Literature and Film - Resources http://www.galilean-library.org/site/index.php/page/index.html/_/essays/literatureandfilm/ Wed, 16 May 2012 23:13:18 +0000 43200 The written word and great movies. Mimetopia and the illusion of meaning in Naboko... http://www.galilean-library.org/site/index.php/page/index.html/_/essays/literatureandfilm/mimetopia-and-the-illusion-of-meaning-in-naboko-r122 (Continued from Part 1...)

Cincinnatus, at the end of his tether, begins to understand his circumstances for what they are. He recognises the theatricality around him, he understands that "... everything has duped me..." With this, comes the realisation of his own tragic complicity in the whole performance:

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This is the dead end of my life, and I should not have sought salvation within its confines. It is strange that I should have sought salvation...I have discovered the little crack in life, here it broke off, where it had once been soldered to something else...


The world around him now has become for him what he has suspected all along, something has been put together, soldered to something else, a makeshift performance, where nothing is real, but where everything fixes, everything spells death. How does language operate in such a parodied world? How can anything that is written, how can the word, be trusted?

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... how capacious my epithets must be in order that I may pour them full of crystalline sense … it is best to leave some things unsaid, or else I shall get confused again. Within this irreparable little crack decay has set in – ah, I think I shall yet be able to express it all – the dreams, the coalescence, the disintegration – no, again I am off the track – all my best words are deserters and do not answer the trumpet call, and the remainder are cripples. (117)


They cannot be trusted. They desert him, or else they are maimed. Silence, then, a hidden language that must sit snugly in the little crack he has discovered, a crack that is at the same time a violent site of conflict and a syncopated world of meaning. He adds: "Everything I have written here so far is only the froth of my excitement, a senseless transport..." (118) His writing, his inscription must go beyond mere representation. It must go beyond the discourse of the everyday; it must move itself into what Delalande would call "Discours sur les ombres (Discourse on the Shadows)." (119)

There is a second condition. The abyss is that which contains nothing and everything. Distinctions between objects disappear in this space where there are no gods, no idols. It is a vortex that quells its thirst for creation by devouring all that already is. Cincinnatus writes for this reason. Yet, as we have seen, his words are, in his own words, deserters and cripples, forming only the froth of the excitement. In order for his words to have any use, they need to move across a vast site of perception, to be transported to a place where the work can be engendered, or tempered. The first step in this process is the presence of the reader.

Cincinnatus has already expressed the notion of someone who will one day read his words an d who would feel he ha awakened for the first time. His is a revelatory work, but revelation require audience. Therefore, now that he is at the end of the line, he beseeches whoever cares to listen:

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Save these jottings – I do not know whom I ask, but save these jottings ... let them lie around for awhile – how can that hurt you – my last wish – how can you not grant it? I must have at least the theoretical possibility of having a reader, otherwise, really, I might as well tear it all up. (120)


The reader, co-conspirator, a double of sorts must be present in order for Cincinnatus to walk freely toward his mortal hour. The meaning of the work lies, then, not in the distance between reader and writer, but between reader and the work, for long after Cincinnatus has slipped into the chink, the crack, the work will still live under the treatment of the reader. Cincinnatus’ words reverberate in Kafka’s with the undertone of Samsa’s double:

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... I shall lie very contentedly on my deathbed, provided the pain isn’t too great….the best things I have written have their basis in this capacity of mine to meet death with contentment. …indeed in the death enacted I rejoice in my own death, hence calculatingly exploit the attention that the reader concentrates on death... (121)


"(T)he capacity of mine to meet death with contentment" implies that ties with the world have been severed. He is already dead (122), a stone. However, this contentment, this rejoicing over the enacted death of the character, is never complete unless Kafka is allowed "the theoretical possibility of having a reader". This exile in death is linked to writing. In other words, Kafka writes in order to die. Cincinnatus by the end of the novel has begun to see and accept this preposterous proposition. Preposterous though it is, once he has allowed himself the possibility that someone will read his words, he is willing to subject himself to the farce that has been his whole imprisonment. He does so to force a separation, a separation that will finally sever all ties with the material world. Kafka, too, says, "I shun people not because I want to live quietly, but rather because I want to die quietly." (123)

Kafka’s quietude is a desire to become nothing, to die anonymously, to pass into the ether of things without a trace through writing. Through writing, one is ultimately also written. To rejoice of one’s own dying through the enactment of the death of a character, to see your own death in someone else’s is not only to effect a negation of one’s self, but also to be re-written in the form of a text. To enjoy your death seen through another’s death, that is, to die as a character in the eyes of a reader – is to enter the abyss, to become legend, to become ether, to transcend the trappings of the material world. By dying through his characters Kafka dies endlessly, but he is also resurrected endlessly. In short, to rejoice in another’s death as one’s own is to immerse oneself in the text, which is the anonymous abyss where only voices speak, and faces are unseen, like Cincinnatus’ father who leaves nothing but the trace of his voice and his essential quality. He has no face. His face is every face.

Kafka is resurrected in each of his texts – the inmate of In the Penal Colony (124) is Kafka: society writes its demands on the inmate as does the attractive human world on Kafka; Gregor Samsa’s predicament is Kafka’s, for the latter, too, is hounded by societal requierement to be useful. The creature in The Burrow (125) who designs his grand structure but who is still filled with doubt about its efficacy and usefulness is Kafka; Joseph K. believes he can understand and function in the world based on his own system of values. His tragedy is Kafka’s tragedy – he does not realise that he can only do so if he fully embraces the human world; K secures a highly sought-after interview in The Castle (126) yet throws away the opportunity. He vacillates in dissatisfaction – all this is Kafka. All this is the abyss. To become a character in his own texts is to rise above the material. This is the motive behind Kafka’s rejoicing.

It is for this reason that Cincinnatus can say, as his jailers arrive at the cell to take him, in an horse-drawn carriage, to his execution,

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I ask three minutes – go away for that time or at least be quiet – yes, a three-minute intermission – after that, so be it. I’ll act to the end my role in your idiotic production. (127)


A three-minute intermission in a matinee. Cincinnatus has finally seen through the whole affair, and his own part in it. He gives himself over to the theatricality of the material world. He embraces the value system in order to overcome it, as Joseph K does not do. "I’ll act to the end." He has been nothing but a character in an "idiotic production". An idiot’s tale within which Cincinnatus is merely "a poor player That struts and frets his hour upon the stage". (128) He embraces his fictionalising and rejoices in his death.

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This realisation has come after he has written his very last words.

Everything that I have written here so far is only the froth of my excitement, a senseless transport, for the very reason that I have been in such a hurry. But now, when I am hardened, when I am almost fearless of...


At this point, he runs out of paper, but manages to find one more sheet and completes the sentence with the word "death", which he immediately crosses out thinking he must say it with greater precision. A single word sits on a blank page. "Death." It is crossed out. DeathDeath.

The very first words he writes down in his cell are these: "In spite of everything I am comparatively. After all I had premonitions, premonitions of this finale." (129) These words are crossed out as well. "I am." The imperative, to be. An affirmation of life, which he crosses out, nullifying that affirmation. It is a life that isn’t. He sees nothing ahead of him, except death. Now, though, at the end of his life, when he confronts death head on, the affirmation of death he nullifies in a similar manner. What does he see in its stead? Precisely that chink, that crack, the syncope. The written word fixes, cuts off the sentient centres that do not fall within the space of a word. That is how he recognises that some things must be left unsaid. (130) There is no death, no dying, if he rejoices in the death of the other, the death of one of the cast of stage characters that he essentially is. Like Kafka, who rejoices in his death in the death of his characters, Cincinnatus C. must rely on the theoretical possibility of a reader in order to rejoice in his own dying in the death of the literary figure of Cincinnatus.

However, despite this realisation, despite the intimation of a freedom that is already within his grasp, he cannot shake off the fear of the idea of his head being hacked off. He understands that the wave of sickness that followed the thought of his decapitation was drawing him "into a system that was perilous to him." Yet, he can do nothing to stave off the system. He recognises that he is caught in a world of unreality, and that he is headed for a world which will transcend all this. Yet, "the sun was still realistic, the world still held together, objects still observed an outward propriety." (131)

Cincinnatus is made to lie on the block. He is positioned to meet the down-swinging axe. It is at this point of being executed, like a word that quells all competing forces of meaning so that only one victor remains, at this point where Cincinnatus can just make out the threshold to some hidden space of release, He discovers the hidden mystic inscription:

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... one Cincinnatus was counting, but the other Cincinnatus had already stopped heeding the sound of the unnecessary count which was fading away in the distance; and, with a clarity he had never experienced before – at first almost painful, so suddenly did it come, but then suffusing him with joy, he reflected: why am I here? Why am I lying like this? And, having asked himself these simple questions, he answered them by getting up and looking around. (132)


He rejoices in his death, the death of the other, and walks away from the scene that is now collapsing, disintegrating all around him. He senses voices, like that of his father, like that of characters on a page, that are akin to him, and in that direction he walks, and exits the stage production of Mimetopia.

Cincinnatus’ anonymity is achieved, not from shunning the world completely. The world, to be sure, is seamless, like the endless tapestries of the Gods. Yet, Cincinnatus, like Gregor Samsa, like the Woolfian narrator, like Kafka, has discovered certain omissions within the fabric of language, the language we must all speak in order to be. That omission, the distance between the structure of this language and the apprehended world forms the concentration of ambiguity. However, in order to gain access to this centre of ambiguity, one must be of the world in order to die with the world. In other words, the world, which consists of a language that seeks to define and fix, is already a world that is dead, inasmuch as it believes in its own facticity and truth. The beyond, contained in a crack, is always already the abyss, the outside that speaks, that dies and is always dying, but which must be resurrected in order to die repeatedly. This circularity, like an undercurrent that is always flowing just under the skin of language is where Cincinnatus disappears. He becomes the abyss, not by challenging the world, but by being of it in order to discover the chink within which the voice of his father and the voices of those other literary figures resonate.

Literature, therefore, is this abyss, this anonymous, absent, omitted language that resounds like an invisible inscription, a trace that forces its way to the Outside of fixity and definition. Cincinnatus’ jottings have been saved, and we read them as a text from cover to cover. Who has written the text? Which cincinnatus has written it? Is it the one who was unnecessarily counting to ten, or the one who had managed to move the unmovable table in the cell and who had dissembled himself, skullcap included? What we are left with these musings is not a fixity or definition, but merely a trace of voices. They are all that remain of the text, of Literature, from which nothing is graspable, but from which everything is discernible.

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Footnotes:

(1) Michel Foucault, Aesthetics, trans. Robert Hurley and Others, Essential Works of Foucault 1954-1984, ed. Paul Rabinow, 1st ed., vol. 2, 4 vols. (London: Penguin Books, 1998). 148
(2) Foucault, Aesthetics. 149
(3) Foucault, Aesthetics. 154
(4) Foucault defines ‘attraction’ in his essay The Thought of the Outside (Essential Works, Vol.1): "To be attracted is not to be beckoned by the allure of the exterior, rather, it is to suffer – in emptiness and destitution – the presence of the outside and, tied to that presence, the fact that one is irremediably outside the outside (154)." Attraction, therefore, is not a positive movement toward something, but an undeniable condition, a burdensome, existential relation similar to the relation between an unsupported stone and the ground.
(5) Samuel Beckett, Samuel Beckett: The Complete Short Prose 1929-1989, ed. S.E. Gontarski (New York: Grove Press, 19995). 109
(6) Foucault, Aesthetics. 206
(7) Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman, trans. Gillain C. Gill (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1985). 347
(8) Foucault, Aesthetics. 157-8
(9) Plato, The Republic, trans. Desmond Lee, vol. Part vii (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1955). 316-25
(10) Maurice Blanchot, The Space of Literature, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln, London: University of Nebraska Press, 1989).
(11) Vladimir Nabokov, Invitation to a Beheading (Harmondsworth, Middlesex and New York: Penguin Books, 1983).
(12) Nabokov, Invitation. 21
(13) Nabokov, Invitation. 21
(14) Nabokov, Invitation. 191
(15) Nabokov, Invitation. 78
(16) Nabokov, Invitation. 77
(17) Nabokov, Invitation. 77
(18) Nabokov, Invitation. 76
(19) Foucault, Aesthetics. 157-8
(20) Nabokov, Invitation. 27.
(21) Nabokov, Invitation. 27
(22) Nabokov, Invitation. 27; (italics my emphasis)
(23) Nabokov, Invitation. 27
(24) Nabokov, Invitation. 21
(25) Nabokov, Invitation. 38
(26) Nabokov, Invitation. 47
(27) Timothy Langen, "The Ins and Outs of Invitation to a Beheading," Nabokov Studies 8 (2004). 62
(28) Nabokov, Invitation. 11
(29) Nabokov, Invitation. 12
(30) Dana Dragunoiu, "Vladimir Nabokov's Invitation to a Beheading and the Russian Radical Tradition," Journal of Modern Literature XXV.1 (2001). 56
(31) Nabokov, Invitation. 129
(32) Nabokov, Invitation. 130
(33) Nabokov, Invitation. 131
(34) Dragunoiu, "Nabokov's Invitation." 56
(35) Dragunoiu, "Nabokov's Invitation." 54
(36) Nabokov, Invitation. 61
(37) Dragunoiu, "Nabokov's Invitation." 56
(38) In all four dystopias, the illegality of the ‘soul’ as a spiritual element in the make up of the individual body and the body of the social is manifest in the ostracising of writing, that which calls to existence what is inadmissible in a materialist monism. We shall come back to this at a later stage.
(39) Nabokov, Invitation. 27
(40) Langen, "Ins and Outs." 61
(41) Foucault, Aesthetics. 177
(42) Nabokov, Invitation. 150
(43) Nabokov, Invitation. 69
(44) Nabokov, Invitation. 78
(45) Nabokov, Invitation. 19 (italics my emphasis)
(46) Nabokov, Invitation. 34
(47) Nabokov, Invitation. 34; (italics my emphasis)
(48) His beheading has already been scripted. The performance, that is, the court hearing, the incarceration, the whole comic episode with M’sieur Pierre, the spider in the cell, the apparent goodwill of his jailers, and so on, is put on merely to provide the already determined ending with a narrative continuity – C is imprisoned; Pierre masquerading as a fellow-inmate befriends him in an attempt to become his brother or double; When thus conjoined, both executioner and prisoner can truly become one when axe meets neck.
(49) Nabokov, Invitation. 60
(50) Nabokov, Invitation. 31-2
(51) Foucault, Aesthetics. 178
(52) Julian W. Connolly, Nabokov's Early Fiction: Patterns of Self and the Other, Cambridge Studies in Russian Literature, ed. Malcolm Jones (Cambridge, New York, Oakleigh: Cambridge University Press, 19992). 167
(53) Nabokov, Invitation. 102
(54) Nabokov, Invitation. 78
(55) Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy and Other Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). 142
(56) Nietzsche, Birth. 143
(57) Nietzsche, Birth. 149
(58) Nietzsche, Birth. 146
(59) Nabokov, Invitation. 21
(60) Nabokov, Invitation. 23
(61) Nabokov, Invitation. 24
(62) Nabokov, Invitation. 29
(63) Nabokov, Invitation. 27; (italics my emphasis)
(64) Sigmund Freud, Collected Papers Volume 5, ed. James Strachey (London: The Hogarth Press, 1971). 175-180
(65) Nabokov, Invitation. 191
(66) Blanchot, Space. 44
(67) Virginia Woolf, A Haunted House: The Complete Shorter Fiction (London: Vintage, 2003). 77-83
(68) Woolf, Haunted House. 77
(69) Woolf, Haunted House. 77
(70) Woolf, Haunted House. 80
(71) Nietzsche, Birth. 144
(72) Woolf, Haunted House. 81
(73) Woolf, Haunted House. 81 (italics my emphasis)
(74) Foucault, Aesthetics. 74
(75) Woolf, Haunted House. 83 (italics my emphasis)
(76) Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1988). 11
(77) de Certeau, Everyday Life. 17
(78) Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978). 11
(79) Nabokov, Invitation. 12 (Italics my emphasis)
(80) Nabokov, Invitation. 33
(81) Nabokov, Invitation. 27
(82) Nabokov, Invitation. 29
(83) Nabokov, Invitation. 41
(84) Nabokov, Invitation. 104
(85) Robert Alter, "Invitation to a Beheading: Nabokov and the Art of Politics," Nabokov: Criticism, Reminiscences, Translations and Tributes, ed. Alfred Appel, Jr., and Charles Newman (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1971). 54
(86) Nabokov, Invitation. 44
(87) Connolly, Early Fiction. 173
(88) Nabokov, Invitation. 45
(89) Franz Kafka, The Diaries 1910-1923, trans. Martin Greenberg and Hannah Arendt, ed. Max Brod (New York: Schoken Books, 1976). 295
(90) Kafka, Diaries. 409
(91) Kafka, Diaries. 302 (italics my emphasis)
(92) Franz Kafka, Collected Stories, trans. Willa and Edwin Muir (New York, London, Toronto: Everyman's Library, 1993). 75-128
(93) Kafka, Stories. 77 (italics my emphasis)
(94) Nabokov, Invitation. 22
(95) Franz Kafka, The Blue Octavo Notebooks, trans. Ernst Kaiser and Eithne Wilkins, ed. Max Brod (Cambridge: Exact Change, 1991). 1
(96) Kafka, Stories. 85 (italics my emphasis)
(97) Connolly, Early Fiction. 174
(98) Nabokov, Invitation. 80
(99) G.M. Hyde, Vladimir Nabokov: America's Russian Writer (London: Marion Boyars Pulbishers, 1977). 134
(100) Nabokov, Invitation. 81 (italics my emphasis)
(101) Nabokov, Invitation. 81
(102) Hyde, Nabokov. 140
(103) Blanchot, Space. 44
(104) Kafka, Diaries. 134 (italics my emphasis)
(105) Connolly, Early Fiction. 175
(106) Nabokov, Invitation. 102 (italics my emphasis)
(107) Nabokov, Invitation. 11
(108) Nabokov, Invitation. 103
(109) Nabokov, Invitation. 103
(110) Nabokov, Invitation. 118
(111) Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, trans. Maria Jolas, 1994 ed. (Boston: Beacon Press, 1994). 47
(112) Kafka, Notebooks. 1
(113) Nabokov, Invitation. 112
(114) Nabokov, Invitation. 116
(115) Nabokov, Invitation. 180
(116) Nabokov, Invitation. 181
(117) Nabokov, Invitation. 175
(118) Nabokov, Invitation. 176
(119) Nabokov states in his Forward that "the only author that I must gratefully recognise as an influence upon me at the time of writing this book", is Pierre Delalande. A quote from Delalande’s book, Discours sur les ombres, serves as the epigraph to Invitation: "Comme un fou se croit Dieu, nous nous croyons mortels" (As the insane believes in God, we believe we are mortals.). Delalande is a spectre, a Nabokovian invention.
(120) Nabokov, Invitation. 165 (italics my emphasis)
(121) Kafka, Diaries. 321
(122) Blanchot, Space. 92
(123) Kafka, Diaries. 295
(124) Kafka, Stories. 131-160
(125) Kafka, Stories. 467-503
(126) Franz Kafka, The Castle, trans. Willa and Edwin Muir (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1957).
(127) Nabokov, Invitation. 179
(128) William Shakespeare, The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Glasgow: HarperCollins Publishers, 1994). 1076
(129) Nabokov, Invitation. 12
(130) Nabokov, Invitation. 175
(131) Nabokov, Invitation. 183
(132) Nabokov, Invitation. 191 (italics my emphasis)

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Bibliography

Alter, Robert. "Invitation to a Beheading: Nabokov and the Art of Politics." Nabokov: Criticism, Reminiscences, Translations and Tributes. Ed. Alfred Appel, Jr., and Charles Newman. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1971.

Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space. 1958. Trans. Maria Jolas. 1994 ed. Boston: Beacon Press, 1994.

Beckett, Samuel. Samuel Beckett: The Complete Short Prose 1929-1989. Ed. S.E. Gontarski. New York: Grove Press, 19995.

Blanchot, Maurice. The Space of Literature. 1982. Trans. Ann Smock. Lincoln, London: University of Nebraska Press, 1989.

Connolly, Julian W. Nabokov's Early Fiction: Patterns of Self and the Other. Cambridge Studies in Russian Literature. Ed. Malcolm Jones. Cambridge, New York, Oakleigh: Cambridge University Press, 1992.

de Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Trans. Steven Rendall. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1988.

Derrida, Jacques. Writing and Difference. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978.

Dragunoiu, Dana. "Vladimir Nabokov's Invitation to a Beheading and the Russian Radical Tradition." Journal of Modern Literature XXV.1 (2001): 53-68.

Foucault, Michel. Aesthetics. Trans. Robert Hurley and Others. Essential Works of Foucault 1954-1984. Ed. Paul Rabinow. 1st ed. Vol. 2. 4 vols. London: Penguin Books, 1998.

Freud, Sigmund. Collected Papers Volume 5. Ed. James Strachey. London: The Hogarth Press, 1971.

Hyde, G.M. Vladimir Nabokov: America's Russian Writer. London: Marion Boyars Pulbishers, 1977.

Irigaray, Luce. Speculum of the Other Woman. Trans. Gillain C. Gill. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1985.

Kafka, Franz. The Blue Octavo Notebooks. 1954. Trans. Ernst Kaiser and Eithne Wilkins. Ed. Max Brod. Cambridge: Exact Change, 1991.

---. The Castle. 1930. Trans. Willa and Edwin Muir. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1957.

---. Collected Stories. 1933. Trans. Willa and Edwin Muir. New York, London, Toronto: Everyman's Library, 1993.

---. The Diaries 1910-1923. Trans. Martin Greenberg and Hannah Arendt. Ed. Max Brod. New York: Schoken Books, 1976.

Langen, Timothy. "The Ins and Outs of Invitation to a Beheading." Nabokov Studies 8 (2004): 59-70.

Nabokov, Vladimir. Invitation to a Beheading. 1960. Harmondsworth, Middlesex and New York: Penguin Books, 1983.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Birth of Tragedy and Other Writings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.

Plato. The Republic. Trans. Desmond Lee. Vol. Part vii. Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1955.

Shakespeare, William. The Complete Works of William Shakespeare. Glasgow: HarperCollins Publishers, 1994.

Woolf, Virginia. A Haunted House: The Complete Shorter Fiction. London: Vintage, 2003]]> Fri, 02 Jul 2010 18:44:43 +0000 5516adb142fcb18a017c72602abbdb6d Mimetopia and the illusion of meaning in Naboko... http://www.galilean-library.org/site/index.php/page/index.html/_/essays/literatureandfilm/mimetopia-and-the-illusion-of-meaning-in-naboko-r121 Niven Kumar (2010)

Literature takes as its space of meaning and operation the void that is created when language tries to move away from itself, to move away from the "mode of being of discourse" (1), that is, representation. The language of discourse is one dimensional, linear, and works towards itself. Instead of approaching itself until it reaches the point where it can only express its own truths, Literature is a language that finds a passage to the outside, where a gap in meaning is formed, where it disperses (2), where it speaks. This challenges the transcendentalism implicit in Descartes' "I think, therefore I am". This Cartesian formula is predicated on the principle that in order for existence to exist, thought or conscious thought, the thought that knows it is thinking, must first exist, a priori. Literature is the neutral space where the transcendental subject is no longer a priori; it is the anvil upon which the subject of Literature (what speaks, and what it speaks about) is laid bare, like an inmate of a penal colony is made to come under the harrowing regime of redemption.

This outside, the neutral space from which Literature speaks, is not one dimensional, but a multi-layered treasure of meaning, a palimpsest. As such, one is never certain of its centre, never able to apprehend its essence, since the outside never yields it. (3) The silence of Literature, then, is not its inability to speak, but its dispersed, non-linear temporality, its ability to transform thought into a material energy, forsaking the wordy interiority of consciousness. The outside, the neutral space of Literature, is also the void, the death of transcendental truths.

In such a situation, where the neutral space we speak of is a void that reveals nothing of its essence, but which we go back to over and over again, attracted (4) as we are by it, we are faced with an absence. It is not merely a physical, spatial absence; it is also a temporal absence, since in Literature, the “here’ is nowhere as well; the "present" is not present. However, the "not present" does not refer back to a past, since the past has the force of the "here" and "now".

The dialectical self-negation inherent in the language of literature calls to mind Beckett’s formulation of this theme: "What matter who’s speaking, someone said, What matter who’s speaking." (5) The absent present that is the site of the language of Literature (writing) encapsulates Beckett’s formulation. Writing frees itself from expressing the views of an author, who disappears once the first word is written, and creates a space into which the writing subject constantly disappears.

Writing, then, is an anonymous process, a withdrawal that leads to a hollowness, which in turn leads to the erosion of the person who speaks. Writing carries the mark of death wherever it goes. Writing is an effacement of the writing subject, the murderer of the author who ceases to exist as his or her first word is born. "The writing subject cancels out the signs of his individuality." (6) The murder of the writing subject, the self-effacement, is the supreme act of Anonymity. It is the point at which Death meets and marries Anonymity, a turning away that denies itself even as it turns away, like a Christ who is thrice denounced before the final denouncement on Golgotha. By doing so, it speaks freely.

This zone of effacement speaks but silently, it writes but invisibly. In a sense it is a forgotten space that is always caught within the liminal space between the inside and the outside, or as Irigaray puts, like "the forgotten vagina", the "passage that is missing, left on the shelf, between the outside and the inside, between the plus and the minus." (7) For Irigaray, this constitutes the drama of concealment and unconcealment, visibility and invisibility, anonymity and individuality. Of course, this drama unfolds upon the battlefield of the relations of sexual difference. However, her metaphor of the concealed, yet ever looming orifice is Foucault’s "always receding" law, the intangible God that is always waiting on the day of judgement. For, if the law were self-evident, it would no longer be the law. If the law were decipherable, then, one could choose to follow it or disobey it. The "presence of the law is its concealment." (8) Just as Plato sees light as invisible, and which can only be seen as eidos, "an idea, or sight with form", in the things that are brought into existence (9), for Foucault, the invisibility of the law can only be 'seen' when it is provoked and appears in the form of punishment, or any other manifestation.

The law always resides on the Outside, and the Outside is always concealed in the web of its own complexity. In other words, the Outside negates itself even as it writes itself into the action which it envelops. This anonymous rendering of its own interiority dissolves all solidity that its manifestations seek to emphasise. In order for Literature to speak free from the secret interiority of the Outside it, too, like the law, must reside in his own concealment.

What arises from this cloaked drama is a contestation that revolves around the concentric circles of anonymity and individuality, between which lies the notion of Self, of Knowing. It is not the Knowing of the subject conscious of its own knowing, but the Knowing that seems to negate its own consciousness; in effect, a non-Knowing, a subjectivity that must also be a mystery to itself in order to be itself. This is not Gnostic mysticism, an all-encompassing wisdom that, being aware of itself, declares to the world that it is the inside, the centre, but the essence of writing, where language continually retreats within itself.

This predicament, which is pre-empted and fore-grounded in Nabokov’s Invitation to a Beheading, is the consequence of writing’s silence, its inaccessibility from the outside of itself where meaning is trapped between two poles. Cincinnatus C’s only recourse to this non-discursive space is through writing. Indeed, it is only when, through his writing, C becomes the text itself that he begins to break free from the discursive apparatus of the everyday. The gap within which C resides is the gap that cannot be accessed by Discourse, that being which resides at the very centre of the Dystopian Outside that absorbs all language and regurgitates it as its own.

In other words, then, the story of Cincinnatus C and his beheading is the story of Literature, its self-concealment in the place of its own presence. Cincinnatus may write the text that we read, or the text we read may be the story of what Cincinnatus writes, but it is still the story of his disappearance, of his eventual submergence into the liquid ether of voices, what Blanchot would call the "space of death." (10)

The Mimetopia of Invitation to a beheading

Materialist Monism and the desacralisation of the Body

Cincinnatus C (11) exists on the fringes of his society. C, "the son of an unknown transient" and a mother he had only met once in his early twenties, and "who had conceived him one night at the Ponds when she was still in her teens", (12) spends his childhood in a "large institution". (13) Even at a very young age, he becomes aware of a strange and unique quality about himself, an opacity that sets him apart from the others around him. This strange quality allows him to retreat from the living world of physicalities into a place occupied by "beings akin to him". (14) Who these beings are is never made clear, but we do know that Cincinnatus’ childhood was filled with dreams within which the world was "ennobled, spiritualised ... the world would come alive, become so captivatingly majestic, free and ethereal, that afterwards it would be oppressive to breathe the dust of this painted life". (15) This free and ethereal dreamworld is a "burning blackness" (16) where he "spins like a top, with such propelling force, such tongues of flame" that he can feel "that primordial palpitation ... the mainspring of my 'I'". (17) Cincinnatus describes this point as the "final, indivisible, firm, radiant point". (18)

However, his difference, his unique ‘absence’, his ability to remove himself from his immediate physical environment becomes increasingly difficult to disguise. The more he is identified as belonging to the outside, the more he is made to conform. The law, as we have seen, resides in its own concealment (19), and as long as it is not awakened, or confronted with recalcitrance, it remains all encompassing and anonymous. C is brought under surveillance when his opacity begins to thwart the law’s perpetual yet imperceptible presence. At the age of twenty-two, C becomes a kindergarten teacher (his duties include "keeping busy little children who were lame, hunchbacked or cross-eyed". (20)) but a "second-degree complaint" (21) is made against him. He is put through a rigorous examination in which he is made to "write letters to various objects and natural phenomena, enact everyday scenes, and to imitate various animals, trades, and maladies." (22) The material must triumph, and the key to conformity is the ability of all individuals to mimic the material, to embody in both body and mind the materialist supremacy over things. C, however, is young, and the resourcefulness of youth enables him to pass these tests. He is released and is allowed to "continue working with children of the lowest category, who were expendable..." (23)

Cincinnatus is therefore already distanced, pushed to the outside by a "world of souls transparent to one another". (24) The novel depicts a dystopian-like world where, as Cincinnatus says, "matter was weary. Time gently dozed." (25) Matter, all that is material and discernible through the medium of matter, the order that is established via a system of empirical facticity, the ordering of things which is implied through the prioritising of the material over the idealist or metaphysical, in short, the system of materialist thought, is only arbitrarily and randomly categorised. The books in the prison library from which Cincinnatus is provided reading material are not arranged in alphabetical order. They are sorted according to the number of pages in each book. (26) Clearly, there is no essential order to this world, but merely "an ordering algorithm" (27) instituted by the ethic of the system in operation. Order disintegrates into entropy.

This entropy, however, is denied, staved off through the emphasis of an enlightened ordering that permeates Cincinnatus’ world. The novel opens with an austere rule of law: "In accordance with the law the death sentence was announced to Cincinnatus C. in a whisper." (28) In his prison cell is a list of rules for prisoners, and even the spider that he finds within the four walls of the cell is described as the "official friend of the jailed". (29) Everything, therefore, that exists or occurs has already been mandated and prescribed, or else forbidden. Physical and material needs are given priority over everything else.

The legal system in Invitation rests on the assumption that a man condemned to die can and will remain content if his physical needs are met leading up to the execution. (30) The needs of the soul are overlooked and the immateriality that characterises the soul and all other concepts such as love, spirit, etc, are denied. Hence, M’sieur Pierre, the executioner, can extol the "pleasures of love", (31) the "pleasures of a spiritual order", (32) and "gastronomical pleasures" (33) by reducing them to the level of physical impulses. (34) In this world which mirrors that of the Soviet State (it shares a "materialist and epistemologically realist world view" (35)) a shadow like Cincinnatus C must keep hidden what will surely be his undoing.

Because he is opaque, because his soul is inaccessible to the intrusive rays of the collective, Cincinnatus is found guilty of "gnostical turpitude", "the most terrible of crimes". (36) Terrible because, his ‘gnosticism’ is a fortress of knowledge and knowing that allows him to penetrate the world beyond the empirical. The "material monism" (37) of the world of Invitation insists on the standardisation and regulation of souls. It seeks to establish and maintain a world that reeks of apocalyptic simplicity, reminiscent of Zamyatin’s We, Orwell’s 1984, and Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451. (38) His "basic illegality" (39) is that unlike the rest of the world, he refuses or is unable to remain within the strict codes of the regulated materialist system. (40)

Materialist philosophies propound a mechanistic reading of the world, and of our inner experience; the soul is merely a manifestation or an extension of the body and its practices. They also suggest a ready acceptance of the observable as real: the official friend of the jailed, the spider in Cincinnatus’ cell, is a toy, placed there for the purposes of authenticity. The spider, like everything else in this prison world within which C is caught, is mimesis, a grand production, it is representation of a ‘real’ reality, hence, a simulation. That the spider is not real does not matter to those who are its authors; that much of the events and procedures within the prison are scripted (which go awfully wrong) is of no consequence, however, since what is essential is the material and all its manifestations and representations.

Materiality in Invitation, then, has more in common with verisimilitude. The incarceration of Cincinnatus, the rights conferred upon him as a citizen, human being, and condemned man (his food is that which the jailers themselves have; visitation rights; privacy; delightful company, etc.), his eventual execution – all these have only a likeness to the truth, and therefore, the appearance of being true. This verisimilitude is what lends the world of Invitation its apparent inherent authenticity.

These premises, then, dominate the world of Invitation where the private, the inside, the interiority of the subject is open to public scrutiny, where space is desacralised (41). M’sieur Pierre, Cincinnatus’ executioner, can claim, therefore that "the structure of Cincinnatus’ soul is as well known to me as the structure of his neck". (42) It suggests a false engagement with the empirical world. It imposes upon the empirical a set of specious assumptions. This also true when the ubiquitous M’sieur Pierre’s very first words to Cininnatus are: "You bear an extraordinary resemblance to your mother. I myself never had the chance of seeing her, but Rodrig Ivanovich kindly promised to show me her photograph." (43) Cincinnatus’ "extraordinary resemblance" to his mother is taken on faith, since there is always some resemblance between mother and son, however remote it might be. Materiality is abstracted, isolated from itself – negated – and reapplied as a ‘new’ truth, a generic facticity, in short, it is ideologised. Verisimilitude. The Work, that is, the scripted world of Invitation, is made authentic. M’sieur Pierre is made to look the picture of credibility. What M’sieur Pierre has achieved here, is that he has become the personification, the embodiment of Discourse.

The language of Discourse, as we have seen earlier, is that which speaks of itself, of its own truths. To put it in materialist terms, it is the body that performs in order to represent itself to itself. A significant idea emerges from this statement. If representation is merely a substitution of the thing itself, then, the representational qualities of the Work within Invitation to a Beheading are, in essence, the only certainties. In other words, the materiality of the society that has incarcerated Cincinnatus C is predicated on its ambiguity, its haphazard claim to truth, which it imposes upon its populace. By communicating with itself, then, reality merely simulates the real. It is mimesis that produces the transparency of souls, because it is the endless simulation of the same. The living, physical reality is an empty shell, meaning-less and devoid of any form of substance, and therefore, authenticity. Reality, or the real, is nothing more than the mimetic impulse, that which Cincinnatus himself describes as "semi-sleep". (44)

Hence, the ritualised order that permeates all thought and action requires that the sentence be whispered. In accordance with this, the judge puts his mouth close to C’s ear and whispers the sentence. This theatricality is further matched by the ‘arena’ of the court:

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... (H)e could see the gaudy pantaloons of their fops, and the hand-mirrors and iridescent scarves of the women of fashion... The defence counsel and the prosecutor, both wearing makeup and looking very much alike (the law required that they be uterine brothers but such were not always available, and then makeup was used), spoke with virtuoso rapidity the five thousand words allotted to each. (45)


The legal system is, therefore, a parody of itself, a caricature that revels in its own interiority, its own ‘self.’ In such a situation, noble principles of justice and morality become vacuous words, with no other life other than their own.

His own lawyer, a certain Roman Vissarianovich, is non-existent in the sense that he is merely a parody of the law sent to protect Cincinnatus. On his first entrance, he is ruffled and sweaty, and visibly troubled because he has, moments before, lost one of his cuff-links. When C asks him why he is being refused knowledge of the exact execution date, Roman exclaims, "Can’t you even now remain within legitimate limits? ... I dropped in merely to ask if you didn’t have some legitimate wishes ..." (46) In the middle of this interview the Prison Director, Rodrig Ivanovich, enters to return Roman his lost cuff-links, despite the sacrosanct confidentiality between lawyer and client.

However, it is here that a significant shift occurs in the narrative. In an exchange between the Director (Rodrig) and the lawyer (Roman), the conventional definitions that distinguish one individual from another begin to disintegrate:

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'Listen to him', chuckled the director. 'He has to know everything. How do you like that Roman Vissarionovich?'

'Oh, my friend, you are so right', sighed the lawyer.

'Yes, sir', continued the former, giving his keys a rattle. 'You ought to be more cooperative, mister. All the time he’s haughty, angry, snide. ... No need to mope as you do. Isn’t that right, Roman Vissarionovich?'

'That’s right, Rodion, that’s right', concurred the lawyer with an involuntary smile. (47)


In an instant, the distinctions between the director of the prison, Rodrig, and the bearded jailer, Rodion who, at the beginning of this episode in C’s cell was not even present, disintegrate as in a burlesque. The rapid-fire exits and entrances belong to the world of farce and the commedia d’ell arte. Not only must C contend with the uncertainty of a beheading that has already happened (48); not only must he contend with a materiality whose vacuousness is hidden by the many masks it wears; not only is he a prisoner of a materialist regime that delimits the world of potentialities into a world of fixed outcomes; Cincinnatus must also struggle to interact with a materiality that is arbitrary, artificial, a materialist vision predicated upon that which belongs firmly in the realm of vraisemblance.

Similarly, a little later on, Rodion the jailer rushes into the cell to say that C will be allowed to see his wife the next day. He leaves the cell, bumping into the director as he does so. The director repeats the same message ad verbatim. Rodion the jailer has left the cell, now occupied by the prisoner and Rodrig the director. But C spots "leather apron and red beard, apparently left behind by Rodion ... still cluttering the chair." (49) The director speaks of cleaning up the cell for the wife’s visit the next day. Wishing to hear no more half-truths and the insignificant preoccupations, C requests that he leave the cell. However, it is Rodion who answers, "Quite impossible." The leather apron and the red beard that were cluttering the chair a little earlier on, are now missing, and comfortably affixed to Rodion’s person.

Cincinnatus recognises, therefore, that he is

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... surrounded by some sort of wretched spectres, not by people. They torment me as can torment only senseless visions, bad dreams, dregs of delirium, the drivel of nightmares and everything that passes down here for real life. In theory one would wish to wake up. But wake up I cannot without outside help, and yet I fear this help terribly, and my soul has grown lazy and accustomed to its snug swaddling clothes. (50)


These spectres rule the land; they are the law. His own death has already happened, and yet he does not know when it will occur. Knowledge of this most significant detail in the story, a detail that is brushed aside by everyone he comes in contact with is, in essence, the kernel of his most intimate self, the point of his subjectivity, the very coordinate upon which all other points of his life so far, and his life hitherto, hinge.

Like an Elizabethan parade of apparitions, the "wretched spectres" that pass for real life, then, are part of an elaborate performance, a grand theatrical experience that can culminate only in the demise of the performance. This is so because the performance itself leads to no resolution. In other words, it is pure performance, a pure staging, a representation of itself for itself.

The defamiliarised, desacralised world of Invitation is a Dystopian world, an imaginary world gone wrong, even if its founding principles hold the promise of the establishment of a utopia. The other classic examples of dystopian fiction already mentioned all depict societies whose goal is a paradisaical state of being. The Utopian vision sees the world as perfectible, that humanity can be perfected, that a state of divinity and grace can be established on earth, that human society and humanity can be made in the image of itself. While utopian spaces are essentially unreal (51), the vision which they are constitutive of are present in all societies, the creation of a better place to live, the establishment of a ‘good’ society. Dystopias, essentially dysfunctional utopias, are the manifest failure of this utopian vision, even though they are predicated upon the same fundamental principles of perfectibility. Indeed, that is what the ‘system’ in Invitation is geared towards, a society of ‘good’, ‘moral’ beings whose lives are in some way conditioned and determined for them. That is why, the reticence of Cincinnatus, his inability to suppress his opaque double, the "I" that sees beyond the desert plains of materialist myopia, the self that cannot be fashioned by any moral code or state dogma, the soul that fails to fall within the limits of the already prescribed mode of being is frowned upon, made to conform, by all the means possible, hounded by the conformist pressures of the surrounding society. (52)

The entire world of Invitation is performative. That is why the world of Invitation is a mimesis of a utopia, a dystopia that aspires to perfection, and therefore, mimics it. It is a Mimetopia, a simulation of itself. It stages itself in what can only be described as a farce, a tragic farce that plays with the life of one man, one human among spectres.

C’s mistake is that he is opaque, impenetrable, not because he has a resilient; his is a "fleshy incompleteness ... a greater part of him was in a quite different place, while only an insignificant portion of it was wandering, perplexed, here – a poor vague Cincinnatus, a comparatively stupid Cincinnatus, trusting, feeble, and foolish as people are in their sleep. But even during his sleep – still, still – his real life showed through too much." (53)

Two Cincinnatuses, then; two sides – one that operated in the materialist "semi-sleep, an evil drowsiness into which penetrate in grotesque disguise the sounds and sights of the real world, flowing beyond the periphery of the mind", and another that finds meaning and sense of wonderment in "a more genuine reality". (54)

The doubling (which we shall look at in the next section) is itself a mimesis, but this time, the mimetic qualities of this coupling is a critique of the Mimetopian materialism of the Work. We have seen above how its arbitrary materialism delimits the possibilities open to an objective, or wholistic apprehension of the world. Instead of allowing for a pluralistic engagement with things and ideas, ‘reality’ is curtailed and contained within defined borders.

Rodrig and Rodion are practitioners of the "art of dissimulation", as Nietzsche would have it, wrapped in the drapery of convention, where perception glides "across the surface of things and sees forms". (55) In their world, where language is ‘legislated’ (56) to establish the first laws of ‘truth,’ there is no "sensuous perception". (57) Instead, things are named, that is, they are given form. They are made to conform to a system of signs. However, form is a prison that obliges the use of customary metaphors; that obliges practitioners "to lie in accordance with firmly established convention", (58) an endless simulation of an empty form. This becomes the sole concern of a system of empirical reality. It is a parody of the highest order, a Sisyphusian ritual that is pure form.

The two Cincinnatuses are heirs to what Nietzsche would call "sensuous perception", a non-schematic impulse that cannot be named. Therein lies the crack in the armour of the Work, the anonymous impulse that Cincinnatus must suppress in order to remain a functioning element in "a world of souls transparent to one another". (59) In his prison cell is written an anonymous "Nameless existence, intangible substance", (60) which he finds on the wall where the door covered it when open. An open door, a free passage outside, an anonymous missive, a clue to his own potential. Another scribbled message in the wall reads: "Measure me while I live – after, it will be too late". (61) Again, the crack appears, and there is a possibility of one of the two Cincinnatuses slipping through this crack. "Measure me while I live", but which of the two Cincinnatuses is to be measured?

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‘What a misunderstanding,’ said Cincinnatus and suddenly burst out laughing. He stood up and took off the dressing-gown, the skullcap, the slippers. He took off the linen trousers and shirt. He took off his head like a toupee, took off his collarbones like shoulder straps, took off his rib cage like a hauberk. He took off his hips and his legs, he took off his arms like gauntlets and threw them in a corner. What was left of him gradually dissolved, hardly colouring the air. At first Cincinnatus simply revelled in the coolness; then, fully immersed in his secret medium, he began freely and happily to ...

The iron thunderclap of the bolt resounded, and Cincinnatus instantly grew all that he had cast off, the skullcap included. Rodion the jailer brought a dozen yellow plums in a round basket lined with grape leaves, a present from the director’s wife.’ (62)


Who is it that dissembles himself? Earlier, Cincinnatus moves a table to position it below the barred window. He places the chair on top of it, and clambers on to look out through the window onto the scene outside, but is unable to see anything. Rodion comes in and tells him to get off the table, and he does. But later, when Rodion has left the cell, Cincinnatus tries again to move the table "for the hundredth time ... but, alas, the legs had been bolted down for ages". (63)

Who speaks? Who writes? Cincinnatus. However, his writing is double, like Freud’s Msytic Writing Pad, a writing machine that allows what is written to be erased by lifting the double sheeting that rests on a wax slate, yet leaving a trace of the inscription on the slate, which can be discerned under special conditions. (64) In other words, the two Cincinnatuses work in tandem, first one, then the other, writing themselves with the already-present knowledge that despite this act erasure will occur when (t)he(y) meet(s) the mortal hour. However, at his beheading he (the other Cincinnatus) walks away from the erected platform upon which his beheading has been performed. As he notices the swing of the executioner’s hips guiding the axe down towards his neck, he steps away, but Cincinnatus has already been beheaded because he sees the pale prison librarian "doubled up, vomiting" on the steps. The execution is performed, the erasure is complete, but the inscription on the wax slate persists in the form of one Cincinnatus, who walks towards "beings akin to him". An event that is not – cannot - be anticipated nor comprehended, by the system of empirical reality:

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He was overtaken by Roman, who was now many times smaller and who was at the same time Rodrig: ‘What are you doing?’ he croaked, jumping up and down. ‘You can’t, you can’t! It’s dishonest towards him, towards everybody … Come back, lie down – after all, you were lying down, everything was ready, everything was finished!’ Cincinnatus brushed him aside and he, with a bleak cry, ran off, already thinking of his own safety. (65)


This anonymous abyss is a welcome release from the prison managed by spectres. Cincinnatus moves outside of a mimetic stronghold, moves into the abyss, into its centre, "the concentration of ambiguity" (66) where, before he enters he must renounce all idols. Cincinnatus’ double writing not only allows him to slip through the cracks. Not only does it allow him anonymity. It allows him, through this anonymity, to inscribe his presence within the abyss, where it remains, resonant. It is inscribed in the double-sheeting of the mystic writing pad that is Cincinnatus’ body/soul. In short, Cincinnatus inscribes the abyss upon his secret skin, thus, becoming the abyss.

Becoming the Abyss

In Virginia Woolf’s short story The Mark on the Wall, (67) two worlds are described, a double world, each with its own stipulations, each with its own codes, its own premises and foundations of truth. The narrator in The Mark, like our Cincinnatus, traverses these two worlds and is more comfortable in one, and alienated from the other. Which is the inside, and which is outside? Both characters, Cincinnatus and Woolf’s narrator, ‘belong’ to both and yet they are also caught within the two of them, vacillating between two extreme poles, like a Kafka unable to live in a world of men, yet unable to stray too far away from it.

The two worlds of Woolf’s narrator collide in the realm of thought. It is in this realm that she wanders, across a vast space of possibilities, confined by nothing except her own inner potential to dream. However, her silent meanderings begin with a mark on the wall, a mark she has never seen before and which now fascinates, intrigues, troubles, perplexes her. "How readily", she says, "our thoughts swarm upon a new object." (68) With this, she is swept away, transported into a world where the mark on the wall not only takes on the essence of other beings – a nail, one that hangs miniatures, not paintings – but also a whole universe that is implied by this one initial premise - a miniature of a lady with "white powdered curls, powder-dusted cheeks, and lips like red carnations. A fraud of course, for the people who had this house before us would have chosen pictures in that way – an old picture for an old room". (69)

Such a standardisation of things is immediately undercut by the narrator’s own seemingly aimless wanderings in her mind. Things in the physical world, in the ‘reality’ of tangible objects and phenomena develop a fixity, thinks the narrator. As she says, "The military sound of the word is enough. It recalls leading articles, cabinet ministers – a whole class of things indeed which as a child one thought the thing itself, the standard thing, the real thing, from which one could not depart save at the risk of nameless damnation." (70) Language, then, becomes a game, a convention that attempts to pour life into the thing as the word is uttered.

The scepticism of the narrator, her flight into a world away from the language of "military sound", her movement away from the fixity of things towards a "nameless damnation", the space where no word exists, no standards dominate - that scepticism is not that of existence, of life, but a scepticism of death. It is a scepticism that questions the limits to understanding, in short, it is a distrust of knowledge, of truth, of verification and summation, a knowledge that is based on what Nietzsche would call "empty husks" with which "they will for ever exchange illusions for truth." (71)

The various possibilities open to her investigation on the nature of the mark on the wall lead her to conclude that "nothing is proved, nothing known." (72) Only a physical examination of the mark, only if she got up from her chair, walked to the wall where the mark was and inspected it, only this would reveal to her the true nature of the mark on the wall. But, she argues, what would she have gained.

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Knowledge? Matter for further speculation? I can think sitting still as well as standing up. And what is knowledge? What are our learned men save the descendants of witches and hermits who crouched in caves and in woods brewing herbs, interrogating shrew-mice and writing down the language of the stars? (73)


This, above all, is a scepticism of death because it defies the fixity that is given to the language of empiricism or materialist thought. Rather be curtailed by the unknowability of things, she enters a space on the outside of ‘language’, the space of death which is not death but, always through dying, passes into a space and time where and when "nothing is proved", but everything is possible, where death does not finalise, but keeps on coming forward and then retreating, an eternal recurrence that can only end in a becoming from nothing.

Her reveries (they are reveries since they are celebration of a unfettered imagination, but being beyond mere imagination and fantasy, are also native to a realm of knowing that escapes the "military sound" of the word) recall Cincinnatus’ own, since both reveries belong to the same realm of wonderment, a forever seeking new limits, new borders to transgress, a real in which limited being is affirmed. (74) The two ‘modes of being’, sitting and standing, are emblematic of the duality of worlds – of thought and action respectively, of silence and noise, of invisibility and visibility, imagination and facticity, creativity and conventionality, fluidity and fixity, fecundity and stagnation. Woolf’s narrator’s creative impulse is facilitated by a freedom of movement in and out and around objects of contemplation. She attains a fluidity of thought, and hence, a prolific creative outburst of associations and possibilities. The mark on the wall, therefore, is no longer merely a mark, an empirical phenomenon, grounded and therefore, fixed in its own facticity. It is also, through the seated narrator’s imagination, all things at the same time, a point in which that has come before, and all that will come are present and reflected in it.

However, this infinity into which the Woolf narrator slips is a precarious point that must always defend its own limits, limits that are themselves indefinable. In other words, the flight to the outside is not only an escape from the harness of the fixity of the inside, the common space, the system. It is also a burden that must be mindful of the constant danger of the collapsing of its fluid walls. As she sits, lost in the outside, drowning in the abyss of the aleph, she is suddenly aware of an interference.

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Everything’s moving, falling, slipping, vanishing... There is a vast upheaval of matter. Someone is standing over me and saying –

‘I’m going out to buy a newspaper.’

‘Yes?’

‘Though its no good buying newspapers... Nothing ever happens. Curse this war; God damn this war!…All the same, I don’t see why we should have a snail on our wall.’

Ah, the mark on the wall! It was a snail. (75)


No sooner has the material world intruded upon the reveries of her otherworld than the mark, hitherto a conduit of meaning and pathways to other spaces outside, is reduced to an empirical certainty. Now it has shape, definition. The mark is no longer a troubled area of conjecture, but a fixity, an identity. Yet, with this identity comes a certain loss of presence, a quality that is required for human experiences to be what they are. That is, human experiences cannot be reduced to what can be said about them. (76) This inarticulabilty provides "the possible with a site that is impregnable, because it is a nowhere." (77) Scientific language, the language of empirical realities ‘captures’ the meaning of this ‘nowhere’ but it stays within the inside, within the wall that separates it from apprehending the object of its desires completely, and in its essence. The ‘capturing’ of the object is always already a flawed project because it invariably pins it down, clips its wings in order for it to be apprehended, in order for it to be articulated.

What the Woolf narrator fails to achieve - complete autonomy from the forces that threaten the world of fecundity and creativity – Cincinnatus C attains, but only after he confronts his own execution, his mortal hour. The ultimate escape is revealed to him only at that hour when the axe falls upon his neck, like the merciless methodologies of the scientific regime which cull its object of inquiry into a form that can be apprehended.

In order to reach that "threshold of revelation", Cincinnatus must, can only write, since "meaning must await being said or written in order to inhabit itself, and in order to become, by differing from itself, what it is: meaning." (78) However, his very first jottings are hapharzard, discontinuous words that are far from the depths into which writing must go in order to speak, in order to become presence:

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On the table glistened a clean sheet of paper and, distinctly outlined against this whiteness, lay a beautifully sharpened pencil, as long as the life of any man except Cincinnatus, and with an ebony gleam to each of its facets. An enlightened descendant of the index finger. Cincinnatus wrote: ‘In spite of everything I am comparatively. After all, I had premonitions, premonitions of this finale.’ (79)


The length of the pencil will be whittled away till what remains, when Cincinnatus is finally taken to be executed, is a tiny stub, the pencil depleted, and now un-usable, but where all that needs to be written has already been written, the way out to the Outside open, and no turning back. No sooner are they written down than he scratches them out. His words are hollow, disjointed. They recall the words on a piece of paper concealed in an envelope that his lawyer, Roman Vissarionovich, presents to him as hope of some kind of reprieve. Cincinnatus tears the envelope to pieces, but when he tries to reconstruct at least one sentence from the scraps of paper he finds that "everything was mixed up, distorted, disjointed." (80) Cincinnatus’ first words, therefore belong still to the stilted performativity of the Mimetopia. His efforts to reclaim his interiority dissolves into a mimicry of that very structure which has taken his interiority hostage. Later, he will find his voice, but till then, he can only speak and write with the voice of the spectres that imprison him, and he will struggle with his death, with his dying, which now, at the beginning of the pencil’s life, he sees no way of transcending.

Cincinnatus, still considers his secret anonymity, his otherworldliness, a "basic illegality" (81) and the instruments of his incarceration insurmountable: "The iron thunderclap of the bolt resounded and Cincinnatus instantly grew all that he had cast off, the skullcap included." (82) Cincinnatus, at the initial phase of his imprisonment, stands between the world and the Book, between Mimetopia and writing, between the Inside (which is always shut out from the Outside by a fundamental error of judgement, or way of seeing: in order for the Inside to grasp phenomena, it must always delimit them to their discernible form only) and the Outside.

The prison Librarian is a welcome oasis in the desert of the fortress, for it is the only way Cincinnatus can while away his time in the cell, awaiting his unknown hour of death, with books, with writing, with reflection. However, books, which are his only solace, are scoffed at by Rodion the jailer. (83) They are the antithesis to the meaning of the Mimetopia. The latter is, in its essence, a simulacra of the book, all that is exterior of the book, which is forcibly separated from the world of the book. It is separated from the Book because it has ceased to recognise the Inside (the soul) as anything but as a manifestation of physical impulses. The only kind of writing that this society favours is epitomised in the novel Cincinnatus is given to read, one entitled "Quercus". The title figure of this novel is also its central hero – an oak tree that forms the focal point. The author of this novel interweaves activity within the oak’s surroundings with scientific descriptions of the tree itself. "Quercus" represents the "acme of modern thought." (84) It is empirical historicism that claims that the history of the world can be gleaned from recorded events occurring through a linear passage of time. This, Robert Alter argues, represents the quintessential "naturalistic novel", a novel of "photographic realism" that is devoid of humanity,[ 85) whereas, what can possibly save Cincinnatus is a writing of a different kind, one that goes beyond the mere facticity of things.

Cincinnatus’ struggle to position himself within this pull, within the extremes of the Mimetopia and Writing leads him to a self-realisation of his own essential self, his own disappearance from the world of named, and therefore, colourless objects. He writes:

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Oh, my anguish – what shall I do with you, with myself? How dare they conceal from me ... I, who must pass through an ordeal of supreme pain, I, who in order to preserve a semblance of dignity (anyway I shall not go beyond silent pallour - I am no hero anyway ...), must during that ordeal keep control of all my faculties, I, I ... am gradually weakening … the uncertainty is horrible – well, why don’t you tell me, do tell me – but no, you have me die anew every morning... (86)


There is no escape from death. Even his writing is a shallow exercise in futility. It is only impatience that goads him to write, the interminable wait for definition, for death, which defines, which fixes. Yet, lurking amidst this impatience is a shadow of an insight into the salvation contained within the pencil:

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On the other hand, were I to know, I could perform ... a short work … a record of verified thoughts ... Some day someone would read it and would suddenly feel just as if he had awakened for the first time in a strange country. What I mean to say is that I would make him suddenly burst into tears of joy, his eyes would melt, and after he experiences this, the world will seem to him cleaner, fresher.


He senses the possibility of history: "Some day someone would read it ..." He feels the vastness of that interior vision. More importantly, Cincinnatus imagines the existence of another. This hypothetical other, for whom he must write, is the necessary outlet for his emerging inner sight, the abyss, which he will become later. (87) This other, a visionary double, he who would see the world as he, Cincinnatus, does and it would "seem to him cleaner, fresher", also writes, for in this double, this other who will one day read his words, lies the inscription, the trace of another world, like the anonymous inscription left on the wax slate of Freud’s Mystic Writing Pad. It is this thought of the visionary double that lights his path toward the one creative germ required to embark on the road to the Outside.

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No, I still ought to record, to leave something. I am not an ordinary – I am the one among you who is alive – Not only are my eyes different, and my hearing, and my sense of taste – not only is my sense of smell like a deer’s, my sense of touch like a bat’s – but, most important, I have the capacity to conjoin all of this in one point – No, the secret is not revealed yet – even this is but the flint – and I have not even begun to speak of the kindling, of the fire itself. My life. (88)


This recalls Kafka’s diary entry of July 28, 1914:

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I am more and more unable to think, to observe, to determine the truth of things, to remember, to speak, to share an experience; I am turning to stone, this is the truth... If I can’t take refuge in some work, I am lost. (89)


Kafka’s inner turmoil, his dissolution, his increasing alienation comes in direct conflict with the fact that "the attraction of the human world is so immense, that in an instant it can make one forget everything." (90) He vacillates between this human world and the world of writing, the abyss where, even though a salvation, leads him to a never-ending death:

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What will be my fate as a writer is very simple. My talent for portraying my dreamlike inner life has thrust all other matters into the background; my life had dwindled dreadfully, nor will it cease to dwindle. Nothing else will ever satisfy me. But the strength I can muster for that portrayal is not to be counted upon: perhaps it has already vanished forever, perhaps it will come back to me again, although the circumstances of my life don’t favour its return. Thus I waver, continually fly to the summit of the mountain, but then fall back in a moment. Others waver too, but in lower regions, with greater strength; if they are in danger of falling, they are caught up by the kinsman who walks beside them for that very purpose. But I waver on the heights; it is not death, alas, but the eternal torments of dying. (91)


Both states of being are states of death. Kafka is lost, a stone, dead-weight if he bathes in "the attraction of the human world", but his writing is the pathway to "the eternal torments of dying."

The doubling that occurs here is the Kafka of The Metamorphosis, (92) the vacillating from one realm to another, the identification of one’s self in both realms. Gregor Samsa is forever shut out from the attractive human world. Yet, he is still very much a part of the world from which he is forcibly shut out. This is the error his family members make – they do not realise that Gregor has retained his human impulse, and relinquished only his human form:

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Gregor had a shock as he heard his own voice answering hers, unmistakably his own voice, it was true, but a persistent horrible twittering squeak behind it like an undertone, which left the words in their clear shape only for the first moment and then rose up reverberating around them to destroy their sense, so that one could not be sure one had heard them rightly. (93)


The Double exists alongside Gregor. He is that Other who sees the world for what it is, who would, like Nabokov’s "gangrel" (94), do what he would like to do but cannot. The insect that gradually takes over, who is the only one among the family who would later think Grete’s violin playing is excellent, when in fact it is not, also houses or carries Gergor the son and brother, whom the attractive human world unfortunately cannot see. Kafka repeats this idea elsewhere: "Everone carries a room about inside him." (95)

What is so attractive about the human world? The Chief clerk and Gregor’s boss are loveless figures who make demands on him and his family. His parents, who demand a life based on Gregor’s own efforts; his sister Grete who dreams the dreams that he is in fact the author of so that he is now responsible for her life; later on Gregor discovers that their debts could have been paid off a lot sooner but was not done so, forcing him to work as hard as he had been. Expectations, obligations and dishonesty. Where is the attraction? It can be found in the hesitation Cincinnatus displays in the matter of his execution. He does not want to die. He does not want to be banished. It is also mirrored in his need to be understood. He beseeches his wife Marthe to open her eyes and understand him and what the authorities were going to do to him. This wanting to belong is echoed in Kafka’s narrative:

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But Gregor was now much calmer. The words he uttered were no longer understandable, apparently, although they seemed clear enough to him, even clearer than before, perhaps his ear had grown accustomed to the sound of them. Yet any rate people now believed that something was wrong with him, and were ready to help him. The positive certainty with which these first measures had been taken comforted him. He felt himself drawn once more into the human circle and hoped for great and remarkable results from both the doctor and the locksmith, without really distinguishing precisely between them. (96)


Yet, Gregor is imprisoned in his own room. The two doors in his room, the one that connects him with the living room and the other with Grete’s room, open into his room, not out. The world he so desperately wants to belong to, that he so desperately seeks understanding from, has easy access to him. Gregor, as a human, has access to them only as an instrument at the service of the family and his employers. However, Gregor the insect has lost his access to this world, no longer is he of any use to it. He is now a burden. His materiality has been judged and it is found lacking. His ‘imprisonment’ is a result of his inability to conform to the demands of the world he wishes to be part of.

Similarly, Cincinnatus’ imprisonment, as we have seen, is a logical consequence of his inability to conform to the demand for translucency. His opacity becomes for him, what the arthropod form is for Gregor – a door that shuts him off from the world of spectres, but at the same time a door that opens onto the abyss from where he can speak at last.

Cincinnatus, then, like Gregor, who vacillates between his own interests and the interests of the family that enslaves him, like Kafka, who vacillates between the world of humans and the world of the abyss, like the Woolfian narrator, who struggles to protect the walls that surround the world of thought, fights an on-going battle with the temptation to fall back on conventional ‘wisdom’, especially since he is raised in a society that discourages original creativity (97) As long as he harbours the belief that salvation can be found in the confines of the materialist world, he will never find a way out of it. However, the more he writes, the more he is shown, or made to see that there exist pathways leading out from the Inside:

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There, tam, la-bas, the gaze of men glows with inimitable understanding; there the freaks that are tortured here walk unmolested; there time takes shape according to one’s pleasure ... There, there are the originals of those gardens where we used to roam and hide in this world; there everything strikes one by its bewitching evidence, by the simplicity of perfect good; there everything pleases one’s soul, everything is filled with the kind of fun that children know; there shines the mirror that now and then sends a chance reflection here... (98)


Writing, art, is the most important instrument of liberation, precisely because its symbolic structure and metaphoric texture obliges it to abandon the one-dimensionality of the discourse of the everyday (99):

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I have as yet said nothing, or rather, said only bookish words ... but as there is in the world not a single human who can speak my language; or, more simply, not a single human who can speak; or, even more simply, not a single human; I must think only of myself, of that force which urges me to express myself. (100)


Then, a little farther on: "there is something I know, there is something I know, there is something ..." (101)

It is clear that Cincinnatus senses a presence, as does the Woolfian narrator, a presence that she locates deep within the hazy realm of conjecture. Gregor Samsa, likewise, can claim to be aware of an "undertone", a double nature, an inscription, a trace of a ‘nowhere’, a mystic writing that lies on the Outside, a mirror that "now and then sends a chance reflection here". It is significant that Cincinnatus introduces the mirror image in his writing. The classic theory of mimesis claims that art is a mirror held up to nature, that art does nothing, says nothing more than what is already ‘said’ in the material world. The novel "Quercus" that Cincinnatus reads in his cell conforms to such a theory of mimesis. Its comprehensiveness and positivistic attitude to the facts merely perpetuate the illusory idea that the material world has an autonomous existence distinct from the sentient centres of experience within or giving rise to it. (102)

Kafka, like Cincinnatus who is slowly awakening to them, has seen these sentient centres, these points of ambiguity where "language coincides with its disappearance. (103) This concentration of ambiguity, as Blanchot would have it, the abyss that one must enter in order become language, become the abyss (Kafka: "...I have a great yearning to write all my anxiety entirely out of me, write it into the depths of the paper just as it comes out of the depths of me, or write it down in such a way that I could draw what I had written into me completely." (104)) is not the mirror that is held up to nature, which reflects everything like a one-dimensional linearity implied and espoused by the materialist monism of Cincinnatus’ world, but the refractive nature of the artistic imagination. (105) It is the double, that shadowy space that when held up to nature changes the path of our perception, disrupts the modes of seeing and apprehending, and which allows Cincinnatus C and his con-sociates – the seated Woolfian, Kafka, and Gregor Samsa – to disappear, to evanesce, to syncopate.

Indeed, now that his writing had gripped him, in the sense that he struggled no longer with the awkwardness of the word, that his poetic imagination had begun to rise from some unknown place, we see that the thematic concern of his writing

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... will now be the precious quality of Cincinnatus; his fleshy incompleteness; the fact that the greater part of him was in a quite different place, while only an insignificant portion of it was wandering, perplexed, here – a poor, vague Cincinnatus, a comparatively stupid Cincinnatus, trusting, feeble and foolish as people are in their sleep... (106)


We now see a gradual shift in Cincinnatus’ physical presence. Whereas at the beginning of the text, Cincinnatus is described in terms which suggest awkwardness, encumbrance and oppression –

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... he had to be supported during the journey through the long corridors, since he planted his feet unsteadily, like a child who has just learned to walk, or as if he were to fall through like a man who has dreamt he is walking on water only to have a sudden doubt... (107)


- now, at the sudden discovery of that absent space from which everything can and must be said, into which one merges, becomes submerged in a nullity, he begins to take on the appearance of an apparition:

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... it was as if one side of his being slid into another dimension ... as though at any moment … Cincinnatus would step in such a way as to slip naturally and effortlessly through some chink of the air into its unknown coulisses to disappear there with the same easy smoothness with which the flashing reflection of a rotated mirror moves across every object in the room and suddenly vanishes, as if beyond the air, in some new depth of ether. (108)


This recalls the stepping away of Woolf’s narrator and Gregor Samsa’s otherness. Cincinnatus’ ghost-like countenance - "... the light outline of his lips, seemingly not quite fully drawn but touched by a master of masters..." (109) - coincides with his realisation of the inventedness of the beings around him – "I am quite willing to admit that they are also a deception but right now I believe in them so much that I infect them with truth." (110)

The distorted, simulated forms of his jailers, the mimetic performativity that underlines their spurious existence is "infected" with truth. Their septicity has made his escape impossible, but he realises now that they are merely inventions, borne out of that "rotated mirror" that can both invent and make vanish, the machine of the abyss of which he is the engine. The refraction of this rotated mirror cuts into pieces the ‘reality’ of beings and objects and at the same time gives rise to a kaleidoscope of possibilities.

Whence comes this realisation that he embodies the machine of the abyss? Cecilia C, his mother arrives for a visit one day, unexpectedly, He has only seen her once in his life. She has ceased for him to be of any significance in his life. Even his father is nothing but a "legend" to him. That his own mother has no knowledge of the father’s identity is laughable to him. Cincinnatus accuses his mother of being a parody, false. If even his own beginnings are suspect, like everything around him in his prison world, his own visions must be groundless. The origins - the ballast of a life, the mother-function, which is the primordial script, that which engenders and brings forth - is the double of the abyss, that which concludes, becomes nothing, a returning to the depths of a ‘nowhere,’ the inarticulability of language itself. This binary constellation – origin/conclusion, birth/death, surfacing/descending, affirmation/negation – is constitutive of that we have been calling the abyss. The same conditions apply to both states of the binary – the mother function brings forth to the surface from the beginning, the starting point, an unknown place but which is always the first place; the anonymous body descends into an unknown space that is already the last place, the only place from where all can be said. This doubled writing begins deep within the first stirrings of life within a body, secret inscriptions that are carried within a person (111) as one carries one’s room with wherever one goes. (112) The inscritption remains, carrying forward its trace, like an invisible signature. However, this signature can only be read anonymously, deep in the recesses, or depths of the abyss.

If, then, his mother is as false as the spectres all around him, Cincinnatus push to the Outside is jeopardised: "... I have pinned my hopes on a distant sound – how can I have faith in it, if even you are a fraud?" (113) Yet, Cecilia C brings with her a secret. She discloses that his father too, was like him, absent, evanescent. That is why all she remembers of him is his voice, for he had transcended the gaze of the empirical. She tells him about objects called nonnons which she used to play with when as a child. These incomprehensibly-shaped nonnons came with a special, distorted mirror that, when held up to ordinary objects, reflected nonsensical distorted objects. However, when they were held up to these strange distorted nonnons, they were transformed into beautifully-shaped things, like a flower or a ship, a person, a landscape.

The nonnon mirror, therefore, is that refractive force of the artistic imagination, the chink in the air which Cincinnatus often felt himself slip into, that syncope within which contained a world of distorted objects made wondrous by a mirror which negates, and in the negation, brings forth a new form, a new way of seeing. The distance between the distorted mirror of the nonnon and the nonnon itself is the space of absence, the liminality that transgresses the origins of language, but which speaks with the clarity of visionaries. It is also the distance between mother and son, between the falsity of her mirror, and Cincinnatus’ nonnon-like incomprehensibility. Faced with her mirror, shining for a second through her eyes, Cincinnatus "suddenly saw that ultimate, secure, all-explaining and from-all-protecting spark that he knew how to discern in himself also." (114)

The abyss is now at hand, awaiting his final transformation. That can only happen if two conditions are fulfilled. The first condition requires that he must recognise that the word restricts, fixes; it is nothing but a normal object that when held up to a nonnon mirror is distorted, like the spider in his cell, which in actual fact "consisted of a round plush body with twitching legs made of springs", (115), or like the cell itself, "which in fact was no longer there", (116) having somehow been dismantled as Cincinnatus was leaving it to go to the place of execution (they are distortions of reality, staged representations that have no meaning other than the fact they are merely distorted simulations of what is considered ‘real’), or that it is itself a mirror that merely reflects a material reality that is autonomous and a priori.

(Continued in Part 2...)]]> Fri, 02 Jul 2010 18:41:09 +0000 70f250e2d762fbde8a2e70eabf6eb953 Borges in his parallel universes http://www.galilean-library.org/site/index.php/page/index.html/_/essays/literatureandfilm/borges-in-his-parallel-universes-r91 Niven Kumar (2007)

Where does one begin with Borges? What meanings, if there is any at all, do we glean from his work? Who is Borges? And how many? One? Three? Five? Is he Everyman? Or is he No Man? Where do his labyrinths take us?

These are merely possibilities in Borges' body of work which imply yet more possibilities, forming a labyrinth of questions culminating in a vague intimation of substance. Borges' ideal and, for him, real world lies in the construction of fictional universes, in the practice of fiction making. His art has been labeled metaphysical, philosophical, sometimes even anti-philosophical. Consequently, studies focus on his style as a means of gaining access to his world of meanings. In other words, style is conceived as containing the meaning of a work of art, "with stylistic devices appearing as significant marks in a literary language that expresses certain intuitions" (Ja n, 1992, 10). The initial purpose of such an analysis is to underline the unique features of the particular work, but the ultimate goal is the prospecting of meaning in the text. Yet, Borges himself denies that there is any meaning to his work, and that his interest in religious, metaphysical and esoteric truths is purely aesthetic in nature (Borges, 1964; 37).

What is the purpose of all his writing, if we assume that all writing is political once the pen has left its mark on paper? The key to this question lies in Borges' own interpretation of what literature or fiction making is, what is written and how it is read.

For Borges, the writer is a "mobile mind in a stationary body" (Sturrock, 1977; 39). While this statement seems innocuous enough, it contains a virulent insistence that imagination is the only resource open to a writer, and that a truly realist fiction writer does not exist. The writer's first act is to isolate himself from everything, and his or her second act is to duplicate oneself in two places and be two people at one time (Sturrock, 1977; 39). Hence, in Borges' fiction, the reader encounters stories about doubles, or doppelgaengers, in pieces like Borges and I and The Shape of the Sword (although this second story is more to do with a perceptual sleight of hand than a problem of identity). Because the writer is essentially a fiction maker, imagination, that constellation of chimerical images, becomes the world he inhabits and lives within and breathes, and which for the maker of fictions is essentially the 'real' world. For the writer, the imagination, despite its interiority, is an entity in itself, an exterior interiority, so to speak, from which he or she has to step away in order to apprehend. In other words, and for our purposes, the maker of fictions creates his own universes and, therefore, is subjected to the laws and conditions imposed upon him by this existential commitment. To be divorced from 'reality' in the idealist world of words, then, is to be doubly alienated through isolation and immobility – these are the two conditions required if the imagination is to be preserved from the distractions or 'invasions' of reality (Sturrock, 1977; 41).

Isolation alone, however, is insufficient for the maker of fictions to practice his craft. Confinement leads to inspiration. It lowers the number and variety of stimuli from the outside world and gives rise to a higher level of mental activity. He writes in the Preface to his Brodie's Report,

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The craft is mysterious; our opinions are ephemeral and I prefer Plato's theory of the Muse, to that of Poe who argued, or pretended to argue, that the writing of a poem is an operation of the intelligence (Borges, 2000a; 20).

Here, Borges is suggesting that intuition is not necessarily synonymous with the intellect. Isolation brings out in the maker of fictions an intuitive temperament. He argues that Poe is an intuitive masquerading as a mathematician (Sturrock, 1977; 49). He is a dissembler, Borges claims, but the Argentine himself is a dissembler, a mathematical spirit masquerading as an intuitive. Despite this, or perhaps because of this, Borges believes that it is intuition that allows the mind to pass from the mundane world of the everyday, replete with specifics and the minutiae of daily routine, to the linguistic world of universals. Intuition, in other words, is the medium through which we pass from existences to essences.

In the opposition between realism and idealism, then, Borges stands firmly in the camp of the latter. For Borges, the realist doctrine that all things exist independently of the mind offers nothing. He is a maker of fictions, and can only utilise mental phenomena as a means of understanding reality, and being part of it. He says:

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I thought above all of the literary possibilities of Idealist philosophy, let us say, rather than its intrinsic merits. This does not mean necessarily that I believe in Berkeley or Schopenhauer ... I believe I was thinking rather of the alchemy or unreality of the material world as subjects usable by Literature (Sturrock, 1977; 22).

Borges' chief goal, then, is a linguistic one, and one that is very instructive for critics and writers alike. His stories divulge not only the conventions and procedures of his own art but of the art of narrative in general, and to that extent they rank among the criticism of literature at the same time as extending the possibilities of creative writing. Borges wants to demonstrate the true nature of fiction: the immateriality of fictional objects, the distinction between causation and succession, the juxtaposition of the possible and impossible on an equal footing. By doing so, however, he inadvertently develops a new way of seeing and apprehending the world, and sets new standards for not only making fiction, but also reading it. Gabriel Garcia Marquez, for example, says that he reads Borges for his "extraordinary ability at verbal artifice. [H]e's a man who teaches you how to write, teaches you to sharpen your instrument for stating things" (Bell-Villada, 1999;44). Julio Cortazar, an Argentine, and an oft-considered heir to Borges' legacy, believes they both coincide in their "search ... for a style" (Bell-Villada, 1999; 44). Carlos Fuentes, the Mexican novelist, argues that Borges "blurs all genres, rescues all traditions, kills all bad habits, creates a new order, rigorous and demanding, on which irony, humour, and play can be built..." (Bell-Villada, 1999; 45).

The three writers mentioned above agree, however, that Borges' fictions are, as Marquez puts it, "escapist literature" (Bell-Villada, 1999; 44). To be sure, Borges' fantastical stories, at first glance, seem far divorced from the reality that we inhabit in our little everydays. His imaginary worlds, his non-existent novels and alien philosophies and landscapes are unimaginable and unreachable. They do not try to attempt any form of reflexivity, preferring instead to forever turning in on themselves, and referring to themselves, like a spiral staircase with no end.

However, Borges' unrealities, his forever multiplying universes, are not anti-realities. His fictions do not merely speak of non-existent landscapes and worlds. Instead, his unrealities are at the core of his aesthetic, and this he argues in his The Secret Miracle, is "one of art's prerequisites". They are not akin to the fantasies of the surrealists. Nor are they in any way similar to the soothing escapist, though elegant, fantasies of Tolkien. Borges' landscapes are disconcertingly suggestive of this world; his characters may inhabit ancient worlds such as Babylon and ancient Rome, or haunt imaginary spaces, like the Library of Babel or the circular ruins, but the fictional scenarios still refer to our own, even if obliquely.

Borges has, on many occasions, stated that his tales are essentially parables, veiled comments on real human problems. As such, they allude to reality indirectly even though they depict unrealities. Borges does not see the magical and fantastical elements as the luxuries of a bourgeois literary man. He sees magic as an essential and redeeming element in fiction making. The realist does not actually create worlds but merely expresses what already is. He suppresses artifice. He argues that the realist novel contains a contradiction. The central concern of the novel, according to E.M. Forster, an argument that Borges subscribes to, is causality. Having fashioned a plot based on character, the writer is obliged to look for reasons, be they obvious or implicit, for the events that take place. This succession of motives and occurrences claim to reflect the real world faithfully and objectively. The realist novel, by definition, represents the presumed working of natural laws. This assumption is untenable in Borges’ reckoning, since nature has an "infinite mesh of causes and effects" (Borges, 1970; 91). Nature has forces that are too numerous to pin down in a fiction. It follows, then, that nature is beyond formal control. Therein lies the contradiction. It is situated between the implicit philosophy of the novel and its intrinsic capabilities, its aims and material means (Villada, 1999; 54).

Magic, then, is a means to clarity and vigour. It has the evocative advantages of the atavistic, but it is also formally lucid, and intellectually diverse; "it is governed by all natural laws, and by imaginary ones as well" (Borges, 1970; 80). In this, Borges anticipates by thirty-five years the Franco-Bulgarian structuralist, Todorov, who, in 1967, conceived of the idea of imaginary causality, a term denoting those events that, though seemingly the products of a random conference of disparate elements, are actually informed and impelled by a greater, more mysterious, transcendental order of things (Villada, 1999; 55).

Imaginary causality, needless to say, runs through much of Borges stories. Not only is this employed by Borges as a stylistic device, it is a direct extension of his world view. Causality, be it divine or imaginary, has one basic characteristic – the loss of the Self. The individual is never in control of his or her own destiny when beneath the surface of all events and actions lies the spark of Chaos, that silent explosion of forces which orders and then re-orders our reality. Borges fiction, especially the more fantastical of his work, exemplifies this loss of the Self, and the struggle to come to terms with the revelation or discovery of our own unrealities. "Let us admit", he writes, "what all idealists admit: the hallucinatory nature of the world. Let us do what no idealist has done: seek unrealities which confirm that nature" (Borges, 1994; 207-8).

My intention in this paper is to focus on the more fantastical of Borges' stories, three in particular, in order to discover the secret universes in which Borges is a contented inhabitant. My purpose is to show that despite their esoteric and obscurantist nature, his stories do hold some relevance to the modern condition and that he brings to literature not only a way of writing, but also a way of reading it.

We have already seen that Borges' work falls well within the rubric of Idealism rather than realism. The fictions of Realism are recognisable by their concealment of artifice, by the normality or unobtrusiveness of their viewpoint on the world. In other words, they are characterised by their fidelity with which they seem to be transcribing a world and not making one up. Borges believes, however, that by employing language in the service of artifice he is exemplifying the real power, not the false promises, of words. For him, as a writer, words and books are reality, as they are for any writer. His acknowledgement that he will never, however many and various the tigers he imagines, accede to the real animal, is an acknowledgement that cuts deep into the pretensions of Realism. Instead of hiding his workings, as most realists do, Borges chooses to make these said workings the subject of his fictions. He vehemently argues that when writers purport to write about what they claim to be first-hand experience of the world, they are in fact using only a second-hand experience of it through the literature of their day. Roland Barthes, in his S/Z, demonstrates, to this effect, that the Realist depends heavily on the cultural stock of his time rather than any immediate confrontation with real people and places.

Reality, for the Argentine, lies outside of literature and language. He is not interested in the mimesis of Reality, but instead is concerned with the mimesis of convention. How does one reconcile the word with the thing, abstraction with reality? You can't, says Borges, and so he uses abstractions as the reality proper to literature. Borges' mind, then, becomes his absolute reality. He walks through it, suffers in it, struggles with it, enjoys it, and exhausts it possibilities.

The last of these is essential for our purpose here today. Borges' reality relies on presuppositions. Presuppositions are tacit. They are potential statements we are committed to accepting if we accept the statement which presupposes them. In his essay, Narrative Art and Magic (2001, 75-82), he argues that in order for William Morris's The Life and Death of Jason to work, the writer has to establish the possibility of the centaur's factual existence. Borges goes on to show here that through artifice and other linguistic and perceptual tricks, Morris achieves the impossible; that is, he uses lyrical verse to achieve a willing suspension of disbelief in order to establish the centaur and the adventures of Jason as factual truths.

Similarly, Borges' fictions, too, are full of 'centaurs', often so cunningly introduced that they escape notice. These artifices suggest, without pretending to represent 'what is', that the reality we know is always more complex than any possible representation of it. It is up to language, therefore, to only hint at this complexity. Its task is to dream into existence the possibility of impossibilities. In this dreaming, then, the permutations for what can possibly be are endless. The dreamer is, at the same time, the dreamed.

Nowhere in his fictions is this clearer than in the story entitled The Circular Ruins. A magician dreams another man to put him into reality. After many repeated attempts, he finally succeeds, but in order to bring him to life he requires the help of the God of Fire, previously worshiped at the temple which now lies in ruins and where he meditates on his project. In return for the help received he sends the newly dreamt man, essentially his son, down the way to another ruined temple to worship the Fire God. He is concerned, however, that his son might discover the fact that he has been dreamed (a humiliating discovery), because he learns of rumours of a man who can walk on fire without being burned.

Years later, when his own temple is surrounded by a forest fire, he walks into the flames, and is relieved to find that he is unscathed. Then, he understands with terror that he, too, is an illusion, that someone else had been dreaming him. The story reminds us of Hume's belief that mankind is nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity. The circular inversions of the dreamer and the dreamt, of dreaming and being dreamt, is firstly suggested by the epigraph Borges employs for the story, the incomplete thought implied when Tweedledee and Tweedledum explain to Alice that she is part of a dream the red King is dreaming at the moment: "And if he left off dreaming about you..." Here, Alice is confronted with the possible unreality of her self, since to be dreamed is to be nothing. This is a delightful infinite regress since the Red King is part of Alice's dream. The idea here is that while Reality is merely the product of one's real time dreaming, if you like, the possibility that our place in that reality has been dreamt by another makes it pointless to attempt to describe the universe through literature.

The Universe, or reality, therefore, is a chaos of impressions upon which any semblance of order is imposed or arbitrary. He concludes that,

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obviously there is no classification of the universe that is not arbitrary and conjectural. The reason is very simple: we do not know what the universe is... We must go even further; we must suspect that there is no universe in the organic, unifying sense inherent in that ambitious word. If there is, we must conjecture its purpose; we must conjecture the words, the definitions, the etymologies, the synonymies of God's secret dictionary.

The impossibility of penetrating the divine scheme of the universe cannot dissuade us from outlining human schemes, even though we are aware that they are provisional (2001, 231).

Borges is attempting, then, to create a "through-the looking-glass" world through his art, juxtaposing it with the world of 'reality'. The world of reality is created by our presence, like the images in the mirrors: impermanent, unreal and of mysterious purpose. This, of course, is not Borges' discovery but has philosophical roots in Berkeley’s work and earlier.

Borges considers Berkeley's negation of objective reality irrefutable and even easy to conceive and accept. He suggests the simile of the mirror:

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Regarding the negation of the autonomous existence of the visible and palpable objects, it is easy to reconcile oneself to it by thinking: Reality is like the image of ourselves that appears in all mirrors, a simulacrum that exists for us, arrives with us, gestures and leaves with us, but that we only need to look for in order to find it.

Berkeley denied matter. This does not mean that he denied things like colours, smells, tastes, and tactility. He denied that there were pains no one feels, colours no one sees, forms no one touches. He argued that to add matter to perceptions is to add to the world another inconceivable and superfluous world. Borges carries Berkeley's postulates and their logical conclusions and consequences to the field of literary creation to mould a literature that moves not within the world of everyday reality but in that of metaphysical reality. Whereas Berkeley wrote under the illusion that he was describing the real world, Borges' literary use of his ideas shows us that the world he projected may be just as unreal as the one he tried to undermine. These realities cancel each other out (Ja n, 1992; 53-54). In other words, like the magician who believes he is a Creator only to find out that he too has been created, we live in the terrifying grip of an infinite regress.

At the root of this story, lies the theme of Creation, which is related to the cyclical repetition of the dream. A dream implies a dreamer, and Creation implies a Creator. The orthodox argument that god is the uncaused Caused is "a mere juggling of words, a violence done to language" (Jaen, 1992; 58). For him, a speech implies a speaker, and a dream a dreamer; this, of course, leads to an endless series of speakers and dreamers, an infinite regress. Since in the world of experience every effect has a cause, the idea of an uncaused Cause introduces a contradiction to this principle in order to avoid falling into an infinite regress. Similarly, in The Immortal, the narrator says,

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Among the corollaries of the doctrine that there is no thing that is not counterbalanced by another, there is one that has little theoretical importance but that caused us, at the beginning or end of the tenth century, to scatter over the face of the earth. It may be summarized in these words: There is a river whose waters give immortality; somewhere there must be another river whose waters take it away (2000, 15).

This possibility that the next river you stop at to drink may be the river that takes away one's immortality relegates reality to a game of chance, with no end to the nightmare of possibilities. That our world is "full of possibilities", as the clich goes, is an anathema, argues Borges, and that is why it is relegated to the level of a clich , sequestered in the world of language like a nun of the Cistercian order.

Further along in the story, the narrator tell us,

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Everything in the world of mortals has the value of the irrecoverable and contingent. Among the immortals, on the other hand, every act (every thought) is the echo of others that preceded it in the past, with no visible beginning, and the faithful presage of others that will repeat it in the future, ad vertiginem. (2000, 15).

The never ending sequence suggested here represents the endless possibilities of language. After all, objects are irrecoverable and contingent by accident of language alone. All this contributes to Borges' essential purpose of undermining individual personality and Self, individual meaning, and individual destiny.

This world view first appears in his essay entitled The Nothingness of Personality (2001, 3):

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I want to tear down the exceptional pre-eminence now generally awarded to the self, and I pledge to be spurred on by concrete certainty, and not the caprice of an ideological ambush or a dazzling intellectual prank. I propose to prove that personality is a mirage maintained by conceit and custom, without metaphysical foundation or visceral reality. I want to apply to literature the consequences that issue from these premises, and erect upon them an aesthetic hostile to the psychologism inherited from the last century, sympathetic to the classics, yet encouraging to today’s most unruly tendencies.

His reference in the last line to the classics is important for it signifies an interest in literature as form, as creation, as opposed to the romantic conception of literature as expression of self or the personality. Because Borges does not believe in the solidity of a personality, he questions the idea of character development in literature. Form is, in itself, a universe, a constellation of being, and it is through its exposition that an artistic, or creative continuity is achieved. He argues:

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I repeat: there is not, behind the face, a secret self governing our acts or receiving our impressions; we are only the series of those imaginary acts and those errant impressions. The series? If we deny matter and spirit, which are continuities, and if we also deny space, I do not know what right we have to the continuity that is time (2001, 321).

Here, Borges is alluding to both Berkeley and Hume. Berkeley denied matter; Hume denied spirit (Borges, 2001; 328). In essence, then, humanity is nothingness. Hence, in The Circular Ruins, the final revelation that the magician, too, has been dreamed suggests not only that the self is illusory, but also that the narrative that has led us to that revelation is illusory, or meaningless. It is the snake eating its own tail. This is his meaning when he stubbornly insists that there is no meaning to his stories.

However, we can go much further. While in The Circular Ruins, Borges shows us that the Self is an illusion, he also believes that the entity, the being of the singular 'I' is not one thing alone, but all the things in the universe, and of none. He argues that "Man is not matter, form, impressions, ideas, instincts, or consciousness. He is not the combination of these parts, nor does he exist outside of them" (Personality and the Buddha, 2001; 348-9). Not only is the self negated, but all things are negated, including the negation of the negation. Borges is here attempting to equate pantheism with the negation of the personality, for pantheism represents the fragmentation and the dissolution of the Godhead.

The central idea of pantheism is that the world is a projection of the divine or the transcendental realm. Therefore, the multifarious diversity of the world is imbued with unreality, and points to an underlying and essential unity. Borges employs the cabbalistic notions of the world as an intellectual or verbal emanation of the divine, Schopenhauer's vision of the world as representation of Will, and the Buddhist perception of the world as a dream of Buddha to suggest in his stories the "vacuity or banality of the differentiated world while affirming its fundamental unity and the equality of its parts" (Jaen, 1992; 79).

In The God's Script (1964, 169-173), or sometimes translated as The Writing of God, Tzinacan, magician and high priest of the pyramid of Qaholom is imprisoned in a cell divided in two by a wall of long iron bars. On one side of this wall is Tzinacan, on the other, a jaguar. The conquering Spaniards have tortured him in order to force him to divulge the secret of the hidden treasure, but he refuses because his God has not forsaken him.

In prison he begins to dream, recalling all that he knew, and in one of these mental sojourns, he recalls the tradition of God who, forseeing that at the end of time there would be devastation and ruin, "wrote on the first day of creation a magical sentence with the power to ward off those evils" (1964, 170). He meditates for months on end, then, remembers that the jaguar was one of the attributes of God. He sets about to decipher the secret word from the black patterns on the animal's coat.

Finally, he cracks the code, but, he does not use the Word to wreak havoc on his enemies and save himself and his people because, he says, he no longer remembers Tzinacan.

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Whoever has seen the universe, whoever has beheld the fiery designs of the universe, cannot think in terms of one man, of that man's trivial fortunes, though he be that very man. That man has been he and now matters no more to him. What is the life of that other to him, if he, now, is no one. This is why I do not pronounce the formula, why, lying here, in the darkness, I let the days obliterate me (1964, 173).

Tzinacan has seen the universe through the eyes of God. In the universe, all things are one and nothing. Like the magician in The Circular Ruins, Tzinacan finds himself unable to change the direction of his fate, even when imbued with the knowledge of Gods. The magician has the power to create a being into existence, but he cannot deny that he is both everything and nothing. Tzinacan has the power to obliterate the Spaniards and claim back his lands and his people, but he has seen the infinite processes “that formed one single felicity” and he becomes a personification of inertia.

It is clear that despite being criticised or labeled as fantastical or irrelevant, Borges employs universal themes, the predominant one being the disempowerment of the individual in the face of universal forces, and the loss of the Self. To be sure, other writers before and after him have dealt with the same issues. Kafka, among these, is the best known and is often compared with Borges. Whereas Kafka writes from the outside looking in, Borges writes from the inside looking in. By juxtaposing the idealist principle that all matter and spirit is illusory with the world of language and fiction making, he allows himself the advantage of exhausting the possibilities of and limits to creative output.

By using abstractions as the reality proper to literature, he extends the life of fiction making, and allows language to explore and describe areas of the human psyche. His literature of exhaustion is a silence that comes with the disruption of all connection between language and reality. Like Nabakov, Borges turns art into anti-art or silence, which proposes a "mood of ultimacy" (Stark, 1974; 3). Discovering that one has nothing to say, one seeks a way to say that.

The 'silence' that Sontag argues exemplifies the work of Borges is a silence that results when a Literature tries to subvert itself, to exhaust its own possibilities. In this, the literature of exhaustion differs from fantastical fiction, since the latter seeks to transcend itself. This self-subverting tendency stems, in Borges' mind, from William Morris's belief that the essential stories of man's imagination had long since been told and that by now the storyteller’s craft lay in rethinking and retelling them.

Borges' literature is about literature. Writers of this kind of literature build an artificial construct, rather than rendering in artistic form meaningful details from a meaning-laden world. They care not for character or plot. The most vivid exposition of the reason why he creates artificial literature can be found in the essayistic story, The Library of Babel:

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At that time a great deal was said about the Vindications: books of apology and prophecy which vindicated for all time the acts of every man in the universe and retained prodigious arcana for his future. Thousands of the greedy abandoned their sweet native hexagons and rushed up the stairways, urged on by the vain intention of finding their Vindication. These pilgrims disputed in the narrow corridors, proffered dark curses, strangled each other on the divine stairways, flung the deceptive books into the air shafts, met their death cast down in a similar fashion by the inhabitants of remote regions. Others went mad... The Vindications exist (I have seen two of which refer to persons of the future, to persons who perhaps are not imaginary) but the searchers did not remember that the possibility of a man's finding his Vindication, or some treacherous variation thereof, can be computed as zero (1964, 55).

The world is inexhaustible, and no man can be completely understood, suggests Borges, and this reminds us of Edmund Husserl's notion of the self's ultimate unknowability, and that it, like the rest of everyday reality, is unreal. A couple of paragraphs down, Borges continues:

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There are official searchers, inquisitors. I have seen them in the performance of their function: they always arrive extremely tired from their journeys; they speak of a broken stairway which almost killed them; they talk with the librarian of galleries and stairs; sometimes they pick up the nearest volume and leaf through it, looking for infamous words. Obviously, no one expects to discover anything (1964, 55).

The Universe, then, which Borges calls the Library of Babel, is infinite because all that can be written about it has already been written. The Library exists ab aeterno. Man is the imperfect librarian looking for the chance infamous Word, not realising that he, too, is the product of chance or of malevolent demiurgi. Further, because the Library can only be the work of a god, as Borges claims in the story, those who try to dissemble or emulate the divine structure are reduced to pathetic figures "in latrines with some metal disks in a forbidden dice cup" who "feebly mimic the divine disorder" (1964, 56).

In other words, while the universe may be infinite, what we can apprehend of it through language is finite. The Library, says Borges, "is unlimited and cyclical. If an eternal traveller went to cross it in any direction, after centuries he would see that the same volumes were repeated in the same disorder (which, thus repeated, would be an order: the Order)" (1964, 58).

Borges' universes, then, are limitless entities, abounding in a multitude of forms, crossing over time and space, their boundaries determined only by the extent of Borges' imagination and language. Reality lies outside of this equation, carries no weight, save for the realities we create in our own minds when we read, for example, of a high priest called Tzinacan, who unravels the secret code of God from the invisible circular designs on the jaguar's coat. The Wheel that Tzinac n discovers and which he explains in his mind is, in fact, the wheel our own minds construct from the cultural stock at our disposal. We do not need to consciously learn that Borges has borrowed the idea of the Buddhist Wheel of Life; we know this from our own vague internal, muddled realities, which collect like moths to a light source, and through which we sift to retrieve what we need. Borges' games, then, include the readers. We are unwitting conspirators in his diabolical labyrinthine puzzles.

Borges is not a magic realist, despite the magical elements. More accurately, he is a literary critic and theorist. He does not theorise the short story form. Rather, he theorises writing. Read in this manner, Borges' task becomes clear.

Borges merely articulates in literary form what we articulate in the form of vaguely apprehended snippets of social and cultural reality. He gives voice to our inner urges, the chaotic order that characterises our dream state. Such reverie weaves soft bonds around the dreamer, and poetises the dreamer. Perhaps, this is Borges' ultimate goal – to attain a purity of form, both in apprehension and expression. This purity is meant to achieve a cognitive resonance within the experience of the reader, to emulate a dream sequence and to extend the limits of a linguistically engendered reality. He forces us, as both writers and readers to confront literature as a mirror (that negates) of the Universe.

Ultimately, Borges is perhaps suggesting that literary creation is the same as the reading of it. Perhaps, he is saying that all our ideas are games of chance that point to one fundamental fact – the objects we dream have already dreamt us.


---

Works Cited:

  • Bell-Villada, Gene H., Borges and His Fiction: A guide to His Mind and Art (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1999).
  • Borges, Jorge Luis, Labyrinths (New York: New Directions, 1964).
  • _______________ Dreamtigers (New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., 1970).
  • _______________ The Aleph (London: Penguin Classics, 2000).
  • _______________ Brodie's Report (London: Penguin Classics, 2000a).
  • _______________ The Total Library (London: Penguin Classics, 2001).
  • Jaen, Didier T., Borges' esoteric library: metaphysics to metafiction (Lanham: University Press of America, 1992).
  • Stark, John, The Literature of Exhaustion: Borges, Nabokov, and Barth (Durham, N.C: Duke University Press, 1974).
  • Sturrock, John, Paper tigers: the ideal fictions of Jorge Luis Borges (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977).
]]> Sat, 12 Jun 2010 20:48:46 +0000 3493894fa4ea036cfc6433c3e2ee63b0 American Psycho Reinterpreted http://www.galilean-library.org/site/index.php/page/index.html/_/essays/literatureandfilm/american-psycho-reinterpreted-r90 Paul Newall (2005)

Bret Easton Ellis’s masterpiece American Psycho is typically described as a satire ("a black-hearted satire on the terrible power of money" said Jenny Turner in the Scotsman) and, in particular, a savage indictment of a (Western) society caught in the iron grip of commercialism, greed and superficiality.

Ellis' decision to quote Talking Heads ("And as things fell apart / nobody paid much attention") on the inlay before the story begins would seem, on the face of it, to set us up for just such a reading. At the same point, Ellis also excerpts Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground:

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Both the author of these Notes and the Notes themselves are, of course, fictional. Nevertheless, such persons as the composer of these Notes not only exist in our society, but indeed must exist, given the circumstances under which our society has generally been formed.

We are thus led, as it were, to viewing the work from its outset as a commentary on a society gone wrong, in which the protagonist is perhaps incidental to the purpose at hand.

American Psycho is also, as is well known, a brutal read, as hard on the stomach as it is on the mind. The numbing detail of chapters cataloguing the recording exploits of Genesis, Whitney Houston and Huey Lewis and The News, combined with incessant information as to which combination of designer labels the characters are dressed in, are upstaged only by the detached and almost itemised descriptions of the many episodes of violence, murder and sexual abuse throughout the text. Ellis spent a considerable amount of time researching these, trying to understand exactly how much punishment a human could take without expiring. This has lent weight to the assumption that his purpose was bloodshed for the sake of it, or to hammer home the lesson of what will surely come of a culture built upon corruption and apathy. In this essay I shall offer an interpretation that goes beyond these basic observations to find a deeper, more philosophical and more romantic story hidden behind the easy option of mere satire.

All that happens in American Psycho is sandwiched between two related remarks, one scrawled in graffiti and the other a neon sign in a cinema. They are, respectively, "ABANDON ALL HOPE YE WHO ENTER HERE" and "THIS IS NOT AN EXIT", both capitalised. Having noticed the former, the novel begins in the third person as the central character, Patrick Bateman, describes a colleague, Timothy Price, before shifting into the first person where, with a few (and significant) exceptions, he will stay. Price is one of three crucial people who will shock Bateman out of the reasoning he has constructed around himself, trapping him and thus leaving him without an exit.

The thesis ostensibly explored in American Psycho is that examined at great length by Dostoevsky in The Brothers Karamazov. Although stated in various (contentious) ways, for our purposes it may be given as "if life is pointless then anything is permitted". Godless or otherwise, a society that has lost its moral rudder makes the existence of psychopaths like Bateman almost an inevitability, or so it is implied. What I want to suggest is that this proposition is precisely backwards: it is not that life is pointless and therefore Bateman does evil, but instead that he does evil to prove (to himself) that life is pointless.

This counterintuitive reading is difficult to appreciate at first but becomes more readily apparent as we compare Bateman's differing reactions to the situations and characters he meets. With his friends, workmates, acquaintances, girls or those people he comes across from day to day at the gym or serving his drinks at restaurants, he is on a kind of autopilot: detached, uninvolved and noting what goes on largely as a spectator. Witness the laconic way in which he tells a girl, Daisy, that he has hurt people before and may do so again with her; or the mechanical discourse on world and US politics at Evelyn's. This is the empty life he has fashioned, comfortable because it is predictable. Nevertheless, the story we read is on one level an extended test as he attempts, with increasing risk, to show that “nobody pa[ys] much attention” to his inhumane behaviour. This, he feels, demonstrates that people just do not care. Perhaps the most memorable occasions are Killing Child at Zoo ("I feel empty, hardly here at all […] and I walked away, my hands soaked with blood, uncaught") and Chase Manhattan. The latter, in particular, involves a change in the narrative as Bateman moves from his usual first-person telling to "Patrick shoots him in the face" and then back again, when "calm is eventually restored". What hope can there be for anyone in such a world?

The problem for Bateman is that he is trapped in this thinking, with each instance of not being called to account convincing him still further that no act can have any meaning. That is the point. At dinner with Jean, he attempts to set this out in detail in a monologue:

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... where there was nature and earth, life and water, I saw a desert landscape that was unending, resembling some sort of crater, so devoid of reason and light and spirit that the mind could not grasp it on any sort of conscious level and if you came close the mind would reel backward, unable to take it in. It was a vision so clear and real and vital to me that in its purity it was almost abstract. This was what I could understand, this was how I lived my life, what I constructed my movement around, how I dealt with the tangible. This was the geography around which my reality revolved: it did not occur to me, ever, that people were good or that a man was capable of change, or that the world could be a better place through one’s taking pleasure in a look or a feeling or a gesture, or receiving another person’s love or kindness. Nothing was affirmative, the term 'generosity of spirit' applied to nothing, was a clich , was some kind of bad joke. Sex is mathematics. Individuality no longer an issue. What does intelligence signify? Define reason. Desire – meaningless. Intellect is not a cure. Justice is dead. Fear, recrimination, innocence, sympathy, guilt, waste, failue, grief, were things, emotions, that no one really felt anymore. Reflection is useless, the world is senseless. Evil is its only permanence. God is not alive. Love cannot be trusted. Surface, surface, surface was all that anyone found meaning in ... this was civilization as I saw it, colossal and jagged…

While it is an easy matter to point to passages like this as indicative of an emptiness in Bateman, he himself contradicts all of it moments later, only to fight against it:

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I get an odd feeling that this is a crucial moment in my life and I'm startled by the suddenness of what I guess passes for an epiphany. There is nothing of value I can offer her. ... and in my own stubborn, wilful way I can admit to feeling a pang, something tightening inside, and before I can stop it I find myself almost dazzled and moved that I might have the capacity to accept, though not return, her love. I wonder if even now, right here in Nowheres, she can see the darkening clouds behind my eyes lifting. And though the coldness I have always felt leaves me, the numbness doesn't and probably never will. This relationship will probably lead to nothing...(emphasis added)

In spite of the effort he makes to turn this feeling away and reject it, the chapter ends rather differently:

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Someone with a baby stroller stops at the corner and purchases a Dove Bar. The baby stares at Jean and me. We stare back. Its really weird and I’m experiencing a spontaneous kind of internal sensation, I feel I’m moving toward as well as away from something, and anything is possible.

Earlier, at the previous dinner, Bateman had imagined "running around Central Park on a cool spring afternoon with Jean, laughing, holding hands." This is followed immediately by the most important line in the entire book: "We buy balloons, we let them go." This is the "taking pleasure in a look or a feeling or a gesture" that has supposedly never occurred to him, and which is said to achieve nothing. As quickly as he experiences these isolated moments, however, Bateman talks himself out of his optimism and back into the solace of the meaningless, where his failure becomes the norm again.

His position is thus one of knowing there is a way out but being too afraid to take it. If everything is meaningless, of course, then there is no shame in not letting the balloon go simply for the sake of it. The suspicion that there is something more is what Bateman attempts, over and over, to kill – to remove the doubt that nags at him and asks why Bethany left him, a circumstance that bothers him so much that, typically, he has to murder her to make it go away. It is when things go differently that his confidence and detachment evapourate, whether trying to strangle Luis Carruthers and finding himself immobilised by not having predicted the outcome or genuinely worried that he does not know how much Tim Price makes or where he went when he disappeared down the tunnel. It is easier for Bateman to believe that nothing is of any consequence and to prove it by acting with seeming impunity than it is to face up to his emptiness on the inside and admit that Jean makes him lose control, not knowing what will happen next.

American Psycho, then, is a story about a man so afraid of the uncertainty in the world around him that he finds solace in an idea; namely, that there is no meaning and no one really cares. This at once renders him no different than anyone else and excuses his failure to take any kind of risk. Never having to worry about making his way in life, he seeks out and destroys meaning wherever he finds or suspects it to be hiding to soothe his worry that he has somehow fallen short. Faced with a friend who takes (non-violent) directions he dare not, a colleague whose sexual orientation he was unable to judge and a secretary who will love him unconditionally, he backs away, unable to cope. This fundamental inadequacy, the certainty – buried far beneath the violence – that he is scared of not knowing what will happen next, is why Bateman is trapped in the sure knowledge that there is no exit external to him to take and why he ends the book by sighing again, crushed under the realisation that he will have to find the answers within himself.

The book is a tragedy, not a satire.]]> Sat, 12 Jun 2010 20:46:53 +0000 08b255a5d42b89b0585260b6f2360bdd <![CDATA[Kirilov's Dilemma]]> http://www.galilean-library.org/site/index.php/page/index.html/_/essays/literatureandfilm/kirilovs-dilemma-r89 Paul Newall (2005)

In his The Possessed (also known as Demons) and other works, Dostoevsky employed an advocatus diaboli device familiar to and used by the Schoolmen and the Church whereby he offered and defended in detail those notions he wished to subsequently challenge, taking care to develop them to their strongest possible form before attempting to show why they are flawed. This is rarely moreso than in the case of the character of Kirilov (or Kirillov).

In an early chapter, during the first description of his thinking (entitled "Another man’s sins" for a good reason), Kirilov explained some of his ideas and received the retort:

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If it is all the same whether to live or not to live, everyone will kill himself and that’s perhaps the only change that will come about.

The scorn of the narrator here is a marker intended to caution us against a simplistic disregard. Kirilov replied:

Quote

It makes no difference. Deception will be killed. Everyone who desires supreme freedom must dare to kill himself. He who dares to kill himself has learnt the secret of the deception.

The deception discussed here is quite subtle and is explained in response to the narrator’s remark that people love their lives because they are afraid of death. Instead, said Kirilov, life is fearful and unhappy – precisely because it seems to have no meaning - until men become afraid of death and transfer their fear to it, rendering life something to be loved. He did not find this impressive because he wanted to learn whether life can be loved on its own terms, given its apparent absurdity. This is the question that Camus wrestled with, asking if we could conclude anything from the seeming meaninglessness of life. It may be that the fear Kirilov spoke of comes of the silence that answers our attempts to find meaning.

Later on, in the chapter "A very busy night", Kirilov expanded on his thinking in syllogistic form when talking with Verkhovensky:

Quote

God is necessary, and so must exist.
But I know that He doesn’t exist and can’t exist.
But don’t you understand that a man with two such ideas cannot go on living?

(Verkhovensky’s comments have been removed.)

In order to explain why he concludes as he does, Kirilov set out come of the consequences of these premises:

Quote

Is there no man on this planet who, having finished with God and believing in his own will, will have enough courage to express his self-will in its most important point? […] All man did was to invent God so as to live without killing himself. That’s the essence of universal history till now. I am the only man in universal history who for the first time refused to invent God. […] To realize that there is no god and not to realize at the same instant that you have become god yourself – is an absurdity, for else you would certainly kill yourself. If you do realize it, you are a king and will never kill yourself, but will live in the greatest glory. But he who is first to realize it is bound to kill himself, for otherwise who will begin and prove it? […] I am still only a god against my will, and I am unhappy because I am bound to express my self-will. […] Fear is the curse of mankind. But I shall proclaim my self-will. I am bound to believe that I do not believe. I shall begin and end, and open the door.

These comments are replete with religious imagery. The general case of the problem that Kirilov was discussing is that of meaning: it does not appear that any meaning exists for our lives (or that is not defeated by the fact of death), but we apparently require that meaning to cope; as a result, mankind has invented meaning – not once, but very many times – in order to avoid the dilemma that meaning is needed but can never be found.

If we take the problem in its most general form, it goes back at least to Ecclesiastes:

Quote

Then said I in my heart, As it happeneth to the fool, so it happeneth even to me; and why was I then more wise? Then I said in my heart, that this also is vanity.

For there is no remembrance of the wise more than of the fool for ever; seeing that which now is in the days to come shall all be forgotten. And how dieth the wise man? as the fool.

Therefore I hated life; because the work that is wrought under the sun is grievous unto me: for all is vanity and vexation of spirit. (II, v15-17)

It seems that all significance is stripped from life by the fact of death. Camus’s attempted solution was to rebel against this thinking and say that we should live in spite of the absence of meaning, refusing to allow this argument to have any power over us. This does not answer the problem so much as advise going on regardless. Others have since insisted that we can give our own meaning to our actions, but this is not the meaning Dostoevsky was considering nor is it clear how it can survive the challenge of Ecclesiastes. Kirilov’s point, instead, was that inventing God had permitted people to dodge the issue entirely by creating a constrast between death (to be feared) and life (to therefore be loved). In order to reject the dilemma, however, someone would first have to show that it could have no dominion over man. The extent of the freedom thus granted could never be clear until someone expressed it fully by choosing to reject it.

In many ways, Stavrogin is the most fascinating character of Dostoevsky’s oeuvre and one who shows by his actions in The Possessed the thinking that Kirilov tried to explain. He, too, found life without meaning and refused to invent a fiction to save it – eventually killing himself quietly and without fuss. While he lived, he frequently sought out ridiculous situations in which he acted in such a manner as to confound expectation and cause trouble for himself, because this was the only way he could feel alive after his rejection of the power of the dilemma. Kirilov, of course, had figured this out, and had Verkhovensky spell-bound when he explained:

Quote

Stavrogin, too, was eaten up by an idea. […] If Stavrogin believes in God, then he doesn’t believe that he believes. And if he doesn’t believe, then he doesn’t believe that he doesn’t believe.

When he eventually hung himself, Stavrogin left a note saying "no one is to blame, I did it myself."]]> Sat, 12 Jun 2010 20:46:03 +0000 30bb3825e8f631cc6075c0f87bb4978c Wag the Dog http://www.galilean-library.org/site/index.php/page/index.html/_/essays/literatureandfilm/wag-the-dog-r88 Chen-Roy Simpson (2005)

Abstract: Wag the Dog is a film about media manipulation. In the first section of the paper, some relatively unknown "Wag the Dog" cases are explored. In the second section, the complicity and lack of vigilance of the Media with regard to manipulation is discussed. In the final section, the paper assesses the impact of both the manipulation of the media by government and the media's own complicity in such manipulation.

Far from Fiction: Wag the Dog and the News Media in Wartime

Released in 1997, Wag the Dog was quite prescient in its central scandal (a president charged with sexual misconduct) and effectively chronicles the many ways in which the news media is manipulated. Two weeks before election, the president in Wag the Dog has allegedly had sex with a minor. In order to divert attention from this scandal, and increase support for the president, Conrad Bream, a sort of Public relations professional (played brilliantly by Robert De Niro), invents a war with the country of Albania. Bream hires the services of Hollywood producer Stanley Motss (Dustin Hoffman) and the movie is a sustained focus on their clever manipulation of the media. Among the many manipulations the two devise are the in studio creation of a war – digitally creating a poor Albanian village ransacked by the war; staged ceremonial events congratulating the president on his efforts in Albania; anonymous leaks to the press; and finally a public relations campaign used to engender sympathy for a 'lost soldier' when the fictionalized war is abruptly put to an end by the CIA. Initially, some of Wag the Dog's scenarios seem to be ludicrous but on closer reflection many of the tactics used in the film are quite real.

"Wag the Dog" Cases

While the relationship between media and military have never been amiable, after Vietnam a new adversarial relationship developed. Convinced that the media portrayal of the Vietnam War significantly contributed to its negative perception by the public, military officials sought new ways to suppress negative press coverage. The new set of rules were first implemented in the U.S. invasion of Grenada, 1983. Ironically, the Grenada invasion is the first war cited by Conrad Bream as an example of media distraction. When asked how the appearance of a war will distract attention, Bream says:

Quote

During Reagan’s administration, 240 Marines were killed in Beirut. 24 hours later we invade Grenada. That was their M.O. Change the story, change the lead. Its not a new concept.

Bream, of course, may be taken to imply that the Grenada invasion was specifically intended to distract media attention by "changing the story, changing the lead." This, in fact, was the claim of many writing at the time of the Grenada war. While it is doubtful that the Grenada invasion was undertaken specifically to distract attention from the Beirut killings (the decision to invade was made three days before the bombing), it is hard to imagine that the its political benefits did not play a part in its role. The Grenada invasion took place (as Bream says) just 24 hours after more than 200 marines were killed by a suicide bombing in Beirut. In his book On Bended Knee, Mark Hertsgaard states that the Marine's death had the potential to be a political disaster for President Reagan because of widespread fear in the public that Reagan could take the country to war. In fact, the war became a political triumph. Public opinions polls rose sharply after the war, spurred on by Reagan's own explanation of the war as an example of the restoration of American power (Hertsgaard, 1988 ).

It is here that we see many parallels with Wag the Dog. In the days leading up to the invasion, information was leaked to the press about it. When asked about the possibility of invasion, officials declared that the idea was "preposterous". The decision to lie was not an isolated incident by war planners but a directive from the highest offices to mislead the press. The invasion was unknown to the White House press offices or the Pentagon until one hour after the attack had already begun. One reporter managed to make it to the island but was detained on a U.S. Navy vessel (Hertsgaard, 1988 ).

The government further subverted the Press by barring reporters from going to Grenada to report on the invasion. As a result, most of the pictures and video of the war came from the government. The video footage was carefully selected: the government videos consisted of paratroopers dropping on the island and shots of students kissing the ground as they returned to America. But this distorted the reality of the invasion. Only a few students kissed the ground when they returned to America. In fact, the students as a group were divided about just how much danger they were in. Other government-supplied videos were of warehouses stockpiled with weapons, purportedly the weapons with which Cuba was going to take over Grenada. One of the reasons for invading Grenada, according to the Reagan administration was that it was being turned into a Cuban-Soviet military base whose purpose was to disrupt the Carribean and Central American region. When reporters were finally allowed access to the island, the claim that Grenadian warehouses were full of Soviet missiles and old weapons, tenaciously reported in all major news outlets and ‘supported’ by government supplied videos of said warheouses were falsified, refuting one of the rationalizations for the war. A second rational for the war was to “rescue American students” but Hertsgaard asks the interesting question “rescued from what? The clutches of Cuban trained Marxists or the combat ignited by U.S. invaders?.” Substantial evidence exists that the Americans could have safely returned without military rescue. The weekend before the invasion, for instance, Cuba and Grenada both made arrangements for Americans to depart the country if they wished (Hertsgaard, 1988 ). Thus, another war rationale was refuted. Nevertheless, the Grenada invasion was a political victory because the administration lied to the press, barred reporters from entering Grenada, and provided news outlets with their decidedly sanitized and favorable images of the war.

In the book Toxic Sludge is Good For You, authors John Stauber and Sheldon Rampton state that after being shut-out of the Grenada War, journalists raised enough controversy to lead to the creation of bi-partisan committee that tried to best balance the media and press in wartime. The idea of a media pool was developed and faced its first real challenge in the 1989 invasion of Panama to oust General Manuel Noriega. Ostensibly, the pool was to provide journalists with quick and easy access to the military and war but quickly turned out to be yet another way to subvert the role of reporters. Media pool members got to the island late, after being delayed two hours by the Pentagon. When the reporters arrived they were detained on a U.S. military base another five hours and therefore missed all the major combat actions which took place during this time. Moreover, the Media Pool was fed outdated information by the U.S. embassy instead of being taken into combat (military personnel refused to take journalists into the combat zone). Overcoming technical difficulties (with a fax machine in the Pentagon), the first pictures of the war surfaced four days later, most of which were taken by the government. The pictures and videos were of parachuting U.S. troops and the reports mostly consisted of U.S. casualties, reporting nothing on the battlefield.

However, media manipulation was not regulated to these short wars. In the 1980's, the Reagan administration secretly tried to overthrow the Sandinista government of Nicaragua, which in 1979 had ousted the American-friendly dictatorship of Anatasia Somoza. In order to win public support for U.S. actions against Nicaragua (trade and economic sanctions), the Reagan administration in January 1983 directed CIA director William Casey to set up an office of "Public diplomacy", described as "a set of domestic political operations comparable to what the CIA conducts against hostile forces abroad; only this time, they were turned against the three key institutions of American democracy: Congress, the press and an informed electorate ... the administration built an unprecedented bureaucracy in the [National Security Council] and the State department designed to keep the news media in line and to restrict conflicting information from reaching the American public." (Stauber & Rampton, 1995).

Following the advice of the then leading Public Relations professionals, the White House created a "communications function", of which the Office of Public Diplomacy (OPD) was primarily to discredit the Sandinista government in the eyes of the American people. Soon a mythical crisis was developed which greatly resembles Bream's first actions in Wag the Dog. Bream, after finding out that the president has been charged with sexual misconduct with a minor, hatches his first plan to subvert the story: he tells his aides to leak a story about a B-3 bomber so his press office can deny press that there is B-3 bomber. Such denial means he’s not lying.

Quote

Bream: Why is the president in China?

Aide: Trade Relations.

Bream: You're goddamn right and its got nothing to do with the B-3 bomber.

Aide: There is no B-3 bomber.

Bream: I just said that. There is no B-3 bomber and I don't know why these rumors get started.

Bream cleverly concocts a diversion. Since the president is in China for trade relations, it is imperative that he stay there for a few more days in order to avoid having to answer to the allegations made against him. However, for it not to seem like the president is extending his stay in China because he does not want to face the allegations, he must give the press something to think about – a crisis involving a B-3 bomber. Bream instructs his aides to "let it slip" to a Washington reporter "I hope this [the president being in China] won’t screw up the B-3 program." Of course, the reporter will ask "what B-3 program and why should it screw it up?" to which his aide will reply "to avert the crisis." At this point in the film Bream does not know what the "crisis" is but leaking the story buys enough time to allow him to create it.

When told by one of his aides that the "story won’t prove out", Bream responds "It doesn’t have to prove out. We just have to distract them." Predictably, the reporters in the film, instead of skeptically addressing the bomber story, spend most of the time asking if the president's stay in China has anything to do with the B-3 bomber and rumors of an "Albanian Ops center." This allows the press office to deny knowledge of any B-3 bomber which only furthers speculation. One reporter asks:

Quote

Is the situation in Albania in anyway related to the Muslim fundamentalist anti-American Uprising?

To which Bream, watching the press conference on television, happily responds:

Quote

Now they get it. There you go. There's a little help.

In other words, all that needs to be done is to leak a false story and enable the curious journalists to expand on it, in the process ignoring allegations against the president. After all, "Muslim fundamentalists" and "anti-American Uprisings" present a threat to national security and "The American Way of life", which are much graver than the sexual misconduct of the president. While the obvious comparison is the President Clinton/Monica Lewinsky scandal*, the Nicaraguan example is more apt since no actual action was taken as in the film. Following directives to find "exploitable themes and trends", the Office of Public Diplomacy during the Reagan administration leaked uncorroborated stories purporting to show the military threat Nicaragua posed to the U.S. One such story was the 1984 "MIGS crisis." The White House leaked information to the press that claimed Nicaragua was on the verge of receiving Soviet Fighter planes. Later research showed that the story did not "prove out" but the story served its purpose. Television news frequently played the story of the MIGS crisis, to the extent that regular news programs were interrupted to give "special bulletins" about it. Moreover, the story diverted attention from the Nicaraguan election, which was held that week and in which the Sandinista government - the one Reagan was trying to overthrow - won by a large margin. In fact, the election was the first "free" Nicaraguan election, though it was soon dismissed by Reagan as a "sham." (Hertsgaard, 1988 )

The most striking example of the similarity between the events in Wag the Dog and the news media in wartime may be the 1991 Gulf War. In the film, faked news footage of a young "Albanian girl" (an actress) fleeing a ransacked, digitally created "Albanian village" is the central means by which Hollywood producer Motss hopes to convince Americans that there is actually a war going on, and most importantly compel enough sympathy and a sense of urgency to distract attention from allegations made against the president. Motss refers to the girl as his "young girl in the rubble" meant to "mobilize" public opinion in favor of the war. While the Gulf War was real, in order to justify and encourage support the Bush administration needed its own "young girl in the rubble." That girl was 15 year-old Nayirah who testified to Iraqi atrocities at the 1991 Human Rights Caucus.

In Wag the Dog the challenge was to convince Americans that there was an actual war; however, the Gulf presented the challenge of making the case for war - a task which involved doing two things: making Hussein the unique embodiment of evil and sanitizing the image of Kuwait in the eyes of Americans. In the book, Second Front, John MacArthur explains many of the details in Pr campaign of the Gulf War. Up until a week before the invasion of Kuwait, Saddam Hussein was an ally of the United States. Throughout the 1980's Hussein's ruthlessness was ignored by the United States since they both shared a mutual enemy in Iran. But the invasion changed all that. The invasion of Iraq would cause a political upheaval in the region as well as impugn on U.S. ability to control resources**. The sanitizing of Kuwait meant the portrayal of Kuwait as a young burgeoning democracy and thus worth the blood of U.S. soldiers. In the cynical words of an Army PR Hal Steward:

Quote

If and when a shooting war starts reporters will begin to wonder why American soldiers are dying for oil-rich sheiks.

Further complicating matters was the fact that Kuwait was not a young bourgeoning democracy. In 1991, Kuwait was ruled by a family oligarchy, the al-Sabah, who disbanded the Kuwaiti national assembly in 1986 giving all executive power to an Emir chosen by and from the family. Even before the disbanding of the national assembly, women were excluded from the political process and only 65,000 males out of a nation of two million were allowed to vote. Kuwait also crushed the small democratic movement it had growing, banned political rallies and had a bad reputation because of its near enslavement of its major workforce who were foreigners (MacArthur, 1992).

In order to turn public opinion for Kuwait, the Kuwaiti government financed one of the largest public relations ever. The first step was the creation of the "Citizens for a Free Kuwait" who were represented by the public relations group Hill & Knowlton. For all its efforts in the Gulf War, Hill and Knowlton received nearly 11 million US dollars in fees from the Kuwaiti government. The reach of Hill & Knowlton's campaign was wide: national days for Kuwait were scheduled; t-shirts were made; and all form of news media were bombarded with pamphlets, clips and videos. On October 10, 1991, three months before the war, the congressional Human Rights Caucus held a hearing on Capitol Hill, officially the first formal opportunity to present evidence for Iraq's human rights violations. However, the Human Rights Caucus was not a committee of congress. This is in the context in which Hill & Knowlton presented Nayirah, a 15 year-old who, in a tearful testimony, claimed to have seen Iraqi soldiers loot Kuwaiti incubators, leaving the children to die on the cold floor. Nayirah, like other witnesses that day, did not reveal her last name, citing fear of Iraqi reprisals against her family. In fact, Nayirah was the daughter of Kuwait's ambassador to the United States, Saud Nasir al-Sabah, and thus hardly a reliable witness. Nevertheless, the story gained national coverage. MacArthur says of the story:

Quote

Of all the accusations made against the dictator, none had more impact on American public opinion than the one about Iraqi soldiers removing 312 babies from their incubators and leaving them to die on the cold hospital floors of Kuwait City.

The story was repeated by the president, all major media outlets (TV, radio, newspapers) and later congressmen cited the story as one of the primary examples of Iraqi barbarity and thus reason for war. Eventually the incubator story made its way to Amnesty International who knew nothing of it before the day of Nayirah's testimony. But the story was false. Kuwait's own investigators could not confirm the story, nor could Amnesty International who later retracted it after further investigations. Nayirah herself was never made available for testimony (MacArthur, 1992).

Perhaps the most insidious form of media manipulation stems from the use of pre-packaged news, or video news releases. It is still not known, for example, what videos Hill and Knowlton produced for air play on TV in the Gulf, nor are they willing to reveal this. In the article Under Bush: a New Age of Pre-packaged Television News, David Barstow and Robin Stein detail the expansion of pre-packaged news in the last decade. Pre-packaged news is news segments specifically produced to be indistinguishable from regular Network TV news, complete with scripts, interviews, and suggested lead-ins. While pre-packaged news existed in the time of the Grenada and Panama wars, in the form of favorable or "sanitized" video footage, the use of video news releases has grown exponentially since and has become much more sophisticated. These videos feature "reporters" who report on an issue, just as if it were regular news. Public relations professionals are careful to not overtly push a message though the segments never feature criticisms of their positions. The segments are distributed to various media outlets and subsequently played to millions of viewers. Networks regularly edit these video news releases by, for example, cutting the paid government employee out and using their own reporters to read the Government-written or Public relations-written script (Barstow & Stein, 2005).

Another carefully orchestrated plan of media manipulation in the film Wag the Dog remarkably resembles the use of Video News releases to engender certain sentiments in the public. In light of the President's return from China, Bream stages a ceremonial event: an Albanian young girl and her grandmother thank the president for his help in their country, and thus the segment broadcasted live in the movie serves to rationalize the fictional war to the American public by showing the good fortune it is bringing about. This deliberate act of manipulation is virtually identical in the first case the New York Times article cites, in which a jubilant Iraqi-American says "Thank you, Bush. Thank you, U.S.A." to a camera crew in Kansas City for a segment about reaction to the fall of Baghdad. The segment was produced by the U.S. State Department.

However, the war on terrorism began before the war in Iraq - in Afghanistan. The Administration used video news releases to justify and support the war in Afghanistan. A total of 59 segments (according to the Times article) were produced, "reporting" how successful the U.S. war on Afghanistan had been. The video news releases explained that as a result of U.S. action, Afghan women were "liberated", now being free to go to school and participate in their country's politics. One such video featured reporter Tish Clark, who later learned that the segment was government produced. Clark, following standard industry practice, had edited the tape and read the script giving the segment the reality of "real news." The segment was broadcast to millions of viewers who were not made aware that the segment was a product of the government. The effective blurring of the lines between "real news" and government or PR produced news, through censorship and media complicity, has led to marriage between the media and the government, in which the government is the greater benefactor.

The Complicity of the Media

In any marriage, one expects to find some storming and shouting. But how much storming and shouting did the press do? While each of the wars from Grenada to the Gulf elicited enough anger from various journalists that new committees were formed with the expressed purpose of better accommodating the demands of journalists in Wartime, journalists consistently complied with prima facie cases of military censorship rather than vigorously challenge them..

The Grenada Invasion is case in point. A day before the invasion, two ABC reporters captured footage of U.S. Navy jets and Marine helicopters on the neighboring island of Barbados. The airplanes landed, transferring soldiers and equipment to helicopters and men in business suits to the Jets. Sharon Sacks, one of the reporters, called the U.S Embassy wanting to find out if the event was signal of invasion but was told it was an evacuation of students (later shown to be false). When this story was filed to ABC News, editor Robert Fyre declined to run the story citing Washington stories that the prospective invasion of Grenada was "preposterous". Further comments from Washington suggested that a U.S. carrier in the region was there to ferry stranded foreigners, not prepare for invasion. All of these were lies, yet the press did not run, lead with, or feature this curious case of Government censorship and deliberate misinformation in its newscasts (Hertsgaard, 1988 ).

John MacArthur, in the book Second Front, details many of the cases in which top newspapers and TV editors simply conceded to the military, showing a nascent lack of vigilance in pursuit of news and complicity with government censorship. After the failure of the National Media Pool system in the Grenada and Panama invasions, another committee was created to address the problems of the press and military in wartime. The compromise was to be tried in the Gulf war but failed miserably. Journalists were confined to hotels and could not independently report; a military escort was necessary on each report; journalists in pools could not choose stories and were instead assigned "slots" by the Pentagon; and journalists' stories had to undergo a "security review" before they could be filed, which is essentially censorship. As a result of these rules journalists agreed to in going into the Gulf War, they were effectively prevented from reporting any other news other than what the Pentagon wanted. Popular stories of the war praised the accuracy of U.S. bombs, and exaggerated the might and quantity of the Iraqi army. IF pre-packaged news represents the most insidious ways of media manipulation, then the conventional acceptance and use of Video News releases in the Journalism industry is probably its most unsettling. In a country that receives over 80 percent of its news from television, what is one to make of the fact that much of what seems like "news" produced by the stations is in fact VNRs produced by the government PR professionals? Are we to na vely assume that the seamless blending of sponsored news and "real news" has negligible impact? The specific purpose of VNRs is the promotion of a product or ideology. The news media's ostensive purpose is to report on different products, whether they be material goods or ideologies. As such, a primary feature of actual journalism is criticism. In order to fulfil its function as an informer, the journalist must be wary of promoting different ideologies, either by short shifting an idea or lacking vigilance in their reporting. The producers of VNRs have a decidedly different objective: the promotion of a product which precludes criticism. Thus, there exists an essential tension between the VNRs and the practice of journalism.

But if VNRs are common then their must be reason for their use. The primary argument for the use of VNRs is its financial benefit to stations: News networks have radically downsized while expanding coverage. The use of VNRs is a cost-saving measure that allows news organizations to gather footage that would either be too expensive to be produced or which they cannot afford at all. Unfortunately, while the argument explains the widespread and conventional use, it says nothing about ethical questions. In Media Codes of Ethics there are no articulated standards for the use of VNRs. While some codes state that work not produced by news organizations should be clearly labelled, this can hardly be sufficient. VNRs still expound, not report on or critique products or ideologies. As a result, the public is still being fed a particular ideology by a news organization. Should the government-produced events of happy Afghan women be accompanied by anything? Is merely noting that this is a product of the government sufficient to curb the ideology produced? Is the later correction of misleading statements or images sufficient? It is impossible to determine precisely how images and videos affect audience perception but that they can should give us caution in thinking that merely labelling uncritical "reporting" is sufficient to prevent propagandizing.

The Impact of "Wag the Dog" Cases

In Wag the Dog, the result of media manipulation is decidedly bleak: the Hollywood producer mysteriously ends up dead and there remains a public permanently deceived about non-existent war. In real life, the consequences are not so different though the casualty is the ability of the public to discern the truth. In the film, some characters express worry that the public will know or find out about the deception but Bream, who refuses to assert the truth or falsity of any statement in the film, gives a devastating response to such naive sentiments:

Quote

You watched The Gulf War. What do you see day after day? The one smart bomb falling down a chimney. The truth? I was in the building when we shot that shot. We shot it in a studio in Falls Church, Virginia, 1/10 scale model of a building.

Asked if the above is true, Bream responds:

Quote

How the **** do we know. You take my point?

This is the crippling skepticism that results when the lines of "real news" and government sponsored or public relations are mixed. The "point" is that the Gulf War images fed to journalists could have been easily been faked by the government. Bream has outlined a possible scenario in which the bombing could have been fictional, asserts it as "truth" but resorts to agnosticism when asked if what he asserts as true is indeed so. That is, how can you tell the difference? We simply don't know.

Moreover, and as Bream argues in the film, it is the visceral impact of the images that matter, not their truth or falsity. While the News media prides itself on its ability to issue public statements correcting mistakes, by the time the media has corrected misleading visual images the point has already been made. Says Bream:

Quote

'54, 40, or fight.' What does that mean? ...'Remember the Maine.' 'Tippcecanoe and Tyler, too.' They’re war slogans. We remember the slogans but we can't remember the war... The Gulf War, smart bomb falling down a chimney. 2,500 missions a day, 100 days. One video of one bomb. The American People bought that War. War is show business.

Bream’s language is important. Firstly, that the Americans "bought" that war, and the comparison of War to show business suggest that the images function to sell Americans a rationale for war and therefore, the images function as arguments justifying and also celebrating military action. Since the country of Albania is little known by Americans, images need to explain the terrorist threat and danger they pose. Why the terrorists are dangerous and the reason for war is explained by the video of a young girl running through the streets of Albania screaming that she has been raped. Why, again, is it justified that the president has gone to war with Albania? The compassion and gratitude shown to the president by an Albanian girl and grandmother when the president arrives. The staged event explains the success of a vague war on an unknown country. Visual images, whether they communicate truth or not have lasting impact.

But of course this conclusion isn't too distressing? Perhaps, the lesson for the public is to develop a "healthy skepticism" toward the Media itself. This is the conclusion of Robert Charles in the informative (but slightly dated) article "Video News Releases: News or Advertising" Charles argues that the charge of "fake news" levied at VNR's is misguided since VNRs often have general news value. For example, in 1993 Pepsi published VNR'S disproving reports that there were syringes in Pepsi bottles which were broadcast on news networks. However, Charles concedes that VNR'S are problematic because they can be used (and are in fact used) to communicate uncritical 'reports' on products or ideologies products. While Charles even-handed approach is appreciated, the conclusion that this should encourage a "healthy skepticism" misses a crucial point: journalists are supposed to be the skeptics. Can the public be expected to have the same time to do as much research as is assumed of journalists? Can the public, for instance, be expected to research reports from overseas? It can easily be replied that a "healthy skepticism" simply entails a suspension of judgment and compels the public to do no more than acquiesce in the face of news. However, this is insufficient. Journalists report information that is supposed to inform the public: this information can then be used by the public to act. Journalists do not present their work in a vacuum in which there is no effect on public attention. Thus, the concept of a "healthy skepticism", while a valuable concept, ignores the demand this will put on a public now expected to critically research the reports of those who are supposed to be its researchers. Though it is unacceptable for the public to take the media simply at face value, it is equally unacceptable that journalists cannot be trusted enough to give fair accounts in the absence of individual research.

Conclusion

Wag The Dog is often referred to as a satire because of the 'absurdity' of its central plot: the creation of a fictional war in order to distract the public from sexual allegations made against the president. On closer inspection, however, the tactics used to manipulate the Media in the film are everyday practices in the world of newsreporting - exemplified by some unknown "Wag the Dog" cases in the Grenadan, Panamanian and Gulf wars. Staged ceremonial events, anonymous (false) leaks to the press, and the creation of sympathetic characters used to explain and justify war are just some of the tactics used in the film which are replicated in the world of news reporting - all of which contributes to making Wag the Dog far from fiction.


---

Notes:

* I say the obvious comparison because of speculation after the 1998 U.S. embassy bombings that President Clinton's retaliation, on the very day he was to face questioning about Lewinsky, was used to distract attention from his trial.
** For more information on the political aspects of the 1991 Gulf War, a good resource is John Pilger whose website is available here.

References:

Barstow David and Robin Stein. "Under Bush: a new era of pre-packaged news." New York Times 13 Mar. 2005 (a copy of this article can be found here).
Charles, Robert. <A href="http://www.worldandi.com/public/1994/september/ci11.cfm">"Video News Releases: News or Advertising", http://www.worldandi.com/. Sep. 1994.
Hertsgaard, Mark. On Bended Knee: The Press and the Reagan Presidency. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1988.
MacArthur, John. Second Front: censorship and propaganda during the Gulf War. New York: Hill & Wang, 1992.
Stauber, John and Rampton, Sheldon. Toxic sludge is good for you : lies, damn lies, and the public relations industry. Monroe: Common Courage Press, 1995. (An excerpt from the book which goes into a little more detail about the Gulf War is available here.).]]> Sat, 12 Jun 2010 20:41:48 +0000 daca41214b39c5dc66674d09081940f0 <![CDATA[Shyamalan's The Village]]> http://www.galilean-library.org/site/index.php/page/index.html/_/essays/literatureandfilm/shyamalans-the-village-r87 Paul Newall (2005)

M. Night Shyamalan's The Village has aroused vociferous responses from viewers and commentators alike but there have been few detailed studies of the themes and ideas explored in considerable depth in the movie. In this essay we look at the celebration and criticism of utopian communities alongside the love story that forms the core of the film.

It is worth noting in passing, however, that Shyamalan is not thought the modern Hitchcock for nothing. In particular, the use of editing in The Village to maintain the deception until the last possible moment (especially when Ivy Walker is set to leave) is masterful. The role of colour, too, and the manner in which it adds to the tension and sense of separation, is quite brilliant. Some viewers reacted badly to the plot twists, perhaps because of his other works in which a similar experience of having the rug pulled out from under them had made them expect such a device, but here protests miss the point of the film and ignore what has been achieved over the course of the story. By examining it more closely we can learn how actually nothing has changed in the community between the opening and closing scenes, save our feeling for what was important about the village after all.

Before shooting began, Shyamalan put all his actors through a form of "boot camp" in which they were introduced to the skills required to live off the land self-sufficiently. From their own comments, it seems this period helped them appreciate how they would need to rely on one another as well as understand how much pleasure could be derived from such a life. Joaquin Phoenix even carved Bryce Dallas Howard a guide stick for her blind character Ivy Walker that made it easy work to pretend to be in love with him, she has said. It is against this backdrop, however, that Shyamalan examines the utopian ideal and the many questions associated with it.

Covington Woods is a community isolated from the outside world by the presence of "those we don't speak of", hostile creatures who live in the woods in something of a truce with the inhabitants of the village: they stay away so long as the people maintain their border unbreached. A line of markers and a watchtower mark the detente. These circumstances are apparently coincidental, however: the elders moved to Covington originally to get away from the nearby towns – "wicked places where wicked people live". Having lost loved ones to crime, the founders of the community have journeyed away from the decadence they saw in the world to try again and provide a better life for their children.

Shyamalan uses his village to plumb the depths of this life for philosophical insights into the nature of the utopian venture. The first and perhaps most general issue is whether we can secede from the world to avoid societal problems or whether these are inevitably part of life? Can we create a community without them? Many people, it seems, believe we cannot, holding wars and criminality to be unavoidable and a part – if an unfortunate one – of the human condition. This is August Nicholl's opinion, who wakes with a start mumbling "… like a dog can smell you." When Lucius Hunt asks him what was said, he expands:

Quote

You may run from sorrow, as we have; sorrow will find you. It can smell you.

Later, near the close of the movie, he repeats the lesson he has learned from recent events, including the death of his son, saying "we cannot run from heartache… heartache is a part of life. We know that now." Somehow this can strike us as an easy answer, though: certainly the community of Covington Woods does not appear to have any of the concerns faced by the distant towns, although we might say that Shyamalan has created a fiction only. There is a distinction to be made between unavoidable sorrows due to death and accidents, on the one hand, and malaises like rape and murder. Can people come to terms with the former while learning to avoid the latter? Is it unduly pessimistic or instead realistic to answer in the negative? The Village shows us that this demarcation is a sound one, but its accuracy depends on the extent to which we take the film to reflect genuine possibilities in our world. We can also look to actual utopian communities to help us decide this issue.

Even if they are not perfect, of course, we can still wonder whether Covington Woods and other utopians societies are better than the outside world, and what "better" can mean in this context. The villagers seem genuinely happy, for example, but again we can object that this is based on Shyamalan's imagination and may not be representative. Nevertheless, those of us with experience of life in smaller communities can attest to the value of closer integration with the people around us while, conversely, the alienation due to modern life in large cities has been the subject of much study by sociologists and psychologist, among others. When we listen to Jake (actually a cameo by Shyamalan himself) holding forth on how to best work for the Wildlife Preserve, all the stories in his newspaper concern murders or combat deaths.

What factors limit the success of separatism? The most important one for the story is the medical constraint. Stabbed by Noah Percy, Lucius lies dying from an infection that can be cured by medicines available in the dreaded towns and this knowledge weighs heavily on the mind of Edward Walker. The additional irony is that Lucius had himself requested permission to travel to the towns to return with potential new medicines, his intention being to improve the quality of life in the village and perhaps help Noah. This, of course, is a common objection to utopian ideals (and also to primitivism): we may rue the evils of modern life, but are we prepared to do without the many advances in medicine if we give up on it and try to start anew? The implication is that either we have to make just such a bargain or we cannot consistently reject the outside world.

When it comes to the threat faced by Lucius, indeed, Walker does not insist on the separation of Covington Woods that he has fought so hard to protect. His wife, on the other hand, is the voice of the critic of utopia:

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You have made an oath, Edward, as we all have, never to go back. It is a painful bargain but no good can come without sacrifice. These are your words I am saying. You cannot break the oath. It is sacred.

This idea that "no good can come without sacrifice" is one some people accept, such as those who refuse blood transfusions or invasive surgery that could potentially save them in order to maintain a principle that holds these are morally (or otherwise) wrong. For Walker, however, matters are not so straightforward. "It is a crime what has happened to Lucius", he insists, and although this event occurred within the community, there is a sense in which the intentions behind it have been violated by the attempted murder, a justification Walker uses to appeal to outside help. Is this acceptable? More importantly, is it not somehow an absurd question to be asking?

This narrow view of utopias relies on a strict separation of them from the outside world, but on the face of it there is no reason why we should judge them according to a criterion of self-sufficiency. The Amish, for instance, prefer to live apart but occasionally trade with others. Can the utopian community, by its example, show that a different life is possible without necessarily giving up on everything? Shyamalan hints at this interpretation with the apparently incidental character of Kevin, the patrolman who guards the border of the Walker Wildlife Preserve. Confronted with the desperate figure of Ivy Walker, he is won over by her appeal and obtains the medicines she needs. More than this, however, we notice the mixture of quiet awe and fascination with which he sits in his van when she has gone, deep in contemplation. This is a particular case of the appeal of utopian ideas, of course, in which we wonder if the lives we lead are not really taking place in the best of all possible worlds in spite of the technological advances we claim to have made. Perhaps it is for this reason that Walker has arranged not to keep people in his community, a function carried out by "those we don't speak of", but to keep them out – achieved, as we learn, by paying government officials to prevent plane routes from passing over the woods as well as by the setting up of the preserve.

In addition to the matter of how the village should interact with the towns, there is the converse: how should wider society treat utopian communities? Do people have the right to secede if they wish? Here again we come to the medical critique: if a group proposes to settle apart from others, should they then be denied access to public institutions and services? The issue here is that in most states we are expected to contribute to the maintenance of order and other provisions, such that withdrawing into a separate community would deprive others of funding. Why, then, should such people remain entitled to healthcare? This tension is what Shyamalan exploits with the dilemma faced by the elders when Lucius' life hangs in the balance.

It remains the case that Walker breaks his own oath, if not himself then through his daughter, by allowing contact with the towns. With this exception, he and the other elders maintain the pretence of the creatures inhabiting the woods to sustain the separation of their community. Are "those we don't speak of" an example of a noble lie, a shared falsehood used ostensibly to bring about positive consequences? We see, eventually, that the creatures are only "farce", but they sustain the integrity of the village and its ideals. Here we find another interesting question explored by Shyamalan: are such noble lies required by utopias, in one form or another? Plainly other societies cope without the threat of beasts clad in red, but is there a necessity for an inward-looking mentality of one form or another, or at least a feeling that there is no need for the trappings of the outside world? For one thing, the suggestion seems to be that it is difficult to leave behind everything, as Lucius observes when he tells his mother that "there are secrets in every corner of this village. Do you not feel it? Do you not see it?" Her justification is that she does not want to be ruled by her memories but at the same time does not want to forget them and the reasons why she decided to become part of Covington Woods in the first place.

The noble lie, in any case, does not scare Lucius and he is conscious of this medical problem. Warned of the possible danger, he insists that the creatures will sense his motives: "they will see that I am pure of intention and not afraid." Where the death of Daniel Nicholson plays on his father’s mind, convincing him (as we have seen) that sorrow is unavoidable, for Lucius it outweighs the threat of potential harm – in short, it does not suffice to keep him content to stay in the village. This restlessness, caused in Lucius by a desire to help others, ifs effectively countered in his fellows by the reminders of "those we don't speak of" (particularly the warnings in the form of the skinned animals). That some, like Lucius, are not satisfied suggests that to preserve an order based on a lie those who seem likely to disregard it must be brought into the deception. This is the subtext when Walker asks "who do you think will continue this place, this life? Do you plan to live forever? It is in them that our future lies. It is in Ivy and Lucius that this way of life will continue."

This, though, is one of the most difficult aspects to the story and Shyamalan is careful with it, not providing a clear – if any – answer. The optimistic interpretation is perhaps that Ivy and Lucius will appreciate the value of the community they are a part of and agree that its survival is more important than the truth, such that a relatively harmless lie is a price worth paying. Walker tells his daughter that "there is no one in this village who has not lost someone irreplaceable, who has not felt loss so deeply that they question the very merit of living at all", but he is speaking only for the elders. When he insists that "it is a darkness I wished you would never know", there is no reason to doubt his sincerity and yet it is the morality of the means that disappoints Ivy. "I am sad for you, Papa", she replies, and this is the indictment of the endeavour as a whole and the point on which the story turns (with one exception, discussed below). Is the life in Covington Woods justification enough for the lie, or does it show us that utopias are predicated on a discontinuity with the rest of the world that in reality does not exist and hence can only be sustained by lies? "What was the purpose of our leaving?", Walker asks. "Let us not forget – it was out of hope of something good and right." Challenged that he has put the community at threat, he ultimately retreats to a moral argument:

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Yes I have risked – I hope I am always able to risk – everything for the just and right cause. If we did not make this decision we could never again call ourselves innocent – and that, in the end, is what we have protected here: innocence. That I'm not ready to give up.

Here, it seems, is our answer: it is better always to do what is right, and the perspective of his beloved daughter has won the day.

Although this is an impassioned speech and it convinces the objectors, Shyamalan gives us a different kind of innocence to that Walker appears to have had in mind. All the exploration of utopian communities and ideals serves as a backdrop to what The Village ultimately is – a love story. For all the critical commentary on the twists in his plots, in this movie his direction takes second place to his writing, with some beautiful dialogue underscoring the depth of the relationship between Ivy and Lucius. The latter part, according to Shyamalan himself, was written specifically for Phoenix, and his soft, breathless delivery perfectly compliments his nervous yet quietly confident role as Ivy's guardian angel. "How is it that you are unafraid while the rest of us quake in our boots?", she asks him, and he responds in a way that helps us understand Shyamalan's verdict on Covington Woods and experiments like it:

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I do not worry about what will happen – only what needs to be done.

For Lucius the threat of the depravity to be found in the towns or the dangers lurking in the trees has no effect because of the attitude he takes towards life. His utterly unconditional love for Ivy is but one facet of a character that seeks only to achieve what is necessary and no more. In many respects he may strike us as something of a simpleton, but this speaks to our own prejudices that Shyamalan is challenging. Lucius senses that the separation of the community from the world outside is one side of a false dilemma and wishes to travel to the towns not for his own benefit but for that of others. He is simultaneously trapped by his indecisiveness in personal matters, which Ivy summarises by telling him that "sometimes we don't do things we want to do so that others won't know that we want to do them." The tension arising in him as a result of these two aspects, in which his quietude and willingness to selflessly help others restricts his ability to tell Ivy how he really feels, is something of a microcosm for the strange way in which utopian communities exist outside the modern world even as their very closure limits what they can achieve.

For her part, Ivy is the heroine of the tale as a whole and ultimately saves Lucius. She is the leader-in-waiting of the community and is able to quiet Noah as no one else can. The interesting thing about her is that she is blind. For Shyamalan, likely intentionally, this has two consequences: firstly, she cannot see the outside world when she ventures into it – nor that the creature that attacks her in the woods is really Noah. When her father tells the Percys that "your son has made our lies real", his daughter’s lack of sight is an equal factor and gives them a chance to maintain the pretence if they wish to. The moment at which the elders all stand in agreement is significant, as we will come to appreciate below.

Secondly, she is truly self-reliant in a way that the other villagers (excepting Lucius) lack the courage to be – and even Walker, when faced with the conflict between his principles and his concern for Lucius, choses the former. We could say, of course, that this actually is the brave decision to make, but there is a strange disconnect between his words and his actions. He tells Ivy that the burden of travelling to the towns to find medicines is "yours and yours alone", but he sends two escorts to accompany her and tries to convince the other elders that this is the right thing to do. Moreover, that Lucius might have died was due to his living Covington Woods, where not only were barriers erected in the form of "those we don't speak of" to prevent villagers going to the towns to improve medical conditions but also the preserve is strictly controlled to ensure that no influences from the towns reaches it. When Noah stabs Lucius, then, it is difficult to accept that responsibility for remedying its consequences falls solely to Ivy when the elders have brought about the circumstances that would lead to death without the towns. Indeed, we could argue that the movie demonstrates that the effects of our choices are far wider ranging than we might suppose, in this case for all intents and purposes condemning a man to death for the sake of a principle. Walker is consistent initially but changes his mind when his daughter tells him that she will die with Lucius.

To understand how the problem is answered by Shyamalan, we have to look to the relationship between Lucius and Ivy and how it is used to conclude The Village. There is no better way to stress the importance of these characters than the beautiful porch scene in which Lucius quiets Ivy. "What can you not say what is in your head?", she asks him, after taunting him with talk of their wedding and making plain that she knows how he feels about her. "Why can you not stop saying what is in yours?", he replies, and then it begins, leaving the viewer spellbound:

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Why must you lead, when I want to lead? If I want to dance, I will ask you to dance. If I want to speak, I will open my mouth and speak. Everyone is forever plaguing me to speak for them. Why? What good is it to tell you you are in my every thought from the time I wake? What good can come from my saying that I sometimes cannot think clearly or do my work properly? What gain can rise from my telling you that the only time I feel fear as others do is when I think of you in harm? That is why I am on this porch, Ivy Walker. I fear for your safety before all others.

Lucius loves Ivy completely, in a fashion that takes no account of where they are and for what reasons. Ivy, likewise, is utterly certain of their love and tests her faith in him when the creature first visits the village. As touching as this may be, though, what relevance does it have to any of the foregoing or to interpreting The Village? The answer lies in the closing moments, when the elders have made their pact to perpetuate their stories and the community the way it is. As they stand in unison, Ivy returns and ignores them all, rushing to the bedside. As she grips Lucius’ hand, the questions of where she is or what principles should guide our lives fade into nothing and the words of her father ring in our ears. "She is led by love. The world moves for love. It kneels before it in all." Covington Woods is many things – an experiment or a critique of society and the utopian communities that try to improve on it – but it is the place where yet again the world moves and buckles under the weight of love. What, in the final analysis, is most important? Ivy Walker answers in two words and all else comes to nought: "I'm back."]]> Sat, 12 Jun 2010 20:37:23 +0000 766ebcd59621e305170616ba3d3dac32 <![CDATA[Soderbergh's Solaris]]> http://www.galilean-library.org/site/index.php/page/index.html/_/essays/literatureandfilm/soderberghs-solaris-r86 Paul Newall (2005)

When Steven Soderbergh's version of Stanislaw Lem's novel Solaris opens with the sight of Kris Kelvin sat on his bed, listening to the disembodied sound of his dead wife's voice, it is immediately clear that the script has departed from the text in significant ways.

Kelvin has been in this position for an unspecified amount of time; his surroundings, including his apartment, are functional; and as we spend more time following his life it is apparent that he pays little attention to those around him – quite an irony, given that he works as a psychologist. He appears to be a man lost, making just enough effort to get by.

Lem's 1961 book is his most famous, the subject of a previous film by the legendary Andrei Tarkovsky and part of the old tradition of science fiction that dealt with the ideas involved in – and consequences of – space exploration, rather than the new technologies actually or potentially associated with it. Lem's Solaris is an enigma, a planet that occupies a twin-sun system and has somehow achieved a stable orbit, ostensibly by its own efforts. The subject of a century of studies and exploration, its ocean is reckoned by some to be alive and conscious, as well as aware that it is being examined and reacting accordingly. Kris Kelvin, our narrator, is part of this tradition and explains it at length in the text. In Soderbergh's reworking, however, Solaris is only under assessment as a possible source of energy; there are no lengthy scientific digressions to set the scene and this is the first of many departures. When Kelvin docks at the Prometheus station at the request of his friend Gibarian, two people are dead and one missing – the former including Gibarian himself who has committed suicide. In Lem's book there were only three crew onboard when Kelvin arrived – the late Gibarian, Snow and Sartorius (a male, replaced by the female Gordon) – while Gibarian's son (whom Kelvin chases) is not mentioned at all. There are other discrepancies that will be noted as their relevance becomes apparent.

There are several themes at work in Solaris, the first of which is a critique of the ideology of exploration that Lem had Snow expound upon at length, words that Soderbergh gives to Gibarian in his soliloquy intended to help Kelvin understand what is happening on the Prometheus. It is worth quoting in full:

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We take off into the cosmos, ready for anything: for solitude, for hardship, for exhaustion, death. Modesty forbids us to say so, but there are times when we think pretty well of ourselves. And yet, if we examine it more closely, our enthusiasm turns out to be all sham. We don’t want to conquer the cosmos, we simply want to extend the boundaries of Earth to the frontiers of the cosmos. For us, such and such a planet is as arid and the Sahara, another as frozen as the North Pole, yet another as lush as the Amazon basin. We are humanitarian and chivalrous; we don’t want to enslave other races, we simply want to bequeath them our values and take over their heritage in exchange. We think ourselves as the Knights of the Holy Contact. This is another lie. We are only seeking Man. We have no need of other worlds. We need mirrors. We don't know what to do with other worlds. A single world, our own, suffices us; but we can't accept it for what it is. We are searching for an ideal image of our own world: we go in quest of a planet, of a civilization superior to our own but developed on the basis of a prototype of our primeval past. At the same time, there is something inside us which we don’t like to face up to, from which we try to protect ourselves, but which nevertheless remains, since we don't leave Earth in a state of primal innocence. We arrive here as we are in reality, and when the page is turned and that reality is revealed to us – that part of our reality which we would prefer to pass over in silence – then we don't like it anymore.

[…]

I'm talking about what we all wanted: contact with another civilization. Now we've got it! And we can observe, through a microscope, as it were, our own monstrous ugliness, our folly, our shame!

Writing at a time when the conquest of near-space was considered a "race", Lem's Snow saw it instead as a testimony to our arrogance at wanting to spread our human conceits unto the very edge of the universe rather than make contact with other forms of life in order to improve our own. This is central to Lem's work as he has Kelvin go over the various attempts by scientists to understand Solaris and attribute a status (alive and/or conscious?) to its ocean. For Soderbergh it is of lesser import, and yet he introduces the problem in a different way through Rheya's struggle in Kelvin's cabin to piece together her memories. She recalls a conversation with Gibarian and others, in which she was "talking about a higher form of intelligence". Gibarian had responded dismissively with "you’re talking about something else. You're talking about a man with a white beard again. You are ascribing human characteristics to something that isn't human." As viewers, we can contrast his certainty here with his temporally later realisation that this very character of his attempts to study Solaris had ensured he could never understand it, warning Kelvin that "there are no answers, only choices." At this early stage, though, Kelvin is himself quite sure that "given all the elements of the known universe, and enough time, our existence is inevitable. It's no more mysterious than trees, or sharks. We're a mathematical probability, and that's all." It seems we are again invited to note this confidence as we come to watch it erode over the course of the movie.

In the novel, the dead Gibarian visits Kelvin – just as he does in the film version, but for longer. During their conversation he explains why there is and must remain a barrier to any understanding of the polytheres (his term for the apparitions):

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We are the cause of our own sufferings. The polytheres behave strictly as a kind of amplifier of our own thoughts. Any attempt to understand the motivation of these occurrences is blocked by our own anthropomorphism. Where there are no men, there cannot be motives accessible to men.

Here we see an extension of Lem's critique: just as we invariably talk about God from a human perspective, we extend the conceit that we can fathom the non-human to Solaris and indeed anything we might find as we advance the frontier through space. We assume that our reason is sufficient to comprehend what motivates God or an entity like Solaris but this presumption remains, for Lem, a barrier to any genuine understanding. Some have argued that we simply have no alternative but to judge the actions of gods or "higher forms of intelligence" by our own standards, but it seems Lem is making the further suggestion that it is our viewing life as a mystery to be solved that is the deeper problem (an idea found in Wittgenstein, most famously). This is the lesson of several so-called Eastern schools of thought, too, insofar as the immediate experience of life is broken into pieces in the attempt to make sense of it, creating a puzzle that was not inherent in the experience itself. The behaviour of Solaris defies the efforts of all the "Solarists" to comprehend it, as Kelvin discovers for himself when he tries to achieve the same via a polythere drawn from his own memories. All he can learn, it seems, is about himself (whence the suggestion some have made that if and when we finally complete the jigsaw puzzle we will be confronted with an image of ourselves looking out at us). When we reach the close of the movie, perhaps the only motivation we can guess at on the part of Solaris was to give Kelvin the chance to do so.

The second aspect of both film and book is given by the lines spoken by Gibarian that follow those quoted above:

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Before we can proceed with our research, either our own thoughts or their materialized forms must be destroyed. It is not within our power to destroy our thoughts. As for destroying their material forms, that would be like committing murder.

The counter-argument to this position is stated forcefully by Gordon, who tells Kelvin that "we are in a situation that is beyond morality." The question is whether or not the polytheres are fully human, and even if they are not whether they should be accorded the same rights. (These issues are especially relevant given contemporary concerns about the consequences of cloning.) In particular, Rheya is identical with her "real" counterpart except that she is formed from Kelvin's memories of her, some of which may be inaccurate (a point we return to below). This is complicated by doubts over whether she can survive away from Solaris, but is an incomplete memory or the effect of the polytheres on the crew of the Prometheus sufficient to justify their destruction? By extension, Lem was asking the same of any forms of life we might encounter in our exploration of the cosmos. That Snow is eventually revealed to be a polythere himself (this does not occur in the novel) – having killed his progenitor by accident – renders the issue still more difficult in Soderbergh's reproduction because it strikes us that action is only mooted for those known to be copies. That is, there is an epistemic dimension: no one advocates the demise of Snow because they do not know that he is a polythere, nor have any reason to suspect it, but Gordon (and later Rheya herself) poses the question regarding Rheya and her own visitor because she is certain of their status.

By making the change to Snow's character in such a significant way, Soderbergh seems to be undermining any possible case for destroying Rheya. Likewise, the scene involving Snow and Gordon in which the latter lets slip that Kelvin sent the previous version of Rheya away does not appear in Lem's work (indeed, in the book it is Snow who eventually uses the device on Rheya at her insistence), and we may ask why it was given such prominence? What it achieves is to force us to reflect on Kelvin’s earlier choice and how his failure to understand his situation was dispelled by banishing the problem, just as Gordon's desire to rid herself of her visitor seems driven more by her own discomfort than any desire to learn about how Solaris sustains them. That Rheya is upset upon discovering that she is a copy only serves to underline this failure to distinguish meaningfully between polythere and reality, which Kelvin comes to appreciate when she asks him "but am I really Rheya?" He replies, making the irrelevance of this demarcation plain, by saying "I don’t know anymore. All I see is you."

The third strand to the story is the fascinating question of how well we can ever know someone (sometimes part of the so-called "problem of other minds"). Although we the viewers are already aware that this Rheya is not really Kelvin's dead wife but an imitation, she is not and has to piece the realisation together herself. "I do remember things, but I don’t remember being there. I don’t remember experiencing those things." Obtaining her memories from Kelvin's, she has content but not context. From our privileged vantage point we watch as this inevitably leads to tragedy:

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Don't you see? I came from your memory of her. That's the problem. I'm not a whole person. In your memory you get to control everything, so even if you remember something wrong I am predetermined to carry it out. I'm suicidal because that's how you remember me. My voice sounds the way it does because that's how you remember it.

Although we can observe that Kelvin would be expected to have largely negative memories of his wife given her suicide and the part he feels he played in it, there is something more important at stake in the inadequacy of his recollections; namely, that all memories are inherently incomplete – even those we have of ourselves. Given that Rheya is dead and therefore must be reconstructed from his memory, the question is not why this should happen but how it could be otherwise? The implication of the polytheres, it seems, is that there can be no total knowledge or understanding of another. Drawn as they are from the thoughts of the crew, they are nevertheless recognised as incomplete renderings by their "real" double; but rather than this being a comment on a supposed failure by Solaris to achieve a perfect copy, instead they speak of the failure of our own conceptions of others to match them. That is, it is we who fall short, not the polytheres or their originator.

Kelvin appreciates this failure, at least in part, by rejecting the idea that his memories should dictate how life with the new Rheya must play out:

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I don't believe we're predetermined to relive our past. I think that we can choose to do it differently. The day I left and you said you wouldn't make it – I didn’t hear you because I was angry. This is my chance to undo that mistake, and I need you to help me.

He thus increasingly conceives of Rheya not as a copy of his wife but an opportunity to atone for his previous errors, with his admission ("all I see is you") pointing us in the direction of acknowledging that complete knowledge of others is both impossible and what we yearn for nonetheless. When Rheya says "I wish we could just live inside that feeling forever", it is difficult indeed to recall that she is supposed to be composed of Kelvin's memories and sustained by Solaris, rather than a new person in her own right. He is, as it were, on almost a level playing field with this Rheya because while she came into existence with an incomplete recollection of her past, Kelvin comes to realise that he is handicapped in exactly the same way as we all are. The desire of lovers to slow time or live in a perfect moment then becomes not a hopeless dream but exactly the response we should expect given that this feeling can neither be recorded as it is in our memories nor expressed in a way that has the same meaning to anyone else.

This, of course, is the last and greatest theme of Solaris: love. Soderbergh has straightforwardly admitted that he intended to tell a love story and it is here that his version departs most significantly of all from Lem’s novel. Back from Solaris, Kelvin tries to describe what "home" means to him:

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What did that word mean to me? Earth? I thought of the great bustling cities where I would wander and lose myself, and I thought of them as I had thought of the ocean on the second or third night, when I had wanted to throw myself upon the dark waves. I shall immerse myself among men. I shall be silent and attentive, an appreciative companion. There will be many acquaintances, friends, women – and perhaps even a wife. For a while, I shall have to make a conscious effort to smile, nod, stand and perform the thousands of little gestures which constitute life on Earth, and then those gestures will become reflexes again.

This, however, is where the two tales diverge. Lem’s Kelvin declares that he will "find new interests and occupations" but "not give myself completely to them, as I shall never again give myself completely to anything or anybody", a profoundly negative lesson drawn from his experience with Solaris that he continues as follows:

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On the surface, I was calm; in secret, without really admitting it, I was waiting for something. Her return? How could I have been waiting for that? We all know that we are material creatures, subject to the laws of physiology and physics, and not even the power of all our feelings combined can defeat those laws. All we can do is detest them. The age-old faith of lovers and poets in the power of love, stronger than death, that finis vitae sed non amore, is a lie, useless and not even funny.

He closes by saying that he lives in expectation, persisting "in the faith that the time of cruel miracles was not past". Soderbergh's Kelvin, on the other hand, takes another route by ending his discussion of home with a desperate admission:

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… but I was haunted by the idea that I had remembered her wrong. Somehow I was wrong about everything.

Notwithstanding the incompleteness of his memories, Kelvin cannot shake the feeling that those things he did recall were inaccurate, born of his grief rather than a genuine reflection of what occurred between him and Rheya. Rinsing his finger under the tap, he realises that he did not cut it; turning to the fridge, he sees a picture that he did not remember was there (leading the new Rheya to form the wrong impression of their home); and so Kelvin learns that his grief is conditioned by his inability to let go of his guilt and focus on the beautiful aspects of their relationship. When, with a start, he realises that Rheya is with him and asks her if he is alive or dead, she replies:

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We don’t have to think like that anymore. We’re together now. Everything we’ve done is forgiven. Everything.

In Soderbergh's Solaris, it is not clear whether Kelvin and Rheya are really back on Earth or whether Kelvin is dreaming this scene as he dies on the Prometheus. What is apparent, though, is that Kelvin has been given another chance precisely because life ends but love does not.]]> Sat, 12 Jun 2010 20:34:29 +0000 605ff764c617d3cd28dbbdd72be8f9a2 <![CDATA[Tykwer's Heaven]]> http://www.galilean-library.org/site/index.php/page/index.html/_/essays/literatureandfilm/tykwers-heaven-r85 Paul Newall (2005)

Although he had claimed upon its completion that the Three Colours Trilogy would be his final work, Krzysztof Kieślowski was writing (with his long-time collaborator Kryzsztof Piesiewicz) a second trilogy at the time of his death, to include films entitled Heaven, Hell and Purgatory.

When the Polish master died, the script for the first was passed to the German director Tom Tykwer who had himself already plumbed the subjects of fate and coincidence, as well as "the relationship between the two", and was therefore a perfect choice to interpret a work sitting squarely in Kieślowskian territory.

The plot of Heaven is quite straightforward. Philippa Paccard, an English teacher working in Italy, is distraught at the extent of the local drug trade and the impact it is having on her students, one of whom has just hung herself leaving a note saying simply "throw me out with the trash". She is recently widowed, her husband having himself overdosed and been involved with a man named Vendice whom she believes to be controlling much of the trafficking. She has been writing to the Carabinieri over an extended period but they have done nothing, due (as we later learn) to at least one of their officers being involved himself. Having discovered a bomb in her apartment constructed (apparently) by her dead husband, she decides to take matters into her own hands and manages to plant it in a wastepaper bin in Vendice's office. At the last moment a cleaner arrives and empties the contents, making her way to a lift to continue with her duties on another floor. A man and his two young daughters already in the lift are killed along with the cleaner when the bomb detonates. Paccard is arrested (having confessed by telephone) and interrogated, believed by the investigators to be part of a larger terrorist network.

At this point we meet Filippo, an officer in the Carabinieri and son of the former head for Turin. Acting as a scribe for the case, he offers to interpret when Philippa insists on testifying in English. She tells the Carabinieri that she has records of all her correspondence with them, explaining the drug problem and her suspicions, but none are found (due, it is implied, to a Maggiore Pini destroying them to cover his own tracks). Philippa believes she has accomplished what she set out to do until she is told that she killed innocents instead, at which point she breaks down (a spellbinding performance by Cate Blanchett, it should be said). She faints and Filippo rushes to her aid, whereupon she wakes up gripping his hand – a shot that Tykwer lingers over just as surely as Kieślowski would have. Filippo resolves to help her escape, later giving as his reasoning that his younger brother Ariel was in her class and she was his favourite teacher. He passes her recorded instructions, which Pini is able to eavesdrop on. The latter confers with Vendice and plans to let her go, in order to bring about her death on recapture and hence keep their involvement secret, but Filippo changes his plan at the last moment and they lure Vendice to Pini’s office while the Carabinieri are searching for them. Philippa shots and kills Vendice with a gun Filippo provides, whereupon the pair go on the run and ultimately escape. Where they escape to, however, is the important detail.

Tykwer has said of Heaven that "the basic theme is redemption". It is how this comes about that provides the depth of the movie, in which the action and the dialogue – even between the main characters, which may not be obvious on first viewing – is minimal. In his message to Philippa, Filippo explains that once they have been able to break her out of custody,

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... then we will think what to do next, because I believe there will be something and it will be beautiful.

Even before this, after watching Philippa cry on learning of the deaths she did not intend, Filippo has admitted to his father that he is in love. At first, however, she is not convinced that anything special is occurring and tells him that she agreed to escape not to avoid punishment, which she fully deserves, but only to kill Vendice.

It is important to realise the situation in which the viewer finds him- or herself at this early stage in proceedings: Philippa has slain four innocent people, even if unintentionally, including two children. Tykwer is careful to spend time with them beforehand as they chat tenderly with their father; in the lift itself, they count the floors as they travel upwards. There can be no suggestion that Tykwer is minimalising the extent of what Philippa has wrought, or presenting an apologetic for it. She then goes on to kill Vendice, a man who could easily have been portrayed as the embodiment of evil but instead is given a scene in which he calls his partner to lament his being called away and hence arriving home to her late. Moreover, when Philippa shoots Vendice it is with Filippo's help, the latter holding the door closed to prevent Vendice avoiding his death. For the more observant, too, we can notice Philippa touching wood for luck on her way to plant the bomb and valuing her own life when she is almost knocked down at a road crossing even as she is about to take that of another. She also calls Vendice's receptionist to ensure no one other than her target is hurt, which demonstrates how calculating and considered her actions are.

What we find, then, is that both Philippa and Filippo are perhaps as far from our sympathies as they could be, and yet there is something wonderful about his unquestioning and immediate love for her in spite of everything that makes us curious about what will happen to them, or how matters can possibly be saved or put right. Tykwer hints at this in a typically Kieślowskian shot (recalling Delpy in the hotel room in White) when the two wake up together in their hiding place, staring into one another’s eyes in silence. It is easy to regard Filippo's behaviour as simplistic, or as a moral failure on his part to realise the magnitude of what she has done and that, straightforwardly, she should be brought to justice for it. Nothing was straightforward for Kieślowski, though, particularly moral issues. Where others had and have the confidence to pronounce on what should or should not be, Kieślowski explored the grey areas where easy answers were seldom (if ever) to be found. The question prompted for us – as viewers – to answer is: given these circumstances, complicated by Carabinieri corruption but where guilt is nevertheless clear-cut, can Philippa be saved?

Another aspect of life that Kieślowski was fascinated by is synchronicity, and often in his work lives that ostensibly were disconnected would meet and prove to be intimately related, the most detailed example being the mirroring of Joseph Kern's mistakes in August Brunner in Red, giving the latter the chance to choose differently and hence save the former. This theme of salvation not through grace or faith but rather the simplest of gestures runs through Kieślowski's oeuvre and we pick it up again in Heaven. The synchronicity involved in achieving this becomes apparent when Philippa and Filippo are on a train bound eventually for Montepulciano and she asks him his age. It turns out that their birthdays match, Filippo having come into the world at the moment when Philippa was receiving her first holy communion. We notice (if we have not already) that their clothing is identical, and begin to realise why Kieślowski had Philippa say to Filippo "I don't even know your name", as if there could be any doubt. When they visit the barber and together have their heads shaved, the implied is made concrete.

With the benefit of hindsight, Giovanni Ribisi was perhaps cast perfectly for the role of Filippo, his constant look of untroubled innocence founded on the certainty of love helping the viewer to suspend disbelief and realise that the congruence of these two lives in so many details is crucial to the exploration taking place before our eyes. Arriving at Montepulciano, Philippa remarks that "it's as if nothing ever happened" and we understand in a flash, as it were, that this line summarises events so far because of Filippo's intervention. When she meets her friend in the middle of the wedding celebrations going on around them, Philippa is slapped in the face and then hugged, forgiven in spite of what she has done. Likewise, Filippo's father meets with them covertly and embraces his son silently, forgiving him, too, as he comments – apparently proudly – "I do know you a little". Both have sinned, whether in the religious or moral sense, but are forgiven in an instant by people who love them.

Religious aspects were central to Kieślowski's work, particularly after his Decalogue series on the ten commandments. In the Montepulciano church, Philippa engages in what we recognise to be a confession (an impression Tykwer emphasises by opening the shot on the boxes themselves, curtains drawn as she speaks). Sat beside Filippo, she lays out her sins in detail and tells him that she has "ceased to believe in sense, justice and life". Head bowed, he hears her out before looking into her eyes and saying simply "I love you". Later, when Filippo’s father asks her if she loves his son, too, she begins to shake her head and tries to say no, wanting him to take Filippo with him and not allow her to drag him down with her needlessly, but she is unable to. Is it a coincidence, then, that Filippo – her saviour – was born on the day she entered the Church, only to hear her confession years later?

Given somewhere to stay for the night by her friend, the two venture out into the Tuscan sunset and there follows surely one of the most beautiful pieces of cinematography ever conceived. Shot from helicopter, Tykwer captures the two as they shed their clothes and embrace, silhouetted against the burning sky and symbolic of the angelic Filippo purifying his double. There is no music and no sound save the gentle rustling of the trees. The landscape becomes the canvas on which this individual act of redemption is painted. This, for Tykwer, is what we have witnessed: "somebody who is completely lost is taken out of the darkness and brought into the light".

Heaven opens with Filippo flying a simulated helicopter, apparently undertaking lessons. In a moment of difficulty he evades danger by taking the craft upwards, to the limit of the program. "In a real helicopter you can’t just keep flying higher", his teacher complains, to which he replies “how high can I fly?” This scene makes no sense at all throughout the movie until the very end: the Carabinieri descend on the farmhouse where the two had been sheltered, but they avoid them initially because they had spent the night on the hills under the stars. As a helicopter swoops and lands, they make their way back and stop at the fence, hands clasped together tightly. The attention of the Carabinieri is directed elsewhere and the pilot steps out, seemingly curious at the events unfolding in front of him. Filippo looks slowly at Philippa and asks her something: "now?" She nods, and they run to the helicopter, which Filippo pilots upwards. We watch from beneath as it rises higher and higher, the Carabinieri shooting in vain. The music stops and the shot lingers, the image becoming smaller and smaller until we can only see the sky into which it has faded.

At Montepulchiano, Filippo's father had posed a rhetorical question, frustrated at himself: "why can we never do anything at the important moments?" He did not realise that he had done everything possible, absolving his son in a moment just as Filippo would save Philippa and himself in the process. We see that the question has been posed and answered: can a person find salvation through love? Dostoevsky’s Raskolnikov was saved by Sonya, and the Russian master's work was a huge influence on Kieślowski, covering similar ground. Philippa and Filippo have found one another and found forgiveness, ending their journey by ascending to heaven.]]> Sat, 12 Jun 2010 20:33:11 +0000 a9a1d5317a33ae8cef33961c34144f84 <![CDATA[Kieślowski's Three Colours Trilogy]]> http://www.galilean-library.org/site/index.php/page/index.html/_/essays/literatureandfilm/kieslowskis-three-colours-trilogy-r84 Paul Newall (2005)

Krzysztof Kieślowski's Three Colours trilogy is a monumental work that blends cinema, philosophy and music in a seamless whole. Its sheer depth poses a host of interpretational difficulties but this paper seeks to unravel a minority of the interwoven themes that form it.

Perhaps the most philosophical of directors (and writers, with his long-time collaborator Krzysztof Piesiewicz), meanings in Kieślowski's work are elusive and not easy to pin down. He claimed that "knowing is not my business - not knowing is", and this is a sense we find throughout his creations: a lack of answers to questions that are explored rather than resolved. Although he had plans to work on a further trilogy (Heaven, since completed by Tom Tykwer, Hell and Purgatory), his death in 1995 meant that the Three Colours was his final gesture.

Blue

When Juliette Binoche first met Kieślowski, they discussed philosophy. This was a recurring trend for him, with Ir ne Jacob"s "audition" for Red consisting solely in a philosophical conversation over coffee. Binoche would turn down Jurassic Park to be Kieślowski"s Julie, remarking that she "would rather play a dinosaur than one of those characters". Reckoned by many to be the finest actress of her generation, she understood that Kieślowski was interested in details and prepared for her role accordingly. Asking to wear her own clothes on the principle that being familiar with costumes is necessary in order to forget them, she studied and was influenced by Annie Duperey's novel L'Ange Noir, which tells of the death of her parents at a very young age. Displaying no visible signs of bereavement, Duperey wrote that she had "suffered enough without having to show it as well."

In Blue Binoche is Julie de Courcy, a woman who loses her composer husband and their daughter Anna in a car crash at the opening of the movie. Fleeing her old life and her lover Olivier, she tries to start over, taking an apartment in a working class area of Paris.

There are several instances of close-ups in Blue, particularly the focus on Julie holding a sugar cube to let her coffee soak into it. Kieślowski was explicit on the importance of these passages:

Quote

We are trying to show how the heroine perceives the world. We are trying to show that she focuses on small things, on things which are close to her. She doesn't care about things which are further away from her. She is trying to limit her world, to limit it to herself and her immediate environment.

Kieślowski's intention here was to show Julie concentrating on tiny details "in order to be able to discard other things". He spoke of sending an assistant on a long search for the right sugar cube (one which would dissolve in five seconds – no more, no less), based on his conviction that the viewer would be patient enough to wait for just this long and understand the implication: that she "watches the sugar cube dissolve into the coffee in order to reject an offer she has just received from a man who loves her".

The opening act in Kieślowski's trilogy is ostensibly concerned with liberte, the first of the ideals of the French Revolution. The subtlety in Blue that can easily be missed, however, is that the process Julie goes through is exactly the reverse of what is superficially occurring. Speaking of the part, Binoche said that "when you’ve lost everything, life is nothing"; but what we see made plain throughout the movie is that she has not lost everything. Olivier still loves her unconditionally and although she tries to remove all trace of her past, selling the family's belongings and eating the blue lollies that remind her of Anna, she keeps the mobile from the blue room and puts it up in her new apartment. Even after Lucille touches it and Julie recoils so slightly as to almost be imperceptible, a quite beautiful gesture on the part of an actress having achieved total mastery of her craft, it stays as a perpetual reminder of what she has lost. This is straightforwardly inexplicable of a woman who supposedly views memories as traps and seeks freedom from them, but it immediately makes sense if we understand her behaviour in a similar way to that of Patrick Bateman's in American Psycho.

Thus when we watch Julie trying to block out the music that reminds her of the past by curling up in a natal position in the swimming pool, fingers in her ears (Binoche's idea), and yet returning to an apartment with the blue mobile, just as she destroys her husband's final composition even as she keeps on a scrap of paper in her handbag the motif that would tie it all together, we realise something: she is not free of all ties because life has lost its meaning, but instead wants to be free in order that life – and the past – will have no meaning. She is hiding from her pain inside a false liberty.

During the meeting with Olivier, Julie recognises the music of the busker outside playing a recorder as that of her husband's. When she asks him where he heard it, he replies that he makes up all sorts of things. This is an instance of a theory of Kieślowski's that "different people, in different places, are thinking the same thing but for different reasons". With regard to music in particular, he held what might be characterised as a Platonic view according to which notes pre-exist and are picked out and assembled by people. That these can accord with one another is a sign of what connects people, or so he believed. Indeed, music played a vital role in all of Kieślowski's work, his relationship with Zbigniew Preisner being a unique one wherein the latter (a self-taught composer and graduate of philosophy) wrote the score before the movie, fitting the story to the music rather than the other way around (Kieślowski described it as "the film [being] an illustration of the music").

Julie's mother has Alzheimer's and represents the ultimate end of any attempt to be free of memories, being unable to recall most details of her life. We notice, however, that when Julie discovers her rat infestation she goes to her mother to ask if she was afraid of rodents as a child. This scene again draws our attention to the inconsistency – or tension – between Julie's apparent desire to forget her past while at the same time needing it to make sense of her present. That she would turn to the one person who really is losing the power of retention is not so much ironic as tragic, demonstrating the absurdity of her predicament.

There are four instances of the fade to blue accompanied by de Courcey's motif for the Concert for European Unity: at the hospital on the visit of the journalist; on the stairs when Julie locks herself out of her apartment; in the swimming pool; and when she learns of Patrice's affair and is asked by Olivier "what do you want to do?" When we realise that these notes are those left by her husband to complete the concert, his last work, they become symbolic of the ties that remain even though she has tried to make a clean break. Only when she finally accepts that she cannot run away from the love that endures does she cry, letting go and beginning again with hope – truly free at last.

White

The second feature in the trilogy, White is concerned with equality. Many commentators have viewed it as the weakest of the films, passing over it in their haste to get to Red and describing it only as a black comedy. There is no doubt that it is funny, but unfortunately this misses the key points that Kieślowski was stressing and also its importance in making sense of the whole. Indeed, it is no exaggeration to say that White adds another dimension without which the overall effect would be considerably lessened.

White is the story of Karol Karol, a Polish hairdresser (named by Kieślowski as a tribute to Charlie Chaplin) living in Paris and married to Dominique Vidal, a French coiffure. She leaves him because of his failure to consummate their union. The movie begins with a number of humiliations, as Karol loses his marriage, his finances and his dignity through the divorce hearing and his (now ex-) wife immediately taking a lover. On the steps of the courtroom Karol is the target of a pigeon with a good aim, so that moments after taking a small pleasure in the bird's flight he is "humiliated through his naivety in the face of nature", as Kieślowski put it. This sets the scene for what is to follow, a point on which Kieślowski insisted:

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Humiliation is the subject of the film. People aren't and don't want to be equal.

In a continuation of the motif from Blue, Karol grins at an old man struggling to use a bottle bank, taking a perverse pleasure in someone apparently being worse off than him. However, he salvages something from his humiliation, demanding the return of his two franc piece (which he subsequently keeps with him) and finding beauty in the bust he notices in a shop window and carefully restores in Poland.

There are two instances of foreshadowing in White. In the opening credits we watch as a bulky suitcase makes it way around an airport carousel, without knowing what this means as yet. Only later do we understand that it contained Karol, on his way home by being smuggled as part of Mikolaj's luggage. Later Karol spins his two franc piece as we watch Dominique enter a hotel room, looking exhausted. This, we discover, is where she will meet the "reborn" Karol after his funeral.

The subplot involving Mikolaj, a Pole who Karol meets in the Paris Metro and helps get him back to Poland, is itself one of rebirth or resurrection. Wanting to kill himself but being unable to do so, Mikolaj offers Karol money to help him. At the fateful moment, Karol shoots him in the chest with a blank before telling him that the next one is real and asking "are you sure?" Mikolaj is not and the two men trade the idea for running onto a frozen lake like children. For Mikolaj now, "everything is possible".

The remainder of the movie follows Karol's rise to prosperity in a Poland opened up to capitalism. Reaching a point of financial security, he is able to fake his own death having first changed his will to make it seem that his ex-wife was involved in the handsome settlement she receives, resulting in her being jailed. Karol is thus able to erase his humiliation and attain equality with Dominique, but it comes at a cost of its own that neither can afford.

Indeed, Kieślowski's real point in White is that the maxim "these days, you can buy anything" is false: love cannot be bought and cannot be described in terms of equality. Moreover, it is much more than consummation, which is hinted at by Dominique early in the film when she tells Karol "you don't understand that I want you. You don't understand that I need you." Only at his funeral does Karol realises that something is wrong with his attempts to achieve parity when he observes that Dominique is genuinely upset. Delpy herself noted that the result of his machinations was that "both characters are locked up in their own prisons – his because people think he is dead. They still love each other, though, and hence there is hope."

There is thus in White a critique of viewing equality in economic terms - or as a matter of power - as both Karol and Dominique come to appreciate that neither have dominion over love, just as Julie learned that she could not free herself from it in Blue.

Red

The final movie he completed before his death, Red is acknowledged as Kieślowski's masterpiece. Its meaning is so elusive that overinterpretation is a constant danger. A good example is the name of the heroine, Valentine, which has been the subject of much speculation. Kieślowski recounted, however, that he had simply asked Ir ne Jacob what she would like to be called, which she responded to by selecting her favourite name as a child. Jacob herself noted that Kieślowski was "distrustful of any message, of a moral", but this is not to imply that interpretation is unlimited.

The most obvious aspect of the film is its daring use of colour. In contrast to the muted greys of Gen ve, anything of any significance it saturated with or marked in red – from the ribbon on Valentine's telephone to Auguste's jeep. When Valentine stops at a traffic light in front of an empty billboard framed in red, then, moments before Auguste crosses the same road and drops his books (the elastic having broken), we are aware that some kind of foreshadowing is taking place.

The subject of Red is fraternity, at least on the surface, but Kieślowski himself stated that "the essential question the film asked is: is it possible to repair a mistake which was committed somewhere high above?" The meaning of this apparently cryptic allusion becomes clearer as the movie progresses, particularly if we pay attention to the many pointers scattered throughout. When we notice the camera lingering over a picture of a ballet dancer in Auguste's apartment, for instance, and then watch Valentine struggling to hold the very same pose at her class shortly thereafter, the room dripping in reds, we expect to find a connection between them. Nevertheless, they seem to keep missing each other, such as when Auguste moves to the window when Valentine's car alarm is sounding, only for his girlfriend to appear and distract his attention.

When she knocks down his dog Rita, Valentine finds herself at the home of Joseph Kern, a retired judge who appears only under this description in the credits. Ostensibly indifferent to Rita's accident, he dismisses Valentine and yet comes to the window to look at her again. He then sends her money to pay the veterinarian's bill – far too much, as it happens, and apparently quite deliberately. Although this scene passes quickly and our attention is focused on Valentine's winning on the fruit machine – red cherries – and her understanding it as relating to her brother’s appearance in the newspaper, the question neither asked nor answered is how the judge was able to post any form of payment without knowing who Valentine is or where she lives…

In any case, the plain implication is that Kern paid too much in order to draw Valentine to him again, and revisit she does. He lacks the correct change for her when she gives back the overpayment, so he disappears inside and fails to come back. Valentine, of course, follows her curiosity and seeks him out, discovering the eavesdropping on his neighbours. Before we come to this strand, however, we notice that the judge points to the thirty francs rather than passing them to Valentine. When she picks them up, we see that they were resting on what seems to be a picture. This is actually a record sleeve, the artist being van den Budenmayer. (The composer was a fictional creation of Kieślowski's and Preisner's, used in La Double Vie de Veronique, although it was taken seriously by some music critics.) Again the camera lingers and we have another example of foreshadowing: later we see Valentine listening to a CD which we recognise by the cover as van den Budenmayer, her interest having been piqued by seeing it at Kern's house. Next to her are Auguste and his girlfriend Karin who buy the last copy, as though the judge had arranged for their paths to cross again.

For Kieślowski, the dialogue involving Valentine and the judge was between "experience which can know disappointment and youth which has yet to face it". Faced with her disgust at his behaviour, Kern challenges Valentine to fix the problems he listens in on and asks her if she acts to help others or instead just to make herself feel better. Rising to the bait, she visits the home of one neighbour only to find the daughter already listening in on her father's conversation with his lover while his wife is cheerfully oblivious. Much as we learned from many of the shorter pieces in the Decalogue, situations like these are too complex for easy answers. No such attempt to help is involved when Valentine learns that another resident controls much of the Genevan heroin trade and wishes death upon him, her brother firmly in her thoughts.

Some commentators have suggested that the judge is – or represents – God. He asks Valentine to stay, telling her "the light is beautiful" just as he is bathed in it. They listen to Auguste's conversation in which he tosses a coin to decide between bowling or studying penal code and Kern does likewise beforehand, resulting in tails and still another lingering close-up. Somehow we know that Auguste will obtain the same result, and – more foreshadowing – that is where Valentine will end up, too. Again and again we find Auguste and Valentine passing one another without meeting, as though the judge is contriving to make it happen. Indeed, he tells her that Auguste has not yet met the right woman; and when she asks how he knows this, he replies "I watch them from my window". This in itself engenders the realisation that much of the movie involves glass, usually as a barrier between a spectator such as Kern and the world outside.

The second discussion between Valentine and Kern takes place after he has turned himself in. He did this, he says, to see what Valentine would do. He mentions that he had to write to his neighbours using a pencil since the pen he had used all his life would not work, while the previous scene had involved Auguste being given a very similar one as a gift. Even so, he remarks that Valentine may have been very close to Auguste when she went bowling, which piques her interest. She notices that he seems happy about the couple breaking up and demands to know if he provoked it; and indirectly, of course, he did.

It is at this point that we witness the development in both characters. Valentine wants to help her brother but has come to realise that there are no easy answers. When she asks the judge if there is anything she can do, he replies "be". Asking for clarification, he repeats himself: "just that: be". Kern then admits that he had made judgements in the past that he now believes to have been wrong, acquitting a guilty man – a sailor – who had since led a good life. Valentine tells him that he had therefore been saved, but Kern wonders about how many others he might have judged differently, even others who were guilty. "Deciding what is true and what isn’t", he says, "now seems to me a lack of modesty." This passage is key to understanding the trilogy and Kieślowski’s oeuvre as a whole: all judgements are too soon and everyone can be saved by the smallest of gestures. This lesson applies particularly to Kern, whose liberation from the confines of his objectivity is symbolised by the breaking of the glass we see him trapped behind on many occasions. After the fashion show he places his hand on the window of his car, a gesture she reciprocates which indicates that their connection has transcended the boundary between them.

Standing at his window, however, Kern states that the difference between him and those he judged is only contingent. In reply, Valentine asks him if there is someone he loves. Jacob herself was clear on the meaning of her character's question:

Quote

You can do anything you want, but if you don't have love, it's pointless. And you can try to help everyone, but if you're not there, it's pointless.

Here, of course, we come full circle to the Concert for the Unification of Europe from Blue and its chorus drawn from 1 Corinthians 13.

The final dialogue occurs after the fashion show, to which Valentine invites the judge. She asks him to tell her again about the dream he described, involving her waking up happy beside someone. When she asks if this is what will happen, he is unequivocal. As though the realisation is unfolding slowly at that moment, she inquires of him, "what else do you know? Who are you?" and states that she feels something important is happening around her. We appreciate what this something is when the judge recounts his experience of visiting the fashion show years earlier and dropping one of his books from his balcony seat when the elastic binding them broke (captured in a beautiful sweeping shot by Piotr Sobocinski), falling to the ground open on a particular page. Just as we had seen for Auguste in the present day, the passage indicated by this "accident" was the one that came up in the subsequent test. As if this were not enough, he then remarks that he had to recharge his car battery.

What we learn, then, is that Auguste is somehow living the judge's life over again, with more than a hint of implication that Kern is directing it. There have been numerous chances for Valentine and Auguste to meet without doing so, but this time the judge will ensure it happens. The details are identical, down to Kern's description of his lover, her betrayal and following the couple across the English Channel. He calls Valentine the woman he never met and explains that his last judgement was on a case involving Hugo Holbling, the man who had taken his only love from him. This was his last act, taking early retirement. There follows the joining of hands and Valentine's noticing an old lady struggling at a bottle bank, the same motif we have found in each element of the trilogy. She helps her, completing the cycle and saving the world in a moment.

It remains only to note the breathtaking close of Red, in which the threads of all the movies are drawn together by the tragedy of the ferry sinking in a storm that also claims a yacht – one we understand to contain Hugo Holbling from the pictures he had shown Karin and the closing of her weather service in order to travel across the Channel. The only survivors are Julie and Olivier from Blue, Karol and Dominique from White (these pairings indicating that both couples remain together and also, by the use of his name, that Karol has given up his pretence of being dead), Valentine and Auguste from Red, along with a barman. (There is no mention of this character, Steven Killian, at any point in the trilogy, which may imply a final lesson from Kieślowski against overinterpretation, leaving a detail that cannot be explained.) This is the moment at which Valentine is captured in exactly the pose of her billboard advertisement, a stroke of genius by Sobocinski that can only be experienced since words fail to convey the sheer power of the shot. The camera then cuts to the judge gazing through a broken window, smiling quietly. Kieślowski has answered his own question, the mistake rewritten and absolved by the love that never fails.

Finis vitae sed non amore


---

1 Corinthians 13

Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I have become sounding brass or a clanging cymbal.
And though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing.
And though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and though I give my body to be burned, but have not love, it profits me nothing.
Love suffers long and is kind; love does not envy; love does not parade itself, is not puffed up;
Does not behave rudely, does not seek its own, is not provoked, thinks no evil;

Does not rejoice in iniquity, but rejoices in the truth;
Bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.
Love never fails. But whether there are prophecies, they will fail; whether there are tongues, they will cease; whether there is knowledge, it will vanish away.
For we know in part and we prophesy in part.
But when that which is perfect has come, then that which is in part will be done away.
When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child; but when I became a man, I put away childish things.
For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part, but then I shall know just as I also am known.
And now abide faith, hope, love, these three; but the greatest of these is love.]]> Sat, 12 Jun 2010 20:32:07 +0000 f5deaeeae1538fb6c45901d524ee2f98