text:
Redressing the Balance
Levinus Vincent’s Wonder Theatre of Nature
By Bert van de Roemer
August 20, 2014

Bert van de Roemer explores the curiosity cabinet of the Dutch collector Levinus Vincent and how the aesthetic drive behind his meticulous ordering of the contents was in essence religious, an attempt to emphasise the wonder of God's creations by restoring the natural world to its prelapsarian harmony.

The cabinet of curiosities of the collector Levinus Vincent (1658-1727) was known as one of the finest and most remarkable in the Dutch Republic during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. A visitor once stated that, in the same way that nobody would believe you could visit Rome without seeing the pope, so nobody would believe you‘d visited Amsterdam without seeing Vincent’s collection. Vincent himself called his collection a “Wonder Theatre of Nature” (Wondertooneel der Nature). The collection comprised of eight cabinets containing, among other things: 600 phials of animal cadavers in spirits, 288 boxes of indigenous and exotic insects, 32 drawers of shells and crustaceans, 14 drawers of minerals and fossils, and a cabinet with a woodland-like scene created from different kinds of corals and sponges.
Though the sheer volume and variety of exotic and marvellous objects on display played a key part in the fame of Vincent’s collection, it was also the unique manner in which these objects were presented which made the collection so special. Indeed, a German visitor, the scholar and bibliophile Zacharias Conrad von Uffenbach, wondered what was cause for more astonishment, the objects themselves or the novel manner of their presentation. Through various prints Vincent had made of his cabinets we can see just what so impressed its visitors and the enormous effort that Vincent and his wife Joanna van Breda must have taken in arranging their precious collectables.
Earlier collections of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries usually displayed a heterogeneous assemblage based on the accumulation of individual objects, all juxtaposed in such a way as to emphasise variety, abundance and contrast. In the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, however, a new tendency of ordering began to gain favour. Collectors were focused more on the overall composition of their collection as a totality, paying particular attention to the proportional and aesthetic harmony between the individual objects. More and more the abundance of nature became subject to a mathematical and symmetrical ordering. The cabinets of Vincent, so painstakingly arranged by himself and his wife Joanna van Breda, were at the forefront of this movement and the example par excellence of such a style.
The great importance that such an aesthetic ordering played in Vincent’s cabinet is shown in the frontispiece he had designed for his small catalogue, Wondertooneel der Nature, published in 1706. In the background of the image there stretches out a hall with eight symmetrically placed cabinets. The foreground reveals allegorical figures that tell the viewer about various aspects of collecting. The figure on the far left represents the Explorer. He holds a net to collect insects, fishes and other small animals, and the zodiac around his shoulders shows that his inquisitive mind should have no limits. He is shown peering under the exquisitely embroidered garment of the figure next to him, who represents Nature, here depicted as the many breasted goddess Isis with a city wall crown on her head and a globe under her arm. The Explorer, ever curious, is investigating what Nature has to offer. To the right of Nature sits the personification of Seafaring with oar in hand and a shell on her head under which flows her hair as waves of the sea. She represents the possibility given to Dutch collectors to be able to collect such exquisite exotica from the East and the West. At the far right of the picture is a reclining figure holding a letter, a caduceus and a jar containing a lizard. Behind her ear sits a writing pen. She represents the Enthusiast or the Collector, describing and noting down everything she observes and communicating this with her fellow collectors and enthusiasts.
With respect to this new method of harmonious and aesthetic ordering, the sculpted group in the background at the very back of the hall between the cabinets is particularly significant. The woman in the middle is described as a ‘swift nymph’ who is responsible for the good order of the collection; the beehive in her hands expresses that her busy efforts can be compared with the indefatigable work of the bees, constantly storing honey in the ‘remarkable structure’ of wax cells. The nymph is assisted by two putti, named ‘Pattern’ and ‘Adornment’. The former holds a compass and a set square and takes care of the harmonious layout of the ground-plans, the latter holds a peacock’s tail and a drawing and sees to it that the vertical elevations of the cupboards make for a splendorous and magnificent sight.
The end results of this expert ordering become apparent in the seven prints of the separate cabinets shown in the second part of the catalogue. A closer look at these will show how Vincent and Joanna varied in different modes of display, but were both consistent in their desire for harmonic proportion. For instance, Vincent possessed two large cupboards of which the upper halves comprised five shelves filled with phials containing animals suspended in spirits, including remoras, swordfish, snakes, toucans, sloths, opossums, chameleons, crocodiles and even some human embryos. The space between the shelves diminished gradually on each higher level and Vincent gives, like all of his other drawers and cupboards, the exact measurements in his catalogue. Each shelf was divided into thirteen compartments by delicately turned pillars and each compartment contained one large phial flanked by two smaller ones. When looking at these prints, comparison with the bees in their beehive seems certainly apt. The cupboards presented an elegant harmonic spectacle in which proportional and geometric order ruled.
Another, more stylized mode of display, can be seen in the cabinet containing insects, eggs and dried animals. In this print, one of the drawers with insects is turned on its side to show its contents to the beholder. The butterflies, beetles and flies are arranged in decorative patterns of symmetrical curls and loops. The countless individual specimens form the tesserae by which the grander form is built. In his description Vincent stresses that every insect was placed according to their colour, size and design in relation to the adjacent specimen, but also with consideration of the total design that, according to Vincent, resembled pieces of embroidery: ‘a work that is impossible to represent in words or images’. Looking at the print we can only wonder what the effect would have been like in real life with all the shining and brilliant colours of the insects still present. Vincent told a German visitor, who compared the drawers with delightful tapestries, that tsar Peter the Great took to his knees before this cabinet to take a closer look, a posture that was later interpreted to be an act of praise.
The pride of the collection was a cabinet containing 68 drawers with 288 boxes of insects and some small birds. Vincent stresses that the collectables here were submitted to an ‘extraordinary regular order’. As science historian Emma Spary has pointed out in her article “Scientific Symmetries”, the print shows a deliberate juxtaposition of the boundless variety of nature with the strict ordering practices of the collector. She discerns three tiers. In the upper part we see three columns of drawers, showing the ‘order imposed by the human possessor’ and expressing the ‘classificatory principles used by the naturalist’. The upright drawers in the lower half presenting their contents show how the ‘strong contrasts in form and pattern’ of the insects were subjected to a ‘bilateral symmetry in ordering’. On the ground, the third tier, we see specimens ‘placed completely at random, even, apparently, escaping the frame of the picture’. They show the boundless and disordered state in which nature presents herself, and which man could bring into better, more organized states through his intellectual and artistic capacities.
From a modern point of view the activities of Vincent and Joanna might seem a frivolous way of passing time, but we only have to think about the enormous amount of effort they must have put into their compositions to understand the many words of praise from their guests. For example, creating the drawer with butterflies must have been a particularly laborious and toilsome task. First, as insects constrict their legs and wings as they die, each specimen would have to have been brought back to its natural posture. This was done by soaking them and then placing each leg and wing, without breaking them, to their original state. Next, a rough sketch of the total design would have been made, which was then elaborated on special gridded paper. This would then have been transferred to the bottom of the velvet-lined drawer. Then, with tiny needles each insect, one by one, would have been pinned in the drawer, slowly building up the total form. The utmost care was taken so that each specimen fitted according to their proportion, colour and design in relation to its neighbour. Thus a gigantic work of natural mosaic was created. But even then the work would have still not been finished: three to four times a year all the boxes and drawers with insects would have to have been rubbed with lavender oil for preservation.
In the panegyrics on the collection the designs of Vincent and Joanna are often compared with the most delicate pieces of embroidery, tapestry or damask. This was no coincidence, as it relates to Vincent’s trade. In the literature he is often described as a ‘damask merchant’ or simply a ‘merchant’ but this does not fully do him justice. He was indeed a merchant of luxurious tissues such as silks and damask, but first and foremost he presented himself as a ‘designer of patterns’. The silk production was a complex and specialized industry that involved many different crafts, from creating the first thread to selling the final cloth. Pattern designers often had an artistic background and from Vincent himself – whose education remains a mystery – it is known that he was a member of the guild of St. Luke, the guild for painters. The artistic skills he used in his trade were applied to add lustre to his collection. In his catalogues, time and time again, Vincent emphasizes that the arrangements were according to his own ‘ordinance and design’. It seems to have been of great importance. He also repeatedly expresses the great pains and costs it took to maintain his cabinet. But it was certainly not an idle pastime. He declares that many visitors, whilst looking at his collection, were strengthened in their religious faith.
Vincent presented this as his ultimate goal. He noted the beneficial effects of his cabinet: the righteous saw themselves affirmed in their beliefs, while the ungodly found reason to acknowledge the Almighty. The faith of visitors was not only affirmed by the magnificent objects they beheld, but also by the special manner of its presentation. Levinus and Joanna were creating a spectacle that presented nature in a harmonious and balanced state, a state which it had once known in Paradise. After the Fall and the Deluge, nature was considered to have departed from this original harmony and fallen into disarray. This was now rectified by Levinus’ and Joanna’s intricate and laborious work. One visitor wrote: ‘Where once in paradise was Adam with his Eva, thou are there with your spouse to arrange God’s wonders.’ Another poem expressed how Joanna and Levinus ‘re-created’ nature in their cabinet.  By presenting their collectables in such designs they were not only presenting a pleasurable sight, but also restoring nature to the beauty of its prelapsarian state. In this way, in Vincent’s room of cabinets, knowledge of nature, aesthetic appreciation and religious contemplation all intermingled and enhanced each other. His collection functioned, indeed, as a wonder theatre of nature.
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

author: ert van de Roemer


text:
Forgotten Failures of African Exploration

By Dane Kennedy
April 22, 2015

Dane Kennedy reflects on two disastrous expeditions into Africa organised by the British in the early-19th century, and how their lofty ambitions crumbled before the implacable realities of the continent.

The exploration of Africa by the British is a story that has been told time and again, often in tiresome detail.  We have shelves full of biographies of famous explorers like David Livingstone and Henry Morton Stanley, along with countless other books on the subject.  These tales of adventure invariably end in the hero’s triumphant return to “civilization” or brave death in “darkest Africa”. Such stories were popular with the Victorian public, and they remain popular today. Yet some major African expeditions have never received much attention.  These were expeditions that ended in ignominious failure.  Because they undermine the triumphalist narrative of the European encounter with Africa, they have been all but erased from historical memory.  For this reason alone, they deserve revisiting.  They also happen to tell us a lot about what the British hoped to achieve in Africa, and why it proved such a challenge.
The Napoleonic wars had barely come to an end when in 1815 the British government sent two large, well-financed expeditions into the African interior.  One was a naval expedition whose mission was to sail up the Congo River, break through its barrier of cataracts, and push as far upriver as possible.  The other was an army expedition whose mission was to march inland from the Guinea coast, contact African states in the interior, and follow the Niger River to its outlet.  Europeans still did not know where the Congo River began or the Niger River ended.  Some geographers speculated that they were one and the same body of water, raising hope that the two expeditions might meet one another on their journeys.  That hope, along with all the others authorities invested in the two expeditions, would be swept away by the implacable realities of Africa.
What we know about the naval expedition comes mainly from the posthumous journals of its commander, James H. Tuckey, and its chief naturalist, Christen Smith, which were published as Narrative of an Expedition to Explore the River Zaire, Usually Called the Congo, in South Africa, in 1816 (London: John Murray, 1818).  Like many naval expeditions of the era, it was presented as a scientific enterprise, sent out to gather knowledge about the natural world.  Sir Joseph Banks, president of the Royal Society and leading proponent of scientific exploration, helped plan the expedition.  He recruited Smith, a botanist trained at the University of Copenhagen, and recommended that Bolton and Watt build a steamship specially designed to carry its crew up the Congo.  Though the steamship didn’t work out, the expeditionary party included, in addition to Smith, a zoologist, a geologist, a marine biologist, and a gardener from Kew.  The book ends with a series of appendices detailing the hydrographic data, natural specimens, and ethnographic information collected by the expedition.  Along with some of the book’s illustrations, the appendices testify to its scientific ambitions.
So what went wrong?  First, the expedition encountered suspicion and resistance from those Africans whose cooperation it required.  At Embomma, the main port at the mouth of the Congo, slave merchants declared that “our intentions could not be good, and that the King should . . . not let me ascend the river” (p. 109).  They suspected that the expedition’s aim was to shut down the slave trade, a not unreasonable assumption in light of the British naval patrols that were sailing in West African waters with precisely this purpose in mind.  Tuckey had to give “my assurances of not coming to prevent the slave trade, or to make war” (p. 110).  Even so, slave traders repeatedly obstructed the progress of the expedition.  The slave trade had other adverse effects.  The expedition’s chief translator was a freed slave from the region who was reunited at Embomma with his father.  Although he accompanied the expedition further upriver, he soon deserted, taking four Embomma porters with him.  For all its claims of scientific neutrality, the expedition found itself inextricably enmeshed in the turmoil caused by the slave trade and its suppression.
The fatal blow, however, came as a result of the region’s dreaded disease environment.  The party was struggling to bypass the cataracts by land when, one by one, its members fell ill.  Tuckey’s party decided to turn back, but the return journey was “worse for us than the retreat from Moscow” (p. 222).  His journal entries became briefer and less coherent.  He was soon dead: so was Smith, his team of naturalists, and over a dozen officers and members of the crew.  All had been swept away by yellow fever.  In the words of John Barrow, the Admiralty official who had planned the mission, “never were the results of an expedition more melancholy and disastrous” (p. xliii).
While Tuckey’s journal details the ordeals he and men endured on the expedition, it also includes passages that suggest the sheer sense of wonder that he must have felt as he ventured up the Congo.  In an early entry, he describes “the lofty mangroves overhanging the boat, and a variety of palm trees vibrating in the breeze; immense flocks of parrots alone broke the silence of the woods with their chattering, towards sun-set” (p. 91).  And the final poignant sentence of his journal, written shortly before he died, observed: “Flocks of flamingos going to the south denote the approach of the rains” (p. 225).
If the Congo expedition was a tragedy, then — to borrow Karl Marx’s famous dictum — the Niger expedition was a farce.  It set out from a trading station at the mouth of the Rio Nunez River.  Its aim was to march into the interior, establish diplomatic and trading relations with African kingdoms along the way, and follow the Niger downstream in the footsteps of Mungo Park, the Scottish explorer who had disappeared a decade earlier during his journey to trace the river’s course.  The expedition consisted of 69 Royal African Corps troops (40 of them white, 29 black), 32 African civilians, 200 pack animals, several field cannon, various other weapons, a plentiful supply of gifts for local rulers, and the standard necessities for such a large force.  Scientific objectives were less prominent in this expedition, though it did include a naturalist, the German Adolphus Kummer.  The party was still in base camp when its commander, Major Peddie, succumbed to some sort of fever, as did another officer.  Unbowed, the expedition set out under a new commander, Captain Campbell.
While disease posed a threat to the men, it proved even more deadly to the pack animals they used to carry their goods and supplies.  Horses, donkeys, bullocks, and camels died off at an alarming rate.  This proved to be the expedition’s undoing.  It had moved scarcely a hundred miles into the interior when the losses reached crisis proportions.  With nearly half its stock dead, it had to bury its field guns and appeal to the ruler of Futa Jallon for porters.  This ruler, known as the Almamy, proved a shrewd negotiator.  He repeatedly upped his demands for payment, withdrawing his porters on each occasion until the British gave in.  He also placed crippling restrictions on the route the caravan wanted to take through his territory.  It gradually dawned on Captain Campbell that the Almamy had no intention of allowing his party to reach its destination: he wanted to prevent the British from supplying his enemy, the kingdom of Sego, with arms.  Eventually, the expedition was forced to abandon its supplies and retreat to the coast, where Captain Campbell promptly died, as did the officer who succeeded him.
End of story?  Hardly.  In an astonishing act of hubris, the British gave it another go, and with a stubbornness that beggars belief, they adopted the same strategy that had proven so disastrous the first time.  Now under the command of Major William Gray, the expedition regrouped and set out from the mouth of the Gambia River, roughly a hundred miles north of its previous point of departure.  Once again it relied on a train of pack animals to move its supplies, and once again they succumbed to diseases, parasites, and poisonous plants.  Once again the expedition tried to hire porters from local rulers, and once again those rulers used this leverage to make extortionate demands for gifts and transit fees while working “to oppose our further progress” (p. 211).  The rule of Kaarta actually began in fact to refer to “the whites [as] his tributaries” (p. 263).  Throughout these ordeals, Gray continued to insist that he driven by a disinterested desire to reach the Niger and trace its course.  “Whenever I spoke of the Niger, or my anxiety to see it,” Gray reports, his African interlocutors “asked me if there were no rivers in the country. . . we inhabit” (p. 349).  Although the book he wrote about the expedition was titled Travels in Western Africa in the Years 1818, 19, 20, and 21 from the River Gambia, through Woolli, Gondoo, Galam, Kasson, Kaarta, and Foolidoo, to the River Niger (London: John Murray, 1825), he never actually set eyes on the Niger.
Like its naval counterpart, this land expedition ran into resistance from local elites who feared that the British would interfere in their slave trading operations.  It also found that it had entered an environment plagued by wars between neighboring states, making passage through the region nearly impossible.  Grey finally swallowed his pride and appealed for rescue to the French, whose influence in the region the British had sought to supplant.  The forlorn party finally returned to the coast a full six years after the original expedition had set out.  The long endeavor had proven a costly, ignominious failure.
These were the two most ambitious expeditions the British would undertake in Africa until the equally disastrous Niger expedition of 1841.  Though their failure was an embarrassment that the British quickly erased from their collective memory, these expeditions are no less worthy of attention than the West African expeditions that made household names of Mungo Park, Hugh Clapperton, John Lander, and others.  They are in some respects more illuminating than their more successful counterparts about the mix of motives that drove the British to explore Africa.  Science—geographical science in particular—certainly played a prominent role, but so too did various other considerations.  Both expeditions were driven by a desire to establish a new relationship with Africa and Africans in the aftermath of the abolition of the slave trade.  These probes of the main river systems of West and Central Africa sought highways into the interior that could facilitate alternative trading opportunities.  Establishing diplomatic relations with states in the African interior was part of this strategy, but it also presumed that force might be required.  This was why the army expedition was so large and heavily armed.  It was prepared to engage in colonial conquest.  Similarly, the commander of the naval expedition believed that “the progress of civilization [in Africa] can only be done by colonization” (p. 187).
Yet the failure of both expeditions to achieve their objectives exposed the stark disparity between ambition and achievement.  The British still lacked the capacity to enter the continent and intervene in its affairs in any meaningful way.  In part, this was due to the African disease environment, which proved so destructive to both expeditions.  But it was also due to the strength and resourcefulness of African states and peoples: they were able to obstruct and undermine the objectives of the British at every turn. The most successful explorers were those who recognized their vulnerability and worked in careful collaboration with indigenous parties.  What the two expeditions discussed here demonstrate is that the explorers of Africa may have been the harbingers of colonial conquest, but they were hardly its agents.
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

author: Dane Kenned

source: public-domain-review

type: essay

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/


text:
Wild Heart Turning White
Georg Trakl and Cocaine
By Richard Millington
October 29, 2014

To mark the 100th anniversary of the death by cocaine overdose of Austrian lyric poet Georg Trakl, Richard Millington explores the role the drug played in Trakl's life and works.

He doesn’t know whether his behaviour was unusual, he didn’t drink but took large amounts of cocaine.
This remark is taken from the medical file of Georg Trakl and is part of a brief account of the poet’s movements and behaviour in the month or so preceding his committal for observation to a psychiatric hospital in Kraków in early October 1914. Just six weeks earlier, towards the end of August, the 27-year-old Trakl had undertaken the 1000-kilometre train journey from Innsbruck, at the western end of the Habsburg Empire, to the far eastern crownland of Galicia, where he was to be deployed as a military pharmacist. His frontline experience was brief but traumatic. During the Battle of Grodek-Rawa Ruska of September 8-11, he was assigned sole care of ninety badly wounded soldiers sheltering in a barn, a task for which he had neither the training nor the equipment. As he later recounted from his hospital bed in Kraków to his friend and publisher Ludwig von Ficker, when one of the wounded men had ended his own suffering by shooting himself in the head, Trakl had fled outside only to be confronted by the sight of local peasants hanging lifeless in the trees. One evening during the westward retreat of the defeated Austro-Hungarian forces, he announced his own intention to shoot himself, but was forcefully disarmed by his comrades. His committal followed on October 6, and he died in hospital on November 3. His medical file lists the cause of death, complete with exclamation mark, as “Suicid durch Cocainintoxication!”
When news of Trakl’s death on the Russian front reached intellectual celebrity Karl Kraus in Vienna, Kraus reacted by claiming that the poet was “hardly a victim of war. It was always incomprehensible to me that he could live at all. His insanity wrestled with godly things”. In the light of what we now know about Trakl’s final months, it is fair to conclude that Kraus underestimated the role that the war played in his demise: there are indeed compelling reasons to number him among its many victims. Yet the enduring value of Kraus’s assessment is that it draws attention to the importance of other factors that made Trakl’s hold on life so tenuous even before first-hand experience of armed conflict precipitated his final crisis. His war story is neither one of the destruction of innocence nor of the betrayal of naïve faith, but rather of the exacerbation of existing vulnerability. What, then, are we to make of Kraus’s assertion that Trakl’s “insanity wrestled with godly things”? First and foremost, the poet’s readers are likely to associate this statement with his dark, exquisite, often enigmatic verse, once characterized by Ludwig Wittgenstein as “beautiful yet incomprehensible” and as possessing “the tone of true genius”. Rainer Maria Rilke was similarly startled by its other-worldly quality, comparing the act of reading his younger compatriot’s second published collection Sebastian in Dream (1915) to being “pressed against panes of glass: for Trakl’s experience occurs like mirror images and fills its entire space, which, like the space in the mirror, cannot be entered”.
Unlike Wittgenstein and Rilke, however, Kraus knew Trakl personally, even having holidayed with him for ten days in Venice in August 1913, and when he expressed amazement at the poet’s ability to “live at all”, he was probably thinking less of his poetry than of his personality. Many aspects of Trakl’s biography point to chronic maladjustment. This is reflected to varying degrees in his inability to hold down a regular job, his sometimes eccentric behavior, his tendency to brooding and melancholy, his habitual identification with abject figures (such as Germany’s best-known feral child Kaspar Hauser), his suspiciously close attachment to his younger sister Grete, and last but not least his drug and alcohol abuse. Trakl’s partiality for “dark poisons”, as he would call them in several late poems, embodied a self-destructive tendency that at a basic, physiological level certainly did more than anything else to render his earthly existence so precarious. “A heavy drinker and drug-eater” is the characterization offered by Ficker, a man by no means given to cheap sensationalizing, least of all in matters concerning his brilliant protégé. From the perspective of Trakl’s wider biography, the cocaine overdose that killed him appears as the culminating act in an unrelenting process of self-poisoning that loomed large over his brief adult life.
Documentary evidence of Trakl’s cocaine use is restricted to the notes in his medical file and therefore to the ten-week period of his active military service in Galicia and hospitalization in Kraków. It is probable, however, that he had at least tried cocaine before, as this was in common medicinal use in the years before the First World War. Ease of access to the full range of available pharmaceuticals was one of several advantages presented by Trakl’s decision to pursue pharmacy as a respectable and gainful career to complement his literary endeavours. He took his first steps along this path immediately after leaving school in autumn 1905, starting with a three-year apprenticeship at a local chemist’s shop in his native Salzburg, followed by two years of pharmacy study in the imperial capital Vienna. Trakl’s letters suggest that his two intoxicants of preference during the pre-war years were alcohol and Veronal (the first barbiturate to be marketed for medicinal purposes), but he is known to have used a wide range of substances, and clearly the imperative to achieve intoxication in any form was more important for him than particular effects associated with individual substances.
Ready availability was probably an important reason for Trakl’s choice of cocaine while on active service in Galicia. First isolated from Andean coca leaves by Friedrich Gaedcke in 1855, in the final decades of the nineteenth century the cocaine alkaloid had been extolled as something of a wonder drug, most enthusiastically by none other than the young Sigmund Freud. Popular tonics such as Vin Mariani and Coca-Cola had made its stimulant effects available to a wide consumer base throughout Europe and North America. Among its numerous medical applications, its local anaesthetic properties had the most profound and lasting impact, so much so that the suffix –caine subsequently became standard in naming synthetic substances with similar properties. An exponential increase in the need for anaesthetics explains the accelerated production and geographical diffusion of cocaine during the First World War. As Hans Maier explains in his 1926 study Der Kokainismus, the main European source of the drug at this time was the German pharmaceutical industry. Whereas recreational use had previously been restricted mostly to major urban centres, the war made cocaine relatively easy to obtain in places as remote, for example, as the Galician countryside to which Trakl’s unit was posted, or for that matter the small Russian village in which Mikhail Bulgakov’s story “Morphine” is set (“Morphine” tells the story of a young doctor who unsuccessfully attempts to cure his morphine addiction by replacing morphine with cocaine and is based on Bulgakov’s own experience of the years 1917-18 in the province of Smolensk). In the aftermath of the war, as Maier notes, the chaotic distribution of army stocks aided the huge rise in the popularity of cocaine that saw it become a “champagne drug” among European socialites during the roaring twenties.
In contrast to his medical file, Trakl’s poetry contains no obvious traces of the heavy cocaine use of his final months — or indeed of any earlier, undocumented use. In this respect it differs from the literary work of his German contemporary Gottfried Benn, a doctor specializing in skin and venereal diseases who between 1915 and 1917 was stationed at a hospital for prostitutes in occupied Brussels. Benn’s cocaine experiments of his Brussels period have a clear literary correlative in several poems and dramatic scenes celebrating the euphoria and vitality associated with cocaine intoxication. Trakl’s reticence about cocaine is consistent with a broader pattern in his poetic treatment of intoxicants. Other terms excluded from his poetic lexicon despite denoting substances he is known to have consumed in considerable quantities include alcohol, beer, schnapps, chloroform, barbiturate, Veronal, morphine, and opium. Of themselves, these omissions might appear unremarkable. Like the Polish Modernist Witkacy, who signed many paintings not with his own initials but with those of the drugs he had consumed while producing them, poets of the post-Romantic age might sometimes choose to insert factual or fictional records of self-medication into their works as tools of self-stylization, but there is no expectation for them to do so. Yet in Trakl’s case, these omissions become significant because of the apparent contradiction they present to the overall prominence within his poetry of psychoactive substances and their effects.
One distinguishing feature of Trakl’s literary approach to drugs is the lack of an obvious confessional gesture, a lack that places him outside the dominant tradition inaugurated by Thomas De Quincey’s early nineteenth-century account of his opium-induced visions. Instead, direct and indirect references to intoxicants and intoxication are integrated closely into his poetic diction and contribute to its distinctive flavour. The poetry he wrote over the last five years of his life is chiefly concerned with plotting parallel processes of decay in the natural and human worlds, and intoxication plays a significant part in aestheticizing his lyric speaker’s confrontation with grim reality. “Towards Evening My Heart” from his first published collection Poems (1913) is illustrative:
Towards Evening My Heart    In the evening you hear the scream of bats,    Two black horses jump in the meadow,    The red maple rustles.    To the traveller the small inn appears by the wayside.    Wonderful the taste of young wine and nuts,    Wonderful: stumbling drunk into darkening wood.    Through black branches painful bells sound,    On the face dew drips.
Drunkenness here is more than an escape. What is “wonderful” about it is not that it changes or erases the content of the speaker’s consciousness, which remains “painful”, but that it gives his consciousness an intoxicated-aesthetic form. The instrument of intoxication mentioned is also representative. In his poetry, Trakl shows an overwhelming preference for wine, “young” or otherwise (other epithets include “fiery”, “golden” and “purple”), which is less a reflection of his real-life habits than a sign of how well this beverage fits into a wider framework of rich pastoral and religious imagery. The modern and medical connotations of a word like “cocaine”, by contrast, make it quite unsuitable for Trakl’s poetic purposes.
Combined with knowledge of the heavy cocaine use of his final months, the deep integration of intoxication into Trakl’s poetics has nonetheless encouraged commentators to pick out indirect cocaine references in several poems. According to Alberto Castoldi, for instance, Trakl’s oxymoron “black snow” encapsulates cocaine’s ambivalence as an instrument of both self-abasement and self-transcendence. He cites the opening quatrain of the proto-surrealist “Delirium”, composed in 1913, by way of illustration:
The black snow that runs from the rooftops;    A red finger dips into your forehead    Blue flakes sink into the bare room,    These are the dead mirrors of lovers.
Attempts to pin determinate symbolic meaning to Trakl’s “delirious” images are necessarily fraught, so readings of this kind must be treated with caution. Moreover, it should be remembered that for a confirmed landscape poet such as Trakl, the primary referent of a word such as “snow” will always be “snow” in the literal, meteorological sense. Nonetheless, the plausibility of seeing hidden cocaine references in lines such as these has an intriguing etymological basis. Maier notes that the nasal inhalation of cocaine in powder form emerged as a popular form of administration in the years 1912-14, and it was precisely this new fashion that produced the drug’s soon legendary association with whiteness and its common metaphorical designation as “snow” (if anything, even more common in German than in English). The affirmation of cocaine symbolism in a poem such as “Delirium” would place Trakl in the poetic tradition that Marcus Boon associates with Charles Baudelaire, whose reticence about intoxicants in his poetry (conspicuous by contrast with the directness of his famous prose disquisition Les Paradis artificiels) “contributes to a certain literary myth” about drugs, surrounding them with an aura of mystery and secrecy and giving them an almost godly or diabolical unspeakability.
Accepting the possibility of covert cocaine symbolism in Trakl’s whiteness and snow imagery means that certain images come to look distinctly like premonitions of the poet’s own fate. The lines “A heart / Turns rigid in snowy stillness” occur in the poem “Limbo”, written in spring 1914, just a few months before his departure for the eastern front, while the poem “The Heart”, which dates to the same period, opens with the line “A wild heart turned white by the wood” and closes with “O heart / Shimmering across into snowy coolness”. As it happens, the prophetic tone in Trakl’s poetry became increasingly pronounced over the last year or so of his life, and the scope of his visions was often much broader. The works of his final period abound with images of collapsing cities, dying peoples and falling stars, although his attention repeatedly turns, as it had in the pastoral scenes of his earlier work, to the fate of individuals or specific groups — women, lovers, soldiers — within his now-apocalyptic landscapes. The last and most heavily anthologized poem he wrote, one of only two he composed during his frontline service in Galicia, contains the most succinct summation of the decline theme running right through his oeuvre (“all roads lead to black decay”), as well as probably the bleakest of all his prophecies in its stark concluding image of genocidal annihilation (“the unborn grandchildren”). The title of this poem, “Grodek”, evokes the site of the battle where the poet himself had, as he related to Ficker, been touched by “the full misery of mankind”.
And here we in turn touch upon the most definite link between Trakl’s poetry and his cocaine use. It is a link that involves neither any obvious influence of his drug use upon his literary work, nor any kind of direct or indirect poetic representation of his life experience, but rather a concurrent intensification of established tendencies in both spheres. Just as his final poem provides the most radical expression of the preoccupation with decay and decline characterizing his entire oeuvre, so too his heavy cocaine use of the same period amounts to a radicalization of the self-destructive tendency that was always inherent in his drug habit. Following their own internal logic, both developments came to an abrupt end when the poet’s own wild heart turned white on November 3 1914.
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

date: October 29, 2014

author: Richard Millington


text:
Ignorant Armies
Private Snafu Goes to War
By Mark David Kaufman
March 25, 2015

Between 1943 and 1945, with the help of Warner Bros.' finest, the U.S. Army produced a series of 27 propaganda cartoons depicting the calamitous adventures of Private Snafu. Mark David Kaufman explores their overarching theme of containment and how one film inadvertently let slip one of the war's greatest secrets.

In early 1942, with America still reeling from the attack on Pearl Harbor, Hollywood mobilized for war.  Soon, silver-screen luminaries like Jimmy Stewart and Clark Gable were pinning wings to their lapels, making the roster of the U.S. Army Air Forces look like the opening credits of an MGM blockbuster.  And while Tinseltown bristled with shiny new uniforms and all-too-perfect smiles, neighboring Toontown was also banging the proverbial drum.  From Walt Disney to Warner Bros., the animation studios were letting slip the dogs — and ducks — of war.  Donald, of course, was a natural recruit (he’s a sailor, after all).  The feathered hero saw action in the jungles of Asia, braving snipers and ravenous crocodiles to single-wingedly wipe out an enemy airbase.  Not to be outdone, Daffy proved that he too was a bird to be reckoned with.  In 1943, the fowl-mouthed mallard parachuted commando-style behind German lines to wage unholy and untranslatable havoc.  Others followed suit: Popeye punched Nazis, Superman sunk ships, and Bugs Bunny peddled war bonds.  For these veterans of paint and light, it was a merry war, a loony war, and for none so much as for the army’s secret mascot: Private Snafu.
Every G.I. worth his creamed chipped beef knew the acronym, but when it first appeared on the barracks screen in a cartoon titled Coming! Snafu! in June of 1943 — the first of twenty-seven such films produced between 1943 and 1945 — the boys were greeted with a more wholesome interpretation: “Situation Normal, All . . . Fouled Up!”  Even watered down, this would seem a curious mantra for a series of training films aimed at preparing enlisted men for the challenges of modern world warfare — that is, until one meets the protagonist.  Introduced, tongue-in-cheek, as “a patriotic, conscientious guy who thinks the army’s swell,” Private Snafu is a short, bald, motor-mouthed Brooklynite with a penchant for catching tropical diseases, leaking classified information, and accidentally blowing himself up.  He is, in sum, a shining example of what a soldier should not be, and he stands as a testament to how the military brass evidently viewed G.I. Everyman: naïve, careless, and perpetually horny.
The cartoons were the product of an extraordinary collaboration.  During the Second World War, the production of propaganda and training films fell to the First Motion Picture Unit, a motley crew of actors, artists, writers, and filmmakers under the supervision of Hollywood director Frank Capra, that champion of small-town American values who had already given the world Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939) and would go on to direct It’s a Wonderful Life (1946).  As the ringleader of this circus, Major Capra — later Colonel Capra — oversaw not only the Snafu shorts but also the highly successful Why We Fight series, which would win him an Academy Award for “Best Documentary” in 1943.  Typically, these projects were outsourced to local studios with the necessary time and resources at their disposal.  When it came down to finding a group of animators willing to take on Private Snafu, Disney proved too expensive and too dictatorial, and so the contract went to Leon Schlesinger’s Warner Bros. Cartoons studio.  At the time, the boys of “Termite Terrace” (as the studio was known) were still relatively obscure.  In retrospect, though, the talent roster behind the Snafu cartoons reads like a pantheon of animation icons: Chuck Jones, Friz Freleng, Bob Clampett, Frank Tashlin, and the “Man of a Thousand Voices” himself, Mel Blanc.  Into this mix, add Theodor Geisel (a.k.a. “Dr. Seuss”), then working as a political cartoonist for the leftist New York newspaper PM, and the merry mashup is complete.
With so many dangerous minds on the job, it’s little wonder that work on the cartoons was carried out in the utmost secrecy.  The security measures, which divided up production duties among different departments whose individual workers were not permitted to see the finished films, make the Warner Bros. operation look like a parody of the Manhattan Project.  But in spite of the hush-hush atmosphere, the subject matter seems harmless enough on the surface.  The twenty-six surviving episodes — all black-and-white — run the gamut of military safety topics: everything from how to maintain proper hygiene in the field, to what to do when faced with a squadron of malarial mosquitos, to why it’s simply not a good idea to go skipping through a mine field.  In Bob Clampett’s Fighting Tools (1943), for example, Private Snafu learns that keeping his rifle muzzle-down in the mud can lead to a sticky situation when caught off guard by a Wehrmacht patrol.  Similarly, in Chuck Jones’s Gas (1944) — an episode in which Bugs Bunny makes a brief cameo — Snafu learns the value of keeping his gas mask handy when poisonous clouds of Teutonic nastiness catch him napping under a tree.
Other cartoons foreground the challenges of working in exotic climes, such as Jones’s (ironically-titled) In the Aleutians — Isles of Enchantment (1945) and Freleng’s Hot Spot (1945), which finds Snafu humping it out in the deserts of occupied Iran.  Still others focus on the basic necessities, like keeping a proper diet on the march.  In Frank Tashlin’s bizarre The Chow Hound (1944), the ghost of a slaughtered bull presides over its own devouring, growing furious as the puerile private throws out perfectly good chunks of carcass.  The moral: don’t waste chow.  It dishonors the beasts who nobly volunteered to be “processed” for the cause.
Although such cock-and-bull stories may have had the desired effect of teaching soldiers the facts of military life, this didactic function obscures a more crucial one, that of providing an outlet for resentment while simultaneously defusing popular misconceptions, like the rumor that other branches of the service are safer and more glamorous (Three Brothers, 1944) or the nagging suspicion that everyone back home is having a ball while the grunts are out risking their lives (The Home Front, 1943).  In effect, these cartoons are a form of officially sanctioned subversion, a kind of Foucauldian pressure valve designed to vent the average soldier’s discontent, releasing just enough anarchic energy to keep the system functioning.  Take, for instance, Gripes (1943).  Directed by Freleng, this short opens with Snafu on kitchen patrol, scrubbing pots, peeling potatoes, and, well, griping:
I joined this here army to join in the fun,A-jabbin’ the Jap and a-huntin’ the Hun.And look at the job that they handed to me:KP, KP, KP, and KP!

After cataloguing more woes of army life — long lines, longer needles, and endless hours in the infirmary — the soldier’s thoughts turn to mutiny.  Fortunately, Snafu’s imagined rebellion is interrupted by his personified military conscience: the gravely-voiced, cigar-smoking, perpetually five-o’clock-shadowed Technical Fairy, First Class.  This cuddly sergeant with wings plays an avuncular role in the cartoons, managing, on occasion, to prevent the private from dismembering or otherwise making a fool of himself.
In this case, the Technical Fairy shows Snafu a vision of what would happen if he were in charge.  Upon receiving his fantasy promotion to “Master-Sarge-Super-Sarge-Whoopity-Doo,” Snafu proceeds to issue a series of dictums.  No more cleaning latrines.  No more discipline.  Instead, each enlisted man will be provided with “two dames” and an extended leave pass.  As charming as this image of state-sponsored prostitution may be, it all goes pear-shaped when the Germans make a surprise attack.  With his troops intoxicated and the Luftwaffe bearing down, Snafu decides it’s better to take a needle in the tuckus than an incendiary bomb where the stars and stripes don’t shine.  The fantasy dissolves.  Hierarchy is restored.  And while the private happily scrubs his pots and pans, the Technical Fairy dishes out wartime ethics: “The moral, Snafu, is the harder you work, / The sooner we’re gonna beat Hitler, that jerk.”  Many of the Snafu shorts follow a similar pattern: the activation of dangerous desires, which are then disarmed by the narrative logic of the cartoon itself.
This form of vicarious indulgence is also evidenced by the films’ rather frank depictions of sexuality, which were more — shall we say — developed than one would expect from cartoons of that era.  Because military films did not have to be approved by the Hays Office — the body responsible for enforcing the Motion Picture Production Code — the animators could push the boundaries of adult humor in ways that conventional Hollywood could not.  In addition to suggestive language, the cartoons abound with buxom cabaret dancers, eager girls-next-door, and mysterious femmes fatales.  These virtual pin-up queens, clearly intended to appeal to a G.I. aesthetic, invite a curious sort of voyeurism.  From a contemporary perspective, this peephole on the past can be a bit disturbing; watching a seventy-year-old image of a cartoon vixen bending over her vanity table in nothing but a garter belt, one suddenly has the uneasy realization that one is ogling the grandmother of Jessica Rabbit.  But for the lonely soldiers who first saw these films, representations of women served simultaneously as erotic outlets and warnings against being distracted by long legs and batting eyes.  For example, in Booby Traps (1944), directed by Bob Clampett, we find our hero in the desert “liberating” a local harem.  The only problem is that this bevy of bombshells is actually a nest of homicidal fembots whose curves are (quite literally) explosive.
In Snafu’s world, women — with the possible exception of one’s mother — are not to be trusted.  Indeed, the only long-term relationship that seems to work out is the odd rapport between the private and his Technical Fairy.  On at least one occasion, the happy ending culminates with an image of Snafu and his imaginary NCO engaged in a big, wet kiss. (Don’t ask.  Don’t tell.)
Each of these overarching themes — the preservation of bodily integrity, the mitigation of resentment, and the negation of female sexuality — boils down to one predominant concern: containment.  And of all the tropes of containment found in the cartoons, the most persistent is the control of information.  With titles like Spies (1943), Rumors (1943), and Censored (1944), the Snafu films present a primer on keeping one’s mouth shut.  Of these, Chuck Jones’s Spies is the most memorable.  Composed in Seussian verses, Spies finds the loquacious private home on leave with a head full of confidential plans regarding troop deployments to Africa:  ※※Indexed under…Containmentof information
I just learned a secret—      It’s a honey, it’s a pip!—But the enemy is listening,      So I’ll never let it slip.‘Cause when I learn a secret,      Boy, I zipper up my lip!

The enemy is indeed listening.  And Snafu, chronically unable to keep his zipper up in any situation, goes about unaware of the sinister stereotypes — beefy Teutons, toothy Japanese, and alley cats with gingivitis — who are poised to pick up scraps of intelligence.  Stopping at a newsstand, Snafu greets the pornography-peddling proprietor — “Hey, give me some magazines to read for when I’m on the ship!” — and his careless words are overheard by three bystanders who look suspiciously like Benito Mussolini, Hermann Goering, and Fumimaro Konoe.
“Don’t breathe a word to no one,” they chant, “but he’s going to go by ship!”  Cut to Snafu at the local watering hole, where a heady combination of booze and broads erodes the “pad-a-lock” in his brain, releasing a gush of useful information into the ready lap of a femme fatale who packs a mini-typewriter in her garter.  “Say, you’re a nifty trick,” he drunkenly tells her.  “I hope I meet some babes in Africa as cute as you are!”  Later, in her lair, Snafu manages to drop a final, crucial detail —
It’s been a wonderful evening,      And I’d like to stay some more,But I gotta get a move on—      I sail at half past four!
— at which point the Aryan beauty’s breasts transform into swastika-shaped radio transmitters with a direct line to the Führer, who, upon receiving these titbits, dispatches a pack of U-boats to intercept the transport.  The ship is torpedoed, and the private finds himself in a fiery cauldron lorded over by a hellish Hitler.  Apparently, not even a guardian fairy can prevail over the uncontrollable desire to self-destruct, a compulsion that wends its way through the cartoons with the obstinacy of a death drive.
For all their preoccupation with secrecy, however, one still wonders why the cartoons themselves were kept confidential.  What was so dangerous about personal hygiene?  Did it really matter if the Germans found out that U.S. servicemen were being encouraged to keep information from the Germans?  In short, what was the big secret?  As it happens, there was a big secret — a really big secret — but one unknown to the directors, writers, and artists who inadvertently let it slip.  In May of 1944, Jones and his team produced Going Home.  Penned (most likely) by Geisel, the cartoon was intended as yet another warning against loose lips on leave.  Upon arriving back in his hometown, Snafu proceeds to regale a succession of family members, girlfriends, bartenders, and gas station attendants with tales of Allied maneuvers, new landing field designs, and other “restricted stuff.”  Then — in one of those cosmic coincidences that reaffirm one’s belief in God, Loki, or the Illuminati — the cartoon takes a singularly prophetic turn.  Snafu brings a date to the local movie theater, where a newsreel flashes: “U. S. SECRET WEAPON BLASTS JAPS.”
The headline is followed by an image of an island reduced to a void, like a wound in the water.  Snafu grabs his girl and whispers (loudly):
I know what did it —What made the big hole —Our new flyin’ bazookaWith radar control.

As the imprudent private gives a rundown of the weapon and its features, the viewer sees a vaguely familiar image, more bomb than bazooka, with mysterious valves and menacing fins.
This, once again, was the spring of 1944.  At that very moment, grave-looking scientists in remote desert bunkers were smoking cigarettes, poring over blueprints, and ordering shipments of uranium-235.  When the powers-that-be got wind of the fact that Warner Bros. had independently invented the atomic bomb, shady departments flew into action.  The cartoon was pulled, not to see the light of day until some years after the war, and the filmmakers, who had no clue as to what was happening, suddenly found themselves in the middle of a poorly written spy thriller, complete with intimidating visits from government spooks in homburgs and trench coats.  There were no prosecutions, of course.  How could there have been?  To do so would have meant acknowledging the existence of the Manhattan Project over a year before the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  Not to mention that this was no conspiracy, but rather an accident of ink, paint, and imagination.  All the same, this chance unveiling reminds us that cartoons are themselves sites of fusion, crucibles where technology, violence, and creativity combine in ways that collapse the divide between reality and fantasy, leaving us to ponder which is more disturbing: the fact that these comic minds could randomly hit upon the most significant breakthrough in modern warfare, or that the scientists responsible for designing and building the most destructive weapon in human history — a device capable of eradicating all life on Earth in the blink of an eye — seemed to share so much in common with the creator of Wile E. Coyote.
Perhaps the ultimate irony is not that a series of military training films obsessed with maintaining secrecy nearly let the bomb drop, but that the Snafu cartoons, which flirted so promiscuously with subversion as a mode of catharsis, accidentally succeeded in becoming genuinely subversive.  Nevertheless, when the reels were shelved after the war, it’s doubtful this was due to their military indiscretions, but more likely out of fear that their racial caricatures would offend a newly rehabilitated Germany and Japan.  Now declassified and available in the public domain, the films offer a glimpse of a time before enemies became friends and friends enemies, before the Cold War ushered in a new situation, even more fouled up, in which Snafu’s “secret weapon” threatened — and continues to threaten — an ending with no merry melody, no curtain drawn, and no Porky Pig to stammer “That’s all, folks!”
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

author: Mark David Kaufman


text:
The Empathetic Camera
Frank Norris and the Invention of Film Editing
By Henry Giardina
May 20, 2015

At the heart of American author Frank Norris' gritty turn-of-the-century fiction lies an essential engagement with the everyday shock and violence of modernity. Henry Giardina explores how this focus, combined with his unique approach to storytelling, helped to pave the way for a truly filmic style.

The story of cinema begins in violence. The first motion picture camera was constructed by Etienne-Jules Marey, a French scientist who, in seeking to prove Darwin’s theory of evolution through recording animals in motion, created a rifle-shaped device — a kind of “photographic gun” — in order to record birds in flight.
Even without this detail there was, for those first exposed to moving images, a sense of violation inherent in the concept. Film was defined at the start by the same protean aspect that made it impossible to define. Was it a way of documenting life, or telling stories? Was it in service of fact or fiction? Art or science? Could the shadow-like findings of the camera ever be trusted as concrete, or as something more than apparition?
The first film apparatus, though developed at the end of the nineteenth century, only reached full maturity by the start of the quite different twentieth century. It was the concept of capturing reality in full that first appealed to the two scientists, Marey and the photographer Eadweard Muybridge, the motion picture camera’s accidental co-creators. But to its first audiences, film represented something different: a total manipulation of reality, an uncomfortable expression of modernity, and a reflection of the contradictions of modern life. A sense of the moving image as deception, as trickery, accompanied the earliest manifestations of cinema, from the abrasive thaumatrope1 onward. It was the story of the terrified audience response to the Lumiere Brothers’ 1896 film L’Arriveé d’un Train that solidified the sense of alienation between the earliest films and their audiences. This is referred to as cinema’s “founding myth” — the idea that the earliest consumers of moving pictures had neither the capacity nor the tools to distinguish film from reality.
The turn-of-the-century novelist Frank Norris makes infrequent reference to the then-new art of cinema in his writing, but when he does, it is always to a distinct purpose. In his 1899 novel McTeague, a group of characters go to the theater and are treated to a short film as part of the program. Their responses vary from wonder to distrust as they are faced with the sheer impossibility of what appears before them. McTeague himself is “awe-struck”:
“Look at that horse move his head,” he cried excitedly, quite carried away. “Look at that cable car coming — and the man going across the street. See here comes a truck. Well, I never in all my life!”
Norris had written McTeague in the late 1890s, after a term of reporting on the Spanish American war for a San Francisco newspaper. The novel — a gruesome story of greed, revenge, and sexual darwinism — was to put him on the map at the age of twenty-nine. The response of the American public of the time — still relatively prim and conservative at the turn of the century — to McTeague’s naturalism was a mixture of fascination and fear, a sense that propriety had been breached in Norris’ no holds barred tale of sex of murder. The depiction of sex and modernity was unlike anything in the current American literary landscape; as a result, the young author was somewhat uncategorizable at first. In 1899 he seemed to have come out of nowhere, a twenty-nine-year-old San Francisco reporter who had come out with a notable novel that didn’t seem to fit inside of any clear mold. In an attempt to link him to some pre-existing tradition, the American press often referred to Norris as an “American Zola” whose graphic depictions of a violent modern world went so far as to outdo the French master himself — as they would outdo Theodore Drieser years later — taking up the gauntlet with his own, more popular naturalist works. But it was Norris’ comfort with depictions of violent sexuality, the world of machines, and a sense of American “melting-pot” ethnicity (including large sections written in dialect and several unfortunate anti-semitic depictions) that made him an indecent writer by the standards of the time. It was also what made his body of work a kind of blueprint for what the cinema would become in no time at all: something that was not, as yet, full art or commodity but squarely in between, trading on sex and violence to draw its earliest audiences and keep them in their seats.
McTeague’s depiction of an early commercial film audience is a scene that fits queerly into the rest of the story, as a strange foreboding of things to come. In McTeague’s incredulity, his mother-in-law’s distrust of the film apparatus as a kind of trick, and his wife Trina’s enchantment at the device, the reader gets an encapsulated view of the different responses to one of the most violently modern events of the time: a trip to the cinema, to see a past reality unfold as if in real time before people who were slightly unable to believe in this reality. This is part of Norris’ grand project, throughout the small but thematically consistent body of work he produced from the age of twenty-nine to his death three years later at thirty-two: a depiction of the everyday shock of new media and industrialization, the concept of capturing time and presenting its fictional form as the truth, through the film apparatus. Even if the story of audience members fainting at the arrival of the train on-screen is, as many suspect, a fiction, the reason for its existence as lore stems from a very real disjuncture, part of the premise of the industrial age. How can the present reality hold a living document of the past? How can a unit of lost time make such a realistic reappearance in the present?
By the turn of the century, the complex relationship between the way life was being represented and the way representation was changing the structure of real, lived life, was becoming a study in itself. Bergson, lecturing in Paris in 1902, compared the “mechanism” of thought and the mechanism of the camera. In everyday life, he said, “we hardly do anything else than set going a kind of cinematograph inside us.”
Norris’ The Octopus came out in 1901, a year before Bergson’s lecture. In it, one of the main characters has a filmic vision before falling asleep:
. . . as his mind relaxed in that strange, hypnotic condition that comes just before sleep, a series of pictures of the day’s doings passed before his imagination like the roll of a kinetoscope.
By 1902, the natural parallel between the mind and the camera as equal agents of visual interpretation was already being drawn. What had begun as a shock to the system was quickly becoming culturally internalized, yet still somehow alien. Modernism would become a sort of response to this, putting forth a body of art and literature that centered on the juncture between physical reality and the human brain that encounters and, without missing a beat, reinterprets it.
The only distinction that seemed to have existed for the earliest film audiences was between belief and understanding. To trust in such an improbable invention as the camera required a grand, collective leap of faith, similar to the kind required by religion or occult forms of spirituality. Indeed, film was from the very start compared to ghosts, phantoms, and dreams, figments which were authored by the mind but were not to be trusted by the rational brain. These are also things that neither science nor religion had any way of making cohere, and as such would soon become signposts of psychology. It was film’s natural place inside of this same area — between something witnessed and something believed, something that exists but cannot be completely explained to the satisfaction of many — that made it appear uncanny by Freud’s famous 1919 definition: the thing that calls into question not only our external environment, but the stability of our own minds and susceptibilities, our faculties of perception.
In 1898, Norris experienced trauma of a more conventional kind during his work as a correspondent in the Spanish American War. In a letter from the front he describes the indelible imagery of battle:
I want to get these things out of my mind and the fever out of my blood and so if my luck holds I am going back to the old places for three weeks and for the biggest part of the time I hope to wallow and grovel in the longest grass I can find in the Presidio Reservation on the cliffs overlooking the ocean and absorb ozone and smell smells that don’t come from rotting and scorched vegetation, dead horses and bad water.
On his return to America, Norris’ intention was to get back to a sane, calm style of living. Instead, he used the period of recovery after the war to conceptualize and write the bulk of McTeague, the grim, realist work that would cement its author’s reputation as an unflinching naturalist, a novelist of violence. The violent reality of the changing world was not something that could be ignored or forgotten once experienced, especially in an environment of combat. It came out in Norris’ work, in cinematic manifestations which would, in turn, influence the art of filmmaking still in its infancy at the time of his death.
Norris completed eight novels in all, alongside a large body of short stories and journalistic pieces. For such a short and relatively indecisive career, the clarity and fixity of Norris’ style is surprising from the start. From McTeague onward, his themes are clear, as is his mode of spinning them into narrative. The earliest and most Victorian of his novels, Vandover and the Brute, lays out a crude, almost experimental sketch of the concept of the “human animal”, borrowed from his greatest influence and naturalistic forbear, Emile Zola. It tracks the decline of its hero, Vandover, from a state of youth and purity to a place of total corruption and degradation, brought about by sexual impropriety and a loss of funds. McTeague is a more sophisticated version of the same story, with a larger cast of characters and a greater emphasis on setting.2 McTeague the dentist is described as uneducated and hot-tempered, and seems, initially, to be saved by his marriage to Trina, a slightly more refined member of the bourgeoisie, and the child of recent German immigrants. The two of them are undone, however, by a series of changes in their income and social status, and the innate and simmering violence of both characters is slowly revealed through their decline.
The Octopus was the first novel in what Norris planned out as “The Trilogy of the Wheat”, an anthology conceived as a fictional-journalistic treatise (much like what Sinclair’s The Jungle would be in 1906) following the life of the wheat crop from growth to distribution to corporate speculation. The Octopus opened the story with a reimagining of the Mussel Slough tragedy of 1880, a bloody example of corporate monopoly that had become, by the time of Norris’ retelling in 1900, a crucial part of the history of the developing West Coast. The second novel was The Pit, which followed Laura Jadwin, a cultured and idealistic woman married to a man whose dealings in the stock market nearly destroy them both. The final novel, The Wolf, was planned to focus on wheat growth and famine in Europe. Norris died before he could begin research.
The literature of the American West was, at the turn of the century, being made almost from scratch, lacking a distinct literary tradition to extend or comment upon, or to emerge from. Its stories were based on and inspired by the evolving landscape of the West itself, poised in this period directly between its original identity as wilderness and the climate of industrialization that was rapidly becoming the new reality. The wild, sprawling landscape of California was no longer a frontier, not yet quite a metropolitan center. The film industry would of course change all that — and quickly.
Norris grew up inside of the changing urban landscapes of Chicago and San Francisco, and made it his purpose, near the end of his life, to track these changes politically in his fiction. Yet his artistic development as a painter, a journalist, and finally a prose writer, was defined by his relationship to the visual world, and the changing ways of interpreting that world that were growing up around him during the time in which he lived.
“One of the legacies of his painterly experience,” his biographers write, “was a fictional aesthetic that similarly downplayed the role of imaginative license and emphasized the Academic values of close observation of life and technical ability in its representation.” This was, as well, his journalistic inheritance. For Norris’ Wave assignments abroad, he was entrusted with a camera. “Whatever he thought of that day,” said Will Irwin, another Wave correspondent, “whatever he had seen with the eye of his flash [camera] or the eye of his imagination, he might write and print.” When he went to cover the Spanish American war, he and his fellow journalists were expected to document what they saw visually as well as in writing. It was, after all, the first filmed American war.
In Norris’ early journalistic work for The Wave and McClure’s, he had already developed the most important aspects of this style. There is in evidence the harsh, overbearing symbolism and crude metaphor which, in the novels, would give way to a variation on the Homeric epithet, a process by which he reduces his characters, by use of a repeated, unchanging phrase, to fixed visual entities, able to be called up as concrete images in the reader’s memory. There is also the forward-moving, action-driven style of narration that is circular and self-referential, such as that used to describe the panoramic views of location that open both McTeague and The Octopus, and the style of repetitive description defined by overuse of adjectives, often in threes (in McTeague, the perfume of Trina’s hair is “sweet, heavy, enervating”. McTeague’s sexual impulse, meanwhile, is “hideous, monstrous, not to be resisted”) that seek to mimic on the page the locomotive style of action they are describing in the scene. It may be that Norris’ work reflects the cinematic mission by the simple virtue of having grown up alongside it. But Norris’ tendency of editing on the page seems to lay out the blueprint for a true filmic style. If his novels are not quite screenplays, they are at the very least sophisticated film treatments, anticipating the kind of intuitive visual storytelling that film had not yet mastered.
In the period between 1909 and 1924, the classical editing technique was born, developed in America primarily by D.W. Griffith. It was also in this period that four of Norris’ major works were adapted to film. McTeague was adapted three times, The Pit twice. The first and last of these adaptations brought on a serious shift in the way that cinema as an art form and the changing laws of artistic adaptation were discussed in the culture at large. 1909’s A Corner in Wheat, adapted and directed by D.W. Griffith, showcases one of the first sophisticated uses of parallel editing in cinematic history by leaping across location to juxtapose the different social realities of its characters as they played out in the real time of the film. 1924’s Greed was Erich von Stroheim’s famous, doomed attempt to translate McTeague, page by page, to the language of the screen.
In The Octopus, Norris actually edits on the page, jumping between locations to contrast between the different realities of the disenfranchised working class and the glutted lifestyle of the rich. The discrepancy is laid out in such a way that the reader must feel some level of responsibility for it. The response is a mix of indignation, guilt, and helplessness. Here are the rich, here are the poor, here is the gap between them. The relationship between them, and how we must feel about it, is clear.
Nothing divides them but a line, a visual break in the narrative. No attempt is made on Norris’ part to ease the reader into their new location — the cut is sudden and severe, almost disorienting. It is from this strangely experimental sequence that Griffith’s own film takes its cues.
A Corner in Wheat combines the most dramatic aspects of The Octopus and The Pit to make a more emotionally succinct statement about economic disparity. Griffith condenses the thesis of the “Trilogy of the Wheat” in thirteen minutes, showing us the different lives of the wheat crop: in the abstract (the stock market) and in reality, and on the shelves, where market forces have driven its value beyond what can be afforded by lower and middle-class citizens (or even harvested by the impoverished farmers). Cause and effect are placed side by side, as tableaux.
We are given the lively dinner party in one frame:
And the poverty tableau in the next:
In the second frame the actors stand still — it is a purely visual moment without any attempt made on the part of the actors to simulate reality. The sense of life having come to a complete halt is clearer in the jarring cut between the intensely animated dinner party scene and this stark portrait. The cut is made too quickly for us to do anything but compare images, and feel.
When Griffith reinterprets the death of Norris’ villain for the screen, he uses the same cutting technique to make a vague moral point. In one frame, the Wheat King falls into the pit of threshed wheat, the very substance that has made him his fortune:
In the next, rioting breaks out at the bakery. The police are called in:
In the next cut, the Wheat King is all but buried in a violent hourglass effect. Only his fingers are visible:
Parallel editing became, after A Corner in Wheat, a type of statement technique. It was a quick and intuitive way to forge a clear relationship between two separate image sequences that, without this relationship, could have stood for anything.
In Norris’ 1897 essay, “Fiction is Selection”, he argues that writers are editors more than inventors. The job of “writer and mosaicist alike” is “to select and combine.” It is from the rough-hewn design in a writer’s brain that a story must be whittled, for nothing can be created that is not already, in some form, hidden in the folds of memory. “Imagination!” He writes. “There is no such thing; you can’t imagine anything that you have not already seen and observed.”
Film’s greatest strength was, from the start, its ability to emotionally manipulate viewers on a mass scale. It spoke to one as easily and as powerfully as it spoke to millions, controlling viewers seamlessly and guiding them toward a forgone conclusion that he believes he has come upon naturally, by an organic, empathetic process. Filmic storytelling was, in even its earliest manifestations, a way of transforming the frighteningly unpredictable human body into a predictable set of responses.
If, in the first quarter of the 20th century, the camera as mechanism stood for pure truth, editing was selection, manipulation, violence. If film as footage stood for impartiality, editing allowed for the presence of an author. Editing was the true artistic aspect of a mode of storytelling that was still too new to be considered an art form. Editing gave film what it desperately needed to become art in the eyes of its audience: a point of view.
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

author: Henry Giardina


text:
A Bestiary of Sir Thomas Browne

By Hugh Aldersey-Williams
June 17, 2015

Hugh Aldersey-Williams takes a tour through Thomas Browne's Pseudodoxia Epidemica, a work which sees one of the 17th-century's greatest writers stylishly debunk all manner of myths, in particular those relating to the world of animals.

Sir Thomas Browne was a seventeenth-century physician in the English city of Norwich. Between tending his patients, he wrote some of the greatest prose in the English language: Religio Medici, the confession of his Christian faith to those who believed he might be an atheist; Urn Burial, a meditation on our mortal remains and the vanity of monuments; and its verdant companion, The Garden of Cyrus, a speculation on the importance of pattern and number in nature.
However, the greatest and most popular work in his lifetime is the one that is now most neglected, Pseudodoxia Epidemica, a vast catalogue of “vulgar errors” — urban (and rural) myths of the seventeenth century — which Browne debunks with unique and characteristic wit, style, and generosity.
Many of these “vulgar errors” concern silly things that people believed about animals. Browne was an astute observer of natural history, well-positioned to correct these errors, and to make his own contribution to the field. He wrote a Natural History of Norfolk and gave several species their now familiar English names. What follows is an ad hoc “bestiary” drawn from these writings, intended to illustrate above all Browne’s gentle method of correcting those who too easily believe in nonsense and superstition.
The Badger
In the seventeenth century, country folk believed that the badger had legs on one side shorter than the other — the consensus was that the short legs were on the left. The idea may originate in the observation that badgers ran easily along the furrows of ploughed fields, where the legs on one side might be on higher ground than the other.
Browne might have refuted this myth simply enough by drawing attention to the fact that the badger’s legs, as measured perhaps from a convenient skeleton or preserved specimen, are of equal length. But he doesn’t do this. Instead, he wants his readers to think about it. He calls upon “the three Determinators of Truth . . . Authority, Sense, and Reason”. However, the authorities he cites (purposely chosen, one feels) are in disagreement. So we must look (“Sense”) and think (“Reason”). Browne asks us to consider what other animals we have seen that are lopsided, trusting that we will be able to think of none, before leading us to the conclusion that such asymmetry is surely “repugnant unto the course of Nature”.
The Kingfisher
Often, when learned authorities (which range from ancients such as Aristotle and Pliny to Renaissance naturalists he has learnt of on his continental travels) fail him, or when sense and reason do not convince, Browne tries an experiment.
Bizarrely, it was once believed that a dead kingfisher hung up by its bill made a good weathervane. To test the idea, Sir Thomas procures one of the dead birds and rigs it up from a thread — an untwisted silk thread, so that no bias is introduced into the experiment. The bird hangs and turns, apparently at random in relation to the wind: “it observes not a constant respect unto the mouth of the wind, but variously converting, doth seldom breast it right”, Browne tells us. Faced with this inconclusive result, he refines the experiment. Here he shows himself as a true modern scientist. He gets a second bird, and now finds that “If two be suspended in the same room, they will not regularly conform their breasts, but oft-times respect the opposite points of Heaven.” He has shown conclusively that a dead kingfisher is not a good weathervane.
Sometimes, though, an experiment does not yield the desired result. People also believed that the bittern, another bird of the kingfisher family, requires the reeds among which it lives in order to make its characteristic mating cry — a low “booming” note that may be heard over distances of two miles. The belief was that the bird must use the reeds somewhat like a bassoon.
On this occasion, Browne obtains a live bittern, which he proceeds to keep in his yard, where he denies it access to reeds. The bird fails to boom. But Browne understands this isn’t the end of the matter. Perhaps the bittern was lovelorn or just fed up. He knows, in the formulation popularized by Carl Sagan, that absence of evidence isn’t evidence of absence. In the end he is forced to rely on the testimony of a friend who has been out in the wild reedbeds and says he has seen bitterns booming without artificial aids.
Some Other Birds
Thomas Browne was born in London and trained as a physician first at Oxford and then abroad in the best schools of anatomy and physic, but he settled and established his medical practice in Norwich in the county of Norfolk. There he makes numerous observations and gives the names we still use to several species, including the mistle thrush, the shearwater, and the merganser.
The Unicorn
Many of the foolish things people believed in the seventeenth century arose from seeing them in pictures, often as heraldic emblems or in biblical illustrations. Such pictures would have been regarded as true in the same way that our twentieth-century parents and grandparents once thought “the camera never lies”.
One widely pictured creature was the unicorn, which had been incorporated into the royal coat of arms of James I when he acceded to the English throne in 1603. It’s still on my British passport. But the trouble was, nobody in England had seen a unicorn. So did the creature exist in far-off lands?
Browne is surprising as he begins to tackle this “vulgar error”. “There may be many Unicorns,” he writes. It is soon clear that he means the word unicorn in its literal sense — a unique horn — and includes the rhinoceros and even the narwhal — the “sea-unicorn” — in his reckoning. He is more doubtful about the emblematic white creature with the horse’s body and goat’s tail whose horn projects from its head at an angle that, as he notes, would make it impossible for it to graze.
Browne has good reason to be concerned about the truth or fiction of unicorns at a time when people are selling substances of supposed medical effect that they claim are made from unicorn horn. This is his motive for addressing the many “vulgar errors” to do with special properties claimed for animals, minerals, and vegetables. In an age when medicine is primitive and unregulated, his careful doses find themselves in competition with raw herbs and false remedies of street-corner “quacksalvers”.
The Basilisk
Browne disavows the existence of many imaginary beasts, but he is reluctant to consign them all to oblivion. He retains the basilisk — a hybrid of a serpent and a cockerel — and satyrs — men with equine ears and tails. “Their shadowed moralities requite their substantial falsities”, he writes. In other words, their role in the myths in which they appear makes them too valuable to let go. We might feel the same today about some of the creatures appearing in the pages of Dr Seuss or Where the Wild Things Are.
The Whale
Herman Melville’s epic novel Moby-Dick contains a long, scientifically descriptive chapter entitled “Cetology”. It draws upon many factual sources, but not least upon Thomas Browne’s account of a sperm whale that he visits when it is beached on the Norfolk coast. Like many others, Browne attends the scene out of curiosity, but also because he hopes to retrieve some of “that medicall matter” known as ambergris, as well as to investigate the spermaceti, the mysterious oil that is held in a reservoir in the animal’s massive head.
Unsurprisingly given their size and rare appearances, whales were regarded as portents. Dutch engravings of the period portray beached whales as an allegory of the endangered nation or its overflowing riches. For Browne, as later for Melville, the whale was a vast curiosity, the container of many physical and metaphysical mysteries.
Noah’s Ark
The existence or otherwise here or there of unfamiliar creatures is a topic that is only just beginning to be explored. Early in his life, Browne travelled to Ireland, where his stepfather had estates. There he noted the presence of spiders — unremarkable maybe, but worth pointing out since in the rest of Britain it was ignorantly believed that Ireland was without spiders quite as much as it was without snakes. Observing the arrival of exhausted seabirds on the Norfolk coast, Browne was among the first to conclude that annual migration over huge distances must be part of their life cycle (he coined the word “migrant” as well as more than seven hundred other neologisms). ※※Indexed under…SpidersBelief in Ireland's lack of
Taking a global view of nature’s diversity also informed Browne’s religious belief. So it is that he finds he cannot hold the story of Noah’s flood as  historical truth. Why? Because there is no mention in the Bible of all the American species that were just beginning to come to the attention of European scholars. Surely if the native Americans had originated in the Old World, they would have taken with them horses, but left behind them the “beasts of prey, and noxious creatures” that are to be found there. “By what passage those, not onely Birds, but dangerous and unwelcome Beasts came over”, was the question. “How there bee creatures there, which are not found in this triple Continent; all which must needs bee strange unto us, that hold but one Arke, and that the creatures began their progresse from the mountaines of Ararat.”
Starfish
In his long, lush essay, The Garden of Cyrus, Browne muses on the significance of the number five in nature. He has observed it in the arrangement of many flowers and thinks he discerns its presence too in the net-like surfaces of catkins and pine cones. He is unfortunately ignorant of the work of Leonardo of Pisa, known as Fibonacci, who described the sequence of numbers that encodes the golden ratio. Yet he tantalizingly anticipates the science of phyllotaxis which found that the Fibonacci sequence and therefore the number five truly do underlie all plants.
In his catalogue of five-fold nature, Browne lists also the starfish, but he knows nothing of the radiolaria, tiny marine micro-organisms that also possess this symmetry, or of viruses which repeat this pattern at an even smaller scale.
Morgellons
While studying medicine in Montpellier in southern France, Browne observed a local affliction to which he gave the name morgellons. The illness manifests as an eruption of tiny hairs on the skin, and was cured by applications of milk or honey. In 2002, morgellons resurfaced as a modern anxiety-related illness with similar symptoms. The disease spread rapidly, thanks to the internet, but was brusquely dismissed by many doctors as “delusional parasitosis”. Tests never found the alleged hairs. Oddly, the hairs of morgellons observed by Browne, before microscopes were widely in use, were visible to the naked eye; by the twenty-first century, the morgellon’s hairs had shrunk to microscopic size.
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

author: Hugh Aldersey-Williams