had two orgasms, with the tremors. And the cries, some sounds. Some moans. I tried not to listen.
I left the next morning. She took me to the bus. She drove me to the bus station. And she was being affectionate and I was being distant like it was too much for me. This thing about the country that bothered me, it was simply an annoyance. The smell of the country had begun to bother me.
Wednesday 19 November 2008
Obama and Clinton
Obama may choose Clinton for Secretary of State: Pretty smart move. Maybe. The Clintons have long-lasting contacts. She is extremely articulate. So what? Two terms in the Senate have made her very experienced for a junior. Right. New conflict with Russia is on the horizon. Europe is building a pipeline to side-step Putin. Will it work? OPEC?, Iran?, Afghanistan? (Black Water...?), Pakistan? (How much more money do we have to give them?!) Israel?, Venezuela?, Resources: In Congo, pirates, minerals, water, gas, oil, trees, R&D, IMF, Latin America...Obama should focus on putting his people and the right people inside and running the CIA. This time let the 'company' do their job which is to protect America's economic interests abroad.
Art Show at Photo 4
Title: J'habite Budapest
Location: 4 Rue Bonaparte, Paris 75006
Artist: Bruno Bourel
Terrific pictures of Budapest. Wish there had been more of them.
Location: 4 Rue Bonaparte, Paris 75006
Artist: Bruno Bourel
Terrific pictures of Budapest. Wish there had been more of them.
Tuesday 18 November 2008
From Miro to Andy Warhol
An exhibit seen at le Palais Luxembourg which is in the Luxembourg Gardens in Paris, if I've mistaken the name of the museum. There was a painting by Robert Indiana which was OK. When I was six years old with my mother we went to Old Harbor Hill on Vinal Haven, the largest of the Fox islands, there was no plumbing, so my mother's friend Robert Indiana whom we happened to be visiting offered to receive us over night. We slept on couches in one of his great rooms where we had been chatting in the course of the night. I wet the couch that night and in the morning my mother and I turned over the cushion thereby concealing the deed. Nor was it the first time my mother was put in such a position. When she flew to Paris to make a deal with Grasset Fesquel. We were the guests of the writer Marie Cardinal whose book Les Mots Pour le Dire which mother had already begun to translate. Cardinal insisted that my mother sleep in her bed so that she would know what it was like to be her, while Cardinal withdrew to the guest room. In that great bed in the Faubourg Saint Germaine I routinely peed. Anyway. At the end of our stay a month later my mother turned the mattress to disguise the deed. But the rest of it...for ten or eleven euros... Maybe ten out of fifty interesting paintings.
Woody Allen makes a try
Christina...Something (Jessica?) Barcelona! Well it's really stupid. Sort of fun, amusing, though basically...I liked it at the time, thinking about it now...nothing. Some people thought it was a laugh a minute.
Monday 17 November 2008
Collective shame and guilt:
In the grip of fear that is all too grounded in real events that are happening at a rapid pace, reported by the media as generalities and corroborated by our own experiences and those of people we talk to every day.
What has happened in the last eight years has so depressed the American people because of two wars, beginning with the stealing of a presidential election (and the out-performance in the second election of the Republicans, which demonstrated their superior understanding of the electoral process) and ending with our economic decline. I am at a loss for words, but something should be said about the affect on the American collective psyche as we witness the stealing of our basic rights as citizens, including habeas corpus and the protection of our privacy and then the collective guilt that some Americans have felt upon learning that our nation was practicing torture, rendition flights and atrocities against foriegn civilians in the name of military action or maintenance of our 764 military bases that we admit to having. Our national mood has changed from one of hope, a kind of joyful sense of being the richest and most powerful nation in the history of the world, backed up by extraordinary achievements in every field of human activity including the Fine Arts which we have every right to be proud of to one of shame and fear, because everybody is either personally affected or knows somebody who is affected by the threat of the loss of their home, the loss of their job, forty-to-fifty percent drop in the value of their assets or their salaries and the possibility of even greater losses. Europeans don't seem to have taken on the full gravity of this catastrophe, at least those we have the privilege of knowing. They are lighthearted, full of whimsy and imagination, playful as ever and retain their sense of identity and uniqueness, whereas I feel Americans are being swallowed up in some group panic and with many signs of the loss of identity and their self-confidence. The collective American psyche is sick and will get sicker. It makes me think of that idea of victor's justice: No leaders of countries will ever be punished no matter what atrocities they have committed unless their countries have been defeated. Remember the hanging of German and Japanese generals after WW2. In the case of America we have not been defeated by an enemy but by ourselves. Self-incrimination and the form of self-punishment complicated by a paralyzing fear of what the future holds which creates this sick collective psyche is much harder to put behind us and find a cure for than the result of a military defeat which requires massive rebuilding of cities and a series war crimes tribunals and summary executions which mark a punctuation from which the nation can move on. In a certain sense, the election of Obama has served as a distraction from the collective guilt and perhaps can promise a new beginning, mainly because by electing an African American the American people have implicitly acknowledged our oldest source of shame, the enslavement of our African brothers and sisters and their subjection and mistreatment which still continues today, not to mention the genocide of the indigenous population. How much or whether or not the election of an African American whose ancestors were not slaves can in any way deal with our collective guilt in a way that contributes to our healing remains to be seen. I doubt that the capacity to believe in a brighter future in short, to be hopeful, is something a nation as sick as ours can muster, given the fact that we have not even seen the full consequences of our economic decline and collective suffering. Hope just doesn't come with this kind of illness.
What has happened in the last eight years has so depressed the American people because of two wars, beginning with the stealing of a presidential election (and the out-performance in the second election of the Republicans, which demonstrated their superior understanding of the electoral process) and ending with our economic decline. I am at a loss for words, but something should be said about the affect on the American collective psyche as we witness the stealing of our basic rights as citizens, including habeas corpus and the protection of our privacy and then the collective guilt that some Americans have felt upon learning that our nation was practicing torture, rendition flights and atrocities against foriegn civilians in the name of military action or maintenance of our 764 military bases that we admit to having. Our national mood has changed from one of hope, a kind of joyful sense of being the richest and most powerful nation in the history of the world, backed up by extraordinary achievements in every field of human activity including the Fine Arts which we have every right to be proud of to one of shame and fear, because everybody is either personally affected or knows somebody who is affected by the threat of the loss of their home, the loss of their job, forty-to-fifty percent drop in the value of their assets or their salaries and the possibility of even greater losses. Europeans don't seem to have taken on the full gravity of this catastrophe, at least those we have the privilege of knowing. They are lighthearted, full of whimsy and imagination, playful as ever and retain their sense of identity and uniqueness, whereas I feel Americans are being swallowed up in some group panic and with many signs of the loss of identity and their self-confidence. The collective American psyche is sick and will get sicker. It makes me think of that idea of victor's justice: No leaders of countries will ever be punished no matter what atrocities they have committed unless their countries have been defeated. Remember the hanging of German and Japanese generals after WW2. In the case of America we have not been defeated by an enemy but by ourselves. Self-incrimination and the form of self-punishment complicated by a paralyzing fear of what the future holds which creates this sick collective psyche is much harder to put behind us and find a cure for than the result of a military defeat which requires massive rebuilding of cities and a series war crimes tribunals and summary executions which mark a punctuation from which the nation can move on. In a certain sense, the election of Obama has served as a distraction from the collective guilt and perhaps can promise a new beginning, mainly because by electing an African American the American people have implicitly acknowledged our oldest source of shame, the enslavement of our African brothers and sisters and their subjection and mistreatment which still continues today, not to mention the genocide of the indigenous population. How much or whether or not the election of an African American whose ancestors were not slaves can in any way deal with our collective guilt in a way that contributes to our healing remains to be seen. I doubt that the capacity to believe in a brighter future in short, to be hopeful, is something a nation as sick as ours can muster, given the fact that we have not even seen the full consequences of our economic decline and collective suffering. Hope just doesn't come with this kind of illness.
Sunday 16 November 2008
The Recent Election
Q: What's an interesting, recent article to read?
A: Read this week's New Yorker in which there are any number of fine articles to do with the recent election, among them "The New Liberalism," by George Packer, "Battle Plans," by Ryan Lizza, "The Fall," by David Grann. The defining moment in the campaign, the speech on race, delivered in Philadelphia focused his way in to leadership, making the Black experience central to the American experience, unifying all Americans in his history making campaign.
A: Read this week's New Yorker in which there are any number of fine articles to do with the recent election, among them "The New Liberalism," by George Packer, "Battle Plans," by Ryan Lizza, "The Fall," by David Grann. The defining moment in the campaign, the speech on race, delivered in Philadelphia focused his way in to leadership, making the Black experience central to the American experience, unifying all Americans in his history making campaign.
Tuesday 17 June 2008
TAKING THE VEIL
The recurring event in the tenth tale of The Heptameron of Marguerite de Navarre is deception. In order for Amador, the hero of the tale, to pursue the object of his desire, Lady Florida, he engages in a series of ruses. Decorous behavior among the nobility in 16th Century Spain was such that emotions and intentions must be hidden at all cost. There was little guilt felt about the fulfillment of carnal desires (needs and ambitions). The situation most to be avoided was any public revelations about one's devious schemes and illicit involvements that could bring shame to one's name and reputation. The more than fifteen instances in this tale of hiding feelings as well as manipulative schemes requiring blattant lies indicate an obsessive anxiety about being discovered and dishonored, or worse. There is a general tendency among the characters in this tale to disbelieve what they are told. The climate of suspicion can be seen as directly responsible for a number of instances of misinterpretation of behavior.
This psychological narrative gives the reader partial access to Amador's feelings that are hidden from the other characters. Full disclosure of his true intentions is delayed until the end of the tale. Whereas we are told when he looks at Florida: "He was transported with joy, and was only able to utter a few words of greatful thanks" (p. 125), it is his behavior which indicates the extent of his excitement that has rendered him speechless, even though Florida fails to see that. His marriage to Avanturada who is Florida's close friend is both a foil and a means of being brought into Florida's proximaty and eventually her trust. Winning her mother's confidence is one more step toward achieving his goal.
Exactly what he is after is not yet revealed to us (how about to himself? Does he know?). The suggestion that what he really wants is a sexual conquest (this may be too strong) is made when he pretends to be making a confession of love to Florida when he begins by asking the question: "Tell me, is it better to speak or die?" (p. 129) In a culture in which feelings must be hidden, there is all the more irony in a feigned confession of love which is actually a manipulative ruse. The suggestion of what he really wants is made when he says: "But you must believe me, my Lady, when I tell you that I am not one of those men who would exploit this advantage. I desire no favour, nor pleasure from you, except what is in accordance with the dictates of virtue." (p. 130-131) By denying he intends to "exploit this advantage," he establishes deviously the possibility of such a thing. He plants this possibility in her mind. He does not say how he might exploit this advantage. Keeping this possibility vague gives him room to retreat. If she had something sexual in mind, this would be her opportunity to reveal her desire. If she were offended by the suggestion, he could deny he meant that.
Lady Florida is understandably suspicious, perceiving something extreme in his behavior that he should have to make "such a long, high-flown speech...." (p. 131) when she has already made him aware that he has what he now seems to be asking for, that is, her trust and favor. She makes herself vulnerable to his manipulations by being too candid about her doubts about his intentions. His speech which was in the guise of a confession is actually a set-up for a further manipulation. When he says: "The reason why I have made so bold as to say all this to you, is that Paulina has become very suspicious." (p. 132), he seems to be asking her to help him hide his feelings for her, but this is just a subterfuge to characterize her behavior toward him being that of someone who is in love with him: "...when you come to talk to me alone in your affectionate way...." She may not have been fully conscious of the nature of her own feelings or the meaning of her behavior toward him. He has found a way of inadvertently suggesting this possibility and thereby releases a new awareness in her. For the first time in the tale, we are given access to her feelings. "At these words Florida was filled with delight beyond bounds. Deep within her heart she began to feel stirrings that she had never felt before." (p. 133) He has also planted the seed of jealousy in her mind. She is so willing to comply with his request that his ruse backfires on him, causing her to avoid contact with him as well as making her self-conscious. Until this point her affection for him has been innocent and spontaneous.
It is now his turn to misinterpret her behavior: "Amador...concluded that she was keeping away from him, not just as a result of his advice, but because she was displeased with him." (p. 133) It is Florida who now tries to hide her jealousy of Paulina, but Amador is so angered by her lie that she is happy he is enjoying himself with Paulina (p. 133) that he finally admits he has no interest in Paulina. Next, we find him using the language that describes so much of their behavior when he speaks of the necessity of covering up his anger and hiding his joy. (p. 134) Only by being away from her can his feelings be kept under control. Only when he leaves, can she allow her feelings to surface: "Love, having been thwarted, was aroused now...." Again the reader is given access to her feelings, feelings to which she herself has been denied access. Soon after, there is a brief moment of reconciliation before Amador is off to war again.
Taken prisoner in a great battle between the Spanish forces and the Moors, Amador does not return to Barcelona for two years. In the meantime, Florida has been married off to the Duke of Cardona. Her marriage is described as "a life that seemed to her little better than death." (p. 138) When she sees Amador again, she lets him know that she married against her will and that he is the one she loves. Then we are told that "she was ready not merely to accept Amador as a devoted servent, but to admit him as a sure and perfect lover." (p. 139) Given what we know from the events that follow, this disclosure of the narrator could be deemed as much a lie as the lies her characters tell each other. It is simply to keep us interested in the rest of the story. Just as we are told that "Florida was almost won" Amador is again called away by the king. This news causes Amador's wife to faint, fall down the stairs and die. Both Florida and Amador are thrown into deep despair, but his dejection is so great, mainly on account of being called away from Florida, that he is willing to risk all and make his true wishes known. But he will not say what he wants. Twice we are told: "He said not a word." (p. 140) "Amador still said nothing." (p. 141) His actions, however, make it quite clear to her what he wants, and "Florida, terrified, thought he must be out of his mind." Finally, on pages 141-142, he does speak the truth of his desire. Her appeal to honor and virtue shames him into one more attempt at deception when he claims he was only testing her: "Your honor is vindicated...." (p. 143) She doesn't believe him, though she cannot stop loving him: "She resolved, in short, to go on loving Amador, but, in order to obey the dictates of honor, never to let it be known, either to him or anyone." (p. 144)
After three years of glorious deeds at war, Amador decides to "score a victory over her as his mortal enemy...." (p. 145) The use of the military metaphor alerts us to the fact that first and foremost Amador is a soldier and, true to his character, conquest is what he is really interested in, not love. Behind his willingness to destroy in order to conquer is his belief he has lost her love forever, which is the result of her decision to hide her feelings from the world. In a secret mission for the king (again the theme of secrecy), Amador devises a way of meeting with the countess of Aranda so he can see Florida. The Countess, always in Amador's corner, arranges a meeting (or tryst?) with her daughter. But Florida goes to the oratory to pray and in order that her beauty not cause feelings of lust in Amador, she bashes herself in the face with a rock and disfigures herself. Here we have one more instance of up, in this case, by destroying, which is immediately followed by her mother covering up the damage by applying bandages to her face. Then, finally alone with her, he tries to overpower her. After all of her attempts to talk him out of raping her, Florida finally calls for her mother, who responds immediately. Amador tries to lie his way out of what could be fatal consequences for him, saying he had only grabbed her hand and tried to kiss it. The countess only half believes him. And Florida, when questioned, lies and refuses to give any details, one more cover-up. After so many veils cast over the truth, the tale ends with Florida taking the veil (a cover!). Amador, off at war again, blots out his life, when trapped in battle, by plunging a sword through his body.
Amador threw his life away in pursuit of a goal he should have known was impossible to obtain. One wonders why Amador failed to see that the person he was after would never be able to respond to him sexually, a person he had known so long but never understood. He was nineteen years old when they first met; she was twelve. Ironically, it may be that she became the creature of his own making, who hearing him preach so many years about the virtues of courtly love, began to believe his lies and learned to abhor the idea of carnal desire.
This psychological narrative gives the reader partial access to Amador's feelings that are hidden from the other characters. Full disclosure of his true intentions is delayed until the end of the tale. Whereas we are told when he looks at Florida: "He was transported with joy, and was only able to utter a few words of greatful thanks" (p. 125), it is his behavior which indicates the extent of his excitement that has rendered him speechless, even though Florida fails to see that. His marriage to Avanturada who is Florida's close friend is both a foil and a means of being brought into Florida's proximaty and eventually her trust. Winning her mother's confidence is one more step toward achieving his goal.
Exactly what he is after is not yet revealed to us (how about to himself? Does he know?). The suggestion that what he really wants is a sexual conquest (this may be too strong) is made when he pretends to be making a confession of love to Florida when he begins by asking the question: "Tell me, is it better to speak or die?" (p. 129) In a culture in which feelings must be hidden, there is all the more irony in a feigned confession of love which is actually a manipulative ruse. The suggestion of what he really wants is made when he says: "But you must believe me, my Lady, when I tell you that I am not one of those men who would exploit this advantage. I desire no favour, nor pleasure from you, except what is in accordance with the dictates of virtue." (p. 130-131) By denying he intends to "exploit this advantage," he establishes deviously the possibility of such a thing. He plants this possibility in her mind. He does not say how he might exploit this advantage. Keeping this possibility vague gives him room to retreat. If she had something sexual in mind, this would be her opportunity to reveal her desire. If she were offended by the suggestion, he could deny he meant that.
Lady Florida is understandably suspicious, perceiving something extreme in his behavior that he should have to make "such a long, high-flown speech...." (p. 131) when she has already made him aware that he has what he now seems to be asking for, that is, her trust and favor. She makes herself vulnerable to his manipulations by being too candid about her doubts about his intentions. His speech which was in the guise of a confession is actually a set-up for a further manipulation. When he says: "The reason why I have made so bold as to say all this to you, is that Paulina has become very suspicious." (p. 132), he seems to be asking her to help him hide his feelings for her, but this is just a subterfuge to characterize her behavior toward him being that of someone who is in love with him: "...when you come to talk to me alone in your affectionate way...." She may not have been fully conscious of the nature of her own feelings or the meaning of her behavior toward him. He has found a way of inadvertently suggesting this possibility and thereby releases a new awareness in her. For the first time in the tale, we are given access to her feelings. "At these words Florida was filled with delight beyond bounds. Deep within her heart she began to feel stirrings that she had never felt before." (p. 133) He has also planted the seed of jealousy in her mind. She is so willing to comply with his request that his ruse backfires on him, causing her to avoid contact with him as well as making her self-conscious. Until this point her affection for him has been innocent and spontaneous.
It is now his turn to misinterpret her behavior: "Amador...concluded that she was keeping away from him, not just as a result of his advice, but because she was displeased with him." (p. 133) It is Florida who now tries to hide her jealousy of Paulina, but Amador is so angered by her lie that she is happy he is enjoying himself with Paulina (p. 133) that he finally admits he has no interest in Paulina. Next, we find him using the language that describes so much of their behavior when he speaks of the necessity of covering up his anger and hiding his joy. (p. 134) Only by being away from her can his feelings be kept under control. Only when he leaves, can she allow her feelings to surface: "Love, having been thwarted, was aroused now...." Again the reader is given access to her feelings, feelings to which she herself has been denied access. Soon after, there is a brief moment of reconciliation before Amador is off to war again.
Taken prisoner in a great battle between the Spanish forces and the Moors, Amador does not return to Barcelona for two years. In the meantime, Florida has been married off to the Duke of Cardona. Her marriage is described as "a life that seemed to her little better than death." (p. 138) When she sees Amador again, she lets him know that she married against her will and that he is the one she loves. Then we are told that "she was ready not merely to accept Amador as a devoted servent, but to admit him as a sure and perfect lover." (p. 139) Given what we know from the events that follow, this disclosure of the narrator could be deemed as much a lie as the lies her characters tell each other. It is simply to keep us interested in the rest of the story. Just as we are told that "Florida was almost won" Amador is again called away by the king. This news causes Amador's wife to faint, fall down the stairs and die. Both Florida and Amador are thrown into deep despair, but his dejection is so great, mainly on account of being called away from Florida, that he is willing to risk all and make his true wishes known. But he will not say what he wants. Twice we are told: "He said not a word." (p. 140) "Amador still said nothing." (p. 141) His actions, however, make it quite clear to her what he wants, and "Florida, terrified, thought he must be out of his mind." Finally, on pages 141-142, he does speak the truth of his desire. Her appeal to honor and virtue shames him into one more attempt at deception when he claims he was only testing her: "Your honor is vindicated...." (p. 143) She doesn't believe him, though she cannot stop loving him: "She resolved, in short, to go on loving Amador, but, in order to obey the dictates of honor, never to let it be known, either to him or anyone." (p. 144)
After three years of glorious deeds at war, Amador decides to "score a victory over her as his mortal enemy...." (p. 145) The use of the military metaphor alerts us to the fact that first and foremost Amador is a soldier and, true to his character, conquest is what he is really interested in, not love. Behind his willingness to destroy in order to conquer is his belief he has lost her love forever, which is the result of her decision to hide her feelings from the world. In a secret mission for the king (again the theme of secrecy), Amador devises a way of meeting with the countess of Aranda so he can see Florida. The Countess, always in Amador's corner, arranges a meeting (or tryst?) with her daughter. But Florida goes to the oratory to pray and in order that her beauty not cause feelings of lust in Amador, she bashes herself in the face with a rock and disfigures herself. Here we have one more instance of up, in this case, by destroying, which is immediately followed by her mother covering up the damage by applying bandages to her face. Then, finally alone with her, he tries to overpower her. After all of her attempts to talk him out of raping her, Florida finally calls for her mother, who responds immediately. Amador tries to lie his way out of what could be fatal consequences for him, saying he had only grabbed her hand and tried to kiss it. The countess only half believes him. And Florida, when questioned, lies and refuses to give any details, one more cover-up. After so many veils cast over the truth, the tale ends with Florida taking the veil (a cover!). Amador, off at war again, blots out his life, when trapped in battle, by plunging a sword through his body.
Amador threw his life away in pursuit of a goal he should have known was impossible to obtain. One wonders why Amador failed to see that the person he was after would never be able to respond to him sexually, a person he had known so long but never understood. He was nineteen years old when they first met; she was twelve. Ironically, it may be that she became the creature of his own making, who hearing him preach so many years about the virtues of courtly love, began to believe his lies and learned to abhor the idea of carnal desire.
Monday 16 June 2008
Problems of Interpretation in Apuleius' The Golden Ass
The Golden Ass is not an explicitly didactic work, though if we look at the way it ends with a religious conversion and an initiation as a priest into the cult of Isis, we could see everything that came before as an allegory of a pilgrim's progress through hellish events in the barbarian outer regions of the empire, chaotic, violent, self-demeaning events until the final safe arrival in the ordered new home of the author, Rome. The work is a celebration of the ordered society, which the capital of the empire offers the traveler. The horrific events, which precede Lucious' religious conversion, offer an extreme contrast to the solace and thrilling ceremony of the religious discipline Lucious devotes himself to. The erotic zest and brio of his dalliance with Photis is not necessarily out of synch with his new religion. Or we might not hope that the requirement of chastity, fasting, and a vegetarian diet are only temporary trials of his initiation, and that he can resume his erotic life. The cult of Isis was essentially a fertility cult, celebrating a cycle of violent death and resurrection. The winter-spring cycle, the death and regeneration of nature. An interpretation of this sort is to be considered an hypothesis.
We can entertain the game of interpretation, looking for clues and guideposts, which might support the argument that such was intended by the author, knowing it could never be proven definately, anymore than a positive or negative judgment of an art work can be proven. It is a matter of backing up our statements with good reasons, which we hope are persuasive, but know that they are not objective truth anymore than our opinions are. We can not be sure that what we infer is actually what the author intended to imply.
If you compare the Golden Ass written in Latin to Daphnis and Chloe written in Greek by Longus, one notes the first major difference is that the former is a first person narrative, and the latter a third person narrative. The difference in this antique way of managing these two kinds of narrative technique is that first person allows the main character to reveal his conscious life, dreams, fears, memories, desires. The third person narrative as it is conducted by Longus describes events and scenes in a pastoral setting from the outside. While it is true that Lucious in the Golden Ass tells us much more about himself, his erotic ecstasy, his feelings of humiliation, and later his religious enthusiasm, what he does not tell us is how to interpret these psychic events or how to interpret the many stories he tells or the novel as a whole or in part.
Earlier I mentioned guideposts or clues which suggest that the author wants us to make certain connections because events were repeated or there is a pattern of similar events which may show that he wants us to pay attention to a particular theme. In other words these events are given prominence in the work, indicating importance. The author does not explicitly state that he wants us to think about these themes. What we are dealing with is implicit discourse, which demands our own participation and may tempt us to develop an interpretation of the meaning of these connections we have made.
The first example is the way events of transformation are explicitly rendered, such as a witch turning a man into a pig as Circe does in Homer's Odessy or in the Golden Ass Photis' mistress turning herself into a bird and flying away or Photis accidentally or on purpose turning Lucious into an ass. These are explicit events told to us. There is another series of metamorphoses which are reversals in the outcome of these stories, which Lucious is conscious of and which are not difficult for us to discern though he does not usually comment explicitly that these transformations have taken place. The first of such transformations is in the story of the witch who kills Socrates with a sword, placing a sponge in the wound. The transformation is a reversal of Lucious' expectation or his own interpretation of what has happened. The dead man gets up and walks with him and the story teller thinks that Socrates is not dead. The wounded man falls, the sponge pops out in the bank of the stream, and it turns out that he is dead. This is an obvious case of a reversal of either expectation or his appraisal of a situation--also emotions felt are opposite of what is appropriate or expected. (Metamorphoses P. 27, vol. 1) Some of these transformations play on the mistaking a dream for reality. (Meta. P. 39-43, vol. 1)--Turns out to be not to a dream. The stories about people who must leave their homes because of shame or guilt. Traveling becomes the allegory of the journey of life.
Only when Lucious becomes an ass does he start living his own story. The fact is is that he is used as the butt of a great joke. And after he comes out of the great scare of being a convicted muderer--his lovemaking continues until he becomes so self-possessed that he wants to be transformed into Eros with wings. As a reward for Lucious' delusions of grandeur Photis picks the wrong potion and Lucious is turned into an ass. The duality is the real Lucious as consciousness within the body of an ass.
When Psyche is married, instead of a marriage it is experienced by her and everyone else in her community as a funeral. And--if you look at the prose there are at least two transformations that take place, in which a normal state of affairs turns to the negative. For example, "Now the light of the wedding torch grew dim with black, sooty ashes." (Meta. p. 247, vol. 1) The music changes from happy to sad, to the Lydian mode which was used for dirges. In the Lydian mode miner keys and dissident intervals are used, creating a mournful or sad mood.
Venus believes she can fulfill her purpose to preserve her superiority by eliminating Psyche who everyone thinks is more beautiful than she is. But Cupid is working behind the scenes unbeknownst to his mother, against her purposes, in his own self-interest. Zephyr, god of the wind, is acting as an agent of Eros to save Psyche from a violent, fatal fall. (Meta. P. 251, vol. 1)
Psyche is saved from death but is imprisoned in a totally isolated life (Meta. P. 261, vol. 1), in which she is alone throughout the day, waiting for night to come and the arrival of her lover. This story is an allegory of the transition from childhood to womanhood, after puberty when a woman is taken into marriage she looses her family and early life. There is a grief as this figure of every woman moves from her parents' household to her husbands', to live under his authority. Psyche's experience has been described by Eric Neumann, a Jungian psychoanalyst, as the allegory of the death of the maiden, which takes place, not only with puberty (sexual maturity) but more especially with the loss of her virginity. The loss of her original home, which she gives up for that of her husband, is what she is grieving for. She has left the place where her mother was the central figure, what Neumann sees as the conflict between the matriarchal, the mother's realm, in conflict with the patriarchal, her husband's realm. In other words Psyche's story is read as every woman's story, in the life cycle. There is no way of knowing that Psyche's story is meant to be read as the story of all women. And that is what the critic is doing when he claims that a story is an allegory. He is taking the leap of relating the particular to the general, which may never have been explicitly stated in the text. This myth serves the psychiatrist well to express issues of women's lives which he wants to speak about, but I would think that such notions would be very far from what people in antiquity would have thought about these myths, which were used in ritual celebrations to evoke catharsis.
There is an interesting kind of tension before Lucious regains his human form, almost superstitious: "I did not, however, dash forward in an unrestrained rush under the influence of my sudden joy, because, obviously, I was afraid lest the peaceful progression of the rites be upset by the sudden rush of a four footed beast." (Meta. P. 315, vol. 2) Lucious is hypersensitive and fearful lest he loose his chance to gain freedom from the de-personifying body of an ass. And again: "Instead, with calm and almost human steps, I slowly edged my body little by little through the crowd...." (Meta. P. 319, vol. 2) As if the ass form Lucious had held was another person.
The irony is that when Lucious is transformed back into his own self with his original body, that the person he was is not the person he is transformed back into, but he becomes a better person, having benefited from this conversion process. The word conversion is in it's denotative, meaning a kind of transformation--specifically spiritual. A kind of transcendence has taken place. We come back to the question, how does this ultimate event in the story narrated to us by Lucious relate to all the stories which came before. Is the personal transformation that Psyche undergoes parallel to the spiritual transformation Lucious undergoes? The answer is no: It is not parallel. How does Lucious' transformation at the end relate to the repetition of suicidal wishes expressed every time the going gets tough for either him or story tellers whom he happens to be listening to, whose bizarre tales he relates to us? One might say that the picture presented to us of life in the colonies of Rome is dire and so threatening that one looses all hope and can no longer cope; rather one looks to death as a comforting release from a terrifying life. Such an embattled relation to life is the perfect opportunity for the solace which religion offers. So making that connection between the way the book ends up and certain salient features of the narrative which preceded it, is a simple interpretation which maybe makes sense out of the book. Nonetheless, we are left with the question, is this interpretation what the author intended us to make. One final question: Is the character of Lucious fictional or autobiographical? Therefore, is the conversion experience offered as a message of hope for us? Or is this story a fictional tale that has a happy ending?
Works Cited:
Apuleius, METAMORPHOSES, edited and translated by J. Arthur Hanson, Harvard University Press 1996.
Erich Neumann, "A Commentary on the Tale by Apuleius," translated from the German by Ralph Manheim, Princeton University Press 1956.
Longus, DAPHNIS AND CHLOE, translated by J.M. Edmonds, Harvard University Press 1996.
We can entertain the game of interpretation, looking for clues and guideposts, which might support the argument that such was intended by the author, knowing it could never be proven definately, anymore than a positive or negative judgment of an art work can be proven. It is a matter of backing up our statements with good reasons, which we hope are persuasive, but know that they are not objective truth anymore than our opinions are. We can not be sure that what we infer is actually what the author intended to imply.
If you compare the Golden Ass written in Latin to Daphnis and Chloe written in Greek by Longus, one notes the first major difference is that the former is a first person narrative, and the latter a third person narrative. The difference in this antique way of managing these two kinds of narrative technique is that first person allows the main character to reveal his conscious life, dreams, fears, memories, desires. The third person narrative as it is conducted by Longus describes events and scenes in a pastoral setting from the outside. While it is true that Lucious in the Golden Ass tells us much more about himself, his erotic ecstasy, his feelings of humiliation, and later his religious enthusiasm, what he does not tell us is how to interpret these psychic events or how to interpret the many stories he tells or the novel as a whole or in part.
Earlier I mentioned guideposts or clues which suggest that the author wants us to make certain connections because events were repeated or there is a pattern of similar events which may show that he wants us to pay attention to a particular theme. In other words these events are given prominence in the work, indicating importance. The author does not explicitly state that he wants us to think about these themes. What we are dealing with is implicit discourse, which demands our own participation and may tempt us to develop an interpretation of the meaning of these connections we have made.
The first example is the way events of transformation are explicitly rendered, such as a witch turning a man into a pig as Circe does in Homer's Odessy or in the Golden Ass Photis' mistress turning herself into a bird and flying away or Photis accidentally or on purpose turning Lucious into an ass. These are explicit events told to us. There is another series of metamorphoses which are reversals in the outcome of these stories, which Lucious is conscious of and which are not difficult for us to discern though he does not usually comment explicitly that these transformations have taken place. The first of such transformations is in the story of the witch who kills Socrates with a sword, placing a sponge in the wound. The transformation is a reversal of Lucious' expectation or his own interpretation of what has happened. The dead man gets up and walks with him and the story teller thinks that Socrates is not dead. The wounded man falls, the sponge pops out in the bank of the stream, and it turns out that he is dead. This is an obvious case of a reversal of either expectation or his appraisal of a situation--also emotions felt are opposite of what is appropriate or expected. (Metamorphoses P. 27, vol. 1) Some of these transformations play on the mistaking a dream for reality. (Meta. P. 39-43, vol. 1)--Turns out to be not to a dream. The stories about people who must leave their homes because of shame or guilt. Traveling becomes the allegory of the journey of life.
Only when Lucious becomes an ass does he start living his own story. The fact is is that he is used as the butt of a great joke. And after he comes out of the great scare of being a convicted muderer--his lovemaking continues until he becomes so self-possessed that he wants to be transformed into Eros with wings. As a reward for Lucious' delusions of grandeur Photis picks the wrong potion and Lucious is turned into an ass. The duality is the real Lucious as consciousness within the body of an ass.
When Psyche is married, instead of a marriage it is experienced by her and everyone else in her community as a funeral. And--if you look at the prose there are at least two transformations that take place, in which a normal state of affairs turns to the negative. For example, "Now the light of the wedding torch grew dim with black, sooty ashes." (Meta. p. 247, vol. 1) The music changes from happy to sad, to the Lydian mode which was used for dirges. In the Lydian mode miner keys and dissident intervals are used, creating a mournful or sad mood.
Venus believes she can fulfill her purpose to preserve her superiority by eliminating Psyche who everyone thinks is more beautiful than she is. But Cupid is working behind the scenes unbeknownst to his mother, against her purposes, in his own self-interest. Zephyr, god of the wind, is acting as an agent of Eros to save Psyche from a violent, fatal fall. (Meta. P. 251, vol. 1)
Psyche is saved from death but is imprisoned in a totally isolated life (Meta. P. 261, vol. 1), in which she is alone throughout the day, waiting for night to come and the arrival of her lover. This story is an allegory of the transition from childhood to womanhood, after puberty when a woman is taken into marriage she looses her family and early life. There is a grief as this figure of every woman moves from her parents' household to her husbands', to live under his authority. Psyche's experience has been described by Eric Neumann, a Jungian psychoanalyst, as the allegory of the death of the maiden, which takes place, not only with puberty (sexual maturity) but more especially with the loss of her virginity. The loss of her original home, which she gives up for that of her husband, is what she is grieving for. She has left the place where her mother was the central figure, what Neumann sees as the conflict between the matriarchal, the mother's realm, in conflict with the patriarchal, her husband's realm. In other words Psyche's story is read as every woman's story, in the life cycle. There is no way of knowing that Psyche's story is meant to be read as the story of all women. And that is what the critic is doing when he claims that a story is an allegory. He is taking the leap of relating the particular to the general, which may never have been explicitly stated in the text. This myth serves the psychiatrist well to express issues of women's lives which he wants to speak about, but I would think that such notions would be very far from what people in antiquity would have thought about these myths, which were used in ritual celebrations to evoke catharsis.
There is an interesting kind of tension before Lucious regains his human form, almost superstitious: "I did not, however, dash forward in an unrestrained rush under the influence of my sudden joy, because, obviously, I was afraid lest the peaceful progression of the rites be upset by the sudden rush of a four footed beast." (Meta. P. 315, vol. 2) Lucious is hypersensitive and fearful lest he loose his chance to gain freedom from the de-personifying body of an ass. And again: "Instead, with calm and almost human steps, I slowly edged my body little by little through the crowd...." (Meta. P. 319, vol. 2) As if the ass form Lucious had held was another person.
The irony is that when Lucious is transformed back into his own self with his original body, that the person he was is not the person he is transformed back into, but he becomes a better person, having benefited from this conversion process. The word conversion is in it's denotative, meaning a kind of transformation--specifically spiritual. A kind of transcendence has taken place. We come back to the question, how does this ultimate event in the story narrated to us by Lucious relate to all the stories which came before. Is the personal transformation that Psyche undergoes parallel to the spiritual transformation Lucious undergoes? The answer is no: It is not parallel. How does Lucious' transformation at the end relate to the repetition of suicidal wishes expressed every time the going gets tough for either him or story tellers whom he happens to be listening to, whose bizarre tales he relates to us? One might say that the picture presented to us of life in the colonies of Rome is dire and so threatening that one looses all hope and can no longer cope; rather one looks to death as a comforting release from a terrifying life. Such an embattled relation to life is the perfect opportunity for the solace which religion offers. So making that connection between the way the book ends up and certain salient features of the narrative which preceded it, is a simple interpretation which maybe makes sense out of the book. Nonetheless, we are left with the question, is this interpretation what the author intended us to make. One final question: Is the character of Lucious fictional or autobiographical? Therefore, is the conversion experience offered as a message of hope for us? Or is this story a fictional tale that has a happy ending?
Works Cited:
Apuleius, METAMORPHOSES, edited and translated by J. Arthur Hanson, Harvard University Press 1996.
Erich Neumann, "A Commentary on the Tale by Apuleius," translated from the German by Ralph Manheim, Princeton University Press 1956.
Longus, DAPHNIS AND CHLOE, translated by J.M. Edmonds, Harvard University Press 1996.
Saturday 10 May 2008
MAINSTREAM MARKET
In the last twenty-five years there have been
important changes in the North American writer’s
market. Twenty-five years ago we still had great
editors in the publishing houses of New York: Pat
Kovici at Viking, Arabelle Porter at New World Writing
and later at Houghton Mifflin, Maxwell Perkins who
edited Thomas Wolf. We had all kinds of great people
like Mr. and Mrs. Knopf who began their mom-and-pop
publishing companies on the dinning room table and who
had an unswerving devotion to literature. Since that
time, these publishing heroes, great editors who
encouraged young writers, even supported them,
{as in the case of Pat Covicci at Viking who gave
Saul Bellow $10,000 a year, until his commercial
success with The Adventures of Augie March.) have
died out. And large corporations have bought
out publishing houses, so that, editors are
little more than cogs in the wheel of big
companies. essentially powerless when it comes
to making choices which involve risk,
such as investing in an unknown, not fully
developed talent. Publishing has become more
ruthless, less personal. And the competition is
fierce. Writers in America must compete with
writers in China and Japan. What we have
now is a world market. Consequently,
certain kinds of talent will go undiscovered.
Twenty-five years ago editors were more
a part of the process, where as now,
for the most part, it is the sales forces who
decide which book or author will fly
or go by the way side. It’s because of
Oprah Winfrey that Schlink, the author
of The Reader, was discovered and
became a popular success over night. And
that is a great thing. For she now
provides a counter force to business as usual.
She enters the living rooms of America and is
payed attention to, on a whole range of subjects.
She has a massive following. She opens her
mouth and people listen. Because of her influence, a
writer like Schlink, who is a fine writer, and
not a writer for a mass market, can reach a
mainstream audience. Such is not the case,
for example, with Penelopy Fitzgerald, who
was a writer in whom there was no great
commercial interest. But suddenly she
caught on in England and then could become
more of a viable commodity here in America.
The further influence, these last twenty-five
years, are the creative writing programs
that have cropped up all over the country,
creating an industry of writing so that there
are now training grounds for would-be
writers where they can learn more quickly
the tricks of the trade. Through intellegence
and hard work young writers can once again
move along more quickly, finding a viable
place for themselves. Literature is actually
now being shaped and molded by certain
trends which are encouraged in the creative
writing programs in America’s colleges
and universities throughout the country.
Another aspect in reaching out to the large
audience has involved making use of young
talent to do research, turning the writing of
the big novel into an industry. In this way,
the research allows the writer to create books
in which the reader feels he can learn something
about say, Hawaii. This type of novel is
something unique to our time. In the late
fifties and early sixties, certain writers like
Phillip Roth, and before him Saul Bellow,
ethnic writers, who might have been on the
margins began to take center stage. To the
American Jewish writers, have also been
added the black writers, the Irish writers,
the chinese, japanese and Korean-American
writers as well as other significant minoriies,
the American Indian writer, for example.
All these groups have added to the pool of
writers readers turn to. Such constituencies
out of which these writers come bring boyancy
to the market, providing new readers. Novels
are only a part of the offerings. Top trade
list books include non-fiction by leading
scientists, in which the general reader can
become educated about the major
developments in, say, biology, the
hottest field in science in recent years.
I have become interested in a writer called
Kizuo Ishiguro who wrote Remains of the
Day and A Pale View of the Hills and another
writer whom I mentioned earlier, Bernhard Schlink,
a German, who wrote The Reader and
Flights of Love a new collection of stories
which are out. These writers are fine writers.
It is fortunate that they become best sellers
here and in England. I am more attracted to writers
who receive the Booker Prize in England or Irish
writers than I am in general to American writers,
probably because they carry on the tradition of the
novel, not simply as traditionalist, but as literary
beings who have been shaped and molded by their own
reading. These people I feel more of a bond with, and
so I read them. One of the unusual and beautiful
features of a writer like Kazuo Ishiguro is his
gift for structure, in his ability to generate
a narrative. In his early work his writing was
more closely linked to what he observed in
the world out of which he came, but, as he advanced,
he became more of a presence in England. He
was able to make the bridge between his own Japanese
roots and the English world of which he had become a
part. And so now, his work has about it a classic
aspect, and I believe that the general reader in every
culture would be moved and interested by
his work. He writes like an angel. And he has a
tremendous talent for structure. I would
suppose that a writer like Schlink in The Reader,
is a writer that’s here to stay, because he’s
writing something which is important about the
generation after the war in Germany, the generation
that looked at the world of their grown-ups and
thought about what they were doing then, when Hitler
was in power . And we are all caught up in
these types of issues as we experience ourselves
being compromised by our governments. It
seems to me that, what he has achieved in The
Reader is something that will be permanently
interesting. As for Ishiguro, I would suppose that he
will be popular, because movies can easily be made
from his work such as "The Remains of the Day" and
other immensely popular stories. I think that
September 11th has had a great deal to do
with an increase in people following blogs written by
journalists who work for among others the
New York Review of Books. I myself spend far
more time reading about the War than I do reading
literary work. In this respect, I take after my mother,
Pat Goodheart, novelist, author of a little known
radical feminist work, called THE TRANSLATOR,
published by Holt in 1979, and translator of
THE WORDS TO SAY IT, by Marie Cardinal,
published by Van Vactor & Goodheart, Publishers,
who, with my father, David Van Vactor are soon
going to introduce their new imprint, FIRELIGHT.
With my father David Van Vactor, Pat Goodheart
established CANTO, a literary magazine, a showcase
for new writing, in a context of established writers.
Later, after the grant cutbacks introduced by Ronald
Reagaon they reluctantly put CANTO on the shelf,
and developed their own small publishing company,
introducing in paperback such writers as WM
Spackman, author of ARM FULL OF WARM GIRL,
Tom Savage's THE POWER OF THE DOG and Francelia
Butler's THE LUCKY PIECE. It is growing up in such
a household where literature was part of life that I
developed my own interest in writing. This is how it
was I have been provided with a literary background,
a context in which to make judgments and develop
my own voice as a critic and future novelist.
important changes in the North American writer’s
market. Twenty-five years ago we still had great
editors in the publishing houses of New York: Pat
Kovici at Viking, Arabelle Porter at New World Writing
and later at Houghton Mifflin, Maxwell Perkins who
edited Thomas Wolf. We had all kinds of great people
like Mr. and Mrs. Knopf who began their mom-and-pop
publishing companies on the dinning room table and who
had an unswerving devotion to literature. Since that
time, these publishing heroes, great editors who
encouraged young writers, even supported them,
{as in the case of Pat Covicci at Viking who gave
Saul Bellow $10,000 a year, until his commercial
success with The Adventures of Augie March.) have
died out. And large corporations have bought
out publishing houses, so that, editors are
little more than cogs in the wheel of big
companies. essentially powerless when it comes
to making choices which involve risk,
such as investing in an unknown, not fully
developed talent. Publishing has become more
ruthless, less personal. And the competition is
fierce. Writers in America must compete with
writers in China and Japan. What we have
now is a world market. Consequently,
certain kinds of talent will go undiscovered.
Twenty-five years ago editors were more
a part of the process, where as now,
for the most part, it is the sales forces who
decide which book or author will fly
or go by the way side. It’s because of
Oprah Winfrey that Schlink, the author
of The Reader, was discovered and
became a popular success over night. And
that is a great thing. For she now
provides a counter force to business as usual.
She enters the living rooms of America and is
payed attention to, on a whole range of subjects.
She has a massive following. She opens her
mouth and people listen. Because of her influence, a
writer like Schlink, who is a fine writer, and
not a writer for a mass market, can reach a
mainstream audience. Such is not the case,
for example, with Penelopy Fitzgerald, who
was a writer in whom there was no great
commercial interest. But suddenly she
caught on in England and then could become
more of a viable commodity here in America.
The further influence, these last twenty-five
years, are the creative writing programs
that have cropped up all over the country,
creating an industry of writing so that there
are now training grounds for would-be
writers where they can learn more quickly
the tricks of the trade. Through intellegence
and hard work young writers can once again
move along more quickly, finding a viable
place for themselves. Literature is actually
now being shaped and molded by certain
trends which are encouraged in the creative
writing programs in America’s colleges
and universities throughout the country.
Another aspect in reaching out to the large
audience has involved making use of young
talent to do research, turning the writing of
the big novel into an industry. In this way,
the research allows the writer to create books
in which the reader feels he can learn something
about say, Hawaii. This type of novel is
something unique to our time. In the late
fifties and early sixties, certain writers like
Phillip Roth, and before him Saul Bellow,
ethnic writers, who might have been on the
margins began to take center stage. To the
American Jewish writers, have also been
added the black writers, the Irish writers,
the chinese, japanese and Korean-American
writers as well as other significant minoriies,
the American Indian writer, for example.
All these groups have added to the pool of
writers readers turn to. Such constituencies
out of which these writers come bring boyancy
to the market, providing new readers. Novels
are only a part of the offerings. Top trade
list books include non-fiction by leading
scientists, in which the general reader can
become educated about the major
developments in, say, biology, the
hottest field in science in recent years.
I have become interested in a writer called
Kizuo Ishiguro who wrote Remains of the
Day and A Pale View of the Hills and another
writer whom I mentioned earlier, Bernhard Schlink,
a German, who wrote The Reader and
Flights of Love a new collection of stories
which are out. These writers are fine writers.
It is fortunate that they become best sellers
here and in England. I am more attracted to writers
who receive the Booker Prize in England or Irish
writers than I am in general to American writers,
probably because they carry on the tradition of the
novel, not simply as traditionalist, but as literary
beings who have been shaped and molded by their own
reading. These people I feel more of a bond with, and
so I read them. One of the unusual and beautiful
features of a writer like Kazuo Ishiguro is his
gift for structure, in his ability to generate
a narrative. In his early work his writing was
more closely linked to what he observed in
the world out of which he came, but, as he advanced,
he became more of a presence in England. He
was able to make the bridge between his own Japanese
roots and the English world of which he had become a
part. And so now, his work has about it a classic
aspect, and I believe that the general reader in every
culture would be moved and interested by
his work. He writes like an angel. And he has a
tremendous talent for structure. I would
suppose that a writer like Schlink in The Reader,
is a writer that’s here to stay, because he’s
writing something which is important about the
generation after the war in Germany, the generation
that looked at the world of their grown-ups and
thought about what they were doing then, when Hitler
was in power . And we are all caught up in
these types of issues as we experience ourselves
being compromised by our governments. It
seems to me that, what he has achieved in The
Reader is something that will be permanently
interesting. As for Ishiguro, I would suppose that he
will be popular, because movies can easily be made
from his work such as "The Remains of the Day" and
other immensely popular stories. I think that
September 11th has had a great deal to do
with an increase in people following blogs written by
journalists who work for among others the
New York Review of Books. I myself spend far
more time reading about the War than I do reading
literary work. In this respect, I take after my mother,
Pat Goodheart, novelist, author of a little known
radical feminist work, called THE TRANSLATOR,
published by Holt in 1979, and translator of
THE WORDS TO SAY IT, by Marie Cardinal,
published by Van Vactor & Goodheart, Publishers,
who, with my father, David Van Vactor are soon
going to introduce their new imprint, FIRELIGHT.
With my father David Van Vactor, Pat Goodheart
established CANTO, a literary magazine, a showcase
for new writing, in a context of established writers.
Later, after the grant cutbacks introduced by Ronald
Reagaon they reluctantly put CANTO on the shelf,
and developed their own small publishing company,
introducing in paperback such writers as WM
Spackman, author of ARM FULL OF WARM GIRL,
Tom Savage's THE POWER OF THE DOG and Francelia
Butler's THE LUCKY PIECE. It is growing up in such
a household where literature was part of life that I
developed my own interest in writing. This is how it
was I have been provided with a literary background,
a context in which to make judgments and develop
my own voice as a critic and future novelist.
Sunday 4 May 2008
Thank you mad painter.
My exgirlfriend told me about sand squirrels: They live near the beach on the dunes in the grass and collect sea shells. Alas they only exist in my immagination and possibly still in her's. I believed her story for almost the whole time we were together, which was five years. Strange, I sometimes think of those sand squirrels when I see real ones, like the other day in Finsbury Park, London.
Tuesday 29 April 2008
INNOVATION AND PROTEST IN THE FINE ARTS BY NICHOLAS VAN VACTOR
INNOVATION AND PROTEST IN THE FINE ARTS
BY NICHOLAS H. VAN VACTOR
First Reader: Chris Hables Gray
DATE
Second Reader: Mary Kaye
DATE
Goddard College
2004
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Abstract
Preface
Introduction
Nietzsche
Two Revolutionary Techniques
Beckett
The Arts in Totalitarian Regimes
The Art of Mass Murderers and the Political Terrorist
Conclusion
Abstract
This paper is about modern art in the 20th Century and role that innovation and experimental techniques play in expressing violent, irrational emotions and subject matter that was taboo in the 19th Century. Works of Beckett and Berg are contrasted to examples of protest art. In addition, this paper will examine the potential of fine art for making effective political protest.
The finding is that the most effective works of protest art did not use experimental techniques. New sets of rules were necessary in the development of experimental techniques, which in many cases had the purpose of unifying the work, creating new forms that were expressive of the radical content of these works. The anti-rational stance that is called for by Nietzsche is essential to the new form modernism takes in the 20th Century in contrast to Enlightenment doctrines that tied modernism to reason and progress.
Preface
My bias in writing this thesis is informed by being a white privileged male with a particular belief system of progress and education, born late to parents (my father was born in 1938 and my mother was born in 1939) who have very definite, though different, views concerning education. I was from the first enrolled in a series of private schools, which more or less satisfied both of them. At the age of three I entered pre-school at the Ecole Bilengue in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and by the end of second grade, my mother had hoped that I would become proficient according to my age in reading and speaking French. This plan was reinforced by frequent trips to France, and then later by living in France for two years.
I had learning disabilities from the first, which were aggravated by being kept in the mainstream educational system. I encountered a huge amount of rejection from my prep-school teachers, which I internalized. These experiences may have made me sensitive to certain aspects of society’s function.
My interest in politics comes from my exposure to explosive political arguments at dinner parties. My father, when I was quite young, started Writers And Publishers Against US Intervention In Central America. I was dragged around to book fairs all over the country.
At the same time I was, as a young child, always given art supplies and encouraged to draw. And so on a purely psychological level my obsession with art and politics can be seen in the history of my early childhood, but on the other hand, in my mid-teens through my early twenties, certain traumatic experiences occurred, which led to my writing a novel, which took place around the time that the Twin Towers were destroyed.
As a grandson of a distinguished American composer, David Van Vactor (1906-1994), I was exposed to the whole range of 20th Century serious music at home.
It could be said that these experiences and connections with art and politics primed me to write this thesis.
I was constantly compared by my mother to political figures in terms of school performance. My low grades and propensity for getting in trouble all the time at school, were used by which my mother to justify such comparisons. For example, when I asked her why she had sent me to the Fessenden school in West Newton, Massachusetts, she replied that one of the Kennedys had gone there. My mother’s ambitions for me were political. She encouraged me to try to become a governor or a diplomat, etc.
I studied international relations and American foreign policy with Professor James Chace at Bard College. Chace was politically active, and was the editor of Foreign Affairs and the author of Acheson, among other books. Last summer I took an American foreign policy course with Jeremy Pressman at Harvard Summer School. He is a full professor at Harvard University. These two professors, especially Chase, can take the credit for making the study of politics alive for me.
I don’t really know how my intellectual interests, the analytical work that I’ve done on literature, my knowledge of the visual arts and music, which is at an early stage, and not sophisticated, fits into my own creative pursuits. It will probably be ten years or more before I can see how my education has impacted my ability to produce artworks, whether visual or literary.
For example, I did extensive work on a novel that I am still not satisfied with. It may be a piece of work that I can come back to or it’s possible that I’ll never be able to get it the way I want it. The fact is that I’m not sure how I feel about a lot of endeavors that have preoccupied me for the last five years. Last fall I wrote a fairly probing fifty pages about events in my life, which led up to my writing the novel and gave me some perspective on what had struck some readers as a rather violent and reckless character that I was portraying. Events in my life when I was fifteen and the years that followed had produced a great deal of anger and resentment that I found an expression for in the novel without perhaps fully understanding what was behind it. I will return to what I wrote last fall when I decide to revisit my novel and try to fix the parts that I’m not happy with.
One way or another, I have been involved with art and politics my whole life. It is their intersection that interests me in this thesis.
Introduction
At the beginning of the 20th Century innovative techniques in the fine arts broke away from traditions of story telling, pictorial representation and musical expression. One result of innovation in the arts was the creation of groundbreaking masterpieces such as Proust’s The Remembrance of Things Past and Joyce’s Ulysses, new schools of painting, such as Dada, Surrealism, Fauve, and Cubism, and the iconoclastic works of Stravinsky (“The Rite of Spring”) and Schoenberg (“Pierrot Lunaire”). The influence of these writers, artists and composers can still be seen today. Joyce’s stream of consciousness technique was used by his contemporaries: Virginia Wolff, Gertrude Stein and Dorothy Richardson and later by William Faulkner in The Sound and The Fury. Schoenberg’s 12-tone technique was used by Alban Berg, Anton Weber and Hans Eissler and later by many other composers such as Hans Werner Henze and Witold Lutoslawski. It is the capacity of these works to express violent primal emotions that I wish to focus on.
Nietzsche’s vision of the need for art that expressed the Dionysian spirit was first put forth in The Birth of Tragedy. I will place Nietzsche’s statements about art in the context of a counter-enlightenment critique that positions itself against reason and is a “total rejection of a nihilistically deflated modernity.” (Habermas, 1997, p. 71) I will discuss Berg’s operas, “Wozzeck” and “Lulu,” which epitomize the kind of artistic expression Nietzsche was calling for.
In my study of literature, the best example of a writer whose innovations in structure and style are inseparable from his success in dramatizing alienation is Samuel Beckett. I might have thought that no writer after Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake could take the novel any further in the direction of experimentation; however, Beckett takes each of his novels one step further in the direction of total abstraction, starting with his trilogy Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable, and finally in the novel How It Is the experimentation is taken to the extreme. When I open How It Is, I am confronted with unpunctuated blocks of run-on sentences and sentence fragments the size of paragraphs without connectives, the grammar of the sentence having been abandoned. Beckett’s experimentation is evident at every level of discourse, from novelistic form to sentence structure. More important to me are the scenes of violence and irrationality depicted in his novels. I would not dare to guess whether or not Nietzsche would have appreciated the extent to which the Dionysian spirit had been realized in the plays and prose fiction of Samuel Beckett. I can only render my own judgment in that regard. How much Beckett’s successful dramatization of extreme forms of behavior is due to his ingenious experimentation is another important question that needs to be asked.
I will pay close attention to what impact these new directions in literature, the visual arts, and music have had on art used for political purposes. Have artists who were politically active made use of the expressive potential that experimental techniques availed them? How were the arts in general affected by repressive regimes in the last century? Have governments made use of innovations in the arts to produce propaganda? I know the Third Reich took full advantage of the most up-to-date methods of stagecraft and lighting in staging mass rallies and had one of the most brilliant filmmakers of her day, Leni Rieffenstal, film the 1936 Olympic Games held in Berlin. Censorship was as widely used by the Third Reich as it was in the USSR. For instance, officials of the Third Reich condemned certain styles such as surrealism as examples of decadent Jewish sensuality, just as they had condemned quantum mechanics as “Jewish physics.”
Even in the United States a political use was found for non-objective painting. It was promoted because it was deemed harmless. Because it was not figurative, was non-representational, it could not be used as propaganda that might be turned against the symbols of capitalism and the American way. Diego Rivera’s mural, commissioned by David Rockefeller for Rockefeller Center, had embarrassed rich New York art collectors by depicting John D. Rockefeller as a demon. After WWII the CIA funded an effort to make New York the capitol of the art world by promoting abstract expressionist painters who were living there and attracting artists from Europe, many of whom were refugees from WWII. (Serge Guilbaut, 1983)
As incredible as it sounds, this bizarre chapter in the use of U.S. taxpayer’s money to influence artistic taste is consistent with other feckless efforts such as the secret funding of Encounter magazine in England. Two of its editors, Frank Kermode and Stephen Spender, felt compelled to resign when they found out the magazine was receiving funds from the CIA. These were minor problems compared to the effect that living in the USSR under Stalin had on writers and composers. Andrey Platinov, who was hounded into obscurity by RAPP (Russian Association of Proletarian Writers), is considered by some critics to be the most brilliant Russian writer of the 20th Century. His tragic life and the very different careers of Sergei Prokofiev and Dimitri Shostakovich in the Soviet Union are discussed below.
The effectiveness as protest art of painting and drawings will be compared to that of film. My comments on examples of protest art, which has a long history, will refer to a recent book by David Kunzle, From Criminal To Courtier: The Soldier In Netherlandish Art 1550-1672 on soldiers by Dutch artists and a show at the Fogg Museum in June of 2003. Photojournalism is the most immediate form of response to current events, both still photography and video.
The compulsory standards of Socialist Realism were felt to be constraining by Soviet writers and composers and all the meddling in their lives by the authorities was not only oppressive but truly menacing. Ironically, the most devastating portrayals of the cruelty and injustice of the gulags were realistic in style and more or less conformed to the dictates of Socialist Realism.
Finally, I conclude that most works of art that realize most fully the potentiality inherent in their particular medium have no political agenda.
PART I
Habermas—even though he “hurls at Nietzsche the charges of subjectivism, nihilism and irrationalism” (Habermas, 1997 p. 74)—saw Nietzsche as the philosopher who turned the tables against the Enlightenment faith in reason by showing the necessity of an anti-rational program through which only the fine arts could offer the possibility of truly authentic expression.
In the book, Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche holds up the Dionysian spirit as a paradigm for drama that has the capacity to express violent and orgiastic emotions of revenge, lust and remorse:
In the barbarian festivals, Nietzsche wrote, the central trait was a complete ‘promiscuity overriding every form of tribal law,’ an unleashing of ‘all the savage urges of the mind until they reached that paroxysm of lust and cruelty which has always struck me as the “witches’ cauldron” par excellence.’ (Ibid, p. 73)
The Dionysian was counter balanced by the Apollonian values of balance, order and reason. Thus Nietzsche recognized “the need for artistic form and aesthetic sublimation.” (Ibid, p. 73)
The idea that a new kind of idolatry has developed, namely the worship of truth, is part of Nietzsche’s anti-rationalist critique; his assault on reason is particularly relevant, because reason is a key term in Enlightenment discourse. Fred Dallmayr discusses the influence Nietzsche had on 20th Century thinkers:
…Habermas treats Nietzsche as the ‘turn-table’ or hiatus separating defenders of modern reason from champions of postmodernism and counter-enlightenment. In the postmodernist camp, his study differentiates in turn between two camps: one attached to Nietzsche’s genealogical method as well as his Dionysian zest, the other concerned with his broader metaphysical ruminations. The founder of the first camp was Georges Bataille, the poet or ecrivain of human excess. In the case of Bataille, we are told, Nietzsche’s legacy inspired an attempted regress to a lost oneness accomplished through an ‘eruption of antirational elements, a consuming act of self-immolation’; Dionysian frenzy here took the form of an orgiastic revelry manifesting itself ‘in play, dance and intoxication just as much as in those sentiments—mingling horror and lust—which are triggered by destruction and the confrontation with suffering and violent death.’ (Ibid, p. 75)
In an essay published after The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, in which Habermas gives his critique of Bataille, quoted above, he addresses the rejection of modernity: “Is modernity as passé as the postmodernists argue? Or is the widely trumpeted arrival of postmodernity itself ‘phoney’? Is ‘postmodern’ a slogan which cultural modernity has provoked in reaction to itself since the middle of the nineteenth century?”(Ibid, Pages38-39) The essay is called “Modernity: An Unfinished Project.” After asking the above questions, Habermas writes that
Romanticism produced a radicalized consciousness of modernity that detached itself solely in opposition to tradition and history as a whole….The characteristic feature of such works is the moment of novelty, the New, which will itself be surpassed and devalued in turn by the innovations of the next style. Yet whereas the merely modish becomes outmoded once it is displaced into the past, the modern still retains a secret connection to the classical. The ‘classical’ has always signified that which endures through the ages. (Ibid, pp. 39-40)
Habermas goes on to say:
This also explains the abstract opposition of modernism to history, which thus forfeits the structure of an articulated process of cultural transmission ensuring continuity. Individual epochs lose their own distinctive features, and the present now assumes a heroic affinity either with what is most remote or what is closest to it: decadence recognizes itself immediately in the barbaric, the wild and the primitive. The anarchistic intention of exploding the continuum of history accounts for the subversive force of an aesthetic consciousness which rebels against the norm-giving achievements of tradition, which is nourished on the experience of rebellion against everything normative, which neutralizes considerations of moral goodness or practical utility, a consciousness which continually stages a dialectic of esoteric mystery and scandalous offence, narcotically fascinated by the fright produced by its acts of profanation –- and yet at the same time flees from the trivialization resulting from that very profanation. (Ibid, pp. 40-41)
Habermas quotes from Adorno: “The zeal directed against tradition becomes a devouring maelstrom. In this sense modernity is a myth turned against itself….” (Ibid pp. 40-41)
Returning to Fred Dallmayr’s defense of Nietzsche against Habermas, I wish to point out that my concern is the way Nietzsche’s call for artistic expression embodying the tension between the Dionysian and the Apollonian foreshadowed many developments in the 20th Century.
As it seems to me, his genealogical ventures are evidence of this fearless and relentless quest, as are his (posthumously collected) fragments on the ‘will to power as knowledge’ and the ‘will to power as art.’ Far from being a renegade, Nietzsche in these and related areas (I believe) steadfastly advanced the discourse of modernity. (Ibid pp. 74)
Part II
Early in the last century two technical innovations, twelve-tone technique and stream of consciousness technique opened up the possibility of expressing in music and literature the primordial chaos Nietzsche was referring to. To understand how these techniques made this possible, it is important to understand the rudiments of these innovations.
Twelve-tone technique could be seen as breaking all the rules of classical harmony, but really is guided by its own new set of rules and has an exquisite sense of coherence and artistic integrity, because everything written in a piece using this technique refers to the tone-row the composer has chosen, which becomes the unifying element in the work. A tone row is like the master theme or tune and is composed of all twelve notes of the chromatic scale.
The composer achieves unity by referring to a kind of control board, the forty-eight versions of the row he has chosen: 1. the upright row in each of the twelve keys of the chromatic scale; 2. twelve of the row inverted; 3. twelve retrograde and 4. twelve retrograde-inversion. Schoenberg’s rule was never to repeat a tone until all twelve tones had been sounded either harmonically or thematically. His student Webern’s contribution was the application of the “serial” concept to all rhythmic figures in addition to thematic material.
Classical forms, such as sonata form, rondo form and fugues, were means of organizing single movements of a piece, so that they followed a conventional pattern to satisfy the expectations of a knowledgeable listener. A single key signature was the sole reference point for the musical composition as a whole. For example, “Symphony No. 4 in C” is a typical title for a piece of music. By contrast, every movement of a piece using twelve-tone technique is governed by the particular tone row chosen, in some or all of its forty-eight versions. By such means, there is the potential to unify harmonically all movements of the piece in a much more comprehensive fashion. The result depends on the ingenuity and the artistic gifts of the composer.
I offer the following analogy. The major scale of classical harmony is composed of eight notes. The four notes that are left out of this scale are like the unconscious or suppressed dissonant elements that threaten the stability of the major scale. For instance, a leading tone, that is, a half step, can be used to modulate to another key, taking advantage of the inherent instability in a major scale.
Alban Berg used the twelve-tone technique in many of his most successful works, notably his operas, “Wozzeck” and “Lulu.” I believe Nietzsche would have recognized these works as epitomizing the art that he was calling for. The subject matter of these operas is what is truly subversive and disturbing.
Wozzeck is an outsider, a man who has been exploited and treated as sub-human, a disturbing figure of alienation. In the course of the opera it is horrifying to witness the mental deterioration of this character, who in the end murders his unfaithful wife. His son looks on as Wozzeck is taken away by the police.
Lulu, originally someone with ambition to be a serious artist, has become a high-paid whore to survive. And at the end of the opera, Lulu is murdered by Jack The Ripper. The twelve-tone technique, as used by Berg in these operas, allows him to register profoundly disturbing emotions, terror, confusion, and sadness, because of the dissonant chords at his disposal, as well as the violent crescendos and rhythmic figures, and all the percussive effects and tone clusters that his mastery of orchestration availed him. The technique makes possible a new kind of musical expression in the service of these two operas.
Stream of consciousness technique is like an interior monologue. The principle connecting one strand of thought following another strand of thought is a free-association. Its main thrust is to imitate more realistically consciousness as a process unfolding in time. And the key to Joyce’s simulation of consciousness is to abandon grammatical sentence structure, which is at odds with the way an actual series of thoughts, sensations, memories, perceptions and fantasies takes place in the mind of a person when he or she is not speaking to another person or is using language to express his/her thoughts on paper.
Better than any description is to quote from a good example of Joyce’s use of stream of consciousness technique, the most famous of which is the last chapter of Ulysses, “Molly Bloom’s Soliloguy,” sometimes referred to as “Penelope’s Monologue.” The scene is Molly Bloom in bed, letting her thoughts run free. This is one of the longest sustained passages in literature using stream of consciousness technique. The whole chapter is one long series of musings that follows a new set of rules of connection and coherence, the grammar of sentence structure, that depends on punctuation, having been jettisoned: Starting on page 690,
Yes because he never did a thing like that before as ask to get his breakfast in bed with a couple of eggs since the City Arms hotel when he used to be pretending to be laid up with a sick voice doing his highness to make himself interesting to that old faggot Mrs. Riordan that he thought he had a great leg of and she never left us a farthing… (Joyce, 1998, p. 690)
and about forty-two pages later, with no period to mark the end of a sentence (because it is not a sentence) until the end, the stream of consciousness ends, as does the novel, with the following on page 732:
…yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes. (Joyce, 1998, p. 732)
Both twelve-tone technique and stream of consciousness technique allowed expression of that part of human experience, which, especially in the Victorian age, had been suppressed, namely erotic or aggressive unconscious drives and fantasies of a violent, anti-social nature, fantasies of rape, sadistic acts, homicide, perversion. Material of a violent nature found its place in the novels of the 20th Century. The harmonic richness and dissonance of 20th Century music with orgiastic, rhythmic invention, such as we find in Schoenberg, Stravinsky and Bartok, allowed music to become much more expressive and powerful. The last century reached its climax with the powerful symphonic works of Henze, Lutoslavski, Schnittke, Boulez and Messiaen. In short, the Freudian psychoanalytic movement, in letting unconscious material out of prison, found some of its best vehicles for expression in music, literature and in the innovations of the surrealists and abstract expressionists.
Part III
Another way of talking about the potentiality of art to express irrationality is Becket’s remarks about chaos and mess, “The confusion is not my invention…. It is all around us and our only chance now is to let it in. The only chance of renovation is to open our eyes and see the mess … there will be new form, and … this form will be of such a type that it admits the chaos and does not try to say that the chaos is really something else.” Regarding how art must find a way of including chaos without canceling it out through a particular art form’s way of ordering its material, Beckett goes on to say: “The form and the chaos remain separate. The latter is not reduced to the former. That is why the form itself becomes a preoccupation, because it exists as a problem separate from the material it accommodates.” (Pilling, 1976, pp. 22-23)
In light of Beckett’s remarks about mess and chaos, it is interesting to consider his decision to use these concepts as subject matter in his novel Murphy. In Murphy chaos is identified with insanity. Murphy starts to lose his mind and tries again and again to get a mental picture of anyone he has been close to or has ever met. “Scraps of bodies, of landscapes, hands, eyes, lines and colors evoking nothing, rose and climbed out of sight before him, as though reeled upward off a spool level with his throat. It was his experience that this should be stopped, whenever possible, before the deeper coils were reached.” (Samuel Beckett, Murphy) To calm himself he ties himself to his rocking chair and dreams of going back home to his wife. Before the gas explosion, which kills him, he is able to calm himself.
A similar image of the spool comes up again at the end of the novel when Mr. Kelly’s kite winch gets away from him. Confined to a wheelchair Mr. Kelly has dozed off. The kite winch “struck violently against the railing, the string snapped, the winch fell to the ground, Mr. Kelly awoke.” He runs after it. “Celia caught him on the margin of the pond. The end of the line skimmed the water, jerked upward in a wild whirl, vanished joyfully in the dust. Mr. Kelly went limp in her arms.” (Samuel Beckett, Murphy) Celia is Murphy’s grieving widow. The repetition of the spool image joins Murphy’s terror about going mad to Mr. Kelly’s loss of the only thing which offers him any joy, his tandem kite.
Malone Dies is the second novel in Beckett’s trilogy. At the end of the novel Lemuel and the other inmates of an insane asylum are taken on a picnic to a lake. The novel ends with Lemuel killing the attendants and several of the inmates with an ax. We can see a kind of grim progress from the earlier novel Murphy to Malone Dies; all the frustration, rage and despair which lead to Murphy’s blowing himself up with gas (accidentally on purpose), instead of being released against the self is directed against others in Lemuel’s ax-murder rampage. There is something grimly positive about homicide as compared to suicide. The book ends there, and these murders are strangely satisfying to me, and even funny. In my opinion, Malone Dies contains some of the funniest passages in literature, for example on page 261:
This first phase, that of the bed, was characterized by the evolution of the relationship between Macmann and his keeper. There sprang up gradually between them a kind of intimacy, which, at a given moment, led them to lie together and copulate as best they could. For given their age and scant experience of carnal love, it was only natural they should not succeed, at the first shot, in giving each other the impression they were made for each other. The spectacle was then offered of Macmann trying to bundle his sex into his partner’s like a pillow into a pillowslip, folding it in two and stuffing it in with his fingers. But far from losing heart they warmed to their work. And though both were completely impotent they finally succeeded, summoning to their aid all the resources of the skin, the mucus and the imagination, in striking from their dry and feeble clips a kind of somber gratification. So that Moll exclaimed, being (at that stage) the more expansive of the two, Oh would we had but met sixty years ago! But on the long road to this what flutterings, alarms and bashful fumblings, of which only this, that they gave Macmann some insight into the meaning of the expression, Two is company. (Beckett, 2003, p. 261)
This comic interlude, starting on page 257 and ending on page 267, takes place in the hospital between two old people finding with each other some sexual satisfaction, but having to go to so much pathetic trouble to achieve satisfaction, after which there follows a riotous exchange of love letters and love poems, and then a description of how the fling cools down.
As an innovator Beckett, following Joyce, was more radical in his experiments than any other writer in the later part of the 20th Century. He departed from the 19th Century conventions of storytelling involving character, scene, action and the inevitable dramatization of moral consequences of tragic misbehavior. A good example is Malone Dies, which refuses to give the main character one name. It seems to be a bunch of stories about different characters, Sapo, McMann and Lemuel. In fact they are all Malone in different phases of his life. This interpretation might require more argument than I’m willing to venture into, however, this interpretation makes more sense of the novel, though I’m quite sure that is the last thing Beckett would want, that is, for his novel to make sense.
The Unnamable, the last of the trilogy, is a novel about somebody who can’t stop talking. The character may or may not be an armless and legless person who exists in a large parfait glass in a window of a bistro. We’ll never know for sure. There are no scenes, no action. Finally after boring us to death, Beckett allows his character to tell the reader a couple of morbid but amusing stories.
The first is about trying to get home to his wife and kids. The closer he gets—close enough to see their faces in the windows waiting for him—the wider the loops which take him far away from them (are these bird loops or what?). When he finally enters the house to confront their decomposing corpses, the whole family having died of poisoning, he stumps around in his crutches, having lost a leg in the meantime, mashing their rotting flesh into the floor. The tale is told with such glee and wonder that it is quite amusing to read.
A good example of Beckett’s experimentation in novelistic structure is Malloy, the first of the trilogy, which is broken up into two parts. The second part is about a detective named Jacques Moran who’s called out in a case. This second part of the novel makes no mention of anything that has happened in the first part of the novel. Either it is a puzzle to figure out how these two parts of the novel are related, or it is also possible that there is no relationship between the two parts. In the second part of the novel, there is a violent murder of a grotesque homeless person in the forest. It is not clear whether or not Moran is the person who clubbed the man to death. Is it possible that the man he’s stumbled upon is Malloy?
By breaking the rules at all levels of written expression, Beckett challenges the conventions of the various literary forms he works with. He also challenges our notion of the nature of self and other and the nature of consciousness. At the level of sentence structure the longer prose work Ill Seen Ill Said uses sentence fragments punctuated by periods that are arranged in such a way that one feels they are complete, though they are not complete sentences. These descriptions stand and have a stark resonance. They are arranged in paragraphs. There is no sense of non sequitur. As a sequence of descriptions there is remarkable continuity and coherence and the same can be said for the sequence of paragraphs.
The coffer. Empty after long nocturnal search. Nothing. Save in the end in a cranny of dust a scrap of paper. Jagged along one edge as if torn from a diary. On its yellowed face in barely legible ink two letters followed by a number. Tu 17. Or Th. Tu or Th 17. Otherwise blank. Otherwise empty. (Beckett, 1981, p. 38)
And on the next page…
Incontinent the void. The zenith. Evening again. When not night it will be evening. Death again of deathless day. On the one hand embers. On the other ashes. Day without end won and lost. Unseen. (Ibid, pp. 39-40)
A totally different experiment is embarked upon in How It Is. Here we are presented with blocks of run on sentences or sentence fragments without punctuation or pauses. They are quasi-paragraphs, not indented and not capitalized with no internal or end punctuation:
the curtains parted part I saw his friends come to visit him where squatting in the deep shade of a tomb or a bo his fists clenched on his knees he lived thus (Beckett, 1996, p. 59)
And the next block:
They broke for want of chalk or suchlike but not in concert so that some my nails were talking of my nails some always long others presentable I saw him dreaming the mud parted the light went on I saw him dreaming with the help of a friend or failing that boon all alone of bending them back to the back of his hand for them to go through the other way death forestalled him (Ibid)
These two distinct patterns, the series of short paragraphs composed of phrases, punctuated by capital letters at the beginning and by periods at the end of each phrase, in Ill Seen Ill Said and the unpunctuated blocks of phrases and run-on sentences in How It Is, are strictly followed by Beckett, as if he were following a different set of rules created for each prose work. These patterns give each work a unique form. A set of rules gives the lines of a poem a form in a similar fashion, for instance, a sonnet, recognizable by the number of lines (fourteen) and by a particular pattern (The Italian sonnet: eight lines followed by six lines; the English sonnet: three quatrains and a concluding couplet). The lines of a sonnet are determined by the metrical scheme and the demarcations between parts, between octave and sestet, or between quatrains, determined by the rime scheme. In contrast to Beckett’s trilogy of novels, the formal aspect of these later prose works visible on the page is much more pronounced, as though the more abstract his works became, the greater his need for formal devices. His early preoccupation with form, the Apollonian side of his artistry, is relevant here, particularly his statement, quoted above: “…this form will be of such a type that it admits the chaos and does not say that the chaos is something else.” (Pilling, 1976, p. 22) The distinct feature of both works, Ill Seen Ill Said and How It Is, is the absence of grammatical form. There is not one complete sentence in either work. It is as if the existence of the old lady in Ill Seen Ill Said is so empty, nothing can be said of it that could fill a complete sentence. A paucity of descriptions is repeated over and over again in various combinations. Pim’s mind in How It Is is so destroyed that his perceptions, constantly interrupted, cannot be registered in grammatical sentences. The mental derangement is expressed by the absence of grammar. In such a way, Beckett found forms that accommodate chaos.
Our prized possession is our ability to speak our native language, to use it correctly and effectively. And that is why we are all extremely sensitive to a writer who is willing to press language to its limits and depart from the rules of common speech.
A further example of the departure from grammatical form can be seen in the second part of How It Is when Pim refers to himself as another person, using the third person pronoun, “the hour of his death at what age it is not said…” and later calling himself my “unbutcherable brother,” while gouging himself with a can opener. The speaker in the play “Not I” speaks of herself as another person. The departure from the grammar of pronoun usage has a radical effect, expressing self-alienation. Another way self-alienation is dramatized in many of Beckett’s works is the main character’s constantly undercutting what he has just said, sometimes mid-sentence, canceling the previous statement immediately after it has been uttered, as if incapable of stating a simple fact without doubting its validity. I am reminded of Nietzsche’s statements about the new form of idolatry, the worship of the truth.
In Beckett’s works the reader is presented with descriptions of extreme loneliness and decrepitude and with acts of violence. No comment is made about their moral implications; no attempt is made to rationalize them. Readers are given the room to have their own reactions to these imagined events, given the room to draw their own conclusions, hence the power of these works.
PART IV
Artists living in a totalitarian regime if they have any originality are seen as a threat to the social order that is being imposed on the people. One of the best examples is Platonov who just recently has been translated into English. Platonov’s life was made miserable by the authorities in Soviet Russia. His commissions were eventually canceled and his books banned.
Distrusted and under attack almost from the very first, he was accused of a bevy of sins: pessimism, anarchism, nihilism, antirealism, symbolism, petty-bourgeois and Kulak psychology, failure to understand the larger purposes of Communist construction which justified the sacrifice of the individual…Barred from book publication for long periods, he was reduced to virtual nonbeing as a writer through most of his lifetime, earning a bare living as a book reviewer writing under several pen names. The stretches of enforced silence as an artist were punctuated by the occasional appearance of a story in a magazine or a slender collection, usually followed by renewed outbursts from party critics. Indeed, except for the periods when he was subject to intense vilification, his name and his work were almost unknown to Russian readers.
Despite the hostile atmosphere, Platonov continued writing in his own manner, which obstinately refused to fit into the requisite forms and moods. He remained a Communist, but he held up his early Communist vision—the vision expressed in the simplest terms by many of his characters—to the realities of the time…” ( Platonov, 1997, p. vii, from “Translator’s Introduction.”)
The prevailing aesthetic that the authorities who passed judgment on Platonov and others, approving their works for publication or banning them, was Socialist Realism. Experimental prose fiction was out, as was surrealism and abstraction in the visual arts. Program music was demanded of composers; in other words, music that attempts to tell a story, for instance, the tone poems of Richard Strauss, “Til Eulenspiegel,” and “Also Sprach Zarathustra.”
In Pravda Shostakovich was harshly criticized for his opera, “Lady Macbeth.” They were saying that Shostakovich was writing music counter to the communist movement. When he wrote his fourth symphony it was panned. In the former Soviet Union when artists were trying to write symboliste poetry not representative of the struggle of the working people, and this went for all types of avant-garde art, it represented class interests, mainly an elitist outlook or residue of the upper classes in Russia, especially; this no longer had anything to do with how much money people had, since in Communist Russia no one had money to speak of, but had more to do with class affiliation.
During the revolution in Russia many families of title and/or wealth were able to get out. For example, Nabokov’s family was able to flee. Nabokov’s writing is an example of what was banned in Soviet Russia: A text filled with hidden meanings, earmarked for intellectuals, not for the common man. But the lives of Shostakovich and Prokofiev were clearly made miserable and held captive by the harsh strictures of the USSR.
Both Shostakovich and Prokofiev were able to be incredibly prolific. On the one hand, unlike Shostakovich, Prokofiev was very much a cosmopolitan figure. Prokofiev spent time abroad, in Paris and in America. Prokofiev didn’t fit in with the Soviet Union’s idea of what an artist’s image should be. That he was completely oblivious to the
real politicization of aesthetics after 1934 is grimly apparent from the fact that he took up residence in Moscow exactly a month before Pravda’s denunciation of Shostakovich’s Lady Macbeth, which at last made plain to musicians how little their future well-being was going to depend on their ability to compose what Prokofiev had understood as ‘music that would correspond both in form and content to the grandeur of the epoch…’ (Walsh, September 25, 2003 p. 24)
We see this oppressive ideology in support of proletarian music expressed in Shostakovich’s own words,
“Of the major Russian composers, only two have known how to sell themselves, Stravinsky (Stravinsky went to live in the U.S., but Prokofiev couldn’t because he had a family in Russia) and Prokofiev. But it’s no accident that both are composers of a new era, and in a sense children, even though adoptive ones, of western culture. Their love and taste for publicity, I feel, keep Stravinsky and Prokofiev from being thoroughly Russian composers. There’s some flaw in their personalities, a loss of some very important moral principles.” (Shostakovich, 2004, pp. 130)
What Shostakovich was not saying, maybe because he couldn’t, was that Prokofiev’s piano concertos were music for the sake of music — an early example of this would be much of Beethoven’s music, although people tried to claim there were themes, which created a certain tension—which was in a sense against the law in Russia, a sure way in the U.S.S.R. to be executed.
In other words, there had to be a narrative in any commissioned or non-commissioned pieces/works. Art had to be representative of either praise of a Soviet leader in power or, in the case of Khrushchev coming into power and Stalin’s regime fading, a purging of a previous leader’s regime. But on the other hand the USSR gave Prokofiev huge success, elevating him to the pinnacle of his career. By writing film scores about figures in Russian history, Prokofiev satisfied the party officials for a while.
Shostakovich wrote fifteen symphonies and was also celebrated. Prokofiev wrote seven symphonies, seven piano concertos, and two violin concertos.
Shostakovich’s fourth symphony was blasted by the Communist press. His fifth symphony was a popular success, but less experimental than some of his previous works. It was easier for the common man to identify with. The seventh was programmatic music about the battle of Leningrad. The symphony ends in a triumphant mood celebrating the successful defense of Leningrad against the German onslaught. It is a long symphony, very bombastic.
One hears in the relentless, frenzied marches the sound of soldiers going to war, in the pounding drumbeats the sound of cannons and artillery, and in the slow movement the sounds of wailing of the grieving for those who died in the war, and the somber long nights of one of the coldest, snowy winters on record, during which German troops outside the city either froze to death or starved to death, and in the finale the triumph and sounds of victory and the release from the terror of the German assault on Leningrad. This is program music, par excellence, and one is reminded of Tchaikovsky’s stirring 1812 overture, written in the previous century.
Hearing all this in the symphony, of course, depends on the listener’s capacity to imagine the historical events. The listener can just as easily hear it as stirring symphonic music, organized around the typical four movements structure we have learned to appreciate from the symphonies of Hayden, Mozart and Beethoven.
When Khrushchev came to power after the death of Stalin, Shostakovich wrote his thirteenth symphony, which was about a massacre of Jews at Babi Yar based on a long poem by Yevteshenko. This poem was a political work, an indictment about war crimes committed under Stalin. Khrushchev had exposed the injustices of the purge trials. This was one of the ways Khrushchev was able to consolidate his own power. Shostakovich used his own talents to contribute to the self-criticism of past crimes against humanity that was going on in the USSR.
Shostakovich went into decline at the end of his life. Although Shostakovich and Prokofiev came from slightly different social strata, these were two elitist composers who had to carefully navigate through the dangerous waters of a police state. Shostakovich was younger than Prokofiev and was not cosmopolitan; therefore he was more able to survive the regime change from Stalin to Khrushchev.
For obvious reasons, neither Prokofiev nor Shostakovich experimented with twelve-tone technique. It is questionable whether or not their music would have benefited from using it. Both composers were so original that neither of them needed the new sound that twelve-tone technique offered. Their music comes across as avant-garde, full of dissonant chords, catchy rhythmic figures and tone color. They might have felt restricted by the rules set forth by Schoenberg and his followers. Shostakovich’s student, Alfred Schnittke, obviously did not. He used twelve-tone technique to advantage in many of his works. It is interesting to note that Stravinsky, while living in Los Angeles, did write some twelve-tone pieces, surely an outgrowth of his friendship with Schoenberg, who was teaching at UCLA, both of them refugees from totalitarian regimes.
PART V
By looking at a number of examples of protest art whether literary, visual arts or musical compositions, I have seen the role that political bias plays. It depends on what side you’re on whether you see the artwork as political protest or, from the other viewpoint, propaganda. Looking at examples of protest art from an historical perspective, aware that I am not in the grip of the political sentiment that inspired these works, I question the capacity of artworks to create powerful emotions for and against political action except in the heat of a political event taking place in the present. When an artwork is used for a political purpose, it may have a temporary emotional effect, but that diminishes over time.
The exposition at the Fog Museum last June in Cambridge, Massachusetts included Saderer: “Rape of the Sabines,” Jack Callot: “The Miseries of War” series, Goya: “Disasters of War” series, 1746-48, De Brym: “Massacre of the Innocence,” Daumier: “Rue Traumernain,” Winslow Homer: “War for Union,” 1862. George Bellows: “The Tragedies of War in Belgium,” specifically “The Germans Arrive,” oil on canvas and lithographs: “The Last Victim,” “Bacchanal,” and “The Cigarettes.”
“The Last Victim” is truly horrifying, depicting fat German soldiers in their spiked helmets with Belgian babies impaled on the ends of their bayonets, raised high toward the sky, which I suspect was pure propaganda. The Bellows was the most disturbing perhaps after Goya’s depictions of the cruelty and ravages where the destructive tendencies of men unleashed by war.
In Anne Hollander’s article in the London Review Of Books November 6, 2003 she discusses David Kunzle’s historical, anti-war book From Criminal To Courtier: The Soldier In Netherlandish Art 1550-1672. There is an interesting painting, which Hollander includes in her review of Kunzle’s book: William Duyster, “Soldiers Fighting over Booty in a Barn,” in which there are swords and guns drawn over what looks like beautiful valuables. There are other soldiers still preoccupied with the examination of their booty, yet to be fought over. Hollander questions the accuracy of many of Kunzle’s claims that he makes in his study of Dutch war paintings. What is important, I think, is that Kunzle may believe “that even the vivid stylistic components of the pictures he discusses are a product of the artists’ fundamental protest against oppression…” (Hollander, 2003) And in the way the article is presented to me implies that in writing this book now, Kunzle himself is protesting present day war.
Picasso comes to mind as the most prolific innovator in terms of creating totally new languages for art as well as producing “Guernica.” Many people have spoken to me about how affected they were by seeing “Guernica,” one of the most famous examples of protest art, but the face coming out of the building, like a cry of terror, and the gored horse in a cartoon-like style, for me, are much less engaging, in terms of color, line and form, than hundreds of other works of Picasso that I have looked at. This may be simply a matter of taste. The fact is nobody has been able to explain to me, exactly why they were so moved by the painting?
Anselm Kiefer’s monumental paintings of buildings in ruins, the architecture reminiscent of Nazi buildings designed by Albert Speer, have been constant reminders of the past most Germans would rather forget. Kiefer’s large artist books of death-like blackened sheets, as if blackened pages in German history, the result of a holocaust, like personal possessions pulled out of the rubble of firebombed Hamburg or Dresden, for me have associations with the reign of death wrought by the Third Reich. Picasso’s “Guernica” protests an event that had just happened. These works by Kiefer refer to events of his parents’ generation. What Kiefer may be protesting was the attempt to cover up these events in post-war Germany, for example, the attempt to eliminate this shameful chapter in German history from the public school curriculum. Recently that neglect has been reversed.
Now I turn to contemporary electronic media, mainly TV and movies. People surf the TV channels, sometimes watching eight to ten different TV programs at a time, hopping back and forth trying to keep up with the progress of each program, even though TV programs move their plots along faster than movies, but because of commercials and people’s diminishing attention spans, one TV show at a time isn’t enough to satisfy the viewer’s appetite for stimulation. Also the lack of transitions between fictional entertainment, news reports and commercials has blurred the distinction between fiction and actuality; and everything on the media is judged for its entertainment value as the sole criterion as to what holds our interest. And this spills over into education: Schools increasingly use audio visual aids. Students now view themselves as consumers demanding to be entertained by their teacher. This pleasure-oriented attitude is not always conducive to hard work that must take place in order to learn something of lasting value.
The influence of novelists and film makers’ imaginations is seen once they have been realized through cinematic techniques, camerawork, captivating actors, special effects, and editing, especially in the depiction of violence, stemming from some loner’s mental problems, like Michael Douglas in Falling Down or crazy political machinations, such as a spy movie thriller, like Matt Damon in The Bourne Identity. The influence of fiction is pernicious once it has been transformed into a mass market media product: Violent movies and TV shows have a pernicious influence on human behavior, and we see actual events taking place in the world either from individual acts, such as the Washington D.C. sniper rampage or organized acts of violence, such as 9/11, that seem to imitate fiction. And further, we see the danger of instantaneous dissemination of information about horrendous acts of violence being responsible for the copycat effect, such as the rash of school shootings following Columbine.
So why not pretend for a moment that the terrorist events that have occurred since the fall of the Berlin Wall were a new form of protest art? “The Unabomber,” Columbine High School, the destruction of the World Trade Center; these events, terrorist, whatever we collectively end up defining them as, remind me of large public art works, like Claes Oldenberg’s gigantic clothes pin monument, his monumental toilet bulb sculpture, Christo’s’s line of umbrellas on the coast of California mirrored by a similar construction in Japan. Protest art on a grand scale has found destruction and homicide as the only way of expressing criticism of the basic principles that were governing American society.
Like a large public works project, 9/11 involved elaborate planning, special training and absolute secrecy, which usually surrounds any new invention until it is out of the R&D phase. The project was brilliantly conceived, because it used commercial airliners that did not have to pass across America’s frontiers, which, full of jet fuel, were transformed into bombs upon impact. The airplanes needed to be hijacked, and all that was needed to accomplish that was the willingness to kill, with a simple mechanism, a box-cutter. The project was low cost, like so many other art projects. Essential to the execution of this massive, destructive happening was perfect timing, secrecy and self-sacrifice. The critique of American values was articulated by the choice of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. That the Twin Towers fell showed the weakness of the American value system. American complacency was exploded. The medium was fire and destruction. Destruction became a more powerful tool than creativity in announcing the existence of a worldwide organization that was willing to challenge Western values, whose members were willing to die for what they believed in.
Only with a hugely destructive event, 9/11, would the Al-Qaeda criticisms be taken seriously. Bin Laden had issued these criticisms to America before: end the sanctions against Iraq and stop supporting Israel. Nobody listened. But the successful execution of the 9/11 project gained Al-Qaeda thousands of followers around the world, but what gained this terrorist organization hundreds of thousands of followers was the US response to 9/11, namely the war in Iraq and the inexplicable support of Sharon’s policies.
Another example, on a smaller scale, is the Unabomber’s artistically crafted bomb packages, using little strips of birch bark to represent nature, which led to several deaths and a number of serious injuries. The Unibomber’s condition for stopping was that his manifesto be published in The New York Times.
Habermas has an apt description of situations of this kind, as follows:
But these almost intangible connections should not mislead us into denouncing the intentions of an intransigent Enlightenment as the monstrous offspring of a ‘terroristic reason.’ Those who link the project of modernity with the conscious attitudes and spectacular public deeds of individual terrorists are just as short-sighted as those who claim that the incomparably more persistent and pervasive bureaucratic terrorism practiced in obscurity, in the cellars of the military and the secret police, in prison camps and psychiatric institutions, represents the very essence of the modern state (and its positivistically eroded form legal domination) simply because such terrorism utilizes the coercive means of the state apparatus. (Habermas, 1997, p. 50)
To my mind, “they” are not shortsighted at all but right on the mark. Habermas is the one who is shortsighted, hampered by his compulsive need to see everything in rational terms.
Film may be the most powerful medium for protest art. Unfortunately, the full use of the potentiality of film art is limited by the fact that it takes so long to make a film. The best one can hope for is that the moral complexity of recent events—not current events—might be probed by a film-maker such as we saw in Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers, Costa Gravas Z, or Missing, Louis Malle’s Lucien Lacombe, and Au Revoir Les Enfants, Oliver Stone’s Patoon, JFK, and Natural Born Killers, and Jerry Buckenheimer’s Black Hawk Down. These were fully realized examples of film art that confronted historical events. Michael Moore’s Bowling for Columbine is a documentary film that puts the mass murders that took place outside of Denver in the context of other recent events such as the armed militias that produced Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols. The brother of Terry Nichols is interviewed by Moore in the film and also other militia members training with their weapons, possession of which the NRA has defended and lobbied for. Moore visits the Lockheed plant in the proximity of Columbine High School that made the missiles and bombs that were dropped on Serbia, and Moore notes the fact that the violence that two students unleashed on their fellow students, killing and wounding many of them and a teacher, came the day after the U.S. started bombing Serbia. Whatever value Moore’s documentary has is of a different sort than that of the films mentioned above, each of which deserves comment in terms of the issues we have been dealing with.
The ironic thing about movies like Platoon and Black Hawk Down and the films of Pontecorvo and Costa-Gravis is that their style is realistic and quite close to the guidelines set down by Socialist Realism in the USSR. A large part of their effectiveness has to do with the realist approach to events. But at the same time what I have just said can be thought of as naive, because when movies like Platoon and Black Hawk Down are made, they are automatically part of the genre of war movies, thus glorifying war, America and making men feel gung-ho. Films that were being made in the Stalinist period are similar in style. Natural Born Killers does not deal with a political event, but a mentality that cropped up in countless mass murder rampages in the US that never sought ideology to justify wholesale slaughter of people that happened to be in their way. Stone uses every resource of the film medium, a huge multiplicity of images inter-cut to recreate the manic homicidal consciousness of the killers. He re-creates surrealist scenes of dialogue, interspersing sit-com laughter as inappropriate responses to what was said and done in the father’s house of the soon-to-be girl friend/accomplice of the killer and other techniques that depart from film realism.
CONCLUSION
Habermas’s fascination with Nietzsche, Battaille, Foucault, and Derrida is bizarre given his need to see everything in controlled and rational terms. The need for rationality limits Habermas’s ability to understand Nietzsche, whom he oversimplifies by not accounting for the changes in the positions taken, from the early works to later works, such as The Anti-Christ and Twilight of the Idols. Habermas condemns Nietzsche for failing to live up to the rigorous protocols of philosophical discourse and for ignoring the moral implications of his pronouncements. To his credit, Habermas’s account of the way the term ‘modern’ has been used since the Enlightenment is indispensable. Habermas’s account of how Nietzsche ushered in post-modernism is less convincing. I suspect that Habermas does not believe ‘post-modern’ is a valid description of 20th Century cultural phenomena, or perhaps he simply doesn’t know how to use the term. It is clear that Nietzsche was an important harbinger of the ‘modern,’ as we know it, so far as literature and music were concerned. Nietzsche’s remarks about the visual arts were too few for me to be able to know what he had in mind, in that regard, for the century he never lived to see.
For all the originality of Beckett’s experiments, which are in line with the whole modernist tendency to create “the New,” and Joyce’s innovations with stream of consciousness technique, many fiction writers have gone back to writing straight forward narratives (ready to be adapted as film or TV) using language in a less idiosyncratic manner. Without resorting to experimentation in form or style, many brilliant writers in the last fifty years have succeeded in registering their observations about human behavior and creating stories that render both the tragic sense of life and its mystery, sometimes a rather peculiar and macabre vision of the world, such as Flannery O’Conner’s stories in A Good Man Is Hard To Find or Edith Templeton’s novel Gordon. That is not to say that innovation ended with Beckett. The great Austrian writer, Thomas Bernhard, showed Beckett’s influence in his early novels, perhaps to a fault, but midway in his career had found a manner that was his and no one else’s, in his many plays and novels. His novel, The Loser, is a shining example of what he achieved.
At the outset I asked the question whether or not art that is innovative, especially in the 20th Century, and that uses experimental techniques, such as twelve-tone technique in music or stream of consciousness technique in the novel, might have a better chance of being effective as protest art, having these expressive means at their disposal. In other words, the ability to create an artwork that departs from frequently used artistic styles and conventions of communicating might give these artists the capacity to express the violence and chaos of political upheavals.
In fact, it may be that the most effective works of art serving a protest agenda were not innovative or experimental, but in the case of the novel and film, they were more effective if they were realistic and straightforward representations of reality.
SELECTIVE BIBLIOGRAPHY
BOOKS AND ARTICLES CITED:
Beckett, Samuel, How It Is, John Calder Publisher, London, 1996.
Beckett, Samuel, Ill Seen Ill Said, Grove Press, Inc., New York, 1981.
Beckett, Samuel, Trilogy: Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnambable, Calder Publications, New York, 2003.
Beckett, Samuel, Stories and Texts for Nothing, Grove Press, Inc., New York, 1968.
Guilbaut, Serge, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art from Paris: Abstract Expressionism, Freedom, and the Cold War, Translated by Arthur Goldhammer. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983.
Hollander, Anne, London Review of Books, November 6, 2003.
Joyce, James, Ulysses, New York: Oxford University Press Inc., 1998.
Nietzsche, Friedrich, Twilight of the Idols and The Anti-Christ, New York: Penguin Books, 1972.
Nietzsche, Friedrich, On the Genealogy of Morality, Translated by Carol Diethe, Cambridge, England:Cambridge University Press, 1998.
Passerin d’Entreves, Maurizo and Benhabib, Seyla, eds. Habermas and the Unfinished Project of Modernity, Critical Essays on The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, Cambridge, Massachusetts: The M.I.T. Press, 1997.
Pilling, John, Samuel Beckett, Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1976.
Platonov, Andrey, The Foundation Pit, Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1994.
Platonov, Andrey, The Fierce And Beautiful World, New York: The New York Review Books, 2000.
Shostakovich, Dmitri, Testim ony: The Memoirs of Dmitri Shostakovich, Portland, Oregon: Book News Inc. 2004.
Walsh, Stephen, “Sideswipes,” London Review of Books, September 25, 2003.
FILMS CITED:
Costa-Gravas, Constantin, Z, 1969.
Costa-Gravas, Constantin, Missing, 1982.
Malle, Louis, Lucien Lacombe, 1974.
Malle, Louis, Au Revoir Les Enfants, 1987.
Moore, Michael, Bowling for Columbine, 2002.
Pontecorvo, Gillo, The Battle of Algiers, 1964.
Schumacher, Joel, Falling Down, 1993.
Scott, Ridley, Black Hawk Down, 2001.
Stone, Oliver, Platoon, 1986.
Stone, Oliver, JFK, 1991.
Stone, Oliver, Natural Born Killers, 1994.
Young, Roger, The Bourne Identity, 1998.
BY NICHOLAS H. VAN VACTOR
First Reader: Chris Hables Gray
DATE
Second Reader: Mary Kaye
DATE
Goddard College
2004
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Abstract
Preface
Introduction
Nietzsche
Two Revolutionary Techniques
Beckett
The Arts in Totalitarian Regimes
The Art of Mass Murderers and the Political Terrorist
Conclusion
Abstract
This paper is about modern art in the 20th Century and role that innovation and experimental techniques play in expressing violent, irrational emotions and subject matter that was taboo in the 19th Century. Works of Beckett and Berg are contrasted to examples of protest art. In addition, this paper will examine the potential of fine art for making effective political protest.
The finding is that the most effective works of protest art did not use experimental techniques. New sets of rules were necessary in the development of experimental techniques, which in many cases had the purpose of unifying the work, creating new forms that were expressive of the radical content of these works. The anti-rational stance that is called for by Nietzsche is essential to the new form modernism takes in the 20th Century in contrast to Enlightenment doctrines that tied modernism to reason and progress.
Preface
My bias in writing this thesis is informed by being a white privileged male with a particular belief system of progress and education, born late to parents (my father was born in 1938 and my mother was born in 1939) who have very definite, though different, views concerning education. I was from the first enrolled in a series of private schools, which more or less satisfied both of them. At the age of three I entered pre-school at the Ecole Bilengue in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and by the end of second grade, my mother had hoped that I would become proficient according to my age in reading and speaking French. This plan was reinforced by frequent trips to France, and then later by living in France for two years.
I had learning disabilities from the first, which were aggravated by being kept in the mainstream educational system. I encountered a huge amount of rejection from my prep-school teachers, which I internalized. These experiences may have made me sensitive to certain aspects of society’s function.
My interest in politics comes from my exposure to explosive political arguments at dinner parties. My father, when I was quite young, started Writers And Publishers Against US Intervention In Central America. I was dragged around to book fairs all over the country.
At the same time I was, as a young child, always given art supplies and encouraged to draw. And so on a purely psychological level my obsession with art and politics can be seen in the history of my early childhood, but on the other hand, in my mid-teens through my early twenties, certain traumatic experiences occurred, which led to my writing a novel, which took place around the time that the Twin Towers were destroyed.
As a grandson of a distinguished American composer, David Van Vactor (1906-1994), I was exposed to the whole range of 20th Century serious music at home.
It could be said that these experiences and connections with art and politics primed me to write this thesis.
I was constantly compared by my mother to political figures in terms of school performance. My low grades and propensity for getting in trouble all the time at school, were used by which my mother to justify such comparisons. For example, when I asked her why she had sent me to the Fessenden school in West Newton, Massachusetts, she replied that one of the Kennedys had gone there. My mother’s ambitions for me were political. She encouraged me to try to become a governor or a diplomat, etc.
I studied international relations and American foreign policy with Professor James Chace at Bard College. Chace was politically active, and was the editor of Foreign Affairs and the author of Acheson, among other books. Last summer I took an American foreign policy course with Jeremy Pressman at Harvard Summer School. He is a full professor at Harvard University. These two professors, especially Chase, can take the credit for making the study of politics alive for me.
I don’t really know how my intellectual interests, the analytical work that I’ve done on literature, my knowledge of the visual arts and music, which is at an early stage, and not sophisticated, fits into my own creative pursuits. It will probably be ten years or more before I can see how my education has impacted my ability to produce artworks, whether visual or literary.
For example, I did extensive work on a novel that I am still not satisfied with. It may be a piece of work that I can come back to or it’s possible that I’ll never be able to get it the way I want it. The fact is that I’m not sure how I feel about a lot of endeavors that have preoccupied me for the last five years. Last fall I wrote a fairly probing fifty pages about events in my life, which led up to my writing the novel and gave me some perspective on what had struck some readers as a rather violent and reckless character that I was portraying. Events in my life when I was fifteen and the years that followed had produced a great deal of anger and resentment that I found an expression for in the novel without perhaps fully understanding what was behind it. I will return to what I wrote last fall when I decide to revisit my novel and try to fix the parts that I’m not happy with.
One way or another, I have been involved with art and politics my whole life. It is their intersection that interests me in this thesis.
Introduction
At the beginning of the 20th Century innovative techniques in the fine arts broke away from traditions of story telling, pictorial representation and musical expression. One result of innovation in the arts was the creation of groundbreaking masterpieces such as Proust’s The Remembrance of Things Past and Joyce’s Ulysses, new schools of painting, such as Dada, Surrealism, Fauve, and Cubism, and the iconoclastic works of Stravinsky (“The Rite of Spring”) and Schoenberg (“Pierrot Lunaire”). The influence of these writers, artists and composers can still be seen today. Joyce’s stream of consciousness technique was used by his contemporaries: Virginia Wolff, Gertrude Stein and Dorothy Richardson and later by William Faulkner in The Sound and The Fury. Schoenberg’s 12-tone technique was used by Alban Berg, Anton Weber and Hans Eissler and later by many other composers such as Hans Werner Henze and Witold Lutoslawski. It is the capacity of these works to express violent primal emotions that I wish to focus on.
Nietzsche’s vision of the need for art that expressed the Dionysian spirit was first put forth in The Birth of Tragedy. I will place Nietzsche’s statements about art in the context of a counter-enlightenment critique that positions itself against reason and is a “total rejection of a nihilistically deflated modernity.” (Habermas, 1997, p. 71) I will discuss Berg’s operas, “Wozzeck” and “Lulu,” which epitomize the kind of artistic expression Nietzsche was calling for.
In my study of literature, the best example of a writer whose innovations in structure and style are inseparable from his success in dramatizing alienation is Samuel Beckett. I might have thought that no writer after Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake could take the novel any further in the direction of experimentation; however, Beckett takes each of his novels one step further in the direction of total abstraction, starting with his trilogy Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable, and finally in the novel How It Is the experimentation is taken to the extreme. When I open How It Is, I am confronted with unpunctuated blocks of run-on sentences and sentence fragments the size of paragraphs without connectives, the grammar of the sentence having been abandoned. Beckett’s experimentation is evident at every level of discourse, from novelistic form to sentence structure. More important to me are the scenes of violence and irrationality depicted in his novels. I would not dare to guess whether or not Nietzsche would have appreciated the extent to which the Dionysian spirit had been realized in the plays and prose fiction of Samuel Beckett. I can only render my own judgment in that regard. How much Beckett’s successful dramatization of extreme forms of behavior is due to his ingenious experimentation is another important question that needs to be asked.
I will pay close attention to what impact these new directions in literature, the visual arts, and music have had on art used for political purposes. Have artists who were politically active made use of the expressive potential that experimental techniques availed them? How were the arts in general affected by repressive regimes in the last century? Have governments made use of innovations in the arts to produce propaganda? I know the Third Reich took full advantage of the most up-to-date methods of stagecraft and lighting in staging mass rallies and had one of the most brilliant filmmakers of her day, Leni Rieffenstal, film the 1936 Olympic Games held in Berlin. Censorship was as widely used by the Third Reich as it was in the USSR. For instance, officials of the Third Reich condemned certain styles such as surrealism as examples of decadent Jewish sensuality, just as they had condemned quantum mechanics as “Jewish physics.”
Even in the United States a political use was found for non-objective painting. It was promoted because it was deemed harmless. Because it was not figurative, was non-representational, it could not be used as propaganda that might be turned against the symbols of capitalism and the American way. Diego Rivera’s mural, commissioned by David Rockefeller for Rockefeller Center, had embarrassed rich New York art collectors by depicting John D. Rockefeller as a demon. After WWII the CIA funded an effort to make New York the capitol of the art world by promoting abstract expressionist painters who were living there and attracting artists from Europe, many of whom were refugees from WWII. (Serge Guilbaut, 1983)
As incredible as it sounds, this bizarre chapter in the use of U.S. taxpayer’s money to influence artistic taste is consistent with other feckless efforts such as the secret funding of Encounter magazine in England. Two of its editors, Frank Kermode and Stephen Spender, felt compelled to resign when they found out the magazine was receiving funds from the CIA. These were minor problems compared to the effect that living in the USSR under Stalin had on writers and composers. Andrey Platinov, who was hounded into obscurity by RAPP (Russian Association of Proletarian Writers), is considered by some critics to be the most brilliant Russian writer of the 20th Century. His tragic life and the very different careers of Sergei Prokofiev and Dimitri Shostakovich in the Soviet Union are discussed below.
The effectiveness as protest art of painting and drawings will be compared to that of film. My comments on examples of protest art, which has a long history, will refer to a recent book by David Kunzle, From Criminal To Courtier: The Soldier In Netherlandish Art 1550-1672 on soldiers by Dutch artists and a show at the Fogg Museum in June of 2003. Photojournalism is the most immediate form of response to current events, both still photography and video.
The compulsory standards of Socialist Realism were felt to be constraining by Soviet writers and composers and all the meddling in their lives by the authorities was not only oppressive but truly menacing. Ironically, the most devastating portrayals of the cruelty and injustice of the gulags were realistic in style and more or less conformed to the dictates of Socialist Realism.
Finally, I conclude that most works of art that realize most fully the potentiality inherent in their particular medium have no political agenda.
PART I
Habermas—even though he “hurls at Nietzsche the charges of subjectivism, nihilism and irrationalism” (Habermas, 1997 p. 74)—saw Nietzsche as the philosopher who turned the tables against the Enlightenment faith in reason by showing the necessity of an anti-rational program through which only the fine arts could offer the possibility of truly authentic expression.
In the book, Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche holds up the Dionysian spirit as a paradigm for drama that has the capacity to express violent and orgiastic emotions of revenge, lust and remorse:
In the barbarian festivals, Nietzsche wrote, the central trait was a complete ‘promiscuity overriding every form of tribal law,’ an unleashing of ‘all the savage urges of the mind until they reached that paroxysm of lust and cruelty which has always struck me as the “witches’ cauldron” par excellence.’ (Ibid, p. 73)
The Dionysian was counter balanced by the Apollonian values of balance, order and reason. Thus Nietzsche recognized “the need for artistic form and aesthetic sublimation.” (Ibid, p. 73)
The idea that a new kind of idolatry has developed, namely the worship of truth, is part of Nietzsche’s anti-rationalist critique; his assault on reason is particularly relevant, because reason is a key term in Enlightenment discourse. Fred Dallmayr discusses the influence Nietzsche had on 20th Century thinkers:
…Habermas treats Nietzsche as the ‘turn-table’ or hiatus separating defenders of modern reason from champions of postmodernism and counter-enlightenment. In the postmodernist camp, his study differentiates in turn between two camps: one attached to Nietzsche’s genealogical method as well as his Dionysian zest, the other concerned with his broader metaphysical ruminations. The founder of the first camp was Georges Bataille, the poet or ecrivain of human excess. In the case of Bataille, we are told, Nietzsche’s legacy inspired an attempted regress to a lost oneness accomplished through an ‘eruption of antirational elements, a consuming act of self-immolation’; Dionysian frenzy here took the form of an orgiastic revelry manifesting itself ‘in play, dance and intoxication just as much as in those sentiments—mingling horror and lust—which are triggered by destruction and the confrontation with suffering and violent death.’ (Ibid, p. 75)
In an essay published after The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, in which Habermas gives his critique of Bataille, quoted above, he addresses the rejection of modernity: “Is modernity as passé as the postmodernists argue? Or is the widely trumpeted arrival of postmodernity itself ‘phoney’? Is ‘postmodern’ a slogan which cultural modernity has provoked in reaction to itself since the middle of the nineteenth century?”(Ibid, Pages38-39) The essay is called “Modernity: An Unfinished Project.” After asking the above questions, Habermas writes that
Romanticism produced a radicalized consciousness of modernity that detached itself solely in opposition to tradition and history as a whole….The characteristic feature of such works is the moment of novelty, the New, which will itself be surpassed and devalued in turn by the innovations of the next style. Yet whereas the merely modish becomes outmoded once it is displaced into the past, the modern still retains a secret connection to the classical. The ‘classical’ has always signified that which endures through the ages. (Ibid, pp. 39-40)
Habermas goes on to say:
This also explains the abstract opposition of modernism to history, which thus forfeits the structure of an articulated process of cultural transmission ensuring continuity. Individual epochs lose their own distinctive features, and the present now assumes a heroic affinity either with what is most remote or what is closest to it: decadence recognizes itself immediately in the barbaric, the wild and the primitive. The anarchistic intention of exploding the continuum of history accounts for the subversive force of an aesthetic consciousness which rebels against the norm-giving achievements of tradition, which is nourished on the experience of rebellion against everything normative, which neutralizes considerations of moral goodness or practical utility, a consciousness which continually stages a dialectic of esoteric mystery and scandalous offence, narcotically fascinated by the fright produced by its acts of profanation –- and yet at the same time flees from the trivialization resulting from that very profanation. (Ibid, pp. 40-41)
Habermas quotes from Adorno: “The zeal directed against tradition becomes a devouring maelstrom. In this sense modernity is a myth turned against itself….” (Ibid pp. 40-41)
Returning to Fred Dallmayr’s defense of Nietzsche against Habermas, I wish to point out that my concern is the way Nietzsche’s call for artistic expression embodying the tension between the Dionysian and the Apollonian foreshadowed many developments in the 20th Century.
As it seems to me, his genealogical ventures are evidence of this fearless and relentless quest, as are his (posthumously collected) fragments on the ‘will to power as knowledge’ and the ‘will to power as art.’ Far from being a renegade, Nietzsche in these and related areas (I believe) steadfastly advanced the discourse of modernity. (Ibid pp. 74)
Part II
Early in the last century two technical innovations, twelve-tone technique and stream of consciousness technique opened up the possibility of expressing in music and literature the primordial chaos Nietzsche was referring to. To understand how these techniques made this possible, it is important to understand the rudiments of these innovations.
Twelve-tone technique could be seen as breaking all the rules of classical harmony, but really is guided by its own new set of rules and has an exquisite sense of coherence and artistic integrity, because everything written in a piece using this technique refers to the tone-row the composer has chosen, which becomes the unifying element in the work. A tone row is like the master theme or tune and is composed of all twelve notes of the chromatic scale.
The composer achieves unity by referring to a kind of control board, the forty-eight versions of the row he has chosen: 1. the upright row in each of the twelve keys of the chromatic scale; 2. twelve of the row inverted; 3. twelve retrograde and 4. twelve retrograde-inversion. Schoenberg’s rule was never to repeat a tone until all twelve tones had been sounded either harmonically or thematically. His student Webern’s contribution was the application of the “serial” concept to all rhythmic figures in addition to thematic material.
Classical forms, such as sonata form, rondo form and fugues, were means of organizing single movements of a piece, so that they followed a conventional pattern to satisfy the expectations of a knowledgeable listener. A single key signature was the sole reference point for the musical composition as a whole. For example, “Symphony No. 4 in C” is a typical title for a piece of music. By contrast, every movement of a piece using twelve-tone technique is governed by the particular tone row chosen, in some or all of its forty-eight versions. By such means, there is the potential to unify harmonically all movements of the piece in a much more comprehensive fashion. The result depends on the ingenuity and the artistic gifts of the composer.
I offer the following analogy. The major scale of classical harmony is composed of eight notes. The four notes that are left out of this scale are like the unconscious or suppressed dissonant elements that threaten the stability of the major scale. For instance, a leading tone, that is, a half step, can be used to modulate to another key, taking advantage of the inherent instability in a major scale.
Alban Berg used the twelve-tone technique in many of his most successful works, notably his operas, “Wozzeck” and “Lulu.” I believe Nietzsche would have recognized these works as epitomizing the art that he was calling for. The subject matter of these operas is what is truly subversive and disturbing.
Wozzeck is an outsider, a man who has been exploited and treated as sub-human, a disturbing figure of alienation. In the course of the opera it is horrifying to witness the mental deterioration of this character, who in the end murders his unfaithful wife. His son looks on as Wozzeck is taken away by the police.
Lulu, originally someone with ambition to be a serious artist, has become a high-paid whore to survive. And at the end of the opera, Lulu is murdered by Jack The Ripper. The twelve-tone technique, as used by Berg in these operas, allows him to register profoundly disturbing emotions, terror, confusion, and sadness, because of the dissonant chords at his disposal, as well as the violent crescendos and rhythmic figures, and all the percussive effects and tone clusters that his mastery of orchestration availed him. The technique makes possible a new kind of musical expression in the service of these two operas.
Stream of consciousness technique is like an interior monologue. The principle connecting one strand of thought following another strand of thought is a free-association. Its main thrust is to imitate more realistically consciousness as a process unfolding in time. And the key to Joyce’s simulation of consciousness is to abandon grammatical sentence structure, which is at odds with the way an actual series of thoughts, sensations, memories, perceptions and fantasies takes place in the mind of a person when he or she is not speaking to another person or is using language to express his/her thoughts on paper.
Better than any description is to quote from a good example of Joyce’s use of stream of consciousness technique, the most famous of which is the last chapter of Ulysses, “Molly Bloom’s Soliloguy,” sometimes referred to as “Penelope’s Monologue.” The scene is Molly Bloom in bed, letting her thoughts run free. This is one of the longest sustained passages in literature using stream of consciousness technique. The whole chapter is one long series of musings that follows a new set of rules of connection and coherence, the grammar of sentence structure, that depends on punctuation, having been jettisoned: Starting on page 690,
Yes because he never did a thing like that before as ask to get his breakfast in bed with a couple of eggs since the City Arms hotel when he used to be pretending to be laid up with a sick voice doing his highness to make himself interesting to that old faggot Mrs. Riordan that he thought he had a great leg of and she never left us a farthing… (Joyce, 1998, p. 690)
and about forty-two pages later, with no period to mark the end of a sentence (because it is not a sentence) until the end, the stream of consciousness ends, as does the novel, with the following on page 732:
…yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes. (Joyce, 1998, p. 732)
Both twelve-tone technique and stream of consciousness technique allowed expression of that part of human experience, which, especially in the Victorian age, had been suppressed, namely erotic or aggressive unconscious drives and fantasies of a violent, anti-social nature, fantasies of rape, sadistic acts, homicide, perversion. Material of a violent nature found its place in the novels of the 20th Century. The harmonic richness and dissonance of 20th Century music with orgiastic, rhythmic invention, such as we find in Schoenberg, Stravinsky and Bartok, allowed music to become much more expressive and powerful. The last century reached its climax with the powerful symphonic works of Henze, Lutoslavski, Schnittke, Boulez and Messiaen. In short, the Freudian psychoanalytic movement, in letting unconscious material out of prison, found some of its best vehicles for expression in music, literature and in the innovations of the surrealists and abstract expressionists.
Part III
Another way of talking about the potentiality of art to express irrationality is Becket’s remarks about chaos and mess, “The confusion is not my invention…. It is all around us and our only chance now is to let it in. The only chance of renovation is to open our eyes and see the mess … there will be new form, and … this form will be of such a type that it admits the chaos and does not try to say that the chaos is really something else.” Regarding how art must find a way of including chaos without canceling it out through a particular art form’s way of ordering its material, Beckett goes on to say: “The form and the chaos remain separate. The latter is not reduced to the former. That is why the form itself becomes a preoccupation, because it exists as a problem separate from the material it accommodates.” (Pilling, 1976, pp. 22-23)
In light of Beckett’s remarks about mess and chaos, it is interesting to consider his decision to use these concepts as subject matter in his novel Murphy. In Murphy chaos is identified with insanity. Murphy starts to lose his mind and tries again and again to get a mental picture of anyone he has been close to or has ever met. “Scraps of bodies, of landscapes, hands, eyes, lines and colors evoking nothing, rose and climbed out of sight before him, as though reeled upward off a spool level with his throat. It was his experience that this should be stopped, whenever possible, before the deeper coils were reached.” (Samuel Beckett, Murphy) To calm himself he ties himself to his rocking chair and dreams of going back home to his wife. Before the gas explosion, which kills him, he is able to calm himself.
A similar image of the spool comes up again at the end of the novel when Mr. Kelly’s kite winch gets away from him. Confined to a wheelchair Mr. Kelly has dozed off. The kite winch “struck violently against the railing, the string snapped, the winch fell to the ground, Mr. Kelly awoke.” He runs after it. “Celia caught him on the margin of the pond. The end of the line skimmed the water, jerked upward in a wild whirl, vanished joyfully in the dust. Mr. Kelly went limp in her arms.” (Samuel Beckett, Murphy) Celia is Murphy’s grieving widow. The repetition of the spool image joins Murphy’s terror about going mad to Mr. Kelly’s loss of the only thing which offers him any joy, his tandem kite.
Malone Dies is the second novel in Beckett’s trilogy. At the end of the novel Lemuel and the other inmates of an insane asylum are taken on a picnic to a lake. The novel ends with Lemuel killing the attendants and several of the inmates with an ax. We can see a kind of grim progress from the earlier novel Murphy to Malone Dies; all the frustration, rage and despair which lead to Murphy’s blowing himself up with gas (accidentally on purpose), instead of being released against the self is directed against others in Lemuel’s ax-murder rampage. There is something grimly positive about homicide as compared to suicide. The book ends there, and these murders are strangely satisfying to me, and even funny. In my opinion, Malone Dies contains some of the funniest passages in literature, for example on page 261:
This first phase, that of the bed, was characterized by the evolution of the relationship between Macmann and his keeper. There sprang up gradually between them a kind of intimacy, which, at a given moment, led them to lie together and copulate as best they could. For given their age and scant experience of carnal love, it was only natural they should not succeed, at the first shot, in giving each other the impression they were made for each other. The spectacle was then offered of Macmann trying to bundle his sex into his partner’s like a pillow into a pillowslip, folding it in two and stuffing it in with his fingers. But far from losing heart they warmed to their work. And though both were completely impotent they finally succeeded, summoning to their aid all the resources of the skin, the mucus and the imagination, in striking from their dry and feeble clips a kind of somber gratification. So that Moll exclaimed, being (at that stage) the more expansive of the two, Oh would we had but met sixty years ago! But on the long road to this what flutterings, alarms and bashful fumblings, of which only this, that they gave Macmann some insight into the meaning of the expression, Two is company. (Beckett, 2003, p. 261)
This comic interlude, starting on page 257 and ending on page 267, takes place in the hospital between two old people finding with each other some sexual satisfaction, but having to go to so much pathetic trouble to achieve satisfaction, after which there follows a riotous exchange of love letters and love poems, and then a description of how the fling cools down.
As an innovator Beckett, following Joyce, was more radical in his experiments than any other writer in the later part of the 20th Century. He departed from the 19th Century conventions of storytelling involving character, scene, action and the inevitable dramatization of moral consequences of tragic misbehavior. A good example is Malone Dies, which refuses to give the main character one name. It seems to be a bunch of stories about different characters, Sapo, McMann and Lemuel. In fact they are all Malone in different phases of his life. This interpretation might require more argument than I’m willing to venture into, however, this interpretation makes more sense of the novel, though I’m quite sure that is the last thing Beckett would want, that is, for his novel to make sense.
The Unnamable, the last of the trilogy, is a novel about somebody who can’t stop talking. The character may or may not be an armless and legless person who exists in a large parfait glass in a window of a bistro. We’ll never know for sure. There are no scenes, no action. Finally after boring us to death, Beckett allows his character to tell the reader a couple of morbid but amusing stories.
The first is about trying to get home to his wife and kids. The closer he gets—close enough to see their faces in the windows waiting for him—the wider the loops which take him far away from them (are these bird loops or what?). When he finally enters the house to confront their decomposing corpses, the whole family having died of poisoning, he stumps around in his crutches, having lost a leg in the meantime, mashing their rotting flesh into the floor. The tale is told with such glee and wonder that it is quite amusing to read.
A good example of Beckett’s experimentation in novelistic structure is Malloy, the first of the trilogy, which is broken up into two parts. The second part is about a detective named Jacques Moran who’s called out in a case. This second part of the novel makes no mention of anything that has happened in the first part of the novel. Either it is a puzzle to figure out how these two parts of the novel are related, or it is also possible that there is no relationship between the two parts. In the second part of the novel, there is a violent murder of a grotesque homeless person in the forest. It is not clear whether or not Moran is the person who clubbed the man to death. Is it possible that the man he’s stumbled upon is Malloy?
By breaking the rules at all levels of written expression, Beckett challenges the conventions of the various literary forms he works with. He also challenges our notion of the nature of self and other and the nature of consciousness. At the level of sentence structure the longer prose work Ill Seen Ill Said uses sentence fragments punctuated by periods that are arranged in such a way that one feels they are complete, though they are not complete sentences. These descriptions stand and have a stark resonance. They are arranged in paragraphs. There is no sense of non sequitur. As a sequence of descriptions there is remarkable continuity and coherence and the same can be said for the sequence of paragraphs.
The coffer. Empty after long nocturnal search. Nothing. Save in the end in a cranny of dust a scrap of paper. Jagged along one edge as if torn from a diary. On its yellowed face in barely legible ink two letters followed by a number. Tu 17. Or Th. Tu or Th 17. Otherwise blank. Otherwise empty. (Beckett, 1981, p. 38)
And on the next page…
Incontinent the void. The zenith. Evening again. When not night it will be evening. Death again of deathless day. On the one hand embers. On the other ashes. Day without end won and lost. Unseen. (Ibid, pp. 39-40)
A totally different experiment is embarked upon in How It Is. Here we are presented with blocks of run on sentences or sentence fragments without punctuation or pauses. They are quasi-paragraphs, not indented and not capitalized with no internal or end punctuation:
the curtains parted part I saw his friends come to visit him where squatting in the deep shade of a tomb or a bo his fists clenched on his knees he lived thus (Beckett, 1996, p. 59)
And the next block:
They broke for want of chalk or suchlike but not in concert so that some my nails were talking of my nails some always long others presentable I saw him dreaming the mud parted the light went on I saw him dreaming with the help of a friend or failing that boon all alone of bending them back to the back of his hand for them to go through the other way death forestalled him (Ibid)
These two distinct patterns, the series of short paragraphs composed of phrases, punctuated by capital letters at the beginning and by periods at the end of each phrase, in Ill Seen Ill Said and the unpunctuated blocks of phrases and run-on sentences in How It Is, are strictly followed by Beckett, as if he were following a different set of rules created for each prose work. These patterns give each work a unique form. A set of rules gives the lines of a poem a form in a similar fashion, for instance, a sonnet, recognizable by the number of lines (fourteen) and by a particular pattern (The Italian sonnet: eight lines followed by six lines; the English sonnet: three quatrains and a concluding couplet). The lines of a sonnet are determined by the metrical scheme and the demarcations between parts, between octave and sestet, or between quatrains, determined by the rime scheme. In contrast to Beckett’s trilogy of novels, the formal aspect of these later prose works visible on the page is much more pronounced, as though the more abstract his works became, the greater his need for formal devices. His early preoccupation with form, the Apollonian side of his artistry, is relevant here, particularly his statement, quoted above: “…this form will be of such a type that it admits the chaos and does not say that the chaos is something else.” (Pilling, 1976, p. 22) The distinct feature of both works, Ill Seen Ill Said and How It Is, is the absence of grammatical form. There is not one complete sentence in either work. It is as if the existence of the old lady in Ill Seen Ill Said is so empty, nothing can be said of it that could fill a complete sentence. A paucity of descriptions is repeated over and over again in various combinations. Pim’s mind in How It Is is so destroyed that his perceptions, constantly interrupted, cannot be registered in grammatical sentences. The mental derangement is expressed by the absence of grammar. In such a way, Beckett found forms that accommodate chaos.
Our prized possession is our ability to speak our native language, to use it correctly and effectively. And that is why we are all extremely sensitive to a writer who is willing to press language to its limits and depart from the rules of common speech.
A further example of the departure from grammatical form can be seen in the second part of How It Is when Pim refers to himself as another person, using the third person pronoun, “the hour of his death at what age it is not said…” and later calling himself my “unbutcherable brother,” while gouging himself with a can opener. The speaker in the play “Not I” speaks of herself as another person. The departure from the grammar of pronoun usage has a radical effect, expressing self-alienation. Another way self-alienation is dramatized in many of Beckett’s works is the main character’s constantly undercutting what he has just said, sometimes mid-sentence, canceling the previous statement immediately after it has been uttered, as if incapable of stating a simple fact without doubting its validity. I am reminded of Nietzsche’s statements about the new form of idolatry, the worship of the truth.
In Beckett’s works the reader is presented with descriptions of extreme loneliness and decrepitude and with acts of violence. No comment is made about their moral implications; no attempt is made to rationalize them. Readers are given the room to have their own reactions to these imagined events, given the room to draw their own conclusions, hence the power of these works.
PART IV
Artists living in a totalitarian regime if they have any originality are seen as a threat to the social order that is being imposed on the people. One of the best examples is Platonov who just recently has been translated into English. Platonov’s life was made miserable by the authorities in Soviet Russia. His commissions were eventually canceled and his books banned.
Distrusted and under attack almost from the very first, he was accused of a bevy of sins: pessimism, anarchism, nihilism, antirealism, symbolism, petty-bourgeois and Kulak psychology, failure to understand the larger purposes of Communist construction which justified the sacrifice of the individual…Barred from book publication for long periods, he was reduced to virtual nonbeing as a writer through most of his lifetime, earning a bare living as a book reviewer writing under several pen names. The stretches of enforced silence as an artist were punctuated by the occasional appearance of a story in a magazine or a slender collection, usually followed by renewed outbursts from party critics. Indeed, except for the periods when he was subject to intense vilification, his name and his work were almost unknown to Russian readers.
Despite the hostile atmosphere, Platonov continued writing in his own manner, which obstinately refused to fit into the requisite forms and moods. He remained a Communist, but he held up his early Communist vision—the vision expressed in the simplest terms by many of his characters—to the realities of the time…” ( Platonov, 1997, p. vii, from “Translator’s Introduction.”)
The prevailing aesthetic that the authorities who passed judgment on Platonov and others, approving their works for publication or banning them, was Socialist Realism. Experimental prose fiction was out, as was surrealism and abstraction in the visual arts. Program music was demanded of composers; in other words, music that attempts to tell a story, for instance, the tone poems of Richard Strauss, “Til Eulenspiegel,” and “Also Sprach Zarathustra.”
In Pravda Shostakovich was harshly criticized for his opera, “Lady Macbeth.” They were saying that Shostakovich was writing music counter to the communist movement. When he wrote his fourth symphony it was panned. In the former Soviet Union when artists were trying to write symboliste poetry not representative of the struggle of the working people, and this went for all types of avant-garde art, it represented class interests, mainly an elitist outlook or residue of the upper classes in Russia, especially; this no longer had anything to do with how much money people had, since in Communist Russia no one had money to speak of, but had more to do with class affiliation.
During the revolution in Russia many families of title and/or wealth were able to get out. For example, Nabokov’s family was able to flee. Nabokov’s writing is an example of what was banned in Soviet Russia: A text filled with hidden meanings, earmarked for intellectuals, not for the common man. But the lives of Shostakovich and Prokofiev were clearly made miserable and held captive by the harsh strictures of the USSR.
Both Shostakovich and Prokofiev were able to be incredibly prolific. On the one hand, unlike Shostakovich, Prokofiev was very much a cosmopolitan figure. Prokofiev spent time abroad, in Paris and in America. Prokofiev didn’t fit in with the Soviet Union’s idea of what an artist’s image should be. That he was completely oblivious to the
real politicization of aesthetics after 1934 is grimly apparent from the fact that he took up residence in Moscow exactly a month before Pravda’s denunciation of Shostakovich’s Lady Macbeth, which at last made plain to musicians how little their future well-being was going to depend on their ability to compose what Prokofiev had understood as ‘music that would correspond both in form and content to the grandeur of the epoch…’ (Walsh, September 25, 2003 p. 24)
We see this oppressive ideology in support of proletarian music expressed in Shostakovich’s own words,
“Of the major Russian composers, only two have known how to sell themselves, Stravinsky (Stravinsky went to live in the U.S., but Prokofiev couldn’t because he had a family in Russia) and Prokofiev. But it’s no accident that both are composers of a new era, and in a sense children, even though adoptive ones, of western culture. Their love and taste for publicity, I feel, keep Stravinsky and Prokofiev from being thoroughly Russian composers. There’s some flaw in their personalities, a loss of some very important moral principles.” (Shostakovich, 2004, pp. 130)
What Shostakovich was not saying, maybe because he couldn’t, was that Prokofiev’s piano concertos were music for the sake of music — an early example of this would be much of Beethoven’s music, although people tried to claim there were themes, which created a certain tension—which was in a sense against the law in Russia, a sure way in the U.S.S.R. to be executed.
In other words, there had to be a narrative in any commissioned or non-commissioned pieces/works. Art had to be representative of either praise of a Soviet leader in power or, in the case of Khrushchev coming into power and Stalin’s regime fading, a purging of a previous leader’s regime. But on the other hand the USSR gave Prokofiev huge success, elevating him to the pinnacle of his career. By writing film scores about figures in Russian history, Prokofiev satisfied the party officials for a while.
Shostakovich wrote fifteen symphonies and was also celebrated. Prokofiev wrote seven symphonies, seven piano concertos, and two violin concertos.
Shostakovich’s fourth symphony was blasted by the Communist press. His fifth symphony was a popular success, but less experimental than some of his previous works. It was easier for the common man to identify with. The seventh was programmatic music about the battle of Leningrad. The symphony ends in a triumphant mood celebrating the successful defense of Leningrad against the German onslaught. It is a long symphony, very bombastic.
One hears in the relentless, frenzied marches the sound of soldiers going to war, in the pounding drumbeats the sound of cannons and artillery, and in the slow movement the sounds of wailing of the grieving for those who died in the war, and the somber long nights of one of the coldest, snowy winters on record, during which German troops outside the city either froze to death or starved to death, and in the finale the triumph and sounds of victory and the release from the terror of the German assault on Leningrad. This is program music, par excellence, and one is reminded of Tchaikovsky’s stirring 1812 overture, written in the previous century.
Hearing all this in the symphony, of course, depends on the listener’s capacity to imagine the historical events. The listener can just as easily hear it as stirring symphonic music, organized around the typical four movements structure we have learned to appreciate from the symphonies of Hayden, Mozart and Beethoven.
When Khrushchev came to power after the death of Stalin, Shostakovich wrote his thirteenth symphony, which was about a massacre of Jews at Babi Yar based on a long poem by Yevteshenko. This poem was a political work, an indictment about war crimes committed under Stalin. Khrushchev had exposed the injustices of the purge trials. This was one of the ways Khrushchev was able to consolidate his own power. Shostakovich used his own talents to contribute to the self-criticism of past crimes against humanity that was going on in the USSR.
Shostakovich went into decline at the end of his life. Although Shostakovich and Prokofiev came from slightly different social strata, these were two elitist composers who had to carefully navigate through the dangerous waters of a police state. Shostakovich was younger than Prokofiev and was not cosmopolitan; therefore he was more able to survive the regime change from Stalin to Khrushchev.
For obvious reasons, neither Prokofiev nor Shostakovich experimented with twelve-tone technique. It is questionable whether or not their music would have benefited from using it. Both composers were so original that neither of them needed the new sound that twelve-tone technique offered. Their music comes across as avant-garde, full of dissonant chords, catchy rhythmic figures and tone color. They might have felt restricted by the rules set forth by Schoenberg and his followers. Shostakovich’s student, Alfred Schnittke, obviously did not. He used twelve-tone technique to advantage in many of his works. It is interesting to note that Stravinsky, while living in Los Angeles, did write some twelve-tone pieces, surely an outgrowth of his friendship with Schoenberg, who was teaching at UCLA, both of them refugees from totalitarian regimes.
PART V
By looking at a number of examples of protest art whether literary, visual arts or musical compositions, I have seen the role that political bias plays. It depends on what side you’re on whether you see the artwork as political protest or, from the other viewpoint, propaganda. Looking at examples of protest art from an historical perspective, aware that I am not in the grip of the political sentiment that inspired these works, I question the capacity of artworks to create powerful emotions for and against political action except in the heat of a political event taking place in the present. When an artwork is used for a political purpose, it may have a temporary emotional effect, but that diminishes over time.
The exposition at the Fog Museum last June in Cambridge, Massachusetts included Saderer: “Rape of the Sabines,” Jack Callot: “The Miseries of War” series, Goya: “Disasters of War” series, 1746-48, De Brym: “Massacre of the Innocence,” Daumier: “Rue Traumernain,” Winslow Homer: “War for Union,” 1862. George Bellows: “The Tragedies of War in Belgium,” specifically “The Germans Arrive,” oil on canvas and lithographs: “The Last Victim,” “Bacchanal,” and “The Cigarettes.”
“The Last Victim” is truly horrifying, depicting fat German soldiers in their spiked helmets with Belgian babies impaled on the ends of their bayonets, raised high toward the sky, which I suspect was pure propaganda. The Bellows was the most disturbing perhaps after Goya’s depictions of the cruelty and ravages where the destructive tendencies of men unleashed by war.
In Anne Hollander’s article in the London Review Of Books November 6, 2003 she discusses David Kunzle’s historical, anti-war book From Criminal To Courtier: The Soldier In Netherlandish Art 1550-1672. There is an interesting painting, which Hollander includes in her review of Kunzle’s book: William Duyster, “Soldiers Fighting over Booty in a Barn,” in which there are swords and guns drawn over what looks like beautiful valuables. There are other soldiers still preoccupied with the examination of their booty, yet to be fought over. Hollander questions the accuracy of many of Kunzle’s claims that he makes in his study of Dutch war paintings. What is important, I think, is that Kunzle may believe “that even the vivid stylistic components of the pictures he discusses are a product of the artists’ fundamental protest against oppression…” (Hollander, 2003) And in the way the article is presented to me implies that in writing this book now, Kunzle himself is protesting present day war.
Picasso comes to mind as the most prolific innovator in terms of creating totally new languages for art as well as producing “Guernica.” Many people have spoken to me about how affected they were by seeing “Guernica,” one of the most famous examples of protest art, but the face coming out of the building, like a cry of terror, and the gored horse in a cartoon-like style, for me, are much less engaging, in terms of color, line and form, than hundreds of other works of Picasso that I have looked at. This may be simply a matter of taste. The fact is nobody has been able to explain to me, exactly why they were so moved by the painting?
Anselm Kiefer’s monumental paintings of buildings in ruins, the architecture reminiscent of Nazi buildings designed by Albert Speer, have been constant reminders of the past most Germans would rather forget. Kiefer’s large artist books of death-like blackened sheets, as if blackened pages in German history, the result of a holocaust, like personal possessions pulled out of the rubble of firebombed Hamburg or Dresden, for me have associations with the reign of death wrought by the Third Reich. Picasso’s “Guernica” protests an event that had just happened. These works by Kiefer refer to events of his parents’ generation. What Kiefer may be protesting was the attempt to cover up these events in post-war Germany, for example, the attempt to eliminate this shameful chapter in German history from the public school curriculum. Recently that neglect has been reversed.
Now I turn to contemporary electronic media, mainly TV and movies. People surf the TV channels, sometimes watching eight to ten different TV programs at a time, hopping back and forth trying to keep up with the progress of each program, even though TV programs move their plots along faster than movies, but because of commercials and people’s diminishing attention spans, one TV show at a time isn’t enough to satisfy the viewer’s appetite for stimulation. Also the lack of transitions between fictional entertainment, news reports and commercials has blurred the distinction between fiction and actuality; and everything on the media is judged for its entertainment value as the sole criterion as to what holds our interest. And this spills over into education: Schools increasingly use audio visual aids. Students now view themselves as consumers demanding to be entertained by their teacher. This pleasure-oriented attitude is not always conducive to hard work that must take place in order to learn something of lasting value.
The influence of novelists and film makers’ imaginations is seen once they have been realized through cinematic techniques, camerawork, captivating actors, special effects, and editing, especially in the depiction of violence, stemming from some loner’s mental problems, like Michael Douglas in Falling Down or crazy political machinations, such as a spy movie thriller, like Matt Damon in The Bourne Identity. The influence of fiction is pernicious once it has been transformed into a mass market media product: Violent movies and TV shows have a pernicious influence on human behavior, and we see actual events taking place in the world either from individual acts, such as the Washington D.C. sniper rampage or organized acts of violence, such as 9/11, that seem to imitate fiction. And further, we see the danger of instantaneous dissemination of information about horrendous acts of violence being responsible for the copycat effect, such as the rash of school shootings following Columbine.
So why not pretend for a moment that the terrorist events that have occurred since the fall of the Berlin Wall were a new form of protest art? “The Unabomber,” Columbine High School, the destruction of the World Trade Center; these events, terrorist, whatever we collectively end up defining them as, remind me of large public art works, like Claes Oldenberg’s gigantic clothes pin monument, his monumental toilet bulb sculpture, Christo’s’s line of umbrellas on the coast of California mirrored by a similar construction in Japan. Protest art on a grand scale has found destruction and homicide as the only way of expressing criticism of the basic principles that were governing American society.
Like a large public works project, 9/11 involved elaborate planning, special training and absolute secrecy, which usually surrounds any new invention until it is out of the R&D phase. The project was brilliantly conceived, because it used commercial airliners that did not have to pass across America’s frontiers, which, full of jet fuel, were transformed into bombs upon impact. The airplanes needed to be hijacked, and all that was needed to accomplish that was the willingness to kill, with a simple mechanism, a box-cutter. The project was low cost, like so many other art projects. Essential to the execution of this massive, destructive happening was perfect timing, secrecy and self-sacrifice. The critique of American values was articulated by the choice of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. That the Twin Towers fell showed the weakness of the American value system. American complacency was exploded. The medium was fire and destruction. Destruction became a more powerful tool than creativity in announcing the existence of a worldwide organization that was willing to challenge Western values, whose members were willing to die for what they believed in.
Only with a hugely destructive event, 9/11, would the Al-Qaeda criticisms be taken seriously. Bin Laden had issued these criticisms to America before: end the sanctions against Iraq and stop supporting Israel. Nobody listened. But the successful execution of the 9/11 project gained Al-Qaeda thousands of followers around the world, but what gained this terrorist organization hundreds of thousands of followers was the US response to 9/11, namely the war in Iraq and the inexplicable support of Sharon’s policies.
Another example, on a smaller scale, is the Unabomber’s artistically crafted bomb packages, using little strips of birch bark to represent nature, which led to several deaths and a number of serious injuries. The Unibomber’s condition for stopping was that his manifesto be published in The New York Times.
Habermas has an apt description of situations of this kind, as follows:
But these almost intangible connections should not mislead us into denouncing the intentions of an intransigent Enlightenment as the monstrous offspring of a ‘terroristic reason.’ Those who link the project of modernity with the conscious attitudes and spectacular public deeds of individual terrorists are just as short-sighted as those who claim that the incomparably more persistent and pervasive bureaucratic terrorism practiced in obscurity, in the cellars of the military and the secret police, in prison camps and psychiatric institutions, represents the very essence of the modern state (and its positivistically eroded form legal domination) simply because such terrorism utilizes the coercive means of the state apparatus. (Habermas, 1997, p. 50)
To my mind, “they” are not shortsighted at all but right on the mark. Habermas is the one who is shortsighted, hampered by his compulsive need to see everything in rational terms.
Film may be the most powerful medium for protest art. Unfortunately, the full use of the potentiality of film art is limited by the fact that it takes so long to make a film. The best one can hope for is that the moral complexity of recent events—not current events—might be probed by a film-maker such as we saw in Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers, Costa Gravas Z, or Missing, Louis Malle’s Lucien Lacombe, and Au Revoir Les Enfants, Oliver Stone’s Patoon, JFK, and Natural Born Killers, and Jerry Buckenheimer’s Black Hawk Down. These were fully realized examples of film art that confronted historical events. Michael Moore’s Bowling for Columbine is a documentary film that puts the mass murders that took place outside of Denver in the context of other recent events such as the armed militias that produced Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols. The brother of Terry Nichols is interviewed by Moore in the film and also other militia members training with their weapons, possession of which the NRA has defended and lobbied for. Moore visits the Lockheed plant in the proximity of Columbine High School that made the missiles and bombs that were dropped on Serbia, and Moore notes the fact that the violence that two students unleashed on their fellow students, killing and wounding many of them and a teacher, came the day after the U.S. started bombing Serbia. Whatever value Moore’s documentary has is of a different sort than that of the films mentioned above, each of which deserves comment in terms of the issues we have been dealing with.
The ironic thing about movies like Platoon and Black Hawk Down and the films of Pontecorvo and Costa-Gravis is that their style is realistic and quite close to the guidelines set down by Socialist Realism in the USSR. A large part of their effectiveness has to do with the realist approach to events. But at the same time what I have just said can be thought of as naive, because when movies like Platoon and Black Hawk Down are made, they are automatically part of the genre of war movies, thus glorifying war, America and making men feel gung-ho. Films that were being made in the Stalinist period are similar in style. Natural Born Killers does not deal with a political event, but a mentality that cropped up in countless mass murder rampages in the US that never sought ideology to justify wholesale slaughter of people that happened to be in their way. Stone uses every resource of the film medium, a huge multiplicity of images inter-cut to recreate the manic homicidal consciousness of the killers. He re-creates surrealist scenes of dialogue, interspersing sit-com laughter as inappropriate responses to what was said and done in the father’s house of the soon-to-be girl friend/accomplice of the killer and other techniques that depart from film realism.
CONCLUSION
Habermas’s fascination with Nietzsche, Battaille, Foucault, and Derrida is bizarre given his need to see everything in controlled and rational terms. The need for rationality limits Habermas’s ability to understand Nietzsche, whom he oversimplifies by not accounting for the changes in the positions taken, from the early works to later works, such as The Anti-Christ and Twilight of the Idols. Habermas condemns Nietzsche for failing to live up to the rigorous protocols of philosophical discourse and for ignoring the moral implications of his pronouncements. To his credit, Habermas’s account of the way the term ‘modern’ has been used since the Enlightenment is indispensable. Habermas’s account of how Nietzsche ushered in post-modernism is less convincing. I suspect that Habermas does not believe ‘post-modern’ is a valid description of 20th Century cultural phenomena, or perhaps he simply doesn’t know how to use the term. It is clear that Nietzsche was an important harbinger of the ‘modern,’ as we know it, so far as literature and music were concerned. Nietzsche’s remarks about the visual arts were too few for me to be able to know what he had in mind, in that regard, for the century he never lived to see.
For all the originality of Beckett’s experiments, which are in line with the whole modernist tendency to create “the New,” and Joyce’s innovations with stream of consciousness technique, many fiction writers have gone back to writing straight forward narratives (ready to be adapted as film or TV) using language in a less idiosyncratic manner. Without resorting to experimentation in form or style, many brilliant writers in the last fifty years have succeeded in registering their observations about human behavior and creating stories that render both the tragic sense of life and its mystery, sometimes a rather peculiar and macabre vision of the world, such as Flannery O’Conner’s stories in A Good Man Is Hard To Find or Edith Templeton’s novel Gordon. That is not to say that innovation ended with Beckett. The great Austrian writer, Thomas Bernhard, showed Beckett’s influence in his early novels, perhaps to a fault, but midway in his career had found a manner that was his and no one else’s, in his many plays and novels. His novel, The Loser, is a shining example of what he achieved.
At the outset I asked the question whether or not art that is innovative, especially in the 20th Century, and that uses experimental techniques, such as twelve-tone technique in music or stream of consciousness technique in the novel, might have a better chance of being effective as protest art, having these expressive means at their disposal. In other words, the ability to create an artwork that departs from frequently used artistic styles and conventions of communicating might give these artists the capacity to express the violence and chaos of political upheavals.
In fact, it may be that the most effective works of art serving a protest agenda were not innovative or experimental, but in the case of the novel and film, they were more effective if they were realistic and straightforward representations of reality.
SELECTIVE BIBLIOGRAPHY
BOOKS AND ARTICLES CITED:
Beckett, Samuel, How It Is, John Calder Publisher, London, 1996.
Beckett, Samuel, Ill Seen Ill Said, Grove Press, Inc., New York, 1981.
Beckett, Samuel, Trilogy: Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnambable, Calder Publications, New York, 2003.
Beckett, Samuel, Stories and Texts for Nothing, Grove Press, Inc., New York, 1968.
Guilbaut, Serge, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art from Paris: Abstract Expressionism, Freedom, and the Cold War, Translated by Arthur Goldhammer. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983.
Hollander, Anne, London Review of Books, November 6, 2003.
Joyce, James, Ulysses, New York: Oxford University Press Inc., 1998.
Nietzsche, Friedrich, Twilight of the Idols and The Anti-Christ, New York: Penguin Books, 1972.
Nietzsche, Friedrich, On the Genealogy of Morality, Translated by Carol Diethe, Cambridge, England:Cambridge University Press, 1998.
Passerin d’Entreves, Maurizo and Benhabib, Seyla, eds. Habermas and the Unfinished Project of Modernity, Critical Essays on The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, Cambridge, Massachusetts: The M.I.T. Press, 1997.
Pilling, John, Samuel Beckett, Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1976.
Platonov, Andrey, The Foundation Pit, Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1994.
Platonov, Andrey, The Fierce And Beautiful World, New York: The New York Review Books, 2000.
Shostakovich, Dmitri, Testim ony: The Memoirs of Dmitri Shostakovich, Portland, Oregon: Book News Inc. 2004.
Walsh, Stephen, “Sideswipes,” London Review of Books, September 25, 2003.
FILMS CITED:
Costa-Gravas, Constantin, Z, 1969.
Costa-Gravas, Constantin, Missing, 1982.
Malle, Louis, Lucien Lacombe, 1974.
Malle, Louis, Au Revoir Les Enfants, 1987.
Moore, Michael, Bowling for Columbine, 2002.
Pontecorvo, Gillo, The Battle of Algiers, 1964.
Schumacher, Joel, Falling Down, 1993.
Scott, Ridley, Black Hawk Down, 2001.
Stone, Oliver, Platoon, 1986.
Stone, Oliver, JFK, 1991.
Stone, Oliver, Natural Born Killers, 1994.
Young, Roger, The Bourne Identity, 1998.
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