The Magnificent Ambersons (Orson Welles, 1942)
Bruno Schulz, "Undula Visits the Artists" [1920-22]
“The future belongs to crowds,” writes Don DeLillo semi-famously as capstone to the bold opening of his 1991 novel Mao II, a book you might say is about art and trouble. One might argue additionally that what the novel fails to foresee is the way in which the internet would existentially isolate folks while leaving them hyper-connected…and hypervigilant. The Indian writer Arundhati Roy once said that the American version of freedom is the freedom to sit at home with your washing machine. DeLillo: “The war is so fucking simple. It is the lunar part of us that dreams of wasted terrain. She hears their voices calling across the levelled city. Our only language is Beirut.” This concern with the individual in unsettled relation to the mass has always been at the heart of DeLillo, but what concerns his later works just as much is an obsession with history—the development of historical spirit should we deign to frame it Hegelian-like—and human evolution (in the way that human evolution is more or less the principle zone of interest for both J.G. Ballard and David Cronenberg also). I love the delicate twinnings—the doublings—in Mao II: the novelist and the terrorist; [Warhol’s] Mao II and Coke II; Yankee Stadium and the Theatre of War. Who did the future end up belonging to? “But it is funny how a picture. It is funny how a picture what?” Totally, Don, totally. I feel seen. In his introduction to the New Directions edition of The Besieged City by Clarice Lispector, the greatest novelist of the 20th century, Benjamin Moser argues with verve and convincing conviction that this characteristically astonishing 1949 Lispector virtuoso ostentationem, written in Portuguese in Switzerland, is mostly about horses and things and how each become central to how the novel’s nominal protagonist, Lucrécia Neves, frames herself in her world; how she navigates. There is the idea of the horse and the idea of unhorsing, obyezloshadenie, a concept borrowed from Isaac Babel, who wrote of the disappearance of horses, their replacement by motors, during the process of industrial modernization. Lucrécia Neves lives in the township of São Geraldo, and the novel depicts a process of modernization in which the town is first filled with horses, brought in to do work related to building and transportation, followed later by a subsequent emptying of the transmorphological city of said horses. Horse and woman are presented as the basic agents of building. They are the main things you need if you want a city in the first place. Lucrécia lives on Market Street, and she drifts through the free market of men and things on offer, bound to nothing but what passes through her senses, what she thereby constructs or helps to construct, if only in passing…if only sketched in passing as ephemeral diagram. If São Geraldo is not a dream world it has something of a dream geography and is never fixed in place, not only because of the predations of progress but because of how unstable our constructions cannot help but be to begin with, the species handcuffed by the conditions of its speciation. Early in my reading of The Besieged City, and definitely with Moser’s inadvertent prompt, I thought a little of Orson Welles’s 1942 film adaptation of Booth Tarkington’s The Magnificent Ambersons, that preeminent Hollywood movie about the effects of unhorsing on the world-frame and the subsequent rise of the motor, but the further I waded into Lispector’s hallucinatory urban vision the more it reminded me of Bruno Schulz’s The Street of Crocodiles, perhaps the great literary work covering communities and their ubiquitous metaphysical slippages. A literature of trap doors, cinnamon men, and animatronic playthings you haven’t even imagined yet.
Dr. Polidori and Lord Byron
Paul West and his wife Diane Ackerman in 2012
One of his many ultra-refined and goes-down-smooth sublime historical fictions, Lord Byron’s Doctor by supreme master Paul West tends, if for sure inherently tragicomic, toward the mirthless, the aghast guffaw, or a wisecrack or chortle caught in the throat. The word “humour” once carried associations with anatomical implications, the elemental fluids upon which our general health was then believed to rest being blood, the biles, and phlegm. When the body’s humours become fowled or corrupted, it may sap one's ability to laugh and carry on and do the good living our tough-love God wants done. Fun and freewheeling days of yore? What good were they ever for? Doctor John Polidori, real and noted historical personage, became at the ripe age of twenty travelling companion and personal physician to legendary Romantic brute Lord Byron, a man of title, fame, and endless stores of mad caprice. Percy Shelley, the great Romantic poet, serially reckless on water and a sworn hash smoker, only three years Polidori’s senior, drowned the year before the doctor committed suicide, age twenty-nine. George Gordon Byron, libertine Baron, died in Greece in 1824, age thirty-six, which he probably went there unconsciously to do. Allegra, the illegitimate daughter Byron sired with Claire Clairmont, Mary Shelley’s stepsister, died at the age of five in 1822. Mary Shelley’s mother, legendary feminist campaigner Mary Wollstonecraft, died shortly after giving birth to her daughter, and Mary Shelley would herself lose three children before giving birth to Percy Florence Shelley. Percy Shelley’s first wife committed suicide and so did Fanny Imlay, Mary Wollstonecraft’s illegitimate daughter, who had an extremely close personal connection to both Mary Shelley and Claire Clairmont throughout the childhoods of all three. Mary Shelley lived to see fifty-three, Claire Clairmont, ever the odd woman out, an impressive eighty. It turns out that Lord Byron had sex with lots of people by any standard but that he was clubfooted, bilious, and nobody’s idea of a good screw. The tragedy of Dr. Polidori is that he aspires to be honest with himself and with the world presented before him, but simply finds himself inadequate to the task, as if his bad faith is happening to him, effect of some other affect, rather than being produced in real time by his nervous system and his choices. Claire Claremont avers, her read a sound one assuredly, that Byron prefers ever to be on the giving end of hurt and anguish, never the receiving, and that’s the cad’s modus operandi. “I don’t give a damn for death,” says Byron in confirmation, “but I do dread its sting. I am not among those who dote deliciously on pain—not my own, at least.” Polidori seeks to achieve a big picture plateau he can actually use or at least settle under provisionally like a tarp: “Heaven, I thought, was like Ampleforth, my old school, where you died a little every day, and we were taught by all those devout old Catholic dominies that the end of life is death. Such is life’s aim, its fruition. I half believed it, sensing even in my early years of school that, once you accepted death, the rest of life was one sustained lying-back, head against the antimacassar for ever. No need to try.” This is the angle of perspective of what comparative literature scholar Gayatri Spivak calls “planetarity,” a position that looks at human existence from the perspective of the biggest of big pictures, reducing it to a matter of minimal cosmic import. Of course, one almost never remains at this level of scale long in the course of one’s meditations, if only because one generally wishes to accomplish things with the limited time one has on this earth—for as long as one is able to continue deluding oneself. If as an early boy Romantic with cute locks of hair, Polidori had placed flowers into the chest cavities of cadavers, he is toward the end of his life collecting organs in preservative in annoyance. The young doctor’s tragedy is the deinosis he would prefer to disavow, such that it must come out sideways, like a flatulence that can kill enclosed mice. It can be traced back through telling vacillations throughout the old doctor’s life. For example, there’s the prostitute Gaby, whom he had revered absurdly, until his participation in a sordid ménage à trois disabused him of any lingering sense of her baseline purity. And the fates and the furies being what they are, it’s only too late that poor Polidori becomes aware that he loves Claire Clairmont, their first sexual congress having been preceded by his peeling leeches from her prone body.
In his typically compact novel The Divorce, Argentinian writer César Aira sets his central metaphysical set piece off to the periphery of the Rhode Island temporarily-ex-national divorcee we think is the hero, putting Enrique instead for that decisive moment in the driver’s seat, fulcrum of a pratfall involving a dousing with water distractedly released from the canvas awning of a Buenos Aires sidewalk café. We are to quickly discover that his childhood "plunged" Enrique “into the bafflement produced by doublings and parallel universes.” The divorcee is sitting at the same sidewalk cafe with charming video artist Leticia, she the first to be hit by the evental waveform of uncanny recognition reverse-spiralling out of Enrique’s sudden dousing. The waveform then hits the male divorcee, who realizes he too knows Enrique, and then a third party, Enrique’s mother, who Enrique had himself believed long dead and who has been seated unbeknownst this past while behind the divorcee and Leticia, out of their eye-lines and for a considerable time unremarked upon by even the author. During his childhood, an event removed Enrique’s mother from his space-time and relegated her to another—until such time as something like another evental portal might open. “It’s not true that you came into this world,” Alan Watts tells us. “You came out of it, like a flower comes out of a plant.” In The Divorce and its metaphysics of the event, natural selection is the linchpin, as in Darwin, the question being: how is it events and semiosis make their selections? “It must have been a kind of short-hand, one event standing in for all the rest. But it could not have been randomly chosen: the recollection must have been special in some way, like all the others, of course…. If that was where the meaning of life lay, it was very mysterious, because no two episodes can have precisely the same significance.” In An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter, from ten years before The Divorce and one of Aira’s most perfect books, the hero, kidnapped from the pages of history, is Johann Moritz Rugendas (1802-1858), a German belonging to and descending from a family dynasty consisting of clockmakers and painters who were originally Flemish but ended up in Germany where Protestants were not subject to persecution and where a lineage of mastery could perhaps attain new footing. “On the threshold of his twentieth year, the world that opened before him was roughly mapped out yet still unexplored, much as it was, around the same time, for the young Charles Darwin.” If Rugendas’s journey through Argentina in the late 1830s is a journey into the heart of darkness, this never becomes a matter of any kind of infernal absorption into the primal or the savage in the commonplace sense, rather taking the form of a somewhat ungainly personal revolution, an enabling and even emancipatory one, even if this picaresque tale is darkly comic and even a little slapstick. A student of the Humboldtian naturalist school of painting and geometric order as well as a bold and ambitious young man, Rugendas heads at the end of 1837 into the Cordillera mountain region of Argentina in the company of guides and Robert Krause, his less talented but otherwise extremely competent colleague, discovering that along the treacherous paths the landscape itself begins to resist even cursory intelligibility. “Jagged lines, impossible angles, trees growing downwards from ceilings of rock, sheer slopes plunging into mantles of snow under a scorching sun.” The horses are thrown off, the mules irritable. After a protracted midsummer idyll in the town of Mendoza, where regular earthquakes and Indian raids are incorporated into the local economy and social life, the team sets out across a flat landscape that is not yet technically the famous Argentinean pampas. “On the plains, space became small and intimate, almost mental.” The resident gaucho begins to have discomfiting premonitions; something doesn’t feel right. Many days into the journey across the plain the group comes upon a surreal, apocalyptic sight: an entire region apparently swallowed up be a plague of locusts moments before their happening upon it, “a lunar ocean.” The landscape painter himself, young master already famous as the foremost cataloguer of the physiognomy of nature, has front row seats he never asked for to physiognomic nature’s comprehensive systems crash. And he is born anew, a battered-to-hell phoenix from the ashes. “Owls began to moan deep in the woods and the terrified Indians were captured in swirls of blood and optical effects. In the dancing firelight, their features drifted free.” So who, then, unseen, is in the landscape? The irreconcilable plural.
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