Morogroves

I have officially given up on Blogger

2011-08-02T17:28:00.000+02:00

This entire blog has now migrated to http://greenhamsam.posterous.com. Viva la Posterous!

How designers, developers and project managers see each other

2011-08-01T15:18:00.001+02:00

Via @robstokes

All I want for Christamas is a teacup pig

2011-08-01T15:07:00.000+02:00

I mean, just look at them.

Zombie vs. baby

2011-07-29T09:15:00.001+02:00

Google + users are nearly all male

2011-07-21T11:35:00.001+02:00

http://mashable.com/2011/07/14/google-plus-male/

Interesting titbit from Mashable.

“SocialStatistics, a third-party site that gathers data from select profiles, pegs the percentage of male users at 86.8%, while FindPeopleOnPlus, which curates information from about a million users, says men constitute 73.7% of Google+.”

Cut the Rope - Android App Review

2011-07-21T11:34:00.000+02:00

Originally published on www.girlguides.co.za

Casual game for Android or iOS
Physics-based puzzle game
Adorable and addictive

You know sometimes you start playing a game that leads you to tell friends you can’t come out tonight because you have some horrible incurable disease (when actually you just really, really need to get to the next level)? Well, this is one of those games.

Cut the Rope has been an obsession of mine for months. Until very recently, it was an Apple-only app, and the reason I would sneak off with the office iPad and hide in the corner, making strange “om nom nom” noises. Thankfully, it’s now been released for Android, so this strange behaviour of mine can now cease.

The premise of the game is quite simple: you have a pet frog-monster thing. But it’s adorable. And it eats candy. So far, it seems like the game was designed by a 5 year old, I know. But essentially, below the cute bubbly graphics, it’s a very clever puzzle game that requires you to get candy to the frog by manipulating it through a series of tools (mainly rope and bubbles) to get to the frog, collecting stars along the way for additional points.

The physics of the engine are quite advanced and the game feels very accurate and tactile. It’sbeautifully responsive and snappy to play, and the silly graphics make you fall in love with it. It’s the perfect game for people who have an oral fixation, because that little frog makes the most satisfying “GHOUM” noise when it bites into its candy. I dare you not to “om nom nom” along with that damn cartoon frog. I dare you.

The animation of the frog is great. He’s responsive to your movements as you play, following the path of the candy with his eyes and opening his mouth in expectation whenever you get close to him. He even manages a look of painfully sincere disappointment if you miss. Maybe it’s just me, and maybe I love food too much, but I feel an emotional connection to that frog.

The game is a good balance between rational pre-planning and fast-paced timing: even if you’ve planned out your route perfectly, you still have to cut the rope at exactly the right moment or lose the momentum of your swing. This keeps you highly engaged. I found I was happy to replay levels over and over again to improve on my score. There are also hundreds of levels, so you can (and will) play for hours.

Downsides? The game doesn’t make use of the accelerometer, although instinct still has you tilting your phone all over the place (and no doubt looking like a chop as you do so). It also has a high propensity to cause you to make funny faces to mirror your frog. I know that it’s not just me who does this. I have watched someone else playing the game and they did exactly the same thing. I have PROOF! Proof, I tell you! *twitch, mumble…*

It’s a very addictive game. Try it; that little animated frog might steal your heart like it stole mine.

Turn ons

Mentally challenging
Adorable
Very satisfying to play

Turn offs

You look stupid playing it
You will develop a deep hatred for spiders, that will rival only your hatred of green pigs who steal eggs

Price: Just under R7 from the Android Marketplace

(Apparently, you can download it for free from m.getjar.com (click ‘quick download’ at the bottom of the page and type in 75206), but I couldn’t get this to work on my phone)

Browser wars

2011-07-21T11:30:00.002+02:00

Via @http://alt-tab.org/

Hair

2011-07-21T11:28:00.001+02:00

I have no idea who this guy is, but his hair is amazing.

via http://72dotsperinch.blogspot.com/2008_11_01_archive.html

Disturbance

2011-06-15T08:24:00.001+02:00

For the third time since moving to Johannesburg, I was awoken last night at 4am to the sound of gunshots right outside my window. My flat is directly opposite a large public park, and a river, and I believe that people are taken there from nearby Alexandra township to be murdered. The worst was the accompanying sound of a French man screaming, over and over again, “Comment? Comment? Comment?” (“How? How? How?”).

Ah, Johannesburg.

Nixon in China

2011-03-10T21:42:00.000+02:00

I watched a filmed version of the Met's Nixon in China last night by the incomparable John Adams. It's an incredible work, and fascinating how good a subject for opera modern politics makes.

Enjoy a yummy clip above - that's the sublime Kathleen Kim singing 'I am the wife of Mao Tse-Tung', my favourite bit.

Bittereinder - Not Another SA Rap Outfit

2011-02-27T00:13:00.000+02:00

Bittereinder, definitely one of the SA bands I'm most excited about right now. Check out 'Tale of 3 Cities' - probably their most accessible - but the whole album is worthwhile.

Unfortunately, too many people seem to be immediately jumping onto the 'they're the new Parow/Die Antwoord. They really aren't - they're serious and considered rather than ironic.

Between these guys and Spoek Mathambo, I'm seriously excited about SA music at the moment.

HTC Wildfire - First Impressions

2011-02-27T00:05:00.000+02:00

Originally published on GirlGuides

I’m not sure I’m going to be able to do justice to this review, folks. Seriously, the phone could be a hand-me-down Windows 7 phone with all the buttons missing and I would still think it was space-age technology, as long as it doesn’t advertise its top feature as ‘FM Radio’. (Yup. Some people still think that ‘FM Radio’ is a feature worth advertising.)
Here it is, out of the box and in my hand. In fact, it’s unlikely to ever leave my hand again. I give little squeals of pleasure every time I stroke its lovely shiny screen. People in the office think I’m cracking up.
So, stay tuned as I take my first happy steps into smartphonedom and experience the joys and sorrows of touchscreens, autocorrect and app stores for the very first time. I may even get around to listing the features of the HTC Wildfire along the way.

It's Me, on ZA Tech Show!

2011-02-27T00:02:00.000+02:00

Big excitement for me... I was a guest on ZA Tech Show last week. This has always been one of those big dreams and it feels *friggen super*.

http://zatech.co.za/podcasts/episode-149/

Supa Strikas... and Tron?

2011-02-13T22:14:00.000+02:00

The cover of 'Supa Strikas!' caught my eye this week. Notice the Tron-esque rival team? Awesome genre-bending.

Supa Strikas could really be a great comic book, were it not for the uncomfortable product placements... and the vague sense that it's actually written by white guys trying to be hip.

Jonathan Franzen on Depression

2011-01-23T23:01:00.000+02:00

Does any modern author write depression as well as Franzen? I love this quote from How to be Alone - his collection of essays.

"Depression presents itself as a realism regarding the rottenness of the world in general and the rottenness of your life in particular. But the realism is merely a mask for depression's actual essence, which is an overwhelming estrangement from humanity. The more persuaded you are of your unique access to the rottenness, the more afraid you become of engaging with the world; and the less you engage with the world, the more perfidiously happy-faced the rest of humanity seems for continuing to engage with it."

Why I'm Not Ready to Abandon my RSS Reader for Twitter

2011-01-22T16:24:00.000+02:00

Ah, Twitter. The maniacal, THC-twitchy jabbering voice in the corner of my screen. Snippets of friends telling me a million-bajillion snippets of interesting information throughout the day and night. Yes, I'm addicted. I can't get enough. But I am not - despite the repeated urgings of my favourite tech blogs - going to let it replace my RSS reader anytime soon. Here's why.

Twitter is noisy - Yes, it's easy to unfollow people who are uninteresting, but there's still just too much stuff to keep up with. If you have a bit of an OCD disorder about information, like me, you like to take time to carefully go through things you want to read, mark them as read, and file them if they're interesting. There's just too much on Twitter to give you any sense of control, and too much of it is about other people's breakfasts.
Twitter is an echo chamber - The power of the RT is incredible, but it does mean that you're exposed to the same articles and memes over and over again. More than that, everyone is too similar on Twitter, which means that you'll hear the same opinions voiced all the time. There just aren't enough conservative pro-lifers on Twitter (or corporate whores, or Julius Malemas) for debates to ever get very interesting.
Twitter is too geeky - Building on this, everyone on Twitter (pretty much de facto) is a geek. Much as I love geeks (and am a geek) this limits the conversation to what matters to a very skewed, niche community. When Apple makes an announcement about a minor employee sneezing, it causes a tidal wave on Twitter. When a Nobel-winning author releases a new novel, barely a ripple. If you have interests that fall outside of the geek realm, you'll need an RSS reader to keep up with the times.
RSS is quiet time - Maybe I'm just a bit antisocial, but I like the fact that going through my RSS reader is totally solitary and private. I can share articles if I want to, but I can also choose to keep some stuff in reserve for interesting dinner party conversation that everyone won't already have heard on Twitter.
Twitter doesn't cater for your (odd) interests - It's difficult to find people to follow on Twitter if you have very eclectic/eccentric interests, but it's easy to find that blog on medieval cartography or (ehem) Victorian pornographic knitting, if that's your thing.
Twitter is a democracy - Which is awesome, but sometimes you don't want to judge the truth by popular opinion. When it comes to matters like hardcore science, I'd much rather read one or two journals that I trust than try to distinguish the truth from the memes in the Twittersphere.

I still believe there's a space for the RSS reader in the Twitterized world, regardless of what popular opinion (mainly voiced through Twitter) is saying.

Community, Identity, Stability

2011-01-22T15:51:00.000+02:00

I've just finished reading Brave New World - and I'm struck by how complex a piece of science fiction it is. Usually touted as 'Dystopian Fiction', it somehow evades such a simple reading. Although many aspects of Huxley's imagined future world - the eugenics, mindlessness, infant conditioning - are typical components of visions of a nightmare future, the whole is much more morally ambiguous.

Totally misleading, but very amusing, cover from one of the early printings

Brave New World is often held up as the antithesis to Orwell's 1984, since Orwell imagines a future dominated by Spartan state control whilst Huxley imagines a future dominated by pleasure. This isn't entirely accurate. The characters in Brave New World live absolutely according to their whims; disappointment, social rejection and lacking are unknown. But those very whims are pre-conditioned into them as young children - so that people become the agents of their own control. What's complex, is that this leads to a future of total happiness and stability for everyone. How can we feel that people are oppressed by being forced to be happy?

Isn't there something in living dangerously?"
"There's a great deal in it," the Controller replied. "Men and women must have their adrenals stimulated from time to time."
"What?" questioned the Savage, uncomprehending.
"It's one of the conditions of perfect health. That's why we've made the V.P.S. treatments compulsory."
"V.P.S.?"
"Violent Passion Surrogate. Regularly once a month. We flood the whole system with adrenalin. It's the complete physiological equivalent of fear and rage. All the tonic effects of murdering Desdemona and being murdered by Othello, without any of the inconveniences."
"But I like the inconveniences."
"We don't," said the Controller. "We prefer to do things comfortably."
"But I don't want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin."
"In fact," said Mustapha Mond, "you're claiming the right to be unhappy."
"All right then," said the Savage defiantly, "I'm claiming the right to be unhappy."

Historical sources indicate that Huxley was very aware of his own ambivalence towards the Brave New World he had imagined. Before World War II, he had written publicly in favour of eugenics as a solution to class wars, economic collapse and the 'deterioration' of the human spirit. Funnily, he was much more troubled by his first visit to America where he first witnessed the pleasure-driven, consumer lifestyle of the US 1920s. This strange combination between an idea he was repulsed by and an idea he thought could be the saviour of humanity seems to be the reason for the novel's shifting moral ambiguity.

The Savage, raised in a reserve outside of this new society, seeing through the readers' eyes, is horrified by the infantilism, godlessness and hypersexuality of this world. But at the same time, the reader can't help but be aware of the fact that the Savage's community is shown as barbaric, frightful and equally morally corrupt (with a religious self-righteousness only too familiar). The situation becomes impossible for the Savage - unable to reconcile his desires and his guilt - he ends his life.

It's an unsettling novel with no clear conclusion (unless, perhaps, Huxley's final utopian work, Island, is seen as the resolution to Brave New World's problems). It remains as challenging and relevant in 2011 as it was in 1932.

How to decide if you're ready for Linux

2010-11-12T13:19:00.000+02:00

Originally published on GirlGuides

You may have heard of it, you've been thinking about it for a while, but you're not sure if you're geeky enough to make it as a Linux user.

What is Linux?

Linux is an operating system that was first created as a hobby by a student at the University of Helsinki in Finland. The fact that it's freely distributed, incredibly functional, adaptable and very robust has made it the main alternative for those who are fed up with the Mac OS X or have had it to death with Microsoft Windows.

Here is the quick list of things to think about, if you're considering making the switch.

Install Linux because:

It makes you feel good – by installing Linux you are supporting the Open Source movement and ultimately making the world a better place.
Free is the best price – not only is the Linux OS completely free, but it opens up a world of software that you can install freely, too. Rather than hunting madly on the Internet for an app that does X and is free, and then being bombarded with notices that it's going to install another programme you didn't want and change your automatic browser settings, and braving the risk of downloading viruses with this software... you could rather have a beautiful, neat software directory with one-click download. Search for whatever you're looking to do, Linux will suggest the best programme and install it for you in one step. You can find software to do just about everything – complex or simple – at the step of a button.
You never have to feel like a criminal again – one of the most awful things about Mac and Windows is that they constantly make you feel like a criminal or a potential criminal, even if you have obtained the software legitimately. There are security checks on security checks every time you try to do something. Woe upon you if you ever lose your disk or serial number. Upgrading is a nightmare and you have to pay an astronomical fee if you ever want to install a newer version of the OS. You'll never have to deal with that again on Linux.
You can make it work however you want it to – Mac-like gestures? A dock? Multiple desktops in a cube arrangement that you can rotate? Window buttons of the left today instead of the right? Sure. Go wild. Changing your settings is as easy as changing your shoes. And it's not just the aesthetic things that are fully customisable, either – you have power over every aspect of your OS. Awesome for control freaks or anyone who likes things just so.
It's a great operating system (OS) – the more you use it, the more you'll understand the power, stability and superior usability that Linux offers you. It's a pleasure to use: everything just works logically and elegantly. Programmes running on Linux feel like they're more deeply integrated into the core software and they work together better, since there's no commercial interest encouraging programmers to ensure that their programmes are dominant. This means that instead of thinking about your operating system as a shell that houses a number of disparate, incompatible programmes vying for your attention, you can start to think of your OS as an organism with interconnected parts all working in tandem to help you accomplish your goals.

Don't install Linux if:

You're a graphic designer or your job requires very specific proprietary software ¬– this can include MS Office, by the way. You can get most things to work on Linux with enough patience, but it can't be guaranteed and it WILL be a mission involving CodeWeaver or WINE, virtual machines or dual-booting. If you can't do anything without Adobe's Creative Suite – rather get a Mac.
You're a hardcore gamer – again, you can probably get it to work, but it might always work with some bugs. If you're serious about gaming, you probably want to stick to Windows.
You regularly connect to a network at work – another thing that shouldn't, in theory, be a problem, but in practice often is. Depending on how the server at the office is set up, you may have to live with ongoing 'quirks' with the network. It's not fun, and don't expect IT Support to be very sympathetic when you go to them with a Linux problem that's preventing you from connecting to the Internet.
You don't like spending a lot of time on your computer – even though Linux distributions like Linux Mint, Ubuntu and Kubuntu get even more user-friendly and easy to use every year, there are still going to be times when you need to spend a good couple of hours plugging away to get something to work (this shouldn't happen often, but it will happen occasionally). If you want everything to be plug-and-play all the time, and you never want to invest time in your OS, then keep it simple and stick to Windows or Mac.
You have a weird local Internet Service Provider – when I first made the switch to Linux, it took me about three months (seriously, three months) to get the Internet working, because I had an uncommon iBurst USB modem. I've subsequently helped friends also struggling to get other local services running, and it's often a bit of a mission. A lot of improvements have been made to more recent distributions (like Ubuntu 10.10) and you're fine if you have wireless or a modem that connects via an Ethernet cable. But bear in mind that if you have a USB modem and an unusual ISP, you're likely to run into issues.
You hate change – if you make the switch, you'll soon find that things are a lot more familiar than you anticipate (don't worry about your screen looking like The Matrix). That said, you'll definitely have to adjust some habits.

Don't worry about:

Not knowing how to code – long gone are the days where using Linux meant being a hardcore computer nerd. Linux has become more and more user-friendly over the years, and there are now numerous different distribution options that can make using Linux being as easy as using Windows or a Mac (one distribution, Linux Mint, in fact aims to replicate the Windows OS as closely as possible). There may be occasional times when you need to enter in a few lines of script, but tutorials online are so comprehensive that it's really a case of copying and pasting what they tell you to do.
It being a constant hassle – apart from the first month or so when you're learning your way around, Linux is amazingly easy to use.

Happy Linuxing!

Margie Orford: the Queen of Crime Fiction

2010-07-11T15:23:00.000+02:00

Shameless self-promotion alert...

Before it goes off the shelves, get yourself a copy of the 7th Wordsetc journal to read my cover story on Margie Orford: the Queen of South African Crime Fiction.

An extract:

It has been 15 years since the dream of the Rainbow Nation became a working blueprint. In that time, South African literature has undergone a crisis in self-definition. The protest novel, which had been the only really acceptable form for so long, was suddenly made redundant. Many have said that the first decade after 1994 was a generally sterile period for South African writers, as we sat in bewilderment, waiting to see whether this new democracy we had given birth to would be living or stillborn. But over the past few years, South African publishers have seen what began as a trickle turn into a flood of local books, as our writers finally felt free again to write about subjects other than race. We are witnessing the re-humanising of our writers: they are remembering about love, about family, about greed and sex ... and about the dark parts of the human mind.

If the past 15 years of South African literature has been about coming to terms with our past, then it seems that we are finally starting to come to terms with our present. And our present, as we all know, is defined by crime. Thus it should come as no surprise that some of our highest grossing local writers write about murders. Deon Meyer, Mike Nicol, Jassie Mackenzie, Andrew Brown and Richard Kunzmann are just a few of the writers who are making a killing by writing killings. One writer who seems to be emerging as a major figure on the local scene is Cape Town-based krimi Margie Orford, who's third novel, Daddy's Girl (Jonathan Ball), hit the shelves this October.

For more, get a copy of Wordsetc at any good SA bookstore.

Umbilical

2009-10-07T19:55:00.000+02:00

In a world overlaying this one
where you never left and things
never changed -

we are sitting, right now,
on your bed, smoking and drinking tea,
just back from the gym.

You are reading me your thoughts
out of the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius,
whilst I ponder

the reason for the lonely tugging of my heart,
which can feel your absence,
even from here.

A Modern Love Song

2009-10-01T21:27:00.000+02:00

Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediment, except,
Of course, those practical considerations of time and distance,
I must have time to finish my degree after all, and you,
Well, we both know you've got important things on your mind.

Let me not to the marriage of true desires admit impediment,
Except if you want to travel later, or if you hate my friends,
Or if you get jealous or if I get bored, or if either of us
Decides to be gay, there'll be no hard feelings of course

It's all a bit outdated these days, anyway.

A Hymn to Mowbray

2009-10-01T21:06:00.000+02:00

Ossewa trolley, where do you go
In the nighttime, carrying your cargo
Of ragged clothes and rotten food,
Tattered cardboard to build frayed shelter,
And scruffy discards with which to build a
Memory?

Ossewa trolley, the squeaking wheels
Of your street serenade, bassline
To the calling melodies of the Trolley Men
The Mowbray Men, the Men who live
Their lives in public, who take tea
Outside the 7/11

Ossewa trolley, where do you go
With a load as big as that lady's groceries,
With a home as big as that lady's
Groceries, where do you go in the
Nighttime, is there a journey of streets?
Is there a journey of memory?

Do you squeak along the trails of the
Empty mountain, do you rattle a worship
To the Togo, a song for the old clay
That saw itself and laughed, remember
Displacement, remember Da Gama, remember
And ask, old ossewa of the new streets:

Where is this
Future
They spoke of?

I'm going with route B

2009-09-08T13:41:00.000+02:00

Biological advantage & the Semenya debate

2009-08-24T20:14:00.000+02:00

Caster Semenya - athletic golden girl and the locus of last week's unfortunate gender controversy - has caused me to become interested in sport for the first time in a long time.

Bracketing the "racist" argument pushed by political infants like Julius Malema and the YCL (the sort of tripe it's best to just ignore), I am personally more interested in the question of "unfair biological advantage" and gender.

On one level, even the sports-ignorant like me can understand the logic of splitting sporting competition on gendered lines. It's not only that the average man is stronger, faster and more agile than the average woman, but that entire spectrum of male physical achievement has very different boundaries to the physical achievements of women. The woman who excels is likely to still fall far short of the male who exceeds expectations in the same discipline. So yes, of course, sport is one place where gender discrimination makes sense, since it's better that women compete in a"B" team than not at all.

But no one can tell you better than nerdy, glasses-wearing, can't-catch-a-ball types like me, that sport is built on "unfair biological advantages". In fact, the very phrase "unfair biological advantage" is redundant. Aren't all biological advantages, by definition, unfair? (Yes, Nozak, you heard me)

We do not try to factor out the "unfair biological advantage" of Carribean sprinters or East European Gymnasts. In fact, I'm tempted to go so far as to say that all sports are, to some degree, (and don't shoot me here) like dog shows: where what we award is physical pedigree. There doesn't seem to be anything wrong with this, either. The human body is a marvellous thing; its splendor something to be appreciated.

But back to Semenya. Let's assume, as it seems likely, that although she's a "girl" in the genital sense, she is an XX with a high level of testosterone or an XXY with non-developed or internal male sex organs. Either of these cases would, inarguably, give her an "unfair biological advantage" against her competitors. But this, to me, is an empirical question, and less interesting.

The more interesting one: when does a "biological advantage", in the realm of biological contest, become unfair?

Who's Running the Country?

2009-07-30T20:52:00.000+02:00

asks Gwede Mantashe, Secretary General of the ANC, at a recent Wits Business School talk on the ANC's new governmental accountability unit.

Gwede Mantashe locks his hands around a bloated belly, his undeniably Motlante-esque beard squaring out an otherwise soft face. He smiles as though half-dozing, whilst the MC introduces him to the audience. And yet, when he stands to speak, he turns these assumptions on their toes: for a man that appears so gradfatherly, Mantashe speaks with unexpected candour and vibrance.

Mantashe has chosen to speak about governmental accountability, and the ANC's role in monitoring and evaluating public servents. It is a thorny issue, cutting to the heart of the party-state divide and the practicalities that interfere. He acknowledges the problem immediately: "Is it appropriate," he asks, "where there is no constituency-based system, for the ANC to ensure that public representatives are held accountable"? For him, he soon makes clear, the answer is yes; but it is a well-considered yes, one that remains fully cogniscent of the complexities of the question.

Newspaper editorials are turning it into a question of 'who is running the country?', Gwede continues. But for him, it is not a question of power, but of responsibility. "Policies determine political elections," Mantashe claims, perhaps somewhat naively. "The ANC was elected by society because of the promises that it made during its campaigning. Now, we must deliver." This is the central reason, he believes, that the party is not only entitled, but is in fact mandated, to ensure service delivery by the state.

Ongoing strikes since the ANC was re-elected, many of which take the form of marches to Luthuli House rather than to Pretoria, seem to indicate that the populace agrees with him.

And up till this point, so would I.

But it is with the effortless sidestep that Mantashe makes into issues at the core of political policy that this simple logic becomes confused. Suddenly, he brings up Polokwane, speaking about the spirit of Communism having reasserted itself against the "forces of decay" that were creeping into the ANC. And this is where his grandfatherly musing becomes something very different.

"The policies of the movement are not up for discussion," he says, as though there is no debate on economic approaches even within the ANC itself. "All of the issues are already decided in the ANC manifesto." He goes on to argue that the debates that formed (in the past, of course, before the Polokwane Renaissance) around the correct response to HIV/AIDS and economic transformation (GEAR) were nothing but squabbles between individuals - "individual passions" in his words - but that the Party's single, inviolable policy remained incontested.

This discussion begins to take on bizarre overtones as he starts to speak of the Party as a third person, saying "the party needs to keep its eye on its strategy." Suddenly, we are far into the realm of Leninist rhetoric, and that, Toto, ain't in Kansas anymore.

Ironically, Mantashe gave this speech just one day after announcing that the nationalisation of the mines issue was "up for discussion" - clearly, at least some things are still on the table for debate. Later though, when the topic is brought up during the Q&A, he labels this an issue of pragmatics, not of principle.

"The Freedom Charter is not a nostalgic document," he says, arguing that it is still the guiding blueprint for the ANC's utopian future. "But," he continues, "we must be systematic about it, not emotional." In the end, he says, he would like to see the mines fully nationalised, but believes that will require a careful, step-by-step process. In saying that "the issue should be opened for discussion," discussion was really all he intended, not believing that SA is ready for the actualisation of its ideals.

Perhaps this is not an unreasonable position, but it is certainly not as reassuring as a Realpolitik approach; discussions of the here-and-now; the muddiness and pragmatism of politics. In fact, listening, I realised that there is nothing quite so discomfiting as a politician driven by ideals.

And this is the heart of what is worrying about Mantashe's call for the ANC to implement accountability structures for "its" public servents: to what extent would such an initiative be driven by a genuine desire for public accountability, and to what extent will it be a way to ensure that "the Party keeps its eye on its strategy"?

Mantashe is not perturbed by the issue of the strikes to Luthuli House (what he calls the "Go to Gwede" mentality), claiming that such marches are testimony to the ANC's role as mediator, not as proxy government. He seems to imply that not being government suits his goals, in fact, calling the ANC the "key strategic locus of power" that has the power to influence all other spheres - whether the economy, the state, alliance partners, SOEs ... "The ANC must not be relegated into an absentee landlord who's only invited to visit around election time," he chuckles.

But perhaps I am being too hard on him. After all, isn't more accountability always a good thing, as long as it does not become thought-control? And there is some resonance in Gwede's quip that the ANC "can't just wait until our leaders are assessed by the opposition and the Mail and Guardian" (later he laughingly adds that he sometimes thinks the M&G's annual minister scorecard is overly generous).

Mantashe himself does try to stress that the ANC's evaluation unit will supplement, not replace, the presidential evaluation unit. He insists that his system will not be cripplingly beurocratic or micromanaging.

But in the end, there are some phrases that Mantashe uses, in his amazingly likeable, disarmingly jolly voice, that seem to echo in the room. "We need to strengthen collective decision making," he says. "We must ensure that ANC's representatives in government are doing the work of the party and not parliament"; that they remain loyal to the "constituency" rather than the "office". Quite an equivocation, that.

But, Gwede, what happens when the party's interests are not the interests of the constituency?

Then, are voting South Africans still running the country?

Cheap, Dirty, Addictive

2009-07-01T22:54:00.000+02:00

Everyone is wining about the Eskom tariff hike. But cheap electricity has done more harm than good.

At approximately 21c/KWh, South Africa's electricity price was one of the lowest in the world. Cheap electricity may sound like a blessing in a country where large segments of the population are still not supplied with power at all, but cheap electricity has encouraged bad energy habits that may be much, much more costly in the long run than we realise.

A brief look into the secret history of South Africa's cheap electricity shines some uncomfortable light onto our current energy practices, and demonstrates the importance of nationwide, systematic change.

Fact: we are supplied almost exclusively by coal-produced electricity

Economic sanctions placed on the Apartheid government lead to an urgent desire for energy independence. Taking advantage of our rich mineral supplies, we developed a highly productive coal-based electricity production system. Because coal and cheap labour were both so readily available, this system was able to produce a large amount of electricity for a very low price. However, this came at an enormous human and environmental price.

Today, nearly 80% of our electricity is produced through coal-powered steam turbine generators. South Africa now produces 224 tones of marketable coal every year, making it the fifth largest coal-producing country in the world (and the third largest exporter).

The under-pricing of electricity has caused South Africans to become addicted to habits of energy wastage.

Fact: the real cost of electricity is higher than you think

Ash, sulphur, nitrogen oxides, organic compounds, heavy metals, radioactive elements, greenhouse gasses ... creating electricity out of coal results in more forms of waste than any other energy source.

Burning coal to make electricity releases large volumes of Carbon Dioxide, one of the main greenhouse gasses. South Africa is the 11th highest emitter of CO2 in the world, and is responsible for 40% of Africa's greenhouse gas emissions. Coal pollution not only contributes to global warming, but it also has disastrous local environmental effects: contributing to land degradation, acid rain and smog. Communities living close to coal power stations are at a high risk of health problems like respiratory diseases.

The cost of electricity that used to appear on our electricity bills was deceptively low. To get an accurate reflection of the cost of electricity, we should have been taking into account:
- the loss of agricultural revenue due to land degradation resulting from coal pollution
- the cost of healthcare for people affected by coal-pollution-induced respiratory diseases, and coal mining accidents
- the likely international tariffs and trade barriers currently in the pipeline for countries that do not comply with international environmental standards
- the loss to our economy is our energy usage continues to outstrip our supply, resulting in continued blackouts
- the possibility that South Africa's coal reserves could run out in the next 50-150 years

The increased cost of electricity will not only fund Eskom's new build programme; it will also bring it some way closer to accurately portraying the real costs of energy production.

Fact: we are not yet doing enough to cut back on energy wastage

In 2007, South Africans were warned that we needed to start saving 10% of our electricity usage every year for the next five years, or our energy supply would be threatened. In early 2008, periodic blackouts demonstrated to us all with no uncertainty that our reserve margin was unsustainably low. But by October 2008, we had only managed to generate a measly saving of 0.4%.

Over the long term, South Africa needs to invest in clean, renewable sources of energy. Our green technologies already lag far behind those of other emerging countries. Brazil has been extremely successful in developing solar home systems in rural areas, wind farms, biomass power and photovoltaics. India has set up an entire ministry of New and Renewable Energy, which is successfully co-ordinating government investment in renewable energy technologies. China has become one of the world's leading investors in renewable energy, and in 2005 invested US$6-billion in renewable energy solutions.

Fact: we are faced with an unprecedented opportunity to alter our energy addiction

South Africa has never been in a better position to change its energy habits. Because the true cost of electricity is finally being made real to us, we are beginning to take pro-active steps to curb our addiction to cheap, polluting electricity.

We can easily reach our 10% target simply by making small changes to our homes and habits. From there, the opportunity is ours to explore the renewable energy sources of the future.

Short Story: Eyes on the Horizon

2009-06-28T19:42:00.002+02:00

In his never ending war against the local brats, Solomon had begun to play dirty. What choice did he have – the little bastards were a law unto themselves; they did it all just to torment him.

Their most recent game was blowing up the thorn bushes that peppered the landscape around the guard tower. They would set up their little bases at night, unnoticed by the night guards who had more interest in the paperback pornos they kept hidden under the radio than in the area they were supposed to be watching. In they would creep like so many cockroaches, then dig a hole and plant homemade bombs in plastic coke bottles. The next day, they would run right up to the perimeter fence, a red-faced Solomon yelling at them exasperatedly, and they’d chant “Guard Guard Guard big fat retard”, throw a match at the thorn bush and run away giggling.

Often their bombs did little more than flare up and get a few dead leaves smouldering. Sometimes, though, they were rewarded with a real explosion of twigs and sand.

Sometimes they took this a step further, and used the exploding thorn trees to distract Solomon whilst another boy snuk up behind, looking for gaps in the perimeter fence that they could sneak through. This was the essential aim of all their “games”, Solomon knew it. They were daring each other to get right into the base, past the guard tower, and to touch the Shack.

Once, months back, when they had set off a collection of Catherine Wheels that had nearly set fire to the truck, a boy had broken through the fence and was halfway to the Shack before Solomon spotted him. He had set off the alarm from the remote in his pocket and the dogs had immediately come roaring out of their enclosure. Solomon had nearly shat himself, he had never seen the dogs loose before, never looking so monstrous, never bounding on a person with maws open snarling and ready to tear. He’d panicked, and leapt in front of the boy with his tazer zapping the air. The dogs had retreated, and the boy had run away with eyes black with terror and urine dripping down his sticky legs.

Solomon never saw that boy again, but it seemed like there were fifty more that took his place. They seemed to breed underground like rats, and their taunting games never ended. By now he’d had it with the bush bombing. Determined to discourage them once and for all, he had spent the whole of yesterday digging up each and every thorn bush in a 20 meter radius around the fence. He was sure that it would discourage them for a while, at least, and that they would feel more vulnerable creeping around in the dark without any cover. Try to get around that you little bastards, he thought, leaning his chair back and stretching out his aching spine.

He had to admit, though, that the land around the guard tower looked even more dismal than usual. Patches of red clay earth showed up amongst the grass, like eczema on a cat. Winter was on its way and there had been no rain in weeks. The long grass was dead, the birds had flown north, and the only living sound was the droning buzz of insects. Insects never bloody die, Solomon thought. Just like those goddam kids.

Reaching for his flask for the first cup of coffee of the day, Solomon’s sun-weary eyes scanned the horizon. No kids, at least. No movement at all. His eyes would make their slow journey around the perimeter once every 15 minutes, all day long, until his shift ended at sunset. Their progress was involuntary, now, after years of sitting in the same chair, interrogating the same dreary field day after day. Unlike the night guards, he never got lazy. He could spend most of the day nearly asleep, his mind filled with nothing but the buzzing of the crickets, and his eyes would still move themselves at the allocated time to do their duty. Every 15 minutes, without fail.

Indeed, it was Solomon’s capacity for boredom that had allowed him to keep his job for all these years. Usually, guards didn’t last longer than a few months before the monotony became too much and they cracked. There was a new guy coming in tonight, actually. He would be joining Solomon at 5 o’clock every day for the next few weeks so that he could be run through the procedures before he took on the night shift permanently. Solomon was looking forward to the company.

The morning passed like this, Solomon daydreaming in his chair about new counterstrategies to foil the shenanegans of his prepubescent enemies, his eyes completing their quarter hour sweeps almost of their own volition. The sun climbed high in the sky, throwing harsh light and shadows across the grass until the scene appeared almost monochrome, broken only by the red graves of the thorn trees.

To any other eye, the scrubby veldt would offer little by way of amusement. Nothing bigger than dung beatle managed to scrape a living off the hard sand; even the vegetation seemed stunted by the dryness. But to Solomon, this landscape was an etch-a-sketch for his imaginings.

He began to picture forts. In each he imagined a tiny horde of boys. In this game, the boys could run half as fast as he could, but there were three forts dotted across the landscape, and about ten boys in each fort. Solomon had to run from one to the other, throwing a smoke bomb in each, and then had to get back to the tower. The boys would start to chase as soon as he threw the bomb in. He played with moving the forts around, adding more, changing the boys’ speed, imagining complex routes that would offer the best means of escape.

He made more coffee. He shifted to a new position in his chair. He let his mind turn off, and fell into his regular afternoon half-nap.

Two fifteen. His eyes started their methodical scan. They became fixed on a shadow in the far distance, and started tugging on his brain to wake up and have a look.

The shadow was new. It definitely wasn’t there 15 minutes ago.

Solomon reached for his binoculors, muttering mental curses at all 12 year old boys who had ever existed. The shadow was still too far for him to make it out clearly, but there was something decidedly person-shaped about it.

He kept the binoculers trained on the figure for the next hour. Once or twice it may have moved, but Solomon couldn’t be sure – it may have been nothing but heat mirage. Occassionally he thought he saw something glinting, like light off a mirror pair of binoculors. After about an hour had passed, the shadow suddenly dissappeared.

Solomon returned to his day. Coffee, lethargy, mind puzzles. After dutifully making a note of the occurrance in the log he had decided that it was probably nothing. Could be the kids, he thought, frustrated by his latest move and thinking up a new plan. Finally, as the sun began to roll down to the edge of the savannah, Solomon saw the new guard approaching. He seemed to be walking with a bit of a kwaito-boy unbalanced shuffle. His uniform was far too big for him, he observed. He was practically a boy. Am I getting that old? Solomon wondered.

The boy’s name was Marley, he said, after Bob Marley – and indeed, his eyes had the glazed-over, red-rimmed look of regular marajuana use. Solomon silently approved of this. The dope-heads seemed to be better at slowing down their minds, staving off the boredom. They made better guards, overall.

When Solomon had been married he had worked briefly for a cash in transit company, and had developed his own little dependency on marajuana because it was the only way to counter the constant stress of the job. Joy had threatened to walk out on him if he didn’t quit, so Solomon had thrown away his last bankie and committed himself to getting sober. The stress of the job proved too much for his naturally sedate humour, he started to lose it, and he was fired. Joy left anyway, in the end. But this was all long ago now.

“Welcome to the guard tower Marley,” Solomon said, in his slow deep voice, “you do like I say and you’ll be okay. I don’t take no nonsense, so listen.”

Marley seated himself on a plastic crate, poured himself some of Solomon’s coffee and stared at him droningly as Solomon explained what was expected of him: perimeter scans, bathroom breaks, the logbook, emergency protocals, the dobermans. He pointed out the structural weak points of the boundary fence, and warned that if any kids’ bombs were set up under his watch Solomon would complain personally to Mr Viljoen. “You understand okay boy? Got any questions?”

Marley’s dull eyes wandered across the room. He shook his head.

Solomon cleared his throat. The boy hadn’t said one word during this whole speech.

They spent the next hour in complete silence: Solomon tracing out the knots in the wooden table top with his finger, looking for patterns; Marley staring intently at a spot of air 10 centimetres in front of his face, not with the far-away look of memory or deep thought, but with a rigid, hypnotic focus. It was uncomfortable, this silent stillness, but it reassured Solomon that the boy would cope well with the boredom.

Suddenly Marley walked to the window, and spoke: “Hey. Solomon, what are we guarding?”

“What you stupid? That there, the Shack. What else would we be guarding?”

Marley stared at him slowly. “No. What’s inside?”

Solomon shifted. “No, I don’t know. I don’t care. What these whities want us to keep safe is not my business. And you,” Solomon folded his arms in a final gesture, “it is not your job to ask dumb questions.”

Marley continued to stare at him blankly.

Feeling uncomfortable, Solomon began to faff around in a drawer looking for the binoculers. Stupid boy, he thought. Probably never done this before. He’d better learn quickly: you ask too many questions and the boss gets nervous. A guard’s job is to keep people away; oneself included. Mr Viljoen was not the sort of man who liked to talk to guards.

Marley reseated himself on his crate, but now turned himself so that he could stare at the Shack.

“No man, boy,” Solomon scolded. “Leave it alone, you hear me.”

He could see himself reflected in Marley’s blank red-rimmed eyes; a middle aged figure with a distorted head bobbing ridiculously. He sat down, feeling feeble.

At ten to six the night guard, a toothless prune known as Ouboy, finally joined them in the watch tower.

“Heita Ouboy,” Solomon nodded, glad to speak. “Quiet day. No disturbances.”

Ouboy, who had long ago tired of Solomon’s feud with the local urchins, shrugged his disinterest.

“Ouboy, you met Marley?”

“Ja, at his training.” Marley had returned to staring at his patch nothing, disinterested.
“When is your last night?” Solomon asked.

“Friday,” and Solomon noticed that he was picking at a new sore on his forearm. The sickness is starting to eat him, he thought, not sadly. Ouboy had always been a useless neurotic, in his opinion. A waste of oxygen.

Solomon said his goodbyes. He looked back as he left the guard tower. Marley continued to sit there still as an abandoned doll, while Ouboy’s hands twitched from scab to scab, taking inventory of what was left of his body. The evening air bit through Solomon’s uniform; the sky was hidden by a thick mat of cloud. Far off in the distant half-light, he thought for a moment that he saw something move. But his mind was already fixed on the far more appealing matter of the tin of pilchards sitting on his table at home.

-------

Solomon arrived the next morning to find Ouboy propped up against the wall, snoring like a chainsaw. Marley looked as though he hadn’t moved an inch from where Solomon had last seen him. Jesus our Lord, he thought, maybe the boy really is retarded.

Ouboy, shaken awake roughly, mumbled that it had been a quiet night. Solomon left them there to do his morning rounds. From a distance, the thorn tree patches appeared unmolested, but he needed to be sure. He did a quick march around the closest patches, smiling at his small victory, and was about to return to the tower when he stopped.

There were footprints all around the perimiter fence. Big footprints. They crossed over and over; clearly whoever had been here had been in no hurry. Had circled the tower two, maybe more times.

Solomon could feel his blood pumping hot through his temples. He hurried up the ladder to the tower, beginning to scream at the two useless men before he even reached the top. “Idiots! What were you doing all night, fucking?”

They stared at him, confused and scared. Through Solomon’s tirade they eventually made out what had happened.

Ouboy made the call to Mr Viljoen, his voice shaking and his fingernails digging so deep into his scabs that they started to bleed.

Ten minutes later Mr Viljoen pulled up in his black 4x4, his mouth pulled into a snarl across his pork-pink face. After checking the footprints, he shouted at the guards to stay at the fence and marched across to the building. Solomon thought about the shadow he had logged the day before, and his stomach began churning guiltily.

The three men watched Viljoen pull a hunk of keys from his pocket and unlock an intricate sequence of locks. He disappeared into the Shack, blocking their view of the entrance with the door. “Auw auw auw ...” Ouboy moaned, shifting his weight from foot to foot. Marley was crouched at the fence, tracing the outline of a shoe print with his finger, his face looking for the first time like a living thing.

Viljoen returned a few minutes later, rubbing his hands on his khakis. Ouboy and Solomon began to breathe normally again: it was clear from his expression that disaster had been avoided.

“Who was on duty here? Ouboy, was it you?”

Ouboy continued to rock his weight slowly from foot to foot. “Baas, we don’t see nothing. Lots of cloud, Baas, and no moon ...”

Viljoen’s eyes ran across Ouboy’s body with painful slowness, as if accusing each half-scratched scab, each discoloured fingernail.

“And you, new boy,” he spat at Marley, “where were you?”

Marley stood up, but kept his head down. Solomon noticed that he was at least a head taller than Viljoen.

“Didn’t see nothing,” he said quietly.

“Goddam it,” Viljoen said. “Solomon, you’re the only one I can bloody trust around here. Do full perimeter checks on the hour. And new boy, you can keep him company, since you seem to have gotten a good fokken nights sleep last night.” And he was gone in a dusty mist.

---------

Solomon told Ouboy to go home; his whimpering was driving him crazy. He sent Marley out to comb the field, arming him with a walkie talkie and the smaller pair of binoculers. He poured himself some coffee up in the guard tower and tried to relax his mind. But his body felt wrong. His bones didn’t fit into each other properly. His blood was beating through the wrong arteries. All he could think about was the shadow he had seen on the horizon, the glinting as though of watching eyes.

Solomon tried to calm his mind, counting the patches where he had dug up the thorn trees. Ha ha ha, take that you bratty kids, he thought, but his heart wasn’t in it.

Marley returned two perimeter sweeps later. “Didn’t see nothing.”

“Well, you didn’t see nothing last night,” Solomon snapped, “you better be sure.”

Marley sat on his crate, looking supremely unconcerned. The damn boy barely seems to recognise my existence, Solomon thought, let alone my authority. Today, no one has any respect for their ... no, stop thinking like that, he thought, you sound like your father.

Marley moved his crate into the corner of the room and curled up to the wall. Almost immediately, his body relaxed into a deep sleep.

Relief. Solomon could imagine he was alone again. Fifteen minutes: his eyes began to skip along the veldt. No thorn trees, no boys. He was at a bit of a loss about what to do with himself.

He had never been bored when he was with Joy. She was a doer if ever there was one. Joy would leave for work at 4am, take three successive taxis into town, clean and cook until 5, make the journey home, clean and cook all over again, and she would still want to go out afterwards. Solomon was dragged off to many a church sale, shebeen party, community rally, by Joy. She would always call him a “dreamy”; “Hey, you dreamy! Get off your ass, there’s a party in the real world at Mama Ruth’s,” she would say, and she would laugh, with that infectious little-girl laugh of hers. Joy always thought there were too few hours in the day. Solomon would tell her that she could have some of his, he always seemed to have extra.

It was the reddish sand of the bush patches that were reminding him of Joy. They brought back the russet colour of her skin in the sunlight. Such colours, in this field, he thought to himself. He began to play at letting his eyes unfocus, until the landscape merged into a soft blur of colour. He squinted and unsquinted, imagining animal shapes. He began to populate the field with wildlife, working out herd numbers and food chains. Three cheetahs, he thought, they each need to eat half a wildebeest a week, or two impala. Let’s say wildebeest have one baby a year, impala two. They have as many male babies as female babies. How many wildebeest and impala do I need to start with?

These problems could amuse Solomon for days, as he didn’t have any school mathematics. He was, however, a very orderly counter, and had the rare talent of holding a single image in his head for ages. He had never actually seen a wildebeest or a cheetah, but had vivid (although inaccurate) ideas about what they would look like.

Fifteen minutes. Perimeter scan. Clear.

Marley shifted around in his sleep. Solomon noticed that the soles of his takkies were just about worn through. He began to take a closer look at the boy. He noticed that although scrawny, he looked tough. His skin was filthy. Probably a street kid, Solomon thought, or something similar. Might have been surviving off selling Swazi Gold in white suburbs. There was definitely something white about him. Something like a white man’s idea of a poor man.
What are we guarding? Marley’s question came soft and unbidden to his mind. Truly, Solomon had never really thought. He began to puzzle solemnly, as though it was a new game. It can’t be valuable, or it wouldn’t be in a shack, he thought. Why have guards for something that isn’t valuable? It could be something dangerous, maybe. Or, it could be something bad. Something ugly.

Fifteen minutes. This time, Solomon paid attention to the horizon. Nothing out of the ordinary. In all of his years of sitting in this tower, he thought to himself, he had never gotten carried away. He had seen paranoia eat away at countless men before him, but he had remained stable, dependable. He had seen men start to scream, shooting at the shadows of the grass. Viljoen had taken away guns, eventually, given them the tazers. Still, men left, their eyes as empty as the landscape, as though the dead grass had started to stare back at them. They had come and gone, so many, and Solomon was still here.

I will not lose it, not over some stupid footprints, he said to himself.

Still, he had never even asked himself, what are they guarding?

Desperate, he kicked Marley awake to stop the dialogue in his head. Some grunting, and then the boy heaved himself up and over to the coffee flask.

“Hey Marley, where you come from?” Solomon asked.

Marley shrugged. “All over.”

“Where are you living now?”

“Town.”

Solomon picked up on the tone and pressed him no further.

Marley sipped slowly at his coffee, huddled on his crate. “So, Mr Viljoen,” he suddenly asked, “what’s his deal? Is he a real ‘Baas’?”

Solomon scowled. “You ask stupid questions,” he said.

“Oh I see,” Marley smiled, showing yellow teeth, “he’s a Big Baas.”

Solomon shook his head, but unbidden, Viljoen’s face, fleshy and cruel, swam before his eyes.

“What’s his name?”

“What?”

“His first name, what is it? Or is he Mister Mlungu?”

Solomon was at a loss. He cast his mind around for a name. “Koos,” he invented.

Marley continued to smile. Solomon immediately decided that he liked him better when he was quiet.

“How long you been working here, with Big Mister Koos?”

It was Solomon’s turn to be evasive. “Long enough time.”

They returned to their separate silences, at an unspoken stalemate. Marley started playing a tapping game with his fingers. Solomon rolled his eyes around and around the horizon, feeling eyes on him again.

-------

Ouboy showed up an hour early. He still looked rattled, and immediately began to nag Solomon for reassurances. “Mr Viljoen, he wasn’t really that angry, hey?”, “There was nothing stolen, or he would have said?”, “Did he call today? Did he say anything about me?”. Solomon answered ambiguously, privately enjoying the panic. He felt in control again.

Ouboy’s scabs were still crusted with dried blood. He hasn’t even washed, Solomon thought. Disgusting old man. Old disgusting man.

Marley started to chuckle softly. “What, boy?” Solomon glared at him.

“Nothing,” he replied, still grinning maddeningly.

Solomon scowled and made to leave. Marley got up to follow. “No no no no,” Solomon said, “you do the night shift.”

“But I did the day shift.”

“Because you slept through the nightshift,” and with that he left, the biting air feeling like victory.

------

The next morning, Marley had gone.

“Ag, Ouboy! You fokken useless, man!”

Ouboy started pulling off scabs in panic. “I fell asleep, little bit,” he said. “But not long ago, the boy must have left now now.”

Solomon kicked the plastic crate. He had been looking forward to pushing the boy for another sleepless day, punishing him. And there had been no sight of the local boys since he’d cut down the thorn trees, he thought angrily.

Ouboy simpered away. Leaving Solomon alone. He had never really felt alone before now, in the tower.

He poured coffee. Extra sugar, extra coffee. His heart fluttered like a trapped insect.

He started pacing. If he didn’t know what he was guarding, then he didn’t know who would try to get in. They had already tried. They knew where he was. They could be watching, right now; they could be ready to make their move.

Fifteen minutes. Like clockwork, his eyes began to sweep the horizon. Nothing. He had to resist the urge to keep looking.

Ssh, Solomon, he told to himself. Think of Joy, the way she looked rubbing vaseline on her skin. Every night, after washing.

When Joy left, she had left her jar of vaseline on the shelf. He still had that jar: it almost glowed in the dark, staring at him while he slept.

Fifteen minutes. He allowed himself to look at the horizon.

Was that a shadow? There, far out to the north. No, I’m paranoid. I’m paranoid, he told himself. Stop it. Stop looking. He was sure it was moving. He was sure it was watching him.

He sat on the floor so that he couldn’t see out the window. There is nothing moving on the field, he chanted in his head. There is nothing, not even a shadow. There are no thorn trees to hide behind. The land is as flat as the sky. I can see almost to the edge of the world and there is nothing.

Suddenly he heard a commotion below. There was a crash, and the dogs began barking. There is nothing there, nothing, nothing!

But Solomon had reached for the remote in his pocket. He pressed the alarm button, he heard the dogs tearing from their enclosure.

He half climbed, half fell down the ladder and landed in a heap on the ground. His limbs felt like dead weight he couldn’t move quickly enough.

He turned, and saw that the dogs had reached the Shack. The door had been flung open wide as gaping mouth.

The screaming started and he scrabbled for his tazer as he ran. His hand felt nothing but the lining of his pocket.

He reached the door. The darkness was swarming with shadowy dogs and the outline of frantic man. He stood helpless in the doorway, waiting for his eyes to adjust to the darkness, bewildered as to what he would do anyway. He stood on the edge of the teeming void of barking and screaming and the smell of sweat and fear and blood, and could think of nothing. Something clattered against his leg. It was a plank of wood as long as his arm.

He picked it up. It was heavy and solid.

He bagan to swing it at the swarming mass in front of him. The first thunk hit a wall. The next thunk hit flesh. Thunk flesh. Thunk miss. Thunk flesh. Thunk flesh. Thunk flesh.

Thunk pulpy flesh.

Thunk pulpy flesh.

Everything was still.

Solomon dropped the plank. It hit the floor with a squelch. The darkness began to solidify into shapes. He was in the Shack. He could make out ropes crossing the ceiling, the gentle curves of hooks and pulleys. There was something enormous on the floor.

He could see now. He didn’t want to see.

Solomon staggered from the Shack and retched his guts onto the grass.

He lay on his kness, his forehead pressed into the puddle of his vomit. The warm autumn sun felt like a soft hand on the back of his neck. Far away it seemed, he could hear slow footsteps approaching.

Solomon lifted his head, and saw a boy watching him through the fence. He must have been thirteen or fourteen. His Adam’s apple was just starting to bulge. Sunlight was winking off his spectacles.
The boy’s face was frozen in terror. He was looking far past Solomon at the terrible thing that was hanging from the roof of the Shack, and at the more terrible thing that was strewn across the floor of it.

There was a long moment where neither one moved. Then the boy’s mouth began to open and shut wordlessly.

There was something familiar about the way the boy moved as he turned and fled across the veldt. But Solomon didn’t care. He rose slowly to his feet, vomit running into his eyes. He walked deliberately to the tower, unable to look behind him. One slow step at a time, he made his way up the ladder.

He punched the correct sequence of numbers into the emergency phone. The phone rang and rang. Solomon waited for what felt like a hundred years.

Click. “Solomon, do you know what time it is?” Mr Viljoen’s voice growled.

“Marley’s dead, Baas.” He let the phone slip from his hand.

He lay propped against the hard wooden chair – perfectly still – for fifteen minutes. Then, of their own accord, his eyes began to scan the landscape.

Poem: Postcards from Canada

2009-06-28T19:33:00.000+02:00

My mind affixes to this image I have of you
Drawn years ago now, penciled in over countless meetings:
The shape of eyebrows, the curve behind ears,
The meeting places of skin - knees and underarms,
Stray hairs on thighs, the arrangement of moles.

Notes that assembled into something that became
You:
your skin,
your eyebrows,
your thighs.

But since it all ended, I have been assembling you
Out of words cramped into postcards from Canada
You tell me only the general now - you tell me:
I've dyed my hair blonde and bobbed it short
I've lost my tan, I've bags under my eyes from lack
of sleep, I'm smoking again, but I'm going to they gym,
Things that scare me, unknown things,
Not additions to my sketches but erasings -
Not news, but things I no longer know about you

Reminders, two or three every month, that you are gone
In the most essential way; that you are dissapearing
Day by day, even in my mind. A long, slow departure

To a Skylark

2009-06-28T10:50:00.000+02:00

Shelley's famous "To a Skylark" begins:

Hail to thee, blithe spirit!
Bird thou never wert-
That from heaven or near it
Pourest thy full heart In profuse strains of unpremeditated art.

The Romantics wrote countless songs about similarly unpremeditated bird-poets. The bird was thought of as the ultimate untrained artist, who sang whatever its "full heart" prompted it to. This notion is premised on the idea that birdsong is individualistic, random and fully innate.

The terribly un-Romantic truth, though, is that bird song is far more a learnt behaviour than one would imagine. Bird song is actually pre-set for each species, and very little individualistic variation goes into it. Baby birds that are raised away from any other birds of their species never learn to sing "properly", and end up unintelligable to other birds of their kind. These birds might be the only "unpremeditated" singers - but their song is more like the ungrammatical speech of feral children than like the creativity of the artist.

Actually, it all boils down to two messages that the bird might actually be saying: "fuck me" or "fuck off" - as birdsong generally relates to territoriality or mating (or, in fewer cases, warning of predators). The cynical side of me might suggest that most poets are expressing one of the same messages - but never mind ...

Quitting

2009-06-28T10:39:00.000+02:00

Imagine a pill was invented which contained all the nutrients, vitamins, proteins and starches that one needs for optimal health. One takes the pill once a day, drinks water, and one is guaranteed a healthy body. However, only half of the population takes this pill; other people still eat food. Life, they argue, is about quality, and they take great joy in the religion of food.

Of course, there is a powerful correlation between food-eaters and younger mortality (they die of heart disease, they get osteoporosis, are a lot more likely to develop cancer because of food-additives etc.), which leads the pill-takers to characterise the food-eaters as suicidal, stupid, as well as unattractive (eating carries with it a range of aesthetic problems: it stains clothes, it destroys teeth, it can cause halitosis and so on).

So, some food eaters attempt to become pill-takers, but they find that even though their bodies soon adapt to not needing food, they still crave it. Their friends go out for meals in restaurants and they feel excluded. They miss the physical satisfaction of putting things in their mouths and chewing. They miss the ritual moments it marks in their day. They miss food as a crutch when they have a bad day, and as something basic they can rely on to make themselves feel good. They miss celebratory meals and religious feasts.

In short, they feel they have lost something intrinsic to themselves. They are healthy, but they feel like they have sacrificed something important in order to be so, and they feel hollow.

This is what it feels like to give up smoking. The only difference is that people are born needing to eat, and learn to need to smoke. But I promise you, the need becomes no less intense.

W H Auden and the eternal anxiety of the poet

2009-06-28T10:35:00.000+02:00

"Whatever his future life as a wage earner, a citizen, a family man may be, to the end of his days his life as a poet will be without anticipation. He will never be able to say: 'Tommorow I will write a poem and, thanks to my training and experience, I already know I shall do a good job.' In the eyes of others a man is a poet if he has written one good poem. In his own he is only a poet at the moment when he is making his last revision to a new poem. The moment before, he was still only a potential poet; the moment after, he is a man who has ceased to write poetry, perhaps forever."

cool kids for hire

2009-06-27T21:11:00.000+02:00

Bizarre fact of the day: did you know that one can rent cool people? Yes, you heard me correctly. This ridiculous company hires them out for testing products and advertising concepts for big corporates. You can also get them to sit down and tell you what's hot, so that you can create branded stickers for Crocs, if that's what will make them buy your products. Even funnier - you can actually hire them to evangelise for your product. Well hey, if those two sexy people thinks it's cool, then I want one too.

Handy to know next time you want to throw a party.

William Carlos Williams and the Metaphors of Science

2008-09-10T07:43:00.001+02:00

Picabia - The Love Machine

What does physics have to do with poetry?

Ever since the Romantics famously let their hair grow wild and declared that poets were better off rejecting science and turning inward to seek truth by the imagination, academics have been reluctant to draw strong parallels between the work of scientists and the work of poets. Our theories tend to rely upon uncovering sociological histories, and we tend to think of poets as bohemians who write “from the heart”; whose work entails uncovering the psychological life rather than in probing physical reality.

Now, William Carlos Williams was certainly no bohemian. Although he maintained productive friendships with numerous artists and writers of his day, he spent his life working as a paediatrician in a small New Jersey town. He was as well-educated in the sciences as in the arts; he read scientific journals and went to lectures by the pioneers of thermodynamics and atomic chemistry of the early 20th century. Williams often writes explicitly about the discoveries of early 20th century physics – much like the theme of evolution repeatedly appears in Thomas Hardy. For instance, in 1915, Albert Einstein published the paper outlining the General Theory of Relativity; and 6 years later Williams Published the following poem:

Oscar Dominguez - Nostalgia of Space

Overture to a Dance of Locomotives [extract]

A leaning pyramid of sunlight, narrowing
out at a high window, moves by the clock:
disaccordant hands straining out from
a centre: inevitable postures infinitely
repeated –
two – twofour – twoeight!

…

Poised horizontal
on glittering parallels the dingy cylinders
packed with a warm glow – inviting entry –
pull against the hour. But brakes can
hold a fixed posture till –
The whistle!

Not twoeight. Not twofour. Two!
Gliding windows. Colored cooks sweating
in a small kitchen. Taillights –

In time: twofour!
In time: twoeight!

- rivers are tunnelled: trestles
cross oozy swampland: wheels repeating
the same gesture remain relatively
stationary: rails forever parallel
return on themselves infinitely.
The dance is sure.

This is probably quite an obscure example – but you can see that he talks explicitly about both Special and General relativity. Note that the metaphor of trains is the one that Einstein himself chose to illustrate Special Relativity – and we are aware of how much science communicates through metaphor in this way. The poem closes with the phrase “the dance is sure” – expressing, perhaps, an appreciation for the certainty of physical law. [The trains – the older symbol of technological advancement; operates on the laws of Newtonian physics – now transformed into the “dancing” locomotives of Einsteinian relativity]

So – although it is an amusing game to trace the scientific themes within Williams’s poems, I am actually interested in a more meta-physical (or, meta-poetical) question – given that Williams clearly believed in the power of scientific metaphors to explain reality and truth; what does the poem do? Does the language of poetry operate differently to the language of science? And if so, what does poetry offer us that other uses of language can not?

Henry Adams, in The Education of Henry Adams, describes why the scientific changes of the turn of the century were so revolutionary. He says,

In these seven years [between 1895 and 1902] man had translated himself into a new universe which had no common scale of measurement with the old. He had entered a supersensual world, in which he could measure nothing except by chance collisions of movements imperceptible to his sense … [We] seemed prepared for anything, even for an indeterminable number of universes interfused – physics stark mad in metaphysics.[1]

Newtonian physics, which had dominated scientific thought until the 20th century, presents a view of the universe as stable. Objects are inert unless acted upon by some force. His paradigm largely describes our common sense experience of matter. Einstienian physics, on the other hand, proves that space and time are themselves dynamic quantities that are effected by forces and movements – and in turn, the curvature of space-time influences the way in which bodies move and forces act. All of the universe is in motion; E = mc2 - mass is energy. 20th century physics asks us to imagine reality on scales that we have never experienced, and to believe that the laws of nature are not what we would expect. This requires a leap of imaginative faith that is near-religious:

Where then will you find the only true belief in our day? Only in science. That is the realm of the incomplete, the convinced hypothesis – the frightening embodiment of mysteries, of transmutations from force to body and from body to – nothingness. Light.[2]

Williams reflects this exhilarating sense of a universe in motion by presenting us with poems that are built with verbs. Objects are never static; he does not paint still lives. Churches “tremble”, trees “arch”, and socks “endure”. This process is not simple personification; rather it is a recognition of a universal animating force, and a record of the mind encountering the world through language.

A Sort of a Song

Let the snake wait under
his weed
and the writing
be of words, slow and quick, sharp
to strike, quiet to wait,
sleepless.

- through metaphor to reconcile
the people and the stones.
Compose. (No ideas
but in things) Invent!
Saxifrage is my flower that splits
the rocks.

Note that the metaphoric relationship is between the snake and the poem about the snake; in this way he is drawing explicit attention to the disjunct between signified and signifier. “No ideas but in things” was his motto – and he preferences concrete words over abstract ones. However, the tension for us as reader lies in the fact that we do not have access to the snake but only to the word or the idea, “snake”. “No ideas but in things” is problematic, then, as long as we insist on reading the poem as a signifier or a secondary representation of reality (and some hypothetical real snake). Clearly, the poem insists that we don’t. Instead, we must take the poem itself as the object. Here is another example:

Picasso - Nature Mort

The Dish of Fruit

The table describes
nothing: four legs, by which
it becomes a table. Four lines
by which it becomes a quatrain,

the poem that lifts the dish
of fruit, if we say it is like
a table – how will it describe
the contents of the poem?

Clearly I am drawing here on Structuralist and Post-Structuralist assuming that language can function as a closed system. But the image that Williams chose is perhaps more illuminating. He fixed upon the metaphor of the dynamo, and claimed that the poem is a machine. This image is far removed from the Romantic conception which sees poetry as sentimental or emotional; something written in times of grief or two express love. No, he argued,

There is nothing sentimental about a machine, and: A poem is a small (or large) machine made of words. When I say there’s nothing sentimental about a poem I mean that there can be no part, as in any other machine, that is redundant.[3]

Williams was not alone amongst Modernist poets in arguing that good poetry should aim to be objective; that the “I” persona of the lyric should vanish; that the distinction between the speaking subject and the described object is an illusory one. T. S. Eliot argues something similar in Tradition and the Individual Talent[4], and Williams’s once-mentor Ezra Pound pioneered a similar notion. The poem is not expressive but creative – it creates meaning rather than communicates it. Therefore it does not matter if the subject matter of the poem is banal and mundane. For instance, the short poem called, Poem.

Poem

As the cat
climbed over
the top of

the jamcloset
first the right forefoot

carefully
then the hind
stepped down
into the pit of
the empty
flowerpot

Because the content is so mundane, what is foregrounded is the poetic process itself – as is highlighted by the title. We are almost tempted construct meaning out of it – to claim that the cat symbolizes the phallus and the flowerpot the nihilistic void – but what is interesting about the poem (and there are many others like it) is the fact that it is powered so vigorously by the mechanisms of poetry: syntax and rhythm; or, form and sound.

The first word in the poem, “As”, places the poem within a continuous tense. The cat and its actions are conjured “as” the poem is read. The “as” also requires the sentence to be completed by a second clause, and this expectation propels the poem. The action is slowed down, the cat moves part by part – first “the right forefoot” and then “the hind”. The action is slowed down further by the modifier “carefully”; and the crucial verb “stepped” is withheld until the eighth line.

Rhythm reinforces the pace postulated by the syntax; the trotting rhythm of “as the cat / climbed over / the top of // the jamcloset” is interrupted by “carefully”, the rhythm is interrupted, mimetically reinforcing the considered, uncomfortably tense moment as the cat shifts its centre of balance – and then is resumed as the undefiable law of gravity takes over. It is an immensely satisfying poem to read, as it creates the sensation of a physical experience. This is the poetic engine. It is the foregrounding the mechanisms of language that are objects to be experienced in themselves.

But, of course, engines must have functions; dynamos must power a system. What system does Williams’s poetry power?

If Relativity was one cornerstone of 20th century science, then another was surely thermodynamics. Thermodynamics and the notion of entropy developed during the 19th century, but entered popular culture as metaphysical concepts in the early 20th. Entropy, simply put, is the rule of energy dissipation; the notion that the universe becomes increasingly chaotic and finally runs down. Entropy is the reason for the irreversibility of time, it is the rule that ash cannot again be flame. Like evolution, entropy became a metaphor for the decadence of Western culture, and it is cultural entropy that is expressed in works like Joyce’s Ulysses and Eliot’s Waste Land. Both works, with their numerous allusions to literary tradition and the chaos of their forms, argue for an old culture, a tradition that has become so overbearing that it allows no space for comprehension; it is the information overload that becomes nonsensical, that Don Delillo will later call “noise”. Life continues but there is less and less energy in the system, and living becomes painful, leading Eliot to call April “the cruellest month / breeding lilacs out of the dead land”.

Williams knew that Eliot was a great poet, but felt that his pessimism and his clinging on to the European tradition of poetry betrayed the poetic responsibility of the American Modernist, which was to “make it new”, as Ezra Pound says. Williams was working on his epic poem Paterson at the same time that Eliot was composing the Waste Land – he published books 4 and 5 after he had read Eliot’s great eulogy for European poetry, and consciously subverts Eliot’s idioms within them. Here are just two small examples:

Williams

The sea is our home whither all rivers
(wither) run .

the nostalgic sea
sopped with our cries
Thalassa! Thalassa!
…
. draws us in to drown, of losses
and regrets .
(Paterson Book IV)

This is the blast
the eternal close
the final somersault
the end.
(Paterson Book IV)

Eliot

The river sweats
Oil and tar
The barges drift
With the turning tide
…
Weialala leia
Wallala leialala
(The Waste Land)

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.
(Hollow Men)

Paterson is built around the central image of a waterfall, which is perhaps the ideal metaphor for entropy (it is a deadly force that only runs in one direction). However, by the end of the poem, Williams insists that the river has begun to run backwards, because of the power of the poem to create sensual experience, within a poem, “the scent of a rose / startle[s] us anew”.

The concept of the permanence of the poem in a world that is otherwise filled with death and decay is an old one; one that occurs for instance in Shakespeare’s sonnets. What is unique in Williams’s poetics is a consciousness that the poem does not preserve lived experience; rather it constructs an experience using uniquely poetic mechanisms. The energy of poetry is immediate and sensual.

A life that is here and now is timeless … All things otherwise grow old and rot. By long experience the only thing that remains unchanged and unchangeable is the work of art.

Often, in traditional poetic discourse, the fertility of love and sex is the figure for this renewing force. Williams consciously rejects this, however. He makes reference to an essay by Henry Adams called “The Dynamo and the Virgin”. In this article Adams (with his idiosyncratic wit) argues that America has never quite managed to free itself from the fear of sex that they inherited from their Puritan ancestors. In American culture, the woman is substituted by the machine, which is eroticised and fetishised. The mechanised woman is a recurring figure in Modernist art (e.g. Kandinsky and Duchamp) and occurs over and over in Williams’s poems.

In book IV of Paterson, he subverts the image of the Holy Virgin by presenting her as Marie Curie, and in her praises a feminine power that is scientific rather than r(R)omantic.

From Paterson Book IV

a cavity aching
toward fission; a hollow,
a woman waiting to be filled

- a luminosity of elements, the
current leaping!
Pitchblende from Austria, the
valence of Uranium inexplicably
increased. Curie, the man, gave up
his work to buttress her.

But she is pregnant!
Poor Joseph,

the Italians say.

Glory to God in the highest
and on earth, peace, goodwill to
men!

Believe it or not.

A dissonance
in the valence of Uranium
led to the discovery [dissonance = juxtaposing, anti-metaphor]

Dissonance
(if you are interested)
leads to discovery

- to dissect away
the block and leave
a separate metal:

hydrogen
the flame, helium the
pregnant ash

[1] Adams, Henry (1918; 1931). The Education of Henry Adams. Random House, NewYork: p. 1069.
[2] Williams, William Carlos (
[3] Williams, William Carlos (
[4] Page 41.

Pancho Guedes: An Alternative Modernist at the SANG

2008-08-27T22:57:00.001+02:00

Space and light and order. Those are the things that men need just as much as they need bread or a place to sleep.
Le Corbusier

The first South African retrospective of the works of influential architect Pancho Guedes runs at the National Gallery until 31st August. The show consists of two discrete exhibitions: the first, curated by Pedro Gadanho, focuses on his intensely productive period in Lourenzo Marx (now Maputo); while the second, curated by Henning Rasmuss and Dagmar Hoetzel, isolates work he completed after the Mozambiquan Civil War when he was forced to flee to South Africa and subsequently became the Dean of Architecture at Wits University. The juxtaposition of the two perspectives on Guedes throws the curation choices into sharp relief, and a dialogue emerges that questions the methods of framing the architect as artist.

The post-1974 exhibition reflects the curators’ training as architects. Although the space of the gallery is used playfully, with geometric dividers decentering the strict division of floor and wall space, the works on display are presented strictly as finalised architectural plans and photographs of “finished” buildings.

The few paintings included in this part of the exhibition are isolated from the other projects, and are presented as artistic objects severed from the creative process of his architectural design. Furthermore, the texts that frame the architectural plans reinforce the concept that the building is primarily a product designed for a client by captioning each design as such.
This room provides a representative overview of Guedes’s oeuvre, but offers no glimpse into the creative process that gave birth to the final products. This exhibition is primarily aimed at the architecturally literate, and may remain fairly impenetrable to an artistic eye that may encounter it casually while trawling the SANG.

The entrance to the pre-1974 section is flanked by a portrait of Guedes crowned by a radiating egg. Indeed, in this section, concepts that are presented as products in the Hoetzel-Rasmuss exhibition are traced back to their embryonic forms.

For instance, photographs of the famous sculpture of two “talking heads” that was presented at the Biennial di Venezia 1976 are displayed in the post-1974 exhibition, while the initial painting can be found in the Gadanho show.

The two exhibitions are complementary, but one is nonetheless led to ask whether the essence of Guedes is most found in the buildings he finally supervised or in the less restrained process of his creative experimentation. Pancho himself has claimed that, for him, making drawings is more important than making buildings; and An Alternative Modernist primarily reinforces the sense of Pancho as an artistic personality that expresses itself through art, instead of framing him as the author(ity) of a strictly defined architectural project.

Painting for the “Talking Heads”

Gadanho chooses to exhibit Pancho’s work as a series of experiments. The final architectural product is curiously absent: the few photographs of the buildings are old, small and few. Rather, the exhibition is dominated by the principle of liminality.

The architectural plans are presented as being only one stage in a series of contingent possibilities that are expressed in multiple forms. The centre of the room is dominated by a series of small wooden sculptures. The sculptures are untitled and resist the mimetic. Some refer directly to recognisable shapes (for instance the sculptures referred to by Guedes as the “Mechanical Flower” and the “Egyptian Barge”), but the majority function as toys that seem to become different objects when they are placed in different positions. Guedes can be seen in the video that accompanies the exhibition playing with his sculptures in this way.

The irreverence expressed in the sculptures does not obscure their referential meanings; but they seem to refer directly to other artists than to platonic forms. The influence of Miro, Klee, Dali and Picasso continues into a series of paintings and rough sketches that are also displayed.

The paintings are notable for the success of their naïf style. Like Duchamp, Guedes considers the relationship between the human and the machine in a post-industrial world. A persistent theme in his paintings is the engine: he represents locomotives, ships, cars and buses; and paints bodies in a cubist style that exposes the fundamental similarity between the man and what he creates.

A surrealist thread runs through all of Guedes’s work; the result of displacement and defamiliarisation. In one painting, a crocodile inhabits a basement. Many of Guedes’s buildings are anthropomorphised (The Smiling Lion; The 5 Caterpillars; The Pregnant Building). The line between the impossible and the concrete is transcended simply by transferring a concept from a drawing to a design.

The naïve style at times disguises highly emotive political statements in Guedes’s work. One painting depicts a stack of dead soldiers in a refrigerated ship being returned for burial in their homeland, the soldiers’ effacement of identity reinforced by the childlike, abstract way in which they are painted.

Like the sculptures, the paintings have been displayed without titles. Although this denies the viewer a familiar point of access into the work, it also reinforces the principles of Guedes’s playfulness and open interpretivity. The curator has designed the exhibition in a spirit true to the Guedes aesthetic. The small captions that surround the works do not attempt to “explain” or fix the meaning of any one work.

The paintings are splashed across the walls with the randomness of a Pollock painting, and are grouped into broad family groups rather than being arranged by strict chronology or theme. The titles of these groupings are tentative statements in the present continuous tense: “Exploring Form and Space” and “Contributing Towards a Modern Space” are examples.

As underlined by the title, An Alternative Modernist presents Pancho as an artist well-informed by the artistic principles of Modernism. The “alternative” may indeed be tautological – Pancho is most Modern precisely when he inverts tradition; when he brings the marginal to the centre.

Much is made of Pancho’s interest in traditional African art – although it is ironically unclear whether this was truly due to a receptiveness to his surroundings or whether the influence of African forms came to him via the channels of earlier European Modernists, such as Picasso, who famously appropriated African forms for the Avant Garde project.

Pancho clearly had a complex relationship with his context and was critical of monolithic notions of “Africanism”. He was nonetheless an important patron of African artists in Mozambique and had an extensive collection of traditional African artifacts.

Although he spent the majority of his productive life in Africa, Guedes always maintained strong links with European Modernism. He was a member of the influential Team 10 during the 50s and 60s, and the strong influence of Gaudi and Le Corbusier on his architectural designs is irrefutable. He referred to some of his own work as “Dali’s soft forms set in concrete and made habitable” and called his Prometheus building his “first built misinterpretation of Picasso’s drawings and paintings for sculpture.”

A Guedes retrospective has been long overdue. Whether Bauhaus-inspired apartment blocks or fantastical floral buildings, his architectural work always ventures beyond the principles of building into the experimentation of form and spatial composition. In him, the functional and the aesthetic impulses become subsumed by the basic Modernist exercise of exploration: finding new ways to use the old.

He is the ultimately democratic artist. He brought his paintings into urban spaces and displayed them as murals; his sculptures were factories and apartment buildings.
There is something ironic in the fact that he has been returned – after all these years, to the gaze of the gallery – while in Lourenzo Marx the buildings themselves are crumbling and neglected. The curators have not, however, done him an injustice, and have played with the gallery space in a way that remains true to the spirit of Guedes’s artistic project.

The Last Turn by WCW

2008-08-09T14:58:00.001+02:00

Then see it! in distressing
detail---from behind a red light
at 53d and 6th
of a November evening, with
the jazz of the cross lights
echoing the crazy weave of
the breaking mind: splash of
a half purple half naked woman's
body whose bejeweled guts
the cars drag up and down---
No house but that has its
brains blown off by the dark!
Nothing recognizable
but the whole, one jittering
direction made of all directions
spelling the inexplicable,
pigment upon flesh and flesh
the pigment of the genius of a world
artless but supreme ...

Beheadings in Irving Welsh's "Marabou Stork Nightmares"

2008-08-04T00:37:00.008+02:00

This essay - written for an Honours Course in Femininst literary theory - examines Marabou Stork Nightmares by Irvine Welsh as a genealogy of the construction of violent masculinity. I explore the method by which the narrative is framed, arguing that the structure posits a hierarchy of consciousness and a distinction between the “internal” and “external” world.

This leads to questions of innate or learned sexual disposition, and a discussion of the homosocial matrix that regulates the socialization of the individual. The place of women within the novel’s social economy is discussed with particular focus on the forces behind Roy’s rapes. I then return to the question of mind and body, and explore questions of the “gaze” within the novel, and argue finally that the text concludes by collapsing the mind-body distinction into a single, fragile construct.

I – Being Inside Roy Strang

Roy Strang initially presents himself as the sort of subject posited by early psychoanalysts. The novel proceeds not according to the logic of realism, but rather by the operations of the dream that Freud outlines – Condensation, Displacement, Representation and Symbolism[1]. Roy Strang, therefore, is not merely the narrator of the novel; he is also its setting. Roy’s mind is discursively constructed as vertical and the narrative moves “higher” and “lower” within his conscious levels. The Stork-Quest sequences are posited at the lowest level of his character (he arrives there by going “deeper/deeper/deeper”) – it is his “subconscious” world, analogous to what Freud would have called his “preconscious”, but presented in the sustained logic of a particular literary genre that would be impossible in the barely accessible preconscious of the human subject. On the highest level is the present (the word here indicating both temporal immediacy and embodied presence). Memory, according to the prepositions that define the narrative space, is the intermediate level between the “reality” and the “dream”. I will talk loosely about the three levels being the world/reality, the memory and the dream – although all three levels are primarily literary, and mediated by an unreliable narrative voice.

In the hospital scenes, Roy is the vulnerable body that Judith Butler describes in “Beside Oneself”, but in these scenes he is a mute object. In his memory and in his dream, he is a talking subject; he is Roy Strang, although the very construction of his subjectivity relies implicitly on the objectification of others; of “undoing” others (women, homosexuals, other men) by taking advantage of the vulnerability of their human bodies.

Basic tensions in Marabou Stork Nightmares are generated by the question of the internal. There is a trail of thought in Feminist theory, from Riviere (1929) to Butler (1990), which contests the notion of gender as identity. Instead, gender is a performance, “a repetition and a ritual, which achieves its effects through a naturalization in the context of a body” (Butler, 1990: xv). The question that Butler then poses, is whether there is something that is masked by the masquerade, or whether the concept implies that interiority is evacuated, and that there is only the mask (1990: 64). Roy, conversely, consistently uses language to suggest that people can be “authentic” or “fake”, and yet is aware that he narrates from an entirely subjective position,

"All I have is the data I get. I don’t care whether it’s produced by my senses or my memory or my imagination. Where it comes from is less important than the fact that it is. The only reality is the images and texts" (p. 16)

Roy constructs the frame of the narrative so that his narrative voice is seen as an “internal” position, disconnected from his physical body that lies on the hospital bed. Therefore, our analysis of the text should proceed from a theoretic position that analyses “interiority”; but the best paradigm is not a foray into the argument between essentialism and determinism, but rather the question of power suggested in Butler’s comment:

The critical question is not how did that identity become internalized? as if internalization were a process or a mechanism that might be descriptively reconstructed. Rather, the question is: From what strategic position in public discourse and for what reasons has the trope of interiority and the disjunctive binary of inner/outer taken hold? In what language is “inner space” figured? … How does a body figure on its surface the very invisibility of its hidden depth?”(1990: 183)

With the question of performativity and the “interior space” in our mind, let us turn to the question of Roy’s sexuality.

II – The Closet-Case

(Almost exactly) halfway through the novel, Bernard describes Roy as a “mercenary wee closet rent-boy” (p. 127). Indeed, in Roy’s dream-world there are numerous suggestions of homosexuality, which are rapidly suppressed. For instance, Roy says to Sandy “ – Maybe we should take our clothes off and go for a little dip”, and then immediately moves out of the dream-world with a repetition of “naw naw that wisnae it” (p. 84). Roy’s only homosexual encounter in the “real” world is his molestation, which in the beginning are a source of pleasure for him (“I felt a sense of power, a sense of attractiveness, a sense of affirmation that I hadn’t previously experienced”, pp. 71-72). It may be that Roy’s (ultimately false) sense of power is akin to that felt by the women in the novel who attempt to access phallic power by accepting a role as sexual objects for men (such as Kim, as will be discussed in section IV), but it must be acknowledged nonetheless that Roy’s homophobia is largely a learned response.

Roy comes to be homophobic as he becomes aware of the punitive power of social masculinity. Shortly after their return from South Africa, there is an incident when the Strangs learn of Bernard’s early experiments in homosexual behaviour, and they threaten him with castration as punishment (p. 88). This incident shocks Roy deeply, and his castration-anxiety becomes associated with homosexuality[2]. As she threatens Bernard, Roy’s conception of his mother alters:

I had always thought of my Ma as young and beautiful. Now she seemed to me to look like a twisted, haggard old witch, staring out at me from behind a smudged mask of eyeliner. I noted the strands of silver in her long black hair" (p. 89)

his extract indicates that the fear of castration irrevocably alters Roy’s perception not only of homosexuality, but of women too, who as “castrated” or “castrating” become crone-like and a source of anxiety. The Freudian reading could be extended further into the extract. Freud (cited in Butler, 1990: 78-88) argued that gender is a form of melancholia, whereby a lost love-object is incorporated into the self so that it may be psychically preserved. Roy, who is taught that he must forsake homosexual love or suffer castration (that is, one can only love a man if one is a woman, and therefore castrated) begins to embody what he believes is the essence of masculinity in order to replace the lost love-object. Although this reading is a quite a far departure from the text, it usefully offers an explanation for the tension between Roy’s homosexuality in his dream-world and his “real”-world homophobia and misogyny. Freud’s framework even predicts that suicide often results from the ambivalence generated by melancholia[3] - in this case, it could be argued that Roy’s phallogocentric society causes him to incorporate or imitate an abstract masculinity, which he both loves (because it affords him power) and hates (because there is a pre-existing aspect of his ego that reviles the incorporated object, in this case the self-critical aspect of Roy), and this tension becomes irreconcilable and causes his life to become unliveable.

Catherine MacKinnon (1987) offers a useful perspective on what this “heterosexual matrix” (what I have been calling the “masculine signifying economy”) achieves. She claims that “Gender emerges as the congealed form of the sexualisation of inequality between men and women” (p. 6-7). The masculine identity therefore secures not biological reproduction (which is never a concern for Roy, and is in fact revealed to be a source of disgust when he dreams of a deformed foetus that has his facial features on p. 159), but rather social power.

III – The Law of the Father

Marabou Stork Nightmares, if it suggests a repressed homosexuality underlying certain kinds of aggressive heterosexuality, does not present an argument for inherent sexual behaviour. What is expressed in Roy Strang’s unconscious world as homosexuality, takes the form in the “real” world as homosociality; labelled by Lacan “the Law of the Father” and by Irigiray “hommo-sexuality” (both cited in Butler, 1990: 55), and it seems impossible to determine which is “primary” and gives rise to the other[4].

Roy’s attempts to become a fully-realised subject (portrayed in the Bildungsroman narrative thread) centre around his acquisition of the rules of masculine culture; his attempts to become an active subject, paradoxically, by submitting himself to the discursive “Law” that dominates his society. Initially Roy finds many aspects of this culture distasteful (or so he claims) but gradually internalises them as protection against the punishment he undergoes when he fails to do so. For instance, as a young boy Roy is forced by his father to fight against his half-brother Bernard (p. 29), as the vessel of his father’s hatred for homosexuality (in these exchanges, Roy thinks to himself “TAKE THAT YA FUCKIN SAPPY BIG POOF”), for being cuckolded (John tells Roy that he must win because Bernard is a “bastard son”[5]) and for being weak or “sappy”. Roy learns from these exchanges that if he is not the more violent, he is forced to “beat a humiliating retreat, overwhelmed by pain and frustration” (p. 30)[6]. In Roy’s world, one is either a winner or a loser (the title of chapter fourteen reasserts this), and although he envies a position in which one can escape the system entirely, he sees the only possibility for doing so in the figure of his brother Elgin, who is autistic (“Perhaps Elgin had the right idea; perhaps it was all just psychic defence”, p. 30).

Football, like boxing, is an institution by which masculine identity is regulated. Roy initially professes to dislike football (p. 101, 117), but gradually comes to incorporate its symbolic power, when he learns that football is a way to delineate alliances and hierarchies between men. For instance, when Roy is harassed by Hamilton and his gang, he is asked what football team he supports, to which Roy replies “Hibs”, thinking that although he has no personal interest in football, “Dad and Tony were Hibs fans and so were most of my mates in the scheme” (p. 101). The particularism of football, which specifically enforces nationalist xenophobia, naturally becomes the site of some of Roy’s most intense expressions of violence when he joins the Casuals. It is ironic, then, that Sandy claims that the attraction of football lies in “the camaraderie of the whole thing” (p. 191). But there is indeed a camaraderie in the violent system, because although it creates antagonism amongst men, it at least defines them as “men” in contrast with those whom the system effaces.

This system of male aggression does not merely position women at the bottom of a hierarchy (as the least physically able to defend themselves) but excludes them from participating in the system of exchange entirely. Butler (1990) discusses Levi-Strauss’s (1969) thesis that in patriarchal societies women act as an object of exchange that consolidates the relationships between men[7], claiming that within his paradigm heterosexual relationships with women are insincere, for their object is not women at all, but other men, and that this is “a repressed and, hence, disparaged sexuality, a relationship between men which is, finally, about the bonds of men, but which takes place through the heterosexual exchange of women” (Butler, 1990: 55). It is not always necessary for women to be present at all for them to be used as commodities; sometimes their symbolic or discursive existence is sufficient. Freud (cited in Doring, 2002: 129) suggests that men often joke with each other about women in a sexually aggressive manner in order to consolidate their homosocial bonds, much like Roy jokes with his uncle Benny that a certain girl has a “[f]anny like the Mersey Tunnel” (p. 139). Sexual aggression as a means to reinforce male bonds takes its most troubling incarnation in the gang rape, in which Kirsty is effaced as a subject, which leads to the impression of the rapists having sex with each other, as though Kirsty was acting merely as a mediating object so that the homosexuality of the act can be denied. During the rape there is a moment when,

Dempsy and Lexo were up her cunt and arse at the same time, their balls pushed together. – Ah kin feel your cock, Lexo, Dempsy gasped" (p. 190)

There is thus a clear tension within the masculine signifying economy of Marabou Stork Nightmares between the desire to exclude women entirely and the necessity of heterosexuality as ego-defensive. Roy asserts the first desire in his “dream” sequence, which is modelled on a genre he calls Boys Own Adventures, in which he childishly (which is perhaps, honestly) tells the women who attempt to engage him and Sandy sexually to leave, yelling that they are “spoiling our adventure … spoiling our fun! It’s just boys! Boys only, boys only, boys only!” (p. 123), and without women to mediate male friendship the system collapses into homosexuality, as we have seen in section I above.

IV – Worthless Women

Within an economy of masculine exchange as all-encompassing as that of Marabou Stork Nightmares, the woman’s place is that of a commodity. Her psychic existence is unacknowledged, and her physicality (the way she is vulnerable to men, and the way she is accessed by them) is consistently reasserted. Roy’s heterosexuality is a product of his homosocial anxiety – he must have sex with women in order to earn the respect of other men. When Hamilton harasses the teenage Roy, he embarrasses him by insinuating that Roy is a virgin (“- Ivir hud yir hole? Hamilton sneered. Gilchrist laughed”, p. 100). Women in this exchange are non-beings, anonymous “holes”, defined by their physical ability to incorporate a man’s penis. Hamilton and Gilchrist parade their girlfriends as signs of their social superiority. When Roy subsequently assaults Caroline Carson, Gilchrist’s girlfriend, it is a way to reassert his status as a man, and the incident coincides with his first attempts at building a gang. Shortly after this event, he properly loses his virginity, and even though he does not really enjoy the sex itself, his immediate thought is that he feels “equals with Tony; both men of the world” (p. 111). His heterosexuality involves talking about his sexual encounters with other men, specifically his brother,

I’d talk to Tony about getting my hole; bullshitting about the number of shags I’d had and the things I’d done. I think he knew I was making most of it up, and I knew that he knew, but he let me go on and said nothing …" (p. 111-112)

Both men are aware that Roy’s stories are a performance; his truthfulness is less important than his ability to participate in one of the rituals of masculinity.[8]

The way in which this commodifying discourse around women (or rather, this commodifying discourse that constructs “women” as a discursive entity) is transformed into physical violence is a genealogy clearly outlined in Marabou Stork Nightmares. The Scots vernacular through which Roy first learns to mediate his experience is presaged on the use of “woman” to denote inferiority. Men who speak in the vernacular constantly label each other female when they are denigrating each other; consistently, “other” men (men not included in the immediate discursive group) are called “cunts”, “tits” or “pussies” (which reinforces not only the concept of female as inferior, but also the concept of female as anatomical) or “wide-o’s” [9] and “punters”[10]. The terms of denigration are specifically applied to homosexual men (on page 22 Roy states matter-of-factly that “Bernard was a girl.”), who are in turn absorbed into the discursive system of pejoratives so that men also aggressively call each other “queer-faced” or “poofs” to indicate that they are lower in the masculine hierarchy. Numerous theorists have suggested that the anxiety created around these words ironically demonstrates the fragility of the masculine norm. In the words of Simone de Beauvoir, “In spite of the inferior role which men assign to them, women are the privileged objects of their aggression” (cited in Kaufman, 1994: 23). Within this system, women and homosexual men are a source of anxiety, as they represent alternatives to the masculine ideal, which must be self-destructively suppressed in order to maintain it.

An ironic awareness of the fragility of Roy’s masculinity, and its continual constructedness, pervades the text. After Sandy and Roy, in the “dream-world”, tell the beautiful women to leave them to their “boys only” mission, the women “drop their disguise” and are revealed to be giant preying mantises with “blonde and auburn wigs, lipstick smeared on those deadly pincher-like insect jaws” (p. 124). Roy’s fear of women (as the threat to his masculinity), which has been cloaked in his desire for them, is revealed to be a façade, and immediately he and Sandy grab baseball bats in self-defence. This could be an allegory for Roy’s violence against the women he is initially attracted to; he fears them and so must destroy the source of his fear (and, indeed, the women become “ugly” after he assaults them, and the source of his anxiety is nullified). Roy’s awareness of gender as “masquerade” (in the words of Joan Riviere) is often un-self-conscious. He defends himself against John’s accusation that the Cashies are “posers” concerned not with football (which in this discourse designates authentic masculinity) but with wearing “fuckin designer labels” (p. 136), but Roy later admits that he does in fact spend almost all of his money on new clothes. He similarly expresses confusion when Martine Fenwick “was intae letting me tongue her in public, but when she sussed I was trying to get her away, she knocked me back” (p. 180).

Although there is the sense of “faked” gender running through the text, what Roy represents as gender’s falseness is one of the most powerfully harmful factors in the plot. Roy’s involvement in Kirsty’s rape, he initially claims, was “faked” (p. 184), and even though it is later revealed that he was the main instigator and most physically violent perpetrator, there is a sense in which this too is a performance, an act that masks his anxiety. The performances of gender, even if Roy claims them to be “inauthentic” with his insistent claims of “it wisnae really like that”, are real because it is the performance rather than the intention that harms or does not harm other subjects. Therefore, even though Kirsty and Roy both agree that the courtroom where her trial takes place is “[a] theatre to humiliate and brutalize [Kirsty] all over again” (p. 223), it is a symbolic rape that causes her even more pain than the initial physical rape.

The women who are charged by Roy as being the most “inauthentic” are those he labels “lesbians”. He never mentions actual homosexual behaviour by these women (and, in fact, he at one stage finds himself kissing Martine Fenwick, who is one of the women he had labelled a “dyke”). “Lesbians” are the women who actively subvert the masculine hierarchy that Roy is psychically defending with such vehemence, for instance, the women who overpower him (usually economically) or who resist their status as commodities amongst men. The first such woman he encounters is his schoolteacher, “Lesbo Gray”, who subverts the expectations of the gender (masculine) paradigm by disciplining her male students with a belt, that is, physically overpowering them. Their act of defiance involves breaking into her office and beating each other with the belt “much harder than when Lesbo Gray … did it” (p. 102-103), thereby reappropriating physical violence as a masculine ability. They claim that she has no breasts, thereby defining her as not female, and then defecate in her drawer, as a way to assert that as not-female, she is therefore disgusting, insignificant and expellable as “shit”. This resonates strongly with Butler’s claim in Undoing Gender (2004b) that to be denied definition within discourse is to be denied personhood – Gray, by being denied status as a woman, is defined as inhuman faeces.

After completing school, Roy begins working at a company called “Scottish Spinsters”, which being a “spinster” economy (one does not recognise the masculinity that is Roy’s paradigm) is one in which he is insignificant[11]. Here, Roy is judged by his economic status, by which he is judged poor, and his ability to obey the politeness code of the office environment, in which he fails. Within this differently-regulated economy a woman, Jane Hathaway, is his superior. Like “Dykey Gray”, Jane Hathaway is described in unfeminine terms, overweight, wearing glasses that remind him of his father’s. Roy speculates that she is having a relationship with Martine Fenwick, has “no tits whatsoever” (p. 114), and is derisive of the fact that the women “go all girlish” when they speak to each other. In this context, too, Roy asserts his ability to decide who – within “masculine” discourse – can judge that a woman sufficiently fulfils her femininity, in order to reclaim power in a situation where he is judged as a failure.

Women, in this system, must choose between being dehumanized (called non-persons or “dykes”) or commodified (called “whores”). Bernard’s “fag-hags” are a third category, although by apparently denying their heterosexuality by choosing to befriend homosexual men, they are labelled asexual “hags”, and therefore nearly fall into the first category. Roy calls them “pathetic” and claims that “there was something incomplete about them” (p. 251). When Roy rapes Caroline and then Kirsty, it is because he believes that they are denying him sexually (although it is later revealed that both were in fact attracted to him). And yet the dichotomy within Roy’s discursive system between “hags” and “whores” is unstable; Kirsty is raped because she is sexually unavailable (a “hag”) and is immediately labelled a “whore slut” (p. 178) once she is raped. These pejoratives therefore do not apply to the dispositions of these women, but rather their acts, their performances. Even the apparent hatred of lesbianism is not stable, as can be seen in the interval of Kirsty’s rape, when Ozzy suggests to a homeless woman that she should accompany her back to the rape-scene and “[g]it some lesbo stuff set up” (p. 187), as bizarre as this paradox seems, it could be read as an attempt to subsume the object of threat (female homosexuality) into a performance by two heterosexual women for the pleasure of men.

There are many women in Marabou Stork Nightmares who are shown in various attempts to escape the rigidness of the discourse that designates them commodities. Some women attempt to find success in the system by fulfilling what they perceive to be expected from them. Kim is a good example of this, who is consistently “used” by men and then “abandoned”, and who becomes the sexual partner even of her own half-brother who is described as entirely sexually indiscriminate. Similarly, the nurse Patricia projects fantasies onto Roy about what a caring man he must be, even though she has never spoken with him and has only heard rumours of his misdeeds, and when her experience as a sexual commodity has been similar to Kim’s: “One he got what he wanted he was off … and there I was, left alone, again. Left with nothing” (p. 31). Like the women who testify against Kirsty at the rape trial, there are many instances of women characters who reinforce the masculine paradigm, who attempt to access phallic power by participating in the “Law of the father”. Even though they find themselves bankrupt within the masculine signifying economy, “left with nothing” as Patricia says, their acquiescence is unsurprising in light of the punishment that transgressive women are shown to undergo.

V - Pornography and the Severed Head

The analysis of the gaze has been an important one for feminist theory. For Sartre, the gaze is symmetrical; although to be looked at is to be made an object, it is only by being thus objectified that we become aware of our own unique position to gaze, and to be a subject (1948). Foucault (1977) extends this to the theory of asymmetric gaze; that is, gaze that regulates hierarchies. For Foucault, the gazed-upon (signified) object is not always able to return the gaze and is thereby denied subjectivity (the ability to signify) [12]. Irigiray (1981) contests the very paradigm of the binary between signifying-subject and signified-object, by stating that the paradigm of Woman as Other to Man is an aspect of the “masculine signifying economy” (1981: 266) and that women are not represented in it at all. She continues to argue that the gaze itself, as it is visual[13], is masculine by nature, and that the eroticization of the visual form of the woman is a mechanism by which she is subsumed into an erotic discourse that renders her passive.

The destructive force of the visual objectification of women is evident in numerous episodes in Marabou Stork Nightmares. One of Roy’s first sexualised acts is the purchase of pornography, when he says he “never liked the ones where the genitals were exposed in too much detail; they were like raw, open wounds, totally at odds with the smiling, inviting faces of the models” (p. 111). This is reminiscent of the “double movement of exhibition and chaste retreat” described by Irigiray (1981: 263), which reveals the inability of the “masculine signifying economy” – as it posits the phallus as the only sexual organ – to represent the female; her genitals are a lack, the wound that remains of the castrated penis. When he sexually assaults[14] Caroline Carson, Roy achieves his domination by forcing her to expose her pubic hair to him. He looks at her in order to shame her, and yet displaces his gaze onto her pubic hair rather than onto her actual genitalia. Roy’s interest in pornography is implicated with his desire to subjugate, and he describes that the comic book depictions of women “being kidnapped and restrained were the biggest turn-ons” (p. 34). During his assault of Caroline Carson he is conscious that his actions are imitative of this socially-condoned media, and verbally denigrates her, “talking like they did in the wankmags” (p. 107). This is taken a step further in the rape of Kirsty, when the rapists watch television whilst raping her, subsuming her into the broader economy of male visual entertainment (p. 189). Interestingly, following the act of visually subjugating both Caroline and Kirsty, they become ugly to him and lose their sexual appeal[15]. Roy himself claims that this is because the women lose their “sense of self” (p. 190); that is, their subjectivity, and all that remains is the body – the metaphorically “beheaded”, or entirely objectified body, which is a repulsive thing.

During Roy’s rapes, he describes the eyes of his victims as failing or dead. Caroline covers her eyes with her hands (p. 107), Kirsty’s face becomes “frozen, her eyes dead” (p. 182). When this rape is re-presented in the “dream” world, it is in the image of a young boy who has been murdered: his genitals mutilated and his eyes gouged out (p. 203). The image used to describe the expression on Kirsty’s face as she is first penetrated is compared to that of an animal being beheaded:

"The expression on her face was … I remember seeing a documentary about some animal being eaten from behind while its face seemed to register disbelief, fear, and self-hate at its own impotence. That was what she reminded me of "(p. 183).

Beheadings litter the metaphorical landscape of the novel: beginning with the beheadings of Winston II[16], the recurring image of the Stork holding the severed head of a flamingo, scenes in the Casuals’ violence that involve “Ghostie … trying to sever [a “Weedgie’s”] meaty heid oaf wi a broken glass” (p. 193), and finally Roy’s symbolic self-beheading by suffocation with a plastic bag (which re-enacts Winston II’s murder). The image of a beheading is the image of a mind and a body severed from each other; the option of subjectivity (seeing eyes) being permanently denied to the object (the body). Roy’s enacting of the fallacy of the mind-body divide seems to be an effort to consolidate a fragile construction that constitutes the female as embodied and vulnerable[17], while the male is a person, and primarily a mind or identity[18].

The fragility of this construction is revealed in the climax of the book, where Roy’s passive vulnerability is exploited as he is physically mutilated. As Kirsty mutilates him, she cuts off his eyelids, so that he is forced to watch her as she actively destroys his body, much as Roy used a mirror during the rape to force Kirsty to watch him as he raped her. She reiterates both “I want to see you, Roy” and “I want you to see … me” (p. 159), which could be read as an attempt to reinstate the symmetry of the gaze that Sartre suggests (1948).

Conclusion

As a reader, finding truth in Marabou Stork Nightmares is like watching a shadow-puppet play. The images we are presented with, being constructions of Roy Strang’s mind, consistently hint at truth, and present its outlines, but those images are shifting and unstable, and cast very different shapes when the narrative perspective, the “light” in my metaphorical conceit, is shifted. Roy presents his text as being a representation of different layers of himself, but in the end the boundaries between these levels disappear. Roy constructs a masculine subjectivity that presents itself as incorporeal, and he enacts it to the degree that he abandons his body to absolute passivity in order that he can be “liberated” to roam his mind. But the mind-body distinction collapses as the book reaches its climax. Kirsty actively takes her revenge in a way that demonstrates to Roy that he is a physically vulnerable body-self as much as a woman is, and that the entire paradigm that would pardon him from that vulnerability is a fragile construct. The lesson to be learnt is one that Judith Butler outlines in Undoing Gender (2004b); the body is a discursive entity, but also the site by which human beings are able to “undo” each other, both in love and in hatred.

References

Butler, Judith (1990). Gender Trouble. Routledge, New York & London.

Butler, Judith (2004a). “Introduction: Acting in Concert””, in Undoing Gender. Routledge, New York & London.

Butler, Judith (2004b). “Beside Oneself: On the Limits of Sexual Autonomy”, in Undoing Gender. Routledge, New York & London.
Doring, Tobias (2002). “Freud About Laughter, Laughter About Freud” in Manfred Pfister (ed.) A History of English Laugher. Rodopi, London: 121-136.
Foucault, Michel (1977). Discipline and Punish, tr. A. Sheridan. Vintage Books, New York.

Freud, Sigmund (1900). Die Traumdeutung (The Interpretation of Dreams). Originally published in German by Franz Deuticke Publishers, Liepzig & Vienna.

Irigiray, Luce (1981). “This Sex Which Is Not One” in E. Marks and I. de Courtivron (eds.) New French Feminisms, tr. C. Reeder. New York: 99-106.

Kaufman, Michael (1994). Theorizing Masculinities. Sage Publications, Calif.

Levi-Strauss, Claude (1969). The Elementary Structures of Kinship. Beacon Books, Boston.

MacKinnon, Catherine (1987). Feminism Unmodified: Discourses on Life and Law. Harvard University Press, Cambridge.

Riviere, Joan (1929). “Womanliness as Masquerade”, The International Journal of Psychoanalysis, vol. 10.

Sartre, Jean-Paul (1948, originally 1939). Being and Nothingness, tr. H. Barnes. Philosophical Library, New York.

Welsh, Irvine (1995). Marabou Stork Nightmares. Vintage Books, London.

Notes

[1] As presented by Sigmund Freud in The Interpretation of Dreams/Die Traumdeutung (1900).

[2] It is made clear that Roy was not originally anxious about homosexuality. In fact, he claims that he originally believed that all sex was anal, after so often hearing Tony saying of women that he would “shag the fuckin erse oafay that” (p. 111).

[3] Ambivalence refers to cathexic tension that is generated in the love-hate relationship between the ego and the incorporated love-object.

[4] Various psychoanalytic theorists (for instance, Freud and – to a lesser extent – Lacan) suggest that the success of homosociality requires the suppression of an innate bi-/homosexuality, however, the sociological work (although it is now outdated) of Levi-Strauss indicate that it is the evolutionary drive towards heterosexual reproduction that necessitates a homosocial system. This seems to be a chicken-or-the-egg debate; for the purposes of this discussion it is enough to recognize that both systems exist, and are symbiotic.

[5] John tells Roy that he is “fightin fir the Strang name”; the etymology of this surname is a Scots word for “strong”, underlining the ideal which the father embodies. This is not to suggest that the ideal of masculinity which is enforced by John is one which John himself successfully achieves, John is in fact described as a rather pathetic figure, who attempts to find a place in an idealistic discourse that he can never, as a working-class Scotsman, achieve true status in. He mimes an Englishness (in his obsession with Winston Churchill) as well as an intellectualism (as evidenced in the corrective letter he writes to the BBC).

[6] Interestingly, in this exchange Roy is urged to poke Bernard’s eye out. The significance of blindness and beheadings is discussed in section V of this essay.

[7] Levi-Strauss (1969) suggests that this is the reason for the incest-taboo that pervades all patriarchal societies; incest renders a woman “worthless” in the economy of male exchange, as the system requires exogamy. Tony and Kim’s sexual relationship is a reminder of the fragility of the exogamous Law, which is therefore suggestive of the fragility of the Law of the Father as a whole.

[8] Another example of the fact that the sexuality of women becomes a discursive site around which men reassert their masculinity, is the scene in which the Casuals harass the group of “winos” in an interlude during Kirsty’s rape. Ozzy says to a woman, Yvonne, “- Bet you’re a good ride, eh”, and the response comes not from her, but from her male companion who “wrinkled his eyes and puckered his lips, sucking in air, and smiled … - Coorse, he grinned” (p. 187). This extract will be discussed in more depth below.

[9] A “wide-o” refers to a vagina, and the specific implications of the metaphor are interesting: the “o” is visually mimetic of a “hole” or a lack (as Irigiray, 1981, argues is the common representation of female genitalia in male discourse); the wide suggests a vagina that has been extensively used by men, or is particularly available for penetration.

[10] A “punter” is also an interesting word, as it suggests both economic and sexual inferiority. A “punter”, according to numerous online slang-dictionaries, refers to a “member of the paying public” and specifically “the customer of a prostitute”. The connotation of a football player, one who “punts” a ball, should not be overlooked within the context of football’s symbolic role of Marabou Stork Nightmares.

[11] Proof of this is the fact that a man who Roy understands as fulfilling all of the requirements for successful masculinity, Derek Holt who is an “ordinary guy; married with two kids, liked a pint at lunchtime, good at his job, … intae fitba …” (p. 114), is seen as a “caveman” (p. 115).

[12] Foucault’s “panopticon” – the prison in which the prisoner is constantly under surveillance, but whose captors are hidden from sight – is therefore the paragon of powerlessness (1977).

[13] Irigiray problematically assumes that “masculinity” is visual, while “femininity” is tactile. It is thorny, and archaic within Feminist discourse, to posit inherent qualities of the “masculine” or “feminine” in themselves; however, we can accept Irigiray’s proposition by allowing for a genealogy whereby the visual is signified as masculine within language. Indeed, prepositionally, sight is often given the semantic property of being penetrative, for instance, “I’ll look into it” or “Look into my eyes”.

[14] The terminology is, of course, negotiable. It could be argued that Roy rapes Caroline Carson.

[15] Of Caroline, he says “To think I’d wanked over that” (p. 107); and of Kirsty, “She looked repulsive already” (p. 183).

[16] This theme begins with Roy’s confessed desire to behead Winston II and use his head as a football (p. 116), is actualized first in his indirect mutilation of the dog’s face (p. 154), and culminates in the dog’s murder, after which “[i]t was like Winson Two had no head at all; just a large, black, charred cinder in a wrap-round piece of melting plastic” (p. 167).

[17] The concept of embodied vulnerability is discussed by Butler, 2004b.

[18] Butler (1990) discusses the fallacious nature of this belief, which she describes as the de Bouvoir-ian notion that the “association of the body with the female works along magical relations of reciprocity whereby the female sex becomes restricted to its body, and the male body, fully disavowed, becomes, paradoxically, the incorporeal instrument of an ostensibly radical freedom (1990: 16).

Freud on Female Sexuality, and later feminist modifications

2008-08-04T00:00:00.019+02:00

Giorgione - The Sleeping Venus

Sigmund Freud's famous essay, "Female Sexuality", silly as it seems now, is still interesting when seen as a stage in the development of Gender Theory. Here I summarize some of the core essays in this chain - keeping my personal opinions to a minimum, because otherwise I would come off sounding rude.

In Freud's essay, the central question is - how does the female come to achieve the situation of the Oedipus complex? Like the boy, her first love-object is her mother, but at some stage she shifts her sexual alliance to her father.

Of course, what is problematic with this model is that it suggests that lesbian or bisexual women are merely “underdeveloped”, as they would have never undergone this original shift: “women [who] remain arrested in their original attachment to their mother and never achieve a true change-over towards men” (p. 22). The mature girl has also shifted her interest in her clitoris to her vagina.

The original attachment to the mother is as intense as the later attachment to the father. Although he admits that psychoanalysts have “long given up any expectation of a neat parallelism between male and female sexual development” (p. 22), he speaks in terms of the “normal positive Oedipus situation” of the male, which the female only achieves after going through a “negative complex”. This “negative complex” stage is the root of hysteria, he claims (the word etymologically derives from the Greek for “uterus”).

Freud suggests that women are more prone to adult bisexuality (Freud believes that all human beings are innately bisexual, but that they are socialised from an early age into heterosexuality) because they have two sexual zones: the vagina which is feminine and the clitoris which is masculine (it was never really clear what he meant by this) .

Whereas, in the male, his Oedipal stage is eventually terminated by the fear of castration; the female already regards herself as castrated and this prompts the female Oedipal stage (only after she initially rejects her sexuality entirely, then attempts to appropriate masculinity by choosing a homosexual love-object). Freud claims that many females are incompletely sexualised, since this process is so lengthy and oblique.

He then discusses the conflict between daughter and mother, which he claims originates in the mother’s role in preventing the child from masturbating or, later, finding a sexual partner; and also because the daughter regards her mother as castrated like herself, and therefore reviles all “femaleness”. Furthermore, the mother is blamed for giving the daughter an “insufficient penis” and for weaning her too soon. There is a powerful ambivalence in the emotions toward the mother, and unlike the boy, the negative feelings cannot be displaced onto the father. Therefore the attachment to the mother is destroyed for the female.

So ... that was the prevailing view on female sexuality at the turn of the century. No wonder so many women ended up insane.

Luce Irigaray, a few decades later, in her groundbreaking essay "This Sex Which is Not One", elaborates on Freud’s “2-sex” classification (masculine clitoris, feminine vagina). In her theory, woman’s genitals are multiple; the woman’s sexuality, in fact, is plural. The woman can masturbate passively (her genitals touch “themselves”). Female sexuality is touch-orientated, and shifting, and all-embracing.

The dilemma for women is that Western society is regulated by the masculine, which recognises only the singularity of the phallus as the true sexual organ. The female does indeed, as Freud described, attempt to appropriate that phallus for herself (through subservience to a male love-object).

The multiplicity of female genitalia is disrupted by intercourse with the man, which is an “intrusion” (p. 262) which separates the lips of the vulva and prevents their autoerotic touch. The vagina is therefore reduced to “one-ness” by the phallus; it becomes merely the sheath that “take[s] over from the little boy’s hand” when his masturbation becomes socially prohibited – it is thereby, in fact, less than one – it is nothing, a hole.

Woman, in the phallocentric dominant social imagination, therefore acts only as “a more or less obliging prop for the enactment of man’s fantasies” (p. 262). The female tactile desire is subordinated by the male visual desire – and women are forced into a position where they must exhibit their bodies, but hide and efface their genitals (which terrify the phallus).

The pleasure that the woman takes in the incomplete form of her genitals must be hidden because it does not satisfy the “phallomorphism” of our society.

The child, in this schema, becomes the replacement for her repressed sexuality. She is denied the ability to touch herself, or to touch the man (“in a culture in which sexual relations are impracticable because man’s desire and woman’s are strangers to each other” p. 264), and therefore fondles her child.

But this strategy is regressive; it reduces the woman and man to “mother” and “father” and rekindles the Oedipal struggle. The dilemma remains: how does the woman remove herself from the social mechanisms which reduce her to a commodity in exchange between men, without renouncing all of their heterosexual pleasure, and thereby cloistering herself?

Another controversial critique of Freud came from practicing psychoanalysist Joan Riviere. The starting point for her most famous essay, "Womanliness as Masquerade" is a work by Ernest Jones called “The Early Development of Female Sexuality” (1927), in which he argues against Freud’s insistence that the phallus is the primary sexual organ of both sexes. Jones was particularly interested in homosexual women; which he categorizes into two types. One of the types of homosexual woman, which Riviere picks up as the basis of her own essay, is the woman who behaves heterosexually, but is in fact strongly masculine in her identity. Femininity, Riviere claims, is for these women a masquerade to avoid incurring the displeasure and violence of men.

Her schema is based upon a basic assumption of Psychoanalysis that all people are born as bisexuals, and that hetero- or homo-sexuality is achieved through the resolution of a series of conflicts that develop during early childhood. Another psychoanalyst, Ferenczi, claimed that the subconscious recognition of inherent bisexuality causes anxiety, and that some men therefore exaggerate their masculinity as a “defense” against their homosexuality. Riviere’s woman, an intellectual who displays strong feminine traits to mask her desire to be masculine, is a kind of corollary of Ferenczi’s man.

At the time she was writing (1929) the female intellectual was a fairly new phenomenon. These women were often compelled to excel at both “masculine” traits (intellectual ability) and “feminine” traits (to be a good mother and lover etc.).

She introduces an example of a patient of hers that was of this type. This woman required constant reassurance of her feminine attractiveness from father-figure-type men whenever she had demonstrated her excellence in her “masculine” career. During psychoanalysis, Riviere uncovered a strong sense of sexual rivalry with both her mother and her father – indicating that the innate infant bisexuality had never been effectively resolved into clear heterosexuality. Her need to “castrate” her father (steal his power, and render him unthreatening) resulted in her choosing to excel in a “masculine” career, which afforded her a sense of superiority over men. However, fearing the father’s symbolic retribution, she warded off his displeasure by appealing to the father (who was embodied by various father-figure-type men) with her feminine sexuality. This allowed her to appear innocent of the castration; Riviere argues that her femininity was a ruse to hide the fact that she possessed the phallus (masculine power).

Riviere argues that the masquerade of womanliness is itself “true” womanliness, as gender is performative rather than innate (as J. Butler later argues). However, for this woman, womanliness was a method to avoid anxiety rather than a sincere source of sexual pleasure. In fact, although this woman enjoyed sex to full orgasm, her enjoyment was a mask of the (male) fear of impotence. She was essentially frigid (i.e. castrated, and longing to castrate) and therefore needed to be loved by men in order to restore her sense of self-worth. Riviere suggests that this woman was innately a homosexual (she fantasized about women, and even identified with her husband when he had an affair).

Riviere cites other behaviors that can characterize this type of woman: technically competent women who pretend to be incompetent, intellectuals who dismiss their own subjects when talking to colleagues (telling jokes etc.).

Riviere suggests that the desire to identify with men arises from an intense rivalry with other women (bordering on sadism). Based upon Melanie Klein’s models of female psychosexual development, she claims that this rivalry results from an unresolved conflict of the Oral phase, in which the mother is seen to withhold the nipple. This anxiety/sadism against the nipple is displaced to a castrative desire, and the desire to become the phallus (in practice, to become masculine) in order to placate the mother. However, the woman feels helpless, as she believes that both father and mother possess the phallus and withhold it from her, and her rage prompts her to create a phantasy of non-lack (by attempting to acquire respect for her masculinity, and thereby to claim to possess the phallus), and must also hide the fact that she believes she has castrated her father/mother.

Furthermore, the woman will deny the existence of the mother (as source of the nipple-sadistic anxiety) entirely in order to avoid that unresolved anxiety. Relations with women are therefore subordinated, and the woman becomes obsessed with how she is viewed by men. In this way, Riviere suggests, the homosexuality of the woman is displaced.

Riviere closes with the question of “what is das ewig Weibliche?”; what is the nature of “true” femininity, or femininity that exists “behind” the mask? She cites Ernest Jones and Helene Deutsch who claim that female heterosexuality develops during the Oral phase, and teaches women to find gratification in incorporation. All of the other apparent qualities of femininity, Riviere argues, are merely reaction-formations that develop out of anxiety, and are not a true source of pleasure for the woman. When women come to accept castration (and concurrently become passive, humble beings, she claims) they are attempting to atone for their desires to castrate. This is true, Riviere argues, of both heterosexual and homosexual women.

In the 1990s the Freudian theory got another makeover in the form of Judith Butler.

In her essay, "Subjects of Sex/Gender/Desire", she insists that feminist theory does not merely reverse the paradigm of gender generalization and create a homogenous enemy in the “colonizing” male. She talks about the need to consider different sites of oppression “horizontally” rather than hierarchically, so as to avoid the “tactic of masculinist signifying economies” (p. 309) of subordinating certain discourses below others.

Certain theorists have argued that feminism effaces the multiplicity of identity (and oppression) by universalizing the category “woman”, ignoring race, class, culture and other dimensions of personhood. They claim that this is “normative and exclusionary” (p. 309), and in fact serves to disable critiques of these oppressions. A response to these critiques has been the attempts at a “coalitional politics” of feminism. Butler, however, is skeptical, her concern being that the perceived need for unity (as a strategic necessity) would not allow for true democracy that allows multiplicity, remains open to contestation, and does not coerce all parties into a particular (class and culture-based) conception of successful dialogue.

Butler argues that coalitions based upon “identity” are doomed to become oppressive; since when identity becomes a linguistic issue it institutionalizes “a definition that forecloses in advance the emergence of new identity concepts”. Instead, Butler claims that provisional coalitions should form around particular concrete practices, which will allow those whose interests are implicated in those practices to remain free of artificial, oppressive identities for the sake of political action.

The notion of “identity” as an objective, stable and universal experience is contested. The notion of “identity” is a keystone for the definition of the “person” that is so essential in our social discourses, and it presumes that personhood is a diachronic category (the person remains “self-identical” over time). Butler, using a Foucaultian paradigm, argues that the linguistic concept of identity constructs our experience of reality rather than neutrally describes it. This is particularly true in the case of gender, which is a highly regulated feature of social/personal life. Those who transgress the nominal regulative categories of gender/sex (LGBTs, “masculine women” and “feminine men” etc.) are therefore “unintelligible”. The binary and unequal categories of “male” and “female” are required for the “heterosexualization of desire” (p. 312) and do not allow for the existence of “identities” that subvert naturalized gender/sexual ones. Modern movements to have these subversive categories recognized therefore provide an opportunity for the concept of “identity” to be questioned (and thereby the possibilities for these marginal/transgressive experiences to proliferate).

Butler then discusses the theories of three theorists of poststructural gender oppressiveness: Foucault, Irigaray and Wittig. She attempts a reconciliation between their differing theories of how sexual categorization derives from power. Irigaray claims that there is only one sex in language – the male – and that woman in this system is unrepresentable (they are not even the Other of the male subject, they are merely the “relation of difference” in a language of binaries in which there is only the male, and woman is entirely silenced). Foucault suggests that there is a potential multiplicity of sexes, but that they are reduced to a binary in order to suppress any position that disrupts the “heterosexual, reproductive and medicojuridical hegemonies” (p. 314). Wittig, finally, believes that only woman is a sexed/gendered being in our language system (while man alone is a “person”), and that this is oppressive. She claims that only the lesbian could overthrow the male-female binary and restore true humanism (in which everyone is a “person”), since the concept of sex does not apply to the lesbian as it does to relationships/identities involving men.

Wittig’s position falls prey to the fallacy of “the metaphysics of substance”, in which concepts that are created by the grammar of language are falsely believed to be prelinguistic attributes of being (i.e. a set of individual psychic impressions are organized by language into a fictitious unity, which is believed to be substantive). Gender is, as Wittig elsewhere concurs, particularly problematic since it is created by language. Language presumes that gender is substantive, and also that it is an aspect of “identity” (one can “be” a woman or a man, as one can “be” heterosexual etc.). The male-female binary is presumed to operate by différance (one is a man only if one is not a woman), and the structure presumes that (heterosexual) desire follows causally from (masculine-feminine) gender, which follows causally from (male-female) sex. However, Butler claims that in reality there is no core “being” primary to one’s performances. Sexual identity does not cause one’s actions; it is defined by them.

Finally, Butler investigates whether gender, as well as the restriction of sexual practice into “hetero-” “homo-” or “bisexual” that it achieves, can be subverted. This can not be achieved, she argues, by identifying a sexual position (e.g. homosexuality) that is already constituted by the regulations of language. Rather, a recognition of the constructedness of identity (which does not render it false) should allow for a politics of gender that allows for the fact that gender is an ongoing discursive practice, and that identity is continually reconstructed.

Jacob Riis

2008-08-03T13:35:00.003+02:00

(Woman with a Plank for a Bed)

"Many of the people shown in Riis's work looked at the camera and the photographer at the moment of exposure. They did not realize that they were looking at you and me and all humanity for ages of time. Their postures and groupings are not contrived; the moment of exposure was selected more for the intention of truth than for the intention of effect." (Ansel Adams)

Jacob Riis, Danish photographer who made a name for himself in the late 1880s as the pioneer of flash-photography in America, used his new technology to penetrate the darkest alleyways of New York. He coined the term "mudracking" for journalism, and was renowned for using his artistic skills to reveal the slum conditions of the waves of immigrants (like himself) that flocked to America after the Civil War.

He was a man who had much personal experience in injustice against the poor. Before he achieved success with the New York Evening Sun, he had lived in a series of filthy tenement halls. His only companion was a stray dog, which a policeman - for fun - beat to death in front of him. Once he had achieved fame, he wrote a series of treaties lamenting on the treatment of the poor - although he remained a racist and a misogynist until he died.

The democratizing impulse of his depictions of the homeless, the poorest members of the city, was a larger aspect of the democratization of artistic subject that Modernism ushered in. Suddenly, it was not only the beautiful or the sublime that could create art - it could be the mundane, the grubbiness of the city, the people who lurked in the dark, not prepared to be seen.

Wallace Stevens's "Anecdote of the Jar"

2008-08-03T13:29:00.002+02:00

Okay, so in all honesty, although I have been denying it for years, I can't stand Wallace Stevens. I find him dry and uninteresting. His poems are like triple-processed cheese. But this one poem - a parody of Keats's "Ode on a Grecian Urn" makes me snigger everytime I read it.

I placed a jar in Tennessee,

And round it was, upon a hill.

It made the slovenly wilderness

Surround that hill.

The wilderness rose up to it,

And sprawled around, no longer wild.

The jar was round upon the ground

And tall and of a port in air.

It took dominion every where.

The jar was gray and bare.

It did not give of bird or bush,

Like nothing else in Tennessee.

Mischief and Morality: the play and seriousness of Philip Roth's doubles

2008-07-28T00:51:00.002+02:00

“If all the intelligence agencies in the world were abolished overnight, there would still be Pipiks aplenty to complicate and wreck people’s orderly lives. Self-employed, nonessential nudniks whose purpose is simply balagan, meaningless mayhem, a mess, are probably rooted more deeply in reality than are those who are only dedicated, as you and I are, to coherent, essential, and lofty goals. Let’s not waste any more frenzied dreaming on the mystery of irrationality. It needs no explanation. There is something frighteningly absent from life. One gets from someone like your Moishe Pipik a faint idea of all that’s missing. This revelation one must learn to endure without venerating it with fantasy. Let us move on. Let us be serious.”[1]

Introduction

The Postmodern writer is a mischief-maker: he plays with all expectations of literary form, of the suspension of belief required by art, of the stability of morality and of the solidity of truth. In Operation Shylock, Roth[2]’s method of play to erase the unified narrative voice through creating doubles, and doubles of doubles, to construct a dialogue that destabilises all of the reader’s certainties. However, in a move that runs countercurrent to most Postmodern literature, Roth refuses to abandon himself to this relativism. This is expressed on page 393, when Philip asks Smilesburger, “Isn’t that the message? The unsureness of everything” to which Smilesburger replies, “The message of your book? I wouldn’t say so.”

Roth achieves his mischief-making largely through the character of Pipik, the self-identified double of Philip.

What is Pipik?

On page 389, Smilesburger claims that,

Pipik is the product of perhaps the most powerful of all the senseless influences on human affairs and that is Pipikism, the antitragic force that inconsequentializes everything – farcicalizes everything, trivializes everything, superfictializes everything – our sufferings as Jews not excluded.

Pipik is the troublemaker in the novel, he sets in motion the comedy of errors that makes the novel seem farcical. He is the single most absurd and unbelievable element of the story - and the most obvious literary construction (there could be no Pipik were there no Secret Sharer in Conrad, or Double in Dosteovsky and so on – the doppelganger is a typical and recognisable figure in literature). He seems to be a character that simply begs a psychoanalytic reading[3]: his penile implant (which is both the symbolic phallus and the fear of castration), the displacement of Philip’s anxieties onto him (Philip says that he sees the sick version of himself when he looks at Philip – the Halycon-induced neurotic), his “protean” nature (reminiscent of the id) and the fact that he is neutralised only when he is re-integrated into the self (when Philip sleeps with Jinx, and finally when Philip calls him “Philip Roth”, at which point he disappears from the narrative). Pipik is, in short, the main reason that the reader is inclined to reject the novel as fact and read it instead as fiction: since fiction supplies the means to interpret him. Pipik is therefore not a troublemaker only because of his activities in the plot, but because of his continual fictionalising of it, against which Philip continually struggles to reassert authenticity.

Not only Philip, but all of the “Philip Roth” personae actively argue for the novel to be read as non-fiction: Pipik becomes angry when Philip attempts to impose “readings” on him (“Is this the way [writers] all think? That out there everybody is playing? Man!” p. 199). The psychoanalytic reading is similarly one that the reader is compelled not to take seriously, firstly because Roth has expressed his distrust of essentialising paradigms[4], and secondly because of Pipik’s own rejection of being “read” and his insistence on his unique personhood (through, for instance, the narrating of his own biography[5]). Furthermore, the psychoanalytic dimension of Pipik becomes a source of comedy; his fake erection labeled “Aristophanic”[6]. The interactions between the two characters are always hysterical, alternating between horror and laughter, and become the most highly charged during the scenes when they alternatively inhabit the same hotel room, that is, when the two identities are forced into the same psychic space. When Philip laughs at Pipik (which he does more than once in the course of the novel) it is when his fear of him is neutralized and he sees Pipik as harmless.[7] As a general rule, Philip laughs at Pipik whenever Pipik reveals himself to be different to Philip – the laughter therefore arises from relief, and is expressive of Philip’s temporary realization that fiction is fiction, but that he is a real and whole person. A relief, of course, that is quickly destabilized yet again as the plot becomes increasingly absurd, increasingly fictive.

The fictiveness/non-fictiveness of the novel is further confused in the bookend statements to the reader: the entity who authorizes the “Preface” is “P.R.”, and the “Note to the Reader” should traditionally also be the voice of Roth, even though they make opposite claims (the “Preface” claims that the book is fact, the “Note” claims that the book is fiction). However, even these become the sites of play: the “Note to the Reader” closes with the sentence, “This confession is false”, with the deliberate ambiguity that “confession” could refer to the entire novel (as designated in its subtitle; the novelistic genre) or to the “confession” (as in a religious confession after a sin, or after mischief) that is the “Note to the Reader” itself. What is labeled a confession of mischief therefore only creates more mischief and confusion, and it becomes unclear if these, too, are part of the fiction body of the text. This tension ultimately produces a comic effect – there is simply no other appropriate response to our confounding bafflement, as the plot becomes increasingly absurd, and is simultaneously increasingly authenticated[8]. The novel plays with the reader’s certainties through fiction-making, and the simultaneous “confession” of that fiction-making, followed by the reassertion that the fiction is true. Pipik is not the only “mischief maker”, Philip is one too. Roth is one too[9].

Roth, in an essay for the New York times entitled “A Bit of Jewish Mischief”[10], claims that the character of Pipik was inspired by a real-life impersonator: “In January 1989 … A man of my age, bearing an uncanny resemblance to me and calling himself Philip Roth, turned up in Jerusalem shortly before I did.[11]” Since Roth is a self-“confessed” mischief-maker, there is no guarantee that he is being more honest here than in the novel; he even warns us that the event “had the unmistakable signposts of the impossible”. Whether Pipik was a real person (not metaphorically real, or a real part of Roth’s psyche, but a real person with a birth certificate) is indeterminate, and therefore Roth forces us to read what is presented of him on its own terms, literary terms, because those are the only ones we can be sure of.

Pipik is not only one of Roth’s characters; he is also one of his readers[12]. He tells Philip that his theory, Diasporism, is based upon readings of Philip/Roth’s fiction. Philip is disturbed by being attributed with ideas that derive from readings of his books rather than ideas that he consciously wrote into them, but accepts the fact that his public persona is ultimately what he is, as much as any persona that he writes for himself[13]. Philip, too, is a reader of the book as much as its narrator; which is best illustrated in chapter 8, when Philip summarises the plot thus far and presents his criticism of it[14]. Philip comes to mimic Pipik, impersonating a different possible version of himself. The dialectics of self are a strong theme in all of Roth’s fiction – in writing himself into his books (in the form of his character Zuckerman, or as Philip) he is questioning the degree to which fiction can act as autobiography[15], and the corollary, that autobiography is the ultimate activity of fictionalising the self. By allowing a “misreader” to become a character in the novel (Pipik), Roth is engaging in a dialectic of his own identity: an identity that is equally determined by the writer and the readers[16].

Roth, in Reading Myself and Others[17] (1977), claims that he “set myself the goal of becoming the writer some Jewish critics had been telling me I was all along: irresponsible, conscienceless, unserious. Ah, if only they knew what that entailed!” (p. 80). Pipik accuses Philip of embodying all of these traits (see especially chapter 3); of refusing to engage politically. Even though the novel is set in a politically (and religiously) volatile setting, Israel, Philip refuses to make explicit his own stance. The other characters enact the dialogue for him, the extreme points of view articulated by characters such as Smilesburger (the Zionist), Zaid (the anti-Zionist); and different perspectives are taken by Pipik (the Diasporist), Anna (the pessimist), Gal (the Israeli soldier, disgusted at his own state), Shmuel (the Jewish lawyer for Palistinians, who scorns them) and so on. Almost all of the minor characters articulate some view on Israeli politics. Philip, however, is only negatively constructed by what he rejects in all of those views[18]. This phenomenon seems to have been enabled by post-Benveniste linguistic theory – in which semantic categories are constituted through differentiation, rather than through positive attributes[19]. It is never clarified whether it is the inherent multiplicity of Roth’s own persona which is expressed in such dialogism, or whether the nature of the political situation itself is so confused that it engineers the disintegration of Philip/Roth’s identity. It may be a bit of both.

This theme of competing narratives and impersonations constructing the self is articulated most openly not in Pipik, about whom Philip struggles to think clearly, but in the character of Ivan the Terrible. Ivan is a real historical character, and his trial is verifiably true. However, he also has existence as an artistic character in the 1958 Sergei Eisenstein film, Ivan the Terrible – a comic/horrific portrayal of Stalin. In real life as well as in art, the person of Demjanjuk is overlaid with emotive ideology, with artistic portrayals, and with the narratives about his history that may or may not be true. Demjanjuk, who may or may not be Ivan the Terrible, is therefore the perfect analogy to Roth, who may or may not be Philip, who may or may not be Pipik. The book is littered both with characters that turn their lives into stories (Aharon and Philip) and characters that turn stories into their lives (Pipik and Zaid), the juxtaposition suggesting that the true self is constructed through both activities. Overlaying and inhibiting all of this multiplicity and power of self-determination is the one great enemy, the one doppelganger of all Jews, Shylock[20].

Conclusion: Towards Ethical Fiction

As we have seen, the subtitle of the book, “A Confession”, ambiguously sets up a literary expectation (by placing the book into the genre of “Confessions”, we begin to read it like a “Confession” – and assume that it is autobiography) and then plays with this expectation (by refusing to be real, by becoming a “confession” of mischief-making). But there is more to this title. A “Confession” resonates with notions of ethical responsibility[21]; a connotation that seems entirely at odds with the Postmodern-play aspect of the book. The book is ultimately an Operation Shylock, which, we are told in the text, is a concrete mission on behalf of all Jews. The mission is to displace the über-doppelganger, with numerous doppelgangers; to shatter an outdated, homogeneous model of The Jew into a multiplicity. By conflating the political mission he attempts in the missing last chapter of the book with the book itself, Roth suggests that what his book achieves is not merely literary fun, but that it is a non-literary (just as the mission in the plot is never narrated[22]), active attempt to be responsible in fiction.

The question as to whether or not there is a responsibility in fiction is one that plays itself out over the course of the novel[23]. Originally the dialogue plays out between Philip and Pipik. Pipik embodies a desire towards action and political involvement. His whole life has been a fight for justice – from his actions as a PI to his political actions (which are eventually realised by Philip, not by himself[24]). Whereas Philip imagines kidnapping Demjanjuk’s son, Pipik plans to do it[25]. It is only once Pipik is re-integrated into Philip (as discussed above) that Philip accepts Smilesburger’s political mission. Operation Shylock, in the end, is a product both of “Pipikism” and “Philipism” - it is both action and literature; it is a mission for the Jewish people in the form of a novel. After, in the narrative, Philip returns from his mission, Smilesburger says to him, “I knew you could write. I knew you could do things in your head. I didn’t know you could do something as large in reality. I don’t imagine that you knew it, either” (p. 381).

In finally playing a role that transcends fiction, that surpasses the comedy and play of Postmodern literature, Roth resurrects his writing from moral relativism. Philip, in the end, does come to a conclusion about his own political/moral stance on the Israeli crisis, and he acts it out. Of course, he never quite tells us what either that stance or action is[26] – but this is perhaps an admonition to the reader to determine for ourselves where in the competing points of view we find truth.

References
Kauvar, E. M. (1995). “This Doubly Reflected Communication: Philip Roth’s ‘Autobiographies’” in Contemporary Literature, Vol. 36, No. 3: pp. 412-446.
Parrish, Timothy L. (1999). “Imagining Jews in Philip Roth’s ‘Operation Shylock’” in Contemporary Literature, Vol. 40, No. 4: pp. 575-602.
Roth, Philip (1977). Reading Myself and Others. Corgi Books, Great Britain.
Roth, Philip (1993). Operation Shylock. Vintage, London.
Safer, Elaine B. (1996). “The Double, Comic Irony, and Postmodernism in Philip Roth’s Operation Shylock” in MELUS, Vol. 21, No. 4: pp. 157-172.
Shostak, Debra (1997). “The Diaspora Jew and the ‘Instinct for Impersonation’: Philip Roth’s ‘Operation Shylock’” in Contemporary Literature, Vol. 38, No. 4: pp. 726-754.
Skinner, Quentin (…). “Hobbes and the Classical Theory of Laughter” …

[1] Spoken by Smilesburger in Operation Shylock, page 386. My emphasis.
[2] In order to clearly differentiate between the overlapping personae presented by the novel, the label “Roth” shall designate the author of the book, “Philip” its narrator, and “Pipik” the personage referred to in the first sentence of the novel, “… the other Philip Roth …”. Of course, these labels may become unstable during the course of the interrogation of authorship and authority attempted by the essay.
[3] Indeed, Pipik mentions both Jung and Freud the first time he meets Philip.
[4] See Reading Myself and Others (1977), and Kauvar (1995).
[5] In which it becomes apparent that not only is Pipik’s biography as fully realized as Philip’s, but Pipik as a character is more physical, a PI, more engaged in the real world than Philip, who is accused of being a man who retreats from action into writing.
[6] Referring to the enormous wooden penises sported by actors in Ancient Greek theatre, in the farcical comedy that would precede the performance of a tragedy.
[7] Classical philosophers, from Aristotle to Hobbes, recognized the element of fear or feelings of inferiority that underpin laughter. In the words of Hobbes, “The passion of Laughter is nothyng [sic] else but a suddaine Glory arising from suddaine Conception of some Eminency in our selves by Comparison with the Infirmityes of others, or with our owne formerly” (cited in Skinner, 2007)
[8] It is helpful to remember that Roth taught for many years a course on Kafka, who similarly presents impossible situations as real. See Reading Myself and Others (1977).
[9] On page 106, Philip asks Aharon to “Define ‘mischief’ please?”, to which Aharon replies “To a mischief-maker like you? Mischief is how some Jews get involved in living.” This exchange introduces an idea which is resurrected in chapter 6, “His Story”, where Pipik accuses Philip of succumbing to a typically Jewish flight from physicality by becoming a writer.
[10] The title, in typical Roth style, can be read either as a description of Operation Shylock or of itself.
[11] Cited in Safer, 1996.
[12] In Chapter 8, Philip is presented with yet more “readers”: Supposnik (who accuses Philip of writing anti-Semitic novels) and the schoolchildren Deborah and Tal (who apply his early short stories to their own experiences of religious/political confusion). This reader-writer dialectic is therefore not confined to the exchanges between Philip and Pipik.
[13] Philip admits that the ideas of Diasporism, which have been authorized with his name, “are mine now” (p. 35).
[14] Page 245: “he himself slips silently out of the plot on the grounds of its general implausibility, a total lack of gravity, reliance at too many key points on unlikely coincidence, an absence of inner coherence, and not even the most tenuous evidence of anything resembling a serious meaning or purpose. The story so far is frivolous plotted, overplotted, for his taste altogether too freakishly plotted … as if the look-alike at the story’s storm center isn’t farfetched enough …”
[15] Shostak, 1997, points out that Roth often expresses frustration at being mistaken for his characters by critics; similarly, in Reading Myself and Others (Roth, 1977) he speaks exasperatedly of critics who assumed that Alexander Portnoy was a self-portrait. In his novel Deception, the narrator says, “I write fiction and I’m told it’s autobiography. I write autobiography and I’m told it’s fiction … let them decide what it is or isn’t.” (Cited in Safer, 1996)
[16] It could be suggested that this shifting of authority is the product of modern technological society, especially the phenomenon of the internet, where text abounds and authorship becomes impossible to ascertain. However, literary theorists had already proclaimed the “death of the author” by the mid 20th century, most notably Roland Barthes.
[17] The title itself resonates with the idea of self being both a product of the writer and of the reader, Roth in the title proposes to “read himself” rather than to presume authority in interpretation.
[18] The taxi driver (who may or may not work for the PLO), for instance, repeatedly asks Philip if he is a Zionist, to which he refuses to respond. Similarly, he refuses to reply to Smilesburger’s question, “did you approve of Israel and the existence of Israel” on page 351.
[19] Discussed in Shostak (1997), who mentions a passage in The Counterlife when Zuckerman says, “If there even is a natural being, an irreducible self, it is rather small, I think, and may even be the root of all impersonation – the natural being may be the skill itself, the innate capacity to impersonate … in the absence of a self, one impersonates selves, and after a while impersonates best the self that best gets one through”. Analogously, Pipik cures his students of their anti-Semitism by forcing them to listen to a tape of anti-Semitic monologue.
[20] On page 334, Smilesburger argues that the kaleidoscopic self is a phenomenon particular to the Jews. This is belied, however, by the biography Jinx narrates for herself, whose endless reinventions are religious as well as transformations of her personality. However, even she comes to be dominated by the Shylock doppelganger, which obsesses her, and makes her an anti-Semite.
[21] Both because of the use of the word in Catholicism, and the fact that the early writers of the genre, for instance Saint Augustine, were religious men. In more modern times, of course, the word belongs to the realm of Law, and therefore ethical punishment.
[22] The chapter following the deleted one is called “Words Generally Only Spoil Things”.
[23] This occurs implicitly through the narrating of real violence in the novel, and the narrator’s disgust towards real violence. These are the points at which the narrator finds that comedy and literary play are insufficient, for instance when he says of Pipik, “it disgusted me that he should insinuate this crazy stunt into the midst of such a grim and tragic affair [the Demjanjuk trial]”, page 52. On page 374 Philip talks about Céline, the anti-Semitic French novelist whom he “tries hard to despise”, and yet teaches the books to his students.
[24] For instance, Pipik originally plans to meet Arial Sharon. Eventually it is Philip who does. Of course, Philip does not realize all of Pipik’s plans.
[25] And Pipik, it is revealed in the Epilogue (in Jinx’s letter), could not write a word.
[26] This is because the final point of view is Roth’s; there are no more doppelgangers left: Page 377 “Nothing need hide itself in fiction but are there no limits where there’s no disguise?”

Rite (a short story)

2008-07-27T15:48:00.001+02:00

Susanne’s mother wielded an enormous cleaver at her. “Honestly! Do something useful or get out of the kitchen. And stop nicking the cheese.”

Sue smiled mischievously and lifted another handful of the creamy cheddar to her mouth as her mother turned back to the chopping board.

She loved being in the kitchen with her mother, while the menfolk sat in the lounge drinking watered-down whiskey, making loud jokes she didn’t understand.

She began to peel potatoes. They felt comfortingly solid in her hands. She peeled away the skin to expose the powdery flesh, and then peeled off bits of the flesh just for the joy of the slicing. She dug out the dark eyes with her fingernails.

“Sies, Sue,” her mother chided her. “Wash your fingers before you do that.” She grabbed the potatoes from her, and began to scrub them roughly over the sink. Sue watched her enormous buttocks jiggling beneath her flowery skirt. She sidled up to them, and rested her head against the rough fabric.

Her mother smiled at her over her shoulder. “If you’re not going to be useful in here, go and ask Uncle Tommy to get more ice. And see if you can find the bottle opener.”

Sue padded into the lounge. Uncle Tommy was conducting a sermon from next to the heater.
“It’s like I said to him, boys, I said to him, you’ve got to give employees boundaries, otherwise they feel they’ve got to test you. They’re uneducated, you know, I said to him, they like to know the rules. Lets them know where they stand.” He took a swig from his glass, and smacked his lips.

Her dad, a planet of a man, to Sue’s eyes, stretched his arms out over his fat belly and crossed his hands together, like he always did when he was about to say something funny.
“Ja, Tom, applies to us husbands too, doesn’t it. Got be disciplined.” He winked over at Auntie Rosemary, who giggled and blushed.

Uncle Tommy laughed. “Ja, Rosie knows how to keep me in my place. She’s got the key to the dogbox hanging on her belt.”

Everyone laughed in a happy chorus. Finally her dad noticed Sue. “What is it, little poppit?”
“Mommy said to tell Uncle Tommy to get more ice and to find the bottle opener.”

Uncle Reggie looked at her from the couch, his nose red and his eyes bloodshot. “I think I saw it in the back room, Susie-Lou.”

Sue ran off at once to get it. She loved any excuse to go into the back room. She’d been forbidden from going in there when Grandma was lying on the bed, and it had acquired the mystical aura of a church, or of her mother’s dressing room.

The room was dark and quiet as she pushed open the door. Even the air seemed perfectly immobile. She stared at the bed. It had been stripped. Sue idly ran her fingers into the grooves of the mattress.

The room had a faint smell that she could not name. Something bodily, and warm, and dry.
Sue walked over to the dark wooden bureau. On it was a collection of delicate porcelain figures. A shepherdess. A boy with a large head and watery eyes. A couple dancing in old-fashioned clothes. A naked woman playing a harp. They were all covered with a film of grey dust. Sue wiped her finger over the naked woman’s breasts, making them white and smooth again. Then, she cleaned off the rest of her, so that no-one would know she’d wanted to touch the statue where it was naked.

The bottle opener was perched on the end of the bureau. Sue grabbed it and left the dark room. She wondered why nobody had thought to open the curtains.

Sue returned to the pleasant noises and smells of the living room. She curled up in the corner, next to the couch, and pretended to be invisible, so that she could drink in the chattering voices and the affectionate laughter without being sent on any more errands.

The men spoke about women, and banking policies, and her daddy told them about the new car he was going to buy, and they all turned miserable when they started speaking about the rugby team that wasn’t doing well, and then cheered up again by making rude jokes about the other teams, and then they spoke about Uncle Reggie’s new business, and then about women again.

Auntie Rosemary wasn’t saying anything, but stroked Susanne’s head gently. Sue felt her body relaxed and weightless, and wondered if she could still be Sue without having any body at all. Although, the delicious smells from the kitchen reminded her that having a body was nice, too.

The sun set as the conversation marinated the room, becoming increasingly hearty with every round of whiskey that went around. Her uncles began so sing a song they remembered from when Grandma still made them go to mass.

Eventually she was called to help bring supper to the table. Everyone was so hungry that they began eating the first course without even saying grace. Sue’s hands were soon sticky, and her mother fussed over her with a napkin.

Very soon the first course was cleared away, and the conversation became suddenly muted. Her Uncle Reggie, sitting across the table, was staring at her again, his eyes even redder than before.

Her mother came from the kitchen, carrying a heavily-laden platter. Everyone watched her lay it on the table. It made a thumping sound like somebody falling.

Her mother brought through a steaming jug. “I hope no-one minds, but I made gravy. I didn’t know if it would be appropriate, but the meat is so dry…”

Everyone loaded up their plate. There were not the usual squabblings over who got the most; Sue thought it must be because there was so much meat, and everyone like meat better than potatoes or vegetables.

Starving, Sue began to eat. She had taken four forkfuls before she realised that everyone else was looking at their food without touching it.

Uncle Tommy cleared his throat. “I feel … we should say something.” Her daddy, always the man to fill a silence, rose ponderously to his feet.

“She was a good mother.”

“The best,” Aunt Rosemary added, dabbing her eye with a soiled napkin.

“Yes, the best. And I know we’re all going to miss her … particular ways of doing things. I know that some of you weren’t in favour of this,” his eyes singled out Uncle Reggie. “Reg, it was what Mom wanted.”

He raised his glass, the broken glass that had a chip out of the rim, half filled with thin whiskey. “To Shirley. May she live on in all of us.”

They all lifted their glasses off the table and murmered, “To Shirley.” Susanne had already resumed eating. The flesh felt grainy in her mouth, and it was already getting cold. She wanted to tell her daddy about something she’d learnt at school about hippos, but he was eating with the look on his face that meant he was concentrating, and didn’t want to be disturbed.

The Desert Music

2008-07-27T14:23:00.005+02:00

The minimalist composers in general, and Steve Reich in particular, were all quite enamoured of Williams's poetry. Steve Reich set pieces out of Pictures from Brueghel to a choir and orchestra. He chose extracts that directly mention music:

"take your song / which drives all things out of mind, / with you to the other world"

"Well, shall we / think or listen? Is there a sound addressed / not wholly to the ear? / We half close / our eyes. We do not / hear it through our eyes. / It is not / a flute note either, it is the relation / of a flute note / to a drum"

"It is a principle of music / to repeat the theme. Repeat / and repeat again, / as the pace mounts. The / theme is difficult / but no more difficult / than the facts to be / resolved"

And finally, less obviously related:

"Man has survived hitherto because he was too ignorant / to know how to realize his wishes. Now that he can realize / them, he must either change or perish"

The extracts all reveal WCW's interest in uniting the arts. He often takes as his subject artistic criticism, or rather what it is to experience a work of art. He most often talks about paintings, of course, being himself an amateur painter; but occassionaly talks about the experience of music, or of the sensations of mundane life.

The last quote is the most interesting. Although a man of deep-felt social conscience, he was critical of the notion that poetry should be used as a tool of political rhetoric. He once said, though, that poetry awakened man from non-awareness, by drawing his attention to the intensity of living experience, which becomes at once a thing utterly squalid and wholly divine. When he says that man knows now "how to realize his wishes" he is speaking not only about the changes that technology, economy and democracy had brought to modern life (although it includes these things) but specifically the ability to become aware of oneself as a truly living, feeling being. This sense of possibility opens man up to becoming divine, or of perishing, because mere animal survival is no longer an option. Once a man has hopes - then those hopes must either be fulfilled or dissapointed.

Reich himself was particularly interested in how he saw these lines as relating to nuclear testing (in the White Sands and Alamagordo deserts). "Realize his wishes" in this sheme refers to man's technological capacities. He has said in interviews that the desert is a place that makes men mad. He cites the biblical passage where Jacob wrestles an angel in the desert - and explains that for him the passage talks about the conflict between man's technological power and his spiritual powerlessness, and the madness (desert) that brings the two into conflict.

On Love and Lolita

2008-07-15T01:20:00.006+02:00

the awfulness of love and violets
remorse despair while you
took a dull doll to pieces
and threw its head away
because of all you did
because of all I did not
you have to die
(Extract from Quilty’s death sentence, p. 298)

This is an essay I wrote on Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita. It analyses chapter 35 - the death of Clare Quilty - in close detail, and talks about the "aesthetic morality" that Nabokov expounds therein.

Lolita’s narrative is framed within a court case. This is most apparent when Humbert opens his story with “Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, exhibit number one …” (p. 9), and is reinforced by similar allusions throughout the novel. It could easily be assumed that this court case concerns the character of the title, Lolita herself, and this assumption indeed seems supported by the structure of the narrative, which focuses upon her, and attempts to justify Humbert’s rape of her. However, Humbert’s first description of himself is not as a paedophile, but as a murderer, “You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style” (p. 9). The Kubrick film version, additionally, for which Nabokov himself wrote the screenplay, closes with an epilogue that explicates that Humbert dies in prison awaiting trial for the murder of Clare Quilty. And yet, somehow, the reader comes away from the book feeling that the murder is the most moral act that Humbert in fact performs. This essay seeks to examine this tension within the book, through a close-reading of the murder scene.

There are many deaths in Lolita; Valeria, Annabel, Humbert’s mother, Charlotte Haze come to mind immediately. Their deaths are humorously absent from the text – Valeria’s expressed in a sentence (“A man from Pasadena told me one day that Mrs.Maximovitch née Zborovski had died in childbirth around 1945”), Annabel’s in a phrase (“… and four months later she died of typhus in Corfu.”), the mother’s described in a mere two words (“picnic, lightning”). Even the crucial death of Charlotte Haze occurs outside of the narrator’s sight, and he spends a mere half-page describing the scene. But the death of Quilty is described in vivid detail; detail matched only in the early descriptions of rapturous moments with Lolita. Humbert the murderer therefore acts in the same mode as Humbert the lover – and as we shall see, it is his characterisation as a lover that justifies him to be the judge and executioner of Quilty the non-lover.

There are explicit similarities between Humbert and Quilty. On p. 293 Humbert even notes that Quilty’s purple bathrobe is much like the one he himself owns. Quilty shares Humbert’s sense of word-play, for instance, “Phil calls Philadelphia. Pat calls Patagonia” (p. 294), and “… as the Bard said, with that cold in his head, to borrow and to borrow and to borrow” (p. 300). He, too, spatters even prosaic English sentences with French, suggesting an education comparable to Humbert’s. In some ways, Quilty treats Humbert as a social equal, playing a game of niceties with him, as in “She met some remarkable people. Do you happen to know –” (p. 297) and “I said I had said I thought he had said he had never …”, parodying polite upper-class (for want of a better-defined term) social interactions. Quilty himself defines these similarities as, “We are men of the world, in everything – sex, free verse, marksmanship.” By “men of the world”, Quilty seems to imply that both characters believe that they are exempt, by a privilege of birth or intelligence, from the social rules that govern a society that they both seem to disdain.

However, undercutting their multiple similarities, there is a subtle awareness of class-consciousness that divides the men. Quilty, for instance, proclaims “You are either Australian, or a German refugee. Must you talk to me? This is a Gentile’s house, you know. Maybe you’d better run along” (p. 296). Humbert earlier debates with himself whether “master was still asleep in the master bedroom (p. 292).

The opening of the chapter reads like a bad horror story, littered with clichés:
A thunderstorm accompanied me most of the way back to Grimm Road … the birds screamed in the drenched and steaming trees. The elaborate and decrepit house … (p. 292)
Coupled with the general sense of unreality of the passage, and the fact that both characters are drunk (“I had overdone the alcoholic stimulation business,” p. 292), the scene is almost a burlesque. Such passages as

I see myself following him through the hall, with a kind of double, triple, kangaroo jump, remaining quite straight on straight legs while bouncing up twice in his wake, and then bouncing between him and the front door in a ballet-like stiff bounce … (p. 301)

are numerous (many times, characters simply trip over things), and the high level of physical comedy in the scene operate in terms of a theatrical, rather than a literary, genre. Indeed, the chapter closes with the line “This … was the end of the ingenious play staged for me by Quilty”. There is a dialogue between theatrical and literary arts that runs throughout the novel, and Quilty, famed playwright, is obviously the ideal interlocutor for the literary purist Humbert. Humbert, on page 198 claims that he “detest[s] the theatre as being a primitive and putrid form”. Indeed, Humbert’s loss of Lolita begins when he loses her to the theatre, to Quilty’s play, in fact, which is the device he constructs to entrap her. It is of significance, therefore, that Humbert forces Quilty to read a poetic death sentence.

The death of Quilty is a dialogue and action laden scene which reads more like a play than like a novel. Humbert’s authorial voice, which dominates the rest of the novel with its ironically mediated descriptions, gives way here to long passages of direct dialogue, a theatrical device. Quilty’s dying monologue in fact lasts a full uninterrupted page-and-a-half (pp. 299-300). The general mode of the chapter, in fact, is overwhelmingly theatrical or filmic – largely resembling an Oscar Wilde or Noel Coward play (the party characters, and the lack of emotional response that characterises that particular social group). The sense of bizarreness which Humbert describes is therefore the product of him finding himself in a world that conforms to different artistic conventions than his own literary one. Humbert’s sense of acting out a role written for him by someone else is interesting in light of the fact that Quilty’s is the only murder that Humbert successfully manages to perform in the novel, though he seriously considers performing others. It is in this scene, moreover, that Humbert finally emerges as a moral agent in the novel. It is therefore interesting that he is stripped of his artistic agency in the face of the theatrical form in the crucial scene.

The theatre/literature dialogue supports more crucial differences between the two men. Humbert’s descriptions of Pavor Manor are as distanced as his descriptions of the Haze home. The passage that reads

There were still other rooms. A happy thought struck me. If and when master returned from his constitutional in the woods, or emerged from some secret lair, it might be wise for an unsteady gunman with a long job before him to prevent his playmate from locking himself up in a room … The house, being an old one, had more planned privacy than have modern glamour-boxes, where the bathroom, the only lock-able locus, has to be used for the furtive needs of planned parenthood.(p. 293)

shows this distance from both the middle class and the American aristocracy in conjunction. Such socially particular phrases as “constitutional in the woods” and “furtive needs of planned parenthood” demonstrate Humbert’s familiarity, and exclusion, from both. The loaded word “furtive” expresses his disdain for the middle class, but his descriptions of Quilty as “fleshy” and “pudgy” demonstrate that Humbert is equally repulsed by Quilty. Dupee (1982) suggests that the confrontation between the two characters is allegorical of the differences between European (restrained, well-bred) and American (opulent, infantile) aristocracy. However, keeping in mind the fact that Nabokov loathes obvious allegory, polemics and Marxist class-consciousness[1] (Nabokov, 1973), we cannot interpret these distinctions as mere class dialectics in themselves. The issue, rather, is one of aesthetics.

Quilty’s lifestyle is characterised by a grandiose, chaotic hedonism repulsive to Humbert. The opulence of the grand house (“a library full of flowers … a rather bare room with ample and deep mirrors and a polar bear skin … there were still other rooms”) is undercut by its unkemptness (Humbert notices “a number of used glasses growing out of the carpet”). Humbert’s aesthetics are curiously ascetic, he refers to “his usual meticulous way” even when cleaning his gun, and fastidiously washes his hands immediately after the murder. He obsessively describes Quilty in phrases of gross physicality: “fleshy”, “pudgy hands” and “hirsute chest”; he evens mentions a play he has written called Proud Flesh (p. 295). The extension of this is Quilty’s attitude to sex, which is obscene and fundamentally opposed to Humbert’s romanticism. Quilty offers Humbert “a rather exciting little freak, a young lady with three breasts” as “house pet”, as well as a photographic book of male genetalia, and the opportunity to enjoy both the daughters and granddaughters of “reliable and bribable” Mrs Vibrissa (p. 300) – he is attracted to deviance merely for its own sake, lacking a real standard of aesthetics to inform his sexual tastes. How different is this orgiastic sexual indulgence from Humbert’s rapture for the Nymphet, whose beauty is a product of its rarity, and its transience. By comparison, Quilty is an undiscerning consumer. This quality is the true distinction between Humbert and his Doppelganger, although it is expressed through a theatrical/literary distinction, and it is this quality that causes the reader to condone Humbert as the judge and executor of his foil.

The reason that the reader bestows his moral blessings upon Humbert, is because his aesthetic selectivity approximates something that has been represented to the modern world as “love”. The uniformity of the reader-response to Humbert in this regard is enormously indicative of the degree to which literature has formed our own moral consciousness. Trilling (1982) argues the eloquent point that Humbert, master of Romance languages and the poetic tradition, is a character that expresses the ideals of Romance stories, which exist in the modern world only in misrepresented forms that deal with sex rather than with unfulfilable, courtly love. It seems possible to argue, however, that Romance ideals pervade modern popular culture, even if in a compromised form (I am thinking here, of magazines like those Charlotte Haze devotes herself to, as just one example). We seem, as readers, to be predisposed to respond to the aesthetics of Romantic/romantic love, even if it overrides our normal moral sensibilities. Quilty’s crime, therefore, and the one that he ultimately dies for, is simply that he is worse than obscene, he is vulgar.

At last, we can make sense of the fact that was visited early in this essay: that the death scene is described in a vividness that equates with the vividness of the romantic descriptions of Lolita. Humbert is allowed to murder Quilty because it is the fulfilment of his role as lover. Shockingly, this implies that Quilty is demonised as a paedophile, while Humbert escapes this label, simply because Quilty’s art-form is not sufficiently seductive to convince the reader of its (political, class-conscious) moral paradigm.

Quilty’s insensitivity to the ideals of romantic love is not only expressed in the references to his sexual perversions, but also in his insensitivity to his own death. Explicitly Humbert must tell him,

Quilty … I want you to concentrate. You are going to die in a moment. The hereafter for all we know may be an eternal state of excruciating insanity. You smoked your last cigarette yesterday. Concentrate. Try to understand what is happening to you. (p. 296)

because Quilty, right until the moment of his death, cannot seem to take the matter seriously. As Humbert begins to shoot him, Quilty reverts to a “phoney British accent … talking in a curiously detached and even amiable manner” (p. 302), and then climbs into bed and wraps himself in blankets as he is shot to death. The burlesque quality of this death conveys more than a theatrical mode, however. The comedy is not arbitrary, but rather reinforces the fact that Quilty is a “semi-animated, sub-human trickster” (p. 294); lacking a human soul (anima) and therefore the ability to love[2]. Quilty is unable to express an emotion as basic as horror; there is a gorgeous juxtaposition on page 294 where Humbert’s impassioned internal monologue (“To have him trapped, after those years of repentance and rage … oh, my darling, this was intolerable bliss!”) is set in the midst of Quilty’s most inane polite babble (“Somebody told me he had a brother with the same telephone company”).

Humbert’s fastidiousness and his abhorrence of flesh are not only aspects of his aesthetics, but are generally repulsions to the idea of death. By chapter 35, Humbert has learned that he can love even the overweight, pregnant, adult, hopelessly poor Dolly Schiller – and the overcoming of the intensity of his fear of transience is perhaps what allows him to finally empathise with Lolita, to call her “a little girl called Dolores Haze, Dolly Haze” and to finally take on the father role in protective action (“She was my child, Quilty” p. 295). In the face of this, Quilty is indeed impotent, sexually and morally, aesthetically and empathetically (“Sure, she may have made those calls, sure. Any place. Paradise, Wash., Hell Canyon. Who cares?”[3]) Humbert repeatedly calls him “feminine” to express his loss of sexual/romantic agency. Quilty’s impotence, really, is the loss of intensity of feeling.

The entrance of Quilty’s bizarre guests onto the scene (the “florid fellow”, the “faded blonde”, the “fat person” and the two girls on the davenport “so young, so lewd”, p. 303) demonstrates that Quilty’s disease (“Quilty was a very sick man” p. 302) extends to the entire social system that supported him, proclaimed him a genius and made him rich. Death means as little to these house guests as it did to Quilty himself – they are drunk and dulled. The “art” that they produce (it is implied that these are mainly pornographic films) is a perpetuation of their “florid”, “fat”, “faded” aesthetics – their art the source of social disease. Humbert is condoned to murder them, since he is the only character not tainted by their aesthetics; he is the only character, in the play, who is revolted by Quilty and his art-form the theatre.

The murder of Clare Quilty is more than the neat solution to make the narrative balance. By constructing Quilty as Humbert’s doppelganger, and by showing the fundamental ways in which they differ from each other, “Nabokov aims to give his narrator complete moral purgation” (Fowler, 1974). Humbert emerges from the murder with clean hands, literally and figuratively. In the concluding chapter, he goes on to state

had I come before myself, I would have given Humbert at least 35 years for rape, and dismissed the rest of the charges … and do not pity C.Q. One had to choose between him and H. H., and one wanted H. H. to exist at least a couple of months longer, so as to have him make you live in the minds of later generations … and this is the only immortality you and I may share, my Lolita. (p. 305)

The irony, of course, is that the law sees fit to punish Humbert for his murder, not for his rape, aiming its punitive powers at the wrong end of the lover-murderer spectrum. This ending should disquiet the reader, and force him to reconsider the depths of his own aesthetic prejudices that favour romantic love to the point where the murder of the non-romantic is entirely ethically justified. Humbert has developed in ethical sensibility over the course of the novel, making him realise (in the closing chapter) that Lolita’s absence from the group of laughing, innocent children that he watches playing is his real crime – but he ends the novel in even more of a socially rejected position than he was when he first desired Lolita. This is the curious puzzle that Nabokov invites us to resolve in our own prejudices.

References
Dupee, F. W. (1982). “F. W. Dupee in ‘Anchor Review’” in Page, N. (ed.) Nabokov: The Critical Heritage. Routledge, London: pp. 84-91.
Foweler, Douglas (1974). Reading Nabokov. Cornell University Press, London.
Frye, Northrop (1957). ”The Mythos of Summer: Romance”. In Anatomy of Criticism. Princeton: Princeton University Press: pp. 186-201.
Nabokov, Vladimir (1959). Lolita. Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London.
(although I cite page numbers from the 1982 Penguin Edition)
Nabokov, Vladimir (1973). Strong Opinions. Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London.
Trilling, Lionel (1982). “Lionel Trilling in ‘Encounter’” in Page, N. (ed.) Nabokov: The Critical Heritage. Routledge, London: pp. 92-102.

[1] Nabokov’s own eloquent phrase is “I loathe such things as jazz, the white-hosed moron torturing a black bull, rayed with red, abstractist bric-a-brac, primitivist folk masks, progressive schools, music in supermarkets, swimming pools, brutes, bores, class-conscious philistines, Freud, Marx, fake thinkers, puffed-up poets, frauds and sharks” (Nabokov, 1973).
[2] I do not mean this to be as sentimental as it sounds – I am referring to the motifs of the Romance mode itself, where ethical and generative/sexual abilities are interlinked (Frye, 1957). Humbert even alludes to the generative concept of Romance in his poem (pp. 298-299), mentioning “a marriage in a mountain state/aye a litter of Lolitas …”
[3] Quilty’s wordplay equates to that Lolita may have been in Paradise, Hell or Purgatory, it is all one to him. Note that this technique of expressing emotion through place names is one used commonly by Humbert throughout the novel, for instance the chapter in fact opens with the phrase “I left insomnia lodge next morning around eight”.

A Length of Chain for Paul Muldoon

2008-07-14T20:17:00.005+02:00

This silly exercise was inspired by the following poem by Paul Muldoon:

Something Else

When your lobster was lifted out of the tank
to be weighed
I thought of woad,
of madders, of fugitive, indigo inks,

of how Nerval
was given to promenade
a lobster on a gossamer thread,
how, when a decent interval

had passed
(son front rouge encor du baiser de la reine)
and his hope of Adreinne

proved false,
he hanged himself from a lamp-post
with a length of chain, which made me think

of something else, then something else again.

This little piece is made up of the first lines of various novels I was reading at the time, and is just a bit of postmodern fun.

As I walked through the wilderness of this world, I lighted on a certain place, where was a den; and I laid me down in that place to sleep: and as I slept I dreamed a dream of man’s first disobedience, and the fruit of that forbidden tree whose mortal taste brought death into the world, and all our woe. There was no possibility of taking a walk that day; I had just returned from a visit to my landlord – the solitary neighbour that I shall be troubled with. Midway through the journey of my life I found myself in a dark wood, for the straight way was lost. Here we have reached the remotest region of the earth: a few miles south of Soledad, the Salinas River drops in close to the hill-side bank and runs deep and green, a wide plain, where the broadening Floss hurries on between its green banks to the sea, and the loving tide, rushing to meet it, checks its passage with an impetuous embrace. It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen; on that first Monday of April, 1625, the market town of Meung, birthplace of the author of the Roman de la Rose, seemed to be in as great a turmoil as if the Hugenots had come to turn it into a second La Rochelle. The sun had not yet risen.

This is a tale of arms and of a man. If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap. My father’s family name being Pirrip, and my christian name Philip, my infant tongue could make of both names nothing more explicit than Pip, but call me Ishmael. My father had a small estate in Nottinghamshire; I was the third of five sons (happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way). I’ve studied now Philosophy and Jurisprudence, Medicine, and even, alas! Theology. I was born in 1927, the only child of middle-class parents, both English, and themselves born in the grotesquely elongated shadow, which they never rose sufficiently above history to leave, of that monstrous dwarf Queen Victoria. I am living at the Villa Borghese. Except for the Marabar Caves – and they are twenty miles off – the city of Chandrapore presents nothing extraordinary. The rustic’s proverb says that many a thing is despised that is worth much more than is supposed.

I learned about the other Philip Roth in January 1988, a few days after the New Year, when my cousin Apter telephoned me in New York to say that Israeli radio had reported that I was in Jerusalem attending the trial of John Demjanjuk, the man alleged to be Ivan the Terrible of Treblinka. It was Apollo, Son of Zeus and Leto, who started the feud, when he punished the King for his discourtesy to Cryses, his priest, by inflicting a deadly plague on his army and destroying his men. The stranger came early in February, one wintry day, through a biting wind and a driving snow, the last snowfall of the year, over the down, walking as it seemed from Bramblehurst railway station, and carrying a little black portmanteau in his thickly gloved hand. Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed. For a man of his age, fifty-two, divorced, he has, to his mind, solved the problem of sex rather well, although it is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.

In the days when the spinning-wheels hummed busily in the farmhouses – and even great ladies, clothed in silk and thread-lace, had their toy spinning wheels of polished oak – there might be seen in the districts far away among the lanes, or deep in the bosom of the hills, certain pallid undersized men, who, by the side of the brawny country-folk looked like the remnants of a disinherited race. Indeed, as Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect. “O gods! grant me release from this long weary watch!” he cried.
“Yes, of course, if it’s fine tomorrow, but you’ll have to be up with the lark,” Alice replied. Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the bank, and of having nothing to do: once or twice she had peeped into the book her sister was reading. She was about to begin reading Italo Calvino’s new novel, If on a winter’s night a traveller.

Dante's "La Vita Nuova"

2008-07-14T16:17:00.005+02:00

Dante's La Vita Nuova ("The New Life"), published in 1295, is a collection of prose and poetry that tells the autobiographic story of his love for Beatrice. Dante first saw the girl when he was 9 years old, and she 8, and remained infatuated with her from that day forth.

On the right: Henry Holiday's depiction of Dante's first meeting with Beatrice. She is the one wearing the "crimson mantle", turning her head to him.

The nature of their love affair no doubt seems bizarre to us today: although he barely knew her, she was the primary muse for all of his writings. She is the guide that leads him through Paradise in The Divine Comedy, and is often described as "Love herself". He claims to have only met her twice; each occassion a brief meeting on the streets of Florence (in the first, they do not even speak to each other). She subsequently married a banker and died when she was just 24 years old. Dante himself married a woman named Gemma Donati, who one imagines must have been perturbed by her husband's obsession for "the Divine Beatrice", whom Dante claims regularly visited him in dreams.

Because of the nature of their (non-)relationship, critics often praise Dante's depictions of Beatrice as being some of the clearest representations of courtly love (you should recognise this phrase from school-Shakespeare: the idea of love being asexual, unfulfilled, secretive and worshipful). Nonetheless, Dante's love sonnets contain some intensely physical imagery. My favourite sonnet from "La Vita Nuova" describes a vision that Dante has, shortly after meeting Beatrice for the second and final time:

To every captive soul and gentle heart
into whose sight this present speech may come,
so that they might write its meaning for me,
greetings, in their lord’s name, who is Love.
Already a third of the hours were almost past
of the time when all the stars were shining,
when Love suddenly appeared to me
whose memory fills me with terror.
Joyfully Love seemed to me to hold
my heart in his hand, and held in his arms
my lady wrapped in a cloth sleeping.
Then he woke her, and that burning heart
he fed to her reverently, she fearing,
afterwards he went not to be seen weeping.

(Patrick Cassidy wrote an aria based upon this sonnet, called Vida Cor Meum, which was used in the films Hannibal and Kingdom of Heaven. It is divine - try to find it if you can.)

The vision fills Dante with fear and grief, as he sees in it a foreshadowing of Beatrice's immanent death. The emotions of the poem are strange: note that Love initially holds his heart "joyfully", but after feeding the "fearing" lady Dante's heart, he begins to weep. It is as though the intensity of the image is so powerful that it transfigures emotion. Always in Dante, the symbolic act has more power than the real.

This changes, as La Vita Nuova progresses. Ironically, after Beatrice's death, Dante's love for her takes on a far more real and human quality. His poetry comes to express simpler, non-metaphorical emotion:

Whenever, alas! I remember
that I may never again
see that lady for whom I so grieve,
so much grief is gathered in my heart
by the grieving mind,
that I say: ‘My spirit, why do you not go,
since the torments you suffer
in this world, which grows so hateful to you,
bring such great thoughts of dread?’
Then I call on Death,
as to a sweet and gentle refuge:
and I say: ‘Come to me’ with such love,
that I am envious of all who die.

Truly, Beatrice becomes more alive to him after her death. Dante once called her, "La gloriosa donna della mia mente" (the glorious lady of my mind) ... a muse that he was free to imagine as he wished, as it so barely included its original human model.

Cinema Nouveau Opera Series

2008-07-12T12:57:00.002+02:00

Cinema Nouveau is currently screening the Metropolitan Opera Series - which were filmed at performances at the famous Metropolitan Opera House itself. The films, thankfully, are not edited to suit MTV-era concentration spans, and all run for about 4 hours.

I went to see the last week of Gounod's Romeo and Juliet. I was the only non-septegenarian in the audience.

Anna Netrebko - at the pinnacle of her opera career - plays a near-flawless Juliet (near-flawless, she misses one or two crucial notes in Act 1, but quickly warms up). She is one of the rare sopranists who are able to combine a voice with an ability to act, and captures something of the innocence and passion of Juliet in her body. I was less impressed with Roberto Alagna, the star tenor, who is not only far too old to play a convincing Romeo (he will turn 45 this year), but is not a particularly strong tenor, either, his voice quite having the range to deal with the arias. Unlike Netrebko, Romeo and Juliet is his first role in a major opera, and I feel that he is too old to be able to really grow into a truly memorable tenor.

The star of the show, of course, is the incomparable Plácido Domingo, opera grandaddy, who conducts the performance. He energises the orchestra, and captures the moods that Gounod imagined far better than the main stars seem able to do.

The staging is not extraordinary, and feels at times a bit clumsy. Of course, it is difficult to make an analysis of the plotting, however, due to the editor's annoying decision to play around with camera angles and cut constantly between close shots of the main singers and wider shots of the stage. I found this terrible distracting. If the purpose of the film was to lend the impression of actually being at the Met, then surely it would have made more sense to simply film the whole thing from one wide camera angle? The opera was plotted to fill the whole stage, and much was lost in the director's snipping, not least of all the illussion of actually being there.

For all of my bitching, it was exciting to see a top performance in far-flung SA, and I thoroughly applaud the Met for their initiative. I only wish that more 20-somethings were using it as an opportunity to discover the magic of opera - rather than being a hall in which 60-somethings fill their time before 7de Laan starts.

Cinema Nouveau Opera Series will continue to play at the V&A until August. Still to see are Donizetti's La Fille du Regimento, Mozart's The Magic Flute, and Puccini's Manon Lescaut.

Three WCW poems

2008-07-10T15:01:00.002+02:00

(from The Dial, 1920)

To Waken an Old Lady

Old age is
a flight of small
cheeping birds
skimming
bare trees
above a snow glaze.
Gaining and failing
they are buffeted
by a dark wind -
-But what?
On harsh weed
stalks
the flock has rested -
- the snow
is covered with broken
seed husks
and the wind tempered
with a shrill
piping of plenty

The Desolate Field

Vast and grey, the sky
is a simulacrum
to all but him whose days
are vast and grey and -
- In the tall, dried grasses
a goat stirs
with nozzle searching the ground.
My head is in the air
but who am I . . . ?
-- and my heart stops amazed
at the thought of love
vast and grey
yearning silently over me.

Blizzard

Snow falls:
years of anger following
hours that float idly down -
- the blizzard
drifts its weight
deeper and deeper for three days
or sixty years, eh? Then
the sun! a clutter of
yellow and blue flakes --
Hairy looking trees stand out
in long alleys
over a wild solitude.
The man turns and there --
his solitary track stretched out
upon the world.

Walt Whitman's "The Sleepers"

2008-07-10T11:40:00.003+02:00

First published in the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass, this poem is an exploration of sexual love as agape.

Allen Ginsberg was especially moved by this poem, as he took it to being a vieled exploration of Whitman's homosexuality (no one is really sure what Whitman's orientation was - we presume bisexual). He analyses specifically the stanza beginning "The cloth laps a first sweet eating and drinking" as referring to fellatio, which was "not done" (or, not admitted to) by properly married women, and had the stigma of being an exclusively homosexual act (bizarre as that may seem today, buggery retains much the same stigma).

Whether his interpretation is correct or not, there are other portions of the poem that are undeniably homosexual, particularly "He whom I call answers me and takes the place of my lover..." Whitman was one of the first poets to openly develop a homosexual aesthetic; before, poets were forced to take great pains to disguise their homosexuality, often resorting to elaborate metaphorical conceits. Poets like Whitman forged the paths that allowed Ginsberg's generation to be open about their sexualities (although, even Ginsberg's Howl was banned under obscenity laws in the McCarthy era).

Of course, there is much more to this poem than sexual politics. The symbolic structure is complex, and we see Whitman pioneering the Romantic-inspired style that was to become the foundation of the "authentic American voice".

The Sleepers

I wander all night in my vision,
Stepping with light feet . . . . swiftly and noiselessly
stepping and stopping,
Bending with open eyes over the shut eyes of sleepers;
Wandering and confused . . . . lost to myself . . . .
ill-assorted . . . . contradictory,
Pausing and gazing and bending and stopping.

How solemn they look there, stretched and still;
How quiet they breathe, the little children in their cradles.

The wretched features of ennuyees, the white features of
corpses, the livid faces of drunkards, the sick-gray faces
of onanists,
The gashed bodies on battlefields, the insane in their strong-doored
rooms, the sacred idiots,
The newborn emerging from gates and the dying emerging
from gates,
The night pervades them and enfolds them.

The married couple sleep calmly in their bed, he with his
palm on the hip of the wife, and she with her palm on
the hip of the husband,
The sisters sleep lovingly side by side in their bed,
The men sleep lovingly side by side in theirs,
And the mother sleeps with her little child carefully
wrapped.

The blind sleep, and the deaf and dumb sleep,
The prisoner sleeps well in the prison . . . . the runaway
son sleeps,
The murderer that is to be hung next day . . . . how does
he sleep?
And the murdered person . . . . how does he sleep?

The female that loves unrequited sleeps,
And the male that loves unrequited sleeps;
The head of the moneymaker that plotted all day sleeps,
And the enraged and treacherous dispositions sleep.

I stand with drooping eyes by the worstsuffering and
restless,
I pass my hands soothingly to and fro a few inches from them;
The restless sink in their beds . . . . they fitfully sleep.

The earth recedes from me into the night,
I saw that it was beautiful . . . . and I see that what is not
the earth is beautiful.

I go from bedside to bedside . . . . I sleep close with the
other sleepers, each in turn;
I dream in my dream all the dreams of the other dreamers,
And I become the other dreamers.

I am a dance . . . . Play up there! the fit is whirling me fast.

I am the everlaughing . . . . it is new moon and twilight,
I see the hiding of douceurs . . . . I see nimble ghosts
whichever way I look,
Cache and cache again deep in the ground and sea, and
where it is neither ground or sea.

Well do they do their jobs, those journeymen divine,
Only from me can they hide nothing and would not if they
could;
I reckon I am their boss, and they make me a pet besides,
And surround me, and lead me and run ahead when I walk,
And lift their cunning covers and signify me with stretched
arms, and resume the way;
Onward we move, a gay gang of blackguards with
mirthshouting music and wildflapping pennants of joy.

I am the actor and the actress . . . . the voter . . the
politician,
The emigrant and the exile . . the criminal that stood in the
box,
He who has been famous, and he who shall be famous after
today,
The stammerer . . . . the wellformed person . . the wasted
or feeble person.

I am she who adorned herself and folded her hair expectantly,
My truant lover has come and it is dark.

Double yourself and receive me darkness,
Receive me and my lover too . . . . he will not let me go
without him.

I roll myself upon you as upon a bed . . . . I resign myself
to the dusk.

He whom I call answers me and takes the place of my lover,
He rises with me silently from the bed.

Darkness you are gentler than my lover . . . . his flesh was
sweaty and panting,
I feel the hot moisture yet that he left me.

My hands are spread forth . . I pass them in all directions,
I would sound up the shadowy shore to which you are
journeying.

Be careful, darkness . . . . already, what was it touched me?
I thought my lover had gone . . . . else darkness and he
are one,
I hear the heart-beat . . . . I follow . . I fade away.

O hotcheeked and blushing! O foolish hectic!
O for pity's sake, no one must see me now! . . . . my
clothes were stolen while I was abed,
Now I am thrust forth, where shall I run?

Pier that I saw dimly last night when I looked from the
windows,
Pier out from the main, let me catch myself with you and
stay . . . . I will not chafe you;
I feel ashamed to go naked about the world,
And am curious to know where my feet stand . . . . and
what is this flooding me, childhood or manhood . . . .
and the hunger that crosses the bridge between.

The cloth laps a first sweet eating and drinking,
Laps life-swelling yolks . . . . laps ear of rose-corn, milky
and just ripened:
The white teeth stay, and the boss-tooth advances in darkness,
And liquor is spilled on lips and bosoms by touching glasses,
and the best liquor afterward.

I descend my western course . . . . my sinews are flaccid,
Perfume and youth course through me, and I am their wake.

It is my face yellow and wrinkled instead of the old woman's,
I sit low in a strawbottom chair and carefully darn my
grandson's stockings.

It is I too . . . . the sleepless widow looking out on the
winter midnight,
I see the sparkles of starshine on the icy and pallid earth.

A shroud I see -- and I am the shroud . . . . I wrap a body
and lie in the coffin;
It is dark here underground . . . . it is not evil or pain here
. . . . it is blank here, for reasons.

It seems to me that everything in the light and air ought to
be happy;
Whoever is not in his coffin and the dark grave, let him
know he has enough.

I see a beautiful gigantic swimmer swimming naked through
the eddies of the sea,
His brown hair lies close and even to his head . . . . he
strikes out with courageous arms . . . . he urges
himself with his legs.
I see his white body . . . . I see his undaunted eyes;
I hate the swift-running eddies that would dash him
headforemost on the rocks.

What are you doing you ruffianly red-trickled waves?
Will you kill the courageous giant? Will you kill him in the
prime of his middle age?

Steady and long he struggles;
He is baffled and banged and bruised . . . . he holds out
while his strength holds out,
The slapping eddies are spotted with his blood . . . . they
bear him away . . . . they roll him and swing him and
turn him:
His beautiful body is borne in the circling eddies . . . . it is
continually bruised on rocks,
Swiftly and out of sight is borne the brave corpse.

I turn but do not extricate myself;
Confused . . . . a pastreading . . . . another, but with
darkness yet.

The beach is cut by the razory ice-wind . . . . the wreck-guns
sound,
The tempest lulls and the moon comes floundering through
the drifts.

I look where the ship helplessly heads end on . . . . I hear
the burst as she strikes . . I hear the howls of dismay
. . . . they grow fainter and fainter.

I cannot aid with my wringing fingers;
I can but rush to the surf and let it drench me and freeze
upon me.

I search with the crowd . . . . not one of the company is
washed to us alive;
In the morning I help pick up the dead and lay them in
rows in a barn.
Now of the old war-days . . the defeat at Brooklyn;
Washington stands inside the lines . . he stands on the
entrenched hills amid a crowd of officers,
His face is cold and damp . . . . he cannot repress the
weeping drops . . . . he lifts the glass perpetually to
his eyes . . . . the color is blanched from his cheeks,
He sees the slaughter of the southern braves confided to him
by their parents.

The same at last and at last when peace is declared,
He stands in the room of the old tavern . . . . the
wellbeloved soldiers all pass through,
The officers speechless and slow draw near in their turns,
The chief encircles their necks with his arm and kisses them
on the cheek,
He kisses lightly the wet cheeks one after another . . . . he
shakes hands and bids goodbye to the army.

Now I tell what my mother told me today as we sat at
dinner together,
Of when she was a nearly grown girl living home with her
parents on the old homestead.

A red squaw came one breakfasttime to the old homestead,
On her back she carried a bundle of rushes for
rushbottoming chairs;
Her hair straight shiny coarse black and profuse
halfenveloped her face,
Her step was free and elastic . . . . her voice sounded
exquisitely as she spoke.

My mother looked in delight and amazement at the stranger,
She looked at the beauty of her tallborne face and full and
pliant limbs,
The more she looked upon her she loved her,
Never before had she seen such wonderful beauty and purity;
She made her sit on a bench by the jamb of the fireplace . . . .
she cooked food for her,
She had no work to give her but she gave her remembrance
and fondness.

The red squaw staid all the forenoon, and toward the middle
of the afternoon she went away;
O my mother was loth to have her go away,
All the week she thought of her . . . . she watched for her
many a month,
She remembered her many a winter and many a summer,
But the red squaw never came nor was heard of there again.

Now Lucifer was not dead . . . . or if he was I am his
sorrowful terrible heir;
I have been wronged . . . . I am oppressed . . . . I hate
him that oppresses me,
I will either destroy him, or he shall release me.

Damn him! how he does defile me,
How he informs against my brother and sister and takes pay
for their blood,
How he laughs when I look down the bend after the
steamboat that carries away my woman.

Now the vast dusk bulk that is the whale's bulk . . . . it
seems mine,
Warily, sportsman! though I lie so sleepy and sluggish, my
tap is death.

A show of the summer softness . . . . a contact of something
unseen . . . . an amour of the light and air;
I am jealous and overwhelmed with friendliness,
And will go gallivant with the light and the air myself,
And have an unseen something to be in contact with them
also.

O love and summer! you are in the dreams and in me,
Autumn and winter are in the dreams . . . . the farmer
goes with his thrift,
The droves and crops increase . . . . the barns are wellfilled.

Elements merge in the night . . . . ships make tacks in the
dreams . . . . the sailor sails . . . . the exile returns
home,
The fugitive returns unharmed . . . . the immigrant is back
beyond months and years;
The poor Irishman lives in the simple house of his childhood,
with the wellknown neighbors and faces,
They warmly welcome him . . . . he is barefoot again . . . .
he forgets he is welloff;
The Dutchman voyages home, and the Scotchman and
Welchman voyage home . . and the native of the
Mediterranean voyages home;
To every port of England and France and Spain enter
wellfilled ships;
The Swiss foots it toward his hills . . . . the Prussian goes
his way, and the Hungarian his way, and the Pole goes
his way,
The Swede returns, and the Dane and Norwegian return.

The homeward bound and the outward bound,
The beautiful lost swimmer, the ennuyee, the onanist, the
female that loves unrequited, the moneymaker,
The actor and actress . . those through with their parts and
those waiting to commence,
The affectionate boy, the husband and wife, the voter, the
nominee that is chosen and the nominee that has failed,
The great already known, and the great anytime after to day,
The stammerer, the sick, the perfectformed, the homely,
The criminal that stood in the box, the judge that sat and
sentenced him, the fluent lawyers, the jury, the
audience,
The laugher and weeper, the dancer, the midnight widow,
the red squaw,
The consumptive, the erysipalite, the idiot, he that is
wronged,
The antipodes, and every one between this and them in the
dark,
I swear they are averaged now . . . . one is no better than
the other,
The night and sleep have likened them and restored them.
I swear they are all beautiful,
Every one that sleeps is beautiful . . . . every thing in the
dim night is beautiful,
The wildest and bloodiest is over and all is peace.

Peace is always beautiful,
The myth of heaven indicates peace and night.

The myth of heaven indicates the soul;
The soul is always beautiful . . . . it appears more or it
appears less . . . . it comes or lags behind,
It comes from its embowered garden and looks pleasantly on
itself and encloses the world;
Perfect and clean the genitals previously jetting, and perfect
and clean the womb cohering,
The head wellgrown and proportioned and plumb, and the
bowels and joints proportioned and plumb.

The soul is always beautiful,
The universe is duly in order . . . . every thing is in its place,
What is arrived is in its place, and what waits is in its place;
The twisted skull waits . . . . the watery or rotten blood
waits,
The child of the glutton or venerealee waits long, and the
child of the drunkard waits long, and the drunkard
himself waits long,
The sleepers that lived and died wait . . . . the far advanced
are to go on in their turns, and the far behind are to go
on in their turns,
The diverse shall be no less diverse, but they shall flow and
unite . . . . they unite now.

The sleepers are very beautiful as they lie unclothed,
They flow hand in hand over the whole earth from east to
west as they lie unclothed;
The Asiatic and African are hand in hand . . . . the
European and American are hand in hand,
Learned and unlearned are hand in hand . . and male and
female are hand in hand;
The bare arm of the girl crosses the bare breast of her lover
. . . . they press close without lust . . . .
his lips press her neck,
The father holds his grown or ungrown son in his arms with
measureless love . . . . and the son holds the father in
his arms with measureless love,
The white hair of the mother shines on the white wrist of
the daughter,
The breath of the boy goes with the breath of the man . . . .
friend is inarmed by friend,
The scholar kisses the teacher and the teacher kisses the
scholar . . . . the wronged is made right,
The call of the slave is one with the master's call . . and the
master salutes the slave,
The felon steps forth from the prison . . . . the insane
becomes sane . . . . the suffering of sick persons is
relieved,
The sweatings and fevers stop . . the throat that was
unsound is sound . . the lungs of the consumptive are
resumed . . the poor distressed head is free,
The joints of the rheumatic move as smoothly as ever, and
smoother than ever,
Stiflings and passages open . . . . the paralysed become
supple,
The swelled and convulsed and congested awake to themselves
in condition,
They pass the invigoration of the night and the chemistry of
the night and awake.

I too pass from the night;
I stay awhile away O night, but I return to you again and
love you;
Why should I be afraid to trust myself to you?
I am not afraid . . . . I have been well brought forward
by you;
I love the rich running day, but I do not desert her in whom
I lay so long;
I know not how I came of you, and I know not where I go
with you . . . . but I know I came well and shall go well.
I will stop only a time with the night . . . . and rise betimes.

I will duly pass the day O my mother and duly return to you;
Not you will yield forth the dawn again more surely than
you will yield forth me again,
Not the womb yields the babe in its time more surely than I
shall be yielded from you in my time.

On Ginsberg and Blake

2008-07-09T20:52:00.005+02:00

Ginsberg claims to have had a supernatural vision whilst reading Blake's "Ah! Sun-Flower" from the Songs of Experience and masturbating. He continued to have visions (often involving the voice of Blake reciting his own poems), apparently not drug-induced, for some time afterwards, until he was carted off for a spell in a mental hospital. There, they apparently told him to stop reading medieval mystic writings. A warning to all of us that are addicted to Hildegard von Bingen!

This is the poem that started it all:

Ah, Sun-Flower! weary of time,

Who countest the steps of the Sun,

Seeking after that sweet golden clime

Where the traveller's journey is done:

Where the Youth pined away with desire,

And the pale Virgin shrouded in snow

Arise from their graves, and aspire

Where my Sun-flower wishes to go.

Verily, a sublime poem. The Songs of Experience are all about a reversal of the expected; an inverting of naive optimism (as encapsulated in the ridiculous poem "The Blossom" from the Songs of Innocence). Blake preserves the singsong, nursery rhyme structure of Innocence, but changes the image into a sad sunflower (surely an oxymoron). The image of death as the sun (the "golden clime") is an unusual one; as death is traditionally understood through winter images. Instead, Blake refers to the Virgin and Youth, normally the symbols of vitality and Spring, as being "shrouded in snow" and in "graves". This is coherent with Blake's belief that virginity was sinful, and that the path to spirituality was through an open sexuality and sensuality. He has turned the both the poetic symbolic tradition, and Christian ethics, on their heads in one little nursery rhyme. Magnificent.

Of course, I do encourage attempting Ginsberg's experiment yourself, but please print out the poem and take it to bed with you, as no-one likes a sticky keyboard.

William Carlos Williams' Influences #2: Charles Demuth

2008-07-08T18:00:00.007+02:00

Charles Demuth was a versatile watercolorist who developed an artistic technique that came to be known as Precisionism. He met WCW during his student days in Philedelphia, and the two remained close friends throughout their lives. He painted his famous "I Saw the Figure 5 in Gold" after a line from Williams' 1921 poem from Sour Grapes:

The Great Figure

Among the rain
and lights
I saw the figure 5
in gold
on a red
fire truck
moving
tense
unheeded
to gong clangs
siren howls
and wheels rumbling
through the dark city

WCWs describes the process of this poem in his Autobiography (p. 172):

"Once on a hot July day coming back exhausted from the Post Graduate Clinic, I dropped in as I sometimes did at Marsden [Hartley]'s studio on Fifteenth Street for a talk, a little drink maybe and to see what he was doing. As I approached his number I heard a great clatter of bells and the roar of a fire engine passing the end of the street down Ninth Avenue. I turned just in time to see a golden figure 5 on a red background flash by. The impression was so sudden and forceful that I took a piece of paper out of my pocket and wrote a short poem about it."

Two other images by Demuth are evidence of his innovative style:

William Carlos Williams' Artistic Influences #1: Alfred Steiglitz

2008-07-08T17:15:00.004+02:00

Bear with me, I am writing my thesis on the sublime WCW and am going to use this blogging space as a way to keep my sources in order.

Peter Schmidt, who wrote some of the seminal critical essays on WCW, suggests that there were three artistic movements that influenced him the most: European Cubism, American Dada/Surrealism, and Steiglitz-esque photography. I will begin by looking at some examples of the latter.

Alfred Steiglitz is popularly accredited with being the man who made photography acceptable as a "real" art-form. The image on the right, 'The Steerage' is probably his most famous. He is the eyes of a New York in its infancy, and documented the experiences of immigrants and the changes wrought by the rapid industrialisation of the early 20th century.

It is the nature of the photograph that nothing is hidden or essentialised. The mundane details of daily life are the essential touchstones for the composition.

In a sense, this aesthetic is the antithesis of that espoused by the cubists, who attempted, above all else, to pare away visual and symbolic clutter to find the essentials of colour and form - that could be beautiful in themselves, without needing to re-present something "real". Photography can never escape reality in the same way. It can frame it, repackage it, hold it still, but never do away with it.