cathannabel
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Cities of Sanctuary
Posted in Refugees, W G Sebald on June 17, 2012
It’s Refugee Week. Every year a time to consider what drives people to leave everything behind and throw themselves on the mercy of a world that is often indifferent, suspicious and hostile. Every year a time to consider what our culture has gained from those who’ve sought sanctuary here, and what it’s lost in those who never made it.
Two very different refugee stories that I came across in the last few days:
Occursus told the story of Pauline, whose family came to Sheffield from Ukraine, and were part of the Jewish community in the slums around Scotland Street. There’s a multiple loss here – of the original home in Novograd-Volynsk, of the area where the 19th century Jewish emigrants settled, and the family home on Allen Street, but also of the connections to that past, and those lost places. Pauline was discouraged from exploring her family history, and now pieces together what she can from fragments and guesses, and sensory memories – smells and sounds. And the Guardian featured Carmen Bugan‘s memories of her father, a dissident in Ceausescu’s Romania, and the family’s escape from oppression. Carmen’s memories have been enhanced in an unexpected way – by the secret police files which she’s now been able to access and which shed a weird light on the years of surveillance and suspicion, imprisonment and torture, but also gave her back a story she’d written as a child and the endorsement of her father’s love for his children in the words of an anonymous watcher.
These stories chimed for me with reflections on Storying Sheffield’s 2012 exhibition, from Matthew Cheeseman’s Einekleine blog, talking about the sensibility of loss, the fragmentary past, memory appearing as traces. He says that the work in the exhibition ‘makes one marvel at all that is not there, at all that is truly gone, erased forever.’ It offers ‘a field of stories so deep, so potentially endless, it induces vertigo, a sense of terror at what has gone before and what will be left behind. … Within this vertigo is a response to the finality of Derrida’s traces: more will come, more will happen. Traces will be replaced by traces, all dying, all corroding, but giving into others, in a protean, quantum-field of experience which is not only filled with loss but also, seemingly at least, a generative, life-affirming push. Speech and stories may be fragile and delicate, but they are replaced and revived by their own action. ‘
There are many, many lines of flight from here. Reading history in the gaps, the absences, the lacunae. Ghosts and revenants, walking the streets of our cities. Themes for future blogs – but in this specific context, a reminder of the field of stories from those who, like Pauline’s parents, and Carmen’s, left behind lives that are unrecoverable now, and made new lives in unfamiliar places. Every refugee has these two narratives – the life before and the life since. And the former interweaves itself with the latter, consciously or unconsciously – Carmen lives on the border between France and Switzerland, where her husband works at CERN: ‘I think I belong on the border. I feel safer psychologically if I have two countries, two places to go’. Another line of flight – borders, frontiers, liminal space…
The refugee story is our story too. Not just in the sense that it could be any of us, though of course it could be – but because how we, our community, our city, our homeland, respond to the strangers who turn to us for sanctuary is a compelling story too, on every level from the most personal to the global political. The refugee story told by some of our newspapers is a travesty of the truth, a mean-spirited, mendacious, xenophobic narrative of a Britain already full up, being taken for a ride by workshy foreigners with sob stories about persecution and spurious appeals to human rights. I would be fairly startled if anyone reading this blog subscribed to that set of views. But because it’s so pervasive, the counter-narrative needs to be robust, and to establish both facts (the laws around asylum, the benefits and entitlements of those seeking it, the numbers involved) and principles.
For Derrida, ‘ethics is hospitality’:
‘Hospitality is culture itself and not simply one ethic amongst others. Insofar as it has to do with the ethos, that is, the residence, one’s home, the familiar place of dwelling, inasmuch as it is a manner of being there, the manner in which we relate to ourselves and to others, to others as our own or as foreigners, ethics is hospitality’. (Cosmopolitanism & Forgiveness, p. 16-17)
He goes beyond this assertion to recognise the possibility that hospitality can entail appropriation, control and mastery, and to explore therefore the idea of cities of refuge, an idea that goes back centuries, but raises issues of state sovereignty and law which he acknowledges are obscure and difficult. There’s no simple way of enshrining that simple principle at national and international level, but without that, the fate of the exiled will always be precarious. Kwame Anthony Appiah‘s study of cosmopolitanism, subtitled ‘Ethics in a world of strangers’, defines it as ‘ universality plus difference”. Based on this, we should offer hospitality to the stranger because of the former – because what we share is more important than what we don’t. That difference may be the first thing that strikes us, and Julia Kristeva sets out a shockingly stark polarity of responses: ‘I’m at least as peculiar as this other, and so I love him/her’, says the observer , or ‘I prefer my own peculiarity, and so I kill the other’ – more recognisably, fascination or rejection. Kristeva’s analysis is complex and problematic on many levels and certainly doesn’t offer – any more than Derrida or Appiah – a programme of change. But it offers some powerful images of what it is to be a stranger – in a state of permanent transience, one’s space ‘a moving train, a plane in flight, the very transition that precludes stopping’, torn between here and elsewhere, belonging nowhere. The stranger loses their language and their place in the community – they count for no one, no one hears them.
W G Sebald’s Jacques Austerlitz came to Britain on the kindertransport. Sebald explores the “effects political persecution produces in people 50 years down the line, and the complicated workings of remembering and forgetting that go with that”. He is interested in the long-term effects on émigrés who “may appear well adapted but, especially as they move towards old age, are still suffering from having been ostracised, deprived of country, family, language. There are damages to people’s inner lives that can never be rectified.” In The Emigrants too, he explores the ‘great time lag between the infliction of injustice and when it finally overwhelms you’.
Derrida rejects the option of giving examples of individual refugees in his text, ‘for there are too many; and to cite the best known would risk sending the anonymous others back into the darkness (mal) from which they find it hard to escape’ (p. 6). There’s truth in this – but the refugee risks losing past, history, identity and language when they uproot themselves to find safety amongst strangers, and every story that can be told is precious, a little bit of light in the darkness.
Refugee Week is obviously about more than telling the stories. It’s about campaigning, to end destitution for refused asylum seekers (Still Human, Still Here), to change practice on the treatment of gay and lesbian asylum seekers, for asylum seekers to be allowed to work. It’s about fundraising to provide resources and support for refugees. It’s about raising awareness and understanding, refuting and challenging prejudices and misconceptions. There are many organisations working in this field, at the local and national level, some of which are listed below. I choose to support Refugee Action, for which my brother has worked for a number of years, and for whom I will be fundraising by participating in the Great Yorkshire Run in September.
http://www.refugeestories.org/living/
http://stillhumanstillhere.wordpress.com/
http://www.assistsheffield.org.uk/
ข้อมูลนักบอล เว็บไชต์ที่มีการรวบรวม นักเตะมากมายเหมือนตลาดนักบอล
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2001/sep/22/artsandhumanities.highereducation
Julia Kristeva, Etrangers a nous-memes (Paris: Gallimard, 1988)
Jacques Derrida, On Cosmopolitanism & Forgiveness (NY, Routledge, 2001)
Kwame Anthony Appiah, Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers (London: Allen Lane, 2006)
Free Men: The Resistance on Film
Posted in Film, Second World War on June 10, 2012
There’s a perception that we’ve been flooded with cinematic treatments of the Nazi Occupation of France in the decades since it ended. There have been a fair few, it’s true, but what’s interesting is the way in which those treatments have changed over the years.
At the Liberation, the notion of France as a nation of resisters was a vital part of de Gaulle’s strategy to unify a country perilously close to civil war. Of course, there was a purge – women who’d collaborated horizontally were publicly shamed, and there were trials, and some executions. But a surprisingly large number of those who were complicit in the implementation of Nazi race laws and in the deportations ended up in positions of responsibility in post-war France.
All of this has been talked about a great deal, it’s true, and one might think that it’s all been said, that everyone knows now who was complicit, and how and why, as well as who did resist. But fictional and cinematic treatments of the era have gone through different phases, each adding a layer of complexity and richness to our understanding.
The most recent films to contribute to this process have been two about the Vel d’Hiv round up (The Round up, and Sarah’s Key), and two focusing on particular clusters of resistance activity. I’ll come back to the Vel d’Hiv in a future blog.
What’s particularly striking about the two recent films about the French Resistance is that in these cases, the resistance was not, strictly speaking, French. Robert Guediguian’s Army of Crime starts with a roll call of names, each one followed by the words ‘mort pour la France’. The names are Armenian, Polish, Italian, Spanish, Hungarian, Russian, some are difficult to pronounce, and the speaker stumbles for a moment, and goes on. We see them on their way to imprisonment, ‘trial’ and execution and then we go back to see how they became martyrs for a country to which they did not belong.
But the Army of Crime – so called after the Nazi poster which aimed to alienate the populace from the resisters by emphasising their criminal acts and their foreign origins – was made up of people who had very little to lose. From the start of the Occupation, as Jews, and/or Communists, many of them refugees from parts of Europe which had fallen earlier to the Nazis, or from other persecutions, they knew they were targets. Some of them joined the armed struggle due to some personal confrontation, others after their families were swept up in the round ups and deported. They fought and died for an idea of France, the France that they had seen as a refuge, even whilst that idea was being betrayed, as they were.
For the resisters in the new film, Free Men, it really wasn’t their war. As Moslems they risked being rounded up only if they were mistaken for Jews and could not prove otherwise, or if they were involved in communist workers groups. But the Paris Mosque was a place of refuge both for Moslems who were involved in the resistance, and for Jews. The scale of this activity is not known – estimates vary wildly – but it seems clear that the head of the mosque, Si Kaddour Ben Ghabrit, instigated and supported the production of false papers for Jews, and the use of the building itself as a hiding place, whilst maintaining outwardly amicable relations with the authorities.
It’s a story that’s even less known than that of Missak Manouchian’s Army of Crime. After all, the Nazis publicised the latter rather effectively with the poster – which far from having the effect they intended, became a focus for solidarity and protest. The clandestine publication Lettres Francaises reported in March 1944 how the ten images on the blood-red background attracted a silent crowd:
‘At length, and solemnly they saluted dead friends. In their eyes there was no morbid curiosity, just admiration, sympathy, as if they were our own. And in fact they were our own, because they were fighting alongside thousands of us for our country, because it is also the home of liberty. On one of the posters, over night, someone had written in capital letters a single word: Martyrs. That is the homage of Paris to those who’ve fought for freedom’
Louis Aragon and Paul Eluard wrote poems about L’Affiche Rouge, and there were earlier films, though one screenplay was rejected on the grounds that these foreigners gave the wrong image of the Resistance.
Free Men isn’t the only film to tell the story of the Moslem resistance – Mohamed Fekrane’s Ensemble came out this year too, though it hasn’t reached the UK yet.
Army of Crime had a very powerful resonance in the context of the anti-immigrant/anti-refugee rhetoric that is spewed out by sections of the press here and across Europe, as does the story of Moslems risking their lives to save Jewish lives. These young men from North Africa are the brothers of the Allied soldiers in Days of Glory, which told of their part in the liberation of France, and their betrayal after the war by the French government.
If Free Men had less emotional heft than Army of Crime, it’s not down to the story. It’s to do with the leading character. Manouchian and his group were from the start politically engaged, passionately committed to the struggle, with a sense of the wider European context – the Armenian genocide, the Spanish civil war. They’re articulate and charismatic. Younes at the start is a black marketeer, willing to spy (rather ineptly) on the activities at the Mosque in exchange for an official blind eye being turned to his business dealings. He’s nudged unwillingly into the resistance by his cousin, who’s already actively involved, and by his realisation of the danger faced by his friend Salim, a Jew passing as a Moslem. Little by little, he’s drawn in until he is risking his life for the cause. The problem is that as a focal point for the narrative he is somehow a bit blank, passive, lacking in real depth.
He reminded me, in fact, of Lucien – Lacombe, Lucien. Louis Malle’s ‘hero’ is an accidental collaborator – a combination of pure chance and his own naivety and vanity put him in a position where he can bring down local members of the Resistance which had rejected his bid for membership. He’s an ambivalent and ambiguous character, and his portrayal has been controversial, because Malle refused to resolve the ambiguities. When Lucien shoots a German soldier and escapes with his Jewish girlfriend, did he do so to save her from deportation, or because the German had taken something he regarded as his? If Younes had not been so powerfully drawn to Salim, would he have allowed himself to be drawn into the Resistance?
Lacombe Lucien is a powerful film because of this opacity, which prevents us from taking refuge in simplistic polarities. Malle’s film, which appeared in 1974, not long after Ophuls’ The Sorrow and the Pity, opened up the possibility of more complex narratives of the Occupation. In Free Men the really interesting characters – Salim, Leila and the Imam himself – are sketched in as we focus on Younes, who we barely know better at the end of the film than we did at the beginning.
Nonetheless, it’s a gripping film, a story that needs to be told. We’ve moved since the Liberation from the Gaullist myth of the inextinguishable flame, through the exposure of collaboration and complicity, towards a celebration of the real rich diversity of that struggle against barbarism.
G. Austin, Contemporary French Cinema: An Introduction (Manchester U.P., 1996)
H. Frey, Louis Malle (Manchester U.P., 2004)
R. J. Golsan, Vichy’s Afterlife (Nebraska U.P., 2000)
N. Greene, Landscapes of Loss (Princeton U.P., 1999)
L. D. Hewitt, Remembering the Occupation in French Film (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008)
A. Insdorf, Indelible Shadows: Film and the Holocaust (Cambridge U.P., 1989)
P. Jankowski, ‘In Defense of Fiction: Resistance, Collaboration and Lacombe, Lucien’, Jnl of Modern History, 63, 3 (1991), 457-82
P. Kael, ‘Lacombe Lucien’, http://www.criterion.com/current/posts/416-lacombe-lucien
S. Lindeperg, Les écrans de l’ombre (CNRS, 1997)
C. Nettelbeck, ‘Getting the Story Right: Narratives of World War II in Post-1968 France’ , Jnal of European Studies, 15 (1985), 77-116
C. Nettelbeck (ed), War and Identity: The French and the Second World War (Routledge, 1987)
A. Rayski, L’Affiche Rouge (Mairie de Paris, 2004)
H. Rousso, The Vichy Syndrome: History and Memory in France since 1944 (Harvard U.P., 1991)
http://www.larmeeducrime-lefilm.com/
http://playbackstl.com/movie-reviews/9939-army-of-crime-lorber-films-nr
http://www.timeout.com/film/reviews/87750/army-of-crime.html
http://television.telerama.fr/tele/films/l-armee-du-crime,13535938.php
http://www.allocine.fr/film/fichefilm_gen_cfilm=135212.html
http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/free_men/
Related articles
- Free Men – review (guardian.co.uk)
- New film highlights remarkable story of Paris mosque director who saved hundreds of Jews from Nazis (timesofisrael.com)
Some Fantastic Place
Posted in Personal on May 29, 2012
This blog is not usually a place for very personal reflections. Today’s different, for reasons that will become evident.
A couple of weeks ago I set off for my regular half-hour pre-work run. I saw someone ahead, walking. Unusual, at just after 6.00 am – I see cars, other runners (as they zip past me) and cyclists, but rarely walkers, unless accompanied by dog. No dog in sight. The walker was slightly uncertain of gait and a couple of times strayed into the road and back. I was getting closer, and I did think of turning round and completing my run by a different route. Told myself not to be daft. As I got level with him I saw he was a black guy, perhaps in his 30s, with a raincoat and a woolen hat, no rucksack or baggage of any kind. He asked me the way to Sheffield. I told him Sheffield was back the way he’d come, and that ahead – a long, long way ahead – was Manchester. He didn’t respond, and I ran on. When I turned round to head home, he was still heading away from Sheffield, and he looked at me as I ran past as if we’d not spoken a few minutes earlier.
I didn’t do anything. I thought about it, but ringing the police seemed wrong somehow. He hadn’t done anything (to my knowledge) and in the unlikely event that they took any action, it might well be traumatic for him – a black man possibly with drug and/or mental health problems is unlikely to have had positive interactions with the police. I couldn’t think what else I could do. On the other hand, if he strayed into the road on some of the bends further ahead, particularly as the traffic got heavier towards rush hour, he could be knocked down. And if he just kept on walking?
He didn’t look like he’d been sleeping rough, he didn’t look or sound drunk. He looked lost – not just that he didn’t know he was heading away from where he wanted to be, and didn’t change direction when he was told, but more profoundly lost. He didn’t look or sound dangerous, but I was alone, and I felt vulnerable. But I have thought a lot about this encounter. To ask myself if I should/could have done something. To wonder what happened to him. And as so often I ask myself what my mother would have done – and as soon as I ask I know. She would have stopped, talked to him, tried to find out why he was walking out along that road, away from the place he said he wanted to get to. She would have tried to help him. She might not have been able to, she might have been rebuffed, she might have put herself at risk, but she would have tried.
A year or so ago I was walking to work as usual past the Children’s Hospital, as a young woman came out in pyjamas, lighting a cigarette, on her mobile – not an uncommon sight. But then she cried out, ‘She’s dead. My baby’s dead’. I stopped. And then I went on because I was afraid to intrude, to barge into a moment of such terrible private tragedy. I know that Mum would have gone to her and talked to her, and tried to help. It might have been a mistake to do so, but it would have been, somehow, a marvellous mistake.
Mum died on 29 May 1995, of pancreatic cancer. She was phenomenally intuitive, empathetic, generous of heart. She didn’t rate herself, but she ought to have done. There’s a song that sums her up, somehow, for which I thank Glenn Tilbrook & Chris Difford, a beautiful song, written about a friend who died very young. But for me, it’s about Mum – the first time I heard it after she died I was driving, and had to pull over because I suddenly couldn’t see, or breathe.
When she told me that, as she’d been diagnosed with terminal pancreatic cancer, she’d be moving to an oncology ward at another hospital, and as she put it, a ward ‘full of people like me’, she meant people with terminal cancer but my thought immediately was of a ward full of people like her, full of loving, intuitive, generous, warm, intelligent, profoundly good people. If I allow myself to riff on that thought for a while, it makes me smile – I envisage the nursing staff being brought cups of tea, being listened to, by people who prefer taking care of other people than being taken care of. I envisage the weaker, sicker patients being cared for by the stronger ones, so that no one’s need for pain relief or a drink, or just someone to talk to, goes unnoticed or unmet. Some fantastic place, indeed.
Real goodness is hard to convey without sentimentality or sanctimony. It comes down to two things, I think, integrity and empathy. If we can live in the world with those qualities we will live good lives, however numerous our failures and deficiencies. Mum had both, in abundance.
‘Her love was life and happiness and in her steps I trace
The way to live a better life
In some fantastic place’
Cecily Hallett, 8 January 1930-29 May 1995.
I miss her. Always will.
Some Fantastic Place lyrics © Kobalt Music Publishing Ltd., EMI Music Publishing
Celebrating Creativity
Posted in Visual Art on May 13, 2012
I’ve been involved in the visual arts for a long time now. First, through working at the – now largely demolished – Psalter Lane Art College site of Hallam University, and subsequently as a member of the board of trustees for S1 Artspace. I didn’t anticipate that working with physicists and astronomers would give me another, equally rewarding, chance to engage with artists and creativity.
Some years back, a colleague in the department sent an email round, asking if anyone else, like him, was doing creative things in their spare time. The result surprised us all. We’re now in our sixth year of holding an exhibition of work by staff and students – now from across the University – and each year people emerge from the shadows, often apologetically offering their work with disclaimers about being an amateur, a novice, not being sure if it’s good enough to be seen in public, but thrilled by the opportunity to take that chance. It’s an annual celebration of creativity.
It’s caused me to ponder on the gulf that often seems to yawn between the two art worlds that I am involved in. One is rooted in the art colleges’ and fine art departments’ contemporary practice, and ideas about that practice. The other is rooted in the individual discovery of the life enhancing and affirming value of creativity, with or without external validation or theoretical context. There’s no value judgement involved here, for me at any rate. But the two worlds communicate very poorly with one another. The contemporary artists often struggle to value work that has no theoretical context. The ‘amateurs’ struggle to comprehend work that requires that kind of context in order to be appreciated. Both are baffled, both lack the language to mediate their own work to the other.
I love both worlds. I’m fascinated and challenged by many contemporary artists whose work I’ve seen – many here in Sheffield at S1, Bloc or Site (Becky Bowley, James Price, Charlotte Morgan, Haroon Mirza, Richard Bartle, George Henry Longly, Jennifer West, Allie Carr, Nicolas Moulin, amongst many others). And I’m exhilarated and moved by the work that is presented to us each year, to go in display in a physics lab, by professors of physics, sociology or medieval French; researchers in electrical engineering, infection & immunity or cosmology; librarians and technicians, receptionists and administrators.
I’m awed by creativity, because I’m not capable of it myself. I envy those who are. I’ve tried – playing the guitar, writing poetry, sketching – but there’s some essential spark missing. That’s OK, this blog is my creative output now, and in connecting with artists, musicians and writers I can share in the magic. I believe utterly and passionately in the creative enterprise – Michel Butor said that ‘every word written is a victory against death’ and with Butor you know that he means not just words but sounds and images.
So this week we’ll be celebrating lots of victories.
The exhibition is open from Wednesday 16 to Friday 18 May, 10 am to 4 pm, in E32, Hicks Building, University of Sheffield, Hounsfield Road, Sheffield S3 7RH.
Michel Butor et Dirk Bouts, Lomme, le 19 mai 2012
Posted in Events, Michel Butor, Visual Art on May 7, 2012
Les éditions invenit,
avec L’Odyssée – Médiathèque de Lomme
vous invitent à rencontrer
Michel Butor autour de son livre : “Dirk Bouts, Le Chemin du ciel et La Chute des damnés” dans la collection Ekphrasis
le samedi 19 mai à 16h00
(Auditorium)
Dans le hall d’entrée de l’Odyssée, jusqu’au 19 mai,
venez découvrir une sélection de livres, d’objets et de photos liés à Michel Butor et son travail, qui montrent le poète dans son cadre quotidien de création entouré d’amis et d’artistes.
Possibilité de s’inscrire à des ateliers d’écriture autour de la peinture, dont le premier se tiendra à 15h00, avant la lecture.
Inscription obligatoire auprès de l’Odyssée, places limitées.
L’Odyssée (Auditorium) 794, avenue de Dunkerque, Lomme
03 20 17 27 40
Affective Landscapes
Posted in Events, W G Sebald on April 30, 2012
Thanks to Attic Fantasist for the following:
Info on an upcoming conference at Derby University, covering a range of topics including psychogeography, cultural politics of identity and landscapes,national identity, edgelands, landscapes of trauma and memory, theories of affect and landscape
And another link of interest to Sebaldians, this interview with the director of Patience (after Sebald).
Butor and the iPad
Posted in Michel Butor on April 28, 2012
Enjoy.
Michel Butor découvre l’iPad, une grande première à l’occasion de sa venue dans sa ville natale (Mons-en-Baroeul), une autre grande première au bout de 84 ans, le samedi 5 mars 2011. Une approche nouvelle pour cet immense écrivain et poète, créateur de livre objet.
Butor Soirée at San Francisco’s Alliance Française
Posted in Events, Michel Butor on April 27, 2012
Soirée Documentary about French writer Michel Butor with the director
A movie about French writer Michel Butor
Friday April 27th at 6:30 pm at the Alliance
Free for members $5.00 for non members
In Partnership with the French American Cultural Society
The director, Blandine Armand, will be present to answer questions and discuss the movie. Author Michel Butor is best known as a leading proponent of “Le Nouveau Roman,” a post-World War II French literary movement that departed from classical genres.
Butor has authored Passage de Milan (1954), L’emploi du temps [Passing Time] (1956), La modification [Second Thoughts] (1957), and Degrés (1960), among other works. Butor’s novels, poems, and essays demonstrate how a place can influence and inform a way of thinking.
Blandine Armand est une réalisatrice française dont l’axe principal de recherche s’articule autour des processus de création artistique. Pour Arte, elle a réalisé plusieurs documentaires sur des metteurs en scène : « Poésie de l’Ordinaire » qui éclaire le travail de Joël Pommerat lors de la création de sa pièce Les Marchands, « Voyage Immobile » sur la pièce Hanjo d’après Mishima mise en scène par Julie Brochen, « Faire bouger le monde » à propos du travail de Guy Alloucherie et « Raconter l’indicible réalité » qui accompagne la création de Pinocchio de Joël Pommerat,
Elle travaille également comme vidéaste. Elle a ainsi réalisé des vidéos de création pour différents lieux de théâtre ou compagnies comme la Chartreuse de Villeneuve-les-Avignon (Centre National des Ecritures du Spectacle), le collectif F7 ou encore Julie Brochen pour son spectacle « Variations ».
Blandine Armand vient de réaliser un portrait de l’écrivain Michel Butor diffusé sur France 5 ainsi qu’un documentaire sur la création de Dom Juan par Julie Brochen au Théâtre National de Strasbourg.
Butor exhibition at Museo Universitario Arte Contemporaneo (MUAC), Mexico City
Posted in Events, Michel Butor, Visual Art on April 18, 2012
See below for details of a new Butor exhibition/event at MUAC, Mexico City:
The MUAC, through the Arkheia Documentation Center will present an exhibition on the french writer Michel Butor’s (France, 1926) file, including some of his works and books about artists and contemporary art.
Michel Butor has over 1500 publications covering various fields such as music, science, philosophy, literature and the arts. He is known in the field of French literature, mainly due to his most famous novel The Amendment, considered one of the pillars of what is known as the new novel (Nouveau Roman) written from start to finish in second person singular, the spanish equivalent to “thou”.
This novel was adapted by Michel Worms into a film in 1970 with the same title. After posting grades in 1960, Michel Butor stopped writing novels and by 1991 he abandoned teaching and retired to a village in the Haute Savoie. Since 1986 he has worked with over two hundred painters, sculptors, printmakers and photographers from different nationalities and published with them essays and books.
As part of this exhibition, a group of Mexican intellectuals close to Butor, undertake a series of conversations to be held in the auditorium of the MUAC.
WEB – EMAIL – LINEA DIRETTA
Michel Butor
dal 20/4/2012 al 20/5/2012
Music and Silence
Posted in Literature, Michel Butor, Music, Second World War, W G Sebald on April 15, 2012
‘Silence is not nothing. It is not the null set’. Music in performance exists between two silences – the expectant pause before the first notes and the instant before the applause. Music and silence are in dialogue, mutually dependent. Silence is inscribed in the music, like its breathing. To put it another way, sound echoes silence, puts into words or music what was implicit, and the two bear traces of each other.
In 4’33”, John Cage’s best known and possibly most important work, the composer developed a ‘fully positive concept of silence’ (Visscher, p. 259) which required openness to the integration of all possible sounds. For Cage, silence is temporal and spatial. It’s the place where sounds appear, ‘made up of all the sounds that exist in permanence (=life) and which surround us (=place).’ (Visscher, p. 262). Cage explained that ‘we call it silence when we don’t feel a direct connection with the intentions that produce the sounds’, i.e. the ambient sounds that are constantly present. 4’33” is a way of experimenting with one’s relation to the external world, silencing music in order to hear the world. For Cage, ‘it leads out of the world of art into the whole of life’. (Visscher, p. 264).
Cage’s piece invites us to hear all of these ambient sounds, and those that drift in from outside – sirens, wind and rain, traffic noise – or from the building – the air conditioning, the creak of floorboards – not as intrusions but as the work itself. It’s as difficult as any of the ‘difficult’ 20th century composers, and it bothers people. The commonest responses are either that it is a joke (yes, the way it challenges audience preconceptions is funny, but at heart it is serious, as Cage’s statements make clear) or that its acceptance in the musical canon (at least its avant-garde experimental subset) is a case of the Emperor’s New Clothes, that the piece is essentially empty of meaning but given spurious significance by critics.
And even if one disagrees, it is an unsettling work. Where we expect to hear a performer and (apart from the performer’s footsteps, the creak of the piano stool or lid, the turning of the pages) instead hear ourselves, our neighbours, the building we’re in, we are uneasy. We know that in a concert hall we are expected to be still, to minimise the rustling, shuffling, and throat clearing sounds that we perversely become desperate to make as soon as it’s taboo to do so. We suffer agonies of embarrassment if a coughing fit can’t be held back, our stomachs rumble, or we applaud at the wrong moment, and we turn judgemental glares on those whose mobile phones ring.
Silence is a weighty thing for an absence. It fills with everything that isn’t being said, all of the sounds that aren’t being heard. Recently researchers from the Australian National University have tuned very sensitive light detectors to listen to vacuum – a region of space that was once thought to be completely empty, dark, and silent until the discovery of modern quantum theory and have discovered that vacuum has virtual sub-atomic particles spontaneously appearing and disappearing, giving rise to omnipresent random noise.
If Cage’s concept of silence was positive, our experience of it, our associations with it, are often more problematic. Collective, imposed silence, for longer than a few heartbeats, tends to create physical, visceral tension and anxiety, rather than a tranquil meditative state. And as soon as one considers the notion of collective silence, one encounters other, more troubling associations.
Silence became one of the dominant metaphors for the Occupation, a blanket of silence over all kinds of enquiry, an emptiness that filled up with fear (Butor described the feeling that ‘nothing was happening, but that this nothing, at the same time, was bloody’). Silence here could betray or protect, could be resistance (as in Vercors’ Le Silence du Mer) or (active or passive) collaboration. And when liberation came, the imposed silence was replaced by a chosen silence, as a generation (because of guilt, or horror) chose to regard the Nazi era as a nightmare that could be put to one side as an aberration. Thus for Butor, silence is something to be fought against – he sees writing, words and music as resistance, every word or note a blow for life.
For Sebald too, silence carries a terrible weight of complicity and conspiracy. Schlant has described West German literature since the war as ‘a literature of absence and silence contoured by language’. Sebald’s fiction has been characterised as presenting us with a ‘Holocaust in absence’ – ‘the edge of darkness that Sebald’s fictions repeatedly bring us up against: a place and a time in which the ordinary constraints of history give way to an immense penumbral continuum of human suffering, exile, and “silent” catastrophes that take place “without much ado.”’ (Anderson, 121). His references are often oblique – in After Nature, Sebald imagines the clouds into which ‘without a word the breath Of legions of human beings had been absorbed’ (96), and in the first of his ‘Poemtrees’, when the landscape that you pass in a train ‘mutely … watches you vanish’ (p3), because it’s Sebald, we think of the trains that crossed Europe, taking their passengers to annihilation. As Ian Galbraith says, ‘Sebald’s landscapes are never innocent’ (p. 189), citing the references to Landsberg and Kaufbeuren in ‘Cold Draught’, and to Turkenfeld in ‘Somewhere’ (Across the Land and the Water, pp. 57, 135)
As George Steiner writes, the points where words fail have traditionally been seen as the points where music begins, or where we fall silent in the presence of the divine, but there is a more recent phenomenon, where ‘language simply ceases … The poet enters into silence. Here the word borders not on radiance or music, but on night’ (46). Is this silence, a ‘suicidal rhetoric’, nevertheless a valid and moral alternative when ‘the words in the city are full of savagery’?
References:
Mark M Anderson, ‘The Edge of Darkness: On W. G. Sebald’, October, 106 (Autumn, 2003), 102-21
Michel Butor, Curriculum vitae: entretiens avec André Clavel (Paris: Plon, 1996)
Thomas Clifton, ‘The Poetics of Musical Silence’, Musical Quarterly, 52, 2 (1976) 163-81
Paul Griffiths, Modern Music: A Concise History from Debussy to Boulez (London: Thames & Hudson, 1990)
Jean Guéhenno, Journal des années noires, 1940-1944 (Paris: Gallimard, 1947)
Florence Rigal, Butor : la pensée-musique (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2004)
Florence Rigal, ‘De la polyphonie à la monodie: Butor, une voix politique’, L’Esprit Créateur, 47, 2 (Summer 2007), 33-42
Ernestine Schlant, The Language of Silence. West German Literature and the Holocaust (NY; London: Routledge, 1999)
W G Sebald, After Nature (London: Penguin, 2002)
W G Sebald, On the Natural History of Destruction (NY: The Modern Library, 2004)
W G Sebald, ‘Bleston. A Mancunian Cantical’, Across the Land and the Water: Selected Poems, 1964-2001 (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2011)
George Steiner, Language and Silence: Essays on Language, Literature, and the Inhuman (NY, Atheneum, 1982)
Eric de Visscher, ‘”There’s no such a thing as silence…” John Cage’s Poetics of Silence’, Interface, 18 (1989), 257-68
Passing Time 