A Leak In The Safe

I really thought I’d read enough Balzac in my life. He’s a great writer, no doubt, but in the 19^th Century the writer was God to his characters and Balzac is a very cruel one, the God of Job, tormenting his characters to the point of perversity. I don’t mind tragedy – I’d even argue that almost all great fiction has an unhappy ending, but, an unbelievably harsh denouement is just as unsatisfying as an improbably good one. In search of naturalism and realism, Balzac (and I have the same beef with Hardy) makes things un-realistic by giving his creations unending bad luck, tilting the whole universe against them in an unfair way, making them, as Shakespeare says "like flies to wanton boys." I realize that naturalists like Hardy, Zola and Balzac were to some extent trying to act as correctives to the sentimental excesses of previous fiction, but, like many reactions, to me they go too far in the other grim direction. As much as, say, a Dickens happy ending strains credibility by all the coincidences that conspire to create it, so does a Balzacian unhappy ending.

Of course, that being said, when I saw this neat copy of the New York Review of Books edition of The Unknown Masterpiece (which is really a short story) bound with a novella called Gambara at the library sale I bought it. You know how things go at library sales – Richard Howard is a crackerjack translator after all and, heck, it was only a dollar. And, despite the predictably downer ending, it’s a cool little piece of work, and the intervening years have added a ironic twist to both stories than even the great Balzac couldn’t foresee.

The plot of "The Unknown Masterpiece" is quite ingenious. In the year 1612 an up and coming painter, Poussin, is coming to pay his respects to the current court favorite, Porbus. Porbus inadvertently takes him into the presence of the older Frenhofer, who, although unknown to the world, is evidently one of the greatest painters of all time. Frenhofer has a masterpiece which he refuses to show to anyone which he claims to be the only work of art to not only faithfully reflect a living woman, but to be an actual living being itself. Poussin is avid to see it and offers up his beautiful mistress as a nude model for Frenhofer in exchange. Frenhofer eventually agrees – the way I read it he doesn’t actually want to paint the mistress but to just compare her nude form to his creation to see if the latter stands up to the former, which, in his judgement, it does. Of course, this being Balzac, the unknown masterpiece proves to be, in fact, an unintelligible mass of over painting except for the perfect image of a foot at the bottom. Poussin and Porbus’s reactions betrays this and although Frenhofer pretends to be unperturbed, that evening he burns all his work and dies.

"Gambara" has a similar arc, with a mad composer who thinks his operas are masterpieces when in fact they are noisy din, the fact uncovered by an interested Italian noble who is after the composer’s beautiful wife. The noble discovers that when drunk the composer abandons his rigid theories and produces sublime lyrical melodies of genius. Unfortunately Gambara refuses to stay stewed, returns to his operas, and the noble takes his wife. In a coda, having been abandoned by the less than noble noble, she returns to live with Gambara again, a toothless ruined woman, and they cling to a precarious and unpleasant existence, the composer repairing musical instruments, the formerly legendary beauty taking in sewing, the both of them starving, his works sold as scrap paper. In the end a kindly Italian Principessa flips them some gold coins, like Balzac granting the reader a few sparkles of light in the unrelieved gloom.

But the really ironic part, the part that even their creator Balzac didn’t know, is that if Frenhofer’s painting weren’t turned to ashes and Gambara’s compositions used to wrap fish, they would today be considered brilliant precursors to Modernism. This is Balzac’s description of the unveiled unknown masterpiece (known in all but the final revised version as La Belle Noiseuse):

Coming closer, they discerned, in one corner of the canvas, the tip of a bare foot emerging from this chaos of colors, shapes, and vague shadings, a kind of incoherent mist; but a delightful foot, a living foot!

Of course this sounds exactly like modern art, a Picasso or Pollock, and had it been painted in the 17^th century (or even the 19^th) would have considered a visionary masterpiece of genius. Similarly Gambara’s theoretical atonalities and dissonances strongly suggest Schonberg, Cage and much of 20^th century classical music. Here’s an irony of which even Balzac, the master of cruel irony, was unaware.

The introduction to the volume by Arthur C. Danto is also pretty good and makes some cogent points about the Romantic conception of art and the naked female body:

as of so high a potency that it verges on numinousness.

The symbolic equivalence the story establishes between seeing a woman’s exposed body and seeing a work of art is an effort on the part of a Romantic writer to find something as valuable as art itself.

It’s refreshing to read a scholar deviating from the party line of the nude as a form of exploitation. Like Marxism, feminist aesthetics seeks to overturn the entirety of human nature and culture overnight on the basis of a few unfounded theories. The female nude has been the most profound subject of art since the days of (possibly matriarchal!) pre-history, and I don’t intend to renounce it now (but that’s for another rant). I can’t buy Danto’s assertion, however, that Frenhofer crashes and burns because Poussin and Porbus can’t comprehend what is actually a masterpiece – I know Balzac enough to be certain such slight mercy is beyond him, and that he means the painting to be an absolute and total failure.

The introduction also revealed that Jacques Rivette made a movie called La Belle Noiseuse (the beautiful pain in the ass), which, since it is almost four hours long and set in the present day, can only be said to be loosely based on the short story. That rang a bell and I dug through the mound of VHS movies I’d picked up at the library sale to find, yes, I’d acquired that at some point too. I’ve only watched the first hour or so, but so far I’m enjoying its leisurely French New Wave pace and its close focus on the creative process. Frenhofer’s played by an actor, but the hands and paintings shown in the film are from an artist named Bernard Dufour (who I’ve never heard of) and his stuff, unlike the junk you usually see in Hollywood movies, is actually quite good.

Well, it seems like book review week here in UBULAND – tomorrow may well break that pattern – but I’ll end, as usual, with a memorable passage, here from Balzac’s Gambara :

Better Than Yesterday by Robyn Schneider

I first came across Robyn Schneider in the Ingram Advance magazine, which touted her as a hot first time Young Adult author. Her hook is that she’s only twenty years old and started her novel Better Than Yesterday when she was fifteen. I was intrigued – I love prep school stories and the fact that she was so young and so close to the experience seemed to suggest that the book would be a sizzling slice of today’s sassy youth combined with the timeless world of prep school. What I was served was a piece of cold plastic.

The book doesn’t start out badly. It’s a sort of riff on Catcher in the Rye, told from the point of view of a group of concerned friends who band together to rescue a wayward runaway prep, bravely endangering their own GPA’s in order to prevent their classmate from blowing his chance to get into a good college. It’s told from the alternating points of view of Skylar, the author’s alter-ego who is practically perfect and Charley (somebody buy this girl an "I"!) her male admirer and rival. Predictably Schneider handles the female point of view much better than the male, and Charley’s main function seems to be to remind the reader how beautiful, brilliant and wonderful Skylar is.

Better Than Yesterday is slick, mildly clever and well paced, and it didn’t start to actively annoy me until about thee quarters of the way through, when our heroine and her drones are in New York City and the whole thing starts to resemble an Afterschool Special. You expect a young writer to be bursting with energy and emotion, but Schneider’s denouement seems as calculated as a meatloaf recipe. There’s not a moment of authentic feeling in the entire product. And clearly, it is a product, as she thanks her "incredible" agent, "amazing" editor and "wonderful" publisher as well as a myriad of writing groups in her acknowledgments. This is writing by committee, by focus group, another nail in the Romantic conception of the rebellious artist. Here the rebel is tracked down by his peers (his dissatisfaction with life evidently centered on his thwarted love for Skylar), and brought back into line like a total wuss. Personally I wanted to hear more about the girl who barfed in the trash can lid and the guys who used their diplomas as rolling papers – at least they have some life to them. In the final scene at graduation Skylar and Charley have an on stage debate about which is more important, school or friends (friends, it turns out, as long as you still get into the right college), and unbeknownst to the author or her characters, the reader’s sympathy is with the audience who are no doubt likewise groaning please let it be over.

The prose is so controlled and modulated that there’s very little of it that’s memorable for good or ill, though, as is often the case, as the plot gets trite, so does the language. Here’s my nominee for the worst chunk of dialogue:

Can’t you just hear that coming out of the mouth of, say, a young Keanu Reeves in some awful movie? Holden Caulfield had a word for it: phoney.

Since I’m on the street level of the book biz, I get a lot of promotional material. There are authors who will send a five page letter about their artistic process or publish in blogs or fanzines lengthy accounts of their influences and inspirations as if they were JAMES JOYCE cluing us into the creation of Ulysses – all for an unreadable, self-published pile of dreck called Murder by Cowpie or the like. Most people these days seem to like the idea of being a writer a lot more than actually writing. The contemporary world is so caught up in the process of celebrity and the manufacturing of successful "product" that the prose component of fiction is considered the least important part.

That said, I’ll give all you lucky readers a quick peep into how I came to put certain elements into MY unpublished and largely unread pile of dreck Snakes in Caves, if only to comment once again on the weird affinities and synchronicities that haunt our world.

The first spark came into my mind in Minneapolis when I read a newspaper story about a couple of teens who were suffocated when the sand cave they were in on the banks of the Mississippi collapsed. They were supposedly "partying" and that image struck me, the cave as the place where not only the laws of society were broken, but perhaps, as in E. M. Forster’s Passage to India, somehow the laws of nature and physics as well. But I wasn’t sure what to put in the cave. At first I was going to have the protagonist’s beloved be killed by the cave in, and her spirit return to the cave. But, unlike Dante, a dead beloved doesn’t work for me, I needed her to be a more active part of the plot. Then, when I was working on a poem about seeing the beloved again after a space of years I got the perfect objective correlative.

The poem compared the shock of seeing someone you loved again to being struck by a snake or squeezed by a python, and this imagery led me to Cleopatra, her avatar Isis, eternal recurrence (like a snake shedding its skin), Pythia, the oracle of Delphi, and on and on. I hadn’t really been into the esoteric very seriously since teendom, but the more I read mythology, occult work, internet paranoia and reputable skeptics, the more snake stuff I found. My protagonist similarly peruses an old library left by the vanished Miller, discovering a wealth of sinister lore soon after I did. There’s a whole chapter of just quotes about the Egyptian, Aztecs, American Indians, Aliens, and the notion of subterranean snakes that could have gone on for ever (and as a matter of fact I’ve been told it goes on too long). I eventually finished the book to the world’s complete indifference, but I really only scratched the surface of snake/cave lore and speculation. The interesting thing to me is how this intuition through image led me to such a fertile place.

I’ve found a bunch a books post writing that were germane, and some have been published since I finished. One such volume is The Serpent Grail: The Truth Behind the Holy Grail, the Philosopher’s Stone and the Elixir of Life by Philip Gardiner with Gary Osborn. It’s not bad as esoteric books go, not on the high level of a COLIN WILSON or GRAHAM HANCOCK, but an interesting read. The authors have certainly uncovered a lot of serpent lore and write pretty well, but as is common with such books they also play a lot of etymological games of dubious worth and fail to tie everything up convincingly. The payoff is the authors’ assertion that a mixture of serpent venom and serpent blood would do wonders for longevity and health, and it’s a little sad that such lofty esoteric speculation so often devolves into how to stay healthy, live long and make money. I also would have respected their argument more if they themselves (like Hancock in Supernatural) had taken a little dose of their own medicine and at least experiment with drinking venom themselves.

But what really struck me was the way their research echoed several of my fictive inventions in Snakes in Caves. The talk about how, through serpent power, at a specific place and specific time a hypnagogic state may be reached that transports the individual to the "portal of the underworld," the place of the dead. That’s pretty much the mechanism of the snake cult in my book, and Gardiner and Osborn even specify the same time I came up with, the equinox, not to mention the fact that, as my faithful readers know, "hypnagogic" is one of my pet words. Like me they found that "everywhere we looked we seemed to see the serpent."

Anyhow here’s some of my favorite bits from the book:

Later on, the famous Assassins emerged from the Druze via Nizari…The Assassins secured loyalty with the use of the drug hashish, hence the term hashashin. The use of hashish, a hallucinogen, is interesting in the light of the shamanic trance state techniques used to access the underworld. The name "Nizar" is also interesting, as we note that the Hindustani term nazar, which is very similar, is the Yogic term for the so-called esoteric third eye, the Agnya or Anja chakra, which is "opened" (i.e. activated) through meditation and the hypnagogic trance state. Moreover, John the Baptist was known as the "Great Nazar." The Gnostic term "Nazarean," which is used in the title "Jesus the Nazarean" and often mistakenly interpreted as referring to the town of Nazareth, which mean "to envision" or "behold" and is also linked to the snake.

There is more to the serpent than meets the eye. Its coils lie at the very foundation of the Western world.

Indeed, the evidence suggested that, at their very core, the world’s religions were all the same. It was just the outward cultural dressing which differed. At the root of them all was the snake – the giver of immortality.

And the snake/serpent became a symbol of wisdom in its feminine aspect, a wisdom for which there is no more powerful image than Sophia.

There is now little doubt that early Christian sects venerated the serpent. St. Epiphanius seemed to put his finger on it in Adversus Haereses (Against Heresies), when he stated that the serpent worshipers "venerate the serpent because God has made it the cause for Gnosis."

It has been suggested that early ritual dances predate the labyrinth itself and symbolize the motion of the serpent, thus enabling the initiate to obtain immortality, either on earth or in the afterlife.

We also suggest that this unique mixture of poison and hallucinogenic drugs must have made the ancient "user" feel that they were in contact with their god, for it would have boosted their immune system and left them on a high for several days, giving them a feeling of being "born again."

It is widely acknowledged that the ancients believed that caves, wells and other openings in the Earth were entrances to the womb of the world Mother or Earth Goddess, from whom all life emerged and into whom all things returned at death. The snake lives within the Earth, the body of the Goddess, and is thus aware of her wisdom and her secrets, including those of life, death and rebirth.

One of the authors who was passing through sort of semi-promised me the chance to write a brief essay on DOROTHY HUGHES for an anthology of female hard boiled writing she’s involved in. Like most of my literary prospects it will probably come to nothing, but it was a good excuse to read some books by HUGHES I hadn’t read before. I ordered one I hadn’t even heard of called DREAD JOURNEY (from 1945), her Hollywood book (presumably inspired by the experience of having two of her books made into movies), and not only was it excellent, but it featured a victim with my surname who was killed so a megalomaniacal producer could cast another woman as CLAVIDA CHAUCHAT in his dream production of THOMAS MANN’s THE MAGIC MOUNTAIN, that character and book being, as the faithful reader knows, among my preoccupations recently. Weird world.

Anyway, here’s a few choice selections from DREAD JOURNEY, by DOROTHY HUGHES, who started her literary career as a poet:

The publicity department must have had an extra reefer to nightmare that one.

He was under her skin where he wanted to be.

Once he hadn’t believed in hell. Once he hadn’t believed in a personal demonic deity. But he’d seem men possessed. He knew powers of evil flogged the earth and powers of good weren’t strong enough to exorcize them. The powers of good, what happened to them? Where was heaven?

She carried her head like a lady and her body like a snake.

She was the one thing alive under the weight of the afternoon. Alive but not real, she was a thing, glittering, empty.

Gratia’s eyes were made of glass, dark glass. You could see through them to the bottomless depth of her, but it was too dark to know what you saw there.

Les said, "He’s as sane as you or I." He took a small breath. "With one small exception. He thinks he’s almighty God."

Dreaming isn’t enough; you have to fight.