The real ogres know how to live

Claude Chabrol is the French Hitchcock. Of course, that's an Anglo-centric way of putting it. He may be better than Hitchcock. At the end of his film Masques the soundtrack even plays Gounod's 'Marche funèbre d'une marionnette' ... the piece used as the theme music for the TV series Alfred Hitchcock Presents.

In this film the sinister character at one point explains: "The love for children, you know, it's terrible ... it eats you alive! They're the real ogres."

Raymond Carver, in an essay on "Influence" in his book Fires wrote: "The biggest single influence on my writing, directly and indirectly, has been my two children. They were born before I was twenty and from beginning to end – some nineteen years in all – there wasn’t any area of my life where their heavy and often baleful influence didn’t reach."

I remember the first time I read this —back before I had any children of my own — this shocked me, maybe because — for like Tonio Kröger I am no doubt ein verirrter Burger — it was not the sort of thing one should say, it was not (in the young Tolstoy's terms) comme il faut, but I think also because — despite the admiration I felt for both the man and his writing — I sensed that here there was something wrong, something that revealed more of some ancient wound of the speaker than it did some universal experience.

Children are — almost by definition — a positive. They know how to live! In a scene at the very end of Mikio Naruse's Late Chrysanthemums one friend advises another whose adult son has just left on a train for a new job in a different city, "Don't worry, young people know how to live".

There are theories about creole languages — new langauges with sophisticated grammars arising out of the many-rooted pidgin languages in communities of immigrant workers of diverse origins — which explain that their creation is due to the children of the community playing together and inventing the new language. But surely the standard languages are similarly invented, or reinvented, children inventing a language based on the inherited dialect, but full of mistakes and radical reuse ... small wonder that reading Chaucer in the original is not so easy.

Problems of the will

"The real problems are the problems of the will" - the quote is from Giuseppe Mazzotta, in his book Reading Dante, but if like me you've watched his Yale lecture course on 'Dante in Translation' more than once, then you'll remember the idea. The full context of the quotation is this: "The body stands for one’s own reality, the passions. It stands for one’s own will. This is the difference between what the Greeks understand as the great intellectual adventure, which is one of knowledge, and Dante’s idea that the real problems are problems of the will. We may not know where we are, and we may understand that we are not happy with the situation in which we find ourselves, but we cannot quite solve these problems with knowledge alone because the problems here are problems of willing."

Dante himself was well aware of the centrality of the question of will in his Comedy. In his Epistle to Cangrande he writes: "Si vero accipiatur opus allegorice, subiectum est homo prout merendo et demerendo per arbitorii liberatem iustitie premiandi et puniendi obnoxius est" (If the work is taken allegorically, the subject is man according as by his merits or demerits in the exercise of his free will  he is deserving of reward or punishment by justice."[bold face mine])

And of all the great writers, who better to understand this than the "problem-gambler" Dostoevsky? But of course it may well not have been until his second marriage that Dostoevsky would actually have felt any 'remorse' at succumbing to the 'weakness' of being addicted to gambling. If the character Alexei in The Gambler is anything to go by, then the young Dostoevsky possibly had his own theories about success and the positive power of human will, although Alexei - like Raskolnikov with his similarly cerebral theories about crime - seems quite incapable of actually attaining the rational control he extols.

Novels are like symphonies: they unfold in a linear sequence, but their parts stand in architectural relation to each other; main themes are announced and explored through their developments.  Crime and Punishment, for example, after a brief introduction which introduces us to Raskolnikov's fevered stream of consciousness, announces a grand theme of the failure of the will as presented in the recounted history of Marmeladov, who has drunk up everything, lost all opportunity, and sinks further and further into wretched hopelessness. He has been reduced to living off the earnings of his daughter who has been driven to prostitution.  We, in a sense, overhear this as he recounts his pathetic story to Raskolnikov, much as Raskolnikov overhears a student and a young officer theorizing over the merits of murdering the old pawnbroker. Of course, it is not many pages after Marmeladov's story that we learn that Raskolnikov himself has been the financial beneficiary of his elderly mother who subsists on a meagre pension, and his sister who had had to take up a very unpleasant serving position; all this bears a striking resemblance to Marmeladov's own circumstances. So we are now left having to revise our suppositions about how Raskolnikov felt about Marmeladov's story; a new light is cast backward over the narrative.  This uncertainty can start to infest the text; when, for instance, Raskolnikov sleeps suddenly in the bushes, and then on the way home, before falling into a deep slumber from which he cannot be woken, he chances to overhear a conversation in the Haymarket with Lizaveta, the unfortunate sister of the pawn-broker, revealing the exact hour at which she will be absent from the apartment, could this perhaps be a delusion? It is paired with the story of Raskolnikov chancing to overhear the student and the young officer, who just happen to be talking of the pawn-broker whom Raskolnikov himself has just visited, and furthermore, they are discussing the very thoughts of murder that he was already apparently thinking himself. How reliable really is this narrator? It starts to feel like the delusional otherness of Fight Club.

Failure of the will is Raskolnikov's own analysis of why most crimes are so readily solved: he believes that almost any criminal, at the moment of the crime, "подвергается какому-то упадку воли и рассудка" - undergoes some failure of the will and reason.

Trifling details und ein neues Niveau

Nikolai Alexandrovich Yaroshenko's
painting 'The Student' (1881)

In Crime and Punishment (1866), Raskolnikov, after receiving some jeering comment in the street about his German hat (someone shouts at him "немецкий шляпник!") and realising how conspicuous it makes him, exclaims: Мелочи, мелочи главное!.. Вот эти-то мелочи и губят всегда и всё… (Trivial details, trivial details above all … It's these trivial details that ruin everything always).

Adorno posing with a musical score

Adorno also saw the power of trifling details: in Minima Moralia he writes "Keine Verbesserung ist zu klein oder geringfügig, als daß man sie nicht durchführen sollte. Von hundert Änderungen mag jede einzelne läppisch und pedantisch erscheinen; zusammen können sie ein neues Niveau des Textes ausmachen." (“No improvement is too small or insignificant to be carried out. Out of a hundred changes, a single one may appear trifling and pedantic; together they can raise the text to a new level.”).

Adorno, of course, understood music, and music is all details; as Emperor Joseph is reported to have said: Gewaltig viel Noten lieber Mozart!

Most anxious to appear clever

Усадьба Богимово, the setting of 'The House with the Mezzanine'

Chekhov in his story "The house with the Mezzanine" paints, in a single sentence, an instantly recognizable and convincing portrait of a young man who has retained the social awkwardness of his student days:

Chekhov, 1879

Зато мой  Петр  Петрович,  у  которого  еще  со студенчества осталась манера всякий  разговор  сводить  на  спор,  говорил скучно, вяло и  длинно,  с  явным  желанием  казаться  умным  и  передовым человеком.

On the other hand my friend Pyotr Petrovich, who still retained the student habit of turning everything into an argument, spoke boringly, listlessly and longwindedly - he was obviously most anxious to appear advanced and clever.

Tolstoy in Youth (Юность) presents himself as a young student with a similar social affliction in a memorably cringeworthy scene:

- Вам,  я  думаю,  скучно,  monsieur Nicolas,  слушать из  середины,  - сказала мне  Софья  Ивановна с  своим  добродушным вздохом,  переворачивая куски платья, которое она шила.
Чтение в  это время прекратилось,  потому что Дмитрий куда-то  вышел из комнаты.
- Или, может быть, вы уже читали "Роброя"?
В то время я считал своею обязанностию, вследствие уже одного того, что носил студенческий мундир,  с  людьми мало  мне  знакомыми на  каждый даже самый простой вопрос отвечать непременно очень умно и оригинально и считал величайшим стыдом короткие и ясные ответы,  как: да, нет, скучно, весело и тому  подобное.  Взглянув  на  свои  новые  модные  панталоны и  блестящие пуговицы сюртука,  я отвечал, что не читал "Роброя", но что мне было очень интересно слушать,  потому что я больше люблю читать книги из средины, чем с начала.
- Вдвое интересней:  догадываешься о  том,  что  было и  что  будет,  -

The young & unpleasant Tolstoy

добавил я, самодовольно улыбаясь.

'I expect you find it dull, Monsieur Nicolas, to hear the middle of the story without knowing the beginning,'  said Sophia Ivanovna to me with her good-natured sigh, turning over the pieces of a garment she was making.
The reading had stopped just then because Dmitri had gone out of the room.
'Or perhaps you have read Rob Roy before?'
At that time I thought it incumbent on me, if only on account of my student's uniform, always to give clever and original answers to even the simplest question put to me by people I did not know very well, and I should have been deeply ashamed to offer brief plain replies like 'Yes,' 'No,' 'I don't care for it,' 'I like it,' and so on. With a glance at my fashionable new trousers and the shining buttons on my coat I said that I had not read Rob Roy but that it was very interesting to me to listen to it because I preferred to read books from the middle rather than from the beginning.
'It is doubly interesting,' I added with a self-satisfied smile. 'One tries to guess what has gone before and what will happen further on.'

Youth p. 242 sect 23

Then in his story 'Muzhiki' (sometimes translated as 'Peasants'), Chekhov describes a character whose only achievement is the acquisition of a few unusual words.

В городе он не живал и книг никогда не читал, но откуда-то набрался разных умных слов и любил употреблять их в разговоре, и за это его уважали, хотя и не всегда понимали.

Although he had never lived in a town or read any books, somehow he had managed to accumulate a store of various clever-sounding words and he loved using them in conversation, which made him respected, if not always understood.

How many writers still it these shoes? The awkward youth eager to impress? The ill-educated spicing every paragraph with clever-sounding words? People like me peppering obscure blog posts with quotes in multiple languages.

Golo and Geneviève de Brabant

 from Le Petit Sheriff #87 9 Jan 1954

In Los pasos perdidos (1953) (The Lost Steps), Alejo Carpentier chooses as a book to represent the unsophisticated tastes of the simple peasant people his protagonist encounters on his journey through the Andes, an account of the story of Geneviève de Brabant and Golo. Carpentier contrasts the simplistic naive tale in the gaudily covered paperback with bad paper with the "modern" novel he had abandoned in disgust which is now being read by his urbanized and spiritually lost mistress, Mouche, whom he is soon to also abandon in disgust, while pursuing the grounded and beautiful Rosario:

Mouche sacó un libro de su maleta. Rosario, por imitarle, buscó un tomo en su hato. Era un volumen impreso en papel malo, lleno de escorias, cuya portada en tricromía mostraba una mujer cubierta de pieles de oso o algo parecido, que era abrazada por un magnífico caballero en la entrada de una gruta, bajo la mirada complacida de una cierva de largo cuello: Historia de Genoveva de Brabante. En mi mente se hizo al punto un chusco contraste entre tal lectura y cierta famosa novela moderna que estaba en las manos de Mouche, y que yo había dejado en el tercer capítulo, agobiado por una especie de vergüenza triste ante su caudal de obscenidad.

Man Ray's photograph
of a marionette of
Geneviève de Brabant.
Atelier Mascotte, 1926.

This choice of book — deliberately or unconsciously or coincidentally — has itself sophisticated literary echoes as an emblem of the simple primitive child-like view of the world and its magic. It recalls a passage from Proust where he describes the uneasy and disturbing distraction of a magic lantern projecting images of that same story of Golo and his "hideous designs" and Geneviève de Brabant, intended to provide solace to a bored an unhappy child in the long hours before bedtime.

A Combray, tous les jours dès la fin de l'après-midi, longtemps avant le moment où il faudrait me mettre au lit et rester, sans dormir, loin de ma mère et de ma grand'mère, ma chambre à coucher redevenait le point fixe et douloureux de mes préoccupations. On avait bien inventé, pour me distraire les soirs où on me trouvait l'air trop malheureux, de me donner une lanterne magique, dont, en attendant l'heure du dîner, on coiffait ma lampe; et, à l'instar des premiers architectes et maîtres verriers de l'âge gothique, elle substituait à l'opacité des murs d'impalpables irisations, de surnaturelles apparitions multicolores, où des légendes étaient dépeintes comme dans un vitrail vacillant et momentané. Mais ma tristesse n'en était qu'accrue, parce que rien que le changement d'éclairage détruisait l'habitude que j'avais de ma chambre et grâce à quoi, sauf le supplice du coucher, elle m'était devenue supportable. Maintenant je ne la reconnaissais plus et j'y étais inquiet, comme dans une chambre d'hôtel ou de «chalet», où je fusse arrivé pour la première fois en descendant de chemin de fer.

Au pas saccadé de son cheval, Golo, plein d'un affreux dessein, sortait de la petite forêt triangulaire qui veloutait d'un vert sombre la pente d'une colline, et s'avançait en tressautant vers le château de la pauvre Geneviève de Brabant. Ce château était coupé selon une ligne courbe qui n'était autre que la limite d'un des ovales de verre ménagés dans le châssis qu'on glissait entre les coulisses de la lanterne. Ce n'était qu'un pan de château et il avait devant lui une lande où rêvait Geneviève qui portait une ceinture bleue. Le château et la lande étaient jaunes et je n'avais pas attendu de les voir pour connaître leur couleur car, avant les verres du châssis, la sonorité mordorée du nom de Brabant me l'avait montrée avec évidence. Golo s'arrêtait un instant pour écouter avec tristesse le boniment lu à haute voix par ma grand'tante et qu'il avait l'air de comprendre parfaitement, conformant son attitude avec une docilité qui n'excluait pas une certaine majesté, aux indications du texte; puis il s'éloignait du même pas saccadé. Et rien ne pouvait arrêter sa lente chevauchée. Si on bougeait la lanterne, je distinguais le cheval de Golo qui continuait à s'avancer sur les rideaux de la fenêtre, se bombant de leurs plis, descendant dans leurs fentes. Le corps de Golo lui-même, d'une essence aussi surnaturelle que celui de sa monture, s'arrangeait de tout obstacle matériel, de tout objet gênant qu'il rencontrait en le prenant comme ossature et en se le rendant intérieur, fût-ce le bouton de la porte sur lequel s'adaptait aussitôt et surnageait invinciblement sa robe rouge ou sa figure pâle toujours aussi noble et aussi mélancolique, mais qui ne laissait paraître aucun trouble de cette transvertébration.

Certes je leur trouvais du charme à ces brillantes projections qui semblaient émaner d'un passé mérovingien et promenaient autour de moi des reflets d'histoire si anciens. Mais je ne peux dire quel malaise me causait pourtant cette intrusion du mystère et de la beauté dans une chambre que j'avais fini par remplir de mon moi au point de ne pas faire plus attention à elle qu'à lui-même.

Marcel Proust, Du Côté de Chez Swann

Censor vandals

This image is from the film Searching for Sugar Man and shows the method by which the former South African regime censored "unsuitable" tracks from LPs, in this case the track 'Sugar Man' from Rodriguez's album Cold Fact. Nothing new here; witness Erasmus's books, several examples of which can be seen in this condition in his house museum in the suburbs of Brussels ...

Flowers all the same colour

There are two kinds of photoreceptor in the eye: cones that are sensitive to colour, but are not triggered by low levels of illumination, and rods which are more sensitive to low levels of light but do not process colour. This is what accounts for the black-and-white feel of scenes at night, and the greys before the dawn.

Chekhov, in his story 'The House with the Mezzanine', has one of his characters obseve this: "Луна уже стояла высоко над домом я освещала спящий сад, дорожки; георгины и розы в цветнике перед домом были отчетливо видны и казались все одного цвета." (The moon stood high now over the house and illuminated the sleeping garden, the paths. Dahlias and roses in the flowerbeds in front of the house were clearly visible and all of them seemed the same colour).

The mechanisms of lens and camera will deliver a different picture of the world, unless great care is taken with filters or processing. The opening scene of Tarkovsky's Nostalghia (see picture above) conveys almost miraculously the sense of the landscape before dawn, the colour levels are so low that the eye struggles to make out whether there is any colour or not.