Monthly Archives: January 2007

No Borges, no Verne, no Wells

One of my favourite reads of last year was Todorov’s The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre (1970). It introduced me to a whole range of primarily French 19th century literature and its dissection of genre is one of the best you’ll find anywhere. The book has its shortcomings too, but these have more to do with the tautological nature of genre construction which is inherent in the notion of genre itself (see here).

I also read Borges’s The Book of Sand last year and I am currently re-reading it. Borges is a master of mixing the real with the imaginary and I was surprised to find no mention of Borges in The Fantastic.

So I did a search for Borges+Todorov and stumbled on this article by Lew on the excellent Depauw website where I had spent time before. From Lew’s assessment of Todorov’s book, the keyword is “sample”:

Since structuralism in literary studies is largely of French origin, this attempt to ruin its reputation takes as its motto the words of a Frenchman, Pierre Bertaux: “At one time it was hoped that the beginnings of a formalization of the humanities analogous [to that of the sciences] could be expected from structuralism. Unfortunately, it appears today that precisely the loudest advocates of structuralism have let it degenerate into a mythology—and not even a useful one.” I fully agree with this verdict. However, inasmuch as it is difficult to expose in a single article the barrenness of a whole school of thought—one moreover which has spawned divergent tendencies, since every author has his own “vision” of the subject—I will limit myself to dissecting Tzvetan Todorov’s book The Fantastic. The author begins by deriding the investigator who would, before proceeding to description of a genre, engage in endless reading of actual works. Todorov’s “sample” of works discussed, as displayed in his bibliography, is astonishing. Among its twenty-seven titles we find no Borges, no Verne, no Wells, nothing from modern fantasy: all of SF is represented by two short stories. We get, instead, E.T.A. Hoffman, Potocki, Balzac, Poe, Gogol, Kafka—and that is about all. What this structural account proclaims to us as the bounds of the fantastic is really quite an antique piece of furniture: the bed of Procrustes. –Stanislaw Lem via http://www.depauw.edu/sfs/backissues/4/lem4art.htm [Jan 2007]

The two of us should take a walk together

“Ulrica invited me to her table. She told me that she liked going out for walks alone. Recalling a joke of Schopenhauer’s, I replied: ‘The two of us should take a walk together.'” —Jorge Luis Borges in Ulrica

Ulrica is a short story that deals with casual sex, 1970s style, published in The Book of Sand.

There has been discussion of Borges’ attitudes to sex and women.  Estela Canto, who had known Borges since 1944, asserted in Borges a contraluz (1989) that Borges’ attitude to sex was one of “panicked terror”. According to Canto, Borges’ father had arranged a meeting between his son and a prostitute, out of a concern that a nineteen-year-old Argentine boy should not be a virgin. –Wikipedia

Sex and women are two very problematic components in the fiction of Jorge Luis Borges: the absence of these two elements, which seems so casual and unremarkable, really highlights the strangeness of their exclusion. For example, scenes of sexual acts are almost totally lacking in Borgesian writing (Emma Zunz’s sexual encounter with an anonymous sailor is the most notable exception) and even the most veiled suggestion of erotic activities is limited to only a very few stories. –Herbert J. Brant, The Queer Use of Communal Women in Borges’ “El muerto” and “La intrusa”

There are, however, instances in Borges writings of heterosexual love and attraction. The story “Ulrica” from The Book of Sand tells a romantic tale of heterosexual desire, love, trust and sex. –Wikipedia

Graphomania. Compulsive logorrhea.

Margaret Atwood asks why writers write in Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing (2002), sourced here.

These are the three questions most often posed to writers, both by readers and by themselves: Who are you writing for? Why do you do it? Where does it come from? …

Here then is the list:

… To pass the time, even though it would have passed anyway. Graphomania. Compulsive logorrhea. Because I was driven to it by some force outside my control. Because I was possessed. Because an angel dictated to me. Because I fell into the embrace of the Muse. Because I got pregnant by the Muse and needed to give birth to a book …

And ‘to pass the time’ reminds us of Borges who notes:

“I do not write for a select minority, which means nothing to me, nor for that adulated platonic entity known as ‘The Masses’. Both abstractions, so dear to the demagogue, I disbelieve in. I write for myself and for my friends, and I write to ease the passing of time.” — Introduction to The Book of Sand

Sade and graphomania

I’m still viewing Marquis and since it reminded Richard Scheib of Quills who notes that

“Both [Quills and Marquis] get inside de Sade’s urge to write no matter what, using sheets and his own blood, although Marquis makes far less melodramatic fuss about the frustrated creative urge than Quills does.”

I considered Sade’s monomaniacal urge to write and looked up graphomania. I found this interesting quote from Milan Kundera’s 1979 Of Laughter and Forgetting:

Graphomania is not a mania to write letters, personal diaries, or family chronicles (to write for oneself or one’s close relations) but a mania to write books (to have a public of unknown readers). … Graphomania (a mania for writing books) inevitably takes on epidemic proportions when a society devlops to the point of creating three basic conditions:

  1. an elevated level of general well-being, which allows people to devote themselves to useless activities;
  2. a high degree of social atomization and, as a consequence, a general isoalation of individuals;
  3. the absense of dramatic social changes in the nation’s internal life. (From this point of view, it seems to me symptomatic that in France, where practically nothing happens, the percentage of writers is twenty-one times higher than in Israel.

.. The mainspring that drives her to write is just that absence of vital content, that void. But by a backlash, the effort affects the cause. General isolation breeds graphomania, and generalized graphomania in turn intensifies and worsens isolation. The invention of printing formerly enabled people to understand one another. In the era of universal graphomania, the writing of books has an opposite meaning: everyone surrounded by his own words as by a wall of mirrors, which allows no voice to filter through from outside. … One morning (and it will be soon), when everyone wakes up as a writer, the age of universal deafness and incomprehension will have arrived.

This passage has reminded quite a few bloggers of the blogging phenomenon itself.

Coming back to Sade as a maniac writer, I wonder how Sade (2000) by Benoît Jacquot treats this graphomaniac tangent.

Carlo Chiostri

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African child in tree with snake () Carlo or Sofia Chiostri

Image sourced here, from a series entitled ‘Modernism from the masses‘ dedicated to art deco postcards.

“It appears to me that Topor is the last representative of the great illustrators who, like Blake and Daumier, Doré and Carlo Chiostri (1863 – 1939), are capable of creating complete universes described in minute detail.” – Fellini quoted in Topor (1985) – Gina Kehayoff and Christoph Stölzl.

More on the notion of ‘modernism for the masses’ and the notion of modernism itself:

The very definition of Modernism has always been contentious. Did it begin with the advent of photography, which liberated the visual arts from the obligations of realism, or was its starting point the experiments in the application of color by such Post-Impressionist painters as Cézanne, van Gogh and Gauguin? Did Claude Debussy’s gradual abandonment of tonality, the cornerstone of Western musical composition since J.S. Bach, lead inevitably to Arnold Schoenberg’s polytonality and the sound experiments of Webern, Stockhausen and Cage? Do the honors of introducing non-representational theatre belong to Pirandello, to the German Expressionists or to the Italian Futurists? And where do Kafka, Musil, Svevo and Joyce fit in? –Anthony Guneratne via http://www.co.broward.fl.us/library/bienes/postcard/modernism.htm [Nov 2006]

See also: modernism – low modernism – mass culture

Introducing ‘The Science Fiction, Horror and Fantasy Film Review’

Marquis (1989) – Henri Xhonneux [Amazon.com]

Last week I found out that my local library owns a copy of Roland Topor and Henri Xhonneux’s 1989 animation film Marquis. This is a film I had wanted to watch for some time. I can’t remember exactly where or how I found out about it, since there is not much info available on the internet. Which brings me to the site I want to introduce: ‘The Science Fiction, Horror and Fantasy Film Review’ written by Richard Scheib, 3,500 pages of reviews and film criticism about which the author says:

Fantastic Cinema is an umbrella label that covers material of great diversity. Here you will find coverage of films as far apart as The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Bambi [a five star film, according to Scheib], of directors that range from Ingmar Bergman to Edward D. Wood Jr – all are represented here and each discussed in terms of their own merits. Fantastic Cinema is not always easy to define in terms of thematic boundaries and a deliberately broad interpretation of what constitutes genre material has been taken in the hope that it will provide interesting discussion.

On Richard’s site you can read a plot synopsis and appreciation of Marquis.

Richard Scheib apparently lives in New Zealand (re website address), but other than that I can’t find much about him. His site has been online for several years, and is still updated regularly. He’s been writing film reviews at least since 1998, here is his IMDB rec.arts.movies.reviews profile page.

Richard, I have a question for you. would you please start a blog and tell us what you’re watching?

See also: fantastic film – SF films – horror films

P.S. Marquis features extensive conversations of Sade talking to his genital (and the genital talking back), other fictions which employ the trope of the talking body parts are  Naked Lunch (1959) – William S. Burroughs and the The Indiscreet Jewels (1748) – Denis Diderot.

What makes a novel unfilmable?

 

Hollywood occasionally attempts to turn supposedly ‘unfilmable’ novels into blockbusters. The Hours, Fight Club, American Psycho, and even Adaptation, were all based on what were said to be unfilmable books; although all were adapted into critically-acclaimed films.

Greencine reports on a flurry of posts relating to the supposed unfilmability of certain novels, some of them prompted by the release of Tom Tykwer’s 2006 Perfume:

There’s Will Gore [With the recent arrival of ‘Perfume: The Story of a Murderer’ in cinemas, perhaps the myth of the ‘unfilmable’ novel can finally be laid to rest] on the concept of the “unfilmable novel” and “The Unfilmables: A List of the Hardest Novels to Film” at Screenhead [including James Joyce’s Ulysses, Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle, John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces and J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye].

In 2005 John Patterson already reported on film adaptations of ‘unwieldy’ novels in the Guardian:

“There is,” Norman Mailer once wrote, “a particular type of really bad novel that makes for a really great motion picture.” He might have been referring to such superselling potboilers as Mario Puzo’s The Godfather or Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With The Wind or, indeed, any number of middlebrow literary atrocities whose cinematic adaptations have entirely transcended their trashy sources.

In answer to my question ‘What makes a novel unfilmable?’, if I had to make a checklist of what makes novels unfilmable:

  1. plotlessness
  2. philosophical introspection (can be solved with voice-over)
  3. experimental fiction
  4. …………….

More on this later… In the meantime, if you feel like completing the list, please be my guest.

P. S. 1: now is a good time to reread Fuchsia’s comment on the ‘Nature of the 20th century reading experience’ where I asked: can one measure a book’s success by counting the number of film adaptations?

P. S. 2: My entry in the top ten of unfilmable novels:

  1. Time’s Arrow: Or the Nature of the Offense (1991)
  2. Do please submit your candidates in the comments …

P. S. 3: And maybe one last question: which films would resist successful novelization?

Andromeda interpretations

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Andromeda (1629) – Rembrandt

Rembrandt’s is one of the uglier interpretations of the Andromeda myth, especially when compared by the following by Chassériau and Doré.

 

Andromeda and the Nereids (1840) – Théodore Chassériau

Paul Gustave Doré (1832-1883) painted Andromeda exposed to the sea-monster. (1869?)

Perseus Frees Andromeda (c. 1515) – Piero di Cosimo (1462 – 1521)

 

I am forced to the appalling conclusion

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Joan Vollmer

In 1951, William Burroughs shot and killed his wife Joan Vollmer in a drunken game of “William Tell” at a party above the American-owned Bounty Bar in Mexico City.

In the introduction to Queer, a novel written in 1953 but published in 1985, Burroughs states, “I am forced to the appalling conclusion that I would have never become a writer but for Joan’s death … So the death of Joan brought me into contact with the invader, the Ugly Spirit, and maneuvered me into a lifelong struggle, in which I had no choice except to write my way out.” (Queer, 1985, p.xxii)

Hatching from a nameless gleam of light I see

Inspired by Richard T Scott’s comment New figurative art

Shadows of a Hand: The Drawings of Victor Hugo (1998)
[Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]

Shadows of a Hand: The Drawings of Victor Hugo (1998) features contributions of Luc Sante, who also contributed to a monograph on Guy Bourdin.

Octopus with the initials V. H. (ca. 1866) – Victor Hugo

The great romantic painter, Delacroix, wrote to Victor Hugo that, had he decided to become a painter instead of a writer, he would have outshone the artists of their century. –via here.

Hatching from a nameless gleam of light I see
Monstrous flowers and frightening roses
I feel that out of duty I write all these things
That seem, on the lurid, trembling parchment,
To issue sinisterly from the shadow of my hand.
Is it by chance, great senseless breath
Of the Prophets, that you perturb my thoughts?
So where am I being drawn in this nocturnal azure?
Is it sky I see? Am I in command?
Darkness, am I fleeing? Or am I in pursuit?
Everything gives way. At times I do not know if I am
The proud horseman or the fierce horse;
I have the scepter in my hand and the bit in my mouth.
Open up and let me pass, abysses, blue gulf,
Black gulf! Be silent, thunder! God, where are you leading me?
I am the will, but I am the delirium.
Oh, flight into the infinite! Vainly I sometimes say,
Like Jesus calling out “Lamma Sabacthani,”
Is the way still long? Is it finished,
Lord? Will you soon let me sleep?
The Spirit does what it will. I feel the gusting breath
That Elisha felt, that lifted him;
And in the night I hear someone commanding me to go!

VICTOR HUGO

From ‘Le bien germe parfois…’ (Good Sometimes Germinates…),
from the collection Toute la lyre, first published 1888. via here.