He Is Touched and Amused

Reading Bury Place Papers, the selection of essays written by Frank Kermode for the London Review of Books, I stumble across this passage, not from Kermode himself but from Michael Wood’s introduction to the volume:

Kermode is not Housman and not a diviner. But he does devote much exquisite intelligence to matters of divinations - even and especially of secular affairs. He would like us to believe we could do without such obliquities. He is touched and amused by the fact that Housman appears to have thought that both laughing and crying were legitimate critical responses to poetry. He is drawn to the thought of a shared, unpuzzling world even if he sees that world as a new fragmented and perhaps never really tenable historical fantasy.

I am startled and bewildered by the phrase ‘he is touched and amused by the fact that Housman appears to have thought laughing and crying were legitimate critical responses to poetry’. The claim reminds me of one of the key moments of New Criticism, Wimsatt and Beardsley’s ‘The Affective Fallacy’, the less well-known and less successful brother to ‘The Intentional Fallacy’. Wimsatt and Beardsley argue that a persistent error in critical responses to literature is to confuse one’s physiological reactions to literature with assessments of its objective features. By chance, the director Matthew Warchus gives a good example of the kind of thing they are reacting on the current Guardian website against when he says that he judges the quality of plays by ‘the tingle factor’ he feels when he reads them.

Kermode wasn’t a New Critic. He started his career after their star had waned though there were Leavisite elements to his early work and Leavis, though really not a New Critic (they cared nothing for morality), had some affinities with them in their close reading of things. Kermode’s success came with some well-regarded books in the sixties, notably the brilliant The Sense of an Ending, but this reputation was sharpened and enriched by his enthusiastic welcome of continental theory in the 1970s (he nobly resigned from Cambridge in 1982 over the MacCabe Affair) and in some ways that would suggest a turning away from New Criticism and all that stuff. But, certainly in North America, deconstruction entered in as a kind of modification - radical, to be sure - of close reading: a reading so close that it distorted the thing read (like the uncertainty principle extended to literature).

So what is he saying here? That laughing and crying are no sort of guide at all? Well, let’s deal with the obvious supports for this idea first. There are strange people who laugh perversely as things most people would cry at and vice versa. And as soon as I say that I think, literary criticism isn’t a referendum: maybe for us, as for Ibsen’s Dr Stockmann, the minority is a better guide. So, Wimsatt and Beardsley suggest, let’s ignore what people happen to do and look at the objective features of the thing itself.

I guess I’m thinking about laughter a lot, thinking about the complexity of laughter in the theatre and the long history of objections to laughter. Laughter is often disregarded, marginalised, dismissed, condemned and censored. There’s something dangerous and trivialising, it seems, about laughter.

In the theatre, this careful paring away of laughter from art is uncomfortable, because the thing itself is affected by the reaction. If you’re performing What the Butler Saw and people aren’t laughing, the performance will usually suffer. The performance is about generating laughter; if they laugh, it goes well; if they don’t laugh, it doesn’t. And similarly if people are guffawing through Elektra, you may not be doing it right (okay unless you’ve decided to do a comedy production, sure sure). And when you get the reaction you’re aiming for, hushed, taut silence in a tragic scene, rolling waves of hysterical laughter in a farce, the actors lock into in, find the right timing, know how to ‘play’ an audience, and the performance therefore alters to play to its audience.

What would Wimsatt and Beardsley say? They might say that regardless of the response we still should look at the performance itself - whysoever the actors performed the way they did, we should still look at the performance. They might insist that the accidents of physiology are insignificant: some people cry, some people just feel sad inside, and one is not more meaningful than the other.

Which is true, except not quite for laughter. In performing a comedy, you’re not trying to get people to appreciate that it’s funny (at least not only that); you’re trying to get them to laugh out loud. It’s the laugh out loud that involves timing and rhythm and precision. Things can be vaguely funny if very approximate, but you’re unlikely to laugh out loud. If everyone is smiling inside, the comedy feels dead. And, more importantly, the experience of comedy can sometimes be enjoyment of everyone else’s laughter, surfing on their laughter, enjoying being part of an audience giving out those great shouts of laughter that wonderful comedy can generate. The show is not just what’s on stage; it’s also the sound of the laughter.

I saw Oklahoma! at the National Theatre a decade or so ago. Musicals are, in a sense, theatrical pleasure-machines, construction designed to produce sheer delight in their audiences. I sat next to an Australian woman who told me before the lights went down that she’d been looking forward to the show for months, that Oklahoma! was one of her favourites, that she had the film soundtrack as a girl, that she loved all the songs and that I’d be lucky if she didn’t sing along.

She was true to her word. As soon as the dialogue in a scene turned towards the matter of a song (‘How you gonna take me to the box social, Curly?’) she began gurgling with pleasurable anticipation and as the song started she had locked into its rhythm, bouncing slightly in her seat and mouthing the words. Perhaps in another mood, this would have been rather irritating, but I was looking for the simpler pleasures of the musical (I was determinedly resisting Trevor Nunn’s attempt to make Oklahoma! into an important statement about the human condition) and that woman became a totem of the pleasures of the musical; her joy was infectious and it was part of my enjoyment of the show. The pleasures of the production were sharpened and focused and enhanced by the co-presence of this woman. Part of the experience and less without it.

And then I am struck that Kermode was supposedly ‘touched and amused’ by this belief of Housman’s, that Wood chooses to describe his response in terms of affect rather than critical appraisal of its objective features.

Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes

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Diaghilev and the Golden Age of the Ballets Russes 1909-1929 is an exhibition currently running at the V&A Museum in London. Not knowing much about the Ballets Russes, I was interested to get an accelerated learning experience.

It’s a smart, intelligent exhibition which takes us through the state of ballet before Diaghilev set up the Russes, shows us a wealth of costumes and designs, gives us videos of Howard Goodall discussing Stravinsky, and takes us on a tour with the company as they conquered the world. There are some tantalising glimpses of their connections to High Modernism, including a couple of the extraordinary, brilliant, completely impractical costumes for Parade. There are also some fascinating videos of recreations of Nijinsky’s choreography for The Rite of Spring juxtaposed with Pina Bausch’s no less astonishing version. For no terribly good reason, but oh how I lingered, there is a case with manuscripts for In Search of Lost Time, Ulysses and The Waste Land. One room brilliantly gives us the backcloth for The Firebird - apparently the largest single item in the V&A’s collection - together with music and some choreographic video projection.

Almost every turn reveals something lovely. There is a stunning pair of posters by Jean Cocteau from 1913 that are both monumental and mischievous. An instantly recognisable Edward Gordon Craig watercolour of Isadora Duncan is an early thrill and a little later a fascinating room is devoted to Nijinsky and includes a strikingly good bust by Una Troubridge that reveals an extraordinarily beautiful young man with high cheekbones, curious mocking eyebrows and a perpetual pout. Easy to see why Diaghilev adored, loved, and jealously protected this nymph. Towards the end of the exhibition we revisit a 1967 auction of the costumes, where they were sold rather cannily as psychedelic outfits for a generation newly re-enchanted with colour and primitivism. One of the Ballets Russes’ dancers is shown on video marvelling at being briefly reunited with her original costume. There is a generous array of Goncharova drawings and designs and she certainly emerges as a remarkable talent. (Her futurist caricature of Diaghilev is above.)

It’s only partly an exhibition about the Ballets Russes. In many ways it’s really an exhibition about how to exhibit dance. Dance is shown in film, in sculpture, in sketches and photographs, in painting, video, notation, in testimony, and in music and other remnants. Dance is there to be imagined in the costumes which hang on their stands looking magnificently inert; you draw on the energy of the music and colour around you to imagine that costume on the back of a dancer, defying the earth for ever longer intervals. It offers remnants proudly, without trying to fill the gaps - a huge map showing all the places in Europe and the Americas that they played is illustrated with a handful of postcards from a member of the company; it’s obviously at some distance from Balanchine and Bakst but it gives a sense of a whirl of social energy that surrounded and bore up those whirls of choreographic energy.

Appropriately, it feels theatrical as an exhibition. We move between spaces through prosceniums and exhibits are framed and lit with an enormously dramatic sense of space. Red and black are the background colours; it’s an exhibition that emerges from the dark, offering sensations rather than analysis. It’s a very sensual exhibition.

I’ll admit that, not knowing much about the company, some of the significance of what I was seeing passed me by. While some of the costumes are remarkable in their modernity, like Léon Bakst’s stunning Shepherd’s costume for Narcisse (1911), printed or hand-painted in strong, simple, organic shapes in blue and orange, a lot of them rather passed me by, but I accept it’s not you it’s me. Perhaps because I know little, I jibed at little at being steered so firmly: this is mostly at the beginning, where I began to feel that the whole of dance before the Russes was being trashed in preparation for Diaghilev to take the stage. We are shown some stiff and awkward opera costumes; there’s an interesting showreel of some rather decorative, twee and facile little dances. I wished I’d known more, because I wanted to ask what were these ballet and dance forms thought to be at the time? What were the dancers and choreographers doing? It’s so terribly distorting to read an artistic practice in the light of what is about to emerge unbidden.

But it’s a very enjoyable couple of hours and while it may feel a bit long, you really need to get to the end to realise how full and rich the whole experience has been, the remarkable journeys you’ve followed them on.

Inception

Some months after the rest of the world we went to see Inception. Okay, here’s the thing. Yes, it’s a very enjoyable, beautifully designed movie. (Actually that hopelessly understates it; the production design is quite astonishingly superb.) Yes, the intellectual puzzles in it are very teasing and enjoyable - and it certainly got me over-puzzling. I did feel it was rather cold though. I never really hooked into the story of Cobb and Mal and the children, which always felt to me like a layer of the puzzle, rather than a genuine heart to the movie. Similarly the father-son relationship was only sketched in, though there were a bit of a tug at how the son was being manipulated.

There’s something odd about how Hollywood does ‘high concept’ movies; genuinely complex thought is never involved; it’s just a rather sedentary paradoxical thought. The Matrix, The Prestige, this, I find them ultimately a bit frustrating because they think they are mind-blowingly clever and they’re just clever. This thought is the one about the man who dreamed he was a butterfly, kind of thing.

The (high) concept of Inception is that some people have learned how to construct dreams for people to enter, and in those dreams people can be fed ideas that can change them when they wake. It also seems that you can have dreams within dreams, though this is increasingly dangerous. This team have been asked to go in to a young man’s mind to plant the idea that he should break up the business he’s inherited from his father. They do this by going down into (at least) four levels of dream: a van chase, a hotel, a mountain base, and limbo.

Okay but this is where it hooked me in. I spent the entire movie, pretty much, convinced that the big final reveal is that the waking state we think is reality is actually a dream. I’d worked it all out: somehow Cobb is stuck in a dream so someone has gone into a dream to plant the idea (the inception) that he should kill himself. The totem that is his link to reality is actually something he’s got from his wife Mal in the dream, so it’s not actually a reliable guide to his wakefulness. The dreamer is obviously Mal and she’s trying to send him a signal to get him back. The scenes in limbo are so upsetting because he needed to hit rock bottom.

And then it didn’t happen. Or did it? I discover - again, months after the rest of the world - that there’s a minor industry producing theories that the waking state is in fact another dream. Everyone seemed to be looking at Cobb at the end (we know that the dreamer gets hostile looks); the reunion with the children felt dreamlike; how did Michael Caine know to show up at the airport? All of this is quite convincingly refuted by this admirably obsessive internetizen, but I’m still left with a feeling that I’ve been deprived of the last satisfying, completing twist of the rubik’s cube.

Of course this appeals to the Matrix-style (or Descartes-style) believers that we’re all being manipulated by some unseen force. Is Christopher Nolan trying to inspire mass suicide?

Get Santa!

We saw the Royal Court’s (first) Christmas show on Monday. God it’s good. I’m guessing that the Court has realised that Christmas shows are fairly lucrative and worth getting in on but also knew that it has a reputation for serious new work with a socially critical edge and it’s hard to square the two. This is an excellent way of squaring the circle.

It’s a show by Anthony Neilson and my mate Nick Powell. The story is about a girl, Holly, who hates Christmas because all she ever wanted was to meet her real father and Santa never gives her that present. She devises a plan to get Santa. Instead she traps an elf who accidentally makes her teddy bear come alive and they inadvertently make it Christmas every day. Eventually, she finds her father and comes to love Christmas.

Anthony Neilson is a brilliant, obvious choice. He wrote The Night Before Christmas and God in Ruins, both Christmas-themed plays. More important maybe, plays like The Wonderful World of Dissocia have a raucous, Carrolian popular energy that seems just right for sending kids into hysterics in all the right ways.

This show had the Court’s subversiveness - one of the first songs is a plea for sexual libertarianism, really, and there are motifs of bestiality, consumerism and dysfunctional families that are very familiar. The language is actually very tame though there’s a series of near-misses that drives the adults into hysteria.

Nick’s music is wonderful, the script sings along, and the cast, especially newcomer Imogen Doel as young Holly, are to die for. 

The Metereological Sublime

Snow always delights. Why should it delight? The holiday season perhaps comes in part from the travails of rural life when the cold weather would force people indoors to eat the birds that wouldn’t survive the winter. They transformed hardship and suffering into delight. But snow continues to delight us in the cities.

Perhaps it’s a version of the sublime. Kant says the experience of a vast rolling ocean is both terrifying and pleasurable because first we feel our physical insignificance and then are reminded of our metaphysical freedom.

Snow delights by sublimely transforming the cityscape. We are reminded of the awesome power of nature. Even London, even one of the greatest, largest, most enduring cities of the world can be blanketed in snow. We can be interrupted, convulsed as a city. We change our lives for a time: we calculate journeys differently, each turn of the road reveals a landscape made unrecognisable, the light is suddenly strange. Our bodies, our very bodies are contorted as we plant our feet differently, feeling unfamiliar strains as our legs tense to stay upright.

But the city renders snow pleasurably sublime because snow, finally, can be incorporated into the city as decoration.