Virtual Scholars
An imagined form of scholarship…Archive for Books
Remembering You Have Forgotten Something…
…given the way things are, it is not easy to return to writing here. It feels late in the day, but I did always promise to write something about Perfume and today, of all days (though whilst in the grand scheme of things needing not to be significant), seems as good as any to get this out.
The last time I was in London I did two things. I collected my copy of Classen et al. (1994) Aroma: The Cultural History of Smell and I watched the film of Perfume. Both were in preparation to write something about Süskind’s novel. Amongst other things I think I was going to say something about the complication of trying to find words for the unsayable of scent. And I had thought the film would struggle even more than the book. I think in a sense it did, but I much preferred the ending, which visually – sculpturally even – was rather nicely done and importantly managed to undo the somewhat clumsy messiah routine of the book. I had always been primed for the film to be like a feature length Christian Dior advertisement. But, in fact, I was reminded of one of those Stella Artois advertisements. Something of the mise-en-scene, the milieu, the class of people perhaps, but also the film of the book is similarly over dramatic and funny for all of that. (Although the wit of the beer commercials – contained within 3 minutes – is inevitably much shaper).
But this all seems superfluous now (and perhaps it always was). If before I had wanted to ’say’ things here, now I am not so sure; hence my growing absence. My words have severely depreciated over the months, which is doubly sad: I don’t like to lose them, but equally I don’t like what I lose because of them (because here they just continue in all emptiness…)
Those who know me will understand when I say I had to ‘rescue’ Aroma from the smoke-dust climes of my family home. Ironically, then, my copy of the book carries its own potent aroma (though the time it has taken me write something has been sufficiently long for my eyes to stop watering as I turn its pages). To my surprise the book contains a direct reference to the novel:
Peter Süskind’s enormously popular book Perfume is a case in point. The keen-scented protagonist of the book, Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, is both ’idiot’ and ‘pervert’ – as well as an offspring of the ‘degenerate’ lower class. Grenouille exercises his abnormal passion for scent by murdering maidens in order to sniff up their sweet fragrance. In the end, through his de-scenting of maidens, Grenouille is able to invest himself with an odour so attractive that he is torn to pieces and eaten by a frenzied crowd.
If Perfume makes for a ‘good read’, it is not only because of its unusual topic and engrossing story line, but also (and perhaps more fundamentally) because of its confirmation of the validity of many of our most cherished olfactory stereotypes – the maniac sniffing out his prey; the fragrant hapless maiden; the dangerous savagery inherent in the sense of smell. (p.4)
I can’t say I recognise any of these ‘olfactory stereotypes’ – at best they seem obscure and a little harsh; at worst they conveniently establish something the authors wish us to believe need debunking. The novel is indeed a ‘good read’ because of its story and story-telling (barring a few didactic sections, particularly a middle section in which Grenouille retreats to the mountains and returns like some pesudo-Nietzschean Zarathustra), but for me the real (and only) impetus to read the book (and read it quickly) came from the hands that gave it to me. The book was an offering, with the potential to know something about myself and another. Sadly, I don’t think we ever really discussed it. Never the right occasion.
…the words of Aroma leave me cold, but the words that fell out of the book (on a scrap paper I inserted back when I had my initial idea for an entry here) seem – where at least I can read my own writing – a little more poignant:
There was a day when you mentioned in email that you were having trouble getting hold of your usual perfume (and you might try another). I never said anything at the time (perhaps because one ought not say these things), but I was struck in terror at your words. …I was doubly affected. Perhaps I wouldn’t get to experience that brush of your perfume again, which was sad enough, but added to which I was struck with the thought I had no idea what it was I was missing. I don’t have a memory of your scent, I just know/knew it because of you… and these unaromatic words simply take me further away…
The strangest of things: to remember something you have forgotten - ‘it is on the tip of my tongue’ we tend to say (what a lovely phrase). The hint of a perfume of someone you long for is a delicate thing. You stand there next to them and that is everything (so you think); but then, just occasionally, playing on the tips of the invisible boundaries between one another, the faint curls of a scent you can only know as being them, when with them. And no sooner does it reach you, it dissolves too.
Perhaps the moment of such scents and of words need not be so different. In A.S. Byatt’s Possession there is a line about people’s handwriting: ‘Certain handwriting can turn the stomach, after one, after five, after twenty-five years’. Here the sentiment is negative, but equally it can be the other way. The mere hint of another’s writing – like a scent you recongise in them – can have an immediate, overflowing sensation.
In writing about the ‘presence’ of her own writing, Cixous notes:
I need writing; I need to surprise myself living: I need to feel myself quiver with living: I need to call myself into living and to answer myself by living: I need to be living in the present of the present: I need double-living: I need to come into life: I am afraid that writing will take the place of living: I need writing thinking of living: I write celebrating living: I need to accompany living with music: I need writing to celebrate living: this morning, I perfumed myself with essence of orange flower water: on the phial of essential oil there is the original label covered with Arabic signs that spirit me away on their sweeping curls to an unknown but imaginable neighbourhood in Baghdad: I adore scripts: and the two most beautiful scripts in the world are Hebrew and Arabic, languages I neither read nor speak… (Cixous, ‘(With) Or the Art of Innocence’)
The infusion here of writing and perfume seems particularly sweet. The to and fro of those delicate languages we barely even read or speak need not be unfathomable scripts – they can the senses of scents or all those messages we pass between one another over the days, months, years… Again, I think of lines from Possession: ‘Letters … are a form of narrative that envisages no outcome, no closure … Letters tell no story, because they do not know, from line to line, where they are going. [...] Letters … exclude not only the reader as co-writer, or predictor, or guesser, but they exclude the reader as reader, they are written, if they are true letters, for a reader’. But… but, I know… I sense it… I’m afraid I don’t adequately ‘answer myself by living’, even if that is not how it feels right now.
Imaging a painful outcome (renouncing, leaving, etc.), I intone, within myself, the exalted hallucination of closure; a vainglory of abnegation seizes me (renouncing love but not friendship, etc.), and I immediately forget what I would then have to sacrifice: my madness itself – which by its very status cannot be constituted as the object of my sacrifice: who ever saw a madman “sacrificing” his madness to someone? (Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse)
…and it is surely the little indefinable and beautiful moments - like the near remembrance of another’s scent – that keeps awake the madness that would be a true madness to sacrifice.
Once the exaltation has lapsed, I am reduced to the simplest philosophy: that of endurance (the natural dimension of real fatigues). I suffer without adjustment, I persist without intensity: always bewildered, never discouraged; I am a Daruma doll, a legless toy endlessly poked and pushed, but finally regaining its balance assured by an inner balancing pin (But what is my balancing pin? The force of love?). This is what we are told by a folk poem…
Such is life
Falling over seven times
And getting up eight(Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse)
In the vernacular I know it to be a ‘Weeble-Wobble‘ which never falls down. How mad they must have felt all those times so nearly hitting the ground, yet recovering due to an irrepressible balancing pin. I am due to go to London again next week, though I really wonder what I will do, how I will remain on a level. This time I carry with me another book. I’ve kept it wrapped in the manila envelope in which it arrived. It bore no note, nothing. I only know it was obtained by its owner (with the fabulous handwriting) in 1999. And I know also, because it was one of the last things we said (and in such a matter of a fact kind of way, which was odd given it was the last time we allowed ourselves to be together), that it had been remembered it had been forgotten, having previously been placed next to a copy of L.P. Hartley’s The Go-between (which of course seemed so apt at the time). But what is this time in which I have to read it?
…keeping in mind that Perfume is a murder story of sorts, I sense myself being on the run. I am a criminal, a thief in the night of my own thoughts and feelings: ‘The sentiment of an accumulation of amorous sufferings explodes in this cry: “It can’t go on…” (Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse). Indeed these words must stop…
…the remembering of something forgotten is a perpetual loss; only ever remedied by the ‘thing’ itself, that which goes beyond any words to describe it…
Slow Time(s)
‘Slower,’ said Jalal. ‘In-two-three-four, out-two-three-four. Very good. Slow the stream of your thoughts. Once you are in Slow-Time, everything will seem to slow down around you. But you will be fast. You will be faster than anything. (from S.F. Said’s Varjak Paw, p.129)
We are accustomed to measuring time in a uniform manner. In this sense, time is made up of fixed, repeatable units. Phenomenologically, however, the way we experience time can alter quite markedly – it can seem to stretch, or constrict as if it were hardly adhering to the usual units of time measured upon the clock face. That final hour, when you are desperate to leave work to go and meet someone, time can feel so long. Yet, upon meeting the person you longed to meet, an hour seems to fly past all too quickly. Are these in fact different kinds of time? Or is it simply how we make use of time, how we shape the time we are in?
In S.F. Said’s Varjak Paw, we are told the tale of a small Mesopotamian Blue kitten who, breaking out of the confines of his owner’s home, must learn to fend for himself in the big wide city. In doing so he re-discovers the Seven Skills of a secret cat martial arts called The Way of Jalal. Of these seven skills, the fourth is Slow-Time: ‘everything will seem to slow down around you. But you will be fast. You will be faster than anything‘. There is something quite plausible about a cat with the ability of slow-time, one only has to sit and watch the stealth with which a cat slowly advances upon its prey (or just a shadow even) to recognise a certain potential for an altered sense of time.
In a rather more elaborate fashion, Slow-Time is an effect used in countless films since its celebrated use (and development) in The Matrix. The following clip offers an account of how the effect is created. Given the nature of the movie industry, it is perhaps without surprise that instead of the gentle sounding Slow-Time, the effect is generally referred to as Bullet-Time. Nonetheless, what is apparent in the creation of the effect is – as a theoretical model – the ability to spatialise time, or rather to ‘move’ in time just in the same way we can willfully move in the three dimensions of space. It is a fantasy of time travel used on a micro-level to move about the perspective of a single event.
Concurrent with reading Varjak Paw, I have also been reading Sara Maitland’s intriguing new book, A Book of Silence. It has got me thinking that perhaps Slow-Time need not be thought of as just a mystical Way, the musings of a theoretical physicist, or the technology intensive illusion of the film industry. Perhaps Slow-Time is equally something quite simple and ready to hand. In her book, Maitland gives an account of an ‘adventure’ she goes on – over a period of 10 years – to experience and chart what we mean by silence (the book reads as of mixture of both personal journey and cultural history). Crucially she seeks to find a positive, affirmative reading of silence, contrary to popular notions, which suggest silence to be boring, asocial and potentially bad for us. She spends six weeks all alone a cottage on Skye. During this self-imposed period of silence (which for her is closely linked to solitude), she notes eight particular experiences: ‘…an intensification of both physiological and psychological sensation; disinhibition; a sense of ‘givenness’ or connection; auditory confusions; an exhilarating consciousness of being at risk, in peril; ineffability and bliss’ (p.78). Not all of these experiences are necessarily relevant to Slow-Time, but they all suggest of a certain mallebility of our own sense of self and our sense or place in time and space. She writes, for example, of a heightened sensation and awareness of the taste of food (even bland food such as porridge), an ability to distinguish various sonics within the rush of wind and rain. And she describes a whole different sense of being in the world, particularly a sensation of blurring with the surrounds, to shed the usual sense of one’s own boundary (of one’s skin etc). Is this how Slow-Time begins, with a re-negoiation with what is going on around you? (…it is worth remembing, the First Skill of the Way of Jalal is Open Mind, ‘only when you admit that you know nothing, can you truly know anything‘!).
Roland Barthes, in his lecture course ‘The Neutral’, devotes a section to ‘Silence’. He begins by differentiating between tacere, which in Latin refers to verbal silence, and silere, meaning stillness, absence of movement and of noise. Sara Maitland’s quest to embrace and understand silence begins more along the lines of verbal silence, but soon (especially following her experiences on Skye) unearths much more of the sense of silere, which, as Barthes explains, generally refers to:
…objects, night, sea, winds … Hence a series of very beautiful ordinary metaphors: the moon turned invisible at its wanning, the bud or the tendril that hasn’t yet opened up, the egg that is not yet hatched: silet, sileunt.
In short, silere would refer to a sort of timeless virginity of things, before they are born or after they have disappeared…
I’d like to think the shift of attention to a silence of things (and not just words, speech), brings us upon a sense of Slow-Time, in that it is about our ability to take up and appreciate shapes within our all too often confined experience of the space-time continnum. Like Maitland, Barthes looks to silence (and more broadly the neutral) in the affirmative. It is precisely its removal from the very structures of meaning we are accustomed to that attracts him and within which he suggests a radical space or time of meaning – or, the opening of meaning. And, there is a underlying interest in Zen for Barthes too, both its ’suspicion with regard to theoretical verbalisation’ and its undoing of hierarchies: ‘Why did the sixth patriarch succed the fifth: “It’s becase,” he says, “I don’t understand Buddhism.” (p.28). At the close of the section on Silence, Barthes writes the following: ‘This integral silence is no longer simply the tacere but joins the silere: silence of all nature, scattering of the fact-of-man throughout nature: as if man were some kind of noise of nature (in the cybernetic sense), a caco-phony’ (p.29). Perhaps, here, Barthes, is raising Slow-Time to the level of humanity, beyond the singular adventures of a very particular cat!
It might be said bridging between Slow-Time and silence, or to put another way, to suggest a certain silence within Slow-Time (which admittedly is often a feature of the sequences one sees in film, at least in that the soundtrack is ’slowed’ through the use of different acoustics), is not entirely appropriate. But, if it is a way to relate Slow-Time to our own lives, it might be worth pursuing. At the time of my writing I am caught up in a certain silence. Not of the solitary kind, as Maitland experiences on Skye. Instead, I am surrounded by a host of sounds, but all of which in a culture the language of which I do not speak. I hear everything, but I do not comprehend and crucially I have little means to make the ‘voices’ in my head become understandable to those around me. It is the latter, I feel, that creates the silence I am in. The days are long (but then I have come from a timezone in which the nights grow dark much earlier) and I find myself noticing all sorts of little details (the shape of clouds, the bleeps of domestic appliances, the structural creaks of the house, the patterns on cushions and carpets), which perhaps I would not normally attend to (although some who know me would might say otherwise!). Is this Slow-Time I am experiencing? Or is my current sense of time simply out of joint? Going on an unusual clumsiness with chopsticks I suspect the latter, but I will keep practicing – one never knows when the art of Slow-Time might come in handy!
[NB. For the regular reader, disappointed not to find an entry here on Perfume, I extend my apologies. However, I have not forgotten and it will one day appear - and soon I hope]
100 Years Later…
R., you set me the task of reading Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude ahead of my visit to Bogotá in the Spring of next year. And ahead of schedule the task is complete. ‘Márquez’ is of course one of the most important cultural ‘exports’ for Colombia and so it makes sense I should finally get around to reading the book (which has sat upon my shelf expectantly for years).
Márquez was born in 1928 in Aracataca, a town in Northern Colombia, ‘where he was raised by his maternal grandparents in a house filled with countless aunts and the rumors of ghosts’ (Biography…). He studied at the University of Bogotá and went on to be a reporter for the Colombian newspaper El Espectador and travelled to New York and numerous European cities as a foreign correspondent (echoes of which arise in the novel). He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982. However, it is far more than this biography of a prominent Colombian that need concern us. Márquez is also a writer of many layers that clearly we can share in the same way we have Flaubert, Proust, and Barthes, as well as film-maker’s such as Wenders, Wong Kar-wai, Keiller and Greenaway.
One Hundred Years of Solitude is a long, magically woven novel, the sort of book that if you put it down for too long only results in needing to start all over again. Fortunately I did not have to read in solitude and when it was all over, this is what I sent by ’mail’ (to the one whose ‘floating world’ has reacquainted me with reading fiction for fiction’s sake):
Yes, 100 is now over for me… Or has just began, since I am now starting to ask myself what it is I have been reading all this time. I suppose in the postmodern ‘tradition’, I have just been reading a book that is the book it refers to – in other words I have been reading Melquiades’ sanskrit parchments all this time, and like the constant battle to dechiper them I am now only just at the beginning of knowing what the book might contain… Dare I read it again? …but that will only put me in the position of needing to read it again, and so on and so on, ad infinitum…
In some respects I could have been satisfied with the first 60 or so pages. The book’s magical realism (for which it is so well known) is subtly opened out, with frames within frames of familial memories and episodes of alchemy. The book is the story of the Buendia family and the town they help found, Macondo. As the backcover notes: ’Part exotic paradise, part nightmare, Macondo is a fantastic world of miracles and mirages where nothing is as it seems. Its secrets lie hidden for years in an encoded book, and only Aureliano Buendia, the last in the dynasty, can unlock its mysteries and discover the fate of this strange land…’. I don’t think it is really to give anything away to cite from the close of the book:
Before reaching the final line, however, he had already understood that he would never leave that room, for it was foreseen that the city of mirrors (or mirages) would be wiped out by the wind and exiled from the memory of men at the precise moment when Aureliano Babilonia would finish dechipering the parchments, and that everything written on them was unrepeatable since time immemorial and forever more, because races condemned to one hundred years of solitude did not have a second opportunity on earth.
The book is unrepeatable – it is an event, not a story book. It stays with me in a way that few books can. I inhabit its landscape and the house at the centre of it all. The fluidity of its mise-en-scene equally conjures up my own past, my family and my memories. In that sense the book is unrepeatable, it can only be my version of the book (I am now its ghost), it has come to inhabit me, as much as I inhibit it.
There are two important recurring motifs to mention, one utopian, which is never realised and the other dsytopian, which troublingly is written out of everyone’s memory. The former is a motif of an unrealised city of ice. The opening line of the book: ‘Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice’ – proclaimed by Jose Arcadio Buendia as ‘the great invention of our time’: ‘When it was opened … the chest gave off a glacial exhalation. Inside there was only an enormous, transparent block with the infinite internal needles in which the light of the sunset was broken up into coloured stars’.
Jose Arcadio Buendia dreamed that night that right there a noisy city with houses having mirrors walls rose up. He asked what city it was and they answered him with a name that he had never heard, that had no meaning at all, but that had a supernatural echo in his dream: Macondo. On the following day he convinced his men that they would never find the sea. He ordered them to cut down the trees to make a clearing beside the river, at the coolest spot on the bank, and there they founded the village.
Jose Arcadio Buendia did not succeed in deciphering the dream of houses with mirror walls until the day he discovered ice. Then he thought he understood its deep meaning. He thought that in the near future they would be able to manufacture blocks of ice on a large scale from such a common material as water and with them build the new houses of the village. Macondo would no longer be a burning place, where the hinges and door knockers twisted with the heat, but would be changed into a wintry city.
The ice factory is never built and subsequently this vision of a wintry city is never realised. Instead Macondo remains a heated, contested space. War rages around it and most troublingly of all a surreal massacre (being the dsytopian motif) takes place following a street protest by union leaders and the workers on strike: ‘…something happened that did not bring on fright but a kind of hallucination. The captain gave the order to fire and fourteen machine guns answered at once. But it all seemed like a farce. It was as if the machine guns had been loaded with caps, because their panting rattle could be heard and their incandescent spitting could be seen, but not the slightest reaction was perceived’. Yet, hours later, the only ’survivor’ of this event is Jose Arcadio Segundo who wakes up in darkness to realise:
…he was riding on an endless and silent train and that his head was caked with dry blood and that all his bones ached. He felt an intolerable desire to sleep … There was no free space in the car except for an aisle in the middle. Several hours must have passed since the massacre because the corpses had the same temperature as plaster in autumn and the same consistency of petrified foam that it had, and those who had put them in the car had had time to pile them up in the same way in which they transported bunches of bananas.
Jose Arcadio Segundo eventually escapes from the train and makes his way back to Macondo, but bizzarely finds that no one believes him about what has happened. He spends his time trying to find out what really went on (if anything at all, for had it been a dream?) and to determine how no one seemed to believe it or wish to speak of it. As the book is at this point beginning to near its end (in one’s hand, one feels the pages already read now undoubtedly outweighing those left to be read) there is a vague sense in which this mystery will eventually be resolved. Concurrent with my reading of the nove, a story, which has been around for sometime, appeared in The Guardian about ‘death squads’ targeting union leaders in Bogotá. The story relates specifically to bottling plants used by Coca-Cola, with the unions claiming that ‘the company’s locally owned bottlers in Colombia used illegal paramilitary groups to intimidate, threaten and kill its workers’ and which in turn has led to an attempted boycott of Coca-Cola products around the world (More…). Mark Thomas’ book Belching Out the Devil: Global Adventures with Coca-Cola (see also Channel 4’s Dispatches) considers this story in more detail. It is a murky tale, which appears hard to pin down (just as the ‘fictional’ account of the massacre in Márquez’s novel). The timing of the appearance of this report, coinciding with my reading of One Hundred Years of Solitude, gave an added twist to the novel’s very last line: ‘…because races condemned to one hundred years of solitude did not have a second opportunity on earth’. One hundred years later, as it were, the solitude continues, or is it only repeated? Like the call of ‘Macondo’, Coca-Cola has no inherent meaning, yet its ’supernatural echo’ rebounds through our capitalist ’Empire’ (to take Hardt and Negri’s term). But I don’t want to give up on that wintry city, not yet, not when literature itself might still manage to show us other pathways.
Yet, Literature and Empire (as befits the ‘logic’ of the latter) must collide. Rachel Aviv’s article for Salon.com, 100 years of solitude — on crack, neatly encapsultes this in its subheading: ‘Latin America’s McOndo literary movement drags the butterflies of magical realism into Burger King. With Jorge Franco’s narco-saga “Rosario Tijeras,” it may have found its first masterpiece’. She explains:
Alberto Fuguet, the young Chilean author who is responsible for coining the word “McOndo,” respects García Márquez but resents the idea that to be perceived as Latin American one must write like him. [...] Fuguet and several other so-called McOndians, most notably Pedro Juan Gutierrez, Mario Mendoza and Edmundo Paz Soldán, came back (in a wave of recent and forthcoming English translations), but their work in no way resembles García Márquez’s. If anything, their style is a cross between Raymond Chandler and Charles Bukowski – Chandler in their depiction of the city as a kind of protagonist, Bukowski in their appetite for large doses of provocative, unsavory details: fucking a corpse in a junkyard, peeing on a former lover’s face, scenes of mass masturbation.
This generation has yet to produce a standout, world-class figure as the one before did, but many hopes have been pegged on Jorge Franco. In 2000, Franco’s “Rosario Tijeras,” which has just been translated into English, won Spain’s most prestigious literary prize. As reported by Silvana Paternostro in the magazine Críticas, Franco made an extraordinary deal with his publishing house in order to get the manuscript into print, promising to pay for all promotion and publicity himself. He peddled the book personally, dropping it off at newspapers and magazines. “He ran into the wife of the editor of El Tiempo, Colombia’s main newspaper, in an elevator and gave her a copy, asking if she would pass it on to her husband,” Paternostro wrote. “Two weeks later, he got an admiring phone call from the editor, who promised to do something. But Franco never thought the editor would dedicate an entire column to ‘Rosario Tijeras.’” The book sold out in two days and since then has has sold more than 300,000 copies in Latin America and Spain – unprecedented for any Colombian writer other than García Márquez. (Rachel Aviv)
Franco’s book has since been made into a film and the English translation of the book is endorsed by Gabriel García Márquez himself, with the line: ‘This is one of the Colombian authors I would like to pass the torch to’. But, as Aviv notes, ‘[w]hen people die in the book it is not because of beautiful, biblical butterfly plagues, but because of acts of street crime – narco-terror’. As I write I await the arrival of copy of the book, which I ordered just the other day (a means of extending my preparatory reading, ahead of coming to Bogotá). I’m really not sure if I want to read the book, but it seems I should:
Franco depicts street crimes, bar brawls, police brutality and poverty, and yet at times his world – one of profound disillusionment and anger – appears just as grotesque and fantastical as does his literary forefathers’ magical ones. Whereas magical realism was a form premised upon nostalgia for a premodern world that has passed or is passing away, Franco’s literary style shrilly acknowledges the presence of modernity: He depicts a recognizable society shaped and permeated by pop culture, mass media, urban growth and the forces and influence of globalization. To return to the present is to reckon with a reality that is, for many, absent of enchantment and magic. As Max Weber once put it, the realistic novel constitutes the “disenchantment of the world,” and in moving from magical realism to realism, in emerging from under the long shadow of García Márquez, this Colombian author attempts to do justice to his profound disillusionment. (Rachel Aviv)
R., in coming to Bogotá, I’m imagining a whole city of ice awaits our explorations… though I know, with that must come the dilemma of whether or not to avert one’s gaze from yet another place, ’shaped and permeated by pop culture, mass media, urban growth and the forces and influence of globalization’.
Wave Theory
Tonight, I sat spellbound… rapt by the drama in constant construction upon the stage (at the West Yorkshire Playhouse) and gripped – if silently – by the vacant seat beside me. This was the second time I got to see Waves, Katie Mitchell’s recent theatre adaption of Virginia Woolf’s complex and experimental novel The Waves (1931). And for a second time I came out in awe of the complexities of the modern human experience and painfully aware I’d never be able to share adequately in what I had just seen. This time around the sensation was doubly acute – which is quite fitting you might say (had you seen the production) since the entire performance is purposively and elaborately decentred.
…Someone speaks, yet the words come from another; someone walks, yet the sound of their footsteps is traced by another; someone raises a glass in the dark, yet upon the screen it is seen held in an entire mise en scene; people pass through a revolving door, yet it is only the sound of a battered old suitcase rocking gently upon the floor…
Roland Barthes writes lovingly of Japanese Bunraku puppet theatre, which he describes ‘practices three separate writings … to be read in three sites of the spectacle: the puppet, the manipulator, the vociferant: the effected gesture, the effective gesture, and the vocal gesture’. The connection is made with Brecht’s alienation effect (indeed this is one of its origins), since Bunraku ’shows the gesture, lets the action be seen, exhibits simultaneously the art and the labour, reserving for each its own writing’:
As Brecht had seen, here citation rules, the sliver of writing, the fragement of code, for none of the action’s promoters can account in his own person for what he is never alone to write. As in the modern text, the interweaving of codes, references, discrete assertions, anthological gestures multiplies the written line, not by virtue of some metaphysical appeal, but by the interaction of a combinatoire which opens out into the entire space of the theatre: what is begun by one is continued by the next, without interveal (Barthes, Empire of Signs)
Yet, the three separate writings of Bunraku are wildly extended in Waves. An array of props are stacked up on metal shelves on each side of the stage, as if the whole performance were coming out of a huge, cobwebbed garden shed. At any given time, someone is reading from the novel (in paperback) – copies passing between hands, as others act out the scene, often with tableaux vivants (screened live on stage) constructed before your very eyes using desk lamps and a small collection of props. Every little action has its sound effects added separately. You watch as someone paces up and down upon a stone slab to give the echoing footsteps that relate to the imagery upon the screen and as described in the pages of the book itself. With fluidity, yet precision, the actors move about becoming characters, offering voices, adding ambient sound, directing scenes and piecing together the decor. This is theatre. It cannot be replicated outside of its time and space, it cannot be recorded or transmitted (on my way to the theatre I had news of a digital blackout at work, no internet, no network… yet sitting in the theatre this evening such ‘drama’ was like an alarm clock buried and forgotten on a beach somewhere). Of course, following a performance or event of this kind, all that is left at one’s disposal are the excited gestures and compliments – ‘you really had to be there’! …and in time all that remain are the ‘thrilling’ write ups:
Katie Mitchell’s extraordinary production of Virginia Woolf’s experimental novel The Waves at the National Theatre is that rarely sighted beast, a performance where theatre and video come together so seamlessly and complement each other so exquisitely it is as if Mitchell, her actors and video artist Leo Warner have created an entirely new art form.
Just as Woolf in her 1931 modernist novel was attempting an experiment in form and struggling to bring the novel into the 20th century, so Mitchell – the radical force beating in the heart of the National Theatre – is pushing theatre kicking and screaming into the 21st century. Waves is about the very act of creativity itself, the tools we use to make art and the self we sacrifice to do it… (The Guardian Theatre Blog…)
…the ‘problem’ of Waves (and that vacant seat beside me) can be drawn up in terms of quantum mechanics, in wave-particle theory. From Newton through to Einstein the mistake was to consider matter in terms solely of particles and light in terms of waves. Yet, by the beginning of the twentieth century quantum theory began to reveal the opposite: matter having wave properties (a particle-wave duality) and light discrete particle properties. ‘The solution to this confusion and contradiction is simple once known. Describe reality from One thing existing, Space (that we all commonly experience) and its Properties. I.e. Rather than adding matter particles to space as Newton did, we consider Space with properties of a continuous wave medium for a pure Wave Structure of Matter’ (On Truth and Reality). Katie Mitchell’s Waves provides just such a Space through which all the elements ebb and flow. Actors and setting are never single ‘particles’ but rather a medium, a continous wave medium. Virginia Woolf grasps the workings of the human mind in this same undulating fashion, indeed she was writing at a time when the world shook with this new physics and a new set of artist impressions. She sought to bring the ‘waves’ of our minds to bear upon a shared space and reality, to reveal something further about our own medium and its collective resonances. In fact, as the director notes in an article on bringing the novel to the stage, it is with Virginia Woolf herself that the very format of the adaptation begins:
Woolf wrote The Waves between July 1929 and late 1931. But its genesis can be traced back to 1927, when she recorded in her diary on February 21:
Why not invent a new kind of play – as for instance
Woman thinks: …
He does.
Organ plays.
She writes.
They say:
She sings:
Night speaks:
I think it must be something in this line – though I cannot now see what. Away from facts: free; yet concentrated; prose yet poetry; a novel & a play. [The Guardian...]
Of course, in wi-fi times, wave-particle theory is more easily conjured to mind (or at least conjured upon the fact-finding screens we have before and between us). I sent out numerous txt messages this evening. In part, I knew what was going to happen. I’d seen the performance before. I knew I was going to be faced again with the fact that whatever I saw was immediately lost to the room. But as I sent and recieved those messages (woman thinks:… He does … Night speaks…) there was nonetheless a realm, a combinatoire of interaction, ‘what is begun by one is continued by the next, without interveal’. So, perhaps, after all, that vacant seat tonight was the best seat in the house… for it is precisely all things being ‘out of joint’ that I now want to remember, to gather up from the ’very act of creativity’ I witnessed this evening, and ‘the self we sacrifice to do it…’
‘Now to sum up,’ said Bernard. ‘Now to explain to you the meaning of my life. Since we do not know each other (though I met you once, I think, on board a ship going to Africa), we can talk freely. The illusion is upon me that something adheres for a moment, has roundness, weight, depth, is completed. This, for the moment, seems to be my life. If it were possible, I would hand it you entire. I would break it off as one breaks off a bunch of grapes. I would say, “Take it. This is my life.” (The Waves)
(…perhaps see you at The Duke Theater on 42nd Street?)
The waves broke on the shore.
Along it came…
I bundled everything into my bag and soon it was heavy again. As ever it was a race against the clock. I checked to see I had picked up everything (the usual feeling, in such a hurry, of having forgotten something crucial lingered). But, I had all the bits and pieces I needed to read in preparation for teaching and of course Marquez’s 100 Years of Solitude (the title set by R. in preparation for my trip to Bogota, the page quotas by our reading group of two!)… There was just enough time, I thought, to get to the library to get that book about blogging (again for teaching), which I’d not been able to get last week because of such early closing times.
I hurried up to the first floor and headed straight to the shelf location 301.231. I spotted it finally down on the bottom shelf and swiftly plucked it from its position. I was all but away again when I noticed a title along the thin tall spine of a neighbouring book: The Digital Film Event. Interesting, I thought and shifted the weight of my bag slightly to be on my way again. Yet, no I couldn’t quite leave it there for a ‘next time’ (and so allow it to be lost to those spaces of lost volumes that ever haunt me). I let my bag down to the floor to free myself to collect up this second book. The pages are glossy I thought. Pictures, some in colour. And what is this, a filmscript in the middle? Could not compute. I was definitely intrigued. Could be a red herring, maybe a little self indulgent (though who am I to talk!). But the back cover did it, ever aware of the ticking clock, my eyes skated over the top few lines:
FILM / VISUAL STUDIES / POSTCOLONIAL STUDIES
Endless travel in cyberspace, virtual reality, and the dream of limitless speed: technology changes our sense of self. In her new book, Trinh Minh-ha explores the way technology transforms our perception of reality.
Yes the word travel appeared I thought, a good omen and cyberspace, which would seem to help knit together our wandering plans and the insistence with which I write this blog. Suddenly the book became such precious cargo. Still with little sense of what it actually contained (and what does it really matter when set against the inspiration it offered), I hurried down to the library desk as if someone might reach out of the shadows and take it from me before I had the chance to have it issued to my name… As I ran the book’s barcode through the machine I became aware of a whole host of new possibilities (if only I could write them down here as quickly as I thought of them). Only yesterday as I half described the plans (or at least their moods/modes) R. and I have dreamt up for my visit, you said to me (as you sat perfectly, cross-legged upon that massive bed) ‘…and you could do more films’. The suggestion startled me for a moment (but that is hardly new) and I think I gave a non-commital reply, but it went quick and direct to my other mind (the one that can’t function in real-time).
R. … I think we have been thinking too small. Let’s not just look to the films and books of Robinsonesque adventures (and other associated Species of Spaces), let’s make our own. In our ever best attempts to refashion Bovard and Pecuchet for the 21st Century, I think we ought to turn our hand to being media artists. We’ll go the whole hog and invent a globalised installation.
I have been writing this, trying to archive my thoughts, as I travel back on the train. As I step off at the station and enter the usual commotion of commuters, I sense all the connections in my head dissipate (a desparate feeling under the circumstances). Still, I hang on to these words saved. It could be a real turning point. I really sense it could be a turning point (something we must discuss during our next skype call). Of course in previous literatures, this remark, which issues as if literally ensconced in the hurlyburly of modern life, might seem to reveal a contrived attempt, or re-presentation, of the transient. Yet, since I am able to type and transmit these words upon my mobile phone, we can’t so easily judge one’s verisimilitude.
…and this simply all feeds into the ideas of the author of The Digital Film Event, Trinh T. Minh-ha. As the backpage blurb continues:
“We are all engaged in social rituals in our daily activities,” she writes, ” and by remaining unaware of their artistic ritutal propensity, we remain ‘in conformity.’” Her goal, as a thinker and an artist, is to transform our understanding of technology and speed so that we are able to “turn an instrument into a creative tool and to step out of the one dimensional, technologically servile mind.”
The paradoz that “stillness contains speed within it” is central to Trinh’s concept of the digital apparatus. With her signature amalgam of feminism, postcolonial theory, Eastern philosophy, and practical understanding of filmmaking, Trinh Minh-ha presents a much-needed advance in our understanding of the real in a technological age.
R. … welcome to The Letters in Red 2.0…
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