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New York Review Books have published a new translation of Pierre Drieu La Rochelle’s novel Le Feu Follet (1931) as The Fire Within , previously translated as Will O’ the Wisp . The novel 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. He visits a close 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. Rochelle’s novel is based on the life of his friend Jacques Rigaut, a minor Dadaist who took his own life at thirty. Rigaut never produced very much in the way of writing, just a slim volume of diary entries, aphorisms about suicide, and some prose poems. He was mostly known as a dandy, the “best dressed and most handsome of the Dadaists”, a heroin addict, and someone obsessed by suicide from an early age, seeing it as his “vocation”. Like Leroy, he married a rich American heiress who returned to America, leaving him behind in Paris. He was briefly employed as amanuensis by sculptor Jacques-Emile Blanche, but lived for the most part off wealthy women and the generosity of friends, “other people’s money”, as he put it. In the novel, Leroy is ageing, losing his looks, laments that he can’t find a rich woman to keep him, and is perfectly open about money being the only interest in his life and being a ponce. He tells his friend Dubourg that one of the reasons he wants to end his life is that he “fait mal l’amour” - makes love badly, although he’s not impotent. There’s no evidence that Rigaut had such difficulties. For Rigaut, eventually, "other people’s money” ran out, and the life of a gigolo was no longer tenable. In 1929, he shot himself in the heart, “after paying close attention to his toilette” according to Breton, placing a rubber sheet over the bed, and locating the exact position of his heart with a ruler. Jacques Rigaut Rochelle doesn't come across as particularly charming. He was a fascist, and edited the Parti Populaire Francais’s anti-Semitic journal L'Emancipation Nationale. A Nazi collaborator, he too committed suicide at the end of the Second World War rather than answer for his treachery. The novel is held together by sub-Sartrean existential philosophising between barely drawn characters, with Leroy an insubstantial presence, and the novel isn't of much value apart from serving as the bare bones of Louis Malle’s 1963 film of the same name. 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 the novel, like Rigaut himself, was mediocre from the beginning. In the film Leroy comes with no real back story, we have to guess to an extent; 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. Malle’s film far surpasses Rochelle’s moralistic tale of aimless hedonism and dispenses with his tedious, artificial, cod-philosophical dialogue. The cinematic 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. The cinematic punctum 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. It is the film’s ‘ punctum’ . Barthe’s term can be reconfigured for cinema: a moment or scene that pierces the viewer, that shoots out of the screen “like an arrow”, a shot or scene of intense, inspired affect or concentrated semiosis that may leave one viewer completely indifferent, or provoke in another a deep, personal reaction. These puncta , which often come at the close of a film, include for me the money blowing away at end of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948); Anthony Quinn weeping on the beach for Gelsomina at the close of La Strada (1954); Sterling Hayden, dead, nuzzled by horses, in the final scene of The Asphalt Jungle (1950); the 'freaks' crawling through the mud and rain to exact a dark and droll revenge in Todd Browning's Freaks (1932); Mercedes McCambridge's screaming face gargoyled by murderous sexual envy in Nicholas Ray's Johnny Guitar (1954); Shirley MacLean’s run back to Jack Lemmon’s apartment near the close of The Apartment (1960). Sterling Hayden in The Asphalt Jungle A punctum can lie in the transition from one scene to another, in the power of the cut itself, in the break with what went before, like a symphonic shift. One of the most affecting of these is in The Deer Hunter (1978): an artistically bold, brutal, and emotionally shattering cut from the scene in the bar in which George Dzundza plays Chopin’s Orphically stilling Nocturne No. 6 in G minor to a sudden, unexpected, emotionally overwhelming immersion in a chaotic and bloody battle in a Vietnamese village. Mouchette Four years after Le Feu Follet , Robert Bresson’s Mouchette (1967) was released, a film which also ends in suicide, one whose severe aesthetic rigour and intense moral seriousness makes Le Feu Follet seem a little self-indulgent. The story of the spatupon life of an impoverished and profoundly alone teenage girl, Mouchette (Nadine Nortier) in rural France, this film of savage and lacerating beauty paradoxically leaves you in a state not of despair but of lifehungry exaltation at its close. Born into a squalid world of poverty and gelid indifference, with alcoholic parents, bullied, raped, derided and rejected, in a word, defiled , the life of a Mouchette puts that of an Alain Leroy into perspective. Shortly after the death by cancer of her mother Mouchette, walking by the river, rips a dress she has just been given on some brambles, and sees the kicking death-spasm of a rabbit shot by hunters; she then waves at a farmer passing on a tractor, who does not return her wave. This is enough. As she approaches the river, Mouchette wraps herself in the dress and rolls down the bank into the water. For the first time in the film there is music, Monterverdi’s Magnificat , and as it irrupts, we see only the sunlight on the water and the quivering of some bankside foliage before the screen fades to black. Like the tangled heap of gore-spattered armour that ends Bresson's Lancelot du Lac (1974), and the charred stake at the end of his The Trial of Joan of Arc (1962), Mouchette ends on an image of stasis, an unavoidable, inevitable terminus. George Bernanos, author of the source novel, wrote that “suicide is inexplicable and frighteningly sudden”, commenting that the story was ultimately about “the tragedy of solitude”. If there is a moment of redemptive beauty in the film it is not Mouchette’s suicide, the meaningless consummation of a life of arbitrary suffering, it is rather when Mouchette is at the town fair looking longingly at the rides and a woman - a passing stranger who we see only from the back and the neck down - slips some coins into Mouchette’s hand so that she can have a ride on the dodgems. This is a moment, and the meaning of, true grace. Nadine Nortier as Mouchette 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.

Pepe le Pew, a member of the marginalised skunk community, about to experience olfactory prejudice When Ally Louks created a Twitter storm after announcing that she’d passed her PhD with her thesis Olfactory Ethics: The Politics of Smell in Modern and Contemporary Prose, it gave outsiders a rare glimpse into postgraduate English studies in the UK. Based on the title alone, any criticism was unwarranted: it sounded innocuous enough, and potentially interesting, though not original, the subject having being covered in books and papers across disciplines for decades (William Miller’s 1997 book The Anatomy of Disgust   examines disgust as a way to maintain social hierarchies, Alain Corbin's classic study The Foul and the Fragrant is almost 40 years old, and Classen et al's Aroma: the Cultural History of Smell is now 30 years old). To defend herself from criticism and mockery Louks, in response, posted the abstract for her thesis online. It proved to be an egregious example of mimetic, boiler-plate academese, giving an insight as to why the numbers choosing to study English literature are at their lowest ever, and dwindling year by year, with departments being scrapped or reduced in size. In essence, Louks’s Abstract claims that negative perceptions of, or reactions to maladour, if the funk comes from ‘marginalised’ groups, are down to prejudice, are racist or sexist, and probably imaginary. Louks was being disingenuous when she tweeted that people were jumping down her throat for using ‘academic jargon such as olfactory’: most people know what this word means, and it is neither ‘academic’ nor ‘jargon’. It was her use of the lexicon of contemporary activism , and the pompous pretentiousness of her prose that was pilloried. She denied being an activist on the one hand, but on the other confirmed it in sanctimoniously moralising tweet after tweet, claiming that she would “continue to call out ‘olfactory racism’". She accused her critics of being 'anti-intellectual', and not able to deal with ‘long words’, yet what could be more anti-intellectual than deforming a scholarly discipline into a cliched vector of race and gender theory, and social justice activism ? People conflate jargon with specialist idiolects: the latter are reasonable and to be expected in any academic discipline, but jargon is a synonym for gibberish, a word describing debased language. A specialist idiolect can become jargon in the mouths of the wrong people, through fraudulence, intellectual over-reach, or idiocy. Louks dishonestly tried to create the false victim-narrative that her critics were mostly male and uneducated, whereas many were not only highly educated but also female, affronted lovers of literature. Louks simply pretended they didn't exist, carefully curated her replies, and went on a blocking and muting spree. One of these, the New Statesman 's Ella Dorn wrote on her blog : “You shouldn’t send rape threats to PhDs or tell them to have babies instead, but you are allowed to be pissed off if you like literature and if those at its highest echelon are using the opportunity to shoehorn 2014 politics into past work rather than actually discovering or doing anything interesting  .... A person who is at the forefront of national intellectual life should be able to construct a thesis that is beyond the intellectual reach of the editorial teams at Bustle or the Huffington Post  circa  2014.” Her abstract is no mere matter of infelicitous phrasing: I put each sentence of its first half into the Hemingway app, and each one scored very highly for unreadability, only slightly lower than the score for actual gibberish. It uses the passive voice, is overstuffed with redundant words, prepositional phrases and adverbs, and contains errors in word usage. This short text is an exercise in circumlocution and, with its tortuous syntax, liek a parody of a postgraduate abstract, although it has to be said, there are much worse . The banality-veiling, obfuscating jargon that such texts comprise is exclusionary, and is meant to be so, its opacity intended to elide critique and, despite so many of the writers of such prose identifying as socialist, to undermine language as communication in order to consolidate class injustice. It serves to either disguise that someone has nothing of substance to say or that what they are saying they know to be false or unfounded – in the end you’re asked to give such texts the benefit of the doubt. The study of literature and literary criticism are civilised and civilising, and the more the better. Like philosophy it has its schools and movements, and some of its language is necessarily recondite and difficult to gain a purchase upon. Rabelais hilariously lampooned Scholasticism and the over-latinate language of the universities of his time, but at least those philosophers and scholars were being sincere. The meretricious tendencies displayed in work such as Louks's represent a new kind of Scholasticism at best, and at worst the cultural vandalism of young Red Guards, betrayers and perverters of language, fast reducing the university to a bog of stupidities. Her abstract is full of words that you'll find repeated ad nauseam in countless abstracts for English literature PhDs, words such as ‘instantiation’ and ‘valencies’ (both misused in this abstract), ‘bifurcated’, which means split into only  two (the word Louks actually needed is unimpressively monosyllabic). Yet again, we get the the ubiquitous, but pretentious and incorrect ‘logics’ (the plural of 'logic' also being 'logic'), ‘iterations’, and ‘interrogates' ( never just ‘asks’). Of course, there's a word split into two by parentheses, '(dis)pleasurable': this tic has been around since the late 80s and has been as hackneyed as 'herstory' for decades, but still appears in may PhD and book titles. The Bronte Sisters in other Wor(l)ds was one I spotted recently, or how about this perfect storm of imbecility: Queering babies (Auto)ethnographic reflections from a gay parent through surrogacy . 'Ecologies’, 'modalities', 'problematise', and ‘liminal’ are also part of this pre-set lexicon. But these words have a significance beyond their meaning: they are counters used for a text to be accepted as contemporary academese. Such silliness should raise a rueful, indulgent smile and a shake of the head from someone marking undergraduate work, but for prose like this to be endemic at PhD level constitutes a crisis. This kind of writing, strewn with specious multisyllabic glitter intended to beguile readers, ultimately stems from Critical Theory, whose influence Camille Paglia anatomises in her essay Junk Bonds and Corporate Raiders : Aacademe in the Hour of the Wolf , where she shows how such language-use quickly became inextricably linked to cynical careerism (she reserves most of her ire for the influence of Foucault ). What began as a corrosive clarity decades ago in France has degenerated, through a game of academic Chinese whispers, into an occluding opacity, or as Hegel put it, "erudition begins with ideas and ends with ordures". The peer-reviewing of articles in this discipline has become a closed, self-affirming, self-nourising coprophiliac circle, excreting and ingesting the same orthodoxies year after year. I used Robert Burton’s phrase ‘learn’d spew’ for my title, because prose like this exhibits not learning, but the repetition of that which has been obediently learned by rote, and brought up half-digested. Her abstract has been put through what Camille Paglia called “the meat grinder of hack work gibberish”. It's depressing to think that the person who wrote this rebarbative mess, which she had three years to finesse and sophisticate, is now in a position judge and mark the prose of others. Some slack ought maybe be cut for Louks because she was trying to impress to pass, and so some grandliloquence is understandable. It was also natural to want to please and imitate her supervisors, one of whom also writes in this style. Louks may actually be able to write, but it's more likely that her thesis is written in the same as-if-parodic style as its abstract. This perhaps why there is an embargo on the release of her thesis until at least 2028, and only 47 people have thus far been given permission to read it. To show that such writing can come from the highest echelons of English studies, here is a typical paragraph  from Judith Butler , one that won first prize in Philosophy and Literature’s  Bad Writing contest: “The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power.” Five subordinate clauses, two main clauses and a scattering of adverbial phrases. And that’s before you have to cope with the vocabulary. There’s no evidence thus far that Butler could write clearly if she wanted to, but this is deliberately opaque, bad writing , intended to prevent anyone even trying to make sense of it. Louks, in addition to her mimetic sesquipedalianism, also uses modish, activist buzzwords, rather than the language of literary scholarship. This is the other lexicon you’ll find in any number of English PhD abstracts and proposals produced over the past fifteen years or so: ‘queer’, colonial’, ‘decolonialise’, ‘intersectional’, ‘gender’, ‘power structures’, ‘colonial legacies’, ‘social reproduction’....  a ritual incantation of cant, adverting fealty to a faux-ideology. Theses such as Louks’s are manifestations of herdthink, so many academic moos. The comically innevitable ‘intersectional’ comes from the American Critical Race Theory of Kimberly Crenshaw, whilst ‘misogynoir’ comes from the writings of BLM activist Moira Bailey: her work was in reference specifically to the treatment of black women online, but like most of the claims put out by BLM, even this proved to be statistically wrong. And in the real world - the one which Louks will never inhabit - the misogyny to which black women are subject comes in the main from black men. This activist language, like the tired language of Critical Theory, is signal and entry key, caste-language and secret handshake, serving as a sign that those who use it want to enter the elite progressive world. Louks is an upper middle class beneficiary of structural class inequalities, busy producing the symbolic capital that allows her entrance into the parasitic world of progressive elites, and is particularly abhorrent in the way that she rides opportunistically on the backs of the genuinely marginalised. ‘Marginalised peoples’, the impoverished and radically subaltern, do not use the language of middle-class activists, and the practical help Louks will give to the marginalised or poor will amount to absolutely nothing - it’s doubtful that she’ll ever even meet any working-class black women, except to be served by them. As English departments shrink and opportunities to teach become scarcer, and competition more fierce, so nepotism and shows of ideological fealty become increasingly important, which is why so many theses display the opportunistic conformism exhibited in Louks’s abstract. Not blind, unthinking mimicry, but deliberate, self-serving mimicry, which has the egregious result of further eroding objectivity and the barrier between scholarship and activism. The result is that English departments, like other public bodies and cultural institutions, end up being dominated by activists,  who consolidate their power through the possession and dissemination of this new symbolic capital, and who destroy those bodies and institutions from the inside. Here is a taster of what you’ll come across from today’s English PhD candidates and lecturers: ”My work is inflected by feminist, Marxist, critical race and queer theory as ways to imagine a world that moves beyond white, heteronormative patriarchy ...I write about Marx as a philologist, critical theorist and Marxist ... I reinterpret Marx’s theory of value to show how it provides the basis for a new, more capacious style of Marxist literary criticism ... a feminist reading method attuned to the ways social forms are shaped by capital’s inner logics and tendencies ... Marxist studies of racialisation, relating to black feminist methodologies ... I wrote about performativity, temporality, capital, and queerness as utopia ... primary research specialisations are black feminist studies in cultural theory, with particular focus on the ethics of representation, migration and the UK's hostile environment ... its four interconnecting parts are ‘transing queer reading’... ‘reading queer ecologies’, ‘queer reading as practise’ and ‘reading queer futures’ ... exposes the ways postcolonial partition territories were always in the process of spatial reproduction, which determines identity so that it is understood as identification ... My work is inflected by feminist, Marxist, critical race and queer theory as ways to imagine and materialise a world that moves beyond white, heteronormative patriarchy and the systemic structures that endorse its prejudices and ideological investments  ... intervene in the fields of Caribbean studies, queer theory, gender and sexuality studies, and feminist cultural studies" by "examining the interconnections between Caribbean (im)material cultures of fluidity and the politics of quotidian island life ... My academic career is driven by the interlocking projects of inclusivity, student support, queer pedagogy, queer research, and institutional transformation.” And so on and so on and so on. This kind of language has spread like a gangrene through the humanities , and there is only one discipline where the pus is as toxic and pungent and that is in Queer Studies, slavering, monstrous offpsring of Postmodernism, the deranged apotheosis of subjective idealism. English Studies and Queer Studies in the UK and US are now closely intricated, and Judith Butler is the prime exemplar of this link (the discipline began, however, in the UK, at Sussex University , with Alan Sinfield). This ideologically determined language-use is not blanket across the whole field, but is fast becoming dominant . Over the years, it has become harder and harder for an undergraduate to avoid Critical Theory and radical politics, just as it has become difficult for postgraduates to have research approved that is not inflected by one or both of them. The politicisation and political correctness of English departments is nothing new, and has been decried since the 80s, notably by Harold Bloom, and by Camille Paglia in the 90s, as Critical Theory took hold on campuses. But they have now gone into overdrive and become more extreme with the intake of staff since 2014 and the baleful influence of Critical Race Theory , decolonisation, Queer theory and, most recently, BLM. As long ago as the mid-70s departments were filling up with those who self-identified as Marxists, convinced that producing Marxist interpretations of literary texts somehow makes one a revolutionary, and who see no contradiction between self-declaring as Marxist whilst putting all one's energy into entering and maintaining one's position within the upper-middle-class via academia (which is not to say they that some weren't some who produced intersting, good work ). It is not Louks’s thesis that’s the real problem, but the fact that it was considered acceptable, that someone actually passed unreadable, cackhanded prose like this, something indicative of corruption in Higher Education at this level, for one such paper can lead to a comfortable, lifelong upper middle class living. The truth is PhD’s have always largely been bought , in that their fees, and the cost of living without earning for three years, creates an enormous financial barrier, which is why the majority of those that undertake them are middle class, and why most English lecturers are also middle class. Higher education has always given off a rank stench of class privilege, and even scholarships to help with costs given to various victim groups tend to go to middle class people within those groups (nepotism is rifer than ever, and I personally know of three people whose PhDs were marked by close personl friends). To these financial barriers to higher education have now been added insurmountable ideological and linguistic barriers. The main funding body for the humanities is the highly politicised AHRC, and if one looks at what Phds (and other projects) it funds, it reads like satire – the same progressive shibboleths and overused activist buzzwords appearing in title after title, abstract after abstract, all written in the same tortuous, try-too-hard prose . If some English departments give the impression of being woke madrassas it is in no small part due to research-funding decisions over the years by the AHRC, and other funding bodies such as the Leverhulme Trust and the British Council. Like the Arts Council, the AHRC is now one element of the progressive middle-class’s grotesque upside-down version of communism, whereby the despised proletariat has its wealth taken from it in the form of taxes, which are then redistributed to this parasitic sector of the bourgeoisie , otherwise known as ‘the blob’ , taking in civil service departments, consultancies, advisory bodies, NGOs, charities , trusts, think tanks, sections of the mainstream media that propaganidises for it, most of the cultural sector and now, increasingly, academia. Potential artists, and now academics, are forced to play up to ideological expectations in order to obtain their funding, and this demand for uniformity and ideological obedience innevitably leads to fraudulent, dishonest art and scholarship. What irked me most about Louks in particular was not so much her abstract, or even the condescending, self-regarding and disingenuous way she responded to criticism, but the fact that she has * preferred pronouns in her X bio. This, like the lexicon of her abstract, amounts to an opportunistic conformism, a cynical toadying intended to help her 'get on', and to obtain social credit. Like all the (exclusively) middle-class people who claim it is the case, Louks is lying, and cannot possibly believe that ‘ trans women are women ’, which is the idea with which the imbecilic display of preferred pronouns is intended to indicate agreement, or 'allyship'. This no small matter for someone whose metier is language: Louks proved that she’s willing to use language in bad faith for social prestige, in order to be considered part of what she thinks of as the socially dominant 'ingroup'. As for her take on maladour, Louks claims that disgust at foul smells emitted by humans is an “unhelpful emotion”. In the first place it isn’t an emotion at all, it is a physiological reaction hardwired into the brain, and an inescapable fact of social life. There’s an enormous body of work on the phenomenology of smell, and on disgust, that spans across evolutionary biology, evolutionary psychology, anthropology, psychology and social history, and the main point about this disgust is precisely that it is  ‘helpful’. To claim that it is not entails rejecting the findings of whole disciplines, and I doubt that that evolutionary biology and evolutionary psychology make an appearance in Louks's thesis. It’s helped us advance as a species, there is a neuroscience behind it, and visceral disgust for a bad odor has been part of humanity’s escape from disease, as well as part of the West’s long ‘civilising process’. The ability to detect disease, infection, corruption and dirt, our repugnance for bad smells, are survival mechanisms that have helped us avoid sources of infection and contamination. Louks pretends to see smell through the distorting lens of a racialised Marxist Critical Theory such that she can claim that people only think  they’ve perceived an odour, out of pure prejudice. However, to pursue ‘olfactory racism’ as a new branch of woke victimology she is going to have slim pickings, for as a thing that operates in the world in this way – and in texts - it is insignificant to say the least. In my experience, too, people are generally tolerant of maladour. † Aversion to malodour and ascribing it to the Other is universal, found across all cultures. This is not just a trivial matter of some black people writing on X that white people smell like pennies – all non-whites when they have come into contact with whites historically have ascribed malodour to them (and vice versa). The phrase ‘looks like they smell’ which Louks singled out for criticism in tweets may seem like a casual, malicious insult, but the human eye and brain have evolved to detect uncleanness from the smallest visual signs and the ascription is likely to be accurate, it being aimed generally at those whose photographs contain visual information indicative of potential pong. This whole affair reeks not just of privilege, but also of impatient worldly ambition: Louks's X account was monetised, she made it known she was looking for both a job and book deal, and she comes across as desperate to become part of Britain's smug commentariat as soon as possible. It didn't seem to bother her that her social media celebrity allowed her to leapfrog  to a book deal over other young academics doing interesting and original work, with a trail of peer-reviewed articles and years of teaching behind them. Indeed, on the anniversaary of her tweet, she posted that it was the post, and not her PhD, that had "allowed er to build the life " she'd always"dreamed of". On her X bio she describes herself as a 'smell commentator' as if she already has a column or show, whereas in reality such commentary is limited to her X posts. Whether the fact that she cannot write comprehensible sentences in English will make any difference to her progress remains to be seen. It's unlikely that it will, for you don't need to be that perceptive to recognise that the medium Louks is most interested in is not the written word but television , with more of an eye to becoming the next Alice Roberts than the Judith Butler of olfaction. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- *Just as Amelia Louks did not have preferred pronouns on her bio five years ago, in another five years’ time they will be gone, and for the same reason as they appeared. You sometimes see it asked on X whether or not you’d date someone who uses preferred pronouns, but an equally valid question is would you date someone who once had  preferred pronouns. Finding out that a partner had once voluntarily used them would be like tearing off their false face to reveal circuitry underneath, or a writhing mass of alien tentacles. †Several times over the years whilst living in London a bus-stinker boarded the bus on which I was travelling and passengers opened windows, retched, fled upstairs or got off at the next stop gasping for air and oh-Jesus-Christing – but I never once saw anyone say or do anything unpleasant or bullying to the person responsible for the reek. In the early 2000s I had, for a period, to catch the tube to work every day from King's Cross to Farringdon. Each morning a dumpy little Indian bag lady in late middle age, with her bag full of bags, would take a seat on the bench at the end of the platform, or stand beside it if it was full . The near-emetic stench that came from her person was unimaginably awful, a thing of not just olfaction, but one of gustation, too. It was amusing to watch people who didn't know better swiftly scatter and shoot away from her and leave the bench and its environs retching, swearing and gasping, and amusing not just to me: following this flight she would rock herself backward and forwards in an exaggerated mime of hilarity. (I wonder if she was taking a kind of malodorous revenge on the world, on the circumstances that had led her to flee into the sanctuary of madness). But the point is that never once did I hear anyone berate, reproach or insult her, and would wager that had anyone done so, they would have been the one subject to censure from bystanders.

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, f air 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 W uthering 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 J ane 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 black ened , 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

Swimming Stags, Lascaux cave, France " ... there are Still songs to sing beyond Mankind" Paul Celan, Threadsuns Art as violence 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. Yet 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. That the first story is one of violence should not surprise us: a haemoscopophiliac tendency runs through all visual culture from its very beginning, and painting across the ages is full of images of flayed, broken bodies, rapes, massacres, and battles. Mimesis and violence are fundamental to humanity, things of instinct and inherency, not mere ubiquity and inclination. Some cave paintings are thought to have been territorial markers, growing out of and promulgating conflict. Palaeolithic flint weapons exceeded functionality into the aesthetic and the first symmetrically shaped objects, stone boluses, were likely used as weapons, to crack open bones for marrow, and animal skulls to get to the nutritious porridge that was so important for the development of the human brain (recent research suggests that cannibalism in pre-history, and even later, were much more commont than previously thought. A concise summary of this new research can be found in Richard Overy's book, Why War ?). Ancient human artists depicted first not only what they wanted to kill, but by extension what they wanted to eat, digest and excrete, and from which they would derive strength. The first signs we read were animal tracks leading us to animals to kill, whilst red, the colour of blood, triggered stimuli which are thought to have been foundational for cognitive development and our very capacity for ideation. As Freud put it in Civilisation and its Discontents , “man’s deepest essence lies in drive-impulses that are elemental in nature and identical in all people”, noting that “the history of humanity is a history of race murders”. In his early essay Primitive Art (1930), Georges Bataille suggests that both children and prehistoric artists assert their personality through a violent destruction of objects and that representation itself constitutes such ‘destruction’, that art is violence in the sense of a violent alteration and seizure of given reality: “it is always a question of the alteration of objects, whether the object is a wall, a sheet of paper or a toy”. This is close to Kant’s notion of transcendental apperception, whereby ‘violence’ is necessarily done to reality in order for us to experience it at all, and in which consciousness itself acts as  a manifold-ordering artist. According to art historian Wilhelm Worringer, “the imaginative life of man is regulated by antithesis” and art began as a way to “tame the terrifying, hallucinatory manifold of reality”, something re-enacted every time an artist “makes an assault on the ineffable”. 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 , Lascaux cave, France La Scene du Puits 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 we see 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 for the lay reader on art from around the world, it remains the only art monograph written by a philosopher for a popular readership. 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. 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 Crime Trilogy "The crime novel is the great moral literature of our era” Jean-Patrick Manchette   Gary Indiana, who passed from lung cancer last October, aged 74, had only begun to get his due as a major figure of American letters in the last decade of his life. Before then he'd been a cult figure, dubbed by Jamaica Kincaide in 1980 as“the Punk Poet and pillar of lower-Manhattan society”. Resentment, the first in his acclaimed crime trilogy was published in 1997 , followed by Three Month Fever   in 1999, and Depraved Indifference in 2002, and all three novels had been out of print until Semiotexte began to reissue them in 2015 as gorgeous trade paperbacks.   Born Gary Hoising in 1950, Indiana published his first novel, Horse Crazy  in 1989, but before beginning a career as a novelist he’d published two volumes of short stories, written plays, poetry, essays and reviews, been an occasional actor, and was, between 1985 and 1988, the much-feared art critic of the Village Voice (his Village Voice columns  are collected in Vile Days: The Village Voice Art Columns, 1985-1988) . Indiana was a true polymath and wrote a well-received memoir, t wo BFI   Classics,  on Viridiana  and Salo , several art monographs, and numerous essays on literature, contemporary art, cinema and contemporary culture, the most recent selection of these being Fire Season: Essays 1985-2021 . His short book Andy Warhol and the Can that Sold the World  (2010) is a small masterpiece of culture criticism and art history, and the sociopathic lack of affect he discusses in that book is not unrelated the depraved indifference that informs and drives his crime novels. Gary Indiana His sensibility was European, and his literary lodestars, rather than the avant-garde of his own country, were Jean-Patrick Manchette, the Sartre of Nausea , Curzio Malaparte, Patricia Highsmith (an honorary European), and his beloved Thomas Bernhard. Fielding was a favourite, often re-read author too, though the savagery of his satire is closer to Fielding’s near-contemporary Tobias Smollett in its portrayal of a society of near universal venality and imbecility, and the cruelty with which he treats his puppets, cruelty being not just Indiana’s subject, but his modus operandi. What he wrote of his hero Thomas Bernhard, that he was “intolerant of imbeciles”, and had “an honesty practically unknown in contemporary writing”, could equally be applied to Indiana, who had a poor opinion of the writing of most of his peers, writing in a review of Barry Miles’s biography of William Burroughs that “the bulk of American fiction consists of cookie cutter, middle-class ‘problem’ novels by tenured academics and their MFA spawn, Dickensian verisimilitude courtesy of Wikipedia.” Indiana’s themes are violence, the corrupting power of wealth and it pursuit, the deadening of affect, the deranging effects of the present-day image-regime, and the “horror that is other people”. But he’s not a miserabilist, you go to Indiana for the ha ha ha, not the boo hoo hoo, albeit the laughter is in the pitch-dark.   Resentment , Three Month Fever  and Depraved   Indifference  are based, respectively, on the real-life cases of the trial of brothers Lyle and Erik Menendez for the murder of their parents Jos é and Kitty in 1989, the three-month killing spree of Andrew Cunanan in 1997, and the grift and murder spree of mother and son team Sante and Kenneth Kimes, that ended with their arrest in June 1998. Indiana’s friend the novelist Lynne Tillman described them as ‘documentary novels’, but there’s too much in them that’s fictive for them to be true romans a clef. Indiana wrote of his methodology: “I took the skeletons of these crimes and put flesh on them, created secondary characters more or less from scratch and altered details of the existing story to suit certain themes suggested by the original incidents but not much explored by the news coverage. In every one of those cases there was a rich family pathology that I tried to drill into to give these stories a larger dimension than what had been reported about them.” Indiana, no fan of the “gooey psychological web of family life”, said that he thought “most parents are monstrous, most families are monstrous” and begins Resentment  with an epigraph from the Philip Larkin poem This Be the Verse : “They fuck you up your Mum and dad/They may not mean to, but they do”. They can also fuck you up by fucking you. The Menendez brothers - the Martinez brothers in the novel - claimed in court that they didn’t shoot their parents because they wanted to get their hands on their inheritance early, but because they were in fear of their lives from their parents. Their bullying, domineering father Jos é had been raping them for years, with the knowledge of the medicated, often suicidal Kitty, and the couple thought they were about to be exposed by their sons. Erik and Lyle Menendez in court Indiana’s view was that the Menendez brothers had  suffered sexual abuse, and there’s a long, appalling section portraying life at Chez Martinez reflecting this. On the other hand, weeks before his murder Jos é had cut the boys out of his will following their arrest for burglarising their neighbours, and in the immediate aftermath of the murders they went on a manic spending spree. Though not monsters like their father, the brothers are nevertheless presented unsympathetically – you’d be hard put to find a single character you like in Resentment .  The elder brother maintains masturbatory correspondence in prison with a fat housewife, Doris Spree, who sees their remote romance as a route to celebrity, and plans to leave her husband for him, fantasising about “a line of Doris Spree fitness products and healthy frozen meals.” Resentment  is split between accounts of the Martinez trial in Los Angeles and the peregrinations of Seth, a lonely, disgruntled journalist sent to cover the story for a New York magazine, his friend and ex-lover Jack, with whom he stays after a stint at chateau Marmont, and their friend DJ, a popular talk show host. Seth is also in LA to interview film star Terry Wade, and is recovering from an aborted romance with a younger waiter/actor back in New York (surprisingly, Wade and his wife come across as the closest to pleasant, well-adjusted people, although they’re neither pleasant nor well adjusted). Jack, a real charmer, is subject to obscenely violent sexual fantasies, and deliberately infects sexual partners with AIDS. The novel is episodic, constructed from discrete, bravura comic set pieces, Indiana leaping from style to style, register to register, and the online sex Jack has is one of its most scabrously funny routines. The novel was written at the very beginning of online culture and social media, and before Friendster and Myspace were the chatrooms of America Online, where Jack has five online identities. From its beginning the internet has stunk of sperm and been a mass masturbation aid and social atomisation device, and Indiana clairvoyantly saw in 1997 that it was going to be the “latest thing in total alienation”. The trial itself is recounted through witness statements, police reports, Seth’s impartations, transcripts of broadcasts, and court transcripts. One of these features a court psychiatrist suffering from multiple Tourette’s that infect the whole court: coprolalia (swearing), copropraxia (feeling the genitals and breasts), and echopraxia (repeating an interlocutor’s words). Polymath he may be, but the humour in Indiana’s novels is often broad and verging on slapstick and burlesque. "They fuck you up, your Mum and Dad" - Jos é and Kitty Menendez Several of the gargoyles in Resentment  are based on real people: Norma Woolcote “the so-called punk novelist ... a shotgun wedding of the infantile and sublime” can only be Kathy Acker, Martin Paley, a conceptual artist who has himself publicly crucified has to be based on the now half-forgotten provocateur Sebastian Horley, and Jamaica Kincaide is mercilessly lampooned as the novelist Unguentina Caribou . Fawbus Kennedy was based on Vanity Fair writer Dominick Dunne, who in the real case, came down firmly on the side of the prosecutors, and who Indiana dismisses as “the kind of nothing this culture has been moving to for decades, a kind of aggravated and insatiable zero". We never find out who the narrator is who incessantly says “Seth says” and narrates the outlines of the Martinez case and Seth’s life-situation at the novel’s opening, and the influence of Bernhard is evident in the recursiveness of the accounts of who said what to whom, and in the italicisation of cliches and hackneyed locutions (although this goes back to the Flaubert of Madame Bovary ). Indiana has a gift, one he shares with Michel Houellebecq, for concise, skewering summation: of an era, a scene, city or psyche, and the Maritnez trial is an armature on which Indian hangs a portrait of America as a moral Wasteland dominated by “unenlightened self-interest that has pushed out most other forms of feeling” and in which psyches are "unhinged by relentless imagery where squalid abuse and tragedy become entertainment”. This portrait of the era’s psychic life includes a far from flattering portrait of LA’s homosexual demi-monde at the dawn of the AIDS crisis, a world of sad searches for connection and meaning, oblivion sought in alcohol, drugs and anonymous promiscuity. Indiana’s vision is infernal, a world where nothings fail to connect with nothings, and he’s said that the trait his demons have in common is “an inner emptiness”. Three Month Fever,  the second book in the trilogy, a sombre book sandwiched between two comedies, is an account of the life of Andrew Cunanan leading up to the three-month murder spree ending with the execution-style killing of his final victim, the designer Gianni Versace, in July 1997. Unlike the Menendez brothers, Cunanan’s parents weren’t sexual abusers, but his father was pushy and socially ambitious for him, and his mother an overprotective religious nut, his homelife as a child strange: “there is a palpable depression lodged deep in his parents’ marriage like a petrified cyst”, Indiana writes. Three Month Fever  was marketed as a true crime book on its initial release, but is too fictional to qualify as an addition to a genre that Indiana disliked and to which said he had no desire to “add one word to”, describing his book as “a pastiche” in which he would “dissolve the unsatisfying modes of the true crime and the non-fiction novel”. The book is a collage fictitious diary entries, police reports, school reports, reminiscences from childhood friends, accounts of dreams, and Cunanan's stream of consciousness, interwoven with narrative. The quality of Cunanan's descriptions and the acuity of his perceptions in his interior monologues give him a somewhat artistic consciousness and, perhaps flippantly, provocatively, Indiana commented that he found Gianni Versace to be a worse individual than Cunanan. Andrew Cunanan wanted poster Affronted by the media’s creation of a “homosexual golem to absorb every scary fantasy about the gay community”, Indiana’s intention was to write beyond the sensationalistic, wildly inaccurate cable network and made-for-tv-movie version of events that portrayed Cunanan as a wannabe celebrity, high class male prostitute in love with Tom Cruise, or a man on an AIDS-revenge murder spree, writing that he “got as close as anyone could to the truth ... what I got was totally contrary to what has been reported in the media”. The novel gives a steady, cumulative portrait of Cunanan and his decline into final despair and madness. Evil too is something one can descend into,  like madness, pushed by force of circumstance, and the borders between the two are porous, overlapping, though there was always something desperate and 'off' about Cunanan. From his childhood on he was serial liar who, according to one acquaintance, was “full of shit and disreputable in some kind of hard to describe but scary way”, and throughout his life he “enlarged the little events of his life for the benefit of people who might otherwise perceive him as ordinary”. Cunanan’s father was Filipino, and he was raised in the dismal National City, California, one of the poorest cities in America. Tortured by his mixed race and the poverty of his background, he pretended to be Jewish and, like a child, at times said he’d been adopted, “his actual home, his actual parents became a plangent secret he shared as a revealing intimacy”. The family moved several times, each time further up the social and economic ladder, ending up at La Jolla, California, where Cunanan started attending the upscale Bishop’s School. His parents not only sacrificed everything for his schooling: his father, now a stockbroker, also embezzled his employers to fund it, and later had to flee justice, back to the Philippines. At Bishop’s Cunanan was poisoned with an obsession with wealth and status by “the proximity of rich kids, and "the moral laxity endemic amongst the monied class”. He became obsessed not with being rich, but with being thought of as rich, and “what people thought of him became more important than life itself”. This “preposterous fact”, Indiana writes, “is the purloined letter in plain sight". The clever and gregarious Cunanan had friends, but was generally found creepy, and knew it, sensing that “suspicion and dislike of him emanated from everyone around him”.  He was dating older, rich men to fund a showy lifestyle even before attending San Diego University, where he majored in American History. When he took up with the fabulously rich Norman Blachford, following humiliating stints as a clerk at a bank and assistant at the Thrifty Junior Drugstore whilst living with his mother, he began behaving like "a Deb who'd married well". He spent, and spread his largesse, extravagantly, splitting his time between travelling with Norman – who gave him a $2, 500 a month stipend – and clubbing and partying with a younger gay crowd. A young Andrew Cunanan with his father, Modesto With the split from Norman, he felt himself - ageing, balding, and bloating - “becoming a despised, laughable creature whose feelings mattered to one, least of all his closest friends”. Norman left him with a soon-squandered $10,000-dollar parting gift, and Cunanan began to drink heavily and get into S&M porn. His drug of choice, on top of Xanax, Vicodin and Percocet, was ball-shrinking, psychopathologising testosterone. Cunanan ran out of money, then credit, then sanity, and the interval between shopping spree and killing spree was a short one. He’d been having a relationship with David Madson, lying constantly to him to hide his relationship with Blachford and explain away his profligate spending. Shortly before Cunanan’s break up with Norman, Madson broke free of Cunanan and moved to Minneapolis, at the same time as their mutual friend Jeff Trail, who was also trying to sever ties from the increasingly erratic and dishonest Cunanan. Cunanan went to stay the weekend with Madson and murdered Trail in Madson’s apartment with a handgun and claw hammer, afterwards effectively keeping Madson prisoner for two days. Madson’s corpse was found a few weeks later on the shore of Rush Lake, in Minnesota. These were probably the two people Cunanan had been closest to in his life. Next , Cunanan murdered real-estate tycoon Lee Miglin in his home in Chicago. Miglin was found with his head completely encased in duct tape to form a makeshift gimp mask, and with more than 20 stab wounds from a screwdriver. Ostensibly a random break-in, it’s unlikely Cunanan didn’t know him (Miglin’s family, however, insist not). He left in Miglin’s Lexus and with $2000 in cash, by this time one of 'America’s 10 most wanted'. Cunanan then murdered cemetery caretaker William Reese, whose vehicle he stole to take him to Miami, where he murdered Gianni Versace on the steps of his mansion before fleeing to the houseboat he was holed up in, shooting himself through the mouth a week later. Cunanan was essentially childish, a tortured narcissist full of self-hatred, a pathologically insecure man who “never gave himself the benevolent long-mirror view that would make him doubt the need for a cover story”. There’s no evidence that Cunanan was obsessed by fame or wanted to be celebrity. He wanted to be liked by everyone and to be fabulously rich without working, a not much more unreasonable thing to ask from life. Indiana, who notes the “cumulative disappointments” of Cunanan’s life, clearly has some sympathy for him, and pointedly refers to him throughout as ‘Andrew’, and this is the only thing that grates with me about the book. For in the end, whatever led him to it, which was nothing so very tragic, Cunanan savagely ripped out of life and destroyed the families of five decent men who had done him no harm. The final novel in the trilogy, Depraved Indifference , is the funniest, and closest to a classic crime novel, Indiana’s descriptions, witty dialogue, and jaded tone having a distinctly noir feel - a rich man’s Jim Thompson. The first kaleidoscopic half of the novel, with its gleefully imagined supporting cast of comic grotesques, moves back and forth in time, each chapter headed by the name of the character it features. It recounts the cons, frauds, thefts, and grifts carried out by Devin and Evangeline Slote and, following the death of her alcoholic hotelier husband, murders, and their dealings with various victims and accomplices,  willing or unwilling, the latter made up largely of the homeless, poor or addicted - ‘losers’ in Evangeline’s parlance. Evangeline is a hugetitted Elizabeth Taylor look-alike who “collects marks like lottery tickets”. This monster, who refers to the fear and chaos she generates as her “zest for living”, is one of crime fiction’s great comic creations. Obsessed by larceny, she even goes in for petty shoplifting and steals the courtesy soap from hotels. Like Sante Kimes, she served time for enslaving and trafficking illegal migrant, Mexican maids. They’re already millionaires and don’t need money, and though Warren derives some amusement from their grifts, he’s a disreputable odd duffer in fearful thrall to Evangeline, whose “presence is like a slow acting neurotoxin.” A young Sante Kimes Implausibly, Sante Kimes was an even more outlandish psychopath than Indiana’s creation, her whole adult life a crime spree: like Evangeline, she didn’t need money and grifted for pleasure, specialising in burning down properties to claim the insurance. As a child she was a pyromaniac who tortured cats, dogs, goats, and her younger sister. Like Evangeline, she had a rich hotelier husband, she had 22 fake identities, and was lover to not just her son, but also her brother (Evangeline’s ‘seduction’ of Devin in one of the book’s queasiest scenes). The first half of the book ends with Warren’s extraordinary dying interior monologue as he succumbs to an aneurism. He’s fixed it so that Evangeline can’t touch his money, and it goes to the children of his first marriage. In the novel’s second half Evangline and Devin try and fail to withdraw Warren’s money from his offshore accounts, and the insurance money from a property they have burned down, along the way murdering a lawyer, an insurance salesman and a bank auditor. Sante and Kennth Kimes being interviewed on 60 Minutes whilst awaiting trial Even as the police are hunting for them, they try to appropriate the ownership of an Upper East Side Beaux Arts mansion by forging deeds and assuming the owner’s identity – after knocking her off. The house is owned by the elderly ’Baby’ Claymore, a former Esther Williams ‘aquabat’ who married well and runs the house as an apartment complex for the arty super-rich, who don’t escape Indiana’s gimlet satirical eye. Devin moves in under an alias, covertly visited by a preposterously disguised Evangline, but the pair are arrested shortly after they murder Claymore’s and dispose of her body. Following the long description of the genteel, cultured and sheltered daily life Claymore lives in the mansion the sudden irruption of madness, violence and nihilism is shocking. In the Kimes case it was 82-year-old socialite and former ballerina Irene Silverman they targeted, and her body has never been found. Although the novel ends with Evangeline being interviewed on the Larry King show, Indiana's target here isn’t the media but the centrality of the con to American life (it’s worth looking up Kimes’s real interviews with King and others on YouTube, her performances are extraordinary). At one point Evangeline justifies herself to Warren with “I love America, but you have to admit it’s full of morons. We owe it to ourselves to make money off them”. This is really no different what you might hear in many-a corporate boardroom, and is the guiding ethos of the advertising industry. In an interview, a friend of Irene Silverman’s who attended their trial described Sante and Keneth Kimes as completely empty, “bodies without souls”, bespeaking the confluence of inner emptiness and evil. Claymore, shortly before being murdered has the letters of Madame de Sevigne read to her by her factotum, and these, testimonies to filial affection and fullness of being, are held up as a moral foil to the depraved indifference that rules the psyche of Evangeline and, by extension, the nation. It was these same letters that Proust held up as an index of his grandmother’s, and so of all possible goodness, in In Search of Lost Time , and Indiana segues into quotes from letters by other literary figures, such as Kafka and Arendt, reflecting: “of course, people no longer wrote them, or no longer with depth and reflection, life moved too quickly now, and parts of the human heart seem to have atrophied in the species as a whole”. Indiana, a severe and unforgiving moralist, once wrote with uncharacteristic near-optimism that “empathy can, in fact, change the world”, and it’s the smothering of empathy, the atrophying of the human heart, and what causes it to wither that is the subject of Indiana's trilogy of parables.

Penguin's new edition of Night of the Hunter Last Summer Penguin launched their Modern Classics Crime and Espionage series, and there are now twenty-nine titles in the collection. The livery features the same green as that of their Penguin Crime series, launched 75 years ago, though they are in the larger and less elegantly proportioned, less pocket and bag friendly B1 paperback format. The new series uses the same colour-scheme as the Romek Marber   covers of the 1960s, black, green, and white only (with an occasional splash of red to denote blood), but are less stark, making use of collage and photography, as well as illustration . To give an even more vintage feel, one that reflects the eras in which the novels were written (none later than the 1970s), a typewriter font, FF Elementis, is used. The covers are all beautiful but there is one drastic difference between Marber’s covers and those of the new editions, which is that the latter are beshitten by blurb. It's puzzling why Penguin chooses to deface pieces of graphic art  in this way that they have gone to the trouble of commissioning and paying a design studio to produce; it's doubtful that it increases sales and some series, such as the Penguin Street Art series, have avoided this fate. Many in the series have been adapted into films, some of them classic film noirs such as Eric Ambler’s Journey into Fear, Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep , and Dorothy B Hughes’s In a Lonely Place . Included in the series is the 1953 novel Night of the Hunter  by David Grubb. The blurb-dropping on the front cover’s collage is a piece of hyperbole from the New York Times  about the book’s “astonishing verbal magic”. Grubb’s novel was a finalist for the National Book Award and was a best-seller, but despite the cult status of the 1955 film, Grubb is an almost forgotten figure. Romek Marber's cover design for The Pledge Rather than dealing in ‘verbal magic’, Grubb strives for literary effect with sub-Faulknerian  orotundities, and the figurative language of the novel, often invoking women and Grubb’s notion of femininity,  is sometimes bathetic, inapposite or overblown: “…now the land was alive and the air ripe and musky with the spring river smell like the ripe, passionate sweat of a country waitress”, or “..the foolish, womanly hoot of the little steamboat” and ”…great gusts of rain that raced like sheep dogs”. Yet overall the novel is enjoyable, gripping and suspenseful, with dialogue so good that Laughton was able to keep most of it verbatim for his film adaptation. Grubb also pulled off the feat of making good as compelling as evil without a descent into mawkishness or sentimentality, in the selfless love of the doughty Rachel Cooper (Lilian Gish). In her essay on goodness in literature, Toni Morrison pointed out the oft-times comedy of fictionally depicted goodness, how it is mocked, and the difficulty of its effective portrayal. If there’s something in that, and there are countless texts in both adult and children’s literature that suggest there isn’t, then she missed the larger point that evil – though romanticised in some works, and often compelling – is much more a matter of comedy, mockery and punishment in fiction than goodness, seemingly having forgotten writers such as Waugh, Dahl, Austen and Dickens, and a whole genre, satire, the “vehicle for the denunciation and correction of vice”. The novel’s villain Harry Powell (Robert Mitchum), despite being a serial killer, is a figure of contempt and fun: physically unprepossessing, a ranting religious maniac and a woman-hating, probably impotent pervert. 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. The plot of Night of the Hunter  is simple enough and identical in film and 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 being arrested. As he awaits execution, he is joined in his cell by Powell, 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). Powell, a bogus preacher but genuine religious maniac and psychopath, who has ‘love ‘and ‘hate’ tattooed across his fingers , tries to wheedle the whereabouts of the money from Harper before his execution, but to no avail. On his release, Powell goes to Harper’s small West Virginia hometown, Cresap’s Landing, to preach, and seduce his 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, 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.  It is also a novel about the corrupting powers of both money and poverty. The realities of poverty and grim exigencies of the depression are more pronounced in the novel where, unlike in the film (in which nothing looks particularly ugly or squalid or dirty or poor) Grubb sharply depicts the effects and the look of rural indigence. In the novel everyone is obsessed with the $10, 000 dollars, including Willa. In Laughton’s movie, the MacGuffin/doll serves a similarly suspense and tension creating function as Stevie’s package containing a bomb in Hitchcock’s Sabotage (1936). Grubb repeatedly calls our attention to it, but it is a flaw of the novel that in its final quarter the money simply disappears from the narrative; we never find out what becomes of it, and must assume it is returned. There are by necessity elisions, contractions, and condensations in the film, but there are no major narrative departures from the book. The backstory of Gish’s character is missing, as is the episode in which she travels to visit her snooty daughter-in-law and her son, now come up in the world and distant with her. Icey Spoon, Willa’s boss, is a character almost as distasteful as Powell: she pesters and emotionally blackmails Willa into marrying Powell for reasons of social conformity, yet she later leads the hysterical mob to the courthouse to lynch him. It’s the same sinister smalltown conformity that Shirley Jackson satirises in her short horror story, The Lottery . Night of the Hunter  is perfect reading for older children, and the film perfect young-teen viewing (despite it getting an adult rating on its release in the UK). Imperiled-children narratives will be perennially popular with kids because they have all at some point – to wildly differing degrees – felt themselves imperiled by adults, wishing to escape them and see them punished (if not killed). Famously, Night of the Hunter  was the only film that Charles Laughton 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, including a devastating one from the sneering and ever-bitchy Bosley Crowther of the New York Times , that he gave up on the idea. It didn’t help that it was released in the same year as the controversial ‘issue’ films The Blackboard Jungle  and Rebel Without a Cause . "Where's the money hid, you little bitch?" 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. 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 calmant 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 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 an 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. Shelley Winters in Odds Against Tomorrow The film’s modernist, novelistic abrupt shifts from register to register, style to style, is the thing that 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 oneiric, surrealistic feel, with screen-filling close ups of spiderwebs, birds, rabbits and owls, a child’s benign story book familiars, with the implication of child-animal complicity, 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, and I can be included amongst them, but I suspect the antipathy to this scene affects adults only. Such artificiality does help give the film a timeless, folkloric feel. 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. Lillian Gish keeping guard, the Big Bad Wolf in the background Cortez had just finished work on the morally brutal Black Tuesday  (1954) - with an authentically psychotic lead performance from Edward G Robinson - on which 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 – not that such taxonomies are really that important - 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, relishing such lines as “you’re the spawn of the devil’s own strumpet”. 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 closer to the wretchedness of the novel's Powell, by contorting his body to make it more awkward looking, andby 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. 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 made dozens of films with Griffiths, starting in 1912, 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 had a long filmography too, 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), and along with Edward G Robinson, Robert Ryan and Humphrey Bogart, he was one of the male faces that defined film noir. 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).  But, if forced to choose one, the standout performance of his career was in J Lee Thompson’s Cape Fear ( 1962), as Max Cady.  Another misogynistic psychopath, this time set on revenge on the man who helped put him in prison for 8 years (Gregory Peck) by raping his pre-teen daughter. You could see his performance as Harry Powell as a kind of rehearsal for Cady, an atavistic personification of male violence and sexual evil. However, this is a naturalistic performance, swaggering, sleazy, arrogant and frightening, unleavened by any whimsy, impishness or humour and, although another imperiled child narrative, definitely one for adults only. 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, .  Mitchum too had his forgettable duds, the somnambulistic Thunder Road (1958), in which all the actors seem to be on the nod, The Last Tycoon (1976), and artistic reverse-Midas Michael Winner’s awful remake of The Big Sleep (1978) come to mind. 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. An intellectual prodigy as a child, Mitchum had an instinctive antipathy to authority (he once shat in his teacher’s hat), and left home at 14 to ‘ride the rails’ as a hobo during the Depression. In 1948, not for the first time, he was busted, this time for marijuana possession (a lifelong habit that went as far as him cultivating his own crop in the 70s), and the publicity sealed his reputation as ‘Hollywood’s bad boy’. An erudite, voracious reader, he and Laughton got on so famously partly due to a shared enthusiasm for literature. Night of the Hunter  is an entertaining thriller distracting enough to while away a couple of too-lazy-for-literature afternoons, one that effectively evokes the landscape of rural West Virginia and gives us a vivid picture of small-town life in the Depression era South in which Grubb had grown up, but is let down by occasional stylistic lapses and a not wholly convincing attempt at stream of consciousness at its close. Its comforting Manicheanism is more suitable for the young. The film is a more 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. Grubb’s novel was published in the same year as Flannery O’ Connor’s landmark story A Good Man is Hard to Find , a more philosophically sophisticated, troubling, if not traumatic, study of the haunting inscrutability of evil. The novel's value lies more in its basis for Laughton’s unique film, one containing images and scenes of such arresting power and insinuating beauty that they remain with you for a lifetime.

A brief guide to Spinoza's concept of freedom Baruch de Spinoza The Jew of Voorburg Of the several very short introductions to Spinoza Ian Buruma’s Spinoza: Freedom’s Messiah , part of Yale’s Jewish Lives  series, is the most useful for those entirely new to the philosopher. Buruma, a journalist and historian, acknowledges in the book’s introduction “I’m not an expert in philosophy and I cannot propose to offer any fresh insights into Spinoza’s thinking”. Buruma’s book is a biography, though he graciously acknowledges Stephen Nadler as ‘Spinoza’s biographer’ (Nadler’s biography is only for serious students of Spinoza). Where Buruma does explicate Spinoza’s philosophy he does so with clarity and concision, with no assumption of any familiarity with the discipline. There is no getting around the difficulty of Spinoza and clear, short introductions like this are invaluable. 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 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, as Buruma points out, he was both during and after his life “identified by his Jewishness”, and he discusses the reception of Spinoza by Jewish intellectuals across the centuries: “... to Heine, Hess, Marx, Freud, and no doubt many others, Spinoza exemplified how to be Jewish without Judaism”. Spinoza 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” Buruma writes, “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. Short history books covering a long span of time are often soporifically list-like, but Buruma keeps the book lively throughout. He gives an account of the persecution and ghettoisation of Jews in seventeenth century Europe and Jewish life in Amsterdam during the Dutch Golden Age, describes the tangled skein of seventeenth century Dutch politics, gives us a sketch of Descartes’s thought and its reception, of the Dutch Reformed Church, and portraits of various characters from the period, such as Spinoza’s friend the Republican Grand Pensioner Johan de Witt, who once offered Spinoza an annual stipend of 200 guilders, which he declined. Expulsion and Exile The book includes a long account of the suicide 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. 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”. Buruma suggests 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. Monument to Spinoza by Jewish artist Job Wertheim, erected in Amsterdam, 1956 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. Buruma puts Spinoza’s lifelong celibacy down to his “total commitment to individual autonomy and freedom”; he 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.   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 often 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. Spinoza 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. “Even scientific thinking today is condemned”, Buruma writes, “if it fails to affirm particular beliefs in social justice”, adding, “this poses a similar threat to intellectual life that the church did in Spinoza’s time, because it leads to timidity and conformity”. Buruma refrains from any further discussion of contemporary issues but does explain that it was these that led him to take on the subject: “… my curiosity was piqued because intellectual freedom has once again become an important issue ... if one thing can unequivocally be said about Spinoza, it is that freedom of thought was his main preoccupation”. 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's Theory of Partial Freedom The title Freedom’s Messiah has a ring to it, but Buruma does not actually go very deeply into Spinoza’s theory of freedom, and Autonomy’s Messiah  would have been more accurate. Firstly, 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 many of those approve of murdering those who don't, 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. Secondly, Spinoza thought that freedom is impossible, that we can only attain varying degrees of partial  freedom, and that part of attaining this freedom is 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, with only god being 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 that complete free will is an illusion; some people have more if it than others, and it is within your 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 is what Val é ry meant be "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, that is, 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 when we experience a partial freedom whilst engaged in rational thought, we 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. Fortune's Slaves 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 being illogical, often illusory, succeeding 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, and not be passive in relation to them, smothering 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, and 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”.   Spinoza: Freedom’s Messiah ( Jewish Lives ) is published by Yale University Press, £16.99     .

An interview with Johnny Monroe, 'the punk Victoria Wood', creator of Coronation Street spoof Buggernation Street, and the notorious BBC Wokeday Evening   During the first lockdown, shortly before I fled London, living in a shared house that had become a miniature lunatic asylum, with murder in the air, rather than wallow in the boo hoo hoo I retreated into and saved my sanity with the ha ha ha, gorging on Laurel and Hardy, the Marx Brothers, Seinfeld , Spongebob , Curb Your Enthusiasm , The Fast Show and Harry Enfield clips, anything. One evening I found myself, in my cups, down a comedic YouTube hole, and came across Buggernation Street for the first time. I did, as they say, PMSL.  I’m not quite sure how I found it, possibly via Derek and Clive , but I was quickly addicted. The channel was under the name ‘Victoria Lucas’, a pseudonym of its creator Johnny Monroe, who had taken 1970s episodes of Coronation Street and dubbed his own dialogue, sound effects and music over them.  Coronation Street became the story of “the filthiest street in the country”, Buggernation Street , set, like Coronation Street, in the fictional town of Weatherfield, but recounting the deviant, erotomaniacal exploits of a streetful of “depraved and retarded northern folk”. The pilot episode opens in the home of “serial benefits cheats” Stan and Hilda and Ogden. “Back street abortionist” Hilda is crowing, with Van der Graaf Generator playing in the background, about having been chosen to feature in the Readers’ Wives section of a porn mag, news she can’t wait to convey to Annie Walker, stuck-up landlady of the Rover’s Return, and Chairwoman of the Weatherfield Satanic Abuse Society. In a later episode, Wild is the Wind , her husband, “fat lazy cunt” Stan, with an ear-dazzling firework display of flatulence, will win a farting competition in a rival pub. This very funny and slyly political episode includes a recitation by Ken Barlow of one of Joyce’s filthiest letters to Nora Barnacle, and the series is shot through with knowing cultural references, high, pop, and low. Monroe’s relentless torrent of scatology, hilariously improbable, baroque sexual scenarios, and obscene vituperations show great imagination and linguistic verve. You don’t see any filth, it’s all language, and it can hardly be said to be pornographic – you’d have to be very peculiar indeed to be turned on by it.  It has in common with de Sade’s writings that the sexual scenarios are patently preposterous and impossible (though de Sade took himself seriously and his writings, though not lacking in satirical content, are emetic and unpleasant). In the alternative universe of Buggernation Street , Albert Tatlock, 173 years old, is a serial flasher obsessed with watching Minnie Cauldwell pee, Ena Sharples is interviewed by the NME, Deirdre Barlow is on the game, Bet Lynch a gravel-voiced transwoman, Len Fairclough a swimming pool haunting paedo, and “pompous wanker” Ken Barlow a rapist (“Can I join you ladies, don’t worry, I’m not going to rape you. Having said that, would you mind if I patronised you for a while?”) Johnny Monroe This laying of a new set of narrative threads over the originals and synchronising consistently funny new dialogue over the old shows an immense original talent, especially considering that it is all improvised. This detournement has been tried before, in Situationist Rene Vienet’s Can Dialectics Break Bricks? and Woody Allen’s What’s Up Tiger Lily? (the former is much funnier than the latter). They’re not nearly as successful, but then Monroe has been at this since his teens, when he created “pastiches and parodies I indulged in with my first tape recorder”. There’s a trickle of filth that runs through Western literature, from Juvenal to de Sade, the poems of Rochester and Swift, to Philip Roth’s Sabbath’s Theatre and Viz . The closest to Buggernation Street are the expletive strewn, filthy fantasias of Derek and Clive in audio-sketches such as Joan Crawford’s Cunt . Much of the humour of Buggernation Street derives not just from the copralalic content and the inventiveness of the invective but also from the incongruity of it coming from the mouths of these ‘beloved’ characters, though in fact most of them retain the essential character traits they have in the original. Albert Tatlock, for instance, was already a miserable old bastard (though not a former gigolo), and Ken Barlow a pompous, superior prig -  these traits have merely been exaggerated to absurdity. The dialogue in Buggernation Street is also a kind of uncensoring because its expletetves and obscene, sexually mocking banter, though grossly exaggerated, are nevertheless closer to the speech in ‘real life’ of that class, time, and place than the dialogue of the original. Although Carry On ’s saucy repartee is clearly an influence, Buggernation eschews double entendre for straight up filth. No people swear as well or with as much gusto as the British and, like James Kelman, Monroe is alive to the poetry and music of swearing. ‘Fuck’ is an infinitely multivalent word, and for the English there are more types of cunt and modes of cuntishness than there are words for snow for Eskimos. The sauciness of British humour and its wordplay, the sketch show and stand-up genres, have their roots in British working class humour and in music halls, and the figure of the comedic pervert, often comically inadequate or half-mad, also began there, continuing into modern popular culture with the suggestive songs of George Formby, characters in the Carry-On franchise, various stand-ups, Benny Hill, and Les Dawson’s Cosmo Smallpiece . Cosmo Smallpiece, a quintessentially British pervert Johnny Monroe is prolific and has self-published several novels, several volumes of poetry and, under the pseudonym Petunia Winegum, writes a regular blog, T he Winegum Telegram . This is wide ranging, though Monroe’s fondness for the 70s is evident, covering subjects such as Starsky and Hutch , the sophistication of script and characterisation in 70s tv dramas, the trial of Fatty Arbuckle, discontinued chocolate bars, obituaries of cultural figures, the Online Safety Bill, and the death of the High Street. It’s a shame that this remains in an obscure corner of the internet because the blog is really a regular column and makes for more entertaining and insightful reading than most that appear inthe mainstream press. Monroe’s video output isn’t limited to Buggernation Street . The filth and elaborate verbal abuse continue hilariously with Bruce Forsyth’s Humiliation Game , in which Bruce mocks, berates and humiliates his gormless contestants (again, he’s bringing to the surface a dynamic that was already present under the surface of the original).  There are TOTP chart run downs that are both mocking and fondly nostalgic at the same time, the humour lying in the puerile and ridiculous names given to songs and bands (Turd Burglars, Klunge, Dicky Dumpling, Erectile Delinquent, Salty Creampie, The Slags) paired with their ridiculous hair, costumes, and posturing. His cruelly funny overdubbing of Rick Beatto’s Spotify Shitlist perfectly skewers the comic banality of every dimwit genre of contemporary music, complete with puerile lyrics, and in one of his Jim’ll Fix It  covers that sails right into the wind a child gets to meet the Gay Daleks. Indigo Rumbelow’s interview with Mark Austen is rendered even more comic and her true idiocy brought more fully out into the open just by the addition of a laughter track and intercutting shots of a laughing studio audience. It was Monroe’s spoof programme rundown of a BBC Wokeday Evening that led to his cancellation. This spoof, which began with “highlights from this year’s book-burning championship from Islington’s George Floyd Stadium” and included notices for LGBTXYZ Cars  and Emily Maitliss giving “an impartial sermon on News Speak at 11pm” went viral. Shortly afterwards, Monroe received notice of the permanent removal of his channel from YouTube and his banning from the platform, citing “multiple or severe violations of YouTube’s policy on nudity or sexual content”. Although the complaints may have been made about Buggernation Street , it was the Wokeday Evening video that attracted the attention of the “Identity Politics Gestapo”. (A very generous sampler of Johnny Monroe’s video content, including episodes of Buggernation Street, can be found on his Vimeo channel , the remainder, and regular new content, on a subscription-only Patreon .) Authoritarians don’t like to be mocked or lampooned and when they are, if they can, they invariably punish. This episode – like so many cancellations – seems an act of revenge from the woke, whose absurd shibboleths, fraudulent cant, dark psychological motivations, inherent totalitarianism and stupidity the video so accurately and scathingly skewered. In the 80s, 90s or 2000s an inventive, original talent like Johnny Monroe would have become a household name (though the sexual content of Buggernation Street would always be beyond the mainstream pale). His satire is essentially Juvenalian. The fact is that from around 2014 comedians could have had a field day. Never in history has so much been offered up for satire, so many maniacs, midwitted mountebanks, hypocritical fellow-travellers, and crackpot ideas to mock; never has so much low hanging comedic fruit been there for the taking. Even on the visual level, of physiognomy and dress, there’s been an embarrassment of riches. Instead, apart from a few honourable exceptions, the comedy world chose cowardice and conformity, to speak fawning lies to power, to promulgate an oppressive ideology, and to thus become themselves fit subjects for satire and derisive mockery. This cowardice, and the decision not satirise the bien pensant elites and dominant middle class doxa, has contributed significantly to the world eventually becoming almost impossible satirise; its absurdities were left unmocked for so long that it has taken on the sinister aspect of a world that is a parody of itself. Satire is after all a corrective mirror intended to eradicate or at least reduce vice and stupidity, to shame into wisdom and right conduct. If one looks at the staff biographies, physiognomies, imbecilities, mission statements, and destructive work of, for example, sensitivity reader agencies, one sees that, though they’re funny, it is not possible to actually satirise them, they’re’ too OTT already. Similarly, a typical Guardian headline is now impossible to differentiate from a parody Guardian headline, which was not the case in 2014, and many of the spoofs of Tatiana McGrath from a few years ago became reality. Gatekeeping, nepotism, conformity and ideological screening are now so prevalent in comedy and in all the arts (Jesse Darling’s acceptance speech for the Turner Prize was a comedy sketch), that the situation has become very much like that of the arts behind the Iron Curtain during the Cold War – only without the dissidents.     I interviewed Johnny Monroe by email:   CM : How did Buggernation Street start, and how popular had it become before YouTube took it down?     JM : I suppose the genesis of Buggernation Street and all my videos can be traced back to the first tape recorder I received at Christmas when I was 10. After using it to record favourite programmes from TV, I quickly set about producing my own 'programmes', even though they were audio-only. I even used to create my own listings magazine to document them all, miniature versions of the Radio Times that I'd draw by hand in exercise books. So, I was creating 'content' on cassette and writing about it as well; today, I create content on video and write a blog and books. It's evident all the seeds were planted a long time ago.   The first Buggernation Street appeared - I think - around 2011; it was just a short, really, running for around 12 minutes. It went down well on YT, but I had no idea whatsoever it would lead on to 70-odd episodes over a decade later. It was something of a best-kept-secret cult for the best part of ten years and then it went into overdrive during lockdown. I had a fair amount of subscribers before then - well into the thousands - I was pretty overwhelmed by the amount of new subscribers I received in 2020/21. I'd usually gain maybe a couple of new ones a week, but during lockdown that completely snowballed so I'd be gaining a dozen a day. It was mind-blowing, really. It's only because of that sudden and unexpected rush of interest that I returned to Buggernation after a gap of six years (I'd originally ended the series in 2015). People were demanding it and I figured I may as well give people what they wanted, especially when they were so bloody miserable thanks to events. Due to a few screen-grabs I thankfully took from YT, I can see that the first new episode of the series premiered on 4 April 2021 and was on 83,521 views and 1.2K thumbs-up by 17 April; at that time, my channel had 12.4K subscribers.   CM : Could you tell me more about your cancellation by YouTube. What reason did they give for taking your channel down?   JM : YouTube gave me no warning, no 'three-strikes-and-you're-out' beforehand when they cancelled me and the channel. Suddenly, everything was gone. I literally ceased to exist on YT. They completely erased me from history - every video I'd ever posted, every comment I'd ever made on someone else's video, all vanished in an instant, as though I'd never even been there. I could no longer subscribe to any other channel, like a video, comment, or even see comments. An email from YT informing of the event after it happened contained an opportunity to appeal, which I did; but it was a joke. They replied to my appeal within a matter of hours and it made no difference to their decision. They'd made their mind up. They said - and I quote: "This account has been terminated due to multiple or severe violations of YouTube's policy on nudity or sexual content', to which they added: 'We have permanently removed your channel from YouTube. Going forward, you won't be able to access, possess or create any other YouTube channels". In other words, "we have rendered you a non-person". The reply to my appeal was that 'YouTube is not the place for nudity, pornography or other sexually provocative content.'   This gives an entirely misleading impression of my channel. There was no nudity in any video I ever posted. Yet, the uncut and uncensored Blurred Lines promo video was still accessible on YT at the time; it may still be for all I know. Double standards. All my videos with 'bad language' or references to sexual acts were over-18 only; they already had measures in place for that and I abided by them. But I'd seen YT change and become more 'corporate' over a period of years from when my channel began in 2010; I was writing about it as far back as 2015, and I'd more or less stopped posting videos by 2019, instead posting new material on smaller and less censorious platforms like Vimeo, as well as my Patreon subscription channel, which I set up in 2021. I only came back to YT because of the sudden rush of new subscribers during lockdown. So many of them told me I was making a difference and giving them something to laugh about that it felt wrong not to pay them back for their kindness.   It's too coincidental that when my BBC1 Wokeday Evening  spoof trailer went viral due to being picked up on and tweeted by several (in the eyes of the MSM) 'undesirables' that YT cancelled me just a few weeks later. I'd touched a nerve, even though to me it was just straightforward satire, which I've always done. To me, if you ring-fence anyone and make them exempt from having the piss taken out of them, you castrate satire, and anyone who calls themselves a satirist and avoids certain subjects is complicit in this.   CM : Do you think anyone should be unmockable and banned from being subjects of satire? And would you agree that a society in which there are protected privileged groups that you can be punished for mocking is totalitarian?   JM :  I don't think anyone should be ring-fenced from satire, though it has to be good satire to begin with; if it's not funny in the first place, there's no point anyway. I don't believe in the 'punching down/up' rhetoric because it's another extension of categorising everybody and pigeonholing people on the basis of race, gender, sexuality etc. 'It's okay to take the piss out of that group, but not this group' and so on. I've spent most of my life avoiding being put into a neat little box and labelled, and I can't understand why anyone would want to begin a sentence with 'As a gay man' or 'As a woman of colour' etc. Just feels like facilitating divide and rule to me.   Funnily enough, going back to schools programmes - one that was referenced in a Buggernation episode was called Cloud Burst,  a serial that was part of the long-running Look and Read  series in the 70s. In it, the same actor plays identical twin brothers, one of whom is a good guy and one of whom is a bad guy. Both characters were played by the British Indian actor Renu Setna, and when the BBC at the time were concerned casting an Asian actor as a villain might imply all Asians were villains, they received reassurances from organisations dealing with race relations that showing both positive and negative traits would present a more rounded and honest portrait of an Asian man - scarily proving 'them' are actually just like 'us'. That to me seems a healthier approach than what we have now. But as Jim Morrison once said in relation to the Permissive Society, this is always a cyclical thing; it swings to one extreme and then gradually swings back again. Could well be a generational thing as well, that the next generation will reject what the current one is pedalling and thus return us to a better place than where we are now; just seems a shame we have to wait.   CM : Do you think that your cancelling was down to higher ups at the BBC or to disgruntled and offended lower downs?   JM : I doubt that my spoof reached as high as the BBC upper echelons, but enough like-minds lower down the food-chain are active on social media, and they probably played their part. CM : Because you criticise woke shibboleths and absurdities, I'm sure there are those who would categorise you as on the right, though it seems to me that you're essentially left wing and sympathetic to the working class - Is that accurate?   JM : Like a lot of people in my position and of my generation, I always regarded myself as being on the 'Left' up until the Left handed the keys of the asylum to the lunatics. Now I'm just one of many who regard themselves as politically stateless. I remember one of my most popular videos was my Trumpton spoof, and the comments I received when it was on my YT channel varied from calling me a Communist to labelling me 'Far-Right'. I remember thinking if I'm being accused of both I must be doing something right. The Wokeday Evening video saw some on the Right try to claim me as one of their own, but I'm not being claimed by anybody. The minute you nail your colours to the mast, your ability to take the piss is immediately limited and you're back in a box, just like adhering to Identity Politics. Fuck that.   CM : Which comedians and comedy shows do you like? Are you a fan of Derek and Clive, 70s stand-ups, and Carry On ?   JM : When it comes to my own favourite comedians or comedy shows, I've always liked comedians who are clearly intelligent and have knowledge about a wide range of subjects but who are also not too highbrow to indulge in smut or simple silliness. This is why I will always be a fan of the Pythons or Derek & Clive or South Park . The Carry On  films I enjoy because I love that feeling of being able to see the next gag coming a mile off, making its delivery all the more enjoyable. To be fair, the same thing applies with Laurel and Hardy; the joy is waiting for what you know is coming.  CM : Do you see yourself as in any kind of tradition - like Hogarth, Viz etc.? And does satire for you have any purpose other than to be funny?   JM : I suppose I do fall into a British tradition of satire, yes; but it's not really a conscious thing, not as though I thought 'Hey, I can do that!' - it just came naturally, something I was doing at school, drawing caricatures of teachers and doing Mike Yarwood-like impressions of them. To me, what I do now is a natural outgrowth of that. Even the name Buggernation Street I coined when I was at school, drawing a comic strip parodying Coronation Street in an exercise book, one which plumbed the same kind of perverse depths as the series does today.   One could take Peter Cook's oft-quoted sarcastic comment about satire re 'the great German satirists of the 1930s 'whose sterling efforts prevented the Nazis from seizing power', but to me it's one of the few weapons people have against the powerful, even if it's ultimately like taking on a tank armed with a pea-shooter. What better reflected the mass discontent of one half of the population with Thatcherism in the 80s than Spitting Image ? And the powerful always find it an irritant, as their reaction in the 18th century demonstrated; playwrights having to submit to the scrutiny of the Lord Chamberlain was a direct response to satirical plays taking the piss out of Walpole and his generation of politicians. So, yes, it has to be funny; but it can be the sole tool that those who will never have power can use as annoying little slingshots aimed at those who do.   CM: Do you have any fondness for 70s and 80s Coronation Street , and already find it funny?   JM: I do have genuine fondness for the first 20 years or so of Coronation Street . The characters and dialogue are so rich, and those old episodes totally hold up today; it goes without saying they piss on today's unwatchable excuse for the series from a great height. People have often asked me to do parodies of Eastenders or Emmerdale , but they're missing the point. It's because I love the Coronation Street  from the era I cover in Buggernation  that I can parody it with such attention to detail; if I didn't care about the source material like I don't care about other 'soaps', Buggernation  wouldn't have stretched beyond one episode.   CM : I grew up in working class, semi-rural north Lincs in the 70s and 80s, and the swearing in Buggernation Street is not that exaggerated to me - is that the case with you too?   JM : Swearing was certainly prolific in the playground in the 70s - virtually every 'swear word' I ever learnt infiltrated my ears for the first time there, and we all swore like navvies whenever a teacher wasn't around. In fact, I remember when I was about 10 being summoned to the headmistress's office to receive a bollocking because some other kid had grassed me up for telling him to fuck off. Although parents in my experience didn't as a rule swear in front of their children then, whenever they imagined their kids weren't listening they'd be effing and blinding like The Sex Pistols having tea with Bill Grundy. As far as the language on Buggernation goes, to me it's perfectly normal that adults around each other at that time would have sworn - as if Len, Ray and Jerry wouldn't have sworn in a masculine bastion like a builder's yard! In a weird way, to me Buggernation is closer to real life than any TV soap ever could be because of the language and the fact characters break wind and go to the toilet - just like real people do.   CM : Are you much aware of the real working class 'sexual underground' of the period?   JM : As far as the 'sexual underground' of the working-class goes during this period, it was perfectly normal for one's dad and his mates to go see a stripper at the pub, or purchase a top-shelf mag, or visit an adult cinema to see the latest Mary Millington movie, or to be having it off with a bit on the side (to use the parlance of the time). It was in the culture, so seems silly to pretend it wasn't there.   CM : Several Coronation Street  characters were comic characters already, Hilda and Stan Ogden, Ena Sharples, Albert Tatlock and the rest. You've made them even funnier. Do you think you've partly brought out something that we already knew was there.?   JM : For me personally, what I often find the funniest about the way in which I've exagerrated the existing characters is when I give them extensive knowledge of pop cultural subjects they clearly wouldn't know anything about - such as Minnie's love of King Crimson, Ena's of Eno, Albert's of Genesis and so on. To me, that's as sublimely silly as the two 'pepperpot' characters on Monty Python paying a house-call to Sartre to settle an existential argument that a couple of middle-aged suburban housewives simply wouldn't have in real life. There are other examples, whereby the Buggernation characters routinely watch and talk about obscure down-time TV of the era, like the test card, IBA Engineering Announcements or schools programmes. The manner in which, say, Alf and Maggie casually discuss water-sports or spanking over dinner is equally so preposterous that it can't be taken as anything other than a joke. As I said in a piece I wrote after my cancellation by YT, the presence of this kind of subject matter in the dialogue of these videos put such horrific images in the minds of the offended that it's almost as though they convinced themselves that the acts were actually shown in graphic detail on screen - utterly ridiculous.   CM : Have you always been a pisstaker - were you a class clown?   JM : I suppose I was what you might call a 'class clown'. At the school-of-hard-knocks I attended, three things mattered in terms of status and respect: being good at fighting, being good at football, and being good at making people laugh. I was useless at the first two but could manage the third.   CM : Stupid names and nickname-giving seems to be a peculiarly British form of humour, there were always kids at school with those particular cruel talents - were you one of those kids?   JM : Any nicknames at school seemed to already be in place before I came up with any, but I did impersonate the teachers, both physically and in comic strips I'd draw with them in.   CM : Do you think puerility has a positive social function - or is it just funny for its own sake?   JM : Being puerile in humour is something I think most people enjoy, even if they don't admit it. I don't really think it has a valid function beyond provoking a laugh, though.   CM: Could you tell me more about your novels and poems.   JM : I've been writing novels and poetry volumes more or less as long as I've been producing videos; the two have run on parallel lines for a decade or so and have had very different audiences. People have come to me through both and have told me they'd often struggled to equate the author of each as being the same person. When I set up my website, the aim was to bring these different audiences under the same umbrella, as I think people aren't as one dimensional as some would have you believe and can actually enjoy both.   CM : Have you ever tried to break into the mainstream? Into the BBC itself, or mainstream publishing houses?   JM :  I sent manuscripts to publishers for years and got nowhere; I eventually gave up when it became possible to publish physical books via Amazon. I knew I was writing good stuff and I felt liberated by the fact I no longer had to go cap-in-hand to detached institutions that I would never be at home in anyway. Being told to 'stay in my lane' is not something I would be comfortable with.   CM : What was your experience of scriptwriting before Buggernation Street ?   JM :  I don't actually 'write scripts' for any videos I produce, Buggernation  included. It's all improvised. In the case of the latter, I assemble the footage from dozens of different archive Coronation Street episodes and create my own narrative, coming up with the dialogue on the spot as I watch the visuals.  "Shut the fuck up Stan, you fat lazy cunt" CM : You said some perceptive things in your blog about the shallowness of contemporary drama compared to the 70s. How would you account for thi s?   JM : I think the state of TV drama today is a natural consequence both of the BBC's DEI policy being imposed upon writers and the way in which those writers are schooled in the system. In the 60s and 70s, television was largely informed by theatre and many of its writers, actors and producers came from that arena; today, that link has been completely severed. Soap operas serve as the contemporary university for writers in particular, and they bring all of its cliches to post-watershed drama, with the only difference being the use of the word 'fuck', which they seem to imagine the repetition of makes what they're writing 'grownup'.   CM : Were you expecting to be cancelled at some point, or did it come as a surprise?   JM : I'd already retreated from YT as far back as 2019, sensing which way the wind was blowing. I only returned because of the tidal wave of new subscribers I received during lockdown, and I largely stuck to just Buggernation Street when it came to posting new material on there. I was very aware of walking a tightrope, but I think it was the sudden abruptness of YT's cancellation which surprised me, not receiving any warning beforehand.   CM : Your sensibility seems best described a 'punk' - were you a punk?   JM : I was too young to be a Punk in the 70s - just a school-kid. But I suppose I have a Punk 'sensibility'. One of my favourite YT comments re Buggernation  was one I used on my website, which called it “A Punk Victoria Wood. I think that's as good a description of the series as anything.     Johnny's Vimeo channel can be found here: https://vimeo.com/user43074276 His Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/user/posts?u=56665294 His blog here: https://winegumtelegram.wordpress.com/ And his website here: https://winegumtelegram.wordpress.com/

“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 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.

“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.