HOW BEASTLY

In an attempt to create the kind of double feature the WHC film series specializes in, I borrowed this week from the WHC Film Studies Center two films released in 1972: Luis Buñuel's The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie and Ingmar Bergman's Cries and Whispers. The match-up was better than I expected. I had seen both films before, some time ago for Bergman, more recently for Buñuel, but even so, I wasn't quite thinking about the degree to which both films, in rather different ways, are scathing indictments of the bourgeoisie.

It's hard, watching the films, to detest the bourgeois characters at once. Unless one already approaches art from the perspective of the class warrior, ready in a heartbeat to tear down these protected and self-satisfied lives lived with dedicated servants attending them, splendid accouterments surrounding them, and a sense of decorum and mastery in all their actions -- and in Bergman's film, beautifully photographed by Sven Nykvist.

In Buñuel's film, any admiration we might feel (if, like most film viewers, we are happy when a film allows us into the select circle of the privileged) is quickly tempered by the film's complete absurdist irony toward its protagonists, subjecting them to situations that begin with something simply awkward (arriving for a dinner invitation on the wrong evening) and spiral down, finally, to murder by gangsters. Along the way, the running gag is that the bourgeoisie are never so much themselves as when sitting down to eat -- au table their taste and sense of manners come to the fore -- and our coterie of six or seven diners is interrupted time and again. At times, one or several of the principles engages in scenes separate from the group -- particularly memorable is one member of the group, M. Thevenot, interrupting an assignation between his wife and Don Rafael Acosta (Fernando Rey, the unflappable, slightly sinister face associated with late Buñuel); Acosta is then visited by an attractive young female terrorist sent to kill him. He offers her champagne, naturellement. Indeed, Acosta's attitude toward terrorists and agitating students is benignly ruthless -- a tone set throughout the film. Then there's the three women attempting to have tea at a restaurant that's out of tea, and coffee, and doesn't serve liquor, but does feature a soulful lieutenant at a nearby table who asks permission to tell the strange story of his mother's ghost and her wish that he murder the man he had believed to be his father...

Buñuel's film is full of odd moments of feeling that clash -- we might say jarringly, we might say surreally -- with the world of the bourgeoisie but which they seem to accept, unruffled, forbearing, displaying their characteristic charme discret. Oddities abound -- such as a bishop who volunteers to work as gardener for one couple, then is called to the bedside of a dying workman who, it turns out, was the murderer of the bishop's parents long ago. But quizzical as such moments are, I got my biggest laugh from a local peasant woman who confides to the bishop: "I can't accept Jesus. Even as a little girl I hated him."

In Buñuel's world, soldiers see ghosts and have interesting dreams, peasants have unexpected complexity; in Bergman's film, the selfless servant, Anna, is the only locus of real feeling and devotion. The sisters, Karin (Ingrid Thulin) and Maria (Liv Ullmann) are unhappily married to men who may be partly to blame for their states of soul, but the film seems to assume that bourgeois marriage can't be fulfilling for anyone. Karin is a real hater and her self-loathing at one point had taken the form of inserting broken glass into her vagina and then smearing the blood across her lips while lying back in bed and seeming to beckon to her husband (much older than her, more of a father figure). Meanwhile, also in the past, Maria's fling with the local doctor (Erland Josephson) caused her husband to inflict a negligible wound upon himself. Lives of quiet desperation, in other words. This all sounds the stuff of lurid melodrama, but add to it the fact that, in the present, the eldest sister, Agnes (Harriet Anderson) is dying painfully of cancer at home on the estate (where the other two sisters are visiting to care for her) and you've got the stuff of Bergmanian psychodrama, as familiar to his world as the absurdity and interlineated stories are to Buñuel's.

As in Buñuel's bourgeoisie in the grip of absurdity, the bourgeois here are faced with horrors that they countenance in their characteristic and distantly engaged way (including what have to be some of the more harrowing enactments of physical pain by Anderson); but more telling about the difficulty of these lives is the scene in which Karin finally speaks what she feels (at the dinner table, of course) and then manages a flood of tears and what seems a heartfelt reconciliation with her estranged sister Maria. In other words, it seems the death of Agnes has inspired a sense of the importance of one's relations and a need to get past the borders and silences that have been constructed. And these actresses are masterful at suggesting all that might be going on behind the deliberate images of politesse that each masks herself with. But in the end, the most telling scene is when Maria, who Karin had vilified for her superficiality, returns to her mask of civil cordiality as the sisters part (with their husbands). Not even the brusque treatment of Anna who, if selfless in her love and sympathy for Agnes, also manifests a degree of devoted pet faithfulness that can be somewhat unnerving in a human, strikes home as forcefully with the unrelenting froideur of these lives.

Or maybe that's just to say that the peasant who could never stand Jesus had more immediate resonance for me than the Christlike (or actually Madonna-like) servant Anna. Though I won't say Bergman's characteristic religious questioning didn't resonate for me, surprisingly moreso than usual (I must be getting old) in the prayer of the priest over Agnes' dead body. Delivered by Anders Ek, the indelible Frost in Bergman's Sawdust and Tinsel (1953), the prayer spoke precisely for a bourgeoisie without firm convictions, whose lives are structured to avoid acknowledgment of real suffering or need or desire, asking one who has suffered to represent their case before God, asking, as it were, for forgiveness for their superficiality and lack of purpose.

Full of seething, wormy, hollow feelingsrather nasty --How beastly the bourgeois is!
--D. H. Lawrence, "How Beastly the Bourgeois Is --" (1929)

THE CDS: The Arcade Fire

When The Arcade Fire's debut album made numerous Best of 2004 lists, I got a bit interested. But why? Probably I liked the band's name and the album's title, Funeral. Maybe it just seemed to suit the mood of the moment. My daughter got the CD and, not all that impressed with it, passed it along to me. I have to say that it still hasn't fully sunk in; or, put another way, there are some stand-out songs I love, the rest just seem to blend together without a lot of distinction. On the plus side, that means that the album has an overall sound that it sustains well -- it's lush, layered, dark at times, but with uplift that has emotional urgency. I'd agree that "Rebellion (Lies)" is one of the best songs of 2004 -- and that's partly because of its insistent drum rhythm that is much less present on the rest of the album. The song grabs you and you stay hooked. And the somewhat strangled voice of the singer Win Butler is very effective on that track, so much so that I've gotten chills when hearing the song by chance somewhere -- the "it's that song" recognition which tells you a track has gotten through. I"m also very partial to the moody, swirling sound of "Neighborhood #4 (7 Kettles)" and I like the way the voice, in its plaintive articulations, is right out front. Of the other songs, the opening, "Neighborhood #1 (Tunnels)" is convincing enough while I'm hearing it, but it doesn't live on in my mind to the same degree as those other two. In fact, when listening to the rest of the songs on the album, I seem to keep waiting for the two I like.

But whatever it is I get from those two songs was enough to make me pick up the band's second album Neon Bible (2007). I've had it a few months now and it's much the same story: a few tracks always rivet my attention while others just sail on past. When I make the effort to listen carefully I find much I like on this record. The band has a definite sound and presence that I associate with the old prog-rock era, tempered by an ear for '80s hooks. In other words, it's a mix that I should respond to! The unusual instrumentation (including string and orchestral arrangements, a choir, a pipe organ, a harp), the denseness of the sound, the literate lyrics (it's always fun to hear Québécois inserted in a song: "Run from the memory / Je nage, mais les sons me suivent"), and the sense of impending doom. What's not to like? I have the sense that if I were 13-17 years old, this album might well blow my mind. Which is to say (not that I'm old and jaded, mind you) that the appeal of earnest, urgent rock music is always aimed at a younger demographic, primarily.

The songs on Neon Bible that I really like to hear are (again the opener) "Black Mirror," "Windowsill," and "My Body is a Cage." But in listening just now before writing this, I found that "Keep the Car Running" and "Intervention" (with its "working for the church while your family dies" hook) gave me some of the same sense of emotional crux that I'm starting to recognize as an Arcade Fire trait: it's not exactly uplift as one expects from a typical hook, but rather a kind of spike in anxiety. Odd. The main body of the album: "Black Wave/Bad Vibrations," "Ocean of Noise," and "The Well and the Lighthouse" all had interesting changes and "(Antichrist Television Blues)" is a tour de force treatment of some kind of psychic breakdown involving little girls as televangelists. In general, I think it's a better, more mature album than the debut.

The Arcade Fire interests me, but I don't know that I could ever really be "a fan" of its particular overwrought sound and its somewhat heavy-handed self-importance. All the same, I think they've established themselves as songwriters and musicians consistently thoughtful, heartfelt and imaginative to merit attention from me (minimal as that might be) but, more importantly, from the younger generation. I think of them as boding well for the musical generation born in late '70s, early '80s -- though perhaps their appeal to critics and to professorial types like me doesn't necessarily translate into being the cutting edge of rock at present (whatever that might be).

My body is a cage
We take what we're given
Just because you've forgotten
that don't mean you're forgiven
--The Arcade Fire, "My Body is a Cage" (2007)

PLATO AMONG THE NEWSMEN

On the 4th of July, my post -- inspired by a Pinsky long poem and a book on the U.S. since 1980 -- looked rather askance at the U.S. I ended by imagining utopia as "independence from the U.S." Exactly the kind of non-patriotic, "hatred of the U.S." rhetoric that conservatives fault liberals for, regularly. Yes, true. But the line I considered writing was "independence from Washington D.C." -- because it does seem that our government, no matter who is at the helm, needs to be checked, contained, redirected, educated, even. I used "the U.S." instead because, I reflected, the "American people" (or some version thereof) elected every administration and so can't take an "us vs. them" attitude to the government. No, for some reason, whatever gang of fools ends up composing the administration "they" now become "us" -- the U.S., that is, and proceeds to act as though it can wield absolute power, which usually means suckering-in enough votes on Capitol Hill and enough "voices of authority" in those bastions of "public opinion" The Washington Post, The New York Times, etc. (as the current administration managed to do, time and again).

The question that came to mind, even as I pressed "publish" on that post was: is it different anywhere else? I think, in certain ways, it might be. But I also considered that, were I living in another country, the prospect of what that country's elected officials were doing to that particular country wouldn't nearly be as demoralizing as watching, at home, what happens to "my" country. In other words, the idea gave me, perhaps for the first time, some real insight into the condition of the exile, as opposed to the expatriate. An exile, for instance, like my man JJ: you just have to leave Ireland rather than sit there and watch Ireland's political machine grind away. The irony, of course, is that Ireland finally achieved Home Rule in 1922, the year Joyce's epic-from-exile was published. It's clear that he couldn't have written it at home and certainly the country didn't need him to achieve its eventual political victory. To each his own. I guess what I'm thinking is that a "parting of the ways" is sometimes necessary just to clear the head of the nonsense and cant that dominates the air in one's familiar bailiwick.

But it's true I sometimes seem to think that, in Dylan's phrase, "it can't be this way everywhere." Then I reflect on Musil, who never visited the U.S., and who wrote the following some time before 1930:

For some reason newspapers are not the laboratories and experimental stations of the mind that they could be, to the public's great benefit, but usually only its warehouses and stock exchanges. If he were alive today, Plato . . . would certainly be ecstatic about a news industry capable of creating, exchanging, refining a new idea every day; where information keeps pouring in from the ends of the earth with a speediness he never knew in his own lifetime, while a staff of demiurges is on hand to check it all out instantaneously for its content of reason and reality. He would have supposed a newspaper office to be that topos uranios, that heavenly realm of ideas, which he has described so impressively that to this day all the better class of people are still idealists when talking to their children or employees. And of course if Plato were to walk suddenly into a news editors's office today and prove himself to be indeed that great author who died over two thousand years ago, he would be a tremendous sensation and would instantly be showered with the most lucrative offers. If he were then capable of writing a volume of philosophical travel pieces in three weeks, and a few thousand of his well-known short stories, perhaps even turn one or the other of his older works into a film, he could undoubtedly do very well for himself for a considerable period of time. The moment his return had ceased to be news, however, and Mr. Plato tried to put into practice one of his well-known ideas, which had never quite come into their own, the editor in chief would ask him to submit only a nice little column on the subject now and then for the Life and Leisure section (but in the easiest and most lively style possible, not heavy: remember the readers), and the features editor would add that he was sorry, but he could use such a contribution only once a month or so, because there were so many other good writers to be considered. And both of these gentlemen would end up feeling that they had done quite a lot for a man who might indeed be the Nestor of European publicists but still was a bit outdated...
--Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities II: Pseudoreality Prevails, Ch. 77: "Arnheim as the Darling of the Press"

LE JOUR DU RETOUR

Thursday, July 10th, was the birthday of Proust, and I spent the day leading a class discussion of the first five chapters of Ulysses, then talked over just under a hundred pages of Musil's Mann with a friend who has undertaken reading Musil's tour de force with me this summer; only later, while watching Raul Ruiz' film of Proust's Time Regained (1999) did I realize it was le jour de naissance of that other great figure (elder to both Joyce and Musil by a decade, more or less) who encapsulated his entire world in a text. So, here's to, belatedly, le maître.

The film is almost entirely pointless, as films go. I mean: if you haven't read Proust in recent memory, most of the film will be wholly inexplicable, and even to the degree that you "follow" the sequence of scenes, they can't possibly give you much of a charge. The film presupposes that you already know who these characters are, and the only way you could is by having read the novels and remembering, as you watch the scenes enacted before you, the wealth of associations with which the narrator has imbued each character. IF that's true of you, you'll find that, here and there, a scene is reasonably well dramatized, partly because the actors in some cases are extremely well cast for their parts (Marcello Mazzarella, who plays Marcel, looks so much like Proust at times that it's uncanny). I was a bit distracted by the fact that the fully mature Odette was played by Catherine Deneuve, still looking great and very regal in the matronly comportment of her sixties, but, to my mind, she was more or less the very image I had of Oriane, the Duchesse de Guermantes -- who in the film was a much slighter figure. This might be correct for the final volume in which Odette has full respectability and the Guermantes have had to make way for the hoi polloi, but it made me want to see enacted those scenes of Marcel's infatuation with the Duchesse with Deneuve in the role. Anyway, the point I really wanted to make is that what was more effective than anything in the film was the enactment of the ailing Proust in his bed, near his death at the beginning of the film, dictating to Celeste: more than anything in the scene, it's hearing the actor recite Proust's prose that fascinates. A Proustian, watching the film, can't help feeling a bit like it's "old home week" on some TV serial in which characters from earlier versions of the series have shown up in this week's episode -- look: there's Bloch, the Verdurins, Cottard... In other words, the film was little more than a device to make the viewer want to read Proust again, if only to fall into the momentum of that prose, and to see those characters given their full due.

But that in itself was a nice birthday tribute for Proust. Much as I find much amusement and interest walking through the familiar paths of Dublin long engraved in my brain by the particular associations they create for Joyce's characters, with here and there a memory of having walked briefly those streets myself a few years ago, and much as Musil continues to amuse and fascinate me with digressions more substantial than his tale, and which seem, with uncanny lucidity, to skewer not simply the pre-WWI era he's aiming at, but also the pre-WWII era he's writing in, as well as the post-WWII era we're living through, there is a quality of immersion that takes place when reading Proust that the other two don't achieve to the same degree.

And yet I have to give Musil great credit for his temporal "triple threat," as it were. While I feel the "modernity" of Joyce's prose in Ulysses will never be surpassed, and that the significance of time in the novel will never find an equal to what Proust has given us, I see both of those worthies as much more of their time than ours. Musil, perhaps because of his mathematical knowledge (so important to so many fields of the contemporary world) and his greater familiarity than most authors with the distinctions bureaucracy makes in social reality, gives us an understanding of his characters' conditions that is more applicable to our own times. Granted, the Austro-Hungarian empire is an odd and specific historical situation -- and Musil does share both Proust's and Joyce's interest in capturing, après la guerre, a world now gone. But what Musil does better than the other two -- because it interests him more than it interests the other two -- is giving us a sense of the world to come. Proust concludes his great novel with the idea of how to recapture everything that was "fugitive, hélas, comme les années," while Joyce gives us perhaps the most indelible "slice of lived time" in the history of the written word. Musil, with his idea of "essayism" and his figure of the rich impresario Arnheim, the "New Man" -- the urbane, cosmopolitan, cultured, efficient capitalist as "man of action" or rather "homme d'affaires" -- is more inclined to look at what is actually happening to the world around him. And, unlike Proust, he has no romance of the ancien régime to set against it, nor any romance of childhood in which his elders are untainted sages and saints. There's no doubt, then, that Musil was the loneliest of the modernist generation-- which is to say, perhaps, that he was the most self-invented among a cohort of singular self-inventions and "ahead of his time" to a degree that few other of the modernists really were (Kafka comes to mind in that regard).

I began this entry thinking I was going to bemoan not reading Proust while having my time taken up with Joyce and Musil. Instead, I seem to have made the case for why -- pardonnez moi mille fois! -- it's the latter and not le maître who I should be reading au présent.

FIVE YEARS ON...

He was waiting: all the time, he was letting himself be pushed this way and that in the insignificant and silly activity he had taken on, talking, gladly talking too much, living with the desperate tenacity of a fisherman casting his nets into an empty river, while he was doing nothing that had anything to do with the person he after all signified; deliberately doing nothing: he was waiting. He waited hiding behind his person, insofar as this word characterizes that part of a human being formed by the world and the course of life, and his quiet desperation, dammed up behind that façade, rose higher every day. He felt himself to be in the worst crisis of his life and despised himself for what he had left undone. Are great ordeals the privilege of great human beings? He would have liked to believe it, but it isn't so, since even the dullest neurotics have their crises. So all he really had left in the midst of his deep perturbation was that residue of imperturbability possessed by all heroes and criminals -- it isn't courage, willpower, or confidence, but simply a furious tenacity, as hard to drive out as it is to drive life out of a cat even after it has been completely mangled by dogs.

If one wants to imagine how such a man lives when he is alone, the most that can be said is that at night his lighted windows afford a view of his room, where his used thoughts sit around like clients in the waiting room of a lawyer with whom they are dissatisfied.

--Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities, Part II: Pseudoreality Prevails; Chapter 62: "The earth too, but especially Ulrich, pays homage to the utopia of essayism" (1930)

'AND IT'S ALMOST INDEPENDENCE DAY'

The gaze of liberty and independence
Uneasy in groups and making groups uneasy.
–Robert Pinsky, “An Explanation of America: A poem to my daughter.”

One could do worse on Independence Day than read Pinsky’s long poem, “A Explanation of America” (1979). The poem, of course, does not live up to its title (what could?), not even on the level of something that might actually clarify things for one’s child -- the ostensible occasion for the poem that gives it an ongoing conceit, but one which cloys at times into that sentimental fixing of the gaze upon one’s own progeny as wonders of being that so often underscores public statements of parental concern and interest. Pinsky is aware of this, so it’s in-keeping with the poem’s tone that he wear his parentalism, as it were, on his sleeve. The poem is most effective when it actually tries to explain Pinsky’s “take” on America for his daughter’s (and his reader’s) sake: as for instance in “Serpent Knowledge,” the very thoughtful segment of the poem which manages to thread thoughts about “strangers” and “others” (or as he says, thinking of myths and sci-fi, “monsters” and “aliens”) into a final statement about Vietnam and the difference it has made in what is often called “the national psyche,” a redefinition of -- to use Bruce Springsteen’s phrase -- “who we are, what we’ll do, and what we won’t.”

I think I responded most to that section of the poem because the book I finished reading yesterday, Dean Baker’s The United States Since 1980 (2007), inspired a similar feeling about the U.S. in the Iraq War era. My dismay about Vietnam is tempered by the fact that I lived through it as a child; as bleak as that failure of U.S. hubris is, the Iraq War, as a “victory,” seems even more shameful, because it’s a victory that makes one seriously question not only the rationale of the U.S.’s foreign policy, but the ability of its leadership to do anything effectively, which is to say without incompetence and criminal fraud, two leading aspects of the U.S. as a superpower in the period Baker’s book covers. Our nation’s status as “last man standing” after the U.S.S.R. went belly up seems to give it carte blanche to find a way to destroy itself -- by simply not knowing what to do with its “power” or how to cooperate with rather than bully the rest of the world. Not that, unlike the U.S.S.R., the “unity” of the States themselves is at risk (though, really, the idea of an inner nation surrounded by a different coastal nation did seem to emerge in the coverage of Bush’s second election), but rather what is at risk is whatever ideal the U.S. is supposed to stand for to the world at large. Supposedly, that ideal is “freedom,” but freedom comes to seem to mean the freedom to buy whatever you want, to live as you please (and to do what’s necessary to support your “habit”), and to hell with the consequences. Early in his poem, Pinsky cites the idea, taken from Malcolm X, that “America is a prison,” so that “freedom” in such a context is completely determined by the context of one’s efforts, by the circumstances, by what has been called, since ancient times, fortune.

The plural-headed Empire, manifold
Beyond my outrage or my admiration,
Is like a prison which I leave to you
(And like a shelter) -- where the people vote,
And where the threats of riot and oppression
Inspire the inmates as they whittle, scribble,
Jockey for places in the choir, or smile
Passing out books on workdays.

The poem is in many ways a meditation on “where one fits in,” and since the demographic of what is “fit” to be recognized as America has changed drastically in the 25 years since Pinsky’s poem (which is the dominant theme of Baker’s book), it’s interesting to see the degree to which the poem is able to countenance the fact that there is no unified past for this country, even if there remains some version of a united future (figures from Baker: Distribution of the [U.S.] population by race and Hispanic origin: 1980: White, 83.2%; Black (only), 11.7%; Hispanic (all races), 6.4%; Asian, 1.5%; 2005: White, 80.4%; Black (only), 12.9%; Hispanic (all races), 14.1%; Asian, 4.2% ; Distribution of the [U.S.] population by region: 1980: Northeast, 21.7%; Midwest, 26%; South, 33.3%; West, 19.1%; 2004: Northeast: 18.6%; Midwest: 22.3%; South: 36.1%; West: 23%-- I quote these figures simply to show the most obvious kind of changes in the mix, and to show -- one of the obvious points that Baker wants to understand statistically -- that the U.S. was a very different place in 2005 than it was in 1980). Pinsky makes some gestures toward the idea that the United States, as any kind of unity, is perhaps the supreme fiction of our history and as such a concept that may not stand forever (he’s very effective at the kind of “Ozymandias” statements that poets are fond of, showing that nothing, ultimately, stands the test of time -- in Pinsky’s case, it’s earned by reflecting on Horace’s place in the Rome of Augustus: Horace who had backed Brutus after the assassination of Caesar, but who Fortuna was kind to, so that he could write from pastoral remove from Rome, not only about the vagaries of favor, but also about ultimate ends (“Death is the chalk-line towards which all things race”), but Pinsky accepts that the only thing “writ in stone” is an epitaph, and he’s not trying to write one for his generation: the speaker is a youngish man whose children are still in school.

For Pinsky, what seems the real stretch of the imagination is not how it might all come to end, but how it ever came to be -- this “nation under God, indivisible,” that is -- which brings him up against those prairies, a nice metaphor for the Midwesterners (to my mind), who, it seems Easterners (who never went out there) and Westerners (who kept going) can’t seem to understand. Something in Pinsky’s evocation of those wide open spaces made hover in my mind a long-gone time when one could simply move away from any constraining regional prison by going further West -- a time, in other words, when one could escape “groups” by finding a place they hadn’t gotten to yet. It’s a nice idea, “the 19th century version of America,” let’s say. What Baker’s account of the U.S. of my adult years (I turned 21 in 1980) has me considering -- and Pinsky’s Malcolm X quotation helps bring that home -- is that, on this Independence Day, 2008, the only truly meaningful freedom I can imagine is independence from the U.S.

I don’t want to fight in a holy war
I don’t want the salesmen knockin’ at my door
I don’t want to live in America no more
–Arcade Fire, “Windowsill” (2007)