Category Archives: literature

Indescribable, unspeakable, ineffable and inexplicable

The Aigiulle Blaitiere. c. 1856 by John Ruskin

A painting by Thomas Hill dated 1870

Reading the opening chapter of Ivins‘s Prints and Visual Communication[1] on the indescribability of things (and the need for photographic representations) reminded me of the garland and the Greek Anthology.

Googling for “indescribability” brings up this interview regarding the sublime, indescribability and mountain literature and mountain art.

The trope of unrepresentability is probably the commonest of all in mountain literature and art: the throwing up of the hands, the confession of the inadequacy of representation to catch the phenomena of the mountain world. I remember reading the journal of an Edinburgh bishop from the 1760s who’d gone on a mini-Caledonian tour. He writes: “I looked north and saw rank on rank of unspeakably beautiful…” He crosses out “unspeakably”—he’s obviously unhappy with it—and writes instead “mountains so beautiful I could not describe them.” Then he crosses that out, and we get four synonyms for “indescribable,” the first three crossed out. What’s exciting about Ruskin is that instead of acquiescing to indescribability, he tries to enact it, to let his art or prose take the forms of their subjects. In his drawing of the Glacier du Bois, near Chamonix, for example, the whole image is vortical; everything is being tugged by some centripetal force which has no apparent center but which is clearly at work. It’s hard to say what that force is, but it has something to do with time, a kind of deep time that is at work in that viewing moment. The glacier looks like a river in flood, in spate; the sun looks to have been absorbed by it, and there’s an inexplicably detached tree bole and root in the foreground. Even his curving signature seems to be vulnerable to the vortex. –Brian Dillon interviewing Macfarlane [2]

My love for subjects starting with un-, in-, a- and variants is great and started with with the notion of unfilmability. Notable related concepts to indescribability include unspeakable, ineffable and inexplicable.

They connote to absence, lacking, contrary, opposite, negation and reversal, concepts and tropes very apt to denote their positive counterparts.

For what is there to say on effability if one does not investigate its negative: ineffability?

The whole of this subject touches on representation in the arts and of course, medium specificity.

Older links to this subjects are general aesthetics and the sublime.

To end with a quote which I cannot reproduce verbatim:

“Sex begins where words stop”. —Georges Bataille.

I’ve explored the previous notion here[3].

Freeing the hand (media theory)

Prints and Visual Communication (1953) – William Ivins [Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]

I’ve read ten pages of William M. Ivins, Jr.‘s Prints and Visual Communication and this work is incredible and incredibly neglected. In its first ten pages it presents a full revisionist history of Classical Antiquity vs. The Dark Ages (what the Greeks and Romans didn’t have). (see “Technology and Invention in the Middle Ages“, Lynn White, published in Speculum#15, April 1940)

But more remarkable still:

From the blurb:

“The sophistication of the photographic process has had two dramatic results–freeing the artist from the confines of journalistic reproductions and freeing the scientist from the unavoidable imprecision of the artist’s prints. So released, both have prospered and produced their impressive nineteenth- and twentieth-century outputs.”

With all Ivins’s talk about “freeing the artist from the confines of journalistic reproductions” with regards to the invention of the photographic process, I find it very surprising to find no mention of Walter Benjamin‘s The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction in this book. Benjamin wrote in 1935/1936:

“For the first time in the process of pictorial reproduction, photography freed the hand of the most important artistic functions which henceforth devolved only upon the eye looking into a lens.”

Thomas Cook @200

Thomas Cook @200*

Thomas Cook’s guide books contributed to the concept of the armchair traveler.

Many people still prefer the real thing.

So did our protagonist.

She asks:

“Where are you going?”

He answers:

“To the Great Exhibition in London. I took your copy of The Stones of Venice , I hope that’s alright?”

“I booked a ticket with Cook“

She shouts:

“Don’t leave me now!” – “Where are you going?”

He answers:

“To the Exposition Universelle in Paris. I took your copy of Walt Whitman‘s I Sing the Body Electric, I hope that’s alright?”

*Thomas Cook was a British travel agent, born exactly 200 years ago today. He commodified the Grand Tour and invented tourism as we know it today. He gave you a A Room with a View in Tuscany. His guide books contributed to the concept of the armchair traveler.

Tracing the European avant-gardes in intimate detail

“Salopes ou le quart heure de rage au soleil” by Paul Joostens

Part of the fun of having my own wiki is being to able to trace the things I find in intimate detail and thus not only arriving (as in this case) at the Antwerp underground, the Belgian avant-garde and abstract art in Belgium but eventually arriving at a European and even worldwide encyclopedia of the avant-gardes.

What came before.

Three weeks ago I discovered a cover illustration by Paul Joostens entitled Salopes (bitches in French) published by Belgian avant-garde publisher Ca Ira!.

Today I finished my entry on Ca Ira!, a who’s who of the Belgian avant-garde.

Ca Ira! was an Antwerp based Belgian publisher who published Clément Pansaers‘s L’apologie de la paresse [1] in 1922. The title Ça ira comes from a song of the French Revolution (Ah! ça ira, translated as: “We will win!”).

Ca Ira! also published work by Paul Neuhuys, Han Ryner, Paul Colin, Céline Arnauld, Picabia, René Arcos, Wies Moens, Charles Plisnier, Romain Rolland, Theo Van Doesburg, Stendhal, Pascal Pia, Renée Dunan, Frans Masereel, Piet Mondriaan, André Salmon and Jean Cocteau.

Ca Ira! was also the title of a monthly magazine that featured avant-garde art, literature and politics. It was founded by a group of young artists, who came out of the smoking war-wrecked world of 1919 with a new élan. Twenty editions were published between April 1920 and January 1923 under the direction of Maurice van Essche, Paul Neuhuys and Willy Koninckx.

The members (many of whom later achieved great fame and notoriety) included Paul Colin, Theo van Doesburg, the young poet Maurice Van Essche, Abel Lurkin, Paul Neuhuys, Arthur Pétronio, Charles Plisnier, Han Ryner, while very appealing dada and expressionist woodcuts and linotypes were added by Floris Jespers, Paul Joostens, Frans Masereel, Jan Cockx, Jozef Cantré, Karel Maes and Jozef Peeters. One finds incidental contributions by Paul Van Ostaijen, Paul Éluard, Francis Picabia, Ezra Pound, Iwan Goll, Blaise Cendrars and Lajos Kassák.

Ennio De Concini (1923 – 2008)

Ennio de Concini is dead

Ennio De Concini (1923 – 2008) was a prolific Italian screenwriter and film director, winning the Academy Award in 1962 for his screenplay for Divorce, Italian Style. He achieved cult notoriety with Europa di notte (1959) and Bava‘s Black Sunday (1960).

La Maschera del demonio / Black Sunday (1960) – Mario Bava [Amazon.com]

La Maschera del demonio/Black Sunday (1960) – Mario Bava [Amazon.com]
image sourced here.

Maschera del demonio, La/Black Sunday (1960) – Mario Bava [Amazon.com]
image sourced here.

Black Sunday (Italian title: La maschera del demonio) is a Italian gothic horror film directed by Mario Bava, from a screenplay by Ennio de Concini and Mario Serandrei, based very loosely on Nikolai Gogol’s short story “Viy”. The film stars Barbara Steele. It was Bava’s directorial debut, although he had helped direct several previous feature films without credit.

Europa di notte (Nuits D’Europe/Europe by Night) is a 1959 Italian film directed by Alessandro Blasetti, written by Ennio De Concini and Gualtiero Jacopetti. This documentary in the “sexy” “mondo” genre is a potpourri of contemporary nightclub and striptease acts recorded all over Europe, including the Crazy Horse Saloon in Paris. Stripteaseuses Dolly Bell, Lily Niagara and Carmen Sevilla are credited. The soundtrack of the film featured “Dans mon île“[1] by French singer Henri Salvador, an early influence on the emerging bossa nova style. Scenes of the film are also featured in Do You Remember Dolly Bell?, the first feature film directed by Emir Kusturica.

Colin Hicks & The Cabin Boys appeared in the Italian film Europa di notte (Europe By Night / Nuits D’Europe ) with Giddy Up a Ding Dong [2]

Joris Ivens @110

Misère au Borinage

Joris Ivens (1898–1989) was a Dutch documentary filmmaker and devout communist. He is internationally known as a foremost documentarist of the early twentieth century, noted for his co-direction of the political film Misère au Borinage, which I had the pleasure of screening in class last year.

Borinage is noteworthy in media theory because it proves the inherent ficticiousness of the documentary film.

Like most documentaries, it mixes reality and fiction, and in this case, contrary to authorial intention. For the film, the two directors had arranged a manifestation with extras from the Borinage. The miners were to walk behind a portrait of Karl Marx. The police mistook it for a real manifestation, they intervened and the “protest” was dispersed. This was filmed by Ivens and Storck.

It would cause Walter Benjamin to write in The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction:

“Similarly, the newsreel offers everyone the opportunity to rise from passer-by to movie extra. In this way any man might even find himself part of a work of art, as witness Vertov‘s Three Songs About Lenin or Ivens Borinage.”

Foretelling Andy Warhol’s famous 15 minutes dictum, Benjamin added that “Any man today can lay claim to being filmed.”

[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d4mvpRDp6wk&]

Rain, accompanied by unknown beats.

If Borinage is a Blakean dystopian “and did those feet” anti-industrialization document, Ivens also made Rain, a much more impressionist affair, generally considered a “city symphony,” a loosely outlined genre typified by Manhatta (1921) and Berlin: Die Sinfonie der Großstadt, (1927).

There was a tremendous fascination with the metropolis, the big city during the 1920s and 1930s, dubbed fittingly for this context, as the Machine Age. Mostly associated with visual culture such as the decorative style Art Deco, the arts movement Cubism, Streamline Moderne appliance design and architecture and Bauhaus style; there were also the films including Chaplin’s Modern Times and Lang’s Metropolis.

Often overlooked are the “city novels,” mostly labeled a modernist subgenre but in reality as old as the novels of Charles Dickens. For our purpose I include Rainer Maria Rilke’s The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge (1910), John Dos Passos‘s Manhattan Transfer (1925), Alfred Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz (1929), James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) and T. S. Eliot’s vision of London in The Waste Land (1922). Especially John Dos Passos‘s Manhattan Transfer (1925) is of importance here as it offers the most positive view of the dynamics of speed, the modern way of life and the unavoidable fragmentation of existence.

While writing this post, the painting below was constantly on my mind. Paris in the rain. That why Paris invented arcades, and Benjamin could write about the romantic mediatic aspects of the city.

Gustave Caillebotte: Urban Impressionist (1995) – Anne Distel
[Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]

François Caradec (1924 – 2008)

François Caradec is dead. “Oh no,” shouts Jane Avril

“We’ll see about that,” says the café concert visitor

“It’s not a farce,” says the book that ought to know

François Caradec (Quimper, 1924 – November 13, 2008) was a French 20th century writer, biographer and historian of French popular culture and the history of the comic book in particular. He was a member of the Oulipo and a regent in the Collège de ’Pataphysique. He is the co-author of the history of farces, Encyclopédie des farces et attrapes et des mystifications.[1].

He wrote biographies on Lautréamont, Alfred Jarry, Raymond Roussel (translated by Ian Monk for Atlas Press), Alphonse Allais, Henry Gauthier-Villars, Le Pétomane and Jane Avril.

Any similarity to any person, event, or institution is intentional and anything but coincidential

In search of intentional and unintentional similarities in fiction

[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CrV1sfJHLHg]

Addio Zio Tom (Goodbye, Uncle Tom) (1971) by Gualtiero Jacopetti and Franco Prosperi

“All events, characters and institutions in this motion picture are historically documented and any similarity to any person, black or white, or to any actual events, or institutions is intentional and anything but coincidential.” –from the credits to Goodbye Uncle Tom, see fictionalization and fiction disclaimer.

Thus opens or closes Goodbye Uncle Tom of which a clip is listed above and it provides an excellent introduction to the tenuous relation between fiction and reality.

Addio zio Tom (1971) – Gualtiero Jacopetti, Franco Prosperi
Image sourced here. [Dec 2005]

Two more quotes provide further food for thought:

“It’s no wonder that truth is stranger than fiction.” Fiction has to make sense – Mark Twain

“The mind of man can imagine nothing which has not really existed.” —Edgar Allan Poe, 1840

If we represent the relationship between fiction and reality on a sliding scale we find on the left hand side: fiction which makes no claim to reality. This kind of fiction is nowadays always preceded by the fiction disclaimer:

“Any resemblance to persons living or dead is purely coincidental.”

The above is sometimes preceded by “The characters in this film are fictitious,”.

This kind of fiction is helped by Poe’s quote in its theoretical approach. If done well, this kind of fiction is called the fantastique, that area of literary theory which provides us with an unresolved hesitation as to our position on the reality/fictitiousness scale. Another growth of this kind of fiction is the roman à clef a novel and by extension any sort of fiction describing real-life events behind a façade of fiction. The reasons an author might choose the roman à clef format include satire and the opportunity to write about controversial topics and/or reporting inside information on scandals without giving rise to charges of libel.

On the right hand side of the scale we find fiction that does make claim to reality. This kind of fiction is nowadays usually preceded by the claim based on true events:

This kind of fiction is helped by Twain’s quote in its theoretical approach. Real stories are often so unbelievable that we need to make the claim that they are based on actual events.

As a narrator of fiction, one is always aided by this claim to capture the audience’s interest. This is true in the case of a joke (tell it as if it has happened to you), in the case of novels (Robinson Crusoe was soi-disant based on actual events) and film (Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) was supposedly about Ed Gein)

A whole range of concepts falls into this category, listed under the heading fictionalization: faction, based on a true story, false document, nonfiction novel, true crime (genre), histories (history of the novel), stranger than fiction and mockumentary.

The funny thing about the right hand position on the fiction/reality scale is that the act of narrating alters reality by default. I always illustrate this point by going back to your youth. You had a brother or sister and you fought with him over something. You went to your mother or father or any other judge-figure, who gave you both the opportunity to tell the story. You both came up of course with a different version.

Which brings me to the Heisenberg uncertainty principle and the observer effect. If the act of perception alters reality, the act of telling a story alters reality. That is why I dislike films such as Schindler’s List because in this case, “real” documentary material is available. Maybe this is also the case for Goodbye Uncle Tom, but boy, I sure would like to see that film.

L’erotismo by Francesco Alberoni (1986)

Looks like Japanese translation of L’erotismo

I started reading Francesco Alberoni‘s L’erotismo (“Eroticism”, 1986). I discovered Alberoni through de Botton when I read Essays in Love, Alberoni’s predecessor is a cult item.

The main discourse of the book is difference between female and male feelings for eroticism along the continuity/discontinuity axis, an approach I believe first explored by Georges Bataille, although Alberoni invokes Pascal Bruckner and Alain Finkielkraut (Le nouveau désordre amoureux).

It also mentions a 1894 funny study by Francis Galton on skin sensitivity in women and men: The relative sensitivity of men and women at the nape of the neck.

The book is well-informed and references Nina Baym (mother of Nancy Baym) and her work on women’s fiction and female reading and writing practice (and the mishistoriography thereof). It equates female pornography with the novels of Barbara Cartland and her equivalents in Europe (Liala in Italy and Delly in France).

Also mentioned are Helen Hazel, the author of Endless Rapture: Rape, Romance and the Female Imagination[1], a work on the rape fantasy (bodice rippers), and Opus Pistorum by Henry Miller (but actually ghost-written by female writer and entrepreneur Caresse Crosby.

And I’ve only read 10 pages.

Dare I say one of the more interesting works on eroticism to have crossed my hands?

P. S. I’m reading a Dutch translation, I’m not sure if L’erotismo has been translated into English.

Ivan Turgenev @ 190

I cannot find any interesting visuals for Turgenev, I gave up and give you the above, an ode to the short story. For what is a novel? Is it not a padded short story?

Ivan Turgenev (November 9, 1818 – September 3, 1883) was a Russian novelist and playwright best known for his novel Fathers and Sons. He popularized the concept of superfluous man in The Diary of a Superfluous Man (1850).

He also wrote short stories, such as The Mysterious Tales, some of which are collected in Fantastic Tales: Visionary and Everyday (Calvino) and Blood and Roses : Vampires in 19th Century Literature (Gladwell and Havoc). I just ordered the latter.

Jahsonic

Burgemeester van Dodenstad