The Times Quotidian

On Creaturely Life: Rilke, Benjamin, Sebald, by Eric Santner
by Guy Zimmerman

The shiver of political anxiety that winds through Eric Santner’s book On Creaturely Life: Rilke, Benjamin, Sebald arises from the work of German jurist and philosopher Carl Schmitt, whose theory of the “state of exception” figured prominently in the juridical foundations of the Third Reich. Santner’s anxiety is shared by the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben in his important work Homo Sacer, and by Jacques Derrida in his lectures on The Beast and the Sovereign, and it concerns the way Schmitt’s thesis is once again expressing itself in the world, particularly in America’s “war on terror.” Santner contextualizes Schmitt’s thinking by examining an impressive slate of German writers that includes Holderlin, Rilke, Heidegger, Walter Benjamin and Kafka, and also the more recent work of the novelist and poet W. G. Sebald. The Jewish “psychotheologist” Franz Rosensweig also figures prominently in the discussion. It’s a heady brew, in other words, and one of the most impressive aspects of the book is how deftly Santner manages to illuminate the nuances that differentiate these big glaciers of thought while also mapping their continuities.

While the book has no direct relationship with modern drama, Santner’s thesis sheds light on how dramatists from Beckett to Pinter, Fornes and Sarah Kane have depicted “creatureliness” on stage. Moreover, this subject matter, and also Santner’s treatment of it, can usefully be examined via complexity theory as marking the emergence of a new “structure of feeling” that connects to political, social and ecological realities confronting us as a species today. “Structure of feeling” is a term Raymond Williams defines in his Drama from Ibsen to Brecht as “the continuity of experience from a particular work, through its particular form, to its recognition as a general form, and then the relation of this general form to a period.”[i] Writing in 1969, Williams’ language is reminiscent of how complexity theoreticians would define “network thinking” some twenty years later[ii], and that is resonant also with the “intelligent materialism” attributed to Deleuze and Guattari by eco-theorists such as Bernd Herzogenrath and Hanjo Berressen.[iii]

Those who have read Sebald’s novels The Emmigrants, Rings of Saturn or Austerlitz, or his book-length poem After Nature will perhaps have been struck by how deeply embodied the experience of his writing is. A kind of exquisite melancholia arises from Sebald’s text, which drifts across the boundaries that typically separate memoir and fiction. This powerful affect is also actually the subject of Santner’s inquiry. He tracks this “structure of feeling” back through Walter Benjamin’s Origin of German Tragic Drama to Rilke’s Eighth Duino Elegy and links it to a mode of being in which we internalize the alienating and oppressive weight of sovereignty by way of a “petrified unrest” typical of creatureliness. Santner calls this mode of being spectral materialism.

The intent here is to undermine the alarming analogy Schmitt makes in his political theory between the role of miracle in pre-modern theology and the power of the sovereign to suspend the force of law, and, in a unilateral fashion, reduce human beings to the extra-legal status of animals. Santner closes his book with an analysis of Rilke’s famous poem the Archaic Torso of Apollo, an analysis that posits a way out of the Oedipal dynamic that, arguably, animates Schmitt’s thinking. “Self-being-in-Otherness,” is the pot of gold at the end of this rainbow, a state of neighborliness one finds also in Deleuze and Guattari under the rubric of the “group-subject.” Santner’s argument about the role art plays in opening this “miraculous exception” from authoritarian domination is arguably an attempt to re-direct Schmitt’s thinking toward an anti-fascist agenda.

The continuities between the “spectral materialism” described by Santner and the “intelligent materialism” of Deleuze and Guattari underscore the tectonic cultural shift we are currently undergoing in this age of global bio-politics. The test of this new materialism is its capacity to illuminate the intricate subjectivities of art, and particularly the new(ish) structures of feeling that imbue certain works of art with a sense that they exist beyond us, in a future we are destined for. Though as a psychoanalytical work, On Creaturely Life orients itself quite differently than anything in Delueze and Guattari, I believe this only makes Santner’s work an ideal vehicle for illuminating these continuities. To even mention Deleuze and Guattari in the context of a psychoanalytic text is to suggest that there’s a baby in with the psychoanalytical bathwater we are in the process of discarding.

What is this “baby in the bathwater?” Perhaps how the creature of “bare life” conceals within himself a source of innate and irreducible freedom. As Santner puts it, “The question raised by all of Benjamin’s work pertains to the possibility of actively mobilizing the resources of remembrance in a post-Proustian world without direct or immediate recourse to the language and structures of religious life. And once again, what is at stake in such a mobilization is above all the possibility of suspending that dimension of our lives where we are delivered over to our creatureliness.” [iv]

Intriguing as it may be, one has the sense Sebald’s “spectral materialism” tells only half of an important story, and that what must still be addressed are the ways man is in no way separate from “nature.” Santner’s assumption that this split exists is itself problematic, suggesting a nostalgia for familiar psychological forms that convey a sense of being cheated, a case of Lacanian longeuers in which we pine for unattainable jouissance, and that impossible reuninon with petit object a. An intoxication is perhaps at work here, a Jones for ineffable longing. This passivity of affect tends to blunt the book’s arguments, particularly toward Part 4 where the analysis trails off like a very interesting but unfinished sentence. The psychoanalytic frame tends toward a reductive focus on the phallic function rather than an opening out in which the book’s undeniably valuable insights might contribute to an expansive discourse that includes other disciplines and the promise of transformation.

And yet, if On Creaturely Life feels a bit like a fragment, a beautiful ruin, this perhaps only serves to amplify Santner’s analysis of the feeling-tone of stunned awestruck-ness that characterizes German modernism from Holderlin through Celan, and its baleful significance for contemporary politics. In the technical jargon of complexity theory, Santner identifies an “adaptive” cultural discourse that is still in the process of emerging today, and he sheds light on hidden connections between this discourse and our fractured contemporary scene, and the potential for change it conceals. Given how forcefully On Creaturely Life reveals the linkages between the particular artistic-literary system that is its subject, and the dominant cultural and political systems that shape our experience, we can perhaps afford to cut Santner some slack on his occasional over-reliance on psychoanalytic reasoning.

NOTES

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[i] Raymond Williams, Drama from Ibsen to Brecht, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1969) 17

[ii] Melanie Mitchell, Complexity: A Guided Tour, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009) 233

[iii] Bernd Herzogenrath, ed., Deleuze/Guattari and Ecology, (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009) 6

[iv] Eric L. Santner On Creaturely Life (London, The University of Chicago Press, 2009)  140

Thinking about Lars Von Trier’s Melancholia
by Rita Valencia

Behold the bride Justine, her name plucked from a novel by de Sade, her body bedecked in crinoline, lace, satin, and bone stiffeners. Her voluptuous skin pillows at the edges of her wedding garment, which squeezes her bosom tightly and blossoms open below the waist. She is a vision in white as she runs across the neatly cropped lawn, dragging ragged rope chains behind her. A cumbersome sort of froth envelopes her, marks her as special and sets her apart from the herd of onlookers, the wedding guests who watch, each regarding her with his/her own form of desire.

To shun their desire, one after the other, is the project of Lars Von Trier’s “melancholy” bride, played by Kirsten Dunst (Justine), whose face, described brilliantly by cinematographer Manuel Alberto Claro, is much better than beautiful as it expresses her mercurial moodswings. We find ourselves ensnared in a madness that would be Cassandra-like if Justine were willing or able to express it coherently.

As do all brides worthy of the gown, Justine has a secret. Her clandestine date with doom is something which she is not able to share, although it is, ironically, something all will share in. The astronomical anomaly which is the domain of scientists she has stolen and adopted into her feminine aspect: a planet which is no more than a sparkle of red in the sky has fallen into her mind’s orbit. Hers is the intelligence of the seer, the shaman, the witch or the saint. She has no power that is superhuman, but the sensitivity she possesses has no place in polite conventional society, a world in which she is still trapped. Having not found any alternative universe, she grows morose and pensive. She has only a partial, truncated faith in herself, which is more problematic for her than no faith at all and yet makes her easier for us to deal with (i.e., medicate) than a true yogi, or a believer like Johannes of Dreyer’s Ordet. Justine’s acts of kindness and cruelty may appear random and arbitrary, though she is unfailingly loving to the child in her life, her little nephew.

Dunst’s bride is exasperating to the audience (turned rather cleverly into extended wedding guests). We see the bondage of the bride as privilege. The conventions demanded of her on her special day are our gifts to her. To refuse them, to try to make “her” special day into her special day is an offense. She only displays “rudeness” to the most arrogant of guests, her boss, whose hideous egocentrism demands the harsh treatment with which she blesses him and leaves him to degenerate into speechless, impotent apoplexy.

The opulence of the wedding party is essential to Von Trier’s strategy, as is the Wagnerian grandiosity that underlays the sumptuous images. The magnitude of gifts granted the bride reflects the profundity of her renunciation. Faced with the ire of her family, she protests to her rigid sister Claire (Charlotte Gainsbourg): “…But I smiled, I smiled a lot!” The bride can smile all she wants, but even these guests, obtuse as pigeons, know there is something awry.

Lars Von Trier has avoided the traps of genre conventionality that turn any filmmaker broaching the subject of the end-of-the-world into a bride getting married to a particularly boring groom. He dances with his subject with characteristic delicacy, care and fine poetic instinct, alluding to a host  of great masters whose work informs his:  the elegant planet choreography of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001, Shakepeare’s lovely suicidal Ophelia, Antonioni’s refractory beauty Giuliana of Red Desert, Resnais/Robbes-Grillet’s scenic mystery of Last Year at Marienbad. His artistic/cultural bloodlines are Ingmar Bergman and  Carl Theodor Dreyer. But his fusion of wedding movie, family drama and apocalypse is a reinvention and a subversion of genre that is uniquely Von Trier and defies labels, much  like Kubrick, Godard, or Fassbinder, who have pretty much invented their own way of “doing” film that can’t be easily categorized as “post modern”, “neo-realist” etc. His work has the quality of good fiction or philosophy leading us into a dark vast forest and leaving us there to contemplate rather than showing us the way back (which always ends up being wrong).

The openness of the result, conceptually, is what will frustrate ordinary audiences and create an attitude of dismissiveness, quibbling and even scorn. But it leaves the rest of us open to speculate. Justine is privy to an apocalyptic vision which is as subtle and elusive as it is inexorable. It drives her into behaviors that have the appearance of rudeness, craziness, or extreme narcissism. “I know things”, she confides to her sister Claire, who has limited patience, as an ordinary woman steeped in the mundane world.

The nature of Justine’s specialness, her alien planetary madness, suffuses the wild poetic vision of Melancholia, a  movie whose notion of the end-of-the-world eschews flying dirt and ruptured concrete. Von Trier sees the annihilation as the display of a single mind so powerful that it is able to magnetize other minds into actually experiencing the same vision. The idea of melancholia, “refined” by modern psychiatry into a concept of endogenous depression, not caused by “outside” factors and characterized by a sense of foreboding, is a clue to this more ambitious project of the film. The sharply abridged world of the grand estate of perfect isolation and prestige is bounded by hairpin turns that frustrate the bride and groom in their attempt to enter it in too large a vehicle. It is reminiscent of Dogville in its self-enclosure. The tiny domain is abandoned by all guests at the end of the misbegotten wedding party and human anxiety is left to fester and infect the imaginations of the beings left behind.

When the planetary disaster is imminent, Claire rounds up her son and tries to escape the estate in a golf cart. “Where are you going Claire?” Justine asks. “The village,” Claire tearfully replies. “This isn’t about the village,” responds Justine darkly.

The experience of the end is shared only by the sisters and the child, Leo. Claire’s husband John (Keifer Sutherland), the bourgeois scientist, has killed himself, more from shame at facing his calculation errors than end-of-world terror. They come together, under no more than a sketch of a shelter created by sticks, a purely architectural form of whimsical surrender, and join hands in love as they merge into Justine’s apocalyptic crescendo. There is no more than this, what we see–what we think we see–and doom.

About Djinn (2011)

Close to a year ago I posted a longer dramatic monologue called Snout. I recall being anxious about deploying creative work in the TQ space, where I had been posting thought pieces on culture, but the experiment seemed interesting to readers, a welcome complication to the line of posts I had made. Djinn, presented below, is a companion piece to Snout and part of a triptych I expect to complete in the next few months. Djinn looks at the reductive power of a name, the trap of a name. The djinn in the piece is a trapped party girl, but also a deity figure – a djinn or genie. The element of nostalgic reflection in Djinn does make it seem like a fitting piece for this time of year, and I think its environmental themes pertain also to life as we are living it here in America on the cusp of 2012. Barbara Eden’s sitcom genie was a fixture of the past in which Djinn is anchored, and one of the many things I admire about Elizabeth Greer’s work here is how she could do justice to the ideas I’m preoccupied with, while also making Djinn into a cosmetics ad gone very wrong. As always I am in debated to Jeffrey Atherton’s visual artistry, brought to life this time by Brad Cooper’s inspired editing.
—Guy Zimmerman

DJINN
Sometimes I think I was born at a very special time
When everything for a brief moment attained this kinda like
Perfect alignment

Do you have that?

Wild
They said that about me
That I was wild

I used to like the clubs yeah
And the sun coming up over Brooklyn to the East
I loved getting lost in the spell of those nights
That soft wild dark because we all can sense
A golden perfect place around the next corner

Do you know what it’s like to be caught in a trap?
Course you do – why am I asking?
Hey now, we’re all in a trap one way or another, my friend
You don’t have anything to worry about
Not from me
The trap releases when you learn to love the trap
Isn’t that how it works?

(titles)

You again – ha ha ha
But really
Look at me blushing
Was that really us?
Did we really do those things?

On the other hand I don’t know you at all
We never met

(then, listening)

Hear that…?

You definitely look familiar
Did I see you at the horseshoe bar?
Did we share a drink together?
Did you shower me with money on some dance floor?
Did I pass you on the street downtown?
Did you feel me in your heart?
Do you feel me there right now?

When I was a girl I used to get these high fevers
My brain would cook and bubble in my skull
I’d have this one hallucination where I’m standing at the edge of a field
In the shadows at the border of this little clearing in the woods
This meadow
And the grass is so wild and green it just throbs with color
Making my eyes ache there under the bright sun
But I have come on a crucial mission
I have been given the knowledge that somewhere in this field of grass
Is the single molecule, and on the molecule the single atom
Where the end of the world is about to begin
And it’s up to me to find that little atom and stop
The world from bursting into flames
Igniting into a storm of nuclear fire
That consumes the planet and everyone on it
All those I love and the millions of strangers too
And all their dogs and cats and all the wild animals too
The mice, the doves on the wing all consumed by fire and heat
Melting, turning to smoke and ash
And at the very last moment I suddenly know
My fever vision suddenly zooms in on this one blade of grass
In the middle of the field and I just fly there
Zero in on that single molecule,
Tunnel in even further to find
That pesky little apocalyptic atom
And I reach out toward it and suddenly of course I wake up
The fever has broken
I’m drenched in sweat, a soft breeze
Blows in through the window
Warm spring air, the sound of birds, my brothers
Throwing a baseball

You know, this air you breath is really delicious
It’s really starting to change me
I can definitely feel it kicking in

You thought I was about to say something about “the edge of chaos”
I wasn’t going to say anything about the edge of chaos
You made bad choices in life
You’re going to have to deal with the consequences
Me, I always hear the roar outside the door
The roar of romance and danger
The ecstatic parade of the divine
Money raining down on the dancing girls
A shower of gold falling from the purse of a god
“Happy New Year” tapped out in white dust
The lines Hoovered off a closet mirror laid out like a table

(Hears something distant. )

You know those magic shows they have in certain old movies?
The magician in the black top hat and the wand
And he has an assistant, a smiling woman
Who gets sawed in half
I always wanted to be that woman sawed in half
That woman in the box that hinges open
Where I’d be in on both sides of the magic trick
Both sides of the illusion, the sleight-of-hand
Half of me in the world of the audience saying oooh and aaah
And the other half in the world of the magician
Leading these suckers by the nose
But the world is not a magic show, is it

Or…mmm…what do you think?

Is the world a magic trick?
Or is it the kind of place where a thing is what it is
And we can rely on that
Where, for example, lip gloss is lip gloss

Simple and direct
And the same goes for me or for you
We are what we are…or…but…

We grow, we change, but something is unchanging too, huh?
Our soul, our essence is what it is…but it changes…?
And isn’t that confusing because things have to be…the way they are…

Or something…right…?

The silk scarf becomes a white dove
And we love it because it’s a total lie that also tells the truth
Things are always shifting into other things
The lie becomes the truth
The truth becomes a lie
Talk about freedom, a high wire act
Floating on air

We give things a name, “wild”
The name never changes
The name is a trap, a jar for the spirit of the thing named
The name that we are given accumulates a story
A history, a little narrative that is a prison
And what you see when you see me
Is a woman learning to forget her own name
A woman intent on being free once more

Venus, web, fly, magic, trap, silent –

What is my name do you think?
Do you even remember it?

In general I’m a mystery
A mystery woman
Some men don’t like that
Some men want to pierce the mystery

They said I was wild
That’s what they said
Me
They don’t say that any more
Is it wild to love the sky, the forests, the seas?
Pricks
Wild
Maybe I’m a just a lover!
Maybe I’m just in love with humanity!

Eh
Life is an ebb and flow
And what if I can see the future
My future, your future
Sure, you want closure
Questions that get answered
You’ve been that way since the pilgrims
You goddamn Americans
Always the same

You won’t stop ‘till you’ve covered the whole goddamn earth
In asphalt and for what?
A waste what a waste
And you won’t stop you won’t ever stop
I’d rather bang every last one of you
Than talk to you
Or know what’s in your mind

Drown me if you have to
Burn me or drown me, do what you want
Just don’t show me the contents of your mind
Ever again
Maybe I’m just pretending to be your captive
Because it turns me on
Master
Do you like it when I call you that?
Master? Listen…!

Can you hear it now?

Sure you can
You can hear it coming, a hot wind
All the way from that meadow long ago

I can do lines now without even doing lines
Every breath is like a line now for me
And God holds the mirror except he’s a goddess
And she approves of me violently
And my sinuses are all stuffed up
It’s from giving you all I have
Over and over and over but I still like you
Would you like a drink?
Would you like some pills or to take a crap?
No? You’re good? Okay.

There are 521 ways to forget
I know because I counted
Trapped away in here all these years
While the rivers baked into streams
I mean someone please pull the plug
Yank the trigger tug the rope
I can’t speak for you but
I’d rather get dragged behind a car
Quite frankly
I’d rather get gutted by a boat hook
In all honesty
Someone give me a hammer
I’ll break open the sky, let all the air rush out

In Central Park at the break of day
I used to go sit by the side of that still lake
In the black water the mutant goldfish
Would slowly emerge
Big bulbous eyes and skin mottled orange and white
As if they had survived the radiation
As will a small percentage of humanity
Transformed into shuffling beasts and monsters
That hobble along the floors of deep smoking valleys
Bellowing to each other
Mating in the rocks and in the ditches
But I could stop all that
And sometimes I think I really did

I was big on recycling
I knew it was just a start
We needed to get to full sustainability
It would be like a dance
We’d be dancing with the planet
We’d restore the jungles and the prairies
Bring all the species back and mid-wife a few new ones as well
Unintended consequences were gonna be our middle name
It would be like a beautiful and terrible dream
We couldn’t ever wake up from
And no more wars because they’re boring and ugly
How to let go
How to sink back into the dark we rose out of
The warm dark of the womb

Fire, fight, engine, flight . . .

Did you forget yet?
Did you forget my name?

CalArts Winter Dance, The Sharon Disney Lund Dance Series,
REDCAT, Los Angeles, California, 16 December 2011
By Alan Berman

Four works were presented at the CalArts Winter Dance event for this year: first-performances of works by two CalArts choreographer-professors, followed by the renown Israeli choreographer Ohad Naharin. The evening revealed stark differences in approach, the first two works incorporating traditional and modern movements within a larger context, while the Naharin works used no conventional movement. Contemporary dance comprises a very broad range of styles, even at a school such as CalArts, known worldwide as a haven of experimental and avant-garde creativity.

One of the two premieres of the evening, Los Angeles choreographer Stephanie Nugent’s multimedia dance work Yes Is Not Passive made comprehensive use of the four talented, athletic dancers who performed it. Set against a discontinuous kinetic backdrop of Roberta Shaw’s three sometimes-simultaneous projections of aerial footage of the tsunami that struck Japan earlier this year, the dancing operated variously in and out of phase with the film, words spoken by the performers in English and Japanese, and sounds assembled by Robin Cox, Paul Matthis, and Nugent. The result was a swirl of compelling actions: so much happened throughout the work that it was impossible to fully appreciate it after one performance. The movement featured rapid elevation changes, with dancers charging to the floor, swiftly spreading out like a wet mop, then rotationally exploding upright. When long, lean Megan McCarthy processed these motions, one could not help but imagine an accelerated time-lapse sequence of a plant sprouting from the ground, then decaying. In fact, each of the performers seemed invited by the choreography to excel in their unique skill sets: Gregory Dorado’s strength and surety; Jose Luis Trujillo’s nimbleness and speed; Lynn Suemitsu’s acrobatic grace, voice, and acting; McCarthy’s ballet chops and endurance. It is significant that Nugent credits her performers with collaboration credit (along with understudy Hannah Cavallaro, who did not appear in this evening’s performance).

The two men and two women found themselves in different pairs, witnessing each other when not in a couple, sometimes coming together, facing one another in the four corners of a floor-lit square, sometimes leaving the stage entirely, other times somersaulting away from each other in formal ways, with toes pointed mid-roll before landing upright. Juxtaposed with flowing forces were static settings, such as having the dancers on a bench with the projection directly on their bodies, diffusing any possibility of delineating the image or seeing the dancers clearly. The tsunami serves as a metaphor for the most difficult out-of-control events in life that can challenge even the most solid relationships. The use of spoken word in the sound design (“Yes.Yes.”) and the dialogue (“Look at me. Look at me!”) forces the audience to engage with the work on a linguistic level, if not a narrative one. The ensemble eventually leaves spoken language by shifting to an invented semaphore, using hands and upper arms in rapid unison movements that recall Trisha Brown’s Accumulation. Apparently no single form of communication was entirely satisfactory to discuss life-altering events, and after 20+ minutes the propulsive work had subsided.

Nugent has continued in her recent work to push boundaries while remaining grounded in virtuoso technique, her curiosity about synthesis of other art forms with dance causing the tradition to be refracted in demanding and thrilling ways. One hopes that there will be more opportunities for her to share this work with an even larger audience.

The other CalArts choreographer represented in the evening, Colin Connor, was the most overtly traditional of the three on the program, although he incorporated props and staging in interesting ways in his work The Sea, the Sea. Dancer Laura Berg began the work on an elaborately constructed metal platform that resembled a portion of a pier, and two other performers (Janaye McAlpine and Shane Raiford) joined her. They left the pier and proceeded through some pairings (boy/girl, boy/other girl, girl/girl) and solo sections on the stage as they displayed extreme spinal flexibility and rotation, which seem integral to Connor’s aesthetic. Connor, whose work has been presented throughout the US and Europe, has said that he is “fascinated by the idea of bodies falling through time,” and the most appealing and memorable moment was when two of the dancers glided to the floor and rolled in parallel, but at different rates, creating an out-of-phase pattern between their two sets of spinning feet. It was brief, but it was brilliant—and one wished for more such delicious surprises.

Ohad Naharin’s choreographic propensities, especially his reverence for ensemble processes, extends such postmodern work as that of Lucinda Childs or the surreal actions of Pina Bausch. While his dancers in the Batsheva Dance Company must have solid technique, they don’t move in any way that could be seen as balletic or traditional. As with David Zambrano’s work, the core language of Naharin’s choreography is founded on exercises he developed following an injury which left him in chronic pain. He calls this movement Gaga and Danielle Agami, a former member of Batsheva, immersed 20 CalArts students in this system to prepare for performing his works for this concert. Both illustrate Naharin’s interest in exaggerations of quotidian motions magnified by a group’s simultaneous delivery of the movement. The first piece, “Humus,” from the larger 2005 work Three, featured a group of female dancers operating in clusters, walking, squatting, touching their tongues to their noses, and vocalizing. When they faced away from us and folded forward, their richly colored tights made their ten lower bodies seem more like a field of vegetables than human bodies. The music was Brian Eno’s introspective “Neroli,” a musical opposite with the following work’s score.

“Echad Mi Yodea,” the title of a traditional Jewish song, was the backdrop for the electric crowd-pleasing final work of the evening, originally created for his company in 1990 as part of the dance Kyr. The hard-rocking version of this minor-key Passover song was recorded by the band Tractor’s Revenge, and the movement works in aggressive synchrony with that driving rendition. Seventeen dancers stood side-by-side in a semicircle across the stage, men and women alike wearing identical black business suits, white shirts, and black hats. Each dancer used a chair as a platform for movement, leaping, writhing, and doing an exuberant seated “wave” for every chorus. After each verse, another article of clothing was vigorously stripped off: hat, jacket, shirt, pants. By the end, the dancers were wearing only men’s blue underwear, and a pile of clothes had formed between them and the audience, who gave a powerful ovation for the celebratory, ritualistic dance.

An Equal Music, Vikram Seth, Phoenix House, 1999
by Melanie Wudl

Avid reader friends of mine recommended An Equal Music for its beautiful poetic language. In fact, the first page is a lovely poem, followed by a John Donne quote on page two wherefrom the book appears to derive its title. With the further promise of travel and lively dialogue, I settled in quickly into the heretofore unknown world of musicianship.

An Equal Music is both a story of a youthful love gone awry, rekindled ten years hence, and a fully considered affair with music. The main characters are the members of the Maggiore Quartet comprised of Michael Holme (our narrator), Piers, Helen and Billy.  The sensual love interest is Julia who forms the quintet for a single engagement. We travel from a humble but beautiful top floor London flat with a view of Hyde Park, to Vienna, Venice and back.

The members of the quartet are talented, complicated and appealing. “Billy is far too fat, and always will be.  He will always be distracted by family and money worries, car insurance and composition.  For all our frustration and rebuke, he will never be on time.  But the moment his bow comes down on the strings he is transfigured.  He is a wonderful cellist, light and profound: the base of our harmony, the rock on which we rest.” Michael, the quartet’s second violin, has never felt unhappy with his position, though he says he agrees with whoever said it should more properly be called “the other violinist”.  He does not consider his spot the lesser, in fact, he believes the second violin is a more versatile chair. “Sometimes, like the viola, it is at the textural heart of the quartet; at others it sings with a lyricism equal to that of the first violin, but in a darker and more difficult register.”

Michael is preoccupied by the re-emergence of the love of his life. I often forget Julia’s name because I never feel I know her quite well enough. The Maggiore Quartet holds her in the highest regard, but I found her emotionally distant, inaccessible. She is all about silk slips and composure, in and out of the concert hall, even as she juggles a husband and child, career and Michael. With about half the book dedicated to the affair between Julia and Michael, I leave it to the reader to determine if Julia’s career shift from piano accompanist to soloist, and the reasons for it, creates a satisfying enough character. Michael’s stunted emotionality had me grappling with why he wasn’t seeking therapy. It took a second reading to cut him a little slack and find his vulnerability believable. At first blush, the force of his angst, at once debilitating and then fierce, doesn’t seem fully earned.

In Seth’s deft hands, a love of classical music and all that it conjures is finely articulated. Early in the novel, the Maggiore Quartet is to play a concert of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven, in that order. As Piers puts it, there’s a thematic connection, each quartet contains a fugal movement. Billy thinks they are getting the key relations all mixed up. “It’s total confusion. First three sharps, then one sharp, then four.  There’s no sense of progression, no sense of progression at all, and the audience is bound to feel the structural stress.” He wants to change the order of the Mozart and the Haydn so that there will be an ascending order of sharps, and thereby a sense of perceived structure. Helen offers that the Mozart was written after the Haydn to which Piers questions the audience’s chronological stress. Billy says they can change the Haydn A major and perform a later Haydn, one that was written after the Mozart,Opus 50 that’s in F sharp minor.  “It’s also got three sharps, so nothing changes.  It’s terribly interesting.  It’s got all sorts of – oh yes, and it too has a fugal last movement… ” Michael disagrees contending that the audience doesn’t care about the order of sharps. Billy retorts “but I do and we all should.”

Vikram Seth offers his most poetic words for Michael as he reflects on what is to come.  “A winter evening in the Wigmore Hall, the sacred shoe-box of chamber music.  We have spent the last month practicing intensively for this night.  The fare is simple – three classical quartets:  Haydn’s opus 20 no. 6 in A major, my most beloved quartet; then the first of the six quartets that Mozart himself dedicated to Haydn, in G major; and finally, after the interval, Beethoven’s steeplechase-cum-marathon, the ethereal, jokey, unpausing, miraculous, exhausting quartet in C sharp minor, which he composed a year before his death, and which, just as the score of the “Messiah” had consoled and delighted him on his deathbed, was to delight an console Schubert as he lay dying in the same city a year later.”

The quartet’s quibbling over Bach, to record or not to record The Art of Fugue is equally enjoyable. The piece’s length gives Piers to voice that they could never perform it, “Quartets don’t do that sort of thing on stage. Besides, Bach didn’t write it for string quartet.” Billy thinks that if the string quartet existed in Bach’s time he’d have written for it. Piers is weary of Billy’s hotline to dead composers. It is here, with The Art of Fugue, that we get to know Helen, who must find a viola she can tune down a fourth, which leads her to a talkative instrument maker and then, in turn, to an early music devotee who, according to Piers, plays a baroque fiddle, wears sandals and sports a beard.  There appear to be stereotypes among musicians.

The Art of Fugue, Die Kunst der Fuge BWV1080 Contrapunctus I, JS Bach (1685–1750)
Emerson String Quartet, Deutche Grammophon, 2003

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After the Wigmore concert, the quartet prepares for Vienna where they will perform Schubert’s Trout Quintet (accompanied by Julia on the piano).  One critic hates the Trout for all its “tedious charm.  It knows exactly what the right moves are, and it makes them all.  It’s light and it’s trite.  I’m astonished that anyone still plays it.” Piers loves the Trout and regrets that “everyone treats it as if it’s a sort of divertimento – or worse.” It turns out Piers’ feelings for the piece are mixed.  He says, “It’s a funny old piece.  It stops and starts and has so many repeats but I truly love it.” Michael thinks it is one movement too long.

The book is smart and does justice to the tight rope an artist walks between natural talent, discipline, focus, respect and intuition. When Michael considers giving up music, Piers’ response is no more than the basic truth of the matter.  “…I’ve stopped thinking creating anything short of a masterpiece is pointless.  I just ask myself two questions about what I’m doing here in my niche in the galaxy.  Is it better done or not?  And is it better that I do this than something else?” He pauses, then saying,  “And I suppose I’ve just added another one:  is it better that someone else does this than me?”

For an enchanting description of Venice, Seth gives to us, “The stone bridge at the Rialto, the wooden bridge at the Accademia, the great grey dome of the Salute, the columns and bell-tower of San Marco, the pink–and-white confection of the Doge’s palace pass over us or by us one after the other; and all so luxuriously, so predictably, so languidly, so swiftly, so astonishingly that there is something about it that is disturbing, almost gluttonous.  It is a relief to be in the open basin of the lagoon, unhemmed by gorgeousness.” No matter how many times I scan this paragraph, I continue to be transported by it.

I first read this book the summer before last and all that fall played Schubert’s Trout and Bach’s, The Art of Fugue (both string and piano).  My most recent read of An Equal Music included interludes of Beethoven String Quartets (a full box set was marvelously found in my husband’s CD collection).  My music education is slim at best, and I’ve never read a novel that prompted hours of attentive listening. But there I was, and still am, a little lighter for the Trout’s cheeriness, unequaled in obsessed contemplation as for The Art of Fugue and continually dumb struck by big bad Beethoven who seems to be able to do whatever he wants.  It is the love story with the music that is by far the tale of this novel that soars.