D. H. Lawrence and a Postcard from Paris

Erotic French postcard featuring a photo of 

Alice Prin (aka Kiki de Montparnasse) 

by Julian Mandel (c. 1920)

 

 

D. H. Lawrence opens his essay 'Pornography and Obscenity' with a liberal acknowledgement that "what is pornography to one man is the laughter of genius to another" [1]. It's a fine definition. 

 

However, it isn't long before he puts his reactionary hat back on and calls for the rigorous censorship of what he terms genuine pornography. Genuine pornography - which Lawrence distinguishes from the erotic aspect of art - is secretive in nature and almost always underworld. Secondly, it is an affront to sex and the human spirit:

 

"Pornography is the attempt to insult sex, to do dirt on it. This is unpardonable. Take the very lowest instances, the picture post-cards sold underhand, by the underworld, in most cities. What I have seen of them have been of an ugliness to make you cry. The insult to the human body, the insult to a vital human relationship! Ugly and cheap they make the human nudity, ugly and degraded they make the sexual act, trivial and cheap and nasty." [2]         

 

Blimey! It makes you wonder what kind of cards Lawrence had been shown; as well as where, when, and by whom ...? As he'd been in Paris for a month shortly before writing his essay, it's possible that he was shown some saucy postcards by one of the bouquinistes plying their trade along the banks of the Seine. 

 

The amusing thing is that - just a few lines later - Lawrence feels obliged to acknowledge that "the human nudity of a great many modern people is just ugly and degraded, and the sexual act between modern people is too often the same, merely ugly and degrading". This would suggest that genuine pornography is actually a truthful representation of bodies and acts; a form of graphic realism that does away with the ideal fantasy of sex as something pure and pristine.   

 

There's a further irony in the fact that later in the same year - 1929 - thirteen of Lawrence's paintings would be seized by the police from the Warren Gallery in London and described by an octogenarian magistrate in pretty similar terms - gross, coarse, hideous, unlovely and obscene.

 

Now, if we think Frederick Mead's reaction unfair and slightly hysterical, then mayn't we also challenge Lawrence's view of French postcards ...?   

 

 

II.

The pornographic postcards with which Lawrence confesses at least a vague familiarity, have, for us, a kind of sepia-toned charm that makes one nostalgic for a time gone by. And, whether Lawrence wants to admit it or not, such images have a long, complex, and intimate relationship with the history of art and photography in which the human figure is so central. 

 

By the 1860s and '70s, nude photos were all the rage in Paris, though the authorities still had a degree of control over their production and circulation. However, thanks to a relaxation of censorship laws and new methods of photographic reproduction, the trade in (increasingly risqué) images in the form of carte postales grew dramatically during the following decades, both in the domestic market and internationally. 

 

Not only did street vendors offer such, but they were sold by wine merchants, café owners, tobacconists, barbers, and, of course, the second-hand booksellers who lined the Seine. As one commentator notes: "It is entirely possible that some two to four million nude photographs were in circulation by the end of the nineteenth century, many of them graphically pornographic ..." [3] 

 

Some cards featured anonymous prostitutes or working-class girls looking to make a little extra cash; others featured well-known models and performers, happy to pose au naturel or take part in a little faux lesbianism for the camera. Often sold in sets of up to a dozen, the cards were avidly collected (though, for obvious reasons, rarely posted in the mail). 

 

By the time of Lawrence's death in 1930, the heyday of the French postcard had pretty much come and gone and the 1940s and 50s saw the rise of the pin-up magazine, which, one suspects, Lawrence would not have approved of either.

 

Notes

 

[1] D. H. Lawrence, 'Pornography and Obscenity', in Late Essays and Articles, ed. James T. Boulton, (Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 236.   

[2] Ibid., p. 241. 

       

[3] Raisa Rexer, 'The Naked Truth About French Postcards', on the Wonders and Marvels website, click here.

 

Readers interested in this topic might like to see Nigel Sadler's book Erotic Postcards of the Early Twentieth Century, (Amberley Publishing, 2015), in which he explores the changes in social attitudes, fashions, and technology through the medium of erotic postcards. 

Every Woman Adores a Futurist: On the Manifestos of Valentine de Saint-Point

Valentine de Saint-Point by Rossana Borzelli (2016)

Acrylic and oil on metal (250 x 125 cm)

singulart.com

 

 

When one thinks of Futurism, one automatically thinks of machines and machismo. For Futurism is the technophallic art movement par excellence; an Italian boy's club obsessed with speed, dynamism, virility, and violence; one which prides itself on its anti-feminism and proto-fascism. 

 

Indeed, Marinetti even made contempt for women - along with worship of war - one of Futurism's founding principles in his Manifesto of 1909, describing them as a form of inert matter (i.e., passive lumps of flesh).  

 

Despite this, there were women attracted to and associated with Futurism; one of whom - Valentine de Saint-Point - even wrote two manifestos of her own ...

 

 

Manifesto della Donna futurista (1912) [1]

Responding directly to Marinetti's misogyny, Saint-Point published her Manifesto della Donna futurista in which she amusingly insists, amongst other things, that men and women are equal - but equally mediocre and thus equally deserving of contempt:

 

"Humanity is mediocre. The majority of women are neither superior nor inferior to the majority of men. They are all equal. They all merit the same scorn." 

 

Later in the text, she challenges the binary idea of two separate sexes; there are, rather, just exceptional individuals, born from within strong cultures, who possess both masculine and feminine traits:

 

"It is absurd to divide humanity into men and women. It is composed only of femininity and masculinity. Every superman, every hero, no matter how epic, how much of a genius, or how powerful, is the prodigious expression of a race and an epoch only because he is composed at once of feminine and masculine elements, of femininity and masculinity: that is, a complete being." 

  

Unfortunately, Saint-Point doesn't show fidelity with her own argument; she repeatedly falls back into the language of men and women and it's pretty clear that what she values most are traits and values traditionally associated with the fomer, such as virility, for example, perhaps the key term of her manifesto: 

 

"What is most lacking in women as in men is virility. That is why Futurism, even with all its exaggerations, is right. To restore some virility to our races so benumbed in femininity, we have to train them in virility even to the point of brute animality."

 

Every woman, she insists, "ought to possess not only feminine virtues but virile ones, without which she is just a female". Once they've been made to man-up as it were - and perhaps even grow a pair - then woman are capable of waging war even more ferociously than men - remember the Amazons! 

 

Saint-Point wants warrior women; not wise or virtuous women, or women who value peace and dream of healing the world. She also wants women who surrender to lust - the second great term of her Futuristic vocabulary - and rediscover their instinctive cruelty. We should stop preaching spiritual justice to women in the name of a mistaken feminism; the latter is an error that undermines their instincts and fertility, falsifying their primordial fatality.

 

The new woman - the Futurist woman - the woman who recognises sentiment as a weakness, will be a sensual woman who understands that lust is the basis of her strength; a bit like the prostitute who incites her illicit lovers to express their darkest desires. 

 

Saint-Point ends her manifesto with the following rallying cry:

 

"Woman [...] go back to your sublime instinct, to violence, to cruelty [...] incite your sons and your men to surpass themselves. You are the ones who make them. You have all power over them. You owe humanity its heroes. Make them!" 

 

Saint-Point would develop her (cod-Nietzschean) philosophy in a second manifesto - the Futurist Manifesto of Lust - published a year later ...

 

 

Manifesto futurista della Lussuria (1913) [2]

 

Conceived as a reply to those critics who had laughed at her earlier manifesto, Saint-Point here expands upon her erotic theory of lust as an "essential part of life's dynamism" and, indeed, as a virtue that drives individuals towards self-overcoming. 

 

For lust is not just a desire for pleasure or to know the body of another. Lust, says Saint-Point, is also the "expression of a being projected beyond itself [...] the joyous pain of a flowering". And fucking - or the union of flesh, as she calls it - is the "sensory and sensual synthesis that leads to the greatest liberation of spirit". 

 

This being the case, if a strong man is to realise his full spiritual potential, then he must realise also his full carnal potential and deny himself nothing when it comes to the pleasures of the flesh: the warrior is fully justified in enjoying the spoils of war and to show moral restraint is a sign of weakness. In other words, rape is both a normal and natural part of warfare; the recreation of life after the slaughter of the battlefield.     

 

And what's good for the goose is good for the gander. Or, in this case, the (male) artist, who has the same desires and same need for pleasure as the warrior; artists should feel no shame in raping their models once the latter have finished sitting for them. As Saint-Point writes - in capitals, just so we hear loud and clear what she's saying:

 

"ART AND WAR ARE THE GREAT MANIFESTATIONS OF SENSUALITY; LUST IS THEIR FLOWER [and] LUST EXCITES ENERGY AND RELEASES STRENGTH."

Lust, also, it seems, makes the world go round; including the world of business, finance, and media; "it drives the great men of business who run the banks, the press, and international trade to increase their wealth". 

 

Essentially, lust is Saint-Point's term for what Nietzsche calls the will to power and desires of all kinds - "whether they are considered normal or abnormal" - are always the supreme spur to action and the most magnificent expressions of our wellbeing.   

Again echoing Nietzsche, Saint-Point calls for the destruction of Christian morality, which considers lust a sin or vice; something shameful to be denied: "We must stop despising desire, disguising it in the pitiful clothes of old and sterile sentimentality" and we must, she says, reject everything associated with romantic love: "counting daisy petals, moonlight duets, heavy endearments, false hypocritical modesty". 

 

Whenever beings - of whatever sex - are drawn together by physical attraction, we should let them "dare to express their desires, the inclinations of their bodies" and transform lust into an erotic (albeit sometimes brutal) art form that allows us to bring sex to full conscious realisation. 

 

In other words, lust must be guided by will, not just instinct and intuition, so that in this way the joys of fucking will result in guaranteed orgasm for both parties. 

 

One can't help wondering if Saint-Point isn't directing her remarks here to a lover who has sadly failed to excite her in the way she hoped ...? And one also can't help wondering quite how seriously she expects us to take what she writes, either here or in her earlier manifesto; for just twelve months later she would declare: 

 

'I am not a Futurist and never have been. I do not belong to any school.'       

 

Notes

 

[1] Valentine de Saint Point, The Manifesto of [the] Futurist Woman (Response to F. T. Marinetti), trans. Bruce Sterling (2008): click here. 

      All quotes are taken from this translation available on italianfuturism.org (an excellent website established by Jessica Palmieri, in 2007, in order to encourage the exchange of ideas and disseinate information about Italian Futurism).

 

[2] Valentine de Saint-Point, Futurist Manifesto of Lust, trans. J. H. Higgit (1973): click here.

      Again, all quotes are taken from this translation available on italianfuturism.com

 

 

Readers interested in this topic might like to see a short essay by Adrien Sina and Sarah Wilson, 'Action féminine: Valentine de Saint-Point', in Tate Etc., issue 16 (Summer 2009): click here to read online.   

Pornosurrealism: Autumn 1929

Ceci est une pipe

 

 

If there is one picture in which Surrealist art, nude photography, and porn all come together, it's a notorious image by Man Ray featuring his mistress and muse Kiki de Montparnasse displaying what Humbert Humbert would describe as the magic and might of her own soft mouth ... [1]

 

The picture - one of four sexually explicit images taken by Ray of himself and his lover - appeared in the avant-garde magazine Variétés, alongside equally explicit poetry written by Benjamin Péret and Louis Aragon (two pioneers of literary Surrealism).

 

The story goes that when editor of the Brussels-based magazine, Edouard Mesens, complained he was having trouble paying the printers, Aragon suggested a special issue should be published in order to increase sales. Keen to contribute, Péret argued that nothing is more special - or sells better - than sex and he volunteered to provide some risqué verse (about little girls lifting up their skirts and masturbating in the bushes, for example).

 

Aragon explained the idea to Ray, who excitedly agreed to provide some photos - which, conveniently, he just happened to have hidden in a drawer of his desk. As one commentator notes:

             

"Even with the faces cropped, Aragon knew who'd posed for them. The male body, hairy and pale, was obviously Ray's. And everyone in Montparnasse would recognise as Kiki's the mouth, lipsticked in a Cupid's bow, clamped around his penis ..." [2]

 

André Breton edited the special special edition and called it 1929. He divided the poetry into four sections, named after the seasons, and each was illustrated with a tipped-in photograph by Ray. The initial print run of 215 copies were intended for private sale in Paris, but most were seized at the border by the authorities and destroyed. 

 

The few copies that escaped the clutches of the French customs offcials were sold (under the counter) at hugely inflated prices to art lovers, for whom the work embodied the freedom, dark humour, and daring eroticism that defined Surrealism. It has since become a collectors item; as has the first English edition published (somewhat belatedly) in 1996 [3].       

 

Notes

 

[1] Vladimir Nabokov, The Annotated Lolita, ed. with preface, introduction, and notes by Alfred Appel Jr., (Vintage Books, 1991), p. 184. 

 

[2] John Baxter, 'Man Ray Laid Bare', Tate Magazine, issue 3 (Spring 2005): click here to read online.  

 

[3] 1929, by Benjamin Péret, Aragon, and Man Ray, (Alyscamps Press, 1996). Although the work is said to have been translated by Zoltan Lizot-Picon, it is actually a collaboration between the art scholar and critic Christopher Sawyer-Laucanno and André Breton's biographer Mark Polizzotti. 

      Whilst - predictably - HM Customs and Excise declared it pornographic and prohibited its importation into the UK, the book was, however, allowed to circulate freely within the United States as a work of art.         

 

 

We Are Transmitters: Reflections on Síomón Solomon's Audiopoetics

"As we live, we are transmitters of life. 

And when we fail to transmit life, life fails to flow through us." [1]

 

 

Rüdiger Görner describes Síomón Solomon's 'Spills of mire I swallowed inside the tower' as "an inspirational meditation on the poetics of audio drama" [2] and I'm happy to endorse this view and echo the praise. 

 

Consisting of five short movements, the text is pretty much perfect as is and hardly needs commentary; it certainly doesn't deserve to be summarized or stripped to its bare bones (so that these can in turn be ground down into fine dust in the name of analysis) 

 

And so, what follows are mostly just brief reflections of my own, inspired by Solomon's in the first three movements [3] ...

 

 

(i) On dying of imagination (or dancing to the radio till you're dead)

 

What do fictional adultress Lady Chatterley and epileptic post-punk icon Ian Curtis have in common? The answer is that both regarded the act of listening to the radio as a potentially suicidal gesture, as Greil Marcus terms it [4].    

 

Lawrence provides a short but rather terrifying description of Sir Clifford Chatterley turning on and tuning in to his newly installed radio and becoming queer in the process, much to Connie's amazement and horror:

 

"And he would sit alone for hours listening [...] with a blank, entranced expression on his face, like a person losing his mind, and listen, or seem to listen, to the unspeakable thing." [5]
 

As for Curtis, the radio, says Solomon, functioned in his imagination not merely as  device to dance, dance, dance, dance, dance to, but as "an acoustic accelerant of auto-destruction, a transmission machine for self-slaughter" [6], that leads to an everlasting silence that might be construed as the ultimate example of dead air; i.e., the void that exists "in the dark heart of hearing" [7].

 

 

(ii) 'Sometimes a wind blows': A quick wor(l)d in David Lynch's ear

 

For some, the ear is the most poetic organ. For others, it's the most open and obliging organ. And for ear fetishists all around the lobe - which, if Solomon's account is true, includes filmmaker David Lynch - aural sex is the only game in town [8].

 

For D. H. Lawrence, hearing is "perhaps the deepest of the senses" [9] and the one we have no choice about; i.e., we can't close our ears in the same manner we can shut our eyes, although we can of course block our ears with beeswax, like Odysseus, should we wish to do so.

Responding to this latter point, Lawrence writes:

"We may voluntarily quicken our hearing, or make it dull. But we have really no choice of what we hear. Our will is eliminated. Sound acts direct, almost automatically, upon the affective centres. And we have no power of going forth from the ear. We are always and only recipient." [10]  

 

One suspects that Solomon would challenge Lawrence's thinking here, particularly the latter claim, believing as he does that "the physical ear is not merely a passive cavity or vacuous opening but a transfigurative chamber of auditory fantasy" [11]. 

However, Solomon might be rather more sympathetic to (or at least more intrigued by) what Lawrence says here about music:

 

"The singing of birds acts almost entirely upon the centres of the breast. [...] 

      So does almost all our music, which is all Christian in tendency. But modern music is analytical, critical, and it has discovered the power of ugliness. Like our martial music, it is of the upper plane [... acting] direct upon the thoracic ganglian. Time was, however, when music acted upon the sensual centres direct. We hear it still in savage music, and in the roll of drums, and in the roaring of lions, and in the howling of cats. And in some voices still we hear the deeper resonance of the sensual mode of consciouness." [12]      

 

 

(iii) 'The Ether Will Now Oblige'

 

I'm pleased that Solomon brings the Italian Futurists into his discussion of audiopoetics. 

 

I'm particularly pleased to see Luigi Russolo, author of The Art of Noise (1916), given a shout out, as he anticipated Lawrence's thinking in Fantasia concerning the relationship between sound and the material unconscious - just as he anticipated everything that was to unfold in music-as-technology in the twentieth-century. 

 

In another memorable passage, Solomon writes:

"As a culture transforms, the aesthetic spectrum of listening, its scale of aural tolerances and refusals, is continuously recalibrated. Accoring to Russolo's epistolary argument, the ear of the Classical age in music could never have borne the modern orchestra's arduous dissonances. The introduction of nineteeth-century machine technology decisively ushered in the advent of noise - which immediately claimed, it is asserted, an absolute sovereignty over human sensibility. As for us multi-layered, late and lonely moderns [...] while we may still be shaken by Wagner and Beethoven, are we any longer stirred?" [13]

 

If it's true, on the one hand, that noise annoys, so do we moderns love - and seem to need - a constant stream of machine-produced sound as a "stimulant whose manufactured proliferation [...] has become perversely anaesthetizing and/or a form of consensual ambient pollution" [14] 

 

The one thing we do not want - and seem to fear - is silence. For that, we no longer have ears, even though it is the silence - that great bride of all creation - from which we are born and to which we must return [15]. 

 

  

Notes

 

[1] D. H. Lawrence, 'We are transmitters', in The Poems,  Vol. I, ed. Christopher Pollnitz, (Cambridge University Press, 2013), p. 389.

 

[2] Síomón Solomon, 'Spills of mire I swallowed inside the tower (an audiopoetic symphony in five short movements)', in Hölderlin's Poltergeists, (Peter Lang, 2020), pp. 89-119. 

      Professor Görner's comment is taken from his blurb on the back cover of this book. He goes on to add that, in short, "Solomon's work is a stunning testimony to the significance of the audiopoetic in our increasingly prosaic world". 

[3] It's not that I didn't find the last two sections - which discuss Greek (amphi)theatrics and the politics of the Hörspiel respectively - of interest, but they belong to areas of research about which I have almost no knowledge and so don't feel qualified to join in the conversation.      

[4] Greil Marcus, The History of Rock 'n' Roll in Ten Songs, (Yale University Press, 2015), p. 33, quoted by Solomon on p. 90 of Hölderlin's Poltergeists.

 

[5] D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover, ed. Michael Squires, (Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 110.

   

[6]  Síomón Solomon, Hölderlin's Poltergeists, p. 90. 

      Solomon is referring to the Joy Division debut single, 'Transmission', released in October 1979 on Factory Records. Readers unfamiliar with the track - and with Ian Curtis - are encouraged to click here and watch the official video (a live performance on Something Else (15 Sept 1979)). 

 

[7] Síomón Solomon, Hölderlin's Poltergeists, p. 91. 

 

[8] Solomon notes of the Blue Velvet director: "Legend has it that Lynch became so fixated with his film's prosthetic ear that he and his make-up supervisor Jeff Goodwin came to regard it as a character in its own right - calling it 'Mr Ear', redesigning it out of silicone rather than latex and even embellishing it, in a superbly disquieting fetishistic signature, with locks of Lynch's own scissored hair." See Hölderlin's Poltergeists, pp. 99-100. 

 

[9] D. H. Lawrence, Fantasia of the Unconscious, ed. Bruce Steele, (Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 103. 

[10] Ibid.

 

[11] Síomón Solomon, Hölderlin's Poltergeists, p. 101. 

[12] D. H.Lawrence, Fantasia of the Unconscious, pp. 103-104. 

      It's interesting that Lawrence mentions the howling of cats as a form of singing that acts directly on the sensual centres. According to Johnny Rotten, his mother once described Kate Bush's singing as sounding like a bag of cats and yet, despite this - or because of this - Rotten loves Kate Bush, as does Síomón Solomon, who describes her musical persona as an angel-cum-banshee. See Hölderlin's Poltergeists, p. 93.  

 

[13]  Síomón Solomon, Hölderlin's Poltergeists, pp 102-103.

 

[14] Ibid., p. 103. 

[15] See D. H. Lawrence, 'Silence', in The Poems, Vol. I., p. 612. 

 

 

This is the 5th - and possibly final - post in a series inspired by Síomón Solomon's work in Hölderlin's Poltergeists. The earlier four posts are: 

How Fascism Makes Killers Of Us All

 

There is No Tongue That is Not Forked

 

A Brief Note on the Life and Work of Stephan Hermlin

What's in a Name? Quite a Lot When That Name is Scardanelli

 

In Memory of Izumi Suzuki

(Verso, 2021)

 

 

I. 

 

Recently, someone sent me an email asking:  

 

Don't you ever get tired of endlessly - and almost exclusively - writing about white European male authors?

 

The answer is no, I don't. 

 

However, just to demonstrate I am aware that there are writers who can't be characterised in these terms, here's a post in memory of Izumi Suzuki; a woman described not only as a pioneer of Japanese science fiction, but a countercultural icon; a woman who initially found fame as a (nude) model and (pink film) actress; a woman who was a member of Tenjō Sajiki, the avant-garde theatre troupe led by Shūji Terayama; a woman who committed suicide in February 1986, aged thirty-seven. 

II.

 

Although Suzuki had decided to devote herself to writing four years earlier, it wasn't until 1975 that she published her first sci-fi short story and it was in this genre that she became something of a cult figure, developing a quirky feminist style in which she expressed her concerns about technology, gender, and the future.

 

Unfortunately, being a cult doesn't pay the bills and although Suzuki managed to support herself and her daughter for a brief period with her writing, she ended her days in ill health, poverty, and, tragically, hanging from a rope tied round her neck.  

The first English language edition of her work has just been published by Verso: Terminal Boredom (2021) - a collection of seven short stories, including the title story, which was the last she wrote before topping herself. 

 

Although critics describe these tales as singular, punky, irreverent, darkly playful and charmingly deranged, I've so far found them to be disappointing - not least in their despairing humanism; future races and alien beings it seems are pretty much just like us and still struggling with the same issues of loneliness, sorrow, and pain. Unfortunately, this melancholic mix of angst and sentimentality isn't really my cup of tea.

 

Having said that - and to be fair to the memory of Suzuki - I've only given them a cursory reading, so may yet discover many things to interest and enjoy within the pages of her book when I return to it in due course and subject it to a rather more considered, critically attentive reading.   

 

But, for now, it's back to the white European male writers I'm accused of privileging ... 

 

See: Izumi Suzuki, Terminal Boredom, trans. Polly Barton, Sam Bett, David Boyd, Daniel Joseph, Aiko Masubuchi, and Helen O’Horan, (Verso, 2021). 

What's in a Name? Quite a Lot When That Name is Scardanelli

Ja, die Gedichte sind echt, die sind von mir, aber der Name ist gefälscht! 

Ich habe nie Hölderlin geheißen, sondern Scardanelli!

 

 

I. 

 

Nietzsche is not the only great poet-philosopher and madman of German letters. Before him came the early Romantic figure Friedrich Hölderlin (1770-1843), who, long plagued by mental illness, was finally committed in 1806. 

 

Deemed incurable - despite the belladonna preparations and cold water baths - Hölderlin was released into the care of a kindly carpenter called Ernst Zimmer, who gave him a room at his house in Tübingen. Here, Hölderlin would spend the last thirty-six years of his life; a period referred to by those in the know as the Turmzeit. 

 

During this so-called Tower period, Hölderlin would occasionally write rhymed quatrains signed with a variety of theatrical-sounding pseudonyms, including Scardanelli, a name which Stephan Hermlin would use as the title of his 1970 Hörspiel, which deals with the poet's breakdown triggered (arguably) by the realisation that there is little room for art in a world dominated by politics and philistinism; something that Hermlin himself would also come slowly to accept despite his life-long communist affiliations and affinity.

 

II. 

 

Offering as it does a "musical variation on a pre-existent artistic matrix" [1], one wonders why Síomón Solomon didn't simply call his translation-adaptation of Hermlin's play Scardanelli: an Extended Remix, instead of opting for the (admittedly more paranormally suggestive) title of Hölderlin's Poltergeists.

 

For whilst I appreciate his desire to announce the work's originality and emphasise its spectral chaos, I think the name Scardanelli should have remained in the title somewhere or other. For Scardanelli is a name that has a real magic to it and which has continued to resonate within creative circles for over 200 years; not just amongst poets and playwrights, but also composers, filmmakers, and even graffiti artists. 

 

I'm thinking, for example, of the large-scale Scardanelli-Zyklus project that the Swiss composer Heinz Holliger worked on from 1975 to 1993 (ECM Records); the 2003 film written and directed by Harald Bergmann entitled Scardanelli, and starring André Wilms as Hölderlin (see image below); and of the fabulous piece of street art (reproduced above) painted on shutters in Milan and posted on the designer Campbell Johnson's Instagram account: click here [2].

 

My point is this: the name Scardanelli unites a wide range of artists and artworks and I think Solomon's work is best understood in relation to this world rather than the academic world of German studies. There's no doubting Solomon is a fine scholar: but he is also an amazing artist in his own right.  

 

 

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Síomón Solomon, 'Translator's Introduction', Hölderlin's Poltergeists, (Peter Lang, 2020), p.13 

 

[2] Mention must also be made of Austrian poet Friederike Mayröcker's recent collection of poems entitled Scardanelli, trans. Jonathan Larson, (The Song Cave, 2018); a collection haunted by the presence of Hölderlin throughout, an author to whose work Mayröcker is, by her own admission, addicted. Click here for more details.       

 

 

A Brief Note on the Life and Work of Stephan Hermlin

Stephan Hermlin by Gudrun Brüne (1985) [1]

 

"Where one asks, others will know no answer, and 

where answers are given, questions will be waiting."

 

 

Stephan Hermlin was born (as Rudolf Leder) into a bourgeois Jewish family in Chemnitz, in 1915. Aged sixteen, he joined the Socialist Student Association as well as the Young Communist League (KJVD). Unfortunately, Germany was probably not the best place to be at that time for a Jewish Marxist and so, in 1936, Hermlin fled abroad; drifting round Egypt, Palestine, England and Spain, before settling in France. 

 

Quickly establishing contact with literary circles in Paris, Hermlin also became involved with an underground German-language radio station. During the occupation - and after a period of internment - Hermlin lends support to the Resistance and goes on the lam, before escaping to Switzerland in 1943 with the help of the (exiled) German Communist Party. 

 

Whilst living in Switzerland, he publishes his first work; a volume of ballads influenced by his experiences in France. Considering the nature of these experiences, one might have expected that Hermlin's Zwölf Balleden to possess a hard militant-ideological edge, but, as one commentator points out, these carefully crafted poetic pieces reveal "a high degree of artistic sensibility and familiarity with European literary traditions from the Middle Ages into Modernity" [2].

 

Hermlin's goal was not to turn poetry into a form of political propaganda but "'to harmonize once and for all that which cannot be fully grasped, that which is perennially eclipsed, that which can only be intimated through music and poetry, the dream, the quiet, the incoming tides of silence, in short everything that makes up the world of lyrics, with the world of the visible.'" [3]

 

As well as establishing his own name as a poet and writer of essays and short stories, Hermlin also enjoys success as a literary translator. I discuss my favourite piece of his from this period in an earlier post on Torpedo the Ark: click here. 

 

Post-War, Hermlin returns to Germany and gets a job as a broadcaster at a radio station in Frankfurt. In 1947 he decides to move to East Berlin in the Soviet-controlled zone (which will eventually become the GDR), where he becomes an active supporter of the new regime. In an obituary for Hermlin, Philip Brady writes:

 

"His move to East Germany was more than a matter of ideology. He returned in many essays and interviews to the question of Heimat (fatherland) and to his own powerfully emotional conviction that the GDR was his only conceivable home." [4] 

 

In 1972, Hermlin is presented with the Heinrich Heine Award by the East German Ministry of Culture, for his services to literature (and the state). In 1979, he publishes what is to become his most popular work, Abendlicht (1979) "in which fact and fiction, reality and dream, politics and Romantic gesture, combine in a story that shifts between autobiography [...] and the narrative of a distanced, anonymous observer" [5].

 

In 1995, two years before his death - and six years after the fall of the Berlin Wall - Hermlin gives an interview to Die Zeit in which he finally responds to the perceived failings of communist intellectuals such as himself and friends including Jean-Paul Sartre. 

 

Perhaps, looking back, Hermlin - like many other writers - was naive to think he could combine his sophisticated artistic sensibility with the political brutalism of Stalinism. Of course it's important to remember the historical context, but, even so ... Having said that, to dismiss his life and work as nothing more than an overly-aestheticised revolutionary fantasy is, I think, a bit harsh.

 

Defending Hermlin from what might be perceived as unfair criticism [6], Síomón Solomon - translator of Hermlin's 1970 radio play Scardanelli - suggests that perhaps his personal failings and political shortcomings might themselves be regarded as "inextricably bound up" [7] with his life as a writer.

 

 

Notes

 

[1] This portrait by Gudrun Brüne can be found in Für Stephan Hermlin zum 13. April 1985, (Reclam, 1985). 

      Dates and details in the post are mostly based upon Síomón Solomon's Biographical Chronology in Hölderlin's Poltergeists, (Peter Lang, 2020), pp. xxvii-xxix, and Philip Brady's, Obituray for Stephan Hermlin, in the Independent (11 April 1997): click here. 

 

[2] Axel Fair-Schulz, 'The Impact of Swiss Exile on an East German Critical Marxist', Vol. 43, No. 3, of the Swiss American Historical Society Review (Nov 2007), p. 31. 

 

[3] Ibid. Fair-Schulz is quoting Hermlin writing in 'Von der Musik Shelleys', in Das Goldene Tor, (Feb. 1947), pp. 108-109. 

 

[4] Philip Brady, Obituray for Stephan Hermlin, Independent (11 April 1997).

 

[5] Ibid.

 

[6] This criticism includes the work of the investigative journalist Karl Corino, who - whilst looking for possible Stasi connections - discovered that Hermlin had reimagined the facts of his own life in order to further his own status as a heroic figure. See Corino's book on this matter entitled Aussen Marmor, innen Gips: Die Legenden des Stephan Hermlin (Econ, 1996). 

 

[7] Síomón Solomon, Hölderlin's Poltergeists, footnote 43 in the 'Translator's Introduction', p. 20. 

 

There is No Tongue That is Not Forked: Notes On Síomón Solomon's Fantasia of Translation

Der Übersetzer - ready at any moment 

to shed their skin and become-other

 

I. 

 

What is the role of the translator? It's an old question: but it remains a fascinating and important question. 

 

And it's a question that the poet and playwright Síomón Solomon has clearly spent a good deal of time thinking about, as evidenced by the Introduction to his translation - and extended remix - of Stephen Hermlin's radio play, Scardanelli (1970), in a newly published text celebrating the life and work of the German Romantic poet Friedrich Hölderlin [1].

 

I'm hoping to discuss Solomon's bold adapatation of Hermlin's audio drama in a later post. Here, however, I wish only to examine his theory of translation [2] which, in a nutshell, posits the translator as an artist in their own right; one who (paradoxically) shows fidelity to a text not by staying as close as possible to it, but by daring to deviate. 

 

Solomon's theory of translation is, therefore, ultimately rooted in a perverse aesthetic; one that queers the text and allows for the birth of an illegitimate (sometimes monstrous) new literary offspring [3]; one that hears strange voices and intertextual murmurings [4] ...  

 

II.

 

Now, of course, there will be many critics who will loathe and despise this model of translation; who will loathe and despise Solomon for what he does with Hermlin's work and for his schizopoetic reading (and re-creation between the lines) of Hölderlin. But I'm not one of them. 

 

In fact, I'm happy to endorse this model which acts "'as a preventative against cultural atrophy and homogenisation'" [5]. And if, as Solomon acknowledges, the translator's cruelty of style results in an inevitable giving and taking of offence, well, that's too bad - can there be art without somebody being disturbed or having their nose put out of joint?  

 

Solomon nails his colours to the mast in the following superb passage:

 

"What we wish to affirm is that [...] the infidelity of [every translation] is not merely an occupational hazard but its transcendental sickness. On this basis, we propose recalibrating the translator's 'success' according to the boldness of [their] betrayals. [...] What is by definition commemorated and celebrated by the translator's Janus-faced remakings is the insufficiency of the source to itself, whose rewriting represents a wager on the literary future. In the necessary corruption of practice, to translate means to return to the origin/al to reimagine it, to complicate and regenerate it, and to recompose its music - even and especially in the teeth of 'misreading' it - through the rash passion for metamorphosis." [6]     

 

Later, Solomon reduces things down to just one (memorable) line that invites readers to imagine translators as a breed of reptilian shape-shifters living and working in a domain in which : "There is no tongue [...] that is not forked" [7].

    

  

Notes

 

[1] Síomón Solomon, Hölderlin's Poltergeists, (Peter Lang, 2020).

      Solomon explains what he means by the term remix to describe his adaptation of Hermlin's play on pp. 13-14 of his Introduction; "we are calling this work a 'remix', aiming as it does to offer a musical variation on a pre-existent artistic matrix [...] influenced by Kenneth Goldsmith's modish conception of translation as renovatory displacement". 

      Readers interested in knowing more about Solomon's reading of Goldsmith can find his three-part post on this topic on Torpedo the Ark: click here. And those who may wish to check out Goldsmith's work for themselves should see Against Translation: Displacement is the New Translation, (Jean Boîte Editions, 2016).  

 

[2] It should be noted that at no time does Solomon refer to his writings on translation as his theory of such and I'm fairly certain he'd wince at the idea, probably insisting that it's more a delirious shared fantasy of translation (of what it might become if pushed to its external limit). Whilst I understand his postmodern concerns and desire to move beyond theory (towards play, performance, and poetry), I'm using the word here for the sake of convenience. However, I have substituted the term fantasia in the title of this post in the hope that this is one that he will very much approve of.    

 

[3] Solomon recalls and transposes Deleuze's self-styled relationship to the history of philosophy as a form of buggery via which he sought to engender monsters; see pp. 9-10 of his 'Translator's Introduction' to Hölderlin's Poltergeists. 

      I have to say, it's a little odd to find Deleuze posing as a sodomite and delighting in fantasies of anal rape (or bum banditry, as Solomon refers to it). Perhaps it betrays the influence of his friend Michel Foucault on his thinking; or maybe he was thinking of D. H. Lawrence, who argued that the power of inspiration always comes from outside and enters us from behind and below.

 

[4] There's a very good reason that Solomon uses the following from Roland Barthes as an epigraph to his work: "Do I hear voices within the voice? But isn't it the truth of the voice that it be hallucinated? Isn't the entire space of the voice an infinite spaciousness?" 

      If, as I do, you accept Kristeva's idea of intertextualité (and/or Bakhtin's dialogism), then the question of translation is made all the more complex; arguably, every text is already a translation at some level and the author a multiple personality who speaks with many tongues masquerading as a unified subject. 

      Clearly Solomon also (more or less) accepts this line of thinking; see footnote 20 in his Introduction where he quotes from Susan Bernofsky's Foreign Words (2005). Bernofsky has also explored the significance of Barthes's work on intertextuality and the death of the author for contemporary theories of translation.   

 

[5] Mark Polizzotti, quoted by Síomón Solomon, 'Translator's Introduction', Hölderlin's Poltergeists, footnote 1, p. 2. 

 

[6] Síomón Solomon, 'Translator's Introduction', Hölderlin's Poltergeists, p. 7. 

 

[7] Ibid., p. 12. 

 

 

For a related post to this one - on Stephan Hermlin's short text 'Hölderlin 1944', trans. Síomón Solomon, click here.   

 

 

On the Splendour of Greco-Sicilian Superficiality

 D. H. Lawrence: Fauns and Nymphs (1927)

  

I. 

 

"Oh, those Greeks! They knew how to live: what is needed for that is to stop bravely at the surface, the fold, the skin; to worship appearance, to believe in shapes, tones, words - in the whole Olympus of appearance! Those Greeks were superficial - out of profundity!" [a]

 

If I had to choose the one passage by Nietzsche that has most significantly shaped my own thinking as a philosopher, both on and off the catwalk, it would be this one. 

 

And, interestingly, despite his onto-theological penchant for indulging in what Nietzsche would characterise as beautiful soul twaddle [b], D. H. Lawrence also seems inspired by this idea of Greek (and Sicilian) superficiality in his 'Introduction to Mastro-don Gesualdo, by Giovanni Verga' [c] ...

II.

 

Regrettably - and unlike Lawrence - I've never lived in Sicily [d], nor even visited this "sun-beaten island whose every outline is like pure memory" [148]. But I'm happy to accept the literary consensus and regard it as a magical location, which provides a clue not only to understanding modern Italy, but also the ancient Mediterranean world. 

 

For according to Lawrence, not only are the Sicilians marked by an ironic fatalism, like the ancient Greeks, but they also lack psychic depth. In other words: 

 

"The Sicilian has no soul, except that funny little naked man who hops on hot bricks, in purgatory, and howls to be prayed into paradise [...] He can't be introspective, because his consciousness, so to speak, doesn't have any inside to it." [151].      

Developing his theme, Lawrence continues:

"The Sicilians today are supposed to be the nearest descendants of the classic Greeks, and the nearest thing to the classic Greeks in life and nature. And perhaps it is true. Like the classic Greeks, the Sicilians have no insides, introspectively speaking." [152] 

 

Unfortunately, however, unlike the classic Greeks, the Sicialians have no external gods. This, for Lawrence at least, is a problem and represents a great loss.

 

Why? Because, says Lawrence, people who live in the sun like flowers - i.e., beautiful but soulless - still need "the bright and busy gods outside" in order to make them feel heroic in the old Homeric sense with "the same easy conscience, the same queer openness [...] and the same ancient astuteness" [152].

 

Whilst the more soulful - more Christian - races of Northern Europe "have got over the old Homeric idea of the hero, by making the hero self-conscious, and a hero by virtue of suffering and awareness of suffering" [151], the Sicilians only feel this sort of thing in short spasms and it is unnatural to them. 

 

In fact, Lawrence concludes, it's pointless to suggest that a Sicilian learn how to develop northern (or Russian) inwardness: "You might as well say the tall and reckless asphodel of Magna Graecia should learn to be a snowdrop." [153]

 

 

III. 

 

Of course, even if the modern Sicilians have lost the bright and busy gods, still they possess the undying beauty of the island itself:

 

"And we must remember that eight-tenths of the population of Sicily is maritime or agricultural [...] and therefore practically the whole day-life of the people passes in the open, in the splendour of the sun  and the landscape, and the delicious, elemental aloneness of the old world. This is a great unconscious compensation. But what a compensation, after all! [...] and you can't read Mastro-don Gesauldo without feeling the marvellous glow and the glamour of Sicily, and the people throbbing inside the glow and the glamour like motes in a sunbeam. [...]

      And perhaps it is because the outside world is so lovely, that men in the Greek regions have never become introspective. They have not been driven to that form of compensation. With them, life pulses outwards, and the positive reality is outside. There is no turning inwards. So man becomes purely objective. And this is what makes the Greeks so difficult to understand: even Socrates." [154]

 

These, then, are the three key words of Greek profundity: superficiality, externality, and objectivity. And these the three key words of the ancient Greek character: singleness, carelessness, dauntlessness [e]. 

 

If you want to become an artist or practice la gaya scienza - if you want to become heroic in the old sense - then you must abandon ideas of salvation or retreating inside yourself in order to twist the soul into knots; instead, concentrate on care of the self as an aesthetic and ethical project that aims for splendour (becoming what Lawrence elsewhere terms an aristocrat of the sun) [f].   

 

Notes

 

[a] Nietzsche, The Gay Science, ed. Bernard Williams, trans. Josefine Nauckhoff, (Cambridge University Press, 2001), Preface to the second edition (4), pp. 8-9.  

 

[b] This amusing phrase can be found in note 951 (Spring-Fall 1887) of The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufman and R. J. Hollingdale, ed. Walter Kaufman, (Vintage Books, 1968), p. 499.  

[c] D. H. Lawrence, 'Introduction to Mastro-don Gesualdo, by Giovanni Verga', in Introductions and Reviews, ed. N. H. Reeve and John Worthen, (Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 145-156. Future page references to this work will be given directly in the text. Readers are encouraged to also read the two earlier versions of Lawrence's Introduction which appear as Appendices II and III (pp. 369-378 and 379-389). This passage from Version I is particularly Nietzschean-sounding in its vision of the Greeks: 

 

"The Greeks were far more bent on making an audacious, splendid impression than on fulfilling some noble purpose. They loved the splendid look of a thing, the splendid ring of words. Even tragedy was to them a grand gesture, rather than something to mope over. Peak and pine they would not, and unless some Fury pursued them to punish them for their sins, they cared not a straw for sins: their own or anyone else's. 

      As for being burdened with souls, they were not such fools." [376-77]    

[d] Lawrence and his wife Frieda spent two years living in Sicily in the early 1920s, at the Fontana Vecchia, on a hill above Taormina. Like many others before him, including - perhaps most famously - Goethe, Lawrence was captivated not just by the island, but also its people, flora, and fauna and he wrote some of his loveliest poetry on the island. In Version I of his Introduction to Mastro-Don Gesualdo, he confesses: 

 

"Perhaps the deepest nostalgia I have ever felt has been Sicily [...] Not for England or anywhere else - for Sicily, the beautiful, that which goes deepest into the blood. It is so clear, so beautiful, so like the physical beauty of the Greek." [378].     

[e] D. H. Lawrence, 'Introduction [Version I] to Mastro-Don Gesualdo, by Giovanni Verga', Introductions and Reviews, Appendix II, p. 378.

[f] See the poem 'Aristocracy of the sun', in D. H. Lawrence, The Poems, Vol. I, ed. Christopher Pollnitz, (Cambridge University Press, 2013), p. 457. See also the related verses 'Sun-men' and 'Sun-women', p. 456.  

How Fascism Makes Killers Of Us All (With Reference to the Case of Stephan Hermlin)

Stephan Hermlin (1915-1997)

 

 

I.

 

One of the defining features of Hitler's Germany is that no one was ever left alone; the private citizen was effectively abolished and every man, woman and child was forced to participate and declare themselves as either for or against the Third Reich.

 

(One of the privileges of living in a lacklustre (pre-pandemic) liberal democracy, by contrast, is that the individual is free to abstain or remain apathetic.)  

 

Given this state of affairs, many Germans enthusiastically raised their arm and shouted Sieg Heil, whilst others put their hands up and surrendered to the Nazis as if resigning themselves to Fate. A courageous few actively took up arms against the regime. 

 

But saying nothing and doing nothing was not an option; everyone was politicised and mobilised for  the coming catastrophe; no one could simply ask to be excused. 

 

 

II. 

 

I was reminded of this whilst reading Síomón Solomon's new translation of Stephan Hermlin's short text 'Hölderlin 1944' [1].  

 

In this piece - described by Solomon as a memoir essay, though one wonders to what extent it's a fictionalised account that blurs reality and dream [2] - Hermlin recalls his time on the run in southwest-central France in early 1944, when resistance to the German occupation was at its height and hardly a day went by "without explosions, attacks, massacres" [3]. 

 

Warned by comrades that his situation was compromised and that the authorities were closing in on him, he agrees to be taken to a new (and safer) location - a solitary farmhouse in the middle of he knew not where:

 

"A farmer, still young, received us in a friendly manner [...] He was helping the Resistance with his wife and two adolescent children. But I would need to be aware, he explained to me in a whisper, that there was someone dangerous to me living on the farm, namely his old mother, who was a fanatical supporter of Pétain and would turn me over to the Germans in an instant should she discover my presence. If I kept quiet, I would be tolerably safe from her. [...] The farmer escorted me into the barn. I clambered up into the hayloft, which was to be my eyrie for some time." [4] 

   

Although the long days hiding in the hayloft could be monotonous, at least there was plenty of time for reflection and reading his volume of Hölderlin, about whom he decides to write an essay. But then, one day, an incident occurs that could have easily ended in a terrible and tragic manner ...

 

"It was around lunchtime when, at an unaccustomed hour, the door squeaked, and unknown footsteps and a reluctant muttering were heard. I guessed that the ominous old woman had entered the barn, and, when the ladder began to creak, I realised she was heading for the hayloft. [...] I pulled the hay silently over me, breathing as lightly as possible. In the same moment, I felt a strange cold fury. I knew that, in the instant of discovery, I would not hesitate to kill that nameless old woman, lightning quick and without a sound. At that moment, she was standing about three metres away from me; I had pulled myself back deep into the hay but could see her with one eye. A dangling piece of straw obscured my view, but for a few blurred seconds I beheld my potential victim, a haggard crone in a black dress, whom I had never seen before, would never see again. At that moment, she gave up her search and climbed, grunting, back down the ladder. I lay with my body over Hölderlin's verses, having not had to become a murderer." [5] 

  

Whether this actually happened or it's a homocidal fantasy, I don't know. But the point remains the same: fascism makes killers of us all - or, at the very least, it obliges us to recognise that we all have the potential to commit terrible deeds when forced to do so. 

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Síomón Solomon, 'Hölderlin 1944', in Hölderlin's Poltergeists, (Peter Lang, 2020), pp. 83-88. The original German text can be found in the Hölderlin-Jahrbuch 23, (1982/83), pp. 172-77.

   

[2] It's no secret that Hermlin reimagined the facts of his own life. He was certainly creative with the truth, shall we say, when it came to his experiences during the War; portraying himself as an anti-fascist hero who fought with the Resistance in France and the Republicans in Spain. His tendency to dissolve the genre distinction between life and literature is best exemplified in Abendlicht (1979). 

      Solomon addresses this issue and provides some useful references to other critics who have been troubled (or amused) by Hermlin's tendency to project subjective experience into false historical context and tell true lies in part (ii) of his 'Translator's Introduction' to Hölderlin's Poltergeists. Unsurprisingly, since Solomon is himself a poet, he concludes sympathetically: 

"The hyperreal horror of the German menace and the continuous terror by which its paranoiac war machine infected the spirits of those it harassed and hunted down can hardly be underestimated, moreover, for the chaos it formented in curdling the contours of actuality, fantasy and memory. At the same time, poets are beings predisposed by definition to exercises of poetic licence. In the political interstices of Hermlin's own Vergangenheitsbewältigung, his reconciliation with his past, if he retrospectively massaged his own myth, he was surely in some measure just being himself." [21]

 

One work that Solomon doesn't refer us to, but which is certainly relevant to this discussion, is David Bathrick's 'Rereading Stephan Hermlin: Residues of Difference in the Post-Wall Public Sphere', in What Remains? East German Culture and the Postwar Public, ed. Marc Silberman, (American Institute for Contemporary German Studies / The John Hopkins University, 1997), pp. 90-100. To read as a pdf online, visit: https://www.aicgs.org/site/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/silberman.pdf

    

[3] Síomón Solomon, 'Hölderlin 1944', in Hölderlin's Poltergeists, p. 85.

 

[4] Ibid., p. 86.

 

[5] Ibid., pp. 87-88.

 

 

For a related post to this one - on Síomón Solomon's fantasia of traslation in Hölderlin's Poltergeists - click here.