1.

“La mélancolie elle-même n’est qu’un souvenir qui s’ignore.”—Flaubert.[1]  Is this an instance of the false passive, or of a genuine reflexive?  Of memory neglected by an agent outside of it, or of memory ignoring itself?  For while an opposition may be drawn between a subject and his own memories, which take on for him a more or less foreign appearance—the mind’s furnishings, rather than the mind itself—it remains true that without these memories he has nothing, is nothing; that his entire mode of self-presentation—that is, of being—hinges on the constant resort to memory.

The memories that provoke melancholy—neglected, overlooked, forgotten—Flaubert’s verb suggests all these—relate, however obscurely, to duties unfulfilled.  The nature of what has been left undone in relation to the figures of memory is often opaque—the mere fact of my having a mother, for example, sometimes pains me inexplicably—because what we take to be the ideal form of our relation to others and to the world, our understanding of our duty to them, tends toward the vague, half-hearted, and commonplace, to the extent that it can be said to exist at all; perhaps because the enlargement of our understanding of the scope of our moral lives, of the effect our least actions have upon our social and physical environment, has been outpaced by the constantly multiplying amusements, temptations, and merely formal obligations to which we subject ourselves; we are morally confused and exhausted, overwhelmed by the variety of choices that face us and pulled at each instant toward novelty, and have shunted off our ultimate choices, to use Peter Singer’s term, those acts of moral reckoning wherein we tell ourselves the truth about our doings and their aftermath and begin at last to take ourselves seriously as moral subjects, into ever-receding tomorrow.  What is due from us is never clear, and melancholy is nothing more than the intrusion of this lack of clarity, and of the vital longing to dispel it, upon life’s constant progression-into—into love affairs, into acquisitions and enterprises—adherence to which seems to preclude attention to that longing.  Whereas the way is always paved for our instrumental undertakings, for our role in the self-perpetuating and self-aggrandizing impulses of society, to which everyone appears both party and partisan, when, in our hearts, it strikes us it might be better to live according to the dictates of our conscience, the path we are led to is fraught with solitude and uncertainty.

2.

Freud asserts:  “The hysteric suffers mainly from reminiscences.”  Hysteria, in this sense, is the acute form of bad conscience, whereas melancholy is bad conscience in abeyance. If hysteria was once thought to be the quintessentially modern form of neurosis, this relates to the profusion of choices thrust upon modern man, virtually all of which have a moral component but which are decided according to instrumental considerations; the memory of these choices, and of the compromised way in which we make them, continues to weigh on us, along with the intimation that we may someday be made to answer for them, and for the disregard of conscience that enabled them.  When the anxiety they provoke is no longer bearable, the sufferer breaks down.  The attacks of nerves frequently described in Chekhov, in “Terror,” for example, are studies of this sort of hysteria.

3.

If reading Chekhov makes us melancholy, it is doubtless because he is the writer most concerned with, and most effective at, rousing our conscience from its wonted slumber.  At times we are melancholy because of our own bad conscience; but at others—when we read “Heartache” or the last paragraphs of “About Love”—we are moved by glimpses of a world in which the moral imperative has been, or might be, obeyed.  A serenity pervades these examples, such as overcomes us before a painting of Vermeer’s.

4.

Having written the foregoing sentence, I began to think of Vermeer, and then of the death of Bergotte in Proust, after he had gone to see A View of Delft for the last time; and wishing to read again those pages, which describe this serenity exactly, I have taken down my copy of The Prisoner and written down the following passage:

All these obligations, which have no sanction in our present life, seem to belong to a different world, a world based on kindness, scrupulousness, self-sacrifice, a world entirely different from this one and which we leave in order to be born on this earth, before perhaps returning there to live once again beneath the sway of those unknown laws which we obeyed because we bore their precepts in our hearts, not knowing whose hand had traced them there–those laws to which every profound work of the intellect bring us nearer and which are invisible only–- if then!–- to fools.

5.

It is not strange, then, that our response to Chekhov or to Vermeer should have the character of nostalgia, though we have never lived in the “different world” that Proust describes; what we reflect on is the image of that world we dreamed up perhaps when we were very young, when the idea of a moral life had already been imparted to us, and we had begun to envisage what it might be, but before we had grown used to the thought that it was a fiction to be left behind, like all those other fabrications of youth; and because its image is less fanciful than the rest of them, because it continues throughout our lives to throb, particularly whenever we or others depart from the quotidian to do or say something beautiful or true, and because it is into that image that we retreat, forever adding further to it, when the world’s cruelty or paltriness overwhelm us, its appeal is never silenced.

6.

What strikes us about Vermeer or Chekhov is the unobtrusive manner in which life’s passage is observed.  When the voices that normally obtrude upon the world are silent—chief among them our own—we feel as though these voices had hung about the world like a veil, and that for once, it has been rent; these voices, and their erstwhile concerns, were idle, and had only dissuaded us from truth.  The obtrusive element in our voices is the instrumental, expressed in vanity, sarcasm, calculation, pettiness, none of which is appropriate to truth in its moral aspect.

7.

If the vision of a life led according to the dictates of conscience is not without melancholy, this is foremost because, having been born into a world in which truth and goodness are eternally pushed aside in favor of ambition, egotism, and greed, we ourselves lapse inevitably into moral debility, and our awakening, regardless of the purity of spirit with which we conduct our lives thereafter, cannot address the failures of our past, which are frozen inside it as in amber; further, the person who follows the dictates of conscience knows that to do so is to forego the better part of those pleasures that had once made life bearable, that the world will misunderstand and mock his decision, and that whatever suffering he relieves or fails to bring about will be nothing compared to the misery in which the world is steeped, which will persist after he is in his grave.  But his melancholy is of a serene rather than hysterical character.

8.

Truth:  it is because of the constant reliance on this word and its subordinates that Nabokov, full of admiration for Chekhov’s art, still derides him as a purveyor of commonplaces.  What is easier, yet more mysterious, than to exhort that we be true?  Though moral conflict lies at the heart of Chekhov’s stories, his delicate treatment of it contributes little to our understanding of the episodes of our moral lives.  For the many times he writes of infidelity, we come away from his fiction with no clearer an opinion of how adulterers and their wounded spouses should act than that they should be true, and this is too general, too crystalline, to be of broad applicability.

This is not an aesthetic criticism:  in art, the creator’s object is an arrangement of effects and an elegance of structure, and in this respect, Chekhov’s instincts are often impeccable.  But if it is said to be in bad taste to dismiss a work for its didactic or philosophical shortcomings, it remains true that art inspires us to moral reflection, and to censure those reflections would be absurd.  Among other things, Chekhov is a refined moral observer, and as moral actors, we should strive constantly to refine our own such observations; therefore it would be wasteful to forego plumbing morality in Chekhov out of misplaced allegiance to art for art’s sake.

9.

 One of Chekhov’s stock characters is the penitent drunkard.  Through inveterate falsehood and sentimentality, he has squandered his credit with the world.  We should not say he is insincere, for at those moments when he declares his good intentions, he is convinced of the purity of his heart, but rather that he has no strength to live out the consequences of his words.  Without this strength, an honest existence is impossible; from the vestiges of his moral nature, he makes promises he is too weak to keep, and his life becomes a hysteric flight from them and from the people he has made them to; when he begins to yearn for truth, it is primarily for a kind of existence he need no longer flee.

For such a person, the maxim “Be true!” is curative, and as readers, we are moved by the humility that overcomes Chekhov’s characters in the course of their redemption.  But it is curious that those tales in which he plausibly presents a moral awakening in terms of its process are aesthetically of the second rank, while his finest ones, to which the term “nuanced” is often applied, either leave this process in suspension or pass over it diegetically, as with Laevsky’s and Von Koren’s transformations in “The Duel.”  It strikes me that a lack of clarity obtains in critics’ taste for praising Chekhov’s nuance and ambiguity, and that we must distinguish these terms’ ethical and aesthetic acceptations.  In aesthetics, ambiguity and nuance are desirable of themselves, and refer to certain irreducibles without which the work in question cannot properly be called art; whereas in ethics, nuance and ambiguity rather denote a depth of attentiveness than the renunciation of judgment.  In the end, ethical considerations strive for clarity in a way that distinguishes them from art.

10.

Those tales of Chekhov’s in which a moral conversion is rendered plausibly as a process fail aesthetically to the extent that their lesson is too easily generalized; having finished them, we extract their moral, and the subtleties that animated it fade.  In the masterpieces, where the conversion is either halted or alluded to elliptically, the ethical mechanics is shrouded by the imagery’s intensity.  Throughout Chekhov’s work, there is a constant struggle between the ethical and aesthetic impulses to outdo one another in force.

11.

Is an artistically satisfying reconciliation of the two possible?  Outside of popular art, which, while sharing certain characteristics, may be something qualitatively distinct from the high art of the past 150 years, the answer may be no.  The most prominent and rigorous attempt I know of must be the chapters concerning Lyovin’s evolution in his growth toward Kitty in Anna Karenina.  When I read this novel, the temptation to skip them is enormous; they have always marred the book for me, and lacked the luster of mimetic truth.  Are we simply more inclined to accept the etiology of a disaster such as Anna’s than that of a moral evolution like that of Lyovin?  It is true that what passes for evidence, amid the intellectual and aesthetic prejudices of our age, presses us to favor the possibility of collapse over redemption, so that descriptions of growth seem inherently false, and we prefer to take our inspiration and heroism from newspapers and memoirs, where they can be fact-checked.

But to emphasize our cynicism is to overlook a fundamental aesthetic principle that transcends passing attitudes towards morality and valor:  the need of tension to carry a story forward.  This relates to our own struggles for survival and mastery, which are projected into literature as into dreams:  what is unresolved invariably begs for attention, and we turn to it from what appears to be secure.  To the degree that we are assured that all will turn out well, there is no stake for us, and our devotion wanes.  When reading absorbs us, our attention feels necessary to carry the plot forward; we may know the ending, but the thought of it dissipates amid the furor of romance or the hail of enemy fire, just as the certainty that we are safe aboard an airplane is of no use to us in the midst of panic.

12.

Success narratives—guides to a better marriage or financial independence—also illustrate the process of moral evolution, and we may seek to impose their teachings on our own lives.  Though they share many features of fiction and may in fact be fiction, we accept them, they build tension in us, and we peruse them for their guiding principles as we would a novel for its resolutions.  The difference between a success narrative and an illustration of moral evolution in fiction is solely one of credence on the reader’s behalf:  whereas in our hearts we doubt we should redeem ourselves by marrying and retiring to the country, like Lyovin, we believe we might achieve “hot monogamy” by following the steps in the eponymous best-seller.

Supposing it were possible to bring to bear on fiction the same credence we grant newspapers, self-help books, and memoirs, would we maintain the reigning opprobrium on didacticism in art?

13.

We reject didacticism in literature as we do prescriptivism in life:  too simplistic, too reductive; extraneous when the matter at hand is clear, unsuitable when it is not.  Or should we rather say:  the morally unambiguous situation is not appropriate to literature.  Though it is widely accepted that hygiene is important for a healthy life, it is inconceivable that a novel should be written in praise of the benefits of hygiene.  A cautionary tale about the consequences of ignoring hygiene, though perhaps suitable for a child, would be insulting to an adult.  The just precept in literature is of interest in two cases:  when it is adopted quixotically, against the dictates of the protagonist’s world, or when it is broken by a character whose dignity is maintained, as in Anna Karenina and Madame Bovary.  In the first case, the pleasure afforded is alternately projective and self-congratulatory:  either we identify with the hero, and his struggles, psychologically, become our own, or else we side with him against his oppressors; regardless, we bask in an impression of our own nobility that a sympathetic reading has conferred on us.  In the second, we confront tragedy, in the Hegelian sense of a conflict between two rights—the precept, and the character’s dignity in conflict with that precept—and are afforded two pleasures:  the intellectual thrill of the riddle and the emotional-aesthetic one of proximity to danger—to the contradictions that destroy the protagonist, but leave us happily alive.

14.

The cautionary tale is aesthetically inadequate because it does not respect the dignity of its characters.  When we speak of the requirement that a work of art be true, it is chiefly to this respect for dignity we refer.  But what do we mean when we speak of dignity?

Above all, in spite of those views of the subject that, since the early humanists, have stressed its innateness and inviolability, we must affirm it to be a reaction-formation, born of rebellion against circumstances, that distinguishes abuse from impersonal violence.  We cannot imagine the notion of dignity arising in a world devoid of threats to it any more than one of truth in a world free of ignorance and error.  To look into the nature of dignity, then, is rather to inquire into the circumstances that give rise to the feeling of indignity and lead the subject to armor himself with the concepts of dignity and indignity and imperatives to respect the former.

We need only invert those ideas of dignity that have come to us from the humanists and from Kant.  If we are told that dignity is inviolable, we should say that the concept of dignity exists to preserve the feeling of dignity from violation; if we read in Bettelheim that dignity is “man’s inherent ability to regulate his life,” we may note that in countless circumstances, man is unable to regulate his life, and as he finds this humiliating, he fabricates a concept, and a set of practices surrounding it—really more a set of customs and a manner of speaking than a concept—that guard him from this humiliation.  The root of the idea of dignity is impotent aggression, incapacity to fight back against humiliation; when Jean Améry strikes his aggressor in the face, despite the savage beating he incurs thereby, he affirms that this act constituted a restoration of his dignity.

But the role of altruism is also essential.  If the concept of dignity occurs to us in the course of our own humiliation, it does so equally, as an outgrowth of our empathy, when we observe the infliction of power on the defenseless, so long as we have not perverted our instincts by allegiance to some herd mentality.  This altruism forms the basis for our objections to the simplicity of cautionary tales as well as to the cruelty of caricature; the character has become real to us, but we see him as helpless against the depredations of the author, imposed on him from above; a remarkable example of this is Jean Améry’s defense of Charles Bovary against his treatment by Flaubert in Charles Bovary: Country Doctor; and many novels on behalf of the maligned serve to dignify their subjects against the mass of popular opinion, which is itself only a kind of badly written fiction.

Thus, of a great work of tragedy, we demand that the protagonist be noble; whereas comedy, which appeals most often to the vulturine instincts, has much of its basis in contempt for weakness and joy in the humiliation of others; and the tragi-comic involves a self-chastening according to which we dabble in cruelty before offering the beset character an out, and then reflect warmly on our magnanimity.

15.

 If we truly believed in the free agency of a gambler or adulterer, we could not grant them that empathy that is the animating force of stories.  Our recognition of such characters’ dignity lies not in our acknowledgement of their sovereignty, but in our sorrow when the illusion of it crashes against an ineluctable doom; not of their subjectivity, but rather their subjection; fundamentally, that is to say, of their capacity to suffer.

16.

What is moral ambiguity in a story, then?  A situation where suffering is inevitable.  Our reflection on it relates to competing claims of dignity, to the attempt to determine who is least deserving of a suffering that must be borne by someone.  While the intellectual puzzle of apportioning suffering begs for an elegant solution, relating to the universal instinct for justice, from an aesthetic perspective, this solution can never be definitive, lest the work in question devolve into didacticism.

[1] “Melancholy itself is nothing more than an unconscious memory,” would be an ironed-out but serviceable translation, but the structure Flaubert employs, the false passive or passive-reflexive, allows for the broader range of interpretations explored above.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Adrian West is a writer and translator as well as a contributing editor at Asymptote. His work has appeared in numerous publications including McSweeney’s, Words Without Borders, and The Brooklyn Rail.  He has recently completed a novel entitled The Aesthetics of Degradation.  He currently lives between the United States and Spain with the cinema critic Beatriz Leal Riesco.

You’re Human Like the Rest of Them: The Films of B S Johnson

Compared to the fertile interactions between the literary and cinematic avant-gardes in Germany, Italy and the Soviet Union, British Modernism and film was virtually a non-event. Wyndham Lewis and the Vorticists, the most militant movement, scorned the medium entirely; of the British Surrealists, only Humphrey Jennings emulated French counterparts Robert Desnos and Jacques Prévert by working in cinema, and when he did, he adopted a naturalistic style, primarily influenced by the British documentary movement, rather than the Surrealist films of Luis Buñuel or Man Ray. Virginia Woolf wrote one brief text on cinema after seeing The Cabinet of Dr Caligari; Dorothy Richardson and US émigré H.D. contributed to Close-Up, the internationally-minded journal that ran from 1927 to 1933, but otherwise, the inter-war Modernists displayed little interest in the newest art form.

After the war, British critics reacted against Modernist literature’s restless experimentation and celebrated the formal conservatism and measured rage of the Angry Young Men. At the same time, in France, several high-profile authors were finding new directions for the ‘innovative’ novel, and some — notably Marguerite Duras and Alain Robbe-Grillet — took their ideas into filmmaking. Disillusioned with the post-war cultural climate, B. S. Johnson argued tirelessly for a continuation of Joyce and Beckett’s interrogations into the limits of language, striving with his friend Alan Burns to collate a circle of British neo-Modernist writers that would rival those in France.

Few of the writers promoted by Johnson worked in film. Like Robbe-Grillet and Nathalie Sarraute, Rayner Heppenstall often explored the inner workings of a protagonist’s consciousness, in response to cinema assuming the 19th century novel’s exteriorised narrative function. Ann Quin had no involvement; nor did Angela Carter. Of those praised for ‘writing as though it mattered’ in Johnson’s Aren’t You Rather Young to be Writing Your Memoirs?, only Stefan Themerson had made films, with his wife Franciszka, the last two of which were propaganda films after they relocated to Britain during the Second World War.

Johnson, however, sustained an interest in filmmaking, with most of his works included in the new BFI collection You’re Human Like the Rest of Them, released to commemorate the 80th anniversary of his birth. Alongside Well Done God, a collection of Johnson’s prose and drama, it forms part of an effort to understand Johnson as more than a ‘novelist’, and appreciate his talent in its entirety. Featuring several short films, agitprop pieces, TV play Not Counting the Savages and several television documentaries that he directed or presented, it is a fascinating package, not least because it shows how Johnson paid scant attention to currents in avant-garde filmmaking, and developed his own utterly distinct practice: like his novels, they are all very different, in subject and style.

You’re Human Like the Rest of Them (1967) was Johnson’s directorial debut — a short film about schoolteacher Haakon, played by William Hoyland, who is painfully aware of his own mortality, and distressed that those around him, particularly his pupils, do not collapse with this shared knowledge. It is often said that Johnson’s voice too closely resembled Samuel Beckett’s — see his contemporary Eva Figes, writing in 2004 — and You’re Human shares Beckett’s concerns with ageing and pointlessness, as well as a similarly stark, detached tone and bleak sense of humour. Little philosophy builds out of Haakon’s despair: a sense that everything is futile can put people, conversely, in a position of power — as it does in Johnson’s novel Christie Malry’s Own Double-Entry (1973), where Malry decided to avenge every ‘debt’ he feels that society owes him — but here, all Haakon can do is “make myself … bloody awkward”, ending, like many of Johnson’s works, on a decidedly defeated note.

Johnson wanted to cut on each word of You’re Human, but settled for one at the end of every line of dialogue. This is not dialectical montage — the contrasting of opposing forces through cutting — but Eisenstein’s influence is apparent, as is, to a limited extent, that of the French New Wave. It is worlds away from the Structuralist approach of the London Filmmakers’ Co-op, however, and nothing in Johnson’s published writing on film suggests that he even knew about the Co-op, who largely shared his aesthetic and political sympathies, and who might have provided vital theoretical and practical support.

His next short, Paradigm (1968) was even more Beckettian, its set stripped down to some coloured blocks against a cloudy background, with a discordant tone rumbling throughout. Its opening credits state that it is the ‘international version’; then, a naked Hoyland presents a monologue in a nonsense tongue. Over its ten minutes, Hoyland interprets this invented language remarkably well, becoming slower and more melancholic as his character ages with each cut, but Paradigm was disastrously received at Cannes in 1969: its producer disowned it after Walerien Borowczyk called it “the worst short film [I’ve] ever seen”. In the DVD’s accompanying notes, David Quantick expresses his admiration for the film, and it’s nowhere near as bad as Borowczyk suggested, but You’re Human far better makes Johnson’s point about the inevitability of ageing and sadness of having expressed everything possible, and similar linguistic experiments had been conducted more wittily by Kurt Schwitters, Raoul Hausmann and others fifty years earlier.

Paradigm effectively ended Johnson’s career as an avant-garde film artist, though he made two very short films inspired by his favourite poets. The ICA commissioned Up Yours Too, Guillaume Apollinaire to mark the fiftieth anniversary of Apollinaire’s death: a two-minute animation drawn by John Furse, its visual style recalls Cocteau’s drawings and the Themersons’ illustrations for Ubu roi. It references the World War I head wound that ultimately killed Apollinaire, as well as his late work Les Mamelles de Tirésias and his visual poetry, through a letter B that turns into ‘best’, ‘beast’ and ‘breast’, before the word multiplies and turns into a breast in profile. It’s a strange, slight work, but wryly amusing for those familiar with its subject; one suspects that Apollinaire (who also wrote pornographic novels) would have approved.

The mysterious Poem complements the Apollinaire film. Filmed in 1971, and just one minute long, it was directed by Johnson and narrated by Hoyland, who delivered the last four lines of Beckett’s Quatre poèmes (in their English translation) over shots of derelict London houses and chimneys, litter, graffiti and a woman undressing. Nobody knows who the woman was or where the film was shown, but the juxtaposition of Beckett’s pessimistic text, and Hoyland’s repetition of its signature line (‘I would like my love to die’), with the sad, subtle images make Poem the most moving piece in this collection, its beauty only reinforced by its brevity.

Johnson directed two more short films — agitprop pieces made in 1971 for the ACTT union to protest the Conservative government’s Industrial Relations Bill. Unfair was co-written with Alan Burns, and used stereotypically sturdy workers and crapulent bosses in its attempt to connect with its intended audiences. Both Unfair and March, which documented a TUC demo in Hyde Park in February 1971, are intriguing period pieces, capturing both the relative strength of the unions before the miner’s strike, and, at one point in Unfair, the homophobia prevalent amongst the Left (seemingly imported from Seventies sitcoms), where a decadent capitalist is asked when we might see a woman as Prime Minister, and replies “Oh, I thought we had one now, dear!” Had Johnson lived to endure Britain’s first female leader, and her equally barbaric policies on unions and LGBT people, his sympathies may have shifted.

The rest of the DVD showcases Johnson’s television work. Not everything is featured: The Smithsons on Housing, a 26-minute documentary about Alison and Peter Smithson’s design for the Robin Hood Gardens estate in Poplar, which the BBC found so ‘dour and inaccessible’ that it ended Johnson’s directorial relationship with them, does not appear — although it has surfaced on YouTube and, like Unfair, it is an interesting record of its time, recording a curious mix of detachment and utopianism.

Johnson continued to write for the BBC, however, scripting Not Counting the Savages for its Thirty Minute Theatre strand in 1972. Plenty of BBC broadcasts from this era have not survived, and the copy presented here is in poor condition; the notes tell us that Johnson fell out with director Mike Newell over the casting of Hugh Burden in the lead role, and the finished product feels slow and oddly stilted. Johnson’s range of literary influences was far broader than has sometimes been credited, but the shadows of Orton and Pinter loom too large over Not Counting the Savages, and the relentless non-communication leaves the characterisation too thin for the contrast between the patriarch’s domestic coldness and his life-saving medical work to have its desired impact.

Finally, there are three television documentaries about writing. B. S. Johnson on Samuel Johnson, made for London Weekend Television in 1971, is an absolute revelation. The 18th century Johnson — wit, raconteur and, most famously, dictionary author — may seem a surprising choice for the 20th century avant-gardist, but the chemistry between them is perfect. LWT’s low budget meant there were few frills — and the wretched ‘docu-drama’ format had yet to be dreamt up by TV executives who thought audiences to be too inattentive to follow non-fiction — and so B. S. Johnson provided an intelligent, humorous biography of Samuel Johnson as a public figure, who wrote “when something force[d] him to”, punctuated by various still images.

B. S. Johnson worked as a teacher, and his presenting style is rather scholarly, but his directorial control allowed him to draw empathetic parallels with his subject — and have some fun with the televisual form. Several slogans flash up momentarily, most memorably ‘Publishers are PARASITES!’ after he has explained how certain proprietors, then and now, would treat writers to a “free lunch” in lieu of payment. (If Johnson would be distraught at what’s happened to the unions since his death, he would be horrified at the widening gulf between authorial creativity and remuneration.) There are plenty of fascinating insights — not least that the dictionary was an attempt to stabilise English when Greek and Latin were still seen as the languages of record — and a delicious ending, as B. S. Johnson quotes one of Samuel’s particularly sharp put-downs and simply says to the camera: “Follow that!”

Johnson also presented a BBC documentary on The Unfortunates, filmed in 1969 as part of their Release series. There’s a deep sadness to him, and the programme, not least because his famous ‘book in a box’ dealt with his friend Tony’s early death from cancer. Johnson drives around Nottingham, reading from The Unfortunates’ stream-of-consciousness text, before covering Nottingham Forest’s match against Fulham — the narrator, like Johnson, is a football reporter who hopes that he may cover something extraordinary, like Joe Payne’s ten-goal haul for Luton Town. The jumps between this routine League tie, everyday life and Johnson’s rather modest explanation of his decision to present the novel as a series of unbound chapters to represent the chaotic nature of existence make this a fascinating, metatextual piece of television, where Johnson both discusses The Unfortunates and re-lives the events detailed within it.

The collection concludes with Johnson’s best known film, Fat Man on a Beach, a forty-minute ‘documentary’ — although the word barely feels adequate — directed by Michael Bakewell for ITV in 1973. Narrator Johnson opens proceedings by telling the viewer that “This is a film about a fat man on a beach” and asking, provocatively yet somehow invitingly, “Do you really want to sit there and watch it?” (How could you refuse?)

The mood constantly shifts: Johnson is friendly, then slightly over-enthusiastic, and then relaxes as he remembers his time in North Wales, reads his poetry and considers the mechanics of filmmaking. These changes in tone often spring from the tension between the presenter-led format and Johnson’s bizarre, disjointed monologue, which meanders from in-jokes about covering gaps in film with shots of bananas to a horrific anecdote about a motorcyclist catapulted through a wire fence and being cut like cheese — “a metaphor for the human condition”, Johnson tells us, refusing to restrict his characteristic morbidity for the prime-time slot.

Forty years on, it seems astonishing not that people watched Fat Man on a Beach, but that it got through any commissioning process, let alone on ITV, now notorious for its pursuit of the lowest common denominator at any cost. Given the contempt in which 21st century television holds its audiences, to be explicitly told that “Now might be a good time to get a cup of tea” before Johnson recites his poetry feels like being credited with an unusual level of intelligence — at least, the viewer could opt to refuse to be patronised, and be rewarded for choosing to stick with the host.

Much has been made of the ending, in which Johnson walked fully clothed into the sea, echoing the death of Ann Quin months before filming, and three weeks before he killed himself. It’s difficult not to see Fat Man on a Beach as a valedictory statement, including as it does so many of Johnson’s preoccupations, but perhaps it’s more interesting to speculate on what might have happened had Johnson continued — could he have built on these short films and television programmes to become an underground-overground artist-activist to challenge the horrors of Thatcherism? We’ll never know, sadly, but You’re Human Like the Rest of Them allows us to consider just how close he might have come.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Juliet Jacques is a freelance writer for The Guardian, The New Statesman and others, who writes about literature, film, art, gender and football. Her Transgender Journey blog for The Guardian – the first to serialise the gender reassignment process for a major British publication – was longlisted for the Orwell Prize in 2011.

By Nicky Charlish.

It isn’t often that a British film which has flopped on its home territory is resuscitated by American enthusiasm. That’s what happened with Croupier (1998, dir. Mike Hodges). But more of that in a moment, let’s go over the plot before we get to the jackpot. Or rather, Jack’s plot. The film’s protagonist is Jack Manfred (Clive Owen), a would-be novelist whose father, Jack Sr. (Nicholas Ball) a gambling South African-based con-man, arranges for Jack to work as a croupier in a London casino. (Jack has already worked as one in South Africa). Suffering from writer’s block, he takes the job. Then, after some experiences at work encourage him to follow the old dictum of ‘write about what you know’, he starts writing a novel whose subject is – a croupier (called Jake). Meanwhile, he is inveigled by Jani (Alex Kingston) – a gambler at the casino – to take part in a robbery there which some gangsters are setting-up (she owes them money – big-time). Unwilling at first, he eventually goes along with her – he could make good use of the money. He receives advance payment, but his girlfriend, Marion (Gina McKee) – a former policewoman turned store detective – finds this money and also intercepts a ‘phone message to him from Jani. The heist – during which Jack is attacked by one of the gangsters – fails, but Marion (who has put two and two together) tells him to leave the casino or she will turn him in. Jack returns to his novel but, shortly afterwards, Marion is killed by a hit-and-run driver. He publishes his novel, I, Croupier, anonymously, but gets a phone call from Jani, now in South Africa. She is due to get married – to his father. Jack has been played all along.

At first this seems a straightforward caper film, but it can be seen to operate on a number of different levels, for closer examination shows that it deals us a hand from several different packs. First, it has an element of noir. Jack has been emotionally emptied by family break-up – Jack’s life is a high-grade illustration of Philip Larkin’s statement about what parents do to you. Yet, although we’re led to believe that it was his father’s gambling which caused this family split, Jack somehow regards the casino as a family, a home-from-home which cannot be betrayed. At his interview for the London casino job he says to himself ‘Welcome back Jack… to the house of addiction’, but you feel it’s not just the punters who he regards as addicts – he needs the place too, and he eventually starts travelling to work in his croupier’s uniform of black tie.

Second, it gives us a picture of Blair’s Britain which is, refreshingly, less than flattering. Britannia is unremittingly icy, not cool. Crime-based films have long shown London at various stages of its history and Croupier is no exception. The Long Good Friday captured London on the eve of the East End’s transformation from dead docklands to financial hub whilst Mona Lisa portrayed Soho on the verge of change, post-Groucho Club new sophistication, pre-rainbow-flagged gay village gentrification, and with old-style gangsters still around. Here, Croupier shows a London of shouting drunks, workers who are seemingly either dissatisfied with their jobs or on some sort of fiddle as in the case of, respectively, Bella (Kate Hardie) and Matt (Paul Reynolds), two of Jack’s fellow croupiers, and dingy hotels (when Jack visits the one where Jani is staying to finalise his involvement with the heist, we can just overhear a family row occurring in another room). This is a London for which modern politicians and their image-makers have no interest and don’t want to know about.

Third, it can be taken as an investigation of numerology used as a sort of unconsciously-adopted belief-system, now that mainstream Western ones – both sacred and secular – seem to have run out of steam (inertia rather than zeal seems to be the hallmark of modern Western Christianity, whilst politics offers nothing except different solutions to getting rich quick). Linked with this is the idea of coincidence: does chance have an element of probability?. For instance, is it coincidental that Marion’s death at the hands of a motorist occurs after her threat to grass-up Jack? And he uses a system of odds to determine whether his scam payment money is counterfeit or not. Given the fragmented nature of his early life and his experience of the unreliability of people as bases for trust, it’s understandable that Jack seeks security and solace in probability – for him there really is safety in numbers.

Fourth, it is an examination of writing – the motives of writers, and the practicalities of how to create stuff for the page. The film’s voiceovers, although all delivered by Jack’s voice, reflect the activities of two people – Jack the writer and Jake the croupier (although that croupier is Jack). To what extent do writers identify with their characters, and how do they relate? At one point, Jack wonders whether writing is work – he reaches no conclusion, although some might be tempted to agree with Truman Capote’s view – stated in the preface to his collection of short stories, Music for Chameleons – that writing is a God-given gift but that that gift is also a whip ‘intended solely for self-flagellation’. (In that preface, Capote goes on to draw a parallel between writers and professional card-players.) In the case of I, Croupier, for the writer to identify with its protagonist is a dangerous game indeed, given the robbery that’s being planned. How much of himself – in this case, the dangerous part that is risking prison or worse – can the writer employ? (One thinks of crime novelist Derek Raymond whose early novels must have been written not only with brio but, given his own underworld involvement at the time of their composition, with caution too, and the toll such a balancing act might, must, require of a writer.)

One might think that, given this wealth of material, Croupier would have been a film destined for immediate success in its native land. In addition, it also has excellent casting – including the bit-parts – evokes the menace and magic of night-time London, and maintains a high level of tension. But this was not to be, at first. Originally released in 1999, for some reason it was not given a major UK release by Film Four (under whose aegis it was conceived), and it was, at the behest of the British Film Institute, given a series of joint screenings with a re-release of director Mike Hodges’ earlier film, Get Carter – but even being linked with that sure-fire cinematic attraction didn’t help much. However, on receiving screenings in the United States its reputation gathered momentum until its budget
was more than recouped. This is surprising, especially given that the film is offbeat, doesn’t have an optimistic view of life – since the eighties, America hasn’t seemed the sort of place
where similar dark offerings, such as Chinatown or The French Connection, would be made, let alone British noir given any critical house room. Perhaps it was its very non-conformist quirkiness that did the trick. Following this encouraging scenario, Croupier was then re-issued in this country, with a heavy-duty media campaign, and was a hit. The fifteenth anniversary of its creation gives us an opportunity to reflect on the strange ways of artistic success – and the role within it of luck.

At the film’s conclusion Jack, having had his novel published at last, realises that he is a one-book writer, and has quit while he’s ahead – like a successful gambler. Also, he has made some money with the robbery, and we suspect that the police consider the matter closed. He has ended-up living with Bella (earlier in the film she’d been sacked from the casino for failing a drugs test) and continues to work as a croupier. But is Jack a winner? On the face of things, yes. He’s got the satisfaction of literary fame without its accompanying public hassle (we glimpse him in a tube train watching someone reading his novel), a steady job, money, and a relationship. Yet his victory is pyrrhic. Emotionally cold, he can have no deep relationship with Bella (who, we learn earlier in the film, was a prostitute specialising in S&M before becoming a croupier and has, presumably, been emotionally damaged by this experience, assuming she wasn’t before). The only pleasure left to him is being at the still centre of the spinning wheel of misfortune where he no longer hears the sound of the ball – he is master of the game whose object is making you lose. (Clive Owen, when the over-dubbing was completed, was asked his view of Jack’s state of mind at the end of the film. His reply was simple: “He’s mad.”) Perhaps Jack’s mental state will provide a form of lifelong insulation against the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. Then again, it may be that, unless his damaged personality is repaired, it’s only a matter oftime before the roulette wheel of his mind loses its moorings in enjoying other people’s bad luck and Jack spins off into full-blown breakdown – or suicide. It all turns on luck – maybe.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Nicky Charlish is a freelance writer and proofreader who has contributed to, among other publications, Melody Maker, Record Mirror, Midweek, Penpusher and the Culture Wars reviews of the Institute of Ideas.

I’ve been taking photos quite seriously for a couple of years now, both digitally and on 35 and 120mm film.

Some of these photographs formed part of my mood board as I was writing Black Bread White Beer.

Taking photographs, thinking about them, was an integral part of the writing.

Everything from these images were absorbed into the book.

Historian and biographer Pierre Champion once characterized French writer Marcel Schwob (1867-1905) as “a man of the future.” It seems an odd assessment of a man who insistently looked to the past. Born into a family of rabbis and doctors, Schwob’s life was strongly marked by an obsessive fascination with bygone historical epochs: he studied Sanskrit; translated Catullus, Defoe, and Shakespeare; he spent his brief adult years studying, with the intention of publishing the definitive study of, fifteenth century outlaw poet Francois Villon. His stories, when not set in antiquity or the Middle Ages, are ripe with allusions to legends, lost customs, nearly forgotten mythologies and characters from the fringes of empire and art. Under the aegis of his uncle, Leon Cahun (great-uncle of the artist Claude Cahun), the curator and librarian of the famous Bibliothèque Mazarine, Marcel spent his formative years surrounded by a rich collection of books and manuscripts, including the Mazarine Bible, printed by Gutenberg himself. When he was sixteen, he wrote and abandoned a novel set in ancient Rome. It could be said that Schwob grew up at the end of the 19th century, but came of age in antiquity.

Champion’s insight may have been less a characterization of Schwob’s gaze than his destiny. In the century following his premature death, Schwob appears to have been all but forgotten. This despite numbering among his admirers Jules Renard, Mallarmé, Paul Valéry and Alfred Jarry (who both dedicated books to Schwob), Robert Louis Stevenson, Oscar Wilde, Borges, and Roberto Bolaño. Despite periodic dustings off—Solar Books published a translation, by “Lady Jane Orgasmo,” of his secretly influential Imaginary Lives a few years ago that is already out-of-print and difficult to find—there seems to be little reason to revise Roger Shattuck’s claim, made in 1955, that Schwob is a “singularly neglected figure.”

The history of literature is, of course, strewn with the neglected, the misunderstood, the forgotten, the never fully realized, and minor figures more influential than renowned. If one were to draw a Venn diagram comprised of each of these categories, Marcel Schwob, along with a handful of others, would be at the heart of their intersections. But how, one despairs, can a man praised so highly during his own life fall completely by the wayside posthumously, as if it was his vitality alone that kept him from obscurity? Unlike many forgotten writers, especially those aligned with movements, Schwob’s preoccupations were not too narrow in scope. He has not aged poorly or grown musty with time. Why, then, has it been his fate to suffer near total effacement?

Certainly, he died too young to cement his legacy. The last years of his brief life were marked by excruciating pain—the effects of debilitating stomach cancer—that made it difficult for him to work at any sustained level, and so he left behind a tantalizing list of incomplete or dreamt-of projects: the aforementioned biography of Francois Villon; a life of Saint Francis; a study of Angelique de Longueval; along with plays, translations, and tales. (Fleur Jaeggy, in a beautiful meditation on Schwob, lists a few evocative titles of his unwritten works: Océanide, Vaililoa, Captain Crabbe.) Like his friend and correspondent Robert Louis Stevenson, about whom he wrote a perceptive essay, Schwob was forced to seek a better climate due to poor health. Unlike Stevenson, he was unable to work under the conditions imposed upon him by 19th century sea travel. After a disastrous trip to Samoa, he returned to France and eventually settled down no further from Paris than an island on the Seine, the Ile Saint-Louis, where during the last two years of his life he regaled visitors, as health permitted, with informal salons, where by all accounts his prodigious learning was fully on display.

The most tempting and recurrent argument about Schwob’s obsolescence has been put forward by several of his admirers: namely, that Schwob’s learning was too great or specialized and his interests too esoteric for the mythical common reader. Scholar John Green stated as much explicitly in an essay on Schwob’s Imaginary Lives, characterizing Schwob as “a man of versatile talents and extraordinary erudition… which almost immediately carried him beyond the reach of the general reading public.” William Brown Meloney V, an early and imperfect translator of The Book of Monelle, makes a similar assessment of one of the writer’s satires, characterizing it as a masterpiece, but “too rare a feast.”

Although I think this argument does disservice to Schwob and serious readers, it would be would be foolish to dismiss it out of hand; Schwob was by any standard a bookish man. In John Erskine’s phrasing, he was given to “think much about experience before he had it, and to approach it with heavy prepossessions built up from his reading,” and while his work is ripe with obscure allusions, the course of literature in the twentieth century has prepared modern readers for just this type of literature. Borges, whose indebtedness to Schwob may not be obvious but is profound, is a writer against whom similar charges could be leveled.

By condemning Schwob to the category of the myopic scholar tracing obscure references through a series of increasingly arcane books and manuscripts, we risk overshadowing his emotional sensitivity, which is as keen as his erudition and is the mark of an artist who deserves a better fate. This sensitivity manifests itself in his curiosity about the individual, which is apparent in the preface to Imaginary Lives, a book once described, in a quaint (and, to modern ears, damning) romantic manner, as the “lives of some poets, gods, assassins and pirates, and several princesses and gallant ladies.” In a passage lamenting the inadequacies of ancient biographers—“Misers all,” he sighs, “valuing only politics or grammar”—Schwob emphasizes his belief in the necessity of an art that unclassifies rather than classifies, one that cares less for the sweeping generalization than it does in uncovering each individual’s anomalies:

Contrary to history, art describes individuals, desires only the unique… consider a leaf with its intricate nerve system, its color variegated by shade and sun; the imprint of a raindrop; the tiny mark left by an insect; the silver trace of a snail; or the first mortal touch of autumn gold. Search all the forests of the earth for another leaf exactly like it. I defy you to find one.

The particulars fix Schwob’s attention and demand in turn to be fixed in art, as they have come likewise to fascinate us in this egalitarian age of memoir. His belief in the necessity of art to convey what is “bizarre” in each human being—which perhaps is partly responsible for his affinity with the macabre, where the telling detail is of utmost importance—seems to me to be of lasting value. When he writes that “To the eye of a painter a portrait of an unknown man, by Cranach, is as valuable as a portrait of the great Erasmus,” he speaks as our contemporary. History records the deeds of Great Men, but each of us, Schwob argues, is by virtue of being alive worthy of attention; our actions may be forgettable, they may be consigned even before their actualization to the abyss, but alight with our obsessions, we love, we despair, we mourn. How could any of these emotions be so trivial as to be undeserving of recognition?

Schwob’s sensitivity is also manifest in his ability to locate the universal in the individual. This is especially apparent in the strange and luminous Book of Monelle, which was recently published in a new translation by poet Kit Schluter (Wakefield Press, 2012).

The Book of Monelle is a book of the dead. On a rainy evening in early 1893, Marcel Schwob, the passive scholar whose childhood was spent in dimly lit rooms amidst dust and daydreams and, according to Meloney, who had until this fortuitous night “lived solely in the realm of ideas and abstractions” met Louise, a tubercular working class girl and prostitute living in the Parisian slums. Little beyond the oblique evidence in The Book of Monelle exists of Marcel and Louise’s life together: a handful of letters to friends in which Schwob pours out his grief after her death and a single letter in Louise’s childlike hand (she wrote using colored pencils) that Schwob pulled back from the flames in which he otherwise immolated his love. From these remains, however, one can piece together a picture of a relationship that has been characterized as a flight into “a fanciful realm of unreality where they reduced all the events of their world into the simplicity of a child’s understanding”.

Captivated by Louise, Schwob entered a second childhood—though it might be more appropriate to call it his first proper childhood. The two colored the world in broad, simple strokes. They played games with neighborhood children, spun stories out everyday objects: a mirror and candle, a broken doll and toy sailboats. They attempted to live, as we convince ourselves children do, in what Schwob would later call the “untruthful moment.” Given the grim state of Louise’s health, it’s not difficult to imagine the feverish intensity of their fantasies. By the end of 1893, she was dead and Schwob was lost in the depths of a grief unimaginable to those who knew him, especially since most of his friends were unaware of the existence of Louise or the fervor of Schwob’s attachment.

The dead become things. We associate those we’ve lost with objects they treasured or places that evoke them. For a time, Schwob clung to the outward remains of his life with Louise: it was said that he visited his publisher’s office with a gang of children in tow. It comes as no surprise that as he came to terms with his grief, Schwob, a creature of the library, conflated Louise with books. They were nearly all he knew. As he mourned, Schwob searched for her in their pages, finding pieces, but never enough to do more than tantalize. “And tonight I went looking for her in books; but I look for her in vain,” he writes. This cruel realization—that no matter how much we cherish or cling to literature, it is always given to us from afar and speaks to and of us imperfectly—led to the creation of Monelle and her sisters. Unable to locate his beloved in print, he undertook to place her there himself.

The Book of Monelle is the result. Its existence is a testament of the artist’s ability to salvage from the wreckage of life something worthy of the love that preceded it. “Throw no debris behind you; may each put his ruins to use,” Monelle instructs, and Schwob does just that, assembling from his ill-starred, mysterious love affair a mosaic of fairy story, parable, and manual on grief. It is an unsettling work, a triptych in which the singular is transformed into the universal.

In the first and last sections, Schwob gives voice to Monelle—the appellation, notes Schluter, designates something like My-her, an amalgam wisely retained in the original French. Her “sayings,” which constitute the first third, drip with fin-de-siècle nihilism, and seem, in their refinement and haunted detachment, unlikely to have been uttered by a barely literate prostitute. However refracted through the prism of Schwob’s learning and grief they may be, the sayings ring with hard-earned, Biblical acceptance of the sorrows of life. “All construction comes from destruction,” she says, which could serve as the writer’s credo, the slow-beating heart of mourning. Destroy, forget, burn, scatter:

Behold the word: Destroy, destroy, destroy. Destroy within yourself; destroy what surrounds you. Make space for your soul and all other souls.

Destroy all good and all evil. Their ruins are the same.

Destroy the old dwellings of man and the old dwellings of the soul; what is dead is a distorting mirror.

Destroy, for all creation comes from destruction.

And for higher benevolence you must annihilate lower benevolence. And thus new art seems a sort of iconoclasm.

For all construction is made of debris, and nothing is new in this world but forms.

But you must destroy the forms.

When a whole is lost, we find it scattered. The middle section of The Book of Monelle bears evidence of this. It concerns Monelle’s sisters, “who are myself,” she says. These girls, whose origins lie in stories Schwob dreamt up for Louise (which grew darker as her illness worsened), are representative of archetypes familiar to anyone who grew up with Cinderella and Bluebeard—the perverse, the innocent, the selfish, &c.—and stand in for Monelle in a series of beguiling fairytales. Schwob’s use of this form is not coincidental: fairytales, repositories of the universal, exist in a parallel realm, beyond the conditions of time. Yet with roots extending into a shared past, they connect us with our common humanity. In placing Monelle and her sisters there, Schwob establishes a haven from the merciless clutches of mortality. Monelle is here and not, in time—in the pages of a book—and not. The stories are effective precisely to the degree by which these paradoxes are retained. We can sense the living memory of Louise in its pages, even if she is obscured by veils of learning and sheltered by layers of mythology. It is Schwob’s struggle to find her through and in his own language that so haunts the modern reader.

This is not to say that Monelle and her sisters exist in an idyllic realm. It is a timeless place, but not a perfect one: one part fantasy, one part truth. The girls suffer and they cause suffering. Their world, like ours, is cruel and contingent, but importantly, placed within the confines of a book, they are beyond death’s reach. In what must have seemed a superhuman effort, Schwob marshaled everything he had—his erudition, his literary prowess, and his grief—to create a space where he could henceforth find his lost love. No more would he search in vain. The Book of Monelle exists.

And though it may be forgotten, though dust and mold will settle on its pages, Schwob was acutely aware of the fact that no book, once it exists, can be entirely lost. There always remains the possibility that someone will stumble upon it, or the memory of it, in that future alluded to by Pierre Champion.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Stephen Sparks (@rsparks) lives in San Francisco. He blogs at Invisible Stories and contributes to Tin House and Writers No One Reads.

Shackleton’s Man Goes South, Tony White, Science Museum, 2013.

The barest bones: ‘There are zeppelins over South Kensington and boat people in the South Atlantic. Among them are Emily and daughter Jenny, travelling south to safety and a reunion with John, who has gone ahead to find work. They travel with Browning, a sailor who has already saved their lives more than once. In the slang of their post-melt world, Emily and Jenny are refugees known as ‘mangoes’, a corruption of the saying ‘man go south’.

Climate is changing. Attention is being paid to the stories we have to tell about it. To model future climate and future weather we need accurate stories.For example, a story which doesn’t predict a shift in technologies on the right scale could be disasterous. But how could we know the scale over large temporal periods? How can we anticipate contingencies if we can’t anticipate vast unknowns? Scientific research is arduous and slow. It is hampered by the need for authoritative compromise and agreement. Nothing can be out of control. Guesses and ideas are tamed by committee. So storytelling from elsewhere has a role. Tony White is from elsewhere. Tony White isn’t tamed. He’s not a committee. He looks at the maps. He shapes up something that marks strange uneasy limits on them. He writes a story that tracks climate change’s strange futures. It breeds.

This work is analogous to An Mhuir and Cheilteach and An Mor Keltek and Ar Mor Keltiek and La Mer Celtique and the Celtic Sea that hoves off the Atlantic and the south coast of Ireland, bounded to the East by St George’s Channel with stranger limits over again at the Bristol Channel, the English Channel, the Bay of Biscay, Wales, Cornwall, Devon, Brittany and the Continental Shelf that just falls to immense depths. Its best understood if you turn your map so that North is where you usually have East. His story is a submerged energy. It is a trap disguised as a benign aside.

A man called Hurley took pictures of Shackleton when the boat went down in the ice. Hurley on the ‘Endurance’ was liked by no one and intensely disliked by some. Yet oddly, he was well liked everywhere else. We know that something is not right here. Albertopolis Disparu is an early chapter from 2009. By chapter 3 we get to the discovery of an unpublished Edwardian science fiction story found, we are told, whilst White was researching Shacklelton’s Antarctic expedition aboard the ‘Endurance’ of 1914. But I’m peering at the pictures Hurley took and see another man, not Hurley, not Shackleton, but Worsley. And in his face another presence, a shadow man whose story slithers around in the background. He is a ghostly warning. The fourth man is Oberleutenant zur See Alfred Arnold.

Oil paints and a banjo. Tony White implants images of Frank Hurleys moving images in some detonating psychic happening in Swedenborg’s House just off from the British Museum, London. The pictures seem to be moving. We see penguins reflected in a pool in South Georgia and a penguin rookery. Shackleton’s boats are being hauled across the ice to Graham Land after the crushing of the ‘Endurance’ . The relief of the party on Elephant Island is clear. Worsley and Shackleton stand on the hull of the crushed ‘Endurance’ speaking but we can’t hear what they are saying.

Then something different. We see the image of a boat and then something deathly creeping across the monochrome phantoms. Some revenant stories produce phantoms. They haunt themselves. This one is Alfred Arnold’s. He wakes from his nightmare, still a young student in Heidelberg University. He has seen the cold dark waters of the Irish sea and torn nets. He hears the screams of dying men as visible white holes and goes blind. It is a vision of dark catastrophe. He wakes covered in skin dust.

White’s psychic tricks pull me back to the series of images of the Chilean tug Yelcho arriving off Elephant Island when the men were at last got off . The ship’s bow is still on display in Puerto Williams. The Yahgan are the indigenous people from there. There is only one full-blooded Yahgan left since her sister died in 2005. Despite the very cold climate the Yahgan wore few clothes before Europeans colonized them and missionaries insisted they covered up. Their natural resting position was a deep squatting position which reduced their surface area. They would resemble Beckett’s Balacqua from out of Dante’s purgatory.

The sailing of Shackleton’s ‘James Caird’ from Elephant Island to South Georgia to get relief for the marooned party is a dark picture. There are faint ghosts on the bow of the ‘Endurance’ with dogs, then Shackelton’s party are at dinner, the ‘Endurance’ still intact but gripped fast in the ice of Weddell Sea. We see members of the ‘Endurance’ party living down below after their ship had become frozen stuck. A deck scene. Igloos built for dogs alongside. The escaping of Shackleton’s boats from the ice. Shackleton’s boats hauled up on to the floes at night during the escape . Tom Crean with puppies . Hurley in the early days of Antarctic exploration, with his ponderous apparatus. Shackleton & Hurley outside a hut. Sledge dogs on the ice and in igloos after the ship had been frozen in. The departure of ‘James Caird’ from Elephant Island. Shots of Caird Coast. A supernal Weddell Sea. Ice flowers. A typical South Georgia glacier. David Mawson and 2 unidentified men at the South Magnetic Pole. Shackleton with his beard off, after returning to base camp from his great southern Polar journey. An attempt (which failed) to haul ‘Endurance’ lifeboats over the ice to Graham Land. The ‘Endurance’ frozen still, rough-surfaced very heavy pack ice with the doomed ship in the background, then closer to the bow , then encampment on sea ice after abandoning the boat with Worsley, perched very high, taking sights. Afterwards Shackleton’s Weddell Sea party landed on Elephant Island and have their first hot drink. Shackleton and Frank Wild stand straight on Elephant Island. After the party waved goodbye to ‘James Caird’ carrying Shackleton, Worsley, Crean, McNeish and another man off to get help. One of the 4 vessels that tried to reach the marooned party on Elephant Island under Frank Wild is a yacht.

Pictures of the yacht, ‘Emma’, used by Shackleton to get off the Elephant Island. A scene after the releasing of the marooned men by the Chilean tug Yelcho. The Yelcho carrying Shackleton’s men from Elephant Island, entering Punta Arenas and then landed at Punta Arenas where Shackleton and Frank Wild can be seen in the van . A crowd at Punta Arenas when the Elephant Island party came ashore. Wild and Shackleton stand in front, with flaky sterness. The Elephant Island party pose outside some building in Punta Arenas. On a table there’s a sketch map by Worsley of the landing place at South Georgia after the great boat journey from Elephant Island, and in the shadows another figure, spectral and distant though in the same room, without a recognizable face. There are images like skin blots of Cape pigeons at South Georgia and inland South Georgia scenery, followed by superimposed snaps of a South Georgia fjiord, Valparaiso, of Tom Crean and Major Shackleton before taking part in the North Russian campaign in 1919 and then a strange distant one of F.A. Worsley, probably taken when he was commanding a P Boat or Q Boat during First World War.

[Sir George C. Simpson. Photo: K.E. Woodley, courtesy the Met Office.]

At the Royal Geographical Society, not far from the The Science Museum, South Kensington, where White did his residency, voices come through the listening post. This is a few years ago now. ‘Ice-pressure approaching the ship: The Endurance at midwinter’ says a blistered voice which sounds far away. ‘I can see a view of Elephant Island, taken from the “spit” at the waterline a line of ice mounds were thrown up, linked with light rope to serve as a guidance during blizzards…’ it continues. Over a period of weeks the same voice comes through, and each time signing off with ‘I’m Worsley’ before fading out.

White writes about the pink glow of the rising sun shining on a pressure ridge in the Weddell Sea, winter 1915, but not in this book. He scribbles by hand in his notebook that the rigging of the “Endurance” is encrusted with RIME crystals. It’s all a mid-winter glow this Weddell Sea, looking just like lead recently formed and just freezing over. The foreground is covered with small carnation shaped crystals, called ice flowers. There’s a glimpse of the ‘Endurance’ through Hummocks and a headland covered with dying tussock grass, South Georgia, then the Moraine Fjord and then “Bulldog” Peak, some summer vegetation and the chick of the Wanderer Albatross, photographed at South Georgia. February 1917.

None of this is monochrome now, but a strange pinky colour. ‘The Paget Colour Plate system used by Hurley was not like today’s colour film. It used a ruled set of colour lines, called a screen, sandwiched with a standard black and white glass half plate negative. The subject was exposed through the colour screen, which acted like a series of colour filters, onto the black and white negative. The negative was reverse processed into a positive transparency and placed back in contact with the screen, giving the effect of a colour photograph.’
There’s a strange magenta/green colour shift that does not resemble the originals. In the Swendenborg House the man who called himself Tony White adjusted some of the plates he showed so that the black and white emusion obliterated the tiny specks of colour in the original colour filters. The Autochrome system used minute potato starch grains to introduce colour, one third dyed red-orange, green and violet on a glass plate. Red light would pass through a red starch grain and give a black dot on the negative but it seemed White wanted to erase this and any reference to the several colour screen processes, using machine ruled lines on the emulsion, introduced before WWI. It was as if he had taken instructions from Rauschenberg, or perhaps he was being more mystic and Malevich was tuning him. Anyhow, according to the notes of the curator of Photographs at the Mitchel Library in 2001, ‘…colour screen processes fell out of favour in the 1920s, when the price of screens became prohibitive. Naturally, enlargement of any colour screen process soon reveals the pattern of lines or, in the case of an Autochrome, the potato starch grains.’

The novel starts with the abandoning of the ship. It is winter of Elephant island. There’s a desperate journey to South Georgia on the ‘James Caird.’ Shackleton died on January 5th 1922, a hero of that escape. He is buried in the cemetery at Grytviken. White alerts us to the equally disastrously trapped ‘Aurora’. Of this other, there were fatalities. Browning’s ‘Prospice’ was placed on their memorial. White holds these two drama together, as if one shadows the meaning of the other. They entwine so that it makes no sense to ask what the experience was of, nor how many, even though everything might as well be called objective. But that’s just a hint. Inside his stories there are the other stories.

Shackleton began the ‘South Polar Times.’ A kind of early zine, not printed but typed and then passed from crew member to crew member. White finds a secret manuscript in the British Library whilst looking at these. ‘Fragments of a Manuscript Found by the people of Sirius When They Visited The Earth During the Exploration of the Solar System.’ It’s a science fiction story involving global warming. Written a couple of years after Hope Hodgson’s classic ‘House on the Borderline.’ It tells the story of a decline of humanity where there is no longer love of sciences and arts, just a fixation with better medicine to bring down the death rate. An Elixir of Life uses production processes that destroy Antarctica. White is astonished at the prescience of the threat of global warming and climate change buried in the piece. He follows it up. That’s his novel.

It is a grotto of mysteries, a cavern beneath the coasted ice cliffs, a wave worn stretch of icy coast, a shattered surface, a wide seascape of ice-roofed islets, a plateau going south (Bage’s party 3000 feet above sea-level)a lining over the Sastrugi, a granite buttress, an Aurora in a blizzard, a panorama of bergs in the Davis Sea, a conclave of emperors, monsters on the deep and a monument to Lt. Ninnis and Dr. Mertz. It is its own mystery.

The heroic age of Antarctic exploration involved Michael Barne (1877-1966) who wrote ‘Ode to a Penguin’. Penguins taste of shoe leather steeped in turpentine. George Simpson (1878-1965) wrote the sci fi story. White embarks on a quest of sorts to discover whether in the story he was alluding to research he was doing about climate change. McMurdo Sound is the hub and centre of the world. Peter Fend makes a map with Antarctica in the middle. ‘to show how ocean currents function.’ The Arctic is subordinate to the Antarctic because currents are controlled in the South. White frantically searches for answers.

He writes shadowy scripts and scribbles information. He talks to whoever he can sceance in. Robert Spicer of the Open University suggests a tropical age will succeed the ice age. Antartica used to be like New Zealand with deciduous forests not tropics and just a few peaks with ice. The familiar ice caps of Antarctica formed fifty million years ago. Fossil leaves tell you what the climate is like. We may well not understand the physics of a warm world. There are genuine data mismatches . Poles amplify the changes elsewhere. Spicer thinks significant melting of the ice will take place in the next few hundred years.

George Simpson writes ‘Does Climate Change’ in 1940. He was the first lecturer in meteorology, delivering his first in Manchester, 1950. He built one of Antarctics first weather stations. He joined the Met Office in Adastral House on the corner of Kingsway and Aldwych. The Ministry Airship Division abandoned Airship-based civil aviation after the 1931 R 101 disaster. Albertopolis Disparu runs elements of this to create the non-orientability effect of a Mobius band or a Klein Bottle. This is as good a metaphor of what White is doing as I can think of. He is creating an algebraic topology where notions of in and out, top side and bottom, make no sense. White stalks down more info at the Met Office now in Exeter. Svante Arrhenius wrote ‘On The Influence of Carbonic Acid in the Air upon the Temperature of the Ground’ in 1896. He used hand calculations. He predicted temperature rise of between 5 and 6 degrees that still hold. Arrhenius won a Nobel prize for other work about chemical reactions. White notes that the same model and the same physics are used for weather forecasting and modeling climate change. Models are used to project for a few hundred years in future but can go no further. Models require creating scenarios of future responses to climate change and these stories are always too brittle to last longer.

White maintains a steady hand to distinguish vision from empirical data. Extreme events help establish this, so he discusses the relevance of the static 2003 heat wave in Europe which caused 35,000 deaths, and the 2008 storm over Burma’s Irrawady Delta that killed 78000 that occurred weeks after his visting the Met Office. So White is steady-handed and sure-footed and never gets his tone wrong. His artiface is well-wrought though orric.

[Sir George C Simpson © Scott Polar Research Institute, University of Cambridge.]

There’s the climate warming threat that is then mixed with the equally stubborn themes of racism and eugenics that White identifies. We are introduced to Ellsworth Huntingdon who linked climate change to intelligence, weather, evolutionary advantage and the origins of racial difference in his ’The Pulse of Progress.’ White stays sober and points to how eugenicist thinking has infected British science ever since 1883 and Galton’s coinage. Ideas of vigor and good stock and restless activity linked this to Simpson’s story ‘where death was banished.’ We get Thomas Griffith Taylor, a high profile racist geographer, a ‘Terra Nova’ survivor who died in 1963 and who wrote the short sci-fi story ‘Valhalla 2000AD’.

That there is something wrong is scripted away from this ugly racism and detoured into prevenient tourism and invasion. So White tells us that Antarctic Temperature has risen 3 degrees over last 50 years, with a seasonal mean rise of 8 degrees in winter months. We are told that people visits have risen from 4000 visits a year a decade ago to 49000. In 2007 the ‘MS Explorer’ hit an iceberg. All were saved. The threat is the threat of invasive species being introduced via spores or seeds. White goes to listen to Emma Tomkins on adaptation and migration and climate change and moving ski resorts up the mountain.

White isn’t writing anything as linear as what this suggests. He’s troubled by storytelling. We need stories to make longer lasting projections. Stories are linked to adaptability. There’s a link between a nations adaptability and coincidence of extreme events. So he mind-bombs. His is a process of elution – extracting one material from another. Psychic ruins reveal new stories. They jut out of White’s versions of ‘The World Turned Upside Down’. Climate is changing but don’t mistake that for extinction. White warns us of making a Romeo Error about storytelling.

‘Romeo Error’ means to give up hope for a species on the mistaken assumption that it is extinct. The Cebu Flowerpecker is a bird rediscovered in 1992 after being lost for 86 years. Romeo Errors tend to take place in environments where lost things stay lost. So some birds remain lost and are assumed to be extinct: the Hooded Seedeater was last seen in 1823, the Turquoise –throated Puffleg in 1850, the Jamaican Pauraque in 1860, the Jamaica petrol in 1879, the Guadaupe Storm-petrol in 1912, the Imperial Woodpecker in 1956, the Eskimo Curlew in 1963, the Ua Pou Monarch in 1985, Bachman’s Warbler in 1988, the Ou in 1989, the Oahu Alauahio in 1990, the Nokupuu in 1996, the Spix’s Macaw in 2000 and the Poo-uli in 2004.

‘Romeo Errors’ are rational when threats are genuine. The Reunion Harrier faces more threats to extinction than any other bird. Poaching, secondary poisoning from dentricides, cultivation and increasing urbanization have eliminated its forests, and road construction disturbs its breeding habitat. Cyclones, heavy rain and fires further degrade the habitat. Invasion of exotic plants increases the degradation. Agricultural pesticide use, silvicultural management, collisions with electrical cable and wind turbines plus human hunting add to pressures note the nerveless Sarah Caceres and Jean-Noel Jasmin. The Oriental Stork is the second most threatened bird. Deforestation and drainage of wetlands for agricultural development, plus spring fires that threaten breeding sites and nests are primary threats. Over-fishing causes problems in breeding sites and wintering sites. It is hunted, persecuted as a pest or captured for zoos. Pollution and changes in water levels caused by large scale dams plus collisions with power lines also cause problems. The threats faced by globally threatened birds are, in rank order, (highest threat first) agriculture/aquaculture, logging and wood/plant harvesting, invasive species, hunting/trapping, residential/commercial development, climate change/severe weather, energy production/mining, transport/utility lines, human disturbance, pollution dams and water abstraction, fishing, other eco system modification and geological events. When we stop seeing Reunion Harriers and Oriental Storks it will be rational to assume them extinct, but they may not be.

There’s the ‘fourth-man’ story that still lurks around. He begins to emerge out of the contours of Frank Hurley’s afterlife. First we download a strafe of images: the Hangars of the 1st Australian Squadron A.F.C. Palestine 1917, a relay station on the top of Anzac Ridge. Ypres, September 1917, on the Cassel Ypres Road at Steenvorde, Belgium in September 1917; in the 2nd Division Pioneers clearing the road near the Cloth Wall, , October 1917; walking near Tank Corner, Ypres; and earlier he’s crossing a flooded Waddy near Ludd, Palestine, one Christmas, then standing at a dump of shells left by the retreating Turks when they were driven back from Gaza, cadent in one of the Modern Rockefeller villages in Palestine. He stands at an angle with the road at Dieran, blank eyed at Ludd looking across to the Judaen Hills, and then, later still, in Jerusalem from the Mount of Olives, at the Crusaders Tower at Ramleh Palestine, the Church of the Ascension on the Mount of Olives is touching like brail. In January he’s with the Army Medical Corps attached to the Imperial Camel Corps in the desert at RAFA Palestine, in a bivouac amongst the Judden Hills near Nalin. There’s an overturned Caterpillar tractor on the road between Jerusalem and Jericho and he’s looking back towards Jerusalem, in action prior to the capture of the hill where the sun is like brisance .

Palestine, amongst the ruins of Gaza, in a sunburnt landscape at Nalin, on the Old Jericho Road just before its descent into the Jordan Valley, in the Camel lines of the Egyptian Camel Corps at Dieran Palestine and at Esdud and in Jaffa and camped amongst the Sand Hills at Belah Palestine and in Jerusalem from the Mount of Olives with its purple mists of evening. Once he’s standing in the ruins of the Grand Mosque Gaza after the bombardment. The enemy used it as an ammunition store house. Another time he’s in the Rocks of Andromeda, Jaffa, with transports laden with War Materials out at sea. He stares at the Latron Gorge on the way to Jerusalem. The view looks back towards Jaffa.

He smokes outside The Mosque of Omar, Jerusalem. On the road from Jerusalem to Jericho along which the Turks were driven after the capture of Jerusalem, the old Jericho Road, he watches soldiers transporting guns & war materials along, with the Jordon Valley in the appressed 2-D background. In the Mount of Olives and the Garden of Gethsemane he’s looking from the Mount of Olives across to the Sea by the Mount of the Ascension and imagines picking a purple Iris and some wild anemones that make red the hillsides of Judea in the spring time.

There is a smoky canticle sounding out whilst he stands by a shell-ploughed battlefield from Stirling Castle looking towards Passchendale. And then he’s staring at Bayonets with Australian infantrymen preparing to resist a counter attack at Zonnebeke, with transport passing through the ruined village of Vlamertinghe, on a windy outpost on Westhoek Ridge, near a dump of material accumulated in an advanced position the day before a battle with bundles of corkscrews used for wiring-off captured ground bored noiselessly into the ground during the night to form posts on which the barbed entanglements are strained.

He watches a stretcher case and a man attending to a badly wounded man in an advanced dressing station, then conducting a battle in a shell-proof dugout, 25 feet below ground where communication is maintained by telephone and foot runners. On the enemy side one of their runners was an unknown Adolf Hitler. They’re sniping enemy planes with a Lewis gun where a tree has been severed by a shell. He listens to Shrapnel bursting amongst reconnoitering planes. He stops to look at he ruins of the Cloth Hall through a cloister window, looks through a ruined cathedral window on to the graves of the fallen, over a camouflaged road like a wonky ecce homo.

He works near a Howitzer of the 55th Australian Siege Artillery in its lair, crouches in funk holes in the trenches in Zonnebeke, Voormezeele, Ypres, Broodseinde and sits in the interior of the Albert Cathedral. There’s a mystical edge to his dark vision here, looping with the famous leaning Madonna and Child. Early in the War a German shell hit and almost severed the supports of the statue. In falling, the base became entangled in some ironwork and for a long while remained poised head downward with the child held out suppliantly to those who passed beneath. ‘The peasantry firmly believed that when the statue fell, peace would come. Strangely enough the Armistice was signed only a short while after the statue fell to the ground.’

He lets in evening by the Cloth Hall, Ypres, the ruins of the Church at Voormezeele, the ruins of the Cloth Hall, a street in Ypres, the Lille Gate, and walks by entire cities and villages along the Western Front that lay in heaps of ruins. He sees the German dead strewing the conquered battlefield. A machine brought down in flames is burning fiercely. There are bombing planes, whilst the enemy is supporting attack with a heavy barrage. He stands at dawn at Passchendale, at the Relay Station near Zonnebeke Station overlooked by battle scarred sentinels, the remnant of a fine old avenue on the infamous track through Chateau Wood. Along the distempered sky-line a train of mules is carrying ammunition forward to the light guns. All around may be seen the wastage of battle which typifies Westhoek. There are camouflaged German Pill-boxes in the Wood of Nonne Bosschen. An observation balloon floats like a drowned figure over the ruins of Ypres. A remnant of the old Boche front line entanglements becomes surrounded by invisible, whistling death. The Menin road by a winter’s sunset becomes eccentric and in need of inscriptions. He can supply none. A Battle-torn wood, the Chateau Wood near Ypres seems to be dissolving into the mud. In a picture attention is directed to the remarkable wraith-like form of the shell burst, and to the outline of a white skull surmounting it, like a spooky striptease girl in ghastly eccrine.

Images. All of them developed at Raines & Co., a shop off St Mary’s Road in Ealing not far from the Ealing Film Studios and the old rape church. In the foreword to his catalogue Hurley states: “I make no claim to pictorial merit; the pictures are records, and except for several of the larger ones are faithful reproductions of the scenes they portray. In order to convey accurate battle impressions, I have made several composite pictures, utilising a number of negatives for the purpose.” Specializing in bromide and carbon printing processes as well as platinotype printmaking, the company built up an extremely loyal clientele of professional photographers, illustrators, and artists. The company was best known for its finishing and enlargements, but also produced unparalleled black and white prints, good quality semi-tint works. Mr. Raines’ life was cut tragically short after eating tainted oysters during a family holiday outing. He contracted typhoid fever and died at home on September 22, 1903. But that’s not it, that’s not the other story. The other story is next to Hurley.

Standing with Hurley on the ‘Endurance’ was Worsley. And in his eyes the fourth man. And with him the submerged strands of White’s narratives, those tangled nets that some stories clear but others snag and can’t. A ghost haunts a ghost. Worsley later commanded the mysterious Q Ship PQ-61. This was the “Mystery Ship” PQ-61 which, on 26 September 1917, sank the German submarine UC-33 by ramming her. There is a Q Boat moored in the Thames, ‘the HMS President’ moored at King’s Reach. PQ-61’s captain was Frank Worsley and her first officer was J.R. Stenhouse who was also part of Shackleton’s “Endurance” expedition of 1914-17. For this action, Stenhouse was awarded the DSC and he would later go on to win the DSO for his work fighting the Bolshevik revolutionaries in North Russia in 1919. In later life, he commanded Captain Scott’s “Discovery” during the National Oceanographic Expedition; sought pirate gold on R.L. Stevenson’s “Treasure Island”; and pioneered Antarctic tourism. Worsley died of lung cancer in Bamford House Claygate, Surrey in 1943, where Ronnie Wood lives and where Tony Richardson’s ‘The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner’ staring Tom Courtenay was filmed in the early 1960s.

Out of Worsley’s eyes crawls Alfred Arnold. He was several times in Great Britain and North and South America on diplomatic missions as a marine officer. He was in Morocco, in the Mediterranean in the Balkan War, in West Africa, in South Africa and during the revolution in Haiti as a Diplomat in 1914 when German, British and French troops put down anti-racist civil unrest. He was Captain Lieutenant of the German Navy, later to be the General Manager of the Ajkai Coal Mines Stock Company. Born in 1891 in Giesenstein Castle, Saxony, Germany and then living in Budapest, Hungary, educated at Heidelberg University and a member of the Polo Club and the All Peoples Association he was awarded the Hungarian Cross of Mercy, the Cross of Albrecht of Saxonia Order and the Hanseaten Cross. He died in 1963 in Bad Schachen.

On 26th September he commanded the UC-33 U Boat that attacked the British steamer SS San Zeferino in St George’s Channel. The ship did not sink. Visibility on the surface was poor due to fog. A PQ-boat PQ-61 rammed his U Boat which had earlier snagged and lost a propeller and so could not escape. The U Boat was holed and sank. Only Arnold survived. Arnold writes: ‘ The enemy was coming closer and we had to get under. The chief engineer reported that he would have the motor clutched any moment, but we waited, measuring the time in seconds. Finally he said that the coupling was frozen solid. … I could see the patrol boat through the conning tower port, and it was very near. Then he rammed us.’ Beforehand there were premonitions of lizard coldness and darkness amongst the crew.

White avoids the vulgarity and conviction of argument, annoys enemies with tinctures of understanding and is old enough by now to not know everything. An obligate limelight spoils certain writers. White works away from anything like that in a positive underground. This novel sets out the grounds for avoiding ‘Romeos Error’, the mistaken belief in our extinction. Each story is a phony, but genuine and truthful. They are like insect eggs that will hatch in the imagination’s eye flesh. It’s notoriously problematic to have a campaign without losing imaginative liveliness. White has produced something about climate change and its political, existential freight with the same mysterious qualities of ‘The House on the Borderline’. White’s concern is whether science can tell the right stories. The Alfred Arnold story was unforeseen. Climate change makes the unforseen story intrinsic. .

The book’s weird earnest zest reminds me of the ‘Quatermass’ movies and the novels of Michael Moorcock. It has an expansive note not found in Iain Sinclair. I like the ramifying notes and its continuing recrudescence. But it carries a soft whispering sound of torture, drones, heat death, poverty and rape in its muted cleave.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Richard Marshall is still biding his time.

‘Clov: There are so many terrible things now.
Hamm: No, no, there are not so many now.’ (‘Endgame’).

A body of despair has been assembled. It has manifest arrangements. Atomic loneliness engulfs us as if parodying our vast populations. Hopes for even timid liaisons diminish in paradox. We recognize that the best times for such hopes are when alone. Never has solipsistic terror been so crowded. Conrad wrote, ‘Who knows what true loneliness is – not the conventional word but the naked terror? To the lonely themselves it wears a mask. The most miserable outcast hugs some memory or some illusion.’ Charlotte Bronte is autobiographical: ‘The trouble is not that I am single and likely to stay single, but that I am lonely and likely to stay lonely.’ Loneliness will always have an obscure history. If it led to easily discerned conclusions then it would be less so. But we refuse obedience to the logic of ending it, aping willpower though powerless. We continue with the hubris of the lonely. This is when the ego strives to stay at least at stalemate and refuses suicide. That is the absurd ground. What are we to make of this attachment to our calamity? Schopenhauer’s question hovers around this: why not self-annihilation given so much agony? The writer finds her ground variously.In Beckett an isolated atomic subjectivity finds a strange equipoise in choreographic endurance. Think of ‘Quad 1’ and ‘Quad 2’ where a dance of exactly such anonymous atomic subjectivity persists unabated over millennia. Jean-Michel Rabaté is pithily deft. He describes the effect of these works as ‘the Inferno as ballet’. This captures their condensed enormity. There is a species of the harmonious in it, a harmony of despair that is ironical, bleak and registering dimensions summarised in Mercutio’s bitterly wry: ‘tis not so deep as a well, nor wide as a church-door; but ‘tis enough, ‘twill serve.’

Beckett’s characters are wrecked particles in this body of despair. Are they outside of anything but a naturalistic philosophy? Adorno describes the failure of philosophy in Beckett’s ‘Endgame’. He is surely right to distance Beckett’s response to this manifest Winterreise from any statement of intent or determined solution. So Existentialism is given short shrift: ‘In Beckett, history devours existentialism.’ This is Adorno’s familiar issue of the impossibility of writing after Auschwitz. Adorno reads the play as a parody of Heidegger and totalitarian Marxist thinking embodied in Lukacs. He criticizes their phenomenology. But Adorno notes in the essay that ‘Proust, about whom the young Beckett wrote an essay, is said to have attempted to keep protocol on his own struggle with death, in notes which were to be integrated into the description of Bergotte’s death. ‘Endgame’ carries out this intention like a mandate from a testament.’ Adorno identifies the absurd in ‘Endgame’ in terms of Fichte. ‘The nonsense of an act becomes a reason to accomplish it – a late legitimation of Fichte’s free activity for its own sake.’ But Fichtean absurdity hardly answers the question as to why suicide is rejected.

Yet there is another philosopher, and one who appears in ‘Endgame’, who arranges an approach to the tragedy of life answering to Schopenhauer’s giant question of why no suicide. In Stephen Dilkes’s ‘Beckett In The Marketplace’ the hagiographic image of Beckett as secular saint is pricked a little. Beckett was an assiduous arranger of his image, a sort of David Bowie of the literati. He deftly suppressed his philosophical reading in public statements. We don’t know why. According to David Addyman and Matthew Feldman between 1930 and 1938 he wrote 266 Folios of five hundred sides of variously typed and handwritten recto and verso notebook pages on philosophy taken from four sources. The sources were J. Archibald Alexander’s 1907 ‘A Short History of Philosophy’; John Burnet’s 1914 ‘Greek Philosophy, Part I: Thales to Plato’; Friedrich Ueberweg’s ‘A History of Philosophy, from Thales to the Present Time’; and the revised second edition of Wilhelm Windelband’s ‘A History of Philosophy’. The last 157 folios all come from reading this latter work amounting to three quarters of all the notes. For this reason it is not unlikely that Beckett was not always sketching a generalized philosophical theme but had a specific one in mind.

Thomas Dilworth and Christopher Langlois think so. They propose that when Hamm remembers visiting a ‘madman’ in some anomalous visit, a recollection occurring halfway through ‘Endgame’ that draws attention to both memory and its defaults as well as the strategic location of the occurrence in the text as a whole, the ‘madman’ is to be identified as Nietzsche. Or Artaud.

‘Clov:
I once knew a madman who thought the end of the world had come. He was a painter and engraver. I had a great fondness for him. I used to go and see him, in the asylum. I’d take him by the hand and drag him to the window. Look! There! All that rising corn! And there! Look! The sails of the herring fleet! All that loveliness!
(Pause.)

He’d snatch away his hand and go back into his corner. Appalled. All he had seen was ashes.
(Pause.)

He alone had been spared.
(Pause.)

Forgotten.’

They conclude that, as with allusions to Hegel’s ‘Phenomenology of Spirit’ in the characters Pozzo and Lucky of ‘Godot’, Beckett ‘… is repeating the strategy of referring through dramatized imagery to a famous philosophical text in order to emphasise a pervasive theme in the play’. Jean-Michel Rabaté notes that Beckett’s relationship to philosophy is purposively playful. At times it works as shorthand, a gesture towards some idea that may or may not be a central concern, at other times it illustrates some more general feature, such as the structure of dramatic reality in the use of the sorites found also in ‘Endgame’. So, elsewhere, we find in Hugh Kenner’s mathematical, rationalist Beckett a looming Cartesian presence. In others we find Berkeley, or else, as in Mary Massoud, a redemptive Christology rebuking Nietzsche. Ruby Cohen’s picaresque humourist may well combine a nihilist philosophy that likes to claim Nietzsche as a precursor.

A Nietzschean Beckett has long been discussed, performed and read in terms of nihilism, existentialism and postmodernism. Beckett the mimetic nihilist, the existentialist humanist, the anti-expressionist or the postmodernist has been self-consciously indebted to what has been supposed as being Nietzsche’s influence. We get readings of Nietzsche as ‘… engaged not so much in the hermeneutics of suspicion as in the aesthetics of play: Beckett becomes a Nietzschean who takes the ‘immense framework of planking of concepts’ that we call Western metaphysics and then ‘smashes [it] to pieces, throws it into confusion, and puts it back together in an ironic fashion.’

Mary Massoud’s Beckett is supposed as being in dialogue with Nietzsche. Her Christianised Beckett writes ‘Godot’ to defy Nietzsche, writing that ‘…in this play, Beckett, with his religious background and his wealth of Biblical knowledge, could very well have been responding to Nietzsche’s gleeful announcement that ‘God is dead’, and his joyful celebration of this realization as a wonderfully liberating factor. Seen in this light, Beckett’s ‘Waiting for Godot’ stands as a warning of the kind of life people would find themselves leading if they adopted Nietzsche’s philosophic view. Far from the glorious liberty prophesied by Nietzsche, they would find themselves leading a life of bondage, and experiencing the worst possible kind of exile: an exile from meaningful life. In its critique of life without God (in defiance of Nietzsche), the play is definitely Christian!’

For some, Beckett goes further than their Nietzsche. For these, Beckett refines or streamlines Nietzsche. So, for example, Richard Cope claims that ‘… the difference lies in the fact that for Nietzsche, expression is inadequate, existing only in relations, but for Beckett, it is impossible, due to a complete breakdown of these relations. Nietzsche still allows for expressive attempts, but remains adamant of the open-handedness of interpretation, whereas Beckett willfully destroys the notion of expression, but can only do so by leaving his methods open to interpretation… Beckett’s claim that ‘there are many ways in which the thing I am trying to say in vain, may be tried in vain to be said’ is at once affirmed and negated, by the fact that he does say it in vain, but in doing so relies ouch unexplainable, because fictitious, terms of obligation. For Nietzsche the realization that ‘adequate expression matters little’, is placed beside the knowledge that we are still drive towards an attempt at such, an action that continues to feed our delusions, from which we must free ourselves ’. From this radically skeptical philosophical position Cope takes Beckett from Nietzsche to the postmodernism of Derrida. He writes: ‘ Derrida allows for a multiplicity in his readings and writings, that at once protects the text, but also opens it up for infinite interpretations. Beckett’s discursive writings, while being stable and systematic, are also aware of their status as a fictive residue of philosophy, self-conscious of their flaws and trappings, and [thus] can be read as being self-deconstructive’.

A postmodern Nietzschean Beckett has been an enduring approach. Richard Began claims that Beckett can be read through the lens of postmodernity, and postmodernity through the lens of Beckett. He discusses both Beckett and Nietzsche in terms of Derridean ideas of ‘differance, unnamability and postmodernity’. He talks about the ‘mirror effects’ of ‘enantiodromia’, the tendency of things to turn into their opposites, as being central to these concerns.

Richard Lane in ‘Beckett and Nietzsche: The Eternal Headache. Beckett and Philosophy’ pairs ‘Ecce Homo’ and ‘Krapps’ Last Tape’ and claims that ‘… Nietzsche cannot escape the reading of his work as void (charges of nihilism or just simply ignoring it), however weighty his literature, however off-balance he throws other writings, whereas Beckett cannot escape the plenitude that he appears to be asserting no longer exists in a non-redemptive world (for example, the proliferation of meaning in a meaningless universe).’

Dilworth contrasts the cheerfuness of Nietzsche with the gloom of Beckett. So for Nietzsche writing about ‘The meaning of our cheerfulness,´ he claims that ‘… the consequences of God being dead are not at all sad and gloomy but rather like a new and scarcely describable kind of light, happiness, relief, exhilaration, encouragement, dawn… our heart overflows with gratitude, amazement, premonitions, expectation´. For Dilworth, ‘Endgame contradicts the optimism’. According to this approach for Beckett, the non-existence of God is no occasion of joyful freedom. His characters everywhere implicitly deny Nietzschean optimism as a farcical delusion. Absence of God is the absence of meaning. It precludes real or lasting happiness. In Beckett, all that is left to Godless humanity is absurdity and despair, which Hamm fearfully, habitually (and, for the audience, unsuccessfully) attempts to keep at bay by generating dialogue, enacting familiar routines, asking the same questions´ and giving the same answers´ , and retelling and extending a little his narrative . Clov says, life´ is a farce, day after day´ . Hamm says crying´ is proof of living´ . If nature has left us,´ nevertheless, Something is taking its course´ , and that can only mean, we change! We lose our hair, our teeth! Our bloom! Our ideals´ !’ Dilworth continues in this vein, linking Beckett with Artaud. Adorno does too.

In this reading the Artaud of ‘Total Darkness’ is anti-Nietzschean, taking the point of view of total pessimism. Dilworth asserts that ‘… a certain form of pessimism carries with it its own kind of lucidity. The lucidity of despair, the lucidity of senses that are exacerbated and as if on the edge of the abyss. And alongside the horrible relativity of any human action, this unconscious spontaneity which drives one, in spite of everything, to action. And Artaud in ‘The Alfred Jarry Theatre’ of 1927 writes: ‘This is the kind of human anguish the spectator must feel as he leaves our theatre. He will be shaken and antagonized by the internal dynamic of the spectacle that will unfold before his eyes. And this dynamic will be in direct relation to the anxieties and preoccupations of his whole life. Such is the fatality that we evoke, and the spectacle will be this fatality itself’. Dilworth, as we noted at the start, identifies the madman with both Nietzsche and Artaud. Given that he takes Artaud as defining an alternative, pessimistic perspective on the Nietzschean idea of ‘the death of God’ the dual identity has the happy face solution of combining the supposedly contrasting positions taken by Nietzsche and Beckett. But why suppose any contrast?

Amidst the plethora of readings that shuffle the postmodern pack is Foucault. Foucault is an enduring hinge thinker in this sort of discussion, connecting the commonly asserted trope associating the Nietzschean death of God with the Barthean/Derridean postmodernist death of the author. The move from postmodern to existentialist readings of Beckett are virulent, where the desire for meaning in a context of nihilism and absurdism become the common ground for Beckettian philosophical musings. Martin Esslin’s seminal book ‘The Theatre of the Absurd’ captures this approach. Simon Crichley’s idea of meaninglessness being asserted again and again as a moral test is just a late, reheated moment in this tradition which bemusingly adds an ascetic morality test into the mix that really has no place anywhere near Nietzsche or Beckett.

Does Nietzsche justify any of these readings? If not then to read Beckett in those terms is to miss actual Nietzschean influences (or suppose that Beckett made unjustified readings of him as well). If the supposed gesture towards Nietzsche in the opening moments of ‘Endgame’ requires that we ask what Beckett wants us to make of this, a rereading of Nietzsche justifies a rereading of Beckett. If we assume that Beckett was indeed alluding to Nietzsche in the quoted passage of ‘Endgame’ then it is legitimate to wonder what philosophical idea had he in mind even if, as Rabaté warns us, his use of philosophical reference is often playful and deflationary. And if postmodern nihilism, for example, is not a justified reading of Nietzsche then in as far as he has been the source of such readings, Beckett should not be read as a postmodernist. Similarly, Crichley’s additional fancy trappings of ascetic ‘moral tests’ in his reading of Beckett are also miscues as Nietzsche is, of all philosophers, the philosopher least likely to be justifying any kind of ascetic moralism.

Of course, as Rabaté rightly warns us, Beckett may be being playful, contrary and ironic with his philosophical source. But there are better readings of Nietzsche that also make better sense of Beckett’s project than those so far mentioned. They help answer the question posed at the start: ‘why no suicides?’

Brian Leiter’s rereading of Nietzsche presents us with a philosophy that achieves this. In this reading Nietzsche is a complex of naturalism, realism and hedonism. ‘Naturalism’ is a slippery term. Here it is methodological. It encompasses anything that science accepts, with a stern ontological commitment that evicts any supernatural brisance.Leiter’s Nietzsche writes only to the poet artist. Leiter considers Nietzsche rare in being someone not looking for a universal readership.His philosophy of art is like Stendhal’s in that it states that art promotes arousal. When discussing the figures who exemplify best what he is discussing it is Goethe, Beethoven and himself who Nietzsche cites. Nietzsche was addressing the artistic genius. His concern was not directly political or social or moral – although he did think that without the spectacle of the artistic genius civilizations would decline – his concern was to save the artist from our ascetic planet where morality and bourgeois conventions threatened to crush artistic wonders. Nietzsche is arguing for an exceptionalism for the likes of Beethoven and Goethe (and Nietzsche) in order that art and the artist could thrive. It is a philosophy of artistic bohemian hedonism. I argue that Beckett is a supreme exemplar.

The ground of Nietzsche’s thinking is the terrible reality of life and the world. He was impressed by science and was a precursor of psychology. He denied freewill and was convinced that lives are meaningless. Although he knew that we are doomed to utter annihilation, Nietzsche nevertheless finds a justification for life. Life’s horrors are redeemed in the demi-psycho-sexual arousal of art. In Nietzsche the arousal works through a mechanism whereby pain is anesthetized through affect. Daniel Came discusses this as an alternative to the implausibility of ascribing an Appollonian ‘… positive aesthetic value to suffering’, something that might be supposed to be no more plausible than Crichley’s attempt to impose some ascetic morality test onto Beckett’s play.

On Leiter’s compelling reading Nietzsche argues that it is through an excess of emotions that a sweetness is felt. This is explicitly associated with sex. He writes that ‘… the peculiar sweetness and fullness characteristic of the aesthetic condition might have its origins precisely in .. sensuality … transfigured [so that] … it no longer enters consciousness as sexual stimulus’. Nietzsche is arguing against disinteredness. This is at the heart of a Kantian ascetic ideal of aesthetic appreciation and creation. Kant’s notion was intended to align aesthetic appreciation with knowledge. Kant thought knowledge was impersonal and universal. Nietzsche ridicules this ideal. Beliefs are just symptoms of feelings. Neither knowledge nor aesthetics are Apollonian. Art promotes a psychology of the orgiastic. In this state the overflowing of emotions, even pain, are experienced as holy and joyous. Nietzsche contrasts this approach with the ascetic. Asceticism converts these life-affirming feelings of sensuality into sin. The tragic feeling is identified as being this orgiastic feeling, and it is in art’s narcotic that the tragic life is understood and suffering overcome.

Nietzsche writes this: ‘The fundamental fact of the Hellenic instinct – it’s ‘will to life’ – expresses itself only in the Dionysian mysteries, in the psychology of the Dyonisian state. What did the Hellenes guarantee for themselves with these mysteries? Eternal life, the eternal return of life; the future promised by the past and the past consecrated to the future; the triumphant yes to life over and above all death and change; the true life as the overall continuation of life through procreation, through the mysteries of sexuality. That is why the sexual symbol was inherently venerable for the Greeks, the truly profound element in the whole of ancient piety. All the details about the acts of procreation, pregnancy, and birth inspired the highest and most solemn feelings … gives religious expression to the most profound instinct of life directed towards the future of life, the eternity of life, – the pathway to life, procreation, as the holy path… It was Christianity with its fundamental resentment against life that first made sexuality into something unclean, it threw filth on the origin, the presupposition of life.’.

In Nietzsche the tragic poet is Dionysian. Sexual hedonism is a predominant theme. Leiter regrets that it is largely a suppressed feature in the secondary literature. If eyes have been averted from the sexy Nietzschean, so have they similarly been averted from the sexy Beckett, as Rabaté notes. One effect of the carefully composed public image Beckett helped construct has been to suppress his hedonistic life. It is clear that Beckett was himself a hedonist, enjoying women and whisky and the abundant company of others. That he spent much of his Parisian time partying in a bar called the ‘Falstaff’ seems apt. The pressure on representing him as an ascetic saint has been sternly patrolled but that image is increasingly under threat, as noted above when mentioning Dilkes’s book. Was there ever so publicity-averse a person so often photographed? His happy erotic relations with numerous women throughout his marriage may seem like distasteful gossip. But even if his life is not a proper concern the work is. Here Beckett is unabashed in writing about the sexual and physiological preoccupations of his characters. (Although Dilke reports that concern about his image led to him refusing to publish his translations of de Sade in ‘Transition’). The sex is no less strangely done as all else in his work. Rabate discusses ‘Mercier and Camier’, a novel not translated by Beckett into English. It suffers in translation through the avoidance of the intense lonely erotica therein. The familiar Becket pseudo-couple is presented in this demi-parody of ‘Bouvard et Pécuchet’ along with the mysterious quest trope. Each time the quest fails Mercier and Camier go back to Helen and have sex with her. There are many passages when the pseudo-couple are men-lovers. In Book 2 of ‘How It Is’ – the narrator has strange sexual liaisons with Ping. We see his testicle. He communicates with a fingernail on the arse, writes words on the flesh of the other’s buttocks. They become a couple. It’s an S&M relationship that includes sodomy, a can opener, carving letters on arse and back, writing on the skin, the repeated word ‘cunt’ and references to torture. Beckett critics have avoided this. Why the homosexuality? Why the S&M? Is it irony? Is it erotic? Is it scatological?

Again, the subtle Leiter reading of Nietzsche helps to suggest what might be going on here. In’The Gay Science‘ Nietzsche writes that ‘Answers to the questions about the value of existence… may always be considered first of all as the symptom of certain bodies’ (Pref:2). Nietzsche states that a person’s moral judgments merely codify symptoms, that they bear ‘… decisive witness to … the innermost drives of his nature.’ Moral judgments are ‘… only images and fantasies based on a physiological process unknown to us.’ They are ‘… symptoms and a sign language which betray the process of physiological prosperity or failure.’ For Beckett to present signs directly inscribed into the erotic hind-parts of his suffering characters is to presnt a literal representation of the twin Nietzschean metaphors of moral value – sign language and symptom. Leiter’s reading continually reminds us that Nietzsche was heavily interested in the mid-19th century German Materialist idiom. Their emphasis on Physiology as the explanation for all things human was formatively decisive in Nietzsche.He went one step further than Descartes. Descartes thought that all animals were bodily machines. Nietzsche added that humans were too. The sexuality in Beckett is linked to the physiologising of the mental, the metaphysical and the moral. Our suffering, and our creativity are bodily symptoms. In presenting the narrator and Ping in terms of strangely erotic, physiological exchange, Beckett is asserting a bold physicalism. Nietzsche believed that our physiological cause and response mechanisms were non-cognitivist. Inclination and aversion are the result of feelings – of disgust, pleasure and other affective mechanisms. They are not the result of reason. Our reasons are post-hoc rationalisations. Beckett’s joke follows from this Nietzschean perspective. ‘Hamlet’ is the result of anal erotic pleasure/pain stimulation. Even when reasons are confounded we hold to beliefs. In the moments of erotic physicality Beckett is giving us the causal machinery for all our values. Sex is vivid in conveying the Cartesian animal that civilisation likes to suppress. If Beckett is a Nietzschean naturalist as I suppose here then the prurient critical suppression in the secondary literature of his endless physiological and sexual imagery is a serious lapse.

Nietzschean and Beckettian hedonism is complex. Pleasure is certainly not the chief good. Existence is not justified according to a hedonic calculation. It is the anesthetizing of pain that motivates Niezsche’s thoughts about the aesthetic, which in turn leads to his surmise that it is linked to a sublimated feeling of sensuality. Art arouses us (like sex) and attracts us (like sex) but does it provide meaning to thwart suicidal nihilism? Leiter suggests such feelings can be thought of in terms of a continuum running from sex to listening to Beethoven. The ‘sweetness and fullness’ is likened to seduction and ‘intoxication.’

Nietzsche writes: ‘ Without intoxication to intensify the excitability of the whole machine, there can be no art… Above all, the intoxication of sexual excitement, the most ancient and original form of intoxication. There is also an intoxication that comes in the wake of all great desires, all strong affects; a intoxication of the festival, the contest, of the bravaura of performance, of victory, of all extreme movement the intoxication of cruelty; the intoxication in destruction … or under the influence of narcotics… The essential thing about intoxication is the feeling of fullness and increasing strength.’

The contrast with the ascetic narcotic is clear: whereas one affirms and increases love of life, and one’s strength, the other turns one against both it and oneself. The artist’s experience is sublimated sexual arousal. This aesthetic value overcomes rational suicidal tendencies. It seems plausible to read all of Beckett’s protagonists as representations of this. They are artists. Adorno says of Hamm in ‘Endgame’ that ‘Hamm considers himself an artist. He has chosen as his life maxim Nero’s qualis artifex pereo[as an artist, I am dying].’ He is an artist whose stories run aground on syntax. What we see and hear in his tramps, ghosts and disappearing acts are the fundamentals of the artistic condition. They are not about any moral test, but rather enunciate some art spectacle.

Remember that Nietzsche’s spectacularly illiberal elitism and anti-morality was about preserving the artistic genius from restrictions that would obliterate their ability to fulfil their role. The elitism is not about aristocratic breeding, wealth, intelligence or any of the usual suspects. He is wholly concerned with art genius. Nietzsche examples of the overman are Goethe and Beethoven (and Nietzsche too). He thought that without the artist, we would be deprived of the spectacle of artistic genius and deprived of such as these, we would deprive ourselves of the source in life of aesthetic pleasure.

The ‘we’ here is not everyone but an aesthetic elite. Nietzsche’s illiberal perspective suggests that he is only writing to those incapable of succumbing to the narcotics of ascetic ideals, and more innocent ones such as : [‘T]he general muffling of the feeling of life, mechanical activity [drudgery], the small joy, above all that of ‘love of one’s neighbour’, the herd organization, the awakening of the communal feeling of power, whereby the individual’s vexation with himself is drowned out by his pleasure in the prospering of the community – these are measured according to a modern standard, [the] innocent means in the battle with listlessness…’ This isn’t about political manoevers, nor social ones. It’s a way of understanding Beethoven.

A higher human being is one who responds to the spectacle of genius and is impervious to the seductions of the innocent or ascetic values. The fate of the non-aestheticised majority is of no great consequence to Nietzsche. His concern is only with those needing the narcotic of artistic genius. The highest human beings are those most attuned to the terrible truths about existence who make art to maintain their affective allegiance to life. The enticement of the spectacle of genius, a spectacle incompatible with the triumph of ascetic moralities over the past two thousand years, is the fulcrum of his writings.

Affinities with Beckett emerge here: Beckett writes to an aesthetic compulsion that is hedonistic. Its value lies purely in its own stimulus and the affect on himself. He is totally unconcerned with offering entertainments for a mass audience. His writes to a minority who seek arousal in the furthest reaches of creative gift and graft. And within his work, his characters continually struggle. His characters are representations of Nietzsche’s elite. They are artists, writers, poets facing up to the eternal fact that ‘the truth is terrible’, as Nietzsche writes in ‘Ecce Homo’. Beckett writes for those who can still understand that oblivion is our destiny and yet remain true to an hedonistic ideal that affirms life. Senseless and meaningless oblivion, plus accompanying pain, are unavoidable, eternal and confronted by our psychological striving to endure, to continue, to live. Beckett’s characters all strive in the face of this certain oblivion to reaffirm the creative energies of life through the spectacle of the artist. It is for this reason that all Beckett’s characters are relentlessly and remorselessly drawn to continually create. Even when capable of only fragments of stories, these are characters bound by fidelity to the creative act. A Nietzschean resolution is detected in this, as summarised in Edgar’s ‘The worst is not/so long as we can say “This is the worst”. The Nietzschean Beckett casts ‘say’as an imperative.

Nietzsche sees life as ‘essentially amoral’ and so it fails to live up to the morality we emotionally invest in. Our societies are morally evil judged by even the most luke-warm ethical system: wars are declared, torture used, innocents killed, individuals imprisoned, wrong-doers get rich, good-guys get punished, the rich get richer, the poor poorer and so on. And beyond this, life is ‘ … essentially a process of appropriating, injuring, overpowering the alien and the weaker, oppressing, being harsh, imposing your own form, incorporating, and at least, the very least, exploiting’ although Nietzsche objects to the slander these terms have been subjected to ‘from time immemorial’. Rather than Heidegger, Pozzo and Lucky in Godot seem to express this aspect of the Nietzschean.

For Nietzsche the terrible truth is existential, moral and finally epistemic. We know little. What we do know science delivers and it fails to sustain our illusions about our selves, such as freewill. Most of our cherished beliefs are illusory. To know what others really think of oneself would make you clinically depressed. That much of what we cherish, including our moral beliefs, are lies and falsehoods, coupled with the idea that the truth is unbearable, is a core of the Niezschean philosophy. So the question for Nietzsche is the key one derived from Schopenhauer and the one we began with: ‘Why continue to live?’ Leiter writes: ‘There are relatively few claims about Nietzsche that are uncontroversial, but I hope this one is: Nietzsche was always interested in responding to that Schopenhauerian challenge, from his earliest work to his last. And the animating idea of his response also remains steady from beginning to end, I shall argue, namely, that as he puts it in the new 1886 preface to The Birth of Tragedy life is justified only as an aesthetic Phenomenon.’ In the ‘Birth Of Tragedy’ he writes: ‘it is only as an aesthetic phenomenon that existence and the world are eternally justified’ and ‘existence and the world seem justified only as an aesthetic phenomenon’ . Nietzsche’s answer to his question: ‘what is the Dionysian perspective on life is given in his new preface to the book in 1886: his last work Ecce Homo contrasts the affirmation of life against the sense that life is deficient. ‘Saying yes to life, even in its strangest and harshest problems; the will to life rejoicing in its own inexhaustibility … that is what I call Dionysian, that is the bridge I found to the psychology of the tragic poet.’

The moral response of Christianity, the slave morality, embodied a disgust for life that he opposes. In returning to his Birth of Tragedy in 1886 he writes: ‘It was against morality that my instinct turned with this questionable book, long ago; it was an instinct aligned itself with life and that discovered for itself a fundamentally opposite doctrine and valuation of life – purely artistic and anti-Christian. What to call it? As a philologist and man of words I baptized it, not without taking some liberty – for who could claim to know the rightful name of the Antichrist – in the name of the Greek God: I called it Dionysian.’ Nietzsche then celebrates aesthetic value, illusion, deception and the destruction of Christian morality.

Admitting the erasure of any rational or cognitive warrant for living, Nietzsche appeals to the affective attachment to living as nevertheless justifying life over suicide. Leiter asks: can something have aesthetic value if bereft of epistemic value? Nietzsche believes it is precisely that which marks out the aesthetic. This is partly because epistemic value is linked to moral value. Hence this: ‘In truth nothing could be more opposed to the purely aesthetic interpretation and justification of the world which are taught in this book than the Christian teaching, which is, and wants to be, only moral and which relegates art, every art, to the realm of lies; with its absolute standards, beginning with the truthfulness of God (and science!), it negates, judges, and damns art. Behind this mode of thought and valuation, which must be hostile to art if it is to be at all genuine, I have never failed to sense a hostility to life – a furious, vengeful antipathy to life itself: for all life is based on semblance, art, deception, points of view, and the necessity of perspectives and error. Christianity was from the beginning, essentially and fundamentally, life’s nausea and disgust with life, merely concealed behind, masked by, dressed up as, faith in ‘another’ or ‘better’ life.’

Again, in The Gay Science we have this: ‘Had we not approved of the arts and invented this type of cult of the untrue, the insight into general untruth and mendacity that is not given to us by science – the insight into delusion and error as a condition of cognitive and sensate existence – would be utterly unbearable. Honesty would lead to nausea and suicide. But now our honesty has a counterforce that helps us avoid such consequences; art, as the good will to appearance … As an aesthetic phenomenon existence is still bearable [ertraglich] to us, and art furnishes us with the eye and hand and above all the good conscience to be able to make such a phenomenon of ourselves…’

He opposes ‘aesthetic Socratism’ on the same grounds. Wherever to be beautiful entails intelligibility, Nietzsche finds the error of thinking that knowledge is virtue. He writes: ‘Socrates is the prototype of the theoretical optimist who, with his faith that the nature of things can be fathomed, ascribes knowledge and insight the power of a panacea, while understanding error as the evil par excellence.’

He turns this on its head, approaching art as deception with a good conscience. Thus here: ‘… art, in which precisely the lie is hallows itself, in which the will to deception has good conscience on its side.’ (GM 3rd Essay). Plato thus is ‘ the greatest enemy of art that Europe has produced. Plato contra Homer: that is the complete, the genuine antagonism.’ The enormity of the point for Beckett scholars needs no emphasise. That the apotheosis of modernity is Joyce’s Homeric epic is what makes the singular appositeness of Nietzschean insight obvious. Beckett is often read as if rejecting Joyce. This new reading suggests that Beckett was working within the same Homeric frame as Joyce, but within a process of reduction rather than enlargement.

What is the Homeric world? It is a world that substitutes moral uplift and cognitive success for ‘… the accents of an exuberant, triumphant life in which all things, whether good or evil, are deified’. Aesthetic value here trumps the moral. For Adorno, as we have noted, this is an obscene response, no longer available since Auschwitz. He reads Beckett as if concurring. But this is a poor reading of both Nietzsche and Beckett. It suggests that Nietzsche was just unable to envisage the depths of our terrible existential state. It suggests that Becket and Adorno had a privileged access to greater depths of existential horror than could have been envisaged by Nietzsche. A contemporary reader such as Badieu thinks Beckett’s negativity is neither nihilism nor pessimism but rather is a parodying of Naziism giving us the courage to live. By showing us oblique effects of Adorno’s historical catastrophe he is able to signal the turning point. But this is a Pauline moment of rupture, and is not what Beckett nor Nietzsche represent anywhere.

The issue was never one of the existence of just suffering. The issue was meaningless suffering. And even the placid life of the bourgeoisie faces the terror of meaningless annihilation. This is Nietzsche’s point of antagonism to the slave morality that substitutes meaningless horror for meaning of a perverse kind. By explaining the horror in terms of a moral deficit, the meaningless is substituted for what he considered the perverse lies of asceticism.

‘Every sufferer instinctively seeks a cause for his suffering; still more precisely, a perpetrator, still more specifically a guilty perpetrator who is receptive to suffering – in short, some living thing on which, in response to some pretext or other, he can discharge his affects in deed or in effigy: for the discharge of affect is the sufferer’s greatest attempt at relief, namely at anethetisation – his involuntary craved narcotic against torment of any kind. It is here alone, according to my surmise, that one finds the true physiological causality of ressentiment, of revenge, and of their relatives – that is, in a longing for anethetisation of pain through affect …[O]ne wishes , by means of a more vehement emotion of any kind, to anesthetise a tormenting, secret pain that is becoming unbearable and, at least for the moment, to put it out of consciousness – for this one needs an affect, as wild an affect as possible and, for its excitation, the first best pretext’ .

So the ascetic blames herself for her pain; the resulting self-loathing acts as a narcotic to relieve the pain. In this way the ascetic resists suicide. But the cost is to exacerbate suffering. This is why Nietzsche reviles the ascetic religious narcotic. ‘[I]t makes the sicker sicker.’ Art is a different narcotic that achieves the same end but without the accompanying side effects. Art restores the affective attachment to life. Art’s role is to prevent suicide for those immune to asceticism.

Nietzsche writes: ‘The truly serious task of art …[is] to save the eye from gazing into the horrors of night and to deliver the subject by the healing balm of illusion from the spasms of the agitations of the will’. Art is a protection and remedy to the tragic insight of our existential situation. We recall Becket’s discussion of Beethoven in his letter to Kern in the 1930’s when we read Nietzsche here: ‘Dionysian art … wishes to convince us of the eternal joy of existence: only we are to seek this joy not in phenomena, but behind them. We are to recognize that all that comes into being must be ready for a sorrowful end; we are forced to look into the terrors of the individual existence – yet we are not to become rigid with fear: a metaphysical comfort tears us momentarily from the bustle of the changing figures. We are really for a brief moment primordial being itself, feeling its raging desire for existence and joy in existence; the struggle, the pain, the destruction of phenomena, now appear necessary to us … We are pierced by the maddening sting of these pains just when we have become, as it were, one with the infinite primordial joy in existence, and when we anticipate, in Dionysian ecstasy, the indestructibility and eternity of this joy’.

A Nietzschean Beckett is no pessimist aesthetician hovering on the brink of suicide. He is an artistic hedonist working to achieve the spectacle of the art genius in order to continue to reinvigorate civilization. His plays and novels represent this Nietzschean aestheticism. He was writing the same before Auschwitz as well as after. Hamm says, ‘ I love the old questions. (With fervor) Ah the old questions, the old answers, there’s nothing like them…’. Adorno comments that he ‘unintentionally garbles Goethe’s phrase about ‘old truths’…’. He thinks Goethe is being presented as a left-over, ‘degenerated to an arch-bourgeois sentiment.’ But I prefer to see this reference to Goethe as a fugitive sign, just as late Beethoven is another, of a Nietzschean affirmation of life.

Beckett’s aesthetic reverses the direction of the Joycean Homeric ideal, moving from the hedonistic exuberance of the synthetic plenum towards its analytic cancellation. But it remains within the Homeric ideal neverthless. Beckett’s characters won’t kill themselves because they are portraits of the Nietzschean artist working in the twilight of creative precision. Hamm is Goethe ‘down among the dead’ with his loneliness like that of other living souls. These are all able to ‘… state silences more competently than ever a better man spangled the butterflies of vertigo.’ Towards extinction they keep brave appointments again and again.

But are all Beckett’s characters poets of fragmented genius? There is a strange obscurity about all these identities. Perhaps this is because their identities are so vividly construed as Homeric physiology. They are not seeking redemption, nor judgement, nor any kind of resurrection. Such would place them in the ascetic’s clutches. Beckett’s radical theatre releases them from that. These are characters still wriggling to ‘go on’ even in the dense fragmentary austerities that Beckett provides.

In our abject loneliness there are just things he sees in need of protection. Of something quite unattached he wrote: ‘It is simply that there exists a wretchedness which must be defended to the very end, in one’s work and outside it.’

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Richard Marshall is still biding his time.

Peru, Gordon Lish, Dalkey Archive, 2013 (E.P. Dutton, 1986)

“Peru is true,” insists Gordon Lish in the introduction to this new edition of his masterpiece: “all too grievously true.” But empirical truth is irrelevant; the book achieves truth on terms of its own. Whether novels secrete a residual effet de réel (Barthes) or deploy the device of a false document (Swift, Defoe) they are defined by their formalisation of the force of truth; its rhetorical pressure, not its propositional content. As with wish-fulfilment, a book like Peru makes a bid to become true, in opposition to life, which is anyway worthless. Such a book is a black box, an object at odds with the world around it. Thus Peru’s truth lies not in its correspondence to reality, but in its consistency with itself. And this kind of consistency (a quality which Lish has called “consecution”) is what allows an artwork to stand alone, asserting its agṓn against all that is. Art authorises the impossible, and artistic truths are of the order of miracles.

For this reason, if Peru represents a “confession,” it is one carried out not in content (confessionalism as a literary genre) but in incantatory form: a performative speech-act addressed to God. The story’s specifics therefore matter less than the statement from which they stem: “there is nothing I will not tell you if I can think of it.” The thoughts that follow accrue truth through their telling. Gordon, 50, father and husband, catches a news clip of convicts fighting with knives under gunfire from guards. The struggle occurs, he later learns, on the roof of a prison in Peru. Subsequently, rushing his son to a bus bound for summer camp, he is struck on the head by the trunk lid of a taxi. Blunt force trauma triggers traumatic memory: reeling and bleeding, Gordon recalls how, aged six, he savagely killed an acquaintance while playing in a neighbour’s sandbox.

The act is portrayed with an objective coldness, which Peru’s early reviewers read in terms of narratorial psychopathology. Yet depth psychology is superfluous; personae in books are merely arrangements of surfaces, much like us. Peru’s apparent brutality results not from some folk-psychological category error, but only from art’s overriding imperative to present—to “make you see” (Conrad), to “incarnate the abstraction” (Pound on James), or to “characterise…an overall total experience” (Lish in Peru). Hence, “you have to imagine dents,” declares Gordon, urging us to envisage the murder: “like a trench—in his hair, in his head. Whereas with his face, it was more like a peach pit with some of the peach still left stuck to it.” The detail with which Lish describes the damage done to Steven Adinoff’s head by Gordon’s toy hoe—and even his callous play on Steven’s speech impediment (“nyou nyidn’t nyave nyoo nyill nyee!”) are crucial corollaries of the book’s pledge to tell all that is thought. Consistency of composition is extra-moral, beyond good and evil. In this respect, Peru proves Shklovsky’s dictum that “art is pitiless.” The final sentence of this passage, for instance, provides the sole reason for those that precede it:

I would have heard it if there had been screams. I heard the water sizzle. I heard the rubber bands. I saw everything—the big white buttons Steven Adinoff had, the blood which got on them, the dents in his hair, the dents which the hoe made in Steven Adinoff’s hair, the way the hoe bent Steven Adinoff’s hair down into them and how it stayed down there in the dents, got stuck there in them. Nothing is not seen, nothing is not heard.

Violence in Peru is compulsively visual—indeed, voyeuristic. Lish’s writing reflects a perceptual reflex; the narrative eye reacts as we would to graphic war footage, or to the car crash we want to but can’t look away from. When broken bodies open up to perception, injury yields ostranenie; the world’s deep structure disrupts our sensoria. In this sense, visions of violence can be visionary; ecstatic. From Gordon’s perspective, Adinoff appears to enjoy his death, as do the prisoners in Peru. Perhaps TV screen and sandbox alike are “evental sites,” as per Badiou—states of affairs which transform our access to truth:

Steven Adinoff knew the deepest thing of all, just like we all would probably prove we do if we suddenly ended up in the same setup as he did with me—plus as those men did with each other in Peru on the roof.

Within the world of the book, the word “Peru” points to a place of primordial wonder and horror, in which killing is innocently consensual, even erotic. Lish localises this liminal state in the sandbox, which we, eyes held open, are forced to behold. But the physical body is inside the soul, not vice versa; the sandbox itself is merely a memory, mediated by the mystery of infancy. This mystery is the true nucleus of Peru, a work which recounts what Nietzsche once called “the seriousness one had as a child at play”—or as Lish has lately put it, “homo ludens submitting himself… to the impressive sovereignty of his nature.”

Gordon at six is an alien entity, as we all were at that age. His amorphous mind is immersed in magical thinking. His reason for killing his rival arises from “rhyme,” and specifically his fantasy that he can “rhyme every word there is”—starting, in the sandbox, with the word “hoe.” The results approach religious glossolalia, and are the closest, he claims, “you ever get to feel to the fact that you yourself are God.” As an adult, watching two Peruvian prisoners bleed to death by an airduct, he likewise imagines that “maybe one of them in his mind was going like this… airduct, airduck, airluck, chairlug.” Here it becomes clear that the concept of rhyme, with its etymological root of “series” or “sequence,” is continuous with Lish’s credo of “consecution.” And Peru implicitly posits this principle—the practice of creation as recursion—not as an arbitrary artistic technique, but as a force of nature. For Lish, poïesis is intensely linked to instinct, just as it is for his key critical influences, Julia Kristeva and Harold Bloom. As spoken in the sandbox, and by the prisoners on the rooftop, poetic language is derived from a prior grammar of drives, of killing and dying and rising again—it is, as put in Peru, “the language of Peru.”

Peru itself is structured in strict accordance with this grammar; as always with Lish, a book is an object built up brick by brick. The section titles signal this explicitly: Peru is presented not as a novel but as a “property,” split into a “cellar” and “roof.” The book’s building blocks could even be parsed into classes. Firstly, objects, or fetishes: this class would include all humans and animals (there are no “subjects” in Peru, apart from the formal subjectivity of the work, which subsumes its contents) as well as recurring keywords such as “hoe,” “shoe,” “buick,” “gossamer,” “rake,” “sandbox” and so on. Secondly, sense-impressions: the sound of sprinklers spraying the lawns; the heat of the sidewalk; “the smell of citronella.” And then there is the associational logic that yokes these components together. Here, as in psychoanalysis, there is no such thing as “free” association. When the description “wet and pink-looking” proliferates across Adinoff’s harelip, a girl’s genitals (glimpsed during a game of “show me yours”) and a disfigured foot, the chain is tightly constrained by consecution—or what we might call, with Gordon, “rhyme,” by which “I don’t mean rhymes as we in general mean them. What I mean is like with like.”

Linking like with like means weaving a world; so while some readers would regard Peru’s narrator as solipsistic, the truth of his situation is that he is God. “I was just like God was,” Gordon recalls, since “I was the one who had to watch things for people, who had to see things… if I didn’t then it wouldn’t be.” For Lish as for Berkeley and Beckett, esse est percipi, and worlds and artworks alike require relentless attention. Gordon again: “when I was six, I thought that I had to keep everything, but everything, in my mind…to keep it all going.” These echoes of Beckett become more precise if Peru is compared to the latter’s late novella, Ill Seen Ill Said. In each, a deliberately limited lexical pool provides the “atoms” of a textual world—as it were, the grains of sand in the sandbox. These are then combined and recombined, raked over and over, in a recursive process whereby an artwork emerges from chaos into composition. In this way, the work is revealed as a world of its own; one whose language is its limit.

Accordingly, we cannot comprehend Lish’s contribution to literature without an awareness that composition cuts across ontology, not only aesthetics. For example, Jason Lucarelli has expertly essayed “consecution” as a writerly toolkit. But a more complete reconstruction of this concept would call for the following thought: consecution may be less a methodology than a metaphysic; a miraculating agent; an instance of spirit or pneuma submerged in the world. In Lucretius, the force of composition is described as a clinamen—our world is born from a “swerving” of atoms in their fall from heaven. Such is the purpose served by Peru’s perpetual swerving, rhyming and recursion. Each consecutive swerve steps closer toward a total curvature, an arc that delimits the work as a world apart. Peru is a paradigm of the artwork as a formally closed system. Hence, what has been called “consecution” is not a matter of mere wordplay; it is the way in which such a system defines its horizon.

What lies inside the horizon imposed by a hyperdense work of art? Peru’s consecutional poetry draws and then redraws a graph which is populated with more points at each pass. In so doing, it mirrors the temporal structure of traumatic memory—circling back on each of its objects again and again, in an eternal return of the same. This obsessive pressure, which the narrator declares has “turned me looking rearward for keeps,” has rightly been likened to Thomas Bernhard’s urge to “go back over everything.” In books by both of these authors, every event that occurs lasts as long as language is in motion: a text could be cut open at any point and disclose the same set of objects and forces; the same composition. But Bernhard’s fractal consecution differs from that of Lish, in that the latter exactingly brackets out “culture,” at least at the level of external reference.

For my part, I would side with an even more forceful extinction, in which each work of art is newly tasked with eradicating the existing tradition. Consistency overcomes history, exposing not a contingent set of experiences, but what Ashbery has called “the experience of experience”—or, as in Peru’s epigraph, attributed to Agamben, “the memory of memory itself.” When such revolutions are reached within works of art, they only endure in the time opened up by the work—briefly, but in that briefness forever. So, in poetry as in Peru, “the way you felt when you were six is the way you still feel now… it is always suffocating, the weather is always August.”

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
David Winters is a literary critic and theorist, and a co-editor at 3:AM. He writes regularly for the Times Literary Supplement, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Radical Philosophy and others. Links to his work are collected at Why Not Burn Books. Twitter: @davidcwinters.

[Image: Cornell Math Explorer's Club]

By James McGirk.

There is no better analogy for contemporary art than Conway’s Game of Life. This is not the same thing as The Game of Life, which is played on a board and simulates the education and subsequent useful employment of a human being. Conway’s Game of Life is a math game, an evolution simulator simple enough to be played on a checkerboard, but most often encountered on a computer. In the game, three rules govern whether or not an individual “cell” lives, dies or reproduces. The operator places pixels on a grid. Each turn the pixels either disappear or reproduce, gradually linking up and evolving into complicated patterns. After hundreds of generations these patterns begin to exhibit remarkable behaviour — some oscillate like machines or glide around the board depositing seeds, but no matter how many generations pass, no matter how infinite the number ofpermutations possible, Conway’s creatures are a constrained infinity; their patterns will never rupture the protocols that created them, for example they will never tip over into another dimension the way Jackson Pollock did when he tipped his canvas over and began dribbling paint on it from above. The problem with contemporary art today is that like the writhing patterns of Conway’s Game of Life it is snarled, hopelessly snarled, in the protocols of a larger, more insidious system.

Art feeds off of disposable income. Money may be delivered directly to an artist or as is more often the case in the professional art world, the money will be mediated through galleries or fellowships or institutional support. The collapse of Lehman Brothers and subsequent implosion of the economy in 2008 evaporated a great deal of disposable income. Yet according ‘How to Make it in the Art World,’ an article published in New York magazine, the art world is thriving, albeit in a “weird moment of equipoise, as the Art Death Star and the Rebel Forces [battle] to the quick.” New York’s art critic Jerry Saltz and his fellow New York writers trace a “billion-dollar unregulated market” with “case studies” that include Sarah Sze, whose massive billowing bricolage mobiles suggest networks and systems; Kehinde Wiley’s sumptuous portraits of marginal others in luxurious garb that are so in demand by wealthy collectors, the artist has partially outsourced his production to China and Senegal, and myriad other collectors and gallerists and artists who, according to Saltz and his crew, hew to “impish contradictions” with “everyone act[ing] like they’re overthrowing the system by thriving in it.”

To Saltz the art world has fractured into thousands of interdependent cliques that are evolving in little clusters, dribbling currency and cross-pollinating one another. He is giddy about the carnivalesque atmosphere, and after a meltdown at Art Basel now sees “art fairs as cultural-biomasses: survival mechanisms where galleries act like great schools of fish, banding together in like groups that allow more to thrive, confusing and eluding predators.” But if you squint at the dozens of artists producing what would charitably be referred to as exploded Cornell boxes of artfully arranged garbage, the discombobulated videogames, and all the howling neons and punky scrawls that pervade contemporary art they will all seem suspiciously similar. If there were a single thread connecting all of these disparate forms it is the ability to snag an intriguing lead from a lazy writer/blogger and extract strands of quivering quasi-academic snot from the agar of the artwork.

Art takes time and effort to produce. To paraphrase Walter Benjamin’s The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction this meant art was once a ritual activity, a sort of sacrifice of productive labour on behalf of a deity or a monarch, and for millennia this relationship meant that images had an inherent sacredness built into to them (doubly so because images themselves were so rare). This aura gradually eroded as images became more common, first through the patronage of the merchant class, and later at an exponentially faster rate through the advent of technologies like the printing press and photography. To repel the onslaught of all these cheap imitations, the work of art had to dig a niche for itself, which meant recognising itself in the context of all the art that had come before it. Art was authentic, more than a mere product, an intellectual achievement, a delicate soufflé of the eons of history that had come before it. Each work of art became a piece of intellectual property, like a master tape, no different than a scribble of expertly produced code. Authenticity lodged a fungible, wordy void within art that connected it to the rest of art history. Discourse about a piece of work and artist’s statements became as important as the work itself. How else do you justify a painted plank of wood or canvas being worth more than its materials and labour?

This squib of text within, however, like an undefended wireless Internet connection, left the work of art vulnerable to hijack by sinister forces, and that is precisely what happened. As context became increasingly important to the discourse about art, to the point where it began to influence the artists creating it, the emphasis of the work began to shift away from appearance and form to the work of art’s position within a network of interdependent intellectual and historical constituencies, and the work of art became something you read rather than looked at.

This was not a good thing. Vision is a far stranger and more complicated process than language. What we see is extremely subjective. The light absorbed by our rods and conesis just one feed of information in an assemblage that more closely resembles The Terminator’s LED augmented vision than the output of a video camera. Imagine a uniform white surface suddenly descending on your field of vision. It would be intensely threatening if it were unexpected, yet perhaps less so if the signal were received in a Bed Bath and Beyond than while walking over an icy crevasse, yet depending on factors such as knowing that you are at risk of a stroke or an accompanying reek of chloroform, one might still be compelled to shriek for help.

Viewers project layers of meaning onto what they see, and like language, some of this is coded and contextual, and consists of logic and syntax that can be learned and manipulated with language. (A famous demonstration of the sort of subterranean optic education we receive as technologically adept Westerners occurred in Africa in the 1950s when anthropologists working with tribesmen discovered that a viewer had to understand that film was a two-dimensional representation before being able to interpret footage of their surroundings.) But there are also countless numbers of unconscious and semi-conscious subroutines at play. By allowing language to hijack interpretation, the work of art pushes code into the foreground and ignores the dank, potentially gorgeous mysteries of vision. The work of art is then no different really than the glider guns sputtering across the board of Conway’s Game of Life.

Visual art that relies on historical context and academic discourse retards itself. That said, in the heyday of poststructuralism, between the 1970s and early 1990s, there was a lot great work produced that explored and exposed the relationship between language and image. Cindy Sherman staged scenes, creating phony film stills that recalled just enough of the iconography of cinema, itself a fusion between language and vision, to almost but not quite, invoke narrative. Her work unpeeled provocative insights into how much of narrative is unconsciously transmitted, and how pigheaded and strange those unconscious chunks of narrative could be. But once you made that connection, once you read Cindy Sherman’s beautiful work as another way to épater le bourgeois, it seemed thinner. The way that walking home from someplace new will always seem less exciting (and shorter) than it did on the way out there.

Sherman’s contemporary Peter Halley refined the rupture between language and reality with a near mathematical precision. He used the protocols of both post-structural criticism and geometric abstraction to reveal the relationship between code and visual representation. He fore-grounded his paintings with syntax, using a severely restrictedpalette of forms, usually just two, cells and conduits, skinny blocks of colour representing conduits and fatter ones representing cells, to create paintings that look like circuit boards. He paired these schematic-like images with an intensely precise and absolutelycrucial title. Revolver (2009), for example, is a triptych, with each of its three panesshowing a series of nested rectangles (four of them, then five, then only three) that convey the chemical and mechanical innards, the heft and the firing mechanism of a revolver. The colours, a combination of black with metallic tones and textures, the series of shapes (the symmetry of four ruptured into five and then left with only three) all refer back to the title; without the word “revolver” these shapes and colors would be meaningless, yet the colours and textures reveal how arbitrary and categorical the word “revolver” really is when compared with the vitality of the thing itself. That is if you reassure yourself that the painting is about handguns exclusively and not, say for example, The Beatles album bearing the same name. And yet for all this sophisticated interplay the work is bloodless and academic. This may well be intentional, a rebuke to the increasingly clotted and academic art world, but because of his reliance on language, when placed beside a painting that brings the full resources of the artist to bear on his medium, Halley’s work is wanting.

Mark Rothko worked at a similar (i.e. gargantuan scale) to Peter Halley, yet by choosing to dwell within the darker, unknowable realms of vision, Rothko’s work achieved an effect far more transcendent than Halley. Simon Schama describes the moment he first encountered a Rothko in BBC’s Power of Art, taking a wrong turn in the Tate Museum and walking into a dimly lit room: “Something in there was throbbing steadily, pulsing like the inside of a body part, all crimson and purple. I felt I was being pulled through those black lines to some mysterious place in the universe.” Rothko used light, size, colour and a larger-than-life scale to swallow his viewers and put them through a spin cycle of optical effects. He didn’t need academic discourse to achieve his ends. Where Halley methodically combined post-structuralism and the techniques of geometric abstraction, Rothko used the more ambiguous but powerful vocabulary of his medium to communicate. And that is where the power of art resides. A work of art that relies on its affiliations or an artist’s statement to ground its viewer hobbles itself.

[Image: 'Bang Goes Theory', Waddington Custot Galleries]

Grounding is also known as quilting, suggesting that one is stitched into a patchwork of associations. Or, to recall Conway’s Game of Life, placed onto a checkerboard and subject to three evolutionary rules. Both “grounding” and “quilting” are an elaborate way of saying: “to prime.” How a viewer is primed to approach a work of art is crucial to its interpretation. A work of art is a bit like an electrical circuit. Without a viewer to complete the circuit, a work of art can do nothing. Not only does this make the experience of interpreting a work of art an inherently subjective one, it also tips the balance of power away from the artist. If this seems hyperbolic, on a micro scale it is. An individual work of art can always snag someone’s attention and obliterate whatever flimsy strands of context the viewer is screening the work through. But consider for a moment how artwork is actually distributed to a viewer’s optic nerve.

The relationship with the viewer has flipped. As a glance at deviantART or a ramble through any open studio night anywhere will prove, there is now a practically unlimited supply of artwork to look at. An artist must seek out his or her viewer. And there now exists a bureaucracy mediating who gets to see what art where and when. To extend the circuit analogy, when people talk about the art world they mean something akin to an electric grid, a system which connects works of art to a scarce supply of viewers. Like the utilities, which mandate certain conditions in exchange for a steady supply of electricity (namely that you pay your bills on time and that your appliances do not feed electricity back into the grid), the art world is dominated by an oligopoly of a few powerful tastemakers who, like the utility companies, will only supply viewers to those who conform to their standards. Which is why the secondary economies of galleries and museums, and tertiary economy of tastemakers and critics are so important: viewers need somebody sift through all of that art and tell them what is worth looking at.

This is not a conspiracy. While most of the people involved in the business of distributing viewers to works of art, particularly those who work in the non-profit sector, likely consider themselves to be working in the service of art, even the most noble among them are dealing with a different set of agendas than the artists are. Artists no longer define what art is, institutions and auctioneers do. Art has allowed itself to become restrained by the marketplace and the academy. These are both systems which ultimately shunt artwork beneath the protocols of something else. They both attempt to quantify and restrain artwork through systems of logic.

An artist’s labour only provides a sliver of value to their work in the marketplace. The rest comes from exchange. “The relationship of money to any individual piece of art is very simple,” writes critic and former art dealer Dave Hickey in Air Guitar: Essays on Art and Democracy. “There is none. Since relative economic value can only be assigned to sets of things (to works of one artist, one period, one style, et cetera), and since even one-of-a-kind objects are valued within the set of “one-of-a-kind objects” (Catherine the Great’s dildo as compared to Louis the XIV’s bedpan), any work of art is both worthless and priceless because it is unique… Everything you pay over [a culturally ascribed minimum value of approximately three hundred to one thousand dollars] is the consequence of previous external investments taken at risk.”

In a perfect marketplace, where all consumers and suppliers have the same information, which is to say all suppliers are capable of delivering the same product to all consumers, and all consumers are capable of buying the same piece of work at the same time, a work of art might do well to preserve its autonomy and stand out from its peers. But the art world is anything but fair. There is no equivalent of the Securities and Exchange Commission. Certain galleries and collectors have far better access to work than others do, which leaves the marketplace for art deeply crooked. Unscrupulous galleries often collude with collectors to inflate prices. Considering how easy it is to anonymously purchase art worth millions of dollars and transfer it from person to person, it is an open secret that many use the art world to evade taxes and launder money. This corruption actually affects the way that the work of art is made. The marketplace assigns a qualitative value to sets of art, and by extension ascribes value to certain techniques or images or styles within art, and by establishing a hierarchy of forms encourages others to adopt the same stance, creating pastiches of art, near-art more approachable to salesmen and collectors than real art, which in turn crowds out the potentially unique and presumably better real stuff.

Institutions and not-for-profits are more insidious still, at least galleries and collectors have a lot of autonomy in their decision making, which although it may privilege certain forms and inflate the value of some awfully crappy artwork, at least allows for a fair amount of creative destruction. This is not the case within the academy. “In institutional cultures there is neither failure nor success, only the largesse or spite of one’s superiors,” writes Hickey. “We continue to presume honest virtue in those art functionaries who receive salaries, ideally from public sources… Through the exquisite logic of Protestant economic determinism, virtue is ascribed to those who can afford to live nice, regular middle-class lives as a consequence of their submission to whatever authority dispenses their salary.”

For art to pass muster it must be vetted through multiple layers of professional bureaucrats (some in the guise of grant-holding artists and professors) and what the industry refers to as stakeholders, constituencies either real or imagined within the institution that are thought to care about the decision. These range from donors who must be appeased, to boards of directors to the press, to the public, to peer institutions, to other decision makers and to more abstracted stakes like the institution’s mission or the director’s boneheaded attempts at social engineering. Few people enmeshed in a gigantic, conservative institution will gamble on an extreme piece of artwork, and more often than not will attempt to mitigate risk and facilitate their decision-making by looking forsignifiers of success such as affiliations, other shows, pedigree or a familiar socioeconomic background.

Remember those impish contradictions, those effortless juxtapositions of high and low that Jerry Saltz and his team applauded? The young artists “breaking barriers between genres,” the cheeky suggestion that to succeed one must: “Join the establishment. Cling to your street cred… Pretend you’re an outsider even when you’re at the center of everything… Get born into it.” Jamming between discourses (“radical egalitarianism”) is characteristic of today’s “new elite,” writes Prof. Shamus Khan in Privilege: The Making of an Adolescent Elite at St. Paul’s School. “Privilege is not an attempt to construct boundaries around knowledge and protect such knowledge as a resource. Ironically, exclusivity marks the losers in the hierarchical, open society. From this perspective, inequality is explained not by the practices of the elite but instead by the character of the disadvantaged. Their limited (exclusive) knowledge, tastes, and dispositions mean they have not seized upon the fruits of our newly open system.”

After running simulations for many millions of generations, Conway’s Game of Life evolved the ability to create miniature games of life. And that is precisely what institutional art does – it cowers behind the protocols of the marketplace and institution, and like a virus mindlessly replicates itself and its practitioners. Too much more of this and the art world will calcify into another beaux-arts academy, or worse yet, for those of us who still believe in the radical potential of the image, art may become fixed, becoming something akin to Kabuki theatre and not budge from its forms and function for centuries.

Contemporary art has become a heat sink of associations and affiliations, so much so that barely any representation can resist being drawn into a preexisting framework of interpretation. Yet there are pockets of resistance.

Lynton Wells has developed a visual language that is toxic to logic but so technicallyprecise and exquisitely rendered it forces his viewer to rely on other senses. He paints realistic, yet anthropomorphic, frogs and fishes and other icons of western myth (such as nude faeries and trees) and places them into colourful, complex backgrounds that faintly recall Gerhard Richter. Fish, James (2010-2011), for example, features an arched rainbow trout clutching a fishing line that curls into a swirling filigree of plant-life and an abstract churning pattern against a background as strange and ominous as a prairie sky before a storm.

Dan Flavin and Mark Rothko dimmed the lights to defamilarise their viewers. Lynton Wells defamiliarises his by using imagery so saccharine it resists interpretation — even as kitsch. There are no cues to pop-culture for even the most generous viewer to ground him or herself onto. These aren’t Disney characters or even cartoons, but something more primeval. If anything, the trout in Fish, James recalls an illustration in a high-end children’s book from another era, perhaps Edwardian, but then there is the hallucinogenic background to contend with. Attempting to contextualise the fish draws the viewer’s eye away from the creature and into the tendrils of the plants and churning surfaces within the painting. The work is also so well crafted it demands attention to detail. Wells uses layers of raw pigment he works directly into his medium for an effect as lustrous as a Dutch master. Fish, James is beautiful and hard to look away from, bewitchingly compelling despite the pulses of anti-intellectual energy emanating from the fishing fish. And then it dawns on you that you have been indulging in Wells’ strange loops and stacked surfaces and colors and optical effects both subtle and glaringly obvious that you have been forced to spend seconds swimming in the piece. The net effect is arguably as sublime as anything Mark Rothko or Dan Flavin ever produced.

There is an intellectual component swirling among Wells’ myriad layers as well, one that hints at a new philosophical approach, one straddling the multiple channels nested within sight, but difficult to explain with words. The closest analogue might be Robert Coover’s writing. Coover takes the opposite approach to Peter Halley. Instead of forcing colour through the protocols of geometry and logic, Coover takes myths and narratives and fleshes them out as far as language will allow him to do so. Multiple timelines, entire books devoted to genres, even the CAVE, an experimental chamber that allows storytelling in multiple of dimensions simultaneously. Somehow Coover’s work always seems to accept its limitations and feel at risk of slipping past the protocols of language into nothingness. Wells seems to be plumbing the same raw substance of human thought but coming at it through a far more robust medium than Coover. Instead of surrendering to it, Wells is just beginning to burrow in.

Early in his career, Lynton Wells was a successful artist, but at the peak of his fame he abandoned it all to make work the way he wanted to. To return to Conway’s Game of Life Wells is the pattern that used its flippers to pull itself onto the beach and start breathing air. But there is plenty of art that has never been connected to the grid. Beyond the nexus of professional art and artists there is another realm, a larger one encompassing everything from doodles and children’s scrawls and fairground portrait artists to people like the late Thomas Kinkade and the legions of sculptors and painters who ply the tourist trade on the coasts. There is absolute freedom out there, but it comes at a terrible price. By losing the attachment to history and academia, a work of art surrenders any claim of being different from any other product and has no protection from the whims of the marketplace. Art in this realm no longer has a culturally ascribed minimum value.

Oil paintings go for as little at fifty dollars in the convention halls at the airport Hyatt, scruffy Salvation Army rescues go for single digits in flea markets – to compete in this environment with art that takes as much labour, time and emotional pain to produce as anything on the grid is madness, yet one artist, after becoming disgusted with her two dealers and the hypocrisy and greed run amok in the art world decided to slough all of her affiliations before gaining any critical traction whatsoever. Not only is she concealing the prestigious institutions she attended, erasing her exhibition record and has severed her personal connections to the professional art world, she actually adopted a sobriquet, effectively erasing herself from the grid. In December, Amy Marrs will set up a stall in an artisan flea market and sell her work, in three or four sizes, priced the way any other product is – as a small fraction over what it cost her to produce it in materials and time. Her work is geometric and abstract, patterns and optic effects distilled from subculture so as to reveal its connection to the original ethos of modernism – as a grasp toward a new form of spirituality in a mad, violent and unfair world, of new forms that are so clean, crisp, cold and honest next to the hideous indulgence of elite art that she hopes to blow it to pieces.

Perhaps, if there is a lesson to be taken away from all of this, it is that art should not be relegated to a simulation, that art is not a game of life at all, but a component of life that deserves to be exposed to the world beyond its bindings, no matter how fragile it might seem.

Peter Halley: Paintings 2012-2013, 11 April-3 May, Waddington Custot Galleries, Cork Street, London.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
James McGirk has a BA and an MFA from Columbia University. He writes a monthly column for 3QuarksDaily and his bylines have appeared in TIME, Foreign Policy, More Intelligent Life, and other publications. His short stories has been published by Fence and The Drum.

By Alistair Cartwright.

The Ten Years On conference that took place on February 9th was a milestone. It was the biggest anti-war conference this country has seen in five years. Anyone who knows Friends House will know that it’s a hard place to fill. The main space – with its tiers of old wooden pews fanning out in blocks of a hundred, like felled trees in a shallow crater, and its three galleries, which deceptively hold half as many people again – is more like an amphitheatre than a hall. It’s big without being grand or cavernous. But it has none of the power to channel and concentrate that your average town hall or lecture theatre does. It’s classic Quaker in this sense, designed for listening not to a preacher but to the person sitting next to you. But that Saturday Friends House was packed. By the time of the closing speeches the only seat I could get was by a side door, perched on the edge of a step. Not ideal, because you couldn’t see a thing of the top table. You could hear fine though, which is what mattered, most of the time. And even when you couldn’t there was enough goodwill to compensate for the direst acoustics.

In the opening session one mic wasn’t quite enough to pick up Tony Benn. At 87 years old his words are still powerful but his voice has gotten fainter. So the five speakers pushed their five mics together — a gesture of solidarity I imagine him smiling at. And Noam Chomsky had to call in his technical assistant — his niece — to coax a glitching Skype connection back to life.

So I sat there with several others, ears trained on the stage and eyes pointing the wrong way.

Have you ever looked at something without seeing it? That’s exactly what I did for about six hours (in.c breaks, running between workshops, queuing for coffee, helping with ushering, talking in corridors). What I didn’t see was the thing we were inside of.

At about 5pm, when energy levels not assisted by caffeine or rabble rousing begin their natural tail-off, I saw this thing for the first time. US campaigner Phyllis Bennis was describing how the demonstrations of February 2003 followed the arc of the sun, starting in the Middle East, rippling through South East Asia, welling up in South Korea and Australia, sailing the Pacific to the US West coast, jumping from one city to another, before crossing the Atlantic to the UK, sweeping up through Scandinavia, and down through mainland Europe and North Africa. The same slogan in 150 languages. What became known as ‘the uncommitted six’ was a phenomenon left in the wake of this wave of protest: six dependents of US foreign policy, who this time bucked the trend and voted against — Mexico, Chile, Guinea, Cameroon, Angola and Pakistan. It meant the defeat of the second UN resolution that the US and the UK sought as a legal go-ahead for the war.

Somewhere in the middle of all this, between the far sides of the Pacific and the Atlantic, I started looking at the faces in the audience.

Scanning the crowd I saw faces black and white; heads grey, red, mohawked and crew-cut; and among them what must have been the youngest delegates of the day: a boy about 13 years old squeezing sideways down a row of seats, right in the middle of the hall.

When he reached his seat I saw he was with two others, a girl and a boy the same age. Out in the corridor I managed to catch the whole family. The parents peeled away and let the kids do the talking. They were a sister and a brother, Sheween and Dereen, and their cousin Daroon.

Only Daroon was on the February 15th demonstration, which is not surprising when I learn that his father is Iraqi dissident and antiwar campaigner, Sami Ramadani. At the time Daroon was four years old. He remembers only a few things: a home made placard, a whistle bought from a demo-hawker, and above all the noise. The noise drowns out the other details. It’s clearly a strong memory for him but nearly impossible to describe. An event, an object, a person or a place would be easy, but how do you describe an intensity?

* * *

The three young people I spoke to represent a generation that has grown up with war. The war on terror has brought death and destruction to Afghanistan and Iraq. Under the cover of humanitarian intervention it has been extended to Libya and Syria. Now in Mali and Somalia the old term is openly reprised. But this war has also stoked racism and hollowed out democracy at home. Born and raised in Britain, with family in Iraq, Sheween, Dereen and Daroon have in some ways seen the worst of both worlds.

They came out of the conference a mixture of intense interest, some sadness, plenty of excitement, and hope. Daroon was all smiles and the words came tumbling out of him. Articulating ideas, shaping and colouring them with speech, and reciting, speedily and somewhat breathlessly, the flow of events, seem to spurr him on. As if talking kept his smile going. His cousins are more quiet but far from listless and not exactly shy. When I ask if they plan to be on the next protest, Sheween is the first to interject: a declamatory ‘yes!’. Her brightness comes in bursts, clarifying and reaffirming, or jolting the conversation onto the next stage.

Dereen, who I spotted in the audience, is in many ways more unassuming. What sticks in the mind are his selections: of examples, instances, events, objects and tales. He speaks slower than his cousin and less definitively than his sister, but everything he alights on is in some way bigger than its immediate contents. Every selection opens up a vista.

Like when I ask him for his highlght of the day and he tells me about a leaflet outlining the case of Omar Khadr, a Canadian and the youngest person to have been held at Guantanamo Bay. Khadr was 15 when he was arrested in Afghanistan, allegedly following a firefight that killed a US soldier. He should have been treated as a child soldier, in other words released and rehabilitated. Instead he was tortured and held without charge for three years. Last autumn he finally returned to Canada where he remains in prison awaiting parole. He is 26 years old, the same age as me.

Khadr’s story reminded Dereen of the dangers of him and his sister’s visit to Iraq in 2007. Sectarian violence was then at its height. The role of the US divide-and-rule strategy in engineering this situation is well known. In 2004 Sunni and Shia militias fought alongside each other in the resistance. They drove back US troops in Fallujah and had the British vitrually confined to Barracks in Basra. Sectarian co-option was the strategy devised to try and turn this situation around. It half succeeded, although success is not the word: the resistance was immobilised by drowning it and half the country in blood. In the process Bush and Blair lost their cherished dream of Iraq as a stable base of operations in the Middle East. Elections and the creation of a new government were a farce; the oil law that would give the multinationals a constitutional guarantee fell through time after time; finally Maliki kicked out his own patrons, with a polite ‘no’ to Obama’s request to extend Bush’s Status of Forces agreement. Of course the neoliberals didn’t do so badly. Halliburton cleaned up in a botch-job reconstruction. BP and ExxonMobil are also in there, pumping millions of dollars out of the country, but they sit less comfortably than they would have liked alongside French, Russian and Chinese competitors. The set up is far from stable. It is basically cowboy territory; hegemony fast and loose.

Sheween and Dereen’s family are from Kurdistan. The two of them are well aware of the tensions and frailities existing between that region — where amid the chaos, the Barzani government has pushed for autonomy and cut advance deals with the oil companies — and the rest of the country. They wish next time they will be able to vist Baghdad, and that Iraq will be a unified Iraq.

At the same time they talk about the beauty of the country. About Sulaymaniyah, known as the cultural capital of Kurdistan, and how they were amazed to find it surrounded by mountains on all sides, like a bowl — a three dimensional experience I imagine no picture postcard can replicate.

Dereen mentions Basra which they also visited. He remembers a soldier coming to speak to their class in school. The soldier described Basra as a desert. But Dereen knew the city was once regarded as the Venice of the Middle East: when Sheikh Zayed built Abu Dhabi, Basra was his model.

Dereen describes how the city used to be surrounded by palm trees, whose shade and shelter held back the creeping desert. Basra sits squarely within the band of desert encircling North Africa and the Middle East, the Syrian desert to the west and the Sahara beyond that. It is one of the hottest cities in the world. But within the desert there is an oasis: the world’s largest Palm grove, including orchard after orchard of hardy date Palms. Lodged in the basin of the Shatt al-Arab river, which carries the waters of the Euphrates and the Tigris into the Persian Gulf, this was Iraq’s most fertile agricultural region. But war and neoliberal policies forced many farmers off the land. Basra’s orchards, with their dense tree cover and crucial position on the Iraq-Iran border, have been a battle ground three times in the last thirty years. If famers weren’t deterred by violence and unexploded mines, they had to contend with the destruction of the city’s water and electricity infrastructure during the bombing of March 2003. Then the new government cut subsidies and dropped protectionist measures. The result is acres of farm land uprooted, dredged and sold off for urban sprawl.

* * *

From earlier in the day I remember two phrases, a statement and a question. Something said by John Rees, an officer of Stop the War Coalition, and something asked by Tariq Ali. The statement, that if this movement didn’t exist we would have to invent it. The question, what happened to the two million people who marched in 2003?

Being rhetorical, it was natural that the questioner should answer his own question: the fact is that many who demonstrated in 2003 wholeheartedly and without a shadow a doubt expected the demonstration to succeed — then and there, in its immediate goal, before the war had even started. If it had done it would have been unprecedented. Movements of opposition have constrained, hampered and derailed existing wars. None so far has prevented a war from happening in the first place. It was necessary then for everyone on the 2003 demonstration to learn a lesson about political struggle. We had to learn that every gain worth holding onto, whether the right of women to vote or the end of Apartheid, is hard won; that major social transformation, even when it happens suddenly, all at once and on a seismic scale, doesn’t come overnight; that every movement has a prehistory, and if it doesn’t, if it explodes onto the scene as something new and at least partly unforseen, then it needs to create and live through this prehistory.

Being rhetorical, it was also a question asked in the plural. ‘What happened to all those people?’ was a question for this room full of people to take up and ask itself.

Here’s what happened to three of them.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Alistair Cartwright has writing published and forthcoming in the poetry magazines The Delinquent and Department, in the London Consortium journal Static, and in the ‘nocturnal’ Nyx. He writes reviews and features for Counterfire.org and is an editor of DifferentSkies.net, a new online publication for experimental prose and creative non-fiction.

By Logan K. Young.

“(You mean you don’t own a copy? What are you, sick or something?)”
- Lester Bangs, “A Reasonable Guide to Horrible Noise”

May 5-6, 1978. For once, it really did happen so fast. All of it. Rather literally, too. Blink, bat an eye or go take a piss, and you probably missed it. (Those things worth remembering, anyways.) What a bummer. Indeed. If you weren’t there, then you just don’t know. Alas, such is life; you have to seize it while ye may. But even if you were around (and you truly were doing it right) you still don’t remember. (Or at least you shouldn’t.) The ones that claim total recall, well, suffice it to say they’re lying. They have to be. For No Wave was the one, true Blank Generation. Yes. It took Aristotle’s tabula rasa, and with one flailing swipe per Attali, all the rest was noise. Noise being code for negation — a deliberate dithering of all things affirmative — No Wave is then best described not by what it was, but instead by what it wasn’t: no shirt, no shoes, no problem. No fucking future. None at all.

But what’s really in a name? No, seriously? It’s a simple enough inquisition. The line is straight, ‘tis the answer what’s crooked. Ensconced in the void plied by these otherwise nameless, at-risk kids, that inquiry becomes a near tautology. Is the thing now the name? Dunno. Is its name just a thing now? Ibid. So, like Beckett’s L’innommable, perhaps anything longform on No New York is primordially flawed. We shan’t go on; we shall go on. On y va! After all, there’s music, movies and mores left to kill. Still. Janie, get your gun.

To be fair, such existential quandaries didn’t matter to a group like Mars. Meanwhile, a band such as D.N.A. couldn’t be bothered. Likewise, not a single epistemological shit was given by Teenage Jesus & the Jerks. And The Contortions, umm, they were just too cool. Sorry. Basically, they were all looking only for a light. But what we’ve come to call ‘No Wave’ wasn’t anyone’s beacon. That’s for damn sure. A raging burnout in a left-for-dead New York City, nah, it was not built to last the night. Everything about it (the look, the feel, the lifestyle…the savagery) was ephemeral. On purpose, no less.

In fact, No Wave wasn’t made to last at all. It was but a flash in the mire, a non-movement of mass transience — Dada gone nihilistic. (Nada?) With certifiable crazies like Sumner Crane, Arto Lindsay, Lydia Lunch and James Chance at the helm, how could it be anything else? It couldn’t. Their time was borrowed at such an unhealthy interest rate, it made the most sense to fold. Pli selon pli, quoth Mallarmé. And during that time, affirmation of any kind — any creed that need be screed — was akin to bullshit. Not in their backyard, naw.

Listening now, 35 years later, one of the most striking things about No New York is how none of the four bands contained herein sound anything alike. At all. The bop-seared caterwaul of The Contortions squeals worlds apart from Teenage Jesus’ draconian coronach. The dual-action, proto-pigfuckings of Mars aren’t even in the same ballpark (much less the same vinyl side) as D.N.A.’s out-of-pocket riddims. And of course, this quartet of East Village-cum-Lower East Side n’er-do-wells sounded nothing like their supposed brethren down in SoHo (Glenn Branca’s Theoretical Girls, Rhys Chatham’s Gynecologists), much less back east in Brooklyn (Red Transistor’s Von LMO). Insofar as a prevailing, immediately recognizable sound at least, there’s no such thing as ‘No Wave.’ There never was. It simply did not exist.

You see, it harkens back to how No Wave was named. Standard convention notwithstanding, the thing soon became sentient. One better, it’s been told that its name means something hence. What started as a self-effacing simulacrum has since become a bona fide title of self-aggrandizement. Case in point: Nowadays, “no wave” gets bandied about as an adjective as often as it does in nominative form. There’s no stopping it. Period. (N.B. Peek at any publication, be it in print, online or via app, from the last six months. You’ll see.) Lowercase, “no wave” is a cheap and easy shorthand tied to the toe of any band that sounds like a deathwish. Hell, they needn’t even hail from the Big Apple. But guess what? That’s totally fine. Honestly, it is. ‘No Wave’ never meant anything in its own lifetime; it should stand for nothing but the same today. Proudly.

As if the name alone weren’t troubling enough, the fact that No New York is, was and forever shall be a compilation proves equally as troublous. More so than anyone else, it was Brian Eno who committed these four bands to wax. So, yet again, an essay explicitly devoted to what’s essentially his mix tape might be a goof from the get-go. At best, a compilation will always be a subjective singles club — a rounding up solitary songs. At worst, it’s just another solipsistic memento mori. It’s a congenital issue. The compilation, itself, can’t help it. No matter how curated the selections, how thoughtful the sequencing, it will forever be less than the sum of its parts. And as anyone who’s ever given a mix tape (or was gifted a Muxtape) knows, an aggregate does not an album make. No, No New York, you are definitely not an album.

But that’s not a denigration. Per se. What’s so great about an album, anyways? What makes it so freakin’ special? That, too, is a question certainly worth begging. An LP is forever. Sure. Spinning 33.333 times right ‘round the unit circle, its Euclidean uniformity is borderline pathological — a record of the utmost compliance. But as an idée affixed to the Cartesian plane, the long-player’s a folly wont of Molière (especially so for No New York’s cruel theatre of sound.) For the foursome Eno picked to grace its grooves, their collective skronk was the epitome of careening; at any moment, things could not only fall apart, they would be decimated. Obliterated, rent asunder. Scorched from the earth. Entirely. In short, there could be no definitive No Wave album. If No New York was to be at all, it had to exist as a compilation. There was just no other way.

Past tense is perfect tense here because none of the bands actually on No New York survived into adulthood. Furthermore, every single No Wave group, circa 1976 to 1980, was more or less stillborn. It’s a sobering fact. Parts of them had to die to keep on living, and, thankfully, the great ones were long gone before they got old. Of course, the immortality rate for sonic immorality always has been high. To wit, four of No New York’s enfants terribles — bass Contortion George Scott, Jerk drummer Bradley Field, Mars drummer Nancy Arlen and even lead Martian himself, Sumner Crane — are dead. Gone. They tell their no tales no longer. Scott, Field, Arlen, Crane, et al. gave us enough nope, and then they hung themselves with it: out to lunch, out to dry. Out, out dark, depraved spot.

Given the clinical sheen of present-day lower Manhattan, yup, said stain is tempting to fetishize. The heart lusts after what the loins hath had. That’s how hindsight works, after all. Remember, though, that nostalgia was initially catalogued as a disease. It was a malady. First. But foremost, if No Wave’s got a tint at all, it ain’t exactly colored up roses. Its vision is far too jaundiced. Any would-be patina would have to consist one-part gut, two-parts grime. Again, that’s for damn sure. And just as No Wave never liked its name while alive, we shouldn’t come to praise the No New York compilation now. No, that wouldn’t be prudent. If anything, No Wave should be razed. Wholesale. Truthfully, that’s probably what No New York would’ve wanted — four vacant bands, 16 condemned tracks.

Obviously, this cannot be done. Why’s that, you ask? For starters, it seems No New York’s been spared the zoning board. Somehow, an edifice that never was concrete got designated as a landmark, an official preserve. And in a city at constant war with real estate marquises and guerilla gentrifiers of every stripe, that’s no small feat of ghost engineering. But really, it’s mostly because it’s been too long. Three-and-a-half decades into the future, No Wave — as an aesthetic proper — can’t be undone. Nay, not even if you sued. The statute remains upheld. What’s wrought is wrought.

It’s the grossest kind of irony, à la O. Henry’s “Magi.” Despite No Wave’s best efforts, its innate intent even, this damned anti-movement ultimately proved too lasting, its Magna Non-Carta of 1978 too important. Not thinking twice, then, would be tantamount to treason. Or, better yet, boho heresy. Apropos of Lot’s wife fleeing Sodom, in acknowledging the carnage that was No Wave, yes, we run the pomo risk of not hearing No New York at all. Ideologically. If ever there were a tribe that didn’t want redemption, then this 40-minute record of their demagogy at its most base would most assuredly be it. But as far as saving No Wave’s best surviving relic goes, looking back is a chance we’re going to have to take. Losing but a pinch of No New York now would be a fate worse than the briniest pillar of salt.

Yes. Bromides, like the taxonomical vampires that catalyze them, suck. But we have to dispense them, if for nothing more than posterity might not have our same apothecary. Stunted in real-time, No Wave’s idiomatic idea of progress nevertheless proved a giant leap forward. Wagons west, destiny manifest. Ho! But in a hundred years time, the apparent glasnost of the World Wide Web’s open-table administration will have surrendered to a thousand more despots — each one less enlightened, more stentorian than the last. Moreover, since takeovers are inherently hostile coups, we can’t exactly arm a militia to stand up to a medium we can’t even fathom coming. So, in light of the menschen-machines that will eventually stop us in our tracks, we have to make sure that future generations will have access to No New York. If we teach them well, maybe one will serve as our children’s protest song. Antichrist, meet your archivist…

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Logan K. Young is the author of Mauricio Kagel: A Semic Life. He has written for NPR, taken pictures for Maximum Rock’n'roll, drawn for Double Scribble, and recorded for Mabson Enterprises. Last summer, he was a student in Thurston Moore’s seminar at the Jack Kerouac School for Disembodied Poetics. Come winter, Young had won a fellowship to the USC Annenberg/Getty Arts Journalism Program. His favorite track off No New York is “I Can’t Stand Myself”.

Nouvelles impressions de Raymond Roussel
(New Impressions of Raymond Roussel)
Palais de Tokyo, Paris

“My soul is a strange factory” – Raymond Roussel

New Impressions of Raymond Roussel points us towards an intellectual history that maps out art’s role in creating a social allegory for the poetic psychoanalysis [1] of mechanized pleasure — in circular struggle with the mechanized mass killings of World War I and II, the holocaust, and Hiroshima. And the rewards of such exhausting circularity are considerable, given both the historical significance of Raymond Roussel’s influence and its unapologetic relevance to today’s cyber culture — with its intransigent obliqueness and mechanical dizziness.

But if I were going to generate an art exhibition as homage to a particularly flamboyant artist [2], even if un peu obscur, I would think that it would be advantageous to try to match the aesthetic qualities of that person (absurdly intricate mechanical interlacings) with the show’s general aesthetic. Unfortunately, that was not the least bit achieved with the homage to the wildly creative dandy writer Raymond Roussel (1877-1933) [3] that is at the Palais de Tokyo’s Centre d’art contemporain in Paris.

While access to much of the remarkable work here (including five of Roussel’s otherworldy handwritten manuscript pages for his last book Comment j’ai écrit certains de mes livres (How I Wrote Some of my Books) and a wonderful cookie-encasing sculpture memento called Etoile cosmique (Cosmic Star) — a glass and silver case that Roussel had made for a star-shaped biscuit he brought back from lunch in Juvisy-sur-Orge with the astronomer Camille Flammarion (1842-1925) on July 29, 1923 — is to be appreciated and relished, the cavernous half-finished Level 1 Galerie Seine devoured and neutralized any stylistic moods of gamesmanship that are associated with Roussel: such as the famously extravagant, yet intricately hermetic, elaborate mechanamorphic constructions that verged on the exuberantly preposterousness of a machine running infinitely wild. Perhaps if I had seen the other two manifestations of this show — Impressions of Raymond Roussel held at the Museo Reina Sofia (Madrid) in 2011 and the Museu Serralves (Porto) in 2012 — I may not have felt so disappointed in the general lack of neurotic deliriousness experienced in this one.

Granted that Raymond Roussel’s disregard for financial restraint [4] cannot be matched by the Palais de Tokyo, but still the gutted construction materials hanging overhead in this ugly cavernous space take the eye and mind out of the magnificently intricate labyrinthine quality typical of his extravagant writings: as established in the prose work Impressions d’Afrique (1910) (a work that features a painting machine that duplicates the colour spectrum of the sky at dawn) [5], Locus Solus (1914) (like Impressions d’Afrique, written according to formal constraints based on homonymic puns) and the obsessive but convulsingly poetic Nouvelle Impressions d’Afrique (1932) [6]. Thus the larger the art (even as it was needed to fill this mammoth half-raw space) the worse it connected to Roussel’s sense of virtual impenetrability through mechanical precision.

Mike Kelly’s lumbering black cave Kandors 10B (Exploded Fortress of Solitude) (2011) and Rodney Graham’s Camera Obscura Mobile (1995-1996) installation were particularly unmatched to Roussel’s obsessive minute attention; a concentration that is capable of whirling together copious narratives from a veiled network of murky puns and obscured double entendres in a way that anticipates the Oulipo. Mark Manders’s steamy black connectivist sculpture Mind Study (2011), Giuseppe Gabellone’s beautiful silver sculpture L’Assetalo (Thirsty Man) (2008) and Jacques Carelman’s droll motion sculpture Le Diamont (The Diamond) (1975) worked only a bit better in reinforcing a spirit of intricate mechanicalness as they each ate up almost an entire room. A relatively fascinating installation by André Maranha, Pedro Morais, Jorge Queiroz and Francisco Tropa called Tres Moscas (Three Flies) (2012) did eat an entire room and only delivered limited thematic power in terms of absurd interlacing.
Much more capable of such finicky and arcane mesmerizing rhythms was the more intimate yet preposterous work of Thomas Bayrle (his deadpan pulsating romantic machine Spatz von Paris, 2011, is one of the highlights of the show).

[Mark Mander, Mind Study]

Rodney Graham’s series of books called The System worked well in the context and it was captivating to see displays of the literary journal Revue Locus Solus, established by American writers John Ashbery, Harry Mathews, Kenneth Koch and James Shuyler. Published in Paris between 1961 and 1962, the journal formed a bridge between French authors, both historical and contemporary, and writers from the New York School and the Beat Generation. The Collège de Pataphysique was represented by the writer Jean Ferry who published several studies devoted to Roussel, including L’Afrique des Impressions, a detailed analysis which consists of considering the text as instructions for users and reconstructing, in the form of maps, diagrams and schedules, the journeys and events that took place at Ponukélé, an imaginary place in Roussel’s Africa. Two comical cosmic Joseph Cornell boxes, Blue Sand Box and Sand Fountain from the early 1950s pleased me, as they bracketed a stream of photographed drawings of fantastic imaginary architecture from 1857 by Victorien Sardou — as did an early Pataphysical video by Jean-Christophe Averty.

The irascible Salvador Dalí is represented with his short motion picture Impressions de la Haute Mongolie (1975), made with the filmmaker José Montes-Baquer. Dalí read Roussel’s books as early as the 1920s and Roussel had a great influence on Dalí’s “critical paranoia” method. Dalí, who died with a copy of Impressions d’Afrique on his bedside table, believed him to be one of France’s greatest writers ever. Jean Tinguely is inserted, rightly, into this mix with a brain-teasing manic lithograph from 1966-67 called Requiem pour une feuille morte (Requiem for a Dead Leaf), rather than an expected endless drawing machine contraption, that would have more directly interlocked with Roussel’s imagined painting machine.
And Roussel’s major inspiration (along with novelist and naval officer Pierre Loti), the author Jules Verne, has a wacky lithograph of a flat globe studded with images entitled Around the World in Eighty Days from 1880. Roussel greatly admired the works of Verne — which he read over and over again, fascinated with their extraodinary voyages and machines, full of bachelor scientists completely absorbed in positivist exploratory dreams taken to delirious extremes. At that scale of interlacing, some of the hypnotic effect of Roussel’s capacious playful circularity can be felt.

However, Gabriele Di Matteo’s contribution to the show’s circularity is essential. His hand-painted over digital-painting Marcel Duchamp, a life in pictures by André Raffray illustrates the time when Duchamp attended a showing of Impressions d’Afrique in 1912, an experience Duchamp would describe as revelatory. As Gabriele Di Matteo depicts, Duchamp, along with Guillaume Appollinaire, Picabia and Picabia’s wife Gabrielle Buffet, attended a performance of Impressions of Africa — the play by Roussel, based on his book. Duchamp later credited Roussel with the inspiration for his The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass). There are several original notes by Duchamp and a drawing that he made for The Large Glass in 1912-1915 in the show, as well as quite a few photos of Duchamp with The Large Glass. Among them is the striking photo of Duchamp that was taken by Man Ray in 1920 that shows a star carved out in Duchamp’s hair. This work connects ludicrously well with Roussel’s star-shaped cookie piece, Etoile cosmique, from just three years later.

[Raymond Roussel’s Etoile cosmique (Cosmic Star), 1923]

Historically, the mechanamorphic impulse behind Marcel Duchamp’s works from 1912 (that derived a good deal from Roussel) is of great significance. That is when Duchamp started producing paintings and drawings depicting mechanized sex acts such as Mechanics of Modesty and The Passage from the Virgin to the Bride — and the fantastic machine-body work The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even that follow his exposure to the play Impressions d’Afrique — is an inescapable point of reference for the avant-garde of the 20th century. The same may be said for Francis Picabia (who has a room of paintings all to himself at the show La Collection Michael Werner just a stone’s throw away at the Musée d’Art Moderne Ville de Paris).

The elaborateness of the machine, for Duchamp and Picabia, became the symbol of sexual bliss [7] attainable through concept connected to auto-sexual autonomy in contradiction to the horror that mechanized war had brought. By hypnotizing attention, the machine freed them from troubling obsessions and personal hang-ups through the alternative model of android life; intimating both our rush of desperation and our ecstatic release, refracted through a web of glazed impersonality. If the machine, as a representative of order, was a fascination Duchamp and Picabia used to balance out the age’s clumsiness, whether of the mind or flesh, Roussel’s mechanamorphic production and machine forms refigured the human body into an almost mechanized substance.

In The Bride Stripped Bare by the Bachelors, Even, which positions a central bride machine over a bachelor apparatus, Duchamp, with the strictness of machinery, applies fantasy to seduction and masturbation. In a way, Duchamp suggests that we (as viewers) can use his art as a vehicle for self-transcendence into a kind of dream world of nonsense sex. This rabbit-hole logic he took from Roussel.

So New Impressions of Raymond Roussel succeeds when it outlines an eccentric expanding circular history of 20th-century art, linking the points between artists and writers who have talked of the influence of this author and his writings on their work: starting with Dada (Duchamp, Man Ray, Picabia), then André Breton and the Surrealists (like Michel Leiris, Salvador Dalí, Jean Cocteau) to Neo-Dada Nouveau réalisme (Jean Tinguely) through Oulipo (Georges Perec) Pataphysicians (Jean Ferry, Jean-Christophe Averty and the Collège de Pataphysique) and the authors of the nouveau roman (like Alain Robbe-Grillet). As noted above, his most direct influence in the English-speaking world was on the New York School of poets John Ashbery, Harry Mathews, James Schuyler, and Kenneth Koch.

Writing as art — or art as writing: this is the theoretical ripe fruit plucked from Nouvelles impressions de Raymond Roussel — art theory as art — made conceivable by Roussel’s inventions of language machines that produced texts through the use of repetitions and combination/permutations. This machine-like logic provides art with a seemingly pure spectacle of endless variety of textual games and combinations flowing in circular form. (We see and feel this most fully, however, in the sprawling and dazzling Julio Le Parc kinetic op art retrospective on the first floor of the Palais de Tokyo, rather than in this show.)

And there are lessons here for painting, also. Within this writing process Roussel described a number of fantastic machines, including a painting machine in his novel Impressions of Africa. This painting machine wonderfully describes and foresees the arrival of computer-robotic technology and it’s application to visual art which we have available to us today, a century after he envisioned it.

The web also regenerates deep connections to the past; so cyberspace, this territory which stretches out from hypertext to the world-wide computer network, from virtual reality to video games, might also be theorized as the domain of Roussel’s idea of reduplicating without duplication, reiterating without repeating: his game-of-mirrors cosmos. His is a strident activity lost in an infinite navigation from one sort of encounter to another in which the affirmation of the other keeps appearing and disappearing in the play of mechanical manoeuvres (or mechanisms) destined to avert gratification. This is where the bachelor apparatus of Duchamp repeats itself ad infinitum by transmitting the machine via an alter-ego.

But New Impressions of Raymond Roussel reminds us that Raymond Roussel’s themes and procedures also involved imprisonment and liberation, exoticism, cryptograms and torture by language — all formally reflected in his working technique with its inextricable play of double images, repetitions, and impediments, all giving the impression of the pen running on by itself through the dreamy usage and baroque play of mirrored form.

Roussel’s running on repetition technique, as used in the Thomas Bayrle sculpture, for example, lends itself well to the creation of unforeseen, automatic, spontaneous art which gives me the feeling of prolonging action into eternity through the ceaseless, fantastic constructions of the work itself, transmitting an altered, exalted and orgasmic state of mind which after the initial dazzle creates one predominant overall effect: that of creating doubt through mechanical discourse.

The image of enclosure is common with Roussel where a secret to a secret is held back, systematically imposing a formless anxiety in the reader through the labyrinthine extensions and doublings, disguises and duplications of his texts, which make all speech and vision undergo a moment of annihilation.

New Impressions of Raymond Roussel succeeds when it presents to us through intimacy the model of quiet perfection of the eternally repetitive mechanical machine which functions independently of time and space, pulling us into a logic of the infinite. We can learn this from Roussel’s final rebus-like book, Comment j’ai écrit certains de mes livres (How I Wrote Some of my Books); the last of his conceptual machines, the machine which contains and repeats within its mechanism all those mental machines he had formerly described and put into motion, making evident the machine which produced all of his machines — the master machine [8]. All of these machines map out an eccentric spiral space that is circular in nature and thus an abstract attempt at eliminating time. They reproduce the old myths of departure, of loss and of return. They construct a crisscrossed mechanical map of the two great mythic spaces so often explored by western imagination: space that is rigid and forbidden, containing the quest, the return and the treasure (for example the geography of the Argonauts and the labyrinth), and the other space of polymorphosic noise: the visible transformation of instantly crossed frontiers and borders, of strange affiliations, of spells, and of symbolic replacements (the space of the Minotaur).

Nouvelles impressions de Raymond Roussel potentially removes us out of our quiet and glib indolence and points us in the potent direction of expanding intensity. I believe that shows like this are critical to us now because the counter-mannerist excess found there can problematize the popular simulacrum that art has become — and make the underground, intricately strange privateness of the human animal livelier.

[1] At age 17, Roussel wrote Mon Âme, a long poem published three years later in Le Gaulois. By 1896, he had commenced editing his long poem La Doublure when he suffered a mental crisis. After the poem was published on June 10, 1897 and was completely unsuccessful, Roussel began to see the psychiatrist Pierre Janet.

[2] Poet, novelist, playwright, musician, and chess enthusiast.

[3] Raymond Roussel was born in Paris in 1877. His writings, including the novels Impressions of Africa and Locus Solus and volumes of poetry and drama, were largely ignored in his lifetime, but have since been championed by the likes of Michel Leiris (whose father was Roussel’s accountant), Raymond Queneau, Alain Robbe-Grillet (his first novel, Le Voyeur, was originally titled La Vue in homage to Roussel’s long 1904 poem of the same name), Georges Perec, Harry Mathews, John Ashbery and Michel Foucault (Foucault wrote a critical study, Death and the Labyrinth, after the chance discovery of one of Roussel’s volumes in an antiquarian shop across from the Luxembourg Gardens). Roussel died under mysterious circumstances (apparently by suicide) in 1933 in Palermo in Sicily after he went broke chasing literary fame before his death — decades before his work began receiving the acceptance he craved. He is buried in Père-Lachaise cemetery in Paris.

[4] In 1894, at age 16, he inherited a substantial fortune from his deceased father and began to write poetry to accompany his musical compositions. Tremendously wealthy, he took two world tours during which he hardly left his hotel rooms.

[5] The story told in Impressions of Africa is a nominally bare-bones fantasy. The shipwrecked inhabitants of the Lyseus, en route from Marseille to Argentina, are captured by an African potentate, Talou, who holds them hostage while awaiting their ransom. The ship’s manifest includes actors, singers, musicians, fearless naturalists, a slew of carpenters, and, fortuitously, a trove of instruments, lumber, scientific equipment, and trained animals. Partly to keep themselves busy, the motley Europeans, dubbing themselves the Incomparables, decide to stage a set of performances. Converging with their gala is Talou’s military triumph over a rival clan (and the execution of a handful of unloyal subjects). This is the back-story of Impressions of Africa, literally.

[6] New Impressions of Africa is a 1,274-line poem, consisting of four long cantos in rhymed alexandrines, each a single sentence with parenthetical asides that run up to five levels deep. From time to time, a footnote refers to a further poem containing its own depths of brackets. Roussel worked and reworked the 1,274 lines of New Impressions of Africa over a seventeen-year period, rewriting each one as many as twenty times to accomplish a mordant succinctness.

[7] Around the same point in time, Dr. Freud was explaining in his lectures that complex machines that repeat in dreams signified the genital organs. Roussel’s descriptions of eggs on plates and the multiple allusions to the odor of urine after the eating of asparagus are typical of a poetic-mechanical apparatus helping to take us further into the area of the unconscious and the sexual.

[8] Roussel had kept this compositional method a secret until the publication of his posthumous text, How I Wrote Some of My Books, where he describes it as follows: “I chose two similar words. For example, billard (billiard) and pillard (looter). Then I added to it words similar but taken in two different directions, and I obtained two almost identical sentences thus. The two sentences found, it was a question of writing a tale which can start with the first and finish by the second. Amplifying the process then, I sought new words related to the word billiard, always to take them in a different direction than that which was presented at first, and that provided me each time with a new creation. The process evolved and I was led to take an unspecified sentence, from which I drew some images by dislocating it. …”

Nouvelles impressions de Raymond Roussel (New Impressions of Raymond Roussel) includes work by: Mathieu K. Abonnenc, Jean-Michel Alberola, Jean-Christophe Averty, Zbynek Baladrán, Thomas Bayrle, Jacques Carelman, Guy de Cointet, Collège de Pataphysique, Joseph Cornell, Salvador Dalí, Gabriele Di Matteo, Thea Djordjadze, Marcel Duchamp, Giuseppe Gabellone, Rodney Graham, João Maria Gusmão & Pedro Paiva, Mike Kelley, Revue Locus Solus, Pierre Loti, Sabine Macher, Man Ray, Mark Manders, André Maranha, Pedro Morais, Jorge Queiroz et Francisco Tropa, Jean-Michel Othoniel, Victorien Sardou, Joe Scanlan, Jean Tinguely, Jules Verne.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Since 1986 Joseph Nechvatal has worked with ubiquitous electronic visual information, computers and computer-robotics. His computer-robotic assisted paintings and computer software animations are shown regularly in galleries and museums throughout the world. From 1991-1993 he worked as artist-in-residence at the Louis Pasteur Atelier and the Saline Royale / Ledoux Foundation’s computer lab in Arbois, France, on The Computer Virus Project: an experiment with computer viruses as a creative stratagem. In 2002 he extended that artistic research into the field of viral artificial life through his collaboration with the programmer Stéphane Sikora. Nechvatal earned his Ph.D. in the philosophy of art and new technology at The Centre for Advanced Inquiry in the Interactive Arts (CAiiA) University of Wales College, Newport, UK. His book of essays Towards an Immersive Intelligence: Essays on the Work of Art in the Age of Computer Technology and Virtual Reality (1993-2006) was published by Edgewise Press in 2009. In 2011 his book Immersion Into Noise was published by the University of Michigan Library’s Scholarly Publishing Office in conjunction with the Open Humanities Press.

By Bobbi Lurie.

I apologize for answering paragraph by paragraph — I can’t find my books by Jabès, so I can’t create an appropriate response (though this response is titled “to this essay which has been obsessing me”). Simply put: thank you for writing it.

I love this essay — it brings up all we face: the things we did not/cannot/will not read.

But I think it’s only a problem if we trust some judge outside ourselves.

As unscholarly as this is, I feel confident that I am drawn to the books I need to read. I’d say I do not really want to read the books I did not read. I truly want to read an essay by Heather McHugh in Poetry — but will I? And if I don’t, do I have a right to say I wanted to?

The things I truly “want” to read, I’ve read, under the threat of many etcs. Reading is a secret affair, something we must hide in order to simultaneously please while remaining alone with ourselves. We attempt to touch others, from a distance. We, writers, know the safety of “about”. Writers, especially, I’d say, are very eager to read anything relating to their obsessions.

You, Andrew Gallix, especially, through this essay, have given me an abundance of metaphors. Thanks to you, I shall be kept busy, as in “right now I’m lost in the writing of Emmanuel Levinas”.

If we think there is a list, how can we find the unknown?

We write to escape but the residue is what was written — the residue represents death while the process represents life.

Writers speak stench – Kafka

I take great joy in deleting my most precious words. The stench of dishonest pronouncements often leads me to see I never lived a life; I only wrote, drew, sung, etched, acted, taught, to hide in the “about” which leads to the artifice which is the only truth: art.

“the realm of the unread has spread like a split-bottle of correction fluid”: what this means (to me) is I want to read more of your work — that is for sure. It’s never the essay; it’s the way it is written. I love the flow of your words, but also, and especially, the brilliance of seeing this enormous thing we (me, I) have been unconscious of, before reading this…

Thanks to you, I found Emmanuel Levinas again; I was distracted by Jabès, who I cannot find.

Had I not grown up on Anais Nin, learning she lied about everything, only later, when I was no longer a young girl, pouring over her “diaries” — had I known it was fiction, I never would have read them. From that day on (that day I read Henry Miller’s book, whose name I forget) genre is/was/will be what I care(d) about. Genre and the actual act of writing — to be given words is grace.

How angry we are when what was given is taken away, whether through the body or through the book.

The book is a corpse. It is the dead matter, the substance of the ego.

I have been going through old journals, finding lists of books I did and did not read.

They mean nothing to me.

What means something to me is that I am going through my vast collection of already-read-never-to-be-read-again books, purchased today books, books to read — piles of books everywhere — books of friends I am obliged to read, research, and more. Mostly, it is a joy searching for and then finding those few, though too many, books I feel I cannot live without, even if it is me who will be the first book off the shelf (there will certainly be no “witness” — it will be oblivion (this is definitely a run-on sentence).

I have made an effort not to purchase hard covers. When they are given to me, I cringe. “This book will live longer than me. Where are the paperbacks?”

With no respect due to Hannah (Arendt), I do not consider her someone capable of determining who is, and isn’t, a genius. Her level of consciousness is only at the level of her own consciousness. Someone with deeper understanding would know they know nothing and as they seek to read “about” what they know (nothing) there is less and less to read. Until there is nothing. Which is pretty much how life seems to be to me. Banal is not the word, Hannah. I’ve been with lots of Geniuses at Apple. They managed to delete all my files after March 2007.

How true! It is a writer’s fear that someone will actually read their writing…at least, for this writer, it is true. I am only a writer while I’m writing. When I’m not
writing I turn into an author of books, of objects, which are misinterpreted by everyone. The biggest shock I got was that you, the author of this essay, knew that the title of my first book is/was/is, The Book I Never Read. For you to mention this book in relationship to this essay: I was deeply moved – and am – simply to have you write the title, in reference to this essay, for this is the place I want to be: the place where something can never be read.

Always, everywhere, most of what is said is said by people in their prime; people with a dream, a view, a goal, a need, a joy.

What happens when you, yourself, can see your own end? Shocking to have spent a life behind the pen, writing or drawing the “about” which was not lived. The books which were not read; the friends which were not made…

And this much-edited version of ourselves, which we have tried so hard to present to the so-called “world,” has, in the end, nothing at all to do with the thing written about.

It is a secret. We are here. We are writing. And then we aren’t.

Kafka was serious: he wanted all his work destroyed. Kafka would have been sickened by the Kafka-T-shirt shops in Prague. The “famous” poet (meaning: “other”"poets” use the word “hate” in relationship to him, though I like him very much) said to me, “You’re crazy. You’ll be missing an experience.”

I said, ”if all of them are dead, if there is not one alive to tend to the cemetery, if the cemetery is kept, for financial gain, by a government which once sponsored their ruin, entering that cemetery is a sin.”

For a man who no longer has a homeland, writing becomes a place to live – Theodor Adorno

Later there was an Iranian who connected to both of us. She hacked my computer — no one wants to hear this story, therefore it does not exist. But I must live with this invisible knowledge, as America is kept busy creating opinions “about” The Oscars.

I have not slept. I may hate this later. But if I don’t write a comment now (after having promised myself that I would never write or read another comment in the comments section again)…this is the living me. A run-out sentence, too tired to correct spelling mistakes.

And I think the ego is jealous of THE GREAT ERASURE and wants to imitate its eternity through non-existence.

“The solitude of the subject results from its relationship with the existing over which it is master. This mastery over existing is the power of beginning, of starting out from itself, starting out from itself neither to act nor to think, but to be.”
- Emmanuel Levinas, Time and the Other, 1946.

Etc.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Bobbi Lurie‘s fourth poetry collection, the morphine poems, was recently published by Otoliths (Australia). Her television reviews can be found in Berfrois. She lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico, though she once lived in Chester, England, bordering Wales, and she misses it; she misses the word, “ta,” especially. She does not know how to punctuate; it may be too late to learn; she keeps using semi-colons, improperly (maybe; maybe not).

I realised, as I thought about this piece, that it was actually quite hard for me to find five objects that have influenced me. Or at least, it was hard to find five objects that I own that have influenced me. As a writer and an academic, I’ve never had the money to actually ‘own’ much and my most valuable possession would be my lap-top. Anyway, it seems to me that we need to shed our attachment to objects, things-in-themselves and the whole web of false desires around materialism and consumerism. In a sense, then, this is more a record of certain obsessions and inspirations, fears and desires, some of which are incarnated in specific objects and others of which are better understood as part of my general environment or maps into my own imaginative terrain.

Gas masks.

I’ve always found gas masks to be frightening, uncanny objects, portents of a rapidly approaching apocalypse. The obsession started when I was a child. I used to love a comic strip called Charley’s War written by the great Pat Mills and published in Battle: Action Force during the 80s. Unlike other strips in the comic, Charley’s War was distinguished by the brilliant realism of Joe Colquhoun’s illustrations and the story-line – instead of being filled with daring heroics – gave some insight into the horrors of trench warfare. I recall one cover in particular: a charge by spear-brandishing German cavalry, but both horsemen and horses were wearing gasmasks and moving through a ruined wasteland. I think that image stayed with me forever: its combination of the archaic and the modern seemed to presage some deeper and more troubling truth about the world that no one was talking about. More recently, as austerity produces unrest, the gas mask has become de rigeur for police and protestors across Europe and the Americas, appearing most vividly in the almost medieval battles between police and protestors in Syntagma Square, Athens (Greek police have fired over 30,000 rounds of tear gas in the last two years). For me, the gas-mask is a symbol of the present crisis, a signifier of the toxic fallout from our discredited and destructive economic system.

The Communal Gardens of West London.

I lived in Earls Court for a while. We lived on a very busy main road, but behind the terrace of stucco town houses was a huge, completely hidden communal garden the size of a small park. It was a great privilege, for the time that I lived there, to have access to this place and for me it always represented a transition from one world to another, a curious juxtaposition of the intensely urban with the almost bucolic. When I was writing Lost Boys, I drew on the tantalising communal gardens of Notting Hill, these beautiful spaces glimpsed between high fences and hedges. What is it like inside those gardens? It seemed logical that my youthful protagonist, Timothy Dashwood, should be summoned by a Pan figure lurking in the trees of such a garden – for me, the gardens stand at the interstices between two worlds; one sheltered, privileged and guarded against the outside world; the other wild, dangerous and abundant with imaginative joy.

Reggae

I suppose my obsession with reggae music (and all music that derives from Jamaican sound system culture) started around ’99 when I was in living in Tottenham. I was actually renting a studio owned by writer and editor Nicholas Royle, (also one of the first people to publish my work). I’d finished an MA at UCL and I was using the remnants of some inheritance my grandfather had left me to write my first (unpublished) novel. I used to listen to local pirate radio stations whilst I was writing and they used to play a lot of reggae and dancehall. The music touched hit me on a both visceral and spiritual level. It’s actually quite hard to get into reggae because the music is not really about ‘bands’ or individual artists but rather a shared culture of ‘riddims’ with the producer or the studio where a track was recorded being more important than a particular vocalist. So I used to write down the names of the sounds that I liked and then I’d head down to Soho, to shops like Daddy Kools (Soho still had record shops then) and get the tunes. I’m an obsessive, geeky, collector type so it wasn’t long before things got out of hand. I have tens of thousands of reggae tunes, including almost the entire Studio One label, (albeit on CDRs after I linked up with some big time collectors). Some years ago I went digital-download only as I ran out of space. Most of my collection is now stashed in crates in my parents’ garage, God knows when I’ll ever have room for it all – or time to listen to everything again. For me, reggae music is the sound of truth – the history they don’t teach you at school, ‘the half that has never been told’, a genre that expresses all of human life – love and suffering, violence and crime, cogent critiques of the capitalist system and messages of spiritual redemption – and that’s without touching on the fact that small studios in the ghettos of Kingston pioneered almost every innovation in current dance music. Plus I love bass. Drum and bass. Lots of bass. I like a heavy vibration I can feel in my bones. In a world every more saturated with bullshit, reggae music (along with blues, gospel and soul) is a touchstone of authenticity. The holy musical triangle stretches from Kingston Jamaica to New Orleans and up to Memphis. Almost everything worth listening to has its roots in these places, from the struggles of the post-slavery Diaspora. This is the true modern music – almost all the rest is just a shabby imitation.

My espresso machine

Coffee. I wouldn’t function without it. I know some writers prefer to hide themselves away, they like to write in isolation. That’s probably the best way to work, but I need activity around me: things going on, little distractions, people to look at. As a result, I work a lot in cafés. My coffee/café habit really got going years ago when I had a brief and disastrous career in market research. I had no interest in any of the products I was supposed to be researching and at lunchtime I’d hide in a café near the office where I’d frantically write my book for an hour or so. My girlfriend recently bought me an espresso machine to stop me spending so much money on coffee. So now I usually start the day with a couple of double macchiatos. There is nothing like the first coffee of the day; sometimes I get up early because I’m looking forward to it so much.

My thangkas

I have a couple of beautiful Tibetan thangkas that I bought in Kathmandu when I was back-packing around India and Nepal in the late 90s. At the time, I hadn’t cut my hair for two years and was very high on charas. I was a bit of a traveller-cliché, stumbling around in sandals and tatty tie-dyed outfits. I’ve never been back to Kathmandu but the city was magical, unlike anywhere I’ve ever been, narrow alleyways leading to ancient squares adorned with astonishing temples and pagodas. These thangkas have followed me around for over a decade. One is of a green Tara, I think, the other a more frightening deity. Tibetan Buddhism is fairly incomprehensible and I’ve always been sceptical of westerners who embraced eastern religions. In fact, I still am although I’ve recently started to practice yoga and Vedic meditation. I have a Sanskrit mantra and when I repeat it to myself it sends me into some sort of trance and sometimes (not always) leaves me charged with energy and imbued with an intense appreciation of everything. It actually works – and it amazes me, these days, to find something that does. Everyone should meditate: I don’t understand why they don’t teach it in schools and prisons, offices and factories. Oh wait… once you start to meditate you gain a degree of clarity and begin to realise just how toxic and warped our lifestyles have become. If more people meditated, people might be less interested in shopping or working or engaging in all the mindless tasks that fill our day. And then what might happen?

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
James Miller is the author of the novels Lost Boys and Sunshine State (Little, Brown). He is Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing and English Literature at Kingston University. He can be followed on Twitter via @jmlostboys. Photograph copyright of Camilla Broadbent.

By Roland Kelts.

Many women in Japan remain mired in a patriarchal culture that caps their career opportunities. Japan continues to rank embarrassingly low on the United Nations index of gender empowerment, beneath several of its less developed Asian neighbours. In the legions of action heroines and headstrong young women in Japanese popular culture, overseas fans often see an illusion of female empowerment, delivered via enticing visuals and story lines created mostly by men.

But the status of real women in anime production may be evolving through advances in technology and societal shifts accelerated by post-disaster turmoil. In Tokyo last year, I had dinner with a frustrated male company manager whose views skew conservative. He told me that what Japan needs now is its own Maggie Thatcher, a leader who doesn’t owe anyone anything because she’s a female in a male-dominated world. Regardless of Thatcher’s politics, he said, what Japan needs most is power and vision. I was reminded of Hayao Miyazaki’s remarks when I interviewed him in California in 2009: “These days, all of our best young artists [at Studio Ghibli] are women,” he said. “Maybe I need to make films about powerful young men now to give them the strength to compete.”

In the production of anime, Japanese women may also be liberated by changes in the creation of the medium. Just as self-publishing models are enabling writers to reach readers without the third-party involvement of publishers, computer software provides artists in anime the means to craft their art outside of studios, which remain largely male-dominated environs.

Anime auteur Makoto Shinkai, whom I have both profiled and interviewed, was a pioneer of the new indie anime model in Japan. He created his first anime short, She and Her Cat, entirely on his own, from photographs he took and imagery drafted on the computer tools that were available in 1998. He then wrote, directed and produced his first feature-length anime, Voices from a Distant Star, on his Apple Power Mac G4.

Shinkai told me at the New York Anime Festival that his goal as an artist was to tell his audience, “You will be OK” – a particularly urgent sentiment in the wake of increasing calamities, he said, not just in Japan, but worldwide.

Hiroshima-based Soubi Yamamato, a 22 year-old female artist from Japan’s new generation of anime auteurs, sees Shinkai as an artistic and spiritual model. “The titles that Mr. Shinkai created on his own opened a door for me to this wonderful culture of indie anime. His creations were were like beacons showing me the way high-quality animation can be made by one committed individual working solo.” Yamamoto’s first commercial release, This Boy Can Fight Aliens, is a 28-minute story about a trio of young males (one of whom has the power to save the planet) and their fraternal affection and conflicts in the rural home they share. The scenario enables Yamamoto to explore the nuances of human interdependence and camaraderie and the will to survive.

“Although things may be hard now, and you’re struggling and feel like you’re all alone,” she says, “there will always be someone somewhere to help you, and there are definitely some people out there who like you.”

I asked Yamamoto why she was compelled to create anime, a traditional, two-dimensional art form in a world of flashier, more lucrative 3D options. “It’s true that the problem with the industry is that animators are not paid well. But anime allows me to express the world I have in my imagination in the most complete way. The appeal is that you can use more than just pictures, because in anime, other elements, such as story, voice and music, are interwoven to create the whole.”

“[In Japan] we have had a great manga culture for many years,” she adds. “Those of us who grew up close to manga and anime and aspired to become writers and animators during our childhood are the artists at work now.”

Like her hero Shinkai, Yamamoto seeks an ameliorative effect through her art. “The world is just a bit kinder than we might think,” she says, “and I want the audience to feel that it’s true.”

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Roland Kelts is a visiting scholar at the University of Tokyo who divides his time between Tokyo and New York. He is the author of Japanamerica: How Japanese Pop Culture Has Invaded the U.S.. Kelts will be appearing at the Japan Foundation in Los Angeles to discuss Anime & Hollywood on February 20. Details and RSVP online here.

Shoot the Wrx: Artist and Film-maker Jeff Keen at Brighton Museum & Art Gallery until 21/04/13.

‘Kill the word before the word kills you,’ ‘How right Motler was to kill the word,’ are among the phrases which flash by in the course of Jeff Keen’s Rayday Film (1968-70). At one point in the film Motler the Wordkiller, embodied by Australian poet Dexter Duke, stuffs pages of text into his mouth and chews them up. Which could be seen as the destruction of the pages, the nourishing of Motler and a dismissal of the metaphorical element in words such as consume, devour, digest which are commonly used to describe reading and acquiring of knowledge. Rather than trying to negotiate the tricky gap between words and what they describe, Keen creates a seamless work where both are unstable and can appear simultaneously, often in the process of transforming into something else.

Though best known as a film-maker, Keen worked as a poet and artist throughout his long career and the exhibition (where Rayday Film shows continuously on the balcony above the main hall of Brighton Museum, hopefully spiking the curiosity of visitors browsing the art nouveau furniture below) provides an opportunity to consider examples from all aspects of his extremely prolific practice. The graphic work on display ranges from early detailed nature studies through surrealist-influenced drawings and large paintings on board which riffle playfully through Hollywood tropes to examples of the ragged-edged works on cardboard which appear in his films of the late 1980s-90s. There are also props, models, bookworks and a selection of publications.

Text appears in several of the paintings. Sometimes its deployment appears relatively straightforward, as in Sincerely Dr Gaz (1973) where Keen, under his nom-de-guerre, plays with the convention of the signed fan picture. The much earlier Victoria Cinema, Betty Grable (1950) makes another point about the way people experience movies by showing not the star herself but the huge grin and starstruck eyes of a young man outside the cinema underneath a poster which bears her name. Reception and transmission of imaginative experience as an undifferentiated part of everyday life is central to Keen’s work. The two Secret Origins paintings (1967) on display employ text in a different way. Stencilled chunks of the alphabet — which look like they’ve been done from the plastic lettering stencil which might at one point have featured in almost every school pencil-case — form a matrix. It could become a wordsearch if the viewer was so inclined, zigzagging from one letter to another, all the makings are there. ‘…Birth of another word’ is handwritten on the first of the paintings, among a whole lot of other fragments of text and image. The phrase ‘Secret Origins’ is open to multiple interpretations of which the DC comic title is only one.

The paintings on cardboard which appear in Keen’s films of the late 1980s-90s are stencilled with slogans. One reads ‘CUT BACK TO 1942/A FOR ART WAR/&POETRY IN FLAMES’. These phrases pop up elsewhere in Keen’s work. The Art War Reader is the title of the 1998 collection of Keen’s poems; there is a listening post for a recording of eight poems made by Keen in 2010 on the balcony alongside the screen showing Rayday Film. Sound elements of language (e.g puns, homophones, onomatopoeia, the kind of aural slippage that leads to ambiguity of meaning) seem important in Keen’s work. If read aloud, ‘POETRY IN FLAMES’ can be heard as ‘Poetry inflames’. Other cardboard paintings from the period bear the legends ‘ORFEO BLATZO’ and ‘BLATZO FURIOSO’. ‘Orfeo’ and ‘Furioso’ are associated in their original contexts with dangerous states of frenzy, whether brought on by disappointed love, as in Ariosto’s poem, or signalling Orpheus’ fate at the hands of the maenads. In Rayday Film, Blake’s Nebuchadnezzar shuffles across the frame and Coleridge’s portrait pops up, his name morphed into that of a hard-boiled private eye. ‘Get me Sam T. Coleridge.’ Any notion of peaceful, pastoral seclusion suggested by The Poet’s Cot (a model on display here which appears in Keen’s film Dreams and Past Crimes of the Archduke) is quickly dispelled once you spot the small green plastic soldier crouched in the doorway, his rifle aimed and ready.

Keen’s war experience remained central to his practice and the use he makes of it is perhaps particularly interesting because of its refusal to settle neatly into a conventional narrative of the second world war. Of course military and film-making vocabularies share the word ‘shoot’ and as the famous telegram sent to Jonas Mekas on the occasion of the founding of the London Filmmakers’ Co-op ‘PURPOSE TO SHOOT SHOOT SHOOT SHOOT SHOOT’ demonstrates, it generates an excitement that’s hard to resist. Keen’s fondness for that visual/verbal pun pops up in the second of the Amazing Rayday broadsheets which shows the words ‘ALL TIRED MOVIES’ issuing from the barrel of a gun. Are these movies being simultaneously generated and bumped off? You decide. Elsewhere on the page, and gnomic enough to be Lichtenberg via Gertrude Stein, a speech bubble proclaims ‘Cinema will/be compulsive or/not be’. But is shooting in a military context a destructive act diametrically opposed to film making as a creative one? It’s not that straightforward. Military action can lead to radical transformation though most frequently not of a positive kind. Keen’s films often document the burning and melting of items, usually toys, in the process of becoming something else. His work reflects, as part of daily experience, familiar, oddly denatured images of weaponry used by the film industry, advertisements and toy manufacturers. He certainly doesn’t glamorize violence but is realistic about the seductive power of its accessories.

Keen seems to have rejected the label ‘pop artist’ and it’s not hard to see why. If pop art is about elegantly subverting existing art world conventions by substituting ‘pop’ content and styles for more traditional ‘high art’ content then the pop artist would have to have accepted that a distinction actually exists between high and low art. If he or she sees all kinds of images, executed for whatever reason in any medium, as forming part of daily experience, unmediated by these conventions, then he or she is probably not a pop artist, even if making use of the stuff that pop artists also use. In its omnivorous sourcing from all aspects of modern life and interest in the processes of transformation, Keen’s work seems to have some affinities with that of Californian collage artist Jess. Against the elaborately crammed background of images in Jess’ massive collage Narkissos (1976-1991), the eponymous central figure grasps George Herriman’s Krazy Kat comic strip on the theme of Narcissus in the way a classical statue, or a more contemporary figure drawing on that grammar of symbols, might display an instrument of power. This is not intended to be kitsch; it’s there because it resonates within the work and beyond it. The poet Frank O’Hara’s seamless transmissions of the complex sensory and information overload of his immediate environment also share some common ground with Keen’s approach. O’Hara’s nimble meditation on the headline announcing the collapse of Lana Turner as he tries to cross the street might be seen as elegantly mapping the same refusal to discriminate between types of experience and these lines from Biotherm (for Bill Berkson) (1962)

‘bent on his knees the Old Mariner said where the fuck
is that motel you told me about mister I aint come here for no clams’
ricochet off Keen’s oft-repeated ‘Get me Sam T. Coleridge on the melting brain line’.

Much of Keen’s published poetry, on display here, reads more like a reflective journal on his film-making than an attempt to achieve something radical within the form. ‘A blade of light/cuts up/the FASTEST FILM ALIVE/snap-shots spurt out/left & right./Each perfect atom/contains the movie/we’ve been waiting for (from 24 Films). Maybe Keen’s memorable line ‘Light travels faster than words’ from Will Yr Brainstem Leave an Imprint? suggests that he didn’t think words had the same radical potential as film. He was certainly aware of contemporary adventures in refashioning language ‘anyone can do it cut up anything says mr wm burroughs & remember old dadamen cut up world/HAVE YOU GOT THE NERVE cut up melt down/respray old art &/life factors’ (from Amazing Rayday no.3). Elements in Keen’s practice line up with some of the ‘old dadamen’s concerns. Kurt Schwitters’ attempts to extend painting and poetry beyond the structures into which they had settled might be echoed in Keen’s 1977 pronouncement on Expanded Cinema: ‘Concerned from the outset with extending film beyond its traditional limits, it seemed a logical step for me to get beyond the frame.’

One of Keen’s prime locations was Brighton’s municipal tip which appears in his films as a cross between a punk alchemist’s laboratory and a particularly bleak spaghetti western set — a great place to light fires and smash things up without getting into trouble. Making props out of rubbish could be seen as having similarities to some of Schwitters’ Merz work but while Schwitters used discarded items to fashion artefacts on a scale up to monumental, Keen seems more interested in speeding up the process of their transmutation.

Keen’s collaboration with Bob Cobbing and Annea Lockwood on the soundtrack of Marvo Movie (1967) is curated on Ubuweb as a sound poem but is much more effective as part of the film. The silent, onomatopoeic ‘sound effects’—‘zowp’, ‘krak’, ‘burst’ and the mysterious ‘zurp’—that appear on cardboard cut-outs in Rayday Film and other works seem to serve a structural purpose in addition to referencing a grab-bag of comics, films and the Batman TV series starring Adam West. The ZAP and ZIP poems that occur in the Amazing Rayday comics are possibly Keen’s most effective attempts at combining the visual and phonetic elements on paper (not only does a column of ZIPs look like the object the word represents but coming from an onomatopoeic source in the first place the sound is a perfect match…)

Cut Staple Flick is displayed here as an uncut sheet but designed to be assembled as a flick book (pun intended) — on which the text OMO ZAP TOR NAP ART emerges and self-destructs. OMO ZAP is Keen’s self-explanatory pun on homo sapiens. Before hearing Keen read his poems I assumed ‘ZAP’ to be a quick impatient sound but his Wiltshire accent draws it out long. In Amazing Rayday no.4 the reader could interpret ‘…is only shatturd wurd frgmtz imploding brain-needlz’ as dialect pronunciation or a scatological pun; I don’t think it much matters as long as an impression of the flexibility and resilience of language — strongest under pressure, as splintered words are the building blocks for new ones — comes across.

A couple of Keen’s ‘pomediscs’, (elliptical cardboard circles that vary in size between a 7 inch single and and an LP with a central hole for the spinner) are also on display. A panelled — but as far as I could tell entirely non-sequential — spiral of drawings unwinds from the central hole to the outer edge. Clouds and other shapes open to a variety of interpretations are overstencilled with texts like ‘MOMOT’ and ‘KAKA’, numbers and more stylized images… They can be glimpsed in action, generating an indecipherable blur during Rayday Film.

The speed at which text erupts in the films — on characters’ clothing, over the walls Keen is filmed graffiting — make almost as it hard to follow, and watching the films with an eye to textual apparitions meant much hitting of the remote and an increasing sense that my attempts to pick out individual words were pointless, as their significance lay only in transition. Which might be why I turned with some relief to the series of five Amazing Rayday (Secret Comics), dated early to mid 60s (plus a reworked version of no. 1 also on display), though I should admit that even when looking out for possible ‘expansions’ of verbal meaning, I failed to notice the obvious echo of Rayday/Mayday which an exhibition panel points out.

The Amazing Rayday (Secret Comics) are all single sheets, slightly larger than A3, on which a dense array of collaged images and text intermingle. The effect is more akin to an old-fashioned newspaper or catalogue than a comic as there’s little in the way of sequenced panels but the editorial voice, for the little it owes to anything, is closer to Wyndham Lewis’ Blast or the magazine the Bastable children put together in E. Nesbit’s Story of the Treasure-Seekers. Onomatopoeic headlines compete with bizarre images and swathes of typewritten text run in all directions through the interstices. On a first glance at Amazing Rayday Secret Comic no. 1 the jumping superheroine in golden bikini and boots at the top right hand corner catches the eye. Individually cut-out typewritten words ‘THE/DAZZLING/SHADOW/OF/THE/PRECIPICE’ outline her torso.

Along what I first took to be the barrel of a space gun (but seemed on closer inspection to be an amorphous form of twisted vegetable matter or internal organs) small white ‘z’s explode forth into ZAP, enclosed in several spiky layers of speech bubble to suggest maximum impact. STUNRAYDAY runs down along the long right hand edge of the page. In smaller type, WHAM, more or less centred, heads downwards on a collision course with EYEBLAZE underneath. Further down and slightly to the right, the letters forming EEEEEEE! rise at a slight angle, enclosed in a gently spiky speech bubble which gives the impression of trembling. In the middle of the long left hand edge BLAM! runs vertically upwards but apart from the final ‘M’ all the letters are slightly tilted on their axis. In the lower left hand corner, apparently straight from Amazing Stories, a four-armed monster uses his lower pair of hands to strangle a professor-type as a girl rushes to intervene with a stick. Above the line of the monster’s upraised, dagger-wielding upper right arm runs the word AARGH! It doesn’t have to be clear who utters it. ‘ALL ANSWERS PLEASE TO FUTURE/CITY MARSMAN ENTERPRISES/JUNK CITY HOUSE OF SECRETS’.

My attempt to render such a complex tangle of immediate visual impressions as a coherent whole is completely unsatisfactory. By contrast,

‘ray words are all junk words cut up/newstrash pulp scientifiction nat/ional marvel comic words……….’

‘IF/WORDS/FAIL/USE/YOUR/TEETH’

‘THE CREATURE WALKS THROUGH THE/MOVIE DARKNESS AND THE/GLASSHOUSE/ OF DECAYED/MEAT’

‘KNOW HOW terror methods of history’s no holds/barred terrifying struggle for power fighting/KNOW HOW secrets of hideous vandals thugs/ferocious aztecs vicious karate kas SECRET/POLICE METHODS are all KNOW HOW methods of/once in a lifetime fighting machine secrets’

‘ZOOM INTO SPACE say cosmic/ray commandoes rescue kisses/to star maidens beyond ray/time daylight magnet time’

These are only a selection of the texts ranging freely across Amazing Rayday (Secret Comic) no.1. Are they here to act as mortar holding everything else firmly set on the page, or as a fluid medium of rehashed verbiage in which images and sounds can freely float? If forced to choose I would opt for the latter, but both are relevant. In his foreword to An Anthology of Concrete Poetry (Something Else Press, 1967) Emmett Williams writes in a way that seems to address the issue better than I could. ‘The visual element in their poetry tended to be structural…a “picture” of the lines of force of the work itself, and not merely textural. It was…a poetry that often asked to be completed or activated by the reader, a poetry of direct presentation — the word, not words, words, words or expressionistic squiggles — using the semantic, visual and phonetic elements of language as raw materials in a way seldom used by the poets of the past. It was a kind of game, perhaps, but so is life. It was born of the times, as a way of knowing and saying something about the world of now, with the techniques and insights of now.’

There are a few bookworks on display in the exhibition; Burnt Book (early 1970s) and the Dreams of the Archduke sketchbook (1970s), featuring, among many other things, E.A. Poe’s submarine. All its richly interesting pages can be viewed in a short film on the balcony. The Secret Battleplane</em£ (early 1960s) and Parachutes fail to open (early 1970s) are bookworks which have been formed by hollowing out the page block of an old volume, creating a hiding place when the book is closed (and thereby paying tribute to a staple device of pulp stories).