winter 2006 transverse 1 2 transverse winter 2006 winter 2006 transverse 3 transverse: a comparative studies journal

copyright contributors 2006 centre for comparative literature university of toronto

all rights reserved the use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written consent of the contributors, is an infringement of the copyright law

the national library of canada has catalogued this publication as follows: transverse: a comparative studies journal

editor: andrés pérez simón new books: jena habegger copyeditor: laurel damashek cover design: bao nguyen

2005 conference organizers: adriana dragomir, annarita primier, ioana sion, martin zeilinger

to contact the editor, please send an email to [email protected]

www.chass.utoronto.ca/complit/journal.htm

4 transverse winter 2006 transverse: a comparative studies journal issue 6, winter 2006 eyedeologies editor’s preface andrés pérez simón 7 visual minorities: self/other encounters in visual literature j. andrew deman 9

“when new york was really wicked”: urban spectatorship and early constructions of urban fear rory mclellan 19 distorting the image: photography and narrative in calvino’s mr. palomar amy hondronicols 31 subjectivity and mechanical reproduction in bioy casares’ morel’s invention irmgard emmelhainz 40 amused to death? roger waters and the thought of neil postman phil rose 53 inter-medial adaptation: the transformation of virgil’s the aeneid into purcell’s opera dido and aeneas sarah jefferies 76 purgatorio xii’s ‘hermeneutic circle’ jenna sunkenberg 86

winter 2006 transverse 5 the coctorphic self in words and images: infernal descent, ghost language and visual poetry in the orphic trilogy ioana sion 96 animating the dead - narrative and 19th century photography christiane arndt 122 arte povera: words as image and experience laura petican 140 mathematics, music, and modernism: modelling the spatial and temporal parameters of frye’s cultural envelope yves saint-cyr 150

new books miguel de cervantes, don quijote de la mancha. regina galasso 172 paul auster, city of glass. maría laura arce 173

contributors 175

6 transverse winter 2006 editor’s preface

Critical writings in this issue were selected from the proceedings of the 2005 Graduate Student Colloquium Eyedeologies. Across Disciplines: En-visioning the Readable / Reading the Visual. This Colloquium was held at the Centre for Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto on 7-8 April, 2005. Four graduate students acted as organizers of the conferences and also edited essays for Transverse: Adriana Dragomir, Annarita Primier, Ioana Sion, and Martin Zeilinger. In Fall 2006, after becoming the new general editor of Transverse, I further revised the essays that appear in this issue. Although the previous work by my fellow partners was excellent, I thought it necessary to make some formal/content changes in order to achieve a homogeneous outcome. I also wanted to incorporate a new section into the journal, one including reviews of recent books, a project that was eventually possible thanks to the help of Jena Habegger. In this issue of Transverse, we have included reviews of recent editions of M. de Cervantes’ Don Quixote – illustrated by S. Dalí – as well as a comic adaptation of P. Auster’s City of Glass. There is no doubt that both editions constitute an interesting case of the dialectic between word and image. The fi rst issue of Transverse was released in March 2004, with Annarita Primier in charge of an ambitious project that encompassed theoretical articles, creative writing, and visual arts. In words of Roland Le Huenen, director of the Centre for Comparative Literature, the journal was conceived as “an interdisciplinary approach linking literature, linguistics, the visual arts, music among other fi elds in the Humanities, as well as works of original fi ction, poetry and art.” Primier did not claim defi nitive answers in the fi eld of literary studies but tried – and, in my view, she succeeded – to incorporate emergent voices into a discussion that is constantly redefi ning itself through the interaction of languages and disciplines. In this second era of Transverse, I will attempt to continue Primier’s path with the help of Adil D’Sousa (Creative Writing), Jena Habegger (New Books), and Laurel Damashek (Copyediting). Other graduate students are also working with us in the process of selecting and editing texts, and we plan to publish the next issue of Transverse in Spring, 2007. As indicated previously, the present issue includes a selection of proceedings from the 2005 colloquium. Contributors to the colloquim were graduate students from North American universities, originally from fi ve different countries, and they all approached the relation text/image from different and enriching angles. It is worth noting that essays from three students in the Centre for Comparative Literature can be winter 2006 transverse 7 found in this issue of Transverse: Yves Saint-Cyr, Ioana Sion, and Jenna Sunkenberg. It is my conviction that new graduate students from Toronto will be published in future issues, and I publicly invite them to submit papers that could be of interest. To conclude, I wish to emphasize once more the excellent job done by the four organizers of the colloquium. I am also grateful to Annarita Primier for her kind assistance in the editing process of the present issue of Transverse.

Andrés Pérez Simón

8 transverse winter 2006 visual minorities: self/other encounters in visual literature j. andrew deman

The recent past has seen fantastic gains in the depth and volume of literary criticism devoted to considerations of race, and encounters between a reader’s concept of Selfness and Otherness. The recent past, though, has also seen the development of a radical new form of literature: comics, a hybrid form building narrative through the combining forces of language and sequential images. The unique nature of this new form necessitates the creation of an alternative literary semiotics of race, one that accommodates the visual and hybrid modes of storytelling in the comics form. Historically, comics have not been commonly utilized as a space for the expression of progressive views on race and ethnicity. In fact, many of the early American comics derived their visual punch-lines from ridicule of racial minorities through caricature. For example, comics played a powerful role in developing and disseminating the iconic visual style of minstrelsy. This ‘tradition,’ if you will, holds a strong place in the history of the form. It can be as overt as ‘The Slumberland Savages’ or it can be as subversive (not to mention pervasive) as Mickey Mouse. As comics artist Chris Ware points out: “What is he doing with white gloves? Gee, I wonder where that comes from? The simplifi cation of the face comes out of an effort to distill a particular identity down to a few simple features, and that includes racial identity. It’s Creepy when you think about it” (qtd. in Juno, 41). Though often its most common victim, African-Americans are not, surely, the only victims of racism in the comics form, which again helped to build and distribute globally common visual stereotypes for nearly all ethnic groups with a place in American society, from the Irish, to the Mexican, to the Jew. Ware points to Abie the Agent as an obvious Jewish stereotype, and Happy Hooligan as an obvious Irish stereotype. He concludes that “If you look at many early comic strips, they’re endemically ‘ethnic’” (49). Even on the superhero side of things, visual caricature can be said to be ethnically marked. For example, in 1975 Marvel comics turned a dying franchise into the best-selling comic in the world by replacing their existing all-American X-men with a globally assembled team, each member embodying some stereotypical perception of their respective nationality, be they an overly-muscled, block-headed Russian, a hypersexed African tribal princess (topless, of course), or a squinting Japanese with a pompous smirk on his face in each and every panel. These renditions are complicated as they do draw winter 2006 transverse 9 upon realistic ethnic visual traits (just as most stereotypes have some fl imsy attachment to reality), but predominantly draw upon the American public’s popular imagination of ethnic visual traits, the collective consciousness of Otherness, and therefore Selfness as well. This same imagination, of course, is one that prior works of American comics art had spent three quarters of a century constructing. Furthermore, it is important to note that these racial depictions are not silent redundancies, ineffective upon a broader culture. Even from its infancy, the comics form has had a powerful effect on society in general, and American society in particular. In his 1989 book No Respect: Intellectuals and Popular Culture, Andrew Ross calls attention to the manner in which pop culture operates as a form of immigrant instruction in American society, or as a substitute for a lacking American mythology. This idea is echoed and focused upon the comics form by such comics critics and historians as Ian Gordon, M. Thomas Inge, and Martin Barker. Each of these writers points to the visual aspects of the form, which defi ed language barriers and provided instant access to a form of American culture. There is a reason, after all, why the in-fl ight safety guides on any given airplane will be written in the comics form. At the same time, the power (and danger) of mass-marketing racism through visual media is explored by postcolonial theorists such as bell hooks and Anne McClintock. Hooks acknowledges the capacity of racially marked imagery to construct the audience, while McClintock exposes how the commodity of racially marked imagery can enforce/ reinforce colonial hierarchies. Combined, this body of critical knowledge points to a highly infl uential tradition of stereotype-construction in 20th century American comics. All of this, of course, is the past, and while the past continues to infl uence the current generation of comics, a quiet revolution has occurred within the past twenty years, and the results have been dramatic. The late 1980s saw the publication of the so-called ‘big three,’ three works of comics art that challenged expectations of the form and paved the way for more serious work to be done in the fi eld. The fi r st is the graphic novel collection of Art Spiegelman’s Holocaust chronicle, Maus, the book that would eventually claim fame as the fi rst graphic novel to win a Pulitzer Prize. The other two major works take the form of deconstructionist masterpieces, working within the superhero genre to effectively subvert it. Basically, Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns and Alan Moore’s Watchmen challenge the necessity of the superhero genre’s lack of realism. Within fi ve years of these achievements, labour 10 transverse winter 2006 disputes and poor business planning at Marvel and DC comics (the two largest publishers of superhero comic books) resulted in the outright collapse of the superhero comics industry, which by 2002 produced approximately 10% of the profi t that it did in 1992. Furthering the revolution, in 1993 – just as the industry was at its apex – Scott McCloud published Understanding Comics, the foundational text of American comics criticism. McCloud provides readers with the necessary tools through which to consider comics as a literary art form with style and conventions completely independent of any other form. The results of these combining factors were progressive gains on the part of the ‘comics as literature’ movement. Just as the high-art form of the graphic novel began to gain visibility, the stigmatized form of the ubiquitous superhero book diminished, and with serious literary work being conducted by legitimate artists, the potential for expressing racial diversity on a new, signifi cant level was created. The fi rst thing to remember is that there is no such thing as a visible minority in non- visual literature. Rather, the reader is placed into a vicarious experience through which the visibility of the individual character is somewhat predetermined through the interpretative apparatus of the narrator, which is then coded in language and transmitted to the reader through the apprehension of text. Thus, the reader does not see anything directly, but instead receives the interpretative data of sight as fi ltered through the consciousness of the narrator. The visual form of the graphic novel, however, operates more directly upon the senses of the reader. This process allows for a less rational experience, one more embedded in the reader’s individual sensory apparatus, as opposed to one embedded in linguistic encryption (language as code). This alternative method of storytelling opens up the possibility for a myriad of communicative effects that traditional linguistic storytelling cannot achieve. This ability of comics to make the invisible visible is of particular interest to the study of visible minorities, as it opens up the possibility for literature to more accurately recreate the crucial visual elements of the Self/Other encounter through the incorporation of visual semiotics. Consider, for example the famous story of visibility that Frantz Fanon recounts in his landmark work “The Fact of Blackness.” Fanon tells of an incident where he encounters a white woman and her child. The child identifi es Fanon as black - “‘Mama, see the Negro! I’m frightened!’” (324) - and Fanon is forced to reconsider his intellectual understanding of the dialectic between his body and the world. As a direct result of this visual confrontation between Self and Other, Fanon comes to some signifi cant winter 2006 transverse 11 conclusions on the nature of visibility and race. He argues that “I am given no chance. I am overdetermined from without. I am the slave not of the ‘idea’ that others have of me but of my own appearance.” (325) He contrasts his state to that of the Jewish people in general, an arguably non-visible minority:

All the same, the Jew can be unknown in his Jewishness. He is not wholly what he is. One hopes, one waits, his actions, his behavior are the fi nal determinant. He is a white man, and, apart from some rather debatable characteristics, he can sometimes go unnoticed (325).

The simple distinction here is visual determination. Fanon lives in a world where he is pre-determined, over-determined (fetishized), by the colour of his skin and the natural visibility thereof. In the written form, however, colour (a visual phenomenon) does not act as a fi nal determinant, leaving that job, instead, to language. Fanon is writing in language, code, and, in so doing, cannot be visually signifi ed by his reader as belonging to any particular minority racial culture until he himself chooses to make his colour known through the reproduction/translation of visual stimulus in outright statements. The little white kid who fears cannibals is likewise invisible. He is only white because Fanon tells us that he is and any associations that we as the reader draw from the child’s whiteness are associations based upon a linguistic system of signifi cation, and not based upon the direct associations of visual stimulus. Language, then, can be a veil to the visible minority, an equalizing force that can subvert the process of overdetermination by removing direct visual semiotics from the equation. This gives the Othered author the opportunity to be heard by a racial majority that might otherwise dismiss their perspective, based entirely upon visual association / misassociation. The transmission of thought, internal monologue, and individual perspective of the world that writing generates creates a powerful level of intimacy. This, in part, makes the written form a strong tool for the creation of empathy across ethnic barriers. At the same time, though, as Fanon himself articulates, the adoption of language as a cultural code can itself represent a form of ascension to the dominant power, thus reinforcing ethnic hierarchies. Furthermore, is it not possible that the veil provided by language creates an effect to the other extreme of determinacy where the visible minority 12 transverse winter 2006 is in fact under-determined in literature, the visual aspects – so critical to racial encounters – unrepresented? What would be the effects of such an under-determination, and what role can visual literature, and the comics form specifi cally, play in unsettling this linguistic order? By itself, the visual encounter is also subject to misinterpretations. Fanon argues: “Face to face with the white man, the Negro has a past to legitimate, a vengeance to exact; face to face with the Negro, the contemporary white man feels the need to recall the times of cannibalism” (326). What Fanon generates here is the potency of visibility as an accelerant to embedded racial prejudices. It is then the duty of comics as a hybrid of language and pictures to diffuse this latent racial tension. This can be accomplished by allowing both the embodiment of the alternate perspective – the empathy and intimacy produced by language – and also the ‘face to face’ encounter of the visual Otherness - the stimulation and recognition of visual semiotics. Through such a process, the ultimate aim would be to effectively re-write the visual associations / misassociations of race. This sort of power of embodiment is highly relevant within the comics form. In Understanding Comics, Scott McCloud develops a sliding scale of realism versus iconicism. He uses the example of a face. The extreme is photorealism, then realistic drawing, then non-realistic drawing, then cartoonish smiley face. The next step is the simple linguistic descriptive “Face” then the more specifi c “two eyes, a nose, and a mouth” and progressively onward into greater descriptive detail through language. (48) Each step brings the representation further from realistic depiction, and closer to universality. According to McCloud, the balance that is struck here is between realism and iconicism. This means that as the representation moves further from realism, the readers achieve a greater capacity through which to embody the text, that is to situate themselves within the story, project their consciousness into that of the character before them. Realism, however, works the opposite way, sacrifi cing reader identifi cation in favour of authenticity, depth and detail. This scale of realism versus embodiment has always existed in literature; the graphic element simply expands the palette at the artist’s disposal. Taking this idea a step further, McCloud is effectively illustrating the potential for comics to transcend certain expressive limitations of the non-visual, linguistic form of literature with regards to experiencing Otherness. The increase in realism that comics can provide may be a pivotal stepping-stone for the impact of literature upon society, specifi cally in the realm of racial diversity. winter 2006 transverse 13 In The Location of Culture, Homi Bhabha evinces the concepts of hybridity and the value of the interstitial encounter. Bhabha argues that cultural negotiation takes place not at the center, but along the borders where cultures collide. Confl ict and confrontation is necessary in the negotiation of both culture and identity. For Bhabha, the margin is the center, the source of defi nition. In this sense, a linguistic encounter between cultures may be said to bypass some aspect of this process of negotiation. If a white reader can become the narrated Fanon without seeing the character, have they really come to terms with the racialized Other, or have they simply projected their white reality onto his consciousness? By rendering minorities visible, the hybrid medium forces the reader into a situation that is closer in realism (as evidenced by McCloud’s scale) than the encounter through non-visual literature alone. Thus, the visualization of minorities through the form of comics may serve a vital social function on the part of literature, by engaging, on simultaneous planes of meaning-making, the notions of Self and Other. This value of visualization is perhaps best evinced by Spiegelman’s Maus. Spiegelman presents a hyperbole of ethnic difference. The Jews are drawn as mice, the Germans as cats, the Polish as pigs, and the Americans as dogs. In grim detail, the hierarchy of the food chain is then recreated as Spiegelman recounts his father’s experiences from the ghettos of Poland to the death camps at Auschwitz / Mauschwitz. What Maus shows is the creative potential in visualizing race. Naturally, the visualizing of ethnicity in these characters would otherwise be near impossible to represent, as all take the form of a white European-descended race. By undertaking to mark his characters with their own racial identity, however, Spiegelman is able to convey to his reader the overdetermination of race that existed at the time, thus accomplishing the argument of Fanon, here within the comics form. The effect is subtle but highly persuasive. Spiegelman forces his readers to question the rationality behind such overdetermination, while at the same time making an argument for the universality of humanity through the reader’s embodiment of Vladek Spiegelman as he suffers through the horrors of the holocaust. Similarly, in Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis, the Iranian experience is effectively conveyed through the graphic novel form. While the white reader cannot help but identify with the all-too-universal antics of young Marji, they are still denied the ability to simply transplant this experience to their own world as a result of the visualization of 20th century Iran. It is one thing to hear the veil described, but it is another thing entirely to see a line 14 transverse winter 2006 of children paraded through the schoolyard with their faces covered. Here, as in Maus, the actions of reading and seeing work both independently and in sympathy. This is the beauty of the comics form’s hybridity: there are essentially three narratives in each story: the written, the drawn, and the interplay between. Joe Sacco, the pioneer of so-called ‘comics journalism,’ also mobilizes race through visual representation to some interesting effects. Specifi cally, Sacco uses caricature, developing an individual visual style for individual races. This strategy is comparable to Sergei Prokofi ev’s musical rendering of “Peter and the Wolf” in which each animal is appointed an individual instrument to represent it in the story. Sacco’s line simply replaces Prokofi ev’s arrangement. Ducks, wolves and little Russian boys are replaced by Palestinians, Serbs, and Americans. It is in this last aspect which Sacco represents his intended audience within his narrative. No one is more cartoonish in these comics than Sacco the American, no-one more distorted and out of place. This too works to achieve some powerful effects. As Western readers encounter this representation of self, what they fi nd is a grotesque. The message is clear: the American does not belong here, is not embedded or situated in this world. The intent is to make the American reader feel like a tourist, often an obnoxious one, as Sacco’s self-renderings show strong links to the satirical work of Robert Crumb. This form of visual intertextuality (a common practice in comics) only further emphasizes difference. As Sacco’s focus, thus far at least, has been on regions of ethnic unrest, the caricature of race serves a signifi cant function in the story as well, providing a constant, inescapable reminder of difference, one that confronts the reader with a palpable sensory expression of ethnic confl ict. Decisions like Sacco’s are large and quite deliberate. There are, however, some subtleties to the form that can have serious ramifi cations for the representation of race in a comics narrative. The very nature of caricature is the combination of selection and exaggeration. The artist must choose what to leave out and what to emphasize. Is a black woman defi ned in her blackness by the colour of the ink in which she’s cast, as in Chris Ware’s Jimmy Corrigan? What if the comic is black and white? Is blackness a state of whiteness when it is not coloured in as in Gilbert Hernandez’s Love and Rockets X? Is blackness an extension of line, fi lled in and antithetical to whiteness as in Howard Cruse’s Stuck Rubber Baby? The visual may be more realistic than the linguistic, but, of course, it winter 2006 transverse 15 is not altogether real. In each of these examples, the choices of the artist, be they the result of artistic choice, the economic necessities of publishing, or subconscious accident, all serve to further the shape of the story. The difference in skin color between Jimmy Corrigan and his adopted sister expresses, silently, the sense of injustice and alienation that Jimmy feels as a result of his estranged father having raised her, but abandoned him. The complex matrix of social and racial interaction that Hernandez builds in Love and Rockets X is well-served by a subtle defi nition of race. In contrast, the racial confl ict of the Southern United States that Cruse portrays in Stuck Rubber Baby indeed benefi ts from an oppositional rendering of race. The point is simple: there are some powerful effects created through the visualization of race, options available, and choices to be made. As with any art form, the comics artist has a wide palette with which to paint any given masterpiece. These fi ner details simply point to the level of depth and complexity that a semiotics of race in comics needs to address. Today, with respect to the comics form, the task of the postcolonial or racial studies scholar is complicated. The fi rst task is the application of existing literary models to the hybrid visual-linguistic form of the graphic novel with the hope of discerning which methods apply, and which fail to accommodate the demands of the new form. This approach will not only help to develop lines of communication across media, but may also provide some radical insight into how the linguistic form operates through the simple generation of an alternative perspective. As my languages professor once told me: “if you want to truly understand English, you have to learn French.” The second step will be to develop new paradigms and approaches to the graphic novel, those entirely independent of traditional linguistic narrative ideologies, new paradigms which will fi ll in the gaps and create a truer understanding of the comics form as a fi eld of artistic expression all its own. The fi nal task is education. The coming generation already knows what a comic book is. Now it needs to know what it can be.

16 transverse winter 2006 works cited

- Barker, Martin. Comics: Ideology, Power and the Critics. Manchester: University of Manchester Press, 1989. - Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. New York: Routledge, 2004. - Claremont, Chris. Essential X-men, Volume 1. New York: Marvel, 1996. 7 vols. - Cruse, Howard. Stuck Rubber Baby. New York: Paradox, 1995. - Fanon, Frantz. “The Fact of Blackness.” The Post-Colonial Studies Reader. Ed.Bill Ascroft, Gareth Griffi ths, and Helen Tiffi n . New York: Routledge, 1995. 323-326. - Gordon, Ian. Comic Strips and Consumer Culture. New York: Smithsonian, 1998. - Hernandez, Gilbert. Love and Rockets X. Seattle: Fantagraphics, 2003. - hooks, bell. Black Looks. New York: Routledge, 1992. - Inge, M. Thomas. Comics as Culture. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1990. - Juno, Andrea. Dangerous Drawings. Toronto: Hushion House, 1997. - McClintock, Anne. Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Context. New York: Routledge, 1995. - McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics. New York: Paradox, 1993. - Miller, Frank. The Dark Knight Returns. New York: DC, 1997. - Moore, Alan and Dave Gibbons. Watchmen. New York: DC, 1995.

winter 2006 transverse 17 - Ross, Andrew. No Respect: Intellectuals and Popular Culture. New York: Routledge, 1989. - Satrapi, Marjane. Persepolis. New York: Pantheon, 2000. - Spiegelman, Art. Maus. New York: Pantheon, 2003. - Ware, Chris. Jimmy Corrigan. New York: Pantheon, 2000.

18 transverse winter 2006 “when new york was really wicked”: urban spectatorship and early constructions of urban fear rory mclellan

Let us go on again; and [. . .] plunge into the Five Points. [. . .] This is the place, these narrow ways, diverging to the right and left, and reeking everywhere with dirt and fi lth. Such lives are led here, bear the same fruits as elsewhere. The coarse and bloated faces at the doors have counterparts at home, and all the wide world over. De- bauchery has made the houses prematurely old. See how the rotten beams are tumbling down, and how the patched and broken windows seem to scowl dimly, like eyes that have been hurt in drunken frays. (Charles Dickens, American Notes)

The lower Manhattan neighbourhood of the Five Points was nineteenth-century North America’s most notorious slum, a series of ramshackle wooden and brick tenements that, to Dickens, seemed to be in the throes of delirium tremens, and which were represented in prints of the period, according to Luc Sante, “as a jumble of gable frame houses, drawn comi- cally tilted and helter-skelter in an awkward attempt to picture decay” (28). The most infamous of these tumbledown tenements was the Old Brewery, a disused factory that was converted into a “barracks for the poor” after it became too rotted for industrial purposes (Sante 26). Herbert Asbury, in his 1928 tabloid history of New York’s underworld, Gangs of New York, gleefully describes the overcrowded building as the “heart of the Five Points,” a place which housed the “lowlife” of Victorian New York City, the repressed unconscious of the up- town residents, the “thieves, murderers, pickpockets, beggars, harlots and degenerates of every type” and which was the site of “much sexual promiscuity” and “[m]iscegenation” (14). Tyler Anbinder contends that the Old Brewery, which in Asbury’s description of it “averaged a murder a night” for fi fteen years, was “a black hole into which every urban nightmare and unspeakable fear could be projected” (67). He quotes the Police Gazette, which conclud- ed that the Old Brewery was “the wickedest house on the wickedest street that ever exist- ed in New York, yes, and in all the country and possibly all the world” (qtd. in Anbinder 67). Touring the Five Points became an international attraction, drawing such fi gures as Dick- ens, a Russian grand duke, Davy Crockett, and Abraham Lincoln. “‘Londoners know it as winter 2006 transverse 19 well as St. Giles; and strangers ask to be shown to it before they visit Fifth Avenue or the Central Park,’” commented Junius H. Browne in his 1869 The Great Metropolis (qtd. in Anbinder 2). Anbinder concludes that “the American concept of ‘slumming’ was probably invented there” (2). Dickens’ 1842 expedition to the Five Points kicked off an explosion of “urban sketches” of the “wicked city” in general and the Points in particular, a veritable “imitative industry of risqué urban travelogues” which included bestselling novels in E.Z.C. Judson’s Mysteries and Miseries of New York (1848) (“a perfect daguerreotype from above Bleeker to the horrors of the Five Points”), and Mathew Hale Smith’s Sunshine and Shad- ow in New York (1868) (Davis 130). What was at stake in these type of discursive con- structions of the space as “dangerous” and “other” was precisely the containment of this “danger” within an emerging urban psychotopographic grid that sought to manage the lim- inality of the Points, and other places like it, places where social boundaries (such as race, class, and gender) were fundamentally in fl ux. This body of lucid, lurid literature opened up the Points to a particularly visual form of scrutiny. The area serves as a remarkable nexus of early visual culture; from early social accounts of the area, to tabloid representations, to the prints of the area that appeared in Harper’s Weekly and Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper to Asbury’s scrapbook of the darker side of the City’s soul, to the documentary sociology of Jacob Riis, the “literature” that surrounded the Points sought to both titillate and educate its viewers. The purpose of this paper is to begin to examine the ways in which this plethora of discourses that enclosed and constructed the Points as a dangerous place represent a response to the emerging conditions of modernity. I will track the ways in which the construction of lines of sight that produce and reproduce ideologies of racial, sexual and class difference are intimately bound up with the discursive organization of the metropolis in ways that managed the terms of contact between normativity and alterity.

The Bad Streets of the Bible

The Five Points forms a locus of urban fear that served to satisfy what Mike Davis refers to as “the Victorian public’s peculiar need to be simul- taneously horrifi ed, edifi ed, and titillated” (128). Christian eschatology, accord- ing to Davis, “made it all the easier to interpret documentary images of urban polarization as spatialized allegories” in a way that “orientalised” the urban poor (128). 20 transverse winter 2006 George C. Foster, in his collection of urban sketches New York by Gaslight (1850), maps an explicitly Christian eschatology onto the Five Points. Foster discusses what he calls the “moral geography of the place,” sermonizing that the Points “is, indeed, a sad awful sight—a sight to make the blood slowly congeal and the heart to grow fear- ful [. . .] Here, whence these streets diverge in dark and endless paths, whose steps take hold on hell—here is the type and physical semblance, in fact, of hell itself” (120). The Five Points was so named for the fi ve-cornered intersection of Anthony, Orange, and Cross Streets (now Worth, Baxter, and Park), an jumbled intersection which, to follow the logic of Foster’s moral geography, formed a pentagram, a demonic other to the well-ordered streets of the Grid Plan put in place north of 14th S t reet in 1811. Foster, like Dickens, has invited his readers along on his tour of this slum, positioning them alongside him, where they share his Revelationary sightline. He writes, following his moral mapping of the place as “hell itself”:

So, then, we are standing at midnight in the center of the Five Points. Over our heads is a large gas-lamp, which throws a strong light for some dis- tance around, over the scene where once complete darkness furnished al- most absolute security and escape to the pursued thief and felon, famil- iar with every step and knowing exits and entrances to every house. (121)

Street lighting, as Wolfgang Schivelbusch has shown, is indicative of the institu- tionalization of the urban landscape, and of the emergence of the modern metropo- lis out of the Victorian landscape. A policeman “stands sentinel” to assure that the light in the Points is not extinguished, and Foster contends that this “single lamp has greatly improved the character of the whole location” (121). Foster’s positioning of his gaze—and by extension the gaze of his reader—in the light of the institutional- ization of the urban landscape is telling because his text is representative of what Stuart Blumin calls “the new literary genre of nonfi ctional urban sensationalism,” a genre which dramatized the contingencies of the emerging metropolis (Blumin 1). Blumin argues that this genre emerged in wider context of urbanization, at a time when a relatively small number of newly mechanized publishing houses “took over most book publishing, created an industry of successful, nationally circulating magazines, and intro- duced a new form of journalism, the mass-circulation ‘penny press’” (14). The result of this industrialization and centralization of the publishing industry in the metropolis was not winter 2006 transverse 21 only a shift in the mode of production, but also a shift in content: “increasing numbers of books from the city were of the city as well (Blumin 16). The explosion of writing about the city that I have been discussing focused in large part on the ills of the emerging metropolis and the various threats that it posed to the fabric of Victorian life. Or, more accurately, this corpus helped to construct the moral fabric of normative bourgeois identity by producing the slum as spectacle. The slum formed a “black hole” or a receptacle into which could be projected all the anxieties about the ways in which the metropolis, as emblematic of mo- dernity, made identity something, to use Tom Gunning’s phrase, “as uncertain as a pano- ply of magician’s props” (17). Gunning goes on to argue that modernity produced a “new confi guration of experience” clearly dependent on the change in production marked by the Industrial Revolution (15). He discusses the new technologies of industrial capitalism as technologies that collapsed “previous experiences of space and time through speed” and concludes that this compression of spacetime through these new systems of circulation had a profound effect on the body (15-16). They produced: “An extension of the power and productivity of the human body; and a consequent transformation of the body through new thresholds of demand and danger, creating new regimes of bodily discipline and reg- ulation based upon a new observation of (and knowledge about) the body” (Gunning 16). The contingency of the city, its demands and dangers, was met, in much of the Vic- torian literature of the street, in an almost compulsive fi guration of the metropolis as a body, blurring and warping the distinctions between topography and physiology. As Mary Burgan notes, almost inevitably topography was conjoined with anatomy in a fi gure of the city as a body. Anatomy was an activating trope in this variation on the cartography of London be- cause it fastened upon the fear of infection, of disease as threatening the entire body (43-44). Dickens’ description of the Points, with which I opened this essay, confl ates the decaying architecture of the city with those who inhabit these slums through a personifi - cation of the buildings themselves (“Debauchery has made the very houses prematurely old”; “patched and broken windows seem to scowl dimly, like eyes that have been hurt in drunken frays”) (101). This confl ation of the living and the non-living, the bodily and the architectural illustrates the series of intricate relays between individual anatomy and the body politic that can be traced through the often vivid intersection of Victorian dis- courses of disease, sexuality, and the city. This Victorian psychopathology of place is what Mark Seltzer would term a psychotopography, a rapport between the subject and space that is “understood at once as a securing of the boundaries of the self [. . .] and 22 transverse winter 2006 as the breaching of these boundaries” (235). He argues, through the work of Jacques Lacan, that subject formation is not merely linked to “isolation” or “fortifi cation,” but also to an identifi cation with outmoded, “degenerate” spaces (235). Following this logic, the production of a healthy bourgeois social body relies, I argue, on both its physical iso- lation from, and its psychological proximity to, the “diseased” or “degenerate” space of the slum. The space of the Five Points, which seems to be crumbling right before Dick- ens’ narrative eye/I (he later even refers to a “square of leprous houses”) represents the threat of degeneration, the threat of “a primitive running together or homogeneity” (Selt- zer 236). This threat takes on a circular logic: the radical failure of distinction (between people and the urban environment) is taken as the “sign or symptom of ‘the primitive’ itself” (Seltzer 236). The result is that Dickens’ narrative gaze projects the anxieties of his bourgeois readers learning their way around the new institutions and spaces of the city into the spectacle of the slum. Their fears of regression are linked, Seltzer notes, to the uncertain psychology of the urban crowd, in which “personal characteristics vanish” and difference is dissolved into the self-same mass of the crowd (237). It constitutes what Elias Canetti calls “the fear of being touched” (15). This fear is one that intimately connects bodies and the spaces they inhabit, the “repugnance to being touched” gov- erning the “way we move in a busy street, in restaurants, trains or buses” (Canetti 15). At its heart, this anxiety surrounding the inappropriate proximity of bodies is about self-differentiation, about preserving the “boundaries of [one’s] personality” (Canetti 15). The fear of the undifferentiated mass of the crowd—what Seltzer labels the “mass- in-person”—is what Dickens’ gaze projects into the Five Points. Once this gaze has con- structed the slum as an undifferentiated mass of decaying mortar, crumbling bodies and rotting souls, it can begin to discipline the “body” of the slum. It is this disciplining that I will track in throughout the remainder of this essay. I will attempt to “show seeing” (Mitch- ell), to open up for analysis the lines of sight that enable social boundaries to be policed. Dickens’ “exploration” of the Points yielded nothing he did not already expect to fi nd; as Davis puts it, “the contemporary reader may have shuddered in suspense” at his foray into the reeking tenements of the Points, “but Dickens knew exactly where he was [. . .] [t]he description was already in the can” (129). Davis is referring to the fact that Dickens had written the same things about London’s Seven Dials in his fi rst book, a peripatetic psychotopography of London, Sketches by Boz, fi rst published in 1839. Dickens makes clear that the Five Points is the generic Victorian slum: “the winter 2006 transverse 23 coarse and bloated faces at the doors have counterparts at home, and all the wide world over” (101). “Dickens,” Davis continues, “was hardly aiming at documentary realism”:

If anything, he was trying to take his readers somewhere already sub- liminally familiar to them, a secret city visited in dreams. This arche- typal place – slum, casbah, Chinatown – is a museum archiving vic- es and miseries of potential fascination to the middle class. (129)

What Davis is getting at is that Dickens’ sightline is one that precedes him: it is a sta- ble, male, middle-class subject position from which to view the “horrors” of night- marish otherness, of undifferentiated self-sameness. I would argue further that there exists a relationship of primary mediation between his narrative frame and the “viewing position” it articulates; that is to say, the two are mutually constitutive. As a number of critics have implied, these ocular interventions into the lives of “other” at home emerged out of a specifi cally male tradition of urban spectatorship that produced and reproduced that power relations that demarcate social boundaries in the city. These observations on urban life ranged from penny romances to literary representa- tions to sociological discourses to actual social legislation. Numerous critics have noted this bleeding together of literary discourse and emergent social sciences, statistical analy- sis and the “true crime” of the penny romances (Fowler). What sutures these seemingly disparate discourses together in the “literature” of the nineteenth-century city, as Deborah Epstein Nord notes, is the fi gure of observer–the rambler, the stroller, the spectator, the fl â neur–a fi gure who is mythically and presumptively male (1). She traces the develop- ment of this narrative persona from a visible character in the urban sketch to a signa- ture–like Dickens’ “Boz”—who is both “authorial persona and fi ctional actor on the city streets,” culminating in the “invisible but all-seeing novelist, effacing all of himself but his voice in the evocation of an urban panorama” (1). Judith Walkowitz connects this literary loiterer to much of the writings of Victorian urban sociology, and contends that this spec- tator had a lot of himself invested in this gaze: “the fact and fantasy of urban exploration had been an informing feature of nineteenth-century bourgeois male subjectivity” (16). Vanessa Schwartz connects this sort of fl â nerie to the new mass press, “which served as a printed digest of the fl â neur’s roving eye,” producing “a sort of fl â nerie for the masses” (88). The urban sensationalism of both Foster and Dickens embody this type 24 transverse winter 2006 of spectatorship. George Catlin’s 1827 engraving of the Five Points catches the fl â neur in the act. The amount of detail in this panorama is staggering; the cumulative visual ef- fect is one of chaotic movement, a plethora of low-rent trauma and brawling framed by grocery stores that sold more wet than green produce (Anbinder). The fl â neur stands in the foreground, his hand holding his spectacles up to his eyes. His bodily presence stands in direct contrast to the ways in which Dickens’ narration of his expedition to the Points strategically erases his body, turning him into pure eye, a trick he had perfect- ed, as I have discussed, in producing the narrative signature of “Boz.” This narrative persona produces his own invisibility, effacing all of himself but his voice as he evokes the urban panorama (Nord 1). Here Dickens strategically inserts the body of his reader into the scene, a midnight tourism of spectres: “Ascend these pitch-dark stairs, heed- ful of a false footing on the trembling boards, and grope your way with into this wolfi sh den, where neither ray of light nor breath of air appears to come” (102). Yet there is no real danger: a “negro lad, startled from his sleep by the offi cer’s voice—he knows it well [. . .] offi ciously bestirs himself to light a candle” (102). The resident of the Points makes himself visible to the scrutiny of the law. “The match fl ickers for a moment,” Dick- ens continues, “and shows great mounds of dusky rags upon the ground” (102). The “negro lad” stumbles away and returns with a “fl aring taper,” lighting the scene for Dick- ens’ narrator, his police escort and his slumming readers, and the “mounds of rags”

are seen to be astir, and rise slowly up, and the fl oor is covered with heaps of ne- gro women, waking from their sleep: their white teeth chattering, and their bright eyes glistening and winking on all sides with surprise and fear, like the count- less repetition of one astonished African face in some strange mirror. (102-103)

Dickens’ narrator here comes face to face with the ultimate other, an other which appears in the light of the taper as one undifferentiated mass, an almost cartoonish rendering of chattering white teeth and glistening eyes against a background of darkness, not unlike the representations found in the new blackface minstrel shows popular in the Five Points. What Dickens’ stages here is a face to face meeting with the racial unconscious. Yet while his gaze allows the reader to read the “surprise and fear” in their faces they do not see him. All they encounter is a “strange mirror,” which converts their individual experiences into an aggregate of “one astonished African face.” Dickens’ narrative gaze, and all that it winter 2006 transverse 25 stands for, cannot fathom these people outside of the discursive strategy of the stereotype.

“Orientalism Brought Home”

Davis notes that the “gothic city novel was orientalism brought home” and goes on to quote Eugene Sue, author of Les Mysteries of Paris, an important early urban sen- sationalist text, published in serial form from 1842-1843 in France and translated into book form in England and America in 1843, as claiming that his text was “nothing less than the urbanization of The Last of the Mohicans” (qtd. in Davis 128). This moment in Dickens’ text makes visible what Homi Bhabha calls the “productive ambivalence” of the stereotype, which he defi nes as “that ‘otherness’ which is at once an object of desire and derision, an ar- ticulation of difference contained within the fantasy of origin and identity” (371). His point is that the ambivalent status of the stereotype, which is already known yet also bears repeat- ing because it can never be “proved” discursively, is made into a productive ambivalence by colonial discourse, a way of stabilizing the fundamentally unstable identity positions of colonizer and colonized through a process of perpetual and anxious repetition. Frantz Fanon argues that the construction of a colonized people as a “population of degenerate types” fundamentally dehumanizes a colonized people, rendering them as a threateningly undifferentiated mass, as, “hordes of vital statistics,” “hysterical masses,” “faces bereft of all humanity,” a “mob without beginning or end” (43). The similarities between the undiffer- entiated mass of the colonial other and the mass-in-person of the urban crowd is striking. Bhabha goes on to argue that the exercise of surveillance is central to main- taining these fi ctions of difference. The objective of colonial discourse is “to construe the colonized as a population of degenerate types on the basis of racial origin, in or- der to justify conquest and to establish systems of administration and instruction” (371). The surveillance I have been tracking constructs the Five Points as orientalised space, its residents as, to use the words of Asbury, “degenerates of every type” (14). This de- generation is often linked, in the nexus of discourses that swirled around the Points, to miscegenation, to the literal crossing of racial boundaries. Asbury tells his reader that in the Points “miscegenation was an accepted fact”; Foster leers that the “negroes” of the Points “associate on equal terms with the men and women of the parish” and “most of them have either white wives or white mistresses, and sometimes both” (125). 26 transverse winter 2006 Foster goes on to describe the black residents of the Points as “savage, sullen, reckless dogs” always “promoting some ‘muss’ or another” (125). He describes in detail one of what he says are regular confl icts between these men and the police. The blacks are not deterred by the “offi cial clubs so liberally rattled about their heads,” they receive these blows “without fl inching” until one of the police “bethought” that “Cuffee’s tender point was not the head, but the SHIN” (126). Foster’s thinly veiled euphemism works in two ways. First, it robs the African-American of his subjectivity (the implication being that he has no brain to rattle). Second, it appeals to the stereotype of the excessively endowed black body, which after abolition was transformed into the myth of the black rapist, which in turn provided the spurious logic of lynching. Foster’s sudden shift from a leering picture of the oversexed black man defl owering white womanhood (“white wives or white mis- tresses, and sometimes both”) to a vitriolic and merciless assault on the black phallus is telling. After the police discover this “trick”, “the woolly-heads are kept in tolerable subjec- tion”; if “they ever become troublesome let but a policeman grasp his club tightly and take aim at the shins, and the ground is cleared in a twinkling” (126). The stereotypes of black- ness are thus used as an accumulation of information on the black body that allows for the disciplining of that body by the white I/eye that I have been tracking throughout this essay. What links the racial encounters of both Dickens and Foster is a scopic regime that functions as a surveillance mechanism precisely by extracting an enduring form from fl e eting process, a transformation of experience into information. The policeman’s club represents a violent articulation of social boundaries and marks a conversion the fear of the undifferentiated mass into an accumulation of information on the bodies of the Five Points, an accumulation that renders them “other.” They, and the place they live, are converted into a series of visual displays, “pen and ink portraits,” to use Foster’s description of his work (121); the space/time of the Points is discursively transformed into something like the topographic version of the Bertillon system, a composite of it- self that serves as dystopic other to the utopic spatial ontologies of dominant subjec- tivities. My goal, in excavating the “evils” of the Five Points, is to claim it as what Fou- cault called, in The Order of Things, a “heterotopia”: a space of alternate ordering which reveals the process of social ordering to be just that, a process rather than a thing.

winter 2006 transverse 27 notes

1 National Police Gazette, in Edward Van Every, Sins of New York as “Exposed” by the Police Gazette (1930). 2 Stuart Bumin provides an extensive list of mid-nineteenth century “urban romances that revolved around the sins, deprivations, and personae of the big city,” by authors such as Judson, George Lippard and Joseph Holt Ingrahm, with such titles as The B’hoys of New York and The Mysteries of Broadway. 3 See Rowena Fowler’s “Statistical Subjects: The Individual, the City, and the Literary Text” for an account of how the literary text both contributed to and was reconstituted by nineteenth-century developments in statistical analysis and the mathematical calculus of probability. 4 See Anbinder for a discussion of these grocery stores or “grog shops” (191-193). 5 Sue: “The barbarians of whom we speak are in our midst; we can rub elbows with them by venturing into lairs where they congregate to plot murder and theft [...] These men have mores all their own [...] a language incomprehensible to use, a mysterious language thick with baneful images, with metaphor dripping in blood” (Qtd. in Davis 128)

28 transverse winter 2006 works cited

- Anbinder, Tyler. Five Points. New York: Plume, 2002. - Asbury, Herbert. The Gangs of New York: An Informal History of the Underworld. New York: Thunder’s Mouth, 2000. - Bhabha, Homi. “The Other Question: The Stereotype and Colonial Discourse.” Screen 24.4 (1983): 18-36. - Blumin, Stuart. “Introduction: George C. Foster and the Emerging Metropolis.” New York By Gaslight: And Other Urban Sketches. Ed. Stuart Blumin. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990. 1-62. - Burgan, Mary. “Mapping Contagion in Victorian London: Disease in the East End.” Victorian Urban Settings: Essays on the Nineteenth-Century City and Its Contexts. Ed. Debra N. Mancoff and D.J. Trela. New York: Garland, 1996. - Canetti, Elias. Crowds and Power. Trans. Carol Stewart. New York: Penguin, 1984. - Fanon, Frantz. Wretched of The Earth. New York: Grove, 1968. - Davis, Mike. Dead Cities. New York: New Press, 2002. - Dickens, Charles. American Notes. Edited by John Lance Griffi th. University of Virginia. 20 Oct. 2006. - Foster, George C. “New York By Gaslight”. New York By Gaslight: And Other Urban Sketches.

winter 2006 transverse 29 Ed.Stuart Blumin. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990. 65-198. - Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things. New York: Pantheon, 1971. - Fowler, Rowena. “Statistical Subjects: The Individual, the City and the Literary Text.” University of Virginia. 20 Oct. 2006. - Gunning, Tom. “Tracing the Individual Body: Photography, Detectives, and Early Cinema.” Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life. Eds. Leo Charney and Vanessa R. Schwartz. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995. 15-45. - Mitchell, W.J.T. “Showing Seeing: a Critique of Visual Culture.” Journal of Visual Culture 1.2 (2002): 165-181. - Nord, Deborah Epstein. Walking the Victorian Streets: Women, Representation,and the City. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995. - Sante, Luc. Lowlife: Lures and Snares of Old New York. New York: Vintage, 1991. - Schwartz, Vanessa. “Cinematic Spectatorship before the Apparatus: The Public Taste for Reality in Fin de Siecle France.” Viewing Positions: Ways of Seeing Film. Ed. Linda Williams. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1997. - Schivelbusch, Wolfgang. Disenchanted Night: The Industrialization of Light in the Nineteenth Century. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988. - Seltzer, Mark. Serial Killers. New York, Routledge, 1999. - Walkowitz, Judith. City of Dreadful Delights: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992.

30 transverse winter 2006 distorting the image: photography and narrative in calvino’s mr. palomar amy hondronicols

Wherever I looked, I saw myself surrounded by screens, cushions, pedestals which lusted for my image like the shades of Hades for the blood of a sacrifi cial animal [...] But I am disfi gured by my similarity to everything around me here. (Walter Benjamin, Berliner Kindheit um Neunzehnhundert)

La photographie était très ancienne. Cartonnée, les coins mâchés, d’un sépia pâli, elle montrait à peine deux jeunes enfants debout, formant groupe, au bout dans un Jardin d’Hiver au plafond vitré [...] J’observai la petite fi lle et je retrouvai enfi n ma mère. La clarté de son visage, la pose naïve de ses mains, la place qu’elle avait occupée docilement sans se montrer ni se cacher. . . (Roland Barthes, La chambre claire)

As these quotations show, photographs shock the viewer by fracturing time, space and the existence of the self in the world. Although photography demonstrates that repetition overpowers a subject with sameness, it also provides a trace of individual existence; the image represents a particular organisation of time and space, and allows different narrative versions of the event to coexist. Walter Benjamin and Roland Barthes discuss photographs that have personal value to each of them as a way to provoke a conscious understanding of the structures that inform photography and perspective. This project investigates how these structures, such as repetition and a reordering of time and space, create an apparent fragmentation of reality even as they provide new ways of making sense of the world and of the individual’s place in it. In Mr. Palomar, Italo Calvino demonstrates how perception, as an attempt to make sense of the world, is also a creative action that provokes change and generates new knowledge. As he looks for patterns of repetition, Palomar relies on order and models to understand the reality around him. Like photography, his methods are often scientifi c and aspire to an objectivity that he never quite achieves. Palomar’s observations reveal ruptures in understanding, since he cannot fi nd any stable conclusions in the discontinuities winter 2006 transverse 31 of space and time. The observations that make up the text function as snapshots of Palomar’s distinctive and individual knowledge of the world. The act of creating and producing art, and of interacting with one’s surroundings in the modern world, was structurally changed by the advent of photography. People learned to see the world with eyes conditioned by looking at photographs and through a familiarity with other technological developments; mechanical reproduction changed experience and perception. Benjamin addresses the question of reproducibility and its signifi cance for both society and the art world: “around 1900 technical reproduction had reached a standard that not only permitted it to reproduce all transmitted works of art and thus to cause the most profound change in their impact upon the public; it also had captured a place of its own among the artistic processes” (Benjamin, “The Work of Art,” 219-220). Photography is remarkable particularly for the way it records, or depicts, a scene. It translates a phenomenon in time into a spatial one. The event is removed from its temporal place and separated from the moments before and after, as only its articulation in space is repeated. The camera’s reconstruction of time in terms that appear wholly other becomes signifi cant: “Within this condensation of past and present, time is no longer to be understood as continuous and linear, but rather as spatial, an imagistic space that Benjamin calls a ‘constellation’ or a ‘monad’” (Cadava 60). Palomar’s gaze functions as snapshots in that he, at fi rst, tries to establish a fi xed understanding of his environment. His attempts at unmediated contact fail because a structure, like photography, always organises his thoughts and responses. Palomar’s vision, like photography, is structured by repetition, as he actively seeks patterns. Calvino’s text begins with Palomar studying a wave, or rather many waves, one after another. He discovers that it is nearly impossible for him to isolate a single wave, and starts to see patterns of repetition. The pattern, however, is not constant: “there are some forms and sequences that are repeated, though irregularly distributed in space and time” (4). Each wave is slightly different in form and movements from the others, and so repetition in this case does not involve identical copies. The study of a wave demonstrates Palomar’s tendency to seek the smallest unit of the phenomena he studies, and use it as a model for the larger system. Similarly, after carefully considering the grasses and weeds of his lawn, Palomar tries “to apply to the universe everything he has thought about the lawn” (33). He recognises his attempt to perceive order in the midst of chaos and concludes that the universe contains smaller models of itself (33). Through 32 transverse winter 2006 the search for repetition, Palomar makes his world understandable by observing small units and grasping their mechanisms. Comforting for Palomar is the very fact of repetition, when identifi ed, because it creates a familiarity that allows him to make some sense out of his environment. The comfort is often short-lived, however, as Palomar contradicts himself and sees alternate possibilities in the relations he establishes. His connection to scientifi c methodology is apparent in how he looks at the wave and his lawn. He divides the sea into ten-metre by ten-metre sections in order to gather an inventory of what he sees (6), and to collect statistical data (31). Such an objective gaze has also fi gured in the visual arts, as demonstrated by the original cover of Mr. Palomar, which reproduced Albrecht Dürer’s woodcut from 1538, Draftsman Drawing a Reclining Nude. Dürer’s woodcut portrays an artist looking at a model through a screen with a grid of squares and a small obelisk-shaped object standing in front of his eyes. The image represents the scientifi c goal of achieving a precise view of an object under study, the infl uence on art of scientifi c procedures, and the obsession with natural human vision that Palomar shares. Palomar is consistently frustrated by his inability to achieve his rational, objective and photographic ideal. One rethinking of his methods leads him to conclude that he should not only attempt to see himself as an object in the world, but that things he looks at should indicate that they want to be looked at. He reverses the relationship of thing to person, as the object gains a subjective desire while his own is erased:

From the mute distance of things a sign must come, a summons, a wink: one thing detaches itself from the other things with the intention of signifying something […] what? Itself, a thing happy to be looked at by other things only when it is convinced that it signifi es itself and nothing else, amid things that signify themselves and nothing else. (115)

As usual, Palomar does not register a revolution in his vision, and so abandons his own objectifi cation in favour of trying yet another tack. Palomar’s procedure of viewing his world as snapshots challenges his expectations. Where he anticipates continuity, he sees parts, fragments and discontinuous elements. One evening he observes a fl ock of star- lings in the Roman sky; while at fi rst he comments on the fl ock as a whole, he begins to discern the individual birds. The appearance of continuity is an illusion, and “the net- work he felt sustaining him dissolves” (63). What Palomar learns is that the universe winter 2006 transverse 33 is made up of many fragments, each a little universe of its own. He problematises the linear fl ow of time in the same way. Through a comparison of the time of the stars and the time of his own world, Palomar identifi es differences; the stars and planets are eter- nal because they exist before and after human presence, while the world, on the other hand, is fragmentary because it is constantly broken up by events, such as births and deaths (47). Palomar begins to see the world as made up of discontinuous units of space and time, which can be reorganised in non-linear ways. The text does not suggest that a view of the world as fragmented is more accurate; instead, it is unclear whether his vision causes fragmentation, because only he sees it, or if reality is actually fragment- ed. Nor does the fragmentation end Palomar’s search for knowledge. In fact, it requires his presence as an observing subject in order to reconstitute some kind of meaning. Like the camera, he must act as Medusa and create images that are left behind to be read: “only when the Medusan glance […] of the camera has momentarily transfi xed history can history as history appear in its disappearance” (Cadava 60). Thus history is imagistic because, as Benjamin explains, the past deposits history in images and only people in the future can see all the details (Cadava 84-86). The fi x ing power of Palomar’s gaze is evident while attempting to observe the wave at a single instant and while shopping for cheese: “his gaze transforms every food into a document of the history of civilization, or museum exhibit” (70). With the evidence of existence in the past comes the realization that it no longer exists; the moment is gone and perhaps the subject is too. In this way, Barthes sees temporal disjunctions in the photograph that brings to mind a future that exists beyond one’s own death: “c’est parce qu’il y a toujours en elle ce signe impérieux de ma mort future, que chaque photo, fût-elle apparemment la mieux accrochée au monde excité des vivants, vient interpeller chacun de nous, un par un, hors de toute généralité” (151-152). Consequently, photography allows a moment to be reread in a new light, or from a new perspective, “for it is another nature which speaks to the camera rather than to the eye: “other” above all in the sense that a space informed by human consciousness gives way to a space informed by the unconscious” (Benjamin, “History of Photography” 510). Photography’s interruption of time’s progress is emphasised by the instantaneity of the camera and its perceived function as a means for scientifi c recording. Specifi cally, the break in the continuous fl ow of moments is marked by the click of the camera, as the instant becomes an image: “the ‘snapping’ of the photographer has had the greatest 34 transverse winter 2006 consequences. A touch of the fi nger now suffi ced to fi x an event for an unlimited period of time. The camera gave the moment a posthumous shock, as it were” (Benjamin, “Baudelaire” 174-175). Barthes also identifi es the click as an interruption of the process of becoming an object and a physical reminder of the camera’s effect on time and the subject: “pour moi, l’organe du Photographe [...] c’est le doigt: ce qui est lié au déclic de l’objectif [...] ces bruits mécaniques [...] cassant de leur claquement bref la nappe mortifère de la Pose. Pour moi, le bruit du Temps n’est pas triste” (32). In this case, the click brings an awareness of representation as separate from the event. However, in order to experience phenomena as directly as possible, Palomar does not use photography – he would like to avoid any mediation between the thing studied and himself. Consequently, he is deaf to the click that signifi es his impact as observer, but he cultivates other ways of realising his role. Avoiding the use of a camera does not guarantee direct access; in fact, Mr. Palomar approaches questions about the way one perceives rather than the nature of what is perceived. A similar focus exists in photography as well, because the image is already separate from the time and place represented and begins to structure perception according to its own logic. Palomar’s thoughts and language always mediate and transform his experiences, and this is what he comes to recognise. Palomar’s failure to fi nd any constants or satisfaction in his conclusions indicates that he cannot freeze experience. Instead, the image in his mind or in a photograph bears the trace of constant change. The isolated instant brings to mind the past and the future, but through difference rather than an uninterrupted fl ow. The placement of each frozen moment side by side duplicates the principle of fi lm: an instant is isolated from all others, yet the imagistic representation of time creates the possibility of connecting, or reading, such temporal fragments in new ways. Discontinuities are necessary as seemingly fi x ed points of reference and comparison. Thus, by removing Palomar’s observations from their original context in his life and the universe, the narrator points out change. Rather than elide discontinuities, Calvino uses narrative to reproduce and emphasize the gaps in Palomar’s perception. The process of collecting fragments of the world and reassembling their signifi cance is then repeated by the narrator who puts the story of Palomar’s observations together, and again by the reader who makes sense of the text. Representation, and more specifi cally language, provides a framework for interpretation as an opportunity to rearticulate experiences with a different focus. In fact, Palomar sees the structure of language in the order he fi nds all around him: winter 2006 transverse 35 This shop is a dictionary; the language is the system of cheeses as a whole […] It is a language made up of things; its nomenclature is only an external aspect, instrumental; but for Mr. Palomar, learning a bit of nomenclature still remains the fi rst measure to be taken if he wants to stop for a moment the things that are fl owing before his eyes. (74)

The world of representation is useful, yet one must be aware of its status as repre- sentation and maintain its distinction from the physical world. As Palomar shows the reader, one’s knowledge of the natural world and perception of it are always condi- tioned by expectations. The potential for confusion exists for both the arts and science:

Science is faced with problems not too dissimilar from those of literature. It makes patterns of the world that are immediately called in question, it swings between the inductive and the deductive methods, and it must always be on its guard lest it mistake its own linguistic conventions for objective laws. (Calvino, “Philosophy and Literature” 45)

Palomar identifi es the same diffi culty while observing the waves: “the space under ex- amination is overturned and at the same time crushed” (Calvino, Mr. Palomar, 6). Calvino’s interest in the particular extends beyond the text of Mr. Palomar, as he indi- cates in Six Memos for the Next Millenium, in the memo on “Exactitude” (65). He fol- lows Barthes in aiming for such a “mathesis singularis.” In La chambre claire, Barthes approaches photographs with an insistance on the individual’s role in determining sig- nifi cance as a way to combat the erasure of difference through repetition and objectivity:

Dans ce débat somme toute conventionnel entre la subjectivité et la science, j’en venais à cette idée bizarre: pourquoi n’y aurait-il pas, en quelque sorte, une science nouvelle par objet? Une Mathesis singularis (et non plus universalis)? J’acceptai donc de me prendre pour médiateur de toute la Photographie: je tenterais de formuler, à partir de quelques mouvements personnels, le trait fondamental, l’universel sans lequel il n’y aurait pas de Photographie. (Barthes 21-22)

36 transverse winter 2006 Barthes would like to maintain a fi ne balance between the unique and the general in order to avoid overwhelming the object of study by the method employed. Calvino and Barthes both strive for a method of investigating the surrounding world that is productive, yet does not erase the specifi city of that which is studied. As Palomar’s patterns of looking at and interpreting the world are the basis for the structure of the entire text, Calvino uses the self, rather than objective generalisation, to structure the fi ctional world: “The author protagonist brings an internal subjectivity to the written world, a fi gure endowed with a distinctness of his own— often a visual and iconic distinctness— which seizes the imagination of the reader and acts as a device to connect the different levels of reality, or even to bring them into being and enable them to take on form in the course of writing” (Calvino, “Levels of Reality in Literature” 114). Palomar’s distinctiveness as a unique being unites the text, putting fragments together to aid his project of understanding, while self and world become so interpenetrated that it is diffi cult to identify which generates the other. The text makes the reader think about the organisation or unity imposed by the character, author and reader. In an explicit reference to the text’s structure, a legend, or key to decode the text, appears at the end of the book in the form of a highly structured system classifying each short episode. The complex structure suggests the effort the narrator put into constructing an elaborate chain of signifi cation and raises the issue of whether or not the structure actually enables greater understanding. As Palomar could not determine an ultimate order in the world, the narrator’s own success appears suspicious. As the reader needs such detailed guidance, the accompanying explanation of the legend suggests the narrator presents his or her individual understanding. The attention drawn to the structure indicates that models should not be abandoned, but should also not be taken for granted. Rather than providing a map to follow, Calvino problematises any unconscious acceptance that the order is correct, and so the text interrogates its own structure. Palomar hopes that death will provide the calm that he cannot achieve with his neverending observations. To bring this calm, he takes up the project of describing every instant of his life and refuses to think of being dead until he fi nishes: “At that moment he dies” (126). With this endless task of representation, Palomar fi nds a way to connect his fi n ite world to the infi nite universe. If time has to end, for him, then it must be fi nite and capable of being described completely. Yet the description of each moment expands time because there is an endless supply of things to describe. As Palomar says earlier, “the winter 2006 transverse 37 surface of things is inexhaustible” (55). His imagined project would stretch time, connecting his life with the infi nite, yet at that very moment he encounters the ultimate fi nitude, death, yet the descriptions connect him to the production and exchange of knowledge. The eternal return of both Palomar and the photograph encompasses a possibility of gaining control through repetition, and as a consequence, it appears as a way to defeat the power of death by having a moment live on in the future. Although the instant is never repeated exactly, the feeling of returning to the moment through the photograph or narrative gives the illusion of control over time and even mortality: “ce que la Photographie reproduit à l’infi ni n’a eu lieu qu’une fois: elle répète mécaniquement ce qui ne pourra jamais plus se répéter existentiellement” (Barthes 15). The task of the photographer and the artist in general is to make evident the illusion of power over time and space in a way that restores specifi city and uniqueness. With Palomar’s death, an author is able to reinterpret his life as a text because Palomar will no longer change. However, rather than suggest that death fi nally stills the universe and makes it graspable, the source of change moves from Palomar himself to his author. The chain continues, as each reader reinterprets the text again. Although his project of description does not transcribe material reality in language, it traces the patterns of the world through the fi lter of his identity. Palomar never fi nds the key to the world’s complexity, but he never ends his search either. By constantly deferring answers, conclusions and satisfaction, Calvino leaves the reader in the middle of the search for knowledge, and invites him or her to continue. Consequently, Palomar gets a second existence through the text, as it both preserves his observations and acts as a new starting point for others.

38 transverse winter 2006 works cited

- Barthes, Roland. La chambre claire. Paris: Gallimard/Seuil, 1980. - Benjamin, Walter. “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire.” Illuminations. Trans. Harry Zohn. New York: Shocken Books, 1968. 155-200. ---. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Illuminations, 217-251. ---. “Little History of Photography.” Selected Writings: Volume 2, 1927-1934. Eds. Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith. Trans. Rodney Livingstone. Cambridge: Harvard University Press/Belknap, 1999. 507-530. - Cadava, Eduardo. Words of Light: Theses on the Photography of History. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997. - Calvino, Italo. Mr. Palomar. Trans. William Weaver. New York: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1985. ---. Six memos for the Next Millenium. Trans. Patrick Creagh. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988. ---. “Levels of Reality in Literature.” In The Literature Machine. Trans. Patrick Creagh. London: Martin Secker & Warburg, 1987. 101-121. ---. “Philosophy and Literature.” In The Literature Machine. 37-49.

winter 2006 transverse 39 subjectivity and mechanical reproduction in bioy casares’ morel’s invention irmgard emmelhainz

Mi alma no ha pasado aún a la imagen; si no, ya habría muerto, habría dejado de ver (tal vez) a Faustine, para estar con ella en una visión que nadie escogerá. (Adolfo Bioy Casares, La invención de Morel)

Bioy Casares’ novella was fi rst published in 1940. It puts forth the possibility of preserving facts by means of animated analog media, questioning the subsequent status of subjectivity, self-consciousness and the soul transformed into memory encapsulated in mechanically reproduced images. Moreover, the novella asks whether ontological re- duplication is possible, addressing the problem of the model and its copies and the issue of making present ‘realistically,’ that which is absent, by technological means.1 I argue, on the one hand, that in a melancholic and pessimistic tone, Bioy Casares points at and mourns the epistemic shift triggered by mechanically reproduced images, which entails the surmounting of Platonism and the death of classical mimesis. On the other hand, in the novella, mourning the notion of the essence of the image (or the referent) gives way to a positive interaction with mechanically reproduced images. As we will see, in Morel’s Invention, spectrality overcomes the possibility of mimetic reproduction, and as reader/ viewers, we are called to redeem the specters and to unburden them of their duties of bearing their own essence, and we do so by actualizing them, by giving them a fake pres- ent, in the present, as opposed to conceiving them as sheer repetitions of ‘that which was.’ The story is the diary of a fugitive who fi nds refuge on an abandoned island believed to be infested with an unknown plague, assuming that no one will look for him there. While trying to survive, he sees a group of anachronistically dressed people living uphill, in an area that on his fi rst exploration of the island looked like a deserted vacation center. The hero spies on the cryptic tourists and falls in love with Faustine, a woman who is part of the group. In his diary, he gives us detailed analyses of their activities, especially Faustine’s, propos- ing varying hypotheses about their strange behavior only to reject them later, as new mys- teries and inexplicable things happen throughout. For example, there are two suns and two moons on the island, and the buildings are unbreakable, or worse: they rebuild themselves. A theory that the hero comes up with for explaining the presence of the tourists on the 40 transverse winter 2006 hill is that they are part of a plot to capture him. He is therefore afraid of being seen and hides from them, turning himself into a kind of voyeur. Later in the story, he tries to address Faustine, yet he discovers that his interaction with the other inhabitants of the island is impossible because they belong to a different world that is hermetically sealed. The two worlds coexist spatially, but their temporalities are disjointed because they function like monadic, self-contained entities. An illustration of this is when the fugitive fi nds them having a picnic in the middle of a thunderstorm. The hero writes:

Aquí viven los héroes del esnobismo (o los pensionistas de un manicomio abandonado). Sin espectadores (yo soy el público previsto desde el comienzo –para ser originales). Cruzan el límite de la incomodidad soportable, desafían la muerte […] Sacaron el fonógrafo que está en el cuarto verde, contiguo al salón del acuario, y, mujeres y hombres, sentados en bancos o en el pasto, conversaban, oían música y bailaban en medio de una tempestad de agua y viento que amenazaba arrancar todos los árboles. (Bioy Casares 33-34)

The greatest heroes of snobism live here (perhaps they are runaways from a mental institution). Without having anyone to look at them, (I am the only spec- tator to their pretentious spectacle) they attempt to appear extravagant. Going beyond the limits of discomfort, they were dancing with death. […] They took out the phonograph from the green room, which is next to the aquarium; men and women, sat on benches or on the grass talked, listened to music and danced in the middle of a thunderstorm so strong that it threatened to pull all the trees away.

To the hero’s astonished eyes, the inhabitants of the island pretend to be stylishly ec- centric by sitting outdoors, dancing and listening to music in spite of a bad thunder- storm to which they appear to be oblivious. He has not realized that the people he sees live in a closed universe that has its own temporality, which is not contingent upon the space it occupies, and disjointed from his own spatio-temporal coordinates. The mysteries begin to get solved very late in the novel. It turns out that Morel, a mad scientist, wanted to perpetuate one week of his life that he spent vacationing on the island with his dearest friends. For that reason, he invented a recording device that captures all the senses in three dimensions, killing its subject winter 2006 transverse 41 in the recording process and perpetuating its image for all eternity. Once recorded by Morel’s machine, the tourists, including Morel, were withdrawn from reality, and became spectral presences that present to the hero a trace of their world. We also fi nd out that Morel envisioned a tool that would produce a combination of virtual museums and family albums conformed by ‘memory-images,’ a legacy of records for future generations to observe and to enjoy remembering their beloved ones. Like analog photographs, Morel’s friends attest to their own origin, bearing traces of their ‘this-has- beenness,’ thus they have a melancholic structure and a noematic quality. Further in the novella, the ‘presences,’ not unlike objects in a museum (one of the buildings on the island is referred to as museum), carry a trace of their world. Morel’s friends have been ‘put out of use’ in order to become mementos of themselves. Their function is to facilitate their own absence, and they can only make themselves present through their own absence. The fugitive tells us that the images were produced by an analog recording device. Analyzing them extensively, the hero elucidates whether they are photographs, radio transmissions, television images, some kind of phonographic recordings, etc. He concludes that they are better than all the existing media because the images Morel created are three-dimensional and smell and feel like themselves, and have fooled him into thinking that they are real. As a result, a concern with the relationship between models and their copies in mechanical reproduction arises in the story, and I suggest that because the presences’ referents are literally dead, Morel’s machine turns humans and everything that it captures into specters. An instance of this is in the passage at the beginning of the story, where the hero fi nds a library in the ‘museum.’ He fi nds a book and puts it in his pocket. ‘Fifteen’ days later, he comes across the book in the library again. Stunned, because he has the book in his own pocket, he concludes that they are twice the same, that they share an exterior identity. Not surprisingly though, the other book is beyond reach. I argue that in a melancholic and pessimistic tone, Bioy Casares points at and mourns the epistemic shift triggered by mechanically-reproduced images, which entails the surmounting of Platonism and the death of classical mimesis. This implies the overcoming of the idea/image equation or the possibility of an internal resemblance between the model and its copies (or the transference of the ‘essence’ from the model to is copies) as the condition for representation. In the novella this epistemic shift is evident by the fact that absence is the condition for representation: the referent is literally non- 42 transverse winter 2006 existent because it is dead. Further, the question of the essence of the image or the possibility of internal resemblance in ontological reduplication emerges in the novel as a matter of self-consciousness. Because the images are animated and realistic, the fugitive asks himself whether the specters are conscious of themselves outside of their own world. Therefore, the question of the essence [noeme] of the still image is addressed as a matter of self-consciousness in animated images. In so far as the others in the story look and act like real persons, the fugitive mistakes them for ‘real’ people until he discovers that they are ‘presences’ entrapped in a frozen present that repeats itself endlessly. Because the ‘presences’ operate in a different plane than that of the fugitive, I argue that they are like cinema characters –animated analog images– which turn the fugitive into a solipsistic fi lm-viewer. Similar to a cinematic projection, the hero, like the solipsistic fi lm-viewer, does not ask himself whether the object in cinema (the ‘presences’) actually exists, and thus the ‘presences’’ universe bleeds into reality.3 Moreover, the hero’s position as a solipsistic cinematic viewer is taken to an extreme in the novel. Life without Faustine becomes unbearable for him, so at the end of the story he decides to splice himself with the images using Morel’s deadly machine so he will be able to be eternally united with his beloved Faustine.4 The story is situated around 1939, and arguably, Bioy Casares is making a commentary on the use of technology in totalitarian systems at the outbreak of World War II. Morel’s omnipresent and panoptic machine both records and projects a giant fi lm. Evidently, this mad scientist is a great dictator/director who orchestrated a dystopian world in which subjection to the apparatus becomes necessary: one must happen within in order to survive. The question that arises is, if subjection to the mechanical apparatus – being seen, or captured by it – is necessary for survival, does this result in the loss of self- awareness? In that sense, the story calls attention to the issue of vision and death, pointing at the objectifi cation inherent in the act of voyeurism and photographic reproduction. In the novella, the price for immortality by means of being portrayed in a lifelike manner is death. A link can be made to Edgar Allan Poe’s story, ‘The Oval Portrait,’ in which a painter makes a portrait of his wife. Having her pose for him for many weeks, as the portrait progressed, she became more dispirited and weak. When the painter fi nished, surprised by the ‘reality’ of the portrait, he exclaimed: ‘This is indeed Life itself!’ At the same moment, his beloved died. We can see clearly that for Poe, realistic representation, or painting as a mimetic enterprise, is deadly. A parallel can be made to Morel’s invention, as it winter 2006 transverse 43 destroys the people it records in the process of representing them realistically. But in order to do so, it must fi rst seize them out of the world and transform them into specters. Since the ‘original’ of the image is dead, reproduction in these two cases produces ‘bad copies,’ evidencing the impossibility of ontological reduplication or of realistic representation. In The Republic, Plato sets out to differentiate good copies from the copies. Good copies derive from the model, which are the product of the idea/image equation, which is the logic of representation. The bad copies are phantoms or simulacra: in them, there is a dissonance with regard to the original and they indicate the impossibility of ontological reduplication. As in Poe’s story, the ‘copies’ are not copies in Morel’s Invention, because the model has ceased to exist (they have been ‘zapped’), and in Platonic terms, the reproductions are to be considered as bad copies, insofar they are phantoms or specters (Deleuze Logic). However, the specters retain their originals’ essence, the noeme of the referent, because they bear the event of their own origin, and therein lies their noematic attribute. In the novella, the question of the platonic essence in mechanical reproduction is precisely what is at stake, and it surfaces as the possibility of the tourists’ soul or essence transpiring in their animated analog images as endowed with self-consciousness. The fear of losing one’s soul by being photographed is dreaded by some people who think cameras have the power to trap the soul in images. From this point of view, mechanically reproduced images are ‘good copies,’ since the passage of the soul to the image leads to immortality, and confi rms the noematic attribute of analog images. This is Morel’s contradictory position, as he believes that in order to reach immortality the body- as-image must be preserved and that his images do have a soul (or an essence) insofar as the ‘real people’ are dead once their souls have been transferred onto the image. For Morel, esse est percipi, that is, to be is to be perceived. In the novella, the fugitive bears witness to the moment in which Morel confesses his crime to his friends, emphasizing the fact that as images, they represent themselves and their world, and that they will live in a photograph forever: Mi abuso consiste en haberlos fotografi ado sin autorización. Es claro que ésta no es una fotografía como todas; es mi último invento. Nosotros viviremos en esta fotografía siempre. Imagínense un escenario en el que se representa completamente nuestra vida en estos siete días. Nosotros representamos. Todos nuestros actos han quedado grabados. (83, my italics) 44 transverse winter 2006 My abuse [to you] consists in having photographed you without asking. Yet it is clear that this is not a common photograph; it is my latest invention. We will live in this photograph forever. Imagine a stage that represents our lives during this past week. We represent. All our actions have been recorded.

The fugitive is in confl ict with Morel’s views on immortality (Morel also happens to be in love with Faustine), and takes a different position: He points out that like mov- ie characters, the specters are not conscious of themselves outside of their world, and therefore cannot have a soul, thus they are ‘bad copies.’ For the hero, Morel’s no- tion of immortality, which insists on conserving the person as an image is primitive:

Creo que perdemos la inmortalidad porque la resistencia a la muer- te no ha evolucionado; sus perfeccionamientos insisten en la pri- mera idea, rudimentaria: retener vivo todo el cuerpo. Sólo habría que buscar la conservación de lo que interesa a la conciencia. (22)

I think that we fail to reach immortality because we insist on defy- ing bodily death –we have not evolved yet. We have a primitive concep- tion of death in so far as we seek to keep the body alive. [I think that] one should seek to preserve only that which interests consciousness.

The fugitive denounces Morel’s insistence on preserving the body’s image alive as the means to reach immortality. In his view, what should be preserved is “that which interests consciousness”, which as we will see, represents for him the possibility for self-refl ection or self-awareness. The fugitive represents the res cogitans in opposition to Morel’s esse est percipi. This position surfaces in the narrative as an oscillation between self-conscious- ness, exterior perception, a description of what the hero sees, and the fear of being seen. From the beginning of the story, the fugitive is in the process of becoming a specter (Morel’s machine is allegedly hovering above the island, recording the fugitive without him knowing it) and insofar as he is fl eeing from external perception (even his own external perception), the res cogitans is operating at this level. Although a diary, the narrative in the novel is more like the fugitive’s stream of consciousness. Bioy Casares never discloses the protagonist’s name or describes him, but rather, presents him to us in the act of examining winter 2006 transverse 45 himself in certain situations. Bodily descriptions are scarce, and the moments in which the body is described are when the fugitive becomes conscious of his own appearance. In his diary, which is the novella’s narrative, he alternates between the stream of conscious- ness and external descriptions, oscillating between a subjective and an objective point of view, becoming aware of his body only when he realizes that he is wounded or hungry, or when he attempts to interact with Faustine, which is when he will allegedly ‘be seen’:

Después de bañarme, limpio y más desordenado –hirsuto (por efecto de la humedad en la barba y el pelo), fui a verla. […] Bruscamente, y visto desde abajo, debí aparecer con mis atributos de espanto acrecentados. (35-36)

Once I washed myself I went to see her. I was clean and yet disheveled –my beard and hair were hirsute because of the humidity. […] My sudden appearance from below must have exacerbated my daunting aspect [from Faustine’s point of view]

In this passage and in a few others, the fugitive emphasizes his external perception and self-perception, but for the most part, he privileges his intellect and the stream of conscious- ness in the narrative, out of fear of losing his consciousness/soul and becoming a ‘bad copy’ like Morel and his friends – it is not by chance that Bioy Casares made him a fugitive. As I have mentioned, the hero’s interaction with the specters is akin to that of fi l m viewing. If the tourists are in their own hermetic universe, they are only conscious of themselves in the moments that they live again and again in their monadic world, and therefore exist like movie characters. Consequently, the hero is a fi lm viewer, who is at once actor and spectator. Blurring the distinction between the act of seeing and the act of reading, Bioy Casares ends the story when the reader logically takes the place of an objective camera. Taking the position of a voyeur, he/she progressively provokes in the fugitive the fear of being seen. As a consequence, the fugitive is afraid of being objectifi ed through others’ vision, because it would cause him to lose his self-awareness or his soul. Moreover, he is also aware that his external identity is that of a voyeur, that in the eyes of the other he has an outside, thus he is paranoid about being seen and consequently being converted into a bad copy (or a specter). In the end, the hero gives up his position as a voyeur by 46 transverse winter 2006 surrendering to the system, by splicing himself with it, even though he is not yet aware of being fi lmed by the machine (or ‘read’ by us). A key word here is ‘splice.’ After Peter Gidal, the splice is a mark in the photographic image of fi lm. It is an effect on the photochemical process that breaks with the narrative, obliterating or breaking the duration of a sequence of a piece of fi lm-time. It functions as a marker, and projected, the splice is a process that holds together two not so disparate, or continuous strips of fi lm (Gidal 64). By splicing himself with the ‘presences,’ the fugitive breaks the narrative without really merging with it. In his enactment of the actor/voyeur position, he can only pretend to become one with the images and at the same time he gives up his position as a voyeur, oscillating between an inside and an outside view of things in the narrative. A parallel can be drawn to Beckett’s Film (1965), a short in which the struggle between the inside and the outside view of things in relation to a character is addressed as a problem of the subjectifi cation and objectifi cation of a character in cinema. The short deals formally with the issue of self-consciousness and perceivedness in fi lm. In it, Buster Keaton plays a character that is in search for non-being. Trying to get away from exterior perception, he breaks down in the impossibility of escaping his own self-perception. Beckett explains in his script that he has split his character in two: the character played by Keaton is called ‘O’ or the object that throughout the fi lm is pursued by the subject ‘E’ or the ‘camera-eye.’ As long as the camera or ‘E’ stays behind Keaton (O), ‘O’ will avoid being perceived. The camera is aimed, in Beckett’s words, at an ‘angle of immunity’ of minimum 45 degrees, which must not be exceeded in order to avoid the risk of causing ‘O’ to experience the ‘anguish of perceivedness’ (Beckett; Deleuze Movement-Image; Henning). O is aware of being ‘seen’ or ‘perceived’ when the angle of immunity is exceeded, which causes him anguish or pain. In order to attain the state of non-being, O must fi r st suppress all extraneous perception. O believes that he is fl eeing from all exterior perception, but there is E, the camera, his own uncanny double, that stands for his self- perception, which can never be totally eliminated. Similarly, the fugitive in Morel’s Invention fl ees from being seen, and the moments in which he chooses to be seen or talks about his appearance are extremely relevant to the narrative. Berkeley’s formula esse est percipi comes again to mind: we exist because we perceive ourselves and because we are perceived by God. In Beckett’s Film, cinematic perception replaces divine observation, and in front of the camera, O winter 2006 transverse 47 realizes that it is impossible to escape both modes of perception. In Bioy Casares’ story, the fugitive becomes aware of the fact that he has an outside, and that he himself brings the specters to life by interacting with them and at the same time, that he is brought to life by the viewer/reader. Film and Morel’s Invention put forth the perception of perception, what Deleuze calls the perception-image, which is a case of Bakhtinian utterance, that is, a double system of reference, the objective and the subjective point of view. The objective point of view is when the thing or the events are seen from the viewpoint of someone who is external to the events, and the subjective is when things are seen by someone internal to the events (Deleuze Movement-Image 72-74). In Morel’s Invention, we are presented with a split subject that oscillates between the inside and the outside view of things. The division of the subject takes place in the fugitive’s self-presentation to the viewer in the narrative. The fugitive is a split subject because fi rst, as we are reading his diary, we are presented with his subjective perception: a stream of consciousness. Secondly, because he interacts with the specters as if they were fi lmic projections and thus he is a cinematic spectator. Finally, taking a step further than relating to the presences as if they were movie characters, he merges with Morel’s world, while giving the reader an exterior view of things. The fact that the fugitive decides to join Faustine as a specter is a formally logical conclusion to the novel. In order for the reader to be able to see him completely from the outside, the outcast must be fi lmed by the machine, which will literally kill him. In cinematic terms, it will objectify him to the extreme, and this is when the viewer/reader becomes an objective, ubiquitous camera, taking the viewing position of a mechanized eye. Further, the hero, in deciding to splice himself with the specters, commits a kind of epistemic suicide. In his subjection to Morel’s apparatus he loses his self-consciousness and ends up existing under Morel’s regime of subjectivity and within his logic of the image: to be is to be perceived. The hero writes: “Mi alma no ha pasado aún a la imagen; si no, ya habría muerto, habría dejado de ver (tal vez) a Faustine, para estar con ella en una visión que nadie recogerá” (130) (“My soul has not yet passed into the image; if it had, I would have died, and I would (perhaps) be unable to see Faustine. Once I become an image I will be with her in a vision that none will pick up”). We can see that right before his death and becoming completely a spectral image he is skeptical, he is not sure whether he will possess self-consciousness or a soul once he is a specter. His last words are a 48 transverse winter 2006 plea: “make me enter into the heaven of Faustine’s consciousness.” It is at this moment that Bioy Casares makes the reader/viewer of the story aware of his/her ability to bring the specters to life and to give them signifi cation. It could be argued that Bioy Casares warns us of the dangers of surrendering consciousness to the technological apparatus and also to Morel’s dictatorship of the spectral image, alluding to a totalitarian use of the media linking it to the experience of fi l m-viewing. In its early days cinema was condemned for being the brain’s nursemaid. Like fascist propaganda, it was seen as something that put the brain to sleep to keep it quiet (Virginia Woolf), or to blind the masses (Walter Benjamin). The killing of seeing (the blinding of the subject) and the seeing that kills (its objectifi cation) are both at stake in the story, critiquing the propagandistic potential of the mass media and of mechanically- reproduced images. We know that Morel and his friends died in the process of becoming ‘presences.’ Like a photograph’s referent, their image certifi es or authenticates their past presence, and the fact that their consciousnesses cannot interact outside of their universe makes them similar to characters in a movie. From this standpoint, Bioy Casares’ novella is a pessimistic rendering of the use of technology. From the fugitive’s point of view, Morel produces ‘bad copies,’ soulless spurious appearances, akin to cinema characters. From a different point of view, beyond the world of representation and toward a spectral logic of the image, the reader/viewer of Morel’s Invention is called not to read the images mimetically, because their origin is negated (by elimination), but refl ectively; that is, the reader/viewer acknowledges that he is in the position to redeem the specters and to bring the outcast into Faustine’s consciousness by giving them a fake present. When the reader takes the position of the objective camera and gets an all-encompassing view of things, he/she realizes that his/her gaze/readership has in a way driven the fugitive to commit epistemological suicide, but at the same time, that Morel’s images function like specters, and therefore cannot be truthful reproductions. As Barthes and Stiegler argue, when specters are encountered, a bracketing takes place. We are aware that they are specters, and we believe that what ‘this was’ (the specter) ‘is’ in the present as actualized by us, through an act of actualization rather than of repetition. Specters are necessarily spatially and temporally deferred, and we must actualize their presence as specters in our present, giving them a fake present. In mechanically- reproduced images, there is a temporal disjuncture that makes the there and then of the original present in the here and now. This actualization implies that the ‘this has beenness’ winter 2006 transverse 49 of the image can never come into the present and that which is represented is dead or has vanished, and we can no longer recuperate it. There is no possibility for repetition. The specters in Bioy Casares’ story demand to be redeemed so they can be unburdened from their duties of ‘essence’ and from their ‘noematic’ qualities. In actualizing the specters by refl ecting upon them, we surmount the time of repetition, and that is how the living can bring the dead back to life.

notes

1 Bioy Casares’ concern with analog technologies can be linked to Jorge Luis Borges and Julio Cortázar, who wrote stories that deal with the ontological and cognitive properties of mechanically reproduced images, refl ecting philosophically about them in literature. Borges’ Funes the Memorious, and The Devil’s Drools by Cortázar (which inspired Antonioni’s fi l m Blow Up) are two examples that come to mind. Moreover, the most widely known interpretation of Bioy Casares’ story is Robbe- Grillet’s and Resnais’ fi lm of 1961, Last Year at Marienbad. The fact that the stories (Morel’s Invention and The Devil’s Drools) were translated to cinema indicates the authors’ concern with the relationship between facts and memory and the temporal aspects of animated analog media and mechanical reproduction in general, which were taken up further in their cinematic versions. 2 All the translations into English are mine. 3 This is a problem posed by Susan Buck-Morss, who wishes to understand the solipsistic conception of viewing fi lm as a critique to the Husserlian problem of intrasubjectivity in his account of the transcendental reduction: how can I know that what I see is universally valid? See “The Cinema Screen as Prosthesis of Perception: A Historical Account,” 52. 4 At the intertextual level, Bioy Casares in Morel’s Invention references Goethe’s Faust, as the woman the outcast falls in love with is called Faustine. There is also a clear allusion to H.G. Wells’ The Island of Dr. Moreau, written in 1896. The novel is also presented as a diary and it explores the dangers of irresponsible scientifi c research. In Wells’ book, Edward Prendrick is shipwrecked and rescued by Moreau’s assistant who brings him to an island. There, Prendrick discovers the doctor’s failed experiments to create higher beings, as they are only bizarre parodies of humans and animals. Pampa O. Arán points out that genre of the detective story is also present in Bioy Casares’ novella, evident in the documental and testimonial nature of the outcast’s diary. Arguably, in her view, we also fi nd the

50 transverse winter 2006 genres of the native informant, romantic idealism, the ethnographic report and philosophical inquiry. In Arán’s account, another genre that is activated in the novella is Thomas More’s utopia, a genre between fi ction and non-fi ction whose theme is the perfect and illusory state in which reason reaches justice and happiness. Within the utopic aspect of the story, adventure and travel are combined with social practices and power relationships, from the standpoint of philosophy and politics. The tradition to which La Invención belongs is one that establishes parallel worlds, extrapolating the cultural tendencies inherent to the latter and the ways in which man relates to reality. See Pampa O. Arán, Estilística de la Novela en M.M. Bahktin: Teoría y Aplicación Metodológica. Córdoba: Narvaja, 1998. 98-99. 5 Thomas Beltzer, in his intertextual account of Resnais’ and Robbe-Grillet’s fi lm of 1961, L’année dernière à Marienbad and Bioy Casares’ La Invención de Morel wishes to understand the images projected by Morel’s machine as holograms. However, holography was not invented until 1947 by the British/Hungarian scientist Dennis Gabor. Hence it is impossible that Bioy Casares envisioned the projections from Morel’s machine as holographic.

winter 2006 transverse 51 works cited

- Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida: Refl ections on Photography. New York: Hill and Wang, 2002. - Beckett, Samuel. “Film:” Complete Scenario, Illustrations, Production Shots. New York: Grove Press, 1969. - Bioy Casares, Adolfo. La Invención de Morel. Madrid: Alianza, 1999. - Buck-Morss, Susan. “The Cinema Screen as Prosthesis of Perception : A Historical Account.” Ed. C. Nadia Seremetakis, The Senses Still : Perception and Memory as Material Culture in Modernity. Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1996. 45-62. - Deleuze, Gilles. The Logic of Sense. New York: Columbia University Press, 1990. - The Movement-Image. Minneapolis: University of Minesotta Press, 2001. - Gidal, Peter. Materialist Film. London: Routledge, 1989. - Henning, Sylvie. “Film:” A Dialogue Between Beckett and Berkeley.” Journal of Beckett Studies 7 (1982): 88-99. - Plato. The Republic. Trans. C. D. C. Reeve. Indianapolis: Hackett, 2004. - Stiegler, Bernard. “The Discrete Image.” Eds. Jacques Derrida and Bernard Stiegler, Ecographies of Television. Malden, MA: Polity Press. 145-163.

52 transverse winter 2006 amused to death? roger waters and the thought of neil postman phil rose

What it comes down to for me is: Will the technologies of communica- tion and culture – and especially popular music, which is a vast and beloved enterprise – help us to understand one another better, or will they deceive us and keep us apart? While there’s still time, we all have to answer for ourselves. (Roger Waters, in Penthouse Magazine, 1988)

Roger Waters’ Amused to Death (1992) is a concept album, which is to say that it is a type of song cycle whose music, lyrics and cover art thematically cohere. Though the former creative leader of the British rock group Pink Floyd still calls it a concept ‘album’, a term once reserved for the vinyl LP, the work represents his fi rst expression of the extended form in CD format, a technology that does not burden its listener with getting up at the half- way point to turn it over. Nor does it thereby disrupt the musical form’s characteristic narra- tive continuity. The album’s cover features a primate—identifi ed throughout the lyrical con- tent of the album as ‘the monkey’—for which reason it’s useful to approach the work with the knowledge that, besides adopting his title from the cultural critic Neil Postman’s popular book Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (1985),1 Waters alludes also to Stanley Kubrick’s fi lm 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). Waters bor- rows the primate image from the opening scenes of the science-fi ction fi lm’s portrayal of tribal ‘man-apes’ of the biological family Hominidae, the single extant example of which is Homo sapiens. The monkey on Waters’ cover sits and watches television, the technologi- cal development whose cultural consequences provide the primary focus both of the al- bum and of Postman’s book. The television features a gigantic eyeball, which stares at the solitary simian. This gaze, however, meets that of the album cover’s viewer as well, there- by implicating all three in a powerful triangular relationship. Viewers turned listeners are invited to associate themselves throughout the recording’s narrative with the mesmerised monkey, according to Waters, in order to examine their own individual relationship to TV. Waters’ perspective with regard to television relates to that of Postman in so far as the media scholar argues in Amusing Ourselves to Death that his fellow Ameri- cans, and by implication the rest of us, are in a race “between education and disas- ter” (163). Given the rich religious thematic content of the album, however, it is interest- winter 2006 transverse 53 ing to compare Waters’ language of television as ‘saviour’ to comments that Postman makes in his later book, Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology (1992):

The argument [that technology has become a particularly dangerous enemy] has continued into our own time with a sense of urgency, made even more compel- ling by America’s spectacular display of technological pre-eminence in the Iraqi war. I do not say here that the war was unjustifi ed or that the technology was misused, only that the American success may serve as a confi rmation of the catastrophic idea that in peace as well as war technology will be our savior. (xii)

Postman notes that the English author Aldous Huxley in his novel Brave New World (1932) employs similar Christian imagery, through the reckoning of time as Before Ford (BF) and After Ford (AF). It was with the emergence of Henry Ford’s empire and Fordism, he sug- gests, that Huxley identifi ed the decisive shift from technocracy to totalitarian technocracy, cultural conditions which Postman denotes with the shorthand neologism “Technopoly.” Writing in 1992, the culture of the United States was, for Postman, Technoply’s sole ex- emplar, and probably remains so, given the character of the global technological system. Several years earlier, in Amusing Ourselves to Death, Postman had summarily treated the importance of what he called ‘the Huxleyan warning’. Contrasting the portrayal of the future in Brave New World with that which Huxley’s compatriot George Orwell advanced in Nine- teen Eighty-Four (1949), Postman argues that Huxley’s depiction of the collapse of liberal democracy in the United States is likely to be the more accurate one. He points out that in Huxley’s vision “no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity and history” through the instilling of fear; rather “people will come to love their oppression”, and “to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think” (Postman Amusing vii). In Postman’s analysis, new technologies, besides competing for time, attention, money and prestige, compete for dominance of their world-view, a fact that is implicit once one acknowledges that a medium contains an ideological bias. “It is not merely a matter of tool against tool,” he writes, “the alphabet attacking ideographic writing, the printing press attacking the illuminated manuscript, the photograph attacking the art of painting, television attacking the printed word. When media make war against each other, it is a case of world-views in collision” (Postman Technopoly 16). From the Gulf War to media war, in the case of television, Postman’s fundamental assertion is 54 transverse winter 2006 that all subject matter that appears there is presented as entertaining, and therefore suggests that entertainment is the ‘supra-ideology’ of all discourse that issues from it. Postman distinguishes between a technology and a medium, suggesting that the former is to the latter as the brain is to the mind. One of the most powerful scenes in 2001— and one that Waters dramatises at the beginning of the album’s third track, “Perfect Sense, Part I”—features a solitary man-ape, holding a large broken bone from the skeletal remains of some kind of animal, who very gradually comes to the realisation that it can be utilised as a deadly weapon. From this portrayal of the pre-historic birth of tool use and intelligence, the next scene has this individual and a couple of his tribe brutally clubbing to death a member of a rival clan that has advanced on their position. This scene helps give shape to perhaps Waters’ primary concern on the album, and one that is pertinent in light of Postman’s comments about 1991’s Persian Gulf War— the potentialities that the confl uence of advanced weapons systems, war and television have for mass desensitisation. In part a response to the American-led action that was to be branded ‘Operation Desert Storm’, Waters says with regard to Amused to Death:

A lot of the songs on this record developed from watching television and just checking out what’s been going on around the world in the last few years. I have this sense of a lot of human and political disasters being exacerbated if not caused by a need that we have in the Western civilised countries to amuse our populations, in the exercise of dramatic foreign policy, i.e. one of the things that we fi nd most amusing is to have wars, hopefully in distant lands, and it’s a concern to me to see war as entertainment on television. (Qtd. in Ladd)

Amused to Death can be construed as a counter-environment to what Postman describes as Technopoly. Here I will limit myself to describing how it does so in relation to television in the late 1980s and 1990s. Before doing so, however, it will be helpful to recount some of Postman’s analysis of the complete transmogrifi cation of the information environment that electronic communications effected, and their consequent metamorphosis of the content and meaning of ‘public discourse’. This will entail an analytical contrasting of the epistemol- ogy of a typographic culture with that of a televisual one. Towards the beginning of Amusing Ourselves to Death, Postman introduces the supposition that the media of communication available to a culture are a dominant infl uence on its social and intellectual preoccupations: winter 2006 transverse 55 In studying the Bible as a young man, I found intimations of the idea that forms of media favor particular kinds of content and therefore are capable of taking command of a culture. I refer specifi cally to the Decalogue, the Second Commandment of which prohibits the Israelites from making concrete images of any thing. ‘Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water beneath the earth.’ I wondered then, as so many others have, as to why the God of these people would have included instructions on how they were to symbolize, or not symbolize, their experience. It is a strange injunction to include as part of an ethical system unless its author assumed a connection between forms of human communication and the quality of a culture. We may hazard a guess that a people who are being asked to embrace an abstract, universal deity would be rendered unfi t to do so by the habit of drawing pictures or making statues or depicting their ideas in any concrete, iconographic forms. (5)

Postman suggests that iconography became blasphemy in order to allow a new kind of God to enter a culture, and that the God of the Jews was to exist only in and through the Word, an unprecedented conception that required the highest order of abstract thinking. In this relation, Postman points out also that it is no accident that the Age of Reason co- existed, fi rst in Europe then in America, with the growth of print culture. It was during the eighteenth century that the preeminent form of the analytic management of knowledge— science—fi rst began to refashion the world. It was also during this time that capitalism is demonstrated to be a rational and liberal system of economic life, and that religious superstition along with the divine right of kings came under relentless attack. Appropri- ately, it is also during this time that the importance of universal literacy became apparent. Postman observes that almost every scholar who has confronted the question of what reading does to one’s habits of mind has concluded that the written word fosters rationality. Its linear and sequential character entails following an argument or line of thought, an activity that requires considerable powers of classifying, inference-making and reasoning. To read means to detect abuses of logic and common sense, and to uncover lies, confusions and over-generalisations. Such analytical management of knowledge consists also of comparing and contrasting assertions and connecting generalisations to one another. These activities all require a distancing and detachment which the isolated and impersonal text encourages. 56 transverse winter 2006 In a culture dominated by print, Postman suggests, the coherent and orderly arrangement of facts and ideas tends to characterise public discourse. Typography, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, he argues, put forth a defi nition of intelligence that prioritised the objective and rational use of the mind, while encouraging forms of public discourse with serious and logically ordered content. Typography, of all media, also has the strongest possible bias toward exposition, which Postman describes as “a mode of thought, a method of learning, and a means of expression” (Amusing 63). The period during which “the American mind submitted itself to the sovereignty of the printing press” Postman calls “the Age of Exposition.” The cultural mind-set and predispositions created through the monopoly of print were dramatically altered with the realisation of electronic communications and their irreversible transformation of the symbolic environment. The invention of the telegraph effected the disengagement of communication from transportation for the fi rst time, and illustrated that space was not an inevitable constraint to the movement of information. In the process it destroyed the prevailing defi nition of information and public discourse. In short, telegraphy attacked typography’s defi nition of discourse through its massive introduction of irrelevance, impotence and incoherence, and required the content of its conversation to be different from that to which typographic culture had been accustomed. The other side of this story, that is, the other primary epistemological antecedent of television, photography, developed almost exactly concurrent to telegraphy. Though the realm of the image was nothing new (after all, painting, as Postman points out, is three times as old as writing), what was, he explains, was its sudden and massive intrusion into the symbolic environment in the form of photography and other forms of iconography:

This event is what Daniel Boorstin in his pioneering book The Image calls “the graphic revolution”. By this phrase, Boorstin means to call attention to the fi erce assault on language made by forms of mechanically reproduced imagery that spread unchecked throughout American culture—photographs, prints, posters, drawings, advertisements. I choose the word “assault” deliberately here, to amplify the point implied in Boorstin’s “graphic revolution” […] What Boorstin implies about the graphic revolution, I wish to make explicit here: the new focus on the image undermined traditional defi nitions of information, of news, and, to a large extent, of reality itself. First in billboards, posters, and advertisements, and later in such winter 2006 transverse 57 “news” magazines and papers as Life, Look, the New York Daily Mirror and Daily News, the picture forced exposition into the background, and in some instances obliterated it altogether. By the end of the nineteenth century, advertisers and newspapermen had discovered that a picture was not only worth a thousand words, but, where sales were concerned, was better. For countless Americans, seeing, not reading, became the basis for believing. (Postman Amusing 74)

Postman elucidates that language and image constitute two entirely different modes of conversation. The latter exists only in particulars, and its vocabulary is limited to concrete representation. The photograph does not present an idea or concept about the world, as do words and sentences, unless the image is converted to idea through recourse to language itself. In the absence of doing so, it is unable to deal with “the unseen”, “the remote”, “the internal” and “the abstract.” It doesn’t speak of “man” or “tree”, only of a man and a tree. Immediately from its opening moments, Amused to Death prepares us for the anthropomorphism that Waters employs throughout the work, a technique that serves to conjure that broad anthropological perspective which views the evolution of the human animal in relation to other species. First we hear the age-old sound of chirping crickets, followed soon thereafter by the barking of a dog—the fi rst animal that humans domesticated, and therefore well-deserving, as his oldest ally, the epithet ‘man’s best friend’. The monkey’s turning on the television interrupts these comforting sounds, and the event establishes a contrast between those natural phenomena that are the product of human ingenuity, and those that are not. One imagines that Waters does not intend the monkey’s aesthetic gesture to be an enjoyable one, judging by the call-in auction program we hear on the television. The television announcer’s singing salesman voice represents the permanently infl ated sense of cheerfulness permeating commerce in what some have come to designate mass consumer culture, a phenomenon to whose development television has helped provide defi nition. In the midst of the exchange between a man and a woman, the music softly enters with spacy sustained synthesiser chords and a mournful electric guitar. Its minor key is outlined in conjunction with the sound of changing television stations, recreating that disjunct experience of the twentieth-century animal, the channel surfer. Materialistic exchanges about jewelry give way to a woman’s tearful voice speaking about the more intangible experience of keeping someone in her “thoughts” and in her “heart”, illustrating the tension that 58 transverse winter 2006 Waters attempts to make apparent between the potential affordances of television. While the electronic-age instrumentation connotes the future (McLuhan Galaxy Gutenberg 135), the sound of growling conjures the struggle for survival as portrayed in the aforementioned opening scenes of 2001, where a wild cat attacks a man-ape, and is then later heard growling during the night while a tribe are huddled together, quite frightened, trying to sleep. The station-changing monkey rests on a British documentary about the emotional and psychological effects of war on World War I veterans, providing viewers with an experience, in all probability, quite exotic to them. Alf Razzell, or Razz, a British company fi l e clerk, who found himself on the front lines during the First World War, recounts the tale of meeting up in no man’s land with his fatally wounded comrade Bill Hubbard, a member of his original company. The profundity of the experience for Razzell, obviously a very old man, is apparent by the sobriety of his tone, which stands in marked contrast to that of the auctioneer salesman. Unable to secure the survival of his comrade, for whom the opening track is named and in whose memory the album is dedicated, Razzell’s tale is another testament to the sentiment that ‘war is hell’, a fact known in a signifi cant way to Waters, who lost his own grandfather and father in the fi rst and second world wars respectively. Incapable of taking the pain of being transported, Hubbard begs to be left to die, leaving Razzell with the “haunting” memory of abandoning him. We do not get to hear anymore about his experience, however, as the monkey is heard abruptly to turn the television channel. We next hear the fl eeting sound-byte, “---I don’t mind about the war, that’s one of the things I like to watch...if it’s a war going on...‘cause then I know if my side’s winnin’... if our side’s losin’---”. Spoken by a pre-teenaged female English television viewer, the clip presumably derives from the aftermath of television coverage during the Gulf War. It serves to demonstrate Waters’ fears that war in the television age will be portrayed and perceived as entertainment. The radical disjuncture between Razzell’s direct experience of war and its representation in the young girl’s experience is striking. The clip serves to transfer us from “The Ballad of Bill Hubbard” to the beginning of “What God Wants, Part I”. According to Waters, the song “derives at least in part from George Bush’s statements during what came to be known as Desert Storm—all that crap about God being on the side of the American people, which is always crass, but within the context of what was going on there, a ‘holy war’, is ludicrous and obscene” (Qtd. in Resnicoff). As the song begins, the foreboding fi ve-note motif repeated in the synthesiser throughout Alf Razzell’s monologue in the previous piece reappears, and its being winter 2006 transverse 59 heard now in double time bestows a sense of urgency. The combined effect of this musical gesture and the distant sound of a mob shouting “What God wants God gets”, creates an unsettling effect which the foregrounded female voices enhance, ominously adding “God help us all” to the chanted slogan. The action heard on the television set consists of someone knocking at a door which, when the individual on the inside opens it, brings the sounds of the mob into the monkey’s living room. With the distorted electric guitar entry we get the fi rst musical intimations of the crassness of George Bush’s statement, which is further elaborated with the aggressive disquiet introduced in tandem with the heavy full band entry.2 Distortion is commonly associated with power, and the cheering crowd amplifi es the potency of this gesture. So does the enantiodromiacal transformation of the perturbed warnings of the female singers into a chorus of cheerleaders supportively chanting, “What God wants God gets” as though buttressing their team at a sporting event. The precursor to “the monkey in the corner”, the aspiring young musician, could conceivably be a younger version of Waters himself:

The kid in the corner looked at the priest And fi ngered his pale blue Japanese guitar The priest said, “God wants goodness, God wants light, God wants mayhem, God wants a clean fi ght.

The bizarre juxtapositions of the slogans about ‘what God wants’ refl e ct the situation surrounding the confl ict in the Gulf. “There we all are dropping bombs and fi ring shells at each other all fi rmly believing that we’re doing it all in God’s name”, suggests Waters, “and the paradoxes that are involved in that still don’t seem to have been brought home to us all” (Qtd. in Cockburn). The jarring nature of this paradox is expressed harmoni- cally as the next section of the song disjunctly exits the established mode, signifying a shifted point of view and mood. This sobering view belongs to the alien (a mood rein- forced through Waters’ use of chromaticism), whose evocation, common within the genre of science fi ction, functions as an additional technique that provides affordance to the “anthropological perspective”—in this case the outsider who studies human civilisation. George Bush’s absurd obliteration of the content of Christianity fi ts congruously into the rejection of history and the traditional world-view as represented in the next song “Perfect Sense, Part I”. With a switch of the television channel we 60 transverse winter 2006 are transferred into an interesting juxtaposition of past and future that returns us once again to 2001. The future is invoked through the use of the synthesiser, and through what Waters describes as an attempt to simulate the sounds that accompany a scene towards the end of Kubrick’s fi lm. One of the astronauts, Dave, after the artifi cial intelligence kills his fellow astronauts and conspires unsuccessfully to lock him out of the spacecraft, shuts down the HAL 9000 computer. As Dave gradually disengages HAL’s ‘memory’ we hear the computer intoning “Dave...my mind is going...I can feel it”, the irony being the idea that a disembodied intelligence can be possessed of feeling. The pre-linguistic monkey hears “the strains of a Viennese quartet”, a literate cultural product of the values of individualism gained in the West through the effects of phonetic literacy and amplifi ed by the mechanical technology of typography, in tandem with the civilising attributes of the Christian world-view (another religion of the word). The invention of writing creates a form of transpersonal memory, as Postman observes (Teaching 34), which in a collectivist sense becomes understood as ‘history’. The monkey in the television age, who declares that “history is for fools”, is certainly estranged from memory, and believes that ‘progress’ requires nothing from it. Cleaning his hands “in a pool of holy writing”, the monkey soldier turns his back on the knowledge of good and evil, represented by “the garden”, to pursue progress in “the nearest town”. The entry of the female voice, however, creates a notable contrast to this position at which he arrives. Often associated with superior emotional intelligence and greater capacity for feeling, the female implores him in an appropriately soothing gospel vocal style. Urged to consider the value of human life expressed in the transpersonal memory that ledgers create, the woman demonstrates sympathetic understanding for the soldier monkey’s state of mind given the models of barbarism that abound:

And the Germans killed the Jews And the Jews killed the Arabs And the Arabs killed the hostages And that is the news And is it any wonder that the monkey’s confused?

The woman also sympathises with him for the “manuals” dedicated to technical progress that he continually must read, and the direction that he is given by the Joint Chiefs of Staff winter 2006 transverse 61 and the brokers on Wall Street. Collectively, these technocratic elites reaffi rm, in the manner of Huxley’s “Our Ford”, his own original sentiments that “time is linear” and that history does not repeat itself. After giving him command of a nuclear submarine, they send him retrogressively back to the “perfect sense” heavenly city of which the eighteenth century rationalists dreamed. But this “Garden of Eden” is prior to the knowledge of good and evil, humanity being not itself a moral force but “a tool in the hands of the great God Almighty”. Since “memory is a stranger”, the concepts of individuation and self-improvement are irrelevant. “Perfect Sense, Part II”, hearkening back to the soundbite of the pre-teenage television viewer who construes war as a game, has the submarine captain literally taking centre stage. Featuring play by play commentary provided by the sportscaster Marv Albert, we witness the telecast of “a sensational matchup” between the American submarine and an oil rig. Prior to this main event, the piece opens with an exasperated Waters, who sings accompanied by a solo acoustic piano:

Can’t you see it all makes perfect sense Expressed in dollars and cents, pounds shillings and pence Can’t you see it all makes perfect sense.

The nationalistic aspect of the currencies’ symbolic content (the United States, Great Britain, and their various offshoots) is signifi cant, particularly given that, in the next rep- etition of this chorus, the refrain becomes “our global anthem”. Waters’ reference to the United States, not only indicative of the fact that CNN’s headquarters is there, relates back to the Wall Street brokers and Joint Chiefs of Staff from the previous song. He does not, however, simply refer to the military-industrial complex that General Dwight Eisen- hower described (just before leaving the offi ce of the president) as having emerged as an extension of the American state following World War II. Rather, his emphasis is on the intrinsic connection between global technologies and commerce—what one might call the fi n ancial-military-industrial-media complex, to which he alludes in the song “Late Home Tonight, Part I”. The protagonist of that song is a pilot whose “kind Uncle Sam feeds ten trillion and change into the total entertainment combat video game”. Though economies in the ‘new world order’ are left to globalise according to a corporate libertarian variation on the principles of laissez-faire, the parlance of contemporary political economy portrays the command economy dynamic of the U.S. as ‘the global economic engine’. 62 transverse winter 2006 Following the completion of the last repetition of the “global anthem” the sounds of crowds cheering as though at a large rock concert can be heard. Appropriately, with the commencement of “The Bravery of Being Out of Range”, we are returned to a similar heavy and distorted rock feel to that which characterised “What God Wants, Part I”. Whereas there, the music was evocative solely of the crassness of George Bush, here, at least in the fi rst verse of the song, according to Waters, we are presented with a portrait of Bush’s predecessor Ronald Reagan, under whom the former served as vice-president. Postman observes, during the writing of Amusing Ourselves to Death, that the President of the United States is a former Hollywood movie actor, and makes note of Reagan’s statement from 1966 that “Politics is just like show business”. Waters portrays Reagan as a smooth image operator, suggesting that he is “good fun at parties” and wears “the right masks”, while his feeling “at home on the range” and his having “a natural tendency to squeeze off a shot” convey his jingoism. His Magnum pistol is “a comfort” and “a friend”, which only the Uzi machine-gun and its superior affordances overshadow in the end. His craving for power is executed not just when he shows off his pistol, but when he “deafens the canyon” with it. The second verse departs from Reagan and returns us to Bush and the war in Iraq. The “band of angels...coming for to carry me home”, that Waters’ allusion to looking over Jordan connotes, is that of “a U.S. Marine in a pile of debris”, which, combined with “the Indian who lay on the Federal Building steps” back home, provides imagery that international viewers are perhaps not so likely to see on their televisions. Though no doubt being shot at with the aid of enemy rangefi nders, Waters’ camera captures the drug- popping, disenchanted soldiers on the frontline, who are weary of “the mess they fi nd on their desert stage.” They are also weary of the apparent bravery of those safely out of battle range—not only the decision makers responsible for sending them there in the fi rst place, but those for whom their ordeal has been reduced to something of a thrilling spectator sport. The third verse, “set in a bar anywhere in America during that confl ict”, shows the furore of hawkish superpatriotism as many Americans become, in Waters’ words, “team orientated” (Qtd. in Ladd):

Hey bartender, over here, two more shots and two more beers. Sir, turn up the TV sound, the war has started on the ground. Just love those laser guided bombs, they’re really great for righting wrongs. You hit the target and win the game from bars 3,000 miles away. winter 2006 transverse 63 The high-fi delity sounds of roaring missiles and the visually dazzling la- ser effects enhance viewers’ sentiment of pride in their team as warfare be- comes aestheticised because, as Waters says, “it wasn’t a real person be- ing killed with a smart bomb it was a blip on a screen, like a video game” (Qtd. in Ladd). Such nationalism is not an uncommon consequence of a country’s going to war, unless, as in the case of Vietnam, the television images consist of constant streams of your countrymen returning home in body bags by the score. Of course, American public rela- tions experts learned thereafter how to control such unwelcome airing of dirty laundry—the press being barred from Dover Air Force Base, where body bags landed during the Gulf War. The beginning of “Late Home Tonight, Part I” creates a striking contrast to the boisterousness of the preceding track. With the sound of birds chirping, the mooing of cows, and the soft sound of a dripping tap, we are transferred to the tranquility of the English countryside. Waters’ foregrounding of the acoustic instrumentation of guitar and string orchestra is appropriate to the rural scene, which is complemented by the quaint tradition of “tea time”:

Standing at the window, a farmer’s wife in Oxfordshire Glances at the clock it’s nearly time for tea, she doesn’t see The phantom in the hedgerow dip its wing Doesn’t hear the engine sing.

Though the farmer’s wife is unaware of the American F-1 fi ghter bomber departing from a Royal Air Force base near to where she lives, we hear the sound of the jet aircraft. The voice of the navigator heard over the pilot’s radio, in combination with the “techno glow” of the pilot’s cockpit with its array of shiny dials, enhances the jet’s marked juxtaposition with the pastoral setting. As portrayed earlier with the nuclear submarine captain, questions of right and wrong are of no concern. The aesthetic value of Dover’s white cliffs, the beauti- ful, blue sunny sky, and another sophisticated piece of high-tech weaponry overshadows them: “I would think if you’re a fi ghter pilot”, Waters remarks, hearkening back to the previ- ous song, “it must be very diffi cult not to be completely seduced by all that sexual energy that you have at your control. All that shiny stuff that spits out death [...] there’s something very, very attractive about it and that’s what’s worrying about it to me” (Qtd. in Ladd). This element of attractiveness, and the attractiveness of the television image, is refl ected in the glossy production values of the song, especially its lavish string arrangement and 64 transverse winter 2006 lush background vocals (where Tin Pan Alley meets Hollywood cinema, meets AM radio). The background vocals enter following the impressive sound-effect of the plane fl ying over our heads and, playing the supporting role to Waters’ lead vocal, are reminiscent of the game’s cheerleaders and fans at home watching it all on television. Waters’ evocation of a television commercial for jeans, interspersed with “the bad guy” getting hit, effectively represents the distracted and discontinuous nature of the world as television presents it. Postman describes this quality in reference to the common phrase used in television news, “Now…this” (often used in order to indicate that what one has just heard or seen has no relevance to what one is about to hear and see). These words suggest, in effect, that viewers have thought long enough on the previous matter, and must now give their attention either to some other news fragment, or to some commercials. Indicating the profundity of our perception towards the medium of television, Postman then offers a suggestion as to why we do not. Whereas we expect books and even other media (such as fi lm) to maintain a consistency of tone and a continuity of content, we have no such expectation of television, and especially television news. We have become so accustomed to its discontinuities that we are no longer struck dumb, as any sane person would be, by a newscaster who having just reported that a nuclear war is inevitable goes on to say that he will be right back after this word from Burger King; who says, in other words, ‘Now...this.’ One can hardly overestimate the damage that such juxtapositions do to our sense of the world as a serious place. The damage is especially massive to youthful viewers who depend so much on television for their clues as to how to respond to the world. In watching television news, they, more than any other segment of the audience, are drawn into an epistemology based on the assumption that all reports of cruelty and death are greatly exaggerated and, in any case, not to be taken seriously or responded to sanely. (Technopoly 104-105) Postman’s reference to youthful viewers reminds us of the young schoolgirl from the clip towards the beginning of the recording, who likes to watch television particularly “when there’s a war going on”. Waters clearly shares Postman’s concern about television’s possible distancing of us from the appropriate feelings involved in particular types of situations, especially when we see “the children bleed” in juxtaposition with the nostalgic images of “BB gun days”, in addition to those that Waters evokes in conjunction with his seductive alliteration (“were you struck by the satisfying way the swimsuit sticks to her skin”). On the night of April 14-15, 1986, fl ying from bases in the U.K. and from U.S. 6th Fleet aircraft carriers in the Mediterranean Sea, U.S. bombers carried out raids on the winter 2006 transverse 65 Libyan cities of Tripoli and Benghazi and their environs. The attack was in response to Libya’s alleged involvement in terrorist activities in Europe and was precipitated by the death of a U.S. serviceman in the bombing of a discotheque in Berlin in early April. According to Noam Chomsky, the April 14th attack was the fi rst bombing in history staged for prime-time television. The bombing raids, as Chomsky observes, were timed to begin at precisely 7 p.m. Eastern Standard Time. Of course, this is exactly when all three national television network channels in the U.S. broadcast their nightly news programs, which agitated network anchors switching to Tripoli for eye witness reports pre-empted. It later came to light that the attack was carried out merely with suspicion that Qadafi had been responsible for the discotheque incident, though the administration claimed that it had possessed “certain” evidence (Chomsky). “I think it was just an exercise of entertainment, and trying out a few weapon systems”, says Waters, “and a little bit of training for the guys...I found it deeply upsetting at the time, particularly because my country was involved in it, which I disapproved of enormously” (Qtd. in Ladd). As the song concludes, the return to the more sober music of the introduction sets the stage for a comparison between the farmer’s wife in England and “another ordinary wife” in Tripoli. On the ground now, we hear the sounds of an announcer on the Libyan woman’s radio or television set, in combination with the sounds of her crying infant and a noisy demonstration “in the street below” in which her husband is participating. Upon hearing the pilot’s bomb dropped, we dramatically hear nothing. With the next song, “Too Much Rope”, we are transferred to what seems to be another low-tech environment, with its sounds of horse drawn sleigh and of someone chopping fi rewood (notably, with an axe, not a chain saw). The chilling howl of a timber wolf suggests that we are near wilderness, but the ubiquitous sound of the television set reminds us that we are still just as much a part of the global village in terms of the movement of information. The tone of the television program running quietly in the background is one of seriousness, as we overhear a man solemnly speaking about a female lying on a bed it is apparent that she is soon to die. One imagines that we are still in the monkey’s living room, and that the wilderness to which we’re transported is, in actuality, a symbolic one. The lyric begins by assessing friendships along one’s diffi cult journey through wintry wilds:

When the sleigh is heavy and the timber wolves are getting bold. You look at your companions and test the water of their friendship with your toe. They signifi cantly edge closer to the gold. 66 transverse winter 2006 Here Waters alludes to the cultural climate of what Postman refers to as ‘Reaganism’, the resurrection of the ‘self-interest’ ethos of neoclassical economics, “especially those ar- guments which give to ambition and even greed a moral dimension” (Postman Building a Bridge 28). Waters satirises this ethos in the song’s second verse, which again projects us from the individual context to that of the entire species with its suggestions that “his- tory is short” and that “the sun is just a minor star”. The individuals who can afford to indulge in high technology fetishism (in this instance in conjunction with the latest model of the Ferrari automobile) dismiss the fact of the poor man selling his kidneys in some “colonial bazaar” simply as “what will be will be”. When combined with the fact of the mili- tary-industrial-fi nancial-media complex, the poor man selling his kidneys, the senseless slaughter of innocents (‘collateral damage’ in technocratic discourse) and the prospect of mass desensitisation, Waters, in response to it all, ruefully sings in the song’s chorus:

You don’t have to be a Jew to disapprove of murder Tears burn my eyes Moslem or Christian, Mullah or Pope. Preacher or poet, who was it wrote Give any one species too much rope and they’ll fuck it up.

‘Too much rope’, of course, translates into too much freedom of action, and this over- abundance proverbially ends in the protagonist’s downfall by hanging him- or herself with it. This freedom of action again draws to mind ‘laissez-faire’, the spirit of unrestraint that has not only been characteristic within the realm of action that constitutes economics, but as part of a matrix that includes the domains of technical and scientifi c development as well. This is why Postman prefaces his book Technopoly with Paul Goodman’s epi- gram, “Whether or not it draws on new scientifi c research, technology is a branch of moral philosophy, not of science”. The reasoning behind this statement is that while sci- ence tells us what we can do, it cannot tell us what we ought to do. So while Waters suggests that you don’t have to be a Jew to disapprove of murder, he is certainly also aware that the Decalogue has doubtless exercised enormous infl uence in introducing the attitude into culture in the fi rst place. Religion, as René Girard has said, is ‘the pla- centa’ of culture, meaning that without religion’s initial establishment of social order, we do not develop the potential to become ‘sensitised’ in the fi rst place. Girard, an anthro- winter 2006 transverse 67 pologist of the Bible, gives accurate defi nition to the legacy of Christian doctrine for the thought-world of nonviolence in his formulation that we did not stop killing witches because we invented science. Rather, we invented science because we stopped killing witches. Whereas Waters appears to share Postman’s perception about the power that television has to undermine rational discourse, he is also very aware of some of the medium’s potentialities—among which, in Postman’s words, are its “potential for creating a theater for the masses” and an “emotional power [...] so great [...] that it could arouse sentiment against the Vietnam War or against more virulent forms of racism” (Amusing 28-29). In this way, as a counter-environment, Amused to Death seeks to explore the possibilities that television may have for ‘sensitising’ us. A central television event for Waters was 1985’s Live Aid, an intercontinental bonanza rock performance spearheaded by ex-Boomtown Rats singer Bob Geldof to raise funds for victims of famine in Ethiopia, the true horrors of which were apparently brought home to people in the UK through a BBC television documentary by Michael Buerk in October 1984. In the fi nale of his Radio K.A.O.S. (1987), “The Tide is Turning (After Live Aid)”, Waters wrote of the event:

Now the satellite’s confused ’cos on Saturday night The airwaves were full of compassion and light And his silicon heart warmed to the sight of a billion candles burning... I’m not saying that the battle is won but on Saturday night all those kids in the sun Wrested technology’s sword from the hand of the War Lords.

On Amused to Death, the fi rst instance of exploring such possibilities occurs during the third verse of “Too Much Rope”. Waters sings of the portrayal of a Vietnam vet “last night on TV”, who returns to Asia and sees the monstrous examples of the effects of widespread American use of the chemical compound Agent Orange. This individual meets and befriends a Vietnamese war veteran, and the moving tale prompts Waters to ask of “this tender TV”: What does it mean this tearjerking scene beamed into my home? That it moves me so much, why all the fuss It’s only two humans being...

The importance of the image of “two humans being” is central to Waters’ work because, 68 transverse winter 2006 for him, it represents the primary means by which we ‘humanise’ ourselves. In “What God Wants, Part III”, the monkey returns from the kitchen and sits back in front of the television. Flipping through the stations we hear a variety of program snippets, including some light entertainment, and the sound of a car salesman gleefully rhyming off the technological components of the car he’s selling. Just as Waters begins to sing “We were watching TV”, the television momentarily features a station broadcasting the news, on which a Chinese announcer begins describing details of the event that took place June 4th, 1989 in Tiananmen Square in Beijing. The governmental crackdown on predominantly student pro-democracy demonstrations is commonly referred to as the ‘Tiananmen Square Massacre’. Half way through the song, we hear the duo powerfully sing, “And I grieve for my sister”, and the music comes to an abrupt stop—made surrealistic by their echoing words, by the return of the television, and by the disjunct effect of the sound of Waters asking his sound engineer “Did we do anything after this?”. The latter’s, “I’ve a feeling we did”, leads Waters back into singing the refrain, and then into carrying on with the girl’s history, illustrating, as he does so, that neither the phone, nor commercials, nor any other distractions divert us. We learn that her grandfather fought in the communist revolution of 1948 against Chiang Kai-shek, and we are invited to imagine the barbarism of Chiang’s “order[ing] his troops to fi re on the women and children”, before he fl ees and establishes “a shoe factory called Taiwan”. At the end of the song, Waters articulates the historical uniqueness of the girl’s tragic circumstances by contrasting her to a number of other historical tragedies, ancient and modern:

And she is different from Cro-Magnon man, she’s different from Anne Boleyn She’s different from the Rosenbergs and from the unknown Jew She’s different from the unknown Nicaraguan, half superstar, half victim She’s a victor star, conceptually new And she is different from the Dodo and from the Kankabono She’s different from the Aztec and from the Cherokee She’s everybody’s sister, she’s symbolic of our failure She’s the one in fi fty million who can help us to be free Because she died on TV.

Because the girl’s death occurs on television it has the potential to move large numbers winter 2006 transverse 69 of people to mourn for her, an effect enhanced through our compassion for its narration by her surviving lover. “[Y]ou never resolve that loss, in my opinion, which is why I feel so for all the people in [...] Iraq, and the girl in Tiananmen Square” mantains Waters,

When something like that happens in your life, you never, ever resolve it. It’s with you until the day you die....In some ways, in experiencing loss, to some extent, it defi nes our humanity....I take comfort from the pain and loss of a loved one because it means I can still feel. My love for the people that I’ve lost is important....The residue of the grief is precious because it keeps the love alive. (“Amused to Death Premiere”)

Once again, however, the monkey changes the station and with the beginning of the album’s last song, with the title of “Amused to Death”, we return to the same call-in auction program with which the album began. Emerging from the excited sounds of buying and sell- ing, we hear a shudder before Waters enters. The mentioned entry is accompanied by the movement of the piece from the established major tonality to the ominous relative minor:

Doctor Doctor what is wrong with me This supermarket life is getting long What is the heart life of a colour TV What is the shelf life of a teenage queen

The sense of world-weariness is apparent in Waters’ alienated questioning of him- self in relation to the existential conditions that constitute “this supermarket life”, a phrase which, aside from connoting the ubiquity of commercial messages in a civili- sation that governs itself predominantly according to economic and technological dic- tates, elicits an image of the type of tabloid culture to which television gives rise. Waters, next, makes reference to ‘Melrose Place’, described by tabloid newspaper The Calgary Sun, no less, as a “tawdry” and “scandalous” Californian, primetime soap opera—a spin-off of the successful program ‘Beverly Hills, 90210’:

And the children on Melrose strut their stuff Is absolute zero cold enough? And out in the valley warm and clean 70 transverse winter 2006 The little ones sit by their TV screen No thoughts to think, No tears to cry.

Waters surmises that “the media is...a mirror that we hold up to ourselves” (“Amused to Death Premiere”), and he suspects, along with Postman, that the show’s young viewers, depending so much on television for their clues about how to respond to the world, are rapidly becoming incapacitated in their abilities to think and feel, par- ticularly regarding to their understanding of themselves and others. “One is entirely justifi ed in saying”, writes Postman, “that the major educational enterprise now be- ing undertaken in the United States is not happening in its classrooms but in the home, in front of the television set, and under the jurisdiction not of school admin- istrators and teachers but of network executives and entertainers.” (Amusing 145) That the entire species has, in fact, ‘amused itself to death’ is communicated to the woman by the Captain (a character who also makes an appearance in ‘What God Wants, Part III’). As the work moves into its grand fi nale, Waters details the end of human civilisation:

We watched the tragedy unfold We did as we were told, we bought and sold It was the greatest show on earth but then it was over We oohed and aahed, We drove our racing cars We ate our last few jars of caviar and somewhere out there in the stars A keen-eyed lookout spied a fl ickering light, our last hurrah.

Waters once again evokes the aliens who busy themselves studying humanity from afar. They attempt to deduce the turn of events that eventually led to our fatal end:

And when they found our shadows grouped ‘round the TV sets They ran down every lead, they repeated every test They checked out all the data on their lists And then the alien anthropologists admitted they were still perplexed But on eliminating every other reason for our sad demise They logged the only explanation left This species has amused itself to death. winter 2006 transverse 71 As the piece comes to a dramatic climax, the full band suddenly drops out and the piece deceptively cadences back into the minor. The alien anthropologists who record our fi nal history confi rm the Captain’s earlier report. In the pregnant pause that fol- lows, the female voices whisper over and over again this fi nal explanation, as though the news were traveling among the aliens. Waters again, with the acoustic guitar’s con- notations of confessional intimacy, rearticulates the conclusion: “No tears to cry, no feelings left / This species has amused itself to death.” As the female voices mourn- fully and ongoingly repeat the refrain, we suddenly hear the television station chang- ing yet again, as if to remind us one last time of the album cover’s implications for the responsibilities inherent in our own relationship to television. We return to the voice of Alf Razzell and to the old man’s conclusion of Waters’ song “The Ballad of Bill Hubbard”:

Years later, I saw Bill Hubbard’s name on the memorial to the missing at Arras [...] And I-when I saw his name, I was absolutely transfi xed. It was as though he was now a human being instead of some sort of nightmarish memory that I’d had of leaving him all those years ago [...] And I felt relieved. And ever since then I’ve felt...happy about it, because always before, whenever I thought of him, I was searching myself—‘Was there something else that I could have done?’

At this point, we hear, from the earlier monologue at the beginning of the album, the repetition of Bill Hubbard’s haunting words, “Put me down. Put me down. I’d rather die. I’d rather die. Put me down”. That the words exist only in the memory of Razzell and the listener is communicated by their auditory presence in the opposite speaker from the rest of the ongoing monologue, which duly continues: “And that always sort of worried me... But having seen him, and his name in the register - As you know in the memorials there’s a little safe, and there’s a register in there with...every name...And seeing his name... on the memorial...It sort of lightened…lightened my heart, if you like”. Following this, we hear the female interviewer ask the old man, “When was it that you saw his name on the memorial?” to which he replies, “Ah...when I was eighty-seven...that would be the year... nineteen eighty-four”. Razzell’s answer leads us back to Postman’s discussion of the prophecies of Orwell and Huxley, and his statement demonstrates that the vision of the former failed to come true, at least during the time that Orwell himself had allotted to it. 72 transverse winter 2006 In his last book, Building a Bridge to the Eighteenth Century (1998), Postman describes how Enlightenment rationalism was, in its essence, a revolt against orthodoxy, the principal one of the time being the Christian worldview; Postman observes that it was inevitable that the latter would therefore be the target of continuous attack. Rationalism itself, particularly as it evolved into what Postman and others have called ‘scientism’, has replaced Christianity as the new orthodoxy. The origins of resistance to its orientations he traces to the counter-enlightenment in which Jean-Jacques Rousseau fi gured so prominently. Reason, as far as Rousseau could see, argued against God and immortality, but feeling was in favour of both. While I have noted Waters’ allusion to William Blake, one of the most noteworthy statements of this counter-enlightenment resistance for Postman is that of the later English Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley in his “Defense of Poetry” (1821), where he made the arguments explaining why reason by itself was insuffi cient to produce humane progress:

Scientifi c and technological advances could proceed without an ethical basis. But that is not the case with social progress. Indeed, when science and technology claim to provide ethical imperatives, we are led into moral catastrophe. Shelley used as illustrations of his point the Terror that accompanied the French Revolution, and the Napoleonic dictatorship. He wrote his essay in 1821. Had he been writing it in 1944, the Holocaust would have served even better. It is only through love, tenderness, and beauty, he wrote, that the mind is made receptive to moral decency....It is the poetic imagination, not scientifi c accomplishment, that is the engine of moral progress. ‘The great instrument of moral good,’ he wrote, ‘is the imagination; and poetry administers to the effect by acting on the cause.’ Thus, the ‘heavenly city’ that the eighteenth- century rationalists dreamed of is not reachable through reason alone, and history will turn an angry face toward a society that relies on it. Progress is the business of the heart, not the intellect. (Postman Building A Bridge 32)

When an interviewer asked Waters whether Amused to Death functioned as a warning he replied: “Partially […] but I hope it will also be a beacon of hope...you take what you like from it” (“Amused to Death Premiere”). As the fi nal section of Alf Razzell’s account of Bill Hubbard rarely fails to draw a tear to the eye, Waters’ work is clearly successful at performing its edifying counter-environmental role. “My hope would be my work would winter 2006 transverse 73 enable spiritual change in people. I hope that’s what it does for me”, and he suggests:

It seems to me that if art has any responsibility, I described it in a poem I wrote after reading Cormac McCarthy’s ‘All the Pretty Horses’. The poem starts off: ‘There is a magic in some books/That sucks a man into connections/With the spirits hard to touch/That join him to his kind’. Those couple of lines express what it is that I feel about art. When I read that novel it touches me in a way that helps me to connect....It’s that connection that is central to all my work—not just with other men, women and children, but with whatever you want to call God”. (Qtd. in Kot)

notes

1 According to Waters, “I stole the title from that book, because I loved the title...I like the book very much”. Radio interview. SWF3, Germany, September 18, 1992. 2 It is quite common for Waters to use a heavy rock style when trying to represent impropriety. For examples see “Money” from The Dark Side of the Moon, “Have a Cigar” from Wish You Were Here (1975), “Young Lust” from The Wall, and “Not Now John” from The Final Cut.

74 transverse winter 2006 works cited

- “Amused to Death Premiere.” Radio Interview. Album Network, Toronto, August 1992. - Chomsky, Noam. Pirates and Emperors: International Terrorism in the Real World. Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1987. - Cockburn, Bob. “Roger Waters Rockline Interview.” Global Satellite Network 8 Feb. 1993. 20 Oct. 2006. - Huxley, Aldous. Brave New World. London: Flamingo, 1994. - Johnson, Sam. “Roger Waters: The Heavy Hitter of Rock Targets War on his Latest Work.” Top Magazine September 1992. 20 October 2006.

- Kot, Greg. “The Different Shades Of Roger Waters.” The Chicago Tribune 18 July 1999. 20 October 2006. - Ladd, Jim. “Amused to Death: An Interview with Roger Wateyd A. Knopf, 1999. --- Teaching As a Conserving Activity. New York: Delacorte Press, 1979. --- Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology. New York: Vintage Books, 1992. - Resnicoff, Matt. “Roger and Me: The Other Side of the Pink Floyd Story.” Musician November 1992. 20 October 2006. - “The Roger Waters Interview.” MTV Europe - News At Night 12 October 1992.

winter 2006 transverse 75 inter-medial adaptation: the transformation of virgil’s the aeneid into purcell’s opera dido and aeneas sarah jefferies

Transformations of form and content, as well as transgressions of discursive and medial boundaries, characterize the adaptation of literary works into opera. An examination of the adaptation of “The Passion of the Queen,” Book IV of Virgil’s epic The Aeneid, into Henry Purcell’s opera Dido and Aeneas (1689) facilitates the creation of an interpretive bridge between both arts and disciplines. Although “The Passion of the Queen” and Dido and Aeneas are settings of the same episode, the meaning components of their respective genres govern how they are constructed and read (Hirsch 222). Through a comparison of the treatment of the Dido episode, the analysis of adaptation as a means of reading between media can be evaluated. An investigation of this kind of adaptation raises important questions about categories and techniques of interpretation. Literature interacts with solitary readers; the performative act of reading mediates text and imagination. In contrast, an operatic libretto remains mute until it is accessed through collective acts of viewing and listening, which are themselves mediated by the interpretive vision of directors, designers, instrumentalists, and singers. Herbert Lindenberger states that, when a canonized literary work such as The Aeneid is turned into an opera, “its admirers note and often deplore what has been ‘lost’ from the original in the course of transformation” (“Theory” 9). I contend that this nostalgic view stems from the inability of traditional techniques of literary interpretation to comprehensively address the inter-medial demands of opera. Traditional literary studies have focused on the Western canon. Edward Said asserts that the canon is reproduced by academic institutions that deposit “everything that is non-humanistic and non-literary” outside of their authoritative structure (22). The Aeneid and Dido and Aeneas have been selected for comparison in this discussion because of their relationship to the canon. While The Aeneid is fi rmly entrenched in the literary canon, operatic librettos such as Nahum Tate’s adaptation of the Dido episode are “affi liated with literature” but have been “excluded from consideration with literature as a result of the ideological capture of the literary text within the humanistic curriculum as it now stands” (Said 24). Historically, opera was closely associated with literature; for the fi rst two centuries of the genre’s existence, almost all operatic commentary was literary in nature (Trowell

76 transverse winter 2006 1193). In Parallels and Paradoxes: Explorations on Music in Society, Said identifi es a trend in academia that is detrimental to the re-emergence of this association, since contemporary intellectuals are often educated in literature, photography, the cinema, painting, sculpture, and theatre, but not music (130). And, as Trowell states, a scholar “will misunderstand the function and effect of the libretto unless he or she is also endowed with suffi cient musicality to respond to the mysterious new compound that results from the fusion of words with music” (1193). Linda Hutcheon describes opera as “that most hybrid of art forms” (xv). Thus, when situating opera in a comparative framework, she notes the importance of applying what Ellen Rosand describes as “a fl exible and varied arsenal of hermeneutical and interpretive instruments” to ensure that this “bitextual creature” is addressed in a musical and dramatic context (qtd. in Hutcheon and Hutcheon xv). One way of establishing this context is to compare adapted librettos with original literary works. Arthur Groos writes, “As adaptations of pre-existing literary works, libretti pose questions of intertextuality, transposition of genre, and reception history” (10) that can be used to place opera “within the purview of contemporary humanistic scholarship” (10). Although the order of Groos’ outline will be altered, the questions he identifi es will provide a framework for the remainder of this investigation. Genre has traditionally been an important criterion for canonical categorization. Edward Donald Hirsch states that by classifying a text as “belonging to a particular genre, the interpreter automatically posits a general horizon for its meaning” (222). Since genre “provides a sense of the whole” (222) and “a notion of typical meaning components” (222) that govern interpretation, it will be the fi rst of Groos’ categories to be addressed. Both The Aeneid and Dido and Aeneas challenged preceding conventions by blending established and innovative meaning components to create new genres. Virgil used literature to create a founding myth for the Roman empire by combining conventions of the Greek oral epic with those of Latin poetry (Williams 339, 365). Romans fi rst encountered the Greek epic tradition in the second century B.C.E. when “they assumed political responsibility over Greece and the Near East” (“Roman” 627). Recognizing the authority of the epic form, Virgil combined formal conventions from Homer’s oral epics, such as extended similes, episodes, and catalogues, with traditional techniques of Latin poetry such as frequent tension between verse structure and sentence structure, alliteration, and assonance (Williams 339, 340, 365). Opera in its turn contains the performative elements of the oral epic tradition. Its origins are traceable to ancient winter 2006 transverse 77 Greek drama, which incorporated choral songs and dance (Brown and Williams 672). Dido and Aeneas was composed for a boarding school in Chelsea, England and was fi rst performed in the spring of 1689 by a cast of “Young Gentlewomen” (Price ix). Like The Aeneid, Dido and Aeneas contains both foreign and indigenous meaning components. Purcell combined formal elements of Venetian and Neapolitan opera with the English court masque tradition, which itself incorporated dance, poetry and music (Moore 43; Harris 8). The leading Restoration playwright John Dryden noted that the dramatic and musical works that predominated in late seventeenth-century England could not be called operas because “the story of it is not sung” in its entirety (qtd. in Harris 6-7). Dido and Aeneas is the fi rst all-sung tragic English opera of its kind (Moore 38). Purcell and librettist Nahum Tate discarded the “crippling conventions of the commercial stage” to attain “the greatest operatic achievement of the English seventeenth century” (Moore 38; Harris 3). Even more than genre, individual texts are dialogic in nature in that they transform other texts and reference the cultural and political world in which they are created. Thus for The Aeneid, Virgil chose a subject “that was national, yet shrouded in the mists of legend; a subject capable of readjustment to suit his poetical purpose” (Williams 334). But he re-fashioned the received mythical history of Troy and subverted the personal objectives of Homer’s heroes, such as Odysseus and Achilles, in order to highlight Aeneas’ political objective as a prototypical Roman ruler (“Virgil” 636). The consequence of this subversion is evident in the way in which “Aeneas’ providential mission subordinates the material reality of Dido and Carthage to the projected reality of Rome” (Bono 29). When constructing Dido, Virgil referenced heroines from Greek and Roman mythology, including Medea, who is discarded by Jason after he obtains the golden fl eece; Ariadne, who is abandoned by Theseus after the Minotaur is slain; and Lucretia, who commits suicide after she is raped by Tarquinius (Sullivan 66). In The Aeneid, Dido is introduced as an episode in Aeneas’ over- arching mission. In contrast, Dido and Aeneas focuses on Dido’s suffering and Aeneas operates “as a shadow in his own opera” (Burden, Woman 227). While Virgil’s epic traces the “total tragic disintegration of what had once been a strong, noble, virtuous character,” Tate presents Dido in a more static manner (Williams 354). Tate constructs Dido according to the baroque musical convention of continuity, which dictates that a work is governed by the unfolding of one dramatic state “rather than by dramatic development” (Kerman 77). Unlike The Aeneid, the text of Dido and Aeneas is meant to be performed, and the adaptation of Dido’s character refl ects this shift in reception. Ellen Harris contends that, 78 transverse winter 2006 instead of portraying Dido as an obstacle on Aeneas’ nationalistic journey, Tate uses her relationship with Aeneas to illustrate a moral stance in Restoration society (32). Tate tailored Virgil’s narrative program to suit the tastes of his audience of impressionable young schoolgirls (Harris 16). The different treatment of Dido’s sexuality and death will be examined next to demonstrate the way in which the performance of a libretto differs from the act of reading. After “an illicit sexual encounter” or rape, death was often the expected fate of a female character in early seventeenth-century drama (Harris 23). Tate adapted Dido’s role in The Aeneid to condemn her sexual actions within the moral construct of Restoration England (Harris 16). The fi rst half of “The Passion of the Queen” depicts how Dido yields to an impossible love and allows Carthage to come to a political standstill (Williams 353). Virgil writes, “Then how they reveled all winter long Unmindful of the realm, prisoners of lust” (Virgil 1208). In Tate’s libretto, the emphasis is placed not on the deterioration of Dido’s kingdom, but on her suffering as a result of a single sexual indiscretion. Tate writes, “How can so hard a fate be took, One night enjoy’d the next forsook” (Purcell 152). Tate eliminates the long- range motivations of Virgil’s epic by emphasizing the personal consequences of Dido and Aeneas’ sexual relationship instead of its impact on Aeneas’ political mission (Harris 21). Dido’s condemnation as a result of her encounter with Aeneas is evident in Tate’s adaptation of the storm sequence. While the storm unites the lovers in the epic, it separates them in the opera and functions symbolically as an objection to Dido’s actions (Harris 26). In The Aeneid, Juno invokes a storm that disorients Dido and creates an opportunity for her to succumb to Aeneas (Burden Woman 233). In Tate’s libretto, Dido is a willing participant in her liaison with Aeneas and a storm is conjured by the Sorceress as a result of their intimacy (Burden, Woman 233). Witches such as the Sorceress were popular in seventeenth- century drama, and Restoration audiences would accept them as an appropriate substitute for Virgil’s divine forces (Moore 53). Motivated by jealousy and envy, the witches in Dido and Aeneas provided Tate with a way of eliminating long-range goals from a drama that, as a self-contained chamber piece, could not be read as part of a larger work (Harris 21). In Dido and Aeneas, the conspiracy against Dido is “of her own making,” since she is ultimately a victim of her own sexual choices (Burden Woman 237). In The Aeneid, Dido takes control of her own fate. She stabs herself and states, “I die unavenged … but let me die. This way, this way, a blessed relief to go Into the undergloom. Let the old Trojan, Far at sea, drink in this confl agration and take with him the news of my death” (Virgil 1222). The literary form allows the audience to imagine the violence winter 2006 transverse 79 and suffering of Dido’s death in a way that could not be captured on the stage. In the opera, Dido does not commit suicide; instead, she dies ambiguously of a broken heart, making her demise palatable for an adolescent audience who would view suicide as a Christian sin (Biancolli 403; Harris 17). Harris contends that Dido’s destruction demonstrates to the girls in the audience that they “should not accept the advances of men no matter how ardent their wooing or how persistent their promises” (17). Purcell’s musical setting of Dido’s fi nal lament confi rms her condemnation and provides an instance where the literary text is inseparable from “musical language” (Robinson 328). In a libretto, a poetic phrase is a template for a musical phrase, which functions as a “heightened form of speech” (Pauly 6). Unlike in Virgil’s text, words are no longer meant to sustain readers’ interest or spur their imagination; instead, they become vehicles for the human voice. The ground bass accompaniment to the aria “When I Am Laid in Earth” consists of nine statements of a single melodic fi gure that are repeated obsessively “without transposition or variation of any kind” (Kerman 58). Robert Etheridge Moore writes that the “relentless, unchanging phrase is of vital dramatic signifi cance in that the queen’s eloquent grief seems trapped by an unyielding jailer” (48). Musical and dramatic representations of Dido’s downfall allow the audience to witness her character differently than when reading. Opera uses the human voice to articulate what a literary text leaves to the imagination. A performer mediates an audience’s experience of the libretto and engages the audience emotionally. Dido sings, “When I am laid, am laid in earth, may my wrongs create No trouble, no trouble in thy breast […] Remember me! remember me! but ah! forget my fate, remember me! but ah! forget my fate!” (Purcell 176-178). While Dryden believed that Restoration librettos should aim to “please the Hearing, rather than to gratify the understanding,” the audience hears and observes how the performer of Dido’s role becomes a mouthpiece for the values and norms presented in the text (Harris 35). While a performer infl uences how a libretto is received, reception history is also infl uenced by the social constraints that govern textual consumption. Like canonical standards, institutional forces impacted the reception of The Aeneid and Dido and Aeneas. The Aeneid was meant to legitimize the rule of Caesar Augustus. By 31 B.C.E., Augustus had fought a decisive battle with Mark Antony, who was supported by Cleopatra (“Roman” 628). Virgil’s representation of Dido makes her resemble Cleopatra. She is presented as a tempting woman who threatens the stability of the Roman Empire (Williams 353). Yet the popularity of her character transcended Augustus’ rule. In Tristia, Ovid contends that no 80 transverse winter 2006 part of The Aeneid was met with as much popularity as the Dido episode (Glover 172). This statement holds true in Restoration England. Virgil was regarded as an important canonical author and knowledge of The Aeneid w a s common amongst ‘intelligentsia and theatre-goers” (Burden Woman 232). Evidence of Virgil’s popularity can be found in a signifi cant precursor to Dido and Aeneas, Tate’s play Brutus of Alba; or, The Enchanted Lovers (1678) which is an adaptation of “The Passion of the Queen” (Harris 20). In the Preface to the play, Tate writes:

I wou’d not have the reader surpriz’d to fi nd this Tragedy bear some Resemblance with the passage of the Fourth Book of the Aeneids, for I had begun and fi nisht it under the Name of Dido and Aeneas; but was wrought by the advice of some Friends, to Transform it to the Dress it now wears. They told me it wou’d appear Arrogant to attempt Characters that had been written by the Incomparable Virgil; and therefore […] I chose to suffer any Inconvenience rather than be guilty of a breach of Modesty. (qtd. in Harris 20)

To avert this breach, Tate referenced Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae, in which Brutus is portrayed as Aeneas’ great-grandson (Price 3). Keeping the events of the play consistent with The Aeneid, he renamed Aeneas Brutus to distance his ad- aptation from the original text (Price 4). The aesthetic distance provided by the operatic form allowed Tate greater liberty in his adaptation of Dido and Aeneas. He was able to keep character names consistent with the original, while continuing to reference links between the founding myth of Rome and the authority of the British monarchy that had been established by Geoffrey of Monmouth. Evidence that the story of Dido and Aeneas could have been read in a political manner in seventeenth-century England is found in the dedication to Dryden’s translation of The Aeneid (1697) (Price 7). Both the dedi- cation and translation contain a veiled attack on elective kingship. Dryden draws paral- lels between an “unscrupulous Aeneas and William III,” inverting Virgil’s intention that Aeneas should be “seen as a heroic refl ection of his king Augustus Caesar” (Price 7). In contrast, for some contemporary critics it is signifi cant that the year in which Dido and Aeneas was composed and performed was also the year of the coronation of William and Mary (1689) (Harris 6). Dido’s destruction and abandonment of her kingdom could have functioned as a warning for the “possible fate of the British nation should Dutch William fail in his responsibilities to the English Queen” (Buttrey 235). Given this parallel, winter 2006 transverse 81 Restoration audiences could have misconstrued the subject matter of “The Passion of the Queen” “in the aftermath of the Bloodless Revolution” had Tate followed Virgil as closely as he did in Brutus of Alba (Price 8). A faithful depiction of Dido’s “obsessive love for Aeneas, their winter of debauchery, her paralyzing guilt, extreme bitterness, and blazing anger at his departure” might have been misread (Price, 8-9). Ultimately, Price, who espouses a political reading of Dido and Aeneas, asserts that after Queen Mary’s death in December 1694, a public performance of Dido and Aeneas would not have been possible because of the subtle implication that William “was responsible for his wife’s passing” (41). While the political climate of Restoration England could have led to the initial obscurity of Dido and Aeneas, contemporary attitudes towards opera have further entrenched its marginal status. In contrast, The Aeneid has maintained popularity as a canonical text and can be easily accessed by the act of reading. Viewing a performance ideally enacts opera’s synthesis of music, literature and drama. In contemporary society, opera has become a “historically closed book” (Lindenberger Opera 16). A small number of popular operas are often repeated to respond to the tastes of an elite audience. Although Dido and Aeneas is important in English operatic history, its brevity makes it diffi cult to include on contemporary playbills in fi nancially constrained opera houses. Thus, institutionalized structures, even if they are of a different nature, continue to govern the accessibility of particular operatic texts and their status in contemporary study. The acts of reading a literary text and watching an operatic text are radically different in nature. Lindenberger states, “Whenever we compare particular elements common to verbal and musical drama, we become aware of the sharply different effects for which each medium strives” (“Theory” 8). By comparing two settings of the Dido episode, I have attempted to demonstrate how focussing on the adaptation process facilitates the identifi cation and appreciation of these differences and, to some extent at least, also an explanation of their causes.

82 transverse winter 2006 works cited

- Barenboim, Daniel, and Edward Said. Parallels and Paradoxes: Explorations in Music and Society. New York: Vintage, 2004. - Biancolli, Louis, ed. The Opera Reader: A Complete Guide to the Best Loved Operas. 1953. Westport: Greenwood, 1977. - Bono, Barbara. Literary Transvaluation: From Vergilian Epic to Shakespearean Tragicomedy. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984. - Brown, Howard Mayer and Bernard Williams. “Opera.” The Grove Dictionary of Opera. Ed. Stanley Sadie. Vol. 3. New York: Macmillan, 1992. 671-682. 4 vols. - Burden, Michael, ed. A Woman Scorn’d: Responses to the Dido Myth. London: Faber and Faber,

1998. - Buttrey, John. “A Cautionary Tale.” Dido and Aeneas: An Opera. Ed. Curtis Price. New York: Norton, 1986. 228-235. - Glover, Terrot Reaveley. Virgil. New York: Barnes and Noble, 1969. - Groos, Arthur. Introduction. Reading Opera. Ed. Arthur Groos and Roger Parker. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988. 1-11. - Harris, Ellen. Henry Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas. Oxford: Clarendon, 1987. - Hirsch, Edward Donald. Validity in Interpretation. Clinton: Colonial, 1973.

winter 2006 transverse 83 - Hutcheon, Linda, and Michael Hutcheon. Opera: Desire, Disease, Death. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1996. - Kerman, Joseph. Opera as Drama. London: Oxford University Press, 1956. - Lindenberger, Herbert. Opera: The Extravagant Art. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992. --- “Towards a Theory of Musical Drama.” Yearbook of Comparative and General Literature 29 (1980): 5-9. - Moore, Robert Etheridge. Henry Purcell and the Restoration Theatre. London: Heineman, 1961. - Pauly, Reinhard. Music and Theatre: An Introduction to Opera. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice- Hall, 1970. - Price, Curtis. “Dido and Aeneas in Context.” Dido and Aeneas: An Opera. Ed. Curtis Price. New York: Norton, 1986. 3-41. - Purcell, Henry. “Dido and Aeneas.” Dido and Aeneas: An Opera. Ed. Curtis Price. New York: W.W. Norton, 1986. 81-187. - Robinson, Paul. “A Deconstructive Postscript: Reading Libretti and Misreading Opera.” Reading

Opera. Ed. Arthur Groos and Roger Parker. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988. 328-346. - “The Roman Empire.” The Norton Anthology of World Masterpieces. Ed. Maynard Mack. New York: W. W. Norton, 1997. 627-629. - Rosand, Ellen. “Criticism and the Undoing of Opera.” Nineteenth Century Music 14.1 (1990): 75- 83. - Said, Edward. The World, the Text and the Critic. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1983. --- Parallels and Paradoxes: Explorations in Music and Society. New York: Vintage, 2004.

84 transverse winter 2006 - Sullivan, J.P. “Dido and the Representation of Women in Virgil’s Aeneid.” The Two Worlds of the Poet: New Perspectives on Virgil. Ed. Robert Wilhelm and Howard Jones. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1992. 64-73. - Trowell, Brian. “Libretto (ii).” The New Grove Dictionary of Opera. Ed. Stanley Sadie. Vol. 2. New York: Macmillan, 1992. 1191-1252. 4 vols. - Virgil. The Aeneid. The Longman Anthology of World Literature: The Ancient World. Ed. David Damrosch. New York: Pearson, 2004. 1167-1259. - “Virgil.” The Norton Anthology of World Masterpieces. Ed. Maynard Mack. New York: W. W. Norton, 1997. 636-639. - Williams, R. Deryck. “The Aeneid.” The Cambridge History of Classical Literature: Latin Literature. Ed. E.J. Kenney and W.V. Clausen. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982. 333- 369.

winter 2006 transverse 85 purgatorio xii’s ‘hermeneutic circle’ jenna sunkenberg

References to interpretation, both literal and fi gurative, occur throughout the entire Divine Comedy as Dante works to emphasize the importance and necessity he places on active interpretation and its production of self-understanding. The Commedia’s references to and representations of interpretation produce a heightened level of signifi cation from the modern reader’s point of view, because of a parallel that exists between its poetically expressed ideas and modern hermeneutic theory. To expose such a correlation, this paper will focus upon one central aspect of the philosophy of understanding, the hermeneutic circle, and its conceptual representation of an individual’s encounter with and interpretation of the phenomenological experiences comprising an individual’s being- in-the world. Explicating an episode within the Purgatorio, will demonstrate how Dante establishes what may be considered a conceptual equivalent to the modern notion of the hermeneutic circle, and more specifi cally, how his description of an individual’s interpretive thought-process resonates within Paul Ricoeur’s culminating “interpretation theory.” Canto XII of the Purgatorio, and its depiction of the prideful souls, is an episode in which the poet’s desire for his readers to fully understand the importance of interpreting well, in relation to his own artwork and by extension to the human experience itself, is poetically and contextually represented through a process comparable to the hermeneutic circle. Through the use of anaphora, acrostic, and contextual images, and with a textual reference to a specifi c direct address to the reader, Dante presents an image of the human psyche’s interpretive experience—the circular progression of thought necessary to produce an occasion of understanding. Purgatorio XII employs a quadruple anaphora in a three-part sequence to represent the process by which one interprets and comes to an understanding resulting in meaningfulness. The fi rst anaphora occurs with the verb “vedea,” followed by the repeated exclamation “O;” the sequence concludes with the four-fold repetition of the verb “mostrava.” This repetition creates a visual and oral emphasis on these words so that neither readers nor listeners can fail to notice them. It is necessary to observe these words and their progression upon one another, because within this structure takes place Dante’s representation of the process of interpretation. The sequence begins with the poet’s recalling his experience of having “seen” the 86 transverse winter 2006 artwork engraved on the walls and fl oor of Purgatory’s fi r st terrace. This verb represents the fi r st component of interpretation, the experience of something through the senses: sight, sound, touch, smell, or taste. “Vedea” (“I saw”) occurs here, because it is the sense that dominates the pilgrim’s experiences on his journey, and by extension man’s experiences in life and the reader’s experience with texts. The second anaphora occurs in the repetition of the expressive “O.” This exclamation represents not an action of the pilgrim’s experience, but the state into which he enters as the direct result of “seeing.” The “O” is the phase in which an interpreter’s mind oscillates between the sensual experience of what he/she sees and the comprehension of what is meant by what he/she sees. It represents the act of contemplation by which one begins to judge what one confronts. To emphasize this oscillation between stages within the process of understanding, Dante makes use of verbs of ‘seeming’ as well as ‘seeing’: “parere” and “vedere.” The fi rst and third verses of the “O” anaphora contain “vedea” in them, while the second and fourth verses contain forms of “parere.” That Dante moves between how the pilgrim “sees” something versus how something “seems” to the pilgrim, parallels the oscillation between an interpreter’s “seeing” something with the senses and then how he/she “re-sees” the same thing when sensual response fuses with intellectual comprehension. Within the act of contemplation, one must accept that a deeper meaning always lies within that which one “sees,” and for this reason the objects begin to “seem” different from what meets the eye. This “O” component progresses to the text’s third anaphora in the verb “mostrava” (“It showed”). Through this verb, one approaches the end of a cycle of interpretation. What is “shown” after contemplation is different from what is “seen” at the process’s beginning. The oscillation between “seeing” and “seeming” results, if one interprets properly, in what the text or artwork being interpreted intends to show: a meaning understood only through a translation into the mind’s contemplative language by the mediating phenomenological experiences of the senses. At this stage, the progression is close to complete, but the interpreter has not yet fi nished his/her task, meaningfulness must be reached. Something now is “shown,” so that one sees more than what was present through the act of “vedere”; but to fully interpret something, an individual must see it for him or herself, rather than merely have it shown to him or her. Dante expresses the achievement of completing a cycle of interpretation in the verse that immediately follows the last anaphora of the three-part series: winter 2006 transverse 87 Vedeva Troia in cenere e in caverne; o Ilion, come te basso e vile mostrava il segno che li si discerne! (I saw Troy turned to caverns and to ashes; O Ilium, your effi gy in stone it showed you there so squalid, so cast down!) (XII, 61-63)

In this verse, Dante repeats the progression of words previously given in the extensive anaphora: “vedeva,” “o,” and “mostrava.” Now, however, the progression completes itself with the word “discerne.” “Discernere” concludes the interpretive act. What was fi rst “seen” is now viewed in a different way: the interpreter understands the meaning depicted by his/her senses with respect to his/her personal situation in life. This self-awareness, meaningfulness, arrives with the return of the action to the self. If the progression had ended on “mostrava” the action would remain within the object, rather than the interpreter. The understanding one gains through “discernment” does not leave the individual, but remains as he or she progresses towards the next experience of something “nova,” the next artwork, the next fi gure of speech, both new and ‘strange’, requiring interpretation. The pilgrim constantly faces new situations which he eventually comes to understand, and then begins the cycle again as he continues towards Paradise, always keeping with him the understandings gained from previous experiences. Dante’s allusions to the interpretive process in Canto XII are not limited to his use of anaphora. He structurally, contextually, and by referencing another passage in the Commedia emphasizes the importance of the interpretive process encoded within the anaphora. Firstly, the initial letters of the three crucial expressions, “vedea,” “o,” and “mostrava”, when viewed from the order in which they appear acrostically on the page spell the word “vom.” In Italian this signifi es “man”; thus, the passage, a fi ctional representation of the process of interpretation, is specifi cally described as a function of the human condition. Interpretation is a gift bestowed upon the human species through divine grace; therefore, to interpret properly is in a sense man’s duty in life. As Dante’s Commedia works to demonstrate, proper interpretation is the event that places one on the right path towards God, every human soul’s fi nal destination. The context of Canto XII similarly represents the importance Dante places on 88 transverse winter 2006 human interpretation. The anaphora passage describes the pilgrim’s seeing thirteen different powerful instances of divine art sculpted upon the fl oor in Purgatory. The forms of purgatorial art witnessed by the pilgrim are all images of punished pride, of both the pagan and Christian traditions, beginning with Lucifer and ending with the destruction of the prideful city, Troy. The purpose of such art is to inform the souls forced to gaze upon it of the necessity to interpret what lies within the sculptures, to understand that sacrifi cing one’s pride, in the face of God, is the better way in life. Arriving at such understanding directly contributes to the purging process of which Purgatory consists. The prideful souls are physically forced to stare at the artwork by weights upon their shoulders. They are forced to commit to the process represented in Dante’s anaphora: they “see” the artwork at their feet, begin to interpret the images, and eventually discern understanding for themselves with respect to their past actions and present situations. Such understanding directly facilitates the souls’ purging, the ‘casting of the slough that prevents them from seeing God.’ Only once these souls have rid themselves of their residual fault and sin are they able to enter Paradise. The Purgatorial art, therefore, functions as a way of teaching the souls to interpret properly so that they may proceed towards God, and Dante uses this art and context to create his textually encoded image by which he teaches his own readers the importance of interpreting well. That the “vom” passage discussed above occurs while Dante-pilgrim views this same artwork seems to imply that it is the task of art in general to activate the interpretive process within the living person. Art is something fi rst to be experienced, and then interpreted in such a way that a unique understanding results, directing one towards the right path in life. In Canto X of the Purgatorio, Dante describes the situation of viewing God’s art in the lines:

Colui che mai non vide cosa nova produsse esto visibile parlare, novello a noi perché qui non si trova (This was the speech made visible by One within whose sight no thing is new—but we, who lack its likeness here, fi nd novelty.) (X, 94-96)

winter 2006 transverse 89 Describing the sculptures as “visibile parlare” refl ects the effects of artwork, specifi cally God’s, on the human being. Through the act of interpretation, images become something analogous to words, something like a ‘discourse’ results, and through this process the individual gains an understanding. Here the images are those produced by God, the only being to whom no sight is “new”, for the purpose of allowing the soul to interpret well, to discover new understanding, and to continue its progression towards divine grace. Canto XII’s representation of the process of understanding moves beyond its structural and contextual portrayal of the interpretive phenomenon. Dante directs his readers to a specifi c passage of the Commedia: the direct address in Purgatorio VIII. Repetition of the semantically charged word “sottile” establishes this connection. Examining the passage in which this word occurs suggests that Dante intentionally directs his readers to this canto’s address, because of its shared concern with the subject of interpretation. It contains a direct statement from Dante instructing his readers on the nature of interpretation and on the importance of interpreting his text well. William Franke identifi es Dante’s use of the address to the reader as a technique for guiding readers to understanding: “Some of these addresses are imperious directions claiming to guide the reader’s understanding of, participation in, or judgment upon whatever is happening in the narrative which they metanarratologically triumph” (43). Dante’s address is an active participation with the reader’s interpretive process. To prevent one from misunderstanding his text, he acts as a Virgil-type guide, and often reveals the meaning of what his readers encounter as they accompany the pilgrim on his journey. Thus, through his direct addresses, the poet himself partakes in the “mostrare” component of his reader’s interpretive journey by revealing its proposals of meaning. Franke assesses this discourse between the poem, reader, and author similarly when he writes:

The reader, by becoming an instance within the poem, moves from the position of epistemological subject, a contextual reality outside the fi ction, a fi xed framework in conformity with which the fi ction unfolds, to a position within an interpretive ontology set up by the poem. The reader becomes part of what is sometimes called ‘the world of the text’. Both the fi ctional world projected by the text and the ‘real’ world of the reader, in which text and reader alike ordinarily fi gure as objects, are included as correlative participants in the interpretive ontology of the poem happening as an event of address by being interpreted as such (43-44). 90 transverse winter 2006 The address to the reader is Dante’s method of communicating to his readers that they are very much a part of his text’s performance and purpose. Their ability to understand that they participate in the pilgrim’s interpretive journey and that they gain understandings relevant to their own particular situations in life is a fundamental aspect of the Commedia. It is therefore necessary that they interpret well, which is why Dante speaks directly through his text and makes its intentions clear. Canto XII’s allusion to such an address occurs in the verse that directly follows the conclusion of the “vom” passage:

Qual di penne fu maestro o di stile che ritraesse l’ombre e tratti ch’ivi mirar farieno uno ingegno sottile? (What master of the brush or of the stylus had there portrayed such masses, such outlines as would astonish all discerning minds?) (XII, 64-66)

Dante’s use of the word “sottile” forms a connection between this passage and the address to the reader four canti earlier in which the word “sottile” is a crucial element. In Canto VIII Dante addresses his reader: “Aguzza qui, lettor, ben li occhi al vero / ché ‘l velo è ora ben tanto sottile, / certo che ‘l trapassar dentro è leggero” (Here, reader, let your eyes look sharp at truth, / for now the veil has grown so very thin— / it is not diffi cult to pass within). He instructs his readers to interpret well by seeing the truth within his poem. At this point, its truth can be seen more readily, because its allegorical veil is “sottile.” Dante’s “subtlety” functions as the mediation through which his readers understand his text. He interrupts the fl ow of his fi ction to bring the readers into “the world of the text,” (43) and insists that they actively fulfi ll their duty as readers by making the effort to actively interpret its truth. The allusion to this passage within Canto XII implies that Dante “subtly” inserts his anaphora in an attempt to catch the reader’s eye, or listener’s ear, and remind him or her of the complex meaning that lies within the text, and of the interpreter’s duty to strive to understand it. The threat of not interpreting well is always present throughout Dante’s text, and it is this threat the Commedia seeks to prevent, primarily through the mediating actions winter 2006 transverse 91 of the fi ctive characters Virgil, Beatrice, and Dante. The “vom” anaphora in Canto XII anticipates this threat, and therefore includes the word “smarrito” as a warning to readers. To interpret incorrectly is to become “smarrito” (lost) in all senses of the word, physically, psychologically, intellectually, and spiritually. If one fails to discern the meaningfulness that lies within the polysemantic surface of life, represented in the equally polysemantic surface of Dante’s fi ction, the result could be movement along the wrong path in life. This had been the state of Dante-pilgrim at the fi ction’s beginning; accordingly, he was labeled “smarrito.” With the help of others, however, he continues on his journey of interpretation and learns to “see” correctly. Dante desires the same outcome for his readers’ experience of his text, and therefore does his best to successfully guide them through it. Having explicated the hermeneutic theory represented within one episode of the Commedia, it is important to indicate how Dante’s progression from “seeing” to discernment is similar to modern theory’s notion of a hermeneutic circle, using Paul Ricoeur’s interpretation theory as the point of departure for this comparison. Ricoeur identifi es the circle as representing the natural hermeneutically and phenomenologically bound condition of man’s being-in-the-world. As David Hoy writes, “the circle becomes a fundamental principle of man’s understanding of his own nature and situation. Understanding, and with it the hermeneutic circle, becomes a condition for the possibility of human experience and inquiry.” (Hoy vii). Establishing a parallel between the circle’s representation of this interpretive process and that depicted in Purgatorio XII’s “vom” passage reveals Dante’s ability to recognize, theorize, and represent the hermeneutical situation of man’s being. Ricoeur’s hermeneutic circle consists of two stages, the “descending analytics” and the “ascending dialectics”, which combine to represent the phenomenological experience of interpretation (Colson 107). His theory of textual interpretation fully develops these two concepts within the events of “explanation”, the initial descent along the circle involving empirical and analytic interpretation of experience, and “understanding” and appropriation”, the ascending shift towards an obtainment of meaning and self-understanding. The dynamic two-fold process of explanation and understanding encompasses the entire interpretive process for Ricoeur: “Then the term interpretation may be applied, not to a particular case of understanding, that of the written expressions of life, but to the whole process that encompasses explanation and understanding” (Interpretation 75). A parallel between the hermeneutic circle central to Ricoeur’s philosophy of understanding and the 92 transverse winter 2006 poetic representation of the human’s interpretive process within Dante’s “vom” passage is fi r st revealed by comparing the stages of progression throughout each author’s process. One can view Dante’s progression as circular in its beginning, with the experience of the senses, the action of “vedere”, moving downwards towards a contemplative discourse of this experience through the “O” and “M” phases of the process, which initiate a shift upwards, returning to the individual’s ‘sight’ through his/her discernment of meaning. The cycle will then repeat itself as the individual engages the next “nova” experience requiring interpretation and eventual understanding, always keeping the discerned meanings from past experiences within one’s memory as the knowledge that will contribute to future interpretation. The correlation between the two writers becomes more evident when viewing Dante’s process in terms of Ricoeur’s “descending analytics” and “ascending dialectics.” Applied to Dante’s interpretation theory, Ricoeur’s “descending analytics” would incorporate the “vedere” phase and half of the “O” phase. The “ascending dialectics” would begin within the oscillation in the individual’s “O” state, which marks an ascending movement along the circle as it passes through the “mostrare” phase performed by the artwork and culminates in the individual’s discernment. The point at which Dante’s interpreter shifts towards an upwards movement of understanding can be suffi ciently portrayed by Ricoeur’s description of the moment of transition within his own process: Beyond the polysemy of words in a conversation is the polysemy of a text which invites multiple readings. This is the moment of interpreting, in the technical sense of textual exegesis. It is also the moment of the hermeneutic circle between understanding initiated by the reader and the proposals of meaning offered by the text (Interpretation 108). Multiple readings of one text are a necessary condition of hermeneutics, because each individual understands him/her self in front of a text differently. Dante’s representation of a stage comparable to an “ascending dialectics” coincides perfectly with Ricoeur’s notion that each individual discerns for him/her self a single meaning from the various “proposals of meaning offered by the text.” This is the exact purpose of the shift from the “mostrare’ to the “discernere” phases presented in Purgatory XII. Thus, both writers place the fulfi llment of a cycle of the individual’s interpretive process within the discernment of meaningful self-understanding. Much remains to be discussed concerning the similar hermeneutic theories of Dante and Ricoeur. One could compare their notions of distanciation, the mediating role winter 2006 transverse 93 of language, and the idea that one’s participation in the hermeneutic circle may result in a progression forwards through life towards what Ricoeur himself describes as “the idea to which happiness points” (Symbolism 312). The goal of this paper, however, is not to present a complete comparative study of Dante’s medieval hermeneutics with that of modern theory. Rather, it is to explicate an instance in which Dante poetically represents a hermeneutic theory, and to indicate how such a theory resonates within modern philosophy. Such a parallel reveals that Dante and many other medieval philosophers have much to offer to the modern endeavors of hermeneutics. Perhaps modern hermeneutics is more indebted to the medieval speculations of an interpretation theory than it tends to accept. The natural condition of distanciation now calls for a reconciliation of the two time periods’ traditions and theorizations, in order to elucidate and expand the modern-day endeavors of a philosophy of understanding.

94 transverse winter 2006 works cited

- Alighieri, Dante. The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri. A Verse Translation by Allen Mandelbaum. New York: Bantam Books, 1980. - Franke, William. Dante’s Interpretive Journey. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996. - Hoy, David. The Critical Circle: literature, history, and philosophical hermeneutics. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978. - Olson, Allen. Myth, Symbol, and Reality. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1980. - Ricoeur, Paul. Symbolism of Evil. New York: Harper and Row, 1967. ---. Interpretation Theory. Fort Worth, TX: Texas Christian University Press, 1976.

winter 2006 transverse 95 the coctorphic self in words and images infernal descent, ghost language and visual poetry in the orphic trilogy ioana sion

The motif of katábasis, or descent into Hades, was originally attached to archaic religious structures, predating the Christian era and the descent of Christ, and most famously to the myth of Orpheus, celebrated hero of the Greco-Roman antiquity. A mythological dictionary gives the following reference: “Le thème de la descente aux enfers apparaît dès l’origine dans le mythe d’Orphée, remontant sans doute à des structures religieuses et sociales très archaïques”(Martin 181). From Antiquity to the Renaissance and onwards, a wide range of writers and musicians like Horace, Virgil, Ovid, Monteverdi, Gluck, Stravinsky, Calderón, Novalis, Nerval, Mallarmé, Valéry, Rilke have designated Orpheus as the patron of their art. As Walter Strauss has stated, “the history of the Orphic in the modern world is an abbreviated version of the history of modern poetry in general”(Strauss 219), from Virgil’s Fourth Georgic and Ovid’s Metamorphoses to Calderón’s El divino Orfeo and Rilke’ Sonnets to Orpheus. It also outlines the history of the opera, evolving from the tradition of fi fteenth century Florentine intermedi1 to the true classical tradition of opera starting with Monteverdi’s passionate La favola d’Orfeo (1607), to Gluck’s neo-classical Orfeo ed Euridice (1762), to Philip Glass’s post-modern chamber opera Orphée (1993), which uses as its libretto the screenplay of Jean Cocteau’s fi lm. The Orphic journey ultimately reaffi rms the force of the song transcending death. Walter Strauss gives an outline of the stages of the traditional Greek myth:

There are three major “moments” in this myth: 1) Orpheus as a singer- prophet (shaman) capable of establishing harmony in the cosmos (his apocryphal participation in the journey of the Argo elaborates this motif); 2) The descent into Hades (katábasis): the loss of Eurydice, the subsequent subterranean quest, and the second loss (here all accounts are in agreement except for the problem of motivation, and this is certainly the best known and most popular portion of the myth); 3) The dismemberment theme (sparagmós), which suggests a possible deviation from Dionysus or a friction between bacchantic Dionysus-worship and Orphic practices. (Strauss 6)

96 transverse winter 2006 A plurality of meanings have been attached to the many metamorphoses of the Orphic myth throughout centuries. Apollo and Orpheus were the designated protagonists of early operas, as prototypes of poetic and musical prowess: “verse, not prose, and music, not speech, formed the natural language of the gods” (R. Parker 2), and opera combined both. The myth was generally used as a statement about death, love, and the regenerating power of poetry and music. In the psychoanalytical age in which Cocteau was writing, Orpheus signalled an inward descent, and the myth mapped the journey of descent to and return from the unconscious or the emotional inferno. As Eva Kushner has noted: “Le couple Orphée-Eurydice représente alors la dualité qui, en l’homme, oppose l’esprit à l’instinct. Euridyce veut attirer Orphée vers l’Enfer, qui est le domaine instinctif. (…) la quête d’Eurydice devient une descente dans l’Enfers du coeur” (23). Eurydice became both a symbol of the death-wish and the obsessive image of the mother or wife – “perpetuelle menace à l’esprit créateur d’Orphée.” The modern Orpheus, like the one from antiquity, is a “fraternal poet”, a humanist participating in the sufferance of humankind, a shaman or healer of souls, beginning with their own. Similar to Dante of the Vita nuova, who experienced his renewal through the love and death of Beatrice, or the Dante of the Divine Comedy who accedes to Christian redemption through descent and ascent, Cocteau also conceives regeneration in terms of descent into hell and creates his own universe of redemption. According to Ovid, after Orpheus’s dismemberment, instead of his corpse, the nymphs discover a fl ower with a circle of white petals around a yellow centre. The fl ower symbolism recalls Dante’s most inspired pattern, the rosa sempiterna, the white rose with its yellow center, formed by the souls of the Empyrean. The Dantesque rose is like a immense amphitheatre, divided vertically and equally between the Old and New Testaments, with the upper rows on one half formed by souls who believed in Christ to come, and on the other half those who believed in Christ when he came. The circle and centre motif points at Orpheus’ transformation into God after his death, the Christ-like sacrifi ce of the poet. For Cocteau, the poet is a messenger perpetually experiencing death and rebirth, endowed with the gift of being able to cross into other worlds and explore the underworld of the unconscious. Cocteau’s own Nekyia began after the loss of Raymond Radiguet, and Orpheus became Cocteau’s key myth and metaphor for the journey between worlds undertaken by the poet, for the link between reality and art, the visible and the invisible. “If the poem could become a poet, Orpheus would be the poem: he is the ideal winter 2006 transverse 97 and the emblem of poetic plenitude” (Blanchot Space 143). He is the origin of the poem, the infi nite trace of absence concealing the secret identity between singing and dying, writing and dying, the transmutation of the invisible into the visible. Rainer Maria Rilke believes that the interior space or the poem’s space “translates things” from the exterior language into the inner one. In the world, things are transformed into graspable objects and in the imaginary space they are transmuted into non-graspable things. The poet is the “essential translator” and his task is the metamorphosis of the visible into the invisible. This transmutation into visibility, into free subjectivity, allows the artist to grasp afresh its singular verbal and visual weave, followed by achieving a certain “objectifi cation” of inner fantasies. The fi c tive language of the unreal is exposed, turned into image, and given an objective body. Poems, novels, diaries, essays, drawings, tapestries, church frescoes, plays and fi lms superbly shape the global multi-medial artistic universe of Cocteau. In terms of medium and message, it is fi lm and the Orphic myth that essentially represent the artist.

“The Orphic Trilogy” and the Coctorphic Self. Myth and Personal Mythology

Cocteau’s work is about autobiographical reshaping of the Orphic legend, about reviving the Greek myth and bringing it closer to 20th century audiences. By adapting and modernizing it, by freeing it of its ornamental, dated elements, Cocteau attempts his personal psychoanalysis. He uses the basic elements of the classical myth, “les mythèmes” as Claude Lévi-Strauss named them, which are rearranged against a modern background, decor and costumes. The three major moments of the myth are outlined in his fi lm Orphée (1949): the theme of the poet-laureate, the katábasis (the underworld descent taking place in between the two “deaths” of Eurydice), and the sparagmós, the poet’s dismemberment at the end. There is no borrowing from the traditional topography of the Inferno, no mentioning of the names of Hades or Persephone, Styx, Phlegeton or Cocytus, Cerberus or Charon. The word “inferno” is used once in the fi lm, and similarly in scene 7 of the stage play from 1926, where we are told that Orpheus will follow Eurydice “jusqu’aux Enfers”. Cocteau’s frequently quoted statement, “I am a lie that always tells the truth”, points at the idea that Cocteau conceals his self under the masques of myth, but precisely these mythological disguises tell the truth and unveil his essence. Self-knowledge is possible only through the artistic act of creation; his self is concealed and revealed through his art. Myth and art 98 transverse winter 2006 appear as a lie for the consciousness, but a lie that reveals truth for the subconscious. In La diffi cuté d’être Cocteau confesses: “Blood of a Poet is only a descent into oneself, a way of using the mechanism of the dream without sleeping, a crooked candle, often mysteriously blown out, carried about in the night of the human body” (77). The relationship of the poet-artist to his creation evidenced in the fi rst episodes from Blood of a Poet (1930) suggests “the initiation of the poet to the poetry within himself” (Evans 90). In the Hôtel des folies dramatiques where he enters through the mirror, or the “gateway of his own image”, the poet fi nds his sources of inspiration, his myths and archetypes, his past, present and future selves. Through a montage of dream-images or onirosigns, four different episodes unfold, vaguely following the four partitions of the Jungian self: the execution-resurrection scene (Ego), the shadow of the opium smoker (Shadow), the fl ight lesson of a disobedient girl (Anima), and the unmasking of the hermaphrodite (Persona). The last two could make more sense when reversed: the hermaphrodite could suggest the Image of his Soul - not the expected Anima, but a “dangerous” balance between Animus and Anima. In this case, the tormented girl emerges as his Persona. Since it is the only episode presenting two characters, it appears as an allegory of society whipping the recalcitrant girl who refuses to abide by the rules. Cocteau never followed any set guidelines, was never part of a literary school and never took a political stand, so this may well be the image that he promoted in society - that of a disobedient child turned martyr and hero. “Les enfants et les héros sont des désobéissants” (Entretiens 8) he insists in his interviews with Jean Dormachi. His public persona was that of an anti-intellectual and an anti-conformist from the early twenties on: “…ce n’est pas la tradition qu’il faut contredire, mais l’avant-garde. Quand je suis entré à l’Académie en disant: ‘Je fais cela contre le conformisme anti-conformiste’, c’était la leçon de Radiguet” (Entretiens 8). By exposing the fourfold nature of his psyche (the four archetypes or eternal aspects of the self), the artist attempts to understand and accept the Orphic nature of his creative activity. Jung equates the regression of the libido into the unconscious with the descent to and return from the Inferno. The descent into the unconscious is analogous to a descensus ad inferos, into Hades, correlated to the maternal or cosmic womb. Like Jung, Cocteau seeks to release the fl ood of his uninhibited imagination, a cornucopia or pandemonium of images, the Pandora’s box; through the revelation of the eidola, the archetypal essence and shape of ideas and dreams that form life, his daimons and creative patterns become apparent. Descent and return stir the matrix of his mythopoetic winter 2006 transverse 99 imagination, this immense repository of arch-images is set into motion, and captured on fi lm. The death-rebirth theme is central to Cocteau’s Orphic identity, resurrectional and “phoenixological” par excellence. Orphism fostered the experience of regeneration and dealt with man’s intrinsic duality between the Dionysian and the Apollonian, mortal and divine, in two different ways. On the one hand, there was an expected natural process of purifi cation through a series of physical rebirths in animal or human shape. On the other hand, in order to accelerate the spiritual regeneration, the Orphic cult would provide salvation during one’s lifetime, through a cleansing process of self- discipline beginning at initiation, a development that resulted in immortality by breaking the chain of deaths-rebirths. Cocteau re-states many times, like Maurice Merleau-Ponty for instance, the idea of perpetual regeneration through art, and that “the painter’s vision is a continued birth” (Merleau-Ponty 168). To be a true artist, one must die and be reborn each time he creates. Immortality can be attained through art, and every act of creation has the role of an Orphic purifi cation. In Cahiers du cinéma, Cocteau defi nes Testament of Orpheus (1959) as his own rite of initiation, fi nally breaking the sensory-motor schema: “Le fi lm n’est autre (outre un auto-portrait d’ordre interne) qu’une traduction dans ma langue de ce que j’imagine d’une initiation orphique” (“Testament” 3).

Coctorphic Myth and Self-Representation.

One of the trilogy’s most fundamental issues concerns the notion of representation, in particular the possibility of distinguishing between reality and appearance, life and art. The question of the limits of representation is addressed by Cocteau in his entretiens with André Fraigneau (Entretiens). Cocteau considers that the work is not a means of evasion but rather one is invaded by it; similarly to Max Ernst, who thought t h at the role of the painter was to grasp and project what is seen in him, one must speak not of “inspiration” but rather “expiration”. It is not the outside universe that is revealed through the work of art, but the inner ghosts. “Je veux dire que l’inspiration arriverait du dehors, et il n’y a pas de dehors. C’est votre nuit qui parle, des choses en vous-même que vous ne connaissez pas. Donc il y a expiration” (Entretiens 109). Here he seems to reject Maurice Merleau- Ponty’s belief that inspiration and expiration of Being are slightly discernible, that “it becomes impossible to distinguish between what sees and what is seen, what paints 100 transverse winter 2006 and what is painted” (Merleau-Ponty 167). At a later stage, Cocteau agreed that in the case of the spectator, expiration is preceded by inspiration coming from the work perceived, which he calls “invasion” of the outside world (of the movie or play). When empathy is established between the fi lm and its beholder, the latter experiences a sublime catharsis, or a trauma, which triggers the probing of the depths of one self. But genuine poetry has no use for evasion. What it wants is invasion, that is, that the soul be invaded with words and objects which propel it to plunge deep into itself. Several passages from The Art of Cinema recall Andrei Tarkovsky’s words: “The aim of art is to prepare a person for death, to plow and harrow his soul, rendering it capable of turning to good. Touched by a masterpiece, a person begins to hear in himself that same call of truth that prompted the artist to his creative act” (Tarkovsky 43). Like Tarkovsky, Cocteau defends the idea of an uncompromising cinema of poetry and distinguishes between commercial “cinéma” and artistic “cinématographe”, between narrative and poetic cinema. He professes in a way the break in the sensory-motor link of modern cinema, and, in Deleuzian terms, tends to reject the movement-image in favour of the time-image. How can the poet’s creation be perceived, if the notion of outside model is questionable? According to Herbert Marcuse in Eros and Civilization and Walter Strauss, Cocteau’s Orpheus is intrinsically connected to Narcissus, as both play similar roles in the modern consciousness. Narcissus attains liberation though beauty and contemplation. The Orphic Eros transforms being and masters Thanatos through song and play. They both show ways of liberating the self through self- contemplation and death, of reconciling Eros and Thanatos, Dyonisus and Apollo. The most advertised image of Orpheus is that of Jean Marais’s face refl ected in the water, in a typically narcissistic pose. In the episode of the drawing of the self-portrait in Le Testament d’Orphée, Cégeste underlines: “Ne vous obstinez pas, un peintre fait toujours son propre portrait.” Is the work of art the imitation of the mental image of the self, or is it the “in-itself”, that very image? Cocteau’s trilogy is modelled on visions of his inner self, striving to become the “in-itself”, the very soul of the poet, the becoming poetry. It would seem that it is the destruction of the self, followed by its rebirth, blindness and vision, darkness and creation that are extensively at play in the poet’s work. According to Ovid’s Metamorphoses, when visiting the Underworld, Narcissus sees his own face refl ected in the waters of the Styx. The descent to Hell unequivocally uncovers our true image of the self. Cocteau continually reduplicates and reifi es his self, stubbornly and winter 2006 transverse 101 methodically. The draped and masked allegorical fi gure in the prologue to Blood of a Poet appears to be the muse of cinema, according to John Carvahlo, but it also stands for the function of myth in art and ultimately the myth of Jean Cocteau himself. Towards the end of his life, he fervently created endless imitations and reproductions - objects - of himself in diverse media, more or less ephemeral:

Adhérant une fois encore charnellement à son modèle – le dernier à sa portée -, le sexagénaire de Santo Sopir allait partout faisant du Cocteau, modelant des assiettes de Cocteau, griffant les initiales de Cocteau. Otage de son propre univers, el en vint à s’imiter, puis à se plagier, à décalquer ses Oedipe et ses Antinoüs sur des programmes, des serviettes, des nappes en papier (Claude Arnaud 733).

Cocteau,propagator of the “Coctorphic myth”, advertiser of his own katábasis, and cre- ator of his own moving statue, was positively affected by the “Orpheus complex”. The Orphic descent to the underworld was actually the myth Cocteau lived by. He sought to capture and shelter his self in his works, perpetuating his Orphic identity in the crea- tive process. Like Jung’s Philemon, Heurtebise was selected as his psychopomp or guide to the other side of the mirror, to the personal and collective unconscious. His life and work constantly reproduced, again in Arnaud’s words, “les Orphée et les licornes qui faisaient sa renommée”. Walter Benjamin famously analysed the issue of the copy and the original involved in “reproducibility”, and argued that the multiplication of cop- ies produced “the decay of the aura” of the original. Arnaud similarly pointed out that Cocteau’s aura seemed to be “exhausted” in the last years of his life. I would argue very much the opposite. In Cocteau’s case, time enhanced the aural charisma of the mul- titudes of Coctorphic copies that we were left with, and I believe that the mystique of this “original” is more appealing now than ever, which hopefully this essay will prove.

Symbolic Elements: Cocteau’s Mirrors

The mirrors, so abundant in Cocteau’s fi lms, graciously “frame” the borders between life and art and insistently undermine the separation between reality and representation. Mirrors are subversive and duplicitous, they challenge the wholeness 102 transverse winter 2006 and uniqueness of the individual, since they typically double a character, show manifold representations of the same model or simultaneously reveal multiple images from several angles. The mirror emphasises a split of identity, a fractured self, or quite the opposite, a “redoublement”, a narcissistic accentuation of the self. The mirror stage, according to Jacques Lacan, is a socializing experience. Through the mirror the child perceives itself as an Other, and is transfi gured into a social being, located in the presence of the Other. “We only have to understand the mirror stage as an identifi cation, in the full sense that analysis gives to the term: namely the transformation that takes place in the subject when he assumes an image” (Lacan 2). Images have a mythical and resurrectional status, they are ways of “world making,” not just “world mirroring”, according to W.J.T. Mitchell and Nelson Goodman. “Pictures are themselves products of poetry, and a poetics of pictures addresses itself to them, as Aristotle proposed, as if they were living being, a second nature that human being have created around themselves” (Mitchell xv). A poetics of pictures is a study of “the lives of images”, from the ancient idols and fetishes to contemporary digital images, and Cocteau’s use of fi lm and mirror is an exercise in self-transformation and world making. The condition of refl ection rather than repetition allows Cocteau to achieve in the space of the cinematic image what repetition of words achieves in time. Refl ection is repetition in the present, the domain of vision. It is an ontological refl ection, which transcends profane time and enters the eternal, mythical present. Deleuze argues that this virtual present may also account for the totality of time. Mirrors help create what Deleuze calls crystal images: the character and the world are trapped in endless refl ections, the actual and the virtual become indiscernible. The image of death at work like bees in a glass hive recalls Tarkovsky’s use of mirrors, for instance in Zerkalo (1974), when the mirror refl ects the young mother as an old woman. “The crystal-image shapes time as a two-way mirror that splits the present into two heterogeneous directions, “one of which is launched towards the future while the other falls into the past” (Deleuze Cinema 2 81). Cocteau’s mirrors are also tied to “liquid perceptions” which, according to Deleuze, characterise the state of the cine-eye in the pre-war French school. Water is persistently present in Blood of a Poet (the mirror is liquid, the water in the wash basin, the snow in the fourth episode). It has its own language different from “earthly languages” (Deleuze Cinema 1 77). Mirrors are also chronosigns, time capsules containing condensed and coexisting sheets of past and projected future on virtual peeks of present. Each present moment, winter 2006 transverse 103 according to Henri Bergson’s famous diagram, is a contraction of the past, a concentration of the cone of virtual past in its apex. The refl ection of the mirror exists in a virtual present; it is the plane containing the peeks of all the cones of the refl ected perceivers. Seeing is always in the present, believes the phenomenologist Bernhard Groethuysen. The surface of the mirror captures the “intuitive nunc”, the unchanging vision which reveals the succession of past- present-future occurrences of the “dialectical nunc”. Reality is consistently subverted by its refl ection or reduplication, whether this be in a mirror or in the form of the poet’s alter-ego. Mirrors signify becoming and “imprinted time”; they are thresholds that tie the characters to the underworld, to death and transformation, and make the limits of representation uncertain.

Cocteau, Blanchot, Jung: Orpheus’s Look Back

In “Le regard d’Orphée,” in L’Espace littéraire (1955), Maurice Blanchot comments on Orpheus’ descent into the depths of hell, towards Eurydice. She is for him “l’extreme que l’art puisse atteindre, elle est, sous un nom qui la dissimule et sous un voile qui la couvre, le point profondement obscur vers lequel l’art, le désir, la mort, la nuit semblent tendre. Elle est l’instant où l’essence de la nuit s’approche” (Espace 227). The Orpheus myth in Blanchot’s text speaks about Eurydice as the “extreme” to which art points. Orpheus’ work is about looking back to see death, ultimately about stepping beyond the boundaries of life. The poet’s task would be to say everything, to write the ultimate masterpiece. In saying everything, at the extreme, it would paradoxically account for the death of the poet who writes. Gazing at the limit would mean seeing life from beyond the grave and transposing it into the world of the living. That vision would be neither within life, nor outside it, but just at the edge of the frame. Here I will refer to the uncanny encounter of the poet Orpheus (played by Cocteau) with his double, in the Testament: it is as if the two fi gures whose paths cross represented a double vision, one coming from birth and the other from the grave. In a fl ash, the poet Orpheus would approach the extreme to see simultaneously his self as seen by himself and as conceived by the others in a sudden apprehension of the wholeness of being. In this mysterious gaze, he is himself and another, himself and Eurydice, neither living nor dead. As Blanchot writes, this is the ungraspable gaze of Orpheus, a double gaze, which Cocteau represents in Testament. It is the image by which, the poet can see the extreme, affi rm his fi nitude and plenitude, the wholeness and 104 transverse winter 2006 absence of being which he represents. To be is to be perceived, famously argued Bishop Berkeley, while Beckett maintains that to be is to be perceived by one’s self. Cocteau’s being lies at the intersection between being perceived by oneself and by the others. Orpheus’ look back marks a threshold, a transgression and a conscious choice: “at this pivotal moment he is choosing his destiny as a vocation” (Romanyshyn 71). According to Mark Greene, the former identity of Orpheus is shattered through this backward glance. “The Orphic moment of the soul is the moment when ‘the possibilities of an exceptional type of personality’ become possible” (Romanyshyn 71). The transformation of his self allows him to become a conscious shaman, able to hold the tension of the shamanic contradiction of being at the same time free and in the service of forces beyond the self. The shaman is a bifocal consciousness with two centres, according to Jack Lindsay, torn between free will and being a mouthpiece for the Gods, between the Apollonian and the Dionysian modes of thought. Built on the older fi gure of the shaman, which his mythic descent into the underworld fully illustrates, Orpheus appears as a shaman-poet as well as a poet-thinker who conveys the tension between philosophos and poiesis. Jung’s psychology is crafted by his descent to the underworld and becomes an expression of the self’s Orphic voice. The soul’s awakening, or the Orphic moment restores the connection with the divine and establishes the harmony between the personal voice and the song of creation, or Dante’s music of the spheres. Cocteau’s lifelong work on Orpheus, like Jungian psychotherapy, is centred around Orpheus’s look back, and helps in choosing to follow your own way to the wholeness of being, and not the mimetic life of conventions. The individuation process can be equated to the soul singing his true Orphic song, and Orpheus to the archetypal fi gure of individuation.

Cocteau and Deleuze: Line, Word, Image and Cinema

In his fi lms as in his diaries, Cocteau intermingles image and word, fi lling in the spaces between drawn faces with a narrative. “With the writer,” he notes, “line takes precedent over form and content. It runs through the words he assembles. It strikes a continuous note unperceived by ear or eye. It is, in a way, the soul’s style.” A painter can paint a landscape or a cross - the subject is irrelevant - as they will always express themselves “Un peintre peut peindre un hareng saur avec une fourchette... c’est toujours son auto-portrait.” winter 2006 transverse 105 One can always tell who the artist is, and a cross made by Miró will never be mistaken for one made by Matisse or Picasso. “Par conséquent, la personnalité se trouve dans la ligne elle-même, beaucoup plus que dans ce que cette ligne représente” (Entretiens 6). Pierre Chanel, the editor of Cocteliana, maintains that the artist’s drawing was the child of his handwriting. “L’écriture c’est du dessin noué autrement et le dessin c’est un autre emploi de l’écriture et quand je dessine j’écris et peut-être quand j’écris, je dessine” (Qtd. in Weiswiller 10). Cocteau’s focus is on the connection between the writer and his objects, between subject and object, and above all between the language- based self as subject and the non-linguistic self as its object. Like Samuel Beckett, Cocteau emphasises the division of the self into two components, one dependent on language and the other on an extra-linguistic mode of being. Beckett, for instance, insists that Proustian involuntary memory establishes the connection between the two and “frees the essential reality that is denied to the contemplative as to the active life” (55). Cocteau found in fi lm the way of expressing the delicate balance between the linguistic and non-linguistic reality of the self. In his trilogy, he uses what Gilles Deleuze and Pier Paolo Pasolini call free indirect discourse, which in cinema corresponds to the semi-subjective perspective of the camera. Cocteau “makes the camera felt” through various tricks like walking through mirrors, and showing the body of a boy absorbed by his angel after being killed by a snowball. Blood of a Poet was made at a time when strangeness displayed all its attributes, argues Cocteau, and this “visible singularity” had the effect of provoking thought. The characteristic Cocteau special effect involves reversing time through reverse motion, for instance in the episode of the resuscitation of the hibiscus fl ower in Testament, or deforming movement through slow motion or nailing the set on the fl oor of the studio and fi lming from above. A well-known example would be the poet’s strenuous walk along the hotel corridor in Blood of a Poet, clinging to the wall as if resisting being pulled away by an anomalous gravity, an effect which is repeated in Orpheus when Heurtebise and Orpheus travel along the infernal wall. Cocteau’s movies could also be read as modern lectosigns, especially Orpheus and Testament (Blood of a Poet would display onirosigns or dream images, according to Deleuze’s categories). Sight and sound are autonomous elements of the free indirect discourse of modern cinema, and both visual and audio images must be read. The act of speech “becomes visible at the same time that it makes itself heard, but also the visual image becomes readable, as such, as visual image in which the 106 transverse winter 2006 act of speech inserts itself as component” (Cinema 2 234). Like Carl Dreyer, Cocteau slows down the cadence of his actors to a ritual pace, which gives the impression of free indirect speech. Discourse is “dis-enchained” from its standard usage, made strange and “framed”. Speech in Cocteau’s fi lms is markedly theatrical and declamatory, and his voice over narration device has the effect of foregrounding speech. As the protagonists cross into the inferno, an otherworld emerges, dispossessed of its linguistic constituents and unaffected by conventional categories. Like Antonioni’s barren spaces (Deserto Rosso, L’Avventura) or Pasolini’s deserted landscapes (Il Vangelo secondo Matteo, Uccelacci e Uccellini, Teorema), Cocteau’s location in Testament is infernal and archaeological (Val d’Enfer in Les Baux, south of France, visited seven centuries earlier by Dante Alighieri, before writing The Divine Comedy2, and inspiration for the Inferno).

It is as if, speech having removed itself from the image to become founding act, the image, for its part made the foundations of space rise up, the ‘strata’, those mute powers of the before or after of speech. The visual image becomes archaeological, stratigraphic, tectonic (Cinema 2 243).

Cocteau explores “the deserted layers of our time which bury our own phantoms” (Cin- ema 2 244), materialised in Val d’Enfer, with its appearance of excavated archaeo- logical digs. The visual and sonic images, disconnected from their standard contexts, must be “read”, that is, re-connected mentally by the spectator who reconstitutes the three-dimensional space sometimes with considerable effort of imagination. For in- stance, the sound accompanying Cocteau’s death by Minerva is that of a jet plane. The voice-over reading becomes the “aerial founder” (fondateur aérien) of the visual image which “reveals its geological strata or foundations” (Cinema 2: 246). The sonic and visual images interact in a “come-and-go between speech and the image” (247). Cocteau’s sound fi lms, like modern lectosigns, exploit the power of a disjunction or conjunction of word and image, sound and sight. The split between seeing and speaking is what re-connects them to one another: “It is the limit of each one that relates it to the other” (260). This complementarity between voice and vision, this “perpetual re-enchainment” of word and image haunts the modern cinema as well as Cocteau’s trilogy. “What speech utters, is also what sight only sees through clairvoyance, and what sight sees, is the unsayable that speech utters” (260). winter 2006 transverse 107 The camera-consciousness becomes all-pervasive. At times it is diffi cult to distinguish between the perspective of the character and that of the camera. “The perspective of the camera invades that of the character to the point that the fi l mmaker’s view is refl ected through his character” (Carvalho 110). John Carvalho elaborates on Deleuze’s belief that “it is a case of going beyond the subjective and the objective toward a pure form which sets itself up as an autonomous vision of the content”(Deleuze Cinema 1 74). Without naming it, Cocteau, like Pasolini, uses the “free indirect subjective” to defi ne and create his “cinema of poetry.” Cocteau’s Orphic Trilogy is the most developed manifestation of the poetic form of his spirit. Like Gianbattista Vico, Cocteau believes the poet to be the creator par excellence. Poetry is the “foundation of writing” and a “prime condition of philosophy and civilization” (“niente è nell’intelletto che prima non sia nel senso” - Scholastics’ axiom). The song of Orpheus precedes thought and articulation, as metaphor comes before abstraction. It liberates the soul of its subjection to melodies that are not its own, it provides self-knowledge and provokes anamnesis through catharsis. The cathartic process of descent is at the core of the theology of Orphism and brings true knowledge of oneself by penetrating the deep strata of the unconscious and uncovering the divine spark. Remembering is triggered by the perfect harmony of the song, which puts the self in contact with the music of the divine spheres. Cocteau’s inner spirit of poetry is prelinguistic and words alone are not a satisfactory expression. His fi lm images trace back the roots of his words to their pre-lingual symbols. Cocteau attempted a continuous translation between genres, between visual and textual, and we could transfer to him Peggy Phelan’s remark in regards to Samuel Beckett’s treatment of words as images, as both artists belong to the same category of those who “saw the visual as worded and understood that the act of speaking inevitably created a pictorial image” (Phelan 1285). According to Beckett, understanding comes through a “sudden visual grasp, a sudden shot of the eye” (“Van Velde” 125) triggered by the extra-linguistic, unconscious visual element. Vision provides us with instant access to the non-lingustic self. For Cocteau, cinema is a mode of writing, as writing is a way of seeing; fi lm is regarded as something like a very special drawing or a precious poem (On the Film 34). “Cinema has never been able – despite anyone who might wish it otherwise – to exist without a text – as origin, as method, as critique, as criticism, as description, even as title. Like almost all painting, the cinema is a slave to text to the point of reducing imagery to the role of illustration,” argues Peter Greenaway (18). Cocteau’s movie 108 transverse winter 2006 Orpheus endeavours not only to strike a balance or a correspondence between the text of his homonymous theatrical play and the visions of his non-linguistic imagination, but simply to let the words evolve into images, retrace the lines into shapes and volumes. We can say that every modern fi lm is made of two components, a visual fi lm of screen images and an audio fi lm of sounds and words. All fi lms are shaped by images and speech, but Cocteau’s fi lms are about words becoming images and vice-versa. This was best manifested in his fi rst silent movie, before words gained their sonic dimension on screen. In Blood of a Poet, Cocteau explicitly gives life to the word in a liquid transition from the words written on the screen, in Cocteau’s elegant calligraphy, to the cinematic image itself. The written line is reassembled in the drawing of the artist’s portrait whose mouth comes alive and is transferred to the artist’s palm, soaked in a wash basin and applied to the statue (played by Lee Miller) which comes to life and utters words that will send the poet to his other world. Onirosigns of statues, which move under the gaze of the dreamer were later used by Ingmar Bergman (in Fanny and Alexander for instance) and living statues appear in Peter Greenaway’s The Draughtsman’s Contract. Moving statues are also metaphors for the art of cinema in general, and Cocteau’s fi rst movie literally outlines the process of transforming words into moving images, of creating fi lms from stills, of disregarding the prohibition on images of the second commandment.

Caméra-stylo, the Art of Cinema and the Self

À propos of Blood of a Poet, Cocteau writes in a letter to his mother: “Je travaille jour et nuit – mais maintenant je sais écrire en pellicule comme avec de l’encre et c’est autre chose, je te l’affi rme, de plus grave et de plus étrange” (Qtd. in Renaudot 47-48). This statement brings to mind the notion of caméra-stylo developed by Alexandre Astruc in 1948, in “The Birth of a New Avant-Garde: La caméra-stylo”. Astruc proclaims the new age of cinema as the age of the caméra-stylo, in which fi lm is gradually becoming a “precise language” (19), “the exact equivalent of literary language” (20) “the most extensive and clearest language there is” (22) and which is essentially “the vehicle of thought” which clarifi es the relationships between subject and objects (Astruc 20). The cinematograph should be treated as an art, which is above all “un véhicule de la pensée” - repeats several times Cocteau in his Entretiens (15, 17). The cinema will break free winter 2006 transverse 109 from the tyranny of the image for its own sake “to become a means of writing just as fl e xible and subtle as written language” (Astruc 18). When the scriptwriter directs his own script, “the distinction between author and director loses all meaning. Direction is no longer a means of illustrating or presenting a scene, but a true act of writing. The fi l mmaker/author writes with his camera as a writer writes with his pen” (Astruc 22). However, does Cocteau use cinematographic images same way as a writer uses literary images? Is it merely “translation into cinematic terms of verbal tenses and logical relationships” (Astruc 22)? Cocteau believes otherwise:

Le cinématographe exige une syntaxe. Cette syntaxe n’est obtenue que par l’enchainement et par le choc des images entre elles. Rien d’étonnant à ce que la singularité d’une syntaxe qui nous est propre – notre style – se traduise dans la langue visuelle. (Entretiens 14)

Cocteau’s primary concern in a fi lm is to prevent the images from fl owing and to oppose, anchor and join them without destroying their specifi city, without overlooking what is in- trinsic to the fi lm techniques. “May fi lm remain fi lm and none of its images be capable of translation into any other language” (Art of Cinema 28), other than the language of edited images following the grammar of free indirect discourse. Cocteau is interested in the colli- sion of shots, in the dialectics of fragmentation and shock. Through editing, the ‘syntax’ of his movie, he tries to segment the cinematic fl ow, to oppose or juxtapose images so as to create new meaning. Roland Barthes discusses the general opinion that the image is an area of “resistance to meaning”, in the “name of a certain mythical idea of Life: the image is re-presentation, which is to say ultimately resurrection” (Barthes 32). Redemption is to be found in this resurrectional quality, and meaning in the juxtaposition of images, in the in-between space. The artist must impose his presence or “invisibility” in the art fi lm, and interrupt the entertaining visual fl ow. The poet has to develop a new language, but in his personal style, he has to translate his style into a visual syntax corresponding to the new medium. For Cocteau, the writer will become “digne de cet art” by creating “un objet dont le style devienne équivalent à son style de plume” (Entretiens 18). He attaches no greater importance to the text than to the visual style, which is “the real style of the fi lm, since it is primarily a matter of writing for the eyes” (Art of Cinema 33). The dead language of cinema only becomes a living language when the author reveals himself though the image, and 110 transverse winter 2006 accomplishes a comprehensive translation between the page and the screen, without lim- iting himself to the imitation of the text. “The cinema studio is a factory for making ghosts. The cinema is a ghost language that has to be learned” (Art of Cinema 130), it is ultimately the language of the author’s illusive self. The fi lm offers visions of reality - it performs a striptease that sheds the shell of the body in order to reveal the soul. Cocteau states:

La force d’un fi lm c’est son vérisme. (…) Orphée est un fi lm réaliste – premièrement parce que c’est mon univers comme Faust est l’univers de Goethe – deuxièmement parce que le cinématographe permet de rendre l’irréel réel– de montrer à tous ce qui se passe en un. (Entretiens 88)

Cocteau claimed that in order to work, fantasy needed to be rooted in the real- ity of selfhood, and cinema had the means to make the soul’s fantastic world real, by showing glimpses into the depths of the unconscious. Through hallucina- tory dreams and fantasies, by exploring the “supernatural Esperanto of the im- age” (Art of Cinema 133), Cocteau developed an all-encompassing style of the self. “Cinematography is realistic, and so are dreams. Everything depends on the order in which reality is cut and reassembled to become your own” (Art of Cinema 71-72). Cocteau repeatedly emphasized the need for precision and realism, for “the marvelous cannot be evoked though vagueness, and that mystery exists only in precise things” (Cocteau 104). The eternal aspects of the soul are objective realities. The pure poetry of the self entails stern discipline, and is better attained “through order, rigor, the invention of new elements, beauty of simple lines, the harmony of perfect rhythms” (Gilson 56). Cocteau likes to be in charge of every element - the “éclairage, décors, costumes, maquillage, musique, etc. Tout cela se trouve dans ma main et je collabore étroitement avec ceux qui m’assistent. Le fi lm est donc […] un objet de moi” (Entretiens 19). The projections of the imagination are absolute objective realities for the artist, and fi lm is an objectifi ed image of the self. In The Orphic Trilogy, a new cinematic vocabulary arises from the combination of spoken and visual language, connecting the linguistic and the non- linguistic parts of what I call the Coctorphic self. Film is the perfect medium for the pure poetry of the “expert in phoenixology,” for globally expressing Cocteau’s Orphic self, “the no man’s land of twilight where mysteries strive” (Art of Cinema: 156). Cocteau found cinema, “the tenth muse”, to be an unparalleled instrument winter 2006 transverse 111 for the communication of poetry and used it as his most cherished poetic vehicle. Poetic cinema or better fi lm-poetry is evocative of the intuitive self of the poet/ fi l mmaker and speaks directly to the subconscious of the viewer. “Each moment on the screen presents to us the mythic prototypes of our own consciousness, or perhaps of our unconscious” (T. Parker 17). It presents “documentary scenes of another realm”, makes visible “the great night of the human body” (Cocteau Two Screenplays 3-4), and aims at connecting the spectators to their authentic self, the collective unconscious, the beyond.

Cocteau and Deren: Cinema of Poetry, a Cross…

Maya Deren, the American avant-gardist, spoke of a cinema of poetry representing a vertical experience opposed to the horizontality of drama and narrative. Her theorization of a cinematic grammar was analyzed in connection to the linguistic model developed by Roman Jakobson. The syntagmatic axis would correspond to linear combinations of words, metonymy and prose, while the vertical paradigmatic axis of language involves word substitutions, metaphor and poetry. We can fi nd further similarities between Deren’s horizontal and vertical structures and Deleuze’s distinction between the linear “movement- image” of classical narrative cinema and the “time-image” of modernist fi lm, which opens up cinema to the phenomenon of thought. Unlike Deren in her An Anagram of Ideas on Art, Form and Film (1946), in Art of Cinema, Cocteau does not attempt to develop a model of fi lmmaking practice. His contribution to fi lm theory is a more or less contradictory description of his artistic practice – fi lmmaking as originating in poetry, emphasizing art and not technology. He does not use theoretical tools and critical methodologies. Deren had a great admiration for Blood of a Poet, Jean Cocteau’s fi rst denunciation of surrealist fi lm, which she saw in New York around 1943. The unconscious and its archetypes are the origin of all art production, according to Jung and the surrealists. Cocteau, like Deren, saw similarities between the cinematic techniques and those of the unconscious, only the raw material of the subconscious was further transformed through the artistic instruments. Film is a method of provoking a special psychic activity in the minds of the viewers, believed Cocteau and Deren. In 1916, at Harvard, Hugo Münsterberg (a colleague of Salomon Derenkowsky, Deren’s father) conducted experiments, which proved that the cinematic apparatus could induce mental 112 transverse winter 2006 processes. Art is not just an expression of pain, but a form which creates pain, and this would indicate a classicist essence, according to Deren. Amos Vogel has pointed out that in this sense, Cocteau’s fi lm is a true classic: “Often mistaken for a surrealist work, this a carefully constructed, entirely conscious artifact mingling symbol and metaphor to project anguish, apotheosis and conception of the struggling artist” (Vogel 81). Like Deren, Cocteau pays conscious attention to order and form in contradiction to the surrealists’ preferred method of provoking unconscious outbursts of inner images. Both Cocteau and Deren harshly criticized the surrealists for rejecting control and for their dependence on random outpourings of the unconscious. Chaos and randomness are not Coctilian attributes. Aesthetic concerns are inseparable from ethical issues, the fi lm is an aesthetic whole having its own integrity and logic, which transforms the viewer and illuminates his human condition. The artists have the obligation to use their conscious faculties in conjunction with modern art techniques and instruments to create artworks that help us comprehend our lives. Film is art, and above all poetic image. T.S. Eliot emphasized the notion of good poetry as communicating directly with the emotional core and the “nerves”. For Ezra Pound, who coined the term “imagism” at the turn of the century, “the work of art is the honest reproduction of a concrete image” (Qtd. in Harmer 176). In his journal Poetry of March 1913, Pound defi nes the term: “An image is that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time” (Qtd. in Harmer 165). It is this conception that Deren adopts in Anagram: “A work of art is an emotional and intellectual complex whose logic is its whole form” (25). In the preface to Anagram she states, referring to Meshes of the Afternoon (1943), that “the function of fi lm was to create experience – in this case a semi-psychological reality” (Anagram 1), but after At Land (1944), her emphasis shifted to space-time manipulation and ritualistic form. Cocteau is also preoccupied with the manipulation of reality, and the shape of his trilogy can be viewed as ritualistic in terms of Orphic ritual of initiation and decent. Space, time and movement is transformed through reverse or slow motion and editing. According to Deren,

To the form of fi lm art, as a whole, such techniques (those of spatio-temporal manipulation through shooting and editing) contribute an economy of statement comparable to poetry, where the inspired juxtaposition of a few words can create a complex which far transcends them. (Anagram 51) winter 2006 transverse 113 Deren believed that fi lm is a “time-form” more related to music and dance than to the spatial or plastic forms, and Cocteau also emphasizes the importance of cinematic rhythm. What is important in fi lm is not what you can see on screen at a given moment, but “how it is becoming”. Film, like poetry and dance, deals with cadence and rhythm, and in Bergsonian terms with “becoming”. Experience and intuition are inextricably linked ways of grasping the becoming of fi lm. Meaning emerges from the form of the indivisible whole transcending the sum of the parts. The new logic of the fi lm art, according to Deren and Gestalt theory, is a ‘function of the total relationships, the form of the work.’ “Just as the verbal logics of a poem are composed of the relationships established through syntax, assonance, rhyme, and other such verbal methods, so in fi lm there are processes of fi lmic relationships which derive from the instrument and the elements of its manipulation” (Deren Anagram 48). The fi l mmaker should be careful when borrowing from the methods of another art form. Filmic and poetic activities use comparable strategies, but neither Cocteau nor Deren tolerates shared methods between poetry and fi lm but are “implying that a fi lmic adaptation of the methods of poetry is the only proper means of creating fi lm art” (Jackson 64). Like Deren, Cocteau stresses line and form as the primary source of emotional feeling and cognitive meaning. They both see the mission of the poet as making visible the interior invisibility. Finally, fi lm - like poetry - is an experience, an intuitive “vertical investigation of a situation”:

A poem, to my mind, creates visible and auditory form from something that is invisible, which is the feeling or the emotion or the metaphysical content of the statement. Now, it may also include action, but its attack is what I would call the vertical attack, and this may be a little bit clearer if you will contrast it to what I would call the horizontal attack, to drama which is concerned with the development, let’s say, within a very small situation from feeling to feeling. (Deren “Poetry” 174)

Conclusions: Cocteau’s “machine that gives shape to dreams”

“Place your night time in broad daylight,” advises Cocteau in Le testament d’Orphée: this was a strategy he followed throughout his career as a fi lmmaker. “Nous sommes habités par quelq’un de beaucoup mieux que nous, par une nuit 114 transverse winter 2006 beaucoup plus intelligente que notre jour. Cette nuit veut aller dehors et exige notre aide” (Entretiens 15). Cinema is the tool that allows this mystery to happen. The poet- fi l mmaker is the mediator between poesis and mathesis, the infi nite night and the human world, the facilitator of the nocturnal dream to be day-dreamt by the audience. Through manipulation of ‘discontinuous’ images, we are told by Arthur B. Evans, the author places onto the screen his inner visions, dreams and ghosts, only he uses real-world locations, which he turns into stations on a journey transcending reality. The artist’s quest is that of a prophet or shaman journeying the afterworld for the benefi t of the reader/spectator, or in Dante’s words: “in pro del mondo che mal vive.” Like the shaman of primitive societies, the fi lmmaker’s goal would be to help others in understanding and healing their inner confl icts and traumas. The fi l mmaker applies his “shamanic” techniques consciously, but its effect may lead into a state of trance in which the transformation of the self takes place. Art is not simply a revelation of the self, but a means of stimulating arduous rites of passage. The poem’s realm is a space of Orphic metamorphosis, Maurice Blanchot states.

Orpheus is the act of metamorphosis: not the Orpheus who has conquered death, but he who always dies, who is the demand that we disappear and who disappears in the anguish of his disappearance, an anguish which becomes song, a song which is the pure movement of dying. (Space 142-143)

The song-poem is the origin of being and dying. Caught in a circle, its point of depar- ture is its point of return. Like Blanchot, Cocteau associates the space of the poem to the space of death and renewal, a restless alliance of absence and presence. His vision is akin to that of Franz Kafka, who writes to “perish peacefully” and dies every time he writes. Cocteau, like Kafka, believes the writer’s power comes from an antici- pated encounter with death: the poet writes to be able to die and dies to be able to write. Like Orpheus’ act of repeated transgression of boundaries through descent and return, and fi nally of transformation, the boundaries between word and image are repeatedly crossed, as one becomes the other. Blood of a Poet is an exquisite demonstration of the transformation of written word into drawing, moving statue and fi lmic image. Cocteau gives “life” to images and thus disrespects the ban on images of the second commandment: “Only God is allowed to make images, because only God is possessed winter 2006 transverse 115 of the secret of life” (Mitchell 16). The link between the knowledge of image-making and the secret of life is perhaps the underlying sense of the opposition between the Tree of Life and the Tree of Knowledge. Cocteau is a reconciler of this antagonism, and his trilogy presents his itinerary of transgression and initiation into the knowledge of creation. The coincidentia oppositorum, the paradox of the coincidence of opposites, is deeply rooted in modern poetry: “For Orpheus is truly a reconciler of opposites: he is the fusion of the radiant solar enlightenment of Apollo and the somber subterranean knowledge of Dionysus” (Strauss 18). Cocteau referred to his fi lms as studies of the “frontier incidents” between two worlds, life and death, real and unreal, actual and fi ctional, life and art, subject and object, between the world of images and that of words. In dealing with fi lm, he attempted to “grasp both sides of the paradox of the image: that it is alive – but also dead; powerful - but also weak; meaningful - but also meaningless” (Mitchell 10). The underworld words surface into the visible world of images and the invisible visions of the unconscious become visible words and patterns of what Jung called the “symbolic life”. Like the poet himself, Cocteau’s words and images follow the Orphic trajectory, linking the Greek antiquity to the modern world. Film enacts and celebrates the synthesis of personal and transpersonal myth and poetry, accomplishes his own Nekyia and Poesis. Analogous to Orpheus’ transformation in the history of opera’s evolution from incipient forms to classical and post-modern, Cocteau’s trilogy maps the evolution of fi lm from the silent to the sound era, from the movement-image to the postwar time-image, from poem to testament. Cocteau had to fi nd the right expression for his personal myth and sense of displaced gravity, and experimented with lines, words, images and movement. The Coctorphic myth’s multiple metamorphoses transmute through various formats and media, from writing to drawing to meta-fi ctional fi lmmaking. Film was the best-adapted medium to his dream world, the only means of giving life to the images within. The self-professed amateur fi lmmaker found cinema to be the perfect tool. He said about La Belle et la Bête, as he had said in various ways about all his fi lms: “Je voulais le dessiner, le peindre, le porter à la scène. En fi n de compte, le cinématographe m’apparut comme la seule machine capable de donner corps à mon rêve” (Qtd. in Alekan 17). As the supreme synaesthetic medium, cinema allowed Cocteau to materialise his magic self, his dream of poetry, his becoming poetry - to use all his artistic talents and incorporate poetry, melodrama, music, drawing and design into a new translinguistic art form, in which he left us the spectacular blueprint of the Coctorphic self. The myth of Orpheus and his descent to the underworld 116 transverse winter 2006 could be seen as the “Ur-Myth of modernism”, the archetypal myth of individuation arguably as essential for the modernist authors as for antiquity. It could well be that the modern age starts with the discovery of the Oedipus complex and tends towards the “Orpheus complex.”

notes

1 Entr’actes entertainments, for instance Angelo Poliziano’s Orfeo (1480?). Other treatments of the Orpheus myth include: Ottavio Rinuccini and Jacopo Peri’s Euridice (1600), Claudio Monteverdi’s La Favola d’Orfeo (1607) - arguably the fi rst great opera; Stefano Landi’s La morte di Orfeo (1619); Luigi Rossi Orfeo (1647); Antonio Sartorio Orfeo (1672); Cristoph Willibald Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice (1762); Joseph Hayden Orpheus (1800); Jacques Offenbach’s comic opera Orphée aux Enfers (1858); Philip Glass Orphée (1993).

2 According to Julien Clergue, strange coincidences happened throughout the making of Testament of Orpheus: “The fi rst scene in Les Baux was with Yul Brynner, whom Cocteau had known for years. Yul was the usher to hell and his fi nal words were “Abandon here all hope.” Cocteau didn’t know that Dante Alighieri had visited that same “Val d’Enfer” in Les Baux seven centuries earlier, before writing The Divine Comedy in which he had used the same words.” See Clergue, Julien. Jean Cocteau and the Testament of Orpheus, 17. Jean Cocteau confesses: “Quand j’ai mis dans la bouche de Yul Brynner la phrase: “Laissez ici toute espérance”, j’ai évidemment pensé au Dante, mais je ne savais pas que Dante avait habité les Baux, le village, et qu’il avait commencé L’Enfer en cet endroit, à cause de ce paysage. Qui n’était pas du tout les carrières, remarquez bien: qui était le paysage rocheux.” See Domarchi, Jean, and Jean-Louis Laugier. “Entretiens avec Jean Cocteau”. Cahiers du cinéma, tome XIX, 109 (July 1960): 1-2.

winter 2006 transverse 117 works cited

- Arnaud, Claude. Jean Cocteau. Paris: Gallimard, 2003. - Alekan, Henri. La Belle et la Bête. Paris: Editions du Collectionneur, 1992. - Astruc, Alexandre. “The birth of a new avant-garde: La caméra-stylo”. The New Wave: Critical Landmarks. Edited by Peter Graham. London: Secker & Warburg, 1968. 17-23. - Barthes, Roland. Image/Music/Text. New York: Hill & Wang, 1977. - Beckett, Samuel. “La Peinture des van Velde ou le monde et le pantalón”. Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment. Ed. Ruby Cohn. London: John Calder, 1983, 133-137. ---. Proust. London: Calder, 1965. - Blanchot, Maurice. L’espace littéraire. Paris: Gallimard, 1955.

--- The Space of Literature. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1982. 171-87. - Carvalho, John. “Orpheus: The Absence of Myth in Cocteau.” Reviewing Orpheus: Essays on the Cinema and Art of Jean Cocteau. Ed. Cornelia A. Tsakiridou. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1997. 103-29. - Clergue, Lucien. Jean Cocteau and the Testament of Orpheus. New York: Viking Studio, 2001. - Cocteau, Jean. The Art of Cinema. London: Marion Boyars, 1992. ---. Cocteau on the Film. New York: Dover, 1972. ---. Cocteau par lui-même. Ed. André Fraigneau. Paris: Seuil, 1957.

118 transverse winter 2006 ---. La diffi culté d’être. Monaco: Editions du Rocher, 1957. ---. Entretiens sur le cinématographe. Ed. André Bernard and Claude Gauteur. Paris: Pierre Belfond, 1973. ---. Journal d’un inconnu. Paris: Bernard Grasset, 1953. ---. “Notes sur Le Testament d’Orphée’’. Cahiers du cinéma 108 (1960). ---. Portraits-Souvenirs. Paris: Bernard Grasset, 1935. ---. Two Screenplays: The Blood of a Poet. The Testament of Orpheus. London: Marion Boyars, 1985. - Crowson, Lydia. The Aesthetic of Jean Cocteau. Hanover, NH: The University Press of New England, 1978. - Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 1: The Movement-Image. Minneapolis: The Athlone Press, 1983. Cinema 2: The Time-Image. Minneapolis: The Athlone Press, 1989. - Deren, Maya. An Anagram of Ideas on Art, Form and Film. New York: The Alicat Bookshop Press, 1946.

--- “Poetry and Film.” The Film Culture Reader. Ed. P. Adams Sitney. New York: Praeger, 1970. 171-186. - Evans, Arthur B. Jean Cocteau and His Films of Orphic Identity. London: Associated University Presses, 1977. - Gilson, René. Jean Cocteau, Cinéma d’aujourd’hui, 27. New York: Crown Publishers: 1964. - Greene, Mark. Re-Imagining as a Method for the Elucidation of Myth: The Case of Orpheus and Eurydice Accompanied by a Screenplay Adaptation. Doctoral Dissertation. Pacifi ca Graduate Institute, 1999.

winter 2006 transverse 119 - Greeneway, Peter. Flying over Water. London: Merrell Holberton, 1998. - Harmer, J. B. Victory in Limbo: Imagism 1908-1917. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1975. - Jackson, Renata. “The Modernist Poetics of Maya Deren.” Maya Deren and the American Avant- Garde. Ed. Bill Nichols. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001. 47-76. - Kushner, Eva. Le Mythe d’Orphée dans la littérature française contemporaine. Paris: Nizet, 1961. - Lacan, Jacques. Ecrits: A Selection. London: Tavistock, 1977. - Linarès, Serge. Cocteau. La ligne d’un style. Paris, Sedes, 2000. - Martin, René, ed. Dictionnaire culturel de la mythologie gréco-romaine. Paris: Nathan, 1992. - Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. “Eye and Mind”. The Primacy of Perception. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1964. 159-90. - Mitchell, W.J.T. What Do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005. - Parker, Roger, ed. The Oxford History of Opera. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996. - Parker, Tyler. The Magic and Myth of the Movies. New York: Citadel Press, 1965. - Pasolini, Pier Paolo. “The Cinema of Poetry.” Heretical Empiricism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988. 167-185. ---. “The Written Language of Reality” in Heretical Empiricism. 197-206. - Phelan, Peggy. “Lessons in Blindness from Samuel Beckett.” PMLA vol. 119, 5 (2004): 1279-1288. - Renaudot, Patrick. Cocteau et Monaco. Monaco: Editions du Rocher, 1999. - Romanyshyn, Robert. “‘Anyway why did it have to be the death of the poet?’ The Orphic Roots of Jung’s Psychology”. A Journal of Archetype and Culture. Orpheus 71 (Spring 2004): 55- 87.

120 transverse winter 2006 - Schifano, Laurence. Orphée de Cocteau. Neuilly: Atlande, 2002. - Shaeffer-Jones, Caroline. “Fixing the gaze: Jean Cocteau’s La Belle et la Bête”. The Romantic Review 93.3 (May 2002): 361-375. - Strauss, Walter. Descent and Return. The Orphic Theme in Modern Literature. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971. - Tarkovsky, Andrei. Sculpting in Time: Refl ections on the Cinema. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1989. - Tsakiridou, Cornelia A., Ed. Reviewing Orpheus: Essays on the Cinema and Art of Jean Cocteau. London: Associated University Presses, 1997. - Vogel, Amos. Film as a Subversive Art. New York: Random House, 1974.

winter 2006 transverse 121 animating the dead. narrative and 19th century photography christiane arndt

An obsession with death seems to have reigned during the 19th century1. Portraiture of dead people, the genre of post-mortem photography, was a popular practice. As Hamilton and Hargreaves state, “Photography supplied a widely distributed need within nineteenth-century society for ways of memorializing the cherished dead, seemingly in a manner which painting was incapable of reproducing” (12). Likewise, painting and literary texts from the era are also pre-occupied with death.2 This occupation with death is connected with the quest for true mimesis in the epoch of realism: death seems to put an end to the possibility of depicting life, and such death also seems to put an end to mimetic representation, yet the contemporaneous inventions of photography and fi lm promised representation beyond the end of life. The new media pledged more than a simple mediation between life and death. Because they depict more perfectly than portraits, they were believed to induce a stronger tie between the depiction and the depicted.3 Perfect depiction seems to be a means to re-think the possibility of overcoming death. Mimesis would then be a means to transgress the border between life and death, and the absent, dead person is assumed to be present through his or her representation. In my analysis, I would like to look into this relationship between life/death and representation. The argument is broken down into three parts: I will fi rst look at photography in the nineteenth century, specifi cally two genres that are occupied with death: spirit photography and post-mortem photography. Secondly, I will focus on contemporary narrative that thematizes death and its depiction by examining a German novella by Theodor Storm called Aquis submersus. The last point will be the consecutive development of representing the dead in fi lm, here, the example is the recent movie The Others.

Reviving the Dead through Photography

Ghosts came to inhabit 19th century photographs in rather uncomfortable numbers, as the so called spirit photography became popular and consequently economically successful for photographers. Spirit photography ultimately resulted from failed attempts 122 transverse winter 2006 to take pictures in early photography. Namely, two possible accidents could lead to the appearance of a ghostlike image in the photograph: either a negative was accidentally exposed to light twice, the so-called double exposure, or a person or object in the picture moved during the lengthy exposure time and thus became transparent. These failed pictures were usually discarded and a new attempt to take a proper picture was made. Combining the two “failures,” photographers turned what was initially an accident into a new technique. Ghost pictures are produced by using the technique of double exposure combined with a short exposure of the supposed ghost picture, such that the ‘ghost’ looks more transparent in the fi nal picture. The photographer uses photographs of the deceased and projects their appearance on the plate once more. Thus, the double-exposed picture looks as if the dead had come back to the world of the living; the photograph of the deceased serves as a means to replace the dead. By the use of a photograph to produce a second photograph, the boundary between life and death is transgressed through pictorial representation. Around the same time as spirit photography, another genre of photography that also represented the dead in a photographic memento fl ourished: post-mortem photography. Pictures of dead bodies were taken, and these bodies were in most cases arranged in a way that made the dead person look as if she were sleeping. These post-mortem pictures, not unlike the spirit photographs, also aim at a revival of the dead. The likenesses are mementos of the deceased, supposed to replace them. A dead person is brought back to life through the picture, as the representation gives rise to the impression that the presence of the photograph overcomes the absence caused by death. A visual depiction that displays, like the photograph, a high degree of lifelikeness, appears prone to being taken for the living themselves, whether they are dead or merely absent. The pictures are meant to indicate life and the camera even appears as a means to literally awaken the dead. Gabriel Harrison, a photographer, describes his visit to a lady whose daughter had just died in his text ”Light and Shadow of a Daguerreotypist” from 1851:

Gently we moved the death couch to the window in order to get the best light, though but a ray. [...] The mother held up a white cloth to give me refl ected light to subdue the shadows. All was still, I took the cap from the camera. About two winter 2006 transverse 123 minutes had elapsed, when a bright sun ray broke through the clouds, dashed its bright beams upon the refl ector, and shedding, as it were, a supernatural light. I was startled – the mother rivetted with frightful gaze, for at the moment we beheld the muscles about the mouth of the child move, and her eyes partially open – a smile played upon her lips, a long gentle sigh heaved her bosom, and as I replace the cap, her head fell over to one side. The mother screamed “She lives! She lives!” and fell upon her knees by the side of the couch. “No,” was my reply; “she is dead now, the web of life is broken.” The camera was doing its work as the cord that bound gentle being to earth snapped and loosened the spirit for another and better world. (Harrison 181)

The camera seems to be able to transgress the boundary between life and death in terms of awakening the dead. Thus, spirit photography and post-mortem photography both aim at a revival of the dead through their visual representation. This aspect of the two genres enlightens a theoretical analysis of photography which connects photography to death, even if the depicted person is not at all dead. In the 19th century, the photographic genre was called the ‘dead mirror’ by its critics.4 This negative evaluation of the new medium draws upon the critical view on direct representation in general. As the idea of reviving the dead is connected to the ideal of perfect representation, one is challenged as the other fades. Thus, the examples of spirit and post-mortem photography are indeed examples of both: the attempt to overcome death through perfect representation and the failure of this endeavor. The failure of representation lies in two different aspects that are ascribed to the medium: motionlessness and reproducibility. Motionlessness is a characteristic of both, a photographed person and of a corpse. The photographs of the dead therefore serve as an incorporation of photography’s medial characteristic. Indeed, the dead are convenient objects of photography, and sometimes the choice of the photographic technique took into consideration that the depicted object was dead and could not move. The fact that post-mortem photography of young children fl ourished in the 19th century is due to the frequency of infant death, the memorial function of photography – and sometimes the photographic technique was chosen in respect to the fact that the object of photography could not move anymore:

124 transverse winter 2006 Medical epidemics were rife until well into the twentieth century. They struck young and old alike, although it was especially tragic when a youngster fell victim. The families, many of whom had not availed themselves of a portrait of the youngster while living, called the studio owner to arrange a posthumous portrait. In the 1850s and 1860s, this required that the photographer transport camera, tripod, and darkroom to the site. Some photographers, taking into consideration the immobility of their subject, relied on the collodiobromide plate – a dry plate (more convenient) process that required lenghty exposure times. The child would usually be positioned as if sleeping, showing a blissful expression and perhaps clutching a favorite toy. (Davenport 79)

In spirit photography and post-mortem photography, we can observe the attempt to use photography in order to overcome death. This use of photography and the medium’s failure to fulfi ll the ascribed function is staged in pictures in which the dead is replaced by a photograph. The picture within a picture displays a double frame, and both framings separate life from death. The person in the picture which is placed on the table is very likely dead at the time the photo is taken, and the woman holding the picture is dead now, while we are looking at the picture. The attempt to replace the dead person by his/her picture expresses both: the presence of death in the moment of picture-taking and the attempt to overcome it through representation. But instead of overcoming death, the photo states the impossibility of this transience. Death, through its visual and rhetorical indicators, petrifi cation and mortifi cation, is inscribed in the picture through the attempt to replace the absent/dead. Not only does the picture of the absent person remain a picture, it also underlines the current absence of the person who was still present while the picture was taken. The inscription of death in the photograph is not limited to post-mortem or spirit photography, it is a general characteristic of photography. Regarding this statement, the transgression from death to life described in the quotation by Gabriel Harrison changes direction. Roland Barthes elaborates on the relationship between photography and death in his Camera Lucida: “Life/Death: the paradigm is reduced to a simple click, the one separating the initial pose from the fi nal print” (92). The photographs themselves indicate that they cannot awaken the dead to life; rather, they show how death is at stake in any winter 2006 transverse 125 attempt for visual representation, since we know at the moment the camera clicks that the image will most likely survive us. The picture bears the trace of death, and every photograph is thus a photo of a dead body, either a corpse or a potentially dead body. The body is marked for death through photography. But the image is not only bound to death because the memento fails to bring the dead to life. Photography, furthermore, marks the beginning of the era of reproducibility, as Walter Benjamin calls it. Here, it becomes apparent how the question of aesthetics is connected to the rise of the new medium. Photography as a means of visual representation is bound to a phenomenon that Benjamin calls the ‘aura’ of a work of art. The ‘aura’ denotes the connection the depiction keeps with the depicted. In The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technical Reproducibility, Benjamin describes the loss of the ‘aura’ due to the loss of the uniqueness of a work of art:

It is no accident that the portrait is central to early photography. In the cult of remembrance of dead or absent loved ones, the cult value of the image fi nds its last refuge. In the fl eeting expression of a human face, the aura beckons from early photographs for the last time. (108)

The uniqueness of the portrait, which still prevails in the daguerreotype since the copper plate is not reproducible, vanishes with the negative print and the possibility of mass production. Photography both gives rise to and destroys the hope of keeping the dead alive, replacing absence with presence through representation. The question of reproducibility is thus the question of an aesthetic value in photography. The picture of the dead person as sleeping, as well as that of the person who is alive in the picture, are both separated from the living body itself – ultimately through the possibility that the living body could by now be dead. The depiction thus, and that is the effect of the loss of the aura, has no connection to the depicted any more. The dead as replacement of the living are endlessly reproduced and thus spread, in Barthes’s words, the ‘Eidos’ of death as a characteristic of the medium (15). The scene in which a dead body occurs as living and sleeping is a result of construction and replacement, not a representation of reality. The image we see is not real anymore or was never real to begin with (we cannot decide since we do not know the ‘story’ behind the picture). Yet the image we see is all we can refer to: any reference 126 transverse winter 2006 from the picture to the depicted fails. Reproducibility, as it cuts the picture off from the depicted – and that is the loss of the aura – destroys mimesis and replaces it with fi ction. In the failed attempt to turn death into life, the medium stresses its connection to death even more. Instead of aesthetic, Pygmalian qualities of awakening the dead, it shows that it cannot fall in line with the aesthetic qualities of art before the era of reproducibility.5 The medium of photography marks the shift from a representation of reality to a reality of representation.

Reviving the Dead through Narrative

Despite its inherent connection with death, accolades welcoming the new medium were frantic in the early days of photography, such as Edgar Allen Poe’s famous statement: “All language must fall short of conveying any just idea of the truth […] but the closest scrutiny of the photogenic drawing discloses only a more absolute truth, a more perfect identity of aspect with the thing represented” (38). Guarding the fortress of language against the intruding image, the writers of the time set out to both evaluate the possibilities of the visual medium and safeguard language against the attack of the visual. The German author Theodor Storm’s novella Aquis submersus, written in 1876, is mostly set in the 17th century. Consequently, no photographs appear in the narration. Yet I chose the text to illustrate the reaction of literature to visual depiction in the 19th century, since the central fi gure of the story is a painter, called Johannes, who has just learned the newest painting technique of the time: Dutch allegoric painting. By thematizing the relationship between visual depiction, allegorical visual depiction, and textual depiction, Storm does, in my opinion, comment on the new medium of his own time – photography – without mentioning photographs themselves. The novella has the structure of a narrative frame. In the exterior narration of the novel, the frame, a 19th century contemporary I-narrator is intrigued to reveal the secret of a portrait he encountered during his childhood. This painting depicts a dead young boy. The narrator of the exterior story later in his life fi nds a manuscript, which describes the mysterious story behind the picture: the painter Johannes undertakes an illicit relationship with Katharina, a girl with whom he grew up who belongs to a higher winter 2006 transverse 127 class of society. Because of the class difference, they are separated, and Katharina, who is pregnant without her lover’s knowledge, marries a priest. Later, Johannes is called to paint the portrait of the priest, and on this occasion he rediscovers Katharina. During their passionate reunion, they are distracted and their unattended child falls into a pond and drowns. Johannes is then presented with the diffi cult task to paint his own dead son, the result of which is the picture the frame narrator is confronted with at the beginning of the text. In Johannes’ son painting, we are yet again dealing with a picture of a dead body. The narrator describes the portrait as such:

Amongst all these peculiar and probably even uncanny objects hung, in the church’s nave, the innocent portrait of a dead child, of a handsome, about fi ve year old boy, who, resting on a lace pillow, held a white water lily in his small, pale hand. In addition to the horror of death, as if crying for help, his tender face spoke of a last fair trace of life; an irresistible empathy overcame me, when I stood in front of the picture. (Storm 381, my translation)

The curiosity the picture induces in the narrator, and consequently in the reader, can be described in terms of a seductive quality. The narrator seeks to fi nd out the identity of the depicted child and thus discovers more paintings as well as an autobiography of Johannes, which contains the sad story of the two lovers and the child’s death. What has taken place, induced by the picture, is what I would like to call ‘hermeneutic seduction.’ This hermeneutic seduction leads to the discovery and narration of the story. The portraits are kept alive in the narrative: although the depicted people are long dead by the time the story is told, their portraits serve as a means for survival – or immortality. Immortality, the survival in a picture or as the painter of that picture, is an aspect of art. In Storm’s text, a picture, once again, serves as a means to transgress the boundary between life and death. This transgression is underlined when the painting is ascribed “a trace of life.” The text frequently makes reference to the mysterious force in works of art. The artist Johannes has the Pygmalian quality of bringing immortal life to dead depictions. This quality is stressed when Johannes’s major work is mentioned: it is a painting of Lazarus, whom Jesus re vived from death. As hermeneutic seduction and immortality are at stake, the depiction of death is, 128 transverse winter 2006 in Aquis submersus, once more a starting point for the exemplifi cation of representation.6 As in post-mortem photography, it seems that the dead body can be revived, the depicted person immortalized through depiction. In the novella, it also becomes clear that revival and immortalization do not result from perfect depiction. It is the process of aesthetization that turns the depiction into a work of art and, ultimately, immortalizes the dead. The text exemplifi es how a depiction can be transformed into art by the effect of a mysterious force that is noticeable yet cannot be described or captured. This effect is formally marked by the frame of the picture. In the novella, the portrait alone as the mere realistic depiction does not seem to evoke a life-like quality of the depicted. This notion is in Aquis submersus introduced through Katharina’s husband, the priest. He initially denies any possibility of successful depiction and delivers a strong statement against visual representation. He is not moved by the painting of his dead son at all as long as it appears to be a mere realistic representation, but the following scene changes his attitude signifi cantly:

In the middle of the room a white bed was laid out. On the pillow lay a pale child’s face; the eyes closed; the small teeth shimmering like pearls between the pale lips. [...] Thus, I sat back down, looked at the small corpse and continued to paint; and as I looked at the empty hands, as they were lying on the linen, I thought: “You have to give the child a small present!” And I painted a white water lily for him in his hand, as if he had fallen asleep playing with it. (Storm 452)

The addition of the lily changes the priest’s attitude entirely: “But when his eyes found the lily in the painted hand of the child, he lifted his hands, as if in pain, and I saw how a fountain of tears suddenly sprang from his eyes” (454) While the priest previously denied the value of works of art, because he tried to perceive them as realistic representations (438), the lily, with its non-realistic impact, makes him realize the value of the painting as a work of art. The lily is not a realistic depiction, it is an allegory. Johannes uses the skill he has learnt in the Netherlands and through this displays the mysterious force of art. Mere representation is not enough to evoke sympathy, or hermeneutic curiosity. It is consequently not enough to gain immortality: all of these functions can only be fulfi lled if the representation bears an aesthetic quality. Death is the starting point for the self-refl exive thematization of representation, since the threat of loss through death fosters the idea of attempting to reach immortality. The work of art becomes winter 2006 transverse 129 a work of art and displays a valid representation through a symbolic feature: the allegory of the lily. Mere depiction is disregarded; its quality is defi cient. This conclusion devalues photography, which was regarded as a means of perfect depiction at that time. The lily Johannes adds to the painting serves as an allegorical link to connect the individual story to its general implication. Thus, the painting sets itself apart from mere depiction through an artistic technique and at the same time displays the realistic notion that the general is depicted through the individual. Yet Johannes, the narrator of the interior story, takes another step towards generalizing the story: he writes his biography and thus produces a literary text. This autobiography is what is presented to the reader in the narrative frame in which the frame narrator discovers the painting of the dead child and Johannes’s manuscripts. Like the frame of the painting, it sets apart its content and ‘marks’ it as a work of art, the novella as a written work of art is framed in the form of a so called frame novella. The text becomes a medium in which formerly dead characters come to life and become immortal through aesthetization.7 In Aquis submersus, the frame of the frame novella marks this aesthetization: what is framed is marked as a work of art. The frame serves as a symbolic means of distinguishing the aesthetic, literary text from any attempt to represent directly, just like the picture of the dead child becomes valuable as a work of art through its frame. Although both the picture and the text are similarly aestheticized through a frame, their status as works of art are differentiated in the text. In the end, the reader reads the literary text, she does not see the paintings themselves. Only their descriptions have overcome time and transgressed the boundary between life and death – the paintings themselves are lost. Storm’s text thus indicates a hierarchy between the different types of art, visual and narrative representation. Life is induced through narration and imagination, not through mere depiction. Including the mere representation, which is devaluated in the text, there seem to be three levels of representation in Aquis submersus: the simple, even perfect depiction of reality, which has no aesthetic value (and can be associated with the critique of the medial qualities of photography), the artistic painting, indicated by the allegorization it depicts, and, ultimately, as the highest level of art, the literary text, which alone appears to include the narrative quality it needs to produce an immortal work of art. If we turn back to the phenomena of post-mortem photography and spirit photography, we, surprisingly, fi nd the same necessity for narrative here: in the case of 130 transverse winter 2006 Gabriel Harrison’s description, we do not see the picture, animated or not; what we are presented with is a textual description of a reanimation of a dead body through a picture. In the picture, the animation described in the text can very likely not be noticed at all or is only visible for people who are familiar with the story behind the picture, with its context. In the case of the photographs themselves, the aesthetic quality is inherent in the story the pictures tell: without knowing that the person is dead, the observer cannot note the life-likeness of the portrait; death is received as sleep, which would simply be a false conclusion. The scenic construction of ‘death-that-looks-like-sleep’ has to be perceived in order to fully understand the quality of the pictures. Furthermore, also in the case of spirit photography, without the story behind the picture, the observer would not understand the meaning and value of the image. Thus, also in the cases of spirit and post-mortem photography, it is through the narrative quality that the pictures ultimately obtain their transient quality.

Reviving the Dead through Film

Storm’s novella underlines the importance of narration, either by the literary text or by the story inherent in the depiction itself, for example through the allegory. The stillness of the photograph is overcome by the context of the narration. The beginning of the 20th century brings yet another new medium. Film does not need to fall back on text, it narrates through the moving pictures themselves: in fi lm, the still pictures of photography come to life. Before, they were corpses. Now, in serial projection, the dead stir. This animation gave yet again rise to the hope for perfect representation: the stillness of photographs was left behind, the new medium of fi lm, similarly to photography, greeted with high hopes. Such hopes are expressed by Adolf Behne, who in 1926 writes in a newspaper:

The writer of yesteryear employed ‘images’ in order to have a ‘visual’ effect. And why is it that the image disappears from front-page articles, essays, and critiques the way it disappears from the walls of middle-class apartments? In my judgment: because with fi lm we have developed a language that has evolved from visuality against which the visuality developed from language cannot compete. Finally, language becomes pure, clean, precise. (Qtd. in Kittler 153) winter 2006 transverse 131 Like in the case of photography, the rise of the new medium of fi lm gives way to claims for the need of a new language, a language of images. In order to examine the relationship between death and representation in terms of the cinematic medium, I would like to turn to a recent movie, which thematizes 19th century post-mortem photography, and combines it with the question of cinematic representation: Alejandro Amenábar’s The Others. The fi l m tells the story of Grace Stewart, who lives with her two children in a house on the Channel Islands at the end of the Second World War; the children suffer from an allergy to light. The three of them are confronted with the presence of ghosts in the house, whom they call ‘the others.’ The new servants in the house seem to know more about these ghosts than Grace herself. At the end of the fi lm, it turns out that not only the servants are actually ghosts, but also Grace and the children. Grace had previously killed her children and then shot herself. She had suppressed the murder and was convinced that she and her children are still alive. The fi rst signifi cant hint of a possible transgression of a boundary between death and life is given in the movie when Grace fi nds a photo album. She looks at the pictures of the seemingly sleeping people, when her servant enters the room. Grace asks her about the pictures and the servant explains to her that the people in the portraits are not sleeping but that they are actually dead. The pictures Grace looks at are typical (and actual) examples of 19th century post-mortem photography.8 The quotation of post-mortem photography in the movie is self-referential, since the dead pictures are not only content of the fi lm, but also technically its form: the rapid projection of the originally motionless pictures turns them into moving pictures. Drawing on the topic of post-mortem photography, the fi l m stages the characteristics of the media: still pictures, represented by pictures of the dead, are transformed into moving pictures, dead bodies into animated ghosts. Likewise, the dead, motionless servants come back. They seemingly step out of their post-mortem photograph which Grace discovers hidden under a bed. Grace and the audience realize that the servants are dead through the discovery of the photograph. When the dead servants appear in the movie, the boundary between life and death is fi nally transgressed, since the servants appear to Grace and the audience as people who are really alive. While their photographic image attempts to bring the ghosts to life, their appearance remains faded and transparent. The attempt is revealed to be a technical trick, even fraud. The medium of fi lm appears to fulfi ll its promise here, the ghosts are not transparent anymore, they are seemingly real and indistinguishable from 132 transverse winter 2006 the others, the real people. In The Others, the notion of representation is furthermore thematized through the children’s allergy to light. Basically, they are allergic to what awakens them to life, as light is the source of projection for the medium of fi lm. Their representation on the screen depends on the light from the projector, and as such their allergy to light can be read as an attempt to resist representation. Likewise, the daughter of the servants denies representation. In her case, it is verbal representation: she does not speak. She refuses to leave audible traces. Her silence puts her back into the era of silent fi lm, which would make it another instance of media in the The Others yet to be examined. It seems that as the children refuse to be ghosts, mere representations, they try to reject the transgression of the boundary between life and death, real existence and existence as an image; they want to stay in the darkness, either in the darkness of death or in the darkness of the unrepresented life. But the medium of the movie drags them out into the light and turns them into representations, into ghosts. The self-refl exivity of the various media – the fi lm staging ghosts, photography displaying stillness, literature commenting on the aspects of aesthetization – blurs the line between the real and the imaginary. The characteristic features of the children show how The Others represents the ultimate conclusion of the development I have been trying to point out: no matter in which stage of real representation images are provided, it is always mere representation we are confronted with – ghostly doubles, if you wish. As the question of representation is the content of The Others, we are ultimately confused about who the Others actually are and in the end, Grace and the children turn out to be the Others themselves. This revelation that Grace and her children are confronted with at the end of the movie is not only revealing to them – the audience is likewise confronted with the realization that what they perceive as real might not be real. The image we perceive depends much more on the story we have heard, on what the imagination adds to it, on how our nerves are betrayed by the moving projection, than by any reality the depiction could be tied to. The ghostly doubles incorporate the horror of the image which is always ‘the other.’ The ghosts of the cinema have come alive in a movie, even though they themselves do not initially realize their ghostly status. In the fi nal scene of the movie, the fi gures of Grace and her children dissolve. With this dissolution, the fi lm displays an early cinematic trick and reminds the recipient of the fact that the people in the movie did never exist as such. ‘It was just a movie,’ is what the parent tells the frightened or crying children in front of winter 2006 transverse 133 the TV. But in the case of The Others, the mother cannot calm the children down, for the status of being unreal has become reality for the ghosts who are forever captured on fi lm. Therefore, in the end, the statement that they are ‘just a movie’ induces horror because it is correct, as the characters are captured on still, dead pictures until the projection against light awakens them to life. Then, the characters appear in ‘just a movie’ – they are ghosts and will remain ghosts, the light brings them to life, as the children, luckily, have left their light allergy behind with their supposed ‘real life.’ Ultimately, it is not the light alone through which the pictures come to life. It is still, like in the narration that contextualizes ghost and post-mortem photography, the recipient through whom the double comes to life: in the movie, the individual still pictures are set together through the inertia of our eyes. Through our perception, the ghosts come to life. As a conclusion to this analysis of the three different media and their staging of the relationship between representation and death, the most obvious observation we can make is that all three media are self-refl exive with regards to the status of representation of the specifi c medium. Post-mortem photography can be read as a theory of photographic representation, Aquis submersus is occupied with writing, the survival and reception of a literary text, and The Others is a comment on the ghosts that fi lm awakens. All three examples furthermore show that representation fails when it attempts to represent reality. Death, as the structural division between reality and representation, is an indicator and serves as a theoretical notion to mark the failure of representation. A possibility for representation lies in aestheticization, which turns the depiction into a work of art. To defi ne the work of art is certainly too much to attempt before concluding this analysis. But if self-refl exivity is a characteristic of works of art, all three examples can claim, even if the perfect depiction fails, to represent aesthetically.

notes

1 I would like to thank Arndt Niebisch, Sue Waterman, Anita McChesney, Sam Fenno, and Vaughan Byrnes for their help in writing this article.

134 transverse winter 2006 2 The popular Gothic novel, Edgar Allan Poe’s texts, and Emily Brontës’s Wuthering Heights (1847), to name some examples. 3 This connection has been called an indexical relationship, according to Charles S. Peirce’s tri-fold distinction: “An icon is a representamen which fulfi lls the function of a representamen by virtue of a character which it possesses in itself, and would possess just the same though its object did not exist. [...] An index is a representamen which fulfi lls the function of a representamen by virtue of a character which it could not have if its object did not exist, but which it will continue to have just the same whether it be interpreted as a representamen or not. [...] A symbol is a representamen which fulfi lls its function regardless of any factual connection therewith, but solely and simply because it will be interpreted to be a representamen. Such for example is any general word, sentence, or book.“ [Charles Sanders Peirce, Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, ed. by Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss, Vol. V, Lecture III, §1. Section 73 (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1960) 50f.] 4 In Der tote Blick, Gerhard Plumpe looks at contemporary documents in order to examine the aesthetical and juridical consequences of the question whether photography should be considered an art or not. He also comments on photography as the ‘dead mirror:’ “Der ‘tote Spiegel‘ wird dann schnell zum gebräuchlichen Topos, der immer dann ins Spiel gebracht wird, wenn es darum gehen soll, ‘naturalistische‘ oder ‘photographische‘ Realitätswiedergabe von der authentischen Kunst des Subjekts abzugrenzen.“ [Gerhard Plumpe, Der tote Blick – Zum Diskurs der Photographie in der Zeit des Realismus (München: Fink, 1990) 35.] 5 On representation in art, Elisabeth Bronfen writes: “Die ‘Repräsentation‘ eines Toten erlaubt dem Betrachter das Verbergen jenes urvertrauten Wissens – daß das Leben immer schon die Signatur des Todes trägt.“ [Elisabeth Bronfen, “Inszenierung der Grenze realistischer Interpretation“, in: Die Trauben des Zeuxis – Formen künstlerischer Wirklichkeitsaneignung, hg. von Hans Körner (Hildesheim, New York: Olms, 1990) 306-334, here: 320.] 6 The representation through art, especially through visual art but also in literary texts, could be furthermore exemplifi ed by means of an examination of the double, the Doppelgänger. Elisabeth Bronfen summarizes the complex relationship between art and death, mediated through the double: “Thus, because it is created based on the same elusiveness it tries to obliterate, what art in fact does is mourn such beauty, and in doing it mourns itself. In this ambivalent contingency on loss, art exemplifi es the uncanny. Substituting for or doubling an absent object, it represents something that it both is and is not, while at the same time the beautiful form both is and is not eternal.” [Elisabeth Bronfen, “Risky Resemblances: On Repetition, Mourning, and Representation,” in: Death and Representation, hg. von Sarah Webster Goodwin and Elisabeth Bronfen (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993) 103-129, here: 117.] 7 Robert Holub comments on the connection of the artistic force and the realistic impact: “It is thus not coincidental that the chief function of art in the novella entails the most extreme form of overcoming

winter 2006 transverse 135 time, namely, in the commemoration of the dead. In these instances the deceased are infused with new life, the process of decay is halted, and nature itself is defi ed.” [Robert C. Holub, “Realism and Recollection. The Commemorations of Art and the Aesthetics of Abnegation in Aquis submersus,” in: Colloquia Germanica, Internationale Zeitschrift für Germanistik, 1985, 18/2, 120-139, here: 129.] 8 The pictures in the movie are taken from Stanley B. Burns, Sleeping Beauty – Memorial Photography in America (Altadena, CA: Twelvetrees Press, 1990).

136 transverse winter 2006 works cited

- Amenábar, Alejandro. The Others, 2001. - Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida – Refl ections on Photography. New York: Hill and Wang, 1981. - Behne, Adolf. “Die Stellung des Publikums zur modernen deutschen Literatur.“ Die Weltbühne 22 (18 May 1926), no. 20, 774-777. Reprinted in: Weimarer Republik, Manifeste und Dokumente zur Deutschen Literatur 1918-1933. Ed. Anton Kaes. Stuttgart: Metzler, 1983. 219-222. - Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technical Reproducibility.” Selected Writings. Volume 3, 1935-1938. Eds. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings. Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2002. - Bronfen, Elisabeth. “Inszenierung der Grenze realistischer Interpretation.“ Die Trauben des Zeuxis – Formen künstlerischer Wirklichkeitsaneignung. Ed. Hans Körner. Hildesheim: Olms, 1990. 306-334. ---. Reisen and Ende der Nacht oder das Aufwachen der Hollywood-Heldin - The Others, Femme Fatale, In the Cut, forthcoming in: FilmGeschichte, Newsletter des Filmmuseums Berlin/ Deutsche Kinemathek. Ed. Hans Helmut Prinzler. Oct. 20 2006.

winter 2006 transverse 137 ---. “Risky Resemblances: On Repetition, Mourning, and Representation.” Death and Representation. Eds. Sarah Webster Goodwin and Elisabeth Bronfen. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993. 103-129. - Burns, Stanley B. Sleeping Beauty: Memorial Photography in America. Altadena, CA: Twelvetrees Press, 1990. - Davenport, Alma. The History of Photography. An Overview. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1991. - Hamilton, Peter and Roger Hargreaves. The Beautiful and the Damned – The Creation of Identity in Nineteenth Century Photography. Aldershot: Lund Humphries, 2001. - Harrison, Gabriel. “Light and Shadow of Daguerrian Life.“ The Photographic Art-Journal, 3/1 (1851): 179-181. - Holub, Robert C. “Realism and Recollection. The Commemorations of Art and the Aesthetics of Abnegation in Aquis submersus.” Colloquia Germanica, Internationale Zeitschrift für Germanistik, 18/2 (1985): 120-139.

- Kittler, Friedrich. Gramophone, Film, Typewriter. Trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999. - Peirce, Charles Sanders. Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce. Eds. Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1960. - Plumpe, Gerhard. Der tote Blick – Zum Diskurs der Photographie in der Zeit des Realismus. München: Fink, 1990. - Poe, Edgar Allan. “The Daguerreotype.“ Classic Essays on Photography. Ed. Alan Trachtenberg. New Haven: Leete’s Island Books, 1980. 37-38.

138 transverse winter 2006 - Storm, Theodor. “Aquis submersus.” Sämtliche Werke in vier Bänden, Bd. II, Novellen 1867-1880. Eds. Karl Ernst Laage and Dietrich Lohmeier. Frankfurt am Main: Deutsche Klassiker Verlag, 1987.

winter 2006 transverse 139 arte povera: words as image and experience laura petican

The interdisciplinary nature of explorations between word and image, where pathways of envisioning the readable and reading the visual overlap and intermingle, offer a distinctive perspective from which to approach works of the 1960s-1970s Italian movement Arte Povera. While the artists and works associated with this group are as renowned for their heterogeneity as for their cohesiveness, there nevertheless exist unifying threads throughout the relatively brief span of their group production.1 These threads incorporate words and linguistic symbols in tandem with traditional and unconventional materials; paint and canvas are paired with light and energy to imbue glimpses of everyday life with vestiges of human existence. Concerned with the essential elements of life and with an interest in the commonplace, Arte Povera’s visual experiments, those appropriations of linguistic symbols from the world of mass communication and industrialization, evinced changing conceptions of the role of the art object in the immediate post-WWII period. Part of the artistic response to the social and cultural climate of postwar Italy was manifested in new understandings of space and time, signaling a break with traditional modes of painting and sculpture. This was a reaction fuelled especially by the effects of Fascism and the legacy of Mussolini’s muddled cultural policies (De Grand 157). For much of the fi rst half of the twentieth century, Italian artists remained fi xed in traditional modes of representation, characterized by either politicized, fi gurative painting, or Futurist-inspired abstraction. The Futurists and Metaphysical painters had demonstrated much innovation in their work and challenged commonly-accepted notions of space and time, e.g. the Futurist play with abstracted, dynamic forms and experiments in various media and the Metaphysical painters’ ethereal cityscapes. However, it remained for Italian artists to initiate a defi nitive break with the past in order to adequately address the war-torn reality that presented itself in the postwar period. Rapid industrialization, mass dissemination of the automobile and the television in the 1950s led to changing notions of space and time and a new awareness of the increasing separation from nature in an industrialized society. As Robert Gordon writes: “The history of ‘high’ culture in Italy since 1945 is a history of radical change. This is not least because the boundaries and parameters of the fi eld that constituted culture itself changed almost beyond recognition in this period, in large part owing to the rapid growth in mass media (cinema, radio, popular magazines, and television after 1954).” (197). 140 transverse winter 2006 In cultural terms, this period of aggiornamento, or catching-up with international artistic developments that had eluded Italian artists during the Fascist regime, led to a level of experimentation in artistic terms that sought to dissolve the barrier between art and life, making the experience of art one of immediacy and contemporary relevance. Those instances where language and its visual manifestations in signs, billboards and advertising composed both the subject matter and the medium of Arte Povera’s experiments, represent the contemporary emphasis on integrating art and human experience in an increasingly mechanized society, and provide examples of the group’s immersion in the word/image dialectic, as words are incorporated in a visual and sometimes interactive narrative. The new relationship with two-dimensional media initiated in the 1950s by Informale artists Emilio Vedova, Alberto Burri, and Lucio Fontana provided the foundations for moving beyond the stagnation that had until then characterized Italian cultural production. Burri’s use of burlap sacks bearing scorch marks, tears and stitches, burned wood, and melting plastic recalls the scars of war in an abstract but highly tactile and sensual manner. Fontana’s literal spatial penetrations in the form of slashes and holes through the canvas and Vedova’s bold gestures on supports that literally come off the wall, invading the viewer’s space, are considered precursors to Arte Povera’s experiments with primary experience and dynamic energy, centred on an exploration of new understandings of space and time. Further infl uence was garnered in Jerzy Grotowsky’s 1960s “poor theatre,” from which Arte Povera derived its name. The term “povera” or “poor” referred to an alternative theatre that rejected costumes and elaborate stage effects in favour of a pared-down focus on the actor/spectator relationship (Christov-Bakargiev 213-124). Similarly, for Arte Povera, focus was directed away from the art object as an end in itself, concentrated instead on the notion of a living experience that acknowledged the role of the spectator as an vital element in the artistic process, indeed, an integral part of the “life” of a work of art. Where in some cases these visual experiments incorporate text and image with the element of human experience, these intersections become the catalysts of forming a dynamic process that literally represents the co-existence of art and life. While, as Celant has written, “The Arte Povera group brought about a gradual emancipation of art from the monolithic, reductive, and minimal object” (Metamorphosis 18), the incorporation of words in visual media, that is, the mutual dependence between word and image in some works, are also instances of the dissolution of the word/image dialectic. Indeed, these visual narratives become sites for a simultaneous literal and conceptual reading, winter 2006 transverse 141 one that happens over space and time, combining the domains of image and text. The American art critic Clement Greenberg wrote an essay in 1940 titled “Towards a Newer Laocoon,” in which he argued for the clear and defi ned separation of the arts, namely a distinction between literature and the visual arts. His argument was centred on a belief in the primacy of each medium’s defi ning characteristics; painting could only be “pure,” and hence, most effective, if it adhered to the two-dimensionality specifi c to it. He writes, “Purity in art consists in the acceptance, willing acceptance, of the limitations of the medium of the specifi c art” (558). Artistic expression became problematic on those occasions when one art form attempted to imitate the effects of another: when painting attempted to portray subject matter beyond its own fl atness, colour or line, when it attempted to communicate through a representation of three-dimensional space and forms, it was betraying its fundamental strengths. Likewise, a written narrative that attempted to adopt the sensual facilities of pure line and colour and communicate on an abstract level rendered itself vulnerable in straying from the peculiarities, the strengths of its medium, the verbal or written word. While arguing for the supremacy of painting over literature, Greenberg states that the imitation of one medium by another results in no more than “a confusion of the arts […], by which the subservient ones are perverted and distorted; they are forced to deny their own nature in an effort to attain the effects of the dominant art” (555). With this paper, Greenberg was responding to Gotthold Lessing’s Laocoön: An Essay upon the Limits of Poetry and Painting, written in 1766, which also emphasized the differences between the visual arts and literature. Although Greenberg agreed with Lessing’s distinction between the two art forms, Greenberg’s exhaltation of painting rivals Lessing’s preference for literature. For Lessing, literature has the ability to represent events and actions over time, in a succession of development, whereas painting is limited to the representation of one singular moment the artist has chosen to depict. This debate is a historical one, its impetus derived also from the writing of Leonardo da Vinci, who wrote,

[…] the painter will surpass you, because your pen will be worn out before you have fully described something that the painter may present to you instantaneously using his science. And your tongue will be impeded by thirst and your body by sleep and hunger, before you could show in words what the painter may display in an instant (qtd. in Kemp 28).

142 transverse winter 2006 However, it is not our purpose here to continue the debate on the relative value of painting and poetry, the visual arts and literature, but rather, to show in several examples the expressive capacity of their integration. To borrow some ideas from W.J.T. Mitchell, the very nature of representation is dependent upon the mixing of word and image, rather than their separation. As Mitchell writes,

[…] the interaction of pictures and texts is constitutive of representation as such: all media are mixed media, and all representations are heterogeneous; there are no ‘purely’ visual or verbal arts, though the impulse to purify media is one of the central utopian gestures of modernism” (Picture Theory 4).

This may be another means by which Arte Povera broke with convention, resisting dominant trends in artistic expression which separated the art forms, and created living experiences of the work of art through combinations of word and image. In Mitchell’s words, the notion of “’word vs. image’ denotes the tension, difference, and opposition between these terms; ‘word as image’ designates their tendency to unite, dissolve, or change places [...]” (Word and Image 53). It is this latter designation, “word as image,” that will be applied in analysis of the following works. Often, Arte Povera’s use of words was antagonistic to the nature of words as tools of communication. Alighiero Boetti’s Manifesto, 1967, a poster produced in an edition of 800, recalls the visual quality of mass-produced promotional advertising. The work consists of a list of names of artists Boetti was associated with, including himself and other members of Arte Povera. Each name running down the left side of the picture plane is matched by an enigmatic series of symbols on the right. As Christov- Bakargiev writes, the list of names and symbols represents an alternative version of the traditional, avant-garde artist’s “manifesto” (42). Tommaso Trini commented that Boetti’s “cryptic criteria” facilitated a kind of management of relations with the artists listed, an exercise in inclusion and exclusion. He writes, “I remember the most common interpretation was that it was a kind of critical text, an organizational chart of features or values (or perhaps we could say merits) jotted down […], which permitted him to stand in judgement over his colleagues” (Trini 126). The secrecy of Boetti’s method was further guaranteed by his leaving the “key to the code” with a notary public, with specifi c instructions that it not be disclosed until after his death (Christov-Bakargiev 42).

winter 2006 transverse 143 Of course, a natural reaction to the work is to try to decipher its message, especially when it seems willing to communicate something; its formal qualities, block letters, a limited, clearly-defi ned, complementary palette, mimic public advertisements. The message seems meant for us, but we are blocked by it at the same time. Trini has speculated,

Why this? Was it because it was unsolvable, in the manner of a rebus? I think it’s more simple than that. That piece was simply not suitable for the kind of critical discourse that generalizes particular facts. Frustrated by the critics, eventually Boetti told Maurizio Fagiolo dell’Arco in a 1977 interview what: ‘In Italy I would rather sell an invented manifesto for one thousand lire than go traipsing around art galleries’ ( 1 26).

A tension resulting from the impenetrability of the work becomes part of its raison d’être. As the words and symbols defy reading, the viewer is led to consider the symbols as formal elements in their own right. Meanwhile, the “code” exists elsewhere and maintains the secret. The work unfolds over time, the symbols perpetually waiting to be deciphered, while the words that signify Boetti’s colleagues are transformed into unknowable images. Also stemming from the imagery of mass communication, Jannis Kounellis’ Z- 3 of 1961, is another example of the changing face of painting in the post-war era. For Arte Povera, the earlier goals of mimesis gave way to a contemplation and immersion in the signs and symbols that constitute our everyday life. This work, reminiscent of a billboard, with its large, block letters and numbers in primary colours, thick, black lines and arrows pointing us in various directions, confronts the viewer with the unadorned, mechanical language of contemporary life and like Boetti’s Manifesto, asks us to decipher its message. But again, these textual symbols take on pictorial qualities, and now the message of mass communication is one of alienation; the code eludes us. Kounellis states,

The work of a painter is to free something without imposing it, because if you impose it you’ve liberated the thing, but not a person. What is crucial for a person, for you or, I don’t know, for everybody, is that freed thing, at all costs. The artist must remain unwavering and not infl ict it violently later, because otherwise it might be accepted but it won’t be understood or it’ll be only vaguely understood. It won’t come alive, while a painting can have a real, living, extreme meaning, and this is what must be understood (Christov-Bakargiev 248). 144 transverse winter 2006 This work functions on imposition. Its resemblance to advertising again compels us to search for a meaning, something to read, but we are left with scattered reminiscences of an attempt to communicate. Painting at this time and place was at a loss for words. Giovanni Anselmo’s Invisibile of 1971, uses the notion of “word as image” to incorporate the viewer physically. The work is composed of a slide projector positioned within a gallery, facing outwards into the space occupied by the spectator. An “image” is projected into the space of the gallery and becomes lost, for lack of a two-dimensional surface on which it would otherwise land. Rather than a painting, sculpture or piece of literature, Anselmo has orchestrated a situation, a tension, whereby the spectator’s involvement becomes necessary to the work’s realization. We don’t know what we are supposed to fi nd projected into space, but upon approaching the projector, we are made aware of ourselves as the surfaces, the canvas, onto which the projected image manifests. But it is not enough that the light hits us, we must adjust our position in front of the projector in order that the image becomes “legible.” The artistic experience is consummated when we read the word/image “visibile” on our person. The title is also instrumental in this work, lending direction and expectation, and thus tension, as the spectator paradoxically looks for an invisible work. As Anselmo states, “The invisible is the visible that can’t be seen” (Qtd. in Gianelli 100). Gilberto Zorio’s Per purifi care le parole o f 1 9 69 is another exercise in which words are set loose and the viewer is again set on a course to discover them, discern their meaning in a visual environment, while simultaneously contributing to the realization and experience of the piece. The work functions by way of a spectator’s interaction with an apparatus consisting of a tube of cloth containing alcohol, supported on one end by a triangular steel structure. As one speaks into the raised end of the tube, the words travel through the alcohol and emerge “purifi ed” at the other end, the viewer having provided the engine behind this “alchemical transformation” of words into energy (Christov-Bakargiev 172). On this aspect of the work, Zorio has stated, “Alcohol is a mystic liquid. It is also called ‘spirits’. It disinfects, burns, inebriates, it transforms and modifi es perception” (qtd. in Christov-Bakargiev 172). Zorio is thus exploring the creative possibilities of perception modifi ed through either alchemical means or a simple play on words. The work extends the boundaries of visual art to incorporate the spoken word of the spectator in a dynamic process that binds the two. This visual object, this process, needs words in order to exist. A fi nal example will further illustrate Arte Povera’s playful, tactical approach to the word/image dialectic, treated as an opportunity to explore new intersections winter 2006 transverse 145 of artistic experience. The following excerpt demonstrates how, when in 1969 Boetti was invited to participate in an exhibition in Leverkusen, Germany, the artist responded to an opportunity to use a few pages in the exhibition catalogue. He wrote,

Dear Sir, I thank you for your letter of 29.6.69, in which you invite me to exhibit in ‘Conceptual Art-No Object’. I am happy to take part in it. With relation to the fi ve pages which are available to me in the catalogue, this is how they should be arranged: -I shall avail myself of only one page (double sided) -this single page will be of a different thickness from that of the others, while still observing the same measurements, quality and colour of the rest -this thickness will (if possible) be fi ve times greater, etc. In the hope that what I have in mind can be done, I must emphasize that in the Kingdom of Olinam it is forbidden to publish books the thickness of whose pages is less than 500 grams per m [square]. I hope to be able to attend the opening. For now, please accept my very best regards. Alighiero Boetti (qtd. in Christov-Bakargiev 237)

The novel attitude to words, text and their visual, formal characteristics noted earlier persists in this passage and is representative of the group’s inventive approach to artistic expression. Boetti has taken advantage of the opportunity to write a description of what he does not intend to include in the catalogue, which would typically be an artist’s statement or illustration relating to the exhibition. Instead, he has treated the pages of the exhibition catalogue not as blank voids upon which he will impose his message, but as integral parts of the process as a whole, where the physical aspects of the catalogue are taken as sites of meaning in their own right. As Mitchell writes, “If art history is the art of speaking for and about images, then it is clearly the art of negotiating the diffi cult, contested border between words and images, of speaking for and about that which is ‘voiceless,’ representing that which cannot represent itself” (Picture Theory 55-56). Arte Povera has confronted this border between words and images and has given voice to both in works that express their inseparability in art and life. 146 transverse winter 2006 notes

1 Arte Povera, as a movement, was offi cially introduced to the public in 1967 by Italian art critic, Germano Celant, in an exhibition titled, “Arte Povera e IM Spazio” at Galleria La Bertesca, Genoa. Subsequent writings on Arte Povera have situated the group’s activity at varying stages throughout the 1960s and 1970s, such as Richard Flood and Frances Morris’ 2001 joint exhibition between the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, and the Tate Modern, London, titled, “Zero to Infi nity: Arte Povera 1962-1972.” Most of the original members have continued their careers working on an individual basis.

winter 2006 transverse 147 works cited

- Celant, Germano, ed. Arte povera – Im spazio. Genoa: LaBertesca Gallery-Masnata-Trentalance, 1967. --- The Italian Metamorphosis, 1943-1968. New York: Guggenheim Museum Publications, 1994. - Christov-Bakargiev, Carolyn. Arte Povera. London: Phaidon Press, 1999. - De Grand, Alexander. Italian Fascism: Its Origins and Developments. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000. - Gianelli, Ida, ed. Arte povera in collezione. Milano: Charta, 2000. - Gordon, Robert S. C. “Impegno and the Encounter with Modernity: ‘High’ Culture in Postwar

Italy.” Italy Since 1945. Ed. Patrick McCarthy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. 197-213. - Greenberg, Clement. “Towards a Newer Laocoon.” Art in Theory: 1900-1990. An Anthology of Changing Ideas. Eds. Charles Harrison and Paul Wood. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992. 554-560. - Kemp, Martin, ed. Leonardo on Painting: An Anthology of Writings by Leonardo da Vinci with a Selection of Documents Relating to his Career as an Artist. Trans. Margaret Walker. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1989.

148 transverse winter 2006 - Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim. Laocoön: An Essay upon the Limits of Poetry and Painting. Trans. Edward Allen McCormick. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984. Mitchell, W. J. T. Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1995. --- “Word and Image.” Critical Terms for Art History. Ed. Robert S. Nelson. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996. 47-57. - Trini, Tommaso. “Alighiero Boetti’s Manifesto (Poster).” Arte povera in collezione. Ed. Ida Gianelli. Milano: Charta, 2000. - Vetrocq, Marcia E. “Painting and Beyond: Recovery and Regeneration, 1943-1952.” The Italian Metamorphosis, 1943-1968. Ed. Germano Celant. New York: Guggenheim Museum Publications, 1994.

winter 2006 transverse 149 mathematics, music, and modernism: modelling the spatial and temporal parameters of frye’s cultural envelope yves saint-cyr

Northrop Frye’s conception of pure literary meaning is informed by the image of centripetal form and movement. For Frye, literary meaning spirals inward, engendering a self-contained “cultural envelope” within which human beings negotiate and construct their perceptions of reality. The musical structure of the fugue – understood as a musical theme that can function simultaneously as melody and accompaniment – likewise consists of a recursive pattern that folds back on itself; this is why Deanne Bogdan identifi es the fugue as the most accurate metaphorical representation of Frye’s cultural envelope. J.S. Bach, for whom Frye had a deep affection, was a master of fugal composition. Bach’s ability to interweave multiple canonic variations recalls the spiral, in that not only is fugal structure fundamentally recursive, but fugal recapitulation-with-variation also amalgamates circular movement and linear displacement. In Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, Douglas Hofstadter identifi es Bach’s fi f th “Canones diversi super thema regium” from the Musical Offering as the epitome of what he calls a “Strange Loop,” a recursive pattern that progresses through the modulations of a hierarchical system only to fi nd itself right back where it started. By drawing analogies between Bach’s fugal composition, M.C. Escher’s visual paradoxes, and Kurt Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem, Hofstadter builds towards the idea that recursive paradox animates the mechanisms through which human consciousness both represents and creates reality, on philosophical, psychological, and semiotic levels. Frye would likely have agreed, for the end of his Anatomy of Criticism foregrounds the relationship between literature and mathematical paradox. Frye writes that:

Whenever we read anything, we fi nd our attention moving in two directions at once. One direction is outward or centrifugal, in which we keep going outside our reading, from the individual words to the things they mean […]. The other direction is inward or centripetal, in which we try to develop from these words a sense of the larger verbal pattern they make. (Anatomy 73)

It is this second, inward fl ow of meaning that animates the cultural envelope, whose function is to contain the educated imagination. The cultural envelope incubates consciousness by

150 transverse winter 2006 locating experiential reality at the heart of metaphorical meaning. Frye wonders “if we cannot see literature, not only as complicating itself in time, but as spread out in conceptual space from some kind of centre that criticism could locate” (Anatomy 17). In this passage, Frye seems to be longing for a comprehensive philosophy of literature, or philosophy of literary meaning. In a sense, he is asking the questions “What is literary reality?” and “How can we model it in space and time?” Linguists such as Edward Sapir and Benjamin Whorf have suggested that language itself generates culturally specifi c epistemologies and ontologies, a suggestion that bears a strong resemblance to Frye’s description of the cultural envelope. In the context of these ideas, can mathematics and music help us to move towards a heuristic epistemology of literature and language, an epistemology grounded in the constant conjunction of oral and written traditions? I will attempt to approach this question by delineating some of the fundamental parallels between Frye’s cultural envelope and certain ideas in philosophy and developmental psychology. I will then demonstrate how structures and systems of notation from mathematics and music can be used to model the spatial and temporal parameters of the cultural envelope’s epistemological fabric. On a fundamental level, epistemology’s primary goal is to address the question “What can we know?” When Descartes formulated his famous cogito, he was attempting to isolate and defi ne that knowledge which lies beyond the reach of theoretical doubt. Theoretically, I cannot prove that the events of my life are not part of some long and elaborate dream, that my perceptions are not being controlled by an “evil demon” in some separate and unknown reality; therefore, it becomes possible for me to doubt the existence the physical world. Furthermore, even if Descartes’ Evil Demon postulate is dismissed as untestable (lack of negative proof does not constitute positive proof), there remains the problem of perception. When I consider the table at which I sit, I must admit that I am not so much aware of the table as I am aware of what my senses tell me about it. I am not directly acquainted with the table as a physical object because I can only experience it through the intermediary of my senses. As Bertrand Russell argues, I can reasonably conclude that the “real table, if there is one, is not immediately known to us at all, but must be an inference from what is immediately known” (11). I form an image in my mind that is based on the information that my senses give me; however, I must make the inference that there is an actual object there that causes my senses to react as they do. If I am directly acquainted with my mental construct of the world (the inference), but only indirectly acquainted with the stimulus (the “real world”), then reality as it is experienced can be nothing but winter 2006 transverse 151 perception. What actually exists, on an experiential level, is the conceptualisation, the perception based on sense data. This is why Frye states that “What is really there? and What are we really seeing? […] tend to become the same ‘phenomenological’ question” (Great Code 14). If one wishes to answer the question “What is real?” one must investigate how human beings construct conceptual models of self and the world. From an early age, human beings develop mental constructs of the world in which they live. These constructs – or conceptualisations – will then form the basis of their sense of reality, and will determine the nature of their behaviour in daily life. The developmental process by which human beings learn to organise their perceptions, the process by which they derive a cohesive perceptual model from a lifetime’s worth of changeable sensory information, has been the object of considerable analysis. This analysis, however, must continually address the fact that phenomenological consciousness is the dynamic result of the complex interaction of genetic predisposition and environment, a conjunction whose reciprocal and multi-faceted nature must to a certain extent remain unpredictable. Nevertheless, certain general conclusions can be drawn. Human beings distinguish between physical and mental events. This distinction, however, need not be ontological; that is, the dichotomous nature of experiential reality – and more specifi cally of the language used to describe it – need not lead us into the philosophical cul de sac of Cartesian substance dualism (the belief that mind and body are of two metaphysically different substances). Rather, one could say that human beings tend to divide knowledge into categories that facilitate the process of organisation and integration. The practical result of this tendency is the capacity to conceive of different orders of reality and to manipulate categorical clusters of information. This ultimately enables one to generalise, to predict, and to anticipate outcomes. If we accept this model as a general description of the perceptual relationship between a conscious agent and the physical world, the question arises “What mechanism bridges the gap between the mental and the physical?” In other words, what is the point of articulation between “being” and “being-in-the-world,” between perception and behaviour? The answer has to do with representation, with signifying, and with metaphor. We interact with reality – while, at the same time, creating it – by manipulating it indirectly, that is, by manipulating its representation. We start doing this when we are very young. The process comes naturally to us; in fact, it’s child’s play. As a growing child learns how to conceptualise the world around him, he is 152 transverse winter 2006 creating his own reality for the fi rst time. Even before he learns the nature of what he perceives, he must learn how to perceive it – he must build a working model of reality within which to grow and develop. It takes years for children to learn how to classify and process sensory information. At fi rst, the child’s working model of the external world will be fragmented. Canadian psychologist Otto Weininger has observed that an infant will “play with his sight: he observes, he watches, he begins to discriminate patterns, shapes, people. He does this in an exploratory way [...]” (Play v). Play is the primary tool that the child uses to explore/create his world. As the child grows older, he will learn how to order a large and complex world through the smaller world of toys. Play has no rules outside of those created by the child; he can, therefore, alter them at any time – he can “function for a time in a narcissistic, almost omnipotent, way” (Weininger Play 9). Thus, the child achieves control over his new world, his new reality. Play, from a certain point of view, can be defi ned as the investment of emotional energy in metaphorical actions and objects used within a metaphorical space. Play is a form of storytelling or mythmaking that, like any other fi ction, engenders its own hypothetical ontology. In The Secular Scripture, Frye argues: “The child should not ‘believe’ the story he is told; he should not disbelieve it either, but send out imaginative roots into that mysterious world between the ‘is’ and the ‘is not’ which is where his ultimate freedom lies” (166). This border country between the real and the fi ctional is metaphor’s native habitat. While any play behaviour can be said to inhabit this interstitial space, Frye maintains that exposure to stories and storytelling will help children to function in a larger world that continues to be just as invested in the hypothetical and the fi ctional as children at play are in imaginary worlds. Citing the fi nal chapter of The Educated Imagination, Bogdan writes that “the earlier children are conditioned by the clear outlines of myths, legends and fairytales, the more likely the hypothetical possibilities of linguistic constructs will act on them as a ‘ground bass’ for interpreting the more displaced forms of myth such as occur in the genres of social realism” (Bogdan 69). However, prior to his entrance into the world of social realism (that is, the wider world of social and cultural myths and rituals), the child is empowered by his inability to differentiate between play and self; he projects his emotions into his play and, in so doing, translates his subjective perceptions into a concrete, tangible, and metaphorical reality that he can manipulate and with which he can interact. At fi rst, the child will not distinguish between his environment, his perceptions, and himself. Gradually, however, play will help him to become winter 2006 transverse 153 increasingly individuated. Individuation is one of the most important milestones in the development of a child towards maturity. Prior to this process, an infant cannot separate sensory data from ego. As Joseph Sandler argues:

When we speak of cathexis [the investment of emotional energy] of the external world, or of objects in that world, we mean the cathexis of representations within the ego, representations that have been built up by successive experiences […] that represent reality as distorted by the child’s intellectual limitations” (Sandler 4).

Individuation is the developmental process through which a child overcomes this ego- centric perception of reality. Implicit within this process is the capacity to conceive of the “other,” to recognise the distinction between object and subject, an ability that allows the child to conceive of an equivalent centre of self in others. The separation from and, more importantly, the internalisation of the mother’s (or caregiver’s) role as guardian of the child’s emotions and regulator of the child’s environment is played out through the process of individuation from the parent. Drawing on the work of Wilfred Bion and Melanie Klein, Weininger argues that the mother contains her baby both before and after birth – before, she contains it physically; after, she contains it emotionally. The child’s maternal container then becomes the basis of his internal container, and thus of his sense of self and of the construction of his perceptual reality (Weininger Play 2). The mother’s role is internalised within the child’s psyche and thus forms the basis of the child’s ability to deal with emotions and interact with others. The idea that a mother contains her child’s emotions by regulating its environment has distinct parallels in Frye’s theory. For instance, Bogdan describes the cultural envelope as “the spatial container of the educated imagination,” whose role is to [shut] out extraneous noise (71). In Creation and Recreation, Frye describes the cultural envelope as the containment that insulates human beings from nature. In both Weininger and Frye’s theories, the notion of containment is directly linked to the child’s and the educated imagination’s capacities, respectively, to engage in generative free-play. In the broadest sense, this play behaviour serves basically the same function as social ritual in the adult world. Like children at play, social ritual allows us to translate subjective perception into behaviour, a process that then allows us to manipulate and interact with our environment and actually create our experiential reality. According to social 154 transverse winter 2006 theorist Patricia Hughes-Freeland, “Ritual as play […] deals not just with the world of facts, but with the world of possibilities: it is a fusion of the dreamed-of and lived-in orders of reality” (Hughes-Freeland 12). For instance, consider the following everyday example. A man has the habit of cleaning his living space every week; the act of cleaning up is habitual and he derives satisfaction from its execution. In fact, when circumstances prevent him from accomplishing this task, his stress level rises; living in a continuously untidy space is disturbing to him, makes him feel out of control and disorganised. This mode of behaviour, taken to an extreme, might be considered obsessive; however, short of this, it is simply a means by which the man ritualistically maintains control – a potentially manic defence. His identity, his perceptual reality, is expressed (and infl uenced) by his day to day actions, by how he lives his life. The act of cleaning, in this instance, could be considered a behavioural ritual. As stated above, when a child is at play, he is ordering his reality in an almost omnipotent fashion. But what of play (and, indeed, social ritual) that involves parameters, rules, or other participants? Consideration of the structure of the child’s exploration clarifi es the distinction between play and playing a game. A game has an internally consistent structure that exists independently of the child (Weininger Play 9). If a child is playing a game or playing with others, he must conform to certain social structures. His will is no longer the only factor; therefore, he must expand his awareness to include factors outside of his own ego. In this context, the child’s play behaviour can also be said to take on performative aspects. For Frye, the performance of ritual, as exemplifi ed b y t h eatrical action, is an essential aspect of the cultural envelope: “ritual, as the content of action, and more particularly of dramatic action, is something continuously latent in the order of words (Anatomy 109). At what point, however, does play or social ritual become performance? Surely the man cleaning his house is not engaged in a performance, even though the act of cleaning might be considered a ritual. Both of these terms have been used loosely, even interchangeably, by many scholars; however, for the sake of clarity, let us narrow our defi nitions. All performance is ritual; however, not all ritual is performance. In theatre, what “validates the performance is that it is made real by the audience” (Hughes-Freeland 15). J Edward Chamberlin argues that “The urge to tell stories and sing songs, like language itself, is a defi ning quality of human societies […]” (“Doing Things” 74); this quality relates to the fact that most ceremonies of belief require specifi c words to be both delivered and received by specifi c individuals or groups, a requirement that presupposes audience reception or interaction. We perform our reality by mediating it. In social context, this performance/ winter 2006 transverse 155 mediation takes the form of a multiplicity of diverse behaviours, from the physical and vocal to the semiotic and graphic to the electronic and digital. Any creative human action can be thought of in these terms, including all oral and written language use. Every time we use language, we are performing our reality. In this sense, a text can be said to “perform” in the sense that, once it is written, it mediates meaning independently of the author every time it is read. Frye refers to this textual autonomy when he argues that “the Dante who writes a commentary on the fi rst canto of the Paradiso is merely one more of Dante’s critics” (Anatomy 5). Unlike oral or physical performance, written texts continue to perform reality in the author’s absence; however, like the oral and physical, meaning is generated through the act of reception. A closed book sitting on a shelf does not perform; the text must be received by an audience (a reader or community of readers) before it can be said to generate meaning. When an oral or written performance is used to generate meaning, it does so through representation. Just as we derive mental constructs based on sense perception, just as children manipulate reality through play, and just as the man engaged in house cleaning orders his reality by ordering his physical environment, so do societies and cultures at large rely on representation to create ceremonies of belief and performances of reality. We construct, negotiate, mediate, and respond to our reality through metaphor. Frye seems to point us in this direction when he argues:

What is descriptive […] establishes a verbal replica of external phenom- ena, and its verbal symbolism is to be understood as a set of representative signs. But whatever is constructive in any verbal structure seems to me to be invariably some kind of metaphor or hypothetical identifi cation. (Anatomy 353)

The question thus arises, “How do we model this performative, linguistic, representational, and playful behaviour?” In other words, how do we fi nd a metaphor to model the ways in which we use metaphor? In a general sense, this is one of the fundamental questions that Frye attempts to answer, albeit within the specifi c realm of literary criticism. The diffi culty in limiting our reading of Frye’s theories exclusively to literature is that literary composition, consumption, and criticism are but particular manifestations of the more general representational play behaviour described above. Moreover, Frye’s metaphor of the centripetal cultural envelope is so rich and inclusive that the temptation to expand its application beyond the world of literature is quite strong. As demonstrated 156 transverse winter 2006 above, the cultural envelope can be related to certain Kleinean and Bowlbean ideas in developmental psychology. There is nothing new about using theories from psychology to model literary processes; however, Frye reminds us that “studies which are competent both in psychology and in criticism […] are aware [of] how much guesswork is involved and how tentative all conclusions must be” (Anatomy 110). What is important to remember is that this is always the case when dealing with any modelling process. Human beings seem to have a tendency to internalise technological metaphors when attempting to describe human nature. Psychologists and neurobiologists, for example, have historically drawn on technological metaphors to model mind/brain functions, from early hydraulic models of consciousness to modern computational models. Furthermore, there seems to be a parallel between the evolution of technology and the evolution of the metaphors used to describe mental processes: Charles Sherington described the mind as a loom at the turn of the century, Wilder Penfi eld referred to William James’ “stream of consciousness” as a tape recorder in the 1950s, Karl Pribram described mental representations as holograms in the 1970s and, today, philosophers of mind such as Patricia Churchland talk about computational subroutines and distributed parallel processing as if the mind were a computer. Congruently, the technology of writing has also been internalised as an anthropomorphic metaphor. One of the consequences of this process has been the tendency to use our written traditions as models for speech itself. As David Olson points out in his article “Demythologizing Literacy,” the assumption that writing is the transcription of speech is an oversimplifi cation that reinforces the deeper Western assumption that societies evolve from primitive orality toward superior literacy (Olson 3-7). Thus, a sequential hierarchy is derived from a metaphorical model that fi lters the perception of oral culture through the lens of inherited written traditions, whose assumed precision and permanence is regarded as carrying more social, cultural, and political power. In contrast to this model, Frye perceives the social and cultural power of the Word as being grounded in utterance. Pure utterance, Frye argues, is a “radically oral production [that] is being referred back to an actual performance. If we want to know what a poem ‘really means,’ we have to read the poem itself aloud” (Myth 110). This is not to say that he wises to impose a rigid sequential chronology onto oral and written traditions, with the oral given place of privilege as the primary source of linguistic meaning. This kind of categorical dualism “is derived from a literary convention” (Myth 110) and obscures the reciprocal and cross-fertilising relationship that always/already exists between oral and written mediation, winter 2006 transverse 157 irrespective of the traditions within which they operate. Rather, what Frye is suggesting is an emphasis on performance, or on the performativity of both oral and written linguistic structures. One could say that this performativity is based on the physical p e rformance of the body and the voice; however, this does not undermine or diminish the performative capacity of any “hypothetically verbal structure,” (Frye Anatomy 71) including written literature. Frye’s position on the use of metaphors to model processes in literature appears, at fi rst glace, to be rather ambiguous. In his “Polemical Introduction” to the Anatomy of Criticism, he expresses an intense dislike for what he considers to be deterministic analogies, claiming that “a scholar with a special interest in geography or economics expresses that interest by the rhetorical device of putting his favourite study into a causal relationship with whatever interests him less” (6). According to Frye, the problem with this approach is that “critical principles cannot be taken ready-made from theology, philosophy, politics, science, or any combination of these” (7). However, on the same page, he states: “The presence of science in any subject changes its character from the casual to the causal, from the random and intuitive to the systematic, as well as safeguarding the integrity of that subject from external invasions” (7). There seems to be a tension between Frye’s conviction that literary criticism should be pure and autonomous on the one hand, and that it should emulate scientifi c methodology on the other. A similar tension arises when he turns, for instance, to the other arts in search of heuristic models to describe how the mechanics of literary (or, in a broader sense, linguistic) meaning relate to the production and consumption of culture. Frye is very critical of theories that “exaggerate the values in literature that can be related to the external source” (7). In contrast to this attitude, however, he states in his “Tentative Conclusion” that the Anatomy of Criticism is an attack on “the boundaries between the methods [of criticism]” (341). What are we to make of these apparent contradictions? The answer to this question is essential to my analysis of Frye’s theories in relation to psychological, mathematical, and musical correlates. In short, structures external to a given fi eld can be used metaphorically to model processes and relationships within that fi eld. This metaphorical mechanism, however, must always come with a caveat not to apply the model in a deterministic or rigid manner. For instance, while a Freudian analysis of a fairytale may produce interesting ideas that enrich our reading of the text (and, reciprocally, of Freudian theory), it would be false to claim that these ideas constitute the story’s intrinsic or fundamental meaning. Frye writes that a myth, like a fairytale, “being a centripetal structure of meaning, […] can be made 158 transverse winter 2006 to mean an indefi nite number of things, and it is more fruitful to study what in fact myths have been made to mean” (Anatomy 341). It follows, therefore, that any other centripetal structure will be just as prone to multiple signifi cation. As Barfi eld puts it,

The naturalist is right when he connects the myth with phenomena of nature, but wrong if he deduces it solely from these. The psycho-analyst is right when he connects the myth with ‘inner’ […] experiences but wrong if he deduces it solely from these (91-92).

Meaning – and, more specifi cally, metaphorical meaning – is a function of context. When a structure or image from one fi eld is placed in the context of another, a metaphorical common ground is established out of which an emergent meaning arises that may not have been present (or actuated) previously. This emergent metaphorical meaning, however, is unstable, responding to the subject’s rhetorical agenda and co-existing with a multiplicity of other potential meanings. This instability, Barfi eld points out, has been a constant irritant to grammarians, logicians, and philologists attempting to formulate a systematic theory of semantics; this is because, in a general sense, it is an instability that is endemic to all language. Depending on which subset is selected or assumed by the reader, different metaphorical meanings will be generated. The potential number of meanings is theoretically infi nite. Frye’s distaste for theories that seek to superimpose external metaphors onto literary criticism relates to his rejection of models that imply a truth of correspondence. Whether this correspondence is based on mimesis or deterministic modelling, the results are equally restrictive, being impoverished in the fi rst instance and dogmatised in the second. A “direct mapping on from words on the page to things in the world,” as Bogdan (61) puts it, is related to deterministic metaphor, in that multiplicity of meaning becomes a liability to be overcome in favour of a categorical truth-correspondence. In other words, when one metaphorical meaning is pitted against another, one or the other must eventually be dismissed as “untrue.” Critical attitudes that imply a mimetic bias likewise fall prey to this kind of reductionism by implying that anything that is not mimetic is a “lie.” In this respect, Frye’s anti-mimetic bias bears a striking resemblance to Brecht’s writings on theatre. Brecht’s attitude towards psychological realism in theatre (which he associated with historical drama and sentimental melodrama) corresponds to Frye’s attitude towards nostalgia poetry and picturesque painting, styles of art wherein the function of the representation “is to stimulate winter 2006 transverse 159 the reader to remember a parallel experience of his own” (Frye Bush Garden 32). Bogdan correctly points out that Frye seems to be in constant retreat from language’s referential capacity. He does not, however, dismiss it or exclude it from his theory. Rather, Frye focuses on the mechanisms of centripetal meaning while, at the same time, acknowledging a reciprocal relationship between reality and representation. The cultural envelope, as typifi ed by the pure utterance, is “a power that re-creates the mind, or perhaps has actually created the mind in the fi rst place” (Frye Double Vision 83). For Frye, language both refl ects and determines; it is both an effect and a cause, a response and a stimulus. In Frye’s theory, the centripetal movement of metaphorical meaning is foregrounded because it goes to the heart of humanity’s capacity both to construct and to deconstruct reality, to build up and tear down the hypothetical worlds that make up the fabric of our being-in-the-world. The centripetal heart of the cultural envelope is the centre of storytelling, where “storytelling” is understood as any creative human activity. For instance, Chamberlin’s defi nition of storytelling includes (but is not limited to) constitutions, nursery rhymes, national anthems, mathematics, history, law, the physical sciences, psychology, sociology, and politics; all forms of system building are examples of storytelling, in that they share a fundamental common ground – that of metaphor. Chamberlin points out that even scientists depend on the mechanism of metaphor to model complex processes in the physical world, from “descriptions of atoms as miniature galaxies with colourful planets, curious moons and remarkable orbits” to descriptions “of light as a wave [or] as a set of particles” (“Your Land” 125). While literature, with poetry at its centre, may be a paradigmatic form of centripetal meaning (as it is for Frye), it overlaps with all other forms of storytelling. This is why Frye notes that “in the study of literary scholarship the student becomes aware of an undertow carrying him away from literature. He fi nds that literature is the central division of the humanities” (Anatomy 12). It is precisely because of this undertow that Frye longs for an autonomous language of criticism. He wants to isolate the mechanics of linguistic construction that generate autonomous, self-contained meaning. Thus, the common ground shared by literary meaning and other forms of linguistic construction would reverse the undertow’s direction of fl ow. In other words, “if the varied interests of critics could be related to a central expanding pattern of systematic comprehension, this undertow would disappear, and they would be seen as converging on criticism instead of running away from it” (Anatomy 12). Frye’s longing for a “pattern of systematic comprehension” is 160 transverse winter 2006 distinctly modernist, in that it calls for a system that is at once autonomous, logically self-contained, and whose structurally congruent axioms (hypothetical worlds) have the power to change the world by helping us to change how we perceive it. In the context of storytelling (in its broadest sense), logical systems of thought are rationalisations of the metaphorical visions that animate human behaviour. In the case of centrifugal meaning, this form of rationalism is unproblematic. One-to-one correspondence (or, more generally, referential meaning), engenders a pattern of systematic comprehension that is based on the ontology of phenomenal reality. The clearest examples of this centrifugal meaning can be found in applied (as opposed to pure) mathematics; such examples would include the mathematics of civil engineering, Newtonian mechanics, architectural blueprints, and technical manuals. In the case of centripetal meaning, on the other hand, the development of a logical system capable of rationalising non-referential meaning is more diffi cult to achieve, at least in a non-reductive manner. The clearest examples of this type of meaning would include poetry, music, and pure mathematics. Through a brief discussion of Frye’s orientation towards pure mathematics, mathematical paradox, and fugal structures in music, I will now attempt not so much to solve Frye’s dilemma, but to point in the direction of its possible solution. My objective is to offer some suggestions as to how Frye’s concept of the centripetal cultural envelope could be heuristically modelled. Frye’s longing for an autonomous language or system of codifi cation, seems to constitute a longing for a real-life version of Hermann Hesse’s fi c tional Glass Bead Game. As such, it must remain, for the moment, hypothetical and elusive. However, both mathematics and music represent existing systems of codifi cation that have the capacity to model the kinds of linguistic mechanisms that Frye locates at the centre of literary criticism. While these systems, given that they are imported from other fi elds, must function metaphorically, they have the capacity to handle dynamic, self-contained, and even paradoxical patterns of organisation that expand in both space and time. This capacity goes to the heart of Frye’s critical agenda. Early on in the Anatomy of Criticism, Frye writes: “The critic is in the position of a mathematician who has to deal with numbers so large that it would keep him scribbling digits until the next ice age even to write out in their conventional form as integers. Critic and mathematician alike will have somehow to invent a less cumbersome notation (16). Both mathematics and music use autonomous systems of notation that function as rational expressions of highly complex, nuanced, and sometimes even winter 2006 transverse 161 irrational or paradoxical patterns of meaning. Frye takes advantage of the elegance and concision of mathematical and musical notation by using them as metaphorical shorthand. For instance, a text’s theme can be correlated to a piece of music’s key signature, while its plot can be correlated to the rhythm of a melodic line (Denham 60). Frye was a pianist and loved Bach’s music, especially the Well-Tempered Clavier; in fact, the Anatomy of Criticism is often regarded as the literary equivalent of the Well-Tempered Clavier (Bogdan 57, 62). In the preface to his libretto for “In the Middle of Ordinary Noise” (a musical masque composed by John Beckwith), James Reaney notes that Frye’s childhood piano lessons with George Ross taught him the “grammar and conventions of classical music,” through which he “fi rst saw the possibilities of describing literature in terms of wheels and mandalas” (Reaney 262). When a musical pattern emerges from noise, its centripetal movement brings order out of chaos. Music must be physically performed in order to be heard, in order for its musicality to emerge from the noise as Gaea emerged from the Chaos in Greek mythology. Therefore, its capacity to create musical meaning is, like poetry, grounded in pure “utterance.” When this performative utterance is written out as musical notation, the notes on the page take on a radically metaphorical signifi cation. The score to the Well-Tempered Clavier, as a physical object, both is and is not music. The written music is a metaphorical representation of a physical sound, just as x2+y2=r2 is a metaphorical representation of an ideal circle. Thus, a mathematical equation can function in the same manner as a line of written music. Frye writes that “pure literature, like pure mathematics, contains its own meaning” (Anatomy 351). This self-containment is the basis of the cultural envelope’s capacity to contain the educated imagination. Bogdan stresses that, for Frye, “literature […] should not be regarded as being primarily about anything other than the literary” (Bogdan 61). Her emphasis on “primarily” points to the fact that literary meaning may not be exclusively self-contained; the tension between the centripetal and the centrifugal, combined with contextual signifi cation, can generate secondary and tertiary levels of meaning. However, Frye’s anti-mimetic bias engenders a hierarchical privileging of the non-referential that shares an important common ground with mathematics and music. A mathematical statement exists within a fi x ed set of propositions in the same way that “literature and mathematics proceed from postulates, not facts; both can be applied to external reality and yet exist also in a ‘pure’ or self-contained form” (Frye Anatomy 351). This is equally true of music, if not more so. For Frye, music is also not primarily “about” anything; it just 162 transverse winter 2006 is. Similarly, Hofstadter writes that a “statement of number theory is not about a statement of number theory; it just is a statement of number theory” (Hofstadter 18). To identify the musical equivalent of this sentiment, Bogdan cites Peter Kivy’s Music Alone: Philosophical Refl ections on the Purely Musical Experience, in which he defi nes the concept of “music alone” as a quasi-syntactical musical structure, some properties of which can be described phenomenologically (Kivy 196). While these properties can be expressive, Kivy stresses that they are not semantic. This means that, over and above any particular audience response or compositional intention and infl uence, music can be understood in purely musical terms. This is why Frye maintains that “music is primarily about itself” (Myth 184). This parallels the modernist attitude that a poem should not “mean” but “be.” Of all the arts, music (like pure mathematics) is most free of centrifugal, referential meaning. For Frye, human freedom is indelibly linked to our ability to conceive of hypothetical possibilities, an ability that is dependent on imaginary existence. Music creates possible worlds acoustically. In mathematics, numbers and processes that could never, even in principle, exist in the real world can be represented by “irrationals.” Examples of irrationals include the square root of two, the conditions under which two parallel lines will meet (in non-Euclidean geometry), and the construction of a square of area equal to that of a given circle, a process that Lindemann proved is impossible (Chamberlin “Mathematics” 235). Frye suggests that “irrational numbers in mathematics may be compared to prepositions in verbal languages” (Anatomy 351), in that prepositions do not refer to actual “things” in the real world. Picking up on the same point, Chamberlin argues that irrational numbers generate meaning that spirals inward “towards the structure of the discourse rather than outwards towards some ostensible referent in the real world” (“Mathematics” 234). Mathematics gives us tools for rationalising not only imaginary numbers and processes, but also numbers and processes that are beyond the powers of imagination itself. These are called “transcendentals,” and are defi ned as numbers that are not the solution of any algebraic equation with rational coeffi cients. Examples include pi and the number e, which is the basis of the system of logarithms. The power of transcendentals is that they allow mathematics to represent infi nity and manipulate infi nite series. Calculus, for instance, transcends infi nity by allowing the mathematician to “assume” that an infi nite series will eventually reach its limit. In a literary context, infi nity is often used as a metaphor for God. Chamberlin notes that Nicholas of Cusa (Cusanus) described God as “A centre which is everywhere, but whose circumference winter 2006 transverse 163 is nowhere,” an image that Borges echoes in his short story “The Library of Babel.” God, like calculus, is what Frye refers to as “a ready-made metaphor” (Great Code 24). A fi gurative god both is and is not God, just as a mathematical series both does and does not reach its limit, just as x2+y2=r2 both is and is not a circle. This is the paradox of metaphor. In mathematics, paradox can be a powerful (and controversial) force. Both Chamberlin and Hofstadter refer to mathematical paradox in the context of set theory. In his 1891 theorem on the non-denumerability of the continuum, Cantor demonstrates a way of putting sets containing infi nite numbers of objects into correspondence with each other. For example, the number of minutes in all time is the same as the number of seconds, hours, and years; or, put differently, the number of points on a line one inch long is the same as the number of points on a line a mile long (both are infi nite). Chamberlin uses the theory of sets as a metaphorical means of understanding how time is handled in a narrative. He points out that what we do when we work with sets “is very similar to what we do when we tell a story and put ten years into a day (as Homer did) or a day into a novel (as James Joyce did)” (Chamberlin Your Land 166). Similarly, the hero in Tristram Shandy worries that it has taken him two years to chronicle the fi rst two days of his life. As Bertrand Russell points out, however, if the biographer lived forever, no part of the biography would remain unwritten since “the number of days in all time is no greater than the number of years” (Your Land 166). Congruently, music also handles the manipulation of time (its expansion, contraction, acceleration, deceleration, etc.) in an elegant and internally consistent manner. The most signifi cant parallel between paradox in set theory and music has to do with the recursive or self-referential paradox. This is the basis of Epimenides’ paradox, in which the self-reference of the statement “This statement is false” or of the rule “Every rule has an exception” generates a self-contradiction that must remain simultaneously true and untrue. In set theory, this type of paradox can be generated by postulating a “set of all sets,” a set that logically must contain itself. In music, this kind of self-containment occurs in canons and fugues. Canon structure, which is contained within the less rigid structure of the fugue, is based on a melody line (fugue subject) that can double as its own accompaniment. A fugue contains itself by recapitulating the fugue subject while, at the same time, developing the subject through variation and permutation. Bogdan argues: Frye’s spatialization of poetic creation and response [is] a kind of archetypal fugue, 164 transverse winter 2006 a symbol for Frye’s privileging of centripetal or ‘purely literary’ meaning as the apo- theosis of verbal design […] the fugue of the High Baroque, which, according the Theodor Adorno, ‘paradigmatically’ resolved mental dualism as manifested in the split between the harmonic and the contrapuntal, is the most propitious musical form to illustrate centripetal meaning as the basis of Frye’s cultural envelope. (58)

She then associates fugal structure with centripetal meaning by describing the fugue as the philosophical apogee of “music alone” (Bogdan 64). Frye relates the polyphony of the fugue’s multiple “voices” to Shakespearean plays in which “several plots [go] on at once […] preserving their individual integrity [and the] intricate texture of [their] repeating and modulating images until the end” (Natural Perspective 27). In Frye’s theory, there is a base- line continuity from fugue, to song, to lyric, to poem; all of these are theoretically contiguous in the sense that they represent a centripetal movement toward the centre of the cultural envelope. The word “centripetal” itself, as a compound of the Latin centrum (centre) and petere (to seek), can be read as “seeking the centre.” When Bach sent his famous Musical Offering to Frederick the Great of Prussia in the mid-eighteenth century, the manuscript bore the inscription “Regis Iussu Cantio Et Reliqua Canonica Arte Resoluta,” which translates as “At the King’s command, the Song and the Remainder Resolved with Canonic Art” (Bach 1). The inscription is an acronym of the Italian verb ricercar, also meaning “to seek.” Hofstadter explains that the word ricercar was actually the original term for “fugue,” and that “the term ‘ricercar’ had survived, and now designated an erudite kind of fugue, perhaps too austerely intellectual for the common ear” (Hofstadter 7). Frye’s use of the word “centripetal,” therefore, should be understood not simply as a static state of non-referential signifi cation, but as a dynamic action that implies an ongoing, unresolved process. This is why Frye stresses that the word “God” should be understood as a verb rather than a noun. Thus, language can rediscover the power of radical metaphor by “conveying primarily the sense of forces and energies rather than analogues of physical bodies” (Frye Great Code 17). In musical terms, this dynamism takes the form of a movement from discordant tension to a kinetic resolution of the musical phrase. In the introduction to Sound and Poetry, Frye stresses that:

Music […] is concerned not with beauty of sound but with organization of sound, and beauty has to do with the form of the organization. A musical discord is […] a sound winter 2006 transverse 165 which throws the ear forward to the next beat: it is a sign of musical energy […] music is not a sequence of harmonies, but a sequence of discords ending in harmony. (xi)

Fugal structure provides “a principle of purely musical organization” (Janson and Kerman 250), both for composer and listener; however, this organization is fi rmly rooted in a tonal tradition. What could be described as the signifi cance of atonal musical organization in Frye? Frye privileges counterpoint over euphony, dissonance and syncopation over music that “sounds nice.” This attitude corresponds to his rejection of the “cult of beauty” (as exemplifi ed by picturesque art) as an overly referential, sentimental, and centrifugal style of artistic expression. In light of this attitude, a study of how atonal music (such as the twelve-tone compositions of Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern) functions in the context of Frye’s theory may be quite useful. Taking Frye’s arguments about music, math, and metaphor as a point of departure, I believe that it would be worthwhile to push his analogies a little further. If we can speak of a rough equivalency between equations and metaphors, or irrational numbers and prepositions (all of which correspond to the centripetal meaning of certain types of tonal composition, such as the fugue and the canon), then could we also postulate an equivalency between transcendental numbers and non-Euclidean geometry on the one hand, and atonal music on the other? In other words, can a departure from tonality be metaphorically equated with a departure from linguistic or mathematical rationalism? This question represents the next stage of my investigation of Frye’s mathematical and musical metaphors. Frye’s hierarchical privileging of centripetal over centrifugal meaning derives from his anti-mimetic bias. It may be, however, that the hierarchical structure of this model should give way to a reciprocal relationship that is more in keeping with the elegance of Frye’s ideas. The dialectic oscillation between applied and pure mathematics, between the referential and the poetic, between the centrifugal and the centripetal, may be more important than the centripetal in-and-of itself. Structurally, the fugue resembles a spiral, in that it combines linear and circular movement. This spiral progression does not simply denote the relationship between two fi xed points; rather, it constitutes a dynamic, interstitial motility. By broadening our understanding of the word “text” (just as Chamberlin broadens his understanding of the word “storytelling”) to include any creative human activity, from the most basic gestural and vocal behaviour of infants to the most complex patterns of social interaction and cultural communication, the discursive 166 transverse winter 2006 potential of literary analysis can be dramatically expanded. Thus, interdisciplinary techniques can modulate back and forth between centrifugal tonality and centripetal atonality, between harmony and discord. This is the dynamic potential of Frye’s theory. It is the result of the dynamism inherent in a poetics that must continually leave itself behind and create itself anew. Human pattern making, the act of signifying, oscillates as it spirals through a process of construction and dismemberment, information and entropy, a process wherein the fi xity of referential meaning is self-refl exively undermined by the unrealised desire to seek the centre. Perceptual reality is animated by the transcendental movement between two opposing undertows, a tension that cycles through different orders of reality as fast as they can be built up, torn down, and built up again.

notes

1 Descartes was never able to account for the problem of how metaphysically different substances could interact in a causal relationship. If the mind/soul is fundamentally non-physical, then it can have no mass or energy, and can thus never act as a causal agent in the physical world. Philosophy of mind continues to struggle with these problems in light of the fact that consciousness as it is experienced in no way resembles the brain as it is observed. Nor can a thinking subject introspect the biological workings of his own brain. Frye refers to this dilemma when he writes: “Human consciousness feels that it is inside a body it knows next to nothing about […] Hence it cannot feel that the body is identical with consciousness” (Great Code 19). In other words, it is impossible to describe the content of thoughts and feelings through neurobiological terminology, just as it is impossible to describe the neurobiological operations of a brain through the language of thoughts and feelings. The fact that no one set of terms can simultaneously describe mental phenomena at both the experiential level and the biological level is a limitation of language itself. Therefore, the apparent duality of mental phenomena is inherent, not in the phenomena themselves, but in the language with which they are described.

2 The social construction of gender roles is a topic that has been thoroughly researched by Judith Butler (Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge, 1990); and

winter 2006 transverse 167 the social construction of motherhood, specifi cally, has been discussed by Nancy Chodorow (The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978). The gender-neutral term “caregiver,” therefore, may be more appropriate, as a father (or other male caregiver) is just as capable of taking on the role of emotional container described above. However, for the purposes of this discussion, I have retained the gender-specifi c terms “mother” and “maternal” in order to emphasize the developmental link between physical and emotional containment, where physical containment is necessarily based on biological motherhood.

3 This point comes out of a conversation I had with Dr. Jean Saint-Cyr, a neuroscientist and professor of psychology at the University of Toronto, about the use of metaphor to describe biological processes that are not fully understood. Professor Jorg Bochow (also at U. of T.) has made a similar point about the metaphorical internalisation of fi lm technology and other visual media. This topic has been discussed quite effectively by Mieke Bal, whose concept of the “anthropomorphic imagination” as one of humanity’s most basic creative tools directly addresses this dynamic.

4 I believe that a comparative study of Brecht and Frye’s writings would be most compelling, although it is not the aim of this paper to undertake such a task. Theatre itself is an excellent metaphor for modelling the dynamics of centripetal meaning. At its most fundamental level, theatre can be defi ned as performative, representational action; that is, it creates a metaphorical space through voice and gesture for the benefi t of an audience. It is this transcendental quality – the transcendence of metaphor – that allows theatre to function on an artistic level. The transcendence of representational action allows for a link, a point of articulation, between separate realities in the same way that play links an internal cognitive model with a tangible, physical world.

168 transverse winter 2006 works cited

- Bach, Johann Sebastian. The Art of the Fugue & A Musical Offering. Ed. Alfred Dörffel and Wolfgang Graeser. New York: Dover Publications, 1992. - Barfi eld, Owen. Poetic Diction: A Study in Meaning. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1983. - Bogdan, Deanne. “Musical/Literary Boundaries in Northrop Frye.” Changing English 6, 1999: 57- 79. - Chamberlin, J. Edward. If This is Your Land, Where are Your Stories? Finding Common Ground. Toronto: Alfred A. Knopf Canada, 2003. ---. “Doing Things With Words: Putting Performance on the Page.” Talking On the Page: Editing

Aboriginal Oral Texts. Ed. Laura J. Murray and Keren Rice. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999. 69-90. ---. “Mathematics and Modernism.” The Legacy of Northrop Frye. Ed. Alvin A. Lee and Robert D. Denham. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994. - Denham, Robert D. Northrop Frye and Critical Method. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1978. - Frye, Northrop. Anatomy of Criticism. Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2000. ---. The Bush Garden: Essays on the Canadian Imagination. Toronto: House of Anansi Press, 1971.

winter 2006 transverse 169 ---. The Double Vision: Language and Meaning in Religion. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991. ---. The Educated Imagination. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1964. ---. The Great Code: The Bible and Literature. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982. ---. Myth and Metaphor. Ed. Robert Denham. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1990. ---. A Natural Perspective: The Development of Shakespearean Comedy and Romance. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World 1965. ---. The Secular Scripture: A Study of the Structure of Romance. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976. ---. Sound and Poetry. New York: Columbia University Press, 1957. - Hofstadter, Douglas R. Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid. New York: Vintage Books, 1980. - Hughes-Freeland, Felicia, ed. Ritual, Perfomance, Media. London: Routledge, 1998. - Kivy, Peter. Music Alone: Pilosophical Refl ections on the Purely Musical Experience. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990. - Morris, Desmond. The Naked Ape. New York: Random House, 1999. - Olson, David. The World on Paper: The Conceptual and Cognitive Implications of Writing and Reading. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. - Reaney, James. “In the Middle of Ordinary Noise.” The Legacy of Northrop Frye. Ed. Alvin A. Lee and Robert D. Denham. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994. - Russell, Bertrand. The Problems of Philosophy. New York: Oxford University Press, 1966.

170 transverse winter 2006 - Sandler, Joseph. From Safety to Superego: Selected Papers of Joseph Sandler. New York: Guilford Press, 1987. - Schieffelin, Edward. “Problematizing Performance.” Ritual, Performance, Media. Ed. Felicia Hughes-Freeland. London: Routledge, 1998. 194-207. - Weininger, Otto. Children’s Phantasies: The Shaping of Relationships. London: Karnac Books, 1989. ---. Play and Education. Springfi eld, IL: Charles C. Thomas, 1979.

winter 2006 transverse 171 cervantes, miguel de. don quijote de la mancha. edition, introduction, and notes by martín de riquer. illustrated by salvador dalí. barcelona: planeta, 2004.

Last year (2005) marked the 400th anniversary of the publication of the fi rst part of Don Quijote (1605) and consequentially many publishing houses, libraries, and other cultural institutions exhibited some type of homage to one of the world’s most widely-known literary works. Among the many tributes to DQ and Cervantes fi g ures the illustrated edition by the Barcelona-based publishing house Planeta in collaboration with the Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí which celebrates both DQ’s anniversary and the fortuitously coinciding “Dalí Year 2004” (the international celebration of the 100th anniversary of Salvador Dalí’s birth on 11 May 1904). Dalí produced several series of DQ illustrations throughout his prolifi c career, using different approaches for editions published in France, Argentina, and fi nally Spain; however, the illustrations included in this particular edition are especially important because they are Dalí’s fi rst of DQ, originally printed in the Illustrated Modern Library edition published in New York in 1946 with the intention of targeting book collectors with a restricted budget. While the recent 2004 collector’s edition (of which 998 copies exist) is noteworthy for the fi ne quality color facsimile reproductions of the actual size of Dalí’s fi r st pictorial adaptations of DQ and black and white line sketches, it is unfortunate that Planeta includes no commentary on the illustrations, and, moreover, fails to provide any information about the U.S. context of their production. Instead, the book’s supplemental material includes an introduction and notes by its editor, Martín de Riquer, along with a biography of Cervantes, general notes on DQ, a chronology, and bibliography, making no mention of Dalí and his interest in the text. In other words, what would have been an opportune moment to introduce a wide-eyed public to not only the circumstances of a lesser-known edition of DQ, but also to Dalí’s important residence and artistic activity in the U.S., is sacrifi ced for a mere reprinting of general information on Cervantes and his work that could be found or reproduced in any edition of DQ with or without illustrations. Additionally, anticipating the publication of Planeta’s relatively expensive edition, the 9 November 2003 issue of La vanguardia magazine (Barcelona) printed a short essay by Montse Aguer, director of the Center of Dalí Studies, which briefl y discusses these illustrations and recognizes Dalí’s longest stay in the U.S. (1940-48) as being amongst his most creative periods. This article includes short but signifi cant interpretations 172 transverse winter 2006 of the color illustrations as well as a somewhat detailed, although rather brief, critical study of Dalí’s work during the 1940s. If elaborated, Aguer’s work could have made an essential compliment to Planeta’s DQ edition; however, as it is only a small part of Aguer’s study of the illustrations, it ultimately serves as publicity for the collector’s edition. While the edition should be applauded for its reproduction of these illus- trations and noted as a beautiful addition to any library, it further disappoints by rely- ing on the “Spanishness” of both Cervantes and Dalí to implicitly explain the rea- sons for uniting their work, which is indicative of the way Dalí is regarded among scholars as well as by the general public today. In other words, by emphasizing and celebrating Dalí’s “Spanishness,” the U.S. origins of his work are ignored, and his ac- tive participation and contribution to U.S. (literary) culture remains unacknowledged.

regina galasso

auster, paul. city of glass. adaptation by paul karasik and david mazzuc- chelli. new introduction by art spiegelman. london: faber & faber, 2004.

In 1985 the contemporary American writer Paul Auster published his second novel City of Glass, a novel that two years later would become a part of The New York Trilogy. Nine years after its fi rst publication, City of Glass became a piece of fi ction that opens the door to envision the readable in its fi rst adaptation to graphic form by Paul Kara- sik and David Mazzucchelli. This edition was published by Faber and Faber in 2004 with a new introduction by Art Spiegelman. This new edition contains bigger images, similar in space to the paragraphs of the original novel. In his introduction, Spiegelman states that the intention of this edition was not to make a “classic illustrated” version of the novel but instead to make “visual translations” of the central metaphors of the novel (a feat which also challenges the standard structure of the comic). This aim is successfully achieved, especially considering that City of Glass is a non-visual novel with a complex language web in which the game of words and abstract metaphors writes the plot and the protagonist’s quest. In the novel, Auster plays with language in describing the central

winter 2006 transverse 173 character, Daniel Quinn, as a “private eye” who is really a “private I”: a detective des- perately searching for his own identity. This “I-deology” or study of the “I” representing the identity is translated by Karasik and Mazzuchelli into an “Eye-ideology” in which the reader can also be the “eye” and the “I” who inspects Daniel Quinn’s identity in each vignette. The streets and labyrinths of New York City are lines drawn out from Quinn’s house windows and walls, making the city and Quinn on his steps appear as one. One of the most revealing aspects of the comic is its visual representation of both the characters created by Quinn and the novel’s other characters. They cohabit with Quinn in the same space, in the same vignette, making the literary mirroring effect almost palpable. The different levels of narration are deciphered in a simultaneous chain of images that the reader-observer follows easily until the end – an end that goes back to the beginning in its intelligent representation of the novel’s void, paralleling Quinn’s isolation as a dark space where only some written words remain. The different vignettes stand for the mysterious and hidden mirrors that write Auster’s text. Through this technique the role of the reader becomes clearer here than in the novel: these little pieces of glass, of mirror that consti- tute the comic put the observer-detective-reader in charge of discovering Quinn’s identity. This comic version overcomes the challenges imposed by literature and language in Auster’s novel. Art Spiegelman calls this comic “a strange doppelganger.” This edition is one more mirror that refl ects City of Glass, but this time the mirror is possible through this visual manifestation that allows the reader to refl ect himself as an observer and ultimately as an interpreter. It goes beyond the limits of the classical comic that refl ects the plain plot of a story to visually translate the main metaphors and themes that the reader is supposed to discover. It brilliantly gives visual shape to those clues hidden for the reader among the lines of the text. Karasik and Mazzucchelli have given the text a new and defi nitive interpretation, one that at the same time challenges the contemporary criticism of Auster.

maría laura arce

174 transverse winter 2006 contributors

j. andrew deman is a PhD candidate at the University of Waterloo, where he is completing a dissertation on representations of race and gender in the North American Comics form. Andrew’s work looks specifi cally at the determinative power of visual caricature and the deconstructive power of the interventionary image in conjunction with multimodal narrative.

rory mclellan i s a P h.D. candidate in Communication and Culture at York University, enrolled in the Media and Culture stream. Her dissertation will explore issues of urban spectatorship, the historical construction of urban fear, issues in raciality and the psychologization of space.

amy hondronicols is currently in the third year of the Ph.D. programme in Comparative Literature at The University of Western Ontario. She is looking at ekphrasis in 20th century Greek and French texts, and at how the geometric perspective of the photograph impacts narrative structure. Her academic interests also include orthodox iconography, as well as the reconstruction of history through documentary.

irmgard emmelhainz is a Ph.D. candidate in Fine Art History at the University of Toronto. Her dissertation focuses on the issue of aesthetico-political representation and representativity bearing on the case study in Jean-Luc Godard’s fi lm Ici et ailleurs.

phil rose is currently a Ph.D. candidate in Ethnomusicology and Media Ecology at York University, and is the author of Which One’s Pink? An Analysis of the Concept Albums of Roger Waters and Pink Floyd (1998).

sarah jefferies recently completed a M.A. in Comparative Literature at the University of Alberta. As a nationally trained opera singer and a member of the Edmonton Opera Chorus, Sarah is interested in examining opera and other vocal music through a literary lens.

jenna sunkenberg is a doctoral candidate in Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto, working on a comparative study of Dante’s Augustinian ‘Hermeneutics of the Self” and Paul Ricoeur’s contemporary phenomenological hermeneutics. She is originally from Boston, and she received her undergrad at Boston University. winter 2006 transverse 175 ioana sion is currently fi nishing her Ph.D. thesis on Dante, Claudel, Beckett, and Io- nesco at the Centre for Comparative Literature, University of Toronto. Recent publica- tions include: “Beckett and the Jungian Mandala” (2006), Precarious Ontologies. Essays on Theatre and the Dramatic Arts (2005), “The Zero Self: Dante and Godot” (2004). christiane arndt completed her Staatsexamen at the Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms- Universität Bonn, Germany, in 2000. From 2002 to 2006, she was a Graduate Stu- dent at the Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, where she completed her Ph.D. in 2006. She recently became an Assistant Professor at Queen’s University in Kingston. laura petican dis her undergraduate and Master’s degrees at the University of West- ern Ontario. She is currently in the fi nal stages of a Ph.D. program at the Internation- al University Bremen, Germany. Her research focuses on Arte Povera and the ba- roque and addresses issues of national and international identity and cultural heritage. yves saint-cyr is a fourth year Ph.D. student at the University of Toronto’s Cen- tre for Comparative Literature. After completing a Bachelor of Fine Arts in The- atre at Concordia University in 1999, he worked for two years as an elemen- tary school drama and music teacher. Currently, he is completing a doctoral thesis on musical structures in twentieth-century Western literature, with a focus on Baroque fugal structure and Arnold Schoenberg’s twelve-tone composition techniques. regina galasso is a doctoral candidate in the Romance Languages and Lit- eratures department at The Johns Hopkins University. An expert on Salva- dor Dali, she has analyzed the presence of Don Quixote’s fi gure in his paint- ings. She was a foundational member of the educative project Spanish Through the Eyes: An Exploration of Hispanic Language, Life and Culture in Baltimore. maría laura arce is a doctoral candidate in English at the Universidad Autónoma of Madrid. She holds a B.A. in English and a B.A. in Compara- tive Literature. She recently worked as a Spanish teacher in Tufts Universi- ty, and is currently writing her dissertation on the American author Paul Auster.

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