pierre bourdieu on how to read charles baudelaire reading charles baudelaire

. . . then, ‘the critic, the viewer’ (as Baudelaire himself puts it) is able to ‘bring about within himself a transformation, which is something of a mystery’, and, ‘by a phenomenon of will-power acting on his imagination‘, can learn to ‘share in the life of the society that has given birth to this unexpected bloom ‘

 
 

How to Read an Author

 

I fear that my critique of the lector’s reading will fall victim to the derealizing neutralization that this reading precisely performs. And, that here I am touching on the very foundation of scholastic belief, I would like not only to explain, or prove point, but make it felt, and in that way overcome routine, or lift by using, as a kind of parable, the case of Baudelaire, who, through successive readings and rereadings, has, more than any other writer, suffered the effects of canonization, an eternization that dehistoricizes and derealizes, while making it impossible to recreate ‘the inimitable grandeur of beginnings’ to which, in a quite different context, Claude Levi-Strauss refers.

 

With Baudelaire we are faced with a problem of historical anthropology as difficult as those that arise for the historian or ethnologist from the deciphering of an unknown society. But, because of the false familiarity we derive from long academic frequentation, we are not aware of it. One of the most hackneyed topics of the discourse of celebration of the ‘classics’, which has the effect of sending them into limbo, as if outside time and space, far away, in any case, from debates and battles of the present, consists paradoxically in as our contemporaries, those closest to us – so contemporary and so close that we do not doubt an instant the apparently immediate understanding (in reality mediated by our education) that we think we have of their work.

 

Yet we are, without realizing it, perfect strangers to the social universe in which Baudelaire found himself, and in particular to the intellectual world with which and against which he evolved and which, in return, he profoundly transformed and indeed revolutionized, by helping to create the literary field, a radically new world, but one for us, is self-evident. Being ignorant of our ignorance, we efface the most extraordinary aspects of Baudelaire’s life, namely the efforts he had to make to bring about that extra-ordinary reality, the literary microcosm as the ‘economic world reversed’. Like Manet, another great heresiarch, Baudelaire is the victim of the success the revolution he brought about: the categories of perception that we apply to his actions and his works, and which are the product of world resulting from that revolution, make them appear normal, natural, self-evident; and the most heroic breaks have become the inherited privileges of a caste, now within scope of every hack writer intent on transgression and the most mediocre celebrant of the academic cult of anti-academicism.

  

This exhortation to a genuine historical anthropology of Baudelaire can draw support from a text by Baudelaire, who wrote, in his first article on the Universal Exhibition of 1855: ‘I ask any man of good faith, provided always he done a little thinking and travelling: what would a modern Winckelman (we are full of them, nation is with them and lazy people adore them) — what, I say, would a modern Winckelman do, what would he say, at the sight of a Chinese product, a strange product, weird, contorted in shape, intense in colour, and sometimes delicate to the point of fading away? yet this object is a sample of universal beauty; but if it is to be understood, the critic, the viewer, must bring about within himself a transformation, which is something of a mystery, and, by a phenomenon of will-power acting on his imagination, he must learn by his own effort to share in the life of the society that has given birth to this unexpected bloom. Few men have received — in full — the divine grace of cosmopolitanism; but all men may acquire it to a greater or lesser degree. The most richly endowed in this respect are the lone travellers … No scholastic veil, no academic paradox, no pedagogic utopia has interfered with their vision of the complex truth. They know the admirable, the immortal, the inevitable relation between form and function. They are not ones to criticize; they contemplate, they study. If instead of a pedagogue I were now to take a man of the world, an intelligent one, and were to transport him to a distant land, I feel sure that though his surprises on disembarking would be great, though his process of acclimatization might be more or less long, more or less difficult, his sympathy would sooner or later become so keen, so penetrating, that it would create in him a whole new world of ideas, a world that will become part and parcel of him and accompany him as memories until his death. Those odd-shaped buildings that began by offending his academic eye (every people is academic in judging others, every people is barbaric when being judged) … this whole world of new harmonies will slowly enter into him, penetrate patiently.*

 

Baudelaire, the auctor par excellence, sets out clearly the principles of a reading which ought to incite the lectores that we always are to some degree to perform a reflexive analysis of the social position of the lector and make a critique of the ‘academic eye’ a preliminary to every reading, and especially to the reading of auctores.† The lector

is indeed never more exposed to structural misreading than he is dealing with the auctor auctorum, the writer who invented the writer. In this case, the effects of ignorance of the historical and distance between the literary world that Baudelaire found and the one he left us are redoubled by the effects of ignorance of the social distance between lector and auctor: the derealization, the dehistoricization and the ‘banalization’, as Max Weber says of the priestly treatment of prophetic charisma, that are performed by the routine, scheduled repetition of scholastic commentary have the effect of making bearable what would be unbearable, of gaining universal acceptance for what would be unacceptable, at least for some people.

By way of a practical illustration of what the effect of ‘resurrection’ (the Kabyles say that ‘to cite is to resuscitate’) produced by a real historicization might be, I would like to offer a somewhat particular way of reading a text of Baudelaire‘s taken from a commentary on Promethie dilivre by Senneville (the pseudonym of Louis Menard): ‘This is philosophical poetry. – What is philosophical poetry? – What is M. Edgar Quinet? — A philosopher? — Er, er! — A poet? — Oh! Oh!,‡ To reactivate the quite extraordinary violence of this text, one only has to transpose it to the present (as in exercises in old grammar books where one had to put a sentence ‘into the present’), with the aid of an intuition of the homologies: ‘This is philosophical poetry. — What is philosophical poetry? – What is Mr X (enter here the name of a present-day poet-philosopher) or Mr Y (a contemporary philosopher-poet or philosopher-journalist)? — A philosopher? — Er, er! — A poet? — Oh! Oh!’ The effect of ‘debanalization’ is striking; so much so that I could not cite the names of contemporary writers that spring to mind without appearing somewhat scandalous, or indecent. Thus, the actualization — in the sense of making present, actual- performed by structural historicization is a genuine reactivation. It helps to give the text and its author a form of transhistoricity which, in contrast to the derealization associated with eternization by academic commentary, has the effect of making them active and effective, and available, when the case arises, for new applications, especially thoseperformed by the auctor, who is capable of reviving in practice a practical modus operandi, in order to produce an opus operatum without precedent.

 

But how does such a reading differ from the wild projection, based on vague supposed analogies, to which the lector so often surrenders (especially when he wants to play the auctor by conceiving and experiencing his reading as a second ‘creation’)? The effort to put oneself in the place of the author is only valid if one has acquired the means of constructing that place as such, as a position, a point (the basis of a point of view) in a social space that is nothing other than the literary field within which the author is situated. Then, ‘the critic, the viewer’ (as Baudelaire himself puts it) is able to ‘bring about within himself a transformation, which is something of a mystery’, and, ‘by a phenomenon of will-power acting on his imagination’, can learn to ‘share in the life of the society that has given birth to this unexpected bloom’. And he may even, as I have in my exercise of socio-logical grammar, expose a strategy that can be observed in different states of the fields of cultural production, the strategy of seeking to combine the properties and profits associated with membership of two different

fields (the philosophical field and the literary field, or the philosophical field and the journalistic field; etc.) without combining the competences and accepting the corresponding costs (which is what Baudelaire’s ‘Er, er!’ and ‘Oh! Oh!’ say in their terribly economic way).

 

Thus, to be able really to understand Baudelaire’s work, and to participate actively, without the true or false modesty of the lector, in the ‘creative’ activity, one has to acquire the means of ‘sharing in the life of the society that has given birth’ to this unprecedented oeuvre, in other words the literary universe in which and against which the ‘creative project’ took shape, and, more precisely, the space of artistic (poetic) possibilities objectively offered by the field at the moment when the author was working to define his artistic intention. This is an inaugural moment, when one has more chance of grasping the historical principles of the genesis of the oeuvre, which, once its difference is invented and affirmed, will develop in accordance with its

internal logic, which is more independent of the circumstances.

Read the whole piece here. 
 

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* C. Baudelaire, ‘The Universal Exhibition of 1855: the Fine Arts’, in Selected Writings on Art and Artists, tr. P. E. Charvet (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972), pp. 115-17.

 

† One would no doubt find many occurrences of this critique of the professorial in the same text on the Universal Exhibition, for example, there is a condemnation of the ‘pedantry’ and ‘erudition’ (ibid., p. 119) of the ‘sworn professors’ that had already been seen in the sur Poe‘: ‘But the point these pundits professeurs have not thought of is that in the life process, some complication, some combination of circumstances, may arise which their schoolboy wisdom has not reckoned with’ (‘Further notes on EdgarPoe‘, in Selected Writings on Art and Artists, p. 189). And we know that Baudelaire often condemned didacticism both in painting and in art criticism (cf. for example ‘The Salon of 1859’, in ibid., p. 318).

‡ C. Baudelaire, Œuvres completes, ed. C. Pichais (Paris: Gallimard, 1985), vol. 2,

p.9.

 

henry miller on young writers writing

What few young writers realize, it seems to me, is that they must find—create, invent!—the way to reach their readers.

It isn’t enough to write a good book, a beautiful book, or even a better book than most. One has to establish, or re-establish, a unity which has been broken and which is felt just as keenly by the reader, who is a potential artist, as by the writer, who believes himself to be an artist . . . . The writer who wants to communicate with his fellow-man, and thereby establish communion with him, has only to speak with sincerity and directness. He has not to think about literary standards—he will make them as he goes along—he has not to think about trends, vogues, markets, acceptable or unacceptable ideas: he has only to deliver himself, naked and vulnerable. All that constricts and restricts him, to use the language of not-ness, his fellow-reader, even though he may not be an artist, feels with equal despair and bewilderment. The world presses down on all alike. Men are not suffering from the lack of good literature, good art, good theatre, good music, but from that which has made it impossible for these to manifest. In short, they are suffering from the silent, shameful conspiracy (the more shameful since it is unacknowledged) which has bound them together as enemies of art and artists. They are suffering from the fact that art is not the primary, moving force in their lives. They are suffering from the act, repeated daily, of keeping up the pretense that they can go their way, lead their lives, without art. They never dream—or they behave as if they never realize—that the reason why they feel sterile, frustrated and joyless is because art (and with it the artist) has been ruled out of their lives. For every artist who has been assassinated thus (unwittingly?) thousands of ordinary citizens, who might have known a normal joyous life, are condemned to lead the purgatorial existence of neurotics, psychotics, schizophrenics. No, the man who is about to blow his top does not have to fix his eye on the Iliad, the Divine Comedy, or any other great model; he has only to give us, in his own language, the saga of his woes and tribulations, the saga of his non-existentialism . . .

Such is the picture which doesn’t always come clear through the televistic screen. The negative, in other words, from which all that is positive, good and lasting will eventually come through. Easy to recognize because no matter where your parachute lands you it’s always the same: the everyday life. 

—Henry Miller, Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch

  

 

a winter weather report from neglected poet coventry patmore

Coventry Patmore is now considered one of the major poets of the nineteenth century, in spite of the small bulk of his verse. He was born at Woodford, Essex, 23 July, 1823 and died at Lymington, 26 Nov., 1896. His "Unknown Eros" was hardly opened by the public, and is only now beginning to take its place as a great English classic; it is full not only of passages but of entire poems in which exalted thought is expressed in poetry of the richest and most dignified melody. Spirituality informs his inspiration; the poetry is glowing and alive. The magnificent piece in praise of winter is in its manner unsurpassed in English poetry. Patmore is today one of the least known, but best-regarded Victorian poets. Patmore was caricatured as the unpleasant poet Carleon Anthony in Joseph Conrad‘s novel Chance (1913).

—culled from Wikipedia and The Catholic Encylcopedia.

 

 

"Winter"

from The Unknown Eros

by Coventry Patmore

  I, singularly moved
To love the lovely that are not beloved,
Of all the Seasons, most
Love Winter, and to trace
The sense of the Trophonian pallor on her face.
It is not death, but plenitude of peace;
And the dim cloud that does the world enfold
Hath less the characters of dark and cold
Than warmth and light asleep,
And correspondent breathing seems to keep
With the infant harvest, breathing soft below
Its eider coverlet of snow.
Nor is in field or garden anything
But, duly look’d into, contains serene
The substance of things hoped for, in the Spring,
And evidence of Summer not yet seen.
On every chance-mild day
That visits the moist shaw,
The honeysuckle, ‘sdaining to be crost
In urgence of sweet life by sleet or frost,
‘Voids the time’s law
With still increase
Of leaflet new, and little, wandering spray;
Often, in sheltering brakes,
As one from rest disturb’d in the first hour,
Primrose or violet bewilder’d wakes,
And deems ’tis time to flower;
Though not a whisper of her voice he hear,
The buried bulb does know
The signals of the year,
And hails far Summer with his lifted spear.
The gorse-field dark, by sudden, gold caprice,
Turns, here and there, into a Jason’s fleece;
Lilies, that soon in Autumn slipp’d their gowns of green,
And vanish’d into earth,
And came again, ere Autumn died, to birth,
Stand full-array’d, amidst the wavering shower,
And perfect for the Summer, less the flower;
In nook of pale or crevice of crude bark,
Thou canst not miss,
If close thou spy, to mark
The ghostly chrysalis,
That, if thou touch it, stirs in its dream dark;
And the flush’d Robin, in the evenings hoar,
Does of Love’s Day, as if he saw it, sing;
But sweeter yet than dream or song of Summer or Spring
Are Winter’s sometime smiles, that seem to well
From infancy ineffable;
Her wandering, languorous gaze,
So unfamiliar, so without amaze,
On the elemental, chill adversity,
The uncomprehended rudeness; and her sigh
And solemn, gathering tear,
And look of exile from some great repose, the sphere
Of ether, moved by ether only, or
By something still more tranquil.

 

richard yates shows how the child is father to the man

Richard Yates, "A Glutton For Punishment"

For a littlewhile when Walter Henderson was nine years old he thought falling dead was the very zenith of romance, and so did a number of his friends. Having found that the only truly rewarding part of any cops-and-robbers game was the moment when you pretended to be shot, clutched your heart, dropped your pistol and crumpled to the earth, they soon dispensed with the rest of it — the tiresome business of choosing up sides and sneaking around — and refined the game to its essence. It became a matter of individual performance, almost an art. One of them at a time would run dramatically along the crest of a hill, and at a given point the ambush would occur: a simultaneous jerking of aimed toy pistols and a chorus of those staccato throaty sounds — a kind of hoarse-whispered “Pk-k-ew! Pk-k-ew!” with which little boys simulate the noise of gunfire. Then the performer would stop, turn, stand poised for a moment in graceful agony, pitch over and fall down the hill in a whirl of arms and legs and a splendid cloud of dust, and finally sprawl flat at the bottom, a rumpled corpse. When he got up and brushed off his clothes, the others would criticize his form (”Pretty good,” or “Too stiff,” or “Didn’t look natural”), and then it would be the next player’s turn. That was all there was to the game, but Walter Henderson loved it. He was a slight, poorly coordinated boy, and this was the only thing even faintly like a sport at which he excelled. Nobody could match the abandon with which he flung his limp body down the hill, and he revelled in the small acclaim it won him. Eventually the others grew bored with the game, after some older boys had laughed at them. Walter turned reluctantly to more wholesome forms of play, and soon he had forgotten about it.

But he had occasion to remember it, vividly, one May afternoon nearly twenty-five years later in a Lexington Avenue office building, while he sat at his desk pretending to work and waiting to be fired. He had become a sober, keen-looking young man now, with clothes that showed the influence of an Eastern university and neat brown hair that was just beginning to thin out on top. Years of good health had made him less slight, and though he still had trouble with his coordination it showed up mainly in minor things nowadays, like an inability to coordinate his hat, his wallet, his theater tickets and his change without making his wife stop and wait for him, or a tendency to push heavily against doors marked "Pull." He looked, at any rate, the picture of sanity and competence as he sat there in the office. No one could have told that the cool sweat of anxiety was sliding under his shirt, or that the fingers of his left hand, concealed in his pocket, were slowly grinding and tearing a book of matches into a moist cardboard pulp. He had seen it coming for weeks, and this morning, from the minute he got off the elevator, he had sensed that this was the day it would happen. When several of his superiors said, "Morning, Walt," he had seen the faintest suggestion of concern behind their smiles; then once this afternoon, glancing out over the gate of the cubicle where he worked, he’d happened to catch the eye of George Crowell, the department manager, who was hesitating in the door of his private office with some papers in his hand. Crowell turned away quickly, but Walter knew he had been watching him, troubled but determined. In a matter of minutes, he felt sure, Crowell would call him in and break the news — with difficulty, of course, since Crowell was the kind of boss who took pride in being a regular guy. There was nothing to do now but let the thing happen and try to take it as gracefully as possible.

 

That was when the childhood memory began to prey on his mind, for it suddenly struck him — and the force of it sent his thumbnail biting deep into the secret matchbook — that letting things happen and taking them gracefully had been, in a way, the pattern of his life. There was certainly no denying that the role of good loser had always held an inordinate appeal for him. All through adolescence he had specialized in it, gamely losing fights with stronger boys, playing football badly in the secret hope of being injured and carried dramatically off the field ("You got to hand it to old Henderson for one thing, anyway," the high-school coach had said with a chuckle, "he’s a real little glutton for punishment"). College had offered a wider scope to his talent — there were exams to be flunked and elections to be lost — and later the Air Force had made it possible for him to wash out, honorably, as a Bight cadet. And now, inevitably, it seemed, he was running true to form once more. The several jobs he’d held before this had been the beginner’s kind at which it isn’t easy to fail; when the opportunity for this one first arose it had been, in Crowell’s phrase, "a real challenge."

 

"Good," Walter had said. "That’s what I’m looking for." When he related that part of the conversation to his wife she had said, "Oh, wonderful!" and they’d moved to an expensive apartment in the East Sixties on the strength of it. And lately, when he started coming home with a beaten look and announcing darkly that he doubted if he could hold on much longer, she would enjoin the children not to bother him ("Daddy’s very tired tonight"), bring him a drink and soothe him with careful, wifely reassurance, doing her best to conceal her fear, never guessing, or at least never showing, that she was dealing with a chronic, compulsive failure, a strange little boy in love with the attitudes of collapse. And the amazing himself had never looked at it that way before.

 

best new york city novels?

What? No Daniel Fuchs? Where is Mr. Sammler’s Planet by Saul Bellow? Why Paul Auster and not Hubert Selby Jr.’s Last Exit To Brooklyn?  Joesph O’Neill’s Netherlands and much of Louis Auchincloss should be here, as well as Capote’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s.

Best novels about New York City

 

1.  Desperate Characters, by Paula Fox
Fierce, strange and savagely insightful, this 1970 classic looks at Brooklyn gentrification and charts a couple’s romantic downfall.

 2.  The Fortress of Solitude, by Jonathan Lethem
Comics and music infuse this whip-smart, deeply felt and slightly autobiographical meditation on youth, race and Boerum Hill. 

 3.  American Psycho, by Bret Easton Ellis
Long maligned and misunderstood, this satire of Wall Street excess is at once disgusting, hilarious and totally relevant to our financially crippled era. 

 4.  New York Trilogy, by Paul Auster
Gotham emerges with a patina of pure quirkiness in Auster’s triptych of pomo noir, which still stands out as his best work. 

 5.  No Lease on Life, by Lynne Tillman
A hilariously jaded East Village woman works as a proofreader by day, cracks jokes and rants about her neighborhood at night.

 6.  Invisible Man, by Ralph Ellison
Ellison’s hero might live in a hovel, but his jazz-infused visions of New York are vibrant and unforgettable. 

 7. House of Mirth, by Edith Wharton
Sure, some of it takes place on a country estate, but Wharton’s scenes in Grand Central and later in Lily Bart’s dilapidated apartment rank as the purest visions of the late-19th-century city’s interiors. 

 8. Underworld, by Don DeLillo
This far-reaching novel’s descriptions of postwar New York are executed with a combination of stunning detail and concealed dread. 

 9. Washington Square, by Henry James
Makes you happy that these days, most people can date whomever they choose.

—from Time Out New York, March 25, 2009

scenes from the writing life: martin amis on meeting his fans

"My queue is always full of, you know, wild-eyed sleazebags . . ." 

AMIS: Judging by everything from reviews to letters I receive, I find that people take my writing rather personally. It’s interesting when you’re doing signing sessions with other writers and you look at the queues at each table and you can see definite human types gathering there.

INTERVIEWER: Which type is in your queue?

AMIS: Well, I did one with Roald Dahl and quite predictable human divisions were observable. For him, a lot of children, a lot of parents of children. With Julian Barnes, his queue seemed to be peopled by rather comfortable, professional types. My queue is always full of, you know, wild-eyed sleazebags and people who stare at me very intensely, as if I have some particular message for them. As if I must know that they’ve been reading me, that this dyad or symbiosis of reader and writer has been so intense that I must somehow know about it.

—from The Paris Review, Issue 146, Spring 1998. Interviewed by Francesca Riviere.

short fiction from richard yates

 

Richard Yates, "Fun with a Stranger"

 

All that summer the children who were due to start third grade under Miss Snell had been warned about her. "Boy, you’re gonna get it," the older children would say, distorting their faces with a wicked pleasure. "You’re really gonna get it. Mrs. Cleary‘s all right" (Mrs. Cleary taught the other, luck­ier half of third grade) "—she‘s fine, but boy, that Snell—you better watch out." So it happened that the morale of Miss Snell’s class was low even before school opened in September, and she did little in the first few weeks to improve it.

 

She was probably sixty, a big rawboned woman with a man’s face, and her clothes, if not her very pores, seemed always to exude that dry essence of pencil shavings and chalk dust that is the smell of school. She was strict and humorless, preoccupied with rooting out the things she held intolerable: mumbling, slumping, daydreaming, frequent trips to the bathroom, and, the worst of all, "coming to school without proper supplies." Her small eyes were sharp, and when somebody sent out a stealthy alarm of whispers and nudges to try to borrow a pencil from somebody else, it almost never worked. "What’s the trouble back there?" she would demand. "I mean you, John Gerhardt." And John Gerhardt—or Howard White or whoever it hap­pened to be—caught in the middle of a whisper, could only turn red and say, "Nothing."

 

"Don’t mumble. Is it a pencil? Have you come to school without a pencil again? Stand up when you’re spoken to."

 

And there would follow a long lecture on Proper Supplies that ended only after the offender had come forward to receive a pencil from the small hoard on her desk, had been made to say, "Thank you, Miss Snell," and to repeat, until he said it loud enough for everyone to hear, a promise that he wouldn‘t chew it or break its point.

 

With erasers it was even worse because they were more often in short supply, owing to a general tendency to chew them off the ends of pencils. Miss Snell kept a big, shapeless old eraser on her desk, and she seemed very proud of it. "This is my eraser," she would say, shaking it at the class. "I‘ve had this eraser for five years. Five years." (And this was not hard to believe, for the eraser looked as old and gray and worn-down as the hand that brandished it.) "I’ve never played with it because it‘s not a toy. I‘ve never chewed it because it’s not good to eat. And I‘ve never lost it because I‘m not foolish and I‘m not careless. I need this eraser for my work and I’ve taken good care of it. Now, why can‘t you do the same with your erasers? I don’t know what‘s the matter with this class. I’ve never had a class that was so foolish and so careless and so childish about its supplies."

 

She never seemed to lose her temper, but it would almost have been better if she did, for it was the flat, dry, passionless redundance of her scolding that got everybody down. When Miss Snell singled someone out for a special upbraiding it was an ordeal by talk. She would come up to within a foot of her victim‘s face, her eyes would stare unblinking into his, and the wrinkled gray flesh of her mouth would labor to pronounce his guilt, grimly and deliberately, until all the color faded from the day. She seemed tohave no favorites; once she even picked on Alice Johnson, who always had plenty of supplies and did nearly everything right. Alice was mumbling while reading aloud, and when she continued to mumble after several warn­ings Miss Snell went over and took her book away and lectured her for several minutes running. Alice looked stunned at first; then her eyes filled up, her mouth twitched into terrible shapes, and she gave in to the ultimate humiliation of cry­ing in class.

 

It was not uncommon to cry in Miss Snell’s class, even among the boys. And ironically, it always seemed to be during the lull after one of these scenes—when the only sound in the room was somebody’s slow, half-stifled sobbing, and the rest of the class stared straight ahead in an agony of embarrassment­ that the noise of group laughter would float in from Mrs. Cleary’s class across the hall.

 

Still, they could not hate Miss Snell, for children’s villains must be all black, and there was no denying that Miss Snell was sometimes nice in an awkward, groping way of her own. "When we learn a new word it’s like making a friend," she said once. "And we all like to make friends, don‘t we? Now, for instance, when school began this year you were all strangers to me, but I wanted very much to learn your names and remember your faces, and so I made the effort. It was confusing at first, but before long I’d made friends with all of you. And later on we‘ll have some good times together—oh, perhaps a little party at Christmastime, or something like that—and then I know I’d be very sorry if I hadn‘t made that effort, because you can’t very well have fun with a stranger, can you?" She gave them a comely, shy smile. "And that’s just the way it is with words."

 

When she said something like that it was more embarrassing than anything else, but it did leave the children with a certain vague sense of responsibility toward her, and often prompted them into a loyal reticence when children from other classes demanded to know how bad she really was. "Well, not too bad," they would say uncomfortably, and try to change the sub­ject. 
 

deleuze on crime fiction: the brilliance of james gunn’s deadlier than the male

Gilles Deleuze, The Philosophy of Crime Novels¹

La Série Noire is celebrating a momentous occasion—its release of #1000. The coherence, the idea of this collection owes everything to its editor. Of course everyone knew something about cops, criminals, and their relationship, even if it was only from reading the papers, or the knowledge of special reports. But literature is like consciousness, it always lags behind. These things had not yet found their contemporary literary expression, or they hadn’t attained the status of common-place in literature. The credit for closing this gap at a particularly favorable moment goes to Marcel Duhamel.² Malraux had this insight to offer in his preface to the translation of Sanctuary: "Faulkner knows very well that detectives don’t exist; that police power stems neither from psychology nor from clarity of vision, but from informants; and that it’s not Moustachu or Tapinois, the modest thinkers of the Quai des Orfevres, who bring about the apprehension of the murderer on the loose, but rank-and-file cops"…. La Série Noire was above all an adaptation of Sanctuary for a mass market (look at Chase’s No Orchids for Miss Blandish), and a generalization of Malraux’s preface.

In the old conception of the detective novel, we would be shown a genius detective devoting the whole power of his mind to the search and discovery of the truth. The idea of truth in the classic detective novel was totally philosophical, that is, it was the product of the effort and the operations of the mind. So it is that police investigation modeled itself on philosophical inquiry, and conversely, gave to philosophy an unusual object to elucidate: crime.

 

There were two schools of truth: 1) the French school (Descartes), where truth is a question of some fundamental intellectual intuition, from which the rest is rigorously deduced; and 2) the English school (Hobbes), according to which truth is always induced from something else, interpreted from sensory indices. In a word, deduction and induction. The detective novel reproduced this duality, though in a movement which was proper to the literary genre, and has produced famous examples of each. The English school: Conan Doyle gave us Sherlock Holmes, the masterful interpreter of signs, the inductive genius. The French school: Gaboriau gave us Tabaret and Lecoq; and Gaston Leroux, Rouletabille, who with "a circle between the two lobes of his forehead," is always invoking "the right track of reason" and explicitly opposing his theory of certainty to the inductive method, the Anglo-Saxon theory of signs.

 

The criminal side of the affair can also be quite interesting. By a metaphysical law of reflection, the cop is no more extraordinary than the criminal—he, too, professes allegiance to justice and truth and the powers of deduction and induction. And so you have the possibility of two series of novels: the hero of the first is the detective, and the hero of the second is the criminal. With Rouletabille and Cheri-Bibi, Leroux brought each series to its perfection. But never the twain shall meet: they are the motors for two different series (they could never meet without one of them looking ridiculous; cf Leblanc’s attempt to put Arsene Lupin together with Sherlock Holmes).’ Rouletabille and Cheri-Bibi: Each is the double of the other, they have the same destiny, the same pain, the same quest for the truth. This is the destiny and quest of Oedipus (Rouletabille is destined to kill his father; Cheri-Bibi attends a performance of Oedipus and shouts: "He’s just like me!"). After philosophy, Greek tragedy.

 

Still we mustn’t be too surprised that the crime novel so faithfully reproduces Greek tragedy, since Oedipus is always called on to indicate any such coincidence. While it is the only Greek tragedy that already has this detective structure, we should marvel that Sophocles’s Oedipus is a detective, and not that the detective novel has remained Oedipal. We should give credit where credit is due: to Leroux, a phenomenal novelist in French literature, who had a genius for striking phrases: "not the hands, not the hands," "the ugliest of men," "Fatal-itas," "men who open doors and men who shut traps," "a circle between two lobes," etc.

 

But the birth of La Série Noire has been the death of the detective novel, properly speaking. To be sure, the great majority of novels in the collection have been content to change the detective’s way of doing things (he drinks, he’s in love, he’s restless) but keep the same structure: the surprise ending that brings all the characters together for the final explanation that fingers one of them as the guilty party. Nothing new there.

 

What the new literary use and exploitation of cops and criminals taught us is that police activity has nothing to do with a metaphysical or scientific search for the truth. Police work no more resembles scientific inquiry than a telephone call from an informant, inter-police relations, or mechanisms of torture resemble metaphysics. As a general rule, there are two distinct cases: 1) the professional murder, where the police know immediately more or less who is responsible; and 2) the sexual murder, where the guilty party could be anyone. But in either case the problem is not framed in terms of truth. It is rather an astonishing compensation of error. The suspect, known to the cops but never charged, is either nabbed in some other domain than his usual sphere of criminal activity (whence the American schema of the untouchable gangster, who is arrested and deported for tax fraud); or he is provoked, forced to show himself, as they lie in wait for him.

 

With La Série Noire, we’ve become accustomed to the sort of cop who dives right in, come what may, regardless of the errors he may commit, but confident that something will emerge. At the other extreme, we’ve been allowed to watch the meticulous preparation of a sting operation, and the domino effect of little errors that loom ever larger as the moment of reckoning approaches (it’s in this sense that La Série Noire influenced cinema). The totally innocent reader is shocked in the end by so many errors committed on both sides. Even when the cops themselves are hatching a nasty plot, they make so many blunders, they defy belief.

 

This is because the truth is in no way the ambient element of the investigation: not for a moment does one believe that this compensation of errors aims for the discovery of the truth as its final objective. On the contrary, this compensation has its own dimension, its own sufficiency, a kind of equilibrium or the reestablishment of it, a process of restitution that allows a society, at the limits of cynicism, to hide what it wants to hide, reveal what it wants to reveal, deny all evidence, and champion the improbable. The killer still at large may be killed for his own errors, and the police may have to sacrifice one of their own for still other errors, and so it is that these compensations have no other object than to perpetuate an equilibrium that represents a society in its entirety at the heights of its power of falsehood.

 

This same process of restitution, equilibrium or compensation also appears in Greek tragedy (Aeschylus, for example). The greatest novel of this kind, and the most admirable in every respect, is not part of La Série Noire: it’s Robbe-Grillet’s Les Gommes, which develops an incredible compensation of errors whose keynotes are an Aeschylean equilibrium and an Oedipal quest.

 

From a literary point of view, La Série Noire made the power of falsehood the primary detective element. And this entails another consequence: clearly, the relation between cop and criminal is no longer one of metaphysical reflection. The interpenetration is real, and the complicity deep and compensatory. Fair’s fair, quid pro quo, they exchange favors and no less frequently betrayals on the one side and the other. We are always led back to the great trinity of falsehood: informant-corruption-torture. But it goes without saying that the cops do not of their own accord initiate this disquieting complicity. The metaphysical reflection of the old detective novel has given way to a mirroring of the other. A society indeed reflects itself to itself in its police and its criminals, even while it protects itself from them by means of a fundamental deep complicity between them.

 

We know that a capitalist society more willingly pardons rape, murder, or kidnapping than a bounced check, which is its only theological crime, the crime against spirit. We know very well that important political dealings entail any number of scandals and real crimes; conversely, we know that crime is organized in business-like fashion, with structures as precise as a board of directors or managers. La Série Noire introduced us to a politics-crime combo that, despite the evidence of History past and present, had not been given a contemporary literary expression.

 

The Kefauver report,⁴ and especially the book by Turkus, Societe anonyme pour assassinats, were the source of inspiration for many of the texts in La Série Noire. Many writers did little more than plagiarize them, or rather they turned them into popular novels. Whether it’s the Trujillo regime, or Battista, or Hitler, or Franco—what will be next when everyone is talking about Ben Barka—that begets a hybrid that is properly Série Noire; whether it’s Asturias writing a novel of genius: M. le President,⁵ or whether it’s people sitting around trying to figure out the secret of this unity of the grotesque and the terrifying, the terrible and the clownish, which binds together political power, economic power, crime and police activity—it’s all already in Suetonius, Shakespeare, Jarry, Asturias: La Série Noire has recycled it all. Have we really made any progress in understanding this hybrid of the grotesque and terrifying which, under the right circumstances, could determine the fate of us all?

 

So it is that La Série Noire has transformed our imaginings, our evaluations of the police. It was high time. Was it good for us to participate as "active readers" in the old detective novel, and thereby lose our grip on reality and thus our power of indignation? Indignation wells up in us because of reality, or because of masterful works of art. La Série Noire indeed seems to have pastiched every great novelist: imitation Faulkner, but also imitation Steinbeck, imitation Caldwell, imitation Asturias. And it followed the trends: first American, then it rediscovered French crime.

 

True, La Série Noire is full of stereotypes: the puerile presentation of sexuality, or what about the eyes of the killers (only Chase managed to lend a particular cold life to his killers, who are headstrong and non-conformist). But its greatness belongs to Duhamel’s idea, which remains the driving force behind recent releases: a reorganization of the vision of the world that every honest person has concerning cops and criminals.

 

Clearly, a new realism is insufficient to make good literature. In bad literature, the real as such is the object of stereotypes, puerile notions, and cheap fantasies, worse than any imaginative imbecile could dream up. But more profound than either the real or the imaginary is parody. La Série Noire may have suffered from an over-abundant production, but it has kept a unity, a tendency, which periodically found expression in a beautiful work (the contemporary success of James Bond, who was never integrated into La Série Noire, seems to represent a serious literary regression, though compensated for by the cinema, a return to a rosy conception of the secret agent).

 

The most beautiful works of La Série Noire are those in which the real finds its proper parody, such that in its turn the parody shows us directions in the real which we would not have found otherwise. These are some of the great works of parody, though in different modes: Chase’s Miss Shumway Waves a Wand; Williams’s The Diamond Bikini; or Hime’s negro novels, which always have extraordinary moments. Parody is a category that goes beyond real and imaginary. And let’s not forget #50: James Gunn’s Deadlier than the Male.

 

The trend in those days was American: it was said that certain novelists were writing under American pseudonyms. Deadlier than the Male is a marvelous work: the power of falsehood at its height, an old woman pursuing an assassin by smell, a murder attempt in the dunes—what a parody, you would have to read it—or reread it—to believe it. Who is James Gunn anyway? Only a single work in La Série Noire appeared under his name. So now that La Série Noire is celebrating the release of #1000, and is re-releasing many older works, and as a tribute to Marcel Duhamel, I humbly request the re-release of my personal favorite: #50.

 

Notes:

 

1. Arts et Loisirs, no. 18, 26 janvier-1 fevrier, 1966.

2. In 1945, the novelist Marcel Duhamel created "La Série Noire" at Gallimard; it is a series dedicated to the crime novel, which he headed till 1977.

3. Maurice Leblanc, Arsene Lupin contre Sherlock Holmes, 1908, reedited by Livre de Poche.

4. In 1952, a democratic senator issued a report on organized crime in America.

5. M. le President (Paris: Flammarion, 1987).

 

—from Gilles Deleuze, Desert Islands and Other Texts, 1953-1974. Edited by David Lapoujade. Translated by Michael Taormina. Semiotext(e) Foreign Agents Series (2004), pp 81–85.

 

lines from the pulps: james gunn’s deadlier than the male

"She had a full-breasted figure in the Biblical style, the kind that suggests camels and water-jars."

 

There’s sex-talk!

Mrs. Krantz perked up. "About the new one?" she asked avidly.

Mrs. Pollicker nodded. "He smells," she said. "All the time. Like an animal."

Mrs. Krantz opened her mouth with a wet smack of ecstasy. "Oh, my, ain’t you human!”

Mrs. Pollicker stood up straight. "I rather think it is primitive," she said, pleased.

Plus there’s violence! 

Danny took his knife out of his pocket. He had something to say and he meant to move quickly, but his reactions were slow. The red-headed man struck him full in his open mouth, so hard that he smashed his jaw and teeth, and Danny’s mind was full of flashes and darkness. His head hit against the wall, and the red-headed man hit him again. Danny fell forward with his arms around the man’s legs, and the red-headed man brought his arm up in almost an incidental gesture to the side of Danny’s head. After that Danny did not think any more at all, not just because he was unconscious, but because he was dead.

—from James Gunn, Deadlier Than The Male (1950), the source for the legendary 1947 Robert Wise film noir Born to Kill, starring Claire Trevor and Lawrence Tierney.

thoughts on the artist’s studio

"Analysis of the art system must inevitably be carried on in terms of the studio as the unique space of production and the museum as the unique space of exposition."

                    Brancusi in his studio

The Function of the Studio*

Daniel Buren

 

In October 10, Fall 1979, pp 51-58

 

translated by Thomas Repensek

 

Of all the frames, envelopes, and limits-usually not perceived and certainly never questioned-which enclose and constitute the work of art (picture frame, niche, pedestal, palace, church, gallery, museum, art history, economics, power, etc.), there is one rarely even mentioned today that remains of primary importance: the artist’s studio. Less dispensable to the artist than either the gallery or the museum, it precedes both. Moreover, as we shall see, the museum and gallery on the one hand and the studio on the other are linked to form the foundation of the same edifice and the same system. To question one while leaving the other intact accomplishes nothing. Analysisof the art system must inevitably be carried on in terms of the studio as the unique space of production and the museum as the unique space of exposition. Both must be investigated as customs, the ossifying customs of art.

 

What is the function of the studio?

 

1. It is the place where the work originates.

2. It is generally a private place, an ivory tower perhaps.

3. It is a stationary place where portable objects are produced.

 

The importance of the studio should by now be apparent; it is the first frame, the first limit, upon which all subsequent frames/limits will depend.

 

What does it look like, physically, architecturally? The studio is not just any hideaway, any room.¹ Two specific types may be distinguished:

 

1. The European type, modelled upon the Parisian studio of the turn of the century. This type is usually rather large and is characterized primarily by its high ceilings (a minimum of 4 meters). Sometimes there is a balcony, to increase the distance between viewer and work. The door allows large works to enter and to exit. Sculptor’s studios are on the ground floor, painters’ on the top floor. In the latter, the lighting is natural, usually diffused by windows oriented toward the north so as to receive the most even and subdued illumination.²

 

2. The American type,³ of more recent origin. This type is rarely built according to specification, but, located as it is in reclaimed lofts, is generally much larger than its European counterpart, not necessarily higher, but longer and wider. Wall and floor space are abundant. Natural illumination plays a negligible role, since the studio is lit by electricity both night and day if necessary. There is thus equivalence between the products of these lofts and their placement on the walls and floors of modern museums, which are also illuminated day and night by electricity.

 

This second type of studio has influenced the European studio of today, whether it be in an old country barn or an abandoned urban warehouse. In both cases, the architectural relationship of studio and museum-one inspiring the other and vice versa-is apparent.4 (We will not discuss those artists who transform part of their studios into exhibition spaces, nor those curators who conceive of the museum as a permanent studio.)

 

These are some of the studio’s architectural characteristics; let us move on to what usually happens there. A private place, the studio is presided over by the artist-resident, since only that work which he desires and allows to leave his studio will do so. Nevertheless, other operations, indispensable to the functioning of galleries and museums, occur in this private place. For example, it is here that the art critic, the exhibition organizer, or the museum director or curator may calmly choose among the works presented by the artist those to be included in this or that exhibition, this or that collection, this or that gallery. The studio is thus a convenience for the organizer: he may compose his exhibition according to his own desire (and not that of the artist, although the artist is usually perfectly content to leave well enough alone, satisfied with the prospect of an exhibition). Thus chance is minimized, since the organizer has not only selected the artist in advance, but also selects the works he desires in the studio itself. The studio is thus also a boutique where we find ready-to-wear art.

 

Before a work of art is publicly exhibited in a museum or gallery, the studio is also the place towhich critics and other specialists may be invited in the hope that their visits will release certain works from this, their purgatory, so that they may accede to a state of grace on public (museum/gallery) or private (collection) walls. Thus the studio is a place of multiple activities: production, storage, and finally, if all goes well, distribution. It is a kind of commercial depot.

 

Thus the first frame, the studio, proves to be a filter which allows the artist to select his work screened from public view, and curators and dealers to select in turn that work to be seen by others. Work produced in this way makes its passage, in order to exist, from one refuge to another. It should therefore be portable, manipulable if possible, by whoever (except the artist himself) assumes the responsibility of removing it from its place of origin to its place of promotion. A work produced in the studio must be seen, therefore, as an object subject to infinite manipulation. In order for this to occur, from the moment of its production the work must be isolated from the real world. All the same, it is in the studio and only in the studio that it is closest to its own reality, a reality from which it will continue to distance itself. It may become what even its creator had not anticipated, serving instead, as is usually the case, the greater profit of financial interests and the dominant ideology. It is therefore only in the studio that the work may be said to belong.

 

The work thus falls victim to a mortal paradox from which it cannot escape, since its purpose implies a progressive removal from its own reality, from its origin. If the work of art remains in the studio, however, it is the artist that risks death . . . from starvation.

 

The work is thus totally foreign to the world into which it is welcomed (museum, gallery, collection). This gives rise to the ever-widening gap between the work and its place (and not its placement), an abyss which, were it to become apparent, as sooner or later it must, would hurl the entire parade of art (art as we know it today and, 99% of the time, as it is made) into historical oblivion. This gap is tentatively bridged, however, by the system which makes acceptable to ourselves as public, artist, historian, and critic, the convention that establishes the museum and the gallery as inevitable neutral frames, the unique and definitive locales of art. Eternal realms for eternal art!

 

The work is made in a specific place which it cannot take into account. All the same, it is there that it was ordered, forged, and only there may it be truly said to be in place. The following contradiction becomes apparent: it is impossible by definition for a work to be seen in place; still, the place where we see it influences the work even more than the place in which it was made and from which it has been cast out. Thus when the work is in place, it does not take place (for the public), while it takes place (for the public) only when not in place, that is, in the museum.

 

Expelled from the ivory tower of its production, the work ends up in another, which, while foreign, only reinforces the sense of comfort the work acquires by taking shelter in a citadel which insures that it will survive its passage. The work thus passes-and it can only exist in this way, predestined as it is by the imprint of its place of origin-from one enclosed place/frame, the world of the artist, to another, even more closely confined: the world of art. The alignment of works on museum walls gives the impression of a cemetery: whatever they say, wherever they come from, whatever their meanings may be, this is where they all arrive in the end, where they are lost. This loss is relative, however, compared to the total oblivion of the work that never emerges from the studio!

 

Thus, the unspeakable compromise of the portable work.