dymo/stencil #036 - tsai ming-liang

Tsai Ming-liang, outside Top Video Flash in High St, Northcote.
(Hopefully his films are available for rental inside the store.)

2. The terrible truth

Separating and letting go (from the herd, from false communion) may be obligatory steps towards individuation and becoming one’s own self – the key to the ultimate ability to break free, but increasingly this process reveals a terrible truth: our essential aloneness - even (and especially) from those we’re closest to.

Pistorius knows it – but, as he discloses to fellow seeker Emil Sinclair, he isn’t prepared to renounce the warmth of the herd for the solitary quest-to-know:

“...I can’t do that, I am incapable of it. Perhaps you will be able to do it one day. It is difficult, it is the only truly difficult thing there is. I have often dreamed of doing so, but I can’t; the idea fills me with dread: I am not capable of standing so naked and alone. I, too, am a poor weak creature who needs warmth and food and occasionally the comfort of human companionship. Someone who seeks nothing but his own fate no longer has any companions, he stands quite alone and has only cold universal space around him...And actually this is the path one should follow. People like you and me are quite lonely really but we still have each other, we have the secret satisfaction of being different, of rebelling, of desiring the unusual. But you must shed that, too, if you want to go all the way to the end...” (Hermann Hesse, Demian, 1919; tr. Roloff and Lebeck 1970).  

Knulp knows it, too – but isn’t tormented by it. His separation is measured and matter-of-fact:

“...I’ve had two loves in my life, real ones I mean, and each time I knew it would last forever and could end only with death, but each time it ended, and I didn’t die. I had a friend too...and I thought we’d never part. But we did part...”

“...no matter how close two human beings may be, there is always a gulf between them which only love can bridge, and that only from hour to hour.”

“Every human being has his soul, he can’t mix it with any other. Two people can meet, they can talk with one another, they can be close together. But their souls are like flowers, each rooted to its place. One can’t go to another, because it would have to break away from its roots, and that it can’t do” (Hermann Hesse, Knulp, 1915; tr. Manheim 1971).

Tristan knows the terrible truth, as well - and attempts to evade it by means of self-obliteration masked as eternal love-fulfilment. During the sublime duet in Act II, Scene II of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, the lovers denounce the Day when they must keep apart and praise the Night when they can be together:

Oh, sink down upon us, night of love

Make me forget I live

Take me into your bosom

Free me from the world.

...

Holy twilight's
Glorious presentiment

Obliterates the horror of delusion

Setting us free from the world.

Tristan goes one step further, giving way to an inherent longing for death:

Let me die!

...

Never to wake!

A perturbed Isolde draws Tristan’s attention back from his rapturous death wish to the unresolved problem of their fulfilment in love, pointing out the necessity for collusion rather than self-interest in any exit-plan he might be contemplating:

Day and Death

Would they not

With equal force attack our love?

...

But this our love,

Is it not called Tristan and Isolde?

This sweet little word “and”,

Binding as it does love’s union

...

How might it be destroyed
Other than with Isolde’s own life

If death were to be given to Tristan? 

At which point Tristan proposes the idea of the Liebestod (death in love): an answer not only to Day's/Death’s obstacle to the lovers’ union but a solution as well to the problem of individuation that opposes oneness and unity with another:

Thus might we die undivided

One forever without end.

Never waking

Never fearing

Embraced namelessly in love

Given entirely to each other

Living only in our love!

Isolde agrees to follow Tristan into death; their love tryst becomes a promised death tryst into eternal, undivided oblivion:

Ardently desired death in love!

In your arms, devoted to you

Ever sacred glow, freed from the misery of waking.

...

Far from the day’s lamentations at parting!

...

Sublime drifting

Without languishing

Enfolded in sweet darkness

Without separating

Without parting

Dearly alone

Ever at one

In unbounded space

Most blessed of dreams!

...

No more Tristan

No more Isolde

No names, no parting!

Ever!

...

Unendingly, ever one consciousness:

Supreme joy of love

Glowing in our breast!

But the desire for eternal union, driven on a conscious level by the influence of the love potion the couple has accidentally drunk from and a belief in the enduring power of love, is no match for Tristan’s deeper desire: his inherent longing for death (a return to the inorganic absence of any life-tension, see Žižek 2002: 106).  He cannot break away from its root. And in the final act, a wounded Tristan breaks the pact of the Liebestod: instead of waiting for Isolde to heal his wound so they might, as promised, surrender their lives together, he tears off his bandages and dies, alone, before her.

Nike Wagner’s devastating reading of the drama posits the love duet and the Liebestod as a cloak for the terrible truth that is revealed when Tristan breaks the pact of simultaneous death:

“...that even in love, every person is alone...that love is a projection of the self, a code-name for all sorts of other needs. Although we hold the romantic hope that we can submerge our ego in another person, this is ultimately a pious self-deception...one cannot escape from oneself...”

Cynical on the one hand, yet solace of sorts, she adds:

“[The music] helps to shield the audience from the terrible truth that is known to Tristan. Overwhelmed by the flood of the music, the spectator will no doubt reconstruct for himself the utopian unity of the lovers” (Wagner 1998: 83-84).

Slavoj Žižek offers a similar view:

“In Tristan, the ultimate truth does not reside in the musical message of passionate self-obliterating love-fulfilment but in the dramatic stage action itself, which subverts the passionate immersion into the musical texture. The final shared death of the two lovers abounds in Romantic operas...this is precisely not what effectively happens—in music, it is as if the two lovers die together, whereas in reality, they die one after the other, each immersed in his or her own solipsistic dream” (Žižek 2002: 123).

Lars von Trier is someone else who knows the terrible truth - making it (and the music from Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde) subject matter for his latest film, Melancholia.

A film about the end of the world, it’s also an intimate portrait of two tortured souls, sisters Justine and Claire, dealing with their respective personal crises. The call to individuation for Justine is sounded by her sense of doom and downward slide into depression. Claire’s consciousness is roused when all her previously held beliefs and props break down in the face of the impending destruction of the Earth and humanity’s inevitable demise.  

Von Trier’s repeated use of the prelude from Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde aptly underscores the sisters’ torment and the planet’s doom (though the more I think about it, the more I’m inclined to agree with Alex Ross’s affront at von Trier’s relentless dwelling on the opening of the prelude that “turns [it] into a kind of cloying signature tune...[robbing] the music of its capacity to surprise and seduce the listener.” But then I, too, am guilty of relentlessly playing and replaying moments from the prelude, yet the music continues to seduce and astonish, so I’m also inclined to be forgiving).

  

As the collision of Earth with the planet Melancholia approaches, Justine reveals a double terrible truth – our essential and our cosmic aloneness:

Justine

The earth is evil. We don’t need to grieve for it...Nobody will miss it...

Claire

There may be life somewhere else.

Justine

No, there isn’t.

Claire

How do you know?

Justine

Because I know things...I know we’re alone.... And when I say we’re alone...We’re alone.

I read Justine’s initial torment as agony over the fact of individuation and her gradual silence, calmness and dispassionate acceptance of the impending doom as relief from selfhood into oblivion.

The portrait of the two sisters is deeply moving and, as someone who normally doesn’t leave his negative energy behind, I am comfortable with the film’s “radical anti-anthropocentrism” (see Steven Shaviro). Von Trier’s vision of the end of the world was for me aesthetically and emotionally satisfying.

But it’s Tsai Ming-liang who most forlornly envisions the terrible truth – giving the lie to our seemingly unfilmable, invisible, internal feelings.

His early films (Rebels of the Neon God 1993 and Vive L’Amour 1994) centre on the inexorable loneliness of young, mesmerising, alienated, urban-dwellers and are fittingly described as “gorgeously glacial” (see Andrew Chan).

In the ironically but optimistically titled Vive L’Amour, three lonely strangers, May Lin, a real estate agent, Ah-jung, a street vendor and Hsiao-kang, a cremation urn salesman, come together accidentally in an unusual love triangle. The film’s moody tone is full of melancholy – the characters are deeply lonely and unhappy. The final scene showing May Lin walking alone through a desolate park and then sitting down at a bench and giving way to a fit of weeping is devastating. It has troubled me since I saw it. Chan is right to describe the final scene as “audacious”, though he dismisses it as a “ten-minute sob-fest that comes off scripted”. I can’t agree. There is in that deeply affecting (actually, six-minute) finale something that reveals the unrelenting truth of our essential aloneness.

Yang Kuei-Mei as May Lin in the final scene from Vive L'Amour

However, comedy is also a central element in the films of Tsai Ming-liang – in the characters themselves and in the chance encounters between them. Jared Rapfogel contends the comedy “lies in the way [Ming-liang] shows us what his characters cannot see – that though they may feel lonely, in fact they’re not nearly as separate as they think...Life is a comedy for Tsai because, from his point of view, people are so far from each other yet so close; they feel trapped in a bottomless solitude, while others crawl by inches away...a universe full of unfulfilled, often unconscious connections”.

The possibility this optimistic notion suggests - that our sense of isolation and despair may not necessarily (have to) be unshared – is something I would like to address in my next blog entry. 

(NB the 1973 Böhm/Jourdan Theatre Antique d'Orange production of Tristan und Isolde remains my preferred production,  however, I have quoted the English libretto from the 1983 Barenboim/Ponnelle Bayreuth production; the translation, in my opinion, is slightly better.)

dymo/stencil #035 - hermann hesse

Hermann Hesse (with Jung close by) outside Allsorts Books in High St Northcote

1. Compulsion to flee

My inherent desire for separation (from the herd, from false communion) is stirring. Incomplete disentanglements and partings won’t do. I’m tempted but terrified by the thought of walking away completely. Regardless, I lack the actual courage to flee. My attempts at flight are condemned to remain imaginary dress rehearsals. How dull.

In the metropolis where Anselm was a teacher and had a high academic reputation, he went about behaving exactly like other people of the world...he was serious or genial as the occasion demanded...But...He suddenly felt as if many years had slipped past and left him standing strangely alone and unsatisfied with a way of life for which he had always longed. It was no real happiness to be a professor, it was not really gratifying to be respectfully greeted by citizens and students, it was all stale and commonplace. (Hermann Hesse, Iris, 1918)

Like Anselm, my mask suggests I’m always where I want to be. The truth is, I’m really always checking to make sure there’s an exit route.

I suspect I’m beginning to undergo individuation, defined by Jung as the process by which a person becomes a psychological individual, a separate indivisible unity or whole, recognising his/her innermost uniqueness...becoming one’s own self or self-realisation...distinguished from ego-centredness and individualism (Encyclopedia of Psychology and Religion Vol. 2).

This process of psychological maturity, through a confrontation between the conscious and unconscious aspects of the self, is considered to be natural, but not everyone responds to its call. After all, as Emil Sinclair perceptively asserts:

...nothing in the world is more distasteful to a man than to take the path that leads to himself. (Hermann Hesse, Demian, 1919)

On the other hand, the process of individuation may also be provoked by a (significant) change in one’s circumstances, a (profound) personal crisis or a (strong) desire to change direction. Having experienced all three lately, it’s probable that my desire for flight is really a call to a confrontation with the self. I’m no longer willing to simply identify with my persona.

According to Jung, the process, though painful, is meant to have a profound healing effect, leading to harmony through deeper self-awareness and greater acceptance of the self. But I’m sceptical that the quest-to-know leads anywhere other than a return to disenchantment and illusion. The ideas about the self inherent in Clarice Lispector’s work (influenced and inspired by Hermann Hesse's Steppenwolf) are much more convincing: identity is an irreconcilable paradox; there is no recourse but to abandon the quest-to-know and return to the paralysing, false security of conventional wisdoms, structures and codes of conduct.

However, that doesn’t mean I don’t find the work of Hermann Hesse deeply satisfying. Hero to the tormented and disenchanted, his Jungian-influenced writing deals with the difficulties put in the way of the individual in his/her effort to build up an integrated, harmonious self. On a conscious level, I’m prone to utopian notions of unity – permitted, at least, in fiction – even if at a deeper level I subscribe more to the idea of the fractured and fragmented nature of reality.

I haven’t yet read Hesse’s last novel, The Glass Bead Game 1943, nor have I been inclined towards his work that deals specifically with quests-for-enlightenment/the mysticism of Eastern thought: Journey to the East 1932, Narcissus and Goldman 1930 and Siddhartha 1922. Starting instead with Steppenwolf 1927, I’ve worked my way backwards through Hesse’s work, moving on to Demian 1919 (his classic story of Jungian individuation), Klingsor's Last Summer 1920, Knulp 1915 and then on to his earliest work which I have responded to most: Rosshalde 1914, Gertrud 1910 and The Prodigy 1906 (probably because they deal with pre-individuated selves).

In Rosshalde, Hesse movingly conveys Johann Veraguth’s struggle for personal fulfilment. Veraguth is wealthy and successful in his work as an artist but has failed to confront his sense of alienation and unhappiness. Having allowed his consciousness to regress into a state of unknowing, Veraguth remains unindividuated and as a result is tormented by self-hatred and filled with hostility:

It was strange and sad, but no more strange and sad than all human destiny: this disciplined artist, who derived his power to work from the deepest truthfulness and from clear uncompromising concentrations, this same man in whose studio there was no place for whim or uncertainty, had been a dilettante in his life, a failure in his search for happiness, and he, who never sent a bungled drawing or painting out into the world, suffered deeply under the dark weight of innumerable bungled days and years, bungled attempts at love and life.

Of this he was not conscious. For years he had not felt the need to see his life clearly. (Chapter Eight)

A visit from an old friend from abroad stirs up buried emotions. Veraguth's sense of despair deepens and the call to individuation is sounded:

...his friend’s visit had shaken him up. Since then the lonely man had lived with a foreboding of danger and impending fate, of struggles and trials in which all his art and industry could not save him. In his damaged humanity he sensed a storm was in the offing and that he lacked the roots and inner strength to withstand it. (Chapter Eight)

Stifled by his unhappy marriage but devoted to his youngest son and his beautiful country estate, Veraguth must confront the painful truth of his inherent need for separation before he can be free to explore possibilities for self-realisation. Responding to the call of individuation, he emerges with the courage to leave his family and his home to travel to India to discover himself anew:

...he looked back over the short summer and discovered something that had been unknown to him only yesterday. Recalling the days of two or three months past, he found himself transformed; today he found clarity and a feeling of certainty as to the road ahead, where only a short time ago there had been only darkness and perplexity...Now it became clear to him that his journey could not possibly lead him back here, that there was nothing more for him to do here than take his leave, perhaps with a bleeding heart but no matter. His life was flowing again, driving resolutely towards freedom and the future. Though still unaware of it, he had inwardly renounced and cut himself off from the town and countryside, from Rosshalde and his wife. (Chapter Thirteen)

Hermann Hesse’s Rosshalde (like Grozdana Olujic’s I Vote for Love) ends with the bittersweet but thrilling promise of adventure and possibility of fulfilment for its hero: 

[Veraguth] breathed deeply the moist, bitter-scented air of the park [at Rosshalde] and at every step it seemed to him that he was pushing away the past...His probing and his insight were without resignation; full of defiance and venturesome passion, he looked forward to the new life, which, he was resolved, would no longer be a groping or dim-sighted wandering but rather a bold, steep climb...(Chapter Eighteen)

But, for me, for now, it's vicarious flight into others’ battles with their subconscious through the remarkable work of Hermann Hesse – until I can rouse my own consciousness out of retreat, confront my own need for departure and book myself on the next flight (to Caracas).

dymo/stencil (sticker) #034 - helmut berger

Helmut Berger as Ludwig II, High St, Northcote

The sad truth about my long break from spraying stencils is that I've been deriving my onanistic gratification instead from watching the films featuring Austrian-born German actor Helmut Berger who I inadvertently came across through my other distraction from blogging: Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde.

In pursuit of fellow Tristanophiles, I read about Ludwig II of Bavaria who was an ardent patron of Richard Wagner.

One of Ludwig's first acts as King was to summon Wagner to Munich, providing him with the financial support to compose and stage his operas. Ludwig's increasing disinterest in his royal duties and neglect of his political responsibilities in favour of indulging his aesthetic satisfactions ultimately led to his withdrawal from public life and a forced abdication.

Ludwig’s frustration with social obligations, his inclination towards solitude and his solace in art make him an intriguing fellow traveller.

Eschewing traditional biographical/historical accounts, I started my Ludwig-related reading with You Higuri’s two-volume Yaoi manga Ludwig II and C. Robert Holloway’s novel My Letters from Ludwig. In hindsight, I should have started with Christopher McIntosh’s biography The Swan King and heeded his implicit warning that “much of the writing about [Ludwig] is of the same quality as the [kitschy] souvenirs: cheap, sentimental and crude." I would have been spared the disappointment to the point of ire at the (irreparable) damage done to Ludwig by both Higuri and Holloway.

Given my conviction that illustration has the power to evoke complex characters with psychological and emotional depth (e.g. Black Hole by Charles Burns and Ghost World by Daniel Clowes), I was looking forward to reading my first manga comic but anticipation turned to alarm when confronted with Higuri’s creepy, infantilised and fetishistic portraits of Ludwig and his equerry Richard Hornig:

Illustrations by You Higuri, Ludwig II, Vol.1

Higuri’s book is referred to as Yaoi or Boys’ Love – a type of manga focusing on homoerotic and homoromantic male relationships (curiously, written by and for women). I can see how the stereotypes on display might raise the ire of some but what puzzles me most is how anyone could find these kinds of images satisfying in any sense. On the whole, there is a vacuity in Higuri’s illustrations masked by an excess of romantic fantasy which renders them little more than fashion sketches on which to hang her kooky portrayal of Ludwig’s relationship with Hornig. One could justifiably feel indignant at this exploitation.

C. Robert Holloway commits an even more serious crime against the nonextant.  Holloway is a character in his own(anistic) novel whose plot hinges on the revelation that Ludwig had been Richard Wagner’s sexual slave; the initial hilarity of this preposterous idea gives way to resentment as it becomes apparent Holloway’s graphomania is simply an excuse to record his uncensored fantasies, leaving one feeling soiled.  

Christopher McIntosh’s ‘sober’ biography of the King restores a complex and balanced portrait of Ludwig, avoiding an overemphasis on his peculiarities/eccentricities. But I preferred Wilfrid Blunt’s ‘enthusiastic’ biography The Dream King which includes many wonderful photos and drawings and 'bizarre and unexpected details'.  

I cringed in recognition at Blunt’s declaration:

“Ludwig was…the kind of concert- or opera-goer who is so despised by the professional musician: the listener who is content to let the music break over him like a wave and who cares nothing for codas, ‘second subjects’, and all the technical paraphernalia with which the average programme note is always so generously stuffed. ”

But it hasn’t prevented me from continuing to let the music of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde break over me.

McIntosh backs up Blunt:

“Often people with little previous knowledge of music or enthusiasm for it are nevertheless carried away when they come into contact with the powerful ethos and atmosphere of the Wagnerian world...It has also been claimed that Ludwig was one of these ‘non-musical’ Wagnerites. Indeed Wagner himself said that Ludwig had no real understanding of music.”

But then offers this consoling justification:

“...each of Wagner’s operas forms a totality [Gesamtkunstwerk], in which words, music and action are fused  ...anyone who...respond[s] deeply must, given the nature of the work, respond to the whole. Thus when we talk about a ‘non-musical’ or ‘musically uneducated’ Wagnerite, what we really mean is someone in whom Wagner’s work has awakened a degree of musical response through the power of the totality.”

An awakening of a different kind and also the highlight of my preoccupation with Ludwig, however, has been the discovery of Helmut Berger who portrays the King in Luchino Visconti’s biopic. Unlike most reviewers of the film, I was undisturbed by the sympathetic portrayal of Ludwig – probably because I was leering. (So much for my indignation at the irreparable damage done to Ludwig by Higuri and Holloway.) Lecherous thoughts aside, Helmut Berger’s performance is riveting, forcefully conveying Ludwig’s dilemma between his public obligations and his personal ideals. As always, the Time Out Film Guide succinctly summarises the film’s shortcomings and its appeal:

“Nothing is more sumptuous than Helmut Berger's performance in the lead, the brooding mad scenes, the deliberately contrived hysterical outbursts, and it takes only a flicker of scepticism to find the whole charade risible. But suspension of disbelief has its own rewards: Visconti's connoisseurship of historical detail and manners is as acute as ever, and his commitment to his subject is total. The film was originally released in cut versions ranging between 186 and 137 minutes; this uncut one [235 minutes], obviously more coherent, simply doubles the interest/boredom rate.”

Links:

1. Select Helmut Berger filmography:

The Damned

Dorian Gray

The Garden of the Finzi-Continis

Ludwig

Conversation Piece

Faceless

2. Tumblr tribute: Fuck yeah, Helmut Berger!

  

3. Critical views of Yaoi – Boys’ Love manga

4. Essay by authoritative manga scholar Frederik L. Schodt who has made me rethink my  position on manga. I might give it another go at some point.

dymo/sticker #001 - richard wagner

Richard and Siegfried Wagner - father & son - outside the laundromat in High St, Northcote. Looking anything but awkward with one another in this photo, though there's plenty of dirt in this family history.

Difficult father-son relationships abound in literature.

The basis of Paul Morel’s troubled relationship with his father Walter in D H Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers is Walter’s abhorrent behaviour: he is coarse, hard-drinking and abusive. Understandably, Paul harbours contempt for him. Yet, Walter is also affable and in places reveals a gentle side. When Paul is laid up with an attack of bronchitis, Walter checks in on him nightly in spite of Paul’s apparent unease and rejection:

On retiring to bed, the father would come into the sickroom. He was always very gentle if anyone were ill. But he disturbed the atmosphere for the boy.
‘Are ter asleep, my darlin’?’ Morel asked softly.
‘No; is my mother comin’?’
‘She’s just finishin’ foldin’ the clothes. Do you want anything?’ Morel rarely ‘thee’d’ his son.
‘I don’t want nothing. But how long will she be?’
‘Not long, my duckie.’
The father waited undecidedly on the hearthrug for a moment or two. He felt his son did not want him…
He loitered about indefinitely. The boy began to get feverish with irritation. His father’s presence seemed to aggravate all his sick impatience. At last Morel, after having stood looking at his son awhile, said softly:
‘Good-night, my darling.’
‘Good-night,’ Paul replied, turning round in relief to be alone. (Chapter IV)

Walter’s straightforward concern and tender enquiry after his son is touching. While I empathise with Paul’s antagonism, I can’t help but find Walter sympathetic.

In contrast, it is hard to have any sympathy for David Waring in Forrest Reid’s novel Following Darkness. The fraught relationship he has with his son Peter can be attributed to the distinct temperaments of father and son. Oblivious to Peter’s nature and his metaphysical concerns, David’s clueless parenting is instead driven by an anxiety over his son’s religious and moral life. Uneasy in his father’s presence in general, Peter is especially uncomfortable with his father’s puritanical views:

It was quite impossible for him to make me religious. For one thing, it was not in my nature. It was not so much that I disbelieved what I was taught of religion, as that these instructions aroused in me an implacable antagonism. I did not like the notion of an all-seeing God, for instance. Imperfectly grasped, this conception represented to my mind a kind of tyranny, a kind of espionage, which I strongly resented.

Peter’s inherent inexorability and resentment at a controlling scrutiny impels him to distance himself from his father’s influence towards a personal freedom and authenticity:

Very quickly I became more emancipated as I began to think things out for myself…

The practical ethics of religion, that I should simply be good and encourage in myself a variety of Christian virtues – that kind of thing did not interest me in the least. As a matter of fact, I possessed singularly few of these virtues. It is true that I detested any kind of meanness or cruelty, that I was truthful, straightforward, and, in certain directions, loving and gentle enough; but I was egotistical, proud, and ludicrously self-conscious, quick tempered, flying into violent passions for very little, and, above all, I had a stubbornness nothing could move. (Chapter II)

Perhaps in part because Reid was only interested in depicting boyhood and adolescence and not maturity and also because Reid understands that sometimes there’s just no fixing painfully awkward relationships, father and son ultimately remain estranged in his novel.

Thanks to a simple but fundamental agreement on religion (and a shared taste for VB), my own awkward relationship with my father has been spared total rupture. My father says there are two types of people in this world: those who believe in religion and smart people. We’re in complete agreement here. No doubt he would also be more sympathetic towards Walter Morel than to David Waring.

Where we part ways, however, is in our taste in music. My father has no time for vocal contortionists. To prevent any further uneasiness between us, I won’t reveal to him my recent interest in opera – or music drama more accurately, and Richard Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde specifically. I’m new to this type of music. Peter Waring’s response to his first opera and preference for the work of Wagner best describes my own:

I had become lost in this appealing melodrama…[the] music had an almost hypnotic effect upon me, for I had never heard it till now…It was all utterly new to me; it thrilled me…

I went to the opera every night that week…and save in the case of “Tannhäuser,” and of “Lohengrin,” I was disappointed. (Chapters XXIV & XXV).

Opera, it seems, is also replete with awkward father-son relationships.  Apparently, there is a ceaseless recurrence of father-son conflicts in Wagner’s work (to look forward to). For the moment, I can only comment on Tristan und Isolde. In Act II, Scene III, King Marke discovers that his wife Isolde and his nephew Tristan have become lovers. The breach in the father/son-like relationship between Marke and Tristan is bitter. Unaware of the true cause of Tristan and Isolde’s all consuming love (the pair have accidentally drunk from the same love potion) Marke is bewildered by their betrayal.  At the end of his reproach, Marke asks Tristan to account for his deceit:

Die kein Elend sühnt,
warum mir diese Schmach?
Den unerforschlich
furchtbar tief geheimnißvollen Grund,
wer macht der Welt ihn kund?    

Why this dishonour
for which no misery can atone?
Who will make known to the world
the inscrutable, deep,
secret cause?

Tristan cannot answer him. Instead, the famous “Tristan Chord” fills the awkward silence. Paralleling Tristan’s agony of guilt and remorse, the music compensates for the insufficiency of language by communicating more clearly than words what Tristan cannot express. It is an astonishing piece of music – suggestive and richly textured:

The University of Texas notes and the The Met Opera notes are helpful here: “The first three measures of Tristan und Isolde presents one of the most famous openings in all of opera and contains the most talked about chord in all of music, a chord rich in content and at the same time ambiguous…[The chord] is actually two motifs. The first one, played by the cellos in the upper register, is known as the “Sorrow” or “Grief” [or “Longing”] motif:

Its continuation is played by the oboes, doubled by the English horn and supported harmonically by two clarinets and two bassoons. …This second motif is called “Desire”...The so-called “Tristan chord”, at the beginning of the second measure is a dissonant harmonic cluster, plunging the listener into an unstable, neurotic world…”

I came to Wagner’s opera indirectly after reading Gottfried von Strassburg’s compelling version of the story of Tristan and Isolde on which Wagner’s work itself is largely based. As a newcomer to this genre, I’m glad I followed the advice of Matthew Boyden in The Rough Guide to Opera and started with the 1973 Böhm/Jourdan Theatre Antique d'Orange production featuring John Vickers as Tristan and Birgit Nilsson as Isolde. Despite the lo-fi sound quality and the unsteady camera work, it’s an unforgettable experience. The amazing setting of the ancient Roman theatre, together with Vickers’ emotionally anguished interpretation of Tristan and Nilsson’s “steam whistle soprano” make up for the technical flaws.

This clip from Act II, Scene III at the end of King Marke’s reproach begins with the Tristan Chord. Tristan’s conflicting loyalty and overwhelming guilt eventually gives way to his death wish. Isolde agrees to follow him. What began at the opening of Act II as a lovers’ tryst ends with the pledge of a death tryst – the Liebestod which occurs at the end of the opera.

Wagner's music and Vickers’ performance floor me every time:

I’ve also got the 1983 Barenboim/Ponnelle Bayreuth and the 2007 Bělohlávek/Lehnhoff Glyndebourne productions to watch as well as the 1966 Böhm, 1952 Furtwängler and the 1972 von Karajan recordings I’m listening to. So it may be some time before I move on to Wagner’s other work. (But probably not as long as it would take me to get tickets to see a performance at Bayreuth – waiting time is between 5 and 10 years.)

dymo/stencil #033 - grozdana olujić

Grozdana Olujić in High Street Thornbury

Grozdana Olujić’s novel Гласам за љубав (I Vote for Love) ends with Slobodan Galac’s thrilling declaration to his pet turtle:

– Држи се, Грета! – довикнав и скокнав на скалничката од еден вагон. – Ние патуваме!

“Hold on Greta!” [he] cried jumping onto the steps of the train carriage. “We’re heading off!”

Slobodan and Greta. Illustration by Simonida Filipova-Kitanovska

Slobodan, a sixteen-year-old Holden Caulfield of the Balkans, shares his literary counterpart’s desire for authenticity and personal freedom (his name Slobodan means ‘free’). His decisive leap into adventure makes for a deeply satisfying ending to Olujić’s novel, contrasting sharply with Holden’s uncertainty and nostalgia at the end of Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye. It’s not improbable to imagine Holden turning to pills. As for Slobodan, I’m not prepared to imagine anything less than success for him in his quest to reunite with his fourteen-year-old girlfriend Rashida (forcibly sent away to Sarajevo by her father) and also in satisfying his wanderlust: 

– Ќе ги достигнеме сите четири страни – Рашида, Грета и Јас...макар да се држиме со заби за ветрот.

“We’ll reach the four corners of the earth – Rashida, Greta and me…even if it means sailing into the wind.”

It’s normally during adolescence that we realise we don’t get to do everything we dream but for Slobodan, the world is still an illusion that must be shattered. I’m a sucker for earnest, introspective loners like Slobodan. Throw in some Romantic/Sturm und Drang qualities and I surrender totally. Needless to say, I won’t be projecting my cynicism onto his adolescent aspirations.

Olujić’s novel, published in 1963, is an early (some say pioneering) example in Serbian literature of ‘blue jeans prose’. The term was coined by literary theorist Aleksandar Flaker to describe a trend in youth fiction of the 60s and 70s modelled on Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye. ‘Blue jeans prose’ is characterised by an antagonistic protagonist, typically a teenager, who expresses him/herself in contemporary urban slang, rejects established norms and conventions and is opposed to the world of adults.  Since the wearing of jeans was seen as a symbolic protest against conformity, the term aptly reflected the attitude of the protagonist. (Today we might refer to this type of fiction as ‘low-rise jeans prose’.)

Slobodan is a worthy icon for adolescent rebellion and angst. Like Holden, he rejects the hypocrisy of the adult world. Unlike Holden, Slobodan does not exhibit any of the qualities he disparages. Sublimating his sense of superfluity under a rebellious pose, Slobodan rejects a world in which qualities such as love and kindness are absent. His rejection is expressed symbolically in a school essay he writes opting for love: 

...ако е возможно да се одбере, и ако човекот за било што гласа, јас гласам за љубов, иако и тоа е на некој начин загубена работа.

... if it is possible to choose, and if a person must vote for something, I vote for love, even if it is in some way a lost cause.

Early in the novel, Slobodan’s mother accuses him of negativity:

– Ти секогаш ги гледаш луѓето од најцрн можен агол!

“You always see people from the darkest side.”

What Slobodan sees are dissatisfied, disillusioned and unhappy adults who have succumbed to a provincial mentality. It’s his negativity and his strong desire to evade a similar fate that propels him towards flight. From a Hegelian point of view, self-identity without negativity signifies the death of being. The transformative potential of negative freedom (freedom from constraint) is the possibility it provides for self-awareness. As well as voting for love, Slobodan votes for self-determination. 

Although some of Olujić’s work has been translated into over 28 languages, it appears that Гласам за љубав is only available in Serbian, Macedonian (Гласам за љубов) and German (Liebe ist wie ein frischer Apfel). In spite of the attraction of reading a text in its original and the aesthetic appeal of Cyrillic, it’s times like this I want to reconsider my decision not to do literary translation because it’s a book I believe should have wider exposure.

Fortunately, Olujić’s first novel Излет у небо (An Excursion to the Sky) is available in English translation.  And it’s equally impressive. The bookflap summary should make it hard to resist:

Minya, the 22-year-old heroine…is cynical and disillusioned, convinced that life is nothing but a series of absurd incidents, relieved only by sporadic  love affairs which she calls ‘excursions to the sky’. She is tired and indifferent…She wants to glide through life, peeling off the days as painlessly as possible, but she knows she is merely marking time, that the moment when she must face the truth about herself is not far off.

It’s available at AbeBooks.

Grozdana Olujić in High Street Thornbury

dymo/stencil #032 alain-fournier

a wistful alain-fournier in brunswick street, fitzroy

Children’s literature has never really interested me much. In the toss up between reading C.S. Lewis at school and borrowing Harold Robbins from the local library, steamy bonkbusters beat children’s fantasy hands down. This might have had something to do with an early infancy in a home bereft of books but abounding in alcohol and pills.  Attempting to redress the omission of classic children’s fiction from my childhood, I read Stevenson’s and Kipling’s adventure stories as an adult but they failed to provide any excitement or thrills. Perhaps childhood enchantment is a prerequisite for enjoying children’s fiction as an adult.

There is one exception: I still harbour an inappropriate fondness for Little Black Sambo. My first encounter at age six with this grand, little, fictional dandy made quite an impression. And what wonderful, considerate, sober parents he had! His mother made him a beautiful little Red Coat, and a pair of beautiful little Blue Trousers; his father went to the Bazaar and bought him a beautiful Green Umbrella, and a lovely little Pair of Purple (!) Shoes with Crimson Soles and Crimson Linings. I am not, however, unaware that my aesthetic development came at the expense of caricature.

Little Black Sambo, from the 1899 edition, illustrated by Helen Bannerman

Children’s books aside, there are a number of memorable literary children, including: Little Father Time, the intensely earnest, troubled young boy, devastated to the point of suicide in Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy. His death and the suicide note he writes shattered me; similarly, in Buddenbrooks by Thomas Mann, Hanno Buddenbrook’s premature death from typhoid fever was lamentable. This poor boy’s lack of vigour and his gradual withdrawal from life elicited my strong empathy; even more poignant is the depiction of Useppe in Elsa Morante’s novel History, set in Italy during WWII. Morante’s portrait of this five-year-old is unforgettably moving, particularly the evocation of his relationship with his pet dog. Sadly, Morante also bequeaths Useppe an early death; distinct from his counterparts, Luca, in Alberto Moravia’s Disobedience, emerges undefeated - however, not before undergoing an existential meltdown. Moravia’s minutely detailed description of Luca’s crisis is painful but it makes his return to life all that much more moving. Depictions of Sturm und Drang adolescence have always attracted me. Luca’s alienation and complete withdrawal from the world, his feelings of rage, disgust, nausea, apathy and indifference, leading to a revolt through nihilism and a death wish, are themes I continue to experience…oops!, explore …in my reading.

My devotion to literature began once I had emerged from the swamp of childhood and entered my own adolescent Sturm und Drang, starting with Alain-Fournier’s Le Grand Meaulnes (1912). Drawing on the themes of verse romance from the Middle Ages (the adventures of a heroic knight errant on a quest), Alain-Fournier’s elegiac novel, subtitled The Lost Domaine, uses a dream-like atmosphere to explore adolescent initiation and regret for lost love and vanished youth. François Seurel narrates the story of his friendship with Augustin Meaulnes who embodies the requisite Sturm und Drang qualities: he is dynamic, impulsive, and adventurous, with a great capacity for love and torment. One day, Meaulnes travels outside the village where he lives with François and ends up getting lost. While wandering, lost in the countryside, he comes across a party being held on a mysterious estate (domaine). There he meets a beautiful girl - his idealised love. Pledging devotion, he asks her permission to return to the domaine to see her. She accepts his request and promises to wait faithfully for his return. Meaulnes returns to the village and tells François about his adventure but his quest to recover the lost domaine and his lost love are frustrated by his inability to find his way back to the estate.

Is it sufficient to have read a favourite book once only?

Nostalgic for Alain-Fournier of late, I can’t decide whether or not to reread Le Grand Meaulnes. I’ve anticipated the time when I would reopen the covers of the novel to experience its (dis)enchantment anew (I have to agree with Alain-Fournier’s brother-in-law who said that at heart the novel is concerned with the sadness of adolescence). But I can’t bring myself to do it. I’ve taken it down from the shelf many times only to put it straight back. Suppose it doesn’t affect me in the same way as when I first read it? And how could it: isn’t youthful admiration always diluted by adult disillusionment?

First readings can be emotionally and intellectually satisfying experiences, allowing you to lose yourself in the story but at best they are incomplete interpretations. It is only with a second, self-conscious reading that it becomes possible to gain a greater critical appreciation of a text.

Endless Love by Scott Spencer is one book I enjoyed reading a second time. David Axelrod, the main character of Spencer’s novel, a modern version of Augustin Meaulnes, is a kindred Sturm and Drang adolescent: he is ardent, reckless and determined, with a capacity for all consuming love. His intense love for his girlfriend Jade is eventually met with parental opposition. Jade’s father forces a temporary break in their relationship. However, David’s obsession for Jade and his commitment to an ‘endless’ love for her, compels him to reckless means to regain her family’s favour and in turn his lost love. He sets fire to her family’s home in the hope of redeeming himself by ‘saving’ the house from burning down. However, like his love, the fire burns out of control. A stint in prison does not diminish his feelings, begun in adolescence, towards Jade. Once released, he continues pursuing her with tragic consequences. David’s capacity for all consuming love is inspiring and pitiable; his unwavering constancy admirable but untenable; and his inability to get over Jade is tragic because it is destructive. In his introduction (which I have read) to a new translation of Alain-Fournier’s novel (which I won’t read), Adam Gopnik invites us to compare David Axelrod with Augustin Meaulnes in order to foreground the succession of literary teenagers undone by their refusal to make the painful transition from adolescence to adulthood – a refusal-to-age.

(It would be otiose to add that these torch bearing, melancholy loners, whose part in life it is always to regret, have had a lasting impression on me.)

But back to my dilemma…is my refusal-to-reread a refusal-to-age? I'm not prepared to risk my first fictional romance on a rereading. It's my defence against adulterating (how damningly accurate that word is!) my memory of the novel. Perhaps the enchantment is the memory itself and it’s simply best to prolong the desire to reread in order to retain the memory. Fulfilment is often disappointing.

I've put Le Grand Meaulnes back on the shelf and will instead read some of the books that Alain-Fournier admired and that inspired his writing:

Dominique by Eugene Fromentin

The Romance of Tristan and Yseult by Joseph Bedier

Pelleas et Melisande by Maurice Maeterlinck

It's a shame I won't be able to buy them from Basilisk bookstore which sadly closed last week. This is one lost book domaine I won't get over.

photo by fitzroyalty