Sunday, August 28, 2016

(8 & 9) Herman Melville, Bartleby (& Billy Budd)




Anarchists and left-wing daydreamers have, among other resistance-minded works of middle class prose, made Herman Melville’s Bartleby, The Scrivener: A Story of Wall-street (1856), one of their most fetishized works of literature. Bartleby is seen to be a revolutionary cocktail of passive resistance, civil disobedience and intellectual freedom.

Last week, when chatting about high, low and class, I told my colleague, curator Nora Sternfeld about the Astor Place Riot, where Melville had a way different role. The story of the Astor Place Riot is a story about class war anchored to high and low culture. Described in detail in Lawrence Levine’s Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchies in 19th century America (1988) it could be said to be uncanny from the point of view of aesthetics.

Shakespeare was only popular culture in early 19th century America, and so the first British highbrow performance was booed out (partly with the help of eggs, potatoes, apples, lemons and shoes) in New York, May 1849. The backslash of ‘cultural development’ made the cultural elite frustrated.

Aesthetically the polarization was lead by the two then leading actors of their own Shakespeare genres. Edwin Forrest’s network was the working class and the gangs of New York, drawing followers from the violent immigrant area of Five Points (the site of Martin Scorsese’s Gangs of New York). Upper class Anglophiles supported the freshly imported Briton, William Charles Macready.

As a member of the highbrow mob of New York, Melville signed a demand that highbrow theatre should get a new chance, and that the police should be defending its second coming. As things escalated a couple of days later, the demonstration of the lower class Shakespeare fans grew in the end to be an attack on the Astor Opera House in the evening of May 10, 1849. (Just imagine how football fans would act if their sport would be taken away from them and made into a creepy highbrow act.) Not only the police, but also the militia, mounted troops, light artillery and a total of 550 men defended highbrow Shakespeare against the lowbrow crowd.

22-31 rioters were killed, 48 were wounded, and 50 to 70 policemen were injured. The high version of Shakespeare had so won, and the popular one slowly faded away, not to be back before the advent of the feature movies.

Nora asked me: “but Melville… he wrote Bartleby?” I had never given it a thought, so I had to get back to the short story.

The protagonist of the story, a Wall Street lawyer, hires a new helper into his office. His name is Bartleby. Bartleby's presence is soon found out to be not just vague, but nearly surrealistically passive. Whatever he is supposed to do, he answers - not even laconically, but in a totally disinterested manner: “I would prefer not to”.

The protagonist, the man running the office tries in vain to start a constructive dialogue with his employee but nothing helps. Bartleby does not even leave the building when the lawyer moves out with the other members of the crew. In the end, Bartleby is taken out from the house by force. He dies in jail.

The story was published 7 years after the Astor Place Riot. Did Melville feel sorry for the people who's art he stole, or is his human touch here just about the solidarity and compassion between two privileged men? Or, was New York’s cultural life so bad, that he was actually just fighting for diversity when he took a side against the lower classes in the case of the Astor Place Riot? It could have been hard to predict that popular Shakespeare dried out after the victory of the highbrow interpretation.

Civil disobedience has, anyway, been too much reserved for middle class males, and one cannot say that Bartleby would be much about anything else, however idealistically you'd be reading the story.

Anyway, if we forget the political bubble surrounding the work, Bartleby is a beautiful narrative.

And Melville, should he be labeled an enemy of the people? I would prefer not to. In Moby Dick, which was published in 1851, the sailors and the poor people helping on boats might be a bit appropriated and romanticized, but still they are portrayed as human beings with dignity. The book is as great as Billy Budd, another sailor romance by Melville.





















Budd's story is way different from Bartleby's. Melville wrote on it 1888-1891.It was published posthumously 1924.

Budd is an innocent, beautiful man, who, in the era of mutinies, in 1843, happens to become an object of jealousy for an officer, who keeps constantly nagging and lying about Budd. In the end Budd, a simple man for whom talking is not the easiest form of self-expression, hits the officer, who dies. Budd gets hanged, and the whole Foucauldian story about hierarchies, unjustice and the complex ethical question of how to punish or how to think about Budd (in the end, he was under heavy pressure and with no human rights), dominates the experience of the book.

Differing from Melville's misanthropy in Moby Dick, the story of Billy Budd shows many positive, idealistic sides of the human species. Many characters in the book really strive to do the right thing, but in real life that is of course often very hard.

I got into Budd following my love affair with Claire Denis' witty and sensitive film Beau Travail (1999). Denis transfers the story to the world of the French Foreign Legion (La Légion étrangère), where it gets way more oriented towards gay erotics, post-colonialism and men's studies. The film is, though, so much more obscure, that I recommend to first read the book.

Crime, punishment, hierarchies and antagonisms - both in books and real life. Melville has never been an easy writer for me. But I cannot say that I would regret reading him.

Saturday, August 13, 2016

(7) STACY HARDY, 52 NIGGERS





“He rewrote the classical music canon. He inserted pop. He noted free improvisation. He bucked the conventions. He fucked minimalism. He reworked the rulebook: Cage’s anal atonal progressions, Glass’ linear additive processes, Reich’s phasing and block additive methods. He started the Post Minimalist revolution, New Music, Improvisation, call it whatever you like.”

I love the way small, independent, outsider and outlaw publishers rewrite the way books are produced, edited and distributed. I just read Stacy Hardy’s 52 Niggers (2007), a small edgy booklet published by Chimurenga, a South African collective, which visited Helsinki last winter. During a week-long act, a cooperation with Third Space gallery and the art journal Rab-Rab, Chimurenga ran its ‘Pan AfricanSpace Station’ in Kallio Library, and broadcasted discussions and music together with local artists, musicians and intellectuals. They left behind them journals and booklets – one of them being the pile of publications that I just borrowed from Sezgin Boynik, the editor of Rab-Rab.

The author of 52 Niggers, Stacy Hardy, is a South African theater artist, writer and journalist. This tiny literary work is a half-fictional interpretation of the life and artistic career of Julius Eastman, a US-based African-American avant-garde composer (1940-1990). Eastman made a scandalous career in experimental modern music. He used provoking names for his compositions, like Evil Nigger and Crazy Nigger, and Hardy’s book dives into his mind, the complex constellation of ethnicity, the stressful career culture of the modern music industry and the whitewashed highbrow scene of the United States. There’s a lot of monologue on music and the world in the books, a lot of anger, and a lot of historical documentation and pedagogy for those who do not know Eastman (listen to his music here).

I felt that I got punched in the face as I read this – but in a positive way. 52 Niggers works like a boxing match. It consists of short sentences, careful use of rough language – no attempts to street credibility here, it is all about minimalist efficiency – and the reader faces both slopes of anger and neurosis in a fast pace.

“A failed application to the Paris Conservatoire. The letter came in the post. One white envelope, black type. He said, “Damn them damn them damn them.” He tore it up. He let it drop. He headed out to score. (…) He kept going. He walked. He didn’t give a shit. He felt zero. He felt zip. He felt ate up. His skin buzzed. He took a left. He crunched glass underfoot. He took a right. Low door. Dark  interior. Match boxes and glass pipes. Cracker jacks on low stools. White smoke that hung in low clouds. He took a seat. He took the hit. He sucked deep. He held it in. He let go. He felt it hit. His mouth closed. His head  dropped black. His eyes rolled. And white appeared. Absolute white. White beyond all whiteness.”

Damn I like this text! I wish I’d be closer to South Africa so I could check out Hardy’s theatrical work. The booklet is small but it reminds me about something Adorno said about art in the era of culture industry. Records, films and books have to have a certain length as they are actually seen to be products. What a great deed to publish short stories on their own and to break this vicious circle.