Gmail kac attac Sontag silence kac attac Fri, Aug 18, 2023 at 12:26 PM To: Stefan Kac The Aesthetics of Silence Every era has to reinvent the project of "spirituality " for itself. (Spirituality plans, terminologies, ideas of deportment aimed at resolving the painful structural contradictions in- herent in the human situation, at the completion of human consciousness, at transcendence.) In the modern era, one of the most active metaphors for the spiritual project is "art." The activities of the painter, the musician, the poet, the dancer, once they were grouped together under that generic name (a relatively recent move) have proved a particularly adaptable site on which to stage the formal dramas besetting consciousness, each individual work of art being a more or less astute paradigm for regulating or 1A reconciling these contradictions. Of course, the site needs con- tinual refurbishing. Whatever goal is set for art eventually proves restrictive, matched against the widest goals of con- sciousness. Art, itself a form of mystification, endures a suc- cession of crises of demystification; older artistic goals are assailed and, ostensibly, replaced; outworn maps of conscious- ness are redrawn. But what supplies all these crises with their energy-an energy held in common, so to speak-is the very unification of numerous, quite disparate activities into a single genus. At the moment when "art" comes into being, the modern period of art begins. From then on, any of the activi- ties therein subsumed becomes a profoundly problematic ac- tivity, all of whose procedures and, ultimately, whose very right to exist can be called into question. From the promotion of the arts into "art" comes the lead- ing myth about art, that of the absoluteness of the artist's activity. In its first, more unreflective version, the myth treated art as an expression of human consciousness, consciousness seeking to know itself. (The evaluative standards generated by this version of the myth were fairly easily arrived at: some expressions were more complete, more ennobling, more in- formative, richer than others.) The later version of the myth posits a more complex, tragic relation of art to consciousness. Denying that art is mere expression, the later myth rather relates art to the mind's need or capacity for self-estrange- ment. Art is no longer understood as consciousness ex- pressing and therefore, implicitly, affirming itself. Art is not consciousness per se, but rather its antidote-evolved from within consciousness itself. (The evaluative standards gen- erated by this version of the myth proved much harder to get at.) The newer myth, derived from a post-psychological con- ception of consciousness, installs within the activity of art many of the paradoxes involved in attaining an absolute state of being described by the great religious mystics. As the ac- tivity of the mystic must end in a via negativa, a theology of The Aesthetics of Silence 15 God's absence, a craving for the cloud of unknowing beyond knowledge and for the silence beyond speech, so art must tend toward anti-art, the elimination of the "subject" (the "object," the "image"), the substitution of chance for intention, and the pursuit of silence. In the early, linear version of art's relation to consciousness, a struggle was discerned between the "spiritual" integrity of the creative impulses and the distracting "materiality" of ordi- nary life, which throws up so many obstacles in the path of authentic sublimation. But the newer version, in which art is part of a dialectical transaction with consciousness, poses a deeper, more frustrating conflict. The "spirit" seeking em- bodiment in art clashes with the "material" character of art itself. Art is unmasked as gratuitous, and the very concreteness of the artist's tools (and, particularly in the case of language, their historicity) appears as a trap. Practiced in a world fur- nished with second-hand perceptions, and specifically con- founded by the treachery of words, the artist's activity is cursed with mediacy. Art becomes the enemy of the artist, for it denies him the realization--the transcendence-he desires. Therefore, art comes to be considered something to be over- thrown. A new element enters the individual artwork and becomes constitutive of it: the appeal (tacit or overt) for its own abolition- and, ultimately, for the abolition of art itself. 2 The scene changes to an empty room. Rimbaud has gone to Abyssinia to make his fortune in the slave trade. Wittgenstein, after a period as a village school- teacher, has chosen menial work as a hospital orderly. Du- champ has turned to chess. Accompanying these exemplary renunciations of a vocation, each man has declared that he regards his previous achievements in poetry, philosophy, or art as trifling, of no importance. But the choice of permanent silence doesn't negate their work. On the contrary, it imparts retroactively an added 16 power and authority to what was broken off-_disavowal of the work becoming a new source of its validity, a certificate of unchallengeable seriousness. That seriousness consists in not regarding art (or philosophy practiced as an art form: Witt- genstein) as something whose seriousness lasts forever, an "end." a permanent vehicle for spiritual ambition. The truly serious attitude is one that regards art as a "means" to some- thing that can perhaps be achieved only by abandoning art; judged more impatiently, art is a false way or (the word of the Dada artist Jacques Vaché) a stupidity. Though no longer a confession, art is more than ever a deliverance, an exercise in asceticism. Through it, the artist becomes purified-of himself and, eventually, of his art. The artist (if not art itself) is still engaged in a progress toward "the good." But whereas formerly the artist's good was mas- tery of and fulfillment in his art, now the highest good for the artist is to reach the point where those goals of excellence become insignificant to him, emotionally and ethi- cally, and he is more satisfied by being silent than by finding a voice in art. Silence in this sense, as termination, proposes a mood of ultimacy antithetical to the mood inform- ing the self-conscious artist's traditional serious use of silence (beautifully described by Valéry and Rilke): as a zone of meditation, preparation for spiritual ripening, an ordeal that ends in gaining the right to speak. So far as he is serious, the artist is continually tempted to sever the dialogue he has with an audience. Silence is the furthest extension of that reluctance to communicate, that ambivalence about making contact with the audience which is a leading motif of modern art, with its tireless commitment to the "new" and/or the "esoteric." Silence is the artist's ultimate other-worldly gesture: by silence, he frees himself from servile bondage to the world, which appears as patron, client, con- sumer, antagonist, arbiter, and distorter of his work. Still, one cannot fail to perceive in this renunciation of "society" a highly social gesture. The cues for the artist's The Aesthetics of Silence 17 eventual liberation from the need to practice his vocation come from observing his fellow artists and measuring himself against them. An exemplary decision of this sort can be made only after the artist has demonstrated that he pos sesses genius and exercised that genius authoritatively. Once he has surpassed his peers by the standards which he ac- knowledges, his pride has only one place left to go. For, to be a victim of the craving for silence is to be, in still a further sense, superior to everyone else. It suggests that the artist has had the wit to ask more questions than other people, and that he possesses stronger nerves and higher standards of excellence. (That the artist can persevere in the interrogation of his art until he or it is exhausted scarcely needs proving. As René Char has written, "No bird has the heart to sing in a thicket of questions. 3 The exemplary modern artist's choice of silence is rarely car- ried to this point of final simplification, so that he becomes literally silent. More typically, he continues speaking, but in a manner that his audience can't hear. Most valuable art in our time has been experienced by audiences as a move into silence (or unintelligibility or invisibility or inaudibility); a disman- tling of the artist's competence, his responsible sense of voca- tion- and therefore as an aggression against them. Modern art's chronic habit of displeasing, provoking, or frustrating its audience can be regarded as a limited, vicarious participation in the ideal of silence which has been elevated as a major standard of "seriousness" in contemporary aesthetics. But it is also a contradictory form of participation in the ideal of silence. It is contradictory not only because the artist continues making works of art, but also because the isolation of the work from its audience never lasts. With the passage of time and the intervention of newer, more difficult works, the artist's transgression becomes ingratiating, eventually legiti- mate. Goethe accused Kleist of having written his plays for an 18 "invisible theatre." But eventually the invisible theatre becomes "visible." The ugly and discordant and senseless become "beautiful." The history of art is a sequence of successful transgressions. The characteristic aim of modern art, to be unacceptable to its audience, inversely states the unacceptability to the artist of the very presence of an audience-audience in the modern sense, an assembly of voyeuristic spectators. At least since Nietzsche observed in The Birth of Tragedy that an audience of spectators as we know it, those present whom the actors ignore, was unknown to the Greeks, a good deal of con- temporary art seems moved by the desire to eliminate the audience from art, an enterprise that often presents itself as an attempt to eliminate "art" altogether. (In favor of "life"?) Committed to the idea that the power of art is located in its power to negate, the ultimate weapon in the artist's inconsis- tent war with his audience is to verge closer and closer to silence. The sensory or conceptual gap between the artist and his audience, the space of the missing or ruptured dialogue, can also constitute the grounds for an ascetic affirmation. Beckett speaks of "my dream of an art unresentful of its in- superable indigence and too proud for the farce of giving and receiving." But there is no abolishing a minimal transaction, a minimal exchange of gifts-just as there is no talented and rigorous asceticism that, whatever its intention, doesn't produce a gain (rather than a loss) in the capacity for pleasure. And none of the aggressions committed intentionally or in- advertently by modern artists has succeeded in either abol- ishing the audience or transforming it into something else, a community engaged in a common activity. They cannot. As long as art is understood and valued as an 'absolute" activity, it will be a separate, elitist one. Elites presuppose masses. So far as the best art defines itself by essentially "priestly" aims, it presupposes and confirms the existence of a relatively passive, never fully initiated, voyeuristic laity that is regularly con- voked to watch, listen, read, or hear-and then sent away. The Aesthetics of Silence 19 The most the artist can do is to modify the different terms in this situation vis-à-vis the audience and himself. To discuss the idea of silence in art is to discuss the various alternatives within this essentially unalterable situation. A How literally does silence figure in art? Silence exists as a decision-in the exemplary suicide of the artist (Kleist, Lautréamont), who thereby testifies that he has gone "too far"; and in the already cited model renunciations by the artist of his vocation. Silence also exists as a punishment-self-punishment, in the exemplary madness of artists (Földerlin, Artaud) who dem- onstrate that sanity itself may be the price of trespassing the accepted frontiers of consciousness; and, of course, in penalties (ranging from censorship and physical destruction of artworks to fines, exile, prison for the artist) meted out by "society" " for the artist's spiritual nonconformity or subversion of the group sensibility. Silence doesn't exist in a literal sense, however, as the experience of an audience. It would mean that the spectator was aware of no stimulus or that he was unable to make a response. But this can't happen; nor can it even be induced programmatically. The non-awareness of any stimulus, the inability to make a response, can result only from a defective presence on the part of the spectator, or a misunderstanding of his own reactions (misled by restrictive ideas about what would be a "relevant* response). As long as audiences, by definition, consist of sentient beings in a "situation, it is impossible for them to have no response at all. Nor can silence, in its literal state, exist as the property of an artwork-even of works like Duchamp's readymade or Cage's 4'33", in which the artist has ostentatiously done no more to satisfy any established criteria of art than set the object in a gallery or situate the performance on a concert stage. There is no neutral surface, no neutral discourse, no neutral theme, no / 10 neutral form. Something is neutral only with respect to some- thing else-like an intention or an expectation. As a property of the work of art itself, silence can exist only in a cooked or non- literal sense. (Put otherwise: if a work exists at all, its silence is only one element in it.) Instead of raw or achieved silence, one finds various moves in the direction of an ever receding horizon of silence-moves which, by definition, can never be fully consummated. One result is a type of art that many people characterize pejoratively as dumb, depressed, acquies- cent, cold. But these privative qualities exist in a context of the artist's objective intention, which is always discernible. Cultivating the metaphoric silence suggested by conventionally lifeless subjects (as in much of Pop Art) and constructing "minimal" forms that seem to lack emotional resonance are in themselves vigorous, often tonic choices. And, finally, even without imputing objective intentions to the artwork, there remains the inescapable truth about per- ception: the positivity of all experience at every moment of it. As Cage has insisted, "There is no such thing as silence. Some- thing is always happening that makes a sound. " (Cage has described how, even in a soundless chamber, he still heard two things: his heartbeat and the coursing of the blood in his head.) Similarly, there is no such thing as empty space. As long as a human eye is looking, there is always something to see. To look at something which is "empty" is still to be looking, still to be seeing something-_if only the ghosts of one's own expectations. In order to perceive fullness, one must retain an acute sense of the emptiness which marks it off; conversely, in order to perceive emptiness, one must apprehend other zones of the world as full. (In Through the Looking Glass, Alice comes upon a shop "that seemed to be full of all manner of curious things--but the oddest part of it all was that whenever she looked hard at any shelf, to make out exactly what it had on it, that particular shelf was always quite empty, though the others round it were crowded full as they could hold.") The Aesthetics of Silence / 11 "Silence" never ceases to imply its opposite and to depend on its presence: just as there can't be "'up" without "down or "left" without "right, ' so one must acknowledge a surrounding environment of sound or language in order to recognize si- lence. Not only does silence exist in a world full of speech and other sounds, but any given silence has its identity as a stretch of time being perforated by sound. (Thus, much of the beauty of Harpo Marx's muteness derives from his being sur- rounded by manic talkers.) A genuine emptiness, a pure silence is not feasible-either conceptually or in fact. If only because the artwork exists in a world furnished with many other things, the artist who creates silence or emptiness must produce something dialectical: a full void, an enriching emptiness, a resonating or eloquent silence. Silence remains, inescapably, a form of speech (in many in- stances, of complaint or indictment) and an element in a dialogue. 5 Programs for a radical reduction of means and effects in art- including the ultimate demand for the renunciation of art itself-can't be taken at face value, undialectically. Silence and allied ideas (like emptiness, reduction, the "zero degree") are boundary notions with a very complex set of uses, leading terms of a particular spiritual and cultural rhetoric. To de- scribe silence as a rhetorical term is, of course, not to condemn this rhetoric as fraudulent or in bad faith. In my opinion, the myths of silence and emptiness are about as nourishing and viable as might be devised in an "'unwholesome" time- which is, of necessity, a time in which *unwholesome" psychic states furnish the energies for most superior work in the arts. Yet one can't deny the pathos of these myths. This pathos appears in the fact that the idea of silence allows, essentially, only two types of valuable development. Either it is taken to the point of utter self-negation (as art) or 1 12 else it is practiced in a form that is heroically, ingeniously inconsistent. 6 The art of our time is noisy with appeals for silence. A coquettish, even cheerful nihilism. One recognizes the imperative of silence, but goes on speaking anyway. Discover- ing that one has nothing to say, one seeks a way to say that. Beckett has expressed the wish that art would renounce all further projects for disturbing matters on "the plane of the feasible," that art would retire, "weary of puny exploits, weary of pretending to be able, of being able, of doing a little better the same old thing, of going further along a dreary road » The alternative is an art consisting of "the expression that there is nothing to express, nothing from which to express, no power to express, no desire to express, together with the obligation to express. " From where does this obligation derive? The very aesthetics of the death wish seems to make of that wish some- thing incorrigibly lively. Apollinaire says, "Jai fait des gestes blancs parmi les soli- tudes. '° But he is making gestures. Since the artist can't embrace silence literally and remain an artist, what the rhetoric of silence indicates is a determination to pursue his activity more deviously than before. One way is indicated by Breton's notion of the "full margin. » The artist is enjoined to devote himself to filling up the periphery of the art space, leaving the central area of usage blank. Art becomes privative, anemic-as suggested by the title of Duchamp's only effort at film-making, "Anemic Cinema, 22 a work from 1924-26. Beckett projects the idea of an "impoverished paint- ing, painting which is "authentically fruitless, incapable of any image whatsoever." Jerzy Grotowski's manifesto for his Theatre Laboratory in Poland is called "Plea for a Poor Theatre." These programs for art's impoverishment must not be under- stood simply as terroristic admonitions to audiences, but rather as strategies for improving the audience's experience. The Aesthetics of Silence / 13 The notions of silence, emptiness, and reduction sketch out new prescriptions for looking, hearing, etc.-which either promote a more immediate, sensuous experience of art or con- front the artwork in a more conscious, conceptual way. 7 Consider the connection between the mandate for a reduction of means and effects in art, whose horizon is silence, and the faculty of attention. In one of its aspects, art is a technique for focusing attention, for teaching skills of attention. (While the whole of the human environment might be so described-as a pedagogic instrument-this description particularly applies to works of art.) The history of the arts is tantamount to the discovery and formulation of a repertory of objects on which to lavish attention. One could trace exactly and in order how the eye of art has panned over our environment, 'naming, ' making its limited selection of things which people then become aware of as significant, pleasurable, complex entities. (Oscar Wilde pointed out that people didn't see fogs before certain nine teenth-century poets and painters taught them how to; and surely, no one saw as much of the variety and subtlety of the human face before the era of the movies.) Once the artist's task seemed to be simply that of opening up new areas and objects of attention. That task is still ac- knowledged, but it has become problematic. The very faculty of attention has come into question, and been subjected to more rigorous standards. As Jasper Johns says: "Already it's a great deal to see anything clearly, for we don't see anything clearly." Perhaps the quality of the attention one brings to bear on something will be better (less contaminated, less distracted), the less one is offered. Furnished with impoverished art, purged by silence, one might then be able to begin to trans- end the frustrating selectivity of attention, with its inevitable distortions of experience. Ideally, one should be able to pay attention to everything. / 14 The tendency is toward less and less. But never has "less" ostentatiously advanced itself as "more." In the light of the current myth, in which art aims to be- come a "total experience, ," soliciting total attention, the strate- gies of impoverishment and reduction indicate the most ex- alted ambition art could adopt. Underneath what looks like a strenuous modesty, if not actual debility, is to be discerned an energetic secular blasphemy: the wish to attain the unfettered, unselective, total consciousness of "God." 8 Language seems a privileged metaphor for expressing the mediated character of art-making and the artwork. On the one hand, speech is both an immaterial medium (compared with, say, images) and a human activity with an apparently essen- tial stake in the project of transcendence, of moving beyond the singular and contingent (all words being abstractions, only roughly based on or making reference to concrete particulars) On the other hand, language is the most impure, the most contaminated, the most exhausted of all the materials out of which art is made. This dual character of language-its abstractness, and its "fallenness" in history-serves as a microcosm of the un- happy character of the arts today. Art is so far along the labyrinthine pathways of the project of transcendence that one can hardly conceive of it turning back, short of the most drastic and punitive "cultural revolution." Yet at the same time, art is foundering in the debilitating tide of what once seemed the crowning achievement of European thought: secular historical consciousness. In little more than two centuries, the conscious- ness of history has transformed itself from a liberation, an opening of doors, blessed enlightenment, into an almost in- supportable burden of self-consciousness. It's scarcely possible for the artist to write a word (or render an image or make a gesture) that doesn't remind him of something already achieved. The Aesthetics of Silence 1 15 As Nietzsche says: "Our pre-eminence: we live in the age of comparison, we can verify as has never been verified before." Therefore "we enjoy differently, we suffer differently: our in- stinctive activity is to compare an unheard number of things." Up to a point, the community and historicity of the artist's means are implicit in the very fact of intersubjectivity: each person is a being-in-a-world. But today, particularly in the arts using language, this normal state of affairs is felt as an extraordinary, wearying problem. Language is experienced not merely as something shared but as something corrupted, weighed down by historical ac- cumulation. Thus, for each conscious artist, the creation of a work means dealing with two potentially antagonistic domains of meaning and their relationships. One is his own meaning (or lack of it); the other is the set of second-order meanings that both extend his own language and encumber, compro- mise, and adulterate it. The artist ends by choosing between two inherently limiting alternatives, forced to take a position that is either servile or insolent. Either he fatters or appeases his audience, giving them what they already know, or he commits an aggression against his audience, giving them what they don't want. Modern art thus transmits in full the alienation produced by historical consciousness. Whatever the artist does is in (usu- ally conscious ) alignment with something else already done, producing a compulsion to be continually checking his situa- tion, his own stance against those of his predecessors and con- temporaries. To compensate for this ignominious enslavement to history, the artist exalts himself with the dream of a wholly ahistorical, and therefore unalienated, art. 9 Art that is "silent" constitutes one approach to this visionary, ahistorical condition. Consider the difference between looking and staring. A look is voluntary; it is also mobile, rising and falling in intensity as / 16 its foci of interest are taken up and then exhausted. A stare has, essentially, the character of a compulsion; it is steady, unmodulated, "fixed." Traditional art invites a look. Art that is silent engenders a stare. Silent art allows-at least in principle~no release from attention, because there has never, in principle, been any solic- iting of it. A stare is perhaps as far from history, as close to eternity, as contemporary art can get. 10 Silence is a metaphor for a cleansed, non-interfering vision, appropriate to artworks that are unresponsive before being seen, unviolable in their essential integrity by human scrutiny. The spectator would approach art as he does a landscape. A landscape doesn't demand from the spectator his "'understand- ing, * his imputations of significance, his anxieties and sympa- thies; it demands, rather, his absence, it asks that he not add anything to it. Contemplation, strictly speaking, entails self- forgetfulness on the part of the spectator: an object worthy of contemplation is one which, in effect, annihilates the perceiving subject. Toward such an ideal plenitude to which the audience can add nothing, analogous to the aesthetic relation to nature, a great deal of contemporary art aspires-through various strat- egies of blandness, of reduction, of deindividuation, of alogi- cality. In principle, the audience may not even add its thought. All objects, rightly perceived, are already full. This is what Cage must mean when, after explaining that there is no such thing as silence because something is always happening that makes a sound, he adds, "No one can have an idea once he starts really listening. 29 Plenitude-experiencing all the space as filled, so that ideas cannot enter-means impenetrability. A person who becomes silent becomes opaque for the other; somebody's silence opens up an array of possibilities for interpreting that silence, for imputing speech to it, The Aesthetics of Silence 17 The way in which this opaqueness induces spiritual vertigo is the theme of Bergman's Persona. The actress's deliberate silence has two aspects: Considered as a decision apparently relating to herself, the refusal to speak is apparently the form she has given to the wish for ethical purity; but it is also, as behavior, a means of power, a species of sadism, a virtually inviolable position of strength from which she manipulates and confounds her nurse-companion, who is charged with the burden of talking. But the opaqueness of silence can be conceived more positively, as free from anxiety. For Keats, the silence of the Grecian urn is a locus of spiritual nourishment: "'unheard" melodies endure, whereas those that pipe to "the sensual ear" decay. Silence is equated with arresting time ("slow time"). One can stare endlessly at the Grecian urn. Eternity, in the argument of Keats' poem, is the only interesting stimulus to thought and also the sole occasion for coming to the end of mental activity, which means interminable, unanswered ques- tions ("Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought/ As doth eternity"), in order to arrive at a fimal equation of ideas ("Beauty is truth, truth beauty") which is both absolutely vacuous and completely full. Keats poem quite logically ends in a statement that will seem, if the reader hasn't followed his argument, like empty wisdom, a banality. As time, or history, is the medium of definite, determinate thought, the silence of eternity prepares for a thought beyond thought, which must appear from the perspective of traditional thinking and the familiar uses of the mind as no thought at all- though it may rather be the emblem of new, "difficult" thinking. 11 Behind the appeals for silence lies the wish for a perceptual and cultural clean slate. And, in its most hortatory and am- bitious version, the advocacy of silence expresses a mythic / 18 project of total liberation. What's envisaged is nothing less than the liberation of the artist from himself, of art from the particular artwork, of art from history, of spirit from matter, of the mind from its perceptual and intellectual limitations. As some people know now, there are ways of thinking that we don't yet know about. Nothing could be more important or precious than that knowledge, however unborn. The sense of urgency, the spiritual restlessness it engenders, cannot be ap- peased, and continues to fuel the radical art of this century. Through its advocacy of silence and reduction, art commits an act of violence upon itself, turning art into a species of auto-manipulation, of conjuring-trying to bring these new ways of thinking to birth. Silence is a strategy for the transvaluation of art, art itself being the herald of an anticipated radical transvaluation of human values. But the success of this strategy must mean its eventual abandonment, or at least its significant modification. Silence is a prophecy, one which the artist's actions can be understood as attempting both to fulfill and to reverse. As language points to its own transcendence in silence, silence points to its own transcendence-to a speech beyond silence. But can the whole enterprise become an act of bad faith if the artist knows this, too? 12 A famous quotation: *Everything that can be thought at all can be thought clearly. Everything that can be said at all can be said clearly. But not everything that can be thought can be said." Notice that Wittgenstein, with his scrupulous avoidance of the psychological issue, doesn't ask why, when, and in what circumstances someone would want to put into words "every- thing that can be thought" (even if he could), or even to utter (whether clearly or not) "everything that could be said." The Aesthetics of Silence / 19 13 Of everything that's said, one can ask: why (Including: why should I say that? And: why should I say anything at allP) Moreover, strictly speaking, nothing that's said is true. (Though a person can be the truth, one can't ever say it.) Still, things that are said can sometimes be helpful-which is what people ordinarily mean when they regard something said as being true. Speech can enlighten, relieve, confuse, exalt, infect, antagonize, gratity, grieve, stun, animate. While language is regularly used to inspire to action, some verbal statements, either written or oral, are themselves the perform- ing of an action (as in promising, swearing, bequeathing) Another use of speech, if anything more common than that of provoking actions, is to provoke further speech. But speech can silence, too. This indeed is how it must be: without the polarity of silence, the whole system of language would fail. And beyond its generic function as the dialectical opposite of speech, silence-like speech-also has more specific, less in- evitable uses. One use for silence: certifying the absence or renunciation of thought. Silence is often employed as a magical or mimetic procedure in repressive social relationships, as in the Jesuit regulations about speaking to superiors and in the disciplining of children. (This should not be confused with the practice of certain monastic disciplines, such as the Trappist order, in which silence is both an ascetic act and bears witness to the condition of being perfectly "full.") Another, apparently opposed, use for silence: certifying the completion of thought. In the words of Karl Jaspers, "He who has the final answers can no longer speak to the other, break- ing off genuine communication for the sake of what he be- lieves in. Still another use for silence: providing time for the con- tinuing or exploring of thought. Notably, speech closes off thought. (An example: the enterprise of criticism, in which there seems no way for a critic not to assert that a given artist 1 20 is this, he's that, etc.) But if one decides an issue isn't closed, it's not. This is presumably the rationale behind the voluntary experiments in silence that some contemporary spiritual athletes, like Buckminster Fuller, have undertaken, and the element of wisdom in the otherwise mainly authoritarian, philistine silence of the orthodox Freudian psychoanalyst. Silence keeps things' "open. Still another use for silence: furnishing or aiding speech to attain its maximum integrity or seriousness. Everyone has ex- perienced how, when punctuated by long silences, words weigh more; they become almost palpable. Or how, when one talks less, one begins feeling more fully one's physical presence in a given space. Silence undermines "bad speech,' " by which I mean dissociated speech-speech dissociated from the body (and, therefore, from feeling), speech not organically in- formed by the sensuous presence and concrete particularity of the speaker and by the individual occasion for using language. Unmoored from the body, speech deteriorates. It becomes false, inane, ignoble, weightless. Silence can inhibit or counter- act this tendency, providing a kind of ballast, monitoring and even correcting language when it becomes inauthentic. Given these perils to the authenticity of language (which doesn't depend on the character of any isolated statement or even group of statements, but on the relation of speaker, utterance, and situation), the imaginary project of saying clearly "everything that can be said" suggested by Wittgen- stein's remarks looks fearfully complicated. (How much time would one have? Would one have to speak quickly?) The philosopher's hypothetical universe of clear speech (which assigns to silence only "that whereof one cannot speak") would seem to be a moralist's, or a psychiatrist's, nightmare- at the least a place no one should lightheartedly enter. Is there anyone who wants to say "everything that could be said"? The psychologically plausible answer would seem to be no. But yes is plausible, too-as a rising ideal of modern culture. Isn't that what many people do want today-_to say everything that can The Aesthetics of Silence 121 be said? But this aim cannot be maintained without inner conflict. In part inspired by the spread of the ideals of psycho- therapy, people are yearning to say "everything" (thereby, among other results, further undermining the crumbling dis- tinction between public and private endeavors, between infor- mation and secrets). But in an overpopulated world being connected by global electronic communication and jet travel at a pace too rapid and violent for an organically sound person to assimilate without shock, people are also suffering from a revulsion at any further proliferation of speech and images. Such different factors as the unlimited "technological repro- duction ' and near universal diffusion of printed language and speech as well as images (from "news" to "art objects"), and the degeneration of public language within the realms of politics and advertising and entertainment, have produced, especially among the better-educated inhabitants of modern mass society, a devaluation of language. (I should argue, contrary to McLuhan, that a devaluation of the power and credibility of images has taken place no less profound than, and essentially similar to, that afflicting language.) And as the prestige of language falls, that of silence rises. I am alluding, at this point, to the sociological context of the contemporary ambivalence toward language. The matter, of course, goes much deeper than this. In addition to the specific sociological determinants, one must recognize the operation of something like a perennial discontent with language that has been formulated in each of the major civilizations of the Orient and Occident, whenever thought reaches a certain high, excruciating order of complexity and spiritual serious- ness. Traditionally, it has been through the religious vocabulary. with its meta-absolutes of "sacred" and "profane, "human" and "divine, " that the disaffection with language itself has been charted. In particular, the antecedents of art's dilemmas and strategies are to be found in the radical wing of the mystical tradition. (Cf., among Christian texts, the Mystica 22 Theologia of Dionysius the Areopagite, the anonymous Cloud of Unknowing, the writings of Jakob Boehme and Meister Eckhart; and parallels in Zen, Taoist, and Sufi texts.) The mystical tradition has always recognized, in Norman Brown's phrase, "the neurotic character of language. (According to Boehme, Adam spoke a language different from all known languages. It was "sensual speech," the unmediated expressive instrument of the senses, proper to beings integrally part of sensuous nature-that is, still employed by all the animals except that sick animal, man. This, which Boehme calls the only "natural language, " the sole language free from distortion and illusion, is what man will speak again when he recovers paradise.) But in our time, the most striking develop- ments of such ideas have been made by artists (and certain psychotherapists) rather than by the timid legatees of the re- ligious traditions. Explicitly in revolt against what is deemed the desiccated, categorized life of the ordinary mind, the artist issues his own call for a revision of language. A good deal of contemporary art is moved by this quest for a consciousness purified of contaminated language and, in some versions, of the distor- tions produced by conceiving the world exclusively in conven- tional verbal (in their debased sense, "rational" or "logical") terms. Art itself becomes a kind of counterviolence, seeking to loosen the grip upon consciousness of the habits of lifeless, static verbalization, presenting models of "sensual speech." If anything, the volume of discontent has been turned up since the arts inherited the problem of language from religious discourse. It's not just that words, ultimately, are inadequate to the highest aims of consciousness; or even that they get in the way. Art expresses a double discontent. We lack words, and we have too many of them. It raises two complaints about language. Words are too crude. And words are also too busy- inviting a hyperactivity of consciousness that is not only dysfunctional, in terms of human capacities of feeling and acting, but actively deadens the mind and blunts the senses. The Aesthetics of Silence 123 Language is demoted to the status of an event. Something takes place in time, a voice speaking which points to the be- fore and to what comes after an utterance: silence. Silence, then, is both the precondition of speech and the result or aim of properly directed speech. On this model, the artist's activity is the creating or establishing of silence; the efficacious art- work leaves silence in its wake. Silence, administered by the artist, is part of a program of perceptual and cultural therapy, often on the model of shock therapy rather than of persuasion. Even if the artist's medium is words, he can share in this task; language can be employed to check language, to express muteness. Mallarmé thought it was the job of poetry, using words, to clean up our word-clogged reality_by creating silences around things. Art must mount a full-scale attack on language itself, by means of language and its surrogates, on behalf of the standard of silence. 14 In the end, the radical critique of consciousness (first de- lineated by the mystical tradition, now administered by un- orthodox psychotherapy and high modernist art) always lays the blame on language. Consciousness, experienced as a bur- den, is conceived of as the memory of all the words that have ever been said. Krishnamurti claims that we must give up psychological, as distinct from factual, memory. Otherwise, we keep filling up the new with the old, closing off experience by hooking each experience onto the last. We must destroy continuity (which is insured by psycho- logical memory), by going to the end of each emotion or thought. And after the end, what supervenes (for a while) is silence. 15 In his Fourth Duino Elegy, Rilke gives a metaphoric statement of the problem of language and recommends a procedure 1 24 for approaching as near the horizon of silence as he con- siders feasible. A prerequisite of "emptying out" is to be able to perceive what one is "full of," what words and mechanical gestures one is stuffed with, like a doll; only then, in polar confrontation with the doll, does the "angel" appear, a figure representing an equally inhuman though "higher" possibility, that of an entirely unmediated, translinguistic apprehension. Neither doll nor angel, human beings remain situated within the kingdom of language. But for nature, then things, then other people, then the textures of ordinary life to be experi- enced from a stance other than the crippled one of mere spectatorship, language must regain its chastity. As Rilke describes it in the Ninth Elegy, the redemption of language (which is to say, the redemption of the world through its interiorization in consciousness) is a long, infinitely arduous task. Human beings are so "fallen" that they must start with the simplest linguistic act: the naming of things. Perhaps no more than this minimal function can be preserved from the general corruption of discourse. Language may very well have to remain within a permanent state of reduction. Though perhaps, when this spiritual exercise of confining language to naming is perfected, it may be possible to pass on to other, more ambitious uses of language, nothing must be attempted which will allow consciousness to become reestranged from itself. For Rilke the overcoming of the alienation of consciousness is conceivable; and not, as in the radical myths of the mystics, through transcending language altogether. It suffices to cut back drastically the scope and use of language. A tremendous spiritual preparation (the contrary of "alienation") is required for this deceptively simple act of naming. It is nothing less than the scouring and harmonious sharpening of the senses (the very opposite of such violent projects, with roughly the same end and informed by the same hostility to verbal-rational culture, as "systematically deranging the senses"). Rilke's remedy lies halfway between exploiting the numb- The Aesthetics of Silence 25 ness of language as a gross, fully installed cultural institution and yielding to the suicidal vertigo of pure silence. But this middle ground of reducing language to naming can be claimed in quite another way than his, Contrast the benign nominalism proposed by Rilke (and proposed and practiced by Francis Ponge) with the brutal nominalism adopted by many other artists. The more familiar recourse of modern art to the aesthetics of the inventory is not made- as in Rilke-with an eye to "humanizing" things, but rather to confirming their inhumanity, their impersonality, their indiffer- ence to and separateness from human concerns. (Examples of the "inhumane" preoccupation with naming: Roussel's Impres- sions of Africa; the silk-screen paintings and early films of Andy Warhol; the early novels of Robbe-Grillet, which at- tempt to confine the function of language to bare physical description and location.) Rilke and Ponge assume that there are priorities: rich as opposed to vacuous objects, events with a certain allure. (This is the incentive for trying to peel back language, allowing the "things" themselves to speak.) More decisively, they assume that if there are states of false (language-clogged) conscious- ness, there are also authentic states of consciousness-which it's the function of art to promote. The alternative view denies the traditional hierarchies of interest and meaning, in which some things have more "significance" than others. The distinc- tion between true and false experience, true and false con- sciousness is also denied: in principle, one should desire to pay attention to everything. It's this view, most elegantly formulated by Cage though its practice is found everywhere, that leads to the art of the inventory, the catalogue, surtaces; also "chance. " The function of art isn't to sanction any specific experience, except the state of being open to the multiplicity of experience-which ends in practice by a decided stress on things usually considered trivial or unimportant. The attachment of contemporary art to the "minimal' narra- tive principle of the catalogue or inventory seems almost to 1 26 parody the capitalist world-view, in which the environment is atomized into "items" (a category embracing things and per- sons, works of art and natural organisms), and in which every item is a commodity-that is, a discrete, portable object. À general leveling of value is encouraged in the art of inventory, which is itself only one of the possible approaches to an ideally uninflected discourse. Traditionally, the effects of an artwork have been unevenly distributed, to induce in the audience a certain sequence of experience: first arousing, then manipu- lating, and eventually fulfilling emotional expectations. What is proposed now is a discourse without emphases in this tradi- tional sense. (Again, the principle of the stare as opposed to the look.) Such art could also be described as establishing great "dis- tance" (between spectator and art object, between the spec- tator and his emotions). But, psychologically, distance often is linked with the most intense state of feeling, in which the coolness or impersonality with which something is treated measures the insatiable interest that thing has for us. The distance that a great deal of '"anti-humanist" art proposes is actually equivalent to obsession--an aspect of the involve- ment in "things" of which the "humanist" nominalism of Rilke has no intimation. 16 "There is something strange in the acts of writing and speak- ing, Novalis wrote in 1799. "The ridiculous and amazing mistake people make is to believe they use words in relation to things. They are unaware of the nature of language-which is to be its own and only concern, making it so fertile and splendid a mystery. When someone talks just for the sake of talking he is saying the most original and truthful thing he can say. Novalis® statement may help explain an apparent para- dox: that in the era of the widespread advocacy of art's The Aesthetics of Silence 1 27 silence, an increasing number of works of art babble. Verbosity and repetitiveness are particularly noticeable in the temporal arts of prose fiction, music, film, and dance, many of which cultivate a kind of ontological stammer-facilitated by their refusal of the incentives for a clean, anti-redundant discourse supplied by linear, beginning-middle-and-end construction. But actually, there's no contradiction. For the contemporary appeal for silence has never indicated merely a hostile dis- missal of language. It also signifies a very high estimate of language-of its powers, of its past health, and of the current dangers it poses to a free consciousness. From this intense and ambivalent valuation proceeds the impulse for a discourse that appears both irrepressible (and, in principle, inter- minable) and strangely inarticulate, painfully reduced. Dis- cernible in the fictions of Stein, Burroughs, and Beckett is the subliminal idea that it might be possible to out-talk language, or to talk oneself into silence. This is not a very promising strategy, considering what results might reasonably be anticipated from it. But perhaps not so odd, when one observes how often the aesthetic of silence appears alongside a barely controlled abhorrence of the void. Accommodating these two contrary impulses may produce the need to fill up all the spaces with objects of slight emo- tional weight or with large areas of barely modulated color or evenly detailed objects, or to spin a discourse with as few possible inflections, emotive variations, and risings and fallings of emphasis. These procedures seem analogous to the behavior of an obsessional neurotic warding off a danger. The acts of such a person must be repeated in the identical form, because the danger remains the same; and they must be repeated end- lessly, because the danger never seems to go away. But the emotional fires feeding the art-discourse analogous to obses- sionalism may be turned down so low one can almost forget they're there. Then all that's left to the ear is a kind of steady hum or drone. What's left to the eye is the neat filling of a 1 28 space with things, or, more accurately, the patient transcrip- tion of the surface detail of things. In this view, the "silence" of things, images, and words is a prerequisite for their proliferation. Were they endowed with a more potent, individual charge, each of the various elements of the artwork would claim more psychic space and then their total number might have to be reduced. 17 Sometimes the accusation against language is not directed against all of language but only against the written word Thus Tristan Tzara urged the burning of all books and li- braries to bring about a new era of oral legends. And McLuhan, as everyone knows, makes the sharpest distinction between written language (which exists in "visual space") and oral speech (which exists in "auditory space"), praising the psychic and cultural advantages of the latter as the basis for sensibility. If written language is singled out as the culprit, what will be sought is not so much the reduction as the metamorphosis of language into something looser, more intuitive, less organized and inflected, non-linear (in McLuhan's terminology) and- noticeably-more verbose. But, of course, it is just these qualities that characterize many of the great prose narratives of our time. Joyce, Stein, Gadda, Laura Riding, Beckett, and Burroughs employ a language whose norms and energies come from oral speech, with its circular repetitive movements and essentially first-person voice. "Speaking for the sake of speaking is the formula of deliver- 99 ance, Novalis said. (Deliverance from what? From speaking? From art?) In my opinion, Novalis has succinctly described the proper approach of the writer to language and offered the basic criterion for literature as an art. But to what extent oral speech is the privileged model for the speech of literature as an art is still an open question, The Aesthetics of Silence 29 18 A corollary of the growth of this conception of art's language as autonomous and self-sufficient (and, in the end, self-reflec- tive) is a decline in "meaning" as traditionally sought in works of art. "Speaking for the sake of speaking" forces us to relocate the meaning of linguistic or para-linguistic statements. We are led to abandon meaning (in the sense of references to entities outside the artwork) as the criterion for the language of art in favor of "use." (Wittgenstein's famous thesis, "the meaning is the use," can and should be rigorously applied to art.) "Meaning" partially or totally converted into "use" is the secret behind the widespread strategy of literalness, a major development of the aesthetics of silence. A variant on this: hidden literality, exemplified by such different writers as Kafka and Beckett. The narratives of Kafka and Beckett seem puzzling because they appear to invite the reader to ascribe high-powered symbolic and allegorical meanings to them and, at the same time, repel such ascriptions, Yet when the narrative is examined, it discloses no more than what it literally means. The power of their language derives precisely from the fact that the meaning is so bare. The effect of such bareness is often a kind of anxiety-like the anxiety produced when familiar things aren't in their place or playing their accustomed role. One may be made as anxious by unexpected literalness as by the Surrealists "disturbing" objects and unexpected scale and condition of objects con- joined in an imaginary landscape. Whatever is wholly mys- terious is at once both psychically relieving and anxiety- provoking. (A perfect machine for agitating this pair of contrary emotions: the Bosch drawing in a Dutch museum that shows trees furnished with two ears at the sides of their trunks, as if they were listening to the forest, while the forest floor is strewn with eyes.) Before a fully conscious work of art, one feels something like the mixture of anxiety, detachment, 30 pruriency, and relief that a physically sound person feels when he glimpses an amputee. Beckett speaks favorably of a work of art which would be a "total object, complete with missing parts, instead of partial object. Question of degree." But exactly what is a totality and what constitutes com- pleteness in art (or anything else)? That problem is, in principle, unresolvable. Whatever way a work of art is, it could have been-could be-different. The necessity of these parts in this order is never given; it is conferred. The refusal to admit this essential contingency (or open- ness) is what inspires the audience's will to confirm the closedness of a work by interpreting it, and what creates the feeling common among reflective artists and critics that the artwork is always somehow in arrears of or inadequate to its "subject." But unless one is committed to the idea that art "expresses" something, these procedures and attitudes are far from inevitable. 19 This tenacious concept of art as "expression" has given rise to the most common, and dubious, version of the notion of silence-which invokes the idea of "the ineffable." The theory supposes that the province of art is "the beautiful, which implies effects of unspeakableness, indescribability, ineffability. Indeed, the search to express the inexpressible is taken as the very criterion of art; and sometimes becomes the occasion for a strict-and to my mind untenable--distinction between prose literature and poetry. It is from this position that Valéry advanced his famous argument (repeated in a quite different context by Sartre) that the novel is not, strictly speaking, an art form at all. His reason is that since the aim of prose is to communicate, the use of language in prose is perfectly straightforward. Poetry, being an art, should have quite different aims: to express an experience which is essentially ineffable; using language to express muteness. In contrast to The Aesthetics of Silence 31 prose writers, poets are engaged in subverting their own instrument and seeking to pass beyond it. This theory, so far as it assumes that art is concerned with beauty, is not very interesting. (Modern aesthetics is crippled by its dependence upon this essentially vacant concept. Às if art were "about" beauty, as science is "about" truthl) But even if the theory dispenses with the notion of beauty, there is still a more serious objection. The view that expressing the ineffable is an essential function of poetry (considered as a paradigm of all the arts) is naïvely unhistorical. The ineffable, while surely a perennial category of consciousness, has certainly not always made its home in the arts. Its traditional shelter was in religious discourse and, secondarily (as Plato relates in his 7th Epistle), in philosophy. The fact that contemporary artists are concerned with silence-and, therefore, in one extension, with the ineffable-must be understood historically, as a consequence of the prevailing contemporary myth of the "absoluteness" of art. The value placed on silence doesn't arise by virtue of the nature of art, but derives from the con- temporary ascription of certain "'absolute" qualities to the art object and to the activity of the artist. The extent to which art is involved with the ineffable is more specific, as well as contemporary: art, in the modern conception, is always connected with systematic transgressions of a formal sort. The systematic violation of older formal conventions practiced by modern artists gives their work a certain aura of the unspeakable-for instance, as the audience uneasily senses the negative presence of what else could be, but isn't being, said; and as any "statement" made in an aggressively new or difficult form tends to seem equivocal or merely vacant. But these features of ineffability must not be acknowledged at the expense of one's awareness of the posi- tivity of the work of art. Contemporary art, no matter how much it has defined itself by a taste for negation, can still be analyzed as a set of assertions of a formal kind. For instance, each work of art gives us a form or paradigm 1 32 or model of knowing something, an epistemology. But viewed as a spiritual project, a vehicle of aspirations toward an absolute, what any work of art supplies is a specific model for meta-social or meta-ethical tact, a standard of decorum. Each artwork indicates the unity of certain preferences about what can and cannot be said (or represented). At the same time that it may make a tacit proposal for upsetting previously consecrated rulings on what can be said (or represented), it issues its own set of limits. 20 Contemporary artists advocate silence in two styles: loud and soft. The loud style is a function of the unstable antithesis of "plenum" and "void." The sensuous, ecstatic, translinguistic apprehension of the plenum is notoriously fragile: in a terrible, almost instantaneous plunge it can collapse into the void of negative silence. With all its awareness of risk-taking (the hazards of spiritual nausea, even of madness), this advocacy of silence tends to be frenetic and overgeneralizing. It is also fre- quently apocalyptic and must endure the indignity of all apocalyptic thinking. namely, to prophesy the end, to see the day come, to outlive it, and then to set a new date for the incineration of consciousness and the definitive pollution of language and exhaustion of the possibilities of art-discourse. The other way of talking about silence is more cautious. Basically, it presents itself as an extension of a main feature of traditional classicism: the concern with modes of propriety, with standards of seemliness. Silence is only "reticence" stepped up to the nth degree. Of course, in the translation of this concern from the matrix of traditional classical art, the tone has changed-from didactic seriousness to ironic open- mindedness. But while the clamorous style of proclaiming the rhetoric of silence may seem more passionate, its more sub- dued advocates (like Cage, Johns) are saying something equally drastic. They are reacting to the same idea of art's The Aesthetics of Silence / 33 absolute aspirations (by programmatic disavowals of art); they share the same disdain for the "meanings" established by bourgeois-rationalist culture, indeed for culture itself in the familiar sense. What is voiced by the Futurists, some of the Dada artists, and Burroughs as a harsh despair and perverse vision of apocalypse is no less serious for being pro- claimed in a polite voice and as a sequence of playful affirma- tions. Indeed, it could be argued that silence is likely to remain a viable notion for modern art and consciousness only if deployed with a considerable, near systematic irony. 21 It is in the nature of all spiritual projects to tend to consume themselves-exhausting their own sense, the very meaning of the terms in which they are couched. (This is why "spiri- tuality" must be continually reinvented.) All genuinely ulti- mate projects of consciousness eventually become projects for the unraveling of thought itself. Art conceived as a spiritual project is no exception. As an abstracted and fragmented replica of the positive nihilism expounded by the radical religious myths, the serious art of our time has moved increasingly toward the most excruciating inflections of consciousness. Conceivably, irony is the only feasible counterweight to this grave use of art as the arena for the ordeal of consciousness. The present prospect is that artists will go on abolishing art, only to resurrect it in a more retracted version. As long as art bears up under the pressure of chronic interrogation, it would seem desirable that some of the questions have a certain playful quality. But this prospect depends, perhaps, on the viability of irony itself. From Socrates on, there are countless witnesses to the value of irony for the private individual: as a complex, serious method of seeking and holding one's truth, and as a means of saving one's sanity. But as irony becomes the good taste of 1 34 what is, after all, an essentially collective activity-the making of art-it may prove less serviceable. One need not judge as categorically as Nietzsche, who thought the spread of irony throughout a culture signified the floodtide of decadence and the approaching end of that cul- ture's vitality and powers. In the post-political, electronically connected cosmopolis in which all serious modern artists have taken out premature citizenship, certain organic connections between culture and "thinking" (and art is certainly now, mainly, a form of thinking) appear to have been broken, so that Nietzsche's diagnosis may need to be modified. But if irony has more positive resources than Nietzsche acknowl- edged, there still remains a question as to how far the re- sources of irony can be stretched. It seems unlikely that the possibilities of continually undermining one's assumptions can go on unfolding indefinitely into the future, without being eventually checked by despair or by a laugh that leaves one without any breath at all. (1967) Gmail kac attac Sontag Porn kac attac Tue, Aug 22, 2023 at 8:28 AM To: Stefan Kac The Pornographic Imagination 學一 No one should undertake a discussion of pornography before acknowledging the pornographies-there are at least three- and before pledging to take them on one at a time. There is a considerable gain in truth if pornography as an item in social history is treated quite separately from pornography as a psychological phenomenon (according to the usual view, symptomatic of sexual deficiency or deformity in both the producers and the consumers), and if one further distinguishes from both of these another pornography: a minor but interest- ing modality or convention within the arts. It's the last of the three pornographies that I want to focus upon. More narrowly, upon the literary genre for which, lacking a better name, I'm willing to accept (in the privacy of 1 36 serious intellectual debate, not in the courts) the dubious label of pornography. By literary genre I mean a body of work belonging to literature considered as an art, and to which inherent standards of artistic excellence pertain. From the standpoint of social and psychological phenomena, all porno- graphic texts have the same status; they are documents. But from the standpoint of art, some of these texts may well become something else. Not only do Pierre Louys' Trois Filles de leur Mère, Georges Bataille's Histoire de TOil and Madame Edwarda, the pseudonymous Story of O and The Image belong to literature, but it can be made clear why these books, all five of them, occupy a much higher rank as literature than Candy or Oscar Wilde's Teleny or the Earl of Rochester's Sodom or Apollinaire's The Debauched Hospodar or Cleland's Fanny Hill. The avalanche of pornographic potboilers mar- keted for two centuries under and now, increasingly, over the counter no more impugns the status as literature of the first group of pornographic books than the proliferation of books of the caliber of The Carpetbaggers and Valley of the Dolls throws into question the credentials of Anna Karenina and The Great Gatsby and The Man Who Loved Children. The ratio of authentic literature to trash in pornography may be somewhat lower than the ratio of novels of genuine literary merit to the entire volume of sub-literary fiction produced for mass taste. But it is probably no lower than, for instance, that of another somewhat shady sub-genre with a few first-rate books to its credit, science fiction. (As literary forms, pornog- raphy and science fiction resemble each other in several inter- esting ways.) Anyway, the quantitative measure supplies a trivial standard. Relatively uncommon as they may be, there are writings which it seems reasonable to call pornographic- assuming that the stale label has any use at all-which, at the same time, cannot be refused accreditation as serious litera- ture. The point would seem to be obvious. Yet, apparently, that's far from being the case. At least in England and America, the The Pornographic Imagination 1 37 reasoned scrutiny and assessment of pornography is held firmly within the limits of the discourse employed by psy. chologists, sociologists, historians, jurists, professional moral- ists, and social critics. Pornography is a malady to be diagnosed and an occasion for judgment. It's something one is for or against. And taking sides about pornography is hardly like being for or against aleatoric music or Pop Art, but quite a bit like being for or against legalized abortion or federal aid to parochial schools. In fact, the same fundamental approach to the subject is shared by recent eloquent defenders of society's right and obligation to censor dirty books, like George P. Elliott and George Steiner, and those like Paul Goodman, who foresee pernicious consequences of a policy of censorship far worse than any harm done by the books themselves. Both the libertarians and the would-be censors agree in reducing pornography to pathological symptom and problematic social commodity. A near unanimous consensus exists as to what pornography is-this being identified with notions about the sources of the impulse to produce and consume these curious goods. When viewed as a theme for psychological analysis, pornography is rarely seen as anything more interesting than texts which illustrate a deplorable arrest in normal adult sexual development. In this view, all pornography amounts to is the representation of the fantasies of infantile sexual life, these fantasies having been edited by the more skilled, less innocent consciousness of the masturbatory adolescent, for purchase by so-called adults. As a social phenomenon- for instance, the boom in the production of pornography in the societies of Western Europe and America since the eigh- tenth century-the approach is no less unequivocally clinical, Pornography becomes a group pathology, the disease of a whole culture, about whose cause everyone is pretty well agreed. The mounting output of dirty books is attributed to a festering legacy of Christian sexual repression and to sheer physiological ignorance, these ancient disabilities being now compounded by more proximate historical events, the impact 1 38 of drastic dislocations in traditional modes of family and political order and unsettling change in the roles of the sexes. (The problem of pornography is one of "the dilemmas of a society in transition, " Goodman said in an essay several years ago.) Thus, there is a fairly complete consensus about the diagnosis of pornography itself. The disagreements arise only in the estimate of the psychological and social consequences of its dissemination, and therefore in the formulating of tactics and policy. The more enlightened architects of moral policy are un- doubtedly prepared to admit that there is something like a pornographic imagination, " although only in the sense that pornographic works are tokens of a radical failure or deforma- tion of the imagination. And they may grant, as Goodman, Wayland Young, and others have suggested, that there also exists a "pornographic society": that, indeed, ours is a fourish- ing example of one, a society so hypocritically and repressively constructed that it must inevitably produce an effusion of pornography as both its logical expression and its subversive, demotic antidote. But nowhere in the Anglo-American com- munity of letters have I seen it argued that some pornographic books are interesting and important works of art. So long as pornography is treated as only a social and psychological phenomenon and a locus for moral concern, how could such an argument ever be madeP 2 There's another reason, apart from this categorizing of pornog. raphy as a topic of analysis, why the question whether or not works of pornography can be literature has never been genu- inely debated. I mean the view of literature itself maintained by most English and American critics-a view which in ex- cluding pornographic writings by definition from the precincts of literature excludes much else besides. Of course, no one denies that pornography constitutes a branch of literature in the sense that it appears in the form of The Pornographic Imagination 1 39 printed books of fiction. But beyond that trivial connection, no more is allowed. The fashion in which most critics construe the nature of prose literature, no less than their view of the nature of pornography, inevitably puts pornography in an adverse relation to literature. It is an airtight case, for if a pornographic book is defined as one not belonging to literature (and vice versa), there is no need to examine individual books. Most mutually exclusive definitions of pornography and literature rest on four separate arguments. One is that the utterly singleminded way in which works of pornography address the reader, proposing to arouse him sexually, is anti- thetical to the complex function of literature. It may then be argued that pornography's aim, inducing sexual excitement, is at odds with the tranquil, detached involvement evoked by genuine art. But this turn of the argument seems particularly unconvincing, considering the respected appeal to the reader's moral feelings intended by "realistic" writing, not to mention the fact that some certified masterpieces (from Chaucer to Lawrence) contain passages that do properly excite readers sexually. It is more plausible just to emphasize that pornog. raphy still possesses only one "intention, 29 while any genuinely valuable work of literature has many. Another argument, made by Adorno among others, is that works of pornography lack the beginning-middle-and-end form characteristic of literature. A piece of pornographic fiction concocts no better than a crude excuse for a beginning; and once having begun, it goes on and on and ends nowhere. Another argument: pornographic writing can't evidence any care for its means of expression as such (the concern of literature), since the aim of pornography is to inspire a set of nonverbal fantasies in which language plays a debased, merely instrumental role. Last and most weighty is the argument that the subject of literature is the relation of human beings to each other, their complex feelings and emotions; pornography, in contrast, dis. dains fully formed persons (psychology and social portrai. 1 40 ture), is oblivious to the question of motives and their credi- bility and reports only the motiveless tireless transactions of depersonalized organs. Simply extrapolating from the conception of literature main- tained by most English and American critics today, it would follow that the literary value of pornography has to be nil. But these paradigms don't stand up to close analysis in themselves, nor do they even fit their subject. Take, for instance, Story of O. Though the novel is clearly obscene by the usual standards, and more effective than many in arousing a reader sexually, sexual arousal doesn't appear to be the sole function of the situations portrayed. The narrative does have a definite begin- ning, middle, and end. The elegance of the writing hardly gives the impression that its author considered language a bothersome necessity. Further, the characters do possess emo- tions of a very intense kind, although obsessional and indeed wholly asocial ones; characters do have motives, though they are not psychiatrically or socially "normal" motives. The char- acters in Story of O are endowed with a "psychology" of a sort, one derived from the psychology of lust. And while what can be learned of the characters within the situations in which they are placed is severely restricted-~to modes of sexual concentration and explicitly rendered sexual behavior-Oand her partners are no more reduced or foreshortened than the characters in many nonpornographic works of contemporary fiction. Only when English and American critics evolve a more sophisticated view of literature will an interesting debate get underway. (In the end, this debate would be not only about pornography but about the whole body of contemporary liter- ature insistently focused on extreme situations and behavior.) The difficulty arises because so many critics continue to iden- tify with prose literature itself the particular literary conven- tions of "realism" (what might be crudely associated with the major tradition of the nineteenth-century novel). For examples of alternative literary modes, one is not confined only to much The Pornographic Imagination I 41 of the greatest twentieth-century writing-to Ulysses, a book not about characters but about media of transpersonal ex- change, about all that lies outside individual psychology and personal need; to French Surrealism and its most recent offspring, the New Novel; to German "expressionist" fiction; to the Russian post-novel represented by Biely's St. Petersburg and by Nabokov; or to the nonlinear, tenseless narratives of Stein and Burroughs. A definition of literature that faults a work for being rooted in "fantasy" rather than in the realistic rendering of how lifelike persons in familiar situations live with each other couldn't even handle such venerable conven- tions as the pastoral, which depicts relations between people that are certainly reductive, vapid, and unconvincing. An uprooting of some of these tenacious clichés is long overdue: it will promote a sounder reading of the literature of the past as well as put critics and ordinary readers better in touch with contemporary literature, which includes zones of writing that structurally resemble pornography. It is facile, virtually meaningless, to demand that literature stick with the "human. For the matter at stake is not "human" versus "in- human" (in which choosing the "human' 99 guarantees instant moral self-congratulation for both author and reader) but an infinitely varied register of forms and tonalities for transposing the human voice into prose narrative. For the critic, the proper question is not the relationship between the book and "the world" or "reality" (in which each novel is judged as if it were a unique item, and in which the world is regarded as a far less complex place than it is) but the complexities of consciousness itself, as the medium through which a world exists at all and is constituted, and an approach to single books of fiction which doesn't slight the fact that they exist in dialogue with each other. From this point of view, the decision of the old novelists to depict the unfolding of the destinies of sharply individual- ized "characters" " in familiar, socially dense situations within the conventional notation of chronological sequence is only one of many possible decisions, possessing no inherently supe- 1 42 rior claim to the allegiance of serious readers. There is nothing innately more "human" • about these procedures. The presence of realistic characters is not, in itself, something wholesome, a more nourishing staple for the moral sensibility. The only sure truth about characters in prose fiction is that they are, in Henry James' phrase, "a compositional resource." The presence of human figures in literary art can serve many purposes. Dramatic tension or three-dimensionality in the rendering of personal and social relations is often not a writer's aim, in which case it doesn't help to insist on that as a generic standard. Exploring ideas is as authentic an aim of prose fiction, although by the standards of novelistic real- ism this aim severely limits the presentation of lifelike per- sons. The constructing or imaging of something inanimate, or of a portion of the world of nature, is also a valid enterprise, and entails an appropriate rescaling of the human figure. (The form of the pastoral involves both these aims: the depiction of ideas and of nature. Persons are used only to the extent that they constitute a certain kind of landscape, which is partly a stylization of "real" nature and partly a neo-Platonic landscape of ideas.) And equally valid as a subject for prose narrative are the extreme states of human feeling and consciousness, those so peremptory that they exclude the mundane flux of feelings and are only contingently linked with concrete per- sons-which is the case with pornography. One would never guess from the confident pronouncements on the nature of literature by most American and English critics that a vivid debate on this issue had been proceeding for several generations. "It seems to me," Jacques Rivière wrote in the Nouvelle Revue Française in 1924, "that we are witness- ing a very serious crisis in the concept of what literature is." One of several responses to "the problem of the possibility and the limits of literature," Rivière noted, is the marked tendency for "art (if even the word can still be kept) to become a completely nonhuman activity, a supersensory function, if I may use that term, a sort of creative astronomy. I cite The Pornographic Imagination 1 43 Rivière not because his essay, "Questioning the Concept of Literature, 99 is particularly original or definitive or subtly argued, but simply to recall an ensemble of radical notions about literature which were almost critical commonplaces forty years ago in European literary magazines. To this day, though, that ferment remains alien, unassimi- lated, and persistently misunderstood in the English and American world of letters: suspected as issuing from a collec- tive cultural failure of nerve, frequently dismissed as outright perversity or obscurantism or creative sterility. The better English-speaking critics, however, could hardly fail to notice how much great twentieth-century literature subverts those ideas received from certain of the great nineteenth-century novelists on the nature of literature which they continue to echo in 1967. But the critics' awareness of genuinely new literature was usually tendered in a spirit much like that of the rabbis a century before the beginning of the Christian era who, humbly acknowledging the spiritual inferiority of their own age to the age of the great prophets, nevertheless firmly closed the canon of prophetic books and declared-with more relief, one suspects, than regret-the era of prophecy ended. So has the age of what in Anglo-American criticism is still called, astonishingly enough, 66 experimental" or "avant-garde" writing been repeatedly declared closed. The ritual celebra- tion of each contemporary genius's undermining of the older notions of literature was often accompanied by the nervous insistence that the writing brought forth was, alas, the last of its noble, sterile line. Now, the results of this intricate, one- eyed way of looking at modern literature have been several decades of umparalleled interest and brilliance in English and American- particularly American--criticism. But it is an inter- est and brilliance reared on bankruptcy of taste and something approaching a fundamental dishonesty of method. The critics retrograde awareness of the impressive new claims staked out by modern literature, linked with their chagrin over what was usually designated as "the rejection of reality" and "the failure 1 44 of the self" endemic in that literature, indicates the precise point at which most talented Anglo-American literary criticism leaves off considering structures of literature and transposes itself into criticism of culture. I don't wish to repeat here the arguments that I have advanced elsewhere on behalf of a different critical approach. Still, some allusion to that approach needs to be made. To discuss even a single work of the radical nature of Histoire de l'Oeil raises the question of literature itself, of prose narrative considered as an art form. And books like those of Bataille could not have been written except for that agonized re- appraisal of the nature of literature which has been preoccupy. ing literary Europe for more than half a century; but lacking that context, they must prove almost unassimilable for English and American readers-except as "mere" pornography, inex- plicably fancy trash. If it is even necessary to take up the issue of whether or not pornography and literature are antithetical, if it is at all necessary to assert that works of pornography can belong to literature, then the assertion must imply an overall view of what art is. To put it very generally: art (and art-making) is a form of consciousness; the materials of art are the variety of forms of consciousness. By no aesthetic principle can this notion of the materials of art be construed as excluding even the extreme forms of consciousness that transcend social personality or psychological individuality. In daily life, to be sure, we may acknowledge a moral obligation to inhibit such states of consciousness in ourselves. The obligation seems pragmatically sound, not only to main- tain social order in the widest sense but to allow the individual to establish and maintain a humane contact with other persons (though that contact can be renounced, for shorter or longer periods). It's well known that when people venture into the far reaches of consciousness, they do so at the peril of their sanity, that is, of their humanity. But the "human scale" or humanistic standard proper to ordinary life and conduct The Pornographic Imagination 1 45 seems misplaced when applied to art. It oversimplifies. If within the last century art conceived as an autonomous activ- ity has come to be invested with an unprecedented stature- the nearest thing to a sacramental human activity acknowl- edged by secular society-it is because one of the tasks art has assumed is making forays into and taking up positions on the frontiers of consciousness (often very dangerous to the artist as a person) and reporting back what's there. Being a free- lance explorer of spiritual dangers, the artist gains a certain license to behave differently from other people; matching the singularity of his vocation, he may be decked out with a suitably eccentric life style, or he may not. His job is inventing trophies of his experiences-objects and gestures that fascinate and enthrall, not merely (as prescribed by older notions of the artist) edify or entertain. His principal means of fascinating is to advance one step further in the dialectic of outrage. He seeks to make his work repulsive, obscure, inaccessible; in short, to give what is, or seems to be, not wanted. But however fierce may be the outrages the artist perpetrates upon his audience, his credentials and spiritual authority ultimately depend on the audience's sense (whether something known or inferred) of the outrages he commits upon himself. The exemplary modern artist is a broker in madness. The notion of art as the dearly purchased outcome of an immense spiritual risk, one whose cost goes up with the entry and participation of each new player in the game, invites a revised set of critical standards. Art produced under the aegis of this conception certainly is not, cannot be, "realistic." But words like "fantasy » Or "surrealism," that only invert the guide- lines of realism, clarify little. Fantasy too easily declines into "mere" fantasy; the clincher is the adjective "infantile." Where does fantasy, condemned by psychiatric rather than artistic standards, end and imagination begin? Since it's hardly likely that contemporary critics seriously mean to bar prose narratives that are unrealistic from the domain of literature, one suspects that a special standard is 1 46 being applied to sexual themes. This becomes clearer if one thinks of another kind of book, another kind of "fantasy." The ahistorical dreamlike landscape where action is situated, the peculiarly congealed time in which acts are performed-these occur almost as often in science fiction as they do in pornog- raphy. There is nothing conclusive in the well-known fact that most men and women fall short of the sexual prowess that people in pornography are represented as enjoying; that the size of organs, number and duration of orgasms, variety and feasibility of sexual powers, and amount of sexual energy all seem grossly exaggerated. Yes, and the spaceships and the teeming planets depicted in science-fiction novels don't exist either. The fact that the site of narrative is an ideal topos disqualifies neither pornography nor science fiction from being literature. Such negations of real, concrete, three-dimensional social time, space, and personality-and such "fantastic" en- largements of human energy-are rather the ingredients of another kind of literature, founded on another mode of con- sciousness. The materials of the pornographic books that count as litera- ture are, precisely, one of the extreme forms of human con- sciousness. Undoubtedly, many people would agree that the sexually obsessed consciousness can, in principle, enter into literature as an art form. Literature about lust? Why not? But then they usually add a rider to the agreement which effec- tually nullifies it. They require that the author have the proper "distance" from his obsessions for their rendering to count as literature. Such a standard is sheer hypocrisy, revealing once again that the values commonly applied to pornography are, in the end, those belonging to psychiatry and social affairs rather than to art. (Since Christianity upped the ante and concen- trated on sexual behavior as the root of virtue, everything pertaining to sex has been a "special case" in our culture, evoking peculiarly inconsistent attitudes.) Van Gogh's paint- ings retain their status as art even if it seems his manner of painting owed less to a conscious choice of representational The Pornographic Imagination 47 means than to his being deranged and actually seeing reality the way he painted it. Similarly, Histoire de "Oeil does not become case history rather than art because, as Bataille reveals in the extraordinary autobiographical essay appended to the narrative, the book's obsessions are indeed his own. What makes a work of pornography part of the history of art rather than of trash is not distance, the superimposition of a consciousness more conformable to that of ordinary reality upon the "deranged consciousness" " of the erotically obsessed. Rather, it is the originality, thoroughness, authenticity, and power of that deranged consciousness itself, as incarnated in a work. From the point of view of art, the exclusivity of the consciousness embodied in pornographic books is in itself neither anomalous nor anti-literary. Nor is the purported aim or effect, whether it is intentional or not, of such books-to excite the reader sexually-a defect. Only a degraded and mechanistic idea of sex could mislead someone into thinking that being sexually stirred by a book like Madame Edward is a simple matter. The singleness of intention often condemned by critics is, when the work merits treatment as art, compounded of many resonances. The physical sensations involuntarily produced in someone reading the book carry with them something that touches upon the reader's whole experience of his humanity--and his limits as a personality and as a body. Actually, the singleness of pornog. raphy's intention is spurious. But the aggressiveness of the intention is not. What seems like an end is as much a means, startlingly and oppressively concrete. The end, however, is less concrete. Pornography is one of the branches of literature. science fiction is another-aiming at disorientation, at psychic dislocation. In some respects, the use of sexual obsessions as a subject for literature resembles the use of a literary subject whose validity far fewer people would contest: religious obsessions. So compared, the familiar fact of pornography's definite, ag- gressive impact upon its readers looks somewhat different. Its 1 48 celebrated intention of sexually stimulating readers is really a species of proselytizing. Pornography that is serious literature aims to "excite in the same way that books which render an extreme form of religious experience aim to "convert." 3 Two French books recently translated into English, Story of O and The Image, conveniently illustrate some issues involved in this topic, barely explored in Anglo-American criticism, of pornography as literature. Story of O by "Pauline Réage 99 appeared in 1954 and immediately became famous, partly due to the patronage of Jean Paulhan, who wrote the preface. It was widely believed that Paulhan himself had written the book-perhaps because of the precedent set by Bataille, who had contributed an essay (signed with his own name) to his Madame Edwarda when it was first published in 1937 under the pseudonym "Pierre Angelique, and also because the name Pauline suggested Paulhan. But Paulhan has always denied that he wrote Story of O, insisting that it was indeed written by a woman, some- one previously unpublished and living in another part of France, who insisted on remaining unknown. While Paulhan's story did not halt speculation, the conviction that he was the author eventually faded. Over the years, a number of more ingenious hypotheses, attributing the book's authorship to other notables on the Paris literary scene, gained credence and then were dropped. The real identity of "Pauline Réage" remains one of the few well-kept secrets in contemporary letters. The Image was published two years later, in 1956, also under a pseudonym, "Jean de Berg. To compound the mys- tery, it was dedicated to and had a preface by "Pauline Réage," who has not been heard from since. (The preface by "Réage" is terse and forgettable; the one by Paulhan is long and very interesting.) But gossip in Paris literary circles about the identity of "Jean de Berg" is more conclusive than the detec- The Pornographic Imagination 49 tive work on "Pauline Réage." One rumor only, which names the wife of an influential younger novelist, has swept the field. It is not hard to understand why those curious enough to speculate about the two pseudonyms should incline toward some name from the established community of letters in France. For either of these books to be an amateur's one-shot seems scarcely conceivable. Different as they are from each other, Story of O and The Image both evince a quality that can't be ascribed simply to an abundance of the usual writerly endowments of sensibility, energy, and intelligence. Such gifts, very much in evidence, have themselves been processed through a dialogue of artifices. The somber self-consciousness of the narratives could hardly be further from the lack of control and craft usually considered the expression of obsessive lust. Intoxicating as is their subject (if the reader doesn't cut off and find it just funny or sinister), both narratives are more concerned with the "use" of erotic material than with the "expression" of it. And this use is preeminently-there is no other word for it-literary. The imagination pursuing its outrageous pleasures in Story of O and The Image remains firmly anchored to certain notions of the formal consummation of intense feeling, of procedures for exhausting an experience, that connect as much with literature and recent literary history aS with the ahistorical domain of eros. And why not? Experiences aren't pornographic; only images and represen- tations-structures of the imagination-are. That is why a pornographic book often can make the reader think of, mainly, other pornographic books, rather than sex unmediated-and this not necessarily to the detriment of his erotic excitement. For instance, what resonates throughout Story of O is a voluminous body of pornographic or "libertine" literature, mostly trash, in both French and English, going back to the eighteenth century. The most obvious reference is to Sade. But here one must not think only of the writings of Sade himself, but of the reinterpretation of Sade by French literary intellectuals after World War II, a critical 1 50 gesture perhaps comparable in its importance and influence upon educated literary taste and upon the actual direction of serious fiction in France to the reappraisal of James launched just before World War II in the United States, except that the French reappraisal has lasted longer and seems to have struck deeper roots. (Sade, of course, had never been forgotten. He was read enthusiastically by Flaubert, Baudelaire, and most of the other radical geniuses of French literature of the late nineteenth century. He was one of the patron saints of the Surrealist movement, and figures importantly in the thought of Breton. But it was the discussion of Sade after 1945 that really consolidated his position as an inexhaustible point of departure for radical thinking about the human condition. The well-known essay of Beauvoir, the indefatigable scholarly biography undertaken by Gilbert Lely, and writings as yet untranslated of Blanchot, Paulhan, Bataille, Klossowski, and Leiris are the most eminent documents of the postwar re- evaluation which secured this astonishingly hardy modification of French literary sensibility. The quality and theoretical density of the French interest in Sade remains virtually incom- prehensible to English and American literary intellectuals, for whom Sade is perhaps an exemplary figure in the history of psychopathology, both individual and social, but inconceivable as someone to be taken seriously as a "thinker.") But what stands behind Story of O is not only Sade, both the problems he raised and the ones raised in his name. The book is also rooted in the conventions of the "libertine" pot- boilers written in nineteenth-century France, typically situ- ated in a fantasy England populated by brutal aristocrats with enormous sexual equipment and violent tastes, along the axis of sadomasochism, to match. The name of O's second lover-proprietor,. Sir Stephen, clearly pays homage to this period fantasy, as does the figure of Sir Edmond of His- tire de l'Oeil. And it should be stressed that the allusion to a stock type of pornographic trash stands, as a literary reference, on exactly the same footing as the anachronistic setting of the The Pornographic Imagination 1 51 main action, which is lifted straight from Sade's sexual theatre. The narrative opens in Paris (O joins her lover René in a car and is driven around) but most of the subsequent action is removed to more familiar if less plausible territory: that con- veniently isolated château, luxuriously furnished and lavishly staffed with servants, where a clique of rich men congregate and to which women are brought as virtual slaves to be the objects, shared in common, of the men's brutal and inventive lust. There are whips and chains, masks worn by the men when the women are admitted to their presence, great fires burning in the hearth, unspeakable sexual indignities, Hog- gings and more ingenious kinds of physical mutilation, several lesbian scenes when the excitement of the orgies in the great drawing room seems to flag. In short, the novel comes equipped with some of the creakiest items in the repertoire of pornography. How seriously can we take this? A bare inventory of the plot might give the impression that Story of O is not so much pornography as meta-pornography, a brilliant parody. Some- thing similar was urged in defense of Candy when it was published here several years ago, after some years of modest existence in Paris as a more or less official dirty book. Candy wasn't pornography, it was argued, but a spoof, a witty burlesque of the conventions of cheap pornographic narra- tive. My own view is that Candy may be funny, but it's still pornography. For pornography isn't a form that can parody itself. It is the nature of the pornographic imagination to prefer ready-made conventions of character, setting, and action. Pornography is a theatre of types, never of individuals. A parody of pornography, so far as it has any real competence, always remains pornography. Indeed, parody is one common form of pornographic writing. Sade himself often used it, inverting the moralistic fictions of Richardson in which female virtue always triumphs over male lewdness (either by saying no or by dying afterwards). With Story of O, it would be more accurate to speak of a "use" rather than of a parody of Sade. 1 52 The tone alone of Story of O indicates that whatever in the book might be read as parody or antiquarianism-a mandarin pornography?-is only one of several elements forming the narrative. (Although sexual situations encompassing all the ex- pectable variations of lust are graphically described, the prose style is rather formal, the level of language dignified and almost chaste.) Features of the Sadean staging are used to shape the action, but the narrative's basic line differs funda- mentally from anything Sade wrote. For one thing, Sade's work has a built-in open-endedness or principle of insatia- bility. His 120 Days of Sodom, probably the most ambitious pornographic book ever conceived (in terms of scale), a kind of summa of the pornographic imagination; stunningly impres- sive and upsetting, even in the truncated form, part narrative and part scenario, in which it has survived. (The manuscript was accidentally rescued from the Bastille after Sade had been forced to leave it behind when he was transferred in 1789 to Charenton, but Sade believed until his death that his master- piece had been destroyed when the prison was razed.) Sade's express train of outrages tears along an interminable but level track. His descriptions are too schematic to be sensuous. The fictional actions are illustrations, rather, of his relentlessly repeated ideas. Yet these polemical ideas themselves seem, on reflection, more like principles of a dramaturgy than a sub- stantive theory. Sade's ideas-of the person as a "thing" or an "object," of the body as a machine and of the orgy as an inventory of the hopefully indefinite possibilities of several machines in collaboration with each other-seem mainly de- signed to make possible an endless, nonculminating kind of ultimately affectless activity. In contrast, Story of O has a definite movement; a logic of events, as opposed to Sade's static principle of the catalogue or encyclopedia. This plot movement is strongly abetted by the fact that, for most of the narrative, the author tolerates at least a vestige of "the couple" (O and René, O and Sir Stephen) -a unit generally repudiated in pornographic literature. The Pornographic Imagination 1 53 And, of course, the figure of O herself is different. Her feel- ings, however insistently they adhere to one theme, have some modulation and are carefully described. Although passive, O scarcely resembles those ninnies in Sade's tales who are detained in remote castles to be tormented by pitiless no- blemen and satanic priests. And O is represented as active, too: literally active, as in the seduction of Jacqueline, and more important, profoundly active in her own passivity. O resembles her Sadean prototypes only superficially. There is no personal consciousness, except that of the author, in Sade's books. But O does possess a consciousness, from which van- tage point her story is told. (Although written in the third person, the narrative never departs from O's point of view or understands more than she understands.) Sade aims to neu- tralize sexuality of all its personal associations, to represent a kind of impersonal-or pure-sexual encounter. But the nar- rative of "Pauline Réage" does show O reacting in quite different ways (including love) to different people, notably to René, to Sir Stephen, to Jacqueline, and to Anne-Marie. Sade seems more representative of the major conventions of pornographic writing. So far as the pornographic imagination tends to make one person interchangeable with another and all people interchangeable with things, it's not functional to de- scribe a person as O is described--in terms of a certain state of her will (which she's trying to discard) and of her understand- ing. Pornography is mainly populated by creatures like Sade's Justine, endowed with neither will nor intelligence nor even, apparently, memory. Justine lives in a perpetual state of astonishment, never learning anything from the strikingly repetitious violations of her innocence. After each fresh be- trayal she gets in place for another round, as uninstructed by her experience as ever, ready to trust the next masterful libertine and have her trust rewarded by a renewed loss of liberty, the same indignities, and the same blasphemous ser mons in praise of vice. Thor the most part, the figures who play the role of sexual 1 54 objects in pornography are made of the same stuff as one principal "humour" of comedy. Justine is like Candide, who is also a cipher, a blank, an eternal naïf incapable of learning anything from his atrocious ordeals. The familiar structure of comedy which features a character who is a still center in the midst of outrage (Buster Keaton is a classic image) crops up repeatedly in pornography. The personages in por- nography, like those of comedy, are seen only from the out. side, behavioristically. By definition, they can't be seen in depth, so as truly to engage the audience's feelings. In much of comedy, the joke resides precisely in the disparity between the understated or anesthetized feeling and a large outrageous event. Pornography works in a similar fashion. The gain produced by a deadpan tone, by what seems to the reader in an ordinary state of mind to be the incredible underreacting of the erotic agents to the situations in which they're placed, is not the release of laughter. It's the release of a sexual reaction, originally voyeuristic but probably needing to be secured by an underlying direct identification with one of the participants in the sexual act. The emotional flatness of pornography is thus neither a failure of artistry nor an index of principled inhumanity. The arousal of a sexual response in the reader requires it. Only in the absence of directly stated emotions can the reader of pornography find room for his own responses. When the event narrated comes already festooned with the author's explicitly avowed sentiments, by which the reader may be stirred, it then becomes harder to be stirred by the event itself.* This is very clear in the case of Genet's books, which, despite the explicitness of the sexual experiences related, are not sexually arousing for most readers. What the reader knows ( and Genet has stated it many times) is that Genet himself was sexually excited while writing The Miracle of the Rose, Our Lady of the Flowers, etc. The reader makes an intense and unsettling contact with Genet's erotic excite- the reader's own. Genet was perfectly correct when he said that his books were not pornographic. The Pornographic Imagination 1 55 Silent film comedy offers many illustrations of how the formal principle of continual agitation or perpetual motion (slapstick) and that of the deadpan really converge to the same end-a deadening or neutralization or distancing of the audience's emotions, its ability to identify in a "humane" way and to make moral judgments about situations of violence. The same principle is at work in all pornography. It's not that the characters in pornography cannot conceivably possess any emotions. They can. But the principles of underreacting and frenetic agitation make the emotional climate self-canceling, so that the basic tone of pornography is affectless, emotionless. However, degrees of this affectlessness can be distinguished. Justine is the stereotype sex-object figure (invariably female, since most pornography is written by men or from the stereo- typed male point of view): a bewildered victim, whose con- sciousness remains unaltered by her experiences. But O is an adept; whatever the cost in pain and fear, she is grateful for the opportunity to be initiated into a mystery. That mystery is the loss of the self. O learns, she suffers, she changes. Step by step she becomes more what she is, a process identical with the emptying out of herself. In the vision of the world pre- sented by Story of O, the highest good is the transcendence of personality. The plot's movement is not horizontal, but a kind of ascent through degradation. O does not simply become identical with her sexual availability, but wants to reach the perfection of becoming an object. Her condition, if it can be characterized as one of dehumanization, is not to be under- stood as a by-product of her enslavement to René, Sir Stephen, and the other men at Roissy, but as the point of her situation, something she seeks and eventually attains. The terminal image for her achievement comes in the last scene of the book: O is led to a party, mutilated, in chains, unrecognizable, costumed (as an owl)-so convincingly no longer human that none of the guests thinks of speaking to her directly. O's quest is neatly summed up in the expressive letter which serves her for a name. "O" suggests a cartoon of her sex, not 1 56 her individual sex but simply woman; it also stands for a nothing. But what Story of O unfolds is a spiritual paradox, that of the full void and of the vacuity that is also a plenum. The power of the book lies exactly in the anguish stirred up by the continuing presence of this paradox. "Pauline Réage" raises, in a far more organic and sophisticated manner than Sade does with his clumsy expositions and discourses, the question of the status of human personality itself. But whereas Sade is interested in the obliteration of personality from the viewpoint of power and liberty, the author of Story of O is interested in the obliteration of personality from the viewpoint of happiness. (The closest statement of this theme in English literature: certain passages in Lawrence's The Lost Girl.) For the paradox to gain real significance, however, the reader must entertain a view of sex different from that held by most enlightened members of the community. The prevailing view--an amalgam of Rousseauist, Freudian, and liberal social thought-regards the phenomenon of sex as a perfectly intel- ligible, although uniquely precious, source of emotional and physical pleasure. What difficulties arise come from the long deformation of the sexual impulses administered by Western Christianity, whose ugly wounds virtually everyone in this culture bears. First, guilt and anxiety. Then, the reduction of sexual capacities-leading if not to virtual impotence or fri- gidity, at least to the depletion of erotic energy and the repres- sion of many natural elements of sexual appetite (the "perver- sions"). Then the spill-over into public dishonesties in which people tend to respond to news of the sexual pleasures of others with envy, fascination, revulsion, and spiteful indig- nation. It's from this pollution of the sexual health of the culture that a phenomenon like pornography is derived. I don't quarrel with the historical diagnosis contained in this account of the deformations of Western sexuality. Never- theless, what seems to me decisive in the complex of views held by most educated members of the community is a more questionable assumption-that human sexual appetite is, if The Pornographic Imagination 1 57 untampered with, a natural pleasant function; and that "the obscene" is a convention, the fiction imposed upon nature by a society convinced there is something vile about the sexual functions and, by extension, about sexual pleasure. It's just these assumptions that are challenged by the French tradition represented by Sade, Lautréamont, Bataille, and the authors of Story of O and The Image. Their work suggests that "the obscene is a primal notion of human consciousness, some- thing much more profound than the backwash of a sick society's aversion to the body. Human sexuality is, quite apart from Christian repressions, a highly questionable phenome- non, and belongs, at least potentially, among the extreme rather than the ordinary experiences of humanity. Tamed as it may be, sexuality remains one of the demonic forces in human consciousness-pushing us at intervals close to taboo and dangerous desires, which range from the impulse to commit sudden arbitrary violence upon another person to the volup- tuous yearning for the extinction of one's consciousness, for death itself. Even on the level of simple physical sensation and mood, making love surely resembles having an epileptic fit at least as much, if not more, than it does eating a meal or conversing with someone. Everyone has felt (at least in fan- tasy) the erotic glamour of physical cruelty and an erotic lure in things that are vile and repulsive. These phenomena form part of the genuine spectrum of sexuality, and if they are not to be written off as mere neurotic aberrations, the picture looks different from the one promoted by enlightened public opin- ion, and less simple. One could plausibly argue that it is for quite sound reasons that the whole capacity for sexual ecstasy is inaccessible to most people-given that sexuality is something, like nuclear energy, which may prove amenable to domestication through scruple, but then again may not. That few people regularly, or perhaps ever, experience their sexual capacities at this un- settling pitch doesn't mean that the extreme is not authentic, or that the possibility of it doesn't haunt them anyway. (Reli- 1 58 gion is probably, after sex, the second oldest resource which human beings have available to them for blowing their minds. Yet among the multitudes of the pious, the number who have ventured very far into that state of consciousness must be fairly small, too.) There is, demonstrably, something incor- rectly designed and potentially disorienting in the human sexual capacity-at least in the capacities of man-in-civiliza- tion. Man, the sick animal, bears within him an appetite which can drive him mad. Such is the understanding of sexuality -as something beyond good and evil, beyond love, beyond sanity; as a resource for ordeal and for breaking through the limits of consciousness-that informs the French literary canon I've been discussing. The Story of O, with its project for completely transcending personality, entirely presumes this dark and complex vision of sexuality so far removed from the hopeful view sponsored by American Freudianism and liberal culture. The woman who is given no other name than O progresses simultaneously toward her own extinction as a human being and her fulfillment as a sexual being. It's hard to imagine how anyone would ascertain whether there exists truly, empirically, anything in "nature" or human consciousness that supports such a split. But it seems understandable that the possibility has always haunted man, as accustomed as he is to decrying such a split. O's project enacts, on another scale, that performed by the existence of pornographic literature itself. What pornographic literature does is precisely to drive a wedge between one's existence as a full human being and one's existence as a sexual being-while in ordinary life a healthy person is one who prevents such a gap from opening up. Normally we don't experience, at least don't want to experience, our sexual fulfillment as distinct from or opposed to our personal fulAll- ment. But perhaps in part they are distinct, whether we like it or not. Insofar as strong sexual feeling does involve an obses- sive degree of attention, it encompasses experiences in which a person can feel he is losing his "self." The literature that goes The Pornographic Imagination / 59 from Sade through Surrealism to these recent books capitalizes on that mystery; it isolates the mystery and makes the reader aware of it, invites him to participate in it. This literature is both an invocation of the erotic in its darkest sense and, in certain cases, an exorcism. The devout, solemn mood of Story of O is fairly unrelieved; a work of mixed moods on the same theme, a journey toward the estrangement of the self from the self, is Buñuel's film L'Age d'Or. As a literary form, pornography works with two patterns -one equivalent to tragedy (as in Story of O) in which the erotic subject-victim heads inexorably toward death, and the other equivalent to comedy (as in The Image) in which the obsessional pursuit of sexual exercise is rewarded by a terminal gratification, union with the uniquely desired sexual partner. 4 The writer who renders a darker sense of the erotic, its perils of fascination and humiliation, than anyone else is Bataille. His Histoire de lOeil (first published in 1928) and Madame Edwarda® qualify as pornographic texts insofar as their theme is an all-engrossing sexual quest that annihilates every consideration of persons extraneous to their roles in the sexual dramaturgy, and the fulfillment of this quest is depicted graphically. But this description conveys nothing of the ex- traordinary quality of these books. For sheer explicitness about sexual organs and acts is not necessarily obscene; it only becomes so when delivered in a particular tone, when it has acquired a certain moral resonance. As it happens, the sparse number of sexual acts and quasi-sexual defilements related in … / 66 aesthetic) of those who are not erotomanes. Indeed, this interest resides in precisely what are customarily dismissed as the limits of pornographic thinking. 5 The prominent characteristics of all products of the porno. graphic imagination are their energy and their absolutism. The books generally called pornographic are those whose primary, exclusive, and overriding preoccupation is with the depiction of sexual "intentions" and "activities." One could also say sexual "feelings," except that the word seems redundant, The feelings of the personages deployed by the pornographic imagination are, at any given moment, either identical with their "behavior" or else a preparatory phase, that of "inten- tion, 9) on the verge of breaking into "behavior" unless physi- cally thwarted. Pornography uses a small crude vocabulary of feeling, all relating to the prospects of action: feeling one would like to act (lust); feeling one would not like to act (shame, fear, aversion). There are no gratuitous or non- functioning feelings; no musings, whether speculative or im- agistie, which are irrelevant to the business at hand. Thus, the pornographic imagination inhabits a universe that is, however repetitive the incidents occurring within it, incomparably eco- nomical. The strictest possible criterion of relevance applies: everything must bear upon the erotic situation. The universe proposed by the pornographic imagination is a total universe. It has the power to ingest and metamorphose and translate all concerns that are fed into it, reducing every- thing into the one negotiable currency of the erotic imperative. All action is conceived of as a set of sexual exchanges. Thus, the reason why pornography refuses to make fixed distinctions between the sexes or allow any kind of sexual preference or sexual taboo to endure can be explained "structurally." The bisexuality, the disregard for the incest taboo, and other similar features common to pornographic narratives function to multiply the possibilities of exchange. Ideally, it should be The Pornographic Imagination / 67 possible for everyone to have a sexual connection with every. one else. Of course the pornographic imagination is hardly the only form of consciousness that proposes a total universe. Another is the type of imagination that has generated modern symbolic logic. In the total universe proposed by the logician's imagina- tion, all statements can be broken down or chewed up to make it possible to rerender them in the form of the logical lan- guage; those parts of ordinary language that don't fit are simply lopped off. Certain of the well-known states of the religious imagination, to take another example, operate in the same cannibalistic way, engorging all materials made available to them for retranslation into phenomena saturated with the religious polarities (sacred and profane, etc.). The latter example, for obvious reasons, touches closely on the present subject. Religious metaphors abound in a good deal of modern erotic literature-notably in Genet-and in some works of pornographic literature, too. Story of O makes heavy use of religious metaphors for the ordeal that O undergoes. O "wanted to believe. Her drastic condition of total personal servitude to those who use her sexually is re- peatedly described as a mode of salvation. With anguish and anxiety, she surrenders herself; and "henceforth there were no more hiatuses, no dead time, no remission." While she has, to be sure, entirely lost her freedom, O has gained the right to participate in what is described as virtually a sacramental rite. The word "open" and the expression "opening her legs" were, on her lover's lips, charged with such uneasiness and power that she could never hear them without experiencing a kind of internal prostration, a sacred submission, as though a god, and not he, had spoken to her. Though she fears the whip and other cruel mistreatments be- fore they are inflicted on her, "yet when it was over she was happy to have gone through it, happier still if it had been 1 68 especially cruel and prolonged." The whipping, branding, and mutilating are described (from the point of view of her con- sciousness) as ritual ordeals which test the faith of someone being initiated into an ascetic spiritual discipline. The "perfect submissiveness" that her original lover and then Sir Stephen demand of her echoes the extinction of the self explicitly required of a Jesuit novice or Zen pupil. O is "that absent- minded person who has yielded up her will in order to be totally remade," to be made fit to serve a will far more power- ful and authoritative than her own. As might be expected, the straightforwardness of the reli- gious metaphors in Story of O has evoked some correspond- ingly straight readings of the book. The novelist Mandiargues, whose preface precedes Paulhan's in the American translation, doesn't hesitate to describe Story of O as "a mystic work," and therefore "not, strictly speaking, an erotic book." What Story of O depicts "is a complete spiritual transformation, what others would call an ascesis. ." But the matter is not so simple. Mandiargues is correct in dismissing a psychiatric analysis of O's state of mind that would reduce the book's subject to, say, "masochism.' » As Paulhan says, "the heroine's ardor" is totally inexplicable in terms of the conventional psychiatric vocabu- lary. The fact that the novel employs some of the conventional motifs and trappings of the theatre of sadomasochism has it- self to be explained. But Mandiargues has fallen into an error almost as reductive and only slightly less vulgar. Surely, the only alternative to the psychiatric reductions is not the religious vocabulary. But that only these two foreshortened alternatives exist testifes once again to the bone-deep denigration of the range and seriousness of sexual experience that still rules this culture, for all its much-advertised new per- missiveness. My own view is that "Pauline Réage" wrote an erotic book. The notion implicit in Story of O that eros is a sacrament is not the "truth" behind the literal (erotic) sense of the book-the lascivious rites of enslavement and degradation performed The Pornographic Imagination / 69 upon O-but, exactly, a metaphor for it. Why say something stronger, when the statement can't really mean anything stronger? But despite the virtual incomprehensibility to most educated people today of the substantive experience behind religious vocabulary, there is a continuing piety toward the grandeur of emotions that went into that vocabulary. The re- ligious imagination survives for most people as not just the primary but virtually the only credible instance of an imagina- tion working in a total way. No wonder, then, that the new or radically revamped forms of the total imagination which have arisen in the past cen- tury-notably, those of the artist, the erotomane, the left revo- lutionary, and the madman-have chronically borrowed the prestige of the religious vocabulary. And total experiences, of which there are many kinds, tend again and again to be apprehended only as revivals or translations of the religious imagination. To try to make a fresh way of talking at the most serious, ardent, and enthusiastic level, heading off the religious encapsulation, is one of the primary intellectual tasks of future thought. As matters stand, with everything from Story of O to Mao reabsorbed into the incorrigible survival of the religious impulse, all thinking and feeling gets devalued. (Hegel made perhaps the grandest attempt to create a post-religious vo- cabulary, out of philosophy, that would command the treasures of passion and credibility and emotive appropriateness that were gathered into the religious vocabulary. But his most interesting followers steadily undermined the abstract meta- religious language in which he had bequeathed his thought, and concentrated instead on the specific social and practical applications of his revolutionary form of process-thinking, historicism. Hegel's failure lies like a gigantic disturbing hulk across the intellectual landscape. And no one has been big enough, pompous enough, or energetic enough since Hegel to attempt the task again.) And so we remain, careening among our overvaried choices of kinds of total imagination, of species of total seriousness. 1 10 Perhaps the deepest spiritual resonance of the career of por. nography in its "modern" Western phase under consideration here (pornography in the Orient or the Moslem world being something very different) is this vast frustration of human passion and seriousness since the old religious imagination, with its secure monopoly on the total imagination, began in the late eighteenth century to crumble. The ludicrousness and lack of skill of most pornographic writing, films, and painting is obvious to everyone who has been exposed to them. What is less often remarked about the typical products of the pornographic imagination is their pathos. Most pornography- the books discussed here cannot be excepted-points to some- thing more general than even sexual damage. I mean the traumatic failure of modern capitalist society to provide au- thentic outlets for the perennial human fair for high-tempera- ture visionary obsessions, to satisfy the appetite for exalted self- transcending modes of concentration and seriousness. The need of human beings to transcend "the personal" is no less profound than the need to be a person, an individual. But this society serves that need poorly. It provides mainly demonic vocabularies in which to situate that need and from which to initiate action and construct rites of behavior. One is offered a choice among vocabularies of thought and action which are not merely self-transcending but self-destructive. 6 But the pornographic imagination is not just to be understood as a form of psychic absolutism-some of whose products we might be able to regard (in the role of connoisseur, rather than client) with more sympathy or intellectual curiosity or aesthetic sophistication. Several times before in this essay I have alluded to the pos- sibility that the pornographic imagination says something worth listening to, albeit in a degraded and often unrecog- nizable form. I've urged that this spectacularly cramped form of the human imagination has, nevertheless, its peculiar access The Pornographic Imagination 1 71 to some truth. This truth-about sensibility, about sex, about individual personality, about despair, about limits-can be shared when it projects itself into art. (Everyone, at least in dreams, has inhabited the world of the pornographic imagina- tion for some hours or days or even longer periods of his life; but only the full-time residents make the fetishes, the trophies, the art.) That discourse one might call the poetry of transgres- sion is also knowledge. He who transgresses not only breaks a rule. He goes somewhere that the others are not; and he knows something the others don't know. Pornography, considered as an artistic or art-producing form of the human imagination, is an expression of what Wil- liam James called "morbid-mindedness. 2) But James was surely right when he gave as part of the definition of morbid- mindedness that it ranged over "a wider scale of experience" than healthy-mindedness. What can be said, though, to the many sensible and sensi- tive people who find depressing the fact that a whole library of pornographic reading material has been made, within the last few years, so easily available in paperback form to the very young? Probably one thing: that their apprehension is justi- fied, but may not be in scale. I am not addressing the usual complainers, those who feel that since sex after all is dirty, so are books reveling in sex (dirty in a way that a genocide screened nightly on TV, apparently, is not). There still re- mains a sizeable minority of people who object to or are re- pelled by pornography not because they think it's dirty but because they know that pornography can be a crutch for the psychologically deformed and a brutalization of the morally innocent. I feel an aversion to pornography for those reasons, too, and am uncomfortable about the consequences of its in- creasing availability. But isn't the worry somewhat misplaced? What's really at stake? A concern about the uses of knowledge itself. There's a sense in which all knowledge is dangerous, the reason being that not everyone is in the same condition as knowers or potential knowers. Perhaps most people don't need 1 72 "a wider scale of experience." It may be that, without subtle and extensive psychic preparation, any widening of experience and consciousness is destructive for most people. Then we must ask what justifies the reckless unlimited confidence we have in the present mass availability of other kinds of knowl- edge, in our optimistic acquiescence in the transformation of and extension of human capacities by machines. Pornography is only one item among the many dangerous commodities being circulated in this society and, unattractive as it may be, one of the less lethal, the less costly to the community in terms of human suffering. Except perhaps in a small circle of writer- intellectuals in France, pornography is an inglorious and mostly despised department of the imagination. Its mean status is the very antithesis of the considerable spiritual pres- tige enjoyed by many items which are far more noxious. In the last analysis, the place we assign to pornography depends on the goals we set for our own consciousness, our own experience. But the goal A espouses for his conscious- ness may not be one he's pleased to see B adopt, because he judges that B isn't qualified or experienced or subtle enough. And B may be dismayed and even indignant at A's adopting goals that he himself professes; when A holds them, they become presumptuous or shallow. Probably this chronic mutual suspicion of our neighbor's capacities-suggesting, in effect, a hierarchy of competence with respect to human con- sciousness-will never be settled to everyone's satisfaction. As long as the quality of people's consciousness varies so greatly, how could it be? In an essay on the subject some years ago, Paul Goodman wrote: "The question is not whether pornography, but the quality of the pornography." That's exactly right,. One could extend the thought a good deal further. The question is not whether consciousness or whether knowledge, but the quality of the consciousness and of the knowledge. And that invites consideration of the quality or fineness of the human subject- the most problematic standard of all. It doesn't seem inac- The Pornographic Imagination 1 73 curate to say most people in this society who aren't actively mad are, at best, reformed or potential lunatics. But is anyone supposed to act on this knowledge, even genuinely live with it If so many are teetering on the verge of murder, de- humanization, sexual deformity and despair, and we were to act on that thought, then censorship much more radical than the indignant foes of pornography ever envisage seems in order. For if that's the case, not only pornography but all forms of serious art and knowledge--in other words, all forms of truth--are suspect and dangerous. (1967) Gmail kac attac Sontag theater film kac attac Sun, Sep 3, 2023 at 1:40 PM To: Stefan Kac Theatre and Film Does there exist an unbridgeable gap, even opposition, be- tween the two artb? Is there something, senuinelie* "theatri- cal." different in kind from what is genuinely Virtually all opinion holds that there is. A commonplace of discussion has it that film and theatre are distinct and even antithetical arts, each giving rise to its own standards of judg- ment and canons of form. Thus Erwin Panofsky argues in his celebrated essay "Style and Medium in the Motion Pictures" (1934, rewritten in 1956) that one of the criteria for evaluat- ing a movie is its freedom from the impurities of theatricality, and that, to talk about film, one must first define "the basic nature of the medium." Those who think prescriptively about the nature of live drama, less confident in the future of that art / 100 than the cinéphiles in theirs, rarely take a comparably exclu- sivist line. The history of cinema is often treated as the history of its emancipation from theatrical models. First of all from theatri- cal "frontality" (the unmoving camera reproducing the situa- tion of the spectator of a play fixed in his seat), then from theatrical acting (gestures needlessly stylized, exaggerated. needlessly, because now the actor could be seen "close up '*). then from theatrical furnishings (unnecessary distancing of the audience's emotions, disregarding the opportunity to im- merse the audience in reality). Movies are regarded as ad- vancing from theatrical stasis to cinematic fluidity, from the- atrial artificiality to cinematic naturalness and immediateness. But this view is far too simple. Such oversimplification testifies to the ambiguous scope of the cam ra eye. Because the camera can be used to project a relatively passive, unselective kind of vision-as well as the highly selective ("edited) vision generally associated with movies-cinema is a medium as well as an art, in the sense that it can encapsulate any of the performing arts and render it in a film transcription. (This "medium' 22 or non-art aspect of film attained its routine incarnation with the advent of televi- sion. There, movies themselves became another performing art to be transcribed, miniaturized on film.) One can film a play or ballet or opera or sporting event in such a way that film becomes, relatively speaking, a transparency, and it seems cor- rect to say that one is seeing the event filmed. But theatre is never 2 "medium. 9) Thus, because one can make a movie of a play but not a play of a movie, cinema had an early but fortuitous connection with the stage. Some of the earliest Alms were filmed plays. Duse and Bernhardt are on film-marooned in time, absurd, touching; there is a 1913 British film of Forbes- Robertson playing Hamlet, a 1923 German film of Othello starring Emil Jannings. More recently, the camera has pre- Theatre and Film 101 served Helene Weigel's performance of Mother Courage with the Berliner Ensemble, the Living Theatre production of The Brig (filmed by the Mekas brothers), and Peter Brook's stag. ing of Weiss' Marat/Sade. But from the beginning, even within the confines of the notion of film as a "medium" and the camera as a "recording" instrument, other events than those occurring in theatres were taken down. As with still photography, some of the events captured on moving photographs were staged but others were valued precisely because they were not staged-the camera being the witness, the invisible spectator, the invulnerable voyeuristic eye. (Perhaps public happenings, "news, 99 consti- tute an intermediate case between staged and unstaged events; but film as newsreel" " generally amounts to using film as a "medium.") To create on film a document of a transient reality is a conception quite unrelated to the purposes of theatre. It only appears related when the "real event" being recorded happens to be a theatrical performance. In fact, the first use of the motion-picture camera was to make a documentary record of unstaged, casual reality; Lumière's films from the 1890's of crowd scenes in Paris and New York antedate any filming of plays. The other paradigmatic non-theatrical use of film, which dates from the earliest period of movie-making with the celebrated work of Méliès, is the creation of illusion, the construction of fantasy. To be sure, Méliès (like many di- rectors after him) conceived of the rectangle of the screen on analogy with the proscenium stage. And not only were the events staged; they were the very stuff of invention: impossi- ble journeys, imaginary objects, physical metamorphoses. But this, even adding the fact that Méliès situated his camera in front of the action and hardly moved it, does not make his films theatrical in an invidious sense. In their treatment of persons as things (physical objects) and in their disjunctive 1 102 presentation of time and space, Méliès' films are quintessen- tially "cinematic"-so far as there is such a thing. If the contrast between theatre and films doesn't lie in the materials represented or depicted in a simple sense, this con- trast survives in more generalized forms. According to some influential accounts, the boundary is virtually an ontological one. Theatre deploys artifice while cinema is committed to reality, indeed to an ultimately physi- cal reality which is "redeemed," to use Siegfried Kracauer's striking word, by the camera. The aesthetic judgment that follows from this venture in intellectual map-making is that films shot in real-life settings are better (i.e., more cinematic) than those shot in a studio. Taking Flaherty and Italian neo-realism and the cinéma-vérité of Rouch and Marker and Ruspoli as preferred models, one would judge rather harshly the era of wholly studio-made films inaugurated around 1920 by The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, films with ostentatiously artificial décor and landscapes, and applaud the direction taken at the same period in Sweden, where many films with strenuous natural settings were being shot on location. Thus, Panofsky attacks Dr. Caligari for 66 'pre-stylizing reality 39 and urges upon cinema "the problem of manipulating and shooting unstylized reality in such a way that the result has style." But there is no reason to insist on a single model for film. And it is helpful to notice how the apotheosis of realism in cinema, which gives the greatest prestige to "unstylized reality, covertly advances a definite political-moral position. Films have been rather too often acclaimed as the demo- cratic art, the preeminent art of mass society. Once one takes this description seriously, one tends (like Panofsky and Kracauer) to wish that movies continue to reflect their origins in a vulgar level of the arts, to remain loyal to their vast unsophisticated audience. Thus, a vaguely Marxist orien- tation collaborates with a fundamental tenet of romanticism. Theatre and Film | 103 Cinema, at once high art and popular art, is cast as the art of the authentic. Theatre, by contrast, means dressing uP, pretense, lies. It smacks of aristocratic taste and the class so- ciety. Behind the objection of critics to the stagy sets of Dr. Caligari, the improbable costumes and florid acting of Renoir's Nana, the talkiness of Dreyer's Gertrud as "theatrical" lay the judgment that such Alms were false, that they exhibited a sensibility both pretentious and reactionary which was out of step with the democratic and more mundane sensibility of modern life. Anyway, whether aesthetic defect or no in the particular case, the synthetic "look" in films is not necessarily a misplaced theatricalism. From the beginning of film history, there were painters and sculptors who claimed that cinema's true future resided in artifice, construction. Not figurative narration or storytelling of any kind (either in a relatively realistic or in a "surrealistic" ' vein) but abstraction was Alm's true destiny. Thus, Theo van Doesburg in his essay of 1929, "Film as Pure Form, " envisages film as the vehicle of "optical poetry," "dy- namic light architecture," "the creation of a moving ornament." Films will realize "Bach's dream of finding an optical equiva- lent for the temporal structure of a musical composition." Though only a few film-makers-for example, Robert Breer- continue to pursue this conception of film, who can deny its claim to be cinematic? Could anything be more alien to the nature of theatre than such a degree of abstraction? Let's not answer that question too quickly. Panofsky derives the difference between theatre and film as a difference between the formal conditions of seeing a play and those of seeing a movie. In the theatre, "space is static, that is, the space represented on the stage, as well as the spatial relation of the beholder to the spectacle, is unalterably fixed," while in the cinema, "the spectator occupies a fixed seat, but / 104 only physically, not as the subject of an aesthetic experience." In the theatre, the spectator cannot change his angle of vision, In the cinema, the spectator is "aesthetically . . . in perma- net motion as his eye identifies with the lens of the camera, which permanently shifts in distance and direction." True enough. But the observation does not warrant a radical dissociation of theatre and film. Like many critics, Panofsky has a "literary 99 conception of the theatre. In contrast to theatre, conceived of as basically dramatized literature (texts, words), stands cinema, which he assumes to be primarily "a visual experience." This means defining cinema by those means perfected in the period of silent films. But many of the most interesting movies today could hardly be described adequately as images with sound added. And the most lively work in the threatre is being done by people who envisage theatre as more than, or different from, "plays" from Aeschylus to Tennessee Williams. Given his view, Panofsky is as eager to hold the line against the infiltration of theatre by cinema as the other way around, In the theatre, unlike movies, "the setting of the stage cannot change during one act (except for such incidentals as rising moons or gathering clouds and such illegitimate reborrowings from film as turning wings or gliding backdrops). Not only does Panofsky assume that theatre means plays, but by the aesthetic standard he tacitly proposes, the model play would approach the condition of No Exit, and the ideal set would be either a realistic living room or a blank stage. No less arbitrary is his complementary view of what is illegitimate in film: all elements not demonstrably subordinate to the image, more precisely, the moving image. Thus Panofsky asserts: "Wher- ever a poetic emotion, a musical outburst, or a literary conceit (even, I am grieved to say, some of the wisecracks of Groucho Marx) entirely loses contact with visible movement, they strike the sensitive spectator as, literally, out of place. What then of the films of Bresson and Godard, with their allusive, thought- ful texts and their characteristic refusal to be primarily a visual Theatre and Film 1 105 experience? How could one explain the extraordinary rightness of Oz's relatively immobilized camera? Part of Panofsky's dogmatism in decrying the theatrical taint in movies can be explained by recalling that the first version of his essay appeared in 1934 and undoubtedly reflects the recent experience of seeing a great many bad movies. Compared with the level that film reached in the late 1920's, it is undeniable that the average quality of films declined sharply in the early sound period. Although a number of fine, audacious films were made during the very first years of sound, the general decline had become clear by 1933 or 1934. The sheer dullness of most films of this period can't be explained simply as a regression to theatre. Still, it's a fact that film-makers in the 1930's did turn much more frequently to plays than they had in the preceding decade--filming stage successes such as Outward Bound, Rain, Dinner at Eight, Blithe Spirit, Faisons un Rêve, Twen- tieth Century, Boudu Sauvé des Eaux, the Pagnol trilogy, She Done Him Wrong, Der Dreigroschen Oper, Anna Christie, Holiday, Animal Crackers, The Petrified Forest, and many, many more. Most of these films are negligible as art; a few are first-rate. ( The same can be said of the plays, though there is scant correlation between the merits of the movies and of the stage "originals.") However, their virtues and faults cannot be sorted out into a cinematic versus a theatrical element. Usu- ally, the success of movie versions of plays is measured by the extent to which the script rearranges and displaces the action and deals less than respectfully with the spoken text-as do certain English films of plays by Wilde and Shaw, the Olivier Shakespeare films (at least Henry V), and Sjöberg's Miss Julie. But the basie disapproval of films which betray their origins in plays remains. (A recent example; the outrage and hostility which greeted Dreyer's masterly Gertrud, because of its blatant fidelity to the 1904 Danish play on which it is based, with characters conversing at length and quite formally, with little camera moyement and most scenes filmed in medium shot.) / 106 My own view is that films with complex or formal dialogue, films in which the camera is static or in which the action stays indoors, are not necessarily theatrical-whether derived from plays or not. Per contra, it is no more part of the putative "essence". » of movies that the camera must rove over a large physical area than it is that the sound element in a film must always be subordinate to the visual. Though most of the action of Kurosawa's The Lower Depths, a fairly faithful transcrip- tion of Gorky's play, is confined to one large room, this film is just as cinematic as the same director's Throne of Blood, a very free and laconic adaption of Macbeth. The claustro- phobic intensity of Melville's Les Enfants Terribles is as pecu- liar to the movies as the kinetic élan of Ford's The Searchers or the opening train journey in Renoir's La Bête Humaine. A film does become theatrical in an invidious sense when the narration is coyly self-conscious. Compare Autant-Lara's Occupe-toi d'Amélie, a brilliant cinematic use of the conven- tions and materials of boulevard theatre, with Ophuls' clumsy use of similar conventions and materials in La Ronde. In his book Film and Theatre (1936), Allardyce Nicoll argues that the difference between the two arts, both forms of dramaturgy, is that they use different kinds of characters. "Practically all effectively drawn stage characters are types [while] in the cinema we demand individualization •.. and impute greater power of independent life to the figures on the 2) screen. (Panofsky, by the way, makes exactly the same con- trast but in reverse: that the nature of films, unlike that of plays, requires flat or stock characters.) Nicoll's thesis is not as arbitrary as it may at first appear. A little-remarked fact about movies is that the moments that are plastically and emotionally most successful, and the most effective elements of characterization, often consist precisely of "irrelevant" or unfunctional details. (One random example: the ping-pong ball the schoolmaster toys with in Ivory's Theatre and Film / 107 Shakespeare Wallah.) Movies thrive on the narrative equiva- lent of a technique familiar from painting and photography: off-centering. Hence, the pleasing disunity or fragmentariness of the characters of many of the greatest films, which is probably what Nicoll means by "individualization." In con- trast, linear coherence of detail (the gun on the wall in the first act that must go off by the end of the third) is the rule in Occidental narrative theatre, and gives rise to the impression of the unity of the characters ( a unity that may be equivalent to the construction of a' "type"). But, even with these adjustments, Nicoll's thesis doesn't work so far as it rests on the idea that "when we go to the theatre, we expect theatre and nothing else." For what is this theatre-and-nothing-else if not the old notion of artifice? (As if art were ever anything else, some arts being artificial but others not.) According to Nicoll, when we sit in a theatre "in every way the 'falsity' of a theatrical production is borne in upon us, so that we are prepared to demand nothing save a theatrical truth." Quite a different situation obtains in the cinema, Nicoll holds. Every member of the movie audience, no matter how sophisticated, is on essentially the same level; we all believe that the camera cannot lie. As the film actor and his role are identical, the image cannot be dissociated from what is imaged. We experience what cinema gives us as the truth of life. But couldn't theatre dissolve the distinction between the truth of artifice and the truth of life? Isn't that just what theatre as ritual seeks to do? Isn't that the aim of theatre conceived as an exchange with an audience?-something that films can never be. Panofsky may be obtuse when he decries the theatrical taint in movies, but he is sound when he points out that, histori- cally, theatre is only one of the arts feeding into cinema. As he remarks, it is apt that films came to be known popularly as moving pictures rather than as "photoplays" Or "screen plays." 1 108 Cinema derives less from the theatre, from a performance art, an art that already moves, than it does from forms of art which were stationary. Nineteenth-century historical paintings, senti- mental postcards, the museum of wax figures à la Madame Tussaud, and comic strips are the sources Panofsky cites. Another model, which he surprisingly fails to mention, is the early narrative uses of still photography-like the family photo album. The stylistics of description and scene-building de- eloped by certain nineteenth-century novelists, as Eisenstein pointed out in his brilliant essay on Dickens, supplied still another prototype for cinema. Movies are images (usually photographs) that move, to be sure. But the distinctive cinematic unit is not the image but the principle of connection between the images: the relation of a "shot" to the one that preceded it and the one that comes after. There is no peculiarly "cinematic" " as opposed to "theatrical" mode of linking images. If an irreducible distinction between theatre and cinema does exist, it may be this. Theatre is confined to a logical or continuous use of space. Cinema (through editing, that is, through the change of shot-which is the basic unit of film construction) has access to an alogical or discontinuous use of space. In the theatre, actors are either in the stage space or "off." When "on, they are always visible or visualizable in con- tiguity with each other. In the cinema, no such relation is necessarily visible or even visualizable. (Example: the last shot of Paradjanov's Shadows of Our Forgotten Ancestors.) Some of the films considered objectionably theatrical are those which seem to emphasize spatial continuities, like Hitchcock's virtuoso Rope or the daringly anachronistic Gertrud. But closer analysis of both these films would show how complex their treatment of space is. The long takes increasingly favored in sound films are, in themselves, neither more nor less cine- matic than the short takes characteristic of silents. Theatre and Film / 109 Thus, cinematic virtue does not reside in the fluidity of the movement of the camera or in the mere frequency of the change of shot. It consists in the arrangement of screen images and (now) of sounds. Méliès, for example, though he didn't go beyond the static positioning of his camera, had a very striking conception of how to link screen images. He grasped that editing offered an equivalent to the magician's sleight of hand-thereby establishing that one of the distinctive aspects of film (unlike theatre) is that anything can happen, that there is nothing that cannot be represented convincingly. Through editing, Méliès presents discontinuities of physical substance and behavior. In his films, the discontinuities are, so to speak, practical, functional; they accomplish a transformation of ordi- nary reality. But the continuous reinvention of space (as well as the option of temporal indeterminacy) peculiar to film narra- tion does not pertain only to the cinema's ability to fabricate "visions, 29 to show the viewer a radically altered world. The most "realistic" use of the motion-picture camera also involves a discontinuous account of space, insofar as all film narration has a "syntax, composed of the rhythm of associations and disjunctions. (As Cocteau has written, "My primary concern in a film is to prevent the images from flowing, to oppose them to each other, to anchor them and join them without destroying their relief." But such a conception of film syntax need hardly entail, as Cocteau thinks, rejecting movies as "mere enter- tainment instead of a vehicle for thought." ) In marking the boundary between theatre and film, the issue of the continuity of space seems to me more funda- mental than the obvious contrast between theatre as an orga- nization of movement in three-dimensional space (like dance) and cinema as an organization of plane space (like painting). The theatre's capacities for manipulating space and time are simply much cruder and more labored than those of film. Theatre cannot equal the cinema's facilities for the strictly controlled repetition of images, for the duplication or match- ing of word and image, and for the juxtaposition and over- / 110 lapping of images. (With advanced lighting techniques and an adept use of scrim, one can now "dissolve in" or "dissolve out" on the stage. But no technique could provide an equivalent on the stage of the "lap dissolve.") Sometimes the division between theatre and film is located as the difference between the play and the film script. Theatre has been described as a mediated art, presumably because it usually consists of a preexistent play mediated by a particular performance which offers one of many possible interpretations of the play. Film, in contrast, is regarded as unmediated-be- cause of its larger-than-life scale and more unrefusable impact on the eye, and because (in Panofsky's words) "the medium of the movies is physical reality as such" and the characters in a movie "have no aesthetic existence outside the actors. » But there is an equally valid sense which shows movies to be the mediated art and theatre the unmediated one. We see what happens on the stage with our own eyes. We see on the screen what the camera sees. In the cinema, narration proceeds by ellipsis (the " cut" Or change of shot); the camera eye is a unified point of view that continually displaces itself. But the change of shot can provoke questions, the simplest of which is: from whose point of view is the shot seen? And the ambiguity of point of view latent in all cinematic narration has no equivalent in the theatre. In- deed, one should not underestimate the aesthetically posi- tive role of disorientation in the cinema. Examples: Busby Berkeley dollying back from an ordinary-looking stage already established as some thirty feet deep to disclose a stage area three hundred feet square; Resnais panning from character X's point of view a full 360 degrees to come to rest upon X's face. Much also may be made of the fact that, in its concrete existence, cinema is an object (a product, even while theatre results in a performance. Is this so important? In a way, no. Art in all its forms, whether objects (like films or painting) or performances (like music or theatre), is first a mental act, a Theatre and Film / 111 fact of consciousness. The object aspect of film and the perfor- mance aspect of theatre are only means-means to the experi- ence which is not only "of" but "through" the film and the theatre event. Each subject of an aesthetic experience shapes it to his own measure. With respect to any single experience, it hardly matters that a film is identical from one projection of it to another while theatre performances are highly mutable, The difference between object art and performance art underlies Panofsky's observation that "the screenplay, in con- trast to the theatre play, has no aesthetic existence indepen- dent of its performance; so that characters in movies are the stars who enact them. It is because each film is an object, a totality that is set, that movie roles are identical with the actors' performances; while in the theatre (in the Occi- dent, an artistic totality that is generally additive rather than organic) only the written play is "fixed, 99 ' an object (literature) and therefore existing apart from any staging of it. But these qualities of theatre and film are not, as Panofsky apparently thought, unalterable. Just as movies needn't neces- sarily be designed to be shown at all in theatre situations (they can be intended for more continuous and casual viewing: in the living room, in the bedroom, or on public surfaces like the façades of buildings), so a movie may be altered from one projection to the next. Harry Smith, when he runs off his films, makes each projection an unrepeatable performance. And, again, theatre is not just about preexisting plays which get produced over and over, well or badly. In Happenings, street or guerilla theatre, and certain other recent theatre events, the plays" are identical with their productions in precisely the same sense as the screenplay is identical with the unique film made from it. Despite these developments, however, a large difference still remains. Because films are objects, they are totally manipu- lable, totally calculable. Films resemble books, another porta- ble art-object; making a film, like writing a book, means con- structing an inanimate thing, every element of which is de- 112 terminate. Indeed, this determinacy has or can have a quasi. mathematical form in films, as it does in music. (A shot lasts a certain number of seconds, "matching" two shots requires a change of angle of so many degrees.) Given the total deter. minacy of the result on celluloid (whatever the extent of the director's conscious intervention), it was inevitable that some film directors would want to devise schemas to make their intentions more exact. Thus, it was neither perverse nor primi- tive of Busby Berkeley to have used only one camera to shoot the whole of each of his mammoth dance numbers. Every "set- up 99 was designed to be shot from only one, exactly calculated angle. Working on a far more self-conscious level of artistry than Busby Berkeley, Bresson has declared that, for him, the director's task consists in finding the single way of doing each shot that is correct. No image is justified in itself, according to Bresson, but rather in the exactly specifiable relation it bears to the chronologically adjacent images-which relation consti- tutes its '"meaning. But theatre allows only the loosest approximation to this sort of formal concern and to this degree of aesthetic re- sponsibility on the part of the director, which is why French critics justly speak of the director of a film as its "author Because they are performances, events that are always "live, what takes place on a theatre stage is not subject to an equiva- lent degree of control and cannot admit a comparably exact integration of effects. It would be foolish to conclude that superior films are those resulting from the greatest amount of conscious planning on the part of the director or those which objectify a complex plan (though the director may not have been aware of it, and proceeded in what seemed to him an intuitive or instinctive way). Plans may be faulty or ill-conceived or sterile. More important, the cinema admits of a number of quite different kinds of sensibility. One gives rise to the kind of formalized art to which cinema (unlike theatre) is naturally adapted. An- other has produced an impressive body of "improvised" Theatre and Film / 113 cinema. (This should be distinguished from the work of some film-makers, notably Godard, who have become fascinated with the 'look" of improvised, documentary cinema, used for formalistic ends.) Nevertheless, it seems indisputable that cinema, not only potentially but by its nature, is a more rigorous art than theatre. This capacity for formal rigor, combined with the ac- cessibility of mass audiences, has given cinema an unques- tioned prestige and attractiveness as an art form. Despite the extreme emotional resources of "pure theatre" demonstrated by Tulian Beck and Judith Malina's Living Theatre and Jerzy Grotowski's Theatre Laboratory, theatre as an art form gives the general impression of having a problematic future. More than a failure of nerve must account for the fact that theatre, this seasoned art, occupied since antiquity with all sorts of local offices-enacting sacred rites, reinforcing com- munal loyalty, guiding morals, provoking the therapeutic dis- charge of violent emotions, conferring social status, giving practical instruction, affording entertainment, dignifying cele- brations, subverting established authority-is now on the de- tensive before movies, this brash art with its huge, amorphous, passive audience. But the fact is undeniable. Meanwhile, movies continue to maintain their astonishing pace of formal articulation. (Take the commercial cinema of Europe, Japan, and the United States since 1960, and consider what the au- diences of these films in less than a decade have become habituated to in the way of increasingly elliptical storytelling and visualization.) But note: this youngest of the arts is also the most heavily burdened with memory. Cinema is a time machine. Movies preserve the past, while theatres-no matter how devoted to the classics, to old plays-can only "modernize. Movies resur- rect the beautiful dead; present, intact, vanished or ruined environments; embody without irony styles and fashions that seem funny today; solemnly ponder irrelevant or naive prob- / 114 lems. The historical particularity of the reality registered on celluloid is so vivid that practically all films older than four or five years are saturated with pathos. (The pathos I am describing is not simply that of old photographs, for it overtakes animated cartoons and drawn, abstract films as well as ordinary movies.) Films age (being objects) as no theatre event does (being always new). There is no pathos of mortal- ity in theatre's "reality " as such, nothing in our response to a good performance of a Mayakovsky play comparable to the aesthetic role of the emotion of nostalgia when we see in 1966 a film by Pudovkin. Also worth noting: compared with the theatre, innovations in cinema seem to be assimilated more efficiently, seem alto- gether more sharable-among other reasons, because new films are quickly and widely circulated. And, partly because virtually the entire body of accomplishment in film can be consulted in the present (in film libraries, of which the most celebrated is the Cinemathèque Française), most film-makers are more knowledgeable about the entire history of their art than most theatre directors are about even the very recent past of theirs. The key word in most discussions of cinema is "possibility." There is a merely classifying use of the word, as in Panofsky's engaging judgment that "within their self-imposed limitations the early Disney films . . represent, as it were, a chemically pure distillation of cinematic possibilities." But behind this relatively neutral usage lurks a more polemical sense of cinema's possibilities, in which what is regularly intimated is the obsolescence of theatre and its supersession by films. Thus, Panofsky describes the mediation of the camera eye as opening "up a world of possibility of which the stage can never dream." Already in 1924, Artaud declared that motion pictures had made the theatre obsolete. Movies possess a sort of virtual power which probes into the mind and uncovers undreamt-of possibilities . . . When this art's exhiliration has Theatre and Film / 115 been blended in the right proportions with the psychic in- gredient it commands, it will leave the theatre far behind and we will relegate the latter to the attic of our memories." (When sound came in, though, Artaud became disenchanted with films and returned to theatre.) Meyerhold, facing the challenge head on, thought the only hope for theatre lay in a wholesale emulation of the cinema. "Let us cinematify' the theatre," he urged, meaning that the staging of plays should be "industrialized, 99 theatres must accommodate audiences in the tens of thousands rather than in the hundreds. Meyerhold also seemed to find some relief in the idea that the coming of sound signaled the down- fall of movies. Believing that the international appeal of films depended entirely on the fact that screen actors (unlike theatre actors) didn't have to speak any particular language, he was unable to imagine in 1930 that technology (dubbing, subtitling) could solve the problem. Is cinema the successor, the rival, or the revivifyer of the theatre? Sociologically, it is certainly the rival-one of many. Whether it is theatre's successor depends partly on how people understand and use the decline of theatre as an art form. One can't be sure that theatre is not in a state of irreversible de- cline, spurts of local vitality notwithstanding. And art forms have been abandoned (though not necessarily because they become "obsolete") But why should theatre be rendered obsolete by movies? Predictions of obsolescence amount to declaring that a some- thing has one particular task (which another something may do as well or better). But has theatre one particular task or aptitude? One which cinema is better able to performi Those who predict the demise of the theatre, assuming that cinema has engulfed its function, tend to impute a relation between films and theatre reminiscent of what was once said 1 116 about photography and painting. If the painter's job really had been no more than fabricating likenesses, then the invention of the camera might indeed have made painting obsolete. But painting is hardly just "pictures," any more than cinema is just theatre democratized and made available to the masses (be- cause it can be reproduced and distributed in portable stan- dardized units). In the naive tale of photography and painting, painting was reprieved when it claimed a new task: abstraction. As the superior realism of photography was supposed to have liber- ated painting, allowing it to go abstract, cinema's superior power to represent (not merely to stimulate) the imagination may appear to have similarly emboldened the theatre, inviting the gradual obliteration of the conventional "plot This was how it was supposed to be, but not how it in fact turned out. Actually, painting and photography evidence parallel development rather than a rivalry or a supersession. And, at an uneven rate, so do theatre and film. The possibili- ties for theatre that lie in going beyond psychological realism, thereby achieving greater abstractness, are equally germane to the future of narrative films. Conversely, the idea of movies as witness to real life, testimony rather than invention or artifice, the treatment of collective historical situations rather than the depiction of imaginary personal "dramas; seems equally rele- vant to theatre. Alongside documentary films and their sophis- ticated heir, cinéma-vérité, one can place the new documen- tary theatre, the so-called "theatre of fact, 99 exemplified in plays by Hochhuth, in Weiss' The Investigation, in Peter Brook's recent projects for a production called US with the Royal Skakespeare company in London. Despite Panofsky's strictures, there seems no reason for theatre and film not to exchange with each other, as they have been doing right along. The influence of the theatre upon films in the early years of Theatre and Film I 117 cinema history is well known. According to Kracauer, the distinctive lighting of Dr. Caligari (and of many German films of the early 1920's) can be traced to an experiment with light- ing that Max Reinhardt made shortly before on the stage in his production of Sorge's The Beggar. Even in this period, how- ever, the impact was reciprocal. The accomplishments of the "expressionist film" were immediately absorbed by the expres- sionist theatre. Stimulated by the cinematic technique of the "iris-in," stage lighting took to singling out a lone player or some segment of the scene, masking out the rest of the stage. Rotating sets tried to approximate the instantaneous displace- ment of the camera eye. (More recently, reports have come of ingenious lighting techniques used by the Gorky Theatre in Leningrad, directed since 1956 by Georgy Tovstonogov, which allow for incredibly rapid scene changes taking place behind a horizontal curtain of light.) Today traffic seems, with few exceptions, entirely one way: film to theatre. Particularly in France and in Central and Eastern Europe, the staging of many plays is inspired by the movies. The aim of adapting neo-cinematic devices for the stage (I exclude the outright use of films within the theatre production) seems mainly to tighten up the theatrical experi- ence, to approximate the cinema's absolute control of the fow and location of the audience's attention. But the conception can be even more directly cinematic. An example is Josef Syoboda's production of The Insect Play by the Capek broth- ers at the Czech National Theatre in Prague (recently seen in London), which frankly attempted to install a mediated vision upon the stage, equivalent to the discontinuous intensifications of the camera eye. According to a London critic's account, "the set consisted of two huge, faceted mirrors slung at an angle to the stage, so that they reflect whatever happens there de- tracted as if through a decanter stopper or the colossally magnified eye of a fly. Any figure placed at the base of their angle becomes multiplied from floor to proscenium; further / 118 out, and you find yourself viewing it not only face to face but from overhead, the vantage point of a camera slung to a bird or a helicopter." Marinetti was perhaps the first to propose the use of films as one element in a theatre experience. Writing between 1910 and 1914, he envisaged the theatre as a final synthesis of all the arts; and as such it had to draw in the newest art form, movies. No doubt the cinema also recommended itself for in- clusion because of the priority Marinetti gave to existing forms of popular entertainment, such as the variety theatre and the café chantant. (He called his projected total art form "the Futurist Variety Theatre. .") And at that time scarcely anyone considered cinema anything but a vulgar art. After World War I, similar ideas appear frequently. In the total-theatre projects of the Bauhaus group in the 1920's (Gropius, Piscator, etc.) film had an important place. Meyer- hold insisted on its use in the theatre, describing his program as fulfilling Wagner's once "wholly utopian" proposals to "'use all means available from the other arts.' ° Alban Berg specified that a silent film of the developing story was to be projected in the middle of Act 2 of his opera Lulu. By now, the employ- ment of film in theatre has a fairly long history which includes the "living newspaper" " of the 1930's, "epic theatre, ' and Hap- penings. This year marked the introduction of a film sequence into Broadway-level theatre. In two successful musicals, Lon- don's Come Spy with Me and New York's Superman, both parodic in tone, the action is interrupted to lower a screen and run off a movie showing the pop-art hero's exploits. But thus far the use of film within live theatre events has tended to be stereotyped. Film is often employed as docu- ment, supportive of or redundant to the live stage events (as in Brecht's productions in East Berlin). Its other principal use is as hallucinant; recent examples are Bob Whitman's Happen- ings, and a new kind of nightclub situation, the mixed-media discothèque ( Andy Warhol's The Plastic Inevitable, Murray the Theatre and Film / 119 K's World). From the point of view of theatre, the interpola- tion of film into the theatre experience may be enlarging. But in terms of what cinema is capable of, it seems a reductive, monotonous use of film. What Panofsky perhaps could not have realized when he wrote his essay is that much more than the "nature" of a specific art "medium" is at stake. The relation between film and theatre involves not simply a static definition of the two arts, but sensitivity to the possible course of their radical- ization. Every interesting aesthetic tendency now is a species of radicalism. The question each artist must ask is: What is my radicalism, the one dictated by my gifts and temperament? This doesn't mean all contemporary artists believe that art progresses. A radical position isn't necessarily a forward-look- ing position. Consider the two principal radical positions in the arts today. One recommends the breaking down of distinctions between genres; the arts would eventuate in one art, consist- ing of many different kinds of behavior going on at the same time, a vast behavioral magma or synesthesia. The other posi- ton recommends the maintaining and clarifying of barriers between the arts, by the intensification of what each art distinctively is; painting must use only those means which pertain to painting, music only those which are musical, novels those which pertain to the novel and to no other literary torm, etc. The two positions are, in a sense, irreconcilable-except that both are invoked to support the perennial modern quest for the definitive art form. An art may be proposed as definitive because it is consid- ered the most rigorous or most fundamental. For these rea- sons, Schopenhauer suggested and Pater asserted that all art aspires to the condition of music. More recently, the thesis that all the arts are leading toward one art has been advanced by 1 120 enthusiasts of the cinema. The candidacy of film is founded on its being both so exact and, potentially, so complex a combina- tion of music, literature, and the image. Or, an art may be proposed as definitive because it is held to be most inclusive. This is the basis of the destiny for theatre held out by Wagner, Marinetti, Artaud, Cage-all of whom envisage theatre as a total art, potentially conscripting all the arts into its service. And as the ideas of synesthesia continue to proliferate among painters, sculptors, architects, and com- posers, theatre remains the favored candidate for the role of summative art. In this conception, theatre's role must dis- parage the claims of cinema. Partisans of theatre would argue that while music, painting, dance, cinema, and utterance can all converge on a "stage, 29 the film object can only become bigger (multiple screens, 360 degree projection, etc.) or longer in duration or internally more articulated and complex. Theatre can be anything, everything; in the end, films can only be more of what they specifically (that is to say, cinemati- cally) are. Underlying the more grandiose apocalyptic expectations for both arts is a common animus. In 1923 Béla Bálacz, anticipat- ing in great detail the thesis of Marshall McLuhan, described movies as the herald of a new "visual culture" which will give us back our bodies, and particularly our faces, which have been rendered illegible, soulless, unexpressive by the centuries- old ascendancy ot "print." An animus against literature, against the printing press and its "culture of concepts, 99 also informs most interesting thinking about the theatre in our time. No definition or characterization of theatre and cinema can be taken for granted-not even the apparently self-evident observation that both cinema and theatre are temporal arts. In theatre and cinema, like music (and unlike painting), everything is not present all at once. But there are significant Theatre and Film / 121 developments today pointing up the temporal aspect of these forms. The allure of mixed-media forms in theatre suggests not only a more elongated and more complex "drama" " (like Wagnerian opera) but also a more compact theatre experi- ence which approaches the condition of painting. This pros- pect of compactness is broached by Marinetti; he calls it simultaneity, a leading notion of Futurist aesthetics. As the final synthesis of all the arts, theatre "would use the new twentieth century devices of electricity and the cinema; this would enable plays to be extremely short, since all these technical means would enable the theatrical synthesis to be achieved in the shortest possible space of time, as all the ele- ments could be presented simultaneously." The source of the idea of art as an act of violence per- vading cinema and theatre is the aesthetics of Futurism and of Surrealism; its principal texts are, for theatre, the writ- ings of Artaud and, for cinema, two films of Luis Buñuel, L'Age d'Or and Un Chien Andalou. (More recent examples: the early plays of Ionesco, at least as conceived; the "cinema of cruelty' of Hitchcock, Clouzot, Franju, Robert Aldrich, Polan- ski; work by the Living Theatre; some of the neo-cinematic light shows in experimental theatres and discothèques; the sound of late Cage and LaMonte Young.) The relation of art to an audience understood to be passive, inert, surfeited, can only be assault. Art becomes identical with aggression. However understandable and valuable this theory of art as an assault on the audience is today (like the complementary notion of art as ritual), one must continue to question it, particularly in the theatre. For it can become as much a con- Vention as anything else and end, like all theatrical conven- tons, by reinforcing rather than challenging the deadness of the audience. (As Wagner's ideology of a total theatre played its role in confirming the philistinism of German culture.) Moreover, the depth of the assault must be assessed hon- estly. In the theatre, this means not "diluting" Artaud. Artaud's 122 writings express the demand for a totally open (therefore flayed, self-cruel) consciousness of which theatre would be one adjunct or instrument. No work in the theatre has yet amounted to this. Thus, Peter Brook has astutely and forth- rightly disclaimed that his company's work in the "Theatre of Cruelty; which culminated in his celebrated production of Marat/Sade, is genuinely Artaudian. It is Artaudian, he says, in a trivial sense only. (Trivial from Artaud's point of view, not from ours.) For some time, all useful ideas in art have been extremely sophisticated. Take, for example, the idea that everything is what it is and not another thing: a painting is a painting; sculpture is sculpture; a poem is a poem, not prose. Or the complementary idea: a painting can be "literary 99 Or sculptural, a poem can be prose, theatre can emulate and incorporate cinema, cinema can be theatrical. We need a new idea. It will probably be a very simple one. Will we be able to recognize it? (1966) Gmail kac attac Sontag styles the rest kac attac Sun, Sep 3, 2023 at 4:47 PM To: Stefan Kac Bergman's Persona / 129 cottage.® But neither can we be absolutely sure that this, or something like it, isn't taking place. After all, we do see it happening. And it's the nature of cinema to confer on all events, without indications to the contrary, an equivalent degree of reality: everything shown on the screen is there, present.) The difficulty of Persona stems from the fact that Bergman withholds the kind of clear signals for sorting out tantasies from reality offered, for example, by Buñuel in Belle de Jour. Bunuel puts in the clues; he wants the viewer to be able to decipher his film. The insufficiency of the clues Bergman has planted must be taken to indicate that he intends the film to remain partly encoded. The viewer can only move toward, but never achieve, certainty about the action. However, so far as the distinction between fantasy and reality is of any use in understanding Persona, I should argue that much more than the critics have allowed of what happens in and around the beach cottage is most plausibly understood as Alma's fantasy. One prime bit of evidence for this thesis is a sequence occurring soon after the two women arrive at the seaside. It's the sequence in which, after we have seen Elizabeth enter Alma's room and stand beside her and stroke her hair, we see Alma, pale, troubled, asking Elizabeth the next morning, "Did you come to my room last night?" and Elizabeth, slightly quizzical, anxious, shaking her head no. Now, there seems no reason to doubt Elizabeth's answer. The viewer isn't given any evidence of a malevolent plan on Elizabeth's part to under- mine Alma's confidence in her own sanity; nor any evidence for doubting Elizabeth's memory or sanity in the ordinary • Which is what most critics have done with this scene: assume that it's a real event and insert it into the "action" " of the film. Richard Corliss disposes of the matter, without a touch of uncertainty, thus: "When Elizabeth's blind husband visits, he mistakes Alma for his wife [and] they make love. being blind is that the man we see wears dark glasses-plus * But the only evidence for the husband the critic's wish to find a "realistic" goings-on. explanation for such implausible I 130 sense. But if that is the case, two important points have been established early in the film. One is that Alma is hallucinating -and, presumably, will continue doing so. The other is that hallucinations or visions will appear on the screen with the same rhythms, the same look of objective reality as something "real." " (However, some clues, too complex to describe here, are given in the lighting of certain scenes.) And once these points are granted, it seems highly plausible to take at least the scene with Elizabeth's husband as Alma's fantasy, as well as several scenes which depict a charged, trancelike physical contact between the two women. But sorting out what is fantasy from what is real in Persona (i.e., what Alma imagines from what may be taken as really happening) is a minor achievement. And it quickly becomes a misleading one, unless subsumed under the larger issue of the form of exposition or narration employed by the film. As I have already suggested, Persona is constructed according to a form that resists being reduced to a story-say, the story about the relation (however ambiguous and abstract) between two women named Elizabeth and Alma, a patient and a nurse, a star and an ingenue, alma (soul) and persona (mask). Such reduction to a story means, in the end, a reduction of Berg- man's film to the single dimension of psychology. Not that the psychological dimension isn't there. It is. But to understand Persona, the viewer must go beyond the psychological point of view. This seems mandatory because Bergman allows the audi- ence to interpret Elizabeth's mute condition in several differ- ent ways-as involuntary mental breakdown and as voluntary moral decision leading either toward a self-purification or toward suicide. But whatever the background of her condi- tion, Bergman wishes to involve the viewer much more in the sheer fact of it than in its causes. In Persona, muteness is first of all a fact with a certain psychic and moral weight, a fact which initiates its own kind of psychic and moral causality upon an "other." Bergman's Persona / 131 I am inclined to impute a privileged status to the speech made by the psychiatrist to Elizabeth before she departs with Alma to the beach cottage. The psychiatrist tells the silent, stony-faced Elizabeth that she has understood her case. She has grasped that Elizabeth wants to be sincere, not to play a role, not to lie; to make the inner and the outer come together. And that, having rejected suicide as a solution, she has decided to be mute. The psychiatrist concludes by advising Elizabeth to bide her time and live her experience through, predicting that eventually the actress will renounce her muteness and re- turn to the world • But even if one treats this speech as setting forth a privileged view, it would be a mistake to take it as the key to Persona; or even to assume that the psychiatrist's thesis wholly explains Elizabeth's condition. (The doctor could be wrong, or, at the least, be simplifying the matter.) By placing this speech so early in the film (even earlier, a superficial account of Elizabeth's symptoms is ad- dressed to Alma when the doctor Arst assigns her to the case), and by never referring explicitly to this "explanation" again, Bergman has, in effect, both taken account of psychology and dispensed with it. Without ruling out psychological explana- tion, he consigns to a relatively minor place any consideration of the role the actress's motives have in the action. Persona takes a position beyond psychology-as it does, in an analogous sense, beyond eroticism, It certainly contains the materials of an erotic subject, such as the "visit" " of Elizabeth's husband that ends with his going to bed with Alma while Elizabeth looks on. There is, above all, the connection between the two women themselves which, in its feverish proximity, its caresses, its sheer passionateness (avowed by Alma in word, gesture, and fantasy) could hardly fail, it would seem, to suggest a powerful, if largely inhibited, sexual involvement. But, in fact, what might be sexual in feeling is largely trans- posed into something beyond sexuality, beyond eroticism even. The most purely sexual episode in the film is the scene in which Alma, sitting across the room from Elizabeth, tells the / 132 story of an impromptu beach orgy; Alma speaks, transfixed reliving the memory and at the same time consciously deliver. ing up this shameful secret to Elizabeth as her greatest gift of love. Entirely through discourse and without any resort to images (through a flashback), a violent sexual atmosphere is generated. But this sexuality has nothing to do with the present" of the film, and the relationship between the two women. In this respect, Persona makes a remarkable modifica- tion of the structure of The Silence. In the earlier film, the love- hate relationship between the two sisters projected an un- mistakable sexual energy-particularly the feelings of the older sister (Ingrid Thulin). In Persona, Bergman has achieved a more interesting situation by delicately excising or transcending the possible sexual implications of the tie be- tween the two women. It is a remarkable feat of moral and psychological poise. While maintaining the indeterminacy of the situation (from a psychological point of view), Bergman does not give the impression of evading the issue, and presents nothing that is psychologically improbable. The advantages of keeping the psychological aspects of Persona indeterminate (while internally credible) are that Bergman can do many other things besides tell a story. Instead of a full-blown story, he presents something that is, in one sense, cruder and, in another, more abstract: a body of material, a subject. The function of the subject or material may be as much its opacity, its multiplicity, as the ease with which it yields itself to being incarnated in a determinate action or plot. In a work constituted along these principles, the action would appear intermittent, porous, shot through intimations of absence, of what could not be univocally said. This doesn't mean that the narration has forfeited "sense. .» But it does mean that sense isn't necessarily tied to a determinate plot. Alterna- tively, there is the possibility of an extended narration com- posed of events that are not (wholly) explicated but are, Bergman's Persona 1 133 nevertheless, possible and may even have taken place. The forward movement of such a narrative might be measured by reciprocal relations between its parts-e.g., displacements- rather than by ordinary realistic (mainly psychological) caus- ality. There might exist what could be called a dormant plot. Still, critics have better things to do than ferret out the story line as if the author had-through mere clumsiness or error or frivolity or lack of craft-concealed it. In such narratives, it is a question not of a plot that has been mislaid but of one that has been (at least in part) annulled. That intention, whether conscious on the artist's part or merely implicit in the work, should be taken at face value and respected. Take the matter of information. One tactic upheld by tradi- tional narrative is to give "full" information (by which I mean all that is needed, according to the standard of relevance set up in the "world' 22 proposed by the narrative), so that the ending of the viewing or reading experience coincides, ideally, with full satisfaction of one's desire to know, to understand what happened and why. ( This is, of course, a highly manipu- lated quest for knowledge. The business of the artist is to convince his audience that what they haven't learned at the end they can't know, or shouldn't care about knowing.) In contrast, one of the salient features of new narratives is a deliberate, calculated frustration of the desire to know. Did anything happen last year at Marienbad? What did become of the girl in L'Avventura? Where is Alma going when she boards a bus alone toward the close of Personal Once it is conceived that the desire to know may be (in part) systematically thwarted, the old expectations about plotting no longer hold. Such films (or comparable works of prose fiction) can't be expected to supply many of the familiar satisfactions of traditional narrations, such as being "dra- matic." At first it may seem that a plot still remains, only it's being related at an oblique, uncomfortable angle, where vision is obscured. Actually, the plot isn't there at all in the old sense; the point of these new works is not to tantalize but to involve 1 134 the audience more directly in other matters, for instance, in the very processes of knowing and seeing. (An eminent pre- cursor of this concept of narration is Flaubert; the persistent use of off-center detail in the descriptions in Madame Bovary is one instance of the method.) The result of the new narration, then, is a tendency to de- dramatize. Journey to Italy, for example, tells what is osten- sibly a story. But it is a story which proceeds by omissions. The audience is being haunted, as it were, by the sense of a lost or absent meaning to which even the artist himself has no access. The avowal of agnosticism on the artist's part may look like frivolity or contempt for the audience. Antonioni enraged many people by saying that he didn't know himself what happened to the missing girl in L'Avventura-whether she had, for instance, committed suicide or run away. But this attitude should be taken with the utmost seriousness. When the artist declares that he "knows" no more than the audience does, he is saying that all the meaning resides in the work itself, that there is nothing "behind" it. Such works seem to lack sense or meaning only to the extent that entrenched critical attitudes have established as a dictum for the narrative arts (cinema as well as prose literature) that meaning resides solely in this surplus of "reference outside the work-to the "real world" or to the artist's "intention." But this is, at best, an arbitrary ruling. The meaning of a narration is not identical with a paraphrase of the values associated by an ideal audi- ence with the "real-life" equivalents or sources of the plot elements, or with the attitudes projected by the artist toward these elements. Neither is meaning (whether in films, fiction, or theatre) a function of a determinate plot. Other kinds of narration are possible besides those based on a story, in which the fundamental problem is the treatment of the plot line and the construction of characters. For instance, the material can be treated as a thematic resource, one from which different (and perhaps concurrent) narrative structures are derived as variations. But inevitably, the formal mandates of such a Bergman's Persona 1 139 as she listens, the second time showing Alma as she speaks. The sequence ends spectacularly, with the close-up of a double or composite face, half Elizabeth's and half Alma's. Here Bergman is pointing up the paradoxical promise of film-namely, that it always gives the illusion of a voyeuristic access to an untampered reality, a neutral view of things as they are. What is filmed is always, in some sense, a "docu- ment." But what contemporary film-makers more and more often show is the process of seeing itself, giving grounds or evidence for several different ways of seeing the same thing, which the viewer may entertain concurrently or successively. Bergman's use of this idea in Persona is strikingly original, but the larger intention is a familiar one. In the ways that Bergman made his film self-reflexive, self-regarding, ultimately self-engorging, we should recognize not a private whim but the expression of a well-established tendency. For it is pre- cisely the energy for this sort of "formalist" concern with the nature and paradoxes of the medium itself which was un- leashed when the nineteenth-century formal structures of plot and characters (with their presumption of a much less com- plex reality than that envisaged by the contemporary con- sciousness) were demoted. What is commonly patronized as an overexquisite self-consciousness in contemporary art, lead. ing to a species of auto-cannibalism, can be seen-less pejora- tively-as the liberation of new energies of thought and sensibility. This, for me, is the promise behind the familiar thesis that locates the difference between traditional and new cinema in the altered status of the camera. In the aesthetic of traditional films, the camera tried to remain unperceived, to efface itself before the spectacle it was rendering. In contrast, what counts as new cinema can be recognized, as Pasolini has remarked, by the "felt presence of the camera." (Needless to say, new cinema doesn't mean just cinema of this last decade. To cite only two predecessors, recall Vertov's The Man with the Godard "It may be true that one has to choose between ethics and aesthetics, but it is no less true that whichever one chooses, one will always find the other at the end of the road. For the very definition of the human condition should be in the mise-en-scène itself Godard's work has been more passionately debated in recent years than that of any other contemporary film-maker. Though he has a good claim to being ranked as the greatest director, aside from Bresson, working actively in the cinema today, it's still common for intelligent people to be irritated and frus- trated by his films, even to find them unbearable. Godard's films haven't yet been elevated to the status of classics or masterpieces-as have the best of Eisenstein, Griffth, Gance, Dreyer, Lang, Pabst, Renoir, Vigo, Welles, etc.; or, to take some nearer examples, L'Avventura and Jules and Jim. That is, his films aren't yet embalmed, immortal, unequivocally ( and merely) "beautiful offend, to appear They retain their youthful power to "ugly; irresponsible, frivolous, pretentious, / 148 empty. Filmmakers and audiences are still learning from Godard's films, still quarreling with them. Meanwhile Godard (partly by turning out a new film every few months) manages to keep nimbly ahead of the inexorable thrust of cultural canonization; extending old problems and abandoning or complicating old solutions-offending veteran admirers in numbers almost equal to the new ones he acquires. His thirteenth feature, Deux ou Trois Choses que je sais d'elle (1966), is perhaps the most austere and difficult of all his films. His fourteenth feature, La Chinoise (1967), opened in Paris last summer and took the first Special Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival in September; but Godard didn't come from Paris to accept it (his first major film festival award) because he had just begun shooting his next film, Weekend, which was playing in Paris by January of this year. To date, fifteen feature films have been completed and re- leased, the first being the famous A Bout de Souffle (Breath- less) in 1959. The succeeding films, in order, are: Le Petit Soldat (1960) Une Femme est une Femme (A Woman Is a Woman) (1961) Vivre sa Vie (My Life to Live) (1962) Les Carabiners (1963) Le Mépris (Contempt) (1963) Bande à Part (Band of Outsiders) (1964) Une Femme Mariée (A Married Woman) (1964) Alphaville(1965) Pierrot le Fou (1965) Masculin Féminin (1966) Made in U.S.A. (1966) plus the last three I have already mentioned. In addition, five shorts were made between 1954 and 1958, the most interesting of these being the two from 1958, "Charlotte et son Jules" " and "Une Histoire d'Eau." There are also seven "sketches": the first, "La Paresse, ," was one of the episodes in Les Septs Pechés Capitaux (1961); the most recent three were all made in Godard / 149 1967-"Anticipation, in Le Plus Vieux Métier du Monde; a section of Far From Vietnam, the corporate film edited by Chris Marker; and an episode in the still unreleased, Italian- produced Gospel 70. Considering that Godard was born in 1930, and that he has made all his films within the commercial cinema industry, it's an astonishingly large body of work. Un- fortunately, many of the films have not been seen at all in the United States (among the major gaps, Pierrot le Fou and Deux ou Trois Choses) or have never been released for art- house distribution (like Le Petit Soldat and Les Carabiniers) or have been granted no more than a brief, token run in New York City only. Though, of course, not all the films are equally fine, these lacunae matter. Godard's work-unlike that of most film directors, whose artistic development is much less per- sonal and experimental-deserves, ultimately demands, to be seen in its entirety. One of the most modern aspects of God- ard's artistry is that each of his films derives its final value from its place in a larger enterprise, a life work. Each film is, in some sense, a fragment-which, because of the stylistic con- tinuities of Godard's work, sheds light on the others. Indeed, practically no other director, with the exception of Bresson, can match Godard's record of making only films that are unmistakably and uncompromisingly their author's. (Con- trast Godard on this score with two of his most gifted con- temporaries: Resnais, who, after making the sublime Muriel, was able to descend to La Guerre est Fine, and Truffaut, who could follow Jules and Jim with La Peau Douce-for each director, only his fourth feature.) That Godard is indisputably the most influential director of his generation surely owes much to his having demonstrated himself incapable of adul- terating his own sensibility, while still remaining manifestly unpredictable. One goes to a new film by Bresson fairly con- fident of being treated to another masterpiece. One goes to the latest Godard prepared to see something both achieved and chaotic, "work in progress" which resists easy admiration. The qualities that make Godard, unlike Bresson, a culture hero (as / 150 well as, like Bresson, one of the major artists of the age) are precisely his prodigal energies, his evident risk-taking, the quirky individualism of his mastery of a corporate, drastically commercialized art. But Godard is not merely an intelligent iconoclast. He is a deliberate "destroyer" ' of cinema-hardly the first cinema has known, but certainly the most persistent and prolific and timely. His approach to established rules of film technique like the unobtrusive cut, consistency of point of view, and clear story line is comparable to Schoenberg's repudiation of the tonal language prevailing in music around 1910 when he entered his atonal period or to the challenge of the Cubists to such hallowed rules of painting as realistic figuration and three- dimensional pictorial space. The great culture heroes of our time have shared two quali- ties: they have all been ascetics in some exemplary way, and also great destroyers. But this common profile has permitted two different, yet equally compelling attitudes toward "cul- ture" itself. Some-like Duchamp, Wittgenstein, and Cage bracket their art and thought with a disdainful attitude toward high culture and the past, or at least maintain an ironic posture of ignorance or incomprehension. Others-like Joyce, Picasso, Stravinsky, and Godard-exhibit a hypertrophy of appetite for culture (though often more avid for cultural debris than for museum-consecrated achievements); they pro- ceed by voraciously scavenging in culture, proclaiming that nothing is alien to their art. From cultural appetite on this scale comes the creation of work that is on the order of a subjective compendium: casu- ally encyclopedic, anthologizing, formally and thematically eclectic, and marked by a rapid turnover of styles and forms. Thus, one of the most striking features of Godard's work is its daring efforts at hybridization. Godard's insouciant mixtures of tonalities, themes, and narrative methods suggest something like the union of Brecht and Robbe-Grillet, Gene Kelly and Francis Ponge, Gertrude Stein and David Riesman, Orwell Godard / 151 and Robert Rauschenberg, Boulez and Raymond Chandler, Hegel and rock "n' roll. Techniques from literature, theatre, painting, and television mingle freely in his work, alongside witty, impertinent allusions to movie history itself. The ele- ments often seem contradictory-as when (in the recent films) what Richard Roud calls "a fragmentation/collage method of narration"* drawn from advanced painting and poetry is com- bined with the bare, hard-staring, neo-realist aesthetic of tele- vision (cf. the interviews, filmed in frontal close-up and me- dium shot, in A Married Woman, Masculine Feminine, and Deux ou Trois Choses); or when Godard uses highly stylized visual compositions (such as the recurrent blues and reds in A Woman Is a Woman, Contempt, Pierrot le Fou, La Chinoise, and Weekend) at the same time that he seems eager to promote the look of improvisation and to conduct an unre- mitting search for the "natural" manifestations of personality before the truth-exacting eye of the camera. But, however jar- ring these mergers are in principle, the results Godard gets from them turn out to be something harmonious, plastically and ethically engaging, and emotionally tonic. The consciously reflective-~more precisely, reflexive-aspect of Godard's films is the key to their energies. His work consti- tutes a formidable meditation on the possibilities of cinema, which is to restate what I have already argued, that he enters the history of film as its first consciously destructive figure. Put otherwise, one might note that Godard is probably the first major director to enter the cinema on the level of commercial production with an explicitly critical intention. "I'm still as much of a critic as I ever was during the time of Cahiers du Cinéma, he has declared. (Godard wrote regularly for that magazine between 1956 and 1959, and still occasionally con- tributes to it.) "The only difference is that instead of writing criticism, I now film it." Elsewhere, he describes Le Petit • In his excellent book Godard (New York: Doubleday and Co., 1968), the first full-length study of Godard in English. 1 152 Soldat as an "auto-critique, " and that word, too, applies to all of Godard's films. But the extent to which Godard's films speak in the first person, and contain elaborate and often humorous reflections on the cinema as a means, is not a private whim but one elaboration of a well-established tendency of the arts to be- come more self-conscious, more self-referring. Like every im- portant body of work in the canon of modern culture, God- ard's films are simply what they are and also events that push their audience to reconsider the meaning and scope of the art form of which they are instances; they're not only works of art, but meta-artistic activities aimed at reorganizing the audi- ence's entire sensibility. Far from deploring the tendency, I believe that the most promising future of films as an art lies in this direction. But the manner in which films continue into the end of the twentieth century as a serious art, becoming more self-regarding and critical, still permits a great deal of varia- tion. Godard's method is far removed from the solemn, ex- quisitely conscious, self-annihilating structures of Bergman's great film Persona. Godard's procedures are much more light- hearted, playful, often witty, sometimes flippant, sometimes just silly. Like any gifted polemicist (which Bergman is not), Godard has the courage to simplify himself. This simplistic quality in much of Godard's work is as much a kind of gener- osity toward his audience as an aggression against them; and, partly, just the overflow of an inexhaustibly vivacious sensi- bility. The attitude that Godard brings to the film medium is often called, disparagingly, "literary. 29 What's usually meant by this charge, as when Satie was accused of composing literary music or Magritte of making literary painting, is a preoccupation with ideas, with conceptualization, at the expense of the sensual integrity and emotional force of the work-more gen- erally, the habit (a kind of bad taste, it's supposed) of violat- ing the essential unity of a given art form by introducing alien elements into it. That Godard has boldly addressed the task of Godard 1 153 representing or embodying abstract ideas as no other film- maker has done before him is undeniable. Several films even include guest intellectual appearances: a fictional character falls in with a real philosopher (the heroine of My Life to Live interrogates Brice Parain in a café about language and sincer- ity; in La Chinoise, the Maoist girl disputes with Francis Jeanson on a train about the ethics of terrorism); a critic and filmmaker delivers a speculative soliloquy (Roger Leenhardt on intelligence, ardent and compromising, in A Married Woman); a grand old man of film history has a chance to reinvent his own somewhat tarnished personal image (Fritz Lang as himself, a chorus figure meditating on German poetry, Homer, movie-making, and moral integrity, in Contempt). On their own, many of Godard's characters muse aphoristically to themselves or engage their friends on such topics as the differ- ence between the Right and the Left, the nature of cinema, the mystery of language, and the spiritual void underlying the satisfactions of the consumer society. Moreover, Godard's films are not only idea-ridden, but many of his characters are osten- tatiously literate. Indeed, from the numerous references to books, mentions of writers' names, and quotations and longer excerpts from literary texts scattered throughout his films, Godard gives the impression of being engaged in an unending agon with the very fact of literature-which he attempts to settle partially by incorporating literature and literary identi- ties into his films. And, apart from his original use of it as a cinematic object, Godard is concerned with literature both as a model for film and as the revival and alternative to film. In interviews and in his own critical writings, the relation be- tween cinema and literature is a recurrent theme. One of the differences Godard stresses is that literature exists "as art from the very start" but cinema doesn't. But he also notes a potent similarity between the two arts: that "we novelists and film- makers are condemned to an analysis of the world, of the real; painters and musicians aren't." By treating cinema as above all an exercise in intelligence, 1 154 Godard rules out any neat distinction between "literary y and "visual" (or cinematic) intelligence. If film is, in Godard's laconic definition, the "analysis" of something "with images and sounds, " there can be no impropriety in making literature a subject for cinematic analysis. Alien to movies as this kind of material may seem, at least in such profusion, Godard would no doubt argue that books and other vehicles of cultural con- sciousness are part of the world; therefore they belong in films. Indeed, by putting on the same plane the fact that people read and think and go seriously to the movies and the fact that they cry and run and make love, Godard has disclosed a new vein of lyricism and pathos for cinema: in bookishness, in genuine cultural passion, in intellectual callowness, in the misery of someone strangling in his own thoughts. (An instance of Godard's original way with a more familiar subject, the poetry of loutish illiteracy, is the twelve-minute sequence in Les Carabiners in which the soldiers unpack their picture-postcard trophies.) His point is that no material is inherently un- assimilable. But what's required is that literature indeed un- dergo its transformation into material, just like anything else. All that can be given are literary extracts, shards of literature. In order to be absorbed by cinema, literature must be dis- mantled or broken into wayward units; then Godard can appropriate a portion of the intellectual "content" of any book (fiction or non-fiction), borrow from the public domain of culture any contrasting tone of voice (noble or vulgar), invoke in an instant any diagnosis of contemporary malaise that is thematically relevant to his narrative, no matter how inconsis- tent it may be with the psychological scope or mental compe. tence of the characters as already established. Thus, so far as Godard's films are "literary' in some sense, it seems clear that his alliance with literature is based on quite different interests from those which linked earlier experimental film-makers to the advanced writing of their time. If Godard envies literature, it is not so much for the formal innovations carried out in the twentieth century as for the heavy burden of Godard 1 155 explicit ideation accommodated within prose literary forms. Whatever notions Godard may have gotten from reading Faulkner or Beckett or Mayakovsky for formal inventions in cinema, his introduction of a pronounced literary taste (his own?) into his films serves mainly as a means for assuming a more public voice or elaborating more general statements. While the main tradition of avant-garde film-making has been 24 "poetic" cinema (films, like those made by the Surrealists in the 1920's and 1930's, inspired by the emancipation of modern poetry from storylike narrative and sequential discourse to the direct presentation and sensuous, polyvalent association of ideas and images), Godard has elaborated a largely anti- poetic cinema, one of whose chief literary models is the prose essay. Godard has even said: "I consider myself an essay writer. I write essays in the form of novels, or novels in the form of essays." Notice that Godard has here made the novel interchange- able with film-apt in a way, since it is the tradition of the novel that weighs most heavily upon cinema, and the example of what the novel has recently become that spurs Godard.° "I've found an idea for a novel," mumbles the hero of Pierrot le Fou at one point, in partial self-mockery assuming the quavering voice of Michel Simon. "Not to write the life of a man, but only life, life itself. What there is between people, space . . . sound and colors. . . There must be a way of achieving that; Joyce tried, but one must, must be able . to do better.' Surely, Godard is here speaking for himself as a • Speaking historically, it would seem that modern literature has been much more heavily influenced by cinema than vice versa. But the matter of influence is complex. For example, the Czech director Vera Chytilova has said that her model for the diptych form of her brilliant Faulkner book, wanted to have the two films he shot in the summer of 1966, Made in U,S.A. and Deux ou Trois Choses, projected together, with a reel of one alternating with a reel of the other. 1 156 film-maker, and he appears confident that film can accomplish what literature cannot, literature's incapacity being partly due to the less favorable critical situation into which each impor- tant literary work is deposited. I have spoken of Godard's work as consciously destructive of old cinematic conventions. But this task of demolition is executed with the élan of some- one working in an art form experienced as young, on the threshold of its greatest development rather than at its end. Godard views the destruction of old rules as a constructive effort--in contrast to the received view of the current destiny of literature. As he has written, "literary critics often praise works like Ulysses or Endgame because they exhaust a certain genre, they close the doors on it. But in the cinema we are always praising works which open doors." The relation to models offered by literature illuminates a major part of the history of cinema. Film, both protected and patronized by virtue of its dual status as mass entertainment and as art form, remains the last bastion of the values of the nineteenth-century novel and theatre-even to many of the same people who have found accessible and pleasurable such post-novels as Ulysses, Between the Acts, The Unnameable, Naked Lunch, and Pale Fire, and the corrosively de-drama- tized dramas of Beckett, Pinter, and the Happenings. Hence, the standard criticism leveled against Godard is that his plots are undramatic, arbitrary, often simply incoherent; and that his films generally are emotionally cold, static except for a busy surface of senseless movements, top-heavy with undram- atized ideas, unnecessarily obscure. What his detractors don't grasp, of course, is that Godard doesn't want to do what they reproach him for not doing. Thus, audiences at first took the jump cuts in Breathless to be a sign of amateurishness, or a perverse flouting of self-evident rules of cinematic technique; actually, what looks as though the camera had stopped in- advertently for a few seconds in the course of a shot and then started up again was an effect Godard deliberately obtained in Godard / 157 the cutting room, by snipping pieces out of perfectly smooth takes. (If one sees Breathless today, however, the once obtru- sive cutting and the oddities of the hand-held camera are almost invisible, so widely imitated are these techniques now.) No less deliberate is Godard's disregard for the formal conven- tions of film narration based on the nineteenth-century novel- cause-and-effect sequences of events, climactic scenes, logical denouements. At the Cannes Film Festival several years ago, Godard entered into debate with Georges Franju, one of France's most talented and idiosyncratic senior film-makers. "But surely, Monsieur Godard," the exasperated Franju is re- ported to have said, "you do at least acknowledge the necessity of having a beginning, middle, and end in your films." "Cer- tainly, " Godard replied. "But not necessarily in that order. 29 Godard's insouciance seems to me quite justified. For what is truly surprising is that film directors have not for some time, by exploiting the fact that whatever is "shown" (and heard) in the film experience is unremittingly present, made themselves more independent of what are essentially novelistic notions of narrative. But, as I have indicated, until now the only well- understood alternative has been to break completely with the formal structures of prose fiction, to dispense altogether with "story 99 and "characters." This alternative, practiced entirely outside the commercial cinema industries, resulted in the "ab- stract" film or the "poetic" film based on the association of images. In contrast, Godard's method is still a narrative one, though divorced from the literalism and reliance on psycho- logical explanation that most people associate with the serious novel. Because they modify, rather than make a complete rupture with, the conventions of prose fiction underlying the main tradition of cinema, Godard's films strike many as more puzzling than the forthright "poetic" official cinematic avant-garde. Or "abstract" films of the Thus, it is precisely the presence, not the absence, of story in Godard's films that gives rise to the standard criticism of them. Unsatisfactory as his plots may be to many people, it 1 158 would hardly be correct to describe Godard's films as plot- less-like, say, Djiga Vertov's The Man with the Camera, the two silent films of Buñuel (L'Age d'Or, Un Chien Andalou), or Kenneth Anger's Scorpio Rising, films in which a story line has been completely discarded as the narrative framework. Like all ordinary feature films, Godard's films show an inter- related group of fictional characters located in a recognizable, consistent environment: in his case, usually contemporary and urban (Paris). But while the sequence of events in a Godard film suggests a fully articulated story, it doesn't add up to one; the audience is presented with a narrative line that is partly erased or effaced ( the structural equivalent of the jump cut). Disregarding the traditional novelist's rule of explaining things as fully as they seem in need of explanation, Godard provides simplistic motives or frequently just leaves the motives un- explained; actions are often opaque, and fail to issue into con- sequences; occasionally the dialogue itself is not entirely audi- ble. (There are other films, like Rossellini's Journey to Italy and Resnais' Muriel, that employ a comparably "unrealistic" system of narration in which the story is decomposed into disjunct objectified elements; but Godard, the only director with a whole body of work along these lines, has suggested more of the diverse routes for "abstracting" from an ostensibly realistic narrative than any other director. It is important, too, to distinguish various structures of abstracting-as, for in- stance, between the systematically "indeterminate" plot of Bergman's Persona and the "intermittent" plots of Godard's films.) Although Godard's narrative procedures apparently owe less to cinematic models than to literary ones (at least, he never mentions the avant-garde past of cinema in interviews and statements but often mentions as models the work of Joyce, Proust, and Faulkner), he has never attempted, nor does it seem conceivable that he will attempt in the future, a transpo- sition into film of any of the serious works of contemporary post-novelistic fiction. On the contrary, like many directors, Godard / 159 Godard prefers mediocre, even sub-literary material, finding that easier to dominate and transform by the mise-en-scène. "I don't really like telling a story," Godard has written, somewhat simplifying the matter. "I prefer to use a kind of tapestry, a background on which I can embroider my own ideas. But I generally do need a story. A conventional one serves as well, perhaps even best. Thus, Godard has ruthlessly described the novel on which his brilliant Contempt was based, Moravia's Ghost at Noon, as "a nice novel for a train journey, full of old- fashioned sentiments. But it is with this kind of novel that one can make the best films." Although Contempt stays close to Moravia's story, Godard's films usually show few traces of their literary origins. ( At the other extreme and more typical is Masculine Feminine, which bears no recognizable relation to the stories by Maupassant, "La Femme de Paul' and "La Signe, " from which Godard drew his original inspiration.) Whether text or pretext, most of the novels that Godard has chosen as his point of departure are heavily plotted action stories. He has a particular fondness for American kitsch: Made in U.S.A was based on The Jugger by Richard Stark, Pierrot le Fou on Obsession by Lionel White, and Band of Outsiders on Dolores Hitches' Fools Gold. Godard resorts to popular American narrative conventions as a fertile, solid base for his own anti-narrative inclinations. "The Americans know how to tell stories very well; the French not at all. Flaubert and Proust don't know how to narrate; they do something else." Although that something else is plainly what Godard is after too, he has discerned the utility of starting from crude narrative. One allusion to this strategy is the memorable dedi- cation of Breathless: "To Monogram Pictures." (In its original version, Breathless had no credit titles whatever, and the first image of the film was preceded only by this terse salute to Hollywood's most prolific purveyors of low-budget, quickie action pictures during the 1940s and early 1950s.) Godard wasn't being impudent or flippant here-or only a little bit. Melodrama is one of the integral resources of his plotting. / 160 Think of the comic-strip quest of Alphaville; the gangster- movies romanticism of Breathless, Band of Outsiders, and Made in U.S.A; the spy-thriller ambiance of Le Petit Soldat and Pierrot le Fou. Melodrama-which is characterized by the exaggeration, the frontality, the opaqueness of "action". -pro- vides a framework for both intensifying and transcending traditional realistic procedures of serious film narrative, but in a way which isn't necessarily condemned (as the Surrealist films were) to seeming esoteric. By adapting familiar, second- hand, vulgar materials-popular myths of action and sexual glamour-Godard gains a considerable freedom to "'abstract" without losing the possibility of a commercial theatre au- dience. That such familiar materials do lend themselves to this kind of abstracting treatment-even contain the germ of it-had been amply demonstrated by one of the first great directors, Louis Feuillade, who worked in the debased form of the crime serial (Fantomas, Les Vampires, Judex, Ti Minh). Like the sub-literary model from which he drew, these serials (the greatest of which were done between 1913 and 1916) grant little to the standards of verisimilitude. Devoid of any concern for psychology, which was already beginning to make its appearance in films in the work of Grifith and De Mille, the story is populated by largely interchangeable characters and so crammed with incident that it can be followed only in a general way. But these are not the standards by which the films should be judged. What counts in Feuillade's serials is their formal and emotional values, which are produced by a subtle juxtaposition of the realistic and the highly improbable. The realism of the films lies in their look (Feuillade was one of the first European directors to do extensive location shoot- ing); the implausibility comes from the wild nature of the actions inscribed on this physical space and the unnaturally speeded-up rhythms, formal symmetries, and repetitiveness of the action. In the Feuillade films, as in certain early Lang and early Hitchcock films, the director has carried the melo Godard / 161 dramatic narrative to absurd extremes, so that the action takes on a hallucinatory quality. Of course, this degree of abstraction of realistic material into the logic of fantasy requires a generous use of ellipsis. If time patterns and space patterns and the abstract rhythms of action are to predominate, the action itself must be "obscure." In one sense, such films clearly have stories-of the most direct, action-packed kind. But in another sense, that of the continuity and consistency and ultimate intelligibility of incidents, the story has no importance at all. The loss of the sparse intertitles on some of the Feuillade films which have survived in only a single print seems hardly to matter, just as the formidable impenetrability of the plots of Hawks' The Big Sleep and Aldrich's Kiss Me Deadly doesn't matter either, indeed seems quite satisfying. Such film narratives attain their emotional and aesthetic weight pre- cisely through this incomprehensibility, as the "obscurity of certain poets (Mallarmé, Roussel, Stevens, Empson) isn't a deficiency in their work but an important technical means for accumulating and compounding relevant emotions and for es- tablishing different levels and units of "sense. The obscurity of Godard's plots (Made in U.S.A. ventures furthest in this direction) is equally functional, part of the program of ab- stracting his materials. Yet at the same time, these materials being what they are, Godard retains some of the vivacity of his simplistic literary and film models. Even as he employs the narrative conventions of the Série Noire novels and the Hollywood thrillers, trans- posing them into abstract elements, Godard has responded to their casual, sensuous energy and has introduced some of that into his own work. One result is that most of his films give the impression of speed, verging sometimes on haste. By compari- son, Feuillade's temperament seems more dogged. On a few essentially limited themes (like ingenuity, ruthlessness, physi- cal grace), Feuillade's films present a seemingly inexhaustible number of formal variations. His choice of the open-ended 1 162 serial form is thus entirely appropriate. After the twenty episodes of Les Vampires, nearly seven hours of projection time, it's clear there was no necessary end to the exploits of the stupendous Musidora and her gang of masked bandits, any more than the exquisitely matched struggle between arch- criminal and arch-detective in Judex need ever terminate. The rhythm of incident Feuillade establishes is subject to indef- nitely prolonged repetition and embellishment, like a sexual fantasy elaborated in secret over a long period of time. God- ard's films move to a quite different rhythm; they lack the unity of fantasy, along with its obsessional gravity and its tireless, somewhat mechanistic repetitiveness. The difference may be accounted for by the fact that the hallucinatory, absurd, abstracted action tale, while a central resource for Godard, doesn't control the form of his films as it did for Feuillade. Although melodrama remains one term of Godard's sensibility, what has increasingly emerged as the opposing term is the resources of fact. The impulsive, disso- ciated tone of melodrama contrasts with the gravity and con- trolled indignation of the sociological exposé (note the re- current theme of prostitution that appears in what is virtually Godard's first film, the short "Une Femme Coquette; 22 which he made in 1955, and continues in My Life to Live, A Married Woman, Deux ou Trois Choses, and Anticipation) and the even cooler tones of straight documentary and quasi-sociology (in Masculine Feminine, Deux ou Trois Choses, La Chinoise). Though Godard has toyed with the idea of the serial form, as in the end of Band of Outsiders (which promises a sequel, never made, relating further adventures of its hero and heroine in Latin America) and in the general conception of Alphaville (proposed as the latest adventure of a French serial hero, Lemmy Caution), Godard's films don't relate unequivocally to any single genre. The open-endedness of Godard's films doesn't mean the hyperexploitation of some particular genre, as in Feuillade, but the successive devouring of genres. The countertheme to the restless activity of the characters in Godard / 163 Godard's films is an expressed dissatisfaction with the limits or stereotyping of "actions. Thus, in Pierrot le Fou, Marianne's being bored or fed up moves what there is of a plot; at one point, she says directly to the camera: "Let's leave the Jules Verne novel and go back to the roman policier with guns and so on." The emotional statement depicted in A Woman Is a Woman is summed up in the wish expressed by Belmondo's Alfredo and Anna Karina's Angela to be Gene Kelly and Cyd Charisse in a late 1940's Hollywood musical choreographed by Michael Kidd. Early in Made in U,S.A. Paula Nelson comments: "Blood and mystery already. I have the teeling of moving about in a Walt Disney film starring Humphrey Bogart. Therefore it must be a political film." But this remark measures the extent to which Made in U.S.A. both is and is not a political film. That Godard's characters occasionally look out of the "action" to locate themselves as actors in a film genre is only partly a piece of nostalgic first-person wit on the part of Godard the film-maker; mainly it's an ironic disavowal of com- mitment to any one genre or way of regarding an action. If the organizing principle of Feuillade's films is serial repetitiveness and obsessional elaboration, that of Godard's is the juxtaposition of contrary elements of unpredictable length and explicitness. While Feuillade's work implicitly conceives art as the gratification and prolongation of fantasy, Godard's work implies a quite different function for art: sensory and conceptual dislocation. Each of Godard's films is a totality that undermines itself, a de-totalized totality (to borrow Sartre's phrase). Instead of a narration unified by the coherence of events (a "plot") and a consistent tone (comic, serious, oneiric, affect- less, or whatever), the narrative of Godard's films is regularly broken or segmented by the incoherence of events and by abrupt shifts in tone and level of discourse. Events appear to the spectator partly as converging toward a story, partly as a succession of independent tableaux. / 164 The most obvious way Godard segments the forward-mov- ing sequence of narration into tableaux is by explicitly theatri- calizing some of his material, once more laying to rest the lively prejudice that there is an essential incompatibility be- tween the means of theatre and those of film. The conventions of the Hollywood musical, with songs and stage performances interrupting the story, supply one precedent for Godard-in- spiring the general conception of A Woman Is a Woman, the dance trio in the café in Band of Outsiders, the song sequences and Vietnam protest skit performed outdoors in Pierrot le Fou, the singing telephone call in Weekend. His other model is, of course, the non-realistic and didactic theatre expounded by Brecht. An aspect of Godard Brechtianizing is his distinc- tive style of constructing political micro-entertainments: in La Chinoise, the home political theatre-piece acting out the Amer- ican aggression in Vietnam; or the Feiffer dialogue of the two ham radio operators that opens Deux ou Trois Choses. But the more profound influence of Brecht resides in those formal devices Godard uses to counteract ordinary plot development and complicate the emotional involvement of the audience. One device is the direct-to-camera declarations by the char- acters in many films, notably Deux ou Trois Choses, Made in U.S.A., and La Chinoise. ("One should speak as if one were quoting the truth," says Marina Vlady at the beginning of Deux ou Trois Choses, quoting Brecht. "The actors must quote.") Another frequently used technique derived from Brecht is the dissection of the film narrative into short se- quences: in My Life to Live, in addition, Godard puts on the screen prefatory synopses to each scene which describe the action to follow. The action of Les Carabiniers is broken into short brutal sections introduced by long titles, most of which represent cards sent home by Ulysses and Michelangelo; the titles are handwritten, which makes them a little harder to read and brings home to the movie audience the fact that it is being asked to read. Another, simpler device is the relatively arbitrary subdivision of action into numbered sequences, as Godard / 165 when the credits of Masculine Feminine announce a film con- sisting of "fifteen precise actions" (quinze faits précis). A minimal device is the ironic, pseudo-quantitative statement of something, as in A Married Woman, with the brief monologue of Charlotte's little son explaining how to do an unspecified something in exactly ten steps: or in Pierrot le Fow, when Ferdinand's voice announces at the beginning of a scene: "Chapter Eight. We cross France." Another example: the very title of one film, Deux ou Trois Choses-the lady about whom surely more than two or three things are known being the city of Paris. And, in support of these tropes of the rhetoric of disorientation, Godard practices many specifically sensorial techniques that serve to fragment the cinematic narrative. In fact, most of the familiar elements of Godard's visual and aural stylistics-rapid cutting, the use of unmatched shots, flash shots, the alternation of sunny takes with gray ones, the counterpoint of prefabricated images (signs, paintings, bill- boards, picture postcards, posters), the discontinuous music- function in this way. Apart from the general strategy of "theatre, 99 perhaps Godard's most striking application of the dissociative principle is his treatment of ideas. Certainly ideas are not developed in Godard's films systematically, as they might be in a book. They aren't meant to be. In contrast to their role in Brechtian theatre, ideas are chiefly formal elements in Godard's films, units of sensory and emotional stimulation. They function at least as much to dissociate and fragment as they do to indicate or illuminate the "meaning" of the action. Often the ideas, rendered in blocks of words, lie at a tangent to the action. Nana's reflections on sincerity and language in My Life to Live, Bruno's observations about truth and action in Le Petit Soldat, the articulate self-consciousness of Charlotte in A Mar- ried Woman and of Juliette in Deux ou Trois Choses, Lemmy Caution's startling aptitude for cultivated literary allusions in Alphaville are not functions of the realistic psychology of these characters. (Perhaps the only one of Godard's intellectually / 166 reflective protagonists who still seems "in character" when ruminating is Ferdinand in Pierrot le Fou.) Although Godard proposes film discourse as constantly open to ideas, ideas are only one element in a narrative form which posits an inten- tionally ambiguous, open, playful relation of all the parts to the total scheme. Godard's fondness for interpolating literary "texts" in the action, which I have already mentioned, is one of the main variants on the presence of ideas in his films. Among the many instances: the Mayakovsky poem recited by the girl about to be executed by a firing squad in Les Carabiniers; the excerpt from the Poe story read aloud in the next-to-last episode in My Life to Live; the lines from Dante, Hölderlin, and Brecht that Lang quotes in Contempt; the oration from Saint-Just by a character dressed as Saint-Just in Weekend; the passage from Elie Faure's History of Art read aloud by Ferdi- nand to his young daughter in Pierrot le Fou; the lines from Romeo and Juliet in French translation dictated by the Eng- lish teacher in Band of Outsiders; the scene from Racine's Bérénice rehearsed by Charlotte and her lover in A Married Woman; the quote from Fritz Lang read aloud by Camille in Contempt; the passages from Mao declaimed by the FLN agent in Le Petit Soldat; the antiphonal recitations from the little red book in La Chinoise. Usually someone makes an announcement before beginning to declaim, or can be seen taking up a book and reading from it. Sometimes, though, these obvious signals for the advent of a text are lacking-as with the excerpts from Bouvard and Pecuchet spoken by two customers in a café in Deux ou Trois Choses, or the long extract from Death on the Installment Plan delivered by the maid ("Madame Celine") in A Married Woman. (Although usually literary, the text may be a film: like the excerpt from Dreyer's Jeanne d'Arc that Nana watches in My Life to Live, or a minute of film shot by Godard in Sweden, reputed to be a parody of Bergman's The Silence, that Paul and the two girls see in Masculine Feminine.) These texts introduce psycho- Godard / 167 logically dissonant elements into the action; they supply rhythmical variety (temporarily slowing down the action); they interrupt the action and offer ambiguous comment on it; and they also vary and extend the point of view represented in the film. The spectator is almost bound to be misled if he regards these texts simply, either as opinions of characters in the film or as samples of some unified point of view advocated by the film which presumably is dear to the director. More likely, just the opposite is or comes to be the case. Aided by "ideas" and "texts, '" Godard's film narratives tend to consume the points of view presented in them. Even the political ideas expressed in Godard's work-part Marxist and part anarchist in one canonical style of the postwar French intelligentsia- are subject to this rule. Like the ideas, which function partly as divisive elements, the fragments of cultural lore embedded in Godard's films serve in part as a form of mystification and a means for refract- ing emotional energy. (In Le Petit Soldat, for instance, when Bruno says of Veronica the first time he sees her that she reminds him of a Giraudoux heroine, and later wonders whether her eyes are Renoir gray or Velásquez gray, the main impact of these references is their unverifiability by the audi- ence.) Inevitably, Godard broaches the menace of the bastard- ization of culture, a theme most broadly stated in Contempt in the figure of the American producer with his booklet of proverbs. And, laden as his films are with furnishings of high culture, it's perhaps inevitable that Godard should also invoke the project of laying down the burden of culture-as Ferdi- nand does in Pierrot le Fou when he abandons his life in Paris for the romantic journey southward carrying only a book of old comics. In Weekend, Godard posits against the petty barbarism of the car-owning urban bourgeoisie the possibly cleansing violence of a rebarbarized youth, imagined as a hippy-style liberation army roaming the countryside whose principal delights seem to be contemplation, pillage, jazz, and cannibalism. The theme of cultural disburdenment is treated 1 168 most fully and ironically in La Chinoise. One sequence shows the young cultural revolutionaries purging their shelves of all their books but the little red one. Another brief sequence shows just a blackboard at first, filled with the neatly listed names of several dozen stars of Western culture from Plato to Shakespeare to Sartre; these are then erased one by one, thoughtfully, with Brecht the last to go. The five pro-Chinese students who live together want to have only one point of view, that of Chairman Mao; but Godard shows, without in- sulting anyone's intelligence, how chimerical and inadequate to reality (and yet how appealing) this hope actually is. For all his native radicalism of temperament, Godard himself still appears a partisan of that other cultural revolution, ours, which enjoins the artist-thinker to maintain a multiplicity of points of view on any material. All the devices Godard employs to keep shifting the point of view within a film can be looked at another way-as adjuncts to a positive strategy, that of overlaying a number of narra- tive voices, for effectively bridging the difference between first-person and third-person narration. Thus Alphaville opens with three samples of first-person discourse: first, a pref- atory statement spoken off-camera by Godard, then a declara- tion by the computer-ruler Alpha 60, and only then the usual soliloquizing voice, that of the secret-agent hero, shown grimly driving his big car into the city of the future. Instead of, or in addition to, using "titles" between scenes as narrative signals (for example: My Life to Live, A Married Woman), Godard seems now more to favor installing a narrative voice in the film. This voice may belong to the main character: Bruno's musings in Le Petit Soldat, Charlotte's free associating sub- text in A Married Woman, Paul's commentary in Masculine Feminine. It may be the directors, as in Band of Outsiders and "Le Grand Escroc, the sketch from Les Plus Belles Escroqueries du Monde (1963). What's most interesting is when there are two voices, as in Deux ou Trois Choses, throughout which both Godard (whispering) and the heroine Godard 1 169 comment on the action. Band of Outsiders introduces the notion of a narrative intelligence which can "open a paren- thesis" in the action and directly address the audience, ex- plaining what Franz, Odile, and Arthur are really feeling at that moment; the narrator can intervene or comment ironically on the action or on the very fact of seeing a movie. (Fifteen minutes into the film, Godard off-camera says, "For the late- comers, what's happened so far is ..") Thereby two differ- ent but concurrent times are established in the film-the time of the action shown, and the time of the narrator's reflection on what's shown-in a way which allows free passage back and forth between the first-person narration and the third-person presentation of the action. Although the narrating voice already has a major role in some of his earliest work (for instance, the virtuoso comic monologue of the last of the pre-Breathless shorts, Une His- tire d'Eau), Godard continues to extend and complicate the task of oral narration, arriving at such recent refinements as the beginning of Deux ou Trois Choses, when from off-camera he introduces his leading actress, Marina Vlady, by name and then describes her as the character she will play. Such pro- cedures tend, of course, to reinforce the self-reflexive and self- referring aspect of Godard's films, for the ultimate narrative presence is simply the fact of cinema itself; from which it follows that, for the sake of truth, the cinematic medium must be made to manifest itself before the spectator. Godard's methods for doing this range from the frequent ploy of having an actor make rapid playful asides to the camera ( i.e., to the audience) in mid-action, to the use of a bad take-Anna Karina fumbles a line, asks if it's all right, then repeats the line-in A Woman Is a Woman. Les Carabiniers only gets underway after we hear first some coughing and shuffling and an instruction by someone, perhaps the composer or a sound technician, on the set. In La Chinoise, Godard makes the point about its being a movie by, among other devices, flashing the clapper board on the screen from time to time, and by briefly { 170 cutting to Raoul Coutard, the cameraman on this as on most of Godard's films, seated behind his apparatus. But then one im- mediately imagines some underling holding another clapper while that scene was shot, and someone else who had to be there behind another camera to photograph Coutard. It's im- possible ever to penetrate behind the final veil and experience cinema unmediated by cinema. I have argued that one consequence of Godard's disregard for the aesthetic rule of having a fixed point of view is that he dissolves the distinction between first-person and third-person narration. But perhaps it would be more accurate to say that Godard proposes a new conception of point of view, thereby staking out the possibility of making films in the first person. By this, I don't mean simply that his films are subjective or personal; so is the work of many other directors, particularly the cinematic avant-garde and underground. I mean some- thing stricter, which may indicate the originality of his achievement: namely, the way in which Godard, especially in his recent films, has built up a narrative presence, that of the film-maker, who is the central structural element in the cine- matic narrative. This first-person filmmaker isn't an actual character within the film. That is, he is not to be seen on the screen (except in the episode in Far from Vietnam, which shows only Godard at a camera talking, intercut with snippets from La Chinoise), though he is heard from time to time and one is increasingly aware of his presence just off-camera. But this off-screen persona is not a lucid, authorial intelligence, like the detached observer-figure of many novels cast in the first person. The ultimate first person in Godard's movies, his par- ticular version of the film-maker, is the person responsible for the film who stands outside it as a mind beset by more com- plex, fluctuating concerns than any single film can represent or incarnate. The most profound drama of a Godard film arises from the clash between this restless, wider consciousness of the director and the determinate, limited argument of the particu- lar film he's engaged in making. Therefore each film is, si- Godard / 171 multaneously, a creative activity and a destructive one. The director virtually uses up his models, his sources, his ideas, his latest moral and artistic enthusiasms-and the shape of the film consists of various means for letting the audience know that's what is happening. This dialectic has reached its furthest development so far in Deux ou Trois Choses, which is more radically a first-person film than any Godard has made. The advantage of the first-person mode for cinema is pre- sumably that it vastly augments the liberty of the film-maker while at the same time providing incentives for greater formal rigor-the same goals espoused by all the serious post-novel- ists of this century. Thus Gide has Edouard, the author-pro- tagonist of The Counterfeiters, condemn all previous novels because their contours are "defined," so that, however perfect, what they contain is "captive and lifeless." He wanted to write a novel that would "run freely" because he'd chosen "not to foresee its windings." But the liberation of the novel turned out to consist in writing a novel about writing a novel: pre- senting "literature" within literature. In a different context, Brecht discovered "theatre" within theatre. Godard has dis- covered "cinema" within cinema. However loose or spontane- ous-looking or personally self-expressive his films may appear, what must be appreciated is that Godard subscribes to a severely alienated conception of his art: a cinema that eats cinema. Each film is an ambiguous event that must be simul- taneously promulgated and destroyed, Godard's most explicit statement of this theme is the painful monologue of self-inter- rogation which was his contribution to Far from Vietnam. Perhaps his wittiest statement of this theme is a scene in Les Carabiniers ( similar to the end of an early Mack Sennett two- reeler, Mabel's Dramatic Career) in which Michelangelo takes time off from the war to visit a movie theatre, apparently for the first time, since he reacts as audiences did sixty years ago when movies first began to be shown. He follows the move- ments of the actors on the screen with his whole body, ducks under the seat when a train appears, and at last, driven wild / 172 by the sight of a girl taking a bath in the film within a film, bolts from his seat and rushes up to the stage. After first standing on tiptoe to try to look into the tub, then feeling tentatively for the girl along the surface of the screen, he finally tries to grab her-ripping away part of the screen within the screen, and revealing the girl and the bathroom to be a projection on a filthy wall. Cinema, as Godard says in Le Grand Escroc, "is the most beautiful fraud in the world, Though all his distinctive devices serve the fundamental aim of breaking up the narrative or varying the perspective, Godard doesn't aim at a systematic variation of points of view. Sometimes, to be sure, he does elaborate a strong plastic con- ception-like the intricate visual patterns of the couplings of Charlotte with her lover and her husband in A Married Woman; and the brilliant formal metaphor of the monochro- matic photography in three "political colors" in Anticipation. Still, Godard's work characteristically lacks formal rigor, a quality preeminent in all the work of Bresson and Jean-Marie Straub and in the best films of Welles and Resnais. The jump cuts in Breathless, for instance, are not part of any strict overall rhythmic scheme, an observation that's confirmed by Godard's account of their rationale. "I discovered in Breathless that when a discussion between two people be- came boring and tedious one could just as well cut between the speeches. I tried it once, and it went very well, so I did the same thing right through the film." Godard may be exaggerat- ing the casualness of his attitude in the cutting room, but his reliance upon intuition on the set is well known. For no Alm has a full shooting script been prepared in advance, and many films have been improvised day by day throughout large parts of the shooting; in the recent films shot with direct sound, Godard has the actors wear tiny earphones so that while they are on camera he can speak to each of them privately, feeding them their lines or posing questions which they're to answer (direct-to-camera interviews). And, though he generally uses Godard 1 173 professional actors, Godard has been increasingly open to in- corporating accidental presences. (Examples: in Deux ou Trois Choses, Godard, off camera, interviewing a young girl who worked in the beauty parlor which he'd taken over for a day of filming; Samuel Fuller talking, as himself, to Ferdi- nand, played by Belmondo, at a party at the beginning of Pierrot le Fou, because Fuller, an American director Godard admires, happened to be in Paris at the time and was visiting Godard on the set.) When using direct sound, Godard also generally keeps any natural or casual noises picked up on the soundtrack, even those unrelated to the action. While the re- sults of this permissiveness are not interesting in every case, some of Godard's happiest effects have been last-minute in- ventions or the result of accident. The church bells tolling when Nana dies in My Life to Live just happened to go off, to everyone's surprise, during the shooting. The stunning scene in negative in Alphaville turned out that way because at the last moment Coutard told Godard there wasn't enough equipment on the set to light the scene properly (it was night); Godard decided to go ahead anyway. Godard has said that the spec- tacular ending of Pierrot le Fou, Ferdinand's suicide by self- dynamiting, "was invented on the spot, unlike the beginning, which was organized. It's a sort of Happening, but one that was controlled and dominated. Two days before I began I had nothing, absolutely nothing. Oh well, I did have the book. And a certain number of locations." Godard's conviction that it is possible to absorb chance, using it as an additional tool for developing new structures, extends beyond making only minimal preparations for a film and keeping the conditions of shooting fexible to the editing itself. "Sometimes I have shots that were badly filmed, because I lacked time or money, » Godard has said, "Putting them together creates a different impression; I don't reject this; on the contrary, I try to do my best to bring out this new idea. Godard's openness to the aleatoric miracle is supported by his predilection for shooting on location. In his work to date- 1174 features, shorts, and sketches all included-only his third feature, A Woman Is a Woman, was shot in a studio; the rest were done in "found" locations. (The small hotel room in which Charlotte et son Jules takes place was where Godard was then living; the apartment in Deux ou Trois Choses be- longed to a friend; and the apartment in La Chinoise is where Godard lives now.) Indeed, one of the most brilliant and haunting aspects of Godard's science-fiction fables-the sketch from RoGoPag (1962) , '"Le Nouveau Monde," Alphaville, and Anticipation-is that they were filmed entirely in unre- touched sites and buildings existing around the Paris of the mid-1960's like Orly Airport and the Hotel Scribe and the new Electricity Board building. This, of course, is exactly Godard's point. The fables about the future are at the same time essays about today. The streak of movie-educated fantasy that runs strong through Godard's work is always qualified by the ideal of documentary truth. From Godard's penchant for improvisation, for incorporat- ing accidents, and for location shooting, one might infer a lineage from the neo-realist aesthetic made famous by Italian films of the last twenty-five years, starting with Viscontis Os- sessione and La Terra Trema and reaching its apogee in the postwar films of Rossellini and the recent debut of Olmi. But Godard, although a fervent admirer of Rossellini, is not even a neo-neo-realist, and hardly aims to expel the artifice from art. What he seeks is to conflate the traditional polarities of spon- taneous mobile thinking and finished work, of the casual jot- ting and the fully premeditated statement. Spontaneity, casualness, lifelikeness are not values in themselves for Godard, who is rather interested in the convergence of spon- taneity with the emotional discipline of abstraction (the dis- solution of "subject matter"). Naturally, the results are far from tidy. Although Godard achieved the basis of his distinc- tive style very quickly (by 1958), the restlessness of his temperament and his intellectual voracity impel him to adopt an essentially exploratory posture in relation to film-making, in Godard 1 175 which he may answer a problem raised but not resolved in one film by starting on another. Still, viewed as a whole, Godard's work is much closer in problems and scope to the work of a radical purist and formalist in film like Bresson than to the work of the neo-realists-even though the relation with Bres- son must also be drawn largely in terms of contrasts. Bresson also achieved his mature style very quickly, but his career has throughout consisted of thoroughly premeditated, independent works conceived within the limits of his personal aesthetic of concision and intensity. (Born in 1910, Bresson has made eight feature films, the first in 1943 and the most recent in 1967.) Bresson's art is characterized by a pure, lyric quality, by a naturally elevated tone, and by a carefully con- structed unity. He has said, in an interview conducted by Godard (Cahiers du Cinèma #178, May 1966), that for him "improvisation is at the base of creation in the cinema. But the look of a Bresson film is surely the antithesis of improvisa tion. In the finished film, a shot must be both autonomous and necessary; which means that there's only one ideally correct way of composing each shot (though it may be arrived at quite intuitively) and of editing the shots into a narrative. For all their great energy, Bresson's films project an air of formal deliberateness, of having been organized according to a relent- less, subtly calculated rhythm which required their having had everything inessential cut from them. Given his austere aes- thetie, it seems apt that Bresson's characteristic subject is a person either literally imprisoned or locked within an excruci- ating dilemma. Indeed, if one does accept narrative and tonal unity as a primary standard for film, Bresson's asceticism-his maximal use of minimal materials, the meditative "closed" quality of his films-seems to be the only truly rigorous procedure. Godard's work exemplifies an aesthetic (and, no doubt, a temperament and sensibility) the opposite of Bresson's. The moral energy informing Godard's film-making, while no less powerful than Bresson's, leads to a quite different asceticism: 1 176 the labor of endless self-questioning, which becomes a con- stitutive element in the artwork. "More and more with each film, " he said in 1965, "it seems to me the greatest problem in filming is to decide where and why to begin a shot and why to end it." The point is that Godard cannot envisage anything but arbitrary solutions to his problem. While each shot is autono- mous, no amount of thinking can make it necessary, Since film for Godard is preeminently an open structure, the distinction between what's essential and inessential in any given film be- comes senseless. Just as no absolute, immanent standards can be discovered for determining the composition, duration, and place of a shot, there can be no truly sound reason for exclud- ing anything from a film. This view of film as an assemblage rather than a unity lies behind the seemingly facile character- izations Godard has made of many of his recent films. "Pierrot le Fou isn't really a film, it's an attempt at cinema." About Deux ou Trois Choses: "In sum, it's not a film, it's an attempt at a film and is presented as such." A Married Woman is described in the main titles: "Fragments of a Film Shot in 1964"; and La Chinoise is subtitled "A Film in the Process of Being Made." In claiming to offer no more than "efforts" Or "attempts," Godard acknowledges the structural openness or arbitrariness of his work. Each film remains a fragment in the sense that its possibilities of elaboration can never be used up. For granted the acceptability, even desirability, of the method of juxtaposition ("I prefer simply putting things side by side"), which assembles contrary elements without reconciling them, there can indeed be no internally necessary end to a Godard film, as there is to a Bresson film. Every film must either seem broken off abruptly or else ended arbitrarily- often by the violent death in the last reel of one or more of the main characters, as in Breathless, Le Petit Soldat, My Life to Live, Les Carabiniers, Contempt, Masculine Feminine, and Pierrot le Fou. Predictably, Godard has supported these views by pressing the relationship (rather than the distinction) between "art" Godard / 177 and "life." Godard claims never to have had the feeling as he worked, which he thinks a novelist must have, "that I am differentiating between life and creation." The familiar mythi- cal terrain is occupied once again: "cinema is somewhere be- tween art and life." Of Pierrot le Fou, Godard has written: "Life is the subject, with 'Scope and color as its attributes. . Life on its own as I would like to capture it, using pan shots on nature, plans fixes on death, brief shots, long takes, soft and loud sounds, the movements of Anna and Jean-Paul. In short, life filling the screen as a tap fills a bathtub that is simultaneously emptying at the same rate. 22 This, Godard claims, is how he differs from Bresson, who, when shooting a film, has "an idea of the world" that he is "trying to put on the screen or, which comes to the same thing, an idea of the cinema" he's trying "to apply to the world." For a director like Bresson, "cinema and the world are moulds to be filled, while in Pierrot there is neither mould nor matter." Of course Godard's films aren't bathtubs; and Godard har- bors his complex sentiments about the world and his art to the same extent and in much the same way as Bresson. But despite Godard's lapse into a disingenuous rhetoric, the con- trast with Bresson stands. For Bresson, who was originally a painter, it is the austerity and rigor of cinematic means which make this art (though very few movies) valuable to him. For Godard, it's the fact that cinema is so loose, promiscuous, and accommodating a medium which gives movies, even many in- ferior ones, their authority and promise. Film can mix forms, techniques, points of view; it can't be identified with any single leading ingredient. Indeed, what the film-maker must show is that nothing is excluded. "One can put everything in a film, " says Godard, "One must put everything in a film." A film is conceived of as a living organism: not so much an object as a presence or an encounter-a fully historical or contemporary event, whose destiny it is to be transcended by future events. Seeking to create a cinema which inhabits the real present, Godard regularly puts into his films references to 1 178 current political crises: Algeria, de Gaulle's domestic politics, Angola, the Vietnam war. (Each of his last four features in- cludes a scene in which the main characters denounce the American aggression in Vietnam, and Godard has declared that until that war ends he'll put such a sequence into every film he makes.) The films may include even more casual refer. ences and off-the-cuff sentiments--a dig at André Malraux; a compliment to Henri Langlois, director of the Cinemathèque Française; an attack on irresponsible projectionists who show 1:66 films in Cinemascope ratio; or a plug for the unreleased movie of a fellow director and friend. Godard welcomes the opportunity to use the cinema topically, "journalistically." Using the interview style of cinéma-vérité and TV docu- mentary, he can canvas characters for their opinions about the pill or the significance of Bob Dylan. Journalism can provide the basis for a film: Godard, who writes the scripts for all his movies, lists "Documentation from 'Ou en est la prostitution?" by Marcel Sacotte" as a source for My Life to Live; the story of Deux ou Trois Choses was suggested by a feature story, published in Le Nouvel Observateur, about housewives in new low-income apartment projects becoming part-time pros- titutes to augment the family income. As photography, cinema has always been an art which records temporality; but up to now this has been an inad- vertent aspect of feature fiction films. Godard is the first major director who deliberately incorporates certain contingent aspects of the particular social moment when he's shooting a film-sometimes making these the frame of the film. Thus, the frame of Masculine Feminine is a report on the situation of French youth during three politically critical months of winter 1965, between the first presidential election and the run-off; and La Chinoise analyzes the faction of Communist students in Paris inspired by the Maoist cultural revolution in the summer of 1967. But of course Godard does not intend to supply facts in a literal sense, the sense which denies the relevance of imagination and fantasy. In his view, "you can start either Godard / 179 with fiction or documentary. But whichever you start with, you will inevitably find the other." Perhaps the most interest- ing development of his point is not the films which have the form of reportage but those which have the form of fables. The timeless universal war which is the subject of Les Cara- biniers is illustrated by World War Il documentary footage, and the squalor in which the mythic protagonists (Michel- angelo, Ulysses, Cleopatra, Venus) live is concretely France today. Alphaville is, in Godard's words, "a fable on a realistic ground," because the intergalactic city is also, literally, Paris now. Unworried by the issue of impurity-there are no materials unusable for film-Godard is, nevertheless, involved in an extremely purist venture: the attempt to devise a structure for films which speaks in a purer present tense. His effort is to make movies which live in the actual present, and not to tell something from the past, relate something that's already taken place. In this, of course, Godard is following a direction al- ready taken in literature. Fiction, until recently, was the art of the past. Events told in an epic or novel are, when the reader starts the book, already (as it were) in the past. But in much of the new fiction, events pass before us as if in a present coexisting with the time of the narrative voice (more accu- rately, with the time in which the reader is being addressed by the narrative voice). Events exist, therefore, in the present-at least as much of the present as the reader himself inhabits. It is for this reason that such writers as Beckett, Stein, Bur- roughs, and Robbe-Grillet prefer actually to use the present tense, or its equivalent. (Another strategy: to make the dis- tinction between past, present, and future time within the nar- ration an explicit conundrum, and an insoluble one--as, for example, in certain tales of Borges and Landolf and in Pale Fire.) But if the development is feasible for literature, it would seem even more apt for film to make a comparable move since, in a way, film narration knows only the present tense. (Everything shown is equally present, no matter when 1 180 it takes place.) For film to exploit its natural liberty what was necessary was to have a much looser, less literal attach- ment to telling a "story. ." A story in the traditional sense- something that's already taken place-is replaced by a seg. mented situation in which the suppression of certain explica- tive connections between scenes creates the impression of an action continually beginning anew, unfolding in the present tense. And, of necessity, this present tense must appear as a some- what behaviorist, external, anti-psychological view of the human situation. For psychological understanding depends on holding in mind simultaneously the dimensions of past, present, and future. To see someone psychologically is to lay out temporal coordinates in which he is situated. An art which aims at the present tense cannot aspire to this kind of "depth" or innerness in the portrayal of human beings. The lesson is already clear from the work of Stein and Beckett; Godard demonstrates it for film. Godard explicitly alludes to this choice only once, in connec- tion with My Life to Live, which, he says, he "built . .. in tableaux to accentuate the theatrical side of the film. Besides, this division corresponded to the external view of things which best allowed me to give a feeling of what was going on inside. In other words, a contrary procedure to that used by Bresson in Pickpocket, in which the drama is seen from within. How can one render the 'inside'? I think, by staying prudently out- side." But though there are obvious advantages to staying "out- side"-flexibility of form, freedom from superimposed limit- ing solutions-the choice is not so clear-cut as Godard sug. gests. Perhaps one never goes "inside" in the sense Godard attributes to Bresson-a procedure considerably different from the reading off of motives and summing up of a character's interior life promoted by nineteenth-century novelistic realism. Indeed, by those standards, Bresson is himself considerably "outside" his characters; for instance, more involved in their Godard 1 181 somatic presence, the rhythm of their movements, the heavy weight of inexpressible feeling which they bear. Still, Godard is right in saying that, compared with Bresson, he is "outside." One way he stays outside is by constantly shifting the point of view from which the film is told, by the juxtaposition of contrasting narrative elements: realistic along- side implausible aspects of the story, written signs interposed between images, "texts" recited aloud interrupting dialogue, static interviews as against rapid actions, interpolation of a narrator's voice explaining or commenting on the action, and so forth. A second way is by his rendering of "things" in a strenuously neutralized fashion, in contrast with Bresson's thoroughly intimate vision of things as objects used, disputed, loved, ignored, and worn out by people. Things in Bresson's films, whether a spoon, a chair, a piece of bread, a pair of shoes, are always marked by their human use. The point is how they are used-~whether skillfully ( as the prisoner uses his spoon in Un Condamné à Mort, and the heroine of Mouchette uses the saucepan and bowls to make breakfast coffee) or clumsily. In Godard's films, things display a wholly alienated character. Characteristically, they are used with indifference, neither skillfully nor clumsily; they are simply there. "Objects exist," Godard has written, "and if one pays more attention to them than to people, it is precisely because they exist more than these people. Dead objects are still alive. Living people are often already dead." Whether things can be the occasion for visual gags (like the suspended egg in A Woman Is a Woman, and the movie posters in the warehouse in Made in U,S.A.) or can introduce an element of great plastic beauty (as do the Pongeist studies in Deux ou Trois Choses of the burning end of a cigarette and of bubbles separating and coming together on the surface of a hot cup of coffee), they always occur in a context of, and serve to reinforce, emotional dissociation. The most noticeable form of Godard's dissociated rendering of things is his ambivalent immersion in the allure of 1 182 pop imagery and his only partly ironic display of the symbolic currency of urban capitalism-pinball machines, boxes of de- tergent, fast cars, neon signs, billboards, fashion magazines. By extension, this fascination with alienated things dictates the settings of most of Godard's films: highways, airports, anony. mous hotel rooms or soulless modern apartments, brightly lit modernized cafés, movie theatres. The furniture and settings of Godard's films are the landscape of alienation-whether he is displaying the pathos in the mundane facticity of the actual life of dislocated, urban persons such as petty hoodlums, dis- contented housewives, left-wing students, prostitutes (the everyday present) or presenting anti-utopian fantasies about the cruel future. A universe experienced as fundamentally dehumanized or dissociated is also one conducive to rapid "associating" from one ingredient in it to another. Again, the contrast can be made with Bresson's attitude, which is rigorously non-associa- tive and therefore concerned with the depth in any situation; in a Bresson film there are certain organically derived and mutually relevant exchanges of personal energy that flourish or exhaust themselves (either way, unifying the narrative and supplying it with an organic terminus). For Godard, there are no genuinely organic connections. In the landscape of pain, only three strictly unrelated responses of real interest are pos- sible; violent action, the probe of "ideas, and the transcendence of sudden, arbitrary, romantic love. But each of these possi- bilities is understood to be revocable, or artificial. They are not acts of personal fulfillment; not so much solutions as dissolu- tions of a problem. It has been noted that many of Godard's films project a masochistic view of women, verging on mis- ogyny, and an indefatigable romanticism about "the couple." It's an odd but rather familiar combination of attitudes. Such contradictions are psychological or ethical analogues to Godard's fundamental formal presuppositions. In work con- ceived of as open-ended, associative, composed of "frag- ments, constructed by the (partly aleatoric) juxtaposition of Godard / 183 contrary elements, any principle of action or any decisive emotional resolution is bound to be an artifice (from an ethical point of view) or ambivalent (from a psychological point of view). Each film is a provisional network of emotional and intellec- tual impasses. With the probable exception of his view on Vietnam, there is no attitude Godard incorporates in his films that is not simultaneously being bracketed, and therefore criticized, by a dramatization of the gap between the elegance and seductiveness of ideas and the brutish or lyrical opaque- ness of the human condition. The same sense of impasse characterizes Godard's moral judgments. For all the use made of the metaphor and the fact of prostitution to sum up con- temporary miseries, Godard's films can't be said to be "against" prostitution and "for" pleasure and liberty in the unequivocal sense that Bresson's films directly extol love, honesty, courage, and dignity and deplore cruelty and cowardice. From Godard's perspective, Bresson's work is bound to appear "rhetorical, 29 whereas Godard is bent on destroying rhetoric by a lavish use of irony-the familiar outcome when a restless, somewhat dissociated intelligence struggles to cancel an irrepressible romanticism and tendency to moralize. In many of his films Godard deliberately seeks the framework of parody, of irony as contradiction. For instance, A Woman Is a Woman proceeds by putting an ostensibly serious theme (a woman frustrated both as wife and as would-be mother) in an ironically sentimental framework. "The subject of A Woman Is a Woman," Godard has said, "is a character who succeeds in resolving a certain situation, but I conceived this subject within the framework of a neo-realistic musical: an absolute contradiction, but that is precisely why I wanted to make the film." Another example is the lyrical treatment of a rather nasty scheme of amateur gangsterism in Band of Outsiders, complete with the high irony of the 'happy ending" in which Odile sails away with Franz to Latin America for further romantic adventures. Another example: the nomenclature of 1 184 Alphaville, a film in which Godard takes up some of his most serious themes, is a collection of comic-strip identities (char. acters have names like Lemmy Caution, the hero of a famous series of French thrillers; Harry Dickson; Professor Leonard Nosferatu, alias von Braun; Professor Jekyll) and the lead is played by Eddie Constantine, the expatriate American actor whose mug has been a cliché of "B' French detective films for two decades; indeed, Godard's original title for the film was "Tarzan versus IBM." Still another example: the film Godard decided to make on the double theme of the Ben Barka and Kennedy murders, Made in U.S.A., was conceived as a parodic remake of The Big Sleep (which had been revived at an art house in Paris in the summer of 1966), with Bogart's role of the trench-coated detective embroiled in an insoluble mystery now played by Anna Karina. The danger of such lavish use of irony is that ideas will be expressed at their point of self- caricature, and emotions only when they are mutilated. Irony intensifies what is already a considerable limitation on the emotions in the films that results from the insistence on the pure presentness of cinema narration, in which situations with less deep affect will be disproportionately represented-at the expense of vividly depicted states of grief, rage, profound erotic longing and fulfillment, and physical pain. Thus, while Bresson, at his almost unvarying best, is able to convey deep emotions without ever being sentimental, Godard, at his less effective, devises turns of plot that appear either hardhearted or sentimental (at the same time seeming emotionally flat). Godard "straight" seems to me more successful-whether in the rare pathos he has allowed in Masculine Feminine, or in the hard coolness of such directly passionate films as Les Carabiniers, Contempt, Pierrot le Fou, and Weekend. This coolness is a pervasive quality of Godard's work. For all their violence of incident and sexual matter-of-factness, the films have a muted, detached relation to the grotesque and painful as well as to the seriously erotic. People are sometimes tor- tured and often die in Godard's films, but almost casually. Godard 1 185 (He has a particular predilection for automobile accidents: the end of Contempt, the wreck in Pierrot le Fou, the land- scape of affectless highway carnage in Weekend.) And people are rarely shown making love, though if they are, what inter- ests Godard isn't the sensual communion but what sex reveals "about the spaces between people." The orgiastic moments come when young people dance together or sing or play games or run-people run beautifully in Godard movies-not when they make love. "Cinema is emotion, ," says Samuel Fuller in Pierrot le Fou, a thought one surmises that Godard shares. But emotion, for Godard, always comes accompanied by some decoration of wit, some transmuting of feeling that he clearly puts at the center of the art-making process. This accounts for part of Godard's preoccupation with language, both heard and seen on the screen. Language functions as a means of emotional distancing from the action. The pictorial element is emotional immediate; but words (including signs, texts, stories, sayings, recitations, interviews) have a lower temperature. While im ages invite the spectator to identify with what is seen, the presence of words makes the spectator into a critic. But Godard's Brechtian use of language is only one aspect of the matter. Much as Godard owes to Brecht, his treatment of language is more complex and equivocal and relates rather to the efforts of certain painters who use words actively to undermine the image, to rebuke it, to render it opaque and unintelligible. It's not simply that Godard gives language a place that no other film director has before him. (Compare the verbosity of Godard's films with Bresson's verbal severity and austerity of dialogue.) He sees nothing in the film medium that prevents one of the subjects of cinema from being lan- guage itself-as language has become the very subject of much contemporary poetry and, in a metaphoric sense, of some important painting, such as that of Jasper Johns. But it seems that language can become the subject of cinema only at / 186 that point when a film-maker is obsessed by the problematic character of language-as Godard so evidently is. What other directors have regarded mainly as an adjunct of greater "real- ism" (the advantage of sound films as compared with silents) becomes in Godard's hands a virtually autonomous, sometimes subversive instrument. I have already noted the varied ways in which Godard uses language as speech-not only as dialogue, but as monologue, as recited discourse, including quotation, and in off-screen comment and interrogation. Language is as well an important visual or plastic element in his films. Sometimes the screen is entirely filled with a printed text or lettering, which becomes the substitute for or counterpoint to a pictorial image. (Just a tew examples: the stylishly elliptical credits that open each film; the postcard messages from the two soldiers in Les Carabiniers; the billboards, posters, record sleeves, and maga- zine ads in My Life to Live, A Married Woman, and Mascu- line Feminine; the pages from Ferdinand's journal, only part of which can be read, in Pierrot le Fow; the conversation with book covers in A Woman Is a Woman; the cover of the paper- back series "Idées" used thematically in Deux ou Trois Choses; the Maoist slogans on the apartment walls in La Chinoise.) Not only does Godard not regard cinema as essen- tally moving photographs; for him, the fact that movies, which purport to be a pictorial medium, admit of language, precisely gives cinema its superior range and freedom com- pared with other art forms. Pictorial or photographic elements are in a sense only the raw materials of Godard's cinema; the transformative ingredient is language. Thus, to cavil at God- ard for the talkiness of his films is to misunderstand his ma- terials and his intentions. It is almost as if the pictorial image had a static quality, too close to "art," that Godard wants to infect with the blight of words. In La Chinoise, a sign on the wall of the student Maoist commune reads: "One must replace vague ideas with clear images." But that's only one side of the issue, as Godard knows. Sometimes images are too clear, too Godard 1 187 simple. (La Chinoise is Godard's sympathetic, witty treatment of the arch-romantic wish to make oneself entirely simple, al- together clear.) The highly permutated dialectic between image and language is far from stable. As he declares in his own voice at the beginning of Alphaville: "Some things in life are too complex for oral transmission. So we make fiction out of them, to make them universal." But again, it's clear that making things universal can bring oversimplification, which must be combated by the concreteness and ambiguity of words. Godard has always been fascinated by the opaqueness and coerciveness of language, and a recurrent feature of the film narratives is some sort of deformation of speech. At perhaps its most innocent but still oppressive stage, speech can become hysterical monologue, as in Charlotte et son Jules and Une Histoire d'Eau. Speech can become halting and incomplete, as in Godard's early use of interview passages-in Le Grand Escroc, and in Breathless, where Patricia interviews a novelist (played by the director J-P. Melville) at Orly Airport. Speech can become repetitive, as in the hallucinatory doubling of the dialogue by the quadrilingual translator in Contempt and, in Band of Outsiders, the English teacher's oddly intense repeti- tions of end phrases during her dictation. There are several instances of the outright dehumanization of speech-like the slow-motion croaking of the computer Alpha 60 and the mechanized impoverished speech of its catatonic human sub- jects in Alphaville; and the "broken" speech of the traveler in Anticipation. The dialogue may be out of step with the action, as in the antiphonal commentary in Pierrot le Fou; or simply fail to make sense, as in the account of "the death of logic" following a nuclear explosion over Paris in Le Nouveau Monde. Sometimes Godard prevents speech from being com- pletely understood-as in the first scene in My Life to Live, and with the sonically harsh, partly unintelligible tape of the voice of "Richard Po- " in Made in U.S.A., and in the long erotic confession at the opening of Weekend. Complementing / 188 these mutilations of speech and language are the many explicit discussions of language-as-a-problem in Godard's films. The puzzle about how it's possible to make moral or intellectual sense by speaking, owing to the betrayal of consciousness by language, is debated in My Life to Live and A Married Woman; the mystery of "translating" from one language to another is a theme in Contempt and Band of Outsiders; the language of the future is a subject of speculation by Guil. laume and Veronique in La Chinoise (words will be spoken as if they were sounds and matter); the nonsensical underside of language is demonstrated in the exchange in the café between Marianne, the laborer, and the bartender in Made in U.S.A.; and the effort to purify language of philosophical and cultural dissociation is the explicit, main theme of Alphaville and An- ticipation, the success of an individual's efforts to do this providing the dramatic resolution of both films. At this moment in Godard's work, the problem of language appears to have become his leading motif. Behind their obtru- sive verbosity, Godard's films are haunted by the duplicity and banality of language. Insofar as there is a "voice" " speaking in all his films, it is one that questions all voices. Language is the widest context in which Godard's recurrent theme of prostitu- tion must be located. Beyond its direct sociological interest for Godard, prostitution is his extended metaphor for the fate of language, that is, of consciousness itself. The coalescing of the two themes is clearest in the science-fiction nightmare of An- ticipation: in an airport hotel some time in the future (that is, now), travelers have the choice of two kinds of temporary sexual companions, someone who makes bodily love without speaking or someone who can recite the words of love but can't take part in any physical embrace. This schizophrenia of the fesh and the soul is the menace that inspires Godard's preoccupation with language, and confers on him the painful, self-interrogatory terms of his restless art. As Natasha declares at the end of Alphaville, "There are words I don't know." But it's that painful knowledge, according to Godard's controlling Godard / 189 narrative myth, that marks the beginning of her redemption; and-by an extension of the same goal-the redemption of art itself. (February 1968) Trip to Hanoi Trip to Hanoi 1 237 know that? Instead of being so amazed at their ability to transcend their situation as America's victims and our identity as citizens of the enemy nation, I began to imagine concretely how it was indeed possible for the Vietnamese, at this moment in their history, to welcome American citizens as friends. It was important, I realized, not to be abashed by all the small gifts and flowers thrust on us wherever we went. Id minded that we weren't allowed to pay for anything during our stay- not even the numerous books I asked for or the cables I sent my son in New York every few days to let him know I was all right (despite my insistence that at least I be allowed to pay for these). Gradually, I could see it was just stingy of me to resist, or feel oppressed by, the material generosity of our hosts. But the change didn't consist only in my becoming a more graceful recipient of Vietnamese generosity, a better audience for their elaborate courtesy. Here, too, there was something further to be understood; and through more contact with people in Vietnam, I discovered their politeness to be quite unlike' 2) "OurS, and not only because there was so much more of it. In America and Europe, being polite (whether in large or small doses) always carries a latent hint of insincerity, a mild imputation of coercion. For us, politeness means conventions of amiable behavior people have agreed to practice, whether or not they "really" feel like it, because their "real" feelings aren't consistently civil or generous enough to guarantee a working social order. By definition, politeness is never truly honest; it testifies to the disparity between social behavior and authentic feeling. Perhaps this disparity, accepted in this part of the world as an article of faith concerning the human con- dition, is what gives us our taste for irony. Irony becomes essential as a mode of indicating the truth, a whole life-truth: namely, that we both mean and don't mean what we're saying or doing. I had originally been disconcerted by the absence of irony among the Vietnamese. But if I could renounce, at least imaginatively, my conviction of the inevitability of irony, the / 238 Vietnamese suddenly looked far less undecipherable. Their language didn't seem quite so imprisoning and simplistic, either. (For the development of ironic truths, one needs lots of words. Without irony, not so many words are required.) The Vietnamese operate by another notion of civility than the one we're accustomed to, and that implies a shift in the meaning of honesty and sincerity. Honesty as it is understood in Vietnam bears little resemblance to the sense of honesty that has been elevated by secular Western culture virtually above all other values. In Vietnam, honesty and sincerity are functions of the dignity of the individual. A Vietnamese, by being sincere, reinforces and enhances his personal dignity. In this society, being sincere often means precisely forfeiting one's claim to dignity, to an attractive appearance; it means the willingness to be shameless. The difference is acute. This culture subscribes to an empirical or descriptive notion of sincerity, which measures whether a man is sincere by how fully and accurately his words mirror his hidden thoughts and feelings. The Vietnamese have a normative or prescriptive notion of sincerity. While our aim is to make the right align- ment-correspondence-between one's words and behavior and one's inner life (on the assumption that the truth voiced by the speaker is ethically neutral, or rather is rendered ethically neutral or even praiseworthy by the speaker's willing- ness to avow it), theirs is to construct an appropriate relation between the speaker's words and behavior and his social identity. Sincerity, in Vietnam, means behaving in a manner worthy of one's role; sincerity is a mode of ethical aspiration. Thus, it's off the point to speculate whether the warmth of Pham Van Dong during the hour conversation Bob, Andy, and I had with him in the late afternoon of May 16 was sincere in our sense, or whether the Prime Minister "really" wanted to embrace us as we left his office, before walking us out the front door and across the gravel driveway to our waiting cars. He was sincere in the Vietnamese sense: his behavior was attractive, it was becoming, it intended good. Nor is it quite Trip to Hanoi 1 239 right to ask whether the Vietnamese "really" hate the Ameri. cans, even though they say they don't; or to wonder why they don't hate Americans, if indeed they do not. One basic unit of Vietnamese culture is the extraordinary, beautiful gesture. But gesture mustn't be interpreted in our sense-something put on, theatrical. The gestures a Vietnamese makes aren't a per- formance external to his real personality. By means of ges- tures, those acts brought off according to whatever standards he affirms, his self is constituted. And in certain cases, per- sonality can be wholly redefined by a single, unique gesture: for a person to do something finer than he ever has done may promote him, without residue, to a new level on which such acts are regularly possible. (In Vietnam, moral ambition is a truth-an already confirmed reality-in a way it isn't among us, because of our psychological criteria of "the typical" and "the consistent." 2> This contrast sheds light on the quite differ- ent role political and moral exhortation plays in a society like Vietnam. Much of the discourse we would dismiss as propa- gandistic or manipulative possesses a depth for the Viet- namese to which we are insensitive.) Vietnam-at least in its official view of itself~may strike the secular Western eye as a society tremendously overextended ethically, that is, psychologically. But such a judgment de- pends entirely on our current, modest standards of how much virtue human beings are capable of. And Vietnam is, in many ways, an affront to these standards. I remember feeling just so affronted when, during the first afternoon of a two-day drive into mountainous Hoa Binh province north of Hanoi, we stopped briefly somewhere in the countryside to visit the grave of an American pilot. As we got out of our cars and walked off the road about fifty yards through the high grass, Oanh told us that it was the pilot of an F-105 brought down by a farmer with a rifle about a year ago. The pilot had failed to eject and crashed with his plane on this very spot; some villagers re- covered his body from the wreckage. Coming into a clearing, we saw not a simple grave but an elevated mound decorated 1 264 is perhaps the most intricately developed expression of private individuality. Conducted at this high pitch of development, talking becomes a double-edged activity; both an aggressive act and an attempted embrace. Thus talk often testifies to the poverty or inhibition of our feelings; it flourishes as a substi- tute for more organic connections between people. (When people really love, or are genuinely in touch with themselves, they tend to shut up.) But Vietnam is a culture in which people have not got the final devastating point about talking, have not gauged the subtle, ambivalent resources of language -because they don't experience as we do the isolation of a "private self." Talk is still a rather plain instrumentality for them, a less important means of being connected with their environment than direct feeling, love. The absence of the sharp distinction between public and private spheres also allows the Vietnamese a relation to their country that must seem exotic to us. It is open to the Viet- namese to love their country passionately, every inch of it. One can't exaggerate the fervor of their patriotic passion and their intense attachment to particular places. Most people, I no- ticed, volunteer quickly where they are from, with a special considered in itself. And one can indeed "talk" revolutions away, by a disproportion between consciousness and verbalization, on the one hands e vid the emount r6 amati cal "will en the atharon 'Huace thanked -and very beautifully, too-instead of reorganizing the administration of the captured universities. Their staging of street demonstrations and confrontations with the police was conceived as a rhetorical or gymbolle, rather than a pragical, act; it too was a kind of talkinfian?" In our society, "idealistic" tends to mean "disorganized"; tends to mean merely "emotional." society in which they live are profoundly confused and thoughtless not people, it is an asocial activity, a form of action designed for the assertion of individuality against the body politic. It is the ritual activity of outsiders, rather than of people united by a passionate bond to their country. Trip to Hanot 1 265 melancholy if they were born in the South and have therefore been prevented from returning there for many years. And I remember Oanh describing his childhood on his uncle's fishing boat in Ha Long Bay, a famous resort area during the French colonial period. (Oanh recalled the excitement he felt as a small boy in the late 1920's when Paulette Goddard spent a holiday there.) But when Oanh had gone on for a while about the splendors of the rock formations in the bay, now heavily bombed, he stopped, almost apologetically, to say something like: Of course your Rocky Mountains must be very beautiful, too. But is it possible to feel like that about America now? That was something I often debated with the Vietnamese. They assured me that I must love America just as much as they love Vietnam. It's my patriotism that makes me oppose my coun- try's foreign policy; I want to preserve the honor of the country I cherish above all others. There was some truth in what they said: all Americans-alas-believe that America is special, or ought to be. But I knew I didn't feel the positive emotion that Vietnamese attributed to me. Outrage and dis- appointment, yes. Love, no. Putting it in the baby language they and I shared (which I'd become rather skillful at), I explained: it's hard to love America right now, because of the violence which America is exporting all over the world; and given that the interests of humanity come before those of any particular people, a decent American today must be an inter- nationalist first and a patriot second. Once at the Writers Union, when I had made this point ( and not for the first time, so my voice may have been a little plaintive), a young poet answered me soothingly in English: "We are patriots, but in a happy way. You have more suffering in your patriotism." Sometimes they seemed to understand, but more often they didn't. Perhaps the difficulty is that, as I've already mentioned, they're quite fond of America themselves. People in Vietnam appear to take for granted that the United States is in many ways the greatest country in the world; the richest, the most 1 266 advanced technologically, the most alive culturally, the most powerful, even the most free. They are not only endlessly curious about America-Oanh said several times how much he longs to visit the States as soon as the war is over-but genuinely admiring. I have described earlier the avidity of the poets and novelists for American literature. Pham Van Dong mentioned respectfully "your Declaration of Independence, from which Ho Chi Minh quoted when he declared the independence of Vietnam from the French on September 2, 1945. Hong Tung, the editor of the principal daily paper, Nhan Dan, spoke of his "love" for the United States and praised to us "your tradition of freedom" which makes pos- sible such creative political acts as the sit-in and the teach-in. The United States, he said, disposes of possibilities of good unmatched by any other country in the world. If their view of the United States seemed at first improb- able, then innocent and touching, the emotion the Vietnamese have for their own country seemed utterly alien, and even dangerous. But by the end of my visit I began to feel less estranged. Discovering the essential purity of their own pa- triotism showed me that such an emotion need not be identical with chauvinism. (How sensitive the Vietnamese are to the difference was clear in the only slightly concealed distaste of people I met in Hanoi for recent developments in China, like the cult of Mao and the cultural revolution.) If the Viet- namese could make such distinctions, so could I. Of course, I knew perfectly well why the attitude the Vietnamese expected of me was in fact so difficult. Ever since World War II, the rhetoric of patriotism in the United States has been in the hands of reactionaries and yahoos; by monopolizing it, they have succeeded in rendering the idea of loving America synonymous with bigotry, provincialism, and selfishness. But perhaps one shouldn't give up so easily. When the chairman of the Writers Union, Dang Thai Mai, said in his speech of welcome to Bob, Andy, and myself, "You are the very picture of the genuine American, " why should I have slightly flinchedp Trip to Hanoi 1 267 If what I feel is that fag-waving Legionnaires and Irish cops and small-town car salesmen who will vote for George Wallace are the genuine Americans, not I-which I fear part of me does feel-isn't that cowardly, shallow, and simply untrue? Why should I (we) not think of myself (ourselves) as a genuine American? With a little more purity of vision-but one would have to close the seepage of private despair into public grievances-maybe an intelligent American who cares for the other ninety-six percent of the human population and for the bio-ecological future of the planet could love America, too. Probably no serious radical movement has any future in America unless it can revalidate the tarnished idea of patriot- ism. One of my thoughts in the closing days of my stay in North Vietnam was that I would like to try. Unfortunately, the first test of my vow came much sooner than I expected, almost immediately, in the first hours after leaving Hanoi the evening of May 17, and I failed right off. I wish something could be arranged to insure a proper "coming down" for visitors to North Vietnam in the first days after their departure. Umprepared, the ex-guest of the Democratic Re- public of North Vietnam is in for a series of brutal assaults. Thirty minutes out of Hanoi, it was the spectacle of the drunken Polish members of the International Control Com- mission sitting around a table in the forward part of the plane dealing out a deck of pornographic playing cards. As we made our first touchdown, in the small airfeld of Vientiane, it was seeing the landing area crowded with planes marked Air America (the C.I.A's private airline) which leave daily from here to drop napalm on villages in Northern Laos held by the Pathet Lao. Then came the taxi ride into Vientiane itself, River City U.S.A. (as Andy dubbed it), sordid outpost of the American empire. Servile, aggressive Laotian pedi-cab drivers trying to hustle a fare, an elderly lady tourist or a freaked-out hippie or an American soldier, weaved in and out of Cadillacs driven by American businessmen and Laotian government personnel. We passed the movie theatres showing skin ficks