selfdivider

In another post, I mentioned that in a story called “Wings” by Yi Sang written in the early ’30s, the ominous presence of the Japanese colonialist state is represented only elliptically, by a department store called Mitsukoshi. When I think of my childhood back in Korea, I can’t remember anything distinctly “Korean” about the experience, whatever that might mean. I lived in Seoul in a high-rise facing the Han River, in a district which is now a trendy hub of city life there. The first film I had seen in a theater was Kramer vs. Kramer, to which I was dragged by my mom so she could watch the movie with her friend. All I remember from the movie is the experience of feeling revolted by how Americans ate their eggs. I listened to classical music with my father, for whom the apotheosis of classical music had already occurred in the overtures of von Suppé (in a telling and logical arc, he is now an avid listener of Celine Dion’s oevure.) When I’d learned that we were to move to the States, my conception of the American life was formed by how the kids had nice bikes to race through the wide streets in suburbia (E.T.), and for some reason, by the saxophone solo in Wham!’s “Careless Whispers,” a song which I’d heard in a department store once - I could not understand English, but had somehow understood that the song was about pining for somebody you aren’t supposed to, and that kind of desire had seemed very liberating, illicit, and American. I found out years later, when I was in America, that George Michael and his sidekick were actually Brits.

Korea was called the “hermit state” for a reason. Unlike Japan and China, it had remained impervious to the western influence until very late, in the 1870’s: in 1876, Japan came in to the country to modernize Korea’s roads and various systems, to facilitate its usurpation. An influx of western goods and cultural influences came in along with the Japanese infiltration, and foreign countries set up their embassies for the first time in Korea. The picture above is of Kojong, the last real emperor of Korea. It was taken by Percival Lowell in 1884. Lowell was the brother of Amy Lowell, the poet, and a distant cousin of Robert Lowell. While Percival Lowell was traveling through Japan, he met a Korean diplomat named Min Young-ik and was hired as a diplomatic secretary on the spot. Lowell’s account of his stay in Korea is amusing to read, because it’s just this New England blue blood complaining and whining about EVERYTHING. Lowell would later found the Lowell Observatory and make a name for himself as an astronomer. His search for Planet X eventually led to the discovery of Pluto (the symbol for Pluto is a monogram honoring Lowell’s name.) More amusingly, Lowell adamantly maintained that there were water canals and oases in Mars, and that intelligent life-beings must have constructed the canals to husband the scarce water supply of the planet.

It was not so amusing that the Emperor Kojong, under the pressure of Japan, would continue to implement the westernization process. His wife, Empress Min, who was the political mastermind behind the anti-Japanese movement, sought to curb the foreign influence in Korea and tried to establish a stronger tie with Russia to oppose Japan. In August of 1895, the Japanese soldiers invaded the Kyeongbok Palace and bayoneted Empress Min and her cohorts to death. They raped her corpse and incinerated her body in the pine forest of Nokwon. In 1905, mere days after reassuring the Korean ambassadors that he wouldn’t do anything to compromise the autonomy of Korea, Theodore Roosevelt would sign the Portsmouth Treaty to end the Russo-Japanese War; one of its provisions would be that Japan possessed political, economic and military interests in Korea as its protectorate - Korea was colonized overnight. Roosevelt would win the Nobel Peace Prize for the Portsmouth Treaty in 1906. Kojong was forced to step down as emperor and his son was installed as a puppet emperor. Kojong died in 1919; many believed that he was murdered by Japanese assassins because of his support for the freedom fighters. It is still not verified how he died, but a couple years ago, I read in the Korean papers that a prominent Korean politician, through his website, said that Kojong should have killed himself rather than to have cooperated with Japan. A man of compassion and magnanimity, this guy. I can only imagine the smug, heartless bastard congratulating himself for his uncompromising moral rectitude, as he and his driver speeds away in his Mercedes to a dinner/karaoke engagement with his campaign donors.

Went to the Sebald panel that the Mercantile Library hosted to kick off the publication of The Emergence of Memory: Conversations with W. G. Sebald (Seven Stories), edited by Lynne Sharon Schwartz. First of all, the library is beautiful, and I can’t believe I didn’t even know about its existence prior to last night. It caters almost exclusively to fiction, its shelves stuffed with great fiction and literary journals. Check out their events and book groups if you’re in NYC. One hundred bucks per year will get you membership and access to the space, well worth the price, I think.

The panelists were Lynne Sharon Schwartz, whose introduction to The Emergence of Memory is graciously simple and is an approachable primer for many readers who might be getting to know Sebald’s life and work. (For the review of the book, check out Terry’s take here.) Joe Cuomo, whose interview with Sebald is published in the book, was also there; he runs one of the best reading series in New York - Queens College Evening Readings moderated by Leonard Lopate of WNYC. Two Columbia professors rounded out the panel: Ross Posnock, Professor of English Lit, and Mark Anderson, Professor in the German Department. Professor Posnock just delivered a lecture on Sebald and Wittgenstein at Yale, and Professor Anderson is currently working on Sebald’s biography (which he hopes to finish next year), and had also participated in the Sebald Symposium I moderated for The Blue Notebooks last year, with Barbara Epler, Sebald’s editor at New Directions, and Professor Andreas Huyssen.

Schwartz kicked off the event with a general introduction. What I found almost refreshing was that Schwartz was not afraid of categorizing Sebald’s work as fiction, despite the category-bending nature of his prose works. She said Sebald’s work was fiction because, well, “he makes things up and shapes and structures his prose works like fiction.” I’d definitely agree with Schwartz on a common-sensical level, much more so than with Vivian Gornick’s preposterously ill-considered response in The Situation and the Story, in which she denies Sebald’s work is fiction at all. Still, it must be said that this kind of dissension which exists makes Sebald’s work even more attractive for so many of us readers, I guess. You can’t pigeon-hole the guy at all.

Joe Cuomo spoke about Sebald in startlingly intimate and personal terms. It seems that he’d formed a close bond with Sebald and his widow since his interview, and Sebald’s death had deeply affected him. He spoke about how Sebald saw the process of writing as a “con trick,” a string of lies by which one arrives at a kind of a truth, and that Sebald had a Flaubertian fear of the false, that somehow he might make a moral and aesthetic compromise through the process of writing which would somehow dilute “truth.” Cuomo talked about the hurricane in 1987 which Sebald writes about in The Rings of Saturn that destroyed both Sebald’s and Michael Hamburger’s homes (there’s a significant section in RoS, if you recall, which takes place in Hamburger’s house.) Cuomo made a brilliant link, the kind which Sebald himself would have made: he noticed that Michael Hamburger’s poem “The Massacre” was essentially about the same experience which Sebald chronicled in RoS; he even read from the letter that he’d written to Hamburger about his discovery. All in all, Cuomo’s account was refreshingly personal and emotionally direct (although, it must be said, it made me somehow uncomfortable… but this probably only means that I’m emotionally stunted and emotional forthrightness freaks me out.)

Anderson followed Cuomo’s deeply personal account of Sebald with his experience in trying to write Sebald’s biography. He mentioned that when a biographer writes a work of biography, (s)he usually looks for certain conforming patterns in the subject’s life, but in the case of Sebald, he found that such a practice seemed at odds with what one naturally values in Sebald, which is that Sebald’s life and work gains intensity by the fact that he worked from the marginal realms, that he was a loner in the periphery. Anderson said that fame did not suit Sebald, and intimated that the pressure of fame - i.e. book tours, big agent and book contract - essentially led to Sebald’s heart attack which killed him. Anderson spoke with insight about the generation of ‘68 Germans, of which Sebald was a member, about how they were not responsible for the war but were indelibly marked by its repercussions. He talked about how the ‘68-ers were disconnected from their families by a conspiracy of silence, and had found out about the war only through papers and media, i.e. 1963 Eichmann trials, which led to an angry moment of realization, and a kind of “phantom guilt” and post-memory. Sebald, accordingly, left Germany and never went back despite the fact that he never felt at home in England. Anderson specified Sebald’s anti-German stance as a rejection of high, northern German culture, and mentioned that Sebald had refashioned his German identity by aligning and identifying himself with the regional Germany, that he’d felt that he was more Austrian or Swiss, even. (This makes a great deal of sense, as Sebald’s literary forebears were writers like Gottfried Keller, Adalbert Stifter, and Thomas Bernhard.) Anderson also talked about Sebald’s hometown of Wertach in Allgäu, a small town with a view of the Alps in which Sebald had spent the first eight years of his life. Sebald had mentioned that the town existed in a pristine pocket outside of the modernizing process, and had always talked about his life with his grandfather with fondness. Anderson remarked that Sebald’s work, in a way, is about the loss of his life in Wertach; that all of his work is one long lament about the loss of pristine pocket of Wertach, which is in turn a lament about the onslaught of destruction caused by the urban, industrial world.

Posnock read from the first few pages of the essay he delivered at Yale on Sebald and Wittgenstein. Posnock talked about Wittgenstein’s notion of “family resemblance,” which is not based on notions of essence or identity, but on a complicated network of similarities “spinning in thread, fiber on fiber.” Wittgenstein formulated his propositions in Philosophical Investigations as such, and had conceived his work - in the Preface to PI - as a “thought criss-cross”: an album of remarks which would result in “a sketch of landscape.” It’s easy to see that Sebald’s aesthetic sensibilities and process closely resembled Wittgenstein’s, the densely webbed intertextuality, etc. Also, Posnock noted that on page 3 of Austerlitz is the photograph of Wittgenstein’s eyes, and how one of the models for Jacques Austerlitz must have been Wittgenstein (i.e. picture of Austerlitz’s rucksack -> Wittgenstein’s famous rucksack): just as Wittgenstein was working from the principles of “family resemblance,” Austerlitz spends his life on investigating the “family likeness” between various monuments in Europe. It goes without saying that Wittgenstein/Austerlitz is also an analogue of Sebald, as the narrator himself travels everywhere, commenting on similarities, convergences, and eerie, overlapping coincidences, the process of which is, after all, an aesthetic implementation of Wittgenstein’s notion of “family resemblance.” Posnock also discussed Sebald’s use of Rembrandt’s “Anatomy Lesson” in terms of Wittgenstein’s dictum of “Don’t think, but look,” from which - according to Posnock - Sebald’s aesthetic stance of “looking” as a counter-stance to a rational, intellectual subjection (and the stance against moral self-anesthesia via looking away/not looking directly) is derived. (As an example, think of Sebald’s On the Natural History of Destruction, in which he quotes Döblin remarking that Germans walked around the destroyed cities “as if nothing had happened,” and how the Swedish journalist Stig Dagerman recalled that the travelers on a train did not look out the window and that he was recognized immediately as a foreigner, simply by the fact that he looked out the window.)

During the Q&A session, citing Ruth Franklin’s New Republic essay which is reprinted in The Emergence of Memory, Schwartz mentioned that one of the latent dangers in Sebald’s work is that through the sheer beauty of his prose, he had somehow aestheticized the historical atrocities, undercutting the true horror of it all. Cuomo disagreed, mentioning the suicides in The Emigrants as amply real examples of such a horror that were not aestheticized. But Anderson retorted that still, Sebald doesn’t really write about the nature of “evil” directly, only choosing to write about the victims, that the presence of “evil” in Sebald’s work is abstract and shadowy at best. The discussion had to end somewhat abruptly because there had to be time allotted for a brief audio clip to be played, of Sebald talking about why he liked dust so much. Then there was wine to be drunk at the back, always a welcome ending to any event (at least for me.)

I talked to Joe Cuomo for a bit and inquired to see if there was a way to purchase a videotape of his conversation with Sebald, because it was broadcast on TV. But to my horror, I learned that the old TV station had turned into a semi-porn station, and that in the process of transition, the new producers had thrown away the Sebald tape from the archives!!! I think I almost barfed; what a loss, considering how there isn’t much video documentation of Sebald conducted in English. I also talked with Mark Anderson, and learned something fascinating; Anderson had met Sebald personally at a reading, and had asked him about the character of Paul Bereyter in The Emigrants, the schoolteacher who kills himself. Anderson suspected Wittgenstein as one of the models (among many) for Bereyter (Wittgenstein also was a schoolteacher) and Sebald had confirmed that was the case. Anderson told me that in his forthcoming biography, there is going to be a whole chapter on Paul Bereyter’s real life, as well as the connection to Wittgenstein, and that he’s planning on publishing a version of the chapter soon somewhere. Stay tuned.

(First image: by Thomas Allen)

Somehow, going from one wiki article to another, I became curious about a film called The Greene Murder Case (1929), starring William Powell and Jean Arthur. The movie was based on a whodunit written by S. S. Van Dine, in which a detective named Philo Vance tries to figure out a series of murders which takes place in the Greene mansion in the Upper East Side, which he calls “the holocaust that consumed the Greene family.” I guess the Philo Vance novels were popular back in the day, as Van Dine wrote twenty or so novels based on the character. Anyways, it seems that the film version of The Greene Murder Case is not available on DVD or VHS, and I’m out of luck (although other Philo Vance films, like The Benson Murder Case and The Kennel Murder Case are available on DVD.)

The novel is available here on Australia’s Project Gutenberg site, and you’ll see that the prose is leaden, the dialog wooden, and the plot plodding. But the point of my interest lies in the final pages of the detective novel, wherein Philo Vance deduces that the murderer used Hans Gross’s Handbuch für Untersuchungsrichter to plan the murders of various members of the Greene family. Hans Gross is commonly regarded as the first to apply scientific methods in forensics to criminal investigation - he invented, for example, dactyloscopy, the science of interpreting finger prints. Basically, the last chunk of The Greene Murder Case is Philo Vance reading out loud from Gross’s various case studies from the Handbuch, complete with page numbers (!), to explain the motives and actions of the culprit. Yes, it’s pretty laughable.

But my primary interest was piqued by the fact that Franz Kafka studied with Hans Gross extensively when he was studying law at Prague University; it seems that Kafka really went out of his way to attend a lot of Gross’s lectures, and it’s likely that K’s legalistic and judicial sensibilities were in many ways influenced by the formative years he spent as Gross’s student. Even more interesting is the fact that Hans Gross’s son was Otto Gross, the anarchist psychoanalyst (he was one of Freud’s most prized students) and notorious drug user. He was also Kafka’s friend. Hans Gross had demanded that his son Otto be forcibly confined in a mental asylum, and it’s believed by some scholars that the beginning of Kafka’s The Trial was inspired by the episode. Weird, weird, weird…
I don’t know why this interests me so much, this tangential relationship between this cheap detective novel and Kafka. I spent much of yesterday thinking about it, even going as far as planning to visit the mansion in which they shot the film. I doubt anything further would come of this, and like most of my other strange fixations, this one will disappear, too, but I’m curious if any of you out there has watched the actual film. According to a few accounts, including the old NY Times review, the film was pretty middling. I’d still like to see the film version of The Greene Murder Case, though, even if just to see Jean Arthur in it. I like Jean Arthur a lot. In the film, she plays Ada Greene, the family’s adopted daughter from Germany. Another creepy coincidence: Jean Arthur’s real name was Gladys Georgianna Greene.

As I mentioned, my daughter and I were sick with stomach flu. But I went to the health clinic to get injected with some Promethazine, an anti-nausea sauce, which not only curbed my vomiting but made me sleep virtually non-stop for almost thirty hours. (I was told I’d be drowsy for about seven hours, but apparently, my body likes Promethazine too much.) When I woke up in the early afternoon on Wednesday, I felt like Philip Marlowe just escaped from the drug-torture sanatorium in Farewell, My Lovely, but keeping in tune with the holiday season, I gathered my wife and daughter and hurrahed over to our friend Vicky’s apartment, near 150th and Fred Douglas Blvd., where she and her mother, Maggie, were hosting a pre-Thanksgiving dinner for her close family members, 100% Puerto Rican style. It was just awesome, a lot of love in that house. Although I couldn’t eat much, I just enjoyed being in a place where all the family members loved each other so demonstrably, so genuinely.

Probably the highlight of the night was in meeting Maggie’s brother, Carlos, who looks like any other unassuming, low-key dude on the street. It turns out that he’s Carlos Bess, who was the engineer producer of all of Wu-Tang’s albums until 2005. Slap me crane-style and call me grasshopper! He sound engineered Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers), Ghostface’s Supreme Clientele (my favorite Wu-Tang solo album and Carlos’s last project with the Wu), and - get this - Jay-Z’s Reasonable Doubt. What the fuck: those three albums alone should be on any head’s top twenty list. My ultimate aim is to have The Blue Notebooks interview Carlos and RZA for the next semester. It’s only natural, since we just talked to Alex Ross last month. Duh.

Just one more thing before I sign off: after I came home, I turned on the TV and saw that Karl Rove was on Charlie Rose (I’m sure the show is a re-run, though.) Poor Charlie was clearly agitated, trying to pin something on the guy. It was really too amusing to watch him hyperventilate. But the weirdest comment came during a moment when Rove was musing about his childhood days in Colorado. He admitted to being a nerd, and said that the fourth grade paper he wrote for his civics class was called “The Theory of Dialectical Materialism.” I thought perhaps the Promethazine shot I took for nausea was finally getting to my head. Or maybe it’s just another proof that the Hegel-Marx trajectory almost never ends up where you hope it would.

My daughter and I have caught the stomach flu, been vomiting non-stop. The Thanksgiving over-eating session is in doubt this year, as my doctor told me to limit myself to rice, apple sauce, clear liquids, etc. (Vodka’s a clear liquid drink, right) My wife, thankfully, did not catch the bug, and have been taking care of us. Two nights ago, she didn’t get to sleep much, watching over our daughter. Watching her made me think of William Carlos Williams’s poem “The Ivy Crown,” in which the poet says that his love for his wife is not like young love, which is obtuse, blinded by light, but is something they will past all accident, a cruelty which by their wills they transform to live with each other. But why even attempt to define love As Henry Fielding tells us in his great Tom Jones, it might be all in vain -

To treat of the Effects of Love to you, must be as absurd as to discourse on Colours to a Man born blind; since possibly your Idea of Love may be as absurd as that which we are told such blind Man once entertained of the Colour Red; that Colour seemed to him to be very much like the Sound of a Trumpet; and Love probably may, in your Opinion, very greatly resemble a Dish of Soup, or a Sirloin of Roast-beef.

Happy Thanksgiving to you & your loved ones.

I’m reading a slim novel called The Seventh Well by Fred Wander, a holocaust survivor (due out this December from W. W. Norton). It was originally published in East Germany in 1970, and is only now translated into English - very elegantly - by Michael Hofmann. Wander seems to have been somewhat of a street urchin, having grown up on the streets after dropping out of high school. He left behind his mother and sister in Vienna and fled to France, on foot, where he was eventually put on a train to Auschwitz. Between 1939 and 1945, he was transported to and from twenty different concentration camps. (Fred Wander died recently, in 2006, in Vienna.)

It doesn’t seem appropriate to call The Seventh Well a ‘novel.’ Wander’s book is comprised of episodic pieces dedicated to remembering different inmates whom he knew, along with short, poetic essayistic prose pieces. Wander’s prose is spare and lucidly beautiful. Really, the only other works I thought of in comparison were Primo Levi’s Periodic Table and, strangely enough, The Coast of Chicago by Stu Dybek (because of the short prose poem-y interstices.)

Michael Hofmann, in his Afterword to the novel, writes about a French term which he finds strangely beautiful - “univers concentrationnaire” (coincidentally enough, in my post about late style, there’s a quote by Sebald in which he calls our world, even now, “le monde concentrationnaire.”) I think Hofmann might be right when he hypothesizes that Primo Levi might have been the person who coined the term. And like Levi, Hofmann evokes the bleak closed system of “the world of camps” in purely unsentimental terms. The inmates finally get to sleep in their bunkers made of boards after escaping another day, after having eaten their fill of rotting beet soup. They try to sleep -

When the three of us were pressed together under one blanket, a blanket stiff with filth, dried blood, and pus, Petrov and I and Tadeusz between us, we could hear a rushing murmur in our ears: a mechanism, a perpetuum mobile, that ran on nothing but life itself and was trying to prevent its own dissolution.

Yet the true beauty of The Seventh Well comes from Wander’s refusal to be trapped in le monde concentrationnaire; the novel, in a crucial way, charts the writer’s growth as an artist, even inside the camp world of solipsism and death. What punctures the insular walls of the camp are the vibrant debates and arguments that various inmates engage in. On Block 16 of Buchenwald, Wander remembers inmates feverishly arguing about the relations between Volkonsky, Rostov, and Trubetskoy in War and Peace, or about Cousin Pons or Colonel Chabert of Balzac. Rack their brains trying to remember a whole scene from Hamlet without any omission. An inmate named Antonio belts out “Addio amore” from Puccini’s Turandot in the middle of the night. Many inmates wake up, startled: listening, spellbound. “It was like poison,” Wander writes, “like a drug, it drove the blood into our hearts and choked us. A glimpse of paradise. The Jews on the mountain, in the valley below the promised land of Canaan.” In the morning after, as usual, death claims more inmates, including Antonio -

Death was all alone among a great number of men. Some lay there stiffly, eyes open, anonymous and despised, like deserters: deserters from a remarkable existence. Then I found Antonio, but he was no longer living. A little man, with dark skin and dark eyes, that even as they faded wore a wistful expression of regret, the last flinching of someone who had seen much that was beautiful. A Mediterranean type, with sores on his legs and a grotesquely swollen head on a neck like the stem of a flower.

(Image from Gerhard Richter’s “Atlas”)

It seems really cold this morning in NYC and my back is killing me because I slept on the couch for the week. Whenever I have a lot of work to do, I can’t put it upon myself to go into the bedroom and sleep like a decent human being. Anyways, my wife just brought me a cup of coffee and Glenn Gould is on the stereo, the French Suites. I think of how so many artists - from Mozart to Klimt and dozens in between - end up being skewered by Thomas Bernhard, but Glenn Gould is immortalized. “We exist,” Gould says in The Loser according to its narrator, “we don’t have any other choice.” Bernhard’s life and work in a nutshell, in other words.

Which makes me think of Edward Said on Glenn Gould. Although Edward Said’s interpretation of Glenn Gould’s pianism is too dependent on Adorno’s description of Bach’s polyphony (perhaps the weakest chapter in On Late Style), his ultimate assessment of Gould’s genius seems spot on to me -

The tension in Gould’s virtuosity remains unresolved: that is, by virtue of their eccentricity his performances make no attempt to ingratiate themselves with his listeners or reduce the distance between their lonely ecstatic brilliance and the confusions of the everyday world.

Gould’s disinterest in resolving the tension between aesthetic pleasure and worldly confusions finds its literary counterpoint in Cavafy. Said quotes from “The God Abandons Antony,” in which Cavafy orders Antony, before his attendant death, to hold still in absolute silence so that he can hear the exquisite music of Alexandria in its exact notes, for the final time -

go firmly to the window
and listen with deep emotion,
but not with the whining, the pleas of a coward;
listen - your final pleasure - to the voices,
to the exquisite music of that strange procession,
and say goodbye to her, to the Alexandria you are losing.

Said claims that this refusal to resolve the tension between disenchantment and pleasure is the prerogative of late style in art: “[Late style] has the power to render disenchantment and pleasure without resolving the contradiction between them.” This seems entirely right to me, too. For example: Beethoven’s Opus 110 Sonata. Its Arioso dolente is perhaps the most despairing passage of music among his late sonatas (Beethoven’s accompanying injunction is Ermattet, klagend - Exhausted, lamenting). Yet it leads, eventually and inexplicably, by the way of fugue, into a finale which is transcendentally ecstatic, life-affirming. The twin flames of disenchantment and pleasure. I think one of Jean Genet’s metaphors in Prisoner of Love illustrates this concept of late style, albeit inadvertently, better than anything I can say about it -

If you put two matches together and light them, they twine so close you can’t separate their single ember. Two immortalities in one. And so with the bard and the power that he sings, as long as no one goes and touches what’s left of the confused but splendid conflagration.

One more application of late style: W. G. Sebald. It bothers me to the n-th degree when different scholars and critics peg his work as unremittingly pessimistic, without hope, even going so far as to proclaim that the trajectory of his work seemed to foretell his untimely death. Is it me or does their reading seem reductive and problematic to you, too They miss the tiny moments of gleam which Sebald pits against the portents of destruction - the rendering of the pleasure and the disenchantment. Without this notice, it seems to me, one is reading only 1/2 of Sebald. The narrator’s notice of a flitting butterfly and the myriad of quartz fragments glimmering in the Alps, before his dreaming of the Great Fire of London in Vertigo. The bodies of herrings which glow in phosphorence after their death (The Rings of Saturn). The impenetrable beauty of salt crystals that the narrator of The Emigrants notices in the salt-frames of Kissengen, after he comes out of the neglected Jewish cemetery that’s almost crumbling into the ground. What to make of these numerous, tiny moments of “beatific” pleasure and beauty, pitted against the scenes of destruction

The answer comes from Sebald himself, in an interview with Michael Silverblatt of KCRW’s Bookworm (you can listen to the podcast here, or read an excerpt from the interview in the forthcoming The Emergence of Memory). Silverblatt astutely notices that there is something in Sebald’s prose which brings “the sensibility of tininess, miniaturization, to the enormity of the post-concentration camp world.” Sebald agrees with Silverblatt’s assessment, and his reply in characterizing his project is not so distant from Said’s characterization of what late style is, how it renders both pleasure and disenchantment, without the artist’s attempt to resolve their contradiction -

I think Walter Benjamin at one point says that there is no point in exaggerating that which is already horrific. And from that, by extrapolation, one could conclude that perhaps in order to get the full measure of the horrific, one needs to remind the reader of beatific moments of life, because if you existed solely with your imagination in le monde concentrationnaire, then you would somehow not be able to sense it. And so it requires that contrast.

Ed Park at The Dizzies had a post on a Korean film called Madame Freedom last week. He was trying to verify a scene from one of Bong Joon Ho’s films, in which cops are watching a show called Inspector Chief, and found that the actor who is in Madame Freedom also starred in Inspector Chief. The weird thing is: in Ed’s excellent interview with Gina Kim, the director of Never Forever, Kim mentions Madame Freedom as one of her inspirations in making Never Forever. (Yet another reason to believe that every thing in this world is linked with every other thing in creepy creepy ways)

I’d seen Madame Freedom a few times when I lived in Korea. Back in the 80’s. The first time was on TV at my aunt’s house. I must have been about seven years old; my aunt told me not to watch it and I watched it anyway surreptitiously, feigning sleep while my aunt was yapping away with her friend on the phone. The film came out in 1956. The melodramatic story is rather formulaic according to today’s standards, but the film - the first commercial cinematic hit after the Korean War - would not only usher in the 1960’s, when Korean cinema experienced its first creative and commercial boom, but would also provide a template, for better or for worse, for future Korean films for decades.

Madame Freedom was directed by Han Hyung-mo, who had shot Korea’s first kiss scene in a film called Hand of Fate (1954); the innovation in Madame Freedom is that it’s the first Korean film to utilize crane shots. The film is an adaptation of Jung Bi-suk’s controversial novel, Madame Freedom, which was serialized in Seoul Newspaper (more on this later). In the story, the heroine, Oh Sun-young, who is the wife of a college professor, gets swept by the ballroom dance fever, which leads to illicit relationships with a college student, and her boss at work. She attempts to come back home, but is not accepted back by her husband.

Much was made about the licentious nature of Madame Freedom when it came out. The novel, when it was published in book form, sold 140,000 copies - the first work of fiction which had exceeded 100,000 in sales. After Jung’s novel came out, a prominent university professor named Hwang San-duk published his excoriation of the novel in University Daily Paper. Hwang accused Jung of falsifying and insulting the image of the Korean academics deliberately, for cheap and fast commercial success. He said any literature which stokes immoral sexual desire in people cannot be true literature (tough luck, Tolstoy and Flaubert), and likened Madame Freedom to Stalin’s or Chinese Communist armies invading the Korean intelligentsia. A feud between Hwang and Jung ensued in the papers, was highly publicized. It’s pretty clear that Hwang did not really read Jung’s novel carefully, as Jung’s novel - with all its limitations (it’s not so good, I’m afraid) - is principally an incendiary criticism of the politicians and public figures in the postwar Korea; the sexual nature of the main plot is in service of Jung’s social critique.

The film version of Madame Freedom, too, cannot be said to represent the best of Korean cinema of the age, artistically speaking. Yet what it did better than any other film was to capture the anxiety of the postwar Korean society. The Korean War was stalled in 1953. President Syngman Rhee, backed by the U.S. government, exercised a dictatorial command over the country (this is a common theme in the postwar Korean history, and a reason for much of the anti-American sentiments in Korea; the U.S.-backed Army general Chun Doo-hwan became Korea’s despotic president in the 80’s, and was responsible for the massacre of thousands of civilians and students through his coup d’etat, which I wrote about here.) The country’s economy was entirely dependent upon the U.S., even as Seoul and other main cities were rapidly modernizing.

This is the backdrop against which we encounter Madame Freedom’s heroine, Sun-young, the university professor’s wife. As I noted before, her fall from grace through extra-marital affairs is formulaic and trite. Yet it is significant - and this is the source of the film’s historical resonance - that the moment in which Sun-young transforms into an eroticized sexual object is precisely the moment when she becomes a manager at the shop which sells western wear. When she trades in her traditional, Korean hanbok for western clothes, bags, and necklaces, she sheds her identity as mother/wife and becomes a “free” woman. Her sexual instinct is awakened by her consumerist desires.

This translation of capitalist/consumerist desire into a sexual freedom occurs, also, in Tanizaki Junichiro’s novel written in diary form, The Key, which was published, coincidentally, in 1956, the year Madame Freedom came out in Seoul’s theaters. In Tanizaki’s novel, Ikuko, a housewife, becomes attracted to another man, and what signals her sexual freedom is also western wear: two-piece suits and pearl earrings, etc. Not to mention that what facilitates and enables sexual transgression is Ikuko’s frequent, dream-like fainting spells caused by that magic potion, that special sauce: Courvoisier cognac. Both Madame Freedom and The Key seem to criticize the hyper-modernizing force of western capitalism and its rationalistic order for eroding the older, familiar way of life.

Such a criticism, no doubt, was also made in American literature, especially at the turn of the twentieth century. Think of Lily Bart’s slow destruction by New York’s upper-class capitalism in Wharton’s House of Mirth. Dreiser’s heroines. So on and so forth. Yet what makes the western capitalism a darker, more sinister force in Madame Freedom (even more so than in Wharton’s or Dreiser’s accounts) is the fact that such a modernization represents not only an erosion of culture or a way of life, but a more pragmatically devastating loss of national identity, in the context of Korean history.

Korea was under Japan’s dark, colonial rule from 1908 until the end of WWII. The primary means by which Japan attempted to fully assimilate Korea into its nationhood was through a swift process of modernization. Cable cars and paved roads. By 1930’s the Jongro Boulevard was lined with Japanese department stores, like Mitsukoshi and Jojiya. (In an unforgettable, surreal story called “Wings” by Yi Sang, one of my favorite writers, the quietly oppressive and panoptic presence of the Japanese colonialist state is represented symbolically, only by the Mitsukoshi department store.) The Korean script of Hangul, too, was not an official script of the country until 1894, when the Korean Royal Court, heavily forced by Japan, issued a Royal Edict to make it an official script of Korea instead of Chinese script. Japan’s idea was to create a new, modern national identity for Korea, which it would co-opt and control for its own sake; Japan’s ultimate ambition was nothing less than to create its own version of Korea’s historiography, ethnography, and studies of Korean language and art, for its own strategic ends.

It is no wonder, then, that both the novelist and the director of Madame Freedom were highly wary and critical of the way Korea was hyper-modernizing, already hypnotized by the capitalistic process. Even Professor Hwang, who had engaged in a bitter feud with the novelist Jung over Madame Freedom, would publicly lament in retrospect, that the harmful process of westernization predicted by Jung’s novel was even more rapid and destructive in reality. So, in the end, Madame Freedom is an old-fashioned cautionary tale. The film closes when Sun-young’s husband closes the door on her, even as their son is calling out, crying, “mommy, mommy.” There is snow on the ground, and Sun-young has nowhere to go. Because of the stigma attached to her now, she can neither come back home nor get a new job. It’s a sad but visceral indictment on the “democratic” Korean society in the 50’s: the old world culture cannot keep pace with the capitalistic growth, cannot codify in time, leaving only victims in its wake. Perhaps they should show Madame Freedom in various countries our government is trying to newly democratize. Free twizzlers and popcorn.

I have no doubt that Walter Benjamin, in his previous incarnation, was a Japanese woman named Sei Shonagon, born in 966 AD, serving in the court of Empress Teishi. Whenever I read Shonagon’s The Pillow Book, I always think that Benjamin’s unfinished Arcades Project might have looked like it, if Benjamin had loosened up a bit, had enough self-assurance to have fun, let that burdensome Marxist ideology go to the dogs. Just as Benjamin’s ambition was to capture the bourgeois life of Paris in the 19th century, Shonagon, remarkably and succinctly, manages to capture the life - both ordinary and courtly - of Heian-kyo.

Even the way she organizes her “pillows” is, I guess, Benjaminian. (Albeit in a lighter, more lyrical manner.) There are mundane lists - of forests, plains, markets, ferry-crossings, bridges, trees that have no flowers… And there are still lists of a more personal kind, of breathtaking epigrammatic beauty and poetic brevity, through which Shonagon lets us see what she sees, feel what she felt. For example, under Things that make you feel nostalgic: “A dried sprig of aoi. Things children use in a doll play… On a rainy day when time hangs heavy, searching out an old letter that touched you deeply at the time you received it. Last year’s summer fan.” Or: Things that are far yet near -

Paradise.
The course of a boat.
Relations between men and women.

These lists are interspersed with more traditional accounts of her personal experience, lending a wonderfully granular reality to the personal reminiscence. And her voice - petulant, mischievous, nostalgic, funny… all at once - invades the modern reader’s head, as unmediated and vibrant as your neighbor’s or a friend’s. In my opinion, she out-Montaignes Montaigne, in that regard.

What is most moving, for me, is that the events which Shonagon tangentially and fleetingly mentions in her narrative correspond to the historical narrative of the downfall of Empress Teshi’s court; yet Shonagon keeps her gaze on the pleasures and delights of the life that surrounds her, only on life’s immediacy. So every time I open The Pillow Book, the effect is such that the present moment - then or now - seems more flourishing, more lasting than it is in reality:

Another scene of fascinating elegance - it’s very late at night, Her majesty has retired to her chamber, everyone is asleep and outside a lady is sitting talking with a senior courtier. From within comes the frequent sound of go stones dropping into the box. Delightful too to hear the soft sound of fire tongs being gently pushed into the ash of the brazier, and sense from this the presence of someone who isn’t yet asleep. A person who stays up late is always elegantly intriguing. You wake in the night to lie there listening through the partition, and realize from the sounds that someone is still up. You can’t hear what is said, but you catch the sound of a man’s soft laugh, and you long to know what they’re saying together.

So what if Daniel Day-Lewis looks uncommonly like Adam Sandler in the photo (It’s a film still from the upcoming There Will Be Blood, directed by Paul Thomas Anderson.) There’s a profile of Day-Lewis in this week’s NY Times Sunday Mag, and it’s great. Every time I read about the guy, I’m convinced more and more that he’s a genius. Can you imagine any Hollywood actor talking about his upbringing this thoughtfully and incisively

One of the great privileges of having grown up in a middle-class literary English household, but having gone to school in the front lines in Southeast London, was that I became half-street-urchin and half-good-boy at home. I knew that dichotomy was possible. England is obsessed with where you came from, and they are determined to keep you in that place, be it in a drawing room or in the gutter. The great tradition of liberalism in England is essentially a sponge that absorbs all possibility of change. America looked different to me: the idea of America as a place of infinite possibilities was defined for me through the movies.

When complimented about his eloquence, he bristles, saying that he is moved by people who struggle to express themselves than by prettified eloquence. Then turns the common notion about American anti-intellectualism - personified by our own G. Dubya - on its head:

In America, the articulate use of language is often regarded with suspicion. Especially in the West. Look at the president. He could talk like an educated New Englander if he chose to. Instead, he holds his hands like a man who swings an ax. Bush understands, very astutely, that many of the people who are going to vote for him would regard him less highly if he knew how to put words together. He would no longer be one of them. In Europe, the tradition is one of oratory. But in America, a man’s man is never spendthrift with words.

Personally speaking, I think Day-Lewis is giving too much credit to Dubya. But maybe he knows that he is, as he says with a smile, that this American mistrust of intellectualism and eloquence is more appealing in movies than it is in politics, slyly nudging us to There Will Be Blood, a film in which he portrays a Charles Foster Kane/Edward Doheny-like oil baron, partly adapted from Upton Sinclair’s Oil! by P. T. Anderson. (Needless to say, this film will have a political resonance.) Asked about why he agreed to take on the role, he explains, not as an actor but as a reader, about the inevitability by which all great stories operate, pull us in -

I was deeply unsettled by the script. For me, that is a sure sign. If you remain unsettled by a piece of writing, it means you are not watching the story from the outside; you’ve already taken a step toward it… What finally takes over, what took over with this movie, is an illusion of inevitability. I think: Can this really be true Is this happening to me again Is there no way to avoid this?

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