03/07/2006
Thomas Harrison on expressionism in the year 1910
Thomas Harrison is Professor of Italian at UCLA, where he has been since 1994. He recieved his B.A. from Sarah Lawrence College and his M.Phil. and Ph.D in Comparative Literature from CUNY. Before joining the faculty of UCLA in 1994 he taught in Italian and comparative literature programs at the University of Pennsylvania, New York […]
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This is KZSU Stanford.
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Welcome to entitled opinions.
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My name is Robert Harrison
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and we're coming to your live from the Stanford campus.
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We had great response to the Jesus show.
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We did a few weeks back and some angry responses too.
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Many of you said you learned things about the historical Jesus you never knew before,
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including the fact that he had several brothers.
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In fact, Jesus' brother James was the head of the Christian church in Jerusalem after Jesus' death.
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St. Paul didn't like him very much, but that's not the point.
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The point is that brothers punctuate cultural history.
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We have the brothers Grimm, the Marx brothers, the Schlegel brothers,
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the Konguud brothers, and it so happens that I have a brother too.
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Thomas Harrison, who like me is a professor of literature,
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who like me has written a few books and who joins us today on KZSU.
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So let's hear it for brothers.
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I'll introduce you to my brother Tom in a moment,
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but first I would like to turn to the Medusa head of reality,
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as we do from time to time on this program,
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and say a word about the calamities of 20th century history.
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In my view, most of those calamities have their source in the biggest disaster
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to have ever befallen the West.
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I mean the First World War, in which millions upon millions of men
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in the bloom of their youth perished in the surreal trenches of Europe.
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Those trenches were nothing but mass graves, and the soldiers who were lucky enough
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to get out of them alive left their souls behind in that underworld.
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An underworld more ghastly than any Hades, or in fair no imagine by poets.
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I would take the ninth circle of Dante's hell over the trenches of the Great War any day.
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What was this war all about? What was it thought over?
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Nothing. Essentially nothing.
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If the leaders of Europe had gotten together for a few days of rational dialogue,
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the whole thing could have been prevented.
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But instead those leaders decided to lose their minds all at once,
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and all at the same time.
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They went insane, and for four years Western civilization committed collective suicide.
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Their died a myriad wrote Ezra Pound and the best among them for an old bitch gone in the teeth
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for a botched civilization.
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I don't know if Western civilization was botched or gone in the teeth before the First World War.
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There's no doubt that it was botched after the war, and because of that war.
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The causes of the First World War were completely insignificant,
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yet its consequences were completely catastrophic.
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The war not only decimated the male population of Europe,
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it made possible the Bolshevik Revolution, which in turn helped fuel the fires of fascism.
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And before you know it you had another World War and a Holocaust, followed by a cold war,
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and mouths and enslavement of China, and so on and so forth.
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If the leaders could have just gotten together like reasonable adults for a few days in the summer of 1914,
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we would not, with wild faces, have marched into that remorseless night,
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or buddle and ree, like blind men battering blind men in a blind ditch.
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Instead here we are today still living out the aftermath of that fateful war.
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That's more like it, Harrison, a fateful war.
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It's naive to think that anything could have forced all the war that the nations of Europe had been building up to for years.
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The best evidence that it was faded, that it had to take place,
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is the fact that the horrors of the Great War had already darkened the European soul before they played themselves out on European soil.
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The realm of spirit and the realm of history, all those separate, are correlative to one another.
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Poets know this better than anyone, that history is the spoken word of an otherwise silent thought of the soul.
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Nothing essential happens in history unless it's first expounded in the realm of spirit.
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This was especially so in the case of the Great War.
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At least that is the crux of a book my brother Thomas Harrison wrote a few years back entitled,
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1910, The Emancipation of Disenance.
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This book looks at what took place in the arts in Europe, in and around the year 1910,
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one of the most remarkable years in the history of European modernism.
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There's no way one can read this book and not conclude that the nihilism of the First World War was precedged, summarized, and mourned in the painting,
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music, poetry, and thought, which are great many artists and thinkers produced in the year 1910.
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I'm putting it too crudely no doubt, and I'll let my brother revise or nuance the thesis for himself.
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As I mentioned, he's with me in the studios of KZSU.
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He's here in the Bay Area on a visit from Los Angeles,
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where he's been a professor of Italian literature at UCLA for the past ten years or so.
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Tom, welcome to the program.
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That's my pleasure.
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So Tom, you may or may not subscribe to the way I characterize things in my opening remarks,
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but before we start probing the main thesis of your book 1910,
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why don't we start with your decision to write a book about a single year?
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What is it about the year 1910 that's so special?
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Why do you see it as a year that emancipated dissonance as you put it in the subtitle of your book?
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And who are the main protagonists of this so-called "inmancipation of dissonance"?
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Robert, as you know, their books written about all sorts of different years, and
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I chose 1910 once I realized that something was going on at that particular moment that it did indeed
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pressage World War I.
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Feelings of enormous spiritual malays, political malays,
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Halley's comet passed over in May of 1910 and provoked all sorts of newspaper articles,
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announcing the end of the world, the end of the world that they've been expecting since the end of the century,
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the previous century as often happens when a century turns to another.
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I discovered that Freud announced the Eruppus Complex in 1910,
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one of his disciples, a psychoanalyst, the Sabina Schpiel-Rine,
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presented the radical thesis that love is tied to destruction and the death instinct of the thesis that Freud himself took over later.
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Kandinsky announced the beginning of abstract art, Arnold Schoenberg, from whom the title comes,
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the emancipation of dissonance wrote the theory of harmony,
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in which he carefully set forth the idea that we had to restructure the language of music
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and no longer use those eight tones but liberate the notes on the other notes on the scale
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that people shied away from except sometimes to create tension.
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So that's the title of emancipation of dissonance.
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People were obsessed with madness, the decline of the West, the degeneration of Europe,
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all this without knowing exactly why,
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but there was an extraordinary convergence of these concerns in music, painting, poetry,
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philosophy, psychology, and it seemed to have its best exposition in that year 1910.
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Yeah, it's remarkable how many actual books or treatises were published in 1910.
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You mentioned Schoenberg, the theory of harmony.
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Kandinsky, you mentioned he writes what's it called on spirituality and art.
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Right.
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Rainer-Rilke writes Mount Laudet-Brigge.
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You speak also of Georg Zimmel, the metaphysics of death, and Cardinal Mikkel-Shader,
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and we'll talk about who finishes a dissertation and actually heels himself, shoots himself
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on the very day that he finishes dissertation.
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That's a warning to all graduate students out there.
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But there's no life after the dissertation sometimes.
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You mentioned Freud and the Edible Complex, and that sense that there is explosive irrationality
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under the surface of the bourgeois world as it had been lived out until then,
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is there a particular obsession with the irrational, and then we'll try to link that to the concept of dissonance?
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Well, you know, there have been so many revolutionary developments in the 19th century from the industrial revolution onwards.
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Philosophically, the climate was extremely pessimistic after Schopenhauer,
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the world is willing representation, proved the point that life is a nasty process.
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Then there was Darwin who theorized the will to survival and Nietzsche himself, made it the will to power.
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The idea was philosophically that things were ruled by a blind will,
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an irrational, animalistic thirst for self-interest and mere getting ahead.
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This provoked an enormous crisis, and those who wanted to find logic and history, a rational process.
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Also, those who were concerned with ethics and morality,
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that Nietzsche had said were not only relative but spurred by almost immoral if not.
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Well, not immoral, but immoral concerns.
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I suggested earlier that madness was being studied.
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Madness in the artist were considered linked and in a sense, heroized,
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as opposed to the normal bourgeois typical person that appeared rather shallow.
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So, artists in this period, I'm talking about the late 19th century through to about World War I,
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saw themselves as visionaries, as prophets, even as saviors of the future.
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And there was a sense that the future was laid in coming and had to be cataclysmic.
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I don't think they quite thought it would be as bad as it was with the war,
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but when you read this period back from the war, it's clear that it's being picked up a few years ahead of time.
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Your, your country of artists and thinkers come mostly from middle or eastern Europe,
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the Austro-Hungarian Empire in particular.
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Is there a reason why the, these fault lines that you've been enumerating seem to be particularly intensified in that part of Europe?
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No doubt.
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In fact, as Zep a few weeks ago was talking about the man without qualities and characterized that Austro-Hungarian Empire as a sprawling conglomeration of countless dozens upon dozens of minority groups, ethnic groups that weren't being represented by power,
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and felt voiceless, um, originated, disenfranchised.
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There was a large Jewish contingent, many of the figures in my book are Jewish.
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It was a period that was particularly anti-Semitic, a famous mayor of Vienna, Carl Luger, was famous for, for his anti-Semitism,
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and also for, for saying, "I decide who's a Jew when he, when he wanted to, to repress somebody."
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So, uh, that Austro-Hungarian Empire included Northern Italy, borderlands, figures who felt outside the power structure,
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and certainly outside of the Western European dominant powers.
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Mm-hmm.
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Suicide is another phenomenon that's prevalent at that time.
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I know that I, I, I, I think I remember from looking again at 1910 that, um, this suicide rates were particularly high at the highest point that they had been in the century in this period.
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Yeah, they had been rising from around 1903 and reached an absolute peak in 1910.
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As though, of course, most of these suicides were young men.
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As though they sense that they were going to be conscripted four years later and meet a, a horrifying experience that they weren't prepared for.
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So, yeah, suicide was, was predominantly was, uh, mental illness, which may have been there before, not, not, recognize because psychology was getting more sensitive to it.
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But, yeah, suicide was a huge thing. So big that Freud himself with a psychoanalytic society called the meeting, I recall it almost an emergency meeting in 1910 to try to get to the cause of suicide among students.
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There's, uh, you quote, uh, is it Henry Adams that you quote in your book about, uh, the year 1910? I don't have it underhand. Let's see where it's.
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I have, I've, I've got it here on the ground.
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You got it.
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That's a great quote. Let's, uh, Henry Adams for the United States, the historian and political theorist, or quote him, February of 1910.
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Every reader of the French and German newspapers knows that not a day passes without producing some uneasy discussion of social decrepituals, falling off of the birth rate, decline of rural population, lowering of army standards, multiplication of suicides, increase of insanity, or idiocy, cancer, tuberculosis,
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signs of nervous exhaustion and feebled in vitality, habits of alcoholism and drugs, failure of hindsight, and so on without end.
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So this is a kind of symptomology. And in 1910, your book, you want to, uh, you, you, you, you set out to show how the arts gave expression in very dramatic forms.
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Primarily, I guess expression is you would, would it be fair to say that the expressionism as a kind of umbrella, genre under which a lot of the poets and musicians and painters that you deal with that they fall into or what we would understand as expressionism?
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Exactly. It's a, it's a term that used to be limited to the visual arts and primarily, primarily still is.
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It's not so much applied to, uh, to music and thinking, but it seemed to me that what was going on in the visual arts could explain also the way people thought and, uh, the, the music too that Schoenberg, this atonal new liberation from tonality.
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Yeah, we could, what exactly did Schoenberg mean by emancipation of dissonance in the musical sphere and then maybe we can talk about the painting and poetry?
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Well, modern music had been becoming increasingly, um, dissonant that is, they would use tones outside of the normal eight that you used either in a major and a minor chord in order to create tension.
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And this in Screeaben and W.C. particularly had reached a, a point at which something else was called for and Schoenberg asked himself, why do we have to resolve these dissonant notes of these things where it goes out of two.
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Why do we have to come back to the reassuring tonality? Why not liberate all the tones in the scale and, and even get free from the center? And I think that that's kind of symbolic of the liberation of that which has been repressed until now.
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If you want to think of them as minority figures politically as well, the, a free, um, not a free for all, but music liberated from the, the key structure and utilization of all its 12 resources.
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That's what I think he was working towards and most people know that Schoenberg invented later in the 20s, the basis for 20th century musical practice, which is the 12th tone row or serial composition where he took all two
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12 tones of the scale and aside, then I signed them in order so you would use all 12 which was absolutely radical.
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In 1910 starts around 1909. He starts thinking of dissonance in positive terms as though one, it's a type of anti authoritarian approach to the, to the convention and two.
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He felt that deformation was necessary for a new type of form. So what he was really interested in was a linguistic revolution in, in music, a new language because the old language was not doing justice to individualities and to, to what the I wanted to express.
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That's why I see him as an expressionist, of course, he was tied to them anyway. He was included in Vasily Kandinsky's blue writer and theology, there were friends and agreed upon a whole lot of things.
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Specialism generally means the, the thrust for the I for the subject for the individual self to to shout out or scream out its concerns that are not being heard by the conventional languages of the time.
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Schoenberg was first and foremost a composer but he was also very much a very philosopher and I think theory of harmony which he was published in 1911 I guess he was writing in 1910.
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Also gives a whole theory of the soul doesn't it?
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Well he doesn't go into that as much as his friend Kandinsky does, who after he attends a concert by Schoenberg at the beginning of 1911 and contact him finds out that
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what Schoenberg doing in music is very much what he aspires to do in painting, namely to revolutionize the language and get over objective representation.
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After the impressionist had sort of dissolved external reality and rarefied it, Kandinsky sees a painting actually by Monet called the haystack and he doesn't recognize it as a haystack.
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He sees it as a beautiful painting but he can't recognize what the object is and that's where dawns on him that painting should free itself from the external world that it's always felt obliged to represent.
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The best he calls it, the rest.
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The external thing he says is precisely what's forbidden to us painters and so he develops the manifesto, spirituality and art requires that you give voice to the
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the soul to the to the irrational self through tone colors and and that painting has the freedom he felt that Schoenberg's polytonal or atonal music hat.
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Is there something in the title spirituality and art that is implicitly polemical against any concert of materialism there on Kandinsky?
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Absolutely, in fact the the polemic with materialism is seen by Kandinsky as a cosmic battle and you know no doubt that many of these artists embraced World War 1 as a cathartic.
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Let's have it out.
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Kandinsky felt that materialism had governed the 18th and 19th century money,
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mongering industrial production capitalism and whatnot and felt that these two great forces were fighting and where he stood was very clear as a matter of fact if you give me just one second, I'd like to quote you, a passenger to from him on this.
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From spirituality and art.
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Well, let me let me quote this one because in the first party talks about what the form of his painting is and what painting should be in a second is what the content is.
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So the the form he says cold calculation patches leaping at random mathematically exact construction silent screaming figures fanfares of color great calm heavy
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disintegrating surfaces that's the form his painting will take and then he defines its content suffering searching tormented souls with a deep rift caused by the collision of the spiritual with the material.
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The living element of living and dead nature constellation in the appearance of the world and so on speaking of the hidden by means of the hidden that hidden by the way is is the inner self to soul that which.
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Freud in a entirely different language was calling the unconscious the the dark true motivators of life and.
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Art of this period wanted to give voice to that expression as a means precisely pushing it out from the inside.
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There's a passage. I have the book here on ninety five where you write that what now seems to be the more bid thinking of the early 20th century because we have been talking about.
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Theories and practices that some people might consider more never the list.
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What now seems to be the more but thinking of the early 20th century was larger the consequence of an unwillingness to acquiesce in the growing materialistic convention convention.
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I'm sorry that all spiritual questions are foreclosed by the self terminating flow of historical experience.
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And be the human mind is accordingly well advised to limit its attention.
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To the furtherance of its pleasures and chores.
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I think that characterizes pretty well the kind of steam on our own air now.
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We're living in now which might explain why a lot of people might have problems.
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Appreciating in any depth the kind of expression is aesthetics that you deal with.
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But let me go on the morbidity is also the consequence of confronting what so many doctrines of happiness, rights and empowerment tend to exclude from their moralizing pictures.
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The irrationality of physical and psychological suffering, the inner radical ability of human petiteness and rivalry, the instability of destiny and the intellectual understanding of it.
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So where these artists heroically trying to delve into those very things that subsequently would be excluded from consideration.
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These artists were perhaps the most ethically committed and philosophically committed generation of artists since the romantics.
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They could not accept the irrationality of external contingent phenomena, of inner needs.
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And they felt they needed to put order into things that at least to understand this order that the official stories were not telling.
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This led them, as I say to maybe exaggerate the case for the amount of suffering, the morbidity, the poverty, although it's hard to say that such things could be exaggerated.
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They're truly disturbed by them. And they developed, as I was saying, metaphysics of negativity.
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One of my chapters called the Deficiency of Being. Being itself is considered a rotten setup.
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I'd like to read you, for instance, Lukachu was famous for being a Marxist philosopher later.
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When he was young in 1910, he was about 22, 23 years old and he wrote this beautiful book called "Soul and Form".
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Lukachu was a Hungarian. Lukachu was from Hungary, but he wrote in German, and the thesis of "Soul and Form" is that "Soul has a hard time taking form and forms, de-forms the soul".
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And I want to read you what he says about life because it turns up in other philosophers, Zimmold, the sociologist, and so on. Listen to this.
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"Life is an anarchy of light and dark. Nothing is ever completely fulfilled in life. Nothing ever quite ends.
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New and confusing voices always mingle with a course of those that have been heard before. Everything flows, everything merges into another thing, and the mixture is uncontrolled and impure. Everything is destroyed, smashed, nothing of her flowers into real life."
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This kind of statement, you can find it in all sorts of thinkers of the time.
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And if you have a second, I want to read you a line by Zimmold from the metaphysics of death.
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"Zimmold being a German".
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Gorgzimo was a philosopher in Berlin, with whom Lukachu and many other people studied, probably even high-digger for all I know. Everyone passed under his wing.
|
| 00:26:50.160 |
And Zimmold says, "All our gain and pleasure, work in peace, and all our other modes of relation, are an instinctive or conscious flight from death. The life we employ to draw nearer to death, we employ to flee it."
|
| 00:27:06.160 |
So he has this nice image. We are like men on a ship who walk in a direction opposite to the one in which it is going.
|
| 00:27:12.160 |
While they proceed to the south, the deck on which they do so is carried to the north with them on board.
|
| 00:27:19.160 |
So this negative metaphysics we no longer share today, and as I was saying in that passage you quoted, we do as a matter of fact everything we do to ignore it and forget about it, put it under the rug.
|
| 00:27:37.160 |
Yeah, repress it again.
|
| 00:27:40.160 |
Well, they certainly, these artists certainly exasperated the contradictions, maybe without resolving them.
|
| 00:27:50.160 |
And we'll have occasion to speak about the afterward to your book where you claim that this was a moment that really could not have been sustained for all that long because it was a particular problematic of negativity and nihilism that
|
| 00:28:06.160 |
did not have a foundation on which you could construct something more enduring and positive into the future.
|
| 00:28:14.160 |
But definitely, I think if we're talking about the mood of the time, it's really quite uncanny the way it seems to pressage.
|
| 00:28:22.160 |
A collective catastrophe like the First World War which seems to play out all the worst nightmares that the expression has had been obsessed by during this period.
|
| 00:28:35.160 |
Well, let's try to touch on a few of the other figures that you deal with.
|
| 00:28:42.160 |
There's a number of poets.
|
| 00:28:44.160 |
There's Rainer Rilke, Georg Trakel, Dino Campana.
|
| 00:28:49.160 |
What did I say a word about Rilke's notebooks of Mount Loryte Brigger which was also published in 1910?
|
| 00:28:56.160 |
Well, Mount is a very interesting prose work about a figure I think he's Danish originally who is in Paris and it starts with his vision of hospitals, sickness, suffering.
|
| 00:29:16.160 |
And as his notebooks proceed, the fictitious course, we find him identifying himself more and more with with the homeless who are much more numerous than he would have imagined from his provincial place of origin, the homeless, the beggars.
|
| 00:29:34.160 |
And it's an exercise in what he needs to learn to be an artist and what his art should really be addressing itself to.
|
| 00:29:44.160 |
And it has this beautiful sort of culmination in the principle as he concludes that he has to be the heavy heart of all that is indistinguishable.
|
| 00:29:55.160 |
I think we have to understand the word indistinguishable as that which cannot be seen clearly, that which is not seen at all, that which doesn't have a form that does it justice.
|
| 00:30:09.160 |
And the heavy heart is the expressed suffering of these poets and musicians and painters at the time who want to call it to attention.
|
| 00:30:22.160 |
The artists are always sometimes pitilessly honest about what's going on.
|
| 00:30:29.160 |
So, Realke does that in prose and then he after the war like Schoenberg and others finds a new footing. But at this point it's really desired to lay it all out.
|
| 00:30:44.160 |
I'm tempted to say it's very consonant with the dissonance of the time with the other artists.
|
| 00:30:52.160 |
One of my other favorite poets, Gewerte Trackel, is also writing, he'll die also shortly during suicide.
|
| 00:31:03.160 |
By suicide, I think in 1917, but you talk about someone who had a very dark vision of human existence, that's definitely Gewerte Trackel.
|
| 00:31:18.160 |
He was a very bleak figure and interesting in taking the guilt upon himself, maybe more directly than some of the others that I study.
|
| 00:31:29.160 |
The idea that one is responsible for all the suffering and pain in the world.
|
| 00:31:36.160 |
He also links up with another theme of my book which is sexuality.
|
| 00:31:42.160 |
Sexuality is as a miracle on the one hand, but as something very dark and questionable on the other.
|
| 00:31:50.160 |
Like Schoenberg, like Sheila, the painter.
|
| 00:31:53.160 |
And Trackel was reputed to have had an incestuous relationship with his sister from which he never could recover in his moral conscience.
|
| 00:32:02.160 |
He was also a drug taker, he was a chemist and did a lot of drugs, and had a horrible experience in the war as the physician for the suffering soldiers.
|
| 00:32:14.160 |
And eventually hanged himself from a tree, but before he did, he wrote some of the most beautiful poetry of the beginning of the century.
|
| 00:32:23.160 |
Maybe we can hear one.
|
| 00:32:24.160 |
If I may add also, Wittgenstein is a character, the philosopher comes into this book.
|
| 00:32:29.160 |
We haven't spoken of him, but Wittgenstein was very, very wealthy, and he gave away all of his money to Trackel and real care, without knowing them at all.
|
| 00:32:38.160 |
But he read him in a journal and said, "Of Trackel, he says, 'I don't understand it, but it has a tone of genius.'
|
| 00:32:44.160 |
And he gave away his entire family fortune to these two poets because he liked what they were saying."
|
| 00:32:50.160 |
You prefer Trackel to the real care, I think.
|
| 00:32:53.160 |
Yeah, and I think so too.
|
| 00:32:55.160 |
Trackel is much more dramatic.
|
| 00:33:00.160 |
Let's hear, if we could hear his voice, as a short verse or two, Trackel, that would be great.
|
| 00:33:07.160 |
All right, I'll read it to you in English though.
|
| 00:33:09.160 |
The poem is called "Untergung," and that is a loaded word.
|
| 00:33:13.160 |
It means decline, but it means destruction going under.
|
| 00:33:17.160 |
Excuse me for interrupting before we go with the poem.
|
| 00:33:21.160 |
The decline of the West is another big, huge motif with the spangler book.
|
| 00:33:28.160 |
Yeah.
|
| 00:33:29.160 |
And then maybe we can also talk about sex and character about the vineyard.
|
| 00:33:35.160 |
Yeah.
|
| 00:33:36.160 |
Let's bring up a spangler right after.
|
| 00:33:38.160 |
So here's the poem, it's just about 12 lines or so.
|
| 00:33:43.160 |
Above the white pond, the wild birds have flown away.
|
| 00:33:48.160 |
And I see wind blows from our stars at evening.
|
| 00:33:52.160 |
Above our graves, the shattered brow of night is bowed.
|
| 00:33:58.160 |
We rock beneath the oak trees in a silver skiff.
|
| 00:34:03.160 |
The white walls of the city ring forever.
|
| 00:34:07.160 |
Beneath thorn arches.
|
| 00:34:09.160 |
Oh, my brother, we climb blind hands toward midnight.
|
| 00:34:16.160 |
So you can see the dark imagery, the night imagery, midnight is very ponderous.
|
| 00:34:24.160 |
But you also have the light imagery, the white pond, the wild birds have flown away.
|
| 00:34:30.160 |
Of course, they're gone.
|
| 00:34:32.160 |
And now what blows is a nice wind from the stars at evening.
|
| 00:34:35.160 |
So this is kind of cosmic anxiety.
|
| 00:34:38.160 |
One of the pictorial representations I have of this just proceeds in 1910 is the screen by Edvad Munk.
|
| 00:34:45.160 |
Of the eye who feels that the cosmos is not only terribly cold, but malign.
|
| 00:34:50.160 |
Some malignancies is at work.
|
| 00:34:53.160 |
And above our graves, as though we have an entered them, but we're already dead,
|
| 00:34:58.160 |
the shattered brow of night is bowed.
|
| 00:35:01.160 |
So the god, if you will, is a negative one.
|
| 00:35:06.160 |
And we're on this silver boat beneath the oak trees, the city walls are white and so on.
|
| 00:35:12.160 |
Very beautiful but haunted palm, typical of many, many others of his.
|
| 00:35:19.160 |
Yeah, I think that when you use the word guilt in his regard,
|
| 00:35:22.160 |
I mean it applies perfectly of trackle as a whole,
|
| 00:35:25.160 |
but really to so many of the others we're talking about.
|
| 00:35:29.160 |
So how about the decline of the west and also a little bit about vinegar in the sex and character?
|
| 00:35:37.160 |
Because we were speaking earlier about the darkness of sexuality for trackle,
|
| 00:35:42.160 |
she lived many of the others actually.
|
| 00:35:45.160 |
Where sexuality now is fused with guilt if you want to look at it.
|
| 00:35:50.160 |
Not in the conventional religious sense, but that there's something about
|
| 00:35:54.160 |
sexuality that is fallen, linked to all that kind of matter that
|
| 00:36:02.160 |
can maybe was trying to get away with through his concept of spirituality.
|
| 00:36:07.160 |
What is this book, Sex and Character?
|
| 00:36:11.160 |
When did that come out?
|
| 00:36:13.160 |
And what's the thesis of that book?
|
| 00:36:15.160 |
Well, Sex and Characters are kind of a study in 1910 expressionism because the man of rights it
|
| 00:36:23.160 |
commits suicide three or four months after comes out and it was one of the biggest best sellers throughout Europe.
|
| 00:36:30.160 |
I think it went through 12 to 20 editions before he committed suicide.
|
| 00:36:35.160 |
He was a Jewish man from Vienna and was in contact with Freud,
|
| 00:36:41.160 |
whose theories he felt had actually been stolen from him, Vine and Gher.
|
| 00:36:47.160 |
The thesis is systematic but fairly simple.
|
| 00:36:52.160 |
One, men are capable of moral behavior, women are not.
|
| 00:36:59.160 |
Therefore, sex does determine character, but it doesn't stop there because only the
|
| 00:37:05.160 |
area character is capable of true goodness, morality, genius, intellectual discoveries.
|
| 00:37:13.160 |
Whereas Jews and others were also born congenitally incapable of achieving those heights.
|
| 00:37:20.160 |
Of course, this comes from a young Jewish man and he may even have been gay.
|
| 00:37:28.160 |
So the image of masculinity that he was presenting didn't conform to him any more than the racial discourse.
|
| 00:37:36.160 |
But many people were taken by this book even if they were themselves Jewish or women.
|
| 00:37:42.160 |
I think Wittgenstein was very influenced by it.
|
| 00:37:47.160 |
So many others, sometimes I wonder to what extent the suicides of 1910 to 1914 were emulating his.
|
| 00:37:55.160 |
As early in the romantic days, people would emulate the suicide of Vesta, Gerta's great romantic hero who killed himself out of noble choice.
|
| 00:38:04.160 |
Refusing a life that was not worth living.
|
| 00:38:07.160 |
So he establishes that and it's a sort of bleak prospect if you're not.
|
| 00:38:11.160 |
If you don't have what it takes and you're born with it.
|
| 00:38:15.160 |
Then, the spangler thing grows out of a number of studies that's at the end of the 19th century denouncing forms of degeneration.
|
| 00:38:24.160 |
We even had an Italy Lombroso who used to study criminals and the way their facial brain structure was a sign that they were destined to.
|
| 00:38:37.160 |
Being anti-nomion, cultural events in Europe, things like symbolism, aestheticism were considered a feat degenerate development by a guy called Max Nordau.
|
| 00:38:51.160 |
He wrote a book called Degeneration in the 90s.
|
| 00:38:53.160 |
I didn't excuse me for interrupting, but didn't the Nazis have famous exhibition on degenerate art in which a number of the characters that you deal with were on exhibit?
|
| 00:39:03.160 |
Well, of course, and that's why the line of this way of thinking goes straight through the Hitler.
|
| 00:39:09.160 |
The degenerate art exhibit was in 36 or 37, and they had not only jazz, music and Kurt Vile and Schoenberg there,
|
| 00:39:19.160 |
but they would hang paintings of Kandinsky upside down and they'd have captions next to you, see?
|
| 00:39:24.160 |
It doesn't matter what side you look at, it still doesn't make any sense.
|
| 00:39:28.160 |
So the degeneracy was almost a sign of pride in some of the artists I deal with, and in some of Hitler's antagonists.
|
| 00:39:37.160 |
Namely, what you people are calling degenerate are visionary types who don't yet have a language in which to express themselves coherently.
|
| 00:39:50.160 |
And the language that you are asking them to conform to is just a watered down empty convention that doesn't say anything.
|
| 00:40:01.160 |
So whichever way you looked at it, whether from the right or the left, things at this time in Europe were not very promising.
|
| 00:40:12.160 |
And my figures were committed to discovering a different type of language that might make better sense of madness and the sexual impulse, self-interest and the imagination.
|
| 00:40:27.160 |
That's why they are artists so shrill and tortured.
|
| 00:40:35.160 |
Well, look who's walked into the studio, hold on a second here. Can we get Alex ahead set? Let's see if we can get him on air a minute, hold on.
|
| 00:40:43.160 |
This is my nephew Alex, he's eight years old. Alex, I've talked about you on this show before when I was talking about birds.
|
| 00:40:52.160 |
I said that you kept asking me what my favorite bird is. Now that you're here, let's see if you're miked up. What's your favorite bird?
|
| 00:41:00.160 |
Well, I like falcons and hawks and I like eagles. I like birds of prey.
|
| 00:41:08.160 |
I like some parrots and macawsing. I like owls and I like lots of birds.
|
| 00:41:17.160 |
How good. Hey, I know that you read a lot of Harry Potter books. You read them all.
|
| 00:41:22.160 |
Yeah. Do you have a favorite one?
|
| 00:41:24.160 |
Well, no, but I like, I don't like number one. I'd say number two would be about my third favorite, maybe fourth.
|
| 00:41:36.160 |
Yeah. I'd say maybe six or fifth would be my favorite, one of those two.
|
| 00:41:45.160 |
All right, well, we're going to have to watch some of those movies together next time.
|
| 00:41:49.160 |
Hey, remember, last year I taught you a poem that you knew by heart. Do you still remember that poem?
|
| 00:41:56.160 |
Yeah. Let's go.
|
| 00:41:58.160 |
After all, the jacks are in their boxes and the clowns have all gone to bed.
|
| 00:42:04.160 |
You can hear happiness staggering down the street. Footprints, dressed in red and the wind cries Mary.
|
| 00:42:13.160 |
Then it goes the broom, girly sweeps up the broken pieces of yesterday's life.
|
| 00:42:19.160 |
Somewhere a queen is weeping and somewhere a king has no life and the wind cries Mary.
|
| 00:42:30.160 |
Then it goes the traffic light turns blue tomorrow and shines its emptiness down on my bed.
|
| 00:42:38.160 |
And the wind screams Mary. Will the wind ever remember the names it has born in the past?
|
| 00:42:46.160 |
With its crutch, its old age and its wisdom, know this will be the last.
|
| 00:42:51.160 |
That's beautiful. You know where that comes from, don't you? Yeah.
|
| 00:42:59.160 |
This is for you Alex, thanks for coming on.
|
| 00:43:05.160 |
After all the jacks are in their boxes and the clowns have all gone to bed.
|
| 00:43:20.160 |
You can hear happiness staggering down the street.
|
| 00:43:28.160 |
Well, here we're back on air. That was a kind of welcome little relief from the ponderous themes that we've been pursuing here in the last few minutes.
|
| 00:43:55.160 |
Thanks to Alex again for providing a little bit of fresh inness and vitality.
|
| 00:44:00.160 |
Exactly. I think degenerate there yet.
|
| 00:44:04.160 |
But we do have to resume a little bit because there's many figures that we haven't talked about.
|
| 00:44:09.160 |
I want to get in Cardinal Michael Stader because he's one of the main protagonists of your book.
|
| 00:44:16.160 |
Can you tell our listeners who was this guy, Michael Stader?
|
| 00:44:20.160 |
What was his career all about and how did it end?
|
| 00:44:25.160 |
Michael Stader was little known until some 20 years ago when his work started to be published by an important press in Italy.
|
| 00:44:34.160 |
He was an Italian.
|
| 00:44:35.160 |
He was an Italian who lived in Austro-Hungarian Empire because that part near TTS was still Austro-Hungarian until after the war 1918.
|
| 00:44:44.160 |
He was from an ethnic point of view.
|
| 00:44:48.160 |
I want to say he was exemplary for the other figures in my book because he was Italian-speaking German-educated by Jewish family.
|
| 00:44:58.160 |
So he had no fixed identity and that was an issue for him as it was for so many others.
|
| 00:45:04.160 |
He went to Florence to do a dissertation in philosophy and he decided to do it on Aristotle and Plato.
|
| 00:45:11.160 |
He called it Persuasion and rhetoric.
|
| 00:45:14.160 |
The thesis of the dissertation was quite simple.
|
| 00:45:17.160 |
That rhetoric gets in the way of our own persuasion.
|
| 00:45:24.160 |
That is, we can't know what we want and what we want to say because we're forced to use a language that isn't ours to begin with.
|
| 00:45:31.160 |
That argument took him into analysis of life as also getting in the way of what we want.
|
| 00:45:38.160 |
In fact, the first sentence of his book, I believe, is, I know that I want and that I do not have what I want.
|
| 00:45:48.160 |
That his desire is what we start with, but we also know that we don't have it because the desire is always a desire for what you don't have yet.
|
| 00:46:00.160 |
It's absolutely fascinating thesis, very short, written in an extraordinarily expressionist style.
|
| 00:46:09.160 |
He struggled on it for a year and then once he completed it, in fact, I've seen the manuscript.
|
| 00:46:15.160 |
It's stained with blood.
|
| 00:46:17.160 |
He shot himself because in that thesis he proved that life could not be lived the way an authentic person would demand it to be lived.
|
| 00:46:27.160 |
Not only did he do that, but he was also a polymath. He was a painter, very good painter, and a poet.
|
| 00:46:34.160 |
He was an extraordinary athlete, good looking guy.
|
| 00:46:37.160 |
So he seemed to have all the qualities, but all of them led him to negative conclusions.
|
| 00:46:45.160 |
So he's, wait, I understand that he shot himself not once, but twice because the first shot didn't kill him.
|
| 00:46:51.160 |
Yeah, that's how determined he was to do it.
|
| 00:46:54.160 |
So is that the logical, what am I trying to say?
|
| 00:46:59.160 |
A thesis is all about proving something, you know, marshalling evidence and making a cogent argument on behalf of a thesis.
|
| 00:47:09.160 |
So his suicide would, I guess, be the crowning evidence that he brings to bear.
|
| 00:47:15.160 |
Yeah, well, it was the proof of the truth of his thesis.
|
| 00:47:18.160 |
He put his money where his mouth was. He had proved that life was degenerate and had to be rejected.
|
| 00:47:24.160 |
So it was a heroic suicide.
|
| 00:47:27.160 |
You know, he comes from Godetia near the Estee in that region.
|
| 00:47:31.160 |
That's a very fascinating part of the world, certainly a Italy.
|
| 00:47:37.160 |
And in fact, a lot of your protagonists come from the margins, literally speaking, and not really from the big metropolitan centers.
|
| 00:47:46.160 |
Of course, there's a lot from Vienna and so forth, but you've been to go to East
|
| 00:47:48.160 |
Eachemian, it's an extraordinary place.
|
| 00:47:52.160 |
Yeah, it truly is. As a matter of fact, it had a huge Jewish community.
|
| 00:47:56.160 |
It was probably one of the biggest concentrations of Jewish Italians, of which there were only 10 left, I think, after 1945.
|
| 00:48:04.160 |
But more interesting than that, in a sense, politically speaking at least, is that after the Second World War,
|
| 00:48:11.160 |
as though the first wasn't bad enough, the city of Gaurice had to be divided between the Italians and the Yugoslavs.
|
| 00:48:20.160 |
And so it was exactly like Berlin, a divided city, with Italians on one side, and the Slavs on the other.
|
| 00:48:28.160 |
Is there a wall there?
|
| 00:48:30.160 |
Well, there's not a wall, you know, a physical wall is in Berlin, but there are gates, and now to go from one side, the other you still crossing countries.
|
| 00:48:39.160 |
But that's how borderland it was. It had to be.
|
| 00:48:43.160 |
The Slovenia there too.
|
| 00:48:45.160 |
Well, yeah, that's what it was, ex-ugoslavia, and then now it's Slovenia.
|
| 00:48:50.160 |
Right.
|
| 00:48:51.160 |
But it remained divided ever since. In fact, the Mical Stateers grave is on the Slovenian side.
|
| 00:48:55.160 |
You can't just go see it.
|
| 00:48:57.160 |
So, yeah, they also suffered from this being in the margins and not being the representative group that was in power.
|
| 00:49:06.160 |
And in fact, in other parts of Europe, let's say the more what we would call the more big capitals, Paris, maybe London, the arts of this period were not exactly converging with this kind of high nihilistic expressionism that you deal with.
|
| 00:49:28.160 |
I mean, when you say that year 1910, a lot of people will think of Virginia Woolf, who has a famous sentence that human character changed in the year 1910.
|
| 00:49:37.160 |
That whole bloom is very crowd.
|
| 00:49:39.160 |
But I think that they were maybe up to something a little different there, huh?
|
| 00:49:44.160 |
Oh, yeah, they didn't have the highernessness by means of which art should be solving the world's problems.
|
| 00:49:52.160 |
And so they were proceeding quite happily through the Virginia Woolf says that human character changes and that art has to look to the interior.
|
| 00:50:01.160 |
It has to quit representing the outside world and what's happening.
|
| 00:50:04.160 |
It has to represent the interior soul or subjectivity of its protagonist.
|
| 00:50:08.160 |
So, there's something comparable going on, but there's not this pathos and there's not the sense of the self as an infinite mystery and even a dark spot that will never be able to come to language because it's not the same thing.
|
| 00:50:16.160 |
So, I mean, Paris was a wonderful place to live in London. These were hopping places. My characters are on the margins and feel left behind by Paris in London.
|
| 00:50:40.160 |
And, okay, there's also futurism at this moment. I mean, Maddy Nett, he writes a famous manifesto in 1910 for futurism.
|
| 00:50:51.160 |
But I think the futurist triumphalistic rhetoric was quite antithetical to the expressions you're dealing with, would you say?
|
| 00:51:02.160 |
was future oriented they didn't have any problem with the War, either. Technology, all the things that
|
| 00:51:07.600 |
vilified the Soul according to my central European characters that repressed and stifled
|
| 00:51:12.640 |
individuality, technology, industry speed, forward, forward. That was that was being applauded by
|
| 00:51:22.280 |
Māṇeti in Paris and through the War that didn't change for him, whereas the others felt not
|
| 00:51:30.400 |
only was that a sort of soulless process, but humanism would be its casualty.
|
| 00:51:37.400 |
Well, I think even though we've only scratched the surface of all the figures and issues that
|
| 00:51:43.680 |
you go into, it's clear enough that this sentence you have in your introduction seems to be
|
| 00:51:50.640 |
born out through what we've said so far. In 1910, as the spiritual prefiguration of an
|
| 00:51:56.320 |
unspeakably tragic fatality, heard in the tones of the audacious and the anguished, the deviant
|
| 00:52:02.320 |
and the desperate, in the art of a youth grown precautiously old, awaiting a war it had long
|
| 00:52:09.200 |
suffered in spirit. Right, the shadow of the future cast over the present. And you know, the best
|
| 00:52:18.080 |
artist aside from Kandinsky, there are a number of painters here. Kokoshka. Kokoshka and Shele, I would
|
| 00:52:25.040 |
say are fundamental in the book, and both of them, along with other German and Austrian
|
| 00:52:31.520 |
expressionists, were obsessed with self-portraits, nude self-portraits, grimacing, bleeding.
|
| 00:52:38.800 |
Again, the artist as a martyr figure and possibly also as savior, the one that's attuned to what
|
| 00:52:49.440 |
their others are ignoring or repressing. You say at the end of your study in the afterward that
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| 00:53:00.480 |
expressionism, as a study described, it had a short run, and that there were internal reasons why
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the theoretical dynamics of 1910 were not destined to develop. I'm continuing to quote here,
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"Nothing much could be built upon them, they were not useful to the social political and economic
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needs of post-war countries, Michael Stader's persuasion and Boobers direction," we haven't
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talked about Boobers, but offered no concrete directives for action, no functional models or systems,
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no idioms for practical behavior. They were utopian reflections on the homeless experience of a
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here and now. So as you see, this was a moment, and it was a particularly dark mood in Europe,
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and that these artists gave expression to that schtimmung, which then history went on to give its own
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sort of explosive form to. Is there something that we can still learn from these figures a hundred
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years later? The kind of art they produced, I know we're speaking about a whole bunch of different
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characters here, but is there something about the kind of art they produce that still can provide
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some sort of aesthetic pleasure would be the wrong word, but some sort of aesthetic insight,
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or are we dealing here with something that happened in history? And if we have a curiosity about the
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history of European modernism, clearly these people have their place there, but is there something
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retrievable? Is there something desirable maybe about the attempt to retrieve their aesthetics, their
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metaphysics, and their cries of anguish? Well, I don't want to short change these figures,
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don't forget that painting in the 20th century really took off from Kandinsky's non-objective
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art, his abstract painting, and the more properly expressed in his painters of 1910 and those years
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have been returned to over and over through movements of neo-expressionism. These were
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the people who before the war sort of did revolutionize the different languages of art in music and
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in painting just to take two of them, and so they had enormous influence and then very salutary
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effect this idea that art has to think about what its own possibility is. So for that point of
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view they've remained in and been seminal figures in development of art. In other respects, of
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course, the darkness of their vision didn't turn a lot of people on, and after World War I
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had to get on to the reconstruction of Europe, and so one had to forcibly leave that stuff behind,
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but don't forget that every time you leave it behind it comes back, and so it did come back in
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World War II, and human nature does not change despite the fact that we think we're getting better
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and more rational and whatnot. So the depths of the soul that they probed are the same depths
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that people try to keep hidden, cyclically over and over and over. So while it's not very pleasurable,
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not much fun maybe to listen to Schoenberg's A. Tonal Music, it's a reminder really of the beast
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that we have within us that'll stick its head up the minute it thinks you can get away with it.
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Beautiful. Well, we've been speaking to my brother Thomas Harrison here on entitled "Epinions,
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I'm Robert Harrison," and I want to thank my brother for coming into the studios here from UCLA
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where he teaches in the Department of Italian. I want to remind our listeners that we have a web page
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for this program. You have to log on to the home page of the Stanford French and Italian
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department click on entitled "Epinions," and you can listen to past shows and archive
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| 00:57:12.160 |
that we've archived there and post comments on our web page if you feel so inclined. I want to
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thank David Lummis for his technical support as usual. So Tom, it's been fascinating discussion.
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I you suggested that we end with a piece of music from one of these
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expressions, if I may say so, or emancipators of dissonance. Can you tell us what we're going to
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hear? It's just a one-minute long, but what is it that we're going to leave our listeners with?
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Well, this is a very short composition by a student of Schoenberg that most people enjoy
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listening to more than to do Schoenberg, Antoine Vayburn, and it's just I think voicing piano.
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It's a very beautiful poem of real care written in 1910, or at least put to music in 1910. It's a love
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song about an absent love that can't be achieved. So it's Antoine Vayburn voice in piano, I believe.
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Yeah, okay, so and so what we're going to hear, the voice is going to be
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reciting this poem of Rainer Wilkes. So we'll leave you all with that and I
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will look forward to having you tune in next week. Again, thanks Tom for coming on.
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You're very welcome and until soon.
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