Filed under LITERATURE …

Aug 19 2009
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brief notes, criticism, LITERATURE

Adventures in Pornography

Today, for perhaps the first time really, for the first time in this way, it struck what a waste of resources tertiary education may be. I mean, a total waste of money and manhours on minds too young, and too inexperienced, to genuinely benefit. This even before we factor in the tremendously homogeneous education they receive, and the limited range of experiences they have had, in this country.

I was doing a presentation on Pauline Reage’s The Story of O for a literature class mainly concerned with censorship. The Story of O is one of the major pornographic novels, together with Georges Bataille’s The Story of the Eye and the opus of Marquis de Sade. It’s a work of high modernism, published in France in 1954, and follows, in third person, a woman referred to only as ‘O’, through a series of sadomasochistic escapades. It is unmistakably porn. It is not an erotic novel, but one that graphically depicts a stockstandard range of situations unmistakably drawn from smut. It is not concerned with feelings, with consent, with empowerment, with mutual adoration. It is, also, unmistakably, art.

What makes The Story of O so fascinating is its idiosyncracy. It is both obscene and morbid; superficial and profound; arousing and repulsive. It reads like a nightmare, and has all the allure. O is the typical pornographic heroine, abused by a number of men in a variety of ways; but the book adds psychology to the stereotypical narrative, in a most disconcerting way. O is submitted to torture by her lover, Rene, and yet she both suffers and enjoys her suffering. She submits herself gladly, as a proof of love for Rene. The intensity of her debasement escalates from the cliched, through mildly offensive, to completely morbid: in the last pages of the novel, naked, tattooed, chained and masked, O has lost any trace of individuality and isn’t even spoken to anymore. Yet the narrator points clearly to the deep satisfaction she feels in this renunciation of self, despite the pain she feels. Around the middle of the book, when her psychology is first brought into the light, the narrator even notices that Rene himself doesn’t seem to enjoy O’s ordeal very much, making it conceivable that O is orchestrating the entire show for her own purposes.

It is a very complex book, and shouldn’t at all be read as realist fiction. Susan Sontag has compared it to other modernist works interested in exploring the deepest recesses of the mind (notable surrealist fiction, for example, and Bataille), and to many works of mystic literature. O’s shedding of the layers of the self is comparable to the path of a Zen pupil or Jesuit novice. For other commentators, it is an expression of the deeply rooted human desire “to be free from oneself, to have the gratifications one associates with the self without the obligation of making the choices by which moral character and personality are defined.” From Peter Michelson’s perspective, it’s possible to read The Story of O as an allegory of falling in love. Or as a prolonged rape fantasy akin to those appearing at the beginnings of romance novels. O’s path towards self-obliteration is as extreme as it is familiar; it evokes not only the usual porn plots, but maps mental territory we genuinely cross. It doesn’t normalise sadomasochism; but it delves straight into it.

I was very interested in how other students have reacted to the book, and was not so much surprised, as deeply disappointed, with the narrowness of their reactions. Unlike a one-joke book like American Psycho or Lady Chatterley’s Lover, time hasn’t softened the transgression of The Story of O; students who would quickly defend the right of Wilde, Lawrence or Rushdie to chart difficult territories were more than ready to be shocked by Reage. What surprised me was how few of them understood any of it. They found O sad, pathetic, impossible to understand. They clearly had no direct experience of the death drive, of the self-destructive potential, which made me think that most of them have probably never even been properly in love.

Over and over again, it was called religious, and all these kids distanced themselves from the religious vocabulary they considered removed from their own lives. They couldn’t find a way into self-renunciation. This disturbed me greatly: I brought in the self-negation of a collective experience, but struggled to find anything Australian apart from the sporting event. Finally, I brought up the housewife: living through your husband and children, what a healthy human being would need to do in order to accept such fate, and how the mental mechanism employed wouldn’t differ greatly from O’s self-obliteration for love. “It’s a not a distant, exotic thing you have no contact with,” I was exclaiming at this point, “do you know a woman who has never worked? A stay-at-home mum? Is that a religious experience too?”

There was a genuine break-through at this point. One of the girls said, after a pause, “I think it’s just that it goes against everything we’ve been taught at school about how we should live, and about what love is.” Telling, the notion of being told at school what love is. This is where I realised we cannot discuss something like The Story of O in that class. It was, quite simply, too early for them.

So much knowledge is experiential, and so obvious this becomes when art criticism tries to happen. Brett Easton Ellis was one of the first artists I’ve read who drew the line between youth and formalism. In your twenties, he said, you don’t understand consequentiality: you’ve had only limited life experience, and you don’t have a proper understanding of the consequences of the things you’re doing. As a result, he said, your capacity to tell stories is limited: you cannot match causes and effects. Instead, the young artist is a formalist; and so is the young critic.

I cannot count how many theatre shows I’ve seen recently that had no understanding of the stories they were telling; and how much criticism I have read that showed no understanding of the meaning of the shows it was criticising. The semi-literary discussion surrounding The Story of O was only the last and the most exasperating case. I’ve been very reluctant to write because I’m getting not so much tired of form (form is always there), but tired of this overwhelming lack of understanding of the stories shaped by the form. A little while ago I read a newspaper article on Beautiful Kate, in which Rachel Ward, the scriptwriter and director, was asked about why she portrayed incest with a bit of sympathy. As if the inner side of all art can be reduced to plot plus artist’s message and goddamn sympathy or condemnation.

Someone, somewhere, once defined good literature as that thing you read and go, Yes, that’s exactly how life is! I never thought of it that way, but that’s how things are! In order to recognise that that’s how things are, though, you have to have known the things themselves. No amount of reading can do it instead.

Jul 22 2009
5 Comments
collage, LITERATURE

The Insularity of English

“At a time when everyone is asking why English-language fiction has stalled, why fewer readers buy novels, part of the answer must lie in the decline of translation. Alert readers of Spanish, French, German, Italian and Portuguese, among other languages, participate in an international aesthetic conversation; readers and writers of English, condemned to silence by insular fantasies of global artistic relevance, are missing out on the next wave of literature.” – Stephen Henighan, The Insularity of English

Jul 19 2009
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Belvoir, FILM, LITERATURE, reviews, Sydney Theatre Company, theatre

STC: Elling & Belvoir: Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk

I am about to burn all my bridges and praise theatre I have never praised before. But we all grow older and up. Two shows currently playing in Sydney are exemplary for what Sydney likes to do: straight plays, if not television. Things that, we smirk from Melbourne, are not quite theatre.

Indeed, both are adaptations of dubious philosophy. Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, at Belvoir Downstairs, is Robert Couch’s adaptation of the 1865 short novel of the same title by Nikolai Leskov. The transposition, in this case, is informed by the existence of no less than three film versions, numerous other stage adaptations, and at least one famous opera (by Shostakovich, recently revived by Opera Australia). Elling, at Sydney Theatre Company, is based on a 2001 Norwegian film (!), itself an adaptation of Ingvar Ambjrnsen’s novel. Pamela Rabe is directing a stage adaptation, originally by Axel Hellstenius in collaboration with Petter Nss, then translated into English by Nicholas Norris and further adapted by Simon Bent (why, it makes you wonder, must the English add another layer of pruning to translated texts?). Suspicious pursuits!

It was already Goethe who complained that, as soon as they read the book, the audience of then wanted to see the play: the transposition of story across mediums, that completely failed to notice that medium was, even then, the message. (Without launching into a rant, that the narrative of Don Quixote was undivorceable from the novel-ness of Don Quixote; that one cannot turn Bukowski’s poetry into a play – although the additional question in this case is: why bother?) In Against Interpretation, Susan Sontag raves against the sanctity of content:

…which gives birth to the odd vision by which something we have learned to call “form” is separated off from something we have learned to call “content,” and to the well-intentioned move which makes content essential and form accessory.

I am a habitual Sontag-disciple in this matter; I believe that the theatre must be theatre first, and say something later. Yet both of these productions, these theatrical mongrels, are terrific, and absolutely worth seeing – something akin to Humphrey Bower and Jess Ipkendanz’s The Kreutzer Sonata at La Mama in 2007, a re-working of Tolstoy’s short story for one voice and two instruments. An adaptation that ought to have miserably failed was instead an astonishing artistic success, one of the finest experiences I have ever had in the theatre.

I am not sure how the formalist in me justifies the tremendous enjoyment to be derived from both Lady Macbeth and Elling, but I suspect it has something to do with story. None of the two are flawless works, but you forgive them even if you notice, because you’re taken along with the narrative. The limitations of the stage, unaddressed as they may be, become invisible as the stage itself vanishes behind the story.

Psychology has made a claim that we human beings love stories because story is the fundamental organisational element of our consciousness. In simple words, we make sense of the world by telling stories to ourselves (and, indeed, the fundamental product of schizophrenia is the inability to construct a coherent narrative of one’s own life). Some artistic forms are better suited to this task, called epic for this very reason: novels, short stories, epic poems. Some not so much: painting, haiku, tragedy. However, human mind is wired to look for a narrative even in the least likely places; and it is comical but not entirely wrong that many works of art are seen to fail when they provide too strong a narrative framework for the viewer, offer too little resistance to the story-telling mind (Jack Vettriano’s painting; pre-Raphaelite didacticism; Bukowski’s poetry; Hollywood movies; the realistic novel – depending on your elitism of choice). In this duel of the urge to narrate with the fickle narcissism of form, victories are sometimes unpredictable. While Aristotle clearly separated dramatic from epic arts, suggesting that theatre is inherently flawed as a story-telling vehicle (and I second that, except in the case of radio play), Brecht has revolutionised theatre by disagreeing. Not too long after, a generation of writers proved that the novel could well exist without telling a story at all.

To return to the matter at hand: the qualities of Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk lie in Joseph Couch’s excellent direction of the narrative material. Robert Couch’s adaptation of Nikolai Leskov’s slim novel is pruned and stream-lined into a tight, breathless ride through the 19th-century Russia. It is as simple a story as they get: Katerina, an abused country wife, a childless slave in her own house, is seduced by a labourer. A woman who was, until then, resigned to a life of complete misery, she latches onto this unexpected source of bliss, and serially murders her way into freedom, trying to keep this love in her life.

It is interesting to find a character of this sort in the intersection of the work of three men: the novelist, the adaptator, the director. (Joe Couch notes: it is as if Leskov stumbled upon her heroine subconsciously, never understanding her motives.) This production, however, is singularly compassionate, and explores her amour fou with an essayistic clarity of thought. Without a single superfluous line or gesture, Couch builds a picture of Katerina, clutching onto a love affair that has become the sole source of meaning in her life. The macabre second act, in which her lover turns against her, is a tight and astute image of attraction turned rage, devotion turned self-annihilation, and joie de vivre turned madness.

Edwina Ritchard, Amy Kersey and Jason Langley’s many secondary characters build a varied, rich world around the two main characters in the tiny Downstairs space. For once, Russians are not played as English people: all characters possess a rounded, fully-fleshed emotional life. Kersey’s Aksinya is not a cockney maid we have come to expect from less culturally literate productions, but a brisk, yet compassionate, peasant woman. Alice Parkinson is extraordinary as a woman whom life has treated so badly as to reduce her to an animal presence, bare life on stage. She shivers and mutters, groans and sings and dances; yet she is not a caricature, but a tragic character whose actions, however extreme, are always understandable.

What could very easily have been a tedious night out is instead a riveting experience. The theatrical perils are enormous: the entire second act tries to enact a long march across Russia on the minuscule Downstairs stage. In the easy-going, frivolous Australia, the entire point could have been so easily misunderstood. Yet the emotional intelligence of the production completely overcomes the technical obstacles, delivering a gripping, utterly absorbing tale.

Darren Gilshenan & Lachy Hulme in Elling. Photo by Tracey Schramm.

The story with Elling is slightly different. A Norwegian comedy instead of a Russian tragedy. Another worrying adaptation trajectory, yet another success of theatre as straight-forward story-telling. Played by the exquisite Darren Gilshenan and Lachy Hulme, Elling and Kjell Bjorne are two lunatics given a council flat, a chain-smoking social worker, and a couple of months in the real world after a lifetime of confinement. If they screw badly enough, Frank will be only too glad to return them to the mental asylum.

The humour that Elling weaves out of this initial situation is as deliciously Scandinavian as it is un-Australian – which is also what makes its final triumph more interesting. The first thing to keep in mind is that the two characters are genuine, bona fide crazies. Kjell Bjarne is a 40-year-old virgin, constantly masturbating and without a clue about the world outside psychiatric institutions. Elling is a well-spoken agoraphobe who conflates his mother with Virgin Mary, possesses a baroque and complex sense of guilt for having outlived her (unlike Christ), and manages to regularly convince the infinitely more low-brow Kjell in the normality of his particular worldview. Reidun, the pregnant check-out chick from the apartment upstairs who becomes Kjell’s romantic dalliance, and the seedy poet Alfons, who befriends Elling out of aesthetic interest in the mind of a madman, are no more conventional human beings, and certainly not immediately likeable.

In front of the comedy of manners that ensues, Sydney audience looked genuinely confused: reluctant to laugh at insanity, at the intellectual and emotional underdevelopment of a pregnant working-class girl, even at the ruined career of a once-famous poet. The stakes are too high, firstly, and secondly, there is never anyone to laugh with. Indeed, in the entire first act, the only scenes that properly elicited laughter were those in which someone was clearly upholding normality (such as when frustrated Frank forces Elling to overcome his phobia and answer the phone).

Keeping in mind our quest for the coordinates of Australian humour – which is, sadly, looking more and more like textbook bully humour – another rule seems to assert itself: Australian humour shies away from the strange-without-resolution, otherwise known as farcical. Scandinavian humour, like in Elling, thrives on unconventional relationships (compare and contrast Kitchen Stories, exempli gratia), which deepen and grow without either of the characters capitulating in front of the differing opinions or behaviour of the other. Looking at the Sydney audience, trying to put my finger on why their engagement with the comedy was failing, the missing link seemed to be, I am sad to report, acceptance. Not tolerance – one tolerates a rash, tolerance is the ability to ignore, and a person on stage is not there to be tolerated – but acceptance of the unreconcilable difference. The audience seemed unable to get their heads around the fact that Elling was not going to be ridiculed out of his agoraphobia, nor Kjell Bjarne shamed out of public masturbation.

By the second act, however, all was resolved. The laughing curve, which dragged on the floor for most of act one, shot up immediately after the interval, and the play ended as an unqualified success. Yet there is no qualitative difference in the execution between the two acts, nor is the second half any more conventional. Quite the opposite: Elling runs off with an evil plot to become a famous poet by planting poems in sauerkraut packets, all whilst jealously plotting to keep their pregnant neighbour away from Kjell. Yet, it seems, by now the audience has thawed towards these mad people. The climax – in which Reidun goes into labour after a night of drinking and smoking, Frank assures them that a night of drunken debauchery is the normal way to celebrate childbirth, and Alfons opts for friendship at the expense of his writerly fame – is emotionally satisfying without being facile.

Again, Gilshenan and Hulme are supported by terrific supporting performances. Yael Stone, in particular, gives great richness to the range of women Elling and Kjell encounter. Directed confidently, but without frills, Elling is a terrific theatre experience. Just like with Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, the focus is solely on telling a story. Neither of the two productions does anything to make a case for theatre as something distinct from prose or television. Yet they both confidently assert, in these often narrative-dislexic times, the timeless importance of some plot and characters.

Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk. Written by Robert Couch. Adapted from the novella by Nikolai Leskov. Directed by Joseph Couch. With Alice Parkinson, Conrad Coleby, Don Reid, Edwina Ritchard, Celeste Dodwell, Amy Kersey and Jason Langley. Belvoir Downstairs, July 2 – 26.

Elling. Based on a novel by Ingvar Ambjørnsen. Stage adaptation by Axel Hellstenius in collaboration with Petter Næss. Translated by Nicholas Norris. Adapted by Simon Bent. Director Pamela Rabe. Set Designer Michael Scott-Mitchell. Costume Designer Tess Schofield. Lighting Designer Nick Schlieper. Sound Designer Max Lyandvert. With Darren Gilshenan, Glenn Hazeldine, Lachy Hulme, Yael Stone, Frank Whitten. Sydney Theatre Company, May 30 – July 18.

May 28 2009
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brief notes, LITERATURE, media

The Monthly strikes again

The locals will know, the un-Australians won’t: after a public and very unflatteringly-viewed sacking of their finest editor to date, because she dared work independently of her board, The Monthly, Australia’s only candidate for an art&politics magazine, has just appointed a new editor. He is 23 years old.

The public discussion has gone two ways: the road of restrained scepticism on the one hand, and the anti-ageism way on the other. The latter say: why couldn’t he be a good editor at that age? I was called young when I started (though I was 28/39/45 at the time)…

Ah, the point ain’t that a 23-year-old cannot be a decent editor of the country’s only pretendent at intelligent political magazine. The point is that he will not be the best possible. One needs experience, those 10,000 hours, one needs to fail before one learns. And, considering the circumstances in which Sally Warhaft lost her position, great skills are required of a Monthly editor if s/he is to be great.

On the other hand, it’s fair to assume there is no real desire to make The Monthly great. Guy Rundle has every right to point out that The Monthly has been content to be rather dull and uninspired where it could have been brilliant and influential. The weight of the magazine lies in what it does, not how it does it. It’s business as usual: we know how little we want, and that means we recognise it immediately. Again we are at the point, so common in this young country, where we proclaim the 20-something as a genius. Again that need not to demand the learning process from others – perhaps because then we would need to demand it from ourselves too?

Pavlov’s Cat, commenting on the issue, quotes T. H. White:

There is a thing called knowledge of the world, which people do not have until they are middle-aged. It is something which cannot be taught to younger people, because it is not logical and does not obey laws which are constant. It has no rules. Only, in the long years which bring women to the middle of life, a sense of balance develops. You can’t teach a baby to walk by explaining the matter to her logically — she has to learn the strange poise of walking by experience. In some way like that, you cannot teach a young woman to have knowledge of the world. She has to be left to the experience of the years. … And then … she can go on living — not by principle, not by deduction, not by knowledge of good and evil, but simply by a peculiar and shifting sense of balance which defies each of these things often. She … continues henceforth under the guise of a seventh sense. Balance was the sixth sense … and now she has the seventh one — knowledge of the world.

The slow discovery of the seventh sense, by which men and women contrive to ride the waves of a world in which there is war, adultery, compromise, fear, stultification and hypocrisy — this discovery is not a matter for triumph. The baby, perhaps, cries out triumphantly: I have balance! But the seventh sense is recognised without a cry. We only carry on … riding the queer waves in a habitual, petrifying way, because we have reached a stage of deadlock in which we can think of nothing else to do. …

I trust 23-year-old boys with very little, on a daily basis. I am 24 years old now: I still don’t know much, but I do know a great deal more than I did a year ago. Those who say that age doesn’t matter perhaps don’t remember what 23 feels like. Or perhaps they’re young themselves, and don’t know how little they know yet. After all, when I was 22, I trusted 23-year-old boys with many things. I am sure Ben Naparstek is among the better 23-year-old boys out there, if not the very best. Still.

On a slightly oblique note: I was on a bit of a mission earlier this year, talking to my older friends about the sort of things they’ve learned with age. I’ve always found that Woody-Allenism, “you don’t learn, you only get older”, troubling and manifestly incorrect. The responses have been interestingly laconic. Some have said you get tougher. Some have said you learn to distinguish types of people. You become less tolerant. Largely, there was a strange quietness at the question, as if they suspected I wouldn’t be able to do much with the information – which was probably right. I see younger people – in my class, or my sister’s teenage friends – and I can see the mistakes they need to make. Like T. H. White points so well, it is an illogical sort of knowledge, an ever-shifting sense of balance. It cannot be taught. What happens, I imagine, is that you learn the world, and you learn yourself.

Roz Hansen, whom I had the great luck to interview in 2008, summarized a woman’s career trajectory this way:

In your twenties you’re treading water, you’re trying things out. In your thirties you know what you’re doing and you’re starting to build your career. In your forties you’re making money. And in your fifties you have the experience, you’re confident, and you do it for love, because it makes you happy.

It’s not a bad thing to have in mind, I suppose.

May 22 2009
6 Comments
Caryl Churchill, essays, ethics, LITERATURE, performance, script, violence

Seven Jewish Children (1?)

Melbourne has had its reading of Seven Jewish Children, its donation bucket and panel afterwards, and yet I am a little surprised that no follow-up discussion has appeared, not even among the bloggers. I imagine it has something to do with the supreme lack of time we all seem to profess at the moment. I certainly have many better things I could be doing. However, I wanted to leave a short note, even if only to signpost: was there.

Caryl Churchill’s Seven Jewish Children is a very beautiful, if tiny, piece of writing, and the biggest failure of the event was quite possibly to use it as a pretext for the panel. I am not sure I would classify it as a political piece, simply. To my reading eye, Children is a text about ethics, community, and conscience, not politics. To those who haven’t read it, it is structured into seven short scenes, in which an unnumbered group of people, with unassigned lines, argue about how to explain seven unnamed moments of recent Israeli history (hiding from the Nazi, the Holocaust – and bear with me when I say ‘Israeli’, I will explain later – moving to Israel, the settlements, the Six Day’s War, the second Intifada, and the most recent attack on Gaza; the references are clear, but left unstated), to an unnamed child, which Churchill stipulates must be absent from the stage. The recurring phrases are: tell her that… – don’t tell her that… – don’t frighten her – don’t tell her THAT.

It is a chilling text to read when, like me, you’ve grown up listening to adults arguing over your head about what you should, and shouldn’t know. Perhaps it is this experience that makes me see Seven Jewish Children as a generous, sympathetic play where many people seem to see blatant anti-Semitism. I asked many questions when I was little, and I remember these conversations exploding into entire family arguments over my little head: tell her this!, tell her that!, don’t tell her that, that’s not true!, and the recurring phrase (one that Churchill leaves out): she is old enough to know. I was old enough to know all sorts of things about how evil the enemy was, how evil the neighbours were, how rotten the state, the continent, the world was. It was a little fight between my parents, and my parents and the world. Parents demarcate their world, their worldviews, their values, through their children, their children signpost a success, an influence. Thus we have vegetarian children, Christian children, Steiner-school children, children who play the violin at the age of three, and children old enough to parrot their parents’ political views.

Just like at my kitchen table, in Seven Jewish Children adults, through parenting advice, are discussing their political views with one another. Yet they are also mounting pressure and breaking down, and this is where Churchill’s extreme rhetorics (David Jays) should not be taken as a condemnation of some cold-blooded, exterminating Zionism or other. The inward-looking worldview of the parent is, here, struggling against the pressure from the disjointed, illogical, terrifying and shameful exterior that cannot be kept outside. As much as, in the face of a terrible world, we would all rather turn Amish than have to teach our children the rules of survival, inwardness cannot be kept forever. (A couple of very interesting films and plays have, since 9/11, focused on this problem of the intruding exterior: most notably The History of Violence and Cache but also, say, Mercury Fur.) The warm, vanilla-scented interior of the community needs to be opened up to the messy, violent exterior that we are responsible for and that contradicts our very values. It is a struggle to keep something complicated simple, for a child, and to protect them without lying, to her but mainly to oneself. And the breaking points happen: one can no longer speak truth because the truth is too unpleasant, or because lies don’t make sense anymore, or because the exterior has gone out of hand. Tell her we kill far more of them is a terrible thing to say, but I’ve heard adults say it over children’s heads, all good people who don’t kill other people, who give small change to the homeless, who hate conflict most of the time; but who are, in that moment, voicing a worldview which exists as legitimately as brotherhood and unity, in their world. They do kill far more of them, or they wish they do, it’s said often enough, she will learn the phrase sooner or later. Parenting becomes an impossible game that needs to be played nonetheless.

So Churchill’s playlet notates the progression of failing rhetoric in the face of a terrible situation; hardly a thing to call anti-Semitic. Yet it is precisely her insistence on making the play political that creates the problems. The text itself is poetic, ambiguous: keeping it free of performance rights, thus encouraging readings and staging worldwide, asking for donations to be made for Gaza and so on, are the external devices that made it into a political play, and it is, I think, a strategic mistake for Churchill. It makes us read a fundamentally literary text in terms of its political use-value, and a number of problems emerge: suddenly every literary gesture needs to stand for either condemnation or justification. To read the text politically ultimately diminishes its value as a work of art, without adding much. But there is a point to make here, too.

More than one person has felt that labeling the children Jewish signposts the dilemma of an entire religious/ethnic group, rather than a nation. It is possible to argue that the Holocaust is a Jewish, not an Israeli tragedy, that it was important to be correct. However, the inclusion of the Holocaust, if anything, tilts the political position (if there is one) of the play towards justifying one kind of violence with another (you see?, strategic mistake). This is exactly the same as the liberal-European position that justifies Islamic terrorism on the grounds of the colonial injustices suffered, or – why not? – Palestinian bombings with the state of Gaza. Yet behind every single nation-state there is the trauma of the preceding displacement: behind the nation-making violence of Yugoslavia was the trauma of the semi-colonial bloodshed of the world wars, just like behind the unification of Germany may be the Thirty Years’ War. Moreover, as Zizek points out, there is a foundational violence at the beginning of every nation: there were people living in just about every land before those currently living there arrived. Israel’s peculiarity is that its own foundational violence, the displacement of Palestinians, is too historically close to be conveniently forgotten. The problematic of the play is so universal that it could be transposed to every single country in the world, as long as it was willing to travel into the history: Seven American Children, starting with religious prosecution in Europe and ending with the genocide of the Native Americans; Seven French Children, in which the revolutionary terror spills over into the Napoleonic wars; Seven Australian Children, and so on. It is a universal story of a dishonest history lesson: and who hasn’t ever had one?

The problem with reading the play politically is that all this needs to be taken into account (and more, and more…). If this historical linearity between foundational violence is taken on into the future, if the arbitrary line between distant and recent history is not drawn (the violent and unfair gesture with which we relegate our past crimes to the past, refuse our victims the right to be historically wronged, and pretend nothing has happened), then the past keeps returning as a terrible justification of whatever our present crimes may be.

+++

However, using this play as a pretext for a discussion on Gaza creates a set of problems much bigger than anything enumerated so far.

I am hoping to be able to continue this. However, I am enormously busy at the moment…
Apr 19 2009
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collage, LITERATURE

Jamaica Kincaid on travellers

The thing you have always suspected about yourself the minute you become a tourist is true: A tourist is an ugly human being. You are not an ugly person all the time; you are not an ugly person ordinarily; you are not an ugly person day to day. From day to day, you are a nice person. From day to day, all the people who are supposed to love you on the whole do. From day to day, as you walk down a busy street in the large and modern and prosperous city in which you work and live, dismayed, puzzled (a cliche, but only a cliche can explain you) at how alone you feel in this crowd, how awful it is to go unnoticed, how awful it is to go unloved, even as you are surrounded by more people than you could possibly get to know in a lifetime that lasted for millenia, and then out of the corner of your eye you see someone looking at you and absolute pleasure is written all over that person’s face, and then you realise that you are not as revolting a presence as you think you are (for that look just told you so). And so, ordinarily, you are a nice person, an attractive person, a person capable of drawing to yourself the affection of other people (people just like you), a person at home in your own skin (sort of; I mean, in a way; I mean, your dismay and puzzlement are natural to you, because people like you just seem to be like that, and so many of the things people like you find admirable about yourselves – the things you think about, the things you think really define you – seem rooted in these feelings): a person at home in your own house (and all its nice house things), with its nice back watd (and its nice back-yard things), at home on your street, your church, in community activities, your job, at home with your family, your relatives, your friends – you are a whole person. But one day, when you are sitting somewhere, alone in that crowd, and that awful feeling of displacedness comes over you, and really, as an ordinary person you are not well equipped to look too far inward and set yourself aright, because being ordinary is already so taxing, and being ordinary takes all you have out of you, and though the words “I must get away” do not actually pass across your lips, you make a leap from being that nice blob just sitting like a boob in your amniotic sac of the modern experience to being a person visiting heaps of death and ruin and feeling alive and inspired at the sight of it; to being a person lying on some faraway beach, your stilled body stinking and glistening in the sand, looking like something first forgotten, then remembered, then not important enough to go back for; to being a person marvelling at the harmony (ordinarily, what you would say is the backwardness) and the union these other people (and they are other people) have with nature.

Jamaica Kincaid: A Small Place

Apr 10 2009
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collage, LITERATURE, violence

Contemplating Hell

Contemplating Hell by Bertolt Brecht
Contemplating Hell, as I once heard it,
My brother Shelley found it to be a place
Much like the city of London. I,
Who do not live in London, but in Los Angeles,
Find, contemplating Hell, that is
Must be even more like Los Angeles.

Also in Hell,
I do not doubt it, there exist these opulent gardens
With flowers as large as trees, wilting, of course,
Very quickly, if they are not watered with very expensive water. And fruit markets
With great leaps of fruit, which nonetheless

Possess neither scent nor taste. And endless trains of autos,
Lighter than their own shadows, swifter than
Foolish thoughts, shimmering vehicles, in which
Rosy people, coming from nowhere, go nowhere.
And houses, designed for happiness, standing empty,
Even when inhabited.

Even the houses in Hell are not all ugly.
But concern about being thrown into the street
Consumes the inhabitants of the villas no less
Than the inhabitants of the barracks.

Apr 04 2009
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classics, Daniel Schlusser, essays, formal inquiry, LITERATURE, naturalism, reviews, theatre, tragedy, VCA, violence

RW: Peer Gynt

Somewhere between the eager, calculated ambition of Julien Sorel, and the holy mania of Hamsun’s narrator in Hunger, there was Peer Gynt, a provincial boy who wanted to be king. Writing in Italy, between the shaky fervour of his early fame, and the secure wisdom of his mature psychological dramas, recently expatriated Ibsen was waxing uncomfortably personal. The first half, an act of plotting bien fait, realism-however-fanciful, is his past; the second, a phantasmagoric circular nightmare, his imagined future. For five acts, Ibsen makes Peer hop from whim to whim, day-dreaming himself into glorious roles and escaping every moment of existential discomfort, confusing this wild gratification of impulsive desires and learnt ambition with truthfulness to oneself.

In Dante’s Inferno, the antechamber to Hell is reserved for those who drifted through life without ever getting behind a cause of belief. Having gambled morals, principles and relationships away for a life lived fully, Peer is revealed to be merely a self-centred little man, not different from a common small-town butcher. He spends his last dramatic moments chased by the Button Moulder with a big ladle, confronted with the very destiny he fears the most: insignificance; oblivion. Categorically denied the last honour of being a great sinner (“merely average”, quips the Button Moulder), unworthy of Devil’s time, he will be moulded into a button.

A sprawling dramatic poem, Peer Gynt careens freely between social verisimilitude and outrageous flights of fancy. In its psychological externalization, each troll is a momentarily irresistible girl, each nightmare a folktale monster. It was not intended for performance, and Ibsen exuberantly did away with reasonable staging demands: spanning 50 years, two continents, an obscene number of characters, changes of tone, pace and fabular focus, it is as unstageable as a play gets. But it was Heiner Muller who said that only dramatic writing that cannot be realised on stage is of any use for the theatre.

Daniel Schlusser takes the text as the starting point to explore the questions and answers Ibsen posed himself. His Peer Gynt eludes, disappoints, dissonates, amazes, stretches and contracts, and meanwhile disagrees with most of what we see on Australian stages these days: despite occasionally looking it, it is not lyrical, not pretty, not atmospheric, not sentimental, and not unknotting itself with silly humour or cute explanations. lt unravels its threads of inquiry with slow thoroughness of a Hans van den Broeck (not among the C de la B for no reason), and yet the complex performance requires no long-winded explanations before it can be fully felt. Its intellectual rigour is solid enough to allow itself wild playfulness. It is gorgeous, masterful theatre.

It is entirely possible to read this Peer as a satire on conventional naturalism. The establishing scene, that two-minute cliché of actor milling around the stage, unaware of the fourth-wall crowd, is here stretched into an unrelenting, 30-or-so-minute setting up of the performance/wedding stage. A fridge is hauled in, a pool filled with balloons, the actors walk on and off stage wrapped in a visible, but gauze-thin layer of heightened stage presence: bringing the drinks, the beach towels, talking into their phones, conducting barely audible conversations, whispered gossip. The endless wedding implosion that builds up is an opaque enactment of a complex social situation, breaking into mini-conflicts, small seductions, power negotiations in far corners. All a sort of long pout at the audience that wants staged life.

However, it is when the performance breaks into the song and dance of serving-the-play, and the performers build up heightened actorliness, that strangeness sets in. In a wonderful inversion, the text is not a source of truth, but an exclamatory deceit. Once literary faithfulness start showing, it looks incongruous to whatever stage reality has been created. The performers recite Ibsen’s extravagant language and emotions sounding more and more like delusional lunatics. Gynt fornicates in the forest, becomes a troll, abandons lovers, grows old, and the closer the performance follows the plotline, the more it seems to descend into plotless chaos. Aase dies when appropriate, then resumes her stage life the hungover morning after. Supporting characters loiter on stage, or drift off into small games. Off-handedly providing the dramatic arc, the production ends in medias res of psychological carnage, leaving us confused, hovering without catharsis (save for a small burst of soap bubbles).

Katie-Jean Harding, Annie Last, Rebecca Bower, Kyle Baxter and Nikki Shiels inPeer Gynt. Photo by Jeff Busby.

Arbitrating the guilt for this life less lived, Schlusser avoids the easy parallel with our media-fed crave for the semiotics of success rather than success itself (remember teenage Grace in Sally Potter’s YES who, when asked what she wants to be, torpidly sighs: “Famous…”?). In Kyle Baxter’s performance, Peer is not a megalomaniac boy whose unstructured, but violent ambition ruins women, and then himself. He is an extraordinarily passive character instead, prancing on the outskirts of the stage playing with props, being laughed at by the cashed-up bogans and mellowly accepting their ridicule as a sign of belonging. If he is a man-boy, it is because the entire group has a vested interest in keeping him on their own level of existential blindness, and it is his overdeveloped imagination that keeps him losing whatever path he may have, not selfish hunger. Ibsen’s Gynt confuses the symbol for the meaning, hunting solid objects that stand for power: money, ruthlessness, detachment, crowns or roles (he wants to be an emperor, an explorer, a philosopher). Schlusser’s Gynt, a bubble-wrapped boy living on the cusp of the most profligate moment in history, in a wealthy, First-World metropolis, doesn’t ask, but is constantly offered. Rather than spreading his ambition too thinly, he loses himself by not being able to refuse. Aase, the mother who lives through her adored child (beautifully calibrated Edwina Wren), forms an alliance with Solveig, obsessively exchanging stories of their dear boy. And Solveig, the silver-prayer-book docile image of all the 19th-century girl cliches, is in Karen Sibbing’s manically delicate performance shown to be a wilful child, a mind as unformed as Peer’s. If she grows old waiting for her childhood crush to return, it is not God-condoned devotion that keeps her in their hut, but infantile refusal to burst her own bubble of romantic fantasy.

In the setting up, it soon becomes clear that men and women live separate fantasies: while women strut on high heels, drink champagne and throw tantrums over their wedding dreams, men set up their beer and Fußball den at the other end of the stage. Unable to break the chalk circle of the masculine group, Gynt becomes a toy boy for the women, with all the confused disrespect that this powerless subordination breeds. In the interplay of outpours of egocentric affection, everyone uses everyone, and everyone feels a winner, yet everyone also feels virtuous, affectionate, generous. When, in the last minutes of the play, Peer Gynt begs Solveig to tell him who he is, where he is, she glows with giggly joy as she announces: “You live in my head, in my song, in my dreams”. Nobody comes off clean: just like Torvald is himself trapped in the dollhouse he has built for Nora, so are these Gen Y child-women shown to be complicit in the infantilisation of the men that hurt and abandon them. In a particularly morbid observation, Solveig jumps into a noise-making, ridiculing frenzy, trying to get Peer’s attention away from his dying mother. (Whether I share this boy-friendly thesis is not the point: it is rare to see a theatre production intellectually both brave and sound enough to freely disagree with.)

However, this psychological triangle is refracted through so many distancing prisms that one could not know the text and still leave with a headful of thoughts. Ibsen’s poem already opens up conflicting levels of narrative. Is it a socially verosimile fable, or hallucinatory psychological realism? It is a story of a story-teller, a man-onion who lies because he couldn’t find his way out of his own mind. It is, finally, half-autobiography and half-anxiety. Schlusser’s production piles the layers even higher. On the boards, it builds storeys of vertiginous conflicting realities: the play slowly establishes itself as a party cum wedding; the wedding is a rehearsal; the rehearsal collapses under the disagreeing perceptions of the participants’ roles; Gynt’s entire life, fantastic as it is, probably no more than an overnight trip that ensues as the rehearsal descends into drunken shenanigans, and then further into an orgiastic ritual of sacrifice. Georgie Read, a woman in 1920s attire, walks through the set untouched by the bogan mayhem. And yet constantly, as a man with a panama hat runs to fetch the characters that drift out into the courtyard through the door at the back of the stage, there is a subtle feeling that we may be looking at a bunch of asylum crazies biding their time. (The crucial moment in Act IV, in which Peer is crowned the emperor of a mental hospital, is not so much missing as dispersed, both subtly pointed at and self-evident.) All apart from the simple fact that, since the characters make demands on the sound technicians and call the stage manager in to wipe the party mess, we all clearly admit to being in the theatre.

Kevin Fa’asitua Hofbauer and Kyle Baxter. Photo by Jeff Busby.

Indeed, one of the main concerns of this Peer Gynt is the multiplicity of make-believe , and the disorder that ensues in leakage. While Ibsen remains unclear about how much of a dream the entire story is, Schlusser keeps us wondering whose dream it is. Layering theatricality and anti-theatricality, virtually all stage action is apportioned into multiple collective illusions with varying numbers of participants, and each one looks equally dubious: from the footballer-wife paradise of cheap positional goods, to Peer and Solveig’s romantic idyll. Turning the wedding into a rehearsal, thus, is not just a stylistic device, but a gesture of utmost importance. There is no logic to rehearsing a performative act, except as an anxiety attenuator; yet it absorbs and breathes that same anxiety because it becomes a fragile battleground of dream and reality – just like the theatre turns into the battleground of ideas not because it is a safe space, but because it isn’t; just like one’s fantasies need to be corrected before they result in actions, and why play-acting is not for sissies. As these self-declared bubbles of comfort build up, Schlusser examines the burning violence they create outside. Wars, gangs, social groups, fashion trends and riots are all no more than collective fantasies in action, indoor safety upkept with violence radiating outwards. Thus the boganville, grown heavy and momentuous with alcohol, turns into a gang mutilation of Anitra (Sarah Armanious), the wedding dress-maker and sacrificial wog. Georgie Read, who follows individuals around wide-eyed and curious, mimicking their bacchanalia with utmost seriousness (from stripper dances to senseless violence), as if trying to prevent the friction between the conflicting frenzies by upholding them all, is not merely an ambulant comic relief, but a body that turns every quotidian affectation, every social convention, into deadpan absurdity.

And yet this same theatre never becomes a collective fantasy of its own. With heavily dramatic wasted on nothing truthful nor meaningful, and savagely grotesque endpoints of mundane behaviour played with glassy, anti-spectacular neutrality, the presentation is jarringly anti-empathetic. It betrays expectations with such cold consistency that we walk out feeling anything but lulled. Giddy, rather, and hiccuppy and confused, while the kick is slowly making its way to the gut. Despite its tone, looking all things wrong (lyrical, cute, naive, sentimental, funny), the final portrait is bleak, damning. Peer Gynt is no longer the sad story of one lost boy. Tonight, the tragedy is collective.

Peer Gynt. Based on Henrik Ibsen, directed by Daniel Schlusser. Set and Costume design Anna Cordingley. Lighting design Kimberly Kwa. Sound designers/composers Nick van Cuylenburg and Martin Kay. Stage manager Jo Trevathan. Performed by Kyle Baxter, Edwina Wren, Karen Sibbing, Heloise Jackson, Justin Arnold, Nikki Shiels, Rebecca Bower, Annie Last, Maj Thomsen, Nick Jamieson, Katie-Jean Harding, Georgie Read, Josh Price, Sarah Armanious, Alexander England, Mike Steele, Kevin Fa’asitua Hofbauer, Kade Greenland. VCA, 26 March – 1 April.

Mar 15 2009
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collage, ethics, LITERATURE

In other people’s words

1. Confronted with a world configured by the colonizer, the colonized subject is always presumed guilty. The colonized does not accept his guilt, but rather considers it a kind of curse, a sword of Damocles.”

- Wounder and Wounded, James Wood

2. “All that my freedom has brought me is the knowledge that I have a face and have a body, that I must feed this body and clothe this body for a certain number of years. Then it will be over.”

- One out of Many, V. S. Naipaul

3. They were in some ways well matched. Like him, she was from modest circumstances—her father was a clerk in a lawyer’s office, and the family lived in a two-bedroom flat in a suburb of Birmingham. She was the only girl at her school to win a state scholarship to Oxford. They were both twenty-two when they married, and neither family was notified. But, whereas Naipaul careered from confidence to anxiety (a year after meeting Pat, he told her that “from a purely selfish point of view you are the ideal wife for a future G.O.M.”—Grand Old Man—“of letters”), Pat was stable, supportive, a willing helpmeet. Years later, in one of this biography’s many devastating moments, Naipaul reread his early correspondence with Pat and made notes. He had got too quickly involved with Pat, he wrote; he had been in too deep and could not get out. It would have been better if he had married someone else. Pat “did not attract me sexually at all.” He decided that the relationship, on his side, “was more than half a lie. Based really on need. The letters are shallow & disingenuous.”

Her presence in this biography is a hush around Vidia’s noise; her job is merely to hold the big drum of his ego in the right position, the better for him to strike the vital life rhythm. Naipaul’s sympathy for the political and emotional fragility of his characters did not extend to his wife. Pat’s diaries make for painful reading: “I felt assaulted but I could not defend myself.” “He has been increasingly frenzied and sadly, from my point of view, hating and abusing me.” Pat died of breast cancer in 1996. “It could be said that I had killed her,” Naipaul tells French. “It could be said. I feel a little bit that way.”

- Wounder and Wounded, James Wood

Feb 18 2009
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LITERATURE, news

This week

The last few weeks, in Melbourne, Australia, have clearly been about showing the dogs for the dogs, and the humans for the humans. I have long been suspicious of the Australian habit of back-patting; of praising our courage, our simple and wholesome practical-mindedness and readiness to help in need. Of saying, we have been brought to our knees, but we will stand again. Now, though, I think it may be not at all different from the Croatian method of digesting catastrophe, which is fierce and unforgiving awe at the senseless cruelty of the world. Sense of not so much injustice, but the magnitude of suffering. Because both are, deep down, just different takes on the same basic truth of life. Terrible things happen; people suffer and die; life continues. We learn nothing but the depth and breadth of our own selves.

(As an urban planner, I am able to simultaneously have another angle on the events, one slightly more outcome-oriented. However, that is a different story, and I am not going to bore you with public policy discussion.)

Sad, sober and toughening-up few weeks. The best thing we can do, as always, is show Hemingway’s grace under pressure, in other words courage. Make sure we find out we are humans, not dogs.

It remains a theatre hiatus for me. Instead, I will offer a couple of reading recommendations. Zadie Smith, always the brilliant essayist, writes Speaking in Tongues for the NY Review of Books, a deep and personal meditation on Barack Obama, language, and difference:

It’s amazing how many of our cross-cultural and cross-class encounters are limited not by hate or pride or shame, but by another equally insidious, less-discussed, emotion: embarrassment. A few minutes later, I was in a taxi and heading uptown with my Northern Irish husband and our half-Indian, half-English friend, but that initial hesitation was ominous; the first step on a typical British journey. A hesitation in the face of difference, which leads to caution before difference and ends in fear of it. Before long, the only voice you recognize, the only life you can empathize with, is your own.

On the other side of the world, the new edition of Plotki is dedicated to Airports. Among many pieces of striking citizen journalism, it is worth singling out Lucie Dusk’s Leaving Nowhere, on the 100-odd residents of Heathrow, thus temporarily not homeless. In Eurozine, Slavenka Drakulić explains Why she has not returned to Belgrade, discussing personal and political responsibility.

While his speech clearly aimed at evoking sympathy from the audience, I must confess that I did not feel any sympathy at all. I was angry at his anger. Speaking on their behalf he somehow suggested that the new generation does not deserve such a treatment from “Europe”. The implication of his argument was that because they are young they must also be innocent.

Proving that serious writing has not disappeared from Australian mainstream media, Guy Rundle, in Winds of change, discusses the past and the future of our economic crisis:

The entire productive capacity of the West has been hollowed out, largely under the tutelage of an economic theory so oriented to consumption that its value calculations could not distinguish between $1 billion of GDP expressed as a steel mill and the same amount as represented by the sale of pet care products. As long as money was moving around, everything was all right.

Finally, fiction. In a recent issue of The New Yorker, Donald Antrim pens Another Manhattan, an exquisite short story that does the most wondrous kind of the short-story magic: changes colour and shape with every paragraph, ending quite a different thing than it began.

But we should always end sad weeks with a music number:

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