The Tempest (Derek Jarman, 1979)
In the 1960s, French philosopher Gilles Deleuze produced in succession short and minor works of tremendous impact on Nietzsche (1962), Kant (1963), Proust (1964), and Bergson (1966). As regards Proust, it is Deleuze’s contention that a relationship to semiotic chains ought to replace a focus on memory in consideration of the basic operational mode of Proust’s multi-volume Recherche. Much of Deleuze’s trajectory through the 60s is traced in his letters. Writing to Jean Piel, who had taken over editorial stewardship of Critique after the death of Geroges Bataille in 1962, Deleuze apologizes for not being able to produce a piece on Céline anytime in the near future. Later, in 1968, writing to Piel again, Deleuze correlates, in passing, Lewis Carroll’s work to an emerging logic of sense and some kind of major project that threatens to expand indefinitely. Lewis Carroll and Antonin Artaud are already united in the work at hand along with a direct consideration of the schizophrenic, as stated explicitly in the letter, even though Deleuze will not meet institutional psychiatrist and future collaborator Félix Guattari until the two men are introduced in the Limousin region during the spring of 1969 (where Deleuze is, naturally, a man chronically unwell, convalescing). Many letters from Deleuze to Guattari are collected in the opening section of Semiotext(e)’s Letters and Other Texts. In one instance Deleuze provides his young depressive colleague with a pep talk: “The idea that conditions are not yet right to do it, either because things are not going well in the current inferno, or that you yourself are not doing well, seems false to me; because it is the same as saying that one can only truly write when things are going well, instead of seeing writing as a modest but active and effective factor in getting out of the inferno for a moment and in feeling better oneself.” Practical advise and indisputably wise. Already by April of 1971 Deleuze is writing derisively in a letter to the great Pierre Klossowski as concerns “Marxist-psychoanalytical immobilism.” Sent a questionnaire by Arnaud Villani in 1980, Deleuze responds to the question “Are you a non-metaphysician philosopher?” by insisting outright: “No, I see myself as a pure metaphysician.” As he has already told us emphatically: “Bergson says that modern science did not find its metaphysics, the metaphysics it needed. I am interested in this metaphysics.” Deleuze and Guattari stood on the side of youth and the “right to nonsense.” It is the jovial industriousness of these great thinkers and their almost jovial vision that makes me think of Ernst Lubitsch’s tender-comic immediate postwar Hollywood masterpiece Cluny Brown, in which young lady plumber Jennifer Jones bangs her wrench haplessly against the clanging pipes until the connection happens for her, the blockage is removed, all that goop slides loose and lazy, and she achieves her schizoanalytic line of flight. What is the line of flight? It’s the thing that finally works…and busts your ass out of the binary apparatus permanente. Prospero, a bunch of other people, a shipwrecking storm at sea, salubrious occasion for myth to emanate like a steam from a compact alien landmass, a little rock, just like all the little rocks from Ithaca to Alcatraz to The Invention of Morel. Bill Shakespeare, The Tempest, 1611. The Bard & Co.’s most metaphysical play. Kathleen M. Lea makes all the salient parallels between The Tempest and pan-European commedia dell-arte: “the favourite setting is either the coast of Arcadia or a lost island; the dramatis personae consists of a magician who has a somewhat malicious interest in the love affairs of a group of nymphs and shepherds among whom one may be his daughter and the other the lost son of the Magnifico or the Doctor who are shipwrecked onto the coast with the Zanni. The magician’s attendants are satyrs, demons, or rustics of the cruder sort… At the denouement the magician discovers the relationship between himself, the lovers, and the strangers, ends the play by renouncing his magic and sometimes agrees to leave the island and return to civic life.” Blaise Pascal said hedge your bets lest ye be ruled out by unknown celestial elites. You need serious computing power to do anything like that these days. “These are not catastrophes I went out of my way to look for—these were my friends,” bemoans F. Scott Fitzgerald respective of a life lived and dragged roughly along tarmac during the Jazz Age, “moreover, these things happened not during the depression but during the boom.” It’s a very delicate business, these intensities, caution Deleuze and Guattari. Intensive excitation may become “harmful if it overtaxes your strength at a given moment […] you have to be able to take it, you have to be in shape […]”
PORTIS
My favourite thing about the Arkansas writer Charles Portis is that when he quit his prestigious overseas journalism gig and they asked him what he was going to do next, he said he was going to go write novels in a fishing shack in Arkansas. Though the noble and sterling True Grit was the novel that made him rich and comfortably retired, it is Gringos, his final novel, that is his most filling/nourishing, most vivid, and just A#1 thoroughbred best. It tells the story of Jimmy Burns, a veteran of the Korean War originally from Louisiana who has spent a number of years eking out a half-assed living on Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula, occasionally tracking down runaways and wanted persons as a side gig. Gringos is to an extent dallying in genre fiction, combining elements of the western and the skip-trace-style detective yarn. Jimmy has something of the quality of a Southerner Philip Marlowe to him. He used to make his living illegally salvaging relics from remote Mayan tombs et cetera, but came to realize that the practice was somewhat risky and probably ethically indefensible. Now Jimmy tracks down the occasional missing person and transports things for people in his truck. One of the many mantras Jimmy shares with the reader warns: “if you have a truck your friends will drive you crazy.” On the subject of his one-time paramour Beth, a smart lady with a penchant for hooking up with poets, Jimmy notes: “Art and Mike said taking an intellectual woman into your home was like taking in a baby raccoon. They were both amusing for awhile but soon became randomly vicious and learned how to open the refrigerator.” Rudy is an itinerant Ufologists come to Mayaland in hopes of making either contact or substantive discoveries pertaining to ancient extraterrestrial interference in earthly affairs. There are others of Rudy’s ilk about. There are also many archeologists and archeological wannabes, foremost among them Dr. Richard Flandin, an elderly gentleman who has been working on his book on the Maya for many decades and who laments repeatedly and at length how he has been alternately robbed and ignored by the know-nothing institution bozos. There are endless ragged bands of roving hippies, more specifically “real hippies, false hippies, pyramid power people, various cranks and mystics, hollow earth people, flower children and the von Däniken people.” Among these can be counted the Jumping Jacks, who profess to be searching for the Inaccessible City of Dawn and who insist innocuously that they have “fled the madness and found the gladness.” They are led by a malevolent guy named Dan, sporting a tattoo which betrays his having spent at least some time in the Aryan Brotherhood, and in the company of the Jumping Jacks is a little red-headed girl who Jimmy will discover, having consulted the Blue Papers comprising the current roster of missing or wanted, to be a runaway named LaJoye Mishell Teeter. Rudy, the alien fanatic, will go missing. Jimmy will go off in pursuit of Rudy and LaJoye Mishell Teeter. He will be handed a .45 automatic pistola on a literal platter. There is an old man known to the locals as El Obisbo who walks around Mérida, the town where Jimmy has nominally set up shop, muttering over and over a passage from Mark about towers coming crashing down and who may or may not turn at night into a reddish fox-faced dog generally only seen about to disappear around a corner. Our house dick sets off with his buddy Refugio, a first-time-out-in-the-field archeologist named Gail, and the daffy Dr. Flandin. Somehow…they end up at the Inaccessible City of Dawn…where hippie hordes have gathered, “this flock of migrant cockatoos,” for what they believe to be the imminent end of the world, some apparently hoping to prevent the apocalypse by way of an unspecified sacrifice. Someone named El Mago would appear to figure in all of this business somewhere. “Monkeys were screaming back and forth at one another across the river. The lunatic monkeys knew something was up.” The world of Gringos is practically outside of world-historic time, though the profusion of hippies might seem to help date it. Jimmy Burns was at some point a teenager fighting as a Marine in Korea. He is forty-one years of age during the events that take place in the novel. Because of this, we can be fairly certain that Gringos, published in 1991 and otherwise not forthcoming on the subject, takes place sometime in the 70s. Portis was also a Marine in Korea. It would seem clear that he identifies with Jimmy Burns and no doubt hands to a certain extent part of his own sensibility over to this congenial loafer, lax as the man is for the most part, sometimes half misanthrope, but always more or less good-humoured and serious about his ethics, beholden to a code…which we all know to be a must for heroes of genre fiction. Sure, Jimmy Burns understands that the UFO nuts are indeed nuts. He’s nobody’s fool. “Still, the flying saucer books were fun to read and there weren’t nearly enough of them to suit me. I liked the belligerent ones best, that took no crap off the science establishment.”
HIGHSMITH
In 1969’s The Tremor of Forgery, a real slow-burner from the great Patricia Highsmith, we keep very close to protagonist Howard Ingham, an American writer who resides at least at the outset in New York, where, on account of the success of his third novel, he keeps a nice if smallish apartment on West Fourth Street, near Washington Square. Circumstances quietly congealing, Ingham finds himself dispatched to Tunisia where he has been sent to connect with a prospective collaborator named John Castlewood who hopes Ingham will craft a screenplay for a project titled Trio, which it is believed needs to be set in Tunisia because the behaviour of the amorous antagonists would not be terribly credible in an American milieu. Back in New York, Ingham has a love interest of his own, Ina Pallant, and he is not quite sure where things stand between the two of them. There is also the matter of Charlotte (or Lotte), a woman to whom Ingham was briefly married and to whom he retains unresolved feelings. The idea is that John Castlewood is supposed to join Ingham shortly, but this does not come to pass, and Ingham grows increasingly agitated in the foreign and totally unfamiliar environment, a great deal of time having passed without his receiving word from either Castlewood or Ina. Ina eventually shows up in Tunisia, the absence of Castlewood is explained, all of this produces further complications and psychospiritual mutations, these generally being complications of a sort that no reader is likely to predict—which is why the reader is reading suspense novels in the first place. Before Ina does show up, Ingham establishes relationships with three key people: Francis J. Adams of Connecticut, or OWL (Our Way of Life), a friendly and good-natured advocate of American values, anti-communist, claiming he has been recruited by dissident Soviets to covertly spread folksy radio propaganda behind the Iron Curtain; the attractive servant boy Mokta, about seventeen years of age or thereabouts, who Ingham would appear to intuit is far more cunning an operator than he lets on; and Anders Jensen, queer Dane with German police dog, whose somewhat bitter worldview seems to rub off on Ingham and with whom Ingham will eventually become something like roommates, moving from his comfy Reine de Hammamet bungalow and into an eminently Arabian squat, the toilet a hole in the floor, where he occupies the floor beneath Jensen and works to complete a novel commenced whilst killing time. Highsmith almost always writes in a third-person that is not properly omniscient in that it is careful to keep fixed on the cogitation of the characters and refrain from providing us with information to which they are not contextually privy. Ingham’s mental state increasingly becomes affected by his new environment. This is a man who moves slowly but is also impatient and restless, compulsively checking to see if mail has arrived, fussy and distracted, but lurking about his frazzled regime like a languid predator. “The days began to drag. They dragged for two days, then Ingham picked up mentally, or perhaps slowed down, so that he didn’t mind the dragging. He was making some progress in planning his novel, and had the first three chapters clearly in mind.” Eating less, its being so hot, Ingham is starting to lose weight. He writes to Ina: “Africa is strangely good for thinking. It’s like standing naked in glaring sunlight against a white wall. Somehow nothing is hidden in this bright light…” As he and Jensen become more bitter and vocal about it, coming to express disdain for Arabs and their attributed lack of a sense of sanctity, this eventually develops into Ingham's feeling at times “a detached disgust for the whole human race.” Though the situation is highly pressurized for sure and we might expect the Ingham-OWL cat-and-mouse business to get heated, as it probably would were this a different Highsmith novel, this great author’s genius lies in fact in her capacity to locate here in a pinpoint and pinwheel manner an interstice whereby two opposed men's competing domains and offset stratagems may well arrive at a powerful unexpected confluence, a radical and highly uncustomary synergy. What does that look like? Perhaps the destiny machine is producing hope rather than doom, and perhaps the unconscious is but its agent. The moral of the story is: I’m alone in this crumbling substandard dwelling structure and that’s how it was meant to be…oh, and the novel’s coming along great. Ommm.
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