This exchange began as a planned book review of Michael Levenson’s Modernism (Yale, 2011). But modernism has a way of making plans fall apart. Our conversation was conducted by email in the viciously cold January of 2012. As Ezra Pound put it, we cannot make it cohere.

AB: My attempts to define modernism either drift into its origins or become unsatisfactorily reductive, so I’ll borrow T. J. Clark’s framing of modernism as ‘a distinctive patterning of mental and technical possibilities’. It’s almost easier to define modernism in negative terms, as what it is against. For example, in literature: a reaction to narrative, to needless artifice. I like Gabriel Josipovici’s suggestion that modernism is art coming to consciousness of its own limits and responsibilities. I’m also fully behind Tom McCarthy’s conception that ‘modernism is not a movement, nor even a way of thinking, but an event: an event with which any serious writer has, in some way or another, to engage, and to which they should respond.’

DW: Yes, I share your sense of the difficulty of reaching a definition. For a start, it seems to me that the term ‘modernism’ only tends to arise when it needs to be mobilised for some rhetorical reason. It’s one of those words we ‘perform’ for each other, isn’t it? Think of how whole subfamilies of modernist ‘movements’ – from Fauvism to Futurism (Dada is perhaps the paradigm case) – were constructed as such via public acts of naming which, while rhetorically rich, were seldom semantically coherent. In the same way, I think it’s hard to unpick the meaning of ‘modernism’ from the performative force that underwrites its usage.

That said, I don’t think ‘modernism’ is or was some sort of philological mirage, or that the problems the word poses for us would disappear if we dispensed with it. They’re far from being ‘false’ problems. Yet, as you say, as soon as we examine the idea we do experience a sort of ‘drift’. It’s easy to let the whole thing dissolve across impossibly broad historical and intellectual fields. Maybe the name captures more than our cognitive mapping can handle.

Of course, one way of resisting this risk is to periodise modernism. For me though, investing too much meaning in periodisation raises risks of its own. An extreme example would be Woolf’s remark: ‘on or about December 1910, human character changed.’ I’m sure she wasn’t being serious, but still, I always found that line irritatingly pompous. McCarthy’s suggestion seems much more thoughtful, since it strips modernism of several layers of misleading localisation. But I’d want to work out what’s meant by ‘event’, in this instance. Are we talking about an event with a historical quality (if so, are we then also talking about ‘modernity’) or one that we encounter in the act of writing; in the ‘work’ of art?

AB: Periodisation is fascinating; every critique presents a different starting point and this point gets earlier each time, with suggestions stretching back to Wordsworth, Swift, Dante, even Catullus. The danger, as Josipovici acknowledges, is that modernism is turned into a period of art history, a style. This is why I prefer the formulation of modernism as an event, one that will always exist, and with which artists must in some way contend. The event, which Josipovici deals with at length in What Ever Happened to Modernism?, is, to use the term that Weber borrowed from Schiller, ‘the disenchantment of the world.’ This links neatly with Simon Critchley’s position that modernity is the achievement of a secular form of life, which clearly we haven’t got to yet. I am less convinced that modernism is simply a response to ‘modernity’ (beyond Critchley’s position on modernity). Woolf’s statement is a neat soundbite, clearly hyperbolic but also with the typical smugness of that coterie. I enjoy Woof’s writing tremendously but it requires looking beyond the deep-rooted snobbery.

DW: One of the many merits of Josipovici’s book is its acute awareness of this tension between ‘period’ and ‘event’, in the terms we’re using. The issue seems central to any attempt to make sense of modernism. At the same time, I’d say the problems it points to are irresolvable.

Here’s an idea. What if we recast this opposition as one between ‘history’ and ‘mythology’?  We could then claim that any account of modernism must involve each of these categories.

For instance, when Weber takes up the term ‘disenchantment’, he wants it to carry a high degree of historical content.  For him it designates concrete, traceable trends relating to rationalisation, bureaucratisation, and so on. But it’s also a sign of something he calls ‘the spirit of capitalism’. My hunch is that here he’s crossing over into the language of myth. And as soon as he starts alluding to literary texts (Goethe’s Faust in particular) his argument is no longer strictly ‘descriptive’, in the sociological sense. It also partakes of something poetic, or mythopoetic.

After all, isn’t the very idea of ‘disenchantment’ (Entzauberung, which I guess suggests a ‘breaking of the spell’) more intelligible as myth than as history? In a way, the same could be said of Eliot’s lament for a supposed ‘dissociation of sensibility.’

I think our confusions arise because the concepts we’re dealing with aren’t ‘purely’ historical, but are entangled in two very different explanatory frameworks. And this itself reflects the complexity of our object.

Northrop Frye famously said that literature is an extension of myth. Perhaps we can say something similar of literary history. Or at least, let’s remember that there are two terms in ‘literary history’, and that the ways we relate to literary history are always already ‘literary’ as well as historical.

AB: That idea sounds workable. It offers a point of connection between the different frameworks, one that is a German sociological argument and the other more English or perhaps transatlantic in origin. Both are necessary in any account of modernism.

The idea of ‘disenchantment’, of a devaluation of the ineffable in people’s lives, has always seemed to me better suited to the German tradition, capturing a Nietzschean insight. Though it is part of the English tradition, it is harder to see through an English literary or philosophical filter.

Eliot’s use of myth seems more symbolic than in the example of Goethe’s Faust, where it is offered up as a complete package. Josipovici cites Kermode’s suggestion that Eliot was a ‘closet Romantic’ for the idea of a period when there was a ‘dissociation of sensibility’.

Disenchantment is closely connected with secularism, which we are arguably further away from, in England anyway, than in Eliot’s day.

DW: Let’s turn to Michael Levenson’s latest book, Modernism. We found that we’d both read that book around the same time, which was what prompted this conversation.

We’ve sketched some of the issues involved in thinking through modernism, although, for my part, I won’t kid myself that I’ve come any closer to comprehending them. I doubt I’ll ever do much more than stretch the scope, or raise the stakes, of my misunderstanding.

Anyway, I’m wondering how these ideas relate to Levenson’s study. I think the book presents an impressively rich, synthetic survey of quite a tightly ‘periodised’ model of modernism. For that reason, though, I’m afraid I felt something was lacking. Reading Josipovici revolutionised my view of modernism, letting me look at it in terms of something like a longue durée.  Levenson is rather less bold: all he does is redescribe (however expertly) the standard view we already knew. Well, that’s my take on it.

But then, he does begin to thicken the picture by stressing the ways in which art, as he says, ‘is a social practice’, embedded in networks of pragmatic actions: ‘exhibiting, publishing, performing, selling, discussing, viewing, debating’ etcetera.  Nonetheless, I don’t think his book delves into that in as much depth as, say, Rainey’s Institutions of Modernism.

I’m rambling again. What do you reckon?

AB: Levenson’s Modernism is less bold than Josipovici’s What Ever Happened to Modernism? He offers no revelations or contentious perspective, but I see each book as striving toward a different goal. Josipovici’s book is polemical, offering a personal critique of modernism that is bold and unfamiliar. Levenson’s goal appears more rudimentary, more in the nature of an overarching history of modernism.

Reading Josipovici’s book redefined my understanding of modernism and helped me decipher why some types of literature intrigue me and others leave me cold. In this sense it crystallised my literary tastes in the same way that T. J. Clark’s Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism shaped my taste in the visual arts.

My objective for reading Levenson’s book was precisely for a definitive, synoptic outline of modernism. In that sense Levenson’s book succeeded, far better than Peter Gay’s flawed obituary. Levenson’s emphasis on the importance of Ibsen, Wagner, Nietzsche and Strindberg as foundational in establishing an oppositional culture is vital. Each of Levenson’s chapters could quite easily deepen to individual meticulous studies, I’m sure some exist, but that would be outside the intention of this particular book.

DW: One thing I’m interested in is the ‘use’ to which these books could be put. I guess this reconnects with my earlier point about performativity. Maybe the measure of any account of modernism is not so much its accurate tracking of history (a la Levenson’s rich but rather flat retelling of ‘the way things were’), as its potential to be put to work in the present.

You claim that Clark and Josipovici helped you to ‘crystallise’ your literary allegiances. This at least proves that engaging with modernism – reading, thinking and writing about it – can still serve some purpose for people like us. If that’s so, then what’s the most useful way of relating to modernism today?

You call Peter Gay’s book an ‘obituary’, which seems precisely right. And for me that word captures what’s wrong with some ways of remembering modernism. For instance, I do have a few misgivings about Lars Iyer’s remarks on ‘the death of literature.’ Representing an entire tradition as ‘exhausted’ and inaccessible (which is also an indirect way of putting it on a pedestal) surely isn’t that useful to us, in the sense I’m suggesting.

What Josipovici does so well is defamiliarise modernism. He productively dislocates it from its context, ‘making it new’ in a way that’s, in fact, emblematically modernist. When you think about it, his whole approach to the historicity of his object is conducted in kind of a modernist spirit. Crucially, what that allows him to do is recover something ‘unfinished’ within modernism; maybe something ‘dialectical.’

As a result, when he writes about middlebrow fiction’s failure to live up to the modernist legacy, his isn’t simply a narrative of loss and nostalgia, as I sometimes suspect Lars Iyer’s is. Instead, I’d say he reorients modernism, recasting it not as a long-gone culture’s last flourish, but as what it still should be for us: a challenge.

AB: Levenson’s study is weaker in its closing chapter, when he delivers his obituary for modernism, conflating, which I see as a common misinterpretation, modernism and experimentation. If you recall, he writes,

‘…seen from one point of view, the succession of new forms – the self-succeeding, self-cancelling pursuit of novelty – led ultimately to exhaustion. The repertory of modernist possibilities was large but not infinite; radical though the experiments often were, they were bound to become repetitive and no longer reproductive.’

Essentially, this is Peter Gay’s ‘modernism as style’ position. It is one way of ‘telling the story’, but it seems unnecessarily reductive and superficial. Josipovici’s argument, similar to Critchley’s, is practical and posits an ongoing engagement. That modernism is a response to the ‘simplifications of the self’ and an attempt to achieve a secular way of life offers an unfinished challenge. Your argument that Josipovici defamiliarises and reorients modernism is exactly right, and that’s why I find his book very different from, but also more important than Levenson’s.

I always enjoy reading ‘death of literature’ pieces. David Shields’ Reality Hunger was exquisitely infuriating. Every time the form appears exhausted, an author breathes life into it in an unexpected way. Contemporary authors like Peter Handke, Thomas Bernhard, László Krasznahorkai, Lydia Davis, J.M. Coetzee, Gerald Murnane and Geoff Dyer are moulding literature in unexpected directions. Those middlebrow authors that Josipovici castigates as ‘prep-school boys showing off’ are easy targets for all the reasons that Josipovici suggests, but this also emphasises that the modernist project, in England anyway, is far from done.

DW: This brings us quite neatly around to a question with which we could ‘close’ this discussion, if only by opening it onto others. Let’s say that, as ever, literature’s death looks a little exaggerated. If this is so, I’m with you in ardently wanting not to ‘have done with’ the modernist impulse, in the way we’ve sought to describe it.

How then might writing return to the problems that modernism presents? Or rather, how will writing refuse to delude itself that it’s rid of those problems? And can it still do so while ‘making it new,’ that is, without lapsing into pastiche, or fetishising a ‘period’ that’s part of the past?

For the record, one literary form I do think is ‘dead’ is the novel of ideas. I’m a cultural pessimist insofar as I can’t see our future producing another Mann, a Goethe, a Sartre. But nor would I want it to. I’d say the days of the great, stately ‘philosophical’ novel are gone, and they’re gone for a reason. Put bluntly, I think it’s no longer enough for writing to ‘thematise’ its conjuncture. Today, treating modernity as a theme has become one more way of turning away from it.

You mention Bernhard in the same breath as Lydia Davis, which I think is fruitful. What I mean here is that I read Bernhard for the same reasons I read some recent American writers. I want to say that I read for the style, but I don’t mean ’style’ in the ’superficial’ sense you astutely describe. In the work of the writers I most admire, a style is always also a stance. That is, for them, a way of arranging words on the page is also a way of reaching a view of the world.

I don’t want to go on and on, so all I’ll say is this: if modernism persists, it surely doesn’t do so as a disembodied idea. Instead, it’s deeply embedded inside the stylistic stances of writers who might not think of themselves as ‘modernists,’ but whose writing itself somehow can’t help but be modern.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

David Winters is a literary critic and a co-editor at 3:AM. Links to his recent articles are collected at Why Not Burn Books?

Anthony Brown is based in London and blogs at Time’s Flow Stemmed. His interests include modernism, post-punk and contemporary classical music, literature and the visual arts.

]]> http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/modernism-then-and-now/feed/ http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/come-hear-the-music-play/ http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/come-hear-the-music-play/#comments Fri, 27 Jan 2012 07:26:34 +0000 Susan Tomaselli http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/?p=43970 Cabaret was a critical, award-winning success. It effectively evoked Berlin before Hitler's rise to power and the precarious six years' peace which preceded the outbreak of war in 1939. It seemed to bring to life the bitter depictions of Weimar Germany made by Otto Dix and Georg Grosz (the former's Portrait of Journalist, Sylvia Von Harden is said to form the basis of a posed scene in the Kit Kat Klub during the film). Its poster, showing a bowlerhatted Sally Bowles, belongs with other iconic ones of that decade, such as those for Chinatown and The French Connection. Nicky Charlish on the 40th anniversary of Cabaret.]]> By Nicky Charlish.

‘Come to the cabaret, old chum.’ Let’s follow singer fraulein Sally Bowles’ exhortation, as 2012 sees the 40th anniversary of the release of Bob Fosse’s Cabaret. Our table’s waiting, but let’s not make the mistake of assuming that we’re going to be making endless libations to Nazi-tinged nostalgia.

Based on the 1966 eponymous Broadway musical by John Kander and Fred Ebb - itself derived from John Van Druten’s 1951 play I Am A Camera, which in turn took its inspiration from Christopher Isherwood’s pre-war novels Mr Norris Changes Trains and Goodbye to Berlin - the film is set in Berlin in the final years of Weimar Germany. Brian Roberts (Michael York), a writer and academic living in Berlin who supports himself by giving English lessons (as did Isherwood - the Herr Issyvoo of Goodbye to Berlin - during his stay in pre-Nazi Berlin), finds himself living in a boarding house along with, among others, nightclub singer and aspiring film actress Sally Bowles (Liza Minnelli). Via her work at the Kit Kat Klub she introduces him into the world of the city’s cabaret clubs where political comedy rubs shoulders - or whatever else comes to hand - with the more traditional forms of hedonistic nightlife: transvestite hookers, women wrestling in mud, the usual stuff. A three-way affair between Brian, Sally and her wealthy friend Baron Maximilian von Heune (Helmut Griem) follows, then fails to work out. An ensuing relationship, between Brian and Sally, also ends in failure - he wants an academic life at Cambridge but she cannot see herself as the wife of a don. Meanwhile, in a subplot, one of Brian’s language pupils, Natalia Landauer (Marisa Berenson), the refined daughter of a wealthy Jewish businessman, meets and eventually marries another of his pupils, Fritz Wendel (Fritz Wepper), a playboy on his uppers who has hidden his Jewish origins in order to succeed socially in Berlin. We glimpse a Jewish world which we know, with the rise of Hitler, is destined to be shattered like a shop window struck by a brick. Throughout the film, the Kit Kat Klub’s MC (Joel Grey) acts as a sardonic commentator on the unfolding socio-political scene.

Cabaret was a critical, award-winning success. It effectively evoked Berlin before Hitler’s rise to power and the precarious six years’ peace which preceded the outbreak of war in 1939. It seemed to bring to life the bitter depictions of Weimar Germany made by Otto Dix and Georg Grosz (the former’s Portrait of Journalist, Sylvia Von Harden is said to form the basis of a posed scene in the Kit Kat Klub during the film). Its poster, showing a bowlerhatted Sally Bowles, belongs with other iconic ones of that decade, such as those for Chinatown and The French Connection.

But, four decades on, what associations does Cabaret have for us today? The answer is rather disturbing ones, for several aspects of the film give disquieting food for thought.

Given the present economic situation it’s easy to comment on the film’s ‘Money Song’ where Sally and the MC’s song, and its accompanying stage routine, enlivened with the aid of strategically-dropped coins, remind us of the Depression which forms part of the film’s backdrop. But we shouldn’t forget the economic confidence - some might say innocence - which prevailed when Cabaret was released. The Depression was then regarded as history which careful economic regulation would ensure was not repeated; Globalism was yet to make its appearance; few would have imagined that the Western jobs-for-life culture would come to an end or that, from Durham to Detroit, traditional industries would be permitted to disappear into a rust belt with little, if any, thought about what would replace them.

People seeing Cabaret when it was first released could look back at the troubled pre-war geo-political world with a sense of security. Theirs was a politically tough, yet simpler, existence. For them, the film’s beer-garden scene - where almost all the customers are roused to dreams of military glory when two brown-shirted SA boys sing the Nazi song ‘Tomorrow Belongs to Me’ - would have been mildly disturbing. (Incidentally, this pseudo-Nazi song was specially written for the film.) But the war, to which such attitudes had contributed, was long past. Anti-Semitism, and the other religious and political conflicts of the Balkans and Eastern Europe, were distant memories, banished by the Allied victory of 1945 and the subsequent emergence of two power blocks: the West, and Russian-dominated Eastern Europe. Despite the Cold War being fought between these two political entities, a ‘hot line’ existed between Washington and Moscow to neutralise the threat of situations which might initiate nuclear conflict. War could happen, but the possibility of nuclear annihilation - mutually assured destruction (MAD) - arguably acted as a check on bellicosity.

Today, this comparatively secure world has disappeared. When Cabaret was strutting its stuff on Western cinema screens, a stronger adherence to traditional Balkan and Eastern European cultural, political and religious beliefs existed, along with the simmering (underground) hatreds which accompanied them, more than might have been expected given the firm military and political control exercised by Moscow over its satellite states. But these beliefs were merely dormant, not extinct. In the following decade the rubble from the fall of the Berlin Wall would, via the changes which swept Eastern Europe and the Balkans in 1989, feed these old attitudes. War and dislocation, fuelled by ethnic, political and religious issues, would again come to the Balkans, and instability to Eastern Europe. The threat once represented by the Soviet Empire would be replaced by that of Islamic extremism, a belief-system seemingly impervious to notions of compromise. No wonder some people have felt the pull of nostalgia for a pre-1989 world, or even for the old European order which existed before it was changed forever in June 1914 by some pistol shots in a Sarajevo street.

Cabaret also manifested a relaxed and hopeful attitude about the possibilities of sex, reflecting a post-Sixties spirit of sexual openness and optimism. In the film, the bisexuality of Brian and Maximilian is accepted as part of the natural order of things, as is the polysexual behaviour on display in the Kit Kat Klub. Plenty of sexually-confused or worried gays, glam rockers and pubescent putative New Romantics - boys and girls - were doubtless helped by Cabaret to come to terms with their sexuality, to realise that they were not alone. And Cabaret would, along with Krautrock and Bowie’s Berlin phase, help enshrine Germany and its pre-war capital within the pantheon of New Romantic influences.

Now, sexuality is an ideological minefield. Expecting it to bear the weight of heralding a social utopia, as the visionaries of the Sixties generation did, was even then straining credulity. It was like imagining that an old bedstead could sustain indefinitely the exertions of a sexually-active young couple. Since the Seventies some might say sex has become fraught with, not free from, fresh taboos. Feminism has contributed to - among other things - a wide-ranging, uncomfortable re-evaluation of the relationships between men and women and the place of sexuality within them. There has been the rise of AIDS, bringing in its wake militancy from gays and the American Religious Right alike. And doctrinal divisions within the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (lGBT) scene have arisen, too, with the emergence of theories of psycho-sexual politics which now set lGBT people at one another throats. And it’s not difficult to suspect that, along with other minorities, lGBT people are simply regarded as electoral cannon fodder by political parties which have either been deserted by their traditional supporters or who wish to enhance their credentials with powerful metropolitan elites.

Cabaret concludes with Brian setting-off from Berlin back to Britain, Sally continuing her quest for stardom - and the Kit Kat Klub full of brown-shirted Nazis. For cinema-goers of the Seventies those boys in brown could symbolise not only a historical period, but also a whole range of socio-political threats, whose time had seemed to have passed. Today they are a symbolic reminder of the dangers which can arise in the wake of new economic and social upheavals.

Willkommen.

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.

 
In the first years of Eadweard Muybridge’s photographic work, the preoccupation with precipices, peripheral zones and abyss-edges propelled his itinerary, as though the experimentation of his work necessitated journeys to topographical frontiers at which previously habitual forms had expired, and the only way forward would now be via from-scratch innovations that treated existing technologies as scorched-earth detritus. As a result, Muybridge’s eye is always on the originating edge of vision and in interrogative movement, scanning terrains that are themselves in flux and newly-created. Such experiments propel the eye of the viewer or spectator into the precipice through the medium of Muybridge’s eye or those of his figures, and much of the vertiginous unease engendered by his first photographic work emerges from the lack of stable ground supporting the eye’s work, together with the mismatch between Muybridge’s own direct gaze into the void and the spectator’s oscillating gaze, multiplied through sequences. Muybridge operates on borderlines; his work’s traces finally delineate the form of his unique personal Scrapbook, to whose assembly he devoted the final years of his life, in its excessive accumulation of those traces, as a ‘borderline’ artefact, half memory-archive, half book of madness. From one perspective, the Scrapbook amasses triumphs of invention and audiences’ awestruck responses to Muybridge’s decades-long innovations. From another, near-simultaneous, perspective, it forms an overspilling ocular pathology-book comprising reports of near-psychotic self-exposure (as with scrapbooks kept by asylum-incarcerated artists, such as Henry Darger and August Walla), and also a documentational journal of fragments from a sequential disintegration, into the state of oblivion that Muybridge evidently feared, as though his Scrapbook formed an anti-temporal grimoire of press-reports transformed by their obsessive accumulation into magic-spells (spells that then devilishly conjured film), gripped and gathered-up by the ailing Muybridge as he anticipated his own death and worked to negate it through a future transit of his work beyond it. Muybridge’s borderline-mad visual sense, in generating his sequential work and then editing its traces into his Scrapbook, often operates on a tight-rope between rigorously disciplined innovation and unrestrained excess.
 
Between his journeys to Yosemite Valley in 1867 and 1872, Muybridge undertook his coastal surveys of California, in the form of journeys from end to end of that ‘new’ territory; although it had been inhabited for many millennia, California had become a state of the USA only in September 1850, several months after Muybridge had arrived in New York, after making the sea-crossing from Liverpool, and around five years before he relocated to the opposite coast of that still-expanding country. In 1871, Muybridge secured an official governmental commission to photograph the lighthouses of the Californian coast; he would travel on a survey ship that followed the coast. Many of his images were taken from sites on the coastal land around the lighthouses, after the steamship had landed nearby - in some images, such as those of the cliff-positioned Point Reyes lighthouse, which had begun operating only three or four months earlier, on 1 December 1870, Muybridge climbed with his camera and developing-materials to a vantage point on the cliffs high above the lighthouse, and took images in which the lighthouse itself forms a negligible, half-hidden presence against the ocean, obscured within rock formations; in a further image, he positions the lighthouse more prominently in view, and assigns two figures (his assistants, or the lighthouse-keepers) to look over the precipice, just as he would himself gaze into the void from Glacier Point in the following year. In photographing lighthouses such as that of Point Reyes, Muybridge was seizing images of instruments of vision, which projected flashes of light with a range of twenty-four miles towards receptive eyes for which they provided a vital means of survival, averting wrecks; the lens (which weighed 6,000 pounds) and twenty-four glass prisms of the Point Reyes lighthouse had been made in France by the Fresnel company and shipped directly to Point Reyes. The lighthouse operated by magnifying and intensifying its power of illumination, projecting it in a flash once every five seconds, as though positioned at the origins of an acceleration process which, twenty-five years later, would result in the projection of sixteen frames per second film images.
 
As well as taking images in sequences from fixed perspectives, Muybridge was evidently ready also to photograph while in motion, from the ship on which he travelled; he had invited the governmental institution which commissioned his work (the California Lighthouse Board) to also request ’such other views as you may direct of other subjects’. At that first stage in his photographic work, as his self-promotional press-advertisements and brochures of the period indicate, Muybridge was willing to photograph anything - animals, paintings, buildings - so that a gap appears between the chance, undifferentiated nature of the potential subjects of his work (in the sense that he could be commissioned to photograph anything, and would do so), and the distinctive preoccupations and experimental parameters of that task’s accomplishment. That contrary dynamic of intention and chance is present, too, in his Scrapbook, in which Muybridge painstakingly edits-together materials written by journalists who have either obliviously scrambled his experiments in their careless accounts, or have simply replicated Muybridge’s own press-releases. Muybridge determinedly overhauls the mass of chance events that constitutes the residue and detritus of his work, into an intentional form that corresponds as identically as possible to his own future-inflected vision of it.
 

Muybridge’s promotional brochures for his wide range of commissions, inserted into his Scrapbook as traces of his work, also indicate his openness to track the ongoing transmutations and movements of the terrains whose edges he travelled along. His lighthouse journey along the Californian coast forms a prescient, filmic ‘tracking-shot’ of that new perimeter of the USA. He covered the entire expanse of the state’s coast on that journey, had already travelled along it northwards from San Francisco on a recent journey to Alaska, and would cover the southern stretch again in 1875, travelling to central America after being exonerated for his act of murder. In a sense, his camera exploratively probes the retinal surface of an emergent entity of vision, myth and obsession - that of California - by pinpointing, in particular, the incandescent, originating bursts of light (twelve per minute) from its newly-constructed lighthouses’ lenses. Those lighthouses prefigure the illuminated towers of palatial cinemas, such as those of Los Angeles’ Broadway district, which would project powerful searchlight beams across urban space and into the sky above the city, at film-premieres fifty years later. Photographing from on board ships, in unpredictable motion, presented instructive challenges for Muybridge, providing him with technical insights on which his future work depended; on instigating the second phase of his commission from his patron Stanford in 1877, with the intention of photographing the movement of Stanford’s horses with greater exactitude than on his first attempt several years earlier, Muybridge evoked the salutary demands of photographing from a ship during his coastal journey of 1875. On 3 August 1877, the San Francisco newspaper The Bulletin, evidently reproducing a press-release written by Muybridge himself, reported on his experiments with photographing scenes on shore from a rolling ship, during his central American travels. The experiments had ‘resulted in the construction of an apparatus and the preparation of chemicals so as to permit the photographing in outline of a rapidly moving body’. In this instance, the ship - as the support for the camera - moved erratically, and (contrary to Muybridge’s earlier experiments, on his 1871 lighthouse-journey) the object or figure on the coast was in movement too, like Stanford’s horses; to track and fix that object or figure, the two conflicting forms of movement had to be synchronised, in order to generate a static photographic image that itself emanated movement.
 
Especially in the first decades of filmmaking, the shooting of sequences in which a moving object was tracked by a camera, itself placed on an unstable moving support, intentionally induced a sense of disorientation or exhilaration for the film’s spectators, as in several sequences in the 1931 film by Edgar G. Ulmer and Robert Siodmak, People on Sunday - a film about journeys taken at speed from the centre of Berlin to leisure-zones on the city’s edge - in which a camera placed on one rapidly moving vehicle abruptly overtakes or is overtaken by another vehicle (and the human figures inside that vehicle) which it is filming; that act of irresistible surpassing propels the spectator’s perception forward, in a sensorially expansive, elating way. Muybridge’s Scrapbook carries a parallel process of forming the expansive outcome of dual, conflictual movements, that together possess a dynamic tension. It was assembled across the decelerating final years of Muybridge’s work, at a moment of unprecedented cultural and technological upheaval and acceleration (encompassing the wide-scale proliferation of film-projection and its public spaces, at the end of the nineteenth century, among other innovations); at the same time, the Scrapbook serves to ‘track’, through its distinctive process of editing, the correspondingly far-reaching, volatile visual upheavals generated by Muybridge’s own body of work, over the preceding decades.
 
Muybridge’s work in motion, in tracking and visualising the USA’s newly instituted topographical boundaries - simultaneously little-known and vitally defining - through the light-inscribed features of its Californian coastline, forms a counterpoint to his later work in the delineation of new corporeal parameters, of human and animal figures in movement. In order to render those boundaries, Muybridge operates through an ocular and technological approach of limitlessness which allows his work its ability to hold and launch amalgams of apparently contrary and inassimilable elements; at the same time, in its disregarding of limitations, his work always risks disintegration, and is touched by the void, so that its traces veer between memory and oblivion. Both of those phases of Muybridge’s work - the topographical and corporeal - comprise explorations of peripheries, edges and vanishing-points: re-cast and newly activated through their transformation into image-sequences.
 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Stephen Barber’s Muybridge: The Eye in Motion will be published by Solar/Chicago University Press in November.

In a paper presented in 2011, Jean-Michel Rabaté discusses a divergence between Beckett’s and Bataille’s treatment of “… an experience of impotence, dispossession and unknowing…” in terms of “… the different libraries they bring to bear on these issues.” The impact of these different libraries is immense: from his library Beckett writes his plays and novels; from his, Bataille develops his system of thought “… in which waste and excess are crucial notions.” Mauss, Hegel and Nietzsche are the representative luminaries of Bataille’s library; Spinoza, Geulinincx and Democritus those for Beckett.

This essay extends the implicit idea that interpretation is not always library neutral. A concern is that much Beckett scholarship that has wanted to develop philosophical connections has used a library containing what has been crudely and erroneously labelled ‘Continental philosophy’ and ignored an alternative one, equally crudely, equally erroneously, labelled the ‘Analytic philosophy’ library. The one library includes the likes of Badiou, Critchley, Derrida, Lacan, Bataille, Zeno, Deleuze, Clemente, Blanchot, MacIntyre, Hegel, Heidegger, Ardorno, Zizek, Guattari, Foucault, Nietzsche, Lyotard, Cavell, Rorty, and Rabaté himself. It is a rich library.

The second library includes Williamson, Sorensen, Priest, Sellars, Fodor, Lewis, Sosa, Russell, Quine, Frege, Wittgenstein, Kuhn, McDowell, Unger, van Frassen, Carnap, Grice, Putnam, Dummett, Davidson, Rosenberg, Leiter, Schwitzgebel, Parfitt, Chalmers and it is immediately clear that there are philosophers, such as McDowell or Wittgenstein, who can be found in either or both. Recently there has been little ecumenical exchange between denizens of the two libraries, although Rorty and Cavell are perhaps exceptions to this.

But anyway, it’s stupid to have two libraries. It’s better to think that there’s just the one, with all sorts of possible reading lists and reference points. The naturalist philosopher Brian Leiter has done much to insist that there is nothing principled about the existence of these two libraries, even though he takes a distinctive philosophical position and finds some philosophical positions jejune and some writers bogus. He condemns the arguments and styles of those he dislikes because they are all in the same library and so he believes they should adhere to common standards of excellence.

In particular, Leieter insists that there are no actual Analytic or Continental traditions to underwrite the notion of the two libraries. ‘Analytic’ picks out a style of doing philosophy that looks to be clear and precise, logical and leans more towards the sciences and maths than the humanities, whereas ‘Continental’ tends to pick out a more literary, a more culturally and politically orientated style, one with a greater focus on the human condition and meaningfulness than the Analytic. Perhaps the most interesting difference in focus is that continental philosophers tends to always wear an historical overcoat. The historicist bent frames much of its philosophy, but it’s not mandatory, nor is it mandatorily absent in the work of analytic philosophers.

Leiter makes it clear that actually there is a great deal of overlap both in style of approach and substantive commitments up until the twentieth century. And he also points out that under both headings are philosophers who have almost nothing in common with each other. If there is something that helps us recognise the Analytic approach to philosophy it is what Leiter describes as ‘its adoption of the research paradigm common to the natural sciences, a paradigm in which numerous individual researchers make small contributions to the solution of a set of generally recognised problems.’ He goes on that, ‘[t]his is true, interestingly, of even the best work by Anglophone philosophers about so-called “Continental” philosophy: researchers debate and work out the details of the readings of Hegel by Brandom, Forster, Pippin, and Wood, or the readings of Foucault by Dreyfus and Rabinow, Gutting, and Pile.

The staring-at-trees-rather-than-forests aspect of this approach has its critics, but Nietzsche, in discussing the philologists of his day, is quoted by Leiter as arguing that this condemned approach is necessary if it is to bring rewards:

‘Almost always the books of scholars are somehow oppressive, oppressed: the “specialist” emerges somewhere—his zeal, his seriousness, his fury, his overestimation of the nook in which he sits and spins, his hunched back; every specialist has his hunched back. Every scholarly book also mirrors a soul that has become crooked; every craft makes crooked.…Nothing can be done about that. Let nobody suppose that one could possibly avoid such crippling by some artifice of education. On this earth one pays dearly for every kind of mastery.…For having a specialty one pays by also being the victim of this specialty. But you would have it otherwise — cheaper and fairer and above all more comfortable — isn’t that right, my dear contemporaries. Well then, but in that case you also immediately get something else: instead of the craftsman and master, the “man of letters,” the dexterous, “polydexterous” man of letters who, to be sure, lacks the hunched back — not counting the posture he assumes before you, being the salesman of the spirit and the “carrier” of culture — the man of letters who really is nothing but “represents” almost everything, playing and “substituting” for the expert, and taking it upon himself in all modesty to get himself paid, honored, and celebrated in place of the expert.

No, my scholarly friends, I bless you even for your hunched back. And for despising, as I do, the “men of letters” and culture parasites. And for not knowing how to make a business of the spirit. And for having opinions that cannot be translated into financial values. And for not representing anything that you are not. And because your sole aim is to become masters of your craft, with reverence for every kind of mastery and competence, and with uncompromising opposition to everything that is semblance, half-genuine, dressed up, virtuosolike, demagogical, or histrionic in litteris et artibus — to everything that cannot prove to you its unconditional probity in discipline and prior training (The Gay Science, sec. 366).

So this kind of work tends to lead to very detailed, very cleverly argued miniatures. Synoptic visioning they are not. This is work that tends to demand knowing everything about a little. For a grand vision you need to know a lot about a lot, and much of the grand synoptic visioning in philosophy has been in writers like Nietzsche, Hegel, Marx done before the explosion of specialist knowledge. ‘Semblance, half-genuine, dressed up’ is the accusation thrown back at attempts at grand visioning without the requisite specialised knowledge. So this isn’t a question of traditions, it’s a question of intellectual honesty and quality of thought and nothing else. (Certainly not geography.)

In this spirit I approach some philosophical queries about Beckett. I have noted that many writers examining Beckett and his interest in philosophy tend not to use the analytic library. But if the walls between the two libraries is conventional and arbitrary then there’s no good reason for this to continue. As an example of what bringing the libraries together I will argue that insights from recent work in the so-called analytic philosophy ibrary into vagueness offer new readings to the Beckett canon.

Beckett writes that he wanted to write impossibility, in order to disrupt those who want to merely enjoy art rather than become enlightened by it. Beckett makes this clear in his essay La peinture de van Velde ou le Monde et le Pantalon, where he writes: “For it is not question here of the grotesque and despicable animal whose specter haunts artists’ studios, like the tapirs one is likely to find in the dorms of the Normaliens, but of the inoffensive barmy one who rushes, as other people go to the movies, into galleries and even into churches, seized by the hope - listen carefully now - of enjoying himself (de jouir). He doesn’t want to be taught, the pig, or become better. He only thinks of his pleasure. He is the one who justifies the existence of painting as a public thing. I dedicate to him these remarks, all made to make him even dizzier. He only wants to enjoy. The impossible is made to prevent him from enjoying.” It is this dedication to the ‘impossible’ that is striking here.

Beckett announces this programme in his famous letter to Kaun in the 1930s: “It is to be hoped the time will come, thank God, in some circles it already has, when language is best used where it is most efficiently abused. Since we cannot dismiss it all at once, at least we do not want to leave anything undone that may contribute to its disrepute. To drill one hole after another into it until that which lurks behind, be it something or nothing, starts seeping through - I cannot imagine a higher goal for a writer today.”

So Beckett writes to create the impossible in order to prevent art being just enjoyed. Beckett’s art aims to be disreputable, to work like a drill, and the vivid image of ‘that which lurks behind’ language is sinister, threatening, suggesting the eerie loathsome monstrousness worthy of Lovecraft or M.R. James.

One of his efforts to create such lurking impossibility was to draw on his knowledge of pre-Socratic philosophers and their discovery of various paradoxes to embed them into the fabric of the worlds he presents. These impossibilities worked as the drill holes he writes of in the Kaun letter. But thanks to work done in recent years in the analytic library, it is clear that he makes a mistake. He truly adds an impossibility in the form of an ancient Greek paradox, but mistakes it for a different puzzle. The mistaken identity means that he was deluded about the nature of the particular hole he was drilling. But he got lucky, because the one he actually uses is better than the one he thought he had.

Matthew Feldman’s essay linking Beckett to the Presocratics called for a ‘genetic scholarship’, “…that is, to conclude with the finished text by way of a scholarly inquiry into how it was composed. By this I mean that only turning to extant manuscripts, to the influences and ‘work in progress’ of literary creation, are scholars able to establish readings that can be ‘falsifiable’ - to … appropriate Karl Popper’s sense of the term - that is to say, arguments that can be shown through documentation to have been an actual stimulus in the act of artistic construction, and therefore a provable influence upon the artist’s imagination rather than a product of the critic’s imagination.”

This exercise of genetic scholarship is now well established following the Knowlson biography of 1996. But such an approach brings intriguing dilemmas for scholars and critics as a consequence of discovering that Beckett’s own scholarship and philosophical argumentation are flawed and that these mistakes are embedded in his resulting texts. What happens when errors are embedded into the texts so that intended authorial meanings are absent, replaced by unintended ones? Do the known and explicit author’s intentions override what he actually writes, inviting critical discretion and a license to restore by invention those meanings? Or rather, are critics to ignore the intended meanings and work with the actual achieved ones in the text, even if these contradict what the author was wanting to express, completing the process of discovery in the spirit of genetic scholarship?

For a writer of Beckett’s stature, and in the light of the type of critical scrutiny to which his texts have been subjected, that likes to emphasise the ideas and often buckles the structure of the texts to their content, Beckett’s scholarly and philosophical errors may signal a greater crisis than would be the case for writers whose ideas and outlook is taken less seriously. The publication of the second volume of his letters, already panning out as one the most significant literary projects of genetic scholarship ever, underlines this point.

Beckett draws wrong conclusions from the material he uses largely because his scholarship muddles up two different puzzles. What Beckett thinks he is presenting is not in fact what he presents. Critics who have followed Beckett’s intentions and read them into the texts have therefore written about what isn’t there. Where an author’s intentions and what is actually written come apart there is a crisis for critical interpretation.

Beckett drills a hole using a heap paradox. This he uses in non-trivial ways. It is referred to by Hamm at the start of Endgame to set the metaphysical mise-en-scène for the whole play, and Happy Days is dominated by its corrosive image. But it seems that Beckett didn’t grasp the threat of this puzzle, mistaking it for a less dangerous one that the mathematician Cantor tamed at the beginning of the last century. Beckett, by accidentally using a much more toxic puzzle, adds to the ferocity of his artistic project. The lurking presence he intends to drill through to and have seep out is more terrifying than he thought it was. Given that his aim was to make the pigs who want art to be merely fun squeal, this would have been a happy revelation for him.

What’s the evidence for this being the case? In replying to Alan Schneider’s letter of 21 November 1957 on the direction of Endgame, Beckett writes in No Author Better Served: The Correspondence of Samuel Beckett and Alan Schneider:

Old Greek: I can’t find my notes on the pre-Socratics. The arguments of the Heap and the Bald Head (which hair falling produces baldness) were used by all the Sophists and I think have been variously attributed to one or the other. They disprove the reality of mass in the same way and by means of the same fallacy as the arguments of the Arrow and Achilles and the Tortoise, invented a century earlier by Zeno the Eleatic, disprove the reality of movement. The leading Sophist, against whom Plato wrote his Dialogue, was Protagoras and he is probably the “old Greek” whose name Hamm can’t remember. One purpose of the image throughout the play is to suggest the impossibility logically, i.e. eristically, of the “thing” ever coming to an end.

So in this letter we have the evidence that Beckett is unclear about who is the old Greek who is the source of the puzzles of the heap and the bald head. His reference to his lost notes suggests that he did at one time know but he has forgotten. He is certainly uncertain, quite rightly, that Protagoras is the man he’s looking for, because he isn’t. But he is specific about the inferences he draws from the puzzles. He takes them to show that mass doesn’t exist for the same reason that Zeno shows that movement is impossible. So he thinks that he is presenting one of Zeno’s paradoxes about infinity. But here’s his mistake. What he’s actually presenting is a different paradox, one that recent philosophical work shows to be about the indeterminacies of borderlines. Philosophers in the analytic library have labelled this puzzle one of vagueness. Zeno’s infinity puzzles and the puzzles of the heap (‘sorites’ in Greek) are therefore not the same puzzle.

Mind you, Zeno does have a puzzle involving a heap. It’s just not the sorites puzzle though. Zeno’s millet seed puzzle is not a sorites puzzle. So by mistake vagueness structures several of his texts, most obviously Endgame, Mercier and Camier and Happy Days, the latter being less an assertion of a puzzle than a display of one, like Escher’s print Belvedere and the language of a zombie.

The misidentified source material is the sorites puzzle. Clov at the beginning of Endgame comments, “Finished, it’s finished, nearly finished, it must be nearly finished. Grain upon grain, one by one, and one day, suddenly, there’s a heap, a little heap, the impossible heap. I can’t be punished any more. I’ll go now to my kitchen, ten feet by ten feet by ten feet, and wait for him to whistle me. Nice dimensions, nice proportions, I’ll lean on the table, and look at the wall, and wait for him to whistle me.” In Ackerley and Gontarski’s Faber Companion to Beckett Beckett speaks of “Zeno’s grains, a logician’s jest” but we also learn that he “…told O’Brien that the allusion was not to Zeno but to a philosopher he no longer recalled.” Beckett’s philosophical source, Windelband, rightly identifies Aristotle’s contemporary Eubilides of Miletus as presenting the puzzle but wrongly claims that it was “retraceable to Zeno”. Modern scholars dispute this, although the misattribution is understandable. Zeno of Elea, a century earlier than Eubilides, was the originator of a puzzle involving millet seed, but not the puzzle, and at a twist it might be reformulated as a sorites puzzle.

Beckett relied on Windelband for his knowledge of the pre-Socratics, and it is only relatively recently that philosophers have got to grips with vagueness and made it clear that Zeno wasn’t working at the same puzzle as the sorites. Timothy Williamson wrote the classic text about vagueness in 1994 and made this clear. Of course, Beckett would not have had access to the scholarship of this formidable logician and so his mistake is understandable. But here’s a case of work being done in the analytic library directly bringing fruits to bear on Beckett scholarship. Thanks to Williamson and others working on vagueness a new dimension of what Beckett’s texts mean is revealed, a meaning that eluded even Beckett.

Zeno’s seed paradox, as reported by Wiliamson, goes: “If the fall of a seed to the ground were completely silent, so would be the fall of a bushel of seed, which it is not.; thus each seed must make a noise when it falls to the ground.” Reformulated as a forced sorites, it becomes; ‘Does one seed make a noise when it falls to the ground? Do two seeds? Three?…’ But Williamson, author of Vagueness, the classic modern text on the sorites, is careful to distinguish Zeno’s puzzle from that of the later Eubilides, writing that “Zeno seems to have based his puzzle on something much more specific: a principle that the noise made when some grains fall to the ground is proportional to their weight.” Williamson is clear that Eubilides is the guy who discovered the proper sorites. And it’s likely that that Beckett once knew this. What he didn’t realise was what Eubilides’ puzzle was about.

Eubilides invented seven famous puzzles, two of which were the sorites and ‘phalakros’, similar in respect of their being ‘little by little’ arguments. The sorites and the phalakros are puzzles of vagueness. The sorites (heap) and phalakros (bald) were in antiquity formulated as a series of questions. ‘Does one grain of sand make a heap? Two? Three?…’ Similarly with the bald man; ‘Is a man with one hair on his head bald? Two? Three?…’ and so on. Eventually there comes a figure where it becomes doubtful as to what the right answer is. And this period of doubt continues for some time until another figure is reached where a right answer seems clear again.

This is the puzzle that Clov recognises in Endgame and to which Beckett refers in his Riverside Notebook when he writes, “C perplexed. All seemingly in order, yet a change. Fatal grain added to form impossible heap. Ratio ruentis acetvi.” This appeal to the sorites puzzle suggests that his mania for minimalism rests on more than just Adolf Loos’ injunction, ‘ornament is a crime’ and Mies van der Rohe’s ‘less is more’. It also adds reason for his ‘Process of Elimination’ in the What Where notebook (Theatrical II 437) where every little change adds up to impossible change. It also adds to what he says in his lecture on Racine, where he talks about the monologue within the dialogue, where several voices add up, little by little, echo by echo, fragment by fragment, until they form a unity. The notebook for Tritte - Footfalls - contains a discussion of voices which Gontarski glosses: “In the dialogue within the monologues (parts II and III), for example, the Mother’s “What do you mean, May, not enough” of part II should be echoed by the voice of Mrs. W’s in part III, “What do you mean, Amy, to put it mildly,” according to Beckett. “Same style for both relationships,” he notes” (IV 337). Understanding the sorites brings a new resource for freshly understanding all this.

Beckett’s art drills the blindspot of the sorites. The non-heap impossibly becomes a heap. The bald man becomes non-bald. Clov sees this when he mutters, scared as hell, ’suddenly’ and names his horror, ‘the impossible heap.’ In Mercier and Camier there’s a reference to “every millet grain that falls”, suggesting Zeno rather than the Eubilides, but vaguely conceived as a sorites, and so deliciously vaguely vague. In Malone Dies we are given “fun and games with the cones and cylinders, the millet grains beloved of birds and other panics” which picks up the anxiety and terror of the sorites that Clov registers in the later work. In Malone we also have Big Lambert’s wife having two heaps of lentils on her table, the smaller getting bigger and the big one smaller. Beckett here presents the embedded logical contradiction of the sorites as a display, as with Happy Days.

Winnie in Happy Days, buried in ‘the impossible heap’ that so terrifies Clov in Endgame, trapped in the impossible, encroaching end where suddenly, one day, at some point, a threshold will be reached, a line will be crossed, but unknowably… What did Beckett think was going to happen? There’s evidence that by taking the problem as a question of infinity, Beckett has been taken to be presenting in many of his texts an unending process rather than any completion to zero, so his voices dwindle and reduce to minima just above ending, as if an ending was impossible, and that the torture of existence continued remorselessly. But if the issue is not infinity but vagueness then these readings may require revision.

City of Lost Souls does not have a strong reputation, even within the uneven oeuvre of controversial German director Rosa von Praunheim. It warrants no description even in his website’s biography, eclipsed by works such as It is Not the Homosexual Who is Perverse, But the Society in Which He Lives, which mobilised the German gay rights movement with its portrayal of social homophobia, and I am My Own Woman, a semi-documentary about German transvestite Charlotte von Mahlsdorf. In Queer German Cinema, Alice A. Kuzniar – one of few to retrospectively address the film – dismisses it as “self-indulgent … silliness.”

Covering the film before its UK release, Guardian reviewer Chris Auty was even less impressed. “The latest and junkiest outing from the travelling opportunist of gay cinema, Rosa von Praunheim … [is] as much calculated to upset a heterosexual audience as to flatter the complicity of a (male) gay one,” Auty wrote on 12 April 1984. Four days earlier, The Observer’s brief synopsis was equally scathing, but came closer to accurately describing its ensemble cast, at least realising that this was not (or at least not primarily) a gay film: “A sort of transvestite/transsexual cabaret, it looks dispiritingly like amateur night on an off-day.”

A week before his colleague damned the film (when a broadsheet would offer three different takes on an underground queer musical) Guardian critic Derek Malcolm provided a more even handed assessment, appreciating its spirit more intuitively than Auty or Kuzniar. “The film is a fairly comprehensive mess” wrote Malcolm, “as if it were put together by a reanimated and manic Andy Warhol” (curiously, as Warhol was still alive). “But for every exhibitionist there’s a quite ordinary human screaming to get out, and von Praunheim’s sympathy with this idea render the film less boring and more fun than you might think.”

Story-wise, the film is a mess: Kuzniar writes it off as “little more than a vehicle for a group of transvestites [sic] to parade themselves through dance and song within a loosely concocted narrative about the employees at a Burger Queen restaurant.” Kuzniar’s synopsis is more accurate than her terminology, but misses the point: making scant pretence to narrative logic, City of Lost Souls is driven by its cast, and by theme rather than plot: its non-judgemental handling of alienation and self-realisation, and especially its anticipation of transgender identities which create space within the established ‘transvestite’/'transsexual’ dichotomy are what make it a (minor) cult classic.

It is no surprise that Malcolm mentions Warhol. The influence of Chelsea Girls, and the Paul Morrissey films Flesh, Trash and (particularly) Women in Revolt, to which Warhol put his name, is clearly visible. Like Warhol and Morrissey, von Praunheim allowed his actors to improvise freely, often incorporating the results into the script, lending City of Lost Souls a similar feel to the films of Warhol, Jack Smith, Kenneth Anger and other pioneers of queer American underground cinema.

According to Man Enough to be a Woman, the autobiography of City of Lost Souls‘ star, Factory actor, Stonewall riots veteran and punk singer Jayne County, von Praunheim was ‘looking for eccentric Americans to be his film’s Warholesque cast of outsiders. County was living in Berlin, performing her stage musical U-Bahn to Memory Lane – her co-star, Tron von Hollywood, introduced her to von Praunheim. After he offered County an 800 Mark advance, she agreed to feature (with Tron), giving the film its title and writing all of her own material, some of which came from U-Bahn to Memory Lane.

Like his New German Cinema contemporary Werner Herzog, von Praunheim liked to blur the lines between fact and fiction, saying that his output was “almost all documentary … Even the feature films are with real people – strong personalities that I build in documentary fashion into my films.” Shot in six weeks, mostly in von Praunheim’s basement, City of Lost Souls works best when he allows his cast to freely express their personalities.

The ‘lost souls’ orbit around Angie Stardust, who owns Burger Queen and runs the Pension Stardust boarding house. Her actual personal history is aired: after her father tried to beat her youthful femininity out of her, she became “the first black transsexual” to perform in New York, at the 82 Club (New York’s biggest pre-Stonewall drag revue and later host to County and other punk pioneers), having initially been turned away because of her colour. After moving to Berlin, Angie finds that she has not escaped racism, with some who provided votes and soldiers for the Nazis surviving and passing their prejudices to their grandchildren; the generation between, she feels, were too busy enjoying West Germany’s ‘economic miracle’ to teach their offspring to entirely reject Nazi ideology.

Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Marriage of Maria Braun (1979), which cynically explores the after-effects of the American liberation of Berlin through one woman’s life after her fling with a US soldier, contrasts its protagonist’s lonely death with Herbert Zimmermann’s famous radio commentary on West Germany’s shock 1954 World Cup triumph, a famous symbol of post-war recovery. Typically, von Praunheim’s depiction of everyday Fascism is more direct than that of his main rival in the New German Cinema group, juxtaposing a child singing a racist song and a white man telling the audience, in Brechtian fashion, that “I love Berlin! My grandmother used to say ‘Arbeit macht frei!’” with Angie’s lament that “People here don’t consider the past.”

City of Lost Souls is more nuanced when exploring the alienation that comes with gender or sexual minority. Tara O’Hara, who keeps bringing men back to Pension Stardust, ostensibly to “teach them English”, identifies as ‘transvestite’ – which had a less narrow meaning in 80s Germany than in contemporary Britain.

Whilst ‘transgender’ had been used in several contexts by 1982, it does not appear in City of Lost Souls. (Zagria offers an interesting historiography here.) Before this term came into common use, ‘transvestite’ – coined by German sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld in The Transvestites: The Erotic Drive to Cross-Dress (1910) – offered more scope than ‘transsexual’ for people to find space between male and female or reject the gender identity assigned at birth without pursuing medical intervention. (The modern meaning, primarily referring to those who cross-dress for sexual pleasure, is clearly signified by Hirschfeld, on whom von Praunheim later made The Einstein of Sex, but was only fixed after ‘transgender’ and other terms assumed this wider function.)

The tensions that developed within the ‘transgender’ alliance, which never quite healed the transvestite/transsexual division, are anticipated by Angie and Tara O’Hara – as are the passionate debates over terminology and semantics held in autonomous spaces as transgender theory evolved in the 90s. Despite his clear sympathy with Angie and Tara’s difficulties in externalising their genders in a transphobic (and xenophobic) society, and his realisation that doing so has necessarily taken both Angie and Tara nearer its fringes despite supposedly being the first step towards a more settled life, aspects of von Praunheim’s framing feel problematic. A shot of Angie topless momentarily punctuates her explanation that seeing ‘transvestites … with breasts’ made her want to transition, giving some visual sense that she has achieved self-realisation, but whether or not this is empowering or exploitative remains open to debate, as no other context is given.

In a scene that looks improvised – County recalls that von Praunheim had a Warhol-style aloofness, preferring to ‘[take] a back seat and [let] people do their own thing’ than provide strong direction or even script every scene – Angie has a heated discussion with Tara O’Hara about their divergent gender identities. The voiceover sets up the conflict: Tara is “a transvestite and wears women’s clothes but wants to remain a man” whilst Angie “is a transsexual … her only problem is that she has a penis that she wants to have removed.”

Here, von Praunheim again walks an ambiguous line between sympathy and sensationalism, but the film handles its subjects intelligently enough for this focus on Angie’s physicality to convey the socio-economic stresses that come with transsexual living, rather than being simply voyeuristic. This effect is achieved when its characters speak for themselves, as Tara asks Angie: “Do you think a sex change will make you a woman?” before asserting that physical transition “is not necessary any more”. Drawing on post-war antagonism between certain transvestite and transsexual activists, Tara’s arguments overlap with those of the early 80s’ most vocal critics of gender reassignment: a subset of ‘radical’ feminists who attacked transsexual people for apparently reiterating patriarchal stereotypes of femininity, an opinion that found its most aggressive and sustained expression in Janice Raymond’s rabid tract The Transsexual Empire (1979).

Whilst transsexual responses to Raymond were published almost immediately (by writers such as Roz Kaveney and Carol Riddell), it was not until the end of the Eighties (after AIDS had seismically altered LGBT culture, and become the focus of von Praunheim’s films) that gender-variant people organised politically. Written in 1987, Sandy Stone’s essay The Empire Strikes Back: A Post-Transsexual Manifesto, became transgender theory’s founding text, encouraging transsexual people to move beyond ‘passing’ (thus silencing themselves) and be open about their pasts, reasoning that a confident, honest assertion of a transsexual identity would undermine Raymond’s critique, which relied heavily on stereotype.

The transgender alliance that arose did not always mask tensions (explored here by Julia Serano) between transsexual people who moved across the gender binary and transgender or genderqueer individuals who aimed to finds space beyond male and female. Tara O’Hara’s ‘transvestite’ ideal instinctively anticipates the latter position, but Angie angrily tells her that it is “because of the old school that you can be what you are … We pumped the hormones, we put up with people calling us ‘faggot’ and ‘drag queen’ … Now it’s easy for you, you get tits, your hair grows, you’re a woman. It was harder for us, we had to act over-feminine …”

And she’s right: the post-war Gender Identity Clinics administered hormones or surgery only to those who met their tough criteria on physical and mental health and in particular on gender presentation and sexuality. The transsexual women who met this obligation to dress in hyper-feminine methods and deny an attraction to other women, being unable to criticise for fear of jeopardising their treatment, all the while facing verbal and physical attacks from various quarters, often having their identities invalidated or ignored, opened space for those such as Tara O’Hara with more playful attitudes to gender.

Eventually, they reach an awkward compromise. Angie absolutely refuses Tara’s suggestion to “accept yourself as a transvestite”; Tara tells her that “we’re the third sex” but Angie prefers to “agree that we’re the New Women”. (Both of these phrases have Victorian connotations, reflecting von Praunheim’s interest in fin-de-siècle sexology: ‘the third sex’ was Edward Carpenter’s term for effeminate homosexuals or ‘inverts’, a concept that Hirschfeld and others later unpicked, while ‘New Women’ was a nineteenth century feminist ideal inspired by the emancipated females in Ibsen’s plays.)

Later, we see Tara O’Hara with one of the men she brings home. As they kiss, she tells him that “I’m a different kind of woman … An extraordinary woman”, trying to make her gender status clear before they become too intimate, knowing that revelation during sex carries the risk of a violent response (often justified by the ‘panic’ defence and the argument that the transgender woman has been deliberately deceptive, that often worked in transphobic courts). When he becomes suspicious, Tara says that she is “a transvestite’. His response reveals that instantly, his sexual identity is thrown into crisis: “I’m not gay – you should have told me that before.” Tara says “you’re not gay because you sleep with me”, explaining that she is “another kind of woman” and talking him into staying: just as von Praunheim does not let Tara undermine Angie’s hard-won identity, so he does not let this man reject Tara’s.

Tara tells her lover that she felt “feminine” as a child, before taking steps to match her body with her feelings, suggesting some intervention (perhaps hormone therapy) despite her rejection of sex reassignment surgery. Here we see the difference between scripted films of the 90s and 00s that used cisgender actors to play transgender characters – Transamerica, Boys Don’t Cry and Priscilla, Queen of the Desert for example – and the underground directors who cast transgender people as themselves, allowing them to create more honest portrayals of the experience of gender-variant life.

The presence of Jayne County, Angie, Tara and drag queen Joaquin in City of Lost Souls ensures nuanced representation rather than cliché – that it incorporates Angie’s real-life lesbian relationship with a white woman, without comment, feels especially progressive. In this context, they are not ciphers for ‘issues’, members of a ‘minority’ or the ‘freaks’ that Calpernia Addams complained that trans actors often end up playing, but simply people, with some of their challenges being gender-specific and others not.

Man Enough to be a Woman was one of few transsexual autobiographies not to be centred around surgery – which County ultimately declines – breaking with the genre’s convention by showing her gender identity’s evolution within a queer context rather than as a struggle to hide it in order to maintain a ‘respectable’ heterosexual life. (This, of course, was an honest representation of her personal history.)

In City of Lost Souls, she plays cisgender woman Lila, who goes from supporting Reagan – to the extent of singing ‘(I Want to Be the One to) Push the Button’ – to becoming pregnant by a Communist who promises to make her a People’s Artist of the German Democratic Republic. Which happens: Lila ends up on East German television singing ‘I Fell in Love with a Russian Soldier’ and declaring her love of Karl Marx – warmly appreciated by the American outsiders feeling oppressed in their anti-Communist homeland and West Berlin (and not entirely aware of the realities of life in the East).

Then, dancer Gary, due to be deported the next day, sets fire to his room: he and Tron are killed and, as angels, look down on the other characters, who obliviously continue dancing as the fire brigade arrive: there is a threat to their hard-won liberation as real, and fatal, as the HIV virus that began to ravage gay and transsexual communities as the film was conceived.

Tron von Hollywood fell to AIDS a few years before County’s book was published in 1995, but he was not the first cast member to die. Tara O’Hara’s ‘freedom’ proved chimerical: she too contracted HIV, according to Man Enough to be a Woman, but was not killed by it. In 1983, she was found severely beaten in a ladies’ room in Tiergarten and taken to hospital, lying in a coma for weeks until the doctors pulled the plug. (Charlotte Cooper’s tribute is particularly moving.)

I feel that City of Lost Souls has aged better than Kuzniar or Auty would have guessed: with gender-variant people slowly gaining mainstream media respect and representation, it’s fascinating to see the debates in which they worked out their gender identities staged before online communities, transgender-specific fanzines or Queer/Transgender Studies courses – all crucial to the development of organised transgender politics.

Lagging behind gay and lesbian history, a transgender cultural canon is still being defined. Rosa von Praunheim emerged at a time when ‘gay’ retained a function as shorthand for a range of gender identities and sexualities fighting shared oppression, and so became known as a ‘gay’ director. Which he was, but his output often explored gender as well as sexuality, better fitting more recent ideas of ‘queer’ filmmaking, and several would slot well into a historiography of transgender film, even after considering the problems in retrospectively transposing the concept onto people who preceded its contemporary usage.

Rather than being ’self-indulgent’, its characters are trying to understand their identities in the face of prejudice – not just transphobia but also homophobia, xenophobia and racism – and far from trying to ‘upset a heterosexual audience’, or even ‘flatter the complicity’ of gay male viewers, its transsexual and transvestite characters were fighting for the freedom to be themselves. Consequently, they provide an inspiration to a culture that has had to prize this struggle above all others, and still has relatively few role models: in doing so, they raise City of Lost Souls far above the limitations of its plot.

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 Dylan Trigg.

“The real landscapes of our world are seen for what they are - the palaces of flesh and bone that are the living façades enclosing our own subliminal consciousness.” (J.G. Ballard)

Against a saturated blue sky, a landscape is in a state of decomposition. Semi-gelatinous material entwines with desiccated chunks of a destroyed world. Towering shafts of ruined debris shoot haphazardly into the sky, forming a monolithic domelike structure in the process. A cow—or its head—appears trapped in the rubble, its body colonised by the ruins. Into this zone of mutilation, two figures, a man and a woman, stand adrift. They enter the field of our horizon and then remain motionless in the ruins. The woman is dressed elegantly, her back turned to the viewer, her body in motion. Turning toward her, a man with the skull of a bird looks on passively. Whether or not they were caught in the destruction or have returned to survey the remains, the viewer cannot be sure. In each case, they are no longer recognisable as “human” and instead have begun assuming the physiognomic characteristics of the landscape. Like the cow, their bodies are in a state of atrophy, their tones now mirroring the colouring of the landscape. Everywhere, borders collapse. What looks like the remains of a civilization may also be the inception of a new world. Similarly, if there are humans in the ruins, then they might just as easily be a new species of life, composed from both the organic and synthetic waste left behind. In the rot and the ruin, there is also life and vitality, a bewildering fusion of different orders of space and time colliding in the same sphere.

We are in the world of Max Ernst’s celebrated painting, “Europe After the Rain II.” Painted between 1940-1942, the work has become canonised as a masterpiece in the surrealist tradition. For J.G. Ballard, the landscapes of Max Ernst assumed a particular importance in his own thinking and writing. Above all else, what Ballard was able to discover in Ernst’s visions was a symbiosis of the natural and the supernatural, the banal and the uncanny, all of which begin not in the objective features of the landscape, but in the pathology of inner space. In his words, Ernst’s world took the form of “self-devouring phantasmagoric jungles [which] screamed silently to itself, like the sump of some insane unconscious”. Like the German romantics who influenced him, Ernst’s eerie forests and organic cities are emblems of the inner working of the deep unconscious manifest—as though by accident—on the canvas of the work. In Ballard, the same process of alchemically distilling disjoined images from the prima materia of everyday life finds its strange expression in his repetition of motifs. Abandoned parking lots, empty swimming pools, and neon nightclubs glowing in the thick forests of night all assume a level of spectral significance made possible thanks to the conjunction of inner and outer space.

Nowhere is this strange union between inner and outer space clearer than in Ballard’s “Cape Canaveral” stories, which are scattered through his writing from the early 1960s to the 1990s. In these stories, Ballard plays with themes of spatio-temporal distortion resulting from the flight into cosmic space. At once a warning against cosmic misadventures, the stories can also be read as an affirmation of humanity’s transformation the misadventures entail, as he states:

“By leaving his planet and setting off into outer space man had committed an evolutionary crime, a breach of the rules governing his tenancy of the universe, and of the laws of time and space. Perhaps the right to travel through space belonged to another order of beings, but his crime was being punished just as surely as would be any attempt to ignore the laws of gravity.”

Employing this theme of cosmic transgression as a background, each of the short stories reprises a very scarce “plot,” involving a physically and more importantly, psychologically, damaged astronaut readjusting not only to the Earth’s atmosphere, but also its structure of space and time. As important as the astronauts themselves are those who are left behind or otherwise bear witness to the astronaut’s journey. “Each space-launch,” writes Ballard, “left its trace in the minds of those watching the expeditions. Each flight to the moon and each journey was a trauma that warped their perception of time and space”.

Finding themselves back on Earth’s terra firma, the voyagers of outer space succumb to a series of strange bodily maladies, which Ballard variously terms “fugues,” “time-plague,” “time sickness” or “space sickness.” Characterised above all by the gradual crystallization of time, the arc of each story culminates in the absolute freezing of time altogether, with the astronauts, the witnesses, and their surrounding environment transformed into an eternal present. Ballard writes:

“The fugues had begun in the same way, with the briefest moments of inattention … All victims told the same story—there were forgotten appointments, inexplicable car crashes, untended infants rescued by police and neighbours. The victims would ‘wake’ at midnight in empty office blocks, find themselves in stagnant baths, be arrested for jay walking, forget to feed themselves. Within six months they would be conscious for only half the day, afraid to drive or go out into the streets, desperately filling every room with locks and timepieces.”

Yet far from fleeing from the fugues, the characters in his stories instead respond with ambivalence to the advent of space sickness. Partly fearful of the destitution of their bodies, at the same time, the more gallant of his characters are drawn to the promise of eternal time, even if that time no longer involves the personal subject. This ambivalence allows Ballard to explore the various affective modalities of space sickness without prescribing a normative basis to its pathology. Indeed, Ballard’s fascination with sickness is less a matter of the moral status of spaceflight and more a fixation with the uncanny protrusions in time and space, as they are experienced by bodily subjects on Earth.

Consider his seminal tale, “Memories of the Space Age.” In this story, the reader is confronted with a “strange pilot” hovering in and around “the rusty gantries of Cape Kennedy”. As it turns out, the pilot is a character named Hinton, a former astronaut who was the first to commit murder in outer space, subsequently descending into madness, and now returning to the “poisoned” landscape of Cape Kennedy. Alongside Hinton, a former NASA employee named, Mallory, and his wife, Anne, have also returned to the dereliction of Cape Kennedy. All of them are within the sickness, in a world without time, “the eternal present of this timeless zone”: Florida.

In each character, “a psychic fissure had riven both time and space, then run deep into the minds of the people who worked here”. Approaching a forest on the border of the NASA causeway while in pursuit of Hinton, Mallory encounters a vision: “The forest oaks were waiting for him to feed their roots, these motionless trees were as insane as anything in the visions of Max Ernst”. This fractured landscape is shrouded in what Ballard calls, “dream-time,” a temporal event horizon surrounding the black hole of space sickness, and marked visually by incandescent light. Once the light strikes the world, only the speediest of animals is able to elude the sickness: “Fish hung in the sky, the wise dolphin happy to be in their new realm, faces smiling in the sun. The water spraying from the fountain at the shallow end of the pool now formed a glass parasol. Only the cheetah was moving, still able to outrun time”.

Ballard’s story straddles the threshold between madness and sanity. If the figure of Hinton reveals the “psychological dimensions” of space flight, thus invoking the astronaut’s “slides into mysticism and melancholia,” then it is for this reason that Hinton is a revelatory figure. In Hinton, the limits of human experience of space and time are pushed to their boundaries. Against this boundary, Ballard entertains the idea that Hinton may have been “the first man to ‘go sane’” in space. For Hinton, space sickness is the signal for new life, a post-temporal dawn that redeems humanity of its gravity and inertia, and sends it toward a world without time. If time as a series of successive moments is lost in Ballard, then what is gained is the immensity of time in its infinite simultaneity.

This post-human understanding of time is a central motif for Ballard. In a diary entry from his story, “News From The Sun,” one character ruminates on the “great biological step” that the fugues mark. There, he speculates whether clock time “is a neurophysiological construct, a measuring rod confined to homo sapiens… Even the materials of my body and the lower levels of my brain have a very different sense of time from my cerebrum”. The dissection of the body’s different temporal modalities is telling. With it, Ballard places the human body in an evolutionary scale, reducing the current configuration of humanity to radical contingency, which may at any point be outmoded by a new species of life. By conflating the disintegration of time with the virility of life, Ballard invites us to reconsider our normative ideas of sickness. Far from characterising space sickness as an ominous symptom of Icarian desire, Ballard instead entertains the sickness as a form of transformation, as he writes: “If time is a primitive mental structure we have inherited, then we ought to welcome its atrophy, embrace the fugues”.

Ballard’s message is not without a factual counterpart. In 1971, Apollo 14 became the third successful manned mission to the Earth’s moon. One of the astronauts on the mission and the only surviving member was Edgar Mitchell. (Pictured above reading a map while investigating the Fra Mauro formation on the moon’s surface). On the return journey back to Earth, Mitchell had a vision. Looking at the blue glow of the Earth radiate in the depths of eternal darkness, Mitchell felt something overpower him, a unity, in which his own ego was sacrificed to a vision of totality. Of the vision, he would have the following to say in a later interview:  “I realized that the molecules of my body and the molecules of the spacecraft had been manufactured in an ancient generation of stars. It wasn’t just intellectual knowledge – it was a subjective visceral experience accompanied by ecstasy – a transformational experience.” Back on Earth, Mitchell was unable to resume his pre-spaceflight existence. Touched by the stars, he felt a compelling need to relay his vision of oneness with his fellow earthlings, who he now saw in their “juvenile” infancy. Thus he established the Institute of Noetic Sciences, a necessary and logical means for Mitchell to educate earthlings of their human potential, a potential that is only visible from outer space.

Mitchell’s narrative of spiritual transformation mirrors Ballard’s pursuit of space sickness as a disease with a purpose, to phrase it in the language of David Cronenberg. Lacking the resources in the West, Mitchell would find guidance in the Sanskrit of ancient India, from where he would develop a new philosophy of existence, blending Eastern wisdom with knowledge torn from the stars, in the process invoking such strange terms as the “Akashic Record” and the “quantum hologram.” In both Ballard and Mitchell, spaceflight thus makes a departure from our present understanding of space and time. Where Ballard sees the crystallization of time, Mitchell sees its expansion. In both cases, however, space becomes a threshold to an understanding of being that is impossible to attain so long as we are bound by the gravity of the Earth’s field of influence.

If Ballard establishes time as the medium for space sickness, then it is in the surrounding world that this sickness is best played out. Ballard’s treatment of the environment—of place—parallels his account of time. In both cases, the distortions in space and time are not objective features that inhere in the world, but are the result of mutually bewildering conjunction between inner and outer space, as one character says in “Memories of the Space Age,” “The real Cape Kennedy is inside your head, not out here”. But this does not mean that place is a mere projection of the internal contents of the astronaut’s minds. Ballard’s Florida is not the product of an idealistic framework, in which the strange itinerary of deserted hotels and frozen animals are reducible to the psychopathology of the astronauts. To be sure, without those astronauts, Florida would be just as real as it would in the vision of the astronauts. Only now, the involvement of the astronauts transforms the materiality of Cape Kennedy into an uncanny world, devoid of its homely attributes.

With his emphasis on the inner space of the astronaut’s voyages, Ballard finds himself in the company of Levinas’s concern with spaceflight as an invitation to a new understanding of place. In an essay titled, “Heidegger, Gagarin and Us,” Levinas reflects on the then recent departure of Gagarin from the Earth’s orbit. What astonishes Levinas about Gagarin’s journey is “the probable opening up of new forms of knowledge and new technological possibilities”. Such openings are not simply to be found in the mechanics of space itself. Rather, their source is the body of Gagarin himself. In his fight into space, Gagarin carries with him a knowledge that is irreducible to objective knowledge or quantifiable data. His is a knowledge that goes beyond the Earth, is resistant to Earth’s re-entry, and thus remains hovering in both the margins of outer space and in the crevices of his body. The reason, Levinas remarks, is because:

“He left the Place. For one hour, man existed beyond any horizon—everything around him was sky or, more exactly, everything was geometrical space. A man existed in the absolute of homogenous space.”

Like Ballard, Levinas recognises that outer space folds back into inner space. This communion between two realms is possible thanks to the materiality of the body. No wonder, then, that for Ballard, the disintegrating world coincides with the disintegrating body, describing Hinton, for example, as having an “undernourished body, an atrophied organ that he would soon discard”. For Ballard, if the body is an obstacle to the eternal present, then it is also the medium of the eternal’s expression. In shedding his body, the world assumes a different appearance, no longer bound by the rigidity of the Earth’s gravitational pull and now in a state of frozen inertia.

The inclusion of the body in Ballard’s vision is emblematically phenomenological, insofar as it is the body that provides the link between self and world. Consider here Merleau-Ponty, the phenomenologist of the body par excellence. For Merleau-Ponty, we find an “organic relation between subject and space”. Spatiality is not something we are inserted into, as though it existed all along and were waiting for the subject’s arrival. The world is not, in other words, comprised of a series of concurrent markers placed in the Earth’s landscape. Rather, being-in-the-world means being placed in a bodily manner. If our bodies place us in the here, then our orientation and experience of place is never truly epistemic in character but fundamentally affective. Space, as he writes:

“Is not a particular class of ‘state of consciousness’ or acts. Its modalities are always an expression of the total life of the subject, the energy with which he tends toward a future through his body and his world.”

Merleau-Ponty draws our attention to the relation between a human’s experience of place and the values, memories, dreams, anxieties, and other such affective states that sculpt that experience. Places are defined in their relationship with the particular subject who experiences them. To think, alongside the astronaut’s experience of space as littered with “derelict landscape[s]…abandoned motels, and weed-choked swimming pools” is to recognise that the significance of such features is relational, a shared communication that takes place neither in the body of the astronaut’s nor in the materiality of Cape Kennedy, but in the spark ignited between the two. For the astronauts of Ballard’s stories, the body is the vehicle of expression for a relation with the world, thus the life of Cape Kennedy is fundamentally manifest in the depths the astronaut’s bodies. Like Merleau-Ponty, Ballard shows us that space and time are not monolithic objects situated in the “world.” Rather, the formation of space and time is subject to the mood and style of the human body’s relationship to it.

Beyond the Cape Canaveral stories, this relationship between the body and spatiality is given special attention in his later story, “The Enormous Space”. The story’s compelling theme concerns an everyman who decides to lock himself in his suburban house in Croydon as a statement of rejection against the world. “I was breaking off,” so the protagonist states, “all practical connections with the outside world. I would never again step through the front door … After that I would rely on time and space to sustain me”. A month into the experiment and the spatiality of the house begins to alter. “A curious discovery—the rooms are larger”. What he first thinks of as a clarity of perspective in turn becomes a mode of oneiric derangement. In his ex-wife’s room, a discovery is made:

“I have strayed into an unfamiliar area of the room, somewhere between Margaret’s bathroom and the fitted cupboards … Another door leads to a wide and silent corridor, clearly unentered for years. There is no staircase, but far away there are entrances to other rooms, filled with the sort of light that glows from X-ray viewing screens. Here and there an isolated chair sits against a wall, in one immense room there is nothing but a dressing-table, in another the gleaming cabinet of a grandfather clock presides over the endlessly carpeted floor. The house is revealing itself to me in the most subtle way … The true dimensions of this house may be exhilarating to perceive, but from now on I will sleep downstairs. Time and space are not necessarily on my side.”

As uncanny as his account of Cape Canaveral, Ballard’s vivid, brilliant description of the infinity of domestic space amplifies the “benevolent psychopathology” linking the bodily subject with the material world. Space extends itself, folds back into its own nooks and crevices, developing mysterious portals to other domains in the midst of the everyday world. None of this can be reduced to “mental illness,” but instead assumes a corporeal and visceral reality for the tenant of this suburban house. The result is a privileged wilderness, in which our habitual understanding of space and time is replaced with a new atlas of hidden worlds, as vast as it is mysterious.

In his vision of a ruined Cape Canaveral, Ballard presents the reader with a microcosm of the universe as a whole. In seeing the Earth from outer space, the astronauts—and thus, the viewers of those astronauts—understanding of time and space is dwarfed by the trauma of seeing the planet float in outer space. To see the planet from afar with all its flora and fauna, its pathos and drama, surrounded on all by sides the infinite stretch of cosmic stasis means sacrificing coherence for vertiginous contingency. It is a contingency that can never be undone, but instead must be affirmed in all its effervescent strangeness. For Ballard, aesthetic wonder is thus replaced with metaphysical horror, a horror that is transposed back to the Earth rather than left in space. In their failure to adjust to Earth’s temporality, Ballard’s astronauts become the material expressions of a more generalised anxiety concerning our place not only in the universe, but more pressingly, on Earth.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Dylan Trigg is a CNRS/Volkswagen Stiftung post-doctoral researcher at the Centre de Recherche en Épistémologie Appliquée, Paris. He is the author of two books, The Aesthetics of Decay (Peter Lang 2006) and The Memory of Place (Ohio University Press 2012). Trigg is currently writing a book on the phenomenology of agoraphobia. His blog is here.

]]> http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/the-real-cape-kennedy-is-inside-your-head/feed/ http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/japanamerica-cosplay-in-the-usa/ http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/japanamerica-cosplay-in-the-usa/#comments Fri, 16 Dec 2011 09:58:54 +0000 Susan Tomaselli http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/?p=43074 The appeal of cosplay outside Japan is a perfect example of the transcultural boomerangs that characterize much of contemporary popular culture. As Japanese otaku of an older generation will tell you, cosplay, and the devotional fandom behind it, came from the United States: photos of costumed fans at North American sci-fi conventions, such as those revolving around Star Trek, appeared in magazines imported to Japan in the 1960s and 70s. Japanese readers adopted the practice, using characters from their homegrown anime and manga series. As the popularity of manga and anime spiked outside Japan, fast-evolving Internet access provided overseas fans first with a peephole and then a massive window onto what looked like an enticing made-in-Japan phenomenon. By Roland Kelts.]]> By Roland Kelts.

An estimated 105,000 fans attended this fall’s combined New York Anime Festival and Comic Con - and you couldn’t walk a meter on the convention floor without seeing or literally bumping into someone in costume.

The larger North American anime conventions feature artists and voice actors from Japan and the United States as celebrity guests, screenings, panels and live performances alongside booths offering merchandise and promotional paraphernalia.

But cosplay, an import from Japan that involves wearing, and often posing provocatively in, a homemade costume of your favorite character, may be the biggest draw.

“It’s like total escape,” a teenager from Philadelphia said as he adjusted the collar of his costume, based on a character from Hetalia: Axis Powers, a notably popular title this year. “You can’t do this every day. And it’s really addictive.”

The appeal of cosplay outside Japan is a perfect example of the transcultural boomerangs that characterize much of contemporary popular culture. As Japanese otaku of an older generation will tell you, cosplay, and the devotional fandom behind it, came from the United States: photos of costumed fans at North American sci-fi conventions, such as those revolving around Star Trek, appeared in magazines imported to Japan in the 1960s and 70s.

Japanese readers adopted the practice, using characters from their homegrown anime and manga series. As the popularity of manga and anime spiked outside Japan, fast-evolving Internet access provided overseas fans first with a peephole and then a massive window onto what looked like an enticing made-in-Japan phenomenon. The word itself, cosplay, is a giddy transcultural mashup of the English “costume” and “play.”

“Cosplay [is now] a more accepted hobby in North America than in Japan,” noted Riddle Lee, an Atlanta-based costume designer and model who has been cosplaying for 12 years. Lee cited the variety of genres beyond anime and manga - comics, movies and the sci-fi subgenre steampunk - that have become a part of the cosplay scene in the United States.

“It allows more ethnicities and age ranges to be involved. But those who are cosplaying from anime and Japan-based videogames really do have a sincere interest in Japan.”

Photographer Ejen Chuang agrees. In 2009, Chuang crisscrossed the United States, attending six anime conventions to shoot over 1,650 cosplayers, 250 of whom appear in his colorful and hefty coffee-table tome, Cosplay in America, published last year.

“Many cosplayers I’ve talked to and photographed have since moved to Japan, either for studies or jobs,” he said. “They wouldn’t put so much effort into their outfits if they did not respect the original source.”

For some, cosplay has become serious stuff. “The skills involved - sculpting, styling, sewing, make-up - could help get you a career in fashion or film,” Lee said.

She has turned her own skill set toward charity. In the wake of the March 11 tsunami and earthquake, Lee launched Cosplay for a Cause, a nonprofit organization whose mission is to raise money for disaster relief. She contacted artists and fellow cosplayers worldwide to create a glossy 2012 calendar, with all proceeds going directly to the Japanese Red Cross Society.

“Japan has been such an influence on my life,” she explains, “from video games to anime characters to food and even its rich history, which fascinates me.”

A New Jersey-based cosplayer known by the moniker Yuffiebunny told me that her passion has led to her own business, Head Kandi, creating hand- and custom-made costume headpieces, wigs and other hair enhancements. She also judges cosplay contests, models for Web sites and magazines, sometimes gets hired as a cosplayer for events - and, of course, attends anime conventions regularly.

While cosplaying is not a career for her, she says, “It’s definitely not a sideline or part-time gig. I work very hard at it.”

Yaya Han, also from Atlanta, and Chicago-based Barbara Staples both tell me that cosplaying and its related activities (designing costumes and accessories on commission, modeling, public speaking and attending conventions) have taken over their lives full-time.

Han said American cosplayers are not only diverse in age, gender and ethnicity, but also in levels of devotion. She divides participants into three groups: the super amateurs, who “know nothing about proper sewing techniques, props, wigs, etc”; the Halloween types, out for “occasional fun”; and the true devotees, members of the “cosplay community [who] make cosplay a lifestyle.”

Staples, 29, attended her first anime convention 14 years ago, and like many women of her generation, was lured by the watershed shojo anime series Sailor Moon. She now runs her own costume design business, Lemonbrat, employing six staffers and two interns.

“I feel like I’m working two full-time jobs,” she said, “because it takes up so much time.”

Americans who cosplay have skewed both younger and older in recent years, with teens now sporting anime and manga costumes alongside cosplayers going gray or even fluffy white. They are drawn to the spirit of interactivity, role-playing participation and community, plus a dose of sincere passion - all emanating from a pop culture universe thousands of miles away.

Staples didn’t cosplay at her first convention. “I didn’t realize people dressed up,” she told me. “Then I noticed and thought, ‘I can make better costumes than that.’ Cosplay was right on the cusp of beccoming really popular.”

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..

“Abstract Literature implodes in a subdued fashion, like a slow motion reversal of an explosion or some other catastrophe.”

- Stewart Home, Blood Rites of the Bourgeoisie (2010)

The first NYC retrospective of Book Work’s ongoing project Again, A Time Machine, the exhibition was, in fact, more than just an overview of the writer’s polymorphous, layered creation. It provided an insight into the labyrinth of contemporary cultural realities - vision of the present as a remixed history, redeemed to resurrect the future DJing decades. The October 22 event not only presented to the viewers samples from Home’s latest book Blood Rites of the Bourgeoisie (2010), but also reasserted the author’s punk-yoga performative approach to reading-writing as the territory of contestation within the contemporary cultural arena: the complicity that is always already a form of resistance against utilitarian nihilo-cannibalism. Almost as an embodiment of the subtext of the virtual, compulsory anti-narrative, Stewart Home’s act was a reworking of the static-kinetic dialectic through postfuturist literary remixing.

Along with Kenneth Goldsmith’s reading as a reenactment of unoriginal genius, the Home happening inspired my revisiting the content of his novel, whose form, i.e. its physical manifestation, was a prop and a character of the writer’s performance titled The Great Downtown Shredding Machine Massacre, part of the Shredded Book series. Besides, it reanimated the reforgotten recollections of his other works. The following are ruminations resulting from my random retake on them.

Imagine a world of wicked pimps and zombie johns. Imagine a ghost town of tormented, ravaged souls. Imagine a community on the social margins being purged from the face of the city in the name of new, troublesome aesthetics. Imagine persecution of the dispossessed in the name of Mammon. Think of a pilgrimage to the shrines where saturnalian deities are worshipped through a babylonian randomness of semantics. Envision a society in which junkies are not addicted to drugs, but to dehumanizing hollowness. Imagine carnality robbed of the bodily - an individual devoid of substantiality. Visualize the communicational channel contaminated by humiliating noise. Hear the afflicted silence crippling human dignity. Imagine a city as an abyss, wide-open, devouring the detritus of what used to be the definition of a human being. Picture enslavement by a belief that the wonder of meaning is not that it is. Welcome Home brewed postfuturist storytelling: “You know very little about the philosophical sources from which aesthetic theory was constructed. Instead you approach most topics from the perspective of Freud diagnosis.” (Stewart Home, Blood Rites of the Bourgeoisie, page 5)

If the noise occurs in the communicational channel, the information flow acts accordingly in order to remix it. As a form of communicational content, all texts are, by definition, in the service of the sovereign - language. The fact that the same substance constitutes both the oppressor and the rebel demands a specific form of speaking. Reading-writing against noise pollution is a creative practice, a form of resistance against oppression. It faces its own predicament resulting from the relational character of language. But there is a noise filter that literature devises to silently clean the communicational channel. The tone is the tacit layer that voices out the affect of the text, thereby enabling a fruitful exchange.

The reanimating remix of the noise is a response to the pluralist consensus censoring the thematic scope of literary wilderness, extinguishing the vitality of a discursive exchange, and imposing on one certain models of living as the only ones. Relying on the communicable unsayable, the intervention of this kind is the source of reawakening of the sedated spirit of peaceful/peaceable resistance.

The sound in 69 Things to Do with a Dead Princess (2002) is the beehive buzz of a discursive multitude portrayed through the proliferation of the crossbreeds between sexual and discursive games, “the orgy of history” (page 22). Masturbation symbolizes communication in a discursive-minded culture - self-absorption in the circularity of transformations “from semen to semantics” (p. 8). The concept of rape is used to criticize dispossession and aggression. From the perspective of power relations, language games do not appear to always be a free play of the signifier and signified: “Alan had been raped by those who’d forced him to constitute himself as a bourgeois subject but his tormentors had been similarly abused” (p. 57). Unlike masturbation and/or rape, the sixty-nine pose is suggestive of communicational reciprocity.

This bizarre travelogue takes the reader around Aberdeenshire stone circles to follow the alleged story about Lady D’s death. This necrofeast shows the dead body of the princess being dismembered and decomposed by the spectacle vultures. Following the scenario of the princess’ gruesome end, the protagonists set out on a journey only to realize that, just like the corpse, they cannot be reanimated either. Despite visiting the places of worship and sacrifice, their quest ends in no (dis)closure. Such an anticlimax happens in the word and the world desensitized to revelation. Thus, the sacred stones turn out to be everything but holy. Rather, they are corners in a military-entertainment wasteland - the society of dispirited physicality and discursively determined selves.

Real Aberdeen of today is not desensitized to researcher’s inquiries. Neither is it averse to the appeal of profit-driven politics. The city is being gentrified and transformed into a kingdom of consumerism. The prevalent atmosphere of mammonesque idolatry is evident in the Granite City’s peculiar stylistic eclecticism. Fortunately, the fiscal fog, brooding over casino iconography, cannot conquer the gleam in the sand, the breadth of the caressing waves, and the overarching blue dome that on the odd day happens to be bright, too.

Shortage and Abundance on the Streets

Down and out in Shoreditch and Hoxton (2004) demonstrates the notion of the remixed noise - the unuttered literary tissue, cracks in the discursive, lateral paths of cultural remixing. Affective sparseness is that what enables such reshifting. Precarious emotionality is a sketch of an a disaffected, zombified individual. Brutal, compulsive physicality symbolizes living in a soulless, commoditized world. The verbalized, coupled with the content infused in the subtext, provides not only a reading, but an experience of the contemporary affective predicament. Characterization, along with the setting, appears to be a potent storytelling device suggestive of the potentials for cultural practice. The novel reveals the cityscape as the face and signs of times. In this absorbingly esoteric, broken up narrative, history meets silence as cohesive literary tissue and a friendly interlocutor.

The portrayal of the character of London charters the changes in the area between Bethnal Green and The City. Accentuated is the grotesque impact of the phenomenon that we in reality know to be a transformative force, turning the city into a jigsaw-puzzle with glossy facades and slums. The creation of such a manic-depressive world has massively been fueled by the new money thriving on the peculiar valences of economics, a projected image of power, hunger for glamour, and the affinity for sensationalism and sentimentality. In other words, the dialectic of pricy cheapness.

There is a sense of tacit collaboration and a mutually conditioned relationship between the authorities and the ghetto via the sustenance of tribulations within the neglected communities and/or neighborhoods. The underprivileged cannot respond to new economic demands of the rejuvenated areas, so they not only remain culturally excluded, but are also relocated to the parts where the housing is seemingly affordable and the class divide apparently invisible. In order to endure the hardships, preserve day-today living, or, simply, support certain lifestyles, the choices available to the disposed frequently imply committing criminal acts. This double-blessing on one hand deepens their degradation, while, on the other, it keeps the authorities at bay, thereby replicating the vicious circle.

Literature itself is no stranger to the double-edged sword in question. It is affected by the limitations of language. Normally, this implies that it is not possible to verbally express what is outside of language. This is how discourse exercises its power. However, all is not in what is said. Not only the verbalized is what makes literature literature. There are literary elements, such as the tone, characterization, and setting conveying the message unutterable by and impenetrable through language. It is where silence disrupts discourse. It is where pockets of freedom await. Despite the evil pimps.

The ways in which affect is emanated through the tacit layers of the narrative, discursive limitations are rendered negotiable, if not surpassed. This indicates a great transformative potential of ambiguity. The aforementioned oscillating character of literature is where its redemptive powers can be found. As a cultural construct, it is both an impediment and the path to freedom. In other words, its constructiveness is what makes it reworkable. And so are other cultural constructs. Thus, it is reasonable to believe that he remix can transcend the sea of fragmented, dispassionate entities and bring on the unity and union of refaced human beings, radiating life reemerged from the living dead. The vital light.

Subversive silent ruptures in the discursive are constituent ingredients of the remix. A DJ - the voice sometimes manifest, at times subtonicly present, a depersonalized vessel for the free flow, an embodiment of the belief that human existence implies and requires acknowledging the limits of one’s own control/power. Realizing one’s own limitations is indicative of the impossibility of total control on other planes. In other words, just as language finds itself trapped in discourse, so is political power, for example, imprisoned in discourse. Therefore, texts can serve the sovereign as a subversive machine dethroning the oppressor. Through silence the message is delivered. The tacit layer, the music/voice of the text, is where the remix occurs. The tension between the imprisonment in language and the elusiveness of the unuttered reflects the oscillations between melancholy and hope. The former results from the deprivation of freedom. For the latter to follow, the tactic reanimating subversive narratives is needed. The remix puts in conversation antagonistic, albeit not antithetical, sides that alternate, reflect, condition, and challenge each other, all the while easing the friction: Who I am. Re-enactment of Finnish immigrants in Ohio, Minnesota. Shadow of sibrothers dream, laughter from famotherslands.

Noises ‘n’ Silences: A Second Bite of the Countercultural Burn Out

Today, what it takes for the human face to reemerge equals the effort necessary for freeing oneself from delusional thinking that being a defaced, unspecifiable particle in the amalgam called contemporary culture is all a human being is about. To err is part of the human predicament. To be humiliated by the deafening noise is integral to corrosive cultural mechanisms. To be denied the right to be an individual may mistakenly become a segment of human life. But to say NO to such enslavement is, too, what makes a human being human. To see one’s refaced individuality as constitutive of the life of fellowship means to preserve the right to remix.

Refacement is awaiting in the noises of confusion and collision of the swinging sixties, punk-rocking 70s/80s, and raving 80s/90s, on the one hand, and the new chimney sweeper-DJ’s voice on the other. Again, seeking such a voice has nothing to do with an uncritical restoration of the past and has everything to do with nostalgia for postfuture. It is a NO to the nihilo-cannibalistic culture. It is also a YES to the call to remix the dormant spirit of resistance against the noise crippling human dignity. Periods of pollution in the communicational channel alternate with those of greened communication. But for the shift to happen, the remix is needed in order to reanimate hibernated words. In the spirit of radical incompletion: “There is no beginning, there is no end; this story goes on forever.” (Tainted Love, p 248)

The book depicts the afflicted impetus of the 1960s countercultures partly resulting from the impact of the drug culture amplified by the authorities’ complicity in their criminalization. Emphasized is the consumerist spirit of the era drawing from the affinities for sensationalism and susceptibility to simulated enchantments. Such an aesthetic happens to be integral to the cultural mythology that is being dismantled in Home’s works including this one. The chapter, ‘The Eclipse and Re-Emergence of the Oedipus Complex,’ along with Home’s film of the same title and somewhat modified details (2004), remixes the psychoanalytic appropriation of the Oedipus myth turned into the incestuous patricidal mania that has been a seed from which therapeutic culture flourished and imposed on human beings a belief in irredeemable culpability.

Our time sees other avenues for the reemergence of human dignity. We now have a silver screen: “At the very moment Freud theorised the unconscious, his fantastic notions were rendered obsolete. Men and women were already assembling in the black womb of cinemas and their collectively realised and suppressed desires were being projected onto silver screens.” (p. 126) One feels it’s about that time that cinema, too, be destroyed (p. 117). Ours seems to be the moment calling for the posfuturist remix of the displacement in question: “Cinema becomes theatre and there is a much needed shift of emphasis away from cultural commodities and on to human relationships from which such products emerge.” (pp. 127-8)

Moments of confusion are reenacted in a kaleidoscopic image of endless atomizing doubling. Mushrooming of the fragmented facts and values makes a world a place overpopulated by islands. Surrounded by a desert. And yet, the dry spell of a fabricated belief is the temporary austerity that suppresses contrapuntal abundance of the imaginations. Awaiting for the harmonization to the syncopated beat.

(M)others off (Re)invention

Once upon a time young minds started to rebel against the inverted face of the dream their mafothers inscribed in the songs of the bloodline. They saw the world being populated by houses with pools in the backyards. They realized that in order not to be stigmatized, it was expected from one not just to inhabit a residential object, but to, actually, own it. It became clear to them that such objects were not the only type of property that was required to be constituent of who one was. Among such objects, one decided, were cars, TVs, telephones, land, information, sex, art, knowledge, holiday homes, acquaintances, businesses, ideas, looks…you name it. Assuming such an identity required a lot of time, energies, imaginations, and skills to ensuring financial means to the abovesaid ends. That left little room for anything that was not merely mimicking of the photographs in glossy magazines, interpersonal relationships not based on utility, and creation not castrated in the name of the dominant taste.

There has been little communication. Because business talks require few words. Beautification is considered redundant. There has been a lot of unscrupulous treatment of the fellow travelers. People learnt how to feel bad about such conduct without necessarily having profound emotional justification for remorse. There have been other manifestations of degraded sentiment. So, people are again taking advantage of science, technology, and medicine. They find out that in some instances they feel similar to the fellow travelers whose intoxication has been a conscious, countercultural choice against hypocrisy. Both camps suspect that something must have gone askew on the way to the future. In the world, living its own self-proclaimed prophecy of madness, they decide that it must have been just about everything.

Some of these thoughts, some of these emotions could be imagined to have been the color of the Ladbroke Grove and Notting Hill of the 1960s. Perhaps our contemporaries dwelling in the areas would relate to the portrayal. They can be imagined to be reading a book saying: “Literature is dead. Time and space died yesterday. You eat dead food, you fuck dead men, even your words die in your mouth. Your sentences are rolled into the ebbing waters of modernism and then wash back like a bulimic’s forced vomiting.” (Blood Rites of the Bourgeoisie, p. 10)

They realize that they were born in the countries of the folks whom they see as kinship and aliens, comrades and an indifferent crowd, benevolent and hostile, neighbors and passers by, guardians of the cradle and scatter-brained wanderers, benign jokers and miserable parasites feeding on the other’s weakness, generous givers and narrow-minded cripples, unconditioning providers and envious backbiters, protectingly warm advisers and unscrupulous upward-social-climbers, kings of laughter and emperors of solemnity, masters of the healing embrace and spiteful tormentors, torchbearers for the soul-saving wisdom and the experts in heart massacring, a fascinating source of uniqueness and blank back-stabbers, endlessly amusing and lame to the core, elated worshippers of life joy and embittered cynics of the lowest order, prototypically passionate and confusingly reserved.

They understand that there are countries that treat themselves as if the rest of the world were the horizon of disappearance. And the rest of the world in exactly the same way. There is the rest of the world that treats itself as the opposition to everything else. And everything else in exactly the same way. There are countries that treat themselves as if they were an afflicted development of a prematurely born child. The rest is the world. Who sometimes judges one for misjudging the wrong turns. Those who observe these phenomena might think that the cultural consensus about rhetorical polyphony is way too aggressive for their genuine cacophonic taste: “The universe buckled, bent and sent into reverse.” (p. 6)

If it is antiutopian to believe that a dream of human dignity and fellowship is an unachievable future goal, then one must be humble enough to call oneself the genuine postfuturist remix culture - the offspring of the bloody, phunkie postfuturist DJ mafothers. Critically reimagining the past, simultaneously reawaking the future, and resurrecting the present, they follow the radical guiding light of the shadow talk in the spirit of refacement: rebirth through silence and solidarity of reindvividualized deselfed fellow-humans, engaged in enduring creation of a free culture based on trust and love. If this way of reimagining literature, practice, and life sounds too utopian for the pluralist critical taste, too bad for the consensus - subversive remixes find the challenge even more pleasurable. Because such remixing simply is in alignment with life.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Nikolina Nedeljkov, is a New York based reader/writer/scholar whose interest is centered around the creation-remix nexus in postfuturist storytelling as a form of peaceful/peaceable resistance against multiple oppression. Contributions on LIES/ISLE, kill author, in Cultural Studies, Education, and Youth: Beyond Schools (Benjamin Frymer, Matthew Carlin, and John Broughton, eds.), and the upcoming issue of GENERO. Note: Pictures by N.N.

I’ve made three films until now, Karma, You+Me=Love, and Mari-chan. I started getting into filming four years ago, because of Sion Sono, but before that I wasn’t into filmmaking, I wanted to draw manga. I met Takashi ”Bob” Okazaki, the creator of Afro Samurai, and he taught me the basics of Manga. So I was pretty serious about that. I don’t have the patience for comics though, it’s just too time consuming. I wanted Mari-chan to have a manga feel to it, that’s why the characters are so over-the-top and she keeps killing everyone but nothing happens to her. - Alex Paille

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER
David F. Hoenigman was born and raised in Cleveland, Ohio but has lived in Tokyo, Japan since 1998. He is the author of Burn Your Belongings (Jaded Ibis Press) and the organizer of Tokyo’s bimonthly PAINT YOUR TEETH, a celebration of experimental music, literature and dance. He is an assistant professor at Meikai University and also writes for The Japan Times. He is currently working on his second novel, Squeal For Joy, forthcoming from Jaded Ibis Press.

On Columbus Day 1936, with the Spanish Civil War raging, the Basque writer and leading intellectual of the Generation of ’98 Miguel de Unamuno gave a speech at the University of Salamanca. It would become a resonant moment, not just within the conflict but in terms of culture before and since. Unamuno had been preceded by monarchists and Falangists who’d raged against the evils of democracy, socialism and seperatism and exalted Fascism as the saving of the nation. They’d been spurred on by the founder of the Spanish Foreign Legion General José Millán-Astray, a war-ravaged veteran who’d had an eye and arm blown off in earlier colonial ventures, and his followers who roared their slogan, “¡Viva la Muerte!” – “Long live Death!” As rector of the university, Unamuno took to the podium and began by stating that, in such times as these, he could no longer remain silent. He went on to attack the “necrophilistic and senseless cry: Long live death” claiming that the militarist rabble had defiled the “temple of the intellect.” They would win, he continued, through sheer brute force but they would never persuade because they lacked “reason and right.” The speech was brave to the point of being suicidal. Through the intervention of Franco’s wife, the writer narrowly escaped being lynched, leaving the stage to cries of “Death to Intellectuals!” and further chants of “Long Live Death!” He was forcibly retired from his teaching post and died shortly afterwards, an alienated hounded figure.

The atmosphere of murderous philistinism was sadly not unique to Franco’s Spain. In Nazi Germany, book burnings and degenerate art exhibitions were already common and the incremental process towards burning human beings was well underway. Within the last decade, we’ve witnessed the video proclamations of, now departed, white-robed mountain prophets, distributed through the etherweb, “This place may be bombed and we will be killed. We love death. The U.S. loves life. That is the big difference between us…”

Unamuno’s last stand is notable not simply for its courageous personal example or for its political implications but also because it demonstrates one crucial purpose of literature itself; writing as an attempt to defeat death (and the forces of death), an ultimately doomed but noble exercise.

Many of the earliest surviving literary texts are fine examples of this quixotic attempt to defy mortality. The furthest we can go back in terms of written language is to Ancient Sumeria, 2000 years before Christ, and their earliest written story, and thus the world’s, is the Epic of Gilgamesh. It’s a work that was no doubt added to and evolved in the oral tradition before its transcription onto a surviving series of clay tablets. In one of the central tales, the hero Gilgamesh attempts to achieve eternal life by consulting the demi-god Utnapishtim who humiliates the mortal by proving he does not have the resolve to stay awake for a mere week (“sleep, like a fog, blew over him”) let alone live forever. Nevertheless, Gilgamesh persists. Learning of a magical desert-thorn that grows at the bottom of the sea and will confer youth upon the aged, Gilgamesh ties rocks to his feet and, somehow avoiding drowning and implosion (the text is elusive on these matters), strolls onto the ocean floor and digs up the plant. Believing his task to have been achieved, Gilgamesh becomes complacent and decides to take some time out on his way home to bathe in a fresh spring. When his back is turned, the miraculous plant is stolen by a serpent. We’re left with the less than valiant image of Gilgamesh, a broken man, crying like a baby. Yet his ventures have not been entirely in vain. Earlier he’d pondered whether the immortality, which would evade him in life, could be achieved through the legacy of his deeds, “Where is the man who can clamber to heaven? Only the gods live forever… but as for us men, our days are numbered, our occupations are a breath of wind… if I fall I leave behind me a name that endures.” In another translation, “I will make a lasting name for myself; I will stamp my fame on men’s minds forever.”

In One Thousand and One Nights, the idea of defying death is much more cunning. A Persian despot named Shahryar orders his vizier to bring him a succession of virgins whom he proceeds to marry, sleep with and then, old charmer that he is, decapitate the following morning. Eventually, the city runs out of virgins and the vizier is forced to hand over his own daughter Scheherazade. For all the subsequent swashbuckling tales of Aladdin, Ali Baba and Sinbad, Scheherazade is the real hero of the epic, a character who’s immense guile, wit, eroticism and imagination keep her from losing her head as her predecessors have. The very nature of the storytelling in One Thousand and One Nights is in defiance of death; by telling the series of wondrous but unfinished tales, Scheherazade prolongs the honeymoon and her life. Fiction, momentarily at least, outwits death. “Recite to us some new story,” she’s instructed “delightsome and delectable, wherewith to while away the waking hours of our night.” Writers have been doing so ever since.

It’s been an ancient tantalising prospect in many cultures, this desire to challenge the natural process of decay and demise. In Gaelic mythology, Oisín, son of the giant Fionn mac Cumhaill, the most gifted poet in Ireland and fighter of the fearsome warrior band the Fianna (Red Branch), is transported away on horseback by the enchanted Niamh of the Golden Hair to a mysterious Atlantic island Tír na nÓg where no-one grows old. Returning on a homesick visit to his place of birth three years later, he’s appalled to find that the once mighty race of Celts have descended into peasant weaklings. Stepping down from his horse to help a labourer shift a mere boulder, Oisín immediately grows old the moment his boot touches the soil. His three years in Tír na nÓg have equated to three hundred here and the intervening time wreck their ruin on him instantaneously. He keels over grey and withered. The Church realising the power of images and icons, even Pagan ones, absorbed the myth by clumsily inserting St Patrick into the closing credits, having him baptise Oisín as a good god-fearing Christian just prior to his death. W.B. Yeats imagined a dialogue between these two archetypes of different eras in The Wanderings of Oisín. Then in his Celtic Twilight phase (or “cultic twalette” as Joyce labelled it), the poet was drawn to the myth of Oisín as it embodied many of his fascinations; lost love, enchantment, feudalism, otherworlds, aging and of course immortality, “And in a wild and sudden dance / We mocked at Time and Fate and Chance… For neither Death nor Change comes near us / And all listless hours fear us / And we fear no dawning morrow / Nor the grey wandering osprey Sorrow.” Yeats would move on to become one of the pioneers of Modernism but would never shake off these fascinations which he later explored through spiritualism, automatic writing and a dabbling in the black arts.

The Greeks too envied the immortality of their gods who’d gained the power by feasting on the heavenly food known as ambrosia. Having been found guilty of corrupting the minds of Athenian youth, Socrates drank hemlock declaring no real philosopher should fear death and, as the poison took it’s hold, comforted his pupils, “Be of good cheer, and do not lament my passing… When you lay me down in my grave, say that you are burying my body only, and not my soul.” The fact we are discussing this, over two thousand years later, proves in some sense that he was right. The Greeks were wise however in countering the desire for immorality with the realisation that what might initially appear a gift worthy of the Gods could well be a curse. In Homer’s Odyssey, the travellers encounter the Island of the Lotus Eaters where they are indulged with a wealth of pleasures, seemingly outside of the squalid flow of daily boredom and dejection that is life. And yet they are forced to leave the island when it becomes apparent that absolute bliss breeds absolute apathy. Happiness is bovine. The Greeks knew that the so-called negative emotions (melancholy, rage, jealousy even abject misery) are the great dynamos of creativity and for these to work there must be some sense of finality, of present joys being fleeting, past joys being impossible to return to and it all ending inevitably in tragedy. From misery comes art whether that’s Jacobean murder-plays, dejected love songs or Post-Impressionist painting.

The Romans expanded on this with characteristic morbidity. In one of history’s few worthwhile self-help manuals his Meditations, the Emperor Marcus Aurelius taught that you can take a strange solace from the very mortality of man. “Think of the myriad enmities, suspicions, animosities, and conflicts,” he wrote, “that are now vanished with the dust and ashes of men who knew them; and fret no more… Keep before your eyes the swift onset of oblivion, and the abysses of eternity before us and behind.” His is a sort of profoundly misanthropic wisdom, a testament to the power of negative thinking, “Take it that you have died today, and your life’s story is ended; and henceforth regard what further time may be given you as an uncovenanted surplus.” It is the very temporality of life that gives it not just its poignancy but its intensity.

Sometimes the mortality question is a bit too close for comfort. With the Black Death raging across Europe, killing roughly half of the continent’s population, the Florentine author Giovanni Boccaccio wrote The Decameron, a diverse collection of tales spun by aristocrats who’ve fled the plague-ridden city for the sanctuary of an isolated country retreat, telling stories to pass the time. It’s possible the English poet Geoffrey Chaucer met the author on diplomatic duties at the wedding of Duke of Clarence and Violante Visconti in Milan. Whether or not they did, Chaucer was suitably impressed by The Decameron enough to base the structure of his Canterbury Tales on the earlier work. Mortality, and the plague, haunts these stories as it does later works like Marlowe’s Dr Faustus and Shakespeare’s King Lear. This is evident most explicitly in The Pardoner’s Tale. Three drunkards set out seeking to kill the figure of Death who they’ve heard can be found lazing under an oak tree. Upon reaching the site, they instead find a hoard of gold and, distracted by their own greed, begin to plot against one another. One of them leaves to obtain food and wine while the others stay and plot his murder. When he arrives back, they kill him and feast upon his spoils, not realising he’s poisoned the lot. In the King James Bible (1 Corinthians 15:55), there’s the lament, “O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?” a sentiment which the symbolist Jan Toorop captured in pencil and chalk and which Brendan Behan, with typical gallows humour, parodied in The Hostage (“Oh death, where is thy sting-a-ling-a-ling”). The Pardoner’s Tale reveals that the victory of death is all around us. As anyone who’s watched The Seventh Seal will know (”Nothing escapes me, no one escapes me”), death always wins, with or without our assistance.

In the early modern age, scientists began to equate electricity with life-force leading to the branch of pseudoscience known as Vitalism. By accident, Luigi Galvani discovered that running an electrical current through the nerves and muscles of a dead frog you could make the corpse animate in the form of spasms or twitches. This led to various harebrained schemes, parlour tricks and scientific dead-ends (including hooking hanged criminals up to batteries for public amusement) but also to creation of one of the great literary archetypes; Frankenstein’s Monster. It was written when the Shelleys (the novelist Mary and her husband the poet Percy) were staying with the poet, cad and cocksman Lord Byron then exiled on the banks of Lake Geneva in Switzerland. Due to a major Indonesian volcanic eruption (Lake Tampora - the largest eruption in recorded history), it was the ‘Year Without a Summer’, also referred to as ‘Eighteen Hundred and Froze to Death.’ Trapped indoors, the party (including their doctor John Polidori) turned to the telling of supernatural fireside recitals and a challenge was laid down as to whether any of them could come up with an original ghost story. Inspired by a nightmare she’d had, Mary Shelley created Frankenstein, Polidori The Vampyre. Thus two of the most abiding monstrous icons came out of essentially the same drink-fuelled wager.

Influenced by Golemic myth, Shelley’s remarkable work centred around the question, what if we could be reanimated after death? What would remain, if God’s plan was subverted, of our souls? It’s no accident that the novel was subtitled The Modern Prometheus, the mortal who dared to steal the secret of fire from the Gods. It was feared science was encroaching on the powers of God in creating life and manipulating its form (you could argue, in contrast to continual tabloid bleating, what’s the point of a scientist but to play God?). There’s an inherent warning in Shelley’s work that there may be a sorry price to pay for this audacity, that in attempting to become Gods we lose our humanity. We can remind ourselves that in Greek mythology perpetuity was a concept restricted not to bliss but to punishment, specifically for those who’d challenged the sovereignty of deities; Sisyphus doomed to roll a boulder up a mountain endlessly, Tantalus to forever long after nourishment just out of reach, Prometheus to have his liver devoured by an eagle every day until the end of time.

Dr Polidori’s composite creation ‘The Vampyre’ would have it’s own afterlife but it would take eighty years and “the vulgar fictions of a demented Irishman” (see Anne Rice’s Lestat series) to fully enter and haunt our times. Bram Stoker assembled Dracula from a wide range of folkloric, cultural and historic sources; his fellow countryman Sheridan Le Fanu’s tales of mystery and suspense, chilling real-life accounts of emaciated Irish Famine victims, psychosexual myths of succubi and incubi (is there any popular story more seething with thinly-veiled lusts than Dracula?), the bloodstrewn excesses of the maniacal Carpathian Prince Vlad the Impaler, the mass murdering Countess Elizabeth Báthory (who sought to remain eternally young by bathing in the blood of virgins) and Polidori’s fiction. The creature would have many defining characteristics; he was an aristocrat, had anthropomorphic powers and was essentially immortal (provided he avoid sunlight, stakes through the heart and was sustained with a sufficient supply of fresh blood). The gift, or burden, of immortality with it’s nocturnal provisos could be passed on in a manner not unlike the proliferation of rabies - a bite to the neck and a virus administered intravenously, which then takes hold over a period of deepening feverish illness and which always results in death. The victim then returns as one of the undead. The vampire-hunter Van Helsing elaborated further, “When they become such, there comes with the change the curse of immortality; they cannot die but must go on age after age adding new victims and multiplying the evils of the world.” There are worse occupations you might think. Dracula was however disillusioned with his share of eternity, despite his vast castle and his harem of vampire triplets, and he would make the ultimately fatal mistake of attempting to move to London. The implication through the novel is that Dracula has deviated from the natural way of things, he has challenged God’s will. His existence is an unholy aberration and must be extinguished (the otherwise risible film Dracula 2000 struck upon the novel idea that Dracula was in fact Judas, condemned to be a nightstalker for his betrayal of Christ). This fear of the un-Christian, the immigrant, ‘the other,’ evident in the paranoia and superstitions of the peasants and in the fairly barbarous means by which our intrepid heroes finish off the Count and his brood, becomes more evident with repeated reading. As in Frankenstein, we can ask ourselves who are the real humans in the story, if such a thing exists?

This ambiguity also links the book to it’s gothic relative Melmoth the Wanderer, the mysterious title character of which, having sold his soul to the devil for an extended lifespan (”he constantly alluded to events and personages beyond his possible memory”), attempts to pass on his contract for damnation to the unwitting. Both are loose adaptations of the anti-semitic Wandering Jew myth in which, according to medieval thought, a Jewish cobbler Ahasver , who had mocked Jesus as he was carrying his cross to Calvary, is damned to walk the earth for all eternity never finding respite. It’s an intriguing myth and appeals to ideas of exile and diaspora but above all, in the age of Jewish ghettos and the Inquisition, it was one more excuse to persecute ‘the other’ especially a semi-nomadic self-contained people. As with Dracula, immortality is something to revile and envy and between those two emotions is the propensity for violence and persecution. It’s not a massive leap from the Wandering Jew and rumours of poisoned wells and blood libel to blood-sucking creatures in high places and from there to the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and beyond. Stoker merely tapped into existing horrors born from fear and suspicion and presented them as imaginary, if it were only so.

Just as man’s capacity to attack those who are different is nothing new, neither is the urge to usurp God’s power. The decisive reason for the quest for the Holy Grail in Arthurian Legend was not simply to locate a sacred relic (they were plentiful in Christendom from Jesus’ embalmed foreskin to bottles containing the last breath of saints) but the possibility that to sip from it would confer eternal youth on the drinker. Rider Haggard’s adventure tale She features an orientalist equivalent of this legend in the life-giving salamander-esque fires of the Pillar of Life. Similarly, the central purpose of alchemy was not merely to transform lead into gold (though this was an expected and welcome by-product) but to uncover the ‘elixir of life’ which would result in youthful rejuvenation. It was not just the prospect of metamorphosed riches that led gullible patrons to the laboratories of the occult magician John Dee (the model for Shakespeare’s Prospero and Marlowe’s Faust according to Alan Moore) and the likes but the need to keep death outside the citadel. Attempts to subvert God’s plan often backfired with successive Chinese Emperors dying from mercury poisoning given to them as supposed vitality-restoring potions.

Nevertheless some eccentrics have claimed to have obtained these very powers. The mysterious Count of St.Germain appeared in 18th century high society, dazzling his regal audiences with audacious skills (in music, chemistry and philosophical debate) and claims, one of which was to have the power of invincibility. It was a claim mocked by Voltaire in a sarcastic letter, “the Count de St. Germain is a man who was never born, who will never die, and who knows everything”. The legendary lothario Casanova was equally sceptical but still somewhat impressed, “This extraordinary man, intended by nature to be the king of impostors and quacks, would say in an easy, assured manner that he was three hundred years old, that he knew the secret of Universal Medicine, that he possessed a mastery over nature, that he could melt diamonds… All this, he said, was a mere trifle to him. Notwithstanding his boastings, his bare-faced lies, and his manifold eccentricities, I cannot say I thought him offensive.” The Count disappears in and out of history from there. He appears as a Tsarist general in Bavaria, a Parisian mime who claimed to have known Jesus on first name terms, an Austrian puppeteer, an extraterrestrial interpreter in California and most recently an erratic spiritualist on French talk-shows (in the incarnation of one Richard Chanfray). He features in the diary of Aleister Crowley and the spy reports of Napoleon III. In actual fact, the ‘real’ Count had died of pneumonia in Schleswig in 1784 but the physical death of the Count isn’t of primary importance, the enigma continued. Whatever or whoever he was as a man, the Count was something else entirely. He had become a simulacrum, a figure on whom all kinds of heresay and hoaxes could be applied. His current whereabouts are unknown.

Fortean Times admirably tried out the Count’s potion for everlasting life (elder flowers, fennel, senna pods and wine) and found it only had prodigious laxative effects. Fiction has offered other dubious methods of revitalisation. In Raymond Roussel’s Locus Solus, a Cabinet of Curiosity-style exhibit of long-dead figures (Danton’s severed head for one) re-enacting historical events is presumed to have been arranged by some form of mechanics or puppetry. In actuality, they are genuine corpses who’ve been brought back to life by the invention, and injection, of ‘resurrectine’ fluid. John R. Lansdale’s even more bizarre steampunk novel Zeppelins West features as one of the main characters the disembodied head of Buffalo Bill Cody, kept alive in a jar filled with hogs’ piss and whiskey.

Given the obvious benefits in terms of power, it’s inevitable that the question of immortality would enter the realm of politics. In the mid-19th century, Leonard ‘Live-Forever’ Jones ran for Governorship of the State of Kentucky, having formed his own High Moral Party (of which he was the only member). His unique selling point was his claim that he was immortal and anyone could be if they followed his steadfast regime of clean-living, fasting and prayer. Instantaneously he became the laughing stock of public and press. He failed to receive a single vote. Unfazed he lowered his ambitions and decided to run for the Presidency of the United States. It was a disaster and he succeeded only in making his ridicule national rather than local. He persisted at every presidential election for the next twenty years and believed the assassination of Lincoln was down to the fact the Great Emancipator had stolen his rightful place as President. Struck down with pneumonia, Jones refused medical care (understandably given he believed he couldn’t be killed) and left this world shortly after at the age of 71.

‘Forever’ Jones was that rare even saintly character in politics; the fool who is a harm only to himself. The idea of indestructibility has manifested too in much more disreputable figures. The insulated, paranoid deferential world of the dictator lends itself to both delusions of grandeur and coercive power that will eventually defy objective truth, morality and mortality. The godly pretensions of dictators have been brutal and absurd, terrifying and kitsch. It’s evident in Gadaffi’s ludicrous plastic surgery, Hitler’s daily overdose of vitamins, hormones, testosterone and amphetamines (as well as more unusual and unhealthy concoctions such as cocaine eye drops, belladonna, atropine, E. coli, strychnine and morphine), Kim Il-Sung’s addition of ‘The Immortal’ and ‘Eternal President’ to his titles. Mussolini actively encouraged the proliferation of the myth that he was immortal when early assassination attempts on his life failed. Man make bold assertions and fate laughs as the saying goes. Hubris becomes nemesis. In Miroslav Holub’s verse, “The fly meditates on the immortality of flies before being eaten by a swift.” Only the North Korean dictator would make it to semi-deity status, a heart attack sending him to an afterlife as an embalmed museum exhibit in Kumsusan Memorial Palace. For the rest, their ends were much more ignominious, with none of the monomaniacal splendour they’d had in mind (or the comfortable end granted to the Thatcherite and Neo-Liberal choice butcher General Augusto Pinochet); frozen in a Misratan meat locker, filed away in charred pieces in the NKVD archives, hung by his heels from a meathook on the forecourt of a Milanese petrol station.

You can almost understand why they thought they would live forever, surrounded by the apparatus of power that could bend virtually anything or anyone to their will. They had inherited the divine right to rule from Kings and Kaisers but had updated it with a suitably modern veneer; it was not God to whom they owed their authority but dialectical materialism or the will to power or providence. Sometimes it was so vacuous or protean they had to invent a name - Juche in North Korea, Jamahiriya in Libya. Before them, royalty had enshrined a dynastic view of immortality; The King is Dead, Long Live the King. Some dictators retained this; Gadaffi and Hussein attempted with their competing sons, Il-Sung succeeded with his film director-kidnapping cognac-sodden heir. Stalin’s sociopathy sent his children into states of alienation (his daughter Svetlana), debauchery (his wastrel son Vasily) and destruction (his reputedly brave and decent son Yakov - pictured above - who committed suicide by throwing himself headfirst onto the electric fence at Sachsenhausen concentration camp following capture by the Nazis and disownment by his father). Nonetheless Stalin understood enough about dynasties and the endless nature of blood-feuds in his native Ossetia to ensure that when he destroyed his former friends and allies in the Old Bolsheviks, he took their families too (recalling Macbeth’s line upon Banquo’s murder and his son Fleance’s escape, “There the grown serpent lies; the worm that’s fled / Hath nature that in time will venom breed”). With a ’successful’ dictator’s death, the individual corporeal body may be gone but the position remains and it claims complete mastery even over time.

Rebels reply in kind at the loss of their heroes. Viva Che! Durruti Is Dead Yet Living! Bobby Sands Lives! claims the graffiti. Except it’s a cry that only articulates melancholy and futility and the absoluteness of these individuals’ absence. Contemplating this, you can understand why the Apostles invented the resurrection of Christ; a hounded terrified group of young men and women, each knowing they would die violent deaths (as the vast majority would), betrayed, bereaved, their movement decapitated, with a religious establishment and the forces of an empire closing in on them. Recorded many years after the event, whether it was the truth, a deliberate rewriting of history by the Machiavellian St Paul, a collective group hallucination, the Chinese whispers of rumour, lapsed memory and wishful thinking passed on down through the Catacombs, the Resurrection pathed the way for the Church which in a sense marked the end of Christianity (there’s more Christ in 95 minutes of Robert Bresson’s Au Hasard Balthazar than in the contemporary Vatican or Westminster Abbey). You can even wonder, if you’re so inclined, where the path of ‘Doubting’ Thomas would have led had it taken hold at the time the gospels and apocrypha were being haggled over as official doctrine; a Church without Resurrection, without the Last Judgement, the Harrowing of Hell, the lysergic outsider art of Revelations and so on.

The Ancients recognised the dangers of political hubris. The preacher in Eccelesiastes warned, “All is vanity… For that which befalleth the sons of men befalleth beasts… as the one dieth, so dieth the other; yea, they have all one breath; so that a man hath no preeminence above a beast: for all is vanity.” Roman Generals would have a slave instructed to remind them at times of success, “Remember that you are merely a man! Remember your mortality!” In this way, a healthy sense of perspective would be re-established. The path to oblivion that led from the assumption of invincibility (and it’s encouragement by sycophants) to Hitler’s bunker would be avoided. An acceptance of one’s mortality could paradoxically extend your lifespan then. This idea of Memento Mori - Remember your mortality would become a rich seam of inspiration and caution throughout cultural history. Artists would include reminders often in the forms of skulls (Franz Hal’s Youth with a Skull for example or Hans Holbein the Younger’s optical illusion in The Ambassadors), the Danse Macabre (in which figures irrespective of rank would be forced to dance with the Grim Reaper) and Ars Moriendi instructions on how to die a good death (or a bad one as Bosch demonstrated in Death and the Miser). Breughel went furthest in depicting people delusionally trying to continue (feasting, playing cards, reciting poems and playing music - see the bottom right of his monumental The Triumph of Death), oblivious amidst the onslaught. “No matter how young, strong, beautiful and vain you are,” the paintings say as much to the painter as to the patron and audience, “you must die.” The tradition has continued to the present day, forming the bulk of Damien Hirst’s career (and arguably say Andy Warhol and Michel Basquiat’s) and emerging in singular works from Christian Boltanski’s Monument Odessa to Jeff Wall’s Dead Troops Talk to RETNA and The Mac’s recent mural, named after the tradition.

When the Communist Nikos Beloyannis was executed by the right-wing Greek government in 1952, Picasso created the explicit memento mori Goat’s Skull, Bottle and Candle. He visited the theme of death in many different guises, often covertly. It’s said if you turn Guernica 90 degrees anti-clockwise, a human skull can be discerned just below the dying horse (alongside hidden harlequins and the silhouette of a bull). His Blue Period began with the public suicide of his friend Carlos Casagemas whom he depicted in his allegorical masterpiece La Vie (X-rays reveal Picasso had originally painted his own face beneath that of his late friend). In his paintings, his beloved little sister Conchita, who had died at the age of seven from diptheria, lived on and seemed even to age. Max Ernst would do the same for his dead sister Maria but her afterlife would be more strange even threatening (perhaps this was to have been expected from a man who claimed to have hatched from an egg his mother laid and believed his soul resided in the form of a phantom bird called Loplop that inhabited his paintings).

Poets too carried on the ritual of Memento Mori in Graveyard Poetry and the Nocturne, most famously during the Victorian Cult of Melancholia, with epics such as Gray’s ‘Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard’, Parnell’s ‘A Night-piece on Death’ and Edward Young’s ‘Night Thoughts’ (pdf). It was a tradition that began long before as T.S. Eliot acknowledged in ‘Whispers of Immortality’, “Webster was much possessed by death / And saw the skull beneath the skin.” The great contemporary writer Harry Crews has emphasised this with a Memento Mori skull tattooed onto his arm, accompanied by the words of the poet e.e. cummings (from the poem ‘Buffalo Bill’s’), “How do you like your blue eyed boy, Mr. Death?” A daily reminder that our time is running out and the things we do now matter because that’s all there is.

Another creative death-seam is that of the elegy, for every one of these is written for it’s author as for it’s subject. In music, we assume Mozart’s Requiem was as much for himself as the wife of it’s commissioner Count Franz von Walsegg for whom it was intended and we are partially right in doing so. Similarly, Tennyson, with his In Memoriam A.H.H. for his departed friend Arthur Henry Hallam (”For this alone on Death I wreak / The wrath that garners in my heart; / He put our lives so far apart / We cannot hear each other speak”).

There have also been almost miraculous technological advances, albeit ones that we are so familiar with we barely acknowledge them. We can, with a mere click of a button, listen to the voice of Skip James singing ‘Hard Time Killin’ Floor Blues’ or a Shostakovich symphony written at the time of the Siege of Leningrad or T.S. Eliot reading The Wasteland, as if from the afterlife. All created by long dead figures and yet we can resurrect them at will. Similarly we can read fragments of Sappho, written 600 years before the Crucifixion or study the Venus of Hohle Fels which is 35,000 years old. Art immortalises. The ancient cave dweller painted scenes of hunting, x-ray pictures of fish or traced handprints not just as decoration or bearing witness but to say, as modern graffiti does, “I was here, I meant something and I wish to continue to mean something.” As Iain Sinclair writes prophetically about (near-)present-day London in Lights Out For The Territory, “Broken sentences and forgotten names wink like fossils among the ruins.”

Something of the spirit survives then to inhabit the future however miniscule or metaphorical. And it will remain immortalised, as long as there continues to exist a person to experience it. Should mankind ever succeed in killing itself off, it will take a surprisingly short time for nature to erase all trace of our existence. Cities will decay or be absorbed by deserts, forests or new ice ages in a few thousand years. The last surviving relics will be those sheltered underground away from the elements (nuclear waste bunkers for example) and those protected by the vacuum of space (the time capsule of the Voyager probe and the space junk that orbits the earth and litters the moon). Percy Shelley’s Ozymandias remains a masterful warning not just of the over-reaching arrogance of tyrants but of the vainglory of mankind’s loftiest achievements.

You could believe in God of course, each to their own, but if you don’t what is there that might fill the void or simply explain it? Those of us who doubt or dread a religious afterlife can put our faith in technology and science even though we know these will ultimately prove futile. If we stretch the bounds of possibility (and what other choice do we have?), we could see cryogenics as some form of salvation. For around $150,000 you can have your body frozen at the point of death and stored in liquid nitrogen until the time arrives (if ever) that medical science can reanimate you. You expire in the here and now and wake up in the future. If the full-blown method is too expensive, there’s the budget option of neuro-preservation in which it’s only your decapitated head stored for a mere $90,000 (the myth that Walt Disney’s head is frozen in a vault somewhere is sadly just a myth).

The Victorians, in their turn, put their faith in technology as a tool of immortalisation, primarily the photograph. Almost as soon as the medium had been invented (beginning arguably with Hippolyte Bayard’s fictionalised Self Portrait as a Drowned Man), a craze began for post-mortem images, mainly of children who had died, bearing in mind the high mortality rates of the time. They make for disturbing but compelling viewing. Dressed up in their best refinery and often placed with dolls or in nurseries, the children appear to be sleeping but that sunken waxen look, familiar to anyone who’s been to a wake, has already stolen over them. The expressions of their parents, often in the photographs too, speak of fathomless grief. In a sense, it’s an attempt to gain some small victory over death, to say this child existed. There are even attempts to revive the practise today as evidenced in the Now I Lay Me Down To Sleep service. In David Eagleman’s stunning treatise on the afterlife, Sum, one of the chapters explores not just death but a second final death which you undergo when the last person says your name for the final time. In death you merely cease to exist, with the second death of being forgotten you cease to have ever existed. The Victorians tried to counter this fear of amnesia with photographs just as they had previously used paintings and death masks. It continues to this day not just in photographs and film footage but in personal websites that become online shrines (and targets for anonymous trolls, another modern phenomena) when the owner dies. We relish, and fetishise, the illusion of stopped time, that last photo or online message, but an illusion is what it remains. In The Book of Illusions, Paul Auster reminds us that the passage of time only invests these photographs with a haunting new context, “because they were dead, they probably spoke more deeply to us now than they had to the audiences of their time.” And of course one day our own photographs will join them.

The photograph will capture us then, just as some Native American tribes feared it would our souls, for the millisecond of it’s taking. In Richard Drew’s famous image of the Falling Man from the Twin Towers, the immediate thing we notice is the theatricality and defiance of it. He looks as if he is not simply resigned to his fate but is bravely diving into it. Photographs taken just before and after the shot reveal this to be an illusion, a pose that only existed for a fraction of a second, the figure, having been buffeted about by air currents and sheer velocity of freefall, was falling as a marionette would. The decisive moment of Cartier Bresson may deceive as much as it enlightens. Yet it is this image that is famous and not the others on his film because we want to believe he defied death. For us then the Falling Man is forever statuesque in that pose of boldness and grace, a man who chose to dive rather than simply fall or sucumb to the flames. In the photograph and only in the photograph, he never has to land. Compare this to James Dickey’s remarkable poetic account of a real-life air stewardess falling to earth after being sucked out through an emergency door on a flight. She may seem alive again for as long as the poem takes to read but we’re acutely aware this is in memoriam. The photograph, on the other hand, deceives. We believe what our eyes tell us.

Photography can be the beautiful lie that seeks to comfort us against the harshness of truth, a counter-myth to the spectre of Memento Mori. “I am forever young” it says but perhaps it mocks us in saying this. Consider the ‘Six Young Men’ of Ted Hughes’ verse, in a photograph taken just before the war, “One imparts an intimate smile, / One chews a grass, one lowers his eyes, bashful, / One is ridiculous with cocky pride - / Six months after this picture they were all dead.” In the intervening years, the photo does not change. Neither does the backdrop “That bilberried bank, that thick tree, that black wall.” It’s a photograph as much a warning as a requiem.

And contrast the almost heroic Falling Man to the Genesee Hotel Suicide taken in 1942 by Ignatius Russel Sorgi a photojournalist for the Buffalo Courier Express. He was on his way back from a routine shoot when a police car overtook him and speed away. Out of curiosity, he followed it to the hotel where a troubled recently divorced guest Mary Miller was out on the ledge. She waved to the assembled onlookers and dropped. Sorgi caught her forever in that pose, devastating not just because of the childlike way she’s reaching out but because of the commonplaceness even mundaneness of the setting; the neon hotel sign, the traffic warden-type figure at the door, the man sitting idly watching the world go by at the Coffee Shop window, beneath signs for sandwiches and milk shakes. Life will go on even after this, one world ends yet a billion continues, a thought that seems obscene and is at the root of our delusional urge to survive indefinitely.

Photographers have sometimes fallen for the beautiful lie themselves. It’s a seductive belief and in their way they’re right to. When you create, something survives because of you (but in your absence) that would not have existed otherwise. The fact that mundane things (from advertising slogans to inanimate objects) outlive even the most extraordinary of people seems so unjust we feel we must rail against it. Surely it cannot be so. The photographer Garry Winogrand knowing that he was dying of cancer, took photos continually in his last months, leaving several thousand undeveloped rolls of film (over a quarter of a million shots) that document his attempt to somehow remain in this life. A similar story is that of Vivian Maier a remarkable photographer who captured over 100,000 street photographs during her life. She died virtually unknown and penniless, the boxes containing the collections being discovered just prior to her death. The subsequent resurrection if you like of critical discovery and acclaim can offer no comfort to her now. Something does remain however from her, from Winogrand, from Robert Capa whose last view of life we can witness in his final photograph taken prior to stepping on a landmine in Vietnam (he’d spent that morning photographing a cemetery) and from the daily Polaroid collection of Hugh Crawford up to his death. It may not be life, it may be ethereal spectacle, life twice removed, but it is something. And in absence of any alternative it may be the best we have.

One of the great techniques of literary immortality is elusiveness. Some of your thoughts will endure if, for example, your books are read or your ideas make it into the common consciousness. Some glimpses of personality, interests, loves, fears, obsessions and so on will remain dormant within the pages and reactivate upon reading. Elusiveness intensifies this experience. If your work is engaging enough a degree of indecipherability will amplify interest. “I’ve put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant, and that’s the only way of insuring one’s immortality,” James Joyce famously said, spawning less a cottage industry of critical theory on his work than some vast Stakhanovite monstrosity, churning out essay after essay. Though Joyce is a literary heavyweight in every sense, it can’t be ignored that the fact his work can be endlessly explored and deciphered is one crucial reason for his renown today. It’s a blessing of Shakespeare that his work has so many layers and is so multi-faceted and yet Shakespeare the man remains an enigma (even if this mystery does regularly attract conspiratorial headcases and snobs who claim he didn’t exist or was someone else). We know less about the playwright than we do the surface of other planets. It means that we can delve through his plays and poems and never come up against the deadening full stop that is the ‘definitive’ view. In other words, we can never be fully satisfied. Similarly the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch remain not only fascinating to us but also immortal because we can never fully understand them, the metaphors and parables within them have been lost or escape us. His work is alive through, not just it’s delights and horrors but it’s obscurity. Sometimes indecipherability is virtually the only thing maintaining our ongoing interest in a work of art. The mysterious Voynich Manuscript, which has defied cryptographers for centuries, would likely join other arcane masterfully-engraved texts amongst the great halls of unread books were it not for the fact we still cannot comprehend it. If we were to unlock it’s secrets, the magic would largely evaporate. Lost books also possess this ephemeral quality. They are immortal and unassailable in a sense because we can never read them. They exist as long as our willingness to imagine does.

No matter how good your work is, you will however be dead, as non-existent as you were before you were born. This will be a difficult to appreciate given your atoms are insentient and will be scattered to the winds or the soil with no memory of ever having been part of you (one particularly mindblowing scientific concept is that which suggests the next breath you take will likely contain a molecule from Caesar’s last breath). If there is an infinity and we are to play a part in it, it will be on a purely molecular level as exemplified in Primo Levi’s masterful short story ‘Carbon’ from The Periodic Table (”Man is a centaur,” he wrote elsewhere in the collection, “a tangle of flesh and mind, divine inspiration and dust”). His countryman Italo Calvino created a recurring character in his stories called Qfwfq, a creature so old he could recall his childhood as an amoeba. In ‘At Daybreak’, Qfwfq describes witnessing the birth of the Solar System, floating around in interstellar nebula which “whirled in the void with our uncles on them and other people, reduced to distant shadows, letting out a kind of chirping noise.” The sun forms through nuclear fusion and the planets coalesce, Qfwfq losing sight of his sister who’s swallowed up in a fledgling planet. Millions of years later, he’ll bump into her by chance in “Canberra in 1912, married to a certain Sullivan, a retired railroad man, so changed I hardly recognized her.”

On the subject of dynastics and atomics, there is some vestige of truth that something of us lives on when we pass on our genes (and our mannerisms and memories and so on) through our children and the lineage continues (or runs out as in Shakespeare’s case for example). It is also a mildly depressing view for those of us without children and probably depressing for those with children too. From a purely reproductive perspective, Genghis Khan remains the most successful person in the history of the human race (some geneticists have estimated 1 in 200 men are direct descendants of the Mongol Emperor). There has to be more though than spreading seed and the possibility of making an cameo appearance on Who Do You Think You Are? when you’re turned to bones. Neither biological or artistic posterity offers much consolation then, in the words of Woody Allen, “I don’t want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve it through not dying.” Art may be the raucous graffiti left on the walls of Pompeii but at best we are the frozen figures of Herculaneum, covered in ash and pumice stone. Only the outlines remain if they find us, cavities to be filled in with plaster to make discernible shapes.

Some might gain some solace from glimpsing their legacy for what it’s worth. Mark Twain twice opened the newspaper to be greeted with his own obituary; the first through illness, the second when thought lost at sea. He responded with the brilliantly understated, and often-misquoted, “The report of my death was an exaggeration” (he’d earlier dealt with a similar theme when Tom Sawyer and Hucklebury Finn faked their own deaths and turned up at their own funerals). Some take the news less jovially. Recovering from a stroke, the great Black nationalist writer and rights activist Marcus Garvey chanced upon his own damning obituary in the Chicago Defender, saying he had died forgotten and reviled. The shock precipitated a second stroke which definitively killed him.

In Virginia Woolf’s Orlando: A Biography, the main character dwells despondently on the end, ‘All ends in death,’ Orlando would say, sitting upright on the ice… Looking up into the sky there was nothing but blackness there too. Ruin and death, he thought, cover all. The life of man ends in the grave. Worms devour us.” Somehow, and the reason is unexplained, Orlando does not entertain the possibility of growing old and dying any further and simply lives for centuries. The novel is understandably then a picaresque affair but also, going back to Gilgamesh and One Thousand and One Nights, it is the story of fiction itself and a demonstration of its possibilities, “Like an incantation rising from all parts of the room, from the night wind and the moonlight, rolled the divine melody of those words which, lest they should outstare this page, we will leave where they lie entombed, not dead, embalmed rather, so fresh is their colour, so sound their breathing–and Orlando, comparing that achievement with those of his ancestors, cried out that they and their deeds were dust and ashes, but this man and his words were immortal.” We return to literature as our opportunity to be Gods, the creators and the destroyers of entire worlds.

So if that is our reason for writing, where’s the reward? Well posterity may well then follow, through skill and luck but sometimes not in the form you wished for. The poet William MacGonagall is today remembered as being the author of the worst verse ever written. So atrocious are his works with their faltering rhythms, inability to scan, inept rhymes and the unrestrained bathos of their subject matter, they become weirdly entrancing. Take this glorious example from ‘The Late Sir John Ogilvy’, “He was a public benefactor in many ways / Especially in erecting an asylum for imbecile children to spend their days.” Unintentionally, they act as an absurd pastiche undermining the shrill rhapsodies to Imperial conquests and requiems for the ‘great and good’ in the Victorian British Empire and can be seen as a unintentional precursor to the poetry of Ivor Cutler, Spike Milligan and today Tim Key. MacGonagall would have been horrified with such a legacy. He was, it seems, deadly serious, seeing nothing absurd in his poetry or statements such as “I don’t like publicans. The first man to throw a plate of peas at me was a publican.” Yet there are thousands of mediocrities (and indeed fine writers) who wrote infinitely better than MacGonagall and yet their reputations have evaporated and their books are out of print and unread (Walter Scott esteemed at one time as the most popular living writer on the planet must qualify as the ‘most unread’ major writer today). You cannot entirely choose how you are remembered and even if it is for being a cultural abomination perhaps its better than not being remembered at all.

This is to presume it’s wise to want to live on. There are many writers in the modern era who’ve written warnings against such yearnings as there were in ancient times. The Marquis De Sade, in his Dialogue Between a Priest and a Dying Man, asserts through the mouth of the dying man, “After death there is nothing. This is not terrifying but consoling.” He then invites the priest to embark on a one final orgy with him, for the road. The priest duly obliges. T.S. Eliot incorporated a quote from Petronius’ The Satyricon in The Wasteland referring to the Cumaean Sibyl who was an oracle who’d been granted immortality. Accounts vary on how long she actually lived; some say for a millennia, in Ovid’s Metamorphoses she’s allowed as many years as grains in a handful of sand. In exchange, she would sleep with the Sun God Apollo. When she later spurned the deity, he looked into the terms of conditions of their verbal contract (it’s no coincidence Apollo was the God of lawyers) and found that although he’d granted her life far beyond mortal reaches, she had never asked for eternal youth. As punishment, he allowed age to ravage her. She shrivelled until she was a dried husk small enough to be kept in a jar. Pilgrims would still come to consult her, “For I myself once saw with my own eyes the Sibyl hanging in her jar, and when the boys asked her, ‘Sibyl, what do you want?’ she answered ‘I want to die.’ This was Eliot’s view of a Western Civilisation that, despite knowing everything that had come before, was in inevitable paralysis and decline. The Greeks had a male equivalent to Sibyl called Tithonus who was condemned with the same affliction of eternal decrepitude, “when loathsome old age pressed full upon him, and he could not move nor lift his limbs, this seemed to her in her heart the best counsel: she laid him in a room and put to the shining doors. There he babbles endlessly, and no more has strength at all.” His mournful pleas to rescind the deal were depicted in verse by Tennyson, “But thy strong Hours indignant worked their wills, / And beat me down and marred and wasted me, / And though they could not end me, left me maimed… / Let me go: take back thy gift… Release me, and restore me to the ground.”

In the lesser-known third book of Gulliver’s Travels, Swift has the eponymous hero land on the island of Luggnagg located in the sea to the east of Japan. Amongst the inhabitants, he encounters beings known as Struldbrugs who, because of some apparent genetic condition, are born immortal and marked with a dot above their left eye which changes colour. Gulliver rejoices upon hearing of their existence and cannot wait to see what wonders and wisdom they have attained. What he finds is an indictment not only of foolish yearning for everlasting life but of the clichéd behaviours of the elderly, “They were not only opinionative, peevish, covetous, morose, vain, talkative, but incapable of friendship, and dead to all natural affection… Envy and impotent desires are their prevailing passions. But those objects against which their envy seems principally directed, are the vices of the younger sort and the deaths of the old. By reflecting on the former, they find themselves cut off from all possibility of pleasure; and whenever they see a funeral, they lament and repine that others have gone to a harbour of rest to which they themselves never can hope to arrive.” In true Swiftian style, the observations are mercilessly scathing, “They were the most mortifying sight I ever beheld; and the women more horrible than the men. Besides the usual deformities in extreme old age, they acquired an additional ghastliness, in proportion to their number of years… from what I had hear and seen, my keen appetite for perpetuity of life was much abated. I grew heartily ashamed of the pleasing visions I had formed; and thought no tyrant could invent a death into which I would not run with pleasure, from such a life.”

Given his fate, you could say that Oscar Wilde realised the perils of decadence too late but the truth is he only underestimated the power and venom of those in the establishment he had brilliantly mocked. Nevertheless The Picture of Dorian Gray seems prophetic in terms of his destruction at their hands. The young rake of the title, corrupted by Huysmans‘ still dazzling À rebours, manages to transpose his decay in both moral and physical terms onto a portrait, staying young as it ages through some satanic covenant, “How sad it is! I shall grow old, and horrible, and dreadful. But this picture will remain always young. It will never be older than this particular day of June… If it were only the other way! If it were I who was to be always young, and the picture that was to grow old! For that-for that-I would give everything! Yes, there is nothing in the whole world I would not give! I would give my soul for that!” Gray manages to live a life of debauchery for eighteen years, barely aging a day in the process. As with all Faustian tales, there is an inevitable terrible payback; the devil is a lawyer specialising in contracts after all. Gray is destroyed yet could have survived forever had he lived a pious life but then where is the fun in that as Wilde knew to his ruin?

Assuming that you are spared aging or retribution, what would you do with all that time? In Douglas Adam’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series, a creature by the name Bowerick Wowbagger becomes immortal by accident and spends eternity insulting every living entity, in alphabetical order, to pass the time. Another creature by the name of Agrajag is continually reincarnated and inadvertently and unwittingly killed by the main protagonist Arthur Dent. The latter is a nod to the Buddhist and Hindu ideas of reincarnation. In the loosest most bastardised reduction of the beliefs, there’s sense of karmic justice to the process; before proceeding upwards to enlightenment or nirvana, the spirit will be reincarnated in various forms, often defined according to failings in past lives – if you’re filthy and slovenly, you’ll come back as a pig for example. Like Abrahamic concepts of life and the afterlife, there’s some spiritual guidance to be taken but similarly it’s also a potent tool of institutionalised religion to control the corporeal world. Much like the Party in Orwell’s 1984, the real hardcore theologies and ideologies seek not just political control or authority. They wish to extend their control into places they can’t physically reach - private life, the imagination, the conscience, dreams, the subconscious, all the secret realms of deed and thought.

The essential message is not ‘don’t stray from our commands’ but ‘don’t even think of straying’. You may evade punishment temporarily but the All Seeing I is taking account. Your soul is immortal and what you do now will damn or absolve you for all eternity. There’s this inherent threat to the afterlife and as a child it’s a particularly effective, and frightening, means of brainwashing. This finds expression in its most extreme form in Catholic and Evangelical depictions of hell, the former exposed expertly in Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man where a priest Father Arnall delivers a preposterous fire and brimstone sermon on the multiplying torments of hell. It’s a sermon so repetitive and hysterical it’s as if the priest himself is already stuck in some kind of hell. The motion is cyclical and inconclusive, the serpent endlessly eating it’s tail. In Arnall’s hell, the endless factor is crucial, “Last and crowning torture of all the tortures of that awful place is the eternity of hell. Eternity! O, dread and dire word. Eternity! What mind of man can understand it? And remember, it is an eternity of pain… At the end of all those billions and trillions of years eternity would have scarcely begun.” All hope is extinguished, things will never get better. Just as in the priest’s sermon though, this raises more questions than it answers. Could you get used to it? People adapt after all and experience and the perception of experience is relative. Would there be tortures marginally less bad than others? Ones you’d look forward to? Would there be blind spots in hell? How would it be administered? Who would do the paperwork? What do you do with masochists? If the threats and bribes of the religious are right and we’re wrong, we’ll have plenty time to ponder such matters.

Even modern writers who’d shook off the dictates of religion (or at least tried to) continued to be obsessed with this existential threat. Baudelaire counselled “Get drunk!” as a means to obliterate the passage of time or at least our perception of it, “So as not to feel Time’s / horrible burden one which breaks your shoulders and bows / you down, you must get drunk without cease.” Friedrich Nietzsche dwelt on the theory of eternal recurrence (as referenced at the opening of Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being), an idea at once repulsive and enviable as he notes in The Gay Science, “What, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: ‘This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more… Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: ‘You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine.”

There are all sorts of echoes that resonate from Nietzsche’s exalted musings; demonic pacts, doppelgängers, parallel universes, past lives and the heretical remnants of Asiatic and Masonic ideas of reincarnation. Nowhere is the latter more chillingly depicted in literature than in Alan Moore’s From Hell when the soul of Sir William Gull rises above Victorian London before transmuting into figures down the ages: William Blake’s Ghost of a Flea, Peter Sutcliffe the Yorkshire Ripper, the Moors Murderer Ian Brady. Certain Hindus and Buddhists believe the soul is immortal and will assume different forms. What happens when a soul that is diseased gets into the system? “Ideas, unlike solid structures, do not perish,” Moore later qualified, “They remain immortal, immaterial and everywhere, like all Divine things.” Perhaps ideas, as Burroughs said of language, are a virus that infected us. And perhaps so too are souls or the pretensions that we even have any.

For Beckett, eternity is a never-ending gallows farce, immortality a mockery in which nothing happens and we never have the dignity to just end the wretched thing. “No, I regret nothing,” he wrote, “all I regret is having been born, dying is such a long tiresome business I always found.” In the same radio meditation From an Abandoned Work, he countered this pessimism with the dark Schadenfreude relish that we might salvage from mutual oblivion, “Let me go to hell, that’s all I ask, and go on cursing them there, and them look down and hear me, that might take some of the shine off their bliss.”

No stranger to the Fascist aesthetics against which Beckett fought in the French Resistance, Yukio Mishima sought a path of Nietzschean self-mastery and came to a gruesome end when Japan failed to follow him on his dubious quest. Against the degrading tides of modernity, Mishima tried to embody the Samurai code, and restore the glory of Nippon in the process, “To keep death in mind from day to day, to focus each moment upon, inevitable death… the beautiful death that had earlier eluded me.” This was a man who wavered between the contemplation of beauty and the worship of death, his florid prose brought to life by that very tension. Mishima’s writing trembles like the needle of a compass between these poles. By envying the marauding soldiers of the Imperial Army, who had committed such atrocities as the Rape of Nanking, and their whited sepulchre sense of honour, Mishima seemed to be drifting over to the ranks of “Long live death.” In the end however when the soldiers jeered him on the balcony and he committed seppuku, he harmed only himself. Life was still sacred to him and he spilled nobody’s blood but his own (disciples followed him shortly afterwards in suicide). It might appear that he crossed some unspoken line, in regarding democracy as degeneration and destruction as the ultimate goal, in exhibiting the juvenile desire to leave a beautiful corpse (through his body-building and exhibitionist homoerotic poses as Saint Sebastian) but his final act of ritual disembowelment and beheading demonstrates not just insane discipline and courage but a curious intention to be reborn. His Sea of Fertility cycle of books returns again and again to the concept of reincarnation and here was a writer, destined it seemed for the Nobel Prize, choosing to metamorphose into something else entirely; a martyr, as deranged and brilliant as a saint, through completely self-directed violence. So in a sense he was reincarnated as last of the Samurai. Whether it was worth anything or if anyone was really listening is another matter.

We now enter the age of reason and cynicism which we currently inhabit for our sins. Just as all utopias are now dystopias, all forms of immortality are now a nightmare. We are in an age when Dante’s Inferno is not just infinitely more satisfying to our ungodly gratuitous tastes than his Paradiso (heaven after all is crushingly dull, absent of those who would make hell such an interesting destination) but one where the Inferno can be made into a computer game (what is more diabolical the sight of Ugolino locked in ice gnawing on Archbishop Ruggieri’s brain or grown men playing X-Box Live for all eternity?). To be undead now means not some state of perpetual grace or supernatural possibility but being included in some slavering horde of zombies that seem to have taken over contemporary mainstream pulp (a massively overexposed theme that retains interest only in those places where the concept crosses into real life through voodoo, parasitic organisms or serial killers; in other words, enough with the fuckin’ zombies).

Vastly more imaginative is the fervid mind of H.P. Lovecraft. In his Cthulhu Mythos, we get a continual subsonic sensation of unease, the feeling that there are entities out there that are impossibly ancient and malevolent, presented in his unique mix of the gothic, the modernist and the esoteric. Most explicitly, immortality takes a form in Lovecraft’s stories through the creatures known as the ‘Great Old Ones’ or the ‘Deep Ones’ who dwell in the depths of the earth and the unexplored ocean floor, tapping into all sorts of latent Jungian myths of the Hollow Earth, mine spirits and Leviathans of the sea. Occasionally these Deep Ones come to the surface to mate with a woman and a hybrid is born that initially, until adolescence, has human form before mutating into monstrous but immortal ‘Fish-Men’ before returning to the cities under the sea (again tapping into earlier myths this time of fairies stealing children and leaving changlings in their place). Lovecraft may exploit pre-existing folklore and collective nightmares but he also pre-empts the space-age epiphanies such as Earthrise and the Pale Blue Dot which revealed Earth’s vulnerability in the vastness of space. There are things out there that will make Hell look parochial. Lovecraft’s terror is an interstellar one, the nightmare of infinity to human conceptual capacity (as William Hodgson’s was before him in The House on the Borderland). We reach the limits of our present knowledge, the points where Einstein and his colleagues can as yet go no further and Lovecraft is there like some malevolent cabaret host to suggest what’s lurking beyond.

The horror of immortality is really just the flip side of wonder at it’s possibilities. One coin, two sides. Nowhere is this more evident than in the writing of that Escher of literature, Jorge Luis Borges. In his collection of stories, paradoxes and fragments entitled Labryrinths, Borges approaches immortality (and mirrors, doppelgangers, invisibility, lotteries, mazes, libraries and everything else) from multiple angles. There’s the extended firing squad reprieve of ‘The Secret Miracle’ (inspired by a Koranic quotation), ‘The Library of Babel’ which like the universe has no beginning or end and most expressly in ‘The Immortal’. A river “cleanses men of death” and a “City of Immortals rises, rich in bastions and amphitheatres and temples.” A note of alarm is there from the beginning: “In Rome, I conversed with philosophers who felt that to extend man’s life is to extend his agony and multiply his deaths.” The narrator encounters troglodytes, subterranean winds, a city that has been constructed as a maze and which “is so horrible that its mere existence and perdurance, though in the midst of a secret desert, contaminates the past and the future and in some way jeopardizes the stars.” Though the narrator is so disgusted with immortality, he searches for the river to reverse his condition, Borges remains fascinated by the concept. “To be immortal is commonplace; except for man, all creatures are immortal for they are ignorant of death; what is divine, terrible, incomprehensible, is to know that one is mortal.” Self-awareness then seems a curse peculiar to humans. But not quite. “Death… makes men precious and pathetic. They are moving because of their phantom condition; every act they execute may be their last… Everything among the mortals has the value of the irretrievable and the perilous. Among the Immortals, on the other hand, every act (and every thought) is the echo of others that preceded it in the past, with no visible beginning, or the faithful presage of others that in the future will repeat it to a vertiginous degree. There is nothing that is not as if lost in a maze of indefatigable mirrors.” We should be glad then that we are mortal? Well no… when you examine that last quote you find yourself thinking this is precisely where we are in terms of culture, lost in the hall of mirrors that is post-modernism (Borges being one of the impish pre-post-modernists who led us here). We have the curse of both the immortal and the mortal and none of the consolation of either.

Let us turn to Kafka for comfort (a phrase you’ll not read very often). His novel The Castle ends prematurely mid-sentence, a disaster you might think, but really it’s a perfect ending. Due to the fact we never appreciate the dimensions of the bureaucracy with which K struggles or reach any positive or negative conclusion, it all becomes perpetual as does K’s sense of alienation in reaction. What better way for a book about infuriating futility and an unreachable end to finish then to not end at all? For Kafka, this was life, “Only our concept of time leads us to call the Last Judgement by that name. In fact, its a court in standing session.” So far, so bad then but there is consolation to be found if we search, and he makes us search, it’s not in The Castle, The Trial, Metamorphosis, In The Penal Colony or The Hunger Artist but in his most un-Kafka work Amerika or as Kafka titled it The Man Who Disappeared. This too ends prematurely but with the character headed to the Mid-West to sign up with a travelling theatre and offers a rare levity, the character being perpetually on the brink of a happy ending. Whether Kafka intended this or not is disputable. The end for Kafka was far from happy.

Let us follow then the Vltava from Kafka’s Prague to the sea and pick up another grand European river in the Liffey. The female personification of the river Anna Livia guests extensively in Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake. The book is a notoriously difficult/rewarding/maddening experience, a maelstrom of language, puns, codes, myth and portmanteaux which famously makes more sense if read aloud in a Dublin accent and if regarded, in contrast to Ulysses‘ ‘A Day in the Life,’ as a nocturnal dream-like experience (”It’s natural things should not be so clear at night, isn’t it now?” Joyce hinted). Fittingly for a man who only ever wrote about Dublin (and was above all a Dubliner contrary to those kleptomaniacs who’ve been claiming recently he was British), the Liffey is the central presence in the book particularly in the Anna Livia Plurabelle sequence with it’s gossiping washerwomen. The rain cycle as every primary school pupil knows is one that revolves around evaporation and precipitation, the water in the Liffey and the sea beyond rises to form clouds which returns as rain in an perpetual cycle. The book mimics this process, taking the form of a circle or mobius strip, it ends mid-sentence at the beginning (”A way, a lone, a last, a loved, a long the…. riverrun, past eve and adams, from swerve of shore to bend of bay”), a cyclical book with no beginning or conclusion (an effect Joyce compared to following the incredibly intricate medieval Celtic-influenced typography of the Book of Kells). A book which never ends and Joyce’s most blatant shot at immortality. The Irishman borrowed the cyclical structure from Dante via his friend the writer Italo Svevo, whose novel The Confessions of Zeno revolves around one man’s Sisyphean existence, for one example forever giving up smoking and forever failing, always poised on the last exhilarating cigarette. Finnegan’s Wake is the novel as cyclorama where visitors would view a cylindrical painting from the inside, entering through an entrance in the floor, beginning wherever they liked. Writing as infinity, forever evading the full stop.

“God if I hear that name Joyce one more time I will surely froth at the gob.” So said Mr Brian O’Nolan, better known as Flann O’Brien or Myles na gCopaleen. It’s a necessary jibe given every Irish writer must crawl from beneath the colossal shadow of Joyce into the light but not entirely fair given Joyce was a professed fan and supporter of the Tyronian (at a time, unlike now, when it was neither profitable nor popular to be so). And also because O’Brien’s unpublished masterpiece The Third Policeman ran parallel to Finnegan’s Wake in terms of it’s cyclical nature. “Hell goes round and round” O’Brien wrote, “In shape it is circular and by nature it is interminable, repetitive and very nearly unbearable.” You forget in the wild surrealism of say a Gardai station existing inside the wall-space of a house or the laugh out loud humour that runs from very first line (”Not everybody knows how I killed old Phillip Mathers, smashing his jaw in with my spade…”) that it’s an insidiously grim novel which ends on one of the most downbeat endings in all literature. This is Dante’s Hell marketed by Failte Ireland. And, like small town Ireland, there’s no escape and it never ever ends.

Neither, in an entirely different variation of misery, does Harlan Ellison’s I Have No Mouth But I Must Scream. Much of Ellison’s visionary work is so far ahead of so-called literary fiction, it’s embarrassing (this story was published in 1967) but it’s overlooked because it’s labelled science fiction and Ellison hasn’t had the decency to be tamed or to die yet. Once he sees sense and does so, like Philip K Dick or Ballard he’ll be defused, declared finally respectable and showered with praise. The literary snobs will absorb him. Or at least they will try. I Have No Mouth… is the dystopia to end dystopias. All of mankind, bar a handful of survivors, has been wiped out. A worldwide computer network AM (Ellison predicting the internet by a good thirty years) has achieved technological singularity and become sentient. In revenge for it’s creation and limitations, it spends the rest of eternity torturing the survivors, keeping them alive through biological manipulation, allowing them to exist like Jonah in the belly of the whale, “AM could not wander, AM could not wonder, AM could not belong. He could merely be. And so, with the innate loathing that all machines had always held for the weak, soft creatures who had built them, he had sought revenge. And in his paranoia, he had decided to reprieve five of us, for a personal, everlasting punishment that would never serve to diminish his hatred… that would merely keep him reminded, amused, proficient at hating man. Immortal, trapped, subject to any torment he could devise for us from the limitless miracles at his command.” Ellison specifically states AM is not God but a machine but it’s hard not to recall that line from King Lear, “As flies to wanton boys, are we to the gods, — They kill us for their sport.” AM might not be God but it does a good impersonation.

In Will Self’s How The Dead Live, the eternal afterlife appears as a London burrough called Dulston, administered by the useless but omnipresent Deathocracy, a place where life goes on familiarly without any sense of fulfilment but with added morbid features such as floating foetuses tethered to their mothers by umbilical cords. Self was quick to point out in interviews that this wasn’t his universal concept of the afterlife but was merely the main character Lilly Bloom’s unique view, reflecting her life experiences. Presumably we all get our own version. Except with Self and something as complex as Alasdair Gray’s Unthank in Lanark or the City of the Dead in Wyndham Lewis‘ extraordinary and largely forgotten The Childermass, maybe its not safe or wise to presume anything or reduce complex ambiguous visions to glib simplicities. All of them, like all great fantastical books, have elements of satire of the existing world. “Is there life before death?” asked the graffiti which Heaney noticed in Belfast and it’s a fair point.

“Death alone allows me to grasp what I want to attain; it exists in words as the only way they can have meaning. Without death, everything would sink into absurdity and nothingness,” Blanchot asserted. It echoes the writing of Dostoevsky in The Brothers Karamazov, “If you were to destroy the belief in immortality in mankind, not only love but every living force on which the continuation of all life in the world depended, would dry up at once. Moreover there would be nothing immoral then, everything would be permitted.” It was wisdom hard-earned, Dostoevsky standing before a firing squad, reprieved at the last moment and Blanchot, specifically in this case, witnessing a dear friend die young - Colette Peignot, a.k.a. Laure, a writer and one of Bataille’s inner circle, his secret cabal Acéphale. Blanchot is unflinching in his record of her death from TB at the age of 35, “Then she turned slightly towards the nurse and said in a tranquil tone, “Now then, take a good look at death,” and pointed her finger at me. She said this in a very tranquil and almost friendly way, but without smiling.” The title of his book crudely translated into English as Death Sentence is ambiguous in French (L’Arrêt de mor) and alludes to a possible temporary reprieve or moment of standstill which occurred, perhaps not a reprieve solely for the dying but for us, the narrator and the reader. After all we’re reading this so presumably we’re still alive. We’re immortal right now, albeit temporarily.

Do we really believe we will die? The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living is the title of Hirst’s shark installation and it’s an apt one. Aldous Huxley advised, “Ignore death up to the last moment; then, when it can’t be ignored any longer, have yourself squirted full of morphia and shuffle off in a coma.” This seems like a solution but really it’s the problem, we fool ourselves in our heads that it will be this easy while having a gut feeling it won’t. When death came for Huxley in the form of throat cancer, he instructed his wife to inject him with LSD and went out into the unknown hallucinating out of his mind. The very same day, John F Kennedy had his head blown to smithereens on Dealey Plaza (and as a side-note this writer’s grandfather fell into the River Foyle drunk and drowned). Countless others will have died and that was a merely day like any other in the grand scheme of things. Huxley’s advice was the modern way; ignore peril until the last moment possible and then, when finally unavoidable, either panic or hope someone else takes control. What he actually did was much more intriguing.

The longer an infinitesimal chance of immortality exists (or merely the sustainable irrational belief in it persists), the longer we will live in denial. When our time comes, surely something will postpone it? The medieval scholars prepared themselves for a ‘good death’ and, in the spirit of vanitas, adapted their lives to be led wisely and to the full. Now that we’re sanitised from experiencing the death of others (even when it happens), we’re much less prepared to deal with it. The modern world promises everything for the right price except more time, leaving us like Marlowe’s Faustus awaiting the chime of midnight and the coming of Lucifer to collect hid dues, “Stand still, you ever-moving spheres of heaven, / That time may cease, and midnight never come… O soul, be chang’d into small water-drops, / And fall into the ocean, ne’er be found!”

In the past few years, Tom McCarthy has extensively examined the subject of mortality from Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas Edison’s technological attempts to contact to and from the afterlife to Cocteau’s radiowaves and mirror portals to the underworld in Orphée, the possibility of communications, through osmosis, permeating the veil between life and the great beyond. The manifesto of his (and Simon Critchley’s) International Necronautical Society is as follows, “1. Death is a type of space, which we intend to map, enter, colonise and, eventually, inhabit. 2. There is no beauty without death, its immanence. We shall sing death’s beauty - that is, beauty.” In The Immortalization Committee, John Gray explored the efforts of early Soviet scientists, eccentric poets and technocrats to foil fate, “A kind of secular mystery cult, God-building was another part of the late 19th-century European current in which occultism and science marched hand in hand. The God-builders believed a true revolutionary must aim to deify humanity, an enterprise that includes the abolition of death.”

Despite our schemes and advances, the old Grimm Brothers‘ tale nevertheless remains true; Death takes his godson down into a subterranean chamber where candles of varying sizes, representing every human life are burning down at different speeds. There’s no getting out of this for any of us and any advice offered can only be hollow; be rich, lucky and healthy and you may avoid it longer. The desire for immortality is hard to shake off precisely because it is the myth of permanence, the nostalgic desire for things to stay the same or rather for things to stay as they never were except in our imaginations. When you see the much bigger picture, as for example H.G. Wells did with The Time Machine, you realise what we regard as fixed is temporal. Its all a question of scale.

Normally we have an ant level view. Perceive things beyond the meagre human lifespan, see them as an immortal might and it all changes. When viewed on a longer term, say fifty million years, Africa will have collided into Europe, squeezing the Mediterranean out of existence and pushing up a mountain range larger than the Himalayas running from Portugal to India. What we regard as absolutely rigid in terms of nations, climate, language, economies and even the human mind and body is transitory and continually often-imperceptibly evolving even as we speak, to say nothing of the fate of the earth, the solar system, the galaxy, universe. This might provoke a celestial form of nihilism or a joy that we are able to even conceive this by some great miracle of chemistry and evolution. The fact remains, nothing’s immortal. Time, as Einstein made us aware, is more treacherous and mercurial than we previously thought, as is our perception of it. We are haunted by the things we have not done, our lost futures as by the places, events and people we’ve lost or left behind along the way. By accident or design, laziness or apathy or merely that we expend too much time simply surviving (shackled to that old toad work in Larkin’s words), time is not on our side.

In Andre Gide’s The Immoralist, the main character is at death’s door with T.B. but recovers and in doing so embraces life, that proximity of death intensifies everything. It makes all existence unmistakably finite and thus vital, “What is important is that Death had touched me, as people say, with it’s wing. What is important is that I came to think it a very astonishing thing to be alive, that every day shone for me, an unhoped-for light. Before, I did not understand I was alive. The thrilling discovery of life was to be mine.” In contrast, what could we expect from immortality but a slide into decadence like Des Essientes or inertia like Oblomov? It’s the quality of the life, the vitality of the life that counts, the magnificent achievements and glorious failures that involve an element of risk, and when the time comes, like all good parties, knowing the right time to leave.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Darran Anderson is an Irish writer. In his spare-time, he is a companion of hellhounds and a conjuror of wicked and damned spirits. This article, along with a companion piece Apocalypse Then: Georg Heym & the Art of Cultural Divination is loosely excerpted from his unpublished/unpublishable book Memento Mori: A Cultural History Of Death.

“I once knew a man,” said Perrott, “who knew all about Stoke Newington; at least he ought to have known about it. He was a Poe enthusiast, and he wanted to find out whether the school where Poe boarded when he was a little boy was still standing. He went again and again; and the odd thing is that, in spite of his interest in the matter, he didn’t seem to know whether the school was still there, or whether he had seen it. He spoke of certain survivals of the Stoke Newington that Poe indicates in a phrase or two in William Wilson: the dreamy village, the misty trees, the old rambling red-brick houses, standing in their gardens, with high walls all about them. But although he declared that he had gone so far as to interview the vicar, and could describe the old church with the dormer windows, he could never make up his mind whether he seen Poe’s school.’

- Arthur Machen, N.

“Poe, you are avenged!”

- Bela Lugosi as Dr Vollin in the 1935 film of The Raven

Having read that as part of the Stoke Newington Literary Festival - and under the aegis of the Flicker Club and the Edgar Allan Poe Society - a bust of the writer had recently been erected outside The Fox Reformed on Church Street; I was puzzled (but secretly relieved) to find just a slate rectangle on the wall with the wording ‘POE/unveiled by Steven Berkoff/on 4 June 2011’, below the blue roundel which has been there for ages commemorating Poe’s attendance at the school ‘which stood on this site’. I took a photo and hurried on.

I should have looked up. Perhaps if it hadn’t been raining, and I hadn’t been thinking about heading into the library then Clissold Park and a bus journey after that to arrive in central London for half past six, I might have done. But I guess, if I’m being honest, I didn’t really want the bust to exist. There were already two plaques (surely enough) commemorating Poe’s three years at Manor House School in the immediate vicinity and the handsome metal plate which has been in the library since 1949 is even elegantly worded. I disliked the bald ‘POE’ which made the writer sound like a brand and let it confirm all my prejudices against literary festivals and personality cults without venturing a second glance.

Back home and feeling I should have been more curious, almost all I could turn up on the internet was the same press release repeated with occasional local variations. Finding one photo of the bust, sculpted by Ralph Perrott, against a brick wall with no other significant features, I assumed it must be on display in the yard out the back of the Fox, and for a while proceeded on this assumption, persuading myself this was indeed the most likely spot since the bust claimed to be placed exactly on the site of the old schoolhouse - and the old drawings of Manor House School visible online show it ’separated from the road by a garden of box-edged beds…’

But two months further on I’ve found a photo of the bust in situ. From the crowd of people spilling across Church Street on a sunny evening, it must have been taken at the unveiling ceremony. Four people are taking photos at the same moment, hands raised and joined above head in the characteristic iPhone posture so if you didn’t know what they were doing it looks like a gesture of prayer. POE is fixed to the wall at first floor level, on the other side of the window and slightly higher than the handsome metal sign of the Fox which protrudes above the street. I hate to admit it, but the lifesize bust, made in clay and cast in durable resin with a stone facade, actually looks quite nice – and the timely re-introduction of doubledeckers on route 73 means that upper deck passengers, at least, will have the perfect view.

My lingering unease about the whole business went off the scale when I realised that the sculptor shares his surname with the character who tells the anecdote about the Poe fan in Machen’s story. I felt slightly reassured when I found Ralph Perrott on a freelance artists’ website - but his entry was only a month old so I had to dig further – and was completely thrown when I typed in ‘perrott poe’ (Google helpfully suggesting that what I meant was ‘parrot pie’) and discovered Jake Perrott, who has much of the same work in his portfolio, works for the same company, and was also involved in the production of an earlier Poe bust. Is it a mistake or a mysteriously evolving split identity? To further thicken the plot, there’s an actor called Clive Perrott who adapted Poe’s story The Black Cat into a film in which he also starred - “Perrott is made up to resemble Poe and recites almost all of the original prose” [Kim Newman] - and Ralph (but not Jake) appears on The Black Cat’s cast list as one of ‘policemen / crowd’. Desperate to extricate myself from this mess, I typed ‘machen perrott’ into the search bar and, as well as the anticipated hits on N, came across some very expensive copies of The Chronicle of Clemendy; or, the History of the IX. Joyous Journeys. In Which are contained the amorous inventions and Facetious Tales of Master Gervase Perrot, Gent, Now for the First Time Done Into English, by ARTHUR MACHEN, ‘SIGNED LIMITED EDITION’, New York: Privately Printed for the Society of Pantagruelists, Carbonnek, 1923. One bookseller thoughtfully notes that there are ‘Two black and white illustrations of naked women in a tussle with the devil’. Even this clue to the name of Machen’s narrator doesn’t take me anywhere particularly helpful, because, as I discover later in the introduction to another book, The Chronicles of Clemendy, written before 1890, is actually Machen’s original work in what he describes as the Renaissance style, following his earlier translations of the Heptameron and Moyen de Parvenir - so this Perrot is also his fictional creation. The question of Poe’s school had evidently preoccupied Machen for some considerable time. N was written in 1935 but in Machen’s 1907 novel The Hill of Dreams the main character receives a visitor ‘who seemed to have moved very freely in the most brilliant society of Stoke Newington. He had not been able to give any information as to the present condition of Edgar Allan Poe’s school.”

“But upon my word I don’t know. I went once, I think, about ‘95, and then, again, in ‘99 – that was the time I called on the vicar; and I have never been since.” He talked like a man who had gone into a mist, and could not speak with any certainty of the shapes he had seen in it. [N.] Putting the narrative against a historical timeline, it’s easy to establish that the Manor House School was demolished in 1880 and replaced with the building currently occupied by The Fox Reformed, therefore Hare (the Poe fan) visiting in fictional ‘95 would not have seen it. If that was the case, why could he not admit it? The other characters in the story are made to voice their frustration with the absent Hare. He is allowed to refer to ‘certain survivals’ of the environment Poe describes in William Wilson, and to have seen some of the things Poe, as a small boy, would have known; like Old St Mary’s Church, though much altered and restored by Charles Barry in the late 1820s in what I’ve seen described as one of his worst attempts at the gothic style, after a survey which revealed, with a spectacularly macabre touch, coffins floating under the floor. But actually the date of the school’s demolition is irrelevant. Even if Hare had been looking at the building, having read the vivid evocation of the school in William Wilson, he wouldn’t have been able to match it up with the bricks and mortar in front of him. In the same way that Poe used his schoolmaster’s real name but changed everything else about him to suit the purposes of the story, the real Manor House School bore little resemblance to Poe’s description of it. The ancient Elizabethan labyrinthine building with gothic windows (where, even after several years, the narrator is unable to say exactly which part he sleeps in) described in William Wilson is perfectly suited to a story of doubling, repetition and reflection: and it sticks so firmly in the reader’s mind that to deny having seen it altogether would be impossible. Taking all of this into account, Perrott’s acquaintance could not have answered in any other way.

Oh gigantic paradox, too utterly monstrous for solution!

- Poe, William Wilson

…and yet I cannot help remembering a criticism of a real author that a friend of mine once
delivered.
“Yes,” he said, “Edgar Allan Poe is wonderful amazing; there has never been anyone like him. But, somehow, one is, now and then, inclined to laugh.”

- Machen, The London Adventure or The Art of Wandering

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Bridget Penney is the author of Index.

These photos are of the punk band Brigandage taken by Joan Geoffrey for ZigZag magazine in the early-mid 80s (erstwhile ZigZag editor Mick Mercer places it in 1984; I’m not sure). The location is definitely Camden Town — outside the tube station, and inside the café next door, which was an occasional meeting place.

I suppose the pictures offer a tantalising peak at Camden before it became the youth-theme-park-cum-alt-shopping area it is now. We can’t actually see much of Camden in the pics, but if we buy into Walter Benjamin’s theory that art has an aura (sod the mechanical reproduction part of his idea) then from these photos, which are most definitely art, we can feel the 1984/NW1-ness of it all. Yes?

Back then, of course — and this will pique the interest of the seekers of untrammelled urbanity and unreconstructed grime, the so called psychogeographers, or it might be hauntologists now (hauntographers?) — Camden was typically dark, dank, dystopian, and many of the other Ds, too. It was closer to the crumbling 1969 Camden portrayed in Withnail and I (a film Brigandage singer Michelle and I saw at the Hampstead Classic and empathised with tremendously — we would argue about which of us was Withnail and which was I) than 1990s Britpop central).

It wasn’t unknown, in 1984, to come across the sort of mad Paddy that featured in Withnail: ‘I’ll murder the pair of yous!’ In the Camden backstreets, the boozers were fading testaments to times past, and water passed in the form of piss up against the proverbial wall — and smelling much the same.

But Michelle and I — I am the lovable spikey top in the pictures by the way — were oblivious to any of this. We were certainly not poets of the dispossessed. We strutted our Billy-the-Kid sense of cool — bombsite kids clambering out of the ruins — posing our way out of the surrounding dreariness. We were living in our own colourful movie (an earlyish Warhol flick we liked to think), which we were sure was incomparably richer, more spontaneous and far more magical than the depressing, collective black-and-white motion-less picture that the 9-5 conformists, or those that stumbled around with their booze-fuelled regrets, had to settle for.

We lived in a hard-to-let housing co-op gaff about ten minutes walk from the tube, up Agar Grove, near to York Way — on the way to Pentonville Prison or Kings Cross, depending on which way the chips fell for you.

Our rehearsal studio was up there, too, on St Paul’s Crescent. There, the female receptionist had a thing about NME writer Paul Morley. She sent letters to him and he replied in his excitable, frothy prose enthusing about how he would like to take her to the park for some wine and a talk — no doubt about his great concepts and theorems regarding modern pop. I’m not sure if she actually did meet up with Paul, but she did become dissatisfied with her boyfriend, who she stopped shagging — but, weirdly, kept giving blow jobs to. Such was the powerful effect of Morley’s words — either that, or she was living in her boyfriend’s flat and felt obliged to recompense him for bed and board in some way. It was a scenario worthy of a song, but we didn’t write it — too close to home probably. Anyway, she used to pass Paul’s flowery letters around, to general amusement. Even better, she was mates with Martin Glover, Killing Joke’s Youth, who would bring back cassette tapes he’d made in New York of the pirate hip hop stations — which were fantastic.

Our house was around the corner, the shoddy shell of a three-storey affair that’s worth more than a million now. Other inhabitants included a drama student, his girlfriend and Toby Nuttall, the son of late beatnik Bomb Culture author Jeff, whose brother Tim would soon join our merry Brigandage band. And if we thought that the mad, the bad, the sad were outside in the gaseous pubs and on the claustrophobic Camden streets, then we should have looked a bit closer to home.

One drunken night, the drama student, jealous that his girlfriend was getting on too well with some South American guy, got up and went out of the living room where the three of them were talking and drinking tequila. He went purposefully to the adjoining kitchen. There, on the rusty cooker that had seen its best days in the 1950s, he boiled a kettle. It took a while — he tried not to watch. He did this calmly. Coldly. It was, perhaps, the only known occasion when a kettle was boiled coldly. When it was steaming, whistling at 210 degrees F. When the water was seething in the same way he secretly was, the student dramatically took the kettle, first putting a towel around the handle so he wouldn’t scold his delicate actor’s hand, and carried it into the living room. There, as his girlfriend sat on the sofa, the stuffing popping out of it, laughing at some joke, he stood above her — how dare she laugh at someone else’s jokes? — and calmly, coldly poured the scorching water all down her front.

Strangely, her hideous screams did not wake us up for we had gone to bed long before the actor had decided to play this, his most insane role — one that melted his lover to the core. (Years later I saw his name in the cast of some BBC period drama. While she, after botched reconstructive surgery, became someone who looked up at you with the eyes of an old stranger if you dared ask if she was all right.)

But then it would have taken a lot to wake us up. We were still young. We were still busy dreaming in Camden Town.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Richard Cabut’s fiction and poetry has appeared in various magazines and books, including The Edgier Waters (Snowbooks, 2006). He has also written for several newspapers and media organisations, including the Daily Telegraph and the BBC. In the past, he played bass and wrote the propaganda for the punk group Brigandage, published the fanzine Kick and wrote for, amongst other music mags, the NME under the pen name Richard North. He lives in south east London, and works as a writer and ghostwriter.

Supercollector, Rita Hatton and John A Walker, Institute of Artology 2010

“Ad man you’re a bad man”, proclaimed the artist collective Bank bluntly about Charles Saatchi in 1997. In 2004, The Guardian art critic, Adrian Searle, praised Saatchi’s popularist approach, eye and humour in his New Blood show, but drubbed the curatorial incoherence. Sir Peter Blake has refused to sell his work to Saatchi because, “I formed the opinion very early on that he wasn’t collecting for the love of art”. Victoria Miro commended Saatchi’s “passion for looking at art”, and Jonathan Jones of The Guardian lauded Saatchi’s “empathy for youth” and his “obsession with the contemporary”, while an anonymous writer in Art Review (actually David Lee, the then-editor) wrote him off as “a commodity trader in art futures”.

Virtually anything Saatchi has done has had vociferous detractors and supporters, though probably more of the former than the latter, especially as the years have gone on. Their views are assiduously documented by Rita Hatton and John A. Walker in the book, Supercollector: A Critique of Charles Saatchi, which first appeared in 2000, a time when Saatchi was firmly ensconced as the all-powerful YBA Machiavelli, a click of whose fingers were deemed to signify fame and success or the artistic rubbish heap. New editions were published in 2003 and 2005, each adding extra chapters to update the story.

The fourth edition now out has more than doubled the dimensions of the original, with nearly 30% more pages and bigger type size. In the intervening decade so much has changed that Walker informs me: “I do not think I will do another edition about Saatchi because I am bored by him now and I think he has lost his novelty value.” Saatchi seems to be in general agreement with this (not quoted in the book): “I certainly was more dynamic once, building my advertising business and my art collection with ferocious energy. Now that I have fizzled out, I still enjoy putting on shows of art that I like and introducing new artists to our visitors, so I hope it makes it worthwhile to plod on.”

It is primarily the ferocious energy phase that Walker and Hatton take issue with, declaring on their book’s back cover that they are writing “a hostile critique from an anti-capitalist standpoint”, the text quoting Marx, not to mention Baudrillard, Bourdieu, Veblen and Raymonde Moulin to reinforce the case. The anti-capitalist stance also embraces anti-consumerism, anti-advertising and anti-Conservatives (but fortunately not anti-Art). Walker, raised in the working class but university educated and now retired on a small pension, has stated bluntly elsewhere in an interview with Robert Orman, “As a painter and art critic myself, I do resent and envy the power Saatchi exercises in the field of art because of his money.”

Ironically, although he and his brother Maurice at one stage ran the world’s biggest advertising agency with 400 offices, 10,000 clients and 11,000 employees, Saatchi, albeit from a middle class background, was educated in a state school (Christ’s College, Finchley) and left education age 17 with meagre qualifications and poor spelling abilities. The factual narrative, which comprises most of the book, details his entry into advertising and the growth of the brothers’ business, along with his increasing focus on art, though it does not illumine exactly how the Saatchis managed to achieve such business success, nor point out that it was potentially achievable by anyone who made it their goal and had sufficient acumen and driving force.

Regardless of what one thinks of Saatchi, a cumulative effect of the book’s narrative is to convey the staggering amount that he has achieved, particularly in terms of the variety and number of shows and artists bought (and sold) and exhibited over the years. By 2004, he owned 2,500 artworks with a value of around £50 million. The book clearly makes the link between the ephemerality and superficiality of advertising and the same quality in much of the work Saatchi promotes, but then he admits that 90% of it will be worthless in ten years time (and it was ever thus). The incorporation of quotes from more recent interviews given by Saatchi reveals even more his maverick, independent and dissenting nature. He is paradoxically a stand-alone art establishment and at the same time highly critical of the art establishment in general, especially its “arid intellectualism”.

One of Walker and Hatton’s most potent judgments is “When one man decides everything, democratic control and accountability diminishes and the arts become overdependent on the whims of an individual.” However, their alternative suggestion that “Improved state funding of art schools and public museums would have prevented much damage from taking place” is less convincing – especially when the policies of the Arts Council and the Tate are considered – than Saatchi’s contention that without rich collectors “the art world would be run by the state, in a utopian world of apparatchik-approved, culture ministry-sanctioned art.” Surely, what is lacking is a number of independently-minded major collectors with different agendas, but who, as the late Tom Lubbock pointed out about Saatchi, are “out on a limb, not worrying about mockery, exposing the curator’s taste nakedly to the world” – something which is hardly likely to occur in the public sector.

If, as Patricia Bickers opined in Art Monthly in 1997, “Saatchi’s dominance does not merely support, but possibly distorts, the nascent market” (by basically disadvantaging smaller competitors), then there is a mechanism via the Office of Fair Trading under the Competition Act to address this. I made such a complaint with fellow Stuckist artists and others in 2004, but it was not upheld. Walker and Hatton, gratifyingly albeit not surprisingly, consider that there was a valid case to be addressed.

Saatchi is now a more benign figure, “greyer and wiser” (a quote reproduced from Charles Darwent in The Independent on Sunday), and even Walker and Hatton concede that “as Saatchi grows older he appears to [be] becoming more discriminating in his value judgements.” (I don’t think they were being ironic.) It is hard to fault his decision to open up the website www.saatchi-gallery.co.uk to any artist who wants to upload a page of biography and images of their work, which they can then sell free of commission. So far over 120,000 artists have taken advantage of this. It has of course been faulted, notably by Jackie Wullschlager, the Financial Times critic, for “turning art into a virtual encounter rather than the imaginative, transcendent, lived aesthetic experience it has always been.” So there you go: it’s all Saatchi’s fault that art is on the internet. He’s a bad man.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Charles Thomson was the only person in 10 years to fail the painting degree at Maidstone College of Art. In 1979, he was a founder member of The Medway Poets, and then a full-time poet for 13 years, with work in over 100 anthologies. In 1999 he named, co-founded and has since been the driving force of the Stuckism movement, which now numbers more than 200 groups in 48 countries. He has demonstrated for 10 years outside the Turner Prize, and in 2005 applied under the Freedom of Information Act for Tate trustee minutes about the gallery’s purchase of its trustee Chris Ofili’s work. This led in 2006 to the Charity Commission’s ruling that the Tate had been acting illegally for the last 50 years. His painting satirising Sir Nicholas Serota, whose face peers over a large pair of (Tracey Emin’s) red knickers, is a well-known image. He was briefly married to artist Stella Vine in 2001.

These Silences experimental literary symposium, 11-14 August, Edinburgh 2011

I wondered if Stewart Home was serious about asking me to review the These Silences weekend he was curating at Summerhall, Edinburgh for 3:AM but I decided to take up the cudgel. We had met earlier in the summer in Edinburgh after a screenplay conference which I didn’t actually see. I asked Stewart Home what his next visit to Edinburgh was about and he told me it was something to do with “avant-garde writing”. I wasn’t optimistic thinking it would be some “arty” thing but decided to go for the whole weekend ticket when I saw Iain Sinclair was speaking on the Friday.

As someone who suffers panic attacks in enclosed public situations the idea of small lecture theatres gave me a certain edge. The words nervous breakdown and putting the psycho in the blurbs just stirred the mix. And what a mix it was. The weekend was becoming a self absorbed cognitive behavioural therapy or maybe an exercise in Mindfulness. When I arrived at the venue it was an old Veterinary College clinical in both design and echoing memory. The door crew were wearing white lab coats taking names on boards. The Lecture Theatre was as advertised Red. The Thursday night was a quiet intro to the event with a half full theatre. The lure for me had been the insertion of the words psychedelia and afro-futurism into the first event on the programme. Iphgenia Baal was nervy but ballsy and settled me right down with her manner and projection. At first I wanted to take photos of her pulling her hair up above her head in a hangman’s noose. The shadows behind her were beguiling as she read from her book The Hardy Tree. Being someone of a mild genealogical bent I particularly liked the reading of gravestone memorials. Anthony Joseph was very musical in his three tiered sci-fi exploration of identity The African Origins of UFOs. I dug a lot of his afro-futurist references and later Stewart Home would ask him in discussion about influences. Earlier Joseph had mentioned the Black Culture/Consciousness canon that a young black man can assimilate. I read later he has a performing music group and a long career in writing. These were no amateurs. Afterwards Stewart Home and I checked out the bar and mulled over the event and the implications of the next night and a fuller theatre.

The Friday evening had a later start and was quite full. I managed to get my usual safe seat on the edge of a row by the door and with bottle of water in hand sat back to forget the day and hear a great influence. We were putting the Psycho back into Psychogeography. Iain Sinclair was introduced by journalist Stuart Kelly who brought up the fact that Sinclair from his writings and life in Hackney had predicted the recent London Riots of August 2011. Sinclair read from his current novel Ghost Milk, the earlier White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings and a few others. What impressed me was what erupted from sheer memory and was applied in conversation. He brought along John Clare out of the ether, the man I had been reading may have been a prime example of a working class autodidact. It was the usual Sinclair tour de force of ideas dragging De Quincey into the event to explain elements of triangulation of psychic experience. Sinclair’s portrait of De Quincey as a furtive inhabitant of hidden Edinburgh’s graveyards and debt sanctuaries, huddled in some narcotic underworld out of sight of officials and reappearing to meet deadlines with publishers, fleshed out my previous investigations into this City character. I once became that furtive figure when visiting De Quincey’s memorial near the railway line in the city centre as I bumped into a drinker talking and laughing with spirits near the Vaults.

Sinclair answered my unuttered question about the first concept word used by himself and his countercultural milieu before his use of the term psychogeography. It was Allen Ginsberg’s ideas relating a “psychopolitics”. As I drifted away in his reveries I began to seriously admire his footwear. I think these things are important when considering art predicated to a great extent on pedestrian movement.

Stewart Home himself was fictionalised in a passage read from one of Iain Sinclair’s books and later when I asked Stewart about this he said that they had just met accidentally and Iain Sinclair had used the meeting in his book with some added colour to expand a train of thought. I began to wonder if the whole weekend was a self-referencing literary exercise and any one us could become a character in a number of different works. This was when I told Stewart Home I was superimposing grid references over the text of this weekend. Sinclair had me thinking that events could be seen through various literary prisms; as if relating a walking scene to a memorised text. It may be that as Sinclair was intimating, things have been so psychogeographically and psychopolitically circumscribed and redrawn as to be gasping for breath and existence. We have to maybe superimpose new maps…

Saturday arrived and I had a letter demanding my attendance at Jury Service. This was a whole new conundrum I might have to write myself out of and it was not lost on me how this weekend was preparing me for some form of trial. I was listening to evidence and would have to make some form of judgement of guilt in a group vote. Back at Summerhall it was Semina writers afternoon where the novel was having a nervous breakdown and Stewart Home set things rolling reading from his Blood Rites of the Bourgeoisie while standing on his head. Bridget Penney’s work was very soothing even at its most demanding. Her delivery was measured and seemed to work in tandem with the restless creaking of the lecture hall’s writing desks: a communicating audience, fidgeting and registering the mystery of silent voices needing contact through this uncomfortable rite. It all became rather ghostly as I was drawn back from my reveries by the bracketed grammar definitions Penney was reading after certain words in her sentences.

Penney was followed by Katrina Palmer who has published a book called The Dark Object. I suddenly felt panicky when she was reading. I asked her later and she said she was nervous but during her reading she held her voice in a low register straitjacket that chilled me. As I grooved on the idea of Hegel as a skeleton chatting her up, while also getting some handy examples of his dense philosophy, her broken vocal became very moving in its intensity. It felt like this really mattered even though the matter of her characters had dematerialised. I am a sucker for a spell and I felt I was getting a contact curse. Before completing the Hegel passage she threw in an even more disorienting piece about a dark version of herself under the desk. I gripped onto my lectern and rode out the reading. I made a note to definitely buy this book. Stewart Home concluded events with some very brief anti-metaphorical jokes and we were off to buy merchandise.

Sunday, the final day, arrived and the rain had been off and on in Edinburgh but it seemed the sun was out for this afternoon’s double-bill. I didn’t really know who Tom McCarthy was prior to this event and was introduced to him before he entered the lecture hall. Stewart Home told me McCarthy had been up for the Man Booker Prize, yet I was still not getting any impression that I was with a heavy hitter. Once McCarthy got going my whole world changed. His reading was called “How to Ignore the Avant-garde is Akin to Ignoring Darwin” and I almost felt that this was directed at me; a cynical old layman out-with these hallowed literary/artistic circles and yet still somehow connected through what McCarthy called transmission and what Ed Robinson would later reflect on as the equal importance of both the Influencer and the Influenced.

Tom McCarthy began in the spirit of one of the weekend’s themes with a visual accompaniment he showed a re-enacted film of the attempted bombing of Greenwich Observatory as if it had happened; a terrorist attempt at the ending of Time. He seemed to be tying up a lot of the threads of the weekend and beyond into a singular transmission. He brought in the idea via Žižek of bones being a dead reminder/remainder within the flesh. He read a long passage from his novel Remainder which dwelt on re-enactment of events in order to decode meaning. I thought his description of a multi-take film shoot was bordering on BDSM play and wondered when someone would utter a SAFEWORD. This was confirmed in the following discussions as McCarthy noted the almost pornographic intent of this sequence as he spoke of repetition’s origins in trauma. He was even more impressive in his riffing and mixing of ideas than Iain Sinclair which certainly took me by surprise. Like Sinclair, he was an accessible and amusing guy.

The afternoon and the weekend’s events were concluded by Ed Robinson’s readings from his study of the Cut-Up method called Shift Linguals. With his text being rather pricey, his appearance here, like Iain Sinclair made this essential attendance on my part. He steadily scanned his way through the past present and future of the Cut-Up and focussed on the Burroughs quote of “writing is fifty years behind art”. The real meat was digested in the following discussion, ‘Storm The Reality Studios’ where Stewart Home and Tom McCarthy joined Robinson for a wide ranging exchange on decoding the original pre-recordings, copyright infringement in plagiarism, book deals, and ultimately in response to a question from the audience, good and bad art! I managed to have an illuminating rap with Robinson after the debate about the Burroughs’ archive and elements of Beat history which happened in the Edinburgh of the early 60s, including the early publication of Burroughs’ material in Scottish academic journals and the collaborations with Jeff Nuttall who appeared to have a social connection with Ed’s family!

All in all a great weekend and I thank all the authors and the curators Stewart Home and Rupert Thomson for a mind expanding piece of cultural therapy.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Raymond Anderson is a single man leading a double life. This way even if he only thinks he is a chicken he still needs the eggs. A designated driver, gleaner, housewife, failed junkie and maven, he wants to be a weather girl again.

Thus far, it has been an enigmatic year for making the world more open to self-government. Since the 2011 revolts in Egypt, Libya and Tunisia, my friends and colleagues have seemingly discovered a newfound interest in East Asia – specifically, South Korea’s model turn from haggard military rule to newly dynamic republic. As a result, the parallels between North Africa and the East Asian peninsula are quickly being drawn by pundits and talking heads: Think of today’s Egypt as South Korea in the 1980s during the early stages of its democratic movement, Libyan ‘King of African Kings’ Muammar al Qaddafi as the middle-eastern equivalent of South Korean General Chun Doo-hwan, Tunisia’s familial network of corrupt commercial dealings as mirror image of South Korea’s early nepotistic big businesses.

Of course, what such optimistic similitudes conceals is an underlying teleological assumption that familiar autocracies will invariably, in the near future, become functioning, secular, democratic nations. However, an honest look at the Korean peninsula in its totality, including North Korea, reveals a series of alternative narrative threads that throws into question the South Korean democratic model: Perhaps the Egyptian military’s influence in its current society is a precursor to a North Korean style military-led society that will remain hostile to democritization, like North Korea’s Dear Leader Kim Jong Il perhaps Libyan leader Muammar al-Qaddafi will continue to stun the international community in consolidating power, perhaps the Orwellian way Ben Ali’s government controls dissent and free expression can best be understood in the light of the hyper-Orwellian way that Kim Jong Il’s regime continues to control dissent and punish free expression.

As the optimism of the Arab Spring quickly dissolves into the riots of the London summer, how can North Korea help us to further delineate the emancipatory deadlocks and antinomies latent in our current situation? You will recall how on April 3rd in Beijing Ai Weiwei was arrested by the Chinese police; and thanks, in part, to the help of many of his vocal international supporters, China’s best-known artist was released after 81 days in detention, conspicuously thinner and quieter. Since his arrest there has been much rumor and talk about what actually happened to Ai Weiwei during his detention and why exactly he was kidnapped. Perhaps the most alarming rumor sprang up in mid-May when it was thought by my South Korean colleagues that Ai Weiwei was being held in an underground facility somewhere in North Korea’s design firm Mansudae; occupying 144,000 square yards in Pyongyang, Mansudae was originally set up to fabricate propaganda art for Kim Il Sung. Speculation had it that Kim Jong Il wanted to pick Ai Weiwei’s brain for North Korea’s own version of Beijing’s Bird’s Nest Stadium.

In retrospect, although the sighting of Ai in North Korea was shown to be false, the Chinese government’s collusion with North Korea to disseminate stadium-sized monuments and foster a totalitarian aesthetics has never been more true. If you follow the news at all, you’re probably sick of reading about the surge of Chinese direct investment in the African continent; however, it is important to note that very little concern has been raised about North Korea’s penetration into the continent. Perhaps the most surprising example of North Korea’s growing African presence is the sight of the African Renaissance monument in Dakar, Senegal. Measuring 164 feet high (13 feet higher than the Statue of Liberty), the giant copper sculpture of an idealized African family depicts a father raising his baby in his left arm, while his right arm is around the waist of the mother – all three staring into the horizon.

The fascist frisson that the statue elicits is unmistakable. In the first decade of the short 21st century, the North Korean design firm Mansudae has built dozens of Kim Jong Il-style monuments similar to the African Renaissance in neighboring African countries like Botswana and Namibia. For both Africa watchers and East Asia watchers alike it is important to note that Mansudae is responsible for building Eternal President, a 66-foot high statue of Kim Il Sung and painting The Year of Bitter Tears, a 269 foot long canvas that mourned the death of the Great Leader. The fact that this same design firm is now providing the manpower and aesthetic vision for an emergent 21st century African nationalism ought to give us all pause. Soon after the completion of the African Renaissance it was reported that the current President of Senegal received a letter from Libyan leader Moammar Gaddafi asking how he too could acquire such a North Korean-style monument.

Up until very recently the discussion surrounding Ai Weiwei’s imprisonment was on how art institutions, like the Milwaukee Art Museum and the Montreal Museum, ought to have been doing more to hasten the release of the detained Chinese artist. Recall how Where is Ai Weiwei? was not only a query posed, but an urgent call to action. Now that Ai has been provisionally released, I fear that the recent ethical demands we’ve come to expect from our art institutions will lose a certain critical momentum and slowly be forgotten from the public narrative. Already the recent London riots have clouded what was eminently palpable only weeks ago - the timing here is crucial. We should not assume that a discreet appeal to the arts in the future will be enough to start the machine in motion again. Are we aware to the degree to which China’s government is relying on the West’s moral malaise and apathy to undercut the emancipatory potential of Art?

Let us not forget that it was only shortly after Ai Weiwei announced in a Twitter posting, “Today, we are all Egyptian. It only took 18 days for the collapse of a military regime which was in power for 30 years and looked harmonious and stable. This thing [the Chinese government] that has been for 60 years may take several months” - that the Chinese Communist Party felt justified in subduing science fiction TV dramas and censoring new art that had the potential for ‘counter-revolutionary subtext.’ In the face of China’s continued efforts to censor positive news about the Egyptian revolution from China’s blogs and web forums, I am happy to report that various East Asian institutions are breaking through the censorship and disseminating the images of the Arab revolt. Activist groups such as the South Korea-based Fighters for Free North Korea have sent 200,000 balloons, across the heavily fortified North Korean border, carrying USB flash drives containing video of the recent wave of North African uprisings; the idea being that a North Korean might finally decide to defect after watching video clips of rebel forces in Libya rise against Muammar Gaddafi. A similar plan is being drawn up by both art professors and art students in Seoul to disperse edited images and sounds of London’s young people confronting the police.

It is precisely against this background, what the media historian Boris Groys has identified as a “resistance in the name of art’s autonomy, that is, in the name of the equality of all art forms and media” that the battle lines of the 21st century will be drawn. On one side we have the Dear Leader Kim Jong Il who thinks of himself first and foremost as an artist, the final arbiter of the public Image; his movies, paintings, sculptures, operas, and many texts speaks to the newest iteration of China’s public art theory that the nation state itself is the purest form of Art. On the other side we have a number of South Korean arts institutions attempting to remind the public of the egalitarian projects of the here and now, and how we can steel ourselves to resist the dictatorship of contemporary taste. It is my profound hope that this dual aesthetic understanding of the East Asian peninsula will further clarify how we understand the ongoing relationship between us, China, and the developing world.

From whatever angle you approach it, we can not underestimate the aesthetic virtue of the image - whether it is the particular image of London’s black youths in the streets forcing the police to back away or the general Image of the North African uprisings. A powder trail links what in each event has not let itself be captured by a teleology. If we see a succession of movements hurrying one after the other, without leaving anything visible behind them, it must nonetheless be admitted that a series of questions persists: How does a situation of generalized rioting become an insurrectionary situation? What to do once the streets have been taken? What is the practical meaning of deposing power locally? How do we proceed the day after? How do we decide? How do we subsist?

As defenders and patrons of the arts in the developed world it seems to certain of us, especially now, that we have approached the edge of a plateau. Revolutions recast twenty times suddenly take shape. At that point the bitter pill that normally seizes us when faced with the certainty of failure fades. We stop losing ourselves in the labyrinth of art fairs, new media art, and relational aesthetics. From one art opening to the next, it is suddenly enough for us to witness an uprising for a link to appear. Directions that seemed contradictory cease to be so. Of course, it is easy to be disheartened by the recent wave of mindless looting and violence in London’s streets. But don’t you go believing, reader, that art institutions can once again retreat into the background. Comrades, let us continue on this path we have stumbled upon earlier this year. If the Ayatollah’s call to murder a novelist was a hinge moment for a previous generation, the Chinese government’s kidnapping of a visual artist is our hinge moment. Ai Weiwei’s release is merely the beginning.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Author of One Break, A Thousand Blows, Maxi Kim’s forthcoming book Did Somebody Say North Korea? confronts one of the pervasive myths of our time: that North Korea is a Communist regime led by a Stalinist dictator that will, with time, disintegrate like the Soviet Union. He currently splits his time between San Francisco and Los Angeles.

East End My Cradle, the modern classic first published by Faber in 1940 and republished three times since - most recently this February by Faber Finds - was the subject of a mini-conference held recently at Queen Mary University of London, fittingly the London University campus of the East End. Goldman has been called “a sort of Proust of the Whitechapel Road” and compared - favourably - with Dickens, Gissing and Gorky, yet his work has suffered neglect since the ’40s, even East End My Cradle. His photo in Penguin New Writing of 1940 is placed alongside those of Eliot, Auden, Isherwood, Dylan Thomas, Graham Greene and a handful of others, yet of them, his name alone is not widely recognised. Yet this is the literary company he really belongs in, though to be sure he can be discussed alongside such Jewish writers of the East End as Israel Zangwill (Children of the Ghetto) and Simon Blumenfeld (Jew Boy). He can, that is to say, be bracketed with ‘Jewish [or Anglo-Jewish] writers’ or with ‘working-class writers’ but his quality transcends the limitations implied by these categories.

The first speaker at the QMUL conference was Prof. Valentine Cunningham of Corpus Christi College Oxford, who gave his usual brilliant performance for his 15-minute talk, demonstrating a knowledge of, familiarity with and understanding of Willy Goldman’s works that set the tone for an excellent conference. Valentine Cunningham devoted several pages to Goldman’s work in his British Writers of the Thirties (1987) and also wrote a full-page obituary for him in the Guardian in 2009, when Willy died aged 99. Two of the speakers were Anglo-Jewish academics, one of them being Tony Kushner who spoke on East End historiography, the other being David Cesarani, who had interviewed Willy in 1987, for the Jewish Chronicle.

Cesarani seemed a little piqued that, as he saw it, Goldman had portrayed East End Jewry in a negative light, had not written about the plight of the European Jews, who were under the Nazi regime at the time, nor about the Battle of Cable Street. It seemed a negative “list” of what Goldman had allegedly left out of his books. When Goldman’s son was interviewed by Dr Nadia Valman after the speakers had done, he pointed out that in fact, Goldman had married his first wife in order to help her escape Nazi Germany and obtain a British passport; Valentine Cunningham pointed out from the floor that there was indeed at least one character in one of the novels who was a European Jew, and that the Battle of Cable Street was mentioned too. The writer’s own avowed aim had always been “to get the East End down on paper” as he said himself at the time. As Valentine Cunningham wrote privately after the conference, “He was … more a sniffer-out of bad odours (Orwell style) than a lovely whiffs of Chicken Soup with Barley man.“

William Goldman Jnr also told the conference that Willy Goldman’s first wife used to live in Vienna, where she had regular meetings with the leader of the underground resistance to Hitler. She passed the information thus obtained to the Daily Worker (the title of Britain’s Communist newspaper before it became the Morning Star). The mainstream press were always amazed at the Daily Worker’s up-to-date information about what Hitler’s forces in Vienna were up to, my father told me.

Ian Haywood gave a brilliant talk in which he placed Goldman in the tradition of working-class writers, thus providing another perspective on “this good writer” as Prof Cunningham called him. Goldman Jnr, the son of the author, who is also the present writer, very much enjoyed being interviewed and responding to questions, at the end. The event was well-attended; those who had been sent invitations were sent 20% discounts on the book with them. It is hoped that this conference served to promote and arouse new interest in Goldman’s work. The tradition of the East End’s welcoming refugees from different countries in each generation continues. They enrich our culture, but only occasionally does one of them prove to be a genius.

After the conference, four of us went exploring the East End a little, in particular to find some of the streets Willy Goldman mentioned a lot while alive. We found a couple, as well as the synagogue, now a mosque, in Brick Lane that he used to attend reluctantly as a boy.

The present writer can testify, as Willy’s son, that he did indeed keep up his stance of being “a sniffer-out of bad odours (Orwell style)” right to the end. In his late 70s he took part in a radio panel for Radio 4, the other members including a bishop who said something about ‘mellowing with age’. The interviewer turned to Willy and asked him if he had mellowed with age. ‘”Mellowing with age?”, responded Willy, “sounds like corruption to me.’

Willy was an activist writer, yet human feeling always came first, not ideology. That is why he left the Young Communists when he was about 19, disillusioned by Stalin’s purges as well as by the behaviour of the Stepney Communist Party, whom he likened to the revolutionaries in Dostoevsky’s The Possessed (or The Devils as it’s more recently been translated).

East End My Cradle includes a couple of chapters that have been published separately as short stories, one of them in particular, a tale of first love and TB, being called “a work of genius”. Willy’s last original book, The Forgotten Word, was not set in the East End at all and has been said to anticipate the Angry Young Men of the following decade. It was also said at the time to represent a whole stage up in Goldman’s literary ambition and achievement.

He did write a story in 1950 (or ’51) that came second in the Observer short story competition of that year; a story by Muriel Spark came first, but H.E. Bates thought Willy’s story superior. It is a funny, moving and touching tale about his father, an East End Jew from Moldavia who hardly spoke English and who went around the streets pushing his barrow and calling out “Ripe fish!”, despite his children’s remonstrances with him that “ripe” was not the appropriate adjective to use for fish. This man was cajoled and bullied by his wife into applying for a job in a local, Jewish-owned or at least -run department store, as a Father Christmas for the season. Of course he transferred his liking for the epithet “ripe” to this job, calling out “Ripe toys!”, ’til the manager reasoned with and persuaded him to change it. I do not know how much, if any, of the story is true, but the characterisations of the mother and father certainly are.

In the early 1950s he produced a book of short stories collected from the 1940s and published together in 1952, called Some Blind Hand and with the handwritten inscription by Willy: “In memory of the days of hunger and love”. Also in the very early 1950s, living in a Somerset village called Butleigh, Willy Goldman conceived and edited a little magazine, the Butleigh Beacon, which, while offering genuine local information to villagers, also had a satirical strain to it that anticipated Private Eye. It seems good that this good writer has not disappeared from public attention, but that his book about the East End - the best one about the Jewish East End - continues to be read.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Bill Goldman, born London 1950, grew up in the Home Counties, mostly. Between taking hallucinogens and helping the striking miners’ pickets, he managed to fail his degree first time around at Essex University. Subsequently investigated poverty, madness, and the derangement of the senses, found them wanting. “Surprised by joy” in Christ, completed a PhD in poetry, lived in Paris, Beijing, Hangzhou for four years altogether, teaching English in universities and backpacking round Tibet and amazing places such as Guizhou, the Heavenly Lake, Lake Karakul, Yunnan and Vietnam. Now back in England, preparing doctoral thesis for publication as a book.