WHATCHA READIN?: WHAT EVER HAPPENED TO MODERNISM? (2010)

Grey Matters in New Haven is a fairly new addition to the city that has changed its character a little. Book Trader, the former primary used bookstore, stocked mostly trade books—novels of all kinds, biographies, books on a range of subjects, yes, but not many purely intellectual works. Grey Matters is more like visiting “the old curiosity shop” and at least some Yale students I’ve met view it as the means to serendipitous finds, browsing their way into the byways of texts not on the syllabus.

I say that, but I don’t know for certain. Maybe there are still theory classes like there were in the ‘90s, but I doubt it. In fact, the shelves of Grey Matters let me glimpse again what it was like to elbow one’s way around Micawber Books on Nassau Street in Princeton or Labyrinth Books on York in New Haven back there at the end of the previous century and the beginning of this one; even the university bookstores attached to Yale and Princeton were once full of books! Strange but true. And so you could go in at any time and expect to find bound copies of the entire works of a considerable range of authors, or at least the best-known or most oft assigned. And there were shelves packed with the products of university presses, each proclaiming that new research and new terminology and new career-making inquiries or late career-capping retrospectives were as important and timely as whatever latest celebrity memoir or business, money, love or family How To.

At Grey Matters, which used to be a clothes store, it’s like you’re in the attic where all those used student copies from the ‘80s and ‘90s went to remote storage. Sometimes you’re even faced with a collection curated from the library of a deceased professorial eminence, a memento mori of texts, books that may bear an inscription from the author, letting your mind wander for a moment over conversations and conference meetings and correspondence that may have gone into a lengthy acquaintance over the course of time needed to bring an idea to birth as a book. The writer’s life, so very rewarding! And yet it all seems filmed over with the dust that has long since settled on print culture, blown in from the long years that have intruded themselves between my earliest thirties and my dawning mid-sixties.

The students, at play in grandpa’s library of long gone intellectual heroes, may take what value they find. Me, I’m on the lookout—as sometimes in used record shops—for this or that find that reminds me there’s room for one more. Something I passed over before but which now will have its day, suiting my mood or a quest for a new wrinkle in an old suit of clothes. I’m not that various, sticking usually with What I Know, but the landscape of that terrain has altered in sometimes unrecognizable ways by this point. And with books, unlike music, I don’t feel the same friction of identity. A book can be picked up out of idle curiosity. Music, less so. Music will need to be inhabited and the object itself has to have a certain allure or aura. A book—usually I have “heard of” the author at least—can just be a momentary indulgence.

So it was when I stepped away from a conference celebrating the career of Peter Brooks (one of those important professors of literature in my grad school days who is stlll with us, as emeritus, and still producing books) to browse a bit and let my mind wander: I came upon a Gabriel Josipovici hardback in clean wrappers—with a Klee on the cover—from Yale University Press: What Ever Happened to Modernism? (2010). Now, it wasn’t simply that perhaps elegiac or perhaps jeering or perhaps ironic rhetorical question/title that got my interest, but also the date of publication. Having recently begun a new fiction ms. set in 2010, I found the coincidence providential. I’d already found—from what little I’d written—that an author born in 1937 and so in his early seventies is holding forth on his views on literature. So why not a quick acquaintance with what GJ (born in 1940) has to say about that literary and artistic movement or tendency or aesthetic doctrine that fascinated me so in my early twenties and became significant to my education and professionalization (such as it was) from the mid-Eighties to . . . well, yes, about the time of GJ’s book! For 2010 is just after the Birth of the Smart Phone, and just after the Big Buy Out, and just two years before my last five week course devoted to Ulysses. Whatever happened, indeed?

The book, it turns out, derives from lectures given in 2007—so not quite the coincidental chime I’d imagined, but no matter. It’s not as if my fictional novelist is not drawing on a lifetime of reflection on his art, much as GJ—a novelist and playwright as well as critic—is doing. In fact, the GJ book that I seemed to dimly recall as I flipped through this later work was Lessons of Modernism (1977; 1987), a book that I at least glanced at somewhere there in my undergrad and/or grad days—1985-94—and so he seemed an old mentor or former teacher showing up again. Why not? I left with the book.

Actually, reflecting on it while carrying groceries home today, I recalled an advisor in grad school mentioning GJ with approval and can only assume Lessons of Modernism was the text in question; it may be that she was pointing to his work as insights from a practitioner of fiction and not simply a critic or scholar. That there was something more at stake for him that had to do with a dissatisfaction with contemporary fiction, which is certainly something I was always going on about back then. The period between the wars had seemed to promise so much for what novels and poems and paintings could be; GJ is fed up by having the likes of Martin Amis and Iris Murdoch and Ian McEwan trotted out as worthwhile novelists. Part of the problem is that GJ is situated in the UK and it’s well known that Modernism didn’t have much purchase there—especially if you clear out the Americans like Pound and Eliot or the Irish like Joyce and Beckett. You’ve basically got Woolf, Forster (if you think so) and Ford Maddox Ford. Lawrence? Well, there you have it. Lawrence is certainly a modernist in his interests but his methods are pretty much cut in the good old yarn-spinner’s mode. But I guess there is a syllabus where Lawrence can sit with “American modernists” like Fitzgerald and Hemingway, sure. The point is that Modernism—which, because of the last named, throws a long shadow of influence in the U.S.—doesn’t inspire the next generation much in the UK. And so GJ imports almost all his examples from Europe and even from other eras.

And that’s where I found him on familiar ground—because arguments about the modernity of Don Quixote and Pantagruel and Tristram Shandy had all fed into background arguments I’d found useful for what made Ulysses the unique work it is. Not that GJ is all that keen to deal with Joyce. He’s much more likely to find figures for his supreme modernist in Kafka, Beckett, Picasso, Stravinsky, and Borges. He’s also apt to pull in Robbe-Grillet and Simon and all those French figures who kept the radical stress on form alive and active in the 1950s and into the 1960s. It’s not that I’m out to fault GJ for his references; I merely read his book to see how well what he says jells with my own discontentment with fiction as generally practiced, looking for maybe the odd apercu that would bounce around in my brain while at work on what my Jonathan Hawthorn is hawking.

Following the idea that serendipity has its own logic, or at least that what gets taken up randomly may provide random yet providential input, the passages in What Ever Happened that appealed most to me came from Kierkegaard (who I’ve mainly read in quotations, though he seems to be for GJ the kind of “modernizing thought influencer” that I found in Nietzsche, way back there in my schooldays), and, which I'll get to first, some quotations from visual artists that struck me as apropos to my own endeavors in that realm. The first from—so unlikely a source as to be memorable—Marcel Duchamp, he of the objets trouvé and source of all that “is it art?” “what makes it art?” rigamarole that keeps the critics and scholars busy and Duchamp, no doubt, laughing in his grave:

“Choice is the main thing, even in normal painting.”

For Duchamp: what object to choose and what to do with it?  In “normal painting” (which is I guess what I do), “what size,” “what orientation,” “what surface,” “what colors,” “what brushes,” “what ‘object’ or ‘subject’ or ‘image’” . . . notice how the second we move away from tangibles—the materials that are used to make the art object I’m making (called “a painting”) we get bogged down. Is the object I’m making a depiction of some other object (the “object” of my attention—in my case, often a photograph or photographs I’ve chosen), or is it a depiction of a “subject”—as in a topic or theme? Or both? And is the ”choice” of an image to depict—based on photograph or image of a painting or some other kind of visual source—the start of the object I’m making or is it not really “an image” until I’ve done something with it? The good news is that—in order to paint—I don’t have to care at all! I’ve only got to make my choices and get busy, which is what I like about Duchamp’s statement. I don’t even have to choose how I want to talk about the painting really. (I’m still put-off by the fact that what I’m doing while I’m at work on the ”piece” is called “painting” and that when I’ve stopped work on it, it is now called “A painting.” The point seems to me to be that “painting” is what you do (as in: applying paint to a surface), and the thing you achieve is a painted surface and we should have some term for the thing other than that which designates the act itself. But we don’t. To even call it “a work of art” is a distortion, since not all will admit that every painting is a work of art, because “art” has a limited range of applicability, whereas “painting” is a generic term (it’s a painting, not a drawing, etc.). But then so many works of art aren’t paintings and the whole problem of “work”—again an activity that gets imported into the static object at the end of the process—is its own headache.)

What this all gets at, to me, is the fact that “the painting” is never really finished, so “painting” it is because it could go on, but also it points to the fact that the painting is not a static object at all—though a photograph of it is. The painting keeps changing—first as the pigments set, then as they age, and, always, depending on the light and temperature in which they are situated, they look different to different eyes, which also age and change. So, if you are at all an aware viewer, you know that you yourself—in terms of your attention and focus and awareness—are never exactly the same when you look at the thing. You keep seeing it differently, if you bother to look carefully.

So, I’ll go with “choice is the main thing” when we’re talking about making the thing—or appropriating a thing for artistic use. But “choice” is not the main thing about the “finished thing.” Except to the extent we become critics and, like GJ, choose our quotations and our examples. So let’s turn to another quotation I wrote down, this time from Francis Bacon, the powerful twentieth-century British painter (I’ve seen two retrospectives, one at Yale British Art Gallery, the other at MoMA), who said, in an interview: “I believe art is recording; I think it’s reporting.”

Now, the context for Bacon’s statement is he’s explaining why he doesn’t care much for abstract, non-representational painting, but also why his style of painting—which is truly unique and a significant achievement for twentieth-century painting—isn’t simply “illustration.” In other words, even as great a painter as Bacon has to worry about what the hell he’s doing. It’s not enough to just be a great painter and get on with it. No, you’ve got to carve out some space between those who believe all representational imagery is “illustration” (clearly, an “applied arts” and not “fine arts” region) and those for whom “abstraction” is built into the very nature of painting since the point of the procedure is not to make an exact copy of some already existing thing but to alter it according to a method, style or manner. Bacon has a definite style, manner, and method and it should be enough to have those things and so be discussed for what those things, in his case, bring to the table. But Bacon, in trying not to just dump on shaping colors on canvas for the sake of visual effect as an end in itself, has to take on a dimension that matters to him (and to me): “recording . . . reporting.” As in: his paintings have “subject matter.”

At the outset though I want to say that I believe that any kind of painting is recording and reporting. An artist of abstract painting is recording and reporting too. It’s just that what they record and report doesn’t take the form of a representational image, and so the “report” is something you have to work to intuit. But the point is that, even with a representational image you recognize at once—Christ’s nativity, say, or a Rembrandt self-portrait—you have to work to intuit the “report.” Because the report is how the painting is a painting. It’s always a report on what was made. Now, with a more abstract canvas the record is really just the record of what got painted, and that’s what makes abstract painting so satisfying as an object: there’s nothing but the painting as painting to be concerned with. But the kind of “recording" Bacon means has to do with the artist as a person who exists in time and so wants to leave a record of that—which may take the shape of a series of non-representational paintings, or which may take the shape of a series of faces or places or animals or what-you-choose.

And so, for my projects of “renderings,” I felt implicated. Since I have one series, called “Philly Days,” in which I choose scans of photos taken in the period when I lived in Philadelphia (1979-83) and make them the basis of paintings: “for the record,” so to speak. That was. Now I’m reliving it (not just recording but reliving because the whole time I’m painting I’m in some space not wholly contained by the here and now). 

Then there’s a series called “21st Century Studies” from photos taken in the 21st century, which, because the pictures chosen are at most 23 years old, feel more immediate and so a “report” on life in the 21st century, so far. In both series, I’ve so far drawn only from my own “circles”—of friends and families, but the “reporting” on the 21st century could go on into other areas. 

I’ve also commenced two series that allow me to “record” images that “stand for” certain influences in my early life: one I call “Pop Figures,” which so far consists of a rendering of James Joyce and his book Ulysses, painted for its centenary; a rendering of the photo of The Beatles on the cover of The Beatles For Sale (1964); a rendering of a composite of stills of Boris Karloff as ‘the Creature” in the original film of Frankenstein (1931). 

The other, related, series is called “Masters Revisited” in which I take an image of a painting by a master painter and submit it to my style of rendering; so far I’ve done a study of the mother and children in Michelangelo’s Flood sequence on the Sistine Chapel; a study of a Madonna and child by Raphael; a reconfiguring of the “muse of history” model in Vermeer’s The Art of Painting, complete with images of places of personal relevance on the map behind her; and a painting done from a lithograph by Delacroix—illustrations for Goethe’s Faust—depicting Faust and Mephistopheles on horseback.

So, the final point: because I’m nothing like so great a painter as Bacon I don’t mind at all that what I do be considered “illustration.” In fact, I think that, if Bacon pushed a bit harder on his language, he’d see that “recording and reporting” simply means—in one sense, at least—illustrating one’s point. One puts up images when words fail or when—perish the thought!—they are utterly irrelevant to the act of looking. Even better than the act of looking is the act of painting.

Then there’s the act of writing (as opposed to reading) but more on that next time . . . 

 

 

 

 

POP GOES THE WEASEL

 

A note, dated 6/21/14, I wrote in ink in the back of my copy of Hal Foster’s The First Pop Age (2012, Princeton UP) says: 

What I’m after: abstract photographs or photographs as abstract paintings. I think Richter [of the five artists Foster examines: Richard Hamilton, Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, Gerhard Richter, Ed Ruscha] is the most germane for my immediate idea (from oceanscape or cityscape photos) but could see the possibility of figures, portraits, ‘iconic images’ (of friends, influences, celebrities) being used the same way.

It’s been done, I know—but the interest is still in the use of fields, lines, planes for form.

Am I ready to become a pop formalist?

Today, having finished the chapter on Richter (back in 2014 I apparently stalled in the Warhol chapter), I can see that I was right. (Not surprising as I’d seen Richter’s “40 Years of Painting” exhibition at MoMA in 2002. I’m thinking that it’s possible I bought Foster’s book at MoMA’s bookstore after viewing the Sigmar Polke exhibit that ran April-August 2014. Both shows gave me much food for thought where making images is concerned.)

Foster strikes me as much more in tune with Warhol and that mechanical aspect of Pop as in thrall to the productiveness of commodity culture. Products for the sake of production rather than production for the sake of product. The very notion of “product” as somehow synonymous with “object” takes its impetus from that conflation, a conflation that, it seems, art in my lifetime (since the end of the Fifties) can do nothing to avoid, can at best exploit.

What Richter—whom Foster quotes a lot with a certain hands-thrown-up gesture—gets at, it seems to me, is the spanner that someone who actually cares about painting throws into the works. Because Warhol doesn’t care, nor does Foster, really. The conceptual force of art is all he can work up any attention to, even if it means that a dizzying level of production on Richter’s part meets with points like: “They [an entire body of “blurred” paintings in gray paint] suggest how our very sensorium, memory, and unconscious have become, at least in part, ‘photogenic,’ that is to say, not only affected by photography and film but also somehow adjusted to them—suited, even designed, to be photographed or filmed, created with such light in mind, along the lines suggested by Kracauer in 1927” (196). So that numerous paintings were created, in the mid-1960s, simply to illustrate a condition that Siegfried Kracauer was onto in the late Twenties. It’s a common feature of Foster: the thesis, uncontroversial as it might be, is supported by the art. No need to really look at it after that.

But the quotations from Richter start to steal the show. “Something has to be shown and simultaneously not shown in order perhaps to say something else again, a third thing” (196—the quotation apparently comes from Richter’s Writings, pg 272, but is not dated explicitly in Foster). “’Illusion—or rather appearance, semblance—is the theme of my life’ Richter also commented in 1989” (215 in Richter; 198, Foster). Foster tries to develop this question of “semblance” to serve his theme of the “photogenic” as an element of Richter’s painting: “semblance is not the resemblance produced in representation any more than it is the negation of this resemblance produced in abstraction. Semblance comprehends both modalities because it concerns the very consistency of appearance—it is what allows the world before us, natural or mediated, or natural as mediated, to cohere—and this concerns Richter above all else: “'Appearance,’ that is to me a phenomenon” (405).” Then Foster cites Richter “in the 1989 statement” saying “All that is, seems, and is visible to us because we perceive it by the reflected light of semblance,” and sums up that “according to Richter, the painter must ‘repeat’ [the semblance of the world] or, more exactly, ‘fabricate’ it” (199, Foster). It would be nice to read Richter’s entire statement but even in this cherry-picked version I like the way Richter suggests that we live in a world that is not simply already viewed through media, as Pop (in Foster’s version) belabors endlessly, but in which “appearance” or “semblance” is a condition of recognizing anything, or having, as it were, visual relations with the world and the things and people in it. His fabrication of that, as what an artist’s act amounts to, puts the burden on the viewer I suppose to determine what relation one of his paintings has to the other elements of the visual world that we recognize. Where do these fabricated semblances fit in in our universe of semblances?

To me, the fascination with what Richter achieves, as a painter, is tied up with my own burgeoning fascination with painting. I can’t say I ever had the fascination with painting as activity that sustained so many careers. I generally wanted the paint to do something I was trying to do, to strike the eye a certain way, and that’s that. The fascination of the painted was something to be found in the hands of masters, or at least in very gifted students. Nowadays I’d say I’m fascinated by the question of what I call “rendering.” And what gets rendered, to some extent, is what Richter is calling “semblance” or “appearance.” Foster insists this has nothing to do with the resemblance between the photograph and its subject and or between the painting and the photograph (the paintings by Richter being discussed all derive from photographic sources). And it’s true that “resemblance” is a lower order quality, one that Richter, as a painter, is too gifted to be bothered by. But it is, to me, a part of the concern of rendering: if I want the image to “look like” the person the picture is of, though not a stenciled version of the image. In other words, the photographic image, or the reproduction, I’m working from is indeed a semblance—of someone or something—but I want to render my relation to that semblance, which is not contained by that image nor exhausted by it, nor by my rendering of it. All the rendering does is perform that relation.

This is something Foster eventually gets to: Richter’s painting “is neither a progressive form of critical art nor a cynical kind of posthistorical pastiche. It does not resolve its contradictions so much as it performs them, and in this performance, it sometimes suspends them as well” (207). It’s not that Foster really sees painting as performance, and yet his formulation, once we get past his usual binary choices about what art can be (critical/cynical, progressive/posthistorical), almost articulates what is at work there. The art of painting as performance. What the whole “performance art” aspect of our contemporary art world [recently watched The Artist is Present] stresses is that the audience wants to be a part of the act/art. Fine. But the Old School approach was about coming to see the finished product/object—all the performance had already taken place, in the studio. Still my preference. And that’s because what happens, in the witnessing/observing/perceiving, is like what happens in reading/listening. I can’t see with another’s eyes nor hear with another’s ears nor read with another’s mind. I bring my own gear wherever I go. I want the artist to show me the semblance arrived at for the sake of my seeing. I'll take it from there. To be “in the scene”—like taking a selfie next to a masterpiece—is to underscore the historical dimension of art. You are there, it’s in your space and time. So what?

But in making art I have no such escape valve. I mean it is in my space and time because I am the one there making it. And there’s no sense of audience, only a sense of when I’m done, if only because I’m tired of “seeing what I can do.” I hit the limits of my ability or of my patience and so it’s time to move on. Otherwise, the rendering is its own agenda, to play with paint for the sake of form. What used to stymy me wasn’t just my lack of skill, but my lack of conviction that there should be something rather than nothing. Not nihilism so much as no commitment to an enduring image. The Pop culture that Foster is keen to elucidate struck me as not worth the candle. Tedious enough in each encounter, why proliferate Campbell soup cans to underscore the tedium? At the same time, there were fabricated images that fascinated—including even fully commercial products like album covers and book jackets, to say nothing of magazine ads. Meanwhile, any canvas no matter how grandly sublime could become an icon in a textbook, a thumbnail. An image, not a painting. The victory of Pop in the sense that seeing the actual “one and only” artwork could seem redundant. Though it’s really not if you really are looking/seeing and not simply conceptualizing as you wander through.

So maybe art isn’t exhausted by the tedium of making things but by the tedium of explicating, of fitting the object into the syllabus, of analyzing for the sake of an activity that, unlike art itself, seems to need no justification. If only because it has academic pedigree.

 All of which is simply a way to further render my note at the back of the book, a way of saying that I could see, in 2014, a détente with Pop, which I otherwise fault with being the a la mode from my childhood onward that seems impossible to outdistance, outlive, escape, or fully accept. And I say, as I did then, that Richter does help me see the way to that end. It’s in the performance of rendering semblance. What anyone other than me sees in that semblance? What the fuck do I care? As SD sez: “unsheath your dagger definitions.” Call it something, if it suits. As all these Pop guys know so well, it must be addressed by the critical—I won’t say “community”—apparatus (apparatchiks?) in order to really exist. But that’s just saying that any semblance one renders as an object must be given its wraithlike existence in the permanent embalming fluid of history or else . . .  we might as well, as Christopher Fry once put it, sculpt in snow.

 Yeah, but I like paint.

SOME THOUGHTS FROM LAST YEAR, 2 (toward a start)

3/12/19

So, if I turn my attention to the major myths as foundations to my readings in a variety of media, the failing to guard against is that every instance simply becomes another example of the same concept. The specificity of the relationship between myth/instance/receiver has to be analyzed. If I play off of Barthes’s tripartite breakdowns where the signified finds a signifier that gets encoded in a sign and the sign (word/work/object) becomes a signifier for the signified (myth) which is decoded in the sign of the mythologist’s analysis, then there’s also a further trio (of allegory) that takes the mythologist’s reading as “signifier” matched to a signified (the cultural work of the sign) that finds its sign in the lyrical history of reception, which is to say that the sign is the coming to consciousness of the formation fantasies and that realizing them, in writing, is the entire goal.

With this approach in mind I have to begin with the mythic sign and move toward the allegory of becoming. This process is personal and individual (hence, the idiosyncrasy) but it is also social/collective because it assumes the general presence and reception of the myth; as critique of the myth the analysis serves a proleptic purpose—a conduit between the past, where the myth was received, the present, where its effects are analyzed, and the future where a possible benefit accrues, not as revolutionary gesture but more as an existential truth, a Sisyphean perpetuation of the burden of knowledge, of the framing of the idea of an emancipatory act. “No exit,” indeed, but that is not a cause for despair if, a good jester, one accepts the joke is on oneself.

Playing with these ideas in my mind at the moment, I see that—to recall my four-part fantasia—ethos would be the comic, the jester’s wit, the ability to laugh at absurdity and to see the cosmic joke in human affairs (how to take people seriously?); pathos would be the heroic, which moves from superheroes to tragic heroes—Christ, Faust, Shakespearean—to antiheroes, Dostoevskyian, in film and fiction; eros would be the poetic—the lyrical—finding its image in woman/the feminine, and having to recognize its presence in oneself: a self involved in rendering the sensual mental sphere which is what I basically find in poetry or at least my poetic heroes; finally, logos would be the narrative principle—uniting novelist and certain film-makers as controllers of the narration/diegesis. It will be seen at once that this change in emphasis, to the theoretical or categorical, lessens the attention to the diachronic, historical approach—the point of autobiographical criticism—but not if I can help it.

My sense of art history, as a sequence of styles and their attendant myths, should keep me focused on the passage of time as an element in reception/conception. (Note: I’m sitting here, now, in the Blue State Coffee Shop on York Street in New Haven, which used to be, when I first moved here, in 1994, a Willoughby’s Coffee Shop—the view out the window on York Street on the rear of Yale’s Sterling Library hasn’t changed much (though there was construction on the outside of the library for many years). I can’t sit here and not remember writing one of the poems I worked on for “At Large,” the poem called “Backseat Driver.”) My point—in that parenthesis—being that the time that has passed from the day of that poem to this—which is to say from the doctorate to now—is not lost but part of the perspective. Time must be contained in the views of the myths, in the allegory of their reception, or I have learned nothing. These thoughts, about the years at Princeton, come from re-reading that Barthes essay, which takes me back to starting at Princeton and the idea that exercised my mind at the time, to unpack the transition from the realist novel to something more subjective, based on an aesthetic response, to see how—again—the impact of history plays into aesthetic experience (a concept I might now see as ‘myth’) as a thematic element of every narrative—which is to say an indication of the author’s choices/assumptions about the “state of the art” and the position of the probable reader/receiver. What kept me from fully embracing Barthes et al. at the time was the sense that semiology was ultimately not concerned with art qua art. In other words, it did not consider the ‘usage’ of the strategies of art—in poetry, in literature—as substantially different from any other form of discourse or media. My “aesthetic experience” claim sought to foreground that particular use value which can only be found in art. With the eclipse of most of my artistic assumptions in the name of ubiquitous media, it’s no surprise that those ideas didn’t garner much support.

The concession, at this remove, occurs on several fronts. First, the situatedness of the critic. The objectivity of theory and history has always bothered me. The claims I make, as a critic, are to some degree performative—which is where both autobiography and lyrical self come into play, as they must, or there is no point in me writing this. My failings in the profession come primarily from trying to write as others do, to appropriate an appropriate voice/stance. If I am to “free my hand” then I’ve got to own the stance entirely, which means “owning up” to the particular idiosyncrasies of the critical gesture. Second: that situatedness has a political dimension because of our surrounding context which interrogates privilege, racial placement, gendered identity and all aspects of the social mimesis. That critical tendency became prevalent as I was finishing at Princeton and was the marked position of the academy at the time—the university as a white male dominated space of intellectual colonialism, an oppression by other means. Because of the steady chipping away at that monolith, any work that arrives as the intervention of a hetero white male with Ivy League antecedents is going to be suspect if not irrelevant. That I can’t help, but I can accept, jester-like, the use of irony. “Hide, fox, and all after” has long been my motto, with all due acknowledgment of its source. The placement of critical pressure on historical accident, the stress on trivial identification factors (whom one’s ancestors were and whom one has sex with and how) as determinant of “position,” is a way of recognizing that the social uses of art, more—its value for social recognition and identification—is all that matters in this period.

The “driven to abstraction” nature of my earliest incarnations take root there as there is no access to that mode of thought by means of those trivial factors. So this—belated—recognition of the social importance—for critical purposes—of that ground is something that the criticism must register. The work on “Between Days” has made that aspect of my past—now told by a self-styled narrator—more accessible and even relevant, particularly where the “myth” of the author/artist is concerned. No doubt a part of that analysis will be of the trajectory of that concept as it plays through my earliest identifications and into the state it now occupies in all its situated banality. What kept me away from biographical/historical analysis of the artist/author before was my sense that such work was essentially gossip writ large. I still believe that, but there is some merit in meeting that view with a grasp of the self-deprecating humor necessary to the form (“who’s he when he’s at home?”). If one can’t countenance the continuity between text and being, between the authority of the author and the triviality of the person, then one becomes a worshipper, an idolater. That I am not.

Third: aesthetic experience as but one factor (even if a “supreme fiction”) in the reception of the everyday fiction of mediated existence. Some version of that argument was contained—at what lengths!—in the transition from modernism to postmodernism and it could be said that my perspective is still a postmodern, “Baby Boom” perspective on the era that I lived through, but, if so, it’s one that has been shaped both by my elders (those born in the ‘30s and ’40s), my contemporaries (born in the ‘50s and ‘60s), and my juniors (born in the ‘70s and ‘80s). The elders come to me through literature, film and rock; the contemporaries share those fields. The juniors—as my stepson’s and my daughter’s generation—inherit them and have their own emphases. The subsequent generation (‘90s and ‘00s) is the student population that may or may not receive the lesson. My locus in that tripartite division is key to my outlook, and it will be key to the historical situatedness of the account. Which is a way of saying that the context—supplied by those who lived through World War 2—is distorted by the elders, moving into the counter-cultural emphases of those born in the ‘40s (who are now our elder statespersons), received—with all due irony and apathy—by those born in the ‘50s and ‘60s (a kind of “lost generation” of its own, but finding—for me—some ready heroes, particularly in rock, less so in the fine arts), moving on to the generation now approaching its fulcrum of middle-age (forty, fifty years old). The true juniors—in their twenties and thirties—are so readily identified with the twenty-first century and its technologies of (so far) benign surveillance and its failing environments and embattled borders as to be largely indifferent to these arguments. So, granted, the target audience is still “my students”—those who were grad students and undergrads in the 2000s. As we move into the 2020s I can only gesture toward what deluge awaits, seeing 2022—100 years after Ulysses—as the place where the record of modernist myth must reach a kind of end-stop. So, then, the myths . . . [Note: I’ve projected spring of 2022 as the completion of the Tarot panels, 12/2/20]

A simple schema would yield ethos as comedy, pathos as tragedy, eros as lyric (whether poetry or song), logos as narrative (in film and fiction). But, while that might work at the schematic level, I don’t think it works in practice. The “comic” as an ethos could be a factor in any genre, as such it’s part of the perspective. Yet I see this as significant, an aspect of my outlook that I may have neglected. The point, then, is to establish the originary myths. The pathos of the hero and the antic comic hero—the value of irony. One would be the hero as redeemed by suffering, another would be the hero whose insouciance carries the day. Another would be the femme fatale of drama and of song; the muse; the model; the artist-hero; the creative ego; the demiurge; the daemon; the various myths of the rock-bard, like the movie star, are deeply invested with a specular identity, but that also serves the scholar-star, the creative genius, the unprecedented talent, the romantic hero; then there’s the trickster, the jester, the fool. The narrator-hero, the observer, the chronicler, the historian, the critic—these are all positions, entities, but the task is to extract the ideology and poetics of these subject positions. And since most of them mark the reception of and identification with the works of lit, music, film, the analysis should take us into the basis of intrinsic conceptions. What I’ve mainly been thinking of, in terms of explication, is my own formation as a critic-subject, a developmental account, but this newer conception puts the critique at the forefront.

Thus, the development is of a series of myths that prolong the ideology of art (as alternative to culture) and invite the poetics of the self-formation that leads to the critique. The end result is not an artwork, nor an artist’s creative ego, but a critical engagement with the perspective made possible by certain interactions and experiences—aesthetic, yes, but requiring an account of what that entails. It’s likely that at any given stage in this diachronic account there will be dominant figures, the unavoidable “new figure” that encapsulates and challenges, that creates the expectation of a further satisfaction. Of course, the line I was considering previously—derived from Stevens’ “Supreme Fiction”—was the abstraction (ethos), change (pathos), pleasure (eros) trio, which still pertains, but at a more meta level. And that level (allegory or supreme fiction) is the vantage point that may be “beyond critique” or “beyond interpretation” as some would have it. It’s the passion for the task that undoes the performance of it. The untamed, untutored essence of need. Abstraction, as I said earlier today, was the necessary lie against bleak reality, recognizing the lack within the particular—so a supplement for the sake of a “higher calling” (a myth in itself); change (pathos) has always been intimate to my vision—what found such fascination in Proust, the realization of time as the tension between “the eternal” (the analogue to an ethos of “the universal”) and the time-bound loss, the impossibility of a fixed value. And that leaves eros/pleasure as the temptation to linger in good feelings, the sustaining attention to sensual satisfactions—seeing, hearing, touching, consuming—where “the work” is a feast, a dance, a spectacle, a trance, a poem. Breaking the trance is the work of criticism, an inscription on a tomb.

I wait in anger and amusement
In my rehearsals for retirement

If I'd have known the end would end in laughter
Still I'd tell my daughter that it doesn't matter

Farewell, my own true love, farewell, my fancy
Are you still ownin' me, love, though you failed me?
But one last gesture for your pleasure
I'll paint your memory on the monument
In my rehearsals for retirement

--Phil Ochs, “Rehearsals for Retirement” (1969)

SOME THOUGHTS (BARTHES) FROM LAST YEAR

3/11/19

I was thinking this morning of how the type of account I want to write should begin with a statement of main themes, that it’s not enough—as I tend to do in lists—to enumerate proper names with maybe a tagline to indicate critical orientation. Then, having had a look-in yesterday at Baudrillard’s Conspiracy of Art, I picked up this morning Barthes’ “Myth Today,” which includes, as perhaps ultimate inspiration or challenge, the lines: “In a word, I do not yet see a synthesis between ideology and poetry.”—with the two seen as “two equally extreme methods”: “either to posit a reality which is entirely permeable to history, and ideologize; or, conversely, to posit a reality which is ultimately impenetrable, irreducible, and, in this case, poeticize.”

For me, the true poeticization is something like “Metro Lace” where language serves the purpose of asserting arbitrary relations to the subject and object—it is a bridge between two things, each with its own status, and the poem approximates moods only, making the capacities of language register presence—thus a sensual act because the writer is a locus of senses and sensory impressions in the act of operating language.

But a critical language needs history—which is biographical first because the utterance has to be placed in time and because the evaluation is retrospective. “Entirely permeable to history”—though—is more extreme than what I had been considering. And that’s where reading Barthes’s very lucid discussion may be crucial at this time. For I begin to see that what has hung me up all along is what I might call the particular vantage of my intervention. I’ve wanted it to be “autobiographical” or “lyrical” criticism, a story of becoming, à la Nietzsche’s “How One Becomes Who One Is,” but that is fraught with the difficulty of articulating who and where and what one is. The account creates its author, I don’t doubt, but that’s an intimidating prospect. As “lyrical,” the account allows for a love story, of sorts, and that might too easily become fan notes or the glib appreciations the internet is rife with. But Barthes’s concept of myth brings me to something I’ve been trying to suggest with such formulations as “exile,” “pursuit,” and “flight.” The point is that the perspective has to be one willing to excavate the myths built into the objects by their context (the historical imperative) and to witness the myths of becoming that each object bequeaths.

Here, then, we’re engaged in true critique, the type that would extract principles of becoming, not so absolute as an interrogation of essence by means of substance, or of form by accident—since I don’t think I will uncover Platonism at the heart of the endeavor, nor phenomenology, but rather a Nietzschean or possibly romantic irony, a gesture, in other words, toward art/poetry by other means. But if I am attentive to the myths built into, or incorporated by, the reception of the object, and how that reception creates or stimulates a certain subject—the subject as receptor/receiver/reader/viewer—then the point of the writer in the equation (what Barthes calls the mythologist) is to delineate the ideology at work each step of the way because, in Barthes’s terms, revolution does not occur. The failure of revolution is the real failure, or the failure of the Real. The arts are, at best, a gesture toward emancipation, but that impetus only exists to end up in art. So that even a “revolution of the word” or a revolution of ways and means within the artform still stops short of eradicating the art world and the history of art. This particular confrontation, compromise and concession has to be acknowledged within the objects, but also within the spectator—as observer, not actant. We are always watching a pageant go by, that’s the nature of the condition. What Barthes points us to is acknowledgment of the degree to which we take the “nature” or naturalness of our condition from the bourgeois world that dominates all critique and tables each intervention. As such, protest is always theater and acting out, unless one sets aside representation and manifests overthrow; that, at times, is the context by which the object is informed, but that gesture becomes encoded into its subsequent reception, into its status as a historic break or defeat.

See Barthes: “Bourgeois ideology continuously transforms the products of history into essential types . . . . So it cannot rest until it has obscured the ceaseless making of the world, fixed this world into an object which can be forever possessed, catalogued its riches, embalmed it, and injected into reality some purifying essence which will stop its transformation, its flight toward other forms of existence. And these riches, thus fixated and frozen, will at least become computable: bourgeois morality will essentially be a weighing operation, the essences will be placed in scales of which bourgeois man will remain the motionless beam. For the very end of myths is to immobilize the world: they must suggest and mimic a universal order which has fixated once and for all the hierarchy of possessions. Thus, every day and everywhere, man is stopped by myths, referred by them to this motionless prototype which lives in his place, stifles him in the manner of a huge internal parasite, and assigns to his activity the narrow limits within which he is allowed to suffer without upsetting the world: bourgeois pseudophysis is in the fullest sense a prohibition for man against inventing himself. Myths are nothing but this ceaseless, untiring solicitation, this insidious and inflexible demand that all men recognize themselves in this image, eternal yet bearing a date, which was built of them one day as if for all time. For Nature, in which they are locked up under the pretext of being eternalized, is nothing but a Usage. And it is this Usage, however lofty, that they must take in hand and transform.”

It’s clear to me, from the above, that for too long I’ve entertained the idea of enumeration, the weighing in the scales—this is more significant than that—for the purpose of creating “the universal order of the hierarchy of possessions”—to create that eternal analogue of my former life, the life I lived within the objects as “worlds” to explore. But I see in Barthes the challenge to objectify the myths of the things themselves, to write as a means to “take in hand and transform the Usage”—where the “usage” is the values gained from the museum, the library, the archive, the collection, the syllabus, the news bulletin, the ad, the prospectus, and the transformation has to come from the twin actions of ideologizing and poeticizing—where history is the autobiography (a life in time) and lyric is the acquired language/taste of a life lived in art.

RETRO READING: CAMUS

Re-read Camus’ The Fall, probably the first time since the 1980s. I read it first around 1974, I think, and it was part of the background I draw on when I recall my high school reading. The formative stuff. My recollection of it—the bar, the quays, the bridge—played a part in the initial “Axis and the Fallen Angel” composition of around ’76 or so. Reading The Fall now, I see in it the seeds of my conviction, fully ignited by reading Nietzsche in those days, that the purpose of life was a kind of mental clarity about one’s state—I suppose I would’ve accepted “spiritual state” as a good enough phrase for what I had in mind. Key to that intention was a need to do away with the teachings of the Catholic church in the name of something else.

In The Fall, the speaker’s insistence on judgment—to give it and to escape it—plays into that need. One could accept that one would be judged “sinful” by the arbiters of that law one was raised with, but the effort was to free oneself of that view, to find another way. The greatest risk was that one had wasted one’s time, one had squandered one’s gifts—and life, with whatever talents and intelligence one possessed, was the chief gift. One was indebted, from the start, but how to repay that debt? For the artist, the way was clear, in a sense: use one’s talents to the best of one’s ability. But there one encounters a question: how do we determine “best use,” how do we understand—or even perceive or conceive—what “talent” compels? It becomes “a blessing and a curse,” as the song says; it becomes a test of one’s mettle all along the way. One reason I want to go back to the scene of starting out is because I want to see again where I went wrong—but, even more so, I want to reshape the past for the sake of the present and possibly for a different future.

Returning to The Fall interests me because I know that the speaker’s insistence that “we need slavery” is something I grasped at some basic level back then—in two senses. One was with Rimbaud’s “we are slaves, let us not curse life.” A complex statement that says our slavery is built into the system we serve. We have our assigned tasks and we let them determine our identities, to a large extent. We are given money for this and so we cease to call it slavery—we are “free,” we say, to choose. But if we are honest, we know how little choice we have. Somewhere in that notion, as I received it, was Nietzsche’s “What, a great man? I see rather the play-actor of his own ideal.” That line, to me, undermined even the unique life of the artist or leader. Such figures were still slaves to an ideal, an intention, that governed them. We might wade through the biographies of everyone whom talent or wealth or wisdom supposedly freed until we come at the moment when they are ruled by something—call it love, call it God, call it need, call it—maybe even—justice. It doesn’t matter. It’s an ideal that shapes that person’s acts, making them, at best, an actor—pretending they “have it,” the ideal—at worst, a puppet, an automaton compelled by the ideal to—and here’s where Camus comes in—make excuses. For we all fail our ideal. And so must own up to it, or take it out on others. “No excuses ever, for anyone; that’s my principle at the outset. I deny the good intention, the respectable mistake, the indiscretion, the extenuating circumstance. With me there is no giving of absolution or blessing . . . .  In philosophy as in politics, I am for any theory that refuses to grant man innocence and for any practice that treats him as guilty. You see, in me, très cher, an enlightened advocate of slavery.”

So we come to the other sense of slavery—as the state of those who require masters, or a master. In other words, the Hegelian master/slave dichotomy. To me, coming from Catholicism, God was the ultimate master and we his slaves because he owned us—having created us for his own reasons. The Christian sense of this debt was simply that we should love Him, worship Him, do His bidding to the extent we could perceive it. But if that master is removed, then mastery itself becomes the task: to master oneself, to make of oneself a master to be loved. To the master who achieves this, perhaps, the mass of mankind would willingly be a slave. But the master? What kind of freedom is his? It’s the kind of freedom (from masters) that Camus’ Clamence calls “a chore . . . a long-distance race, quite solitary and very exhausting.” The master enslaved to his mastery.

This is not only the artist enslaved to his own ideal of mastery—of, perhaps, preaching a message to the masses via art—but also the task which Camus will imagine as the rock of Sisyphus. Pushing the rock up the slope, Sisyphus masters gravity; letting it roll to the bottom and pursuing it, he masters himself. But he is eternally enslaved to that struggle. There’s no freedom through tasks. Freedom from all tasks—that, I suppose, was the tact I took. The freedom simply to Be. To be, not only as “finale of Seem,” but Be as the only acceptable slavery. For one must exist. Camus also argues for the acte gratuit of suicide, as a gesture of mastery of the moment, and over life itself—which some find, no doubt, in the taking of other lives. But it should be clear that in the philosopher’s oubliette—or what Camus’ speaker calls “the little-ease” (a medieval torture confinement)—we are only concerned with the life we were given. (If one lets oneself become an executioner of the life of others one is indeed defined by the task, by the fact of lives one can end until someone or something ends one’s own life. Needless to say, all such acts are distractions—as is sex and appetite—from the existential emptiness at the heart of the endeavor, any endeavor.)

Granted, art or war—or maybe the art of war—are alike in their valuing a skill set that must prove itself again and again. At some level, the exercise of these skills may be an end in itself, but don’t we—the spectators of the world historical cases these exercises establish—want something more? Some like to speak of edification, but that’s a mighty abstract idea. Don’t we want, really, a rooting interest? A sense that there are stakes and that our hero-warrior or hero-artist or hero-ruler may fail mightily or succeed greatly? But in what lies that success or failure? Renown? The eyes of the multitude upon the acts, and the judgment—always the judgment of someone from somewhere—that it was “worth the time,” “worth the candle,” worth—if it must come to it—the whole world. And into that “world” we place the crying babies of need, and the misused and abused women and men, and all those who have shackled their fortunes to the side that lost, and all those who danced in the streets with the side that won, and all those who never knew comfort and all those who squandered riches untold, and all those who struggled to improve their lot or the lot of others, and those who broke every rule and yet thrived, or who reviled their betters or abased themselves for preference, or who lived pious, quiet lives, exulting in God, or who threw all caution to the wind and gave themselves over to every sensual pleasure and pain. “All” are subsumed in this Battle Royale of one against the very principles of existence.

Thus existentialism chez Camus.