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Angles New Perspectives on the Anglophone World
6 | 2018 Experimental Art
Anne-Laure Fortin-Tournès, Brigitte Félix and Hélène Lecossois (dir.)
Electronic version URL: http://journals.openedition.org/angles/946 DOI: 10.4000/angles.946 ISSN: 2274-2042
Publisher Société des Anglicistes de l'Enseignement Supérieur
Electronic reference Anne-Laure Fortin-Tournès, Brigitte Félix and Hélène Lecossois (dir.), Angles, 6 | 2018, « Experimental Art » [Online], Online since 01 April 2018, connection on 23 September 2020. URL : http:// journals.openedition.org/angles/946 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/angles.946
This text was automatically generated on 23 September 2020.
Angles est mise à disposition selon les termes de la Licence Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International. 1
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Video introduction to issue 6 Anne-Laure Fortin-Tournès, Brigitte Félix and Hélène Lecossois
What Do We Mean by Experimental Art? Derek Attridge
“Finding a Form to Accommodate the Mess”. Experimental Science and Storytelling in Thalia Field’s Writing Abigail Lang
Experimental Fiction, Or What Is a Novel and How Do I Know? Ralph M. Berry
New Old Forms: Djuna Barnes’s and Virginia Woolf’s Return to the Archaic as Experimental Modernist Form Elaine Hsieh Chou
Graphic Interlude Experimental Art Paul Edwards
In the Turbine of Experimentation: Tate Modern and the New (?) Rationale of Collective Performance Catherine Bernard
Contemporary British Art and its Contested Publicness: The Case of the Artangel Trust Experimenting with Site in Britain Today Charlotte Gould
A work of art as an experimental exhibit. Broodthaers and the Eagle Susanne König
Curating Creative Experimentation: the HyperPavilion at the 57th Venice Biennial Interview with Philippe Riss-Schmidt Philippe Riss-Schmidt and Anne-Laure Fortin-Tournès
Varia
F. H. Bradley’s Neoplatonic Turn in Ethical Studies (1876) Jean-Paul Rosaye
“Many Rivers to Cross:” Orphic Confluences of Fred D’Aguiar’s Children of Paradise and Wilson Harris’ Palace of the Peacock Léo Courbot
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Video introduction to issue 6
Anne-Laure Fortin-Tournès, Brigitte Félix and Hélène Lecossois
This media file cannot be displayed. Please refer to the online document http:// journals.openedition.org/angles/953
Transcript:
1 In their introduction to the 2005 issue of Tracés, dedicated to “Experimenting”, Anthony Feneuil and Pierre Saint-Germier point out that contemporary aesthetics, like science shows an interest in the notion of experimentation. The idea of “experimental art” is the legacy of our modernity. But what if we consider, together with Derek Attridge in the article which opens this dossier, that “all art worthy of the name is experimental”? Then we need to examine more closely this experimental quality which seems to be such an essential part of the definition of art.
2 First of all, does “experimental art” as such exist or should we speak of an experimental dimension in art? In that case, the experimental dimension might be found in the creation of utterly new forms, but also in the renewal and the transgression of existing forms. The idea that a work of art is experimental stems from the apparent rejection of the previously dominant mimetic mode, but that is not necessarily the case: contents, not just forms, can be the site of an experimentation.
3 Although the 20th and 21st centuries are particularly rich in “experimental” fictions, from the start the novel has been characterized by its experimentation with the representation of the world. Let us remember the example of Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy with its black and marbled pages, or the sinuous line of a spiral to represent the plot on the page. From the moment of its invention to the contemporary openness of fictions overriding generic boundaries, the novel as a self-exploratory genre has fed on formal experiments.
4 Dealing with experimentation in the novel leads us to consider the materiality of the text. All the strategies of “form-breaking” come into play, which can include the incorporation of other media. The debate can therefore be extended to experimentation in the arts in general. Does the qualification “experimental” bring added value to the artistic gesture?
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5 Those are some of the questions addressed by the seven articles gathered for this issue of Angles, the selection of photographs by Paul Edwards, and the interview with curator Philippe Riss-Schmidt.
6 In “What do we mean by experimental art?”, Derek Attridge examines the acceptions of the adjective “experimental” in the hard sciences, then in its relations with innovation and avant-garde. Attridge proposes to replace the idea of experimentation, which is too indeterminate, by that of “invention” as conceptualized by Derrida. Inventiveness in art aims at revealing what is “excluded by the current cultural configuration” and thus opens “a path for future work”.
7 In the collection of stories Bird Lovers, Backyard and in her recent novel Experimental Animals (A Reality Fiction), Thalia Field investigates the complexity of the links between experimental science and storytelling. As Abigail Lang shows, Field takes issue with the scientist view of science developed by Claude Bernard, which includes experimentation on animals. Field’s texts develop an ethical poetics of experiencing — as opposed to experimenting - in which the artist’s task is to deal with the chaotic nature of the world and of life.
8 R. M. Berry goes back to the Modernist moment of experimentation to probe the origins of the notion. The Modernist novels of Joyce, Woolf and Faulkner have undeniably established models of experimentation with narrative, but the legacy of those “models” has proven problematic for the experimenters of the fifties, sixties and seventies. Actually, the contemporary novel can be experimental on its own terms only if it works as “performative experiment” in which the readers’ experience is engaged with the text.
9 The works of “high modernist” writers such as James Joyce or Ezra Pound were for a long time held as defining the very nature of the experimental in art. It now appears that works which have never been considered as part of the modernist canon are no less experimental. Why then have such novels as Virginia Woolf’s Orlando or Djuna Barnes’s Ladies Almanack never been regarded as experimental? This is the question Elaine Chou raises in “New Old Forms: Djuna Barnes’s and Virginia Woolf’s Return to the Archaic as Experimental Modernist Form”.
10 Catherine Bernard looks into the way artistic experimentation has changed since the age of the avant-gardes while retaining its critical edge. The Tate Modern Unilever Series (2000-2012) is a perfect illustration of that change, as it explores corporeality and sensation in relation to the possibility of critical knowledge. Catherine Bernard’s definition of experimentation as introducing tension between intellection and sensation leads her to show that artistic experimentation nowadays does not only seek to work the sensation regime imposed by the culture industry but is also critical of it.
11 Site-specificity and the search for new, original locations are largely responsible for the experimental quality of British art today. Charlotte Gould thus explores the ways in which experimental qualities are now disseminated over the whole process of imagining, producing and remembering works that are often ephemeral. The Artangel Trust that specialises in looking for unexpected sites to commission for ephemeral art is a case in point. Its hybrid model of financing has allowed the trust to resist the political instrumentalisation of art.
12 Susan König, for her part, turns her attention to post-war art. She apprehends the work of Belgian artist Marcel Broodthaers — his fictional museum project, “Musée d’art
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moderne, Département des Aigles” (1968-72) — as a paradigm of the experimental in the visual arts of the 1960s and 1970s.
13 Broodthaers’s museum can be seen as an anticipation of some of the questions dealt with by contemporary curators like Philippe Riss-Schmidt, who presented HyperPavilion at the 57th Venice Biennial in 2017. In his interview with Anne-Laure Fortin-Tournès, Philippe Riss-Schmidt comments on how contemporary art confronts the entanglement of the digital with the physical in the age of posthumanism.
14 To supplement our investigation of the experimental in art, academic and photographer Paul Edwards has kindly agreed to have a selection of his photographs included in the current issue of Angles. The photographs are Tarot card illustrations of Naomi’s Mademoiselle de Phocas, a novel which originally appeared in the Ouphopo — the Workshop for Potential Photography — between 2005 and 2007 and which was translated into English by Paul Edwards himself.
ABSTRACTS
This video introduces the thematic contributions on ‘Experimental Art’.
La vidéo présente les contributions thématiques sur “L’art expérimental”.
INDEX
Keywords: video, art, experimental, literature, United Kingdom, Ireland, Great-Britain, United States Mots-clés: vidéo, art, expérimental, littérature, Royaume-Uni, Irlande, Grande-Bretagne, États- Unis
AUTHORS
ANNE-LAURE FORTIN-TOURNÈS Co-Guest editor of Issue 6. Professor at the Université du Mans.
BRIGITTE FÉLIX Co-Guest editor of Issue 6. Professor at the Université Paris 8.
HÉLÈNE LECOSSOIS Co-Guest editor of Issue 6. Professor at the Université Lille 3.
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What Do We Mean by Experimental Art?
Derek Attridge
1 What exactly do we mean when we call a work of art experimental? And how does experimental art relate to non-experimental — but still successful — art in the eyes of those who use these terms? To explore this question, I would like to approach it from six different directions; if we can gain a sense of how the term is generally used, we may be in a position to advance to a more theoretically based account.
2 (1) “Experimental” may be understood purely on the basis of the scientific model. That is to say, art may be used to test various hypotheses, or artists and scientists may work together to produce results that aim to illuminate the nature of reality or instruct the general public. One of many such examples is the “Synergy Project: Light and Life”, described on the project’s website as follows: Tristan and artist Shawn Towne set out to develop a novel means of conveying human impacts on sea grass beds through art based on light and movement. Their inspiration is derived from underwater video taken off the coast of Cape Cod, focusing on fragile, ephemeral eelgrass beds. These are locations where man’s influence is driving rapid changes in the ecosystem, often for the worse. Through their work together, they hope to communicate the degradation of these systems from coastal development, as well as provide a baseline view of particular ecological sites at a given point in time for potential scientific application. (Synergy Project)
3 However, this rather literal meaning is not what is usually meant by experimental art; the term may gain some authority from its overtones of hard science, but does not usually imply an actual engagement with science and scientists. The etymology of “experiment” takes us back to the Latin verb experiri, to test or try, and its associated noun experimentum, a trial, test, or proof; and the word in English of course predates the development of scientific method. (The earliest recorded examples of “experimental” mean “having experience of” or “based on experience” — and we may note that the French equivalent of “experiment” is expérience.) What does connect the modern scientific and artistic uses of the word is the sense of trial-and-error, of testing a hypothesis — but in the world of the arts, an experiment is not controlled in the same
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way as it is in scientific practice (a point I will come back to) nor is it a requirement that the experiment be repeatable by others.
4 (2) The experimental quality of art is more likely to be understood as a matter of degree of innovation. We do not use the label “experimental” for John Banville’s Book of Evidence (1989) or Colm Tóibín’s The Master (2004) or Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake (2003), though they are all outstanding examples of the novel form. We are more likely to apply the term to Eimear McBride’s A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing (2013) or Will Self’s Umbrella (2012) or Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves (2000). McBride’s and Self’s novels announce in their first paragraphs that they are probing the limits of what is readable: For you. You’ll soon. You’ll give her name. In the stitches of her skin she’ll wear your say. Mammy me? Yes you. Bounce the bed, I’d say. I’d say that’s what you did. Then lay you down. They cut you round. Wait and hour and day. (McBride 2013:1) I’m an ape man, I’m an ape-ape man . . . Along comes Zachary, along from the porter’s lodge, where there’s a trannie by the kettle and the window is cracked open so that Muswell Hill calypso warms the cold Friern Barnet morning, staying with him, wreathing his head with rapidly condensing pop breath. (Self 2012: 1)
5 Danielewski’s experimentation begins even earlier: the title page states: HOUSE OF LEAVES
by Zampanò
with introduction and notes by Johnny Truant (Danielewski 2000)
6 We may then notice that the page facing the title page has the words “MARK Z. DANIELEWSKI’S” across from the title. And if we flip through the book, we encounter a host of different type faces, pages largely blank, print running sideways up the page, and so on. House of Leaves shows itself to be worthy of the adjective “experimental” even before we start reading the text. One problem with this approach is that it presents us with a spectrum, and a spectrum that has many works falling somewhere in the uncertain middle area. For instance, staying with novels, would Ali Smith’s How to Be Both (2014) be considered experimental? It appears at first to be relatively conventional, but when the reader discovers halfway through the novel that it is starting again in a different century (and especially if she learns that had she picked up a different copy of the same book she might have read the two halves in the other order) the term “experimental” might seem appropriate. Or take Eleanor Catton’s The Luminaries (2013). From one point of view it is a long, highly conventional narrative imitative of the three-decker Victorian novel; but when we take into account its form we may want to call it experimental: each of the many characters is associated with a zodiacal sign or heavenly body, each of the 12 parts opens with an astrological chart relevant to the date on which the events of that part occur, and the parts diminish in length in imitation of the waning moon.
7 This uncertainty about the middle ground perhaps does not matter; we can live with the idea of degrees of “experimentalness” and have no problem with the idea that one work is “highly experimental” while another is “somewhat experimental”. More problematic is the effect of history and hindsight on this approach. Let us take Beethoven’s “Eroica” symphony, for instance. In this work, first performed in 1805, Beethoven produced a highly radical piece of music which represented an immense
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challenge for its first listeners, who had heard nothing like it before. The composer, it must have seemed, was experimenting with the symphonic form. But we are unlikely to call it experimental today because of its place in the history of the symphony; Beethoven’s innovations soon became accepted resources for composers, and even longer, more discontinuous, more harmonically daring symphonies were to follow. Or take Picasso’s 1907 painting Les Demoiselles d’Avignon: this work broke all the rules of representational art, and yet its influence has been such that it now has a solid place within the history of art that renders the term “experimental” unlikely in current discussions. We tend not to think of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922) as experimental today, though Eliot certainly was experimenting with what could be done in poetry, nor of Le Corbusier’s starkly simple villas of the nineteen-teens, though they were aesthetically revolutionary buildings, in both cases because their innovations gave rise to entire movements in their respective art forms.
8 It seems, then, when we take historical processes into account, the term “experimental” does not simply mean “degree of innovation.” We need to complicate our approach to the idea of experimentation in art.
9 (3) The examples I have mentioned suggest that we are more likely to call something an experiment when it does not lay the foundations for a new movement, as the Eroica symphony, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, The Waste Land, and Le Corbusier’s villas did. We are more likely to use the term for a work of art whose innovations proved to be a dead-end, an artistic gamble that did not pay off. One body of poetry that still often gets called experimental is the series of attempts by a number of poets in England in the late sixteenth century to write vernacular verse in quantitative metres, imitative of Latin and Greek verse (as they understood it). Edmund Spenser, Sir Philip Sidney, Thomas Campion and many others tried to determine which syllables of English words were “long” and which “short” and to construct lines of verse on this basis; however, the nature of English speech, dominated by stress, not quantity, was unsuited to this method, and the craze soon died out.1 Readers voted with their eyes and ears, so to speak, and preferred the accentually-based verse of The Faerie Queene and Astrophel and Stella (not to mention the plays of the Elizabethan dramatists, who were wise enough not to meddle with the vernacular verse-forms they had inherited.) These attempts at quantitative English metre are often referred to simply as the “quantitative experiments”. Other examples might be William Blake’s experiments with colour printing, which did not stand the test of time, and the language invented by Ted Hughes and Peter Brook for their play Orghast, presented at Persepolis in 1971 but not used again. And no doubt there were innumerable experiments by artists of all kinds throughout history whose failure led to their being quietly set aside, and of which we are consequently unaware.
10 This seems a rather negative approach to experimentation in the arts, however; it more or less equates “experiment” with “failed experiment”. It ought to be possible to speak of successful experiments, even in the past. We need to complicate our picture further.
11 (4) Perhaps we should put the emphasis on the size of the audience. Is experimental art always art of minority interest? How does it relate to the notion of the avant-garde, which usually implies art that appeals to only a small number?
12 It is certainly true that most examples of what we are likely to call experimental art do not have wide appeal, for reasons that are obvious. Arnold Schoenberg’s second string quartet, written in 1908, in which the composer experimented with complete atonality
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for the first time, still does not draw large audiences. However, if what appears to be an experiment does in the course of time become popular, we may well cease to think of it as experimental — as with the examples by Beethoven, Picasso, Eliot and Le Corbusier mentioned earlier. But there are possible counter-examples. Late in his life, Matisse started creating works of art out of boldly coloured cut-out shapes in a manner that we might want to call experimental; Turner, also late in his career, experimented with swirls of colour to produce paintings that were abstract in all but name; Malevich conducted what are called “suprematist experiments” with blocks of colour or squares of black or white. Yet these three bodies of work were among the most popular exhibitions in London in the year 2014 — in fact, the Matisse cut-out show was Tate Modern’s most popular show since the gallery’s opening. Because these works did not become assimilated as central to major movements in art — what could follow Matisse’s snail (Figure 1), Malevich’s black square (Figure 2) or Turner’s seascapes (Figure 3)? — they have not suffered the same fate as the other examples; they still stand out as exceptional and experimental.2
Figure 1. Henri Matisse, The Snail (1952-3)
Source: http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/art/reviews/henri-matisse-the-cut-outs-art- review-9259383.html#gallery
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Figure 2. Kasimir Malevich, Black Square (1915)
Source: http://www.tate.org.uk/art/research-publications/the-sublime/philip-shaw-kasimir-malevichs- black-square-r1141459
Figure 3. J. M. W. Turner, Seascape with Distant Coast (ca. 1840).
Source: http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/turner-seascape-with-distant-coast-n05516
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13 Music and literature do not furnish examples quite so easily, though it is worth noting that McBride’s A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing, rejected by publishers over nine years of fruitless submissions, won the Goldsmiths’ Prize, the Bailey’s Prize, the Desmond Elliott Prize and the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, and is undoubtedly selling well as a result (if not always being read to the end). Some of the minimalist music of Arvo Pärt might be considered both experimental and popular, though to some ears it is too bland and unadventurous to merit the former label. Size of audience is not, it seems, a fool-proof guide to what we mean by “experimental”.
14 (5) The next question to be considered is: “Is experimental art always a matter of technique — of a trying-out of new forms? Or is it possible to be experimental in terms of content alone?” All the examples we have looked at so far involve formal innovation; they do not necessarily introduce material that has previously been kept out of the domain of art.
15 An artist who uses a relatively conventional form but depicts events or objects that have hitherto been excluded from art may well not be regarded as experimental. Zola represented aspects of reality that had not been the subject of fiction before him, but my sense is that we do not think of him as writing experimental novels, in spite of his own claim to be doing so (a claim based on approach (1) above, since he modelled his work on that of natural scientists). On the other hand, when there is a clear disjunction between new content and conventional form, we may reach for the idea of experimentalism to describe the work. When Mark Quinn creates a sculpture in Carrara marble representing the thalidomide victim Alison Lapper, naked and pregnant, and exhibits it on a plinth in Trafalgar Square, the contrast between the highly traditional polished marble and realistic carving and the unusual human body it represents is what makes the work powerful — and perhaps takes it into the realm of the experimental (Figure 4).
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Figure 4. Marc Quinn, Alison Lapper Pregnant (2000)
Source: http://marcquinn.com/artworks/single/alison-lapper-pregnant1
16 However, the self-assurance of Quinn’s statue makes it hard to think of it as an experiment; it reads as the work of someone who knew exactly where he was going when he made it, rather than somewhat trying out an idea without knowing where it will lead. This brings us to the final question.
17 (6) Does experimental art as commonly understood, then, mean not fully achieved art, where the reader, listener or viewer senses the riskiness of the project in its not quite complete success? In such cases, we might feel we are sharing with the artist the trial- and-error character of artistic creation, rather than receiving from his or her hand something that bears no traces of the chancy process whereby it come into being. If we return to the Matisse cut-out exhibition I mentioned earlier, we find Zoë Pilger writing in a review published in the Independent: “The early cut-outs were small, experimental” (Pilger 2014, my emphasis).
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Figure 5. Henri Matisse, The Fall of Icarus (1943)
Source: https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2014/mar/29/henri-matisse-cutouts-tate- modern-drawing-scissors
18 Presumably the later, larger, cut-outs, more suggestive of the artist’s confidence in what he is doing, do not register as experimental. Colin Wilson, reviewing the late Turner exhibition, makes the opposite point: “Nor are these dozens of paintings experiments but finished works by a master” (Wilson 2014, my emphasis). For Wilson, it is the impression the works give of being finished that prevents them from being called experiments. (Richard Dorment, though, notes that “Turner experimented with octagonal and round formats and explored ever wilder colour combinations” [Dorment 2014, my emphasis]; what motivates this comment, no doubt, is that octagonal and round formats never caught on, so they remain in the realm of the unsuccessful experiment, however finished they may seem.)
19 We can conclude from these various uses of the term “experiment” that we do not employ it in an entirely consistent manner. The paradigmatic experimental work of art, perhaps, is one that is highly innovative in form, but does not entirely succeed in what it attempts; it bears the marks of the artist’s trial-and-error procedures; it is appreciated by the few rather than the many; and it remains outside the mainstream of artistic production. But none of these criteria except the first is essential — and when we apply the term to contemporary artworks we can, as has often been noted, only do so in a provisional way: the future may turn current experiments into mainstream productions.
*
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20 I want now to set the term “experimental” next to another term, “inventive”, and I will begin by quoting Jacques Derrida. Writing of the inventiveness of Francis Ponge’s little poem “Fable”, he says that writing such as this is liable to the other, open to the other and worked by it; it is writing working at not letting itself be enclosed or dominated by that economy of the same in its totality, which guarantees both the irrefutable power and the closure of the classical concept of invention. […] Passing beyond the possible, it is without status, without law, without a horizon of reappropriation, programmation, institutional legitimation; it passes beyond the order of the demand, of the market for art or science; it asks for no patent and will never have one. (Derrida 2007: 46)3
21 This account of invention makes it sound very much like experimentation in art, challenging the status quo, going beyond the “possible”, introducing that which is uncategorizable and unmarketable. But for Derrida, all art “worthy of the name” operates like this.
22 I find this a useful way to think about art’s relation to the norms and habits that exist at the time and place of both its production and its reception.4 Invention, says Derrida, is always “invention of the other” (“invention de l’autre”), a phrase with a double genitive: the invention invents the other, but the other also invents. It is an act but also an event. In this act-event of invention, a way of doing art that is unthinkable within current norms is brought into being — an alterity that resists closure, troubles the institution, and demands new forms of attention and interpretation (and sets the critics searching for new ways of addressing — and inevitably circumscribing — the new work).
23 My question is this: Is it possible to distinguish between the inventiveness of all art (at least all art of any significance) and what is called experimental art? As we have seen, the term “experimental” suggests trial-and-error, the testing of new forms, the taking of risks; but isn’t this true of all inventive art? Wasn’t Sophocles being experimental in introducing a third actor onto the Greek stage? Wasn’t Chaucer being experimental in creating a verse-form we now call iambic pentameter? Wasn’t Defoe being experimental in writing a fictional narrative in the guise of an autobiography? These and many other innovations in the histories of all the arts were radical, untried, uncertain. I have already mentioned inventive works by Beethoven, Picasso, Eliot and Le Corbusier that, in the creative process, were experiments, and there are countless more examples. Only in hindsight do the new ventures by such artists appear obvious — a third actor hardly seems a surprising innovation, iambic pentameter feels like a natural verse-form in English, the novel in the guise of a fictional autobiography is hardly unusual — because they introduced new possibilities into the art form for others to take advantage of. Kant called this “exemplary originality” (Kant 1974: 150-1): not just that which has not been done before, which might be meretricious or trivial art, but that which, once done, creates fresh opportunities for new forms of originality. It is very easy to be original in the narrow sense: I could without difficulty produce a jumble of words, or sequence of sounds, or a pile of objects never before heard or seen. But these works of so-called “art” would not be inventive: they would not engage with the cultural, intellectual, political and ethical context within which they have been created, and they would not open up new possibilities for other artists. They would not, to use Derrida’s words, be “open to the other”.
24 The other, however, is not simply that which does not exist, or does not exist yet; it is other to “the economy of the same” — in other words, it is what is excluded by the
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current cultural configuration; it is what cannot be seen, or heard, or done, thanks to the power of the doxa. This is why the work of the true artist is difficult and risky: the task is to exploit the fissures and tensions within the economy of the same (which is never wholly coherent or totalised) to allow the other to be apprehended, and what that other is is not something that can be known in advance. And this is why it opens a path for future work.
25 It seems to me, therefore, that all art worthy of the name is experimental: all strong artists are working at the limits of what can be achieved, and all such artists are taking risks, engaging in a process of trial-and-error, going down a road without knowing where it leads. As J. M. Coetzee puts it with reference to verbal invention: It is naïve to think that writing is a simple two-stage process: first you decide what you want to say, then you say it. On the contrary, as all of us know, you write because you do not know what you want to say. Writing reveals to you what you wanted to say in the first place. […] What it reveals (or asserts) may be quite different from what you thought (or half-thought) you wanted to say in the first place. (Coetzee 1992: 18)
26 The writer of poetry, drama or fictional prose experiments with language, with what it can be made to say but also with what it can make the writer say. This is what Derrida suggests by the ambiguity of “invention de l’autre”, and what I mean by the coinage “act- event”. (Coetzee captures this doubleness in his apothegm, which occurs just after the passage I have quoted, “writing writes us”.) The painter experiments with the possibilities of light, colour, texture and representation; the composer experiments with the possibilities of sound. And so on. The greatest artists, perhaps, are those who are most sensitive to the cultural context in which they are working (which is, of course, inseparable from the social, political and economic environment), most open to the ideas, forms, sounds, shapes and feelings it occludes and the possibilities that exist for accessing them, most daring in letting those possibilities become real in their work, and most skilled at knowing when what they are making has reached its full realization.
27 I believe it is right to go on calling some instances of this artistic making “experimentation”, especially when it involves radically new techniques that do not become part of the central narrative of the art-form in question because they are taken up and developed by other artists. But what is also important is that we try to identify and encourage those contemporary experiments that are not merely offering something different but are engaging with the unapprehended potential that the culture has excluded — the kind of experiment that Derrida would call an invention. In the future, hindsight may strip the label “experimental” from these works precisely because they have identified so powerfully what is needed to bring to visibility, audibility or readability what the culture has excluded; they may come to seem an essential part of the story of art. We should not forget, however, that they started as experiments: ventures into the unknown, trials without guarantee of success, failures leading to new attempts, and a trust in the work that is finally delivered over to public judgement.
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BIBLIOGRAPHY
Primary sources
Atwood, Margaret. Oryx and Crake. London: Bloomsbury, 2003.
Banville, John. Book of Evidence. London: Secker and Warburg, 1989.
Catton, Eleanor. The Luminaries. London: Granta, 2013.
Danielewski, Mark Z. House of Leaves. London: Random House, 2000.
Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Judgment. London: Collier Macmillan Publishers, 1974.
McBride, Eimear. A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing. Norwich: Galley Beggar Press, 2013.
Self, Will. Umbrella. London: Bloomsbury, 2012.
Smith, Ali. How to Be Both. London: Hamish Hamilton, 2014.
Tóibín, Colm. The Master. London/New York: Picador, 2004.
Secondary sources
Attridge, Derek. Well-weighed Syllables: Elizabethan Verse in Classical Metres. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1974.
Attridge, Derek. The Singularity of Literature. Abingdon: Routledge, 2004.
Attridge, Derek. The Work of Literature. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2015.
Coetzee, J. M. Doubling the Point. David Attwell, ed. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1992.
Derrida, Jacques. “Psyché: Invention de l’autre.” In Psyché: Inventions de l’autre. Paris: Galilée, 1987.
Derrida, Jacques. “Psyche: Invention of the Other.” In Psyche: Inventions of the Other. Peggy Kamuf and Elizabeth Rottenberg, eds. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2007.
Websites
Dorment, Richard. “Late Turner: Painting Set Free, review: ‘Don’t let’s get too sentimental about Turner’.” The Telegraph. 8 September 2014. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/art/art-reviews/ 11081456/Late-Turner-Painting-Set-Free-review-Dont-lets-get-too-sentimental-about- Turner.html
Pilger, Zoe. “Henri Matisse: The Cut-Outs, Tate Modern, art review.” The Independent. 14 April 2014. http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/art/reviews/henri-matisse-the- cutouts-tate-modern-art-review-9259383.html
Synergy Project. http://science360.gov/obj/video/698ddccc-3558-40bd-a52e-bad1e90bf019/ synergy-project-light-life
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NOTES
1. For a full discussion, see Attridge (1974). The movement had analogues in a number of other European countries, including France, Germany, Italy and Spain. 2. This is not to suggest that later artists have not been influenced by these experiments, but they cannot be said to have initiated artistic movements when displayed. Later artists — the abstract expressionists of the 1940s and 1950s in the case of late Turner and the minimalists of the 1960s in the case of Malevich — may be seen to have built on them, but this does not lessen their experimental status in their own time. 3. Translation modified. The original French reads: “Cette écriture est passible de l’autre, ouverte à l’autre et par lui, par elle travaillé, travaillant à ne pas se laisser enfermer ou dominer par cette économie du même en sa totalité, celle qui assure à la fois la puissance irréfutable et la fermeture du concept classique d’invention. […] Passant au-delà du possible, elle est sans statut, sans loi, sans horizon de réappropriation, de programmation, de légitimation institutionnelle, elle passe l’ordre de la commande, du marché de l’art ou de la science, elle ne demande aucun brevet et n’en aura jamais.” (Derrida 1987: 61) 4. I have developed the notion of invention in The Singularity of Literature (Attridge 2004) and The Work of Literature (Attridge 2015).
ABSTRACTS
This essay explores and evaluates a number of possible ways in which the phrase “experimental art” might be understood, considering several particular examples. “Experimental” may be understood purely on the basis of the scientific model, though this is not what we usually mean by the term. The experimental quality of art is more likely to be understood as a matter of degree of innovation, though this approach is rendered problematic when put in a historical context. We are more liable to call something an experiment when it does not lay the foundations for a new movement, but is something of a dead-end. It may be thought that the size of the audience is important, experimental art often being of minority interest, but some counter-examples are cited. The next question the essay considers is: “Is experimental art always a matter of technique — of a trying-out of new forms? Or is it possible to be experimental in terms of content alone?” Experimental art as commonly understood often means not fully achieved art. The essay then sets the term “experimental” next to another term, “inventive”, drawing on the work of Jacques Derrida. Inventive art is very like experimental art, challenging the status quo, going beyond the “possible”, introducing that which is uncategorizable and unmarketable. The paradigmatic experimental work of art, perhaps, is one that is highly innovative in form, but doesn’t entirely succeed in what it attempts; it bears the marks of the artist’s trial-and-error procedures; it is appreciated by the few rather than the many; and it remains outside the mainstream of artistic production.
Cet article explore et évalue les différentes manières de comprendre l’expression “l’art expérimental”, en se basant sur des exemples précis. “Expérimental” peut être entendu comme étant entièrement basé sur un modèle scientifique, même si ce n’est pas ainsi qu’on l’entend habituellement. La qualité expérimentale de l’art est cependant beaucoup plus liée à un degré d’innovation qu’elle introduit, bien que cette approche puisse être problématique quand on la
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replace dans un contexte historique. Il est plus probable que nous désignions une œuvre comme “expérimentale” quand elle ne pose pas les fondations d’un nouveau mouvement, mais qu’elle représente plutôt une impasse. On peut penser que l’ampleur du public qui l’apprécie est importante, l’art expérimental n’étant souvent intéressant que pour une minorité de personnes, mais on peut trouver des contre-exemples. La question que se pose ensuite l’article est la suivante : « est-ce que l’art expérimental est toujours une question de technique, d’expérimentation autour de formes nouvelles ? Ou bien est-il possible d’être expérimental seulement au niveau du contenu ? » L’art expérimental tel qu’on le conçoit d’ordinaire est souvent un art qui n’est pas totalement achevé. L’article confronte le terme d’« expérimental » avec celui d’« inventif », en se basant sur l’œuvre de Jacques Derrida. L’art inventif est très semblable à l’art expérimental, il remet en question le status quo, va au-delà des possibles, introduit ce qui n’est pas catégorisable ni commercialisable. L’œuvre d’art expérimentale paradigmatique est peut-être celle qui est très innovante au niveau formel mais ne réussit pas tout à fait à atteindre le but recherché. Elle porte la marque de la procédure de tâtonnement de l’artiste, elle est appréciée par quelques-uns plutôt que par le plus grand nombre, et elle reste en dehors de la production artistique standard.
INDEX
Keywords: experimental art, science, technique, risk, inventiveness, Derrida Jacques, art, literature Mots-clés: art expérimental, science, technique, risque, inventivité, Derrida Jacques, art, littérature
AUTHOR
DEREK ATTRIDGE Derek Attridge is the author of, among other books, Peculiar Language: Literature as Difference from the Renaissance to James Joyce (Cornell, 1988), Poetic Rhythm: An Introduction (Cambridge, 1995), The Singularity of Literature (Routledge, 2004; reissued as Routledge Classic, 2017), Moving Words: Forms of English Poetry (Oxford, 2013), and The Work of Literature (Oxford, 2015). He is the editor of Jacques Derrida’s Acts of Literature (Routledge, 1992) and collections of essays on literary theory, James Joyce, and South African literature. Forthcoming is The Experience of Poetry: From Homer’s Listeners to Shakespeare’s Readers. Having taught at Oxford, Southampton, Strathclyde and Rutgers Universities, he is now Emeritus Professor at the University of York, and a Fellow of the British Academy. Contact: derek.attridge[at]york.ac.uk
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“Finding a Form to Accommodate the Mess”. Experimental Science and Storytelling in Thalia Field’s Writing
Abigail Lang
1 With the romance of the avant-garde now spent or suspect, experimental has emerged as a convenient term to refer to that type of literature which demotes conventions and promotes invention. Where, at one end of the spectrum of generic conformity, crime fiction or romance tend to renew compositional elements without questioning their defining genre, experimental literature seeks to challenge generic conventions, an ambition which accounts for many of its other common features: its often perplexing character, its greater reflexivity and attention to language. Thalia Field’s work have consistently been identified as experimental with all her books manifesting generic hybridity. Since 2000 her work has primarily been page-based, developing at the intersection of narrative, essay, drama and performance and often incorporating images and extensive research. Field is the author of two long prose-works whose subtitles may be heard as fanciful generic labels: Ululu (Clown Shrapnel) and Experimental Animals (A Reality Fiction). The latter zeroes in on a key moment of the term experimental ’s fortune to clarify its appeal. Field has also written three collections of stories or “essays in narrative clothing” as she likes to call them. In these collections Field repeatedly interrogates the units of storytelling (story, character, action), considering how they solidify or dissolve. Her latest collection of stories, Bird Lovers, Backyard, takes up these metanarrative questions and intertwines them with similarly elementary questions in biology and ethology: What is behavior? What is a species? What is an individual?
2 In a 2011 interview, Field takes issue with mainstream or realist narrative, which she calls “cinematic prose”, for its narrowness of outlook and its human-centeredness: From where I stand, I think literary practice is due for a deep revision of our relationship to the world and to “selves” in it. Cut open to expose the human-
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centered narrative for its arrogance and ignorance […] Cinematic prose contains consistent scale, in space and time, and the human figure, whether in close-up or establishing shot, predominates. This aesthetic holds because ultimately we don’t spend a lot of time in the awareness of our world without ourselves as tragic heroes of it. Larger timeframes or scales rarely occur to us. Participation in the chorus of other creatures seems impossible, and it’s scarcely imaginable to write ourselves out of the picture altogether. (Mellis)
3 Looking at the world as “a chaotic nonhierarchical system of interdependence” (Mellis), her own writing proposes to expand our understanding of narrative components, exploring non-human time scales and points of view, resorting to choral voices, dissolving characters to the point of evanescence, or restricting action to thinking or walking. Field’s dissatisfaction with conventional narrative and impatience with the human as sole template stems in part from an environmental awareness fostered by her education and enduring interest in biology. And many of her unconventional narrative choices are rooted in biological facts. But, as a student of biology, she became equally frustrated with science’s blindness to its methods and use of language1, and several of her stories confront science’s epistemological blind spots. Field’s two most recent books are sustained arguments with science and storytelling. While Experimental Animals takes Claude Bernard to task for his refusal of experience in the name of experiment, Bird Lovers, Backyard confronts Konrad Lorenz’s use of analogy as scientific method and his use of storytelling to assert authority. Both books also help make clear how Field arrives at her distinctive narrative forms in an attempt to do justice to the variety of life-forms and the complexity of situations, a scruple that prompts her to finely negotiate with categories and frameworks.
Exposing physiology’s denial of experience and lack of empathy
4 “Seriously, Mr Zola, before talking to the public about ‘physiology’, ‘experiments’, ‘experimental’ etc, it would be good to first learn what the words mean,” (Field 2016: 207) reproves René Ferda, a student of the deceased Claude Bernard, outraged at Zola’s irresponsible appropriation of his master’s terms. Thalia Field takes this warning to heart and her most recent book sets out to “explore the word ‘experimental’ — [and] put some backstory to a phrase we use without too much rigor.” (Boully 2016) Set in Second Empire Paris and centering on the “father” of experimental medicine, Experimental Animals. (A Reality Fiction) revives some of the conversations that attended the birth of modern experimental physiology and the consequent anti-vivisection movement. Exhaustive research in archives and periodicals enabled Field to create a polyphony of voices through a dexterous montage of citations. The connective tissue is provided by a fictionalized narrative voice, that of Marie-Françoise Bernard, Claude Bernard’s wife, a character consistently vilified in the accounts of the medical corporation. Opposed to vivisection, she separated from Bernard in 1870 and set up an anti-vivisection society. The book shows her roaming the streets of Paris night after night to save the dogs and cats stalked by Bernard’s assistants.
5 In An Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine (1865), Bernard vindicates the superiority of experiment over observation. Where the observer is content to observe the facts that nature offers him, he writes, the experimenter makes them “present themselves in circumstances or conditions in which nature does not show them.” (15)
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Field also documents Zola’s enthusiasm for Bernard’s method and, by juxtaposing quotes of the two men, shows how the novelist devised Le Roman expérimental by analogy: “Zola: ‘It will be sufficient for me to replace the word ‘doctor’ by the word ‘novelist’ in order to make my thought clear and to bring to it the rigor of scientific truth.’” (113) Zola: “Since medicine is becoming a science, why should not literature itself become a science, thanks to the experimental method?” He will look into social ills and bring their facts into the open. “The problem is to know what a certain passion, acting in a certain environment, and in certain circumstances will produce as regards the individual and society. And the way to solve it is to take the facts in nature, then to study their mechanism by bringing to bear upon them the modifications of circumstances and environment. Just as Mr Claude Bernard transferred the experimental method from chemistry to medicine, so I transfer it from medicine to the drama and the novel.” (112-3)
6 Claude Bernard having shown “that fixed laws govern the human body”, Zola is confident that “[o]ne day physiology will no doubt explain the mechanism of thought and passions; we shall know how the individual machine of a man works, how he thinks…” And when Bernard claims: “The experimenter is the examining magistrate of nature”, Zola echoes: “We novelists are the examining magistrates of men and their passions.” When Bernard writes : “[…] it is the experimenter who always doubts and does not believe that he has absolute certainty about anything, who succeeds in mastering the phenomena which surround him and extending his power over nature”, Zola echoes again: “The true work of the experimental novelist is there, to go from the known to the unknown in order to master nature” (112-5).
7 Field’s researched novel establishes again and again the mechanistic view of nature and the ideology of mastery that underpins this scientist version of science, inextricably bound with the demotion of experience and the promotion of experiment inaugurated by Francis Bacon. Originally synonymous with empirical, experimental took on its current meaning of sought experiment when Francis Bacon distinguished it from merely accidental experience, making it a form of experience at will. Three centuries later, Claude Bernard himself campaigned to draw medicine from “the shades of empiricism.” (Bernard 1865: 193) While the “conquests” of the experimental method remain undisputed, it has become difficult to ignore the underpinning ideology of a method which seeks to reduce the organic to mechanistic processes and whose cognitive model is rape. Ferda praises his master Bernard for having “penetrated to the mechanisms of organic processes” and used the experimental method “to interrogate nature and tear away her secrets.” (Field 2016: 204) The statue of a lovely girl at the base of the stairs of the main medical school building testifies: “She holds folds of a cloth immodestly above her torso, with the carved words: Nature Reveals Herself to Science” (92). Bacon’s distrust of both deduction and empiricism reveals its perverted facet when Magendie, Claude Bernard’s teacher and an enthusiast pioneer of vivisection, boasts of his refusal to think and feel: “Why think when you can experiment? Exhaust experiment, and then think. When I experiment, I have only eyes and ears; I have no brain.” (13) Field’s archival findings reveal the perverse side of the experimental method as experiment at will, the rage for knowledge pursued by one subject at the expanse of an objectified other. “Claude: ‘What morality says we can’t do to those like us, science authorizes us to do to the animals.’” (21)
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8 Many features of Field’s writings appear to have been embraced in reaction to the prejudiced underpinning of the experimental method. Wary of the rage for knowledge and mastery, Field often resorts to ignorant or subaltern narrators. Because Fanny Bernard is almost entirely absent from the archive, and thus official history, “Field constructs a voice for Fanny that guides, cuts through, organizes, and interprets the chorus of male voices that comprise the bulk of the historical record.” (Goldman) Wary of the excesses incurred by the analytical approach (when a live being is reduced to an organ or function), Field seeks to embraces a situation in all its messiness. Instead of following Zola who ambitioned to “dissect” a character and “put men and women through things” (Field 2016: 112), she seeks to show the interconnectedness of things and beings, large and small. Wary of the operating theater which focused the audience’s attention on Bernard’s performance, she reconsiders the older model of the Salon which promoted conversation, and what she writes of Madame de Scudéry applies to her own work to a certain extent: “Like Fontenelle, she set her dialogues in gardens, and in her books there is no protagonist, no consistent narrator or authorial voice, just a sequence of entertaining verbal adventures: Conversations on Diverse Subjects.” (105) But more than Madame de Scudéry, the writer who embodies the counter-model to the experimental method heralded by Bacon, systematized by Descartes and radicalized by Bernard is Montaigne, the champion of experience against experiment. As Giorgio Agamben has shown in Infancy and History, The Destruction of Experience, experimentation and modern science have discredited experience in the traditional sense, which is the sense Montaigne still gave to his Essays as occasions for errancy and chance encounters; “For — as demonstrated by the last work of European culture still integrally based on experience: Montaigne's Essays — experience is incompatible with certainty, and once an experience has become measurable and certain, it immediately loses its authority.” (Agamben 1993: 18)
9 Field’s Bernard offers a pathetic illustration of this fact. Repeatability of experiment, a defining feature of the scientific method, turns into a macabre farce. Field threads a parallel between science and theater, questioning the demonstrative dimension of Bernard’s practice. A failed playwright, who staged a successful amateur vaudeville, Bernard became popular when he opened his own ‘demonstration theater’ and performed a repertoire of experiments in front of an audience avid for the signs of science. To curious ladies and gentlemen, as well as to artists and other students, Claude performs these physiology experiments, even if they are only staged facts. […] The audience in his basement sees live rabbits and dogs undergoing this puppet show. A second act might be to damage the brain of a pigeon or cat so it turns only around and around, no longer able to walk straight; more of a comedy, on days that need brightening. Claude laughingly calls himself “the physiologist in the theater.” (Field 2016: 12)
10 “Only action, crusty old Aristotle warned, centers the drama.” (4) And in Bernard’s theater there is only one actor, and passive, suffering props. Animals are “strapped to a table”, their vocal cords cut to prevent them for crying. But it is Bernard’s description of the effect of curare that best defines vivisection as the drama of withheld action. Claude, from “On Curare”, Review des Deux Mondes: “Within the motionless body, behind the staring eye, with all the appearance of death, feeling and intelligence persist in all their force. Could one conceive of a more horrible suffering than that of an intelligence witnessing the successive subtraction of all the organs that serve it, and thus finding itself enclosed alive within a corpse. Since time began, epic
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stories wanting to move the reader to pity showed us sensitive beings closed in immobile bodies. Our imagination can’t conceive of anything more unhappy than beings equipt with feeling, by that I mean able to feel pleasure and pain, while being deprived of the ability to flee the one and go toward the other. The torture that the poetic imagination has invented is produced naturally by the action of an American poison, curare. We could even add that fiction lags behind reality.” (156)
11 What makes this passage so appalling is that here, by means of the epic, Bernard for once demonstrates empathy, recounting this extreme experience of pain and death from the animal’s point of view. What for the vivisector is a measurable, repeatable experiment is a final experience for the animal: a profound transformation experienced over a period of time. By contrast to that animal’s deadly immobilization, Field’s ambition is to move us to awareness and action, using the means of the ancient epic poets: empathy and “poetic imagination”. She repeatedly does so by opening the circle of protagonists not only to those who act but to those who are acted upon, not only to those who speak and are recorded but to those who hear and remain unrecorded. Her aim is not to tell a hero’s quest but to address a “situation”: a “paradoxical ecology of perspectives and meanings” (Field 2016b). For, as Tim Ingold puts it, “we can understand the nature of things only by attending to their relations, or in other words, by telling their stories. […] Stories always and inevitably draw together what classifications split apart.” (Ingold 2011:160). But stories raise their own issues.
Exposing ethology’s compromised use of narrative and analogy
12 Bird Lovers, Backyard creates a “situation” at the narrative level. While the nine stories which compose the book are independent, they question and answer each other, and the book’s meaning emerges from this active conversation. Unlike her two previous books of stories, Bird Lovers, Backyard has a recurrent narrator who appears in the first and last stories and in the long central piece devoted to Konrad Lorenz. This recurrent narrator is a choral one, a group of former biology students turned itinerant thinkers on the brink of homelessness, and clearly a persona for Field herself in what feels like her most autobiographical book to date. The choral narrator voices Field’s growing dissatisfaction with science as a former student of biology: “During lab-sections of the bio courses, some students begin to consider that perhaps they weren’t cut out for ‘real’ research. They begin refusing live-animal experiments, and find themselves criticizing ‘method’ at every turn.” (Field, 2010: 71) While Experimental Animals constitutes her argument with live-animal experiments, Bird Lovers, Backyard is, among other things, her argument with “scientific ‘method’”.
13 The central story in the collection shows science caught up in narrative, especially when asserting authority. For it so happens that experimental proof is less convincing to the human imagination than a good story. Devoted to Konrad Lorenz, the Nobel Prize-winning father of ethology, and entitled “Exposition: He told Animal Stories”, it exposes Lorenz’s questionable scientific method based on analogy and storytelling as well as his connections with the Nazi regime. It does so by juxtaposing excerpts from his published and unpublished work, a collage interspersed with questions and reflections from the choral narrator who comes to question their own interest in stories and ethology, presumably also questioning their initial attraction to Lorenz because here was a scientist who distrusted zoos and labs, never used invasive
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techniques and advocated animal welfare. Field suggests that Lorenz erected his whole, erroneous, theory of instinctive behavior after witnessing one hand-reared starling make a grab for a non-existent fly: Lorenz: “Although it had never trapped a fly in its whole life, [it] performed the entire fly-catching sequence without a fly.” A skeptical colleague once asked Lorenz, “Is that something that actually happened or just something you saw?” In other words, is storytelling your scientific method? (Field 2010: 64)
14 The material Field collects and ingeniously juxtaposes shows how blind Lorenz, and some of his peers, are as to their motivations, how their hypotheses, their experiments and theories reflect a prevailing ideology, how, like any other human being, they are drawn by unconscious desires and sometimes conscious interests — and how much they are after a good story, an appealing new theory that will supersede the previous one. Because, unlike fiction, science can only accommodate one “paradigm” per generation. Further down, Field asks: “How is a story not the story? What if there was a fly?” (70) What increases the responsibility of science compared to fiction is that it passes its stories as the story, i.e. the truth. The history of science, of course, instructs that a theory will only remain “the story” until overthrown by an even better story.
15 By the end of the Lorenz exposure, the students are left with serious doubts about the scientific character of science: “Years later, only a rangy group remains on the library stairs, pondering what part of behavior isn’t ultimately fantasy.” (88) They are equally suspicious about the avowed goals of literature and science: “It is so often said that poetry2 and science both seek truth, but perhaps they both seek hedges against it.” (81) Perhaps poetry and science consolidate our impulses, providing a mythical or scientific justification for our often destructive desires. (One only needs to consider how scientific racism served to sanction slavery and discriminatory practices before it was exposed as ideology in the late 20th century.) “Freud also used literature — mostly Greek tragedies — to illustrate his discoveries. To drape one’s science in the authority of the poets seems as common as poets using science to dramatize daydreams.” (78) Delving deeper into the Lorenz material and their own attraction to stories, the students realize that stories are ultimately all we have to make sense of our world, to organize data into a pattern, to narrate and situate ourselves. “We like these stories because it’s hard to get a grip on exactly where we stand. No matter how many airplanes we build or satellites guide us, we feel like we’re everywhere and nowhere, lost in our family without a poster or a map.” (81)
16 “Exposition” gives us to understand Field’s early change of career: if science is so riddled with stories, one might as well become a writer and search for alternative ways of telling; ways of telling which are themselves informed by one’s experience with science as well as one’s dissatisfaction with so-called realist narrative. Field’s work develops at the juncture of narrative and biology and uses one to question the other. And to question both, since science and “realist” fiction are predicated upon the same modern assumptions: a god-like omniscient perspective, separation of subject and object, linear causality.
17 Unlike experimental science, vivisection, and the realist novel, Field refuses to pry into live organisms and psyches. She doesn’t venture to explain what goes on in the mind of the feral child in “Development: Another Case for Television”. She refuses the bird’s eye view of the omniscient narrator; we are always in the thick of things, lost in medias res. Unlike Lorenz who could not refrain from drawing analogies and imposing a moral
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twist onto his animal stories, Field refuses anthropomorphic projections and ventriloquy: “Anthropomorphism involves projecting one’s self into the body of something which is so completely different that its interiority cannot be known, yet assuming that one can tell stories in its voice; a species ventriloquism.” (78) Or when she does resort to ventriloquy, she does so overtly and humorously: “This Crime has a name” is a letter from the grave written by the last individual in a now extinct species of sparrows, which Field endows with the analytic capacities of a scientist and philosopher. But in “Youthful Folly”, her pet-newt remains obdurate and impenetrable to human psychology and language. It took me three days to realize I couldn’t properly care for Newt. I could read Newt about as well as I can ancient Greek. Is the rock hot enough? Do you need more shade? […] There is no language at all, it seems, between some creatures, and an excess among others. Or, rather, sometimes an excess of one or another language results in profound silence. I watched. I tried to feel the air temperature from his point of view. I exercised anthropomorphic skills to no avail. I knew, as cricket carcasses littered the tank, that I was inadequate as a conversationalist in Newt’s language, causing him a long, drawn-out starvation. (101)
18 Field’s stories also refuse narrative build-up as I will proceed to show, but rather than continue defining the characteristics of her stories negatively, instead of showing how her critique of modern science and realist narrative led her to abandon a number of conventional features of narrative, I now want to take a more constructive approach and further characterize her stories based on her project.
Finding the right distance and “a form to accommodate the mess”
19 My hypothesis is that Field’s main object or concern is life, a premise supported by her initial and continuing interest in biology. Like the bird in the Audubon epigraph to Bird Lovers, Backyard, life is an elusive quantity that has continuously challenged philosophers and biologists and remains improperly defined. “When an individual is seen gliding through the woods and close to the observer, it passes like a thought, and on trying to see it again, the eye searches in vain; the bird is gone. — J. J. Audubon.” (vii) In a 1999 panel on methods of composition, Field says she’s always seen the world as “a really fractured place, a really disorganized, incomprehensible, elusive, mysterious, impenetrable and difficult place.” (Baer) Clearly, it is this world, in all its complexity, that she wants to address in her work, or, as Beckett famously put it: “To find a form that accommodates the mess, that is the task of the artist now.” (Driver: 23) Another artist who was acutely aware of this challenge and remains an important reference for Field is John Cage. In “Lecture on Nothing”, he writes: “Structure without life is dead, but Life without structure is un-seen” (Cage 1961: 113). For Field as for Cage then, the challenge is to devise an adequate structure, one that will make life visible (observable, apprehensible), without destroying it. This challenge accounts for the strong constructivist impulse in Field’s pieces. They devise a grid that serves as a ground and system of coordinates for an elusive figure, or invent a procedure that will trap and organize the material she researches. Many of her pieces experiment with typography and layout, treating the page as stage. Unlike the traditional plots and story-lines they replace, these often graphic structures flaunt their artifice.
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20 What defines the adequate cage? A recurrent figure in Field’s books is Heini Hediger, a Swiss biologist and zoo director, the founder of zoo biology and proxemics in animal behavior. In Wild Animals in Captivity, Hediger challenged the anthropomorphic vision of zoo enclosures as prison cells and the “traditional idea of the wild animal roaming more or less aimlessly at random about the world,” instead defining an animal’s territory as a highly differentiated individual living space centering around a home. Flight is first and each animal shows a characteristic escape reaction as soon as the enemy approaches within a definite distance: the flight distance (Hediger 1950: 19). Since “man is the universal enemy” (19), “the smallest cage in theory must thus be a circle of a diameter twice the flight distance” (32). “Only at the center of this minimum theoretical cage would the animal be separated from surrounding spectators by its flight distance, and thus able to find rest there.” (32) Similarly, Thalia Field’s stories often choose to illuminate the stage only peripherally, allowing a blind spot at the center for the object or characters to take cover, to escape full view. Important features of her characters will sometimes remain indistinct: number, gender or species. Is the narrator in “Apparatus” singular or plural? It says “we” but what sort of “we” has a sudden yearning for a cinnamon roll? Being the last of its species, the bird-narrator in “This Crime has a name” speaks both as an individual and as a species: A memory-bird that died and kept right on living, exploding from one to many in mid-flight. […] Am I a unit of life, a unit of evolution, or am I simply the latest in a long series of mistakes? […] I tell myself I’m not a dusky seaside sparrow any longer, since I don’t form a functional part of the future of that group. (Field 2010: 31-32)
21 Where wild animals each have their flight distances, the human animal withdraws in his mind. Aggression begins with the seemingly innocuous and well-meaning question the scientist asks the feral child: On video: “I wonder what you’re thinking,” he said, “What are you thinking” holding that white bowl full of liquid. Where are you taking that? He’s going to yell and scream and beat your head like your father did. (Field 2010: 97)
22 “I know exactly where I am” the narrator boldly announces at the end of “A : I”, the opening story in Field’s first collection, defying her analyst who presumably would encourage the exploration of who one is (Field 2000: 14). Instead of a lyric I predicated on soul-searching, Field proposes a zoological I defined in terms of territory. Therefore, the adequate cage or narrative structure is one that allows the “subject” to hide from view.
23 For Field as for Cage, one feels, these structures are a compromise, a constructivist step to wrench the work away from convention and to welcome the mess. Cage eventually abandoned structure in favor of process, which he likened to the weather. The epigraph to Incarnate: Story Material, Field’s second book, evokes passing clouds: “The clouds will pass, do not try to follow them — Venerable Khandro, Rinpoche” (Field 2004: vii). While Bird Lovers, Backyard remains extremely planned and constructed, the book as a whole and the opening story in particular question the “‘instinct’ for order” through a critique of urban planning and its potential drift towards intolerance and the logic of ecocide.
24 The opening story, “Apparatus for the Inscription of a Falling Body”, unambiguously refuses narrative buildup and takes up the challenge of a plotless story: “Instead of narrative build-up, what if we have Icarus crawling right into the water — wings on, indifferent to flight — skipping past the story-part to lie down in the ending?” (Field 2010: 1) It also proposes that we turn our attention away from the tragic hero to make
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room for larger groups, maybe whole species: “What about a million — convinced just to skip the whole drama, wade in and float there — wet, sinking, unmoved by the sun? […] can we think about a whole species like a character?” (1) Where Icarus’s liftoff and crash delineates Gustav Freytag’s famous pyramid of narrative structure (exposition; rising action; climax; falling action; resolution), Field flattens out the graph and keeps the action on the ground, along the time axis. The story is organized as a series of chronological logbook entries, kept by what gradually appears to be a group of marginalized traveling philosophers. Instead of narrative build-up we have a list of chronological entries; instead of Icarus’ tragic flight, action is limited to thinking, note- taking and, at midday, finding the bathroom and a trashcan.
25 The choral narrator is sitting in an empty food court, drawn there by a flyer advertising a thinking contest to solve “the pigeon problem”. Pigeons become a problem when you “[l]ook at it from the side of architecture”: “shit falls fast and sticks hard” (1-4). The problem of the city begins with “junk — that stuff we don’t want but can’t make go away” (20). Hence the vexed question of the backyard that the book’s title points to. In more ecological terms, pigeons become a problem when the territories of two species overlap, that of people and pigeon: “Pigeons aren’t thought to have selves that can have interests. ‘Cultural Carrying Capacity’ is the fancy name for the animal death rate resulting from how willing humans are to put up with them.” (20) Field questions what her characters call the “‘instinct’ for order”. It enables us to think (by classifying, comparing, building analogies) and survive (by separating the clean from the unclean, the live and the dead) but is also the root of intolerance and the logic of genocide and ecocide. While the narrator here looks at the issue from all possible angles, other stories in the book show individuals and institutions uncritically thinking up “solutions” to get rid of what they term “pests”. The story entitled “Discussion group” is a list of posts answering the query of one member of the forum: “Need solution to kill ants in garden” (112). It demonstrates an ingrained irrational fear of penetration and the limitless imagination of simple citizens when it comes to means of extermination. But experts are no better: Lorenz evolved a north-south theory of canine origin which has since been proved utterly wrong, but which successfully echoed the Nazi volkisch ideology which insisted that Jews — “‘jackal-people of the barren deserts’” (73) — were naturally part of no wilderness, essentially displaced. And as late as the 1980s, the American Office of Endangered Species let the dusky seaside sparrow go extinct because it upheld the “‘purity of races’” (40) and refused to sponsor hybridization programs3.
26 The choral narrator itself feels marginalized and from the way the one woman they encounter and approach refuses to answer them or even look at them, we get the sense they are perceived as loiterers or vagrants. They see themselves as the distant heirs of the Greek public philosophers, eager to “[m]aybe start a dialogue, a dialectic” (Field 2008: 39). But the forum in which they gather is a depleted agora, a dystopic food-court. They never meet a single citizen to discuss the matters of the City: “But where do people gather? We can’t find any trash, just a strong smell of ammonia and dirty water” (Field 2010: 4). “People, once political, are now simply manageable. […] Few left to argue with, few to pressure for answers. So thinkers wander around.” (Field 2008: 37) “Apparatus” dramatizes Field’s compositional mode. In her stories, Field proceeds like her choral protagonist, addresses a question, a portion of the present which, as she writes, “gunks up the senses” (Field 2010: 10): something messy, confused, complex, paradoxical. Like them, she throws questions at it, makes hypotheses without providing
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answers, hopefully engaging the reader into the conversation. And it’s probably in that sense, more than in a strict Cagean procedural sense, that her stories are indeterminate as to their outcome, which is how Cage defined the experimental in “Experimental Music: Doctrine”: “and here the word ‘experimental’ is apt, providing it is understood not as descriptive of an act to be later judged in terms of success and failure, but simply as of an act the outcome of which is unknown” (Cage 1961: 13). Endowing her stories with an initial structure enables Field to throw in a lot of inconsistency because, as she says, narrative is such a weedy species.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Agamben, Giorgio. Infancy and History. The Destruction of Experience. Trans. Liz Heron. London & New York: Verso, 1993.
Baer, Chris, Thalia Field, and Wang Ping. “Methods of composition.” July, 1999, Naropa Poetics Audio Archive, https://archive.org/details/ Baer_Field_Ping_panel_Methods_of_composition_July_1999_99P055.
Bernard, Claude. An Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine. Trans. H. C. Green. New York: Dover Publications, [1865] 1957.
Boully, Jenny, “The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #61: Thalia Field”, December 8th, 2016, http://therumpus.net/2016/12/the-rumpus-mini-interview-project-61-thalia-field/
Cage, John. Silence, Lectures and Writings. London: Marion Boyars, [1961] 1968.
Driver, Tom. “Beckett by the Madeleine.” Columbia University Forum 4:3, summer 1961: 21-24.
Hediger, Heini, Wild animals in captivity. An Outline of the Biology of Zoological Gardens. [1950], New York: Dover, 1964.
Hill, Kevin D. “The Endangered Species Act: What Do We Mean by Species?” Boston College Environmental Affairs Law Review 20 (2 art. 3), 1993: 239-264. http://lawdigitalcommons.bc.edu/ cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1424&context=ealr
Field, Thalia. Point and Line. New York: New Directions, 2000.
Field, Thalia. Incarnate: Story Material. New York: New Directions, 2004.
Field, Thalia. Apparatus for the Inscription of a Falling Body. Seneca Review 38 (1), spring 2008: 22-44.
Field, Thalia. Bird Lovers, Backyard. New York: New Directions, 2010.
Field, Thalia. Experimental Animals (A Reality Fiction). New York: Solid Objects, 2016a.
Field, Thalia. Thalia Field, “The TNB Self-Interview by TNB Fiction”, November 24, 2016b, http:// thenervousbreakdown.com/tnbfiction/2016/11/thalia-field-the-tnb-self-interview/
Goldman, Nathan, “Experimental Animals: A Reality Fiction - Thalia Field”, http://www.full- stop.net/2017/01/03/reviews/nathan-goldman/experimental-animals-a-reality-fiction-thalia- field/
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Ingold, Tim. Being Alive, Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description. London: Routledge, 2011.
Mellis, Miranda F., “Interview with Thalia Field.” Context 18, (n.d.) http:// www.dalkeyarchive.com/interview-with-thalia-field/
NOTES
1. Epistemology notwithstanding. This would primarily target run-of-the mill scientists applying instructed protocols mindlessly but does not spare major scientists as her exposure of Konrad Lorenz shows. 2. Used here in the Aristotelian sense which foregrounds mimesis rather than metron and therefore overlapping with what would later be called literature. 3. “The Fish and Wildlife Service’s decision to terminate the cross-breeding program was the result of bad, or at least obsolete, taxonomic analysis combined with questionable legal analysis.” (Hill 1993: 259)
ABSTRACTS
Thalia Field’s writing draws its power and inventiveness from the conversation it conducts between biology and storytelling. On the one hand, Field draws from biology or geology to invent non-human points of views or timescales and thus rethink the units of narrative (character, plot, action). On the other hand, she taps the critical learning garnered by poetry and poetics to point out the failings of science when it misuses its authority and turns a blind eye to its motives. On closer examination, “realist” fiction and scientific method share certain characteristics: omniscient point of view, separation between subject and object, linear causality. To these they owe their great cognitive faculties but also some tragic lapses. Experimental Animals, a polyphonic historical novel depicting the birth of Claude Bernard’s experimental medicine and of the anti- vivisection movement, shows the tragic flaw of physiology to be the denial of experience in the name of experiment and the lack of empathy for objectified animals. Turning to ethology, the science of animal behavior, Bird Lovers, Backyard exposes Konrad Lorenz’s tragic flaw to be a compromised use of storytelling and the projection of human psychology onto animals. Bearing these flaws in mind, Field seeks to write from the right distance, a requirement which accounts for the experimental forms her stories take, an experimentalism that owes more to John Cage than to Bernard or Zola.
L’œuvre de Thalia Field tire sa force et son originalité de la conversation qu’elle y conduit entre la biologie et la narration. D’une part, elle se sert de la géologie ou de la biologie pour inventer des échelles et des points de vue non-humains et ainsi repenser les unités de la narration (récit, personnage, action). D’autre part, elle se sert du savoir critique de la poésie et de la poétique pour pointer l’aveuglement de la science quand elle abuse de son pouvoir et s’illusionne sur ses motifs et ses méthodes. A y regarder de près, récit « réaliste » et méthode scientifique partagent des caractéristiques — point de vue omniscient, séparation du sujet et de l’objet, causalité linéaire – qui ont fait leur puissance cognitive mais ont parfois aussi causé leurs dérives et leurs méfaits. Roman historique polyphonique consacré à la naissance de la médecine expérimentale et
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des sociétés de lutte contre la vivisection, Experimental Animals montre que la faille de la physiologie de Claude Bernard réside dans le déni de l’expérience au nom de l’expérimentation et dans le manque d’empathie pour les animaux réifiés. Consacré à l’éthologie, la science du comportement animal, Bird Lovers, Backyard montre que la faille de Konrad Lorenz réside dans un usage compromis du récit et la projection de la psychologie humaine sur les animaux. Avec l’enseignement de ces deux failles en tête, Field cherche à écrire à la bonne distance, une exigence qui explique la forme expérimentale que prennent ses histoires et qui doit plus à John Cage qu’à Bernard ou Zola.
INDEX
Keywords: Field Thalia, experimental, experience, storytelling, science, biology, Bernard Claude, Cage John Mots-clés: Field Thalia, expérimental, expérience, narration, science, biologie, Bernard Claude, Cage John
AUTHOR
ABIGAIL LANG Abigail Lang is Associate Professor at Université Paris-Diderot and a member of Laboratoire de Recherches sur les Cultures Anglophones (UMR 8225). Her research focuses on American poetry and poetics, issues of forms, genres and media, and transatlantic exchanges. A translator of anglophone poetry into French, she co-directs the Motion Method Memory series at Presses du réel. With Vincent Broqua and Olivier Brossard, she runs the Poets & Critics program and the Double Change bilingual reading series. Recent publications include a collection of essays on contemporary British poetry co-edited with David Nowell Smith (Palgrave, 2015), the digital edition of the magazine Change (1968-1983) (Presses du réel, 2016) and translations, often made in collaboration: John Ashbery and James Schuyler, Un nid de nigauds (2015), Lyn Hejinian, Ma vie (2016), Caroline Bergvall, L’anglais mêlé (2018) at Presses du Réel and Tracie Morris, Hard Korè (2017) at Joca Seria. She has written two books with Thalia Field, A Prank of Georges (Essay Press, 2010) and Leave to Remain. Legends of Janus (forthcoming). Contact: abigail.lang[at]wanadoo.fr
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Experimental Fiction, Or What Is a Novel and How Do I Know?
Ralph M. Berry
1 Some years ago while preparing for class, I needed to quote Wittgenstein but did not have my current copy of Philosophical Investigations (2009) at my office (henceforth abbreviated as PI). As a result, I found myself paging through the old, marked-up paperback I had studied as a graduate student. The passage I sought was §283, which begins with the question: “What gives us so much as the idea that beings, things can feel?” Glancing at my marginal notes, I was surprised to discover that I had originally taken the passage in a sense exactly opposite my present understanding. That is, I had taken Wittgenstein’s question rhetorically, as a challenge to our confidence that other creatures have feelings. It was as though Wittgenstein himself doubted that horses and dogs can really suffer. Such an interpretation now struck me as preposterous. It flew in the face of Wittgenstein’s insistence in PI §303 that doubting pain in any real situation is immensely difficult, his insinuation in PI §245 that trying to know pain better than its outward manifestation has something outlandish about it, and his statement in PI §250 that it makes no sense to say a dog’s pain is only a simulation. Responding to the feelings of others is what Wittgenstein calls a “form of life,” a way of interacting in which human beings agree. For him, questioning forms of life is futile. It was as though, having failed to take Wittgenstein’s question literally — that is, as a frank inquiry about our bond with others — I had gotten his philosophy exactly backwards.
2 So my question is this: why would Wittgenstein ask his question in this form? That is, the phrase “so much as the idea” is ordinarily rhetorical, is normally used to express suspicion of an idea. Its implication is that some conventional belief is dubious, with the accompanying insinuation that those accepting it have been uncritical or naive. My earlier interpretation, even if mistaken, was hardly idiosyncratic. So, if Wittgenstein did not intend to question our forms of life, why would he use a form of expression that in both German and English seems to invite misreading, a form that Wittgenstein actually does use rhetorically in his very next section? “How could one so much as get the idea of ascribing a sensation to a thing?” he asks in §284, and then retorts: “One might as well ascribe it to a number!” The derision in these sentences seems
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unmistakable. I wouldn’t even know how to take them literally. I mean, if you ask me, “What gives you so much as the idea I care?” I am not likely to think you are making a frank inquiry.
3 I start with this example from Wittgenstein because, when thinking about experimental fiction at the present time, one does not know where to start. No novelist or movement or body of work provides the kind of central or orienting position, at least among Anglophone writers and critics, that Joyce, Woolf, Faulkner, and Beckett provided fifty years ago, and I do not just mean that beginning with William Gass’s The Tunnel or Theresa Cha’s Dictée or George Perec’s Life: A User’s Manual will seem controversial. I mean that it is likely to seem arbitrary, as though one had merely universalized one’s own subject position or feelings. In saying that a few mostly white, mostly male, mostly Irish modernists once provided an “orienting position,” I have in mind something more than that they possessed cultural authority and canonical status, although I do not want to minimize these crucial facts. However, I am also referring to a position already staked out at their works’ first appearance, a position not reducible to their later institutional recognition and that differentiated them from near contemporaries like E.M. Forster, Edith Wharton, Graham Greene, and Theodore Dreiser. I would describe it this way: early modernist experimental novels presented themselves, not just as formal innovations or challenges to realist conventions, but as disclosures of what a novel is, of the novel as such. That is, for a reader of Gertrude Stein’s Melanctha or Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist or Proust’s Swann’s Way, it became necessary to reconsider, not only what the activities of reading and writing fiction might mean at present or in the future, but also what these activities had meant at any time, even in the best known works of the past. That people accepted these modernist experiments as novels at all thus seemed more consequential than whether reviewers extolled them as masterpieces or dismissed them as failures. The question that their acceptance forced, assuming one regarded Eliot’s Middlemarch and Flaubert’s Madame Bovary as classics of the genre, was how the same concept could apply to such different examples. Either one ruled out these experiments by definition, it seemed, thus fixing a limit on one’s concept — something earlier novelists and their readers had rarely needed to do — or one acknowledged that novels apparently never had been what, prior to these works, everyone believed them to be.
4 What I mean by staking out an orienting position becomes clearer, I think, if we compare these early 20th-century novelistic experiments with modernist painting. For the turn- of-the-century curators, critics, and painters aligned with Impressionism, the paintings of Cézanne, Van Gogh, and les Fauves did not look particularly innovative. Despite its break with Courbet’s realism, Monet’s Impressionism was still recognizable as a new, subjective inflection of the representational aims of earlier art, something British art historian Roger Fry showed (Fry 1996a) but interpreting Cézanne’s or Van Gogh’s painting as Neo-Impressionist — that is, as a new, subjective inflection of Impressionism itself — discounted their work altogether, making it the symptom of an idiosyncratic or aberrant psychology. Part of what made Fry’s advocacy of modernist painting so controversial was his frank recognition that, for Cézanne and Van Gogh to count as artists, the subject of Western art history would have to be reconceived. According to Fry, what Post-Impressionist painters had discovered was “the visual language of the imagination”, an abstract grammar of shapes and colors, immanent in all classic art, but which, despite changing conventions of representation, spoke “directly to the spirit” (Fry 1996b: 100, 106). Even for those who remained unconvinced, Fry’s account
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raised the stakes of aesthetic discussion unprecedentedly high. Monet might be criticized for obscuring the reality Courbet had made vivid, just as Henry James was often faulted for submerging action in the vagaries of consciousness, but such disagreements did not stake the very concept of painting or fiction. However, if one took Fry seriously, then the risk of failing to appreciate Cézanne’s achievement was that one might fail to know what made painting an art. It was as though modernist works had fused example and concept, practice and theory, present and past. This fusion, or the possibility of it, was what inspired critics like Cleanth Brooks, not just to concede, but to assert that he was reading Shakespeare and Milton “as one has learned to read […] the moderns” (Brooks 1947: 193), and when Viktor Shklovsky called Tristram Shandy “the most typical novel in world literature” (Shklovsky 1965: 57), he, too, was reordering literary history in accord with contemporary experimentation.
5 All of this may sound both familiar and wrong. My claim has been that what made novels like Joyce’s Ulysses or Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury or Woolf’s To the Lighthouse different from novels at other times, both before and since, was neither their innovations of form and content nor their challenges to norms of representational fidelity, but their revelation of something about novels at all times, something about the human form of life to which the reading and writing of novels is integral. It was only because modernist experiments laid bare these lived conditions of our concepts, or seemed to, that formalist critics like Fry, Brooks, and Shklovsky, to name just three, found it reasonable to construct a systematic criticism on their basis. However, it remains debatable whether the effect of such disclosures, when viewed in the light of subsequent history, has been more orienting than confusing. I will explain what I mean with an example of modernist fiction’s raised stakes.
6 In “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown,” Virginia Woolf maintained that the novelists of her generation experimented, not out of rebelliousness or a desire for originality, but because, at the time they began writing, “there was no English novelist living from whom they could learn their business” (Woolf 1993: 240). Unlike the classic novelists — Woolf’s examples are Jane Austen and Laurence Sterne — turn-of-the-century novelists like Arnold Bennett substituted social circumstances, economic conditions, and other conventional markers of identity for what novelists find “permanently interesting,” something Woolf repeatedly calls “character in itself” (Woolf 1993: 235, 236, 240). In her essay, this quality, immanent in all classic fiction, is what orients novelists and their readers in the way that Fry’s “visual language” of shapes and colors is supposed to inform painting. It makes the novelist’s art what it is. However, when Woolf tries to explain what she means by “character in itself,” she finds herself in a position not so different from Bennett’s. Not only is she unable to abstract this quality from its conventional associations, but even when she tries to tell a story, hoping to exemplify it, her embodiment of human character, Mrs. Brown, recedes into an “atmosphere,” an “impression,” an incommunicable “vision” (Woolf 1993: 238, 245). Woolf’s nearest approach comes with saying that what makes any character outlive convention is not its lifelikeness, but rather its “power to make you think not merely of itself, but of all sorts of things through its eyes” (Woolf 1993: 239). The idea seems to be that, “in itself,” character is distinct from the markers by which it is identified. Experiencing it is less like recognizing someone than like experiencing her experiencing. The emphasis falls, not on what the other sees or thinks or feels or even how differently, but on experiencing as she experiences, from her position, in her time.
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7 Apparently, Woolf thinks that what makes the novel confusing, especially for beginning readers and writers, is not that this source of its interest changes. Although famously announcing that human character changed in the month and year that Roger Fry introduced modernist painting to the London public, Woolf identifies her exemplar of character, Mrs. Brown, not with her generation’s distinctive viewpoint, but with the timeless reality that she claims the novel as a form evolved to express. “Mrs. Brown is eternal,” she declares, “Mrs. Brown is human nature, Mrs. Brown changes only on the surface” (Woolf 1993: 243). Nor does the problem seem to be that character is metaphysically other, essentially multiple, or even particularly difficult to know. On the contrary, Woolf stipulates that no one could long survive in the world without “a good deal of skill in character reading” (Woolf 1993: 235) and insists that her audience is as intimately acquainted with it as she. In fact, it is precisely the familiarity of “character in itself” that seems confusing. Noting that in the course of daily life everyone has experiences of character as vivid as Woolf’s experience of Mrs. Brown, Woolf chides her audience for reading so uncritically: “In your modesty you seem to consider that writers […] know more of Mrs. Brown than you do,” she declares. “Never was there a more fatal mistake” (Woolf 1993: 248). Again, the stakes seem very high. Woolf’s implication is that all readers should be as uncompromising as her own generation, should accept no substitute for what makes works like Pride and Prejudice and Tristram Shandy permanently interesting. And if, as a result, we find ourselves in her generation’s predicament, if no character, not even Mrs. Brown, adequately represents character “in itself,” that is, if examples and concepts do not fuse, then no novel or novelist provides an orienting position. The starting point for knowing what a novel is has shrunk to the size of the individual subject. It is as though every life were an experiment.
8 I have tried to bring out a potential, if not quite for solipsism, then for something like radical individuation in the tendency of early 20th-century experimental novels both to force the question of what a novel is and to present themselves as answers, and my argument is that we cannot make sense of the novel’s subsequent history without appreciating this potential. It is the success, not the failure, of works like To the Lighthouse that assigning an orienting position to experimental novels or novelists today appears arbitrary. However, I must first return to Wittgenstein’s question, “What gives us so much as the idea that beings, things can feel?” for it demonstrates how critical for our knowledge of any concept such experimentation is. If other readers are as impressed as I originally was with the difficulty of answering this question, then part of what seems impressive is that the difficulty results from no lack of knowledge of others’ feelings. This paradox — that we find ourselves unable to answer questions to which it seems everyone must know the answer — recurs throughout Wittgenstein’s philosophy. In truth, it seems as unclear in Philosophical Investigations as in “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown” how we could be ignorant of what others feel, since in both works our attunement to those around us appears so deep and pervasive. Like Woolf, Wittgenstein believes that we are frequently aware of someone else’s sensations, that an acquaintance’s mood can affect us powerfully, and that, seated on a jet or train or bus, we may have difficulty not knowing more about what some stranger feels than we want to. In Wittgenstein’s later philosophy, all of our concepts depend on shared forms of expression and response similar to those Roger Fry believed modernist painting had disclosed, forms so integral to our lives that, were we unacquainted with them, we would not be able to learn what they are.
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9 However, despite our familiarity with these forms, it appears far from clear in Philosophical Investigations that we know them. One reason for doubt is that, when questioning any concept, we regularly confuse them with some picture (bild) or explanatory model inherited with our language (PI §115), and if we try to abstract the form from the words (§90-91, §120), or from the picture with which past usage has associated our words, we easily become disoriented (§123), as though our native language were foreign to us (§116). Although this disorientation discloses a gap between what everyone knows and what anyone can say about it, Wittgenstein does not think that an accurate representation of our shared patterns of expression and response would close the gap. On the contrary, this representation, or its lack, is itself part of our confusing picture. In explaining the kind of representation that he thinks would, if not close the gap, then make it disappear, the kind he calls “surveyable” or “perspicuous” ( übersichtliche, [PI §122]), Wittgenstein describes how we experience such a gap: Here the fundamental fact is that we lay down rules, a technique, for playing a game, and that then, when we follow the rules, things don’t turn out as we had assumed. So that we are, as it were, entangled in our own rules. (PI §125)
10 Wittgenstein’s point here is not that these rules are the wrong rules; even less is it that there really are no rules, no collective regularities of expression and response with which, when correctly applied, our concepts conform. His point is more nearly that having a concept of something, knowing what feeling is, means knowing examples of it, knowing feelings, not knowing rules, forms, conventions, definitions, etc. (PI §69, §208). And if this tautology is Wittgenstein’s response to the question, “What gives us so much as the idea that beings, things can feel?”, then how does the philosophical problem of feeling — or of any other concept — arise in the first place? Or as Wittgenstein puts it: “This entanglement in our rules is what we want to understand: that is, to survey” ( übersehen [PI §125]).
11 It has often been remarked that the experimental fiction of the fifties, sixties, and seventies, especially in the U.S., but also in Ireland, Latin America, France, Italy, England, and elsewhere, seemed almost written against itself, creating philosophical and narrative problems that it then tried, with unclear success, to overcome. Like the novelists of Woolf’s generation, the post-WWII writers of anti-novels, metafiction, the nouveau roman, early magical realism, and Oulipian potential literature, all struggled against what they considered widely-disseminated misrepresentations of their art, but the novels with which they contrasted their works were not only those of the previous generation, that is, the — by now classic — experiments of early modernism. Rather, their struggle was also against contemporary and near-contemporary novelists who wrote as though modernism had never occurred. To the Post-war experimenters, writing a novel meant, among other things, doing what Woolf, Stein, Joyce, Kafka, and Proust had done: laying bare conditions realism had obscured, abstracting human interests from their conventional displacements, disclosing what fiction is, what reading and writing means. However, their on-going commitment to experimentation exposed a paradox. What exactly had the modernists disclosed? Was it, as Fry claimed, certain forms immanent in all classic works, forms that made possible one human’s representation of another and on which the significance of stories at any time depended, or had modernism demonstrated the limits of such forms? That is, had novels like Stein’s The Making of Americans and Joyce’s Finnegans Wake shown that the collective regularities of expression and response were always inadequate, that fiction, when it achieved what classic novels had achieved, was reducible to nothing pre-
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existing? Writing in the early seventies, Italo Calvino described literary experimentation as inherently divided, expressing both a desire for autonomy, for literature’s existence as “merely the permutation of a finite set of elements and functions,” and also a desire to transcend these elements and functions, to “escape from the confines of language” (Federman 1975: 76-7). Woolf’s pursuit of character “in itself” can be understood as an expression of either desire or both. And if Calvino was right, then the postwar experimenters faced a choice: either they could restrict themselves to playing with the forms modernism had already disclosed — forms that, although timeless, seemed finite in number — or they could attempt a self-overcoming so absolute, so singular, that the novel as a concept would cease to exist.
12 Surveying the literary experiments of the fifties, sixties, and seventies, I am struck by how often the insistence on a novel’s construction from definite recurrent forms accompanies the attempt to differentiate it from everything pre-existing, determinate, or separately knowable. In the most blatant version, these two, seemingly opposed tendencies converge in a novel’s dispelling of its own representational illusion, as when Humbert tells us in the twenty-ninth section of Part Two of Nabokov’s Lolita (1970), “Then I pulled out my automatic — I mean, this is the kind of fool thing a reader might suppose I did;” (282) or when at the end of Beckett’s Molloy (1955) Jacques Moran disavows his narrative’s beginning; or when in Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969) the narrator remarks, “The story I am telling is all imagination. These characters I create never existed outside my own mind” (80). An effect of such disillusionments is to abstract the activity of narrating from the action narrated, locating the novel as such, if not in the words we are reading, then just where seems impossible to say. In the writings of Borges, Calvino, Beckett, Christine Brooke-Rose, B. S. Johnson, Ishmael Reed, William Gass, Harry Matthews, Clarence Major, Nathalie Sarraute, Alain Robbe- Grillet, and Monique Wittig, to name only a few, this irreducibility of novels to determinate representation seems, not just compatible with, but paradoxically dependent on, generic conventions, plot types, and stock characters sufficiently determinate to be themselves represented. When at the beginning of John Barth’s story “Lost in the Funhouse,” (1988) we are told how all story beginnings function, or when in Borges’ “The Library of Babel” (1962) we learn of the one book that comprehends all the others, or when we discover in Gilbert Sorrentino’s Mulligan’s Stew (1996) the characters and settings of countless earlier novels, the novel as such seems, if anything, simply this example in my hand. Such singularity is one version, I believe, of what novelistic experiments, from early modernism to the present, want. That words are different from meanings, the announced theme of William Gass’s novel Willie Master’s Lonesome Wife (1971), is not for novelists a linguistic theory, philosophical thesis, or empirical fact. It is a narrative predicament, and its resolution depends, not on readers accepting this difference, or even making sense of it, but on words becoming as immediately interesting as pleas for help or cries of pain. Only when the word “novel” acknowledges what I am doing now, does Gass’s novel — or any novel — do more than create confusion by saying, “These words are all I am” (not paginated).
13 To those for whom writing in the Post-war period meant, not just producing a new example of a widely-applied concept, but discovering what novels are, what a word like “novel” is doing, such singular achievements seemed the end of orienting positions. No novice writer or reader could learn her business from their example; nothing followed from them but themselves. However, as Calvino’s description suggests, it was far from clear that this kind of transcendence was all the Post-war experimenters wanted. Even
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when the concept of a novel completely vanished into these self-identities, a question remained whether they had really established a limit on all pre-existing forms or merely disclosed a gap between what every novelist knew and what any novel could say about it. In fictions from the sixties such as Donald Barthelme’s “Marie, Marie, Hold on Tight” (1961), Clarice Lispector’s The Passion According to G. H. (2012), Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 (2006), or Ronald Sukenick’s “The Death of the Novel” (2003), a philosophical problem of meaning comprised the narrative predicament, but rather than resolve it, interpreting these works as representations of representations only replicated the predicament, transferring to the reader responsibility for the problem.
14 In Sukenick’s novella, a question about experimentation’s meaning remained not just because, when announcing the death of the omniscient author, the fictional author, Ron, presumes to omniscience, nor even because he feels inspired to this self- overcoming by a student stroking his thigh underneath the seminar table. It remained because, when Ron tries to differentiate his writing from all pre-existing forms, his words are appropriated by the character Neal, a tormented war-protestor who, between the narrated action and the act of narrating it, throws himself off a bridge. Neal rails against the confines of language, despising all the unquestioning compromises that substitute for reality and pleading with Ron to “give me something that makes life worth living” (48). Both the fictional author and Neal, the fictional reader, seem to believe that, when satisfying answers come to an end, actions are what count, or in Ron’s words, “Reality doesn’t exist....There is only reading and writing, which are things we do” (41). However, nothing Ron can say, not even about the “things we do,” counts for Neal, or not enough to make life worth living. If this pervasive unreality, which feels to Neal worse than death, is not to confuse what Sukenick’s reader makes of it, reading must differentiate Neal’s refusal of life from Ron’s refusal to represent it, accepting no substitute for what is permanently interesting and closing the gap between action and narration, example and concept, present and past. This demand raises the stakes of both writing and reading as high as life itself, but without questioning to no end, how is anyone to discover what the word “novel” means?
15 When taken rhetorically, as a challenge to our concept of feeling, Wittgenstein’s question in PI §283, “What gives us so much as the idea that beings, things can feel?”, conjures a picture of human relations. In it, a gap separates what human beings know from the pain, fear, desire, or rage of others, both human and non-human. What bridges this gap are the regularities of expression and response shared by the members of any sociological or biological group. Experiencing another’s experiencing, according to this picture, is responding in accord with the forms of one’s own group to another’s forms of expression. Regardless how immediate the experience, these shared forms mediate it, and if abstracted or represented separately, they will expose the gap. Anytime we question our concepts, this picture is apt to confuse us, substituting for or displacing the life we share with an indefinitely vast and diverse array of others, but not because it inaccurately represents human relations. On the contrary, it precisely depicts the distance between remorse and words of remorse, between any individual’s mood and his or her demeanor, and between all present suffering and the account a sufferer gives of it later, and it gives a perceptible form to the potential for disaster of immediate, heartfelt responses to the misery of other groups. Wherever our collective and individual experience with these gaps has not proven comic or embarrassing, it has usually proven painful, leaving its impression on our bodies, minds, language, and social institutions. When, in the absence of any context suggesting derision or irony, we
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hear Wittgenstein insinuating in PI §283 that we have been uncritical, we are responding to these individual and collective experiences of the gap and expressing how they have made us feel.
16 There is something that, until we hear Wittgenstein’s question literally, we will have difficulty knowing, but the surprise of Wittgenstein’s response to the question, a response running throughout the section of Philosophical Investigations (§243 - §315) dubbed “the private language argument” but concentrated in §284 through §287, is that what the question’s rhetorical inflection makes difficult to know are not the feelings of others. On the contrary, all the examples in §284 through §287 presuppose this knowledge. That a wriggling fly vivifies my imagination as stones and numbers do not (§284), that my relation to another’s facial expression is hardly less direct than my relation to my own (§285), that I respond to an injured person differently than to a damaged body part (§286), that my pity tends to dispel my doubt (§287), are just irrelevant psychological curiosities, not responses to the question in §283 at all, unless I know in such circumstances that the concept of feeling is the issue. Apparently, my uncertainty, when it comes to applying this concept, whether there is really much difference between a fly and a stone does not mean that, when it comes to applying it, I do not know the difference between a fly and a stone. In fact, it is hard to imagine any difference I know better. As Wittgenstein says, “All our reactions are different” (§284). If I nevertheless question it, if I continue to experiment with my application of this concept, inflecting PI §283 ironically and opening a gap between words and feelings, then what I have taken for a representation, this picture of human relations, becomes my own doing. I am trying to find out something I cannot find out while acting in accord with my group. It is what feels so different anytime I hear Wittgenstein’s question as a frank inquiry. And assuming that, even in the absence of satisfying answers, my questioning to no end is not just uncritical conformity, assuming I must know what I am doing, then there seems an obvious point: I experiment with how I express my feelings and question the forms in which I respond to the feelings of others because, otherwise, I will never know what it means to have a concept of feeling, to know what feeling is.
17 The accepted term among literary critics for writing like Wittgenstein’s in PI §283 is “performative.” Such writing differs from representation in the way that action differs from the imitation of action and also in the way that any act of narrating differs from its resulting narrative of actions. Although in the absence of starting points and orienting positions what counts as experimental fiction will remain indefinite, I believe that the most satisfying experiments of the last three decades have been developments of performative writing, and, in closing, I want briefly to mention three, all written in the U.S. since the early nineties. They are Carole Maso’s AVA (2002), Steve Tomasula’s VAS (2004), and David Markson’s Vanishing Point (2004). In these three works, the predicament in the novel is also the predicament of the novel, where that means the concept is implicated in the example, creating a problem for reading and writing that is overcome only by seeing what a novel is, what reading and writing fiction means. And, in all three, this predicament entails a gap separating the action from the narration. What is presently happening and how it is to be presented is itself the predicament. In Tomasula’s VAS, this gap appears as an action that, from the start, the fictional author, Square, has already decided to perform, and the written consent to this action that he withholds. What creates their separation is the action’s seeming implication in a story of violence, one written into nature and culture, which Square, the book VAS,
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Tomasula, and the reader all know is not merely fiction. In Maso’s AVA, by contrast, the gap is between Ava’s life as itself an action, one which, to be complete, needs more time, and her life as a story, occurring to her and us, if at all, only in a moment. Ava’s predicament is that, having lived her first thirty-nine years as a perpetual beginning, as unlike anything she has experienced before, she is left feeling — along with Maso and the reader — that her end is premature. Finally, in Markson’s novel the predicaments in and of the novel seem almost indistinguishable, amounting to little more than the fictional author’s difficulties arranging the notes we read. Because the notes comprise roughly two-thousand examples of misrecognition and obtuseness, examples in which writers and artists figure prominently, we seem to confront, if not solipsism, than sheer arbitrariness when we read, “Author is pretty sure that most of [the notes] are basically in the sequence he wants” (Markson 2004: 8).
18 Although a gap between the action and its narration (between what is known and what can be said about it) seems implicit in any novel, constituting interests intrinsic to the genre, in Maso’s, Tomasula’s, and Markson’s novels, this gap takes on a material form. In AVA and Vanishing Point, it appears as a uniform white space separating the individual fragments, while appearing in VAS as the lovely but erratic layout that eliminates the established indicators of textual continuity. In Markson’s case, only the page numbering and periodic references to the fictional author provide any basis, external to the fragments’ content, for supposing that our movement over the white space is oriented to more than an accidental beginning or end. The same seems true of Maso’s novel, with the exception that no fictional author is present and the fragments have been divided into three sequential sections, “Morning,” “Afternoon,” and “Night.” However, given both the randomness of Ava’s memories and their tendency to recur in any section, searching for evidence of chronological development seems futile. In Tomasula’s work, by contrast, the more or less conventional representation of Square’s domestic conflict seems to establish a beginning and end unproblematically, but in the three-hundred intervening pages the action and its narration seem as discontinuous as in Markson and Maso. Not only are the pages of VAS inconsistently numbered, but with the continuity of speaker, topic, and time independent of the layout, although we may admire each page as we admire a painting or photograph, a passage’s location in the printed text can mean nothing or anything (see Figure 1).
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Figure 1. Extract from VAS: An Opera in Flatland, a novel by Steve Tomasula
Art and design by Stephen Farrell. University of Chicago Press, 2004. Source: https://www3.nd.edu/ ~stomasul/VAS_homepage.html
19 These material gaps cannot be satisfyingly traversed without in each case resolving the predicament in the narrative, and what I find particularly productive, not only in these three fictions but also in other similarly performative experiments, is that this closure means acknowledging my responsibility for the gap. In AVA, I must experience Maso’s beginning and end in a given fragment, and once that happens, it becomes obvious that at every instant it was always possible. In VAS, I have to discover myself on the page I am on, as though, when reading, I had been elsewhere, substituting Square’s or Tomasula’s narration for what I am continuously doing. And in Vanishing Point I need to find the novel’s interest in literature’s and art’s confusions, which is how and where it has always been found. In each case, a discontinuity that appeared written into material reality is dispelled by forms of activity in which I have been engaging for as long as I have been telling and hearing stories. They include recognizing in a later utterance or action the meaning of an earlier one, feeling very differently about the same sentence depending on where it is located, and experiencing all the doubts about an author’s words that are raised by the words of a narrator or character. I do not see any other way, following modernism, that the novel as such can be disclosed. The achievements of experimental fiction remain singular, not necessarily in the uniqueness of their form or their self-identical meaning, but in my responsibility being something I alone can acknowledge. At the limit of what one human can impart to or about another, actions are what count. By abstracting what we do from the circumstances in which these actions habitually occur, experimental novelists are not denying that reality exists or that we can know it, but they are reminding us what our actions mean, what does or does not come of them. Wittgenstein famously said that his
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aim in writing was to find a way to stop without doing violence to his own or anyone else’s meaning. It is an achievement of that kind that I believe establishes the starting point for knowing what novels are, that gives to any experimental fiction its orienting position.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Primary sources
Austen, Jane. Pride and Prejudice. London: Penguin, 2003. First published 1813.
Barth, John. “Lost in the Funhouse.” In Lost in the Funhouse. New York: Anchor Books, 1988. First published 1963.
Barthelme, Donald. “Marie, Marie, Hold on Tight.” In Come Back, Doctor Caligari. Boston: Little Brown, 1961.
Beckett, Samuel. Molloy. Trans. Patrick Bowles. In Three Novels. New York: Grove, 1955. First published in French 1947.
Borges, Jorge Luis. “The Library of Babel.” Trans. James E. Irby. In Labyrinths. New York: New Directions, 1962. First published in Spanish 1944.
Cha, Theresa. Dictée. Berkeley: U. California Press, 2001. First published 1982.
Eliot, George. Middlemarch. New York: Norton, 1977. First published 1871-72.
Faulkner, William. The Sound and the Fury. New York: Norton, 1994. First published 1929.
Flaubert, Gustave. Madame Bovary. Trans. Merloyd Lawrence. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1969. First published 1856-57.
Fowles, John. The French Lieutenant’s Woman. London: Vintage books, 1996. First published 1969.
Gass, William. Willie Master’s Lonesome Wife. New York: Knopf, 1971. First published 1968.
Gass, William. The Tunnel. Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive, 1999. First published 1995.
Joyce, James. Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. New York: Norton, 2007. First published 1916.
Joyce, James. Ulysses. New York: Random House, 1986. First published 1922.
Joyce, James. Finnegans Wake. New York: Viking, 1976. First published 1939.
Lispector, Clarice. The Passion According to G. H. Trans. Idra Novey. New York: New Directions, 2012. First published in Portuguese 1964.
Markson, David. Vanishing Point. Washington, DC: Shoemaker and Hoard, 2004.
Maso, Carole. AVA. Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive, 2002. First published 1993.
Nabokov, Vladimir. The Annotated Lolita. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1970. Lolita first published 1955.
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Perec, George. Life a User’s Manual. Trans. David Bellos. Boston: Godine, 2009. First published in French 1978.
Proust, Marcel. Swann’s Way. Trans. C. K. Scott Moncrieff, Terence Kilmartin, D. J. Enright. New York: Modern Library, 2003. First published in French 1913.
Pynchon, Thomas. The Crying of Lot 49. New York: Harper Perennial, 2006. First published 1965.
Sorrentino, Gilbert. Mulligan’s Stew. Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive, 1996. First published 1979.
Stein, Gertrude. Melanctha. In Three Lives. New York: Penguin, 1990. First published 1909.
Stein, Gertrude. The Making of Americans. Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive, 2006. First published 1925.
Sterne, Laurence. Tristram Shandy. London: Penguin, 2003. First published 1759-67.
Sukenick, Ronald. “The Death of the Novel.” In The Death of the Novel and Other Stories. Tallahassee, FL: Fiction Collective 2, 2003. 41-102. First published 1969.
Tomasula, Steve. VAS. Chicago: U. of Chicago Press, 2004. First published 2002.
Woolf, Virginia. “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown.” In A Bloomsbury Group Reader. S. P. Rosenbaum, ed. Cambridge MA: Blackwell, 1993. 233-249. First published 1923.
Woolf, Virginia. To the Lighthouse. Orlando, FL: Harcourt, 1981. First published 1927.
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Brooks, Cleanth. The Well-Wrought Urn. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1947.
Federman, Raymond, ed. Surfiction: Fiction Now and Tomorrow. Chicago: Swallow Press, 1975.
Fry, Roger. “The Philosophy of Impressionism.” In A Roger Fry Reader. Christopher Reed (ed.). Chicago: U. of Chicago P., 1996a. 12-20.
Fry, Roger. “Post-Impressionism,” in A Roger Fry Reader. Christopher Reed, ed. Chicago: U. of Chicago P., 1996b. 99-110.
Shklovsky, Victor. “Sterne’s Tristram Shandy: Stylistic Commentary.” Trans. by Lee T. Lemon and Marion J. Reis. Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays. Lincoln: U. of Nebraska P., 1965. 27-57.
Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Philosophical Investigations. Trans. by G. E. M. Anscombe, P. M. S. Hacker and Joachim Schulte, 4th ed. Revised. Malden MA: Blackwell, 2009. First published 1953.
ABSTRACTS
The essay interprets experimental novels as attempts to determine what a novel is, rather than as formal innovations or challenges to realist conventions. A consequence of such an interpretation is that the stakes of aesthetic discourse are raised unusually high, making an issue of the very concept. For modernist novelists like Virginia Woolf, these raised stakes mean that knowledge of what a novel is, although radically democratic, poses a problem similar to the epistemology of other minds, that is, a problem of subjective isolation, of solipsism. In such a context, understanding the history of novelistic practice subsequent to modernist experimentation requires acknowledging this potential of aesthetic knowledge to individuate readers and writers. That assigning an orienting position to specific novels or novelists today seems arbitrary, if not hegemonic, does not result from anything about the political and ethical conditions of aesthetic practice that modernist novelists did not themselves know. On the
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contrary, it results from the success of their experiments, from the aesthetic achievements of writers such as Woolf. What their conceptually transforming ambitions have made manifest is that, for those familiar with novels generally, questioning what passes for literary fiction today is not a matter of lacking knowledge, or none that even the most widely recognized novelist or critic possesses. This situation resembles the one addressed by Wittgenstein in the “private language” section of Philosophical Investigations. The specific resemblance is that, although concepts of either aesthetics or feelings, once questioned, can prove difficult to justify or explain, their difficulty presupposes no lack of knowledge of aesthetics or feelings. On the contrary, Wittgenstein suggests that this “picture” of a lack is itself part of the difficulty. In his later philosophy, conceptual problems seem to arise in much the way that novelistic problems in the post-WWII period seemed to have arisen, specifically, as a result of language users questioning the conceptual conditions of their own practice. For experimental novelists of the sixties and seventies, writing a novel seemed as ambitious an undertaking as for their modernist forerunners, but a question arose for them about what such ambition entailed. Had the modernists succeeded in laying bare the forms immanent in all classic novels, forms on which the significance of stories at any time depended, or had they demonstrated the limits of such forms? The difference was that between acknowledging what a novel is and rendering the concept unknowable, but both the acknowledgment and its skeptical denial seemed to follow from the same question. Wittgenstein’s solution to problems of this kind in Philosophical Investigations is to write such that hearing what the question asks means recognizing our responsibility for the difference. The accepted term among literary critics for writing of this kind is “performative.” It differs from representation in the way that an act of narrating differs from a narrative of action. The essay concludes by showing through brief readings of novels by David Markson, Carole Maso, and Steve Tomasula, that radically experimental fictions can go beyond self-questioning, performing an act of acknowledging what narration is.
Cet article envisage le roman expérimental comme une tentative pour déterminer ce qu’est le roman, plutôt que comme un ensemble d’innovations formelles ou de remises en question des conventions réalistes. L’une des conséquences d’une telle interprétation est que les enjeux du discours esthétique sont placés très hauts, et remettent en question le concept lui-même. Pour une écrivaine moderniste comme Virginial Woolf, cela veut dire que le savoir sur le roman, bien que radicalement démocratique, pose un problème similaire à l’épistémologie d’autres esprits, c’etsà-dire un problème d’isolement subjectif, ou de solipsisme. Dans un tel contexte, comprendre l’histoire de la pratique de l’écriture romanesque venant après l’expérimentation moderniste requiert une reconnaissance de ce potentiel d’un savoir esthétique possédé par les lecteurs et écrivains individuels. Que le fait d’assigner une position orientante à des romans ou des romanciers spécifiques aujourd’hui puisse sembler arbitraire, si ce n’est hégémonique, ne résulte pas de quoi que ce soit qui concerne les conditions politiques et éthiques de la pratique esthétique que les romanciers modernistes ne connaissaient pas eux-même. Au contraire, cela résulte du succès de leurs expérimentations, des réussites esthétiques d’écrivains tels que Woolf. Ce que leur ambition de transformer les choses conceptuellement a rendu manifest est que, pour ceux qui sont familiers avec les romans en général, remettre en question ce qui est considéré comme de la fiction littéraire aujourd’hui n’est pas un problème d’un manque de savoir, ni d’aucun savoir que le romancier ou critique le plus largement reconnu ne possède. Cette situation ressemble à celle qu’analyse Wittgenstein dans la section des Investigations Philosophiques intitulée « le langage privé ». Ce qui est particulièrement ressemblant est que bien que les concepts aesthétiques ou bien se référant aux sentiments, une fois remis en question, puissent s’avérer difficiles à justifier ou à expliquer, leur difficulté ne présuppose pas une ignorance de ce que sont l’esthétique ou les sentiments. Au contraire, Witgenstein suggère que cette « image » d’un manque en elle-même fait partie de la difficulté. Dans sa philosophie
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ultérieure, les problèmes conceptuels semblent surgir de la même façon que les problèmes du roman dans la période de l’après deuxième guerre mondiale, plus précisément comme le résultat du fait que les utilisateurs de langage remettent en question les conditions conceptuelles de leur propre pratique. Pour les romanciers expérimentaux des années 60 et 70, écrire un roman paraissait être une entreprise aussi ambitieuse que pour leur prédécesseurs modernistes, mais une question s’est posée à eux à propos de ce que cette ambition signifiait. Est-ce que les modernistes avaient réussi à mettre à nu les formes immanentes à tous les romans classiques, des formes dont dépendaient la signification des histoires de tout temps, ou bien avaient-ils démontré les limites de telles formes ? La différence revient à celle existant entre le fait de reconnaître ce qu’est un roman et le fait de rendre le concept inconnaissable, mais la reconnaissance tout comme sa négation sceptique semblent être produits par la même question. La solution apportée par Witgenstein aux problèmes de ce genre dans les Investigations philosophiques est d’écrire de telle manière qu’entendre les présupposés de cette question veut dire reconnaître notre responsabilité dans l’établissement de cette différence. Le terme habituellement utilisé par les critiques littéraires pour cette manière d’écrire est « performative ». Elle diffère de la représentation au sens où l’action de faire récit diffère du récit d’action. L’article conclut, à travers de courtes analyses de romans écrits par David Markson, Carole Maso et Steve Tomasula, sur l’idée que des fictions radicalement expérimentales peuvent aller au-delà de la remise en question de la forme propre pour produire de manière performative un acte de reconnaissance de ce qu’est le récit.
INDEX
Mots-clés: fiction expérimentale, roman moderniste, Wittgenstein Ludwig, langage privé, métafiction, autonomie, fiction performative, Markson David, Maso Carole, Tomasula Steve Keywords: experimental fiction, modernist novel, Wittgenstein Ludwig, private language, metafiction, autonomy, performative writing, Markson David, Maso Carole, Tomasula Steve
AUTHOR
RALPH M. BERRY R. M. Berry is author of the novels Frank (2006), an "unwriting" of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, and Leonardo’s Horse, a New York Times “notable book” of 1998, as well as two collections of short fiction, Dictionary of Modern Anguish (2000), described by the Buffalo News as "inspired […] by the spirit of Ludwig Wittgenstein," and Plane Geometry and Other Affairs of the Heart, winner of the 1985 Fiction Collective Prize. He edited the fiction anthology Forms at War: FC2 1999-2009and, with Jeffrey DiLeo, the critical anthology Fiction’s Present: Situating Contemporary Narrative Innovation (2007). His essays on experimental fiction, Wittgenstein's philosophy, and Stanley Cavell have appeared in such journals as New Literary History, Philosophy and Literature, Symploké, Narrative, and Soundings, and in such volumes as the Oxford Handbook of Philosophy and Literature (2009), Stanley Cavell and Literary Studies (2011), and Ordinary Language Criticism: Literary Thinking After Cavell After Wittgenstein (2003). He is emeritus professor and former chair of English at Florida State University and the former director of the independent literary publisher FC2. Having retired from teaching at the end of 2016, he and his wife, Ruth Fleming, now live in Atlanta, GA. Contact: rberry[at]fsu.edu
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New Old Forms: Djuna Barnes’s and Virginia Woolf’s Return to the Archaic as Experimental Modernist Form
Elaine Hsieh Chou
The Uncensored Texts of 1928
1 1928 was a tumultuous year for literature in the English-speaking world. D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover was printed privately in Italy. Compton Mackenzie’s Extraordinary Women featured lesbians on the island of Capri. Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness was embroiled in a highly publicized obscenity trial. The latter was banned not because it featured explicit scenes but because it earnestly asked for lesbians or “inverts” to be accepted in society. Amidst this commotion, two other controversial texts published that same year somehow went unscathed: Virginia Woolf’s Orlando and Djuna Barnes’s Ladies Almanack, which are both centered around same-sex love and the arbitrariness of gender — shocking notions in 1928. Although they are experimental in their form and content, neither are remembered as being so. In all of Woolf’s oeuvre, Orlando is seen as her unserious, frivolous work and Ladies Almanack has never even been considered part of the modernist canon, let alone a groundbreaking work. Why were two highly experimental works never thought of as such?
2 Perhaps we should recall that in and around 1928, “High Modernism” was still at its peak. Just the year before, Woolf had published To the Lighthouse; Dorothy Richardson, Oberland; James Joyce, sections of Finnegans Wake. In 1928, T.S. Eliot released parts of “Ash Wednesday”; Ezra Pound, a draft of “The Cantos.” These works are not only remembered for being experimental, they have become examples of what defined experimental writing during modernism.1 Although Joyce, Eliot and Pound liked to borrow from Greek myth and Old English, the un-borrowed language they employed remained firmly stuck in the early 20th century. Their experimentalism was entirely
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predicated on the formal structures and typography that had become popular within literary circles. Orlando and Ladies Almanack, on the other hand, embraced the florid and descriptive language of bygone eras, borrowing from the Elizabethan and the Rabelaisian. Both texts are also extremely funny—a rarity in “High Modernist” literature. Because of this, these texts were not heralded as new or experimental literature upon their publication.
3 This paper seeks to explore a widespread anomaly prevalent during the era of modernism, which valued only experimental form and disregarded experimental content. Modernism’s habit of valuing a strict set of art forms above all others had long- lasting repercussions: not only did it dictate what was worth including in the English canon, it diminished and discarded “female” forms of writing. If experimentalism is defined by that which deviates from contemporaneous work, Orlando and Ladies Almanack were undeniably experimental, both for their renewal of an “archaic” textuality that celebrated rather than repressed language and for their overturning of stable sexual identities. I argue that the choice to use humor, the whimsical and the playful, far from being outdated styles belonging only to the Restoration period, were experimental, sociopolitical choices inseparable from the provocative subject-matter of both texts. Thus, choosing to cultivate an aesthetics of the “old-fashioned” was necessarily political. I aim to uncover why writing about unorthodox desire required an alternative language or a renewal of prior literature.
4 Arguably, Woolf and Barnes moved within a limited circle of writers and thinkers, certainly one restrained by English and American contexts. But the stakes articulated by Orlando and Ladies Almanack extend beyond this small circle and are representative of an age-old belief: that experimentalism is defined by what is “new,” with the concept of “newness” being deeply rooted in a celebration of the masculine and a denigration of the feminine. By recognizing the experimental and subversive quality of these two works, we initiate a discourse that goes beyond “High Modernism” into its peripheral, hybrid spaces. If we consider Orlando and Ladies Almanack not as oddities in the modernist narrative but as quintessentially modernist, we must rearticulate how the “new” is not necessarily experimental and how the “archaic” is not necessarily uninventive. Although these two works might seem like outliers in an otherwise seamless modernist discourse, they must still be considered modernist texts and experimental in their own right.
Where “Experimental” Converges with “Modernist”
5 How the experimental became diametrically opposed to the traditional is historically linked to modernist definitions of the experimental. According to The Routledge Companion to Experimental Literature: [Experiment literature] lays everything open to challenge, reconceptualization and reconfiguration. Experimentation makes alternatives visible and conceivable, and some of these alternatives become the foundations for future developments, whole new ways of writing […]. Experiment is one of the engines of literary change and renewal; it is literature’s way of reinventing itself. (Bray et al. 2012: 1)
6 In this standard definition, newness and future-forward thinking are inherent in all experimental literature. These themes have largely defined the period of the 1900s– 1940s, so much so that the word “modernist” has become synonymous with the word
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“experimental.” The Routledge Companion goes on to explain that “Many of the general features, and even some of the specific practices, of experimental literature of the second half of the century were anticipated by the avant-garde groups of the period from just before the Great War until the immediate aftermath of World War II, the epoch of the great isms of the early twentieth century” (Bray et al. 2012: 4). This conflation of terms — modernist and experimental — would secure the place of a few selective works in our collective memory, consigning others to obscurity.
7 Modernist anthologies, too, like to refer to World War I as the catalyst for the dramatic form-breaking that ensued in the early 20th century. In this version of modernist literature, when Western society became fragmented and broken, poetry followed suit: the sonnet turned into free verse, words left their textual placeholders to travel across the page in disjointed typography or non-existent punctuation. The coherent and chronological narrative gave way to the opaque and the absurd. We are reminded of Ezra Pound’s call for all artists to “make it new.” Modernism has long been associated with a “dramatic break from the past” (Schoenbach 2012: 4) and descriptions of this period fall back on negative words such as collapse, destruction, dissolution, disintegration, crisis, etc. (Schoenbach 2012: 4). In The Modernist Papers, Frederic Jameson departs from the theme of “the new” but nonetheless highlights how “conventionality” and “kitsch” were anathema to modernism: What drives modernism to innovate is not some vision of the future or the new, but rather the deep conviction that certain forms and expressions, procedures and techniques, can no longer be used, are worn out or stigmatized by their associations with a past that has become conventionality or kitsch, and must be creatively avoided. (Jameson 2007: 5)
8 Elitism was thus inextricable from the monolithic and selective discourse that was High Modernism.
9 The advent of the avant-garde and its formalist, military undertones add another facet to what “experimental” implied. As Peter Burger has explored, shocking the public was at the core of the avant-garde (Burger 1984). Shocking meant anything besides what was already known; it certainly did not include tradition or bygone concepts. Victorian literature was thus frowned upon and any pleasurable reading automatically became a detested form of unintelligent “mass culture.” In his influential text Modernisms: A Literary Guide, Peter Nicholls explains that “The contempt for forms of popular culture which would determine some of the avant-garde positions of the later modernism has its roots in the nineteenth-century responses to the growth of the literary market” (Nicholls 2009: 12). Popularity in the form of financial payoff had become stigmatized.
10 This version of modernism as a desolate “waste land” takes precedence in society’s collective memory and remains the version we believe is worth teaching,2 none of which is an accident: [T]he most vocal critics of mass culture were in fact the pioneers of university- based English programs, British Modernist critics, whose foundation for the study of literature was based on a repudiation of mass culture and mass-cultural consumptive practices. (Pease 2011: 197-8)
11 Cambridge scholars, along with T.S. Eliot, “created the intellectual basis that English literature studies followed in Britain […]. Not only were they the first, Modernist critical practices were the formative practices of English literary criticism produced within the university” (Pease 2011: 201). Modernism, conceived as a narrow-minded vision of experimentalism, was in fact institutionalized within and through
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universities, the birthplace of the literary canon. As Suzanne Clark put it so aptly, “High modernism meant that the works of a few male writers stood for a whole period of literary history” (Clark 1991: 34-5). To this Shari Benstock adds “modernism constructed itself on a political agenda of exclusion — the exclusion of the Other” (Benstock 1994: 100). The irony is not amiss here: although the avant-garde considered themselves as being on the margins of mainstream art, they did not recognize that they themselves took part in marginalization: “avant-garde movements have willfully chosen their marginal position — the better to launch attacks at the center — whereas women have more often than not been relegated to that position” (Suleiman 2014: 151). This double standard of the avant-garde may explain why some of the most experimental works of the modernist period remain unknown and unstudied.
12 Furthermore, conceptions of the avant-garde and the experimental were gendered by nature. Although there are numerous instances of “male” qualities trumping “female” qualities in literature, suffice it to say that “[i]nstances of Modernist advocacy of firm, hard, dry, terse, classical masculinity, over and against the messy, soft, vague, flowery, effusive, adjectival femininity of the late Victorians, abound, and instances of male Modernist antifeminism and misogyny are legion” (DeKoven 2011: 214). From fiction to essays to manifestos, the gatekeepers of what qualified as art had also decided that good art was inherently male. Pound, considered a “father” of modernism, believed that true genius was born in the male reproductive system. He postulated that “it is more than likely that the brain itself, is […] only a sort of great clot of genital fluid held in suspense or reserve” (qtd. in Burke 1987: 103-4). Thinking turns into a creative act via “the phallus or spermatozoid charging, head-on, the female chaos” (Burke 1987: 104). Even at the biological level, women were stripped of creative agency.
13 Modernism’s fear of sentimentality and all its connotations is not unrelated to these misogynist agendas: “The term sentimental makes a shorthand for everything modernism would exclude, the other of its literary/non-literary dualism” (Clark 1991: 9). This “feminization of culture as content” meant that modernism got away with its “questionable exclusions” and “its most notoriously reactionary violence” (9), thereby “revers[ing] the increasing influence of women’s writing” and the importance of its evolution (1). Gendered, modernism associated women with “the mass” and its productions became “objects of critical disdain” (5). These ideas were bound up in what constituted experimental writing: Modernism is […] stabilized by a system of gendered binaries: male / female, serious / sentimental, critical / popular. Upsetting the system — as women do — introduces an instability and reveals the contradictions. As we acknowledge the contributions of women, we see that modernism was both revolutionary and reactionary; the sentimental was both banal and transgressive. (Clark 1991: 8)
14 Written off as “feminine,” Orlando and Ladies Almanack stood little chance as being recognized as “serious” (code for “masculine”) literature.
15 What did it mean that those producing “the only” experimental work were then deeming it as such? They were simultaneously defining and upholding a self-made standard within a closed circle of cultural production and critique. This phenomenon provides useful insight into why Orlando and Ladies Almanack did not create shockwaves in 1928 in spite of their incredibly experimental, incredibly taboo content. No matter their content, their form ostensibly belonged to the past (and according to “High Modernism,” form dictated experimentalism above all else). At the same time, these
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two novels do not easily fit into any single interpretative mold because they are not sentimental in tone, nor are they examples of mass-produced entertainment. They were written by two women who moved in the literary circles of Bloomsbury and Parisian salons and who considered themselves among those writers doing critical, experimental work. In the two following sections, I will postulate why Orlando and Ladies Almanack were both misread until nearly a half a century after their publication.
Orlando: Metafiction and Performing Gender
16 When Virginia Woolf set out to write Orlando: A Biography, she was ambivalent about what kind of novel it would be. At the outset Woolf revealed, “I am writing Orlando half in a mock style very clear & plain, so that people will understand every word. But the balance between truth & fantasy must be careful” (Woolf 1980: 162). Later she explained, “The truth is I expect I began it as a joke, & went on with it seriously” (185). This ambivalence about just how explicit Orlando could be persisted until its completion, when Woolf thought that it “may fall between two stools, be too long for a joke, & too frivolous for a serious book” (177). Even though she referred to her novel a “lark” and a “writer’s holiday,” she remained determined to “revolutionise biography overnight” (Woolf 1977: 429).
17 When Orlando first came out, it was called “pure fantasy” (Majumdar and McLaurin 1975: 222), an “orgy of romance” (225), “a wonderful phantasmagoria,” “a kind of inspired joke” (235), “tongue in her cheek” (235) with “an important element of ‘spoof’” (235). Critics invented an explanation for Woolf’s sudden departure in style by deploying a lexicon of the improbable in order to discredit her novel. J.C. Squire writes off Orlando in a few swift sentences: This book is a very pleasant trifle and will entertain the drawing-rooms for an hour: a suitable companion for the jade carving and the painted snuff-boxes. But I think that even of its kind it is not in the first order. Even a trifle, to be excellent, must have enthusiasm behind it. This book, one feels, was conceived frivolously and chancily. (quoted in Majumdar and McLaurin 1975: 229)
18 Cleveland Chase’s review is even harsher, claiming that the theme of Orlando is “for a Victor Hugo, not for Mrs Woolf… Her best novel, To the Lighthouse raised my hopes for her. Orlando has dashed them and they lie in iridescent fragments at my feet” (quoted in Majumdar and McLaurin 1975: 233). The reference to Hugo is intended to make Woolf’s work appear outdated. Chase had “horrid doubts” about Woolf being one of “the only important innovating novelists” and concluded that “only Joyce is […] sure of a place in the history of the development of the novel” (234). In none of these reviews is the novel’s subversive and progressive themes mentioned let alone praised. They all effectively dismiss Woolf’s novel as glib and frivolous.
19 The only review written by a woman, Helen MacAfee for The Yale Review, takes up the defense of Orlando: It is the right and the nature of the artist to renew the forms of expression inherited from great predecessors by impressing upon them his own intense being. Mrs Woolf, who has chosen fiction as her chief literary medium, has from the first shown herself impatient of the old categories, and now in her latest novel she declares her independence openly in the subtitle, ‘a biography.’ (quoted in Majumdar and McLaurin 1975: 237)
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20 MacAfee intuits the experimental nature of Orlando that aimed to “renew,” to “revolutionise,” a sentiment shared by Woolf’s husband. Woolf wrote in her diary that Leonard “takes Orlando more seriously than I had expected. Thinks it in some ways better than The Lighthouse; about more interesting things, & with more attachment to life, & larger” (Woolf 1980: 185). But years later, even in contemporary surveys of Woolf’s work, Orlando is left out of her œuvre. As Sherron E. Knopp has noted, “Those who admire the book hasten to admit that it is only a minor interlude amidst more serious acts of creation” (1988: 25). One example Knopp cites is Mitchell Leaska who in 1977, “omitted [Orlando] from The Novels of Virginia Woolf: From Beginning to End. The few critics who treat the novel sympathetically and at any length locate its claim to serious consideration elsewhere than in the sexual politics that are its raison d’être” (25).
21 And yet, Orlando was perhaps the first English novel to explicitly separate gender from selfhood. Orlando is written in the third-person from the point of view of a biographer who attempts to recount the wondrous life of Orlando, who was born a man until his thirtieth year when he inexplicably wakes up a woman: “Orlando had become a woman —there is no denying it. But in every other respect, Orlando remained precisely as he had been. The change of sex, though it altered their future, did nothing whatever to alter their identity” (Woolf 1973: 133). The novel’s sexual politics is not cloaked in difficult language. During his 300 years of life, Orlando’s love of women, or at least a certain woman (Sasha), remains constant: “though she herself was a woman, it was still a woman she loved” (154). He manipulates his gender through sartorial performance by simply trying on and taking off different clothes, realizing that, “Vain trifles as they seem, clothes have, they say, more important offices than to merely keep us warm. They change our view of the world and the world’s view of us” (179). Orlando laments how his physical capacity is hampered by heavy and restricting dresses. He discovers he was unquestionably granted certain rights as a man and then, for no logical reason, stripped of these rights when he becomes a woman. As a lady, she is ushered into a society where her role is to nod and smile, to not show too much conviction or intelligence. The narrator wryly notes, “As long as she thinks of a man, nobody objects to a woman thinking” (268), one example out of many similar remarks. Towards the end of novel, Orlando feels the ticking of the societal clock so forcefully that almost against her will she marries and quite literally finds a child in her arms.
22 Towards the end of the novel, however, Orlando discovers that her husband Marmaduke Bonthrop Shelmerdine was also performing gender: “You’re a woman, Shel!” to which Shel responds, “You’re a man, Orlando!” (252). Heterosexual marriage thus transforms into its disavowed other. Like Judith Butler would argue years later in Gender Trouble, Woolf understood that gender is a performance. According to Butler: [A]cts, gestures, enactments, generally construed, are performative in the sense that the essence or identity that they otherwise purpose to express are fabrications manufactured and sustained through corporeal signs and other discursive means. That the gendered body is performative suggests that it has no ontological status apart from the various acts which constitute its reality. (Butler 1990: 185)
23 Throughout Orlando, s/he only performs male or female — we are never told what sex Orlando is born with. The fact that Orlando is able to switch genders, (“she seemed to vacillate; she was man; she was woman” [Woolf 1973: 152]) was a provocative statement about how biological sex does not equate gender identity. Going even further, Woolf seems to argue that embracing a more androgynous conception of the self is fulfilling
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and beneficial: “nor can there be any doubt that [Orlando] reaped a twofold harvest by this device; the pleasures of life were increased and its experiences multiplied” (211).
24 The form of the novel, too, effectively undid biography just as Woolf claimed she would. As she was writing, Woolf wondered in her diary “What is obscenity? What is literature? What is the difference between the subject and the treatment?” (Woolf 1980: 207). Orlando is born during the reign of Queen Elizabeth and lives on into Woolf’s present day. In fact, in a bold metatextual move, the biography ends the day the book is published. It was entirely inspired by and dedicated to Woolf’s friend and lover Vita Sackville-West, who could not inherit her ancestral home Knole because of her sex. Woolf takes up her cause in Orlando and “gives” Knole to Sackville-West permanently through the act of writing.3 The reader embarks on a novel that claims it is a biography, only to discover Orlando is a fictional character, only to discover that he is based on a woman who very much exists. The text is experimentally metafictional since it acknowledges its own fictiveness but also incorporates a number of true-to-life facts. The textual seams “show” and Woolf makes no effort to hide them, in the sense that she does not smooth over the text’s many discrepancies. In fact, the first edition was printed with oil paintings and photographs purported to document Orlando’s life but included actual photos of Vita as a child and adult (Figure 1). This flouting of the usual author-reader pact was of great confusion to most critics. A fictitious male/female character portrayed through photographs of a very real, living woman? Serious literature was not allowed to have so much fun!
Figure 1: Extract from Virginia Woolf, Orlando: A Biography. New York: Crosby Gaige, 1928
Page 145 shows a photograph purportedly of Orlando. Source: https://www.smith.edu/libraries/libs/rarebook/exhibitions/penandpress/case11a.htm
25 The burning question is why did absolutely no review discuss Orlando’s radical refutation of gender norms or its undoing of biography and fiction. The answer lies in two phenomena discussed earlier: the novel’s popularity and its “archaic” form: Knopp
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informs us “that the book sold twice as many copies in six months as To the Lighthouse had in a year” and was considered by Leonard as “the turning point in her career” (Knopp 1988: 143). After its success, Woolf herself remarked, “I think I may say that I am now among the well-known writers” (Wool 1980: 201). It was her first financial success, yet it was received as the least of her literary successes. Its popularity nullified its esoteric potential.
26 As for the novel’s archaic form, a brief glance at the first pages of Orlando tells us that Woolf’s language took on a different tone from her earlier works: Happy the mother who bears, happier still the biographer who records the life of such a one! Never need she vex herself, nor he invoke the help of novelist or poet. From deed to deed, from glory to glory, from office to office he must go, his scribe following after, till they reach whatever seat it may be that is the height of their desire. (Woolf 1973: 14)
27 The syntax and diction used throughout the novel is reminiscent of an earlier era in writing, notably Elizabethan; this should come as no surprise considering the novel’s initial time frame, though the style of language remains consistent throughout. Critics today commonly agree that the fantastical nature of the novel and its archaic language were Woolf’s methods of protecting the novel from censorship. She closely followed Hall’s The Well of Loneliness controversy and was prepared to testify at the obscenity trial. Although in the end she did not testify because of pressure from the Bloomsbury group, one cannot help but wonder if the outcome of the trial encouraged her to lean more towards the un-incriminating fantastical. But I would also argue that her reclamation of archaic language is anything but uninventive, unoriginal or unexperimental.
Ladies Almanack: A Homocentric and Intermedial Found Object
28 If Orlando was an anomaly for 1928, imagine the odds of a similarly “archaic” book produced that same year. Djuna Barnes originally had trouble finding a publisher for her “chapbook.” In the end, Ladies Almanack was printed by Maurice Darantier in Dijon, the same publisher as Ulysses after Sylvia Beach’s first publication. Its only print run was relatively small, some 1,050 copies, which may explain why no (discoverable) contemporary reviews of Ladies Almanack appeared after its initial publication. Unlike Orlando’s financial success, Ladies Almanack gained little revenue and was sold in the streets of Paris to raise money for Thelma Wood’s spinal surgery, who was Barnes’s lover at that time. Although in 1928 there were no comparative reviews of Orlando and Ladies Almanack, Alfred Kazin considered the two writers side-by-side in The New York Times Book Review in 1937: It was Virginia Woolf who delivered that challenge in one of her numerous attacks on realism in the novel, but Miss Barnes has gone beyond Mrs. Woolf’s practice of her own theory. For Miss Barnes is not even concerned with the immediate in time that fascinated the stream-of-consciousness novelists. (qtd. in Marcus 1991: 197)
29 She was furiously interested in the past and its intersections with the present, as was indeed Woolf.
30 Just as Orlando was born from a biographical standpoint, Ladies Almanack blurs fiction with reality. Self-labeled a “slight satiric wigging,” Ladies Almanack is a roman à clef
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centered on Natalie Clifford Barney’s Paris salon, featuring Barney as the protagonist “Dame Evangeline Musset,” in addition to writers Radclyffe Hall, Mina Loy, Lady Una Troubridge, Janet Flanner, Dolly Wilde, Romaine Brooks and Solita Solano. Compared to Orlando, it features explicit descriptions of the lesbian milieu in Paris but one has to be able to read through numerous puns and private jokes to understand just how bawdy Ladies Almanack really is. The details of lesbian lovemaking is disguised in archaic language: Musset, who was “wide famed for her Genius at bringing up by Hand, and so noted and esteemed for her Slips of the Tongue” (Barnes 1972: 9), fondly tells a story that boasts her expertise with the female anatomy: “I recall one dear old Countess who was not be confined until I, fervid with Truth, has finally so floored her in every capacious Room of that dear ancestral Home, that I knew to a Button, how every Ticking was made!” (34-5). The text spins on a homocentric axis: every woman is “turnable.” Dame Musset makes it her mission to “turn” all women and is unerringly successful (Barney was a famous lover and seduced several married women). Her sexual prowess is even immortalized when, after she dies and her body is cremated, “all had burned but the Tongue, and this flamed, and would not suffer Ash,” and her admirers sit upon the eternal flame of her tongue (84). Like Orlando, Dame Musset is a blend of masculine and feminine: at her birth, she “came forth an Inch or so less than” a boy (2) and when her father expresses his disappointment that she was born a girl, she replies: “Am I not doing after your very Desire, and is it not the more commendable, seeing that I do it without the Tools for the Trade, and yet nothing complain?” (2).
31 In the world of Ladies Almanack, female desire is embedded in mimesis: the ideal relationship is “Bosom to Bosom, Braid to Braid, Womb to Womb!” (19) and while “A man’s love is built to fit Nature,” a “Woman’s is a Kiss in the Mirror” (23). The outlier in their coterie is Patience Scalpel (Mina Loy) because she prefers men, although she makes the mistake of supposing that, “she herself, though all Thumbs at the business and an Amateur, never having gone so much as a Nose-length into the matter, could mean as much to a Woman as another” (50). Sexuality is presented as fluid and changeable, similar to gender in Orlando. But Barnes goes even further: the Almanack decries romantic love, monogamy and hypocritical middle-class sensibilities on marriage and lust. Hall’s character (Tilly Tweed-in-Blood) advocates for same-sex marriage: “Just because woman falls, in this Age, to Woman, does that mean that we are not to recognize Morals? What has England done to legalise these Passions? Nothing!” (19). An undisputed given in the text is the dangerous nature of patriarchy: in addition to decrying man’s inability to please women, the narrator mocks man’s desire to “medicalize” female desire.4 Indeed, at age ten Dame Musset was “deflowered by the Hand of a Surgeon” (24) and her “turning” of women is her vindication: “I am my Revenge!” (25). But Lady Buck-and-Balk goes one step further, declaring “would that we could do away with Man altogether!” (24). Moreover, Barnes rewrites and invents religious myths about the fall of Lucifer, Jezebel and Sheba in order to render them more centrally feminine myths. “[T]he first Woman born with a Difference” (26) is hatched from an egg, not from the union of Adam and Eve. For these reasons and others, Ladies Almanack has been called “a radical critique of patriarchy” (Lanser 1979: 41) that effectively “legitimize[d] lesbian eroticism by taking it for granted” (Nair 2012: 78). But why did it take until 1979 for Ladies Almanack to receive critical attention as a groundbreaking text, to be finally recognized as “a linguistic and literary experiment” (Lanser 1979: 40, my emphasis)?
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32 Just as Orlando’s form had barred the book from being received as experimental, so too did Ladies Almanack’s form determine its status as decidedly un-modern. The beginning lines are no more of this age than they were a century ago: NOW this be a Tale of as fine a Wench as ever wet Bed, she who was called Evangeline Musset and who was in her Heart one Grand Red Cross for the Pursuance, the Relief and the Distraction, of such Girls as in their Hinder Parts, and their Fore Parts, and in whatsoever Parts did suffer them most, lament Cruelly, be it Itch of Palm, or Quarters most horribly burning, which do oft occur in the Spring of the Year, or at those Times when they do sit upon warm and cozy Material […] (Barnes 1972: 1).
33 Did Barnes, like Woolf may have, believe that an archaic, coded language would protect her from the judgmental censorship she saw her friend Hall undergo? The diction, syntax, capitalization, neologisms, archaisms and satirical puns are more consistent with the English Restoration than 1928’s popular aesthetics of the time. The book is presented as an almanac, an ancient book form that records changes in the calendar, the weather, moon and sun. Ladies Almanack’s chapters follow the astrological calendar. But it is also written as an antiquarian chapbook, popular during the 16th century, which were medleys of different bits and pieces, from advice to popular ballads. In a similar vein, Barnes includes a song complete with musical bars, a poem and sidenotes in the margins. But the book is also a patchwork of many other forms: it “resembles the picaresque fable in structure, the mock epic in tone; it uses or parodies a host of forms including the saint’s life, the ode, the prayer, the love song, the allegory, classical mythology, and Sacred Scripture itself” (Lanser 1979: 40). Barnes turned genre on its head with her collage-making, borrowing from different media to create a text that defies categorization.
34 Ladies Almanack is iconographic in the purest sense of the word. Barnes self-illustrated the book in the form of mock wood-cuts, drawing “baroque cherubs, ornate parodies of religious iconography, feminized zodiacs, and other emblems archaic and arcane (Figure 2). The result is a pastiche which defies generic classification” (Lanser 1979: 40). The interplay between text and image was quite commonplace before the 19th and 20th centuries but highbrow modernism frowned upon intermedial projects and artists; they valued “disciplinary purity” and favored a strict separation of the arts in a bid to endow literature with “an authority enjoyed by the sciences” (McDonald viii). As much as Cubist and Dadaist art seemed to collide with modernist poetry, High Modernism “militated against genuinely cross-disciplinary work’” (Elliott and Wallace 1994: 124). Barnes’s illustrations give the Almanack a depth and complexity that go beyond the text in an acknowledgement of its material textuality. Image and text do not meld together but are juxtaposed in dialectic tension.
35 Ladies Almanack, with its refusal to acknowledge the year 1928 save for some “slips of the tongue,” presents itself not as a new publication but as if it were an old relic accidentally discovered at a secondhand bookstore. Caselli describes it as both an “antiquarian object” and a “carefully crafted artefact” (Caselli 2009: 41, 44). Unlike other modernist works that heavily cite authors and works from the past, no other text devotes itself so entirely to the past. Ladies Almanack is thus experimental at the same level as Marcel’s Duchamp’s found object, upending assumptions about authorial control (the novel is signed by the pseudonym “A Lady of Fashion”). Caselli explains that “The almanac tradition thus provides this 1928 text with the means to resist the
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centrality of author and plot” (2009: 46). Individual authorship is fittingly erased in a text that takes female community as its very center.
Figure 2: Frontispiece of Djuna Barnes’ ‘The Ladies Almanack’ (1928)
Source: http://jot101.com/2014/08/djuna-barnes-ladies-almanack-1928/
36 In addition to its antiquarian language and illustrations, the text is also exceedingly playful, its drawings round-figured and quaint—all of which give the book a simultaneously flat and three-dimensional quality, as if it were a children’s book for adults. There was decidedly nothing else like it on the market. But Barnes was never given recognition for her ingenuity and her unique form of experimentalism despite writing prose and poetry unlike any other modernist writer. Her version of modernism was uniquely her own: a self-taught writer, she had an astonishing command of the English language. Sylvia Beach wrote that her writing, “with its strangeness and its melancholy note […] did not resemble that of any other writer of her time” (1956: 112). Her style has been more closely aligned to Gothic literature or even fin-de-siècle decadence than the style of her peers; yet her politics were a century ahead of them. Paul West astutely points out that Barnes “wanted to undo all readers, to deflower them one way or another, to stop them from expecting fiction to behave like some well- bred social organism” (West 1990: 242). Barnes did not try to tame language, she let it roam uninhibited.
Let the Women Play
37 While Orlando was damned because of its popularity, Ladies Almanack was damned because of its obscurity. Their transgressive and subversive ideas were ignored not only because of the double standards of High Modernism but because, I believe, they posed too great a threat to societal norms. As it turns out, modernism was not as futurist or forward-looking as it claimed in spite of its furious “form-breaking.” Woolf and Barnes lobbied for an anti-essentialist notion of gender and a separation of gender and sexual
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desire, notions which are hardly accepted today. Woolf and Barnes wanted to go beyond the restricting category of “lesbian” which they were both ambivalent about, preferring the term “Sapphic” instead. Their interest in exploring same-sex lives, both within and outside of the page, is also an interest in sameness as a concept, sameness as an exploration of the self through the other. “Modernism had mothers as well as fathers,” DeKoven declared (2011: 213). In these texts written for other women (Vita Sackville-West and Thelma Wood) Woolf and Barnes were gesturing towards these maternal literary roots. Clark adds that “modernism invented an écriture féminine, a feminine writing which would rupture male conventions. But it did not make possible the appearance of a feminine subject within language” (Clark 1991: 7-8). The need to make room for a feminine subject was never more apparent than when Woolf sought out the “female sentence” in A Room of One’s Own and developed it further in Three Guineas.
38 Why did Woolf and Barnes both decide to return to older forms of language as a way of saying something new (about women, about gender, about love) in 1928? Most critics would say it was for pragmatic reasons, to avoid censorship, and it is undeniable that Orlando and Ladies Almanack were not written in the same earnestness as The Well of Loneliness. Their formal movements were decisively un-transparent, usurping the reader at every turn; such textual manipulation was a method of controlling and diverting the reader’s assumptions. But censorship seems too simple an answer. Orlando and Ladies Almanack’s similarities include a return to nature (with Orlando’s Romantic desire for nature as maternal, nurturing and inspirational) in addition to a return to a more pagan conception of the woman’s body (the Almanack’s structuring through the phases of the moon). I argue that Woolf and Barnes wanted to leave behind the dryness and hardness of highbrow modernism, not to return to the Elizabethan age but to revel in nostalgia for the frivolous, fantastical and the off-limits funny because, oddly enough, there was more freedom in the bawdiness of the pun and the endless possibilities of the impossible. Words had taken on a sterility in their time; because modernism took itself too seriously, criticism and high-minded elitism had become suffocating. Orlando and Ladies Almanack’s language is fertile in more senses than one: for its multiplicity, joyous rapture and jouissance, its irreverence and laughter; for its symbolic creation of a lasting object between two women, which could not manifest itself physically through the act of pregnancy and birth. It was within the wild, yet safe, space of language that a woman could be anything: another sex, adventurous, glib, even immortal — she was free to experiment not just formally but thematically in an effort to discover what modernism meant to her.
Canonical Revisions and Experimentalism
39 To acknowledge Orlando and Ladies Almanack’s place in experimental modernist literature would create reverberations throughout all literature that we consider experimental. Reinscription within the canon (or anti-canon) is not divorced from the political. Benstock points out, for example, that to acknowledge Woolf’s bisexuality, scholars “would be forced to redefine modernism in ways that acknowledge its Sapphic elements” (Benstock 1994: 97) and to reckon with modernism’s volatility, its unknowability — unsettling notions for all literary scholars and critics who have tried to give shape to an era. Benstock explains that
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[Sapphic texts] are difficult to place according to genre. Because they insist upon writing beyond the boundaries of our inherited critical traditions, readers have difficulty in knowing what to say […]. Collectively, these texts are the ‘dangerous symptoms’ of a system that cannot tolerate difference. (Benstock 1994: 114)
40 The point is not, I think, to read texts like Orlando and Ladies Almanack and prove that they fit into Eliot or Pound’s modernist mold in an effort to justify their worth. The point is to reconsider such exclusionary standards altogether, to perhaps stop applying them to women writers they did not, could not, understand. The myth that modernism was about pure aesthetics is no longer sustainable because even though “Modernism practiced a politics of style, it denied that style had a politics” (Clark 1991: 5). To what extent is our collective obsession with experimental form (often at the expense of experimental content) founded in misogyny and elitism, steeped in fear of “mass culture,” in a reluctance to democratize art? In the end, the standards that decided what was and was not experimental were arbitrarily dictated in 1928, as they still are today. The political nature of the experimental, and its far-reaching tentacles, shocks us into the realization that there is always more at stake than pure aesthetics when we call something “experimental.”
BIBLIOGRAPHY
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Beach, Sylvia. Shakespeare and Company. New York: Harcourt, 1956.
Benstock, Shari. “Expatriate Sapphic Modernism: Entering Literary History.” Rereading Modernism: New Directions in Feminist Criticism. Lisa Rado, ed. New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1994.
Bray, Joe, Alison Gibbons and Brian McHale, eds. The Routledge Companion to Experimental Literature. New York: Routledge, 2012.
Burger, Peter. Theory of the Avant-Garde. Minneapolis: U. of Minnesota P., 1984.
Burke, Carolyn. “Getting Spliced: Modernism and Sexual Difference.” American Quarterly vol. 39, No.1 (Spring 1987): 98-121. DOI: 10.2307/2712632
Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge, 1990.
Caselli, Daniela. Improper Modernism: Djuna Barnes’s Bewildering Corpus. Burlington: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2009.
Clark, Suzanne. Sentimental Modernism: Women Writers and the Revolution of the Word. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1991.
DeKoven, Marianne. “Modernism and Gender.” Cambridge Companion to Modernism: Second Edition. Michael Levenson, ed. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2011. 212-231.
Didi-Huberman, Georges. Invention of Hysteria: Charcot and the Photographic Iconography of the Salpêtrière. Boston: MIT Press, 2004.
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Schoenbach, Lisi. “Introduction: Pragmatic Modernism.” Pragmatic Modernism. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2012. 1-16.
Elliott, Bridget, and Jo-Ann Wallace. Women Writers and Artists: Modernist (Im)Positionings. London: Routledge, 1994.
Jameson, Frederic. The Modernist Papers. London: Verso, 2007.
Knopp, Sherron E. “‘If I Saw You Would You Kiss Me?’: Sapphism and the Subversiveness of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando.” Modern Language Association vol. 103, No. 1 (1988): 24-34. DOI: 10.2307/462459
Lanser, Susan Sniader. “Speaking in Tongues: ‘Ladies Almanack’ and the Language of Celebration.” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies. vol. 4, No. 3 (1979): 39-46. DOI: 10.2307/3346147
Levenson, Michael, ed. Cambridge Companion to Modernism: Second Edition. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2011.
Majumdar, Robin and Allen McLaurin, eds. Virginia Woolf: The Critical Heritage. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd, 1975.
Marcus, Jane. “Mousemeat: Contemporary Reviews of Nightwood.” Silence and Power: A Reevaluation of Djuna Barnes. Mary Lynn Broe, ed. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1991. 195-204.
McDonald, Gail. Learning to Be Modern: Pound, Eliot, and the American University. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1993.
Nair, Sashi. Secrecy and Sapphic Modernism: Reading Romans à Clef Between the Wars. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2012.
Nicholls, Peter. Modernisms. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.
Pease, Allison. “Modernism and Mass Culture.” Cambridge Companion to Modernism: Second Edition. Ed. Michael Levenson. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2011. 197-211.
Suleiman, Susan Rubin. “A Double Margin: Reflections on Women Writers and the Avant-Garde in France.” Yale French Studies, No. 75 (1988): 148-172. DOI: 10.2307/2930312
West, Paul. Afterword. “The Havoc of the Nicety.” Ryder. By Djuna Barnes. 1928. 2nd edition. Normal: Dalkey Archive Press, 1990. 243-250.
Woolf, Virginia. Orlando: A Biography. 1928. Orlando: Harcourt Inc., 1973.
Woolf, Virginia. A Change of Perspective: The Letters of Virginia Woolf: Volume III: 1923-1928. Nigel Nicolson, ed. London: The Hogarth Press, 1977.
Woolf, Virginia. The Diary of Virginia Woolf: Volume III: 1925-1930. Anne Olivier Bell, ed. London: The Hogarth Press, 1980
NOTES
1. Outside of North America and Western Europe, there were geographical variations in what constituted experimental work. Recent research into global modernisms, Asian and African modernisms for example, challenges the Anglophone conception of modernism as the default. 2. Within the field of modernist studies, alternative modernisms are now widely accepted. Michael Levenson writes in the Cambridge Companion to Modernism: “It is so tempting to make the many Modernisms into one thing, and then to place that one thing into a single chapter within a
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tidy narrative” (Levenson 2011: 4). Yet outside of academic circles, these popular perceptions of modernism persist. 3. Orlando is intimately biographical. Woolf wrote to Sackville-West: “I’ve lived in you all these months-coming out, what are you really like? Do you exist? Have I made you up?” and “I'm so engulfed in Orlando I can think of nothing else… I make it up in bed at night, as I walk the streets, everywhere… I have never more wanted to see you than I do now” (Woolf 1977: 264, 430). 4. Here I am referring to the tradition of treating female sexuality as a disorder, e.g. the history of hysteria, as discussed in Didi-Huberman (2004).
ABSTRACTS
The following paper posits that High Modernism regards experimental literature purely in terms of form, not content; and how this regard is rooted in the gendering of literature i.e. masculine signaling “experimental” and feminine signaling “traditional.” As a result, the modernist canon is rooted in the exclusion of the other, notably texts that disrupt conservative views on gender and sexuality. I show how, contrary to popular belief, Djuna Barnes’s Ladies Almanack and Virginia Woolf’s Orlando are two experimental modernist texts, both in terms of their “archaic” language and in terms of their sexual politics. The fact that both texts are indeed experimental forces Modernism to reexamine its exclusionary practices and how it defines experimentalism.
Cet article cherche à montrer que le « high modernism » a toujours perçu la littérature expérimentale seulement d’un point de vue formel, sans tenir compte du contenu ; mais cette approche est intrinsèquement sexiste, opposant le masculin « expérimental » au féminin « traditionnel ». Par ailleurs, l’œuvre moderniste est enracinée dans l’exclusion de l’autre, notamment les textes qui défient les perspectives conservatrices sur le genre et la sexualité. Cette contribution montre qu’au contraire Ladies Almanack de Djuna Barnes et Orlando de Virginia Woolf sont des textes expérimentaux par leur langage, soi-disant « archaïque », mais aussi par leur traitement de la sexualité. Cela oblige le Modernisme à réexaminer ses pratiques d’exclusion et, partant, sa définition de l’expérimentalisme.
INDEX
Mots-clés: Barnes Djuna, Woolf Virginia, littérature, modernisme, genre, sexualité, saphisme Keywords: Barnes Djuna, Woolf Virginia, literature, Modernism, gender, sexuality, Sapphism
AUTHOR
ELAINE HSIEH CHOU Elaine Hsieh Chou studied English literature at the University of California Irvine, the University of Lorraine and La Sorbonne Nouvelle Paris 3. She is currently completing an MFA degree in fiction at New York University. Contact: chou.elaine.h[at]gmail.com
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Graphic Interlude Experimental Art
Paul Edwards
1 What Is The Novel About?
2 It is the story of Echo and Narcissus: Naomi and Olympe de Phocas.
3 It is Jean Lorrain’s novel Monsieur de Phocas (1901) brought up to date. The context is not the Decadent Paris of the 1890s, but the “Goth” culture of today. The Goth revival of the 1990s is a more morbid affair than the Batcave music scene of the late seventies. Today, music is packaged with images of tortured bodies, Kafkaesque metamorphoses and biomechanics, much of it drawing from the anatomy of insects and other segmented creatures. With the growth of the web, this culture has propagated itself by (digital) photography, mainly by adolescents and young adults in search of images of their desires and fears. Images of the body become Other, subject to dreams of transmutations, through lust and violence. Images of humanoid insects.
4 It is a novel about love and photography. Both of them dark.
5 It was inspired by Alfred Jarry’s hypnotist novel Absolute Love (1899).
6 It is a novel about love and hypnosis.
7 What would you do if your doctor told you that you had been living for several years under hypnosis, and that the time had come to “wake” you, thus killing your memory, your character traits, your loves, your very self? Would you accept to “die”?
8 Or would you fight to the death? Would you fight your un-hypnotised self?
9 And on whose side would your lover be?
10 Meanwhile, Parisians have taken to living on the roofs, forging an alternative community, an anti-city.
11 The novel Mademoiselle de Phocas originally appeared in French in L’Ouphopo numbers 20 to 23 (2005-2007).
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Photographic Tarot Illustrations
12 L’Ouphopo, the review published by the Ouvroir de Photographie Potentielle (Workshop for Potential Photography), has long committed itself to evolving new methods of literary illustration. Mlle de Phocas having become available to us under very favourable circumstances, it was with Naomi’s novel that we sought to put into practice the idea of Tarot card illustrations. The idea of playing with the reader’s fears and superstitions was encouraged also by the red sleeve on the typescript which read “Gothic love story” (L’amour goth), a promise of all that is dark in the affairs of love and longing. The first ten Tarot cards were distributed in issue 16, and the instructions for use are reproduced in the Boxed Edition in English translation for the first time.
13 Olympe is a photographer. The novel describes her photo shoots and gothic accessories, her creations, forays and fantasies, both sexual and morbid. It is a highly visual novel. The temptation to recreate her photographs is constant as one turns the pages, though a million-dollar film would perhaps be a more satisfying solution. Restricting oneself to the still image has its advantages though. The illustrator has to be an actor, has to take on the rôle of Olympe or Moth, and has to shed his eyes for theirs. The resultant photographs are the products of an imaginary photographer.
14 A Tarot pack comprises 78 cards: 22 Major Arcana and 56 Minor Arcana. Associations are attached to each card, but their meaning changes in the presence of the six Modifying Arcana (V The Pope, X The Wheel of Fortune, XV The Devil, XX Judgement, XXI The World, XXII The Fool). The Ouphopo Tarot is based on the Marseilles Tarot, but the figures and interpretations have been brought into line with the world of the novel. The cards are to be drawn the first time you read the novel, and the first time only, at the end of each chapter, in order to predict what will happen next. Jot down what the cards say each time. The predictions unveil themselves upon reading the novel a second time, when you are “an older and a wiser man”. The cards never lie, because we have fixed them with malice, and now they are “loaded”.
Paul Edwards, Sept de Souris-Chauve
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Paul Edwards, Deux de Dislocation
Paul Edwards, Empress III
Paul Edwards, Hierophant V
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Paul Edwards, Emperor IV
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Paul Edwards, The Knight of Clubs
Paul Edwards, The Knight of Swords
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Paul Edwards, Olympe de Phocas, Autoportrait
ABSTRACTS
This graphic interlude features a selection of pictures included in Mademoiselle de Phocas, Gothic- Industrial Photographer, a novel by Naomi translated into English by Paul Edwards, photographs by the translator.
Cet interlude iconographique comporte une sélection d’images de Mademoiselle de Phocas, Photographe Gothique-Industrielle, un roman de Naomi traduit en anglais par Paul Edwards, avec des photographies du traducteur.
INDEX
Mots-clés: expérimental, photographie, Naomi Keywords: experimental, photography, Naomi
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AUTHOR
PAUL EDWARDS Paul Edwards is associate professor in English at the University of Paris Diderot, and CNRS researcher at the Maison Française d’Oxford (2017-2018). He is a translator with Atlas Press, founder member of the Ouphopo (Ouvroir de Photographie Potentielle, or Workshop for Potential Photography), whose review L’Ouphopo he has edited since 1995, and was the editor of the Alfred Jarry Society Review L’Étoile-Absinthe from 1996 to 2005. He was, briefly, a photojournalist and a puppeteer.
SELECTED PUBLICATIONS IN FRENCH • Perle noire. Le photobook littéraire, Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2016. • Soleil noir. Photographie et littérature, Presses Universitaires de Rennes, Rennes, 2008. • Je Hais les photographes: textes clés d’une polémique de l’image, Anabet, Paris, 2006.
SELECTED PUBLICATIONS IN ENGLISH • Rock Photography. Cover Art from The Beatles to Post-Punk, Ouphopo, Paris, 2011 [Editor]. • Marcel Duchamp, Étant donnés. Manual of Instructions, Philadelphia Museum of Art / Yale University Press, Philadelphia, 2009 [Translator]. • Lydie Fischer Sarazin-Levassor, A Marriage in Check. The Heart of the Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelor, even, Les Presses du Réel, Dijon, 2007. [Translator. Autobiography by Duchamp’s first wife.]. • Collected Works of Alfred Jarry, 2 Vols, Atlas Press, London, 2001, 2007. [Co-editor, translator.]
EXHIBITIONS (SOLO) 1992: “Thatcherism” (Sorbonne; W.H.Smith; Nouveau Quartier Latin). 2003: “Messalina”, (À Plus d’un Titre, Lyons; University of Rheims (2001)). 2008: “Mademoiselle de Phocas”, Bookartbookshop, Hoxton, London. 2012: “In the Woods with Mademoiselle de Phocas” (Maison du Canal, Paris). 2012: “Trees and Tangled Banks” (University of Rennes 2; NYU Paris; Grestain Abbey). 2018: "“Insect Tarot and the Ouphopo” (Maison Française, Oxford).
EXHIBITIONS (GROUP) 1995: “Jean-Pierre Brisset” (La Ferté Macé). 1997: “Ouphopo et ses amis” (Théâtre 13, Paris). 1999: “Ou-X-Po” (Centre Pompidou, Paris). 1999: “OuPhoPo” (Villa Douce, Rheims). 2000: “Le Collège à la Collégiale” (Chartres). 2000: “Ubu in England” (Mayor Gallery, Cork Street, London). 2001: “Bibliomania” (travelling exhibition). 2005: “Ou-X-Po 2” (Centre d’animation Vercingétorix, Paris). 2007: “Paris-Photo Off: Révélation” (MAS, Paris). 2010: ““Pinhole Event Paris/Still in Motion/London Photography Festival” (Cartonnerie). 2010: “Summer Exhibition” (Flat Art Gallery). 2011: “The Illusion of Art” (Courtyard Theatre Hoxton, London). 2012: “What Is To Be Done?” (Bookartbookshop, London). 2013: “Photobooks” (Bibliothèque Grands Moulin/ Paris Diderot University). 2014: “Ennéagone” (Maison du Canal).
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2014: “Oulipo” (Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal). 2018: “Patataces” (Galerie Satellite, Paris).
PHOTOJOURNALISM 1990-92: Illustration for Cosmos Picture Agency: Paris; The Sologne (rearing animals). 1990-92: French Doctors in the Bronx; Algeria between elections; Hospital waste; Body-piercing; Fifties culture. 1990-92: Internships with The Guardian and Index on Censorship. 1990-92: Stills photographer for La Momie, directed by Laury Granier (Andreï Tarkovski Prize 1996), with Philippe Léotard, Carolyn Carlson and Jean Rouch.
PUPPET SHOWS (New Model Theatre) 1994-00: Jarry’s Ubu Roi, Ramsgate Festival (May 1994, May 1995); French Institute, London (10 December 1996); Theatre Royal, Portsmouth (October 2000). 1997-00: Jarry’s Caesar-Antichrist, Eastbourne Festival (25 October 1997); Preetz Festival, Germany (September 1998); Portsmouth University (October 2000). 1995-98: Rodenbach’s Bruges-la-Morte, École Normale Supérieure, rue d’Ulm (March 1995); Ramsgate Festival (May 1995); Théâtre 13/Centre Daviel, Paris (October 1997); Eastbourne Festival (October 1997); Preetz Festival, Germany (September 1998). PUPPET SHOWS (String) 2003: Franc-Nohain’s Vive la France !, Fondation Boris Vian, Paris (March 2003). Contact: paul.edwards[at]paris-univ-diderot.fr, www.phlit.org, www.ouphopo.org, www.photointhebook.org
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In the Turbine of Experimentation: Tate Modern and the New (?) Rationale of Collective Performance
Catherine Bernard
1 Like many artistic categories, the “experimental” has undergone many mutations. It occupies an in-between theoretical space in which sciences, philosophy — specifically empiricism — as well as the arts — in their modernist and avant-garde instantiations — cohabit. Artistic experimentation has consequently remained an evasive phenomenon that resists definition. Vincent Broqua chooses to define artistic experimentation as a form of conceptual “constellation” (“étoilement” in French): Rather than seeing it as if under erasure, and drawing from the way Barthes explores Sarrasine through its figures, I would like to envisage the experimental as a constellation. Since, as Barthes himself suggests, it is not compact as an argument might be, the constellation leaves the notion open, while allowing for synthesis and analysis.1 (Broqua 2013: 27, my translation)
2 As modern art morphed into contemporary art, the notion has become more evasive than ever. The “end of art,” as defined by Arthur Danto, is supposed to have brought the very narrative of artistic experimentation to a close (Danto 1997). Artistic pluralism has replaced the modern dialectics holding mainstream art and experimental art in fruitful tension (Danto 1992: 217-231). If art is no longer driven by a quest for “truth,” whether it be in the form of truth to the object, of medium specificity or of truth to emotion, then the dialectics opposing mainstream and experimentation loses some of its centrality. As I hope to show in the argument that follows, artistic pluralism has indeed unhinged the definition of experimentation inherited from modernism and from the avant-garde and has consequently also made it increasingly difficult to circumscribe what is meant by artistic experimentation.
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Experimenting (with) modernity
3 For that very reason, it might be useful to place the recent avatars of experimentation in a broader and longer history. If we retain one of the accepted definitions of artistic experimentation, as rehearsed by Terry Smith in Volume 08 of Studies in Material Thinking, published in 2012, the notion should not be tethered to the 20th century and to modern art, nor even to a longer history of art going back to Romantic art and its urge to push back the limits of representation. Experimentation in art in fact looks back to modernity and its foregrounding of epistemology and enlightnement as exemplified, for instance, by Joseph Wright of Derby’s oil, An Experiment on a Bird in an Air Pump, of 1768 (Figure 1): “Wright’s painting not only depicts an experiment taking place, it also, and more importantly, pictures the quintessentially modern idea of experimentality as such.” (Smith 2012: 1). Smith concurrently emphasizes the allegorical nature of Wright’s vision and the way the chiaroscuro — the work’s formal language — draws on the long tradition of “religious paintings of miraculous revelation — including, to be specific, the moment of holy judgment over the fate of the living. He has, of course, substituted a scientific demonstration, making his painting an awe-struck celebration of Enlightenment rationalism.” (2)
Figure 1: Joseph Wright of Derby, An Experiment on a Bird in an Air Pump, 1768
Oil on canvas, 183 x 244 cm, The National Gallery, London. Source: http://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/joseph-wright-of-derby-an-experiment-on-a-bird- in-the-air-pump
4 In spite of its rather classical manner, Wright of Derby’s work is seminal in more ways than one, when it comes to examining the logic of artistic experimentation. In it, structural experimentation ties in with scientific experience. The subject of the work indeed foregrounds the triumph of visual and scientific enlightenment, as inscribed in
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modernity’s epistemological agenda; but the painting’s allegorical nature also captures something of the essence of modern artistic experimentation in its very link with experimental knowledge. At stake is not only modern art’s “relation to experimentality in the natural sciences,” (Smith 2012: 4) but precisely a ramified constellation in which enlightement and artistic reason are inscribed in content and form, as well as pictorial self-reflexiveness. In what is, after all, but a modern, enlightened vanitas, Wright of Derby anticipates on what was to be the rationale of modern art: i.e. art’s capacity to reflect on its own visual economy, on its capacity to make us see, to enlighten us, while also inviting us to a a visual experience that has intrinsically to do with life and death, light and darkness, with seeing and looking away, with contemplation and fear.
5 There is, in Wright of Derby’s painting, no rationality without emotion; and the emotion here painted is disturbingly akin to Kant’s sublime. Deeply rooted in English empiricism, the work can only be read now as a visionary anticipation on the powerful and heuristic conjunction of experimentation with experience as it was to be explored by Romanticism and by modern art, whether one thinks of the early modernist experimentations of Claude Monet with light and atmospheric conditions, of the later experimentations of Kandinsky and his almost oxymoronic conjuring of spiritual reason, and even of Duchamp’s capacity to toy with our knowledge of art in order to make us reflect on the very status of our aesthetic emotions. Deeply embedded also in the visual economy of early capitalism, the work refuses to look away from the scientific realities of its time which entailed the subjugation of nature. It seems even to flatter itself on its capacity to make us see, to bridge the gap between science, philosophy and art. Here art is anything but dis-interested. The characters in the painting are all fully engaged in the vision of the scientist’s experiment on the bird and their investment is also our engagement with the action depicted and with the painter’s spectacular light effects and their allegorical import. Wright of Derby’s self- reflexive vision of art is thus at odds with the Kantian notion of disinterestedness propounded in his 1790 Critique of Judgment. The validity of the work lies in the here and now of visual experience which itself reflects the visual engagement in scientific experimentation and knowledge.
6 The issue of disinterestedness would return later in the guise of modern art’s autonomy and that return has proved to be crucial both to the narrative of modern art and to more recent developments in artistic experimentation. As Peter Bürger reminds us in his ground-breaking essay, Theory of the Avant-garde, modern art’s experimentations are premised upon its autonomy from the realm of the social: “the autonomy of art […] permits de description of art’s detachment from the context of practical life,” (1984: 46) and the task of the avant-garde was, on the contrary, to bridge the gap between art and the polis, between form and context. When looking at Joseph Wright of Derby’s work, one is reminded also that such an urge already drove earlier aesthetic experimentations. Indirectly anticipating on avant-garde’s later questioning of art’s autonomy, the work maps a visual specular space where scientific, philosophical and artistic speculation merge, where enlightenment becomes visually embodied, where sensation becomes intelligent (Bürger 1984: 1-11).
7 That process by which art bridges the gap between aesthetic experience and its material context cuts across modernity, and by material we are referring to the technical, economic, historical conditions of possibility of the work. That same process conditions both Turner’s experimentation with pigments and light, and Cézanne’s
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painting from nature. It is eventually reappropriated by avant-garde’s programmatic undoing of artistic autonomy. With the 1920s’ avant-gardes, experimentation becomes synonymous with the new, with self-reflexiveness and with art’s reasserted relevance to the present: Like the word “contemporary,” the term “experimental” hovered in art discourse in many parts of the world throughout twentieth century as a synonym for avant- garde. It was favored especially when one of the arts — poetry, theatre, cinema, dance, architecture, art — “experimented” with the necessity of one of its core conventions, rendered it provisional or risked dispensing with it altogether in the interests of a higher goal (such as greater expressive power, more direct engagement with an audience, etc.). (Bürger 1984: 2)
8 My purpose here is to explore anew that zone or moment of intersection between aesthetic experimentation and material experience as offered in performance art. More specifically, in the context of Tate Modern, contemporary art’s engagement with experimentation and experience will be read within the context of corporate art, one of the most blatant instances of art’s constrained material conditions of visibility and of its direct involvement with the present.
Experimenting / performing
9 As several of the contributions gathered in this volume amply show, one of the forms taken by contemporary artistic experimentation has been performance. Performance best embodies that aesthetic “erosion” already identified by Theodor Adorno in “Art and the Arts” in 1966, an “erosion” thanks to which the arts become fluid, thus experimenting with their own language and putting their own generic rules and laws to the test: “The erosion of the arts is hostile to an ideal of harmony that presupposes, as the guarantee of meaning, what we might call ordered circumstances within the kinds of art. […] It is as if the artistic genres, by denying their own firm boundaries, were gnawing away at the concept of art itself.”2 (Adorno 2003: 384-5).
10 The capacity to explore the limits of one’s own artistic practice has become crucial to artistic experimentation. Performance literally embodies that urge to stray and fray one’s own artistic fabric, once again in order to make aesthetic experience a material and concrete one. Although the “dematerialization” of the work of art, as defined by Lucy Lippard in her 1973 essay on conceptual art, is still operative here, such dematerialisation goes with a reembodied corporeality that re-anchors the artistic experience with its material context.
11 Adorno’s ambiguous geographical metaphor of art’s “Verfransung” is apt in more than one sense. Straying away from one’s ascribed rules and remit in order to experiment, brings art into renewed encounter with experience itself and what it means to be of the here and now, fully immersed in the present. Yet, for all its aptness, Adorno’s grasp of his own spatial metaphor overlooks what it also points to, i.e. the way such artistic straying destabilises the very notion of artistic autonomy and opens the work of art to the world.
12 For many critics, experimental practices have appropriated the avant-garde’s agenda and aim at reinventing art’s embodied confrontation with its material conditions and with ideology at large. For Hal Foster, contemporary artists have turned ethnographers all the better to observe the shifting, critical “relation between artistic authority and
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cultural politics” (Foster 1999: 71). For Nicolas Bourriaud, such a mutation has entailed the redefinition of artistic production as a form of “postproduction” confronting the ideology of “ownership and moving toward a culture of the use of forms, a culture of constant activity of signs based on a collective ideal: sharing.” (2002: 4). For Marc James Léger, in Brave New Avant-Garde, this entails a form of phasing out of art into an intermediary zone of sensory and intellectual activation that denies any categorical definition and which seems to adapt Adorno’s metaphor of “straying” to the expanded field of a culture without hierarchies or limits (see also Bunzl 2014).
13 Performance harnesses the power of sensation and experience to artistic criticality. Even more specifically, and as many critics have noticed,3 performance, in its collective form, also entails an unhinging of the very concept of creativeness as grounded in individual inspiration and production. With collective performance, formal experimentation comes to confuse the frontiers of the individual and the collective, of production and reception. And such confusion is relevant to our present in more than one way. As Claire Bishop has noted in her essay Artificial Hells, collective or “delegated performance” seems to embrace a form of democratic program by opening itself up to the audience. Such confusion in turn takes on a critical political relevance in the sense that artistic “postproduction” can also be understood as reflecting our global system of production, with its logic of outsourcing. Delegated performance may thus also be seen to play in the hand of a system whose efficiency and economic performances heavily rely on the delegation of production and on the foregrounding of innovation and creativeness: Through the discourse of creativity, the elitist activity of art is democratised, although today this leads to business rather than to Beuys. The dehierarchising rhetoric of artists whose projects seek to facilitate creativity ends up sounding identical to government cultural policy geared towards the twin mantras of social inclusion and creative cities. (Bishop 2012)
14 In many ways, collaborative performance dramatises issues and tensions that also inform other areas of collective life. As Tim Stott also remarks at length, in relation to Robert Morris’ performance work, it conjures and makes tangible issues as abstract and complex as that of governance and regulation, specifically in the way collective performance must find a subtle balance between freedom and prescription (Bishop 2012).
15 As we will have the occasion to comment later, the ambiguity generated by collaborative performance has become part of the critical performativity of collaborative art, or, to return to Bishop’s analysis: “Artistic practice has an element of critical negation and an ability to sustain contradiction that cannot be reconciled with the quantifiable imperative of positivist economies.” (Bishop 2012: chap. 1). Collaborative performance initiates a form of creative delegation always in excess of the prescribed and predictable forms of aesthetic experience, and that even comes to allegorise part of the present cultural economy which it contributes to.
Experimenting with corporate art
16 But, one may wonder, what becomes of such collective practices when the critical potential of performance is itself, from the start, inscribed in the pragmatic rationale of the museum? What avails of such criticality when it is apparently harnessed to the
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complex immersive system of a museum of modern art and its incumbent economy of pleasure, reflexion and contemplation? What kind of leverage effect can collective performance still have on the overall economy of artistic experience and on the modern imperative of experience as experimentation when performance is seemingly harnessed to the complex agenda of culturtainment as exemplified in the cost-effective model of the new museums of modern art?
17 The Unilever series offers revealing insights into the complex economy of performance and experimentation as staged by one of the flagships of modern art and of the culture industry, i.e. Tate Modern. The series was launched in 2000 by Tate Modern and coincided with the museum’s opening to the public. Characteristic of both the artistic turn of corporate culture and of the corporate turn of museum culture, this series crystallises the contradictions of contemporary performance as one of experimentation’s privileged media; and one should remember that Tate Modern has placed performance at the centre of its expansion project, with the opening of Tate Tanks in 2012 which are specifically devoted to performance and “Art in action”.4 While the series was avowedly inscribed in our commodified culture industry, it also raised disturbing questions about artistic authority and the political and symbolical economy of collective artistic experience. With the Unilever series, the museum seemed to function as an emotion plant or factory — une fabrique d’émotions — in which criticality returned to the very heart of the cultural machinery.
18 Choosing the Unilever series to reflect on the performative critical impact of performance may seem an odd choice, as most of the works in the series would seem to qualify as installations rather than performances. Yet most of the installations in the series also programmatically entailed the public’s participation, whether it be minimal and contemplative or more immersive and active. Situated in the Turbine Hall of Tate Modern, most of the works were difficult to ignore and many had in fact to be circumnavigated before the visitors could reach either the entrance desks or the escalators leading to the exhibition spaces.
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Figure 2: Olafur Eliasson, The Weather Project, 2003
Installation view, Turbine Hall at Tate Modern. Photo: Tate Photography © Olafur Eliasson. Source: https://www.royalacademy.org.uk/art-artists/ name/olafur-eliasson-hon-ra
19 The works in the Unilever series only existed as experience, then as the memory of that experience, as Lucy Lippard already explained about conceptual art in Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object, when she stresses the short-cut produced by conceptual art from idea to practice: “The emphasis on process also led to art-as-life, life-as-art pieces” (Lippard 1973: xvi). Some of the works tapped into the vocabulary of the sublime more characteristic of American land art, with its insistence on the spiritual and the awe-inspiring; this was the case with Olafur Eliasson’s 2003 Weather Project which experimented with mono frequency lighting to reconstruct an indoor sun and produce an immersive visual and atmospheric experience (Figure 2).5 More broadly, the Unilever works all involved a physical experience, itself a mixture of concept and experience, of reflexiveness and exhilaration not so distant from the experience inherent to the aesthetics of the modernist shock or of the modernist epiphany. In keeping with Tate Director Nicolas Serrota’s agenda, as detailed in his 1996 Walter Neurath memorial lectures, they re-engineered the museum as a machine triggering emotion rather than interpretation.6
20 For many observers, the series colluded too overtly with what they denounced as the immersive and consumerist turn of museum culture.7 Yet the series’ take on contemporary art’s vocabulary and dialogue with its context was more subtle and paradoxical than the standard lament about the commodification of museum going would have it. The Unilever series requires us to think counter-intuitively. It requires we rethink the way the conceptual heritage works its ways through collective performance and installation art and questions the entrenched binaries opposing idea
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and sensation. As we will see, many of the works did reclaim the heritage of conceptual art. Yet they did so in order to embody that heritage, to force us to live it through. No doubt the works were sensational in more than one way: they often fully exploited the language of sensationalism, shock, surprise and even distraction, but they did so in order to force idea and emotion into a renewed dialectics.
21 So, rather than expose the supposed Disneyfication of art, rather even than simply try to reclaim the heritage of conceptual art underlying the grammar of sensation and of sensationalism that structured most of those works, we need to confront the possibility that in the Unilever series, the power of sensation is an effect of the conceptual and experimental approach to the phenomenology of art.8 As may be apparent, the monumental nature of the Turbine Hall is here of the essence. In most, if not all, of the works in the Unilever series, the conceptual, allegorical reflexion on art’s vocabulary and on the emotions it produces closely depends on the exceptional, extra-ordinary nature of the Turbine Hall space. In that sense, the intensification of affect here engineered might be said to be also characteristic of what Hal Foster has defined as the “art-architecture complex” which brings together art and architecture in renewed dialogue: Over the last fifty years, many artists opened painting, sculpture, and film to the architectural space around them, and during the same period many architects became involved in visual art. Sometimes a collaboration, sometimes a competition, this encounter is now a primary site of image-making and space-shaping in our cultural economy (Foster 2011: vii).9
Opening up
22 We would like to take two concluding examples of the paradoxical criticality of the works produced as part of the Unilever series: Doris Salcedo’s 2007-2008 Shibboleth and Tino Sehgal’s 2012 These Associations.
23 Columbian sculptor Doris Salcedo’s 2007-2008 commission, Shibboleth, was exemplary of the dialectics of concept and sensation foregrounded earlier. Consisting of a 167-metre- long forking crack opening up in the concrete floor of the Turbine hall, Shibboleth pushed back the limits of installation art — did it still qualify as an installation? —, and produced a form of embodied narrative by which we came to experience the work’s conceptual program (Figure 3).
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Figure 3: Doris Salcedo, Shibboleth I, 2007. Tate Modern
© Doris Salcedo. Source: http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/doris-salcedo-2695
24 Like the Shibboleth of the Old Testament,10 Salcedo’s shibboleth was literally a branch. Taking after the Bible’s allegorical logic, it is a branch from which potential meanings branch out endlessly and is also a powerful discriminant in more ways than one. It literally divided the museum space, and the visitors were compelled to act out the division when they stepped across the fracture. Stepping across the rift made the public suddenly aware of a space they usually walked through without paying much attention to its function and nature. The rift thus functioned as a reflexive trigger making the space and its cultural function suddenly tangible. The natural aspect of the rift — it is reminiscent of the great geological rifts — foregrounded the cultural space of the gallery in an empirical way that literally embodied and made us reflect upon the conceptual/cultural/physical/political nature of the experience entailed in a visit to the temple of culture, i.e. the museum. It dissected the space of the gallery, made it tangible at last, functioning like a hyperbolical post-object installation. At the same time it moved beyond this primary acception of the term to act against the concept and addressed our bodies in space, the space of the gallery, made suddenly unfamiliar again.
25 The reference to the Shibboleth may also be to Derrida’s own take on the Biblical Shibboleth.11 With Derrida, we could argue that Salcedo’s shibboleth was a trial, a trial which fully addressed and engaged the language of the tribe in its exclusive and inclusive power. The rift speaks out in the language of the tribe, of those who are fully museum-literate and can understand, discriminate the parable behind the empirical experience. Yet, its powerfully physical address also sublated the exclusion. Its conceptual and formal references may have remained concealed from many a visitor, yet it addressed us all, and thus an inchoate, immediate form of address literally took
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place, just as the poem takes place in us in its address: “The poem speaks, even should none of its references be intelligible, none other than the Other, the one to whom it addresses itself” (Derrida 1994: 35).
26 Salcedo’s Shibboleth activated a form of reflexive experience, which also touches upon global issues of spatial demarcation and frontiers with their incumbent experience of loss and fracturing.12 A recent exhibition of Salcedo’s work at Harvard Art Museums logically elaborated on the theme of mourning to understand works that both metaphorise and materialise contemporary experiences of loss. In her keynote lecture to the symposium organised with the exhibition, Judith Butler chose to take Salcedo’s work as precisely relating to the necessity to “activat[e] the performative dimension of public grieving”13 Thus experimentation with the language of installation art and performance — in their most ramified and complex economy — may be said to produce an allegorical, and yet embodied critical experience with ramifications extending far beyond the remit of Shibboleth while being already implicit in it.
27 The last commission in the Unilever series offered just as complex an instance of the dialectics of concept and sensation that rules contemporary installation and performance art. Sehgal’s These Associations offered a disturbing recapitulation of the questions raised by many of the works commissioned for the series: how can art reclaim the museum space for aesthetic experience? How can that process also reclaim the language of experimentation and avant-garde within the remit of the globalised museum economy? Just as importantly for the present volume and for my discussion of the criticality of aesthetic experience, what kind of critical leverage may experimentations with aesthetic participation and reception still achieve in our global age of short-lived extasies?
28 If Tino Sehgal’s These Associations was both highly conceptual and highly embodied, it was all the better to harness the language of participatory art to a criticism of authority and collectiveness. Sehgal’s participatory performance evinced all the characteristics of participatory art. It relied both on “delegated performance,” on “multiple authorship” to resort to Boris Groys’ term (2007: chap. 7),14 as well as on the redefinition of production as post-production in Nicolas Bourriaud’s terms already mentioned. For These Associations Sehgal brought together a group of participants alternating scripted collective movements and more intimate dialogues with visitors chosen at random and during which the performers revealed private memories. The performance was both neatly premeditated and unpredictable. The movements were choreographed and timed, yet both the choreographed moments and the dialogues needed to adapt to the shifting presence of the visitors.
29 Because of its collective nature, These Associations lends itself to renewed allegorical readings of the process of delegated labour. Sehgal’s agenda offers an embodied reflexion on “the ethics and aesthetics of contemporary labour,” to resort to Bishop’s analysis of delegated performance. Especially in so far as it may seem to stage the process of outsourcing, delegated performance may seem to mimic the “managerial changes in the economy at large” (Bishop 2012). But such mimicry is no endorsement. Engaging with the spectacular machine of the museum made for a collective experimentation which brought into question the economics of emotion.15 Sehgal’s experimentation with the language of performance addressed the sense of collectiveness in complex, once again, ramified ways. The questions raised by These Associations were many: who, for instance, retained the authorship of such a collective
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achievement? A question which, in turn, reflected back both on the globalisation and mutation of the productive economy and the necessity to think the effects of such changes through. How did such an experimentation tie in, for instance, not so much with the logic of outsourcing but with other collaborative experimentations in our contemporary world? How did it reflect, for instance, on the new collaborative economy of the creative commons explored by Jeremy Rifkin in Zero Marginal Cost Society (2014)?
30 These Associations allegorised, scripted, staged these questions in order to address our lived-in present through the language of experimentation. Performance allowed these questions to be embodied and lived through, at the heart of the museum engine, in the turbine of our global culture industry, where every experience seems doomed to be commodified and turned into marketable goods necessary to produce more aesthetic experience.16
31 In its programmatic collusion with the global machinery of marketed culture, the Unilever series occupied an aporetic zone, where the paradoxes of art were turned into lived experience. Paradoxically following in the distant footsteps of Wright of Derby’s enlightened yet incarnate reflexion on the power of vision and representation, following also in the footsteps of the great avant-garde, the Unilever series artists addressed us from the turbine of art, to move beyond the fracture of art and society and address the unfathomable paradoxes of what may be defined as the new artistic collaborative commons.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
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Adorno, Theodor. L’art et les arts. Jean Lauxerois and Peter Szendy, trans. Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 2002.
Benjamin, Walter. Paris Capitale du XIXe siècle. Rolf Tiedemann, ed. Paris: Les Éditions du Cerf, 1989.
Benjamin, Walter. “Theses on the Philosophy of History.” Illuminations. Hannah Arendt, ed. London: Pimlico, 1999. 253–264.
Benjamin, Walter. Baudelaire. Giorgio Agamben, Barbare Chitussi and Clemens-Carl Härle, eds. Paris: La fabrique, 2013.
Bishop, Claire. Artificial Hells. Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship. London: Verso, 2012.
Bourriaud, Nicolas. “Preface to the Second Edition,” Postproduction. Culture as Screenplay: How Art Reprograms the World. New York: Lukas & Sternberg, 2002. 4. http://faculty.georgetown.edu/ irvinem/theory/Bourriaud-Postproduction2.pdf
Broqua, Vincent. À partir de rien. Esthétique, poétique, politique de l’infime. Paris: Michel Houdiard, 2013a.
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Davidts, Wouter. “The Vast and the Void. On Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall and ‘The Unilever Series’,” Footprint. Delft Architecture Theory Journal, 1 (Autumn 2007): 77-92. DOI: 10.7480/footprint. 1.1.669
Derrida, Jacques. Schibboleth pour Paul Celan. Paris: Galilée, 2003.
Derrida, Jacques. “Shibboleth [sic] For Paul Celan,” in Aris Fioretos, ed. Word Traces: Readings of Paul Celan. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins UP, 1994. 3-74.
Foster, Hal. “The Artist as Ethnographer,” The Return of the Real. Cambridge [Mass.]: MIT Press, 1999. 171.
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Groys, Boris. Art Power. Cambridge [Mass.]: the MIT Press, 2008.
Kelly, Michael, A Hunger for Aesthetics. Enacting the Demands of Art. New York: Columbia UP, 2012.
Kester, Grant H. The One and the Many: Contemporary Collaborative Art in a Global Context. Durham [GA]: Duke UP, 2011.
Kwon, Miwon. One Place After Another: Site-specificity and Locational Identity. Cambridge [Mass.]: MIT Press, 2002.
Léger, Marc James. Brave New Avant Garde. Essays on Contemporary Art and Politics. Aldershot: Zero Books, 2014.
Lippard, Lucy. Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972. New York: Praeger, 1973.
Rifkin, Jeremy. The Zero Marginal Cost Society. London: Palgrave, 2014.
Serrota, Nicolas. Emotion or Interpretation. The Dilemna of Museums of Modern Art. London: Thames & Hudson, 2000.
Stott, Tim. Play and Participation in Contemporary Arts Practices. London: Routledge, 2015.
Smith, Terry. “Experimentality: Theories and Practices,” Studies in Material Thinking, vol. 8, “Experimental Art,” May 2012. https://www.materialthinking.org/papers/89
Thompson N., ed., Living as Form–Socially Engaged Art from 1991-2011. Cambridge [Mass.]: MIT Press, 2012.
Trentini, Bruno. “Peut-on faire une esthétique incarnée du jugement réfléchissant?” Naturaliser l’esthétique ? Questions et enjeux d’un programme philosophique. Jacques Morizot, ed. Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2014. 201-215.
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Wilson, Siona. Art Labor, Sex Politics. Feminist Effects in 1970s British Art and Performance. Minneapolis: U. of Minnesota P., 2015.
NOTES
1. See also Broqua (2013a). I am aware that translating “étoilement” as “constellation” tinges the argument with deliberately Benjaminian overtones, but it seems to me that Benjamin’s constellation hankers after a metaphor that might capture something of the experimental nature of thought processes that are both sensitive and allegorical. In his entry devoted to the notion of “Constellation” of the recently discovered notes towards his essay on Baudelaire, Benjamin mentions the “Constellation of sensitive temperament and allegorical intelligence,” (Benjamin 2013: 628). One should also insist on how crucial to a historical approach to art Benjamin’s constellation proves to be, since in his 18th Thesis on the Philosophy of History as well as in the Book of Passages, he defines the arrested dialectic produced by a constellation as the juncture of past and present (Benjamin 1989: 478-9; 1999: 255). 2. One should point out the ambiguity of Adorno’s original metaphor: the term used “Verfransung ” connotes both a geographical “straying” and a material “fraying” of the boundaries or hems of the arts. The French translation, probably under the unavowed influence of Barthes’ conception of the text as texture, opts for “effrangement” (“fraying”), see Adorno (2002: 43-74). 3. See, for instance, Wilson (2015); Thompson (2012); Kester (2011); in relation to site-specificity: Kwon (2002). 4. This was the title of the inaugural program of Tate’s tanks in 2013. The slogan can still be found in a picture of the Tank Foyer: http://www.tate.org.uk/visit/tate-modern/tanks. 5. Olafur Eliasson, The Weather Project, 2003. Monofrequency lights, projection foil, haze machines, mirror foil, aluminium, and scaffolding, 26.7 m x 22.3 m x 155.4 m. The museum’s website explanatory note interestingly refers back to the Enlightenment and quotes Samuel Johnson: “The subject of the weather has long shaped the content of everyday conversation. The eighteenth-century writer Samuel Johnson famously remarked ‘It is commonly observed, that when two Englishmen meet, their first talk is of the weather; they are in haste to tell each other, what each must already know, that it is hot or cold, bright or cloudy, windy or calm.’ In The Weather Project, the fourth in the annual Unilever Series of commissions for the Turbine Hall, Olafur Eliasson takes this ubiquitous subject as the basis for exploring ideas about experience, mediation and representation.” http://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-modern/exhibition/ unilever-series/unilever-series-olafur-eliasson-weather-project-0 . 6. The lectures were given in the runner up to the Tate launch and published in paperback by Thames & Hudson in 2000, the year of Tate’s opening (Serrota 2000). 7. For a panorama of the various takes on Tate Modern more broadly, see the contributions to the round table “Tate Modern” in October. As expected, art critic Julian Stallabrass was highly critical of Tate Modern’s de-hierarchising agenda: “what the Tate displays is much more the postmodern smorgasbord. It’s Arthur Danto’s idea that we’ve come to the end of the narrative and we can now just play happily ever after within this field of various contents, which are wonderful because they are various, and we can just mix and match as we like.” (Stallabrass 2001: 9). 8. A similar suggestion has been made by Bruno Trentini: “Peut-on faire une esthétique incarnée du jugement réfléchissant?” In this chapter Trentini turns, for his part, to the entanglement of cognition and sensation characteristic of the aesthetic experience. In his defense of an “embodied aesthetics” he analyses the aesthetic relation as pertaining to the cognitive impulse and as the embodiment of that impulse, a dialectics which informs the self-reflexive nature of artistic experience as thinking emotion: “Cet acte réfléchissant, dont l’émotion dépend avant
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tout de l’élan cognitif lui-même dépendant des singularités de l’œuvre, s’accompagne d’un mouvement projectif au sens où l’œuvre est considérée comme cause de l’émotion éprouvée.” (in Morizot 2014: 214). 9. On the impact and economy of size in the Unilever series, see Davidts (2007). 10. The term “Shibboleth” denotes a stream or an ear of corn. In Judges 12.6, the correct pronunciation of the word Shibboleth is a matter of life and death and distinguishes the two sister and yet enemy tribes descending from Ephraïm and Manasseh. 11. See Jacques Derrida’s lecture on Paul Celan, published under the title Schibboleth pour Paul Celan (2003), and itself a homage to Celan’s poem “Shibboleth”, published in the collection Von Schwelle Zu Schwelle (From Threshold to Threshold) in 1955, in which Celan accounts for the radical condition of existing on the threshold. We will not have the time to analyse the importance of Derrida’s “misprint” of Celan Shibboleth as Schibboleth, but it is of course crucial to his reading of the poem’s address. 12. For such a reading of the work, see Kelly 2012: chapter 4, “The Salcedo Effect”. 13. “Doris Salcedo: The Materiality of Mourning,” Harvard Art Museums, November 4, 2016–April 9, 2017: https://www.harvardartmuseums.org/visit/exhibitions/5201/doris-salcedo-the- materiality-of-mourning. For Judith Butler’s keynote, see https://www.youtube.com/watch? v=9o9_ZP2Z7aI. 14. Groys focuses specifically on installation art which he considers to exemplify the redefinition of the traditional tasks of the artist, the curator and the spectator. 15. This does not mean that non-delegated performance may not achieve a similar level of criticality. Marina Abramovic’s 2014 512 hours performed in the Serpentine Gallery is a good case in point. For this performance, she invited members of the audience to come and stand in front of a blank wall while whispering in their ears to think about the present. By entailing a form of productive dissemination of aesthetic emotion, her performance also reflected on issues of authorship, and power and pushed back the boundaries of the private and the collective. 16. See for instance the rhetoric of sensation and entertainment used in the presentation of the Tate Modern extension project: “This new development will transform Tate Modern. An iconic new building will be added at the south of the existing gallery. It will create more spaces for displaying the collection, performance and installation art and learning, all allowing visitors to engage more deeply with art, as well as creating more social spaces for visitors to unwind and relax in the gallery.” http://www.tate.org.uk/about-us/projects/tate-modern-project. Switch House — now the Blavatnik Building, after one of the most influential patrons of Tate, Len Blavatnik — was inaugurated on June 17, 2016.
ABSTRACTS
Artistic experimentation, as well as the concepts elaborated to define it, have undergone considerable changes since the age of the avant-gardes and yet experimentation still retains some of its critical purchase. The present article focuses on recent experimentations in the field of installation and performance art and on the way these works may enlighten us on the kind of critical leverage offered by aesthetic experimentation in its complex and often conflicted relation to our contemporary sensorium. Taking the case of some of the most prominent installations and performances commissioned by Tate Modern as part of the Unilever Series (2000–2012), we intend to understand how the criticality of experimentation as imagined by the
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great avant-gardes has been queered and reinvented by artists who work within the regime of the spectacular while remaining faithful to the incisive spirit of experimentation. Our first intention is to explore the empiricist legacy of experimentation, by returning to the semantic pairing of scientific and artistic experimentation, as evidenced, for example, in Joseph Wright of Derby’s great oil: An Experiment on a Bird in an Air Pump (1768). Placing the likes of Doris Salcedo’s Shibboleth (2008) and Tino Sehgal’s These Associations (2012) in a long historical and critical perspective, we intend to highlight a still relatively under-explored aspect of experimentation: that of corporeality and sensation in their relation to critical knowledge. Taking experimentation to rely on a subtle tension between sensation and intellection or between experience and concept, we try to show how contemporary experimentation reinvents such a tension. Placed at the very heart of the museum machine and of its economy of attraction, the works in the Unilever Series foregrounded the economy of sensation often harnessing the sensational to a complex critical stance. Working both with and against the sensation regime imposed by the culture industry, these works elaborated complex experiential allegories in which the visitor’s experience worked towards differential modes of being. More specifically even, it was, we argue, their collective logic that gave us to grasp our current regime of visibility and experience, at the juncture of the private and the public, of sensation and corporate culture.
L’expérimentation dans l’art, tout comme les concepts élaborés pour la définir, ont connu de très profonds changements depuis l’ère des grandes avant-gardes et pourtant l’expérimentation conserve une incontestable puissance de décentrement critique. Cet article se tourne vers des expérimentations récentes dans le champ de l’installation et de la performance, et s’intéresse à la manière dont elles nous éclairent sur la relation complexe et souvent conflictuelle que l’art entretient avec notre sensorium. Prenant pour exemples certaines des créations qui virent le jour dans le cadre de l’Unilever Series, commissionnée par Tate Modern entre 2000 et 2012, nous souhaitons comprendre comment la visée critique de l’expérimentation telle que définie par les avant-gardes a été repensée par des artistes qui travaillent de l’intérieur du régime spectaculaire de l’art, tout en restant fidèles à la volonté incisive de l’expérimentation. Notre intention est tout d’abord d’explorer l’héritage empiriste de l’expérimentation, en revenant sur l’association qui lie sémantiquement les régimes scientifique et artistique de l’expérimentation, telle qu’elle est donnée à voir, par exemple, dans l’huile de Joseph Wright of Derby, An Experiment on a Bird in an Air Pump (1768). Lisant des œuvres telles que Shibboleth de Doris Salcedo (2008) ou These Associations de Tino Sehgal (2012) dans une perspective historique et théorique longue, nous visons à comprendre un aspect encore peu exploré de l’expérimentation : le lien entre la sensation ou la corporéité et l’élaboration d’un savoir critique. L’expérimentation est ici perçue comme fondée sur une tension subtile entre sensation et intellection, ou encore entre expérience et conceptualisation, et nous souhaitons montrer comment l’expérimentation contemporaine tente de réinventer cette tension. Placées au centre de la machine muséale et de son économie de l’attraction, les œuvres de l’Unilever Series donnaient à voir l’économie de la sensation et mettaient le sensationnel au service d’une vision critique complexe. Travaillant à la fois avec et contre le régime de sensation imaginée par l’industrie culturelle, ces œuvres élaborèrent de complexes allégories dans lesquelles l’expérience du visiteur induisait des régimes d’expérience différentiels. C’est plus spécifiquement encore leur logique collective qui nous permettait de comprendre les régimes de visibilité et d’expérience actuels, tels qu’ils travaillent à la jonction du privé et du public, de la sensation et de la culture capitaliste.
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INDEX
Mots-clés: art expérimental, art contemporain, performance, Tate Modern, Unilever Series, Salcedo Doris, Sehgal Tino Keywords: experimental art, contemporary art, installation art, performance art, Tate Modern, Unilever Series, Salcedo Doris, Sehgal Tino
AUTHOR
CATHERINE BERNARD Catherine Bernard is Professor of English literature and art history at Paris Diderot University, UMR 8225 (Laboratoire de Recherche sur les Cultures Anglophones). Her research hinges on the history and the politics of forms and aesthetics, from Modernism to contemporary aesthetics. She has published extensively on modernist and contemporary visual culture and art (from the Bloomsbury group, to Andy Warhol, David Hockney, but also Gillian Wearing, Rachel Whiteread or Mark Wallinger). Among her most recent publications in that field, one may mention: “Christopher Nolan’s Inception: Spectacular Speculations,” Screen, Martine Beugnet et Jane Sillars (eds.), “The Reflexive Turn: Mediating and Remediating Hollywood,” n°58/2, Spring 2017, https://academic.oup.com/screen/article-abstract/58/2/229/3866484?redirectedFrom=fulltext; “La vielle dame et la preneuse de son : (micro)-utopies d’un art de l’ordinaire,” Polysèmes, Anne- Laure Fortin (ed.), “L’art intempestif — La démesure du temps,” n°17, Spring 2017, http:// journals.openedition.org/polysemes/1794; “Âmes sensibles s’abstenir : violence à / de l’art contemporain. À propos de Gillian Wearing, Damien Hirst, les frères Chapman & co.,” Sillages critiques, Marc Amfreville, Aloysia Rousseau et Armelle Sabatier (eds.), “Écriture de la violence,” n°22, 2017, https://sillagescritiques.revues.org/4846; as well as the following chapters: “Modernity’s Sylvan Subjectivity, from Gainsborough to Gallaccio,” in Julian Wolfreys (ed.), New Critical Thinking. Criticism to Come, Edimbourg: Edinburgh UP, 2017, pp. 36-49; “Rethinking Originality / Making Us See: Contemporary Art’s Strategic Transpositions,” in Sonya Stephens (ed.) Translation and the Arts in Modern France (ouvrage en l’honneur du Professeur Rosemary Lloyd), Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 2017, pp. 237-247. Her research has also focused both on Modernist literature and on contemporary English fiction (Graham Swift, Martin Amis…). She is the author of critical editions and translations into French of Flush (Paris: Gallimard, coll. La Pléiade, 2012) and of a selection of Virginia Woolf’s essays (Essais choisis, Paris: Gallimard, 2015). She has also edited several volumes of Études britanniques contemporaines, among which: “State of Britain”, Études britanniques contemporaines, n°49, 2015, http://ebc.revues.org/2603, as well as “Reassessing Literary Commitment (Anew)”, “Commitment / L’engagement”, Études britanniques contemporaines, n°50, 2016. http://ebc.revues.org/3074. She is currently working towards a monograph on the body politic of contemporary British fiction and visual arts to be published in 2018 with the Presses de l’Université Paris-Sorbonne. Contact: catherine.bernard[at]univ-paris-diderot.fr.
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Contemporary British Art and its Contested Publicness: The Case of the Artangel Trust Experimenting with Site in Britain Today
Charlotte Gould
1 The fairly recent reassessment of the value of British art means it has been possible to read some of its micro-histories as original and inventive rather than simply derivative of French or American art, especially early modern art. In this regard, Dana Arnold and David Peters Corbett’s 2013 collection of essays A Companion to British Art, 1600 to the Present, appears as one of the latest attempts at reassessing the value of a national tradition which was long disparaged, even by English and British critics, for its supposedly misguided association with bourgeois patrons whose tastes were often decried as philistine. One of the chapters in the volume demonstrates how British modernism, for example, while it has often been considered as belated and undemonstrative, can today be appraised in a less universalist manner, and that in a more relativist period, it might be evaluated again, its author, Janet Wolff, going as far as to wonder whether realist or figurative art of the time — among which much of the productions of the Bloomsbury Group — might just as well be considered the art of modernity (Wolff 2013: 60–75). This type of reassessment which started in the second part of the 20th century had to contend with centuries of aesthetic dismissal — which famously finds its roots in the iconoclasm which followed the English Reformation — and the ingrained idea that artistic experimentation was not a British forte. It took the — short-lived — audacity of Pop in the 1960s, and then the brash confidence of Young British Artists in the 1990s to put an end to the country’s artistic marginalisation and to allow its artists to showcase some of its idiosyncrasies as cutting-edge rather than parochial. This article will focus on recent trends in contemporary British art, particularly on the way in which specifically national attitudes to presenting, as well as to financing and commissioning works have opened up possibilities for the creation of
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ground-breaking art, thus disseminating experimental qualities over the whole process of imagining, producing and then remembering mostly ephemeral works.
2 The articulation of the experimental and the contemporary is not as obvious as one might assume, especially when art can return to painterly figuration, or to classical sculptural forms. In recent British art, the conjunction of the two seems to have manifested itself most strikingly in its occupation of sites outside of the museum or gallery, whether site-specific works or public art: from the monumentality of Antony Gormley’s Angel of the North to the minute interventions of David Shrigley in the streets of Glasgow, as, for example, his hand-written note posted on a tree and which comically stated: “Lost: grey and white pidgeon (sic) with black bits. Normal size. A bit mangy- looking. Does not have a name. Call 257 1964.” Whether permanent or ephemeral, such interventions are described by Boris Groys as the momentary privatisation of public space through the act of installation. In these indeterminate shapes, Groys finds the expression of both an artistic and a curatorial freedom and says: “the artistic installation — in which the act of art production coincides with the act of its presentation — becomes the perfect experimental terrain for revealing and exploring the ambiguity that lies at the core of the Western notion of freedom.” (Groys 2017) Recently, the experimental seems to have resided in the choice of new locations art has explored which, in a postmodern context in which the explicitly experimental avant- garde has waned as a concept, has allowed for situational, or contextual, rather than formal explorations. This of course tends to justify the national, territorial approach the present article is adopting. Recent debates about these new “territories” — understood not just figuratively — explored by art have been particularly intense in Britain, especially in the texts of Claire Bishop or Jen Harvie, and have concerned new definitions of spectatorship, site-specificity, occupation of the public sphere and even of the delimitations between art and non-art — when a concert is both a concert and a performance, or when a swimming pool installed at King’s Cross during construction work is both a functioning leisure equipment and an art work.
3 Over the last two or three decades, the publicness of British art seems to have been one of the most debated aspects of its contemporary manifestation, raising political and social questions as well as aesthetic ones. Art intended for public exhibition, and sometimes even more than that, art intended for social action and engineering, for regeneration and for community making — as opposed to the art created for the market, which also boomed in Britain over the same period, as exemplified by Damien Hirst’s career — has been redefined formally and economically by the hybridisation of its public funding with private philanthropy and corporate sponsorship, thus resonating with contemporary redefinitions of how people understand notions of public and private today.
The publicness of public art
4 In his introduction to Art and the Public Sphere, W.J.T. Mitchell (1990) remarks that while studies of “public art” have traditionally been inquiries into the relation of beauty and bureaucracy, or studies of the art commissioned and owned by the State, new forms of publicness mean that today the question of spectatorship exists in the context of contested definitions of the public sphere — which, in The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, published in English in
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1989, Jürgen Habermas has described as a British invention. Publicness has indeed started to entail larger considerations which are not strictly spatial, but also political (will military drones gain access to our private properties?), economic (can public art be funded by sources other than the State?), social (we do tend to take our private phone conversations outside, for all to overhear), and technological (are online forums, accessed from the safety of our homes, the new public agora?). Mitchell designates publicity, surveillance and censorship as factors of transformation, and he is not overly pessimistic concerning the implications of these changing conditions on artistic possibilities: What is the “public,” for art or for anything else? Is there any such thing as a public sphere in the cultures of late capitalism? Are we witnessing the liquidation of the public sphere by publicity, the final destruction of the possibility of free public discussion, deliberation, and collective determination by a new culture of corporate, military, and state media management, and the emergence of a new world order in which public art will be the province of “spin doctors” and propagandists? Or does the internalization of global culture provide opportunities for new forms of public solidarity to emerge, and leave openings for the intrusion of new forms of public resistance to homogenization and domination? (Mitchell 1990: 2)
5 Public space is never fixed, it is always defined in context and according to how private space is envisaged at the same time, and to how privatisation imposes a reconfiguration of these definitions. What is sometimes presented as an actual genre, site-specific art, and which in the 20th century was automatically associated with progressivity and criticality, is therefore in fact a rather ductile notion whose political efficiency has had to be reconfigured following the breakdown of traditional spatial experiences and the growing of a generic quality of sites, especially urban ones. Discussions of site-oriented art have been particularly interesting, abandoning the phenomenological mode of site- specific art (for example, Richard Serra’s “to remove the work is to destroy it” motto defending the grounded and fixed, even when it is ephemeral and singular), for a more discursive one. Miwon Kwon’s 2000 article “The Wrong Place” observed a tendency to grant particular artistic validation to artists’ nomadism, while also remarking on the standardisation of sites, of places made generic to accommodate capitalism via an abstraction of space (Kwon 2000: 33-43). Meanwhile, Simon Sheikh believes that the disappearance of the locality of the public sphere in the context of the globalism of high culture creates a “post-public situation” (Sheikh 2008: 35 and Robbins 1993) in which the public sphere has become spectral — sometimes more an object of nostalgia than an actual arena.
6 In her 2013 book Fair Play. Art Performance and Neoliberalism, Jen Harvie points to the ambiguities of today’s art locations and how difficult it is for artists to escape being instrumentalised when, paradoxically, they try to escape the market forces at work in private galleries and even in some museums. She uses a commercial term to talk about today’s ephemeral site-specific art: “pop-up venues,” (Harvie 2013) a practice originating in times of economic recession when vacant properties are co-opted as temporary cultural spaces, an opportunistic harnessing of resources which gave rise to New York’s Soho loft culture in the 1970s and has been associated with innovative art practices, but also, Harvie argues, with an acceptation of under-funding and the prospect that the interim artistic use will make the location attractive and result in more expensive real estate. The experimental character of site-specificity for its own sake, in this context, would merely be a historical, dated one. The “pop-up” space today
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still is an office, shop, or factory which is temporarily empty because it is not rented out, or awaiting renovation or demolition. It has the potential to become a temporary autonomous zone, or TAZ, as theorised by Hakim Bey.1 But when an increasingly high number of empty shops and estates are made available through the effects of the recession, their temporary use by artists saves owners costs on security, maintenance and business rates taxed on empty buildings, thus defeating its utopian occupation. Commenting on some recent uses made by artists of such empty locations, Harvie remarks that the political credentials they often assume derive directly from occupying disused or derelict buildings whose poverty has become an aesthetic feature, and that this automaticity must be questioned. She believes the sometimes professed ability of these contemporary works to enact social change simply because they are created within the community is compromised by risks of co-optation by a liberal agenda. The potential for such works to contribute to social inequalities through processes of gentrification, volunteerism and the naturalisation of economic exploitation is something Harvie is very critical of, as well as identifying an element of pastoral condescension for picturesque poor neighbourhoods in many contemporary works, something she found in Artangel commissions like Michael Landy’s Break Down (2001) which took place in an empty C&A shop on Oxford street, and, more tellingly, in Roger Hiorns’ Seizure (2008) and the use it made of a derelict South London housing estate behind Elephant & Castle.
7 In the heyday of Tony Blair’s “Cool Britannia”, art was indeed presented as a solution to increase employability, minimise crime and foster aspiration, but also, to regenerate deprived areas left impoverished by deindustrialisation. The Thatcher government had already been keen on the idea of regeneration because it was an American import, but it was New Labour who decided to invest more money in such schemes, bolstered until 2008 by favourable economic conditions, but also helped in great measure by the belated introduction of a National Lottery in Great Britain, which John Major approved in 1994, but which was going to benefit the cultural policy of New Labour when it came to power three years later. Artistic interventions outside of traditional institutions thus became a new major feature in Britain, supported by State money, but also by private funding which Margaret Thatcher had encouraged and New Labour did not renege on, and by Lottery money which is difficult to define as either strictly public — it is redistributed by the Treasury and then by the Arts Council — or private — it is a form of voluntary contribution by ticket buyers, even when they envisage it more as the possibility of coming into a huge sum than as a philanthropic act.
Artangel commissions
8 The Artangel Trust appears as a particularly useful case study to analyse how contemporary British art was still able to work around its contested publicness and the debates its political and financial context generated. Artangel have been credited with providing artists with all the money and logistics they need to bring their dream projects to life, and with finding ingenious ways of securing funding which does not tie them down with either the public or the private sector. An independent art commissioning agency based in London, it has operated since 1985 and is responsible for producing some of the most striking ephemeral and site-specific artworks in the last thirty years, from John Berger’s Vertical Line, to Rachel Whiteread’s House, or Alain
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Platel’s Because I Sing. Artangel’s existence spans three decades, which now form a consistent ensemble in terms of both art historical and political periodization. It was launched as a reaction to the cuts in funding for the visual arts and redirection towards private patrons introduced by the Thatcher government in 1979 and has since adapted in a distinctive way to changes in the government’s and the Arts Council’s cultural policies. Its mixed business model, the recourse to public, private and corporate funds, is indeed the result of the more general hybridisation of funding encouraged by consecutive governments since the 1980s. Their focus on scouting for unexpected locations to commission ephemeral works has earned them the esteem of the art world.
9 The question of site-specificity happens to have a particular British history. The process and issue-based type of work which emerged in the 1960s and 1970s had created new links with the public realm and allowed art to be defined as such outside of the gallery walls. In the United Kingdom, the Artist Placement Group founded in 1966 by John Latham and Barbara Steveni inaugurated a trend for artists’ residencies, whether in businesses or in state administration, and their motto “the context is half the work” has become well-known. The 1977 Art in Public Places scheme then provided new incentives to take art outside. The ICA’s seminal 1982 Art and Architecture conference later encouraged what came to be termed the “new collaboration” between artists, architects and planners on pioneering initiatives, namely the launch of the Art and Architecture Society in 1982, and, in 1984, of the Public Art Development Trust, supported by the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation. Both organisations worked with the public and private sectors to encourage the commissioning of art in rural and urban settings, with the aim of involving artists in processes of regeneration. In 1986, Glasgow School of Art opened an Environmental Art Department with a public art remit. The arrival of Artangel in 1985, inspired by American models such as New York-based Creative Time (founded in 1973) or the Dia Art Foundation (1974), was framed by the same desire to escape the predictability of the gallery.
10 The trust has aimed to be experimental in the way it functioned as well as in the art it was going to help produce, its role being different from that played by the plethora of public art agencies and consultancies which the new cultural climate had fostered: indeed, Artangel never planned to act as a mediator between a client and an artist. The trust’s directors since 1991, James Lingwood and Michael Morris, truly work alongside the artists they commission, with the planning of certain collaborations sometimes taking years, and can be considered to be the producers of the works, and not simply their commissioners.
British cultural policies since the 1980s
11 The 1980s had first seen a spectacular U-turn in British cultural policies from then on geared towards the encouragement of private support for the arts, with the introduction in 1984 of the Business Sponsorship Incentive Scheme (BSIS). By 1992–93, government expenditure of £4.5 million a year was producing sponsorship of £7.5 million a year. The 1990s and 2000s saw artists resist the promotion of culture as a tourist attraction by New Labour and the systematisation of the use of site-specific art for regenerative purposes. The 2010s were then marked by the cuts introduced by the coalition government in the face of which some independent art organisations like Artangel, preceded by ArtOffice or Locus+, soon followed by Situations, Modus
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Operandi, or InSite Art, were able to demonstrate that their hybrid model of financing in which Arts Council England money was now secured could allow them to weather such impositions. In 2011, ACE, the Heritage Lottery Fund and DCMS launched the £100m Catalyst scheme to boost private giving and endowments to arts organisations, something Artangel was actually able to benefit from.2
12 This post-consensus context, the political break with the Welfare State introduced by the Thatcher government in 1979, is one which has been marked by the growth in importance of the cultural sphere in Britain, both in terms of the positioning of the country’s art market and in terms of public policy, although the successive governments in power since the 1980s have justified this new prominence differently. Art has either been transferred over to private interests in order to emulate an American model, or subsidised, but mostly because it was seen as an investment. The notion of “cultural industry” started becoming a motto in the early 1990s, with London all the while becoming defined as a new “creative city” (see Bianchini and Landry 1995). Cultural dynamism and artistic credentials became stakes in the competition between major cities as exemplified by the intense vying for the title of European City of Culture or for the yearly City of Culture badge. In an age when art and culture have been reassessed economically and politically, artists are often commissioned to obey policy directives and thus act as social workers capable of aiding society and of impacting urbanism. Andrew Hewitt has identified three claims made for the social function of art at the turn of the century: its role in cultural democracy, its function as an economic driver, the fact it offers solutions for social amelioration (Hewitt 2011: 19-36). These claims derive of course from a liberal tradition in the arts which believes they can help and improve the working class (Bennett 1998), but they are also mostly associated with the notion of culture-led regeneration.3 Hewitt admits that they are effective arguments to lever funding for the arts from the government, but he also sees the rhetoric as complicit with an agenda of marketisation and privatisation: “Cultural policy tied to this agenda produces the rhetoric of publicly funded art as a public good for social amelioration; the art it generates is hegemonic” (Hewitt 2011: 33). Indeed, the argument Hewitt opposes is that high culture might not be capable of such social engineering quite simply because it itself is actually what defines the traditional social division between the leisured elite and a working mass.
13 This British situation in which art, since the end of the 1980s, has become central to political debate, has been decried when art became a luxurious commodity (here the example of some very successful Young British Artists again comes to mind), but also when it made claims to social improvement (the efficiency of which is something Hewitt believes was never proven — while Claire Bishop has rather consistently bemoaned the consensual, almost drab, nature of so-called participatory or relational art (Bishop 2006)). Artangel have navigated through these debates and responded to cuts with works which offered to reclaim the public high street and London landmarks (Krzysztof Wodiczko’s 1985 City Projection) and to highjack the tools of advertising for the purpose of political and social engagement (Barbara Kruger’s We Don’t Need Another Hero hoardings installed by the trust across England and Ireland, Les Levine’s 1985 Blame God or Tim Head’s 1986 International Contracts). They then responded to New Labour’s instrumentalisation of art as part of the “Cool Britannia” rebranding of the country, and then to the coalition’s call to self-reliance under the motto “Big society” by redefining site-specificity and ephemerality, and by confirming their taste for
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unusual locations, thus declining to produce politically and economically-efficient art to suit the current trends in cultural policy.
14 Artangel has not expressed a clear political opposition to changes in policy, at least not since the 1990s — its first steps were clearly taken to address the climate of the 1980s. The agency has however adopted a reactive position to either instrumentalisation or commercial exploitation through its choices of sites. As we have already stated, they have persistently sought out new locations for their projects by occupying disused estates, tube stations, cinemas, or buildings which bear the marks of the country’s deindustrialisation, or by choosing lighter interventions which cannot be exploited for the purpose of regeneration. Because with Artangel projects, the choice of venue is as important as the medium or the technology used — their new slogan is “Extraordinary art, Unexpected places” — their distinctive appropriation of interim spaces in the city and outside, has come to resonate with the economic model they have had to shape for themselves in the particular British context. After having been very present in the high street and very visible in the 1980s and early 1990s through their use of the Spectacolour Screen on Picadilly Circus and of hoardings, Artangel today seem to seek out less visible locations. Their more discreet approach is probably a reaction to the age of political instrumentalisation exemplified by Tony Blair’s March 6, 2007 speech at Tate Modern, with its focus on the economic benefits of an art boom the outgoing Prime Minister called a “golden age.”4
Post-internet age
15 The changing relations between art and its environment had also been further transformed from the end of 1980s by the development of the media. The new spaces explored by Artangel projects take into account the redefinitions political, social and technological changes have imposed on notions of public and private spaces, the gallery or museum themselves not necessarily embodying the opposite of the public sphere of the street. Indeed, the late 20th century art gallery might sometimes be more immune to private interest than any other urban or rural site subject to planning or used for advertising, and the reintroduction by Tony Blair of free access in 2001 makes it a locus of sociability. By looking into projects based on walks through the city (Janet Cardiff’s The Missing Voice in 1999), on radio or television broadcasts (Life Class: Today’s Nude, Alan Kane’s 2009 televised drawing class for Channel 4), on cinema theatres both as the apparatus for cinematic experiences and as sites where private emotions are dealt with publicly (Melanie Counsell’s 1993 Coronet Cinema), one notices that reconfigurations of public and private realms are central to the way Artangel projects have explored new trends in site-specificity.
16 From the outset, Artangel have persistently sought out new locations for their projects which might redefine concepts of site-specificity — by making use of disused shops and buildings which bear the marks of the country’s economic ups-and-downs, or by choosing lighter interventions which cannot be exploited for regeneration purposes. We have seen how Artangel have progressively sought out less visible locations, and how this might be down to their resistance to political instrumentalisation. Another explanation for this could be a reaction to the sudden prominence and visibility of Young British Art in the 1990s. More generally, the agency has approached space and
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site as a material in itself, a material susceptible to the transformations imposed by economic and political conditions.
17 In Situation Art, Claire Doherty explains how site-specificity has been replaced by situation-specificity, adding the notion of activity taking place at a specific place to the geographical and material location (Doherty 2004). Artangel are not looking into working with heritage or monuments in the traditional sense of the term, like the Fourth Plinth Project. Rather they choose places of circulation and favour the impermanence of the environment the artists are going to work with. Daniel Silvers’ 2013 Dig took place in an open wound in the city of London, a disused parking lot which served as a blank, impermanent and unstable space, the exact opposite of a landmark. Its location close to the British Library but behind large palisades used to hide building sites hid it in plain view, the hustle and bustle of the area distracting from paying attention to the unexpected. A pretend archaeological site, it looked like an open wound in the city, which dug below the surface of a blank, impermanent space. Because Artangel commission works outside of the museum or gallery space, this means that their institutional recognition has to be all the stronger in order to confirm that this ephemeral event, this disruption in the cityscape is indeed an artwork. Even when Michael Landy occupied an empty C&A store on Oxford Road for Break Down, its very central location was hidden by the fact that the space could still be mistaken for a shop.
18 The rapid commercialisation of the public sphere has been one of the causes for the redefinition of the boundaries between public and private sphere. Public and private divisions are dynamic because the privatisation of the public sphere through marketing is concurrent with the publicity given to private emotions, conversations or information in a society where communication is on the move thanks to mobile phones and widespread internet access. Public space is lent an aura of democracy in debates on urban design by a notion that it is where people of different classes, races, and genders mix informally. But British academic Malcolm Miles has also stressed the fact that, while it has today come to be defended in the face of the encroachment of privatised space in the Business Improvement Districts which are mushrooming in London, the shopping centre, and the gated compound, it was never a site of democracy, always a site in which power was performed by those who held it through processions, public executions, and the siting of public monuments which construct historical narratives to lend present regimes an illusion of being a logical culmination of a history (Miles 2008: 77). By neither indulging in a sort of National Heritage nostalgia nor in the picturesque of the ruin, but embracing both the past and the future, many Artangel projects have insisted on the inescapably mutable nature of public space.
19 Indeed, the very notion of context-specificity means that art works, the forms of which could have seemed dated, derivative, mere repetitions of modernist or 60s and 70s cutting-edge experimental works, are experimental still. In the relationship between site and work, new attempts at experimentation can be found. The ductility of locations itself, the fact that works no longer simply occupy a physical site but respond to a larger context which the location embodies, this imposes an experimental character to the art which is present there. The specific identity of the local has indeed experienced transformations, which make each site the locus both for itself and for the rest of the world. While architect Rem Koolhas has described the contemporary city as a “generic” one, one which has abandoned its specific identity to align with the impositions of global forces — commercial, political and even cultural — French geographer and
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anthropologist Michel Lussault has recently come up with the notion of hyper-lieux (hyperlocations), specific locations towards which people converge both physically and numerically, they are traversed by different experiences because they are places where things happen, which also happen online — for example Times Square in New York, or Notre-Dame-des-Landes in France where, from 2009 to 2018, protesters opposed the building of an airport in a ZAD (Zone à défendre). Site-specific works today encompass these conflicts between local and global forces, as well as technological connectivities, which shake the foundations of their sites. This unstable background is a marker of their contemporaneity.
Conclusion
20 Since the end of the 1980s, Artangel has managed to come up with a successful model which allows for all of these preoccupations to be taken into account. It has accompanied the development of “situation” art and helped redefine site-specificity for the turn of the century, it has suggested alternatives to the instrumentalisation of the “social turn” in art, as coined by Claire Bishop, and been at the forefront of a redefinition of ephemerality which is not simply an artwork with a set lifetime, but a work of art devised in a digital age. This successful venture confirms that the experimental is today not necessarily found in novel forms or styles, but also in novel ways of engaging with a transformed environment, and that this environment is a spatial one, but also, quite strikingly in Britain, an economic one.
21 Artangel has now become an influential beacon on the national artistic scene, and its sustained independence, its approach to locations, the ephemeral way it occupies them, has been inspirational for more established institutions, among them Tate Modern. Indeed, museums of contemporary art have today shed their traditional role as receptacles for approved, finished works, they are no longer mere custodians for posterity, but, inspired by examples such as that of Artangel, they have themselves become involved in the production of the works they show and in a discussion with the living artists who make them. On the heels of independent agencies like Artangel, of artist-run initiatives, or of the work done by a new generation of independent curators, museums now are themselves unusual locations for art interventions, and regularly function as laboratories, as official places traversed by artistic experimentations — turning the Turbine Hall into a de-institutionalised public space open to passing artistic ideas.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Arnold, Dana, and David Peters Corbett eds. A Companion to British Art, 1600 to the Present. Oxford: Blackwell, 2013.
Bennett, Tony. Culture, A Reformer’s Science. London: Sage, 1998.
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Bey, Hakim. The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological Anarchy, Poetic Terrorism (1985). Weehawken: Grim Reaper Press, 1991. https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/hakim-bey-t-a-z- the-temporary-autonomous-zone-ontological-anarchy-poetic-terrorism
Bianchini, Franco, and Charles Landry. The Creative City. London: Demos, 1995.
Bishop, Claire. Artificial Hells. Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship. London: Verso, 2012.
Bishop, Claire. “The Social Turn: Collaboration and its Discontents,” Artforum, February 2006: 178-183.
Blair, Tony. “Tony Blair’s speech on the arts”, The Guardian, 6 March 2007. https:// www.theguardian.com/politics/2007/mar/06/politicsandthearts.uk1
Bourriaud, Nicolas. Esthétique relationnelle. Dijon: Presses du réel, 1998.
Connolly, Maeve. “Artangel and the Changing Mediascape of Public Art.” Journal of Curatorial Studies 2 (2) 2013: 196-217. DOI: 10.1386/jcs.2.2.196_1
Doherty, Claire ed. From Studio to Situation. London: Black Dog Publishing, 2004.
Habermas, Jürgen. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT, 1989.
Harvie, Jen. Fair Play. Art Performance and Neoliberalism. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.
Hewitt, Andrew. “Privatizing the Public: Three rhetorics of art’s public good in ‘Third Way’ cultural policy”, Art & the Public Sphere, Vol. 1 (1) 2011: 19-36. DOI: 10.1386/aps.1.1.19_1
King, Scott. Anish and Antony Take Afghanistan. Zurich: JRP Ringier, 2015.Koolhaas, Rem. The Generic City. New York: Monacelli, 1995.
Kwon, Miwon. “The Wrong Place”, Art Journal, Vol. 59, No. 1 (Spring, 2000): 33–43. DOI: 10.1080/00043249.2000.10791980
Lussault, Michel. Hyper-lieux. Paris: Seuil, 2017.
Miles, Malcolm. “Critical Spaces: Monuments and Changes”, in Cameron Cartiere and Shelly Willis eds. The Practice of Public Art. London/ NY: Routledge, 2008. 66-90.
Mitchell, W.J.T. ed. “Introduction: Utopia and Critique” in Art and the Public Sphere. Chicago/ London: The U. of Chicago P., 1990. 1-5.
Robbins, Bruce ed. The Phantom Public Sphere. Minneapolis: Minneapolis UP, 1993.
Sheikh, Simon. “Publics and Post-publics. The Production of the Social,” in: Jorinde Seijdel, ed. Art as a Public Issue: how art and its institutions reinvent the public dimension. Open, Rotterdam: NAi Publishers, 14 (2008). 28–36.
NOTES
1. Hakim Bey’s (a pseudonym) “The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological Anarchy, Poetic Terrorism” (1991, first published in 1985) is a famously anti-copyright text which can be accessed freely online, and in translation on a variety of platforms, and in which the author calls not for more public art, but for the more radical use of art sabotage. See, for instance, https:// theanarchistlibrary.org/library/hakim-bey-t-a-z-the-temporary-autonomous-zone-ontological- anarchy-poetic-terrorism
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2. About the Catalyst programme aimed at helping arts organisations diversify their income by seeking out private support whether philanthropic or corporate, see the first Arts Council report published by the Arts Council in March 2014, http://www.artscouncil.org.uk/sites/default/files/ download-file/Catalyst%20Evaluation%20Year%20One%20-%20Final%20Report.pdf last accessed July 9, 2017. 3. Artist Scott King’s 2014 exhibition “De-regeneration” was a humorous take on public art and its endorsement by both western governments and “big business” alike for the sake of regeneration. The series Anish and Antony Take Afghanistan (King 2015) mocks the pretensions of the ideology of regeneration and its patronising gigantism in post-industrial Britain — as well as two British art stars. In A Balloon for Britain, 2012, King imagined that the Cameron government had offered him millions to devise a scheme to regenerate Britain’s ten poorest towns and cities. The fictional result: an idea to float 50 metre tall party balloons across each of these poverty stricken areas. 4. An unabridged transcription of Tony Blair’s speech can be found on the Guardian website (Blair 2007).
ABSTRACTS
The Artangel Trust, an independent art commissioning agency founded in London in 1985, is used as a case study to demonstrate how the experimental has come to be found in environmental explorations in Britain today, rather than in more strictly formal ones. Indeed, the curating and the siting of art, especially in a country whose artistic tradition has been defined by its insularity, has become the main locus of experimentations which touch upon creation, but also contextualisation and funding. The way art has recently escaped its institutional inscription has coincided, politically, with a post-Welfare encouragement of a new, specifically British funding model, combining a Continental form of State funding and money coming from philanthropic giving and corporate sponsorship, inspired by the cultural policy of the United States. This new economic context, coupled with a redefinition of the unusual public spaces these works occupy, point to the new conditions of artistic experimentation in Britain.
Le Artangel Trust, agence indépendante de commande d’œuvres publiques qui fut créée à Londres en 1985, est ici utilisé comme une étude de cas pour démontrer que l’expérimental se trouve aujourd’hui dans des explorations plus environnementales que formelles. En effet, le commissariat d’œuvres, et l’installation de celles-ci dans l’espace, en particulier dans un pays dont la tradition artistique a été définie en termes d’insularité, sont devenus les lieux principaux de l’expérimentation créative, expérimentation qui ne touche pas qu’à la forme, mais aussi à l’occupation de l’espace et aux conditions de financement. En effet, la façon dont l’art a souvent cherché ces derniers temps à échapper à son inscription institutionnelle a coïncidé, au Royaume- Uni, avec une rupture politique avec l’Etat-providence et avec la création d’un nouveau modèle national, associant un soutien d’État selon le modèle continental, et l’injection d’argent privé venant de mécènes et de sponsoring d’entreprise, inspiré par le modèle américain. Ce nouveau contexte, couplé à une nouvelle définition de ce qu’est l’espace public que ces œuvres occupent, se révèlent être les nouveaux terrains de l’expérimentation artistique britannique.
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INDEX
Keywords: public art, philanthropy, art commissioning, British cultural policy, United Kingdom, art Mots-clés: art public, philanthropie, commande d’art, politiques culturelles britanniques, Royaume-Uni, art
AUTHOR
CHARLOTTE GOULD Charlotte Gould is a former student of the École Normale Supérieure de Cachan and agrégée in English. Her doctoral thesis was defended at the Sorbonne Nouvelle in 2003 under the following title: “Les Young British Artists, L’École du scandale” and she is now Assistant professor in British culture and art at the Sorbonne Nouvelle (Paris 3), where she is a member of the research group 19-21. The focus of her research is contemporary British art, as well as public art commissioning since the 1980s. Recent publications include “Artangel Commissions, A New Approach to Site”, in The International Journal of the Arts in Society (Common Ground, 2017), and the book chapter “Jeremy Deller’s The Battle of Orgreave, rejouer 1984” in Ici notre défaite a commencé. La grève des mineurs britanniques (1984-1985) (Syllepse, 2016). In 2012, she co-directed the Ashgate volume Marketing Art in Britain: A Cultural History, 1700 to Today with Sophie Mesplède, which was reissued by Routledge as a paperback in 2017. She is a member of the Société des Anglicistes de l’Enseignement Supérieur (SAES), of the Association of Art Historians (AAH), and of The Arts in Society Research Network. Contact: c.gould[at]wanadoo.fr
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A work of art as an experimental exhibit. Broodthaers and the Eagle
Susanne König
1 Experimentation is integral to literature and art as well as to the natural sciences. The search for new artistic means of expression, the formation of a new canon and the use of new artistic materials are all based on findings obtained through experimentation. Experimentation was a key category for the modernists in particular (Dingler 1928). The difference from previous periods lay especially in the modernists having given a new programmatic significance to experimental procedures in both the natural sciences and art. The modernists were distinguished by a stylistic pluralism as an expression of a constantly changing society, accompanied by a new understanding of art. In particular, art after 1945 gave rise to a new concept of art hardly anticipated in the traditional genres of painting and sculpture, for example.
2 But what does “experiment” mean? While the Scholastics understood “experiment” to mean experience in general, the modern era restricted its relevant sense to experience brought about through deliberate human action (Dingler 1928). Thus “experimentation” nowadays refers to controlled, purposive action aiming at some specific goal: the invention of something new or the production of new knowledge. This quest for the new characterises modern art and in particular contemporary art in a variety of ways. While controlled artistic practices may at first glance seem to conflict with the artist’s claim to freedom, artists do indeed seek new practices that are repeatable and therefore controllable (Rheinberger 2012).
3 In his classic study, The Story of Art, Ernst Gombrich (1909–2001) thus entitled his chapter on Modernism “Experimental Art”, to underscore the newness of this age (Gombrich 1984: 557-598). While previous forms of art built upon the stylistic features of past eras, modifying them or combining them, the modernists distinctively chose wholly new preconditions and developed new methods, materials and content. Gombrich applied the concept of experiment only to art of the first half of the 20th century, however. But what role has experiment played in post-war art? While the experimental character of post-war art seems to have greatly intensified, describing every new artistic method as “experimental” would be to water down the concept. Not
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everything that is contemporary is also experimental. “Experimental” does not just refer to something new — experimental art rather comes from certain experimental methods.
4 In his work Musée d’Art Moderne, Département des Aigles (1968-72) Belgian artist and poet Marcel Broodthaers investigates a particular form of experimental art. Broodthaers’ fictional museum project provides a good basis for a study of the concept, as the artist has himself repeatedly referred to the experimental quality of his art. Indeed, our starting assumption in this essay is that this work by Broodthaers illustrates in a quite paradigmatic way central elements of experimentation in contemporary art of the 1960s and 70s. For example, on 16 May 1972 Broodthaers opened a section of a museum entitled The Eagle from the Oligocene to the Present in the Städtischer Kunsthalle in Düsseldorf, signing it with the following words: “Marcel Broodthaers shows an experimental exhibition of his Musée d’Art Moderne, Département des Aigles, Section des Figures” (Broodthaers 1972, I and II).
5 The Düsseldorf exhibition is part of his fictional museum project, which extended over a four-year period from 1968 to 1972.1 Altogether it comprised twelve sections appearing for varying periods of time in different places. The content of the project concerned the relationship between art and society and examined the definition of art as a social convention. The related analysis of art and the art world is then not to be separated from the museum as an institution, which after all is the place where the social conceptions of art manifest themselves. In this project, Broodthaers treated the institutional environment with its recurring exhibition situations, its mechanisms of conveying art and its structure. Given the displacement in space and time, Broodthaers’s museum never had the form of an integral “building”, however. The displacement of an art object over such a long period of time and through such an expanse of space underscores the experimental nature of the project, for hardly has any one visitor seen the complete museum with its twelve sections. The first part of this article examines the experiment in which a museum with twelve sections altogether is declared to be a work of art. The second part then explicates the experiment in which an exhibition is declared to be a work of art. Finally, the third part examines the role of the viewer within Broodthaers’ artistic experiment.
Experiment 1: The museum as a work of art
6 Broodthaers founded the Musée d’Art Moderne, Département des Aigles, Section XIXème Siècle, in his Brussels atelier on 27 September 1968. In the three nearly empty rooms of the museum, which existed for one year, he exhibited packaging material on loan from Continental Menkes, an art transport company. The approximately fifty crates of varying sizes bore labels printed in English or French, all of which referred to art: “Picture”, “Tableau”, “Sculpture”, “Handle with care”, “Keep dry”, “Brussels”, “Painting”, “Fragile”, “Haut”, “Bas” and so on. To this collection Broodthaers added around fifty postcards showing paintings and drawings from French masters of the 19th century (Broodthaers 1991: 194-5; Crimp 1996: 221; Broodthaers 1994: 46-50).
7 Supplementing this ensemble were two slide shows with caricatures as well as postcards of 19th century paintings and drawings. These reproductions lent the section its name, Section XIXème Siècle. This very first exhibition exemplified the experimental character of this work, for in lieu of a conventional work of art, Broodthaers made the
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context in which artistic activity takes place the subject of his artistic-analytic inquiry. His art became the instrument of criticism and analysis of the institution of art and its social functions. The question of the extent to which museums participate in defining art itself arose when Broodthaers extended the 1960s student movement’s general criticism of institutions to the realm of art. In doing so, he chose a moderate form of analysis that viewed the institutions from the inside, in keeping with German activist Rudi Dutschke’s call to “March through the institutions”. Dutschke had the idea of changing society by working from or within the institutions. This march into and within the institutions can also be seen in the course of the fictional museum project from 1968 through 1972.
8 This artistic-analytic method has an experimental character if the medium of art, its institutions and its own system become the subject of art. While the general criticism of institutions by the student movement of the 1960s was a widespread phenomenon in the Western World, the extension to the artistic realm was a novelty at the time. One of the greatest challenges of this experiment for Broodthaers, however, was whether the viewer would recognise the fictional museum as art and discern the underlying analysis of art.
9 Broodthaers therefore originally abandoned the institutional place of the museum in order to analyse, within the private space of his atelier, the conditions of the place he had just left — namely the museum with its specific relationship between art and society. From this marginal position he endeavoured to reflect on art as a system, moving from section to section and back into the field of art until, arriving at the centre, namely at the most important exhibition for contemporary art, the documenta, he concluded his inquiry. His next two sections thus disclosed two unusual spaces of art, namely writing in the Section Littéraire and the beach and sea in the Section Documentaire (Broodthaers 2003: 48). The Section Littéraire comprised a series of open letters written by Broodthaers between 1968 and 1971. As he has never mentioned, exhibited or published all the letters in their totality, however, we cannot say with certainty which individual letters belong to the Section Littéraire. In this section Broodthaers experimented with new places for exhibiting and with writing as an artistic medium.
10 The Section Documentaire was created on a summer day in 1969, in the coastal village of Le Coq in Belgium. Together with his friend Herman Daled, Broodthaers dug and etched the ground plan of a museum in the sand still moist at ebb tide, surrounded by curious beachgoers. To clarify their idea, Broodthaers placed signs along the boundaries of the ground plan with directions and prohibitions in the Belgian national languages of French and Flemish generally familiar to museum-goers. For example, one sign read “Musée d’Art Moderne, Section XIXème Siècle”, another “Défense absolue de toucher aux objets” (“Touching the objects is strictly forbidden”) and still another “Il est strictement interdit de circuler sur les travaux” (“Treading on the objects is strictly forbidden”) (Broodthaers 1991: 204). Once their project was completed, Broodthaers’ wife Maria Gilissen photographed the scene before the tide came in and washed it away just a few hours later. The section owes its name to these photographs. Here Broodthaers again experimented with new exhibition locations and with the documentation as a new medium of art.
11 Exactly one year after the opening of the first Section XIXème Siècle in Brussels on 29 September 1969, Broodthaers closed the section. To the closing ceremony he invited
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guests whom he had brought along with the Brussels exhibition to Antwerp for the A379089 alternative art centre (Broodthaers 1992: 201-3). Here he replaced the 19th century postcards with postcards of paintings by a 17th century master, Peter Paul Rubens. The A379089 alternative art centre generally exhibited no classical works of art, but merely works which, like Broodthaers’s, experimented with new media and materials or belonged to an extended artistic discourse.
12 From there, Broodthaers’s museum assumed the unconventional exhibition status of an urban institution. He exhibited the Section XIXème Siècle (Bis) in the between series at the Düsseldorf Städtischer Kunsthalle, which since 1968 had taken place in irregular succession between the official exhibitions (Broodthaers 1997: 74-7). For the new section, Broodthaers borrowed eight original works of the 19th century Düsseldorf School of Painting from the repository of the Düsseldorf art museum and hung them in the typical manner of a 19th century gallery: two rows of four paintings (Broodthaers 1992: 206). The between series was also experimental in character: as usually the time between exhibitions is used for dismantling and setting up and for conducting yet another exhibition series (Buschmann 202: 143). Jürgen Hartan, the director at the time, nevertheless used between for art forms deviating from customary notions about art. Paradoxically, Broodthaers nevertheless presented eight original works from the 19th century as a sort of “repeat exhibition” of the first section.
13 The Section Folkorique gained entry to institutional space in 1970, when Broodthaers donated a work from his own collection to the curator of the Département Folklorique of the Zeeuws Museum in Middelburg, Piet Van Daalen, namely a cloth embroidered with the words “Musée — Museum, les Aigles (the Eagles)”, fabricated by his daughter Marie-Puck (Zwirner 1997: 123). The donation of the folkloristic needlework was to be only part of the Section Folklorique. The project was to be completed by a book or catalogue with illustrations of the Département Folklorique works, photographed by Maria Gilissen. From these photographs Broodthaers and Piet Van Daalen intended to select a series. The edition was never completed, however (Broodthaers 1992: 205).
14 On 12 January 1971 Broodthaers opened the Section Cinéma in a basement room at Burgplatz 12 in Düsseldorf (Broodthaers 1997: 140-169). Here Broodthaers showed his films and also experimented with new forms of presentation. The basement walls were partly painted black and white (Broodthaers 1997: 140-161). On one wall he installed two projection surfaces next to each other. One presented a political map of the world, on which he projected the film Le Musée et la Discussion (1969) (Broodthaers 1997: 80). For the other, he painted a white projection area on a black wall, and on top of that several black rectangles in which “Fig. 12”, “Fig. 2”, “Fig. 1” and “Fig. A” were inscribed in white. When Broodthaers showed videos on the painted and printed projection surfaces, visitors found themselves partially unable to distinguish between film and surface. In his Section Cinéma Broodthaers seemed to have returned to the marginal areas of art. This impression was primarily due to film not yet having played a major role in the contemporary art of the time, however.
15 At the 1971 Art Cologne fair Broodthaers then exhibited his Section Financière at the Michael Werner Gallery stand. Paradoxically, however, the Musée d’Art Moderne was for sale here between 1970 and 1971 as it had gone bankrupt. Broodthaers drafted the cover artwork for 19 copies of the art market catalogue. The front cover bore the title “Section Financière, Musée d’Art Moderne à vendre 1970–71 pour cause de faillite” (“Financial section, Museum of Modern Art, for sale 1970 - 1971 on account of
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bankruptcy”). The back cover showed an eagle with the lettering ‘Fig. 0’ and the text “O Mélancolie, aigre château des Aigles” (“Oh, Melancholia, sour château of the eagles”) (Broodthaers 1992: 212-3).With this section at the Art Cologne fair, Broodthaers began occupying an increasingly important institution in art, and he began focussing on its commercialisation.
Figure 1: Marcel Broodthaers, Musée d’Art Moderne à vendre – pour cause de faillite (Museum of Modern Art for sale – due to bankruptcy), 1970-71
© 2016 Estate of Marcel Broodthaers / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / SABAM, Brussels. Source: https://www.moma.org/slideshows/45/8
16 With the last four museum sections Broodthaers then moved into the centre of the art world. Featured as a conventional exhibition at the Düsseldorf Kunsthalle, his Section des Figures totally dissolved the visible demarcation from his museum fiction (Der Adler 1972, I and II; Borgemeister 1977: 135-154; König 2012: 35-46). His exhibition entitled The Eagle from the Oligocene to the Present presented the fictional museum as an ordinary exhibition. Here he exhibited different objects of art in addition to items of natural history, handicraft, advertising and mundane use whose only unifying element was the eagle motif. The Section des Figures was the visualisation of the Département des Aigles. The objects were appended with text panels recalling title labels and bearing the sentence: “This is not a work of art”.
17 The final three sections were shown at the documenta 5 in Kassel. The Section Publicité concerned the publicity work and advertising conducted by museums, while at the same time promoting the Section des Figures concurrently running at the Düsseldorf Kunsthalle (Buchloch and Gilissen 1995). Broodthaers thus clothed an affirmative self- promotion as a reflection on the relationship between advertising and art.
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18 The last two sections shared a place at the documenta. After 50 days, Broodthaers transformed the Musée d’Art Moderne, Département des Aigles, Section Moderne, into the Musée d’Art Ancien, Département des Aigles, Galerie du XXème Siècle, and thereby developed the autonomous museum for 20th century art into a traditional museum with a section for modern art (Broodthaers 1995: 68-79). Museums of modern art were still not very common at the time.
19 Broodthaers’ Musée d’Art Moderne follows the tradition of Marcel Duchamp’s ready- mades. Duchamp examined the alleged phenomenon of making an object a work of art by declaring it to be such. In taking up this tradition, Broodthaers also asked whether a museum could itself be declared a work of art. Broodthaers was particularly interested in whether the viewer could recognise a museum as a work of art if it was not an actual “building”, but rather an exhibition extending over a four-year period in different places and employing the most variegated materials, signs and allusions. Within this museum, he examined the various sections (17th and 19th centuries, for example) and their tasks and functions (collecting, preserving, exhibiting, public relations). In doing so, he employed artistic materials still unusual at that time, while also studying contemporary artistic styles, thus approaching Land Art through the use of sand and Language Art through the use of writing.
Experiment 2: The exhibition as a work of art
20 Broodthaers himself articulated the purpose of the fictional museum as the “analytical study of the concept of art” (Broodthaers 1972, I: 4). This treatment did not pertain to such pictorial issues as style, composition or materiality, however, but rather elaborated on the contextual conditions of art. Within the museum cycle, the Section des Figures and its exhibition entitled The Eagle from the Oligocene to the Present assumed a key position, as they embodied the overall idea of the fictional museum. While the other sections referred to the museum through quotations and allusions, the Section des Figures dissolved the boundaries between reality and fiction so that the exhibition visitor could barely distinguish the fictional museum and the actual exhibition.
21 The intention and strategy of the exhibition are evident from the subtitle itself, The Eagle from the Oligocene to the Present — the Oligocene being the middle part of the tertiary period that began 65 million years ago and ended 2.5 million years ago and during which the eagle evolved: the implied criticism of the scientific principles of classification dissolve the boundaries of traditional scientific and artistic disciplines, as Jürgen Harten also makes clear in the exhibition catalogue. Harten remarks that “an area [has been] outlined that heretofore has resisted scientific treatment because it could not be confined to any one discipline” (Broodthaers 1972, I: 9). The symbolic overloading of the eagle is exposed through the ironic exaltation of the same and the ironic treatment of scientific authority, as Broodthaers expressly points out in the catalogue: “But the geology should be incorporated in the (sensational) title, giving the title a flair of pseudo-scholarship and exposing the eagle symbol as something adopted without reflection, as not even put up for discussion” (Broodthaers 1972, II: 18). The “unreflective” use of the eagle symbol refers both to the ideologically, religiously or politically motivated object and to the art object itself.
22 Like no other animal, the eagle has become the epitome of power and the sublime in European cultural history. As Broodthaers remarks, scientific investigations into the
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F0 F0 “king of the air” contributed to this symbolism by “developing 5B ... 5D an erroneous idea of the bird. Most scientific writers described the eagle in pathetic terms” (Broodthaers 1972, II: 18). In other words, the eagle became the myth par excellence. In this exhibition Broodthaers thus dealt with the eagle, its image and name and with its different sorts of significance. We see this first in his choice of exhibits, displaying originals alongside copies, prints, photographs or commodities (Broodthaers 1972, II: 18). Besides their motivic equality, the objects also shared the status of acknowledged museum objects: many of them had already been legitimated as art objects by their original museums, whereas the others, “non-museum” objects, were thus upgraded only in Broodthaers’s fictional museum.
23 The exhibition constituted an arbitrary cross section of the various repositories of the lending institutions, given the absence of any system underlying the collection. According to Harten, the exhibition did not aim at any completeness, its scope being determined solely by “arbitrary bits of knowledge and the lenders’ willingness to help” (Broodthaers 1972, I: 18). The materiality of the exhibits of was also coincidental, as the lenders did not always send the originals, but sometimes only copies or photographs of the objects.2
24 The arbitrarily assembled objects, each with a different temporal and geographical origin, had a dual significance in the exhibition: on the one hand as valuable museum- like artefacts and on the other hand as mythological symbols. Michael Oppitz describes these two levels in these terms: On the one hand, because they are being shown as museum pieces, and on the other hand because they are signs already carrying cultural baggage: wherever encountered, the image of the eagle is highly emblematic and mythologically significant. The eagle can represent strength, virility, severity, eschatological yearning, freedom or domination. In other words, the eagles presented by Broodthaers all move on the 2nd level… and precisely in showing this to us, Broodthaers returns the eagles to the object language level. (Broodthaers 1972, II: 18)
25 Oppitz highlights the multiple coding of the eagle and stresses that by juxtaposing the different objects Broodthaers undoes the charged character of their content. Broodthaers’s treatment of the exhibits described above gave their positioning in the exhibition a particular significance, revealing fundamental shifts in the traditional classification systems of museums: the exhibits are positioned only according to the requirements and possibilities of their presentation, and not by chronological or geographical order. As a result, viewers could no longer follow a specified route through the exhibition, but had to make their own way (Broodthaers 1972, II: 20). At the same time, large chronological and geographical jumps between the individual exhibits occurred, which was also in keeping with the overall concept. While the exhibits all shared the same motif, they differed in their categorical references. Displayed side by side, they afforded the viewer new possibilities of combination that would not have been available to a visitor to the corresponding home collections. Conventional museums operate according to classification schemes that internally organise the exhibits either in chronological terms or by individual section and externally subdivide the types of museum into categories like art, military or archaeology (Minges 1998). In Broodthaers’s case, on the other hand, the exhibits are removed from this system and recombined on the basis of their shared motif (Borgemeister 1977: 146).
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26 While owing to their academic authority museums usually raise an implied claim to truth, while also suppressing the constructive nature of this truth, Broodthaers employed the temporary exhibition to formulate a “proposal”. For this reason he also set great value on equal treatment of the individual exhibits, so that no one object could acquire a symbolic dominance over another (Minges 1998). Oppitz describes this as “annulling the hierarchies among the objects” (Broodthaers 1972, II: 20).
27 Broodthaers was thus evidently aware of the power of museum authority. Indeed, he feared that his museum might be misunderstood by viewers as a sort of “opinion”. To counteract this inclination, he tried to debunk traditional academic category systems as the site of an only seemingly objective production of consensus. The traditional museum, whose concept arose from the modern encyclopaedic systemisation of knowledge, collects objects, conducts inventories, runs exhibitions and publishes catalogues. Inventories tear the objects from their historical contexts, isolate them as individual items and turn them into artistic artefacts to be re-assigned a place in accordance with conventional stipulations. They then become objects of a certain system of knowledge (Borgemeister 1977: 147). Broodthaers’s method splits the eagle into its images on the one hand and their significances on the other: these significances are lexically stored and the object preserved as an “aesthetic preparation” in the museum (Broodthaers 1972, II: 10). In the context of his deconstructive project, he now provisionally endows all the exhibited objects with the status of “work of art” — expressly including those which previously no museum had elevated to this status in any exhibition. In his view, isolating the objects entails their aestheticisation, which is of only short duration in the fictional museum, however.
28 Conventional museums turn objects into representatives of an idea of art that overly emphasises aesthetic impressions, while at the same time suppressing reflection on the social, political or economic context. The eagle items were ideal for elaborating this view, for they combined two sorts of myths: first of all, the eagle is an animal with certain ascribed qualities whose image always confronts the addressee with an overload of symbolism that can hardly be suppressed. Secondly, the image of the eagle is an aesthetic artefact, embodying a museum-governed idea of art. Broodthaers thus writes that the “concept of the exhibition rests on the identity of the eagle as idea with art as idea” (Broodthaers 1972, II: 19).
29 This commonality between art as idea and the eagle as idea lies in the comparability and interchangeability of the two. According to André Malraux (1956: 9-12), the peculiar character of museums lies in their practice of comparing and exchanging works of art with one another, a function corresponding to the basic significance of the eagle objects in Broodthaers’s museum, where they too are compared and interchanged with one another. The museum makes the artworks representatives of its own ideological idea, an unspoken, abstract idea of art. The objects are thus robbed of their inherent value in terms of their history, geography or moral function, for example, as Borgemeister notes: “It [the museum] does this in order to subsume under a concept that is at once historically determined and intent upon imparting its own knowledge and its own history” (Borgemeister 1977: 147). The concept of the museum is the subsumption of all objects under its own level of knowledge as the truth: whatever is in the museum is art.
30 Broodthaers underscored the interchangeability of objects in the context of a museum exhibition by appending the academic-type labels “Fig. 0”, “Fig. 1”, “Fig. 2” or “Fig. A”
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to the exhibits or even to individual passages in the chapter Section des Figures in the catalogue of the Eagle Museum in Düsseldorf. Closer scrutiny reveals this supposed specification to be just the opposite, given the arbitrariness of the assignment of labels, and thus illustrates the interchangeability and equal ranking of the labelled objects. Broodthaers underscored this point by appending to all the objects the negative inscription “This is not a work of art” and stating: “‘This is not a work of art’: the formula is a figure 0. Each exhibited item in Düsseldorf is a figure 1 or a figure 2. And each station in this museum falls under this rudimentary system” Broodthaers 1994: 128).
31 Broodthaers’s comment confronted the viewer precisely at the place that first gave the object its legitimacy as a work of art, namely the museum. The irony of the plastic signs announcing “This is not a work of art” is to be understood in the context of the declared objective of the exhibition: an “analytical treatment of the concept of art” (Broodthaers 1972, I: 4). While usually labels serve to identify the exhibits by stating their titles, materials and sizes or by providing the museum’s own descriptions and classifications of the works, now the only information provided is a negation of the status as a work of art. The negative labelling thus returns to the objects their identity and uniqueness taken away when they were elevated to the status of artworks in a museum, and breaks with the self-evident ascription of status as well as with the overall discursive basis on which this ascription rests. The objects once more become the things they originally were.
32 But back to the eagle: Oppitz shows that Broodthaers defuses the mythical power of the eagle by demonstrating the presence of this power among all conceivable eagles. He describes this mythoclastic effect, reinforced by the principle of the sequence and the resulting annulment of the hierarchy, as follows: A curious double effect: by subjugating all of the exhibits to his overall intent, Broodthaers strips off their mythical surplus value. He liberates the eagle objects from their conventional overdetermination precisely by using them anew, as equally ranked tools of his experiment. (Oppitz 1972: 20)
33 Borgemeister describes this demythologisation as the reversal of all definitions and overdetermination of the eagle objects down to the “zero point” (Borgemeister 1987: 151) which for Broodthaers has the aim of liberating the objects: release from the determination of the encyclopaedic order of knowledge generally and of that of the museum in particular. The view of the objects is to be freed from the perception, considered self-evident, of the eagle as a symbolic creature, in particular as a power symbol, in order to direct a critical regard at the historicity and interest-guided use of that symbol. Broodthaers himself repeatedly uses the concept of a zero point in this connection: “It’s easy to see that I wanted to neutralise the use value of the eagle symbol and reduce it to a zero value in order to introduce critical dimensions into the history and the use of this symbol” (Broodthaers 1972: 20).
34 As a final point in this interpretation of the Section des Figures we shall discuss Broodthaers’s exhibited objects from the world of commodities and consumption. Notable about the eagle exhibition was its display not only of eagles from the world of art and eagle artefacts from natural history museums, but also everyday objects depicting eagles. Particularly the latter objects illustrated Broodthaers’s method of deconstruction and demythologisation, as well as his Marxist stance in addressing the difference between the pure material value and the surplus value of the products. For
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Broodthaers the principle of the myth of commodities corresponded to the principle of the museum: the products assume qualities extending beyond their functionality and utility. At the same time, insight into the background of their production is suppressed. Like works of art, commodities seem to have a life of their own, detached from the context of their origin.
35 Broodthaers provokes the viewer by juxtaposing eagles in art and eagles in advertising — the seemingly liberated eagle in historical art and the unfree eagle in contemporary F0 F0 advertising, as it were. He explains that “ 5B … 5D when it places thought within a frame of reference that can help the individual protect himself against the images and texts communicated by mass media and advertising, which shape our codes of behaviour and ideology” (Borgemeister 1987, 42: 145).
Experiment 3: Completion by the viewer
36 For Broodthaers, the viewer plays a central role in the execution of the experiment. The directors Hartan and Ruhrberg emphasized that “the exhibitions are made for the visitor” (Broodthaers 1972, II: 5). Broodthaers wanted to dissolve the traditional role of the viewer as that of a merely passive perceiver. The activity he demanded was the cognitive completion of the project by the public, who were to be encouraged to intellectually embrace works of art beyond merely consuming them. The recipient would then be integrated into the process by giving meaning, a process that would deprive both the artist and the museum of their authority. The displacement in authority would lead to the de-hierarchisation of given structures. The spatial- temporal sequence of the individual sections of the fictional museum and the integration of the role-playing shifted the emphasis from the object to the process. In this project, Broodthaers assumed the role not only of artist, but also of museum director, curator, art historian and collector. The viewer was charged with completing the work of art. The fictional museum sought no unequivocal and universally valid interpretation, nor any denotation, but rather a connotation, an ambiguity, which the viewer would decipher and complete in his or her own way. Accordingly, visitors’ comments were recorded in the catalogue for The Eagle from the Oligocene to the Present, where the two directors — Hartan and Ruhrberg — explain in their introduction: “We invited the public to collaborate on our experiment. The second part of the catalogue therefore begins with comments from visitors to the exhibition” (Broodthaers 1972, II: 5). Broodthaers let the visitors have their own say and made them assume the role of an art historian or critic by publishing their intellectual contributions in the form of a commentary. For the first time, the Städtische Kunsthalle thus presented an exhibition catalogue in two parts, with the second part containing the public’s comments following the opening. De-hierarchisation could be seen again in the selection of comments, which were published in no particular order and in uncensored form. Unqualified comments such as “Probably supposed to give the Chinese after World War III an overview of our present culture” (Broodthaers 1972, II: 8) were included as well as those obviously misunderstanding the point of the exhibition, such as “Informative! But why aren’t the objects decorated or fitted with eagles, etc. not works of art? Who decides this?” (Broodthaers 1972, II: 9). Besides the large number of negative comments and those showing a misunderstanding, some positive remarks were also published:
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“The myth of the eagle is demystified by the myth of ‘This is not a work of art’. An interesting exhibition — confusing + stimulating.” (Broodthaers 1972, II: 11)
37 In the catalogue Broodthaers asks: “To what extent has information about contemporary art penetrated into the public’s consciousness?” (Broodthaers 1972, I: 16). Provocatively directing this question at the public, he immediately gives the expected answer: ”’This is not … this is not a work of art” means nothing other than: “You, the public — how blind you are!”’(Broodthaers 1972, I: 16). Broodthaers seems not to have expected that the public would understand his project in terms of the concept of art and the idea of the eagle — which gave his museum the subtitle Département des Aigles and was visualised in the Section des Figures. On this point Harten F0 F0 remarks: “ 5B … 5D to refer the purpose without regard for the thing, the eagle, to an iconographic idea, means for Broodthaers to be blind” (Broodthaers 1972, II: 24). Broodthaers himself writes in retrospect in the second part of the catalogue about the results of his experimental exhibition: “The goal is to suggest a critical reflection on how art is presented in public. As regards perception by the public, I find that habits and personal fixations stand in the way of an unprejudiced reading. Nevertheless, the plaque bearing the inscription: ‘This is not a work of art’ plays a certain role. It disrupts the visitor’s narcissistic projection onto the object he or she is viewing, but it does not reach their consciousness” (Broodthaers 1972, II: 19).
38 While the public’s perception can be disrupted, the exhibition is unable to achieve a reflective result in terms of the idea of art and the idea of the eagle. The only remaining hope is therefore “that the viewer assumes the risk him or herself — for a moment — of no longer feeling so much at ease in his or her own senses” (Dickhoff 1994: 12).
Conclusion
39 Following Roland Barthes, we can characterise Broodthaers’s Musée d’Art Moderne, Département des Aigles as a second-order myth (Broodthaers 1972, I: 16). His analysis of the concepts of art, the museum and the eagle aimed at their demythologisation. By utilising the structure of the museum, he integrated the myth of the museum in the artificial myth of his own museum. This artificial myth in particular helped him to uncover the quasi natural conditions of the museum as something historically evolved. The museum, whose construction historically depends on systems of classification, presents the latter as natural and unalterable givens. From behind the myth of the museum have emerged its social and political conditions, so that the museum could now be unmasked as the product of bourgeois ideology (Oppitz 1972: 177-180). This process is exemplified by the case of the eagle. In his Section des Figures Broodthaers exposed the Myth of the Eagle by producing in his museum an artificial myth. Through the constant repetition of this myth, in which Broodthaers stylised the eagle in all the forms of its overloaded significance in order to turn it into a sort of super eagle, he dissolved its ultra-meaning and reduced the object to what it actually is: an eagle. This enables us to perceive the apparent naturalness of the Eagle myth as historically conditioned. The second-order myth enabled him to overturn all definitions and overdetermination of the eagle objects.
40 Finally, at this point we can acknowledge the distinctly experimental character of Broodthaers’s art, which explores the diverse definitions and possibilities of art on the levels of “the museum”, “the exhibition” and “the viewer”. He raised questions as to
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whether a museum or an exhibition could be a work of art, for example, leaving the answers up to the visitor. He thus focussed his artistic endeavours on the issue of how the museum participates in defining art and in establishing the status of works of art as fetish objects. With his experimental exhibition he attempted to free the work of art from its commodity value and the eagle from its overloaded symbolism, and to demythologise the creature. In this way artistic differs from scientific experimentation: Broodthaers’s experiment did not involve controlled and purposive actions whose repetition would always yield the same results. Rather, such experiments were and are bound to a specific place and time, for the public’s reactions will vary depending on when and where such artistic experiments occur.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Broodthaers, Marcel. Marcel Broodthaers, Der Adler vom Oligozän bis heute. Vol. I and II. Exh. Cat. Düsseldorf: Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, 1972.
Broodthaers, Marcel. Marcel Broodthaers. Exh. Cat. Paris: Galerie nationale du Jeu de Paume, 1991.
Broodthaers, Marcel. Marcel Broodthaers. Exh. Cat. Paris: Galerie nationale du Jeu de Paume, 1992.
Broodthaers, Marcel. Marcel Broodthaers: Projections. Exh. Cat. Eindhoven: Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum, 1994.
Broodthaers, Marcel. Els Límits des Museum. Exh. Cat. Barcelona: Fundació Antoni Tàpies, 1995: 68-79.
Broodthaers, Marcel. Marcel Broodthaers. Cinéma. Exh. Cat. Düsseldorf/Berlin: Kunsthalle Düsseldorf/Nationalgalerie Berlin, 1997.
Broodthaers, Marcel. Marcel Broodthaers. Politique/Poetique. Exh. Cat. Wien: Kunsthalle Wien, 2003.
Broodthaers, Marcel. “Der Nullpunkt.” Heute Kunst N° 1, April 1973: 20.
Barthes, Roland. Mythen des Alltags. Trans. Horst Brühmann. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2008.
Borgemeister, Rainer and Chris Cullens. “‘Section des Figures’ The Eagle from the Oligocene to the Present.” October Vol. 42, Autumn 1987: 135-154. DOI: 10.2307/778271
Borgemeister, Rainer. Marcel Broodthaers. Lesen und Sehen, Bonn: Weidle Verlag, 2003.
Buchloh, Benjamin H. D., Gilissen, Maria, eds. Marcel Broodthaers. Section Publicité du Musée d’Art Moderne, Département des Aigles. New York: Marian Goodman Gallery, 1995.
Crimp, Douglas. “Dies ist kein Kunstmuseum.” Über die Ruinen des Museums. Dresden/Basel: Verlag der Künste, 1996. 212-241.
Dickhoff, Wilfried, ed., Marcel Broodthaers. Interviews & Dialoge. Köln: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1994.
Dinçkal, Noyan. “Wissenschaftsgeschichte.” Handbuch Moderneforschung. Interdisziplinäre und internationale Perspektiven. Friedrich Jäger, Wolfgang Knöbl and Ute Schneider, eds. Stuttgart: Verlag J.B. Metzler, 2015.
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Dingler, Hugo. Das Experiment: sein Wesen und seine Geschichte. München: Mentis 1928.
Gombrich, Ernst. The Story of Art. London: Phaidon 1984.
König, Susanne. Marcel Broodthaers. Musée d’Art Moderne, Département des Aigles. Berlin: Reimer, 2012.
Malraux, André. “Das imaginäre Museum” in Stimme der Stille. Baden-Baden: Woldemar Klein Verlag, 1956.
Minges, Klaus. Das Sammlungswesen der frühen Neuzeit. Kriterien der Ordnung und Spezialisierung. Münster: Lit-Verlag, 1998.
Oppitz, Michael. “Adler Pfeife Urinoir.” Interfunktionen 9, Köln, 1972: 177-180.
Rheinberger, Hans-Jörg. “Experiment, Forschung, Kunst” Jahreskonferenz der Dramaturgischen Gesellschaft, Oldenburg, 26–29 April 2012. https://dg.websyntax.de/assets/Uploads/ ContentElements/Attachments/Hans-Joerg-Rheinberger-Experiment-Forschung-Kunst.pdf
Zwirner, Dorothea. Marcel Broodthaers. Köln: König, 1997. 116-139.
NOTES
1. See Borgemeister (1987); Borgemeister (2003: 137-192); Crimp (1996); Dickhoff (1994: 75-96); König (2012); Zwirner (1997: 116-139); Broodthaers (1991: 189-231) and Marcel Broodthaers: Projections (1994: 46-53, 78-87). 2. Interview with Jürgen Harten on 26th May 2000.
ABSTRACTS
Experimentation is integral to literature and art as well as to the natural sciences. The search for new artistic means of expression, the formation of a new canon and the use of new artistic materials are all based on findings obtained through experimentation. Experimentation was a key category for the modernists in particular. The difference of modern art with previous periods lies especially with its having given a new programmatic significance to experimental procedures in both the natural sciences and art. Modern artists are characterised by a stylistic pluralism as an expression of a constantly changing society, accompanied by a new understanding of art. In particular, art after 1945 gave rise to a new concept of art hardly anticipated in the traditional genres of painting and sculpture, for example. Thus “experimentation” nowadays refers to controlled, purposive action aiming at some specific goal: the invention of something new or the production of new knowledge. This quest for the new characterises modern art and in particular contemporary art in a variety of ways. While controlled artistic practices may at first glance seem to conflict with the artist’s claim to freedom, artists do indeed seek new practices that are repeatable and therefore controllable. Not everything that is contemporary is experimental. “Experimental” does not just refer to something new — experimental art rather comes from certain experimental methods. In his work Musée d’Art Moderne, Département des Aigles (1968-72) the Belgian artist and poet Marcel Broodthaers investigates a particular form of experimental
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art. Broodthaers’ fictional museum project provides a good basis for a study of the concept, as the artist has himself repeatedly referred to the experimental quality of his art. Indeed, our starting assumption in this essay is that this work by Broodthaers illustrates in a paradigmatic way central elements of experimentation in contemporary art of the 1960s and 70s. For example, on 16 May 1972 Broodthaers opened a section of a museum entitled The Eagle from the Oligocene to the Present in the Städtischer Kunsthalle in Düsseldorf, signing it with the following words: “Marcel Broodthaers shows an experimental exhibition of his Musée d’Art Moderne, Département des Aigles, Section des Figures”. The first part of this essay examines the experiment in which a museum with altogether twelve sections is declared to be a work of art. The second part then explicates the experiment in which an exhibition is declared to be a work of art. Finally, the third part examines the role of the viewer within Broodthaers’ artistic experiment.
L’expérience fait partie intégrante des sciences naturelles, de la littérature et de l’art. La recherche de nouveaux moyens d’expression artistique, la création d’un nouveau canon ou l’utilisation de nouveaux matériaux artistiques, tout cela vient de découvertes accompagnées d’expériences. En particulier pour l’âge moderne, l’expérience est considérée comme une catégorie clé. La principale différence de l’art moderne par rapport aux époques précédentes est que dans la modernité, la signification programmatique des méthodes expérimentales dans les sciences naturelles et les arts a changé. La modernité a été marquée par le pluralisme stylistique comme expression d’une société en constante évolution et s’est accompagnée d’une nouvelle conception de l’art. Par-dessus tout, l’art d’après 1945 constitue un nouveau concept de l’art, qui ne correspond guère aux genres artistiques habituels tels que la peinture et la sculpture traditionnelles. À l’heure actuelle, l’expérience est considérée comme une action contrôlée et axée sur des buts avec un objectif principal: pour inventer de nouvelles choses ou générer de nouvelles idées. Cette quête de quelque chose de nouveau caractérise l’art moderne et surtout l’art contemporain à bien des égards. Tandis que les pratiques artistiques contrôlables semblent à première vue contredire la prétention artistique de liberté, les artistes recherchent aussi dans leurs œuvres des pratiques nouvelles, reproduisibles et donc maîtrisables. Cependant, tout ce qui est contemporain n’est pas nécessairement expérimental. Expérimental n’est pas un terme qui désigne quelque chose de nouveau en général, en revanche, l’art expérimental a été créé par certaines méthodes expérimentales. L’œuvre Musée d’Art Moderne, Département des Aigles (1968-1972) de l’artiste et poète belge Marcel Broodthaers explore une forme particulière d’art expérimental. Le projet de musée fictif de Broodthaers est un bon choix parce que l’artiste lui- même s’est souvent référé à la qualité expérimentale de son art. En fait, selon l’hypothèse initiale de cet article, l’œuvre d’art de Broodthaers montre de façon paradigmatique des éléments centraux de l’expérience de l’art contemporain des années 60 et 70. Le 16 mai 1972, par exemple, Broodthaers ouvrit au Städtische Kunsthalle de Düsseldorf un département intitulé “Der Adler vom Oligozän” et le signa ainsi: “Marcel Broodthaers présente une exposition expérimentale de son Musée d’Art Moderne, Département des Aigles, Section des Figures”. La première partie de cet essai examine l’expérience dans laquelle un musée de douze sections au total est déclaré œuvre d’art. Le second aborde ensuite l’expérience dans laquelle une exposition est déclarée œuvre d’art. Et la troisième examine le rôle du spectateur dans l’expérience artistique de Broodthaer.
INDEX
Mots-clés: art conceptuel, art contemporain, 1960 (années), 1970 (années), Broodthaers Marcel, critique institutionnelle, expérience artistique, rôle du spectateur Keywords: artistic experiment, Broodthaers Marcel, concept art, contemporary art, 1960s, 1970s, institutional critique, role of the viewer
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AUTHOR
SUSANNE KÖNIG Susanne König is Professor of Art History at the Fachhochschule Potsdam. Her current research focuses on the circulation of knowledge between art and design. Before that she was a member of the academic staff at the University of Leipzig, the University of Paderborn and the University of Siegen. She studied art history and philosophy at the University of Stuttgart as well as arts and media management at the Hanns Eisler School of Music in Berlin. She is the author of Marcel Broodthaers: The Musée d’Art Moderne, Département des Aigles, Reimer Verlag, Berlin, 2012. Contact: Koenig[at]fh-potsdam.de
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Curating Creative Experimentation: the HyperPavilion at the 57th Venice Biennial Interview with Philippe Riss-Schmidt
Philippe Riss-Schmidt and Anne-Laure Fortin-Tournès
EDITOR'S NOTE
The interview was conducted via e-mail in November 2017.
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Figure 1: HyperPavilion, courtesy of Philippe Riss-Schmidt
Photo by Vinciane Lebrun-Verguethen
Anne-Laure Fortin-Tournès: You curated the HyperPavilion exhibition in this year’s Venice Biennial.1 In what way can it be said that the HyperPavilion engages with the idea and the forms of experimentation in the arts? Philippe Riss-Schmidt: As a curator I seek to explore the ways in which the digital and physical worlds have merged to create an entangled hybrid new reality that encompasses and envelops us globally, therefore it is very difficult for me to imagine curating a prospective exhibition without presenting networked, time-based or generative art pieces… The idea of experience is everywhere at the HyperPavilion. The limitation for me is to use technology not as a tool, but for its own purpose. Therefore, to answer your question, I believe the notion of experimentation is systematically underlying the exhibition because it is quite difficult to curate an exhibition that comments on our times, if the exhibition remains static. It is experimental because experimentalism is where the critical edge lies. Since the digital exhibition revolution has now become a fact, an accurate exhibition can only be a transition exhibition, i.e. an exhibition that continues to exist after it is officially closed. However, because the digital revolution started more than twenty years ago and is accelerating, I really don’t think we can still equate the use of digital means with experimental art.
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Figure 2: HyperPavilion, courtesy of Philippe Riss-Schmidt
Photo by Vinciane Lebrun-Verguethen
ALFT: Prior to the opening of the Biennial, an article published on March 27, 2017 in Artnews online2 announced that the HyperPavilion would present “post-humanist art”. How would you define post-humanism? PRS: In this article written for Artnews I meant that we presented at the HyperPavilion several pieces that were created by the artists with the help of an AI (Artificial Intelligence). But more importantly, I globally meant that due to the connectivity of exponential network systems, we have witnessed the emergence of the first global civilisation and at a same time of multi-centred civilisation. We are at an impending post-human civilisation turn: the infiltration of the network is ubiquitous, the merging of the physical and digital has created a continuous vibration, everything is linked by direct or distended contact, everything is connected, everything is entangled, everything is bathed in the same environment that unfolds in successive encapsulations, which are both visible and invisible. Maybe I should have said post- biohuman rather than post-human because machines have not won yet.
ALFT: Did you conceive of, and experience, the curation of HyperPavilion as a moment and as a gesture of creation? PRS: The exhibition was quite immersive, the idea was for the visitors to experience what was exhibited in a new way — the exhibition included a 360° theatre, very large- scale projections, a hologram theatre… There was indeed a curatorial decision to conceive the exhibition as a moment of immersion and therefore of creative experimentation.
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Figure 3: HyperPavilion, courtesy of Philippe Riss-Schmidt
Photo by Vinciane Lebrun-Verguethen
ALFT: Most, if not all of the works exhibited at the HyperPavilion are site specific. How did you select the artists? Which criteria were applied to the selection? PRS: I have been following the research of these artists for a while now, I did select a mix of native artists (raised on the internet) and non-native artists (born before the internet). I have been lucky enough to work with a producer willing to produce several new art pieces but we also worked with existing pieces that we did adapt to the venue. It was essential to work with native artists because of the way they think and work: native artists belong to the first generation whose brains have acquired plasticity, who have been changed over time by the internet and the new technologies. The next step would be to work on an exhibition with post-native artists, that is to say the GEN Z.3
ALFT: Did you intervene in the creation of the works? Were they the product of a form of artistic dialogue? PRS: Yes, a lot. Curating, in my opinion, must be understood as a methodology. Curators must not limit their roles to just researching artists and their works, but expand their roles. They must discern in which direction humanity is going, now that we are all connected… I always worked like that, more particularly when a new piece is commissioned that is very exciting to tackle with the artist.
ALFT: How would you describe the public targeted by the Venice Biennial? Is the public visiting the HyperPavilion different from it? PRS: Being at the Biennale, we targeted both the art world and the newcomers. We had more than 50,000 visitors, it was interesting to see the reaction of native and non-native visitors. While native visitors felt immediately at home, you could see the traditional (non-native) visitors struggle somewhat at the beginning, but on leaving the venue, I believe everyone had learned something.
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ALFT: Would you say that post-humanist art is accessible to a wider public than art whose focus and/or medium is not digital? PRS: Thanks to the expanding networks and the many different means of dissemination nowadays, it is obviously easier to disseminate art and reach out to people, but I would not state that art is accessible to a wider public… yet.
ALFT: Immersion as a medium and a new form of exhibiting art is of paramount importance in the HyperPavilion. In what way would you say that digital immersion changes the public’s way of apprehending art works? PRS: We live in a post-“white cube” 4 era, physical space is no longer the final destination of an exhibition but a part of the exhibition itself. In the 21st century, if you want to comment on the world we live in, the exhibition needs to be built as a transition show that is at the same time physically immersive and that also continues evolving during and after the show.
ALFT: The works presented at HyperPavilion all used and questioned technology. Were they also critical vis-à-vis their uses and abuses? PRS: Actually, the entire exhibition is very critical of new technology, if not dystopian. The first HyperPavilion was a survey exhibition at large. Being in the Venice Biennial for the first time, it was important for me to propose a general statement. HyperPavilion did focus on an international group of artists, whose common objectives question, challenge and respond to the digital transition. Now that the digital revolution has happened, and that everything from climate to technology is changing at an accelerating pace, l will say humanity has entered phase two of the Anthropocene,5 and it does not look good.
ALFT: You used the word “e-renaissance” in connection with HyperPavilion. What did you mean? PRS: It was a euphemism, I meant exactly the contrary actually. I believe we are entering again into dark times not to say the e-Middle Ages. We live in “filter bubble” 6 times where algorithms designed by the very few regulate and monitor the lives of millions of humans, and in the end this risks isolating people within their own bubbles of interest. The world belongs to the lords of GAFA7 in the western world or to the kings of BATX8 in Asia. I don’t think we are even close to an e-res-publica.
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Figure 4: HyperPavilion, courtesy of Philippe Riss-Schmidt
Photo by Vinciane Lebrun-Verguethen
NOTES
1. Founded in 1895, La Biennale di Venezia (the Venice Biennial) is a cultural institution dedicated to the organization of international, multi-disciplinary exhibitions and events foregrounding avant-garde creation in the visual arts (International Art Exhibition), film (International Film Festival), architecture (contemporary music and theatre, contemporary dance. The 57th Biennial during which the HyperPavilion was presented opened on May 13, 2017 and closed on November 26, 2017. See the Bienniale di Venezia official website (http:// www.labiennale.org) and the Biennial Foundation website (http://www.biennialfoundation.org). 2. Alex Greenberger, “‘Welcome to the E-Renaissance’: ‘HyperPavilion’ Will Showcase Post- Humanist Art During Venice Biennale”, http://www.artnews.com/2017/03/27/hyperpavilion- venice-biennale/ 3. “Generation Z”, also called “iGeneration”, designates the generation of individuals born around and after the millennium. They are characterised by their familiarity with the internet technology and the digital environment in general. Generation Z follows Generation X (mid 1960s-mid 1970s, the children of the baby boomers) and Generation Y (those born between the 1980s and 2000), in a classification system that was originally designed by demographers and sociologists using the United States’ demographic history as a reference. 4. This phrase is used to refer to the art gallery, especially conceived as a relational space between the viewers and the exhibited works, as it was argued by art critic Brian O’Doherty in his seminal book, Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space (1976).
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5. The term has been used informally since the mid 1970s and popularised in 2000 to refer to the radical changes brought to the earth’s ecosystems as a result of human activity. Modelled on the designation of geological epochs, the word “anthropocene” is derived from the Greek words anthropos (“human”), and kainos (“new”, “recent”). The curatorial statement presenting the HyperPavilion provides the following comment: “Anthropocene is a term that etymologically translates as new human. An epoch, which specifically focuses on human’s impact on the Earth’s geology and ecosystems. Humanity has entered phase two of the Anthropocene, due to the connectivity of its network system, it has formed both a global and multi-centred civilisation. Additionally, the exhibition makes reference to the Gaïa hypothesis, which depicts our Earth as an intelligent, networked and self-regulated system.” See the HyperPavilion website: http:// hyperpavilion2017.com/# (accessed January 5, 2018). 6. Coined by American internet activist Eli Pariser, the expression refers to the risk of cultural and ideological isolation because website algorithms select the type of information that users would like to read based on their personalised previous searches, resulting in a considerable narrowing of the exposure to contrary or alternative information. 7. GAFA is an acronym for Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon. 8. BATX is an acronym for the rival companies of GAFA in Asia: Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent and Xiaomi.
ABSTRACTS
The interview tackles the issue of the relations between art and technology, curation and creation in the digital age. Philippe Riss-Schmidt, the curator of the HyperPavilion presented in the 57th Venice Biennial in 2017, comments on the conception of the exhibition as an experimental immersive space designed to reflect on the post-biohuman world we are entering, and to offer a critical perspective on how artists confront and challenge the digital revolution.
L’entretien aborde la question des rapports entre l’art et la technologie, entre l’activité de commissariat d’expositions et la création artistique à l’ère digitale. Philippe Riss-Schmidt, le commissaire de HyperPavilion, exposition présentée à la 57e Biennale de Venise en 2017, évoque sa conception de l’exposition comme un lieu expérimental et immersive conçu à la fois pour refléter le monde post-humain dans lequel nous entrons et pour proposer un point de vue critique sur la manière dont les artistes s’emparent de la révolution digitale pour mieux la défier.
INDEX
Keywords: contemporary art, experimental, digital exhibition, curation, post-human art Mots-clés: art contemporain, expérimental, exposition numérique, commissariat d’exposition, art posthumain
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AUTHORS
PHILIPPE RISS-SCHMIDT Philippe Riss-Schmidt, curator and founder of the HyperPavilion, is a curator and exhibition maker based in Paris and Paimpol, France. Philippe also runs the PR Curatorial Office (2016), a curatorial bureau devoted to the organisation of large-scale outdoor and indoor exhibitions. His previous key curatorial projects include: New2; Drawing After Digital; Surface Proxy; Full Screen; #1DAD. He has organised the HyperSalon at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, and inaugurated the #postdigital conference cycle at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris. In addition, he has worked as a gallerist and art advisor in London and Paris. Contact: philippe[at]hyperpavilion.io
ANNE-LAURE FORTIN-TOURNÈS Anne-Laure Fortin-Tournès is Professor of British literature at Le Mans Université (France). Her research focuses on contemporary and ultra-contemporary art and literature. She has published books and articles on British contemporary art and fiction: Martin Amis et le postmodernisme (Rennes, PUR, 2003), Les Figures de la violence (Paris, Publibook, 2005) Parcours/détours (Paris, Publibook, 2008). Her current work revolves around the representations and imaginaries of the body in hypertext literature. Contact: al.fortin-tournes[at]wanadoo.fr
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Varia
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F. H. Bradley’s Neoplatonic Turn in Ethical Studies (1876)
Jean-Paul Rosaye
1 According to a persistent interpretation, Francis Herbert Bradley was a major representative of a neo-Hegelian trend that spread in Britain in the late-Victorian period and consolidated into a British Idealist movement. It also insists that this philosophical experiment was short-lived, as it was overwhelmed at the beginning of the 20th century by a philosophical revolution initiated by Bertrand Russell and George Edward Moore. However, this interpretation has been wholly reconsidered since the 1980s following the formidable reassessment not only of Bradley’s metaphysics but also of the impact of the whole movement in British philosophy and politics.1 Russell’s importance as a philosopher has not been undermined in this revision, but it is now accepted that Bradley’s philosophy and the Idealist movement were not a mere transition filling the gap between the old empiricist school of the mid-19th century and the new analytical philosophy of the early 20th century (Rosaye 2012a). If anything, British Idealism is now viewed as a complex and cogent philosophical stream that can neither be disproved, nor neglected and disposed of easily.
2 One of the major attacks led by Russell against idealism was the accusation of its subservience to Hegelianism, whose main representative in England was Bradley. Russell aimed at what he perceived as Bradley’s Hegelian metaphysical shortcomings to perform his own revolution, but like all successful revolutions it was also linked to other factors. On closer scrutiny, Russell’s new philosophical tools were also promoted by the scientific revolution, as they were simply better adapted to the new logical and physical models contradicting the old Newtonian world-system. All the philosophies which had heavily invested in epistemology and ontology, while following the methods that had befitted the Newtonian world of science, had become either outmoded or useless.
3 Yet, the claim that Bradley’s so-called Hegelian philosophy was the heart of the matter, and the idea that Russell's thrusts explain the demise of Idealism and the philosophical upheaval in the last century, are nevertheless elements worth exploring as they seem neither totally right nor totally wrong. The dilemma runs as follows: after showing
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great interest in Hegel’s philosophy, Bradley openly rejected Hegelianism and denied there was anything like a Hegelian school in England; Bradley’s repudiation of Hegelianism was criticised by the British Idealists who still regarded Hegel’s metaphysics as the main model to follow; a split in the Idealist movement occurred between monists and personal idealists, prompted by a refusal of some aspects of Hegel’s system and of Bradley’s monism, which by that time had diverged from Hegelianism; lastly, Bradley considered that his own metaphysics ended with “something not very different, something perhaps more certainly the essential message of Hegel” (AR 552).
4 Bradley’s interpretation of Hegel is obviously the clue to this dilemma, and it has to be explained to rectify the claim of his debt to Hegel. Moreover, as Russell’s misunderstanding or perhaps fraudulent interpretation of Bradley was effective (Wander 1994: chap. 4; Candlish 2007), we can conjecture that it touched upon the difficult importation of Hegelianism in Britain, where an old idealist tradition already existed and had re-emerged at the beginning of the 19th century.
5 Contrasting with the introduction of Kant’s philosophy in Britain, Hegel’s philosophy had always been treated with caution and had met with frequent disapproval. Finally, the compatibilities between Hegelianism and the existing idealist tradition in England engaged the whole Idealist movement into such scholastic quandaries that an Occamian razor-like intervention was needed.
6 This essay aims to show how Bradley, after using Hegel’s conceptual power and vigour to dig strenuously into the perplexities of his age, turned to Neoplatonism and conceived an original metaphysical position which forced other idealists to question their own. Eventually, although it provided considerable philosophical speculation, shaking English philosophy out of its former simplistic complacency, the British Idealist movement did not get over its divisions, sounded out of place. It was finally taken over by the congenial empiricist and common sense traditions, better adapted to the new emerging scientific world-system.
7 1865 was a key date in the history of British philosophy. While Bradley entered University College, Oxford, to study philosophy as an undergraduate that year, two important books were published: John Stuart Mill’s An Examination of Sir William Hamilton's Philosophy, and John Hutchison Stirling’s The Secret of Hegel. These books were epoch-making as they symbolically marked the end of the philosophical domination of the empiricist and common sense traditions in Britain and the birth of the British Idealist movement. The famous controversy regarding the relativity of knowledge2 started by Mill (1873) to oppose Hamilton’s philosophy and its major exponents has to be seen in the wider context of the main issues of the Victorian Age, set in a tension between the traditional make-up of ‘old and merry England’ and the modernising forces of industrial society. What was needed at that time was a theoretical foundation adapting the traditional settings of a Christian society to the new advance made by scientific knowledge and the transformations of society. In other words, it had become crucial to temper the materialist drive supported by the naturalists and the positivists, as well as to remedy the ‘Victorian crisis of faith’ of the 1850s and 1860s3. The solution offered by Kant, showing the limits of the understanding to fathom the realm of the ‘thing in itself’ and leaving reason to the practical field of our actions and judgments was turned by Hamilton, Mansel and Spencer into the vague theory of the ‘Unknowable’ where faith and religion were mixed in a rather confused form of
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mysticism. This solution was not sufficient, and the naturalist-scientist devotees, though they were theoretically committed to confuting the relativity of knowledge, finally put up with it as it ruled out any interest in the absolute and left science with the task of building up a consistent knowledge of the world. But the ‘relativity of knowledge’ controversy only reached stalemate and left the two camps with the inability to produce any useful and reliable philosophical agreement (Rosaye 2012b).
8 For quite some time, a myth was entertained that Stirling’s book, The Secret of Hegel, provided in 1865 the answer to the ‘Victorian crisis of faith’, making Hegel the champion of Christianity, and setting up the neo-Hegelian school which responded to the metaphysical issue in sketching the much-needed doctrine of the Absolute. But there are good reasons to believe this was indeed a myth. Conveniently, it provides a date for the beginning of the British Idealist movement, but it is misleading as it conveys a simplistic picture of the Idealist achievement in the 19th century. In addition, despite the enormous success of his book, Stirling was not taken seriously in British universities, which he never joined as a fellow; and it was also mockingly remarked at the time that he had kept Hegel’s secret very well. Other elements must be taken into account.
9 Since Coleridge and Carlyle, and perhaps starting with the Romantic criticism of utilitarianism, laissez-faire economics and industrial society as a whole, idealism had materialised as one possible answer to the alienating venture of modernity. The tradition of Platonic idealism in England was reinvigorated by Coleridge and Carlyle to contradict what T. H. Green called the ‘popular philosophy’ stemming from the spirit of the Aufklärung (Green 1888). Their intellectual fight against abstract egalitarianism, the Jacobin passion, and Napoleonic imperialism was in tune with the conservatism of Burke but also with Fichtean nationalism and the idealist revolution in Germany that Kant had started in an attempt to restore the notion of transcendence. These ‘literary philosophers’ were only the first phase of growth of idealism in the 19th century, but their enterprise was extended and systematised by philosophers who, while they resorted to a strategic use of German Idealist philosophy, also fostered a revival of Greek letters, going back as it were to the basics of the philosophical endeavour.
10 Alongside Stirling’s passion for Hegel, Benjamin Jowett had a decisive influence in introducing Hegel’s philosophy in the curriculum at Balliol College in the 1860s, asking Edward Caird and T. H. Green to use it as a model to counter the philosophies of Spencer, Mill and Alexander Bain. But Jowett embodied the ambiguities of Hegelianism in Britain as he gradually refrained from the strategic use of Hegel and decided to return to Plato and offer a translation of his dialogues to contribute to the Philhellenic ideal in Britain. The ambiguity of this derivation, either following Hegel, or imparting new vitality to Platonic studies, was reconciled by Green.4 He infused a real interest for philosophical speculation to his students (Nettelship 91-7), and he gathered the problems of his age in an adroit parallel with the time of Protagoras, equating the task of Plato and Aristotle against the Sophists with the fight led by Kant and Hegel against the materialism and agnosticism of the modern age (Green 1888). In the wake of Green’s teaching at Balliol, his students also aimed at a theoretical refoundation of philosophy and considered that Mill’s philosophy was much below what was needed. As William Wallace wrote, “[Mill’s] conception, although a desirable one, falls short of the work which Hegel assigns to philosophy” (Wallace xxii).
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11 It is possible to distinguish three main perspectives in the idealist movement which moved in the direction indicated by Green: the historical question of progress and evolution, the care for politics and ethics, and a philosophical reinterpretation of religion. The first two followed the Hegelian theme of the progress of reason in history. Hegel’s conceptual precision and systematicity was helpful, even if it required arduous efforts and time for Green and his students to match their model. The third perspective, the religious question, was much more delicate. Even if some scholars have intimated that the German Idealist philosophers finalised the ideal of the Reformation (Jaeger 324, qtd by Gallet 130) and that Hegel came to crown their intellectual monument, the complexity of the religious question in England prevented from the outset direct use of Hegelian schemes. This is the general intellectual context in which Bradley emerged as the most central and enigmatic representative of the whole British Idealist movement. As he listened to Green’s lectures and had chosen him as his tutor to supervise his first essays, he could neither escape the rising tide of Hegelianism nor the strong bias in favour of classical studies in Oxford. Nor could he ignore the philosophical and religious conflicts of his day.
12 Bradley became a fellow of Merton College in 1870 and in the following four years he directly worked on some key debates of his time, such as the question of miracles, the critical method, and the relativity of knowledge. We can trace the evolution of his thought concerning Hegel’s philosophy in his pamphlet on critical history which discusses these issues, The Presuppositions of Critical History, published in 1874, two letters sent to his brother in February 1873, and a manuscript entitled ‘The Relativity of Knowledge’ written in 1873-74, that is to say, just a few years before the publication of his first important work, Ethical Studies (1876) — made him famous on the philosophical scene. It is in this period that Bradley first formulated the key ideas that he developed afterwards in his epistemological and metaphysical works.
13 His pamphlet on critical history, and more specifically his note E, in the appendix, which is the real conclusion of the book, was centred on the idea of the finiteness of man: “Everything, we have said, depends on personal experience” (PCH 59). The main problem comes from the mediation with the universe, which Bradley considered as a system, an organism, not unrelated to man’s thought and feeling: The universe seems to be one system; it is an organism (it would appear) and more. It bears the character of the self, the personality to which it is relative, and without which for us it is as good as nothing (PCH 65).
14 How is it possible to characterise the mediation between the finiteness of man and the infinite, to reach the truth of any singular historical moment, as well as the reality of the universe? It is of course an important Hegelian theme. But the main problem comes from the fact that Hegel presupposed the perfect mediation of Reason, introducing the idea that God is thought, and that man could also have access to absolute knowledge. This went beyond the Kantian presupposition of man’s fallibility and openly challenged the usual conceptions of the relativity of knowledge of the time.
15 In a letter to his brother Andrew, Bradley exposed Hegel’s solution, encapsulated in the famous phrase from the preface of Principles of the Philosophy of Right, “what is rational is real, and what is real is rational”, and he did it with some reservations on the meaning of ‘rational’: All I was talking about was the theoretical question. I am not competent to say whether Hegel has answered it or not: or whether the question has any sense! The
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question is simply ‘Can you account for nonsense?’ & perhaps that is nonsense. Can you from thought generate the world? Of course you cannot because you are finite. But if God is thought, does that account for the existence of such a world as ours? Of course not in detail, but can we see far enough to say that God or the thought wh. makes the world a system is the creative prius of the matter of sense, so that nothing is lost but that the sensuous world is (as a whole) beautiful & rational & that the rational isn’t the dry bones of it merely (Corresp. 4).
16 In the manuscript ‘The relativity of knowledge’, where the problem of thought and sense is carefully studied with the help of Hegel’s philosophy, that is with the idea that ontology is the solution to the deadlock produced by the conflict between the schools of Mill and of Hamilton, Bradley did not develop what he called “The true doctrine”, “the Absolute” as the “reconciled contradiction”, and he only sketched the outline of a system on the status of knowledge and on the Absolute as thought. It might have been too early for Bradley, who was just starting his career as a philosopher. But given the fact that by 1883, in his book The Principles of Logic, Bradley was no longer prepared to accept Hegel’s main principle, as he made clear in his conclusion (PL Book III, Part II, Chap. IV, §16: 591), it seems evident that his reservations prevented him from following Hegel blindly and produce the system British Idealists were looking for.
17 In Ethical Studies, Bradley worked out his divorce from the idea that the real is rational and distanced himself from the possibility of a perfect mediation by reason alone, through the patient conceptual approach leading to absolute knowledge. Although generally interpreted as his most Hegelian book, mainly because three consecutive essays were written in the shape of a perfect dialectical demonstration and leading to a final statement that echoed the Hegelian Sittlichkeit, where the objective spirit finally reaches maturity, this book is also where Bradley finally turned to a Neoplatonic approach of morality and religion which he would uphold in his later metaphysical works. In his unfinished article on ‘Relations’, written shortly before his death in 1924, Bradley had fused elements coming from Plotinus’ analogy of the “flight of the alone to the alone” as well as from the common Hegelian theme of “unity in diversity”: Nothing in the end is real but the individual; and the individual is unique and (at least in my opinion) there is in the end but one individual which is real and true. And it is individuality that everywhere we seek, and with this alone can be satisfied more or less perfectly in so far as its realisation is more or less complete. And individuality means the union of sameness and diversity, the presence in all of the One and of the One in everything (Essays ‘Relations’ 663).
18 Using the Hegelian dialectic and Hegelian themes such as Sittlichkeit does not necessarily mean one is a Hegelian. Actually, one has to accept the whole system to make such a claim. Bradley used dialectics to explain a progression of doctrines (hedonism in Essay 3, the Kantian categorical imperative in Essay 4 and the Hegelian theory of the State in Essay 5) more than he accepted the genuine Hegelian movement of the real towards the Absolute. Whereas Hegel presented philosophy as the final stage of the absolute spirit, Bradley refused this statement, considering instead that religion was the end. In other words, religion is not the result of any internal and dialectical necessity but its cessation, an abandon of the self in the Absolute. This means that the conflict of doctrines and the finiteness of man are only solved in the totality of the Absolute in a non-discursive decision.
19 Personal experience is presented as the final answer to morality at the very end of Ethical Studies, thus putting an end to the claims of a hedonistic conception of life but also the duties and the actions commanded by society through moral life:
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Here we are landed at last, the process is at an end, though the best activity here first begins. Here our morality is consummated in oneness with God, and everywhere we find that ‘immortal love’, which builds itself forever on contradiction, but in which the contradiction is eternally resolved (ES 342).
20 Spiritual life ending in love is a common theme of the Plotinian tradition. But this explicit Neoplatonism did not come unprepared at the end of Ethical Studies, it was also progressively, and implicitly displayed in Essay 6 (‘Ideal Morality’) and in Essay 7 (‘Selfishness and Self-sacrifice’), before its culmination in the ‘Concluding Remarks’. In Essay 7, Bradley produced a series of elements betraying a strong Neoplatonic bent: his genetic theory of morality describing the movement from childhood to adulthood as a progressive elevation from selfishness to self-sacrifice is cast in the cosmic plan of a conflict between two opposing principles, the ‘bad self’ and the ‘good self’, more than in a dialectical movement (ES 277); evil has no ontological consistency (ES 279), and the ‘worst self’ is only selfishness; there is no call for grace, the good is a natural desire and there is pleasure and harmony in it (ES 292).
21 These Neoplatonic themes were not only adjusted to challenge the Hegelian system, nor were they only further developed in the ‘Concluding Remarks’ of Ethical Studies to counter the Evangelical claims of his time.5 They became the foundation of a philosophy of the Absolute that he exposed in his metaphysical work, to the dismay of some British Hegelians. Bosanquet criticized Bradley’s departure from Hegel as it undermined the unity of the Hegelian group (Bosanquet 1885: v-vii), and he was closely followed by other Idealists.
22 Six years before Bradley’s first edition of Appearance and Reality, Andrew Seth (Pringle- Pattison in 1898) had already started to shun Hegel’s philosophy in his book Hegelianism and Personality (1887). In the conclusion, Seth attacked Hegel who was thought to have undermined the case for the autonomy of the self with his idea of the identification of divine and human consciousness in the realization of Spirit. With Hegel, personal identity was evaded in the structures of the family, the community (Sittlichkeit) and the Absolute. But with Bradley’s theory of self, the problem was even worse, as Andrew Seth argued after receiving Appearance and Reality. He more systematically attacked his doctrine of the Absolute later, in an article entitled ‘A New Theory of the Absolute’ (1894). Criticism switched then from Hegel’s to Bradley’s monism.
23 As remarked before, Bradley forced the other British Idealists to question their own position regarding Hegel as well as their interpretation of the Absolute. If all were ready to agree with the transcendence implied by the notion of Absolute, few were prepared to welcome the immanence it also contained.
24 It is likely that Bradley escaped the Hegelian conceptual endeavour to reach absolute knowledge in returning to a more insular idealist tradition, in integrating a discourse on the Absolute which had demonstrated some potency. This interpretation was suggested by William Ralph Inge in his 1917-18 Gifford Lectures on the Philosophy of Plotinus, where he remarked that Bradley was a valuable guide to understanding Plotinus (Inge 39-40, 104n1), or in his 1925 Hulsean Lectures published in 1926 as The Platonic Tradition in English Religious Thought where he explicitly linked Bradley’s philosophy to the mystical tradition of Christian mysticism.
25 At the end of Appearance and Reality, Bradley rephrased Hegel’s principle of the rationality of reality as ‘Reality is spiritual’ (AR 552). And his postulate that this was Hegel’s real secret, not only bears testimony to the role Neoplatonism played in
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German Idealism as well as in the gestation of Hegel’s thought, his philosophy also indicates that idealism was a central problem in England.
26 Ralph Cudworth, one of the Cambridge Platonists of the 17th century, had already been very suspicious of a form of Platonism putting the One, or the Absolute, above everything, refusing the idea of a personal God and confusing Him with nature. And he accused it of pantheism if not atheism. The same accusation was pronounced against Hegel’s philosophy, and so did the Personal Idealists of the late 19th century with Bradley’s monism. Perhaps they were not off the mark, as Bradley had explicitly written that the lesson Darwinism had imparted to modern society was that “it may force on us in some points a correction of our moral views, and a return to a non- Christian and perhaps a Hellenic ideal” (Bradley ‘Some Remarks on Punishment,’ April 1894, Essays: 149).
27 It is therefore hardly surprising that Bertrand Russell capitalised on the rift in British Idealism at the beginning of the 20th century. He himself had been an idealist, and a Hegelian before rejecting it all (Russell 48). Nevertheless, questions remain. It is now well-established that Russell misunderstood Bradley, if he did not force on him metaphysical positions Bradley had never upheld to serve the promotion of his own philosophy (Candlish 2007). Idealism, after all, was too quickly neglected in a century all too ready to abandon metaphysics to suit the brand new theories on universal relativity.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bradley, Francis Herbert. The Presuppositions of Critical History and Aphorisms. Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 1993. Hereafter PCH.
Bradley, Francis Herbert. Ethical Studies. Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1962 (2nd ed. Rev. and corrected 1927, intr. Richard Wollheim). Hereafter ES.
Bradley, Francis Herbert. Principles of Logic. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1928 (2nd corrected ed.). Hereafter PL.
Bradley, Francis Herbert. Appearance and Reality: A Metaphysical Essay. London: Swan Sonnenschein & Co., 1902 (2nd ed.]). Hereafter AR.
Bradley, Francis Herbert. The Collected Works of F. H. Bradley, Vol. 4: Selected Correspondence (June 1872-December 1904). Carol A. Keene, ed. Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 1999. Hereafter Corresp.
Bradley, Francis Herbert. Collected Essays. Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1935. Hereafter Essays.
Bosanquet, Bernard. Knowledge and Reality: A Criticism of M. F. H. Bradley’s ‘Principles of Logics’. London: Kegan Paul, Trench and Co., 1885.
Boucher, David and Vincent, Andrew. British Idealism: A Guide for the Perplexed. London & New York: Continuum, 2012.
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Candlish, Stewart. The Russell/Bradley Dispute and its Significance for Twentieth-Century Philosophy. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.
D’Haussy, Christiane. “1850-1880 : Essor religieux dans une société prospère”. In Hugh McLeod, Stewart Mews, Christiane D’Haussy, eds. Histoire religieuse de la Grande-Bretagne. Paris: Cerf, 1997. 83-116.
Gallet, René. Romantisme et Postromantisme de Coleridge à Hardy: Nature et surnature. Paris: L’Harmattan, 1996.
Green, Thomas Hill. “Popular Philosophy and its relation to Life” (1868). In Works of Thomas Hill Green. Vol. 3: Miscellanies and Memoir. R. L. Nettelship, ed. London: Longmans, Green and Co, 1888: 92-125.
Inge, William Ralph. The Philosophy of Plotinus (The Gifford Lectures at St Andrews, 1917-1918). Vol. 2. London: Longmans Green and Co, 1918.
Jaeger, Hasso. ‘La mystique protestante et anglicane.’ In La mystique et les mystiques. André Ravier, ed. Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1965. 257-380.
Mackenzie, John Stuart. “The Hegelian Point of View”. Mind, NS XI, 1902: 54-71.
Mander, William. British Idealism: A History. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2011.
Mander, William. An Introduction to Bradley’s Metaphysics. Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1994.
Manser, Anthony and Stock, Guy. The Philosophy of F. H. Bradley. Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1984.
Mill, John Stuart. An Examination of Sir William Hamilton's Philosophy, and of the Principal Philosophical Questions Discussed in his Writings (1865). London: Longmans, Green, Reader and Dyer, 1873 (3rd ed.).
Nettelship, Richard Lewis. A Memoir of Thomas Hill Green. London: Longmans, Green and Co, 1906.
Rosaye, Jean Paul. F. H. Bradley et l'idéalisme britannique : Les années de formation (1865-1876). Arras: Arras PU, 2012a.
Rosaye, Jean Paul. “‘The Relativity of Knowledge’: Retour sur une querelle philosophique au milieu de la période victorienne (1865).” In Crise et culture. Martine Piquet, ed. Université de Paris-Dauphine: Cahiers du Ciclas (15) 2012b: 1-10.
Rosaye, Jean Paul. “F. H. Bradley entre orthodoxie et hérésie : le sens des ‘Concluding Remarks’ de Ethical Studies.” Revue française de civilisation britannique. Yannick Deschamps and Suzy Halimi, eds. 18 (1) 2013: 171-181. DOI : 10.4000/rfcb.3652
Russell, Bertrand. My Philosophical Development. London: Allen & Unwin, 1959.
Stirling, John Hutchison. The Secret of Hegel. London: Longman, Roberts & Green, 1865.
NOTES
1. Since the publication of The Philosophy of F. H. Bradley by Anthony Manser and Guy Stock (1984) for the centenary of the publication of Bradley's Principles of Logic, there has been a continuous and increasingly strong reassessment of Bradley's philosophy, and of British Idealism more generally. More recently, William Mander's quasi-encyclopedic British Idealism : A History (2011), and David Boucher and Andrew Vincent's highly informative book British Idealism : A Guide for the Perplexed (2012), have suggested that the study of the British Idealists (and of Bradley among
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them) is not only firmly entrenched in philosophical research now, but also that it still provides very innovative insight on British philosophy and British social and political thought from the middle of the 19th century to the 21st century. 2. For a detailed account of this controversy, see Rosaye (2012). 3. The reference to a ‘crisis of faith’ is mainly, but not totally, due to Charles Darwin's publication of Origins of Species in 1859. See d’Haussy’s enlightening article on this question (d’Haussy 1997). 4. This point of view was maintained until the 20th century, as evidenced by Mackenzie (1902: 62). 5. For a study of Bradley’s alternation between orthodox and heretic explanations of the Christian doctrine, see Rosaye (2013).
ABSTRACTS
F. H. Bradley is usually referred to as one of the British neo-Hegelians of the late Victorian period. But the intersection of Hegelian thought with British philosophy at that time was not synonymous with total subservience to Hegel’s metaphysics, and Bradley’s philosophical development offers an appropriate perspective to assess the importance of this case. The Hegelian influence on the British monists of the late 19th century (Edward Caird, Henry Jones, Bernard Bosanquet, Francis Herbert Bradley) is a well-known fact which has been increasingly studied since the 1980s. But attention to the Platonic tinge in the English form of Idealism has generally been neglected. Bertrand Russell, who acted as the main opponent to Idealism in England at the beginning of the 20th century, had capitalised in particular on a bifurcation in the Idealist movement, due to some misunderstanding over the Hegelian influence. In fact, the source of this rift can be traced back to Bradley’s Neoplatonic turn in his Ethical Studies (1876). In this book, Bradley meticulously designed a gradual transformation of his former Hegelian positions towards Neoplatonic intimations of the reflexive motion of the self towards consciousness and complete realization. Bradley’s turn from pure Hegelianism to aspects of the Platonic tradition had important consequences in the subsequent history of the British Idealist movement up to the rise of analytical philosophy in the 20th century.
F.H. Bradley est habituellement considéré comme un néo-hégélien anglais de la période Victorienne tardive. Mais le rapport que la philosophie britannique de cette époque a entretenu avec la pensée hégélienne n’implique pas une soumission indéfectible, comme en témoigne l’évolution philosophique de Bradley. L’influence de Hegel sur les monistes britanniques de la fin du dix-neuvième siècle est un fait connu et étudié avec une belle constance depuis les années 1980, alors que les traces de platonisme dans la forme anglaise de l’idéalisme ont généralement été occultées. Bertrand Russell, le célèbre pourfendeur de l’idéalisme au début du vingtième siècle, s’était appuyé dans ses démonstrations sur une bifurcation intellectuelle au sein des idéalistes, laquelle était due à un certain malentendu au sujet de l’influence hégélienne. Or, la source de ce malentendu est déjà observable avec le tournant platonicien effectué par Bradley dans ses Etudes éthiques de 1876. C’est dans ce traité que Bradley a commencé d’infléchir ses positions sur l’idée de soi, initialement hégéliennes, en direction de conceptions néoplatoniciennes. Le détournement de Bradley d’un pur hégélianisme a eu des conséquences importantes dans l’histoire du développement philosophique des idéalistes, jusqu’à l’essor de la tradition analytique au vingtième siècle.
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INDEX
Keywords: Bradley F. H., Russell Bertrand, British Idealism, Hegelianism, Platonic tradition Mots-clés: Bradley F. H., Russell Bertrand, idéalisme britannique, hégélianisme, tradition platonicienne
AUTHOR
JEAN-PAUL ROSAYE Jean-Paul Rosaye is Full Professor at the Artois University in France. He is the author of more than sixty articles and conferences, mainly on the history of ideas in a European context, and also of a few books centered on the idealist ascendancy from the late Victorian period to the beginning of the 20th century : T. S. Eliot poète-philosophe : Essai de typologie génétique, [2000] ; Autour de l'idéalisme britannique: recherches et réflexions méthodologiques sur l'histoire des idées en Grande- Bretagne, [2010] ; F. H. Bradley et l'idéalisme britannique: les années de formation (1865-1876), [2012]. He is vice-director of the humanities research centre “Textes et Cultures” (EA 4028) of the Artois University, and director of a team of researchers working on “Civilization and Transcultural Studies”. He is currently working on a translation of F. H. Bradley's famous metaphysical treatise Appearance and Reality as well as on a study of Bradley's metaphysics. Contact: jpaul.rosaye[at]gmail.com
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“Many Rivers to Cross:” Orphic Confluences of Fred D’Aguiar’s Children of Paradise and Wilson Harris’ Palace of the Peacock
Léo Courbot
1 In his famous essay “The Withdrawal of Metaphor,” Jacques Derrida explains that no discourse can avoid using metaphors, because the metaphorical always returns as it recedes, “like a wave on the shoreline” (1978: 66). As a consequence, and as Derrida repeats in Monolingualism of the Other, no one ever fully masters a language, no matter how fluently one speaks, because the literal, or escape from the metaphorical, is never fully achievable (1996: 44). Language is under the influence of metaphor, it is affluent with metaphor, and metaphor itself consists in the confluence of a syntagm with an unusual paradigm. The word fluency (and its linguistic derivations) is itself imbued with metaphorical signification as soon as it is used to describe linguistic abilities, since its primary meaning, as etymology shows, designates what is fluvial, flows and watery fluxes. Revealingly, fluency and, by extension, its derivatives, can simultaneously designate a confluence between a watery pattern and a linguistic phenomenon: the flowing together of two rivers and the weaving together of a metaphor may each instance confluence, while each being related to the other also through the word confluence. But if the flowing together of two rivers springing from different topoi, themselves potentially populated with different cultural groups, is translatable into metaphorical confluence, it is likely that topographical confluence will lead to tropological manifestations of the cross-cultural: fluid topos and fluent tropos, tropics and tropes can intertwine into what I tentatively call, elsewhere, a tropicality.1
2 Despite the numerous possibilities that fluency-related metaphors may offer for the study of the cross-cultural, thinkers and artists focusing on this question tend to do so through the lenses of unpredictable determinism, rhizomatic sea routes, or hybridity, rather than through a language derived from fluvial topography. One may think of Antonio Benitez-Rojo’s fractal model of the repeating island to discuss Caribbean
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culture, or of Édouard Glissant’s notions of échos-monde and chaos-monde. As for oceanic principles, Edward Brathwaite’s notion of tidal dialectics aims at a metaphorical understanding of (Caribbean) island populations, while Paul Gilroy’s Black Atlantic designates African-diaspora populations living on both sides of what once was the Middle Passage, confirming Derek Walcott’s idea that “the sea is history” (Walcott 1986: 364-6). Lastly, Patrick Chamoiseau’s notion of creoleness and Homi Bhabha’s concept of hybridity focus more exclusively on language as a cultural vehicle. Chroniclers of the cross-cultural thus rarely openly deal with the fluvial in relation to fluency and confluence, which may seem strange,2 considering that many cities around the world owe their cosmopolitanism, at least in part, to their having been founded on riverbanks and seashores, navigable waterways via which, among other things, foreigners could come.
3 In the Caribbean, two exceptions come to mind: Wilson Harris and Fred D’Aguiar, both of anglophone, Guyanese upbringing. Guyana, meaning “land of many waters” in the language of the Caribs (D’Aguiar 2003), owes its name to the dense fluvial network of its interior, a gigantic tropical rainforest. It is not too surprising for these writers to belong to the small number of cross-cultural intellectuals whose attention is drawn by fluency. Despite or thanks to the generational gap that separates them — Harris’ career started in the late 1950s, while D’Aguiar’s took off in the mid 1980s — the two authors are friends, and D’Aguiar does not hide the influence Harris has had over him. Although he renounced writing a doctoral thesis on the works of Wilson Harris when he started being a successful poet, Fred D’Aguiar, in articles such as “Prosimetrum” (2009a) or “Wilson Harris, the Writer as Surveyor” (Misrahi-Barak & Joseph-Vilain 2012), reflects on how Wilson Harris’ poetics of time and space was derived from his exploration of the Guyanese interior, and of soundings of its rivers, in novels such as Palace of the Peacock and The Four Banks of the River of Space. It is also important to mention that Fred D’Aguiar has dedicated a series and a collection of poems to Wilson Harris:“Frail Deposits” (D’Aguiar 1993: 35-8) and Continental Shelf (2009), and acknowledged Harris’ work as a major source of inspiration for his latest novel, Children of Paradise, the plot of which gives crucial importance, like Harris’ Palace of the Peacock, to a Guyanese river, while dealing with the 1978 Jonestown massacre (D’Aguiar 2014: 363), a theme that Harris himself explored, in 1996, in a novel entitled, precisely, Jonestown.3
4 In other words, on top of these writers’ friendship, the influence of Harris over D’Aguiar also leads one to reflect upon confluence as intertextuality, especially since Harris’ interest in Guyanese rivers finds its counterpart in three out of the seven novels by D’Aguiar: Children of Paradise (2014), Bloodlines (2000) and, to a lesser extent, Feeding the Ghosts (1998), the plots of which give crucial importance to rivers and waterways, and where the main characters, in a genealogical confluence of sorts, are all orphans with more or less supernatural qualities indicative of another intertextual link with the Orphic and the myth of Orpheus — sailing on the rivers of the underworld to bring Euridyce back to life — as a potential point of confluence for these three novels. By Orphic, I mean all the features that are constitutive of and related to the myth of Orpheus, such as (magical) music or art, enchanted or enchanting nature, the underworld, resurrection, and ghostliness. It is through a sounding of such Orphic features in the fluxes of Harris’ Palace of the Peacock and D’Aguiar’s Children of Paradise that this article is to explore the network of cross-cultural, intertextual, and metaphorical confluences that operate on, in, and between their works.4
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I. Palace of the Peacock
5 Wilson Harris’ fiction presents such Orphic characteristics critics generally tend to deal with it in terms of magic(al) realism (Bowers 60; Zamora & Faris 167, 258, 371), a literary genre in which magic elements are presented as an integral part of reality, a narrative trend the diverse theories of which are generally elaborated from Franz Roh’s discussion, in 1925, of post-expressionist painting (Zamora & Faris 15-31), and/or from Alejo Carpentier’s description of the baroque, marvellous reality the author attributes to Latin American landscapes in the essays “On the Marvelous Real in America” (1949) and “The Baroque and the Marvelous Real” (1975) (Zamora & Faris 75-88, 89-108). As Harris himself oxymoronically suggests, if magical realism is an “innovative tradition that has become fashionable,” it was “scarcely articulated or considered in 1960” (Harris 2010) when he published Palace of the Peacock, his first and most famous novel. Harris strongly insists, in an interview with Fred D’Aguiar, on the more crucial importance of “myth” over magic in his novels and in general, as “a term we have undervalued” (D’Aguiar 2003). In a later essay, D’Aguiar also brings to the fore the “myth-making imperative” of Harris’ work (Misrahi-Barak & Joseph-Vilain 29-44). In this respect, Jeanne Delbaere-Garant wrote an essay ,“with a view to making the concept a little less confused and certainly more teachable” (Zamora & Faris 249), proposing to split what is called “magic(al) realism” into more specific categories, such as “mythic realism,” which she associates with Harris (255, 258), and where “’magic’ images are borrowed from the physical environment itself, instead of being projected from the characters’ psyches” (253). Hence, rather than reading through the lens of magic(al) realism, one might gain from studying Harris in mythological terms and in relation to the “physical environment,” or landscape, particularly given that Harris experienced the epiphany that led him to become a writer as a land surveyor, as D’Aguiar explains: Traditional biographical data about Harris tell us he was born in New Amsterdam in 1921, trained in Georgetown as a surveyor, and from the late 1930s took part in, then led, expeditions into the interior of Guyana, to survey rivers and the areas around them. Armed with theodolite, pen, and notepad, the rational surveyor encountered a dense rainforest interior which belied the measurements and readings of his rational instruments and sequentially trained mind. What he discovered on these trips forced him to search for a method to match his encounters with sudden rainfall juxtaposed with blinding sunshine, river depths of such marked difference in such close proximity that he doubted his instruments, local Amerindian tribes who historicised the place in purely mythical terms, and, ultimately, a landscape imbued with qualities of a powerful character and God or gods, able to mould perception and resist categorisation. Harris’s language altered as a result. Landscape became instructive not simply in terms outlined by the Romantics, whose great legacy remains that landscape is a thing we can benefit from by knowing about, a cathedral of sorts for spiritual renewal. But for Harris that landscape enacts perception, governs it, steers it into new mental terrain. This transformative aspect of landscape was bound to alter Harris’s language, since the way he talked about place had to be part and parcel of his discoveries about the power of Guyana’s rainforest interior. When allied with time, this sensory reception of a place turned out to be a literary practice, a theory about fiction, an account of the intuitive imagination, and therefore a new type of fiction. (D’Aguiar 2009a)
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6 This passage gains from being cited at length because, on top of showing D’Aguiar’s admiration for Harris, it concisely provides important information about Harris’ relation to such things as Guyanese nature, romanticism, Carib mythology, and scientific survey, that are all part and parcel of the author’s works. While the description of Harris’ puzzlement in the Guyanese interior is evocative of what Carpentier perceived as the natural, marvellous reality of the American continent, it is also related, by D’Aguiar, to the Romantics’ mystification of nature as a “cathedral of sorts,” such as can be found in Wordsworth, to whom we shall return. Such links perceived between lo real maravilloso, romanticism and indigenous South-American mythology in relation to Harris’ astonishment in front of the many rivers and lush vegetation of the Guyanese interior point to a “cross-culturality” the expression of which Harris defines as a “task [he] could not evade” (D’Aguiar 2003) in his writings.
7 One way for Wilson Harris to achieve such a task is to rely on the Carib myth of the bone flute or spirit-bone. More specifically, when he was sounding rivers of the Guyanese interior, Harris perceived a rhythm, a “word-less music” in the landscape and in its waterfalls which, according to his 1988 preface to Palace of the Peacock, he could transcribe thanks to the bone-flute as a trope he deems “pertinent to the entire body of fiction [he has] written” (Harris 2010: 8). D’Aguiar explains the myth as follows: The bone of the enemy is hollowed by the Carib into a flute and tunes played on that flute in order to learn the strategies of the enemy. This war ritual involves consuming a morsel of flesh of the enemy as a similar act of habitation, of becoming the enemy in order to better understand him/her. If a conflict might seek such resolution, by crossing over to the other side, might it not be applicable to an outlook mired in partiality and badly in need of additional viewpoints? This is Wilson Harris’ big claim and one on which he staked his approach to fiction writing […]. (Misrahi-Barak & Joseph Villain 36)
8 Hence, the music of Guyanese rivers has a rhythm that Harris can perceive and transcribe through the indigenous bone flute, the playing of which constitutes a threshold through which one may access the Other’s knowledge. Such access to Otherness allows for a cross-cultural syncretism that differentiates the bone-flute from the romantics’ Eolian harp, while both instruments are in tune with nature. One must not forget, however, that the Other, from whom knowledge is acquired, is dead, and his/her flesh is consumed. This, on top of being reminiscent of the 1920s Brazilian art movement of Antropofagia that “took cannibalism as a metaphor for the process of cultural assimilation” to respond to euro-centrism and Western imperialism (Bastos 102), is evocative of the power of partial resurrection that the bone flute is endowed with: in other words, marvellous nature, music, and resurrection are all related through the bone flute, just as if it were played by Orpheus, who moves nature and the underworld with his lyre, to bring his defunct lover back to life. This allows for the designation of Harris’ prose as Orphic, as can be seen in novels such as Palace of the Peacock.
9 Palace of the Peacock takes place in the Guyanese interior. Its main character, Donne, a planter and the homonym of the famous Renaissance poet, embarks on a journey upriver to retrieve his native workers who have fled his plantation because he has mistreated them. When he and his crew, “made up of diverse races and mixtures” and historical characters (Benitez-Rojo 188), reach the village where they believe the workers to be, the villagers take flight on canoes as soon as they see them, because Donne and his crew, we learn, are actually supposed to have died during a similar
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expedition in the past.5 The crewmen embark on a seven-day journey to their second death, which Donne and surviving crew members experience while ascending a ladder of rocks, beside a gigantic waterfall, to the Palace of the Peacock — a place Antonio Benitez-Rojo reads, like Gareth Griffiths, as El Dorado (Benitez-Rojo 189; Griffiths in Lewis: 83). The characters finally gain spiritual rebirth there, confirming to readers that the journey was a “psychic” expedition as well (Benitez-Rojo 190), an Orphic rite of passage. — The ascension of the waterfall to a palace where “the light’s rays decompose” (188) is comparable to the “Orphic doctrine” which, Douglas J. Stewart explains, “included a belief in the ‘pillar of light,’ a metaphorical description of the progressive stages of enlightenment through which the faithful initiate could pass — and that this was symbolized in the ritual by climbing a ladder” (Stewart 258).I
10 In Palace of the Peacock, Dreamer, the I-narrator and Donne’s brother, has the frequent impression of seeing through Donne’s eyes as much as through his own, as if he had blown into a bone flute carved out of his dead brother’s skeleton: “And we looked through the window of the room together as though through his dead seeing material eye, rather than through my living closed spiritual eye” (Harris 2010: 20). Hence, in the novel, a cross-cultural, creolized and meta-fictional crew goes on a journey upriver for seven days, a duration reminiscent of the Biblical myth of Genesis. This quest leads to (metaphorical) resurrection or regeneration rather than to Donne’s retrieval of his workers. The story is told by Dreamer, who has gained, in the novel’s opening scene, bone-flute-like access to his (br)other’s senses. Marvellous reality, river navigation, bone flute, and resurrection or regeneration through a rite of passage involving the ascension of a ladder-like waterfall all are features of the plot that contribute to the Orphism of Harris’ prose.6 These features from Palace of the Peacock are also elements that D’Aguiar alludes to in his latest novel, Children of Paradise.
11 Before turning to D’Aguiar’s novel, it is worthwhile returning to a potential link between Harris’ prose and romantic poetry. Intertextual echoes can be perceived between Palace of the Peacock and poems by Coleridge and Wordsworth in the Lyrical Ballads, namely, “The Foster-Mother’s Tale” and “Tintern Abbey,” poems related, at some point, to sailing and to rivers. In “Tintern Abbey,” a poetic persona — the poet here, as confirmed by Wordsworth’s address to his sister in the second half of the poem — relates his thoughts on his revisiting the banks of the river Wye, in England. Wordsworth can hear a waterfall in the distance, just as he did when he was wildly roaming the area as a younger man, and he compares his memory of the place to the way he perceives it on this second visit. When Wordsworth was younger, “The sounding cataract / Haunted [him] like a passion” (Wordsworth & Coleridge 158). However, as an older man “with an eye made quiet by the power / Of Harmony, and the deep power of joy, [he sees] into the life of things” (157). Wordsworth privileges the latest mode of perception over his bewilderment as a younger man: the “sounding cataract” is an apt play on words, since it designates the tumult of a waterfall as much as a sight impairment — which, paradoxically, usually develops in old age. One may translate these lines as Wordsworth’s way of explaining that, during his youth, his overwhelming, passionate response to landscape altered his vision, whereas on his second visit, to use the words of his friend Coleridge, he is an older and “a wiser man” (78) who, having calmed down and tampered his passion, has a “quiet eye” that allows him to “see into the life of things” and, possibly, their rejuvenating power. Now, just as Wordsworth revisits Tintern Abbey, Donne, in Harris’ novel, returns to the Palace of the Peacock, and both Palace and Abbey are located near a waterfall. Nature, be it the
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Guyanese interior or the British countryside, seems to be privileged over, respectively, a local village the crew passes by to reach the waterfall in the Palace of the Peacock, and a religious temple in “Tintern Abbey.” Lastly, in Palace of the Peacock, Harris privileges a mode of vision over another, just as Wordsworth does in “Tintern Abbey,” between a “dead seeing material eye” and a ”living closed spiritual eye,” as shown in the above-cited passage (Harris 2010: 20). As Fred D’Aguiar explains in relation to a quote from Harris’ The Four Banks of the River of Space, the privileged bird’s-eye view, which sees the invisible natural currents of the ebb and flow of tides relates to the closed (dreaming) and seeing eye of the narrator in Harris’s first novel Palace of the Peacock (1960). The continental map shrinks to a view of earth as if from outer space as that imaginative eye soars (Misrahi-Barak & Joseph-Vilain 157)
12 The privileging of a “living closed spiritual eye” over a “dead seeing material eye” would then amount to supporting an unconscious and imaginative, or dream-like response to one’s sensory reception of landscape, more than a conscious, more objective and down-to-earth vision, in the same way as Wordsworth would favour emotion “recollected in a state of tranquility” (Wordsworth & Coleridge 307) rather than a fit of passion. The “state of tranquility” may be equated with REM sleep, with the dreams that Harris evokes through the trope of the “closed spiritual eye” that looks inward. Through this intertextual bond between Wordsworth and Harris, one may perceive Harris’ indebtedness to romanticism, and witness time and space being compressed, the Wye forming a confluence with the Cuyuni river, as well as the Palace and the Abbey being syncretized into a scene one could picture through a quiet, dreaming eye.7Tintern Abbey is relatively absent from the poem as a religious temple, inviting readers to identify nature as if it were a church, in the same way as Coleridge’s “The Foster-Mother’s Tale” invites readers to compare trees to the pillars of a cathedral.8 On the stump of one of these trees, an orphan child is said to have been found and, when he grew up, readers learn, he “went on ship-board / With those bold voyagers, who made discovery / Of golden Lands” (81, emphasis mine), in the same way as Donne, in Palace of the Peacock, decides to sail to the Guyanese interior, ultimately to find the Palace of the Peacock and/or the gold city of El Dorado (Benitez-Rojo 189; Lewis 83). Harris might then have chosen to call his main character “Donne” because, on top of his historical homonym’s being contemporaneous to the time of great Western expeditions to the “new world,” the fictionalised character’s pastoral quest for El Dorado as an American utopia, an Acadia of sorts, corresponds to the Classical thrust of Renaissance artistry to which the actual Donne belonged: Harris even relates El Dorado and Donne through a portmanteau word, “EldoraDonne” (Harris 2010: 11) in the novel’s preface.9 However, this classical contiguity is evoked only to be cast aside, since reaching El Dorado leads the fictional Donne through a spiritual process of resurrection that appears both to fictionalise Harris’ own epiphanic experience in Guyana’s rainforest and to shift from a classical quest to a more romantic approach. In this sense, the trajectories of Wordsworth’s romantic verse and Harris’ prose form yet another transcontinental confluence where nature, with its forests and waterfalls, forms a fountain of youth, “a cathedral of sorts for spiritual renewal” (D’Aguiar 2009a) and artistic reinvention.
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II. Children of Paradise
13 The romantic idea of nature as “a cathedral of sorts” (D’Aguiar 2009a) is also close at hand in Fred D’Aguiar’s latest novel, Children of Paradise, since it tells the true, tragic story of the Jonestown massacre, the ultimate consequence of Jim Jones’ decision to relocate his religious commune from urban United States into the Guyanese interior, a move that is reminiscent of the church that replaces the forest in “The Foster Mother’s Tale” (Wordsworth & Coleridge 79). However, in the novel, the relocated commune pollutes the river adjacent to its site with waste and chemicals from its pigsty10 that prevent the indigenous-Indian population from a downstream village to fish and bathe there: “The indigenous tribes who depend on the river cannot ignore the commune’s pollution. Fish are dying; the water irritates the eyes and causes rashes on the skin of the children who bathe in it at the wrong time; it stains clothes yellow and orange; and at different times of the day, the water stinks like a pigsty” (D’Aguiar 2014: 272). Such a down-to-earth, eco-critical dimension, represented by the man-made confluence of a natural river and an abject stream of toxic waste, subverts the idyllic, pastoral setting of the action and any potential progression to a sense of romantic harmony with a wilderness that, however, D’Aguiar describes in the same terms as he describes Harris’ expeditions to the Guyanese rainforest in the aforementioned passage from “Prosimetrum” where D’Aguiar states that What [Harris] discovered on these trips forced him to search for a method to match his encounters with sudden rainfall juxtaposed with blinding sunshine, river depths of such marked difference in such close proximity that he doubted his instruments, local Amerindian tribes who historicised the place in purely mythical terms […] (D’Aguiar 2009a, my emphasis)
14 This statement concerning Harris is paraphrased, in Children of Paradise, as follows: If the commune located beyond the reach of history sought to give history the slip and start from scratch, there could be no better setting than a realm where myth rules the order of night and day. In a place where trees big and plentiful create their own rain cloud and downpour and it is possible to walk in a stride through a wall of rain into a bright room of sunlight (D’Aguiar 2014: 119, my emphasis)
15 In addition to this re-presentation of the marvellous reality of the Guyanese interior, the presence of an indigenous village on the riverbank in Children of Paradise is reminiscent of the Arawak village Donne and his crew sail by in Harris’ first novel. D’Aguiar actually often refers to Palace of the Peacock in Children of Paradise, and more often than not in Orphic ways, as suggested by the myth-inspiring setting of both the novel and Harris’ expeditions, and confirmed by other features of D’Aguiar’s prose that we shall now study.
16 Children of Paradise strikingly rewrites some scenes and re-activates tropes and themes from Harris’ prose:it uses the same forest as that of Harris’ surveys and the location of Palace of the Peacock; it deals with the 1978 Jonestown massacre as in Harris’ Jonestown (1996) — also mentioned in a long meditative poem D’Aguiar published in 1998 entitled Bill of Rights —; and it mentions the bone flute. The bone flute or spirit-bone is interesting in an Orphic perspective since, just as the myth of Orpheus, it conjures up the themes of music and magical resurrection and, thus, creates a cross-cultural confluence between South-American and European mythologies.11 Fred D’Aguiar first uses the bone-flute image in a series of poems entitled “Frail Deposits,” to tell Wilson Harris that “The flute [he’s] trying to blow a tune on / belongs to [Harris]” (British
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Subjects 36), thus positing Harris’ work as an influence. In Children of Paradise, the bone- flute seems to re-appear when Pastor Jim Jones offers a flute to the novel’s main character, a young girl named Trina, after she has performed her false death and resurrection under the orders of Jones who, thanks to the trick, strengthens his authority over the commune members who believe he has achieved a miracle (D’Aguiar 2014: 21, 68-72).12 In this sense, Jones stands as an Orpheus of sorts, bringing Trina, a young Euridyce, back to life. Harris had also mythologized Jim Jones in Jonestown by representing him as a Jonah who was “disgorged by the whale to launch a miniature atomic bomb in the rainforest desert of Jonestown” (Harris 1996: 23). Jonah’s being swallowed and thrown up by a whale itself is another resurrection metaphor and, in Harris’ Jonestown, the whale’s being white (87) also evokes intertextually Melville’s Moby Dick. More importantly, when Harris compares Jim Jones to Jonah through the nickname “Jonah Jones of the Whale” (166, 167), he suggests that, as a pastor preaching suicide, Jones, like Jonah, betrays his disciples and their God.
17 Yet, it is actually Trina, with her flute, who appears to be the most Orphic of characters in D’Aguiar’s novel. She improvises music with her flute in a romantic way, as if it were an Eolian harp, an instrument played by the wind: “Trina makes up a tune that comes from listening to the wind in the trees and then the rain made by the trees and the arrival of sunshine through that rain” (D’Aguiar 2014: 97). The (religious) music she plays, along with the commune’s school band, has an impact on nature: “The music teacher calls out the hymn for the class to begin, and the instruments chime in synchrony. The entire forest of wildlife draws nearer and grows quite still. Some of the birds join in with their own musical improvisations. Trina takes the lead with a flute solo” (108). Interestingly enough, nature’s responsiveness to music is also a feature that is added by Wordsworth to Virgil’s original version of the myth of Orpheus in the English poet’s 1788 attempt at translating the Roman poet’s Georgics (Wordsworth 1788: 646, l. 49a-49c). In other words, the power of Trina’s flute could be informed by a romantic treatment of Orphism. Moreover, Trina’s instrument, being a flute out of which she draws music inspired by the wind, could function as a Carib Eolian Harp and/ or as a romantic bone-flute of sorts (it was offered to her after her mock-resurrection), thus constituting a tropicality, that is, a metaphorical and cross-cultural confluence which, apart from being endowed with Orphic power, is to play an important role in the unfolding of Children of Paradise. It serves in one of Trina’s attempts at having the commune’s children follow her and escape by taking a riverboat at the commune’s pier, one of many incentives to try to flee from the hell the commune has become, as Jones schedules suicide drills for the camp’s members, who are soon to be made to kill themselves by drinking Kool-Aid mixed with cyanide, as their historical counterparts (D’Aguiar 2014: 357-62; Naipaul 132-5). Escaping from the commune on a river thanks to music is also evocative of the myth of Orpheus, all the more so when one realises that Trina’s attempts at escape fail, one time because of her turning back.
18 Before getting to the failed escapes proper, attention must be paid to the boat that allows for such attempts, because it is reminiscent of the boat used by the cross- cultural crew of Palace of the Peacock, because this boat, in Children of Paradise, epitomises the cross-cultural. For instance, Trina and her mother, Joyce, are often asked to run — money-laundering — errands for Jones and the commune by sailing up- and downriver, to and from the capital, Georgetown, on Captain Aubrey’s boat. That a character called Joyce sailing on a river to a capital is evocative of an intertextual and cross-tropical allusion to her homonym, the Irish modernist, and his “Ulysses on the
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Liffey,” as D’Aguiar puts it (D’Aguiar 1991: 235), making a Guyanese river virtually flow with the Liffey for a second in the reader’s mind. The conversations that Joyce has with Aubrey on board the ship often deal with such mixed genealogies. When Aubrey inquires about Joyce’s ethnicity, “She says she has yet to meet someone who is not tainted with some mixture or other. Her father came from Spain to Florida on business and met her mother, a Micosukee, in an illegal casino at West Palm beach” (D’Aguiar 2014: 56). Later in the discussion, the captain wonders if she feels an affinity to nature. He says everyone knows that the tribes in this forest have lived there for thousands of years without interfering with the place, while the Europeans with their enslaved Africans and indentured Indians from South Asia ruined the place in just four hundred years. Right on cue, a barge floats by with a red flag warning them that logs would follow […] (56)
19 Here, Aubrey historicises his eco-criticism by relating deforestation, represented by a multitude of floating logs, to the history of colonisation and the African slave trade, at the end of which indentured servants from the Asian subcontinent were brought to the Caribbean to replace and/or work alongside freed slaves. The captain conjures up a picture of the cosmopolitanism resulting from this process, as in today’s Guyanese population, made up of people of European, African, Asian, and indigenous descent, and of all possible genealogical blends deriving from these groups. Conversely, in Palace of the Peacock, the boat’s crew is made up of Renaissance poet John Donne, of Schomburgh, a man of German-Arawak lineage whose name is reminiscent of the Schomburgk13 brothers who explored the Guyanese interior (Benitez-Rojo 188), of an Arawak woman, and of the Portuguese DaSilva twins. As Benitez-Rojo argues, “There is also mention of the subsequent arrival of the Africans, and of the Asian Indians and of the Portuguese, as consequences of the plantation economy” (188). Benitez-Rojo proceeds by saying that “the men who make up the boat’s crew, whose blood is profusely mixed, represent, along with the aged Arawak woman (The Great Arawak Mother), Guyanese society as it now exists” (188-9). Harris confirmed this statement in an interview with D’Aguiar, as the names of the crewmen, in his novel, are given to “plumb an illustration of the cross-cultural figuration the entire party implicitly maintain[s]” (D’Aguiar 2003). Hence, the riverboats of both Children of Paradise and Palace of the Peacock constitute metaphorical vessels of cross-cultural confluence. The intertextuality of such confluence in Children of Paradise is openly emphasised when Joyce and Trina, who start planning their escape, try to find a code name for Aubrey. Trina conjures all the famous historical and literary captains: “Hook. Ahab. Kirk. Drake. Blackbeard. Raleigh. Morgan. Cook. Silver. Bligh. Columbus. Cabral. Vasco da Gama” (D’Aguiar 2014: 252).
20 The cross-cultural qualities of the ship can also be read as Orphic in passages when Aubrey’s first mate makes implicit and ironic commentaries upon what is happening on board by whistling famous songs from both sides of the Atlantic. For instance, when the boat leaves the commune, the first mate whistles Peter, Paul and Mary’s “Leaving on a Jet Plane.” When they drop Joyce at the Pier, he comes up with the soul of Otis Redding’s “Sittin’ on the Dock of the Bay.” Finally, when the commune guards become stand-offish with Aubrey following orders from Jones who has learned that Joyce has befriended someone outside the commune, his first mate covers the Beatles’ “Let it Be” (215-217). When Jones actually manages to get the Guyanese authorities to prevent Aubrey from sailing to the commune, Aubrey buys a false license, repaints his boat, and renames it with a musically evocative name: “Many Waters,” which “immediately gets nicknamed Muddy Waters, not after the American bluesman but due to the nation’s
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seawater” (267). Even the narrator has to clarify the name because of the musician it may bring to mind, and s/he does so by relating the boat to Guyanese features: Guyana means “Many Waters” in the Carib idiom, and muddy waters border the country’s shores. The sense of an Orphic relationship between music and land nevertheless persists, all the more so since the phrase “Many Waters” is also evocative of Jamaican singer Jimmy Cliff’s “Many Rivers to Cross,” to which D’Aguiar alludes linked to Guyana’s many waters in Bill of Rights, his poem on Jonestown: “Many rivers to cross but I quibble / Over names: the Courentyne, Essequibo, / Potaro, Mazaruni, Demerara …” (D’Aguiar 1998: 57).
21 Before things fully go wrong at the commune, during one of their trips up and down the river, Aubrey and Joyce who, as readers implicitly understand, progressively fall in love as the novel unfolds, climb their way up a waterfall: “She watches him, his legs, his back, his arms and shoulders, to keep from craning at the height of the cataract. At the top of the ledge, he holds out his hand and helps her up beside him, and they step through the falling water and end up behind it and simultaneously move into a cave — just air and mist [...]” (D’Aguiar 2014, 156, emphasis mine). For D’Aguiar to specify that the atmosphere of the cave, because of the waterfall, amounts to “just air and mist,” to a “river somehow lifted into space” (279), is more ingenious than ingenuous, since “air and mist” are the main components, in Palace of the Peacock, of the waterfall Donne climbs after “the river, which is horizontal, alters to a vertical waterfall — the same river but plunging free of the strictures of its banks and depths and rising as voluminous mist,” in D’Aguiar’s words (D’Aguiar 2012: 37, my emphasis). As Donne ascends the marvellous waterfall, he can see a carpenter working in a “room” that is “as old as a cave and as new as a study” (Harris 2010: 103, italics mine). In other words, the misty cave that Joyce and Aubrey reach after climbing the waterfall conveys an additional sense of the intertextuality that operates between Children of Paradise and Harris’ novel, and of the crucial importance both novels attribute to nature as a place requiring consideration. Another loaded signifier in the above-mentioned passage from D’Aguiar’s novel is, of course, “cataract,” which designates the waterfall as Joyce tries to look away from it so as not to be frightened by the height at which she has climbed. In fact, as argued above, the polysemous quality of the word “cataract” helped helps? Wordsworth, in “Tintern Abbey,” to contrast the dissipated gaze characterising his wanderings as a young man in the vicinity of a waterfall with the calm, river-like “quiet eye” that designates the mode of perception by means of which he, as an older, initiated man, allows nature to sink in (Wordsworth & Coleridge 157-8). In this sense, Joyce’s decision to divert her eyes from the waterfall may amount to choosing a better mode of sensory perception within a natural framework. If so, her decision to fix her gaze on Aubrey’s muscular body, being suggestive of the proximity of erotic phantasy, may correspond to her diving inward into desire and imagination, to a figurative plunge sparked by the actual, phenomenal spring she cannot look at anymore. Such a correlation of a Wordsworth-like interplay with nature and an inward-looking, “dreaming eye,” appears to fuse, as in Palace of the Peacock, a romantic conception of sensory perception with Harris’ Orphic response to the marvellous Guyanese interior (Stewart 258).
22 In spite of its being located in such a marvellous rainforest, the commune becomes so hellish that Joyce and Trina progressively come to plan their escape. Their scheme always involves Aubrey’s ship which, before being renamed “Many Waters,” is called the Coffee, after “an eighteenth-century enslaved African who ran away from his
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plantation and led a slave rebellion. He lived in the interior and evaded capture,” Aubrey explains to Joyce, who reacts by saying: “Sounds like my kind of guy” (D’Aguiar 2014: 54). Knowing the ship’s name refers to marooning, and hearing Joyce’s equivocal statement on board, alluding both to her having been deserted by her husband (57) and to the “escapist” pleasure she feels sailing with Aubrey, “Coffee” could be read as a proleptic sign of Joyce, Aubrey and Trina’s plotting for evasion later in the novel. Onomastically, “Trina” is also paronomastically close to “tryin’a,” slang for “trying to,” which is evocative of the main character’s three failed attempts at escape (305-7, 329, 344-5).
23 After having chosen to work at the pigsty, the part of the commune that is closest to the river, and after having let the pigs loose as a sign to let Aubrey, who stopped at the jetty, know that they want to escape (275-6), Joyce and Trina indeed try and fail thrice to run away from the commune. While their first escape is thwarted by the commune’s pet gorilla — in actual history, a “chimpanzee (or some other kind of primate)” rescued from mistreatment in a Californian circus and brought to Guyana (Naipaul 65) — the second one is ruined by Trina, who makes the last minute decision to turn back to get the other children from the commune and the gorilla, as she says she dreamed it as the only way to make it. Trina then “breaks from her mother’s embrace, runs to starboard, and leaps into the water and disappears” (D’Aguiar 2014: 329) until she is saved from drowning by the first mate, who hands her to Aubrey, who finally “pulls Trina out of the river” (330). That Trina sacrifices her second chance by diving into the water to fetch the other children is reminiscent of Christian self-sacrifice as much as of Orpheus’ plunge into the underworld,14 while her being brought back from below the surface by Aubrey and his first mate makes an Orphic pair out of the crewmen. On the other hand, Trina’s decision which preferred her dream vision to reason might once again correspond to an evocation of the privilege given to imagination over reason in D’Aguiar’s works (D’Aguiar 1995: 26; 1998: 41) and in Harris’ Palace of the Peacock. Trina’s third and final attempt at escape also fails, although it corresponds to the way she had almost prophetically dreamed it, because the captain arrives too late to rescue the children. The mission resembles pandemonium at the end of the novel, when Jones harasses his followers over the commune loudspeakers, pretending their haven is under attack, and forcing them through multiple suicide drills. As a consequence, Trina takes advantage of the atmosphere and organises a parade of which the leader and dressed-up king is the commune gorilla, while she dictates the pace at which the parade should progress by playing her flute, like a “Pied Piper” (345).15 Hence, like the Pied Piper of Hamlin in the folktale, another intertextual reference in D’Aguiar’s novel, Trina’s music almost has the power of leading the children away from the hell the commune has become, in the same way as Orpheus’ musical skills almost allow him to bring Euridyce back from the underworld. Such (Orphic,) tragic irony, and the horror of the suicide scene, are, however, partly alleviated by an imaginative ending where the children (on their way to Paradise?) sail on captain Aubrey’s boat until they all “shape- shift and escape,” as in an Ovidian metamorphosis, to a place where light is summoned to splinter (D’Aguiar 2014: 362), as in the “rainbow’s spectrum,” the “place where the colors’ identities are generated as the light’s rays decompose,” in other words, the Palace of the Peacock (Benitez-Rojo 188).
24 Thus, the romantic and Orphic ways in which Wilson Harris responded, in life and in fiction, to the marvellous reality of the Guyanese landscape, find their counterpart in Fred D’Aguiar’s latest novel, drawing a network of cross-cultural, intertextual, and
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metaphorical confluences between Palace of the Peacock and Children of Paradise, as a reflection of the confluences one might perceive in Guyana’s many rivers. For in these novels, it is along rivers and near, or even in waterfalls that intertextual confluences between the myth of Orpheus, Wordsworth, Harris and D’Aguiar have been found, suggesting that romanticism and magic(al) realism might consist in analogous translations of a common, Orphic perception of the environment. For instance, waterfalls in Palace of the Peacock and Children of Paradise are reminiscent of the cataract one finds above Tintern Abbey, at least insofar as they are related to binary modes of perception — dream state and waking life — analogous to those defined by Wordsworth through the tropes of the “quiet eye” and “sounding cataract” (Wordsworth & Coleridge 157-8). These “eyes,” as tropes for various artistic ways of seeing, point to metaphorical confluence in turn, the most striking example of which, in the above- studied novels, appears to be the myth of the Carib bone-flute as an instrument that is made to function like the Eolian harp of European romantics, and played with Orphic effects, maybe somewhere below El Dorado and above Tintern Abbey, a cross-cultural trope that is evocative of the transatlantic and cross-cultural confluences that may operate between Ovid, Wordsworth, Harris and D’Aguiar who, as artists, may themselves be viewed as Orphic figures of sorts. The Orphic subtext seems to condition, to some extent, D’Aguiar’s vision of his work, when he claims, in an interview, that his writings are “out of [his] hands” (Frias 2002: 423) as soon as they are published. In other words, D’Aguiar appears to mean that once his works are made available for the public, he relents his power over his texts and what they may become in the hands of critics and readers in general, in the same way as Orpheus loosens his grip on his lover’s ghost. In this sense, one may suggest that his ideas appear to form a final, ideological confluence with Maurice Blanchot’s reading of the myth of Orpheus as an allegory of the artist’s yielding his or her work, freeing it from his or her grasp (Blanchot 175), and into our world.
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NOTES
1. For an in-depth exploration and definition of the word “tropicality” and what I suggest it may designate, see Courbot (2016). This article is a thoroughly revised and extended version of a presentation I gave at the SAES conference in Lyons on June 4th 2016, the theme of which was “Confluences”. 2. This is actually only partly strange, because it is often the Atlantic, an ocean, that many of these thinkers perceive as the main point of confluence, because of its relation to colonisation, and to the triangular trade that took place between the Americas, Africa, and Europe. 3. In an article entitled “How Wilson Harris’s Intuitive Approach to Writing Fiction Applies to Writing Novels about Slavery,” D’Aguiar openly confirms that Harris’ “texts supply [him] with an intuitive approach to history, myth, landscape and to the writing of fiction” (D’Aguiar in Misrahi Barak 2005). 4. Doing this does not translate any intention to posit Ovid, or Western mythology, as the single source, or origin, of the works in question, although it is clear that D’Aguiar is familiar with Ovid and Greek or Roman myths (D’Aguiar 1985: 1; 1993: 60-3; 1998: 73; 2009: 86-7). The word Orphic only serves the purpose of the present argument insofar as it conflates several features of Harris’ and D’Aguiar’s works, and may function, at times, as one of their intertexts. The description of both novels as Orphic does not necessarily always entail Harris’ and D’Aguiar’s indebtedness to European mythology for the writings in question. Rather, it is indicative of the fact that the mythological genealogies underlying every language cannot be circumvented, no matter how desirable it can appear to be (Derrida 1971: 11). One cannot use English, or French for that matter, and avoid using the word Orphic to designate what is Orphic — that is, subterranean, fluvial, musical, supernatural yet in communion with nature, elegiac or resurrectional, and prophetic — according to these languages and their accompanying Greek and Roman mythological backgrounds. 5. The present study will not provide any thorough discussion of the historical traits of Palace of the Peacock. However, readers interested in this subject may find Linda Hutcheon’s concept of “historiographic metafiction,” defined in A Poetics of Postmodernism (1988), useful as a means of interpreting this aspect of Harris’ text.
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6. John Thieme perceives this psychic journey upriver and the Donne/Dreamer pair of characters as grounds on which Palace of the Peacock can be perceived as a partial revision of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and its Marlowe/Kurtz couple. This, in turn, suggests yet another confluence between Harris’ novel and Chinua Achebe’s famous responses to Conrad in the novels Arrow of God and Things Fall Apart (Thieme 27-37). 7. D’Aguiar also compares Harris’ novel The Mask of the Beggar to Wordsworth’s verse, more specifically, “The Prelude,” as he argues that climactic moments of that novel — which also is one of Harris’ rewritings of Palace of the Peacock, according to D’Aguiar — “bear similarity to Wordsworth’s ’spots of time’” (D’Aguiar in Misrahi-Barak 2005). More than strengthening our point, this suggests that both D’Aguiar and Harris attentively read Wordsworth, whose poetic vision of nature, as argued here, is comparable to Harris’ and D’Aguiar’s magic(al) realist treatment of landscape. 8. As far as intertextuality with Coleridge is concerned, a scene from D’Aguiar’s second novel, Dear Future, might be drawn from the “Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” In Coleridge’s poem, an old sailor atones for having killed an albatross with a cross-bow by recounting his “sinful” gesture to those who will listen (Wordsworth & Coleridge 10-78). In Dear Future, when Red Head, an unbaptised child, dies and is subsequently sent to limbo, he shoots down a bird there with his slingshot, and has to pay for the deed by burying the weapon in the earth or, more precisely, in clay, which also conjures up the Old Testament story of the Creation of Man (D’Aguiar 1996: 187). 9. Kenneth R. R. Gros Louis explains that Donne lived at a pivotal moment in British renaissance — the end of the Elizabethan reign and the advent of Enlightenment philosophy — that also corresponded to a (related) shift in the ways literary treatments of the figure of Orpheus were oriented, since the character arguably went from being used as the epitome of the pastoral ideal and a utopian allegory of civilising force (tempering animal instincts with art) to standing for the melancholic persona par excellence, singing his sorrow even after his dismemberment, as if the death of Elizabeth spurred melancholy in the poets of her time as much as Eurydice’s passing did in Orpheus (Gros Louis 1969: 70). 10. In its 1977 brochure, the commune in fact claimed possessing “130 pigs,” a chickery, but did not mention dairy, although twenty-two bovine corpses were found after the massacre (Naipaul 128). 11. Again, Harris claims the bone-flute as relevant to all of his work (Harris 2010: 8). It is in fact present in Jonestown too (Harris 1996: 16, 156, 215), sometimes along with a character named Lazarus, a resurrectional figure of sorts (39-41). Moreover, according to the novel’s opening, epistolary section, the novel is a “dream book” that was sent to “W. H.” for edition by its author, whose pseudonym is Francisco Bone, who claims to be the only survivor of Jonestown. 12. Achieving false miracles really was one of Jim Jones’ “specialties,” and it played a significant role in establishing his reputation in the United States, before the Commune flew to its “agricultural mission” in Guyana (Naipaul 59-60). 13. The spelling of the historical name is apparently anglicised in Harris’ novel. 14. Christ was actually already compared to, and sometimes named, Orpheus by early Christians (Gros Louis 1966: 644-5). 15. In Bill of Rights, D’Aguiar’s book-length poem on Jonestown, the Carib bone-flute and the Pied Piper are related (1998: 59, 80).
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ABSTRACTS
Seldom does criticism address cross-cultural issues in terms of confluence. In fact, scholars tend to use chaos theory (Glissant, Benitez-Rojo), oceanic tropes (Gilroy, Brathwaite), and linguistic foci (Chamoiseau, Bhabha) to deal with them. This is peculiar, first of all because many cities, on all continents, owe their cosmopolitanism to their having been founded on riverbanks and seashores. Moreover, the word fluency and its derivatives can metaphorically relate watery patterns and linguistic phenomena: metaphor itself can be described as the confluence of a syntagm with an unusual paradigm. As a consequence, if the flowing together of two rivers, springing from different topoi, potentially populated with different cultural groups, can be translated into metaphor, it is likely that topographical confluence lead to tropological manifestations of the cross-cultural: fluid topos and fluent tropos, tropics and tropes, would intertwine into what I tentatively call tropicality. However, although scholars in cross-cultural fields rarely address the fluvial theme, Caribbean novelists Wilson Harris and Fred D’Aguiar show, in their novels, an exceptional awareness of the poetic potential of looking at creolization through the lens of confluence, which is apt, knowing that both authors are of Guyanese upbringing, Guyana meaning “land of many waters” in the language of one of its indigenous tribes: it is in these fluvial waters that Harris, originally a land-surveyor, found his source of inspiration for novels that would, in the next generation of Guyanese authors, greatly influence Fred D’Aguiar. This suggests that in addition to metaphoricity and topography, intertextuality might be looked upon as a third type of confluence, and it is these three types of confluence that I propose to track in D’Aguiar’s latest novel Children of Paradise (2014) and Wilson Harris’ Palace of the Peacock (1962), paying particular attention to how both novels themselves gather into a confluence founded on romantic and Orphic subtexts that, in turn, suggest that romanticism and magic(al) realism might consist in analogous translations of a common, Orphic perception of the environment.
La critique aborde rarement les questions d’interculturalité en termes de confluence. En effet, les chercheurs ont tendance à recourir à la théorie du chaos (Glissant, Benitez-Rojo), aux tropes océaniques (Gilroy, Brathwaite) et aux phénomènes langagiers en tant que tels (Chamoiseau, Bhabha) pour parler de ces sujets. C’est en partie étrange, tout d’abord parce que nombre de villes, sur tous les continents, dérivent leur cosmopolitisme de leur fondation sur les rives de fleuves et les littoraux. Qui plus est, le suffixe -fluence et les mots formés à l’aide de celui-ci peuvent lier, de manière métaphorique, phénomènes fluviaux et structures linguistiques: la métaphore elle-même peut être décrite comme confluence d’un syntagme avec un paradigme inhabituel. Par conséquent, si la confluence de deux fleuves jaillissant de lieux distincts potentiellement peuplés par des groupes culturels différents peut être transformée en métaphore, alors il est probable que la confluence topographique ainsi traduite devienne une manifestation tropologique de l’interculturalité: topos fluvial et tropos langagier, les tropiques et les tropes, se mêleraient en ce que je propose d’appeler une tropicalité. Cependant, malgré le fait que la critique s’appuie rarement sur ces métaphores fluviales, les romanciers Wilson Harris et Fred D’Aguiar font preuve, dans leurs œuvres respectives, d’une exceptionnelle prise de conscience du potentiel poétique découlant d’une observation de la créolisation depuis l’angle de la confluence : il est intéressant, alors, de noter que les deux auteurs en question sont d’origine guyanaise, puisque « Guyane » signifie « territoire inondé » ou « territoire plein d’eau » et servait, dans une langue indigène et avant de définir le territoire en question par son vaste réseau fluvial, à désigner un affluant de l’Orénoque. C’est d’ailleurs dans ces eaux fluviales que Harris, en tant qu’explorateur et avant de devenir écrivain, a puisé son inspiration pour écrire des romans qui, dans la
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génération d’écrivains guyanais lui succédant, influenceraient profondément Fred D’Aguiar. Cette influence suggère aussi qu’en plus de la métaphore et de la topographie, l’intertextualité pourrait-être perçue comme une troisième forme de confluence, et ce sont ces trois types de confluence que je propose d’étudier dans le dernier roman de Fred D’Aguiar, intitulé Children of Paradise (2014), et dans le premier roman de Wilson Harris, Palace of the Peacock (1962), en prêtant une attention toute particulière à la façon dont ces deux romans eux-mêmes forment une confluence définie par des textures romantique et Orphique communes qui, à leur tour, laissent à penser que le romantisme et le réalisme merveilleux pourraient, en fait, être des traductions analogues d’une même perception Orphique de l’environnement.
INDEX
Mots-clés: confluence, tropicalité, Wordsworth William, Harris Wilson, D’Aguiar Fred, orphisme, romantisme, réalisme magique Keywords: confluence, tropicality, Wordsworth William, Harris Wilson, D’Aguiar Fred, Orphism, Romanticism, magical realism
AUTHOR
LÉO COURBOT Léo Courbot has a PhD from the University of Lille 3, France, where he works as a Temporary Teaching Assistant (ATER); he is an associate member of the CECILLE research laboratory. He was admitted to the French Competitive Exam at Ph.D Level (Agrégation) in 2013. He does research on Caribbean literature and intercultural theory, specifically focusing on Anglo-Guyanese author and professor Fred D’Aguiar (recently naturalized as an American citizen, in 2014). His first research monograph, Fred D’Aguiar and Caribbean Literature: Metaphor, Myth, Memory, is currently being peer reviewed for publication by Brill/Rodopi. Contact: leocourbot[at]gmail.com
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