B L O O M S B U R Y IN D IA
B l o o m s b u r y P u b l is h i n g In d i a P v t. L td
S e c o n d F l o o r , L S C B u i ld i n g N o . 4 , D D A C o m p le x , P o c k e t C - 6 & 7 ,
V a s a n t K u n j, N e w D e l h i , 1 1 0 0 7 0
B L O O M S B U R Y , B L O O M S B U R Y A C A D E M IC IN D IA a n d th e D i a n a lo g o
a r e tr a d e m a r k s o f B l o o m s b u r y P u b l is h i n g P ic
F i r s t p u b li s h e d in In d i a 2 0 2 1
T h i s e d i ti o n p u b li s h e d 2 0 2 1
C o p y rig h t © B rin d a B o se , 2 0 2 1
B r i n d a B o s e h a s a s s e r te d h e r r ig h t u n d e r th e In d i a n C o p y r i g h t A c t
to b e i d e n ti f i e d a s th e E d i to r o f th is w o r k
B lo o m s b u r y A c a d e m ic
A n i m p r i n t o f B l o o m s b u r y P u b l is h i n g P ic
A ll r i g h ts re s e rv e d . N o p a r t o f th is p u b li c a ti o n m a y b e r e p r o d u c e d o r tr a n s m i tte d in
a n y f o r m o r b y a n y m e a n s , e l e c tr o n i c o r m e c h a n i c a l , i n c lu d i n g p h o to c o p y i n g ,
r e c o r d i n g o r a n y i n f o r m a ti o n s to r a g e o r r e tr ie v a l s y s te m , w i th o u t th e p r i o r
p e r m is s i o n i n w r i ti n g f r o m th e p u b li s h e r s
T h i s b o o k is s o le ly th e r e s p o n s ib i l ity o f th e a u th o r a n d th e p u b li s h e r h a s h a d n o ro le
in th e c r e a ti o n o f th e c o n te n t a n d d o e s n o t h a v e r e s p o n s ib i l ity f o r a n y th i n g
d e f a m a to r y o r l ib e llo u s o r o b je c ti o n a b l e
B l o o m s b u r y P u b l is h i n g P ic d o e s n o t h a v e a n y c o n tr o l o v e r , o r r e s p o n s ib i l ity f o r , a n y
th i r d - p a r ty w e b s ite s r e f e r r e d to o r in th is b o o k . A ll i n te r n e t a d d r e s s e s g iv e n in th is
b o o k w e re c o r r e c t a t th e ti m e o f g o i n g to p re s s . T h e a u th o r a n d p u b li s h e r r e g r e t a n y
i n c o n v e n i e n c e c a u s e d i f a d d r e s s e s h a v e c h a n g e d o r s ite s h a v e c e a s e d to e x is t, b u t c a n
a c c e p t n o r e s p o n s ib i l ity f o r a n y s u c h c h a n g e s
IS B N : H B : 9 7 8 - 9 3 - 8 8 4 1 4 - 9 2 - 0 ; e B o o k : 9 7 8 - 9 3 - 8 8 4 1 4 - 9 3 - 7
e Pd f: 9 7 8 - 9 3 - 8 9 8 6 7 - 1 2 - 1
T y p e s e t in M a n i p a l T e c h n o lo g ie s L im ite d
B lo o m s b u r y P u b l is h i n g P ic m a k e s e v e r y e f f o r t to e n s u r e th a t th e p a p e r s u s e d in th e
m a n u f a c tu r e o f o u r b o o k s a r e n a tu r a l , r e c y c la b l e p r o d u c ts m a d e f r o m w o o d g r o w n in
w e l l- m a n a g e d f o r e s ts . O u r m a n u f a c tu r i n g p r o c e s s e s c o n f o r m to th e e n v i r o n m e n ta l
r e g u l a tio n s o f th e c o u n tr y o f o r i g i n .
T o f i n d o u t m o r e a b o u t o u r a u th o r s a n d b o o k s v is it w w w .b lo o m s b u r y .c o m a n d s ig n
u p f o r o u r n e w s le tte r s
CONTENTS
A cknowledgements
ix
1
In tr o d u c tio n
Brinda Bose
Gleaning
P la to a n d P ro u s t, B e d f e llo w s : ‘ C o n c e p t’ a n d ‘ Id e a ’ f r o m
th e C la s s ic a l to th e M o d e r n
41
Aveek Sen
Je a n G e n e t a n d Je a n - P a u l Sa rtre : W r i ti n g in R e s is ta n c e a n d
61
th e P r a c tic e o f T h e o r y
M ichael Levenson
T h i n k in g w ith C in e m a : M a n i K a u l R e a d in g D e le u z e
M
M oinak Biswas
Perforation
I f th e O u ts id e r Is D e e p ly W ith in
97
Charles Russell
D is s id e n t P o e ti c s , E x p e r i m e n ta l E x c e s s : Ja a k k o Y l i- Ju o n ik a s
F in n is h N o v e l
111
Neuromaani
Laura Piippo
D e c l a s s in g A rt: M a n ik B a n d y o p a d h y a y a n d C o m m u n is t
A e s th e tic s in In d ia
126
Rajarshi Dasgupta
Caprice
‘ V u lv a s S c h o o l ’ : T o w a rd s a P r o v is io n a l P e d a g o g y
151
Sophie Seita
Paraphernalia
W e a p o n is a tio n o f th e B o d y in G o ld m a n , B la ir a n d A lm a d h o u n
Eyal Amiran
163
Contents
v iii
F r e e in g th e Im a g e a n d C in e m a tic Ju s tic e : N o n - P a r titio n e d
A e s th e tic s in K a m a l A lja f a r i s
Recollection
180
Heidi Grunebaum
Descent
T h e H o m o s e x u a l a n d H is Fu tu re ( C a th e r, C le m e n ti a n d C r is p )
195
Taylor Black
Sa p p h ic L in e a g e s : O r, N o te s f o r a Q u e e r - F e m in i s t P o e tic s
2Q&
Brinda Bose
F lu x
T r a n s l a ti o n s D is s id e n c e : M i r a ji b e c o m e s Sa p p h o
227
Geeta Patel
Is T h e re a H o m o s e x u a l in th e T e x t?
246
Rahul Sen_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
Elesh
T h is C ity , ‘Stin k in g C o r p s e : A d o n is s P o e tic s o f M o d e r n ity
an d D e a th
265
A l-Khoder A l-Khalifa
Ea tin g D is s id e n c e o f A n to n in A rta u d : T o w ard s a P o o r A e sth e tic s
282
Soumyabrata Choudhury
Ephemera
N o c tu r n a ls ( A R e m i n i s c e n c e )
301
Anil Yadav, translatedfrom the Hindi by Chinmaya Lai Thakur
A bout the Editor and Contributors
317
Index
323
Acknowledgements
As with some edited collections, this one too acquired a life of its own
over a long gestation period that took it in different directions from
its origin—a conference on dissident Aesthetics I had organised at
the centre for english studies at Jawaharlal nehru University in 2017.
I then invited many who were not at the conference to contribute to
this volume and, inevitably, my own ideas and intentions morphed
along the way. However, I would like to thank my colleagues, student
volunteers and office staff for their support during the conference and
for the Ugc-sAP grant which made both the conference and technical
help for preparation of the manuscript possible, and to all the speakers
(many of whom travelled from distant lands on their own university
funds to be a part of it) who made it exciting and memorable.
teachers, students, friends and family—many of them fellow
travellers on the minefield of the humanities—have contributed in very
special ways through a lifetime of trekking through it: both who are,
and are not, visibly a part of this volume. I will use my privilege here
to name a few, in affection and appreciation. my warmest thanks to—
Al khoder Al khalifa, currently my Phd student, bringer of
astonishing books and ideas that have expanded my reading and
thinking horizons—and sudden flowers, coffee and smiles.
Amal Amireh, mainstay of my graduate school days; sharing books
and histories, friends, food, gossip, poetics and english department
politics in a very charming, old American city.
Asad Zaidi and nalini taneja, whose camaraderie and affectionate
encouragement are always heartwarming.
Bhaswati chakravorty and swapan chakravorty, for acute literary
insights and raucous adda, art and books, precious family tales and
photographs, and the very best Bloody marys infused with slit green
chillies.
Bishnupriya ghosh and Ishanti chaurasia, with whom I grew up
(and never quite did)—sharing poetry, novels, essays, songs and secrets.
Always there for me ever since I can remember, especially through days
and nights which are thin.
christopher Ricks and emily dalgarno, supervisors with the lightest
of advice, and a steady mentorship that upheld, most of all, the freedom
to think.
geeta Patel, whose sparkling friendship and remarkable scholarship
brightens especially the months she spends in delhi every year.
ix
x
Acknowledgements
kamal swaroop, whimsical maker of startling images and words, my
large-hearted, gentle friend.
lyndall gordon and karina williamson, who exuded so much
warmth and literary knowledge in the english chill, a long time ago.
michael levenson, dearest friend and inspiration, formidable and
generous scholar of literature, always gracious, caring and reassuring.
moinak Biswas, for sharpness, wit, understanding and a remarkably
textured, felt knowledge of politics and the arts. For his quietly
resounding tales of people and places riddled with bon mots—and for
his amused, grounded advice.
Prasanta chakravarty, the keenest reader of poetry I know—from
whom I have learnt so much about literature, cinema, politics and
philosophy. The chiselling of MargHumanities together into varied
shapes for five effervescent years was a life-changer.
Rahul sen, sometime student and excellent friend, fearless forager
among the arts and sexualities—with whom I continue to explore,
learn, think and grow.
Rimli Bhattacharya and kumar shahani, for their warmth, humour,
shelter, friendship—and their felt perceptive practice of aesthetics,
shared always with grace and ease.
santasil mallik, currently my mPhil student and prize-winning
filmmaker, brimming with sharp, promising ideas. Also, a huntergatherer-provider of quite astounding cinema and essays on literary
visualities.
sarah dasgupta and Roshan Jila, who effortlessly brought literature
to life in the now-distant school classroom, and without whose very
early faith in me, I would never have embarked on this journey at all.
shohini ghosh, picker-upper of spirits, incisive and delightful
scholar of cinema, provider of lightness in being along with razor-sharp
persuasions and dissuasions.
sukanta chaudhuri and supriya chaudhuri, warm, inspiring teachers
(and later, friends) with whom—and a few others—my journey in the
humanities began at college, and whose sparkling erudition remains a
beacon.
In memoriam:
kajal sengupta, icon of the free spirited, who taught drama
dramatically and strode about life with courage, sharp intellect, humour
and spitfire energy.
lalita subbu and sunil dua, among my earliest colleagues in the
teaching of literature in delhi, and irrepressible companions, both, for
delighting in the moderns.
subhabrata Bhattacharyya, who gently, generously shared his love of
literature and cinema from our college days, till a long time after.
Acknowledgements
xi
For this book in particular, my warmest gratitude to each of my
contributors—Al-khoder Al-khalifa, Anil Yadav, Aveek sen, charles
Russell, chinmaya lal Thakur, eyal Amiran, geeta Patel, Heidi
grunebaum, laura Piippo, michael levenson, moinak Biswas, Rahul
sen, Rajarshi dasgupta, sophie seita, soumyabrata chowdhury,
taylor Black—for their scholarship, good humour, patience and trust,
all in infinite measure. my thanks, also, to my meticulous editors at
Bloomsbury, R. chandra sekhar and shreya chakraborti; to Apala
Bhowmick, for her enthusiastic help with preparing the manuscript; to
santasil mallik, for taking and editing the cover photograph; to sophie
seita, for letting us use her photograph (in performance at JnU in
January 2020) on the cover.
For blind encouragement, and even blinder pride in me, my late
parents, nandita and subrata Bose. For equally and astonishingly
sustained enthusiasm and support every single day, my family—kinsuk
mitra and Romik Bose mitra, and sreeya, Rajika and Rohil ghosh.
I owe a great deal to many libraries over many decades: the
Presidency college library and the national library in calcutta; the
Bodleian at oxford; the mugar memorial at Boston University; the
Hindu college library, the Ratan tata library and the central library
at the University of delhi, the sahitya Akademi library, and the nehru
memorial museum and library and the central library, JnU, in new
delhi. Also, along the way, the British library in london, the Robarts at
the University of toronto, the Alderman at the University of Virginia,
libraries at the Rockefeller centre at Bellagio and at the Fondation
maison des sciences de l’Homme in Paris, at saarland University in
saarbrücken, at keele University in staffordshire, at the University of
leeds, and at the University of the western cape in cape town. many
debts of gratitude have mounted over decades to photocopy shops on
campuses, and in recent years to pop-up library sites online.
Hands down, however, I offer my fondest gratitude for books and
atmospherics, through many decades, to bookshops on college street,
calcutta—and not least for the fuelling by familiar, heady fumes at its
redoubtable coffee House, of liquid ‘infusion’, immersed conversations,
and other whiffs, other aromas.
IntRodUctIon
Brinda Bose
To enter this space is to inhabit the ruptural and enraptured disclosure
of the commons that fugitive enlightenment enacts, the criminal,
matricidal, queer, in the cistern, on the stroll of the stolen life, the
life stolen by enlightenment and stolen back, where the commons
give refuge, where the refuge gives commons. What the beyond
of teaching is really about is not finishing oneself, not passing, not
completing; it’s about allowing subjectivity to be unlawfully overcome
by others, a radical passion and passivity such that one becomes unfit
for subjection…. The undercommons is therefore always an unsafe
neighborhood.
—‘The university and the undercommons’,
Stefano Harney and Fred Moten (2013, 28)
For some relatively independent thought to occur in one’s mind,
earlier practices need to be oublierred—to coin a portmanteau word
from the French oublier and the English err.
… One effect of oublierring gives me another imperative: to think
of society and the social operations of touching and not touching, but
not in a received ‘sociological’ manner.
… The purpose behind the way the argument is presented—in style
and movement—is to invite you to think along with the argument,
with as few intellectual accouterments or paraphernalia as possible.
Thinking—adventuresome, and destitute.
—Practising Caste: On Touching and Not Touching,
Aniket Jaaware (2019)
Do not be afraid; our fate
Cannot be taken from us; it is a gift.
—Inferno, Dante Alighieri (2009, 85)
ম্যাগযাজিন শব্দটি আজম লক্ষ করেজি েযাইরেল ও কজিতযাে সরগে যু ক্ত
—‘বিজক্তগত জিিযানযা’, েযাল্গুনী েযায়
1
2
Humanities, Provocateur
The word magazine I have noticed is connected with a rifle and with poetry.
—‘one’s own Bed’, Falguni Roy (2019, 12; translation mine)
my inchoate thoughts about the humanities (as) provocateur can trace
some roots to this framing, by Harney and moten, of something of
a counter-revolution in the university that is ‘fugitive’ and ‘stolen’—
which I find insistently seductive. Aniket Jaaware’s distinct, remarkable
approach to ‘caste studies’—thinking through touch and not-touch—
is stirring and compelling, as a humanities practice. My thoughts,
wayward, also repeatedly return to Dante’s Inferno: its particular sense
of life and its evocations, churning with a terrible—and terrifying—
beauty. And in another world and time, to twentieth century Bangla
poet Falguni Roy, who pares language down to yoke (by violence)
together the un/likely connection between a gun and a poem, the word
‘magazine’.
An agent provocateur is more than one who is simply provocative:
being, rather, one who incites another to break a law and even be
punished for it. In english, however, the use of provocateur alone may
indicate simply provocation. I offer this eclectic collection of essays
and whimsies as both a provocation (of passionate, critical thought)
and an instigator of (metaphoric, real) law-breaking in the continuing
crafting of the humanities, in the university as much as outside of it—
through the creation of an ‘undercommons’. A certain irascibility that
accompanies the sense of a provocateur is similar, I would suggest, to
the idea of the fugitive and the stolen from Harney and Moten: forming
an undercommons which destabilises by instigating ruptures and
raptures and aspires to ‘the beyond of teaching’: becoming ‘unfit for
subjection’ and making up an ‘unsafe neighbourhood’. The idea of the
unfit and the unsafe, I would like to think, connects methodologically
with Aniket Jaaware’s idea of ‘de-stitution’/destitution (which he
pits against ‘institution’) in the practice of the humanities, outside
of a ‘received sociological manner’: he negotiates the question of
caste through the signifier of touching and not-touching and deploys
largely the literary method to (re)read a social phenomenon. In doing
so, he both touches and does not touch the endemic of caste; and he
gives himself the freedom to ‘oublierr’—to forget, and to err—in his
peregrinations towards a goal that is also a no-goal.
As the essays are pulled together—untidily, spilling out of any neat
dovetails and chain-links—and I try to write up an introduction that will
float some anchoring words and thoughts for the collection and yet allow
each of the pieces to breathe in their own skins without packaging and
labelling, the world has shrunk before one’s eyes into isolation chambers
and quarantine calendars. As the ‘novel coronavirus’ of 2020 has spun
Introduction
3
into a rapid action force, we have sightlessly stared into the heart of a
pandemic darkness not seen in at least a hundred years. The spectre of
breathless death has begun to haunt global waking and sleeping. Is this a
good time to think about what a fugitive humanities might do, to stir up
trouble against assertions of a pale goodness and a humane, sanctifying
touch, rather to endow it with an anarchic power of its own to shake the
world of its complacency and its fears, both equally stupefying? For even
as we stare into a Dantesque inferno, we must not, indeed, be afraid—
that our fate, our life (a gift, however it may look), might be snatched
away from us. The bullet we are staring down resides in the rifle as well
as in the poem, as Falguni Roy says with wonder as well as a certain
resignation: we cannot allow the word to be muzzled.
The throes of the pandemic have evoked two sets of reactions,
mainly, from those yet unaffected by the virus directly and therefore
not in hospital queues: one of responsible and calm ‘social distancing’
and constant hand-sanitising, the other of anxiety and fear and handwringing for oneself and loved ones near and distant—and combinations
of the two in varying proportions. The terror of a killer virus, spreading
across the globe unchecked until an antidote is invented, cannot be
underestimated. no current living generation has borne witness to
such a calamity, as figures of the dying and dead mount. It is hardly
unexpected that there should be a cloud of paranoia, gloom and fatality
hanging over each university, school, office, road and park, emptied of
people who cower at home before televisions, phones and computers,
feverishly, impossibly, tracking an invisible microbe that might choke
any life at any moment of a living nightmare.
Susan Sontag had said in AIDS and Its Metaphors (following up on
Illness as Metaphor after about a decade; Illness being published in 1978):
What makes the viral assault so terrifying is that contamination, and
therefore vulnerability, is understood as permanent. even if someone
infected were never to develop any symptoms—that is, the infection
remained, or could by medical intervention be rendered, inactive—
the viral enemy would be forever within. In fact, so it is believed, it is
just a matter of time before something awakens (‘triggers’) it, before
the appearance of ‘the telltale symptoms’. (Sontag 2001, 135–136)
Contagion, in human understanding, is an apparition of death, both
inevitable and irreversible. It shrinks zestful life to pint-size and impels
each of us to grasp only at being infection-free, a base life that kills any
possibility of dream, fantasy or a soaring creative imaginary.
How can the humanities make an intervention in such a time as this,
when life as we have known it is hanging in the balance? And not just
4
Humanities, Provocateur
for being in the throes of this pandemic either, perhaps. The virus of the
spring of 2020 should eventually pass—or become embedded in our lives
in mutated forms—leaving whatever disasters in its wake it will. But we
are now in an age of disasters, economic and environmental, public and
private—and we exist in the continuum of a pandemic named trauma.
Will the cosy reputation that the humanities is mostly called upon to
bask in—that of being an ameliorating presence, injecting goodness
into people and times that are nasty and brutish—do the trick? What
can its role be among unprecedented unhappiness and suspicion, when
contagion calls for distancing and isolation, while loneliness cries out
for the solace of touch? How must it address a world of the fearful and
fearsome, when a mere promise of beauty—past or future—teems with
woes of inadequacy?
Praise the mutilated world
and the gray feather a thrush lost,
and the gentle light that strays and vanishes
and returns1
writes Adam Zagajewski in ‘try to Praise the Mutilated World’ (translated
by Clare Cavanagh) and from poetry we can take our cue. Philosophers
in the west, circling around Slavoj Žižek and Giorgio Agamben and then
Judith Butler, Bruno Latour and Alain Badiou among others, have been
debating the call for ‘social distancing’, a euphemism for sanitising touch
to ward off infection, steering through its biopolitical implications for
intimacy among individuals and communities, even as this pandemic
has unfolded. Panic, as we know, is one of the great contagions of a
contagion; on the other hand, killer-contagions must perhaps bear this
weight of (their) affliction. The ongoing debate2—drawn, of course, from
Michel Foucault—between biopolitics, bare life, liberal democracies,
capitalism, socialism and a pandemic even as it engulfs the globe from
end to end is illuminating, if only for the realisation that it is possible to
think beyond modes of immediate and necessary responsibility even in
the grip of a crisis—but that there are perhaps limits to what politicalphilosophical thinking can do.
In ‘Clarifications’, Giorgio Agamben feeds the controversy he had
earlier created when writing on the effects of the pandemic in Italy, by
further denouncing the paralysis caused by fear of sickness and death:
… It is obvious that Italians are disposed to sacrifice practically
everything—the normal conditions of life, social relationships,
work, even friendships, affections, and religious and political
convictions—to the danger of getting sick. Bare life—and the
Introduction
5
danger of losing it—is not something that unites people, but blinds
and separates them.3
He ends this short commentary by prophesying that the normalising of
‘social distancing’ will inevitably lead to a world of human desolation,
‘wherever possible substituting machines for every contact—every
contagion—between human beings’. setting aside what has been scoffed
at and dismissed in his commentaries, one may say that Agamben here
is trying to speak like a poet: he is placing a living value not just on
‘contact’—but on ‘contagion’—between people.
This could well be Zagajewski’s ‘mutilated world’, a world of illness
and imperfection; the one the poet exhorts us to ‘try and praise’.
Much ridicule is being heaped on Agamben, prophet of ‘bare life’, for
stretching his metaphor to swallow up a pandemic; it is true that if one
is looking for reason and responsibility from a profound thinker then
a counterintuitive suggestion that there might be a richness, if risk, in
contamination and fatal disease might appear dastardly by any measure
and especially so in the midst of an egregious crisis of existence for all
of humanity. On another register, however, one might wonder if this—
particularly, this—may not be the time to escape to other imaginations
of past and present. Zagajewski’s poem is strung on nostalgia and the
power of memories of delight and wonder, to sustain one through
ravaged times.
You gathered acorns in the park in autumn
and leaves eddied over the earth’s scars
—the remembrance of ordinary moments of companionship and
pleasure are likened to nature’s continued commitment to heal its
wounds and renew itself in an evocative image, ‘leaves eddied over the
earth’s scars’. Agamben reiterates his scepticism, of the global cry for
safety through compulsive sanitisation, in another blog-piece dated 11
May 2020: ‘It is legitimate to ask whether such a society can still be
defined as human or whether the loss of sensible relations, of the face,
of friendship, of love can be truly compensated for by an abstract and
presumably completely fictitious health security.’4
In The Adventure (2018), Agamben’s short philosophical discussion
drawing upon a story of four egyptian gods in Macrobius’s Saturnalia
and Goethe’s Urworte, he lists Demon/Spirit, event/Chance, eros/
Love, necessity/Destiny and Hope as the deities that preside over a
human being’s birth and life and in medieval tales, a knight’s adventure
is signified by chance, destiny, risk and marvel. In the chapter titled
‘eros’, Agamben writes on Georg Simmel’s entwining of eros and
adventure: ‘If eros and adventure are here often intimately entwined,
6
Humanities, Provocateur
this is not because love gives meaning and legitimacy to adventure, but,
on the contrary, because only a life that has the form of adventure can
truly find love’ (Agamben 2018, 54). He then turns to Oskar Becker, an
early student of Heidegger’s, for his ‘philosophical theory of adventure’
which moves away from his teacher’s thought about ‘being-thrown’
(into a situation or existence, dasein, that he cannot escape but also
cannot fully comprehend) to its opposite, ‘being-carried’, a ‘lightness’
which ‘defines the “adventurousness” of the artist’s experience’ (2018, 55).
Becker sees ‘adventure’ as
the condition of an existence—such as that of the artist—that is
placed in between ‘the extreme insecurity of being-thrown and
the absolute security of being-carried’.... It is significant here that
the artist takes the place of the knight as the subject of adventure.
(Agamben 2018, 56–57)
It is the artist, therefore, who must rise from being-thrown and
continually move towards being-carried, ideally hanging between the
two existences, never certain about whether life will hand out only tough
lessons—but ready to meet them head on with a certain ambivalent
confidence. Adam Zagajewski is perhaps the gentler poet—‘beingthrown’ rather than ‘being-carried’, accepting mutilations as inevitable:
though offering nostalgia as panacea, a possibility by which to heal, a
leaf to eddy over a scar. Denise Levertov in ‘Goodbye to tolerance’ is
more of the other; contentious, more welcoming of wounding, angrily
discarding those who seek or offer healing in past perfect.
Goodbye, goodbye,
I don’t care
if I never taste your fine food again,
neutral fellows, seers of every side.
tolerance
What crimes are committed in your name,
writes Levertov, singling out ‘genial poets’ and ‘good women’ as the
enemies of the full, difficult life she hails. She is dismissive of
weak hearts, perfect pulses that never
falter: irresponsive
to nightmare reality,
and sets the parameters for a renewal on her own terms which will not
be a palliative but a challenge:
Introduction
7
we shan’t meet again—
unless you leap it, leaving
behind you the cherished
worms of your dispassion,
your pallid ironies,
your jovial, murderous,
wry-humored balanced judgment,
leap over, unbalanced? ... then
how our fanatic tears
would flow and mingle
for joy ...
In the ‘nightmare reality’ of a pandemic—the one right here, and the others
that lurk for coming generations—the intrepid poet commands that one
should ‘leap it’ and ‘leap over, unbalanced’—to steal a fugitive future, and
discover ‘how our fanatic tears/would flow and mingle/for joy…’
Both Zagajewski and levertov, perhaps on different paths, play
provocateur, one gently and sadly, asking that bodily infliction be
folded into praise of the world and the remnants of living be illumined
by the perfect, passing memory; the other commanding that a sense of
affliction be discarded altogether for a rapturous mingling of ‘fanatic
tears’ and ‘joy’. Harney and Moten invite us to tread intrepid paths, ‘on
the stroll of the stolen life’, ruptured and rapturous at once. Jaaware
dares us to be ‘adventuresome, and destitute’, as we push on with our
reading and thinking and to sculpt the material to our method as much
as the method to our material. Dante plunges us into a fiery hell, but
exhorts us not to fear that what is ours will be taken away from us.
And Falguni Roy reminds us that an apocalypse waits to leap from a
poem as much as a rifle. Across and between them lies the task for the
humanities, perhaps—at once to retrieve and to relinquish the wound
that our present continually inflicts upon us and then to be defiant,
fearless—weeping and exalting, exalting and weeping.
GLEANING
How odd is it that words seem like a necessity and a consolation
while at the same time they are an anchor, a deviation, a source of
incomprehension … I believe in stuttering, in speech torn to pieces
by its own thorns and brambles. I believe too in a total and absolute
truth that is perfectly inexpressible. (Pajak 2019, 22)
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Humanities, Provocateur
Frédéric Pajak, swiss-French writer and graphic artist, launched in
2012 his 10-volume Uncertain Manifesto (written in French) of which
the seventh was published in 2018. An english translation of the
first volume, by Donald nicholson-Smith, appeared in 2019. Walter
Benjamin stands at the shifting core of this tale made of art and words,
recalling as if the beginnings of all our readings and gleanings; Samuel
Beckett and the artist Bram van Velde also appear. Pajak is not overly
interested in archiving histories of event, but more, like Benjamin’s
archetypal rag-picker, in ferreting out bits and pieces of language
and thought that are lost in heaps of words and in them discovering,
discerning, the glint of gems. This is the best we can do—should do—
with inherited knowledges, he seems to tell us as he accompanies
Benjamin through his fitful travels, loves, experiments and writing
and nails them all with brooding, black-and-white drawings that often
dominate the pages, leaving his words small, poignant.
‘Benjamin’s method’, says Pajak, ‘was to combine the scraps of
thought that he had collected as so many quotations; this meant not
producing a theoretical treatise but rather offering thought a new path
to follow by reconstructing it from fragments’ (2019, 149); earlier in
Uncertain Manifesto, Pajak delineates his own method, against a dark
charcoal sketch of a heaving sea:
This morning, the sea is replete. Just a trace of saliva, enough to
lap tenderly at the beach … to write and draw as the mood takes
me. And to read, or rather reread enormities, contemporary or not.
Read, and live. And share a little of what I read, of what I live, and
why, and how. (Pajak 2019, 83)
This is what we are doing in our essays here, and what we wish them
to do going forward through our readers: not to produce a ‘theoretical
treatise’ but to ‘combine scraps of thought’ to offer newer paths to
thought; to write and draw and watch and read ‘as the mood takes’ one;
to ‘read, or rather reread enormities, contemporary or not’; to read and
live and share a little of what one reads and lives—and how, when and
why.
How would one hold ‘enormities’ to ransom, though, if we are to think
in terms of fragments of event, slips of memory and scraps of thought?
The trick may lie in rereading enormities: in taking them apart, in
pulling them off pedestals, in deconstructing and reconstructing them,
as well as in replacing them with the miniscule, the dispensable, the
incomprehensible. But not just that, either. By enormities in scholarly,
artistic and archival resources we mean an immeasurable quantity,
nothing that any of us singly can cover, endorse or dismiss. We each
Introduction
9
seek and hold close the sources that move us and make us think. we
adore them and argue with them. As long as we engage with them,
they are our special ‘enormities’ and we make good our investment by
conversing with them in some form or other.
we are not compelled to satisfy each one about our curiosity or our
criticality as long as we have something to say and a democratic space
to say it in. we do not have to prove our understanding of an entire
body of work to draw upon what of it draws us in. we may engage
with it how we will, in whatever form or length we wish, creatively
or cryptically. like Benjamin’s rag-picker, this anthology travels to
different, disconnected locations to pick at what arrests our thoughts
in the humanities at a point of time. Here they are strewn before you,
some ideas and words that seemed precious to us, drawing upon the
‘enormities’ luring us there. Like Benjamin’s rag-picker, we hope that
our readers will be drawn to this collection and will find something in it
that will want them to linger and to hold. essays are gleanings, in their
execution and in their reception too, we hope; may the harvest, lean or
full, be a rich one.
And gleanings being traces, they remain with us, invisible,
embedded. They re-surface like ghosts, as if to sit by the bedside of
other dying souls and ideas, offering succour, however depleted and
pitiable. Jibanananda Das, modernist (and sometimes surrealist) poet
of Bengal (1899–1954), in the poem ‘Komolalebu’/‘Orange’ from his
famed collection Banalata Sen, asks to float back after death with a slice
of orange to the bedside of a dear one, carrying one sorry bit of fruit as
offering:
একিযাে যখন বেহ বেরক িযাে হরয় যযাি
আিযাে জক জেরে আসি নযা আজম পৃজেিীরত?
আিযাে বযন জেরে আজস
বকযারনযা এক শীরতে েযারত
একটযা জহম কমলযারলিু ে কেুণ মযাংস জনরয়
বকযারনযা এক পজেজিত মুমূরুষুে জিিযানযাে জকনযারে।
—‘কমলযারলিু ’ (িনলতযা বসন )
Once when I have left this body
shall I never come back to earth again?
May I come back again
on some winter’s night
bearing the miserable flesh of a chilled slice of orange
to the ebbing bedside of some familiar one.
—‘Orange’ (from Banalata Sen; translation mine)
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Humanities, Provocateur
In a strange—but not morbid—way, this could be every artist’s spectral
return, over and over, bearing the work s/he has made—‘the miserable
flesh of a chilled slice of orange’—to the bedsides of those who are dear,
precious, known and unknown. The slice of orange is imbued with
contradictions, it is a miserable and sad piece of fruit and yet it is chilled
and therefore possibly alluring to a hot and flushed brow and throat,
bringing relief and sustenance from the love it signifies. Gleanings,
pickings, traces, remainders: these are the metaphorical, miserable slices
of oranges offered to each of us from all we see, hear and know, when
we are at a high or low ebb. Perhaps unlike t.S. eliot’s ‘Lazarus, come
from the dead, come back to tell [us] all’,5 these slices of orange—our
essays—will never have entire tales to tell or answers to offer for our
‘overwhelming questions’ but they will spark thought, ignite ideas and
bring back forgotten insights. The story of Lazarus came to haunt eliot’s
Prufrock from the Gospel of St Luke in the new testament, when a rich
man in Hades begged Abraham to send the poor, dead, good Lazarus
across the chasm to dip his finger in water and cool his parched, burning
tongue and then send him to earth to warn his brothers of their imminent
fate in Hades. But our fate is a gift, as Dante has said, and no one can ‘tell
us all’: that is not what is meant for us at all. We can only stab at wisps
and webs that float around us, some within grasp and some without, to
enhance those discernments accrued to our piecemeal knowledges.
two entries in the entrancing Drafts for a Third Sketchbook by Max
Frisch read:
Am I very attached to life?
I am attached to a woman.
Is that enough?
and
I’m not ill, or I don’t realize I am. What’s got into the words? I’m
shaking sentences, the way you shake a broken watch, and take it/
them apart, spending time it doesn’t show. (Frisch 2013, 23)
The two apparently unrelated utterances come together to claim
an urge for life and love and language. What is enough? How much
attachment is enough? What will make us shake the broken watch of
our ill bodies, ‘spending time it doesn’t show’, to seek another minute,
an hour or a day? What do we do with what we learn from life and
its inevitable sorrows? Gerard Manley Hopkins caught this moment of
waning strength and glimmering knowledge in ‘Spring and Fall’:
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11
Ah! ás the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By and by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you wíll weep and know why.
In ‘worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie’ lies the deepest sadness a young girl
can first encounter, the knowledge of a world that will eventually become
pale and fragmented; it needed coined portmanteau expressions—
‘wanwood’, ‘leafmeal’—for Hopkins to convey such a quiet and
devastating realisation. This is the ‘Fall’ that Margaret grieves for, a
fall that denotes autumn, Adam and eve, and leaves actually dropping
from trees all at once. ‘Spring and Fall’ is unrelentingly despairing, and
yet in its weeping and knowing has an ethereal, exquisite grace—even
an incomprehensible solace—that soars beyond the mere mourning of
passing seasons and lives.
PERFORATION
I have been a swallower of lives; and to know me, just the one of
me, you’ll have to swallow the lot as well. Consumed multitudes
are jostling and shoving inside me; and guided only by the memory
of a large white bedsheet with a roughly circular hole some seven
inches in diameter cut into the centre, clutching at the dream of
that holey, mutilated square of linen, which is my talisman, my
open-sesame…. (Rushdie 1981, 11)
Salman Rushdie’s Indian-english novel of 1981–1982, Midnight’s
Children, is anchored not so much in all those known and unknown
Indians born in the country’s hour of freedom from colonial rule as
the title indicates, as it is by the spectre of a perforated bedsheet. This
‘mutilated square of linen’ brings a fragmented vision: first, one can
only see part of a whole through it, and second, one is also, perforce,
seeing partially: hence the one who seeing is also compromised by never
being allowed to see anything other than (in) fragments, and the world
is never complete to him. In the first chapter, titled ‘The Perforated
Bedsheet’ and through his novel, Rushdie wrings dry the metaphor of
hole and whole, inside and outside, partition and fragment. In a bizarre
tale set in spring in the Kashmir valley that opens Midnight’s Children,
Aadam Aziz, grandfather of the novel’s protagonist Saleem Sinai and
a Heidelberg-trained young doctor with a mythically distinct nose, is
called for a house visit to treat the landowner’s daughter who is sick.
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Humanities, Provocateur
Rushing over, doctor Aziz discovers that protocol would not allow
even a doctor to violate maidenly modesty; a bedsheet with a seveninch hole would therefore shelter her entirely from his gaze, while the
perforation would be placed against the specific part of her body that
was ailing, for him to examine.
As days progress, the landowner’s daughter has many ailments, and
Doctor Aziz is repeatedly called upon to examine various parts of her
anatomy through the perforation in the bedsheet, which, nevertheless,
continues to separate them. He gains ‘insider’ knowledge of her body—if
only superficially, in parts and under strict surveillance—while remaining
an outsider to her as a person. Yet he falls in love with her; it is almost
inevitable that this introduction to the young naseem Ghani is alluring,
clearly more so for being less than complete. So Saleem Sinai, born
momentously along with a new nation and its partition upon the midnight
of 15 August 1947—who becomes a snot-nosed breathing metaphor for
its struggling new life—traces his origin to the perforated sheet that was
instrumental in his grandfather’s impulse to marry the young woman
hidden behind it, thus to beget a lineage of big noses. Curiosity, intrusion,
intervention, secrecy, prudery, allure, romance, genealogy, history, illness,
diagnosis, life, death: these, and more, are signified by a ‘holey, mutilated
square of linen’ which is a ‘talisman’ and a ‘open-sesame’. What is it that
opens with that hole? Knowledges incomplete, talismanic.
A perforated bedsheet creates consternation but offers numerous im/
possibilities. If torn with intent, it signals a way of the undercommons,
something from outside and below sneaking up and in to spy, gain
knowledge, perhaps even offer a salve. If rent by wear and tear, it still
allows a window to the covered and unknown; meanwhile, the bedsheet
for all its state of indecency remains a barrier to complete transparency
and mingling. If a perforation provokes curiosity and daring—even,
or often, about the ordinary and mundane, made extraordinary by the
veiling—the (remaindered) sheet sustains and thwarts it, dictating how
one may ‘know’ it. And while there may be a glimpse, touch or smell of
the attraction, parts of it that are inaccessible are the most tantalising
of all. Rushdie’s extended metaphor of the perforated bedsheet may be
deployed to think about the ways of art that are different, either banal or
deemed dysfunctional, exhibiting signs of mental or physical sickness:
here represented by naseem Ghani’s mysterious (and mysteriously
shrouded) ailments. The characteristics of ‘perforation’—arousing
curiosity and desire by conscious distancing and identifying in a
distanced/veiled object an aura which it may either possess or have to
be imaginatively endowed with—would work to extract singular tones
and meaning in its critical appraisal. The trope of the outsider looking
in has been continually reworked and reimagined in art, literature and
Introduction
13
politics, almost as much as the insider reporting to the world outside
from the trenches of experience.
on ‘outsider Art’, derived from the twentieth century painter Jean
dubuffet’s French formulation ‘Art Brut’ (‘Raw Art’), Colin Rhodes
writes,
It is seductive whether visible to a wide audience, or hidden from
view entirely, and in this sense possesses a tantalizing and fragile
presence … [which] grew out of Surrealism’s interest in phenomena
that lie outside individual prejudice and expectations and in the
commonplace of experience … their enigmatic life. (Rhodes 2000, 22)
Art by the clinically insane was of particular interest to Dubuffet;
Surrealism too thought of madness as a sign of freedom, a subversion
of the oppressive everyday. Outsider Art extended itself to all
transcendental or metaphysical worlds, representations that lurked
beyond the real; the wall between the real and the imagined, however,
was perforated, and art and artist existed on both planes at once, or
interchanged them. This ‘swallowing’ of lives outside of one’s skin and
across a divide—of linen or iron—and the consuming of multitudes
that swarm and jostle within one, take unforeseen and astonishing
shapes in creative, critical and political forms of aesthetics.
In a conversation with Mark Foster Gage, Jacques Rancière explains
his perception of the political as aesthetic: ‘The aesthetic problem is
not at all about beauty. It is about the experience of a common world
and who is able to share this experience. For me, politics is aesthetic in
itself, and in a sense, was constituted as such before art’ (Rancière and
Gage 2019, 10). Rancière thus distinguishes between ‘making’ art as
something consciously ‘beautiful’ and a democratic experience of the
aesthetic that emerges organically from the ground and is encountered
as pleasing, moving, enraging, embittering, joyous or sorrowful. In
Proletarian Nights—whose original title, when published in 1981, was
Nights of Labor: The Workers Dream in Nineteenth Century France—
Rancière studies factory workers in their moments of leisure and finds
in them poets and artists and music-makers. It does not allow for them
to escape the days of labour which make for the politics of class, but the
nights imbue their lives with a political aesthetic, as he says in his preface:
those nights wrested from the normal sequence of work and sleep.
They were imperceptible, one might almost say inoffensive breaks
in the ordinary course of things, where already the impossible was
being prepared, dreamt and seen: the suspension of that ancient
hierarchy which subordinates those dedicated to labour to those
endowed with the privilege of thought. They were nights of study
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Humanities, Provocateur
and intoxication, and days of labour prolonged to hear the word of
the apostles or the lectures given by teachers of the people, to learn,
to dream, to talk or to write. They are Sunday mornings begun
early so as to leave for the country together and take the dawn by
surprise.6
In holding this other life of the workers up to light, Rancière wishes to
exhibit not only the rupture between a worker’s hands and eyes, as he
says in his interview with Gage but also the arbitrary disruption between
two kinds of human beings, one of which belongs to the working class
(2019, 12). A proletarian night ‘of study and intoxication’ is aesthetic
even as it is political.
A corollary of this is also true: the aesthetic can be political in and of
itself. It is a mistaken commonplace that for art to be truly political, it
must avow an agenda and some propaganda. The political nests within
art; it may be retrieved by drilling a hole through its aesthetic form
but in fact it ceases to be art when ideology serves as its envelope or a
frame or an emblem-embossed, colour-coded cover. Viktor Shklovsky,
described as both a patriarch and enfant terrible of literary Formalism
who introduced the concept of ostranenie—‘of making the habitual
strange in order to re-experience it’—to critical vocabulary about art,
says in his essay ‘The Links of Art Do not Repeat each Other…’: ‘Art
is not a way to console… Art is a way to reveal and renew reality… it’s
closer to its source than its shadow is to the object which conceals part
of the ground from the sun’ (Shklovsky 2017, 324). In another essay
titled ‘A Sentimental Journey’ (1923), in which he digs up memories
of the Revolution in Russia from 1917 to 1922, he declares, ‘Art is, at
its heart, ironic and destructive. It animates the world. Its task consists
in creating inequalities. It creates them through comparisons’ (2017,
150). What, then, about a politics—endemic then to Russia—that
highlights inequalities, and goes to work on them as manifest ideology?
What about an art that weaves in and out of such political lives and
commitments, passions and estrangements?
Alexandra Kollontai (1872–1952)—Marxist feminist revolutionary,
member of the Bolshevik government of Russia in 1917–1918,
diplomat and writer who advocated ‘free love’ just as she believed that
the family would ‘wither away’ when the state would take over and
stamp out social inequality in the ‘revolution to come’—constructs
a complex tale of human intimacy, love and betrayal in the early era
of Russian Communism in a compelling short story, ‘The Loves of
Three Generations’ (1929).7 Straightforward, with no flourishes of style
or emotion, Kollontai tells of three women—grandmother, mother,
daughter, each a torch-bearer both of the Communist ideology and
Introduction
15
‘free love’ that the author held aloft—as they resolutely make their
way through many a dilemma about the many men they cherish and
fight for, fight alongside, fight against. Finally, faced with her daughter
Genia’s bewilderingly cold-blooded approach to the lover they end up
sharing, Olga Sergejewna is more aghast at Genia’s nonchalance about
her passion than the fact that it is her own man that her daughter has
slept with: ‘Without warmth, without even the most elementary feeling
for one another, without the goodness of heart that places the feelings
of those one loves above everything else ... is that Communism?’
This conflation of (free) love with Marxist political ideology is
pivotal to loving and working honestly and fiercely, pronounces Olga
stoutly in the short story: one cannot love less, let alone coldly or with
disinterest. After Genia’s casual sexual relationship with Andrei, she is
contrite at the thought that her mother, whom she loves to distraction,
may have been hurt. This, to her, is infinitely more significant than
her dalliance with her mother’s partner, and for which she is willing to
immediately sacrifice the man whom she insists means nothing to her;
instead, she proclaims:
And there are those I love—oh, how I love them.... not only mother
... Lenin, for instance. Please, don’t smile. I love him more deeply
than any one of those whom I have liked for a passing moment.
When I know that I am to see him, that I am to hear his voice, I am
absolutely beside myself for days.
This easy transference of devotion from lover to political leader and
idol intricately complicates the idea of free love in Kollontai’s story.
That is why, to Genia, her love for her leader Lenin is at par with
romantic love. That is why her adoration for her mother, a dedicated and
efficient party worker, can casually cancel out her (perhaps unthinking)
sexual intimacy with her mother’s man. It is important that there is
no dilemma in Genia over the choices she makes at different points of
time; only her political commitment is steadfast, akin to the most loyal
of loves. What does the political mean, on such a canvas? What does
communism mean to love, or love to communism? Is this Kollontai’s
own avowal of loyalty to the men who led communist Russia around
the time of the revolution?
If the short story indicates such, Kollontai’s manifesto of 1921,
‘The Workers’ Opposition’, records her strong critique of Lenin’s
leadership. (Kollontai’s changing politics around feminism through
her life is fascinating: she opposed early Russian feminism that focused
on what she saw as individual and elite freedoms, constructed a new
feminist politics that challenged Lenin’s misogyny when she became a
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Humanities, Provocateur
part of the Bolshevik government at the time of the revolution of 1917,
working for abortion rights and communes for mothers at work, among
other issues—but later in life no longer championed feminist causes at
all, moving on to other concerns.) In the manifesto, first published in
the well-known Russian magazine Pravda in January 1921, she writes:
The masses are not blind.... The workers may cherish an ardent
affection and love for such personalities as Lenin. They may be
fascinated by the incomparable flowery eloquence of trotsky and
his organizing abilities. They may revere a number of other leaders as leaders. But when the masses feel that they and their class are
not trusted, it is quite natural that they say: no, halt! We refuse to
follow you blindly.8
Kollontai as a sometime feminist and lifelong political thinker is quite
riveting: if one places her fiction (usually dismissed) alongside her
political writings, one glimpses the contradictions and convictions of a
woman’s intrepid communist life lived avidly in the throes of arguably
one of the grandest revolutionary movements in world history.
CAPRICE
Lifting belly.
How are you.
Lifting belly how are you lifting belly.
We like a fire and we don’t mind if it smokes
Do you. (Stein [1989]1995, 2)
Gertrude Stein wrote Lifting Belly, a fifty-page long avant-gardist-lyrical
paean to her love, Alice—with a refrain, ‘lifting belly’, quixotic shorthand
for lesbian pleasure—between 1915 and 1917. The Autobiography of
Alice B Toklas by Stein is flagged as an experiment in composing an
ambiguous life-story of one’s own with a companion’s signature,
doubling up as a tribute to the companion which traverses many
boundaries of voice, history and belonging effortlessly, politically; not
very well known is her prose-poem Lifting Belly, however, that cavorts
in regions of language and body and astounds for its sheer tactility
and word acrobatics. It is likely that Stein’s extravaganza, catching the
sexual with words—without using any sexual words at all—has made
many of her readers uncomfortable. Stein brings the sexual into the
everyday and that is what makes many squirm. Rebecca Marks, Stein’s
lyrical editor, writes evocatively of this power:
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17
By associating lifting belly with the details of everyday life—
sandals, candles, figs, salmon, pencils—and with events, people and
places all over the world—Geneva, Barcelona, the Battle of Verdun,
the King and Queen of Montenegro—Stein creates a universe of
lifting belly. Lifting belly is not lesbian sex, over there in the closet,
hidden in bed, away from the public eye. Lifting belly is lesbian sex
in the world, participating, relating and transforming everything it
encounters. Lifting belly is a language. Lifting belly is an occupation.
Lifting belly naturally celebrates. Lifting belly eroticizes, incarnates
everything it touches. (Stein 1995, xix)
Stein’s friendship with Pablo Picasso is said to have inspired her
attempt to write cubist prose and poetry, of which Tender Buttons
was perhaps her most spectacular achievement, though Lifting Belly
also exhibits some of those angularities along with its lyricism.
Meanwhile, the regular Paris evening salon at 27 rue de Fleurus—
home of Gertrude, her brother Leo and later Alice—was regularly
attended by stars of the literary and art world including Picasso,
Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Apollinaire, Joyce, Pound, tzara, Braque
and Matisse. In fact, it was claimed by Stein in Autobiography to
be the address at which cubist art was birthed—because of those
who attended her soirees and how she collected and arranged their
paintings on her atelier walls—to the artists’ collective outrage.
‘Yet’, writes earl Fendelman,
there was more than vanity in it, for what she believed the paintings
expressed was a new theory about aesthetic perception, one which
demanded that the artist, the object, and the audience be drawn
together in a unified reality.... Believing this, she could see her
placing of the paintings side by side as a seminal act, an expression
of the same art of juxtaposition that played so large a part in early
cubist work and which provides a direct analogue for much of Stein’s
own practice in her verbal portraits. (Fendelman 1972, 481–482)
This rather naughty and delicious claim of Stein’s was publicly
denounced in 1935 by the artists Braque, Matisse, tzara and a few
others who frequented her salon, in a pamphlet titled Testimony Against
Gertrude Stein, published as a supplement to a journal, Transition. While
their wrath at Stein’s nonchalant audacity was possibly justified, their
somewhat childish tirades against her airy exaggerations and fictions
in the assumed voice of Alice toklas hardly wrapped them in dignity.
The Testimony, instead, becomes a testament to Stein’s overwhelming
personality in every aspect of her life—as friend, lover, host, patron
of the arts, art collector, bon mot dispenser—and possessor of an
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Humanities, Provocateur
exuberant pen and a fervent imagination that often compromised facts
for the sake of glorious technicolour. An incensed Matisse wrote of
Stein/toklas’s Autobiography in his Testimony:
Her book is composed, like a picture puzzle, of different pieces of
different pictures which at first, by their very chaos, give an illusion
of the movement of life. But if we attempt to envisage the things
she mentions the illusion does not last. In short, it is more like
a harlequin’s costume the different pieces of which, having been
more or less invented by herself, have been sewn together without
taste and without relation to reality. (Braque et al. 1934–1935, 8)
The image of the harlequin works quite famously for Stein in spirit if
not in appearance and thumbs its metaphoric nose at the sudden, late,
collective disdain of artists who had thronged her home. Her radical
experiment with autobiographical writing—talking really about the life
she conjured up and lived, in the voice of her companion Alice—is as
much an example of the zaniness of her creative energy as are writings
as diverse as Tender Buttons and Lifting Belly. In Autobiography, Alice
recalls one of their dinner parties when she was seated next to Picasso:
‘After a while I murmured to Picasso that I liked his portrait of Gertrude
Stein. Yes, he said, everybody says that she does not look like it but
that does not make any difference, she will, he said’ (Stein 1933, 14).
Certainly Stein was a chameleon-writer, if one were to extend Picasso’s
drollery about her person to include her pen.
The sister was not a mister. Was this a surprise. It was. The conclusion
came when there was no arrangement. All that time that there was a
question there was a decision. Replacing a casual acquaintance with
an ordinary daughter does not make a son. (Stein 1914, 65)
—in Tender Buttons, Stein ruffled up some gender trouble well before it
was a gleam in Butler’s eye. For Alice in her love-lyric, she wrote:
Lifting belly. Are you. Lifting.
Oh dear I said I was tender, fierce and tender.
Do it. What a splendid example of carelessness.
It gives me a great deal of pleasure to say yes. (Stein [1989]1995, 3)
Completed by 1917, here was a testament that was saying yes to ‘fierce
and tender’ (lesbian) pleasure, a good handful of years before Joyce’s
Molly Bloom made ‘yes I said yes I will Yes’ a refrain for a woman’s
claim to joyous sexual abandonment among the flowers and among the
Modernists.
Introduction
19
PARAPHERNALIA
two of Bengal’s maverick artists—filmmaker Ritwik Ghatak and
sculptor-painter Ramkinkar Baij—captured in their work much of that
which was decadent, poverty-stricken and resplendent in India, before
and after its independence and partition in the middle of the twentieth
century. Ghatak left behind an unfinished documentary on Baij which
he was shooting in 1975 in Santiniketan (‘abode of peace’) that housed
Visva-Bharati, the university Rabindranath tagore founded and where
Baij taught. Ghatak passed away in 1976; his son Ritoban later stitched
together the footage Ghatak had collected over four days of continued
shooting and made it available on Youtube.9 This is a priceless peridocumentary, more moving and ‘immediate’ for being amateurishly
edited and sub-titled, which is also a constant reminder that it is not
the film we were meant to watch—and yet, we are grateful for the gems
it offers us.
That machines big and small aid us and fail us, that life and death
are games of the body that energise and sap us incessantly, are of no
particular shock. Documentary footage offers us the sights and sounds
of Ghatak walking with Baij under a bristling sun around ‘Kala Bhavana’
(the arts complex of the university), stopping at Baij’s sculptures placed
in abandon on the greens and at the intricate murals on university
buildings that he produced with other artists and students, the two of
them engaged in conversation, banter and laughter. It provides not just
insights into one artist’s provenance enabled by another but a frangible
sense of how perilous all art is, how driven the artist is, how his tools
are both unique and contingent, and how the display, preservation and
archiving of art is entirely unpredictable.
Baij worked on his sculptures with found materials, mixing concrete,
cement, sand and clay and produced a scabrous, unfinished texture of
work-in-progress that spoke gruffly but warmly to the stories he was
trying to capture. ‘Mill Call’ (1956), a sculpture of a factory-workercouple with a child rushing towards the rice mill as the morning whistle
sounds, has figures with cloth streaming behind them. Describing his
sculpture to filmmaker Ghatak on camera, Baij earnestly explains that
since the coolies don’t get time to dry their clothes before they have to
get to work very early, the woman’s saree flying after her dries in the
breeze as they sprint to make it to the mill on time (6.24–7.00 minutes,
documentary footage). In the rough tenderness of the sculpture’s
material, in the tale behind the cloth that streams after the running
figures and in the picture of graceful flight that they present, a story of
poverty, labour and love is erected. Baij was artistically and emotionally
invested in the Santhal tribal families of the neighbouring district; this
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Humanities, Provocateur
was continually reflected in his sculptures. In answer to an interviewer’s
comment that ‘-most of [his] work relates to the santhal natives of
Birbhum’, Baij reflected,
Yes, maybe. They are toilers ... they work ... they have active hands ...
in the sun ... under open light ... flowing unkempt hair ... oozing
sweat. They feel hunger. They suffer ... they have sorrow ... they
are poor. (After some silence) They are very active. I love activity of
work ... Rhythmic ... active life.
… They offer richness of form. (Baij 2010, 17)
It is the richness of form that Baij explored, as did Ghatak, fellow
maverick, and both produced art in and from ‘found objects’ well
before the term acquired its prominence in aesthetic vocabulary.
Asked whether he would make a self-portrait, Baij replied laconically,
‘Whatever an artist creates, is his self-portrait’ (2010, 18). He recalls
how the ‘blue earth’ that is exposed after heavy rains impelled him to
pick up handfuls and start kneading them into figurines (2010, 46);
many of his sculptures on the grounds of the Visva-Bharati display
this grey-blue sheen in the cement and concrete he used, mainly
because he could not afford more durable materials like bronze. The
famous Bengal monsoons also made him put his art canvases to other,
immediate uses. In a conversation in the documentary footage, Ghatak
asks Baij about the paintings that he has hung from the eaves of his
home to plug rainwater dripping from his roof; Baij laughs ruefully and
replies,
Yes—the large oil paintings I hang below the roof facing downwards.
They won’t be harmed, you see, as they are oil colours. I hang them
there because of the rains.... I have got the roof partially repaired,
but not fully. now because of the exhibition I have to bring the
canvases down—then what will I hang in their place? [Laughs
loudly]. Then with the little money I have, I will have to buy some
straw! But I need money for food as well ... so how will I make ends
meet? [laughs again]. (27.10–28.28 minutes documentary footage;
transcription into english mine)
‘Kinkarda’, as he was known affectionately, never lost his energy and
delight in making art, and making life, with whatever he possessed, saw
and found. The energy, most of all, was ferocious. He recalled a piece
of spine-tingling advice he received from Rabindranath tagore, once
when working on a portrait of the poet who was also his mentor:
Introduction
21
He looked all around to check if anyone was listening…. Then he
leaned forward, and said to me, Look, when you see something [you
wish to draw], just spring like a tiger and grab it from behind, twist
the neck in a stranglehold, and never look back…. —This is the last
word. (17.34–18.15 minutes documentary footage, transcription
into english mine.)
Ritwik Ghatak, his filmmaker-interlocutor, also had strong words about
art and the artist. In ‘A Scenario’, published in 1974, Ghatak sketches a
‘mad’, ‘drunk’ director after his new film has been rejected:
The director should feel isolated from his medium of expression…
At the end the man should emerge as a hero with all his fallacy.
When he is absolutely alone and on the verge of suicide he is
offered an alternative.
He has to leave all art work and go away into some lonesome
spot to earn his living. He accepts.
He goes to the spot. nature is beautiful around him and he falls
in love with it.
It seems that a happy ending is in view. But that is not to be.
He tears up the landscape with his own hands, literally.
And then there is the atomic explosion turning the seawater into
a huge mushroom. (Ghatak 2000, 103)
Here is an apocalyptic vision, in syncopation with the artist as both
creator and destroyer, as magnificent and maleficent. It is not that wellworn elegy about how humans have ruined and misused the bounty
of nature, either: it is about taking the object of artistic desire by the
scruff of the neck as a tiger does its prey, and by wringing it, tearing it
up—‘literally’. And then finding an outstanding piece of art at the end
of it, a gigantic explosion that overwhelms one like the tsunami it must
be, bearing the blood and toil of hands, eyes, machine, brush, colour,
camera and concrete.
DESCENT
In The Queer Art of Failure, Judith Halberstam (2011, 2–3) writes,
under certain circumstances failing, losing, forgetting, unmaking,
undoing, unbecoming, not knowing may in fact offer more creative,
more cooperative, more surprising ways of being in the world.
Failing is something queers do and have always done exceptionally
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well; for queers failure can be a style, to cite Quentin crisp, or a
way of life, to cite Foucault, and it can stand in contrast to the grim
scenarios of success that depend upon ‘trying and trying again’.
samuel Beckett’s words in his short, characteristically cryptic,
prose piece Worstword Ho (1983) are often quoted, sometimes to
offer some faint encouragement in the face of disappointment and
hopelessness at failure: ‘All of old. nothing else ever. ever tried.
ever failed. no matter. try again. Fail again. Fail better.’10 Beckett
queered the idea of achievement as success, making ‘fail again’ and
‘fail better’ aspirations instead. Failure, Beckett seemed to imply,
was sharper than, deeper than, more intelligent than success.
Halberstam pushes to theorise failure as queer, adding to moten
and Harney’s ‘seven theses’ for ‘stealing from the university’ in The
Undercommons (cited earlier) and finding ways to turn to ‘subjugated
knowledges’ (Foucault’s term), in three succinct directives: ‘Resist
mastery, Privilege the naïve or nonsensical, Suspect memorialization’
(2011, 11–15). looked at through such a lens—success then being
that which desires mastery, privileges the mature and sensible,
valourises the past and/or nostalgia—it seems as though Halberstam
offers a formula for raising the ante of the humanities and digging
for ‘knowledges from below’.
Hervé guibert, French writer, photographer and journalist, was an
intimate friend of michel Foucault’s, whose final days he recorded in a
book, To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life, which shot Guibert to
fame on its publication in 1990. Guibert died of AIDS in 1991 at the age
of 36, two weeks after a failed attempt at suicide. Perhaps all of his life’s
work in photography, diaries, journals and thinly-disguised fiction were
exercises in suspecting memorialisation (even while he wrestled with it)
and failing again, failing better. His book on photography, Ghost Image
(published posthumously), has no photographs, and carries at its start,
and heart, a wrenching tale of how he laboured to get his mother to
pare down to her more natural look he loved, to photograph her—
undoing her coiffed hair and making her change many dresses—only
to discover that he had not put the roll of film correctly into its slot
in his camera and so finally had not a single photograph of that long,
fervent, devoted effort: ‘That blank moment (that blank death? since
one can shoot ‘blanks’) remained between my mother and me with the
secret power of incest. It had imposed a silence between us. We never
spoke about it, and I never photographed her again’ (Guibert 1996, 15).
Many years later, when his parents were moving house, he got a
fleeting chance to re-enact that earlier moment of perfection with a
camera aimed at his mother—
Introduction
23
and at that very moment my mother’s face suddenly, unexpectedly,
relaxed, rebelled, miraculously resumed the expression I had given
her during our first session. Through the viewfinder, in the space
of an instant, my mother became beautiful again. It seemed that
she was trying to convey to me a message of her sadness. (1996, 15)
But can one recreate perfection exactly the way it was? Guibert does not
seem to think so; in her resumed beauty his mother had now conveyed
her sadness.
So this text will not have any illustrations except for a piece of blank
film. For the text would not have existed if the picture had been
taken.... For this text is the despair of the image, and worse than a
blurred or fogged image—a ghost image.... (1996, 15)
In some ways, a text is always the despair of the image, as Guibert
repeatedly discovers in his many journals and memoirs, grappling
with writing homo/sexuality and death together—and bringing to it
tragedies of memory and photography. He does it with raw energy
and desolation at once, capturing the wildly sexual spirit of an age now
already far distant. In The Mausoleum of Lovers, Guibert writes:
One could say that photography, a certain photography is a very
erotic practice: this way of almost fondling the subject, encircling
it, modifying its attitudes, but more than anything maintaining a
distance from the idea that the camera is magic and infernal, that
the disposition of the lenses and the machinery make of it an object
of extreme power…. The secret of the other shall be my secret. And
this face which stares at me can very well decompose: it is already
dead. (Guibert 2014)
The AIDS epidemic of the late twentieth century has been resurrected
in the fear and stigma invoked by the novel coronavirus pandemic in
the twenty-first century; if one had assumed that it was its identity
as ‘the gay disease’ that had caused HIV/AIDS to be so reviled, our
current crisis reveals a universal terror at the spectre of death by
touch—any touch at all, this one carrying an invisible killer microbe
from fingertip to lung. The last couple of decades have also been
marked, perhaps globally, by a slow-rising revolt against the lure of
the hedonistic—in life, in love, in desire and in death—as a backlash
against the rock-and-roll years that germinated in the West from the
late 1960s and leached into the spirit of that century everywhere, till it
turned. It is not surprising then that a simmering moral pandemic has
ignited into a glowering fire fuelled now by a morbid virus, particularly
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Humanities, Provocateur
across middle- and upper-class communities whose members are the
most able to implement minute measures for safety, and are also the
most risk-averse, secretive and self-conscious in loving and living. In
sharp contrast are guibert’s fevered remembrances of his dying friend
michel Foucault (whom he calls muzil) in To the Friend Who Did Not
Save My Life, as he describes how an ill and coughing Foucault was still
ecstatic and energised by a tryst with pleasure and death on a visit to
san Francisco.
muzil adored violent orgies in bathhouses…. In the autumn of
1983, muzil returned from his seminar with a dry cough that was
tearing his lungs out and slowly wearing him down. Between fits of
coughing, however, he was eager to report on his latest escapades
in the baths of San Francisco. That day I remarked to him, ‘Those
places must be completely deserted now because of AIDS.’ ‘Don’t be
silly,’ he replied, ‘it’s just the opposite: the baths have never been so
popular, and now they’re fantastic. This danger lurking everywhere
has created new complicities, new tenderness, new solidarities.
Before, no one ever said a word; now we talk to one another. We all
know exactly why we’re there.’ (Guibert 1991, 21–22)
Though the words at the end are similar to current exhortations
calling for ‘new tenderness, new solidarities’ to launch a humane fight
against an inhuman virus, it is clear that his dying friend’s exuberance
vouches instead for catapulting into an orgasmic end; and it is hardly
a surprise then that Foucault (and Derrida too, for other, but related,
reasons) have fallen out of favour with intellectuals of our day who task
themselves with the saving of humanity and the universe sentimentally
and ecologically, systematically draining them of danger, daring and
fantasy.
FLUx
Wayne Koestenbaum wrote perspicaciously of Hervé Guibert’s
‘unbridled, impatiently probing eroticism’:
The discourses engulfing AIDS were precisely the languages of
wound—of contamination, filth, and mistake—that he’d already
been plumbing and relishing, vocabularies he obtained from
Genet, from the données of the French language, from Barthes
and Foucault, from looking in the mirror, from his camera,
from pornography, from his crazy great-aunts, from his mother
who wiped his bottom until he was thirteen years old, from his
Introduction
25
father who punched him in the jaw. The rhetorics of wound and
of abjection that nourished him and that formed the nucleus of
his sexual imaginaire were then drowned out and ventriloquized
by the mythologies of AIDS; Guibert already spoke the lingo of
Wilde’s Dorian Gray before AIDS rewrote Wilde and took him on
as its untimely echo. Guibert investigated sexuality; a private eye,
working for no government, he sleuthed with a rare ferocity and
candor. Premature death cut off the investigation.11
Guibert was sexuality’s agent provocateur of the past century, one
among many illustrious names. Wilde, Genet, Foucault, Guibert—
among others—constitute a lineage that forged a queer art of writing
failure and death, straddling two centuries. Love and desire remained
at the core of it, across sexualities. Al Alvarez, literary critic, novelist,
essayist and poet, caught it, like the sharp spark of sunlight on an
upturned mirror, in ‘Catharsis’:
It is the tenderness you feel you know
You may have had the tenderness you miss.
… Your eloquence will flow
Beyond the measure pacing your distress
till it breaks down the limits of your care
And finally you relish what you seem
And are to your last sense all you forgo.
Love. The particular. no more no less.
Alvarez’s renowned study of suicide, The Savage God, was birthed of his
friendship with Sylvia Plath, who, along with Virginia Woolf, remains
in readers’ memory as a luminous symbol of one who knew more of
the flux between life and taking one’s life than one might ever wish for.
And yet, as she writes in her poem ‘Kindness’,
The blood-jet is poetry,
There is no stopping it.
The blood-jet of poetry ricochets continually between heart and
body, there is no stopping it—revealing and hiding, exploring and
considering what it is, what it wants to expose and what it yet is driven
to conceal, also a death-risk and a death-wish—all rolled into one.
Revelations and secrets dance as if through a minefield of life and
death together, as Jacque Derrida’s analogy of the hedgehog on the
road in ‘Che cos’è la poesia?’/‘What is Poetry?’ captures in a fraught,
tensile image:
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Humanities, Provocateur
It sees itself, the response, dictated to be poetic, by being poetic …
an imparted secret, at once public and private … the animal thrown
onto the road, absolute, solitary, rolled up in a ball, next to (it)self.
And for that very reason, it may get itself run over, just so, the
hérisson, istrice in Italian, in english, hedgehog. (derrida 1995, 289)
what does ‘being poetic’ mean, in embodied terms? It is the whatness of
the hedgehog thrown onto the road, in that moment of being ‘absolute,
solitary, rolled up in a ball’—and ‘for that very reason, it may get itself
run over, just so’—both the essence and the sum of ‘being poetic’. It
is the moment of heightened life, of imminent danger, of inevitable
death; it is that moment of swinging wildly between all of these states
and being suspended between them, tumescent and throbbing with an
energy that is keener for the possibility of being extinguished, ‘just so’.
one is reminded of marvell’s impassioned exhortation in ‘to his coy
mistress’:
let us roll all our strength and all
our sweetness up into one ball,
And tear our pleasures with rough strife
Through the iron gates of life:
Thus, though we cannot make our sun
Stand still, yet we will make him run.
Marvell’s extended metaphor is, as has been said, intensely sexual and
visual; his lover in the poem invokes solitariness as the most fearful
proposition imaginable, pleading with his coquettish beloved to roll
their combined energies and romantic love into ‘one ball’ that will hurtle
them through the battles of life. Derrida’s hedgehog rolls into a ball
to protect its (solitary, but teeming) energies—perhaps its life—when
thrown onto the road and at that very moment lays itself bare to death,
just so. But then Marvell’s tearing pleasure will lead to la petite mort, an
orgasmic death. nothing at all remains, finally, but the pendulum that
swings between desire and death and brief moments of life hanging
between, rolled up into a ball: the sum total of ‘being poetic’.
This totalling, this rolling up into a ball, is marked, however, by
heterogeneity and flux. Simone Kahn, Surrealist poet, gives an account
of a game invented in 1925 by André Breton, Yves tanguy, Jacques
Prévert, and Marcel Duchamp during one of their regular hangouts in
Paris. It was a version of the one known as ‘Consequences’: each of them
added phrases to a rolling narrative to make up an absurd story. It later
took on a new—bizarre—title from a prompt that Prévert provided at
the start of a round of play, ‘exquisite corpse’, which was followed by
Introduction
27
the phrase ‘will drink the new wine’, the conjunction arousing shouts
of delight from the players. sometimes they used pictures instead of
words: each would draw a body part, starting with the top of the head.
The paper would be folded before it went to the others in turn, who
would then add face, neck, torso, hip, thigh, knee and foot—belonging
to any living species, and often with wild embellishments. When the
sheet was unfolded, a surreal creature would have taken shape.
Breton’s Surrealist Manifesto had been published a year earlier in
1924, which had suggested that one way of probing psychic depths was
by playing games—and clearly, playing ‘exquisite Corpse’ with words
or pictures was one such raucously creative, collective experiment.
Kahn writes in Surrealist Women:
It was an unfettering … we were sure of getting an astonishing
amalgam. Violent surprise provoked our admiration and sparked
an insatiable passion for new images: images unimaginable by one
brain alone—images born of the involuntary, unconscious, and
unpredictable combination of three or four heterogeneous minds.
Some sentences assumed an aggressively subversive character.
Others lapsed into excessive absurdity.
… the game became a system, a method of research, a means of
exaltation as well as stimulation, and even, perhaps, a kind of drug.
… From then on, it was a delirium.
Indeed. Heterogeneity, collectivity, subversion, amalgamation,
absurdity—the idea of ‘an unfettering’ that could be delirious and
subversive at once was claimed by the Surrealists as their own, of
course, but it has seeped through many movements of the arts through
centuries, if not always as rambunctiously. undoing the fetters, letting
the flux in (and out), allowing nothing to crystallise into permanent
shape and size, sound and feel: in the words of Walt Whitman in ‘Song
of Myself ’, 51,
Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)
FLESH
We think of how flesh lives and dies, the flesh and bones and blood of
the artist and audience, and the paper, texture and colour of the book,
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canvas, film screen. We think of touch and tenderness, of death and
remembrance. We think of dead bodies charred, of ashes, of pages and
paintings crushed and faded and crumbling. How does living flesh—in
humans, in art—merge with the ravaged and the dead? How are stories
of flesh and blood interred; how do they metamorphose from life to
death to after-death, how are they fed and resurrected and received?
In the third volume of a set of fictional memoirs, Summertime
(2009), J.M. Coetzee moves into phantom territory uncharted in the
first two volumes (Boyhood 1997 and Youth 2002), by now imagining
himself dead. A segment of his own life is painstakingly reconstructed
by a biographer—an englishman named Vincent—who interviews
significant women, colleagues and others who crossed his life between
1971 and 1977, tracing leads from the writer’s ‘notebooks’ of those years
that he accesses to (re)discover secrets of his shrouded past. In creating
this wrenching girdle that encircles not only an autobiographical
yet fictional narrative, he also conjures up a novelistic framework
that continually airs emotions recollected in tranquillity as a writer’s
masquerade, truth and dare and fiction jostling for space on each page.
A literary experiment juggling memory, fact and imagination, Coetzee
pulls off in Summertime a palimpsest of rare sharpness, terror and
beauty—not really about a writer at all, but about writing. The book peels
layers off its protagonist (the writer John Coetzee) through transcribed
interviews with many who were intimate with him, interviews that are
almost entirely unsympathetic to him though woven through with a
throbbing immersion in the man they each knew well for a stretch of
time. In doing so he experiments with a new form of fictional memoir or
autobiography, one that is critical from the outside looking in—or rather,
imagines and then mimics those looking critically, in recollection, at the
person they knew closely for some time. The very sense of a memoir
is thus dismantled as it moves through different registers of fact and
fiction—as if flesh falls off from the bone, literally and metaphorically.
Coetzee’s Summertime is proof that a writer is obsessed about
being remembered for the writing—as a dancer for the dance and a
painter for the painting—and this desire to be enshrined in a piece
of creative work sits ever uneasily with a deep fear of being a person
who is ordinary, who loves and loses, is loved and lost. When the flesh
disintegrates, the book will remain … or so every writer wishes. Says
Adriana, a Brazilian woman in Cape town where John Coetzee (of the
fictionalised memoir) was her daughter’s teacher and who was sexually
attracted to first his student and then her mother:
You know the word disembodied? This man was disembodied. He
was divorced from his body. to him, the body was like one of those
wooden puppets that you move with strings. You pull this string
Introduction
29
and the left arm moves, you pull that string and the right leg moves.
And the real self sits up above, like the puppet-master pulling the
strings. (Coetzee 2010, 198)
This is echoed by James Joyce in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, a
sketch of one who is a puppet-master of an imagined universe: ‘The artist,
like the God of creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above
his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his
fingernails’ (Joyce 2005, 249)—this ‘disembodied’-ness is also a sense that
Coetzee perhaps inherited strongly from the Moderns, an idea that the
artist is quintessentially disconnected from his own body and its sensations,
as well as from all other bodies it comes into contact with.
And what of the ultimate disembodiment then—death? The body
dies, the body lives on both in spirit and another shape in poetry, art,
photographs. In Dying Modern, Diana Fuss talks of the ‘corpse poem’,
born, she says, of a frustration with elegies, and the limits of mourning.
Can a poem be, or become, a corpse? She compares emily Dickinson’s12
corpse poems to Paul Celan’s. Dickinson writes:
A word is dead
When it is said,
Some say.
I say it just
Begins to live
That day.
(Dickinson, ‘Life: LXXXIX’)
Fuss says then, ‘Writing in the shadow of mass extermination, Paul
Celan, one of Dickinson’s european translators, contradicts his
predecessor’s faith in the afterlife of language:
A word—you know;
a corpse.
Come let us wash it,
come let us comb it,
come let us turn
Its eye heavenward. (Fuss 2013, 75)
(Celan, ‘nocturnally Pursed’)
Celan here no longer has faith in the immortality of language, not even
in poetry. Word itself has become a corpse that must then be washed
and made ready for its journey to the afterworld. And yet the corpses,
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strung together to make poetry, have remained on the pages of the
books they went into, still and quiet, yet darkly raging. For celan too,
of course. so many of his poems simmer and splutter with angry grief,
but burst with a life force even at moments of and after death, moments
of ‘impossible mourning’ as Derrida called Celan’s tussles in poetry
with the sense of continued and repeated loss. In the wrenching ‘Death
Fugue’, the chant-like cadence of ‘black milk … we drink you …we
drink you’ leaves one breathless and mesmerised at once:
Black milk of morning we drink you evenings
we drink you at noon and mornings we drink you
at night
we drink and we drink
A man lives in the house he plays with the snakes
he writes
he writes when it darkens to Deutschland your
golden hair Margarete
he writes and steps in front of his house and the
stars glisten and he whistles his dogs to come
he whistles his jews to appear let a grave be dug
in the earth
he commands us play up for the dance
(translated by Pierre Joris)
Celan captures the ruptures in language—the very flesh of
communication—through language itself, sharply, like that jab into
the earth for the burial of the dead. Anne Carson says, ‘Paul Celan is a
poet who uses language as if he was always translating. […] Strangeness
for Celan arose out of language and went back down into language’
(Carson 1999, 28). This is an acute observation; he works the feel of the
alien into his poetic language, so that his words and phrases embody
the sense of disaffection that the very use of language brings to any
attempt to express thought and emotion. He carries the weight of this
estrangement, this inadequacy, this fracturing and this death to his
poetry, which slides like a razor into butter: ‘Black milk of morning we
drink you evenings….’ In this jab that draws blood from the reader, the
word rests in power.
Binoy Majumdar (1934–2006), a nonconformist Bangla poet who
was, for a while, a part of the Hungryalist movement in Bengal in the
second half of the twentieth century before he had differences and
left the group, affirmed the grace of the word in books even while in
hospital for mental illness.
Introduction
31
কলমটি হযারত জনরয় বহঁ রট বগরট বগিলযাম আজম ।
বগিলযাম প্যাকৃজতক েৃশ্ আে নেনযােীরেে বেখরতই ।
এভযারি নযা বেরখ আজম জলখরত পযাজে নযা ।
েেিযায় বেখলযাম পুেুর ও েমণী অরনক
বেযাগীরেে একিযাে বেখরত এরসরি ।
আে হযাসপযাতযারলে েযারেযায়যান িযাজি হযারত
েঁ যাজিরয় েরয়রি ।
েিনী বয িরলজিল ‘পৃজেিীে সি িই ভুল’ বসই
েিনীও েঁ যাজিরয় েরয়রি
আমযাে ধযােণযা িই ভুল নয় সি ।
(‘কলমটি হযারত জনরয়’)
with the pen in my hand I had walked down to the gate.
I had gone for a glimpse of nature and all the men and women, only
to see them.
without seeing them thus I cannot write.
At the door I saw men and young women, many
had come to see some patients for one visit.
And the hospital gatekeeper with key in hand
was standing there.
Rajani who had said ‘All the books of the world are wrong’ that
Rajani too was standing there
I have a feeling that all the books are not wrong.
(‘With the Pen in My Hand’, translation mine)
What the poet, in all his despair and madness, affirms is the integrity
of the word and the book, even as corpse and coffin. nature, men and
women, the hospital gatekeeper with key in hand and the night—they
are all still standing around, waiting—and even as the (woman named?)
night says all the world’s books hold no lessons to be learnt, the insane
poet speaks from the gut: he does not agree that all the books are wrong.
Indeed, perhaps only the books are at least partially, temporarily,
contingently, right. So much so that when men and women have
become old and finally corpses, separated in life as in death, it is the
word in the book that keeps them fused, promises Majumdar:
… যখন েুিরন
যু িতী ও যু িক জিলযাম
তখন জক িযানতযাম িু রিযা হরয় যযাি ?
আশযা কজে িতষু মযারন বতযামযাে সন্যান নযাজত ইত্যাজে হরয়রি
আমযাে ঠিকযানযা আরি বতযামযাে িযাজিরত,
বতযামযাে ঠিকযানযা আরি আমযাে িযাজিরত,
জিঠি জলখি নযা ।
আমেযা একররে আজি িইরয়ে পযাতযায় ।
(‘জেরে এরসযা, িযাকযা’)
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Humanities, Provocateur
… when the two of us
were a young woman and man
did we know then that we would grow old so?
I hope that now you have children grandchildren etcetera.
my address lies with you in your home,
Your address lies with me in my home,
we shall not write letters.
we are together in the leaves of the book.
(‘come Back, o wheel’, translation mine)
EphEmEra
Anil karanjai (1940–2001), a painter-iconoclast who also belonged to
the Hungry generation of writers and artists from Bengal, repeatedly
drew distorted figures, often with more eyes than there are individuals
on the canvas.13 Bodies are contorted and merge with others—not
cubist like Picasso’s, but flowing and rounded, with robust colours and
chilling expressions—telling stories of hunger and anger, shock and
sorrow, perhaps even of love. There is, in fact, a painted ‘Homage to
Picasso’ (1973, oil on canvas) too, in rich reds, maroons and browns,
in which Picasso is three-eyed. In each of his misshapen and vibrant
images, we are struck, over and over, by the power of their gaze(s). The
many, extra, eyes protrude and stare, are sometimes blank, sometimes
laden with the pain and knowledge, the grandeur of knowledge. In an
evocative self-portrait (1974, oil on paper),14 Karanjai has his own face
made up of eyes placed askance, at least six eyes can be clearly counted,
from cheeks up into the forehead; the rest of the face is chiselled from
crevices, channels and dark corners in a deep brown with hints of
watermelon red, eerily resembling his face—but not really a living,
human one. The channels cutting through his face cleverly move up
towards the head forming roots of a plant. And in this astonishing selfportrait, from his forehead, a tree or bush of luminous greens—a few of
the many shades that Karanjai uses in his verdant landscapes—sprouts
and blooms.
It is a portrait that is riveting and unnerving at once. The eyes,
multiple and strange, the dark cracks and crevices, the luscious,
luxurious greens: they add up to fantasy bordering on nightmare. We
are drawn in, as to all of the arts, seduced by proverbial sirens, lured
to our deaths real or imagined. The discombobulated eye haunts us as
a symbol of what life holds, what we must see and yet cannot bear to.
eyes float around us in air and water, separated from faces: we watch
and are watched, we are unseeing and we are not seen. It becomes a
Introduction
33
metaphor, hanging loose, of our making non/sense of the world—
nothing at all to do with the physiological function of the eye. we each
have our own tales to tell, and our own readings of others’ tales. we do
not know what they auger for us in the years we still have to live, but
we know, like dante did, that we cannot be afraid of what our fate will
bring us, for it is a gift.
How does the language of literature—and where it resides primarily
for us still, in books—struggle to reflect the fragmentations, distortions
and contortions that fate continually throws at us? Intriguingly, there are
books in fragments, perhaps returning in a long wide arc to Sappho’s
dismembered lines of poetry on faded and torn papyrus leaves composed
in Greece in sixth century bc. Anne Carson’s Float (2016) comes in a stiff
clear plastic cover filled with booklets, loose sheets, cover pages and even
a contents page which can be read as a series of short and long writings
or any picked out at will, of reading notes, jottings, poems, translations,
essays and plays. In a stream-of-consciousness poem in the pack, ‘Wildly
Constant’, Carson writes of Iceland, glaciers and a library:
The library contains not books
but glaciers.
The glaciers are upright.
Silent.
As perfectly ordered as books would be.
But they are melted.
What would it be like
to live in a library
of melted books?
With sentences streaming over the floor
and all the punctuation
settled to the bottom as a residue.
It would be confusing.
unforgivable.
An adventure.
Carson’s chosen vehicle for her collection of writings—a hard
transparent folder with one end open, booklets and sheets snugly fitted
inside but calling out to be strewn around the bed or the grass, to allow
the sentences to stream and the punctuation to settle—bears to her the
gift of letting go. She can write in verse or prose or throw a handful of
words across a page, and all of it will dive into the folder and become
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Humanities, Provocateur
one of a bunch of wild grasses and fruit to be picked out at whim. The
three-sided box invites us to let ourselves go, too. It describes itself thus:
Float
A collection of twenty-two chapbooks whose order is unfixed
and whose topics are various.
Reading can be freefall. (Carson 2016)
AND, ‘READING CAN BE FREEFALL’…
It is this freefall that fantasy, nightmare and the humanities entice
one into, and aid and abet. This collection of essays—with no prompt
from the editor other than asking for the writers’ ways of ‘doing the
humanities’, engaging with chosen texts, thoughts, theories, senses
and sensations—invites you all to such a freefall. I have not tasked
myself in this Introduction with summing up each contribution
to Humanities, Provocateur for you, or even with establishing
connections between them or with my vision for the book. to be
honest, I had no clear vision, except that I wanted a varied bunch of
people—each of whom I know to be passionately engaged in thinking
about the humanities in their own very original and creative ways—
to record an experience of such engagement, its methods as much
as its deviations from ‘method’. I have not touched upon the artists
or writers or filmmakers or thinkers or texts that my contributors
have written about. Instead, I have grouped the essays in couples
and triples under section headers that I would like you to interpret
in abstraction which coincide with the ones used to separate sections
of this Introduction—sections where I follow some erratic leads to
what I have read and seen and thought and felt and learnt, in my
own unruly forages in the humanities. I imagine the contributors
each having responded to such foraging, without this text in front of
them—in fact, even before this text was written. This ‘Introduction’
then talks to them in turn, and the conversations never stop.
At worst, I hope that such errant ruminations will spark echoes for
you in similar—or indeed, diverse—directions. At best, I wish that
they coagulate in liquid patterns that will pick up colours and voices
and images from the ones let fly by my contributors in their essays.
together, if they add up in some haphazard, scrambling way to invoke
humanities practices that break the laws set for the study of the arts
across a wide spectrum and impel a few to move out of cushioned
cubby-holes lined with weighty theory and packaged with styles taught
in formulaic academic-writing courses, my work will be more than
Introduction
35
done. we come to this collection—and everything that we read, or
watch or listen to—as equal learners, like Jacques Rancière’s ‘ignorant
schoolmaster’ in multiples and everything we put in or take out from
each page we turn, and return to, will enrich us with its traces. The
traces shall remain in us, shall germinate new ideas, shall go with us to
new places and people and pieces of art, among garbage and flowers.
Invisibly we shall draw cobwebs between us—those whom we know
and those whom we don’t—for carrying these traces, and they will
connect us in innumerable ways through stray dreams and sharp
observations that have touched us in the essays. For as Rancière’s
(1991, 41) schoolmaster Jacoctet teaches, ‘everything is in everything.
The power of the tautology is that of equality, the power that searches
for the finger of intelligence in every human work.’
Humanities, Provocateur invites you to Anne Carson’s freefall of
reading. to read the pieces together or separately, as and when the mood
takes you. to be struck by fresh connections and intriguing inferences.
to argue and to disagree. to cherish or to distrust. to be led to texts
you do not know or back to some you know well. to be lured to the
undercommons, to read against the new tides that come in to you with
a line or an essay and then to flow with them awhile. to be adventurous
and destitute, at the same time. to never be afraid, for our fate is our
gift. to wield, and hold, the poem in our lives like a rifle—or perhaps
like a beloved one is losing. to snatch an elusive, odd thought from the
mouth of the mundane and to make the ordinary extraordinary with a
sudden, astonishing, wondrous word or image that kisses you on a page
at which you have, momentarily, taken pause.
NOTES
1. Zagajewski, Adam, ‘try to Praise the Mutilated World’, translated by Clare
Cavanagh. Available at https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/57095/
try-to-praise-the-mutilated-world-56d23a3f28187 (accessed 20 March
2020).
2. The debate includes a number of interventions from philosophers, primary
among them being Žižek and Agamben. A special section of The European
Journal of Psychoanalysis titled ‘Coronavirus and philosophers’ carries a
translation of Agamben’s initial intervention and the responses to it from
a group of philosophers. Available at http://www.journal-psychoanalysis.
eu/coronavirus-and-philosophers/ (accessed 20 March 2020).
3. Giorgio Agamben wrote a response to the criticisms of his original
intervention and a translation of this response can be found here, dated 17
March 2020: available at https://itself.blog/2020/03/17/giorgio-agambenclarifications/ (accessed 20 March 2020).
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Humanities, Provocateur
4. giorgio Agamben, ‘Biosecurity and Politics’, translated by d. Allan dean.
Available at https://medium.com/@ddean3000/biosecurity-and-politicsgiorgio-agamben-396f9ab3b6f4 (accessed 15 may 2020).
5. t.s. eliot, The Love-Song of J Alfred Prufrock:
Would it have been worth while,
To have bitten off the matter with a smile,
To have squeezed the universe into a ball
To roll it towards some overwhelming question,
To say: ‘I am Lazarus, come from the dead,
Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all’.
6. Jacques Rancière, Proletarian Nights, ‘Preface’, translated by Jonathan Ree.
Available at https://www.radicalphilosophyarchive.com/issue-files/rp31_
article2_ranci%C3%A8re_proletariannights.pdf (accessed 14 May 2020).
7. Alexandra Kollontai (1929). Available at https://www.marxists.org/
archive/kollonta/1929/great/ch03.htm (accessed 15 May 2020).
8. Alexandra Kollontai, ‘The Workers’ Opposition’ (pamphlet). First
published in Pravda, 25 January 1921, 8. Available at https://libcom.org/
files/The%20Workers’%20Opposition%20-%20Alexandra%20Kollontai.
pdf (accessed 7 november 2020).
9. Ritoban Ghatak (ed.), Ramkinkar Baij, A Personality Study
Documentary by Ritwik Ghatak. Available at https://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=GCBWrdn1eRY (accessed 14 April 2020).
10. Samuel Beckett, Worstword Ho. Available at https://genius.com/Samuelbeckett-worstward-ho-annotated (accessed 20 April 2020).
11. Wayne Koestenbaum, ‘The Pleasure of the text: Hervé Guibert’s unbridled
eroticism’. Available at https://www.bookforum.com/print/2102/herveguibert-s-unbridled-eroticism-13298 (accessed 21 April 2020).
12. https://www.poeticous.com/emily-dickinson/life-lxxxix-a-word-is-dead
(accessed 10 January 2021).
13. A representative range of Anil Karanjai’s art can be viewed on the site
https://sites.google.com/site/anilkaranjai2/home.
14. This portrait can be viewed on the public group page titled ‘Anil Karanjai’
on Facebook, available at https://www.facebook.com/1645707748989175/
photos/a.1645727998987150/2347486135477996/?type=3&theater.
REFERENCES
Agamben, Giorgio. The Adventure. translated by Lorenzo Chiesa. MIt Press,
2018.
Alighieri, Dante. The Inferno, 6. translated by John Ciardi [1954]. First Signet
Classics, 2009.
Baij, Ramkinkar. Self-Portrait: Writings and Interviews 1962–1979. translated
by Sudipto Chakroborty, 2nd edition. Monfakira, 2010.
Introduction
37
Braque, georges et al. Testimony Against Gertrude Stein. Pamphlet 1, Transition,
no. 23 (1934–1935).
carson, Anne. Economy of the Unlost: Reading Simonides of Keos with Paul
Celan. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999.
carson, Anne. Float. Jonathan cape, 2016.
coetzee, J.m. Summertime. Vintage, 2010.
derrida, Jacques. ‘che cos’è la poesia?’, Points…: Interviews 1974–1994.
stanford University Press, 1995.
Fendelman, earl. ‘gertrude stein Among the cubists’. Journal of Modern
Literature 2, no. 4 (november 1972): 481–490.
Frisch, Max. Drafts for a Third Sketchbook. translated by Mike Mitchell. Seagull
Books: Calcutta, 2013.
Fuss, Diana. Dying Modern: A Meditation on Elegy. Duke university Press,
2013.
Ghatak, Ritwik. ‘A Scenario’ (Published originally in Drishya, no. 18, July 1974).
In Rows and Rows of Fences: Ritwik Ghatak on Cinema. Seagull Books, 2000.
Guibert, Hervé. To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life: A Novel. translated
from the French by Linda Coverdale. Athenaem, 1991.
———. Ghost Image. translated from the French by Robert Bononno.
university of Chicago Press, 1996.
———. The Mausoleum of Lovers: Journals 1976–1991. translated from the
French by nathanaël, 2014. Available at https://www.asymptotejournal.
com/nonfiction/herve-guibert-the-mausoleum-ofof-lovers/ (accessed 21
April 2020).
Halberstam, Judith. The Queer Art of Failure. Duke university Press, 2011.
Harney, Stefano and Fred Moten. The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning &
Black Study. Minor Compositions, 2013.
Jaaware, Aniket. Practicing Caste: On Touching and Not Touching. Orient
Blackswan, 2019.
Joyce, James. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Collector’s Library, 2005.
Kollontai, Alexandra. ‘The Loves of Three Generations’. In A Great Love. new
York: Vanguard Press, 1929.
———. ‘The Workers’ Opposition’ (pamphlet). First published in Pravda, 25
January 1921.
Pajak, Frédéric. Uncertain Manifesto. translated by Donald nicholson-Smith.
new York Review Books, 2019.
Rancière, Jacques. The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual
Emancipation. translated by Kristin Ross. Stanford university Press, 1991.
Rancière, Jacques and Mark Foster Gage. ‘Politics equals Aesthetics: A
Conversation’. Aesthetics Equals Politics: New Discourses Across Art,
Architecture and Philosophy. edited by Mark F. Gage. MIt Press, 2019.
Rhodes, Colin. Outsider Art: Spontaneous Alternatives. Thames and Hudson,
2000.
Roy, Falguni. Falguni Samagra: A Collection of Bengali Poems by Falguni Roy
and Related Writings. Dumdum Junction Publications, 2019.
Rushdie, Salman. Midnight’s Children. Alfred Knopf, 1981.
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shklovsky, Viktor. ‘The Links of Art Do not Repeat each Other. Once Again,
on the Dissimilarity of the Similar’. Viktor Shklovsky: A Reader. edited and
translated by Alexandra Berlina. Bloomsbury, 2017.
Sontag, Susan. Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors. Picador, 2001.
Stein, Gertrude. Lifting Belly. (ed. Rebecca Marks). The naiad Press, [1989]
1995.
———. Tender Buttons. Marie Claire, 1914.
———. The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1933.
PlAto And PRoUst, BeDFeLLOWS: ‘ConCept’
and ‘Idea’ from the ClassICal to the
modern
Aveek Sen
e.H. Gombrich: You cannot simply lie in your bed and imagine what
you will want to paint?
Bridget Riley: That’s impossible!
eHG: It will turn out differently?
BR: You cannot plan like that.
eHG: No.
—Bridget Riley, Dialogues on Art (2003, 40)
Art is a special discerning exercise of intelligence in relation to the real….
—Iris Murdoch, The Fire and the Sun (1977, 78)
This platonic person discovered a soul in the world
And studied it in his holiday hotel.
—Wallace Stevens, ‘The Pure Good of Theory’ (1984, 331)
What do people expect me to do with my eyes? What should I look at?
—Giuliana (Monica Vitti), in Michelangelo Antonioni’s
Red Desert (1964)
In Plato—with whom it all began—Ideas and beds are intimately linked.
In Book X of The Republic, a middle-aged Socrates explains to Glaucon,
a little more than 400 years before the birth of Christ, why the work
that painters and poets do ‘have no serious value’ (Plato 1983, 431).
Socrates is talking, with his usual, devastating urbanity, about three
kinds of beds. First, the unique ‘bed-in-itself ’, created by God. This
is the real thing that exists in ‘nature’, the realm of eternal Forms or
Ideas. Then there are the actual beds on which people sleep, made
by carpenters. Finally, at the bottom of this chain of creation, is the
painted bed—a useless copy of a copy, standing at a third remove from
reality. Moving downwards from the Idea of the bed to the painted bed,
one moves from reality to illusion, from truth to lies, from God to the
painter. The philosopher must move in the opposite direction and while
41
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Humanities, Provocateur
doing so should ignore the painted bed altogether. The knowledge of
the Beautiful and of the Good—both embodied in the Ideas or eternal
Forms—is too serious a moral goal to be waylaid by art and its dubious
representations. Of course, the whole conversation is, in a sense, also
a deliberate artifice created by Plato. ‘Philosophy’, Iris Murdoch had
written, ‘is essentially talk’ (Murdoch 1977, 21). And Plato was too
acutely aware of the treacheries of language—particularly of figurative
language, of myths and metaphors—not to have misgivings about the
element of invention in his own philosophical system that gives to
writing the illusion of brilliant talk.
The word, Idea, comes out of this sophisticated, ironic, yet morally
serious philosophy of knowledge. It carries within it not only the internal
hierarchies of this philosophy (the three levels of Bed-hood) and its
original myths, metaphors and structures but also the long history of how
Western art and aesthetics have seized Plato’s philosophy to continually
create new systems of values that turn on its head his original devaluation
of the artist. From Plotinus, through Marsiglio Ficino and Philip Sidney,
to Kant and Shelley, Plato’s philosophy of the Ideal, originally so
dismissive of mimesis, became the basis of a series of lofty defences of the
verbal and visual arts. Plato was a great artist who feared, in Murdoch’s
words ‘the consolations of art’. The art and aesthetics that he sought to
denigrate and exorcise from his pure system of philosophy took on an
endlessly inspiring life of their own—in neoplatonism, in Christianity, in
Classical and Romantic, and finally, in Modern art and aesthetics—thus
making Platonism its own elaborated critique. What is anti-Platonic in
this critique is, therefore, at another level, profoundly Platonic. This is
why A.n. Whitehead’s description of all european philosophy—and, one
might add, aesthetics—as footnotes to Plato does not sound reductive. So,
when Joseph Kosuth, in One and Three Chairs (1965), placed a common
folding chair on the floor and hung from the wall behind this chair an
actual-sized photograph of it, next to a blown-up dictionary definition of
the word ‘chair’ and called this arrangement Conceptual Art, it became
an irreverent exploration of the Idea or Concept of ‘chairness’, parodying
Plato’s progression from a real to the ideal chair. The ideal chair, in
this case, is not an Idea in the realm of eternal Forms but a dictionary
definition. Theology or moral philosophy becomes structural linguistics
in One and Three Chairs, as signifiers rub shoulders with signifieds and
Plato is reborn as Saussure in 1960s new York. God, the carpenter and
the artist—or use, manufacture and representation—which Plato wanted
to keep strictly separate, are conflated in Kosuth’s governing Idea of the
work by his deadpan levelling wit.1
In 1999, tracey emin installed, at the tate, the actual bed in
which she ‘almost went out of her mind for four days’, complete with
Plato and Proust, Bedfellows
43
skid-marked sheets, used condoms, soiled knickers and all the detritus
of a ‘lost’ weekend. she called it My Bed and got two kinds of responses
from her viewers. she was shortlisted for the turner Prize but did not
get it eventually. And more interestingly, two chinese artists ‘critically
intervened’ in what they saw as emin’s unabashed ‘self-promotion’.
They jumped onto the exhibit half-naked, had a brisk pillow fight,
shouted in ‘unfathomable Mandarin’ (as one reporter describes) and
tried to take a swig from one of the empty bottles of vodka lying next
to the bed. There was muted applause from the other viewers, until
the security guards got over their bemusement and carried the Chinese
artists off. It must have been difficult for the curators to restore My
Bed to its ‘original’ form, the one that would correspond exactly to its
creator’s Idea of it. There was no dearth of conceptualisation behind the
making and then the viewing of this work. It is significant how emin
succeeded in releasing detailed information about this bed and what it
had meant to her, before and during the work was being viewed. She was,
in turn, seen by her turner-Prize judges as illustrating ‘graphically’ in
this work the ‘themes of loss, sickness, fertility, copulation, conception
and death’. And the two Chinese artists also saw their ‘intervention’ as
some sort of Gilbert-and-George Performance Art, motivated by their
own critical, but nevertheless aesthetic, agenda. each artist or pair of
artists started with her or his prior Idea of what she or he wanted to
do and their ‘work’—the bed itself, and what was subsequently played
out on it—was the creative realisation of this Idea, although limited
and transformed by the nature of the materials or circumstances with
which or in which they were working.
This ‘single, intellectual, largely random decision to name this or
that object or activity ‘art’’ has been seen as the hallmark of Conceptual
Art (Smith 1997, 257). And our keywords, ‘concept’ and ‘idea’ are
indispensable to how the artists themselves describe the nature of such
decisions. ‘In Conceptual Art’, wrote Sol LeWitt, in a 1967 Artforum
article, giving this kind of art its first theoretical exegesis, ‘the idea or
concept is the most important aspect of the work … all planning and
decisions are made beforehand and the execution is a perfunctory affair.
The idea becomes the machine that makes the art …’ (Smith 1997, 261).
Sometimes this ‘making’ is simply a self-consciously peremptory act
of naming. Something becomes an art object only because someone
says that it is so. In this, the quintessential Conceptual artefact is, of
course, Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain (1917)—an ordinary urinal signed
‘R. Mutt’ and entered as a titled piece of sculpture in an exhibition
Duchamp was helping to organise in new York. This ‘readymade’ piece
by Duchamp—who claimed to be ‘more interested in the ideas than in
the final product’—radically changed the notion of the art object as well
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Humanities, Provocateur
as that of the artist’s role as ‘maker’. ‘concept’ and ‘idea’, in lower case
and used interchangeably, are used by duchamp and lewitt to elevate,
with a provocative wilfulness, the active intellectual agency of the
artist, even while depriving the art object of its traditional uniqueness
and ‘aura’—in fact, making it infinitely reproducible. not just Plato,
but also Walter Benjamin is turned upside down.2 It is paradoxical
how these artists and theorists use the Platonic baggage of ‘idea’ and
‘concept’ to idealise and even sensationalise the figure of the artist even
as they subvert the idealisation of Art itself. It is as if Plato’s dismissive
trivialising of the artist has come full circle here, making trashiness
itself a kind of value, an ideal. The maker of trash becomes, therefore, a
challenging and charismatic figure who can claim for himself the right
to trash traditionally ‘higher’ forms of Art.
The Conceptual Artists’ use of ‘idea’ and ‘concept’ as synonyms
that transfigure mundane, readymade objects through the power of the
intellect might be illuminated by the writings of a very different kind of
early-sixteenth-century artist. In his sonnet, ‘Non ha l’ottimo artista in se
alcun concetto’, Michelangelo provides a rare insight into his technique
of working with marble. His language is explicitly neoplatonic in this
poem, particularly in the use of the word ‘concetto’ in the opening
quatrain.
not the best artist has in himself any concept
That a single marble does not enclose in itself
With its excess; and to this attains only
The hand that obeys the intellect.3
Dedicated to Vittoria Colonna—the widowed Marchioness of Pescara
and herself a prolific poet—the sonnet invests the artist with a humility
which Michelangelo habitually adopted when addressing this austere
and intellectual noblewoman. Michelangelo’s reverence towards
Vittoria is therefore identified with the sculptor’s deference to his
medium, the single piece of unworked marble. And this deference
arises from the acknowledgment that the ‘concept’ behind what the
sculptor will make with this block of marble is located within the marble
itself. This is the source of the artist’s humility, his solemn, but manual,
obedience. His work is to chip away at the superfluities and bring out the
form that is inherent in the stone. Hence, the reader remains uncertain
about whether the ‘intellect’, at the end of the fourth line, is that of the
artist or of his medium. Is the hand shaping the marble, or is the marble
determining the action of the hand? to locate, as Michelangelo does,
the work’s governing ‘concept’ within its medium itself immediately
renders his depiction of art’s ‘making’ far more complex than the
Plato and Proust, Bedfellows
45
conceptual Artist’s rather imperious celebration of artistic intention.
In michelangelo, the medium is imbued with its own intellect and the
‘work’ of art—the process as well as the product—exists in the interface
of the medium’s intellect and the artist’s. Here, too, Plato’s Idea or
eternal Form is radically humanised and materialised—turned into
stone, as it were but without destroying the sense of the transcendent
beauty of the Idea. The rest of Michelangelo’ sonnet is about art’s vital
relationship with the Platonic eros, experienced as a kind of ‘love’ for a
particular human being. It is a profoundly Platonic poem because the
hand that brings out the Form (hidden in the marble) is obedient to a
force that is both aesthetic and moral. Where then does the ‘Concept’
reside—in the medium, in the artist’s mind or in some transcendent
realm outside and above both? to answer this question is also to think
deeply, but lucidly and pragmatically (as the best artists do), about
the relationships among the hand, the mind and the medium and to
blur the boundaries separating theory and practice, the technology,
psychology and metaphysics of art.
The problem of trying to fathom in words the baffling relationships
among the mind, the hand and the medium preoccupied Francis
Bacon, working with paint in the twentieth century as much as it did
Michelangelo, working with marble in the sixteenth. With Bacon, too,
the dynamic and unpredictable relationship between the ‘conscious
will’ of the painter and the physical nature of the ‘actual paint’—how
the latter ‘moves’ on the canvas with a will of its own—brings about the
profound ‘accidents’ of art:
You know in my case all painting—and the older I get the more
it becomes so—is accident. So, I foresee it in my mind, I foresee
it, and yet I hardly ever carry it out as I foresee it. It transforms
itself by the actual paint. I use very large brushes, and in the way I
work, I don’t, in fact, know very often what the paint will do, and it
does many things which are very much better than I could make it
do. Is that an accident? Perhaps one could say it’s not an accident,
because it becomes a selective process which is part of this accident
one chooses to preserve. One is attempting, of course, to keep the
vitality of the accident and yet preserve a continuity.… When I
was trying in despair, the other day, to paint that head of a specific
person, I used a very big brush and a great deal of paint and I put it
on very, very freely, and I simply didn’t know in the end what I was
doing, and suddenly, this thing clicked and became exactly like the
image I was trying to record. But not out of any conscious will, nor
was it anything to do with illustrational painting. What has never
yet been analyzed is why this particular way of painting is more
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poignant than illustration. I suppose because it has a life completely
of its own. It lives on its own, like the image one’s trying to trap; it
lives on its own, and therefore, transfers the essence of the image
more poignantly. so that the artist may be able to open up or rather,
should I say, unlock the valves of feeling and therefore return the
onlooker to life more violently … there is a possibility that you get
through this accidental thing something much more profound than
what you really wanted. (sylvester 1997, 16–17)
For Bacon, the energy and the poignancy of ‘making’ reside in the
shadows that fall between what one really wanted and what one gets
at the end, between ‘the image one’s trying to trap’, ‘the essence of that
image’ and what the paint finally allows one to produce. And this energy
is vital in more than one sense. It violently returns one to life and to a
richness of feeling that is akin to the solemn ardour of Michelangelo’s
sonnet.
In 1547, Benedetto Varchi, a member of the Florentine Academy,
lectured on the rival merits of painting and sculpture to the Academy,
using the same sonnet by Michelangelo. Varchi’s commentary brings
together the various notions and images that we have been looking at
so far, making him sound like a slightly more pedantic contemporary
of the Conceptualist LeWitt:
… our Poet’s Concetto denotes that which, as we said above, is
called in Greek idea, in Latin exemplar, us ‘model’; that is, that form
or image, called by some people the intention, that we have within
our imagination, of everything that we intend to will or to make
or to say; which [form or image], although spiritual … is, for that
reason, the efficient cause of everything that can be said or made.
Wherefore the Philosopher [Aristotle] said in the Seventh Book of
the First Philosophy [Metaphysics]: ‘The active form, as regards the
bed, is in the soul of the artisan.’ (Sylvester 1997, 120)
It needed the audaciousness of an Aristotle to take Plato’s bed and place
it right within the ‘soul of the “artisan”’—not ‘artist’, mind you, but
the carpenter, the craftsman, as William Morris and the Bauhaus set
would have understood. And it would perhaps not be too sensational
to say that modern—that is Romantic and post-Romantic—art theory
was thus born out of Plato and also ‘dialectically’ out of him. Raphael’s
monumental fresco in the Vatican’s Stanza della Segnatura, The
School of Athens (1509–1511), puts Plato and Aristotle at the centre
of the entire composition. They stand side by side, overseeing the
Plato and Proust, Bedfellows
47
great assembly of ancient greek sages, Plato (resembling leonardo
da Vinci) holding his book Timaeus and the index finger of his right
hand pointing upwards towards the realm of the Ideal, while Aristotle,
holding his book Ethics, gestures downwards with his right hand, the
palm facing the ground and parallel to it, symbolising his investigation
of the natural and human worlds. It is in the Timaeus that Plato presents
his most famous celebration of the creative artist. However, this artist
is not a human being but the Demiurge, creator of the universe, and
the cosmos is his aesthetic achievement, the only work of art worthy
of Plato’s respect. Plato’s philosophy, thus, at once banishes the artist
and apotheosises him which is perhaps why Raphael puts him with
Aristotle at the centre of his ‘School’. In this school, Art is inseparable
from Philosophy, Theology and Mathematics, from the highest and
most abstract intellectual pursuits—as the presence of Pythagoras and
euclid, among others, indicates—while being just as integrally located
within the human and natural worlds.
The essential story of Western art from Plato to the Moderns—of
which Raphael’s School of Athens is both a subject and an early telling—
can be traced with all its problems and paradoxes in an unusual place—
the entries under ‘idea’ and ‘concept’ in the larger Oxford English
Dictionary. The OED shows how ‘idea’ was first ‘adopted’ by the modern
languages in the sixteenth century in its ‘general Platonic sense’. In this
sense, an Idea was ‘a supposed eternally existing pattern or archetype
of any class or thing, of which the individual things in that class are
imperfect copies, and from which they derive their existence’. The
dictionary’s earliest english illustration of this sense is from Philemon
Holland’s 1603 translation of Plutarch’s Moralia:
Idea is a bodilesse substance, which of itselfe hath no subsistence, but
giveth figure and forme unto shapelesse matters, and becommeth
the very cause that bringeth them into shew and evidence. Socrates
and Plato suppose, that these Ideæ bee substances separate and
distinct from Matter, howbeit, subsisting in the thoughts and
imaginations of God—that is to say, of Mind and understanding.
It is clear from Holland’s translation and the other OED examples of
usage that by the second half of the sixteenth century, the definitive
leap from the mind of God to the mind of man, as the realm in
which Ideas reside, has already been made. Holland’s english moves
seamlessly from a theological to a psychological vocabulary. And this
is the movement that defines the shift of the word’s dominant usage
in english henceforth. As a standard, principle or ideal to be aimed
at or desired, an Idea is what the ‘human’ mind or imagination holds
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and contemplates, and therefore, even produces. If one is a christian
Platonist, then one is free to think that it is god who has planted the
Idea in the human mind since the mind itself in its highest capacities
is what is divine in man. But the transition from this belief to its purely
secular indeed implicitly blasphemous version has already taken place
in the sixteenth century. By the time the Romantics take this up, the
internalisation of Ideas is complete. After running through the four
stages in the evolution of the word, as laid out in the OED from Plato
to ‘modern philosophical developments’ (Descartes, Locke, Kant and
Hegel), one begins to see how ‘Idea’ not only becomes a keyword in
philosophy but also a part of a much more practical vocabulary of
human creativity—artistic as well as less exalted forms of the ‘making’
of things from pre-existing forms, designs or plans. ‘Idea’ begins
to align itself with words like ‘design’, ‘model’, ‘plan’, ‘pattern’ and
‘type’. The word descends from a timeless and transcendent sphere
into a psychological, material or technological one without losing its
intellectual and originary character. For Philip Sidney, in An Apology
for Poetry (1595), ‘the skill of the artificer standeth in that Idea or foreconceit of the work, and not in the work itself ’.4 to ‘ideate’—that is, to
form an idea of, to imagine, conceive—comes into english a little later.
The OED cites a sentence from John Donne’s prose, dated 1610.
‘Skill’, ‘work’ and ‘artifice’ are all words that straddle the intellectual
and the manual, High Art and the relatively humbler crafts. Sidney’s
‘fore-conceit’ is an important ancestor of the modern ‘concept’—a word
that has always been more at home than ‘Idea’ has been in the realm
of practical creativity, of materials and products and hands. Sidney’s
compound also reveals the etymology of ‘concept’, which entered
english much earlier than ‘idea’, in the late fourteenth century and was
almost always used in its earlier from ‘conceit’ which survives today,
interestingly, in the notion of ‘conceitedness’, personal vanity or pride.
From the beginning, ‘concept’ was related to the purely human mind—
meaning notion, understanding, opinion or estimation (in a neutral
sense). But with the subsequent emergence of ‘Idea’, it got assimilated
into the later word’s semantic field, without letting go of its original
practical, less exalted character. In the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries, this proximity to ‘Idea’ also lent to ‘conceit’ an added sense
of ‘the excessively and ingeniously fanciful’. to use ‘conceits’ became
a form of literary affectation that came to be associated with the selfconsciously learned sophistication or ‘wit’ of ‘metaphysical poets’
like John Donne, Andrew Marvell and Abraham Cowley. Such an
affectation was perceived as having come from that land of exquisite
corruption and Mannerist extravagance, Italy, and was associated with
the Italian word, ‘concetto’ (used, although more austerely, in Varchi’s
Plato and Proust, Bedfellows
49
commentary on michelangelo’s sonnet) and with the poet, giambattista
marino, among others in spain and Italy. samuel Johnson—in his 1779
essay on cowley in the Prefaces … to the Works of the English Poets—
finds the word ‘conceit’ indispensable to his critical discussion on
the english Metaphysical poets. His description of Metaphysical wit
gives a broad but accurate sense of what the use of conceits signified,
philosophically and stylistically, and remains strikingly applicable to
the work of modern Conceptualists like Duchamp, Kosuth and LeWitt
and generally to a great deal of Surrealist and post-Surrealist Art:
[Wit] may be more rigorously and philosophically considered as
a kind of discordia concors; a combination of dissimilar things, or
discovery of occult resemblances in things apparently unlike…. The
most heterogenous ideas are yoked by violence together; nature
and art are ransacked for illustrations, comparisons, and allusions;
their learning instructs, and their subtlety surprises.… Their wish
was only to say what they hoped had been never said before.… And
in the mass of materials, which ingenious absurdity has thrown
together, genuine wit and useful knowledge may be sometimes
found, buried perhaps in the grossness of expression, but useful to
those who know their value…. (Greene 1984, 678–679)
Duchamp’s Conceptualist urinal/fountain is informed by precisely
this kind of verbal-visual wit. Fountain, and many of the works that
it inspired, are ‘conceits’ whose deliberate effect exploits the violent
yoking of decorously separated notions and things confounding
the Platonic hierarchies that keep apart sacred and profane, mind
and body, abstract and concrete, spiritual and material, physical and
metaphysical. This is how they create the shock of the new, both for
the eye and for the mind. The subversiveness of this ‘avant-garde’ wit
and its products is exclusive and intellectual, their outrageousness
self-consciously snobbish and their irreverence wilfully ‘conceited’
(in the modern sense). Donne and his urbane Inns-of-Court friends
would have understood and delighted in the ingenious absurdities of
Duchamp and Dali.
The OED’s etymology of ‘idea’ takes us also to the heart of another
defining conflict within Western art, played out in the history of the
word’s usage. The dictionary points out that the Greek ίδέα—which, in
its everyday senses, could mean look, semblance, form, configuration,
species, kind, class, sort or nature—is derived from the root ιδ, meaning
‘see’. Plato used ίδέα and its cognate εîδος (usually translated as ‘form’)
indiscriminately, as did Aristotle, who did not discriminate clearly
when summarising Plato, although he tended to prefer εîδος as his own
technical term. As the poet, Coleridge, points out in a very useful note
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on ‘Idea’ in his Biographia Literaria (1815), Plato’s ίδέα—‘considered as
mysterious powers, living, seminal, formative, and exempt from time’—
existed as the antithesis to είδωλα or ‘sensuous images; the transient and
perishable emblems, or mental words, of ideas’ (coleridge 1984, 96–97).
The root ιδ—akin to the Latin vid-, also meaning ‘see’, and making up
english words like ‘visual’ and ‘evidence’—is therefore, like a dangerous
kernel of visuality threatening to undermine the transcendence of the
Platonic Idea. Idea, though notionally opposed to ‘image’, is essentially,
indeed seminally, linked to it. The visual—the actual physical activity
of the human eye—is at the root of the metaphysical in Plato, and
hence, seeing becomes disturbingly inseparable from knowing in the
epistemologies that come out of his philosophy and flow into modern
theories of knowledge and modern aesthetics.
In Plato’s philosophical discourse, this is, at one level, the problem
of metaphor. The language of vision informs our various languages
of experiencing the world and of processing that experience into
consciousness and knowledge. How do we read, then, the blazingly
visual and poetic myths and images in Plato’s philosophy—the Myth
of the Cave in The Republic, the chariot and horses in Phaedrus, the
hemispheres and the winged soul in The Symposium or the Demiurge
in Timaeus? ‘“Is it a metaphor?” is, of course, a fundamental question
to be asked about metaphysical explanation,’ writes Iris Murdoch, ‘Our
ability to use visual structures to understand non-visual structures ...
is fundamental to explanation to any field’ (Murdoch 1977, 67–68).
Yet, this is not simply a technical problem of how philosophy or
metaphysics explains its disembodied concepts. It is more crucially
and abidingly, a problem of how we actually come to know things and
what constitutes this knowledge. It is a problem of how we trust the
‘evidence’ of our senses in building up a certain knowledge of the world
and of ourselves and how we then represent, communicate or reveal
these ‘truths’ to ourselves and to other human beings through shared
modes of expression. It is also a problem of how we reflect on, write and
talk about these processes.
Do we have to see in order to believe and know? This central question
in epistemology has a distinct relevance for each modern sphere of
intellectual activity—the empirical sciences, medicine, law, theology,
art and everyday life. How do we know that the earth is round? How
do I find out if I am HIV+? How do we prove that Imrana Bibi was
raped by her father-in-law? Why should we believe that God exists?
Is my spouse committing adultery? These are, at one level, similar
questions. What links them is the idea of visual evidence. Human
knowing is helplessly dependant on sight, pleasured and compelled
by it, yet deeply mistrustful of it too. Iris Murdoch reminds us that,
Plato and Proust, Bedfellows
51
for st. John of the cross, ‘god is the abyss of faith into which we fall
when we have discarded all images of him.’ ‘This is the point’, she adds,
‘at which Plato starts making jokes’ (Murdoch 1977, 65). Coleridge, a
little after his note on Idea in the Biographia, refers to this ambivalent
dependence as ‘that despotism of the eye’, ‘the emancipation from
which Pythagoras by his numerical, and Plato by his musical, symbols,
and both by geometric discipline, aimed at, as the first προπαιδεντικόν
[preparatory education] of the mind’ (Coleridge 1984, 107). numbers,
music and geometry become, therefore, the symbols and guarantee
of the mind’s capacity to free itself from its subjection to the eye—
its capacity for intellectual abstraction. But even these abstractions
are founded on reading, looking at lines, points and shapes and on
listening and then processing these sensations in the brain. Plato’s
mistrust of the senses, the basis of his epistemology, is rooted in an
attitude to the body, particularly to sexuality—what Murdoch calls
his sense of ‘human worthlessness’ (Murdoch 1977, 20)—that results
in his privileging of the spiritual over the corporeal. This is carried
forward into Christianity’s hierarchical division of body and soul (as
a consequence of Original Sin) which in turn, has been secularised by
modern empiricism into the Cartesian polarities of body and mind or
matter and mind. each of these modern polarities tends to privilege the
mind as superior.
Philosophy and Art might be seen as located at opposite ends of
this abstract-to-concrete spectrum. If Philosophy is Idea, then Art
is Image; if the former deals with universals then the latter gives us
particulars (embodied in the aesthetic object). In this, Art may be seen
as both a critique and a complement of Philosophy, in terms of both
pleasure and knowledge. Yet, even while co-opting Plato to vindicate
what he originally undermines, Art—particularly certain schools of
Modern Art—often internalise Plato’s misgivings with the image
and the eye, with the physical and the material. It is impossible for
the visual arts to be anything but visual and for the plastic arts to be
anything but material—and in this, Art is forever shackled to the eye
(of the artist and of the viewer) and to matter. However, if Conceptual
Art has vengefully brought the Platonic Idea or Concept down to
the level of the most banal things (beds and chairs and urinals), then
Abstract expressionism and Minimalism in painting and sculpture
have journeyed in the opposite direction, away from the transfigured
junkyard of ‘things’, from the subversive towards the sublime, towards
the realisation of a more Platonic notion of Idea or Concept. With the
paintings, it is as if the very fact of having shed the sculpture’s third
dimension, limiting themselves to the flat surfaces of pictorial space,
has led to a reduction of their materiality, moving them closer to pure
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abstraction, towards a kind of secular spirituality, a modern mysticism.
This journey towards abstraction is also a journey away from the
human body towards a purely formal, and therefore, intellectual notion
of subject matter—a state of non-depiction, beyond the figurative, the
narrative and the representational. This is a kind of art that aspires to
the condition of geometry or, better still, of music and might derive its
deepest inspiration from the contrapuntal music of J.S. Bach.5
early twentieth-century abstraction—of Kandinsky, Mondrian
and Kasimir Malevich—spoke a recognisably Platonic, quasi-spiritual
language when talking about itself. In ‘Concerning the Spiritual in Art’
(1911), Kandinsky spoke of a ‘coming era of great spirituality’ (quoted in
Harrison 1997, 200). And in 1913, Malevich placed a black square on a
white ground, claiming that his art like the Platonic Idea, ‘wants to have
nothing further to do with the object as such’, for ‘it can exist, in and
for itself, without things’ (Gablik 1997, 244). Such a composition would
gesture towards ‘an immediate, legible geometry’ (Gablik 1997, 244)
that can be conceived by the mind before its execution. Almost
three decades later, in 1943, Mark Rothko and Adolph Gottlieb were
still proclaiming their involvement with ‘eternal symbols’. Rothko
described the transition, in his painting, from abstractions of human
figures to those exploring non-figurative relationships between ‘colourfields’. The latter becomes the painting of ‘shapes’ created from the
need ‘for everyday acts’ to belong to ‘a ritual accepted as referring to
a transcendent realm’ (Gablik 1997, 194–195). In his late dialogue,
Philebus, Plato concedes to sensation the pleasurable experience of
‘pure beauty’ through the contemplation of certain colours, simple
geometrical figures or a single series of pure notes. This form of pure
contemplation sorts out, emphasises and attends to harmonious
patterns that are already latent in the universe and in the cosmic
mind (Murdoch 1977, 12). In an earlier dialogue Meno, by making a
slave boy solve a geometrical problem, Socrates proves to Meno that
these harmonious patterns in the cosmic mind had also once existed
as notions in the human mind before it was born to its servitude to
the body and to the material world. So, all that Socrates did with the
slave-boy was to make him remember what his soul had once known
in its pure, disembodied state. In Philebus, philosophical truth, which is
purely expressive of reality, is compared to a small piece of pure white
colour (Murdoch 1977, 12).
It is this purity—the purity of the Idea in its original Platonic
sense—that modern Minimalism invokes and realises by literalising
Plato’s metaphors and similes for contemplation, thereby rendering
contemplation itself inseparable from looking. In Laws, Plato seems to
be tracing the shift from Cubism to Minimalism when he writes, ‘Can
Plato and Proust, Bedfellows
53
there be any more accurate vision or view of any object than through the
ability to look from the dissimilar many to the single idea?’ (murdoch
1977, 26) The mind’s eye in Plato becomes the eye’s mind with the
Minimalist artists. The journey from Cubism to Abstract expressionism
(Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock and Barnett newman) and Minimalism
(Don Judd, Robert Morris and Frank Stella) was a passage from europe
to America across the Great Wars into the coldness of the Cold War.
But aesthetically, it was a backward quest—a tracing of Cubism ‘back
down through its extensions to the point at which art ceased to be
able to call upon a world of whole objects’ (Smith 1997, 201). And
this attempt to put Humpty together again after his great fall had to
be essentially Platonic. A revival of the idea of wholeness—achieved in
pictorial space but also grasped and held in the intellect of the artist and
of the viewer—was also a revival of ‘idea’ and ‘concept’ as keywords.
Barnett newman’s great work of 1948—an impasto cadmium-red light
stripe, centred vertically upon a more thinly-painted cadmium-red
darker field—is called Onement I. Working in the late 1940s and 1950s
and well into the Cold War, painters and sculptors (many of them Jews
and Russians living in America) would have found it impossible to not
see the relationship between figurative and abstract art in terms of art’s
relationship with the human and the non-human, and by extension,
the inhuman.
How did abstract Art stand in relation to human form as well as
human feelings? If the realm of Ideas in Plato—the chief enemy of the
open society, according to Karl Popper—had not been structured around
the ideas of the Beautiful and the Good and in some dialogues around
Love, there would have been something chillingly inhuman about its
transcendence. Literary celebrations of the classical Ideal—especially in
Romantic poetry—also address its intimidating, but sublime coldness
‘all breathing human passion far above’.6 Yet, as Keats’s poem tells us,
when a living viewer stands in front of or walks around a work of art,
then even the coldest and most remotely abstract work becomes part
of a human scene. It becomes part of a vital relationship, in space and
time, between the mind and body of the viewer and the form and the
content of the work.
If one stands for a sufficiently long time in front of newman’s
Onement I (or any of his great ‘Stripe’ paintings) and allows oneself to
be worked upon by the painting’s meditativeness, then what begins to
emerge—somewhere between the eye’s mind and the mind’s eye, that
zone between perception and recognition—is an essential relationship
between one’s own verticality as a body standing in space and the
verticality of newman’s vividly-coloured stripe and perhaps even that
of the painting itself, hanging on the wall. newman’s painting unites
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number, line, colour, mind, body and language. The numeral 1 is also
a vertical line, which, in turn, is the simplest possible rendering of the
upright human body, but rendered here not only as a line but also as
a heightened strip of redness standing out within and against a red
background. These make up a composition whose individual vertical
elements (the stripe and its background, an upright column of red) are
self-similar and also resemble the verticality of the pictorial space itself
and its frame. And all this is ‘held’ not only within the painting but also
crucially, grasped in one’s eye and mind as a viewer, constituting within
the space and time of viewing, one’s sense of being oneself. This is a
vividly unified self, a perceiving subject who has just used his eyes and
his reflective powers to get to the geometric essence of his bodily and
figurative presence in space. Hence, the significance of newman’s title,
Onement I, which suggests the word, ‘wonderment’. Such multiple, yet
unifying acts of recognition produce their own sense of wonder.
But this wonder is profoundly ambiguous. And the ambiguity is
brought out by the relationship between the titles of two of newman’s
other great and huge stripe paintings—Euclidian Abyss (1946–1947)
and Vir Heroicus Sublimis (1950–1951). to render the human body as
a vertical line within and against a single vast colour field is to simplify
as well as reduce the body to its linear, geometric essence; what Blake
had called the ‘human form divine’ is transfigured as well as annihilated
in this process. newman, therefore, repeatedly uses the language of
the sublime, and of terror, when talking about his own work. The
sublime makes us feel very big as well as very small, empowered as
well as overpowered. This is why confronting a mountain, a great
work of art, a tremendous piece of Fascist architecture and God, are all
part of the human experience of the sublime, and herein lies, too, the
ambiguity of the sublime. newman’s ‘heroic and sublime’ man is both
an apotheosis of the human into Abstract Art, as well as a terrifying
reduction of the human by pure geometric space or a radiant primary
colour. This ‘Human Abstract’ is placed in the euclidian abyss and
becomes a helplessness before the void’,7 or a series of mysterious slits
in the void. For newman, a Jew who knew his Aeschylus and nietzsche,
terror before the unknowable and the incommunicable (‘the eternal
insecurities of life’8) becomes a compelling creative force. He describes
Euclidian Abyss as ‘my first painting where I got to the edge and didn’t
fall off ’.9
Witnessing the gradual but inevitable effacement of human feeling
and form by (in? into?) stupendously simple shapes, colours and edges
is what a chronological viewing of Mark Rothko’s paintings ultimately
becomes. In a kind of gathering silence, bodies turn into blurred,
huge squares and rectangles, luminous reds and oranges become the
Plato and Proust, Bedfellows
55
bleakest grey and black as we approach the last works done just before
his suicide in 1970. what Rothko conveys to the viewer—visually,
emotionally, intellectually and spiritually—is the oppressiveness of the
simplest of forms, colours and textures, the terrible weight of simplicity
or abstraction itself. This arose, as Rothko himself spelled out, from
a ‘clear preoccupation with death’: ‘All art deals with intimations of
mortality’.10 And in Rothko, the gradual absenting of the human figure
becomes a steady act of killing. ‘It was with the utmost reluctance that
I found the figure could not serve my purposes’, Rothko had once
said, ‘But a time came when none of us could use the figure without
mutilating it.’11 Yet, in a sublime paradox, the very absence of the
figure made it possible for the human to be a pervasive and informing
presence in Rothko’s paintings. In his late and last paintings, pictorial
space turns into a mysteriously frozen tragic theatre in which the
human is affirmed, even reified, through extinction. In the ‘abstract’
Art of both newman and Rothko, ‘the single human figure—alone in
a moment of utter immobility’ becomes the Idea instead of an Image.12
This ‘single human figure’, brought into being while being
obliterated in, and by, Art is actually three beings in one—the artist,
his subject and the viewer. It is, therefore, a ‘onement’ in Barnett
newman’s sense of the word. Another such creature can be found in
the third volume, La prisonnière (The Captive, 1923), of Proust’s novel,
A la recherche du temps perdue (In Search of Lost Time). This is the
writer, Bergotte, the description of whose death in a Parisian art gallery
in front of Vermeer’s View of Delft, becomes one of those extended and
magnificent reflections on Art and Life and time that are arranged
across Proust’s immense novel. One of the last things he wrote and
inserted into the novel before his own death, the Death of Bergotte is
both art history and art theory as fiction but informed with Proust’s
preoccupation with his own mortality. Proust himself had gone to see
in May 1921, an exhibition of Dutch paintings at the Jeu de Paume
where he had seen both the View of Delft (1660–1661) and the Girl with
the Pearl Earring (1665–1667) by Vermeer. In Proust’s transformation
of this experience into fiction, a Modernist writer’s confrontation
with seventeenth-century Dutch Realism becomes a fatal catastrophe,
narrated with a coldly ironic, yet beautifully elegiac sensationalism.
Proust dramatises in Bergotte’s death, a moment of transition from
classic figurative realism to something like Abstract expressionism,
several years before the latter’s time. This is a history of representation
itself, almost comically enacted in the last few seconds of a man’s life.
And it is a transition not only in artistic practice (how one paints or
writes) but also in aesthetic perception (how one looks at pictures and
writes about them).
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Humanities, Provocateur
Hearing of Bergotte’s death, Proust’s narrator recalls, in La
prisonnière, how Bergotte had been dying slowly of an undiagnosed
illness.13 (This illness—because this is Proust writing, and writing
largely about himself—must have been an acute and terminal form of
hypochondria.) Bergotte had stopped going out of doors and when he
got out of bed, he remained swaddled in rugs and shawls, as if to protect
himself from intense cold. When the few people who were allowed
to see him wondered why he was wrapped up in travelling rugs, he
would say merrily, ‘After all, my dear fellow, life, as Anaxagoras has
said, is a journey.’ ‘Thus,’ the narrator reminisces, ‘he went on growing
steadily colder, a tiny planet offering a prophetic image of the greater,
when gradually heat will withdraw from the earth, then life itself.’14
This metaphor leads, in the narrator, to thoughts on the extinction of
the human species itself by the ‘invading cold’ and a vision of what
would happen to Art, and to artistic fame, when there are no human
beings left on earth, only animals who have managed to survive the
cold. Suddenly, in the dwindling light of this final entropy, all Art, even
the most ‘modern’, appears pathetically human to the narrator, beyond
salvage or salvation in the face of human mortality. His saving grace is
irony and its tonal achievements. ‘Irony: a modern ingredient’, Rothko
had written in 1958, ‘A form of self-effacement and self-examination in
which a man can, for a moment, escape his fate’ (Murdoch 1977, 210).
Then, he recounts how Bergotte had read that the View of Delft
was being shown in Paris, a picture which Bergotte had adored and
‘imagined that he knew by heart’. Bergotte also read an art critic’s
account of ‘a little patch of yellow wall’ in the picture that was ‘so well
painted that it was, if one looked at it by itself, like some priceless
specimen of Chinese art, of a beauty that was sufficient in itself.’ He
had not been able to recall this detail, so after eating a few potatoes and
overcoming some initial spells of dizziness, he set out for the gallery
and reached Vermeer’s great work:
He noticed for the first time some small figures in blue, that the
sand was pink, and, finally, the precious substance of the tiny patch
of yellow wall. His dizziness increased; he fixed his gaze, like a child
upon a yellow butterfly that it wants to catch, on the precious little
patch of wall. ‘That’s how I ought to have written,’ he said. ‘My
last books are too dry, I ought to have gone over them with a few
layers of colour, made my language precious in itself, like this little
patch of yellow wall.’ In a celestial pair of scales there appeared to
him, weighing down one of the pans, his own life, while the other
contained the little patch of wall so beautifully painted in yellow.
(Proust 1989, vol. 3, 185)
Plato and Proust, Bedfellows
57
And then he had two more attacks of dizziness and died on the floor of
the gallery in front of the picture. ‘He was dead,’ remarks the narrator
‘dead forever? who can say?’
Bergotte’s is a death by colour. In his last moments, his eye transforms
Vermeer’s painting, first, into an Impressionist work, reducing the
figures and the sand to their colour elements, blue and pink, and then,
as the unity of the whole work begins to disintegrate in his eyes, he
picks up a little detail, again for its vividness of colour and in no time
this detail—‘the tiny patch of yellow wall’—becomes the part which
creates its own whole, a new painting ‘in itself ’ (a phrase that recurs
in this passage). This new painting is what a more modern vocabulary
would call a pure ‘colour-field’, a colour become shape (‘patch’). Yet it
never quite dissociates itself completely from its mimetic link with the
wall. Its truth and Beauty, as a work of art in itself, lie both in capturing
the vital essence of yellowness and in representing—in colour, texture
and shape—what that particular sunlit bit of wall in Delft was ‘really
like’, its ‘precious substance’. But if one were to forget the original wall
and see the detail simply as a patch of colour and texture (‘layers of
colour’), enlarged independently of the rest of Vermeer’s painting,
then one could be looking at an Abstract expressionist work, a yellow
rectangle which an artist like Rothko could have painted. And, in
effect, this is what Bergotte does with ‘his’ fragment of Vermeer. (Are
abstract paintings, then, ‘little patches’ taken out of some gigantic, prior
figurative work and given a life and value and truth of their own?)
Bergotte’s patch of yellow is also a subjective composite. Modern
readers of Proust have tried to identify the exact detail in Vermeer’s
painting that Bergotte fixes on and have come up with three such patches.
Bergotte’s patch is not only a merging, in the eye and in the mind, of
these three (or possibly more) details but it is also a telescoping of his
last viewing of the picture with his vivid memories of it from previous
viewings (he imagined that he knew the picture ‘by heart’). So, the little
patch of yellow wall is a mental image—like the famous ‘madeleine’
dipped in tea, in the overture to the novel’s opening volume, Du côté de
chez Swann (Swann’s Way, 1913)—gathering into itself an entire history
of private sensation, of looking, remembering and reviving.
From being something realised in Vermeer’s art, the patch of wall
becomes, therefore, an Idea in Bergotte’s soul and memory, a fugitive
Ideal that his own art, in another medium, wants to capture. Proust’s
image for this is poignantly Classical: ‘he fixed his gaze, like a child
upon a yellow butterfly that it wants to catch, on the precious little
patch of wall’. In the art and mythology of antiquity, Psyche is, at once,
soul, butterfly and Cupid’s human lover who is made a goddess only
after she knows suffering through love. In Classical Art, the butterfly
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Humanities, Provocateur
emerging from the chrysalis stands for the soul leaving the body at
death and it later becomes an image for the resurrected soul in christian
iconography. Proust’s butterfly, so luminously mythological (like the
‘celestial pair of scales’ later), gives Bergotte’s vision of Vermeer’s yellow
wall a quality of inwardness such as an Idea in Bergotte’s soul which is
just about to be, but is never quite, fully bodied forth or ‘expressed’ as
a realised image in Bergotte’s Art. There is a delicately Platonic feel to
this, heightened a little later, by the ‘celestial’ aura given to the pair of
scales. Yet the lightness of the butterfly itself and the comic irony of
the narrator never allow the image to lose its elusively psychological
and modern character. But this most fleeting image of the artist’s
soul—the place where what he sees and longs to create, pleasure and
desire, restlessly reside—prepares the reader for the extended piece of
Platonism that follows the account of Bergotte’s death.
Plato’s theory of ‘anamnesis’—in dialogues such as the Phaedrus and
the Phaedo—is yet another of his ‘myths’ that are poised uncertainly
between the literal and the metaphorical. In it, Forms and Ideas become
an argument for the immortality of the soul. We know of Ideas and
are able to enjoy and long for the Beautiful and the Good, because our
souls were, before birth, in a place where these Ideas or Forms were
clearly seen. The incarnated soul tends to forget this knowledge but
may be reminded of it by philosophy and dialectics, as the slave-boy in
Meno is made to solve the geometric riddle by Socrates, who reminds
the boy of what he already knew before he was born into slavery. In
anamnesis, the realm of Ideas is entirely separated from the sensible
world in which human beings exist and their journey from illusion to
reality—in the Myth of the Cave, for instance—is actually a process of
recovery through recollection. Proust’s narrator wonders—with a hard,
brilliant, disenchanted playfulness—whether Bergotte’s soul would
survive his death.
All that we can say is that everything is arranged in this life as
though we entered it carrying a burden of obligations contracted
in a former life; there is no reason inherent in the conditions of
life on this earth that can make us consider ourselves obliged to
do good, to be kind and thoughtful, even to be polite, nor for an
atheist artist to consider himself obliged to begin over again a score
of times a piece of work the admiration aroused by which will
matter little to his worm-eaten body, like a patch of yellow wall
painted with so much skill and refinement by an artist destined to
be forever unknown and barely identified under the name Vermeer.
All these obligations, which have no sanction in our present life,
seem to belong to a different world, a world based on kindness,
Plato and Proust, Bedfellows
59
scrupulousness, self-sacrifice, a world entirely different from this
one and which we leave in order to be born on this earth, before
perhaps returning there to live once again beneath the sway of laws
which we obeyed because we bore their precepts in our hearts, not
knowing whose hand had traced them there—those laws to which
every profound work of the intellect brings us nearer and which are
invisible only—if then!—to fools. (Proust 1989, vol. 3, 186)
Proust both humanises the Platonic realm of Ideas and separates it
from the ‘fallen’ human world. It becomes a lost but glimmeringly
remembered, realm of human goodness and also the place from where
the laws that govern and are expressed in ‘every profound work of
intellect’ emanate—Vermeer’s as well as Plato’s. For Plato, this world
was far beyond the human. But for Proust, it is a realm that we have
lost in human time, through an entirely mortal process of forgetting
and loss. It can be recovered imperfectly only in the pleasures and
rigours of Art and private memory. Yet its laws may be revealed to all
but fools (of the non-erasmian variety) and herein lies Proust’s sublime
conceitedness.
But Proust’s account of the death of Bergotte and the birth of
Modern Art is framed, and subjected to an almost brutal irony, by yet
another Platonic idea. The narrator, when he hears of Bergotte’s death,
is deep into his complicated and tormented love for Albertine. He reads
in the papers of Bergotte’s death the day before and is struck by the
inaccuracy of this account, for Albertine had told him that she had met
Bergotte the day before, when, according to the papers, he was already
supposed to have been dead. It is only much later that he learns that the
papers were correct and that Albertine had the ‘charming skill’ of ‘lying
naturally’—her artless Art.
What she said, what she admitted, had to such a degree the same
characteristics as the formal evidence of the case—what we see with
our own eyes or learn from irrefutable sources—that she sowed
thus in the gaps of her life episodes from another life the falsity of
which I did not then suspect and began to perceive only at a much
later date. (Proust 1989, vol. 3, 187)
Albertine embodies all the reasons for which Plato banished the
painter and the poet from his ideal republic. These men traffic not only
in copies of copies but also in ‘falsity’ and lies; and the more realistic
their art, the more dangerous they are. Albertine’s lies, as the narrator
gradually realises, are ‘animated, coloured with the very hues of life’.
They are her own little patches of yellow wall. What inspires her is
‘verisimilitude alone’ and she is surpassed in her ‘storytelling’ only
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Humanities, Provocateur
by her friend ‘blossoming’ and ‘rose-pink’ like her, in whose lies ‘one
saw … in front of one the thing—albeit imaginary—which she was
describing, through the eyes, as it were, of her words’ (Proust 1989,
vol. 3, 190). Bergotte’s life-in-death was, therefore, quite literally, a
lie. Proust is here juxtaposing two kinds of human creativity—also
two kinds of ‘verisimilitude’—and then letting one frame the other.
Vermeer is seen through the eyes of Bergotte, who, in turn, is briefly
(for the narrator) placed within Albertine’s lie.
Plato offers two explanations of the human imagination—a
‘good’ one, in his theory of Ideas, embodied in the philosopher and
a ‘bad’ one, in the figures of the deceiving painter and the lying
poet. After Plato, art, literature and aesthetics have tried to co-opt
the good theory in various ways and defended the artist from the
bad one, yet without entirely disavowing the latter’s trueness and
perverse charm:
… given man, by birth, by education,
Imago dei who forgot his station,
The self-made creature who himself unmakes,
The only creature ever made who fakes,
With no more nature in his loving smile
Than in his theories of a natural style,
What but tall tales, the luck of verbal playing,
Can trick his lying nature into saying
That love, or truth in any serious sense,
Like orthodoxy, is a reticence?15
Proust’s account of Art, in the death of Bergotte, seems to contrast
Albertine’s art with Vermeer’s and Bergotte’s. But ‘contrast’ seems
to imply apartness and polarity, both of which are made impossible
by Proust’s own art of storytelling, which interlaces these two distinct
strands within Plato’s philosophy. Great Art—emphatically human
and always modern—remains reticently (and sometimes volubly)
poised between Bergotte’s patch of yellow wall and Albertine’s ‘story’—
between laws and lies, absence and presence, Idea and Image. But the
word ‘and’ is perhaps too simple for joining these words in pairs. What
Plato himself feared and his subsequent footnote-makers (philosophers
as well as artists) affirmed with fewer misgivings, is that the Idea might
more humanely reside ‘in’ the Image and—bad news for philosophy—
the Image, in the Idea. The great and difficult work of Art is to keep that
little preposition in place.
Plato and Proust, Bedfellows
61
NOTES
1. kosuth’s work is also a rather simplifying homage to magritte’s two
versions of This is not a Pipe, made in the late 1920s, which then became
the subject of Foucault’s brilliant 1968 essay with the same title. In the
second version, magritte presents a carefully drawn pipe with the text,
‘This is not a pipe’ written underneath in a frame that is placed on an easel
standing on a clearly depicted floor. Above everything, in the pictureroom’s realm of the Ideal, floats a pipe exactly like the one in the frame,
but much larger. Would this picture have been possible without Plato?
2. On ‘aura’, see Benjamin (1992, 211–244).
3. I have used here the text and its very literal translation provided in erwin
Panofsky (1968, 117–118). Here are Michelangelo’s lines, ‘Non ha l’ottimo
artista in se alcun concetto,/ Ch’un marmo solo in se non circoscriva/ Col suo
soverchio; e solo a quello arriva/ La man che ubbidisce all’intelletto.’
4. Sir Philip Sidney (1973, 101). (The OED also quotes this sentence.)
Shepherd’s long note on this passage (157–158) shows how Sidney’s Idea
is not ‘pure Platonism’ but is a keyword in his poetics that ‘runs parallel to
Mannerist theory of painting’.
5. For a wonderfully readable exploration of the complex relations between
Bach’s counterpoint, certain kinds of modern art and mathematics, see
Hofstadter (2000).
6. John Keats, ‘Ode on a Grecian urn’ (1820).
7. newman’s own words, quoted in Concepts of Modern Art, 197.
8. Ibid., 191.
9. Ibid., 195.
10. Ibid., 199.
11. Ibid., 206.
12. Ibid., 197. These are Rothko’s own words, written in 1947.
13. I have used the english translation of Proust’s novel by C.K. Scott
Montcrieff, terence Kilmartin and Andreas Mayor, 3 volumes (Penguin,
1989), entitled Remembrance of Things Past. The Death of Bergotte is in
volume 3, 180–191.
14. Ibid., 182.
15. W.H. Auden, ‘The truest Poetry Is the Most Feigning’ (1953).
REFERENCES
Auden, W.H. Collected Poems. edited by edward Mendelson. Faber: London,
2007.
Benjamin, Walter. ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’.
In Illuminations, translated by Harry Zohn, 211–244. London: Fontana
Books, 1992.
Coleridge, Samuel taylor. Biographia Literaria. edited by James engell and
W. Jackson Bate. Princeton: Princeton university Press, 1984.
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gablik, suzi. ‘minimalism.’ In Concepts of Modern Art: From Fauvism to
Postmodernism, edited by nikos stangos, 200. london: Thames and
Hudson, 1997.
Greene, Donald, ed. Samuel Johnson, 677–697. Oxford: Oxford university
Press, 1984.
Harrison, Charles. ‘Abstract expressionism.’ In Concepts of Modern Art: From
Fauvism to Postmodernism, edited by nikos Stangos, 200. London: Thames
and Hudson, 1997.
Hofstadter, Douglas R. Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid. London:
Penguin Books, 2000.
Holland, Philemon. Plutarch. London: Arnold Hatfield, 1603.
Murdoch, Iris. The Fire and the Sun: Why Plato Banished the Artists. Oxford:
Oxford university Press, 1977.
Panofsky, erwin. Idea: A Concept in Art Theory. London: Harper and Row,
1968.
Plato. The Republic. translated by Desmond Lee. London: Penguin, 1983.
Proust, Marcel. Remembrance of Things Past. translated by C.K. Scott
Montcrieff, terence Kilmartin and Andreas Mayor, 3 volumes. London:
Penguin, 1989.
Riley, Bridget. Dialogues on Art. edited by Robert Kudielka. London: Thames
and Hudson, 2003.
Sidney, Philip. An Apology for Poetry. edited by Geoffrey Shepherd. Manchester:
Manchester university Press, 1973.
Smith, Roberta. ‘Conceptual Art’. In Concepts of Modern Art: From Fauvism
to Postmodernism, edited by nikos Stangos. London: Thames and Hudson,
1997.
Stangos, nikos, ed. Concepts of Modern Art: From Fauvism to Postmodernism.
London: Thames and Hudson, 1997.
Stevens, Wallace. Collected Poems. London: Faber Books, 1984.
Sylvester, David. The Brutality of Fact: Interviews with Francis Bacon. London:
Thames and Hudson, 1997.
JeAn genet And JeAn-PAUl sARtRe: wRItIng
In ResIstAnce And tHe PRActIce oF tHeoRY
Michael Levenson
1
Their careers were parallel, intersecting, then divergent. Out of war
each received intellectual acknowledgement that soon turned to
celebrity: Sartre’s existentialism became a global fascination and
disturbance, Genet’s success no less incendiary. Only months after
the armistice, Sartre gave the soon-to-be-famous (notorious) lecture
on ‘existentialism is a Humanism’, later disowned but at the time
reputation-clinching. Genet’s five novels appeared in a furious rush
in the mid- and later-1940s. When the two insurrectionists met in the
cafés of Paris and then in the pages of Sartre’s massive study Saint Genet
(1952), their reputations were reciprocally sealed. each was a mirror
and de-forming mirror for the other. The present chapter means to
parse the insurrection and the acclaim: the parallel development, the
unsteady intersection and the glare of mutual illumination, disclosing
and distorting. It takes the years 1949–1952 as focus, widening to the
first post-war decade and then extending to brief consideration of the
after-history of a nexus.
‘existentialism is a Humanism’ was delivered on 29 October
1945 and published in a wildly successful small-book format soon
after. The simplifying force of its polemic came to trouble Sartre but
it had the advantage of clarifying both the appeal and the challenge.
existentialism, in Sartre’s offering, was at its heart a repudiation of
the bourgeois ascendancy. With the end of war, an exhausted middle
class looked to restore its ravaged pieties: religion, tradition and social
stability. Its props were the mottoes of the resigned universal truth: the
‘common sayings’ that ‘all mean much the same—that you must not
oppose the powers-that-be; that you must not fight against superior
force; must not meddle in matters that are above your station’ (Sartre
1948, 25–26). Against this impassive proverbial wisdom (‘How like
human nature’, Sartre 1948, 26), Sartre deployed the provocations of
contingency: existence precedes essence; human reality is undefined
and indefinable; we make ourselves in, and only in, our acts.
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Humanities, Provocateur
These slogans had only recently taken canonical form when Sartre
met Genet in 1944. Jean Cocteau was the intermediary, having made
contact when Genet was still an unpublished writer, known to the
French state as thief and prisoner. During the war he was in and out
of confinement; he was also writing, riskily and prolifically and would
later call prison the seedbed of his creativity. The five novels were
composed in under five years in his early thirties. Their appearance
marked a moment of brazen gay expression allied to late-modernist
experimentalism (openly linked to Proust) and the legend of a life
beyond legality.
Sartre admired the writing but no more than he appreciated the
totemic life. Genet’s precarity—orphan birth, confinement in Mettray
Reformatory; the years of theft, prison, poverty and solitude—had
no counterpart in the social and intellectual station that Sartre knew.
Their differences in status, class and comfort were marked. Yet within
the shifting political alliances and cultural hierarchies of the post-war
years, the two figures not only traversed the distance between them but
also helped to confuse its clarity. Genet gained literary status with his
novels as speedily as Sartre had done with Nausea and as soon as he
became a Parisian phenomenon, he moved through the cafés and into
the theatres with comparable assurance.
Before celebrity came ‘freedom’. An overworn credo now, la liberté
was clarion in the first years after war—first in the liberation from
the German occupiers, then in Sartrean metaphysics, both technical
and popularised. existential freedom for Sartre is the disowned origin
of our human-ness. It has been repressed and repudiated because
of the burdens it places on us: the anguish (of ‘complete and utter
responsibility’) and abandonment (the absence of God). We escape
these burdens through the blindness of ‘bad faith’, especially if we
seek middle-class complacency. Yet, as aggressively as Sartre offered
these propositions, they were often given an anodyne turn agreeable
to peacetime consumerism. Freedom from occupation, freedom to
buy.
Where la liberté cuts deeper is when it meets constraint and
bafflement, as it had done during the Resistance. A shopper on the
boulevards enjoys a freedom reduced to oppressive banality. But as
Being and Nothingness (1943) articulated in close detail, the telling case
is when others seem to control the making of meaning or even the right
to movement and the assignment of name. So, in the case of Baudelaire,
the subject of Sartre’s first post-war biography (1947), a career of blight
and disappointment discovered freedom in its moments of failure—
failure to write, to act and to sustain vocation. The lesson of Baudelaire
is that a life of false starts and reversals, of ennui and embarrassment,
Jean Genet and Jean-Paul Sartre
65
can be justified through the pain of lucidity. The more Baudelaire
obstructs his own fulfilment, the more he understands freedom.
… whether they happened to be immediate actions or continuing
enterprises, these plans, which he could never carry out, were
always before his eyes. They forced themselves on his attention
unceasingly, urgently, helplessly. If he suppressed completely the
spontaneity of the reflected consciousness, by doing so he arrived
at an even better understanding of its nature. He knew that it was
its nature to hurl itself outside itself, to transcend itself in order to
attain an end. That is why he was, perhaps, the first to define man
by what lay beyond him. (Sartre 1967, 35–36)
This perception of our own transcendence and of our unjustifiable
gratuitousness must at the same time be a revelation of human freedom.
And, in fact, Baudelaire always felt that he was free. (Sartre 1967, 39)
Sartre dedicated the book to Genet; the previous year he had written
publisher’s copy for Miracle of the Rose and as he adjusts his philosophy
to his politics at the end of the 1940s, he comes to see Genet as fulfilment
of what he had only sketched in the ennui of Baudelaire. Baudelaire,
or at least Sartre’s Baudelaire, had discovered the self-transcendence
of freedom through the excruciations of lucid encounter with himself.
Genet wasn’t given the luxury of alienation from social privilege; as an
orphan, thief, a gay man in daily poverty, he had to contend for lucidity,
wresting it from dispossession. The Others, the bourgeoisie and their
minions, have, own and flourish. For Genet, unlike Baudelaire, freedom
must be physically adversarial and legally criminal.
There is more. Genet will dare you to name his guilt, force you to
see what you call trespass. In its opening pages, The Thief ’s Journal
portrays the blatant visibility of a tube of vaseline. During a raid, a
Spanish detective has found it, partially rolled up, through a search of
Genet’s pockets. The ‘very sign of abjection’, the ‘little gray leaden tube
of vaseline’, is used by the police to ‘flourish their revenge, their hatred,
their contempt’ (Genet 1964, 20). But for Genet, the object becomes his
own act of contempt, more contemptuous because most visible. In a
characteristic Proustian manoeuvre, he thinks how the greasy contents
remind him of an oil lamppost and a meeting with an aging woman, a
thief, who could have been his mother. The private rumination, linking
jelly, lamp, thief and mother, culminates in the high rhetoric of Genet’s
defiance.
The tube of vaseline, which was intended to grease my prick and
those of my lovers, summoned up the face of her who, during a
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reverie that moved through the dark alleys of the city, was the most
cherished of mothers. It had served me in the preparation of so
many secret joys, in places worthy of its discrete banality, that it
had become the condition of my happiness, as my sperm-spotted
handkerchief testified. Lying on the table, it was a banner telling the
invisible legions of my triumph over the police. (Genet 1964, 21)
Most striking is the willingness to solicit the gaze of the Other, all those
Others who have made Genet Other, especially the police as the most
immediate arm of the norm. Genet consistently performs a distinctive
rhythm, moving in darkness, neglected or concealed and then standing
in the open, suddenly indifferent to concealment, prepared to be
seen in unrepentant defeat. The murderer Maurice Pilorge, whose
execution gave Genet literary impetus, mugged and wise-cracked on
his ascent to the scaffold. Through Our Lady of the Flowers, a dying
Divine parades through Montmartre in full eye-catching grandeur. In
Miracle of the Rose Bulkaen accepts the spittle cast into his mouth by
exulting as if the ‘ghastly game’ were ‘a courtly one’ (Genet 1971, 256).
These incidents, among many, enact the ceremony of repudiation from
below. Impossible to sink further into degradation, the victim glories in
a prideful humiliation beyond further wounding.
A different openness to gazing occurs in the last of the novels, The
Thief ’s Journal, where Genet goes furthest in testimony and confession.
Sartre (2012, 545) calls it ‘a literary testament or at least a conclusion’,
where ‘Genet speaks of Genet without intermediary’ (Genet 1964,
‘Foreword’, 1). Certainly, it represents the place where he writes fully
of the most resistant, least digestible, of crimes: namely betrayal.
Willingly, he testifies to its many instances and sharper pleasures. When
Genet became the fast-rising successor to Proust and Céline, his theft
could seem picturesque; even his gay sexuality had Proustian pedigree.
But the caressing praise of treason and betrayal has been a trouble to
friends and commentators, treason which ‘had that power which was
taking greater and greater hold of me’ (Genet 1964, 50). ‘[B]egging and
prostitution were to me a discipline which taught me to utilize ignoble
elements, to apply them to my own ends, indeed, to take pleasure in my
choosing them’ (Genet 1964, 72) and these, writes Genet, are a prelude
to the more intense satisfactions of betrayal. Setting aside the defensible
cases where a treacherous act might be justified, where it might stand
in service of the Good, he reserves his praise for ‘low betrayal’: the ‘kind
that cannot be justified by any heroic excuse. The sneaky, cringing kind,
elicited by the least noble of sentiments’. The betrayer must be ‘aware of
his betrayal’, must ‘will it’, and must ‘be able to break the bonds of love
uniting him with mankind’ (Genet 1964, 242).
Jean Genet and Jean-Paul Sartre
67
leo Bersani has worked to preserve the outrage of genet’s treachery,
describing it as a ‘form of revolt that has no relation whatsoever to the
laws, categories, and values it would contest and ideally destroy’ (Bersani
1995, 152). genet, argues Bersani, refuses ‘any moral value whatsoever
in homosexuality’ (genet 1964, 161) and this because his deepest aim
is to refuse ‘to participate in any sociality at all’ (genet 1964, 168)—still
further, to eliminate ‘relationality’ as such. These are strong claims,
bracingly put; yet they surely miss Genet’s unbroken relation to his
unsleeping adversary, the be-normed social world. Few motifs are more
frequent than his summoning of opposition. ‘I want the total enemy’, he
wrote in an unpublished fragment, ‘one who would hate me beyond all
bounds’ (‘J.G. Seeks’ in Genet, 1). And elsewhere: ‘I would like the world
not to change so that I can be against the world’ (Genet 2004).
Central to his resistance (and revenge) is this assertion of an anomaly.
Genet can be against the whole world because no one can be like Genet.
The texts, especially The Thief ’s Journal, are laden with explanations.
no events are mute, they come with present-tense commentary and
often elaborate interpretation. But emphatically, Genet insists that the
‘explanations I am giving occur to me spontaneously. They seem valid
for my case. They are to be accepted for mine alone’ (Genet 1964, 49).
The singularity of vocation—to corrode the society that prevails, ‘to be a
thorn in its flesh, a remorse—an anxiety—a wound from which flowed
its blood, which it dared not shed itself ’, in order ‘to achieve something
new with such rare matter’ (Genet 1964, 244)—means that Genet can
explain nothing but himself. That he is intent to interpret as much
as to recount, that he so often shifts register from act to loquacious
rumination, that the generalisations nevertheless account for no more
than an anomalous history: this is decisive to his provocation and also
his invitation to existential philosophy.
2
Invited to write a preface to Genet’s collected works, Sartre—
unexpectedly, amusingly—composed a book of over six hundred pages
that appeared in 1952 and served as volume one of the collection. It
thus came at the end of, and arguably brought to an end, Genet’s career
as a novelist. Just as notably, Saint Genet became a pivot in Sartre’s
career. The philosopher named it as one of his four principal texts
and it was indeed the one that engendered the philosophic-political
adversarialism that would persist for his last three decades.
In the first moments of the existentialist spectacle of 1945, Sartre was
another who found it easy to make enemies. He found little difficulty,
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either politically or rhetorically, in repudiating the bourgeoisie—ever
easy épater. The challenge from the Communists, on the other hand,
raised questions of both philosophic principle and vehement political
critique. Was existentialism only and ever an individualism? For all
its insistence on commitment, did Sartrean freedom ever escape the
ambit of personal will? Was it not, finally and fully, suited to the very
bourgeoisie it took as an enemy? As Sartre himself characterised the
charge: we are ‘reproached for leaving out of account the solidarity
of mankind and considering man in isolation’ (Sartre 1948, 50). The
Communist critique pressed the issue that acquired more force from
the party’s strength in France’s post-liberation settlement.
‘existentialism is a Humanism’ had shown Sartre’s sensitivity
to his left critics. He asserts, and will never cease to assert, that
philosophy must begin with the Cartesian cogito. no other
foundation is thinkable. But this is philosophic truth not class doxa:
‘Our point of departure is, indeed, the subjectivity of the individual,
and that for strictly philosophic reasons. It is not because we are
bourgeois, but because we seek to base our teaching upon the truth’
(Sartre 1948, 51–52). nor does the cogito confine us to the nest of
individuality:
when we say ‘I think’ we are attaining to ourselves in the presence
of the other, and we are just as certain of the other as we are of
ourselves. Thus, the man who discovers himself directly in the cogito
also discovers all the others, and discovers them as the condition of
his own existence. He recognizes that he cannot be anything (in the
sense in which one says one is spiritual, or that one is wicked or
jealous) unless others recognize him as such. (Sartre 1948)
The cogito is immediate but not final, private but not alone. The Others
are never not near, never not determining; they surround and impinge;
they implicate the individual in the realm of ‘inter-subjectivity (Sartre
1948, 53).
These distinctions and refinements—‘cogito’ and the ‘cogito
among others’—will trouble the career from this point forward. to
his Communist critics, the bourgeois taint remains unmistakable:
despite all the hand-waving towards the rest of us, the priority of
consciousness gives away the game. For his part, Sartre knew this
difficulty as crucial and refractory. The question of how to retain the
precedence of individual existential freedom and the commitment to
collective struggle stands as close to the centre of Sartrean vocation
as any. As it came into provocatively crisp focus in the later 1940s, so
did Genet.
Jean Genet and Jean-Paul Sartre
69
Impossible to know precisely when sartre understood what genet
could mean to existential philosophy, when he recognised the potency,
not of confirming example, but of a generative challenge at a moment
when his existentialism was obliged to change. Sartre’s next major
work What is Literature? (1965) continues the bickering conversation
with the Communists. The book gives a brisk refusal of Marxism,
contending that the
effect of dialectical materialism … is to make Good and evil vanish
conjointly. There remains only the historical process, and then
Stalinist communism does not attribute so much importance to the
individual that his sufferings and even his death can be redeemed
if they help to hasten the day when power is seized. (Sartre 1965)
On the other hand, and crucially, Sartre embraces the arrival of
socialism after the final decay of capitalism; he sees no other solution
to the troubles of contemporary history. But since literature ‘is in
essence heresy’, no true writer can join the Communist Party, which
is ‘incompatible with the honest practice of the literary craft’ (Sartre
1965, 251–252).
According to the strict canons of What is Literature? the post-war
writer must accept the new responsibilities of contemporary history. It
will no longer be sufficient, if it ever was, to dream of universal truth
and literary purity. War and occupation have taught the inescapable
lesson: ‘All at once we felt ourselves abruptly situated’ (Sartre 1965,
207): ‘Brutally re-integrated into history, we had no choice but to
produce a literature of historicity’ (Sartre 1965, 209). Sartre takes this to
mean that fiction must portray, not ‘average’, but ‘extreme’ situations
(Sartre 1965, 217); it must abandon the false equanimity of an allknowing narrator; it must render character/narrators who are trapped
in the midst of ‘incomprehensible events’, whose outcome they cannot
foresee (Sartre 1965, 222). All of these demands point to Genet, who
nevertheless receives only incidental mention within What is Literature?
(as one who had spoken of the ‘politeness’ owed to the reader). Sartre
had met Genet three years earlier, had written his preface to Miracle of
the Rose; and would soon compose a foreword to The Thief ’s Journal.
If he ignores Genet in 1947, it is surely because of the last demand in
What is Literature? that the contemporary writer engages a ‘literature
of praxis’ (Sartre 1965, 290), ‘tied up with the coming of a socialist
europe’ (Sartre 1965, 289), not ‘pure propaganda’ (Sartre 1965, 291)
but fully committed.
Much of the uncertainty of Sartre’s position in the late 1940s is
shown through the cautious approach to Genet. But over the next few
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years, as he works through the difficult balance of commitments—to
the heretical writer who must never join the Party, to the necessity
of Socialism, to the primacy of the free cogito, to the claims of intersubjectivity, to the recognition of historical necessity—Genet moves
from the margins of casual mention to become the emblematic figure
of the age.
What Genet’s life and life-writing manifest is, most deeply, an
existential orientation: an opening to the suddenness of reversal, abrupt
discontinuity, epiphany, calamity—and this because, ‘A catastrophe
is always possible. Metamorphosis lies in wait.’ For Genet, the law of
metamorphosis constitutes an erotic principle (‘Hardly had I touched
him, when the stairway changed: he was master of the world’, Sartre
1964, 40) but beyond eros, metamorphosis becomes a condition
of being. The words ‘sudden’ and ‘suddenly’ give the rhythmic
punctuation of Genet’s writing, where at any moment, a face changes
(‘suddenly become sad’); the landscape alters; a border is crossed. The
transformation is at once inner and outer: ‘I’m suddenly alone because
the sky is blue, the tree is green, the street quiet, and because a dog,
who is as alone as I am, is walking in front of me’ (Funeral Rites, 160).
Metamorphosis can elevate but it can also ruthlessly depress.
Genet understands that his metamorphic life was originary and in
that sense inevitable. The orphan assigned to a village family knows
he comes from elsewhere and from someone else. Arrested, convicted,
despised and dispossessed, change is forced upon him. How could he
help but live ‘suddenly?’ A superstitious waiting for the next thrust of
accident pervades the work and the work of life. What gives the bite of
challenge, though, is the upsurge of will, that lives alongside accident.
In the midst of overwhelming pressures—life as a beggar, life during
european war—there is still room to manoeuvre, to plot and act, to
steal, seduce and betray.
Also, to write. When he first loomed up for Cocteau in the midst
of occupied Paris, he seemed the marvellous but still inassimilable
prodigy. Who was this tainted criminal, carrying his poetry on brown
paper? Who was he to presume? And who was this gay man to hymn
the song of sexual passion for thieves and beggars and assassins? Above
all, Genet carried the claim of experience: that he had been there,
touched that, given himself and his senses to a world only imagined by
successful writers, no matter how politically dedicated. The brutal facts
of experience trumped the ideology of commitment. If he didn’t fit all
the criteria laid out in What is Literature? it would be the theory not
Genet that had to change.
That he was a famously difficult personality is also to the point.
Hyper-sensitive and touchy, irritable and demanding, he will bicker
Jean Genet and Jean-Paul Sartre
71
with those, above all cocteau, who take pains to help him, to publish
and promote him. capable of affection and loyalty among a handful
of friends and lovers, he was more expert in rudeness and ingratitude.
Most abiding, though, was the practice and then theory of solitude.
The accident of his life and the laws of the state meant that Genet
was often alone—in ‘utter solitude’. ‘Much solitude’, he goes on, ‘has
forced me to become my own companion’ (Genet 1964, 85). That
he affirms the isolation forced upon him, that he sees it as a proud
separateness—these declarations will never be far from Genet’s
testimony: ‘the greater my guilt in your eyes, the more whole, the more
totally assumed, the greater will be my freedom. The more perfect my
solitude and uniqueness’ (Genet 1964, 84). Bersani is surely right to see
the infamous practice of treachery in the service of solitude: Genet says
just this in confessing that,
It is perhaps their moral solitude to which I aspire that makes me
admire traitors and love them—a taste for solitude being the sign
of my pride, and pride, the manifestation of my strength, the
employment and proof of this strength. For I shall have broken the
stoutest of bonds, the bonds of love. (Genet 1964, 46)
Again, though, we should see this not as a break with ‘relationality’,
but relation in its most austere aspect, the utterly solitary I, knowing
itself only through the universe of others from which it stands separate.
notably, when that universe includes readers, everything changes: ‘My
solitude in prison was total. now that I speak of it, it is less so’ (Genet
1964, 110).
In very few years after the end of the war, Genet became an
incarnation of existential integrity, validated as much through the
stringent personal history as through the gripping texts. Thomas
Flynn has fairly claimed that he served as a model for ‘authenticity’
(Flynn 2014, 278), a status granted by Sartre after the hesitations in
What is Literature? Presumably, the change is due, not only to Sartre’s
developing views, but also to Genet’s acquaintance and interest in
existential philosophy. Written several years into their friendship,
The Thief ’s Journal echoes Sartre’s thematics, even his phrasing, as in a
critical passage such as this.
My eyes burned. I was hungry. Copper glints played over my tough
beard in the sunlight. I was dry, young and sad. I learned to smile
at things and meditate upon them. As a young Frenchman on that
shore, from my solitude, from my beggar’s state, from the dust of
the ditches that rose up in tiny individual clouds about each foot,
renewing themselves at every step, my pride derived a consoling
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singularity which contrasted with the banal sordidness of my
apparel. (genet 1964, 74)
genet never confused himself with anyone else. His acute sense of
being his ‘own companion’ not only separated him from others but
created the fascination (and the glamour) of self-sufficiency.
3
Solitude, singularity and authenticity—the claim of Genet on existential
theory was evident. Moreover, to encounter a living author through the
intimacy of extended conversation was to locate concern where Sartre
now concluded it must be: in the immediately situated moment of the
historical present tense. Here is where the ‘cogito’ lives, here in the first
quickening of freedom after the war. Genet is at once an incomparable
example of post-war adversarial life and test case of existential philosophy.
Will it be possible to reconstruct the ‘mythical representations he has
given us of his universe’ (Sartre 2012, 5) and to do so from the first-person
standpoint of the living being, as he invents project, meaning and value?
What makes the case still more formidable is that the Sartre of 1950
is not the existentialist of the wartime 1940s. Since the founding of
Les Temps Moderne (1945), he had unceasingly engaged the political
fury of liberated europe. Through collaboration with Simone de
Beauvoir, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Raymond Aron; through the
tense relationship with Albert Camus; and most substantially, through
involvement in national and global politics in the Cold War, Sartre had
descended from the abstract portrayal of the existential condition. At
the end of 1947, he helped to found the Rassemblement démocratique
révolutionnaire (Revolutionary Democratic Assembly), offered as a
third force between Stalinist Russia and uS-led global capitalism.
Between the rottenness of capitalist democracy, the weaknesses
and defects of a certain social democracy and the limitation of
Communism to its Stalinist form, we believe an assembly of free
men for revolutionary democracy is capable of giving new life to
the principles of freedom and human dignity by binding them to
the struggle for social revolution. (Quoted in Birchall 2004, 94)
When the RDR began to tilt in the American direction, the movement
broke up in disputes and it was in this period that Sartre turned
earnestly to Genet. At the same time, however, he was moving towards
his closest alliance with the French Communist Party (PCF), beginning
a much-noticed and distinct period in the career (1952–1956). During
Jean Genet and Jean-Paul Sartre
73
those four years, he not only came close to the party orthodoxy but also
began a thorough reconsideration of marxism. sartre had described the
‘main objective’ of the RdR as uniting ‘all revolutionary claims with the
idea of freedom’ (cohen-solal 2005, 302). over the next two decades,
he will develop this conjunction on the philosophic plane, as he awaits
some advance in politics.
The first encounter with Genet had come at the moment of early
existentialist confidence in the sovereignty of freedom. It’s not that
constraints of ‘situation’ had been ignored but emphasis fell strongly
on the resources, the capacity and the wide amplitude of the free
agent. In characteristic tones, Sartre identified the freedom on which
literature must rest: ‘whether he is an essayist, a pamphleteer, a satirist,
or a novelist, whether he speaks only of individual passions or whether
he attacks the social order, the writer, a free man addressing free men,
has only one subject—freedom’ (Sartre 1965, 68). The interest in
Genet as exemplary freedom dates from these early post-war years.
The long-deferred writing of the book, though, meant that Sartre
was reconsidering the claims of revolutionary politics and Marxist
philosophy as he wrote Genet from freedom into constraint.
4
The immensities of Saint Genet lie not only in the sheer length but
the immense labour of interpretation that is dedicated both to the
illumination of Jean Genet and the status of interpretation itself. Its
credo is never not worth citing.
I have tried to do the following: to indicate the limit of psychoanalytical
interpretation and Marxist explanation and to demonstrate that
freedom alone can account for a person in his totality; to show this
freedom at grips with destiny, crushed at first by its mischances, then
turning upon them and digesting them little by little; to prove that
genius is not a gift but the way out that one invents in desperate cases;
to learn the choice that a writer makes of himself, of his life and of
the meaning of the universe, including even the formal characteristics
of his style and composition, even the structure of his images and
of the particularity of his tastes; to review in detail the history of his
liberation. (Sartre 2012, 584)
The vertiginous ambition has disoriented the reception of Saint Genet.
Its enormity has been its memorable feature. Lost has been the closer
texture of argument which is what is needed here.
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The orphan Genet lived under foster care in a farming community
founded on laws of property, codes of legitimacy and norms of faith:
‘Work, family, country, honesty, property’, writes Sartre, ‘such is his
conception of the Good’ (Sartre 2012, 6). Yet, in this place at that
moment, the young man fails to meet the terms of value. ‘He is a fake
child’, because in the Morvan, to Have is to Be. Having nothing, the
child Genet is nothing; so, he steals. He steals in order to pretend he has
and is: ‘His austere and feverish quest for Being becomes an imaginary
satisfaction only’ (Sartre 2012, 12).
Sooner or later, he is caught in the act of theft. He is ten or thereabouts,
when he is discovered and a voice names him a thief. ‘That was how it
happened’ surmises Sartre, ‘in that or some other way’ (Sartre 2012, 17).
If he were older, or if he were in different circumstances, less fixed and
constrained, he might have resisted, returned contempt for contempt.
But he has nothing, no resources and no outlet: ‘He is trapped like a rat’
(Sartre 2012, 21). The young boy, hemmed in on all sides, is named evil
and therefore Other. unable to resist the imposition of categories, he
must accept them, must know himself as he is named and called. This is
a key for Sartre: that the orphan is compelled to become ‘Another than
Self ’ (Sartre 2012, 35). He will never simply accord with himself. What
he needs and seeks is a ‘way out’, but how is that possible?
Here Sartre arrives at a dramatic crossing, for himself as well as his
subject. Genet cannot shift the burden of his naming. He cannot not
be the thief. Therefore, he will affirm what he cannot in any case deny:
‘he has chosen the worst. He had no other choice’ (Sartre 2012, 49).
Or as The Thief ’s Journal had recently put it, ‘If he has courage—please
understand—the guilty man decides to be what crime has made him’
(Sartre 2012, 242). Sartre elevates the phrase to high philosophic stakes
in another of the book’s credos: ‘We are not lumps of clay, and what is
important is not what people make of us but what we ourselves make of
what they have made of us’ (Sartre 2012, 49).
The story that Sartre tells, intricate and urgent, is that the trapped
orphan can retrieve freedom by willing his necessity, willing it to the
hilt. He becomes the outlaw he is judged to be: ‘thief, homosexual,
traitor’. Because he is resourceful and because he has the opportunity
to read and the capacity to listen to an inner ear, Genet discovers how
the solitude of illegitimacy gives him room to dream. He dreams of
evil, argues Saint Genet, the evil that brings revenge on those who have
crushed him. He creates the carnival of a fantasy universe, a counterworld which can escape the oppressive weight of the Real.
Here, Sartre’s book gives a shrewd reading of camp avant la lettre
and avant Sontag. Genet, when free to belong to the gay culture of
Montmartre, can break ‘away from being in order to withdraw into pure
Jean Genet and Jean-Paul Sartre
75
appearing’ and can become ‘lord of hoaxes, booby traps, and optical
illusions’ (sartre 2012, 359–360). He takes on the vocation of fakery—the
extravagant illusion of costume and sexual identity, of style, of scent and
voice. He exploits the truth of ‘our ambiguous society’ where ‘naturalism
and artificialism coexist’ (Sartre 2012, 361). It is an embrace of bad
taste that always prefers the copy to the real. even in sexual passion,
argues Sartre, Genet is driven above all by the image that precedes and
succeeds the thing itself. Masturbation ascends above intercourse; like
the imaginary satisfactions of theft, it ‘de-realises’ the world.
Within a narrative that depends on the precision of its hinges, the
crucial swivel is to Beauty—not art, but beauty, the beautiful appearance
that consorts with evil. to choose it is to pursue the satisfactions of the
shadow, the unreal, the masturbatory and the imaginary. Sartre holds
that this rejection should be accepted for its radicalism, as a radical
refusal of the exclusions of the Just, who police the realm of appearance
with special and excessive zeal. The goal is to dwell in artifice; the tactic
is the gesture, which gives the glamorous sheen of a fabricated identity
(thief, traitor). no life-changing action is possible (even conceivable)
for the gesture-self: ‘[t]he act does not matter: the aim is to be’ (Sartre
2012, 321).
For the hemmed-in illegitimate thief, the narrow avenue seems to
lead in this one direction: ‘evil, betrayal, failure, gestures, appearances,
Beauty: this complex assemblage is the “tangle of snakes”’ (Sartre 2012,
192). According to Sartre, it might have gone no further, ending in ‘an
extraordinary effort [that] transformed acts into gestures, being into the
imaginary, the world into phantasmagoria and himself into appearance’
(Sartre 2012, 161). The saving turn and the last metamorphosis occur
because of contingencies that persist within the narrow margin of this
freedom. The entrapped gay-thief-beggar happens to hear a fellowprisoner attempt a poem, and happens to realise he can do better. The
contingency of an event meets the accident of a propensity: Genet’s
who-knows-whence verbal consciousness, his taste in words and
meanings.
In the reflex of an instant, what Sartre calls a ‘small click’, Genet
began his own poem that ultimately became ‘Le Condamné à Mort’
(‘The Man Condemned to Death’), the launching work of the career.
The other prisoners mock his poem; hurl ‘insults and jeers’ (Sartre
2012, 427) that only encourage Genet to complete the work. Within
the drama of Saint Genet, the poem-in-revenge is the last ‘gesture’, and
the first literary act. Contingent though it may be, the incident shows
that words can produce not only a being (gesture) but a doing (action).
The poem can affect its listeners. If they taunt and deride, so much the
better for the campaign of resistance/revenge.
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From that beginning—the small click—a vocation unfolds. since
the branding of the orphan as a thief, his one avenue had been to
live symbolically, to turn theft and sex into gestures of Beauty/evil,
to survive by ‘de-realising’ the world. Then comes transformation,
Genet recognising how language can bring a return to the real. This is
what unfolds in the writing of the first novel Our Lady of the Flowers
which begins under the sway of the old gesture-dreaming. An ‘epic of
masturbation’, Sartre calls the book: its words ‘are those that a prisoner
said to himself while panting with excitement’ (Sartre 2012, 448). Yet,
within the work a final hinge swings, when Genet realises that a novel
has a life beyond the writer; it can find readers whom it will scathe and
change. Our Lady is then a dream ‘that contains its own awakening’
(Sartre 2012, 455). Genet wakes to find that ‘With words, the Other
reappears’ (Sartre 2012, 456). ‘A word uttered is word as subject; heard,
it is object’ (Sartre 2012, 457). The orphan boy had no instruments to
resist the coercions of naming and judging, but left alone to dream,
he discovered that words of fantasy (‘I wrote the verses in order to
be moved’, Sartre 2012, 426) could become instruments acting upon
others. Genet the Fantasist returns to the world as novelist. Or put in
Sartre’s terms, ‘if he prefers the work of art to theft, it is because theft is
a criminal act which is derealized into a dream, whereas a work of art is
a dream of murder which is realized by an act’ (Sartre 2012, 482).
The act of writing as reprisal, the novel as insurrection—this is the
possibility that the long search has revealed. If Genet’s fellow prisoners
were the first victims of his wounding words (‘Le Condamné à Mort’),
he soon turned towards his real, living and ancient oppressors, the
complacently punitive bourgeoisie with their morals and their state—
the Just. As a thief he had gone unnoticed, at best one hoodlum among
the rest, numbered more than known. Having become a published
novelist, he can scar them in the nether places. This is what the wordas-object can do: Suppose—this is how Sartre describes the discovery
of novel-writing—suppose
he gave himself, by an act, the power of existing elsewhere, in all his
virulence, for horrified minds? What if he conferred ubiquity upon
himself with his own hands? What if he deliberately invented a way
of embodying himself in strange substances and forced the others
to discover him there? (Sartre 2012, 488–489)
In spite of their scruples, the Just will be obliged to see him. What is
more and more delicious, they will be obliged to see through his eyes
and within his desires. The beauty of the style, the play of structure,
the workings of the canny and seductive ‘I’, implicate readers in the
world they made Other, and because they cannot help but take on the
Jean Genet and Jean-Paul Sartre
77
subjectivity of genet, they find the Other in themselves. Reading this
guilty author, they become guilty. ‘The reader has only to turn ten pages
to discover himself: I am bad, repentant, a homosexual, I am a monster’
(Sartre 2012, 499). The long-deferred escape leads to the spectacular
triumph of the unavoidable novelist.
Here is the imperative telos that drives through the excess of Saint
Genet: the authority of authorship. Sartre’s book is, at the end, a paean
to writing (and unacknowledged source of the Derridean ‘writing’
that will work to replace its philosophic dominance): ‘Before writing,
what is [Genet]? An insignificant little worm, a bug that scurries,
unnoticed, between the slats of the floor’ (Sartre 2012, 486). It takes
many years and many accidents before Genet awakens, but once alert
to the power of the word (‘My victory is verbal’), he becomes exemplary
and legendary as the hero of authentic freedom, won from the most
unavailing circumstances.
5
We return to the tube of vaseline. For Sartre, it had become an
interpretive talisman, to which he recurs many times. ‘The ignominious
accessory’, he writes, ‘is taken from him and put on a table; it becomes
Genet himself firstly because it is his property and secondly because
it reveals and symbolizes his homosexuality.’ It is ‘an effigy of Genet’
(Sartre 2012, 488). But elsewhere, the identity changes; it concerns not
the person but his work:
About his books one could say, without changing a word, what he said
about his tube of vaseline: ‘I was sure that this puny and most humble
object would hold its own against them; by its mere presence it would
be able to exasperate all the police in the world; it would draw upon
itself contempt, hatred, white and dumb rages’. (Sartre 2012, 490)
The vaseline is Genet; it is his work. These are indeed equations on
which The Thief ’s Journal depends; they are what tempt Sartre to what
we may call his allegory of metaphors by which he reads Genet’s life
in terms of successive identities. The life is a coerced metaphor (the
boy is a thief) escaped through the play of contingency and freedomwithin-constraint. The search for a ‘way out’ becomes a search for
different metaphors: the self as traitor, as aesthete, as evildoer and as
saint. each stage is a phase in the allegory; each transcends and cancels
the previous. The life/career is measured through its substitutions,
culminating in the apotheosis of the writer.
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A different trope wends through Genet’s writing itself. This is
a figure of shift and slippage, the accumulation of names and terms
and epithets. towards the end of the The Thief ’s Journal, Genet muses
over his pocket address book, listing the thieves he has known and the
streets where he found them. Accordingly, the address book, ‘has the
same authority as a prick. It is my treasure.’ He proceeds to enumerate
the names and places and then clarifies:
I’ve said they were handsome. not with regular good looks, but with
something else, made up of power, despair and many other qualities,
the mention of which involves comment: shame, shrewdness, laziness,
resignation, contempt, boredom, courage, cowardice, resignation,
contempt, boredom, courage, cowardice, fear.… It would mean a long
list. (Genet 1964, 251, ellipsis in original)
The pattern is characteristic and recurrent. One term engenders another
in a ‘list’ without a natural limit. Of the much-cherished Guy, we read
how he possessed ‘some indefinable element of meanness, stupidity,
virility, elegance, pomp and viscosity’.
We should take this as a leading tactic of Genet’s resistance: to
confuse the work of epithet and the values that cling to the epithetic.
Fair enough to say with Sartre that some terms ascend above others and
that saint is the highest of all (saintliness is ‘the most beautiful word
in human language’). Yet here, too, there is corrosion, depletion and
evacuation. ‘I run the risk of going astray by confounding saintliness
with solitude’ and ‘am I not, by this sentence running the risk of
restoring to saintliness the Christian meaning which I want to remove
from it?’ (Genet 1964, 215). Such restless deft recasting of his most
caressed and treasured terms is characteristic and perpetual.
Commonly, Genet’s project is seen as nietzschean, a transvaluation
of all values. Such acts of reversal are of course available and evident:
criminals are flowers; evil beautiful; treachery gorgeous; theft precious.
Throughout the oeuvre, no value is immune to inversion. But inversion
has its own invert. to cherish evil as beautiful is to change evil but to
preserve the value of beauty, just as praising the ‘moral elegance’ of theft
transvalues thievery only by retaining the valence of elegant morality.
One conventional meaning holds, so that a second may be reversed—a
semantic project always under strain. even when he arrives at the
supreme, the most beautiful word, ‘saint’, it has a meaning that is both
foundational and unsettled. The result is continuous slide along the axes
of value, the ‘long list’ of signifiers, as in a bravura passage such as this:
I would be overjoyed if I could call [Lucien] scoundrel, blackguard,
riffraff, guttersnipe, hoodlum, crook, charming names whose
Jean Genet and Jean-Paul Sartre
79
function is to evoke what you, derisively, call a pretty world. But
these words sing. They hum. They also evoke for you the sweetest
and spiciest pleasures, since, placing before them, under your
breath, the words tender, dear, adorable or beloved, which they
subtly attract, you murmur them to your lovers. (Genet 1964, 163)
nothing as bi-valued as metaphor can resist such slippage through
contiguous meanings, the metonymic glide. unconcerned to achieve
the stability of identities, literal or figurative, Genet prefers the play of
adjacencies, a constantly shifting attention, as in the scan of his address
book. Without overstressing the distinction, we can see significant
disparity between Sartre’s reading for metaphor, organised by the telos
of Writer and Genet’s unresting movement along the chain of episodes,
associations, desires, lovers and memories.
6
The distinction—teleology of metaphors, metonymic skid—has bearing
on the unfolding careers after the fateful eight-year period (1944–1952),
stretching from their first acquaintance to the publication of Saint
Genet. Sartre’s book was a landmark for both men. Bataille captured
the massive challenge of the work, describing it as ‘not only one of the
richest books of our time but also Sartre’s masterpiece’. At the same
time, the author’s ‘flaws have never been more obvious; never before
has he let his thoughts drone on at such length’ (though of course, he
would again soon). Cocteau was witty-serious in remarking that, ‘eva
Peron’s canonization by the pope and Genet’s by Sartre (another pope)
are the two mystical events of this summer.’ More seriously, less wittily,
he noticed how ‘Jean has changed since the publication of Sartre’s
book. He looks as if he were trying at once to follow it and to escape it.’
Genet himself groused to Cocteau that ‘You and Sartre have turned me
into a monument. I am somebody else, and this somebody else must
find something to say’ (C-S, 317).
Genet was, in fact, blocked for most of the next five years. When
he returned to his second flowering, he turns away from novel-writing
and towards the remarkable plays that take form in the later 1950s.
But beyond the intermittent literary effort, he continued to pursue
a complex and varied counter-life: in his sexuality, his contact with
small-time thievery, and ultimately, his support for oppressed and
insurrectionist groups: Algerian revolutionaries, the Black Panthers
and the PLO. The telos Sartre had framed for the life—the arrival
at writing as the terminus of freedom and the ultimate ‘way out’—
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disintegrates through the continuous movement among interests and
passions. genet describes his life as a series of ‘trips, snags, detours
and returns’ (quoted in white 1993, 537), centred only on the love of
a few men. commitment to writing flares and fades: for several years,
he refused to allow any of his plays to be produced; at no point did he
make writing a life-project or defining vocation.
These circumstances have a surprising connection to changes
in Sartre’s life and self-understanding, changes expressed in this
remarkable passage.
My neurosis—which wasn’t all that different from the one Flaubert
suffered in his day—was basically that I firmly believed that nothing
was more beautiful than writing, nothing greater. to write was to
create lasting works, and that the writer’s life ought to be understood
through his work. And then in 1953, I came to the realization that
that was a completely bourgeois viewpoint, that there was a great
deal more to life than writing. All of which meant that I had to
rethink the value I placed on the written word, which I now felt was
on a whole other level than where I had previously placed it. From
that point of view, I was, somewhere around 1953–54, cured almost
immediately of my neurosis. And at that point I felt a strong urge to
understand.… And so I wrote The Words.... (Sartre by Himself 1976)
The coincidence of dates is evocative. Sartre finished Saint Genet, which
apotheosised the ‘solution’ of writing, only to abandon the solution for
himself. It’s as if, like his subject Genet, he felt ‘monumentalised’ into
a pose inhibiting his freedom. The insight into his ‘bourgeois’ fetish
of writerly vocation belongs alongside another recognition of just
this period, described by Beauvoir: ‘In 1944, Sartre thought that any
situation could be transcended by subjective effort; in 1951, he knew
that circumstances can sometimes steal our transcendence from us; in
that case no individual salvation is possible, only a collective struggle’
(Beauvoir 1977, 242). In the spirit of Beauvoir’s precision, we should
remember that 1952 was when Saint Genet at last appeared after several
years of gestation and also the year Sartre began his sustained fellowtravelling with the French Communists.
The work with and for the Communists came to an end four years
later but the tension between ‘collective struggle’ and ‘subjective effort’
never ended. In 1957, the year after breaking with the party, Sartre wrote
the major short work Search for a Method (Questions de méthode) that
can be seen as a tense integration of the lessons of Saint Genet with the
experience in (and out of) the Communist Party. now, and henceforth,
he sees Marxism as the ‘only valid interpretation of history’; until
Jean Genet and Jean-Paul Sartre
81
class struggle has achieved its just outcome, no freedom can be fully
achieved (sartre 1963, 21). The claims of radical existential agency—
always capable of transcending its circumstances—and the counterpart
presumption of writing as secular salvation: these are relinquished in
favour of a Marxism he will no longer resist. Sartre’s rueful testimony
suggests the extent of the change:
The other day I re-read a prefatory note of mine to a collection
of these plays—Les Mouches, Huis Clos and others—and was truly
scandalized. I had written: ‘Whatever the circumstances, and
whatever the site, a man is always free to choose to be a traitor or....
When I read this, I said to myself: it’s incredible, I actually believed
that!’ (Sartre 1974, 33)
What he comes to believe is put clearly in Search for a Method: Marxism
is ‘the philosophy of our time. We cannot go beyond it because we have
not gone beyond the circumstances which engendered it’ (Sartre 1963, 30).
Still, and crucially, he will not surrender the example of Genet or at least
his reading of Genet. The constraints of history may be overwhelming;
they may reduce agency to the narrowest circumscription; but they
can never eliminate a discrepant singularity. In the epigrammatic
phrasing of the Search, ‘Valéry is a petit bourgeois intellectual, no
doubt about it. But not every petit bourgeois intellectual is Valéry. The
heuristic inadequacy of contemporary Marxism is contained in these
two sentences’ (Sartre 1963, 56). Sartre comes to accept Marxism as
the unsurpassable philosophy but only until it has achieved its ends. In
the meantime, we are condemned to be a little bit free, freedom as ‘the
small movement which makes of a totally conditioned being someone
who does not render back completely what his conditioning has given
him’ (Sartre 1974, 35). even as a ‘small movement’, freedom will never
disappear from Sartre’s philosophy or his activism.
7
For Genet, for Sartre, for Genet-Sartre and Sartre-Genet, the post-war
decade was a scene of transformation in what seemed possible for an
adversarial life. Separately and together they raise difficult questions
concerning the fate of dissidence in late modernity. Both sustained
the convictions of engagement. But neither could settle within the
discipline of the party. In their opposition to the Algerian War, as in
May 1968, they were obstreperous, insistent and visible, while each
preserved the rights of discrepancy.
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The similarities are instructive but no more than the contrast. Sartre,
in accepting an unsurpassable Marxism, generated the formidable
theory of the Critique of Dialectical Reason. It laid out a long march
through history, from the French Revolution to the final emancipation
from need, collectively achieved through many small individual acts of
freedom. no emancipation without shared struggle, but struggle always
beginning with the most immediate material needs, one body at a time.
The arguments are dense, difficult and affirmative—affirmative in the
conviction that the common struggle of even severely constrained
selves can bring history to justice. Here it is good to recall that Sartre
claimed to have learned the ‘positivity in love’ through writing of
Genet: ‘I wrote Saint Genet to try to present a love that goes beyond the
sadism in which Genet is steeped and the masochism that he suffered’
(Sartre 1981, 13).
Genet, cherishing fewer hopes, shared no such affirmation.
Certainly, he was willing to take risks, legal and physical, in his staunch
defence of the Black Panthers and the PLO. His erotics stirred, though
did not always coincide with, his politics. Prepared to assert identityof-being as well as solidarity-in-conviction, he travelled, spoke, wrote
and risked. He joined the Panthers in California (new York and new
Haven) and the PLO in Jordan and Lebanon. He was unstinting in his
long hours of activism and his singing rhetoric of support. Repeatedly,
however, he conditioned that support on the claims of the oppressed,
not on expectation of their triumph: ‘Listen’, he said in a later interview,
‘the day the Palestinians become an institution, I will no longer be on
their side. The day the Palestinians become a nation like other nations,
I won’t be there anymore.... I think that’s where I’m going to betray
them. They don’t know it.’ With the Panthers too, he held that if victory
were ever achieved, he would withdraw, remaining unassimilable,
inappeasable.
Sartre would not, could not, say with Genet that he was a
‘vagabond’, whose ‘true homeland [was] any old train station’ (White
1993, 538). But beyond the register of hope and temperament, the two
careers drew parallel arcs through post-war contention. The magnetic
and opportune field of political celebrity, the defiant iconoclasm,
the willingness to turn writerly vocation to activist campaigning,
the commitment to national liberation even while holding fast to a
singularity, the mix of prideful utterance and humble service, the
presentation of a life-history as an exemplary offering—these acts
and attitudes crystallised in the few years after the war and opened
prospects for the future of dissidence.
Jean Genet and Jean-Paul Sartre
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REFERENCES
Astruc, Alexander and michel contat, directors. Sartre by Himself. translated
by Richard seaver, 1978.
Beauvoir, simone de. Force of Circumstance. new York: Harper and Row, 1977.
Bersani. Homos. cambridge, mass: Harvard University Press, 1995.
Birchall, Ian H. Sartre against Stalinism. oxford: Berghahn Books, 2004.
cohen-solal, Annie. Jean-Paul Sartre: A Life. translated by Anna cancogni.
new York: The new Press, 2005.
Flynn, Thomas R. Sartre: A Philosophical Biography, 278. Cambridge:
Cambridge university Press, 2014.
Genet, Jean. ‘Interview with Rüdiger Wischenbart and Layla Shahid Barrada’.
In Genet, The Declared Enemy: Texts and Interviews, translated by Jeff Ford,
edited by Albert Dichy. Stanford: Stanford university Press, 2004.
———. Funeral Rites. translated by Bernard Frechtman. new York, Grove
Press, 1969.
———. ‘Interview with Hubert Fichte’. In Gay Sunshine Interviews, vol. 1,
edited by Winston Leyland. San Francisco: Gay Sunshine, 2004.
———. Miracle of the Rose. translated by Bernard Frechtman. Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 1971.
———. The Declared Enemy: Texts and Interviews. translated by Jeff Ford,
edited by Albert Dichy. Stanford: Stanford university Press, 2004.
———. The Thief ’s Journal. translated by Bernard Frechtman. new York:
Grove Press, 1964.
Sartre, Jean-Paul. ‘The Itinerary of a Thought’. In Between Existentialism and
Marxism, translated by John Matthews. London: Verso, 1974.
———. Baudelaire. translated by Martin turner. new York: new Directions,
1967.
———. Existentialism and Humanism. translated by Philip Mairet. London:
Methuen, 1948.
———. The Philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre. edited by Paul Arthur Schilpp. La
Salle: Open Court, 1981.
———. Saint Genet: Actor and Martyr. translated by Bernard Frechtman.
Minneapolis: university of Minnesota Press, 2012.
———. Search for a Method. translated by Hazel e. Barnes. new York: Random
House, 1963.
———. What is Literature?. new York: Harper and Row, 1965.
Sartre par lui-même, directed by Alexandre Astruc, Michel Contat, Guy
Séligmann, Institut national de l'Audiovisuel and Sodaperaga Productions
(France, 1976).
White, edmund. Genet. London: Chatto & Windus, 1993.
tHInkIng wItH cInemA:
mAnI kAUl ReAdIng deleUZe
Moinak Biswas
Film theory in India took a self-conscious shape with the emergence of
academic film studies in the 1990s. Philosophical reflection on cinema,
however, can be traced back to an older tradition of intellectually reflexive
filmmaking. That tradition produced two figures in the 1970s who have
an important body of writings—Mani Kaul (1944–2011) and Kumar
Shahani (1940–). Given the radically innovative cinema they espoused
they felt the need to articulate their principles, which also prompted
them to outline an aesthetic philosophy around their work. The body of
writing in question is not large but it demands serious attention from us
for its significance. I shall confine myself primarily to Mani Kaul’s essays
here (Shahani has been dealt with by others extensively; Shahani and
Rajadhyaksha 2015; Jayamanne 2015) and to one area—the aestheticphilosophical exploration of cinema that he undertook.
Film philosophy has become a prominent scholarly pursuit in
recent years. The number of books and journals dedicated to the
subject has gone up significantly. university courses and academic
conferences in the area have also become quite common. Continental,
especially French, philosophers have provided a strong impetus for
the development. Gilles Deleuze’s two books Cinema 1 (1986) and
Cinema 2 (1989) proved crucial for this. Other major philosophers have
also made their contribution, among them Jacques Ranciere, Alain
Badiou and Jean-Luc nancy (Deleuze 1986, 1989; Rancière 2006, 2010,
2013, 2019; Badiou 2013; nancy and Kiarostami 2007).
Philosophy does not use cinema to illuminate its propositions in this
kind of work, neither does it explain the thought latent in the films. Its
function is quite different. As Deleuze explained in his lecture ‘What
is the Creative Act?’ given at FeMIS, the film and television school
of Paris in 1987, they treat cinema as something that ‘produces’ ideas
with its own means (Deleuze 2006). Hence it is far more serious than
a question of the philosopher turning to cinema to find in it a surface
of reflection, an arena for the play of ideas produced somewhere else.
Alain Badiou has gone to the extent of saying that the relationship with
cinema has become essential for philosophy today (Badiou 2013).
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kaul and shahani appear to share a great deal with these thinkers if
we consider their commitment to the act of creation and the necessity of
an aesthetic mode of reflection. They also share with these philosophers
the method of working through the arts. Music and painting, especially
the former, became crucial to the aesthetics they adopted and discussed.
And they share a deep interest in european modernist cinema with
the philosophers in question. Sometimes even the exemplars are the
same: Bresson and Godard come to mind most readily; but there are
others. In fact, the modernist aesthetic orientation of Deleuze, Ranciere
or Badiou, I would suggest, is what brings them close to these Indian
filmmakers.
It is certainly what brings the thinking of Mani Kaul and Gilles
Deleuze close. Kaul started making films and writing down his ideas
before Deleuze’s Cinema volumes came out. But it is possible to see
his thought, drawing upon Indian aesthetic theories, upon his practical
experience in film, painting and Indian classical music, and developing
in conversation with modern european arts, contributing to a project of
modernism—an internally heterogeneous, global project that has seen
multiple beginnings. We cannot go into a discussion of modernism,
but in order to avoid confusion, I would like to mention that the word
‘modernism’ here relates to a set of self-conscious critical reactions to
the institutional forms of modernity that flourished in many national
contexts throughout the last century. It covers a range of positions,
including the avant-garde.
Mani Kaul was among the earliest artists/critics in India to read
Gilles Deleuze. And when he did—sometime in the early 1990s—he
found much to admire and relate to. He had been formulating some of
what Deleuze had to say on cinema in his own way; but the philosopher
must have offered a plane of reflection against which he could rearticulate those ideas. This curious connection, where a non-academic
thinker in film met a philosopher thinking with the cinema, should tell
us something about the moment of new Wave in Indian cinema which
nurtured a modernist charge. The questions on which their thinking
came to converge are: (a) the problem of utterance in cinema, (b)
multiplicity and (c) the function of the ‘interval’.
Kaul mentioned on more than one occasion that he treated the shot
as a whole, as something that has already happened in time. Hence, he
did not endorse the use of master shots followed or preceded by details
snatched from it, which is the standard mode of sequencing. One
should not return to a shot or gather multiple shots into an aggregate
view because the process of filming should not be taken as treating
pieces of reality into a whole. It is not fragments of reality that the
filmmaker represents. He starts from ‘sensations’ that prompt him to
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explore the minor variations within an angle, not arrange compositions
side by side. These variations, the shots, should allow the unplanned
and unscripted to enter the frame. The unscripted, the contingent,
became increasingly important in Kaul’s work as he moved from his
first films (Uski Roti 1970; Duvidha 1973) to the subsequent phase
(Satah se Uthata Aadmi 1980; Nazar 1991). For his 1999 film, Naukar
ki Kameez, he decided to shoot without the cinematographer looking
through the camera (Vasudev and Lenglet 1983, 238–239, 241–242;
Kaul and Vajpeyi 2013; Times of India 2014).
This aesthetics seeks to overcome the dualism of realityrepresentation. The image is taken to be as real as anything else to
begin with. Kaul must have found a strong resonance in Deleuze’s nondualist approach to the image and to the cinema as a whole. The lesson
Deleuze draws in his cinema books from Henri Bergson, for example,
is that one cannot maintain the duality of movement and image,
consider one occurring in the world and the other in the mind as its
representation. Since movement cannot be quantified, since it is always
whole, always occurring between the points of time and distance we
fix for its measurement, it itself works like an image. And conversely,
there is movement in the brain as it perceives such images. This is the
reason why Deleuze used the hyphenated term ‘movement-image’.
Movement-image and time-image constituted the two fundamental
elements of cinema for him.
Deleuze and Kaul both tried to think beyond the question of
representation. They opposed the idea of cinema as language. Kaul
cites Deleuze to support his claim that elements of cinema cannot
be compared with verbal elements or ‘utterances’. The point of Kaul
saying the image deals with ‘sensations’ is to make the claim that it
does not start off as but becomes language (Kaul 2018). He points to
Deleuze’s proposition that images are ‘utterable’ before they become
‘utterances’; one has signs and images before they become language.
I quote Deleuze from Cinema 2:
(e)ven with its verbal elements, (cinema) is neither a language
system nor a language. It is a plastic mass, an a-signifying and
a-syntaxic material, a material not formed linguistically even
though it is not amorphous and is formed semiotically, aesthetically
and pragmatically. (…) It is not an enunciation, and these are not
utterances. It is an utterable. We mean that, when language gets
hold of this material (and it necessarily does so), then it gives rise to
utterances which come to dominate or even replace the images and
signs, and which refer in turn to pertinent features of the language
system, syntagms and paradigms, completely different from those
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we started with. we therefore have to define, not semiology, but
‘semiotics’, as the system of images and signs independent of
language in general. (Deleuze 1989, 29)1
Deleuze had C.S. Peirce in mind rather than Ferdinand de Saussure when
he chose semiotics over semiology. Kaul told udayan Vajpeyi in their long
conversation Uncloven Space that he felt he was working with plasticity of
a medium rather than with set languages (Kaul and Vajpeyi 2013). And he
was fond of citing Deleuze on cinema being something utterable.
His anti-representational position led Mani Kaul to assert
repeatedly that he did not believe in ‘convergence’ in art. The european
perspective system was the best example of convergence for him. The
four european artists he felt most inspired by, Dostoevsky, Matisse,
Bresson and tarkovsky, all broke away from this rule: ‘I wonder what
could be common among these four? And I think that these four artists
were working against the ideas of perspective and convergence’ (Kaul
and Vajpeyi 2013, 12). For him, Renaissance painting and symphonic
music were perspective-oriented, whereas Indian classical music was
not. He saw the art of convergence imbibed by standard filmmaking
everywhere as an enormous obstacle to overcome, an impediment to
develop forms where lines of narration or individual destinies do not
meet in the horizon—the kind of cinema he practiced. What we are
calling modernism in his (and Shahani’s) case involved a re-articulation
of Indian traditional modes of music, painting and epic storytelling.
At the time Kaul spoke on his aesthetic philosophy in Uncloven
Space he was editing his ambitious adaptation of Dostoevsky’s Idiot
(Ahmaq, 1992), having already finished another Dostoevsky adaptation
(Nazar). An abiding theme in this book-length dialogue is ‘multiplicity’
that Kaul says he was looking for more self-consciously in the films he
was making at that time, and which he considered to be a foundation
of non-convergent art. He expresses his admiration for Deleuze’s
use of the term multiplicity, which the philosopher distinguished
from the ‘multiple’. Kaul refers to an essay where Deleuze talks about
multiplicity using the metaphor of grass as against the root. Multiplicity
is a fundamental theme that Deleuze discussed on many occasions.
One cannot be sure which text Kaul had in mind but he could well be
referring to Deleuze’s Dialogue (with Claire Parnet) where he writes:
In a multiplicity what counts are not the terms or the elements,
but what there is ‘between’, the between, a set of relations which
are not separable from each other. every multiplicity grows from
the middle, like the blade of grass or rhizome. We constantly
oppose rhizome to the tree, like two conceptions and even two very
different ways of thinking. (Deleuze and Parnet 2002, viii)
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I am not sure if kaul would be able to reconcile himself all the way
with deleuze’s idea of multiplicity, which rejects the original oneness
of being or the fundamental unity of reality, but at least on the aesthetic
level he was deeply attracted to the idea. As he moved away from the
highly structured compositions of his early films into the randomness
of Nazar and Ahmaq, he was getting closer to a tendency of continual
branching out of the narrative line.2
Deleuze found a startling way to explain what made another
filmmaker, Akira Kurosawa, pick Dostoevsky for adaptation. He thinks
it was because they both have characters who, while they are caught up
in some emergency, seem to always have something even more urgent
to worry about:
Dostoyevsky’s characters are constantly caught up in emergencies,
and while they are caught up in these life-and-death emergencies,
they know that there is a more urgent question—but they do not
know what it is (…) It’s the idiot. It’s the idiot’s formula: ‘You
know there is a deeper problem. I am not sure what it is. But
leave me alone. Let everything rot … this more urgent problem
must be found.’ Kurosawa did not learn from Dostoyevsky. All of
Kurosawa’s characters are like that. This is a felicitous encounter.
(Deleuze 2006, 317)
Such characters drive the narrative away from set goals, derail it, open
new lines of development. Kaul was trying to incorporate that principle
into his films. There was indeed another felicitous encounter, the one
between him and Deleuze. He was not aware of Deleuze’s remarks on
Kuroswawa and Dostoevsky, but spoke about The Idiot and himself in
the same manner:
As soon as I begin talking about one thing, at least three or four
things start unfolding in my mind. Sometimes I cannot proceed
in the single line and have to return where I began. Then I move
ahead again, leave it and go somewhere else…. I saw this habit of
mine reflected in The Idiot…. Sometimes it seems as though he has
forgotten about the main character, as if Dostoyevsky has forgotten
the storyline … so the poor man is writing about this predicament
he is facing, acknowledging that he has no idea what will happen
ahead. (Kaul and Vajpeyi 2013, 134)
The cinema he practiced proved difficult for the viewers because it
did not move through cohering spaces but along other axes. One
of them was time. Both Shahani and Kaul self-consciously tried to
release the logic of spatial elaboration into a temporal and musical
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one. Theirs was a cinema of duration. Kaul writes, ‘Therefore no trace
of characterisation, there is no trace of psychology of characters. It
should be direct sculpting in time’ (Vasudev and Lenglet 1983, 20).3
This was before the cinema of duration became a genre of sorts with
the world-wide emergence of ‘slow cinema’. Kaul began to say in his
later writings and lectures that it was time, not space or image, that
constituted the basic material of cinema. And he found in Deleuze an
ally. Modernist cinema, the new turn that cinema took in the West after
World War II, was characterised by Deleuze as the cinema of the timeimage since time could be directly apprehended in it. This happens
when time is freed from its subservience to action and movement, from
what it seems to hold and contain. That helps us perceive time itself in
duration. ‘Cinematographically speaking’, Kaul writes in his late essay,
‘Cinematography and time’
(A) cameraman can only contribute to a film that strives for
cinematographic time if he treats the objective reality as a reality of
sensation, rather than a visualization of verbal descriptions, worse,
conceptions. Sensation is a preverbal condition of cognition and
speaks of no intentionality. (‘Beneath the Surface: Cinematography
and time’ in Kaul 2018, 46)
This leads to an experience of time that is not lost in the experience of
events unfolding. This cinema is of necessity a cinema that interrupts
action and sometimes even immobilises itself.
In all this, the interval has a curious role to play. The interval can be
the gap between two angles, two notes on a musical scale or between
action and reaction in narration or performance. It comes between
the measuring points if one quantifies something like movement by
the space covered by movement or measures time by the clock. As
Deleuze says, ‘(M)ovement will always happen between two instants’
(Deleuze 1986, 32). And the interval, it seems, is also what relates
one to another, it is in-between terms, relational in nature. Before he
wrote the Cinema books, Deleuze gave an interview to the Cahiers du
Cinema editors on Godard’s television work, Six Times Two (1976),
a non-fiction series of six films that Godard made with Anne-Marie
Mieville. Deleuze commented on the prevalence of relations in
Godard’s work. I quote him at some length:
Godard’s not a dialectician. What counts with him isn’t two or three
or however many, it’s AnD, the conjunction AnD. The key thing is
Godard’s use of AnD. This is important, because all our thought’s
modeled, rather, on the verb ‘to be,’ IS.… even conjunctions
are dealt with in terms of the verb ‘to be’.… But when you see
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relational judgments as autonomous, you realize that they creep
in everywhere, they invade and ruin everything: And isn’t even a
specific conjunction or relation, it brings in all relations, there are as
many relations as AnDs, and doesn’t just upset all relations, it upsets
being, the verb … and so on. And, ‘and … and … and …’ is precisely
a creative stammering, a foreign use of language, as opposed to a
conformist and dominant use based on the verb ‘to be.’
AnD is of course diversity, multiplicity, the destruction of
identities. It’s not the same factory gate when I go in, and when I
come out, and then when I go past unemployed. A convicted man‘s
wife isn’t the same before and after the conviction. But diversity and
multiplicity are nothing to do with aesthetic wholes (in the sense
of ‘one more,’ ‘one more woman’…) or dialectical schemas (in the
sense of ‘one produces two, which then produces three’). Because
in those cases it’s still unity, and thus being, that’s primary, and
that supposedly becomes multiple. When Godard says everything
has two parts, that in a day there’s morning and evening, he’s not
saying it’s one or the other, or that one becomes the other, becomes
two. Because multiplicity is never in the terms, however many, nor
in all the terms together, the whole. Multiplicity is precisely in the
‘and,’ which is different in nature from elementary components
and collections of them.
neither a component nor a collection, what is this AnD? I
think Godard’s force lies in living and thinking and presenting
this AnD in a very novel way, and in making it work actively.
AnD is neither one thing nor the other, it’s always in between,
between two things; it’s the borderline, there’s always a border,
a line of flight or flow, only we don’t see it, because it’s the least
perceptible of things. And yet it’s along this line of flight that
things come to pass, becomings evolve, revolutions take shape.
(‘three Questions About “Six Fois Deux”’ in Bellour and Bandy
1992; upper case in the original)
Godard himself talked about his ‘method of the in-between’. He was
fond of quoting Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s lecture ‘Film and the new
Psychology’, given at the IDHeC (as the Paris film school was known at
the time) in 1945. Merleau-Ponty wrote:
The idea we have of the world would be overturned if we could
succeed in seeing the intervals between things (for example, the
space between trees on the boulevard) as objects and, inversely, if
we saw the things themselves–the trees–as the ground. (MerleauPonty 1964, 48–49)
Thinking with Cinema
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kaul and kumar shahani were among those who dreamt of occupying
the in-between.
Jacques Ranciere, another philosopher to write extensively on cinema
and the visual arts, has underscored the tendency of contemporary art to
be relational in nature (Rancière 2009, 21–24). we are invited to see the
relations between items in an installation artwork more than the items
themselves. ‘Relation over positive terms’ is a common theme running
through the work of these thinkers. we cannot go into the discussion
of the interval in deleuze’s Cinema books, but one should perhaps
mention here that the three categories he created for what he called the
‘movement-image’—perception-image, action-image and affectionimage—are all defined in terms of the relation they have to the ‘interval’
between ‘received’ and ‘executed’ movement.
Mani Kaul pushed the idea of the interval towards an apprehension
of absence in cinema. Representing the absent has the potential of
radically altering the very practice of representation. On the question of
the interval, he had another felicitous moment of meeting with Deleuze.
He had been thinking in his own way about the interval, mostly with
the help of Indian arts and aesthetics. He cited several instances—from
the ninth century Indian thinker Anandavardhana’s idea of intervals
between literal and suggested meanings to the existence of intervals in
haiku. We fail to write haikus most of the time because we miss the
fact that there is an interval between the lines (Kaul 2018, 38–39). The
most elaborate treatment of the interval perhaps comes through the
analogy of music. For Kaul and Shahani, the Dhrupad and the Khayal
respectively served as the subtlest exemplars of the productive intervalprinciple. Kaul, a trained Dhrupadiya, wrote about the crucial role of
the silent interregnum in the music when Dhrupad is performed. The
absent is also a part of the sound:
Dhrupad is made up of tone and silence. It might seem strange to
suggest that one should go to a musical concert to listen to silence.
But that is the truth of a Dhrupad experience; its fullness will be
appreciated only if one begins to relate to both tone and silence,
particularly to a kind of pervasive and a whole silence that stands
above the tonal expression. (Kaul 2018, 35)
More importantly, he wrote on the role of shrutis and overtones–the
not yet note, the dissonance between notes–as flowing intervals of sorts.
The notion of absence he arrives at following this line of thinking, while
all along making a case against perspective, points to a cinema of the
possible, of the future. Kaul discusses Parshadeva’s thirteenth-century
treatise on music Sangeet Samayasar in his essay ‘Seen from nowhere’,
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where the author spoke about ‘shruti’ in music embodying the space
of variation itself. kaul interprets this as something that harbours the
possibility of music, and also its emotive source. ‘(s)hruti is not a highly
specific condition of the note or notes in a raag. It is in fact the source
and origin of the specific condition of the note or notes in that raag’,
he writes (Kaul 1991, 418). He arrives at a notion of presence/absence
through this musical understanding of the ‘utterable’:
The notes included in the melodic structure constitute the
consonant space, whereas the excluded make up the remaining
into a dissonant and absent space. The melody when restricted
to its ‘sweet’ character, in fact, excludes the excluded space and
therefore in its elaboration fails to achieve the status of what has
been ... termed the perspectiveless totatily.… Between any two
included notes in a raag lies in darkness the excluded area. (‘Seen
from nowhere’ in Kaul 1991, 418)
What he called the ‘irrational interval’ helped him think with cinema
better than its rational counterpart.
The nyaya-Vaishesika school of thinking the absence (‘abhava’) and
the related idea of perception of the absent, ‘anupalabdhi’, helped him
think of cinematic space in terms of what is not yet there, what will be
there, and so on, so that the yet-to-be-uttered, the potential and virtual,
become stuff of contemplation. Film theory has thought about absence
primarily in the Lacanian psychoanalytical model. Kaul was interested
in psychoanalysis but not in the lack-based model. Deleuze, it may be
recalled here, wasn’t either.
We are reminded of the conception of the shot that Kaul proposed:
travelling into and within the single angle/shot by minimal displacement.
This makes the interval have substance, allows the director treat
absence itself as substance. not only the shot, but the narrative lines
should undergo a multiple to one to multiple movement, according to
Mani Kaul. A single thread of storytelling can be avoided in such an
approach; moreover, one could avoid treating the multiple strands of
narrative as a collection of many single storylines.
There also is a lesson for political cinema here: not to turn what we
know into its filmic equivalent, as politically correct cinema does with
ease today (especially in India), but to allow the not yet formulated, the
non-formed to emerge. ‘The people are missing’ in modern political
cinema, Deleuze said, as he thought the people are a becoming, always
a minority (Deleuze 1989, 216). He meant the same for the cinema
that will speak to that people. A significant point about politics can be
Thinking with Cinema
93
derived from the aesthetic thought of mani kaul, whose cinema appears
to be apolitical—it is the point about working with absence as yearning.
NOTES
1.
2.
3.
christian metz famously argued that cinema is a language but not a
language-system (langue). deleuze was taking on that position; see metz
(1974, 31–91).
kaul says,
we can speak of this dialectic of order-disorder only as a beginning,
but this opposition is useless in multiplicity. A time arrives when
you do not think in relation to this dialectic. For you there is
nothing such as order or disorder. what is it instead then? what
can be present without having to be dialectical? (2013, 58)
‘sculpting in time’ is of course a reference to tarkovsky’s book of the same
title.
REFERENCES
Badiou, Alain. Cinema. translated by susan spitzer. cambridge: Polity Press,
2013.
———. ‘cinema and Philosophical experimentation’ and ‘on cinema as
democratic emblem’ in Cinema.
Bellour, Raymond and mary lea Bandy, eds. ‘Three Questions About “Six Fois
Deux”’. In Jean-Luc Godard, Son + Image 1974–1991. new York, Musuem
of Modern Art, 1992.
Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 1, The Movement-Image. translated by Hugh
tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. Minneapolis: university of Minnesota
Press, 1986.
———. Cinema 2, The Time-Image. translated by Hugh tomlinson and Robert
Galeta. Minneapolis: university of Minnesota Press, 1989.
———. ‘What is the Creative Act?’. In Two Regimes of Madness, Texts and
Interviews 1975–1995, translated by David Lapoujade. Cambridge, MA:
MIt Press, 2006.
Deleuze, Gilles and Claire Parnet. ‘Preface to the english Language edition’. In
Dialogues II, translated by Hugh tomlinson and Barabara Habberjam. new
York: Columbia university Press, 2002.
Jayamanne, Laleen. The Epic Cinema of Kumar Shahani. Bloomington: Indiana
university Press, 2015.
Kaul, Mani and udayan Vajpeyi. Uncloven Space. translated by Gurvinder
Singh. Quiver Books, 2013 (Originally published in Hindi as Abhed Akash
in 1994).
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kaul, mani and Udayan Vajpeyi. ‘“The Rambling Figure” and “Beneath the
Surface: Cinematography and time”’. In The Rambling Figures of Mani Kaul,
edited and compiled by Stoffel Debuysere and Arindam Sen. Courtisane
Festival, 2018.
———. ‘Seen from nowhere’. In Concept of Space, Ancient and Modern, edited
by Kapila Vatsyayan. new Delhi: Indira Gandhi national Centre for the
Arts, 1991.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. ‘Film and the new Psychology’. In Sense and
Non-Sense, translated by Hubert L. Dreyfus and Patricia Allen Dreyfus.
evanston, Ill: northwestern university Press, 1964.
Metz, Christian. ‘The Cinema: Language or Language System?’. In Film
Language: A Semiotics of Cinema, translated by Michael taylor. Chicago:
The university of Chicago Press, 1974.
nancy, Jean-Luc and Abbas Kiarostami. Abbas Kiarostami, The Evidence of
Film. Paris: Klinksieck, 2007.
Rancière, Jacques. Film Fables. translated by emiliano Battista. Oxford: Berg,
2006.
———. ‘Aesthetics as Politics’. In Aesthetics and its Discontents, translated by
Steven Corcoran. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2009.
———. The Future of the Image. new Delhi: navayana, 2010.
———. Béla Tarr: The Time After. translated by erik Beranek. Minneapolis:
univocal, 2013.
———. Intervals of Cinema. translated by John Howe. London: Verso, 2019.
Shahani, Kumar and Ashish Rajadhyaksha. Kumar Shahani: The Shock of Desire
and Other Essays. new Delhi: tulika Books, 2015.
Times of India, ‘experiments in Hindi Cinema’, 1 February 2014.
Vasudev, Aruna and Philippe Lenglet. ‘Interview with Mani Kaul’. In Indian
Cinema Super Bazaar. new Delhi: Vikas, 1983.
IF tHe oUtsIdeR Is deePlY wItHIn
Charles Russell
The first issue—who is perceived as outside—immediately raises the
questions of who determines who is outside and outside of what?
And what is the position and the interest of the person who labels
another as being outside? Of course, at this moment, that means us.
Who are we to address the figure outside our presumed frame of
reference—here, inside. Inside what? Who is considered an ‘Outsider’
to society is, in essence, a sociological question; therefore, it becomes
almost immediately a political question. But, we may also observe a
psychological component. How and why does the outsider represent a
threat or perhaps a possibility, to the dominant culture, and particularly,
to those within it observing or perhaps imagining the life and actions
of the outsider?
What constitutes an outsider aesthetic can also be seen in terms
of a sociology—and a politics—of art. Most frequently, during the
past century, however, the question seems to focus primarily on the
ways and reasons that generally established aesthetic practices are
challenged or expanded by the works of those seen to be ‘outside’ (or
non-participants in) the normative practices, historical, traditional and
institutional definitions of art and artists. Yet we are also led to ask,
again, what are the implicit or explicit politics of art? What role does
it play in our cultural life that might lead to awareness of, if not action
towards, the possibility for change?
I will explore these questions by speaking of three American and
european visual artists, each of whom has been labelled at times an
‘outsider artist’. But my remarks are grounded as well in literary studies,
for the conception of the outsider has resonated—in Western european
and American culture, at least—in cultural studies and across art and
literary forms for several centuries.
two general approaches to the question who is seen as an outsider
prevail: one declaring the ‘outsider’ a threat, the other, perceiving a
figure of fascination, if not attraction. In the first, emphasis is placed
on how the outsider is ‘structurally determined’, that is, defined by and
from the perspective of the dominant social formation and ideology.
Here, the outsider, as individual or group, is seen as distinct from
cultural norms, hence often perceived as an inferior figure and/or a
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threat to be dismissed, controlled or even exterminated. In Outsiders:
A Study in Life and Letters, the literary historian Hans mayer traced in
euro-American literature and history the presentation of three groups
of ‘existential’ outsiders: women, homosexuals and Jews—‘existential’
because they are declared by dominant social codes to be defined by
their ‘sex, origins or psychic and corporeal makeup’ (Mayer 1982, xvii).
Mayer could well have included psychotics and in the case of the united
States, African-Americans, as figures whose very existence challenged
the legitimacy of the cultural order.
In contrast to the ‘existential’ outsider, Mayer observes, is the
‘intentional’ outsider, one who chooses to step beyond bounds, to
‘consciously transgress boundaries’ (Mayer 1982). Yet, rather than
being a figure of fear or disdain to the majority, the intentional outsider
is often a being of fascination, even admiration to those who have
remained within the confines of the social code. This vision of the
Outsider-within was especially prevalent throughout the Romantic era
and influenced the popular image of the hyper-sensitive, troubled and
visionary artist. Because many who reside within the social order can
imagine a personal act that would break sensed constraints, transgress
boundaries and open up the possibility of a state of un-experienced
freedom, the voice of the artist on the margins has been heard as that
of a kindred spirit.
When we turn to the realm of modern and postmodern aesthetics,
we find that the outsider—whether existential or intentional—is seen
more as a figure of fascination, even a possible model of behaviour,
than as a cultural threat. This is an expression of the founding myths of
modernity—the artist as critic of dominant cultural codes, a dissident,
as well as an agent of potentially emerging realms of being. In seeking
new aesthetic languages and exemplars of more authentic being,
artists and intellectuals have often looked to those at the margins of
society as exemplars or unwitting allies. especially in the visual arts,
artists, in their belief that some people experience more intensely the
sources of the creative impulse when freed from the mental shackles
of bourgeois culture, have variously found model outsiders in the socalled ‘primitive’ cultures, children, psychotics and highly marginalised
individuals living within but profoundly separate from society.
But, as has often been remarked, the determination of who is an
outsider is usually an act of a person of the majority (even if such
figures believe themselves to have ‘minority’ status, as have artists and
intellectuals across the modern era). The Outsider artist becomes an
idealised figure, no matter how desperate, pained or alienated he or she
may be and the outsider’s creations may be deemed ‘art’ by the insider
because they can be valued for the aesthetic strategies of potential use to
If the Outsider Is Deeply Within
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the mainstream artist in her or his own battle with the academy. Thus,
even as the figure perceived as marginal to, or outside of, the normative
culture can present significant challenges to the dominant culture by
his or her specific life choices and aesthetic creations, we need also
recognise in those challenges evidence of the needs, fears and desires of
those members of the dominant culture who label the outsiders figures
of personal and cultural significance.
In an effort to explore these ideas, this discussion focuses on three
visual artists, Henry Darger, Thornton Dial and Hipkiss—all deemed
outsiders whose creations are both aesthetically strong and inventive
and who offer significant insights into our culture from positions fully
engaged in that culture, even if they have been proclaimed outsiders.
Following the binary categories mentioned previously, one might
term Darger and Dial ‘existential’ outsiders, the one appearing so
psychologically distressed as to seem psychotic, the other a member of
a formerly excluded, repressed minority. Yet while it might be useful
to term Hipkiss as an ‘intentional’ outsider, I’ll discuss how his act of
establishing his own space of personal and creative freedom demands
that he reject the presumption of those who would label him an outsider.
The art and writing of Henry Darger (1892–1973) present a vision
of rampant sentimentality and vividly pictured horror, awe-struck
religiosity and prurient brutality, sanctimonious moral condemnation
and perverse delight. Confronting his world, we are swept immediately
into the turbulent imagination of a solitary artist whose most private
fantasies give voice and vision to the subconscious drama of our
popular culture.
Darger, an orphaned and probably abused child, lived a long,
solitary and apparently dreary life, holding only menial jobs and
attending Catholic religious services daily. Yet he worked for over five
decades late into each night, writing and illustrating fantastic epics
of imaginary realms. His most remarkable creation is a 15,145-page
unpublished epic, The Story of the Vivian Girls, in What is Known as the
Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinean War Storm, Caused by
the Child Slave Rebellion. He composed the work over a period of some
twenty years and then illustrated it over the next three decades with 300
large watercolour collages for which he is now primarily known. The
manuscripts and paintings were discovered shortly before his death in
1973 by his landlord who brought them to the world’s attention.
In the Realms of the Unreal presents written and visual images of
a war raging on an imaginary planet between four Catholic countries
against a nation that worshiped Satan, practiced child slavery in brutal
factories and tortured, strangled and disemboweled children en masse.
Darger’s vision of good and evil in combat is dramatically expressed in
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competing depictions of innocence affirmed and betrayed. The works
are both compelling and deeply disturbing, products of a vivid and
torn, even tormented, imagination. They communicate a profound
ambivalence. Darger projects himself as both protector and destroyer
of innocence; a servant of God and an agent of Satan; a vulnerable
child and a murderous adult; a victim of horrific torture and a slayer of
demons. every element of his Manichean world claims equal validity,
each the expression of a psychological and moral struggle for which
Darger has no convincing resolution.
Symptomatic of his torment is the image of the young girl—as ideal
moral being and as vulnerable victim. Darger clearly embraced his
society’s cult of the purity and innocent beauty of little girls and adopted
and traced their images from the most popular and saccharine media—
comic strips, colouring books, children’s and family magazines. He
idolised girls and the traditional social roles they held. Many of his most
beautiful scenes are of peaceful moments where his heroines—the seven
Vivian Girls of his title and other children—nestle within lush landscapes
untouched by war, although few such moments actually exist in his novel.
More consonant with the breathless, hyperbolic, action-driven
narrative are the fervid images of battles, raging storms, abductions of
children and the horrors of child torture and slaughter. These violent
scenes play out in tempestuous landscapes seemingly stirred up by
the human generated chaos. For instance, in one work, At Norma
Catherine. But wild thunder-storm with cyclone like wind saves them,
the Vivian Girls and the enemy soldiers that have captured them are
buffeted by the tumult of a suddenly risen storm and only an inserted
caption indicates the happy ending in store.
Yet, Darger would also write and illustrate graphic depictions of
young girls being strangled, disembowelled, crucified, hanged, flayed
and dismembered. The images clearly express a fully imagined sadistic
blood-lust visited upon his love objects by the artist. They led numerous
critics to declare Darger an exemplary outsider artist, an extremely
reclusive individual whose tenuous psychological stability placed him
at the margins of acceptable social behaviour.
nevertheless, no matter how many landscapes are strewn with the
disembowelled corpses of young naked girls or cosmic projections of
girls being strangled in the billowing clouds, the epic’s heroines, the
Vivian Girls always escape and lead both the vulnerable children to safety
and the forces of good to victory. However far Darger’s imagination
might go into the realms of the blasphemous and demented, no matter
how many times and for how long he lingers on the killing fields, he
always steps back, if only temporarily, to regain himself and his ties to
the common culture of righteousness and sentimentality.
If the Outsider Is Deeply Within
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darger’s constant return to the dominant moral and religious codes
remind us that however much he might be considered an ‘outsider’, his
passions and his art are strongly linked to the values of his society. But
he also captured—and was captured by—that society’s darkest fears
and desires, its dread and inherent violence.
darger, an avid reader, was strongly influenced by fiction written
for adolescent males—particularly tales of moral, brave, Christian boys.
He also incorporated characters and themes of nineteenth-century
popular literature such as those of Dickens and Harriet Beecher Stowe.
Uncle Tom’s Cabin proved an especially rich trove of sentimental and
horrific imagery, including the lingering death of angelic Little eva, the
horrors of slavery, Simon Legree’s brutality toward tom and the final
exaltations of sanctimonious Christianity. All share popular culture
conventions of threats to innocence that are ultimately rebuffed and
of moral conflicts, engaged and overcome. But necessary to all these
narratives is a prolonged, emotionally charged tension during which
the threat of evil dominates before the much-delayed moment when
the moral order triumphs.
Furthermore, Darger’s sources of violent and inherently perverse
imagery included the daily newspapers. He was fascinated by tales
of the American civil war which were popular in his youth but even
more revealing is his obsessive interest in collecting newspaper stories
and pictures of abducted or murdered children. A staple of the socalled ‘news’, even today, such stories of domestic threat and tragedy
feed a seemingly insatiable collective thirst for the lurid sensations of
anger, fear and perhaps desire stimulated by sporadic outbreaks of the
collectively repressed into ‘public’ view.
Thus, even as we ponder these images as expressions of the ‘outsider’
Darger’s problematic psyche, we can also see in them Darger’s deep
and sustaining connection to the popular culture of his day in his
ready adoption of the visual forms and narrative themes drawn from
popular media. We encounter in his work familiar fantasies of Western
culture: fantasies of innocence protected, moral triumph, religious
fidelity, as well as pervasive sexual aggression, gender antagonism and
sanctimonious brutal violence. This marginal artist thrusts forward
the uncomfortably widespread, long-enduring cultural obsessions
with vengeance, war, rape and paedophilia that coexist so easily with
desperate religious longing, and utopian, if infantile, sentimentality.
Indeed, however much he might be considered an ‘outsider’, he makes
explicit—consciously or not—repressed truths from the cultural
centre, the collective unconscious, in which, even those at the centre
are immersed. Instead of being called an ‘outsider’ artist, Henry Darger
should be viewed as a self-taught vernacular artist, whose works
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resonate from the centre of the private and collective emotional life of
his culture.
The art of Thornton Dial emerges from the margins of society
to articulate what has been unknown, ignored or repressed. Dial’s
exclusion was not an issue of mental condition, however, but one of
class and race. Born in 1928, a poor African American in the deep South,
Dial grew up during an era of institutionalised racism in which not only
was he assumed not to have a voice but was actively denied one. to
develop an art that addresses the personal, cultural and historical issues
as he did was an unexpected and inherently political act. His work is
indeed political and presents us with a dissident vision of a life and
culture at once distant, and yet, of a common historical moment.
The 1992 painting Graveyard Traveler/Selma Bridge, for instance,
offers an allegorical representation of the life and death of the civil
rights leader Dr Martin Luther King, Jr., focusing simultaneously on
his participation in the 1965 civil rights confrontation at the edmund
Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, the urban world he served and where
he would be assassinated and the graveyard to which he—and all of
us—are destined. It is meant to be read from right to left and then back
downward to the right, as our eyes follow a yellow path arching over the
turbulent blue of the Alabama River and then curving into a darkened
landscape and pointing towards the cemetery in the lower right.
A figure representing Dr King stands at the right edge the bridge, poised
to cross one of the many rivers of his life’s journey. At the far left, Dr
King has been transformed into a tiger—Dial’s iconic figure for the
black male—who will soon encounter around the bend a horse rider
signifying the white police force that brutally attacked the freedom
marchers. Although depicting a specific political and historical event,
the painting resonates with broader existential significance, as Dial
subsequently observed: ‘As a man live, he is a graveyard traveler. every
move he make, death will move with him. Martin Luther King had
to cross Selma bridge. every man got to take that same trip’ (Dial in
Mcevilley and Baraka 1993, 150).
An illiterate factory worker, late in life, Dial began creating sculptural
works out of found and discarded objects and painting massive abstract
and representational assemblages which express intensely personal
and historically informed responses to African American life. He had
always made ‘objects’ as he called them—he is said to have never heard
the word art or considered his creations artworks until he was 60. But
familiar with the tradition of the constructed yard show—in which
numerous rural and urban African Americans decorate their home
environments with symbolic constructions of used or found objects—
Dial placed his works around his family’s homes.
If the Outsider Is Deeply Within
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He also destroyed or buried many works, partly for lack of space,
in larger part, out of fear of attracting unwanted attention from white
people, the ‘authorities’ who, he assumed, would require he have a
license to do such work and would probably tax them. He also suspected
they might recognise the weighted political meanings within the works.
one early sculpture which was not destroyed and certainly could be
easily understood is Slave Ship, from 1987, a depiction of the middle
Passage, in which chained figures fill the body of the ship, while under
an American flag a white man rapes a black woman.
Dial, an artist of immense productivity and visual ambition,
was discovered and championed by a white collector passionately
supportive of Southern African American vernacular art, after which
he achieved some success in both the folk art and mainstream art
worlds. But one senses that the passion to create was intensely personal
and not dependent on social recognition.
Dial’s works are often emotionally-charged, visually-complex
and politically-aware. The broad scope of his vision and creative
commitment address a complexity of personal, ethnic, historical and
global issues. His art has looked back to the historic drama of slavery,
segregation, economic struggle and civil rights in America, as well as
confronting current history and popular culture concerns encountered
through the mass media including war and the global politics of oil, the
public and media frenzy over the lurid death of Princess Diana and the
succession of oil wars the united States has entered.
His paintings can be intensely personal, yet depict a condition and
sensibility universally recognised. The 1997 Construction of the Victory,
for example, commemorates Dial’s survival from a near fatal bout with
hepatitis. The brilliant red-soaked stretched and tied fabric denotes
the blood of life—and the fluids and life nearly lost. embedded flowers
connote the signs of hospital well-wishes and foreseen memorials.
The centre star-flower form suspended below the blood-red cross
symbolically binds all elements together, holding a pair of crutches that
rise in a triumphant V shape.
A similarly-placed V dominates his 2004 work Victory in Iraq, a more
sombre and decidedly less optimistic, painting. Here, the metal bars of
the flag-coloured V barely constrain the jumbled mass of barb wire,
tangled metals and electrical wires in which stuffed animals, children’s
toys and a severed head of a mannequin are embedded. The spots of
red on torn clothes refer to blood but not necessarily to life triumphant.
The victory announced could be either in the future after much carnage
or this may indeed be a portrait of what Victory looks like.
When first noted by the art world, his works were seen by some as
expressions of what was deemed an outsider culture, a subaltern society
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of uneducated black people working in indigenous folk traditions. But
this world appeared to have no place within the dominant art dialogue.
Although excluded by the academy, dial was not ignorant of this
world. nor did he feel especially challenged by it, as can be seen in
The Art of Alabama, 2004, in which a flamboyant exemplar of African
American yard assemblage rises splendidly above a garishly-painted
concrete replica of a classical greek statue placed ingloriously on a box
pedestal of found wood. If dial acknowledged the western tradition,
seen on his occasional visits to museums, his place in art history was
not a major concern for him. Rather, it is history in the broadest sense
that engaged him.
These are the creations of an historically-engaged individual,
speaking to culture at large through a personal vision, grounded in a
vernacular aesthetic. Dial is no ‘outsider’, though he and many selftaught African American artists emerge from a culture little known
to many. But he makes it abundantly clear that he and the African
American vernacular artists are from within the heart of the American
culture—and world culture—and that their objects, their art, speak to
both their and our placement within a common culture and history.
The work of the artist first known as Chris Hipkiss was introduced
to a segment of the art world in the early 1990s by critics and artists
associated with the ‘Outsider Art’ world in england. As an untrained
artist who left school at age sixteen to pursue a trade but who
assiduously created increasingly large drawings in pencil and ink of
startling, seemingly phantasmagoric landscapes, he seemed to fit into
notions of the figure outside. The bizarre, disturbing works he created
were taken as evidence of a radically disaffiliated figure. Hipkiss has
been labelled as an Outsider ever since an appellation that may have
brought relative success and renown at first but which also traps the
artist in a marginal segment of the art world, limits viewing by a larger
general populace that should experience it and diminishes the truly
radical vision of independent-minded beings.
nonetheless, we can understand this early—and lingering—portrait
of the artist as outsider because his works are profoundly unsettled
and unsettling. The drawings suggest landscapes or scenes from some
unknown but imaginable personal and mythic realms which evoke
turbulent narratives of political and sexual import.
The works can be extremely large, one is 140-centimetre high and
400-centimetre wide, while other works, 180 by 110 centimetres, stand
as distinct depictions or might serve as individual components of
larger panoramas. They are almost all drawn in black ink or graphite
on white grounds, although gold or silver ink are also applied at
times. The images are often framed by graphically bold, if mysterious,
If the Outsider Is Deeply Within
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titles or poetic phrases, while occasionally, similar phrases may be
dramatically placed like billboards atop imposing buildings, sometimes
sending contradictory messages—as in one, where HoPe and HAte
are proclaimed (‘hope’ being, perhaps significantly, smaller). In other
works, such enigmas are seen issuing from the mouths of the multiplearmed, scantily dressed, feminine-androgynous figures who are often
found throughout the landscapes.
Hipkiss’s world is a place of extreme, if visionary, clarity, of precisely
defined landscapes in which factories, industrial buildings and towerlike structures dominate surrounding fields of strange plants, insects
and birds which appear to be industrialised mutations (Image 1). All
graphic elements—whether massive factories, blades of grass, mutant
vegetal forms, regimented formations of birds and insect life or the
androgynes—are finely drawn with a seemingly impossible exactitude.
As in a surrealistic painting, in which every element is presented with
an equal intensity, the familiar is rendered uncanny and the bizarre is
presented as quotidian.
Image 1: Wolfe and Stole.
Source: Image art by Hipkiss.
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The landscapes suggest blurred boundaries of urban and rural domains,
of technological and natural realms in conflict. Hipkiss has described
the landscapes as suburban, where the urban and the rural meet. That is
something he appears to dread—the suburban: ‘I see and live life from a
kind of rural perspective, but I’m still intrinsically tied to the detail, the
banality, the expanse and horror of Suburbia—a place I know so well’
(Hipkiss 2010). But he has also invoked ‘the landscape of Suburbia,
where the “people” of the city and the “nature” of open country are
hidden in the immensity. In the behemoth that is Suburbia, there is
no room for these essential motifs but they have still got to be there
somehow’ (Hipkiss 2010).
The meeting of disparate, indeed dissonant realms, articulates
the hybridity of a present and an impending world. In these highly
articulated panoramas, we alternately and simultaneously, sense
ubiquitous threat and anarchic celebration. The scenes invite both
dystopian or utopian interpretations. These landscapes intimate
fundamental shifts in gender identity and extreme transformations
of the natural and planned ecology, where technological forces are
seemingly turned against both populace and nature, while concurrently,
a populace of androgynous beings cavort freely and ironically within
the contested terrain. The androgynes prove to be especially mysterious
yet captivating figures. They establish a human presence acting in
apparent disregard of the implicit horror of the behemoth surrounding
them, and announce a transforming vision of sexual ambiguity, sexual
liberation, and sexual expression.
Throughout this work, Hipkiss seems to be working from an
intense personal awareness—responding to recognisable cultural
conditions and opposing tropes of dominance and freedom. Hipkiss
has admitted that in these imaginary expanses there is ‘a kind of “selfportrait”’ (Hipkiss 2010). And—if the works invoke the present, yet
augur something as yet not fully-known but imaginable, through these
appealing and disturbing images—the artist makes the activity of both
creating and viewing a challenge to self-knowledge—a challenge taken
up by the artist and offered to the viewer. For us, it is decidedly difficult
to assume a stable, single perspective on the art object and its vision. We
are compelled to see it both panoramically and from within its frame.
Thus, the large panoramas invite, indeed often demand, discrete
viewings from different perspectives and distinct distances. We are
moved to stand back to encompass the expansive vision of these
landscapes but in order to fully to read them and to attempt to interpret
them, we must move forward for close viewing. The complex detail, the
many components, the strange figures uttering enigmatic phrases in
If the Outsider Is Deeply Within
107
minute thought-balloons bring us intimately within these mystifying
worlds. one finds oneself moving back and forth, shifting one’s
relationship to the work and the world it contains. And at times, in the
process, we discover an unexpected perspective upon noticing that the
framing texts sometimes are written in reverse—as if the artist and now
‘we’ are within the labelled landscape looking out through the eyes of
Hipkiss.
And who is this Hipkiss? Hipkiss is the fabricated name assumed
by a pair of english artists, Chris and Alpha Mason, who moved to
southern France in 2006. Chris is the drawings’ draftsman; Alpha
is primarily responsible for the enigmatic, suggestive texts being
voiced by the androgynous figures and framing the landscapes.
Chris Payen and Alpha Mason met in London as young adults and
began collaborating and later married, upon which Chris took her
surname. the pseudonym Chris Hipkiss was born, and for years,
the male who drew the works was assumed to be the sole artist,
until recently the male first name, Chris, was dropped in favour
simply of Hipkiss. In recent years, the two have insisted on the
equal relationship at the heart of their creative vision. Indeed, they
have lived and have presented an art that has, in their words, ‘always
defied patriarchal norms’, for whom ‘gender simply doesn’t figure
as important’ (Hipkiss 2015). One might detect both male and
female ‘symbols’ within the compositions but the figures within the
artworks are beings of decidedly female and male attributes who are
embraced by Hipkiss as their ‘alter egos’.
By presenting their alter-egos as active participants within the world
they envision, the artists position themselves within the narrative. They
accept a place within a dynamic of change towards a world that’s as yet
unknown. Hipkiss has stated that these are not visions of an oppressive
future state but rather are ‘definitely present tense’ (Hipkiss 2015).
Within this present, these two self-described ‘feminist and political
and independent’ artists act through their creations. In effect, Hipkiss’s
oeuvre testifies to two individuals’ confrontation with the promise and
threat of profound changes in our cultural dynamics, changes that
might be viewed from the relative solace of the French countryside
where they live but which challenge the artists as much as the viewers—
wherever we may be situated. The act of confronting and creating art
out of the contemporary is a way of knowing and exploring realities; it
is a means of expressing and creating oneself.
‘Hipkiss’ may be ‘self-taught’ but ‘he’ is neither naïve, marginal,
nor psychotic. They are well-aware of the operations of the art world
but do not engage with the narratives of the commonly-approved art
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history within which the majority of academically trained artists frame
their practice. Instead, Hipkiss react directly to the social and political
concerns of the culture and have developed a visual vocabulary at once
responsive to imagery encountered in the mass media, yet is intensely
personal and unique.
If these works can be read by us as either dystopian or utopian, and
perhaps, both simultaneously, they call us back to central issues of this
collection: who are the dissidents, the ‘outsiders’; where do they reside;
what is their relationship to us; and what do they reveal to us about our
common state?
Henry darger, Thornton Dial and Hipkiss have all been projected
as outsiders—largely without their knowledge or assent. Yet from that
real or metaphoric outside location, their art serves to reveal the culture
within, albeit from a skewed perspective that renders the familiar world
strange as it is sharply seen anew.
Considering their lives and works, we confront varieties of what
might indeed be called ‘a dissident aesthetics of the insider who is
already always “outside”’. But we need ask, how can we locate these
artists—and others—as truly being ‘inside’ or ‘outside’ the culture?
Where are those locations and who maps them? Are such decisions
based on the manifest or latent meaning within the individual’s acts
and creations or do they reflect as much the perspective and desires of
the viewer residing, however uncomfortably, at the culture’s core? And
can we determine whether the ‘outsider’s’ vision represents a significant
challenge to the dominant culture for the observer?
One might view Darger as an individual who desperately wanted
to be inside, who dramatically identified with the religious and moral
codes of his culture but who could not reconcile either his own
psychological distress or his perception of the inherent violence and
perversity residing at the core of the culture, to find peace and stability
inside. The hyperbole of beauty and horror within his art challenges
his readers and viewers to determine whether this outsider’s vision of
social contradictions truly speak for his and their, culture and thus,
anoint him a legitimate and necessary insider.
Dial speaks with the wisdom and experience of the ‘outsider’
forcibly excluded from society’s regard yet who, like many of his fellow
‘outsiders’, looks back in and on the lies and conflicted truths of that
society. His is an aesthetics of dissidence and independence that can
also claim to be an authentic expression of the realities at the centre of
the culture, established from a location only the wilfully blind would
call outside.
Hipkiss’s vision may be an aesthetics of dissidence, by default.
It is one of those artists who simply step beyond the boundaries of
If the Outsider Is Deeply Within
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the ordinary to articulate a panorama of culture real and imaginary,
present and future, intriguing and foreboding, one within which we
may already be living while tempted to call it outside.
wherever the so-called outsider resides, as each of these three artists
has made evident, we, the viewers, the readers, confront and experience
the conflicts and contradictions at the heart of our cultures, as well as
the passion and promise of individual struggle for self-expression and
enactment within that contested terrain.
I suggest that our receptivity to the art of the outsider signals our
need for the outsider to exist. we desire an alternative aesthetics of
un-belonging and discomfort that asserts that this world which is ‘too
much with us’ has not succeeded in dominating the spirit of desire and
resistance.
Thus, the outsider—the existence and identity of whom may
reflect the imaginative projections of those inside who are straining
to imagine alternate modes of being—may serve to articulate the
uncomfortable and unavoidable truths about the culture that envelops
us all, insiders and outsiders alike. They reveal that, fundamentally, an
outsider aesthetics, a dissident aesthetics—and politics—might present
ever more sharply-felt images of the oppressive conditions that have
engendered in the viewer and the reader the impassioned desire for an
alternative vision.
So that, even if the creative act is not taken up in a spirit of dissent,
when we investigate these individual idiolects that personalise visual
or literary languages and in the process, potentially disrupt or expand
collective discourse, we engage once again the implicit politics of
aesthetic statement, and action, that have shaped vanguard criticality
and aesthetics across the modern era.
I suggest that for the viewer—for us—outsider aesthetics in its varied
forms, as distinct expressions of specific individual artists, is essentially,
an affirmation of the value, indeed the necessity of art as we have
known it: as focused individual action, intense expression of deeplyfelt experience that challenges accepted versions of received reality. It
is an art that resonates in the lives and dreams of other individuals and
illuminates the complexities of a shared culture, an art that reveals that
the outsider is experienced most deeply within.
Representative images of the works of Henry Darger Thornton Dial,
and Hipkiss can be accessed at:
http://officialhenrydarger.com/images/
http://www.soulsgrowndeep.org/artist/thornton-dial
http://www.hipkissart.com/past.html
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REFERENCES
Hipkiss. ‘detail in the distance’ on-line blog, Crow Parliament, 22 August 2010;
no longer accessible.
———. ‘Interview with Alex nodopaka,’ in Vayavya, 2015. Available at http://
www.vayavya.in/hipkiss-interview.html (accessed 7 november 2020).
mayer, Hans. Outsiders: A Study in Life and Letters. cambridge, mA: mIt
Press, 1982.
mcevilley, Thomas and Amiri Baraka. Thornton Dial: Image of the Tiger. new
York: Harry n. Abrams/Museum of American Folk Art, 1993.
dIssIdent PoetIcs, eXPeRImentAl eXcess:
JAAkko YlI-JUonIkAs’ FInnIsH
noVel NEUROMAANI
Laura Piippo
In this chapter, I discuss dissident poetics in Neuromaani (2012),
an excessive Finnish experimental novel by Jaakko Yli-Juonikas
(b. 1976). I examine how and what kind of in-betweenness is produced
in the novel that both harbours dissident literary modes and, at
the same time, exposes the always-already murky undercurrents of
the so-called mainstream and the current capitalist ‘system’. First, I
introduce Neuromaani, its composition, themes, context, background
and reception. After that, I lay out the theoretical background of my
reading: the concepts of actual, virtual and repetition. Lastly, I examine
the excess produced by the dissident poetics of in-betweenness in
Neuromaani. Brian McHale argues that (descriptive) poetics itself is inbetween of interpretation and theory: it can be informed by and have
implications for both (McHale 1994, 59). In this regard, Neuromaani
offers an interesting point of departure for contemplations on both
the novel’s own poetics and on their possible interpretations but also
more generally the nature of literary in-betweenness or the possible
contemporary poetics of dissidence—and their counter-cultural
potential.
Following the Oxford English Dictionary, poetics is here understood
as the creative principles or techniques informing any literary
construction. This also applies, according to the OED, to social and
cultural constructions, and thus, brings a wider scope of human
interaction and meaning-making on various platforms into play.
Jacques Rancière argues that literature (and, more generally, art) is a
specific mode of language: ‘a language that speaks less by what it says
than by what it does not say, by the power that is expressed through it’
(Rancière 2011, 59). He then continues naming this the ‘poetic power’
(Rancière 2011, 67). In this regard, literature is both a self-sufficient
form of and an expression of society. Through these remarks, I seek
to map out ways to configure and re-configure poetic spaces of being
an outsider within—and along the lines of Jacques Rancière, maybe a
possible way out.
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ON THE POETICS OF NEUROMAANI
Neuromaani is—following a collection of short stories and two novels—
the fourth literary work by Jaakko Yli-Juonikas, a prominent Finnish
writer of experimental prose literature. It is a vast and versatile book
of over 650 pages and with exceptionally elaborate cover design by
markus Pyörälä, who received an award for this work. As soon as it
was published, Neuromaani was described as ‘having no predecessor
in Finnish literature’ and the comparisons were largely sought from
Anglophone literary traditions. Neuromaani received generally good
and even hesitantly applauding reviews but was repeatedly titled as ‘too
difficult’ or ‘too much’ by the critics (cf. Piippo 2016). It has since then
attracted also academic interest (cf. Piippo 2018, 2020).
Neuromaani circulates and permutes various found texts, both
canon and outsider, factual and fictional. Certain types of outsider
literature often apply certain elements and traits very tightly knitted
to the language associated with madness which is a very particular
kind of otherness. I concentrate especially on the usage of literary
traits typical for the so-called ‘outsider’ or self-published literature
that often resemble the ones of madness and schizophrenia. The novel
also operates with and within the language and jargon of neuroscience,
clinical research, hospitalisation and science frauds. There is also a lot
of ambivalent and literary humour which partially lightens the mood
of the novel but at the same time creates a harsher contrast for its more
abrasive or traumatic contents. In this chapter, I look into what kind
of poetics these traits produce when they leak into mainstream or
highbrow prose literature.
The novel opens with a paratext. On the first page, there is an abstract
in english which states that ‘[t]he study focuses on a series of crimes
committed by a loose group of Finnish neuroscientists in 1999–2000’
and that ‘[t]he complexity of this bioethical problem is not so much
due to the unparalleled nature of the incidents themselves, but the fact
that the phenomena in question force us to fundamentally reformulate
the distinction between researcher and researchee.’ The abstract ends
by saying: ‘On the course of research work, this study has gradually
adopted a multi-layered, novel-like form. The unorthodox method
of processing should not be seen as artistic vagaries but rather as
desperate, blindfolded groping towards, possibly, “the unspeakable’’’.
There is a list of keywords, as well that reads as: ‘neuroscience, forensic
psychology, antisocial behavior, defalcation, scientific misconduct,
bioethics, rationality of science, fMRI, Finnish cases’.
The actual novel begins—as so many postmodernist classics—as
a nordic-noir-esque detective story or mystery, two neuroscientists
Dissident Poetics, Experimental Excess
113
arrive at a hospital where a convict, a man named silvo näre, is placed
under a mental examination. we do not know what crime he has
committed (and we shall not learn that during the course of the novel)
but in the presence of the scientists and medical staff, we find out that
he hears voices—one voice in particular:
Do you still remember, Silvo, how we talked yesterday, on
Monday? You told us, how some man is giving you orders. Do
you remember? It would be nice if you told us more about this
man who bosses you around. Is he scary? Or do you feel safe
when he talks to you?
Gereg. Kahakka and Rambo glace at each other surprised, write
the unexplainable word down swiftly. explanations and theories
begin to circulate. näre stares at Harriet relentlessly.
Did you say gereg, Silvo? Can you tell us, what gereg means?
Have you invented this word by yourself?
Gereg says: pick up mom from the station.
Aha, so gereg is a name? Is gereg the man that commands you?
It isn’t just some stadtholder. Mostly he talks utter nonsense.
And not always to me but to someone else. This, that and the
other. Mindless allegations. Such a twittering chipmunk. Fourth
of them, the lastborn, the prodigal son still unknown to the
general public. (Yli-Juonikas 2012, 13–14)1
Soon after this paragraph, the narration shifts from Silvo’s point of
view to the one of Gereg’s. there seems to be, however, multiple
narrators and diegetic levels in Neuromaani, and it is generally hard
to distinguish them clearly from each other. the structure of the
novel is borrowed from the choose-your-own-adventure-novels
from the 1980s and Neuromaani, thus, represents the genre of
ergodic literature. the term ergodic, coined by espen J. Aarseth, is
defined as follows:
In ergodic literature, nontrivial effort is required to allow the
reader to traverse the text. If ergodic literature is to make sense as a
concept, there must also be non-ergodic literature, where the effort
to traverse the text is trivial, with no extranoematic responsibilities
placed on the reader except (for example) eye movement and the
periodic or arbitrary turning of pages. (Aarseth 1997, 1)
There is also no main narrative, plot or storyline to be found; the novel
keeps constantly fragmenting and changing directions. There are
multiple endings where usually the protagonist dies and the reader has
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to go back a few chapters or start over from the beginning. Therefore,
the reader is deprived of the final answer or interpretation of the
story—if there even is (only) one. This structure, fragmented by the
jumping from chapter to chapter, is a clear nod towards the (ontological)
metalepsis (Genette 1980, 234–235) made popular by the AngloAmerican postmodernist novels. It also servers another purpose—the
partly paratextual instructions for moving about within the book resonate
with the fragmentation of the mind which is also one of its recurring
themes. As the novel progresses both the narrator(s) and the reader grow
increasingly suspicious, even paranoid, about the events:
If you suspect the father, turn to chapter 57. Or (option c) the
note includes a coded message appointed to someone else, which
you are in fact not meant to understand. If you are interested in
breaking the code, move to chapter 118. On the other hand, it is
not completely ruled out, that (d) I have imagined the whole thing.
Maybe these curious occurrences are born in my mind and only
reflect my worst fears (or hopes!?!). Read more in chapter 103. And
yet, in the last resort one might ask, (e) does it really matter? One
might as well drop the whole schizoid business and move on to
more exciting adventures. More exciting adventures available in
chapter 202.2 (Yli-Juonikas 2012, 33)
The fragmentation also reaches the level of the text, breaking up and
apart both the cohesion of the story and the reader’s meaning-making
processes and efforts:
I wish we had had the sense to settle our ‘differences’ a little earlier
[---] when it wasn’t too late yet [---] so much important is left unsaid
[---] on child spies [---] on irradiation of the brain [---] don’t blame
your father, he can’t help the ruthlessness of his life instinct [---]
white grass, the fleeting white respiration [---] ‘laterna magica’ [---]
father’s white ear [---].3 (Yli-Juonikas 2012, 530)
not even the wording is left untouched:
Shocking images and flashes from the lowest levels of the
consciousness—a city in ruins, a pillar of fire in the h*riz*n, black
j*nipers in front of the housing cooperative, which turn into a pack
of wolves during the night [---] unstable state of mind leaves only
2 options: ex*t st*ge l*ft and dem*l***on of th* f*** h*se—move to
chapter 25, or rising in the atmosphere—move to chapter 180. This
is admittedly a hard choice, and requires an ability to emphasize
with a deviant individual’s psyche. Have courage, friend—one must
Dissident Poetics, Experimental Excess
115
only throw oneself into the stream of expression, seek the seekers
path, c*nnect with the *umanit**s *i*****.4 (Yli-Juonikas 2012, 77)
All these traits form the slightly unhinged style and feel of the novel.
many of these literary devices are also related or comparable to the
linguistic features of madness. This not only reinforces the theme
of the outsider or dissident within but also connects the style of
the text directly to the consciously forced speech of schizophrenic
patients. Other typical linguistic features associated with madness
or schizophrenia are neuronal or recurring sentence structures,
neologisms, mixed metaphors and uncontrolled associations, as well
as the banal and vulgar vocabulary which is also associated with social
stigma (Covington et al. 2005). The medical-clinical discourse of
neuroscience is placed in an absurd light right from the start. This effect
is enhanced by the overly specific reproduction of names of registered
trademarks, pharmaceutics and instructions on doses.
The whole composition of Neuromaani is interconnected in
many ways. Mimicking the academic style of writing with footnotes,
references and citations (much like in Infinite Jest by David Foster
Wallace (1996) or The House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski (2000),
it urges the reader to look these references up in order to find the key
metaphor or solving the riddle of the text. However, all these lines of
investigation, no matter how intriguing, turn out to be a cul-de-sac.
Some of the references are correct and accurate, leading to other texts
that actually exist but some are fictional or misleading. For example,
journals and articles mentioned are often amalgamations of both
factual and fictional names and references.
This kind of mixing up different textual material is rather common,
especially in postmodernist fiction (McHale 1987, 202–203) but
it is interesting from the perspective of the materialising effects of
reading. The conscientious reader, who tries to track down and map
out every quotation and reference very soon becomes overwhelmed
with the sheer quantity of the material and even sooner finds
themselves rather let down by the book. The seemingly vital clues
turn out to be plain mockery of either the reader’s endeavours or just
sheer literary parody. The large quantity of the referenced material—
whether already existing or fictional make-believe—overwhelms the
(especially academic) reader who tries to keep track of everything and
take note of every single potent metaphor or literary device. There
is, although, just simply too much to take into account and the book
thus lures the reader to extend their reading-time over anything that
would be considered trivial (cf. Aarseth 1997, 1). All of the different
aspects of the novel, no matter how hilarious or intriguing, fold into
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a bundle of affections best described as frustration or exhaustion.
Neuromaani could, therefore, be best described as excessive. excess
is the state or an instance of surpassing usual, proper or specified
limits. It is too much, too many. It is part of the Other (Altman 1989).
This calls in for reconfiguring the ways of reading, interpreting and
contextualising the novel and its poetics.
BEING IN-BETWEEN: THE MATERIALITY OF ACTUAL
AND VIRTUAL
Poetics, as everything else, is currently navigating through the times of
capitalism. According to Félix Guattari ‘capital is a semiotic operator’
which ‘seizes individuals from the inside’ and has the goal of ‘controlling
the whole of society’ (Guattari 1996, 220). to this process, he refers
with the term ‘semiocapitalism’ which seems to engulf everything it can
seize—literature being no exception here. Following Gilles Deleuze and
Félix Guattari, literature is ‘permeated by unformed, unstable matters,
by flows in all directions, by free intensities and by singularities’
(Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 45). Neuromaani is indeed quite a handful
of all of those. Its non-linear structure, combined with vast amounts of
themes, motives, references, characters, footnotes and subtexts—both
canon and outsider—create a rhizomatic narrative that is difficult to
handle or grasp. The title of the book translates as ‘neuromaniac’ or
nouveau roman—already giving the reader some hints regarding its
style and its thematic and literary origins, for example, in the literary
tradition of French and Anglo-American postmodernism (cf. Piippo
2018). Both of these are characterised by the emphasis on metafiction,
the notion of the literary work’s own fictionality and ontological status
as a codex (McHale 1987, 9–10).
This very material body of the book provides a solid starting
point for the analysis of the poetics of in-betweeness (Piippo 2018).
However, when discussing the material aspect of literature, we must
first define ‘materiality’. Literature’s materialism is here understood in
Gilles Deleuze’s terms of actual and virtual. Deleuze is also one of the
main philosophical influences behind the concept of new materialism
(Dolphijn and van der tuin 2013, 14). Virtual and actual are both real but
not everything that is virtually contained—or immanent—in this world
is or becomes actual. Actual is our everyday world at the present moment
in time, virtual, on the other hand, is all its possible and impossible pasts
and futures (Grosz 2000, 228). According to the widely cited quotation
‘“virtual” is not opposed to “real” but opposed to “actual”, whereas “real”
is opposed to “possible”’ (Deleuze 1988, 96–98).
Dissident Poetics, Experimental Excess
117
Virtual—for example, dreams, memories, imaginations, pure
qualities, the story world—is real insofar as it has an effect on us,
the virtual insists on the actual. The object of ‘a book’ is, in this case
particularly, for its dual nature. It is genuinely both actual and virtual,
wherein both the physical body of a book with printed words on its
pages, held in one’s hand and the act of reading are actual but the ‘real’
contents of the book—text, narratives, metaphors, images, etc.—are
virtual. Virtual multiplicities form the actual narrative(s) which can be
read in the book but they also contain all the what-ifs, alternate endings,
reader’s expectations, wishes, hopes and so on. This also applies to the
aspect of style. As Claire Colebrook puts it:
Style is best thought of as virtual, as a power of variation and becoming,
a power to create anew without prior reference or ground. Deleuze
offered a number of ways to think about the literary approach to
intensities and affect. each event of the literary re-opens the question
of what and how literature might become, and so each mobilisation
and creation of affect is itself different. (Colebrook 2002, 106)
Both actual and virtual are created and separated from each other
through the process of repetition. The materiality of literature, in this
sense, is created in a process in which the actual emerges from the virtual
(Deleuze and Parnet 2002, 148). The actual contents of the book are so to
say, ‘permeated by unformed, unstable matters, by flows in all directions,
by free intensities and by singularities’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 11).
In this sense, the material effects of reading—for example, the reader’s
bodily reactions, feelings, evocations and possible later actions which can
be linked to the previous reading of the book—are also part of the book’s
contents, materiality and its meaning. The key point is the equal reality
and the relationship of the two main concepts. When talking about the
materiality of a book or its poetics, one should also include the virtual
aspects in the analysis. now that we see the ontology of Neuromaani, we
are to find out its epistemology. What are the materials it has used for
its composition? How does it use them? The question here then again
is: what kind of affects actualise from the virtual of Neuromaani in its
reading, especially concerning the circulation and repetition of found
material that is connected to the concept of ‘outsider’?
REPETITION: PRODUCING THE OUTSIDER
The excessive use of found literary material like references, subtexts,
styles, allusions and (anonymous) quotations can be analysed in
terms of repetition. Repetition is a process that actualises for example
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narratives and forms from the virtual of literature, creates new
literary space, and therefore, affects the materiality of literature. Here,
repetition is understood in a Deleuzian way: thinking of repetition as
a process, which re- and deterritorialises the literary space. Deleuzian
repetition can be divided into Platonic and nietzschean repetition,
where the first relies on similarity and simulation, and the second, on
difference and effect (Deleuze 1994, 190). In this sense, the narration,
the use of found material and other forms of literary repetition are more
interesting when examined as nietzschean repetition. Here, writing does
not only mechanically repeat the already existing forms and conventions
of literature but re-activates the movements and lines which create new
literature: the very effects of reading and the new textual and affective
space for the outsider within. especially experimental prose heavily uses
different forms of literary repetition and production of affects this way,
challenging the more straightforward ways of perceiving the materiality
of literature.
experimental literature often questions the dominants, tastes
and structures of the current literary and cultural field. It poses the
very ontological question of its own ‘literaturnost’: is this literature
or could it be (Bray, Gibbons and McHale 2012)? The Situationist
International would state that it is a question of recuperation and
detournement. In other words, does this experimentation pose any
resistance to the current dominant? By following and mapping out the
lines of different forms of repetition in Neuromaani—compulsory rereading of the chapters due the ergodic structure, genre-related traits
like metafictional elements and the usage of found material—and by
following repetitions dual core impulse of simultaneously binding and
breaking apart (cf. Piippo 2018), it is possible to analyse closely the
dissident poetics in Neuromaani.
Neuromaani itself is already in the state of being and outsider within.
It is an experimental piece of literature with reader’s expectations
of a highly complex structure and a rather narrow audience, yet
published by a prestigious publishing house and receiving critical
acclaim. The same thematic extends beyond the novel itself: it is
written and published in Finnish which is a very small language on a
european scale, not even to mention global proportions. On the other
hand, Finnish is a very literary language with a strong national and
institutional position and, in that sense, cannot really be regarded as
a minor language.
Neuromaani is thus layered in many ways but not least in its
tendency to circulate, appropriate and emulate found textual material:
styles, jargon, poetics, references and quotations. The general style and
vocabulary of the novel are largely dominated by the neuroscientific
Dissident Poetics, Experimental Excess
119
and medical jargon—an effect that is enhanced by the overabundance
of footnotes and other traits of academic writing:
And there I was, celebrating this new millennium of great hopes
and fears, rounded up with the good old usual suspects: Small
S.A., Perera G.M., DeLaPaz R., Mayeux R. ja Stern Y. 1999, and
all we could think of was ‘Differential regional dysfunction of the
hippocampal formation among elderly with memory decline and
Alzheimer’s disease.’ Annals of Neurology 45. S. 466–472.5 (YliJuonikas 2012, 101)
There also is the aforementioned structural analogy to other (post)
postmodernist novels but also many references to Finnish literary
traditions. There is, for example, a long passage that is, in fact, a parody
of the realist Finnish prose of the 1950s and 1960s (Yli-Juonikas 2012,
303–306), and several subtle nods towards Finnish classics. There is,
however, a lot that is derived from urban folklore and the so-called
outsider literature. All these voices mix in the novel. For example, a
now late Finnish ‘outsider-author’ and conspiration theorist Vilho
Piippo, who also was allegedly a schizophrenia patient, is presented in
a long passage as an expert on neuroscience, conducting research and
corresponding with Bill Clinton, who is being referred to as ‘the leopard
king’ and whom Piippo warns about the dangers of the dissidents
within (Yli-Juonikas 2012, 594–597).
Outsider literature is a literary equivalent to the international field
of outsider art. Outsider literature is often self-published or vanity
press that distinguishes it from edited literature which is published
through traditional publishing houses or other institutions of the
literature scene. Important here is the inherent solitude of the selfpublished literature: there is no editor or publisher’s style sheet that
would comment or co-author the work. Outsider art has its roots in
the psychiatric hospitals’ hospital art, also called art brut in order to
avoid excessive stigma (Haveri 2016, 113). This junction reinforces the
reader’s connotations of madness and dissidence in Neuromaani. It is
possible to recognise several of the mentioned or referenced names
as Finnish outsider writes if one is acquainted with the phenomenon.
Only in Neuromaani, they are presented as practitioners, researchers
and authorities of the field of neuroscience. In a comparative view,
the linguistic features that coincide with the schizophrenic language
in the novel appear to be largely derived from these same sources.
The motivation of this article is, however, not to label or diagnose
any writers or texts referenced in Neuromaani. What is of interest here
is the literary devices and works which convey the feel and connotations
of madness. That is the poetics of dissidence and the outsider within
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Humanities, Provocateur
which are also central to the composition of Neuromaani. The founder
of the term art brut, French artist Jean Dubuffet has also noted that
not all features of art brut were typical only to the art of the hospital
patients. One must also bear in mind the autonomy of the literary
work, its meanings or intentions cannot be solely drawn from the
author, whether be they an outsider or not.
The references and connotations recognised as ‘outsider’ do,
however, have an effect on the poetics of Neuromaani, as they add
new virtualities to the body of the novel. The authoritative language
of neurology, medicalisation and diagnostics become unstable when
mixed together with the themes of fraud, crime, pseudoscience and the
affections produced by the schizophrenic language. All this is connected
to the postmodernist conception of literature, where the meaning of
the text is no longer traced back to the author but is rather seen as a
motley painting, a heterogenic assemblage of various texts and their
heteroglossia. Literary narrative structures often experiment in the
area of the mind, especially a mind in state of fragmentation (Zunshine
2006, 54–57). Characteristic to these outsider traits and poetics woven
into the tissue of Neuromaani is indeed their excessiveness.
ExCESS: THE DISSIDENT WITHIN
How does the excessive quality in and of Neuromaani react to the current
cultural dominant and global circumstance of capitalism? Could it be
in this very excess where an aesthetic that will both represent and resist
these times could be found? The ethos of capitalism is to overcome old
boundaries and in that maxim lies the excessive spirit of capitalism,
too. Semiocapitalism, or the current post-Fordist digital culture, is
founded on immaterial labour and the explosion of the info-sphere
(Virno, Bertoletti, Cascaito and Casson 2004, 9–10). Here ‘capital is a
semiotic operator’ that ‘seizes individuals from the inside’ and has the
goal of ‘controlling the whole of society’ (Guattari 1996, 200, 212). All
this leads to an excess of visibility and expressivity. According to Franco
‘Bifo’ Berardi, ‘the expansion of a specific cognitive function redefines
the whole of cognition’ (‘Bifo’ 2005). On a personal level, the outcome
of the acceleration described earlier is often exhaustion and depression
(‘Bifo’ 2009), the former of which is the affection that dominates the
reading of Neuromaani as well. The machine of capitalist production
and circulation operates only by continually breaking down (Deleuze
and Guattari 2010, 8).
What is the dynamic between the excess of Neuromaani and the one
of semiocapitalism? excess as a concept has three distinctive sites. It can
Dissident Poetics, Experimental Excess
121
be seen as redundancy (‘too much’), transgression (‘more’) or mediation
(‘exceeding the limits’ as an ongoing process and strategy) (sihvonen
1991, 31–33). capitalism produces extreme diversity and multiplicity but
the basic condition of possibility for this profusion is money and credit
(lazzarato 2012). Heterogeneity turns into homogeneity in the long run
and the problem of excess is projected to those who are too many or
too much: the dissident. This way of seeing the excess represents the
sites of it as ‘more’ and ‘too much’. As Rick Altman writes: ‘The right to
identify and name the excess carries enormous power, always in favour
of the dominant. to name excess is thus just another way of naming the
dominant. totality minus excess equals dominant’ (Altman 1989, 346).
On the other hand, it is the sheer excessiveness of the event that provokes
anxiety in our terms of understanding and representation. As Steven
Shaviro writes on Bataille’s thought on excess:
There is no end to the accumulation of the capitalistic mode of
production—it abolishes all hierarchies of means and ends, all
teleologies. However, it cannot abolishes excess, which continues
in obsessive moments of production and valorisation. For Bataille,
as homogeneity increasingly imposes itself as the immanent law of
production under capitalism, it threatens to become more and more
disorderly, to run more and more out of control. (Shaviro 1990, 56)
In Neuromaani, there are numerous subtexts, characters, references,
pseudo-references, sources, thoughts and red herrings. eventually, the
reader will also find themselves entangled in the deteriorating language
and structure, different interpretational threads and the multitude of
virtualities. They also become both, uncomfortably numb, and aware
of their own role as the reader, and the way the text is to observe and
comment on this role. What is also amplified is the dissident poetics
drawn from the surrounding culture, normally repressed by the
excess of capitalism. In the context of Neuromaani it is, in fact, these
very poetics, the outsider within, that enables the creation of a virtual
interpretational space separate from the repressing excess—a point of
departure for reading that is roaring instead of repetitive. Here the excess
of the novel becomes something that is exceeding pre-set boundaries
and limitations of thought. The dissident produced in the novel now
becomes part of the reader through the process of actualization from
the virtual that is embedded in the process of reading. This combination
of exhilaration, frustration, exhaustion and being out-of-joint is typical
to excess, or ‘the third meaning’, as Roland Barthes calls it. Neuromaani
enhances these notions embedded in the excess, especially through its
multidimensional actual and virtual structure.
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The novel serves as a memento, vessel and manifestation to all
the layers surrounding intersecting it. It creates a parallel series
for the surrounding conditions, and an amplifier for the outsider
within. This also distinguishes Neuromaani apart from the typically
paranoid undertones of the postmodernist classics. These aesthetics
and poetics which can be understood via the dynamic between
the actual and the virtual present a possibility to create something
that is creative rather than opposing, and yet resistant and resilient
when it comes to the recuperating practices of capitalism. The point
of creating or line of flight lays in the affective relation between the
various actuals and the virtuals. According to Fredric Jameson,
‘[a]lthough the “global world system” is “unrepresentable,” this does
not mean that it is “unknowable”’ (1991, 53). ‘An aesthetic of cognitive
and affective mapping’ is needed to examine critically the processes
exploitation and expropriation (Jameson 1991, 54; Shaviro 1990,
5). It is the task of resistance movements and art to create collective
agencies of enunciation that match the new subjectivity which also
encompasses the inherent in-betweenness and the dissident within. In
this reading, I have aimed to present that, by adding actual and virtual
layers repeatedly upon one another, there just might be enough room
in the affective and literary folds of Neuromaani—or any other literary
work with the same strategy—for the excess and dissidence to build up,
regroup, and eventually, break free.
NotEs
1.
Finnish original:
Muistatko vielä Silvo, kun me juteltiin eilen maanantaina? Kerroit,
että joku mies antaa sinulle käskyjä. Muistatko? Olisi mukavaa, jos
kertoisit meille tästä miehestä, joka komentelee sinua. Onko mies
pelottava? Vai tunnetko sinä olosi turvalliseksi, kun mies puhuu
sinulle?
Gereg.
Kahakka ja Rambo vilkaisevat toisiaan yllättyneinä, kirjoittavat
selittämättömän sanan vikkelästi muistiin. Selitysmallit ja teoriat
alkavat risteillä mielessä. näre tuijottaa herkeämättä Harrietia.
Sanoitko sinä gereg, Silvo? Voitko kertoa meille, mitä gereg
tarkoittaa? Oletko keksinyt ihan itse sen sanan?
Gereg käskee hakemaan äidin asemalta.
Ahaa, siis gereg on nimi? Onko Gereg se mies, joka käskee sinua?
Dissident Poetics, Experimental Excess
123
2.
ei se ole pelkkä käskynhaltija. Useimmiten puhuu mitä sattuu.
eikä aina minulle vaan jollekin toiselle. kaikkea sekavaa. Älyttömiä
väitteitä ja kysymyksiä. sellainen kimittävä pikkuorava. neljäs niistä,
kuopus, suurelle yleisölle tuntemattomaksi jäänyt tuhlaajapoika.
(Yli-Juonikas 2012, 13–14; all translations are by laura Piippo)
Finnish original:
3.
Jos epäilyksesi kohdistuvat isään, siirry lukuun 57. tai sitten
(c) lappuun sisältyy jollekin toiselle henkilölle kohdistettu
koodiviesti, jota minun ei ole tarkoituskaan ymmärtää. Jos koodin
murtaminen kiinnostaa, siirry lukuun 118. toisaalta ei voi pitää
poissuljettuna, että (d) minä kuvittelisin koko jutun. ehkä ko.
merkilliset ilmiöt ovat syntyneet mielessäni ja heijastavat vain
pahimpia pelkojani (tai toiveitani!?!). lue lisää luvusta 103. silti
viime kädessä voi kysyä, (e) onko jutulla oikeastaan väliä. Yhtä
hyvin voisin jättää sikseen koko typerän skitsoilun ja siirtyä
kiinnostavampiin seikkailuihin. kiinnostavampia seikkailuja on
luvassa luvussa 202. (Yli-Juonikas 2012, 433)
Finnish original:
4.
5.
kunpa olisimme ymmärtäneet sopia ‘erimielisyytemme’ vähän
aiemmin [---] kun ei vielä ollut myöhäistä [---] niin paljon tärkeää
jää sanomatta [---] lapsivakoojista [---] aivojen säteilytyksestä
[---] älä soimaa isääsi, hän ei mahda mitään elämänviettinsä
armottomuudelle [---] valkoinen ruoho, pakeneva valkoinen
hengitys [---] ‘taikalamppu’ [---] isän valkoinen korva [---]. (YliJuonikas 2012, 530)
sokeeraavia kuvia ja välähdyksiä tietoisuuden alimmista kerroksista –
rauniokaupunki, tulipatsas h*riso*tissa, yöllä susilaumaksi muuttuvat
mustat k*tajat taloyhtiön pihalla [---] epävakaa mielentila antaa vain
2 vaihtoehtoa: t*kav*semman täy*kä**n p**ku – siirry lukuun 25, tai
k*hoamin*n a****r**sä – siirry lukuun 180. Valinta on kieltämättä
vaikea ja vaatii sinulta eläytymiskykyä poikkeusyksilön sis. maailmaan.
Rohkeutta, ystävä – tulee vain heittäytyä kokemuksen virtaan, etsiytyä
etsijän tielle, k*tkeytyä *hmis**den *h******* (Yli-Juonikas 2012, 77)
Finnish orignal:
suurten toiveiden ja pelkojen milleniumia minä juhlistin kaverieni
kanssa Rio de Janeiron räkäisimmässä merimieskapakassa, koolla
oli koko vanha hampuusijengi small s. A., Perera g. m., delaPaz
R., mayeux R. ja stern Y. 1999 ja kaikilla pyöri mielessä vain
‘Differential regional dysfunction of the hippocampal formation
among elderly with memory decline and Alzheimer’s disease.’
Annals of Neurology 45. S. 466–472. (Yli-Juonikas 2012, 101)
124
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———. Difference and Repetition, translated by P.R. Patton. new York:
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B. Habberjam. new York: Columbia university Press, 2002.
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Lazzarato, M. The Making of the Indebted Man: An Essay on the Neoliberal
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declAssIng ARt: mAnIk BAndYoPAdHYAY
And commUnIst AestHetIcs In IndIA
Rajarshi Dasgupta
Remember Manikbabu’s Madan weaver? He who said how do I work
on the loom with yarns that are bought with Bhuban trader’s money?
How can I betray you? I am getting gout in my joints and legs from
sitting idle. So, I worked on an empty loom, an empty loom.... One has
to do something after all….
—nilkantha Bagchi in ‘Jukti, takka Ar gappo’
(Ritwik ghatak 1974)
INTRODUCTION
The question of culture is a paradox for Indian communists. They play
down their engagements with culture although historically it has been a
great source of strength for their movement. It is why the colonial state
saw them as heralds of ‘dangerous ideas’ despite their small number and
localised presence. This view has hardly changed if the current regime’s
signals are anything to go by. While communist parties are electorally
weak and their armed faction is confined to pockets, they continue to
feature as a major target of ruling party campaigns. However, in doing
so the right-wing shrewdly recognises two facts that seem to elude
the left’s comprehension. The first is that, behind the rhetorical nod
to development, popular politics is moulded today by issues that have
more to do with culture than economics. That is precisely where the
low caste groups are staking claims for recognition and the right-wing
is pitching its Hindu nationalism, with hardly any debate on neoliberal
policy choices. The left’s insistence on economic issues, howsoever
pressing, is unable to create much room for intervention at this level,
calling for attention to culture. nevertheless, the critique of capitalism
also connects to a social imaginary that is crucial to the making of
the nation since independence. This is the second important fact: the
imagination of another India with secular and socialist elements that are
on the back foot but refusing to go away. That is because among other
elements it draws sustenance from the communist idea of an equal and
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Declassing Art
127
just society. In their bid for a long-term hegemony, the left remains a
key opponent for the right-wing forces. Interestingly, in this, they find
unlikely allies among Dalit formations who resent the communist sway
over culture as a variant of upper caste domination they must overthrow.
It is this enduring relevance in the political optics on the culture that
seems to escape the communists, partly due to doctrinaire reasons.
unlike western Marxism, where the political value of culture was
rethought by the likes of Raymond Williams and Stuart Hall following
Althusser and Gramsci, Indian communists remained stuck to an
old school Marxism. Despite exposure to Soviet and Chinese cultural
manoeuvres, most of them could not think beyond culture as an
instrumental aspect and subordinate to economic interventions. When
experiments with culture by inspired sections contested this limited
framing, they met with party apathy and censure from leaders, apart
from rare occasions. The upshot was a division of labour between
activists who organised trade union politics and those who worked
with language, literature and arts. While organising workers and
peasants was deemed essential, engaging with literature and arts did
not seriously count. A mechanical approach that pitted ‘change’ against
‘interpretation’ bred such distrust for culture it effectively blinded
communists to one of their key achievements. What they overlooked
in the process is their own practice of constructing Marxism as a
discourse, its grounding, translation and adaptation to different lifeworlds in certain parts of this country. This blindness partly explains
why communist politics could not spread far because they failed to
recognise how it came to grow roots in the first place. At the same
time, they went so deep where the roots could branch out, it insulated
them against massive global reversals since the late twentieth century.
Ironically, this endurance rested on a practice that dogmatism still
does not allow them to grasp as politics. It, therefore, calls for a critical
reconsideration of how cultural engagements can be understood as
essential to their practice and what are its traces in the communist past.
Our point of departure is to give up on a uniformly universal idea of
Marxism. When variations are no longer subject to authenticity checks,
we can pay more attention to what has departed from the original and for
what reasons. Allow me to suggest here that such moves stand a better
chance of analysis if ‘translation’ is taken up as a concept-metaphor
for thinking about political practice. It helps to map how certain ways
of interpreting reality come to be grounded in different languages
and contexts and how these interpretations gradually fuse into the
articulation of a new discourse. We often ignore what is construed as
Marxi sm in the subcontinent is different in subtle but significant ways
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Humanities, Provocateur
from what the term means elsewhere, for instance, in china or cuba,
let alone european contexts. The move I suggested is precisely useful in
tracking how Marxism came to acquire a distinctive ‘discourse’, taking
a new shape in different pockets of late colonial India. As we know,
initially it came up in parts, with abridged translations of key texts,
circulated from abroad and reviewed in regional languages. Around
this core there gathered a more complex network of ideas in communist
strongholds like Maharashtra, Kerala and Bengal. Here the discourse
practically expanded into an everyday outlook, with immediate links
to the experience, aspirations and preoccupations of the local people
and indigenous society. not surprisingly, this called for complex
negotiations with notions of subjectivity and self-worth, collective
wisdom and narrative traditions, in short, all that was peculiar to these
contexts and alien to Marxism elsewhere. It is this part that I want to
highlight: How such elements came to be accessed and understood,
interpreted and remoulded, in a painstaking process of what we
may describe as a vernacular remaking of Marxism. The recoding of
indigenous society in terms of class-struggle could not have taken place
merely by repeating an abstract treatise remote in time and space. It
needed extensive mining into what Williams refers as structures of
feeling, harvesting motifs from folk tales and mythologies, repurposing
popular tropes of resistance and rubbing together different ideas of
labour and craft, art and politics (Williams 1961). This process is what
we have set out to study which is critical for grasping the distinctive
character of Marxist discourse and the profound impact of communist
politics on culture in India.
There are of course many dimensions to cultural engagements.
A rich body of growing scholarship has been meticulously documenting
these histories in different contexts. In that sense, there is quite a bit of
literature, more so in regional languages, although they hardly speak to
each other (Bhattacharya 1987; Bannerji 1998; Roy 2000; Ghosh 2010).
Despite the rich analysis, therefore, not much of this work tackles the
discursive construction or probe the relation of cultural engagements
with political practice. More specifically, they do not focus on how
these engagements shaped the discourse differently from elsewhere and
the conflicted location of culture in communist practice. These larger
concerns make up the background of our discussion here that is going
to take up a telling example of communist engagement with culture in
late colonial India. I have written at some length about the astonishing
breadth of these cultural engagements which ranged from scholarly
histories of colonial modernity (Dasgupta 2004) to polemics, plays and
popular revolutionary poetry (Dasgupta 2005a). A recent essay of mine
has discussed the efforts at translating key texts like ‘The Communist
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manifesto’, ‘wage, labor and capital’ and ‘capital’ from the first
abridged versions to annotated editions in several Indian languages
(Dasgupta 2019). These texts reveal how often the same persons
working with workers and peasants were working at translations and
writing poetry, rendering the dogmatic division of culture and politics
increasingly problematic to sustain. I realised, however, that I was
missing a critical dimension when I began looking at how communists
created a new kind of art to complement reports on famine and
peasant revolts in early communist publications (Dasgupta 2014a).
One cannot fully comprehend how such exercises were creating a new
Marxist discourse without also grasping how this process of creation
impacted the indigenous habitus in turn. We need to understand the
specific ways in which the cultural terrain was getting transformed, that
could not happen without Marxism, yet which the communists did not
think of naming at the time. That is what I try to capture in the phrase
‘communist aesthetics’ in the title of this chapter.
The phrase is not used here in a strict sense, and it is not limited
to issues of beauty and artistic forms. As noted, these facets are taken
up in a growing body of works, that range from art history to theatre,
film and performance studies, besides literary criticism. I will make
use of insights from them, especially, works that focus on the 1940s
and 1950s. It is a rare period, when P.C. Joshi encouraged artistic
practices—the only communist leader who took culture seriously,
though not seriously enough to call for a theoretical rethinking. The
essay will fleetingly touch upon certain themes of this period such as
the iconography of socialist realism. However, my attempt is to open
the remit of communist aesthetics to a wider conceptual reference,
exploring two specific aspects in the limited scope of this essay. The
first is a move described in philosophical discussions as the aesthetic
turn to ‘everyday’. Simply put, it signals a negation of aesthetic pleasure
in elevated sentiments and wonderful objects normally associated
with beauty and singular experience. Instead, it takes up the dreary
and mundane existence that is lived in ‘anesthetic’ terms and makes it
completely unfamiliar, recasting it with an aura that imbues the ordinary
with strange and intense sensations. The move has close affinities with
the avant-garde strategies of a modernist literary movement in the
colony. I believe it to be a profoundly political aspect of communist
engagements that pulls the meaning of aesthetics back to its roots in
a way not discussed so far. It also helps to underline why the conceptmetaphor of translation can be useful to understand communist politics
and reveals how communists were altering the cultural terrain in the
process. The second aspect I want to underline is the deeply subjective
dimension of cultural engagements. They not only entailed carving
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out a new social perspective but also the critique of one’s own class,
individual history and the representation of one’s practice in profound
ways. let me explain this from another angle. Unlike other political
entities, an account of oneself is very rare in communist narratives.
The reason, as I argued elsewhere, is a manner of self-fashioning that
involves a personal erasure. to be a communist is to overcome the
‘bourgeois’ ego-centric self: to become ‘declassed’ (Dasgupta 2014b).
It is this work of ‘becoming’—a specific manner of self-conduct, that
directs the relation with the world, with others and steers the practice
of representation. It spelled a constant experiment with the meaning
of art and artist: The challenge for art was breaking down the figure of
the artist and the subject in the usual authoritative sense. The challenge
for the artist was to reconfigure art into what it is not—to belong to
the masses and cease to be art. It is this limit-attitude to art and the
turn to everyday that I consider two of the most distinctive aspects of
communist aesthetics in India. We are going to explore them in more
detail in the pages to follow, with the help of perhaps the most iconic
communist author of India, Manik Bandyopadhyay.
THE IMMEDIATE CONTExT OF CULTURAL
ENGAGEMENTS
Let me briefly outline the historical background of the literary works
of Manik Bandyopadhyay. Most commentators see his later writings
as outstanding instances of communist literature that came to be
produced in the course of a momentous cultural initiative taken up in
the 1940s. The latter is known as the progressive literary movement
or Pragati Sahitya Andolan in Bangla, Pragatisheel Sahitya Andolan
in Hindi, Purogamana Kala Saahithya Prasthanam in Malayalam and
Taraqqi Pasand Adabi Tahreek in urdu. It largely grew out of the ‘AntiFascist’ association of writers, artists and intellectuals in India, inspired
by similar associations protesting nazi repression in europe. Initially
a broad platform including liberals and Gandhians, the communists
gave it an added momentum while using it for their own ideological
mobilisation. In the process, it came to produce a new body of socially
engaged writings, led by the likes of Premchand, Krishan Chander,
Rajinder Singh Bedi, Ismat Chughtai, Faiz Ahmed Faiz and Saadat
Hassan Manto in Hindi and urdu, besides the likes of Bandyopadhyay
and Sukanta Bhattacharya in Bangla. At the same time, it saw fierce
and acrimonious debates about committed literature and the ways in
which class perspective should shape creative writing. Much of these
debates were triggered by provocations, incitements and interventions
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from communist critics and writers who tried to show the direction
they wanted for literature to take with their own experiments. The
outcome was admittedly varied, producing fiction verging at times on
propaganda as well as transgressive writings that are hard to box into
tidy categories. While it led to raging disputes even among communists,
such writings and subsequent cultural experiments of the Indian
Peoples’ Theatre Association became critical in taking Marxism to the
ordinary people. The famine and the ‘tebhaga’ movement in Bengal,
for instance, triggered a profusion of radical narratives on poverty and
exploitation, factory strikes and peasant agitation, ranging from posters
and paintings, plays and short stories, novels and even daily news reports
and photographs reaching across the country (Basu 2017; Ghosh 2019;
Sunderason 2020; Bhattacharya 2020). Mainly produced by communist
artists and writers, this body of work became instrumental in achieving
two things: First, as noted, it helped to break down, translate and
reconstruct the discourse of Marxism, directly speaking to the needs
and aspirations of a large number of people suffering in colonial India.
Second, by submitting the discourse to a dialogical process with the
local habitus, its customs and mores, such works turned Marxism into a
compelling perspective for many, including a growing spectrum of the
bhadralok middle class. This is precisely what Manik Bandyopadhyay’s
writings illustrate.
We must remember that the predominant section of political
organisers, leaders and activists hailed from the middle classes:
the madhyabitta-bhadralok, many of them residing in Calcutta and
Dhaka and the district and mofussil towns of Bengal. Although
they hailed from a nineteenth-century formation of mostly uppercaste Hindu absentee landlords, traders and petty collaborators,
the madhyabitta turned fairly heterogeneous by the early twentieth
century. They now included a remarkably wide range of people,
including unemployed youth, indigent clerks and struggling teachers
as well as solvent government officers, successful doctors, lawyers and
petty bureaucrats. All were bound, however, by a common pride in their
educated status and aversion to manual labour (McGuire 1983; Sarkar
1998). Literature and cultural practices enjoyed a key role in the selfconstruction of these people and, not surprisingly, strongly overlapped
with their political domain. It is why the nationalist discourse mainly
took shape through literary writings in the nineteenth century, as
scholars and historians have pointed out. The sphere of creative
writing was thus already a site for negotiating political issues, even if
this connection remained implicit in madhyabitta thinking (Kaviraj
1998; Chakrabarty 2000). Along with this historical background,
the ‘progressive movement’ also owed much to a modernist literary
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movement that took place in the early 1930s. A bunch of new literary
journals such as Kallol, Sanghati, Kalikalam, Uttara and Purbasha
inaugurated a powerful trend of literary experiments that came to
be known as the ‘Kallol’ movement. Their stories signalled a radical
departure from established aesthetic norms by breaking the divide
between ‘public’ and ‘private’ matters observed for long in vernacular
literature as a mark of taste and morality. taking inspiration from
Marx and Freud, the ‘Kallol’ movement broached new themes and
introduced new protagonists, talking about the urban underclasses for
the first time, the difficult life of coal mine workers and the secrecy and
bigotry around sexuality in colonial society. Some of these writings may
read in hindsight a touch naïve and like a sentimental indictment of the
society, but there is little doubt that the movement radicalised both style
and content of Bangla literature in a bold manner. More significantly, it
started a completely new trend with a small number of alternative noncommercial journals owned by poets, artists and writers that created a
new kind of print space and public for allowing literary experiments to
explore more radical directions in the years to follow.
The Kallol movement was soon followed by a set of new journals
that came to acquire a legendary status in the history of Bangla
literature. These included Kabita and Parichay and the first set of
identifiably Leftist journals such as Arani and Pratirodh that played an
instrumental role in the ‘progressive movement’. Besides providing a
site for experimental writing, they regularly published those debates
and exchanges over political, artistic and theoretical differences that
arose before long between Marxist and liberal factions. These debates
included contributions from a new set of Marxist intellectuals such as
Sushobhan Sarkar, Benoy Ghosh, Gopal Haldar and Hiren Mukherjee on
the one hand and formidable liberal intellectuals like Humayun Kabeer,
Buddhadeb Basu and Pramathanath Bishi on the other, apart from other
shades of the intelligentsia. The early communists often turned these
debates into occasions to push the meaning of terms like ‘progress’ and
‘progressive’ interpreting them as a commitment to a materialist view of
history and by extension a class perspective. The disputes grew intense
and acute as some Marxists advanced admittedly reductionist frames
for evaluating vernacular traditions, denouncing respected canons as
‘bourgeois’ and proposing new criteria for a ‘proletarian literature’
in Bengal (Mitra 1980; Roy 2014). In fact, even Marxists like Samar
Sen and Saroj Dutta fiercely disagreed with each other and bitterly
debated over what should be the appropriate writing strategies for
‘progressive’ literature. What became decisive at this juncture was,
however, the emergence of a host of new authors such as tarashankar
Bandyopadhyay, Swarnakamal Bhattacharya, Syed Waleeullah and
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especially, manik Bandyopadhyay (dasgupta 2005b). while theoretical
interventions tried to steer the ‘progressive movement’ with arguments,
these writers came to provide concrete examples of a new literature,
translating the radical influence into authorial techniques and narrative
strategies. manik Bandyopadhyay’s texts were the leading instance of
this corpus, to which we turn further.
THREE WAYS OF READING MANIK BANDYOPADHYAY
Prabodh Kumar Bandyopadhyay was born in 1908. He came from
an educated middle-class family, growing up in different locations
of Bengal Presidency that now lie in Odisha, Bihar and currently
Bangladesh. He was the fifth son of a government officer, an early
science graduate from Calcutta university who became a Kanungo and
rose to become a Sub-deputy Collector. expectedly, Prabodh enrolled
as an undergraduate in Mathematics at Presidency College in 1928. He
wrote his first story somewhat casually, simply to win a bet taken with
friends, turning his nickname Manik into a pen name for the occasion.
This short story, ‘Ataseemamee’ was published in 1928 and drew
considerable attention persuading Manik to consider writing seriously.
two more short stories were published in 1929 and Manik decided to
leave his studies and join the literary world, much to the dismay and
against the wishes of his family. A series of outstanding novels followed
in the span of the next few years that include Dibaratrir Kabya in 1934,
Janani in 1935, Padma Nadir Majhi, Putul Nacher Itikathha and Jibaner
Jotilata in 1936. unfortunately, around the same time, the young writer
was diagnosed with epilepsy, a lifelong ailment that worsened with
years, aggravated by his struggle against penury, alcohol addiction
and mental illness, leading to his untimely death. However, the early
novels had already established him as a powerful author, coming in the
wake of the Kallol movement and pushing creative fiction into radical
and uncharted directions. Before long, critics and the reading public
hailed him as one of the three great writers of mid-twentieth century
Bangla literature, along with Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay and
tarashankar Bandyopadhyay, who helped to reshape the modern novel
in India into what an eminent scholar has come to term as ‘provincial
epic’ (Chaudhuri 2015). Manik’s first collection of short stories,
Pragoitihasik, came out in 1937 and the following years witnessed an
astonishing outpouring of novels and short stories published almost
every year until his relatively early death in 1956. Although he kept
battling with extreme poverty and intense bouts of physical and mental
disorder, Manik joined the ‘progressive movement’ around the turn of
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the 1940s and became a member of the communist Party of India in
1944. He served as a member of the highest board at the meetings of
anti-fascist writers and artists’ association in 1944 and 1945. He died
at the premature age of 48, leaving behind an imposing corpus of 36
novels, 177 short stories, two plays, a few essays and poetry. By then
manik Bandyopadhyay was recognised far and wide as the foremost
marxist author of Bengal if not of India.
This recognition appears in hindsight not without a small share of
misfortune, as it has subsequently led to carving up Manik’s writings
into rather restrictive schemes of reception. Perhaps the most awkward
of them is also the most influential: one approaches Manik with a
definitive threshold between (what he wrote) before and after he
became a Marxist. This scheme allows a curve of evolution in perhaps
what is seen as the author’s ‘consciousness’, understood in terms of the
difference in style, plots and protagonists that came to feature in his
writings over the years. The strength of this scheme lies in offering a
clear-cut sequence that is literally progressive that is affirmed by the
mode of appreciation of a significant segment of leading scholars.
According to them, Manik represents the best of an Indian variant
of socialist realism which is a claim made with persuasion, substance
and sophistication by the likes of Mihir Bhattacharya, among a host
of others (Bhattacharya 2011). At the same time, there is a persistent
unease and sense of anxiety if not censure in this same framework of
whatever Manik had written ‘before’ he became Marxist. The value of
Manik as a Marxist writer could be realised, it seems, only at the cost
of dismissing his writing as wasteful and aimless when he was yet to
become a Marxist. Many erudite admirers of Manik Bandyopadhyay,
even literary critics like Malini Bhattacharya, thus cannot but hold
up the coarse matter and raucous style of his early writings as a
telling contrast to the superiority of his later (class-conscious) prose
(Bhattacharya 1987). Despite the note of valorisation, it is hard to
overlook the crude reductionism built into this scheme that comes
across best in a comment on his characters made by a Marxist scholar:
A good deal of idiots and subnormal characters appear in the early
stories. As against this the characters in the later stories are moved
to vigorous self-activity, making choices, acting decisively, proud
of their strength, skill and wits as complete human beings, resisting
all efforts to dehumanize them. (Mahanta 1989, 297)
Regardless of my difference with this reading, the engagement with
Manik’s characters remains a productive axis to think about the
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politics of his literature. we shall return to it shortly, not only to
argue why plotting such characters is politically important but also
why the later protagonists may not always comfortably fit into agentic
interpretations. They linger with traces of trials and tribulations of
his early characters in no less measure and often betray an acute
sense of suffering. The linear evolution of choice-making actors has
therefore only a very limited and surface traction in reading Manik,
least of all as a politically conscious writer. But before we get there
let me talk about the second frame of reception that remains popular
outside the Marxist circle which is not without valuable insights.
Interestingly, even this scheme splits up Manik into binary segments
for interpretation: an early Freudian phase, followed by a late Marxist
phase. In this distribution, Manik remained heavily influenced
by the writings of Freud, Jung and Adler for roughly the first ten
years of his career. That is when his writing frequently tore into the
hypocrisy and pretension of bhadralok society, while he deliberately
chose odd characters and unusual themes, focusing on psychological
complexities around sexuality as the key subject to explore. The next
phase marked a decisive shift in this scheme from ‘sex’ to ‘economy’ as
the major preoccupation of Manik’s writing, attesting to the growing
influence of Marx. It is not difficult to detect an overlap at this point
with the first scheme of reception. Although limited by a similar
schema, this framework highlights important points, especially two
aspects underlined by commentators like nirmal Kanti Bhattacharjee
(Bhattacharjee 2008). First, it finds in Manik the sense of a fulfilment
of the literary ‘rebellion’ promised by the Kallol movement, bringing
the underclass and marginal people into the foreground of the public
gaze, as the new subjects of the aesthetic and political discourse of
Bengal. In that sense, he presented a matured expression of one of the
tendencies that defined literary modernism in Bengal. Second, Manik
marked a critical turn in Bangla literature from the lyrical mood and
pastoral charm narrated by Bibhutibhushan and tarashankar to what
Bhattacharjee calls the petty and wretched existence of people living
in the villages. Although uneasy with the Freud to Marx sequence, I
find this transition valuable for grasping the manner in which Manik
can be described as worlding the representation of society. It arrested
the readers like never before, with a haunting sense of misery and
desolation that further intensified when Manik’s narratives began to
shift from life in villages to the big city. I suspect it is precisely this
atmosphere of relentless suffering, cruelty, greed and moral violence
that was unbearable for readers who looked for redemption and heroes
in his early writings. A cursory look at the protagonists of his short
stories confirms the lower depths he kept plumbing: beggars, vagrants,
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murderers, drunkards, criminals and depraved characters who
self-destruct. All of them inhabit moral darkness that lent his
first short story collection its name (Pragoitihasik, translated as
‘Primeval’). It is indeed these dreadful characters that her Marxist
critics found ‘sub-normal’ and insufferable. It is precisely such a
netherworld that Manik found worthy of writing about, instead of
the decent salubrious society. Such a society has fidelity, family, hope
and constancy—but nothing of what Manik saw as elementally true
about life and deserving of story. He was drawn to the other kinds. As
he explained
But thieves are very lonely in life. They have no one to call their
own … whatever level their feelings may belong to, whatever harsh
and ugly boundaries might limit their imagination, (the fact is that)
what they feel and imagine are constantly changing and different at
every moment. They think much more than many bhadralok. They
discover many such truths about life that do not even remotely
appear in the prospects of many well educated and cultivated
minds…. There are millions of honest gentlemen in this world who
I cannot write about. Their lives are without stories … the life of a
thief is full of stories. (Bandyopadhyay 1998, 186, translation mine)
Manik’s penchant for marginal characters continued well into his
second short story collection, Mihi o Mota Kahini published in 1938.
However, this was also partly a passage where the liminal lives and
unsettling moments were beginning to seep into mundane middleclass narratives, increasingly unfolding in urban locations, in milieus
typical of bhadralok society. Manik began using habitual passages of
daily existence to suddenly reveal furtive moments of shocking greed,
cruelty and enigmatic acts of insanity. His stories disclosed sinister
sensations lurking in domestic gestures and calculated spite that
wrecked comfortable intimacies, driving home bitter realisations about
life. The narrative strategy shaping in the process is revealed in a short
story we are going to discuss at some length below. In some sense, it
testifies to a discreet conversation taking place between Freud and
Marx in Manik’s writings, rather than a sequence or passage from one
to another. As we shall see, the disquiet and menace were being moored
in the structural logic of classes and individual foibles were turning into
a coded index of transactions between actors who come from different
social strata. The stories of depravity, theft and lunacy were finding
their way into the bhadralok habitus and sensibility.
Before discussing the story that illustrates this conversation, I want
to briefly flag an important point with regard to the trajectory of the
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subject or character in manik. I believe this point intersects with
the third frame of manik’s interpretation, that is yet to be properly
assembled but which has already been gestured by scholars like moinak
Biswas (Biswas 2003). moinak makes a strong case about reading
manik’s characters along a new arc of thinking—what I describe as
the un-becoming of subjects. According to this arc the protagonists of
a narrative travel from the point of being individuals to slowly losing
their status in the narrative as ego-centred, self-contained, authoritative
subjects. This transformation is sometimes staged as a distribution of
subjectivity, where constitutive elements of the key character come to
be exchanged with minor characters. At other times it is facilitated by
the explosion of a larger event, where the masses and the site of their
congregation become the new subject of Manik’s narrative which in fact
mirrors the history in making in this decade. Moinak plots this passage
from the publication of the novel Ahimsa in 1940 through Chatuskon
in 1942 to a sense of culmination in the novel Chinha in 1947. I find
this line of argument extremely productive for a new reading of Manik
Bandyopadhyay, that gives a radically new sense to the meaning of
practice of a Marxist author which is removed from the persuasive and
yet reductionist older framework. I will be drawing upon this line of
interpretation in what follows while modifying its take on writing as
practice and adding a dimension of self-practice I mentioned at the very
outset of the essay. In effect, I will contend that the passage of subject in
Manik also reveals his life as a communist author and how he thought
of writing as a practice—what I describe as ‘becoming declassed’ and
‘declassing art’. It is where the logic of aesthetics intersects communist
life and art, a terrain that is difficult and daunting to tread upon without
trepidations. Perhaps one of the simplest ways we can take the first step
is to describe the relation of the individual to the masses—the crowd or
the bhir, as outlined in one of Manik’s early novels, Amritasya Putrah,
published in 1938. It will not be out of place to remember that this
was a period of severe labour unrest and political congregations were
becoming a common sight in the city of Kolkata:
He joined the crowd after entering the park. Quite a large number
of people had gathered there, around three thousand perhaps. Once
he entered, he saw the peculiar expression of the same characteristic
on every face he could see around him that he noticed about the
meeting from the outside. It was not difficult to guess that some
were there just to pick up a bit of novelty for free on their way back
from office; some have taken a break from aimlessly roaming about
and joined the crowd; some have joined the meeting called for the
country’s sake simply to escape an extreme sense of self-loathing
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and to find satisfaction in (taking part in) a noble deed; some have
come to get their fix from the sense of excitement and exhilaration
at such meetings! (Bandyopadhyay 1998, 271)
Allow me to quickly draw attention to some aspects of this description
before we take up the story I promised to discuss. The first aspect is that
although the passage is about an individual observing other individuals
who have joined a crowd to attend a (political) meeting, the centre of
narration is where the meeting is taking place: the park is the stage
where things and characters are unfolding, for better or worse. The park
as a public site in the city may not stand out as a prominent character
as yet but it certainly features in the cast of Manik’s little theatre, as a
new kind of space where bodies congregate. The second aspect is the
relation of externality that the protagonist inhabits in relation to the
crowd gathered for the meeting, whose political nature does not seem
to matter much. It is clear that he hardly relates to this crowd and in
fact observes them from inside and outside as basically the same—a
motley assembly of individuals gathered by chance from different
walks of life, with nothing consciously bringing them together. The
detail of observations notwithstanding, the subject is distant from
what he describes, with a touch of disdain and even sarcasm. At the
same time, there is the third aspect that reveals a striking density of
emotions and sensations experienced by the subject. What he dismisses
as banal and insignificant is at once thickly inflected with close, almost
forensic, scrutiny of faces, bodies, gestures, expressions, motivations
and emotional landscapes. The overt style of detachment appears to
disguise a fierce passion to relate to the lives of others one does not really
understand. The pursuit of singular truths and intensive lives seem
to have shifted in such passages from marginal subjects to shadowy
people occupying the centre; the exceptional moment is found in the
recesses of every day. This is what the short story Sareesrip illustrates,
as we shall see.
THE CALCULATIONS OF EVERYDAY
According to several commentators, Manik’s stories are mainly analysis
of peoples’ psyches, basically meaning that the acts of his characters
are plotted in terms of their ‘subconscious’, driven by complexes and
obsessions, which explains his debt to Freud (Bandyopadhyay 1996).
This does not convince me but I will let that pass since there are moments
in Manik which do indeed read as pathological. Instead, I would like
to introduce an important modification along the following lines.
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The angularities one often encounters in Manik’s characters and their
actions may very well come across as cases of individual eccentricity
and what is conventionally described as ‘abnormal’. However, if one
looks at them closely, perhaps in a symptomatic manner, it becomes
clear that such characters are actually representatives rather than
exceptional in society. In other words, their afflictions, if we can use
such a term, are characteristic of a more extensive disorder that belongs
to a collective register. In that sense, they stand as Manik’s diagnosis
of everything that is wrong with the way in which collective existence
and relationships are conducted in society. The individual neurosis, so
to speak, is the key to understanding a madness shared by all. What
it means is that there is a move in Manik that takes a cue from Freud
about the complicated ways of the individual mind and turns it around
to shed light on how the collective functions to which the individual
belongs. It is here that we come across a structural logic revealed by the
acts of madness and this underlying logic that characters follow without
being fully conscious is precisely where Manik begins to turn to Marx.
Behind the insanities of human society, according to Manik, lies the
petty calculations of self-interest and exploiting others. The shape of
these self-interests intricately meshes with questions of property and
class. That is what Manik presents us in the short story titled Sareesrip,
a dystopic fable, published in 1939. Let me briefly outline the plot
further.
The story begins with Charu, a widow and heir to the mansion of her
late father-in-law. Charu has suffered from misfortunes throughout her
life; her husband was insane and their only child is mentally challenged.
But Charu had a strong practical mind and managed her property well.
With age, however, she started losing her grip and circumstances forced
her to lease out the mansion to Banamali, someone she grew up with.
Charu was affectionate towards Banamali, who was a bit younger to her,
while he saw her as an object of distant fantasy when growing up. This
memory, however, did not prevent him from usurping Charu’s mansion
later on. Formerly owners, Charu and her son, become practically
dependent on Banamali’s charity. She turns desperate, trying to revive
the old affection, trying to please Banamali, to secure a place in the
mansion and a shelter for her boy. Meanwhile, her younger widowed
sister Paree enters the scene, seeking refuge. Realising Banamali now
owned the mansion, she starts flirting with him. Charu is terrified to
find them in bed one night and feels her place slipping away as Paree
rises in the pecking order of the mansion. Resigned and bitter, Charu
leaves for a pilgrimage, devising a plan to murder Paree with cholera
germs. unfortunately, Charu was herself infected and died soon after.
Her dying thought is worth quoting: ‘there is always an ulterior motive.
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whichever corner, whatever way a person turns, there is always an
ulterior interest behind it.’ This is the moral of Manik’s story. Banamali
grows tired of Paree soon after Charu’s death. As he becomes cold and
distant, Paree loses her sanity. For a while, Banamali enjoys her pathetic
state and her antics of trying to seduce him. But before long, Paree is
moved into the servant’s quarters. A maidservant greets Paree in her
new room. Sympathetic, she has a similar story to tell.
to be honest, I dislike talking about literature in a way that boils
down to plots and characters which is what I just presented. One reason
is that it renders the details, the discrete moments and distractions, the
slight nuances and fleeting imageries redundant, that are so crucial
for reading an author like Manik. There are instants in Sareesrip that
can leave a reader feeling anxiety building up like a ticking bomb in
her gut and then there are moments that tell her how nothing in life is
sacred, all must be consumed and laid to waste. There is the dangerous
fencing in the subtext of dialogues exchanged innocently and there is
the dead weight of unhurried silence at a moment when someone is
begging for words. All these elements, riddles and suspense are missing
from a plot summary. It can obscure how the story keeps holding back
what in fact it wants us to realise desperately. That there is very little
we really know about others and ourselves. Most of all, there is no way
of knowing how the minds of people keep working away, silently and
lethally, behind all the warmth and bonhomie; the ideas of affection,
memory, kinship, blood ties, etc. are all simply sentimental prattle
to comfort us. Human beings are more creaturely than they know or
admit, they are quite similar to predatory animals. The way their minds
work belies all well-meaning logic, it demands chilling metaphors to
show up the reality, like Sareesrip or the snake, the reptile, the title of
the story. The particular use of this metaphor seems to confirm all the
more the intuition of those critics who prefer to read Manik in Freud’s
shadow, dark and driven by sexual mysteries.
Yet the metaphor has a logic after all. It reveals a passage whose
purpose may be unknown to the prey but only until her last moment.
The logic of the entire movement becomes clear when the prey comes
to realise she is the prey. Let us recall Charu’s dying reflection, the
moral of the story: ‘there is always an ulterior motive’—the motor of
the plot, the invisible ubiquitous logic. This ulterior motive, that drove
them to vie for Banamali’s charity which made deadly foes out of
two sisters, was in fact the mansion—its ownership and access—the
concrete, material structure right at the heart of the tale. Once we look
back at the narrative from this perspective, it no longer reads like an
enigmatic tale of perplexing cruelty and senseless breakdown of loving
relations. The plot to murder a sister, the use of sex in exchange, the
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deceit of the man who controls the means—every little move begins
to make sense when the mansion is seen as structuring or to borrow
an old terminology, overdetermining the story. It becomes clear how
manik has plotted a literally hierarchic order of classes (and gender)
with this structure. The dispossessed women are sent downstairs to live
with the servants, while the patriarch, who owns the mansion, lives and
decides their place from above. The two floors of the mansion signal
the place of the principal classes: he who has capital and consumes
and they who must suffer and work at his whim. What the story offers
then is not only a dissection of pathology that coils in the corners of
eccentric minds but also a painstaking document of exploitation that
uncannily follows a class optics. In other words, Sareesrip stages what
I have described already as a conversation between Freud and Marx.
As this conversation progresses, Manik’s writings of this period seem
to become increasingly concerned with individual lives that are caught
up in relations across different classes, negotiating a changing society
and its logic of ruthless exploitation. As the novels of this period bear
out, like Sahartali (volume one in 1939 and volume two in 1940) and
Saharbaser Itikatha (1942), Manik explores the complexities of people
migrating from villages to city, their aspirations of class mobility and
glimpses of bourgeois society and the fraught struggle of urban poor
and labouring lives at the other end of spectrum. At the same time,
works like Ahimsa (1940), Chatushkon (1942) and Pratibimba (1943), as
Moinak Biswas has pointed out, begin to experiment with what we can
perhaps describe today as the deconstruction of the individual subject.
Published in 1942, Saharbaser Itikatha had already mentioned the ideas
of ‘communism’ and, perhaps more significantly, the idea of becoming
notun manush or a new kind of human being in the making. The cold
and grim calculations of everyday appeared possible to overcome for
once. It posed a question of writing differently and becoming a different
kind of writer: the conscious project of a ‘communist’ aesthetics.
The shifts in Manik’s trajectory must be seen with the background
of dramatic social and political changes in Bengal. The Provincial
Legislative Assembly elections of 1937 led to short-lived governments
by the Muslim League and Krishak Praja Party in the province.
However, this limited self-governance proved futile and Bengal was
plunged into the infamous famine and unrest in 1942. While the
circumstances pushed the middle classes to increasingly engage with
politics, this was further intensified by international events, ranging
from the civil war in Spain to the outbreak of World War II. The
conjunction of all these factors gave a larger dimension to the activities
of the ‘progressive’ movement in Bengal. The context felt appropriate to
Marxist ideologues for an intervention in the ‘progressive movement’
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and create an ideological mobilisation of cultural activists. The aim was
to translate the Marxist perspective at a basic level—as a materialist
understanding of all processes, including life, society and history. The
political function of art and literature was to establish this. In 1944, as
Manik joined the communist party, its intellectuals presented a set of
commentaries on writing and its relation to politics. It included a
powerful piece by Manik about how writing relates to labour and how
the writer is basically a ‘labourer of pen’. This is what we take up for the
last part of our discussion, looking at Manik’s theoretical articulation
of the project of communist aesthetics and tracing a tension lodged in
its heart.
DECLASSING ART: THE SUBJECT OF LABOUR
Manik’s tract, titled Kano Likhi (Why I Write) was originally composed
in Bangla, as part of a similar collection published under the same title.
An abridged translation follows further.
There are certain things that cannot be communicated by any
means other than writing. I write to communicate those things.
Regardless of what other writers have to say about this, I have no
doubt that they write for the same reason.
One can think on the basis of mental experiences. I have
experienced much more than many people ever since I was a
child. to say that one is born with talent is bogus. […] The desire
to undergo mental experiences and the ability to withstand their
pressure may increase or decline and this change is an intelligible
process. It can be explained by analysis. I have been able to roughly
understand the history of my own outlook since I was a little boy.
The urge to write is just like ten other interests. It is like solving
a mathematical problem, building a machine or searching for the
ultimate meaning. It is in the same league as playing, singing or
even making money. The ability to write comes from this passion
and the single-minded devotion to learn how to write. […]
I write in order to share a small fraction of the ways in which I
have realized this life. I have come to know what nobody knows in
this world. But I share a common ground with everybody in what
is meant by that knowledge. I share that ground to offer some of
my realizations.
[…] I make [the reader] realize them. He undergoes a mental
experience by reading what I have written…. The writer is successful
when he makes the reader arrive at these realizations. As such, the
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writer is merely a wordsmith, a labourer of pen (kalam pesha majur).
His life is a failure if he fails to make his writing work. It is a bigger
failure than the life of a casual labourer on the street…. (manik
Bandyopadhyay, Kano Likhi in Jugantar chakrabarty 1995, 10,
translation mine)
On the surface of it, Manik’s argument is as follows. The writer is not
a talented genius, different from ordinary masses. There is a process
involved in writing that is based on having experience in life which
runs similar to other activities, often involving passion and devotion.
Anyone can understand it by analysis and one must get rid of romantic
ideas about this process. The writer is a type of worker after all, what
Manik describes as kalam pesha majur or ‘labourer of pen’. Given that
the tract was authored when Manik had joined the party and began
serving in the highest body of its cultural associations, it is fair to
assume that the argument was meant to perform a task of ideological
interpellation. In effect, Manik was urging artists and intellectuals to
forsake their middle-class roots and identify with the labouring classes.
to see oneself as a labourer was to intellectually, if not existentially, join
the perspective of oppressed classes—what communists referred to as
becoming declassed. It was in some sense the formal aim of communist
aesthetics, to weld together work and art, labour and literature, into
something new and political. It is what his Marxist readers would
celebrate in later Manik as truly realist and fittingly radical.
However, allow me to point out a fundamental tension in the tract
which recurrently drives apart the underlying ideas of ‘writing’ and
‘labour’ in Manik’s deposition. In fact, if we strictly follow the sequence
of his arguments, we can discover a fascinating oscillation between
the singularity of what is involved in writing and the universality that
it must be subjected to for making sense. Although it is comparable
to ‘ten other interests’, it requires arduous apprenticeship and rare
passion. The author might share common ground with everybody but
his knowledge of life is original and exclusive. Anyone can write on
the basis of experiencing life but not all of us can take the pressure of
experiencing more and thinking through them. Few have realisations
that are worth sharing and even fewer can make others experience them
through reading what they write. That is the deep meaning of working
with words that anyone who writes may not be able to make work. It
is a failure when it does not work and what is the example that comes
closest to this sense of failure? It is the life of the casual labourer working
on the street. It seems what brings the casual labourer and labourer
of pen on the same plane of conversation in the tract is the shadowy
presence of alienation. The communist writer must identify with life
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that labours without meaning but his own labour has life only insofar as
it recovers that meaning. The meaning that is lost in labour is possible
to recover in writing which is what makes the political project possible
but impossible at the same time to resolve. I believe this impossibility
at the heart of communist aesthetics is something that worked as a
profound realisation in Manik Bandyopadhyay’s later writings. Despite
the urge to create agentic heroes to inspire the movement, and there are
quite a few of such celebrated figures, I find the most memorable tale of
resistance a testament to this realisation. It is a short story published in
1946, titled Shilpi, a word that has been translated as ‘craftsman’ but I
prefer the word ‘artist’. It is in my consideration as close as one gets to a
communist parable of India. The essay will come to a close with a brief
discussion of this story.
The story is about a community of weavers set in the backdrop
of changing times. traditionally, the weavers used to work for the
rich feudal families in the area. They were used to setting their own
terms for the raw material like yarn and the value of goods they were
meant to deliver. They were poor but proud craftsmen, known for the
sophistication and refinement of their skill. Manik takes up the story
when their old way of life is beset with a crisis. The regular orders
from traditional patrons have dried up. The weavers are left without
work. They consider selling their looms as their families begin to
starve. A merchant agrees to employ them at this point and appoints
a middleman, Bhuban Ghoshal, to recruit the weavers. But there is a
fatal clause. The weavers cannot produce their traditional items. The
merchant wants them to weave common towels (gamchha) with poor
yarn. This will fetch him profit from the venture. Most of the weavers
take this as an affront. They refuse and continue to starve. Manik shows
the refusal as their resistance, inspired by the stubborn pride of one
man—Madan, the master-craftsman.
Madan is the protagonist of Manik’s story, he is the shilpi in person,
the figurehead of the community. His wife is pregnant but she continues
to starve with the rest of his family. Madan feels helpless. His body is not
used to sitting idle. His limbs ache with sharp fits of pain as they miss
their toiling routine at the loom. The middleman coaxes and cajoles
Madan, persuading him to take up his offer. But Madan obstinately
holds on to his pride, his reputation as a master-craftsman who never
compromises. After all, he was a mythical figure among weavers. There
is a saying in the area: ‘the day Madan weaves a gamchha’ which amounts
to something like the day sun will rise in the west. Such is Madan’s
standing in the community. He might be poor and starving and out of
work but he will not bend to the bidding of the market. As Manik wrote,
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145
Bhuban cannot comprehend this fervor and arrogance of an
ordinary weaver [like madan]. He feels angry, and perhaps a
bit jealous too … [He] knows if madan agrees, most weavers
will follow suit next day. But [madan] is a willful, obstinate and
strange man. now you see him breaking into laments and crying;
now he turns stubborn and irate. one moment he sobs like a poor
weaver, the next moment he speaks imperiously, as if he is king!
(manik Bandyopadhyay, Shilpi, in Jugantar chakrabarty 1995, 113,
translation mine)
As Madan’s wife takes ill, needing food and medicine, he relents and
agrees to Bhuban’s offer. He feels sad about the shoddy material but
accepts the advance from Bhuban. Madan starts working on his loom
in the late hours of the night. As the sound of his loom reaches the halfasleep, starving weavers, they feel confused, some are outraged at this
lowly betrayal. They gathered in front of his hut the next morning. How
could Madan betray them? Madan answers,
Come inside and take a look. Yes, I have been working, but it is
an empty loom. These terrible fits of pain make me numb from
not working so long. I worked on an empty loom. How can I take
Bhuban’s offer? How can I betray you? The day Madan goes back on
his word…. (Manik Bandyopadhyay, Shilpi, 1995, 115, translation
mine)
CONCLUSION: THE CROWD AND THE EMPTY LOOM
According to Moinak Biswas, Manik’s deconstruction of subjects
reached a kind of culmination with the publication of Chinha, a novel
loosely based on either the violent clashes between police and public
on Rashid Ali day, 12 February 1946 or similar events on 25 november
1945. It marks the explosion of ego-centred subjects and Manik’s
experiment with Bangla novel in a new direction where the streets as the
site of history and the crowd take over as protagonists of the narrative.
I will leave aside the argument about Manik’s experiment with the form
of the novel and draw your attention to the perceptive point made here
about the crowd as the new subject. This is driven home right away as
the novel takes off, where the crowd stands in complete contrast to its
aloof and distant description that we came across before in early Manik.
Chinha begins with the merging of the crowd and the individual, the
crowd as the individual:
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The feeling of disbelief and excitement overwhelms him, as if he
has forgotten what it means to feel terrified and lose all sense of
bearing. […] Such a huge event, such a terrible event, involving so
many people. He is unable to think about it, it does not make sense
to him. Still, the event unfolding between the police and the people
on the main road has taken over his consciousness in such a way
that as if he can feel everything, understand everything. As if he has
himself become the crowd. (Chinha, Manik Bandyopadhyay, vol. 5,
1998, 365)
In some sense, this is the essence of becoming declassed: the fusion of
the individual and the crowd, the becoming crowd of the individual
and the crowd acting like an individual. This exchange of the singular
and collective is what we see unfolding in a different way in the short
story Shilpi. Madan is very much an individual. He is different from the
rest in his skill and ability as a master-craftsman. He is different in his
willfulness, his vanity and temper. One moment Madan appears like
‘a poor weaver’, the next moment ‘as if he is king’. What Madan did
was no ordinary labour. It is art, it gave meaning to not only his own
work but to the work of the entire weavers’ community. His life was a
legend in the locality, he was a part of the folklore, a symbol of artisanal
pride. That is why Madan cannot bend before the market. He is not
an isolated individual; he is that historical individual who must stand
for the collective. But how does he keep the resistance going, how does
he hold on to meaning when capital has come to town? This is where
art and labour must part ways and the artist must invent new political
gestures that can recover the meaning alienated from labour. Where
is this gesture that signals at once the impossibility of communist
aesthetics and the art of making it possible? It is Madan’s work on the
empty loom, the ultimate crucible of communist aesthetics, Manik
Bandyopadhyay’s gift to the future.
The empty loom fittingly returns in a 2016 video by Moinak Biswas,
titled ‘Across the burning track’ (Biswas 2016). It forges a conversation
between the 1940s and 1970s with reference to Manik and clips from
Ritwik Ghatak’s 1974 film Jukti, Takko Ar Gappo. Ghatak plays the
character nilkantha Bagchi in his film who recalls Madan’s empty loom
after he is shot by the police in an encounter with naxalite radicals. As
the video explains, it is an autobiographical citation reflecting Ghatak’s
commitment to political art, if I may add, as a communist filmmaker.
Ghatak’s citation of Manik reveals a third dimension of communist
aesthetics apart from what has been flagged before. There is a profound
sense of crisis that informs the life of communist artists, as Manik and
Ritwik came to embody, along with others like the poet Sukanta and the
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artist chittaprasad. It is a crisis that madan illustrates very well. It is an
existential crisis that becomes inseparable from political disposition as
the commitment to masses guarding against individual compromise,
even at the cost of life. The fidelity to this crisis forms the ethos of
becoming declassed. It is at the same time a crisis for aesthetic practice
that must refuse programmatic coding and which cannot be cast into
formulaic certainty and preconfigured propaganda. It must emerge from
the doubts and vacillations of everyday, wagered and invented every time,
catching everyone by surprise like the sound of Madan’s empty loom.
Here is the practice of declassing art: ‘One has to do something after all’,
says nilkantha Bagchi before he dies in Ghatak’s film. This ‘something’
is at once a denial of ‘art’ and an ironic admission of futility besides the
affirmation of a practice that is impossible to realise but possible as a
gesture. Hence, the parable of Manik Bandyopadhyay.
REFERENCES
Bandyopadhyay, Manik. Rachanasamagra, volume 2, Kolkata: Paschimbanga
Bangla Akademi, 1998.
———. Rachanasamagra, volume 5. Kolkata: Paschimbanga Bangla Akademi,
1998.
Bandopadhyay, Srikumar. ‘Jibane Sangketikata o udvat Samasyar Arop’,
Bangasahitye Upanyaser Dhara, 513–532. Calcutta: Modern Book Agency,
1996.
Bannerji, Himani. The Mirror of Class: Essays on Bengali Theatre. Calcutta:
Papyrus, 1998.
Basu, Priyanka. ‘Becoming Folk: Religion, Protest and Cultural Communism in
the Kabigana of Ramesh Sil and Gumani Dewan’, South Asian History and
Culture 8, no. 3 (2017): 317–337.
Bhattacharya, Mihir. ‘Moment and Movement: People’s Creativity in the
History of Progress’, Social Scientist 39 (2011): 11/12, 41–47.
Bhattacharjee, nirmal Kanti. ‘Manik Bandyopadhyay: A Centenary tribute’,
Indian Literature 52, no. 6(248) (2008): 8–16.
Bhattacharya, Malini. ‘The Class Character of Sexuality: Peasant Woman in
Manik Bandyopadhyay’, Social Scientist 15, no. 1 (January 1987): 46–59.
Bhattacharya, Sourit. ‘Disaster and Realism: novels of the 1943 Bengal Famine’,
Postcolonial Modernity and the Indian Novel: New Comparisons in World
Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham., 2020.
Biswas, Moinak. ‘Beyond the Subject of Difference: On a Persistent Plot in
Manik Bandyopadhyay’, Jadavpur Journal of Comparative Literature 40
(2003): 119–128.
———. Across the Burning Track. Video, Shanghai Biennale. Available at
https://youtu.be/DwxZGL4_nto, 2016.
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chakrabarty, dipesh. Provincializing Europe. Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 2000.
chakrabarty, Jugantar, ed. Manik Bandopadhyayer Sreshtha Galpa. calcutta:
Bengal Publishers, 1995.
chaudhuri, supriya. ‘Provincial epic’, American Book Review 36, no. 6 (2015),
14–26.
dasgupta, Rajarshi. ‘Inventing modernity in the colony: The Marxist Discourse
on the Bengal Renaissance’, Contemporary India 3, no. 1 (January–March
2004): 23–41.
———. ‘Rhyming Revolution: Marxism and Culture in Colonial Bengal’,
Studies in History 21, no. 1 (January–June 2005a): 79–98.
———. ‘Manik Bandyopadhyay: The Word and Work of Bengali Marxism’,
History VII, no. I (2005b): 43–58.
———. ‘The People in People’s Art and People’s War.’ In People’s Warrior:
Words and Worlds of P.C. Joshi, edited by Gargi Chakrabarty, 443–456. new
Delhi: tulika, 2014a.
———. ‘The Ascetic Modality: A Critique of Communist Self-fashioning.’ In
Critical Studies in Politics: Exploring Sites, Selves, Power, edited by nivedita
Menon, Aditya nigam and Sanjay Palshikar, 67–87. new Delhi: IIAS and
Orient Blackswan, 2014b.
———. ‘Capital in Bangla: Postcolonial translation of Marx’. In Capital in the
East: Reflections on Marx, edited by Achin Chakrabarty, Anjan Chakrabarty,
Byasdeb Dasgupta and Samita Sen, 27–38. Singapore: Springer nature,
2019.
Ghosh, Pothik. Insurgent Metaphors: Essays in Culture and Class. Delhi: Aakar
Books, 2010.
Ghosh, tanusree. ‘Witnessing Famine: The testimonial Work of Famine
Photographs and Anti-colonial Spectatorship’, Journal of Visual Culture 18,
no. 3 (2019): 327–357.
Kaviraj, Sudipta. The Unhappy Consciousness: Bankim Chandra Chattapadhyay
and the Formation of Nationalist Discourse in India. new Delhi: Oxford
university Press, 1998.
Mahanta, Aparna. ‘towards an Art of the People?’, Economic and Political
Weekly 24 (1989): 6, 295–299.
McGuire, John. The Making of a Colonial Mind: A Quantitative Study of
the Bhadralok in Calcutta, 1857–1885. Canberra: Australian national
university, 1983.
Mitra, Sarojmohan. ‘Progressive Cultural Movement in Bengal’, Social Scientist
8 (1980): 5/6, 115–120.
Roy, Anuradha. Sekaler Marxiya Sanskriti Andolan (Bangla). Calcutta:
Progressive Publishers, 2000.
———. Bengal Marxism: Early Discourses and Debates. Kolkata: Samya, 2014.
Sarkar, Sumit. Writing Social History. new Delhi: Oxford university Press, 1998.
Sunderason, Sanjukta. Partisan Aesthetics: Modern Art and India’s Long
Decolonization. Stanford: Stanford university Press, 2020.
Williams, Raymond. The Long Revolution. London: Chatto & Windus, 1961.
‘VUlVA’s scHool’:
towARds A PRoVIsIonAl PedAgogY
Sophie Seita
Note on the text: This piece is excerpted and adapted from a 50-minutelong lecture performance titled Vulva’s School: A F*cking Didactic Take on
Experimental Feminist Performance Art, or, How to Read, first presented
at the university of Cambridge in november 2018 and then re-staged
at the independent art space Florens Cargo, in Darmstadt, Germany in
August 2019; and at Jawaharlal nehru university, new Delhi, in January
2020. In all iterations, the performance was accompanied by a slide show
of images and videos. The second and third performance further added
costume, choreographed movement, voice recordings and several props
(a skipping rope, a red suitcase, a red wig, a slate and some chalk and
a ‘my little pony’ figurine).The title is an homage to the late feminist
performance artist Carolee Schneemann, whose lecture-performance
Vulva’s School (1995) imagines an anti-patriarchal pedagogy through
the character of Vulva who learns quickly that she is not part of the
curriculum: ‘Vulva deciphers Lacan and Baudrillard and discovers she is
only a sign, a signification of the void, of absence, of what is not male …’
(Schneemann 1997).
*
An artist in a black kimono, her arms lifted and angled to frame her
head, index and middle finger pressed together in a salute of scare quotes.
Between them a line of text, luring us to ‘Pretend you are not there.’
*
In her 2013 video piece, How Not to Be Seen: A Fucking Didactic
Educational.MOV File, filmmaker and critic Hito Steyerl offers a
satirical take on the instructional film genre in what is a sort of copy
or creative re-imagining of a Monty Python sketch. The video is
structured around five lessons for disappearing. For Steyerl, to become
invisible in today’s media landscape is mainly to become invisible to
cameras. The video thus humorously plays with green screens, airfield
resolution targets and performers dressed as pixels. A computerised
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voice-over chimes, disinterestedly, other suggestions for ‘how not
to be seen’, namely: to camouflage oneself, to become smaller than
a pixel, to live in a gated community, to become a superhero or to
be a woman over 50. Another is simply to walk off-screen. I am here
also reminded of the ultimate act of performance art by the American
conceptual artist Lee Lozano, who made a piece which only exists as a
title and as a commitment. In Dropout Piece, the artist moved herself
out of the art world and into obscurity.
Like the unruly school dropout who no longer wants to play along.
There is, of course, something neurotic about invisibility and visibility
and the theorist Sianne ngai has called paranoia a specifically feminist
affect of our times.1 Steyerl’s video satirically reveals but never teeters on
the edge of that neurosis itself. The 1980s’ synthesisers lend a retro vibe.
We even end a neat dance routine by the pixels. And Steyerl disappears.
to be abstract is often to be illegible. And to be illegible is often to be
invisible. The invisible artist may ‘flutter around the canon’ (BrookeRose 1989, 65) but as such is like a mosquito a disturbance to the
equilibrium of Man, establishing the bite as her oeuvre.2
The feminist and queer artist is usually already invisible. Or, as
eve Sedgwick notes, much violence is hyper-visible and ubiquitous—
it needs no laborious detection—so what does exposure or paranoid
reading add to that recognition (Sedgwick 2003, 143–144)? And to be
invisible as a woman, queer, trans, disabled, or non-white person can
often guarantee safety.
Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about pedagogy, about reading,
how to put into words for myself and for others what a work does
and especially what feminist work does. How to make sense of texts,
without sense-making being another manipulative imposition on me,
the text, my readers or my students but where sense radiates from a
spectrum like distributed particles of light, colour or sound.
And of course, the truth is, I still often don’t know how to read.
What I learnt from Steyerl via humour (sometimes the best kind of
teacher) is that perhaps the format itself can be didactic. Like the mov
file. Can the form of this lecture performance be instructive, too? I
wrote to someone recently that I rarely make mistakes. It wasn’t exactly
a lie but it was partly aspirational, partly a playful provocation. As in,
bring it on.3 Perhaps this ‘bring it on’ is a feminist gesture.
CAN YOU SING
to copy and remake, to re-read, is a signature feminist practice; but the
signature requires repeating in order to be recognisable as such; and given
‘Vulva’s School’
153
that feminism has centuries of materials to catch up on, that scribal scratching
into the groove of an alternative history might take some more time.
don’t despair, my friend tells me in a dream, repetition is a juicy
democracy.
CAN YOU NOT VARY IT
sometimes we repeat things because we want to make them ours.
sometimes because we hope that by repeating we make them different.
Repetition can give a presence.
The supposed familiarity of the feminist gesture is sometimes
pointed out to chide the feminist performer. Perhaps she’s called
Vulva or maybe she’s called A One-trick-Pony, which is her glittery
code name. She is told that sexiness on stage combined with difficult
language is ‘expected’. She is told ‘you don’t need that’, meaning: the
feminist or queer label, the constant critique.
i: hello.
Pony: hello.
i: let’s do that again.
Pony: ok.
i: hello.
Pony: hello.
Pony: different?
i: maybe.
i: i’ve forgotten the instructions.
Pony: that’s sad.
i: it’s not real.
Pony: ah.
it’s an easy gesture, i use it often and expertly
i have no such options with the pony
we could call this pony’s table talk
we all know that animals perform heroic deeds
and ponies are divinatory, they warn of danger (Seita 2016, 123, 127)
*
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In queer time, Jack Halberstam argues, ‘repetition is privileged over
sequence’ (Halberstam 2011, 119). The Queer Art of Failure proposes
a ‘low theory’ as a ‘mode of transmission that revels in the detours,
twists and turns through knowing and confusion and that seeks not to
explain but to involve’ and that consider ‘getting lost over finding our
way’ (Halberstam 2011, 15). I’m deeply attracted to this lure of getting
lost and also deeply scared of it. Theoretically, this is all very well
but practically it sounds a bit like the self-help book a well-meaning
friend once gave me for my birthday. What’s more, how would we
teach the detour?
Maybe this brings us back to form.
Maybe I’m reading too much into this.
Maybe this is just about throwing in a little bit of good old modernist
fragmentation.
the loop of that which was just described or named is endless perhaps
a square is there a square that is not dull what would it take to make
it like it was a knife.
CAN YOU UNDERSTAND ME
In what was perhaps the first-ever feminist lecture-performance,
Virginia Woolf told the students at Girton and newnham in
Cambridge that we think through our mothers when we are women.
today, we would qualify that we may have ‘many-gendered mothers’
(as Maggie nelson via Dana Ward calls them) and that we can all have
other feminist or trans artists as or instead of mothers. to counter the
‘procession of educated men,’ we need other lineages, other pedagogical
strategies. We have never had a vulva’s school.
My thinking about a contemporary ‘Vulva’s School’ has been
influenced by the pedagogy of hospitality offered by feminist magazines
like HOW(ever), HOW2 and Chain, all of which featured experimental
formats like the forum or unusual introductions to works, as ways of
figuring out how to do feminist theory in practice. Their pedagogy was
one of active listening. Similar to Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro,
who set up an actual feminist school at Cal Arts in 1971 (we could call
it an offshoot of Vulva’s School), these magazines set up a provisional
school for poets in their pages.
What does it take to found a school? A school of fish is a critical
mass. A school of fish may seem choreographed but is not.A school of
fish, for Halberstam, is a school of queer learning. As Halberstam puts it
with regard to the Disney film Finding Nemo, ‘Dory [as a queer subject]
‘Vulva’s School’
155
forgets family and tradition and lineage and biological relation and
lives to create relationality anew in each moment and for each context
and without a teleology and on behalf of the chaotic potentiality of the
random action’ (Halberstam 2011, 80). Active forgetting is a queer
tactic. It’s a way to turn away from expected lines.
Up until recently, every talk I would give, every performance, would
be meticulously planned. I would know exactly what I was doing and
where I was going. I was over-prepared. But lately, I’ve started to
explore the creativity, even the lucidity, afforded when you have not
yet worked it all out, when you are not in top form. (I’ve had a pinched
nerve in my neck for three weeks now. How would we read that? Maybe
feminist performance is a form of shouldering. ALWAYS KeeP YOuR
SHOuLDeR tO tHe WHeeL.)
A provisional feminist pedagogy does not promote intellectual
laziness or dilettantism, far from it. It’s rather a serious attempt to
experiment with forms of writing, making and relating that allow us to
think differently. It means setting up situations and phenomenological
conditions that then determine newly what we can think, make or say.
This may entail a certain vulnerability.
WHO DOES AND WHO DOES CARE
A how-to manual for Vulva’s School:
If they say we write in milk, let them have our toxins.4 Tipp-ex is our
new fountain pen. The pupils at Vulva’s School will wield it.
The labour of blanking out what was written before is not new, but
Vulva’s pupils do not need to be new. The gesture of re-, of re-writing,
re-doing, re-making, is a crucial feminist tool. But after graduating
from Vulva’s School, the prefix re- will be an archaeological relic. Always
having had the patriarchal bone to pick, Vulva’s pupils will have other, less
unrelenting nourishments to chew on.
Vulva may be the headmistress, but there shall be no rulers, only
triangle rulers. No straight lines. To think in the manner of Vulva’s School
is to think in tangents, curves, slopes, and angles.
Drenched in correction fluid.
Tipp-ex to erase the ‘tippen’, the typing—but in English ‘to tip’ is to
topple, to tip the scales, to throw off the balance.
Or:
It’s tipping it down
Or:
I’m standing on my tippy toes
Or:
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It’s on the tip of my tongue
Or:
It’s the tip of the iceberg
And the tip is where we take the patriarchal, racist rubbish.
*
In some ways, I have now arrived at a prototype for Vulva’s school.
A prototype is all about the experiment. It’s about trial and error, the
renewed, the modified. It’s about a model. It’s about the provisional.
About making and unmaking types. It’s also about the physical and
material contact of subjects and objects. About what knowledge we
want to impart as scholars, as thinkers, as artists and as writers. And if
we can ultimately separate our identities so very neatly.
This could be a resolution.
Steyerl’s AI instructor advises: ‘resolution determines visibility.
Whatever is not captured by resolution is invisible’.
*
Another artist is seen holding a knife.5 Her eyes are bulging silver balls or
maybe orbs. Shimmering with the threat of patriarchal triumph.6
*
Feminist and queer performance art is often angry, dissident or emerges
from dissatisfaction while its form may be utterly joyful, even exultant.
The feminist killjoy is ‘willing to cause unhappiness’ and refuses to
make happiness her cause, as Sara Ahmed triumphantly suggests
(Ahmed 2017, 258). She is recalcitrant.
Which is fucking didactic. A didactic take is a handling technique.
Grab it.
*
So, my performative lecture is really a series of propositions, maybe a series
of lessons, with the lessons yet undetermined. So, you learn the steps.
*
Two women spin, fast, in sync, and then they’re out of it, ever so tauntingly
close. Four movements to find their shadowy other. Come Out. Figures
‘Vulva’s School’
157
repeat. Accelerate, decelerate. Minimal shifts bring boundless variations,
relations. Of what is turned and returned. Embodied abstraction and
refined complexity. to show Them.7
WHO MAKES WHO MAKES IT DO
Brent Hayes edwards argues that ‘there is something like a queer
practice of the archive’ that celebrates the ‘elusive’ and ‘what can’t quite
be explained or filed away according to the usual categories’ (edwards
2012, 970). Is the elusive necessarily queer? Is to be queer to be elusive?
And do I want that? except abstractly, except formally but not in my
body? Recently, I’ve been ‘trying to figure out how to “have” feelings
in writing. How can the ornamental, the voluptuous, be productive
beyond the sonority of the aphoristic, how can abstraction be other
than the cooler underside of the lush particular?’*
We, as literary scholars, have of course imbibed that form and
content are inextricably linked, various ‘extensions’ (Creeley/Olson) or
‘revelations’ (Levertov) of one another. And yet, our talks and journal
articles hop happily from a to b to c, with maybe some u-turns for kicks
but even those are folded into a nice little argumentative trajectory.
This is where the lecture performance enters stage left, flamboyantly
donning a ruff or jabot, probably no tie.
ACT III: I MEAN WHAT I SAY8
I want to move back in time briefly, to the progenitor of literary and
page-based performance: Gertrude Stein. Another of my teachers of
reading.
In An Exercise in Analysis (1917), the character called Part XXVIII
asks, but without a question mark: ‘Can you understand me’ (Stein
1977, ‘An exercise’, 129). to which Act II replies: ‘I can understand
you very well’ which in turn is picked up by Act III merely rhymingly
spinning the language in a new direction ‘Do you agree with Miss
Crutwell.’ Whoever Miss Crutwell is, she is not in the play.
* I’m citing myself, again. Some would call it self-plagiarising. I call it recycling.
Or being in analysis. So, language can become modular. A form of transference.
Which is all about knowledge. Available at http://www.3ammagazine.
com/3am/little-enlightenmentplays-textual-performances-sophie-seita/
(accessed 3 november 2019).
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Humour undercuts any attempt at psychologising even the most
abstract of characters.
Act II
It was a copy.
Act III
It was a copy.
Act IV
It was a copy.9
One could snicker at this and say, well, is this repetition warranted,
what’s all this sing-song, but when the three copies are followed by
Part XXXVII’s admonition: ‘Do not make a mistake’, I am somewhat
appeased. I remind myself that it is an ‘Exercise in Analysis’ after all.
And all exercise requires repetition.
NOTES
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
Sianne ngai has suggested that ‘confrontation with complicity becomes
the specific form “paranoia” takes in women’s writing’. See ngai (2001,
7–8).
I here wish to acknowledge that I have been inspired by my former
student Desmond Huthwaite who wrote an essay titled ‘How to Bite:
experimental Women Writers and their teeth’; a how-to guide to a new
feminist aesthetic: an aesthetic of bite.
See Ahmed (2017, 267). I also want to thank Raphael Lyne for telling me
about Bring It On (2000), dir. Peyton Reed, written by Jessica Bendinger,
which subsequently made it into this lecture performance.
See also Riley (2000, 104); Robertson 2016, 19–30).
It’s perhaps not surprising to find so many knives in feminist art; most
notably in Martha Rosler’s Semiotics of the Kitchen (1975), but also twenty
years later in Patty Chang’s Melons (1998).
See Maya Deren, Meshes of the Afternoon (1943).
See Anne teresa De Keersmaeker, Fase, Four Movements to the Music of
Steve Reich (1982).
This and the previous sub-headings are from ‘An exercise in Analysis’ and
‘Four Saints in Three Acts’ (1927), in Stein 1977 (119–138 and 440–480).
Stein 1977, ‘An exercise’, 131.
‘Vulva’s School’
159
REFERENCES
Ahmed, sara. Living a Feminist Life. durham and london: duke University
Press, 2017.
Bring It On. dir. Peyton Reed, written by Jessica Bendinger, 2000.
Brooke-Rose, christine. ‘Illiterations’. In Breaking the Sequence: Women’s
Experimental Fiction, edited by ellen g. Friedman and miriam Fuchs, 55–71.
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989.
edwards, Brent Hayes. ‘The taste of the Archive’, Callaloo 35, no. 4 (2012):
944–972.
Halberstam, Jack. The Queer Art of Failure. Durham and London: Duke
university Press, 2011.
ngai, Sianne. ‘Bad timing (A Sequel): Paranoia, Feminism, and Poetry’. In
Differences 12, no. 2 (2001): 1–46.
Riley, Denise. ‘Milk Ink’. In Selected Poems, 104. Reality Street, 2000.
Robertson, Lisa. ‘toxins’. In 3 Summers, 19–30. toronto: Coach House Books,
2016.
Schneemann, Carolee. Vulva’s Morphia. new York: Granary Books, 1997.
Sedgwick, eve. Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity. Durham and
London: Duke university Press, 2003.
Seita, Sophie. ‘My Little enlightenment: The Plays and textual Performances
of Sophie Seita, interviewed by David Spittle’, 3:AM Magazine, 29 May 2017.
Available at http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/little-enlightenmentplays-textual-performances-sophie-seita/ (accessed 3 november 2019).
———. ‘Pony: Five tableaux’, The White Review 16 (2016): 119–131.
———. Objects I Cannot Touch, Video, 2014.
Stein, Gertrude. ‘An exercise in Analysis’. In Last Operas and Plays, edited by
Carl Van Vechten, 119–138. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins university Press,
1977.
———. ‘Four Saints in Three Acts’ (1927). In Last Operas and Plays, edited by
Carl Van Vechten, 440–480. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins university Press,
1977.
Steyerl, Hito. How Not to Be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational .MOV File,
Video, 2013.
weAPonIsAtIon oF tHe BodY In goldmAn,
BlAIR And AlmAdHoUn
Eyal Amiran
As Paul Virilio has shown, military visualisation technologies such
as radar, satellite photography and laser-guided munitions, and their
extensions in facial recognition, traffic and crime prediction algorithms
and geo-location services, have increasingly been used to image and
identify the body. Digital media, broadly understood, is related to and
indeed part of weaponry. What is the place of the body in the aesthetics
of cybernetic optical regimes, to borrow from De Certeau (Goldman
2017, 53), and how does art concerned with digital ideas of the body
today relate embodiment to new media’s new world theatre? Achille
Mbembe argues that capital, and not politics, determines the value of
the body in the age of Big Data (as though, to anticipate, there can be
data without politics, capital without bodies).
The computer does not see persons but statistics, patterns, physical
objects: As markets themselves are increasingly turning into
algorithmic structures and technologies, the only useful knowledge
will be algorithmic.
Instead of people with body, history and flesh, statistical
inferences will be all that count. Statistics and other big data will
mostly be derived from computation. (Mbembe 2016)1
For Grégoire Chamayou, drone warfare is distinguished from earlier
battlefield logics where the warrior is close to or, as in the case of the
kamikaze, actually is the bomb: ‘Whereas the kamikaze implies a total
fusion of the fighter’s body and weapon, the drone ensures their radical
separation. The kamikaze: My body is a weapon. The drone: My weapon
has no body’ (Chamayou 2013, 84). Hence, the suicide bomber presents
an answer to drone warfare by re-taking personal death onto herself or
himself, in theory, as a counter to the disavowal of personal involvement
and responsibility built into drone warfare. This formulation seems
intuitively right but preserves the Hegelian dynamic of actors and
objects. Chamayou’s distinctions treat the body as a physical object
located in space and not also as a concept, a psychological reality, a
figure in a larger cultural logic. understood in this larger way, the
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body does not divide into subject and object, either here or there, and
instead is connected to the new reality of media-weaponry: it does not
separate warring parties but is the ground where they meet. That is
how the body has been seen by new literature, such as I consider here,
that examines the body’s relation to new media weaponry. The new
aesthetic work I read here understands the body through discourses
of weaponisation, the move away from thinking about weapons as
discrete tools and towards understanding the process that makes any
part of the social world serve the interests of war and war on behalf of
these interests, leading to the dissolution of an us and them, here and
there, safe and sorry.2
The term ‘weaponisation’, which has come into vogue in the last
three years, was introduced in the 1950s by Werner von Braun (Kelly
2016). Weaponised memes poison democracies with disinformation,
writes journalism and media professor Michael niman (2019) in
truthout.org. Afghan miniskirts are the weaponisation of nostalgia,
says a September 2017 article in Ajam Media Collective (Shams).
WikiLeaks ‘not only dropped’ her stolen emails, ‘they weaponized
them’, said Hillary Clinton on the new Yorker Radio Hour.3 Russian
kompromat is understood to be more than ‘weaponizing damning
evidence to blackmail a target’ (Davidson). Steve Bannon ‘weaponized
Breitbart’, says Fox News—as though Breitbart had been anything
but a weapon to begin with (Fox News 2017). ‘Do they disrespect the
mind or are they in need of a political tool to weaponize the culture
wars?’ television reporter Bill Moyers asks Princeton’s Joan Scott.
‘I think it’s both’, says Scott.4 This formulation appears to preserve an
instrumental and grammatical relation between actors and objects, but
in reading digital-age art that meditates on the arrival of weaponisation
as more than a catch phrase, weaponisation, along with the discourses
of securitisation and monetisation which it resembles, replaces cultural
objects with processes, first among them the process of making things
into a process. unlike monetisation, however, which recalls the Marxist
transformations of objects in the service of capital and characterises
the neoliberal age, weaponisation as an idea answers the metaphysical
aesthetics of digital media. It promises to be the apotheosis of cultural
processes, their logical extreme, a claim encouraged by the seeming
transformation of objects into data in digital media. Important as
Deleuze and Guattari’s deterritorialising schizophrenia has been as a
way to understand the transformation of the world under capital, its
fluidity is pretty viscous—it, too, preserves an instrumental relation
between objects that are made to connect with each other as the power
plug fits only the socket, the pizza box only the pizza (in Anti-Oedipus).
Whether the claim for the pervasive weaponisation of the data age can
Weaponisation of the Body
165
be separated from other economies or is borne out ‘in fact’ is not my
question; I ask rather what assumptions new media art makes and what
vision of the social world it produces, when it instances weaponisation
as a digital phenomenon. The art I study here shifts its aesthetic to a
world where any object is a virtual weapon, by which I mean with Pierre
Lévy that it has the potential of transformation for harm, and where the
environment itself is weaponised, made a theatre of war produced by
the metaphysical aesthetics of new media.
Conceptually, the challenge to instrumentality goes back to Paul
Virilio’s analysis of the cultural place of weapons. Martin Heidegger
in the ‘World Picture’ essay argues that science, with its research
methodologies—by implication tools, including weapons—produces
the world as an object to be manipulated by human agency and so
separates humanity from the world (57–66); Marshall McLuhan
in ‘The Medium is the Message’ largely agrees, arguing that tools,
including weapons (one of his examples is the gun), extend and so
revise the human. This argument takes a decisive turn in Paul Virilio’s
idea that the cultural object is no longer a thing but a process that, in
a nod to traditional conceptions of action and of things, is predicated
on systemic instrumentality. Instrumentality remains, but only just, in
the wake of instruments, even though the instruments have turned into
processes. Hence, instrumentality today is a kind of instrumentality
without instruments, a functionalism without actors. In the aesthetic
arguments I study here, digital media are seen to reproduce a vertiginous
relation between images and objects that reflects the perpetual war of
the social world. Any cultural object is a weapon, and no object can be
seen apart from weaponisation. This weaponisation of anything in the
digital age threatens to erase the instrumental relation that objects have
had since the world image came to be.
In Agon (2017), which fuses poetry, critical theory and image in
hybrid form, Judith Goldman explores the weaponisation of everyday
life. The book is published in print by The Operating System Press but—
as Katherine Hayles argues about neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon
(My Mother Was a Computer 117–142)—could not exist as an art form
outside the new media age which is its subject.
1 ❘ ❘ ❙ ia Bugs Bunny weaponizes a hot barb ❚❘ ❙ 2 ❘ ❘ ❙ er’s towel A se esaw
❚❘ ❙ 3 ❘ ❘ ❙ too ❚❘ ❙ 3a ❘ ❘ ❙ easily weaponized, ❚❘ ❙ 4 ❘ ❘ ❙ banana peel ❚❘ ❙ 4
❘ ❘ ❙ Kool Aid ❚❘ ❙ 4a ❘ ❘ ❙ a set-up operatio ❚❘ ❙ 4b ❘ ❘ ❙ nalize weaponized
windo w, ❚❘ ❙ 5 ❘ ❘ ❙ defenestration ❚❘ ❙ 5a ❘ ❘ ❙ Silent premises of ❚❘ ❙ 6 ❘ ❘ ❙
everyday lif ❚❘ ❙ 7 ❘ ❘ ❙ e weapons possible ❚❘ ❙ 8 ❘ ❘ ❙ pain-platform compa
❚❘ ❙ 8a ❘ ❘ ❙ ratively underpollut ed ❚❘ ❙ 8b ❘ ❘ ❙ spectral arsena ❚❘ ❙ 9 ❘ ❘
❙ l linked to its dol lar ❚❘ ❙ 10 ❘ ❘ ❙ ablation ❚❘ ❙ ❘ ❘ ❙ ❘❚❘ ❙ ❘ ❘ ❙ ❘ 1 ❘ ❘ ❙ hurt the
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Humanities, Provocateur
body ❚❘ ❙ 2 ❘ ❘ ❙ on the bar ❚❘ ❙ 3 ❘ ❘ ❙ s of the cage ❚❘ ❙ 3a ❘ ❘ ❙ but the cage
alread y ❚❘ ❙ 3b ❘ ❘ ❙ a weapon ❚❘ ❙ 4 ❘ ❘ ❙ ‘we’ weapon ❚❘ ❙ 4a ❘ ❘ ❙ ized intimacy
subvoc al ❚❘ ❙ 5 ❘ ❘ ❙ does tear gas (also ❚❘ ❙ 5a ❘ ❘ ❙ ) weaponize tears ❚❘ ❙ 6 ❘
❘ ❙ weaponized dummy ❚❘ ❙ 7 ❘ ❘ ❙ hand multiple bright ❚❘ ❙ 8 ❘ ❘ ❙ yellow
warning ❚❘ ❙ 9 ❘ ❘ ❙ signs all over the ❚❘ ❙ 10 ❘ ❘ ❙ packaging between ❚❘ ❙ ❘
❘ ❙ ❘❚❘ ❙ ❘ ❘ ❙ ❘ 1 ❘ ❘ ❙ weaponized elevator in act ❚❘ ❙ 1a ❘ ❘ ❙ ion films ❚❘ ❙ 1b❘ ❘ ❙
mecha nical persecuting ❚❘ ❙ 2 ❘ ❘ ❙ world ❚❘ ❙ 3 ❘ ❘ ❙ linked to the species
through ❚❘ ❙ 4 ❘ ❘ ❙ its motor style ❚❘ ❙ 5 ❘ ❘ ❙ Vertigo of the persecuti ❚❘ ❙ 6 ❘
❘ ❙ ve structure ‘Organs ❚❘ ❙ 6a ❘ ❘ ❙ exoscopically represented, growin ❚❘ ❙
7 ❘ ❘ ❙ g wings for inter ❚❘ ❙ 7a ❘ ❘ ❙ nal persecutions’ Where man ❚❘ ❙ 7b ❘ ❘ ❙
does no longer encounter ❚❘ ❙ 8 ❘ ❘ ❙ himself or: Where man in fact ❚❘ ❙ 8a
❘ ❘ ❙ encounters himself Your mirror ❚❘ ❙ 9 ❘ ❘ ❙ image weaponized as
som ehow ❚❘ ❙ 9a ❘ ❘ ❙ tal ler than you ❚❘ ❙ 10 ❘ ❘ ❙ Sees self (Goldman
2017, 13)
There is a great deal going on here extraordinarily together—the
elevator image, the hand and wings, crying and seeing signs—but
to render some of the hybrid words, numbers and barcodes of this
passage into selective sentences, including my own punctuation for this
purpose, and to narrow the focus:
Bugs Bunny weaponizes a hot barber’s towel. A see-saw too
easily weaponized, banana peel, Kool Aid, a set-up operationalize
weaponized window, defenestration. Silent premises of everyday
life . . . hurt the body on the bars of the cage, but the cage already
a weapon, ‘we’ weaponized intimacy . . . does tear gas (also)
weaponized tears[?]. Warning signs all over the packaging.
(Goldman 2017, 13)
In a world of tear gas and bars, gas to make you cry and gas you cry
about, bars of cages and the digital barcode that circulates consumers
and their objects of consumption, Kool Aid is a weapon, cartoon banana
peels are weapons, windows are weapons and the very space in which
these so-called objects, really processes, take place is also weaponised.
Hence, continuing the carceral bar motif, ‘toothbrush as Shiv, Or cake
with a file baked into it’ (Goldman 2017, 14). In prison especially, all
objects may be closer than they appear, put to innovative uses, and
in the world as the prison house of capital, objects are always already
processes that serve capital. unlike Deleuze’s increasingly specialised
objects, however, weaponisation gives an unexpected multivalence
to things. If in Marx commodity objects are valued as they may be
acquired by capital and cannot be read outside their place in commodity
chains—desiring machines, as Deleuze and Guattari then call them in
Weaponisation of the Body
167
Anti-Oedipus—in the post-classical economies of the current capital,
objects are not captured or exchanged so much as instrumentalised
in service of the larger culture-capital machine whose functioning
transforms its targets into further processes. The result is an aesthetic
of a new non-solid state, a not merely accelerated world of processes
but one in which every thing is also working as another thing, seen
from the other angles of industrial process, what Goldman, after Lacan,
calls a ‘Vertigo of the persecutive structure’ (Goldman 2017, 13). It is a
vertiginous world ‘[W]here man does no longer encounter himself or:
Where man in fact encounters himself. Your mirror image weaponized
as somehow taller than you’ (Goldman 2017, 13).
The body remains the key contact for these weaponised transactions.
It cries, is held in prison, drinks the Kool Aid it has made, brushes its
teeth and eats the cake. The world is outside us but also in our image,
except bigger and in charge of us, as in the dash cam images of police
cruisers and CCtV.
1 ❘ ❘ ❙ hit the lock but ❚❘ ❙ 2 ❘ ❘ ❙ ton on remote ❚❘ ❙ 3 ❘ ❘ ❙ to ma ke alarm
❚❘ ❙ 3a ❘ ❘ ❙ chirp check status of your ❚❘ ❙ 4 ❘ ❘ ❙ character service ❚❘ ❙
4a ❘ ❘ ❙ weaponized character lock ❚❘ ❙ 4b ❘ ❘ ❙ feature using key frames
❚❘ ❙ 5 ❘ ❘ ❙ frame fun ction ❚❘ ❙ 5a ❘ ❘ ❙ weaponized parergon ❚❘ ❙ 6 ❘ ❘ ❙
weaponized Laugh track or auxil ❚❘ ❙ 6a ❘ ❘ ❙ iary weaponized cut ❚❘ ❙
6b ❘ ❘ ❙ weaponized pan ❚❘ ❙ 7 ❘ ❘ ❙ weaponizing off-screen ❚❘ ❙ 8 ❘ ❘ ❙ profilmic area in fr ❚❘ ❙ 8a ❘ ❘ ❙ ont of camera record ❚❘ ❙ 9 ❘ ❘ ❙ ing field
the realit ❚❘ ❙ 10 ❘ ❘ ❙ y or situation ❚❘ ❙ 10a ❘ ❘ ❙ happening in fro ❚❘ ❙ ❘ ❘ ❙ ❘❚❘ ❙
❘ ❘ ❙ ❘1 ❘ ❘ ❙ nt of the camera po ❚❘ ❙ 2 ❘ ❘ ❙ sition and angle what’s ❚❘ ❙ 3
❘ ❘ ❙ in the picture establish ❚❘ ❙ 4 ❘ ❘ ❙ es understan ding ❚❘ ❙ 5 ❘ ❘ ❙ of
what is seen ❚❘ ❙ 6 ❘ ❘ ❙ weaponized viewfinder ❚❘ ❙ 6a ❘ ❘ ❙ steadicam or dash
cam ❚❘ ❙ 7 ❘ ❘ ❙ weaponized playback ❚❘ ❙ 7a ❘ ❘ ❙ photosh op to weaponize a
photo ❚❘ ❙ 8 ❘ ❘ ❙ stock photo ❚❘ ❙ 9 ❘ ❘ ❙ weaponized compression, glitch
❚❘ ❙ 10 ❘ ❘ ❙ dot-density ❚❘ ❙ ❘ ❘ ❙ ❘❚❘ ❙ ❘ ❘ ❙ ❘ 1 ❘ ❘ ❙ weaponized username
❚❘ ❙ 1a ❘ ❘ ❙ weaponized password ❚❘ ❙ 2 ❘ ❘ ❙ Go back to a ❚❘ ❙ 2a ❘ ❘
❙ nother saved state and ❚❘ ❙ 3 ❘ ❘ ❙ choose ano ther dia ❚❘ ❙ 3a ❘ ❘ ❙
logue option ❚❘ ❙ 4 ❘ ❘ ❙ weaponized blockchain, side ❚❘ ❙ 4a ❘ ❘ ❙ chains
or entry chains wea ❚❘ ❙ 5 ❘ ❘ ❙ ponized locking out, remote ❚❘ ❙ 6 ❘ ❘ ❙
locking weaponized activation, de ❚❘ ❙ 6a ❘ ❘ ❙ activation, reactivation
❚❘ ❙ 6b ❘ ❘ ❙ granting managed access ❚❘ ❙ 7 ❘ ❘ ❙ so-called ‘protection’
softwa ❚❘ ❙ 7a ❘ ❘ ❙ re weaponized plug-in ❚❘ ❙ 7b (Goldman 2017, 22)
to select a simplified line of thought again from the hybrid words,
numbers and barcode images: ‘What’s in the picture establishes
understanding of what is seen. Weaponized viewfinder, steadicam or
dash cam, weaponized playback, photoshop to weaponize a photo . . .
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weaponized username, weaponized password . . . granting managed
access, so-called “protection” software, weaponized plug-in’ (Goldman
2017, 22). Here the emphasis is on digital manipulability of representation
(Photoshop, but also the dash cam that police routinely explain does not
tell the whole story, for example), while the notion of the ‘weaponized
plug-in’ suggests that digital adaptability revises Deleuze and Guattari’s
desiring-machines model. Goldman modifies the general concept of
weaponisation by showing the fungibility of cultural objects, in part
under the policing pressure of the bar code. Multiplying resistance, with
De Certeau, Agon offers a total attack on the culture of bar codes. There
can be no compromise with the weaponised land. The point may rely
to an extent on the fact that the book that makes it is in print, offering
a kind of resistance to the fungible digital world it critiques, but it is not
anachronistic: print images of barcodes are still barcodes, seen by people
but read only by the light gun. In Agon, the gun will read the image.
For Goldman, if we stick to the instrumental aspect of the growing
weaponisation of the image, its increasingly deadly use in global
military culture, we repeat the technocratic and territorialising
mindset that is the problem to begin with. to believe in weapons in
the wake of weaponisation (when anything is a weapon) or to believe
in instruments and actors (when any circumstance is weaponised—the
cage itself is a weapon) is a defensive move that requires critique. It
shores against ruin—it believes in ruin. It suggests that certain objects
and their use are the problem, preserving the human from them, when
it’s the processes that weaponise the world that lead it down its wellknown downward slope. The body is part of the new process, not apart
from it, as in Chamayou’s formulation.
That is a lesson of David Blair's digital video Wax (1993, released
as a feature film in 1991) which connects the weaponisation of media
to what is for Blair its metaphysical logic.5 For Blair, an American
media artist now working in France, new media and its target are
conflated vertiginously in the metaphysical paranoia of colonial
necropolitics, a paranoid fantasy that is made all too real in modern
human history. Blair’s Waxweb, a hypermedia work based on his
1992 digital video Wax, or the Discovery of Television Among the
Bees, belongs to what Jeffrey Shaw has called ‘the field of digitally
expanded cinema’ (‘Introduction’, Shaw and Weibel 2003, 21).
Waxweb consists of ‘more than 1 million picture, hypertext, and 3-D
links’, a network of 1,600 shots arrayed in what Blair describes as ‘a
25-section matrix unique to each shot . . . The perceived boundaries
between the movie and the surrounding composition will dissolve’,
continues Blair, ‘sending the movie into extended time, as if it were a
temporary world’ (Shaw 2001, 183). The same can be said about Blair’s
Weaponisation of the Body
169
Wax which is my focus here, an 85-minute video that mixes live-action
sequences, found footage and computer-generated art (digital theorist
lev manovich helped create the digital effects). Wax had a theatrical
release and was broadcast on the internet in 1993.6
The film is narrated by its protagonist, Jacob Maker, played by Blair
in a trance-inducing monotone, and includes the story of Maker’s
ancestors, who brought Mesopotamian bees to the west, as well as about
the invention of new photographic media and its use to correspond with
the dead. The early 1990s Maker plot is the main through line of the film.
Maker writes code for target acquisition in military flight simulators in
Alamogordo, new Mexico (Image 1). He also keeps a hive of bees, like his
english grandfather James Hivemaker who had imported bees to england
Image 1: David Blair, Wax (1993). Jacob Maker’s X-shaped gunsight for
virtual target acquisition in flight simulators.
Source: David Blair.
from Mesopotamia to replace dead english bees. One day at work
Jacob Maker feels there are souls under the virtual targets he designs;
he visits the bee hives and hears voices in them. Mesmerised by the
bees, he travels by means of a simulated flight in his head to the place
of his birth, his grandfather’s statue garden called the ‘Garden of eden’
in Abilene, Kansas, where he learns that there are dead souls in the
sky who target the living, including him. Over the next few days, his
bees insert a crystal into his head—the bee tV—through which he
sees and travels across space and time. In the ‘Garden of eden’ in
Abilene he learns that he is Cain and that he has the ‘X-shaped gun
sight’ on his forehead. He also sees the ‘new world’ in space where
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the bees have settled: ‘it was the land of the dead’. The bees receive
new bodies that form an alphabet in the language of Cain; walking
in the new Mexico desert near trinity Site (the site of the first test
detonation of an atomic weapon in 1945), looking like an astronaut
in his beekeeping suit, Maker sees the dead alphabet in strings across
space (Image 2). Maker enters a cave in the desert and sees wax from
which new bodies are made for the future dead. He leaves his body
Image 2: Blair, Wax (1993). Strings of letters in the language of the dead lead
to the Planet of the Dead.
Source: David Blair.
behind, dead on the floor of the cave. That is his literal, physical body in
the film, and yet he will become one with a bomb and return in another
body: the body is not exempt from fungibility under the media regime
of weaponisation. travelling in space, he visits the city of the dead
and the Planet of television, the closest (according to the narrator)
one can get ‘to the eye of God’. The narrative dwells on details of the
city of the dead, its architecture, interiors and public spaces which are
computer-generated images in the film, as though to reiterate the nearbourgeois-fication of the chain of substitutions, which, if a part of the
foreign insect-world, comes off as domestic and adapted to the body.
‘now I was Cain’, he says; he must kill to return to earth and get his new
body. Cain, notably, was the founder of the first city, as well as the first
murderer in Biblical history. Jacob returns as a missile by television to
Basra, in Iraq in 1991 and using his X shape destroys an Iraqi tank and
its occupants and is reborn as twin women, Alel and Ziva, researching
corn genetics in new Mexico. The bees, he says, have promised a peace
of 1,000 years.
Weaponisation of the Body
171
Wax reproduces a metaphysical fantasy familiar in digital
embodiment, but this time as farce. It borrows the wax from descartes’s
second meditation as an image for the body in relation to the mind
(descartes 1984, 20–22). In the wax, one cannot distinguish body and
form from each other, the dancer from the dance (see also Aristotle’s
1984, II.1). Blair’s figures for the mind as microcosm are the letter X
and the line of alphabets of which it is part (Image 3): he finds the image
in the Biblical origin narrative, on the forehead of the first twin, and his
protagonist Jacob Maker connects it with the Biblical Jacob, who also
crosses his twin and takes his place.
Image 3: Blair, Wax (1993). Jacob Maker returns as the X-shaped from the
Planet of the Dead to find a target in Iraq.
Source: David Blair.
Blair invokes the Platonic cave where the wax that forms future human
bodies is found. The reference is also to Plato’s Timaeus, where God
creates the world by combining elements ‘like the letter X’ (36b) to form
the globe.7 In On the Name, Jacques Derrida connects Plato’s X with the
mental wax, a space that enables thought but is neither intellectual nor
sensible: it is ‘that which “prepares” the Cartesian space, the extensio of
the res extensa’ (109). In Derrida’s reading, Plato imagines a structure,
the ‘khöra’, that rejects the distinction between sensible and intelligible,
body and thought, and is neither (92, 96, 110) but rather separates and,
in so doing, defines the two (103). It is not a receptacle or container
for being (95) but, like a virtual object, is ‘“something,” which is not a
thing’ (96). In fact, it is ‘so indeterminate that it does not even justify
the name and the form of wax’ (116). This virtual wax, Derrida writes,
is a requirement of the cycle of becoming (Derrida 1995, 103; see also
Ann Weinstone 1997, 86).8 Maker’s vision of the world as a closed and
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recursive system draws on this virtual potential for bodies which is
also echoed in the cave fantasies of digital media theory of Wax’s time,
only for Blair the consequences are not liberatory, creating a brave new
digital world, but dire.
For Blair, the consequences of digital metaphysics are figured in
paranoia on the one hand (the notion that the world is enclosed in
oneself, a version of one’s hard drive) and in the gulf war on the
other (the actualisation of Virilio’s vision of war by remote control,
where thought magically kills), linked by the weaponisation of space
and the body-image. the relation between code and image, bomb
and target, is also represented in the video in the circular migration
and colonisation from the old world to new mexico and from earth
to the moon. maker must go to the Planet of the dead, become the
linguistic X of cain, return to mesopotamia, now Iraq, in a new body
and kill two soldiers for the cycle of substitutions to work. once he
discovers the bees, he abandons his wife and lovemaking, he says,
the physical body, and is absorbed into the virtual cosmic cycle. His
body mediates and makes possible the transformation of space into
place, virtual into geographical and vice versa. But it’s no saving
grace that maker cannot equate code with world without his bodily
mediation, that he must leave his body behind twice in the film,
leaving his wife and then his body in the cave. In maker’s paranoid
fantasy, the code is already a weapon, is weaponised, without the
body’s mediating function, but in reality, he needs the body to make
his fantasy real, both to think his bee-thoughts (thoughts of ‘being’)
and as a vehicle for his new language. If for Blair we can weaponise
only in fantasy—at the expense of the body—a madness of the
technocratic world, the physical death in Iraq and the colonised new
world testify to the real world effect of that fantasy, from which it
cannot be separated.
Blair produces a fantasy of a cosmic, dead and virtual language of
the world that requires human participation to become actual. This
vision appears as a dangerous projection of desire, a death-wish to be
a bomb and to abandon the human world. Its narcissism, the flipside
of paranoia, as Freud argues in his reading of Schreber, sees everything
as an aspect of oneself, from space conquest and the conquest of the
new world in new Mexico to the production of atomic weapons and
the videogame logic of the 1991 Gulf War.9 But to move from the
grammar of the textual archive to the physical world it animates,
is to make the mechanical nature of writing a genetic motor for the
universe.10 The warrant for it comes by a metonymic substitution,
as though the automatic and the mechanical were already material.
Weaponisation of the Body
173
despite the deterministic equation between code and weapon in the
paranoid vision Blair exposes, a determinism somewhat overwritten by
the quirky eclecticism of the metaphysical language of the dead, this
work anticipates the fungibility between anything produced by the
language of cain—any object produced by language, already associated
with murder—and weapons, and sees this weaponisation of language
as the fundamental quality of the mediated world.11 The metaphysical
fantasy of WAX shows the colonial and imperial ideology produced
or reproduced in digital coding, which targets a territory, replacing
bodies with code and code with bodies, the old world with new and
the new with old. In Blair we can avoid weaponisation if we get rid of
metaphysics or possibly language altogether, but short of that the world
itself is weaponised by media. Because we cannot divorce weapons
from media, territory from language, we already speak the language of
Cain and live in the land of the dead.
The third, a more lyrical interpretation I consider here of the
weaponisation of the world through new media culture is Ghayath
Almadhoun and Marie Silkeberg’s The Celebration, a hybrid 9-minute
video that juxtaposes the destruction in Syria today with the bombing
of Berlin in 1945. It comprises text from Almadhoun’s poem ‘The
Details’ together with video and sound. Almadhoun is a Palestinian
Syrian poet living in Sweden; Silkeberg is a Swedish poet and translator.
The Celebration combines Goldman’s argument that anything is a
weapon and the world is made a process for weaponisation with Blair’s
indictment of deterministic and circular predatory culture and its
paranoid logic. The poet bought a house ‘overlooking the war’, he says:
[I] arrived at frightening truths about poetry and the white man,
about the season of migration to europe,
and about cities that receive tourists in peacetime and mujahidin
in wartime,
about women who suffer too much in peacetime, and become fuel
for the war in wartime.
The poet abandons poetry for the war, but finds that the war is inside
his poem and the poem inside the war. In The Celebration, an 8-second
aerial footage of bombed-out Berlin in 1945 loops and repeats, taking
us again over the ruins, making a ‘rewind’ sound each time it restarts.
Five seconds of Chopin’s nocturne Opus 9 no.1 plays when the footage
runs. Almadhoun reads his poem ‘The Details’ aloud in the Arabic
original over the video and the translated english text floats over the
images as the poem is read. The text of the poem appears gradually, as
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though it were being typed during the screening. It clearly comes after
the video, in the video.
The poem begins: ‘I was exploring the difference between revolution
and war when a bullet passed through my body.’ The poet’s body
refutes the modern distinction between contemplation or art and
action, aesthetics and politics. In the world of the poem, which is our
world or civil war, we cannot be either kamikaze or voyeur, either the
bomb or poetic code but must be both at the same time. This theme
continues throughout the poem.
This city is bigger than a poet’s heart and smaller than his poem, but
it is big enough for the dead to commit suicide without troubling
anyone, for traffic lights to bloom in the suburbs, for a policeman
to become part of the solution and the streets a mere background
to truth. (Almadhoun 2012, 24)
The poem’s world is, like Blair’s, inverted onto itself: the city is smaller
and larger than the poet who contains it, it is natural in its artificiality,
its violence is restorative and its transience enduring. This is because it
embodies a new modality of fungible energies understood to be possible
in digital aesthetics in a way not traditionally explained in theories of
circulation and return (see Wark 2004). This world is also, in a way, one
that heralds the extreme violence it must endure later in the poem, of
self-disciplining: the dead kill themselves, traffic lights and policemen
become ‘part of the solution’—the slogan for social change and progress.
Poetry is sometimes in its own mind timeless, an antidote to time,
while the photograph is set in time, a snapshot of an historical moment
that cannot be altered. When in The Celebration the text appears
gradually, floating above the images, it occupies the position of the
viewer or of the camera flying over the city. It is both outside the time
of the video and associated with the repetition of historical events that
is part of the message of the work. As the video repeats, it does so from
the perspective of the text that floats above it and that comments on it
and on history. This juxtaposition is key to the work which connects the
mediated reproduction of the event with the repetition of history. The
rare short video of Berlin recalls today drone photography such as we
have seen, for example, of Homs in the wake of Syria’s civil war. The
point is not that history repeats itself, that Homs repeats Berlin or Syria
europe or that periods of peace, like tourism, can alternate with periods
of mujahidin but that, as the poem discovers, tourism and the mujahidin
are co-constructed, each the obverse of the other. From the drone’seye perspective of media, recalling, as Chris Malcolm has pointed out,12
Benjamin’s angel of history, we perceive not the reversibility but the
Weaponisation of the Body
175
simultaneity of the Renaissance and of the Inquisition, of Rimbaud’s
poetry and the slave trade, of Foucault and of AIds:
Throw away the Renaissance and bring on the inquisition,
Throw away european civilization and bring on the Kristallnacht,
Throw away socialism and bring on Joseph Stalin,
Throw away Rimbaud’s poems and bring on the slave trade,
Throw away Michel Foucault and bring on the Aids virus. (Almadhoun
2012, 27)
Simultaneity, or perception of the pervasiveness of destruction as a
constituent element of construction, is not a function of new media,
in this case digitised video footage. But here, the ability to loop back
an aerial view of destruction demonstrates a consciousness of history
disavowed by, for example, Heidegger.
Throw away Heidegger's philosophy and bring on the purity of the
Aryan race,
Throw away Hemingway's sun that also rises and bring on the
bullet in the head,
Throw away Van Gogh's starry sky and bring on the severed ear.
Throwing or being thrown is, ironically, Heidegger’s characterisation
of the human condition—but it is his racism and white universalism
we got anyway. Through the logic of weaponisation we can say that the
tourist is already a fighter, the poem already the war. each aesthetic
object, each aspect of civilisation we prize and each object of horror or
aspect of civilisation we abhor, are each other’s other side, co-present
in the ongoing civil war, the war inside a weaponised culture that
is also the culture of weaponisation. That is something that floating
above the ruin in a video loop shows, reinforcing the ‘details’. From
the air, we are the weapon, like Blair’s weapon. From the air our body
is a weapon, as well as a target for weapons. From the air, Goldman
might say, the air itself is a weapon. The ruins of Berlin and Homs
are interchangeable, though Berlin kept more of its roofs than did the
suburbs of Damascus, as Almadhoun notes in an interview (ArabLit
2014). We see more than the effects of the bombing, which is over
when the tourists return.
This view of history is produced by the interpenetration of media,
like Blair’s digital paranoia, when the words float above the landscape
like weapons that see the other side of things and the voice of the
author owns this world. ‘Does tear gas (also) weaponize tears?’ asks
Goldman.
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Humanities, Provocateur
❙ 3 ❘ ❘ ❙ linked to the species through ❚❘ ❙ 4 ❘ ❘ ❙ its motor style ❚❘ ❙ 5 ❘
❘ ❙ Vertigo of the persecuti ❚❘ ❙ 6 ❘ ❘ ❙ ve structure ‘organs ❚❘ ❙ 6a ❘ ❘ ❙
exoscopically represented, growin ❚❘ ❙ 7 ❘ ❘ ❙ g wings for inter ❚❘ ❙ 7a ❘
❘ ❙ nal persecutions’ where man ❚❘ ❙ 7b ❘ ❘ ❙ does no longer encounter
❚❘ ❙ 8 ❘ ❘ ❙ himself or: where man in fact ❚❘ ❙ 8a ❘ ❘ ❙ encounters himself
The answer is Yes: weaponisation as it is understood in the age of
digital media is the condition of every aspect of the experience, all an
extension of the body. Man—the blame resides in patriarchal history
and white universalism—does not encounter himself because he is no
longer the referent for things; instead, he encounters himself because
he cannot be separated from things:
Just as if you are eating your beloved’s fingers, or suckling from an
electric cable, or being inoculated against shrapnel, just as if you are
a memory thief, come, let’s give up poetry, exchange the songs of
summer for gauze dressings and harvest poems for surgical thread.
(Almadhoun 2012, 26)
Songs and gauze: these are not opposites but different aspects of the
same thing, the poet both tourist and fighter. Then pen is not mightier
than the sword, it simply is the sword, and the sword the stylus pen
that writes ‘Man’s’ history, for Almadhoun as well as for Blair. not
weapons, then, that threaten the body, but weaponisation of the body,
the sense that a word mediated by Blair’s digital metaphysics throws us,
as Goldman writes, into a ‘vertigo of the persecutive structure, “Organs
exoscopically represented, growing wings for internal persecutions,”
Where man does no longer encounter himself or: Where man in fact
encounters himself ’ (Almadhoun 2012, 13).
NOTES
1. I have argued that the idea that people appear as bare-life or as physical
bodies to Big Data plays an important role in the imaginary of digital
culture (Amiran 2018).
2. In de Certeau’s cybernetic society, as Goldman says, ‘the strategic system
of “technocratic rationality” produces all space—“There is no longer an
elsewhere”—and yet in doing so “defeats itself ”’—giving rise to numerous
strategies of resistance . . . ‘his description anticipates the blurring
and reciprocal constitution of the physical and virtual in the world of
ubiquitous computing’ (Goldman 2017, 53). See Certeau (1984, 40–41).
3. Clinton: ‘They [WikiLeaks] not only dropped them [stolen emails], they
weaponized them.’
Weaponisation of the Body
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
177
‘new Yorker Radio Hour,’ episode no. 100, interview with david Remnick,
16 september 2017. In an interview with terry gross, clinton said email
leaks from her campaign [chairman John Podesta] were ‘weaponized into
negative stories’ by Russian agents and wikileaks. Interview with terry
gross, ‘Fresh Air,’ nPR 9/18/17.
‘In the Age of trump, a chilling Atmosphere.’ Interview with Joan scott.
By Bill moyers. moyers & company, 18 october 2017. Available at
http://billmoyers.com/story/academic-freedom-age-trump/ (accessed on
12 december 2020).
see mccaffery’s essay on this little discussed masterwork of the late
twentieth century.
‘Cult Film Is a First On Internet,’ according to Markoff ’s article in the
New York Times. Blair estimates the audience of the film to have been
about 50 viewers (telephone conversation with the author, 2001). It was
broadcast on 23 May 1993.
God combines the elements ‘into two parts which he joined to one
another at the center like the letter X, and bent them into a circular form,
connecting them with themselves and each other at the point opposite to
their original meeting point’ (36b).
As Weinstone writes:
In the Timaeus, Plato writes of a ‘receptacle,’ a chora, a matrix, or a plane
from which mimetic forms come and go. Plato likens this receptacle
to a mother and the source or the spring to the father. The receptacle
is ‘formless and free,’ predifference, preidentity. It is ‘an invisible and
formless being which receives all things and in some mysterious way
partakes of the intelligible’ [Timaeus 1178]. The matrix is a hybrid of mind
and something that might be understood as sublime, or subtle, matter.
Investing code with sublime life, VR becomes both receptacle and source.
By ingesting code, the user ‘recovers’ from the condition of mimesis. (86)
In a 1994 email message to the author, Blair referred to the Gulf War as
the ‘Golf War’; he confirmed it was not a typo. For a relevant discussion of
Daniel Paul Schreber as a proto-theorist of the virtual see Roberts.
For the claims that have been made ‘for digital algorithms as the language
of nature itself ’ and for the world as a ‘universal computer’, see Hayles
(2005, 15–30).
David Golumbia has argued that language, violence and weaponry are
increasingly intertwined in the age of digital revolution.
In lecture notes shared with the author (uC Irvine, 23 April 2016).
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markoff, John. ‘Cult Film is a First on Internet.’ The New York Times, Monday,
24 May 1993, C3.
Mbembe, Achille. ‘The Age of Humanism is ending.’ Mail & Guardian
(Johannesburg, South Africa), 22 December 2016. Available at http://
intercommunalworkshop.org/achille-mbembe-the-age-of-humanism-isending/?print=pdf (accessed 12 December 2020).
McCaffery, Larry. ‘Interview MS. Found on a Floppy Disc: Some Reflections of
“Processed narratives” and David Blair’s Wax, or the Discovery of Television
Among the Bees.’ Available at http://www.spinelessbooks.com/mccaffery/
wax/ (1993) (accessed 12 December 2020).
McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. nY:
McGraw-Hill, 1964, 1965.
niman, Michael I. ‘Weaponized Social Media Is Driving the explosion
of Fascism.’ Truthout.org, 5 April 2019. Available at https://truthout.
org/articles/weaponized-social-media-is-driving-the-explosion-offascism/?utm_source=sharebuttons&utm_medium=facebook&utm_
campaign=mashshare (accessed 11 May 2019).
Plato. The Dialogues of Plato. 2 vols, translated by B. Jowett. nY: Random
House, 1892.
Roberts, Mark S. ‘Wired: Schreber as Machine, technophobe, and Virtualist.’
In Experimental Sound & Radio, edited by Allen S. Weiss, 27–41. Cambridge,
MA: MIt Press, 2001.
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the Latest Salvo in the War on terror.’ Ajam Media Collective, 6 September
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media, edited by Peter Weibel and timothy Druckrey, 110–111. Cambridge,
MA: MIt Press, 2001.
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Wark, McKenzie. A Hacker Manifesto. Cambridge, MA: Harvard university
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FReeIng tHe ImAge And cInemAtIc JUstIce:
non-PARtItIoned AestHetIcs In kAmAl
AlJAFARI’s RECOLLECTION
Heidi Grunebaum
For many years, I have been collecting Israeli fiction films shot in Jaffa
as early as 1960. These are films in which Palestinians are disappeared,
yet also exist at the edge of frames, visible in traces. Preserved also is
a city; alive again in moving images, its gradual destruction over the
decades chronicled film by film. From the footage of dozens of films
I have excavated a whole community and recreated the city. Though
out-of-focus, half-glimpsed, I have recognized childhood friends, old
people I used to say good evening to as a boy; my uncle. I erased the
actors, I photographed the backgrounds and the edges; and made the
passers-by the main characters of this film. In my film, I find my way
from the sea, like in a dream. I walk everywhere, sometimes hesitant
and sometimes lost. I wander through the city; I wander through the
memories. I film everything I encounter because I know it no longer
exists. I return to a lost time.
—kamal Aljafari (2016)
The poor image is a rag or a rip; an AVI or a JPeG, a lumpen
proletariat in the class society of appearances, ranked and valued
according to its resolution. The poor image has been uploaded,
downloaded, shared, reformatted, and reedited. It transforms
quality into accessibility, exhibition value into cult value, films
into clips, contemplation into distraction. The image is liberated
from the vaults of cinemas and archives and thrust into digital
uncertainty, at the expense of its own substance. The poor image
tends toward abstraction: it is a visual idea in its very becoming.
—Hito Steyerl (2012, 33)
In his film Recollection, Kamal Aljafari’s aesthetic of ‘cinematic
justice’ claims and reconstellates the historical particularities
of Israel/Palestine. Released in 2015, Recollection is a cinematic
intervention that explores, amongst other things, what it may mean
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181
to free the image to imagine non-partitioned futures. In it, Aljafari
deterritorialises the image and sets it to work on different grounds:
creating space, quite literally, for a heterogeneous many, to imagine a
plurality of people and predicaments within the same cinematic space,
the same filmic territory. Cinematic justice, Aljafari’s concept, is a
move and a movement by which the image is freed from its mooring
in a weaponised aesthetic field recalibrating the relationship between
aesthetics and politics.
One of the trilogy of films entitled The Jaffa trilogy, Recollection is
set in the Mediterranean port city of Jaffa in Israel which is the artist,
filmmaker, a Palestinian citizen of Israel and resident of Berlin, Kamal
Aljafari’s hometown. Created from hundreds of hours of archived
film footage, Recollection is repurposed from some 60 Israeli feature
films. The Israeli feature films are mostly from the bourekas genre,
a popular B grade film genre featuring Mizrachi—Arab and north
African Jewish—actors, all shot in Jaffa between the 1960s and 1970s.
In the opening sequence, Aljafari discloses his aesthetic approach to
the film. One views an assemblage of scenes from different bourekas
films in which the actors vanish before our eyes, digitally removed from
the original film footage. In an outdoor scene from the 1973 hit Israeli
musical comedy, Kazablan, the actors fade away before our eyes leaving
nothing but rubble and roads. David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s founding
prime minister, is seen walking in an orchard and then—with no small
irony, wishful thinking or nod to one possible meaning of cinematic
justice—disappears from the screen. The sequence alerts the viewer
that what will remain in the frame after the opening title will be the
backdrop of the sequences from which the actors are erased.
Source: Frame from recollection, Kamal Aljafari (2015).
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what had been in the background of the images in the fiction films
becomes the gritty foreground in this documentary: roads, alleys,
houses, buildings, rubble, ruins, abandoned portside warehouses, nonactors who had been watching the film shoot from a window or balcony
or walking past near the edge of the frame or peering around a corner,
all these come to be discerned in the blurry images on the screen. In
the case of a man caught on camera walking across the frame and out
again, it is the only visual record that exists of Aljafari’s uncle which
he stumbled upon whilst he studied frame after frame of hundreds of
hours of film rushes. That fleeting scene of the blurred figure of the
man who is his uncle is brought back into the film again and again, for
its duration.
Reworking the archival and visual footage to create a cinematic
poem that ‘frees the image’ from ‘cinematic occupation’ (Hochberg
2017), Aljafari describes his aesthetic practice of ‘cinematic justice’ as
‘something quite magical only possible in cinema.… By erasing the
actors I could move freely in the image [to] liberate this place, liberate
the image … (Aljafari 2016). The contemporary weaponisation
of regime-aligned aesthetic fields relies on the power of visual
identification to constitute their subjects.1 For aesthetic fields to be
weaponised, they must draw from the conceptual categories that
underpin them, including the deployment of discursive formations
in which populations, communities and groups are imagined. In
this, the disciplinary field of demography works crucially to produce,
identify and call up a concept of majorities and minorities which
align with the same categories of and categorical distinctions between
nationality, citizenship and non-citizen subjects. not ironically, for
Palestinians, as well as for Sudanese, eritrean and other African
asylum-seekers in Israel, there is no clearly demarcated category for
non-Jewish refugees ‘as such’ in Israel’s demographic discourse or
legal apparatus.2 Indeed, the Israeli state is continuously haunted by
its anxieties about ‘demographic threats’ and the need to maintain
a Jewish majority, whatever that might be, for its ethno-nationalist
project to be sustained.
In a weaponised sensorial field that seems to privilege visuality,
then, what does it mean to free the image? How might this be different
from ‘moving freely in the image’? Aljafari removes the actors but he
also removes the Hebrew film credits. In this, he loosens the image
from its filmic implication in the double erasure of Palestinians, ‘firstly
in reality and then in cinema’ (Aljafari 2016). Whilst this recollects
the historical and ongoing predicament of Palestinians, it does much
more; and this is where the film performs some of its most crucial
operations: It opens a cinematic space in which multiple predicaments
Freeing the Image and Cinematic Justice
183
and subjects implicated in the impossible conjuncture that is Palestine/
Israel are recalled in ways that point to the possibilities to reimagine
a different kind of political subject opened by a reconstellated or
perhaps, differently weaponised, aesthetic field. If the double condition
of Palestinian erasure (in reality and in the fiction films) is evoked
in Aljafari’s digital removal of the actors, so are the predicaments of
Israel’s other ‘others’, Arab and African Jews. The actors erased from the
bourekas films arrived as immigrants to Israel from Arab and African
lands in the 1950s and 1960s; as are the contemporary predicaments
of the many who undertake the perilous, increasingly deadly crossing
over the Mediterranean Sea from Libya, turkey, Morocco and other
coastal areas of north Africa in the hope of remaking life in conditions
that sustain life.
Set in Jaffa, Recollection is Aljafari’s search for his hometown as it
was before his birth. Pre-war Jaffa, like many of the 500 Palestinian
towns and villages depopulated and destroyed in the war for Palestine,
ceased to exist as it had been before the war. As Daniel Monterescu
(2015) and Gil Hochberg (2017) point out, Jaffa’s story is also different
from those of other Palestinian urban centres in Israel/Palestine as it
had been through a major process of growth and modernisation in the
two decades prior. Before Jaffa became a war zone and was annexed to
the municipality of tel Aviv, the Mediterranean port had grown into
a modern urban centre with a working port and a population that had
tripled in 25 years to 71,000 people. Jaffa had become, as Hochberg
reminds, ‘the urban commercial and cultural centre of Palestine—and
the home of most local Arab newspapers prior to 1948’ (2017, 537).
In november 1947, Jaffa found itself within the un partitioned
territory allocated to the future Jewish state. From partition until the
end of the war, it became a town in which Jewish and Palestinian
soldiers and militia waged a devastating urban war. From 71,000 fewer
than 3,000 Palestinians remained in the conquered city whilst the
Manshiyeh quarter of Jaffa next to tel Aviv had been bombed out of
existence. A ‘mixed city’ as many describe it, a port town open to the
Mediterranean and its worlds and experiencing an accelerating process
of gentrification, Jaffa is also known as Umm al-Gharib or ‘Mother of the
Stranger’ (Monterescu 2015, xi). At a time in which Arabic has officially
been relegated to a second-class language in Israel, Jaffa’s other Arabic
name evokes the historical irony in which exile and return; banishment
and welcome are entangled: concepts once so central to a Jewish ethical
imagination—deformed by Jewish ethno-nationalism and its statealigned religion—are far closer to, and truer of, a Palestinian ethical
imagination and, in the long shadow of the Atlantic slave trade, closer
to an African diasporic one also.
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In many of the digitally-retouched sequences that become
indiscernible as having been unrelated sequences in Aljafari’s film,
foregrounding the extent to which the post-1948 urban ruins of Jaffa
were a preferred feature film location in Israel. In the early 1950s, the
Palestinian ruins that were Jaffa soon became the preferred film location
for Israeli cinema as it was in the process of establishing itself and as it
created new national narratives for the new Israeli national imaginary
(Aljafari 2016; Shohat 2010, 119). With the new state’s mission to
produce a spatial, aesthetic and discursive territory congruous with the
corresponding and increasingly hegemonic strand of political Zionism
concerned with all things ‘demographic’, Palestinians of historic
Palestine were made absent presences.3 Whilst this is an enduring
existential and political condition it also indexes an irrepressible
anxiety that has never ceased to haunt the Israeli state. For the denial
of Palestinian collectivity was a founding principle of Israeli statehood
asymmetrically harnessed to its corollary denying ‘the historicity of the
Jewish diaspora’ (Raz-Krakotskin 2011; Zraik 2003) which brings me to
think about the bourekas films more pointedly.
Source: Frame from recollection, Kamal Aljafari (2015).
A genre of Israeli cinema panned by film critics and loved by Israeli
film-going audiences (Shohat 2010), bourekas films were mainly comic
melodramas and musicals produced in Israel, primarily between the
1960s and 1980s. The films characters tended to portray ethnic tropes
and ethnic ‘types’ based on stereotypes of Mizrachim, Arab and north
African Jews who had recently arrived in Israel (Shohat 2010). These
stereotypes were shaped by Zionism’s hierarchised and racialised
conceptions of civilisation, ideas of the european enlightenment which
had been unattainable fictions for Jews in europe before they come to
settle in historic Palestine from across europe, Russia and the Hapsburg
Freeing the Image and Cinematic Justice
185
empire both to colonise Palestine, as well as to escape murderous antisemitic persecution.4 The bourekas films portrayed Mizrachim not as
complex and rounded individual characters but as social stereotypes
that drew from the Orientalism of the state and Western discourses
on Africa and the Middle east. Mizrachim were depicted variously as
good-natured, stupid, lazy, simple characters or as conniving, thieving,
violent and criminal ones. The political rhetoric of Israeli colonial
racism was ubiquitous, as ella Shohat demonstrates citing Ben-Gurion
calling Moroccan Jews ‘savages’ and Golda Meir declaring that Arab
Jews were ‘coming from another, less developed time’ … prompting
her to ponder whether it was possible ‘to elevate these immigrants to
a suitable level of civilization?’ (2010, 106). In Shohat’s discussion of
bourekas films, she cites a journalist from Israel’s still extant newspaper,
Haaretz writing about the newly-arrived Arab and north African Jewish
immigrants in full throttle ‘civilizational clash’ mode in the face of:
‘Immigration of a race we have not yet known in the country,’
whose ‘primitivism is at a peak,’ and ‘whose level of knowledge
is one of virtually absolute ignorance, and, worse, who have little
talent for understanding anything intellectual.’ These immigrants
are, [the journalist] continues, ‘only slightly better than the general
level of the Arabs, negroes, and Berbers in the same regions. In any
case, they are at an even lower level than what we knew with regard
to the former Arabs of eretz Israel.’ ‘These Jews,’ he goes on, ‘also
lack roots in Judaism, as they are totally subordinated to the play of
savage and primitive instincts.’ They also display ‘chronic laziness
and hatred for work,’ and ‘there is nothing safe about this asocial
element. (Shohat 2010, 206)
Kazablan, the film of which footage is digitally recut and introduced
in the opening sequence of Recollections is a classical film musical in
the bourekas genre, remains the highest grossing smash hit Israeli
film of all times. Directed by Menachem Golan (1973) the film is
set in Jaffa and tells of a Mizrachi man from Morocco, Kazablan
(named after the Moroccan city, Casablanca) who falls in love with an
Ashkenazi Jewish woman, Rachel whose parents come from Poland.
Her family rejects Kazablan (on racial grounds). A conflict ensues
after Kazablan is suspected of theft of money from Rachel’s house,
and is arrested, although later he is cleared. In the end, Kazablan reunites with his (Ashkenazi) woman and redeems himself from his
‘condition’ of Arabness, previously synonymous with criminality and
violence, to become a ‘proper’ citizen—a word etymologically linked
to the French term, propre with its implication in moral discourses
of hygiene, cleanliness and self-possession. As a cinematic lesson in
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Israeli civics, there is an important analogy made between becoming
an Israeli by becoming whiter, Ashkenazi. The staging of identification
demographically comes full circle in this cinematic genre that produced
a national imaginary as a closed field in which its internal others are
incorporated and assimilated.
In the bourekas films, the action takes place inside ruins, yet the
films have no avowed relationship to the historicity of the ruins.
Indeed, the sub-plot about the threat of evictions for the Mizrachim
of Jaffa in Kazablan, is as silent on the history of forced displacement
of the Palestinians of Jaffa as the genre is in entirety. At the same time,
however, the genre documents the paradox at the heart of Israeli
cinema filmed in Jaffa which, as Aljafari has commented, ‘wanted to
exclude and erase the Palestinian history of Jaffa, the Palestinians of
Jaffa, whilst also documenting them’ (Aljafari 2016).
Source: Frame from recollection, Kamal Aljafari (2015).
The actors in the bourekas films, however, raise those ‘other’ Jewish
figures who were still diasporic in many respects, or, in other words,
not yet national. The actors were mainly Arab and African Jewish
actors from Morocco, Iraq, Yemen, egypt and Libya whose Arabness
or Africanness were erased in a process of coercive acculturation
into national citizenship—a tragically ironic experiment mimicking
european nationalisms. These are the figures who are digitally made
to vanish as Aljafari brings the visual archive of his hometown to the
foreground. If the image is freed from being a ‘location’, as a setting for
bourekas films, denuded of its props and actors, Aljafari’s hometown is
recreated cinematically as a place where the traces of these asymmetrically
connected regimes of erasure may be revisited in considering the
possibilities of cinematic justice for imagining a postcolonial future.
Freeing the Image and Cinematic Justice
187
scholars and activists interested in Arab and African Jewish cultural
and resistance politics in Israel have investigated the racial fantasies
and formations which underlie the systemic practices across multiple
sites of political and social legitimation of anti-Arab and anti-Black
racism, excavating the ideological grounds of political thought and
cultural production that have constituted the racial and ethnic others
internal to the Jewish polity.5 nonetheless, the primary fault lines along
which the contradictions inherent to Zionism as segregationist ethnic
nationalism are understood as primarily those between Palestinians
and Israelis. In this, the field of ‘demography’ as a regime-aligned
discipline is deeply implicated in producing Jewishness as a national
category that underlies the majoritarian aspirations and anxieties of
the state. In counter-hegemonic politics, there are important political
ethical considerations and valid historical reasons for reproducing
these demographic categories, not least the extent of disavowal with
which the ethnic cleansing of Palestine has been met and the narratives
with which it has been countered. These fault lines provide a divided
and racially hierarchised Jewish Israeli polity with a common ‘enemy’,
a shared ‘other’ which shores up a civic sense of common Jewishness.
At the same time, the Israeli/Palestinian fault line mitigates the extent
to which anti-Arabness and anti-Blackness constitute the limits of
Zionism as an ideology of Jewish nationalism as well as its internal
contradictions. to surface this is to make visible the ‘infrastructures
of hierarchical citizenship [in Israel] that rely on white supremacy’
(Yerday 2019). The repurposed footage from the bourekas films, then,
re-collect the historically and politically connected links ‘between the
dispossession of Palestinians and the dislocation of Arab-Jews’ (Shohat
2010, 252) and ethiopian Jews, complicating and expanding the stakes
of partition, segregation and erasure in the making of Israeli national
narratives and national identity whilst imagining how these might be
reconstellated.
In freeing the image with his dual method of repurposing and
digital retouching, Aljafari’s ‘filmmaking not only lays claim to a lost
space and people but also stands as a model for transnational solidarity
and resistance against violent dispossession and displacement’ (Atoui
2016). As I have suggested earlier, however, it goes further still. Aljafari
frees the image to discern precisely these criss-crossing fault lines
offering an aesthetic that holds complex and interconnected meanings
dispersed across different temporal and spatial conditions. to ‘free
the image’, then, is to undo the fixities and fictions of demographic
logics, of nationalism and its desires so as to move freely in the image, in
the horizons of imagination it opens. These are available, of course, but
the viewer has to produce them, has to desire to produce them. In this, the
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viewer is implicated in Aljafari’s commitment to free the image. The
film foregoes narrative and speech (except for one brief and strange
dialogue recorded) one of the aesthetic decisions that free the image,
enabling the moving image to become a personal and poetic homage
to Jaffa as a disappeared place and to its ghosts that linger—including
Aljafari’s own family members who show up as so many phantoms
after the props and actors have been removed. Foregoing narrative
enables the imagination to be estranged from hegemonic and counterhegemonic repertoires, familiar if epistemologically asymmetrical fields
of meanings. In this, the politics of signification that stabilise meaning
and produce those things that go without saying are complicated and
opened. By unmooring the image from narrative, Recollection enables
a kind of inverted forensic investigation in which fiction cinema
provides the documentary record of disappeared places and people
that are both specific to Palestine/Israel and to more contemporary
universal experiences. ‘It’s not a film from there’, writes Kamal Aljafari
of Recollection. ‘It is a post-catastrophe film, a Sebaldian film, what
this image requires [is] to be freed from its mooring in Palestine,’ he
continues (Aljafari 2016) suggesting that freeing the image and moving
freely in the image are distinct if related gestures.
The footage in Recollection’s opening sequence approaches Jaffa port
from the sea, with the image bobbing as if the hand held camera is on
a small boat. It seems to be cut from the opening sequence of Kazablan
in which the camera approaches Jaffa from the sea. to arrive back
to Jaffa from the sea is to return on a route made by those who were
made refugees, Palestinians who were forced to flee from home and
homeland. It is this same sea that carried Palestinians during the 1947–
1948 war who travelled south and approached land at Gaza where most
remain still today. It is the same sea that carried, a few years later, Arab
and Africa Jews from Morocco, tunisia, Libya and elsewhere in the
early 1950s as the Jewish Agency drove projects of mass migration to
Israel. The bobbing image of the approach to Jaffa’s port viewed from
the sea would have been theirs too, as the first speaking character claims
in the opening sequence of Kazablan which begins with the sea, camera
bobbing on its impossible horizon, a prefatory narration framed within
the colonial ‘telos’ of Zionism that compresses and conflates biblical
and political time:
The sea of Jaffa; some call it the Mediterranean. This is the sea that
brought the whale that opened its belly for Jonah. This is the sea
that brought the Christians, the Moslems, the turks, David Ben
Gurion and me, Moshiko Babayu, fisherman of the sea of Jaffa.
(Kazablan 1973)
Freeing the Image and Cinematic Justice
189
By setting the approach to Jaffa in the sea Recollection dissipates the
territorial stability of the Israeli bourekas films as the grounds on which
‘Israeli cinematic collective memory … affirms the founding premise
of Zionism’ (Atoui 2016). This deterritorialising gesture also opens the
moving image of the Mediterranean, this ‘Mare nostrum’, to also recall
the contemporary sea routes of those escaping military and economic
wars to seek refuge and asylum, to remake home in an elsewhere that
might sustain the conditions for life.
If film is a mode of thought, Recollection offers a way of reimagining
postcolonial life in Israel/Palestine as both a shared condition and
critical political discourse that might open a response to possibilities
for political representation, the abrogation of which is the condition
of being made refugee, of statelessness. For the aesthetic procedures by
which the image is freed destabilise the visual fields and weaponised
aesthetic repertoires that criminalise homelessness, flight and precarity.
In this, Recollection offers a way of reimagining ‘postcolonial life’ that
deterritorialises the image from its particular setting and history in a
gesture of profound and abiding hospitality. Cinematic justice, then,
is the opening of a singular image as a universal idea for the not-yetcommunity of a non-partitioned paradigm that the film makes possible.
NOTES
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
I am thinking here of Ariella Azoulay’s The Civil Contract of Photography
(2008) and her Civil Imagination: A Political Ontology of Photography
(2011), Gil Hochberg’s Visual Occupations: Violence and Visibility in a
Conflict Zone (2015); t.J. Demos’ The Migrant Image: The Art and Politics
of Documentary during Global Crisis (2014), Gregoire Chamayou’s Drone
Theory (2015) and eyal Weitzman’s Forensic Architecture: Violence at the
Threshold of Detectability (2017) as most immediately relevant examples.
In this regard, Hadas Yaron, nurit Hashimshony-Yaffe and John
Campbell’s ‘“Infiltrators” or Refugees? An Analysis of Israel’s Policy
towards African Asylum-Seekers’ in International Migration (2013) is
instructive.
Absent presence alludes to the Absentee Property Law of 1952 in
which Palestinians who were not in their homes but remained inside
the boundaries of the new state at the signing of the armistice in 1949
were defined as Present Absentees. The law allowed the state to seize the
properties of Present Absentees and place them under the curatorship
of a specially designated office, the office of the Guardian of Absentee
Property.
See, for example, Amos elon’s The Israelis: Founders and Sons (1971).
A very brief selection, for example, would include Sammy Smooha,
Israel: Pluralism and Conflict (1978), ella Shohat, ‘Sephardim in Israel:
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Zionism from the standpoint of Its Jewish Victims’ (1988), sami chetrit,
Intra-Jewish Conflict in Israel: White Jews, Black Jews (2009), smadar
lavie, ‘mizrahi Feminism and the Question of Palestine’ (2011), Avi
Yalou in conversation with libby lenkinski, ‘know your “enemy”’
(2019). Available at https://jewishcurrents.org/know-your-enemy/ and
efrat Yerday, ‘Precarious Privilege: An Interview with efrat Yerday’,
Graylit: Liberatory Art and Thought at the Intersection of Palestinian
and Jewish Histories, 1 november 2019. Available at https://graylit.org/
blog/2018/12/17/18wpztrlrg0oxiaaluft7sw7s72ayt.
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International Migration 51, no. 4 (2013): 144–157. Available at https://
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/imig.12070 (accessed 28 December
2019).
Yerday, efrat. ‘Precarious Privilege: An Interview with efrat Yerday’,
Graylit: Liberatory Art and Thought at the Intersection of Palestinian
and Jewish Histories, 1 november 2019. Available at https://graylit.org/
blog/2018/12/17/18wpztrlrg0oxiaaluft7sw7s72ayt (accessed 13 December
2019).
Zraik, Raef Faris. ‘Palestine as exile’, Global Jurist Advances 3, no. 2 (2003):
1535–1661.
tHe HomoseXUAl And HIs FUtURe
(cAtHeR, clementI And cRIsP)
Taylor Black
PREFACE: NEW YEAR, SAME HANGOVER
new Year is a horrible holiday. while, throughout the rest of the
calendar year, I find myself able to keep my mind clear of the anxietyprovoking thoughts about what’s happened to me in the past and
what’s to come in the distant future, there is something about the
stretch of time immediately preceding and following 1st January that
forces me to take stock of these horrible and abstract notions of time.
For starters, the whole month of December is, as is commonly stated,
always already a difficult time for those of us who consider ourselves
as indigent members of our families and reluctant members of society
at large: in just a week’s time following Christmas holiday celebrations
comes another event that forces the entire world’s attention upon
itself. With weary, yet hopeful eyes gazing into the distance and the
promise of another year, human beings all over the earth take long,
hard looks at the mistakes that have made up their pasts and the flaws
that constitute their existences in order to make promises. All of the
regretful feelings that come up as a result of this are meant to bring
forth a flurry of changes and improvements in the new year to come—
only like all gambles, the one made with the future comes with odds
that are immediately stacked against the large majority of its players:
depressives promise they will find happiness; overeaters swear they will
overcome their love of food; alcoholics drunkenly decide they will one
day reach a state of sobriety; and life’s failures pin all of their hopes on
the possibility of success.
Much like the feeling of being hungover that manages to mark
every single new Year’s Day for me each time it comes around, all
of the trappings and festivities that go along with preparing for and
celebrating this horrible event almost always return the emotional high
that is, at a certain moment, associated with the prospect of another
year with a state of dizzied, frazzled disappointment and despair. You
see, try as we all might to plan our time out and measure out some
kind of notion of success in the time to come, any wager made against
what we call the future is, at least for most people, already a lost cause.
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Further, even though the earth’s population is largely comprised of
individuals who have at least ‘some’ chance at winning in the future,
there is also a small, awkward minority that not only will lose but who
also simply cannot play the game at all. In other words, outside of the
winners and the losers of fate, there are also the immediate failures of
existence: people who experience life itself as a dead loss.
what really animates my distrust of new Year’s festivities is not
only the tragic spirit of change and self-determination that overtakes
humanity in its prescribed moment of stock-taking and future-planning
but also my own intense understanding of the holiday as merely the
source of a kind of hangover that, for me, increases and constitutes my
experience of being alive. This annual gamble that the world is asked
to make against the future and against its own lives is, for those of us
who have been dealt a losing hand, the holiday which provides human
beings a regular reminder that we just can’t win.
The homosexual man is, in the geography of the living, this figure
I have been describing. Born with the striking and overwhelming
characteristics that constitute him as a mistake of nature, the homosexual
steps out of the womb and onto dry land immediately disqualified from
the game of success. Life is, then, from this point on not something that
can be orchestrated or laid out in any sort of understandable or alreadydetermined fashion. With no chance of winning, the future operates as
a kind of insult to the homosexual, who, especially in his earliest stages
of development, finds himself constantly threatened with it, by elders
and betters who say, each step of the way, that something will have
to change in order for happiness and success to come. Knowing fullwell from the start that these changes in temperament and gesture that
might make life more bearable are, in essence and in repeated practice,
not possible, the homosexual has to find a way to operate in daily life
without a clear negotiation of what’s to come.
Without a certain kind of stoicism of character and strategic
cynicism in behaviour, then, the experience of being homosexual
can, if performed incorrectly, feel something like a bad hangover.
What I would like to do in the rest of this chapter is investigate a few
different accounts of homosexuals in their gambles with the future. In
order to both historicise the high stakes involved in the development
of modern male homosexuals, I will first approach two separate but
compellingly resonant examples of lives lost in the fight against the
future—Paul from Willa Cather’s ‘Paul’s Case’ and tyler Clementi,
the young gay man who became famous for having committed suicide
and subsequently being resurrected as an avatar for a media campaign
to publicise gay teen suicide. In doing this, I will rely on work done
by eve Kosofsky Sedgwick on the epistemological constructions of
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homosexual males in the twentieth century as immediately failed
figures and a way of being and feeling alive that is, as she says,
underscored by a ‘very specific association of gay male sexuality with
tragic early death’ (Sedgwick 1990).
From there, I will look to Quentin Crisp and bring forth my own
appropriation of his story and of his life’s work to offer a solution
beyond the limits of homosexual loss or victory in the game of time: to
consider how ‘failure’, if fully constituted and performed, can be a way
out—not as a way of saying or hoping that homosexuals might one day
win but that they simply don’t have to. The hangover of existence that
comes for homosexuals is the product not necessarily of being born
a dead loss but of pinning one’s hopes in the narratives provided by
liberal and positivist constructions of gay identity and epistemology.
neither a form of optimism nor pessimism, however, failure can
provide a strategic and self-sustaining way of remaining on earth and
feeling alive: it transforms the wariness of being a hopeless case into a
way of refusing the insult of the future. As someone who understood
himself to be a failure, and claims to have ‘never been legally married
to real life’, Crisp (1968, 125), nevertheless, dedicated all of his energies
to constructing his way of living into ‘one, long, tentative flirtation with
the world’. Through this ontological approach to feeling and being in
the presence of time, Crisp has provided for us an example of how to
feel life as pure event. Rather than succumbing to failure as a way of
being failed, Crisp developed a method of becoming that was creative
and imaginative. For him, failure constituted a kind of conviviality, a
life composed by liveliness, non-linearity—an anti-new Years. Rather,
his celebration is like throwing a party that cannot finish but keeps
circulating, bumping, clinking glasses and forgetting where, why, what
and who? The matter of survival—for Crisp—is not about resisting the
future but transgressing its limits, accepting it, feeling it.
A SIN AND A LIE: THE LIFE AND TIMES
OF THE MODERN HOMOSExUAL
The stakes are very high for the modern homosexual man. Already having
emerged bruised and battered from the nineteenth century, during
which time the species found itself detected by western psychological
experts and totally pathologised by an entire discourse and culture
that surrounded them, the life and times of the homosexual person
living after the turn of the twentieth century is one that is immediately
marked by a certain kind of challenge: to both overcome and represent
the shame of being a failed and tragic figure operating upon the social
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landscape. The disgrace of effeminacy that homosexuals carry along
with them and pronounce with each gilded and willowy gesture, makes
the possibility of negotiating a public life a constantly-losing battle.
This sad fate, however, not only disrupts the external realities of being
a homosexual, but also composes a fragmented inner world, and poses
a certain kind of challenge for him to somehow overcome the shame
that makes up his emotional state and render some kind of life that
is at least partially livable. tormented and bullied in early life for the
extreme nature of both his personality as well as his mannerisms, the
adolescent homosexual finds himself, in the early stages of his own
gamble at living, under fire and on guard from the word go. The trick
is, in this case, either overcoming and hiding that which is shameful
and disgusting about himself in hopes of a brighter and more stable
future or, as so often becomes the case, succumbing to loss altogether.
The tragic nature of homosexual subjectivity in this case is also,
in Sedgwick’s terms, marked by a certain kind of sentimentality.
Moving from the example of Melville’s Billy Budd to Oscar Wilde’s
Picture of Dorian Gray, Sedgwick charts this short game-change in the
production but also in the very real lives of young homosexual men
caught in this period of transition in western culture. While both stories
feature characters embodying masculinities that, to the contemporary
reader, translate clearly at least as non-normative, if not totally ridden
with a certain kind of homosexuality, Sedgwick describes a change in
reception that, for homosexuals to come, presents an assortment of
new challenges and tragedies. The ‘beauty’ and ‘splendour’ that makes
Billy Budd so remarkable and which draws not only the attention and
love of the characters in the story but also of Melville’s reading public
becomes, in a post-Wildean universe the cause of sexual stigma and
panic:
For readers fond of the male body, the year 1891 makes an epoch
.… For readers who hate the male body, the year 1891 is also an
important one. At the end of Dorian Gray, a dead, old, ‘loathsome’
man lying on the floor is the moralizing gloss on the other thing
the servants find in Dorian Gray’s attic: ‘hanging upon the wall, a
splendid portrait of their master as they had last seen him, in all the
wonder of his exquisite youth and beauty.’ (Sedgwick 1990, 131)
All of the characteristics that, in contemporary terms, get recognised
as ‘camp,’ ‘gay’, or ‘queer’ about homosexuals became, in this pivotal
moment, arbiters of disgust and sources of shame. The masculine
beauty that young Billy Budd seems to represent quickly dissolves, as
in the example of Dorian Gray, becoming instead something totally
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suspect and perverse and awful about his personality and personhood.
likewise, the characteristics now associated with the modern and
contemporary homosexual man—effeminacy of gesture and excess
of emotion—both work to characterise life and make it immediately
unliveable. Homosexuality is both a secret to keep and the inspiration
for prohibition; a shame to behold for the homosexual person and a
source of panic and disorder among the rest of the normal, heterosexual
population. The spectacle of the challenge facing homosexuals occurs
in the constant attacks made upon them by the glaring eyes and
overwhelming anxieties of the people who surround them, marking,
in Sedgwick’s terms, a strong strain of sentimentality in the telling
but also in the experience of living, this story. Staged outside of the
grammatical limits of what western culture considers to be acceptable,
the life and times of the homosexual is a pity to behold, as he is defined
as a living insult:
These knowing activations of the ambiguities always latent in
grammatical person as such, at any rate, point to the range of
meanings of sentimentality that identify it, not as thematic or a
particular subject matter, but as a structure of relation, typically
one involving the author-or-audience-relations of spectacle; most
often, where the epithet ‘sentimental’ itself is brought onto the
scene, a discreditable or devalued one—the sentimental as the
insincere, the manipulative, the vicarious, the morbid, the knowing,
the kitschy, the arch. (Sedgwick 1990, 143)
As a matter of performing life, homosexuality is always on the verge of
breaking down: it is the spectre of failure itself, hanging in the balance
of life as it unfolds and stumbles upon itself across the earth’s surface.
Marked by the presence of an undeniable perversion, the homosexual
performative reality is one, to use terms employed by Sedgwick and
Andrew Parker in their introduction to Performativity and Performance,
disfigured by a constitutive form of illness which makes living life
possible only to the extent that it always seems to be going wrong.
Citing the presence of the term ‘perversion’ in J.L. Austin’s formative
work on performativity and language, How To Do Things With Words,
they highlight the ways in which it operates in certain kinds of suspect,
failed utterances: ‘If something goes wrong in the performance of a
performative, “the utterance is then, we may say, not indeed false but
in general unhappy”’ (Parker and Sedgwick 2000, 3). In other words,
the impact of homosexuality is not only challenging and shameful on
the personal level but also something complicated on an interpersonal
level, making a complicated existence for the homosexual man, whose
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‘secret’ is exposed and performed every time he makes a public entrance.
The characteristics of the homosexual are both regarded and embodied
as insults—something made much worse considering that they are
essentially perceived by heterosexual audiences as rude and distasteful
acts of unbridled conduct. This ‘theatrical’ nature is, for Parker and
Sedgwick, ‘linked with the perverted, the artificial, the unnatural, the
abnormal, the decadent, the effete, the diseased . . . inseparable from
a normatively homophobic thematic of the “peculiar”, “anomalous”,
“exceptional”, “non-serious”’.
TYLER CLEMENTI AND ‘PAUL’S CASE’:
A STUDY IN TEMPERAMENT’
It’s no wonder, then, that young homosexual men have such a hard time
coping with the challenges and even the very presence of living itself. As
promised, I now offer the stories of two men in this stage of development
who, like so many between them, played and, ultimately, lost their
precarious gambles with the future. One morning in late September 2010,
tyler Clementi threw himself off of the edge of the George Washington
Bridge. While known by his friends and family members as a generally
happy and contented young man, Clementi’s life-ending decision was
apparently instigated upon learning that he had been ‘outed’ by his
dormmate at Rutgers university, who secretly broadcast a live feed of
Clementi and another man engaging in some kind of physical intercourse
(Knickerbocker 2010). While certainly sad and tragic as a personal story,
Clementi’s case is, unfortunately, not unique—in fact, the now infamous
media campaign led by Dan Savage meant to operate as a caution against
queer teen suicide, and called It Gets Better, was started just weeks before
Clementi’s own demise, that itself became the centre of a whole string
of incidents like it among young gay men across the united States in
the following months. For these deceased people, as well according to
the story of homosexual adolescence both preceding and following all of
this, the life course is itself a constant source of loss and hopelessness: the
future weighs on the stages of development like a hammer, constantly
battering any feelings of adequacy or stability.
In this sense, then, Clementi’s decision to jump to his own demise
off the bridge that morning not only served to prove the point of
the It Gets Better campaign and the story of gay suicide it has been
telling but also works presently to punctuate the tragic and cautionary
tale of adolescent homosexuality itself. The sound and the impact of
Clementi’s body—dead to the world even before it hit the surface of the
cold and unforgiving waters of the Hudson River—is in concert with
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other young homosexuals before him, reaching back to the beginning
of the twentieth century and the formative example of willa cather’s
Paul, who met a similarly horrible collision with his future, when he
summoned up the nerve to throw himself in front of a train as it was
pulling into newark’s Penn station. At about the same age and the
exact same moment in each young man’s development as a homosexual
person, both Paul and clementi realised that they were hopeless cases,
and tragically, gave in to the understanding that, as cather herself
puts it, ‘was a losing game in the end’ (cather 1983, 120).
Having served his station in life fully sensing his exile from the
society of his school and family units in Pittsburg, Paul brought
himself to new York city, like clementi, with a decision weighing
on him and held under his breath. life was, before this moment, also
tainted with his distaste for the ‘ugliness of the world,’ enacting a neverending sensation of being alone and hungover in the world, set-off by
a resounding ‘ache in his head’ and a ‘bitter burning on his tongue’
(Cather 1983, 120). Having spent the week preceding his death in new
York City, shopping, fucking and theatre-going, Paul packed himself
up and left for newark feeling his life to be complete and sensing his
destiny almost too clearly. The synthesis of these two opposing, queer
feelings left Paul, in the moments before his death, to radiate with
his own failures—or, as Cather would have it, to undergo ‘a spasm of
realization … [burning] like a faggot in a tempest’ (Cather 1983, 116).
Paul’s love for the theatre and his desires for an effete, resplendent
kind of lifestyle, not afforded to him in his hometown, makes for
from the start and to his betters an immediately-suspect feature of his
personality. His taste and his mannerisms which when fully indulged
during his final week’s stay in new York, make him feel so fully like
himself are interpreted themselves as performative insults in his real
life—a disposition he was forced to literally wear upon his chest:
In one way and another, had made all his teachers, men and women
alike, conscious of the same feeling of physical aversion. In one
class he habitually sat with his hand shading his eyes; in another he
always looked out of the window during the recitation; in another
he made a running commentary on the lecture, with humorous
intent…. His whole attitude was symbolized by his shrug and
flippantly red carnation flower. (Cather 1983, 103)
More than just an act to maintain, though, Paul’s case of antisocial
behaviour and his homosexual nature is, for him, an embodied
reality—something that, like the red carnation he wore upon his lapel,
announced to the world exactly what amount of disgust it ought to
regard him with. Paul’s many and assorted flourishes are both of his
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doing and the very matters which, in the scheme of things, account for
his undoing as a person.
Homosexuality is more than the performance or even the utterance of
perversity, it is also the state of embodying and fully sensing total failure
and humiliation. to be regarded as sick and impertinent is to realise and
become both sick and impertinent yourself: a challenge which adolescent
homosexuals are asked and dared to fail at again and again. Both clementi
and Paul made, and in a way, won the gamble they themselves made with
the future. By submitting themselves to death, they only used themselves
to articulate what they had been clearly instructed, both by the culture
that brought them up, as well as the shaky natural state in which they
were brought into the world: that life, for homosexuals is a mistake to
be made and fate, a game to be lost. while it may be said that clementi’s
suicide may be the result of a homophobic culture, it is also true that it
was a result of a certain tragic pessimism on his part to his station in
life—in other words, his hopelessness for his own future was brought
on by his own acceptance of the truth of his homosexuality as well as his
overwhelming insecurities about what that meant for him in the future.
Paul’s more brazen example represents something a bit more outlandish
and perhaps even optimistic as an approach to his own failures than
in clementi’s case—meaning that, while he soberly accepted his life as
ultimately unliveable, he was still able to come to his suicide with at least
a brief understanding of what pleasure he was accustomed to feeling. The
end of ‘Paul’s Case’ finds our hero suspended in the air above the train
tracks, his body waiting for the looming impact of the oncoming train
and the all-too-imminent future:
He felt something strike his chest—his body was being thrown
swiftly through the air, on and on, immeasurably far and fast,
while his limbs gently relaxed. Then, because the picture making
mechanism was crushed, the disturbing visions flashed into black,
and Paul dropped back into the immense design of things. (Cather
1983, 121)
With no way out of the game of life, these two characteristic examples
prove homosexuality to be a dangerous gamble for those whose very
bodies and souls are offered up to the future as a sacrifice.
even though both Clementi and Paul lost their lives and indeed that
they were both born to do so—it is not as if they failed at performing
the roles cast for them. As a form of lived and embodied perversity,
homosexuality is, as Parker and Sedgwick argue, a very risky kind of
performative state for someone to find themselves in—one where the
possibility of failure is always as close as your next breath. In this way,
the suicides committed by both of these young men should simply
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be considered an early but not inappropriate curtain call to the tragic
drama of their lives on earth. The impact of each violent death is simply
the effect of a punch line arriving too early in the insult that each
Clementi and Paul surely felt their lives to represent. This is the reality
that structures the life of the modern homosexual man, who is forced to
act out and predict a truth about themselves that is not actually uttered,
whose entire way of being in the world seems to indicate total failure
and total humiliation on his part.
This shame that haunts the homosexual man in all of the performances
and moments of development of his adolescence, is one that makes him
feel the impact of his life like an insult that never ends. Hungover in this
way then, the sensation of being on earth is akin to be nauseated all
the time; in the same way that normal people come to regard flagrant
homosexuals with a certain kind of disgust, the homosexual person is, if
in touch with his own inner feelings, likewise sickened by the sight of it
all. Paul, for instance, answers the continuous accusations of insolence
and wickedness brought on by his instructors and family members with
his own antagonism against the rest of the world, with his very own
performative reproach inflecting each and every move he makes. Here,
Cather solves the riddle of Paul’s awkward station in life, drawing out the
sickening way in which he moved about his existence.
Perhaps it was because, in Paul’s world, the natural nearly always
wore the guise of ugliness, that a certain element of artificiality
seemed to him necessary in beauty. Perhaps it was because
experience of life elsewhere was so full of Sabbath-school picnics,
petty economies, wholesome advice as to how to succeed in life,
and the unescapable odours of cooking. (Cather 1983, 111)
to escape this feeling, Paul, while in Pittsburg, attends the theatre,
under the very glib auspices of an employee of Carnegie Hall. Safe
from rude accusations and hidden from the glares of disgust that
made up his daily life, Paul finds himself at home in the dark space
of the audience. He also is able to access some sense of himself and
his pleasures by imagining a fictive elsewhere and other-life that he
may have, in different circumstances, been able to live: in the very real
presence of his dream of life. each time, it was coming off this high and
re-emerging into the real world that resumed Paul’s eternal sickness:
After a concert was over, Paul was often irritable and wretched
until he got to sleep—and tonight he was even more than usually
restless. He had the feeling of not being able to let down; of its
being impossible to give up this delicious excitement which was
the only thing that could be called living at all. (Cather 1983, 106)
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Paul’s response to the strength of both his fantasy of himself and the
disgusting life he finds himself tied down by, while still in Pittsburg,
is to change his lot, even if for a fleeting moment of happiness and
contentment. As in Clementi’s case, Paul tragically understands, even
here, that the future is something that won’t have him, a prospect he
simply can’t cope with himself. However, there is a certain optimism
present in the clarity of Paul’s fantasies that makes his death something
more than just sad, unlike Clementi, who seems to have simply given
up acting as a normal, heterosexual person at the very moment that
the wheels began to come off of his performance. At the heart of the
homosexual’s dilemma lies, I think, problems and possibilities evident
in the very differently-constructed spaces of fantasy each of these boys
operated with while on earth. Very much feeling alien in the world, Paul
still, in his trips to the theatre and his ultimate sojourn in new York City,
is able to understand the unique and even momentarily empowering
sense of himself—of his own pleasures, tragic and failed as they may be.
For Clementi, blending into the very drab landscape of Rutgers
university became something more than just a temporary profession:
it came to constitute the structure of his hopes and dreams, ones he
found himself bound to lose. While there is certainly a tragedy to
Paul’s case of homosexual individuality, Clementi’s gamble at getting
and getting along undetected makes his story an example of tragic
individuality: his homosexual disposition became something he felt
he could overcome, until, in the end, he came to feel the weight of his
utter helplessness over the matter, crashing into his body like a highspeed train. Having the truth of both his homosexuality and, after
that, his decision to commit suicide, all recorded and broadcast on the
internet, Clementi left for all of us a disembodied tragedy—one that
will keep occurring so long as it is used to back up fantasies of things
‘getting better’ for homosexuals, of the future being something they
should pin their hopes on at all. The trace of Clementi’s unhappiness
still hangs in the balance, waiting to be connected to other cases of
queer suicide and forming a constellation of gay hopes for a happy,
but still impossible, future to come.
‘YOU DON’T HAVE TO WIN’: A HOMOSExUAL RESOLUTION
As I try and bring this discussion of homosexuality and the challenges
presented to it by the future to a close, my mind returns to a comment
made by Quentin Crisp each new Year. never one to miss a chance to
give his opinion on any matter or leave any question unturned, when
asked, most often by journalists, for his thoughts on the year to come,
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he would always say: ‘It will all get worse.’ like anything he said, this
prediction could easily be understood as pert, negative and even bitchy.
However, as easy as these kinds of conclusions about mr crisp are for
other human beings to make, they miss the spirit behind his words and
his intentions for them—indeed, about the true worth and effect of the
life of this overlooked and misunderstood man.
Looking back, it was, in fact, just after new Year’s Day, and almost
exactly three years ago to this day, that I had my first ‘encounter’ with
Quentin Crisp. Sometime before I left new York City to visit my family
in north Carolina, I received a film in the mail through one of those
online rental companies that have become so popular in the united
States. entitled Resident Alien, and advertising on the blurb of the sleeve
enclosing the disc a brief account of a true iconoclast, of one of the relics
of bohemian new York. I packed it in my suitcase and, shamefully, let
it sit there until I returned home two weeks later. After almost sending
the thing back, I decided, in one of those annual hangover states that
seem only to come after new Year’s festivities, to pop it in and give
Mr Crisp a try. not even fifteen minutes into the film, my entire life was
changed. I had been viewing a montage of scenes of him placed on trial
for his inconvenient views and misunderstood presence on earth, one
against a gay rights group in new York City and the other as a featured
guest on one of the more popular (and trashy) talk shows of the day. In
response to a question of whether or not his effeminate and outlandish
appearance was a help or a hindrance to the struggle for gay rights and
equality, Quentin confirmed what it was that his audience was looking
for with a simple ‘no’. It was, however, his continued commentary in a
follow-up interview to this scene in Resident Alien (1991) that floored
me, that made me an immediate and dutiful follower of Quentin Crisp
and missionary of what he termed Crisperanto:
The worrying thing to me about the gay community is that they are
fighting for their rights, and I don’t believe anybody has rights. If
we all got what we deserved we would starve.
The ultimate usefulness of this comment, much like his new Year’s
proclamation, is that it is absolutely, staggeringly true. Quentin did not,
in his own phrasing, step out of his mother’s womb onto dry land in
order to say those things about his presence and about the world that
it wanted to hear. Born and bred a mistake, Quentin learned to take
every step and make every gesture on earth with the full, embodied
understanding of himself as totally unique, as completely self-reliant.
However, as this montage in Resident Alien displays so clearly, as utterly
declarative and well-rehearsed his statements and mannerisms became
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over time, he was, and I would argue, still has never been able to meet
an audience worthy of his glory and his wisdom.
of course, rights discourses are problematic and fictitious, especially
for sexual minorities. If Quentin was trained as and understood
properly to be an academic or a philosopher, no one would protest
his saying this. The effect of his statement to the sceptical crowd of
gay community members is not only to protect himself from their
attacks upon him and their attempts to place judgement on his life
within a political narrative he knew he was not a part of. His ‘no’ to the
question of the convenience of his life and the helpfulness of his words
is an answer to all his naysayers—to all those people, whether through
homophobic attack or political interpolation, who would like to judge
him as anything other than himself, as Quentin Crisp, or as any more
or less than Quentin Crisp. For him, prejudice against an identity or
a lifestyle was never something he knew, and indeed never a fight he
felt the need to dedicate himself to. The problem facing Quentin is and
has always been his own and the prejudice the world has had against
Quentin Crisp has been for being ‘too’ like himself, too willing to fix
what the world always insisted were ontological wounds. What I find
so inspiring about Quentin and his life’s work is his insistence upon
himself, as well as the very humble and imminently useful ways in
which he explains how anyone else might follow his lead in their own
professions of being and becoming.
Here on earth, and in the wake of another year moving into the past,
homosexuals find themselves again in true need of Quentin’s words
of eternal wisdom. Following the string of suicides by queer youth,
both the gay and mainstream press in the States has started a new
campaign to convince homosexuals both young old, nay to ‘convince
them’ that ‘It Gets Better’. unfortunately, the continued presence of
homophobic violence and queer suicides, works against the logic of this
admittedly optimistic and well-intentioned campaign to change the
sexual climate culture. The pressure facing these young people upon
the tragic decision to end their lives is the weight of a gamble with the
future that narratives of identity and equality and sexuality only work
to encourage; understanding themselves as homosexual ‘people-tocome’, queer suicide victims have decided that this is not a fight they
can win.
Survival is, for Quentin, an affective state of becoming open to
the future in the present; happiness is, then, not something-to-come
or even something to work for—it involves, rather, a concentrated
method of feeling absolutely ‘in the continuous present from head to
foot’ (Crisp 1968, 125). unlike nihilistic forms of living in the present
that actively forsake the future, this presentness means being open
The Homosexual and His Future
207
to, and even experiencing, the future in a whole series of continuous,
focused moments. Understanding his past and future in the embodied
now, Quentin was able to live full of intensity, without the burden of
blame or anxiety. From beyond the grave, he has messages of hope
for us trying to live in the future: ‘I hope [my example] has inspired
you to live your life as carelessly as I have done. I have lived my life
in the best way I know how and I regret nothing’ (crisp 2000). while
homosexuals, as a political category or epistemological category, may,
over time ‘win’ through measures of political acceptance or cultural
equality, actual, living people who find themselves in situations with
which they cannot cope in a way they cannot recognise in any human
being around them, only need to understand the words that Mr Crisp
came on earth, not only to say, but to embody and display, in his own
wicked and wonderful way: that you don’t have to win.
REFERENCES
Cather, Willa. ‘Paul’s Case: A Study in temperament’. In The Troll Garden.
Lincoln: university of nebraska Press, 1983.
Crisp, Quentin. The Naked Civil Servant. new York: Penguin Books, 1968.
———. ‘The Omnibus Afterword.’ Omnibus, edited by Phillip Ward. new
York: triangle Press, 2000.
Jonathan, nossiter (director). 1991. Resident Alien.
Knickerbocker, Brad. ‘tyler Clementi Suicide: Reaction is Swift and
Widespread’. Christian Science Monitor, 3 October 2010.
Parker, Andrew and eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. ‘Sexual Politics, Performativity,
and Performance.’ In The Routledge Reader in Politics and Performance,
edited by Lizbeth Goodman and Jane de Gay. new York: Routledge, 2000.
Sedgwick, eve Kosofsky. Epistemology of the Closet. Berkeley: university of
California Press, 1990.
sAPPHIc lIneAges:
oR, notes FoR A QUeeR-FemInIst PoetIcs
Brinda Bose
With my fingers too, rather than with my eyes, I read these poems.
Ionic volutes—delicate and ringed—white shells with the inner
side of pearl—indented cup with the chiseling as fine as the pattern
of the under-leaf lining of the wine itself … all this—more and much
more—and to concentrate my senses, struggling now with faint, exotic
perfumes, pungent and stimulating, not quite familiar, with colours,
rose and the violet of the rainbow, I close my eyes and with my fingers
like one blind would find my way about this poetry.
—H.d., ‘A Poet in the wilderness: songs of Anacreon’ (2019, 64)
what do animate bodies and the bodies of aesthetic texts have in
common, other than in terms of how works of art and literature
represent living bodies, their actions and emotions—sensually,
intellectually and stylistically? In the representation of bodies in art, we
look for signals that tell us how they are, how they look and feel and act;
how they are gazed at and acted upon. And we read the bodies of texts
for their linguistic, aural, visual and rhetorical effects, their signs and
structures. What do we do then, when we bring the two together in our
enterprise of reading and meaning-making, when the body of the text
fuses with the bodies in and out of the text, bodies real and imagined,
living and dead and fantastical? When we are reading poetics through
and with the body, we not just read of the erotic in texts, but read our
texts erotically: and the second we do both by engaging with the writing
in intimacy, desire, longing, love and pain - and by understanding how
the shape and texture of our texts reflect, and expand on, the intimacies
of desiring and loss that they are speaking of.
‘With my fingers too, rather than with my eyes, I read these poems’,
says H.D., making the tactile central to the experience of reading, an
experience that is imagined through the sensorium, fingers feeling
words through tips that trace them on the page, nerve-ends tingling;
what if we read with our fingers and eyes both, the type on the page
assuming shapes, high-jumping and high-fiving, gambolling and
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209
strolling and stopping? what if eyes and fingers are locked and
enthralled, no longer knowing where the sensate body ends and the
word-print begins? What if these legacies are bequeathed through
generations of poet-lovers, lovers of words and of women and men
and not-women-not-men, by other women who have been deviantly
adventurous, who have looked to write and to love in words and ways
that have glanced askance at both love and writing?
Reading a few women poet-philosophers through many centuries
that are quite astonishingly interwoven, the ancient Sappho is found
to live and breathe in so many of those who followed her through the
ages, leaving lineages and lessons for our contemporary times. What
is revealed is an echoing that is perpetuated through the idea of the
body—and this is not merely the female desiring or loving or suffering
body that is strewn across and between poems by Sappho and her sisters
through the ages. If we think in tandem, rather, of the female body and
of the body of the poem, and certain ways of shaping poetry in extension
of the female self that travels beyond Cixous’s formulation of ‘l’ecriture
feminine’ or feminine writing—we are surprised repeatedly by flights
of creative and affective imagination that are perhaps not governed by
the phallic at all. And if we follow some of these impudent and intrepid
queer-feminist aesthetic routes in our reading, meshing the tactile with
the intellectual, we could flag a certain method of reading that we call
‘queer-feminist’ or ‘body-poetic’.
In Anne Carson’s translation of Sappho’s poetic fragments titled
If Not, Winter (Carson 2003), she distinguishes her interpretation of
the remaindered poem by the repeated use of a particular punctuation
mark, the single bracket:
]
]
]
]thought
]barefoot
]
]
]
]
—‘Fragment’ (Carson 2003, 23)
Here are two words and nine symbols (a single closing bracket on each
line), walking barefoot down a page, like the thought whose ‘bare’-ness
this Sapphic fragment conveys. It is sheer serendipity, perhaps, that these
two words are all that survive of this fragment that the translator, Anne
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carson, then frames in a vertical series of closing brackets to indicate
missing words or lines. so bare the thought, like the foot unshod—and
more naked than flesh, the two words here, for being shorn of sentences
that are usually crammed with words in neat rows. deprived of safety
in numbers, appearing without comrades on either side, only flanked
above and below by a row of lonely single brackets emphasising what
was or might have been had the fragment been clothed, un-naked and
the foot un-bare.
we can mourn the loss of clothing that covers and completes or we
can revel in the words now bared, as sappho had aspired: ‘may I write
words more naked than flesh, stronger than bone, more resilient than
sinew, sensitive than nerve.’ to sappho, the word was body and flesh,
sinew and nerve—and when bared and naked, was strong, resilient
and sensitive. each word crawled and strode through her poetry, more
naked than flesh, not for the faint-hearted. A fifth-century hydria in
the national Museum of Athens that portrays Sappho reading from
a papyrus, has become the most abiding image of the Greek lyric poet
of the sixth century bc. While it is not known whether Sappho was
literate, this image, her translator Anne Carson avers, is an accurate
representation of her because the powerful intrigue of word-clusters
printed—and missing—on a page has, since, emerged as one of the
most fascinating aspects of Sappho’s poetic legacy.
Born in 630 bc, this poet of the island of Lesbos is believed to have
composed nine books of lyrics, of which only one complete poem and
myriad fragments have surfaced; she is known as a poet of fragments as
much as the poet after whom lesbian sexual identity has been named.
Anne Carson—formidable poet herself, as well as a translator and
literary critic—who produced in 2003 the widely-acclaimed translation
of Sappho’s fragmented lyrics If Not, Winter, has upheld the primacy of
the eye on a plain sheet by playing with signs and symbols, letters, lines
and punctuation scattered with careful intent on each page. With the
liberal use of blank spaces and different kinds of brackets, Greek text
and english translation facing each other in camaraderie and combat,
Carson both recreates Sappho’s nearly-illegible etchings on papyri
discovered accidentally in an ancient rubbish tip around the start of
the twentieth century and seduces attention to the body of the text
… that also then becomes, by a peculiar material transformation, the
embedded—yet living, and writhing—body in the text.
Between the sixth century bc when she lived and wrote and the
present, Sappho has spawned a worthy lineage in poetry, particularly
over the last century following the discovery of her poem-fragments
on bits of papyrus. It is a lineage, however, that is inadequately traced,
concentrating upon the one that legitimises a homosexual identity in
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211
women’s poetry—‘the first lesbian poet from whose birthplace, Lesbos,
the term is derived’. What is far more fascinating, however, is an
entwined significance of the body in the Sapphic lineage of writing if we
take a close look at some of Sappho’s poetic fragments and the critical
thought and poetic writings of Gertrude Stein, H.D. Anne Carson and
Jeanette Winterson. We can imagine each of them, variously, to be in
imaginary conversation with Sappho as well as with each other, such is
the imprint of the legacy of the almost-lost ancient poet of Lesbos on
the twentieth century.
Through our own discrete sets of creative and critical readings
of these cross-generational poets—each one an intense thinker and
philosopher, as well—we can discover that the sexual (especially female)
body and its enactments of desire in this Sapphic lineage is woven with
and interrogated by the body poetic in content, language and form: in
the images and the materiality of touch that they invoke, in the tactile
sensuality of the words themselves as well as in the visual contortions
they demand of the eye as printed symbols moving across and down
each printed page in unexpected ways, sometimes solid and terse and
sometimes liquid and swirling. And that Sappho inspired in these
poets/poetic prose writers, who engaged so intimately with her work—
its fragmentary presences, its tantalising absences—this conscious
experimentation with sensual content, poetic language and poetic
form: a constant play as much with the texture and timbre of words
as with their shapes and spaces and movements on the page, creating
a volatile, sometimes floundering art of poetics as inflammatory and
unpredictable as the female body in desire, of desire.
eros shook my
mind like a mountain wind falling on oak trees
(Carson 2003, Sappho’s ‘Fragment’ 47, 99)
wrote Sappho, and on the printed page ‘mind’ falls off the line even
as eros begins to shake it: this is a visual a/ffect, not just an e/ffect,
a simultaneous internalising and externalising of this emotional and
phenomenological falling off. One feels the tremble and tumble as the
mind is humbled, even as one sees it visually represented on the page.
eros continually shakes the mind of the poet, for whom the body is
relentlessly and unequivocally the site of desire—combining its pain
and its pleasures—even as the mind registers it just as relentlessly. Anne
Carson, in her study titled Eros: The Bittersweet (Carson [1986]1998)
describes eros as a state of being in classical philosophy and literature,
starting with Sappho, in whom, presumably, all things erotic and
romantic begin and sink. And she focuses on the Greek word that is
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generally the english ‘bittersweet’—glukupikron—but translates the
lines as
eros once again the limb-loosener whirls me sweetbitter,
impossible to fight off, creature stealing up, saying then:
‘sweetbitter’ sounds wrong, and yet our standard english
rendering ‘bittersweet’ inverts the actual.... should that concern
us? If her ordering has a descriptive intention, eros is here being
said to bring sweetness, then bitterness in sequence: she is sorting
the possibilities chronologically. many a lover’s experience would
validate such a chronology, especially in poetry, where most love
ends badly. (carson 1998, 3–4)
carson’s translations are acutely conscious of and make wondrous
virtue out of both the accuracy of meaning and the laying out of words
on the page. In this case, she inverts the usual english compound
word ‘bittersweet’ into ‘sweetbitter’, gaining both affect and effect:
what we might pass over as commonplace, ‘bittersweet’, we stop at in
surprise, ‘sweetbitter’; the shock is deliberate and intellectual at the
same time, it wants to surprise but also maintains a chronology for the
two elements—first sweet then bitter—that she infers as being more
true to lovers’ experience of this contradictory affect. It is the state
of ‘sweetbitter’ that causes the ‘sensational crises’, leading the poet
to cry ‘I don’t know what I should do: two states of mind in me …’
(Carson 1998, Sappho’s ‘Fragment’ 51, 8), pushing Carson to conclude,
‘Whether apprehended as a dilemma of sensation, action or value, eros
prints as the same contradictory fact: love and hate converge within
erotic desire. Why?’ (Carson 1998, 9).
Many centuries later, ‘H.D., Imagiste’ as Pound christened her, a
new england Modernist strongly influenced by Sappho, was flailing
about elegantly within the same contradiction, looking for objective
correlatives in language, often, astonishingly, using the same words as
Sappho, whose translations were published well after H.D. wrote her
poems. H.D.’s ‘Oread’, said to be the most perfect Imagist poem in six
brief lines:
Whirl up, sea—
whirl your pointed pines,
splash your great pines
on our rocks,
hurl your green over us,
cover us with your pools of fir.
Sapphic Lineages
213
echoes sappho in word and sensuality:
eros once again the limb-loosener whirls me
sweetbitter…
‘whirl’ is the graphic, somewhat unusual choice of word that an
overwhelming sexuality appears to be riding on, where a limb-loosening
eros in sappho turns into the splashing, hurling sea in H.d., ‘impossible
to fight off ’ in Sappho and invited in to ‘cover us…’ in H.D.’s troth with
the wild waters off the new england coast which mingled fir and water
along a rocky coastline. This fraught sexuality, deep desire cohabiting
with anxiety, not knowing what to do with the ‘creature stealing up’,
(Sappho), whether to beckon over and embrace such a need—‘splash
… on our rocks’ (H.D. 2019)—or to cry out in frustration.
‘I know not what to do, two states of mind in me …’ (Carson 1998,
Sappho’s ‘Fragment’ 51, 8). H.D. playfully, and seriously attempts a
new genre, poetic expansion, when she undertakes a literal completion
of this Sapphic fragment, pretending to know what the cause of
Sappho’s dilemma was or making it her own with a deliberate disregard
of what this takeover might mean. In ‘Fragment 36’, H.D. imaginatively
plays upon what Sappho’s dilemma might have been, giving it a local
habitation and a name:
I know not what to do—
My mind is reft.
Is song’s gift best?
Is love’s gift loveliest?
I know not what to do,
now sleep has pressed
Weight on your eyelids.
Shall I break your rest,
Devouring, eager?
Is love’s gift best?
There are quite a few things happening here. First, there is an intimate
appropriation of Sappho and her fragment by H.D., born of a sense of
inheritance and belonging, understanding and continuity. next, there
is an eloquent gesture by her, towards a legitimate imaginative flight of
poesy inspired by this comfortable intimacy with a lineage of poets and
poetry—for Sappho could have been an Imagist, so many centuries before
Imagism was conceived as a movement. Further, there is an implication
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that though sappho’s fragment signals no specific direction for the poetic
expansion H.D. undertakes, the younger poet as if naturally assumes it to
be about sexual love. The fragment then swells—literally, figuratively, to
become a new poem with Sappho’s words anchoring it as an epigraph but
retains an added dimension for being H.D.’s playful, soulful re/creation
of what Sappho’s poem may have said. And it is surely not accidental
that H.D.’s poem—one that takes the place of Sappho’s missing poem,
much like a living body occupies the space of a body lost—is both serious
and light-hearted, a soliloquy of a lover in the throes of sexual desiring
at the bedside of the desired one who is asleep. There is both pathos and
bathos in the situation: they reside in the two sexed bodies in the poem as
much as these effects play games with each other in the text, mimicking
the human bodies lying close and yet so far apart, separated by sleep and
waking.
What starts as playful fencing with a sleeping beloved—
now sleep has pressed
Weight on your eyelids.
Shall I break your rest,
Devouring, eager …
In contemplation of rousing the sleeping beloved to offer ‘love’s gift’—
her body—the speaker then turns sombre suddenly, fearing coldness
and rejection:
Shall I turn and take
Comfortless snow within my arms,
Press lips to lips that answer not,
Press lips to flesh
That shudders not nor breaks?
Is love’s gift best?
In tune with much of Sappho’s fragments, H.D.’s homage to them
is a poem filled with longing and the pain of desire unreciprocated.
‘You burn me’ says Sappho’s fragment 38. (Carson 2003). The divided
mind in H.D.’s imaginative expansion wrestles like desiring bodies do,
waiting, wanting, uncertain and in an exhilarating extended metaphor,
‘two white wrestlers’ emerge to represent the moment of the freeze,
the still point before action breaks out, the mind at pause before
contradiction breaks in:
As two white wrestlers,
Standing for a match,
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215
Ready to turn and clutch,
Yet never shake
muscle or nerve or tendon;
so my mind waits
to grapple with my mind
like the two bodies in suspended animation, ‘ready to turn and
clutch’, the poem uses the divided mind as a refrain, each return to it
also captures H.D.’s desire ‘to turn and clutch’ at Sappho’s troubled
image of ‘two states of mind’ at war within. If one sees the impassioned
engagement of later poets with Sappho as a live wire, a dialogue
continues. If one recognises that a lineage of Sapphistry has leached
through the fabric of centuries into our present, then one would have to
disagree with Jeanette Winterson when she said in Art and Lies: A Piece
for Three Voices and a Bawd of Sappho, ‘Her body is an apocrypha. She
has become a book of tall stories, none of them written by herself. Her
name has passed into history. Her work has not. Her island is known to
millions now, her work is not’ (Winterson 1995, 69). This has emerged
as a hyperbolic complaint on many counts though it is of course true
that Sappho’s birthplace Lesbos is famed for lending its name to a love
that dare not speak it. But it cannot any longer be said that she is not
known for her work.
In fact, it seems mundane now to talk of Sappho’s legacy as one
that has merely ‘inspired’ others: Winterson herself is proof of how
Sappho has not only spawned many poets who are texturally in her
thrall but of how she has spread under the skin of prose writers (like
Winterson) who could not perhaps have written of the female sexual
body in ways they have, without a Sapphic shadow watching over them.
In Winterson’s musings on eros and artifice fictionalised through three
voices, Art and Lies, Sappho is one of the three (the others are named
Picasso and Handel). She pronounces in the Sappho section, ‘There’s
no such thing as autobiography there’s only art and lies’ (Winterson,
1995, 69). In this our era of (so-called) post-truth, this may be a truism
worth exploring for Sappho and her lineage, especially in the context of
Sappho’s emergence into light so many centuries after she lived, when
the bulk of whatever we have of her work now was discovered on bits
and pieces of papyri.
It may be fair to say that Sappho’s autobiography is being written
on the body and by the body, of other poets’ texts; thus, it is a story
of her life contaminated by her future, albeit one in which she will be
resurrected larger than life in the myths that will whirl up and cover us
with her firs—and to that extent, it is not autobiography as we know
it, but art and lies in a very Modernist sense. And it is her mythic
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being, contained in fragmented poems on leaves, that sustains her as
a contemporary of women writers since the beginning of the twentieth
century, when the sapphic fragments were discovered and began to be
translated.
winterson writes:
This is what I saw.
A woman balanced on the edge of a parapet, her arms pulled out
in long wings …
Balanced on the primaeval ledge she waits for the gift of tongues.
She is a howling belly before the coming of the Word …
The Word calls her. The word that is spirit, the word that is
breath, the word that hangs the world on its hook. The word bears
her up, translates the incoherent flesh into an airy syntax. The word
lifts her off all fours and puts a god in her mouth. She distances
up the shrunken world in a single span of her tongue. (Winterson
1995, 73)
Sappho is the Word, and the Word is flesh, a living breathing flying
calling thing. Sappho made such a word possible, she birthed it, the
‘howling belly before the coming of the Word’.
And so Sappho said:
]
]
]pity
]trembling
]flesh by now old age
]covers
]flies in pursuit
]
]noble
]taking
]sing to us
the one with violets in her lap
]mostly
]goes astray
(Carson 2003, Sappho’s ‘Fragment’ 21, 39)
to read Sappho in Anne Carson’s translation, If Not, Winter, is to
experience, like a voyeur, the intimacy of a poet translating another
whom she both reckons a gift, a legacy and one to quarrel with, be
impatient about. Carson is no meek translator in awe of classical
Sapphic Lineages
217
greek grandeur she can play with because it happens to have come to
her in bits and pieces, like remnants of many jigsaw puzzles thrown
haphazardly in a bucket together, never to find mates that fit entirely
into their nooks and crannies. She, instead, possesses her material and
makes it her own and like the best of lovers, discovers new ways of
getting under the skin of words she has been offered tantalisingly on
papyri fragments, unstrung, like stars in a dark sky.
In her introduction to the volume, Carson explains her ways of
seeing and doing:
When translating texts read from papyri, I have used a single
square bracket to give an impression of missing matter, so that ]
or [ indicates destroyed papyrus or the presence of letters not quite
legible somewhere in the line. It is not the case that every gap or
illegibility is specifically indicated: this would render the page a
blizzard of marks and inhibit reading. Brackets are an aesthetic
gesture toward the papyrological event rather an accurate account
of it…. Brackets are exciting. even though you are approaching
Sappho in translation, that is no reason you should miss the drama
of trying to read a papyrus torn in half or riddled with holes or
smaller than a postage stamp—brackets imply a free space of
imaginal adventure. (Carson 2003, xi)
Carson’s excitement breathes through the pores of her plentiful
brackets, in which the disappearance of words once spoken by a lover
are fair game to be chased and to be marked absent—over and over,
such is the poignancy of the single bracket that can never be closed.
each absence is a slim but deep gnash, a wounding, a loss. each absence
is also teeming with possibility, promising a space for the imagination
to focus on a bracket and run with it, run riot with it. What the absence
further does is turn the spotlight on the word or words that have
survived; as in love, what survives through loss is precious as a jewel,
both for what it is and what the lost signifies. The words that remain
seem to have come through a sieve, they are the essence in which the
kernels of meaning reside, the extraneous has loosened like dust from
their shoulders. Such a sense of the remaindered that raises itself to
glory beyond all imagining is the very lesson of Sappho’s fragments. It
is also a lesson of modernist women’s poetry. This was expedient—if
serendipitous.
The lesson that the rather mysterious and angular Modernist
Gertrude Stein took from Sappho, one might imagine, is just this: that
words must emerge as if from a sieve, those that survive when a poet
has run a few sentences through some tiny holes. And thought must
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come in spurts, fierce and tender, as Stein throws carelessly at us in her
long poetic tribute to lesbian sexuality, Lifting Belly, written between
1915 and 1917:
Lifting belly. Are you. Lifting.
Oh dear I said I was tender, fierce and tender.
Do it. What a splendid example of carelessness.
It gives me a great deal of pleasure to say yes.
Why do I always smile.
I don’t know.
It pleases me.
You are easily pleased. (Stein 1989, 3)
It is sometimes said that Stein was a poet before the world was ready
for her and this seems true of experiments like Lifting Belly, where she
writes her lovemaking with Alice B. toklas into word and truth, though
they are also, always, ‘art and lies’. Her body and her lovers seep into
the pages of her slim book which she fills with reverie and repartee
and conversation and rumination, all about her love and their love and
their lovemaking her writing their bodies their smell their voices their
liquids and solids and her words that flow and stop, stop and flow, even
while their bellies lift and fall, fall and lift, fierce and tender.
In 1935, Stein said in the first of the four lectures she delivered to
students of the university of Chicago that were published together as
Narration (Stein 1935), that
If you live a daily life every minute of the day the description of that
daily life every day must be moving, it must fill you with complete
emotion and it must at the same time be soothing. It must be
completing as emotion and it must be soothing. If you live your
daily life every minute of the whole day there must really be very
little excitement in the narrative with which you while the time
away that is natural enough if you think about it and a great deal
of the written narrative in english literature has to do with this
thing…. (Stein 1935, 4–5)
It is clear from the ways in which she employs language in her
lectures, too, as well as in her poetic prose and poetry, that Stein was
intent on breaking narrative moulds and forcing the cadences of the
poetic everyday to percolate into the body of every text she produced
both visually and aurally, continually changing its shape and form
and texture and tone, startling the reader and listener into ever-new
intimacies with it.
Sapphic Lineages
219
Rebecca mark, who in 1989 edited the publication of Lifting Belly as
a standalone long poem, writes: ‘when gertrude stein writes “Éclair”,
she asks us “It is clear?” and she also tells us about the pastry éclair, a
pastry in two pieces with cream in the middle. Is it clear? she asks us to
think about this.
…
lifting belly can you see the caesars.
I can see what I kiss.’ (Stein 1989, ‘Introduction’, xxxi)
Can we see Caesar, the nickname for Gertrude Stein? … Can we see
the Caesar, the seizure, the muscle spasm, the orgasm? Mark advises,
‘When you listen to this passage, think of Caesar not only as a general,
as Gertrude, as a salad, but as cease her, seize her, sees her, and finally as
a seizure, a tremor during sex, an orgasm.’ (Stein 1989, xxxii)
Stein says in her fourth lecture of 1935,
One of you brought me poetry to read the other day and I said
remember that if you have to use strained words to say what you
have to say by strain existing in the words that you are using, what
feels to you a rare emotion becomes common-place not ordinary
that is alright but just common-place and a common-place thing
does not contain feeling. That is what makes a common-place thing
a common-place thing, that that it does not contain feeling. (Stein
1935, 46–47)
She experimented with language in her poetry and prose, both, almost
entirely as if to avoid this at all cost, this production of a common-place
thing—‘not ordinary that is alright’—because ‘a common-place thing
does not contain feeling’. Strained words, Stein said, transforms a rare
emotion into a common-place one; Stein’s words flow, unstemmed
and unstrained, moving forward in little eddies and jet-spurts, making
thoughts and utterances loop back on themselves, transforming the
ordinary into the rare and shaping a body upon the page that mirrors
these liquid shapes and flows. Always conscious of the way words chisel
not just meanings but also their own lives and breath upon each page
they occupy, Stein juggled with rhymes, synonyms and homonyms in
wild, gasping, sexual abandon until ‘done’.
Why am I if I am uncertain reasons may inclose.
Remain remain propose repose chose.
I call carelessly that the door is open
Which if they may refuse to open
no one can rush to close.
Let them be mine therefor.
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everybody knows that I chose.
Therefor if therefore before I close.
I will therefore offer therefore I offer this.
Which if I refuse to miss may be miss is mine.
I will be well welcome when I come.
Because I am coming.
Certainly I come having come.
These stanzas are done. (‘Stanzas in Meditation: 83’)
Queerness reclined across the skin of Stein’s life and loves and took fruit
in surprising forms in her writing. A close friend of Pablo Picasso’s,
Stein was also writing what has been called cubist poetry, repeating
words and phrases like building blocks that constructed thought and
image insistently on bare pages, inspired by cubist art that worked
with repetitive lines and angles to pull together, and yet distance, the
artist from the art. Stein wrote two memorable, mystifying poems for
her friend Picasso, who never read a word of her poetry even as he
discussed endlessly with her the intricacies of the modernism they were
on the threshold of, and carving into being, everyday. The second of
these, ‘If I told Him, A Completed Portrait of Picasso’ (1924), uses—
like many of Stein’s experiments with word-sounds—repetition, to
create an overwhelming but blurred sense of meaning, a ‘meaning’
inlaid with an indulgence of him, an easy, teasing intimacy between
long-time friends, a certain affectionate exasperation. A portrait of
Picasso inasmuch as it is her portrait of him, the one she knows in the
way she knows and in the only way she can convey it, through oblique
words and sounds. Her focus on the clipped repetition of certain words
also deliberately denies the possibility of stringing together sentences
that will explicate her thoughts, even while ‘A Completed Portrait’ in
her title mockingly insists on this very impossibility made possible.
together with ‘If I told Him’—the first half of the title, separated by
a comma from the second—Stein seems to be saying, with humour
and a sharp reality, that what she would tell him would throw back at
him a completed portrait of himself, that it could only be in repetitive
fragmented phrases, that the cadences from its sounds would hold
some hazy, yet deep and ‘complete’ meaning, as would the frame it
built on the page, and that here, finally, was a cubist portrait in a poem:
a gift from her in return for the ‘complete’ portrait that he had painted
of her. All this, and so much more—or, less.
He he he he and he and he and and he and he and he and and as and
as he and as he and he. He is and as he is, and as he is and he is, he
is and as he and he and as he is and he and he and and he and he.
Sapphic Lineages
221
can curls rob can curls quote, quotable.
As presently.
As exactitude.
As trains.
Has trains.
Has trains.
As trains.
As trains.
Presently.
Proportions.
Presently.
As proportions as presently.
Farther and whether.
was there was there was there what was there was there what was
there was there there was there.
whether and in there. (‘If I told Him, A completed Portrait of
Picasso’)
georges Perec, in Species of Spaces and Other Pieces (1974), conveys
evocatively the games one plays with selves, spaces, locations and
words, juggling with print and blank on his pages:
I write. I inhabit my sheet of paper, I invest it, I travel across it.
I incite blanks, spaces (jumps in the meaning, discontinuities,
transitions, changes of key).
I write
in the
margin
I start a new paragraph. I refer to a footnote.
I go to a new sheet of paper.
…
This is how space begins, with words only, signs traced on the blank
page. to describe space: to name it, to trace it, like those portolanomakers who saturated the coastlines with the names of harbours, the
names of capes, the names of inlets, until in the end the land was only
separated from the sea by a continuous ribbon of text. Is the aleph, that
place in Borges from which the entire world is visible simultaneously,
anything other than an alphabet?’ (Perec 1974, 11–13)
In Stein, as in Sappho and in H.D., the body and the page are both
travelled upon and travelling, always; the movements uncharted
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and riotous. In the sexual and the creative, there has been from
the beginnings of time a metaphoric obsession with land and its
explorers of the new and unknown; queer sexuality and feminist
word-making bring an edge to this adventuring that births the
possibility of an implosion. They turn the discovering in upon
itself. In Lifting Belly, as Stein traverses flowers, food, words,
memories and her lover’s body with equal intensity, she invokes
geography almost inevitably:
Lifting belly naturally celebrates
We naturally celebrate.
Connect me in places.
Lifting belly.
no no don’t say that.
Lifting belly oh yes.
tax this.
Running behind a mountain.
I fly to thee. (Stein 1989, 25)
Stein was actually doing in the first quarter of the twentieth century
what Jeanette Winterson did at the end of the century, from the 1980s,
when writing loves and other relationships into being: allowing the
shapes and sounds of words in themselves and on the page to crystallise
and melt in prose that could easily merge with the poem laid out like a
tall sparse body in print, or the prose-poem spread voluptuously over
white spaces that leaves no gaps for breaths to be taken.
In her celebrated long poetic prose rumination, Written on the Body,
Jeanette Winterson (1992) pays Steinian homage to the lifting of bellies:
‘explore me’, you said and I collected my ropes, flasks and maps,
expecting to be back home soon. I dropped into the mass of you and I
cannot find the way out. Sometimes I think I’m free, coughed up like
Jonah from the whale, but then I turn a corner and recognise myself
again. Myself in your skin, myself lodged in your bones, myself
floating in the cavities that decorate every surgeon’s wall. That is how
I know you. You are what I know. (Winterson 1992, 120)
experimental poetics that write the lesbian body, the body somersaulting
into word, lifting belly as it dances and spins—they are merely making
good a long-held lineage, saved on bits of papyrus on the island of
Lesbos in sixth century bc. Sappho wrote, ‘I would not think to touch
the sky with two arms’ (Carson 2003, Sappho’s ‘Fragment’, 52) but her
fragments have changed the tenor of touch so firmly, and with such
Sapphic Lineages
223
fragility, that the poem has become a body of parts, quivering and
shivering with shock and delight.
despite every loss, every longing, every jealousy and dread, sappho’s
‘Fragment’, 31 is at once wryly affirmative and affirmatively wry:
whoever he is who opposite you
sits and listens close
to your sweet speaking …
for when I look at you, even a moment, no speaking
is left in me
no: tongue breaks and thin
fire is racing under skin …
and cold sweat holds me and shaking
grips me all …
Carson in her translated version retrieves a line that is set apart, and
makes up an incomplete last thought, slightly sombre,
But all is to be dared, because even a person of poverty (Carson
2003, Sappho’s ‘Fragment’ 31, 63)
Carson refutes the common idea that this poem is about jealousy and
involves a triangulation of people. She contends:
Jealousy is beside the point; the normal world of erotic responses
is beside the point; praise is beside the point. It is a poem about
the lover’s mind in the act of constructing desire for itself.... For in
this dance the people do not move. Desire moves. eros is a verb.
(Carson 1998, 16–17)
That is indeed what Sappho has been able to inject into all the poetry
that remains in intimately sexual conversation with her so many
centuries later, the idea that eros is a verb that travels, making word of
the body: the body becomes a poem and the poem a body that burns
with longing and dances—because for ‘even a person of poverty’, ‘all
is to be dared’. This was a lesson that a succession of later queer poets
found in Sappho’s Fragments and internalised in their making of
poems. Carson and Winterson’s translations and experimental poetics
have borne forward this lesson of daring into the twenty-first century,
making contemporary, all over again, that ancient Sapphic art of word
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and the absence of word together caressing a poem into being—and
the artful body that the words form on the page bearing as much
significance as the meanings of the words themselves.
It is through this lineage of queer-feminist poetics, validating both
the female body and the body of the poem as erotic, that a method for
doing the humanities may be emergent, continually focusing on the
corporeal texture of lives and loves and words all at the same time and
interchangeably. The shape and feel of desire, between women and by
women here, and embodied in poetry through its language which is
fragmentary and terse but teeming with passionate intensity, this is how
we may flag a way to enter and encounter the humanities. The method
is in the immersion, the madness, the pursuit of meaning and shape of
a single dangling word as a body and the piling up of words in patterns
floating and running across pages as bodies. tracing the movements
of letters and words and phrases on a page, marking the ellipses and
the spaces and the brackets, savouring the repetitions as though they
are lovers’ caresses: bodies speak and words reach out to touch each
other or turn away. We read their stories by unearthing what is lost
as much as what remains, by unlayering, by uncovering, by searching,
finding and not finding. Bodies and texts are palimpsests, like Sappho’s
papyri, like our stories of desiring and losing. We are tantalised by what
is missing; we are terrified and yet seduced by the signs and signifiers
we discover: we do the humanities like a lover, erotically.
REFERENCES
Carson, Anne. Eros: The Bittersweet. Illinois: Dalkey Archive Press, [1986]1998.
———, ed. and trans. If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho. new York: Random
House, 2003.
Doolittle, Hilda (H.D.). ‘A Poet in the Wilderness: Songs of Anacreon.’ In
Visions and Ecstasies, Selected Essays. new York: David Zwirner Books,
2019.
Perec, Georges. Species of Spaces and Other Pieces. Penguin Classics, 1974.
Stein, Gertrude, ed. Rebecca Mark. Lifting Belly. tallahassee: The naiad Press,
1989.
———. Narration. Illinois: university of Chicago Press, 1935.
Winterson, Jeanette. Written on the Body. Vintage International, 1992.
———. Art and Lies: A Piece for Three Voices and a Bawd. Canada: Vintage,
1995.
tRAnslAtIon’s dIssIdence:
mIRAJI Becomes sAPPHo
Geeta Patel
wandering from town to house, a wayfarer misplaces
the road that gathers him home. That which was once mine
and your belongings, both foresworn
from memory. Mine and yours no longer known.
nagarī nagarī phirā musāfir
ghar kā rāstā bhūl gayā,
kyā hai merā, kyā hai terā,
apnā parāyā bhūl gayā.—Mīrājī
Who was Miraji (1912–1949)? Miraji was a resolute re-composer
of prose and voluptuously synaesthetic, as well as an exquisitely
philosophical poet in urdu, an avid translator, a voracious essayist
and an edgily incisive attuned, empathetic reader, of whom one could,
following most appraisals of Miraji’s capacious and sometimes startling
interventions in both lyric and criticism say, that Miraji augured a new
strain of urdu modernism in the cauldron of anti-colonial politics.1
even as Miraji was juggling accolades for lyrical feats, Miraji was also
fending off excoriations; widely circulated portrayals of Miraji as an
opaque, enigmatic versifier and a supposed sexual pervert. Though
many of the questions Miraji fostered sifted through the semantics
of solitude, Miraji rarely worked alone—preferring the intellectual
camaraderie of those who shared a sense of the times as well as those
virulently opposed. Miraji saw them-self always in concert with fellow
artists—‘adab nigār—and singing endlessly towards the infinite finale of
a lingering route through the murk, mist or smoke or the dhundalānā—
of loss. 2
Dhundalānā, a concept to which Miraji returned in several texts, is
a moody nominal adjective that illuminates a stance of being, blended
with, melded into or promising an aesthetic politico-philosophical
vantage—the animating condition for Miraji’s particular registers of
modernism (jadīdiyāt). In one such place, an essay on new poetry,
Miraji teases out dhundalānā’s filaments and its nuanced habitations;
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here miraji crafts a mythopoetic, historical genesis for the lyric of the
time.
After this a besieging storm crossed the seven seas and struck. the
hurricane of western culture, organization, and education hit. It
funneled up dry twigs and leaves, but in its glory also helped new
buds sprout. now, slowly new voices surfaced into hearing....
And the hubbub of all these musical hues stirred up a turbulence,
waves seethed out from it that birthed new stages for the journey
of life. But whose murkiness/smokiness (dhundalānā) was like a
maze. The sort of tangle in which only a few could trace the right
road and take it.
This was the sensibility of the new poetry in that era. new poets
stood at crossroads, a threshold from which many roads ventured
outwards—to the right, the left, the front and the back. But poets
did not really know which road they had chosen. What value the
experiments of the past had for them. For how long they had to
stand thus. How long the despairing, violent, agitated sensibility of
the present would hang around with them and on which path must
they find their way. What desecration the ambience, the quality of
their future would pose for them.
new poets slipped away (evaded their circumstances) by
using their profound curiosity as their excuse, when truthfully,
they were only lost or entombed in the murky/smoky (dhundalā)
reflection (aks) of themselves or their communities. Around
them, the old sustenance on the strength of which people could
survive or endure everyday (Heimlich) hassles had faded away;
they no longer held sway. Poets were now alone and needed
to chase support. Sometimes they turned to the wrong things
for help. Sometimes even if they reached a place that might
provide them with the right sort of assistance/succour they
were flummoxed; they didn’t even quite know where they had
arrived. the major cause of these circumstances was that they
didn’t know the contemporary foundations of the edifices they
had to embellish and which forms had to be drawn up along new
templates.
the reasons for this turbulence can be said to be found in
the opaque (mub-ham)3 period of 1857, when the old bindings
that held the social and political together began to fray to make
way for new customs, habits, arrangements and institutions. One
can say that a space of a few generations had already been born
between new emerging young poets and their elders; those who
had seen the intellectual pushes and pulls, quandaries as a pulse.
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If we consider the past of today’s poets from a political vantage
point, we see that along with our abject state arising from the
attenuation of national governance or rule were things that excited
or stimulated political life and that these were merely the diminished
servilities brought about by adversity. They assumed those political
shapes through which our nation while battling the world began to
birth new joys and a curiosity and vehement desire for progress and
freedom along every path/venue of life. (Jalibi 1988, 523)4
These passages make it that clear Miraji envisioned dhundalānā as an
aesthetic psychic state/circumstance in which poets at the crossroads
blundered in a deep bind, a morass of mazes. They idled, skulked,
dawdled interminably (pace Arondekar), semi-comatose, enervated,
almost unheedingly baffled, swathed in dulled fog, unable (except
for a few) to find their route back or to forge a path forward—these
were the circumstances in which they were snarled (albeit continuing
to draft lyrics) before and after 1857. Politics then, the extant political
brutalities and challenges, the estranging potentialities of the time
come together with aesthetics to engender dhundalānā. Let’s call
this condition political melancholia, suspended perhaps even toxic
depression in the Freudian sense, emanating from a sort of loss where
the object, aim (maqsad) and thing (bāt) had faded away from any
chance of being brought to the surface or been so stuffed so deep in
one’s historical innards (the space of a few generations to which Miraji
alludes might call this to mind) so that it was no longer amenable,
not even handy to be mourned painstakingly, then released or soaked
up in the Freudian sense.5 David eng (2019), in his newest take on
melancholia with Shinhee Han, quoting Sigmund Freud reminds us
that though melancholics might know whom they have lost, they don’t
know what they have lost. Mourning occurs through time—perhaps
fabricates time’s flow. Here, however, it is as if even time itself was
gummed up; poets didn’t even know from whence they had arrived,
where they stand, what was portended for them. The past, present and
future, all evaded them.
Why do I go to melancholia?6
That state of anguish without surcease, grieving without end,
which could be said to exemplify melancholia begins with Miraji’s
predecessor, Altaf Husain Hali, the nineteenth-century poet and critic.
Hali composed a nauhah, an elegy to the demise of poetry itself, a poem
whose sorrow offers up the melancholic palette to which Miraji alludes:
Poetry has died, it can never be resuscitated ... even the dust, the
ashes of death effaced … I call to the heavens as witness, can anyone
be rubbed out more thoroughly than this … bringing lyric to mind
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over and over uproots my soul, guts it … those whom we lost have
given up on us as well … ghalib and shefta, nayyar, Azad and
Zauq, time can never unveil these faces for us to gaze upon again.
(Patel 2002, 174–175)
Hali does not fall into mourning in the Freudian sense, he does not
let grief over who and what has died for him wash him away utterly,
and then slowly, excruciatingly grief surfaces again so that he can lose
himself in another. Hali grieves interminably and Miraji’s dhundalānā
seems to be its aftermath. Ghalib and Shefta, nayyar, Azad and Zauq
were also poets renowned for their handiness, their kalā, their nimble
skill, which was love in all its arcane, irritating, soul heaving, searing,
minute and epic-making lyrical glory.
Letting this corpus fall somewhat into disuse, Hali re-organised, reoriented his aesthetic inclinations and his own expertise as a poet away
from the tug and pull of love, away from the cast of characters that
enacted love’s often dire plotted courses, away from the mise-en-scène
of gardens, wine haunts, floral cornucopia, the palette that churned
feeling; denuding love’s resonant metaphoric hues of their succour. The
objects and ornate metaphors through which desire, yearning, longing
consummated and shaped itself were stripped of their significance.
Rather, Hali veered towards other topics and lyrical technae: advocating
aesthetic naturalism (one early foray into modernism), necharal shai’rī
that included poignant descriptions of seasons, alongside a political
revitalisation of Muslim history. Many of those metaphors, whiff of
breeze, roses wilting to death that stirred love, became the objects of
description. Along the way, Hali’s lyrics often flattened into literalism;
he withdrew his investments in his predecessors, many of whom were
his teachers without mourning their demise, dropping metaphorics
along the way.7 Almost as if as he exiled his own past, he jettisoned a
self and the tongue he once inhabited.8
Hali did this without giving his heart over wholly, without reinvesting
himself utterly and unreservedly. Hali withheld a small chunk of what
might have washed him away in its torrent, brought him completely to
his knees. Hali’s melancholic reservation was a profoundly political one
as we will go onto see (Cheng 2000; eng and Han 2019; Munoz 2009).
Through two generations of composers, that small piece reserved by
Hali fell into disuse perhaps, disappeared through who knows what
cracks, no longer available to touch and to eventually release: its effect
was the dhundalānā of which Miraji speaks. What comprises this loss,
what might its enabling conditions have been?
A synoptic, schematic history of the early-to-mid-nineteenth
century as a counterpoint to the one Miraji offered which I translated
Translation’s Dissidence
231
in the opening sequences of this chapter, will provide a leeway into
the conditions of possibility I am provoking into presence here. Altaf
Hussain Hali’s despairing lament was both a requiem to the 1857
revolution and grief over the reverberations of colonial educational
policy. education was one small room in an entire architecture for
producing ‘benevolence’—the gifts for their welfare bestowed on
the colonised—which included hospitals, lunatic asylums, pensions,
orphan schools, etc. Hali himself was a recipient and had been funded
out of the money that was set aside for education by the colonial state,
so he was well-versed in the subtly graphic effects that ensued (Bentinck
1977; Bentinck website; Burke 1884; Dirks 2006; Kerr 1852; Lushington
1824; Minault 1998). Colonial pedagogical projects (Viswanathan) were
hegemonic—doing their work by marrying moral fibre to aesthetic
forms (Samaddar 2014). Or more simply put, colonial education was
vested in transforming the askew moral habits of colonised denizens by
inducting them into new ways of making art, of crafting lyric, from verbs
to topics to metrical forms (Grant 1813). These were relayed through
certain genres of english literature and Greco-Roman literature and law
which had been recouped in the late eighteenth and nineteenth-century
Britain—all of them translated into Indian languages in order to do
what they must. The aesthetic was infected with decadence; love lyric
being a preeminent carrier. The cure for dissipation, debauchery, was
staunchly proper education that inoculated prose and poetry against
iniquity. Money was parcelled off to translation projects. And then to
prizes given for newly keyed lyric and prose that would show off, flaunt
their debt to translated salutary materials (Pritchett 1994). The result:
languages that would speak their art in a colonial tongue, and so, sinew
new moralities (Patel 2007, 2016).
As a financial beneficiary of colonial beneficence, Hali fleshed out
the necessary paradox, the double bind in which writers who were
scrounging around for patrons lived: he took the money and entombed
his lyrical forebearers in a litany of accusations, debased their lyrical
feats, consigned them to oblivion and handed up a piece of his soul9
(Patel 2016). In so doing, Hali gave the British a return on their
investment but not a complete one. Melancholia, grief without end or
surcease, seemed to be the only viable bulwark, a holding station, a last
resort against the takeover of everything that might matter (eng and
Han 2019).
And the effects were those of which Miraji speaks—wandering
dolefully in the mists—a melancholic’s habitations. We might think of
dhundalānā then as the traces, the scars of maiming (Puar 2017), the
upshot of colonial necropolitics (Mdembe 2003) homing in on, targeting
and razing aesthetic forms. In the face of this, Hali’s melancholia makes
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sense—but what miraji speaks of are its intergenerational effects,
melancholia’s lingering on in the cells of Miraji’s compatriots’ sentences.
Might modernism, then be for Miraji, a possible therapeutic poetics
leading through towards and perhaps out of this intergenerationally
bequeathed melancholia.
The loss of value in urdu’s literary forbearers under the constant
barrage of criticism levelled by colonial commentators against their
aesthetic habits was absorbed by urdu writers in the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries and floated to the surface in their judgements
(ma’yyār) on beauty and pleasure, in their accounts of what failed
and what succeeded. This, after all, is the work of hegemony in the
Gramscian sense, it shows up in the ways in which taste is given or
is on the tongue. to reanimate, in a certain fashion, what had been
scrapped on the way and through it engender the circumstances that
might bestow life to their voice and idioms, poets in the twentieth
century such as Miraji tried their hand at translation.
to speak to this, I turn to Miraji’s essay on Sappho. In this closing
section, I will focus more closely on it while bringing in fragments
and titbits from other writings. I have chosen this essay because it,
in particular, forges responses that speak to the narrowest fissures
through which violence comes to reside in the ordinary. In other
words, this essay on Sappho performs its tasks by taking on ideologies
that planted their tentacles deep into the political grammar, desires and
into each word crafted by Miraji’s compatriots. The essay’s plotting
and grammar of the evocations of desire, love, anguish, joy, gender,
history and governmentality incite indirect commentaries on the
processes of governance that left urdu poets in a coma. Indirection
was, paradoxically and ineluctably, the only direct way to intervene
in the cellular (in hegemonies) and through it funnel into what had
been displaced from immediate view. Here, one might want to drift
slightly away from the Freudian psyche to bring a medicalised analytic
to bear on melancholia—the unani/Greek lexicon of humours.10,11
Melancholia’s scourge was black bile, seated in the liver.12 Livers are
the organs/channels where love’s potency finds its place for urdu and
unani medicine, where love’s blood is stored. Medicinal revitalisation of
those suffering from melancholia’s doldrums, its dolorous, lugubrious,
enervating effects might well be through galvanising the hot, humid jolt
into one’s senses that love demands—Sappho, the poet of love, was an
ideal instrument or medium.
As I will go on to show, Miraji’s impetus was double-edged and
fraught with the double-bind of that time. The work or the ‘amal,
the kām, that Miraji performed dug in deep, pulled out the guts of
everyday phrasing, tugged and tussled with the tacit as well as baldly
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233
stated addressees of (those who were asked to listen to) the rhetorical
gesticulations and genuflections of political lyric, a lyric which had
been hewn for their putative edification. Miraji guided everything and
wrote towards those who held tightly onto the value of their place as
addressors. Since, Miraji’s aim, or maqsad, was nothing less than the
unravelling of hegemonies in their minutest capillary flows, Miraji
rhetoric steered towards the most potent and virulent of their effects.
This was the incubation of realism (the anti-love-lyric lyric), the literary
form that was believed by fellow writers to be the most efficacious
political aesthetic for the only robust indictment of colonialism: haqīqat
parastī, the twentieth-century rendition of Hali’s naturalism (necaral)
or mimesis—much of it magnetising around the place of and the status
of women.13 to target the literalism of mimesis, Miraji had to evade or
slide past the crudely literal, veering instead to an arsenal of rhetorical
gestures of indirection and possibility, from allegory to metaphorics,
slyly insinuating through them other venues for gazing, for intellectual
labour, for fancy—takhayyul, a word that fused thinking with dreaming,
both of which were terms essential to Miraji’s repertoire. In bringing a
Perso-Arabic and Sanskrit lyrical glossary, methodically withheld from
and straying away from parsimonious realism to augment Miraji’s
theoretical vocabulary, Miraji also implicitly advocated a literary path
that swerved away from an exclusively english one (while refusing to
give up on it entirely).
When I look at Miraji’s entire corpus of essays on poets that came
from other places and other times, taken along with the translations of
those lyricists for Miraji’s own time, I see something more sinuous in
them than I had when I first wrote on them in my book, where I portrayed
them as an alterior archive, one that broke with the conventional english
curriculum that had been installed for the edification of the colonised
(Patel 2018; Viswanathan 2014) and that brokered other lineages in their
stead. Looking closely and incisively at one essay helps me understand
each such essay as a quest, whose project is sometimes baldly stated but
more often insinuated into the flow of its plotting.
Miraji’s essay on Baudelaire for example stakes its narrative impetus
explicitly at its outset—on the fetishised figurations, the centrepieces
of the pedantic political poetics of Miraji’s time: women, workers and
the poor. Baudelaire furnishes another iconography and pedigree for
them than one garnished from colonised South Asia—so the gauntlet is
also thrown at europe’s feet, to its ghouls tucked away in its own dark
corners (Miraji 161–190). Sappho, on the other hand, does her dirty,
so to speak, through constant subtle reminders, a mnemonic code, as it
were, to a webbing of allusions which scroll backwards to the education
policies that engendered the forgetting entailed in melancholia. In so
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doing, the reminders clarify, izahār, a path through the labyrinths, into
a truth sedimented in them. Foucault might call alethurgy, glossed in
Urdu as izahār, of which he says,
the set of possible verbal or non-verbal procedures by which one brings to
light what is laid down as true as opposed to false, hidden, inexpressible,
unforeseeable, or forgotten, and say that there is no exercise of power
without something like alethurgy … hegemony cannot be exercised
without something like alethurgy. (Foucault 2010, 7)
miraji, in this essay on sappho, revisits alethurgy, as izahār, clarity
several times. so, Foucault’s appeal to alethurgy, perhaps as a device to
speak to what miraji is attempting to massage, dhundalānā the state in
which even the possibility of finding one’s way to izahār fails, might be
particularly apposite.
Alethurgy had to be claimed by Miraji in another key. Hegemony, to
paraphrase Foucault was about conduct—Miraji’s maqsad, then, was
directed at conduct, its potentialities, its foreclosures and its miscarriages.
And given the Greek textual history that Foucault makes his base in the
lectures on the government of the living, where he explores the lineaments
of alethurgy, in a peculiarly apposite fashion, Miraji turns to Sappho. Here,
in Miraji’s essay, izahār or disclosure, or bringing to light, hurtles headlong
into the possibilities of its constant, consistent and necessary failure. Miraji
exploits many of these possibilities in the grammar of sentences, in the
plotted flow of narrative, in the miniscule twists of rhetorical play, the call
of images, the folding of their own voice into others, in melancholia.
Sappho is an ideal muse for Miraji, partly because she herself had
been brought to life so many times as herself, in translation. In the essay
on her, Miraji talks about the ebb and flow of translation as tolling the
tales of Sappho’s demise and rebirth from the crypt of forgetting each
time a translator found her again, most notably in the hands of the
nineteenth-century decadents and more recently with translations
based on new poem fragments. Sappho died—in the hands of her
interlocutors, the quarry, Miraji explains, of Christian pogroms against
immorality. And Sappho’s chronicle is told via Miraji’s charting of
the loves she had, dying a little death, each time she lost one love and
finding her being again as she hitched her feelings onto another. A poet
whose biography, as narrated by Miraji, began in exile and ended with
a chase, away from her own land, her vatan, to pursue a boatman she
loved that led to her spectacularised suicide, Sappho’s own life required
her to find her place over and over every time she lost it (nagy 1990).14
Sappho’s life becomes the melancholic’s object lesson—a how to lyrical
manual for mourning.15
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But, more significantly perhaps, the deepest rapport that Miraji as a
poet and translator had with Sappho, one where Miraji begins to fold
into her, was her love for another woman, Atthis. Here Miraji hails
readers, asking them to feel for her—as hamdard—in a kind of acutely
shared listening, through which a reader comes to experience Sappho’s
joy and love and to suffer her grief. It is through Sappho’s queer loves and
her wandering life, the genres through which she unearths possibility
that we might see the genesis of pathways through melancholia. The
history of urdu poetics in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries
was love lost—love was forsaken as a lyrical device and those who
sang love vanished from view—and translation was its vehicle. Love’s
metaphors furnish the arsenal for the language of grief, even if the same
object gets re-instated when it is found again. In the final analysis, in
Miraji’s hands Sappho becomes, as she does for so many others who
have spoken in her voice in translation, the poetess best known for love
lyric and lyric attuned particularly to Sapphic desire.
But I’d like to pause here for a moment and turn for a small hiatus to
the idea of the quest in Miraji’s work that might provide an augmenting
mise-en-scène for the essay on Sappho. Miraji wrote a number of
poems I have termed journey-jātrī-poems—each meandered, almost
in dreaming, along the chancy, magical path towards creativity—
takhalikiyāt. Creativity was the soul of much of Miraji’s corpus, its
raison d’etre, the search for it, where, how and what consumed Miraji.
And it had to—given what Miraji believed was true, alethurgy, about
that time—that poets were grasping about, blundering in a blanketing
morass of loss, with a denuded sense of their past and with only murky
avenues towards a thin tenuous future. Creativity, metaphors that
hummed with potency, the craft of the voice, required feeling, ehsās,
coupled with intellect, zahan. Without each, the other was hollow,
did not invigorate, provided no fodder for the pen, fired no pleasure
in listeners; words flattened out into literalist tedium. Sappho, then,
comes along as the ideal muse for this quest. The essay on Sappho can
be seen as a journey poem, on a quest towards creativity, the craft of the
voice invigorated through feeling, ehsās, coupled with intellect, zahan;
but more importantly it is a gendered and sexualised lyrical tongue.
So, what does Miraji do in the essay? Miraji opens the essay on
Sappho with dhundalānā—the state in which Miraji says Greek lyric
lies, from which the pathways to Sappho, the voice that enfleshes
creativity, must be tracked. Sappho then is one possible route through
dhundalānā, not in some undemanding sense, but one that is thorny
and discomfiting, as barbed and meandering as the slow course of
mourning. Miraji’s maqsad is to bring urdu’s creativity to life, in the
face of its floundering in and under the aegis of great loss, from the
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bits and bobs that he can scrounge from wherever he finds them.16
Sappho is peculiarly apposite for Miraji’s orchestration of a world
out of the fissures and crumbs that have been left behind as a legacy
of Miraji’s own past—after all, she herself is compiled out of the
muddied melodies from ancient Greece.
As I have indicated, colonial education policies and projects and
their governance of the living were often underwritten by substantiating
claims garnered from or fashioned through classical authors translated
(literally and figuratively). Miraji’s journey into alethurgy via Sappho
begins with them. Calling Plato, Socrates and Athens the purported
fount of european civilization Miraji fleshes Sappho through phrases
and quotes taken from this archive: most notably, dotting the essay
with Socrates’ invocation to her as ‘beautiful Sappho’ (321). Miraji
then goes onto Catullus and Horace, who ‘profit’ from her writings and
Homer, by whom she was so revered that she could be justly named a
‘poet’ (322). Here, we see Miraji’s use of the word duniya or world as a
something that organises a canon both in its successes and shortfalls,
its culling of materials for profit. It is the world that British officials
commanded into being.
When Miraji brings Sappho to presence via the annals of classical
authors, something askance is birthed; classical enchantment loses
its gloss somewhat. First, because Sappho is the very embodiment of
depravity. Then, though Miraji launches his essay with giving both
Greece and Rome their due, Miraji very quickly turns that around on
its head, with a searing exposé of the dire state of gendered subjects
in Greece—an indictment of Greek democracy that failed some of its
most vulnerable denizens.
This line of exploratory historiography is suggestive of what the
essay poetically plays out, the provenance of conduct and history in
the most capacious sense possible. The essay meanders. In doing so, as
jātrī nazms did to similar effect, Miraji’s essay could be said then to be
a lyrical paean to, a series of byways to conduct: the stances poets take,
history as a reservoir for comportment, what poetics can evoke for us
as a guideline to our own demeanour, the legacies of composition that
seed the mannerisms of analysis we usher in.
Miraji composes the essay through reiterations of the vocabulary
associated with surmise: andāzah (estimation), ho saktā hai (it might
have been), mumkin hai (it’s possible), hu’ā hogā (it might have
happened), lāzmī (what must be). In closing this chapter, I will offer
possibly the most salient features of what Miraji might have hoped
to achieve with ‘Saffo’. One is tucked into the word ‘shāyad’ perhaps,
conjecture and surmise.
Translation’s Dissidence
237
Perhaps it is the signature of prophecy and the essay is a recital, an
inventory of the syntax of surmise, of what might be in the guise of
what might have been or must have been. History is conjectural but not
merely so, the possibilities it brings to bear miraji seems to say, bear the
heft of futures which are thrown from it. The past, then, is as prophetic
as the future, the present lying in their wake (suspended between abad
and azal, between eternity and time without an ending). Perhaps this is
Walter Benjamin’s angel of history, facing the past? Almost everything
that has the texture of historical truth about Sappho, described with
meticulous tender care so that it comes across as a vivacious present—
beginning with Sappho’s mother’s rush across the sharply scented
pine forests of Lesbos to Mythilene with her young children, following
upon her father’s death, her library of contemporary resources, her
staunch political stances, the spirited conclave of poets who composed
in concert—is hedged in by surmise, perhaps this was so. All these
are prophetic futures by which Sappho’s voice would live in the time
given by Miraji to fellow sojourners (Miraji, 324–328). And because we
are speaking of Greece, the heartland of the classical, whose registers
ground colonial claims for themselves and the prophetic future they
propose, for those who they have colonised, the grammar of surmise
gently deflects the censuring surety of their pens. even as Sappho’s past
unravels the labyrinth in which urdu found itself and its lost past is
unobtrusively smoothed away in surmise and what is possible.
Here, I’d like to return to the lexicography of surmise, lodged
not in the more predictably historical but in the poetry that Miraji’s
translated, in Miraji own inimitable style as something that expands
the sparseness of Sappho’s fragments into lyrical, dreaming history.
Fidelity is not Miraji’s stance, recomposition is—in tuning Sappho’s
voice to Miraji own lyrical one, Miraji calls her back, resurrects her for
urdu (Apter 2014). In her rebirth Sappho marries, loves both men and
women. And love, after all, is all about surmise. Who hasn’t turned to
guesswork when they hurtle into love: from potential to possible? Is
it true, can it be true, how certain am I, does she or doesn’t she, am I
imagining it: are all such familiar phrases when love hails one, overtake
one’s senses, turns one into a bumbling bubbling fool. Her marriage is
entirely coded in surmise; and not one with which Sappho is enchanted.
And even Phaon, Sappho’s last great love, assumes gloriously inspired
shape through surmise:
It’s possible that this astonishingly graceful young man might have
been hired by Sappho to row her in his river barge. And perhaps
when, on the water’s surface lit up by the full moon, under the
stars’ shadows, the flat bottom barge flowed towards her, Phaon
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standing by his oar, his beauty and grace turned to flesh, this poet,
so overflowing with feeling may have arrived at love. (276–277)
women, however, are never given the grammar of surmise, the mayhave-been, the possible. For them, miraji uses only certainty. And, more
than in any other place, miraji’s portrayals of desire emanate directly
out of the poetry. It’s as though miraji’s voice takes over from sappho’s,
flowing easily into enjambment from the verse. miraji is born again, as
sappho sings, whether in ecstasy or deep mourning, jealousy or joy.
In love’s fervour, melancholia loosens its tenacious grip. And here is
where miraji asks readers and for the poets that belong to jadīdiyāt
for hamdardī—asks them to follow in those footsteps and become one
with sappho. Bring takhayyul to takhlīq in ikhlāq. The embers of envy
ignited Sappho’s heart because by now her passion had turned stormy.
Like the gods I’ve come to see what is before me/ the one who sits
facing me/I look upon your face/ attend your voice/your sexy style
shakes my heart/Ah! Longing for sacrifice stuns me so/my voice
faded to nothing/were I to glimpse you/my tongue would hitch
to silence/words empty in my mouth/fire mortify my flesh/I am
blind when I turn to look/monstrous noise fill my ears/but ‘no’ is
scripted into sorrow’s fate/my life cannot deliver me/I endure grief
as I wait/I cannot see my death even when I search for it far and
wide/my death refuses to reveal when it will show up/.
And in ‘Prison of love’:
Passion shackled me/rebellious terror brought me to my knees/
In bitterness is also the clarity of milk/where tyranny there also
kindness/I’ve come to understand love’s respite in a heart’s ordeal/
my life burned to nothing/Atthis has left me/she’s bound her soul
to a stranger. (Miraji, 274–276)
Atthis’ loss is death withheld, held out but not given, Sappho’s love
for her deeply paradoxical, flesh mortified and tantalised, tender and
pitiless. With Phaon’s bad faith, however, Sappho takes her death into
her own hands, leaping into the sea in Sicily the place to which she had
earlier been exiled. Once Sappho had died, Miraji was free to release the
prophetic poet and bring to life ‘Prophecy from another time’, the first
lyrical fragment Miraji translated in the essay on the poet. Rather than
finishing off Sappho’s life with her historical death, Miraji restores her
in the closing section of this essay. Sappho, Miraji says, tells us that love
makes even a brute a lyricist. ‘In a world of sorrow dusted with agony/I
live, survive in a sort of loss, as though the wind’s lament sends my tale
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239
of love on/that mischief though brutal/leaves not a trace’ (miraji 281).
But it does change something profound for miraji and sappho’s sorrow
traces possibilities that are more than mere surmise. For after these lines,
written ostensibly for Phaon and his faithlessness, Miraji commences a
conversation with/as Sappho—a guftagu in which Sappho goes back and
forth exchanging verses with Indian poets who lived in Miraji’s present
and then back to the past. First, Akhtar Sheerani, the leading romantic
poet from Miraji’s time, who inspired Miraji and then Mirabai the
medieval mystic in whose voice Miraji also sang, and finally, further back
Bhratṛhari, who Miraji also translated. They become Sappho’s conclave,
it is to them she speaks in verse and they respond in kind.
But the converse between poets is not absentminded, not haphazard.
Poets are pulled towards each other through metaphor. It’s as though
metaphors were alive, vibrant, thrumming, voluptuous, prickly and
gutting.17 They throw out resonances, create moods and speak to one
another. The bulbul calls out to the nightingale, the flushed earth
summons the earth garlanded in colour and willy-nilly drags Mirabai
towards Sappho. Mirabai trades with, senses with, Sappho through
metaphor. Metaphors have claims on people and people have claims on
metaphor—the result is an ambience which the two partake. Metaphors
as doing—not just being—they do something to lift melancholia’s
doldrums?
What then can we take away for ourselves from the lead up to
Miraji’s finale? Logos is embodied in a lexicon that provokes the
question of value, scattered as though artlessly throughout the entire
text: measure, profit, accrue, assay of money and pressing for claim. But
Miraji was nothing if not a meticulous wordsmith. And Miraji braces
Sappho against claims that siphon value away from her, even as her
craft calls her worth into being.
We might begin with what it means to speak as a woman who loved
women—something Miraji did and something that was snatched away
from women whose proxies staked claims on their behalf (both the
British who acted for their so-called protection and the Progressive
writers who wrote in their stead). ‘Only women can compose’ says
Miraji in an essay on poetics. Here, Sappho does not compose in her own
solitude. Rather her mahfil composes her and this mahfil encompasses
Miraji’s—making poetry is not a solitary craft, lyric is deeply social,
the fraught convivialities from which urdu modernism was shaped.
And what Miraji shows us is that these composite compositions do not
mirror a world, they are not mimetic in any simple sense, and in this
way, they will not accede to British installed proprieties for poetics so
assiduously followed by both Hali and the Progressives. Rather, lyrical
compositions could be thought of as a series of washes in painting,
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where what was freshly observed was tuned into lament and euphoria,
politics and hope. metaphor tugs and calls and poetry reassembles
worlds but not in the architectural blueprints of convention that format
solace; more especially, if those lyrics called to speak anew are love’s
fragments composed by a woman for a woman.
It is in the absence of returning, as though guilelessly, to truth value
that those who have to live the legacy of violence can find their hopes
might bear something more than the brutal. Colonial education stripped
legacies away, stripped communities bare of their putative histories
(whether valued or cheapened). So, also with Sappho as pedagogical
figuration. But what Miraji translating Sappho and translating as Sappho
directs us to attend to is that history as fidelity stalls within the boundaries
of literalness—histories waylaid or abraded away cannot be recouped
through restoring their exactness. neither repair, nor reparation, nor
restoration, nor compensation alleviates melancholy into mourning.
Only when the historical is released into someone else’s surmise, history
as dream fragments of another’s exilic lives and desires (flowing with
delight, caught up in deep despair), can something that is not inimical to
metaphoric creativities burgeon. translation held tightly to impropriety,
becomes both composition and analytic. Lyric may be the only place
where, Miraji suggests through Miraji’s translations of Sappho, fusing
with her queer loves and softening ourselves to metaphors that are
alive and lively and troublesome and awkward, we might escape. Seeing
flourishing where endless death or marring lived, where creativities’
runaway possibilities might find their voices and melancholia, whether
its lineaments are unani or Freudian, might surcease. But these are also
places where betrayals are still one arbiter of possible futures: here, in all
of them, is a possible genesis for modernism.
The two poems with which Miraji concludes speak to these measures:
When nights hours have slipped away, morning’s flame about to dawn
when fickle sleep tests one’s eyes, a god brings dreaming
these words so grim, how can my heart bear
the sorrow and calamity that fills it
how can I let my soul’s hope persist unfinished
exultation lifts my mind, I won’t let grief overwhelm me
the sky’s tender joy will engulf, soak my heart
when I was young, guileless, my mother offered me play things
I opened my hands to accept them, it wasn’t as though I could refuse
the heavens bestow rapture to those who chance hope, and the hymns
and sacrifices
in my songs
shed their disquiet and my melodies dance, bloom, flower. (Miraji 355)
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241
And the final one, which is Miraji’s culminating paragraph, ‘[t]hose
who have beauty are worthy, whether a beautiful statue or a charmed
one/But the one who does not please in this way, is instead worthy,
truly exquisite’ (Miraji 356) is his conclusion. Ma’yyār: the measure
of worth. And it is Sappho’s own character that measures up: perhaps
a measure for Miraji’s compatriots, whose tongues are held silent or
voice only what has been given them as the proper arbiters of political
speech. Therein lies their melancholia—with Sappho’s voice the gift
that might release their jadīd melodies into song.
NOTES
1. Many lineages and forebearers have been suggested for urdu modernism
or jadīdīyāt. One such finds its inception in the poet Altaf Husain Hali
and his turn to lyrical naturalism which I will speak to later in this
chapter. See Ahmed (2008) for another assortment of engagements that
fall under the auspices of modernism, Ahmed’s lineage building exercises
focus on transformations sited primarily in the formal features of lyric.
Most conventional histories of twentieth-century urdu poetry are routed
through three well-known lyricists—Miraji, n.M. Rashid and Faiz Ahmed
Faiz.
2. Because Miraji was a putative man who took the name of a woman (either
a bhakti poet or a woman with whom Miraji was infatuated). I am trying
to not use the masculine or feminine when I speak about Miraji.
3. I contrast dhundalā to mubham—both are concepts for Miraji—in fact
Miraji thinks of mubham in relation to tasavvur as idea or concept/
imagination. Mubham comes closer to the notion of undecidable, even
ineffable (the first perhaps almost Derridean in its scope), uncertainty,
ambivalence, where ordinary categories of analysis or genre conventions
cannot reach or even do their work. It opens up possibilities for reading—
here in this prose snippet it probably comes closer to uncertain, or even
a time where things haven’t been settled or causes can’t be determinate
(Patel 2002, 269–277). Against this is dhundalā—closer to something
murky, a morass even, more a state of being than a stance for an analytic.
4. All translations from Indian languages in this chapter are mine.
5. Given Miraji’s avid perusal of Freud or Freudian readings of writers such
as Charles Baudelaire—turning to Freud to think about a term Miraji
coins seems particularly apt.
6. Swift schematic takes on the work of an abbreviated posse of scholars might
offer some foreshortened guidelines. Many of them turn to melancholia
as a genre of being that comes into presence for black or Asian or Latinx
or Jewish or Cypriot communities lingering under legacies of colonial
or racialised or ethnic brutality, or histories of violent dispossession that
underwrote political ascendancy by communities such as the British. even
if these situations that have either fallen way from the repertoire of those
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7.
8.
9.
10.
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who were responsible for them or been repudiated by the stolen habitation
of places and objects that were handed over to people who had also paid
a steep price as was the case in cyprus. each scholar opens some of their
forays into exploring the somatic-political conditions that underwrote
melancholia through sigmund Freud’s early essay ‘mourning and
melancholia’ (1959), often routing their interrogations through Frantz
Fanon. Many of these theorists of melancholia give its energy different
nomenclatures, postcolonial or critical melancholia being two instances.
I am playing with demetaphorisation and literalisation that are considered
symptoms of and the linguistic grammar of melancholia; when
melancholia was enfleshed in and through language. See both Khanna
(2003) and Abraham and torok (1994) from whom Khanna draws. In
the cases I delineate language is the target, its forms desecrated, so it is
not just the symptom but also that which must be reoriented—and that
rupture is not just an effect of but constitutes the causal circumstances
for melancholia. In South Asia, this metaphor bore the brunt of colonial
razing. This is true also for indigenous communities whose tongues were
literally shredded by policies of settler colonialism.
Bhaskar Sarkar’s (2009) wonderfully enunciated, careful parsing of
melancholia in his book on partition cinematics provides me a route
to also envision this dropping away of self and the moral features that
are activated in that loss; here Abraham and torok (1994) can also be
considered alongside Sarkar’s invocations. Hali works well with Sarkar’s
schema: loss of an object that is not set apart from one’s self but necessary
to how one envisions and lives, reflecting as Sarkar suggests, one’s self
worth. As Sarkar points out, turning to Freud to elaborate what he is
exploring, melancholia is central to the make-up of the ego itself—the
lost object or ideal substituted for, preserved by and as the ego. In other
words—herein lies the dilemma that melancholia brings. And that might
be carried over into the dhundhalānā that Miraji presages for their own
compatriots—a multigenerational melancholia, mourned as Sarkar
intimates as ‘chimera’. Sarkar is also productive in the ways in which he
speaks of the ‘contingent, traumatic event that remains largely inaccessible’
about which communities encounter difficulties in understanding the
experience, placing it in a meaningful account, so that it is rendered
opaque with only fuzzy symptoms left over or persisting beyond the realm
of language—this may well be alluded to as Miraji’s dhundhalānā.
Most writers on melancholia would term this ambivalence (Khanna
and Bhabha). I prefer double bind (Patel 2016) because it articulates the
conundrum (I kill off my ancestors to revitalise myself but in the process,
I also destroy myself) in a starker more unambiguous fashion.
Freud was clearly aware of the humoral theory of medicine, but as many
commentators have suggested, his melancholia did something slightly
different than the usual understanding of melancholia as a humour. unani
medicine that was akin to the Galenic system, could be considered the
translation of it used by physicians in a later period. See Ahmad (1999);
Ayush website; Azmi (2001).
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11. and 12. see Yael navaro’s (2012) invocation of maraz or illness that her
turkish-cypriot interlocutors used to describe what they were; the Urdu
for patient is marīz. one might then want to put these two together to
grapple with melancholia’s effects as somatic-psychic.
13. See also Bhaskar Sarkar (2009).
14. Mackail (1910) gives Miraji some of his information on Sappho. For
alternative translations, see Carson (2002) and also https://digitalsappho.
org/bibliography/.
15. The curious synergy between Sappho returning from exile, her capacity for
love coming back and her living again over and over through translation
provides us a much more polygonal, packed calibration for the lifting of
melancholia into grief that just what we could see through one transit
bereft of all the others.
16. Donald Winnicott the psychoanalyst speaks in Playing and Reality (1971,
67) about creativity as the antithesis of what he seems to describe as
melancholia (where a person does not care where they are alive or dead
engendered in what he terms compliance). He poses the enchantment
of creativity as venue through which life becomes possible and viable.
I think that Miraji turns to creativity in the same fashion to enable
similar pathways of possibility. Sappho might be what Winnicott calls a
transitional environment or phenomenon—through which something
can be worked through.
17. See navaro on metaphor—which helped me craft my own analysis. She
meticulously works through the allegiances enabled through thinkers who
might be set off against one another—to bridge the separation between
psyche and thing, between human and not. Metaphors for her do—they
are active, they generate. Here she builds on the work of teresa Brennan,
taking off where Brennan leaves us slightly stranded. navaro also speaks
about metaphor creating a mood or state, objects, things, detritus
producing more generalised affects, not more personal feelings. Indic
(Perso-Sanskrit) rasa-dhvanī-bhāva—aesthetic theory might be more
viable as a way of feeling through the nuances of what navaro suggests.
(Patel 2007) Partly because mood—perhaps the urdu kaifiyat—is only
made possible, only comes to be through objects, through nature—objects
and nature produce moods (more generalised ones that are mobilised
through many mood shifts). And mood is akin to an ambience in a room,
shared across everyone in each other’s presence.
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urdu Markaz, 1988.
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miraji. Mashriq o Maghrib ke Nagmen (songs from the east and the west).
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1971.
Is tHeRe A HomoseXUAl In tHe teXt?
Rahul Sen
moon in cancer, Pisces rising. sign of the exile and the poet. wealth
is spurned. success at thirty-six. early death. eccentricity lessens
with age. literary success, world travels, pilgrimages, a house by
the sea. A twenty-year Venusian proficiency in the arts; aesthetics
and the sexual. Conventionally speaking a bad-charactered person
but devoted to the learned, friend to society’s rejects, sacrificing,
attaining wisdom after repentance at eros. Last years in decline.
Friends are progeny. Beloved of women. Disappearance of an aged
woman. Moon and Jupiter cushioning against poverty. Great faith
in mankind.
—Hoshang Merchant, The Man Who Would Be Queen (2011)
to read these lines of Hoshang Merchant’s autobiographical fiction is
to witness a torrent of scattered words, discontinuous phrases, sparse
images and lone ruminations, spread on the page like Sapphic fragments,
glaringly staring back at the readers with a rage and pathos that perhaps
only sequestered marginality can uphold. One can manoeuvre through
the disjointed distributions of words and non-linear placements of
isolated images, awaiting the arrival of an interpretative serendipity that
would cause an explosion, detonating the unflinching truth underneath
words that seem more naked than flesh. But it is only an illusion of
explosion, one realises, a non-arrival of serendipitous truth that
obscures meaning and thwarts any easy attempt at a poetic exegesis.
The words brim with prurient energy and through the evocation of
‘eros’ and ‘aesthetics’, ‘friend’ and ‘beloved’, paint the canvas with a
literary transgressiveness that resists singularity of meaning and proves
counterintuitive not only in terms of content but also form—generically
betraying the autobiographical narrative.
Hoshang Merchant’s autobiography, The Man Who Would Be Queen,
which he intriguingly calls ‘autobiographical fictions’, was published in
2011. Arguably, the first gay autobiography in the english language,
published in India, ‘the book took almost thirty years to be completed
and published,’ says Hoshang in a personal interview. In the text which
is divided into four sections—tracing the narrator’s childhood days in
a conflicted family, to his education, experiences and sexual encounters
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Is There a Homosexual in the Text?
247
abroad in the United states, Palestine, Jerusalem, to his days as a
professor of literature in India—one can witness the juxtaposition of
two uncoupled, or perhaps not, ideas which shape its meaning and
possibilities of reading—that of the growth of a poet’s mind and/or the
sexual philandering of a gay person at home and the world. The text’s
resistance to any easy generic qualifier is borne out by the contradictory
description of being ‘autobiographical fictions’ on the cover page to ‘a
collection of lyric essays’ on the end page. In between these two lurks a
panorama of sentiments from love, rage, hatred, jealousy, heartbreak,
joy, pain, orgasm, ecstasy and all the complexities and contradictions
that permeate the narrator’s personhood.
Hoshang Merchant’s narrative uncovers the multiple tongues or
‘polyglossia’, as Mikhail Bakhtin1 (1934) would term it, of the queer
individual. It is this splinteredness within, and fragmentation without,
that materialises a queer aesthetics and politics of which Merchant is an
exemplary exponent. It is perhaps significant to note that ‘the literary’
not only serves as a referential axis in the text—lines ranging from Anaïs
nin to Proust, Plato to Lorca, Borges to Auden, Shakespeare to Rumi,
Sufi poetry to his own poems—but becomes sites of identification for
the narrator who anchors his queerness not only to categories of
identities such as ‘gay’, ‘homosexual’ or ‘queer’ but on to the transient
malleability of the literary which prides itself on contingency,
infinitude, borderlessness, felicity and jouissance. The ‘literary’,
however, is never taken or received on its face value; the subversive
turning around of the title of Rudyard Kipling’s novella, The Man Who
Would Be King to the seductive and titillating The Man Who Would Be
Queen, not only bears testimony to the appropriation or affirmative
sabotage of canonical literary texts but also punctures the masculinist
common sense that sustains the canon. This, accompanied by the
image of Merchant that adorns the book cover, turning his back to
the readers, looking contemplatively on his side and holding a hand-fan
with long hair flowing alongside his bodily curves, perhaps, resembling
a naked geisha or mermaid2—not only underscores the queer aesthetics
of the text but brings back the body in conversation with notions of
writing gender and sexuality, literature and politics, femininity and
queerness.
THE AUTHOR IN CONVERSATION
March 2017: Hoshang Merchant was staying in Jawaharlal nehru
university for a week as a ‘writer in residence’, conducting workshops,
delivering public lectures and holding poetry reading sessions. I decided
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to speak to him about his book and his understanding of queerness,
writing, politics, poetry and aesthetics.3 merchant was everything that
I had imagined; the image conjured by those hauntingly lyrical words
was coming alive. walking with the support of a stick, maintaining his
usual queer idiosyncrasy, there was an air of joy, loneliness, jubilance,
passion, sexiness, longing, pathos, sadness, ecstasy and bereavement
about him. with affectation and whimsicality, he responded to my
questions as if a yesteryear queer is speaking to his progeny! Hoshang
Merchant unequivocally admits that women’s autobiographies were
an inspiration for him behind writing this book ‘since, there were no
homosexual autobiographies from India at that time’, he says. With a
playful and affective tone he mentions, that, ‘I grew up imitating the
women, took inspiration from them to write my autobiography. now
the women imitate me, I am the queen.’ He ends the sentence with
impeccable hijra4 claps, a sardonic grin and poetry in his eyes. Merchant
prides himself on claiming the ‘beginning’ on many grounds—his
edited anthology, Yaarana: Gay Writing from India, was published
in 1999,5 one year before the publication of Ruth Vanita and Saleem
Kidwai’s Same-Sex Love in India: A Literary History. It is regarded as the
first gay anthology from India, apart from his autobiographical fictions
which is the first queer autobiography written in the english language
in this country. ‘I am the alpha and omega’, says Hoshang with a campy
flamboyance, claps again and adds, ‘I am beyond “gay” and “queer”.
I am the fairy, the queen. I am the empress chakki.’ Hoshang loved and
lived in the pre-queer theory days; he frontally positions this temporality
in our conversation—‘in those days “queer” was not in vogue. I was a
faggot, a campy, limp-wristed homosexual who took the penis of all
those straight men out there, inside me’—then breaks out in a laughter
that holds dissidence and pride in a high-pitched feminine voice.
I realised the difficulty of interviewing a person like Hoshang
Merchant, most of whose replies were circumlocutory and erratic,
always substituting the apparent with metaphors, analogies and
anecdotes that demand interpretation. even in the most mundane and
dreariest of conversations, he seems to be at his lyrical best, turning
the ordinary into poetry with his prodigious wit. It was much later
that I realised, it was part of a larger queer practice that Merchant
seems to embody—of frolicking and playing around with words that
hold multiple meanings and double entendre, oftentimes, bordering
on the sexual, erotic and risqué overtones. ‘Language made me gay’,
says Merchant, emphatically, who believes the self to be nothing
more than a literary construction. On being asked, why did he prefer
to choose ‘autobiographical fictions’ over autobiography, Merchant
revealed that he sees the self as a fictive imagination; a construction
Is There a Homosexual in the Text?
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from selected dominoes of memory. ‘The subject first constructs itself,
then constructs his autobiography’—this idea seems to run all along his
book and it is this imaginative impulse that comes alive in pages after
pages, paragraphs after paragraphs. In a self-referential tone, he writes:
He said my autobiography was ‘made sublime,’ that I wanted to
present myself in a good light. to one’s beloved one shows the
potential self, the beautiful self, though I do not care for public
opinion. Autobiographical art is suspect. All art is falseness not
only in the sense that it is a moulding, a retelling but also in the
sense that art is the hand-making of one’s life; it is a made universe.
even autobiography is fiction. (Merchant 2011, 68–69)
Merchant gives a literary, almost poetic explication to what Judith
Butler writes in her second preface to Gender Trouble. She opines, ‘the
difficulty of the “I” to express itself through the language that is available
to it. For this “I” that you read is in part a consequence of the grammar
that governs the availability of persons in language’ (Butler 2007, xxvi).
While acknowledging the inability of a complete escape from the limits
of linguistic availability, Merchant’s queer project seems to be one that
withstands the masculinist deployment of grammar, by turning words
on their heads that obscures easy intelligibility within the available
frameworks of knowledge-production.
It is interesting to observe that Merchant’s verbal rage and aggression
do not get translated into his writings: all the cuss words and slurs
that animate his speech, sublimate on the page, get substituted by an
aesthetic serenity that one may witness in Sufi poetry. One realises that
this performative contradiction marks Merchant’s queer aesthetics and
reveals that behind words are other words of varied significations; it
also creates the political in ways that are contingent, not easily readable
as transparent moments in the text. His latest book of poetry—My
Sunset Marriage—which was to be released on the following day,
embedded the performative contradiction at the level of textuality by
combining felicity and farewell in two words. In the subsequent part
of the chapter, I will further engage with these contradictions in his
writings and explore the possibilities that they open in terms of queer
politics and aesthetics.
WRITING GAY
In the introductory chapter of her third book, Tendencies, published
in 1993, eve Kosofsky Sedgwick wrote a deeply personal and
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autobiographical response to the current state of queer studies in
the United states. The chapter, titled ‘Queer and now’, not only
expositions Sedgwick’s engagement with gay and lesbian suicides,
the AIDS epidemic crisis, her own struggle with cancer, but also
exhibits, stylistically, how the autobiographical/personal can serve
theoretical purposes. Merchant’s text too can be considered as metaautobiographical—in the penultimate section of the book, he gives
an account of ‘How I write’ and ‘Why I write’. The text, therefore,
not only remains ‘autobiographical fictions’ but offers a theory of
autobiography, commenting upon itself in a self-referential gesture. He
asks: ‘how do you write gayness when there is no gay culture? How you
create a gay aesthetic for urban India?’ (Merchant 2011, 168). I would
like to hold on to the idea of ‘writing gayness’ and ‘gay aesthetic’ in the
subsequent part of my chapter and explore the limits and openings of
these concepts as explicated by Hoshang and other practitioners.
‘What do you mean by writing gayness’, I had asked Merchant
right at the moment he was about to put a fresh chikoo inside his
mouth. After a few seconds of silence, that is needed to chew and
gulp the succulent fruit, he retorted with an actressy flamboyance:
‘doctor sahib, maine kaccha chikoo kha liya. Mere pet mein chikoo ka
bachcha toh nahi ayenge na?’ which approximately stands in the english
translation as: ‘Oh doctor, I just ate a raw chikoo. Will I get pregnant by
its seeds?’ Hoshang had already responded to my query with a counterquestion and explained a complex theoretical speculation using an easy
analogy and farcical light-heartedness. His response reeked of a textual
queerness and bore the evidence of what he means by ‘writing gayness’,
playing around with intelligibility and resisting the easy readability of
signs and words, their meanings and significations. Let us consider the
following passage for a better understanding of the concept that I am
trying to tease out:
I stumbled upon Priscilla of the Desert. S/he hadn’t been
reincarnated yet on Hollywood celluloid. But here was the living
type. If only I knew! Thinking him to be an Adonis I was soon
tossed up into his hot embraces, enjoying his kisses. But this was
Venus with a penis. S/he turned and slept on her stomach. I slipped
manfully into her manhole. Coming took some doing for lack of
friction. I persisted a full half hour under the desert sun only to
have my performance applauded by a group of gay voyeurs on a
sand-bluff above us! (Merchant 2011, 117)
On the surface, this is an act of passionate intercourse and searing
romance from foreplay to orgasm. By means of a reference—Stephan
Is There a Homosexual in the Text?
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elliott’s film, The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert which deals
with the lives of two drag queens and a transgender woman—Merchant
textualises his lovemaking with a person whose gender identity seems
indeterminate. At the level of plot, the embodied queerness of these lines
is unequivocally evoked and is easily identifiable, readable and rendered
transparent. The presence of the intertextual sign of ‘Priscilla’ affirms
the motif of non-normative desires and gender variance that embellish
the paragraph. What is interesting, however, is the achievement of this
gender-variance at the level of language. Through a careful or playful
selection and deployment of words, the author interrupts the ennui of
specificity—in this case, of gender. not only is the pronoun of the other
person split open as ‘s/he’ but phrases such as ‘Venus with a penis’ and
‘manfully into her manhole’ lay bare the non-finality of meaning in the
text, inscribing an uncertainty in the register of linguistic legibility that
denote a ‘doubleness’ not only in the identitarian sense—of the actors
involved—but also in terms of writing itself. If queerness is indeed ‘the
open mesh of possibilities, gaps, overlaps, dissonances and resonances,
lapses and excesses of meaning when the constituent elements of
anyone’s gender, of anyone’s sexuality aren’t made (or can’t be made)
to signify monolithically’ as Sedgwick argues (2003, 8), the previous
passage, perhaps, provides a literary explication to her observation. If
the title of the autobiography is The Man Who Would Be Queen, then
the sentence—‘I slipped manfully into her manhole’—brims with
ramifications and possibilities that push the frontiers of our literary
imagination, thereby, affecting and altering our epistemological
performance. A ‘man’, who is a ‘woman’ (queen) penetrates a ‘woman’
who is a ‘man’—a deconstruction would perhaps yield a convoluted
and syntactically serpentine result: the man is not a man is a woman
is not a man is not a woman. Intelligibility is rendered precarious by
the author, its limits and internal contradictions exposed vis-à-vis sex,
gender, desire and bodies. The contradictions do not, however, limit
readability; rather, enable the readers to re-imagine gender and sexual
possibilities outside the available grammatical/syntactical frameworks
of binary mundaneness. Merchant’s text, therefore, offers us a lesson
in imaginative reading or aesthetic education. Speaking in favour of
literature and the literary in the training of our imagination, Gayatri
Chakravorty Spivak writes:
... we who learn from fiction must think a borderless world of
unconditional hospitality.... In this activation, a literary education
can be a great help, because the teacher engages directly with the
imagination. The teacher of literature has nothing else to teach....
And engaging with the imagination in the simplest way makes us
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suspend our own interests into the language that is happening in
the text, the text of another traced voice, the voice of the presumed
producer of the text. I use these words ‘trace’, ‘text’, ‘voice’ because
the utility of the imagination is not confined to what we recognize as
‘literature’ today. The element that we might call the ‘literary’, that
trains the imagination to step out of self-interest, exists in many
shapes and forms in the pasts of all civilizations. In the thinking of
a borderless world today, we have to use the imagination through
literary training in the broadest sense, including the filmic, the
videographic, the hypertextual, learning to read in the broadest
sense. (Spivak 2014, 3–4)
towards the beginning of the chapter, I had contended that the author
anchors his queerness, oftentimes, to the literary and works of literature.
In this regard, his text offers a lesson in the training of our imagination,
impelling us to think the unthinkable, read the unreadable. ‘Writing
gayness’ then also becomes an exercise in envisioning a ‘borderless
world’, as Spivak would argue, where a tapestry of words holds
revolutionary possibilities of social justice and rearranging human
desires.
I will stay with the idea of ‘writing gayness’ and look closely at two
other sections from the text for further explication. While recounting
his days in Palestine, Merchant writes:
Power cuts can be fun. They can be tragic too. The newspapers
reported a mother lacing her bride-to-be daughter’s school
sandwich in the dark at dawn with rat-poison, thinking it to be
black pepper. The high school girl merrily ate it: her last sandwich
as a carefree lass. She was brought home from school, dead. A scene
of rejoicing became a scene of mourning. Palestinians are used to
that. (Merchant 2011, 111–112)
On another occasion, he writes with a digressive tone: ‘it is all a matter
of concentration: if you concentrate on wealth, you become a rich
man, if on love, a prostitute, if on beauty, a poet, if on god, a saint.’
(Merchant 2011, 74). However, a little later in the same chapter, in a
letter written to Behzad, he writes: ‘I have become an ordinary human
being, no longer poet, prostitute or saint...’ (Merchant 2011, 80). It is
interesting to note the strain of doubleness in Merchant’s writing—of
contradictions, anomalies, metalepses and messy misalignments—
that informs and interrupts the text from within. By challenging
the violence of meaningful singularity and textual totalitarianism,
Merchant embeds in his writing, stylistically, an ambivalence or
dissimulation that causes substitutability of signification. His writing,
Is There a Homosexual in the Text?
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like queer desires, is displacing, fissured and contrarian—marked by
a textual excess that overdetermine strategies of reading and meaning
making. From the lines mentioned earlier that I chose for discussion
and several other lines and passages in the text, it can be discerned that
objects and metaphors lack fixity, they are floating signifiers that at
once mark the particular and its lexical opposite, oftentimes, rendering
redundant their textual reverseness. In Merchant’s textual economy,
therefore, ‘fun’ is always ‘tragic’, ‘rejoicing’ is always already ‘mourning’,
prostitution is inevitably contained in sainthood—through laying bare
the inseparability of polar opposites and the substitutability of words,
Merchant writes gayness that opens a mode of transaction between
writing and desire, gender and literature, politics and philosophy,
wrapping expressions around boisterous erotic energies. One can read
queerness in the text, not only in non-normative sex acts but in the
texture of the alphabets, the positioning of the words, (dis)placements
of symbols and metaphors that constitute meaning by continually
thwarting, deferring and dispersing it. Borrowing Barthes’ (2012)
terminology of ‘readerly’ and ‘writerly’ texts, it can be said that The Man
Who Would Be Queen is both a readerly and writerly text and is neither
a readerly nor a writerly work.6 It is this idea, of both is and is not that
renders Merchant’s writing queer, affirming the textual doubleness
that is spread across chapters. In this regard, the entire text seems to be
in drag, suggesting and implying a literary/theoretical cross-dressing,
bringing into question the epistemic and ontological regimes of writing
and the written, effecting and affecting a spilling over of meanings and
categories.
There are several things that ‘writing gayness’ may mean, or be made
to mean, in the context of literature, art and aesthetics. Hoshang Merchant
is certainly a prominent expositor in this genre but not without artistic
antecedents; two literary giants—Shakespeare and tagore—made their
venture into this artistic form years before ‘gay’ became a political
category of identification. Both Shakespeare and tagore seemed to forge
a queer aesthetics, oftentimes through the deployment of language that
serves as a literary and theoretical blueprint for scholars of posterity.
In an untranslated essay titled ‘Banglar Lingo Prakriti O Rabindranath’
(‘The nature of Gender in the Bengali Language and Rabindranath’),
Sibaji Bandyopadhyay (2011) explores the gender-neutral nature of the
Bengali language, exploited and appropriated by tagore in most of his
works to equivocate the gender-identity of other persons, characters
and referents. Through the usage of the third person gender neutral
pronoun, shey, Bandyopadhyay discloses the techniques and strategies
used by tagore to supplant the limits of masculinist signifying
economy, facilitated by the Bengali language that is not circumscribed
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by the institutions of phallogocentrism. consequently, he traces ‘desire’
in the oeuvre of tagore by articulating how, not only pronouns but
even nouns and adjectives can be made to signify gender neutral
subjects, as these seem to be used habitually rather than controlled
by grammatical conventions. Shey in the tagorean oeuvre and in
the Bengali language in general can, therefore, mean both masculine
and feminine and neither masculine nor feminine. In his celebrated
play, Chintrangada, tagore does not delineate an easy transition of
gender from ‘man’ to ‘woman’, kurupa to surupa but frisks, frolics and
foreplays with the gendered possibilities and fluidity of the Bengali
language—he uses kurup, the gender-neutral form, to obfuscate an easy
readability of his protagonist’s gender identity pre and post transition.
It is also significant to note, that, in the english translation of the play—
Chitra—Madan, one of the major characters become eros. While eros
is the Greek god of sexual attraction, it can simultaneously be read as
the life force or will to live in the Freudian sense. While the english
language proscribes tagore to revel in a linguistic fluidity, it unbolts
other possibilities—from an individual god, Madan gets translated
into an erotic principle, thereby, refusing to get interpellated into the
constraints of a masculinist signifying economy. tagore’s words, like
Merchant’s, defer and dupe the impediments of the linguistic registers,
fulminating with contingency vis-à-vis gender, sexuality and desire.
In this game of language, power and displacement, tagore is joined
by William Shakespeare, who despite writing within the english
linguistic register conjures words, phrasings, images and metaphors
that (dis)locate identities, confound intelligibility and romp with
meanings and signs. Malvolio’s famous description of Viola/Cesario to
a mourning Olivia, in Twelfth Night, who having rejected the advances
of all amorous men, is ardently overwhelmed by his words and hastily
allows him/her inside her chamber:
OLIVIA: Of what personage and years is he?
MALVOLIO: not yet old enough for a man, nor young enough
for a boy; as a squash is before ’tis a peascod, or a cooling when ’tis
almost an apple: ’tis with him in standing water, between boy and
man. He is very well-favoured and he speaks very shrewishly; one
would think his mother’s milk was scarce out of him.
OLIVIA: Let him approach: call in my gentlewoman. (Shakespeare
1993, 54)
Overlapping of pronouns, riddles of images and symbols, violent
juxtaposition of opposing ideas mark the lines that open myriad
interpretative possibilities and imaginings, resisting a singularity
Is There a Homosexual in the Text?
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of thought and identity. shakespeare plays with the established
conventions of grammar and lexical rigidity which restricts the gender
and sexuality of persons in language. This is perhaps expressed more
beautifully, in two other instances in Romeo and Juliet, whose wantonword-play precludes all heteronormative readings of the drama,
presenting a linguistic queerness that seems sweeter than honey, fiercer
than maenads. When Romeo attempts to kill himself, after being
banished by the Prince, for he cannot reconcile with his separation
from Juliet, Friar Lawrence reprimands him:
Hold thy desperate hand!
Art thou a man? Thy form cries out thou art.
Thy tears are womanish; thy acts |denote|
The unreasonable fury of a beast.
unseemly woman in a seeming man,
And ill-beseeming beast in seeming both! (Shakespeare 2011, 149)
If language produces the ‘subject’ and renders it available within the
matrix of intelligibility; if the grammatical norms of language naturalise
gender then the most elemental way to challenge gender norms and their
comprehensibility would be to contest the grammatical conventions of
the language within which gender is given. Sara Ahmed has argued that
words can have ‘orientations’ too—sexual or otherwise—Shakespeare
maximises the orienting powers of words to (dis)orient and muddle
their signifying practices. ‘unseemly woman in a seeming man’—one
fails to distinguish the ‘original’ from the ‘imitation’, the ‘real’ from the
‘unreal’, dismantling our notion of an essential identity.
There is another way in which Romeo and Juliet may spark the
imagination of the queer theorist. The kind of ‘doubleness’ that one
witnesses in the writing of Merchant, can be discerned in the lines of
Shakespeare too. Hoshang Merchant, being a reader and teacher of
Shakespeare was certainly influenced by the bard’s queer practices. One
finds lines of Shakespeare being quoted in his autobiography. towards
the beginning of the play, Shakespeare deploys this textual doubleness in
at least two instances. After her first meeting with Romeo, and knowing
his identity, Juliet tells her nurse: ‘If he be married/My grave is like to be
my wedding bed’ (Shakespeare 2011, 61). upon knowing that Romeo is
a Montague, belonging to the enemy clan, Juliet contemplates:
My only love sprung from my only hate!
too early seen unknown, and known too late!
Prodigious birth of love it is to me
That I must love a loathed enemy. (Shakespeare 2011, 61)
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opposite words and phrases spelled out in the same breath, crisscrossing
meanings and truths in an irretrievable fashion and creating ontic
confusions at the textual level. not only does one fail to distinguish
between the wedding bed and the death bed, but ‘love’ and ‘hate’,
‘beloved’ and ‘enemy’ are uttered with a queer synonymity. similar
to Hoshang’s narrative, here too, we have interchangeability of words
and substitutability of meanings; a spilling over of ideas where ‘love’
is always already ‘hate’, the beloved is inevitably the ‘enemy’. Instead of
being heralded as the archetypal heterosexual love story or romance,
Romeo and Juliet might as well qualify as the greatest hate-story ever
written if one aligns with Juliet’s passionate uttering.7 shakespeare’s
queer aesthetics, like merchant’s, can be witnessed at the textual
level, stylistically and formalistically—in his word-plays, metrical
arrangements and drag techniques of a literary crossdressing—not
simply at the level of content and plot.
In an essay titled ‘Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading’,
eve kosofsky sedgwick (2003) argued for a shift in the practice of
critical reading from a paranoid position to a reparative position—the
former predicated on a ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’ and examining the
liberatory or oppressive/homophobic status of texts; while the latter
is pleasure-centric, emphasises on feeling/affect and how texts might
heal/help us to think alternatively and feel better. taking the theoretical
cue from Melanie Klein, Sedgwick encourages the readers to adopt a
‘depressive’ position rather than a ‘paranoid-schizoid’ position. If
the paranoid critic’s task is to expose the strengths and weaknesses
of texts, the depressive/reparative reader’s relationship with texts is
more complex where one fails to see the inseparability of strength and
weakness, engages with the surprises, resources and pleasures that
texts have in offer. In reading the instances of ‘writing gayness’ in the
three texts, that, I discussed earlier, adopting a depressive/reparative
reading position might allow us to shift the critical attention away from
queer desires to a more queer focus on techniques, strategies, modes of
reading and writing and thinking queerly about and with the form of
the text.
NOTES TOWARD WRITING QUEERNESS
... woman does not bring about the same regionalization which
serves the couple head/genitals and which is inscribed only
within boundaries. Her libido is cosmic, just as her unconscious is
worldwide. Her writing can only keep going, without ever inscribing
or discerning contours, daring to make these vertiginous crossings
Is There a Homosexual in the Text?
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of the other(s) ephemeral and passionate sojourns in him, her, them,
whom she inhabits long enough to look at from the point closest
to their unconscious from the moment they awaken, to love them
at the point closest to their drives; and then further, impregnated
through and through with these brief, identificatory embraces, she
goes and passes into infinity. She alone dares and wishes to know
from within, where she, the outcast, has never ceased to hear the
resonance of fore-language. She lets the other language speak—
the language of 1000 tongues which knows neither enclosure nor
death. to life she refuses nothing. Her language does not contain, it
carries; it does not hold back, it makes possible. (Cixous 1976, 889)
Hélène Cixous in her canonical essay ‘The Laugh of Medusa’, published
in 1976, argued that the only means through which women can liberate
or reclaim their sexuality, bodies and voices is through putting herself
‘into the text’ by effecting a mode/practice of writing that is distinctively
and markedly ‘feminine’. Écriture feminine or ‘feminine writing’ works
towards inscribing the femininity, female body and female sexual
difference into language and came to influence French feminists such
as Monique Wittig and Luce Irigaray. In Cixous’ words, the two aims of
this kind of writing is ‘to break up, to destroy’ the masculinist signifying
economy of phallogocentrism and ‘to foresee the unforeseeable, to
project’ a future that is unequivocally feminine (Cixous 1976, 875).
It is important to note that Cixous places the female body as the site
of this kind of writing—as both that makes the writing possible and
itself gets written in the process. Cixous’ project apparently seems to
be an identitarian one where lines, words, phrases, images and symbols
of subversion, sensuousness, longing, insurgency, love, militancy and
desire flow out of a female-identified body. However, like all great
poems and literary art, one soon begins to witness the contradictions
and fissures in Cixous’ arguments. ‘Which works, then, might be called
feminine?’ she asks and replies that ‘the only inscriptions of femininity
that I have seen were by Colette, Marguerite Duras … and Jean Genêt’
(Cixous 1976, 878–879). It is riveting and queer to see Jean Genêt
being invoked in the same sentence along with two other female artists;
despite not inhabiting a female body, Genêt is capable of producing
‘feminine writing’ or a feminine aesthetics that transgresses masculinist
conventions. A little later, Cixous hails Molly Bloom’s soliloquy in
James Joyce’s Ulysses as being capable of transgressing and transcending
the masculinist discursive practices and setting an exemplary example
of what she theorises as ‘feminine writing’. Does Merchant’s idea of
‘writing gayness’ serve as an analogous standpoint to Cixous’ notion of
écriture feminine? Would Cixous have validated Hoshang Merchant’s
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writing as an example of ‘feminine writing’? would Hoshang like to see
his writings function under the rubric of écriture feminine or is there
a possibility of a homologous bracketing of écriture queer? I would
leave these at the level of speculation, for the answers would entail both
affirmation and negation, and would touch us, caress us, lick us with
‘the language of 1000 tongues’—that Cixous alludes to—which knows
no finality of meaning.
Almost nineteen years after the publication of ‘The Laugh of Medusa’,
Lee edelman (1994) in his path-breaking work, Homographesis,
further complicated the relationship between textuality and sexuality,
writing and the body, identity politics and critical practice. If Cixous’
insistence was on a differential writing that is markedly ‘feminine’,
edelman’s engagement borders around the idea of the ‘mark’—what
renders it legible and intelligible? under what condition does this
‘mark’ make its entry into the system of writing and language? What
political ramifications might this ‘mark’ entail? towards the end of
his autobiography, Hoshang writes: ‘As everyone knows by now, I’m
homosexual. to write this sentence and to speak it publicly, which
is a great liberation, is why I write’ (Merchant 2011, 154). Hoshang’s
writings, therefore, admittedly bear the ‘mark’ of the homosexual.
I would hold on to this ‘mark’ for a brief while and see what purpose
it serves! What are its limitations and possibilities? In the opening
chapter to his book, edelman writes:
I want to call attention to the formation of a category of homosexual
person whose very condition of possibility is his relation to writing
or textuality, his articulation, in particular, of a ‘sexual’ difference
internal to male identity that generates the necessity of reading
certain bodies as visibly homosexual. This inscription of ‘the
homosexual’ within a tropology that produces him in a determining
relation to inscription itself is the first of the things that I intend the
term ‘homographesis’ to denote. (edelman 1994, 9)
In the light of edelman’s argument, who views the existence of the
homosexual person in ‘relation to writing or textuality’, it is difficult
to comprehend in the case of Hoshang’s statement, that, if it is the
homosexual person who writes or conversely, does writing produce
his homosexuality? In other words, does identity precede writing or
writing produces a legible identity? When he says—‘how did I write
my first poem? I was beaten up while cruising the streets of a small
university town in Michigan, one summer in the early 1970s’ (Merchant
2011, 154)—one feels as though Merchant’s text is in conversation with
edelman’s where he refers back to the ‘body’ as a homograph, a site
Is There a Homosexual in the Text?
259
of sexual difference but also that which ‘demands to be read … a
body on which his “sexuality” is always already inscribed’ (edelman
1994, 10). Throughout the text of Merchant’s narrative, the body
is diffused through words that bear its pain, longing, ecstasy, desire,
beauty, sensation and the myriad nameable and unnameable feelings
that the body is capable of repertoiring. Featuring the body becomes a
major trope of what Hoshang calls ‘writing gayness’—it is not simply
an act of writing about the body but simultaneously, with the body,
through the body, on the body. One can discern the reverberations
of Cixous, who too had urged women to write ‘through their bodies’.
However, edelman’s theory of ‘homographesis’ performs a doublebind; taking the theoretical cue from Derrida, edelman writes:
Writing, therefore, though it marks or describes those differences
upon which the specification of identity depends, works
simultaneously … to ‘de-scribe,’ efface, or undo identity by framing
difference as the misrecognition of a ‘différance’ whose negativity,
whose purely relational articulation, calls into question the
possibility of any positive presence of discrete identity. (edelman
1994, 10)
In other words, although, Merchant proclaimingly writes as ‘a
homosexual’, the inscription of his sexuality into writing postpones and
defers the production of its meaning. This difference and deference of
meaning, instead of reifying and consolidating his identity, adjourn it.
It no longer remains a stable, comprehensible and differential identity
but becomes a confusion, an error, a trouble, a Derridean différance
that shifts legibility and intelligibility. edelman is cognizant of this
double-bind of homographesis when he writes:
Like writing, then, homographesis would name a double operation:
one serving the ideological purposes of a conservative social order
intent on codifying identities in its labor of disciplinary inscription,
and the other resistant to that categorization, intent on de-scribing
the identities that order has so oppressively inscribed. That these
two operations, pointing as they do in opposite directions, should
inhabit a single signifier, must make for a degree of confusion, but
the confusion that results when difference collapses into identity
and identity unfolds into différance is, as I will suggest ... central to
the problematic of homographesis. (edelman 1994, 10)
It is difficult, almost impossible, to pin down the ‘mark’ of difference
to a specificity; and therefore, while ‘writing gayness’ may flow out of
homosexual bodies, it liberates the body from the aegis of writing and
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renders it illegible. The ‘single signifier’ performing the twin tasks of
inscribing and de-scribing identities, thus, is not simply the ‘problematic
of homographesis’ alone; it informs Hoshang’s project of ‘writing
gayness’ as well as Cixous’ postulations on écriture feminine—in either
instance, the writing can both be traced back to homosexual and female
bodies respectably and not be followed back to the identitarian bodies
as points of derivation. Who owns the queer aesthetic then, one may
ask? What political imagination works behind the framing of such an
interrogation? If post-structuralist criticism has taught us anything, it
is the fiction of identities and their foundationalism—hetero, homo or
otherwise. If one is to believe that gay writing can only emanate from gay
bodies, then the logic of heteronormativity appears to be an immutable
absolute, insulated from transgression and border-crossings.
‘Is there a gay art?’ asked Bersani in 2010. taking a series of artists
and authors from Da Vinci to Caravaggio, Mallarmé to Beckett, he
opens with the provocative lines:
In speaking of gay film—or, more generally, gay art today—we
tend to mean films or novels with gay topics, more often made
or written by gay or lesbian filmmakers or novelists. That is, for
all the anti-identitarian rhetoric of current queer theory, what we
mean by gay and lesbian art would seem to be inseparable from
notions of gay authorship, gay audiences and gay subjects. I want
to propose a notion of gay art—more exactly, a homo-esthetic—
to which homosexual desire is essential, but which, precisely and
paradoxically because of this, can dispense with the concept of
homosexual identity. (Bersani 2010, 31)
nothing, perhaps, teaches this better than The Man Who Would
Be Queen which through a series of contradictions and selfcancellings demonstrates itself to be an anti-identitarian document.
(Dis)embodying a queer aesthetics that reeks through every
word and page, images and utterances, the text simultaneously
discloses everything and nothing about the narrator, rendering the
autobiography as mere fiction. Through means of writing gayness or
queerness, Merchant’s testimony closes with an anti-autobiographical
remark: ‘When Laura Riding, poet, had uninvited visitors she would
yell out of an upstairs window: “I am not in.” Anaïs nin too does not
live here anymore. nor does “Hoshang Merchant”’ (Merchant 2011,
200). The narrator has already disappeared by now, sublimated into
the ecstatic excess of his text; he is nothing more than third-person at
this moment. Do not go and search for him in vain, you will find him
in the silhouette of every word of the book, in the intricate patterns
Is There a Homosexual in the Text?
261
and designs that he has carved out of his desires. He has learned to live
in negation, cross borders—internal and external—with his libidinal
heaves, and conjure lines, emotions, words, alphabets and poetry that
bring political imagination to life.
NOTES
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
For an explanation of heteroglossia or polyglossia refer to the chapter,
‘discourse in the novel’ in The Dialogic Imagination (1981).
I am referring to the Penguin edition of the book. For further details,
check citations.
He spoke in a combination of Hindi and english. For institutional reasons,
I have translated the Hindi words and phrases into english. much has
been lost in translation but I have tried to remain as close to the original
as possible. Also, the interview was much longer; I have used only the
sections that are relevant for discussion here.
The word ‘hijra’ is a local variant of the anglophonic ‘transgender’.
He spoke a lot on the publication history of Yaraana. I have deliberately
not ventured into that discussion for primarily two reasons: one, much
has already been said and written about it; second, it demands a much
broader and elaborate space and cannot be achieved within the limited
scope of this chapter. For a detailed discussion on the politics of selection
and publication of this anthology see the fifth chapter of Akhil Katyal’s
book The Doubleness of Sexuality.
In The Pleasure of the Text, Roland Barthes (2012) articulates the
distinction between ‘readerly’ and ‘writerly’ texts. The former has a more
coherent narrative, stable meanings and status-quoist; the latter has no
fixed meanings, constituted by non-linear meta-narratives that demand
active readers for meaning production.
I am indebted to Professor Madhavi Menon for this idea. This came up
during a private conversation in 2017.
REFERENCES
Bakhtin, Mikhail. ‘Discourse in the novel’. In The Dialogic Imagination, 1934,
549–868. uSA: university of texas Press, 1981.
Bandyopadhyay, Sibaji. ‘Banglar Lingo Prakriti O Rabindranath.’ In
Rabindranath, Bakpati, Bishwamana, 63–111. Kolkata: Calcutta university,
2011.
Barthes, Roland. The Pleasure of the Text. notting Hill editions, 2012.
Bersani, Leo. ‘Is There a Gay Art?’. In Is the Rectum a Grave? and Other Essays.
uSA: university of Chicago Press, 2010.
Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. new
York and London: Routledge, 2007.
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cixous, Hélène. ‘The Laugh of Medusa.’ Signs 1, no. 4 (Summer 1976): 875–893.
edelman, Lee. Homographesis. London and new York: Routledge, 1994.
Katyal, Akhil. The Doubleness of Sexuality: Idioms of Same-sex Desire in Modern
India. India: new text, 2016.
Sedgwick, eve Kosofsky. Tendencies. Durham: Duke university Press, 1993.
Merchant, Hoshang. The Man Who Would Be Queen: Autobiographical Fictions.
new Delhi: Penguin, 2011.
Sedgwick, eve Kosofsky. ‘Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, Or,
You’re So Paranoid, You Probably Think This essay Is About You.’ In
Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity, 123–151. united States:
Duke university Press, 2003.
Shakespeare, William. Twelfth Night, Or, What You Will. united States of
America: The Folger Shakespeare Library, 1993.
———. Romeo and Juliet. united States of America: The Folger Shakespeare
Library, 2011.
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. Readings. Kolkata: Seagull, 2014.
tHIs cItY, ‘stInkIng coRPse’: AdonIs’s
PoetIcs oF modeRnItY And deAtH
Al-Khoder Al-Khalifa
The crisis of poetry arises in the presence of human loss, yet it is in
this moment that poetry effectuates its promise of establishing its
own world. The coming of an apocalyptic state, with all its grimness
and destruction, makes poets question the futility of writing in the
presence of a catastrophe: what is it that poetry can do when, finally, the
unthinkable and the unspeakable become reality? Martin Heidegger,
in his reading of the nature of Rilke’s poetry and the metaphysical
aspects of poetry in general, starts his essay with an excerpt from
Holderlin’s poem ‘Bread and Wine’ that goes as ‘… and what are poets
for in a destitute time?’ (1971, 89). For Heidegger, what defines the
poet’s position in this ‘destitute time’ is that the poet should delve into
this abyss to unveil Being. The destituteness of time is constituted not
only by ‘the God’s failure to arrive’ but also by how ‘[m]ortals have not
yet come into ownership of their own nature. Death withdraws into
the enigmatic. The mystery of pain remains veiled’ (Heidegger 1971,
94). It is this creation of the void by the destitute time that brings the
poet into achieving the impossible task: ‘to be a poet in a destitute
time means: to attend, singing, to the trace of the fugitive gods.’ The
poet, then, by experiencing and enduring the abyss, ‘utters the holy’
even when time is that of devastation that sanctions utter silence
(Heidegger 1971, 92).
Similarly, in his elegy poem ‘tibaq’, translated as ‘edward Said: A
Contrapuntal Reading’ and written on the occasion of the death of
edward Said, Mahmoud Darwīsh physically and intellectually invokes
a dialogue with Said thirty years ago. Darwīsh shows the thinker’s
take on questions like identity, home, exile, loss and death. But more
effectively, one matter seems to be of paramount concern to Said, that
is, the impossibility, yet the necessity of writing. This necessity emerges
out of the dire need and the hopeful task of questioning, ‘What can
poetry say in a time of catastrophe?’, when bloodletting becomes the
main scene as ‘blood’ covers not only humans, but taints ‘the almond
flower’, ‘the banana skin,/in the baby’s milk, in light and shadow,/in
the grain of wheat, in salt’ (Darwīsh and Anis 2007, 180–181). This
scene of death proliferates where the land of Palestine becomes ‘smaller
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than the blood of its children/standing on the threshold of doomsday
like/sacrificial offerings. Is this land truly/blessed, or is it baptized/in
blood/and blood/and blood’. In this scene of death, the world appears
‘without a sky, the earth becomes an abyss’ where ‘prayer’, ‘sand’ the
‘Sacred Book’ fail to arrive. Therefore, Said’s will after his own death
is for Darwīsh to fulfil the impossible task of writing, because it is only
poetry that can sing amongst the wreckage and become ‘a consolation,
an attribute/of the wind, southern or northern’ (Darwīsh and Anis
2007, 181).
to confront the atrocities caused by constant bewildering events is
a process of poetic experimentation. The poet, facing unprecedented
destruction, piles of corpses, and hence, the nebulousness of tomorrow,
comes into a moment of befuddlement. What follows might be a
questioning of the validity and even the possibility of writing poetry
in a similar assessment to Adorno’s dictum that ‘to write poetry after
Auschwitz is barbaric. And this corrodes even the knowledge of why
it has become impossible to write poetry today’ (Adorno 1967, 34).
However, if such a time of carnage instils silence, it is this very time that
necessitates revolutionising poetry so as to bring a hopeful change to
our reality. The poet’s role, as Heidegger would think, is to substitute the
gods who fled the place and sing in the void created by the destituteness
of time, and, as Darwīsh tells us, ‘[poets] invent a hope for speech,/
invent a direction, a mirage to extend hope./And sing, for the aesthetic
is freedom’ (Darwīsh and Anis 2007, 181–182).
This need for revolutionising poetry should not be understood as
a result of an external catastrophe occasioned due to events such as
war. Revolutionising poetry can also be a part of a superior project of
modernity as the poet feels that the catastrophe is a consequence of
certain maladies intrinsically structured from within that have long
been incapacitating the progress of culture into dynamicity, and thus
leading into chaos. This can be inferred from the various writings of
many poets from the Middle east since mid-twentieth century till the
present day who have put in mind the need for a more transformative
poetry regardless of the issue as internal or external. Reading Adonis’s
poetics of modernity and poetry helps understand this. This chapter
studies the poetics and poetry of one of the most influential, yet
controversial, contemporary Arab writers: Adonis. The attempt is to
read his poetics on Arab modernity so as to understand the deeper
structure of the limitations and the need for revolutionary poetry which,
in a Rancièrean sense, disrupts, reconfigures and, hence, transforms
the formal norms of Arab culture. Therefore, the study covers some of
Adonis’s theoretical writing on Arab poetics, modernity and language
and their relation to the death of Arab intellectualism. Also, to see how
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267
Adonis performs his modernist tendency in poetry, a close reading of
the long poem This is My Name is conducted.
At the age of 18 in 1948, Ali Ahmed said esber decided to take on
the name Adonis, equivalent to the levantine and mesopotamian deity
tammuz. The choice that was made by a hadatha (modernity) poet
like Adonis at the time when the mainstream was favouring al-turath
(traditionalism), marks his early transformative nature manifested in
the rejection to belong to any fixed and inherited identity in favour
of something more universally dynamic. This dissenting act was
addressed in the 1980s by Jacques Derrida1 who asserted that the
Syrian poet ‘carried an infinity of names within him’, that such an
act is manifested in his eagerness to ‘step outside of himself ’. now,
Adonis can ‘tear his given names from the soil, thereby detaching from
the identitarian borderlines of place’, transcending into a new poetic
identity, ‘a cultural passport’, to achieve universality (Rapaport 2013,
109). More importantly, it stands for the poet’s chutzpah and attitudes
towards the current state of the Arab culture, it is the cornerstone of
Adonis’s project of modernity.
Adonis’s understanding of modern Arabic poetry has four major
issues and concerns he presents in his article ‘muhawala fi ta‘rif alshi‘r al-hadith’ (‘An Attempt to Define Modern Poetry’). First, he
believes that modern poetry is an intellectual and spiritual vision that
goes beyond, if not discards, the long-established principles. It is a
rejection of the old poetic methods and forms and a reconfiguration
of its attitudes and techniques of representing realism without causing
a change:
[Poetry of realism] discusses a priori ideas, opinions and feelings
already existing in the minds in which its role is to sing them—sorting
and presenting them as rhythms. The essence of modern poetry is
based on reversing the values of ‘realism’, substituting the hormone
of ‘reality’ with ‘creativity’, and finding a unique truth beyond the
reality of the world. (My translation; Adonis 1959, 80–81)
Second, Adonis argues that because modern poetry is a vision of
discovery, mysteriousness and irrationality, it should discard ‘the fixed
form’, adopting a more open and free one. It is forever escaping from the
‘imprisonment … of specific meters or rhythms’. Third, in traditional
Arabic poetry, the role of language is to ‘express’ reality without
changing it, while the language of modern poetry is that of ‘creativity’
that transcends apparent meaning, unearths ulterior truth and leads to
unfamiliar visions (Adonis 1959, 85). The poet now produces ‘magic’
and is no more under the subordinate of language (Adonis 1959, 86).
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Ambiguity, finally, completes, yet is influenced by, the first three issues.
Poetry that exceeds the norms in its vision, whose form never rests
and whose language explodes, belongs to the logic of strangeness in its
attempt to ‘reach the depths of reality, beyond appearances and surfaces,
and towards the marvelous and the transcendental’ (Adonis 1959, 88).
Throughout his oeuvre—an effort presented in thirteen criticism
volumes and more than twenty volumes of poetry—Adonis extensively
discusses the social, political and theological hindrances to innovation
and modernity in the Arab culture, its catastrophic consequences, the
necessity of a transformative language as a method to renew this culture
through reconfiguring its very long-established values. The year 1957
witnessed what Adonis would call his intellectual birth as he joined the
poet Yusuf al-Khal in Lebanon in editing the avant-garde journal Shi’r
(Poetry).2 Through Shi’r, Adonis, along with Muhammad al-Maghut
and unsi al-Hajj, introduced his first modernist poetic tendency
manifested in the emergence of the Arab prose poem. The form was at
first disdained even by the most progressive writers of the time as being
a strange and threatening innovation to the traditional buhur al-shi’r
al-arabi (metre of Arabic poetry). For Adonis, labelling the prose poem
as such is not surprising and comes as part of a bigger debate between
the dominating ideology of literalism and modernity.
In fatiha li nihayat al-qarn (An Overture to the Century’s endings,
1980), Adonis finds that the essential problem preventing the progress of
the modernity project and limiting individual creativity and imagination
is the subjugation of reason to orthodox theological authorities imposed
by usul (traditions) and al-harfiah (literalism). This literalism is effective
due to the dominating traditional belief that regards history and the sacred
text as the only reference of truth which fixates on the staticity of Arab
cultural identity to which all descendants should conform. For Adonis, this
monistic view of truth has taken Arab culture into the verge of decline:
the space of freedom has shrunk, and the repression has increased
… we have today less religiosity and less tolerance and more
confessionalism and more fanaticism. We are more enclosed and
enwrapped in darkness … and what we call homeland is becoming
a military barrack, a confessional hamlet, a tribal camp. (quoted in
Kassab 2010, 129)
This traditional tendency in the current Arab culture runs deep in the
region’s history since the caliphate era. During the Islamic Golden Age,
all what was called ‘‘the people of innovation’ (ahl al-ihdath)’ were
pejoratively indicted for heresy, ‘a rebellion against religion’ for their
criticism of the caliphate.3 In poetry the use of ‘ihdath (innovation) and
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269
muhdath (modern, new)’ as terms characterising writing that violates
‘the ancient poetic principles’ have religious origin:
The modern in poetry appeared to the ruling establishment as
a political or intellectual attack on the culture of the regime and
rejection of the idealized standards of the ancient, and how,
therefore, in Arab life the poetic has always been mixed up with the
political and the religious, and indeed continues to be so … [This] is
indicative of a general cultural crisis, which is in some sense a crisis
of identity. (Adonis 1990, 76)
During the Arab Nahda (renaissance) the question of modernity was
adopted to the extreme by two different tendencies: ‘the traditionalist/
conformist (usuli) tendency, which considered religion and the
Arab linguistic sciences as its main base; and the transgressing/nonconformist (tajawuzi) tendency, which saw its base, by contrast, as lying
in european secularism.’ What prevailed was the usuli with its vision
that ‘the ancient … is the ideal of true and definitive knowledge’; only
within this vision the future is imagined (Adonis 1990, 77). The effect,
Adonis elucidates, is felt in the artistic production of the Nahda period
that retuned to ‘the values of pre-Islamic orality’, revived the ‘forms of
expression’ of the past to talk about the problems of the present, and,
therefore, established these forms as ‘absolute inviolable principles’.
Arab identity seems to be ‘a bundle of self-delusion, and Arab time to
stand outside time’ (Adonis 1990, 79–80).
Although modernity for Adonis and other Shi’r poets stands for ‘the
rupture or the discontinuity’ that distinguishes it from the conventional
and classical Arabic verse, this ‘discontinuity’ does not mean to be
in isolation from the past and cultural heritage (Haydar 1981, 51).
Modernity, for Adonis, is a rejectionist vision of the sacredness and
absolutism of institutionalised interpretation of a text as a source of
truth and knowledge. What is favoured now is the individual’s freedom,
the celebration of plurality and multiplicity of readings. In a Bakhtinian
sense, this vision denounces the fixed, closed and monophonic cultural
identity and necessitates an ever dynamic, open and heteroglossic
interpretation. It ‘travels towards the other and its profound essence’,
establishing a heterogeneous culture in a constant process of becoming
‘the most perfect presence’4 (Adonis 2005a, Part 1, Ch. 5.16).
The impact of the inviolability of the usuli ideology in the present
Arab literary scene is, however, more unrelentingly effective more than
any time before. In his book al-muhit al-aswad (‘The Black Ocean’),
Adonis approaches questions of religiosity of politics, the hegemonic
authority of censorship, the crisis of writing and innovation and
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the current scenario of the more disturbed Arab culture after, and
during, wars and invasions. Creative language is seen as both a tool for
expression and ‘an act of liberation’ in man’s ‘constant journey towards
the unknown and search for truth’. However, under the unshaken
authority of orthodoxy, the ‘word … is essentially a “security”
question’, where culture functions as a tool for underscoring political
and securitarian hegemony:
What is the secret behind this Arab political obsessiveness to
strengthen the hegemonizeation and subjugation over the ways of
using the word? What is the source of this vision of politicizing
language in this way? When politics transforms language from
being the power of man’s self-expression and freedom into the
domain of creating censorship, ban, repression, and subjugation,
it ‘produces’ … a home which has no place but for humiliation and
slavery. (My translation; Adonis 2005b, 229–230)
The liberating function of the creative language is inspirational for
creating poetry that challenges this cultural death with disruption of
the norms. For Adonis, transforming Arab culture into a culture that
radically revises its own old inherited values is possible when more
power and freedom is given to language: when the word becomes ‘a
force for creativity and change’, it places its culture in an ‘atmosphere of
investigation, questioning and inquiry’. The result is emptying the old
language from ‘the prevailing traditional meaning’, and, therefore, the
word becomes ‘a mass radiating with unfamiliar associations’ (Adonis
and elmessiri 1987, 115). This word is an explosive ‘fire that burns only
in the depths of humans filled with the sun’: an innovative writer does
not exist without living in and writing about that moment of the quake,
the moment when the role of the free word is the ‘deconstruction of
traditional time’ (Adonis and elmessiri 1987, 118).
This word of change is uniquely practiced by the avant-garde
Adonis. His antipathy towards fixed and inherited identity granted
him an impenetrable modern idiom of change. He started first with
his poetic self, with his given name, and, therefore, he chose a name, a
word that detached him from belonging to place or time, embracing
an ever-dynamic identity. This emigration outside one’s self invokes
an abstention from using both the poet’s original language and
even a foreign language. This establishes, in a Derridean sense, a
unique idiom of the poet that others ‘cannot appropriate and that
performatively suspends, decides and … yields a certain unreadability
or untranslatability’ which ‘instantiates the instability of meanings
across borderlines’ (Rapaport 2013, 111–113). This rejection to be
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easily grasped is Adonis’s invocation of a poetic revolutionary strategy
to criticise the static norms and values and to attain pluralism and
inclusiveness through the dynamism of a word. Indeed, Adonis writes
‘literature [that] “does” politics as literature’ (Rancière 2010, 152). In
doing so, he vigorously spares no effort to aesthetically reimagine a
space of equality that establishes a new world whose founder is finally
the long unnoticed voice. Interestingly, the relevance of the concepts of
the political aesthetics and equality of the French historian and theorist
Jacques Rancière are clearly echoed in Adonis’s dissenting poetics.
Rancière explores the inseparability between the two ‘forms of the
distribution of the sensible’, art and politics that are ‘two strands of
the same originary configuration’. Their main concern is liberation
and equality as ‘politics consists in reconfiguring the distribution of
the sensible which defines the common of a community, to introduce
into it new subjects and objects, to render visible what had not been’
(Rancière 2009, 25). In order to understand the relation, or rather
relations, between politics and aesthetics, it is necessary to examine the
functionality of both forms. Aesthetics ‘is the system of a priori forms
determining what presents itself to sense experience. It is a delimitation
of spaces and times, of the visible and the invisible, of speech and noise,
that simultaneously determines the place and the stakes of politics as
a form of experience’ (Rancière 2004, 9). Accordingly, aesthetics not
only precedes but determines politics in which the later appropriates
‘the modes of presentation or the means of establishing explanatory
sequences produced by artistic practices’ (Rancière 2004, 60). Besides,
‘the distribution of the sensible’ is that system which constitutes the
limits of ‘sense perception’ and, therefore, decides who can participate
within the boundaries it creates (Rancière 2004, 7). Within this biased
system there are others who are prevented from participating and stay
outside these established boundaries. This is the moment of aesthetic
politics: through dissensus, art ‘redistributes’ and reconfigures ‘the given
perceptual forms’ (Rancière 2004, 59). This aesthetic politics produces
‘a sensorium that had been outside and elsewhere in relation to the
common and given its disruptive appearance, makes for an interruption
and reconfiguration of the network of the distribution of the sensible’. By
‘changing sensible perception itself ’ it changes the framework ‘of what
constitutes political experience and possibility’ (Fisher 2013, 164).
When the dominating politics and ideologies of a culture establish
boundaries around its own past and strictly structure life within it as per
inherited traditions, it does not instigate equality as it leaves no hope
for creativity and innovation. For Adonis, these powerful authorities
turn their culture into the culture of death, or what he calls, ‘theatre
of nothingness’, which is full of ‘corpses, shrapnel, funerals, graves,
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and ruins’. A writer who radically ‘registers his agitation against this
policy is regarded as irrational’ because ‘the death of the other, whether
this other is a friend or an enemy, is necessary’ for the existence of
the orthodox ideologies (my translation; Adonis 2005b, 243–244).
The structured death of intellectualism, language and imagination
is a provocative occasion for a dissenting writer such as Adonis who
deliberately chooses irrationalism as a method to voice out against
conservatism and the limitation of dominant discourses and to grant
egalitarianism and inclusiveness to all the voices that were otherwise
denied before. This artistic act of equality affects the nuances of a
culture where the construction of both ‘the enunciating “I” and the self
of the subject’ and ‘poetic and fictional texts’ now demonstrate ‘signs
of fragmentation’. This ‘rich, though fundamentally different modes
of writing and cultural creation’ is characterised by being inclusive of
‘a multiplicity of voices’ and ‘a language of possibilities, uncertainty,
alternatives and contradictions’, while discarding the credibility of ‘the
notion of unity’ (Abu Deeb 2000, 339–340).
This Is My Name is Adonis’s eloquent and radical critique of this
declining culture for its blind attachment to live within the borderlines
of the past.5 Through this ‘secret manifesto’ he reaches the pinnacle in
prophesying a revolutionary and transformative poetic practice that erases
with fire to transcend this world into a new sublime reconfiguration. The
poem came during a period of defeatism—after the six-day war in 1967
and the decline of Arabness—but it is not a direct response to it. War is
part of a bigger cultural apocalypse Adonis has always warned of. Arabs are
not in crisis because a culture in crisis means to be in the in-betweenness
of either survival or death as this culture ‘has a vision and a project of
adventurously improving to a better state.’ All the external factors—
catastrophes, invasions, constant wars, slaughters—besides the repression
and censorship practiced by the dominating absolutist ideologies over
creativity and pluralism are all indications of ‘a slave society’ that is
culturally dying and ‘declining’ (my translation; Adonis 2005b, 239). The
poem begins with an act of erasing to write some new realities:
erasing all wisdom this is my fire
no sign has remained—My blood is the sign
This is my beginning (Adonis 2010, 107)
There are indications of a forthcoming revolution: ‘erasing’, ‘my fire’,
‘my blood’ and ‘my beginning’. It is the ‘fire’ and ‘flame’ of creativity and
innovation the speaker intends to perform that forces ‘the footstep of
life’ to end ‘at the door of a book … erased with [his] questions’ (Adonis
2010, 108). Thereafter, the speaker’s determinist vision regarding
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the ravaging reality created by the prevailing totalitarians power:
obsolete norms should be eradicated through nebulous questioning to
reconstruct an ever-evolving world of endless possibilities.
Adonis forms a complex metric construction throughout the
poem to challenge the metric unity of traditional Arabic poetry. The
poem confusingly uses familiar Arabic metres but its open form
simultaneously disrupts its familiar musical unity as it never clearly
shows when that metric unity of (a) certain line(s) comes to an end
and when another meter starts. Also, the poet abruptly shifts from this
disruption of the metres into inserting a more revolutionary poetic
form he is famous for, that is, the prose poem. With full awareness of
the long-established poetic rules that have been dictating the writing
of poetry since the eighth century, Adonis performs a modernist act
of reconfiguring these rules.6 The critic Khalida Said comments that
the poem performs poetic dynamism and declares its own principle of
change by destroying ‘the principles of the poetic inviolability, stability
and classicism’ that hostilely oppose poetic newness and fossilise life
itself. This poem ‘transcends all the previous achievements of poetry
and that includes even that of the poet’ as it shows ‘no relaxation, no
finale, and no final form, but rather a constantly ever-renewing creativity,
adventure and beginning’ (my translation; Said 1970, 254). Adonis uses
paradox as another modernist technique which intensifies the poem’s
mysteriousness in targeting the Arab self and identity. The speaker strikes
us with the paradoxical images of ‘country’, which is static, and ‘river’,
which is dynamic, when he says, ‘My country runs behind me like a river
of blood’ (Adonis 2010, 113). This paradox expresses the geography of
death in Arab culture: it is as long as a ‘river’ but instead of water, that
stands for life, it carries ‘blood’ that covers all of its geography. This is
followed by another opaque paradox: ‘The forehead of civilization is a
floor slathered with algae’ (Adonis 2010, 113; emphasis added). After the
‘river of blood’ covers the ‘country’ with the red colour, it continues its
progress and now reaches ‘the forehead of civilization’ and history itself
that needs a transformation of its obsolescent conventions.
Throughout the poem’s open form, Adonis repeatedly uses a word
that represents a line on its own surrounded by white spaces of silence.
This modernist technique dismantles the traditional Arabic rhythm
that depends on the unity of the poem’s metre and the rhyme and the
length of the lines. In this example, ‘as its flag’ appears in Arabic as
one word in one line, rayah: This country/raised its thighs/as its flag
(Adonis 2010, 109). And then in another occasion he says:
no place for me, no use in death This is the dizziness of a man who
sees the corpse of the ages on his face and falls no motion (Adonis
2010, 115)
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This ‘rhythmic event’ which makes out of ‘a single word a line of
poetry’ is a Mallarméan impact on Adonis and never existed in
previous traditional Arabic verse. These isolated words do not take
the word-rhyme role as they vary in their positions and their role
becomes more complex with the surrounding white spaces. They both
generate a unique rhythm that ‘makes silence speak, and turns space
among words into another writing in which the essence is erasing that
intensifies the rhythm of both the seen-written and erased-written’ (my
translation; Bennis 2001, 152). What is manifested in Adonis’s poetry is
the collapse of ordinary experience that dominated the classical literary
text and the rise of a new unfathomable discourse which as he says,
‘I walk on the ice of my pleasures/I walk between miracle and confusion/I
walk inside a rose’ (Adonis 2010, 113). The poet no more cares about
traditional rhythm and rhyme or the sacredness of language so ‘breaks
the crutches of song and roots out the/alphabet’ (Adonis 2010, 112).
These disruptive techniques are clear markers of the poem’s
impenetrability which is one major characteristic of contemporary
Arabic poetry. This deliberate act ‘occurs within a quest to secularize
Arabic poetry and society’, in which a rejectionist poet like Adonis
‘enacts a secular self, which takes the religious as its other’7 (Furani
2012, 238). This is manifested through the dialogic nature of the poem’s
speaker that nebulously questions, critically contrasts and vehemently
expunges and negates the dominating religious discourse. For example,
the voice announcing, ‘This is my name’ has the decisive authority of
no one but God who tells Moses in exodus 3:15: ‘this [is] my name for
ever, and this [is] my memorial unto all generations’. Also, in Islamic
tradition one of the names of God is The Wise, like in 2. 45: ‘They said,
‘exalted are You; we have no knowledge except what You have taught
us. Indeed, it is You who is the Knowing, the Wise.’’ Here, the quest for
wisdom from no authority but the Absolute is a central issue of faith
conveyed through the established interpretations of the sacred text.
Then, when the speaker says, ‘this is my beginning’, it coheres with
‘this is my fire’ for the ‘erasing [of] all wisdom’ is negated through this
very ‘fire’ of questioning and rejection. This results in the speaker’s selfdiscovery of death and life at the same time which is his new genesis:
‘no sign has remained—My blood is the sign’.8 For Adonis, ‘erasing’
the discourse of death by ‘fire’ has ‘the authority of naming through
negating’ where poetry finally has the power, unlike before, to be ‘a
language that names’ (my translation; Bennis 2001, 227–228).
What seems central here is the debatable question of interpretation of
the authoritative sacred text. In Sufism and Surrealism, while examining
the resemblance between the aesthetics of the Sufi and surrealist visions,
Adonis explains that both produce ‘unorthodox forms of writing’.
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They extensively use figurative language that does not lend itself to any
‘conclusive answers’ but rather ‘raises more questions’, and, therefore,
disturbs knowledge. In religion ‘interpretation, i.e. figurative language’
of the religious text is either rejected for the sake of literalism or
accepted only when ‘any answer that conflicts with the orthodox view
is outlawed’. As such, interpretation, functioning as an analytical work,
confirms what ‘conforms with the … literal meaning of the text’ rather
than al-tasa’ul (questioning) it. In poetry, Adonis adds, the power of the
figurative language resides in its innovative nature:
[It] renews man in that it renews thought and language and relations
to things. It is a movement that denies a present existence in its
search for another existence … just as the language it uses transcends
itself, so too does the reality that it is explaining transcend itself.
Thus figurative language links us to another dimension of things—
its invisible dimension. (Adonis 2005a, Part 1, Ch. 5.5)
The poem’s modernist disrupt-to-reconfigure strategy of questioning,
erasing and then naming marks a complete shift from a long history
of al-naqil (conveyance) into al-aqil (reason), performed through the
creative language of al-inkaar (negation), al-hadm (subversion), tajawz
(transgression) and al-taghyir (transformation). The poem bewilders its
reader with highly symbolic imagery, devastating moments and events
of death as a reference to the decline of the Arab culture. The naming
that Adonis articulates is secularism that protests against the state of
being culturally stagnant, and, therefore, declining, if not entirely dead.
It is a protesting voice calling for a civil society to abolish absolute
authorities like the ‘sultan’, the ‘caliph’, whose ‘word is a crown studded
with human eyes’, and ‘mosque and church’ that determine politics,
life and death ‘as two executioners and the earth is a rose’. For the
poet, these institutions, and even the seemingly progressive thinkers
who dignify Arab Nahda and its traditionalist tendency, repressively
force ‘histories [of] swarms of locusts’ and ‘[t]he dust of the legends’
to structure ‘the bones’ of our present, turning their lands into a ‘stable
on the moon,/the sultan’s staff, the prophet’s prayer rug’. Therefore,
the speaker decides to ‘name this city “stinking corpse”’ whose people
are ‘absence’, ‘a river without sound’ and ‘foam spewing from a river
of words/Rust in the sky and its planets,/rust in life’. The sceptic Arab
intellectual now is in ‘dizziness’ and ‘falls no motion’ after realising the
futility of seeking ‘shelter’ or even to escape to ‘death’ as ‘the corpse of
the ages’ sheds its light, if not darkness, on the present and feeds it like
‘a nipple for infants’ (Adonis 2010, 109–116). Later in the poem, the
image of the ‘Dajjal’ shows the deceptive nature of these institutions:
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dajjal9 buried a people in his eyes
dajjal excavated a people from his eyes
and we heard him praying above them
and we saw how he made them kneel
and we saw
how the people were like water cupped in his palms and
we saw
how water became a windmill (Adonis 2010, 119–120)
Interestingly, these dissenting rhythms of secularisation are strategically
structured on this very trope of death for this culture, like the phoenix
should burn to die and resurrect, returning to life from its own ashes.10
Adonis’s deliberate repetition of war-like images such as ‘fire that
weeps’, ‘fire to conquer’, ‘flames’, ‘ashes’, ‘erase’, ‘flood is coming’ and
‘river of blood’ are a reminder that his erasing revolution of the past is,
on the one hand, full of ‘sorrows’ and ‘turns the green branches into
snakes and the sun into a black lover’. On the other hand, it is brought
about by and is meant ‘for the people of flame’ and ‘fire to conquer’ and
‘bear ashes for all the sultans’ of the old time (Adonis 2010, 107–108).
Those ‘people of flame’ are Arab poets, of past and present, presented
in the poem as the libertines who question absolutism via subversive
language and new visions of life. In the poem, Adonis illustrates how
the modernist poets have always been suffering because of their fervour
to challenge the institutionalised ‘word’:
I see a word—
All of us around it are mirage and mud Imruulqais could not shake
it away, al-Ma’ari was
its child, Junaid crouched under it, al-Hallaj and al-niffari too
Al-Mutannabi said it was the voice and its echo ‘You are a slave,
and it is your angel master’ The nation is tucked deep within it
like a seed
Go back to your cave (Adonis 2010, 116)
The speaker adds that banishment or death are the expected
punishments these iconoclasts have always been facing. In his book
muqaddimah li al-shi’r al-arabi (Introduction to Arabic Poetry) and
while discussing the daring poetry of Abu nuwas, one of the prominent
poets of the Abbasid period, Adonis figures out that poetry is all about
living the danger of questioning, rejecting and transcending any
dogmatic form of power. Because this poetry grants its people ‘the will
and the choice’ that compensate for the downfall in the future, ‘the
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poet is never afraid of punishment, instead he willingly does what leads
him into punishment’ for the sake of his people who are ‘disturbingly
shattered by the winds of death’:
when the poet evokes the strange death and resurrects and lives
in its presence, he then hybridizes and familiarizes it, emptying
it from the terror of menace and downfall. The poet faces death
with a determination and not as a surrender, and lives to see its
end instead of staying burdened by its perpetual threats. (my
translation; Adonis 1971, 48)
The speaker relates the suffering, death and rebirth of Ali, nobody but
Adonis himself. The character of Ali here echoes the koranic story of
the prophet Joseph. It simultaneously embodies the miserable, yet
creative, stories of the Arab freethinker’s rise from underneath the
rubbles. ‘This is the time of death, but/in each death there is an Arab
death’ (Adonis 2010, 112), where the Arab intellectual, like the prophet
Joseph, is thrown ‘into a well and covered … with straw’, preventing
him from radiating enlightenment upon the public. However, an idea
never dies and disruptively, like a quake, resurrects from its own death
to deconstruct the static norm of life and move into the dynamism of
constant reconfigurations, where avant-garde ‘light find[s] its way to
Ali’s land’ (Adonis 2010, 109). For Adonis, revolutionary language is a
‘fire that burns only in the depths of humans filled with the sun’, a fire
that is capable of renewing even itself, an act which has a futuristic appeal
inherent in itself (Adonis and elmessiri 1987, 118). Therefore, the speaker
is granted with a new ‘voice’ of freedom and fragmentation like ‘the
ravings of a warrior as he breaks the crutches of song and roots out the
alphabet’ (Adonis 2010, 112). Hence the deceleration: ‘I can transform:
Landmine of civilization—This is my name’ (Adonis 2010, 108). to
create a new present, the speaker first becomes ‘a flame/a magician that
burns in all waters—/storming he rages, invades all books and soils/He
sweeps away history and blots out the day with his wings’ (Adonis 2010,
112). After this storm that erases all forms of traditionalism, the speaker
moves into naming: ‘This broken earthen jug/is a defeated nation This
space/is ash These eyes/are holes/I will see a craw’s face/in the features
of my country
I will name this book/“shroud.”/I will name this city
“stinking corpse”’. A new civil form of life, like ‘a flower or song’ can
‘grow out of [this] naming’, where nature ‘and the earth may waken and
return/as a child, or a child’s dream’ (Adonis 2010, 114–115).
This poem, and many of Adonis’s poems, can be read as examples
of a modernist variation of a subgenre well-known in Arabic poetry,
ritha’ al-mudun (city elegy). Robyn Creswell (2019) argues that this
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‘modulation’, of which Adonis is a precursor, is not strewn with gestures
of a nostalgia to ‘a happy and prosperous past before lamenting the fallen
present’, and it also rejects to express verbally that sense of ‘affective
solidarity’ with those suffering within a city as is the case with ritha’ almudun.11 Instead, Adonis, through the use of series of questions in the
poem without getting answers, registers an exilic idiomaticity of being
in a state of aphasic ‘solitude’, archives ‘melancholy’ and establishes a
remarkable topography that shows ‘the interior wastes and the seacoasts
of exile’ (Creswell 2019, 176). As ‘[n]othing but madness remains’
(Adonis 2010, 121), the speaker’s city turns into cul-de-sac, mounting
‘disaffection’, and the poem becomes an ‘invective’ written ‘document
of disaffiliation’12 (Creswell 2019, 177). Therefore, Adonis’s elegiac genre
functions within the parameters of his modernist project. It reconfigures
the relation between literature and politics so as to extricate poetry from
the ‘mobilising power of the state’ and, thus, this facilitates and frees the
process of cultural transformation from politics (Creswell 2019, 179).
This Adonisian subgenre of elegy is extraordinarily similar to Mallarme’s
tombeaux.13 Although these poems are about other poets in pain but they
do not eulogise or celebrate the harmony between these poets and the
collective. Rather, Adonis’s poem does not mourn but revises things,
producing ‘a countertradition’ as we feel a ‘common exclusion’ and
‘painful species of exile’ shared between him and the other revolutionary
figures from the history of the Arab culture. The appearance of these
figures, mostly poets, is, on the one hand, to witness and comment on a
dystopic present, not very different from its past, and, on the other hand,
to show how these poets have ‘an unsponsored legitimacy’ and ‘freedom’
of being autonomous ‘from the workings of power’ which enables them
to revise and transform (Creswell 2019, 184).
NOTES
1. The seminar is referred to in Rapaport (2013).
2. Arguably one of the earliest modernist literary journals in the Arab
World, Shi’r was established when modernity began preoccupying Arab
culture. It showed an association with this by pursuing poetic change and
innovation (Haidar 2008, 73). Over its forty-four issues, Shi’r introduced
new forms into Arabic literature such as the prose poem and manifestoes
and was open to non-Arabic literature. What distinguished the Shi’r poets
from their contemporaries is the awareness of the necessity to reconfigure
poetry through redefining al-turath (tradition) (Creswell 2019, 1–5).
3. Among the ‘people of innovation’ who tremendously influenced Adonis
are Abu tammam, Abu nuwas, al-Ma‘arri, al-Mutanabbi, al-niffari and
al-Hallaj.
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4. Reference is being made here to ‘epic and novel: towards a methodology
for the study of the novel’ that appears in Bakhtin (1981).
5. Adonis first published this long poem in Mawaqif journal. Then he
reintroduced it in 1971 in a volume that contained two other long poems:
An Introduction to the History of the Petty Kings and A Grave for New York.
6. The traditional Arabic metre of poetry was founded by Al-Khalil AlFarahidi during the Islamic Golden Age in the eighth century. Before
that, prosodic rules where incoherent and did not work within a system.
Changing this way of writing poetry into a strict prosodic system, Al-Khalil
established the sixteen metres of poetry that determine whether a poem
can be written and accepted. Any poetic attempt to write beyond these
metric rules was simply unacceptable. The musical unity of the poem is
created through the stability of the poem’s form itself. In this sense, every
metre of these sixteen commands the length of the line, which sustains
its stability all over the poem and this line has two balanced hemistichs,
called al-sadr and al-‘ajuz, which give the musical unity of the poem. This
unity comes from the equal division of these lines into certain numbers of
accents and syllables, where al-taf ’ilah (poetic foot) is created through the
repetitions of these syllables and accents. The unity also comes from the
rhyme of the poem that is also unvaried. This unity of the form determines
even the meaning of the poem itself as the poet has to choose a certain
metre that suits the theme of the poem. For example, if the poet’s theme is
pride, praising or reciting events and news, then they would clearly choose
al-bahr al-tawil (the long metre).
7. The term ‘rejectionist poet’ is used here to refer to the fact that Adonis
labelled himself and was labelled, along with other prose poets who
adopted radical transformation as a strategy, as al-shu’ara al-rafdiyyun
(rejectionist poets), for his tendency to reject not only the interference of
religion in politics but the tendency of other poets of his time to return
blindly to traditions.
8. In the Arabic text, the poet uses the word ayah (verse), but the english
translation prefers the word ‘sign’, one of the senses of the word ayah.
9. Dajjal (the deceitful) is ‘the one-eyed giant’ eschatological figure that
appears in Islamic tradition. Known also as al-Masih al-Dajjal (pseudoChrist), he calls himself God and many people follow him, ruling over ‘the
earth for forty days … before being slain by Jesus son of Mary’ (Halperin
1976, 213).
10. Adonis extensively uses mythological and legendry figures of death and
finitude in his poetry for they grant him ‘timeless perspective from which
to view the human condition and strengthened [his] feeling of being … a
constant present’ (Adonis 1990, 95).
11. A traditional Arabic poetry genre that was occasioned and developed by
the decline of al-Andalus during the Abbasid Caliphate. It responded
to the catastrophic fall of the premodern Islamic city and talked about
longing, displacement and collective recuperation. Among the known
poets of this subgenre are abu al-baqa’ al-rundi and Ibn Zaydun. For
further reading on city elegy, see elinson (2009) and Basha (2003).
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12. This invectiveness is close to a form of elegy known in Arabic literature as
hija‘ al-mudun, which is the opposite of rith’ al-mudun. See Fakhreddine
and Orfali (2018).
13. As much as Adonis was influenced by Arab libertines in poetry, he
was also ‘captivated by Western culture’, especially French, where
reading Baudelaire revealed [Abu nuwas’s] particular poetical quality
and modernity and ‘Mallarme’s’ writing explained ‘the mysteries of
Abu tammam’s poetic language and [its] modern dimension’ and that
through ‘Rimbaud, nerval and Breton’ he discovered ‘the poetry of the
mystic writers in all its uniqueness and splendour’ (Adonis 1990, 80–81).
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Koninklijke Brill, 2000.
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———. Fatiha Li Nihayat al-Qarn: Bayanat Min Ajl Thaqafa Arabia Jadida
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———. An Introduction to Arab Poetics. translated by Catherine Cobban.
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———. al-muhit al-aswad (The Black Ocean). Beirut: Dar al-Saqi, 2005b.
———. Adonis Selected Poems. translated by Khaled Mattawa. London: Yale
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Nancy
Berg
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lity/ أدوﻧﯿﺲ: اﻟﻐﺔ، اﻟﺜﻘﺎﻓﺔ، ’اﻟﻮاﻗﻊ. A
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and Kingdom elegy in the Andalusian Poetry). Damascus: Shira‘ li-l-Dirasat
wa-al-nashr, 2003.
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eAtIng dIssIdence oF AntonIn ARtAUd:
towARds A PooR AestHetIcs
Soumyabrata Choudhury
I am hungry. I have no appetite.
—Antonin Artaud
1
Unlike kafka in ‘A Hunger Artist’, Antonin Artaud—on the verge of
physical collapse, body ravaged by cancer, towards the end of his life—
actually feels hungry. Artaud can be imagined to go on a lunch date
with his friend and, eventually, legatee to the rights of his works, Paule
Thévenin, just a few days before his death and at Thévenin’s door make
this extraordinary assertion: ‘I am hungry. I have no appetite.’1
In this respect, he is indeed unlike Kafka’s hunger artiste. The latter,
mostly silent during his forty-day fast, has no need to express any
particular thoughts towards his acts because he is rigorously and silently
dedicated to the performance of his fasting in the same way that one
does not need to express any thoughts about performing any ritual. The
hunger artist is only concerned about the fact that he could better his
performance if given a chance but for ritual reasons again the impresario
stops his fast every time on the fortieth day. For the hunger artiste, the
medical reason for doing so by the impresario is no different from ritual
reasons because, every time, the last day arrives as a repetitive occasion
that both ends his performance and frustrates his confident ambition to
break his own record. Indeed, the rigorous and endless repetition of the
ritual sequence of fasting makes it, in the exact sense, a performance that
is an encoded and expert action with no vacillation or interruption by
thought. The hunger artiste, in other words, is a professional.2
2
Antonin Artaud experiences his relationship with food as real. His
illness prevents him from assimilating food with the normal efficiency
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Eating Dissidence of Antonin Artaud
283
and periodicity of a healthy person—which results in a body partially
starved and emaciated. At the same time, this very physical deprivation
causes in him great surges of hunger. And, as in any state of hunger,
food transmutes from being merely an object of assimilation and
excretion to an idea. It is as an idea that food becomes a scintillating and
interruptive thought for Artaud. His hungry body is as if addressed by a
kind of beatific aura of food, a greater horizon of satisfaction that both
pulls him forward and uplifts his spirit—hence, we can imagine him
nearly traipsing through the streets of Paris to Paule Thévenin’s house
for lunch, and simultaneously, he can be pictured as being repulsed
by the presence of food in both the ritual setting of a social occasion
like lunch and an alimentary setting of the substance called ‘food’. So,
at the precise point of intersection between the flight of the idea and
the assault by food, Artaud can be thought to produce his singular and
shattering act of speech: ‘I am hungry. I have no appetite.’
unlike the hunger Artiste’s continuous and ritually encoded
performance of fasting, Artaud is confronted with real negativity
that knots together food and thought. no ritual form or medical
prescription quite suffices to untie this knot and free Artaud’s life from
a kind of alimentary thinking that he both thinks and suffers, suffers
and speaks. At this crossroad, the reality of thought interrupts the great
chains of ritual that encircle a society of performance but at the point
of this slight chink that opens the great ritual grids of the world—we
are not at all greeted by any triumphal cry of either new thought or
new art. Antonin Artaud experiences this chink or opening within the
discipline of the world, that is meant to churn out endless forms and
sequences of performance and crystallise into society as a performance
machine, as an opening and aperture of his own being. In so far as
Artaud belongs to the same performance society that the hunger artiste
does, he must either fulfil his obligations as a professional artist—which
could mean in his case, an actor, a poet, a painter—or he must retire
from his professional status. This is what Antonin Artaud either refuses
to do or his so-called illness comes as too quick an interruption, like
a lightning flash, for him to discern the very elements of a situation
so as to enable himself to take a measured and rational decision on
his life and work. So instead of simply being counted as one of those
enormously talented individuals who professionally could not realise
their promise, that is being counted as a ‘failed artist’, Artaud’s is a
life of art interrupted by life itself. There are two dimensions to this
interruption: the first is the interruption produced by Artaud’s illness
and the second is that produced by his thought—and insofar as they are
the same, we might call this an interruptive and ‘poor’ thought.
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3
In a letter Artaud wrote to Jacque Rivière, he invented a strange
French word created by nothing less than an impulse of the
negative—impouvoir. the two alternative english translations
for this word are ‘un-power’ and ‘im-power’ (in this context, see
Blanchot 2004, 109–115). Both translations indicate a strange
operation of negation or opposition that does not come from any
term or force that is outside the object being negated or opposed.
so, if Artaud, as he writes to Rivière, admits to feeling an impouvoir
gripping his thinking then it is not that he is hampered or deprived
of thinking properly by some agent or force that is blocking him
like an enemy or adversary outside himself. to that extent, it would
seem that the question of illness is too historical and empirical an
instance to account for Artaud’s ‘poor thought’. Yet, at no point, can
Artaud be thought to think outside the sufferings of his body. this
is the real enigma of the singular experience that the eating paradox
and the alimentary utterance of Artaud’s life must be traced along
their itineraries as experiences of thinking.
Artaud himself indicates to Rivière a kind of symptomatology of
this thinking. He says that thought slips in such a way that he can’t
quite find himself or grip himself in the act of thinking. Hence, the
signification attached to such neo-words as ‘impower’ or ‘unpower’
is to somehow grasp this slipping beneath the forms of the thinking
given in and to the world that provide the grid for the world as
thinkable and knowable. surely, one part of this thinkable and
knowable world is the artistic one and one great form of the world
thinkable as and through art is the form of ritual. In that sense,
ritual is not merely the content of the performances that take place
in the world in the common way we understand a religious ritual
or a social ritual. It is the other way round: ritual is the very form
of the world as performance. so, it is not a question of this ritual
performance, or that; it is rather, that ritual is the general logic of
a world that is guaranteed in its performances, and in that sense,
a ‘performance world’. It is this guarantee of the world, through
both a techno-ritualistic procedure and a metaphysical one, that
the enigmatic experience enclosed within the hollow of Artaud’s
impouvoir hollows out. In the very movement of this hollowing
out, the ritual richness of the world as performance is denuded and
the poverty that resultantly grips the world strangely becomes an
affirmation of thought.
Eating Dissidence of Antonin Artaud
285
4
‘Poor thought’ as we have called it, is neither a pure inward activity
of the subject nor a new objective knowledge that can be added to
the world’s encyclopaedias. In this respect, ‘poor thought’ is not an
affair of the power that forever entwines itself with knowledge. Then
the question follows that what does such thought have to do with
the strange provenance of neo-words like impouvoir or impotential/
impower? One has to clarify here that the affirmation of poor thought
is neither an affirmation of power nor an affirmation against it. It
is rather, an affirmation of the constitutive weakness of power, its
exposure to a fragment of contingency that hollows its political and
professional mastery from within. But even ‘within’ is too interiorising
a spatial expression; the ‘within’ here is similar to the status of ‘food’
for Artaud’s eating paradox. In both cases, the impulse or the assault
arrives from without as either an object of hunger or revulsion but
simultaneously, the object seems to enclose within itself the very
essence of an experience that has lost both its subjective identity and
its objective locus. This is the reason why Artaud needs to resort to
some sort of a language of weakness when writing to Rivière that speaks
of his thought slipping away from or slipping beneath the capacity to
symbolise his own experience. exactly at this point, the logic of ritual
performance and its technical as well as metaphysical guarantees are
echoed in the general logic of discursive expression and symbolic
competence. Artaud is the most singular thinker of an experience of
weakness or poverty that befalls him but insofar as it is a weak, poor
and denuded thought, it only testifies to the tortures of techno-ritually
speaking, an ‘incompetent’ thinker.
However, such incompetence is the rare creation of a thought that
refuses to yield to the ritual and professional temptation of performance.
Artaud’s incompetent or unperforming creation of thought is precisely
that—thought as a dissident creation against the world as performance.
It is in this context that one must re-read some of Artaud’s most wellknown and lacerated texts to realise that what is affirmed against the
regime of performance is a word or idea as old as the performance itself
and yet sought to be wrenched free from it—the word ‘theatre’.
5
Antonin Artaud’s texts and scenarios for what he called the Theatre
of Cruelty are often seen as prophetic announcements for a future of
performance freed from bourgeois proscenium-staging of psychological
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drama and redirected towards a future of the total ritual or Total
Theatre as Ritual (1994).3 This hyper-performative appropriation of
Artaud, in fact, departs more and more from the thought of theatre,
which is incipient in the word ‘cruelty’. This appropriation seeks to
tempt us with ritually sanctified and institutionally legitimated images
of what could be called merely cruel performances from the world of
theatre arts, performance art, video art, installation art and so on. We
are not saying that this rich historical corpus of performance works
or ritual successes is to be disparaged in any way; we are only asking
whether this contemporary, as well as archival, wealth responds to the
test of Artaud’s thought of ‘cruelty’, when Artaud said that ‘cruelty
is necessity’.4 In this sense, we are asking a frankly counter-intuitive
question: whether performance is necessary for the thought of theatre.
In fact, we can exacerbate the question even further: we can ask whether
theatre was not always a thought of exit from performance insofar as
the latter’s success was already guaranteed by the ritual technology of
the world while the former was, in its very birth, meant to be a gesture
of the real. It is on the question of the real that the thought of theatre
as a necessary exit from the great enclosure of performance and food
as the mere alimentary object of physical satisfaction must be thought
together. In both cases, the real is the opposite of anything that is
otherworldly and metaphysical; it is the interruption that is felt in the
body as a weakness, as an insistent hunger but only weakly oriented
towards the exact food destined to satisfy it. The idea of theatre and
the idea of food are similar in that they are a betweenness flanked by
the professionally incompetent body and the intellectually illegitimate
act of thinking. In other words, hunger and thought are the respective
madnesses of the body and the mind, insofar as both refuse to be
satisfied by any ritual foods, whether of the body or the mind, that
are offered as a recompense for the professional labours of the great
performers of the world including the performer of hunger.
6
So it is a matter of some interest that Kafka’s ‘A Hunger Artist’ does not
actually end with the reconfirmation of the web of the world as a web
of ritual performances. The hunger artist at the fag end of his dimming
career as well as dimming life admits to the overseer that he would
never have undertaken the fast had he found the food that he liked.
‘I couldn’t find the food I liked. If I had found it believe me I should
have made no fuss and stuffed myself like you or anyone else.’5 Thus,
the hunger artist no longer speaks of food as ritual food, something
Eating Dissidence of Antonin Artaud
287
to be ritually assimilated or in the same fashion rejected within the
professional act of fasting but as the real co-relate of desire. The very
last words of his life reveal the professional performer to be a forever
deprived being, deprived of the real of his desire. At this point, the tale
moves into a strange metaphoric luminosity. Once the hunger artist is
dead and buried, his cage is now occupied by a panther who strides that
confined space with such luminous energy that the crowds are back and
everyone is transfixed to this magnetic site in sharp contrast to the last
failing days of the hunger artist performance when most of the people
would pass by his cage to the ones hosting the fabulous and dangerous
animals of the circus. now that the hunger artist has gone, the cage
is re-occupied by one such animal who re-incites great spectatorial
interest in the world as performance. However, exactly as part of this
performance, the panther is brought food to eat—real food, that sets
the panther’s shining throat and jaws in motion and seems to generate
a light that captures one and all. So, exactly at the loss of ritual efficacy
of one artist, and one sequence of performance, another is instituted
and this time it is the institutionalisation and ritualisation of that very
animal reality—real food—which was the locus of a fabulous and
disciplined deprivation ritually practised by the genius of the hunger
artist. At this point, the Great Form that is performance, the encoding
of repetition within a ritual and the luminous assimilation of reality
by the body of the performer, the shiny throat and jaws of the panther
cannot be distinguished anymore.
What Kafka localises in the dying and disciplined body of the
hunger artist—the discipline of dying/fasting—and equally, delocalises
and discloses to be a fragment of reality perpetually lost or yet to
come—the reality of a food that the hunger artist would like and never
did find—Antonin Artaud re-insinuates in his own vital and historical
being and body. For Kafka’s hunger artist, everything was set off
because he could never find the food he liked; for Artaud, he could
never satisfy his great hunger for food because his body did not like the
food he liked. to that measure, what Artaud never ceases to declare is
that he is captured and tortured by a body that is nothing but a history
of errors, bad organs and bad combinations of organs, a series of bad
localisations. So, instead of merely announcing the deprivation of his
being by the absence of the real of food, the food that he would ‘like’,
Artaud rages at the deprivation of his being by the error of his body
and in that cry of repudiation, he strangely affirms a new theatre of the
real. It is a theatre which cannot conceivably be performed within any
historico-ritualistic form because the fundamental pre-supposition of
that performance, which is the body of the performer, is constitutively
repudiated by Artaud. So, for Artaud the real to come is a new body, a
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body whose localisation is still too dim, too weak, too enveloped in a
kind of ‘impouvoir’, impower/unpower to produce itself as historically
and ritually verifiable body. It is in this sense of a real to come which
will not be subjected to either the historical contingency or the ritual
binding of that contingency, both of which one calls ‘performance’,
that Artaud articulates with the word cruelty in his manifesto Theatre
of Cruelty and identifies cruelty with ‘necessity’.
7
Let us take a brief detour to trace an episodic journey on different
meanings and connotations of something like ‘necessary food’ across
different contexts. For instance. in fifth century bc, in Ancient Athens,
we find an interesting bifurcation proceeding from the status of food,
or rather, food grain in society. While grain is the basic subsistence
material for human life, and any human being, whether free man or
slave must eat to survive, we find in Athens at this time (which is the time
of Periclean democracy in 450 bc) a strange privilege or value attached
to the act of citizens eating. Pericles seems to have instituted a state fund
called theoric which was meant to be disbursed as a direct payment or
dole to the citizens, rich and poor alike, who were meant to utilise
these funds to undertake certain civic activities including buying of
grains and, among other things, theatre attendance. So, paradoxically,
while a citizen is meant to make a minimal payment made available
by a state fund, effectively both subsidising food as well as making
it mandatory too for the citizen, other sections of society including
slaves and women are not privy to this state fund. This means that
the latter can both be imagined to not be given a state subsidy but also
to be given free grain or allowed free entry into the theatre depending
on specific circumstances. In other words, the citizens’ act of eating is
rendered by this uniform prism of civic funding, a significant eating
(Choudhury 2013).
The significance mentioned earlier displaces the meaning
of necessity from one that is based on subsistence and minimal
reproduction of the species to a new type of civic necessity. By this
second logic of necessity, even food serves a symbolically constitutive
function and mere nutrition now functions as a refraction of the
citizens’ civic constitution rather than the natural constitution of any
living body whether the citizens’ or the slaves’. Hence, from natural
necessity, we move to a political semiotic necessity where food is both
the substance of the sign citizenship as well as its signifying enactment.
In ancient Athens, this second logic of necessity corresponds to what
Eating Dissidence of Antonin Artaud
289
could be called a liturgical logic that was founded on a certain system
of public services. By the common and natural logic of the necessary
nutritive reproduction of species, the act of eating is simultaneously
individual and species-centric. The human-animal eats to preserve
its particular self but its particular self is inseparable from the general
reproduction of the species. The liturgical logic of the Athenian city,
in significant contrast, chooses to grant necessity to only a civic act of
eating. Of course, in physical terms, the animal and the civic acts (of
eating) cannot be distinguished from each other. What is effectuated is
internal bifurcation within the act between a symbolically constituted
a significant part and a naturally given nonsignificant part. And the
mechanism of this effectuating Athenian state fund, that is provided
only to the citizens who are properly liturgical subjects and in eating
(just as in attending the theatre), they perform a public service to
themselves on behalf of themselves. By this civic-nutritive mobilisation
of the liturgical logic, the citizens distinguish themselves from women,
slaves and foreigners, in that the latter, whether in the act of eating or
that of attending the theatre, remain confined to the automatism of
natural necessity.
Another historical site of symbolic mobilisation of food and
its sublimation into a necessity higher than a mere natural one, is
accomplished in the ritual appropriation of eating (and drinking)
during the catholic eucharist. As part of the eucharistic celebration of
the memory of the Last Supper, bread and wine serve as both physical
substances to be ‘tasted’6 as well as signs to be transformed into the
Body and Blood of Christ. What, in terms of natural necessity, can only
be received as a divine miracle of transubstantiation, defying the natural
law of unexchangable substances (bread/body, wine/blood), in terms of
symbolical constitution within the logic of religion can be understood
as a re-semiotisation of food into a new regime of necessary signs.
As signs, bread and wine surpass their capture by ‘taste’ and instead,
make taste an aesthetic prism to refract the real ritual activity of barely
touching the little wafer of bread and the drop of wine with the tongue
so as to ensure that this minimal sensation or aesthesis is only a material
platform to launch the work of the ritual code. This code prescribes in
a necessitarian move the transformation of a natural substance into
ritual-symbolical value, bread and wine into Body and Blood. Once this
ritual efficacy is secured, the contingency of taste is sublimated into
both ritual rigour and theological dogma—the two necessitarian masks
flanking the merely ‘natural’ face and function of the human-animal.
It is interesting that, in the nineteenth century, Marx locates the
crux of surplus values in the difference between what the labour
produces as value and what is its own value. The later value is what
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marx calls the reproduction of living labour—that is the value of
labour expressed in terms of what is necessary to reproduce itself as an
exchangeable commodity, in other words, its price on the market.7 This
simply means, when labour has produced the value of labour power,
it has secured its value of reproduction. So, while labour produces
surplus value, it is exchanged as a commodity only as labour power.
The exchange value of labour power is nothing more or less than its
necessary natural value of being reproducible as the substance of living
labour, which is to say, all the nutritive and other substances that
are required to reproduce labour power. But Marx’s theory of value
is precisely that value is not natural; it is socially-necessary value that
is determined by the logic of exchange of commodities. Value is the
co-creation of a society of commodities. In this, Marx goes beyond
Adam Smith who would still understand something like poverty as an
equivocal experience confronted with natural necessity and defined by
socially necessary parameters. For Marx there is only socially-necessary
determination of value which is measurable and expressible only by
the meaning of exchange value. In this respect, Marx grasps labour
as both a living substance and as a structure of the exploitation of
value without, in any way, making an organic and historical gradation
between these two dimensions, insofar as for Marx, the human species
is constitutively labour. The specific social formation that is a capitalist
society capitalises or invests all of human animality into a social process
of the extraction of surplus values. Hence, with Marx’s analysis there is
no remainder that survives the circuit of commodity exchange whether,
that remainder be a normal human-animal seen as purely nutritive or
even socially-equivocal straddling the line between society and nature
as Adam Smith imagines as a ‘poor’.
While it is true that Marx did not resort to any residual logic of natural
necessity and attempted to rigorously demonstrate a social capture of
all so called natural values, he did produce a political imagination of the
worker as a subject-imprisoned to a socially-determined natural level of
existence. to that extent, the poor and the immiserated classes partake
of a social misery whose analogy still lies in natural necessity.8 Precisely
because the subject of labour, that is the worker, is locked to the level
of socially-determined parameter of his or her natural reproduction,
the worker, politically speaking, confronts the class enemy—the
bourgeoisie, with images of a kind of surplus experience. Conforming
to such an image, Antonin Artaud in the twentieth century accuses
this surplus experience, whether in a poem, in a letter or in unfinished
theatre-scenario, ‘you eat too much! You petty bourgeois initiates ... you
smell of garlic mayonnaise ...’.9 to the extent that these words express
a rebellion against decadent capitalist consumption, whether nutritive
Eating Dissidence of Antonin Artaud
291
or cultural, Artaud stands at the threshold of a modern western culture
saturated by late capitalist hedonistic promise of sensuous aesthetic and
material ‘surplus pleasure’.10 But this threshold is intrinsically unstable
because all surplus is already a movement beyond the necessitarian
logic that forms the social infrastructure of the experience itself. It is
this contradiction that in Artaud’s life and work, occupies the threshold
to eventually displace it towards a strange solution to the contradiction.
The solution either prophecies something like an absolutely new ritual
regime and a surplus-culture that exceeds its own infrastructure so
overwhelmingly that its codes and ceremonies, its exchanges and values
are rendered completely unrecognisable to its own ideological mirror—
or it returns to a strictly necessitarian threshold so rigorous and so exact
that it becomes infra-social whose secret measure is nothing less than
cultic.11 This is the critical and tremulous threshold Artaud occupies
at the beginning of the twentieth century—a position from where the
thought of theatre is launched towards multiple futures.
8
Antonin Artaud and Simone Weil, apart from being near
contemporaries, are also philosophically united in one respect: both
were dissatisfied with the mere social or organic determinations of
necessity. While Artaud gave the name ‘cruelty’ to the thought of
necessity, Weil joined necessity to a force or power that she called ‘super
natural’. Again, the logic of a surplus beyond an economic doctrine of
surplus is at stake. For Weil, such a pure surplus-necessity could be
found, for instance, in the Hindu text of the Bhagwad Gita, in which
the idea of duty according to Weil is performed not along the lines of
interests or even egoistic power but as a form of pure obedience. So
strangely, in this interpretation, the relation of obedience to command
is not a motivated by submission to power but a determination of
power or force without any of the predicates or properties of power
that we associate with what is conventionally called ‘social power’ or
‘political power’. Hence, with Simone Weil, we encounter a speculative
experience, which the contemporary Italian philosopher Roberto
esposito (2015, 120–155) calls ‘the sovereignty of sovereignty’.
This extraordinary coincidence of pure necessity and pure surplus
is to be found in both Artaud and Weil, though both use very different
measures to measure and express their definitions of ‘necessity’. For
Weil, the example of the Hindu text of Gita is illustrative of her desire
to interpret this canonical text in a fundamentally anti-ritualistic
way. If the Gita were to be interpreted as an ideological document,
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presenting a philosophy of duty determined as ritual performance, then
weil’s interpretation of pure impredicative power contained in the
text’s meaning would fall apart.12 without entering into these specific
historico-philosophical debates, one can pay attention to Weil’s
analogical passion when it comes to measuring and expressing ideas
according to new improvised philosophical measures. For instance, she
refers to Gandhi and his pronouncements of non-violence, in a specific
historical context, to propose the following analogical test: Weil
suggests that true Gandhian thinking on non-violence should test nonviolence on the grounds whether it contains in its very core, in its selfactivity, the same tensile and ‘muscular’ force that violence contains
(esposito 2015, 137). According to Weil, only if non-violence possesses
the same muscular force as violence, does it reach the status of true
thought or a true principle. In proposing this tensile and ‘muscular’ test
for the idea of non-violence, Weil almost replicates the last paragraph
of Kafka’s ‘A Hunger Artist’ in so far as the magnetic and shiny rhythm
of the panther’s mouth with the food caught between its jaws renders
this food ‘necessary’, rather than food being merely a natural necessity.
Similarly, for Weil, non-violence can be made necessary by its selfactivity, its very own shiny jaws, its own ‘necessary food’ rather than
it being either a theatrical or a political ritual merely being practiced
as a hunger fast in tactically-chosen periods of self-deprivation of
nutrition. At the same time, Weil’s test should not be misunderstood
as an aesthetic one. The panther is not putting up a performance in
the same way as the Hunger Artiste does; its rhythm is the rhythm of
the real. even better, the real is only verifiable in a kind of experience
and analytics of rhythm. All ritualising is only retrospective and to
that extent, unnecessary. Simone Weil also calls this ritual technology
‘idolatrous’ (esposito 2015). to this extent, she includes even Marx
among thinkers who render the ‘super natural’ force of necessity—a
force without force, articulated with the im-power of sovereignty—
into the force of the social and the measure of the animal. Instead of
this reductive field of social and political philosophies of power, Weil
proposes a thought of ‘action’, where the action and the thought cannot
be disaggregated into subject and object. to this extent, the thesis is
clear: necessity is thought. And this is a thesis intensely shared by Weil
and Artaud, albeit in drastically heterogeneous sights and ways.
Simone Weil expresses this thesis again in an analogical pursuit
of the most vivid and elusive measure. She says that necessity is not
determination of this or that; necessity is the very real of determination
as such. That there is determination is what solicits the thought of
necessity. Weil says that ‘determination’ (or one could alternatively
say, the ‘real’) is without any substance yet harder than any diamond
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(esposito 2015, 154). Antonin Artaud’s thought of cruelty seems to
pursue a similar analogy. cruelty is determination, not of this or that,
but of its own necessity. In this respect, cruelty is indeed expressed by
the old greek word for both necessity and fate—ananke.
The only question that still remains somewhat unaddressed is: what
does the thought of cruelty have to do with the thought of theatre?
Again, to grasp this relationship one might take recourse to Simone
Weil’s precise philosophical thesis that determination is actually the
point—insubstantial yet harder than any diamond—at which all forms
and predicates of power that underlie a political philosophy give way
to an experience of impower or as esposito calls it, of impolitics.
Similarly, for Artaud, cruelty is that point at which all ritual codes and
ceremonies lose their encoded efficacies and are immanently exposed
to their own being-ritual or even, to the gesture of such ritual-being.
In being self-exposed, Artaud seems to be saying that ritual necessity
is rendered contingent but the contingency of the event of ritual itself
becomes a ‘necessary’ thought of what he calls a Theatre of Cruelty.
This is the most one can travel with Antonin Artaud and Simone Weil,
as themselves co-travellers on a brief but singular journey.
9
The limits of comparison between Artaud and Weil impinge on both
sides of the comparison. If, for Weil, the exit from the socio-vital
ideology of modern politics lies in a certain existential, and even physical,
experiment with ‘super natural’ necessity, in the case of Artaud the very
exposure of ritual to its gestural contingency confines this critical selfreflection to the space of fundamental equation: theatre = ritual. For
Weil, as well as for Artaud, the limits are broken in disparate, if not
incommensurable, ways such that analogical comparisons must be
abandoned from this point onwards. We will not speak of Weil further,
apart from indicating that her conclusive and dying experiments with
starvation both embodied a certain supernatural distance from natural
assimilation of food, as well as converted the determination of the
world as affliction or suffering in the very element of personal existence
(Weil 2002, 80–84). Of course, one cannot leave this trail without
clarifying that the determination of the world as an affliction, for Weil,
is the very passage of exit from the world as it exists. For Artaud, the
Theatre of Cruelty is a self-confessed manifesto without any models or
examples. to that extent, it must have neither an archive nor a future. It
must be what it is—the breakout of the contingent thought of necessity
as cruelty. However, a certain chapter does open up in the accidental
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future of Artaud’s crypt and one figure who attempts to ‘read’ the
cryptic language he presumes to inherit from Artaud is the Polish
director Jerzy Grotowski. In a short essay, called ‘He wasn’t entirely
himself ’, Grotowski suggests Artaud’s crypt contains a prophesy or a
vision but the actual work of theatre must find a method suitable to
realise this cryptic agenda for the future (Grotowski 2004, 59–64).
Indeed, Grotowski undertakes such a rational search for a true theatre
of cruelty appropriate to Artaud’s vision. More than that, in his own
work and corpus of writing, Grotowski names such a rational-historical
theatre a ‘poor theatre’.
For Grotowski the meaning of poverty is not privative; rather, it
is subtractive. The actor is both a rational and vital unit, who must
subtractively discover her ‘truth’ which, in turn, must be ‘revealed’
as a necessary gesture of this very poverty. But the gesture that must
be arrived at through this rational revelatory subtractive method—a
method flanked clearly both by science and religion—cannot but be
both historical and be necessarily reinserted into ritual web of the
world as performance. Despite his pioneering and daunting initiative
Grotowski, in the history of theatre, exemplifies a peculiar contradiction.
On the one hand, his subtractive or minimising method subtracts from
all predicates including communitarian and cultural ones but the more
he minimises his self-relation as western theatre director, the more he
multiplies in his work signs of other than western cultures and cultural
predicates. This eventually leads to a generalised communitarian
project alternatively called Theatre of the Roots or Cross Cultural
Theatre. The second contradiction that follows from this one is that
while Grotowski concentrates the experience of the actor’s revelation
within her own ‘truth process’13 and to that extent, she frees herself
from the empirical reality of the spectator, the more her truth demands
a kind of confessional and anonymous other who, instead of being the
public spectator, would now exude the authority of the master, or the
guru, that is Grotowski himself.
Given this somewhat futile, and yet collaterally fertile, search that
Grotowski undertook—guided by what he called Artaud’s prophesy—
is there a possibility of finding a philosophically-truer relationship of
Artaud’s notion of cruelty in Theatre of Cruelty neither with the history
of philosophy, nor with that of theatre, but with events that are able
to produce certain undecidability between these identified regimes of
history? Let’s conclude with one rather random example of such an event
from the French Revolution. In the very early stages of the revolution,
between 1789 and 1790, when the first festivals of the revolution
were created by the different revolutionary groups as well as the new
government, one striking festival was called the Festival of Misery.
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This was a peculiar, if not absurd, festival in which poverty and
misery were celebrated. What rational meaning can be given to such a
celebration unless the entire exercise is imagined to be a massive act of
collective masochism? However, when one examines the actual historical
unfolding of the event, it reveals something quiet unprecedented
and extraordinary. The Festival of Misery is a celebration of misery,
poverty, even hunger—neither as religio-social virtues bordering on
martyrdom, nor as wilful embodiments of impotential or impower but
as the real of history that manifests poor, miserable and hungry people
insofar as they exist. And insofar as they exist, they already testify to a
necessity that goes beyond the mere contingent fact that even if they
are hungry today, potentially they can eat not just well in the future but,
who knows, they could also become those decadent petty bourgeoisies
who an Antonin Artaud could turn and accuse of eating too much
and smelling of garlic mayonnaise. Surely neither Marx nor any other
egalitarian thinker would deny such an optimistic and dismal possibility
but this very contingent possibility is what the festival of misery, at a
specific historical moment, superseded by affirming the existence of
a real people in their real material conditions. And insofar as such
a reality is affirmed and celebrated in the festival it frees the fact of
poverty and hunger from both the empirical causality of nutritive and
other deprivations and from the entrepreneurial ontology of potential
that sees every deprivation as a future opportunity, an aspiration
and self-enrichment. Insofar as both these evaluations dominate the
imagination of poverty, the poor are necessarily not thought (Castel
2003, 159–167).
It is this deprivation not so much from the food, as from thought,
that the festival of misery enthusiastically, and revolutionarily, corrects.
It also produces a certain social discourse of law and duty which
provides a kind of ideological emblem for the festival of misery. The
festival announces that, henceforth, society owes a ‘sacred debt’ to
the poor. This is obviously a counter-intuitive idea of debt because
society from now on owes a debt to those people who, by definition,
are not credit-worthy. This counter-intuitive logic is the essential logic
of a new necessity—the necessity of generic equality—or the equality
that binds a generic humanity. In this respect, the festival of misery
invents a language, as well as a gesture, for the thought of the real which
neither submits to the model of natural necessity (necessary food), nor
to that of socio-liturgical necessity (significant food). And insofar as the
festival celebrates and affirms an experience whose reality cannot be
encoded or incorporated into a limited ritual form the festival of misery
is not a ritual festival. It is, even within the sequence of festivals of the
French Revolution from 1789 to 1794, an exceptional festival to the
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extent that its performance is indiscernible from the historical reality
of the revolution itself. The exceptional event that the festival celebrates
is part of the festival itself. And so, at this insubstantial point in history,
harder than any diamond, the thought strikes like a new and necessary
lightning flash, and instead of being stupefied by this event, speaks in
Artaud’s imagined voice—a voice so cruel and so frail as to be beyond
any imagination, ‘What is a revolution if not a festival, what is a festival
if not a revolution?’ (Derrida 2002, 290–316).
NOTES
1. This essay creates a series of scenarios, partly imagined and partly citing
from documents from Artaud’s life particularly after his release from
Rodez asylum in 1946 up to his death in March 1948. The documents
themselves are mostly incomplete and fragmented hence the imagined
supplementation is almost constitutive of the nature of these documents.
Some of these scenarios/documents are ‘Letter to Peter Watson’, ‘tete-atete with Antonin Artaud’, ‘to put an end to the judgement of God’, ‘Last
letters to Paule Thévenin’. Antonin Artaud left the rights to his works
for Paule Thévenin who among the several works that she authored, coauthored the book The Secret art of Antonin Artaud. See Jacques Derrida
and Paule Thévenin (1998, 1976). Also see Antonin Artaud ‘to put an end
to the judgement of God’ in Selected Works. It might also be mentioned
here that the author of this essay has written a play based on these very
fragments and documents called ‘tete-a-tete with Antonin Artaud’.
Though unpublished the play has been performed as a solo-piece since
1998 by the author more than 25 times.
2. See Kafka (1998, 243–256). As for the founding of the space and status for
acting as a profession and ceremony in modernity we have to probably go
back to Denis Diderot as the first philosopher of acting as a profession. For
the key Diderot text on this, see Diderot’s Paradox of Acting.
3. In addition to this, one could read some of his ‘scenarios’ including ‘The
conquest of Mexico’.
4. Among several valuable commentaries on Artaud’s identification of
cruelty with necessity, two specific texts that stand out are Jacques Derrida
(2002, 290–316); Andre Green (2011).
5. Kafka (1998, 255).
6. See Agamben’s reference to Campenella in the short text Taste by Giorgio
Agamben (2017, 24).
7. See Karl Marx ‘The Labour-Process and the Process of Producing SurplusValue’ in Capital, vol. I, translated by Samuel Moore and edward Aveling
(with a Preface by Frederick engels). noida: Maple Press.
In particular Marx says ‘… the capitalist incorporates labour as a
living ferment with the lifeless constituents of the product. From his point
of view the labour process is nothing more than the consumption of the
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8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
297
commodity purchased i.e. of labour power’ (p. 172). It is interesting to note
that in contrast to marx’s total socialisation of the ‘living ferment’ that is
labour, Adam smith’s measure of poverty or the ‘poor’ has the following
equivocation: The poor is someone who feels ‘shame’ while living in society
in so far as he is a being who has to expose his existence to that very society
as ‘poor’, meaning he lives a degraded life. In Smith’s subjective measure the
‘shame’ the poor feels is co-related to an objective condition of a life spent
‘without breaches’. ‘Breaches’ or boots signify both the objective measure of
a civic and solvent existence but a life without ‘breeches/boots’ or a life of
‘shame’ is precisely a life exposed and degraded to a condition of ‘natural’
necessity. In this connection, also see Sen (1999).
In this context see the analysis of primitive accumulation in Capital. Ibid.
771–831.
See Antonin Artaud ‘letter to Peter Watson’. Available online at https://
my-blackout.com/2019/03/28/antonin-artaud-letter-to-peter-watson/.
The coinage of ‘surplus pleasure’ refers to the ambiguous meaning of the
French word jouissance which both indicates, the simple sense of pleasure as
well as something unassimilated or even traumatic in that very experience.
This division between a prophetic Artaud and a performative Artaud
is actualised in the twentieth as well as the twenty-first century by the
alternative trends of myriad cultural performances and rituals, particularly
subtended by the sign ‘oriental’ and a certain Artaud style whose
performativity is interestingly seen more in cultic poetry, performance art
even visual arts rather than in the space of legitimate theatre.
For an interpretation of the Gita in the light of caste and ritual action and
ritual obedience, see Ambedkar (1987).
This is a conceptual invention that Alain Badiou, the contemporary
French philosopher has made in his work. Whether there is any structural
or subjective similarity between Grotowski’s performance system and
Badiou’s philosophical system is a matter for the reader to decide.
REFERENCES
Agamben, Giorgio. Taste, translated by Cooper Francis. Kolkata: Seagull
Publications, 2017.
Ambedkar, B.R. ‘Krishna and his Gita: Philosophical Justification of
Counterrevolution.’ In Writings and Speeches, vol. 3, edited by Vasant Moon,
357–380. Bombay: education Department, Government of Maharashtra,
1987.
Antonin Artaud. ‘to put an end to the judgement of God.’ In Selected Works,
edited by Susan Sontag. Farrar, new York: Straus and Giroux.
Artaud, Antonin. Theatre and its Double, translated by Mary Caroline Richards.
new York: Grove Press, 1994.
Blanchot, Maurice. ‘Artaud’. In Antonin Artaud: A Critical Reader, edited by
edward Scheer. London and new York: Routledge, 2004.
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castel, Robert. From Manual Workers to Wage Laborers: Transformation of the
Social Question, translated and edited by Richard Boyd. new Brunswick and
london: transaction Publishers, 2003.
choudhury, soumyabrata. Theater Number Event: Three Studies on the
Relationship between Sovereignity, Power and Truth. shimla: IIAs
Publication, 2013.
derrida, Jacques. ‘Theater of Cruelty and the Closure of Representation.’ In
Writing and Difference, translated by Alan Bass, 290–316. London and new
York: Routledge, 2002.
Derrida, Jacques and Paule Thévenin. The Secret Art of Antonin Artaud,
translated by Mary Ann Caws. Cambridge: MIt Press, 1998, 1976.
Diderot, Denis. Paradox of Acting, translated by Walter Herries Pollock.
Piccadilly: Chatto & Windus, 1883.
esposito, Roberto. ‘A Politics of Ascesis.’ In Categories of the Impolitical,
translated by Connal Parsley. new York: Fordham university Press, 2015.
Green, Andre. The Tragic Effect: The Oedipus Complex in Tragedy, translated by
Alan Sheridan. Cambridge: Cambridge university Press, 2011.
Grotowski, Jerzy. ‘He wasn’t entirely Himself.’ In Antonin Artaud: A Critical
Reader, edited by edward Scheer. London and new York: Routledge, 2004.
Kafka, Franz. ‘A Hunger Artist.’ In Selected Short Stories: Franz Kafka, translated
by Willa and edwin Muir. new Delhi: Srishti Publishers, 1998.
Marx, Karl. ‘The Labour-Process and the Process of Producing Surplus-Value.’
In Capital, vol. I, translated by Samuel Moore and edward Aveling (with a
Preface by Frederick engels). noida: Maple Press, 2014.
Sen, Amartya. Social Exclusion: Concept, Application, and Security. new Delhi:
Critical Quest, 1999.
Weil, Simone. ‘Affliction.’ In Gravity and Grace, translated by emma Crawford
and Mario von der Ruhr. London and new York: Routledge, 2002.
noctURnAls (A RemInIscence)
Anil Yadav, translated from the Hindi by Chinmaya Lal Thakur
It must have been an ordinary winter morning in nakhlau. I was going
to the ‘reporters-meeting’ at my office that took place every day at
11:00 am. As one approached the glare of the vehicles caught in traffic,
one felt that a fire that one had seen in a dream had broken into
millions of pieces and was lying scattered on the road. The usuallyboring traffic lights at Hazratganj crossing appeared welcoming and
generous, for they saved me from the cold winds. The sunlight felt
soothing. The beggars perched on the veranda of the dilapidated Coffee
House building were dozing off. An urgent frenzy was running through
the kids who cleaned the car-glasses as they wanted a little something
to eat. Their hands moved under the force of some insipid inspiration
drawn from pity. In such a state, one inevitably looks up at the towerclock of the general post office which hasn’t worked for a while and at
the eagles that keep flying in circles above it. With them, I must have,
at that moment, been lost in seeing time swim comfortably in the river
of sunlight. Suddenly, at very close quarters, I felt the powerful odour
that rises from the bodies of madmen who live on the road. Someone
knelt close to my ear and said, ‘Sir, please, will you give me two rupees
for a smoke!’
‘Hunh ... What?’
Disinterestedly, I looked away from the pleasures of the winter
morning. That man, wrapped in a filthy and torn blanket, leaned gently
while standing. He held a beedi within the tender grasp of his fingers.
His eyes, burdened with insufficient sleep, had a watery glint that
made it appear as if he had known me for ages. There was a prominent
smile between his thick, ash-coloured beard and moustache, further
accentuated by his broken incisor. His incredibly lush hair diverted my
attention; despite my best attempts, my own hairline kept receding and
here was this man who had such cascading hair that it made up a crown
for him!
I could not stop smiling and kept looking at him. He was happier
and more attentive than I was, for it seemed as if he had crossed paths
with an old acquaintance after a long, long time. Suddenly, the trafficlights turned red and the noise of the engines reached a crescendo.
I blurted, ‘Come and sit at the back.’
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without hesitation, he sat pillion as if we had indeed decided that
we would meet today. Unexpectedly, at that moment, I became worried
about the wallet in my back-pocket for I could not feel it despite several
attempts. Finally, despite the shame that he would realise what I was
doing, I ascertained that my wallet was intact.
I made him sit on a chair at the reception. Before I went to the meeting,
I asked the peon to get him some tea and a bundle of beedis. The peon,
in order to garner support for his mocking surprise, looked towards the
office. The office looked at me and said, ‘You got him for an interview?’
‘I know him, thought he could have tea here.’
By the time I returned, he had gulped down two cups of tea and
run through 10–12 beedis. The latter had been put down on the centretable, though, and not in the ash-tray. They had been lined-up on the
table’s boundary so that they could be lit up again. He picked up the
cup, gave it a gentle shake and said, ‘The tea was beautiful.’
‘The winters must be agonising?’
He guffawed and said, ‘The summers will always be hot and the
winters will always be cold.’
The peon complained, ‘Sir, there is such a terrible smell here. Lice
have spread through the entire office because of him and none but you
all will suffer as a result.’
He would push his long fingers through his hair from the back of
his head and give it a scrub as if he was searching for something. Then,
whatever was found would be thrown on the floor. Dirt and grease
spots marked his fingers. The yellowed nails had begun to wilt under
their own weight and turned inward.
I asked, ‘Do you have lice in your head?’
Looking across, he laughed silently for a while. As if what I had
said made no sense at all. He then went on to explain, even as he kept
searching the roots of his thick hair,
I was a small kid when I was going to my grandma’s place. My
mother was with me. In a train. I looked out of the window every
once in a while. My mother tried to dissuade me but I did not bother
to listen to her. Some charcoal fell into my eyes. I cried, shrieked, and
howled, but it could not be taken out. Medical treatment also did not
help. now, that coal has entered my brain and has become larger.... It
keeps breaking into pieces and comes out intermittently.
‘So, there is a colliery within?’
‘Who knows what is inside!’
Since that day, I kept searching for men like him among the mad
people, the beggars and the addicts, so that I could hear more of such
incredible stories. Often, in the mornings, I would find him and take
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303
him to the office so that he could get some tea. In his presence, the
office became an anxious space, a space that couldn’t carry the weight
of his presence. The peon would deliberately cause a delay in providing
his tea. The unit-manager would desperately want him to leave and
keep asking, with fake laughter, ‘Have the sages themselves come down
from the Himalayas?’. My colleagues would say,
Such people should be given 10–20 rupees outside the office itself so
that they don’t come in. The newspaper office is getting corporatised
and even we are being expected to get rid of our burly moustaches and
report to work every day in sharp ties. Someday, this mad fellow will
make you lose your job and then you will understand.
Apparently unaware of all of this, he would sit cuddled under the
blanket, sip tea and say, ‘Sir, it is a cold day. Let us bask in the sun.’
I would feel a great respite as I took him to the terrace. The terrace
was occupied by newspapers, rusty typewriters, coolers, tyres and
unidentifiable glut that had rotted due to exposure to rainwater. These
articles competed among themselves to outlive each other and continue
flourishing on the terrace. A peepal tree had broken its way through the
wall so that it could inspire the competitors. It seemed as if it said to
them, ‘My children! Stay on! For, one day, life will burst from within
each of you.’ One fine day, while watching paper-kites swishing in the
sky, after having had a plate of khasta-kachoris from Rattilal’s shop, he
said, ‘Sir, hand me some paper. I want to write something.’
‘Will you need a computer or will it be handwritten?’
‘I will be comfortable if I write with my own hands.’
I felt a great sense of urgent inevitability running through me—
as if the purpose behind our meeting was going to be fulfilled soon.
Indeed, something so great and truthful and yet so simple was going
to emerge, it would be that even the best of writers was incapable of
producing such. They would commit suicide in the disappointment
that they were not able to say what this man was surely going to present
to the world soon. I took him to my corner desk at the office. I unlocked
the windows and offered him my seat. I left him with two pens, two
bundles of beedis, a thick sheath of paper attached to a clipboard and a
glass of water.
At that moment, I was anxious and restless like a child who buries
a coin into the earth and wishes to harvest a treasure. I knew, though,
that everything could be spoilt if he came to know that I was waiting for
him to produce the masterpiece. So, I did not disturb him.
He was gone by the time I returned in the evening. Multiple sheets
of paper lay scattered on the table. The floor, too, was littered with bits
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of crumpled paper. He had also left his smell at the corner, the powerful
smell that reminded me of smoke, filth and fear. I went through the
papers. not even a scribble was to be found on them. They were as blank
as they were when I had left them with him. I did not find anything even
when I unfolded all the crumpled balls of paper that lay on the floor.
A few lines had been scratched on some, though. And from those, one
could tell that his grip on the pen wasn’t at all stable. His hands would
have shaken horribly or the pen itself would have run away, afraid of
colliding with some mountain-like rough and uneven mass.
The bureau-chief Shivshankar Goswami was trying his best to
suppress his giggle. Amused at my anxiousness, he said, ‘Do you know
who he is?’
‘no, not at all.’
‘He is Mr Ajay Kumar from Allahabad. He used to work at the desk
for the Northern India Patrika (nIP). I also used to work at Allahabad
then, for Amrit Prabhat, nIP’s Hindi edition. I could recognise him
somehow, with great difficulty.’
‘How did he come to such a state?’
‘Got into bad business with girls! We had heard that he was beaten
black and blue by the girl’s relatives. Lost his mind as a result. He has
a big house in tagore town but boys from the university have taken it
over.’
‘Did you speak with him?!’
‘How can you talk to someone who has lost his senses?’
The next day, I found the stairs leading to the office smelling of the
extra dose of phenyl with which they had been wiped. The manager
himself had ensured that the entire office be given a ‘hygienic’ scrub.
The two chairs and the centre-table that adorned the reception had
disappeared. Only the sofa remained. The peon had been instructed
that he should not leave his work to make tea for one-two random
persons who might enter the office. I kept looking for him on the streets
only to be disappointed. He himself found the right place to meet me
though and began coming to the Pioneer Square every day.
The Pioneer Square is not a Square, actually. It used to house the
offices of The Pioneer in the past. It faces the busiest road of nakhlau,
that is, the Ashoka Road that traverses the Charbagh Railway Station,
Vidhan Sabha and nishatganj. every night, the 100-metre footpath
along the road transforms into the largest depot for newspapers
published in the city. At 2:00 am, trucks drop bundles of newspapers
there which are attended to by agents and sleepy newspaper hawkers
who ride bicycles with large carriers attached. The air at the Square is
burdened and lightened at the same time—with the smell of printing
ink and with the surprise that marks those who take a quick glance at the
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fresh headlines printed in the newspapers, respectively. An atmosphere
of rejoicing and gaiety prevails there, generated by the scrambling in
which the hawkers indulge and by the choicest abuses that they hurl at
each other. By 5 am, pushing down on the pedals with the greatest force
they possess, the hawkers leave the square like darting arrows. The
Square attracts all kinds of nocturnals. two-three tea-stalls, a dhaba
and a couple of khokhas selling betel-nut and cigarettes cater to them
till their own lightbulbs grow tired, dim and ultimately, fade out.
The boundary of The Pioneer’s office is marked by a dried-out drain.
The concrete at the drain’s bank has caused an old sharifa tree to become
diseased and grow only to dwarf size. As if to console the tree, a gul chandni
shrub has grown to lean on it and it blooms every night. Just below the gul
chandni is a neglected stone that symbolises some god or deity. A stone
plinth bounds the sharifa tree and it must have served as a shanty-like tea
stall at one point of time. Behind the tree and the shrub are numerous
mango and ashoka trees, with leaves the colour of dirt and ash. These trees
hardly allow any light to pass through them and reach till the plinth. The
little light that gets to the plinth is the same as the light that is left in the
elephant’s life. This must be the reason why he searched for the moon
from within the space between the leaves as he sat there at the plinth alone,
gulping rum. It is only later that others also began to gather there.
One night, to get rid of his loneliness, he drained his alcohol on the
small stone and decorated it with four chandni flowers that he picked
up from the ground. The mound thus became a shrine to Shiva and
he called the place Madireshwar Mahadev, meaning where wine and
drinks are offered to the greatest of the Gods, Shiva. The city already
had temples dedicated to Koneshwar, Lodheshwar, Bhanvareshwar and
Gardeneshwar Mahadev. So, this name came to act as the parody of the
parody of the tradition of giving context-specific names to shrines.
The elephant hardly had any eyebrows. He had heavy-set, wrinkleridden cheeks that housed small eyes with a narrow gaze. Hence, hidden
among the trees, he seemed an elephant to the world. He was a journalist
of good repute. His reports were most ordinary but were marked with his
desire to say something of his own. As a result, the sequinned stars in his
writing often became visible. But he could not work at one place for too
long a time. He was his own master, a man of his own heart. So, he was
either thrown out of work or he would himself resign from his position,
and thus, cut the very branch on which he was perched.
He was a misfit. At the Press Club, often he would get into fistfights
with others. So, he started to sit here, near the Square. The more scared
he became, the lonelier and more aggressive he turned.
The elephant, armoured with at least a quarter of rum, came to the
Square by 15 minutes to 9 pm or so. Very soon, with the arrival of the
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duo of sudhanshu trivedi and siddhartha kalhans from the university,
a bench picked up from Bhagauti’s dhaba would be set up in front of
the plinth. siddhartha was a journalist who was unemployed ever since
he had returned from delhi. The sheer disappointment and boredom
that he felt at the ordinariness of life made him eager to enliven it by
telling some or other fanciful tale. If he felt that there was something
that could force the listener to pay attention to what he was saying,
he indeed possessed the power to make his narrative sound realistic
and believable. everyone thought that he suffered from some strange
disease that forced him to tell lies but his genius was such that he
could fit a rocket’s engine in a three-wheeled tempo and make it fly.
Sudhanshu, unemployed since he finished his studies, had the talent to
express flippant moral statements on the ‘decline’ of those around him.
He could also mimic others, often with great accuracy.
Alok trivedi from Hussainganj followed Sudhanshu and Siddhartha
to the Square, with his own followers Mamma and Manna. The latter
had been to Japan on a work visa and had proved to be useful in some
factory there. Having learnt from Japanese foremen, Alok would make
a strange whistle-sound with his teeth and tongue: ‘eessh ... eessh’.
He would then order Mamma and Manna to follow suit and what
inevitably followed were glasses, water, cigarettes and everything else.
From Dar-ul-shafa appeared Bhau Raghvendra Dubey and Ravindra
Ojha who, according to popular opinion, constituted the pair of Chacha
Chaudhary and Sabu. Despite having worked in nakhlau for decades
together, Bhau has never rented a house for himself to live in. Often, at
the MLA quarters, he would just pull the curtains in any of the rooms
and sleep on the durrie. Ojha, who hailed from Baliya, had undertaken
an intense study of pulp literature for five years. His mouth was always
full of chewing tobacco and he had again found a job with a newspaper.
Once, when he went to the village, his wife had insisted that she, too,
would like to return to nakhlau with him. When Ojha did not agree,
and she had realised that she would not have her way, she had made
sure that their six-year-old daughter had accompanied her father back.
Because there was no one to take care of her, Ojha began to bring her
along even to press conferences. On one occasion, I ran into the fatherdaughter duo while returning from Chief Minister Mayawati’s press
conference. The anxious, irritated and helpless Ojha shouted and said
to me, ‘Hey Anil, this spoilt girl has bothered the hell out of me! She has
had so much of cashew that her tummy just won’t stop running. What
should I do now?’
By the time the night shift would come to an end at the newspaper
offices, others would also arrive at the Square—Ramesh Pant, Mausiya,
Divya Prakash, Yashwant, Pradeep Mishra, Kunwar ji Anjum, Vinay
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shreekar, Anil Upadhyay, Rajeev deekshit from the department of
Information, (newspaper) agent Haider.... This would bring about a
huge pile of scooters and motorcycles in circles right in front of the
sharifa tree. As more people would arrive, the circles would only become
larger and larger. Seat cushions would be lifted off from rickshaws till
the arrival of their passengers.
Just at this moment, the actor Siddhartha Pakrasi from Sitapur would
come, carrying a tiny suitcase in his hands. His gait was so clumsy and
he would give himself such a shake while walking that it looked as if he
was unable to balance himself while being caught in some storm that
was approaching the Square. Though we never asked, it was believed
that he was an officer at the excise Department. He would present the
suitcase filled with pouches of country liquor to the elephant and say,
‘Dear child, here, take this and drink as much as you like.’ Then, he
would recline on the plinth and make himself adequately comfortable.
Once the pouches had been emptied into the bucket brought
from Bhagauti’s dhaba, all kinds of addhas and pauwas—halves and
quarters—were poured into the mixture. A mug was used as the stirrer
and, with the addition of water, the resultant fluid-like substance would
begin to glisten. With respect and adoration, it was called Halahal, after
the poisonous liquid that Shiva himself had gulped down. Just two pegs
of Halahal of the size of tea-glasses were enough to send any person
into a world that he had never known before. During the conversation
at the Square, if a reference was made to some artist, actor or actress
who worked at the theatre after he had lain down on the table for a
while, Pakrasi Dada would suddenly become alert and get up. His eyes
would narrow as a result of the anger, hurt and pride he felt. At such
moments, he would roar, ‘I was the one who made him what he is, here,
in nakhlau itself. I gave birth to him.’
I had always thought that he reacted in such a manner because he had
to give up on his theatre work for the sake of his family and household.
The truth, apparently, was otherwise. Actually, dark-humour was an
indelible part of his personality and it could not be controlled, no
matter how hard one tried. Between his roar and dialogue, he would
thus be found giving birth, on the footpaths of nakhlau, to all the selfmade abbots and braggart art-gurus of his time. The theatre in nakhlau
used to enjoy great repute in the past. Once, someone was speaking
about the actor Anupam Kher, who had studied at the Bhartendu natya
Akademi in nakhlau. Some students had beaten him up, after which he
had left the city for Mumbai. Having heard this, at once, Pakrasi Dada
got up and said, ‘He was indeed a big one, monkey!’
Past midnight, there would arrive at the Square, hijras who had
been refused payment for their services by the soldiers of the Central
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command at the cantonment. They were beaten up and forced to
flee after the sex and would thus come to the Square tearfully abusing
the soldiers. They said that the government can only give food to
the soldiers but can’t provide for what they could do. ‘Man’ does not
understand this fact actually but acts, for a brief while, as if he gets it.
till the ‘work’ is not done, he perceives the hijra as a desirable woman.
As soon as there is the inevitable ‘release’ following the sex, the hijras,
for him, become the laughable, dirty, middling-substance that he uses
and let’s go. There would also come to the Square young boys who
would sniff petrol stolen from scooters. They told horrible tales of the
great lusts of the greats in the society. There would also come students
enamoured of seeing the sights of the city during the stunned night for
they just could not hide their surprise at the fact that something that
looked so ordinary and accessible during the day could transform into
something so wonderful at night. Rani, the duggi, would come at any
time. She wore anklets that produced a ringing sound with every step
she took. She would bring out a glass from under the bright and loose
lehenga that she wore and request, ‘Dear, make a peg for me as well.’
Women who are in the business of selling their own bodies on the
streets of nakhlau, without letting any discretion or fear impede their
way, are called duggis. The customer has to work hard to gain access to
the costlier prostitutes—ekkis, begums and dahlas—but he himself is
easily spotted by duggis and chakkas. Rani lived with her mother under
the stairs of the Coffee House’s verandah. She would get pregnant every
year. When the bulge in her belly couldn’t be concealed any longer
and became easily noticeable, she would disappear for a while. After a
month or two, the foetus would either itself give way or someone would
take away the newborn from her. She would then return and resume her
trade. The elephant got her a job of selling newspapers in the afternoon
on multiple occasions but she just could not sustain it beyond a brief
period of time. The resultant losses had to be borne by the elephant
himself. Rani was squint-eyed and had chipped two of her incisors. The
latter had created a gaping hole which made it appear as if she was
smiling all the time. every day, two or four young men got enticed by
that smile. She felt a great sense of victory, a great satisfaction whenever
she would catch someone superior to herself in her trap. Perhaps this
is why she never gave up on this business and picked another trade.
Drunk, she would either get lost in herself or begin to complain, ‘Those
two boys sitting at the garbage collection place are not paying me the
money they owe.’
Once she realised that the mood at the gathering was gloomy, Rani
would orchestrate a stratagem whose conclusion would be known
to us already. Around the Square are three places where MLAs can
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stay—dar-ul-shafa, Royal Hotel and ocR. After getting off from trains
at night, most of those who come to stay at these places also come to the
Square for some refreshment, usually, betel nut and cigarettes. Rani,
having already reached the Square, would eye travellers in safari suits
carrying briefcases or those wearing starched, white kurtas and tell
the elephant, ‘Dear, do keep an eye. I am going now.’ She would then
start moving and walking around the target who, typically tired after
having endured a long train-journey, wanted to sleep but couldn’t. The
sound from her anklets would generally form the backdrop in which
the target and she spoke with each other, wordlessly. Her drama began
only when the target started to negotiate the price and bargain. She
would then start shouting as if she were completely helpless, ‘You
scoundrel! Rascal! You with the charred face! Don’t you have a mother
and sisters at home? My brothers, please come and see! He is creating
such trouble for me. Please come.’ Shocked and horrified at this sudden
turn of events, the target would usually run away or be beaten black and
blue by the two-three young boys who kept waiting for opportunities
like this one to arise.
This trick, this plan that Rani employs could easily be called
‘morality’, which our society has been using since times immemorial.
Once unachievable and impossible moral expectations are attached
to someone, the easy-to-acquire skill to trap and hunt him has been
developed to such an extent now that all of us have come to distinguish
between right and wrong according to our own convenience and
choice. Ajay Bhaiya, for instance, did not enjoy drinking and he was
always looking for some dry accompaniment to go with it. He believed
that morality provides sustenance and security. Much like animals
change their colour, mimic the sound of others, act as if they are dead
and produce poison and electricity within themselves to acquire these
two things, the humans too forego their original character and seek to
mingle with the grass, leaves and environment of society by acquiring
behavioural traits that aren’t at all their own. Indeed, morality is
actually an invention of the animals and we have merely adopted it for
ourselves.
The elephant, at first, tried to control this unruly gathering by using
a candle but was unsuccessful. Then, he adopted another ploy. Through
the day, he would read poems, ghazals and nazms published in books
and magazines and then copy the appropriate ones that could be used
at night. Then, with the performers reclining on the plinth, the chosen
verses were recited and discussed under the light of shamaas which
were hung as if a mushaira or some grand function was underway at the
Square. Without showing any regard for the recital to reach its intended
crescendo, Rajeev Deekshit would start singing and playing tabla with
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his hands on the bench. As this singing programme that paid great
heed to the requests of all of its listeners moved ahead, embarrassed
new singers would keep cropping up and join Rajeev. If Rajeev could
not remember a song, he would inevitably find someone who sang one
or two lines. Ajay Bhaiya could sing almost any song that had been
picturised on Dev Anand. The problem, though, with poets and shayars
was that someone’s hero and beloved was another’s stupid fool. There
was a wide gap between what he had written and how he had lived. As
one stared into this hole pulled by the weight of one’s relations and
likes and dislikes, quite often, there was a chance that people could start
hurling abuses at each other or come to blows.
On the other side of the Square, at the deck of Baba’s tea-stall,
‘devotional hymns’ kept playing. By virtue of their sheer power and
intensity, they could keep the nocturnals awake throughout the night.
The elephant had got Baba a tape cassette whose first song was ‘Sarkai
lyo khatiya, jara lage’ (‘Move your cot closer to mine, oh darling!
Come to me, for I feel so cold!’). When the deep-seated fantasies and
lusts of the nocturnals, mixed with the waves of Halahal, escaped the
underground and came to be expressed openly, then each one of them
danced their hearts out. They swayed to the rhythm of Baba’s songs
played at full-volume and yet somehow stayed within a huge circle of
benches that covered the entire road. They stopped only once they were
bathed in sweat. If the dancing wasn’t satisfying enough, they played a
football-like game with empty beer cans or bottles of Coke.
On one of many such bacchanal nights, the elephant winked while
pointing towards Ajay Bhaiya and said, ‘Let’s test him tonight’.
Whenever the Square got a visitor who wasn’t really the type who
could frequent the place, he was, at the very outset, subjected to a
madness test. But our kind consideration had caused considerable
delay in Ajay Bhaiya’s case. A motorcycle race in which the ‘subject’
would be sitting pillion, held at the empty Ring Road outside the city,
was the chosen method for the madness test. If the man was happy
at a speed greater than ninety kilometres an hour, then he would be
accepted as mad. Otherwise, declared a fake, a poser, he would be
taken by the scruff of his neck and forced out of the scene. There was a
great disagreement though over this method of testing madness. I felt
that when a man is subjected to great risk and danger, we can surely
estimate his bravado but cannot say anything about his madness.
Most people, on account of some fear or the other, fall prey to mental
imbalance. As no one gave two hoots about my argument that there
is no point in subjecting an already scared man to greater fear and
risk, it became clear that the thrill for speed held sway over logic at
the Square.
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311
one night, on the race, I took Ajay Bhaiya to chinhat, an area
twenty kilometres away. once we reached the place, with great concern
and pity, he said to me, ‘You controlled the motorcycle so well. kindly
accept my gratitude.’
He had passed the test and was accepted by the nocturnals at the
square.
we had adopted an absolutely despicable and cheap method to test
him. This became known when he went with me to get alcohol for the
first time. The weight in our pockets usually determined our access to
liquor once the shops had closed. If we had money, we went to Lakdi
Mohal or Subhash Mohal at the Cantonment. There, some retired
soldiers had collected a stock of rum by controlling the quota meant
for some serving soldiers. They would sell from this stock to make
a profit for themselves. Sometimes, we would also meet some largehearted fellow who would serve us a couple of pegs without charging
a single penny, in exchange for some quality conversation and talk.
When money was scarce, we would knock on the doors of stores that
sold country-liquor. If there was an even greater scarcity, we would go
to the by-lanes of Old nakhlau where raw alcohol, brewed illegally on
the sandy banks of the Ganga at unnao, would be sold in empty bottles
of english liquor.
It wasn’t money that made liquor available at country-shops, it was
actually something else. Within their dark windows used to be a small
skylight which when knocked upon continuously for about ten minutes
would evoke a sleepy but wry and heavy response from the inside,
‘Bloody hell! How much do you want that you have been rustling your
bangles so hard?’
‘Five, white.’
‘Get the change out.’
Having taken the money, he would throw the pouches out and say,
‘You mother’s dick! Bloody drunkards! Don’t even let me sleep and just
come whenever they like.’
Once this happened, the window would never open again, no matter
how hard one tried knocking or doing anything else.
On one occasion when it was raining, the entire house went to drag
the foul-mouth out of his tiny hole. With the help of a jack-and-wrench
borrowed from the workers who were laying underground wiring-lines
by cutting across the road, the shutter was broken down. tired from
the effort and breathing heavily, by the time we reached inside, he had
not only escaped through some unknown route but also carried away
the quota that was meant to be cleared during the night. Around filthy
and dilapidated benches, we saw that there lay empty pouches, bottles,
rotting leftover food, sputum and a rush of frothing urine. The picture
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these presented to the eyes was truly horrifying. we all stared at each
other with blank gazes for a while and then returned.
one night, Ajay Bhaiya and I were returning successfully from our
expedition. we had asked fellow nocturnals for the way to a derelict
country liquor stall situated behind the muddy pothole that lay beside
the trucks lined up near charbagh Railway station. It must have been
around 2:30 or 3:00 am. A group of excited teens and kids was passing
through from the other side of the road, beside the Udayganj drain.
The boys held sticks and batons in their swaying arms. to our surprise,
we noticed that some of them were holding a man with their arms and
legs. He was clinging on, somehow and he didn’t have a single piece of
clothing on himself. He spotted us and broke the silence that the night
had cast by pleading loudly, ‘Oh my lords! Please save me! They are
going to kill me!’
The voice was recognisable. I stopped. He ran a dhaba in front of
the Charbagh Station. His face was swollen, an eye was battered and
closed and he was bleeding from his mouth. One could easily observe
the beating-marks that had appeared on his back and thighs. The boys
had thrashed him thoroughly. He tried to fold his hands that seemed to
hang loosely in the air and said, ‘Save me, brother! I will close my hotel
and leave for my village.’
even before we could ask anything, the boys dragged out a nineyear-old from within their group and presented him to us. They said,
‘Look at what the scoundrel has done! The boy’s cheek has been bitten
so hard that it bleeds! This man abuses those who work at the hotel. We
will kill him tonight and throw the body into the drain!’
The boy, wearing a tattered vest, hid his cheek with his palm and
stared at all of us. He was clearly bewildered. I tried to persuade them,
‘If he dies, all of you will go to jail. Let us all go and let the police take
care of him.’
The leader laughed and said, ‘That would be even better as we would
become the mafia once we are in jail. Then this bastard will pay taxes
to us.’
‘take him back. I will send the police after you.’
‘He feeds them for free, brother. I swear the police will do nothing.’
After much pleading, coaxing and cajoling, the boys relented on
the condition that they would kill him if he did not close the hotel
immediately and leave for his village on that very day. As soon as they
placed him on the ground, he, in his stark-naked state, ran up to the
drain’s slope.
On the way back, Ajay Bhaiya said, ‘This happens because all of you
have eroticised everything, filled everything with sex. So, everything
has a gender—the sun, the earth, water, air, pillar and the door. “Man”
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is only exploiting the sex that is hidden in everything.’ one day, a
reporter at the office informed me, ‘That mad fellow who used to come
here earlier has met with an accident. He is seriously injured and is
lying at the crossing. The police crime-bulletin telecast last night also
mentioned the incident and there his full name was reported as ‘Ajay
Kumar Srivastava’.
I rushed to the spot along with a friend. He was lying on the road
at Akbari Gate, among the beggars who were attempting to fight the
winter by sitting around a small bonfire. Some heavy vehicle must have
hit him for he had broken his head. Skin from his foot had also grated
off. He had lost two-three teeth and could not lift one of his hands.
While anti-tetanus injections were being administered to him at a
nearby clinic, a thought crossed my mind. I wondered how this man
could traverse two worlds—one, within society and the other, outside
it—with so much ease? I reasoned that, perhaps, the desire to return to
a place still persisted in him.
He was admitted to the general ward of the Civil Hospital after
his arm had been plastered and feet strung together. Compared with
the other patients there, he was taken care of more earnestly, for the
reporters who looked after the medical beat often arranged food,
medicines, blanket and check-ups for him in consultation with the
doctors. He received greater attention also because he spoke with the
doctors in english.
I wanted his wounds to heal only gradually so that he could survive
the remainder of the winter with the regular food and heater’s warmth
provided by the hospital. But he was recovering with disappointing
alacrity. About ten days had passed since he had been admitted. Saved
from the exposure to ash, dust and filth, the lines on his face had begun
to be visible. His palms, as yellow as ripe maize from the sustained
exposure to small flaming fires, had started to pale in colour. With his
clean kurta-pyjama and with some glow restored in his eyes, he had
now come to resemble the other patients in the ward. And, just at that
time, he gave us the slip at night. Intensive and detailed searches yielded
no result. everyone at the Pioneer Square, including Rani, was asked to
keep an eye out for him but he wasn’t found anywhere.
Meanwhile, a man named Sateesh Ranjan began to call and ask about
him. He wanted to meet him. I wondered why. Ranjan responded, ‘Ajay
was my classmate.’
Ranjan was an industrialist, the brother of the Home Secretary
Rajeev Ranjan Shah. Some journalist or policeman had told him that
Ajay Kumar was in touch with me. He came in a big car along with
his son. The search for the absconder then became organised and
systematic. There was no news on the first night. On the second night,
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he was found clad in the red hospital blanket, enjoying the warmth
from a small bonfire on Cantonment Road. The plaster on his arm had
turned the colour of his skin.
‘How are you, Ajay?’, shouted Sateesh Ranjan but his voice got
crushed under the weight of his own emotions.
‘… My son! … He is your uncle! Come on, greet him. Say “Namaste”.’
The boy, alarmed by the appearance of this man, tried to hide
behind the driver. He put his hands into the pockets of his shorts and
said, ‘Naste’.
If one looked at Ajay Bhaiya’s face, one felt that he was used to
meeting his friend Sateesh Ranjan almost every day. It was as if, while
crossing the road, they had met again and had decided to enjoy the
warmth of the bonfire. Meanwhile, Sateesh Ranjan reined his emotions,
thanked me and left along with him in his car.
He was kept in the guest room of a bungalow in Aliganj. Before
he began to enjoy the soft, white bed, the spotless, white pillows and
curtains and the warmth from the sharply coloured quilt, a servant
ruled over his nails. A barber was called to shave his beard and thick
hair. to rid him of germs, a couple of servants bathed him thrice in
warm water mixed with a skin cleanser. A doctor came and gave him
a thorough check-up. everything, he reported, was normal but Sateesh
Ranjan felt that compared with the situation in Allahabad when Ajay
and he were friends, everything was now anything but normal.
It is supposed that the great cleansing and scrubbing that he went
through after so many years would have had a powerful impact on him.
He must have shrunk a little for some energy would have escaped from
his body pores that would have been unlocked after a long time. The
mouth of the colliery within his head, usually hidden under the thick
mass of his hair, would have been opened. The entry of fresh air, light
and other waves and currents into his body would have allowed him
to resume contact with the entire universe. nonetheless, the result was
that he dozed off even before he could have dinner and continued to
sleep for four days. The doctor continued to report that everything was
normal and alright.
After he woke up, he made someone call me and got it conveyed that
he was doing absolutely fine and that I should visit him at the earliest.
I was thoroughly engaged at the Pioneer, though, and couldn’t go.
Presently, the season altered, and one began to feel the warmth of the
summer wind behind one’s ears. One fine day in the month of March,
I was on my way to the office. Sunlight was skimming the waters of the
Gomti river. The seriousness that marks the winters had disappeared
and the westerly gave an abrupt shake to everything that it encountered
in its way. From a distance, I could see a man looking for something on
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315
the banks of the river. The grass and the weed reached up to his knees.
Dogs were barking at him. The outline seemed vaguely familiar. It is
him, I realised suddenly. After parking my bike at the bank, I waded
into the grass. It was him, engrossed with something.
He smiled at my sudden appearance. Then he laughed as he put his
hand on my shoulder and said, ‘You, my friend …’.
I asked, ‘You ran away from the bungalow too! Why?’
He stared into my eyes and vigorously moved his hands up and down
as if to indicate that I should never even broach that subject. ‘Why …’
‘What happened?’
He turned his palm towards the grass and it glistened in the sunlight
being reflected from the river water. He exclaimed, ‘Hunh! … This
pleasure, the pleasure here cannot be found anywhere else, my friend.’
At that moment, the fresh green grass on the bank was laughing
like madmen do. It was to disappear in a few days though, bound to be
burnt down by the summer heat, and be extinguished.
ABoUt tHe edItoR And contRIBUtoRs
Editor
Brinda Bose teaches at the centre for english studies at Jawaharlal
nehru University, new delhi. Her research interests are in modernisms,
gender/sexuality studies, feminist and queer theory, cinema and
humanities studies. she co-founded/co-steered MargHumanities, a
platform for conversations on the arts and literature, in and outside the
university (2011–2016). Her book, The Audacity of Pleasure: Sexualities,
Literature and Cinema in India, was published in 2017. She is the editor
of Translating Desire (2002) and Gender and Censorship (2006) and the
co-editor of Interventions: Feminist Dialogues on Third World Women’s
Literature and Film (1998) and The Phobic and The Erotic: The Politics
of Sexualities in Contemporary India (2003). She has done critical
editions of Woolf ’s Mrs Dalloway, Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and
Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass, and a critical anthology on the
early novels of Amitav Ghosh. Her chapbook, Calcutta, Crow and
Other Fragments, was published in 2020. She is currently working on
the politics and erotics of avant-garde modernisms, and editing an
anthology on the avant-garde in India.
Contributors
Al-Khoder Al-Khalifa is a Syrian researcher and currently a doctoral
scholar at the Centre for english Studies at Jawaharlal nehru
university, new Delhi. In 2016 he completed his Masters in english
from the university of Delhi on a scholarship from the Indian Council
for Cultural Relations (ICCR). After completing his BA degree in
english in Syria, Khalifa worked there as a teaching Assistant at the
Department of english, Furat university, from 2010 to 2014, where his
research interests included modern American literature, Arab writers
in the diaspora, Arab modernism and translation. Currently, his focus
is on un/translated contemporary literature from the Arab Mashriq,
war literature, avant-gardism, political aesthetics, death and bare life.
In his current PhD work, Khalifa is studying the political aesthetics of
death and bare life in the context of the Arab Mashriq by engaging with
contemporary texts emerging from the long-disturbed areas of Iraq,
Syria, Lebanon and Palestine.
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About the Editor and Contributors
Anil Yadav is a senior journalist with the online Hindi edition of
BBc. He is the author of Woh Bhi Koi Des Hai, Maharaj! (translated
into english by Anurag Basnet as Is That Even a Country, Sir!, 2012),
Nagarvadhuwen Akhbar Nahi Padhti (city Brides don’t Read the
Papers) and a collection of essays Sonam Gupta Bewafa Nahi Hai
(sonam gupta Is not Unfaithful). He lives in lucknow and new delhi,
India.
Aveek Sen is a writer, teacher and collaborator in the arts. He was
associate editor (editorial pages) at The Telegraph and lecturer in
english at St Hilda’s College, Oxford. He read english literature at
Jadavpur university, Calcutta and university College, Oxford, where
he took a First as a Rhodes Scholar. He won the 2009 Infinity Award
for writing on photography given by the International Center for
Photography, new York. He has collaborated as a writer with Dayanita
Singh, Roni Horn, On Kawara, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Moyra
Davey, Bharti Kher and Subodh Gupta.
Charles Russell is Professor emeritus of english and American Studies
at Rutgers university, where he was Director of American Studies
and Associate Director of the Institute on ethnicity, Culture, and the
Modern experience. He also served as the Rutgers, newark Associate
Provost for Academic Affairs. He received his PhD in Comparative
Literature from Cornell university. Among the eight books he has
published are Groundwaters: A Century of Art by Self-Taught and
Outsider Artists (2011); Self-Taught Art: The Culture and Aesthetics of
American Vernacular Art (2001); Poets, Prophets, and Revolutionaries:
The Literary Avant-Garde from Rimbaud through Postmodernism
(1985); The Avant-Garde Today: An International Anthology (1981) and,
co-edited with Professor Carol Crown, Sacred and Profane: Personal
Voice and Vision in Southern Self-Taught Art (2007). He is currently at
work on a book-length manuscript on the visual aesthetic.
Chinmaya Lal Thakur is a doctoral researcher in the Department of
Creative Arts and english at La trobe university, Melbourne. His work
concerns the limits of subjectivity as inscribed in the novels of David
Malouf. Postcolonial studies, Continental philosophy, novel-theory
and modernist literatures constitute his research interests.
He holds an MPhil from the Centre of english Studies, Jawaharlal
nehru university for the dissertation, ‘The novel and epistemological
Critique: Reading Franz Kafka’. His essays and critical reviews have
been published in several edited volumes and journals including Journal
of Postcolonial Writing, The Charles River Journal, South Asia Research,
About the Editor and Contributors
319
and Contemporary South Asia. In 2018, he edited the anthology Literary
Criticism: An Introductory Reader for worldview Publications.
Eyal Amiran is Professor of comparative literature at Uc Irvine and
editor of the journal Postmodern Culture (Johns Hopkins). He has
published Wandering and Home: Beckett’s Metaphysical Narrative (Penn
state) and Modernism and the Materiality of Texts (cambridge) and
co-edited the collection Essays in Postmodern Culture (oxford). His
essays on the relation between contemporary literature and electronic
culture have appeared in Cultural Critique (on ‘pornocracy’ in popular
media), Discourse (on utopian digital architecture), TDR (on stelarc),
Ex-position (on ‘the open’ in the age of Big data), parallax (on digital
ontology and the echosphere) and elsewhere. He is working on a book
on psychological ideas of politics in modern comics.
Geeta Patel is a Professor at the University of Virginia, charlottesville,
with three degrees in science and a doctorate from columbia University,
new York, in inter-disciplinary south Asian studies (in sanskrit and
Urdu). she has published widely in both academic and popular venues
and translated lyric and prose from sanskrit, Urdu, Hindi and Braj. Her
first monograph, Lyrical Movements, Historical Hauntings: On Gender,
Colonialism and Desire in Miraji’s Urdu Poetry, writes the history of
Indian literary modernism through its harbinger Miraji. Her second
book, Risky Bodies & Techno-Intimacy: Reflections on Sexuality, Media,
Science, Finance, uses techno-intimacy as the locus for interrogating
capital, science, media and desire. She is completing several other
projects: a manuscript on the Muslim woman writer Ismat Chughtai;
a manuscript on fantasies embedded in advertising titles Billboard
Fantasies; a series of small books on the poetics of historical pensions,
insurance, credit and debt. Her current research is on the ways in which
the history of bacteriology and our relationship to our own bacterial
life gives rise to our everyday violence. She and Meghan Hartman
are also compiling a monograph of their new translations of Miraji’s
poetry. And she has recently started composing her own lyrics under
the lockdown in India.
Heidi Grunebaum is a writer, scholar and poet. She is director of the
Centre for Humanities Research at the university of the Western Cape
where she convened a research platform on Aesthetics and Politics.
Grunebaum’s work focuses on aesthetic and social responses to war
and mass violence, the politics of memory in South Africa, Palestine/
Israel and Germany. She is author of Memorializing the Past: Everyday
Life in South Africa after the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (2011),
320
About the Editor and Contributors
co-editor of Uncontained: Opening the Community Arts Project Archive
(2012), Athlone in Mind (2017) and the poetry chapbook Book of the
Missing (2019). with mark J. kaplan, she made the documentary
film, The Village Under the Forest (2013). She is currently working on
a collection of essays on nonpartitioned aesthetics and a film on the
politics of race, racism and Jewish memory in contemporary Germany.
Laura Piippo completed her doctoral thesis on the poetics and affects
of a prominent Finnish experimental novel Neuromaani (2012) by
Jaakko Yli-Juonikas, at the university of Jyväskylä, Finland. This study
and her other projects focus mainly on experimental and avant-garde
literature, the concept of assemblage and theories of transtextuality
on different literary platforms, both analogue and digital. Her peerreviewed articles, edited volumes and special issues on these topics have
been published (or are forthcoming) both in english and in Finnish.
Currently, Piippo works as a university Lecturer at the Department
of Music, Art and Culture Studies in the university of Jyväskylä,
where she has been teaching literature and literary theory since 2012.
Previously she has also worked as a researcher in the consortium The
Literary in Life: Exploring the Boundaries between Literature and the
Everyday (Academy of Finland, 2015–2019) and as a visiting early
career researcher at the university of Amsterdam in 2016.
Michael Levenson is William B. Christian Professor of english at
the university of Virginia and author of A Genealogy of Modernism
(Cambridge university Press, 1984), Modernism and the Fate of
Individuality (Cambridge university Press, 1990), The Spectacle of
Intimacy (Princeton university Press, co-author Karen Chase, 2000),
Modernism from Yale university Press (2011) and editor of the
Cambridge Companion to Modernism (2000, 2nd edition 2011). His
more recent book is The Humanities and Everyday Life (Oxford, 2018).
He has published essays in such journals as ELH, Novel, Modernism/
Modernity, The New Republic, Wilson Quarterly, Raritan; among his
public lectures are those at Harvard, Yale, university of Chicago,
Johns Hopkins, Berkeley, Delhi university and Oxford university. At
the university of Virginia, Professor Levenson has been chair of the
english Department and is the founding director of the Institute of
the Humanities and Global Cultures, where he built partnerships with
institutes in nanjing, Shanghai, Delhi, Oxford and London.
Moinak Biswas is Professor of Film Studies at Jadavpur university,
Kolkata. He is also a Coordinator at the Media Lab, a centre for experiments
in digital forms, at Jadavpur. His books include Apu and After: Revisiting
About the Editor and Contributors
321
Ray’s Cinema (2005) and Ujan gang baiya (1990). He edits the Journal
of the Moving Image, and was one of the founding editors of BioScope,
South Asian Screen Studies. Apart from having written and codirected the award-winning Bengali film Sthaniya Sambaad (2010),
he created the installation Across the Burning Track, which was
commissioned for the 11th Shanghai Biennale in 2016.
Rahul Sen taught courses on critical writing, feminism, queer theory
and literature at Ashoka university for four years. He has joined the
english Department at tufts university, Boston, from Fall 2020 as a
graduate student for doctoral research. His areas of interest revolve
around literary theory, sexuality studies, and cinema. Rahul mostly
revels in the kitsch and the camp; his secret fantasy is being Clarissa
Dalloway, who throws successful evening parties for his friends. not
only will he buy the flowers himself, but also cook—which is the other
art that he has begun to master.
Rajarshi Dasgupta teaches at the Centre for Political Studies, Jawaharlal
nehru university, new Delhi. Formerly a Fellow at the Centre for
Studies in Social Sciences Calcutta, he did his BA from Presidency
university, Kolkata, MA and MPhil from Jawaharlal nehru university
and his DPhil from Oxford university. Dasgupta mainly teaches
courses on Marxism, biopolitics and political theory. His research and
publications address the history of Indian radicalism, the relations
of culture and politics and the distinctive features of urbanisation in
South Asia. Some of his publications include ‘ethics and Politics’ in
P.K. Datta and S. Palshikar eds, Indian Political Thought, ‘Rhyming
Revolution: Marxism and Culture in Colonial Bengal’ in Studies in
History and ‘The Ascetic Modality: A Critique of Communist Selffashioning’ in Menon, nigam and Palshikar eds, Critical Studies in
Politics. His latest publications are ‘Frontier urbanism: urbanisation
beyond Cities in South Asia’ in Economic & Political Weekly, ‘The
Consolidation of BJP: Analysing Lok Sabha elections 2019’ in Socialist
Perspective and ‘Capital in Bangla: Postcolonial translation of Marx’ in
Chakrabarty et al. eds, Capital in the East: Reflections on Marx.
Sophie Seita is an artist and academic working with text, sound and
translation on the page, in performance and in other media. She
is the author, most recently, of My Little Enlightenment (Pamenar,
2020) and Provisional Avant-Gardes: Little Magazines from Dada to
Digital (Stanford university Press, 2019); the translator of uljana
Wolf ’s Subsisters: Selected Poems (Belladonna, 2017), and the editor
of The Blind Man (ugly Duckling Presse, 2017), named one of the Best
322
About the Editor and Contributors
Art Books of 2017 by The New York Times. she works internationally
on various projects and has performed at la mama galleria, Bold
tendencies, the Royal Academy, the Arnolfini, Kunsthalle Darmstadt,
Jawaharlal nehru university (new Delhi), Raven Row, Parasol unit,
the Drawing School, Art night London, and elsewhere. In 2019, she had
a solo exhibition of text, videos, and performance props at [ SPACe ]
Gallery London. Following her Junior Research Fellowship at Queens’
College Cambridge, she is currently an Assistant Professor at Boston
university and co-organises the Sound/text seminar at Harvard. She is
working on a number of projects: a book of lyric essays called Lessons
of Decal; an academic trade book titled Literary Live Art, and a practicebased and speculative collaboration with musician naomi Woo in the
form of The Minutes of the Hildegard von Bingen Society for Gardening
Companions.
Soumyabrata Choudhury currently teaches at the School of Arts and
Aesthetics, Jawaharlal nehru university, new Delhi. He has previously
taught at CSSSC, Kolkata, and has been a fellow at the Centre for
Studies in Developing Societies (CSDS), Delhi, and the Indian Institute
of Advanced Studies (IIAS), Shimla. His book Theatre, Number, Event:
Three Studies on the Relationship of Sovereignty, Power and Truth was
published by IIAS, Shimla in 2013. His new book Ambedkar and Other
Immortals: An Untouchable Research Programme came out in 2018.
Taylor Black is Assistant Professor of english at Duke university.
He has published on twentieth-century American literature, popular
music, gender and sexuality studies, queer theory, ontology and theories
of becoming and, above all, the subject and practices of style in Women’s
Studies Quarterly, American Quarterly, Discourse and the Journal of
Popular Music Studies. Black is the co-editor of the Spring 2016 issue of
WSQ, ‘Survival’, with Frances Bartkowski and elena Glasberg.
IndeX
A
abstract art, 51 (expressionism); see
also minimalism, Plato, 53–54,
57, 72, 102, 157, 180
actor, 283, 294, 307 (figure of); see
also sartre, Jean Paul
Adonis, 250, 266–274, 276, 279n9,
279n10; see also death/mortality
Adorno, theodor w., 266, 280
Aesthete, 76 (as self-identity); see
also allegory, Genet, Jean, 130
(aesthetics)
Affect, 117, 118 (affective register),
122 (relation), 152 (feminist),
206, 220, 243n17, 245, 248, 256,
272, 278, 320; see also Jameson,
Fredric, sedgwick, eve kosofsky
Agamben, giorgio, 4–6, 35n2, 35n3,
36n4
Taste, 296n6
The Adventure, 5
Ahmed, sara, 156, 158n3, 241n1, 255
AIds, 22–25 (epidemic), 175, 250
Alighieri, dante, 1–3, 7, 10, 33
Aljafari, kamal, 180–184, 186–190
Allegory, 77, 233
Almadhoun, ghayath, 173–176
Alvarez, Al, 25 (study of suicide); see
also suicide, AIds, and wilde,
oscar
Amiran, eyal, 176n1
Anomaly, 67 (shift of history), 200
Antiquity, 58
Apter, emily s., 237, 244
Arabic, 266, 267 (poetry), 269;
272 (intellectualism), 273–276
(poetic aesthetics), 278n2,
279n6, 280n12
Archive, 157, 172, 180, 233 (of
colonialism), 278, 293
Arendt, Hannah, 190
Aristotle, 46–47, 49, 171
Artaud, Antonin, 282–288, 291–295,
296n1, 296n4, 297n9, 297n11
Artifice, 42, 46, 48 (one who
invokes), 75, 21, 5; see also
winterson, Jeanette
Artist, 42 (figure of), 43 (chinese),
44–47 (role of), 53–57 (frame),
58–60, 61n3, 85 (as provocateur),
97, 98 (as outsider); see also
liminality, 99, 101, 104 (AfricanAmericanvernacular artists), 130,
132, 140, 146, 152 (as queer),
220 (distance from art), 283 (as a
professional)
Artlessness, 59, 239
Aryan, 175 (race)
Assemblage, 75, 102, 104 (artwork),
120, 181
asylum seeker,182, 189n2
Auden, w.H., 61n15, 247
Autobiography, 28, 215; see also
winterson, Jeanette and artifice,
246–247, 250, 258
Avant-garde, 49, 85, 129, 268, 270,
277
Azoulay, Ariella, 189n1, 190
B
Bacon, Francis, 45–46
Badiou, Alain, 4, 84; see also deleuze,
gilles, 85, 297n13
Baij, Ramkinkar, 19, 20, 36n9
Bakhtin, mikhail, 247, 269, 279n4
The Dialogic Imagination, 261,
280
Bandopadhyay, manik, 130–
133, 137–138, 139; see also
encounter(s), 143–147
323
324
Index
Bandyopadhya, Bibhutibhushan,
133, 135
Barthes, Roland, 24, 121, 253
The Pleasure of the Text, 261n6
Baudelaire, charles, 64, 65, 233,
241n5, 280n13
Beauvoir, simone de, 72, 80
Beckett, samuel, 8, 22, 36n10, 260
Bedi, Rajinder singh, 130
Ben-gurion, david, 181, 185
Benjamin, walter, 8, 44, 61, 174
(angel of history), 237
Bergson, Henri, 86, 124
Bersani, leo, 67, 71
Is the Rectum a Grave? and Other
Essays, 261
Bhattacharya, mihir, 128, 131, 134
Biblical, 170–171, 188
Borders, 258, 261
Borges, Jorge luis, 221, 247
Boundaries, 16, 45, 98, 106, 108, 120–
121, 136, 189n3, 240, 256, 271
Braque, georges, 17, 18
Breton, André, 26
Surrealist Manifesto, 27
Brooke-Rose, christine, 152
Butler, Judith, 5, 249
C
calcutta, 131, 133
camp, 74, 198; see also gay,
queerness, avant-garde, 248; see
also merchant, Hoshang
camus, Albert, 72
capitalism, 4, 69, 72 (Us-led global
capitalism), 116, 120–121
semiocapitalism, 120
critique of, 126
carson, Anne, 209–211, 213–216,
217, 223
Eros: The Bittersweet, 223,
210–212
If Not, Winter: Fragments of
Sappho, 213–222
cather, willa, 201–213
certeau, michel de, 163, 168, 176n2
chamayou, grégoire, 163, 168,
189n1
chander, krishan, 130
cheng, Ann Anlin, 230
chetrit, sami, 190n1
chinese, 43 (artists), 57 (art), 127
(politics); see also mandarin
chopin, Frédéric, 173
christianity, 42, 48, 51, 58, 78, 101,
188, 234
chugtai, Ismat, 130
cinematic form/aesthetic, 89, 92, 180,
182
citizenship, 182, 185–187, 288
city, 133 (in manik Bandopadhyay’s
works), 183 (cultural space),
275, 278, 279n11 (Islamic), 289
(Athenian)
cixous, Hélène, 209, 257–260
clementi, tyler, 196, 200–204
coetzee, J.m., 29
Summertime, 28; see also writer
(figure of)
cohen-solal, Annie, 73
cold war, 53, 72; see also genet,
Jean
coleridge, samuel taylor, 49, 50,
51–53
commodity, 166 (marxist concept of
chain), 290 (exchangeable for use
value); (art as); 291 (fetishisation),
297n7
communist Party of India, 134
communist(ism), 14; see
alsoideology, 68, 72 (French
communist Party), 126–131,
134, 141,142, 143 (writer),
128 (‘the communist
manifesto’)
conceptualist, 49; see also duchamp,
marcel
conflict, 49, 106, 128, 186, 189n1,
189n5, 275
consumerism, 64
Index
creativity, 155, 235, 243n16, 267; see
also derrida, Jacques, 268, 272
crisp, Quentin, 22, 197
The Naked Civil Servant, 204–207
critic, 98 (artist as)
cubism, 52, 53
D
darger, Henry, 99–108
darwish, mahmoud, 265–266
dasgupta, Rajarshi, 128, 129, 130, 133
death/mortality, 3–4, 9, 19, 23
(and sexuality), 28, 31–32, 59
(Proust’s account of Bergotte’s),
202, 230, 238 (miraji), 257, 264,
272, 279n10; see also Adonis and
poetry
and pleasure, 24, 26, 234, 317
cultural, 266, 270–271
death-wish, 25, 172
in Arab culture, 273, 274–276
scenes of, 264–265
defiance, 65; see also genet, Jean
deleuze, gilles, 85, 86; see also
Bergson, Henri, 87–88, 91–99,
93n1, 116–118; see also guattari,
Félix, 120, 164, 166, 168
A Thousand Plateaus.
Capitalism and
Schizophrenia, 117, 120
Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and
Schizophrenia, 164, 167
Cinema 1, 84, 91
Cinema 2, 84, 91
Dialogue, 87
demos, t.J., 189n1
derrida, Jacques, 24, 25; see also
poetry, 30, 171, 251; see also
edelman, lee
‘che cos’è la poesia?’/‘what is
Poetry?’, 25, 26, 296, 296n1,
296n4
On the Name, 171
syrian poetry 267
Writing and Difference, 296
descartes, René, 48, 171
325
dial, thornton, 99, 102, 108, 109
diaspora, 184 (Jewish)
dickens, charles 101
diderot, denis
Paradox of Acting, 296n2, 298
digital, 164–166, 169; see also
manovich, lev, 243n4
aesthetics, 174–176, 176n1, 180,
183; see also Aljafri, kamal,
185, 187 (retouching images)
media, 163, 168 (video), 172, 173
(coding), 177n10 (algorithms),
177n11
post-Fordist culture, 120
disability, 152 (as identity); see also
trans-displacement, 186 (forced,
of Palestinians); see also Palestine,
187, 254
dissidence, 81 (late modernity), 82
(future of), 108, 111; see also
poetry, 119, 122, 248
doolittle, Hilda (H.d.), 208,
211–215, 221
duchamp, marcel, 26, 43–44, 49
duras, marguerite, 257
E
edelman, lee, 259
Homographesis, 258
edwards, Brent Hayes, 157
effeminacy, 198, 199, 20;5 see also
sedgwick, eve kosofsky, crisp,
Quentin, and cather, willa
elegy, 21, 229, 265, 278n11 (city),
280n12
elegiac, 276
subgenre, 278
eliot, t.s., 10, 36n5
embarrassment, 64 (ennui and),
310
encounter(s), 13, 65, 88, 103, 108,
139; see also Bandopadhyay,
manik, 166, 176, 205, 246
eng, david, 229
epistemology, 50, 117, 197 (gay
identity)
326
Index
epistemological, 196, 207, 251
erotic(s), 17; see also stein,
gertrude, 23, 82, 208, 211,
212; see also doolittle Hilda
(H.d.), 223, 248, 312
eroticism, 24, 224, 36n11
erotic principle, 70, 253-4
ethical, 183 (Jewish imagination),
187
ethno-nationalism, 182, 183
etymology, 48, 49, 185; see also
citizenship
euro-America(n), 98 (literature and
history)
existentialism, 63; see also sartre,
Jean Paul, 68, 81 (agency), 98; see
also outsider, 102, 184, 293
crisis, 147
existential, 64 (freedom)
existentialist, 67, 72–73
philosophy, 67, 69, 70, 72
F
fail, 22; see also Halberstam, Judith,
25, 64, 75, 143, 195, 202
aesthetics of, 196–197, 287
failure, 22 (figure of); see also
Beckett, samuel, 199, 283
(artist)
Faiz, Faiz Ahmed, 130, 241n1
Fanon, Frantz, 242
Fantasy, 76, 139, 171–173, 204
and daring, 24, 74
dream, 3, 32 (nightmare), 34
paranoid, 168, 172
Flynn, thomas R., 71
folklore, 119 (urban); 146
Freud, sigmund, 132, 135–136, 138–
141, 172, 232, 241n5, 242n6, 254
friendship, 4–5, 17, 25
Frisch, max
Drafts for a Third Sketchbook, 10
Furani, khaled
Silencing the Sea: Secular Rhythms
in Palestinian Poetry, 274
Fuss, diana
Dying Modern: A Meditation on
Elegy, 29
G
gablik, suzi
Concepts of Modern Art: From
Fauvism to Postmodernism, 52
gandhi, mohandas karamchand,
130, 292
gayness, 197, 250–260
gaze, 12, 32, 56–57, 66, 135, 230, 305,
312
geisha, 247
genet, Jean, 24–25, 64–82, 257
ghatak, Ritwik, 19–21, 36n9, 126
Jukti, Takko Ar Gappo, 146–147
goldman, Judith, 163, 165–167,
176n2
golumbia, david, 177n11
grosz, elizabeth
Deleuze and Feminism, 116
guattari, Félix, 116, 164; see also
deleuze, gilles
guibert, Hervé, 22
H
Halberstam, Jack, 154–155
Halberstam, Judith, 22
The Queer Art of Failure, 21–22,
154
Han, shinhee, 229
Harney, stefano, 1–2, 22
Harrison, charles, 52; see also
abstract art
Concepts of Modern Art: From
Fauvism to Postmodernism,
52, 62
Hayles, n. katherine, 165, 177n10
hedonism, 23, 291 (capitalistic)
Hegel, g.F.w., 48
Hegelian, 163
Heidegger, martin, 6, 165, 175,
265–266
hijra, 261n3, 308
Index
Hindu, 291 (text, Hinduism), 126
(nationalism), 131
Hipkiss, 99, 104–108
Hochberg, gil, 182–183, 189n1
Hofstadter, douglas R., 61n5
Holland, Philemon, 47
Hollywood, 250
327
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young
Man, 29
Ulysses, 18, 257
justice, 82
cinematic, 180–182, 186, 189
social, 252
K
I
identity, 74 (sexual), 75, 104
(gender), 187 (national);
see also Israel, 197 (and gay
epistemology), 206, 251–258, 269
(crisis of)
ideology, 14 (art and), 15, 70, 97, 173
(colonial and imperial), 187; see
also Zionism, 268, 293
immigrant, 183; see also Israel, 185
immorality, 234
imperial, 173; see also ideology
India, 11; see also Rushdie, salman
(colonial), 19, 85–87 (aesthetic
theories), 91, 126 (communists),
128–199 (languages), 134; see
also communist Party of India,
144, 231, 241n4, 247, 304
indigenous, 103–104, 128, 129,
242n7
intimacy, 4, 14, 15, 72, 166, 208, 213,
216, 220
Islamic, 141, 230, 268–269, 274,
279n6, 279n9, 279n11
Israel, 180–189
immigration to, 183
national identity, 187
J
Jalibi, Jamil, 229
Jameson, Fredric
Postmodernism, or, the Cultural
Logic of Late Capitalism, 122;
see also affect
Jayamanne, laleen, 84
Joyce, James, 17, 18
kafka, Franz, 2, 286–287, 296n2
‘A Hunger Artist’, 292
kant, Immanuel, 42, 48; see also
Varchi, Benedetto
kassab, elizabeth suzanne, 268;see
also creativity, Zionism, and
Islam
katyal, Akhil, 261n5
kaul, mani, 84, 87–89, 93
Concept of Space, Ancient and
Modern, 92
‘the Rambling Figure’, 86, 91
Uncloven Space, 93n2
keats, John, 53, 61n6
khanna, Ranjana, 242n7; see also
melancholia, 242n9
kiarostami, Abbas, 84, 94
kinship, 140
kipling, Rudyard, 247
kollontai, Alexandra, 14–16, 36n7,
36n8
L
l’ecriture feminine, 209, 260
language, 224, 231 (Indian), 235,
241n4; see also translation, 242n7,
251–253, 280n13
and form, 211, 218, 219, 249 (of
expression)
weaponisation of, 173, 248
(gayness), 268–270, 275
lavie, smadar, 190n5
lesbian, 16–18, 210–211, 218, 222,
250; see also suicide, 260
lévy, Pierre, 165
liminality, 97–98; see also artist,
101, 136 (of lives)
328
Index
M
N
malcolm, chris, 174
mandarin, 43 (untranslated
language)
manifesto, 8, 15; see also kollontai,
Alexandra, 13, 272, 278n2, 288;
see also Artaud, Antonin and
performativity, 293
marginality, 246
manovich, lev, 169; see also digital
marino, giambattista, 49
marx, karl, 132, 139, 290, 296n7
marxism, 69, 73, 80–83, 127–129,
131, 136
marxist, 14–15; see also kollontai,
Alexandra, 132, 134, 143, 164
mbembe, Achille, 163, 179
mcluhan, marshall, 165
melancholia, 234, 242n7; see also
khanna, Ranjana, 242 (Freud)
melville, Herman, 198
Billy Budd, 198
merchant, Hoshang, 246
The Man Who Would Be Queen:
Autobiographical Fictions,
246–261
merleau-Ponty, maurice, 72, 90
michelangelo, 41, 44–46, 49, 61n3
minault, gail, 231
minimalism, 51–53
miraji, 227–244
modernism, 85, 116, 135 (in Bengal),
220, 227–232, 239 (Urdu), 241n1
modernity, 81, 128, 266, 278n2,
280n13, 296n2
morality,78, 132, 309
moten, Fred, 1–2, 7, 22
munoz, Jose, 230
murdoch, Iris, 42, 50
The Fire and the Sun: Why Plato
Banished the Artists, 51–54
myth, 42, 50, 58, 98, 215
mythic, 104
mythical, 11, 72, 144
mythology, 25, 57, 128
mythological, 58, 279n10
mythopoetic, 228
nagy, gregory, 234
nancy, Jean-luc, 84
narrative, 113 (diegesis), 246
(autobiography)
navaro, Yael, 243n17
new York city, 201, 204
ngai, sianne, 152, 158n1
nin, Anaïs, 247, 260
nostalgia, 5, 22, 164, 278,
O
ontological, 114, 116–118, 197, 206,
253, 295
outsider
as trope, 12, 115–122
figure of, 97, 98–103
as identity,109, 112
canonical, 108, 119, 121
outsider Art, 13; see also Rhodes,
colin, 104
P
Pajak, Frédéric, 7, 8
Palestine, 180–185, 187, 247, 252,
265, 317
Panofsky, erwin, 61n3
paranoia, 3, 152, 158n1, 168
(metaphysical), 172; see also
Freud, sigmund, 179
paratext, 112, 114
Patel, geeta, 230, 231, 233, 241n3,
242n9, 243n17
pedagogy, 151–152, 154, 155
(feminist)
Perec, georges, 221
performativity, 199, 288, 297
Plath, sylvia, 25; see also Alvarez
Plato, 41–59, 177, 236, 247
Ethics, 47
Platonic, 118, 171
Platonism, 41, 61n4
Timaeus, 171, 177n8
Plutarch
Moralia, 47
Index
poetry, 17, 25 (derridean
hedgehog), 205 (tactile reading);
(poetics); (forms of); 267 (of
realism); (metre), 279n10 (death
in); see also Adonis and death/
mortality
poetics of dissidence, 111
Pollock, Jackson, 53
popular culture, 99, 101, 103
Postmodernism, 116
power, 69, 76, 111, 164, 182, 252,
275–278, 285, 290–291 (labour);
see also weil-simone, 297n7, 307,
310
Premchand, 130
prison, 64, 71, 76; see also genet,
Jean, 166–168
imprisonment, 267, 290
prisoner, 64, 76
Proust, marcel, 55–58, 59–60, 66,
247; see also nin, Anaïs and
queerness (figure of)
Q
Queerness, 1, 154, 204; see also
suicide, 240, 253–258
activism, 153
as crip, 21
figure of, 157, 198, 222, 247
literature, 223, 246
sexuality, 197, 200
R
radical, 18, 75, 104, 132–134, 143,
279n7
Rajadhyaksha, Ashish, 84
Rancière, Jacques,13, 35, 36n6,
84–85, 91, 111, 266, 271
Realism, 13, 55 (dutch), 129, 134,
233, 265
resistance, 67 (writing), 144, 168,
176n2, 187, 247
Rhodes, colin, 37
Outsider Art: Spontaneous
Alternatives, 13
Riley, Bridget, 41, 158n4
329
Rimbaud, Arthur, 175, 280n13
ritual, 52, 282–295, 297n11
Robertson, lisa, 168n4
Rothko, mark, 52–56
Roy, Falguni, 2, 3, 7
Rushdie, salman, 12
Midnight’s Children, 11
S
said, edward, 265, 296n7
samaddar, Ranabir, 231
sappho, 209–212 (female body and
of the body of the poem; poetic
embodiment), 213–215 (eros in),
216 (translation), 224
sarkar, Bhaskar, 131, 242n8, 243n13
sartre, Jean-Paul, 63–64, 70–75, 76,
79–80, 83; see also existentialism
Baudelaire, 65
Between Existentialism and
Marxism, 68–69, 81; see also
marxism
Existentialism and Humanism, 68
Saint Genet: Actor and Martyr,
66, 72, 73–74, 76–77
Search for a Method, 81
The Philosophy of Jean-Paul
Sartre, 82
What is Literature?, 69, 73
schizophrenia, 112, 115, 119, 164
schneemann, carolee, 151
sedgwick, eve kosofsky, 152, 196,
200, 202, 249, 252
Epistemology of the Closet, 197;
see also crisp, Quentin, 198,
199
Tendencies, 249, 250–256
Touching Feeling: Affect,
Pedagogy, Performativity, 162
segregation, 187
segregationist, 187
self-portrait, 20, 32
sen, suhit k., 297
shahani, kumar, 84–85, 87–88, 91
shakespeare, william
Romeo and Juliet, 255–256
330
Index
Twelfth Night, Or, What You
Will, 254
shaw, Jeffrey, 168
shklovsky, Viktor, 14
shohat, ella, 184–185, 189
smith, Adam, 290, 297n7
smith, Roberta, 43, 53
sontag, susan, 3; see also AIds, 74
south Asia, 233, 242n7
sovereignty, 73, 291–292
spectacle, 67, 199
spivak, gayatri chakravorty, 251
Readings, 252
stein, gertrude, 16, 157, 158n8,
158n9, 211; see also doolittle,
Hilda (H.d.) and carson, Anne,
217–219, 220–222
Narration, 218
Tender Buttons, 17; see also erotic
and poetry
The Autobiography of Alice B.
Toklas, 16, 18, 218
stevens, wallace, 41
steyerl, Hito, 151–152, 156
stowe, Harriet Beecher, 101
subaltern, 103; see also indigenous
sublime, the, 51
sufism, 274
suicide, 21, 25, 174, 202; see also
clementi, tyler, 234, 250; see also
lesbian
suicide bomber, 163
gay teen suicide, 196, 200 (queer),
202, 206
surrealism, 13, 274
syria, 173, 267, 317
civil war, 174
T
tagore, Rabindranath, 19, 20, 253,
254, 304
taste (aesthetic), 18; see also
kant, Immanuel, 73, 75, 118
(hegemonic), 132; see also
morality, 201
temporal, 88, 187, 248
theatre, 129, 163 (world theatre), 201
(idea of performance)
theatre-going, 271, 285, 289,
297n11
of cruelty, 293, 294; see also
Artaud, Antonin and weil,
simone
toklas, Alice B., 217–218
totalitarianism, 252
traditionalism, 267, 277
trans-, 152, 154 (gender/queerness),
187 (national/continental)
transgression, 98, 121, 131
(propaganda), 260
translation, 173 (figure of
translator), 178, 142 (as
process), 128, 129, 131, 133 (as
form), 241; see also language
U
unorthodox, 274 (forms of writing),
112
Urdu, 130, 227, 232, 234, 235, 237,
241n1, 243n11, 243n17
V
Vajpeyi, Udayan, 86, 87, 88
Varchi, Benedetto, 46, 48
violence, 101, 135, 152, 174, 177n11,
186, 189n1, 206 (homophobic),
232, 292 (non-violence)
Virilio, Paul, 163, 165, 172
Viswanathan, gauri, 231, 233
voice,16, 18 (authorial, see also
stein, gertrude), 75, 98
(artist on the margins), 102,
157 (author’s), 234; see also
melancholia, 235 (poetess in
translation), 235–239 (miraji
and sappho’s), 248, 252, 275
(protesting), 296; see also
Artaud, Antonin
voluptuous(ness), 157, 227
(synaesthetic), 239
Index
W
war, 53; see also cold war, 63, 70, 72,
99, 173–175, 177n9, 183, 188; see
also Palenstine, 272, 276
American civil war, 101
and occupation, 69, 103, 164
gulf war, 172
spanish civil war, 141
wark, mckenzie
A Hacker Manifesto, 174
weil, simone, 291–293
wilde, oscar, 25, 198 (dorian gray);
see also sedgwick, eve kosofsky
Picture of Dorian Gray, 198
winnicott, donald
Playing and Reality, 243n16
winterson, Jeanette, 211, 215
Art and Lies: A Piece for Three
Voices and a Bawd, 215, 216
Written on the Body, 222
331
woolf, Virginia, 25, 154
writer, 73, 77, 134; see also
Bandopadhyay, manik
activist, 272
figure of, 18; see also stein,
gertrude, 28; see also coetzee,
J.m., 70, 142–143
post-war, 69
Y
Yli-Juonikas, Jaakko, 111, 112
Neuromaani, 111–124
Z
Zionism, 184, 187–188, 190n5
Žižek, slavoj, 4, 35n2
Zraik, Raef Faris, 184