Peter Handke: Kaspar and Other Plays

 Is it a tribute or a reproach that I couldn't help but imagine how I would produce these plays as I read them?  Was I imagining the possibilities that the author opened up before me, or trying to imagine how the flaws could be repaired?  A little of both, as it turns out.  Handke makes no secret of his intention to challenge the audience, rather than to entertain.  The obviously titled "Offending the Audience" is not the only example of his gleeful contempt.  I wouldn't be surprised if, had I cared to consider critical approaches to this work, they were filled with comparisons and connections to Samuel Beckett, a similarly sneering playwright for whom I have never developed a taste.  

And yet the ideas in these plays were undeniably interesting.  Fun, even.  I thought about different ways to stage the works as I read them, and came up with some rather creative, if I do say so, ways to remove the the voice of a mediocre white male whose pride has been bruised from them and make them enjoyable without diluting them.  Neither is it only in the tone of the works that the author is the chief obstacle.  It is no surprise that the man who created these diatribes is also something of a controversial figure, and by some measures a genocide apologist.  No one else could have possibly been so brazen.  

I like brazenness, of course, and I like diatribes. I even like offense and scorn and contempt.  They all have their part to play in literature, and perhaps especially on the stage.  In this case, however, I wish that they just didn't smell so much like fragile male ego.  These were not works of genius, but they were works of incredible gall, and that is at least something.

박하령: 기필코 서바이벌!

 유챃과 읽기 실력을 노피기를 위해 읽은 캑 뿐이다.   깊은 의미를 찾을 기대가 안 됐음에도 불구하고 인문학 전공의 본능을 못 말려 생각이 든다.  한국 아동 소설 중에 부모 둘 다 제대로 대해주는 이야기가 없는가?  물론 서양 아동 소설 중에도 고아 주인공이 있기는 있지만 전부 다 그런 게 아니다.  제가 자라면서 읽던 책들에 위로해 주고 충고해 주는 부모 절반이상였다.  이왕에 말 나오는데 한국 아동 책 뿐만 아니라 모든 한국 소설에 부모가 없거나 원수가 돼서 없는 샘인 이야기 . . . 95%이상? 제가 아는 한국 친구 중에도 부모 둘 다 옆에 있어주는 사람이 없다.  

재목에 나오는듯이 이와 같은 잔인한 끔찍한 세상에서 서바이벌 밖에 생각이 된다.  기필코 행복이란 책이 한국에서 연출할 수 없겠다.  오히려 의지를 펴서 군략을 쓰고 적을 격퇴해야한 다는 이와 같은 책 필요하다.

In The Heat of the Night

 Objectively speaking, this is the perfect film.  Every single element of it was executed to the very highest standards, not just mine but those who are in charge of doling out awards and laurels of various sorts.  Furthermore, it transcends the realm of good filmmaking and reaches the apex of "great" by virtue of having a reason to exist, a painful truth to uncover, and a message that people needed to hear whether they wanted to or not.  

Which makes my reaction to it a bit incongruous.  When the movie ended, I was seriously frustrated.  Such a good movie, and yet so many plot holes, unanswered questions, and tenuous connections.  I stewed in that frustration for a good while.  As a film, it was genius.  As a story, it was almost insultingly amateurish.  So I thought.  

Whether intended or not, my reaction revealed another element of the genius of this film.  somehow over the course of the film, I had become so invested in Tibbs' story, his outlook, that I had fallen into the same trap that almost undid him.  Those plot holes and incongruities that so frustrated me--they didn't really exist.  I only felt them because I expected something else, for the vast conspiracy at the heart of the mystery to be exposed, and for the bigots and bullies to get their comeuppance.  When that didn't happen, I was so frustrated that I instinctively blamed the film for what I perceived as a flaw, but was instead the very fabric of the story.

If I had watched the movie purely as a murder mystery, it would have been tied up in my mind as neatly as Jessica Fletcher or Matlock could have hoped.  But I didn't watch it that way.  I scarcely noticed the ostensibly central mystery, just as Tibbs did and, like him, was blinded.  Blinded to the extent that for some time after the movie was over, I didn't even believe that the mystery had been solved.  And that, in my book, is art.

Dante Alighieri: Divina Commedia

 I wonder if Dante was satisfied when he finished this.  With neither progenitor nor offspring, this work certainly has earned its place in the pantheon of world literature.  No work before or since can compare to it in ambition as far as I am concerned.  it is not simply that Dante set out to explain the mysteries of the afterlife; evidently that would have been to easy for his taste.  Rather he set out to do that backward and in heels, so to speak, in a hobbling meter of his own device, and with a radial symmetry that would impress even with today's ability to go back and adjust things after the fact.  This would have been a herculean task for any, but he did the thing, and then topped it off with riveting narration, indelible characters, and a cosmic imagination so profound that many today take it to be gospel fact.  The orders and ranks of angels, for example, are taken as metaphysical fact in some circles, when in fact this is something of Dante's pure invention.

Dante's trip through hell is the most widely known, of course, and I had even committed passages from it to memory decades ago.  Naturally, the gruesome and inventive punishments there tend to capture the memory, and who among us has not found ourselves "Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita mi ritrovai per una selva oscura ché la diritta via era smarrita"? Even those who have not yet reached the "mezzo" can relate.  

Familiar though I was with the Inferno, I had never touched the other two books in the Commedia before finally setting myself to it this year.  Fully aware of the book's import and influence, it seemed insulting to read it in English, and I set out to do it backward and in heels--in Middle Italian.  Refusal to do things the easy way is a point Dante and I have in common.  Like Dante, I set my nose to the belt sander, and did it.  I wonder if, like me, Dante also felt dissatisfied with the result.

The Commedia is a masterpiece; of that there is no doubt.  It's a fractal mosaic of words and ideas, as awe-inspiring in its geometry as in its language.  But that was the easy part.  Dante eats words and shits terza rima.  What he set out to do, however, was not merrely to write a glorious labyrinth of epic poetry.  He set his sights no lower than to solve the mysteries of existence, and resolve the fundamental contradictions at the heart of the religion that shaped his entire life.  His decision to make himself the sojourner in the story makes it obvious that it's an allegory of the doubts he wrestled with in life, but it would be a mistake to stop there.  The journey of the character Dante parallels that of the believer Dante, to be sure, but there is a third journey here:  that of the author.  The Commedia is not an explication of the conclusions that bolstered  his faith; it bears the marks of a thought in progress, the conclusion of which was unsure at the outset.  

And the conclusion of those three journeys, the believer, the writer, and the character, might possibly have been less definitive that they would have wanted.  After all of that, after a literary, if not literal, trip to hell and back, the answer to the question, "How can all of this that I believe and have been taught possibly be true?" turns out to have been, "None of your business.  It is for God to know and understand.  It is for you to believe and follow."  The character was satisfied.  He even pretended that it was an actual answer.  Maybe the believer in Dante was also content to leave it there.  But how could the writer have been?  How could a mind that would bother to ask the question have been satisfied with that answer?  One who set out to prove by logic and theology that God is indeed just and good . . . surely he saw how thoroughly he failed at that task.  And the reader--this reader, who wore Dante like a robe while reading, and eagerly awaited the ultimate answer in the ultimate sphere, some truth buried in the cornices of this towering masterpiece--how could he feel otherwise?

마부

 예술과 문학은 무슨 역할을 맡는 걸까?  우리 아는데로 보여줄까? 아니면, 우리 보는대로 보여줄까?  이 질문은 왔다 갔다 하는 추처럼 예술의 역사의 핵심 질문이다.  Caracci와 Caravaggio, Constable과 Turner, Manet와 Monet, 예술 뿐만 아니고 전체 문화의 쟁점이다.  한편에, 오발탄과 같은 작품이 우리 겪는 대로 존재를 반영하는 점에 가치가 있다.  윗사람들이 아랫사람들을 밟는 게 현실이라 그렇지 않다는 게 착각 뿐이다.  예술은 위로해야 하는 역할 아니라 아무리 끔찍해도 현실을 밝여야 한다는 측면이다.

다른 한편에 오발탄과 같이 1961년에 개봉한 마부는 무참히 현실을 반성할 필요가 없다는 측면이 있다.  우리 다 겪는 고통스러운 생활을 화면에서 볼 필요가 있냐는 작품이다.  잠깐이라도 인생에서 탈출해서 안도할 수 있다면 좋은 거 아닌가에도 의미가 있다.  마부에 나오는 얘기는 현실에 볼 수 없다.  아무리 열심히, 아무리 도덕적으로 살아도 결국은 또 같다. 인명재천이라더니.  기적을 기다리자는 작품 아니고 잠시 기적을 기다리면 안 되는짖를 잊자는 작품이다.

Okot p'Bitek: Song of Lawino and Song of Ocol

Progress or tradition?  When I say "fuck, no" to the cisheteronormative white ableist phallic theocapitalist kyriarchy, am I just another colonizer?  Just another outsider trying to impose my beliefs on a long established culture that celebrates all the things I abhor?  When I say that religion is unequivocally harmful, and I do, am I really a paternalist know-it-all with an inflated sense of my own importance?

As ever, the problem is on its face an either/or, a dichotomy in search of a synthesis, and p'Bitek's work is a revealing study of the problem.  What is his conclusion?  Whose side is the author taking, Lawino's or Ocol's?  Is p'Bitek in favor of tradition, or progress?  It would be understandable if one took Ocol to be a straw man, a comically oblivious and deluded foil, whose only purpose is to strengthen his opponent's arguments.  It is surely not without purpose that the author paints him so clearly as a sad pawn in the political games of the Pan-African movement.  Lawino gets an undeniably more forgiving treatment: the woman wronged, the preserver of tradition, the voice of reason, not to mention around three times as many pages to make her case.

But she is wrong.  Maybe not on every level, and maybe not even in the broader intention of the work, but she is wrong, and p'Bitek does not shy away from highlighting it:

That child lying

On the earth

. . . Heavy with malarial parasites

Raging through his veins,

The mad woman

spits on the palms

Of his hands

And on his feet,

Squirts beer

On his face

to cool him,

Spills chicken blood

On his chest,

A gift to Death! (III)

 

This boy does not need chicken blood; he needs quinine.  The old ways may be lovely and touching, but they are false.  There is no disputing this.  And the new ways that Ocol is championing are not, as Lawino seems to think, some ridiculous Western intrusion.  She rails against the ridiculousness of the celibate priests; the dry, spiritless teachers who can't even dance properly.  She glories in the wild freedom of the culture she knows.  To her, of course her husband is ridiculous, learning English, desiring a Westernized moppet, wearing ludicrously impractial trousers.  Her wit is so biting, her imagery so vivid, one is seduced into thinking that she is the voice of this book.  In reality, it is Lawino who is the straw woman.  

Ocol struggles, to be sure.  His position is unsolidified, even contradictory.  He rails against Western intrusion, declaring,

To the gallows

With all the Professors

of Anthropology

And teachers of African History,

A bonfire

We'll make of their works,

We'll destroy all the anthologies

Of African literature

And close down

All the schools

Of African Studies

But it is not because they intrude that he wishes to abolish them.  It is because they remind him of something he doesn't want to see, and which he desires to escape:

 Smash all these mirrors

That I may not see

The blackness of the past

From which I came

Reflected in them (III).

One doesn't need to know that this very closely reflects p'Bitek's own stated position in life, to make the connection.   As beautiful as the old ways are, wild and free and glorious, they are wrong.  Quinine works.  Chicken blood does not.  To Lawino, this Ocol is just a colonial stooge, but to p'Bitek he seems to be more.  He is a man struggling with the reality that progress is good, but the ways in which progress wants to come are bad.  Ocol, in his poem, is on the verge of realizing what p'Bitek knows: that Leopold II, Bismarck, Livingstone and Stanley bring nothing but death with them.  But so did Mansa Sulayman, Askia, and Shaka.  None of these has the answer.  What is needed is not a Western answer to an African problem.  What is needed is "A new City on the hill" (IX),  a truly African way forward that is beholden neither to colonizers nor to ancestral spirits.  Ocol never does resolve this dilemma, and his diatribe is correspondingly inconsistent,  but somewhere in this dilemma there is an answer.

Gil Vicente: Four Plays

 I am reminded of a terrible movie: Art School Confidential, wherein one of the characters' paintings is lauded because "it's as if he's never seen a painting before."  This is exactly the impression I get from reading these accidental attempts as drama by a man for whom play-writing was certainly not a primary vocation.  Vicente was, as far as we know, a goldsmith who offhandedly prepared a little staged production for the Queen, and turned out to be rather good at it.  Because he was nothing resembling a literato, his plays are startlingly unplaylike, something of a bridge between medieval passion plays and commedia dell'arte.  No plot, nor characterization, nothing that we would think of as suitable for the stage, rather more like arranged speeches.  Convoluted and inelegant.  Charming, and occasionally insightful, there was nothing here that I am likely to read again.

And yet.

What a bizarre overlap there is with Benvenuto Cellini.  Both European men operating around the year 1500.  Rather a tenuous connection.  Both goldsmiths first and writers offhandedly.  Very well.  Both inadvertently engraved in posterity for something they no doubt thought of as a trifle at the time.  More promising.  Compare, however, these words of Vicente's:

If hard work and merit spelt success I would have enough to live on and give and leave in my will (To the Conde de Vimioso, III. 382-3).

with these of Cellini:

It is not enough to be a man of virtue and talent (Autobiography, can't be arsed to look up the page number).

This takes the parallel from convenient to spooky.  One is tempted to look for evidence of Cellini's frustration in Vicente's plays, and vice versa. for now, I will instead observe the frustrating truth that talent, hard work, and merit (I make no claim to virtue) have absolutely fuck all to do with what this existence recognizes as success, and that I can sympathize with both men. 

Robert Hughes: Seventy Proven Hypnosis Scripts

 There is not much to say about this book, but an awful lot to say about the place it represents on my current path.  I took some valuable concepts and tools away from it, several that I have already applied with success.  On the whole, it is repetitive and reductive, and by no means needed to be as long as it is.  One gets the impression that vast swaths were copied and pasted from one section to another, which is presumably because they work.  

But what can I say about the new doors that are opening to me, of which this is a mere splinter?  Shall I wax dramatic, and marvel at the wonders of the human mind to which I am being awakened?  Shall I confess my fear that I am not suited to open these doors and ask these questions?  Shall I make some forced attempt to connect what I am learning about human experience to the rather more stable rocks of literature and philosophy?  Shall I leave the reader, of which there are presumably none, with the impression that I might be going mad?  Yes, I think this last one will do nicely.

Svetlana Alexievich: In Search of the Free Individual

I am an unapologetic, though recovering, completionist.  As one who has stumbled across my blog might gather, it is rather a sense of pride that I have written about absolutely every book iI have read (and some movies I have watched) for roughly fifteen years.  Even though it scarcely qualifies as a book ( being rather the transcription of a speech), reading, and writing about, this item is definitely a sacrifice at the altar of completionism--twice so, insofar as it is also a notch on the list of "Nobel Prize winners".  

How frustrating, therefore, that it has done rather the opposite of what I intended.  I had hoped to cross Alexievich off the list, add her to the collection, and set her upon the shelf to be admired.  I was, instead, smitten by her perspective, brutally realistic and deeply philosophical.  Raw and clear, and most importantly unafraid of the implications of what she sees.  I have read rather a few books in my time, quite a few that are brutal observations of reality, and slightly fewer that are bold and clear attempts to answer unanswerable questions.  If this brief glimpse is to be trusted, Alexievich is of that rare flavor that dares to do both.  

Accordingly, as much as I want to put her on the shelf and mark her "done," I simply cannot.  I am intrigued and smitten, and must dive further into her mind before I can let her go.