A Modest Request from a Potentially Homeless Writer

Will You Pay My Rent?

by James Albert Barr


Will you pay my rent? Seriously, it's nearing the end of the month (shit, it's actually tomorrow!) and I really need someone to cover it for me because I'm plumb broke. I really am. I can't remember being so utterly, so abjectly bereft of renewable funds. I'm totally broke, and practically penniless. And as Canadians well know, pennies are now absolutely useless; they've been discontinued and formally retired by the federal government. Stores reject them and piggy banks are less credible with them collected in its ceramic belly. Actually, I've got an old Classic Coke can filled with pennies. It still makes for a good paper weight, even though I rarely use paper now; especially single sheets strewn everywhere like during my "Henry Miller phase".

Yes, you guessed it: I'm unemployed at the moment, and not entirely without a degree of deliberateness on my part, I fully confess. But you see, here's the thing: I can't be wasting my precious, and quite frankly, crucial time making money, traditionally, for a living, because I'm preoccupied at the moment with representing you in the courtroom of life. What is the "courtroom of life" you might ask? with perhaps an inkling itching you in a hard-to-reach-area, or a visceral or cerebral discomfort all taut and knotted, but not so paralyzing as to prevent you from performing your daily tasks resulting in a likely bi-weekly stipend and a Pavlovian endorphin-rush from realizing that Friday has come around once again? 

No, I, and those considerably few like me (but most importantly me at this particular juncture), are the writers, the artists, the "lazy sumbitches who gotta git off their asses and earn a goddamn paycheck!", who are on the figurative front-lines, in the wrestling ring, hovering over an operating table and, yes, the proverbial courtroom trying to defend your collective freedom, your connection with verifiable life and existence, your connection with yourself. Because that connection is getting slowly shut-down, day by day, and even minute by minute, isn't it? 

Don't lie. I can feel the veritable disconnect from here in front of my laptop at 3:00 a.m. Mountain Time with The Knife's Shaking the Habitual semi-blasting from my Sony boombox (I believe it's track-four, "Without You My Life Would Be Boring", that's playing right now). And even more disturbing and unsettling, our very children are being born directly into it! It's the very air they first draw into their unsuspecting, their utterly unwitting, lungs and brains. They're inured to this disconnect before they've even said their first words. And we wonder "what's wrong with kids today?" And not the way we wondered what was wrong with kids from the pre-internet/cellphone era either. This is something completely different, isn't it?

Life, society and culture have become increasingly more complex and dumbfounding hasn't it? Culture itself seems to be drained of nearly all substance and meaning and value. You see and feel this too - oh, yes, I know you do, consciously or just below the surface of sentience. You don't believe me? You think I'm full of shit and artsy-fartsy pretension, or worse, I'm just plain crazy? Ask yourselves this pertinent question: What do you believe in? Do you truly feel fulfilled in, and by, that belief, and that belief alone within the abstract purity of its conviction and integrity? Or is it supplemented with anti-depressants? Or some other pharmaceutical prescription for reasons that are completely lost on you, despite the "happiness" you've incurred from your belief(s)? Alcohol? Recreational drugs? Sex/porn addiction? Gaming addiction? On-line social media addiction? 

Can you stand being alone with yourself and your thoughts without the ambient aid of music or television or some other aural/visual distraction keeping the internal "unpleasantness" at bay?  Is your respective identity fortified with an unwavering sense of personal truth without it being totally governed by ego, narcissism and self-interest; which is to say, not completely deluded out of sheer and necessary rationalization and self-denial? Is empathy a foreign concept to you? Do you feel desensitized by life, your life? My life? Their life? Have you ever wondered what a day is like in the life of a Ugandan child? Or perhaps a single Detroit mother? How about an American Midwestern farmer? A struggling actress waiting tables off of Sunset Boulevard? An abused girlfriend from a broken family? A New York stock-broker? A globally curious youth in Beijing dealing with internet regulations? What does any of this have to do with your own life? It's "tough all over" I once read a retired "adventurer" say in an influential graphic novel.

I get it. I really do. It's really fucking hard to just muster up the requisite energy and sheer will to get out of bed and motivate yourself to accomplish yet another day of likely professional drudgery and adult responsibility, especially if you have a family to support. Where's the time to give a good goddamn to anything outside the immediacy of your own life drama? Therein lies the true tragedy of our contemporary world; one that is now wholly imprisoned by inhuman corporatism, worker-bee exploitation, technology-obsession/distraction and vapid, consumer-addled culture and media. And it's here that I come in, dear readers and fellow human beings, however damaged and deprived we all are and feel; and rightly so, because this is not the world we should be maintaining with the sweat of our brows and the very essence of our souls, our sense of meaning and value towards ourselves, our children, family, friends and others, humanity's very existence and nondescript, potentially post-human, future.

For reasons too drawn-out and protracted to get into here, suffice it to say that, after many years of observing and absorbing humanity's past, and now perpetuating present, I've taken on the Atlas-like task of attempting to explain this mess we undoubtedly find ourselves in, here at the early stages of the 21st century, and at the very least provide some kind of alleviation, if not outright solution, whatever the seeming ridiculousness of such a statement; my efforts are well-meaning and genuine, I promise you. And in order to exact said colossal task, I cannot be bogged down with worry and anxiety pertaining to the whereabouts - from daily physical and mental exertion - of the required funds expected to sustain, on a monthly basis, the residency I now, at present still, occupy here in the western regions of Canada.

So, once again, and from the humbling heart I assure you, can some kindly patron, with enough spirited sympathy and appreciation for the arts, foot the rigid bill of my "adult responsibility" and generously pay my frickin' rent, so I can get some real work done here in our collective name?...although I'll be taking all authorial credit of course, but for a damn good cause, you understand. Numerical figures can be discussed with the required discretion expected from such a sad and abject request asserted from this writer, a writer so utterly devoid of ego or sense of pride, apparently, that he'd resort to cyber-panhandling for legally tendered alms.

Oh, I almost forgot: you think you can throw in a few bucks for some groceries? I live on a strict, and very cheap, diet of: Kraft Dinner, Mr. Noodles, Chef Boyardee can goods, cheap wine, water, day-old bread and no-name cheddar cheese. It'd be greatly appreciated for sure. Eating is important of course, and I'd like to keep it up for the sake of the writing. Come on, help a "talented", socially-conscious mo-fo out, huh?  ;-)

Goldfrapp's Brilliant Debut Album from 2000: "Felt Mountain"

Beauty, Retro-Futurism, Woman as Symptom and the Post-Human Horizon

by James Albert Barr

"Who do we think we are?" - Goldfrapp: "Pilots"

"It's the stuff that dreams are made of." - Sam Spade in John Huston's "The Maltese Falcon"

"There's no escape. The city's ours. We made it....We fashioned this city on stolen memories. Different eras, different pasts, all rolled into one." - Mr. Hand from the 1998 film "Dark City"




The English electronic pop duo, Goldfrapp, released their eerily gorgeous debut album, Felt Mountain, in September of 2000. I only belatedly purchased my precious copy of it in 2008 after a fortuitous visit to my favorite record store in Toronto, Sonic Boom, on a late summer evening. I casually walked into the store, made my way down an arbitrary aisle and then heard the instantly captivating, otherworldly sounds that opened the album's first, stunning track, "Lovely Head". This was followed by the ambiguous, forlorn whistle from the duo's lead-singer and band's namesake, Alison Goldfrapp. This plaintive, solitary whistle recalls 60s European soundtracks, art-house pictures, and especially Sergio Leone films, which featured the stupendous music of Ennio Morricone. And then Alison's "character" - an apparent artificial twin/clone/replicant - dispassionately sings the first verse: "It starts in my belly/ Then up to my heart/ Into my mouth I can't keep it shut/ Do you recognize the smell/ Is that how you tell us apart". This discernible clone or android or reanimated corpse stays true to her/its claim of being unable to "shut her mouth" when she suddenly wails in such a terrifying, unearthly way, announcing its unnatural and implicitly forbidden presence: science creating artificial being; a being with sentience and consciousness it would seem...and a sense of the horror as well.

The eerie, spooky and spacey sound created to make such an unsettling, yet strangely beautiful, noise could be understandably mistaken for a theremin (popularly used during the 50s in sci-fi movies), but it was, in actual fact, Alison's own voice dramatically processed through a semi-modular monophonic synthesizer which modulated and distorted her voice rendering it virtually unrecognizable and inhuman. For me, it irrepressibly conjures up images of  Maria's gynoid robot-double (variously referred to as "Maria-robot","Maschinenmensch","Futura", "Ultima", "Robotrix"), if we actually heard her voice, from Fritz Lang's classic 1927 futuristic silent film, Metropolis. This associative notion is reinforced by the striking image of a sepia-toned Alison Goldfrapp split in two by a mirror or Rorschach-effect on the album cover of Felt Mountain. Alison's image resembles that of a 1920s era film starlet, if not the German actress Brigitte Helm herself, who played the Maria character and robot-double in Metropolis. It also implies the recent discovery of "genome-splitting/DNA tampering" and human-cloning.   

And, moreover, this sublimely atmospheric, cinematic, pop-culturally allusive and endlessly listenable album, with its postmodern cache, also alludes to a plethora of other eclectic, and profoundly related, sources spanning two centuries: Art Deco, hard-boiled film noir, the 1939 New York World's Fair, the modernist architectural delineations (i.e., sketches) of Hugh Ferris, German expressionism, Hugo Gernsback's Amazing Stories pulp magazine, spy films and James Bond theme songs, Blade Runner, Dark City, The Thirteenth Floor, The Matrix, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Darwin's evolution theory, Villiers de l'Isle-Adam's 1886 proto-sci-fi novel The Future Eve, Frank Whale's Bride of Frankenstein, Dean Motter's comic book series, retro-futurist Mister X and Terminal City, William Gibson's concept of the "semiotic ghost", Frederic Jameson's 1982 essay "Can We Imagine the Future?", and even H.P. Lovecraft's patented theme of our Faustian/Promethean thirst for "forbidden knowledge", whatever the horrific consequences that may result.   

Despite Felt Mountain's conspicuously modern, electronic sound and aural aesthetic, as well as its seeming emotionally cold distance and bloodless detachedness, I find the album quite affecting, moving and deeply melancholy (there are, indeed, some lush strings and operatic vocal flourishes here and there to counterpoint the underlying darkness and inhumanness). It incites an emotional reaction because of the ironic remoteness and sense of tragedy in its narrative. There's a dark intimation of a post-human presence pervading the album, and more and more throughout our present culture and society; an empty, frightening feeling of abandonment, betrayal and destitution, both physically and emotionally, even when sharing the same space; an increasingly artificial alteration to our collective ontology, our organic being and sense of human communion with one another. Crucially, this also includes the utter draining of the symbolic economy, its meaning and value, within cultural, social and gender relations.    

To further counter the futuristic, mechanical tone of the album, Goldfrapp recorded Felt Mountain in a remote, rural bungalow in Wiltshire county, South West England, hence the very suggestion of remoteness and seclusion in the album's title. Much of the time Alison was alone, and having been affected by this extensive solitude it influenced the lyrics she was writing for the album. Her love of film and memories of her childhood also contributed to the abstract, obsessional quality of the lyrics. Musically, Felt Mountain featured an array of different sounds and influences ranging from 60s pop to German cabaret, Shirley Bassey, John Barry/Morricone/Badalamenti soundtracks, folk, chamber-music, and of course electronica. It achieved only moderate commercial success, which is not surprising in my opinion, as it hardly catered to popular, mainstream tastes, but it did get short-listed for the prestigious Mercury Prize for Best Album in 2001.

Many of the lyrics on Felt Mountain express a sense of being abandoned, betrayed, rejected, jilted and discarded, while obsessively, stubbornly, and out of sheer emotional necessity, clinging to the notion of being loved and desired regardless. There are relatable instances where Alison sings about feeling discarded like a "brown paper bag", being "wired to the world" and "that's how you made me"; "I'm not supposed to feel/ I forget who I am"; "It's just the sound of you and me/Time twitching/Murmurs of our friendly machine"; "Say my name, whisper it/I'm deliciously wired"; "I fool myself to sleep and dream/Nobody's here, no one but me/So cool, you're hardly there/Why can't this be killing you/Frankenstein would want your mind, your lovely head"; "I think I loved you more than me/Are you human or a dud/Are you human or d'you make it up".

The album is dominated with this pervasive lyrical theme and trope of self-effacement, negative space and relational distance; supplemented and reinforced by the moody, electronically-baroque and aloof music (composed by both Alison and her partner Will Gregory), despite its icy, jagged-diamond and prismatic beauty. Like the Frankenstein monster (gender reversed) rejected by its maker, and Maria the robot used for manipulative and diabolical purposes as her human counterpart is unjustly imprisoned, and the femme fatale dying or disappearing at the resolution of a hard-boiled detective novel or film noir, Alison's apparently artificial persona is suffering from rejection and abandonment, bereft of her power of being desirable and wanted. Do modern women share the same sentiment asserted in 1985 by postmodern feminist scholar Donna Haraway, that she would "rather be a cyborg than a goddess", if it would only abolish patriarchy in the end?

Is woman simply just a "symptom of man" as controversially suggested by post-Freudian psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan (1901-1981), even in artificial guise? Utilizing Lacan's seemingly sexist theory, contemporary critical theorist and philosopher Slavoj Zizek addresses the equally controversial theory of gender roles of social value in Otto Weininger's 1903 book Sex and Character where he (Weininger) insists that women are inferior to men, and have no predisposition towards "becoming a genius and bettering their spiritual being"; in point of fact they act as a distractive and destructive agent against men's "true desire". Symbolically, "she only exists as a result of the unethical division in man himself and therefore has no existence in her own right" (Tony Myers: "Slavoj Zizek" - 2003). Zizek uses what he terms a "Wagnerian performative" to show the similar functioning of woman's role as espoused by Weininger's claims in Sex and Character.

For example, in Wagner's opera The Flying Dutchman, the titular hero eventually fulfills his "symbolic role" by means of woman - assigned to the opera's main female character Senta - acting as a "performative", a necessary vanishing mediator (in Frederic Jameson's' terminology) and symbolic prop, between Man and his ultimate destiny. Senta indeed dies at the end of the opera. However, Zizek brilliantly uncovers an ironic twist that supplants Weininger's and Wagner's male chauvinism by stating that if the so-called "woman as symptom of man" maintains the consistency, the integrity of the subject male, then by virtue of its dissolution will in fact betray that consistency/integrity and the subject will dissolve, be effaced and rendered indistinct. What that means is that man only exists by woman conferring meaning upon him to give him consistency; his existence is "out there" in woman and therefore he depends for his existence on her, hence woman's equal and proportional existence, according to Zizek's insights here.

During the late 19th century the issue of men and women's respective place in society, and the idea of eugenics in general, were being studied and fiercely debated. Charles Darwin focused much of his 1871 book, The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex on this very issue and claimed that evolutionary biology determined men's apparent superiority over women. Clearly, this is not the prevailing attitude in contemporary times, at least on the surface; and even the so-called "physical differences" are being considerably challenged by the female sex on the world stage daily. Conversely, however, and despite the major progressions made through the "women's lib" movement of the 60s and 70s, women are still ubiquitously displayed, in their "ideal form", as sexual objects in our advertisement-saturated culture. So there appears to be a deep-seated contradiction of sorts, both contested and endorsed by males and females alike. The woman as predominant, non-subjective sexual object, actually, artificially and virtually, and the woman as emancipated individual with her own mind and worldview are implicated in an ontological and epistemological struggle within the underlying themes of Goldfrapp's Felt Mountain album.

Of course, the other major theme of  Felt Mountain is the postmodern/retro-futurist one. In arguably the album's most beautifully crafted song, "Pilots", Alison sings in the beginning: "Armored cars sail the sky/They're pink at dawn/If I lived forever you/Just wouldn't be so beautiful as the sun/When it shines all over the world", followed by the song's chorus, which asks a very pertinent, but unnervingly simple, existential question: "We're pilots watching stars/The world preoccupied/We're pilots watching stars/Who do we think we are?"; a reflection on "the tomorrow that never was" depicted in early 1930s/40s pulp magazines and other pop-culture media of the day, and displayed in the 1939 New York World's Fair, haunts these lyrics to be sure. In Frederic Jameson's key 1982 essay, "Can We Imagine the Future?", he says: "We can no longer entertain such visions of wonder-working, properly 'science-fictional' futures of technological automation. These visions are themselves now historical and dated - streamlined cities of the future on peeling murals - while our lived experience of our greatest metropolises is one of urban decay and blight. That particular utopian future has in other words turned out to have been merely the future of one moment of what is now our own past".

The pervasive ambiguity and love-hate position of living in our hyper-technological, organically-alienating and increasingly digitally-virtualized, world is suffusing through all, certainly first-world, denizens' constitutions at present, either consciously or not. Are we indeed collectively moving closer to a "post-human age", such as predicted by science-fiction author Vernor Vinge in 1993, leading to what later developed into "the Transhumanist Movement" in the 90s/2000s; and will we be ultimately subsumed by the alleged coming Singularity as inventor/futurist Ray Kurzweil hopes will eventually be the case, thus establishing an apparent "cure for death and aging" for its own narcissistic sake?...

"Are you human or a dud/ Are you human or d'you make it up?"

Agnes Moorehead's Performance in Orson Welles' 1942 "The Magnificent Ambersons"

The Woman Who Broke Ground in Film-Acting Nearly a Decade Before Brando Did


by James Albert Barr

"Perhaps the most revolutionary thing Orson Welles ever put on film was this character - a spinster aunt who wasn't a comic relief biddy but a full-blooded, Jamesian tragic figure, brilliantly and scarily realized by Agnes Moorehead." - (on Moorehead's character, Aunt Fanny, from "The Magnificent Ambersons") Michael Gebert: The Encyclopedia of Movie Awards (1996)


 



In 1942, a mere year after the release of his masterpiece debut film, "Citizen Kane", Orson Welles wrote and directed his follow-up (and provided the film's narration as well); a period piece adapted from the 1918 Booth Tarkington novel of the same title, "The Magnificent Ambersons". Both tell the story of a proud, wealthy, American Midwestern family who find themselves collectively falling on hard times as major changes take-over society shortly after the turn of the 20th century. These "changes" ultimately result in what became the Modernist Age, an age the Amberson family were ill-prepared to meet, or accept, to their financial detriment and broken familial solidarity. Though not as fervently celebrated, and endlessly praised, or analyzed, as its monumental predecessor, "The Magnificent Ambersons" is generally considered an American classic and one of the finest films ever made. It was added to the National Film Registry and the Library of Congress in 1991 as "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".

The film starred Joseph Cotton (who co-starred with Welles in "Citizen Kane"), a young Anne Baxter, Dolores Costello, Tim Holt, Ray Collins, and the unforgettable Agnes Moorehead, as the feisty and emotionally-wrecked spinster, Aunt Fanny. Her performance easily towers over all of her co-stars in the film. And I would submit that Moorehead, in general, broke new ground in film-acting that year in 1942. She brought a completely new and modern on-screen presence, sensibility and tone to her incredible performance.

In an era where cinema was still relatively young and rife with possibilities in all areas of its craft, Agnes Moorehead was already a veteran actress of little acclaim, already in her late 30s, when she met Orson Welles in 1937 and joined his theatre company, the Mercury players. She also did myriad radio performances with The Mercury Theatre on the Air (until Welles moved the company to Hollywood in 1939 to work for RKO Pictures, which distributed "Citizen Kane" in 1941) and later with CBS, particularly on their radio program "Suspense". Later, as a result of her increasing popularity and demand, she would be referred to as the "first lady of Suspense". Her significant cinematic debut was in "Citizen Kane" where she played the small, but memorable, role of the mother of future newspaper mogul, Charles Foster Kane, whom she reluctantly, but out of tragic, financial necessity, gives up to a wealthy banker in order to give her son a better life. Its implied that the child has been abused by his father as well, thus reinforcing the mother's intentions for the child's future welfare, not knowing what actually laid ahead for the boy and his now compromised childhood and adolescence; his beloved sled, 'Rosebud", left behind with his innocence forever,...seemingly. The classic shot of her looking out the window as her child is about to be taken away from her is both disturbing and heartbreaking in its seeming emotional distance: "I've got his trunk all packed. I've had it packed for a week now."

In her next film role in "The Magnificent Ambersons" Agnes Moorehead got a much bigger part, and she fearlessly threw herself headlong into the role of tight-buttoned, yet emotionally unhinged, Aunt Fanny. I feel it was with great irony that Moorehead's performance would be initially met with similar disdain and dismissiveness, as the Amberson family did while observing the great societal changes outside their collective 19th century bubble, when the film was first screened for test audiences. During many of Moorehead's scenes as Aunt Fanny, the audience would laugh out loud! Why did they laugh at her performance? Because it was a kind of performance not seen before in film at that time. It was so new and modern that its initial audience had no idea what to make of it, and so laughter (as is so often the case when people encounter the new and unfamiliar, even to this day, of course) was evidently their first reactionary impulse towards this "strange" on-screen behavior before them.

Moorehead's performance was filled with a precariously tethered, and episodically unleashed, disposition uncharacteristic of a properly bred Victorian era "lady". But its important to take into consideration Aunt Fanny's "spinster status". She's likely in her thirties, unmarried with zero prospects, and probably still a virgin, yet she evinces all the signs of a passionate and energetic, grown woman. In other words, her untapped sexuality has rendered her prone to outright hysterics, especially by the time the film reaches its ironic and unfulfilled, but necessary, "climax", where during the memorable "boiler room scene", Aunt Fanny, while confronted yet again by her pompous and ignorant nephew George, reveals that she is completely broke and the family fortune reduced to nothing. George is, not surprisingly, dumbfounded by this confession from his visibly distraught aunt, and so he unwittingly pushes her for an explanation that should have been obvious had he not been so selfish and oblivious. This "push" finally drives poor Aunt Fanny over-the-edge, and so she has a complete emotional breakdown in which George futilely attempts to restrain her to little avail when she wishes that the furnace she's leaning against, while pitifully sitting on the floor, was actually working so she could be burned by it. But, again to George's ignorance, for which Fanny must again inform him, they can't afford the gas to operate the furnace.

Moorehead infused her innovative performance of Aunt Fanny with many fascinating ticks and idiosyncrasies, unusual verbal inflections and startling moments of unbridled outbursts that set her far apart from not only her co-stars in "The Magnificent Ambersons", but also her colleagues in the film industry in general at that monumental time; a time that preceded Marlon Brando's legendary, and hitherto industry-changing performance nearly ten years later in 1951's now classic, "A Streetcar Named Desire", where he remarkably introduced the style known as "method acting"; a novel approach that brought a new form of on-screen naturalness that challenged and ultimately supplanted the old "mannered style" of acting that was the norm for pre-50s cinema.

After the release of "The Magnificent Ambersons", where it did only moderate business at the box-office, it was nominated for four Academy Awards, including one for Agnes Moorehead in the Best Supporting Actress category (her first of ultimately four nominations in that category within a 22 year span). She eventually lost to Teresa Wright for her performance in the year's highest grossing film and biggest winner at the Oscars, "Mrs. Miniver" - a crowd-pleasing wartime melodrama that went on to win Best Picture and five other awards besides. Only the New York Critics circle awarded Moorehead for her astounding performance in Orson Welles' underappreciated sophomore effort.

Although quite attractive, with rather striking and visibly intelligent facial features, Agnes Moorehead never became an "A-list" actress, with many starring and top-billed roles over the course of her long and distinguished career. Told early in her career that she was not "the right type", she was predominantly relegated to "supporting roles" which she always gave her all in with great range, originality, effortless poise, naturalness and zest. She had a great reputation for being a consummate professional and dedicated thespian in the truest sense. For better or worse, she is best known for playing the haughty, eccentric and mischievous witch, Endora, mother to Samantha, on the very popular 60s sitcom "Bewitched" for eight seasons. In my opinion Agnes Moorehead was greatly underrated and one of the absolute greatest actresses of her, or any, era!


 

Stephane Mallarme's Haunting Absence in the 21st Century (Part 2)

The Hymeneal Violence of the Poet's Verse and its Rendering as Hamlet

by James Albert Barr


"Whoever hovers around an exceptional character such as Hamlet, is merely Hamlet himself." - Stephane Mallarme: Hamlet (1886)

"All of Mallarme's text, however, is organized in such a way that at its strongest points, the meaning remains undecidable; from then on, the signifier no longer lets itself be traversed, it remains, resists, exists and draws attention to itself. The labor of writing is no longer a transparent ether. It catches our attention and forces us, since we are unable to go beyond it with a simple gesture in the direction of what it means, to stop short in front of it or to work with it." - Jacques Derrida: Acts of Literature (1992)

"Reader, this is what you have before your eyes, a written work..." - Stephane Mallarme: Les Mots Anglais/English Words (1876)

Despite the revitalizing experience spent with his great friend and confidant, Eugene Lefebure, at Cannes, in which his creative and intellectual strengths and energies were recharged, Mallarme suffered a horrible following winter in Besancon where he was, somewhat ignominously, transfered from the lycee in Tournon, not just because of his decidedly poor evaluation as an English teacher by the French Ministry of Education, but most probably because of his controversial reputation as a decadent, avant-garde poet of very un-Christian and immoral works that even provoked an influential member of the community to threaten to remove his child from the school. 

After only a short period in Besancon, which initially appealed to Mallarme until he was obligated to socialize with his conservative and complacent new neighbors and colleagues, he asked for yet another transfer; this time to Avignon where, among other benefits, he would be able to better afford a home for his family, see friends who already resided there, and incur more optimal, surrounding conditions in which to compose his unusual poems. He struggled harshly with his bills and inadequate salary while in Besancon.

But while all these domestic problems and distractions were usurping so much of his precious creative time, Mallarme had initiated, what he felt at the time, was a necessary study of both philosophical and scientific texts to significantly prepare him for his exceedingly ambitious "life's work": le Livre, the Great Book, his Epos. This, however, proved fruitless, despite his initial intentions because he wasn't, after all, a trained philospher, and derived very little pleasure from the reading of pure philosphical texts, such as Hegel's, for instance (most of his Hegel books remained in their store-bought wrapping). And, in the end, Mallarme was a fiercely independent thinker who preferred to arrive at his discoveries completely on his own, for better or worse (his understanding of Plato's Ideal Realm, for instance, was fairly inconsistent in his later critical writings, despite their ultimate brilliance, mostly by the more individually original ideas expressed throughout them). 

It was during the summer of 1866 that Mallarme envisaged his great work; a work that he figured would take at least twenty years to achieve. In a remarkable letter (Mallarme's amazing, poetic letters are perhaps only rivaled by those of John Keats) to his friend, Theodore Aubanel, Mallarme attempted to explain to the ultimately perplexed Aubanel the profound transformation his thought, creativity and overall sense-of-self had recently sustained:

"As for me, I have worked more this summer than in my entire life. I have laid the foundations of a magnificent work. Every man has a secret within him, many die without ever finding it... I am dead and resurrected with the jewelled key of the ultimate treasure chest of my mind. It is now up to me to open it in the absence of any impression borrowed from elsewhere, and its mystery will spread out into a most beautiful heaven. I need twenty years during which I am going to retreat within myself, avoiding any publicity except for some readings to my friends. I am working on everything simultaneaously, or rather I mean that everything is so well organized within myself that now, whenever a sensation reaches me, it is transfigured and is automatically lodged in a particular book or poem. When a poem has matured it will fall. I am imitating the laws of Nature, as you can see."

Unfortunately for Mallarme, after such a lofty declaration to his friend Aubanel, he found his exciting new intellectual and poetic clarity was waning as he engaged the philosophical and science texts later that year, and right before the harrowing winter he barely endured at the end and beginning of that 1866/67 period. Reporting once again to Aubanel, Mallarme informed him of his rather slow going regarding his "great work":

" My befuddled mind refuses to return to its former lucidity and I am just having to endure it, on my divan amongst a pile of books which I peer at and dip into without being able to finish them. It is true that they are books of science and philosophy and that I wish to experience through myself each new idea and not learn it from someone else."

Finally coming out the other end of that awful, but also crucial, winter, Mallarme had at last regathered his physical and mental strength enough to reengage his work by composing two of his greatest sonnets: "Quand l'ombre menaca de la fatale loi" (his "religious crisis" sonnet, where he declares his breach with "the old dream" of God) and "Le viege, le vivace et le bel aujourd'hui" (his exquisite "Swan trapped in ice" sonnet). Between his revelatory visit to Cannes the previous summer resulting in his monumentally important discussions with Lefebure, his taxing winter, in which much of his evenings were spent staring up into the clear night skies and contemplating the constellations (in which the light he was seeing emanated from stars that had died eons ago, thus revealing to him its fundamental paradox and the dichotomy of presence/absence that would incessantly preoccupy his creative vision thereafter), the letters he sent to Aubanel, and the two sonnets he would compose between the spring of 1867 and 1870 (though they weren't officially published until the early 1880s), he came to a renewed spiritual conclusion that would, for the rest of his life, dictate his religious/philosophical attitude and constitutuion.

He would officially pronounce (only to those close to him, understandably) his break with his Catholic upbringing and declare himself, essentially atheist, despite his wife, Marie's, continuing belief, as well as the rest of his family and the majority of people he interacted with, particularly at school. Although, he would retain elements of religiosity within the aesthetic confines of his poetic approach, where later he would define his Great Work as "The Orphic explanation of the Earth which is the sole duty of the poet and the supreme literary game."

Essentially, several years, in fact, before Nietzsche declared "God is dead" in his 1882 book "The Gay Science", Mallarme arrived at that conclusion himself. For him, and decidedly for an increasing number of like-minded others (mainly artists, writers, poets, scientists and philosophers, but certain intelligent laymen as well) throughout the 19th century, significantly enough, it was historically important, and about time, that Man become truly "modern" in his thought and in his understanding and perception of the world and of his being. Crucially, for Mallarme, this entailed the realization of the significance - in every sense of that term - of what language actually was and did.

In this regard, Mallarme anticipated the 20th century obsession with language via linguistics, semiotics, intertextuality and deconstruction (in the works of Saussure, Barthes, Derrida, Kristeva, Lacan, Eco, etc.) with his painstaking and laborious process of contemplating every-single-word he employed in his poems with exhaustingly precise detail and exact purpose, always noting their etymolgies, sound and double meanings. It was with this "post-Christian" world-sense of the truly modern that Mallarme boldly and confidently wrote to Lefebure:

"Yesterday I finished my first outline of the Work, clearly delineated and totally endurable, if I myself endure. I contemplated it quite calmly and without any horror and, closing my eyes, I saw that it existed. The Venus de Milo - which I like to attribute to Phidias (the Venus de Milo had only been discovered in Milos in 1820, about fifty years before this letter had been written, and was originally credited to Praxiteles who lived around the 4th century B.C., but eventually attributed to Alexandros of Antioch circa 130-100 B.C.), so generic has the name of that artist become to me - and the Mona Lisa seem to me to be and are the two great shimmerings of Beauty on this Earth and my Work, such as it is imagined, is the third. Absolute and unconscious Beauty, which is inalterable in Phidias's Venus; Beauty whose heart, with the arrival of Christianity, received the venomous bite of the Monster, painfully resurrected with a strangely mysterious smile, but a smile of forced mystery which she senses to be the condition of her being. Finally, Beauty which, through the knowledge of Man, has discovered in the universe the relative stages of its development, remembering the secret horror which forced her smile in Da Vinci's time, and to smile in a mysterious manner - smiling mysteriously now, but happily and with the eternal inner serenity of the Venus de Milo which has been recovered, having understood the mystery of which the Mona Lisa could only know the fatal sensation."

Of course, with the exception of several, not directly-related, but incredibly beautiful and brilliant poems (among them "Les Fenetres", "Funeral Toast", "L'Azure", "Sonnet en-yx", his "tomb sonnets" to Baudelaire, Poe, Verlaine, Wagner, "Prose [for Des Esseintes]", "L'apres-Midi, D'un Faune" [for which Debussy so wonderfully translated into one of the greatest pieces of late 19th century classical music], and his collection of exquisite prose poems such as "Le Phenomene Futur", "Plainte D'Automne", "La Pipe", "Un Spectacle Interrompu" and "La Declaration Foraine") Mallarme, in the end, did not live long enough to see the realization of his Great Work. Before he suddenly died in 1898, at age 56, he had composed one of the most radically modern poems of the entire century; a poem that would have a profound influence on 20th century letters and theory: "Un Coup De Des", or "A Throw of the Dice". This landmark Symbolist poem was the culmination of everything Mallarme put into the art of composing poetry and tackling the existential crisis of humanity so viscerally felt more and more by century's end, only to explode climatically and globally in every literal sense in the first half of the 20th century.

But therein lies the ultimate and unbearable irony of the implications suffusing through Mallarme's monumental poetry: the violence, however Silent as well as audible, so inherent in everything, despite the almost equally unbearable Beauty found in existence if apprehended and truly beheld with attending understanding and appreciation, if ultimately ineffable, resisting language and clarification. This is the key to understanding Mallarme's poetry and critical theories. In order to essentially defy and transcend the innate imperfection in language and communication, Mallarme, via Symbolism, short-circuited and circumvented the rules of language, and the Symbolic Order that perpetually vacillates (like the optical trick of the candle between two human profiles) and precariously mortars our collective reality, our world, in order to access truisms of pure perception.

This very "violence" is intimated in one of his best earlier poems, "Les Fenetres" (i.e. "The Windows"). In the poem's final stanza Mallarme, with an existential urgency, asks: "Is there a way, O self, thou who hast known bitterness/ To burst the crystal that the monster has profaned,/ And take flight, with my two featherless/ Wings - at the risk of falling through eternity?" This poem anticipates his "Swan trapped in ice" sonnet composed years later; and is related to an earlier well-known sonnet, "The Chastised Clown", who wants to escape the confines of his make-up and the circus tent; a poem that, not insignificantly, references Hamlet and his own existential dilemma and gloom, brought on, or rather surfaced from its dormancy, by the dark and insidious conditions of Elsinore's grieving, yet corrupted and debased, courtly state.  

Mallarme's poetry, in fact, is peppered with either direct references or allusions to Hamlet; and for good reason. Mallarme was a great admirer of Shakespeare's masterful turn-of-the-17th-century play, and became basically obsessed with its titular character. He profoundly identified with Hamlet. In his 1886 review of the play that he had just seen around that time Mallarme quotes in his review: "Whoever hovers around an exceptional character such as Hamlet, is merely Hamlet himself. And, with his useless sword-point, the prophetic prince, destined to perish on the threshold of manhood, melancholically pushes that heap of garrulous nothingness off the path which he himself cannot follow - heap which he in turn might be, if he grew old." 

The "monster" mentioned at the end of "Les Fenetres" is crucial to Mallarme's work and philosophical aesthetics. In his excellent book of translations and commentary of Mallarme's poetry, Henry Weinfield elucidates on his understanding of where Mallarme was coming from regarding the Monster: "A monster, commonly, is something unnatural, something paradoxical, something that, in possessing a dual nature (like humanity itself), surpasses nature. But if we trace the word 'monster' back to its roots (recalling that Mallarme was always concerned with etymology), we find that it derives from the Latin 'monere', 'to warn', and that it originally has the meaning of an omen or divine portent, which is consonant with the prophetic quality of the poem ["Funeral Toast" in the case of this specific quote, but indeed related to 'The Windows" as well]."

The notion of "the monster" echoes all through the 19th century, particularly, perhaps beginning with Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein", E.T.A. Hoffmann's "The Sand-man" through to some of Poe's macabre stories (who was one of Mallarme's biggest influences), and eventually to Robert Louis Stevenson's "Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" and H.G.Wells' "The War of the Worlds". Even Joseph Conrad's classic tale, "The Heart of Darkness" implicates the mounting, century-spanning ominousness at the turn of the 20th century, which concluded Marlow's mission with Kurtz's final unnerving words: "The Horror! The Horror!"; and expressed visually in Edvard Munch's famous painting of 1893, "The Scream". Perhaps the best expression of the collective sense of foreboding and dread that ultimately culminated in the pronoucement of "the death of God" in the 1880s, and was fully realized in the global devastation of two World War's in the first half of the next century, was the end of Edgar Allan Poe's, seemingly ironic, breakthrough 1833 short-story, "MS. Found in a Bottle":

" A feeling, for which I have no name, has taken possession of my soul - a sensation which will admit of no analysis, to which the lessons of by-gone times are inadequate, and for which I fear futurity itself will offer me no key. To a mind constituted like my own, the latter consideration is an evil. I shall never - I know that I shall never - be satisfied with regard to the nature of my conceptions. Yet it is not wonderful that these conceptions are indefinite since they have their origin in sources so utterly novel. A new sense - a new entity is added to my soul."

This "feeling", this "new entity" added, and inured, to the collective soul of the 19th century, particularly in Europe, had utterly haunted Mallarme and ultimately drove his creativity and feverish desire to express this inexpressible "thing" that hopelessly eluded the narrator of Poe's disturbing story. And in Shakespeare's "Hamlet", a very early example of the initial dread and portentousness that ineffably disseminated through the next few centuries, originally provoked by the alleged "bifurcation of human consciousness" caused by the Calvinist offshoot of the Protestant Work Ethic advent of what would eventually develop into full-blown, and human-alienating, Capitalism, Mallarme would profoundly hitch his star to and attempt a retroactive explanation of what exactly Hamlet was really going through as history's first exponent - regardless of his "fictional status" -  of the existential plight of Man.

In Roger Pearson's superb 2010 book on Mallarme in the "Critical Lives" series, he states that: "For Mallarme the theatre is, ideally, a place where human beings join together in undergoing a 'solemn' ritual of cosmic understanding: 'the stage is the evident foyer/hearth/focal point [in French, 'foyer'] of pleasures taken in common, also and all well reflected, the majestic opening onto the mystery whose grandeur it is our purpose in this world to envisage'....,for Mallarme, 'Hamlet' is 'the play par excellence': 'for there is no other subject, mark my words: the antogonism between man's dream and the fateful circumstances meted out to his existence by misfortune'. With the minimum of interference from the particularities of place, time, and plot, Hamlet's dilemma is our dilemma - to be caught 'between': between childhood and adulthood, sanity and madness, doing and not doing, life and death. He is the 'latent lord who cannot become', a 'juvenile ghost of us all, partaking thus of myth'. Increasingly for Mallarme - although he had already intimated this in 'Un Spectacle Interrompu" - the purpose of art is to hold us in suspense: not the foolish suspense of the melodrama, so glibly resolvable, but a suspense that promises a meaning beyond the suspense, a prolonged wondering that opens onto 'Mystery'. The 'fury against the formless' prompted by the death of Anatole (Mallarme's eight year old son who tragically died in the 1870s) is calmed by the all-embracing 'relations' of the Idee, by the 'ministry of the poet'."

This all-encompassing "between" is what Derrida refers to as "the hymen" when studying and deconstructing Mallarme's work. Mallarme himself used the word in his tongue-in-cheek prose work, "Mimique", which is about a murder by tickling, in order to evade all traces of the crime. In his essay on Mallarme Derrida determines the characteristic "undecidability" depicted in Mallarme's verse. And it's this prevalent, linguistic indecisiveness, much like Hamlet's chronic delaying to kill the murderous King Claudius, that pervades through so many of Mallarme's poems, which Derrida brings to our attention in his patently clever and profoundly insightful way: "In 'Mimique', the word hymen is inscribed in such a place that it is impossible to decide whether it means the consummation of marriage or the veil of virginity. The syntax (and Mallarme was quoted as saying that 'I am profoundly and scrupulously a syntaxer') of the short word or is sometimes calculated to prevent us from deciding whether it is the noun 'gold', the logical conjunction 'or', or the adverb of time, 'now'."

In Hamlet's - and literature's for that matter - most famous soliloquy beginning with "To be or not to be, that is the question", we can see for ourselves the instant connection with Mallarme's syntactical manoeuvrings of "undecidability", as a way of preserving the - sometimes exasperating - mystery, and seeming elusiveness, of his verse in order to protect the integrity and existential delicateness of his message and textual music. Essentially, in the end, Mallarme's text, by virtue of its syntactical and undecidable character, is Hamlet and his ontological being circulating, hauntingly, through the verse, the poetry. And, to conclude here, from Henry Weinfield's closing words on his introductory essay of his book of Mallarme translations: "After observing that the plurality of language militates against the immediacy of spoken truth, Mallarme concludes that if there were only one language, and if the truth could therefore be uttered immediately, then 'poetry would not exist: supreme complement [or completion], it compensates philosophically for what all languages lack." 

                                                                                                               
                                                                 
     
                                                                                                       
                                                                                      
(note: I'd love to hear any feedback regarding this or any of my previous articles! Both positive and negative responses are welcome. If, by any chance, you are having difficulty accessing my comment section located below (like a few people have claimed) then you can reach me at this email address: j.a.barr@hotmail.com, Thank you all for your readership and support here at my blog!) 


    

Stephane Mallarme's Haunting Absence in the 21st Century (Part 1)

The French Symbolist Poet's Crucial Relevance as a "Semiotic Ghost"    

by James Albert Barr

"Poetry is the expression, by human language restored to its essential rhythm, of the mysterious meaning of the aspects of existence: it thereby endows our sojourn with authenticity and constitutes the sole spiritual task."
                                                                 - Stephane Mallarme (to journalist Leo d'Orfer - 1884)

It's been 115 years since French poet Stephane Mallarme died at age 56 in 1898, and his notoriously elusive poetry has, perhaps, never been more timely than it is right now early in the 21st century. But that so-called timeliness, however, should be taken with an ironic grain of salt. The reason for this is fairly obvious: while we presently live in a feverish world of material dominance, techno-romanticism, gadget obsession, ubiquitous event-presence and the deluge of ever-flowing information (as opposed to genuine knowledge), Mallarme's poetry and literary theories have quietly and unassumingly resided in abject obscurity outside the more appreciative confines of academia and poetry's selective cognoscenti. Yet, his verse continues to haunt us peripherally, like, as William Gibson aptly put it in his 1981 short-story, "The Gernsback Continuum", a semiotic ghost.

What makes Mallarme's work a kind of "semiotic ghost" can be directly analogized with what cultural critic and author Charles R. Acland refers to as residual media, which is usually in connection with a form of technology, but I would argue can, and is, related to culturally artistic media as well, like Mallarme's poetry, and even prose works. Residual media is characterized by Acland as "reconfigured, renewed, recycled, neglected, abandoned and trashed media technologies and practices" that continuously haunt and insistently occupy a peripheral space in contemporary society. As Acland further explains: "Figures from the past...creep up to remind us of their existence and of the influence they wield in the present. For an era such as ours that puts a premium on advancement and change above all else, declarations of the presence of the past can be confusing or alarming. There is nothing like that old party pooper 'historical consciousness' to dull the gleeful celebrations of progress and the new".

The Gibson phrase, "semiotic ghost", however, is especially suited to Mallarme and his work, particularly, because of the poet's strong connection with both the technical term "semiotic" and
the non-corporeal quality of the word "ghost", which is so prevalent in Mallarme's verse.

The word semiotic is an adjective that comes from the branch of linguistics called semiotics. Linguistics, itself, is the study of the structure and meaning of language, which is prominently associated with the monumental work of Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913), though the basis of this work would be challenged, and some believe superseded, in the 20th century's second half by Chomskian linguistics, cognitive linguistics and generative grammar. His book, "Course in General Linguistics", which was published posthumously in 1916 from the collected notes of some of his students who attended his lectures in Geneva, became one of the seminal works on linguistics in the 20th century.

He also, subsequently, was one of the founding fathers of semiotics (or semiology), and introduced the concept of sign/signifier/signified/referent. Semiotics, then, is the study of signs and sign processes (also known as semiosis), such as: indication, designation, likeness, analogy, metaphor, symbolism, signification and communication. Semiotics is basically divided into three specific branches: 1) Semantics - the relation between signs and the things to which they refer or denote; their particular meaning, 2) Syntactics - the relation of signs in formal structures, such as sentences; and 3) Pragmatics - the relation of signs and sign-using agents, which determines context.

Semiotics doesn't just cover signs found in language structures, but also in non-linguistic and concrete signs that are indicative of a particular culture, custom and time period. Pro wrestling, for instance, is one such example of a semiotic system of signs depicting a staged spectacle where the socially constructed concepts of Good and Evil are acted out by muscle-bound performers who exaggerate stereotypes of human strength and weakness within their pre-chosen "characters", while being watched by an audience who expects to see, time and again, the on-going myth of justice and treachery played out before them, and respond accordingly with great unwitting gusto and excitement. Fashion is another, where what one wears projects and disseminates, either consciously or not, a certain image and identity, class and social position or attitude. In fact, famed French semiotician, Roland Barthes (who wrote about wrestling and fashion in his important books, "Mythologies" and "The Fashion System"), once said that: "Nobody dresses innocently".

For Stephane Mallarme, the semiotic richness suffused in his relatively small poetic output (a little over a hundred published poems) extended beyond the page and thoroughly into his very life and constitution. He was born in Paris, France in 1842 into a middle-class family of provincial lawyers; a profession that Mallarme had never flirted with taking seriously, much to the chagrin of his ineffectual father, Numa. His mother, Elizabeth, prematurely died when she was just 28 - Stephane was only 5 at the time. Mallarme's maternal grandmother, Fanny Desmolins, forthwith became his substitute mother and guardian. He had a sister, Marie, who tragically died young at the age of 13 from a severe recurring rheumatic disorder. Though premature deaths of children were not uncommon for that period, Mallarme was deeply affected by his adored sister's death, and subsequently developed a preoccupation with death and mortality, which would unsurprisingly find its way into his poetry and themes.

After circumventing law school, and inevitably failing a Registry exam to become a clerk, Mallarme chose, practically by default, to become a teacher; specifically an "English teacher". His interest in poetry and writing had gradually developed since childhood, and eventually became not only a passion, but an outright vocation by the time he hit his twenties. His main influences, initially, were Charles Baudelaire and Edgar Allan Poe, thanks, exclusively, to Baudelaire singularly introducing the work of Poe to French readers with his excellent translations of not only Poe's poems and stories, but perhaps most importantly - for Mallarme - his translations of Poe's theoretical essays on poetic composition. Victor Hugo and Theophile Gautier were also significant influences on Mallarme.

When Gautier died in 1872, Mallarme was commissioned to compose a poem in his honor. The title of the poem was "Toast Funebre" ("Funeral Toast"), and it is one of Mallarme's greatest poems. In the poem, Mallarme, while paying due homage to one of his poetic heroes, still took it upon himself to compose an exquisitely elaborate "rallying cry" for all pure poets: "Et l'on ignore mal, elupour notre fete/ Tres simple de chanter l'absence du poete,/ Que ce beau monumentl'enferme tout entire." ("And we who have been chosen guardians of the word/ Are simply called upon to sing the absence of the bard./ Whom this fine monument encloses now indeed.") Mallarme's obsession with absence and nothingness and the void (le neant) is clearly expressed in this remarkable poem. But, as was his subtle touch and uncanny perception, Mallarme would always seem to make a delicate connection with the ontological membrane between life and death, presence and absence, corporeality and nothingness, essence and void, entity and ghost; and with an appropriate sense of wit and irony: "Nous sommes/ La triste opacite de nos spectres futurs," ("We are nothing, then,/Save the sad opaqueness of the future ghosts we bear.")  

Aptly enough, we can see how William Gibson's notion of the "semiotic ghost" fits perfectly with Mallarme's poem, its significations and symbols throughout. Mallarme, himself, became one of those "future ghosts" that continue to haunt literary tradition, French culture, English culture, academic syllabuses, linguistics and semiotics, textual space, the blank page and computer screen, modernist tradition and postmodernism, musicality; "the flower missing from all the bouquets"; "the silent thunder suffused in the leaves"; "the shade that now you are"; "The scintillations of the one-and-six"; "the transparent glacier of flights never flown"; "And avaricious silence and night's immensity" - the closing line from "Funeral Toast".

Some of the most memorable, yet unnerving and powerful, lines from "Funeral Toast" come from the poem's middle-section where Mallarme essentially spells out the ineluctable discovery and burden of the pure poet; a poet with an artist's soul, a philosopher's mind, a scientist's curiosity, a craftsman's precision, and a wise person's unvarnished consciousness:

"Vaste gouffre apporte dans l'amas de la brume
  Par l'irascible vent des mots qu'il n'a pas dits,
  Le neant a cet Homme aboli de jadis:
  'Souvenirs d'horizons, qu'est-ce, o toi, que la Terre?'
  Hurle ce songe; et, voix don't la claret s'altere,
  L'espace a pour jouet le cri: 'Je ne sais pas!'"

("Vast abyss transported to the gathered mists prevailing,/ By the irascible wind of words that he did not say,/ Nothingness to this Man, abolished yesterday:/ 'Memories of horizons, O thou, what is the Earth?'/ Howls this dream; with a voice that can barely issue forth,/ Space as a joke returns the cry: 'I do not know!'")

How did Mallarme arrive at this unsettling, if not harrowing, conclusion, which Milan Kundera called, in his 1984 novel of the same title, "the unbearable lightness of being"? In early 1866, when Mallarme had just turned 24, he had been utterly exhausted, mentally and even physically by his composing the first section of what would become his predominantly dialogical poem, "Herodiade". A poem that would ultimately occupy his time and incessantly revisionist activities for the rest of his life, and remain unfinished! That first section was titled "Ancient Overture".

While slowly and painfully composing "Herodiade's" first section during the entire winter of 1865-66, Mallarme made a devastating discovery, and it involved the very nature and dynamics of language and existence itself. As he composed each line, carefully selecting the exact right words in the exact right syntax and line formation with painstaking scrutiny, he noticed the inherent, contradictory aspects of language, as he attempted to synthesize the intended musical quality with the poem's narrative and overall sense. As Gordon Millan put it in his excellent 1994 biography on Mallarme (only the second such official biography done after Henri Mondor's initial tome about fifty years earlier): "He (Mallarme) realized that in practice the kind of harmony or correlation between sound and sense which he desperately sought was extremely rare.

What was even more disturbing, he discovered that in the French language at least, these two elements which he specifically sought to unite were frequently in direct and total contradiction to each other. It was a fundamental defect in the language which he commented upon much later, and with some humor, in one of his critical essays: ' Compared to ombre [shadow], which is opaque, the word tenebres [darkness] has little density, and how disappointing it is when one is faced with the perversity which, in total contradiction, confers in the case of jour [day] and nuit [night], a tone of dark upon the former, of light upon the latter.'"

Without any previous knowledge and familiarity with Buddhism, Mallarme viscerally encountered "two abysses" which brought him to the edge of despair. The first one was the sense of Nothingness itself, the pre-Lacanian sense of the notion of the Order of the Real; that which is outside of the language-buffering realm we all became accustomed to when we all learned language as a small child, and thus entered the Symbolic Order, which is to say, the world as we know it in our daily, diurnal and quotidian lives. And the second abyss was the precarious nature of life itself, "the unbearable lightness of being" that Kundera wrote about.

Utterly exhausted and anxiety-ridden, Mallarme was in desperate need of a vacation, away from his boring and unfulfilling teaching job, for which he wasn't very good at anyway, and decided to travel to southern France to visit Cannes and hook-up with an older friend, Eugene Lefebure, who was highly cultivated and crucially receptive to Mallarme's existential plight. Their long discussions, which covered nearly all of Mallarme's concerns and passions, all the while beholding the breath-taking beauty and vistas of the Mediterranean, greatly recuperated Mallarme and provided a much-needed mental, emotional and creative replenishment....

Please continue on to Part 2 which is available here at The Culture Fix!   :-)

Daredevil #177 and the Impact of Frank Miller

A Childhood Discovery and its Enduring Influence

by James Albert Barr

In the Fall of 1981, when I was thirteen years old, living in my hometown of Saint John, New Brunswick, Canada, I happened to walk into a convenience store that was located at the corner of Rothesay Ave. and McAllister Drive on the eastside of town where I lived with my young family. If memory serves, I was simply visiting the store with the intention of buying some candy (a not altogether unusual activity for someone around that age, certainly back then) but when I saw that they had a spinner-rack of comic books, I found myself helplessly gravitating towards it to peruse the collection of new comic books on display. 

The spinner-rack featured comics from the two main publishers - then and now - of superhero comics: DC Comics and Marvel Comics. There were also a few issues from the likes of Gold Key, Harvey, and even Charlton Comics, but DC and Marvel dominated the selection, no doubt. I saw the latest issues of, say, Batman, Detective Comics (the other Batman title, of course), Superman, Action Comics (the other Superman title, of course), Green Lantern, Amazing Spider-man, Incredible Hulk, Moon Knight (issue #14, in fact, which I would buy about a week or so later, thus introducing me to the fantastic artwork of Bill Sienkiewicz; a brilliant, multimedia illustrator whose work is second only to Frank Miller's, IMHO), Captain America, The Micronauts (a personal favorite of mine from the 80s), so on and so forth, until I finally came across an issue of Daredevil ("...in His Strangest Adventure", and it turns out they weren't lying!). It was a lone copy of #177, and it had an immediately eye-catching front-cover, as well as a very intriguing tag-line at the lower right-hand side of the cover that read: "Yes, we did...we dared to publish this, the most offbeat story of the year!" The title of this specific, personal watershed, issue was/is: "Where Angels Fear to Tread". That famous title (which E.M. Forster gave to his 1905 novel) comes from a previously famous line from Alexander Pope's 1711 poem "An Essay on Criticism". The full line reads: "Fools rush in where angels fear to tread." 

The cover to this seemingly irresistible superhero comic book (which only cost a mere fifty cents in 1981, though the next issue - #178 - would cost me sixty cents when Marvel increased their prices to match DC's) featured our titular hero, Daredevil, in apparent peril attempting to escape the gaping, razor-sharp jaws of a huge and hideous, multi-eyed demon! Only on this issue's cover do we actually see Daredevil wearing his cowl (i.e., his mask); it hangs behind his shoulders like a hood all through the issue's interior panels, and with good reason. I picked up this issue and started flipping through its 20-plus pages with great interest and curiosity.

As I jumped from page to page, the speed in which I commenced initially began to slow down as each subsequent page more and more transfixed me and the burgeoning sensibilities I was unaware of inside me during those days of pubescence when the biological changes of a boy just entering his teens had begun to sprout, so to speak. I eagerly purchased that issue of Daredevil and brought it home to read it through excitedly, both absorbing Frank Miller's hardboiled-style writing and his engrossing art more thoroughly. I was immediately smitten with this man's work! I also learned that Miller's first issue on Daredevil was in 1979 with issue #158. He began writing the issues as well beginning with #168, in which introduced his very popular female character, Elektra.

To my mind and memory, at the time, I had never seen such a dark and weird, moody and mature looking superhero comic book before (the closest being Batman #251 a couple of years prior; the classic "Joker's Five-Way Revenge" issue featuring the amazing, realistic artwork of industry legend, Neal Adams), where the story appeared to depict the hero unmasked and fighting some sort of monster in his own mind. In other words, a superhero, in human alias-mode (blind defense lawyer, Matt Murdock), struggling with the psychological complexities of his internal world and past childhood trauma. In Jungian terms, Daredevil/Matt Murdock was fighting against his "shadow", his "personal demon". This kind of storytelling (the raw modern text, the taut, visual illustrating, creatively fluid and cinematic panel structuring, emotional texture and visceral, noir-like atmosphere) was something completely new to me at that understandably naïve age of thirteen. And in a subplot within the same issue there was a story involving the political corruption of a mayoral candidate who was being controlled by one of Daredevil's recently established arch-villains, The Kingpin (Frank Miller needed a crime lord for his developing, issue by issue, plot in Daredevil, and so appropriated The Kingpin from Spider-man's rogues gallery with complete impunity); political corruption was a concept which I was not very familiar with in the "real world" until I got older and more informed (as well as cynical, of course) about said real world.

To provide a relatively brief summary of Daredevil #177, it begins with Daredevil unmasked, fully exposing the head of Matt Murdock as he sports the rest of his costume only in the presence of his former trainer and master; a considerably older, rough and cantankerous man simply called Stick. A couple of issues back in Daredevil #175, our hero was nearly killed in an explosion. Though he survived the blast, Daredevil lost his "super radar sense", which he instantly developed after an accident years before that robbed him of his sight. However, all his other remaining senses were ultra-enhanced to a super-human level. In issue #176, Daredevil is seen struggling with the loss of his radar sense, as he clumsily goes out on patrol in New York's Hell's Kitchen, keeping close vigil of The Kingpin's actions and also trying to track down the deadly female assassin known as Elektra, who just so happened to be his ex-girlfriend from several years back. His girlfriend at the time, Heather Glenn, even witnesses him nearly falling to his death as he was jumping from building to building and slipped a bit.

So clearly Daredevil was in great need of some help in order to get his radar sense back, hence the sudden appearance of Stick. The two of them, at the beginning of Daredevil #177, are in a stuffy, old attic filled with old mementoes and such from Matt's past. He is holding a bow while packing a bevy of arrows. There's a target at the other end of the attic where he's been attempting to hit with arrows for three consecutive days unsuccessfully. He's tired and frustrated, and feeling utterly lost physically, emotionally and mentally. But Stick, who is also blind, is a hard disciplinarian and won't let Matt rest. Stick insists that Matt has to dig deep into himself, psychologically, if he wants to get his radar sense back, and that apparently involves being around familiar things in a familiar setting. And constantly trying to hit the target as he simultaneously travels back in his mind to his childhood where he lived with his single-parent father, a washed-up boxer, who urged Matt to study hard and "become somebody" unlike his father. Matt was also the frequent victim of bullying from the neighborhood kids in Hell's Kitchen. He wouldn't fight back because his dad didn't want him to become like him, which of course frustrated young Matt. After actually fighting back during one instance of getting bullied, Matt ran home, elated by his victory, only to incur his father's immense disappointment, further confusing and frustrating Matt in the process.

With each traumatic childhood memory resurfacing intensely, Matt shoots an arrow at the target only to miss it again and again, provoking Stick to whack him with his han bo (i.e., three foot wooden staff) to motivate Matt with, evidently, good old-fashioned negative reinforcement. It works because Matt takes yet another try at the target, but seems to get more and more frustrated, as well as angry with each increasingly futile attempt. Finally Matt confronts his father (who's been dead since Matt was about eleven) in his mind, in a boxing ring. As Matt (still in his Daredevil costume with the mask off) tries to embrace his father (who's garbed in boxer's shorts and gloves) he's punched in the face by him. This internal confrontation represents, in Matt's psyche, his father's continuing disapproval that still echoes deep inside of Matt even as an adult and superhero! When Matt's dad suddenly is shot in the back by an arrow, Matt is then confronted face to face with the psychological appearance of The Devil, his "personal demon", the very manifestation of all of Matt's hatred and anger, but most importantly, his fear that has been festering deep within him. After fighting the demon with little to no effect, it is at this moment that Matt has a revelation, an epiphany, thanks to the unrelenting taunting from the demon, who states: "This is the end, Mattie boy. I'm gonna rip the flesh from your bones, piece by piece...Scared?" He realizes, probably because he's just so damn exhausted by all his anger and frustration and fear that he isn't afraid anymore, that this is all absurdity and unreal, so Matt then picks up the bow and arrow, slowly and assuredly, and says calmly: "No. I'm not scared. And I'm not angry. Not anymore. And that's why I can kill you." He then shoots an arrow straight into the center eye of the demon. The demon instantly disappears and we then see an arrow stuck into the center of the target within the attic (which represents the human psyche) that Matt and Stick occupy. To be sure that Matt did indeed get his radar sense back, Stick shoots an arrow at Matt as he's pulling his arrow from the target. Matt easily deflects the incoming arrow and then grins.                              

I didn't know it then, but that issue proved, I suppose inevitably, but no less pertinently, to be rather prescient for me personally, as I too would go on to battle my own "personal demons", and psychological impediments, through my beleaguered teens and early adulthood. But the lesson, nay revelation, learned from Daredevil #177 would stay with me, at least latently, throughout those years, becoming more and more manifest with each passing year of my own self-imposed auto-didacticism and investigations into human psychology and human history via my becoming an avid reader and talker/communicator, as well as an aspiring writer. That Daredevil issue and the many subsequent ones I collected over the course of the following year or two, coupled with the revelation that was The Police's 1983 "Synchronicity" album, inspired me to make my own comic books and characters, and write my own songs; to ultimately express myself and my growing world view.

Because of Frank Miller's memorable work on Daredevil I was compelled to seek out his other work, both past and present. One of the most unforgettable works by him, shortly after he left Daredevil with issue #191, was his groundbreaking six-issue mini-series published by DC Comics entitled Ronin. It was obviously a series meant predominantly for adults to read. However, I was only about to turn fifteen when issue one was released, costing $3.00 and was presented in deluxe format, with high quality paper stock, hence the much higher price. Ronin is about a disgraced Japanese samurai warrior whose master is killed on his watch by a demon named Agat. Hunting down Agat the ronin must kill the demon with his own blood, and so when the chance arises the ronin drives his samurai sword through himself and Agat, but before they both die Agat is able to trap their souls in the sword whereupon they are eventually freed eight centuries later in a dystopic, near-future New York City. The ronin winds up being reincarnated into the body of Billy Challas, an unfortunate born with no limbs and working for the Aquarius Corporation testing out cutting-edge prosthetics, and developing his telekinetic and psionic abilities. When the merge happens between the two, Billy's body and his powers artificially develop arms and legs, and the face of the ronin overtakes Billy's own. When the ronin realizes he's back and feels the full affects of disorientation by being reborn eight hundred years after he thought he died, and then learns of the demon, Agat's, diabolically supernatural ploy to escape death, he sets out to find him and destroy him for good.

Admittedly, the story in Ronin can be a little convoluted and unfocused, but Miller's artwork was beyond anything seen in comics before, certainly North American comics, as he displayed a manga influence hitherto unfamiliar to American and Canadian readers of comic books. And the graphic level of violence depicted within the series' six issues (especially issue #2! At the time reputed to be the most violent comic book ever made) was also an example of pushing the proverbial envelope in 1983-84 when comic books were becoming more and more adult-oriented.

This growing-up process in the comics industry culminated in 1986/87 with Frank Miller's monumental 4-part Batman mini-series The Dark Knight Returns, with its heavy political overtones, and returning the Batman character to his initial roots with his 4-part Year One arc in the pages of Batman #404-407. Miller had also perhaps written the most beloved Daredevil arc a year before with the Born Again set of issues. Miller also enjoyed substantial successes with his series of Sin City comics (where several stories were eventually made into a fine 2005 film co-directed by Robert Rodriguez and Miller himself) and his 5-issue mini series 300 (which was also made into a highly successful film in 2006, directed by Zack Snyder). Alan Moore also played a pivotal role in comic books growing-up and gaining much more legitimacy outside the confines of the industry with his amazing graphic novels V For Vendetta and the groundbreaking Watchmen, which brilliantly deconstructed the superhero mythos. Other great writers like Neil Gaiman, Grant Morrison and Warren Ellis would shortly follow in Miller's and Moore's considerable footsteps with their own outstanding, literary and mature works.

Admittedly, Frank Miller's latter-day work has been far less inspiring, or just plain bad. His highly anticipated sequel to The Dark Knight Returns released in 2001-2002 as a three-issue mini series and called The Dark Knight Strikes Again met with much disappointment, if not outright hostility, among fans and critics alike. His All-Star Batman and Robin would pejoratively give birth to the regrettable "goddamn Batman" slogan, and his 2011 Holy Terror graphic novel was a lurid exponent of off-the-tracks political propaganda (by his own admission no less!) and sheer lunacy. So Miller has apparently not escaped the fate that has stained the legacy of other great artists, musicians, poets, directors, and so on, who outlived their respective artistic peaks, and yet continued to produce subpar works. But for me, Miller's earlier and mid-period work made an indelible impression on me and influenced me greatly, not just as an artist in my own right, but as a human being and individual.