When we think of comic books it is easy to be put off by the lesser, gratuitous works that can be seen to litter any medium: works of adolescent sensation where Lady Spandex and Captain Forearms fight the ferocious Explosion Monster (I’m copyrighting that).  But if you cast your mind back to the characters that have lasted, some for almost a century, who have been revived and re-contextualised with each generation, you can see some quite intriguing archetypes on display.  Most obviously there are the early superhero characters that have their origins in Greek and Roman mythology: Wonder Woman is an Amazon, early artwork of The Flash depicted him as an exact replica of his mythical antecedent, Hermes (or Mercury) messenger of the gods, but the superhero genre as a whole is a modernisation of these ceaseless epic tales.  These are Gods among humankind, warriors granted unearthly powers, and like myths in their time, which sought to rationalise the human experience through fantastic tales of morality and fatalism, these superhero narratives, and the heroes they gave rise to, often speak to the concerns of the modern world (with equal smatterings of violence).

Consequentially, there is inestimable pleasure to be had dissecting the many allegorical facets of these seemingly innocuous adventures.  Like Gothic fiction before it, where social angst could be played out with the aid of invasive, inhuman vessels into which our paranoias might be poured – Dracula as the personification of our xenophobic terrors; Frankenstein’s monster as the scientific desecration of the natural; the Werewolf as our primal desires stirred alive to roam free – comics can likewise play out collective neurosis and escapist ideologies.  Sure, we don’t see the Hulk stooped to recite Milton in the flickering of a fading fire, but he still speaks something of a retribution visited upon mankind for its foray into unnatural science (gamma radiation, wasn’t it?), or the id left unchecked to rage and destroy.  Superman, often seen as the adolescent fantasy (the underestimated Kal-El hiding his true power under the awkward mask of bespectacled Clark Kent), is also the ultimate American immigrant magnified.  …And in a cape.  Spiderman is puberty.  The X-Men are (perhaps a little heavy-handedly) intolerance in all its forms.  The Silver Surfer is… Well he’s… Okay, I don’t know what the hell he is.  The dude is naked and surfs through space.  That’s weird.

I assume that I am not the first to draw this comparison, but to me Batman is the modern Hamlet.  Sure, he’s a little more proactive, is perhaps a little kinder to his sidekicks (he doesn’t send them off to get executed, at least), and doesn’t have quite as unnerving a fixation upon his mother, but the thematic similarities run deeper.  Both are characters whose narratives are born in the death of their parents (Hamlet’s mother is just as lost to him in her debasement), both are Princes motivated by revenge to seek justice, both are contemplative, melancholy, and use artful deception (skirting the edges of madness) to bring their opponents down.

Perhaps most tellingly, however, is the parallel between their environments.  Something is rotten in Denmark, and the entire state reeks of this corruption.  The new King is morally poisoned; wise figures such as Polonius sink into drivelling inanities; dear friends like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern betray and are betrayed; Ophelia is lost to insanity when she forgets to use a floatation device.  The world is a manifestation of the turmoils within Hamlet’s mind, and the forces waging to tear his psyche apart.  And in exactly the same manner, Gotham City is Bruce Wayne’s inner monologue projected outward on his urban sprawl.  The city is awash in lawlessness and vice, its colourful criminals manifestations of a perverted communal consciousness – indeed, there is profit in reading the entire Batman narrative as merely the elaborate delusions of a rich kid named Bruce lost in the haze of a dissociative disorder, sitting in his own Arkham Asylum cell.  Thus, few of Batman major villains are superhuman.  In most cases they are intriguing psychological tropes: Two-Face is the self-loathing schizophrenic; Joker is the psychotic unchecked by the superego; Poison Ivy is the environmental militant blinded by her convictions; Penguin is the social climber haunted by an inferiority complex; Riddler is the sad, self-sabotaging egomaniac.  And king amongst them all is their antagonist, Batman, who nightly wages war on the excesses of these personal demons, never able to kill them, but outwitting them, beating them into submission, and returning them to the momentary quiet of the subconscious where they fester, waiting to spring forth again.

And so Batman occupies a unique space in the comic book pantheon.  He is a terrifying figure, not noble and bright, but slinking through the shadows, almost Goya-esque, heroic not because he is granted super powers he is obliged to use, but a mortal man (now over seventy years old), battling against the neurosis that threatens to overtake us all, and haunted by the profoundly human realisation that his struggle can only end with death.

Simone Weil once wrote: “Attention alone – that attention which is so full that the ‘I’ disappears – is required of me.  I have to deprive all that I call ‘I’ of the light of my attention and turn it on to that which cannot be conceived.”[1]

There’s a challenge for me in Weil’s work that is based around the fact that she takes ‘absolute truth’ to be a given.  She spent her whole life searching for ‘truth’.  Can this belief in an ultimate truth also allow for multiple subjective truths, and take into account the fanaticism that has a tendency to develop whenever someone believes that they ‘have’ the ultimate truth (which invariably differs from other people’s truths)?

Is there a way of moving through my own subjective truth towards a deeper silence, that perhaps also sits beneath other people’s subjective truths: a great reservoir of light?

Polish poet Adam Zagajewski suggests that contemporary mass culture “is marked by its complete ignorance of the inner life,”[2] the life that provides the “final and indispensable energy propelling both poetry and people.”[3]

I’m beginning to think that this ‘inner life’ draws its energy from the silence that lies beneath things.  Perhaps paying attention to this silence is the first step towards writing poetry that expresses something deeper than my own subjective truth, that reaches below the ripples and currents of our ‘information age’ to a clearer understanding of the impact we have on each other and the world.

[2] Zagajewski, Adam.  A Defense of Ardor. Trans. Clare Cavanagh. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004. (138)

[3] ibid.

I adore the materiality of books, not always for the sake of the words in them as such (unless they have been inked into the margins that is) but for the hands the physical object has passed through. I would be as happy with a digital version of Journal of Dreams right now but it would never have the impact on me that The Australian and New Zealand Pharmaceutical Formulary 1934 did; that small blue book, when I picked it up at Sydney’s Rozelle Markets, still contained the hand-written script sheets of Dr. J. W. Quilter and the hand-drawn plans of a house. Not plans for actually building the house it seems, but information and advice for a would-be house-sitter (or milk thief): a circle with a cross through it indicates the location of: “Milk: on back steps – money too. No milk Wed. Night”. The kitchen is “Nice and Sunny”; the flat “all electric”; the area’s bus timetable is “available on request”; the driveway is edged by pepper and banana trees, beside the garage is an incinerator. It was these personal items stored between the pages of the book that convinced me to buy it. It was only later that I realised the poetics of the Formulary; how I can’t help but say, “Mix the Exsiccated Ferrous Sulphate” (32) in iambic pentameter and that the phrase “Tincture of Belladonna” (61) most clearly evokes for me the Zanzibar night markets where the swaying lamps gave just such a colour to the air.

Will the book as a physical object pass away in this digital age? I doubt it, it is after all an extremely effective information storage machine, not to mention its elegance and the way it symbiotically absorbs the heat from a human hand. I’m glad to have lived in an era dominated by the material book but am excited by the prospect that this dominance is coming to an end – e-books are here and if I had an e-reader I would buy Swedenborg’s Journal of Dreams for about 5$ and have it right – now; that is if it had been digitised yet, which, unlike 40 or so other titles by the author it has not (so alright, e-books are (almost) here).  I’ll have to wait for this book to be returned to the library, to be pulled from someone’s bag, placed in the return shoot by their hand. Perhaps if they are out there now reading this they will leave me a message slipped between its pages or comment on this post – please, what did Swedenborg dream on the 6^th of April 1744?

Citations

Finnemore, H., ed. The Australian and New Zealand Pharmaceutical Formulary 1934, W.C Penfold & Co. LTD, Sydney, 1934.

This is certainly a different kind of saying everything to that of Sade or Blanchot—one more concerned with the world as tangible, demanding as a premise that the world be tangible. Leslie Hill observes that Flaubert denotes “a fundamental shift in emphasis in the relationship of the author toward his material and his language […] arriv[ing] at an awareness of the near impossibility of a successful mimesis of reality” (333). But it is this near impossibility that founds a search for something beyond, a search initiated by Mallarmé and further executed by Blanchot, among others.

Although Flaubert attempted to distance himself from the realist movement, he acknowledged that he was considered one of its “high priests” (96). In his study of the milieu surrounding realism, Stromberg notes that “the realist movement was not only reacting against the romanticism of the previous era, but also the philosophical idealism of the German school, in particular of Hegel” (xv). Erich Heller senses the irony of this reaction against Hegel. Reading Flaubert through a Hegelian lens, Heller writes, “Flaubert, indeed, blatantly gives away the conspiracy of Realism […] Somewhere in its heart quivers the hatred of reality and the lust for conquest” (96).

If I may be permitted to read along the lines of Heller through a 20^th-century lens, it strikes me that Flaubert’s efforts have much in common with the motion of the Hegelian dialectic as characterised by Alexandre Kojève. It would seem that literary realism, in its quest for absolute expression, employs the dialectical movement it reviles. In his letters Flaubert claimed that the impersonality necessary to objective writing is achieved by assimilation of the objective world: “exterior reality must enter into us, almost make us cry out with it, if we are to represent it well” (93). In a phrase which could have been uttered by Kojève, Flaubert demands that writers “absorb the objective” (93). This idea of becoming impersonal via absorption is very close to Kojève’s portrayal of the dialectical movement. According to Kojève, the being whose desire is directed toward a natural-object (such as the tangible world Flaubert seeks to express in its entirety?) “creates and preserves its own reality by the overcoming of a reality other than its own, by the ‘transformation’ of an alien reality into its own reality, by the ‘assimilation’, the ‘internalisation’ of a ‘foreign’, ‘external’ reality” (4).

The dialectical movement is a neat way of thinking about the expansion of knowledge, but it also necessitates thinking about that which cannot be known, that which resists assimilation into individual consciousness and emphasises difference. Arguably this revelation is Flaubert’s greatest achievement.

Citations:

Flaubert, Gustave. “On Realism.” In Documents of Modern Literary Realism. Edited by George J. Becker. 89-96. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963.
Heller, Erich. “The Realistic Fallacy.” In The Artist’s Journey into the Interior and Other Essays. 89-97. New York: Random House, 1965.
Kojève, Alexandre. Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Lectures on the Phenomenology of Spirit. Translated by James H. Nichols Jr. Edited by Allan Bloom. Ithaca; London: Cornell University Press, 1969.
Stromberg, Roland N, ed. Realism, Naturalism and Symbolism: Modes of Thought and Expression in Europe, 1848-1914. New York; Evanston; London: Harper and Row, 1968.

Print, paper, and newspapers enabled the rise of new types of political systems based on expanded popular participation. The transition was not smooth, but those who understood the signs of the times early gained a historical head start. It is not a coincidence that Benjamin Franklin had a background in printing and newspaper publishing. The liberal-democratic political system that resulted from the American Revolution was well aligned with the emerging information technology of the time.

In the same way, he argues, the internet will require new forms of political representation into the future. Elsewhere, over at Melville House publishing, the implications of the internet for the future of the publishing industry and the work of writers:

The digital publishing dream is a wet one, for many publishers. Like kids in an old (very old) fashioned lolly shop, we’re surrounded by possibilities. Sure, it’s a little scary, as all good adventures should be. The lure of science fiction dangles enticingly in front of us and the learning curve beckons us onward and upward. We are athletes on the Tour de France. Some of us are in better shape than others. It hurts, the pain in our chests, the threat of defeat, the seemingly unattainable summit where Apple trees flourish and welcome us with open arms. We think we can, we think we can, and we can of course we can; this is nothing short of a revolution. A global coup in the analogue to digital migration. If ever the world was an oyster, then surely it is now.

When we think of Latin American literature what comes to mind, at least for most English-language-readers, is (yes, you guessed it) Magic Realism.  Most people think of the writers of the Boom led by none other than García Márquez (without a doubt one of the greatest novelists of the 20th century).  The problem, though, is that “Latin American literature” is much more than Magic Realism. I recently went back to and re-read Alberto Fuguet’s piece “I am not a magic realist” where he explains that his own reality as a Chilean writer, living in Santiago, has nothing to do with Macondo (the town of One Hundred Years of Solitude) and much more to do with McOndo. Fuguet says:

Unlike the ethereal world of García Márquez’s imaginary Macondo, my own world is something much closer to what I call “McOndo” — a world of McDonald’s, Macintoshes and condos. In a continent that was once ultra-politicized, young, apolitical writers like myself are now writing without an overt agenda, about their own experiences. Living in cities all over South America, hooked on cable TV (CNN en español), addicted to movies and connected to the Net, we are far away from the jalapeño-scented, siesta-happy atmosphere that permeates too much of the South American literary landscape.

Fuguet is only one of many “Latin American” writers who have distanced themselves from Magic Realism in the last forty odd years. What is interesting is that Fuguet does this by destabilising the notion of “Latin America” as created by García Márquez et al, and by appealing to some version of the ultra-modern-commodified and globalised popular culture of the late 20th and early 21st centuries.  The relevance of looking at this, of contemplating this, has tremendous consequences not only for how the “periphery” is conceptualised (in this case Latin America itself) but also for how the “centre” is.

I will confess immediately that I don’t speak German, and thus cannot read Rilke’s luminous work in its original, but I have found Stephen Mitchell’s translations to be rather striking.  You can get a marvellous Selected edition (which includes the ‘Duino Elegies’ and ‘Ariel’) from Vintage International (The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke).  Likewise, as fans of the book will attest, Mitchell’s translation of Letters To A Young Poet captures the wonder and consolation that Rilke offers to any soul-starved (though frankly a little whiny) artist awaiting inspiration (Letters to a Young Poet).

But back to The Tempest and the multi-layered, enriching experience of Rilke’s cross-pollination: ‘Der Geist Ariel’ is a wonderful short poem, The Tempest proving itself to be perfectly suited to Rilke’s sensibilities.  Themes of the agony of longing; the tremulous bonds of love that quiver with desire and despair; ghostly images of absence and loss; Rilke explores them all, tracing the immaterial bonds that unite us all in a tidy summary of Ariel and Prospero’s relationship:

And half imperious, half almost ashamed,

you make excuses, say that you still need him

for this and that, and, ah, you must describe

how you helped him.  Yet you feel, yourself,

that everything held back by his detention

is missing from the air.

Come on.  That’s good stuff. 

For much of the poem the narrator speaks to Prospero as though in the midst of a dialogue, but at its conclusion Rilke projects himself into the eyes of Ariel, in a nicely embedded parenthesis, watching as Prospero surrenders his power, becomes merely a man again, and asks the audience for the indulgence of their applause.  And what a magnificent moment!  Shakespeare, through the character of Prospero, is dropping his authorial mask at the end of his ‘final’ play to ask his audience to bid him and his work a fond farewell, but Rilke’s manner of respecting this request is to instead slide into the text, putting on the mask of Prospero’s newly freed spirit to admire his once-master as a grateful participant in the fiction, swooning in a kind of Stockholm Syndrome of Artistry.  It’s lovely. 

Ultimately, this exchange got me wondering about other examples of such artistic and authorial conversations, where one work directly responds to the stimuli of another masterpiece.  Obviously there are the famous ones – Keats’ ‘On First Looking Into Chapman’s Homer’, Auden’s ‘Musee des Beaux Arts’ and its description of Brueghel’s Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, or for that matter, William Carlos Williams’ collection Pictures From Brueghel – but are there ever famously negative responses?  Reactions against a work that in its revulsion creates art?  ‘I Hate Madame Bovary And Here’s Why’, a haiku?  Traditionally we think of the artist sitting in stunned bliss or giddy excitement, striving to scratch out their response to a work that has rocked them to their very core, but the artist can be notoriously petty.  The genius even more so.  (I’ve heard that that elephant who paints with his trunk is a complete bastard.)

I’m positive that there are numerous such examples of writers responding with rebukes rather than regard, but my enfeebled brain is struggling to think of one.  And I guess that for now I am happy enough to swim through the warmer waters where everyone is struck with a dreamy wonder. 

p.s. I don’t hate Madame Bovary.  I think she’s funny. 

The purpose of a Midrash, Hart suggests, is commonly “the desire to make sense of oddities in scripture–contradictions, gaps, repetitions and the like…” (11), thus serving to stabilise a (biblical) source text. While reading Hart it occurred to me that much of Jacques Derrida’s work can be viewed as a radicalisation of this practice: Derrida often interrogates and explodes anomalies in source texts, thus destabilising, rather than stabilising them. For me, when the instability of a source text is exposed it is often fiction that finds its way in, or perhaps fiction has a way of excavating what was lurking there all along. I performed the following [Radical] Midrash on an extract from Derrida’s “Plato’s Pharmacy”, itself an interrogation of Plato’s Phaedrus:

“Pla[y] to[o much with the oven and it will awaken – Swedenborg, that great big woman, used to roast heads in there. He] maintains [his dream diary, experiencing] both the exteriority of writing and its power of maleficent penetration, its ability to affect or infect what lies deepest inside [his memory]. The pharmakon is that dangerous supplement that breaks into the very thing that would have liked to do without it yet [Swedenborg, of course, cannot resist the lure of writing: this remedy for memory-loss, this poison for memory, this pharmakon. As he shapes on paper each dream, its impression is erased from his living memory. It is, not surprisingly, his tongue that displays the symptoms first,] lets itself at once be breached, [each word clanging between his lips,] roughed up [to furnace-touch], fulfilled, and replaced, completed by the very trace through which the present increases itself in the act of disappearing.” (110)

Derrida, Jacques. “Plato’s Pharmacy.” Dissemination. Trans.: Barbara Johnson. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981, 61-172.

Hart, Kevin. “Francis Webb: Unsaying Transcendence” Southerly 60.2 (2000),10-25.

Webb, Francis. Cap and Bells: Poetry of Francis Webb. Ed. Michael Griffith and James A. McGlade. Sydney: Collins Angus & Robertson Publishers Pty Ltd, 1991.

The exhibition was opened by Christopher Allen, art critic and former lecturer at the National Art School.  Part way through his speech, he was interrupted and jeered at in a manner that seemed utterly incongruous with the slender champagne flutes sparkling in people’s hands.

The reason for this lay in the content of his speech itself, in which he acknowledged that there were people in the room who “hated each others guts”, and that this fact should be brought out into the open before he proceeded.  He then spoke about the changes that have been made recently to the National Art School – in particular, the recent sacking of the majority of the heads of department and the push towards a new curriculum that signals a radical departure from the school’s long heritage of studio-based teaching.

Government funding (and the lack of it) is really at the heart of these massive changes to one of Australia’s oldest, most respected art schools.  Beyond the microcosm of this one speech, in a small gallery just off Oxford Street, lies the National Art School itself: the students, the teachers, those who support the school; and beyond that are the government departments and bureaucrats who implement policies and balance budgets.  Beyond that again lies the wider community, many of whom have never heard of the National Art School, and will never venture inside any of the small galleries just off Oxford Street.

The question for me is, was this impassioned speech important in this broader context?  Did it mean anything?  I believe it did – even if only by virtue of its honesty.  It was not a “nice” speech.  It was a speech that revealed a deep respect for, and a willingness to fight to save a tradition that is being threatened.  That same honesty, passion and energy is absolutely necessary if we are to fight – in each of our small microcosms – for a world that is not governed solely by balancing the budget.

Saving Lascaux has received the support of some of my real heroes in the world of poetry, especially Pierre Joris and Clayton Eshleman (an article by Eshleman about Lascaux is available on Joris’ blog). The question is, why as poets we should care? Eshleman proposes that at Lascaux

humankind’s greatest endowment, imagination, is initiated, empowered, and fully realized. It is arguably the most spiritual spot on earth.

And others have spoken to the idea that Lascaux provides the ‘basis of contemporary art‘. But for me, there is something more fundamental about it. Jerome Rothenberg, in the preface to the original 1967 collection Technicians of the Sacred asks what is primitive poetry?

the work will probably not end with the “single” line & its various configurations – will more likely be preceded & followed by other lines. Are all of these separate “lines” (each of considerable duration) separate poems, or are they the component parts of a single, larger poem moving toward some specific (ceremonial) end? Is it enough, then, if the lines happen in succession & aren’t otherwise tied? Will some further connection be needed? Is the group of lines a poem if “we” can make the connection? Is it a poem where no specific connection is apparent to “us”? If the lines come in sequence on a single occasion does the unity of the occasion connect them into a single poem? Can many poems be a single poem as well? (They often are.)
What’s a sequence anyway?
What’s unity?

Such questions don’t apply to just ‘primitive’ (Rothenberg uses the term in no way disparagingly) poetry, but for poetry at all its localities in time and geography: poetry is much bigger than the 400 yr old Western cannon we learn at universities, and much much bigger than my generation’s cannon of post-WWI modernisms. Lascaux reminds us that what we understand by ‘poetry’ needs to be de-centred, non-hegemonic. Poetry is more than lines, stanzas, pages, books, movements etc. Poetry existed in other times. Poetry is written in other languages. Poetry is performance, song, dance, music, spoken, written…poetry doesn’t just come now from the metropole. It isn’t a stretch to admit that an imagination that can comprehend poetry outside of what we understand by the Western tradition can also begin to comprehend equally ideological assumptions, like that capitalism is a natural, neutral and global system.

If, as Zukofsky says, “Education begins with poetry” that “informs…the intellect” or as Sidney says that it’s a “first nurse” that allows us to feed on “tougher knowledges,” then Lascaux is worth us caring about.