Category Archives: culture

Knots of indecision

In search of the roots of counterculture

Frontispiece to William Blake‘s Visions of the Daughters of Albion (1793), which contains Blake’s critique of Judeo-Christian values of marriage. Oothoon (centre) and Bromion (left), are chained together, as Bromion has raped Oothoon and she now carries his baby. Theotormon (right) and Oothoon are in love, but Theotormon is unable to act, considering her polluted, and ties himself into knots of indecision.

While the phrase “free love” is often associated with promiscuity in the popular imagination, especially in reference to the counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s, there are plenty of historical antecedents.

In 1789, radical Swedenborgians published the Plan for a Free Community, in which they proposed the establishment of a society of sexual liberty, where slavery was abolished and the “European” and the “Negro” lived together in harmony. In the treatise, marriage is criticised as a form of political repression. The challenges to traditional morality and religion brought by the Age of Enlightenment and the emancipatory politics of the French Revolution created an environment where such ideas could flourish. A group of radical intellectuals in England (sometimes known as the English Jacobins) supported the French Revolution, abolitionism, feminism, and free love. Among them was William Blake, who explicitly compares the sexual oppression of marriage to slavery in works such as Visions of the Daughters of Albion (1793).

Another member of the circle was pioneering English feminist Mary Wollstonecraft. Wollstonecraft felt that women should not give up freedom and control of their sexuality, and thus didn’t marry partner Gilbert Imlay, despite the two having a child together. Though the relationship ended badly, due in part to the discovery of Imlay’s infidelity, Wollstonecraft’s belief in free love survived. She developed a relationship with early English anarchist William Godwin, who shared her free love ideals, and published on the subject throughout his life. However, the two did decide to marry. Their child, Mary took up with the English romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley at a young age. Percy also wrote in defence of free love (and vegetarianism) in the prose notes of Queen Mab (1813), in his essay On Love (c1815) and in the poem Epipsychidion (1821).

Sharing the free love ideals of the earlier social movements, as well as their feminism, pacifism and simple communal life, were the utopian socialist communities of early 19th century France and Britain, associated with writers and thinkers such as Henri de Saint-Simon and Charles Fourier in France and Robert Owen in England. Fourier, who coined the term feminism, argued that true freedom could only occur without masters, without the ethos of work, and without suppressing passions; the suppression of passions is not only destructive to the individual, but to society as a whole. He argued that all sexual expressions should be enjoyed as long as people are not abused, and that “affirming one’s difference” can actually enhance social integration. The Saint-Simonian feminist Pauline Roland took a free love stance against marriage, having four children in the 1830s, all of whom bore her name. —Wikipedia

The publishing houses of Western counterculture

Last August I asked whether anyone knew of the German and British equivalents of Eric Losfeld’s Éditions Le Terrain Vague, an editing house I admire for its readiness to publish works of ‘high art’, works of political subversion and the works of erotic avant-garde which accompanied the post-war European sexual revolution. Thanks to the comments by Andrej Maltar I have been able to fill in these gaps. If anyone else knows of other publishing houses that played this role in the rest of Europe (Spain, Italy, the former Eastern Bloc or the Scandinavian countries), please let me know. Below is a little write-up on Jörg Schröder:

Typical cover of März-Verlag with their distinctive look – yellow with thick black and red types. März-Verlag is the German equivalent of similar Western publishing houses such as Eric Losfeld’s Éditions Le Terrain Vague, American Grove Press and Great Britain’s John Calder’s various publishing houses. März-Verlag was run by Jörg Schröder, who published Rolf Dieter Brinkmann, Castaneda, Leonard Cohen, Robert Crumb, Fassbinder, John Giorno, Gerhard Malanga, Kenneth Patchen and J. G. Ballard. Jörg Schröder was also the german publisher of Histoire d’O and he ran the German branch of Girodias’s Olympia Press.

More publishers of interest:
Dalkey Archive Press – Atlas Press – Sylvia Beach – Creation Books – Edmund Curll – Lawrence Ferlinghetti – Maurice Girodias – Glittering Images – Grove Press – Eric Losfeld – Headpress – New Directions – Obelisk Press – Olympia Press – Jean-Jacques Pauvert – RE/Search publications (V.Vale and A. Juno) – Barney Rosset – Taschen

A fallacious catalogue

The visible work left by this novelist is easily and briefly enumerated. Impardonable, therefore, are the omissions and additions perpetrated by Madame Henri Bachelier in a fallacious catalogue which a certain daily, whose Protestant tendency is no secret, has had the inconsideration to inflict upon its deplorable readers–though these be few and Calvinist, if not Masonic and circumcised. The true friends of Menard have viewed this catalogue with alarm and even with a certain melancholy. One might say that only yesterday we gathered before his final monument, amidst the lugubrious cypresses, and already Error tries to tarnish his Memory . . . Decidedly, a brief rectification is unavoidable. —source

So begins Borges’s Pierre Menard, a fine piece of false document-based appropriative writing which I acquired at Antwerp book store Demian today, inbetween a haircut and a philharmonic concert (Wagner’s Tannhäuser and G. Holst’s The Planets (whose Mars theme was used in British cult tv series The Quatermass Experiment).

The keyword that I find in many works by Borges is fallacious which translates in my Dutch version as bedrieglijk. Fallacious are concepts which are based on fallacies.

More on fiction within fiction:

Fictional books and authors figure prominently in several short stories by the Argentine author Jorge Luis Borges. A few of Borges’s fictional creations include The Book of Sand, Herbert Quain (author of April March, The Secret Mirror, etc.), Ts’ui Pen (author of The Garden of Forking Paths), Mir Bahadur Ali (author of The Approach to Al-Mu’tasim), as well as the imaginary Encyclopædia Britannica of the story “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius.” Borges’s most famous and beloved fictional book, however, is Don Quixote! This Don Quixote is written by the fictional symbolist poet Pierre Menard in Borges’s “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote.” In this story, Menard undertakes an independent word-by-word and line-by-line recreation of Cervantes‘s classic novel. The story itself takes the form of a review of Menard’s work for a literary journal; though Menard’s Quixote is still unfinished, the imaginary reviewer concludes that Menard’s circumstances and the intervening history between Cervantes’s 16th century Spain and Menard’s fictional present produce a Quixote that is more pleasurable to read and deeply richer in meaning: though Menard’s Quixote is identical on a word-for-word basis to Cervantes’s original, Menard’s is superior! This ironic conclusion is often read as a commentary on the nature of accurate translation, but more significantly as an illustration of the manner in which the meaning of a text is determined as much if not more by the reader than the author. –fictional books at Wikipedia

Best of 2006

Seen:

The Sultan’s Elephant by Royal de luxe

You’ll just have to take my word for it but you can’t believe how happy I am Antwerpen spent 800,000 Euros to have the popular spectacle The Sultan’s Elephant in the streets of my city Antwerpen, Belgium.

Films:

As far as film goes I enjoyed Brokeback Mountain, Borat, Walk the Line and especially V for Vendetta and The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema.

Music:

I was enthralled by Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture which came to me via V for Vendetta. The track is about 10 minutes long, but you should head straight for the very short danceable bit (the cannons) at the very end of the song. Explosive! I started listening almost exclusively to classical music station Klara here in Belgium. Klara als features a most excellent experimental music programme: mixtuur.

More on 1812:

There is relatively little music below 50 Hz, loud bass below 30 Hz is rare, music below 16 Hz is almost non-existent, and music below 5 Hz is probably non-existent. (Incidentally, the cannons in Telarc’s recording of Pyotr Tchaikovsky‘s 1812 Overture are said to go down to 5 Hz.)

Books:

Fear of Flying (1973) – Erica Jong
Conjugal Love (1947) – Alberto Moravia

1001 things to do before you die

The mid 2000s saw the process of listmaking coming to the fore with titles such as 1001 Movies (2004), 1001 Paintings (2007), 1001 Books (2006) and 1001 Albums (2006) [you must] see, read and hear [before you die]. I like to think of Jahsonic as an addition and alternative to these lists, with particular attention to what I call a certain ‘cult’ factor. For film I propose 250 films and their directors; for literature 120 books and their writers; and for music a history of dance music and a history of black music, a history of experimental music and their makers. In the visual arts I have fantastic art.

Is Stephen King the 20th century Sue or the 20th century Balzac?

There are two contradictory views of culture. The first holds that culture is the very best that a society produces, the second holds that culture is everything a society produces, even ordinary and ugly phenomena. In my opinion, both views are right.

Matthew Arnold says culture is the best of culture, providing the definition of high culture. But his view of greatness is a social construction influenced by trends and fashions, conditions of power, intrinsic characteristics of the work, historical accidents or a combination thereof.

The opposite view is taken by Raymond Williams who states culture is ordinary; culture is what is popular as defined by sales and mind share.

If we apply these two views of culture to 20th century English language literature we get:

  • Arnoldian writers: James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Ian McEwan, Samuel Beckett and J. M. Coetzee
  • Williamsian writers: Stephen King, Danielle Steele, Agatha Christie, Enid Blyton and Barbara Cartland (source: index translationum)

In both views, these writers are successful. The Williamsian writers’ success can be measured by calculating the number of times they have been translated. The Arnoldian writers’ success is not that easy to measure but it can be done by using lists of ‘lists of novels that have been considered the greatest ever’ and other literary canons. I have largely based my shortlist of writers on the recently published books 1001 Books You Must Read Before you Die.

It would be interesting to find out if there are writers who sold well — even very well — but are still critically acclaimed. The answer according to the index translationum is William Shakespeare. He is currently the 7th most translated author in the world. This was not always the case. Lawrence Levine remarks that “By the turn of the nineteenth century, Shakespeare had been converted from a popular playwright whose dramas were the property of all those who flocked to see them, into a sacred author who had to be protected from ignorant audiences and overbearing actors threatening the integrity of his creations.”

So Shakespeare is both popular and critically acclaimed. Other writers in this category include, in order of appearance in the top 50 list of the index translationum:

If the history of literature excludes popular literature — as it does in the Arnoldian view — it cannot be taken seriously, it is no more than a case of historical revisionism, an historical falsification, an illegitimate manipulation of literary history.

But then again, one can probably think of enough interesting things to say about Stephen King, Agatha Christie and Enid Blyton. But what on earth is there to be told about writers such as Danielle Steele and Barbara Cartland? Although I must say that The Myth of Superwoman (1990) by Resa L. Dudovitz did a good job at explaining and defending women’s fiction.

Are writers of the Williamsian category culturally significant? Is this category of literature one we wish to preserve or forget?

Coming back to Stephen King, who I consider central in this discussion regarding cultural significance and ephemerality, will King’s name really be forgotten in 100 years? Not if we believe Petri Liukkonen, the author of Kirjasto, a site I’ve mentioned before. She writes: ” Like Anthony Trollope, Charles Dickens or Balzac in his La Comédie humaine, King has expressed the fundamental concerns of his era.”

Balzac and Dickens are certainly not forgotten, they respectively rank number 38 and 26 on the index translationum. So is King really the Balzac or the Dickens of the 20th century?

Still, a final question remains. We’ve mentioned Balzac and Dickens, but we left out Eugène Sue (I’ve previously mentioned Sue in relation to Stephen King ). Both Balzac and Sue were very popular. Balzac is remembered and Sue not. Is it the Arnoldian dynamic at work that has given eternity to Balzac and oblivion to Sue? Is King the 20th century Sue or the 20th century Balzac?

Low, middle and high culture

Popular Culture and High Culture: an Analysis and Evaluation of Taste (1974) – Herbert J. Gans [Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]

With all this talk on nobrow, low and high culture, maybe it’s time to define the concepts of these cultures a little better. The best effort so far defining low and high culture is the following schema by American sociologist Herbert J. Gans from his 1974 book Popular Culture and High Culture: an Analysis and Evaluation of Taste.

High culture

  • Interest in creative process and symbolism
  • Preference for experimentation
  • Introspection preferred to action
  • Accepts different levels of meaning
  • Expects consideration of philosophical, psychological and social issues

Upper middle culture

  • A less literary verbal culture
  • Figurative and narrative art preferred, especially if illustrative of individual achievement or upward mobility
  • Enjoys nineteenth-century art and opera, but not early music or contemporary art

Lower middle culture

  • Form must unambiguously express meaning
  • Demands conclusions
  • Unresolvable conflicts not made explicit
  • Interested in performers, not writers or directors
  • Influenced by word-of-mouth judgement

Low culture

  • No concern with abstract ideas: form must be entirely subservient to content
  • Demands crude morality with dramatic demarcations, but usually limited to family or individual problems
  • Performer is paramount: enjoys vicarious contact with ‘stars’
  • Considers ornateness attractive

–Schema adapted from Herbert J. Gans (1974) by Stephen Bayley (1991)

See also: culture – high – low

Stephen King and Eugène Sue

My previous post which mentions Eugène Sue got me thinking about Stephen King. Sue was one of the most popular novelists of the 19th century, yet he is now forgotten. King is one of the more popular novelists of the 20th century (according to the Index Translationum he is currently the 10th most popular novelist). Will his work be forgotten 100 years from now? Googling for “Stephen King” and “Eugéne Sue” brings up this quote on the best literature site on the net: Kirjasto:

Thomas M. Disch has noted that “readers of such current melodramatists as Stephen King or Anne Rice ought to be highly receptive to Sue’s grand excesses” (Horror: The 100 Best Books, ed. by Stephen Jones and Kim Newman, 1988). —http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/esue.htm [Dec 2006]

Even if Anne Rice or Stephen King are forgotten in 100 years, horror fiction does not need ‘great‘ writers to survive. Horror is perpetually re-written. Horror and sex are at the center of the death-of-the-author-theories. Just as Faust was a reproduction of Don Juan, the writings of King and Rice are reproductions of The Mysteries of Paris and Dracula. Such is the nature of intertextualness. What some people perceive to be “great literature” is often no more than fanboyism and fashion. [Dec 2006]

P. S. Doing the same search “Stephen King” and “Eugéne Sue” brings up Dumas and John Grisham. The context is the serial novel as it was published in two Parisian cheap, advertising-based newspapers in 1830s France: La Presse and Le Siècle. “There was serious money to be made: the papers would pay up to 100,000 francs for the exclusive rights to a novel by a top-ranking author. The most popular and highly regarded of these were not necessarily writers who have held on to their places in the literary Pantheon: who now reads (or has even heard of) Frédéric Soulié or Eugène Sue?”