Category Archives: Erotic tragedy

From the archives: Crisis and melancholy

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Georg Scholz. Self-Portrait in front of an Advertising Column. 1926. Oil on pasteboard, 59.5 x 78.5 cm. Karlsruhe, Staatliche Kunsthalle.

Originally filed in August 2011. In regard to the last paragraph, Mark Nixon’s excellent monograph Samuel Beckett’s German Diaries 1936–1937 was recently published by Continuum.

The melancholy that attends the work of the late Expressionists, and especially those of the New Objectivity, is inherent in the work. In Scholz’ self-portrait above, the individual is surrounded by advertising slogans and commercial businesses on a concrete street, and as in many portraits of the era, the subject himself seems set in amber. It is as if the Dionysian qualities of the German Expressionists, with their dynamic action and bright colors, had exhausted themselves, leaving only an Apollonian contemplation of the cities that were left in their wake. The New Objectivists also abandoned the explicit nature-mysticism of the Expressionists—when nature is absent, as through the asphalt alleys of the city, one can’t see the spirit that inheres in it.

When we look back at these pictures from the perspective of history, knowing that the second European war was at least ten years in the offing, we may be accused of inferring from the work our own sense of impending disaster for the subjects in the portraits themselves—a critical malfeasance to be sure. But the melancholy and sadness exhibited by these portraits, even those of an erotic and sexual nature, are inescapable, even once the historical context has been set to one side. The expression has a different spiritual quality: the subjects look out to us with a self-knowledge that they are doomed, and that they are losing their grip on the imaginative sensuality that their bodies express: a mourning. Art becomes a means of preserving the expression of sensual imagination for future generations, should they exist. Scholz, and the other figures in this portraiture, are becoming lost in the Culture Industry of 1920s Germany; propaganda and fascism were already imposing themselves on the individual imagination in the effort to exterminate it in the interests of a greater German whole. Hitler’s government grouped both Expressionists and New Objectivists in its definition of entartete Kunst. We need no government to do that for us in 21st century in America. We have learned from our Culture Industry to do it for ourselves.

During his sojourn in Germany in 1936–1937, Samuel Beckett acquired a familiarity with (if not an expertise in) both Expressionist and New Objectivist art. In 1949, he may have had in mind the German movement when he defined the project of the postwar artist in the Three Dialogues: “The expression that there is nothing to express, no power to express, no desire to express, together with the obligation to express.” It remains a project of the artist who recognizes that he or she lives, writes, and paints in a post-catastrophic era.

First texts

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The role of sexuality and tragedy in Samuel Beckett’s work is receiving new attention. Published by Palgrave just last year, Paul Stewart’s Sex and Aesthetics in Samuel Beckett’s Work is finally taking up one of the most underexamined dimensions of Beckett’s plays and novels, and obviously it harks back to the link between Schopenhauer and Beckett. For both writers, sex and eroticism is ambivalent; they find quite as much disgust as joy in erotic union. I’m looking forward to getting to this new entry in the Beckett bibliography, when I have the time. (Ah, for desk and review copies … )

Meanwhile, the systematic study of sex and aesthetics in Schopenhauer, Beckett, and Barker towards a discussion of erotic tragedy in a post-catastrophic age must begin with the wider questions of perception and aesthetics. Arthur Schopenhauer considered his doctoral dissertation On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason an essential prolegomena to his main work; first written in 1813, then vigorously revised in 1847, the essay is overture, and for a work of epistemology it is eminently readable, I recall. In it he presents his first revisions and corrections of Kant’s epistemology, and the later revision is as lucid and witty as his main work itself.

Samuel Beckett’s Proust (1930), his first book publication (which can be found in the fourth volume of the The Selected Works of Samuel Beckett from Grove Press), is famously more about Beckett’s early aesthetics and his debt to Schopenhauer than it is about the author of Remembrance of Things Past. It is perhaps his most important work of aesthetics and criticism, unrivalled in his oeuvre until the “Three Dialogues with Georges Duthuit” of 1949. New attention is beginning to focus on the relationship between Schopenhauer’s thinking and Beckett’s work, which along with Beckett’s attitudes towards eroticism is also somewhat undervalued. Gottfried Büttner’s “Schopenhauer’s Recommendations to Beckett,” found in the 2002 issue of Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui, and of course Ulrich Pothast’s 2008 The Metaphysical Vision demonstrate the growing interest in this line of criticism in recent years.

I’ll be reading both Fourfold Root and Proust in the next few weeks and hope to comment as I read on.

Eros as repudiation, renunciation, resignation

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In Act One of Tristan und Isolde, both characters drink deep from a chalice which they believe contains poison; instead, it is a love potion. Only a superficial consideration would conclude that this was “ironic,” despite the course of events of the opera. This is an ultimate transgression against the values of quotidian life — Isolde’s betrothal to King Marke and Tristan’s loyalty to Marke are rendered so much dust by the desire which overcomes the two lovers. Tristan and Isolde are joined and united in their cultural and social as well as their erotic transgressions, through which they also reach an apotheosis of sensual experience through and with the Other, ultimately becoming one with the Other in the loss of individual identity to an identity shared and devoured together in the single moment of ecstasy. As the lovers sing in the extraordinary Act Two:

TRISTAN
Tristan you,
I Isolde,
no longer Tristan.

ISOLDE
You Isolde,
Tristan I,
no longer Isolde!

TOGETHER
Un-named,
free from parting,
new perception,
new enkindling;
ever endless
self-knowing;
warmly glowing heart,
love’s utmost joy!

Obviously this is far more than a description of de- or re-gendering. This experience — this un-naming, self-knowing, this “joy” (the German original is “Liebeslust”; perhaps a native German speaker could provide a more subtle translation, for I suspect “Lust” is not a precise equivalent to “Freude”) — is only available to the transgressive erotic pair, for it flies in the face of the culture itself, even the quasi-romantic culture of the opera. Indeed, it repudiates that culture in this solemn ecstasy: there is no further participation possible in the culture, even if the desire itself is doomed. One should read Tristan and Isolde’s transgression more closely, too, as to the nature of that transgression. In a sense it is a least a fetishization of death that leads to the desire: of extraordinary risk, of opening the self to what may be a profoundly dangerous enactment of erotic expression. To a darkness, to a point of no return, and to indissolubly bind oneself to the Other, are the destinations of the couple, even beyond ordinary experience of sight and movement. It is not for this phenomenal world, but a possible brief glimpse and experience of the thing-in-itself as a bodied union, the driving “will,” for want of a better word, that justifies the repudiation and renunciation.

But what of resignation? That the condition to which lovers aspire is insupportable in the phenomenal world, and must be located beyond it, even if the project is hopeless. It is in the nature of sexual and erotic ecstasy, as it is in the nature of the aesthetic experience, that the moment of recognition, the moment of realization, the moment of true jouissance, is brief and rare, and it does not last. Perhaps the experience which follows those moments (for life, such as it is, does go on once they’ve passed) is an attempt to capture that moment again, once in a while. But moments of aesthetic or erotic transcendence are necessarily rare; we are not built for it, perhaps, bound to the world as we are.

It is possible to be a pessimist and a bodied philosopher (blood and head, flesh and mind) of eros. Perhaps all of eros’ true devotees are pessimists. The rest are devotees of something else, perhaps: pleasure, or titillation: the surface qualities so beloved of those who live on the surface.

Resexualizing the theatre

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The theatre was necessarily desexualized (Beckett) before it could be resexualized again (Barker). … The thing-in-itself is as unknowable in the theatre as it is unknowable in the phenomenal world. At best its contours can be described; the thing-in-itself cannot. As the test site for the limits of empirical knowledge, the theatre’s stress and tension lie in the use of the limits of empirical knowledge, of theatre itself, to describe these contours. The project must be to attempt to cross this uncrossable boundary for the slim additional knowledge it permits. Because the theatre is a metaphor for the limits of this empirical knowledge through the body, a metaphor for the phenomenal world itself, extremity is necessary: it is the edge that may pierce the veil of Maya.

26 July 2010

Arthur Schopenhauer, as well as being one of the last of the German Romantics, was also the first philosophical modernist, a status confirmed by the necessity of his work to later artists and thinkers like Wagner, Freud, and Beckett. His metaphysics explicitly provided the underpinning for the erotic tragedies devised in music drama by Wagner and in psychology and philosophy by Freud. What must also be noted is the extent to which compassion (not duty, as proposed by Kant) forms the basis of Schopenhauer’s ethics. The drama as unique arena for this exploration permits the thought that, as male writers express themselves as bodied females in the metaphorical context of drama and theatre, they are engaging in a compassionate endeavor: to find themselves in the experiential, erotic biologically-determined Other, as a lover may recognize himself in the contemplation of the beloved, and to attempt to experience the body of the Other as their own, in both pain and ecstasy. Primarily, the avenue to this experience is the dramatic word, written to be spoken, further elaborated by the other arts, primarily lighting and costume design, of the theatre.

This, I should say, is far different than poor Jimmy Stewart’s project in Vertigo. Stewart’s desirous detective remains far outside Kim Novak’s body: the artist remains distant from his creation. The writer and director of erotic tragedy seeks union with the Other in the project of expressing this pain and ecstasy: joined, to express a perspective through new eyes.

The overarching theme of Superfluities Redux this year will be to explore the metaphysics and technique of a neo-modernism and how it relates to a new mode of erotic tragedy that I first introduced in Word Made Flesh. Please feel free to use the comments section to add your own contributions to what I hope will be a stimulating series. And please note that comments sections on individual posts are open for only seven days as a spam-prevention measure.

In the mailbox

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"It's a Jungle Out There." Bodysuit by Alexander McQueen. Brown leather with bleached denim and taxidermy crocodile heads. 1997-98.

Contemporary Theatre Review‘s uniformed delivery boy was at my door at six this morning, bearing with him the new issue 21.4; my review of this summer’s Alexander McQueen exhibition at the Met appears in the “Backpages” section of this new issue, along with an essay on “New Women Playwrights” by Aleks Sierz, a history of Martin Crimp’s plays in Australia by Vicky Angelaki, and Philip Hager’s discussion of the protests in Athens. Indeed, this issue of the journal is just packed with goodies: before you get to “Backpages,” there is an extensive discussion of Tim Crouch’s play The Author, with contributions from Helen Iball, Chris Goode, Stephen Bottoms, and Crouch himself. The issue is available online here. My academic friends may be able to access this through their institutions — I’m afraid I can’t help the rest.

I first wrote about McQueen on 9 May 2011; that post is below.

People find my things sometimes aggressive. But I don’t see it as aggressive. I see it as romantic, dealing with a dark side of personality.
Alexander McQueen

Elegance, glamour and couture are anathema to the progressive collectivist; in fashion, they exploit the individuality of the body, not its absorption into a mass; especially couture, clothing fitted for the specific individual and resistant to mass reproduction. In the 1990s many designers — several of them British — used fashion and couture to examine the close relationship of the body, eros and death, as several British dramatists used the theatre and drama to explore the same relationship. In her 2007 book Fashion at the Edge, Caroline Evans wrote about these designers:

[Fashion] can be a symptom of alienation, loss, mourning, fear of contagion and death, instability and change. Like psychoanalysis, it “investigates the domain and configuration of incoherence, discontinuity, distruption and disintegration.” …

Fashion, with its affinity for transformation, can act out instability and loss but it can also, and equally, stake out the terrain of “becoming” — new social and sexual identities, masquerade and performativity. … If the imagery of late twentieth-century fashion seemed dark or bleak, it may be because it signalled an attempt to chart new social identities in a period of rapid change, while reflecting contemporary concerns with death and decay.

This description especially applies to the work of Alexander McQueen (1969-2010), whose career is now being investigated and celebrated at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in the exhibition Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty, running through 31 July. The resemblance of fashion to drama in McQueen’s dark but highly sexualized and erotic collection was noted even by The New York Times‘ Holland Carter in a review of the show last week, headlined “Designer as dramatist, and the tales he left behind.” “Clothes [in McQueen's later career] become costumes,” Carter writes, “with sensuous, sumptuous lives of their own” — an admission of the erotically transformative effect of couture, clothes making the woman as well as the man. Carter also writes:

Mr. McQueen repeatedly said, as have many other designers before him, that his intention was to “empower women” through his designs, though the impression often is that he’s hobbling, even tormenting them. And while his insistence on political content is one of the more intriguing aspects of his work, it is also one of the slipperiest and least resolved.

Both fashion and theatre are fetish and metaphor, the object standing in for an abstraction. Carter above touches on but does not resolve or investigate the darker reaches and redefinitions of the empowerment of the bodies and individuals within these costumes, for it’s an empowerment and imagination that touches and even exceeds at times the taboo. There is a torment in the furthest reaches of ecstasy and desire: a giving-up of the self; through costume and theatre we play with the imaginations of this torment, as well as its furthest reaches of associated pleasure. In constriction and restraint there is a coursing of ecstasy in the body that, because restrained, can’t be released in gesture; instead it flows, again and again, over and over, circulating endlessly through the flesh, without respite. Far from objectifying the wearer, in the theatre the spectator, male or female, can participate in the erotic and subjective reconstruction of the wearer, provided they are open to the empathetic imagination. (If women can imaginatively participate in the “male gaze” that Molly Haskell identified in cinematic spectatorship in 1972, it’s certainly possible for men to participate in a similar “female gaze”: a more difficult project, however, for it requires an ever greater repudiation of a conventional sexual consciousness embedded in the Culture Industry and its products.) Erotic tragedy requires a costume designer who acknowledges the elitism of couture; the darker intersections of politics, culture, eros and death; and the possibilities of imaginative erotic expression through the clothed body.

There are other theatremakers, such as Jan Fabre in Belgium and Piotr Tomaszuk in Poland, who recognize couture’s erotic and tragic contribution to theatrical presentation. It is no surprise that the British dramatist closest to McQueen’s sensibility is Howard Barker. Barker, who designs the costumes for his own productions under the pseudonym Billie Kaiser, is keenly aware of the nexus of fashion, drama, tragedy and eros; his costumes, too, strain against the regimented conformity of everyday fashion in an attempt to touch on the tragic and erotic streams that run beneath experience and can empower new human possibilities of imagination. He acknowledges that this attempt requires a daring eroticization and surrender of the self through its cultural representation in clothing — one gives one’s self up to what one wears in a process of erotic transformation. In a 2010 interview with Mark Brown, included in the recent collection Howard Barker Interviews 1980-2010: Conversations in Catastrophe, Brown asks Barker about the subject of high heels in Barker’s work (“about which things have been written,” Barker laughingly responds):

BROWN: I’m intrigued by the use of high heels in much of your work. It subverts the vapid use of them as a mere fetish. It elevates  physically, of course, and enhances, for many actresses, their capacity for elegance.

BARKER: There are two stage aspects to this garment. One is that it gives height, obviously, and posture, because it alters a woman’s shape profoundly. Women have been wearing high heels since at least the third century BC; it’s well recorded. So, they’re inherent in European culture; there’s something profoundly historic about this garment.

You might say it has a symbolic relation with sexuality and its opposite, appearing and disappearing with climates of erotic expression and repression. Also — speaking purely artistically, purely of the stage and film — heels have a tremendous sonic value. The actress appearing and disappearing — announced and then the sound slowly decaying — must recall every child’s memory of the passage of women on the pavement, one of the deep resonances of infancy, and embedded in the sexual imagination.

BROWN: Some actresses seem to grasp this from your work, almost instinctively. I discovered this recently, whilst working on … [a] reading of your (Uncle) Vanya. The young actress Nicola Daley — although she was, in fact, playing Chekhov — talked about her sense that she required high heels. Even playing a male role, she sensed from the play the need for her, as a woman on the stage, to have that elevation and authority. It wasn’t being required of her; she herself suggested it.

BARKER: … There was a generation of feminists who regarded high heels as the purest manifestation of enslavement to a sexual stereotype. These ideas seem less influential now. A new generation of women just sees them as part of the great cultural tradition of being a woman, which, first and foremost, elevates your arse.

The metaphysical and ideological implications of arse-elevation aside, Barker’s comments can be interpreted to encompass more of couture than footwear, of course. There is a fine online preview of the Met’s exhibition here.