Louie Bluie's Whorehouse Bible

I wish a fine publisher would put out a facsimile of Howard "Louie Bluie" Armstrong's Whorehouse Bible (6:22). 

I love this documentary. Terry Zwigoff also directed Crumb (1995), poster art by Robert Crumb.

100 favorites, literature

The Librarian, oil on canvas, 1566.  Giuseppe Arcimboldo.  Skoklosters slott, Skokloster.

skoklostersslott.se/en/node/108

Lucian (c. 125-180) / A True History
Ibn Tufail (c. 1105-1185) / The Improvement of Human Reason
The Life of Lazarillo de Tormes and of His Fortunes and Adversities (1554)
Denis Diderot / The Indiscreet Jewels (1748)
Voltaire / Candide (1759)
Laurence Sterne / The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1759-1767)
Xavier de Maistre / Voyage Around My Room (1794)
Friedrich Hölderlin / Hyperion (1797, 1799)
Novalis (1772-1801) / Heinrich von Ofterdingen
Mary Shelley / The Last Man (1826)
Nikolai Gogol / Dead Souls (1842)
Emily Brontë / Wuthering Heights (1847)
Herman Melville / Bartleby, the Scrivener (1853)
Lewis Carroll / Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1867)
Comte de Lautréamont / Les Chants de Maldoror (1868-1869)
Fyodor Dostoyevsky / The Idiot (1869)
Joris-Karl Huysmans / Against Nature (1884)
Mark Twain / The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884)
Knut Hamsum / Hunger (1890)
Léon Genonceaux / The Tutu: Morals of the Fin de Siècle (1891)
Marcel Schwob / The Book of Monelle (1894)
Arthur Schnitzler / Lieutenant Gustl (1900)
Joseph Conrad / Heart of Darkness (1902)
Frank Wedekind / Mine-Haha, or On the Bodily Education of Young Girls (1903)
Félix Fénéon / Novels in Three Lines (1906)
Robert Walser / Jakob von Gunten (1909)
Rainer Maria Rilke / The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge (1910)
Alfred Jarry / Exploits and Opinions of Dr. Faustroll, Pataphysician (1911)
Franz Kafka / The Metamorphosis (1912)
Octave Mirbeau / Dingo (1913)
Marcel Proust / In Search of Lost Time (1913-1927)
Miguel de Unamuno / Mist (1914)
Hermann Hesse / Demian (1919)
André Breton, Philippe Soupault / The Magnetic Fields (1920)
Maurice Dekobra / The Madonna of the Sleeping Cars (1925)
Jack Black / You Can't Win (1926)
Emilio Lascano Tegui / On Elegance While Sleeping (1926)
Louis Aragon / Irene's Cunt (1928)
Alfred Döblin / Berlin Alexanderplatz (1929)
William Faulkner / As I Lay Dying (1930)
Henry Miller / Tropic of Cancer (1934)
Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935) / The Book of Disquiet
Dezső Kosztolányi / Kornél Esti (1936)
Witold Gombrowicz / Ferdydurke (1937)
Adolfo Bioy Casares / The Invention of Morel (1940)
Maurice Blanchot / Thomas the Obscure (1941)
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry / The Little Prince (1943)
Jorge Luis Borges / Ficciones (1944)
Gherasim Luca / The Passive Vampire (1945)
Raymond Queneau / Exercises in Style (1947)
Boris Vian / Foam of the Daze (1947)
Osamu Dazai / No Longer Human (1948)
J.D. Salinger / The Catcher in the Rye (1951)
René Daumal / Mount Analogue (1952)
Vladimir Nabokov / Lolita (1955)
Pier Paolo Pasolini / The Ragazzi (1955)
Jean de Berg / The Image (1956)
William S. Burroughs / Naked Lunch (1959)
Flannery O'Conner / The Violent Bear It Away (1960)
Alexander Trocchi / Cain's Book (1960)
Julio Cortázar / Hopscotch (1963)
Konrad Bayer / The Head of Vitus Bering (1965)
Pierre Klossowski / The Baphomet (1965)
Jerzy Kosinski / The Painted Bird (1965)
Richard Brautigan / Trout Fishing in America (1967)
Mikhail Bulgakov / The Master and Margarita (1967)
Michel Tournier / Friday (1967)
Venedikt Erofeev / Moscow to the End of the Line (1969)
Chester Himes / Blind Man with a Pistol (1969)
Pierre Guyotat / Eden, Eden, Eden (1970)
Unica Zürn / Dark Spring (1970)
Henri Michaux / Miserable Miracle (1972)
Alexander Kluge / Learning Processes with a Deadly Outcome (1973)
Walter Abish / Alphabetical Africa (1974)
Grisélidis Réal / Black is a Color (1974)
Isabelle Eberhardt / The Oblivion Seekers (1975)
Peter Weiss / The Aesthetics of Resistance (1975)
Bohumil Hrabal / Too Loud a Solitude (1976)
Jean-Patrick Manchette / Fatale (1977)
Gabriel García Márquez / Innocent Eréndira (1978)
Georges Perec / Life: A User's Manuel (1978)
Italo Calvino / If on a Winter's Night a Traveler (1979)
Max Frisch / Man in the Holocene (1979)
Umberto Eco / The Name of the Rose (1980)
Thomas Bernhard / Wittgenstein's Nephew (1982)
Charles Bukowski / Ham on Rye (1982)
Kathy Acker / Blood and Guts in High School (1984)
Alasdair Gray / 1982, Janine (1984)
László Krasznahorkai / The Melancholy of Resistance (1989)
Herta Müller / The Land of Green Plums (1994)
William H. Gass / The Tunnel (1995)
Juan Goytisolo / State of Siege (1995)
Antonio Tabucchi / The Missing Head of Damasceno Monteiro (1997)
Orhan Pamuk / My Name Is Red (1998)
Leonid Tsypkin / Summer in Baden-Baden (2001)
Édouard Levé / Oeuvres (2002)
José Manuel Prieto / Encyclopedia of a Life in Russia (2003)
Horacio Castellanos Moya / Senselessness (2004)
Victor Pelevin / The Sacred Book of the Werewolf (2005)
Mikhail Shishkin / Maidenhair (2005)

notes on novel writing

Angelus Novus (inverted), oil transfer and watercolor on paper, 1920.  Paul Klee.  The Israel Museum, Jerusalem.

www.imj.org.il/imagine/collections/item.asp?itemNum=199799

... I have this theory of throwaway art, art that's done very casually and even randomly, with minimal effort, but only because it expresses a carefree genius of some kind, thus it's just an everyday affair, no big deal, without consequence, so it can be easily tossed out without any remorse or given away for free as it were.  But for these reasons, such art is the greatest achievement, naturally effervescent to an infinite degree.  Perhaps in some ideal society in some parallel universe, this will be the case.  Present society spends way too much time preserving too many things, and this propertizing logic being rather rigid can hinder much-worshipped "progress."  People do hold on to rather boring binarisms, and they can't see that the profound finds its best expression in the superficial.  Moreover, such logic is just plain paranoid of playfulness. 

Tragicomic tales are the best ones I think, have the most potential for all-around wisdom.  Straight dramatization of what happened is what's unconvincing, although it can be employed at certain times for irony and hilarity.  Most (meta)narratives employ omniscient commentary, usually to describe the mis-en-scène of the story and to describe the psychological actions of the characters.  Metacommentary comments on but also decenters the commentary, thus it can ironically and parodically remark on the self-certainty and conditionality of the commentary AND itself.  This doubtful or self-doubting "deconstruction" can be very funny but also be earnest if not be more true to the psychological and mental vicissitudes of the person, to a certain stream-of-consciousness, more "authentic" because in real life we do contradict ourselves and we do wander as well as wonder about all sorts of things in a more or less random fashion (a classic of this kind is Laurence Sterne's The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman), and at the same time we do fixate on things too, which again can be playfully exposed in metacommentary.  Metacommentary can take the form of recursion, that is, the novel can be about the writing of the novel.  And the recursionist novel can perhaps take the form of an epistolary novel, that is, a novel in the form of letters or other kinds of correspondence (chats, emails, IMs, etc.).  Usually, this is done chronologically, but it's ok to jump forwards and backwards in time, which is much more like how memory works, or how it doesn't "work" and succumbs to fantasy and sometimes willful forgetting.  Metacommentary doesn't necessarily have to take these forms (as embryonically employed in Michel Houellebecq's The Elementary Particles). The metacommentary can take the form of a very self-conscious albeit very subjectivistic mental "journal" or "memoir" (Edouard Levé notably does this neatly).  It can be written as if it were being thought or imagined extemporaneously at that very moment (I'm reminded of J.D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye and Venedikt Erofeev's Moskow-Petushki).  Like cinéma vérité, it's littérature vérité.  It's also a kind of phenomenology, but one that's neither eidetic or apodictic, and rather given to solipsism and soliloquy.  Drawings, notes, photos, etc. can be included as well as random ephemera (e.g. Kathy Acker's Blood and Guts in High School).   For me, the original inspiration for metacommentary is Dostoyevsky's Notes from Underground and Rousseau's autobiographical writings - but with the ludic qualities of something like Voltaire's Candide.  Novels usually have a linear narrative, but I wonder if there's some way to use hypertext, again to non-linearly and discursively play on the associations and disassociations of emotions, feelings, intuitions, perceptions, thoughts, memory, fantasy, dreams, the ineffable even.  Perhaps all this can only be effectively done in a first-person narrative, and a confused one at that.  

Regarding dialogue, whether from the vantage point of the first-person narrative or a more "objective" one, a more standard one, metacommentary might come in handy to provide a context of all the dialogic(al) happenings, external and internal.  In a way, it's the opposite of polyphony and all the other good stuff Mikhail Bakhtin theorized.  Metacommentary contextualizes the hubristic pretensions of representing dialogical truth in some way.  Rather than being toward the other, the self only recognizes itself as other.  Some people might call this good old-fashioned existentialism, but oh well, perhaps existentialism didn't recognize its own narcissism thus also awaken to what I'll call a voluptuous vulnerability, or ultimately, a primary innocence even.   

Regarding profanity in literature, I neither like nor dislike it.  Usually, profanity in particular, colloquial speech and patois in general, they're employed unconvincingly in books - that's my main gripe.  And usually, the profanity's for the purposes of "realism."  However, only a few writers manage to pull that off, such as Charles Bukowski.  Writers have enough problems getting so-called regular speech down convincingly.  I think profanity just like disturbing images can be used effectively to shock as it were.  Sometimes, profanity can be used in a "cartoony" way, to caricaturize people or situations (William S. Burroughs and Chester Himes do this well), and thus to ironize them.  The best policy perhaps is to try doing a certain caricaturized realism if you will, which most likely requires profanity if only for the reason that most people do use it at some point in everyday life, and those that don't are living in literature, and only literature of an aseptic kind.  But moreover, even in everyday life, when people use profanity, they're usually assuming some kind of role, even to themselves.  When used amongst each other thus showing mutual trust or comfortability or also hostility, they're for that time suspending their usual existence of more or less insignificance.  Even when using profanity privately, e.g. "Shit!" or whatnot after making a mistake, the person's assuming a role, dividing the self and suspending identity.  This is the interesting thing about profanity, that it produces significance while suspending identity.  Often, through profanity, a person isn't so much honestly expressing "personality" but rather impersonating a (socio-symbolic) persona, usually the persona of another person.  Profanity does create a fantasy space-time par excellence, conflating the Imaginary and the Symbolic, other and Other.  So, when people cuss, they aren't really "keepin' it real" as they used to say. They aren't expressing themselves genuinely so much as they're proffering an appeal of some kind.  Otherwise, why even couch the usually mute circulation of stable "knowledge" in terms of profanity?  Another example is when a person utters whether aloud or inwardly in a time of exasperation "Fuck me!" or "I'm fucked!" - it's an appeal distanced and distancing from what the self is in "reality."  To provoke is also to appeal.  Of course, this counter-intuitive knowledge is pointless for many people mired in a certain natural consciousness.  Perhaps profanity is unavoidable to convey a certain realism, justified by the story or characters.  Even when speech acts are rather pathetically pedestrian and uninspired, some of them can be utilized for funny or touching ends.  For some situations, I wonder if they occasion something akin to Derrida's Glas ... that is, two or multiple intertextual columns that play off each other. 

That said, I think that nothing beats a certain clean and crisp writing, unadorned writing.  Kenzaburō Ōe is a master of such writing.  Elfriede Jelinek's works are excellent, sometimes spare, and unsparing of human folly.  I like lovely writing as much as the next person (I wish I could write like Hermann Hesse), from classics to Magic Realism and beyond, but there's too much of it out there - and thus, too little of it really, too little that challenges certain sentimentalisms reacting to (post)modernist posthistoire.  Also, I admire avant-garde and experimental literature, from Comte de Lautréamont's Les Chants de Maldoror to the various surrealisms notably and cut-up etc., but it's not the most accessible stuff.  I may abstain from pedantically demonstrating theory in literary works, but I'm not against certain theoretical strategies to build the literary architecture, as long as the process disappears in the resultant product.  It must appear to be a monad.  The work must appear to be effortless.  I'm not against "difficult" literature, but it's exemplified in deceptively simple works.  I think the challenge is to make something very readable, short and snappy ...

letter fragment

I'm grateful for Lisa's philosophical promptings. 

 كتاب في معرفة الحيل الهندسية   (The Book of Knowledge of Ingenious Mechanical Devices), Al-Jazari. 

www.muslimheritage.com/topics/default.cfm?ArticleID=466

... In any case, I find your correction of Aristotle, from dynamis-energeia-entelechia to dynamis-techne-energeia-techne-entelechia-techne, to be intriguing as well as needed.  It does seem that Aristotle's triad is more appropriate to the circle of nature.  Also, what is missing in Aristotle is the concept of Contingency as a form of human agency and mediation.  Perhaps this is necessarily aporetic for Aristotle because he presumes a certain teleological anamnesis.  The movement from dynamis/potentiality to energeia/being-at-work presupposes that work brings about actuality.  However, this bringing about of actuality is mediated by the human agent of techne/memory, of (re)production/recollection, or practice/theory.  Also, the movement from dynamis to energeia can represent an epistemic transition - that is, dynamis then techne bring about new forces.  This creates the (always-already) ground for energeia to erupt spontaneously, contingently.  Contingent movements as Desire are the mediation to Actuality - that is, essence appears.  Ousia (Substance, essence) is recast by the subject-object becoming, in the movement from energeia to techne.  Lastly, in the movement to entelechia, to Actuality proper, techne/memory has created a certain cosmological paradigm, or system(s) of knowledge.  However, like a fruit grown too ripe, it decays.  Actuality must pass into non-being, and what survives destruction gains objectivity.  Sorry for being Hegelian here but Aristotle may have benefitted from having a concept of the human Subject.  Throughout the movement of dynamis-techne-energeia-techne-entelechia-techne, human subjectivities are at work, mediating fulfillment of actual processes.  It's also interesting that your correction brackets or displaces the telos of entelechia, by ending with techne.  This is significant because it shows the space-time(s) of reconfiguration.  It allows for episteme (or paradigm) shifts, allows for variances in recollective projects and not just (re)production of Actuality.  Even as (re)production, techne outruns Actuality - innovation outruns its use value.  Relatedly, techne as aleatory invention (as opposed to Science) allows for an outrunning of normative belief structures, for better or for worse.  So, I do see how techne as subjective and at times aleatory (Re)production/Recollection is the mediation missing in Aristotle's triad.

Elephant Automaton Clock, 1600-1625.  Gilt metal with enameling.  Loyola University Museum of Art, Chicago.

www.luc.edu/luma/collections/collection_details/elephant_clock.html

Ingmar Bergman's Through a Glass Darkly (1961)

Originally written on 02.14.2010

The title is taken from Corinthians 13:12: For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.  This verse is set within the context of love, or more specifically, charitable love (agape).  Interpretations may vary.  One interpretation: the dim mirror represents an imperfect and incomplete knowledge of oneself and God, whereas with charitable love there is a change in the person in that the person will have self-knowledge like God's knowledge of the person.  It is uncertain if Ingmar Bergman was thematizing charitable love or a broader notion of love (that is, how it is generally understood) in relation to God.  Throughout the film, the charitable love of all the characters is tested.  If Bergman was thematizing a broader notion of love, then the film becomes even more ambiguous.  It can be said that all the characters love each other just as much as they are alienated from each other and from God, if not from their own selves - this brings up the problematic of a false love.  In any case, the dislocation of love and of God is perhaps the main motif of the film. 

Bergman himself said:

A God descends into a human being and settles in her.  First he is just an inner voice, a certain knowledge, or commandment.  Threatening or pleading.  Repulsive yet stimulating.  Then he lets himself be more and more known to her, and the human being gets to test the strength of the god, learns to love him, sacrifices for him, and finds herself forced into the utmost devotion and then into complete emptiness.  When this emptiness has been accomplished, the god takes possession of this human being and accomplishes his work through her hands.  Then he leaves her empty and burned out, without any possibility of continuing to live in this world.  That is what happens to Karin.  And the borderline that she crosses is the bizarre pattern on the wallpaper.  Through a Glass Darkly was a desperate attempt to present a simple philosophy: God is love and love is God.  A person surrounded by love is also surrounded by God.  That is what I… named "conquered certainty." 

Through a Glass Darkly can be seen as a family drama where once alienated members rally around Karin's illness, and afterwards everyone is less alienated from each other.  In a way, the film does have sort of a conventional structure and denouement, though it is broken up by depictions of Karin's psychosis.  Perhaps Karin's illness is the very hand of God=love which has brought the others closer together (as the popular saying goes, "God works in mysterious ways").  In so doing, love prevails, and each is touched by God.  This is a platitude, but that is how the drama unfolds.  This appears to be how Bergman resolves certain contradictions in the film.  However, there is a sense that the message of God=love is a false one, a false hope.  That is, is the hopeful love of the others, specifically of David and Minus, some kind of defense mechanism against submitting totally to love?  At the end, they seem to inhabit a limbo of emptiness and hope.  Also, they seem self-absorbed.  In other words, they seem not to want to face their emptiness but only to have false hopes in a desperate message of God=love.  But is this also their absolute emptiness?  Or is the hopeful message of love really another distraction from facing the absolute emptiness of God=love?  In the end, do they really know God=love?  And despite her saying "I have seen God," Karin feels the most intense loneliness.  Even surrounded by the others' love, she is alone.  There is a sense of being forsaken.  Bergman leaves certain things unresolved, and perhaps the contradictions of the film and its intentions are what make it interesting.  Perhaps Karin's psychosis is a sort of anamorphosis of the others' absolute emptiness.  In other words, her absolute emptiness is the distorted picture or extreme case of the absolute emptiness experienced by the others.  No doubt, Bergman is disassembling and reassembling the parts of spiritual crises.  Perhaps in a profound spiritual crisis, there is a certain indistinguishability of things - between emptiness and hope, between loneliness and love, between God and silence.  The film begins with a shot of the opaque surface of the sea then quickly shifts to a shot of the clear depths of the sea.  This can be interpreted as a metaphor for Corinthians 13:12, the opaque surface being a dim mirror whereas the clear depths being Godly self-knowledge.  But also, this can be a metaphor for the contiguity or the coalescence of absolute emptiness and God=love.  Metaphysically, it can be a metaphor for a certain Augenblick conversion, an imminence (that is, Godly love is in all things, good and bad).  Then there is a shot of all the characters emerging in unison from the sea, or more specifically, defining the horizon of the sea and the sky.  The characters inhabit the horizon of their picture of themselves and God's knowledge of them.  Also, their emergence from water can be seen as a sort of baptism, possibly a baptism into absolute emptiness.  All this is very simply but effectively captured, sets the tone of the coming drama.  The stark surroundings, the run-down house, the wrecked boat can be interpreted as metaphors for a derelict existence in the dual sense, abandoned by God=love but also abandoned to God=love; it is uncertain which choice is better.  Perhaps the possibility of living in this world is also the impossibility of God, or the possibility of Godly love is exposed with the exposure to life's impossibility, its absolute emptiness.  Despite the happy ending, Bergman does not really offer a convincing middle choice.  The dilapidated room with the cracked decorative wallpaper was a particularly effective place to set Karin's plunge into psychosis, her meeting with God, as a place of absolute ruin and its imagination. 

At the end of the film, David consoles Minus, that God and love may be the same thing - "God exists in love, every sort of love, maybe God is love."  Especially after Karin's second schizophrenic breakdown which is a traumatizing episode for everyone involved, again, God=love may come off as a platitude, and the ending may be unsatisfactory.  Following Bergman's own conceptualization, absolute emptiness may be Karin's alone.  Nevertheless, the trauma of Karin's breakdown notably can be interpreted as inducing drastic anagnorises in all the characters, psychological and spiritual changes. The others undergo changes too, but it is difficult to locate the time of these changes.  Except for Minus, the others do not express any drastic change.  The others too experience emptiness, but does their emptiness approach an absolute one?  While fishing, David tells Martin about his suicide attempt, how this left him in a certain emptiness through which he recognized his love for Karin, Minus, and Martin.  Minus can be seen as being left in a certain emptiness after having incestuous sex with Karin.  Martin is a more ambiguous figure.  Perhaps he has been left in a certain emptiness since Karin's first schizophrenic breakdown.  His emptiness is less pronounced, but it is obtusely signalized by his spurned sexual advances toward Karin which may be a metaphor for the his objectification of her and which in turn shows his own desperate destitution (it can be said, he is putting up a good front).  Minus seems to have been most affected by the events of the breakdown (he did have sex with his sister after all), but then he is easily consoled at the end and is relieved mostly that "Papa spoke to me."  If it is Bergman's intention to show that absolute emptiness is a sort of locus of God=love, Karin's is a bizarre case since she is raped by God as a spider, and devastated, she leaves for the hospital in sunglasses to avoid Godly light.  There is also the issue of hope.  Is absolute emptiness the voiding of hope for the possibility of continuing to live in this world?  Whereas Karin does "choose" to leave this world, the others continue to live in it.  As David tells Minus, God=love is "something to hold on to."  Perhaps Bergman's intentions were contradictory, or as he said, "desperate."  If anything, they are ambiguous.  From our perspective, the drama can be seen merely as revolving around Karin's schizophrenic breakdown and her hallucinations.

Bergman's portrayal of the schizophrenic's world or psychosis in general is compelling.  Moreover, the psychosexual dynamics are one of the most interesting aspects of the film.  David is haunted by the loss of his wife which is embodied in his daughter, and he somewhat perversely wants to record Karin's deterioration.  Minus is sexually repressed but also yearns for his father's affection (one can speculate that he is homosexual), and his incestuous liaison with Karin throws him into more confusion.  Martin seems to compensate for his resignation to the fact that Karin is incurable by turning her into a sex object, though he is rebuffed.  And Karin, her sexuality is purposely vexing, her sexual subjectivization being guided by voices, and her desire for God's desire (that is, the desire of the Other) becomes a sort of leitmotif of the film.  The voices can be interpreted as a sort of short-circuited superegoic injunction that commands not enjoyment (within the circuit of desire and its metonymic incompletion) but jouissance - after all, Karin is shown having orgasm.  However, jouissance is only perversely attained.  Sexual coupling can be interpreted as a metaphor for loveless alienation, or a violation.  So, if the film was to be politicized, it has a certain conservative message on sex (it goes so far as showing God to be a rapist).  Bergman adroitly uses parallelism and symbolism - the play performed by Minus and Karin (where the artist cannot die for his art) is a harbinger of their incestuous liaison, the helicopter appears just when God as spider appears to Karin, and water symbolizes conversion.  There is so much symbolism just in that sequence of Karin and Minus in the wrecked boat which is a partial shelter from the rain, symbolizing both dissolution and baptism.  David the father can be seen as another superegoic voice, the injunction to desire and enjoy hopeful love so as not to tarry with a barren life.  Even though he experiences a certain emptiness then love with his suicide attempt, he still is distant and distances himself from the others.  He still cannot get over the death of his wife (who was also schizophrenic), face the truth.  His writing displaces the truth (the critique implied in the play), so that even Karin's breakdown is an opportunity to write.  It can be interpreted that David symbolizes castration - that is, the entry into the circulation of desire and language with the loss of jouissance.  David yearns for his dead wife, Minus yearns for this father, Martin yearns for Karin - each yearns for a connection to someone who would displace the true emptiness of their lives.  Each have fantasies of reconciliation, that which will reflect wholeness (secondary jouissance) - David with fantasies of his love for the others as well as of literary success, Minus with fantasies of revenge, Martin with fantasies of Karin's sexual readiness.  Minus' mockery of his father through the play is his way of getting attention and finally affection.  In fact, the play may be the dramatization of fundamental fantasy.  Like the artist who only flirts with deadly truth, each is unable to truly confront their own spiritual paucity, and "love" too becomes a symptom of the confrontation's evasion.  Each has a vague "love" for the other(s).  "Love" (what is imagined to be the Other's desire) can be interpreted as objet petit a (cause of desire).  In other words, they mistakenly expect their "love" to be returned somehow, to be justified.  But in each, there is a misrecognition of another's desire.  David plans to leave for a trip despite his family's wishes, Minus relents to Karin's amorous advances unquestioningly, Martin seems to misread Karin's vulnerability for sexual availability.  But how does all this relate to Godly love?  Is the choice only between a horrific God (God as spider) or hopeful love?  The former is all too impossible and the latter is all too possible, which is also the impossibility of Godly love.  Perhaps this is related to the impossibility of life.  The message of God=love, that every sort of love is God, is a fragile one.  "Love" may be necessary for livable life, but livable life may only go to show the superfluidity of Godly love.  Bergman's argument seems to be almost apophatic, showing God by showing what is not God.

Ingmar Bergman's The Silence (1963)

Originally written on 02.17.2010

There is transcendent silence or God.  There is immanent silence or breakdown of communication, abandonment and loneliness.  There is distant silence or desire for recognition.  There is imminent silence or death, as well as life (and politically, the fatal logic of war).  There is transcendental silence or human love. 

Though silent, God is not altogether absent in the film.  It can be interpreted that God is manifested in the tender moments of caring love between the characters - between the old attendant and Ester, between Johan and others.  God can be interpreted as an attendant and a sort of timekeeper, a witness to life and death, but also a foreigner to the existential meaning of human life and death, and of God.  Bergman also alludes to God with (sun)light, which is both cruel and kind (Anna avoids heat and light, whereas Johan is drawn to and gently illuminated by it).  There is also an apophatic allusion to God with the painting of the satyr and the nymph which catches Johan's eye (the painting is a harbinger for the "primal scene" of his catching his mother kissing her lover) as well as with the rain Anna douses herself with in the final scene, an anti-baptism.

The city is a topsy turvy world, a living hell, a place of absolute anonymity as well as wantonness.  The dwarfs who are the most "well-adjusted" people in the film are an oblique ironic comment about this inhuman world.  The junk wagon drawn by a corpselike horse and the tank signify a certain doom, an end of the human.  The horse-drawn junk wagon also serves as a counterpoint - it signifies a final judgment, barren existence or the bare soul.  The foreign city like the Freudian Uncanny is also a picture of the characters' repressions of the Id.  The foreign reality can also be interpreted as the Real, a break from and in the Symbolic.  Most interpretations focus on the breakdown or the impossibility of communication between the characters, notably between Anna and Ester.  However, there is an unspoken understanding between Anna and Ester.  Each senses thus understands the other as the antithesis (carnal vs. cerebral, etc), as representation.  However, each does not know the other's true face, does not recognize the other as a whole - there is understanding but not truth.  It is implied Anna habitually lies to Ester.  Also, one can even say that there is only "communication" when there is no communication.  That is, both Anna to her lover and Ester to the attendant as well as in her prayer (which is to her mother rather than God) confess the truth to a silent interlocutor - there is truth but not understanding.  There is no "translation" between understanding and truth.  The only moment of true recognition is not through speech but music, when Ester and the attendant agree on Bach.  Translation becomes the leitmotif of the difficulty of communication if not the misdirection of speech.  In order to know the most basic things (hand, face, etc...as well as the person's soul), speech and understanding must be (re)translated somehow into recognition and truth.  Translation is also a ciphering, that is, a sort of forgetfulness of experience.  This forgetfulness or "innocence" is paradoxically exhibited in Johan, who becomes a site of memory and equivocality.  Translation is imagining the truth of experience of what remains "foreign" or other.

Bergman beautifully captures the personalities of the characters with their individual perspectives on external reality.  Anna is the narcissistic gaze, which is emphasized by mirrors.  Ester is the voyeuristic gaze, looking out windows or onto the other suite (one is reminded at times of Velázquez's famous painting Las Meninas via the inversion of its perspective).  And Johan is the Imaginary gaze, as well as the onlooker of the "primal scene" which overwrites the Imaginary with the Symbolic.  With the (ap)perception of abandonment, there is a certain "death," Johan turns from a certain undifferentiated innocence to a certain divided experience.  With alienation, he goes from being the autoerotic and alloerotic self to being an aporetic subject.  Also, he jumps from the desire of the Other's desire (the sensual sphere of his mother) to the desire separated from the Other's desire (the supersensible stratum of undying love).  A mutual recognition of some kind (even a togetherness in loss and loneliness) between Ester and Johan is implied.  At the end, Johan is shown raptly wondering at Ester's letter, as if trying to decipher some imminent spiritual revelation.  The hotel itself becomes a sort of topography of ego formation, notably Johan's.  It is a wonderland as well as a traumatic site, a conflation of heaven and hell.  For the others, it is a place where Id overtakes Superego, and also where Thanatos overtakes Eros.  If keeping to an oppositional schema, it can be interpreted that Anna represents the pleasure principle and that Ester represents the reality principle or even the death drive.  However, Anna can be interpreted as both the pleasure principle and the death drive - forces of the Id.  She is possessed by the Id - she has illicit sex and she wishes for her sister's death (and her promiscuous sex educes Ester's feelings of betrayal which quicken death).  In a way, she barely has an "ego" - her care for Johan is merely an extension of her narcissism, and she feels smothered by Ester's superegoic perfectionism.  In fact, Anna refuses discourse with Ester - the Real puts a stop to Symbolic functioning.  And Ester, her angst can be attributed to the denial of the death drive - she drinks, smokes, and works to disavow her illness and moreso she expresses horror of dying, its "eternity."  Also, Ester's superegoic perfectionism is shown to be empty, a front.  And her unanswered prayer with impending death puts into doubt the absolute superego, God.  Ester is not merely the frigid sister, the absolute opposite of sensuality - she yearns for intimacy with Anna and Johan but can only express her desires indirectly.  As Ester's spying shows, her neurosis verges on possessiveness.  Curiously, if there is any superegoic figure in the film, it is the least overbearing one - the attendant, for the most part watchful, punctual and caring.  In a world that is out of joint, he speaks the most humanism, though that speech is a foreign one. 

The shots of hands especially and affectionate touching are rather profound.  There is that one beautiful scene when Johan smells Anna after scrubbing her back when she is taking a bath.  Moreover, there is the scene of Ester gently touching Anna and Johan as they sleep, or the one of Johan observing Ester's hands.  Relatedly, "hand" is the first word that is translated by the attendant.  Corporality itself becomes a sort of hieroglyph - that is, it needs to be (re)translated.  Separated from the burdened soul and its speech, it is as if the body and its touch return to innocence.  The soul stripped bare thus purged of its derangements becomes then the locus of love.