Monthly Archives: December 2006

Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel (1928 – 2006)

French psychoanalyst Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel died in 2006. She was Freud Professor at the University College of London, and Professor of Psychopathology at the University of Lille. She is best known for her connection of the ego ideal to primary narcissism, her extension of this theory to a critique of utopian ideology and her theories on the relationship between art, creativity and perversion.

From Jahsonic:

Lifespan: 19282006

Related: abnormal psychologypsychoanalysiscreativityperversion

By the time of the student rebellions of May 1968, she had become a political conservative. In their anonymous 1969 book L’universe contestationnaire (reworked and published in English in 1986 as Freud or Reich? Psychoanalysis and Illusion), Chasseguet-Smirgel and her husband/co-author Béla Grunberger argued that the utopian political ideology of the student demonstrators, as well as of their Freudo-Marxist avatars Herbert Marcuse and Gilles Deleuze, was fueled by primary narcissism, the desire to return to the maternal womb. Further, that the very term “Freudo-Marxism” was oxymoronic–one could not reconcile the reality principle with the Communist utopia. Chasseguet-Smirgel’s analysis of Wilhelm Reich, the Freudian dissident who became an insane systematizer of the libido, explains why his orgonic theory collected followers despite its apparent wackiness.

Creativity and Perversion (1996) – Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel, Otto Kernberg Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]

…the number of perverts involved in the field of art is probably much greater than the average for the population in general…. It can be supposed … that the pervert inclines in some particular manner to the world of art. –Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel, Creativity and Perversion, 1984

And at Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Janine_Chasseguet-Smirgel [Dec 2006]

Nobrow, taste and corpus

Dan Green of The Reading Experience does not like Stephen King. I’ve read this before, in fact, according to Google, it is the 24th time that he or one of his readers call upon Stephen to discuss the strengths of literary merit. Every time someone displays a patronizingly superior attitude towards Stephen King, my nobrow instincts rise up and I feel the snobbishness as if it was directed towards me. In his latest post Dan even goes so far to say that “film adaptations of [Stephen] King’s fiction such as Brian De Palma‘s Carrie and David Cronenberg’s The Dead Zone are infinitely superior to the novels on which they’re based, which in my opinion don’t rise above the level of poorly written, sub-gothic trash. (There, I’ve said it.)”

This is probably the first time I’ve read in a highbrow literary blog that a film is superior to the novel and it is of course — at least with reference to The Dead Zone and Carrie –, pure bollocks (there, I said it.). But at the same time I can understand Dan’s position. For example, I’d love to be able to watch the 1967 film adaptation of James Joyce’s Ulysses, rather than reading it.

But I wonder: why do I defend Stephen King? I defend him because I used to be an avid reader of King and because he writes in the tradition of the “limit experience”. The tradition of transgressive fiction. He writes about states of the human condition which transcend the everyday life. He makes you curious of what life can and can’t be about.

Now is a good time to be a bit more specific about the nobrow concept. Frank McLynn will come to my aid. He calls Kingsley Amis a phoney because he maintains that: “[it is] impossible to enjoy and appreciate Westerns, film noir or private-eye fiction of the Raymond Chandler kind and acknowledged literary heavyweights like Melville, Conrad, Dostoevsky and Zola.”

But is Kingsley Amis really a phoney because he feels that?

Being nobrow is about knowing the entire corpus of literature. If you only know two colors, let’s say green and blue, you can’t call yourself an expert on colors. Likewise, if you only know highbrow literature, you can hardly call yourself an expert on literature or literary merit. The first thing you need to know when you claim to have any taste at all, is the corpus. And this is indeed the big paradox of the nobrow position. You can only call yourself nobrow if you know the corpus of both high and low culture. And then you have to make your own choices. If you only know high culture, you are not nobrow. If you only know low culture, you are not nobrow. In practice, this means, that for being a nobrow person, you come from the highbrow position.

This, however, does not mean that I am against a canon of sorts. Being in education, I recognize the need for a canon, for a curriculum. And I suppose that we all want to define our own literary canons. And my plea is include King in the 20th century literary canon, just as we’ve included Bram Stoker from the 19th literary canon and Sade from that of the 18th century. Please do not exclude literature from the canon on grounds of its content.

I’m not saying that Dan and other Stephen King bashers despise Stephen King’s books solely on the basis of their content (otherwise critics such as Dan wouldn’t like the films based on his novels), but I do get the feeling that most of this rejection is for a large measure based on content related rather than style related criteria.

Which reminds me of Susan Sontag’s On Style:

It would be hard to find any reputable literary critic today who would care to be caught defending as an idea the old antithesis of style versus content. On this issue a pious consensus prevails. … In the practice of criticism, though, the old antithesis lives on, virtually unassailed. Most of the same critics who disclaim, in passing, the notion that style is an accessory to content maintain the duality whenever they apply themselves to particular works of literature. … Many critics appear not to realize this. They think themselves sufficiently protected by a theoretical disclaimer on the vulgar filtering-off of style from content, all the while their judgments continue to reinforce precisely what they are, in theory, eager to deny.

Bretonian and Bataillean strains of Surrealism

I stumbled on the document excerpted below by researching the 1934 quote by André Breton “Have professed absolute surrealism“, and it got me to modify my page on Surrealism and give more prominence to my perennial favourite and “dissident surrealist” Georges Bataille.

Apparently American modern art criticism as professed by Rosalind Krauss, Yve-Alain Bois, Denis Hollier, and Hal Foster has been much influenced by Bataille. Although I should add that it has not only been Bataille who influenced American art and literary criticism; the whole of French theory has had an enormous — and by some much bemoaned — influence on postmodern American theory, much like German theory was influential in post-war France.

When considering Spanish Surrealism, André Breton’s Freudian-based models of automatism and subconscious manifestations predominantly occupy the majority of the attention given. While these frameworks are at least partially relevant within the scope of the early twentieth-century poetry and art, other models that have been overlooked deserve due attention. Namely, the philosophical approximations concerning informe (formlessness), “the excremental,” and “the ethnographic” as developed by the French thinker Georges Bataille–a renegade surrealist–are of great importance and need elucidation. Even though critics such as Rosalind Krauss, Yve-Alain Bois, Denis Hollier, and Hal Foster have elaborated on these Bataillean motifs in their examination of contemporary art, the influence of these theories in early twentieth-century Spain has not been extensively examined. The contention here is that Bataille’s ideas of the twenties and thirties amplify our understanding of the literature of the poets of the literary Generation of 1927 in Spain, many of them so-called surrealists. In Michael Richardson’s words, “Bataille’s understanding concentrates on elements [like ethnography and informe] within surrealism that few critics have recognized, and thus gives us a new perspective on what surrealism may mean”.

… This dialogue [between France and Spain] is evident when considering Hispanic avant-gardists such as Salvador Dalí, Luis Buñuel, Alejo Carpentier, and others, who continually cross borders and establish a correspondence between the Parisian, Hispanic, and Catalan artistic ambiences. Of particular interest here is a detailed examination of this rethinking of the surreal (in Bataillean terms) in one of the most disputed works of the period on the Spanish front: Federico García Lorca’s 1929 collection of poems Poeta en Nueva York. –David. F Richter via ~david.f.richter/Informeing%20Lorca2.pdf

Robert Monell on Alain Robbe-Grillet

Anicée Alvina in Glissements progressifs du plaisir (1974)

Alain Robbe-Grillet‘s 1974 Glissements progressifs du plaisir… breaks numerous aesthetic and cultural boundaries and is not an easy film to watch as I found out during a mid 1970’s screening in Manhattan, with Robbe-Grillet in attendance, where I suddenly found myself so repulsed by the film’s transgressive imagery and atmosphere that I had to suddenly bolt the theater for fresh air. In the lobby I found myself faced with Robbe-Grillet himself, who was awaiting the post-movie discussion. He smiled as our eyes met for a second. I wanted to apologize or explain, but I didn’t say anything. He seemed to understand and proved to be a very modest and witty commentator on his own work. —Robert Monell

Anicée Alvina died last November. She was 52.

Anicée Alvina est morte le vendredi 10 novembre 2006, à l’âge de cinquante-deux ans, a-t-on appris hier. Comédienne par passion, plus caméléon que carriériste, « plutôt du genre rock’n’roll », selon ses propres termes, Anicée Alvina, l’égérie d’Alain Robbe-Grillet et de Gérard Blain, avait réussi à mener un parcours exigeant et multiple, passant même un moment à la chanson et à la scène au sein du groupe de rock Ici Paris. –via Le coin du cinéphage

Staying with Alain Robbe-Grillet, I just found a very interesting interview with him:

A.R.-G. Quand on [Alain and Catherine] s’est mariés j’étais pour la fidélité conjugale et c’est elle, tout de suite, qui m’a expliqué que c’était une idée assez sotte et probablement peu viable, que les messieurs avaient besoin de chair fraîche, et les dames aussi. Que ce qu’il fallait, c’était s’entendre bien. Le premier livre de Catherine, L’Image, écrit en 1957 peu avant notre mariage, endossait mes fantasmes sado-érotiques de la même façon que le livre de Dominique Aury, Histoire d’O, décrit, en réalité, ceux de Jean Paulhan. Peu à peu, Catherine a découvert qu’elle aimait inverser le fantasme et même, maintenant, se spécialiser dans la domination. Elle est une dominatrice passionnelle, le contraire d’une professionnelle, il n’est jamais question d’argent et comme c’est assez rare, sa cour est très étendue. —lire.fr

Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events

I watched Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events with the girls yesterday evening and loved it. Loved Jim Carrey, Meryl Streep and even Dustin Hoffman’s cameo appearance.

The film is based on this series of comic books.

On its steampunk qualities:

Although the books can be classed as ‘steampunk‘, in that they involve young people struggling against great odds in an anachronistic setting, the addition, in later books, of the mysterious organization known as V.F.D. have begun to push the story into the new genre of post-steampunk (in the same way that later additions to the cyberpunk genre are now classed as postcyberpunk). –wikipedia

On its macabre and black comedy qualities:

The books can also be classified as absurdist fiction, due to their eccentric characters, quirky writing style and generally improbable storylines. Some might argue that these books could also be classified as black comedy, because of the mix of humorous and macabre elements.

In the words of my favorite Amazon critic Jeff Shannon and one of my favorite film critics tout court:

If you spliced Charles Addams, Dr. Seuss, Charles Dickens, Edward Gorey, and Roald Dahl into a Tim Burtonesque landscape, you’d surely come up with something like Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events. Many critics (in mostly mixed reviews) wondered why Tim Burton didn’t direct this comically morbid adaptation … but there’s still plenty to recommend the playfully bleak scenario, … a variety of fantastical hazards and mysterious clues, some of which remain unresolved. Given endless wonders of art direction, costume design, and cinematography… –Jeff Shannon, Amazon.com

One more thing: loved the self referentiality of the intrusive narrator of the film (such as is commonly displayed in 18th and 19th century literature.)

The Man Who Laughs (1869) – Victor Hugo

The Man Who Laughs (1869) – Victor Hugo
[Amazon.com]
[FR] [DE] [UK]

Victor Hugo’s novel The Man Who Laughs is a horror story of a young aristocrat kidnapped and disfigured by his captors to display a permanent grin.

In the novel, Hugo gives his own account of the work of the Comprachicos:

“In China, since time immemorial, they have achieved refinement in a special art and industry: the molding of a living man. One takes a child two or three years old, one puts him into a porcelain vase, more or less grotesque in shape, without cover or bottom, so that the head and feet protrude. In the daytime, one keeps this vase standing upright; at night, one lays it down, so that the child can sleep. Thus the child expands without growing, slowly filling the contours of the vase with his compressed flesh and twisted bones. This bottled development continues for several years. At a certain point, it becomes irreparable. When one judges that this has occurred and that the monster is made, one breaks the vase, the child comes out, and one has a man in the shape of a pot.”

This example clearly displays all of the most common elements of the legend: first, association with outsiders (the Chinese); second, the victim being a young child; and third, assertions of the methodology that stretch the limits of credibility but seem to remain within the domain of the possible. —http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comprachicos [Dec 2006]