I can’t see Borges yet

That Donald Cammell has been influenced by Borges may be further illustrated by two more examples. His 1977 film Demon Seed – a visionary but unsettling work where an AI named Proteus attempts to conceive a child with a human woman – contains a scene where a programmer discusses the paradox of Shi Huang Ti, as related by Borges in The Wall and the Books. The second example is more grim, as it involves Cammell’s suicide. After shooting himself in the head with a shotgun, he remarked to his wife that he “couldn’t see Borges yet.” He died a few moments later, with the ambulance on its way to his home. —themodernworld.com

Borges and film (also at themodernworld)

Highest rated films based on stories by Borges (IMDb)

A great deal of highfalutin American and European writers left little or no impression on him

Borges largely preferred genre fiction to literary fiction:

André Maurois … wrote, “His sources are innumerable and unexpected. Borges had read everything, and especially what nobody reads anymore[emphasis mine]: the Kabalists, the Alexandrine Greeks, medieval philosophers. His erudition is not profound — he asks of it only flashes of lightning and ideas — but it is vast.” Maurois was mostly correct; Borges read everything, but there was a lot he didn’t finish, including “The Brothers Karamazov,” “Madame Bovary,” Proust and Thomas Mann. A great deal of highfalutin American and European writers left little or no impression on him (the major exception being the French symbolist poets, especially Paul Valéry). The last great modernist of 20th century literature drew his primary inspiration not from other modernists but from styles and modes of literature (fables, folk tales, ancient epics) that had become proud words on dusty shelves and from writers of prose and poetry such as H.G. Wells, Rudyard Kipling, G.K. Chesterton (particularly the Father Brown mysteries), Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, the Irish fabulist Lord Dunsany, and Argentine “gaucho” poets, writers who, for one reason or another, Western literature had relegated to the twilight realm of the praised but unread. He preferred genre literature to the deep-dish classics. –“Borges: A Life” by Edwin Williamson via http://dir.salon.com/story/books/review/2004/08/27/borges/index_np.html?pn=3 [Jan 2007]

Philosophy in the Bedroom (1795) – Marquis de Sade

Related: French literature – novel – Marquis de Sade – 1790s

Philosophy in the Bedroom (1795) – Marquis de Sade
[Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]
A new edition with a cover by Tomer Hanuka (Google gallery)

Philosophy in the Bedroom (La Philosophie Dans le Boudoir) is a play written by the Marquis de Sade in 1795 in the aftermath of the French Revolution. Depending on one’s point of view, it is either a philosophical work laced with erotica, or just pornography.

Engaging, titillating, disturbing, and startlingly confessional

Tracey Emin (2006) – Tracey Emin
[Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]

The most highly publicized of the infamous Young British Artists, Emin has stirred as much controversy as she has acclaim, being both highly personal and extremely original in her art. Emin’s work is engaging, titillating, disturbing, and startlingly confessional. One of her most famous pieces is Everyone I Ever Slept With 1963-1995, a tent appliquéd with names. Another notorious work, My Bed—the scene where she spent four days contemplating suicide—was exhibited at Tate Britain when the artist was short-listed for the Turner prize in 1999. Though denounced by conservative critics at the outset, Emin’s work has attracted serious critical attention for more than a decade. In the words of Art in America, “What brought Emin to prominence was shock value, but what keeps her work powerful as she continues is the strength and nuance of its form and content.” Compiled in close collaboration with the artist herself—and unprecedented in its scope—this is the definitive book on Emin, featuring drawings, paintings, sculptures, appliqués and embroideries, neon and video stills as well as her own writing. –from the publisher

See also: contemporary art – British art

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

carlochiostri.jpg

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