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"Energy is Eternal Delight" William Blake A still from Nikita Mikhalkov's 1980 film adaptation of Oblomov I Oblomov, the eponymous anti-hero of Ivan Goncharov’s 1859 satirical novel, is the living embodiment of inertia. He's widely considered to be the epitome of the ‘superfluous man’ of Russian literature of the 1840s and 1850s, but has none of the Byronism, glamour, or elegance of Turgenev’s Bazarov or Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin. A man in his thirties living in rooms in Petersburg with his manservant Zhakar and cook Anisya, Ilya Ilych Oblomov came up to the capital from Oblomovka, the family estate in the provinces, to join the civil service, eleven years before the action of the novel begins. After two years in his job, using a faked sick note, he escapes work of any kind for good, and sequesters himself from society. Oblomov lives in genteel squalor, due in part to the neglect of his irascible factotum Zhakar, himself an indolent buffoon. In his gloomy apartment are cobwebs, plates with mouldering scraps of food, and a few books and journals gathering dust, unread or somnolently glanced through. He never goes out, rarely gets up, and lives only for Anisya’s meals, wine, and coffee, and luxuriating in his bed. Recently I read an old review of the novel in The Spectator that claimed the novel is a “guide to being idle”. It’s nothing of the sort, but this view of Oblomov, that he is a cultured proto-slacker to be admired and emulated, rather than pitied, and that the novel celebrates a life of idling, is a typical but perverse misreading. The same review referred to Oblomov as “a fizzing ball of energy intellectually”, but there’s no evidence in the text to support such a statement, yet this take too, that Oblomov is an intellectual, and a philosopher of idling, is also prevalent. But he doesn’t read (“serious reading exhausted him”), write, take any interest in art or politics, or in anything else. Goncharov was obviously against Oblomovism, but you wouldn't think so from much that has been written about the book and its pitiable anti-hero. Critics and reviewers have been altogether too kind to him. Oblomov does have good qualities, but his indolence isn’t one of them. “Flabby beyond his years”, he lives a depressive’s existence, in semi-darkness, attentive to and curious about nothing: “... for Ilya Ilich recumbence was never a necessity, as it would be for an ill or sleepy man, not an occasional occurrence, as it would be for someone who was weary, not a pleasure, as for a lazy man; it was his normal state”. Oblomov is “an exaggerated portrayal of one of life’s extremes”, as Goncharov put it. He was not aiming for psychological realism, but presenting a satirical personification of a feckless, parasitic upper middle class. Oblomov is a target of authorial ridicule (though the satire is unusually gentle) and to identify with him or to imitate his lifestyle would be absurd. Goncharov thought of Oblomovism - the name given to this destructive apathy by one of the novel’s characters - as a tendency that was debilitating to Russia as a whole, to its peasantry, bourgeoisie, and its Civil Service. Oblomov is no dandy aesthete along the lines of Huysmans’s des Esseintes, no intrepid mental traveller to the depths of inner space, experimenting with new modes of living. One of the defining features of the 'superfluous man' of Russian literature is that he is overeducated, yet Oblomov's education is explicitly less than middling. His merits are modest, and he is an endearing but pitiful mediocrity. He makes a few broadsides against society to justify his withdrawal from it, but his comments could have been lifted from a novel, and are rationalisations to justify his permanent lie-in and etiolated existence. Oblomov has been liberated from labour by the serf system in Russia, and the essence of his existence is an inherited parasitism, his habitual state one of near stupefaction. If the satire is gentle, it’s because Goncharov was no stranger to procrastination and sloth. It took him eleven years to complete the novel and, like Oblomov, he retired from the civil service to rooms in Petersburg, shutting himself away from society. II We meet Oblomov as he receives a series of visitors from his bed, ex-colleagues and amiably lampooned social types, in his once opulent but now tatterdemalion oriental dressing gown. Subinsky and Volkov, social butterflies, Alexeyev, an exaggerated personification of nobodyness, Penkin, an up-and-coming young writer who observes that Oblomov is “the same incorrigible lazy bones”, and Tarantiev, an arrogant, scheming sponger. Each tries to persuade him to accompany them to Ekatarinof, a pleasure garden along the lines of Vauxhall Gardens. He refuses, and tries in turn to persuade each of them to stay and have dinner with him instead. Between callers, Zhakar entreats him to get out of bed. By midday he has made it to his armchair, though still in his dressing gown, and after Tarantiev has left he returns to his bed. The plot is driven by two long-unanswered letters that Oblomov has received. One is from the bailiff at Oblomovka informing him of the parlous condition of the estate and its drop in income, requesting that he come and personally put things in order. It’s obvious from the letter that he’s losing money from the estate’s mismanagement, and that he’s been diddled by the bailiff. The other is from his landlord, giving him notice to leave, as he wants to knock Oblomov’s flat together with the adjoining one. Oblomov knows he has to find a new accommodation, and that he needs to visit his estate, but can muster the strength for neither. Tarentiev offers to send an acquaintance of his to be Oblomov’s agent at Oblomovka, and also tells him that his friend, Ivan Matveyevich, has a house on the ‘Vyborg side’ of Petersburg (a semi-rural, less salubrious district, across the other side of the Neva) who employs his sister, Agafia Matveyevna, as housekeeper and cook. Finally, Stolz arrives. It is four-thirty and Oblomov is still in bed. Stolz is Oblomov’s childhood friend, a man characterised by Goncharov as Oblomov’s opposite, although what he does for living is left unclear. Whatever, he’s a man of action who is “constantly in motion ... who both went in society, and read, but when he found the time for all this, God only knows”. Oblomov “sincerely loved and trusted him alone”, and only Stolz succeeds in getting him up, dressed, and out into society again. They agree that Stolz will stay with Oblomov, and while he unpacks Oblomov dozes and drifts off into a dream, really a dreamed memory, of his boyhood on Oblomovka. It’s given a long chapter to itself, and the life and scenes it describes are the psychological explanation for Oblomov’s passivity, lethargy, and gluttony. “The people of Oblomovka”, Goncharov writes, “had a hard time believing emotional upheaval. They did not accept life as a round of constant aspirations to go somewhere and achieve something. They understood life as nothing other than an ideal of tranquillity and inaction”. Life at Oblomovka is peaceful, and existence there is based around food, “the first and most vital concern in Oblomovka”, and his mother spends the whole morning conferring with staff about the menu for lunch, a meal followed by universal napping. She overfeeds him, ensuring that he does nothing for himself, even putting on his own socks, and is always looking for an excuse not to send him to school (a school run by Stolz’s father). His life is made up of meals, strolls, and vacant reverie, in an atmosphere of incipient dilapidation and slow decay. For Goncharov the estate stands for Russia as a whole. After Oblomov recounts his dream to him Stolz comments perceptively that “it all began with your inability to put on your own stockings and ended with your inability to live”. The dream shows that Oblomov suffers not from an excess of clarity about life, but is victim of a natal nostalgia. Uncorrupted by his privilege, it's true that Oblomov is kind and generous, and has remained artless, but he is at the same time useless - he just can’t get his shit together. As Stolz puts it in one of his several encomiums for Oblomov: “He has an honest and faithful heart ... having lost the strength to live he hasn’t lost his honesty and faithfulness ... his soul is transparent, clear as crystal. Such people are rare”. Yet there's not quite enough in the text to support such laudations. It's true that Oblomov does loan out negligible sums of money to former acquaintances and indulgently keeps on a servant at least as lazy as him. But as for ‘goodness,’ that’s about it, it’s just that he’s not actively bad. Things change for a while. That night Oblomov and Stolz go out for dinner with a large party. Oblomov overcomes his near agoraphobia and goes back into society, with difficulty, and with several scenes of amusing gaucheness. In his youth, we're told, Oblomov was attractive to women, but “because intimacy with women entails a great deal of trouble ... he tended to limit himself to a bow from afar, at a respectable distance ... his amorous intrigues never developed into full blown romances ... and in their innocence, simplicity and purity were not inferior to tales written by some lady lodger of a certain age”. Stolz goes on business abroad, expecting Oblomov to join him in Paris, after having introduced him to the vivacious, clever and teasing Olga Ilyinsky and her guardian aunt. He thought that introducing him to Olga “would be like bringing a lamp into a darkened room”, not foreseeing that the two would fall in love. With Olga, Oblomov’s “heart thirsted for life again”, and so follows the longest section of the book, and the narrative shifts from social comedy bordering on burlesque to the glandular fiasco of romantic love. All the transports, rhapsodies, lachrymal laments, declarations, doubts, obstacles, and sub-plots of their affair are recounted. The bathetic and almost baroque delineations of elevated emotion and fine feeling in this section I took to be satirical-parodic. Intentionally humorous or not, it is very funny. For Olga, “her love is justified by [Oblomov’s] meekness, his pure faith in good, and most of all his tenderness ... he was simpler than Stolz and kinder, and although he did not make her laugh, he made her laugh simply by being himself and easily forgave her teasing”. This is hardly propitious. Olga gives off a faint whiff of reform, and they debate his way of living together often. Oblomov is a rescue project for her, and his getting his act together in regard to his estate is an implicit condition for their marriage. But over this, even as he is systematically fleeced by Tarantiev’s agent, he continues to procrastinate, just as he continually makes excuses not to join Stolz in Paris. Oblomov writes a break-up letter that surprisingly shows he has the full measure of both himself and Olga, although they are briefly reconciled and plan to shortly announce their engagement to Olga’s aunt. But Oblomov was right, his love was a mere velleity. He makes excuses not to visit Olga. Meanwhile, he has moved to rooms in the house of Ivan Matveyevich on the Vyborg side, and the Neva freezes over, conveniently separating the lovers. III So far, so farrago. The truth is that Oblomov started noticing his new landlady and cook Agafia, who eventually becomes his wife, as soon as he moved in. “What wonderful coffee! Who makes it?” he asks on his first day in his new apartment. He looks at Agafia, a widow with two small children “with the same pleasure with which he looked at a hot curd tart”, ogling her strategically uncovered shoulders, pneumatic embonpoint and “fat active arms”. His concupiscence is as much gustatory as carnal. She’s a wonderful cook and genius of household management. Her brother, a gourmand like Oblomov, lives in a flat upstairs and ensures that the household has the finest provender the city has to offer, with no expense spared. From the beginning Agafia has been seducing Oblomov. It’s a sly and sweet seduction, shy glances and smiles, teasing flashes of flesh. And above all, endless delicious meals, snacks and drinks. Agafia, seemingly a woman with little-to-no agency, knowingly steals Oblomov away from her undeclared rival, the sexy bluestocking Olga. What earns Oblomov her devotion is his lack of vulgarity, coarseness and guile, and his kindness to her children. Without doubt these are fine qualities, refinements Agafia finds captivating and to which up until now she’s been a stranger. She also, through her union with Oblomov, significantly raises the social status of her and her children. Stolz, shortly after Oblomov’s move, returns to Russia and puts affairs at Oblomovka in order, sacking the agent Tarantiev had sent and ensuring that Oblomov gets a comfortable income from his estate. Agafia repairs Oblomov’s dressing gown, signalling a return to his previous otiose mode of living. But it’s nowhere near as apathetic and desultory as before: the food is even better, he has sympathetic company, everything is clean, bright and bustling around him. At Agafia’s “everything of a hostile nature had disappeared from his life” and, smoking his post-prandial cigar “in a dull reverie”, his new life “reminds him of Oblomovka”. Ivan Goncharov However, there’s a temporary interruption of Oblomov’s idyll. Tarentiev and Ivan Matveyevich (who has in the meantime moved out, and no longer supplies top-quality groceries to the household), to make up for the loss of their share of the corrupt agent’s swindling of Oblomov, trick Agafia into signing a fraudulent promissory note claiming Oblomov is in debt to her, which must be paid off every month to Matveyevich, so that much of the estate’s income is diverted to the swindlers. For a while, the couple are on their uppers, their indigence, as was their plenty, described in terms of food, its quality and quantity. Stolz returns to Russia for good – by now having married Olga himself – to find Oblomov in this reduced state. He soon uncovers the dastardly plot by Tarantiev and Ivan Matveyevich, and Oblomov’s income from his estate is restored to him in full. Stolz and Olga take an estate next to Oblomovka, but Oblomov can’t be persuaded to move and take over the running of it. Agafia’s home returns to being another Oblomovka, where Oblomov lives "surrounded by good, simple, loving faces ... in a lazy crawl from one day to the next.” Occasional sleepy peasant rutting, steaming pies, tasty tarts and pastries, cake, vodka, wine, frequent naps, coffee, cigars. More, it’s true, than many could hope for and of which, no doubt, many dream. It’s a state of animal slumber, life lived in a struggle-free eternal present. Oblomov progresses from flabby to fat. He eats to excess, tries to sleep and nap as much as he can, and takes no exercise other than a resented daily post-prandial walk. He and the lovingly servile Agafia now have a baby boy, Andrei (she sets the rascal onto Oblomov’s recumbent body so that he can pull his nose or ear to wake him). Stolz is appalled at Oblomov’ marriage and paternity, and his persistent refusal to go and run his estate. Reminiscing about their romance, Oblomov observes of Olga that “she can sing the Casta Diva, but she doesn’t know how to make vodka like this, nor how to make a chicken and mushroom pie”. Oblomov dies of a second stroke shortly after Stolz’s final visit, brought on, in the words of his doctor by “lying about and eating fatty, heavy food”. It’s a sad end: “not having experienced the pleasures to be attained through struggle, he mentally rejected them and felt at peace only in his forgotten corner, which was alien to action, struggle and life”, and he “passed away without pain or suffering, like a clock someone had forgotten to wind”. Perhaps if the satire of Oblomov had been just a little crueller, more venomous, and traitorous to Goncharov's class, not so many readers would have read against his condemnatory intentions and crassly taken Oblomov as an exemplar. Oblomov is funny, but the humour is gentle and the protagonist treated with a little too much compassion. There’s room in the world for Oblomovs and Oblomovism, it’s a social type and human predilection, and sometimes a necessity as a method of recuperation. But its universality or permanence is baneful, an illness, the death of the human spirit. Baudelaire wrote of ennui, to which he was not immune, that it was a spirit of evil, one that “could swallow the whole world in a yawn”.

Swimming Stags, Lascaux cave, France The Boy’s Own story of the discovery in 1940 of the linked caves at Lascaux in the Vezere valley in France, and the 600 or so 17, 000-year-old paintings inside them by schoolboy Marcel Ravidat and his mischievous scamp of a dog Robot can be found in all histories of Prehistoric art. Since Lascaux, older sites and cave art have been found: the Chauvet cave, discovered in 1994, contains friezes as well preserved and of comparable beauty as those in Lascaux that are 37, 000 years old. What makes Lascaux so special is that it contains the most written-about and analysed of all prehistoric images, the so-called La Scene du Puits. This is not the most beautiful of the paintings in Lascaux, but it is humanity’s first extant story or narrative, a murder mystery and, like the most disturbing of these, one that remains enigmatic. Some of the longer prehistoric friezes found in caves may be hunting scenes or show, perhaps, the successive stages of the rutting cycle, but what is sequential or contiguous and denotes the passing of time is not a story. Considering the age of paintings in Chauvet it is extremely unlikely that La Scene du Puits is the first narrative; cave art and some portable objects are the only prehistoric art available to us, but they represent just a fraction of what would have been produced. Most would have been executed on perishable or temporary substrates such as wood, the human body, or outdoor rock exposed to the erasing elements. La Scene du Puits is found at the bottom of a shaft more than five metres deep. It is extremely difficult of access, in the most profoundly dark and silent part of a place already one of profound darkness and silence. Yet the archaeological evidence indicates that this was the most frequented section of the Lascaux cave. The logistical challenges of creating or even viewing this painting would have been considerable. By the time of Chauvet our prehistoric ancestors had mastered not just the manufacture of brushes, pigment and its binding, and of trompe l’oeil effects utilising the rock surface, but also the manufacture and use of ladders and scaffolding, and lamps for long-lasting light. The mixing of pigments would have been as specialised an activity as painting, one for which a complicated body of technical knowledge needed to be amassed. The women and men who made these paintings were also accomplished drafts-people who had practised a great deal. Such grace and economy of line, such haunting and time-transcending verisimilitude, indicate teaching and many hours of practice. La Scene du Puits, Lascaux cave, France La Scene du Puits is a tableau that shows a bison with its entrails spilling out. In front of, almost underneath the bison is a hybrid figure, part bird, part man. In contrast to the naturalism of the animal figures, he is depicted in a schematic, clumsy, stick-figure style. Underneath this prone, male figure with erect penis, arms outspread as if struck dead, is a bird, seen laterally, atop a stick. To the left of these figures is a rhinoceros, walking away from the scene. Across the bison’s flank is a spear and next to that, underneath the bison, is what could either be a spear thrower, arrow, or short thrusting spear. The stick that supports the bird may be a line relating to and illustrating a Palaeolithic understanding of bird-flight and gravity. This bird-headed stick may also be a spear-thrower: it has a strong resemblance to spear throwers with animals carved at one end that have been found in the Dordogne region. Between the bird and the rhinoceros are two parallel lines of three dots. The same abstract figures can be seen above the large auroch in the Hall of Bulls at Lascaux, and elsewhere. Everything image in the cave would have had its equivalent in speech: humans had had a well-developed Broca’s area of the brain (connected with speech) since Homo Habilis, and Neanderthals had full powers of vocalisation, so such abstract signs found in caves corresponded to sounds, both communicating the same things. What we see here is writing, and La Scene du Puits is therefore a written, as well as a visual narrative. Palaeolithic animal-headed spear-thrower Of the ‘classical’ Palaeontologists, only the Abbé Breuil, the first to explore the caves, accepts that it may have been the rhinoceros and not the human that killed the bison, yet this is by far the most likely explanation. The wound is large enough for the bison’s entrails to spill out, something unlikely to result from a mere spear-point wound. If the wound were made by the rhinoceros’s horn, this would be accurate natural observation on the part of the artist: rhinoceroses charge head down and thrust upward into the belly of an opponent, often tossing smaller adversaries high into the air. Moreover, the spear is not in the bison. The short and long lines in the composition that have been identified as weaponry also have an eye-guiding pictorial function, irrespective of what they may represent. (This belies the accepted art-historical view that arrows used to indicate direction are not found before the eighteenth century, and that the arrow was not used symbolically until the sixteenth century.) The bison in this image is charging, yet has been fatally wounded with its entrails hanging out: no beast could charge like this whilst so seriously wounded. But this anomaly indicates the presence, not the absence of sophistication on the part of the prehistoric artist. Three-hundred thousand years before the Futurists, this artist has tried to depict more than one moment of time within a single pictorial composition, and not just within a single composition, but within a single figure. The method of showing the same limb of an animal in different positions, or adding ‘extra’ limbs or heads to suggest movement can be observed at Lascaux and other caves, preceding the same avant-garde gesture by Giacomo Balla by around 150, 000 years. Often, we see flurries of added contour lines giving an impression of flux, or sequential animation based on retinal persistence through the use of juxtaposed or superimposed successive images of the same animal, giving an impression of rearing, galloping and so on. Inside the dark caves, the flickering of the oil lamps would have added to the sense of movement. In La Scene du Puits the bison has two manes to suggest movement, its front and back half inhabiting different chronological spaces, one the time of the bison’s charging, the other the time of its wounding. Giacomo Balla, Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash, 1912 Wounded lion with two heads and tails to suggest movement and emotion, Lascaux Lost animality, grotesque humanity, the dawn of servility George Bataille first wrote about La Scene du Puits first in Lascaux, or the Birth of Art (1955). Commissioned by his friend the publisher Albert Skira for a series of monographs on art from around the world, it remains the only art monograph written by a philosopher for the lay reader. Bataille never showed much interest in meaning of the narrative, commenting that “none of the proposed interpretations seems satisfactory to me”. In Lascaux he gave a sympathetic-magic explanation which he suggested as being valid for all prehistoric art, a view he later abandoned. Unable to explain precisely what is going on in terms of ‘story’, he self-deprecatingly wrote: “We may perhaps go this far: the rhinoceros disembowelled the bison, the bison killed the man – but that is not, indeed, very far, nor very satisfactory”. Only three elements of the image really exercised Bataille: the wound, the erection, and the schematic rendering of the human figure, a feature common to all Upper Palaeolithic art, and crucial to Bataille’s interpretation of cave art generally. He had already drawn attention to the “difference in presentation of the man and the beast … the stiff, childlike manner of the former, and the naturalism which achieved astonishing perfection in the latter”, and how this relates to humankind emerging from its animality, in several short essays: Primitive Art, The Passage from Animal to Man (1952) A Visit to Lascaux (1952) and A Meeting in Lascaux (1953), essays written before he visited Lascaux, based on photographic reproductions in books. In The Passage from Animal to Man Bataille sees the human form being reduced to a few sticks as denoting humanity’s lost animality, capturing “the very moment when the animal within him became human” and as an “effacement of man before the animal”. This tendency to depict the human form as comic, ugly or deformed he also views as the primitive, violent and negating roots of caricature. For Bataille, children’s art uses the same deforming, caricatural figuration as cave art and children “draw in their own way and by means of which they oppose themselves to adults “. He recalled his own youthful defacing of his copy books and schoolfellows’ clothing in Primitive Art, claiming that in such activities he had “rediscovered the natural conditions of graphic art … a question of altering what one has to hand”. La Scene du Puits not only enacts and represents ‘the passage from animal to man’ but philosophically reflects upon it: “man only partially divulged his own body … its strange character emphasised the interest in a passage from animal to man … and far from feeling ashamed of the share of the animal that remained within him, he masked that face of which we are so proud with it, and flaunted that which our clothes conceal”. Here he is referring to the humanoid’s erection. It is a moot point as to whether it is being ‘flaunted’: it isn't hidden, but its size has not been exaggerated, and there is no realism in its depiction – it is a tiny pointed stick, drawn in the same “grotesque and childish” way as the rest of the figure. Only very recently has it been established that Homo Sapiens wiped-out not only Homo Neanderthalis, but probably also exterminated several other species of hominid. Research on early hominids was in its infancy when Bataille presciently wrote: “… it seems worthwhile to remind ourselves of the extent to which a monkey’s ugliness disturbs us … Middle Palaeolithic man certainly looked like a monkey. We might ask this question: did Neanderthal Man’s appearance, which the first men who walked fully upright had to have known well, cause the same horror in these men that the sight of a monkey induces in us? ” Georges Bataille So, the guilt over the killing of animals that Bataille insists on may also have been ancestral guilt over the killing off of other, competing, more animalistic-looking hominids, those that were his closest ancestors. In Lascaux, he suggests that the wearing of animal masks by humans was due to species-shame: “the artist felt obliged to clothe a nascent marvel with the animal grace they had lost … the artist achieved a positive virtuosity as a draughtsman, but disdained to portray his own face … The transition from animal to man was, foremost of all, man’s abjuration to animality”. According to Bataille, that coming into play of transgression and taboo that the unavoidable tasks of hunting and killing represented for Palaeolithic man was one of the processes by which we became fully human, instilling guilt and shame requiring expiation via art and ritual. It is because he has broken the taboo of murder that male figures such as the one in La Scene du Puits are depicted in such a pictographic manner: “Humanity must have been ashamed of itself at that time, but not of its underlying animality”. The very manner in which the human figure is depicted, its style, is an act of expiation, with animal figuration a contrasting gesture of obeisance to animals. In The Theory of Religion (1973), Bataille admits the obvious, that we have no way of fully accessing animal consciousness. The words 'animal’ and ‘animalism’ do refer to animals in Bataille's writing, but for him they also have figurative as well as literal meanings. He has a particular way of using language that can lead to his work being misinterpreted and seem more baffling than it actually is, this is his overdetermining certain words, giving them significations in excess of those they normally carry. Thus ‘death’ for Bataille is not merely the end of life, but also symbolises a radical negation of objective reality. Similarly, 'sacrifice' is not only the killing of a creature as part of a ritual, but refers to any action which produces sacred things through a negation of given reality. These two concepts are closely related and overlap, and illustrate well how Bataille's system of thought is based on the conceptual contiguity of terms. Thus, 'sacrifice' and death' are both in turn closely related to 'evil', which again, does not just mean the opposite of good, but is also that which resists assimilation to the utilitarian, to futurity, profit and goals. It is that which lives in and for the moment, in what he called the 'continuous sphere of animals and animality’, as opposed to the ’discontinuous sphere’ of the non-sovereign human, that mode of life inaugurated by the appearance of tools, which ‘broke the seamless continuity of the world', creating time and history. Along with ‘formless’, 'play', 'transgression', 'the barbaric', immediacy', ‘expenditure', 'animality' the 'accursed share' and 'art', the words form a linguistic-conceptual constellation, each word almost a synonym for the others. They form one half of a dichotomy, the other being the linguistic-conceptual constellation whose meanings are also contiguous and overlapping, formed by words such as 'work', 'conformity', 'the profane' 'the utilitarian', 'slavery', ‘architecture', 'the classical', 'human', 'futurity',’ bureaucracy' ‘profit’, ‘war’, ‘the bourgeoise’ and, filthiest of all, 'servility’. In Theory of Religion Bataille discusses in more detail how humankind’s emergence is linked with a negation of its animal nature, explaining how tools introduced time, work, futurity and goals, and thus self-consciousness. Becoming human involved humans setting themselves free from the “extreme domination of death and of reproductive activity … under whose sway animals are helpless”. Here, Bataille is referring to nature being subject to the helpless instinct to procreate and to kill. For Bataille’s friend Kojeve, who influenced his thinking in this regard, ‘animality’ is ‘mere given being’, a state of existence not created by conscious voluntary action, one “that does not go beyond itself to transform given reality”. This brings us up against a paradox of Bataille’s claims about the animality of cave art, because art was something human that transformed given reality, but in so doing inculcated a mode of consciousness that was prior to these transforming impulses. If humanity’s journey began with the transcendence of animal nature, for Bataille this transcendence paradoxically created an unrequitable desire for a return to humanity’s prior way of being-in-the-world, to the perfect immanence of animalism, a way of inhabiting the world that is “like water in water”, which humanity can now only express and temporarily achieve through art. For Bataille, ‘immanence’ means a world in which the relation of a being to its environment is unmediated, with nothing posited beyond the present. Immanence is an “intimacy” between man and the world, with the earth, with animals, that can be achieved only by close aesthetic attentiveness to it, and as an emblem of this he suggests the complete and seamless interpenetration of coition. This explains the overpainting in cave art, the lack of concern with posterity and permanence: the artists were interested only in the process of painting, in achieving a privileged mode of inhabiting their world, in experiencing a ‘sovereign moment’. A ‘sovereign moment’, in Bataille’s lexicon, is one in which all calculation, futurity and servility are absent. Achieving such a moment is an act of ‘evil’ - an act which resists the utilitarian, performed for its own sake. Animal existence fulfils all of the conditions of the sovereign and the evil in the senses that Bataille uses these words, and animals function with a “purposeful purposelessness”, like the Kantian artwork. The return to animality is, must, and can only be intermittent, made up of what painter Willem de Kooning termed ‘slipping glimpses’: “If man surrendered unconsciously to immanence, he would fall short of humanity; he would achieve it only to lose it and eventually life would return to the unconscious intimacy of animals. There is a tension created by being human without becoming a thing, without returning to animal slumber … Whilst the individual cannot connect himself with that which goes beyond his own limits, he glimpses in a sudden awakening of that which cannot be grasped but which slips precisely away as déjà vu.” So art, ultimately, is a kind of déjà vu of animalism, of a non-instrumental, unmediated relation with the world, artistic production being the benign doppleganger of work. This radical uncleavedness involves and enacts a becoming-animal and a becoming-human at the same time, and this absence of mediation between human and world is an epiphanic moment of recognition of the truth of the world ‘as it is’. The ecological and political implications of exchanging the rags of perception for the robes of the sovereign through art are obvious enough, and if the experience itself is intermittent, a remainder stays with us and these animal glances at reality give an insight as to how the world might practically be reconfigured in a way that makes human existence per se more sovereign, less alienated from nature, less servile, and how our historico-technical progression may be reconfigured in a less destructive way.

The Will to Power “To represent terrible and questionable things is, in and of itself, an expression of the artist’s instinctive desire for power and glory; he does not fear them.” Nietzsche, The Will to Power The post-war period, with its constant global conflicts, was a rich one for history painting, and the genre dominated American art of the 60s and 70s from the onset of the Vietnam war. Leon Golub (1922-2004) was the foremost history painter of the late twentieth century. After depicting the war in Vietnam, he moved on to the smaller proxy, so-called ‘dirty wars’ that continued around the globe through the 1980s, in the tradition of the dispassionate witness-bearing inaugurated by Jacques Callot’s 1633 series of prints, The Miseries and Misfortunes of War. Callot’s prints documented the first ‘total war’, the Thirty Years’ War, one characterised by countless atrocities, and it’s the absence of heroism or valour in his etchings, his detachedly documenting and merely bearing witness, that made Callot the first modern in the depiction of conflict. Golub’s paintings are in this tradition, and the activist impetus of peers such as Wally Hendrich, his wife Nancy Spero, the Art Worker’s Coalition, and Ed Kienholz, is absent from his work. Leon Golub, Gigantomachy II, 1966, Metropliotan Museum of Art, New York, USA. Western painting through the ages is full of images of battles and violence. Mimesis and violence are both so fundamental to human beings that we can say that they are things of inherency, rather than mere ubiquity. However historically specific a depiction of human brutality may be, it will always have ant odour of the eternal. This eternality of brutality is foregrounded in Golub’s paintings throughout his career, from the early Gigantomachy, Burnt Man, Napalm and Vietnam series, to his later Interrogation and Mercenaries series. By 1966 Golub had begun to use scale as a rhetorical mode. Gigantomachy II is a monumental 9 x 24 ft. The oversized figures on this large canvas tower over and menace us, an effect achieved in part by hanging his unframed, unstretched canvases at floor level. His works of this period were still informed by the same iconographical repertoire of images and styles as his work of the fifties, such as Classical sculpture, ‘Outsider Art’, shamanic masks, and Expressionism, giving them an air of primitivism, and this melding of styles crossing history and geography expresses the historical continuity and universalityof war. Jacques Callot, The Hangman's Tree, from The Miseries and Misfortunes of War,1633. Gigantomachy II depicts a group of naked men engaged in murderous hand-to-hand combat. Its main source was the frieze of the Great Altar of Zeus at Pergamon, c.180-160 BCE, so there is little suggestion of depth, and just enough recession for the figures to fit before and behind each other, with the back figures stuck to the ground, Fuzzy Felt fashion. The bodies are clumsily posed and ugly, as bodies are when engaged in physical violence. Although the title refers to a battle between the Olympian Gods and the race of giants from Greek mythology, there is nothing to differentiate the two warring enemies in the painting. The only suggestion that there are different “sides” is given by the ground, which is split almost equally into two, with a darker, excremental ground on the left, and a lighter brown on the right. The darker ground continues across the lower left-hand side of the painting to suggest a floor, although where floor and wall meet is indeterminate, a characteristic of Golub’s grounds generally. Golub is not depicting the oppression of the weak by the strong but making a generalized, essentialist statement about male aggression. Strong vertical and horizontal gouges and thick stripes of paint evoke scar, bruise, wound, and blood, dried and fresh, in a violently expressionistic style he dubbed “barbaric realism”. The faces of the figures in Gigantomachy II are barely discernible, abbreviated and schematic, and the battling bodies seem like one enormous writhing mass of human flesh, at war with itself, forever. By the time of Vietnam II, in 1973, Golub had abandoned these hieratic, classically influenced figures and was using photographic resources, as he began to amass what grew to be an enormous archive of images. Its sources were eclectic – anything from tv news stills, press and official war photography, boxing and football magazines, and Soldier of Fortune magazine – but its subject matter was monotonous: conflict and violence. Leon Golub, Vietnam II, 1973, Tate Modern, London, UK. With the Vietnam series, Golub for the first time addressed a specific war, and in Vietnam II he aimed also for specificity in his depiction of weaponry and uniforms, to anchor the paintings in their historical moment. Of this painting’s clumsy, awkward-looking figures, Golub said that he wanted them to be “gross, vulgar, clumsy as war”. This clumsiness was achieved, and a suggestion of a “constructed” self was enhanced by combining many photographic sources to form aggregate, almost collaged figures, implying that the modern human subject is an aggregate of sources, mostly from mass media. In an interview with David Levy-Strauss he said, “I virtually sense myself as made up of photos and imagistic fragments jittering inside my head”, contrasting his paintings to the ‘crystalline slice’ of a photograph, adding that his ‘aggregated figures’ are ‘more liquid, they flicker’. This though is problematic, as he depicts the victims in the same style as the perpetrators, yet it cannot be argued that a Vietnamese peasant’s subjectivity was formed by the Western mediascape of the time. There’s a tension in Vietnam II between humanism and anti-humanism, and the pathos of the scenario portrayed is at variance with the manner of its depiction, particularly the figures’ eyes. These cancelled eyes evoke an almost Sadean materialism, suggesting an ultimate impersonality and savage determinism at the core of the human. The figure of the Vietnamese boy, inspired by the iconic photo by Nick Ut, is at the very edge of the picture plane, and seems to be running to the arms of the viewer for succour, a futile entreaty to be forever frustrated. This was the last of his paintings in which a victim’s eyes would look out at the viewer. Following this, he cast aside self-deluding liberal pathos for what could be seen as a deterministic nihilism. Nick Ut, Napalm Girl, 1972, Associated Press. Vietnam II is the largest of Golub’s paintings – 10 x 40 feet. Like his other large paintings, it is unframed and hung at floor level. Golub may have been influenced by the size and landscape format of the cinema screen and using such scale to distance his depiction of the war from that on the small, square television screen (although he was a great admirer of the large-scale history paintings he saw by Gerome, David, and Delacroix when he lived in Paris between 1969-64). With its dour palette of the quasi-khaki of raw canvas, dried-blood reds, blacks, and browns, there is a refusal of the pleasurable haptic qualities of brighter colours and their powers of stimulation, a reaction against the bright palettes of Pop Art and Abstract Expressionism, as well as the blandishments of advertising, a deliberate making-ugly. These are the colours of the squalid, ugly, smelly mess of violent death, and suggest, too, an inner “lifelessness” and lack of affect. The specificity of the uniform and gun that Golub attempted in the Vietnam paintings make the painting no less essentializing than his Gigantomachy paintings: this historical accuracy in weapon and uniform depiction is lost on most viewers of the paintings. Even on close examination, Golub’s rendering of these items makes them seem generic. But his ‘failure’ in this regard was serendipitous. Vietnam II does not refer to a particular atrocity in the Vietnam war; the incident, like the figures in it, is an aggregate. However much a painter may want to communicate with his contemporaries, historical specificity in a painting is illusory, and any depiction of specific brutalities can be read as exemplifying the whole bloody nightmare of history. After the burnt and peeling flesh of his Burnt Man and Napalm paintings, Golub never again depicted wounds and injuries, blood, corpses or gore. This eschewing of gore may have been an ethical decision, and another indirect influence of the mass media on his work: by the time of Vietnam II almost all taboos regarding the depiction of violence had been broken, and brutality and torture in popular cinema had become mere jokey fun (some critics lay this at the door of the Bond films, David Thompson at that of Psycho). Violence is always imminent in Golub’s paintings - it may have been a granting of respect to victims that stopped him from showing them as corpses or damaged bodies, but this imminence makes his paintings all the more menacing. From the mid-1950s, using a meat cleaver, Golub had been scraping his painted canvases, in places going right down to the nap. This abrasion of the surface gives the paintings an ancient, ruinous look, universalising the barbarity portrayed. He may have been violently attacking the scenes represented, attempting a kind of sympathetic magic, but could also have been enjoying a vicarious acting out of violence. This hints at an identification with his violent, domineering, and destructive protagonists. The primitive artist, according to ethnologists, sought power by creating images of power. Leon Golub’s relationship with the soldiers, mercenaries, and interrogators in his paintings is complex and troubling, and something of Palaeolithic artists' relationship with the figures they portrayed is present in his portrayals of violent men. J Ross Baughman, Interrogation, 1977. Associated Press. Leon Golub, Mercenaries V, 1984, Saatchi Gallery, London, UK. Mercenaries V (1984) is based on an AP Press photo taken in Rhodesia by J. Ross Baughman. Golub made significant changes from the original photograph, the most obvious being the addition of colour, the men under interrogation being clothed, and their number reduced to three, all done for the sake of balance and elegance of composition. The source photograph, with the man’s head touching the top of the frame is, by conventional aesthetic standards, badly composed. The figures in the painting, by contrast, are evenly spaced, the limbs, including those of the interrogator, contrapuntally arranged. Legs, torsos, and the figure of the interrogator divide the painting into three equal parts. Whilst in the photograph the ground is clearly sand, in the painting we cannot tell where floor meets wall, giving the impression that the action is taking place in a blueish void. The paint for the victim’s faces has been evenly applied and hasn’t been attacked with solvents and cleaver in Golub’s customary way, in contrast to that of the domineering tormenter, whose face looks diseased, the external acting as metonym for a rotten and corroded interior. Another obvious difference between source photo and painting is that the interrogator in the photograph wears military fatigues, whilst in the painting he wears civilian clothes: a uniform would inhibit the viewer’s uncomfortable identification with this tormentor. The interrogator points his gun at a head, and his outspread left hand theatrically presents the scene as if it were a grotesque tableaux vivant laid on for the viewer’s delectation. His eyes look directly into the viewers, and he smirks in rueful triumph, in a kind of ‘so it goes’ and ‘how do you like that’ look. Few painters have their protagonists look directly at the viewers in a way that incorporates them into the situation viewed. This effect is compounded by the closeness of protagonist to picture plane, his life-size scale, and the painting being hung at floor level. Leon Golub, Interrogation II, 1981, Art Institute of Chicago. In Interrogation II, we again see an elegant patterning of verticals and diagonals, and there are similar theatrical, pointing hand gestures. The smiles of two of the interrogating figures are directed at the viewer; this disquiets, as when one smiles at someone, one expects the smile returned, and so a complicity is created between the viewer and these characters. The third figure on the right points at the genitals of the man being interrogated, whilst the man beside him points with both hands at his own genitals. This could be a jeering indication that something gruesome is about to happen to the genitals of their prisoner, or pointing to the ultimate source of male aggression. There is almost no recession to Interrogation II, and we feel that the characters are almost in our space, whilst the furnace-red ground gives a hellish feel of the scene taking place in a no-space, no-time, all-time. As in all of the Mercenary, White Squad and Interrogation paintings, we don’t see the victim’s face – in this case it is hooded. This lack of a face confirms the distance not only between the oppressor and oppressed within the painting, but also that between viewer and victim. There is a refusal to foster any feeling of identification, and therefore of pathos, and the viewer experiences the act of objectifying a victim. This, and the fact that torturers are given a face, and that their eyes that meet ours, brings us closer to the perpetrators than to the victims. In a piece of emotional and moral realism, they are more ‘human’ for us than their anonymised victims. The torture victim is also naked, and is central to the canvas, and our looking at his vulnerable nakedness augments our objectification of him. Leon Golub, Interrogation III, 1981, Art Institute of Chicago. In Interrogation III the female victim, whose naked body is the cynosure of the canvas, has had her eyes and mouth taped over, and her nipples and genitalia form a primitive schematic face as we look, one that seems to eerily to stare out at us, as we vainly search for a face to meet ours to resist our complicity in objectifying her. Leon Golub’s art gives a voice to suffering, but he also gives one equally to cruelty. He once commented that his oppressors are just “guys on the job, maybe even taking pride in a job well done”. In an interview with Martha Rosler, he denied that his paintings were activist, commenting,“The basic thing I want is a kind of reportage. It is similar to Renaissance paintings in whose figures you see the customs of the time, the power relationships between people”. He went on to connect his own feeling of power as an artist to that of the violent figures depicted, and to the global power of America: “I am an American artist. I think that a powerful society, generally speaking, has powerful art … The implications of confidence and the use of force are implied by these figures … The circumstances which permit me to record this kind of art are part of American confidence”. Golub repeatedly claimed to be a mere recording witness and was reluctant to condemn the perpetrators of violence in his paintings. For instance, the original collective title of the Vietnam paintings was Assassins, which he judged to be too condemnatory and changed, explaining, “you can’t blame the GIs for the guys who were initiating this”. It is such statements that led Peter Schjeldahl to describe Golub as “a citizen of the left but classically conservative: convinced of human wickedness to a degree almost beyond caring”. Making violence the subject of art necessarily aestheticizes it, even when attempting to capture its squalid quiddity, and to render it abhorrent. Golub’s art is a cruel art in the sense not of delighting in suffering, but of a refusal of complacency, and of a courageous tarrying with the cruelty of reality. Few painters have produced such dispassionate disquisitions on political violence, militarism, and brutality. E. M. Cioran once wrote that only a monster can see things as they really are: Golub exhibited this monstrous strength.

“For those dreamers who considered that force, thanks to progress, could soon be a thing of the past, The Iliad could appear as an historical document; for others, whose powers of recognition are more acute and who perceive force, today as yesterday, as at the very centre of human history, The Iliad is the purest and loveliest of mirrors”. Simone Weil, The Iliad or the Poem of Force Vengeance of Achilles, 1978, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia Western literature begins with a song of savagery and gore. It is this bloody epic poem, the Iliad, specifically Alexander Pope’s 1720 translation of it, that Cy Twombly illustrates and interprets in his series of ten paintings Fifty Days at Iliam. Nicola del Roscio, Twombly’s long-time assistant, recounts that Twombly was “fixated for some time on Pope’s translation, almost in a fanatical way”. That he is illustrating a text is made clear by the incorporation of the titles within the body of the paintings, a reference to the captioned illustrations in a book. Twombly had already treated the subject of the Iliad and the Trojan war more than 10 years earlier in 1962, in the paintings Vengeance of Achilles and Achilles Mourning the Death of Patroclus, and again in the triptych Ilium, 1964. The ten paintings that make up Fifty Days at Iliam are now housed in their own room, as Twombly wished, at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. It’s likely that Twombly, who lived in Italy from the late 1950s, had seen the Hall of the Iliad in the Pitte Palace in Florence, and the idea of his own ‘Hall of the Iliad’ may have been inspired by it. Although he would have been familiar with art relating specifically to The Iliad, including amphorae at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, paintings and vases at various sites in Italy, and the Flaxman illustrations to his edition of Pope’s translation, it was to the literary text to which Twombly was responding. Cy Twombly was one of the Twentieth Century’s most literary painters, obsessed enough by his favourite poets not only to include snippets of their verse in his paintings, and create paintings as a response to them, but also to rewrite or ‘correct’ their poems in his copies of their books. Vengeance of Achilles, 1962, Kunsthaus, Zurich The ten paintings follow each other like a loose, discrete narrative based on the slaughter-filled books XIX and XX of the Iliad, beginning with the decision of Achilles to re-join the war, following the death of Patroclus. Paintings focusing on the Trojans face those dealing with the Ilians across the gallery, with the painting Shield of Achilles displayed alone in a separate room. Twombly explained his decision to replace the ‘u’ of Iliam with an ‘a’ to David Sylvester, relating the series to his earlier Achilles painting: “I spelt it I-L-I-A-M which is not correct. It’s U_M … Because I did that Vengeance of Achilles with the A shape. Also, it’s the Achilles thing and the shape of the A has a phallic aggression – more like a rocket. The Vengeance of Achilles is very aggressive. My whole energy, will, work … [has] a very definite male thrust. The male thing is the phallus." Critic Mary Jacobus described this series as a “meditation on the aesthetics of violence” and Twombly was ambivalent about violence - not only is his style violent and barbaric, but he illustrated a poem that glorifies war. Del Roscio, noting that Twombly was “a convinced anti-war person who was against any kind of violence” describes the alarming genesis of the Fifty Days at Iliam series, showing Twombly’s identification with Achilles, and how the motivation for the paintings lay partly in vengeful aggressiveness and domestic strife: “The fury of Achilles and the other warriors [in the paintings] was the result of the irritation and rage that Cy’s wife Tatiana, in a domestic mixture of familiar contempt, caused in daily episodes, emotionally overpowering him … He carried with him a halo of anger and rage, cigarettes and Pinot Grigio." The 1962 Vengeance of Achilles is three metres high, and Twombly uses scale to intimidate. Achilles does not face, but confronts us, the air of menace enhanced as the figure is hooded, level with the picture plane, and as close to being in the viewers space as is possible without resorting to trompe d’oeil. The flurries of graphite and red oil paint are contained within the A shape, connoting the disciplined ‘cold fury of the warrior’ rather than an intemperate frenzy, allegorising both war and warmaking, art and artmaking, the A standing for Apollo and the Apollonian, that which structures and makes coherent passionate Dionysiac frenzy. Achaeans in Battle, 1978, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia This painting, like many of Twombly’s works, hovers on the edge of figuration and abstraction, inducing a state of semiotic delirium. An important book for Twombly, one he studied closely, was William Empson’s Seven Types of Ambiguity, in which he discusses the ways that poets can create ambiguity, suggestion, ambivalence and multivalence with “one sentence, phrase or even [a] single word”, through “any verbal [or pictorial] nuance, however slight, that gives room for alternative reactions to the same piece of language”, producing a “richness and heightening of effect”. Vengeance of Achilles is thus simultaneously blood-tipped phallus, dagger, sword or spear-point, wraith, arm, artist, warhead, flame, Klansman, arrowhead, Ares, giant ‘A’, Apollo and Achaean. The letter ‘A’ also implies the orginary and elemental, and that the violence associated with this figure is fundamental to humankind, with the scribbled pencil lines' evocation of pubic hair compounding a sense of the phallic and the primary. Rage is properly the title of Homer’s poem, and his contemporary audience probably knew it by that name. The rage depicted in the 1978 version of Vengeance of Achilles is specifically a testicular rage, and the hybrid shape is at once ball-sack and chariot wheel. A similar phallus shape to the one in this painting appears in both Achaeans in Battle and Ilians in Battle, though in these two paintings it more closely resembles a crude toilet wall graffito. The prick-chariot that is Agamemnon in Achaeans in Battle is the only one that Twombly has clearly delineated as a penis, rather than just a schematic penis shape, through the inclusion of a glans. Whatever Twombly may be implying about male violence and vengeance the image unavoidably amuses, and the childish pleasure of scrawling obscene graffiti – in effect straight onto a gallery wall – is not only one that Twombly alludes to, but also experienced. Twombly has shown a consistent phallomania, yet the obvious homo-erotic implications of his work have elicited barely any critical comment. The viewer is pointed towards the next ‘episode’ clockwise by these phalli, and the general movement from left to right calls attention to the fact that we are ‘reading’, evoking the written text of the Iliad. I would suggest that how we are taught to read words affects how we read images, that is, from left to right, (including the cinema: all the long tracking shots in films that I can recall have moved from left to right) and so affects how we experience a painting. Like those that dominate both versions of Vengeance of Achilles, the overdetermined form that is the Shield of Achilles presides over a tangled knot of significations and metaphors, some having in common qualities such as redness or roundness, and so on. What is a shield is also a sun, what is a sun is a ball of fire, what is a ball of fire is a wound, a scrotum or an anus, a blazing eye or a burning world. The circle is of course a symbol of eternity and, in this context, because of all the other violence-related connotations it calls forth, it expresses a fatalism about war – the eternal recurrence of the same barbarities. Which is not to say that Twombly necessarily laments this: The Iliad is a relentless catalogue of killings described with queasy, medically accurate detail, and it was a text that was dear to him. Shield of Achilles, 1978, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia In the 1975 Vengeance of Achilles, rather than just the tip, the whole of the penis-spear-missile is in red oil, whilst the scrotum-chariot-wheel is rendered in graphite. There is a predominance of red in all of Fifty Days Iliam, and the paintings in the cycle that have Achilles as a protagonist express his rage through red. The most obvious things that the reds used by Twombly call up are torn flesh, and blood, freshly spilt or in various stages of congealing and drying, and it has an archaising effect and archaic sources, both art-historically and psychologically. The preference for red has a genetic basis and it is possible that an attraction to red minerals was deeply ingrained in the biological behaviour of humans. According to anthropologist Ernst Wreschner in his paper Red Ochre and Human Evolution: “Cognition is knowing or acquiring knowledge. The perception of red, the ability to discriminate colours, led to actions that resulted in new experiences and learning. Part of the cognitive process is the endowment of objects– in this case ochre – with meanings. The creation of relationships [between objects] resulted in cultural structures.” The colour red was the first to be given meaning, to be used figuratively and to accrue symbolic associations, all pain, conflict or violence-related. The red-violence-representation nexus has been foundational for humankind’s cognitive development, and it is thought that the associative stimuli red ochre triggered contributed to the development of the brain and our very capacity for ideation. Red also acts directly on the nervous system and provokes an intense somatic response more effectively than any other colour. Twombly’s work generally has a primitive feel (like the work of his contemporary Leon Golub) because it is pictographic, often with the violence of a scrawl, on a white ground with no concern for figure, depth or perspective, like cave art. As well as a cave wall, this white ground also evokes the marble of monument and statuary. Another literary figure that fascinated Twombly was Mallarme. In Fifty Days at Iliam there's a Mallarme-like use of white space to give more force to what inhabits it. Mallarme wanted to give his isolated words an explosive, aggressive force, and as in Mallarme's of Un Coup de Des Twombly places a word or phrase in isolation on the page/canvas, exploiting the resonance-giving power of white space. In the 1978 Vengeance of Achilles the expanse of white is a visual cognate of silence, and therefore of death and eternity, which makes its roar of red seem vainglorious. He also places words and proper names alongside non-linguistic elements, dissolving the barriers between the pictorial and linguistic, the canvas invoking both canvas and page. In Cy Twombly’s paintings there is an automatic, aleatory element: not the planned, programmatic chance of the surrealists, but an unmediated transference of energy, something atavistic and aggressive surging urgently from the body itself, accounting for their feel of suppressed drives finding vicarious release. The similarity of Twombly’s technique to a toddler’s scribbling has often been noted, and the intoxication of paint that is Shield of Achilles is perhaps his most obviously ‘scribbled’ painting, with its heavily applied oil crayon over a ground of scumbled white oil with pinkish notes. Cy Twombly in Rome Twombly once commented that “the scribble is the artist’s fundamental rhythm”, and paintings such as Shield of Achilles gives the viewer a sense of the enjoyment of pure motor pleasure that toddlers are known to get from scribbling, an atavistic joy in pure mark-making being evident in much of Twombly’s work. Shield of Achilles is an example of what child psychologists have recently characterised as ‘onomatopoeic scribbling’, whereby scribbles are divided into ‘good’ and ‘bad’, ‘fast’, ‘slow’, ‘happy’ or ‘sad’ lines, and the substrate is either ‘caressed’ or ‘hit’ (when painting his Nine Discourses on Commodus, Twombly used a whip to paint). If Twombly is attempting a kind of ontological portrait of Achilles, it’s fitting that he does so partly by replicating the typical expression of a toddler’s inchoate rage. Cy Twombly replaced Picasso as the artist most subject to the derisory comment ‘my child could do that’, but the truth is that nobody could ‘do that’ without Twombly’s particular sensibility or artistic training. Conversely, no adult can achieve the nonchalant sprezzatural abandon of a child’s scribble because the child is coming from an irrecoverable, infantine subject position. When we are moved by our children’s scribbles it is partly because we experience nostalgia for a lost state of being, before we were time’s food or memory’s prey, and had barely nibbled the fruit of the tree of knowledge. When an artist such as Twombly tries to recover something akin to this infantile state it is a falling-back-into, not a going-beyond. Despite the ostensibly avant-garde, neo-Abstract style of his paintings, according the thinking of TS Eliot, Twombly, with his lack of historical specificity, and the way he incorporates the whole of history in his works, is a traditional painter, having “the historical sense, which is a sense of timelessness as well as of the temporal … this is what makes the writer [read: painter] traditional”. In Eliot’s terms, Twombly is using the “mythical method” rather than the “narrative method”, “controlling, ordering, giving a shape and significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is … history.” Fifty Days at Ilium is Twombly’s most achieved work in this regard, the paintings calling forth simultaneously the prehistoric cave wall and the utmost contemporary artistic sophistication, the scribbling child and the slaying warrior, murderous, petty vengefulness and disinterested aesthetic distance, the birth of humankind and its final fatal flame.

A Cup of Water and a Rose, c. 1630, The National Gallery, London It’s a small painting, just 21x30cm, but powerful, seductive, pregnant with meaning. You don’t need to catch the Francisco de Zurbarán exhibition starting in May at the National Gallery to see it, it’s part of their permanent collection, in room 30. Thought to be an autograph study, that is, produced without the aid of studio assistants, by the time Zurbarán painted A Cup of Water and a Rose in around 1630 he was Spain’s leading religious painter, though he’d painted mythological scenes for Philip IV’s palace, the Bien Retiro. For Sevillian painters still lives were a lucrative sideline, but this portrait is a still life and a religious painting, for it’s a portrait of the Virgin Mary in which she’s portrayed through her attributes. The rose, plate and ceramic cup in the painting, with its two gracile handles suggesting the Virgin’s arms, also appear in Miraculous Cure of the Blessed Reginaud of Orleans (1626-1627), The Infant Virgin at Prayer (163-1635), and in his more famous still life, Still Life with Oranges and a Rose (1634), another ‘mystical still life’ in which the lemons are symbolic of faithfulness, the oranges purity and fecundity, the rose, divine love. It was not unusual for a painter to have a stock of ‘props’ that might appear in different paintings and most still lives are a combination of memory, imagination, direct observation, studies and sketches, with guessed at shadows, and Zurbarán would not have had these objects before him when he painted this work. Still Life with Oranges and a Rose, 1633, Museo del Prado, Madrid In this painting the symbology begins with the frame, which is unobtrusive and modest, its dark totality matching that of the painting’s background. It’s a reverse profile frame, meaning that its highest point is at the sight-edge (the inside edge of the frame). This is typical of Baroque art, thrusting what is depicted towards the edge of the picture plane, but it also, which is more germane to this painting, reduces the shadow cast onto the painting, shadows representing time, and therefore mortality. Much later, Giorgio Morandi would, in some of his metaphysical paintings of bottles and jars, banish shadows completely to evoke the eternal, and the timeless time of art. The objects in this painting are life-size and close to the picture plane, encouraging, rather than a moving back to take in its architectonics, moving closer. Nearness of looking gives a tactile quality to what is looked at. As one move away from objects they lose their volume, become less substantial, eventually becoming apparitional. Here, this tactility of sight which cannot actually touch becomes metaphor for the Virgin herself: corporeal, yet divine, uneffable. By depicting Mary only through her attributes all carnality has been removed from looking at her, and the modesty, simplicity and clarity of the scene chastely evoke Mary, and the cup, rose, water and plate fluoresce from a symbolic, spiritual dark. All paintings, like us, are at the same time material and metaphysical things. Paintings are philosophy, as our minds become intricated with them as we look sometimes it feels as if we’re thinking with the artwork, not about it. Paintings are also linguistic objects, inseparable from language. As soon as we encounter a painting, we bespatter it with language, initially with gobbets of noun. The more we look the more abstract becomes the language which we think. In this instance, for example, the first things that occur to us, are ‘cup’, plate, rose’, water, brown, black, white, before we move on from the denotive to the connotative. Beauty, purity, femininity. Claudia Cardinale in Federico Felllini's 8 1/2 (1963) When we think of a figurative work like this, we think also of it in terms of abstraction, even those who've convinced themselves they don’t like abstract art, for in the end all paintings are abstract: pattern, colour, architectonics, leitmotifs, tonal relations, shifts, modulation,s and transitions, colour symbolism and density, and so on. The black and brown colour fields that bifurcate A Cup of Water and a Rose, their relationship, and the very subtle intermingling of their joining are like a Rothko in little. This bifurcation is repeated tonally in the plate and the cup, just as the rose is split into pink and white – flesh and spirit - for it’s a painting about the interplay and paradoxes of the dualities of existence. In A Cup f Water and a Rose there’s a hierarchy of surfaces, from the subterranean metal, to the earthly clay, to the flesh of the flower, to the purity of water, and finally to ineffable, divine light: Christ was ‘the light of the world’ and luminosity was God’s first gift on the first day of creation. The plate is of silver and represents redemption and the word of God, and all that is argent is associated with femininity and the moon. The plate's outer and inner rims and the mouth of the cup form three circles, the Trinity, eternity, the endless flow of life, and divine perfection. The water represents purity, virginity, and perfection. Mary was known as the Mystic Rose, while its white connotes Divine Love. The rose is thornless: the roses of the Garden of Eden only grew thorns after Adam and Eve had sinned, so this is a rose that points to redemption and the afterlife. All of this codified symbolism of the era will have more resonance now for a devout Catholic, for whom it may retain its original meanings. Yet time has not rendered it dryly art-historical. The painting itself invites contemplation and close looking, and post-religion, its modesty and simplicity, its call to an attentiveness to the physical world, to the beauty of form and form-giving light, means that it is still, for a secular age, a work that is about, and inculcates, aspiration and a will to redemption, but the redemptive capacities of art, not God: “whoever increasingly strives upward ... him we can save”, wrote Goethe. And of course, all Christian imagery was previously pagan imagery, with much the same meanings, ones they retain in a secular age. Purity, aspiration, devotion, the desire to slough off of moral filth, all have meaning in the secular world, too. (Fellini uses a cup of water, held by a young woman (Caludia Cardinale) a symbol of purity in 81/2.) Light itself, and the light of the intellect, we can regard as a gift, even in not from a god, just as we can see death as gift and destiny, as so many do when on its cusp. The beauty of the light on polished surfaces, the baroque, lyrical storm of reflection, shadow, light and the flesh of the corolla, where the material and the incorporeal are intermixed is no less beautiful for not having come from God. When Simon Weil wrote that “attentiveness is prayer” she didn’t necessarily mean a prayer to God but was venerating the state of prayerful attention to the world in and for itself. Art teaches *attentiveness to the physical world, tutors us in going inside ourselves to properly look at and aestheticise what we see, appreciating forms and the relations between them for their own sake. But such attentiveness is difficult; it is an aspiration, one that “A Cup of Water and a Rose metaphorises and instantiates.

Louis Malle's 1963 film The Fire Within is adapted from Pierre Drieu La Rochelle’s 1931 novel Le Feu Follet , based on the life of Rochelle’s friend Jacques Rigaut, a minor Dadaist who took his own life at thirty. It concerns the last two days alive of Alain Leroy, a recovering heroin addict living in a sanatorium who has decided to commit suicide. He spends a day in Paris meeting a succession of old friends, attempting to persuade himself there may after all be a reason to continue living. Rigaut never actually wrote much, and was mostly known as a dandy, the “best dressed and most handsome of the Dadaists”, a drug addict, and someone obsessed by suicide from an early age. Like the novel’s protagonist, he married a rich American heiress who returned to America, leaving him behind in Paris, and lived largely off wealthy women and the generosity of friends. Eventually, "other people’s money” ran out, the life of a gigolo was no longer tenable, and in 1929 he shot himself in the heart. The book is held together by sub-Sartrean existential philosophising between barely drawn characters, and isn't of much value apart from serving as the bare bones of Louis Malle’s film.  One difference between the film and the book is the sense that the movie’s Alain Leroy (Maurice Ronet) cannot accept the impending mediocrity of his life, nor the incipient banalisation of the world around him, whereas the Leroy of Rochelle’s novel, like Rigaut, was mediocre from the beginning. In The Fire Within , Alain Leroy comes with no real back story. What we know is that he has an ex-wife in the United States who is paying for his drying-out-clinic in Versailles, is an ex-soldier, a legendary carouser, an alcoholic (rather than the novel’s junky), and that he writes, though it’s not made clear with how much success. He is attractive and sympathetic: thoughtful, sensitive, well-liked, loved even, by his friends. Over the course of a day and night he visits his friend, Dubourg, who has become an Egyptologist, married and had two children, his old drug buddies, and a rich, decadent bourgeois couple, Cyrille and Solange. None of these encounters are enough to persuade him to not go through with the suicide he has planned for the next morning. Alain Leroy is also an alter-ego for Malle, a dandy himself, who had gone through a severe bout of clinical depression, and who at the time of the film’s production was a semi-alcoholic night owl, trying to come to terms with the suicide of a close friend. He wrote in regard to his movie that “the best way to avoid committing suicide is to make a film about it”. The clothes Ronet wore were Malle’s, as was the esoteric miscellany of objects in Leroy’s room at the clinic where he's living, including the Luger with which Leroy ends his life. When Leroy comes back to the clinic after his day of meeting friends and a night wandering Paris, he shaves, packs, lays on his bed, finishes reading The Great Gatsby , then shoots himself through the heart. He is ageing, has no trade, no home, no purpose, no future; having tried to convince himself to reconnect with life, in the end he simply prefers not to, and his suicide is calm and without histrionics. The film is an elegiac mood piece and character study, and what Malle brings to the story is style, a kind of cinematic dandyism. Ronet’s performance is understated and for much of the time he has the affectless demeanour of the severely depressed, his face a spent bulb. The elegiac mood is established in part by a soundtrack of Satie’s Gnossienne number 1, its melancholy ironically laid over scenes of the insectile, scurrying city dwellers Leroy observes. For several years, until I saw it a second time, I misremembered Le Feu Follet as being wholly about Alain Leroy trying to purchase a pack of Sweet Afton cigarettes in Paris and that it is his failure to do so, after wandering around Paris from tabac to tabac, that precipitates his suicide. In fact, it takes up just one short scene, so for a long time I was haunted by a non-existent film. Nevertheless, for me it remains the most important scene. It represents Leroy’s will and desire being thwarted and how this affects him psychologically. Cioran, Schopenhauer, and the Philosophy of Suicide For the philosopher E M Cioran writing was, as film making was for Louis Malle, a way of staving off suicide. A book, he wrote, “is a suicide postponed”. Peter Sloterdijk claims that, in turn, Cioran’s writings have been “an effective form of [suicide] prevention for many readers.” He got a reputation for recommending suicide, but did nothing of the kind. For Cioran, like Nietzsche, the greatness of someone, indeed the level to which he has being, resides in how much suffering he or she can bear. The suicide lives on the false assumption that suffering is something we should avoid, whereas for Cioran anything that attenuates the cruelty of truth, and the truth of cruelty, is bad: “How much truth a spirit endures is the measure of its value … we exist only insofar as we suffer”. Joyfully facing the simple, unadorned experience of the cruel real is a tragic, time-conquering, Dionysiac loss of self, a becoming nothing. In the eyes of Cioran, if the abyss looks back you, you must laugh in its face, blow it a raspberry. Once you have accepted your insignificance, ephemerality and meaninglessness, that you are a speck upon a ball, you are free. And there is none so callous - or generally so humourless and boring - as the optimist. “The discipline of suffering”, Cioran writes, “has created all the enhancements of man so far”. For Cioran, suicide always comes too late; the worst, being born, has already happened; there may be no reason to live, but likewise, there is no reason to die. Emile Cioran Schopenhauer, like Cioran, also gained an undeserved reputation for recommending suicide to others but not going through with it himself. Whilst he sketched a view of the world and social relations that might make the weak-minded or emotionally fragile consider it, he condemned suicide. Like Cioran he saw a positive value in suffering, which is caused, in his system, by the in-itself of the world and of all phenomena, the Will. If one commits suicide, one is prevented from achieving salvation by negating the Will to Life and achieving a state of will-lessness, a state from which one can objectively observe and empathise with suffering and the malign workings of the Will in the world: “the person who commits suicide [in reality] wills life, and is only dissatisfied with the conditions under which it has been given to live”. Schopenhauer condemns suicide as a “strong affirmation of the will”, a desperate way of finally taking control. This Sartrean notion of suicide, as the one remaining way of expressing your freedom in a buffeted, failed life, is, for Schopenhauer, the ultimate pyrrhic victory. If the controlling, defeating and thwarting forces outside you have forced you into suicidality then, rather than having gained your autonomy, you have surrendered it entirely, serving your head upon a plate for Fate. A Schopenhauerian state of will-lessness is achieved through aesthetic contemplation. The ideal way to live life for this philosopher is as an ascetic-aesthetic life. Rather than suicide, “what is greatly superior is continuing to exist in an attitude of resignation in the face of suffering”. The act of willing (and its concomitant frustrations) can only be suspended in disinterested aesthetic contemplation: for Schopenhauer, a genius is one who has the utmost capacity for contemplation. Art reveals the general, abstract and eternal forms by which the Will manifests itself, and it in turn becomes an object or representation. As the Will is now in the service of aesthetics, art has taken a kind of revenge upon it. Schopenhauer as a young man The highest form of this will-lessness via art is achieved in and through music. Schopenhauer exalted music because it is non-representational, non-mimetic, independent of the phenomenal world, and therefore a direct representation of the Will at its purest and most abstract. Schopenhauer’s is an ascetic aesthetic: rather than seeking voluptuary pleasures or achieving worldly happiness, one seeks through art the cessation of suffering, willing and desire. From both a Ciornian or Schopenhauerian perspective, Alain Leroy is a coward and his suicide vain, egotistical and selfish. Unlike Rochelle’s novel, however, Malle’s film is neither judgemental nor sentimental, and it’s left unclear whether the world is not enough for Alain Leroy, or too much, whether he commits suicide out of strength or weakness. Writers have been particularly prone to suicide, often due to guilt and shame at the bewhoring of their art or a sense of declining creative powers: Gerard de Nerval, mad, hung himself with an apron string he claimed was the Queen of Sheba’s garter, Ernest Hemingway, mad, with a shotgun, Hunter S Thompson, like his father, with a shotgun, whilst on the phone to his wife, Primo Levi, threw himself from a stairwell, Sylvia Plath, clinically depressed, gas, David Foster Wallace, clinically depressed, rope, Marina Tsvetaeva, "forgive me, but to go on would be worse", rope, Tadeusz Borowski, gas, Marina Tsvetaeva, by hanging, Gilles Deleuze, threw himself from a window, Unica Zurn, threw herself from a window, Ingeborg Bachmann, perhaps, Robert Burton, by hanging, in order to align with his astrological predictions, Jack London, morphine, Arthur Koestler, barbiturates, in a pact with his wife, Stefan Zweig, barbiturates, in a pact with his wife, Heinrich Kleist, shot his crippled lover then his mad self, Walter Benjamin, morphine, John Berryman, the Mississippi, Hart Crane, the Gulf of Mexico, Anne Qin, the English Channel, Virginia Woolf, the Ouse, Paul Celan, the Seine, BS Johson slashed his wrists, Klaus Mann, taking no chances, slit his wrists, overdosed, and switched on the oven gas, Vladimir Mayakovsky, a pistol shot to the head, Jan Potocki, a pistol shot to the head, with a home-made silver bullet, Chatterton, arsenic, Mark Fisher, by hanging, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, chloroform, Anne Sexton, carbon monoxide, Yukio Mishima, a grotesquely botched Seppuku, Seneca, on the orders of a mad emperor, hemlock, Socrates, by judicial decree, hemlock, Iris Chang, mouth, revolver, Richard Brautigan, head, revolver.

Famously, Night of the Hunter  , Charles Laughton's 1955 noir, was the only film that he directed. One of the great actors of his generation ( Mutiny on the Bounty  ,1935; Jamaica Inn  ,1939; The Hunchback of Notre Dame  (1938), he didn’t intend the film to be his last. He’d planned to follow it with an adaptation of Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead , but was so dispirited by the negative reviews that he gave up on the idea. The plot of Night of the Hunter  is simple enough and identical in the film and David Grubb's Pulitzer Prize winning source novel. Ben Harper (Peter Yates) robs a bank, shooting one of the tellers dead. He returns home and has just enough time to hide the bankroll of $10, 000 in the belly of his daughter Pearl’s (Sally Jane Bruce) doll, ‘Miss Jenny’, swearing her and her older brother John (Billy Chapin) to secrecy before he's arrested. As he awaits execution, he is joined in his cell by Harry Powell (Robert Mitchum) who's been sentenced to 30 days for driving a stolen car, although he is in reality an undetected serial killer of widows (who he met through lonely hearts columns). Despite being a serial killer, Powell is a figure of contempt and fun: physically unprepossessing, and a woman-hating, probably impotent pervert. He's a bogus preacher, but a genuine religious maniac and psychopath who has ‘love ‘and ‘hate’ tattooed across his fingers. A celebrated scene shows him get an erstazt switchblade erection, the blade of his flick-knife cutting through his trouser leg, as he disgustedly watches a burlesque show. Powell tries to wheedle the whereabouts of the money from Harper before his execution, but to no avail. On his release, he goes to Harper’s small West Virginia hometown, Cresap’s Landing, to preach, and seduce Harper's widow, Willa (Shelley Winters). They marry, but on the wedding night, instead of dancing the newlyweds' bed spring jig she was expecting, Willa is subjected to a dementedly misogynist, flesh-hating sermon, and the union remains unconsummated. John blurts out that the children know the whereabouts of the money, and one night Willa returns home from her work at a café and overhears Powell aggressively trying to get the information out of Pearl. That night, he slits Willa’s throat and dumps the body at the wheel of her his Model T in the river, telling the townsfolk that she has run away. The children flee downriver on their father’s skiff and wash up at the riverside smallholding of Rachel Cooper (Lillian Gish), a widow who takes in orphans and runaways, bringing them up as her own. Powell tracks them down but is chased off by ‘Miz Cooper’ with a shotgun. He returns that night, and she shoots him in the shoulder. He retreats to the barn, is arrested, and narrowly escapes being lynched whilst in custody. Night of the Hunter's   expressionist bedroom scene Both book and film have been taken as condemnations of the church and religious hypocrisy, but as the preacher is both bogus and insane, neither work as a critique of religion. The story is an allegory about the battle between good and evil, a story of sexual mania and misogyny, told through the binaries of innocence and experience, love and hate, fantasy and reality. If Willa represents the realm of illusion, credulity, and dream, Powell represents the irruption of a bladed and butchering reality principle into life.   The book and Gruub's novel diverge in significant ways, although Laughton kept most of the dialogue. Laughton and Grubb got on well, but Laughton wanted someone with more film experience, and Grubb in any case was too strange and uncommunicative a man to work with. He hired James Agee ( The African Queen , 1951), a supposedly ‘functioning’ alcoholic at the time. Agee submitted a bizarre, bloated and unfilmable 300-page script, that Laughton radically cut down, without, however, taking any writing credit. The realities of poverty and grim exigencies of the depression are more pronounced in the novel and Grubb sharply depicts the effects and the look of rural indigence, whereas in the film nothing looks particularly ugly or squalid or dirty or poor. In the novel everyone is obsessed with the $10, 000 dollars, including Willa, and Grubb repeatedly calls our attention to it. In Laughton’s movie the doll is merely a MacGuffin serving a similarly suspense and tension creating function as Stevie’s package containing a bomb in Hitchcock’s Sabotage (1936). "Where's the money hid, you little bitch?" Night of the Hunter  opens with the binaries-announcing blast of the preacher’s discordant, angrily stabbing, staccato theme-tune followed by a  lullaby, Dream, Little One, Dream , then, startlingly, with the face of Lillian Gish and those of ‘her’ children constellated like stars in the sky as she reads to them, to us, from the bible, cautioning them, and us, to “beware of false prophets who come to you sheep’s clothing”. A similar homily from Gish closes the film, when she tells us that “… children are man at his strongest, They abide. They endure”, but it is saved from sentimentality by the strength of Gish’s performance, her character's stern goodness, and the faint intrusion of the preacher’s menacing theme tune, which doesn't, however, ruin its bedtimestory sense of closure. We are then magic-carpeted through time and space to a child finding one of Powell’s victims dead in a cellar, to Mitchum pootling along a country road in his Model T wondering aloud to himself a how many “whores and bitches” he’s murdered so far, then to the court where he’s been arraigned for driving a stolen a car.  In The Night of the Hunter there's a constant moving back and forth between darkness and light, idyll and menace, both thematically and visually. Laughton regularly screened silent films by Pabst, Murnau and Griffiths for cast and crew before production, and Laughton’s cinematographer Stanley Cortez (The Magnificent Ambersons , 1942; Shock Corridor, 1963) was influenced by D W Griffiths, with his slow tracking shots and crisp, highly defined photography. The influence of silent film is also there in the set design, its narrative propelling and expository mis en scene , and in its acting style. Griffiths is there, too, in those more brightly lit scenes of a bucolic America, a pastoral idyll in which the children appear alone, and in the close-ups of Gish, in which she looks straight into the camera. There is even a silent-era iris fade that closes down on a boy on a basement window, though like some other quirks of the film it was a makeshift necessitated by a tiny budget, as they had no zoom lens. The influence of German Expressionist set design and lighting is most obvious in the pantomimic scene of Willa’s murder that takes place in a stylised hotel room that is part-coffin, part-chapel, a halo of light around her pillowed head as she awaits the blade. Shelley Winters in Odds Against Tomorrow The film’s modernist, abrupt shifts from register to register, style to style, is what makes it so unique, so ahead of its time, and contributes to its overall feeling of artificiality, something stemming perhaps from Laughton’s long association with Berthold Brecht. Cortez and the set designer Hilyard Brown set out to achieve a child’s perspective in scenes of looming, towering and outsize scale, scenes which often have the look of a child’s picture book come to life, particularly in the use of silhouettes, redolent of moving paper cut-outs. Mitchum performs the film’s allegory in little with the celebrated scene in which he has his two tattooed hands fight to the death, with good hypocritically triumphant (though predictive of his fate). The most artificial-looking scene, shot completely on a sound stage, is that of the children’s voyage downriver on the skiff, which has an dreamlike, surrealistic feel, with screen-filling close ups of spiderwebs, birds, rabbits and owls, a child’s benign story book familiars, implying child-animal complicity, and that the creatures are somehow watching over them. The water glitters sidereally, and the preacher is seen in silhouette astride a horse in the distance, all to Pearl’s otherworldly, cracked and quavering singing of a sinister lullaby. However original, this odd scene grates on some, but I suspect the antipathy to this scene affects only adults, and its artificiality contributes to the film's timeless, folkloric feel. Lillian Gish keeping guard, the Big Bad Wolf in the background Cortez had just finished work on the morally brutal Black Tuesday  (1954) where he’d experimented with Kodak’s new Tri-Ex film. Black Tuesday  is perhaps visually the darkest film ever made, barely lit, it looks as if Franz Kline might have been artistic director.  On Night of the Hunter , it helped Cortez achieve opaline, glowing whites and contrastingly deep, rich and velvety blacks, sometimes lighting a scene with just a single candle (something Kubrick later experimented with on Barry Lyndon , 1975). Despite its expressionistic black and white lighting and the centrality of a crime, Night of the Hunter  isn’t really a film noir because of its lack of moral ambiguity and fatalism, its closure and hope, its stylistic heterogeneity, the centrality of children to the narrative, and its element of black humour, courtesy mostly of Robert Mitchum’s mannered performance. Harry Powell in the novel is scrawny, physically pathetic, unappealing, weasel-faced, characterisation that highlights Willa’s desperation and gullibility. Mitchum on the other hand was one of Hollywood’s most desirable men, a pin-up, and beard-splitter of no small repute. His honeyed drawl and somnolent flesh-appraising eyes here become unctuous and minatory, more killer than lover. He clearly takes a wicked pleasure in the part, one that he jumped at and thought was made for him. It is not a naturalistic performance and its mannered emphaticness was no doubt influenced by the regular diet of silent movies Laughton fed the cast, and was a departure from Mitchum's usual laconic nonchalance. Mitchum compensated for his brawn and good looks, bringing him as close as he could to the physical wretchedness of the novel's Powell, by contorting his body to make it more awkward looking, and by playing the buffoon in some scenes, loping away whooping when threatened with the shotgun, pratfalling on a jar whilst looking for the children in the cellar, or flailing helplessly and squealing childishly when John traps his finger in the cellar door. His clownishness, his defeat by children and an old lady, also undermine the sexual allure he normally brought to his roles. Mitchum had a long filmography, over a 100 films stretching back to 1943 and reaching right up to the 1990s, and few actors have given so many stellar performances in so many classic films, including the greatest of all noirs, Jacques Tournier’s Out of the Past , (1947). Highlights are his later performances in Peter Yates’s half-forgotten and underrated masterpiece The Friends of Eddie Coyle  (1973), and Paul Schrader’s half-forgotten and underrated masterpiece The Yakuza  (1974).  He was always self-deprecating about his acting, commenting that he came from the ‘Smirnoff School’ of acting, but in fact he initiated a whole new ‘cool’, understated style of acting in the 40s, which was hugely influential. Lillian Gish, DW Griffiths’ muse, the ‘Queen of the close-up’, helped develop the gestuary of silent film out of its theatricality, just as Griffiths, in the same films, invented the grammar of the cinema with which we’re now so familiar. She also had a long filmography, and, starting in 1912, made dozens of films with Griffiths, including the epochal Broken Blossoms (1919), Birth of a Nation (1915), and Intolerance (1916). Her performance in Night of the Hunter is a masterclass in subtlety and nuance, and the emotional power of eye and face. Both Grubb and Laughton convincingly and touchingly depict the growing love between Miz Cooper and the traumatised and withdrawn John, and the latter's coming back alive emotionally. Mitchum and Gregory Peck in Cape Fear Shelley Winters too, as Willa, landed a role perfect for her. She had a quality of incipient hysteria and seductive vulgarity that made her perfect for this role, as she was for Lolita’s pretentious and manstarved mother in Stanley Kubrick’s 1962 adaptation of Nabokov’s novel, Lolita . She also had a long filmography going back to 1943, highlights being two outstanding noirs, Cry of the City (1948), with Richard Conte, and the unforgettably bleak but poetic Odds Against Tomorrow  (1959), the only film noir starring a black actor, Harry Belafonte. The most celebrated, iconic image from Night of the Hunter  is Winters dead at the wheel of the Model T with her long hair being pulled along, dancing with the current alongside the reeds (although the body was a wax model). Brash and gobby in real life, she had been Marilyn Monroe’s flatmate in the 40s: a self-confessed ‘party girl’, it was Winters who coined the phrase ‘FMN pumps’. It’s a shame that she’ll probably remain best known for her comically maudlin demise in The Poseidon Adventure  (1972), because she was really a very good, nuanced actress, . Despite it getting an adult rating on its release in the UK, Night of the Hunter is perfect pre and young-teen viewing. Imperiled-children narratives will be perennially popular with kids because they have all at some point felt themselves imperiled by adults, wished to escape them, and see them punished (if not killed). It is a complex and intricate artwork, partly due to composer Walter Schumann’s refined and variegated use of music, an integral and considered element of the narrative, and it contains images and scenes of such arresting power and insinuating beauty that they remain with you for a lifetime.

Baruch de Spinoza The Jew of Voorburg, Expulsion and Exile The philosopher Baruch de Spinoza was a Portuguese Jew born in 1632 in Amsterdam, the son of a successful dealer in Mediterranean foods, but was cast out of the Portuguese synagogue in 1656 after falling out with Jewish biblical scholars and disputing core elements of Judaism, such that he was considered an atheist. However, he was both during and after his life “identified by his Jewishness”, and for Jewish intellectuals such as Heine, Hess, Marx, Freud, and no doubt many others, Spinoza exemplified how to be Jewish without Judaism”. He was completely detached from the Jewish faith, laws and community following his expulsion, yet his regular relocations (moving between Amsterdam, the countryside just ouside the capital, Rijnsburg, The Hague, and Voorburg), his autonomy, and his indigence, make him the archetypal rootless, cosmopolitan Jewish intellectual, precursor of figures such Eric Auerbach and Walter Benjamin. In Voorburg, to where he moved in 1644, he was known as ‘the Israelite’, and ‘the Jew of Voorburg'. “His dedication to reason and freedom of thought” Ian Buruma wrote, in what is probably the best short iintroduction to his work, Spinoza: Freedom's Messiah , “and his idea that there were universal goods, owed something, perhaps a great deal, to his being born a Jew in a Gentile society”. Spinoza, still looked at askance by Orthodox Jews, nevertheless had a basalt tombstone erected to him by Jewish admirers in Amsterdam in 1956, with the Hebrew word ‘amcha, ‘your people’, carved beneath his face. Expulsions from the synagogue (known as cherem) were quite common but were typically temporary and couched in mild language, whereas Spinoza’s read:  “By the sentence of the angels, by the decree of the saints, we anathematise, cut off, curse and execrate Baruch Spinoza … with all the curses written in the book of law, cursed be he by day as cursed he be by the night, cursed when he lies down and cursed be he when he rises up … the Lord shall not pardon him, the wrath and fury of the lord shall henceforth be kindled against this man, and shall lay upon him all the curses written in the book of Law”. Spinoza may have been influenced by the example of Uriel da Costa who, when Spinoza was ten, was given 31 lashes publicly, and afterwards had his body trampled upon by the synagogue congregation for saying that Mosaic law was a human invention, and that Judaism and Christianity were both made up of useful fictions. It was for making the same claims that Spinoza was expelled, but in addition Spinoza claimed that God and Nature were indivisible, which was tantamount to atheism. He also said that angels are imaginary, that the immortality of the soul is false, and that there was no transcendental cause of things, everything being part of a single and all-inclusive Nature. It's possible that the viciousness of Spinoza’s anathema (afterwards, he was not allowed to do business, or even to meet his own siblings) was because Rabbi Menasseh ben Israel, Spinoza’s former tutor, was trying to negotiate a return of Jews to England with Cromwell, or because he had been doing too much business with Gentiles. Spinoza was offered a huge sum of money to recant but he refused it, choosing instead to earn a living by lens grinding and the generosity of rich admirers, preferring “a life of quiet contemplation to the rough and tumble of commerce”.   Spinoza didn’t publish his views on the Bible in his lifetime and his Ethics  was passed around between friends from 1665, but not published until 1677, and even then only in Latin. It is in part this life of “quiet contemplation” that has made Spinoza the philosopher’s philosopher, such an exemplum. He ate with consistently spectacular frugality throughout his life and seems to have been asexual, and was as far from being the 'average sensual man' as it’s possible to be, dismissing sex as without significance, ‘mere titillation', and romantic love as 'illusory'.   Monument to Spinoza by Jewish artist Job Wertheim, erected in Amsterdam, 1956 Spinoza's Theory of Partial Freedom There is no getting around the difficulty of Spinoza. His austere style, with its at-first-bewildering ‘definitions’, ‘axioms’ and ‘scholia’, his fundamental notions of ‘substance’, ‘attributes, ‘the infinite’, ‘mode’ and so on, has had all imaginative and figurative language expunged from it, everything that derives from images, from sense experience, or that can have subjective associations, so that words become like logical counters or numbers. Spinoza is only partially successful in this, as discursive language can never be fully divested of subjective associations. The clarity and finality of Euclidean geometry was his model, and his style cannot be separated from his philosophy which, in very crude short, is that we can access freedom only through rational thought and adequate ideas (an adequate idea is one that is so logically unassailable that it is safe to proceed to the next without error), and by freeing ourselves from illusions and the tyranny of emotions. Each proposition in his complex edifice the Ethics  follows precisely on from the one that precedes it, and all are intended to mutually support one another. Spinoza created a model of what constitutes “clear and consecutive” thought in the Ethics , and the book's style is linked conceptually to his notion of ‘God’ (in his metaphysical system God is indistinguishable from Nature, is  Nature), who cannot be thought of in terms of any image, analogy or figurative language, and all of whose actions proceed with absolute Necessity, like stages in the unfolding of a geometrical proposition - or of the Ethics . Yet the purpose of the Ethics is to aid the reader in living the ‘Good Life’, to be a practical guide to the “right conduct of life”. One becomes acclimatised to his style, and the final three chapters - Concerning the Origin and Nature of the Emotions , Of Human Bondage, or the Nature of the Emotions , and Of the Power of the Intellect, or of Human Freedom  - have, and were intended to have, a ‘self-help’ feel to them. The relative ease of reading of these chapters is due to their vocabulary being familiar to us, that of the emotions, whereas the opening two chapters, introducing his metaphysics, are couched in his taxing philosophical idiolect. It’s recommended, then, if you want to tackle the Ethics , to begin with the final three chapters. Spinoza led a life of reading, writing, study, discussion, and corresponding. He corresponded with many acolytes and some of the leading minds of the age. He had numerous friends, mostly Mennonites and Collegiants, as well as some of Holland’s leading political figures. He enjoyed chess and sketching, and made a little extra money from drawing portraits. At his final lodging, with the painter Van der Spyck in Voorburg, he would often not emerge from his room for days, but when he did, would sit with the family and chat over a pipe. He aimed for a life of moderation and complete equanimity and clarity of thought, untroubled by emotional upheaval or the suffocating foetor of intimacy. He hated conflict, violence and mobs, and was an enemy of conformity, superstition, pseudoscience, belief, and dogma, as opposed to reasoned argument and adequate fact. In an age in which in which the enlightenment is in retreat, social contagions spread like wildfires, and in which pseudoscience and crudely racialised ideologies  reign, Spinoza is surely the philosopher for our age. Essential for freedom, according to Spinoza, is freedom of speech, “If a state extends to man’s minds and speech it is a tyranny”, he wrote, insisting that “in a free state everyone is allowed to think what he will and say what he thinks”, though he distinguished between freedom of thought and freedom of action, exempting from free speech incitements to violence and anything intended to deceive. “What greater evil can be imagined for the Republic" he wrote, "than that honest me should be exiled or considered wicked because they hold different opinions and don’t know how to pretend that they don’t.” Spinoza thought that rationality could only liberate certain self-willed and courageous individuals, not all of humanity because, in his view, most of humanity is too feeble-minded for autonomous, rational thought. This may seem intellectually arrogant, yet Stanley Milgram’s experiments in the 60s showed that only 20 per cent of people are capable of critical thinking: almost 2 billion people still believe in an anthropomorphic God, and even belief in witchcraft is still widespread globally, with around 200 witches being murdered annually in the Congo alone. Spinoza approved of organised religion if it didn’t oppress with its dogmas, despite thinking all of its stories and the idea of an anthropomorphic god preposterous. He wrote that “the Wisdom of the Prophets is a great comfort for those whose powers of reason are not strong” and that many needed “religion’s moral guidance and system of rewards and punishments to keep them virtuous and peaceable”. It would be wrong to see this as social elitism, however. It was the elites and the texts they generated that were subject to his criticism, not ‘the masses’, for want of a better phrase, and he recognised the harm and violence to which toxic texts and inadequate, “mutilated and confused ideas” could lead, the horrors of the Thirty years War being withing living memory. Spinoza thought that freedom per se is impossible, and that we can only attain varying degrees of partial  freedom, and that a major part of attaining this freedom is by becoming aware of our unfreedom. Spinoza thought of freedom in terms of autonomy, and that one is free only to the extent that one is self-determining, but only god is completely self-determining and therefore fully free: “That thing is said to be free”, he wrote, “which exists by mere necessity of its own nature and is determined in its actions by itself alone”. Everything less than God is affected by causes other than itself, but only humans can recognise and limit these causes, and, via such insights, becoming more or less free. A Spinozan freedom is to be, as much as one can manage, enfeoffed to nothing and nobody, not even one's own emotions. It's not that free will is an illusion, but complete free will is; some people have more if it than others, and it is within one's power to increase it. One is un free,according to Spinoza, “to the extent to which one thinks on the basis of inadequate ideas”. ‘Inadequate ideas’ are those due imagination, unreliable testimony, ‘common notions’, propaganda , musings, dreams, superstition, “confused or mutilated ideas”, or insufficient information, rather than those that are the result of a sequence of previous ideas that could not have been otherwise, ideas unaffected by outside influences: freeing yourself of these inadequaate ideas is what Val é ry meant by "the terrifying discipline of the free mind".   Freedom is inseparable from understanding and rational thought; freedom is insight, and the highest form of thought. Beyond insight is ‘intuition’, the immediate, an unmediated, perception of the truth (it’s a moot point whether Spinoza thought that only God was capable of true intuition). We can come close to experiencing God’s autonomy by maximising our own autonomy, and by rejecting anything that reduces our autonomy or anonymises us. God, in Spinoza’s metaphysic, is Nature, and Nature God, so that as we experience a partial freedom whilst engaged in rational thought we thereby become one with Nature. Freedom also consists in acting and not being acted upon. The less one is acted upon, the less passive one is, and the further one goes from a lesser towards a greater degree of perfection, of fullness of being, and substantiality of existence. This striving to increase our power of thinking and acting Spinoza termed ‘conatus’. For Spinoza, the aim of any human life is to live one of “cheerfulness and joy” and to avoid pain and melancholy, emotions Spinoza categorised as the ‘sad affects’, along with jealousy, anger, hate, envy, depression, fanaticism, sadness and grief. These 'affects' reduce our power to act and think, and put us in their bondage. Pity, for instance, he regarded as a ‘weakening affect’, though he wasn’t prescribing callous indifference: “… pity no one, but do good and perform helpful actions”, he advised. Like Nietzsche, he regarded pity not only as useless, but recognised it as often performative, with surreptitiously selfish motives, an emotion only ostensibly other-directed. Of Human Bondage To be governed by emotions is to have one’s being weakened, to have a low level of existence, and to move farther from Nature. Ordinary loves and hates, desires and aversions, according to Spinoza, are illogical, often illusory, and succeed each other without any logical connection. “I assign the term ‘bondage’”, he wrote, “to men’s lack of power to control and check the emotions. For a man at the mercy of his emotions is not his own master but is subject to fortune”. To achieve equanimity, one must think rationally about one’s emotions, free yourself from your bondage to them, ascertain their true cause and source, not be passive in relation to them, and must somother them with the pillow of rational thought. Even just by reflecting on them one has already become more ‘active’ and ‘powerful’. One must avoid anything, and anyone, according to Spinoza, that saps one’s power or disturbs one’s equilibrium: what discombobulates, banish. Spinoza made a distinction between the force of outside compulsions and inner necessity, obedience to one’s true nature. This ‘becoming oneself’ is one of several ways in which his thought overlaps with Nietzsche’s. Nietzsche called Spinoza a ‘sick hermit’ and a ‘poison brewer’ but added that “what is poison for the inferior type” is “for the higher type … nourishment and delectation”. Both had a similarly dim view of pity, of petty calculation, and for the desire to dominate others, and valued recognising the cold truth of a situation and accepting it with equanimity, if not joy. Nietzsche saw Spinoza as a kindred spirit and precursor. Spinoza’s passive, affect-enslaved, ill-informed conformist is a cousin to Nietzsche’s Untermensch, and his unmediated, intuitive action cognate with Nietzsche’s ‘noble action’. For both, the nadir of being human, the most abject mode of being, is servility. For enabling freedom of thought, unlike Nietzsche, Spinoza regarded democracy as the least tyrannical option, “since sovereignty belongs to everyone”. “An assembly of reasonable men”, he wrote, “elected by reasonable people, acts reasonably”. However, he thought that to enjoy the benefits of democracy entailed the quid pro quo of submitting to legitimate authority and largely giving up our individual powers. The key word here is ‘legitimate’, as he believed that unreasonable laws should be flouted and that unreasonable or tyrannical states, and leaders without a mandate, should be overthrown. On the social, ethical, and political plane, not to think and act according to Spinoza’s dicta regarding rationality, the banishing of affect from decision making, and using only adequate ideas as much as one is able to is pure folly. Freedom on Spinoza's terms is not easy. Attempting the maximum of self-determination and minimising the degree to which we are affected by anything outside of us necessarily involves a certain level of isolation, rejecting not just inadequate ideas, but also those who hold them. But as Spinoza wrote at the close of the Ethics,  “all things excellent are as difficult as they are rare”.       .

Threads “After all, what acte gratuit, what vulgar outrage or moronic barbarity can compare with the black dream of nuclear exchange” Martin Amis, Einstein’s Monsters Threads (1984) is a television film that went against the grain of the medium itself, one of its very rare masterpieces, and one impossible to watch and be left unshaken. The feature-length drama portrays the build up to a nuclear attack on Britain, the attack itself, and its aftermath. It was commissioned by the Director General of the BBC, Alistair Milne, after he watched Peter Watkins’s earlier BBC film about a nuclear attack on Britain, The War Game (1966), ironic, as it was one of his predecessors, Sir Hughe Greene, who had banned that film for almost twenty-years. What makes Threads so impressive is that with an anti-spectacular, excruciating realism, it presented TV audiences with harrowing, unameliorated truths, something rare for a television audience to encounter, then or now. Directed by Mick Jackson (A Very British Coup, 1998, The Ascent of Man, 1973) and scripted by Barry Hines (Kes, 1969), Threads was nominated for seven Baftas and winning four, it showed that aesthetically exhilarating masterpieces can be produced with minuscule budgets (£400, 000 in this case, not even £1.5 million in today’s money) if the talent, integrity and institutional support are there. The film was almost obsessively researched by Jackson. The after-effects of nuclear war a were a part of public discourse at the time, and the anti-nuclear movement vocal and strong – there was a slew of documentaries such as the 1982 QED episode A Guide to Armageddon (produced by Jackson) and the Panorama episode If the Bomb Drops (1980), detailing what would happen following an attack. Two years before Threads, Jonathon Schell’s The Fate of the Earth had been published, an influential wake-up call detailing everything that would happen to humanity and the earth following a nuclear exchange. Threads opens like a traditional soap-operatic family drama, something akin to 1973's popular ITV series A Family at War, with young Sheffield couple, working-class Jimmy Kemp (Reece Dinsdale) and the more bourgeois Ruth Beckett (Karen Meagher) finding themselves unexpectedly parents-to-be, planning their marriage, and moving into a new flat. We follow their lives, and that of their parents, neighbours, colleagues and friends, and later that of a Council member, Clive Sutton (Harry Beety) the city’s ‘designated wartime controller, as the tense build up to a nuclear attack (triggered by a conflict between Nato and the Warsaw Pact after the Soviet invasion of Iran) is depicted through newspaper headlines, radio and television reports, conversations, scenes of jets flying overhead, and brief clips of activity at military bases. Masterfully edited, the live action is intercut with black and white stills, and throughout the film there are terrifying facts and statistics about the realities of a nuclear attack presented on intertitles and through voiceovers. These documentary interventions act as distancing effects that paradoxically increases the emotional impact of the drama, and the clipped speech and sober, impartial tone of the voiceovers disorientingly contrast with the increasing horror of the images and the statistics related. The breakdown of civil society begins even before the attack, and overnight money loses all meaning. Forty-seven minutes into the film an 8-megaton thermonuclear bomb is detonated above the North Sea, then there's a near-direct his that destroys Sheffield, and a final 3000 megaton exchange that ushers in a global nuclear winter. The next hour and ten minutes of the film are concerned with the aftermath: firestorms, hurricanes, mass fatalities, the total collapse of civil society, starvation, looting, summary executions, madness, typhoid, dysentery, and cholera epidemics, people puking their lives out with radiation sickness, and a return to a pre-medieval subsistence society in a dark, cold, blighted world where little grows. There are no dramatic palliatives: every character bar Ruth soon dies a horrible death, and after the blast Jimmy dies before finding her. Ruth’s parents are murdered by looters, the luxury of their basement affording them only a few more days of life than the door propped against a wall that Jimmy’s parents cower beneath. Councilor Sutton suffocates in a bunker beneath the Town Hall with his colleagues, having achieved nothing. The authorities, starving themselves, turn against the population, looting the looters. Part of an exodus from the city in search of food, Ruth gives birth to her daughter Jane in a filthy outhouse, biting through the umbilical cord. We’re told in a voiceover that, due to radiation, “there is a high risk of deformity and mental retardation”. Thirteen years after the blast she dies, her eyes covered in cataracts, as her teenage daughter Jane (Victoria O’Keefe) affectlessly tries to wake her – “Ruth.Up. Ruth. Work” she says in her denuded language. The film ends with Jane in turn giving birth in a makeshift hospital, with a look of horror and terror on her face as she's handed the abomination she has birthed. The War Game Before Threads there was Peter Watkins’s The War Game, but a television audience didn’t get to see it until 31 July, 1985, the night before a re-screening of Threads to mark the 40th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In Watkins's film the catastrophe is the result of a conflict between the West and the Communist bloc after a Soviet invasion of West Berlin following fighting in South Vietnam.The War Game, which used non-professional actors, is filmed as a faux-documentary in the style of news magazine programmes of the period, with plummy-voiced interviewers, hand held cameras, vox pops with citizens before and after the nuclear attack, and is also intercut with factual intertitles and voiceovers. As as with Threads music is eschewed, and here there is no initial focus on families or individuals with whom an audience can empathise. After a one megaton thermonuclear bomb incinerates Kent, we agan see an immediate decline into savagery: coups de grace administered by the police, firing squads, gas poisoning, starvation, blindness, and piles of corpses being burned. There was less known about the effects of nuclear war in 1966, with almost no public awareness, and a voice over informs us that: “on almost the entire subject of thermonuclear weapons and the problem of their possession and the effects of their use there is now practically total silence in the press, in official publications, and on television” – a far cry from the mid-1980s when it was a dream-haunting cultural obsession. The War Game was also heavily researched but it was the effects of the carpet bombing of Dresden and the concomitant firestorms that most informed the film, and documentary footage from Dresden is included in it: “everything you are now seeing” the narrator tells us, “happened in Germany after the heavy bombing of the last war”. Peter Watkins was a golden boy at the BBC following the success of his innovative historical drama Culloden (1964) which used the conceit of a contemporary news team covering the 1764 Battle of Culloden, garnering him a British Screen Writers’ Guild Award. But The War Game, due to be shown on the BBC on 06 October 1965, was withdrawn from screening on the grounds that “it was too horrifying for the medium of broadcasting” following a private screening for members of the Cabinet Office, Home Office and Ministry of Defense. The ban resulted in Watkins resigning from the BBC and his lifelong self-exile from the UK. The War Game ran from April to May 1966 at the BFI, won a Special Prize at the Venice Film Festival and an Oscar for Best Documentary Feature in 1967, none of which was enough for the BBC to consider screening it for another two decades. The Chairman of the BBC’s Board of Governors at the time, Lord Normanbrook, was the former Cabinet Secretary responsible for government planning during a nuclear war, which is presented in the film as shambolic. Watson didn’t only criticise government planning, but also included short interviews with actors portraying members of the ever-rotten British establishment speaking in favour of nuclear weapons, which were however taken verbatim from actual interviews. The depiction of people not being able to afford the materials for a bomb shelter, and the speed at which an exploitative black-market economy grows up during rationing were seen as critiquing capitalism (instead, the latter inadvertently suggested something eternal about human nature, and there is more of Hobbes than Marx). There was also implicit criticism of British conduct towards German during the war, especially the carpet bombing of some of its cities. This was likely to have alienated some of the public, many of whom had lost people in the war, and had lived through The Blitz, and the bombings and firestorms in other cities, themselves. This agitprop element of the film weakens it aesthetically, making it a less powerful film than Threads. Minor aeshtetic flaws, however, don't justify the banning what was nevertheless a powerful, innovative and necessary movie. The idea that it was “too horrible for the medium”, considering the context of the film’s withdrawal and who was involved, doesn’t wash: the ban was an establishment stitch up with potential opposition to bellicose foreign policy, nuclear proliferation, and the spending on it, in mind. The Cold War was effectively over by 1989, communism gone by 1992, and fears of a possibility of a nuclear exchange between the Superpowers dissipated almost to nothing by the beginning of the nineties. Yet in 1984 the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientist's 'Doomsday Clock' stood at four minutes to midnight (that is, Armageddon), whilst today it stands at just 85 seconds to midnight*, and the organisation says that “humanity is living on borrowed time”. The US and Russia now have significantly fewer warheads, yet still enough to kill the inhabitants of the earth several times over. Although full global disarmament is supposedly the eventual aim of The Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, it includes no processes to achieve it. There are now new dangers presented by AI, which could prove to be the final instantiation of our hubris, and it seems unlikely that it won’t make it into the nuclear industry, and into the military as far as nuclear command and control. Threads and The War Game are rare films in that they are not merely ‘still relevant’, but are significantly more relevant and necessary now than when they were first screened. The world is a much more unstable place than it was in then, the chances of both nuclear war and accident are much higher, and a nuclear war would make climate change an irrelevancy. ******************************************** *The main culprit for us being so close to ‘midnight’ is Pakistan, a chaotic country whose intelligence, military, and civilian leaders share power with the unseen hand of Islamic militants, and responsible for the nuclear proliferation of other countries not recognized as Nuclear States. In 1990 and 2019 Pakistan and India came closer to a nuclear exchange than the US and the Soviets did in 1962 over the Bay of Pigs, in disputes over Kashmir, which remains a flashpoint. The Commission on the prevention of Weapons of Mass Destruction has stated that “when you map Weapons of Mass Destruction and terrorism, all roads lead to Pakistan”. Dr Abdul Qader Khan, the ‘Father of the Pakistani Nuclear Bomb’ did more than any other man to increase the danger of a nuclear war. In the 70s he built Pakistan’s nuclear weapons programme in secret after stealing plans for a centrifuge to create weapons grade plutonium whilst working for URENCO in Amsterdam. He sold plans for centrifuge design to Iran in 1997 for $3m, and in 1992 traded missile technology for uranium enrichment technology with North Korea. In 2004 Khan was put under house arrest and went on live television confessing to an international black market in nuclear materials and to enabling nuclear proliferation to Iran, North Korea and Libya. He died in 2021.

Emily Brontë Heathcliff is an enigma who must and can only remain an enigma. The unknowability of his origins, the instability of his identity, are the whole point. To argue that he is ‘from’ anywhere, or is of this or that race, is fruitless. If he is ‘from’ anywhere, it is hell; the intention is that he be perceived as a supernatural, demonic being, and it's this that elevates the novel from Victorian melodrama to the Gothic. Wuthering Heights is informed by several different narrative modes, and one of them is the changeling narrative, well-familiar to Brontë through folk tales and her beloved ballads. Heathcliff being named after Mr Earnhsaw’s dead child establishes this changeling trope. With his arrival the happy household becomes ‘infernal’ and Heathclif becomes “a usurper of [Hindley’s] father’s affections [and] from the very beginning ... bred bad feeling in the house”, as Nelly Dean puts it. Her description of Heathcliff as ‘a cuckoo’, an unwelcome intruder who takes from others in a ‘nest’ what doesn’t rightfully belong to them, is accurate, and tells us how we are to view his function in the narrative. There is no rational explanation for Mr Earnhsaw’s bringing Heathcliff home with him, which suggests beguilement, something bolstered by his equally irrational favouring of the boy, for which Heathcliff remains ungrateful, and rubs in Hindley’ face. As for Heathcliff’s ‘social status’: he goes overnight from being a homeless starveling to the favoured son of the second richest landowner in the second largest house in the region, one in which “all the house would be obliged to bend to his wishes”. Following an interregnum, he becomes the owner of both houses. It’s being said that Heathcliff is mistreated for this or that reason in order to characterise him as a victim, but Heathcliff is not mistreated at all by a single character other than Hindley, and this is in revenge for being usurped (a usurpation that begins with Heathcliff’s symbolic breaking of Hindley’s violin, a gift from his father) in his rightful place in the family, and his animosity towards Heathcliff is not without justification, however grand guignol its manifestations. In the first part of the novel then, it is Hindley who is the ‘outcast’. There is no ‘cycle of abuse’ or ‘generational trauma’, merely Hindley, for a period (and the subject of just a few paragraphs of the book) working out his revenge on Heathcliff. Even that mistreatment has been overstated. He mistreats Catherine, whom he strikes, too, and considering that she is his sister, it’s reasonable to regard his treatment of her as worse. Heathcliff returns for a while to his actual social status, somewhat above it in fact. Rural England at the time was a place of homelessness, indigence, and semi-starvation, and the working-class population of Haworth/Gimmerton were poor, hovel-dwelling hand-loom workers with a high mortality rate. Hindley might easily have shown Heathcliff the door to join the ranks of the rural homeless, and the relowering of his social status is something to which the other servants in the house are also subject after old Mr Earnshaw’s death. Later in the novel when Catherine (from whom the harshest descriptions of Heathcliff come) calls him an “ungrateful brute”, she is being sincere. Recently, very recently, it has been argued that Heathcliff is 'non-white', even a ‘person of colour’, and that the novel is ‘about’ race, racism and ‘racial tensions'. It’s time to definitively controvert this distractive interpretational red herring, which almost has the character of a hoax or conspiracy theory. There are fourteen very brief references to Heathcliff’s appearance. None come from an omniscient narrator confirming that Heathcliff ‘is’ this or that race; all come from characters in the novel. They are: 1. In the opening chapter, Lockwood describes him as a “dark haired gypsy in aspect” 2. Mr Earnshaw on bringing Heathcliff home describes him as “dark as if he came from the devil” 3. Lockwood describes Heathcliff’s face as being “as white as the wall behind him” 4. Nelly describes the child Heathcliff as “...a dirty, ragged black-haired child”. 5. Mrs Earnshaw calls him “that gypsy brat” and 6. Mrs Linton exclaims “Miss Earnshaw scouring the country with a gypsy!” 7. Hindley calls him a “gypsy” 8. Mr Linton describes him as that “strange acquisition my late neighbour made in his journey to Liverpool, a little Lascar, or an American or Spanish castaway” 9. Joseph calls him a “flaysome devil of a gypsy” 10. Nelly, on his return as a gentleman after three-year absence, describes him to his son as “a tall man with dark hair, and says that his face is covered in dark hair and that his face is sallow” 11. Mr Linton asks if Heathcliff is “the gypsy, the plough boy?” 12. He is described by Nelly as “that dark little thing” 13. Describing Heathcliff to his son again, Nelly says he has “black hair and eyes” 14. Placating him as he compares himself to the flaxen haired, milk-skinned Edgar, Nellys says “he may have a father who is an Emperor of China or a Mother is an Indian Queen”. That’s twenty-two words if we don’t take the sentences as a whole, if we do, it’s still fewer than fifty. Only two make direct reference to his skin, one commenting on its whiteness in a state of fear, the other calling it “sallow”, which means yellowish, and is not a synonym for “swarthy” (a word which in any case does not appear in the book). Four merely say his hair is “dark”, one says it is “black”. Three say he is “dark” generally, whilst he is likened to a gypsy five times. These descriptions cancel each other out: Chinese, Indian, Spaniard, gipsy and Lascar all have distinctly different physiognomies and sets of facial features, and if he looks like one, he can't look like one of the others. Apart from Nelly’s consoling words, none of these brief remarks are said to Heathcliff, but about him, in his absence, and none are connected to any action taken against him. Lascar sailors on an East India Company ship A ‘Lascar’ referred specifically to a Malaysian or Indian sailor working for the East India Company. It’s not possible that Emily Brontë ever encountered one – she took the word from de Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium Eater (1821), where it features heavily. But this is not the point, because here the word is used to lampoon old Mr Linton, not to say anything about Heathcliff, part of a scene intended to mock and satirise the Linton family and, by extension, their class. Mr Linton calls Heathcliff, who is a small boy, a Lascar, yet the world only referred to adult sailors, and was not used as a more general racial descriptor. In the same sentence he suggests Heathcliff might also be an “American or Spanish castaway” or a gypsy, none of whom would have the Asiatic features of complexion of an Indian or Malaysian, and so this is another display of Mr Linton’s ignorant nincompoopery. More importantly, Linton calls him a “plough boy”, as Heathcliff is described as begrimed and as not having washed or changed his clothes for three months - and it's this dirtiness and unkemptness that triggers the contradictory slurs about his appearance. The word ‘Lascar’ is the only thing – this one word – that makes any reference whatsoever to British colonialism, or to a non-white race, and it would be excessive to call it even a tangential reference, yet in recent years the word 'colonialism' has been unaccountably used in reference to Wuthering Heights, though without anyone doing so ever being able to identify any scenes, characters, images, or pieces of dialogue in the book that relate to colonialism in any way or make mention of it. This is because there is a total absence of any of these in the novel. And it's this tiny constellation of twenty-two words, giving off such a meagre light, that is used to back up the claim that the book is ‘about’ racism. The very small number of these references to Heathcliff's appearance and origin also throw into relief just how overstated are notions of Heathcliff's supposed 'otherness'. Jet black hair with brown eyes are features of not only Southern Europeans but also of many Northern Europeans and Britons – Dark Celts - particularly in Britain’s northern counties, Ireland, and Wales. All are classed as white. In the Britain of the early nineteenth century, fair skin was a social signifier; it meant that you don't have to work out in the sun so your skin can stay white, whereas working class people (like ‘plough boys’) will tan and therefore be swarthy. ‘Black’ at that time meant dark colouring overall, and ‘black’ and ‘brown’ were complexion descriptors regularly used for Britons and Europeans: when the priapic Samuel Pepys wrote in his diary of a “very pretty black woman” he’d espied he was talking about a brunette! ‘Black eyed’ was applied to many characters in British, Scottish, and Irish ballads and songs of the eighteenth and nineteenth century (often beautiful, idealised peasant girls), and the traditional song The Nut Brown Maid is about a white British girl. Two typical Dark Celts: Sean Connery and Catherine Zeta-Jones 'Gypsy' is the slurring epithet most used by characters in the novel to refer to Heathcliff. The rural working class in northern Britain, inhabitants of places like Haworth/Gimmerton, feared gypsies (though they did intermarry with the native working class). They were linked to curses, kidnapping children, theft, and the evil eye. ‘Gypsy’ was, and still is, used by the ignorant as a slur: the insult in being likened to a gypsy lies in its betokening dirtiness, poverty, supernatural evil, and criminality. Growing up on the estuarine Yorkshire/Lincolnshire borders in the 1980s I remember that ‘gyppo’ or ‘gypsy’ was a common insult, and for a white child with black hair and brown eyes to be called a ‘black bastard’ was not unusual. Gypsies would go from village to village on a circuit collecting scrap on a horse and trap, selling heather and clothes pegs door to door, and for seasonal agricultural work, much of which was still not mechanised at that time. Children were warned by adults to avoid gypsies and not to annoy them, peasanty superstitions about their devilish powers were still very much active, and people bought something from them in order not to be cursed. Lockwood is the first to use the word gypsy of Heathcliff; he says he is a “gypsy in aspect". ‘In aspect’ means that something or someone resembles a thing, not that it is that thing. His use of the word ‘gypsy’ is different from those of other characters in the novel, as he doesn’t use the word negatively. The literati, upper classes, middle class urbanites, and the intelligentsia, of which the Brontës were a part of, romanticised gypsies in the eighteenth and nineteenth century, not just in Britain, but across Europe, and they feature in many novels, poems, ballads and songs. They were romanticised as free and close to nature, and there were many idealised ‘portraits’ of them painted - a late iteration of this is D H Lawrence’s 1926 novella The Virgin and the Gipsy. Lockwood’s likening Heathcliff to a gypsy when he first meets him is therefore a part of this character’s ongoing comedy of naïve misapprehension. Lockwood specifies a “dark haired gypsy” because there were other types, gypsies who were not dark. In the UK Romani gypsies are officially classified as ‘white’: the blonde haired and blued eyed Robert Plant is a Romani, as is actor Michael Caine, 70s teenage fap fodder David Essex, and the somewhat darker Charlie Chaplin. The origins of Roma gypsies are in northern India and they have strong genetic links to the pale Dam people of that region. They left in around 1000 CE, scattered and settled across the Balkans, the Middle East, Persia and Europe, and assimilated with other races, leading to a wide variety of skin tones and hair colouring, first coming to Britain in the mid sixteenth century. They stopped looking phenotypically like Indians over 800 years ago. A Romani gypsy encampment in encampment in turn of the century Britain The idea then that Heathcliff is ‘non white’, or that the book is ‘about racism’ or ‘racial tensions’ bears no close examination. The only thing that can be said for certain is that Heathcliff is not Anglo-Saxon in origin and has black hair, brown eyes, and a sallow or dark complexion. He could be a Dark Celt (a good example of which would be Scottish actor Sean Connery), a gipsy, or a southern European. None of these are regarded as ‘people of colour’ (a phrase that was only coined in the 1970s), as ‘non-white’, or as ‘racial others’. In the mid nineteenth-century the non-white population of the United Kingdom was less than 0.01% and over a hundred years later, in 1945, it still hadn’t quite reached 1%. Almost all of this 0.01% lived in port towns and in the portside areas of those towns. They were largely sailors and dockworkers, with some prostitutes, and many were transient. Not only had most people in Britain not seen a non-white person, many had not even seen anyone from the neighbouring town or village by the time they died. When Nelly tells Lockwood that they “don’t take well to foreigners in these parts” she’s talking about the reception of Frances, Hindley’s wife, who is simply not from Yorkshire. In Yorkshire and neighbouring Lincolnshire people from outside those counties, and particularly those from the South of England, are still strongly disdained, with Londoners held in particular contempt. In other words, there just weren’t enough people of other races in the country for race or racism to be an issue, which is why there is not a single record or report of racial tensions or violence in Britain during this period. The first violent incidents around race in Britain (aside from sporadic attacks on Jews over the centuries) were disturbances and small riots in several port towns including Hull, Liverpool and Glasgow in 1919, in the aftermath of the First World War. These were due to tensions and resentments among dock workers and sailors over their wages being undercut by foreigners. Until this, there was nothing, and the numbers of those involved in these disturbances, whites and non-whites combined, was less than 1000 people. A 'Black Irish' man: Thomas Butler, or 'Black Tom', the 10th Earl of Ormond, circa 1560 Some have gone even further, to claim that Heathcliff was, or 'could have been' ❋black. Firstly, if Heathcliff were black, how could he have had a blonde and blue-eyed child, as he does? This on its own should be enough. Secondly, if Heathcliff was black, he’d have been referred to as a ‘blackamoor’, ‘Ethiopian’, ‘Negro’ or ‘Moor’ or, if mixed-race, a ‘mulatto’. Thirdly, if Heathcliff had been black, there would have been reference to him having the facial features, hair, and colouring of a black person, but there are none. Fourthly, a well-to-do Yorkshire farmer adopting a black child would have called forth not only radically different reactions from locals and family, but would have been a national cause celebre. Finally, if Heathcliff had been black it would, logically, have been impossible for a character to have likened him to a gypsy, Lascar or Spaniard. The fact that Mr Earnshaw finds Heathcliff in Liverpool (in the capacity of a livestock farmer and trader), and that Liverpool was a centre for slave trading, is cited to back up this daft claim. But it involves a fundamental misunderstanding of the slave trade. Not only was Liverpool not swarming with African slaves, there were none at all present: the slave trade was triangular in structure, and Liverpool was one of the British ports where the goods exchanged for slaves (who were picked up in Africa, then deposited in the Americas or British West Indies) were sold and traded, not the slaves themselves. Marxist critic Terry Eagleton argues, not unconvincingly, that Heathcliff could be Irish, but misses the point that a final pinning down of his identity subverts the intentions of the novel, although Irishness is without doubt one of the elements that makes up Heathcliff’s unstable, patchworked identity. In the mid-nineteenth century, someone who looked like Colin Farrell would have been described as ‘Black Irish’, and hundreds of thousands of Irish-speaking, completely indigent Irish had disembarked in Liverpool in the 1840s. The Brontës' father Patrick was Irish, raised in a one-room hovel. It’s been claimed that Patrick tried to hide his Irish background, and it's true he did change the family surname from Brunty to Brontë but he, and the rest of the family, spoke with broad Irish accents which they made no effort to hide (what rendered Patrick an eccentric recluse was the death of his wife, from which he never recovered). Whilst it’s true that the family were seen by the poorer residents of Haworth as interlopers, the resentment was class-based, and not helped by the family's conspicuous aloofness. Anyone outside of Yorkshire was considered an outsider, and regarded with hostility – they didn’t ned to be Irish. The Brontës’ Irish grandfather had been an orphan like Heathcliff, and their uncle had been discovered as a stowaway on a ship travelling between Liverpool and Ireland, both of whom, consciously or not, must have gone into the creation of Heathcliff. There’s something of her father too in Heathcliff, and of Jack Sharp, the adopted nephew of her relative John Walker, who took possession of Walker’s estate on his death before eventually being ousted again by his sons: like Heathcliff, this interloper obsessively nursed his revenge, which he took by befriending one of their cousins, Sam Stead, and deliberately ruining him with drink and gambling. But all of the foregoing is beside the point. For it's not a matter of who Heathcliff is, but what he is. This is boldly announced at the novel’s opening when Mr Earnshaw says that is “it is dark as if it came from the devil”. It is the operative word, and the changeling and infernality tropes are later confirmed in Hindley’s “beggarly interloper ... imp of Satan”. Heathcliff is a literary construct, a wordpuppet with so many amalgamated literary and personal sources that he’s worthy of his own The Road to Xanadu treatment. Emily Brontë’s lifeworld was so remarkably constrained, isolated, and asocial that the novel is necessarily a book made of books. Influenced strongly by German Romantic Literature, which she read in the original German, particularly the uncanny tales of ETA Hoffman, her protagaonist is also an amalgam of characters found in fairy tales, a malign Dick Whittington or Cinderella, the Demon Lover of balladry and folk tale, the ‘Gipsy Laddie’ of song, of Byron’s Manfred and Conrad and Byron himself, and of Milton’s Satan (Patrick Brontë could recite the whole of Paradise Lost, something extraordinary then, miraculous now). Emily Brontë’s notoriously severe moral †rectitude precludes the idea of Heathcliff as a romantic hero. Though strongly influenced by Milton’s Satan, he has none of his fallen grandeur, and is a very petty demon. Heathcliff is avaricious, pettily vindictive, churlish, morose, envious, violent and vengeful, irreligious, a wannabe adulterer, a domestic abuser, a child abuser, kidnapper, and a sadistic killer of animals - a capital crime for Brontë who loved them and preferred them to humans. All low and ignoble traits in a man without even a hint of charm, and with no saving graces. All of the natural imagery used for Heathcliff is negative, and based around hardness, barrenness, and sterility, and the child that he fathers is sickly, peevish, and short-lived. Charlotte Brontë, the only person to have discussed the novel with Emily, was correct in her moral judgement of Heathcliff, who “stands unredeemed; never once wavering in his arrow-straight course to perdition ... an evil beast ... waiting his time to spring and destroy”, and about his identity, “he was neither Lascar nor gypsy, but a man’s shape animated by a demon of life – a ghoul”. The more positive perceptions of Heathcliff have been heavily influenced by cinema adaptations intent on turning this grim tale of monomania, hate and revenge, peopled exclusively by maniacs, into a romance. In the second half of the novel, Heathcliff becomes a stock figure of Northern European fairy tale, the paternal ogre who must be defeated by children, “a creature of the northern mists ... a gnome” as Philip Larkin put it. If there is a case for arguing Heathcliff being any kind 'other' apart from a supernatural other, then it is a class other, not a working class other, but a lumpenproletariat/vagabond, and not as victim, but as threat. When Heathcliff dies and the rich girl, Isabella, with whom we are intended to sympathise, gets her property back, all of the book's characters are glad, and a flower garden grows at the farmhouse, symbolising the end of his blight. There is a love story in Wuthering Heights, one that is charming, convincing and amusing, whose protagonists, Hareton and the younger Cathy, defeat this ogre, Brontë’s avatar of vindictive hate. The moral and emotional heart of the book is Cathy civilising this Caliban figure with books. Books, for an author for whom literature and reading was a kind of religion, are the novel’s central image, and its punctum is Hareton’s accepting a book from the younger Catherine. Wuthering Heights is a very funny novel – Lockwood, young Linton, Nelly, and Joseph are all gleefully depicted comic turns. But I include in that comedy the novel’s relentless gloom and the 'passion’ between Cathy and Heathcliff, which I find bathetic – melodramatic scenes and speeches of the “you’d have to have a heart of stone not to laugh” variety. And I’m not even sure that this comicality is unintentional on Brontë’s part. It’s certainly not a depiction of normal romantic love or an erotic attraction between two adults; as Virginia Woolf, who disliked the novel, put it, “there is love, but it is not the love of men and women”. Cathy is not romantically or sexually attracted to Heathcliff: what she suffers from is nostalgia for her childhood, of which Heathcliff was a part and is a reminder: “I wish I were a girl again, half savage, and hardy, and free” (although she still is a girl, just nineteen, when she dies). It’s significant that Cathy moves away from Heathcliff at the same time as her pubescence, when she becomes intent on seducing and bagging Edgar Linton, of whom she says, “I love the ground under his feet, and the air over his head, and everything he touches, and every word he says, I love all his looks, and all his action, and him entirely, and altogether”. The unlibidinous nature of Catherine’s feelings for Heathcliff is not reciprocated, though this is something we have to surmise, as there is a complete lack of sensuousness in the language: it’s an exceptionally chaste novel, and we assume carnality only from the appearance of children. Liverpool's Waterloo Dock in 1889 Catherine’s suggestion to Edgar that he accept Heathcliff as a ‘friend’ to both of them also illustrates the sexless nature of her attachment, and it is to Heathcliff that she expresses her desire to have several sons fathered by Edgar. The only intimate contact we see between Heathcliff and Cathy is when she “bestowed seven or eight kisses on his cheek” on her return from Thrushcross Grange – when she is twelve years old. Heathcliff himself disabuses the even half-observant reader of any notion of him as a romantic hero, describing to Nelly the “fabulous notion” Isabella has of him as a “hero of romance, even after she’s watched him hang her dog, as “genuine idiocy” - a misapprehension he brutalises her out of, but to which some readers are unaccountably still subject. The nugatory so-called love scenes between them are a matter of a very small amount of dialogue and a few short monologues, barely a couple of pages, and we see them together in the novel only a few times, briefly. Vowing, nursing, and carrying out revenge following romantic rejection is pathological, if not psychotic behaviour, and Heathcliff’s conduct during Catherine’s illness would in modern parlance be labelled ‘stalking’. Worse, he even wants revenge on his so-called beloved, wishing upon her suffering even after her death: “if you fancy I’ll suffer unrevenged, I’ll convince you to the contrary ... may you not rest as long as I am living”. He then abuses and torments the daughter of his ‘beloved’, and swindles her out of her property. All in all, not a great catch – he’s not even good looking. Catherine is sincere when she calls him “a miserable, degraded character”: “Shall I pity you”, she cries”, “not I. You have killed me and thriven on it, I think. How strong you are! How many years do you mean to live after I am gone.” For me this section of the book is the weakest, Victorian melodrama at its shrillest, in part because there’s simply not enough in the foregoing narrative to justify it. Heathcliff dashing his head against a tree trunk and howling like a beast, Catherine bashing her head against the sofa and "biting her pillow to shreds”. Ludicrous. Heathcliff and Cathy were brought up as brother and sister, and Heathcliff’s obsession with Catherine was in part inspired by Byron’s incestuous love for his half-sister Augustus Leigh, which Brontë had read about in Thomas Moore’s Letters and Journals of Lord Byron with Notices of his Life (1833) which accounts, paradoxically, both for its trangressiveness and chasteness. Cathy’s vague and confused monologue is informed by Shelley’s - in my view preposterous – poem Epipsychidion, in which he posits the ideal lover being a spiritual brother or sister, whose love “fills the universe with glorious beams”. To take seriously Cathy’s “He’s more myself than I am ... he is my own being ... Nelly I am Heathcliff” one would have to take seriously the idea of a mystical union of souls or, for that matter, souls. Cathy’s expression of her bond with Heathcliff elicits from Nelly the admonishing remark, “I can make no sense of your nonsense, Miss”; quite rightly, for it is undoubtedly confused almost-gibberish, though there is a case for arguing that this is proto-modernist prose accurately delineating the speech patterns of a disintegrating mind, or one entering a state of delirium, which Catherine is doing. Such an extreme of self-dentification with another person, even if tenable, would constitute a radical loss of independence, a kind of spiritual self-immolation. You can see, though, how this element of the novel might appeal to certain types. ❋The intention of this artificial racialisation is to imply that Britain has always been multi-ethnic. Classic English literature is of no use whatsoever in bolstering this revisionist myth. The only other example its promoters give is Bertha, Rochester’s wife in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847). However, Bertha is white. The misconception about her comes from a misunderstanding of the world ‘Creole’: Creole was not a synonym for 'mulatto', it meant anyone of European descent born in the West Indies or Spanish America. It never referred to natives, and it has nothing to do with the usage of the same word in Southern American states. It would have been unthinkable in any case for a member of the English gentry to have married a native, and there are no records of such: colonists did have sexual relations with the natives, but only via concubinage and rape. Bertha is described as blackened, not black, that is, something has happened to her – her illness. Her brother Richard is described as ‘pale’ and as having ‘white cheeks’, and Bertha comes from one of the leading, richest families in Jamaica, that would have made its money from sugar and slaves. Creole women had a reputation for moral depravity in Britain due to their proximity to and fraternisation with black people, and were seen as tainted, something which informs Bertha's characterisation, so on the basis of this one could still argue that Bronte’s characterisation is racist. †Emily Brontë was a writer who makes fellow Victorian recluse Emily Dickinson seem like a garrulous gadabout and social butterfly and was, apart from her family, universally, if unfairly, disliked. Her life, apart from brief, reluctant periods away which made her ill, was her family, housework, walks on the moors, her animals (a Merlin hawk, Nero, two geese, a cat, and her dog, Keeper) and, above all, reading and writing. According to her first biographer Mrs Gaskell, Brontë “never showed any regard for any human creature; all her love was reserved for animals”. A great admirer of hers was fellow misanthrope E M Cioran, who wrote of a “solitude such that the merest rendezvous is a crucifixion”, a sentiment to which Brontë would have been sympathetic. She rarely left the house, never once stepped foot in the nearby village, and when the postman or delivery boy called, would retire to the back of the house in order not to encounter them. According to the headmaster of the Belgian school she briefly attended and taught at, the Pensionnat Heger, she was “silent and painfully retiring”, and had nothing to do with anyone outside the classroom. When she and Charlotte took tea with their cousins the Dixons in Brussels, Emily refused to say a single word during the whole engagement. Her misanthropy was such that in a French essay she wrote that “nature is a vast machine constructed to bring forth only evil”, and she scandalised the school by informing a class of children (whom she treated atrociously) that she didn’t like children, and preferred animals. She certainly never fell in love; it will remain unknown whether she felt any physical attraction for a man; not only did she never so much as kiss a man, she didn’t meet or even see very many in her lifetime, and all her knowledge of love came from books (and the observed rutting of livestock). Emily Brontë was far from progressive. She was a staunch Tory like her father, and an astute player of the stock market, one among several reasons why it’s fruitless to search the novel for social critique. Both she and her father were abolitionists, like most of the British middle class at that time. But, both being recluses, it was support from afar and on paper, not a ‘mixing in abolitionist circles’. Like her admirer Ciora, and other writers such as George Bataille, Artaud, Gerard de Nerval, Unica Zurn, and Anna Kavan, I put her in the category of the ‘functional mad’ writer (‘cognate with the 'functional alcoholic’). Ted Hughes called the Brontës “the weird sisters” and anyone exhibiting behaviour like Emily Brontë’s today, particularly her self-starvation and silence as weapon and protest, would be unlikely to escape the attentions of intrusive bourgeois lanyard wearers, who would have her medicalised and medicated.

In my callow youth, I owned several garlic presses in succession. I thought they, and garlic itself, sophisticated. Growing up in 1980s rural Lincolnshire cooking suspicious foreign food was something that might land you in a burning Wicker Man, screaming for mercy from jeering, turnip-faced yokels. Now, at the risk of having a contract taken out on me by Alessi or Oxo Good Grips, I would urge anyone in possession of one of these nefarious devices to get rid of it, and to learn to prepare garlic for your dishes without one. People become very defensive about their garlic presses, accusing their detractors of food snobbery. Whatever evidence you present, they would rather their garlic press be prised from their cold dead hands than give it up. But it’s not only in the kitchens of high-end restaurants where you’ll find no garlic presses, you won’t find them being used in any  professional kitchen: a chef who started to use one would be ridiculed, stopped in his or her tracks and, ideally, subjected to a day’s light-to-medium bullying, depending on whether or not they argued the toss. If the purpose of a garlic press, first mass-produced by Ayliss in the 1950s, is to prepare garlic for use in cooking, then it is a failed invention, one that should have stayed on the drawing board and never gone into production. The pulp that comes from a garlic press burns very easily, more so than any other preparation method, and whether it burns or not, it will impair the flavour of your dish. You can find a detailed scientific explanation in Harold McGee’s On Food and Cooking  of what compounds are released and how they interact with each other, but briefly, pressing the garlic through those tiny holes releases a high concentration of allicin and other sulphur compounds, producing a strong, aggressive garlic smell, and a flavour bitter to the point of acridity. Even using a microplane is better, as it cuts rather than squeezes, though what it produces is still too fine for sautéing (I use one for grating garlic into tzatziki ). A 1950s Zyliss garlic press If this is not enough to deter you, the puree produced by a garlic press integrates badly with the other ingredients, or into a sauce, creating small pockets of intense garlickiness, the metals most are made of are reactive, and will impart an extra, unwanted metallic taste to your dish and, finally, they are a pain in the ass to clean. You don't need advanced knife or culinary skills to do without a garlic press. In professional kitchens that do a lot of covers ready-peeled garlic is minced in a Robocoup and kept in oil. At home, on the rare occasion that you’ll need a great deal of garlic, you could use your food processor. If a recipe, such as that for a marinara  sauce, calls for paper thin slices of garlic, you need not use a knife (or, as in Goodfellas , a razor blade) but instead you can use a mandoline or a truffle slicer. Not letting garlic burn isn’t just a matter of prepping it properly, but also of making sure you sauté it very gently. The same goes for onion, and if you are sautéing garlic with onions, you shouldn’t add the garlic until the onions are beginning to soften (if you want to bring out the sweetness of onions and make them less harsh in flavour add some sea salt to them as they sauté, which breaks down and releases the onion's sugars). Too high a temperature will not only impair the flavour of your garlic and onions, but also that of your olive oil, if that’s what you’re using. Olive oil has a low smoke point and extra virgin olive oil even more so and, if heated too high, its chemical structure changes and it becomes carcinogenic. (After being in so many kitchens with black-as-midnight oil in their fryers I rarely eat deep fried food when eating out; no doubt this problem got worse as the price of cooking oil went up and up. The danger is not just in the oil itself - the oil browns batter prematurely, leading to the risk of eating undercooked food). Forget food shows, extra olive oil should be used only for the very gentlest of sautéing and is ideally used only for cold sauces, dressings, tossing things in, and as a finishing oil. Most professional kitchens now use rapeseed oil, as it has a much higher smoke point and is cheaper; even as a finishing oil I think extra virgin rapeseed oil superior, as it is tasteless and has a vibrant, golden yellow colour. If you do need to finely chop garlic, it’s very easy. Smash the garlic clove under the blade of your knife at the widest point near the handle, with the side of your fist. You can then peel the garlic easily and take out the green root inside, if there is one (if this is root is large, it means that the garlic is old and stale). After removing the skin and root, bash the clove once or twice more and then you can start mincing with your knife. If you need a paste, for instance for aioli , instead of mincing the bashed garlic sprinkle on some sea salt and squash it down firmly with the flat of your knife blade near the tip, then scrape it across your chopping board. Turn your knife over and press and drag in the other direction, repeating until you have a paste. You can also do this in a pestle and mortar. You’ll notice that the resulting paste is quite different to the fetid and odoriferous pus that pops out from your garlic press. A knife with a thin blade and a little flexibility such as a Sabatier 20cm Chef Knife is best for this operation. Pustular filth There are several ways to impart the taste of garlic to your food without any chopping at all. I make a very quick, easy tomato sauce by cutting a garlic bulb in half and putting the two halves into the chopped tomatoes with a whole bunch of basil – along with seasoning, a teaspoon of sugar, and a tablespoon of oil – and just removing them when the sauce has cooked. This, reduced to the consistency of a thick jam, is also how I make a pizza topping. This sauce fills the house with a wonderful smell: if used correctly garlic is neither stinky nor harsh, but fragrant and sweet. An admittedly stylish-looking , but nevertheless abominable Zyliss Susi 3 If you’re making a dauphinois or want a garlicky mash, steep peeled cloves in the cream and milk, and rub the sides of the baking dish for the dauphinoise with a cut garlic clove. A simple Tuscan tomato sauce, Pici all ‘aglioe , is made by sautéing 4-6 crushed garlic cloves as gently as possible, then squashing them with the back of a wooden spoon into the oil when they are soft, before adding some pepper flakes and chopped tomatoes. The way to get the sweetest and least harsh garlic taste is to roast it and use the pulp. You can wrap new potatoes in foil parcels with peeled garlic cloves, seasoning and a little oil, and roast them. The potatoes come out sweet and caramelized, and the garlic can be smeared straight onto them, perfect for a Sunday roast. Alternatively, slice the top off a garlic bulb, cover the top with a little foil, roast, and squeeze out the pulp when done. This pulp can be used to add to a sauce, soup, gravy, or stew, and also acts as a thickener. Mixed with olive oil, it was what we tossed the house potatoes in at Rotorino  in Shoreditch (gone now, one of London hospitality’s many victims of Covid), along with some deep-fried rosemary. There, by force of circumstance, taking my turn to prepare staff food, I happened on a delicious pasta sauce, adding this roasted garlic pulp to a tomato sauce along with mascarpone cheese - a pinkish, pretty-coloured sauce that in its creamy sweetness is perfect for pernickety kids. Better people than me have railed against garlic presses. Marcella Hazan in T he Essentials of Italian Cooking  wrote: “garlic cloves may be used whole, mashed, sliced thin or chopped fine, depending on how manifest one wants their presence to be. The gentlest aroma is that of the whole clove, the most unbuttoned scent is that exuded by the chopped. The least acceptable method is preparing it through a press. The sodden pulp it produces is acrid in flavour and cannot even be sauteed properly”. Anthony Bourdain , with typical aggression, wrote, “old garlic, burnt garlic ... garlic that has been squashed through one of those abominations, the garlic press, are all disgusting”, whilst Eizabeth David, who refused to stock them in her London shop, described them as “ridiculous and pathetic” in her book Is There a Nutmeg in the House ? In short, a garlic press is less than useless, a traitorous saboteur that you should banish from your kitchen for good.

Jean Genet became familiar with the paintings of Rembrandt on visits to London in 1952, Amsterdam in 1953, then Munich, Berlin and Vienna in 1957, and this is one of two essays that he wrote about the painter. First published in L'Express in 1958, its style, like the rest of his art criticism, flits between the notational and the poetic. A meditation on the effects of profound loss on artmaking, seeing and vocation, it gives an inisght, too, into Genet's writing, particularly his novel: if Rembrandt's 'wound' was the death of his beloved Saskia van Uylenburgh, for Genet, it was his childhood. A great kindness . And it’s to proceed without delay that I use this phrase. Rembrandt’s final self-portrait seems to say: “I am of such intelligence that even savage animals will sense my kindness”. But it’s not morality that drives the painter to seek adornments for the soul, it’s his metier that requires it, or, rather, brings it in its train. It’s possible for us to know this because, by a chance unique in the history of art, a painter who posed before a mirror with narcissistic complacency, left us, parallel to the rest of his oeuvre, a series of self-portraits in which we can observe the evolution of his technique and the effect of this evolution on the man. That, or else the inverse. In the pictures painted before 1642, Rembrandt is in love with splendour, but a splendour that exists nowhere else but in the scenes represented. The sumptuousness – as in his Oriental and Biblical scenes – lies in the richness of the decors, accoutrements and costumes. Jeremiah wears a gorgeous robe, places his foot upon a rich rug, and the vases placed on the rock are of gold. One senses that Rembrandt is happy to invent or portray a purely conventional richness, just as he is happy to paint a sumptuously costumed Saskia as Flora, or himself, on his knees, magnificently attired and raising his goblet aloft. Of course, from his youth he’d painted people of humble background - often adorning them with opulent finery - yet though Rembrandt dreamt of outward splendour, he at the same time tended towards humility in faces. Sensuality withdraws itself when he touches the face, and even when young he preferred to paint faces worn by ageing. A matter of empathy perhaps, or merely the challenge of technical problems posed by a pensioner’s face. Who knows? But these faces have been accepted as ‘picturesque’. He paints them with taste and finesse, but even when the face is that of his mother, without love. The wrinkles, crow’s feet, warts, the folds of the skin, are all scrupulously rendered, but they don’t extend to the interior of the canvas, aren’t nourished by the warmth that comes from living organisms; in short, they are ornamental. Detail from the Portrait of Margaretha de Geer  (wife of Joseph Trip), National Gallery, London It is the two portraits of Mme Trip (National Gallery) that are painted with the greatest affection, those two heads of an old woman that rot and decompose before our very eyes. Here, decrepitude is no longer considered and reproduced as something picturesque, but as something just as loveable as anything else. If we were to wash away the surface His Mother Reading , under the wrinkles we’d find the charming young woman his mother continues to be. We cannot wash away the decrepitude of Mme. Trip, for it is precisely that  which appears before us with such force. It is there. Dazzling. Vivid. And it tears away the veil of the picturesque. Whether agreeable to the eye or not, decrepitude exists. And so is beautiful. And rich in … have you ever had a small wound, on the elbow perhaps, which has become infected. A scab forms. You pick at it with your nails. Underneath, you see that the filaments of pus that nourish the crust go a long way down … your whole organism at work nourishing this wound. Each square centimetre of Mme Trip’s metacarpal or lip is the same. Who succeeded in that? A painter who only wanted to render what is , and who, in painting it with such exactitude, returned to it all its force, and thus its beauty. Or else it is a man who, having understood – through sheer force of meditation – that everything has its dignity, must now devote himself to representing that which ostensibly lacks it. It's been said that Rembrandt, unlike, say, Franz Hals, didn’t know how to capture the likeness of his models; in other words, couldn’t see the difference between one man and another. But if he didn’t see them, perhaps they didn’t exist for him. Perhaps it’s all just trompe l’oeil . His portraits rarely reveal the character traits of his models: the man or woman there before us is not, a priori, spineless, cowardly, good or evil: but is capable, at each instant, of being any of them. But what never appears in his portraits is the caricatural, accompanied by the judgemental. Nor do we see, as with Hals, any ‘sparkling humour’ but, like the rest, it could  be there. Except for the smiling face of his son Titus, there is not a single face Rembrandt painted that seems serene. All seem pregnant with serious, deep drama. These characters, with their huddled, contained postures, are like tornadoes held momentarily at bay. They embody a destiny that has been precisely foretold and that, any minute now, they will fulfil. Rembrandt’s own drama, however, seems only to be that of how he will look at the world. He wants to know what it’s all about, so that he can be delivered from it. All of his figures are aware of a wound, from which they are taking refuge. Rembrandt knows that he, too, is wounded, but he wants it, vainly, to heal. It is this that gives his self-portraits their air of vulnerability, compared to that air of confident strength we perceive when looking at his other paintings. Without any doubt, this man, well before reaching maturity, had recognised the inherent dignity of all being and every object, down to the humblest. In his drawings, the delicacy with which he rendered the most familiar attitudes is not without sentimentality. At the same time, his natural sensuality, allied with his imagination, still made him desire luxury and dream of splendour. His reading of the bible exalted his imagination: buildings, weaponry, furs rugs, headdresses. The Old Testament, above all, inspired his theatricality. He paints. Is celebrated. Becomes rich. Is proud of his success. He adorns Saskia in velvet and gold … then she dies. If, after this, only the world remains, and painting as a way of approaching it, encountering it, then this world only has, or rather is , one single value, according to which this  has no more or less inherent value than that . A Woman Bathing in a Stream (Hendrickje), National Gallery, London But one doesn’t rid oneself of mental habits or such strength of sensuality overnight. Nevertheless, it seems that he did try and rid himself of them, a little at a time, not by rejecting them outright, but by transforming them, so that they could be of service to him. He clings on to splendour – I speak here of that splendour he dreamt and imagined, as well as a certain theatricality.  To defend himself from them they undergo a certain treatment under his hands: he will henceforth exalt conventional splendour but distort it in such a way as to make it barely recognisable. And he will go still further. This brilliance that makes things seem so precious he will incorporate into his most miserable subjects, so that all is confused, indistinguishable. Nothing will be what it seems, but what will silently, imperceptibly illuminate the humblest matter will be the as-yet-unextinguished fire of his old taste for opulence and splendour which from now on, instead of being on the canvas and the object represented, will be placed inside it. This process proceeds slowly, obscurely, and will reveal to him that each face has value, and that each human identity is worth as much as any other. The Prodigal Son in the Brothel , or Rembrandt and Saskia , Gemaldegalerie, Dresden As for painting, this miller’s son of twenty-three knew how to paint, and admirably, too, but at thirty -seven he loses his flair. Now he will have to learn everything again, hesitantly, almost gauchely. And slowly he discovers again the unique magnificence that each object possesses, one thing neither more nor less grand than any other; he, Rembrandt, must restore it, offering it to us, utilising the magnificence of colour. One could say that he is the only painter who shows equal respect to the model and to the painting as object, exulting in both at the same time, and one by the other.  But what touches us so strongly in these paintings that strive so strenuously for the exaltation of everything - with no concern for hierarchies - is a  sort of reflection , or rather an inner glow, not nostalgic, but yet still of something not yet completely extinguished, the remains of his glorious dreams of luxuriousness, the lees of his theatricality, those signs of an ordinary  life that was caught up, like any other life, in convention, and made use of it. And in what a manner! Without destroying or exhausting it, but by transforming it, contorting it, searing it. And so now the signs of exterior splendour come to illuminate anything in the here and now, but from within. And Rembrandt himself? Apart from some self-satisfied self-portraits, all reveal, from his youth onwards, an essentially anxious man pursuing vagrant truths. The acuity of his vision is not adequately explained by the psychological need to stare into a mirror. Sometimes he has an almost mean look about him (recall that he went so far as to pay for one of his creditors to be jailed), or vain (the arrogance of that ostrich plume atop a velvet hat … and that golden chain); little by little, the hardness in his face attenuates. Before the mirror his complacent narcissism becomes an anxiousness, and a passionate, then tremulous seeking. For some time now he’s lived with Hendrickje Stoffels, and this magnificent woman (apart from those of Titus, the portraits of Hendrickje are steeped in the sublime old bear’s tenderness and gratitude) must at the same time satisfy his sensuality and his need for tenderness. In his final self-portraits, we can longer discern any indications of psychology. If we insist upon it, we can see something like kindliness pass across his face. Or is it merely detachment. Whichever you choose, here, it’s the same. Towards the end of his life Rembrandt became good. Because malice puts a screen between the self and the world. Malice, spitefulness, and all forms of aggression, all that we term ‘character traits’, our humours, desires, eroticisms and vanities. We must pierce this screen to let the world in. Yet Rembrandt didn’t seek out this goodness – or, if you prefer, detachment – in order to follow religious or moral precepts (it is anyway only in moments of abandon that an artist can truly have any faith, if at all). If he commits what we can call his personal characteristics to the flames, it’s to achieve a purer vision of the world in his art, one that is more just. In the end he didn’t care if he was good or bad, irritable or patient, rapacious or generous. He wanted to be nothing more than a hand and an eye. What is more, and by this egotistical route, he had to achieve a kind of purity, one that is so evident in his final portraits that we are almost hurt by it. And it is by the narrow path of painting that he achieves this purity. Self Portrait as Zeuxis Laughing , Wallraf-Richartz Museum, Cologne If I wanted to schematically, crudely, describe this process – one of the most heroic of the modern era – I would say that in 1642 (though even by this time he was no ordinary man) unhappiness completely overwhelmed this young man bursting with talent, but who was also full of violence, vulgarity, and an exquisite delicacy. With no hope of happiness ever reappearing in his life, and with a terrible effort, he will try, since only painting remains for him, to eradicate from his works all the signs of his vanity, all the signs too, of his happiness, his dreams.  At the same time, he wanted, since after all it is the aim of painting, to represent the world, yet to make it unrecognisable. Does he achieve this straight away? This double demand leads him to give the paint itself a value equal to the that which it depicts, and this exaltation of paint, as it couldn’t then be arrived at through abstraction (though sleeve in The Jewish Brid e is an abstract painting), leads him to the exaltation of everything that can be represented by paint, without exception. This effort results in him being able destroy that in him which could lead to a differentiated, hierarchical vision of the world: now, a hand has the same value as a face, a face as the corner of a table, the corner of table that of a stick, a stick as  a hand, a hand to a sleeve … all of that is perhaps true of some other painters, yet what painter, up to this point, had made something lose its identity in order to exalt it?  The hand, the sleeve, and then, without doubt, the painting itself, move endlessly from one to the other unceasingly, in a vertiginous pursuit, towards nothing. And changed too are the old theatricalities, the sumptuousness and luxury: they no longer have their old function but are now in the sole service of solemnity. Between 1666 and 1669 there must have been something more in Amsterdam than the paintings of an old crook (that's if the story of the repossessed engraving plates is true).   There was also what remained of a person reduced to extremity, who had almost completely disappeared, moving from bed to easel, from easel to the toilet – where he probably made hasty sketches with his dirty nails - and what remained could hardly have been anything more than a cruel goodness , something bordering on imbecility. A chapped hand that dipped brushes into blue and brown paint, an eye that alighted on objects, nothing more, nothing more than a consciousness that bound an eye to the world without hope. In his final self-portrait, he laughs gently. Yes, gently. He has learned all that a painter can learn. Firstly, this (or lastly  this): that the painter is wholly the gaze that goes from object to canvas, and the movement of the hand that moves from the little globules of colour to the canvas. Self-Portrait at the age of 63 , National Gallery, London The painter is now gathered entirely into the tranquil journey of the painting hand, this serene back and forth in which all fears, luxuries, and splendours have been transformed. Legally, he has nothing. Through a juggling of the books everything he has will be split between Hendrickje and Titus. He won’t even own his own paintings. A man has lived and died entirely through his work. What remains of him is enough for the journey, but he still has enough time left to paint The Return of the Prodigal Son . He dies before succumbing to the temptation to beclown himself. Translation © Chris Milton