Ways of Seeing

I heard from a friend, female, via email, regarding my “Crossing the Lines” essay of Jan. 11. Her comments are always smart, reasoned, and telling. In this case, however, she had not read Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita—and perhaps my essay did not explain enough of the plot line—and so she had a quite obvious question. Since she didn’t comment on this site, I shan’t mention her name, for confidentiality, but I will quote from her email a couple lines that touched off my answer to her, and this short essay.

Where do you think the line should be drawn in sexual relationships between children (or teenagers) and adults? […] Your article’s point, however, is that great art happens when lines like that are crossed or obliterated altogether, whether the subject be sexual or anything else. But what line has been set in the first place?

I ultimately answered her first question: besides the established law on “age of consent” between adults and children, we all have a line we set for ourselves—or at least I imagine we all do. Perhaps it’s a line that we learn from society (likely) or a line we learn from just being human (not likely, but the thought is nice). Although this answer (and subject) is a “way of seeing,” it does not deal with art directly, so I’ll move on to my answer to her comment and second question, which are really the impetus behind this essay:

I’m glad you brought up that Lolita conundrum. That’s exactly the kind of “line” I was talking about….but more toward how writers create art through social controversy. Humbert Humbert was an early-40s, never-been-married man, who fell in deep lust with a 13 yr old girl (a coquette, really, but hardly precocious). That’s the “line” that Humbert (the character) crossed, and Nabokov (the artist) needed to breech to show many things about the human psyche, not to mention societal mores.

I took a class while working on my MFA, in which Lolita was taught, but not discussed as “well, what’s it all about?” kind of round-table seminar. We in fact looked at how the author created art out of this human drama: how Nabokov built tension through his scenes; the psycho-drama between Humbert and Lolita; how Nabokov actually brought characters from one state of mind to another; and of course all the images (and imagery) that made the reader see things happen. However, there were several students in the class who simply thought that Nabokov was sort of disguising his lust for little girls by writing about Humbert Humbert. If one knows anything about Nabokov, that kind of thought is ridiculous. But I was astounded how some of my classmates couldn’t get around their own notions of mores, society, etc, to discuss the book as art…or discuss it as a piece of literature and what makes it work that way. They simply kept pointing to the book and saying “how could someone think this up who doesn’t have that urge to molest children?” Needless to say, none of them were good writers themselves, and didn’t know a metaphor from their kneecap. But that reader mindset is the battle most artists have to fight if they are going to break barriers of what is considered “decency” in society. Nowadays, I don’t think any subject has gone without discussion or put somehow into art (with varying results as to their “low” art or “high” art value).

There’s another reason i’m glad you brought up the age thing with Lolita: I put that up front in the essay because that’s just the sort of thing people latch onto and, perhaps, obsess about and thus miss the point of the essay. (I’m not saying you did this….). I mentioned several authors in that essay, and their famous works in which they crossed lines. Why should only the prurient, most sordid, story be the only one rebutted? (again, i’m not singling you out, but rather touching on the sort of focus that many people have when “hot button” issues come up in conversation or essays). Perhaps at the time, Lolita may have been the grandest issue a literary writer could have tackled. Yet Flaubert’s Madame Bovary was seen as a scandalous story, and all she was doing was having lots of affairs (and even died in the end for her “sins”—always a just punishment back in those days of writing…characters didn’t get away with being “bad” until Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie, a story about a young woman who slept her way to the top of society, and lived to enjoy it (thank you very much) ). But in the 1850s, especially in Catholic France, marriage was still sacred, and to step out of it in any way was scandalous.

One more thing…artists need lines to cross, and they don’t want those lines to be “obliterated” as you say. If one obliterates the lines, then the drama from which an artist can extract is diminished.

Yes, my friend did not mention the other several writers I included in the essay—she was emailing me a quick note, which included lots of other subjects, and so I didn’t expect an essay in reply—but she understood the essay’s overall “point” about crossed lines. My argument is not with my friend, but with my former classmates, who as college students nearing graduation (of the four I speak, three where undergrads in their final semester) should have known better, and as writing student should have been able by then to distinguish between art and … whatever else there is in “real” life.

No, no, no! I don’t expect everyone to “get” something, or everything. Mere appreciation of art forms can be difficult; understanding art forms is difficult. But comprehending where the artist is coming from should not be a hurdle at all. Sorry, that’s where I draw the line. British artist Damien Hirst preserves a shark in formaldehyde. Stupid? Perhaps to some, but who can argue the man’s sincerity in creating art for some effect, even if most people who see the exhibit “don’t get it”? Christo and Jeanne-Claude wrap buildings, walkways, even around islands. Incomprehensible? Lots of people think so—they just don’t get it. But again, Who can argue their artistic vision and integrity? Now, any reader can say these two examples don’t broach any “unseemly” subjects, such that Nabokov did with the budding sexuality of a young girl, taken advantage of by a middle aged man.

So perhaps then it becomes a subject matter issue for people. But which subjects should not be touched by artists, and who should arbitrate the guidelines or—should it come to that again out of history’s long past—laws for their use? “Government!” cry the masses. Okay. Bad idea, but okay, let’s look at that. Government writes laws banning obscenity, which include pornography of any nature, in art forms of various kinds (but today people think of photographs when “pornography” is mentioned). Lots of pornography laws exist in America, and especially the American South, the buckle on the country’s Bible Belt. Yet look at this fact: South Carolina has the youngest “age of consent” law; 14 years for female to consent to sex with an adult, 16 years for male. Talk about a problem of subject matter! These facts create all kinds of possibilities—lines—for artists to cross, not the least of which points to Humbert Humbert’s infatuation with 13-year-old Dolores Haze. As I see this problem now, the dangers do not lie with artists crossing lines. The dangers lie with people who can’t deal with a subject not only dreamed up by an artist, but one that exists in their very laws.

My female friend asked me, “what line has been set in the first place?” for which artists must cross to create art. Perhaps it is this line I just mentioned, the line created between what people—governments—impose on one segment of society, while in another that line has been broken to create just that sort of power breech that confounds people’s view of society, and humanity.

Tags: Seeing in Progress by mark
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One important element needed to create art is the need to cross a line. Art is, if we want to show something about humanity, I think, an expression of metaphor. When Humbert Humbert finds that he must pursue Lolita, he becomes a metaphor for action upon hidden desires. It’s only natural, Humbert explains, and has historical roots, in fact, for a man of advancing age to seek the beauty of a pubescent girl. The real-life argument (or inarguable position) of an adult-child sexual relationship plays little part of the ensuing art. Crossing that line, in the literary context here put, is the pursuit of art, and creating that metaphor through language is the assumption of the ultimate success of that art subject’s validity. In other words, what is not talked about in society is intrinsic for art’s subjectivity: what does happen—what can happen—when someone of an ordinary (or extraordinary) intellect turns off the switch that prevents us from pursuing taboos, and crosses the line established by socio-societal norms?

Vladimir Nabokov’s style, his language, the poetry infused in his sentences to create beauty, sustains that art objective in Lolita. If not dealt with from a literary position—an intellectual framework even—as Humbert Humbert devises, the work completely fails as art. Pornography thus ensues, and in this case of a rather demented nature, by most standards, I should think. Yet the lynchpin in this case, I would argue, is the crossing of that line between “tastefulness,” “propriety,” and “accepted social mores.” Nabokov could not have been the first man to think of a situation like that of Humbert, nor of a character like Lolita, who by the evidence in the novel is completely on to Humbert—and she precociously provokes the situation between them. These are real people who can be found in society, in newspaper accounts, in journals throughout history. Nabokov merely took those notions finally across that line.

That line crossed to create art need not be one of such profound separation between “decency” and “pornography” as many would argue is what happens in Lolita. One need only look at Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones, the story of a foundling given an education and sense of virtue. But Tom has a bit of an appetite for good food, strong drink, and women. Fielding places Tom in situations that often create hilarity because of that line between moralism and reality, given the signs of the times in 18th century England, and all those hypocrisies. Morality often is the line that must be crossed in literature, because establishment norms are upheld by people who cannot themselves attain (or long sustain) that lofty station, even when large segments of society hold themselves in such extremity. Hypocrisy always shows itself, because, as artists down the centuries have proved, human beings are filled with contradictions. Humanity is folly, the artist says over and over, and THIS is what it is like to be human.

That line an artist crosses is not necessarily about thumbing a nose at government or society, but an attempt to show the folly of hypocrisy wherever it shines. For example, Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary describes a provincial French woman’s boredom with being a country doctor’s wife, and out of complete narcissism travels in and out of sexual liaisons to find happiness. Flaubert had no notions to say to society, “a woman has every right to fuck around if she gets bored, regardless of society’s and the Church’s mores and rules.” In fact, one finds in Flaubert’s letters and diaries that he did not like Emma Bovary; he thought she a typical product of bourgeois society that could not own up to the lofty ideals they espoused in their middle class ranks. Nearly all the characters of the novel show, ultimately, Flaubert’s dislike of the bourgeois class: Dr. Charles Bovary ends up killing a patient out of shear bravura at the thought of making a name for himself (and becoming rich) in the medical field; Homais is a typical blowhard with superficial ideals, exposed through his incessant talk filled with clichés. Even with the success of the novel, Flaubert was put on trial for indecency, yet even that is a separate matter to its status (and gift to we readers) as art. On his deathbed, it has been told, Flaubert expressed his ultimate view of his anti-heroine, by saying “that whore” would live on in art long after he was dead. He was right: out of his low opinion of the French middle class of his time, he created a character that yet speaks universal truths about marriage and society.

Contemporary literature has license to broach any subject. It were the Fieldings, Flauberts, Woolfs, and Nabokovs who blazed the trails. Nothing today lies shielded behind the veil of “propriety.” Thus, subjects of the so-called prurient nature hold little fascination in the literary realm. But that doesn’t mean there are no longer any lines to cross. Writers such as Philip Roth continue to test the relationship between men and women, the love (or its antithesis) that bonds (or destroys) them in such as a work as Sabbath’s Theater. Norman Rush saw through a woman’s eyes (Mating, 1992) an intellectual exploration of love, its acquisition, and long-term bond extraneous to the physical-sexual desire. In Mortals (2003), Rush approached from the male perspective those bonds, and how desire can upset the balance between husband and wife.

Metaphor is no less important or difficult to attain in art today as it was 100 or 150 years ago. Perhaps as there are so many stories in our literary conscience, we demand that writers find new ways to approach the classic dilemmas of life. That forces new lines, other lines, to cross, lines that are nuanced from the architecture of what has already been written. I think this presents opportunity, rather than obstacles, for the literary artists. Any quick look at society, relationships, sexual power, independence, and individuality, yields numerous possibilities for story. As in pool, art is all about angles one sees between the objects on the table; and then of course, you must take the shot.

Tags: Literature, Seeing in Progress by mark
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At a dinner party last night, we got to talking about Samuel Beckett through the ebb and flow of conversation. I mentioned that people can surf to websites and download the text of many of Beckett’s plays, including Waiting for Godot, Krapp’s Last Tape, and Endgame. A dinner mate brought around the comment that Beckett’s plays were not meant to be read, but performed. I couldn’t agree more, yet actors must first read the play before they can perform a part, and discuss what’s going on with the play, their parts, and how all that links. Likewise, directors must gain an insight of a play—ideally to what the author had in mind while writing it—so they can stage the drama to its greatest effect.

I read Waiting for Godot before I saw it performed at London’s Old Vic Theater in 1997, with Ben Kingsley as Estragon and Alan Howard as Vladimir. I wanted to “get a handle on it,” as I thought at the time. My reading was quick, as I remember. This wasn’t a mistake, per se, but it did show me something about the difference between reading a Beckett play (perhaps any play), and seeing it performed. I had little knowledge of Samuel Beckett beyond survey courses in university, or what I would pick up in the bookstore while surfing through the stacks. And then came the stage performance at The Old Vic.

The silence that stretched between one spoken line and the next astonished me. And it wasn’t the silence itself, but what was happening during these periods between Estragon and Vladimir’s dialogue. I saw reflection—on what was said, what was meant by what was said, or what could be meant by what was said; I saw where a piece of dialogue had taken a character into his present condition, and nowhere else. I saw expressive countenance, the enlightened eyes or frown-in-flummox. I saw the dramatic gesture, an act with meanings all of itself. I saw the ponderable and the imponderable between Estragon and Vladimir. Silence says so much, Beckett was telling us.

In an interview with Kingsley and Howard near the end of rehearsals for the Vic performances, of which I’ve only today been able to read thanks to web archives, Kingsley and Howard had this to say:

Ben Kingsley: We’ve done such a lot of talking during rehearsals. There comes a time when things have to be allowed to settle. Where our brains ought to be now is veering towards silence.

Alan Howard: We’ve had to dig and delve. It’s the nature of the beast. Godot is made up of millions of fragments and connections.

…..

Howard: I think it would be very difficult for actors to do this play unless there was a natural aptitude for each other………..

Kingsley: ……. to be in on the same joke.

Howard: It can’t be arranged or structured. There’s such an astonishing musicality in the text and rhythms of speaking, intonation and connection, quite apart from what is being said. He uses simple language, which becomes more and more involved. A simple line can carry great complexity with the way it is timed, intoned. The way in which it rubs up against the line before and the line after it. It is a piece of material constantly moving, with 10,000 interweaving strands.

Kingsley: It eats you up. You go home in a take-away bag.

Howard: It’s very, very exacting.

In 1985, Samuel Beckett directed his three most famous plays—Waiting for Godot, Krapp’s Last Tape, and Endgame—for film productions, grouped under the title “Beckett Directs Beckett.” I’ve read several accounts of Beckett’s directorial involvement, including that he made many textual changes to the acting text of the plays. At one point in the rehearsals for Endgame, Beckett stopped the actor, Rick Cluchey, and asked him to wait a few beats of silence between one word and the next. The silence, Beckett explained, would be all important for the audience to understand.

Who but the author has the last word on interpretation? Some would argue that answer. Especially when you take into context the fact that Beckett made changes to his originally published texts for those 1985 performances. We’re talking as much as 30 years between original publication (and performance) and his final hand in their productions. What did Beckett see? Did that come from hindsight, or just a practiced (practical?) sense to squeeze the most out of the language for better effect? No one knows for sure. Beckett didn’t enlighten anyone (except of course the actors), although the change to his plays will undoubtedly contribute to an answer, as insufficient as that may be for some people.

What is clear, I think, is that Beckett never lost his sense of the absurdity of life—or life’s absurdities: take either for what they say about humanity. The silence of thought, and the space that silence gave between the banter that humans spew because we are language-possessed beings. Yes, Beckett’s vision was silence, always the silence.

Tags: Literature, Seeing in Progress, Theater by mark
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Koyaanisqatsi is a film that one can easily envision having been made in the 1920s, or ‘30s, or even the ‘50s…from somewhere in China, or Russia; one of those strange, state-sponsored films that show capitalism in disrepute, and uncheckable disintegration, and likewise show some Benevolent Government (it doesn’t have to be China or Russia, but I’m a Westerner and have been properly washed of all things harmful coming from Daddy Country) in perfect resolve to protect its people and, better yet, uplift them and show the outside world the splendid life they live under the watch and care of government.

Nothing could be further from the truth, however. This scenario comes wholly from the imagination of historical happenstance. In fact, the film Koyaanisqatsi premiered in 1982, directed by Godfrey Reggio (famous for broad, panning scopes that articulate the world in poetic folds of visual concentration), and produced by Francis Ford Coppola. The film features what many high-profile reviews and casual viewers have described as “a movie with no conventional plot” that focuses on humanity’s unbalanced relationship with his own and Earth’s environment brought about through untamed progress. One can disagree with the reviews and viewers’, and my own, simple synopsis of Koyaanisqatsi. It’s certainly an art film, by all stretches of modern film description. Yet it also holds that socio-political angle if only through basic interpretation of its subtitle: “Life Out of Balance”.

I don’t review movies. Never have. However, as my passion for arts extends to each possible room of the arts’ hacienda, I can say something about how the movie affected me. And—before I do so—let me also point out that this effect has little to do with my overall point of this essay. Nonetheless, readers expect this in the back of their mind, to the effect of asking themselves as they read, “But what do you think about the movie?” So here’s my take on Koyaanisqatsi: Reggio presents a vision of life that seems straight out of Alvin Toffler’s book “Future Shock”, a dramatic exposition of life and society moving so quickly that people’s minds—partly because of genetics perhaps, but more likely their sense of history and of themselves in its maelstrom—cannot grasp the ever new landscape presented to them by science, medicine, manufacturing, social change, architecture, even art. All this sounds familiar, doesn’t it? A computer’s life is about two years; pharmacology has advanced to a point where people live much longer than they should ever rightly expect; the Internet has changed everything about communication and information retrieval for the present and into the long, long future. “Future Shock” actually was published in 1984, two years after Koyaanisqatsi. Don’t think future shock is lived by you? Think again. If I were writing this essay in 1984, I would have had to stop and go to the library to look up Toffler’s book for the year it was published; likewise for Reggio’s movie. Instead, I found both references—and all the information I could possibly want—within 18 seconds, just by Googling both names. That, my friends, is future shock.

Koyaanisqatsi makes a case for life out of balance through images and sound. First by showing in those broad, sweeping pans, Mother Earth in its pristine nature. Then, gradually, Reggio introduces the effects of humanity on both Earth’s landscape and, ultimately, the environment. As this happens, music plays, first with the tempo appropriate to Earth’s historic geological progress, then, increasingly, according to humanity’s intrusion on the world, right up to that present day when the film’s last roll was shot in 1981. I won’t say more of “what happens” in the film because that would sully the overall experience each of us can have with its images and score. However, a few minor notes before one overriding issue:  there is no dialogue; there are no characters; but, you can watch this film with popcorn and soda.

That Web sites and reviews call Koyaanisqatsi “without conventional plot” I would both agree and disagree. Shut up and let me be contradictory for a moment. “Plot” is such a conventional term that I’m not surprised Koyaanisqatsi is described in that way. Yet plot is not needed, or, to wit, plot need not be talked about at all with so much else going on in this film. What else is there going on, Mark? you may ask. I will tell you.

Metaphor.

Godfrey Reggio uses images and music to do the work in 1.5 hours that thousands of voices in the 1960s Environmental Movement raised for at least a decade: too much is going on with our lives (technically a non-environmental issue, but certainly relational to how we live socio-environmentally) and too much is happening against society in general, the environment in particular, and humanity under the microscope of film.

Plot? Plot?? Who needs plot when you have character? “The Earth”; “Machinery”; “Shapeless High-Rise Buildings”; “A Man Walking Quickly”; “A Woman Staring.” Or, who needs plot when you have metaphor? “Man Vs. Himself; “The Machinery of Progress Vs. Necessities of a Life Fully Lived; “Modern Life’s Speed Vs. Stress on One’s Humanness”. Or…come up with your own after you’ve watched the film.

The irony of that ubiquitous statement— “a film without conventional plot” —is part of what Koyaanisqatsi battles against. Plot summaries are quick avenues to the notation of materials, be they films, novels, theater, ballet, television, even poetry. Speed is what society worldwide is all about nowadays. We want things fast. We want information there when we need it, as we demand it. I’m no different, often. When I searched for the “Future Shock” reference, I had to wait nearly two seconds for the page to load on screen. What agony when I’m holding onto a thought to complete the sentence I had in mind to write! How in Hell did Proust write 900,000 words to complete “In Search of Lost Times” without a computer?

Yes. Life out of balance. The increased speed with which we live, and thus demand of those objects—and people—that we use for our business, relationships, relaxation, and pleasure. There is no time for plotless movies, is there? Well, if that is true, there is then no time for metaphor, no time for irony (if people even know what that is anymore). And then there is little enough time for Shakespeare, for Sam Johnson, even for David Sedaris. Well, perhaps we can fit in Sedaris.

Shame on this sentiment. And a pox, too! For when we loose the mental image that metaphor creates, and then the story that springs from metaphor (yes, story), we as humans are in fact the slaves to the very machines that we’ve demanded use of in order to lessen our dependence on long, painstaking tasks, machines that would leave us more time to read, to succeed in our relationships, for love, for our children, even to contemplate the world. If that limitation becomes reality, what is to happen to our sense of ethics, skepticism, even honor?

Tags: Film, Seeing in Progress by mark
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