Bollettino
John Burns is one of the New York Times most intelligent foreign correspondents. The Times usually slathers an aggressive, heedless neo-liberal ideology on its foreign news, picking its stringers, in such places as Venezuala, from among the most notorious class of exploiters, and in general sending out people whose framework is a sort of rightwing Friedmanism. This makes it very hard to know what is happening in the rest of the world. In the case of Iraq, the NYT has been notoriously supportive of a mere propagandist, Judith Miller. She isn’t even a competent propagandist. Her famous article about the unnamed, disguised Iraqi scientist pointing to spots in the sand where WMD are buried could be used as a freshman journalism class joke. Miller is a throwback to the Hearst reporters that went to Cuba to supply America with grounds for a war with Spain, except that she doesn’t spread that rara avis plumage of jingoistic prose – no Richard Harding Davis she. Rather, she prefers the mothballed clichés of the Wolfowitz set.
Burns, however, went into hiding because of the toughness of his reporting about Saddam Hussein’s insane leadership of his country. So it was all the more jolting to read his analysis of the recent events in Fallujah. It was not only wildly misleading, but childish in its tones and theme. The theme is: why aren’t the Iraqis grateful to us Americans? The tone was like the whining of some sullen twelve year old heir whose gifts of his old clothes to the maid’s son still hasn’t convinced the boy to play with him. Such generosity! Such complaining people, these Iraqis! After all the electricity we’ve got going for them too.
As for the misleading part: the whole history of the American/Iraqi encounter in Fallujah was set by the massacre of 17 to 30 Iraqis in the occupying of the town. Why this happened still remains a mystery, although it is easy to guess that American trigger happy nervousness had a lot to do with it. What did not occur, however, was a ‘firefight’ – which is how Burns describes it.
That theme of gratitude/ingratitude reflects the deeper, entrenched racism that frames the whole neo-imperialist enterprise, with its unconscious (or sometimes conscious) presentation of Iraqis as “children”. The parent/child image has been a standard legitimating trope in the colonialist discourse since the Spanish waded ashore on Hispanola. In Iraq, its late efflorescence has caused the CPA to act in enormously irrational ways. That the horror of the lynching of the four mercenaries in Fallujah touches off a similar response in Burns, who should know better, does not bode well for US/Iraq relations. So instead of asking such journalist questions as: why is the Army using mercenaries in the Sunni triangle, and why were these four guys going into a town the army wouldn’t enter in an unarmored vehicle, he gives us his shock and dismay.
From the beginning, we have maintained that the top down implementation of civil change, such as was envisioned by all the Defense Department planners, goes against everything we know about the failures of central planning. That is hard earned knowledge for the left. Lately, we’ve been wondering what it means to combine the benefit of a welfare state with bottom up self organization – the kind of foreign policy that the left should be vigorously exploring. In thinking about this, we keep bumping into the name James C. Scott, the man who wrote “Seeing Like A State.” So we went to an essay in Studies in Comparative Society and History for a recent essay by Lisa Wedeen, entitled “Seeing like a Citizen”. Since the essay is about the interplay between state and culture in Yemen, we thought that it might have some suggestions about what the progressive project in Iraq would be like.
Wedeen discusses three events in Yemn. One is the first direct presidential election, held on September 23, 1999. The second is the tenth anniversary celebration of national unification, on May 22, 2000. And the third is the career of a serial killer who did his killings in a University setting. Here is how Weedon sees a community of thematic interest in these different threads:
Each of the events betrays a note of irony. The election was widely heralded
as “the first free direct presidential election” ever held in Yemen, and there was
never any doubt about the ability of the incumbent to capture a majority of the
vote. Yet the ruling party, on dubious legal grounds, barred the opposition’s
jointly chosen challenger from the race and then appointed its own opponent.
President ƒAli ƒAbd Allah Salih had a chance to win what the world would have
regarded as a fair and free election, but chose instead to undermine the process,
using the apparently democratic form to foreclose democratic possibilities. In
the case of the unification anniversary, both the preparations and the event itself
required the regime to introduce state-like interventions in domains where
they had never been seen before. In areas of everyday practice, such as garbage
collection and street cleaning, the state made itself apparent to citizens in ways
that could only serve to remind them of how absent it usually was. Finally, the
revelation that a shocking series of murders had taken place inside the state-run
university produced communities of criticism in which people found themselves
sharing a sense of belonging to a nation the existence of which was merely
imputed by the failure of the state to exercise its expected role of protecting
its citizens.”
As you can see, gentle reader, these are familiar themes in the Iraqi context. Wedeen wants to know why, firstly, a party in power would overreach to the extent of delegitimating its democratic standing for no apparent gain; secondly, why the state can come spasmodically to life, spending money on a ritual celebrating itself to the extent that it points its citizens to that expenditure – for instance, in cleaning up the streets before the celebration – and so points to its incompetence both before and after the celebration; and thirdly, why a ruling elite that exists in terms of its assertion of direct power can still leave the citizens of the state feeling unprotected. To put the third question less clumsily: why is the state so inefficient at security, given its emergence from an overtly militarized context?
Wedeen uses the word "belonging" -- a term that has grown suspiciously popular in the social sciences -- to link up to her titular image of seeing to make her general point: “Yemen demonstrates how events of collective vulnerability can bring about episodic expressions of national identification.”
We’ll get back to this essay in our next post.
Saturday, April 03, 2004
Friday, April 02, 2004
Bollettino
The Black and White world
In the 1730s, a French monk, Louis Bertrand Castel, invented a color ‘clavecin.” Following a suggestion by Athanasius Kircher that arrangements of colors corresponded to arrangements of sounds, the clavecin was designed to create color harmonies synchronized to music. That Kircher was invoked should tell us that Castel was an anti-Newtonian, which he was -- il doutait 'que Monsieur Newton n'eut jamais manié de prisme' – of the profound sort – Castel, like Kircher, still lived in a world in which science was an exquisite web of analogies. The kind of reductionism and mathematical method that Newton applied, without any pre-determining analogies, seemed like a desecration of that web. Blake had that same sentiment a century later, although by then the pre-modern understanding of nature had been irreversibly lost, along with the culture that sustained it. Castel’s example influenced the ever-peculiar Russian composer, Scriabin, in the 20th century.
Well, this is an odd starting place for a post about the world of black and white films and photographs – the world of technical photo-reproduction for most people from the mid nineteeth to the mid twentieth centuries. We start here because we want to touch the folk science of color -- the system of folk beliefs that contain schematics for the correspondence of color to words, sounds, moods, crimes and virtues. We’ve been thinking about that world because, somehow, we came across this exhibition of tabloid photographs. We find photos like this enormously and mysteriously appealing. In fact, it is hard to think of the modern era – from around 1900 through the 1950s – without thinking, unconsciously, in black and white. Kennedy’s assassination, for me, is in black and white, although I’m not really sure the Zapruder film was black and white. I’ve often wondered why nobody has explored how the optical values of the historical iconography spill over into our larger historical imagination.
It isn’t simply that black and white is a color scheme – as human things, colors in their mutual relations one with the other have human significances even as they do the "job" of blocking in figures that philosophers assign to them. There’s an old philosophical bias towards the figural and against color. Color is considered accidental, transitory, way too mutable. Here the old schematic bias, the old logocentrism, as Derrida puts it, flashes into sight and as quickly vanishes.
Try to imagine, for instance, the photo of the wifebeater on the ninth page of the exhibit in different colors. For me, this is almost impossible. Even if I saw the image colorized, it would revert to black and white in my memory, just as certain events -- say World War I -- happen in black and white in my memory. I cannot see it, mentally, in technocolor. The effect of the alleged wifebeater photo is all in the heavy face of the smiling husband, the blocked out head of the wife, and the hand holding -- a gesture that suddenly seems sinister. LI has remarked before, on some post, about the tension between caption and picture. This one has a caption that is a Dashiell Hamlett short story in a sentence: “William Charles November 28, 1947 Friday Held on suspicion of wife-beating.” Can he possibly not be guilty? No, every nuance here proclaims his guilt. But this is where we find the black and white world particularly eerie – it is as if those colors were not only necessary to his representation, but the secret determinants of his crime. It is as if those colors had the pervasive influence of the fates upon Mr. Charles – as if when he beat his wife, the act itself must have been in black and white.
...
On another note -- LI has finally made the Paypal thing work. Check it out.
The Black and White world
In the 1730s, a French monk, Louis Bertrand Castel, invented a color ‘clavecin.” Following a suggestion by Athanasius Kircher that arrangements of colors corresponded to arrangements of sounds, the clavecin was designed to create color harmonies synchronized to music. That Kircher was invoked should tell us that Castel was an anti-Newtonian, which he was -- il doutait 'que Monsieur Newton n'eut jamais manié de prisme' – of the profound sort – Castel, like Kircher, still lived in a world in which science was an exquisite web of analogies. The kind of reductionism and mathematical method that Newton applied, without any pre-determining analogies, seemed like a desecration of that web. Blake had that same sentiment a century later, although by then the pre-modern understanding of nature had been irreversibly lost, along with the culture that sustained it. Castel’s example influenced the ever-peculiar Russian composer, Scriabin, in the 20th century.
Well, this is an odd starting place for a post about the world of black and white films and photographs – the world of technical photo-reproduction for most people from the mid nineteeth to the mid twentieth centuries. We start here because we want to touch the folk science of color -- the system of folk beliefs that contain schematics for the correspondence of color to words, sounds, moods, crimes and virtues. We’ve been thinking about that world because, somehow, we came across this exhibition of tabloid photographs. We find photos like this enormously and mysteriously appealing. In fact, it is hard to think of the modern era – from around 1900 through the 1950s – without thinking, unconsciously, in black and white. Kennedy’s assassination, for me, is in black and white, although I’m not really sure the Zapruder film was black and white. I’ve often wondered why nobody has explored how the optical values of the historical iconography spill over into our larger historical imagination.
It isn’t simply that black and white is a color scheme – as human things, colors in their mutual relations one with the other have human significances even as they do the "job" of blocking in figures that philosophers assign to them. There’s an old philosophical bias towards the figural and against color. Color is considered accidental, transitory, way too mutable. Here the old schematic bias, the old logocentrism, as Derrida puts it, flashes into sight and as quickly vanishes.
Try to imagine, for instance, the photo of the wifebeater on the ninth page of the exhibit in different colors. For me, this is almost impossible. Even if I saw the image colorized, it would revert to black and white in my memory, just as certain events -- say World War I -- happen in black and white in my memory. I cannot see it, mentally, in technocolor. The effect of the alleged wifebeater photo is all in the heavy face of the smiling husband, the blocked out head of the wife, and the hand holding -- a gesture that suddenly seems sinister. LI has remarked before, on some post, about the tension between caption and picture. This one has a caption that is a Dashiell Hamlett short story in a sentence: “William Charles November 28, 1947 Friday Held on suspicion of wife-beating.” Can he possibly not be guilty? No, every nuance here proclaims his guilt. But this is where we find the black and white world particularly eerie – it is as if those colors were not only necessary to his representation, but the secret determinants of his crime. It is as if those colors had the pervasive influence of the fates upon Mr. Charles – as if when he beat his wife, the act itself must have been in black and white.
...
On another note -- LI has finally made the Paypal thing work. Check it out.
Thursday, April 01, 2004
Bollettino
“Beauty should not happen”
LI received a letter from our friend T. in NYC regarding our “beautiful woman” posts. It was addressed to the character in our novel, Holly Sterling – and like a spur in the ribs, it reminded us that we have not been writing the novel in the last week or two. T. has been a regular reader – with red pencil in hand – of the novel.
(Our excuse, our regular excuse, is that since we are close to being kicked out of our apartment, losing our electricity, and in general deprived of the amenities – like a slug under the salt, in other words -- we have other things on our mind. Samuel Johnson, in our humble opinion, might have been wrong – the threat of imminent hanging doesn’t wonderfully concentrate the mind – it fatally scatters it. Of course, we don’t claim to have the highwayman’s strong character. Or perhaps we have a different sense of the drama of our ending. Its sheer pettiness is insurmountable).
But to get back to T.’s letter – if you haven’t read the Beautiful Woman posts, it won’t make any sense to you. Go and read them – they begin two posts back.
We’ve edited and shortened the letter a bit.
"Holly dear,
You must obviously wonder of this intrusion. Its true that it is embarrassment that is at the forefront of my mind as I write to you; I ask and assume too much of your attention. After all, our first and only meeting was so brief that you can’t possibly remember this admirer, I could not have made any impression whatever; and, after all, you were already dead.
Although you are dead, I've heard stories of your beauty. Secondhand stories, its true, and none of them ever mentioned the color of your hair, and a few told me of your accent, but the last fact was not presented as integral to your beauty. No, I actually do not know how beautiful you were, but I can imagine....the fewer and sparer the tales, the more space for my imaginings. Anyway, I'm rather appreciative of beautiful women, and I've recently read a little book that gave me much cause to think about beauty, and divinity, and divinely beautiful women....I thought I might share this with you.
Will I offend you so much if I speak of Pierre Klossowski; will you be offended if I even merely invoking a few references in order to tell you a bit about beauty? Realize that as a beauty, you perhaps have little to say beyond the seeming affect it has had on others. That is your first person (if you will have one at all). My first person account is as pure as it can be on this matter. A reasonable concern of yours: Is what he [LI] has to tell me merely scopic? Perhaps; some would argue “Indeed and only.” Well, then, since you cannot have even a taste of the scopic (according to those who say “Indeed and only”), then I will offer a few observations from that place that cannot be yours.
I swear Holly, I'm not a pervert, but an author that dares to contemplate possible conclusions to the saga of Diana at her Bath as PK, is an author that I need more of in my life. Will you be offended by that possibility that Acteon, not quite all a stag, left hand still in human form, groping Diana’s breast, at the brink of penetrating the goddess in human form whereupon he is set upon by the ravenous hounds that rip him apart, drenching Diana in blood; or, alternatively, Acteaon wearing the bloody head of a stag upon his own, seduced by the goddess, rapturously on top of her….
No, I am not a pervert, but give me myth, Holly dear, just don't ask too much of my faith; engage me in tales of wondrous plausibility, and I will never demand that you tarry with the truth; you are dead Holly, which renders this the beginning and the end of our correspondence, but let me know the story of your beauty.
Divinity unto uselessness, if you prefer a theme.
Did the persona behind Limited, Inc. ever tell you one tale of the Invisible Woman? No, well, LI should have, for it might inform you of what is to come, and what becomes of you. The beautiful woman, such as yourself, need not be here, or there, exactly; its (please excuse and pardon me: your) presence is not always a matter of proximity, but intimate contact, at a distance or otherwise.
That sensation when one is before beauty, when one espies it, that then one is nearer to the "religious gravity" that Barthes finds the Lover provides. I am a far less discerning man; I need not the magnitude of a Lover – any beautiful woman will do. Contact at a distance; contact without the often unavailable or inconvenient facts and particularities of proximity; such is the space that I am trying to explain; I’m sure you have occupied that space, knowingly or not; think back to times before your demise…the attention of their conversation… the casual embrace….the touch at your wrist or shoulder…a glance from across the room: all of them abstract and indistinct in their formality, seemingly ordinary.
Preceeding that space?: Waiting. It is an unknown; that one, beknowst to one or not, is always waiting for beauty - that one is there only because one should not be there. Beauty should not happen; there is no apparent teleology to the encounter, it is rare and awkward and unusual. Although miracles surely do happen, one cannot predict them for they have no place amidst the rigors of prediction and verification; brilliant and extreme (the dictionary indicates of ‘beauty’ (etymologically related to 'bounty')); but it is all so much a matter of what beauty DOES - thus the examples that one might mine from the History of Western Lit., from Helen to Mademoiselle Marnaffe and to a more current date (the Dulcinea del Tobloso is a peculiar case, to be sure, but enough of my parody of erudition!). A beautiful woman does nothing for me, she is superfluous, unnecessary; yet she immediately ends that waiting and therefrom does that impressionistic sense of space and color ensue - wholly human for she is seen as a beautiful woman, but also ethereal; thus, a moment formally sublime.
What did your beauty do Holly? That is the story that I want to hear.
There is, of course, never anything normal about the peculiar charms of a beautiful woman - arms ever too long, face far to piqued, nose rather askew, hands very much too small, etc… but usually a disorganization well short of anything that might be a fetish. What is IT? Yes, what is it? It is, at least, that rare moment of apperception wherein one finds oneself amid both those things that are real and their unreal relations and affiliates, where simulacra are welcomed, as are shadows and echoes; where poses and masks are intimate and alluring.
“Beauty” as a word can only emerge (as it did), don't you think, Holly dear, after all the bother of the period of courtly love? One does not take on burdens and challenges inspired by beauty, one does no great deeds intoxicated by beauty for beauty, no matter how delirious one might become in the presence of beauty, there is neither obedience, nor loyalty, nor service to beauty (unless, of course, one is engaged in some part of the all so pernicious "beauty industry"; but that is far far apart from my fixation at present), while there may be inspiration in the seeing, there is nothing particularly ennobled by such inspiration. Ah, ideals, and idealistic and idyllic ways of telling of them!
A small confession, Holly dear, I am a limited man, a man devoid of grand themes and epic scales, without even the slightest hope of a Form. I have only and merely my few tales, fewer of which I know very well at all. I write to you only as an admirer of beautiful women.
The beauty that recurs as opposed to the fashion of a time; the beauty that remains, adorned or not; yes, that's the one. While a pretty girl may be like a melody, a beautiful woman is a requiem.
Perhaps, Holly dear, you became only a motif or a type. But be of good courage: becoming a woman of substance was never in your stars… to your benefit, if I don’t say-so myself. You will, like every other beauty, remain at a distance, connected to me no matter that distance, in fictive space, or otherwise. My shame, indeed, should either of us take the guise of the Object – that is reserved for my indiscretion: that I might become a nusiance and bother, interrupting your view of what it is that is of you attention.
Diana at her Bath? Pierre Klossowski? How might I get from mere beauty to the divine? All reasonable questions Holly dear.
“Only divinity is happy with its own uselessness.” There is, for us mere mortals, a terrifying vertigo to this aimless and useless existence; we require obscurity and false clarity. Here is the intimacy of divinity and beauty: beauty is its own uselessness; beauty requires as little relation to the sexual act as does love or the needs of procreation, as does any divine one.
Apprehending beauty is the end of the waiting that is integral to every other moment not proximate to beauty (moments unto that ceaseless cycle).
Again, under threat of boredom: What does beauty DO? The same question might be posed to divinity of mythological time: the tale of the gods is what they DO. “This mountainous horizon, these woods, this vale and these springs, do they thus have no reality except in her absence? […] The more absorbed I become in the appearance of these objects, the better I see what the breeze is tracing: her forehead, her hair, her shoulders – unless a more blustery wind is creasing her tunic farther into the hollow of her thighs, above her knees. […] More than ever I experience the dignity of the space as the most reasonable enjoyment of my mind, the moment her forehead, her cheeks, her neck, her throat and her shoulders take shape there and dwell there, the moment her unendurable gaze explores and her nimble fingers, her palms, her elbows and legs slice and strike the air.”
From the affect of beauty on the beholder, to Diana’s visage at her bath: “…yet this body, in which she will manifest herself to herself, she actually borrows from Actaeon’s imagination.”
I, in the company of a beautiful woman can no more dominate her than I might submit myself to the her; I can only be submitted by that unknown force of beauty and that made that moment of the encounter inevitable.
One visage of that force is the Daemon, the intermediary between the god and man, between the beautiful and the beholder: “It is I who teach you this, O Actaeon, I whose external form, malleable to the will of the gods, so well lends iteslf to espousing their unfathomable intentions in order to give your senses proof of their arbitraty existence.” Beauty interrupts the continual and recurring flow of obscurity unto arbitrariness. In mythological cases, the Daemon functions as the interruption, in other more temporal and far less dramatic moments, beauty does so.
Such an interpretation: the encounter of Acteon and Diana at her Bath: “This incidence still belongs to the world of irreversible and uninterrupted space: the danger, the risk – like that of the hunt and the bath after the hunt – lies in the fact that the sacred grove of Diana’s bath is situated in this same space, and that numerous paths which seem to lead nowhere run into that very place.”
Yes, it is that “morose delectation” of Actaeon that I savor every so often.
“’What I saw, I cannot say what it was.’ Not that what one cannot say, one might not more fully understand, nor that one cannot see what one does not understand. Actaeon, in the myth, sees because he cannot say what he sees: if he could say it, he would no longer see. Yet Actaeon, meditating in the grotto, confers on Actaeon suddenly busting into the sacred in which Diana is bathing, the following remark: I shouldn’t be here, that’s why I’m here. The real experience, however, would boil down to an absurd proposition: I was supposed to be here because I was not supposed to be here.”
Nunc tibi me posito visam velamine rares
Si poteris narrare, licet - Ovid
[Now you may tell you saw me here unclothed,/If you can tell at all.]
“As soon as one analyzes these words, one notes in them both the provocation and the irony […] The provocation: Say it, then, describe Diana’s nudity, describe my charms, that no doubt what you’re waiting for, what your fellow men would love to know. The irony: If you can tell at all!”
A beautiful woman, then, is a fragment that is not of a whole, before or after the encounter with her. The “system” of her beauty is never wholly psycho- or social. Her beauty is without the obligations of language and consciousness (thus, speechless and thoughtless). “She is a beauty, no matter her features.” – Diana Vreeland. If you can tell at all. The particular features of a beautiful woman are accidental; she is a phantasm without essence. As a phantasm, possession is without concept.
Yes, Holly dear, you are sterling, like every beautiful woman; never once did you go lightly or gently.
But now my imagination has taken-over, trespassing both beauty and fantasy. I have failed to even indicate the beauty of a woman that arises only in conversation; you and I, of course, will never converse.
I remain,
T.
“Beauty should not happen”
LI received a letter from our friend T. in NYC regarding our “beautiful woman” posts. It was addressed to the character in our novel, Holly Sterling – and like a spur in the ribs, it reminded us that we have not been writing the novel in the last week or two. T. has been a regular reader – with red pencil in hand – of the novel.
(Our excuse, our regular excuse, is that since we are close to being kicked out of our apartment, losing our electricity, and in general deprived of the amenities – like a slug under the salt, in other words -- we have other things on our mind. Samuel Johnson, in our humble opinion, might have been wrong – the threat of imminent hanging doesn’t wonderfully concentrate the mind – it fatally scatters it. Of course, we don’t claim to have the highwayman’s strong character. Or perhaps we have a different sense of the drama of our ending. Its sheer pettiness is insurmountable).
But to get back to T.’s letter – if you haven’t read the Beautiful Woman posts, it won’t make any sense to you. Go and read them – they begin two posts back.
We’ve edited and shortened the letter a bit.
"Holly dear,
You must obviously wonder of this intrusion. Its true that it is embarrassment that is at the forefront of my mind as I write to you; I ask and assume too much of your attention. After all, our first and only meeting was so brief that you can’t possibly remember this admirer, I could not have made any impression whatever; and, after all, you were already dead.
Although you are dead, I've heard stories of your beauty. Secondhand stories, its true, and none of them ever mentioned the color of your hair, and a few told me of your accent, but the last fact was not presented as integral to your beauty. No, I actually do not know how beautiful you were, but I can imagine....the fewer and sparer the tales, the more space for my imaginings. Anyway, I'm rather appreciative of beautiful women, and I've recently read a little book that gave me much cause to think about beauty, and divinity, and divinely beautiful women....I thought I might share this with you.
Will I offend you so much if I speak of Pierre Klossowski; will you be offended if I even merely invoking a few references in order to tell you a bit about beauty? Realize that as a beauty, you perhaps have little to say beyond the seeming affect it has had on others. That is your first person (if you will have one at all). My first person account is as pure as it can be on this matter. A reasonable concern of yours: Is what he [LI] has to tell me merely scopic? Perhaps; some would argue “Indeed and only.” Well, then, since you cannot have even a taste of the scopic (according to those who say “Indeed and only”), then I will offer a few observations from that place that cannot be yours.
I swear Holly, I'm not a pervert, but an author that dares to contemplate possible conclusions to the saga of Diana at her Bath as PK, is an author that I need more of in my life. Will you be offended by that possibility that Acteon, not quite all a stag, left hand still in human form, groping Diana’s breast, at the brink of penetrating the goddess in human form whereupon he is set upon by the ravenous hounds that rip him apart, drenching Diana in blood; or, alternatively, Acteaon wearing the bloody head of a stag upon his own, seduced by the goddess, rapturously on top of her….
No, I am not a pervert, but give me myth, Holly dear, just don't ask too much of my faith; engage me in tales of wondrous plausibility, and I will never demand that you tarry with the truth; you are dead Holly, which renders this the beginning and the end of our correspondence, but let me know the story of your beauty.
Divinity unto uselessness, if you prefer a theme.
Did the persona behind Limited, Inc. ever tell you one tale of the Invisible Woman? No, well, LI should have, for it might inform you of what is to come, and what becomes of you. The beautiful woman, such as yourself, need not be here, or there, exactly; its (please excuse and pardon me: your) presence is not always a matter of proximity, but intimate contact, at a distance or otherwise.
That sensation when one is before beauty, when one espies it, that then one is nearer to the "religious gravity" that Barthes finds the Lover provides. I am a far less discerning man; I need not the magnitude of a Lover – any beautiful woman will do. Contact at a distance; contact without the often unavailable or inconvenient facts and particularities of proximity; such is the space that I am trying to explain; I’m sure you have occupied that space, knowingly or not; think back to times before your demise…the attention of their conversation… the casual embrace….the touch at your wrist or shoulder…a glance from across the room: all of them abstract and indistinct in their formality, seemingly ordinary.
Preceeding that space?: Waiting. It is an unknown; that one, beknowst to one or not, is always waiting for beauty - that one is there only because one should not be there. Beauty should not happen; there is no apparent teleology to the encounter, it is rare and awkward and unusual. Although miracles surely do happen, one cannot predict them for they have no place amidst the rigors of prediction and verification; brilliant and extreme (the dictionary indicates of ‘beauty’ (etymologically related to 'bounty')); but it is all so much a matter of what beauty DOES - thus the examples that one might mine from the History of Western Lit., from Helen to Mademoiselle Marnaffe and to a more current date (the Dulcinea del Tobloso is a peculiar case, to be sure, but enough of my parody of erudition!). A beautiful woman does nothing for me, she is superfluous, unnecessary; yet she immediately ends that waiting and therefrom does that impressionistic sense of space and color ensue - wholly human for she is seen as a beautiful woman, but also ethereal; thus, a moment formally sublime.
What did your beauty do Holly? That is the story that I want to hear.
There is, of course, never anything normal about the peculiar charms of a beautiful woman - arms ever too long, face far to piqued, nose rather askew, hands very much too small, etc… but usually a disorganization well short of anything that might be a fetish. What is IT? Yes, what is it? It is, at least, that rare moment of apperception wherein one finds oneself amid both those things that are real and their unreal relations and affiliates, where simulacra are welcomed, as are shadows and echoes; where poses and masks are intimate and alluring.
“Beauty” as a word can only emerge (as it did), don't you think, Holly dear, after all the bother of the period of courtly love? One does not take on burdens and challenges inspired by beauty, one does no great deeds intoxicated by beauty for beauty, no matter how delirious one might become in the presence of beauty, there is neither obedience, nor loyalty, nor service to beauty (unless, of course, one is engaged in some part of the all so pernicious "beauty industry"; but that is far far apart from my fixation at present), while there may be inspiration in the seeing, there is nothing particularly ennobled by such inspiration. Ah, ideals, and idealistic and idyllic ways of telling of them!
A small confession, Holly dear, I am a limited man, a man devoid of grand themes and epic scales, without even the slightest hope of a Form. I have only and merely my few tales, fewer of which I know very well at all. I write to you only as an admirer of beautiful women.
The beauty that recurs as opposed to the fashion of a time; the beauty that remains, adorned or not; yes, that's the one. While a pretty girl may be like a melody, a beautiful woman is a requiem.
Perhaps, Holly dear, you became only a motif or a type. But be of good courage: becoming a woman of substance was never in your stars… to your benefit, if I don’t say-so myself. You will, like every other beauty, remain at a distance, connected to me no matter that distance, in fictive space, or otherwise. My shame, indeed, should either of us take the guise of the Object – that is reserved for my indiscretion: that I might become a nusiance and bother, interrupting your view of what it is that is of you attention.
Diana at her Bath? Pierre Klossowski? How might I get from mere beauty to the divine? All reasonable questions Holly dear.
“Only divinity is happy with its own uselessness.” There is, for us mere mortals, a terrifying vertigo to this aimless and useless existence; we require obscurity and false clarity. Here is the intimacy of divinity and beauty: beauty is its own uselessness; beauty requires as little relation to the sexual act as does love or the needs of procreation, as does any divine one.
Apprehending beauty is the end of the waiting that is integral to every other moment not proximate to beauty (moments unto that ceaseless cycle).
Again, under threat of boredom: What does beauty DO? The same question might be posed to divinity of mythological time: the tale of the gods is what they DO. “This mountainous horizon, these woods, this vale and these springs, do they thus have no reality except in her absence? […] The more absorbed I become in the appearance of these objects, the better I see what the breeze is tracing: her forehead, her hair, her shoulders – unless a more blustery wind is creasing her tunic farther into the hollow of her thighs, above her knees. […] More than ever I experience the dignity of the space as the most reasonable enjoyment of my mind, the moment her forehead, her cheeks, her neck, her throat and her shoulders take shape there and dwell there, the moment her unendurable gaze explores and her nimble fingers, her palms, her elbows and legs slice and strike the air.”
From the affect of beauty on the beholder, to Diana’s visage at her bath: “…yet this body, in which she will manifest herself to herself, she actually borrows from Actaeon’s imagination.”
I, in the company of a beautiful woman can no more dominate her than I might submit myself to the her; I can only be submitted by that unknown force of beauty and that made that moment of the encounter inevitable.
One visage of that force is the Daemon, the intermediary between the god and man, between the beautiful and the beholder: “It is I who teach you this, O Actaeon, I whose external form, malleable to the will of the gods, so well lends iteslf to espousing their unfathomable intentions in order to give your senses proof of their arbitraty existence.” Beauty interrupts the continual and recurring flow of obscurity unto arbitrariness. In mythological cases, the Daemon functions as the interruption, in other more temporal and far less dramatic moments, beauty does so.
Such an interpretation: the encounter of Acteon and Diana at her Bath: “This incidence still belongs to the world of irreversible and uninterrupted space: the danger, the risk – like that of the hunt and the bath after the hunt – lies in the fact that the sacred grove of Diana’s bath is situated in this same space, and that numerous paths which seem to lead nowhere run into that very place.”
Yes, it is that “morose delectation” of Actaeon that I savor every so often.
“’What I saw, I cannot say what it was.’ Not that what one cannot say, one might not more fully understand, nor that one cannot see what one does not understand. Actaeon, in the myth, sees because he cannot say what he sees: if he could say it, he would no longer see. Yet Actaeon, meditating in the grotto, confers on Actaeon suddenly busting into the sacred in which Diana is bathing, the following remark: I shouldn’t be here, that’s why I’m here. The real experience, however, would boil down to an absurd proposition: I was supposed to be here because I was not supposed to be here.”
Nunc tibi me posito visam velamine rares
Si poteris narrare, licet - Ovid
[Now you may tell you saw me here unclothed,/If you can tell at all.]
“As soon as one analyzes these words, one notes in them both the provocation and the irony […] The provocation: Say it, then, describe Diana’s nudity, describe my charms, that no doubt what you’re waiting for, what your fellow men would love to know. The irony: If you can tell at all!”
A beautiful woman, then, is a fragment that is not of a whole, before or after the encounter with her. The “system” of her beauty is never wholly psycho- or social. Her beauty is without the obligations of language and consciousness (thus, speechless and thoughtless). “She is a beauty, no matter her features.” – Diana Vreeland. If you can tell at all. The particular features of a beautiful woman are accidental; she is a phantasm without essence. As a phantasm, possession is without concept.
Yes, Holly dear, you are sterling, like every beautiful woman; never once did you go lightly or gently.
But now my imagination has taken-over, trespassing both beauty and fantasy. I have failed to even indicate the beauty of a woman that arises only in conversation; you and I, of course, will never converse.
I remain,
T.
Sunday, March 28, 2004
Bollettino
The principal objections to democratical or popular
government, are taken from the inequalities which arise among men
in the result of commercial arts. And it must be confessed, that
popular assemblies, when composed of men whose dispositions are
sordid, and whose ordinary applications are illiberal, however
they may be intrusted with the choice of their masters and
leaders, are certainly, in their own persons, unfit to command.
How can he who has confined his views to his own subsistence or
preservation, be intrusted with the conduct of nations? Such men,
when admitted to deliberate on matters of state, bring to its
councils confusion and tumult, or servility and corruption; and
seldom suffer it to repose from ruinous factions, or the effect
of resolutions ill formed or ill conducted. – Adam Ferguson
Ill formed resolutions, and ill conduct in carrying them out, were at the heart of the Clarke controversies this week. LI watched with our most jaundiced eye as the Bush administration tried out a defense compounded of contradiction, denigration, and denial. None of them have worked very well, because they rebound against a solid fact: before 9/11, the mind of the Bush administration gave less thought to Al Qaeda then they did to raising the acceptable level of arsenic in drinking water. It was a non-agenda item.
However, the real question is whether the Bush mindset has changed in such a way as to secure us against terrorist attack. Us, in the narrow continental sense, and us, in the sense of the U.S. and its allies.
Although we generally avoid the vaguely repulsive experience of reading the Washington Post’s Charles Krauthammer – he is one of those columnists who seems to spit as he writes – his column about Clarke made the one sensible case against him, even as it buried the case in the usual Right Wing rolodex calumny. Clarke, in fact, should have apologized to the families of the WCT, because he, more than anyone else, was the architect of Clinton’s failed anti-terrorism initiatives.
“It is only March, but the 2004 Chutzpah of the Year Award can be safely given out. It goes to Richard Clarke, now making himself famous by blaming the Bush administration for Sept. 11 -- after Clarke had spent eight years in charge of counterterrorism for a Clinton administration that did nothing.”
Unfortunately, Krauthammer undermines his own point by exaggerating it to the point of caricature. Still, the Clinton administration did not do enough. And what it did do should have been done differently. There, we would have to agree. The problem is, what Clinton did wrong – responding with military force to Al Qaeda without jacketing that force in the full panoply of political pressures on those states in which Al Qaeda operats -- has been taken up by the Bush administration as a strategic panacea. The result of taking the Clinton doctrine to absurd extremes is shown in the overthrow of the one country in the Middle East that we know was not, in any major way, connected with the jihadists in Afgahanistan. All the eagerness that Bush’s apologists have shown in trying to pin some connection between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein stands in almost comical contrast with what we know about the connections between Al Qaeda and two of our allies, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. We know, and the whole Arab world knows, that if we are really trying to justify a war with a country on the basis of known, prolonged and sustaining relationships between that country and Al Qaeda, our soldiers would be in Riyadh and Islamabad.
Clarke’s failure, we think, comes from his obsession that Al Qaeda could only be dealt with by military force. We think that the Clinton administration should have been out there shaking its finger at the Saudis, at Pakistan, at Malaysia, at Indonesia, at Egypt – at every country where the terrorists have comfortably found niches.
Clinton didn’t do it. Bush, with the evidence before his eyes that something had to change, decided to relapse into the old groove. Clarke has surprised LI by showing that Bush shared the Iraq obsessions of his Defense Department subordinates. We assumed that Bush was more, well, sane than the Rumsfeld crew. We are still not sure we buy Clarke’s evaluation of Bush’s motives. But post 9/11, we have watched as the Bush administration, behind its rhetoric about a new kind of warfare, are engaging in just the kind of mistaken strategy that shows they have learned nothing from the past. The justification of this is comic: the war on terrorism, we are told, is going to last thirty years, fifty years, a century. Actually, it should have lasted precisely two years. By this time, Al Qaeda networks should really have been rolled back. Instead, they have further embedded themselves in the Mediterranean periphery.
Clarke’s claims about the Bush policy were being tested out even as he spoke last week. Unfortunately, the press was only interested in the sensational side of it, and soon let it sink to page B-12 or whatever. Two things happened in Pakistan. They are summarized by a Week in Review piece in the NYT:“On March 18, Pakistan's president, Pervez Musharraf, gave a television interview in which he described a pitched battle between Pakistani soldiers and 400 to 500 militants and set off expectations that Al Qaeda's No. 2 leader, Ayman al-Zawahiri, had been surrounded.
Two days later, military officials were playing down talk of Mr. Zawahiri's encirclement as "conjecture." And by the end of this week, a fresh audiotape message purportedly from Dr. Zawahiri emerged - taunting the government with a defiant call for General Musharraf's overthrow.”
The October surprise in the current election was supposed to be the capture or killing of Osama bin Laden. But it looks increasingly like another surprise, one not so pleasant for Bush, might occur – the toppling of the Mussharef regime. In fact, Pakistan is the one country in which stateless terrorism could actually metastasize to encompass the organs of the state. If this happened, or even if there is a bloody revolt, the Bush doctrine would not only take a fatal hit – it would open up a threat both to this country and to India that is a level larger than any terrorist threat ever before.
So, next week, we will do another post on Pakistan -- October Surprise II
The principal objections to democratical or popular
government, are taken from the inequalities which arise among men
in the result of commercial arts. And it must be confessed, that
popular assemblies, when composed of men whose dispositions are
sordid, and whose ordinary applications are illiberal, however
they may be intrusted with the choice of their masters and
leaders, are certainly, in their own persons, unfit to command.
How can he who has confined his views to his own subsistence or
preservation, be intrusted with the conduct of nations? Such men,
when admitted to deliberate on matters of state, bring to its
councils confusion and tumult, or servility and corruption; and
seldom suffer it to repose from ruinous factions, or the effect
of resolutions ill formed or ill conducted. – Adam Ferguson
Ill formed resolutions, and ill conduct in carrying them out, were at the heart of the Clarke controversies this week. LI watched with our most jaundiced eye as the Bush administration tried out a defense compounded of contradiction, denigration, and denial. None of them have worked very well, because they rebound against a solid fact: before 9/11, the mind of the Bush administration gave less thought to Al Qaeda then they did to raising the acceptable level of arsenic in drinking water. It was a non-agenda item.
However, the real question is whether the Bush mindset has changed in such a way as to secure us against terrorist attack. Us, in the narrow continental sense, and us, in the sense of the U.S. and its allies.
Although we generally avoid the vaguely repulsive experience of reading the Washington Post’s Charles Krauthammer – he is one of those columnists who seems to spit as he writes – his column about Clarke made the one sensible case against him, even as it buried the case in the usual Right Wing rolodex calumny. Clarke, in fact, should have apologized to the families of the WCT, because he, more than anyone else, was the architect of Clinton’s failed anti-terrorism initiatives.
“It is only March, but the 2004 Chutzpah of the Year Award can be safely given out. It goes to Richard Clarke, now making himself famous by blaming the Bush administration for Sept. 11 -- after Clarke had spent eight years in charge of counterterrorism for a Clinton administration that did nothing.”
Unfortunately, Krauthammer undermines his own point by exaggerating it to the point of caricature. Still, the Clinton administration did not do enough. And what it did do should have been done differently. There, we would have to agree. The problem is, what Clinton did wrong – responding with military force to Al Qaeda without jacketing that force in the full panoply of political pressures on those states in which Al Qaeda operats -- has been taken up by the Bush administration as a strategic panacea. The result of taking the Clinton doctrine to absurd extremes is shown in the overthrow of the one country in the Middle East that we know was not, in any major way, connected with the jihadists in Afgahanistan. All the eagerness that Bush’s apologists have shown in trying to pin some connection between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein stands in almost comical contrast with what we know about the connections between Al Qaeda and two of our allies, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. We know, and the whole Arab world knows, that if we are really trying to justify a war with a country on the basis of known, prolonged and sustaining relationships between that country and Al Qaeda, our soldiers would be in Riyadh and Islamabad.
Clarke’s failure, we think, comes from his obsession that Al Qaeda could only be dealt with by military force. We think that the Clinton administration should have been out there shaking its finger at the Saudis, at Pakistan, at Malaysia, at Indonesia, at Egypt – at every country where the terrorists have comfortably found niches.
Clinton didn’t do it. Bush, with the evidence before his eyes that something had to change, decided to relapse into the old groove. Clarke has surprised LI by showing that Bush shared the Iraq obsessions of his Defense Department subordinates. We assumed that Bush was more, well, sane than the Rumsfeld crew. We are still not sure we buy Clarke’s evaluation of Bush’s motives. But post 9/11, we have watched as the Bush administration, behind its rhetoric about a new kind of warfare, are engaging in just the kind of mistaken strategy that shows they have learned nothing from the past. The justification of this is comic: the war on terrorism, we are told, is going to last thirty years, fifty years, a century. Actually, it should have lasted precisely two years. By this time, Al Qaeda networks should really have been rolled back. Instead, they have further embedded themselves in the Mediterranean periphery.
Clarke’s claims about the Bush policy were being tested out even as he spoke last week. Unfortunately, the press was only interested in the sensational side of it, and soon let it sink to page B-12 or whatever. Two things happened in Pakistan. They are summarized by a Week in Review piece in the NYT:“On March 18, Pakistan's president, Pervez Musharraf, gave a television interview in which he described a pitched battle between Pakistani soldiers and 400 to 500 militants and set off expectations that Al Qaeda's No. 2 leader, Ayman al-Zawahiri, had been surrounded.
Two days later, military officials were playing down talk of Mr. Zawahiri's encirclement as "conjecture." And by the end of this week, a fresh audiotape message purportedly from Dr. Zawahiri emerged - taunting the government with a defiant call for General Musharraf's overthrow.”
The October surprise in the current election was supposed to be the capture or killing of Osama bin Laden. But it looks increasingly like another surprise, one not so pleasant for Bush, might occur – the toppling of the Mussharef regime. In fact, Pakistan is the one country in which stateless terrorism could actually metastasize to encompass the organs of the state. If this happened, or even if there is a bloody revolt, the Bush doctrine would not only take a fatal hit – it would open up a threat both to this country and to India that is a level larger than any terrorist threat ever before.
So, next week, we will do another post on Pakistan -- October Surprise II
Friday, March 26, 2004
Bollettino
“The most remarkable letter came from a woman who signed herself Thérèse M***, who asked the Courrier des spectacles to call on women to join together to "unveil this madness and force her to appear for what she is, so that visible beauty no longer be humiliated by hidden ugliness." It seems that Thérèse's husband was so taken by this "spectacle held up as the triumph of [the female] sex" that he demanded that she make herself invisible, having no further communication with him except through acoustic horns protruding from a globe of glass. "You can easily imagine that a woman of 23, not badly treated by nature, would not accommodate herself with facility to such a condition," wrote the disconcerted wife. Nevertheless, she explained, she would give anything in the world to know this secret, for, she realized, "it is enough to be invisible, however ugly one is, to receive the most flattering compliments." – Jann Matlock, The Invisible Woman and her secrets unveiled.
We can’t do it. We can’t leave the discussion so up in the air.
Jann Matlock, like any good cultural studies theorist, has read her Benjamin, and her Ginzberg, and her Foucault. She is fortunate enough to work on French culture, especially the roots of modernity – which, for French scholars, are easy to trace. You go to the French Revolution, you go to Paris, and you read the papers. Perhaps this is how she found the marvelous Invisible Woman.
This is the layout of the Invisible Woman exhibit of 1800. Spectators file into a room in which a glass ball hangs from the ceiling. Four acoustic horns jut out of the ball pretty far. The spectators can listen, if they wish, to the voice that speaks through these horns. It is the voice of a woman. And the woman’s implicit and explicit claim is to be in the room.
In other words, an invisible woman.
The contrivance is as rich in dialectical possibilities as the Turkish chessplayer to which Walter Benjamin refers in the Theses on history. That chessplayer enters the canon of modernity via Edgar Allan Poe, who wrote a detecting essay about it. Benjamin, no doubt, found the essay through Baudelaire’s translation of Poe.
Just as that chessplaying automaton possessed a solution, so, too, the Invisible woman possesses a solution. Matlock quotes an anonymous demystifier:
“We know today how the show worked thanks to a number of texts published to capitalize on the popularity of this and similar shows. The most remarkable of these, a pseudonymous pamphlet of 1800, entitled "The Invisible Woman and her Secrets Unveiled," was most likely published by Robertson himself and sold to viewers of the rival show at Saint-Germain l'Auxerrois (fig. 5). Decrying the miracle of the Invisible Woman as deriving from "a puerility," the pamphlet proclaimed that its author had no scruples about dissipating "the marvel that fascinates the eyes of the blind multitude": "we believe rather that we should get credit and glory for giving the following recipe for effecting the false miracle that enraptures every day." 48 Anyone wishing to replicate this magic was directed to build an acoustic contraption in a room below another room connected only by a slit in the floor, explained the author of the pamphlet. One should then hang a glass box above the hole in the ceiling of the lower room to distract the public from the point through which they might be seen. "Place in the above room on cushions, so her movements make no noise, a girl who puts her eye to this oblong opening in the floor of her room so she can see the objects presented to her . . . and then name them by applying her lips to the opening in the hidden tube." From her hidden room, the girl would regale the crowd with what she saw in a room where she was supposed to be residing, invisibly, amidst the acoustic paraphernalia that conducted her voice. "You will thus have the magic," declared the pamphlet, "of the Invisible Woman." “
How can LI resist this image, since it lays out so exactly, so suggestively, the situation of the beautiful woman in the novel? Indeed, one feels – or at least the writer fields, with his irritable, extended sensibility, his ludicrous antennae -- the woman on her cushions in the chamber below her description. The words come out, the crowd is, as it wants to be, mystified, and no woman appears in the glass ball, which sways slightly. No one notices the slit in the floor.
As Mattlock remarks, invisibility – from invisible rays to invisible powers – was a popular topic of the late Enlightenment. Remember, this is the period both of Mesmer and Mozart’s Magic Flute. The naturalization of what, in a previous epoch, would have been considered the work of demons or angels, did not so much destroy the power of the invisible as transfer it to another field, and another regime of legimation.
We loved the instruction in sleight of hand that Mattlock finds:
For Robertson [the exhibitor of the IW], the Invisible Woman Show was not an "experiment" of invisibility but rather a demonstration of acoustics like those displayed in Fitz-James's ventriloquism act. 53 Indeed, the Invisible Woman managed to hold the attention of audiences through several decades of the nineteenth century in shows throughout Europe and the United States because the illusionists in whose cabinets she appeared increasingly made claims about the scientific significance of the acoustic system on which the show was based. As Jacques Lacombe remarked in his Dictionnaire des amusemens of 1792, in order to dupe the public one had not only to have several ways to do the same trick but a way of turning arguments about one's tricks to one's advantage. Lacombe particularly cited illusionist Henri Decremps's advice that, when performing tricks before an audience of enlightened individuals, one should always avoid claiming one's powers magic or supernatural, but rather should suggest that they came from "an uncommon source that was extraordinary although natural."
This image and its semantic field, all of which Mattlock so expertly discloses, seems to LI to give us a sense of why it is so difficult to create a beautiful woman in a story. And why, perhaps, it wasn’t so difficult in an epoch that bore the painful detachment from magical beliefs in its recent collective memory. As Mattlock puts it, “As one newspaper article noted, spectators may well have left the show aggravated by its failure to satisfy their curiosity, but they nevertheless repeatedly told others that "in your life you have never been shown anything so beautiful as the woman that one does not see.”
Holly, je pense a vous!
“The most remarkable letter came from a woman who signed herself Thérèse M***, who asked the Courrier des spectacles to call on women to join together to "unveil this madness and force her to appear for what she is, so that visible beauty no longer be humiliated by hidden ugliness." It seems that Thérèse's husband was so taken by this "spectacle held up as the triumph of [the female] sex" that he demanded that she make herself invisible, having no further communication with him except through acoustic horns protruding from a globe of glass. "You can easily imagine that a woman of 23, not badly treated by nature, would not accommodate herself with facility to such a condition," wrote the disconcerted wife. Nevertheless, she explained, she would give anything in the world to know this secret, for, she realized, "it is enough to be invisible, however ugly one is, to receive the most flattering compliments." – Jann Matlock, The Invisible Woman and her secrets unveiled.
We can’t do it. We can’t leave the discussion so up in the air.
Jann Matlock, like any good cultural studies theorist, has read her Benjamin, and her Ginzberg, and her Foucault. She is fortunate enough to work on French culture, especially the roots of modernity – which, for French scholars, are easy to trace. You go to the French Revolution, you go to Paris, and you read the papers. Perhaps this is how she found the marvelous Invisible Woman.
This is the layout of the Invisible Woman exhibit of 1800. Spectators file into a room in which a glass ball hangs from the ceiling. Four acoustic horns jut out of the ball pretty far. The spectators can listen, if they wish, to the voice that speaks through these horns. It is the voice of a woman. And the woman’s implicit and explicit claim is to be in the room.
In other words, an invisible woman.
The contrivance is as rich in dialectical possibilities as the Turkish chessplayer to which Walter Benjamin refers in the Theses on history. That chessplayer enters the canon of modernity via Edgar Allan Poe, who wrote a detecting essay about it. Benjamin, no doubt, found the essay through Baudelaire’s translation of Poe.
Just as that chessplaying automaton possessed a solution, so, too, the Invisible woman possesses a solution. Matlock quotes an anonymous demystifier:
“We know today how the show worked thanks to a number of texts published to capitalize on the popularity of this and similar shows. The most remarkable of these, a pseudonymous pamphlet of 1800, entitled "The Invisible Woman and her Secrets Unveiled," was most likely published by Robertson himself and sold to viewers of the rival show at Saint-Germain l'Auxerrois (fig. 5). Decrying the miracle of the Invisible Woman as deriving from "a puerility," the pamphlet proclaimed that its author had no scruples about dissipating "the marvel that fascinates the eyes of the blind multitude": "we believe rather that we should get credit and glory for giving the following recipe for effecting the false miracle that enraptures every day." 48 Anyone wishing to replicate this magic was directed to build an acoustic contraption in a room below another room connected only by a slit in the floor, explained the author of the pamphlet. One should then hang a glass box above the hole in the ceiling of the lower room to distract the public from the point through which they might be seen. "Place in the above room on cushions, so her movements make no noise, a girl who puts her eye to this oblong opening in the floor of her room so she can see the objects presented to her . . . and then name them by applying her lips to the opening in the hidden tube." From her hidden room, the girl would regale the crowd with what she saw in a room where she was supposed to be residing, invisibly, amidst the acoustic paraphernalia that conducted her voice. "You will thus have the magic," declared the pamphlet, "of the Invisible Woman." “
How can LI resist this image, since it lays out so exactly, so suggestively, the situation of the beautiful woman in the novel? Indeed, one feels – or at least the writer fields, with his irritable, extended sensibility, his ludicrous antennae -- the woman on her cushions in the chamber below her description. The words come out, the crowd is, as it wants to be, mystified, and no woman appears in the glass ball, which sways slightly. No one notices the slit in the floor.
As Mattlock remarks, invisibility – from invisible rays to invisible powers – was a popular topic of the late Enlightenment. Remember, this is the period both of Mesmer and Mozart’s Magic Flute. The naturalization of what, in a previous epoch, would have been considered the work of demons or angels, did not so much destroy the power of the invisible as transfer it to another field, and another regime of legimation.
We loved the instruction in sleight of hand that Mattlock finds:
For Robertson [the exhibitor of the IW], the Invisible Woman Show was not an "experiment" of invisibility but rather a demonstration of acoustics like those displayed in Fitz-James's ventriloquism act. 53 Indeed, the Invisible Woman managed to hold the attention of audiences through several decades of the nineteenth century in shows throughout Europe and the United States because the illusionists in whose cabinets she appeared increasingly made claims about the scientific significance of the acoustic system on which the show was based. As Jacques Lacombe remarked in his Dictionnaire des amusemens of 1792, in order to dupe the public one had not only to have several ways to do the same trick but a way of turning arguments about one's tricks to one's advantage. Lacombe particularly cited illusionist Henri Decremps's advice that, when performing tricks before an audience of enlightened individuals, one should always avoid claiming one's powers magic or supernatural, but rather should suggest that they came from "an uncommon source that was extraordinary although natural."
This image and its semantic field, all of which Mattlock so expertly discloses, seems to LI to give us a sense of why it is so difficult to create a beautiful woman in a story. And why, perhaps, it wasn’t so difficult in an epoch that bore the painful detachment from magical beliefs in its recent collective memory. As Mattlock puts it, “As one newspaper article noted, spectators may well have left the show aggravated by its failure to satisfy their curiosity, but they nevertheless repeatedly told others that "in your life you have never been shown anything so beautiful as the woman that one does not see.”
Holly, je pense a vous!
Thursday, March 25, 2004
Bollettino
Two announcements:
One is that LI will be coming out much more erratically in the upcoming weeks, if at all. We talked to a man about a job today -- he actually had one. Seven bucks an hour, telemarketing. If you told LI when he was twenty that he'd be working for seven bucks an hour when he was forty seven, well, perhaps we would have opened the vein right there and then. But so it goes in this ruin of an economy.
Second is that LI has a small piece coming out in the New Yorker. Small as in Books in Brief small. A review of Marilyn Yalom's book. It should be published in the next couple of weeks. These guys have such class -- they are eager to pay me. Unlike some places that I can't name, that have floated me for two months and caused my ability to eat, turn on lights, and talk on phones serious damage.
Alas, we won't have time to examine the conceptual strain in the use of the word 'object' in feminism. Throw it on the fire, boys.
Two announcements:
One is that LI will be coming out much more erratically in the upcoming weeks, if at all. We talked to a man about a job today -- he actually had one. Seven bucks an hour, telemarketing. If you told LI when he was twenty that he'd be working for seven bucks an hour when he was forty seven, well, perhaps we would have opened the vein right there and then. But so it goes in this ruin of an economy.
Second is that LI has a small piece coming out in the New Yorker. Small as in Books in Brief small. A review of Marilyn Yalom's book. It should be published in the next couple of weeks. These guys have such class -- they are eager to pay me. Unlike some places that I can't name, that have floated me for two months and caused my ability to eat, turn on lights, and talk on phones serious damage.
Alas, we won't have time to examine the conceptual strain in the use of the word 'object' in feminism. Throw it on the fire, boys.
Tuesday, March 23, 2004
Bollettino
Beautiful women
We’ve reached the fourteenth chapter of our novel. At this point, we have to describe Holly Sterling. Holly’s death is the event that sets in motion the whole plot, and her corpse has been drained and buried since at least the third chapter. Eventually, we knew that we would have to show her in life – we would have to go backwards. And we knew that we had a problem. Holly Sterling is beautiful. Her reputation is held in that adjective. Beauty is one of her assets.
But between the saying of the thing and its credibility lies the whole sad mechanism of art. A mechanism that is as prone to breakdowns as one of those early versions of the horseless carriage. The ones with the engines you had to crank.
The figure of the beautiful woman lies at the very limit of the descriptive powers of the novel. At that limit, it defines the describable. What can be described is everything up to the beautiful woman. She, however, by being so purely descriptive, escapes description. This has been so for a long time. In the Iliad, the events are set in motion by a beauty contest and the seizure of a beautiful woman, Helen. In other words, from the very beginning of Western literature, the beautiful woman has been that figure from which the action flows. If Helen had been another smudged helot, and Paris had been a horny shepherd, who would have cared? In fact, we would have cared -- this question inaugurates another tradition – comedy – and is explored by, among others, Moliere in Amphytiron, as well as Shakespeare in Midsummer Night’s Dream. Class – status – is, in other words, written into the contract between reader and writer that sets the terms of the beautiful woman, and in its clauses we shift from comedy to tragedy and back.
But this is the theoretical fog that hovers over the facts in the case. In fact, how is Helen beautiful?
In that paleo age of the mirror, Homer’s answer is surprisingly modern. Or perhaps I should say that the answer is caught in a mode of representation that operates as a sort of invariant throughout Western literature. He constructs a negative space around Helen – that is, he shows her effect upon her beholders. It is not Helen who is beautiful – or at least, her beauty requires a mirror. It is a relation, not a Platonic form. Her most famous entrance is in the third book, where the elders behold “white armed Helen” at the gates, while the troops assemble below to battle:
Forthwith she veiled her face in shining linen, and hastened from her
chamber, letting fall a round tear; not unattended, for there followed
with her two handmaidens, Aithre daughter of Pittheus and ox-eyed
Klymene. Then came she straightway to the place of the Skaian gates. And they that were with Priam and Panthoos and Thymoites and Lampos and
Klytios and Hiketaon of the stock of Ares, Oukalegon withal and Antenor, twain sages, being elders of the people, sat at the Skaian gates. These had now ceased from battle for old age, yet were they right good orators, like grasshoppers that in a forest sit upon a tree and utter their lily-like [supposed to mean "delicate" or "tender"] voice; even so sat the elders of the Trojans upon the tower. Now when they saw Helen coming to the tower they softly spake winged words one to the other: "Small blame is it that Trojans and well-greaved Achaians should for such a woman long time suffer hardships; marvellously like is she to the immortal goddesses to look upon.”
Notice how beauty is not only in the eyes of the beholders, here, but is described almost entirely with reference to those eyes, and that effect. The woman herself – white armed, shedding some tears, covered with a cloak – has no real descriptive distinction to set her looks apart from ox eyed Kymene and Aithre. She is filled in, so to speak, by being filled in.
Every writer feels that something is surrendered here. But the defeat is obscure. The stakes of the battle are the writer’s own powers, but what are the means by which one recovers from the certain defeat that ensues from testing those powers on beauty?
That’s a very material question for LI.
However, contrast Homer with Balzac’s managing of the first encounter of Mademoiselle Marnaffe and Baron Hulot in Cousine Bette (note: most early translations of Balzac are bowdlerized. Better to read him in a good Penguin translation, if you don't read French):
Au moment où le baron Hulot mit la cousine de sa femme [poor cousin Bette] à la porte de cette maison, en lui disant: "Adieu, cousine!" une jeune femme, petite, svelte, jolie, mise avec une grande élégance, exhalant un parfum choisi, passait entre la voiture et la muraille pour entrer aussi dans la maison. Cette dame échangea, sans aucune espèce de préméditation, un regard avec le baron, uniquement pour voir le cousin de la locataire; mais le libertin ressentit cette vive impression qu'éprouvent tous les Parisiens quand ils rencontrent une jolie femme qui réalise, comme disent les entomologistes, leurs desiderata, et il mit avec une sage lenteur un de ses gants avant de remonter en voiture, pour se donner une contenance et pouvoir suivre de l'oeil la jeune femme, dont la robe était agréablement balancée par autre chose que ces affreuses et frauduleuses sous-jupes en crinoline.
- Voilà, se disait-il, une gentille petite femme de qui je ferais volontiers le bonheur, car elle ferait le mien.
Quand l'inconnue eut atteint le palier de l'escalier qui desservait le corps de logis situé sur la rue, elle regarda la porte cochère du coin de l'oeil, sans se retourner positivement, et vit le baron cloué sur place par l'admiration, dévoré de désir et de curiosité. C'est comme une fleur que toutes les Parisiennes respirent avec plaisir, en la trouvant sur leur passage. Certaines femmes attachées à leurs devoirs, vertueuses et jolies, reviennent au logis assez maussades, lorsqu'elles n'ont pas fait leur petit bouquet pendant la promenade.
La jeune femme monta rapidement l'escalier. Bientôt une fenêtre de l'appartement du deuxième étage s'ouvrit, et elle s'y montra, mais en compagnie d'un monsieur dont le crâne pelé, dont l'oeil peu courroucé, révélaient un mari.
Sont-elles fines et spirituelles, ces créatures-là!... se dit le baron, elle m'indique ainsi sa demeure. C'est un peu trop vif, surtout dans ce quartier-ci. Prenons garde.
Surely it is the dress, that robe which shows an agreeable motion produced by something other than those “affreuses et frauduleuses” crinoline slips – caused, in other words, by the motion of the thing itself, Marnaffe’s ass – which anchors our sense, from the very beginning, of Marnaffe as a woman who has a carnality that makes Helen’s white arms seem very pale, indeed. Cousine Bette is a novel of vengeance. The vengeance is effected by a very plain woman – Cousine Bette – on a beautiful woman – her cousin, Baronne Hulot – by means of a ‘jolie” woman – Marnaffe. It, too, is about an abduction of a sort, except this time it is a man, Baron Hulot, who is abducted. His abduction is in exchange for the abduction of Cousine Bette’s love, the sculptor Wenceslas Steinbock, who is stolen by the Hulot family for the daughter, Hortense. So we are not, after all, so far from the Illiad. But the emotional values in this story all emerge out of Hulot’s descent into the very delirium of pussy and ass – a delirium measured by the expenditure of money – for banquets, dresses, apartments, jewelry, the draining away the Hulot family fortune. Hulot’s taste for lying between Marnaffe’s cheeks is a ruinous passion, and in its ruin, a perversely heroic one. For all of Henry Miller’s poetic of the Land of Fuck, Hulot seems the truer inhabitant of the flesh. Balzac’s concept of the flesh is to oppose it radically to thought – this is the flesh you find around the bone. This is the pure flesh of the dick: unthinking, its will all rushes and retreats of blood.
But one could well ask: haven’t we slipped off the rails? Is Marnaffe more than “jolie”? For Balzac, beauté is ascribed to Baronne Hulot – Hulot’s wife. Her beauty is made up of the fact that she is a great soul. Her great soul is proven by the enormity of her sacrifices – in effect, she sacrifices the family estate to her husband’s appetite for Marnaffe. This sacrifice entails ruining her children, so that Marnaffe can devour the family fortune. Balzac precedes Zola in Nana in making the voracity of the whore – eating and sex, that everlasting duo -- play into a metaphor of money being spent. Nana eats, at a certain delirious point, whole railroad companies. Marnaffe mearly gulps down the Hulot real estate.
Helen, of course, cries and smiles – but does she eat? Does Baronne Hulot?
Baronne Hulot is nearing fifty. Balzac had a rather charming obsession, even when he was twenty, with forty to fifty year old women. He compares Adeline to her daughter, at the beginning of the novel, and tells us that 'amateurs of sunsets" would prefer the mother. But he fails to make the contract with the reader stick. Baronne Hulot’s beauty is affirmed at the limit of our imagination – we can believe in it, as we can believe in God, through a labyrinth of metaphors. But the thing itself – as a good thing, something as palpable as Marnaffe’s ass – always escapes us.
Next post I’m going to use Jann Matlock’s essay on The Invisible Woman and her Secrets Unveiled, and an ethnographic study of cocktail waitresses by Lorraine Bayard de Volo, to go a little further with this.
Beautiful women
We’ve reached the fourteenth chapter of our novel. At this point, we have to describe Holly Sterling. Holly’s death is the event that sets in motion the whole plot, and her corpse has been drained and buried since at least the third chapter. Eventually, we knew that we would have to show her in life – we would have to go backwards. And we knew that we had a problem. Holly Sterling is beautiful. Her reputation is held in that adjective. Beauty is one of her assets.
But between the saying of the thing and its credibility lies the whole sad mechanism of art. A mechanism that is as prone to breakdowns as one of those early versions of the horseless carriage. The ones with the engines you had to crank.
The figure of the beautiful woman lies at the very limit of the descriptive powers of the novel. At that limit, it defines the describable. What can be described is everything up to the beautiful woman. She, however, by being so purely descriptive, escapes description. This has been so for a long time. In the Iliad, the events are set in motion by a beauty contest and the seizure of a beautiful woman, Helen. In other words, from the very beginning of Western literature, the beautiful woman has been that figure from which the action flows. If Helen had been another smudged helot, and Paris had been a horny shepherd, who would have cared? In fact, we would have cared -- this question inaugurates another tradition – comedy – and is explored by, among others, Moliere in Amphytiron, as well as Shakespeare in Midsummer Night’s Dream. Class – status – is, in other words, written into the contract between reader and writer that sets the terms of the beautiful woman, and in its clauses we shift from comedy to tragedy and back.
But this is the theoretical fog that hovers over the facts in the case. In fact, how is Helen beautiful?
In that paleo age of the mirror, Homer’s answer is surprisingly modern. Or perhaps I should say that the answer is caught in a mode of representation that operates as a sort of invariant throughout Western literature. He constructs a negative space around Helen – that is, he shows her effect upon her beholders. It is not Helen who is beautiful – or at least, her beauty requires a mirror. It is a relation, not a Platonic form. Her most famous entrance is in the third book, where the elders behold “white armed Helen” at the gates, while the troops assemble below to battle:
Forthwith she veiled her face in shining linen, and hastened from her
chamber, letting fall a round tear; not unattended, for there followed
with her two handmaidens, Aithre daughter of Pittheus and ox-eyed
Klymene. Then came she straightway to the place of the Skaian gates. And they that were with Priam and Panthoos and Thymoites and Lampos and
Klytios and Hiketaon of the stock of Ares, Oukalegon withal and Antenor, twain sages, being elders of the people, sat at the Skaian gates. These had now ceased from battle for old age, yet were they right good orators, like grasshoppers that in a forest sit upon a tree and utter their lily-like [supposed to mean "delicate" or "tender"] voice; even so sat the elders of the Trojans upon the tower. Now when they saw Helen coming to the tower they softly spake winged words one to the other: "Small blame is it that Trojans and well-greaved Achaians should for such a woman long time suffer hardships; marvellously like is she to the immortal goddesses to look upon.”
Notice how beauty is not only in the eyes of the beholders, here, but is described almost entirely with reference to those eyes, and that effect. The woman herself – white armed, shedding some tears, covered with a cloak – has no real descriptive distinction to set her looks apart from ox eyed Kymene and Aithre. She is filled in, so to speak, by being filled in.
Every writer feels that something is surrendered here. But the defeat is obscure. The stakes of the battle are the writer’s own powers, but what are the means by which one recovers from the certain defeat that ensues from testing those powers on beauty?
That’s a very material question for LI.
However, contrast Homer with Balzac’s managing of the first encounter of Mademoiselle Marnaffe and Baron Hulot in Cousine Bette (note: most early translations of Balzac are bowdlerized. Better to read him in a good Penguin translation, if you don't read French):
Au moment où le baron Hulot mit la cousine de sa femme [poor cousin Bette] à la porte de cette maison, en lui disant: "Adieu, cousine!" une jeune femme, petite, svelte, jolie, mise avec une grande élégance, exhalant un parfum choisi, passait entre la voiture et la muraille pour entrer aussi dans la maison. Cette dame échangea, sans aucune espèce de préméditation, un regard avec le baron, uniquement pour voir le cousin de la locataire; mais le libertin ressentit cette vive impression qu'éprouvent tous les Parisiens quand ils rencontrent une jolie femme qui réalise, comme disent les entomologistes, leurs desiderata, et il mit avec une sage lenteur un de ses gants avant de remonter en voiture, pour se donner une contenance et pouvoir suivre de l'oeil la jeune femme, dont la robe était agréablement balancée par autre chose que ces affreuses et frauduleuses sous-jupes en crinoline.
- Voilà, se disait-il, une gentille petite femme de qui je ferais volontiers le bonheur, car elle ferait le mien.
Quand l'inconnue eut atteint le palier de l'escalier qui desservait le corps de logis situé sur la rue, elle regarda la porte cochère du coin de l'oeil, sans se retourner positivement, et vit le baron cloué sur place par l'admiration, dévoré de désir et de curiosité. C'est comme une fleur que toutes les Parisiennes respirent avec plaisir, en la trouvant sur leur passage. Certaines femmes attachées à leurs devoirs, vertueuses et jolies, reviennent au logis assez maussades, lorsqu'elles n'ont pas fait leur petit bouquet pendant la promenade.
La jeune femme monta rapidement l'escalier. Bientôt une fenêtre de l'appartement du deuxième étage s'ouvrit, et elle s'y montra, mais en compagnie d'un monsieur dont le crâne pelé, dont l'oeil peu courroucé, révélaient un mari.
Sont-elles fines et spirituelles, ces créatures-là!... se dit le baron, elle m'indique ainsi sa demeure. C'est un peu trop vif, surtout dans ce quartier-ci. Prenons garde.
Surely it is the dress, that robe which shows an agreeable motion produced by something other than those “affreuses et frauduleuses” crinoline slips – caused, in other words, by the motion of the thing itself, Marnaffe’s ass – which anchors our sense, from the very beginning, of Marnaffe as a woman who has a carnality that makes Helen’s white arms seem very pale, indeed. Cousine Bette is a novel of vengeance. The vengeance is effected by a very plain woman – Cousine Bette – on a beautiful woman – her cousin, Baronne Hulot – by means of a ‘jolie” woman – Marnaffe. It, too, is about an abduction of a sort, except this time it is a man, Baron Hulot, who is abducted. His abduction is in exchange for the abduction of Cousine Bette’s love, the sculptor Wenceslas Steinbock, who is stolen by the Hulot family for the daughter, Hortense. So we are not, after all, so far from the Illiad. But the emotional values in this story all emerge out of Hulot’s descent into the very delirium of pussy and ass – a delirium measured by the expenditure of money – for banquets, dresses, apartments, jewelry, the draining away the Hulot family fortune. Hulot’s taste for lying between Marnaffe’s cheeks is a ruinous passion, and in its ruin, a perversely heroic one. For all of Henry Miller’s poetic of the Land of Fuck, Hulot seems the truer inhabitant of the flesh. Balzac’s concept of the flesh is to oppose it radically to thought – this is the flesh you find around the bone. This is the pure flesh of the dick: unthinking, its will all rushes and retreats of blood.
But one could well ask: haven’t we slipped off the rails? Is Marnaffe more than “jolie”? For Balzac, beauté is ascribed to Baronne Hulot – Hulot’s wife. Her beauty is made up of the fact that she is a great soul. Her great soul is proven by the enormity of her sacrifices – in effect, she sacrifices the family estate to her husband’s appetite for Marnaffe. This sacrifice entails ruining her children, so that Marnaffe can devour the family fortune. Balzac precedes Zola in Nana in making the voracity of the whore – eating and sex, that everlasting duo -- play into a metaphor of money being spent. Nana eats, at a certain delirious point, whole railroad companies. Marnaffe mearly gulps down the Hulot real estate.
Helen, of course, cries and smiles – but does she eat? Does Baronne Hulot?
Baronne Hulot is nearing fifty. Balzac had a rather charming obsession, even when he was twenty, with forty to fifty year old women. He compares Adeline to her daughter, at the beginning of the novel, and tells us that 'amateurs of sunsets" would prefer the mother. But he fails to make the contract with the reader stick. Baronne Hulot’s beauty is affirmed at the limit of our imagination – we can believe in it, as we can believe in God, through a labyrinth of metaphors. But the thing itself – as a good thing, something as palpable as Marnaffe’s ass – always escapes us.
Next post I’m going to use Jann Matlock’s essay on The Invisible Woman and her Secrets Unveiled, and an ethnographic study of cocktail waitresses by Lorraine Bayard de Volo, to go a little further with this.
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